Hostage Run

  Then the side door opened and the Troll came in.

  That’s what he looked like: a troll. Not one of those cute plastic trolls with the stand-up purple hair either. But an evil fairy-tale troll, the kind of green-skinned, pimply midget muscleman who hits unsuspecting travelers over the heads with his club. And all right, he didn’t have green skin, not quite. And he was dressed rather stylishly in gray slacks and a black turtleneck and a corduroy jacket. But he was about four feet tall with bulging arms and legs. He had a huge head with thick red hair. He had tannish cheeks with sickly pink patches. He had big round eyes full of pain and rage. Even his friends would have said he looked like a troll. If he’d had any friends. Which he didn’t.

  The other thugs all stopped in their tracks as he entered. Even Nosey stopped sobbing and dropped his hands from his bloody face.

  Molly paused, holding the dumbbell over her shoulder, ready to strike. She went on screaming as loud as she could. Someone had to hear her somewhere.

  The Troll crossed the workout room quickly with a rolling, crippled gait. His hate-filled eyes took in the scene: the Noseless Wonder, bleeding and mewling; Thug One panting with his useless efforts; Smiley McDeath all out of smiles and looking right well ashamed—and, of course, Molly, brandishing the dumbbell at them all and screaming like a banshee.

  The Troll gave them all one look. Then, in a voice like a landslide of gravel, he said, “What’s taking so long?”

  Whereupon he reached quickly inside his corduroy jacket, drew out a gun, and shot Molly in the chest.

  It was a stun gun: it hit Molly with an electric charge that turned her arms and legs to water. The next thing she knew, she was lying on her back, her mouth open in a soundless cry of agony. The smiling man with death in his eyes was leaning over her, his syringe lifted again.

  After that, there was only blackness.

  2. MANHUNT

  “FIND HIM!” MISS Ferris said. “Now!”

  She never raised her voice. She never changed her tone. The expression on her face didn’t even flicker. It was as flat and unemotional as ever. She wasn’t a big, imposing figure either. She was a small woman, in fact, and young, only in her thirties. She had short black hair that made her hard features seem almost boyish. She wore a dark pantsuit that made her body seem all straight lines and angles. But as unimpressive as she might have seemed to an outside observer, everyone in the room knew she was in command. The moment she gave the order, the security team of enormous and muscular tough guys—Victor One and Bravo Niner and the hilariously named Juliet Seven and all the rest of the letter-and-number crew—scattered, on the hunt.

  Her face set—it was always more or less set—Miss Ferris turned away from the retreating hulks and faced the thin microphone that snaked out of the Control Room wall on its gooseneck wire.

  “Don’t make them hurt you, Rick,” she said, her tone still cold and impassive. “Give yourself up while there’s still time.”

  “Fat chance,” Rick Dial muttered to himself. And he continued to drag himself along the narrow air vent.

  This was his plan—not much of a plan, he had to admit, but the best he could come up with. The compound that housed the MindWar Project was largely underground. And the thing about an underground compound, Rick had realized, is that it needs air. And the thing about air is that you have to bring it from above ground and pipe it through the whole facility. Rick had spent the last six weeks pilfering the compound’s specs, mapping out the air circulation system, and stealing the security cards and codes he would need to gain access to the vents.

  But of course the place was so well guarded, so locked down, so wired up with security features, that the alarm had gone off mere minutes after he’d entered the ventilation system. Miss Robot Face Ferris was probably tracking him on sensors even as she broadcast to him through the compound’s loudspeakers.

  “Really, Rick,” he heard her deadpan voice droning to him now. “You’re being childish. You know you can’t pull this off.”

  Why didn’t she ever change her tone of voice? She sounded like a GPS giving directions. Turn left in five miles—and give yourself up.

  Something about the emotionless woman really got under Rick’s skin. He wanted to shout at her: “Where’s Mariel? Who’s Mariel? How can I save her?” He had to bite down hard to keep his mouth shut so he wouldn’t give his location away.

  But even though he said nothing, Miss Ferris knew what he was after. Her monotonous drone continued over the speakers: “This isn’t helping anything, Rick. We’re doing everything we can to help your friends. I know it’s frustrating, but you can’t just act on your own like this.”

