Free The Great Game by Lavie Tidhar Page A

There was that still left, to chart and understand.
    Â 
    It was night and Smith was tired, but he'd been used to worse and at least no one was shooting at him any more.
    Â Â Which was not to say they weren't watching–
    Â Â Though he tried to shake any possible shadows, following a circuitous route through the city, keeping an eye out for enemy agents.
    Â Â Which meant, at the moment, just about anyone.
    Â Â But he needed to get to where he was going unobserved. Keep a low profile, from now on. Fogg was understandably angry. Another public murder and he, Smith, like a fool, smack in the middle of it.
    Â Â  Shadow executives had to keep to the shadows.
    Â Â He was getting old.
    Â Â There was no getting away from it. The realisation dawned on him gradually, in stages: he was past it. Mycroft had been right to retire him.
    Â Â And Alice, he thought. What was she doing still playing the game? She had told him once, lying beside him in a hotel room in – it must have been Prague, or was it Warsaw? Somewhere in that region, in a spring with long bright evenings and the smell of flowering trees – "My one wish is not to die in bed."
    Â Â Now she was dead and he was still around.
    Â Â Ahead of him was the church. He was at St Giles, and it was dark there, and the people who moved about looked furtive. Which suited him fine. He went into St Giles in the Fields, the church quiet and welcoming. He stood there for a long moment, as he always did, wondering what it meant, a church, a place of worship; wondering, too, where the dead went, if they went anywhere at all, and if they did, what they found there.
    Â Â He went and lit a candle. For the Byron automaton. Could you do that? Could you light a candle for a machine that no longer ran? Yet people were machines, too, running on vulnerable fleshy parts that decayed and were easy to harm. People shut down every day. Some – many – had been shut down by him.
    Â Â What happened then?
    Â Â Everything. Nothing. He lit the candle and placed it gently in place, in the damp sand, with the others. Goodbye, Byron, he thought. Another name on the long list of Smith's life had been crossed out.
    Â Â He sighed, then went forward, towards the dais, and sat on a bench but at the end, in the shadows, close to the wall, and waited.
    Â 
    "Mr Smith."
    Â Â The voice woke him up and for a moment he felt confused, thought he was back in his small house, back in the village, and it was time to tend to the cabbages. Then he remembered the house had burned down, people had tried to kill him, what had been left of the cabbages had been dumped in the rubbish tip, and he was in a church and must have fallen asleep. He shook his head ruefully. Another sign of getting old. Getting careless.
    Â Â "Mr Smith?"
    Â Â He turned his head and stared at an old, lined face. It was like staring into a mirror. "Fagin," he said.
    Â Â "Thought you were dead, like, Mr Smith," Fagin said.
    Â Â "Retired," Smith said.
    Â Â Fagin grinned. One of the things that Smith always noticed about Fagin was that his teeth were in remarkably good condition. They were white and straight and looked at odds in that face even as, like now, they had been carefully blackened with coal, to give them a ruinous appearance.
    Â Â But of course, Smith was one of the few who knew Fagin's secret…
    Â Â "You lot," Fagin said, "never retire. Die, yes. But never retire."
    Â Â "And your lot?" Smith said, and Fagin grinned and said, "Tis a matter of choice."
    Â Â This was the truth about Fagin: his real name was Neville St Claire and he had been, in his younger days, an amateur actor and a newspaper reporter. Faced with a new wife and mounting bills, the young St Claire took to the streets, putting on makeup and transforming himself into a hideous beggar, who called himself Hugh Boone.
    Â Â The old bee keeper had put an end to that