Disappeared, or dead? Maj wondered, feeling very cold inside. The guy who met me at the banquet last night was plenty scared.
Harold J. Dawkins sat up in the implant chair. He was in his mid-twenties, with clipped peroxide-blond hair and a boyish grin. He wore athletic clothing but didn’t look like he owned a club membership anywhere. “Hey, great sim. It’s like you’re really there.” He planed his hand through the air in front of him and made jet engine noises.
Maj smiled, relieved. “Thanks. I put a lot of time into that build.”
“Trust me,” Dawkins said. “It shows. I’m glad I came over here.” He took a PDA pad from his pocket and switched it on. “I think we just might be able to work something out. If you’re ready to license the property.”
Catie looked at Maj with rounded eyes that Dawkins couldn’t see and mouthed, Wow!
“Sure,” Maj said. “I mean, are you sure?”
Dawkins laughed. “I’ve been licensing games for a while. I think I know a good one when I see it. If you could, I’d like to talk to you about the potential arrangements. If you have the time. And that’s assuming you don’t have any other offers you’d like to consider.”
Maj was stunned. “Uh, no, there aren’t any other offers.”
Catie frowned at her, then turned to Dawkins with a sweet smile. “Of course, there are still a few other companies who are going to demo the sim later today and tomorrow.”
“I understand, but I’m prepared to go to contract over this,” Dawkins said. “Right now.”
“Just like that?” Maj asked.
Dawkins shrugged. “It’s a yes-or-no proposition. My company puts me out here to buy games, that’s what I do. If I see something I like, I’ll know it, and then I license it. I guess you could make this harder than what it is, but I never have.”
Everything in Maj wanted to say yes. It was a confirmation of her talents and instincts. But a feeling persisted in her that suddenly everything wasn’t quite right. The offer just didn’t feel right.
“Can I get back to you on that?” Maj asked.
Consternation and irritation showed on Dawkins’s face. “I’d really like to talk to you about this now.”
“I know,” Maj said. “But my dad wants me to talk to him first if anyone is interested in the game.” It wasn’t a lie. Her dad took an interest in everything she did, and he probably would want to talk to her first. “Can I give you a call after I’ve talked to him?”
“I’m really used to getting what I want out of a deal,” Dawkins said.
“I’m not saying you won’t,” Maj replied.
Dawkins hesitated for a moment, as if struggling for something to say. Finally he smiled and left.
Maj watched the rep go, suspicion darkening her thoughts.
“She didn’t go for it,” Heavener said.
Seated behind the cluttered desk in the comfortable disarray of his personal workspace veeyar, Gaspar smiled despite the fear that thrummed steadily in him. Maj Green was proving to be quite resourceful. All the Net Explorers were. He watched Heavener through a buttoncam.
Heavener talked on the encrypted comm-line, and he was only able to hear her side of the conversation. “Maybe Dawkins overplayed his hand,” she said, “but it was within the parameters of his assignment.” She paused. “No, I don’t think the girl is overly suspicious of him.”
Gaspar glanced at the other monitors open to him on the desk, surveying the convention. Heavener’s tech teams had been very quick to reestablish the spylines. As yet, she hadn’t given him any concrete assignments other than to monitor the situation and keep the confusion going on concerning Oscar Raitt.
He’d felt good about the Raitt connection Matt Hunter had turned up. That had been perhaps the only link to Peter that Heavener hadn’t accounted for. The woman had her flaws — other than being a deadly killer and psychotic.
“Stronger measures are called for,” Heavener said. “After ten o’clock Eastern Standard Time tomorrow, it will be too late to stop it.”
Gaspar listened intently. Ten EST was when Realm of the Bright Waters was due to launch. He’d known Peter’s game was the centerpiece of their plans, but he didn’t know D’Arnot Industries was only waiting on the launch. He still wasn’t completely sure what the corporation was going to do with the game’s disruptive programming.
“We kill her,” Heavener said.
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.
She knows I’ve been listening. The realization hit Gaspar like a depth charge.
“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.