Bree said, “I still don’t see how that links—”
Ali held up his hand, said, “Celes Chere? I swear to God, she has her own Victorious game too. I’ve got friends at school who are obsessed with going to—”
He grabbed up his phone, started tapping with his thumbs. “Oh my God, I think it starts tomorrow!”
“What does?” Bree asked.
“Just let me make sure,” Ali said, and then he looked up at us, grinning, and pumped his fist. “Victorious promotes these big e-sports tournaments where people obsessed with the games go to play for like a gazillion in Bitcoin. The biggest tournament of the year starts tomorrow in Atlantic City! Prelims for Blade Girl, featuring Celes Chere, start at two p.m. Same thing for the Marstons. And Conker prelims get under way at three!”
CHAPTER
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AT 1:40 THE next afternoon, February 4, a Thursday, techno music pulsed and blared through the Atlantic City Convention Center. The raucous crowd was not at all what Mahoney and I expected. Yes, there were lots of eager tweens and doughy adolescent males who looked like they tended toward the stoner-slacker end of the spectrum. But there were also young women and grown men and women, many dressed as their favorite avatars in a Victorious game. We saw six or seven Conkers in the kind of squirrel outfits you might see at a rave concert, several women dressed as glam avatar Celes Chere, and two couples sporting the sort of futuristic cowboy garb the Marstons supposedly favored in their game.
Vendors sold fast food. Hawkers offered tournament programs and other Victorious-branded souvenirs.
Mahoney said, “Feels like we’re going into a combination of a prize fight, a rock concert, and a Star Wars convention.”
“With three million in Bitcoin to the winner,” said Philip Stapleton, Victorious Gaming’s security director.
“Why Bitcoin?” I asked.
Stapleton shrugged. “My bosses think it’s edgy.”
Stapleton was in his early forties, a former navy NCIS investigator who’d been shot in the hip in the line of duty, left the military, and joined Victorious two years ago.
We’d given him the gist of what had brought us to the event and a copy of Kristina Varjan’s photograph to distribute via text to his team. He’d been concerned that a wanted bomber might be in the complex, but we told him it was unlikely she was there.
He took us through open double doors into a sprawling exposition space. There were five raised stages, four of them set up to look like boxing rings but without the highest rope around their perimeters.
There were seats surrounding the rings and the main stage, fifty rows deep and filling with fans. Above each ring were four large screens facing the growing crowds. The pulsing techno grew louder.
Stapleton explained that during the preliminary rounds, each of the four rings would serve as a battleground for one of the four big Victorious games.
The first ring would feature contestants in Conker’s Bad Fur Day, the game Ali described the night before. The Ruins would play in ring number two, starring the Marstons, a couple in a dystopian world searching for their lost children.
Competitors in ring three would vie in Avenging Angel, which featured the avatar Gabriel in a fantasy scenario. Ring four’s contestants were looking to advance in Blade Girl, starring Celes Chere, a badass with mad martial arts skills facing danger in an unnamed urban setting.
I wanted to head straight to the Blade Girl ring but was stopped by a booming voice over the PA system: “Let’s get ready to rumble! Let’s get ready to be Victorious!”
The fans jumped up, raised their fists overhead, screamed, whistled, and stomped their feet. The music took on a frenetic, infectious pace and beat.
Stapleton led us to the central stage where Austin Crowley and Sydney Bronson, the young co-founders of Victorious, were dancing and imploring the crowd to join them. They were dressed like hipsters, Crowley in thick black glasses and a nerd cut and Bronson in a black-and-white-checkered jacket and a red porkpie hat.
I’d read up on them on the way over. Crowley and Bronson had met by chance at a party in Boston. Crowley was a sophomore and standout student at MIT who spent his free time gaming. Bronson was a bored freshman at Harvard who also spent most of his free time playing games.
