Game Over (6 page)

Was this a dream too? Was he in a nightmare right now? Or had his nightmares invaded reality?

He reached the base of the tower. He reached the door. He grabbed the handle, pulled it open.

He froze when he saw the rifleman standing just inside. Another Boar?

No, a soldier. Assigned to guard the tower elevator and staircase, the soldier also started in surprise when he saw Rick. He clutched his rifle more tightly, butt and barrel. But his eyes were not afraid. Like everyone else in the compound, he knew Rick. He recognized him.

“What?” he said, confused. “What do you want?”

“There's something wrong in the booth,” Rick said breathlessly. “There's someone up there who shouldn't be.”

The soldier shook his head, uncertain. “That's impossible. I've been here the whole time. No one could've come in without my seeing them.”

Rick didn't wait around to argue. Quickly, he pushed past the guard to the elevator. He pushed the button. The elevator buzzed to life. But the box was up top, in the booth. It started to descend slowly. Rick couldn't wait. He rushed to the stairs.

The stairs wound up above him a long way. Rick had been working out hard for months, bringing his legs back into shape, but they weren't wholly healed. They still hurt
when he pushed too far. They hurt now—hurt like fire—as he bounded up the stairs. He was breathing hard by the time he was halfway to the top. He was clinging to the banister, pulling himself onward despite the pain.

Now the booth door appeared before him. He was gasping for breath. The pain lanced through his legs with every step he took. He didn't care. He still had the heart of a football hero, passionate, indomitable. He had woken in agony after some games—lots of games—games in which he'd been tackled hard and driven to the ground again and again. He had woken in agony and gone right back into training. That was who he was. That was what he was like. He was not going to let a little searing physical torture slow him down. He never had before.

He reached the door. He pushed it open. He saw the soldier at once, lying facedown on the floor in a pool of his own blood. The room was filled with a weird smell, not a human smell, a smell like lightning, air on fire, ozone burning.

Rick rushed across the booth to the fallen man. He knelt down beside him. He turned him over.

Dead. A young man, only a little older than Rick. Short, cropped blond hair, blue eyes, open, staring. There was a single wound in his chest. Not a bullet wound. Rick recognized it. He'd seen such wounds before. It was a wound from a sword.

He understood. The man—the soldier—this RL man—had been struck down by a soldier Boar—a creature from the Realm.

But how?

Rick knelt there staring into the soldier's staring dead eyes.

Is this a dream?

It wasn't. He knew it wasn't.

What is going on?
he thought.
What in the world is happening?

LEVEL TWO:
BABA YAGA'S TABLE

6. CONTRACT KILLER

HAROLD HEPPLEWHITE,
A professional murderer, stepped out of his car into a ghost town. Not long ago—not long ago at all—this had been a working facility, a secret high-tech outpost surrounded by an enclosure that was almost the dark mirror image of the MindWar compound: barbed wire, guard towers, soldiers with machine guns standing watch.

This, however, was Kurodar's headquarters, a secret station hidden in deep jungle on a deserted island off the coast of Africa. This was where the Realm was created, where it sprang out of the terrorist's imagination and spread through cyberspace.

Hepplewhite looked around him. The once busy compound was all but abandoned now. The barracks were dark and empty. Windows broken. Doors banging in slowly rising wind. The soldiers were gone, the guard towers unmanned. Only a few local men and women wandered here and there. South African natives from poverty-stricken villages, they had been shipped over to the island to do the outpost's cooking and cleaning. Hepplewhite
spotted one of them—a very dark-skinned woman in khaki rags—carrying a pot of some sort of steaming food across the empty area to the large building at the center of the place.

It was an odd building, this central one. A white, modern, faceless tower without windows. To Hepplewhite, it looked less like a building than some kind of bizarre machine. But there was a door set in the ground floor. As he watched, the woman with the pot disappeared through it.

Hepplewhite left his car behind and headed after her.

