The Never Game

“Where are you taking me?” Eddie Linn asked, his voice vibrating like an off-balance washing machine. The SUV paused at an elaborate security gate, which then opened, and the vehicle sped through.

Shaw had two reactions to the question. First, the man’s concern was solely about himself. Shaw supposed Linn would happily throw him to the wolves. Second, it was pointless to ask. Even if the guards in the front seat had been able to hear it through the Plexiglas, they wouldn’t have answered.

When the Suburban stopped at the back door of Hong-Sung’s futuristic headquarters, the guards nodded them out and directed them inside, where the group descended a flight of stairs. Shaw looked back, wondering if the pregnant woman’s limo was behind them. It wasn’t.

“Don’t look around. Walk.” This from the bigger guard, who took Shaw’s arm. Gripping tighter than even Tony Knight’s men, who really knew how to grip.

“Don’t push it,” Shaw said.

And was rewarded with a crushing squeeze.

Linn didn’t need a jerk of the leash. He walked passively beside the smaller guard.

They were taking the prisoners down a lengthy, dim corridor. It might have been in the basement but it was spotless. The walls were bare. Somewhere, not far away, machinery hummed.

A two-minute trek took them to an elevator, in which they ascended to the fifth — and top — floor. It opened into a small, plain office. The receptionist, a woman of about forty, sitting at a wooden desk, nodded to the guards. Shaw and Linn were led through the wide double doors behind her. This room was larger yet just as austere as the receptionist’s, hardly the place for the CEO of a multibillion-dollar conglomerate to work.

For that’s who they were looking at: Hong Wei, whom Shaw recognized from the internet stories he’d downloaded. The dark-haired Asian was about fifty. He wore a suit, white shirt and blue shimmery tie. The jacket was buttoned. Shaw and Linn were deposited in chairs facing him. The guards stood a respectful distance back but also close enough to step forward and break necks in a fraction of a second.

The doors through which they’d entered opened again and the pregnant woman walked in. She carried a file folder and handed it to the man behind the desk. “Mr. Hong.”

“Thank you, Ms. Towne.”

Shaw noted something odd. The man’s desk contained no computer, other electronic device or telephone, either mobile or landline.

Hong opened the file and read studiously for a moment.

Linn was close to whimpering. Shaw had decided that while there might be consequences to his furtive meeting with Eddie Linn, dismemberment and being fed to the aquatic life in San Francisco Bay probably was not going to be one of them. Largely because it would have happened already.

Which meant his hypothesis of Hong’s involvement shrank a few percentage points.

Hong read. Very slowly. And he seemed not to move a muscle. Shaw didn’t even see him blink.

To Hong’s right, lined up side by side like logs at the lumber camp where Shaw had worked summers during college, were a number of yellow wooden pencils and, to his left, a half dozen more. Those on the right had needle-sharp points. The ones on the left were duller. Did the CEO appreciate the dangers of digital communication so much that he relied on paper and carbon?

Hong read without any acknowledgment of the two men in front of him.

Linn took a breath to say something. Then apparently thought the better of it.

Waste of time...

Shaw waited. What else was there to do?

Finally Hong finished reading and looked at Shaw. “Mr. Shaw, you are here because you were trespassing on private property. This park where you were sitting is owned by Hong-Sung Enterprises. There are signs.”

“Conveniently invisible.”

“You had a reasonable expectation that this was private property.”

“Because the landscaping outside the fence matches the landscaping inside?”

“Exactly.”

“That’d be a tough one for a jury to buy.”

“And since we were able to hear your conversation we had a reasonable expectation that Mr. Linn here was in the process of divulging trade secrets to you and—”

“My God, no, I wasn’t!” The high voice rose even higher yet. “I was just helping—”

“Which justified our taking you into custody, as if you were shoplifters at a grocery store.”

Shaw glanced at Ms. Towne. Her face was calm and confident and he bet she’d be a loving and huggy mother when off the clock. She continued to stand, despite a nearby empty chair.

Hong tapped the folder. “You make your living with these rewards, do you?”

“That’s right.”

“What do you call yourselves? Rewardists?”

“I’ve heard that. I don’t call myself anything.”

“And I understand you are not a private investigator; nor are you a bond enforcement agent. You assist in finding missing persons and escaped fugitives, and suspects who have not yet been identified or located, for rewards, traveling around the country from, say, Indiana to Berkeley, in your recreational vehicle.”