In their first conversation, both said they thought they could come up with better games than any on the market. They decided to try, and they had enough success with their first effort that they both quit school. The rest was history. According to Forbes, six years after they left academia, they were worth a quarter of a billion dollars.
The music died. Bronson went to the mike, said, “That’s the energy we want in this room! Am I right, right, right?”
The crowd hooted and howled back its approval.
“We hear you,” Bronson said. “We see ya, and we feel ya too!”
The fans erupted again.
Over their clapping, Bronson said, “I am Sydney Bronson, chief visionary officer at Victorious! And I’d like to introduce my partner and our chief geek, the man who takes my ideas and makes them come alive, Austin Crowley!”
Crowley came somewhat reluctantly to the mike. His eyes swept the crowd, hesitated, then pushed on. He looked like he was suffering from stage fright as he said, “Well, do they make you happy? Our games?”
The crowd cheered. He gained confidence, threw his fist overhead, and roared, “Will Victorious rule the gaming world?”
The fans went wild.
“All right!” Bronson said, coming back to the mike and throwing his arm around his partner. “Austin and I welcome you to the Victorious world championships, the richest e-sports event on the planet, an event that is only going to get bigger and richer in the years to come!”
The men gave each other high-fives and then shouted in unison, “We declare these games open!”
Crowley threw both hands over his head, and Bronson pumped his fist and crowed, “First bouts start in five minutes!”
They waved and walked offstage.
Fans started to push toward the various rings.
I was about to suggest to Ned that we take a walk around when, across the sea of people moving in all directions away from the stage, I saw a woman dressed as Celes Chere gazing back at me. She had a green lanyard around her neck and a green badge that identified her as a contestant.
Pretty face, short, spiky blond hair, shiny white coat, and pale skin. She looked away, put on cat’s-eye sunglasses, and merged with the fans heading toward rings one and two. I stared after her, seeing the structure of her cheekbones, jaw, and nose in profile before the crowd blocked my view.
“Alex,” Mahoney said. “Let’s—”
I started pushing into the crowd, calling over my shoulder, “I think I just saw Varjan!”
CHAPTER
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THE CURRENT IN the river of fans was moving against us, and we didn’t want to pull our badges and set off a panic. It was slow getting through, but we finally reached the left side of the stage and entered into a flow of people moving in the direction I had seen her.
“There she is,” Mahoney said.
I stopped to see him pointing at a woman about thirty yards away, also dressed as Celes Chere. But she had thirty pounds on the woman I’d just seen.
“Not her,” I said, catching sight of another Celes Chere, but she was too tall. In frustration I looked at Stapleton, who’d followed us. “Can we get up on the stage?”
He hesitated, and then nodded. “You’re sure it was her?”
“Not one hundred percent, no,” I said, climbing the stairs.
On the stage, I pivoted to scan the crowds on the north side of rings one and two. Mahoney climbed up beside me.
I spotted a third Celes Chere with her back to us, and then two more, and then six or seven others just entering the venue in a pack.
“They’re everywhere!” Mahoney said.
“We’ll have to check every one.”
A voice behind us said, �
�Who are these guys, Phil?”
Mahoney and I turned to find the founders of Victorious looking at us. We pulled out our credentials and introduced ourselves. They were alarmed when Stapleton said we were searching for an assassin and bomber.
“In here?” said Bronson, the one who’d left Harvard. “Why would he come here?”
“She,” Mahoney said. “And we don’t know. Maybe she’s a fan of your games.”
I said, “She was wearing a contestant’s badge.”
Crowley, the one who’d dropped out of MIT, had a mild stammer. “What d-does she look like?”
“She’s dressed as Celes Chere.”
Bronson laughed. “Good luck finding her. There’ll be two hundred of them in here by the time we get to the semifinals.”
Crowley studied me. “Do we need to clear this hall? Sweep the place?”
“We can’t do that,” Bronson said. “We’re not doing that. It’s all we’d need to—”
Over the crowd noise, the first explosion was muffled. The second was louder but nothing like the bomb that had torn apart the motel room the day before.
