The Restoration Game (10 page)

After the 1917 Revolution, there was a huge literacy programme, which (credit where it's due) got most of the population able to read and write in Krassnian (in the Latin script, so that the oppressed masses could read exactly as well as the local ruling class). Around about 1935, some tidy-minded official in Moscow decides that all the languages that have hitherto been written in their traditional script (whether it's Latin, Arabic, Georgian, Ossetian, or whatever) will henceforth be written in Cyrillic. Overnight, everyone affected is illiterate in their own language all over again. The stupid, it burns, as the saying goes. The resentment, it burns too.

So the upshot of all this is that in 1992, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the government of Krassnia (all excommie and pro-Russki, but pandering like mad to Krassnian national sentiment) decreed that henceforth Krassnian would be written in the Latin script.

Which—stop me if you've heard this before—made every native speaker of Krassnian officially illiterate in Krassnian
all over again.

(Hence the need for a Krassnian-Krassnian dictionary.)

Sean took a deep breath, one that I heard across two desks. We all looked up.

“That's it,” he said. “Done. Fixed. Fuck.”

On that last word, it was like he'd let the last of the breath out. His shoulders slumped.

“Fuck,” he repeated, then straightened up. “I just fucking hope I never have to do all that ever again.”

I felt quite irrationally responsible, or at least as if I'd be blamed, because (a) my desktop had been the first affected and (b) I suspected the lads would assume that I'd been careless. So I kept uncharacteristically quiet.

“What was it?” Matt asked.

Suresh stood up. “It was more than an annoyingly persistent scambot,” he said. “That was just a cover for a piece of code set up to send chunks of
our
code to some cleverly munged I. P. address.”

“Our
game
code?” said Matt, sounding outraged.

“Yes,” said Suresh. “I think it was an attempt to pirate our games, or one of them.”

Sean shook his head. “You're right about what it was trying to do,” he said. “But I don't agree about the social engineering scam.
That
wasn't a cover! We might never have noticed anything was wrong if that hadn't been plastered over our screens in big flashing letters.”

“So why do that?” asked Joe. “Seems like self-defeating, no?”

“Not if we were
meant
to notice it,” said Sean. “It's like football casuals used to leave business cards on people they'd beaten up and left bleeding in the gutter. ‘You have been done over by the Hearts Mental Krew,’ sort of stuff.” He fixed me with a narrow-eyed gaze. “I think we've just had a card saying: ‘You have been done over by the Russian Business Network.’”

The Russian Business Network, in case you're lucky enough not to know, is the nastiest, most powerful cybercrime syndicate on the planet. Child porn, malware, botnet seeding, phishing, spam hosting, identity theft, denial of service attacks are all in a day's work for them. Fake antimalware alarms are one of their favoured methods of planting malware. I've never heard of them leaving a calling card.

“The RBN?” said Matt. “Oh come
on.
You're being a wee bit overdramatic, Sean.”

“He's not,” said Suresh. “We know that the scam is Russian.” He waved a sheet of diagnostics. “Traced it back to a known RBN host in Tajikistan. Good reason to think the trojan came from the same source.”

“What I don't get,” said Joe, “is why whoever tried it would want us to know.”

“Maybe Lucy can tell us,” said Sean.

I sat bolt upright, which is not safe to do if you have your chair on tilt. I had to grab the side of the desk.

“What?” I cried. “Why should I know?”

“The Krassnia thing,” said Sean. He looked as if he were embarrassed to be saying this, but had to persist. “Russia's interested in Krassnia, isn't it? You know about Krassnia, Lucy. D'you think there's anything going on we don't know about?”

Shit shit shit shit shit

“Oh, sure,” I said. “It's actually quite difficult to find out anything about Krassnia—and I've tried, believe me—so there's bound to be something we don't know about. But I'd be very surprised if the Russians care about a
game
, or even if they know about it. How could they?”

“This Small Worlds company,” said Matt. “Nobody kens much about them. I mean, they could be dodgy themselves, or have dodgy connections. Hard to operate in that part of the world without dealing wi' the dark side, know what I mean?”

“Now that's being paranoid and overdramatic,” said Sean.

