A Game Called Chaos (6 page)

Frank filled Chelsea in on what little they'd
found while Joe ordered the pizza. When he was done, Chelsea flopped onto her couch. “What a nightmare this day has been!” she said. “Not only did I have Winters harassing me, but Ron Rosenberg called Dave and claimed that our contract with Royal is invalid. He said Royal promised he'd come back to Wondersoft. Rosenberg's lawyers are supposed to stop by the office in the next day or two. Dave is completely freaked out.”

“That sounds like an intimidation tactic to me,” Frank said.

“Yeah,” Joe called back from the kitchen. He'd taken it upon himself to make some coffee. “Unless Rosenberg's turned up something new since last night. He sure can't hang a case on that e-mail he got. We can't even be sure if it really came from Royal.”

“Speaking of e-mail,” Frank said, “we should check in with Phil to see if he's turned up anything new.”

“Oh, I almost forgot in all the excitement,” Chelsea said. “Phil called me just before I left. He said that his computers at home couldn't take the e-mail trace any further. He needed something more powerful. Dave and I offered him the computers at our office; they're state-of-the-art.

“Phil's going to drive up tomorrow morning. I'm glad he can help out because we just don't have the manpower to tackle this kind of thing
right now. All our best computer people are jammed with work.”

“It'll be good to have him here,” Frank said. “We might need his expertise.”

“And we're doing so well on our own,” Joe said sarcastically as he brought in the coffee. “I was pretty sure that Zeb was behind the ransacking of Tochi's apartment—until you told us he'd been here all day. His bothering you and Viking continuously doesn't leave him any time to drive to NCU and back.”

Frank nodded. “Yeah. Though that doesn't rule out Zeb, or anyone else, helping Royal on this crazy stunt. None of the suspects we've got seem to have the skills to pull this prank off by themselves. Not even Royal.”

“But the only one who has a motive to help Royal in messing with Viking is Rosenberg,” Joe said. “The other two guys seem to hate Royal's guts. Hey, do you think maybe this is some kind of a scheme by Royal and Rosenberg to break Royal's contract with Viking?”

“If it is,” Frank said, “Rosenberg would need really great lawyers to pull it off. The courts would frown upon antics like this.”

“Well, it doesn't seem much like a prank to me, or my company,” Chelsea said. “This stunt could cost us everything.”

“And maybe that's Royal and Rosenberg's plan.
If Viking went out of business, Royal's contract would be void, wouldn't it?” Joe asked.

“I'd have to ask our lawyers,” Chelsea said. “I suspect that Dave is having them go over that contract with a fine-tooth comb right about now.”

Just then the doorbell rang. “Pizza man,” said a voice on the intercom.

Chelsea got up to press the button to buzz him in, then stopped. “I hope it's not Zeb again. I wouldn't put it past him to hang around and bribe the delivery guy.”

Frank and Joe got up. “We'll go downstairs to get it,” said Frank. He and Joe exited the apartment and went down to the front door.

When they got there they found a delivery boy waiting with their pizzas. Frank paid the bill and watched the kid walk back to his truck.

“Doesn't look old enough to drive, does he?” Joe said. “Hey! Who's that messing with the van?”

Sure enough, someone was prowling around the Hardys' van. The brothers set the pizzas down and dashed out the door for their car.

“If this is Winters again, I'm going to deck him for sure,” Joe said.

“Not if I do it first,” Frank said.

The figure poking around the van didn't notice the Hardys coming. Joe grabbed the person by the shoulder and said, “What do you think you're doing?”

The person spun around. She was a medium-tall, thin woman in a tan trench coat and slouch hat. She had short-cropped black hair and a roundish face. She wasn't much older than the Hardys, but her outfit—a fedora and trench coat—reminded Frank of something from a thirties detective movie.

“Me?” said the woman. She seemed shocked at being caught. Frank and Joe nodded solemnly at her. “I was just looking around. I'm buying a new car soon, and I was thinking about buying this kind of van.”

“It looked like you were trying to
break into
this
particular
van,” Joe said.

“No, no. You've misunderstood,” the woman said.

“Maybe the police should decide if we've misunderstood,” Frank said.

The woman sighed and her shoulders slouched forward a bit. “Okay, you got me. No need to call the police. My name is Samantha Rockford, my friends call me Sam. I'm a private detective working for Ron Rosenberg. Do you know him?”