Still, gray and brown smoke boiled and billowed from the northeast corner of the space. People there began to scream and run toward the exits.
That set off a stampede. The smoke rolled forward and swallowed the crowd, which turned hysterical. Fire alarms went off. The sprinkler system was triggered.
That set off more hysteria, and people began to slip and fall as they scrambled toward the doors.
Stapleton grabbed Bronson and Crowley. “Until we know what’s going on, we need to get you both out of here, now!”
The video-game creators looked frightened but nodded.
Bronson said, “You don’t think this assassin woman did this, do you?”
Peering through the mist and the smoke at the knots of fans fleeing the building, I said, “There’s not a bit of doubt in my mind she did it. The question is why.”
Part Three
BLACK FRIDAY
CHAPTER
45
AT ONE A.M. mountain time on Friday, February 5, Dana Potter parked his truck out of sight on a spur into BLM land off a desolate road in rural El Paso County, West Texas, hard by the New Mexico border.
“Check your phone,” he said as he put on an ultralight communication unit with a jaw microphone.
“It’s off for a reason,” Mary said.
“Let’s triple-check.”
His wife looked irritated but did as he asked while he got out into the cold air and retrieved their packs from the back of the pickup.
“Nothing, no service,” she said. “Dark hole.”
“Thank you.”
“You sure that thing’s going to work on sat phones?”
“Supposed to shut down a mile around,” he said, hoisting his pack onto his shoulders. “We’ll see.”
Mary looked uncertain as she put her pack on, put her boot in the stirrup, and then climbed onto her horse. She sighed.
“What’s the matter?” Potter said once he was in his own saddle.
“I was just thinking of what could go wrong.”
“I plan on seeing my boy day after tomorrow, tell him his life is saved.”
She gazed at him and nodded slowly and then sharply. “Me too.”
“Happy to hear,” Potter said.
They each tugged down infrared glasses that lit up the scrub and the low mesa before them. They kicked their horses and moved in silence and at a steady pace as they cut cross-country along the same route they’d used before.
At two-twenty, one hour and eleven minutes after they’d started out, they reached the arroyo, retrieved the still green paloverde boughs, and, as before, set them in a pile on the opposite bank of the sandy dry riverbed. They tied up the horses well upriver.
It was still pitch-dark, a moonless night, and the stars shone brilliantly when the two crested the hill above the agricultural fields and the ranch.
Potter felt a steady breeze hitting the back of his neck.
“Wait,” he said. “Wrong wind.”
They stood there, calmly waiting, for five, maybe six minutes before dogs barked in the distance.
Wordlessly, they backed down the side of the mesa and removed their packs. They each found an Ozonics device about the size of a thick paperback. The Ozonics was a miniature ozone generator that would destroy their scent; not even dogs would be able to detect them.
They turned the machines on, dressed warmer, and assembled their rifles. With their packs up on their shoulders again and carrying the weapons and the ozone machines, they climbed back up the hill and stood there waiting, listening.
When no dogs had barked after five minutes, they moved quickly forward to their chosen hides. Mary lay belly-down behind her rifle at 2:40 a.m. mountain time, almost ninety minutes before first light. Her husband laid a rectangle of camouflage material over her, from her boots to her head, where it draped across the top of her telescopic sight.
“Good?” he muttered.
“Real solid,” she said. “Night-night.”
“I’ll wake you.”
“Mmm,” his wife said.
Potter set up less than a foot away, got beneath another length of camouflage cloth, and put the Ozonics out in front of him downwind. He got behind his rifle, settled, and heard Mary rhythmically breathing. He still marveled at his wife’s ability to shut the world off at will and find refuge in catnaps that almost always made her sharper.
A match made in heaven, he thought, closing his own eyes. I still believe that.
