The Never Game Read online

  “Muh . . . my baby, baby . . .”

  “Buh . . . Belinda’s going to be just fine. Guh . . . got you out of the Tuh . . . Titanic, didn’t I?”

  “Baby . . .”

  Okay. It had to be the rocks. No time left.

  As he turned them both toward the shore, Elizabeth Chabelle screamed. “He’s back! He’s come back!”

  Shaw looked up and saw the silhouette of a figure running toward the pier.

  However fast the 911 responders were, they couldn’t possibly be here by now, unless via helicopter, and no helicopter was near. It would be Jimmy Foyle. He’d returned to take out witnesses.

  Shaw kicked hard, fighting to turn toward the pier. They’d hide under it and risk the rise and fall of the water, trying to avoid the spikes and nails and sharp barnacles on the pylons.

  Once more the cold arms of the ocean didn’t cooperate. They kept Shaw and Chabelle nice and centered, six feet away from the pier. A bull’s-eye for Jimmy Foyle, who was, Shaw knew very well, a fine shot.

  Shaw blinked water from his eyes and looked up . . . to see the figure dropping to his belly on the rotting pier and extending a hand.

  Which held not a pistol but something . . . Yes, something cloth, a rope of bulky cloth . . .

  “Come on, Shaw, grab it!” The figure was Detective Dan Wiley.

  So their backup had made it after all. He was the one Standish had texted for assistance. Since they weren’t on the case, they needed someone unofficially, and the only person Standish could think of was the Liaison officer.

  After two tries, Shaw managed to grip what Wiley’d lowered.

  Ah, clever. Wiley had bound Shaw’s jacket and his own together. He’d tied his belt onto the end, like a rescue harness.

  “Under her arms!” Wiley shouted. “The belt.”

  While the cop held his end firmly, Shaw worked the belt over Elizabeth Chabelle’s head.

  The big man pulled her upward. She disappeared onto the top of the dock. The improvised device was lowered again and Wiley tugged while Shaw’s feet found some purchase on the pilings. A moment later he too scrabbled onto the pier.

  66.

  Never hesitate to improvise . . .

  Which was, of course, one of the rules in Ashton Shaw’s voluminous Book of Never.

  At the moment, his son Colter was thinking of a more specific variation:

  Never hesitate to use the efficient heater of a dinged-up gray sedan to warm the core temperature of a hypothermia victim.

  Shaw was reflecting that this was a pretty good rule as he sat in LaDonna Standish’s Nissan Altima. Parked nearby were eight or nine police cars, representing various agencies, and the ambulance where Elizabeth Chabelle was being examined.

  Shaw’s shivering had lessened and he turned the heat down some. He was in a change of clothing provided by the Santa Clara Fire Department, a dark blue jumpsuit.

  Shaw’s bloodstained phone hummed with an email. It was from Mack, his private eye, and was in response to the call he’d made in Brad Hendricks’s den just before he’d begun collecting drives and other tidbits from the desk with a tissue.

  He read the email carefully.

  Hypothesis became theory.

  Shaw noted a medical technician stepping from the ambulance and, frowning into the glare, looking around. He spotted Shaw and approached. Shaw climbed out of the Nissan. The tech reported that Chabelle’s multiple heartbeats—the one emanating from her chest, the other from her belly—were both strong. The medics had assured her that the amount of drug Foyle had used to sedate her would have no lasting effect on mother or child. Both would be fine.

  For LaDonna Standish, however, the same could not be said.

  Shaw had steeled himself to the fact that she had died from the terrible wounds. But no. The detective was alive, in critical condition, and had been medevacked to a hospital in Santa Clara, which had a trauma center specializing in gunshot wounds. She’d lost much blood, though Shaw’s tourniquet and his jotting down the time had probably saved her life, at least temporarily. The technician told Shaw she was still in surgery.

  Dan Wiley was standing near his car, speaking with Ron Cummings, the JMCTF supervisor. Prescott and the unnamed shorter agent from the CBI were present too, but Cummings now was in charge.

