This was what had driven Gragg for the last twenty-four hours straight: After shooting him, the SS officer stood over his body. It was the infamous Oberstleutnant Heinrich Boerner from the single-player mode of OTR. Even freakier, Boerner spoke over Gragg’s body. He said: “Tod ist unvermeidlich, aber meist unbeutend,” with an English subtitle appearing on the bottom of the screen: “Death is inevitable but largely unimportant.”
How the fuck had they done that? It was absolutely the same voice-over artist for Boerner from the original single-player game.
Had this custom map been done by the CyberStorm folks themselves? Gragg was obsessed with reaching the wine cellars again. He had to find out what Boerner was doing there. Only this time he wasn’t going to let that fuck shoot him in the back. Yet he knew only too well that Boerner was a slippery character—not likely to repeat his tactics. Gragg resolved to save grenades for the cellars.
The next round started with much of the usual crew—similarly obsessed folks, cursing this addictive game and striving to take the abbey before dawn broke on another sleepy-eyed workday. This time Gragg made sure to follow in the path of a player whose screen name was Major Pain in the Ass. MPITA was a good player, with quick reflexes and a good grasp of key combinations for jumping, switching weapons, and leaning around corners. Gragg crawled behind him during the flanking maneuver, then stuck close on his tail going into the monastery ruins. He never let him get more than a step or two ahead. MPITA soaked up most of the gunfire from Krauts with Schmeissers and heavy machine guns. By the time MPITA was taken out with a Panzerfaust, Gragg was farther into the ruins than he’d ever gotten without taking serious damage.
He took out the Panzerfaust team with a couple blasts from his pump shotgun—his weapon of choice for this map. A sniper rifle was useless in the close quarters of the ruins.
Gragg then stormed forward, hitting a command key that caused his avatar to shout, “Follow me!” He headed toward the dormitory hall, and that was going to be the next problem.
As he reached the corner, Gragg hit the key combo to lean left. He quickly spotted the MG42 team a hundred feet down the roofless, rubble-strewn corridor. The loader pointed and shouted, and the gunner turned toward him and opened fire just as Gragg ducked back again. Tracers whined past for a moment or two until the Krauts decided to save their ammo.
It was an engrossingly realistic game.
Gragg turned his view to face five other Allied players catching up behind him. This was fantastic. They’d never come this far with so few casualties. That meant only ten of the sixteen had been killed in the assault—a record low. He hit the command keys again, and his avatar shouted, “Charge!”
He raced straight across the hall toward a shallow alcove he knew of, immediately drawing fire again from the MG42 at the end of the hall. He watched his health meter drop quickly to 20 percent by the time he reached the safety of the alcove. The players right behind him tried to follow him into the alcove, but Gragg knew it could fit only one player at a time. Their avatars bumped and jumped against his, striving for cover until the Germans mowed them down. Three other players had hung back under cover, and they exchanged fire with the MG42 until Gragg heard what he was waiting for: silence from the Kraut machine gun. They were reloading.
Gragg switched to grenades and charged forward. As he ran over the corpses of his fallen comrades, he picked up their med kits, increasing his health back to 95 percent. It was an odd genre conceit that fallen players sprouted medical kits like Christmas presents, and that picking up a medical kit would immediately increase the health of injured characters—but right now Gragg was all for it. He wanted Boerner’s head on a stick.
He could see the Krauts wrestling a belt of ammo into the open breech of their gun while he ran toward them. The machine gun barrel steamed ominously.
The detail of this game is fantastic.
Just as the Krauts slammed the breech closed again, Gragg hurled his grenade down the hallway. It was a perfect throw, and the Germans ran shouting from their machine gun nest.
By that time, Gragg had switched to his shotgun, and he pumped two rounds into each of them as they fled the explosion. They dropped with captivating rag-doll physics. When he reached the smoking machine gun nest, only one of the Krauts was still moving, lying on his back with a 3-D texture of blood ostensibly flowing from his mouth—that meant he was 98 percent wounded.
