Gameprey

closed his fist and downloaded the access code, creating a simple icon in the form of a red agate marble. “Find me quick,” he said. “Or you’ll find me dead.”

“Trust me,” Mark said. “I won’t let you down.”

Gaspar tossed the marble across. Mark caught it, then tossed a glowing blue pyramid back. “The trace utility?” Gaspar asked.

“Yes.” Mark reached forward and a control panel appeared in the air before him. He punched a button and the alarm shut off. “Get moving before they get suspicious.”

Gaspar tried to think of something to say but couldn’t. He leaped back onto the Net and returned to his workspace.

“What was it?” Heavener demanded.

“One of the gamers,” Gaspar replied. “He got deep into the system, but it rejected him.” Please let Gridley be as good as I’ve heard he is.

“Where’s the girl?”

Gaspar searched the screens. Suddenly crosshairs flared into crimson life on one of the convention monitors. They bracketed Maj Green as she passed through the early morning convention crowd waiting for Realm of the Bright Waters to go online.

Hesitation locked Gaspar up. How long will it take for Net Force to find me? How long before Gridley breaks into the mainframe supporting the online game? If he didn’t tell Heavener where Maj was, she’d know something was up. And he’d die. It was that simple. “She’s in the convention center,” he said. “I’ve got her onscreen.”

The buttoncam view on Heavener’s screen shifted abruptly as the woman and her team changed directions. As they raced through the hotel hallways, other cameras picked them up.

Gaspar tracked the collision course as if hypnotized. “God help us,” he whispered.

22

Maj looked around the packed convention center. A lot of the people around her hadn’t left the room at all, but most of them had returned over an hour ago. The Realm of the Bright Waters game was due to go online in less than twenty-four minutes. Excitement was building.

“Man, if I’d known this was going to be this big,” one of the guys next to her grumbled, “I’d have reserved a room with an implant chair. I’ve called every cyber cafe in the city and they’re booked.”

“I know,” the guy next to him said. “If you don’t have access to your own system, you’re not going to get on for a little while. At least we’re not alone, and we’ll get to see what it’s like.”

“Yeah, but it’s not the same as being there.”

Maj listened and felt edgy. Too much stress and not enough sleep was a bad combination. But there was no way around it. Sleep was out of the question. Even knowing the Net Force team lurked in the shadows wasn’t as helpful as it might have been for the her stress levels. Once the game was launched, Eisenhower Productions and D’Arnot Industries didn’t need Peter Griffen alive. That realization left her feeling cold.

Her foilpack buzzed, and she answered it.

Matt’s bruised face appeared on the small screen. “Mark’s inside the system. He made contact with your guy. A Net Force team is already en route to his location. If anything’s going to happen, it’s going to happen quickly.”

“I know. I’ll stay in touch.” Maj closed the foilpack. Matt and Catie were handling the comm-loop for their end of the operation, patching the Net Force teams in through the pass-through communications ports Mark had created in the Net. Leif and Megan were on the move through the hotel, watching for Heavener.

Maj walked through the game booths, listening to the excited chatter of the gamers. She felt all wound up inside. It didn’t make sense for Heavener to be in the hotel, even though the woman didn’t know she’d been identified. But Maj knew she couldn’t have just gone to her room and waited.

Her foilpack vibrated in her pocket again. “Yes.”

Matt’s worried face filled the vidscreen. “I just got a patch in from Andy. He’s hacked into Heavener’s cyberguy’s systems. They’re tracking you on the hotel cameras. Get out of there. Go somewhere safe”

Anxiety filled Maj. Why is Heavener tracking me?

“Get moving,” Matt said. “I’m on my way.”

Struggling to keep from glancing around, Maj headed for the nearest door. Maybe they’ll think I’m meeting someone for breakfast.

She kept her steps unhurried but purposeful, weaving through the crowd. She didn’t look at the ceiling where the cameras were. But when she opened the door leading out of the convention center into the main hallway, she came face to face with Heavener.

The woman smiled cruelly, not a blond hair out of place. “Hello, Madeline,” she said. Three men stood behind her, blocking any chance of escape.

Seated in her veeyar workspace in her hotel room, Catie opened the comm-patch to Agent Roarke, Matt, Leif, and Megan, who were converging on the convention center.

“Heavener found Maj,” Catie said. She stared at the screen and tried to remain calm.

“Where?” Matt asked.

“At the main entrance on the north side,” Catie replied.

“I’m on my way,” Roarke snapped. “You kids stay back.”

Hooked into the hotel security system through the spycams from the gamers Andy and Mark had met, Catie watched as her friends ignored the agent’s orders. She knew they weren’t going to let one of their own down. But why would Heavener be after Maj? The woman’s profile doesn’t read like she’s into grudge matches. Catie sat and watched, feeding information to Captain Winters.

Andy monitored Mark’s progress through the Eisenhower Productions systems, marveling again at how his friend slipped through security like a greased eel. No one equaled the Squirt when it came to evading intruder programming.

Then Catie’s message about Maj’s situation came in. He opened a com-link to Catie. “Use Catie’s foilpack vibrator to send a message in Morse code. They can’t intercept that.” The programming wasn’t normally on most foilpacks, but Mark had recently added the option to theirs after a Net Force mission debrief. “Send the words Hocus Pocus.”

“Mark’s spoof program?” Catie asked. “Will it work with holoprojectors?”

“We’re going to find out,” Andy said, then relayed a message to Mark to let him know he was going to be gone for a moment. He reached up into the Net and launched himself at the Bessel Mid-Town Hotel. He stepped into the virtual world only a short distance behind Heavener and the three men with her. “Catie?”

“I sent the message.”

“Then here comes trouble,” Andy said. He accessed the programming that gave him holoform in the real world.

“Net Force knows about you, Heavener,” Maj said.

The woman’s smile only turned frostier. “Do they?”

“They know about the bleed-over effect in Peter’s game, too. They know you’re going to use the bleed-overs to access the computers of anyone who downloads the game.”

Heavener shrugged. “It seems a little late to stop that now. You even had your own little part to play in this. If your own veeyar hadn’t inadvertently picked up Griffen’s game, we wouldn’t have had to kidnap him.”

Maj felt relieved. Kidnapped was a long way from dead.

“And if we hadn’t kidnapped him, we would never have gotten the media coverage we did. Maybe I should have planned for that all along.”

“Don’t you mean D’Arnot Industries should have?” Maj asked.

The announcement took some of the smile from Heavener’s face.

“With kids and adults downloading the game onto computers owned by the government,” Maj continued, “the