Midnight Empire (2 page)

The flight was smooth, the accommodation luxurious, the afternoon in Moscow (his first time) wonderful. He visited the old chess academy, now the headquarters of an American bank, and felt there an affecting sense of the old masters—Bronstein, Kotov and Boleslavsky—their great intellects, and also a sense of his father, the young Komsomol leader from Sverdlovsk with the strategic, practical mind. In some way, Dmitri felt that he was carrying the flame. But that evening, after only an hour at the table, he had lost his twenty-five thousand dollars. The problem was that the businessmen were not, as the manager had advertised, bad players. They were truly terrible players. When Dmitri tried to bluff a five-thousand-dollar pot he was called by an industrialist from Omsk with the bottom pair. Then he lost everything to a local criminal—a man who probably cooked drugs and whored underage girls—who did not understand that when drawing to a straight, you do not call for your entire stack when your chances of winning are one in five.

That night Dmitri did not sleep. The sunrise he watched on the plane back to Sverdlovsk was the brightest, the most piercing and revelatory he had ever seen, and he resolved never to play in Moscow again. Not until he could give twenty-five thousand dollars away without thinking twice.

For that entire winter, he played on the computer at home ten to twelve hours a day. Snowstorms and sleet and blizzards and every combination of temperature and wind went on outside but for as long and as hard as he could, he concentrated on the screen.

Dasha eventually told him that it wasn't healthy. ‘Get a girlfriend,' she said. ‘Get out of the house.' And he did have a few romances. Zoya, the daughter of the lawyer who had mounted an unsuccessful prosecution of the local authorities over Boris's death, a girl who was ‘perfect for marriage' (said Dasha) but who, when they made love, lay as still in bed as if she wasn't breathing. And Aljena, a ‘slut' (said Katerina) who wanted Dmitri to take her only to the two best restaurants in town and not to the cafés that ‘any other boy could afford' (said Aljena). But neither Zoya nor Aljena lasted long. To truly excel—to be as great as Mikhail Botvinnik or Vasily Smyslov and to die content after an autumn twilight surrounded by grandchildren and a long dynasty of dogs—it was necessary to pare back one's life to its essentials, to its defining rubric. A woman, for the time being, could only be a distraction, not something he actually required. What he required was perfection: perfection of mind, its precise and indelible rewiring.

And he might have achieved it too, had his body not let him down, if the world was not so cosmically cruel a place as to sow within his success the seeds of his eventual destruction. The pain began as an ache along the ridge of his right index finger, a sometimes twinge. It was his mouse hand. Of course he ignored it for a long time, believing that he could simply battle through. But after two months the pain was crippling. He could play for an hour, no more, then his hand refused to obey and his neck and shoulders joined the protest, entering into sharp and agonising spasms that left him wailing in his chair. The doctor, whose name was Borodin, diagnosed de Quervain's syndrome or Dupuytren's contracture: he wasn't certain. But whichever it was, it was an injury of repetitive strain, and it would not heal until Dmitri ceased his gaming—and perhaps not even then.

And so Dmitri spent a week playing left-handed, but it was terrible; he could not keep his concentration, and he gave away money in a string of losing sessions that left him questioning everything he knew about the game and also the nature of his soul.
What you do is who you are
, he heard on a television program, and who is a losing poker player but a nobody—a wholly vacant space?

He drove to the spot where his father had drowned. By the river, the air had a startling freshness, sharp, cool, gusty. He walked along the bank, away from the swimming spot, to the place where they'd pulled Boris from the water, the spot where a worker from the slaughterhouse had tried to perform CPR. Then he cried, the first time since the day of the funeral. Strictly, it wasn't sadness about his father, but sadness about change; the fact that nothing stayed the same, that the water that went by here was water never seen again.

He went home then and did not touch his computer. Instead, he began to frequent the cafés that Aljena had thought so commonplace. There, he read books and he smoked. In the afternoons he went to see films. It was, he knew, a search for meaning. Slowly, he had transformed himself into nothing, but now he would make something of himself, first by consuming the great Russian novels and movies, the achievements that had made his country what it was.

