Geek Mafia (38 page)

"Christ!" he exclaimed. "Oh fuck..."

"What?" Lily and Chloe said together, looking around for some new danger.

"That guy with the gun. Fuck. That guy! I know that guy. It was the fucking private eye from the highway and that money pick up."

"Are you sure?" asked Chloe.

"Yes. Absolutely sure now." And he was. Even in the bad light he'd recognized the man's frame. Although he'd never gotten a good look at the shooter's face, he'd heard his voice, the same voice that had threatened him on the side of highway 17.

"What the fuck was he doing here?" Chloe asked, of no one in particular. Her eyes were unfocused, her mind deep in thought, calculating this new piece of information's ramifications.

From over where Winston lay, they heard Dr. Kelly say in a loud voice, "Ok, on three. One. Two. Three."

They looked over to see four of Winston's crew lifting him and carrying him towards the truck. Lilly broke off from their conversation and ran over to help them.

"How's he doing?" she asked Kelly.

"It's not as bad as it could've been. Nothing vital hit. Two through and throughs and the other is lodged in his back. I think I can get it out, but I need better light and conditions. We need to go. Now." The others were already loading Winston into the back of the van.

"Ok, go," Lilly said. "I'll take the other car and meet you at the safe spot." Kelly nodded and then rushed back to the truck.

Paul and Chloe stood and watched the van disappear out of sight, following the same path Raff had retreated down just a few minutes before. "What's it going to be?" Lilly asked them. "You coming with me or not?"

Paul looked to Chloe for confirmation and they both silently agreed. "Not," he said. He wasn't ready to give up yet.

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"Ok," Lilly replied, a hint of sadness in her voice. "Good luck." She gave them one last look and then scooped her bat off the ground and started to jog off into the darkness.

"Lilly, wait a sec," Chloe shouted. "Can you do us one last favor?"

"Sure," she said, "What is it?"

"Can we switch cars?" Chloe asked.

"Why?"

"Raff bugged and put a tracker in ours and I haven't deactivated either device yet. We need a clean vehicle."

Lilly thought about this for a moment. "Then he'll be able to track me, won't he?"

"Yeah, but he's not looking for you." Lilly didn't seem to buy this line of reasoning. "I know it's a pain in the ass, but we need to move fast and I don't have time to put that thing up on a lift and go over it. And I know you don't either, but..."

Lilly held up a hand to stop her. "No, it's ok." She pulled a key ring out of her pocket and tossed it to Chloe.

"It's Win's car anyway. He'll be pissed if he finds out I didn't give it to you when you asked."

"Thanks, Lilly!" Chloe said, tossing Chloe her own keys. "I really appreciate it."

She took the keys and climbed into Chloe's car. From the open window she said, "Green Jetta, parked in the lot across the street." Then she tore off into the night.

Without looking back, Chloe and Paul set off at a run for the exit. They knew they didn't have much time.

When Filo finally regained consciousness hours later, he had no recollection of what had happened.

Everybody had just disappeared. As he stumbled to his feet he noticed the pool of blood in the middle of the alleyway. With no idea whose it was or where his friends were, he ran, his head pounding. It took him another hour and a half to make it back to the main Crew house. When he arrived the locks had been changed and the place was stripped bare. The Crew had gone.

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CHAPTER 36

"Where are we going?" Paul asked a few minutes later. "The real storage locker is that way." He pointed toward a freeway onramp.

"We need a place to plan first. Besides, if he knows where it is then he's got it covered. He'll have the place staked out."

"I knew we should've gotten the money first," he said.

"If we'd done that they would've caught us there instead of where we had reinforcements. Raff would have the money and we'd have our heads cracked." She pulled the car into a Denny's parking lot, shut the engine off and turned to face Paul.

"First let's talk about this private eye fucker," she said. "You're sure it was him? I never got a good look at his face."

"Yeah, I'm sure. Abso-fucking-lutely. What I don't know is what it means. How did he get there? Why was he helping Raff?"

