Virtually Undead Read online

  A good-looking woman, he reflected. The business suit did more to hide than to show off her figure, probably intentional. He rose to his feet as she walked toward him. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Mike Foreman.” A nice, neutral way to start. He held out his hand and they briefly shook. Her hand was dry.

  “Stephanie,” she said. She looked Michael up and down. “You look just like your picture.” She sat down.

  “I hope so. The people who think a sparkling personality will make up for a fake picture are deluding themselves.”

  “That’s for sure.” She glanced around the restaurant, seemed to like what she saw and picked up the menu. “What’s good here?”

  “No idea. The place is popular and I’ve been meaning to try it.”

  “Okay.” She opened the menu and studied it. He liked the way she gave the menu her full attention. He did the same.

  “Do you like Indian food?” he asked.

  She grinned. “Love it.”

  He felt something inside himself relax. “Me, too,” he said.

  In the end, Michael wasn’t quite ready to declare it the best Indian restaurant in the city, but it was pretty damn good. The menu wasn’t overly large and contained some dishes he had never heard of. They agreed to share an order of chicken kababs, vegetable fritters, a spicy mixed seafood dish and marinated lamb chops.

  “Obviously,” Stephanie said, “you like to eat. Do you cook, as well?”

  “Now and then. I’m hardly an expert, but I do putter around the kitchen. How about you?”

  “I can barely boil water. My mother tried to teach me but I wasn’t interested. I’m sorry about that now. I mostly eat take-out.”

  The food arrived. Stephanie Seymour seemed to enjoy the meal just as much as Michael, and he enjoyed her company. She was a senior associate in a mid-sized law firm in mid-town, hoping and expecting to make partner in the next few years. Her specialties, it turned out, were mostly estate planning and taxes. Unlike a lot of lawyers Michael knew, she seemed happy with her job.

  “I realized a long time ago that I didn’t want litigation. Too much naked competition.” She wrinkled her nose. “And I would prefer not to represent criminals, which narrows the field considerably. There are some sleazy dealings in trusts and estates, but basically, I can go home at the end of the day and sleep at night.”

  “I wish,” Michael said, “that I could say the same.”

  She nodded. “A couple of my college friends went into medicine. One is a dermatologist and the other is a vet.”

  “Good choices. Dermatologists rarely get woken up in the middle of the night. I don’t know much about being a vet, but I imagine it’s mostly office hours.”

  “Both of them like their jobs.” She shrugged. “They both have husbands who work. Neither of them need to worry about money.”

  Must be nice, Michael thought. “When I first saw your profile,” he said, “your name seemed familiar, so I did what anybody else would do and I googled you.” He smiled. “Stephanie Seymour, former super-model.”

  “Hah!” She sat back, sighed in repletion. “Not so former. She’s in her fifties and still in the tabloids.” She smiled. “My father is a professor of ancient languages at NYU and my mother teaches art history at Columbia. She specializes in ancient Greek pottery and mosaics. Neither of them pay the slightest attention to fashion or pop culture. They had never even heard of her. It wasn’t deliberate.”

  “My parents are archaeologists. They also are more focused on the past.”

  She grinned at him. He grinned back, and felt a little flutter in his chest. “Dessert?” he asked.

  “Ras Malai,” she said. “I love it.”

  “What a coincidence,” Michael said. “So do I.”

  Chapter 12

  Bellerion the Great remained anonymous. Michael paid the agreed upon amount in Bitcoin, which, according to Bellerion’s instructions, could not be traced.

  And there it was, an email with two attachments. The email itself was cryptic:

  I think you’ll find these interesting.

  The first attachment was an in-depth profile of all ten people killed during Remington Simulations’ Virtually Dead tournament, including Ralph Guthrie. The second was an even more in-depth profile of Remington Simulations itself. Both attachments contained a list of sites accessed in compiling the information. Michael suspected that the list was far from complete.

  The profiles of the victims revealed ten smart, young geeks, eight male, two female. All had high IQ’s. All had received many excellent grades in High School and college, and almost as many poor ones. Like much of the gaming community, they had apparently marched to the beat of their own drum, not willing to waste time on subjects they considered unfulfilling.

  So far as could be determined, none of the ten had ever met. All had jobs but only three, Ralph, Lucius Simpson and Alex Morgan made their living primarily through playing games. Simpson and Morgan were, it seemed, almost famous, among game players, at least. Both had scored big in online tournaments over the past five years. Like Ralph, they were streamers, with their own followers on YouTube and Twitch.

  All ten were active on Facebook, hardly a surprise. Half the world (literally) was active on Facebook. All ten listed over a thousand Facebook friends. Michael’s hacker had helpfully highlighted certain commonalities. Four-hundred-fifty-three names were listed as friends of two victims. One-hundred-twenty-four were friends of three. Fifty-six were friends of four, and so on.

  Five names were listed as Facebook friends of all ten victims. The five were all young men: Joseph Bell, Reece Garner, Jeffrey Abbott, Brooks Nadler and Charles Deering. They were all gamers, which certainly made sense. An in depth profile of all five, including cross-references, was included. Bell and Deering were Facebook friends with each other, as were Abbott and Nadler, though the five were spread out across the country. It was unclear if any of them had ever actually met, outside of their on-line contact.

