The Danger Game

by Ian Bull

  When Venus rises before dawn, her light will be brighter than the mighty Mars. What does that say about power? Douglas is making brazen choices just like Mars, but he’s winging it now. Always have a plan, I say, and waiting to see what cards your opponent plays next is not a plan.

  We made love right after dinner in the master suite. While we were both climaxing, I screamed that he was the best lover ever and I couldn’t live without him. With the endorphins coursing through our veins, we stayed quiet, staring at the walnut ceiling with the gold inlay, listening to the slosh of water against the ship’s hull.

  Then it arrived—his long sigh of contentment. That was my opening. I asked for his advice and reassurance, which he gave me. My ideas became his ideas, and he then convinced me that he does want to end the game, sooner than later.

  The rabbits were released from their cage an hour ago. I thought Julia would’ve stayed, so she’s an idiot. The show is just a live sporting event now, and we’re cutting between different remote cameras. We will hunt them down, lingering for drama just before the kill, and then we disappear with all the money.

  Already we are erasing our tracks, eliminating all our digital fingerprints with computer animators and rendering experts around the globe. Then, we will live our amazing lives as we become global influencers and finders of hidden Einsteins.

  While I showered and changed clothes, Douglas bounded out of bed like a teenager, hit the weight room, switched between his cold thermogenesis chamber and his infrared sauna, and ended his workout with a green smoothie laced with NAD+. Now, he’s ready to play and win The Danger Game, like a card shark in the championship round.

  He will win fast. We have enough drones and motorcycles chasing them that it may be over already. All the better. I’ll enjoy their final demise in endless replay.

  The lights of Agrigento are a thin, golden line. Even the street lights seem soothing here. In the United States, they’re ugly, hot, white sodium lights.

  I sip the last of my wine when a familiar whirring starts. I turn on my heel just as Devon zooms up. He pushes his toggle, raising his chair so we’re eye level.

  “You shouldn’t sneak up on people.”

  “Is sneaking up on people bad?”

  “Only when they catch you at it.”

  “Then I’ll make sure I never get caught. I want you to take me to Agrigento tomorrow. You could show me the temples and lecture me on Greek and Roman history. I bet you’d love that.”

  “If you’re trying to get on my good side, it’s working. I’d love to go ashore with you. But I thought you were working on the Hodge conjecture.”

  “I need to take a break, then come back and review.”

  “Review? Does that mean you’re done?”

  He shrugs and smiles, afraid to say. Douglas leaves the lounge, steps through the glass, and joins us on the aft deck.

  “My son isn’t sharing, but I believe he’s finished the Hodge conjecture.”

  Douglas touches Devon’s shoulder. “I’m not surprised. We’re all on the upswing, just like we planned. Remember the five Ps.”

  “Proper planning prevents piss-poor performance,” Devon says, this time with the voice of Bugs Bunny.

  “I’m taking him to see the ruins of Agrigento tomorrow morning. We’ll ask for the blessing of the gods, so he can finish his work.”

  “Good. Then we’ll pull anchor. We’re almost done here.”

  “And I’ll be off this boat!” Devon hits something on his keyboard and a Sousa victory march plays along with the sound of fireworks exploding. Devon motors backward through the open lounge door, music still playing, showing off. Rebecca appears behind him in the doorway and hits the button on the elevator, which will take him up one level to his teenage cave. Red-haired Rebecca, always perfect in her starched ship’s uniform, holds the elevator door open as he spins in his wheelchair one more time before heading in. She gives me a tiny wave, and I wave back.

  “I admit it, she’s good for him.” I could say more, but I let that say everything.

  “I know.”

  When the elevator door completely closes, he turns to me, his face in shadow. The yellow lights from the shore give his smooth head a halo. “We have a problem.”

  My heart races. “Yes?”

  “The local news in Milwaukee is reporting a murder-suicide of two men in a motel on the Pine River. Police discovered them twelve hours ago.”

  A breeze gives me goosebumps. “We knew they would. Have they identified them?”