CHAPTER
46
I COULDN’T SLEEP that night. I tossed and turned, my mind working in circles. Each trip through the puzzling events of the past week, cycling over and over, made me anxious and stirred up a metallic taste at the back of my throat.
That taste is a sure sign that you’re going to throw up or that you’re so tense you’re burning adrenaline. At four twenty a.m., I said good-bye to any notion of real sleep and got up slowly and quietly so as not to wake Bree.
She’d had a tough day and was back to making little headway in the Senator Walker murder investigation while dealing with Chief Michaels, who was renewing pressure on her.
I eased into our closet, shut the door, and turned on the light. Three minutes later, dressed in long underwear, FBI sweats, and a pair of New Balance running shoes, I shut the bedroom door behind me.
I stood there a moment at the head of the stairs, aware of the ticking of the furnace, the hum of the fan in Jannie’s room, and the squeak of a mattress in Ali’s. Behind the near door, I could hear Nana Mama’s gently rasping breathing.
Those familiar noises calmed me as I walked down to the front hall, where I put on a black watch cap, a headlamp, a windbreaker with reflective stripes front and back, and a pair of thin wool gloves. Outside, it was a clear, moonless night. The temperature hovered just above freezing, and I could see clouds of my breath while I went through some ballistic stretches.
At four forty, I turned on the headlamp, jogged down the stairs to the sidewalk, and took off at an ambitious pace toward Capitol Hill. I hoped vigorous physical activity would take my mind off that vicious circle of incidents, thoughts, and half-baked theories that had been plaguing me since Ned Mahoney and I left Atlantic City.
But no such luck. By the time I crossed Pennsylvania Avenue and started chugging uphill toward the Capitol, they were back again. This time the facts, memories, and ideas flipped through my brain in near chronological order.
Senator Betsy Walker is ambushed and shot by a pro just feet from her front door. Shortly after Walker’s murder, Kristina Varjan, known assassin, enters the country with a fake passport and is spotted by a CIA operative.
Carl Thomas, the medical-equipment salesman from Pittsburgh, is found hours later and a few blocks away, garroted to death in an Airbnb. Access to his files is blocked by Scotland Yard.
Fernando Romero, sworn enemy of Senator Walker, dri
ves cross-country to make a pile of Benjamins, gets caught in a snowstorm the night of Walker’s murder, and drives on into Washington only to die in a firefight with police.
Sergeant Nick Moon, one of the toughest, most skilled martial artists I’ve ever known, is killed in a hand-to-hand fight by another professional not two hours south.
Varjan tries to blow up me and Mahoney. Then she appears dressed in a costume at a video-gamers’ extravaganza. Was she going to be a contestant?
I tried to discount that idea, but then thought, Maybe she’s good at the game.
But then why set off a smoke bomb? She had to have recognized me somehow and was using it as diversion to make her escape.
But why? Why would she do that? She’d already gotten away from me. Why didn’t she just leave the building?
I thought about Austin Crowley and Sydney Bronson, how rattled they’d been to hear that a bomber, assassin, and fugitive from justice had been a registered contestant. They’d promised to turn over their data from all entries into the tournament.
As I ran between the Capitol and the Supreme Court Building, heading north toward Independence Avenue, none of it made any clear sense. The circular thinking started again, upsetting me, and I ran faster, picking up the pace to a virtual sprint. Pumping my arms, lengthening my stride, I reached Independence and was going to run downhill all the way to Union Station before turning back toward home.
But then, right there at the corner of Constitution Avenue, just north of the Supreme Court Building and the Library of Congress, I was hit with a sense of foreboding so strong that I came to a full stop and stood there panting, sweat pouring off my brow and trickling down my back. I was overheated, but I shivered so hard my headlamp beam slashed back and forth, and my teeth chattered.
I looked down the hill and in my mind I saw the riderless black horse from President Catherine Grant’s funeral procession. It was so real, I could hear the stallion’s hooves clopping.
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