Page 1 of Don't Game Me
1
The empty baggage claim carousel squeaked along its serpentine path. Her wedding date’s plane had landed at LaGuardia twenty minutes before hers, and rendezvous was scheduled for right here at his carousel. Right now.
Rebecca Harrison texted:I’m here. Where are you?
She’d wanted them on the same flight, but he’d gotten a last-minutecheapflight.comdeal.Flights from San Diego were expensive. She got that.
Her grip on the rollaboard tightened as she waited for a reply. Her only company at the still-moving carousel was a few roughed-up unclaimed suitcases.
A buzz signaled an incoming call. Caller ID: Pascal Nordin.
Her boss.
The bottom dropped out of her stomach. Pascal had commanded she take a fellow intern of his choosing as her wedding date. The order stepped way over the employer-employee personal line, but so did everything about the past eight months of her life as an intern at GenShare. Her “date” might be a good friend and a sweet guy with genius skills as a cloud computing analyst, but she and Stuart as a couple? Tough sell. They liked the same guys. Pascal didn’t know that, or if he did, didn’t care.
“Hello? Pascal?” She pressed the phone tight against her ear. No greeting came back. Calling her boss by his first name still felt as awkward as it had the first time he’d insisted she do so while in his bizarre ultramodern office with a fireplace. Who in Southern California used a fireplace? And at work, no less. At first, she thought him a progressive employer attempting to create an open, welcoming atmosphere but later realized it was a part of the con to make people relax around him.
Maybe the call had been dropped, or the high level of ambient noise around her drowned out his response. Her tone notched up an octave. “Sir?”
“There’s been a change,” Pascal’s smoke-worn voice croaked.
“Where’s Stuart? I’m here. He’s not.”Please, please let Stuart’s connection in Colorado have been delayed. He would’ve texted if so.
“He had a…” Her heart pounded through the pause before her boss said, “Loyalty conflict.”
Stuart was dead.
Morbid to jump to that conclusion. Maybe he’d been fired. How optimistic and full of rainbow unicorn bullshit was that concept.Loyalty conflictwas code for game over. As in murdered or fake suicide or unusual accident. The terror of being next on the “loyalty conflict” list, of being scheduled for eradication by the global organized crime group who owned Pascal, paralyzed her into remaining in this crap internship. Well, that and going to jail. They had a video of her committing corporate espionage.
Damn her pride for designing the dangerous program, and double damn her naiveté when they tricked her into using it. All she’d done was walk into the lobby of what she’d been told was a “sister company” for a benign test run. She’d opened the program and boom, GenShare was in their mainframe. They stole turbine designs critical for cutting-edge jet engines and sold the information to the Chinese. The U.S. Department of Justice had the breach under investigation. One little leak from GenShare with her name involved, and game over for her.
“Where’s Stuart?” She swallowed through the lump lodged in her throat. Had Pascal gotten wind of their plan to escape his grip? Stuart wouldn’t whistleblow. That was guaranteed death.
No one double-crossed Pascal or the mysterious underground eGaming kingpin who owned Pascal and forced GenShare employees to play on an illegal gaming circuit. Months ago, when they discovered her talent at video gaming, they shifted her away from software engineering into gaming team training during the day to improve her performance on game nights. At first, she’d been flattered. Later, when her brother, Kaleb, had been sucked into the same gaming scenario on the opposite coast and murdered for refusing to cooperate, she realized she needed to get out.
She should’ve been finishing her master’s degree at Berkley, not interning in Southern California for an “innovative” tech company—aka invasive spy tech—and forced into playing and gambling on an illegal eGaming circuit a few nights a week. This wasn’t fantasy football or poker. It was high stakes multi-player character online games.
“Stuart had an accident on the way to the airport.” Pascal’s tone conveyed sadness, not that she believed it for a second.
“What happened?”
“New plan. You’re going to do what we planned for Stuart.”
Her hands curled into her phone. “Is he…dead?”
“Stuart’s gone.”
“Why’s he gone?”
“We’d just fired him. He was planning to leave us, so we figured we’d beat him to the punch. He must’ve been driving upset or something.”
She shivered. They knew Stuart planned to get away from them. How? They’d been so cautious with their plan. They must know she was involved too.
Pascal said. “You’re going to get close to Jake Allen. Be his wedding date.”
“Jake Allen? You mean, the best man? I guarantee he’s got a date.” She wasn’t some sort of secret agent or super spy who could take orders to commit crimes on their behalf. Would she if they asked? Her hands shook to the point she struggled to keep the phone level with her ear. If she said no, she could end up in the same afterlife as Stuart or arrested by the Department of Justice for corporate espionage. A yes from her meant she’d hurt people she cared about.
“Jake is at carousel six. We’ve taken care of things to create an opportunity.”
