“The Vecchi’s suburban residence.” One of our bodyguards approached a well-hidden booth, pushed a button and was answered by a female voice. “How may I be of assistance?”
“Good evening!” Stacey walked over. “I am Anastasia Zavala. I’d like to speak with the owners. Is this possible?”
“One minute please, let me inquire.” Considering that we hadn’t been told ‘no,’ someone was at home after all.
“Please pass on through,” the intercom announced less than ten seconds later. “Alexander is ready to receive you.”
“Alexander?” I glanced over at Stacey with surprise.
“The husband,” she explained quietly, getting back in the car. “His profession is a mystery. Several years ago, he was awarded the ‘start-up of the year’ award. As you can see, his start-up is doing just fine.”
“Yeah,” I drawled, regarding the statues rushing past us.
“Welcome to the Vecchi residence.” An elderly yet remarkably hale butler met us at the main door. Despite his advanced age, he held himself with astonishing confidence and assurance. One glance was enough to tell that the old man didn’t have much energy at his disposal and yet he maintained it so carefully that you couldn’t help admire his bearing and tact. There were minuses too however — with all due respect to the Vecchi, dressing a butler as an Adviser to the Emperor of Malabar is a bit too much in my view. Just a tad over the top.
Inside, this palace wasn’t very original either — basically everything that I had seen in Barliona had been recreated here in reality. At one point I even tried to read the butler’s properties, assuming that these adherents of ‘imitation’ had managed to recreate this function in our world as well. But no dice — the old man had no properties. Or else I didn’t have access to them.
“Anastasia, what an unexpected surprise.” A relatively young-looking man met us in an oval office that in Barliona served the function of the Imperial council chamber. At first glance, I’d give him 30 but it was unclear how old this business magnate really was. Modern medicine, money and a desire to look young can work miracles. A head, two arms, two legs and short-cropped black hair…If you ask me, an ordinary person of whom there are masses in our city. The main thing that stood out was his fitness, which one normally encounters among professional athletes. It was a good thing at least that Alexander hadn’t started dressing like the Emperor and met us in an ordinary robe with the emblem of a black Chinese dragon embroidered on it. A symbol? An emblem? Something vaguely familiar which I had seen somewhere and immediately forgotten.
“Alexander, please forgive our temerity. I decided to pay you a visit,” Stacey smiled, offering her hand. The master of the palace took it and elegantly kissed it and only then looked over at me.
“Daniel Mahan, if I’m not mistaken,” Alexander offered me his hand. I shook it and barely contained my smile — judging by the firmness of his grip, I was speaking with a strong and confident person. I even felt some sympathy for him. The charisma of the master of the palace could be sensed not only in his grip but in how he held himself in what seemed like an ordinary bathrobe. We were dealing with an aristocrat through and through. You could strip him naked and he’d manage to appear noble.
“Tea? Coffee? Juice?” Mr. Vecchi offered as the old butler arose beside him. Almost immediately! Now it was clear how he spent the energy that filled him. He had his own internal motor! I’ll need to try to find someone like him…
“…And that is why I decided that you were the root of all our troubles. I did my best to hurt you, which doesn’t do me any credit, and as a result I wish to offer my apologies. Personally and sincerely.” Stacey concluded her brief monologue from her comfortable seat on the enormous couch.
“Wow,” Alexander drawled, clearly flustered. “This…Hmm…This is a wow! To be honest, I have been considering for a while now why my partners seem to be dropping off one after another, but I couldn’t find the reason for it. So this was your doing?”
Stacey merely shrugged her shoulders ambiguously, sipping the aromatic coffee in her hand.
“Yes, Anastasia, I have to confess that you’ve astounded me. Shocked me. There are few people who would find the courage and strength to come and tell the truth. And moreover, avoid insults and apologize directly. If Roxanne were home, she would not have been able to control her emotions and would surely start to cry.”
“She’s not here?” Stacey asked with surprise.
“She is away on business. It has already been a month, by my reckoning, and she will be away for another. I hope that…”
“I already spoke with everyone and asked them to bring everything back to order,” Stacey smiled, understanding what Alexander had wanted to ask her. “I’m sure that they’ll come back this very week. If anything, give us a call. You have our number.”
Almost imperceptibly, the conversation transitioned to purchases and sales and how Alexander’s website was doing, so I grew bored. With all due respect to the speakers, I didn’t care.
“May I offer you a tour of our gallery?” After half an hour, when I had begun to yawn openly, the owner made a gesture to the butler. It looked like he wasn’t planning on letting Stacey go and she wasn’t rushing to get back home. Alexander was an interesting conversation partner.
The old man led me to a wide and long corridor that played the role of the local art gallery. There were many paintings. In fact there were very many. Large, small, pretty, vivid, dark — not every museum could boast such a collection. I even began to wonder whether they were all real or fakes…They could easily have been the latter to — Alexander had demonstrated his proclivity for imitation.
