Midnight Empire (26 page)

‘Is this an insight? No such thing as zero risk.'

‘People win the lottery all the time. That is one in millions. Twelve buy-ins. Let's give you one in twenty, one in thirty that you lose. What if you go up in stakes now and it happens to you?'

‘I will drop back.'

‘If you manage that you will do it too late.'

‘I'm going up.'

‘You are trying to die.'

‘That's fairly dramatic.'

‘Come, Daniel. Again, 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?'

Daniel and Dmitri went to Reims. Booked themselves straight into the club. It was just after lunch and there was no game. They saw the Notre Dame and ate at the Place Drouet d'Erlon.

Dmitri said that he needed to call his wife—his youngest was going to the ear, nose and throat specialist today for a replacement pair of grommets.

‘You have children,' Daniel said.

‘Katya and Tanya. They live in California with their mother, Lilia. They are the best thing in my life. They are balance. They measure the time.'

They went to their separate rooms. The covers on the beds were a silent blue. Daniel sat there thinking, What am I doing here? Can I trust this man? He looked out the window at the afternoon sun and decided what did it matter; he'd hit something, a limit or a boundary, and he was up against it.

He won five thousand in two days. In Toulouse, it was twelve and a half. They went to the club's tacky midnight bar and Dmitri said that okay, Daniel had been much better in subsequent appearances but he was still playing very dumb.

‘Your style at the table—you are minimising risk, cutting the odds, staving away chance. You are not super-tight but you are vanishing the probability of loss. Alright. That is how you play.

But then you are playing thirteen buy-ins. So it doesn't matter how careful you are. You will not defeat the mathematics, the variance of the dead churning. I tell you, you are going broke.'

But he did not go broke. He made money, lost some, made it back, won some more. He and Dmitri played on the same tables and he kept the Russian to his right so that when the man got aggressive he could get out of the way.

They spent four days in Cannes; five in Saint-Malo. They gambled with the owners of Thai soft-drink companies, with an Egyptian Formula One mechanic, with shady-looking businessmen from Angola. Their hotels were plush—Dmitri insisted. In Le Havre they slept on a yacht.

Three nights in Caen. Two in Le Mans. Daniel stole an enormous pot from a professional in Angers but gave it back slowly the following night. Dmitri won, lost, won big and then bigger again. Leaving Amiens, Daniel wasn't certain what he was up, but it was at least thirty grand.

They took a train to Marseille; hired a BMW to drive to Nîmes and onward to Montpellier. Dmitri told Daniel stories about chess champions, about inimitable intellectual triumphs, matches that were famous in Russia but about which no one in the West had ever heard.

They considered going to Spain but instead spent four nights on the Riviera playing against English cricketers aboard the Casino le Lydia in Barcarès.

Dmitri rang his wife in the afternoons, after breakfast, making no mention of the Mediterranean. They got back from lunch on the third day to find that someone had broken into Dmitri's room. The hotel said that they would fly him by helicopter to the US consulate in Toulouse to get his passport replaced.

‘You're American?' said Daniel.

‘American. Russian. Only my father would say they are not the same.'

They went to Bayonne, ate lunch at a tourist restaurant overlooking a city square. They'd seen the Cathederal of Notre-Dame then toured a fort. They would play tonight at an intimate club called the Canard d'Or. Daniel watched a ragged-looking man who was sleeping at the edge of the square by a tree whose shade had shifted, leaving him exposed to the sun.

‘So, I am sitting here thinking that you still have not told me, Daniel, why you are playing our game.'

Daniel shrugged. ‘I am playing it to play.'

The Russian seemed suddenly sombre. He raised a finger, his voice now hard and pointed. ‘It is not a life, Daniel. You must understand. I am a great reader, as you know. The books will not tell you this but poker is no life. It is only death. Or it is nothing and then it is death. A silent process of death. You may be with people at the table but each of you is alone. You are in the Siberian wilderness. I do not exaggerate. You may talk and talk and the game may connect you but you meet no one, you engage with no one. This is the heart of it. Nine of you at the table dying. Nine of you not living. I do not exclude myself in this. At the table we become nothing, we are nothing. Nine souls without history, beyond time, outside themselves. In your case I suspect that this may be the attraction?'

