The little inn thirty miles outside of Paris wasn’t a place to expect a chance meeting. In fact, the American ambassador had come there explicitly to avoid seeing people he knew. He had a knotty problem to work out, one that was diplomatic, strategic, and even social, and didn’t want to be interrupted. He was a well-known man in the French capital—in fact, in many places around the world, but those little encounters wore on him, even though social encounters were a large part of his job. Now he sat having his third cup of coffee, looking up at the worn beams of the ceiling, beams that had been set there before the French Revolution, wondering how to keep Qatar out of the upcoming World Leaders Summit.
It was a problem that had occupied him for days, and the decision had to be made today. Qatar had a new young prince who wanted to show his independence by standing up to the Saudis and of course the United States. It was a sort of national adolescent stage, challenging the last superpower. The ambassador didn’t want the summit turning into that kind of theater. So he sat and brooded and tried to soak up the old wisdom of this place.
But the old atmosphere was abruptly disturbed by a passing American who nearly stepped on the ambassador’s toes as he carried his own coffee from the bar. The American, a thin young man of nondescript apperance, glanced down, muttered something apologetic, then looked more sharply at the ambassador.
“Mr. Nicholas?”
The ambassador sighed, but the gracious smile was already shaping his lips, the smile that had eased millions of dollars in donations out of rich men, charmed influential women visiting from the States, and in fact had probably helped him acquire his position. Certainly the gracious smile was a necessity of his job. Sometimes Paul Nicholas hated feeling that smile on his face.
“Jack Driscoll. Hi. This is weird. Do you remember me? I was your son’s roommate one semester at Yale. We met at parents’ weekend. I was the one who did the, you know, the little magic act at the talent show.”
“Oh yes. Jack. How are you? Are you here on business, or—?”
Obviously not. The young man wore jeans, tennis shoes, a striped shirt covered by a gray hooded jacket. No way he was in business. Of course, he could have been some computer or Internet genius with a fortune already in the bank, which was why it paid to be nice to everyone, in spite of appearances. But Jack had the sort of slightly lost look of a man who would flash a lot of bills and remain unaware of the looks his wallet drew. His coffee cup clattered a little in the saucer he carried.
“No, just touristing. There’s supposed to be some church around here—in fact, this is probably where people come to get away from other tourists. Sorry. Don’t let me interrupt. I’ll just go out on the—”
“No, that’s all right. Sit down, Jack. I remember your magic act. Did the goldfish ever turn up again?” For a moment the ambassador welcomed the interruption. His thoughts were going nowhere but in circles anyway. There was something ingratiating about the young man, the way he stood already turned away, as if not expecting welcome anywhere, coffee cup sloshing a little, alone in a foreign country. Wasn’t it part of the ambassador’s job to help such people?
The young man did sit at the round wooden table. He had a thin face with still a few childhood freckles, dark blonde hair, pale blue eyes. Looked very young but might have been in his mid-twenties. The ambassador gave him a short study then looked off across the room, his problem still occupying his mind.
“You’re a diplomat, aren’t you, sir? I remember. Career Foreign Service, right? You know, you might be able to help me with something. I’ve got kind of a diplomatic assignment myself. Another Yalie friend of ours, Steve Reynolds—you probably didn’t meet him—anyway, he’s getting married this summer, and he’s asked me to help with the guest list. Well, specifically he wants me to figure out how to uninvite another guy from New Haven, a guy he was roommates with for one year and is still kind of friends with, but he’s one of those guys who’s, you know, not a jerk or anything, really, but kind of a trouble magnet—says the wrong thing to the wrong person, still drinks like we did in college, always—well, anyway, Steve is marrying this very nice girl, old New England family, Puritans only a couple of generations back, ha ha, or as good as, you know what I mean, and he just feels like Eddie carries too much disaster potential.”
Paul Nicholas was amused by the rush of words. When people approached him with problems these days, it was obliquely, and always only after a courtship of ritual and greetings with the obsequiousness factor carefully calculated on both sides, never this baldly and certainly not this rushed. His smile had turned genuine. “But—?” he asked drily.
