Gaspar’s blood turned to ice in his veins.
“Captain Winters will get involved in finding out who executed her,” Heavener continued. “By the time they cordon off the convention and get the investigation set up, they won’t be thinking about the game.”
On the monitor screen Heavener listened for a short time, then she smiled coldly.
“I have a very simple plan in mind,” Heavener said. “Oscar Raitt, the game designer we kidnapped last night, can be used to take the fall. I will set it up so it looks as if Raitt killed Green and Griffen out of jealousy over his friend’s successes. We’ll make it look as if Griffen faked his own disappearance to enhance the marketing of his game. Eisenhower officials will back us up, saying Peter was zealous in making the game a hit. After he murders Green and Griffen, Raitt will be shot dead by one of the hotel guards we’ve bought off.”
Gaspar listened to the silence that followed Heavener’s words. He felt short of breath, liked he’d been running hard.
“Tomorrow morning shortly before the game’s release online,” Heavener agreed, then tapped the touchscreen to break the connection. She turned and walked to Gaspar’s body lying in the implant chair. A knife magically appeared in her hand.
“Listen, little bug,” Heavener said in a cold, sandpapery voice, “I know you’ve been spying on me.” She tucked the knife blade up under Gaspar’s physical body. “I let you live so you’d know how futile anything you might try is.”
Gaspar couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. The connection he had with his physical body was dimmed because of the neural interface with the Net, but he still felt the chill of the knife edge at his throat.
“What happens if I slice across the carotid artery here?” Heavener placed the blade’s point against his neck. “You bleed to death, of course. But do you choose to watch your own death from there? Or do you return to your body and die here?”
Gaspar couldn’t answer.
“And if you watch from there,” Heavener went on, “when you die here, do you simply wink out of existence there? Like the last spark in a broken lightbulb?”
Shivering fear ran all through Gaspar. The stress overload indicators flashed a warning in the air beside him. If his reactions didn’t stay under control, the Net would kick him out and put him back in that chair. He struggled to stay calm.
Abruptly Heavener pulled the blade away. “Don’t fail me. There are worse things in life than dying. I know them all.” She stepped toward the buttoncam mounted on the wall and slammed the butt of the knife into it, smashing it.
Inside the veeyar workspace, the monitor changed to a cold, flat empty gray.
21
In her hotel room Maj lay back in the implant chair and leaped onto the Net. She opened her personal workspace and placed a call to Leif’s foilpack.
On the third ring Leif answered, his head appearing in a monitor. “Yes.”
“I was just offered a licensing agreement for my flight-sim,” Maj said without preamble.
Leif looked near-exhaustion, but he smiled. “Congratulations.”
“I don’t think so,” Maj replied. “I think it was a setup. This guy didn’t want to take no for an answer and seemed a little put out when I didn’t want to start talking negotiations immediately.
“Nobody does business like that,” Leif said.
“He says he does.”
“And what do you think?”
“That someone sent him my way as a distraction,” Maj answered honestly.
“Because of Peter Griffen’s disappearance?”
“It’s bigger than that,” Maj said. “And I think it’s more than just the money involved.”
“Maj, when you’re talking about corporations, money’s always the bottom line.”
“Actually, there’s two things,” Maj replied. “You’re used to looking at business somewhat altruistically. Wealth is like politics and is usually about two things.”
“Money”—Leif nodded, understanding—“and power. So if it’s not about the money, where does the power come in?”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe you could look into Fortress Games. They’re a major player in the software entertainment business, but maybe they’ve got partners.”
“I’ll take a look,” Leif promised, “and let you know.”
Maj thanked him and broke the connection. Then she placed a call to Mark, catching him on the Net as she’d expected. A vidscreen opened up in her workspace, showing Mark dressed in his crashsuit.
“Andy and I are taking a close look at the Realm of the Bright Waters online gaming package,” Mark said. “Want to come up?”
“Find anything interesting?”
“Maybe,” Mark admitted. “But it’s nothing really glaring. Come take a peek.” He extended a hand through the vidscreen.
Maj took his hand and let him pull her through the Net telecommunications system. The Net blurred around her. In the next instant she stood on a high cliff overlooking a tree-strewn valley. Bright river water reflected the sun as it rushed through the valley’s heart.
“Is there any reason we’re wearing these?” Maj waved at the crashsuit she wore that was similar to Mark’s.
“The game pack has a tendency to want to react with any kind of programming in it,” Andy said. He sat hunkered down at the cliff’s edge, dressed in a crashsuit as well. “Really user-friendly.”
“Is that unusual?” Maj asked.
“Not so much,” Mark admitted. “A lot of game packs tend to be automatically engaging. They present the world and the possibilities, and hope to catch someone’s eye long enough to sign them up for the online services.”
Maj peered into the valley. Brightly colored birds sped through the trees, winged heartbeats of red, orange, emerald green, and shimmering dark blue.
“I wanted us here without triggering all the interactive programming,” Mark said. “When we first got here, we were attacked by a primitive culture.”
“Real Stone Age throwbacks,” Andy agreed, with a grin. “But I had my sword, and Mark had a couple spells tucked away. He set his hair on fire at one point. You should have seen them run.”
“Sounds like fun,” Maj said.
“Like I said,” Mark went on, “the interactive feature is pretty standard. It entices the gamer to want to see the rest of the world. Good stuff. Well designed and well thought out. However—”
“This,” Maj said, “is the part I was waiting for.”
“I checked for the anomaly you and Matt ran into in your veeyar. I ran some diagnostics against what’s being offered in the game pack against what you experienced. The anomaly isn’t here.”
Maj considered that, trying to make it fit with what she was thinking. “It should have been.”
“It’s not. But I checked over the game pack programming and discovered other interesting details. A lot of the normal programming from an online interface is missing.”
“The game pack is defective?” Maj asked.
“No. When a user logs on and downloads the outline programming from the game server, the missing files will automatically be patched in.”
“So why leave them out?”
“I don’t know,” Mark told her.
“The first thought,” Andy put in, “would be to conserve space on the game pack datascript. But that’s not an issue because the files are archived and fit easily in the space that’s provided.”
