MasterSpy — the story

The top-secret MI6 HQ

The latest news was so bad as to give rise to such thoughts, even when one is settled in a comfy chair in one’s luxurious penthouse office in the top-secret MI6 headquarters, cunningly hidden in Vauxhall Cross, London.  The news in the spy business is always bad, of course, but this news is bad even by spy standards.

For several months now, Dr. Maybe (the Ruritanian dictator) has again been threatening to take over the world.  It was thought that he was planning to suborn the world’s cats to this end, but a stakeout of alt.cats.world.domination turned up nothing but spam, so there was nothing for it but to send in Britain’s four top agents — codenamed Rubber Guts, Flash Harry, Hair Brain and Nosy Ferret.

These four have established a safe house in the centre of Malenkograd, Ruritania’s capital and Dr. Maybe’s headquarters city, and for the past six months have each been exploring one of the quarters of the city:  Potholes, a series of caves; Stepping Stones, built over a giant lake; The Underground Railway, a (hilariously inaccurate) reproduction of London’s Tube; and Snakes and Ladders, which is like a giant (and deadly) board game.  Heck, this guy must be even more crazy than the usual run of insane dictators...

But now, on the brink of their success, desperate news has come in — one of the four is Dr. Maybe’s loyal henchman, Igor the Engineer, who long ago infiltrated British Intelligence knowing that the time would come when he would be assigned to a mission like this.  He has secretly been laying deadly traps in all four quarters (destabilising the Potholes and Stepping Stones quarters, and turning parts of the other two into dead-ends which no agent can ever get out of alive); he has also corrupted the three information sources in the city, so that only one type still tells the truth and the other two always lie; he has added bogus escape tickets and bogus exit doors (one to each quarter) to add to the genuine one already there; and even worse, he has sabotaged the mission equipment so that each agent can only carry one ticket at a time (Ruritanian tickets are man-size and very heavy) and the agent in Underground Railway can only carry one travel permit at once.  Worst of all, he has sabotaged the secure data link with London, so now only one agent at a time can be controlled.

All this can mean only one thing — he is about to betray the other three to the evil Doctor, and reap his reward whilst crippling MI6 in the process.  Unfortunately, the above is all that the agent codenamed Jumping Jack could pass on to London before he was assassinated by a Ruritanian agent — it is not known which of “our” agents is the mole.

Your duty as Spymaster General is clear — evacuate the three true agents (by finding the real exit ticket needed for each agent’s genuine door, passing that ticket to the agent at the Safe House, having the agent make his escape, and doing this for each agent in turn) and then trick the Ruritanians into trapping the Mole (much easier — just send him, without a ticket, through either of his exit doors), thereby saving the world, avenging Jack, and safeguarding the innocence of the cats.  (Hey, wait a minute — innocence?  Cats?  Since when?)  But sifting the truth from the lies, working out the correct escape order, and executing the three escapes in the right order, all while avoiding the hazards of the domains, isn’t going to be easy...