Either way, he wasn’t going to live a long life in the trackless wastes of suburbia—and that was something.
The only car Gragg had at the moment was the first one he’d ever owned—a piece-of-shit blue 1989 Ford Tempo whose paint had long ago bleached into Grateful Dead tie-dye patterns. The rear window leaked, and the resulting mildew stench in the car made his sofa smell like a field of heather by comparison.
He kept the Tempo because a guy his age was suspicious without a car. Gragg lived most of his life under stolen identities—such was the life of a carder—but he still had a real name and social security number to maintain. Thus, the Tempo. On paper Gragg was a loser, supposedly working part-time at a computer parts store in Montrose. He officially earned little but didn’t apply for welfare or food stamps. He was just a slacker—an unambitious young punk who spent most of his hours in the alt.binaries.nospam.facials newsgroup. His ISP could vouch for that. The official Brian Gragg was a totally uninteresting person.
Gragg always registered his good cars under assumed identities, and unlike his bulk identity thefts, Gragg was more selective about the identities he “wore.” No one too successful or too poor. He found his victims by trading with other carders for the social security numbers, names, and addresses of middle-class folks. Folks who weren’t worth much on the open market except as a mask. Once he picked a name, it was easy to use online skip-tracing services to find the last half-dozen places where the victim worked, where they’d lived, their credit reports, income tax information, relatives, and neighbors. It was all readily available. Gragg had a policy of selecting only Fortune 1000 or government employees for his victims—real solid folks. His Honda Si had been registered under the name of an Oregonian man who worked for TRW. The irony always made Gragg smile. Of course, he made certain to pay his victim’s illicit bills on time—at least as long as he kept the identity.
But the fiasco with the Filipinos left him without a decent ride, and there hadn’t been time to set up a new identity. Certainly Gragg didn’t want to be seen shopping for a new car just now. Too risky.
So here he was getting into his own car—with a laptop full of warez and a 9mm pistol. The pistol wasn’t really a concern—this was Texas, after all—but the laptop made him nervous. He knew the government wasn’t afraid of guns, but it was afraid of laptops—and what the government feared, it punished. Connecting his real identity with the hacking world would be disastrous. As far as authorities knew, he was a know-nothing high school dropout with no prior arrests, and he wanted to keep it that way. He brought a degausser with him as well as a DC-to-AC adapter for his car’s cigarette lighter socket. In a pinch, he could use it to demagnetize the drive. At worst the police would suspect he’d stolen the laptop. That was no big deal.
Gragg had slept a few hours after cracking Boerner’s code. Although he was eager to get on with his self-appointed quest, there might be difficulties ahead—and he wanted to be sharp. Meth wasn’t the answer. Down that road lay madness and the worst sort of police difficulties. It was important to keep the blood pure.
Standing next to the Ford Tempo in the early night, Gragg glanced around at his light industrial neighborhood. They made screen doors and custom car parts down here. After dark it was generally a ghost town except for the occasional pit bull behind a fence or tractor-trailer backing into a parking lot. Tonight was no exception. Gragg breathed deeply of the night air. It was crisp and refreshing.
He placed his GPS unit on the seat next to him. The coordinates from the encrypted string were somewhere up near Houston International Airport—North Houston, below Beltway 8 between Tomball Parkway and Interstate 45. If he remembered correctly, this was scrubland crisscrossed at half-mile intervals by surface roads, bayous, and occasional subdivisions.
Gragg drove for nearly an hour into the cool autumn night. Between knots of office parks and suburban sprawl, the metal halide streetlights gave way to darkness, and the stars shimmered, unobscured overhead. The pleasant fragrance of dead leaves and chimney smoke sometimes overpowered the fungal stench in his car.
Getting into the general area of the GPS coordinates proved to be the easy part. Normally, if he had to convert GPS coordinates to a map location, Gragg would just key in a destination, but this time, he didn’t want to leave a data trail. So he spent a couple of hours trying to find a road that brought him closer to his target, glancing now and again at the map on his GPS unit. Several rural routes weren’t in the database, so he was left backtracking and zigzagging over back roads, following hunches.
