“Our map.” He lowered the tablet, swiping a finger across the bottom to make the keyboard appear. He typed the words “find Monkey” with quick, efficient taps before pressing the ENTER key. The cursor dropped to the next line.
Maggie was peering over the seat at us. I frowned at the tablet, which Mahir was watching with absolute focus. Minutes ticked by.
“Okay,” I said finally. “This is officially stupid. In case you were wondering whether it had the ‘Shaun thinks this is stupid’ seal of approval, it does. Is there a plan B?”
“Yes.” Mahir held up the tablet, showing it to me again. A second line of text had appeared beneath his, with the cursor blinking on a third line now.
EXIT GARAGE, it said.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I grumbled, and started the engine.
“It’s based off a pre-Rising computer game,” said Mahir. “So primitive it’s invisible to most monitoring systems.” He began typing. “At the end of the drive, wave to the guards and turn left. You’ll come to an intersection with a 7-Eleven. When you get there, turn right.”
“Fucking. Kidding. Me,” I said.
At the base of the driveway, we all waved to the guards as we waited for the gate to open. They waved back, apparently accustomed to strange behavior from their eccentric, wealthy clientele.
“Are you sure this is necessary?” I asked, still waving.
“If the directions say to do it, we do it,” said Maggie. “That’s what everyone says. If you don’t listen to the Monkey, he doesn’t meet with you.”
“Let’s hope the directions don’t tell us to shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” I muttered, and pulled out onto the street.
The directions did not tell us to shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die. They did tell us to drive down dead alleys, only to turn around and go back the way we’d come; to drive in circles through residential neighborhoods, probably setting off dozens of security alerts; and to get on and off the freeway six times. It was incredibly annoying. At the same time, I had to admire the Monkey’s style. None of the neighborhoods we drove through had gates or manned security booths. None of the freeway exits we used required blood tests. We might be driving like idiots, but we were driving like idiots without leaving a definite record of where we’d been, or why we’d been there.
We were crossing a bridge that actually floated on the surface of a lake—thankfully, the Monkey hadn’t requested we do anything stupid, like drive into the lake; I would have refused, and then I might have had a mutiny on my hands—when Mahir looked up, eyes wide. “Shaun?”
“What?” I asked. “Are we being followed?”
“No. The directions…” He cleared his throat, looked at the screen, and read, “ ‘Turn on your jamming unit. Tune it to channel eight, or these instructions will cease.’ We don’t have a jamming unit, do we?”
“Actually, funny story—hey, Becks!” I looked at the rearview mirror. She turned, the reflection of her eyes meeting mine. “Put the jammer’s batteries back in and turn it on, will you? The text-based adventure wants us to get scrambled.”
“On it, Boss,” Becks called, and put down her gun.
I hadn’t wanted us to kill the jammer in the Agora parking garage—no matter how upper-crust they were, there were bound to be some things that would upset them. We’d settled for checking it for obvious bugs and removing the battery pack before heading into the hotel. Now I was glad we’d taken that approach. If the Monkey knew we had the jammer, he would probably have been pissed if we’d killed it.
“This guy must think he’s the goddamn Wizard of Oz,” I muttered. “I don’t like being spied on.”
“We’re off to see the Wizard,” chanted Maggie, in a gleeful singsong voice.
“Before you start killing people with joyous abandon, you might like to know that the next batch of directions has arrived,” said Mahir dryly. “Maggie, please don’t antagonize him; he’s had a hard week, and he’s liable to bite.”
“Spoilsport,” said Maggie.
“Thank you,” I said. “Where are we going?”
“At the end of the bridge, turn right,” said Mahir.
There was no joking around after that. Whatever test we’d been taking, we’d apparently passed, because the directions sent us along a straightforward series of increasingly smaller streets, until we were driving down a poorly maintained residential road in one of the oldest parts of Seattle. This was a million miles from the cultivated opulence of the Agora, or even from the reasonably well-maintained Berkeley streets where I grew up. This was a neighborhood where half the houses burned years ago and were never rebuilt, and where the remaining homes were surrounded by the kind of ludicrous fencing that was popular immediately after the Rising, when people were frantically trying to protect themselves from the next attack.