Warren Murphy: Target of Opportunity

This was a great game. Still couldn't figure out why it was called Ruby. Then again, he never understood why Tetris was called Tetris.

The doors on either side of the stage blew open under the hard shoulders of sunglassed men with guns.

Flashlights blazed and a voice cried, "Freeze! Don't move! Secret Service! Don't move!"

Coggins dropped to one knee, waiting. Had they seen him?

And the agents converged on a man who had been sitting in the front row, waiting in sinister silence.

The man stood up. His back was to the seat rows. He was short and slight and might have been some harmless professor of astronomy waiting to expound on the top quark.

The Secret Service agents treated him like a coiled asp.

"Keep your hands where they are!"

"I'm not resisting!" the man shouted suddenly. "I'm not resisting arrest!"

A human wave, they converged on him, threw him to the floor and cuffed him. He submitted without a struggle.

"You are under arrest for attempting to assassinate the President of the United States," an out-of-breath Secret Service agent said.

"I didn't assassinate anybody," the man said in a nervous voice. "I'm a patsy."

When they hauled him to his feet again, someone hit the lights. Everybody got a good look at the assassin then. Except Bud.

"Holy shit!" an agent exploded. "He's wearing one of our countersniper windbreakers."

"I don't recognize him," another said.

"He's not from the Boston office," said a third.

"Still, this guy looks vaguely familiar," a fourth agent said.

"We'll sort it out later. Let's get him out of here."

They spun the handcuffed prisoner around and marched him roughly up the aisle.

Bud Coggins ducked behind the pine barrier and watched the knot of men approach, their captive stumbling before them, his pasty face sweaty and drained of blood.

"Did I fail?" he whispered into his helmet.

"No. Do you see the man's face?"

"Yes."

"Does he look familiar to you?"

"Yeah. Yeah, he does! But I can't place him."

"Then here is a clue. The name of the game is Ruby. You are Ruby, Bud Coggins. Do you understand now? You are Ruby."

And Bud Coggins understood perfectly. He came out from behind the pinewood barrier in a marksman's crouch and shouted, "Oswald! You killed my President!" He then emptied the contents of both guns into the handcuffed prisoner. The man gave out a groan, twisted on his feet and sprawled on the carpeted aisle.

A storm of return fire tore into Bud Coggins's wildly pounding heart, lungs, spleen, kidneys, liver and most importantly, his '7R helmet. It cracked open like an Easter egg.

As he lay broken and bleeding in the cavernous auditorium, looking at the real world through real eyes, Bud Coggins smiled through his pain.

This Ruby is a great game, he thought. He felt totally, absolutely, scarily immersed in the experience of dying.

And then he did die. Happily. He had been the first human being to play Ruby and he had won first time out.

Chapter 4

Remo Williams cruised past the entrance to Sam Beasley World.

It looked exactly the way he remembered it. Before it had fallen into the biggest sinkhole in Florida history, that is. Pennants chattered in the wind, and colorful bunting everywhere proclaimed Have a Beasley Christmas.

Two years ago an armed invasion of Cuba had brought Remo to the Cuban-exile community of Miami on the trail of the mastermind attempting to destabilize the island nation. The trail led, of all places, to Sam Beasley World, where Remo had discovered an underground installation in which preparations were under way for a second assault using animatronic soldiers under the command of the legendary animator and theme-park operator, Uncle Sam Beasley.

It was hard to judge which was more fantastic: that the Sam Beasley Corporation, with theme parks in several nations, would try to overthrow the Castro government in order to establish a tax-free world headquarters and theme park in the Caribbean; or that the mastermind was none other than Uncle Sam himself, who was supposed to have died in the mid-1960s.

Eventually Remo and his mentor, Chiun, had gone to Cuba to head off the second invasion. In the process they had captured Uncle Sam alive. Normally disposing of a problem like Uncle Sam would have been easy. Remo was sanctioned to kill in the name of national security. Except that Remo had grown up watching "The Marvelous World of Sam Beasley" and had been a huge fan. The Master of Sinanju, too, had a soft spot for the defrosted animation genius.

So they had spirited him to Folcroft Sanitarium, the CURE cover installation, where Uncle Sam was stripped of his hydraulic hand and cybernetic eyeball. Then he'd been installed in a rubber room to live out the rest of his natural life, which, considering that he had been given an animatronic heart in addition to the other cyborg parts, could mean a hundred years or so.

Uncle Sam had recently escaped, and for three months Dr. Smith had been trying to track him down. No luck. The CURE computers were down, leaving the organization virtually blind except for human intelligence.

So every few weeks Remo would infiltrate a part of the Sam Beasley empire looking for him. Now that it was completely rebuilt, it was time to hit Sam Beasley World in Furioso, Florida, once again. It was no fun, but it beat putting up with the snotty French at Euro Beasley.

Remo parked in the lot and bought a ticket at the entrance. He walked down Main Street, which was bedecked with silvery tinsel and other Christmassy decorations, eyes and ears alert for signs of trouble. The last time he was here, the cartoony greeters had been put on alert and issued weapons. They had been told they were repelling terrorists.

Instead, Remo and Chiun had gone through them like buzz saws. Back then, the entire park had been honeycombed with snares and booby-trapped attractions. Remo had no reason to think the rebuilt attractions were any different.

As he melted through the crowds, Remo pretended not to notice the greeters whispering into their snouts and fuzzy paws.

"He's here," whispered Gumpy Dog into his paw.

"The one with the thick wrists," added Missy Mouse.

"He's headed toward Horrible House," said Mucky Moose into his drooping foam antlers.

Remo overheard them tracking him. No response seemed to come back. Maybe Beasley was here, maybe he wasn't. If he was, there was only one place he would be. Utiliduck.

Casually Remo sauntered over to a great plastic hippopotamus with a yawning mouth. A sign hung on the hippo's lower tusks. It said Trash.

As people passed by, they tossed their empty soda cans and candy wrappers into the hippo's mouth. When the hippo's belly got full, it shut its mouth and, with a whoosh, emptied its trashy guts into a pipe that led from its fat gray rump to somewhere underground.

Remo watched the hippo's mouth reopen. So did a greeter dressed as Mongo Mouse. He was pretending to ignore the curious questions of a little ponytailed girl while trying to act nonchalant.

Instead, he looked like a human radar dish with those ridiculous ears zeroing in on Remo Williams.

Remo ignored him and waited for the mechanical pink mouth to yawn its fullest. When the little girl with the ponytail tugging on his spun-glass tail succeeded in distracting Mongo for a moment, Remo dived into the hippo's mouth.

The hippo, stomach counterweights responding to Remo's lean one hundred fifty-five pounds, promptly shut its happy jaws.

Mongo Mouse looked up and muttered, "Shit."