“The ancestors of the Vecchi,” the old man began to explain, stopping before the first painting. Dressed in ancient vividly colored costumes, the man and woman stood beside a fireplace smiling at the viewer. Alexander — the painting featured none other than him — had been depicted very manfully. The proud bearing, the rapier hanging from his belt, the gaze of a thinker directed into infinity — the painter had managed to convey Mr. Vecchi’s grandeur and charisma effectively. The woman, I would guess Roxanne, was also depicted…
A cold sweat swept over me. My nervous system glitched. A wind howled through my head — there was not a single thought in it. I froze like a sculpture — unable to look away from the smiling woman. The woman looking at me from the portrait of the Vecchi was none other than Marina.
The same Marina who had set me up and sent me to prison, the same Marina who had returned to betray me again.
Chapter Eleven. The Burden of the Creator
“Daniel, I’ll say it again — this is nonsense!” Stacey spent our ride home fruitlessly trying to appeal to my reason. Yet I remained unshakable: Roxanne and Marina were the same person for me. In an attempt to disabuse me of my conviction, Alexander showed us photos and videos of Roxanne — which only made me dig in my heels further. This was definitely the woman who had offered to become my girlfriend during that ill-fated seminar. Alexander tried to get in touch with Roxanne in order to prove me wrong, but her phone was out of network range. As it had been that entire month — which prompted me to remind those present what had happened with the so-called Marina. She had been incinerated. This really made the palace owner lose his cool. Calling me “a milksop oaf,” he kindly requested that we depart his residence and never consider returning ever again. On the whole, the entire evening ended unpleasantly with a tangle I couldn’t make any sense of.
“Stacey, I can prove to you that this isn’t nonsense!” An interesting thought suddenly came to me. “Turn around! We need to go to Cafe Alventa!”
Cafe Alventa was an establishment of great renown among certain narrow circles. This was where burned-out Barliona players would go to try to wait out their dependency on the game. You could arrange a secret one-on-one meeting here, even if someone was spying on you. Most importantly, this was the unofficial headquarters of the Freelance artists.
“Mahan, Anast
aria.” An enormous bartender nodded at us as if we were long-time pals. Despite the late hour, the place was practically brimming — the in-game pace of life in Barliona left an impression on this corner of reality. When we entered the cafe, I heard someone whisper “Look! It’s Mahan and Anastaria! What are they doing here? ” but no one tried to block our way or talk to us. This wasn’t the kind of place where you did something like that.
The giant bartender had a dishtowel in his hands and was automatically drying glasses with it. His expressionless face could easily have led you to assume that he was off somewhere in his thoughts, but his eyes betrayed the opposite — the bartender’s clinging gaze checked everything up and down, assessing how much danger this or that detail posed to the establishment. I didn’t know the bar manager personally as I hadn’t been here in a few months, but I knew for certain that anyone in his position would have earned it for good reason.
“I’d like to organize a poker tournament. I need other players. Everything by the rules.” If you were to translate this to open speech, I had said: “I have work. I need a Freelancer. Without anything illegal. ”
“Why would a player who prefers to play on his own, prefer others?” the bartender asked in a bombast, still mechanically drying a glass.
“I need independent people. The outcome of the tournament might be so unexpected that the girl with me here, might not believe it. I want to demonstrate that the game was fair and within the rules.”
“Will you be playing using a Barliona deck?” the bartender frowned, for the first time betraying an emotion. There were plenty of hot-heads willing to risk everything to hack Barliona but they were not allowed into this cafe. Alventa prized its reputation.
“No, a standard deck. No Barliona or other themes.”
“Cat!” the bartender suddenly barked loud enough for the entire place to hear. “Take these guests to the game room! We’re about to hold a tournament!”
Law enforcement agencies naturally knew all about this place but tried not to interfere with its operations. Freelancers, just like private detectives, were very useful people. Data recovery, lost passwords, information, exploits — they were frequently employed for legal as well as mostly-legal purposes. The big fish that dealt with ‘dirty’ as well as ‘big’ business, didn’t hang around the cafe, but we didn’t need those either.
“Dan, I don’t understand what we came here for,” Stacey addressed me as soon as we’d settled down at the gaming table. “What are you trying to prove?”
“I’m not trying to prove anything. I want to show you,” I smirked, clenching my fists under the table. The likelihood that the data that I want to find hasn’t already been wiped was around 50%. Either they’d erased it or they hadn’t. I could run this search on my own — I had the skills and experience to do it — but I didn’t want to give Stacey a reason to doubt me. As soon as she sees the result, she’ll believe me on the spot.
“Good day, gentlemen!” The door opened and five people entered the room with a dealer behind them. They wore masks yet, despite this, I knew two of them. Our paths had crossed in the past. The other three were unfamiliar to me, but I hadn’t any doubts that they were competent — the bartender didn’t let people wander in off the street. It took recommendations and proven experience to get these gigs.
“Place your bets,” the dealer dealt our hands. “Mahan has the big blinds. Anastaria small blinds. Take your places gentlemen.”
Everyone took their seats and the ‘game’ got under way.
