by A. J. Markam
I grinned. “Hey, come on – it’s better than ‘I’d kiss you, but I’m afraid I might puke in your mouth.’”
Then I realized, Maybe not such a good idea to put that image back in her head.
It didn’t seem to bother her, because she laughed. “True. You went from revolting to straight-up cheeseball. You’re improving in all sorts of areas. Pretty soon you might not even be a total turn-off.”
My smile fell. “I’m a total turn-off?”
“Well,” she said with a flirtatious smile, “not a total turn-off.”
I didn’t know how to follow that up, so I just opened the door to the room. “Would you like to come in?”
She stood there as though she were thinking about it, but she didn’t say anything.
Now or never, bud.
I leaned in and kissed her on the mouth. She returned the kiss – a slow, lingering one that went on for about ten seconds.
Then she put her hand up against my chest and pushed me away the slightest bit.
I backed off a couple of inches and whispered, “Come inside.”
“I want to… but that’s why I probably shouldn’t.”
“Okay, that’s confusing…”
She smiled. “We’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other. There’s no need to rush things.”
“Who said we’d be rushing things?”
“Right,” she smirked. “You just want to invite me in for a little bit of lock picking so you can ‘search my secret places.’”
I shook my head. “I am totally regretting saying that now.”
She laughed. “You should. I’ll see you tomorrow at 10 AM.”
“Well,” I said, trying to end on a light note, “I enjoyed sticking knives in you tonight.”
“Too bad that’s the only thing you’ll be sticking in me tonight,” she said with a mischievous grin.
“Oh my God!” I said, legitimately shocked by her joke – and then I laughed. “If only Seth and Russell could’ve heard that!”
“Don’t you dare tell them I said that, or knives will be the only you ever stick inside me.”
I laughed and held up one hand. “I promise – scout’s honor.”
“Okay. Well… goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
She was about to go, but hesitated… then walked back and give me gave me one last kiss on the lips, short and firm. Then she broke off and backed away.
“Good night,” she whispered again.
“Good night,” I said, and watched her fade from view as she logged out.
I went into my room and closed the door.
I didn’t know if dead guys could get blue balls, but I figured there was a pretty good chance.
Speaking of ‘dead guys’… I looked in the mirror and checked myself out. Was there something about me that grossed her out?
No… I looked like a slightly grey bald guy, but kind of buff. Like if Jason Statham totally shaved his head and turned super pale.
Yes, I had the weird yellow eyes, but so did she.
I breathed into my cupped hand and sniffed it.
Smelled like cherry cough syrup.
She couldn’t have hated kissing me, because she came back for another one, I reminded myself.
Oh well. With a long night ahead of me with no naked fun on the horizon, I flopped down on the bed, brought out the new lockbox I’d bought that afternoon, and started to study it.
This was going to be the first time I would have to combine physical lock picks with magical ones. I inspected the very easiest lock on the box, which was a combination of fire magic and three separate types of physical pics. Then I got my enchanting kit, spread out the rune stones on the bed, opened up the bags I would need for casting the spells, began to prepare –
Knock knock.
My head spun around as I stared at the door.
If I’d had a heartbeat, it would have skipped.
She came back!
I leapt up from the bed and ran over to the door. Visions flashed through my mind: me sweeping her into my arms, pressing my lips against hers, throwing her down on the bed –
This was going to be incredible. A six-year-long dry spell was about to be over, and with a woman I genuinely liked and cared for – not to mention she was smoking hot –
I flung open the door and immediately froze.
It was Arkova.
41
“Oh,” I said, both glum and annoyed at the same time.
“Try not to act so happy to see me,” the blood elf said as she pushed past me into the room.
“I wasn’t,” I said as I closed the door, then collapsed back on the bed.
Now that I was face-to-face with the prospect of having to tell Arkova what had happened that day, I was starting to feel sick to my stomach.
“What, couldn’t convince your little ‘friend’ to spend the night?” the FBI agent sneered.
I glared up at her. “Don’t.”
Arkova seemed taken aback. “Alright. We won’t go there… as long as you’re not letting it interfere with the job.”
“How do you keep finding me?” I said accusingly. “Are you tracking me or something?”
“Hold on… accept the invitation I’m sending you first before you say anything else.”
A window appeared with the words, Arkova has invited you to join her in a private chat room. Accept / Decline
“What’s this?”
“I want our conversation to be private.”
“So… where’s this private chat room?”
“It’s not a place. It’s basically a secure audio channel. We’ll be able to hear each other, but no one else will.”
“You’re sure?”
“Just hit ‘Accept.’”
I did, and suddenly the entire world went silent. I could hear distant voices in the pub one minute, and then the next, Arkova’s voice was the only thing that was audible.
But the room around us stayed exactly the same.
“Whoa,” I murmured.
“To answer your question: we have your immersion pod in the building, remember?” she said with barely concealed contempt. “I can just go and look at where you are on the pod’s monitor.”
