The gamer’s friend lifted a middle finger to the screen.
They both relaxed when the game loaded and they could start to shoot aliens.
Shaw wandered up to an employee.
“Got a question,” Shaw said to the man, who was in black jeans and a gray T-shirt, which had KNIGHT TIME GAMING across the chest. The letters began at the left in solid black, then dissolved into pixels, graying so that the final ING was hard to see. He noted that all Knight Time employees wore the same outfit.
“Yessir?”
The man was six or seven years younger than Shaw. About Maddie Poole’s age, he thought.
“I get games for my nieces — you know, birthdays and Christmas. I’m checking some out here.”
“Great,” said the man. “What’re they into?”
“Doom. Assassin’s Creed. Soldier of Fortune.” Maddie Poole had briefed him.
“Classic. Hmm, girls? How old are they?”
“Five and eight.”
This gave the man pause.
“I’ve heard about Conundrum.” He nodded at the screen.
“I was going to say, it’s a bit old for them. But if they play Doom...”
“The eight-year-old’s favorite. What about your game Prime Mission? They like The Whispering Man.”
“I’ve heard of that one. Never played it. Sorry.”
“Prime Mission’s good, right?”
“Oh, a big winner at The Game Awards.”
“I’ll take them both. Conundrum and Prime Mission.” Shaw looked around. “Where do I buy the discs?”
The employee said, “Discs? Well, we’re download only. And it’s free.”
“Free?”
“All our software is.”
“Well, that’s a deal.” He glanced at the impressive monitor overhead. “I’ve heard that the head of the company’s a genius.”
Reverence dusted the kid’s face. “Oh, there’s nobody in the business like Mr. Knight. He’s one of a kind.”
Shaw looked up at the screen. “That’s the new installment? Conundrum VI?”
“That’s it.”
“Looks good. How’s it different from the current one?”
“The basic structure is the same, ARG.”
“ARG?”
“Alternative reality game. In Installment 6 we’re upping the galaxies to explore to five quadrillion and the total planets to fifteen quadrillion.”
“Quadrillion? You mean, a player can visit that many planets?”
With geek pride, the man said, “Theoretically, if you spent just one minute per planet, it would take you — I’m rounding — twenty-eight billion years to finish the game. So...”
“Pick your planet carefully.”
The employee nodded.
“It’s been delayed, right? The new installment?”
He grew defensive. “Just a little. Mr. Knight has to make sure it’s perfect. He won’t release anything before its time.”
“Should I wait for that one, for VI?” Another nod at the screen.
“No, I’d get V. Here.” He handed Shaw a card:
On the back was a link for downloads. Into Shaw’s back jeans pocket.
He thanked the employee and walked slowly past the players. He posed similar questions to a couple of other employees in the booth and got many of the same answers. Nobody seemed to know anything about The Whispering Man. He tried too to find out where Knight was presently and some things about his personal life. Nobody answered the specific questions, though the same message was often repeated: Tony Knight was a visionary, the paternal god atop the Olympus of high technology.
Smacked of cult, to Shaw.
He’d done all he could do here, so he headed to the booth’s exit, walking past a curtained wall. He was halfway along it when he startled as a hundred lasers and spotlights positioned around the twenty-foot monitors towering over the booth shot fiery beams toward the ceiling. Amid a deafening blare of electronic music, a booming voice cried, “Conundrum VI, the future of gaming... Ever free...” And on the screen, a death beam blew to pieces one of the fifteen quadrillion planets.
Everyone nearby turned to the display and the light show.
Which is why not a single person noticed when a flap in the curtains opened and two fiercely strong men yanked Colter Shaw into the darkness on the other side.
35
As he stood in a dim alcove, being expertly frisked in silence, he reflected on the flaw in his plan. Which had otherwise been a good one, he believed.
After a half hour of playing the role of naïve attendee, asking seemingly pointless yet probing questions, he’d assumed the Knight Time employees would realize he surely had to be here for some purpose other than buying children video games that were utterly inappropriate.
And so he would head outside the convention center to see if Knight’s minders would take the bait: Shaw himself. As soon as he was in the parking lot, headed for the deserted corner where he’d left the Malibu, he would hit Mack’s phone number and open a line. His PI would hear who and how many, if any, of Knight’s men had come after him. If that happened and it sounded like he was endangered, the PI would call the JMCTF and the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office. Shaw had also slipped his Glock into the glove compartment of the Malibu, just in case.
A good plan on paper, flushing Knight or his people as potential suspects.
But a plan based on the assumption that they wouldn’t dare move on him at the convention center itself.
Got that one wrong.
He was now quick-marched a good thirty feet into the black heart of the Knight Time booth, through more shrouds of soundproof cloth. He’d heard the distant bass of the Conundrum VI ad. Then, once it had served its distractive purpose, the speaker volume dropped.
Shaw didn’t bother to say anything. His bald minders wouldn’t have answered anyway. He knew they were pros. Was the shorter one Person X? Sophie had said her kidnapper was not tall.
Size nine and a half shoes...
When they arrived at a proper door — not a fabric flap — they halted, then put everything Shaw had in his pockets into a plastic box, including, of course, the phone on which Mack’s number was front and center but as yet undialed.
The box was handed off to someone else and the two men holding his arms escorted Shaw through the door and dropped him into a comfortable black chair, one of eight surrounding an ebony table. The walls had been constructed with baffles, the ceiling acoustical tile. All these surfaces were painted black or made from matte-black substances. The space was deathly silent. The only illumination came from a tiny dot at the bottom of one wall, like a night-light. Just enough to make out a few details: the chamber — the word came to mind automatically — was about twenty feet square, the ceiling about eight feet high. No telephones, no screens, no laptops. Just a room and furniture. Private, and secure from the outside world.
His father would have appreciated it.
The shorter guard left, the other remaining at the door. Shaw could see some features of his captor. No jewelry. The earpiece of the Secret Service and TV commentators. Dark suit, white shirt, striped tie that seemed to be clip-on — an old trick — so that it couldn’t be used as a garrote in a fight. His face in the shadows so Shaw couldn’t see any expressions. He guessed there’d be none. He knew men like this.