The countryside alternated between narrow wooded roads, spanking new subdivisions, and gritty industrial or heavy-equipment companies. Around one A.M. Gragg found a surface road that mercifully continued to within a couple decimals of his target. He was heading out into scrubland again when a dilapidated-looking low brick building loomed up on his left, between clumps of trees. It bore the name Nasen Trucking, Ltd., although no trucks were visible in the chain-link-fenced parking lot. A lone streetlight shone down from a telephone pole near the gravel entrance.
Gragg slowed down as the GPS latitude coordinate clicked to match his target. Longitude was still a decimal off, though. Gragg checked the compass reading. That meant left. He pulled the car over to the entrance of the parking lot, beneath the bright streetlight, and looked around.
There were a couple of battered mailboxes near the entrance—the larger sort that rural companies and farmers used. Gragg squinted to read the writing on the side. The nearest had “Nasen Trucking” stenciled on it in a sans serif font. The other box had one word on it in black Gothic lettering: Boerner.
Gragg’s throat tightened. He looked to the left, where a gravel road ran past Nasen Trucking, into the woods—into darkness. He was exposed, sitting in the light like this. He cranked the wheel to the left. The power steering screeched in protest, and Gragg gritted his teeth. If he hadn’t alerted anyone before, he sure as hell had now.
He accelerated down the gravel road and out of the light. The stones crunched under his tires and dinged off his tire wells. The sound reminded him of his childhood and long prairie driveways. Once out of the cone of the streetlight, he slowed to five mph and scanned the darkness for…he didn’t know what. Bare birch trees lined the road on the left, while a ditch and a riot of thornbushes ran along the right. Gragg turned off his headlights and put the car in park. He took his foot off the brake to prevent the brake lights from giving away his location to anyone driving along the main road.
Gragg fumbled around in the darkness and found his rucksack. He unzipped it and pulled out night vision goggles. Untangling the headband, he then pulled them over his head and powered them up. He scanned the terrain ahead in the green glow of the viewfinder.
The edge of a single-story cinderblock building was visible a couple hundred feet down the road. There were no lights there. A single, thick chain spanned the road fifty feet ahead, secured to two steel posts. A metal NO TRESPASSING sign hung down at its lowest point.
Gragg looked at the GPS unit. He was still one decimal off. He put the car in gear and, with some trepidation, let it roll forward without putting his foot on the gas. He scanned from side to side, looking for anything that wasn’t a plant or a rock. He finally reached the chain and put the car in park again. He glanced at the GPS unit.
He was on station.
Gragg hesitated for a moment, then turned off the engine. Suddenly he could hear the woods. He heard the clattering of naked tree branches in the wind. Leaves scraped across the gravel road with each gust. The interior of the car cooled rapidly.
Gragg pulled the Glock 9mm pistol out of his rucksack and then freed the pistol from its holster. He placed it on the bench seat beside him.
What the fuck am I doing out here?
It was starting to seem like a really bad idea. He was running blind, and that was definitely something Brian Gragg did not like. It ran against his nature. He scanned the trees and the desolate-looking cinderblock buil
ding again.
How did this place have anything to do with the Monte Cassino map? There wasn’t any light out here. Was there even electricity? Gragg craned his neck to look up through the windshield and accidentally bumped the single night vision lens against the glass. He straightened the goggles and looked again. An electrical feed line ran along the road on the left side. Narrow utility poles of gray, cracked wood supported it every hundred feet or so.
Following the line with his eyes, Gragg noticed something interesting ahead: a fairly tall antenna was bolted to the side of the cinderblock building. He could see the mast rising above the roof.
Gragg took a deep breath. He was jittery. Time to concentrate. He pulled his laptop bag from the backseat and cleared space on the seat beside him. He put the pistol on the dashboard, then unzipped the laptop bag. He unpacked his laptop and booted up, flipping up the tiny antenna on the wireless card. He was temporarily blinded as the screen lit up, and he hurriedly stripped off the night vision goggles.
