“Close your net over this room,” Heavener ordered. “Execute now. I’ve got someone in here with a mask program passing himself off as Matt Hunter.”
Cold hard fear filled Gaspar, and he couldn’t help looking at Heavener across the room. How did she know?
“Latke, close the net.”
Automatically Gaspar closed the net, securing holo traces in a minefield over the immediate area. That had been only one of the safeguards Heavener had insisted on. Now if he tried to leave the room along the Net, he’d be tagged with a trace virus, and Heavener would know he’d made contact with Maj Green.
And he didn’t even know where to tell Maj to find his own body.
Heavener circled the room, talking to the two men inside the room over the audlink running through Gaspar’s veeyar system.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Gaspar said to Maj, taking her by the arm and pulling her. He scanned the room. There were three other exits. He glanced over his shoulder. Heavener and the two men had spread out, going slowly and steadily through the crowd, closing in like pincers. They easily covered three of the exits. The exit on the other side of the room was his only hope.
“What’s wrong?” Maj asked, resisting his urge to move.
“They’re on to me.”
“The woman?” Maj still wasn’t moving, and Heavener was getting closer.
“Yes. But she doesn’t know it’s me. She sees your friend Matt, the same as you do.”
Maj got into motion, following at his side. “What happens if she finds out it’s you?”
“Then I’m dead, and your friend Peter is probably dead, too.” Gaspar struggled not to run for the exit. They were ahead, but it was going to be close.
“Latke,” Heavener called over the audlink. “Do you see him? The guy with Madeline Green?”
Gaspar had to restrain himself from correcting Heavener and telling her it was Maj, not Madeline. “I see him. Are you sure that isn’t Matt Hunter?”
“Matt Hunter left the room where he was a few minutes ago,” Heavener responded. “He’s another problem I’m having to take care of at the moment.”
“I missed that,” Gaspar said. Panic flooded his senses, and he knew his heart rate was accelerating beyond control again. He tried to control it, knowing the tranquilizers would definitely affect his ability to do everything he needed to do.
“We’ll talk about it when I see you again,” Heavener said.
Gaspar felt like an animal with a leg in the iron jaws of a bear trap. He hurried toward the glass doors of the exit. “I need you to open the door,” he told Maj. “It’s not programmed for holo interaction. There are holoprojectors out in the hall for the hotel guests, so I won’t be immediately tossed out of the hotel, but if I just walk through the door, Heavener’s going to know I’m a holo instead of a person in a mask program.”
“Heavener’s the woman?”
“Forget you heard that name.” Gaspar couldn’t believe he’d let it slip. “The door. Get the door.” He held her arm, the sensation almost feeling normal thanks to the holoprojector feedbacks.
Maj hit the door release lever, and they walked briskly out into the hallway. Gaspar trotted alongside her, listening to his heart thunder back in his physical body. He expected to feel the hot burn of the tranquilizers rushing through his system at any second.
“Stop!” Heavener’s voice barked behind them.
Maj broke into a run, yanking Gaspar after her. He stumbled and almost fell, prey to the realistic approach of the holoprojectors. The hallways were safe, he knew from his research on the hotel, and so were most of the rooms. He glanced over his shoulder, watched in escalating terror as Heavener started closing the distance. Maybe Maj would have been able to outrun her on her own, but he couldn’t keep the pace.
“She’s catching up,” he gasped.
Abruptly Maj turn and shoved him ahead. “Keep going!”
Gaspar hesitated just a moment, watching as Heavener pounded down the hallway. The two men followed behind her. “Matt’s in danger. That’s how they knew I was here. Don’t forget.” Then he ran, wishing there were someone else in the hallways to help Maj, wishing he didn’t think he was such a coward for running.
But he ran as hard as he could, taking the first corner to the left that he came to. Releasing the holo form, he jumped back to his veeyar.
“Peter’s a brilliant guy,” Oscar Raitt said. “He’s always got a head full of ideas. Twists on programming no one else has ever even thought of. If there was ever anyone born to work in the gaming world, it was Pete.”
Matt sat at the small desk in the hotel room where Oscar was staying. “You don’t think Peter disappeared on his own?”
“No way.” Oscar was adamant. He was at least six feet eight or six feet nine, with the broad shoulders of a woodcutter or a linebacker. He sat on the bed, obviously more at home there than in one of the hotel’s regular-sized chairs. He wore a tank top and shorts, his massive feet clad in Roman sandals. A chocolate mint was stacked on top of the pillow behind him. “That production number Pete had up front? That was his show, man. In his book, this would be an all-time low.”
“Had you been in touch with him much?”
“Sure. We talked a lot.” Oscar grinned. “We saw each other at least once a month. He was the reason I got to know Paris so well.”
“Paris?”
Oscar nodded. “Yeah. You know. Paris, France. Eiffel Tower. Arch of Triumph. Napoleon.”
“Got it. What was Peter doing in France?”
“Developing Realm of the Bright Waters. That’s where Eisenhower put him up to do the design work.”
“I didn’t know Eisenhower Productions had a Paris office.” Leif had mentioned that Eisenhower was based in Seattle.
Oscar lifted his broad shoulders and dropped them. “Beats me. But that’s where Pete worked on the game. He didn’t take much time off, but when he did, he usually called me, and we spent some time prowling the city. Art museums because any video graphics designer is going to tell you that you just can’t see enough stuff. And we spent some downtime at the cyber cafés. A true game junky just can’t get away from it.”
“What did you talk about?” Matt asked.
“The usual. What he was working on, what I was working on. What we thought of some of the games that were out there.”
“Peter didn’t mention any problems with Eisenhower Productions? How they wanted to market the game?”
“No. Peter didn’t concern himself with that. Realm of the Bright Waters was strictly his baby. They couldn’t make move one without his okay.”
“Isn’t that unusual in the gaming industry?”
“Like finding a frog with wings. In the real world.”
“Don’t the publishers underwrite a lot of a developer’s expenses?”
“Most deals,” Oscar said, “they underwrite entirely. Financial freedom doesn’t come without a price, though. They usually control the milestones and deadlines more than you do, and they can make you release a game that you know isn’t right. It’s hard to blame them, though. They’ve got investors and accountants crawling over them with microscopes.”
“You two worked together on some games in the past, didn’t you?”
Oscar nodded. “Peter said he thought he might need me on this game at the end. He had some problems with the game engine. He built it from scratch, you know, to maximize play possibilities.”
“I don’t understand,” Matt admitted.
“One of the chief gripes of the CRPG players,” Oscar said, “is the whole campaign structure. Take a game like Sarxos. It’s interactive, with a constantly varying number of players online, all with their own agendas. They raise armies, battle each other for regions, cities, rights to water, whatever. But you can’t introduce new elements into the game without playing havoc with a lot of ongoing campaigns.”