"I think he was always helping Raff."

"But he was with the CFO when I went to pick up the money. He's the guy who tackled me in the park. He can't have been working with Raff then...?"

"Why not?" said Chloe. "Why couldn't he have been working with Raff all along?"

Paul had no answer for this startling suggestion. Could that be possible? Had he been planning this ever since then?

"Raff is the one who set up that whole Gondry con," Chloe said. "He put that whole thing together while we were away and he was definitely the lead on that."

"Do you mean the whole con was a setup?"

"No it was genuine. The payoff was certainly genuine and the whole Crew worked that sting. Not even Raff could've fooled us all on something that big. Not even I could've done that. But the Private Eye was a late addition to the mix - he must've used some cover story to get close to the mark so he could be there at the exchange. That's why we were all so surprised when he showed up at the park."

Paul thought back over the debriefing. "Which finally makes sense of why Raff called me in at the last minute. He didn't need a fresh face and he wasn't trying to help me get into the crew. He was setting me up.

Setting the whole thing up so that he could put pressure on me. He told the Private Eye where to find my car and put him on my trail."

"I don't even think he's a real Private Eye at all. He's just Raff's accomplice. His 'Winston' maybe. He knew I had someone in the life outside the Crew. I always suspected that he did, too, but I could never find any hint of who it might be. This homicidal old fuck must be the guy. Raff's mentor in the biz."

"That can't be good for us," Paul said.

"Not good at all."

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"So they've been after the money since the beginning. Just to split it between the two of them?" he asked.

"Looks like."

"Fuckers."

"Yep."

"It's really pretty brilliant," Chloe mused. "I have to say that if I wasn't so pissed I'd be impressed. The really clever thing is that he's managed to poison the whole Crew against us. My own goddamned crew."

"Maybe he didn't get all of them," he said hopefully.

"It doesn't matter. Now that I know he got some of them, there's no way I can trust any of them. That's the brilliant part. He knows I won't risk it now and all the while he'll win more of them over to his side." She frowned. "By the time it's safe to show my face - if that ever actually happens - I'll have no chance of winning them back."

"Unless we can prove he's the one who really betrayed them."

"Not fucking likely."

"But worth a shot huh?"

"Maybe," she said. "But that's tomorrow's problem. Right now we've got to get the money before they break in and take it."

"The storage place my cousin used is actually pretty high tech. It's not the rat hole we just came from. All indoors. 24-hour security. Cameras. The whole thing's only a few years old."

"They'll need to con their way in then," said Chloe. "At least that'll take them a little longer to put together."

She thought for a while, running over scenarios in her mind. "What we need is for someone we can trust to go in there and get the cash out for us. Someone they won't recognize. But someone we can trust."

"Why not try disguises?" Paul suggested.

"Too risky. That's what they'll be looking for, especially now that they know we're on to them."

They both thought silently for a long while. The car started to become uncomfortably stuffy.

"This is the problem when all your friends turn against you," said Chloe. "You've got no one to pick up your stolen money for you in the middle of the night. Especially not in this neighborhood."

Paul looked out the rapidly fogging windows at the parking lot and street beyond. He in fact did know this neighborhood pretty well - which was unusual for him in San Jose.

"Actually I have a friend in this neighborhood," he said softly. "Or at least I used to."

"Really?" said Chloe. "Will he be happy to help us out?"

"Probably not. But maybe it's worth a try."

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"Who're you thinking of?"

"You're not going to like it," he said.

"I haven't liked anything for three days. Who're you thinking of?"

"Greg."

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CHAPTER 37

Paul had met Greg in high school, when they'd both played in the same weekly Dungeons and Dragons game on Saturday afternoons. They'd hit it off almost immediately, which surprised many onlookers since outwardly they had almost nothing in common. Back then - the late eighties - Paul's image and fashion sense hovered somewhere between punk and goth, with lots of black leather and band t-shirts (although in retrospect he was the textbook example of a poseur
). Greg was chubby and socially awkward but brilliant. Pretty much
your stereotypical nerd, except for his love of water skiing and jet skis.

