Game Ten: A gripping conspiracy thriller, page 1
GAME TEN
James Long
© James Long 1994
James Long has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1994 by Simon & Schuster Ltd.
This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
For Ben, Harry and Matilda
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Author’s Note
Prologue
Monday June 24th
Paul Wade, flying on wings of Ecstasy, convinced of his invulnerability by an extra snort or two of the purest coke he’d ever got his hands on, thundered into the early Kentish dawn.
The other side of Caterham, he was killed by a small lump of concrete but he didn’t know it at the time. The speeding car, Shamen blaring from the tape player, got away from him on a bend as his chemically modified brain completely misunderstood the evidence of his eyes and simply failed to tell his hands to turn the wheel fast enough. A broken building block, hidden in the long grass of the verge, bounced the rear tyre back into line with a violent jolt.
The car lurched back on to the road in a cacophony of noise from ancient suspension bushes, its glove-box lid dropping open and a cloud of dust, which would have delighted any drugs squad analyst, rising from the floor. Inside the radio-cassette player, the brittle filament of a tiny pea-bulb had broken under the transmitted shock. Within an hour, that tiny piece of broken wire killed him.
Paul’s friends had cheered him on his way, the Lone Ranger of the satellite screen, when they’d surfaced from the warehouse rave in Catford. Blown along by the magic powder in his veins, he’d set off to breach the dark citadel and bring his long investigation to a close.
The Ecstasy, taken before midnight, wore off before he came to his destination, allowing a little blackness back into his soul. He coasted, pulling the wheel over to let gravity take the car down the lane with a dead engine. The high wire mesh of the scrapyard fence was black against a lightening pink and yellow eastern sky. He sprinkled a small heap of coke on to the back of his hand and sniffed deeply, feeling clarity burst upwards through his brain like cold, running water.
Closing the car door silently, he checked the windows of the caravan for signs of life, just as Monkey had told him to.
Normally the little red light would have warned him that, with the tape ejected, the radio was still switched on, but now its filament was hanging limply inside the bulb. It was shortly before 5.50a.m. when he found a way through the wire into the scrapyard. It was just a minute or two later when the transmitters came on all over the country and a Radio 4 announcer in the basement of Broadcasting House put on the opening medley that heralds the network’s daily awakening.
The volume control had been turned right up for the rave music, and the six speaker array – possibly the most valuable part of the whole car – pumped out ‘Rule, Britannia!’ for all it was worth. A light came on in the caravan.
Chapter One
Saturday July 13th
The Gulfstream whispered its way on to the apron, joining a row of megabuck corporate jets, and dwarfing the ranks of Cessnas which were the little airfield’s more usual inhabitants. The heat of Sonoma County, California hit them as they walked down the steps, but not for long. A stretch limo waited just yards away beyond the wingtip. The two men weren’t dressed in the usual corporate jet and limo style. Both in their forties, they wore soft sports jackets, expensive plaid shirts, slacks and Timberland boots. Only the colours differed. The shorter man had an expression of pure glee on his face and he stopped on the tarmac, opened his arms wide, then did a little pirouette, sniffing the air appreciatively, loving it.
‘Final leg, Hacker,’ he said. ‘Gonna be great. Bet you can’t wait, huh?’
The other man looked more at home in casual clothes. He glanced around at the fields and the distant woods. ‘I can’t say, Ed. I hope it’s not a waste of time,’ he replied shortly.
‘Bohemia’s never a waste of time. You wait. You never saw anything like it.’
The driver opened the rear door of the limo for them. ‘Good to see you, Mr Butzer. Welcome to the Grove.’
In the back, Ed pulled open the burr walnut door of the cocktail cabinet and whooped with glee. ‘All right. Here we go. This’ll get you started.’
He poured a large measure of brown liquid from a decanter into one of the lead crystal tumblers which nestled in padded sockets inside the cabinet, and passed it over.
‘What is it?’
‘Rusty stovebolt. Go on, knock it back.’
‘Rusty what?’
‘Scotch, Drambuie and Kahlua. Great detailing, eh? They even get the booze in the limo right. It’s the camp drink for Bone Yard. That’s my camp.’
The other man took a sip and made a face. ‘Kind of sweet, isn’t it?’
Ed Butzer, head of one of the meanest mergers and acquisitions law firms in Manhattan, looked at his old college pal and giggled. ‘Sure it’s sweet. Got to get into the vacation mode, Hacker. This is the biggest vacation of them all.’
‘Ed, I wasn’t planning on coming for a vacation. You said . . .’
‘I said, you want to meet the guy, you come with me. I know where he’ll be with his pants down and his schlong in his hand pissing on a tree. Doesn’t mean you can’t have fun.’ He’d finished his drink already and his cheeks had taken on a warmer glow. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you didn’t used to call me Ed when we were at Harvard. You’re Hacker and I’m Teddy, right? Like the old days.’
‘Whatever you say . . . Teddy,’ the other man said with a slight sigh.