Three months into this, the pain in his hand had almost gone. Traces remained, little stings, but he saw them as useful reminders. In this period, he used his computer only once, transferring his winnings ($537,502) from the poker site to accounts at Troika Dialog and Rosbank. And he met a girl, Lilia; or rather he re-met her—she had gone to his school, they had once performed chemistry experiments together. Thus he found contentment again, in Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Eisenstein and Lilia. It was a very good few months for him, lost days of books and conversation and sex, and when Lilia said it was time for her to return to Moscow (she was studying European history at the State Linguistic University) he decided that he loved her and that he would go too.

So they moved into a rented apartment near the city centre, Lilia going to school while Dmitri sat in Moscow cafés, reading
The First Circle
and
Life and Fate
while contemplating taking a course himself, in mathematics.

It was when entering one of these cafés that he bumped into the casino manager, who was rushing to meet a new player, and who spoke over his shoulder, holding the door open. ‘Dmitri, you are in Moscow! You should have told us! Do you have somewhere to stay? Take my card. Join us at the game.'

But he didn't play. He went to talk to a professor of mathematics, a specialist in game theory at the State Technical University who was very busy, who didn't have time to talk except to say that Dmitri could enrol only once he had taken the department's admissions test, held on the twelfth of June. Dmitri explained that he didn't want to do undergraduate studies, that he wanted to do original research. He explained a concept he had been thinking about, how a player facing only one opponent could fashion a style that was mathematically unexploitable. ‘What you are describing is already known,' said the professor. ‘Take the test and do your undergraduate work first.'

Disappointed, Dmitri went to the university's bookstore and purchased the textbook used in the game theory course. It was true, the strategy he had theorised was called the Von Bormann function. There were many other things too, formal definitions for plays and approaches that he felt his gut understood. This excited him: the fact that he had come to these conclusions not through science but by natural mind. There were other theories too, axioms and functions, equilibriums and values, which were new to him, that he began to think about how to exploit.

That evening, after taking Lilia to dinner, he went back to the casino, to the poker game with the businessmen.

‘I played all night, Daniel. At 7 a.m., when the table broke, I had made a hundred thousand dollars. The following night, I made thirty-four thousand and the night following that, one hundred and forty-five. Since then I have been playing all over the world, sometimes in very tough games, sometimes in very loose games with maniacs who have a lot of money. Now I live in America in an enormous house with my wife, my daughters and my mother and sister.

‘But why do I tell you this? Why do I tell you my story? It is because I am wondering, Daniel, I am wanting to know what you are doing at my table. You are not a rich businessman. It is obvious you cannot afford the money in front of you. I do not say this aggressively, or arrogantly, or with strategic intent, but tell me, my friend, because you look like an honest man, you have honest eyes—what is going to happen to you when you lose?'

Displacement

1

Earlier

A
bright coastline suddenly from the darkness, clear nodes of white light: roadways in miniature, small towns in network followed by the great long carpet, the bastion Los Angeles.

Air travel. Guaranteed it would block Daniel up. Sixteen hours of flight; he wouldn't be able to go for days.

In 17A he'd been dreaming, running through a tunnel, wet and dank, the concrete innards of a beast large and dark.

In the bathroom he washed his hands and threw cold water on his face. He looked at himself in the mirror. His dark features, the whites of his eyes.

Was he doing the right thing?

He took a shaky piss, shuddered at the fierce gurgle of the plumbing sucking it down.

The ranges, when they reached Las Vegas, had an alien quality, deep ocean sediments that had lithified, sand dunes that had hardened over ancient, geologic time.

The thin walls of the US Airways jet made the experience of flight more intense, more floating, and as they turned for the airport (city on their left, red desert on their right) he'd fallen into a daydream, imagining some troubled Martian outpost below, a place of secrets and he, the hero, sent to solve them.

He looked again at the instructions he'd been sent.