  “Watch me,” Rick muttered. He ignored the throbbing ache in his legs and continued to drag himself down the metal shaft.

  Miss Ferris didn’t understand, he thought. She didn’t know how he felt. How could she? With her stony face and metallic blue eyes, empty of all emotion. She didn’t understand that he couldn’t just wait around hoping she and Commander Mars might one day decide to send him back into the Realm. He had to get back there—soon, now. He had to find Mariel, to rescue Mariel. She had saved his life. He owed her. And maybe more than that. He wasn’t sure yet, but he thought it was possible he had fallen in love with her. Even though he had no idea who she was. Even though he wasn’t even sure she was real.

  It had happened like this. Two months ago, Commander Mars, the leader of the MindWar Project, had sent Rick into the Realm. The Realm was a bizarre country in cyberspace, a projection of the imagination of a mysterious terrorist named Kurodar. Kurodar had created the Realm by wiring his brain into a number of supercomputers. Through the Realm, he was hoping to infiltrate America’s defense systems, its electricity grids, its business exchanges—infiltrate them through pure thought, unstoppable, and so destroy them and bring the country to its knees.

  Until Mars and Miss Ferris had tapped him for this mission, Rick had been a broken man: his football career over, his legs crushed, his spirit in ruins. For months, he had locked himself in his room to play video games endlessly. And weirdly, it was that—his gaming skills, linked with his quick quarterback reactions and leadership ability—that had turned him into the perfect MindWarrior. Mars and his techs had projected Rick in avatar form into the online world of Kurodar’s sick imagination. There, Rick had been able to stop the cyberterrorist from slaughtering thousands.

  But it wasn’t the success of the mission that had revived Rick’s soul, that had inspired him to start working his legs back into shape, that had reignited his natural drive and ambition, and his pure macho fighting ferocity. No. It was Mariel.

  How to describe her? She was a silver nymph who traveled through the MindWar Realm’s metallic water; a mysterious Lady of the Lake who had armed and armored him for battle, who had taught him to marshal the power of his spirit so that he could sometimes change the very nature of reality in Kurodar’s online world. She was brave and wise and, yes, majestically beautiful.

  And she was trapped in the Realm. And she was dying.

  Bit by bit, hour by hour, while Rick remained here in this stupid compound, helpless, Mariel’s energy was slowly bleeding out of her. Soon—maybe even now—she—and her friend Favian—would sink into the Realm’s nightmare version of death, a living decay from which their souls could not be released until the Realm itself was destroyed.

  Mariel was dying—and Commander Mars would not let Rick go back into the Realm to save her. Mars and Miss Ferris wouldn’t even tell him how she had gotten into that place or who or what she was. Was she a human being like himself, who had been sent into the Realm to battle Kurodar as he had? Was she someone he might one day meet in RL—in Real Life? Or was she just some strange manifestation of the Realm itself? Or . . . what?

  Rick didn’t know. But he thought the answers had to be in the compound’s files somewhere. And he had decided to find them.

  Over the last few months, Rick had been getting strong again, working his body
back into gridiron shape. His legs still hurt like pins were being stuck into them, but his arms were growing powerful. They pulled him along the narrow air shaft quickly. When he craned his neck, he could see the vent up ahead. He had studied the compound specs a long time. He knew that was the exit he wanted.

  “Listen to me, Rick,” Miss Ferris said to him now over the loudspeakers. “I haven’t told you this before, but we’ve been making plans to send you back in. We’re almost ready.”

  “Yeah, right,” Rick muttered to himself.

  And as if she heard him, Miss Ferris droned back, “Think about it, Rick. I’ve kept a lot of secrets from you. I’ve had to. That’s my job. But I’ve never lied to you—and I’m not lying now.”

  Sweat was pouring into Rick’s eyes as he pulled himself painfully the last few yards to the vent. It was true, he thought, Miss Ferris hadn’t lied. But she hadn’t helped him much either. And she didn’t know what it was like for a guy like him to just sit around helplessly while Mariel drifted into the grip of an agonizing living death. Rick was an action guy. A fighter. Even a hothead sometimes. He couldn’t just do nothing. He couldn’t turn himself to heartless stone like Miss Ferris.