“Well, yes sir, you get right to the point. But Steve does business with Eddie now, and in fact Eddie’s the one with the contacts. I mean, people do like him, they’re in the same business, he’s not somebody you can piss off just because—excuse me—”
The ambassador was barely listening, the recitation having reminded him of his own problem. Besides that, his eye had been caught by someone much more prepossessing than the young American on his left. A young woman walking straight toward them, looking at Paul not with personal recognition but just as if she immediately knew him as someone important.
In his years abroad Paul had learned to spot Americans, subliminally noting their aggressive walks, the way they held their shoulders, their clothes, their prolonged eye contact, other items of national character he couldn’t even describe. With this woman— little more than a girl, really, maybe twenty-one or -two—he wasn’t sure. She had the American confident gaze, but the way she held her long neck was somehow European, as were her clothes. She had pale skin, dark brown hair, very noticeable red lips even when she was barely smiling, as now, and unlined complexion, bright blue eyes under long dark lashes, and a nose distinctive enough in its length to give her whole face character. She walked up to the table, looking right at Paul the whole time, but when she stood directly in front of him, said, “Jack. You’re not boring someone else with this wedding business, are you?”
There was a mutter of apology off to Paul’s left, but he was standing to take the young woman’s hand and say, “It’s no bore, Miss—”
“Arden. Arden Spindler.” In French she apologized for her friend’s intrusion. She had a charming low voice that required Paul to bend toward her. He answered in French that the intrusion was welcome since it had allowed him to meet her.
He waved a hand, also in French, and she joined them. The table was now a social occasion. The ambassador glanced from the woman to the young man. “And are you two travelling together?”
“No,” Jack said quickly, while Arden rolled her eyes in a way that conveyed a more complicated relationship, enough to make Paul chuckle. “Just one of those chance meetings abroad, you know?” Jack added, sounding sullen.
The young woman’s eyes were still on Paul’s. “But Jack’s been obsessing over this wedding problem so much that everyone who knows him even slightly has heard about it at enormous droning length.” She turned to him. “It’s easy, Jack. Just don’t invite the bore. And if he finds out about it later you tell him it was inadvertent, the wife’s family was in charge of the invitations, blah blah.”
The sullenness of the silence to Paul’s left became more pronounced. Paul smiled as if performing counseling. “Doubtful that would work. Because it’s not just the wedding, there are the preparations. If as you say everyone who knows Jack knows he’s thinking about this, then trust me this—Eddie was it?—is going to hear about the wedding long before it happens and will probably even call up the groom to ask about it, maybe even expect to come to the bachelor party, and so forth.” Paul waved a hand again to indicate complications.
“Yeah, Arden. You just think it’s simple because it’s not your problem.”
“Well, then, get him a date who’ll keep him in line. Or get him invited to something else that weekend that sounds better to him. Mr. Ambassador, I’m so sorry. Come, Jack, let’s be off.”
“Not at all, Arden. And call me Paul, please. So you two are here to see the Church of St. Benedicta?”
“I’ve heard it’s nice. Authentic but not ostentatious…” Arden’s voice trailed off, her blue eyes fastened on Paul Nicholas.
But he was now staring out the window. Suddenly he smiled. “Not a date,” he said.
“No sir, like I said, Arden and I just happened—”
“No, no. Your boorish friend. You don’t get him a date, you invite someone even worse than he is. Someone so outrageous it will make your Eddie not want to appear anything like him. You don’t uninvite one, you add one. Someone who’ll make the unwanted guest want to appear moderate by comparison. And we know who’s got the crazy end of the bench anchored, don’t we? Has had it staked out for years.”
Add someone to the summit who would appear crazy and sullen, yet flamboyant. The young prince from Qatar would never want to appear to ally himself with the crazy dictator, nor would he want to appear that man’s protege, as he unavoidably would if he took similar positions; he could only look subservient rather than independent. By adding someone even farther out the political spectrum, Paul would drive Qatar toward the moderate. The summit’s effectiveness might be damaged, but what was it going to accomplish anyway? It was a show. And even with the craziness factor heightened, the American President would appear more statesmanlike by comparison. Even if the young prince did make noise, the President would appear above it all. And that was the ambassador’s job, to create that impression.
“After all,” Paul Nicholas laughed, “it’s only a wedding.”
“Brilliant, sir,” Arden murmurred.
“You inspired me,” the ambassador answered. “Thank you. Sorry, I have to run. Things to arrange. Goodbye, Arden. Enjoy your church. Be sure to take the stairs to the choir loft. Goodbye— Jeff, was it?”
