The Never Game

by Jeffery Deaver

  LaDonna Standish had started canvassing in the Quick Byte, displaying the picture of the young man, who’d been there earlier in the day and was not present at the moment.

  Shaw was presently pursuing a related lead: browsing Santa Clara County and California State records—using Standish’s secure log-in. What he learned—and it was quite interesting—he recorded in one of his case notebooks.

  He sat back, staring at the now-blank screen.

  “What?” Standish said as she joined him. “You’re looking like the cat that got the cream.”

  Shaw asked, “Doesn’t the cat get the canary?”

  “Cream sounds better than a dead bird. Brad hasn’t been here since you saw him earlier.” She went on to explain that none of the patrons now in the café knew him. A few recalled seeing him have the fight with the young woman he claimed he’d met online but couldn’t remember seeing him before that.

  Standish was tucking something into her wallet. She said to Shaw, “Took a liking to me ’cause I’m a cop.”

  “Who?”

  “Tiffany. I’m now a lifetime member of the QB Koffee Discount Klub. You’re one too, aren’t you?”

  “Invite’s in the mail, I guess.”

  “Work it. She’s sweet on you, you know.”

  Shaw didn’t reply.

  Standish’s face grew solemn. “So. We’re talking cream and cat . . . What’d you come up with, Shaw? There any chance to save Elizabeth?”

  “Maybe.”

  * * *

  —

  Shaw parked on a street of old houses, probably built not long after World War II.

  Cinder block and wood frame. Solid. He wondered if that was because of earthquake danger. Then decided: No, there wouldn’t have been that much forethought put into these children’s toy blocks of homes. Plop ’em down and sell ’em. Move on.

  This was a different Mountain View from where the rich lived. Different from even Frank Mulliner’s place. Not as dingy as East Palo Alto but plenty grim and shabby. The persistent hiss of the 101 filled the air, which was aromatic with exhaust.

  The yards, which would be measured in feet, not acreage, were mostly untended. Weeds and patches of yellowing grass and sandy scabs. No gardens. Money for watering the landscape—always expensive in the state of California—had gone for necessities and the crushing taxes and mortgage payments.

  He thought of Marty Avon and his dream, Siliconville, recalling what he’d just read online a half hour ago.

  For decades, Silicon Valley has always looked for the “Next Big Thing”—the internet, http protocol, faster processors, larger storage, mobile phones, routers, browser search engines. That search goes on and always will. The message that everybody has missed in the Valley: Real Estate is the true Next Big Thing . . .

  The house Shaw focused on was typical of the bungalows here. Green paint touched up with a slightly different shade, stains descending from the roof along the siding like rusty tears, discarded boxes and pipes and plastic containers, rotting cardboard, a pile of newspaper mush.

  An ancient half-ton pickup sat in the driveway, the color sun-faded red. It listed to the right from shocks that had long ago lost enthusiasm.

  Shaw climbed out and was walking toward the door when it opened. A burly man, balding and in gray dungaree slacks and a white T-shirt, approached. Looking at Shaw ominously, he strode forward and stopped a few feet away. He was about six-two. Shaw could smell sweat and onion.

  “Yeah?” the man snapped.

  “Mr. Hendricks?”

  “I asked what you wanted.”

  “I’d just like a few minutes of your time.”

  “If you’re repo, that’s bullshit. I’m only two months behind.” He nodded toward the junker.

  “I’m not here to repossess your truck.”

  The man processed, looking up and down the street. And at Shaw’s car. “I’m Minnetti. My wife’s name was Hendricks.”

  “Brad’s your son?” Shaw asked.

  “Stepson. What’s he done now?”

  “I’d like to talk to you about him.”

  “Brad ain’t here. Supposed t’be in school.”

  “He is in school. I checked. I want to talk to you.”

  The big man’s eyes went squinty. “You’re not a cop. You’d’ve said so. They gotta do that; it’s the law. So what’s the little shit done now? He can’t’ve fucked your little sister. Not unless she’s a computer.” He grimaced. “Over the line. About your sister. Sorry. He owe you money?”