Daniel said nothing.

‘When is such a thing justifiable?' Dmitri said. ‘It is only justifiable if you dominate, if you make obscene profits while having a life outside the game. And I do not see that in you, the will or the ambition to dominate. I do not see the cruelty. With Russians, it is always cruelty in spades. Our history is tyrant after tyrant with his hands on the mechanisms of the state. But this is not in you. Your character. You have had it too easy, perhaps. You have never had to really fight. So you can never be good enough. Yes? You can never win at the rate necessary to exist beyond the game. Instead you will graph up and down, and you will never connect to anything. You will be the lost traveller on the landscape of no effect. The years will travel through you, the foreclosing current of time. Do not think that I am talking about gambling. I have no comment to make on gambling. I am speaking to you only about devotion to this game.'

‘What are you saying to me—quit?'

‘I am asking you to reconsider what you are doing. I have thought hard about the nature and philosophy of poker, its consequences for the spirit. I believe I have seen it in all its dimensions. Certainly, you are yourself entitled to some insight, but I started playing this game ten years ago in the cold thrashing of a Russian winter so that I might feed and clothe my mother and sister. And for a few months in Europe you are playing why?'

‘Why?'

‘Yes. What is the reason you are playing in the dark moments, when it is only you and this wall it seems you are against?'

‘Just to play, Dmitri.'

‘Just to play? Then that is very serious.'

‘Yes. Isn't it a very serious game?'

Did he ever sense that he was being followed? That forces were closing in?

No. But what he did note was an absence. He had now played in hundreds of places, including the biggest clubs, and nowhere had he set sight on her. The tournament lists, the gazettes that were published of entrants and results—thousands of names and no mention of Ania. It was silent proof of her falsity, his foolishness. The fact that he'd been so smoothly outplayed.

They were eating breakfast and he was reaching for a teaspoon when he happened to glance at the newspaper Dmitri was reading, a particular headline beneath the fold.
US Prosecutors Say Pentagon Official Sold State Secrets
.

The paper was an international edition of
The Times
. Across the table, Daniel read the first paragraph before coming to a halt. Something hardened in his chest and he looked away, at the wall, one of those that was mostly mirror.

He waited for Dmitri to finish with the paper. When the man put it down, Daniel picked it up.

A former intelligence official was charged today with accepting more than $1.7 million from an unnamed foreign intelligence service for the sale of state secrets. Federal prosecutors accused long-serving Pentagon cryptanalyst Arthur Nathan Bradley of compromising state security by providing information and access to federal programs to foreign nationals for financial gain.

Former and current counter-intelligence officials alleged that Bradley had, for a period of years, cultivated links through which he sought to trade information in order to alleviate financial difficulties.

A spokesperson for the Pentagon said that, while serious, the damage caused by Bradley's offending was comparatively minimal. She said that the analyst had occupied a developmental role and that the operational implications of his betrayal were low. She would not comment on suggestions that, as a result of Bradley's actions, the US drone program had effectively been grounded.

In legal papers to be filed today it will be explained that the FBI uncovered Bradley's activities after suspicions were raised over unusual transactions picked up by routine IRS examinations. Credit checks reveal numerous defaults in the name Arthur Bradley registered to addresses in Washington DC in 2008 and 2009.

It is not clear why the Pentagon's internal security failed to notice Bradley's actions. A spokesperson said that the former official was refusing to cooperate with investigators.

The White House today said that Bradley's arrest, which occurred yesterday at his home, was a ‘good result' which proved that the FBI and the intelligence community were up to task.

An independent intelligence analyst said that, of the hundreds of thousands of Americans with top-secret security clearance, there were bound to be ‘a few bad apples'.

If found guilty, at 64 years old Bradley may spend the rest of his life in prison. He had been due to retire in eight months' time, a factor prosecutors believe pressured him into taking greater risks.

