I sank gratefully into Mira’s comfortable desk chair. The room glowed a flickering blue from the monitor, casting bizarre shapes over the walls. I watched the shadows dance, a tiny part of me quite certain that something horrifying lurked in the darkness. Even when you get old enough to know there’s no monster under the bed, there’s always that little voice that asks what if you were wrong. I debated long and hard about flipping on a light, even if I risked waking the family up.
There was nothing in my e- mail, so I logged on to Grapevine. (Well, there was nothing from Viljo, but I did have one advertisement for a dating service and two offers to greatly enlarge my penis. How does any self- respecting person actually hit Send on an e-mail like that?)
Too late, I realized I hadn’t turned the volume down. The same woman’s voice screamed, “I see you!” and I nearly knocked everything off the desk in an attempt to hit the MUTE button in time. Snatching the tumbling speakers before they hit the floor, I froze, waiting to hear Mira get out of bed. I counted five long breaths in silence before I finally concluded she’d slept through it.
Carefully replacing the speakers, I put on the headset, muttering, “Viljo, I am going to strangle you.”
Almost immediately, the webcam window sprang up, the geek in question waving a cheery hello. No one should be that cheery this late at night, even counting the time difference.
“Dude, do you ever sleep?”
“I can sleep when I am dead. And if there is coffee and Red Bull wherever I end up, maybe not even then.”
Even the thought of it made my stomach churn. “How your head has not exploded by now, I will never know.”
“Your words wound me. Right here, in my heart.” He smirked; I could see that much over the grainy feed. “But I, most magnanimous and brilliant Viljo, will ignore your insults and produce the information requested of me.”
He’d found something. He only strutted and preened like that when he was proud of himself. “It’s only been a few hours!”
“More than ample time.”
I had to grin as he flexed his thin arms for the camera. He made me look muscular. “Well, spill it, oh guru of the perpetual signal.”
“Checking Miguel’s phone was easy. I should see if the phone company down there needs a Net security consultant.” He did something with his keyboard, and a window popped up on my screen-a call history, apparently. “Guy’s was a little harder, but really, their ‘secure’ site is laughable.” Another window popped up, and I adjusted them so I could see both at once.
“Okay, what am I looking for here?”
“On Miguel’s, three weeks ago, there is a number with a California area code, 714. See it?”
I located the number in question. Miguel had talked to that number five times in the week leading up to his disappearance. The calls were always inbound, though Miguel never called the number back. “Okay.”
“Now look at Guy’s record, for five weeks ago. The same number is there.”
Sure enough, it was repeated quite a few times there, too, but again, only inbound. “Well, whose number is it?”
Fuzzy Viljo frowned in choppy stages. “That is where things get tricky. I have more digging to do, but right now, it is looking like a prepaid cellular phone.”
“Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe… it’s another champion’s number. Who’s the guy out of San Fran. Avery?”
“That is not Avery’s number, nor is it any number that Ivan has used. I have a few more places to poke around before I will know for certain.”
“Well, don’t forget to sleep, man. You’re no good to me passed out over the keyboard.”
His snort came through the headset loud and clear. “As if.”
“G’night, man.”
“Hey! I am not done!”
I halted in the middle of shutting the window down. “What else do you have?”
Viljo’s image held up one finger, indicating for me to wait, and in another moment, more windows popped up on my monitor. “Miguel and Guy have both tried to sign onto the system in the last week. Unsuccessfully.”
“Are you sure?”
“Do you think I would make a mistake like that?” He frowned at me. Great, now I’d offended the little geek. “Both attempts were made within hours. They did not gain access because they failed the security checks. Things Miguel and Guy would not have forgotten. Someone is trying to get in.”
“You’ve had hack attempts before. Amateur stuff, you said.”
“Not like this. It gets weirder. I cannot get an IP address on it.”
We were rapidly descending into that realm of mumbo jumbo where I was definitely out of my element. “And that is… not normal?”
“No. All Internet presence has an IP address. You can mask it, or confuse it, but you still have one. This is just… vapor. A ghost in the machine.”
“So it’s someone better than you.”
He snorted. “There is no one better than me. I am telling you, something is fucked up here.”
“Well… batten down the hatches or whatever it is you do. I’ll let Ivan know.” And, as an afterthought, I asked, “Have you heard from the others?”
“Everyone has checked in except Sveta and the Knights Stuck-up-idus.”
Sveta was in Eastern Europe somewhere. At least, I thought she was. She was the only female champion I was aware of, and that is where my knowledge ended. “I’ll let Ivan know that, too. Get some sleep, Viljo.”
“You, too.”
Two tries to call Ivan resulted in a “Customer has gone beyond the service area” message, and I almost threw my cell across the room in frustration. Dammit. Of all times for the phone service to go down. Why couldn’t Miguel’s family live in a real city, instead of some hole in the mountains?
I did my usual house walk, checking for open locks and windows and rogue Ford Escorts, then crawled into bed beside Mira with a (manly) whimper and did my best to sleep. In my dreams, the Yeti was there, gnawing at my right leg like a starving terrier. It wasn’t the most pleasant of nights.
15
“Jess.”
“Jesse.”
“Jesse!” Although my head was buried under my pillow, Mira’s voice wouldn’t let me sleep in peace. Then, to make it worse, she started shaking my shoulder.
“Wha mrrmfh? G’way.” I swatted blindly at her, connecting with nothing.
“Wake up. Ivan’s on the phone.”
That at least penetrated the foggy haze in my head. I fumbled my hand free of the tangled sheets to take the cell phone and tried not to groan as every muscle in my body protested. It was official. I was way too old to be water-skiing across linoleum floors. “H’lo?”
“Dawson! I am to be waking you. Much to be apologizing.” A deep voice thundered in my ear, sounding totally unapologetic despite words to the contrary.
Oh hey… It was Ivan. Dimly, I knew Mira had told me that already. “Ivan. Um yeah, hi… Hang on, I gotta jump-start my brain.” Coffee-I could smell coffee. Like a zombie, I shuffled out into the hallway in only my plaid pajama pants, searching for the source of that divine smell. I don’t drink it often, but when I need it, I need it.
It didn’t take me long to realize that my right leg was still rather annoyed with me for last night’s escapades. It reinforced this message with a sharp pain every time I stepped down-not a good start to the day.
“I am not to be knowing what this ‘jump-starting’ means.” He didn’t wait to find out, either. “What news are you to be having from Grapevine?”
“Everyone has checked in but Sveta and the Order.”
