The Restoration Game Read Free Page A

on agreement, hundred thousand on delivery.”
    “Pounds? Euros?”
    “Dollars.”
    Oh well. Still in not-to-be-sneezed-at territory, for a company as small as ours.
    “I think I can make that fly,” I said.
    “Oh, don't you try selling this to the team,” said Amanda. “ My people will talk to your people, OK?”
    A couple of questions will have occurred to you. One: how is this lady professor of cultural anthropology or whatever going to come up with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars? Two: what does she want with a multiplayer online role-playing game in Krassnian in the first place?
    They occur to you, but they didn't occur to me.
    The only question that occurred to me was: hmm, so what's behind the CIA's sudden interest in Krassnia?
    I already knew the answers to the other two, because I already knew my mother was a spook.
    3.

    Not that it hadn't been a bit traumatic finding out, at the age of thirteen, right in the middle of my rebellious, weed-smoking, body-piercing, diary-keeping, two-fingers-down-the-throat puking, hormone-churned huff at the world. If this scene was in a movie they'd need to cast a different actress, who'd be in the credits as Teenage Lucy, and rummage up a roomful of late-nineties kipple. So you imagine me sitting on my bed, chin on knees poking through the cultivated distress of my jeans, leaning on a big batik cushion and facing a Kurt Cobain poster on the wall opposite. The Cranberries are messing with my head through earphones the size of earmuffs. I'm reading a thick Guy Gavriel Kay paperback. Scene set? Good. Enter Amanda, after a token knock.
    I scowled at her and saw her lips move. I stuck a thumb in the book and reached around the back of my head and prised away Dolores's dolorous lyrics.
    “What?”
    “There's something I've been meaning to tell you,” Amanda said, looking awkward.
    “I know,” I said. “Don't smoke. Do my homework. Use a condom. Eric isn't my father.”
    Wow, that one worked. I could see her flinch. I almost felt sorry for her. Almost. But I was cruel then.
    “That isn't…” she said.
    “That wasn't…” she added.
    “How do you know?” she got her act together enough to ask.
    “Mom, I'm not stupid ,” I said.
    She didn't inquire further on that point. She came and sat down on the only other seating in the room, an old beanbag opposite the bed, sinking so far that I had to lean forward to see her face.
    “What I've been meaning to tell you,” she said, “is, um…it's about Krassnia. We had some good times there, didn't we?”
    “Yes, Mom, I had a very happy childhood there. Until you took us away from it.”
    She winced again. “It wasn't my choice. The place looked like it was about to blow. All US citizens were advised to leave.”
    “And nothing happened.”
    (Apart from the scariest day of my life, which rather undercut my point, but Amanda ignored that opening.)
    “We didn't know that then,” she said. “Anyway”—she chopped with her hand, looking impatient—”that's all beside the point. I'm not going to let you rake all that up again. This is about something that really does concern you. It's about what I was doing in Krassnia in the first place.”
    She leaned back farther into the beanbag, as if to make sure that if I were to make some sudden movement, she would be out of range.
    “Your research?”
    “Kind of,” she said. “Um, well. My research wasn't just for my thesis, and it wasn't just about, you know, all that ancient stuff. I was sending a lot of it to, well, someone at the US embassy in Moscow. Someone who sent it all back to, um, to Langley, Virginia.”
    “You were a CIA agent?” I shrieked.
    “The correct term is ‘asset,’” she quibbled. “But, yes, that's about the size of it.”
    The implications weren't really sinking in yet.
    “Why are you telling me now?” I asked.
    “I've been exposed,” she said. “A guy at Langley has been arrested for working for the Russians, and for the Soviets