  Because, Shaw guessed, it was his officer and not theirs who’d found the perp and rescued the victim.

  With help from the concerned citizen.

  Shaw could see another participant in the festivities. Thirty feet away, Jimmy Foyle sat in the backseat of a police cruiser, head down.

  It was Dan Wiley who’d collared him. The detective had been on the narrow road to the beach where Standish had texted him they’d be, when he found Foyle’s white BMW speeding toward him.

  While the man may have been a lousy detective, he’d proved he had a cool head under fire. With his unmarked car he’d played a game of chicken, driving Foyle into a ditch. When the game designer leapt out and began firing, blindly, Wiley had simply squatted behind his car, holding yet not firing his weapon until the man’s magazine was empty, and then went after him. The tackle must have been a hard one. Foyle showed evidence of a bloody nose and his left hand was deformed by a thick beige elastic bandage. The protruding fingers were purple.

  Cummings noted that Shaw had emerged from his hot lodge of a sedan and the supervisor walked his way. Prescott and the other agent started after him. Cummings uttered something and they stopped.

  “You okay?” Cummings asked.

  A brief nod.

  The Task Force commander said, “Foyle isn’t talking. And I’m at sea.”

  Some irony in the comment, considering that they were standing thirty yards from the Pacific Ocean, where Shaw and one extremely pregnant woman had nearly drowned.

  The setting sun flared atop Cummings’s shiny head. “So?”

  Shaw explained, “Marty Avon told me he’d found someone who fit the perfect profile of the Gamer: Brad Hendricks had been spotted at the Quick Byte Café, he was obsessed with The Whispering Man and he was offline when the kidnappings occurred.”

  “You thought he was too perfect.” Cummings would not have risen to be Joint Task Force Senior Supervisor Cummings without being shrewd. “Like he was being set up.”

  “Exactly. His proxy was suddenly shut down and his name conveniently appeared. Oh, Brad was worth checking out as a suspect. And I did. I went to see his parents, went through his room. It was a pretty grim place. But I’ve searched for plenty of missing teenagers and a lot of their rooms are grim too. I noticed something he had on the wall. It was a chart of his progress through The Whispering Man. I realized it was the game Brad was obsessed with. Not the violence the game represented.

  “That kid had absolutely no desire to get out into the real world— and, frankly, do much of anything, let alone go to the trouble to kidnap anybody.”

  The Turtle . . .

  “So I settled on the idea he was most likely innocent. Somebody wanted him to take the fall for killing Henry Thompson. Who? I looked at what Thompson was blogging. We’d already considered the data-mining blog. That turned out to be unlikely. I also considered his story about the high cost of property and rentals in Silicon Valley.”

  A scowl. “Real estate here? Tell me about it.”

  “Marty Avon created a syndicate to buy up property and create low-cost housing for workers. Was the syndicate guilty of kickbacks or bribes? Was Thompson onto them? I used LaDonna’s account to get into the county and state databases. Avon’s syndicate is nonprofit. None of the principals will make a penny on it. There was nothing for Thompson to expose there. Maybe he’d come across another real estate scam but I didn’t have any leads there.

  “Then I stepped back. I thought about how we got onto Brad Hendricks in the first place. Jimmy Foyle. I remembered that Marty Av
on—with Destiny Entertainment—told us that game companies’ databases could be hacked easily. Foyle was a talented white hat hacker.”

  Cummings shook his head and Shaw explained what the term meant.

  “I guessed he hacked The Whispering Man server and changed Brad’s log-in times to make it look like he was out when the crimes occurred. Brad was at the Quick Byte recently, which would link him to Sophie, but nobody’d seen him before. He’d gotten a text from a young woman who said she wanted to meet him there. I’m sure it was Foyle pretending to be her so people would spot Brad, associate him with the café. Then today, since he’d done what he needed to—kill Thompson—he shut off Brad’s proxy and we got his address.”

  “But why kill Thompson?”

  “Because his blog about a new revenue source for software companies was going to expose what was really going on.”

  “What was that?”