  The vent. He reached it. Struggling to move in the narrow space, he wrestled his Swiss army knife out of his jeans pocket. This wasn’t going to be easy. There were only two bolts holding the vent in place, but the heads were on the outside. He had no way to reach them. He was going to have to use the knife’s wrench to loosen their shafts.

  He knew he had only minutes, if that, before the security team caught up with him. He drew on his quarterback mind, that laser-like focus that allowed him to throw a football accurately while huge linemen thundered toward him for the sack. His hand never shook, his eyes never wavered. He loosened the bolts. He shoved out the vent. As it clattered to the floor, he slid through after it, headfirst.

  He clattered to the floor himself—and, oh boy, the pain that shot up through his aching legs gave him a Venti-sized jolt of wake-up. He cried out but immediately rolled over and stood up on the Persian rug, ignoring his agony. A telescoping walking stick hung from his belt and slapped against his hip, but he didn’t use it. He could walk pretty well now for short distances.

  A Persian rug? he thought suddenly. What was up with that?

  He looked around him. He was in a small room, very small, and very different from the other cold, bare, mechanical rooms throughout the compound. This was more like a gentleman’s study in a suburban home. The rug. A studded leather chair behind a mahogany desk with a sleek laptop on it. Shelves of leather-bound books on every wall. A flat-screen monitor with a scene of the outdoors: it stood in for a window down here below the earth.

  This, Rick knew, was Mars’s office. Rick had chosen to come here because it was at the compound’s center, far away from the security stations around the perimeter. He figured it would take the guards a while to reach him here. Also, he figured the commander’s computer would have the greatest access to the project’s secret files. That’s what he was after: the file on Mariel.

  His breath short with anticipation, Rick limped to the desk and dropped into the leather chair, grateful to get off his aching legs. Stealing Mars’s password had been no small feat. Unlike his dad, Rick was no computer genius. He’d simply had to maneuver himself into position to read the commander’s flying fingers as he entered the word into his machine. It had helped that Mars was distracted at the time by the fact that Rick was yelling at him, demanding to be sent back into the Realm.

  Now Rick tapped the computer’s keys and waited for the machine to come to life so he could enter the password himself.

  I’m coming for you, Mariel, he thought with ferocious intensity.

  But neither ferocity nor intensity helped him here. Nothing happened. The computer stayed dark. Rick tapped the password into the keyboard again. Come on, come on. He checked the power cord. Checked to make sure the thing was on.

  Nothing. Dark.

  Rick’s hopes began to curdle in his stomach.

  “Wrong fingers,” said a voice from the doorway.

  Rick jumped to his feet, his eyes rising quickly. There, framed in the suddenly open door, was Victor One, his father’s personal bodyguard.

  Victor One was a little older than Rick, twenty-six. He was a little taller and more muscular, too, with short-cropped brown hair, a weather-beaten face, and witty blue eyes. He wore jeans and a U.S. Army sweatshirt. He’d been some kind of special forces hero in Afghanistan, and while he was an easygoing kind of guy, nowhere near as intense as Rick, he was plenty tough. Rick knew he was ready for action.

  Rick pulled his walking stick from its holster and pressed the button so that the stick shot out full length. He didn’t have much hope of beating Victor One in a straight-on duke-out, but hey, a nice stick could be a dangerous weapon in the hands of a man who had survived sword fights with two-legged alligators in the Realm.

  “Just stay away from me, V-One,” Rick said to him. “I’ve gotta do this.”

  “Fact is, you can’t do this,” the bodyguard said calmly, leaning casually against the doorjamb. “There’s no way. This computer only wakes up when it feels Mars’s fingerprint pressed to the screen. What will they think of next, right?”

  Rick tried not to show it, but he was silently cursing himself for being an idiot. No computer genius—that was an understatement. He’d never even thought of a fingerprint-sensitive computer lock. Mars probably let him steal his password just to make him feel stupid. It had worked, too. He felt stupid-plus.

