Michael Dibdin - End games

Jake and Madrona drove up into the mountains, pulled the bikes out of the back of the SUV and then cycled along an old railroad grade winding up above a dark, sinuous lake sheathed by forested slopes. Now they were sitting side by side on the timbers of a trestle overlooking the shimmering water below. The fresh, warm air was heady with the smell of pine sap and creosote.

‘Tell me about the Rapture again,’ he said.

Madrona smiled.

‘Oh Jake, you’re just like a baby, wanting to hear the same story over and over.’

She sighed wistfully.

‘I’ve been thinking a lot about babies recently.’

‘We’ll have one, Madrona. Real soon. I just have to get this project finished first. As soon as that’s done I’ll switch to breeding mode, I promise.’

He grinned at her.

‘The Lord has sworn and will not repent.’

‘Huh?’

‘Some hypertext link. I want to say someplace in the Bible, but I can’t be bothered to Google it.’

‘I never read that creepy Jewish stuff. They had their chance to accept Jesus as their personal saviour and they blew it.’

‘But you told me that the end times can’t happen without the Jewish state.’

‘Oh sure. That’s why we’re in Iraq. Pastor Gary says that even though it turns out that Saddam didn’t have any like missiles and was never a threat to us, he was a big threat to Israel. That’s why the president had to send in the troops. The other stuff was just window dressing to keep the liberals quiet.’

Jake leant over and kissed her. God, he loved this woman. She wasn’t maybe what you’d call really beautiful, but she was a total babe. A sweet smile, frizzy blonde hair, plus the guileless blue eyes of a child combined with that hot bod and a voice like wind-chimes colliding in a gale, harmonious but with a raucous edge. Above all, though, he loved Madrona for her mind. She was sublimely stupid.

This was a central processing issue, nothing to do with data storage, which for Jake was peripheral. Why overload your system with a bunch of mostly dormant read-only files when the internet could come up with anything you didn’t know in like 0.18 seconds? Jake didn’t know practically everything, but he wasn’t stupid. You didn’t rise like a rocket through the massed ranks of Microsofties without being able to spot a glitch invisible to other eyes, or figure out a more elegant route from A to B than detouring via Z. But Madrona was not only even more ignorant than him about every aspect of human knowledge, except maybe female grooming, she was also dumber than fuck. Jake found this adorable. It was like having some big, placid, playful dog around the place, only one you could have great sex with too.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Before the end times can happen, the Jews have to rebuild the Temple. Then Jesus and the Antichrist duke it out while we all watch from heaven. It’s foretold in the Book of Revelations. God, I can’t wait to see the movie!’

Jake sighed.

‘Yeah, well, we’re having some problems.’

‘Really? Like what?’

‘Oh, the director wanted to cast some English guy but he pulled out. Plus we’re having some issues with the location shooting in Italy. I’m sending one of my people out there to try and fix things up.’

Madrona made her charming sideways moue.

‘I’ve always wanted to go to Italy.’

‘Chill, hon. I’ll take you there for our babymoon.’

‘But I don’t get it. If those guys are being assholes, why don’t you just make the movie here? Nevada or Utah or Arizona or someplace.’

Jake longed to tell her the truth, to bring her in on the whole delicious secret, but that would be too risky. The fact that Madrona had nothing to say didn’t stop her talking incessantly, particularly when she got together with girlfriends like that turbo-bitch Crystl. The media had been sniffing around Rapture Works and its unique project for months. So far Martin Nguyen had managed to ensure that they gave big returns for small feeds, but as the commencement of shooting approached the predators were getting hungrier by the minute. If Madrona mentioned the truth to even one of the gals in her worship group or therapy workshop, somewhere along the line someone would figure out that there were big bucks to be made by breaking the story. At the same time, Jake couldn’t lie to Madrona. It would be like stealing candy from a kid.

‘No, it’s got to be Italy. See, every game has a scenario, but only the players can make it all pan out by making the correct moves. By moving against Saddam, the guys in DC made a good blocking move. Right now I’m set to make an even better enabling move.’

‘Wow,’ said Madrona.

‘Totally,’ agreed Jake. ‘Here’s the thing. Okay, the Jews rebuild their temple. What about all the goodies they kept in there, the lost Ark and shit? You can’t fake those. Plus a lot of people think they’re not around any more.’

‘How come?’

‘It’s like history. Way back, the Romans burned the Temple down and stole all that stuff.’

‘That was the Jews’ punishment for rejecting Jesus. But wouldn’t they have melted them down and made it into jewellery? Hey, you know what! If you ever want to buy me something, I could really use some gold bracelets.’

Jake looked around at the jagged rocks and spiky conifers, then up at the vacant blue sky.

‘Madrona, is God perfect?’

She laughed.

‘Well, I could have used longer legs. But sure, of course he is.’

‘Then everything he does must be perfect, right? So he wouldn’t have designed a game which could never work out because one of the key items of loot is lost for ever.’

‘I guess.’

‘Okay. So if the Apocalypse is going to happen, all that treasure from the Temple must still be around somewhere. And I’m pretty sure I know where one chunk of it has been hidden all this time.’

Madrona looked totally awed.

‘Really, hon? What are we talking about here?’

Her husband smiled artlessly.

‘Like, a candlestick?’

At seven o’clock precisely, Claude Rousset awoke from plump, untroubled sleep, grasped the vacuum flask of coffee he had prepared before retiring the night before and stepped outside accompanied by Fifi, leaving his wife snoring contentedly in bed. The sun had not yet reached the side of the lake where their camper van was parked, but further out the water glinted prettily in a gentle breeze. The silence was absolute.

Fifi went off to urinate on selected features of the landscape while her master sipped his coffee and started planning the day’s activities. Monsieur and Madame Rousset owned a furniture shop in Dijon. Every August they closed up the business and took to the road. Having thoroughly explored every region of France, many of them more than once, they had lately started to venture further afield. Switzerland and Spain had been first, then the Ligurian coast, Tuscany and the Amalfi peninsula. This year, feeling they were by now seasoned travellers, Claude had proposed to his wife that they tackle Sicily and le Calabre sauvage.

Sabine Rousset’s response had at first been decidedly negative, but in the end her husband had prevailed. Fears of Mafia shoot-outs, larceny, theft, extreme poverty and casual violence were absurd and anachronistic, he had declared. Italy was a leading industrial nation and a founder member of the European Union, and that included the bits south of Naples. Sabine still had her doubts, but she had not held the marriage together for almost thirty years without learning to pick her battles.

When she finally emerged, the sun was up above the mountains, the temperature had climbed several degrees and her husband had made his plans. After leaving Crotone the previous day, they had visited San Severina and the Bosco del Gariglione, one of the few remaining patches of the primeval forest that had once covered these mountains — named selva, ‘wild’, by the Romans, later corrupted to Sila, as the extract from the Michelin guide read aloud at some length by Claude had explained.