While the laptop booted up, he kept looking around in the darkness. He could actually see pretty well once his eyes adjusted. There was some moonlight.
After what seemed an eternity, the logon dialog came up, and a minute later Gragg launched NetStumbler. The program scanned for access points. In a moment, he was surprised to see a familiar SSID appear: Monte_Cassino.
The signal appeared to originate from the cinderblock building. Gragg’s jitters returned. Had he really done this? He tried to calm his rising fear. What was he doing? He thought about it.
There was an OTR server here.
He configured his Wi-Fi card to use the SSID, and soon Gragg obtained an IP address on the unsecured network. He didn’t even bother to explore. Instead, he closed NetStumbler and ripped open his CD case. He flipped through the CD-Rs until he found one marked with felt pen “OTR.” He slid the CD into the laptop’s drive and launched Over the Rhine. He clicked quickly past the opening screens, then selected multi-player mode. He let the game scan for available servers. Only one appeared in the server list: the Houston Monte Cassino server. This was the one visible to his wireless card.
Gragg smiled, then double-clicked on the name. The map started to load. Oddly, the weapon selection dialog box never appeared. Soon, Gragg’s avatar was standing, unarmed, in a trench at the base of the Monte Cassino mountain. Normally he’d work his way around to the left, but without weapons it was rather pointless. Gragg peered over the lip of the trench, and he could see the familiar German MG42 nests up at the edge of the ruins.
Strangely, the Krauts didn’t open fire immediately. Gragg let his avatar stand there for a moment, and still no tracer bullets came streaming down. He decided to push his luck and hopped up on the fire step—then out into full view.
Still no gunfire. The Germans just sat there.
Gragg started walking toward their lines. He had never approached the monastery successfully from this angle, and now he could see three machine gun nests aiming down at him from a hundred meters away. The gun barrels followed him as he walked, but still they did not fire.
Gragg kept walking, straight up to the center machine gun. The loader crouched next to the gunner. The NPCs had that familiar blank look on their faces. Before long, Gragg was within ten feet of the machine gun barrel. It stared down on him, ready to send his avatar into the spectator list. He was so close he could see the rank of the gunner from the textured graphic patches on his shoulders: Unterfeldwebel. A sergeant.
To Gragg’s shock, the gunner released his grip on the weapon and held up his hand. “Halt!” He peered at Gragg closely. “Ich kenne Deinen Namen.” He rose and motioned for Gragg to follow. “Komm mit!” With that the gunner walked off into the ruins. Gragg hurried to follow. A dozen German soldiers rose from their concealed positions among the rocks and watched with glaring eyes as he passed.
The Unterfeldwebel brought Gragg through a maze of rooms and splintered wreckage. Around each corner were more Kraut soldiers clutching Schmeissers or manning mortar positions. Every time he walked past, the Krauts would whisper to each other and point. Gragg had to hand it to Sobol; every detail was there. It gave him a strong sense of being an outsider in an enemy stronghold.
Gragg was led down into the same cellar where he’d first encountered Boerner in the Monte Cassino map. They walked between the wine casks toward the doorway in the opposite wall. Torches lit their way, flickering against the darkness under the influence of a digital breeze. Gragg glanced around. There was no sign of the fire damage from the earlier game.
They headed into the dark passage that led to the round tower base. The ray of sunlight still shined there, illuminating the wall where the encrypted message once was, but now it was carved with:
29.3935 -95.3933
Gragg turned his avatar to face the familiar metal screen through which he’d spoken to Boerner before. It was dark behind the screen. Suddenly the space beyond filled with the flare of a match, and Boerner was there, lighting his cigarette at the end of that damned filter. He cupped it with his hand until it lit, then breathed out a cloud of voluminous smoke.
The Unterfeldwebel gave a sharp salute with a click of his boot heels and scurried out, leaving Gragg’s avatar alone with Boerner. Boerner looked up and fixed his monocle over his left eye.
“Vee meet again, mein freund.” Boerner clamped the cigarette holder in one corner of his mouth. “You know ze console, yes? Use it zu answer my qvestions.” Boerner waited for some response.