  “Not yet.” Douglas steps an inch closer, and his eyes come into a shaft of light coming from the upper deck. “But in your production schedule—the media isn’t supposed to know about the deaths until well into Sunday. The media may catch on to us while the game is still in play.”

  My heart races. I feel like I’m back in production at Velodrome, killing myself to make a billion dollars for the company while Gil Koresh complained I wasn’t reaching his arbitrary quota of hit shows in the Monday meeting. I swallow to push my fear down. “How much money have we made, my love?”

  “We just crossed a billion. And, it’s The Rescue Game that did it.” He says it with just enough of a demeaning tone to suggest that I should have known about it.

  “It’s still a billion. Let’s pull the plug and disappear.”

  “Quintana and Travers can’t be allowed to survive to argue anything different than our version of the truth. But they’re running through the desert now because we let them out.” Now he’s rewriting history and blaming me? Because someone opened the motel room door two days early?

  “Take the show offline at least. Send in a cartel to shoot it up. Hire the Mexican Air Force to bomb that rock pile they’re hiding in. Heyman can dump their bodies in the Sea of Cortez for the sharks and the squid, and we can be in Malta by morning.”

  Douglas shakes his head. “No. We finish The Danger Game as planned. They will die in the final episode, just like the app promises. Then, the story that Naythons published will become official truth.”

  “Once they identify the bodies, it may not matter. That could happen in four hours or twenty-four. I think we should be gone by then.”

  Douglas smiles. “We will keep monitoring the situation and play as long as we can.”

  “Why?”

  “I never leave money on the table when I can turn my cards into a winning hand.”

  A passing yacht sends a bow wave that makes our ship rise and fall. The red buoys in the channel clang. I exhale and count to ten.

  “It’s your game, my love. Play it as you wish.” I touch his arm. “Shall we play now?”

  He shoots me his power glance. That was bad, like I was the granting him permission. He turns fast and goes into the main salon with me at his heels.

  “Talk to me, boys!”

  Elliot and Ismael stare at their computer monitors and at the broadcast on the big monitor above them. Min turns in his seat. “This is almost live. With 5,000 uploads, there’s a delay, so this happened about thirty minutes ago.”

  Julia Travers is stuck in an A-shaped rock cave opening, thirty yards high. Steven Quintana limps up behind her, blinks in the sunlight, and holds up his bloody hand. It looks like a huge, swollen red grapefruit wrapped in bloody, brown, butcher paper. A microphone on a drone gets her voice: I’m sure one’s getting the wide shot and the other two are getting our close-ups. You fuckers!” She shoots both middle fingers to the cameras.

  All three boys laugh and cheer. “She’s awesome,” Min says.

  “Not as awesome as watching her in the shower.”

  “TMI, dude,” Ismael says.

  I clap at them. “You’re disgusting. Shut up and do your jobs.”

  The video cuts to a team of four motorcycles riding through the desert hills on a path right below the ledge where Quintana and Travers are standing. Thank God, they’re trapped. It will be over soon.

  “So, where are they? Arizona? New Mexico?” Min asks.

  �
��And, who’s doing the live switching?” Elliot asks. “We’ve got more cameras

  than Monday Night Football.”

  They’re in Baja, twenty miles from the ocean. Peter Heyman runs the broadcast through a fiber optic cable that one of Douglas’s companies buried years ago, before our last production. But they will never know that.

  “None of your business,” Douglas says. “And asking proves that you have too much spare time. Min. What are the download numbers?”

  Min looks at his screen. “Climbing way past a billion, Boss Man. Sales took off once they got outside.”

  Maybe people don’t want to see them suffer. Or, maybe they prefer giving spoiled movie stars and their lazy boyfriends a fighting chance. Or, maybe The Rescue Game is more fun to play. It doesn’t matter anymore. I just want it to be over.

  “Law enforcement is coming. But we pull the plug only when I say. Understand?”

  “Yes, Boss Man,” they all chant.

  “Elliot, monitor the app and make sure there’s no way outsiders can get in.”

  “Yes, Boss Man.”