Jack only nodded. The ambassador rushed off between the tables, full of energy and purpose. After half a minute Jack turned his gaze on Arden. She smiled at him, blindingly. She really was a lovely young woman. Brilliant, too. With qualities that set her apart from anyone he’d ever known. He quite hated her.
“That was neatly planted,” he said.
“Thank you. You might have gotten there on your own.”
“But what was really impressive was that you didn’t even know what I was pitching.”
“It was pretty obvious.”
He laughed. “The fact that you think it was—”
She shrugged. “I caught a few words of what you were saying, I wondered what the ambassador would be doing here, not meeting with anyone, when he had the planning of the summit to worry about, so I guessed—”
“Yeah. Thanks. I guess. I really didn’t want—”
“Sorry. I just didn’t think you were selling it.”
“Sure I was. I just hadn’t—”
“No. He wasn’t listening. He wasn’t thinking. You hadn’t—”
“I think he was. Maybe it was too—”
“No. You know why?”
“I know why. Because he wasn’t trying to impress me. Once a beautiful woman was sitting—”
“—i.e.—”
“Yeah, yeah.” Jack looked away from her smile.
“I can’t believe I got you to say it.”
“Of course. It may take me a little longer without your obvious advantage—”
She patted his knee. “You could have done it without me.”
He just smiled at her. Not making a rejoinder. She smiled back for a second, then frowned. “Damn. I made your argument for you. How did you—?”
He didn’t smile or otherwise acknowledge the triumph of getting her to admit he hadn’t needed her help. “There’s something else, Arden. I hope we can fix it.”
“What?”
“He doesn’t remember me. Not my name, not my face. He’ll never even remember he talked to a guy in a bar.”
She didn’t answer. She just suddenly inhaled and looked up at the ceiling, at those old beams that had witnessed a lot of scenes, a lot of conversations, few of them memorable. Jack didn’t say it, neither did she, but they were both thinking of the rejoinder he could have made: But he’ll remember you.
It wasn’t how they operated. They weren’t remembered, they certainly weren’t acknowledged. Ever. The ambassador should never say to anyone, I met this charming young woman, and she started me thinking… All he should remember was that he’d been alone at an out-of-the way spot when he’d had a brilliant idea.
She didn’t even say Damn. But they both knew. Nor did Arden say, I’ll fix that some way. They both knew that too.
She started a new conversation. “So, you headed home too?”
When Arden said “home,” it was with invisible quotation marks that Jack heard. She had spent her childhood all over America, then the best years of her adolescence in a Swiss boarding school that in some corners was much more than a finishing school, for the last three years auditing college courses in America and Europe. Home for her was a theoretical concept.
“Sure. I wouldn’t miss a meeting.”
“I’m on the 4 o’clock to Heathrow. You too?”
“No, the five.”
“Why don’t you come with me, see if you can get on mine, we can fly together.”
“I’ve got a couple of things to do. Meet you in London?”
For a moment he gave her his undivided attention. Her explanation of how she’d stepped into the conversation with the ambassador didn’t satisfy him. He wondered if she’d been spying on him. In fact, he wondered what a lot of his group wondered.
Arden looked back at him, blue eyes shiny, still with a trace of a smile, until her lips twisted in exasperation. “No, Jack, I didn’t read your mind…. And I do know what people think about me.” Arden glanced down at the old scarred tabletop for a moment. “Some day, maybe, I’ll tell you how you make a person like me.”
“I’m sure it starts in a laboratory.”
She smiled, and for a moment he regretted the insult. But she’d probably manipulated him into that feeling too. Jack stood up abruptly. “See you.”
“Yep.” After he left, Arden let the smile drop. Her eyes were even shinier. She had no illusion Jack would be meeting her in Heathrow Airport.
Jack hurried away, didn’t stop outside the door for a cab. He kept walking until he felt sure he wasn’t being followed, then headed for the train station. He was headed back to America, all right, but he was taking the long way.
The next morning Jack Driscoll was in Malaysia. His current game company had sent him to what was grandly billed as the OtherWorld Gaming Convention. Jack’s company thought the odd blend of philosophy and strategy in his games should have an appeal in this part of the world, and in fact at least two of the games he’d created had large cult followings in Asia. Which hadn’t made Jack rich, because the editions were mostly pirated. He was also here to meet dealers in person, hoping that would make them more inclined to include him in their profits. Wishful thinking, Jack thought, but the company was paying.