  Had the intrepid private detective come up with a clue?

  What was that term? Six degrees of separation. Supposedly, according to the theory (more of a conceit, actually), any two people on Earth could be connected by no more than six individual social connections. Person One knows Person Two who knows Person Three and so on.

  Michael had no idea if it was true, but he doubted it. The idea, however, certainly had merit. Maybe eight or ten intermediate contacts was more likely.

  In books and movies, the heroes were fond of saying, “I don’t believe in coincidence.” In real life, coincidence happened all the time. Still, a coincidence had to be investigated. Not by himself, of course, but investigated. He winced at the thought of what Harold Strong would say when Michael pointed out this particular coincidence.

  But anybody could surf the internet. Michael had been adamant that nothing he received could get Michael into legal jeopardy. Harold Strong and the FBI might resent Michael’s curiosity, but curiosity was not against the law.

  Also, of course, since the FBI were professionals and Michael was just floundering around, it seemed pretty likely that they already had this information.

  So…Remington Simulations. Incorporated in Delaware, founded by three people who had been friends at Harvard. One was Royce Johnston, a college dropout who inherited sixty million dollars and then proceeded to waste half of it on a series of ill-fated ventures before, apparently, getting a bit more serious about his money and his life. However, considering Remington Simulations current predicament and probable fate, a lot more of that sixty million was on the verge of being wasted.

  The second was Alice Scott, from Dearborn, Michigan, who had graduated first in her high school class and majored in linguistics at Harvard, before pursuing a graduate degree in computer science.

  The third was Mario Ferrara, from Miami, another gamer. All three, as teenagers, had been in some small trouble with the law. Since they were minors, the court records were sealed, but online commentary from friends and local new
s sites were publicly available. All three had been teenage hackers. Hmm? A clue?

  Beyond Royce Johnston’s contribution, additional funding was hard to trace. The Kickstarter campaign had raised a couple of million dollars but a couple of million was a drop in the bucket. There were references to private meetings, all of them cryptic, none definitive. Private corporations could invest their money wherever they wished. If some faceless group had decided to invest in Remington Simulations, they were under no obligation to reveal it.

  Johnston, Scott and Ferrrara had hired the design team but had apparently kept close tabs on their work. The design team, plus everybody else associated with the company, had apparently lawyered up. Newspaper and website statements were all diplomatically vague.

  Prior to the deaths, however, there were a lot of quotes, many of which seemed both colloquial and not diplomatic at all. It occurred to Michael that this stuff seemed surprisingly detailed and not exactly public. How was this information obtained? Michael skipped back to the introduction. Huh…

  Email and text messages were private. Chat boards and social media might or might not be. Amazing, the things people would post to their friends, fans and followers.

  Sandra Devine and Gary Woodson, the two deceased members of the design team, had died together. They were both married to other people, though Sandra Devine was separated and in the process of obtaining a divorce. The two had made little effort to keep their affair a secret. They had died in a boating accident off the coast of Connecticut, having both been drinking. The boat had hit a submerged rock.

  Shortly before her death, Sandra Devine had put a down payment on a luxury apartment in mid-town. Gary Woodson had bought himself a Corvette, not the most expensive sports car out there, but not cheap, either. Despite this, foul play had not, at the time, been suspected.

  The remaining members of the design team seemed squeaky clean. Middle class, good schools, excellent work history, smart, accomplished and never in trouble of any sort….but then, a criminally inclined stalker of the dark web would know how to fake it, wouldn’t he?

  Harold Strong puffed up his cheeks and gave Michael a long, brooding look. “You’re getting to be a regular little pain in the ass.”

  “So, sue me,” Michael said.

  “We won’t sue you. We’ll arrest you.”

  “Oh, please.” Michael waved a hand in front of his face.

  They were sitting in Harold Strong’s office at One Police Plaza. The office was larger than Michael had expected, also neater. The shelves held an assortment of books, mostly non-fiction. Two visitors’ chairs were placed across from Harold Strong.

  “Did you know that the United States has a higher percentage of its population currently in jail than any other supposedly democratic nation on Earth?” Michael raised an eyebrow.

  “No,” Harold Strong said. “I didn’t.”

  “I read an article not too long ago that said when the United States was founded, there were only twenty crimes for which a citizen could be jailed. Now, there are over a thousand.”

  A small smile flit across Harold Strong’s face as he considered this.

  “However, despite what is increasingly becoming a dictatorial police-state, a law-abiding member of the public can still look up anything he damn well wants. None of these sources are confidential.” He hoped.

  Harold Strong frowned down at the report that Michael had handed him. “I’ll admit, the five names are interesting.” He narrowed his eyes at Michael. “The FBI has also made this particular association. All five are being investigated further, but thank you for your concern.”

  Oh, well... “So, what do you make of it?”

  “Why should we tell you?”

  “Because I’m a consultant; also, a concerned citizen.”

  Harold Strong sat back in his chair and gave Michael a faint, disapproving frown. “We expect our citizens to be concerned. Crime, after all, is a danger to us all. Confidential information, however, is kept confidential for a reason.”