  “Ismael, story submissions are over. Dump everything. Erase any trace of any link or portal or even a hub or transfer point. Then, focus on The Rescue Game. Get inside. Find out who’s playing. I want names before this is over.”

  Ismael twists in his red leather chair. “We’ve tried. They ping us around the globe.”

  “Search social media and the gaming sites. Whoever is playing The Rescue Game will brag. Engage them. Track them and see where it leads you. That means all of you.”

  I point at the big screen. Everyone looks. The motorcycles are closing in. Steven Quintana looks down, sees them coming, and pulls Julia Travers back inside the rocks. This is the first time that I can’t see what they’re doing, and I don’t like it.

  “This game is getting exciting,” Douglas says. “But I have a few cards to play that they don’t know about.”

  I have a card left, too. I still have Trishelle Hobbes’s phone number.

  41

  CARL WEBB

  Friday, March 15, 1:00 p.m. (PST)

  California

  I spend an hour writing a detailed email about everything that happened in Wisconsin and send it to Detectives Gum and McCusker, and Tim Neavins, a field officer at the FBI with whom I’ve worked in the past. No response. The sheriff found Mendoza and Marsh over twelve hours ago. Why aren’t they calling me?

  “Any luck?” Trishelle asks as I walk back into the dining room.

  “Nada. Either something big is happening or nothing at all is happening.”

  “So, we’re still on our own. We have to find them ourselves.”

  “There it is. Let’s proceed.”

  We print out documents and tape the pages to the white walls lining the hallway. We stare at the evidence, looking for patterns, and then write on the walls with Sharpies, linking one paragraph to another.

  “That’s quite an evidence board,” Darna says, looking up from her computer.

  “It hasn’t helped much,” I say.

  We then watch the most recent episode of The Danger Game nine times in a row, pausing at every bush, tree, and cactus that Julia and Steven run past. A few minutes after they disappeared back into the slot in the rocks, they ended that episode with New Live Download Soon! printed across the screen.

  “Steven messaged they were in Mexico. That looks like parts of it,” Rafael says.

  “It also looks like Arizona,” Trishelle says. “Those look like saguaro cactuses.”

  “The plural of cactus is cacti,” Glenn says, and none of us tells him to shut it.

  “They’ve been locked inside, how could he know where they are?” Darna asks.

  We watch them scramble up the hill and disappear into the rocks. The episode cuts to the POV shots from the helmet cams of their pursuers. The drones catch Steven and Julia emerging onto a tiny ledge halfway up the hill. Darna turns up the volume so we can hear Julia: You fuckers! Julia flips off the cameras.

  “Freeze it,” Trishelle says.

  Darna stops the playback on Julia with both middle fingers extended, a twisted grimace on her face.

  “What’s Steven doing?” Trishelle asks.

  I look closer at Steven for the first time. “He’s propping up his hurt left hand with his right. He’s stumbling. He looks like he’s about to fall down.”

  “His right hand. The one holding the elbow. It’s moving.”

  Darna backs up ten seconds and plays it again and again. I spot it now. He’s moving the fingers of his right hand, against his left elbow. Darna zooms in on the image.

  “Is that sign language?” Glenn asks, and he brings up the American Sign Language alphabet for A through Z on his screen. We all stare at his screen. He zooms in on the image and we stare at the close-up video of Steven and his moving hand.

  “A, J, A, B, A, J, A, B, A, J, A … ”

  “Baja! They’re in Baja!” Rafael says.

  Darna attacks her keyboards. “Messages are coming in from The Rescue Game. The huge cacti are bigger than saguaro. They’re cardøn, found only in Baja.”

  Trishelle grabs my forearm so hard that her nails dig into my flesh through my dress shirt, but I don’t mind. Those nails mean she has hope.

  “He’s damn good,” Rafael says.

  “Baja is four hundred miles long,” I explain.

  “Can we get satellite pictures?” Trishelle asks. “Maps?”

  “We don’t need to!” Darna yells. “We have the Army of Light!”

  “She’s right,” Glenn says. “We know where Steven is because Too Cool for School interpreted the clues. We ask our gamers for help.”