Harold Hepplewhite was a slender man of medium height with the narrow, intelligent face of a librarian. Oily black hair, slicked back. Mild eyes blinking behind round wire-rimmed glasses. Thin lips decorated with an even thinner mustache. He wore white linen pants and a white linen jacket over a paisley shirt open at the throat. He didn't look at all like the sort of man who would kill you, but in fact he would kill you without hesitation and never think much about it afterward. He had murdered people with guns, knives, garrotes, and other assorted tools too gruesome to mention. He'd even shot a guy with an arrow once. He was not a freelancer. This was his steady job. The Axis Assembly kept him on retainer, and he was always ready to go to work. When someone became a problem for the Assembly, it was Hepplewhite's job to make him stop being a problem—in other words, to make him dead.

Now it was Kurodar who had become a problem for the Assembly and Hepplewhite's assignment was to deal with him—which was to say, kill him.

Hepplewhite reached inside his jacket. His hand brushed the butt of the pistol in the holster under his arm. It was a custom-made .22 with a built-in sound suppressor. It fired almost silently, and its small bullets were hollow and contained a poison that would kill a man almost instantly if the bullet itself didn't do the job. But Hepplewhite did not draw the weapon. Instead he reached for the smart phone in his shirt pocket. He drew it out. Pressed one button. Spoke two words: “I'm here.” And slipped the phone back into his shirt.

Then he put his hands in the pockets of his slacks and began to stroll slowly across the compound toward the white building. He glanced around casually as he walked, but there was nothing to worry about that he could see. There were no gunmen, no guards. They had all run away the moment they heard the Assembly was abandoning the MindWar Project. They all knew what that meant. They all knew what would come next: Harold Hepplewhite. And Death.

With no one to stop him or question him, Hepplewhite reached the door of the building, pulled it open, and went inside.

It was downright eerie in here. An enormous lobby like the lobby on the ground floor of a New York City
office tower. But no one around. No one at all. No noise. No motion. An empty chair behind the reception desk. No lights on. The security terminals all dark.

Hepplewhite's footsteps echoed on the tiled floor, ghostly, as he passed through.

The elevator wasn't working, but the door to the stairwell was ajar. As he stood at the top of the stairwell, Hepplewhite could hear the footsteps of the woman with the food descending to the bottom. Still moving slowly and casually, he followed her down.

At the foot of the stairs, he came into a long corridor with fluorescent lights in the ceiling. Some of the lights were off, some were on, some were blinking fitfully, blue glare and shadows alternating on the floor below. Hands in his pants pockets, Hepplewhite passed beneath them. He passed several guard stations, but there were no guards. He went through several heavy iron doors, but they were all unlocked and standing open. Whenever he paused and listened, he could hear the woman's footsteps echoing up ahead of him.

At last, he turned a corner and caught sight of her again. She was entering the final room, Kurodar's room, the Control Room, the place where the Realm was made.

The woman had just gone through the door. Hepplewhite went after her. He reached the threshold. He stepped over.

And he nearly gagged at what he saw.

The brilliant physicist Ivan Doshenko—the terrorist now known as Kurodar—had always been an ugly little
man. Stoop-shouldered and small, he had always had a face like a skull crossed with a toad. But now . . . now, the man was an atrocity. A slimy purple barely human thing strapped to a chair, wires and tubes going in and out of him blending seamlessly with sinews and nerves and veins. His body and the banks of computers all around him were so completely linked that Hepplewhite found it difficult to distinguish the man from the machine.

Disgusting
, Hepplewhite thought.
Killing him will just put him out of his misery.
Not that he cared whether Kurodar was miserable or not.

The woman with the pot of food stood beside the creature, spooning soup into the toothless hole of his mouth. Two other men, also South African villagers, also dressed in old khaki, stood tending the machines and screens that blinked and fizzled all around the room. They glanced over at Hepplewhite when he entered, then quickly glanced away. Their eyes were wide and frightened. They had been expecting him and only hoped he would leave them alive after dispatching Kurodar. He would. He did not kill for pleasure, after all. It was just a business to him.

