The Never Game

“Five objects.” Avon’s voice was hollow. “I came up with five because my daughter was learning to count. She used her fingers. She’d do the right hand and then, when she went to the left, she started over again.”

Shaw explained, “One possibility is that the kidnapper’s a player who’s obsessed with the game and is acting it out. Like the boys in Ohio. If so, we want to try to trace him.”

The detective said, “Mr. Shaw here had a conversation with Tony Knight and...” A glance Shaw’s way.

“Jimmy Foyle.”

“Conundrum. It’s a real phenomenon. Supposedly the longest source code ever written for a game.”

Fifteen quadrillion planets...

Avon added, “Alternative reality. I’ve thought about publishing one but you really need supercomputers for them to work right. You should see their servers. Well, what can I help with?”

Shaw explained what Foyle had suggested. How they wanted to locate local gamers who were online frequently — obsessed with the game — as well as offline at three specific times: when Sophie was kidnapped, when she was rescued and when Henry Thompson was taken.

Now would come the battle. Avon would say, Sure. And you don’t get user logs without a warrant.

And he was indeed shaking his head.

“Look,” Standish said, “I know you’ll want a warrant. We’re hoping you’ll cooperate.”

Avon scoffed. “Warrant. I don’t care about that.”

Standish and Shaw regarded each other.

“You don’t?”

The CEO chuckled. “Do you know what an EUA is?”

Shaw said he didn’t. The detective shook her head.

“‘End user agreement.’ Whenever anybody subscribes to The Whispering Man, they have to agree to the EUA. Every software and hardware company makes you agree or you don’t get the goods. Nobody reads ’em, of course. Ours has got a clause that gives us permission to use their data any way we want — even give it to the police without a warrant.

“No, we have other problems. We’ll have to track the user — your suspect — through his IP address. We get hacked all the time — all game companies do — so we separate online presence from personal information. All our gaming servers know is that User XYZ has paid, but we don’t know who he is. That might not be a problem, tracking IP to the user’s computer. But most of our subscribers — at least the younger ones — use proxies.”

“Masks that hide their real location when they’re online,” Shaw said. He did too in all of his online activity.

“Exactly. ID’ing somebody using a proxy is time consuming and sometimes impossible. But let’s give it a shot. When was he offline?”

Shaw displayed his notebook.

“Now, we’ll want subscribers who play for, let’s say, twenty-five hours a week or more but were offline then.” Nodding at the notebook. “Quite some handwriting.” Avon hunted and pecked and, as he did, he mused, “Did you know that in China they’re considering legislation to limit the hours you can play? And the World Health Organization just listed video gaming addiction as a disease. Ridiculous. That’s like saying lawyers who work more than forty hours a week are dysfunctional. Nurses, surgeons.” He fiddled with a pencil that had a clown’s head topper. He glanced at the screen. “Okay. Here we go.”

Standish sat forward. “You have results already?”

Shaw, familiar with the speed of Velma Bruin’s rewards-finding algorithm, Algo, wasn’t surprised.

Reading the screen, Avon said, “The answer is a yes, with a caveat. There are about two hundred and fifty-five people who play the game at least twenty-five hours a week and they meet the offline timing criteria. Of those, sixty-four aren’t anonymous — no proxies. But none of them are within a hundred miles of here. The others? They’re behind proxies. So we have no idea where they are — maybe next door, maybe Uzbekistan.” He gazed at the list. “Most of them are off-the-shelf proxies, not very righteous. They can be cracked but it’ll take some time.”

He tapped out another request. Hit RETURN. “There,” he said, “I’ve got somebody on it.”

And then Marty Avon went into a different place mentally. Finally he asked, “Where was the girl hidden?”

Shaw said, “The Abandoned Factory. Level 1.”

“You know the game? You play it?”

“No. You’re thinking he put Henry Thompson — that’s the new victim — at a different level?”

Avon said, “The kidnapper’s a gamer, obviously, and it’d be a fail to repeat a level and a cheat to play out of order.”

Shaw, who embraced technology in his work, had been amused to learn that geeks often swapped verbs for nouns: A fail was “a loss,” an ask was “a question.”

“The second level’s called The Dark Forest.”

“So Henry Thompson’s being held in the woods somewhere.”

Standish grimaced. “Got a few acres of those around here.”

Shaw’s eyes fell on the set of toy soldiers. They were about three inches high, dark green, in various combat poses. Troops from the Second World War, probably. Nowadays, what would the manufacturer produce? Men or women sitting at drone command stations? A cybersecurity expert at a desk, hacking into Russian defenses?