fingers. In the games, you could see Nick trying to top himself with bigger and bigger set pieces, while Simon withdrew more and more into his own work. When you looked at the bug database, this was when the Mournblade sightings started their slow climb in frequency toward the present day.
This was the game where I discovered a scrap of hand-lettered text on the stationery of the old Hotel Raphael, an intelligence dispatch from the CIA. It was in code, and I had to root around in the library to find the old decoder wheel. NICK MY FRIEND LAURA REAL NAME EVA KAROLY STASI REPEAT STASI SORRY TO BE THE ONE BRENDAN
Nick’s plastic face showed no reaction. It was three in the morning and I wasn’t in a state of mind to examine my feelings about this.
Clandestine VII: Countdown to Rapture (1997)
Karoly again, and by this time it was well into Sunday night and the game had become somewhat hallucinatory.
Nick’s a superspy, used to waking up at odd places and times, handcuffed to odd things. As Nick, you wake up tied to a chair in a featureless room more days than not at this point. Or else you wake up on a white sandy beach, faceup in the surf at the high-tide mark. You wake up in an alleyway behind a hotel in Monte Carlo, pockets full of thousand-Euro chips. You wake up at the controls of a stalled F16 at 10,000 feet, ears ringing and tasting your own blood. You wake up with a stranger pointing a gun at you, or you wake up alone. This time, it was on a submarine.
Karoly was at bay far out on the northern rim of Siberia; a shivering, wet-suited, jet-lagged Nick Prendergast surfaced by moonlight at the base of a cliff before the ice-slick entrance to a natural cave system. The year was, notionally, 1989, and this version of Nick had a sort of Baywatch styling.
He crept inside and began garroting and poison-darting his way through Lenin-era subbasements crammed with rusty, brine-crusted filing cabinets. Up through caverns with vast, slowly cycling turbines, breaking necks and cutting throats and ducking the occasional electrical arc. For Nick this was, after all, only a Tuesday.
Eventually Nick made it down the hall and ducked into a restroom. As Nick you stare into the bathroom mirror. Nick stared back, haggard after a sleepless Monday night getting drunk, beaten up, driven around, and tortured. He was dressed in what was once a nice semi-formal look, but tie and dinner jacket were long gone. If experience was anything to go by Nick would likely go on to kill every single person in the building he was currently inside. Nick did a lot more killing than what was considered professional in the real intelligence community, but in fairness he got handed some pretty difficult assignments.
Lisa watched as I went through at a leaden, bureaucratically deliberate pace; I hoarded health packs, conserved ammunition, and dutifully dragged guards’ bodies into supply closets, where they’d never be discovered. Life went on, knife to garrote to pistol to shotgun to light submachine gun to chain gun to sniper rifle to rocket launcher.
“Are you having any fun whatsoever?” Lisa asked me, materializing from the shadows with a bowl of ramen.
“Fun takes many forms. And no. I’m just trying not to die.”
“Weren’t you already here?”
I’d crept around a corner to find three Soviet guards already dead.
“Can’t be. Just got out of the stairwell.”
We exchanged glances. I sprinted ahead, then pulled back. The next room was crowded with alert guards. I heard a sniper rifle ping and one of them went down. Mournblade had returned.
“So… did you have a plan for when this happened?” she said.
“I’ve killed, like, nine hundred seventy-seven guards in the past forty-eight hours.”
I ducked out and back. The sniper had an annoyingly good position at the top of a wide cylindrical shaft. We were at the base of a missile silo, I realized.
“This one’s going to be eating souls for a while with his magic sniper rifle,” she said. I’d kept Nick Prendergast alive this long; I didn’t want to step into that kill zone.
“I know.”
“Can he suck their souls when they’re already dead?” she asked.
“No. Ew. But no.”
I stood back and started rolling hand grenades through the door. Booms and recorded Russian screaming started up. Above, the demented sniper reloaded. Souls for the accursed rifle! Then silence as the last guard died. I turned the sound up.
“What?”
“Wait for it,” I said. Silence,