  “Tony Knight and Jimmy Foyle were using their games to spread false news stories for profit.”

  67.

  Shaw said to Cummings, “Earlier, my private eye opened a subscription to the video game Conundrum.”

  He explained that he’d asked Mack to go back and look over broadcasts that appeared in the few minutes before the game loaded. The PI found a number of stories in those broadcasts that were blatantly false, spreading rumors about businesspeople and politicians.

  Shaw lifted his phone and paraphrased Mack’s notes about several stories that he himself remembered from the past few days: “Congressman Richard Boyd, suicide because of rumors of texting young gay prostitutes. No reports of such activity prior to the ‘story’ appearing in Knight’s game. Boyd’s wife had just died and he was reported by family members to be in unstable condition. His death may throw the balance of power in Congress up in the air.

  “Arnold Farrow, CEO of Intelligraph Systems, Portland, was forced to step down after rumors he spoke favorably about interring Japanese American citizens during the Second World War. No reports of such incident prior to the story appearing in Knight’s game.

  “Thomas Stone, Green Party candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, rumored to have been affiliated with ecoterrorists and to have participated in arson and vandalism. He denies it and no charges were filed.

  “Senator Herbert Stolt, Democrat-Utah, subject of hate mail campaign for proposing a tax on internet usage. First reported in Knight’s game. Stolt denies any such proposal and no record of such a proposal exists.”

  Shaw tucked his phone away. “Tony Knight’s offered his games and add-ons for free, provided you sat through news broadcasts and public service spots. And he didn’t dare let Thompson find that out. For three or four years, the company’s revenues had been declining. Their one big game—Conundrum—wasn’t doing well; and Foyle, the designer, couldn’t come up with any new ideas. Knight was desperate. He was sort of a player—in the traditional sense of the word. I’d guess he contacted lobbyists, politicians, political action committees, CEOs, floating the idea of offering a platform to broadcast whatever they wanted: lies, rumors, defamatory and phony news stories.”

  “Video games as a way to get propaganda in front of an audience.” Cummings was both appalled and impressed, it seemed.

  Shaw added, “A young audience. An impressionable audience. And it goes a lot deeper.”

  “How so?”

  “You got game add-ons for registering to vote. And there were plenty of suggestions about who to vote for—some subtle, some not so subtle.”

  He noticed Wiley walk to the car where Foyle was handcuffed in the backseat. He opened the door and bent down, spoke to him.

  Cummings said, “And all under the radar. It’s just an add-on to a video game. Who’d even think about it? No regulation. No FCC, no Federal Election Commission. All fake news and opinion. How big an audience?”

  “Tens of millions of subscribers in the U.S. alone. Enough to sway a national election.”

  “Jesus.”

  Shaw and Cummings watched Dan Wiley close the back door of the car. He walked forward, the handsome, unflappable TV cop.

  Cummings asked, “He going to talk?”

  Wiley: “He looked at me like I was a bug. Then said he wanted a lawyer and that was that.”

  68.

  Brad Hendricks was hunched forward, sitting in front of the high-definition computer screen in his basement lair.

  The young man, motionless, ears enwrapped in large headphones, typed frantically, yet with dead eyes fixed on the Samsung screen. Nothing existed but the game, which was, Shaw noted without surprise, The Whispering Man.

  Shaw continued to the basement but stopped at the foot of the stairs, peering at the computer screen.

  A window reported that Brad now had eleven objects in his KEEP BAG.

  A memory came to Shaw. Ashton had made him, Russell and Dorion prepare GTHO bags, near the back door—the door facing the mountains. The bags—intended, yes, for a get-the-hell-out situation—contained everything you would need to survive for a month or so under even the most extreme circumstances. (When older, Colter had learned the real acronym among survivalists was GTFO. Ashton Shaw would never have condoned such language in front of the children.)

  Shaw approached, wide and slow.

  Never surprise an animal or a human . . . unless you need to surprise them for your own survival.

  Brad turned his head, saw Shaw and turned back to the game.

  Subtitles appeared at the bottom of the screen.