Matt looked stubborn. “Whatever—even if they're totally legit, they could have had a leak.”

“Aha!” said Sean, brightening. “I know. Somebody in Russia who makes or pirates or sells games is warning us off because they don't want the competition!”

“Aye, sure,” said Matt. “Like Dark Krassnia or whatever we're calling it is going to blow away Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft?”

“In a niche market, it might,” said Sean. He rubbed his hands together. “Well, that makes sense. Me and Suresh have fixed the security hole that let the trojan in, and we've beefed up the firewall, so let's give them some competition, what say you chaps?” (That last in an affected gung-ho English accent.)

“You're no worried about the warning?” Joe asked. He swivelled a fingertip in his ear, a revolting tic for which I was just about ready to smack the back of his head. “I've heard the Russians can play kind of heavy.”

“Ah, you're talking about drug deals and stuff like that,” said Sean. “A bit of hacking's the worst they'll do over something like this.”

And much to my relief, that was where the matter was left to rest. I said nothing more, and got on with dealing with the day's admin before returning to translating the script. I was reassured that Digital Damage's internal network had, like my mind, firewalled the Other Thing.

2.

Over the next couple of weeks life settled down a little. I left work at varying times, not always after six, and took varying routes home. Nobody followed me, or at least nobody I could detect by the simple techniques I used: pausing at shop windows and checking the reflections, doubling back, that sort of thing. The young beggar with the squishy-sounding footsteps was nowhere to be seen (or heard). The weather improved into April. Alec was up in the Highlands, at one of the university's field stations, picking ticks off sheep and applying statistics. He and I exchanged texts and photos about ten times a day, had long calls in the evenings, and were never out of each other's company at the weekends. It was all wonderful.

The Wednesday of the third week I finished the game-script translation. I did a little song and dance around the office, accepted all the congratulations, and emailed the script to Small Worlds. Two hours later, I got an email back.

Small Worlds had a problem—their Krassnian-language female voice actor was down with a throat infection. Could I do the voice acting instead? They would seek out studio space in Edinburgh and set me up with an appointment. Ambience and general cleaning-up of the sound file would be done by Small Worlds' own techs: all I'd have to do was mouth the lines with as much conviction as I could muster.

I forwarded the email to Sean.

“Can you do this?” he emailed back.

“Guess so,” I said.

“Go for it,” he replied.

I emailed Small Worlds to tell them to go ahead.

I left work a little early, around five thirty, and walked home by the direct route, down Lauriston Place. About a hundred metres from the flat I caught a whiff of the same pipe tobacco that Alec smoked. Not many people smoke pipes at all these days, and even fewer do so in the street. I glanced around, half expecting to see Alec. I couldn't see any pipe smokers.

The following evening I left work about six thirty. At the same point in my walk home, I caught the same whiff. This time, I did see the pipe smoker: a tall, heavily built man in a dark suit, about twenty paces behind me. I walked on past the flat entrance, crossed the street, walked past the big HBOS building, crossed Earl Grey Street at the first lights, and walked on down towards Lothian Road. I idled by the Woolworth's shop window, stopped to look at the Odeon's film posters, turned down Morrison Street a short distance, then crossed and doubled back, turning left again into Lothian Road.

In all of these twists and turns and pauses I didn't see the big guy at all, but every so often I caught that pipe-smoke smell. I began to wonder if I wasn't imagining it. I stopped outside the Filmhouse and turned around. The tall man, pipe jutting from his mouth, was about ten yards behind.

I stepped out into his path. The street was busy enough that nothing would happen to me unnoticed. He looked mildly irritated and swerved slightly to walk on past me. I stepped in his path again. He stopped. I stared at him, shaking inside.

Like I said, tall. Not so much heavily built as muscular in the chest and arms. Almost eccentrically old-fashioned, like a lawyer or a clergyman, in a three-piece suit that didn't stretch, or hang awkwardly; it was fine enough to have been cut for him. Grey hair, combed back. Straggly black eyebrows. He wore a white shirt and striped pale-blue-on-dark-blue silk tie. His cheeks looked as if they'd been shaved too often with a blunt blade and then stung with aftershave—of which, indeed, the scent was strong from where I stood, overlaying the pipe smoke smell. In one hand he had a briefcase, in the other his pipe. He looked so respectable, so politely bemused and taken aback, that I felt a surge of embarrassment and self-doubt.