Gragg loved this part. Sometimes severely wounded AI soldiers would surrender.
The injured Kraut held up his hands with melodramatic fear, looking up at Gragg’s avatar. “Nicht schiessen!”
BOOM! Gragg wasted him and reloaded.
The other three surviving members of his squad arrived, reloading their Tommy guns. The chat window started rolling fast and furious now:
Sergeant Hairy Balls> Any more grenades?
Your Retarded Brother> Never been this far!
Go Mets!> Loki, we’ll cover u
Gragg smirked. Like hell, motherfucker. He typed:
Loki> Fuk u. I took out the machine gun
A moment, then Sergeant Hairy Balls’s avatar moved toward some cellar steps. The others followed, with Gragg taking up the rear. This was the way he liked it.
Gragg looked down the stairway. That was the entrance to the wine cellar where he’d seen Oberstleutnant Boerner yesterday. He was going to kill that fucker this time.
Should he warn the others? He calculated whether it was better to share the information and increase the chance of success, or risk it all and keep victory for himself. He decided to let them find out the same way he did.
Hairy Balls tossed a grenade into the cellar and chased the resulting explosion, charging inside with his Thompson blazing. Suddenly the doorway filled with an orange glow, and flames leapt out of the cellar with a throaty roar.
Flamethrower. Boerner was holed up in the cellars with a fucking Flammenwerfer. This was suicide. Hairy Balls was already dead.
The other two players started tossing grenades in through the opening. They ducked in and out of the doorway, chased by roaring flames each time. Gragg knew they were taking damage, but they were helping; a flamethrower had only ten blasts.
By the time the flamethrower was exhausted, Your Retarded Brother was dead, and Go Mets! was badly injured. Gragg knew this because a player’s avatar limped when it had less than 20 percent health—and his companion was limping pitifully.
Gragg let Go Mets! grab the med kits from their fallen comrades, since he was of no use to Gragg dead, and they both charged into the wine cellar, guns blazing. Boerner was nowhere in sight.
Gragg hoped it was Boerner they were chasing, since he was running out of ammo. He typed into the chat window:
Loki> Did u see him?
Go Mets!> No
The wine cellar was dimly lit the last time Gragg was here, but now the fires left by the flamethrower illuminated the place pretty well, so they didn’t have to probe the dark corners of the room behind the wine barrels. From experience Gragg knew that wood textures could ”burn” in OTR, so they had to move through here fast, or they might lose any chance of catching Herr OberstLeutnant at all. Gragg glanced up and saw that the beams overhead had caught fire.
Damn! Who designed this level? It’s incredible.
A doorway led through the far wall of the cellar. The exhausted flamethrower pack lay on the stone floor there.
An echoing German voice shouted from that direction: “Amerikaner!” It was Boerner, all right.
Gragg rushed forward with Go Mets!, and they took up positions on either side of the doorway. Gragg started leaning in to take a look, when he saw the infamous Heinrich Boerner character stand up from the cover of some crates behind Go Mets!. Boerner was dressed in his trademark SS officer grays with a floor-length greatcoat and an Iron Cross under his chin.
This bastard son of an AI engine had dropped the flamethrower in the exit to make them think he’d left the room, and they both fell for it, like morons
.
Boerner leveled a Schmeisser submachine gun at Go Mets!’s back and opened up. To his credit, Go Mets! leapt up like a house cat and spun around, firing wildly with his Thompson. Gragg tried to pump a few rounds in Boerner’s general direction, but Go Mets! was blocking the line of fire.
By the time Gragg circled around and Go Mets! limped to cover, Boerner was moving behind the huge wine tuns again—his evil laugh echoing.
“Fucker, fucker, fucker!” Gragg actually shouted at his flat-screen monitor.
Just then he heard the telltale clink, clank of a German potato masher landing in his general vicinity.
“Fuck!” Gragg ducked down and scurried away, but he was still caught by the blast and went flying across the room. He was suddenly down to 15 percent health.
“Damnit!” He pounded his workbench.