Below the surface, though, they had almost everything in common. They had both been fanatical Dr. Who fans
as kids. They shared a passion for the same sci-fi and fantasy authors, from the comedy of Douglas Adams
and Piers Anthony, to the hard sci-fi of Poul Anderson and Isaac Asimov, to the morbid and depressing
fantasies of Stephen Donaldson and Michael Moorcock. They obsessed over the X-Men and read The Dark
Knight Returns and Watchmen with mouths agape in awe. And of course they rejoiced in Star Wars and
watched Start Trek the Next Generation religiously. They were, in short, geeks of a feather.

But more than anything, they had in common a love of games. Their Dungeons and Dragons group became
the center of their social lives, with every Saturday game stretching through the night and into the following
Sunday evening. During the week they talked constantly about their adventures and their characters and
various ways they could tweak or improve the rules to make their games better. In their most speculative
midnight reveries, they plotted and planned the game company they would create if they had a chance,
describing in every detail how they'd do things better.

After high school they always stayed in touch, even as they went off to different colleges hundreds of miles
apart. Greg studied computer systems engineering at Georgia Tech, where he knew more than most of the
teachers and found he had a special talent for computer chip design and engineering. Paul went to Oberlin
College in Ohio, where he got a degree in fine arts and illustration. Every Christmas break and summer
vacation the old D&D group would get together again, and the core group of five players stayed thick as
thieves.

Seven years after graduating from college, Greg had started a chip design company and sold it to another,
much larger company, netting over twenty-million dollars for himself in the process. Paul had worked as an
artist for various comic companies before self-publishing his own series,
Metropolis 2.0
, which became one of
the better selling indie-comics of the late nineties. He didn't have anything resembling the kind of money Greg
had made, but they were both successful and happy in their chosen careers.

The next step was obvious; a plan hatched over a series of excited phone calls that resulted in the foundation
of Fear and Loading Games. Greg brought the money and some technical know how, and Paul brought the
intellectual property and inspiration for their first game, based on his comic book. Greg's network of contacts
in Silicon Valley made finding the other founding partners pretty easy. Evan, Jerry, and, of course, Frank
soon joined their team. They incorporated, rented an office, and got to work making the next smash hit game.

That was three years ago now, and things hadn't quite worked out as Paul had expected. Two and a half years
of working together had strained Paul's friendship with Greg. Paul found Greg to be strangely distant and yet
oppressively controlling. Greg no doubt thought Paul was moody and lazy and hard to work with. They spent
less and less time together socially, and by the end Paul would've been hard pressed to remember the last time
the two old friends had seen a movie or had a meal together.

"And you're sure this is a good idea?" Chloe asked Paul for the fifth time. They were standing on the front
porch of Greg's modest house in San Jose. For all his money, Greg was not the kind of guy to buy big
expensive houses and cars just because he could. This was the same house he'd bought when he first moved
out to San Jose. It had more room than he needed as it was, and since he spent most of his time at the office
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anyway, he saw no reason to upgrade.

"No," said Paul, "For the fifth time, I'm not sure this is a good idea at all. But it's definitely an idea."

"A bad idea," Chloe insisted.

"Do you have a better one?" he asked, tired of this conversation.

"I haven't had time to come up with one. I've been too busy trying to convince you that this plan is bullshit."

"Too late," Paul said and pressed the doorbell.

"This is fucking insane," Chloe said under her breath. She reached her hand into her shoulder bag. Paul knew
that it was the stun gun, not the laptop that she was getting ready.

They heard footsteps from inside and then the door swung open. There was Greg, in shorts and a Fear and
Loading t-shirt, a twenty-dollar bill in his hand. "You're not pizza," he said, confused at first glance.