Jack was a noticeable figure in the throng, though not unique. Contingents of Indians and Brits and Australians, even a few Americans, mingled with the largely Asian crowd. And a crowd it was. Jack was amazed at the numbers this convention had drawn, more than three thousand paid memberships. Game companies had opened their vaults too. The huge convention center was filled with displays, some of them the size of Broadway musicals. At one end a band billed as the hottest pop group in south Asia blasted out waves of sound, with occasional lyrics in English confirming that the words were meaningless. On another stage ninja fighters played by live actors flew through the air, only to disappear behind large screens where their digital counterparts took over the action. The use of live actors was arresting, especially since many of the people in this room looked as if they went for days at a time without seeing a real human being. Some of the audience members wore costumes themselves, though most just wore jeans and t-shirts, dedicated to favorite games or rock bands. Pink Floyd was unusually well-represented on the t-shirts. For Jack, still a little displaced, the scene seemed hallucinatory. This could have been a similar convention in any big city in America, only with some of the kids’ heads digitally replaced by Asian ones.
He was pretty sure the people following him were real, though.
A game convention is no place for a paranoid to begin with, with menacing figures on every hand and company representatives leaping out of every exhibit to grab a passerby’s arm. And a few people obviously recognized Jack, especially after his first autographing session. But again he felt that tickle of observation in his peripheral vision, the sign he was being watched. He knew of no good reason why anyone should be watching him, and he didn’t like it.
He walked the crowded aisles, both losing himself and looking for someone. Here and there he stopped to chat with another designer he knew. Not conversations that should be recorded for posterity: “Hey, man, ‘s’up?” “Oh, you know—” Eyes gesturing around to show the weirdness of the scene. The other person nodding. “You gonna be in Oakland next month?” “I think so. There’s this girl…” “Real girl?” “I’m not sure. That’s why I’m going.” “You think you’d know a real girl if you saw one?” “Ha ha, Jack.”
Jack laughed and moved on. At one display he stood respectfully to the side of a line of autograph seekers. The man on the other side of the table was signing copies of posters for a game that bore his name: “Chun Lee’s Deadly Digits.” The game was about three years old, but still very popular. Chun was Korean, his broader, thicker features distinguishing him from most of the southern Asians here. Like many people in the crowd, he wore a black T-shirt, but Chun’s featured Mickey Mouse holding up one white-gloved hand. On one of the white digits was a ring. The shirt carried no printing, but Jack knew the ring on Mickey’s finger very well.
Chun stood to exchange very small bows, only head-nods really, with the man for whom he’d just signed, and when Chun stood he caught sight of Jack. He showed no sign of recognition, but then Jack made a small, odd gesture, touching his temple with his little finger, as if brushing back hair. Chun’s eyes lit up. Jack had heard this expression all his life, but never seen it more truly demonstrated. Beams of delight seemed to come from Chun’s eyes, holding Jack in place.
The Korean designer finished signing hastily, put a sign on his table that said in Chinese that he would return soon, and vaulted over the table without touching it. This was no mean feat, since when he landed in front of Jack it became clear that Jack, at 6’2”, was nearly a foot taller. Chun beamed and gripped both Jack’s arms. Jack bowed his head and then tried to stay slouched so they were closer to eye level.
“Jack Driscoll! I know you, though pictures of you are hard to come by.”
Jack nodded at the ring on Mickey’s finger. “You’ve played Back Alleys.”
Chun touched the ring on his t-shirt as if pledging allegiance. “Not just played it. It is my map of the world.”
“Really?” Jack looked puzzled. “But then—”
“I know. Deadly Digits was hardly in the same mold. But it was what was wanted from me. It was my way of breaking in.”
Back Alleys had been Jack’s failed game, the one that depended on strategy and cunning rather than violence. Chun’s Deadly Digits, by contrast, had a body count akin to the Battle of Gettysburg.
Chun took Jack’s arm and walked with him. They occupied a zone of their own amid the chaos of the convention. The gaming world was very odd. One could be the designer of a game that had sold millions, yet walk unrecognized even in a crowd of fans. This had many advantages, such as now.