  “No.”

  He sized Shaw up. “He couldn’ta beat you up or anything. Not that boy.”

  “I just have a few questions.”

  “Why should I tell you anything about Brad?”

  “I’ve got a proposition for you. Let’s go inside.”

  Shaw walked past Brad’s stepfather toward the front door. There, Shaw paused, looking back. The man slowly walked toward him.

  The air within the bungalow was heavy with the scent of mold and cat pee and pot. If Frank Mulliner’s décor was a C, this was a grade below. All the furniture was shabby and couch and chairs indented with the impression of bodies sitting for long periods on the ratty cushions. Cups and plates encrusted with food sat stacked on the coffee and end tables. At the end of a corridor, Shaw believed he saw the fast passage of a heavyset woman in a yellow housedress. He guessed it was Brad Hendricks’s mother, startled that her husband had let an unexpected visitor into the home.

  “So? Proposition?”

  No offer to sit.

  Didn’t matter. Shaw wouldn’t be here very long. “I want to see your son’s room.”

  “I don’t know why I should help you. Whoever the fuck you are.”

  The woman’s face—a round pale moon—peered out. Below the double chin was the burning orange dot of a cigarette tip.

  Shaw reached into his pocket and extracted five hundred dollars in twenties. He held it out to the man. He stared at the cash.

  “He doesn’t like anybody to go down there.”

  This wasn’t a time for bargaining. He glanced at the man, his meaning clear: take it or leave it.

  Brad’s stepfather looked into the hallway—the woman had disappeared again—and he snatched the bills from Shaw’s hand and stuffed them into his pocket. He nodded to a door near the cluttered, grimy kitchen.

  “Spends every minute down there. Fucking games’re his whole life. I’d had three girlfriends, the time I was his age. I tried him on sports, wasn’t interested. Suggested the Army. Ha! Figure how that went. You know what me and the wife call him? The Turtle. ’Cause every time he gets outside, he goes into this shell. Closes down. Fucking games did that. We took the washer and dryer and moved ’em to the garage. He wouldn’t let Beth go down there for laundry. Sometimes I think it’s booby-trapped. You be careful, mister.”

  The unspoken adjunct to that sentence was: I don’t want the inconvenience of having to call the police if you touch something that blows your hand off.

  Shaw walked past him, opened the door and descended into the basement.

  The room was dim and it seemed to be the source of the mold stench, which stung Shaw’s eyes and nose. Also present was the scent of damp stone and of heating oil, unique among petrochemical products. Once smelled, never forgotten. The place was cluttered with boxes, piles of clothing, broken chairs and scuffed tables. And countless electronics. Shaw paused halfway down the creaky stairs.

  The center of the room was a computer workstation, featuring a huge screen and keyboard and a complicated trackball. He recalled what Maddie had told him about those who had preferences for playing on computers, versus those who liked consoles, but Brad also had three Nintendo units, beside which were cartridges of Mario Brothers games.

  Nintendo.

  A shrine to the chivalrous who prot
ect the weak. I like that one better . . .

  Ah, Maddie . . .

  A half dozen computer keyboards lay in the corner, many of the letters, numbers and symbols worn away, some keys missing altogether. Why didn’t he throw them out?

  Shaw continued down the uneasy stairs. Nails were needed in three, maybe four, places to keep the structure safe. Some boards sagged with rot. Shaw clocked in at about one hundred and eighty pounds. Brad’s stepfather was clearly two hundred and fifty or more. He presumably didn’t come down here much.

  The cinder-block walls were unevenly painted and gray stone showed through the swaths of white and cream. Posters of video games were the only decorations. One was of The Whispering Man. The pale face, the black suit, the hat from a different era.

  You’ve been abandoned. Escape if you can. Or die with dignity.

