I look at the two security guards. They stand stoically, nearly identical in their navy suits, not moving but briefly making eye contact with me before returning their gaze out the window behind me, as if at any moment armed soldiers of fortune might swing in on grappling hooks and start mowing us down with automatic weapons.
“Have you strapping fellows ever prevented somebody from being killed in a high-stakes augmented reality game with a twenty-billion-dollar family fortune on the line before?”
Neither of them responds. They stare at me and I stare at them.
Eventually, they realize that my question is not rhetorical—that I actually do want to know if they have any experience that might help them prevent me from getting blown up by some mad game master. They exchange a glance and I have their answer before they can utter the words.
“No, ma’am,” they say in unison.
24
My new bodyguards are named Ed White and Mel Fuller. They have both been incarcerated, but not at the same time and not in the same prison. One of them comes from a family of cops. The other comes from a family of Marines.
As a result of my feverish interrogation, I learn that they both are the youngest children of big respectable families and that they have both had problems with addiction in the past, but say they’ve put that behind them.
“You have so much in common,” I say, looking first at Ed and then at Mel.
“I guess that’s true, ma’am,” agrees Ed, not seeming to find my statement terribly interesting.
I realize that I am slightly delirious from lack of sleep. The timid reactions of these bodyguards to my questions makes me assume I am coming off like some kind of manic idiot. I need to center myself. To recalibrate.
I wander around the building for a bit, chitchatting with assistants and vice presidents as my bodyguards trail behind me.
“This is Ed and Mel,” I tell everyone, introducing them and making them shake hands. I have to get in front of how weird everything is if I don’t want to seem like I am retreating into some kind of literal or emotional bunker to deal with the trauma of losing my father and my brother. Ed and Mel are pleasant enough to my staff. People keep offering them food and drinks and they slowly relax, becoming less menacing in general.
The emotional timbre of the space is hard to gauge, mainly because I can tell people are being extra-sensitive around me. There are reporters camped down in the lobby, and I make the decision not to give any interviews: not to the Times, not to the Post, not to the Journal. I don’t know what I would even say. Eventually, the story about this game will leak out somewhere, but I haven’t yet figured out the best way to manage the fallout. The game makes us look crazy. It makes us look terrible.
But, then again, we are crazy and terrible.
Honestly, I barely know what to do with myself until noon rolls around. When I return to my office, I am a nervous wreck. Alistair is already waiting there for me. He doesn’t look any better than me. There are dark circles under his eyes and his hands are shaking.
“Any luck tracing those phones?” I ask him.
“All I can tell you is that this Game Master is somewhere in the United States and probably somewhere in New York,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean much. They could just be some lackey hired by the real person in charge.”
“Finding them would be a good start anyway,” I note.
“I’ll keep narrowing it down,” he says. “I’m running a carnivore program to help triangulate the likely location of the Game Master, since the Game Master must call all four of us at once. Actually, the longer you can keep them talking on the phone, the better chance I’ll have at figuring out who it is. It won’t help us trace the call, but the more data we collect, the better chance we have of unscrambling the voice modulation.”
“You can really do that?” I ask.
“If you can rattle them and make them speak in their most natural cadence possible, we should be able to get more fruitful data,” says Alistair. “People have patterns in how they speak that we can abstract. If we have suspects, for instance, we can match them against any voice profile that we generate. We might not be able to figure out exactly what this person sounds like, but we will be able to possibly eliminate false positives and to narrow down our suspects.”
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll keep them talking.”
Detectives Jay and Rutledge return around 11:45, trailed by Angelo Marino. I excuse myself and step into my bedroom, where I call Bernard, who does not answer. I try Gabriella, who does.
“Alistair and I nearly died yesterday,” I tell her, then give her a synopsis of our adventure the night before. “The aquarium blew up when I held up my phone to it.”
“That’s terrifying!” gasps Gabriella. “I’m so glad you’re both okay! You must be freaking out about today’s call.”
“A bit,” I admit. “Bernard won’t answer any of my calls. Do you know where he is? We need to coordinate here. We need to all be on the same page.”
“I’m not sure that he actually believes Henley is dead,” she confides. “He thinks his death is some kind of con or joke or hustle, that it’s part of your strategy to win. He thinks you two cooked it up together.”
“What?” I say, my features freezing with incredulity. “You can’t be serious.”
“Yeah, he told me not to believe anything you say,” she continues. “He says the cops are in on it. He says Angelo is working for you, because he needs you to win so he