On the other hand, if that man and woman who had been following Jack all morning closed in, he couldn’t count on any help from adoring fans. He felt a little safer, though, because Chun’s bodyguards, two men dressed in jeans and white t-shirts, were also following them at a discreet distance. Chun’s anxiety was well-known even beyond the gaming world. He was North Korean, a defector, and perpetually feared recapture.
But now Chun ignored his guards and everyone else at the convention, talking as enthusiastically as any newcomer to the gaming world, telling Jack about his experiences at the convention, his travels, how he had gotten started. Then he suddenly stopped, taking Jack’s arm. “There is something I have wanted to ask you. On level 7, when you are in that alley in Helsinki and you pick up a stick to fend off your attackers, isn’t that a violation of the no-weapons rule you’ve established?”
“Ah,” Jack said, “you’ve played the pirated edition.”
“No!”
“I’m ’fraid so. The pirates couldn’t stand the lack of violence and slipped that one scene into the game.”
“This is horrible!”
Jack shrugged. Chun remained outraged on his behalf, looking around as if for a complaint desk. Jack laughed. “They stole it from me, Chun. Altering it for their own market seems a lesser sin by—”
“No.” Chun kept his hand on Jack’s arm, looking sternly into his eyes. “If one is going to take a man’s work, one must take it all, especially its principles. Anything else is an abomination.”
Jack laughed again. “You have a very refined sense of ethics.”
Jack was much less concerned with the years-ago theft of his intellectual property than with the fact that he could no longer see Chun’s bodyguards. Amid the huge crowds in the convention center there were ebbs and flows of people, like waves. One of those tides had apparently swept over the bodyguards and pulled them out to sea. They could have just gotten momentarily separated from their principle, but Jack didn’t think so.
He stood in the midst of all those people and felt isolated. No one else saw. No one would do anything. Where was security? Earlier in the morning Jack had seen uniformed guards scattered regularly through the hall, but now saw none.
He and Chun walked on. The bodyguards did not reappear. Chun in his absorption with questioning Jack didn’t seem to notice. Jack no longer saw the man and woman he thought had been following him, either, but didn’t feel reassured.
“I thought perhaps picking up the stick in the alley was permissible under your rules because it was a found object, not meant as a weapon, and you didn’t carry it with you.”
Jack shook his head. “No weapons, that was the rule. A stick is a weapon.”
“Ah.” Chun puzzled at the obstacle. “What if you defended yourself with a hatrack, then, that happened to be available? What about… a credit card?”
“Chun, you’re going way deeper into this than the game will really support. The point of it was not to get attacked. Once you’re attacked you’ve failed.”
“Ah,” Chun said again. He had amazing concentration, standing completely absorbed in thought in the middle of the chaotic scene. Jack, on the other hand, was looking all around them. He felt a trap tightening, though he still didn’t see the people he’d thought were pursuing him.
Then he did—the woman, her blondeness distinctive in the crowd, flitting behind a booth.
“Chun?”
“Eh?”
“Where are your men?”
Chun turned very slowly, a complete three hundred and sixty degrees. The quality of his concentration changed abruptly. His features moved alertly. His hands clenched and unclenched. Chun was trim and well-muscled, but barely over five feet tall. Jack could see over his head.
“Sometimes you can’t see them,” Chun said slowly of his bodyguards.
“That would be true if they were gone, too.”
“Come.”
Chun took Jack’s elbow and guided him swiftly. Jack hoped his friend was looking for allies, but Chun just kept moving, turning from aisle to aisle, finally slipping through a relatively open space. On the other side, among a crowd of exhibits again, he said, “Two of them, yes? A man and a woman?”
Jack nodded. “Do you recognize them?”
Chun shook his head. “Only their purposefulness. Will you do me a favor, my friend?”
“Of course.”
“We are going to walk down that narrow aisle over there, back into the staging area where it’s less crowded. I will walk in front. Your body and your coat should cover me. Just keep walking back that direction until you are in an area empty of people. All right?”
“Isn’t there anybody you could call?” Jack asked. “Back-up? Bring on the next shift of bodyguards early?”
Chun smiled at his nervousness. “You are the next shift, Jack. Heaven sent you, I think. Come.”
He turned and walked, still as if strolling. Jack, following orders, walked almost directly behind him. Jack wore a long, lightweight overcoat, a variation on a style of dress still favored by some gamers, how many years after “The Matrix”? Chun seemed to compact himself even farther.
