“Can you expand the face?” Wu asked, thinking he could get Johnson to run it through face rec.
Axel used his thumb and index finger to zoom in. “It’s kind of pixilated,” he said. “But you should be able to isolate the image and clean it up.”
Axel had instinctively grasped what he wanted. The kid was smart.
“I think the power surge from the electrical charge might have overloaded the circuits and caused the glitch,” Axel went on. “Once that happened, I figured since the electricity was real, maybe these people were real. I mean, why would you create an avatar and then cover it with another avatar on top of the first image?” He shrugged. “Makes no sense—and it’s a huge waste of time and effort.”
“But why live subjects?” Wu asked.
“Don’t know,” Axel said. “But look at this.” He moved his cursor again, this time indicating another avatar lying on the floor in the lowest level of the structure. “This guy wasn’t dead last time I checked.” He glanced at his watch. “About half an hour ago. This isn’t in real time. This stuff is edited before it goes out.”
“Looks like he got stabbed in the neck and bled out,” Flint said. “The spatter pattern looks like it came from an arterial bleed.”
“This game needs investigating,” Wu said. “Is that why you’re bringing it to our attention?”
“Watch these two,” Axel said, clicking the captured still image closed and directing their attention to a pair of avatars moving along the bottom floor.
Wu watched the image of a woman clad in ancient armor with gold breastplates and a matching helmet make her way down a corridor, leading a large creature with the body of a man and the head of a bull.
“If I remember my ancient Greek mythology,” Wu said, taking in the massive pair of horns sprouting from the avatar’s head and the silver ring in its broad nose, “the one in the back is a Minotaur, and the one in front is Athena.”
“The Minotaur is obvious,” Flint said. “But how can you tell about the woman?”
“There’s an owl perched on her helmet,” Wu said, recalling a classical studies course at Columbia. “Athena was the goddess of war and wisdom. She was often shown with an owl. The armor is also a dead giveaway.”
“You can zero in on certain rooms and characters,” Axel said. “And you can go back to catch what you missed.” He hit a button, and the images zoomed in reverse. “Listen to what Athena says here.”
The feed started forward at normal speed. Athena was speaking to the Minotaur in an electronically altered feminine voice. “I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy.”
Axel stabbed his keyboard, freezing the scene. “Did you hear that?”
Wu looked at Flint, who seemed equally baffled, then back at Axel. “Perhaps you should explain.”
“When Dani became a Ranger, she had to recite their creed,” Axel said. “I helped her memorize it.” His eyes widened. “That line is taken verbatim from the Ranger Creed.” Realization hit Wu with the force of a physical blow. Now he knew why Axel had shared the video with them.
Axel sped up the feed again before resuming normal speed. “Watch Athena move,” he said.
The goddess avatar made her way down the corridor in a way that made Wu think of the tactical training he had received at Quantico. She cleared rooms methodically and seemed to be in charge, directing the Minotaur, who remained behind her. When she gestured with her left hand, he noticed what looked like a thick band wrapped around her wrist.
“Is that a cuff bracelet on her wrist?” Flint said, apparently spotting the same thing.
“Could be,” Axel said. “Can’t be sure because it’s not part of the avatar’s suit, so it shows up like an extra-thick layer.” He frowned. “That’s not important, though. She used to teach me military stuff for fun. I know how my own sister moves, and this is pure Dani.” He paused. “I also researched the avatar and came to the same conclusion you did. Athena is the goddess of war, and Dani was a soldier.”
Wu shifted his gaze back to the Minotaur, certain Axel was right. “Half-man, half-bull,” he murmured, then repeated the key word. “Bull.”
He looked at Flint, unable to say more in the presence of civilians. No one here knew—or could know—about the exact nature of Dani’s assignment and who she was with.
Flint nodded his understanding.
Toro was the Spanish word for bull, and it was also Gustavo Toro’s code name. Axel was thinking about his sister’s real military background, unaware that she had gone undercover as Nikki Corazón, also a soldier. Either way, it made sense that she would be portrayed as a goddess of war. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell whether her cover had been blown or not, but he did know that avatars in what was supposed to be a virtual world were dying in real life. Flint had no doubt arrived at the same inescapable conclusion he had.
Agent Vega and Gustavo Toro were trapped inside a killer’s game.
CHAPTER 38
Dani gazed at her grotesquely misshapen face. The fun house mirrors covering the walls of the room made her feel like she’d been sucked into a nightmarish version of a Salvador Dalí painting. The mirror reflected what she felt inside rather than a physically accurate image, contributing to the surreal effect.
She had just killed a man. And not for the first time.
As in combat, she’d done what was necessary to survive, but this time felt different. At eighteen, she had told everyone she was joining the Army to honor the memory of her father but never admitted—even to herself—that she was also running from the legacy of her mother.
Toro had called her a killer, and she had responded with all the righteous indignation of the guilty. Now she looked at her distorted reflection and saw all the way into her soul. She could no longer deny the truth of who and what she was.
“We’re in the right place,” Toro said, tapping the handwritten message scrawled on the back of the envelope. “Let’s open it.”
The instructions had directed them to the next room, where they would find a wall of mirrors before breaking the envelope’s seal.
“I haven’t had a chance to check this yet,” she said, holding up the compact pistol she’d taken from Doc Tox.
She would never carry a weapon into battle without knowing whether it was loaded and functional. A firefight was not the place to find out whether the gun would go bang when she pulled the trigger.
“Watch my back,” she said to Toro as she released the magazine, dropping it into her hand. She had noticed that the weapon felt a bit light and wasn’t surprised to find the magazine empty except for one .45-caliber round at the top.
Cursing, she pulled back the slide to see a single round in the chamber.
“We’ve got two shots,” she said.
“So there were only four bullets in there to begin with,” he said. “I’m sure that’s not how Chopper kept his gun, so that means Nemesis is screwing with us. Again.”
She seated the magazine back in place. “Maybe there’s a cache of ammo hidden somewhere.” Grateful for its compact size, she tucked the gun into the top of her boot and straightened. “Let’s have a look at the clue.”
As if by tacit agreement, neither of them had mentioned Toro’s blurted comment since leaving the cobra room. She had to assume Nemesis had heard the remark. The FBI had scrubbed as many photographs of her from news stories when she graduated Ranger school as possible, but someone with the kind of resources Nemesis had at his disposal could go far deeper than a Google search. What were the odds that every last image of her face anywhere on the web over the past four years had been expunged?
Operating on the assumption that her plans had gone to shit—always a prudent position—that meant any hope that Nemesis would stop the game had died as surely as Doc Tox. Despite his speech about how they were all a bunch of soulless mercenaries, Nemesis clearly didn’t care who Dani was or what she did.
So be it.
Toro tore open the seal and pulled out the folded paper inside. She glanced around his shoulder to read a printed message.
BREAK THE RULES, MIRROR IMAGES ABOUND, BESIDE YOURSELF ANGRY, DOOR TO FREEDOM
They looked at each other. Dani read it out loud, still unable to make sense of it.
“This is bullshit,” Toro said. “How the hell are we supposed to figure out what it means? It’s nothing but a jumble of words.”
“A word jumble,” she said to him. “What if that’s exactly what this is?”
Toro simply looked at her.
“This is written as groups of three words separated by a comma.” She tapped the page. “What if the words are out of order? Or what if the letters are scrambled?”
Toro’s eyes widened. “We have to unscramble all these letters? That would take forever without a computer.”