I'd meant to challenge him, in a voice to turn heads.

“Excuse me,” I said, just loud enough for him to hear. “Are you
following
me?”

Fully expecting a surprised or dismayed dismissal of this paranoid fantasy accusation from a clearly overwrought young woman, I folded my arms and looked him in the eye as sternly as I could.

The man frowned.

“Not exactly,” he said. “I was making sure that you weren't being followed.”

He had a quiet voice, a West of Scotland accent mellowed into refinement.

“So you
were
following me!”

He considered this for a moment, then nodded.

“Logically, of course”—he stretched a smile—”I can't dispute that. You're not, by the way.”

“Not what?”

“You're not being followed.”

“Except by you!”

I was still undecided whether or not to make a scene, right there in front of the folks heading in to the Filmhouse for the seven o'clock screenings.

The man shrugged. “As I said, I can't deny that.” He nodded sideways. “Shall we step inside and discuss this over a coffee? Or a bite to eat, if you like?”

I stayed put. “Who are you?”

“My name is Ross Stewart,” he said. “And you're Lucianne Stone.” He slipped the pipe in his jacket pocket and stuck out a hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

Bewildered, I shook the hand of the man who might have been my father.

The Filmhouse has a bar-restaurant at the back, serving decent food at a reasonable price. I'd been there a lot, before movies.

I nodded to Maria, a Polish girl I'd worked with at Starbucks, behind the serving counter, and she smiled back. I ordered a feta and salad in pitta and a black-currant smoothie; the man calling himself Ross Stewart ordered a bowl of chilli con carni and a weissbeer. The place was busy. The man paid for both of us. We took our drinks and orbited around people shrugging on coats until we nabbed a table for two, by a pillar.

“Well…” said Ross, after taking a sip and giving me an appraising look over the rim of the ribbed chunky glass.

“Just a mo,” I said.

I rummaged my phone from the floor of my bag and thumbed keys as if texting, but actually paging through the menu to the camera settings. I flicked back the lens cover, held up the phone, and took a nonflash shot. On the screen it saved bright and clear.

“Hey!” he said. “Wait a—”

I'd speed-dialled it to Amanda before he could react.

“Fuck,” he said. “What do you think you're doing?”

“Checking your credentials,” I told him.

“Who with?”

“My mother,” I said.

His mouth fell open. His face paled a little, then reddened. He put his glass down with a bang.

“Fuck,” he said again. He laughed suddenly, and shook his head. “I should have known.”

“Known?”

“What to expect from you. Jeez, Lucianne. You're your mother's daughter all right. Speaking of which—how did you spot me?”

“The smell of your pipe,” I told him.

He put his elbows on the table and leaned his face into his hands. Then he opened and spread his hands and looked at me, shaking his head and laughing.

“What a—” he began.

At that point the waitress arrived with our meals and my phone rang: Mom. I selected Answer, put the phone to my ear, and signalled apology to the waitress with a waggle of my eyebrows. She put the plates down on the wrong sides. The man nodded, smiled at her, and swapped them as Amanda spoke. No small talk from her. No us-girls-together tone this time.

“What the fuck d'you think you're playing at, Lucy?” Amanda demanded.

“Funny you should ask, Mom,” I said, keeping my nerve in a way that made me feel smug and proud. “That guy in the photo has just said more or less the same. Expletives included.”

“Well, Lucy, you just put that—that—put him on the phone right now.”

I handed the mobile across the table. The man looked up from stirring a meditative forkful of sour cream into the surface layer of his chilli con carni. He took the phone with a smile at me.

“Hello, Amanda,” he said. “Good to hear from—”

I only heard one side of the conversation, but I got the picture. It went like this:

“It wasn't part of my—”

“Well, no, that's—”

“Sorry, but that's your problem, and—”

“Look, I'm not one of your—”

“I was just—”

“Don't start that ag—”

“Yeah, I'll put her on. Love you too, sweetie.”