“It must be hard looking over your shoulder all the time like this. See people even when they’re not there. Actually, though, it’s a good mind-set for a game designer, if you think about it. Have you thought about coming up with a game based on your own situation?”
At some point, Jack realized he was talking to himself.
He hadn’t had much time to formulate a plan when he’d felt followed, but now enlisting Chun seemed not to have been as brilliant as he’d thought. The little gamer was so beset by genuine dangers that he would bolt at a sign like this, as he had done. His bodyguards had proven useless, too. Jack continued to walk, armed now only with a cell phone, and no one he knew could reach him in time.
He passed a work table and quickly picked up a dowel rod, about an inch in diameter and two feet long. Jack slipped it up the sleeve of his coat. The rod was lightweight wood, but better than nothing.
At first he had heard rustling around him. Now that sound was gone, as was much of the noise of the convention. Curtains that closed off this backstage area absorbed much of it. There were the sounds of moving footsteps and murmuring voices, and Jack even saw a handful of people, but all flitting so fast they didn’t seem to see him. He would have welcomed being challenged for a backstage pass and kicked out of here, but of course that didn’t happen, since he wanted it.
He thought he heard the sound of a body falling, but that could have been only panic beginning to sing in his ears, painting its own scenario out of random noise.
He turned a corner and suddenly there was the woman, right in front of him. Tall, blonde, slender, with a thin face and dark eyes focused laserlike on Jack. She wore a white business suit, the legs of which tightly wrapped her own. It would be made of some fabric that allowed her to move fast. Her hands were out in front of her in what, for all Jack knew, was the killing position of lao-tze.
A person could have been caught in her gaze. Jack, though, immediately leaped to the side in the confined area. Sure enough, a foot shot through the space he had occupied a moment before. A bare foot in a blue pants leg. The man who’d been following Jack earlier had doffed his shoes and any pretense of being a member of the convention. When his kick missed its target he pivoted quickly, leg still upraised, bringing the same foot rapidly toward Jack’s nose.
Six inches from its target, the foot hit the dowel rod Jack had slipped out of his sleeve. Jack cracked it smartly just where he had aimed, at the man’s ankle bone. He heard the contact, like a well-hit line drive.
His attacker showed no response. His swinging foot missed Jack’s face, but the attacker landed on that foot and immediately leaped off it, coming toward his target again.
“Oh, shit,” Jack said, scrambling back. He had always thought these impervious-to-pain players were cheats in a game world, and he’d never imagined encountering one in real life. That smash on the ankle bone would hurt like hell, he was sure of that, but the man wouldn’t give into the pain until after this fight. After Jack was down and dead.
So Jack’s dowel rod wasn’t going to be much help, except to fend off attack, but now the other man would be ready for that. The attacker stood for just a moment looking at Jack with a flat, dull gaze. Jack wondered if this staring at the opponent was a new form of martial arts. This man didn’t seem to be trying to hypnotize him. Maybe only to memorize him.
No, it was a distraction. Even while the eyes remained on Jack, the man’s foot came at him again, this time directly upward. Jack stepped back and held the stick parallel to the ground, tightly in his two hands, hoping the foot would smash on it again. He held it perfectly positioned. The foot hit right in the middle of the stick.
And broke through it, hitting Jack in the chest. Jack fell backward, onto the ground, catching himself so his hands were down on the concrete floor. His opponent’s eyes smiled. Jack would not be able to rise from that position, in this small space, without making himself vulnerable for all the time his opponent would need. Jack just sat for a moment, but that was dangerous too. The attacker’s foot reached out and pulled Jack’s foot forward, so that his legs were extended, making it even harder to rise and leaving Jack even more exposed. Then, his fastest move yet, the man pivoted on that foot and brought his other one around in a roundhouse kick Jack didn’t even have time to fall back to avoid. He cringed, beginning to slide away from the blow, hoping to evade enough of its force to stay alive and barely conscious.
The swish of flesh past his face was so close that Jack could smell the dirt under the man’s toenails. One of the nails, very short, sliced Jack’s nose, opening a trail of fire. Jack screamed.