“Here’s the situation,” I began, folding my hand. “Eighteen months ago, a Freelancer retraining took place. No doubt you took part in it. I need any information you can get about a girl who sat beside me at that event. Who she is, where she’s from, how she got here and why. The most important thing I need is a video or photos of that retraining session. I’m certain that this data is stored for about three years, so you shouldn’t have any difficulty finding it. I’m willing to pay double. I need all this as quickly as possible.”
“Why do you need this, Daniel?” asked one of the masks. I recognized her — several years ago we tried to date, but nothing had come of it.
“I suspect that the girl who had introduced herself to me as Marina is none other than…”
“Let’s find the girl first,” Anastaria interrupted me, tossing several chips into the pot. “I raise. And I’ll add that we need a full list of who was at that meeting. The female part. A dossier for each one, including a photo. You may exclude yourself,” Stacey turned to the masked girl. “You were there, weren’t you?”
“Determine the female participants, provide dossiers about them, including a photo and a video of the seminar,” the girl replied without a hint of awkwardness. “Anything else?”
“No. Whoever does this first will get paid treble. Everyone else will get the agreed rate.”
“So everyone will get paid?”
“Yes. I need as much information as possible.”
“When’s the deadline?”
“Yesterday,” I smiled. “The earlier, the better. But no later than within 24 hours.”
“I accept the terms,” said one of the unfamiliar masks, pushing his chips into the center. For him, the game had ended. “All in!”
“Call,” echoed everyone else. “Your assignment will be completed.”
The game ended. The dealer helped us draft the services contract in which I accepted all liability for any illegal action the people I hired undertook, and then I transferred the required money to the cafe’s account and passed on my contact information for where the obtained the information was to be sent. Then I headed home quite satisfied, while Stacey followed behind without saying a word. Until we got home, at least. As soon as we had showered and gotten into bed, she turned to me and said:
“Let’s assume — and I do mean assume — that you’re right. As I recall it, you mentioned that you had looked for information about Marina after your bet. You even found something. Why then didn’t you notice the resemblance between a simple programmer and one of the most famous women of not just our city, but our entire region?”
“I wasn’t looking for information about a specific person,” I explained, realizing that I couldn’t avoid being honest here. “I needed info about Marina’s education and the courses that she had taken. Comparing her appearance to some celebrity didn’t really cross my mind. Plus, I’ve never been interested in celebrities. The posters I had of you were more than enough. You were my celebrity.”
“Don’t change the topic.”
“Stacey, I’ll say it again — it’s not just that I’m sure that Roxanne is Marina and they are one person. I’m utterly convinced of it. It’s…It’s like in the game when your premonition screams that you need to do something.”
“So what is it screaming now?”
“That I should figure it out and understand: what, why and how? Do you understand that if I’m right, then Donotpunnik’s conspiracy reached far deeper than it even seems right now? Why would Roxanne get involved in it? Would the wealthiest woman in the world really risk everything over some more money? Her status, her name, her freedom? Her very life, if you think about it! Remember what Alex said: They never did find Marina. That is, they found a heap of ash that remained of her.”
“I don’t understand,” Stacey frowned. “What are you getting at?”
“You know,” I sat up from my excitement, “I even see now what happened! Marina really does exist! Or rather existed!”
“You’re scaring me, Dan.”
“Look! Assume that there really was a freelancer named Marina who specialized in exploits. Some old, wrinkled, one-legged lady, obese and unable to move on her own. One-and-a-half years ago she had to attend a retraining session, but instead Roxanne showed up in her place. Under her name. If I’m right, and damn it, I feel that I am, then our search results should be pretty fascinating! The freelancers will dig up a dossier on Marina, who she is and where she’s from, and yet
if they find a video, well, there won’t be any Marina in it. But Roxanne will be there!”
“You’ve been watching too many cartoons,” Stacey smirked a little unconfidently, but I was on a roll:
“Alex was looking for Marina and he found her! Inside Barliona everyone knew Roxanne as Mirida, so…Stacey!” My eyes glowed. “We need to visit Hellfire or Donotpunnik. They saw her out in reality! Let’s show them a photo of Roxanne and ask them whether they recognize her? I’m sure that Alex can arrange a meeting for us!”
“Did you forget that you’re an outlaw in Barliona?”
“Ah the hell with the Reputation! I mean really! I had it, I lost it, to hell with it! This is a game after all!”
“Dan, forget the word ‘game,’” Stacey sat up. “For you, Barliona is a way of earning your living and providing for your family. You have a clan that earns you a stable income. What its owner’s Reputation is means a lot.”
“It’s not an issue. Once they install the capsule, I’ll make you the clan head. Meanwhile, I’ll deal with Geranika and Karmadont. Something tells me that if I get to the bottom of that whole affair, either I’ll get it in the back of the neck, which is where I am now anyway, or I’ll end up with some exceptional bonuses. I’ll transfer the clan over to you tomorrow.”
“The hell with that! You’re not making a clan head out of me,” smirked Stacey. “I’m with you. Do you really thing that you and Plinto will get all the goodies? Like hell!”
Clans War Page 25