S Huang - Zero Sum Game

Arthur didn’t seem to be able to move. I reached out and nudged the door all the way open, stepping into the dimness. My boots squelched on soaked carpeting.

The inside of the garage was finished, and was the room I had seen during our video connection with Checker. A counter around the perimeter of the small space served as one long computer desk, and brackets rode up the walls supporting more monitors and tower frames. Checker had probably half again as many computers as Anton crammed into about a quarter of the space, but whereas Anton’s machines had been a sprawling mess of half-open cases and loose circuit boards, Checker’s cluster was much more fastidiously organized.

At least, it had been.

Someone had torn the place apart. Computers had been rent open willy-nilly, every hard drive in the place yanked, and I saw a number of loose adapters in empty spaces where laptops had probably sat. All the monitors were dark, and one LCD was smashed, the cracks spider-webbing outward from where something very hard had struck it. Something like a crowbar or a tire iron.

I swallowed.

Near the back, soot blackened the desktop in several places, and metal frames twisted where they had been on the periphery of small explosions. I bent to look more closely in the dim light. A dark brown smear and smudged handprint told their own story.

Arthur edged into the room behind me. “Oh, Lord,” he whispered. “Oh my God…”

“Let’s check the house,” I said.

The back door of the house was still locked, so I kicked it open, ignoring the twinge from my chest wound. Someone had beaten us here, as well: multiple black bootprints tracked through every room, and drawers were upended and furniture overturned in a search that had as little regard for Checker’s living space as Steve’s men had shown for Courtney’s.

Steve’s men. This could have been them again. Or Pithica. Or both.

“Did I do this?” mumbled Arthur. “Did I?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Orphaned adapters and Ethernet connectors told us Checker had kept no shortage of computers in the house, either, but everything from laptops and tablets to ebook readers had been swept up and taken. I wandered into the living room. A flat screen TV dangled crookedly on the wall where it had been knocked askew, and a snowdrift of papers from an emptied file cabinet made half a mummy of a guitar on a stand. It looked like Checker had had a pleasant place, before he’d been abducted.

“Russell,” Arthur called.

I found him in the washroom, frowning at the sink. “What is it?” I asked.

“Toothbrush,” he said. “Toothbrush and toothpaste are missing.”

“So?”

“Seem weird to you? Kidnappers or killers, and they take him a toothbrush?”

I mulled it over. It did seem weird.

“My God,” said Arthur suddenly. He pushed back out of the washroom, dashed to the front door, and flung it open to dive out onto the porch, his head swiveling from side to side as if he were trying to see in all directions at once.

I followed him out. “What is it?”

“Blue Nissan. You see a blue Nissan anywhere?”

I got what he meant immediately. This was Los Angeles, of course Checker owned a car—but the driveway was vacant, and the garage had been converted into his hacker cave. So where was it?

I peered through the sheeting rain into the street. Parking wasn’t bad in this neighborhood, and cars were sparse. I didn’t see a blue Nissan.

“He got away,” I breathed. Maybe.

Arthur pounded a rain-slicked fist against one of the porch’s pillars. Then he sank onto the porch swing and rested his head in his hands.

I had a thought. “Hey. Where have you been leaving him your messages?”

“Got a few numbers for him,” Arthur mumbled. “Tried ’em all.”

“Whatever you think is the most foolproof one, dial it now.”

I sat down next to him as he pulled out his cell; he wiped a wet hand on the porch swing’s cushion to dial with marginally drier fingers before handing the phone to me. Over the drumming of the rain I heard a recorded stock voice of a British woman tell me the party I was trying to reach was not available and to leave a message after the tone. Said tone chimed.

“It’s Cas Russell,” I said. “I’m, uh…I’m here with Arthur, and we’re kind of hoping you aren’t dead.” I swallowed and thought again of Anton. “We both got whammied by Dawna Polk, but I’m pretty much back to normal. At least according to someone I trust. Arthur’s still a basket case, but I think he’s getting better.”

Arthur reached out and tried to grab the phone away from me, but I leapt up off the swing and danced backward. “Call us back, okay? And whatever you do, don’t give Arthur back the flash drive. Dawna convinced him it’s meaningless, but I’m pretty sure it’s important.”

I hung up.

“He hasn’t called me back.” Arthur sounded sore. “What makes you think he’s going to call you back?”

“Let’s wait and see,” I said. “Should we go back to the flat? It’s drier.”

He stood. “Can I have my phone back now?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because if Checker calls back, I don’t want you to answer.”

Arthur hunched into himself. “Really think he’s okay?”

I looked out at the rain. I hoped we were right, but realistically? “I don’t know,” I said. My chest was aching badly now. “Let’s go back, yeah? I’ve got a car.”

“And where did this car come from?”

“I bought it.”

“Liar.”

He allowed us to drive back anyway.

Only a few roads out from Checker’s place I took a right turn and said, “Don’t look now, but we’re being followed.”

Arthur flicked his eyes to the side mirror. “I don’t see anything,” he said, after a few more streets of watching the tragic comedy that is LA drivers trying to navigate through pounding rain. “How can you tell?”

“Game theory,” I said. “The white sedan isn’t driving selfishly.”

“They staked out Checker’s place,” Arthur guessed. “Case we came back.”

“It’s okay,” I assured him. “They’re not after us; they want us to lead them back to Rio. I can lose them.” I juked the steering wheel to the side and slammed on the gas, shooting through the next intersection just as the light changed. Arthur yelled. In the rearview mirror, an SUV crashed spectacularly into the passenger side of the white sedan, and brakes screeched as three other cars skidded on the wet streets, spinning to a stop and completely blocking the intersection behind us.

“What the hell!” cried Arthur.

“We’d better switch cars,” I said.

“You could’ve gotten us killed!”

“Please. That was child’s play.”

“You might’ve gotten other people killed!”

“At those velocities it would have been their faults for buying death traps.” It was true, though I hadn’t thought it through in so many words beforehand. I decided against telling Arthur that. “We should probably relocate our hideout to somewhere outside LA.”

Arthur covered his eyes with one hand. I almost felt sorry for him.

By the time we arrived back at the apartment, I could tell my body temperature was edging up into a fever. We squelched inside, and I went to dig out some dry bandages. Arthur, no matter how irritated he might be with my methods, started mother hen-ing me again and pulling out another bag of IV antibiotics.

When the phone in my pocket rang loudly, however, the clean bandages hit the floor as I scrabbled at my jacket. Arthur was squeezing the IV bag in his hand so tightly it looked like it might burst. I finally got the phone out, almost dropping it in my haste to hit the button before it went to voicemail. “Hello?”