Then he leaped back and up to his feet. His opponent hadn’t been toying with him. He’d been interrupted by problems of his own. A problem, that is. Chun was back. He stood behind the attacker, having pulled him back just enough to keep his foot from connecting with Jack’s head. Then he had dropped him. Chun stood there smiling slightly, hands up loosely in front of him, bouncing on the balls of his feet, looking a little ridiculous in his jeans and Mickey Mouse t-shirt and martial arts pose.
The man on the ground moved so fast he was airborne as he was turning, both his legs and hands aimed at Chun. He came at him like a rain of knives.
And Chun spun, closing momentarily through those arms and legs, inside the other man’s defenses, where Chun cracked him in the nose with his elbow. There was a flurry of other moves on both parts, mostly defensive, Jack thought, and then the two fighters backed apart.
The attacker didn’t shake off Chun’s blow as he had Jack’s. He appeared obviously dazed, blood spurting down from his nose, covering his mouth and chin. Chun began to move again.
The root of Chun’s reputation in the martial-arts-gaming world, even before he’d designed a game, was that he had been North Korean and then southeast Asian karate champion three years in a row when he was eighteen, nineteen, and twenty. The digits in his Deadly Digits game were his own.
Jack had not struck up a conversation with him by random.
“Take the other one!” Chun yelled as he spun in to attack the man.
Jack turned to the woman, who had stayed back from the action. She looked panicked, he thought.
This lithe blonde martial arts woman was such a gaming convention. They were always turning up in the kinds of games Chun designed. In real life there were very few, and Jack didn’t think whoever was following him had come up with one at short notice. The woman was just along as a distraction while the man came in for the kill. Jack gave her an appeasing look, as if to say, Just don’t do anything stupid and you’ll get out of this okay.
And the woman spun on her heel and kicked him in the head.
“Unghh.” He had had just enough time to turn with the blow, slipping some of its force, but his head still rang. He jumped back, trying to gain time, and she rushed in to him. Jack still had half the broken stick in his hand, and he thrust it at her face like a knife, its jagged end capable of doing a lot of damage. She evaded it smoothly, though, twisting back and to the side, which gave Jack the opportunity to sweep his own leg behind hers and pull. This move didn’t knock her down, just made her lose balance and stumble back. Jack didn’t press his advantage, afraid she’d hit something vital the next time she closed with him.
“Chun!” he yelled. “I can’t take this other one!”
The woman smiled. In a strange accent, sort of British-Chinese, she said, “Unfortunately for you, he is occupied.”
Jack looked back past her, folded his arms across his chest, and smiled himself. “Unfortunately for you, he’s not.”
She didn’t believe him. That was clear from her continuing confident smile. But her eyes were no longer fully on Jack, and neither were her ears. When she heard the swish of movement behind her she turned quickly, moving her head to the side. She still got clipped, though, by the small three-legged stool Chun had thrown from ten feet away, where he was just wrapping up his own opponent. The stool caught the woman on one of her cheeks. She gave to lessen the blow, bending back.
Which gave Jack the opportunity to roll suddenly to the ground and through her legs. A sort of rolling tackle, not legal in any sport, but effective. The woman went down and hit the back of her head on the concrete floor. This cracking sound was even louder than the last one. She didn’t move.
A moment later Chun stood beside Jack looking down at her. “Who is she?” Jack asked.
Chun gave him a strange look. “No idea. She is not Korean, though. Neither is the man.”
“Well—”
“Yes.” The North Korean government certainly worked through agents of other nationalities. So did other organizations.
Chun looked at the broken stick in Jack’s hand. “You used a weapon.”
“No, I failed to use a weapon. That’s a game rule, Chun, not one when somebody’s trying to kill you. Anyway, you used the little stool.”
“Yes, but it was a found object. I didn’t bring it with me.” Chun smiled.
They walked away without bothering to search the attackers’ clothes. They wouldn’t be carrying any identification, at least no accurate ones. Maybe they would still be unconscious when security came to get them.
At the curtain, Chun turned and looked back. “You know,” he said quietly, “when I slipped away, neither of them followed me. They both continued to come after you.”
“Probably thought you were still with me or close by. Wanted to take me out first the way they took out your guards.”
“Mmmm,” Chun murmured, then shook his head. “I don’t think they were after me, Jack. I think they were after you.”
Jack continued to look at the bodies on the floor, avoiding his new friend’s eyes. “Really?” he said.