They crossed a bridge, left a little town behind and the road began to wind through small trees. Detecting even through a mounting fog of rusty stovebolts that his companion was having second thoughts, the lawyer tried again. ‘Got to appreciate the tradition here to understand it right, Hacker. The Bohemian Club’s been coming to the Grove for over a hundred years. Jim Baker, Cas Weinberger, Kissinger, all those guys. Reagan spent his formative years bunking at Owl’s Nest camp. Nixon was at Cave Man. Schultz, Nick Brady, Gerry Ford, they were all at Mandalay. That’s a pretty special camp, Mandalay; you want to take a look in there. Luxury.’
‘I thought it was all one camp.’
‘Hell, no. The Grove’s one big redwood forest, but over the years all these separate camps got set up. Lotsa different styles and customs. Makes it sort of exclusive but together at the same time.’
‘What about George Bush?’
‘Sure. Bush, now, he joined Hill Billies, with Cronkite and Tom Clausen, people like that.’
‘Clausen the banker?’
Teddy nodded. ‘Bankers, defence industry, construction, electronics, lawyers, the works. If it’s Republican, big money or big influence, it’s here somewhere. Jesus, Hacker, this is where they decided to make Reagan president. It’s where they pulled together the finance for the atom bomb. Some people even say it’s where they fixed things with Gorby’s people to break up the Soviet Union.’
‘So we’re going to do some business?’
‘Make the contacts, maybe. Do some serious drinking. Piss on some redwoods, listen to the music, watch the play. Take it slowly, it’s meant to be fun. You’ll get the idea when you see the Cremation of Care tonight. That’s awesome.’
Up a side road the true forest began, and through a complex of gateways, security checks and baggage-handling docks, where attentive camp servants swarmed around the trunk of the limo, they passed through the guarded perimeter and entered the cathedral cover of the giant redwoods and the extraordinary, private world of the Bohemian Grove.
*
In the evening, the redwoods soared two or three hundred feet into darkness. The smell of wood fires and barbecues mixed with the left-over sappy warmth of the forest and the brief tang of urine from the soaked circle of mossy leaf-mould at the base of each of the surrounding trees. For the past two hours, while Teddy caught up on old acquaintances among the log cabins and tents of Bone Yard camp, its gateway guarded by a full-size dinosaur skeleton, Hacker had been meandering through the Grove, weaving between the hordes of men – only men – who were all clutching glasses, slapping backs and doing the corporate macho things that Grove customs called for. At the end of the long River Road, bordered by the camps – Cliff
Now, however, there was an expectant stillness among the hundreds of men ranged around the lake in the dark. Soon after nine o’clock, absolute silence fell. Even the belching and the trickling of urine stopped as a torchlight procession of hooded, robed figures, druids in orange and red, emerged from the trees bearing a covered figure on a litter. They quenched their torches in the water, and in the sudden darkness a burst of singing switched his attention to the end of the lake where a crescendo of floodlights revealed a forty-foot statue of an owl, now surrounded by more robed priests and acolytes.
Teddy nudged him and whispered, ‘The figure they’re carrying, that’s Care. Watch.’
The bier was laid in a black gondola, and the boat made its way slowly across the lake, poled by a tall figure all in black, while dry ice sent smoke billowing across the surface of the water and a faint electronic ululation seemed to fly high above their heads from treetop to treetop. As the gondola approached the shrine, the funeral pall was pulled from the figure showing a grotesque body with a withered and ancient mask for a face. It was lifted from the boat on to the shore and placed on a pile of timber in front of the giant owl. The forest was silent.
Just as the priests advanced on the pyre with their torches, a high cackling laugh from way up the slope in the towering trees sent shivers down Hacker’s spine. There was a sudden exhalation of breath from the hundreds of men all around him. In the topmost branches of a redwood, a green, shimmering hologram appeared: the figure of Care, moving, writhing. Its mouth opened and an enormous voice declaimed, ‘Fools, fools. When will ye learn that me ye cannot slay? Year after year ye burn me in this Grove, lifting your shouts of triumph to the pitying stars, but when again ye turn your feet toward the marketplace, am I not waiting for you as of old? Fools, to dream you conquer Care!’
The torches went out, but now something was happening to the face of the great owl. With a deep voice that sounded like Ronald Reagan, its features flickering into life with help from a hidden projector, it said, ‘Fellow Bohemians, I, the great Owl of Bohemia, give ye counsel. Rekindle your torches from the Flame of Fellowship. Thus shall ye banish Care from this our sacred Grove.’
The High Priest emerged from the throng around the owl. ‘Our Flame of Fellowship shall damn thee for a space, Care. Thy malevolence shall lose its power beneath these friendly trees, and in the flames that eat thy effigy we’ll see the signs that, once again, midsummer sets us free.’
As the flames sprang up around the effigy of Care, loud cheers sounded from the crowds among the trees, rockets whooshed from launchers across the lake to explode with multi-coloured thunderclaps, and a band launched itself into ‘There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight’.