1. Taxi to the Nexus Lofts.

2. Email notification of arrival to Liaison Coordination Office, ACC; and,

3. Wait.

ACC, he had surmised, was Air Combat Command.

At McCarran International he was surprised to find slot machines by the baggage carousel. He then waited in a long taxi queue behind college students and families, behind girls with tanned skin and men with chunky silver watches and BlackBerrys, and there was something, an elsewhere innate to their very postures, that seemed terrifically American.

The taxi driver took him the wrong way, went south on the freeway instead of north, then used an overpass to U-turn. A black man with two-day growth and a silver chain around his neck, he mumbled something about missing an exit and about roadwork, and there
was
roadwork, but Daniel knew the man had simply heard his accent, guessed it was his first time in the city, and was adding to the fare. Daniel could have protested. But rather than cause an argument, he told himself that it wasn't his money, and he sat quietly and set his watch to the local time, 10.32 a.m. The sun seemed high already, a strained white glare.

The Nexus, a pale tower in three segments with a shade structure of porous metal on top, was two blocks from the famous Las Vegas Strip. As his guidebook suggested, Daniel tipped the driver fifteen per cent. He carried his own bag into the lobby. Along one wall was a water feature, rocks and trickling sound.

Along the other, a wide desk of blue resin. A buzzer was labelled ‘Press for attendant' but the attendant appeared before Daniel could reach it. ‘Welcome to Las Vegas, sir,' he said. ‘How can I help you?'

‘I should have a booking for a loft.'

‘Daniel Carter?'

‘Yes.'

‘I'll need your passport for ID, sir.'

The loft was much bigger than Daniel had expected. On the fifteenth floor, it had a view west over the Strip and Daniel could see the towers of Planet Hollywood and Caesars Palace and what the attendant explained was the Bellagio's cupola. A living area had several sofas, an LCD television and a six-person dining table. This was hedged by a kitchen of stainless steel and granite, which the attendant explained had been designed by Dellacasa (what- or whoever that was). On the building's roof, Daniel would find a lap pool, an entertainment deck, a gym and a sauna.

Daniel thanked the attendant then dumped his bag in the biggest of the three bedrooms before taking out his laptop and sending the email to the liaison office as he'd been instructed. Afterwards he took a shower in a bathroom where the bench was the same blue resin as the desk in the foyer. He tried to use the toilet but it was pointless.

The fridge was barren. A unit on the wall displayed both the indoor and outdoor temperatures, 59 and 98ºF. There were six pillows on his bed.

He sent an email to Michael Sett, his boss, letting him know that he'd arrived. He found a digital safe in the wardrobe and put his passport and some cash inside. He stood at the window and looked out.

He was nervous. He hadn't thought that he was going to be, but he was. He looked across the valley to the hills, a few of which had red stripes, striking red hoops two-thirds the way up their pale heights, like American Indians in paint before battle in a technicolour western, hard to look at for long with the desert sunlight so unforgivingly bright.

There was a reply from the liaison office.

Daniel
We're snowed under here but we'll arrange for someone to interview you soon. Relax for a few days. Sending you a phone by courier. Call me if you need, thanks,
    Jake (your liaison)

Daniel wasn't sure what Jake meant by interview. He was an engineer, not an advisor. He checked his watch and composed a quick email to his girlfriend, Hannah (
Here safe, call soon
). Then he fell asleep on the sofa wondering whether he was supposed to have tipped the attendant.

Daniel worked for LinkLock, a Canberra telecommunications company, specialists in cryptographic technology. LinkLock's products had once been communication appliances, but the company had recently created a new technology, one that was no small revolution for cryptographic exchange. A method for secure transmission through insecure networks, it used the principles of quantum mechanics and was based on imperfections in fabricated diamonds. It was not an encryption device as such, but rather a method of securely transmitting the keys required to encode and decode private messages. Using the system, sender and recipient were able to exchange keys with absolute (quantum) confidence that no third party anywhere in the network carriage had intercepted them. This was because the very act of examination (of witnessing)
changed
the keys, rendering them void.