The console. Gragg usually used it for cheat codes. He peered at the keyboard and hit the tilde key. A DOS-like console appeared in the northern third of the screen. It listed a number of scripting events that had already taken place—such as the appearance of the Boerner model and the creation of the objects in this room. The console served as both a comprehensive log of program events and a command console for overriding game settings. Basically, it gave him a blinking cursor where he could type input.
As soon as the console appeared, Boerner said, “Excellent. You haf some knowledge zu find me again. Vee vill zee how much knowledge you haf. Haf you come alone? Yes or no?”
Gragg sucked in a breath. He didn’t want to admit he was alone, but lying made him more nervous. He typed Yes at the console line and hit ENTER.
Boerner’s avatar kneeled down so he could “see” Gragg’s avatar around the console window. He smiled at him. “Gut. Haf you told anyone else about zis?”
Gragg hesitated again. What better way to get killed than to say yes? He remembered all too well the video images of body bags from Sobol’s estate. But what would that gain Sobol? Why go through so much effort just to kill someone?
Gragg typed No and hit ENTER.
Boerner regarded Gragg’s avatar, then suddenly thrust open the grate that separated them. The metal door slammed against the stone wall as Boerner strode forward to get right in Gragg’s face. “I vill later find out ze truth. Better zu admit it now if you haf told ozzers.” Boerner’s eyes bored into Gragg through the laptop screen. “Haf you told anyone?”
Gragg typed No again and hit ENTER.
Boerner smiled that wicked smile of his again. He patted Gragg’s avatar on the shoulder. “Ausgezeichnet. Und haf you brought your bag of tricks mit you? Yes?” Boerner waited for an answer.
Gragg typed Yes and hit ENTER.
Boerner swept his arms into the air. “Open ze gate!” His words echoed in the cellar corridors.
Beyond Gragg’s laptop screen—in the real world of autumn cold—Gragg heard a metallic noise. He glanced up toward the front of the car. Suddenly the thick metal chain blocking the road dropped completely to the ground. The NO TRESPASSING sign clattered noisily on gravel.
“Fuck me! That’s it….” Gragg pushed the laptop away and fumbled for the car’s ignition switch. He started the car, threw it in reverse, and twisted in his seat to see where he was going. What he saw behind him stopped him cold.
Another thick chain had risen up not far beh
ind his car. He could see it illuminated in his backup lights, along with the back of a metal sign—probably identical to the other one. In gravel and without a running start, there was no way he was getting through that thing. He started to panic. He glanced to the left and right. The birch trees on the left were impenetrable by car. To the right, he’d never get the car over that ditch. He heard talking and looked down at the laptop still facing him on the bench seat.
Boerner puffed on his cigarette there. “Relax, mein freund. If I vanted zu kill you, I could haf done so already. Move your car forvart, please.”
Gragg’s mind raced, gauging his chances of fleeing on foot—through the birch trees and into the fields beyond. That was crazy, right? He was out in the middle of fucking nowhere. This whole area could be filled with traps for all Gragg knew. How much planning had Sobol already displayed? It had to be Sobol. Gragg contemplated facing a real-world Boerner, and it dawned on him that running away on foot was a one-way ticket to zero health—without respawning.
Boerner stared at him from the nearby laptop. Gragg shook his head clear of that thought. Boerner wasn’t staring at anybody. It was just a bunch of texture maps arranged for a first-person viewer. Sobol was fucking with his mind. This was definitely not a cool situation.
Boerner shook his finger at Gragg. “You mustn’t be afraid, mein freund. Unless, of course, you lack skill.”
Gragg gave Boerner the finger and pulled out his cell phone. He took a moment to consider whom he might call. Surely not the police? Definitely not the police. How about one of his road-racing buddies? Or one of his rave bouncers? Bad idea. Right now, “Loki” was supposed to be dead. But they didn’t know him as Loki. His world was so full of lies he couldn’t keep them straight.
Gragg cycled through his saved phone numbers and selected his lead rave bouncer. Gragg put the phone to his ear. Nothing but static came back. He looked at the bar count. “No Service.”
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