  There was a flowchart on the wall—measuring three by four feet. In handwriting as small as Shaw’s yet much more careless, Brad had detailed his progress through the levels of The Whispering Man, jotting hundreds of notes about tactics and workarounds and cheats. He’d gotten as far as Level 9. The top of the chart, Level 10, Hell, was blank. The level no one had ever attained, in the history of the game, Shaw recalled.

  A sagging mattress sat on the box spring, with no frame. The bed was unmade. Empty plates of food and cans and bottles of soft drinks sat near the pillow. A stack of music CDs rested beside a decades-old boom box. All the boy’s disposable income went into gaming gear, it seemed.

  Shaw sat in Brad’s chair and watched the screen saver, a dragon flying in circles. He followed the hypnotic motion for a full three minutes. Then he pulled out his phone and made two calls. The first was to LaDonna Standish. The second was to Washington, D.C.

  61.

  I mean, people want to come here? For the fun of it?”

  Colter Shaw and LaDonna Standish walked through the chaos of the C3 Conference. Shaw carried a backpack over his shoulder. A woman security guard at the entrance had examined the contents carefully, using what looked like large chopsticks to probe. Standish’s gold shield had not exempted him.

  The detective’s head was swiveling, left to right, then back, then up, to take in the huge high-def screens.

  “I got a headache already.”

  As before, there were a hundred different blaring sounds: spaceship engines, alien cries, machine guns, ray blasters . . . and the never-ending electronic soundtracks with the ultra-bass pedal tones that seemed to exist unrelated to any game. It was as if the conference organizers were worried that a few seconds of silence might creep in like mice in a bakery.

  Shaw shouted, “We’re not even in the loudest part.”

  They dodged their way through the crowds of intense youngsters, passing by the Hong-Sung booth.

  HSE PRESENTS

  IMMERSION

  THE NEW MOVEMENT IN VIDEO GAMING

  Shaw glanced at the queue of excited attendees, goggles in hand.

  He didn’t see Maddie Poole.

  Standish called, “I’m going to tell you one thing, Shaw. Our daughters are not getting involved in this game shit.”

  He wondered what games would be available when Gem and Sefina were old enough to play. Wondered too how on earth Standish and Karen would keep them from the console controller or the keyboard.

  In a few minutes they came to the Knight Time Gaming booth, where Tony Knight’s developer, Jimmy Foyle, greeted them at the entrance.

  He shook Shaw’s hand and, after introductions, Standish’s.

  “Let’s go inside,” Foyle said, nodding them in.

  They followed him into the working area of the booth, where Shaw had met with Knight and Foyle the day before. The three sat at the conference table. Foyle pushed aside promotional materials for the new installment of Conundrum. Three employees sat at the three computer stations. Shaw couldn’t tell if they were the same ones as before; all Knight Gaming workers were oddly identical.

  The detective said to Foyle, “It was your idea how to find the subscriber to The Whispering Man, the one who’s a suspect. We really appreciate it.”

  “I had some thoughts, that’s all,” Foyle said modestly. He was as shy as the other day. Shaw remembered the press described him as a “backroom kind of guy.”

  Shaw had called earlier and told him there’d been another kidnapping and that they had a suspect, could he help once again? He’d agreed.

  Shaw now explained about Brad Hendricks.

  Standish added, “We think it’s him but we’re not sure. There’s no grounds for a warrant . . .” She looked to Shaw.

  “Brad lives at home with his parents,” Shaw said. “I went to see them—he’s in class now. I . . . convinced his stepfather to help us.”

  The game designer asked, “Turning against his own stepson?”

  “For five hundred dollars. Yes.”

  Foyle’s brow furrowed.

  “He let me take all of this.” Shaw hefted the backpack onto the table. Foyle peered inside at the scores of external drives, disks, thumb drives, SD cards, CDs and DVDs, along with papers, Post-it notes, pencils and pens, rolls of candy. “I just scooped up what was on the boy’s desk.”

  Standish said, “We looked through some of it. The drives and cards we could figure out how to plug in. All we got was gibberish.”

  “You need somebody to decrypt it,” Foyle said, “and you can’t go to your own Computer Crimes people because you can’t get a warrant.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Because what you’re doing is . . .”