Kurodar's huge, insanely bloodshot eyes also turned in Hepplewhite's direction. If the scientist felt fear, he didn't show it. He merely lifted one withered branch of an arm and made a gesture, brushing the woman away. She withdrew, taking her food with her and, with a quick, frightened backward glance, hurried out of the room.

“Hepplewhite,” said Kurodar. Whatever his voice had once been like, it was now a dead echoing thing. It sounded like something dropped into a deep well. His Russian accent was still thick, and the loss of his teeth and the atrophy of his lips made his words indistinct. “Have a seat,” he said.

But Hepplewhite remained standing, slouched, his hands in his pockets. “No need,” he said. “I won't be here long.”

Kurodar's laughter sounded like a big hollow gong being struck repeatedly. “You mean simply to kill me and be on your way?” he said in a more or less pleasant tone.

Hepplewhite shrugged. “You know how it is. You are a loose end. Loose ends must be tied up.” The sight of Kurodar disgusted him, but he forced himself to look into the red-streaked eyes. There was an intensity of feeling in them, but what feeling? Hepplewhite wasn't sure. “You don't seem to be afraid,” he said.

Kurodar laughed again. “Of you? No.”

“Of death then. Are you at peace with death?”

Kurodar stopped laughing suddenly. Suddenly his tone was dark and seething. “I am at peace with nothing,” he said. “I wake up in a rage every morning and go to sleep in a rage every night. Between waking and sleeping, I think of one thing only: vengeance, nothing but vengeance. I am never at peace.”

Hepplewhite nodded. His handlers at the Assembly had briefed him on Kurodar. He knew what the terrorist
said of himself was true. Doshenko had been the son of a high-ranking KGB official in the old slave state of the Soviet Union. The KGB was the brutal Soviet security agency—their spies and secret police. Kurodar's father, Adam Doshenko, had had enormous power. With a single word and for no apparent reason, he could have almost anyone thrown in prison, order him tortured, order him killed. Kurodar's father could make his enemies disappear forever with a fingersnap—and he often did.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, a mob had dragged Kurodar's father out into the street. In their fury at a lifetime of oppression, they had beaten the man to death right in front of his son's eyes. Kurodar had worshipped his father, and the killing had marked him for life. He had nursed his anger inside him until it grew into a titanic and obsessional rage.

He wanted vengeance—not on the people who had mobbed and beaten his father. He wanted vengeance on America. The Americans were the ones he blamed. It was the Americans more than anyone who had hemmed in the U.S.S.R. and brought her down, all without firing a single shot. And why? As Kurodar saw it, all his father wanted—all the Soviets wanted—was to make all people equal. That's why they had killed tens of millions of their citizens. That's why they had conquered hundreds of millions more. What else could they do? People were not naturally equal. You had to make them so! Cut them all down to the same size and kill the ones who refused to go along.
Wasn't equality worth it? Of course it was. Equality was only fair, after all!

But the Americans hadn't seen it that way. No, they had destroyed his country and caused the murder of his father, and Kurodar had sworn vengeance on all of them. As Hepplewhite understood it, that's what this whole crazy MindWar Realm scheme was all about. Payback. Bring America down.

A fantasy,
Hepplewhite thought. That's all it was. However brilliant he might be, Kurodar was just an angry little geek with a pipe dream of revenge. The Axis Assembly also wanted America destroyed, after all, but they were willing to do it the right way, slowly, almost unnoticeably, day by day. Infiltrating their agents into American government where they would preach equality. Placing them in American universities to teach the young about the glories of equality. Getting them jobs in newspapers and on TV . . . until Americans started to cut one another down to size without any need for violent intervention at all.

But the Assemblymen had allowed Kurodar to seduce them with his daydreams of a United States in flames. The MindWar Realm. Madness.

Now Kurodar's grand schemes had been foiled—twice—and by a kid who played video games. Enough. It was time to bring this madness to an end.

“Well,” Hepplewhite said drily. “You will have peace now. I have come to give you peace.”

He took his right hand from his pocket and was about
to reach inside his jacket for the .22 under his arm. But when Kurodar spoke again, something in his tone made Hepplewhite pause.