Bradley. Reading between the lines the man had sold tell of LinkLock's existence to someone who had evidently decided to test it. They had tried to form an intercept and that was what had sunk the drone.

Bradley. It was why Austen had come to interview him. Why the FBI had wanted to know about LinkLock and its American connections.

Bradley. In other words, nothing to do with Ania?

‘Dmitri,' Daniel said. ‘Dmitri, do you know a poker player, a woman named Ania?'

‘Of course I do.' The Russian brushed something from his sleeve. ‘I happen to know every player on earth.'

‘So you don't know her?'

‘This is the first person you have named while we have been travelling. That has taken weeks. Who is she?'

‘Someone.'

‘He is very descriptive.'

‘Do you know her or not?'

Dmitri faced him, brought a hand to his chin. ‘I have never heard of her. Why?'

Daniel paused. ‘She, um . . .'

‘Yes?'

It felt like he wouldn't be able to speak. He clenched one hand, ended up looking outside, towards the sunlight.

‘Well, that is terribly interesting, Daniel. Really.'

The street was busy outside, people walking with purpose.

‘Why don't you look her up?'

Daniel turned. ‘Look her up?'

‘If she is a poker player.'

The Russian toyed for a moment with his phone then handed it to Daniel. Daniel looked at the screen. It was the website of a poker database.

He knew that a search was a bad idea. He knew that it was probably very stupid, that it could be traced. But he had to know. He keyed her name. Of course he found an entry. She was there in tournaments as far back as two years ago, the first of them even in Warsaw. Career winnings: two hundred and twenty-eight thousand. A one-line biography explained that she was mostly a live-cash player.

Dmitri snatched back the phone. ‘So who is she, my friend?

I think her statistics are not so bad.'

What she must think of him.

How she must detest him.

How could he have managed it, to get things so wrong? How could he have been so irrational and senseless? He was supposed to be a scientist, someone of logical mind. All that proof he'd strung together: evidence only of absurd and unsound thought. It was horrendous. It was as if he understood nothing, as if the ability to read the human universe had completely bypassed him; why bother. Better to shy away. Better to curl up and die.

Better to do what he was doing now.

‘So who is she exactly?' Dmitri said again.

Exactly, he had no idea.

In Gruissan, he lost twenty-four thousand euro. It peeled off like nothing, like silence at midnight. In Mont-Dore, it was thirteen more. Dmitri told him
concentrate
. ‘What is it that you think you are doing?'

In Vittel, a sunrise so bright it felt scorching.

In Bordeaux, half a dozen begging children huddled around him, crying, trying to take his wallet.

He sat at the tables and lost money like it was air and he was choking.

‘What is wrong with you?'

Ad Qs facing a three blind raise. He re-raised and almost called off when his opponent pushed all in.

Triple sevens on the flop. He bet his stack and was killed by a river card flush.

He steamed. Lost patience. Threw chips at lost causes. He played some very dark sessions, long hauls where he got up slightly only to break even or lose.

They sat on trains, watched scenery sliding past. They saw rose-coloured sunsets and slow, creeping dawns.

He couldn't do it, could he, get in contact with her? They'd be watching. They'd come for him in an instant.

‘You are losing very badly, Daniel. You need to start thinking about whether you belong here. You are not killer enough for these stakes.'

Was it that he needed to pare himself down, become even lighter, or was it that he needed to confess?

He and Dmitri went for a drink and he ended up telling the Russian everything: once he got started he couldn't stop. Dmitri looked at him with a certain amazement, as if he'd just heard the story of a terrible bad beat. ‘So this is the why,' he said eventually. ‘You're a wanted man.' And did Daniel hear some kind of edge in the words? Had an opportunity been detected? The Russian seemed suddenly deep in thought, mulling something behind his façade. ‘We'll have to decide what we can do, Daniel. We'll have to think about this.' And the confessor knew it was an error, offering a man like this the chance. Dmitri was wealthy but—any reward on offer—wasn't he exactly the type to take it?