The grenades kept coming, and both Gragg and Go Mets! fell back, firing at nothing in particular. By the time they stopped, they were damn near back at the cellar entrance. Embers were falling down around their ears. Gragg lost another 1 percent of health in fire damage.
Gragg tilted his view upward to see the ceiling fully engulfed in flames. The place was filling with smoke. A beam in the corner collapsed, sending up sparks.
Incredible effects.
Gragg turned his view to Go Mets!’s avatar. The guy looked like hell, swaying unsteadily and wheezing.
Gragg aimed the shotgun. BOOM!
Go Mets! fell dead. Gragg collected his med kit and was back up to 39 percent health again.
PK-ing’s a bitch, fella.
Then Gragg realized he was out of shotgun shells. He also had no grenades left. He switched to his Colt pistol. This was laughable; he was up against Boerner with a peashooter.
Good as dead now. Might as well go out fighting.
Gragg’s avatar ran like a wild man across the burning cellar, firing his pistol at nothing in particular. He ran to the doorway on the far side and jumped over the discarded flamethrower pack. He ran full-speed into the darkness.
It was with considerable surprise that he found himself still alive and moving toward a faint light ahead. He stopped to reload his pistol and then continued.
Soon he reached a circular chamber with a beam of sunlight shining down from a hole in the ceiling, illuminating a section of the wall. It appeared to be the basement of a shattered tower. Several barred windows ringed the walls in the shadows. It was a dead end.
Gragg looked back the way he’d come. No wonder Boerner let him in here—now he was trapped.
Gragg wondered why Go Mets! wasn’t flaming him in the chat window for player killing. Perhaps if any of the first squad survived the diversion attack, he could convince them to move up and help out. Gragg hit the TAB key to bring up the player list. To his surprise, no one else was playing on the server anymore. There weren’t even any spectators—which is what you turned into after getting killed. All thirty-one human players had disconnected. It was strange. He closed the player list. Maybe they were shunning him for player killing?
Gragg’s avatar moved around the dark room. He noticed the wall where the sunlight struck it. There, in the center of the sunlight, a texture map of chiseled stone spelled out a cryptic message:
m0wFG3PRCoJVTs7JcgBwsOXb3U7yPxBB
Gragg stared at it for a while. What the hell?
Just then he heard a familiar voice off to his left: “Amerikaner.”
Gragg spun left and emptied his Colt in the direction of the voice. It was Boerner all right, standing behind a latticework grate cut into the wall. His shadowy form was partially hidden by the grate. The bullets didn’t seem to have any effect. Apparently the game engine treated the latticework as a solid object—like a bulletproof confessional.
In a few seconds Gragg’s pistol was empty. As he stood there, his gun still aimed at Boerner, the SS officer took out a lighter and lit a cigarette at the end of a long black filter. The orange glow lit up his hawkish, Aryan face for a moment.
The Oberstleutnant’s dark eyes turned to Gragg’s avatar. “You haf played long. Haf you no job?”
Gragg’s jaded eyes widened in amazement.
Who the hell created this map?
Boerner continued to smoke calmly. On a lark, Gragg hit a hotkey for game taunts. His avatar shouted at Boerner: “I think the Germans are out of real men!”
Boerner frowned. “Stop zat nonsense.”
At his computer, Gragg stood up, kicked his chair back and gripped his head in mute amazement. His eyes quickly returned to the screen.
Boerner took another drag on his cigarette. “Are you a brain-dead punk”—he motioned to the text centered in the sunlight on the wall—“or do you haf useful knowledge, yes? If you do, use your key, and ve vill meet again.” He clenched his teeth on the cigarette filter, smiled darkly, then turned and walked away—laughing his (literally) trademark evil laugh. It echoed in the halls.
Gragg watched him go, then turned to face the writing on the wall again. He hit a key combination for the in-game camera to snap a screen capture.
The moment he did so, he was ejected from the game. The Houston Monte Cassino server never appeared in the public listings again.