  “Irregular.” Standish leaned forward and said evenly, “We’ll lose the chance to present any evidence we recover in court. But I don’t care about that. All that matters is saving the victim.”

  Foyle asked, “If he’s following The Whispering Man gameplay, what level would it be?”

  “The Sinking Ship.”

  Foyle winced. “Around here? Hundreds of tankers and containerships, a lot of them have to be abandoned. Fisherman’s Wharf, Marin. Pleasure boats everywhere . . .”

  Shaw said, “Your Conundrum’s an ARG, alternate reality game. Marty Avon told us that it only works because your servers’re supercomputers.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can you use them to break the passcodes?”

  “I can try.” The man peered into the backpack. “SATA drives, three-and-a-halfers without enclosures, SDs . . . thumb drives. Some he’s made on his own. I don’t recognize them.” He looked up, his eyes eager at the idea of a challenge, it seemed. “You know, I might find a symmetric back door. And if he uses first-gen DES, then anyone can crack that.”

  Shaw and Standish regarded each other, exceptions to the “anyone” rule.

  “If that’s the case, I could have readable text or graphics in hours. Minutes, maybe.”

  Standish eyed her phone for the time. “Brad Hendricks’s going to be out of class soon. Colter and I are going to follow him. He might lead us to Elizabeth. If he’s just left her to die, though, you’re the only hope.”

  62.

  A half hour later, LaDonna Standish was piloting her Nissan Altima along an increasingly deserted region of western Santa Clara County, keeping a safe distance behind the car they were following.

  Shaw texted Jimmy Foyle:

  Brad Hendricks is on the road—not going home. Colton and I are following. Maybe on way to kidnap site but can’t tell. Success with encryption?

  A moment later the game designer texted back.

  First SATA drive, can’t crack. He used 2-fish algorithm. Working on SD cards now.

  Shaw read this to her.

  Standish gave a wry laugh. “Two-fish. Computer stuff. Who comes up with those names? Why Apple? Why Macintosh?”

  “Google makes sense to me.”

  A glance his way. “You gotta smile som
etime, Shaw. It’s like a contest now. I’m going to make it happen.” She steered the Nissan around two more turns, then slowed at the top of a hill, keeping far enough back so they wouldn’t be spotted in the rearview mirrors.

  In the distance was the hazy blue of the Pacific Ocean. From here, it lived up to its name.

  “And our backup?” Shaw asked.

  A glance at her phone. “Nothing yet.”

  Both Shaw and Standish had understood they couldn’t request tactical backup from the California Bureau of Investigation, given their “renegade” investigation. They’d be closed down in an instant or would have to talk their way up through the ranks to find someone senior to support them. No time for that. Standish had sent some texts, to see if she might “improvise” backup. Apparently with no success. She sent another message.

  Shaw opened The Whispering Man gameplay booklet that Maddie Poole had bought for him. He was skimming to look for anything to help them when—if—they found where Elizabeth Chabelle had been abandoned.

  Level 3: The Sinking Ship.

  You’ve been abandoned on a Forrest Sherman–class destroyer, the USS Scorpion, which has been struck by an enemy torpedo and is sinking in shark-infested waters, a hundred miles from land. You’re in a cabin with a bottle of water, a cotton handkerchief, a double-sided razor blade, an acetylene torch and a container of engine lubricant.

  There are a number of crew members on the vessel and only one life raft remaining, hidden on board. You must find the raft before the ship goes under.

  Gameplay clues:

  1. The more members of the crew who die, the more resources will be left for the others.

  2. The ship is rumored to be haunted by the ghosts of the crew of a World War II destroyer, also named the Scorpion, that went down in 1945. A ghost can achieve his final rest by taking the life of a sailor on your vessel.

  3. There is something large cruising nearby underwater. It might be a megashark—or might be a submarine, though whether it’s friendly or enemy is not known. The radio gear on the Scorpion was destroyed by the torpedo strike.