  Harold Strong seemed to mean it. Michael opened his briefcase, pulled out another sheet of paper and handed it across the desk. “How about this?”

  Harold Strong took the print-out, glanced at Michael, looked down at the paper, wrinkled his nose as if the paper might be unclean, and carefully read it through. When he was done, he folded the paper, put it down and took a deep breath. He seemed, Michael thought, to be restraining himself.

  “How did you get this?”

  The paper he had handed Harold Strong was a spreadsheet listing fifteen bank deposits, made into two accounts in the Cayman Islands, in the names of Sandra Devine and Gary Woodson. The fifteen deposits added up to over five million dollars.

  “An anonymous source.”

  Harold Strong closed his eyes and looked pained. “What makes you think this data is correct?”

  Michael shrugged.

  “It’s not hard to fake an excel spreadsheet,” Harold Strong said. “If it is fake, we have no way of finding it out. Cayman Islands financial institutions are very private and very confidential.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  Harold Strong went on. “Over forty of the world’s fifty largest banks have branches in the Cayman Islands. There is an unknown amount of foreign money—but estimated to be in the vicinity of two trillion dollars, deposited in the Cayman Islands.” He unfolded the piece of paper, looked at it again, then looked up at Michael. “You got anything else?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.” Michael smiled and handed Harold Strong a third sheet of paper. It listed five series of names, with arrows pointing from one name to the next. Some of the names were highlighted in green, some in pink. A few were highlighted in red. Harold Strong looked up at Michael.

  “These are people who have had on-line contact, one with the other.”

  The names of the five people who had been Facebook friends of all ten dead victims were listed first, each of the five beginning a new paragraph.

  “Notice anything?”

  Harold Strong frowned at him. “Not off-hand, no.”

  “You’ve heard of Tyler Barris?”

  “I have.” Tyler Barris was a former gamer. He was currently serving a twenty-year sentence in jail for having ‘swatted’ a perfectly innocent man named Andrew Finch. Barris had gotten into a dispute with Finch over an online game. Barris called the police, told them that he himself was holding his family hostage and gave them Finch’s address. The police SWAT team responded to the call and killed Finch.

  “How about Kyle Giersdorf?”

  “No.”

  “Have you heard of Twitch?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Kyle Giersdorf is a gamer. On July 28, 2019, at the age of sixteen, he won three million dollars at the Fortnite World Cup, a gaming tournament.”

  “Nice,” Harold Strong said.

  “Twitch is a site that lets fans watch online games as they’re being played, live. A month or so after he won the tournament, Kyle Giersdorf was sitting in his living room, playing a variant of Fortnite online, while being watched by 38,000 spectators, when he disappeared from the game for about ten minutes. He was swatted. Luckily, one of the cops on the SWAT team was a neighbor and recognized him. Nobody was hurt, but they certainly could have been. These people take their game playing seriously.”

  “I’ve heard about Fortnite,” Harold Strong said. “The tournament was in the news. I didn’t pay much attention to it.” He raised an eyebrow. “So, why don’t you tell me what these names all mean?”

  “All five are highly rated gamers. They’re well known in the gameplaying community. So were the ten players who were killed wearing Remington Simulations’ exosuits.”

  Harold Strong nodded. “This, we know. All three hundred were well known in the gaming community. That’s why they were chosen.”

  “But only ten were killed. Why only ten? And why these ten?”

  Harold Strong frowned. “Well, that certainly is the questio
n, now isn’t it?”

  “They never found the guy who swatted Kyle Giersdorf. Speculation is that the call came from Europe.”

  “What happened here is considerably more complicated than swatting,” Harold Strong said. “Somehow, the suits were manufactured with extra parts. They were capable of killing their victims and then recording their brainwaves as they died. Someone, somehow, activated the suits. Someone, somewhere, had something to gain, but we don’t know what.”

  “Love or money. Isn’t that the saying?”

  “That is the saying, but it’s often wrong. Serial killers, for instance, kill people simply because it gives them a thrill. I suppose you could say that they love the thrill, but that would be stretching it.” Harold Strong shrugged. “So, again, tell me what you think these names all signify?”

  “The ones surrounded by green have records of some minor difficulty with the law.”

  Harold Strong raised an eyebrow. “How minor?”

  “Speeding tickets, jay-walking. The sort of crap that anybody might get caught for.”

  Harold Strong shrugged. “Go on.”

  “The pink ones are more serious. Petty theft, drunk and disorderly, minor assault, harassment. Stuff like that.”

  Harold Strong smiled down at the paper and appeared slightly more interested. “And the red ones, I assume, are more serious crimes?”

  “They are.”

  “Let me see if I understand what you’ve done, here. You start with a name and list a contact, then you list a contact of the contact, and so on. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re listing no more than…”—Harold Strong peered down at the paper—“eight, maximum, initial contacts for each of the five. Everybody has more than eight contacts. Why these? How about the hundreds of other contacts that everybody on Earth has made?”

  “We narrowed it down to the ones that contained at least one person of interest in the chain.”

  “Six degrees of separation,” Harold Strong said.