“Oh yeah…”
Sometimes things were so real in the game, I forgot there was even such a thing as an immersion pod.
“Well?” she prodded. “What do you have to report?”
“We’re going outside the city tomorrow on a quest. It should be a good one – I think I’ll be able to level up four or five times.”
“That’s nice, but that’s not really what I had in mind.”
I picked up the new lockbox. “I got a new training tool.”
“I’m more interested in what you’re planning to do about the orcs.”
I winced. “…about that…”
She stared at me with the beginnings of alarm. “What?”
“There was kind of a… setback…”
“What?”
“I accidentally stumbled into their group while I was in Stealth, and Oktar could see me, and they forced me out of Stealth, and… it didn’t go so well.”
Her face lost at least half its color.
“Please tell me you’re joking.”
“I wish I could.”
She flung her hand out behind her, floundering blindly for a chair. When she brushed up against one, she weakly sank down into it.
“Please, please tell me that you didn’t blow your cover on the first day of the operation.”
“I wouldn’t exactly say I blew my cover…”
She closed her eyes like she was in excruciating pain. “Just… start from the beginning.”
I told her everything.
The longer I went on, the more she slumped over in her chair. She briefly looked up in alarm while I was recounting my conversation with Oktar, but by the end her face was buried in her hands.
“Oh God…” she moaned to herself. “I begged them not to ass
ign me to this case… but did they listen? No…”
“At least I got to look at the plans,” I insisted. “That could be useful, right?”
“I don’t know… I’ll run it up the flagpole and see if anybody can figure it out at the Bureau…”
“How did he know I was there? How could he see me in Stealth?”
She looked up out of her hands long enough to shoot me daggers with her eyes. “That’s what you care about right now?”
“It could be important in the future.”
“It sounds like he can see people or creatures disguised in Stealth mode. Some classes have the ability, although he’s a Warrior, so he probably has a magical device. Maybe that amulet you saw. Or it just alerted him to your presence, rather than let him see you. Of course, none of that is important, because the entire operation’s going to be scrubbed because you went and screwed up.”
“Hey, he made both of us in the marketplace,” I said defensively.
“Oh, so now your screw-up is MY fault?” she raged.
“Look, it’s not a total wash.”
“And how do you figure that?”
“They know I want a job, but they have no idea who I really am or why I want it.”
“That’s your definition of ‘not a total wash’?”
“I think they believed me.”
“What does that mater?! They cut off your head,” she snapped.
I shrugged, feigning a nonchalance I didn’t really feel. “I figure in this world, that’s basically just like bum-rushing you out the door.”
“Just one little, teensy problem with what you just said,” she seethed. “Bum-rushing is NOT a good thing.”
“Look, if I’d stopped trying to get jobs every time they threw me out the door, I’d have never learned to crack safes.” Which was sort of true. I got unceremoniously shown the door a lot before I upped my street cred.
“That was then, this is now.” She stood up angrily. “Log out. You’re done.”
“What do you mean ‘I’m done’?!”
“You just scrubbed the entire mission,” she hissed. “This entire thing is a wipe. Months of planning, and you destroyed it in a couple of days.”
“Does that mean you’re going to let me go?” I asked hopefully.
“NO, you IDIOT!” she yelled. “You couldn’t have sabotaged this any worse if you’d tried! Which I’m going to assume you did, because there’s no other way you could have effed it up this royally!”
Bitch.
“Calm down,” I said. “I already have another plan.”
“Oh great,” she sneered. “Does this one involve telling them exactly who I am?”
“No, it involves me building street cred so they want to recruit me.”
“And how are you planning to do that?”
“You got me thinking with that whole analogy about infiltrating a neo-Nazi group. I figured if I robbed somebody, the orcs might take notice and – ”
“That’s not a new plan!” she yelled. “That was the original plan!”
I stared at her in surprise. “It was?”
“YES! If you’d done what we’d planned, which was robbing a bunch of smaller operators not aligned with the orcs, they would have seen you as a potential recruit! But now you’ve blown THAT all to hell!”
“No I didn’t. I just announced I was in town a little earlier than I’d have liked.”
“WRONG. Now that you’ve blown your cover, you’re just going to look like an overeager groupie – or an incompetent undercover agent! They’re going to completely ignore you now!”
“So I’ll just have to force them to notice me.”
“And how the hell are you going to do that?”
“I’m going to rob the Shadow Bank.”
42
The look of surprise on her face was priceless.
“You what?” she whispered.
“I’m going to rob the Shadow Bank.”
“That’s what I thought you said,” the muttered, and then her anger came back. “You can’t, so don’t even bother thinking about it.”
“Why not? I’m a Rogue, aren’t I? It’s full of safes, I’m learning to pick locks – ”
“The entire place is guarded with more magical alarms than you can imagine. You thought getting past Oktar was hard? You try to step foot in the Shadow Bank, even in Stealth mode, and you’ll set off ten different alarms and twenty armed guards will come running. You’d be dead before you got five feet.”
