Джеймс Паттерсон - Target - Alex Cross

Nana Mama patted her heart. “Thank God, you got out of there in time.”

“I’ve been weak-kneed and grateful a thousand times since it happened,” I said.

We went into the kitchen, where my grandmother had a steaming pot of soup made from chicken, celery, onions, basil, garlic, oregano, and halved cherry tomatoes. She’d also made two big loaves of garlic bread slathered with lots of butter.

While Jannie helped Bree ladle the soup into bowls that Ali ferried to the kitchen table, I was feeling almost overjoyed. It was such a simple thing, being with family, preparing for dinner, but that evening, it made me want to cry.

“What else, Dad?” Ali said. “Do you know where she went? Varjan?”

Ordinarily I would have deflected further conversations about an ongoing case, but since Mahoney had let the cat out of the bag with the media, I shared with them what I knew. I explained Varjan’s reputation as a ruthless killer for hire, her recent arrival in the U.S. under the name Martina Rodoni, and our belief that she was in the country to kill someone other than me and Mahoney.

Nana came to the table and we all held hands to say grace.

My grandmother finished with “Thank You for getting Alex out of that motel room this morning. And bless him in the days ahead.”

“Amen,” we all said.

After I’d eaten two slices of homemade bread, finished a bowl of the delicious soup, and gone back for seconds, Bree said, “I don’t suppose there was any evidence left in the motel room? Other than the bomb material, I mean.”

I started to shake my head, but then I remembered something. I dug in my pocket for my phone.

“About the only thing I could find that survived was a Bible, and I don’t know if this has a thing to do with anything, but there was this list of...”

I found the picture on my phone and tapped it to open it. “Here.”

I turned it and showed them the list raised by the soot:

Celes Chere

Prelim 2 sharp

Marstons, same

Gabriel, same

Conker 3

“What does that mean?” Jannie asked, passing the phone to Nana. “Did she write it?”

“Who knows?” I said. “It was just there on the inside back cover, so I shot it.”

Ali took the phone from Nana Mama, who shrugged, said, “What’s a Conker?”

Staring at the screen, Ali said, “Well, a Conker is this...” He looked up at me. “Dad, Kristina Varjan. No doubt about it.”

“How do you know that?” Jannie asked, her brow knitted.

“So, first, Conker? He’s like this crazed squirrel. Drinks. Smokes. Likes to smack people in the face with a frying pan.”

“What?” my grandmother said.

“In a really good video game, Nana,” Ali said. “Conker’s the hero avatar in Conker’s Bad Fur Day. Check it out, Dad, for real.”

“I will, but how do you know that Varjan wrote the list?”

He pointed to the list. “Marstons? Gabriel? Those are avatars in other video games made by the same company, Victorious Gaming.”

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!”

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?”