  THE HYDRAULIC PRESS WILL BE OPENING IN FIVE MINUTES. GET THROUGH IF YOU CAN. A REWARD AWAITS ON THE OTHER SIDE.

  But, Shaw recalled, the Whispering Man himself was the coach. The master of the game sometimes helped you. Sometimes, he lied.

  The boy turned his ruddy face to Shaw, pulling off the headphones and pausing the game. He brushed his straight, shiny hair from his eyes.

  “Brad? Colter Shaw.”

  He handed the young man the backpack, containing most of the items he’d taken to Jimmy Foyle.

  Peering inside, Brad said, “Never liked Conundrum.”

  “Ads, infomercials.”

  Brad gave a frown, as if at something so obvious it hardly needed stating. “No, no. Jimmy Foyle’s smart—too smart. We don’t need a quadrillion planets. He used to be good but he forgot what gaming’s all about. He made a game for himself, not for players.”

  Fun, Shaw recalled Marty Avon telling him. A game has to be fun.

  Brad pulled out the disks and drives and arranged them on the desk. He looked affectionately at one as if happy a dog that had wandered out of the yard had now returned.

  He arranged them in some harmonious order. “Do you know why silicon is used? Silicon? Used in computer chips?”

  “I don’t, no.”

  “There are three types of materials. Conductors let electrons through all the time. Insulators don’t let any through. Semiconductors . . . Well, you get it. That’s what silicon is. They let electrons through sometimes and not others. Like gates. That’s the reason computers work. Silicon’s the most common. There’s germanium. Gallium arsenide’s better. This whole area could have been called Gallium Arsenide Valley.” He picked up the headphones. He wanted to get back to the game. The screen pulsed impatiently in its waiting state.

  Before he could put them on, though, Shaw asked, “You ever get outside?”

  “No. Too much glare on the screen.”

  Shaw, of course, had meant something else.

  “Why don’t you grind? On Twitch?”

  If Brad was surprised that Shaw knew the term, he gave no indication. The boy offered a smile but a sad one. “That’s for the pretty people. In nice rooms. With fun things on the walls and made beds and clean windows. You’re on webcam all the time. The subscribers expect that. They expect you to be cool and funny. And talk out your gameplay. I don’t do that. It’
s instinct, the way I play. Only twenty-two people in the world have gotten to Level 9. I’m one of them. I’m going to get to 10. I’m going to kill the Whispering Man.”

  “I want to give you something.”

  No response.

  “It’s the name of somebody you might want to call.”

  Still silence. Then the hands lowered the headphones.

  “Marty Avon. The CEO of Destiny Entertainment.”

  Now a flicker of emotion.

  “You know him?”

  “I do.”

  “To talk to?”

  Shaw found the number on his phone, lifted a pen from Brad’s desk and wrote it on a Post-it. He placed the yellow square near an empty yogurt container and five books about Minecraft gameplay. “Tell him I wanted you to call. If you’re interested in a job, he’ll talk to you.”

  Brad glanced at the slip of paper quickly and his attention wavered to the screen.

  Then the headphones were back on. The avatars were in motion. The knives were drawn. Laser guns powered up.

  Shaw turned and walked up the stairs. In the living room he glanced at the parents, mother on a couch, stepfather in an armchair, both focused on a crime show on TV.

  Without a word, Shaw passed them by and stepped outside. He fired up his dirt bike and rode far too fast through the damp evening.

  69.

  This’s him.”

  Helmet in hand, Colter Shaw was standing in the doorway of Santa Clara Memorial Hospital, the third word in the name ever curious to him in connection with a house of healing because it suggested the place had had its share of failures.

  He nodded to the woman who’d just spoken, in a whisper worthy of the Whispering Man. LaDonna Standish.

  From her elaborate bed, surrounded by elaborate machines, she continued: “Colter, this is Karen.”

  He recognized her from the picture on Standish’s desk. She was a solid woman, tall and with a farm girl look about her. Her hair, which had appeared blond in the photo, was a vibrating tone of orange-red, two shades brighter than Maddie Poole’s.