“That’s funny… seeing as how I’ve already been inside.”
She stared at me again, with the second-best look of surprise of the night on her face. “…you what?”
“Well, technically I was already dead when I was in there, but…”
I proceeded to tell her how I’d scouted the place in ghost form. For once, she actually shut up and listened.
Once I was finished, she looked off into the distance as though she was considering.
“Well?” I prodded her.
“Okay… I’ll admit that was pretty damn clever, you getting in like that.”
“Can I get that in writing?” I joked, but she steamrolled right past me.
“But you can’t do anything in ghost form, so it’s basically useless except for – ”
“Except for casing the place,” I interrupted. “Getting their patterns down. Learning the guard rotation.”
She looked at me, and a flicker of hope dawned in her eyes. Then it died.
“You do remember that the last people to rob the Shadow Bank got killed in the real world, right?”
Actually, I did. That was the fly in the ointment.
A really big, nasty fly.
“I know – but I don’t really have a choice at this point, do I? Besides, either you guys protect me, or maybe the orcs will tell them to leave me alone. We’ll figure that part out when we get there.”
“It’s still impossible,” she said.
“Why is it impossible?”
“To use the intel, you have to get inside while you’re alive. And it’s absolutely impossible to do that.”
“What if I could buy my way inside?”
“No one in their right mind would betray the Shadow Bank. They have complete records of their employees’ identities in the real world. They know that if they cross the bank, they’ll have them killed in real life.”
“I wasn’t talking about that kind of buying my way in.”
“Then what?”
“What if I wanted to do a deposit with them?”
She scoffed. “You’d have to have five million gold at the very least just to get a meeting with them.”
“So get me five million gold.”
She stared at me. “From where?!”
“You’re the FBI – you can’t get me five million in made up coins?”
“THAT’S FIVE MILLION DOLLARS!” she yelled. “They’re not going to allocate that kind of money to an undercover operation like this!”
“Not even to bust a hundred billion dollar operation?” I asked. “Then who doesn’t want the operation to succeed, huh – me or them?”
She stopped. It was kind of hard to argue with that logic.
Then she shook her head. “What’s your cover story going to be? You just happened to find five million dollars? They’re not going to buy that.”
“They check up on their customers, right?”
“Yes?”
“So when they check up on me, they’ll find an LA safecracker who just got out of prison… who’s looking to stash a bunch of money I hid from the cops before I went away for six years.”
Her mouth dropped open slightly.
I savored the third shocked look of the night, and lay back across the bed with my arms folded behind my head.
She shook her head again. “Even if you got inside that way, you would still have to get into other safety deposit rooms, pick locks, and then get out with your haul – all past twenty or so heavily armored Level 50 guard
s. If you go into Stealth, alarms will immediately go off. You can’t. It’s impossible. Forget about it.”
“How did the last guy who robbed them do it?”
“Ever seen the film HEAT?”
“Yeah, of course. I love that movie.”
“He basically tried to pull that big bank robbery scene. He hired seven Level 50 Rogues and Warriors to go in blazing while he went in and robbed one room. Turns out, though, that he’d intended to screw his partners over the whole time. He got out with the money while they got captured. Then he took off for parts unknown.”
“Did the guys he’d hired dime him out?”
“Sort of. He hadn’t let them know his real name – he used all sorts of aliases – but he’d let enough information slip that the hired guns told the Bank, the Bank told the orcs, and the orcs were able to track him down.”
“Do the orcs have moles inside the company?” I whispered, suddenly very afraid. “DarkWorld Inc. or whatever?”
“That’s a possibility. Not a very good one, because unlike most of the objects in the game world, the employees’ actions are all tracked online. When the guy turned up dead, DarkWorld agreed to help us investigate and turned over thousands of hours of digital logs. Either the orcs’ inside man is very good at covering his tracks… or the orcs just used their real-world intel to find him. Either way, the robber died.”
“And the guys he hired?”
“They died, too.”
“How do you know all this, then, if everybody’s dead?”
“One of the robbers came to the Bureau, begging to turn himself in. Ian Gardner. This was two years ago, mind you, and the Shadow Bank and the orcs were just starting out their money laundering in the game. There’d been no crime reported, he had no criminal record in the real world, so we thought he was just a freak. But we took down a statement and turned him loose. In the two days it took us to file the initial report, the Russians got him in real life.
“When Ian turned up dead, we went to the company. They helped us out, but they made it very clear that they couldn’t provide any computer records of what went on in the Shadow Bank – because it was all opaque to them. When we tried to get a judge to give us a warrant for a search, we got laughed out of the courtroom five times. And then when we finally did get a warrant, the Bank laughed at us. Told us they weren’t American citizens and to contact their countries’ consulates. It was a bureaucratic nightmare, and we lost in ten international courts. Nobody took it seriously that these anonymous video game geeks were running an international money laundering operation, even though somehow those same geeks could afford some of the most expensive lawyers on the planet.”