‘Phew,’ said Teddy. ‘OK, Hacker. What did you make of that?’
Not a lot, Hacker thought. Fake California Shakespeare, ham acting and overdosing on the special effects. ‘Very impressive,’ he said.
Teddy pointed to a group of robed priests making their way into the crowd. ‘See who they are?’
Hacker recognised with incredulity the faces of a Supreme Court Judge, the head of one of the world’s biggest electronics groups, and a former US Secretary of State. ‘Good God.’
‘It’s a great honour taking part in the ceremony. That and High Jinks.’
‘High Jinks?’
‘You’ll see it. The Grove play. Serious stuff. One performance only and this year they say it’s costing eighty thousand bucks. Can you imagine?’
On the model of the Cremation of Care, he thought he could imagine only too well. They walked slowly down past the open-air dining circle, an array of log tables and benches, and towards Bone Yard camp. There was a large sign on a redwood, a picture of an owl, saying: ‘Gentlemen, please! No pee-pee here!’
‘Too close to the dining area. Everyone used to piss on it. Damn near killed it,’ explained Teddy.
‘What now?’
Teddy, who was having trouble walking in a straight line, made a big effort to concentrate. ‘Well, with a little slice of luck, now is when you get to see your man, just to get to know the guy. He was in the ceremony, but I had someone invite him over to the camp for a rusty stovebolt after.’
They passed the skeleton and walked on to the wooden platform which jutted over the slope of the hill. Bone Yard was filling up with excited old men, talking about the ceremony they’d clearly seen year after year, just as if it were brand new.
‘Whoo. That voice. Wasn’t that something?’
‘I kinda liked the hologram.’
‘Yeah. Courtesy of Radtech. Cost twenty-five grand, I heard.’
‘Ed! Son of a gun. How yer doin’? C’mon over here and help us out,’ called a former attorney general. ‘Lewis here reckons his dick is so long he can piss twice as far as I can. I’ve got a hundred says he cain’t. C’mon over and judge.’
Teddy waved. ‘Nobody’s a bigger dick than Lewis. Back in two shakes, Hacker.’ Then he ambled off, giggling.
Left behind, Hacker stood there, taking in the scene. Someone was playing loud honky-tonk piano on one corner of the deck. A huge glass contraption of tubes, pumps and tanks was dispensing the sickly drink in all directions. Rowdy laughter came from all around. He watched it all, distant, disappointed, wanting out, searching the faces and finding no echo of his own feelings, nothing but fleshy, drunken, uncritical enthusiasm. Then his gaze crossed a pair of sober, sardonic eyes, and he felt the sudden flash of meeting a fellow countryman in an alien land. A pencil-thin, elderly man, dressed all in black – shirt, slacks and bootlace tie – was watching him, leaning on the railing. As their eyes met, he nodded slightly then came over.
‘Something tells me you’re not too impressed, are you?’ he said with a southern accent.
‘It’s all very unusual.’
‘You don’t have to be polite to me. I’m just a guest. It’s a giant frat party for rich guys, getting a kick out of pretending they’re in touch with nature. Shit, some of these guys destroy a forest every day of their working lives.’
Hacker looked around. ‘Maybe I’m here for the wrong reasons. I thought it was meant to be some kind of powerhouse.’
The other man laughed mockingly. ‘Maybe once. Maybe still, but only for the inner circle.’ He thrust a hand out. ‘I’m Bernard.’
‘Right, I’m . . .’
‘I know just who you are, buddy. I’ve been wanting to . . .’ That was as far as he got. Teddy reeled back to them from the judging.
‘Hacker, your man’s over there. Come on.’ He registered the other a little late. ‘Oh, pardon me.’
‘No, that’s OK. Catch you later.’
Leaning on the rail at the edge of the platform, a fat, perspiring man of sixty or so, dressed in an orange robe, with the cowl pushed back from his head, was draining a glass and acknowledging the plaudits of passers-by for his performance.
‘Great show, Randall. Moving, real moving.’
‘Good of you to say so, er . . . Ed.’
‘This is my friend, Hacker. He’s my guest this year. I wanted you two to meet.’
At that moment, a man with his shirt soaked in the Bone Yard’s noxious whisky mixture arrived in their midst with a loud rebel yell, seized Teddy by the arm and danced him off across the platform in a violent waltz which had the other men lurching back out of the way and screeching with laughter. In their wake, the man called Randall mopped his brow, sipped from his glass and blinked in an out-of-focus way. ‘Hacker. What’s that? First name?’
‘No. It’s just an old nickname. I’m glad to meet you. I have an interest in some useful prospects on the East Coast and I thought maybe . . .’
A stubby finger jabbed him in the chest. The hand it projected from still held the glass, slopping sticky liquid on to his shirt. ‘Whoa there. Out of line. Cut that shit. Weaving spiders come not here.’
‘I’m sorry, what’s that again?’
‘You don’t know that, you ain’t no Bohemian.’
‘Well, I’m just visiting but . . .’