Chapter 10:// In the Air
Ross leaned against Sebeck’s unmarked police cruiser. It was parked on the shoulder of Potrero Road. “Do you need directions to Woodland Hills, Sergeant?”
“Just a brief detour.”
“What is this, the first murder scene?”
“Down that dirt road.” Sebeck pointed back at the closed steel gate. He stood in front of the steel winch box. A police warning tag hung from the winch housing.
Sebeck noticed that the steel cable was coiled on the ground beyond the chain-link fence, stretching out of sight downhill. The county probably lowered it to avoid any additional accidents. “Hang on a sec.” Sebeck keyed a handheld radio. “Unit 992, this is D-19, over.” Sebeck looked to Ross again. “We have a patrol unit guarding the murder scene down below.”
A voice crackled over the radio, “Unit 992, over.”
“I’m at your 20. I need to raise this cable. Is the area clear down there? Over.”
“Ten-four. Area clear, D-19. Over.”
“Stand by. Out.”
Sebeck clipped the radio onto his belt under his sports coat. He produced a ziplock bag from his pocket and unrolled it. It contained keys and a remote control. He removed the keys and flipped through them. He used one to unlock the winch housing. He flipped open the door, then searched for the key to the winch. He inserted the key and turned it in the lock.
The winch motor kicked to life, grinding like a powerful can opener. Sebeck leaned around the side of the winch housing to check the progress of the cable. It wasn’t budging.
Ross looked on from his position at the car. “You turning it the right way?”
Sebeck stopped it. He pointed to the arrows next to the lock. “It says ‘In.’ I’m turning it to ‘In.’ This is ‘Out.’”
He cranked it the other way. The winch paid out a small bit of cable before clicking to a stop. “See? That’s ‘Out.’”
Sebeck cranked it the other way again. The motor ran, but it didn’t even retrieve the small amount he had just paid out. The winch mechanism would not engage even though the motor was running. He stopped it and pulled the key out.
“That’s strange. Although, now that I think about it, the handyman said the cable didn’t come out of the ground when he ran the winch.”
Ross looked puzzled. “The cable was in the ground?”
“Yeah. It was buried in the ground, and the handyman got a faked e-mail from the management company to come over and run the winch.”
Ross came up alongside and studied the winch housing. “If running the winch doesn’t do anything, why bother to send a spoofed e-mail to have someone run it?”
“It is strange. The FBI lab will probably take it apart.” Sebeck pulled out a pad and pen. He started writing down brand, model, and seria
l numbers for the winch. “Any writing on that side?”
Ross shook his head.
In a moment they were done, and Sebeck put his pad away. “I want to take another look at the murder scene while I’m here. It’ll only be a few minutes.” They returned to the cruiser. Before getting back into the car, Sebeck pulled the remote control from the ziplock bag and pointed it at the gate. He clicked it.
The gate squeaked once, then started swinging open. Another, familiar sound came to Sebeck’s ears, and he cocked his head to listen closely. Ross’s hand slapped across his chest, startling him. He glared at Ross, who was pointing. Sebeck followed his finger.
The winch was running, pulling the steel cable taut.
It took the final clang of the gate stopping to rouse them from their stunned silence. The cable was as taut as a piano wire.
Sebeck looked at Ross.
Ross pointed at the remote. “Whose remote is that?”
Sebeck looked down at it. Then nodded appreciatively. “It belonged to Joseph Pavlos. The victim.”
Ross nodded back. “That’s about right. Otherwise, the cable might be discovered too early, and the murder attempt would fail.”
Sebeck pondered it. “But then why send someone out here to run the winch if the key didn’t do anything? Like you said: why fake the work order?”
They both thought about it for a few moments.
Ross turned to Sebeck again. “What was the first thing you did after finding out the handyman ran the winch?”
“We detained him and requested a search warrant for the property management office.”
“And how much time did you spend waiting for the warrant and searching the office?”
Sebeck grimaced. “Long enough for the second victim to die.”
“So maybe it was a distraction to give him time to kill the second programmer.”
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