  “Bring him back here, Victor One,” came Miss Ferris’s monotonous command from the loudspeakers. “Bring him back here right now.”

  Rick raised his stick threateningly, but Victor One just went on leaning in the doorway.

  “Does that robot voice of hers annoy you like it does me?” he asked.

  “Oh man, does it ever,” said Rick. “It drives me bats.”

  “I want him back here right this minute,” said Miss Ferris—but though her words were growing angrier, her tone remained unchanged.

  “See, she thinks I’m going to rush at you,” said Victor One with a shrug. “Slug it out or something. You hit me with that stick. I hit you back. And so on. I don’t know about you, but that sounds really painful to me.”

  “It does,” said Rick. “I have to agree with you there.”

  “And here’s the thing,” Victor One went on. “You really can’t get into that computer, so we can stand here all day if you want to and it’s not gonna get you anywhere. Better idea? I happen to know Lady Ferris is telling the truth. They are about to send you back into the Realm. Do what they say and you can get everything you want without all the hitting stuff. Personally, I always prefer to skip the hitting stuff.”

  Rick looked at the useless computer. Looked at Victor One in the doorway. He sighed. The man was right. A fight would get him nowhere. There was nothing more he could accomplish here.

  “Are you sure they’re planning to send me back into the Realm?” he asked Victor One.

  Victor One opened his mouth to answer—but it was Miss Ferris’s automaton voice that came through the loudspeakers instead.

  “It’s true,” she told him. “We’re ready to send you back into the Realm. But there’s something you’re going to have to do first . . .”

  3. TEST-DRIVE

  THE CREATURES CHARGED over the hill in droves: an army of fanged demons, sweeping the air with axes, maces, and claws like swords. Some could fly on gray, leathery wings, and these shot heat beams from their eyes that scorched the grass below them. A cacophony of weird, hollow, nerve-jangling shrieks rose like a cloud from the midst of the horde.

  Rick had only ninety seconds left before the ticking device in the earth exploded. He had only a minute or so before the horde of demons reached him. He was armed with nothing but a small, dagger-like blade. He had used the blade to pry the front panel off the bomb. Its printed circuits were now displayed in t
he open, but there was no way for him to tell which line in the maze of metal would disarm the device and which would set it off. He was pressed close to the edge of a cliff. Beyond it was a sheer fall of a thousand feet onto jagged rocks. The bomb was planted deep in the ground. There was no way to budge it. If it exploded, it would scorch the plain and Rick with it.

  “We’re going to have to tell him about Molly,” said Rick’s father quietly. Lawrence Dial—code-named the Traveler—was a small, balding bespectacled man. He looked nothing like his son, but exactly like the physics professor he was.

  “No. It will only distract him,” said Commander Jonathan Mars.

  The two men were sitting together in a small amphitheater in the underground compound, a high-ceilinged room with arcing rows of movie-style seats descending to a large screening area above a platform. Rick—Rick’s body—lay on the platform inside a glass box the size of a coffin. His avatar—the living embodiment of his imagination—was projected in 3-D holographic images in the screening area. There he was, life-like, fiddling with the bomb while under attack by the demon army. He now had only forty-five seconds left until the demons overran him. He had about a minute before the bomb went off.

  “This mission is going to take every ounce of focus he has,” Mars went on brusquely. “We hoped when Rick blew up Kurodar’s fortress, the Axis Assembly would withdraw their support of MindWar, but somehow Kurodar has convinced them to double down. He’s strengthened the Realm and refined its interface with RL. I need a hundred and ten percent of Rick’s attention. That’s why I won’t even send him in—or anyone in—until they can pass this test.”

  Mars continued to watch as the holographic drama unfolded. He was a man in his fifties. Silver-haired, craggy-faced. He had bushy white eyebrows that hung like cliffs over humorless, deep-set eyes. Whereas Rick’s dad was dressed casually in slacks and a button-down shirt, Mars wore a black suit with a red tie. He made a fitting companion for his second in command, the prim Miss Ferris, who was sitting next to him, stone-faced.