  Trishelle’s phone rings on the living room coffee table. She holds up the screen. It says No Caller ID. “Should I answer it?”

  We nod. She puts it on speaker phone and answers “Hello?”

  “Trishelle? This is Larry Naythons. Can you talk about The Rescue Game?”

  We all shake our heads, and she hangs up and tosses it back down.

  “Keep going,” I tell Glenn.

  “With a half-million players, some know Baja. Others, with deeper Mexican connections than us, may already be working on it. We just have to alert the players.”

  “We can’t reveal too much. Otherwise, it will endanger Steven and Julia.”

  We move into the hallway with our Sharpies and stare at the black markings on the white walls. Only Darna stays with the computers in the dining room, still staring at the live feed of The Danger Game, waiting for something new and horrible to happen.

  Under the heading Sources, I underline Too Cool for School.

  “He’s our one in a million,” Rafael agrees.

  “One in a billion,” Glenn says.

  “Can we find him? Get him involved directly?” I ask.

  “We can post messages on gaming sites, asking him to contact us. We can trace his email, see which server and IP address his submissions are coming from,” Rafael says.

  Under Suspects are three names: Douglas Bushnell, Tina Swig, and Peter Heyman.

  “What about them?” I ask. “If we can find Bushnell and Swig, that may be as good as finding Steven and Julia.”

  “Cut off the head of the snake. End the threat,” Glenn agrees.

  “We ask Rescue Game players to also search for Bushnell and Swig.” Rafael says.

  “Too risky,” I say. “We can’t reveal that we know his name or even that we think they’re on a yacht.”

  Glenn nods. “That would spook him. We have to do that search ourselves too. When are your NRO contacts sending us their pile of harbor photos?”

  “Today. Until then, we’re looking for Too Cool for School and Steven and Julia.”

  “Oh, we’re on it. And when we find something, you must be ready, Sergeant Webb.”

  I get why Major Glenn Ward is pulling rank on me. If we find them—when we find them—it’ll be my job to rescue them.

  Trishelle stares at m
e. “What’s your plan?”

  “The Rey brothers.”

  The Rey brothers are Brazilian ex-Navy bad asses with their own security company, and they do proof-of-life rescues in Brazil, Central America, and Mexico. I called them this morning on the way back from Wisconsin. They’re going to charge me a fortune, but they can be ready in twenty-four hours.

  “They’re live again!” Darna yells from the dining room. We rush to her monitors. Three men have left their motorcycles and are climbing the canyon walls to the ledge where we last saw Steven and Julia before they crawled back inside. Three camera drones hover there, one for each man. The images cut from the helmet cams of the men, to the drones—and then cuts to the other side of the hill, where the fourth drone hovers above the slot entrance where Steven and Julia first went in. Two more men climb the slope and crawl inside.

  “How long has it been since Julia flipped off the cameras?” I ask.

  “An hour. And I don’t see any way for them to get out of there.”

  Everyone stares at the broadcast on the monitors, riveted. I walk into the living room. Trishelle’s phone is lit up on the coffee table. I power it off, then step out on the balcony and call Lucas Rey from my phone. He needs to be ready, and we need to be lucky.

  42

  JULIA TRAVERS

  Friday, March 15, 2:00 p.m. (PST)

  Baja California

  Steven crawls on his hands and knees with me right behind him, my nose banging into his butt. We scurry in the dry dirt, moving in the narrow sliver at the bottom of two towering sandstone rocks. He grunts in pain. His hand must be killing him. I look up; this slot between the rocks is so narrow we can’t even stand, but at the top of the slot is a thin line of blue sky. And hovering there are the three fucking drones.

  Voices echo off the rocks. The motorcycle men are inside. It won’t take them long to follow our tracks in this maze. They laugh and hoot, knowing that we hear them.

  My hand hits Steven’s right foot. There’s no shoe, just a sock. When did his shoe come off? An idea cuts through my brain. I grab Steven’s left foot and try to yank off his shoe. He tries to scurry forward, so I yank harder.