“We've met,” Joe said. Something about this woman didn't seem right to him. Perhaps it was her clothes, or maybe it was the way she kept glancing around as she spoke. She seemed to be looking for something, though Joe couldn't spot what.

“Well,” Sam continued, “he hired me to check up on Steven Royal. Rosenberg says he's gone missing.”

“Really?” Joe said, raising an eyebrow at his brother.

“And why are you
here?”
Frank asked.

“I was checking Royal's known associates. When I saw you guys fraternizing with Sirkin before, I figured you might know something about the case.”

“So you decided to break into our van,” Joe said. “Doesn't ring true to me, Frank.”

“Me neither,” said the elder Hardy. “Let's take her inside and let the police sort it out.” He took Sam by the arm and urged her toward the apartment door.

“This really isn't necessary,” Sam said. She tried to pull away, but Frank's grip held her gently in place.

As they walked toward the apartments, Chelsea poked her head out of the lobby door. She had the pizzas in her arms. “Hey, guys,” she said. “What's going on?” Then her eyes went wide. “Look out!”

At the same moment Chelsea screamed, Frank and Joe heard the roar of a car engine behind them. They turned in time to see a blue sedan barreling down on them at full speed.

Frank pushed Sam one way, and he and Joe dove in the other direction. The speeding car whizzed between the two groups, missing them all.

Before it could change direction or brake, the car slammed into a concrete pylon at the bottom of one of the parking lot's light poles. The sedan's engine revved for a couple of seconds more, and then the engine died.

Frank and Joe got up and looked at the wreck. “Oh, man!” Joe said. “Whoever's inside there must be really messed up.”

The brothers ran to the car to try to rescue the driver. Chelsea dashed over to join them. “Frank! Joe! Are you all right?”

“Better than whoever's in here,” Joe said, trying
to open the crumpled driver's-side door. He tried to peer inside, but the front and side windows of the car had shattered into a million spiderwebs of glass.

All Joe could see was a large white blob in the driver's seat. He couldn't make out the driver's head, or even his arms, just an indistinct shape. He feared that the person inside had been crushed beyond recognition.

He let out a relieved sigh when he realized what had really happened. “The air bag deployed,” Joe said. “But it's blocking my view. I can't see anything else.”

“Neither can I,” said Frank. He had been trying to look into the passenger side of the car. But that side had crumpled against the pylon. The wreckage prevented Frank from seeing inside. “Maybe the driver's still alive,” he said, joining Joe on the driver's side of the car.

Chelsea looked at the car, then at the brothers. “This is Steven Royal's car,” she said, a note of fear and sadness in her voice.

“What a way to end a case,” Joe said. He pulled on the door handle, but the door didn't budge.

“Let me help,” said Frank.

He and Joe positioned themselves so they could both get a good grip on the door handle.

“On three,” Frank said. Joe nodded at him. Frank counted. “One . . . two . . .
three!”

The brothers pulled hard on the door, and slowly it creaked open, metal scraping against metal. The air bag fell away from the seat as the door opened.

“Holy cats!” Joe said. “There's no one inside!”

Sure enough, the driver's seat was empty.

“Just like in A Town Called Chaos,” Chelsea muttered.

“Cars can't drive themselves,” Frank said, turning his scientific eye to the sedan's steering column. “There has to be some kind of remote-controlled steering device here.”

“I'm sure there is,” Joe said. “But maybe we'd better let the police poke around inside the car. They'll be here any minute.”

Now that he was listening, Frank could hear police sirens; they weren't very far off. Someone in the apartments must have called them.

“Well, they won't be able to shrug this off,” Frank said. “Whether it was Royal controlling this car or someone else, this stunt could have seriously hurt us.”

“And Sam,” Joe said. He looked around. “Say, where did she go? Chelsea, did you see where Sam Rockford went?”

“Is she the woman in the trench coat who was with you? I was so worried about you guys, I didn't pay any attention to her after you pushed her out of harm's way,” Chelsea said. “Who was she?”

“A PI working for Rosenberg,” Frank said. “Maybe.”

“She seemed to know Royal was missing, though we didn't tell Rosenberg that,” Joe added.

Chelsea sighed. “As if we didn't have enough trouble!”

• • •

The police took Royal's disappearance much more seriously now. They impounded the wreck of Royal's car and took it to the police lab for testing. They also spent a couple of hours talking to Frank, Joe, and Chelsea. During the course of the interrogation, the Hardys learned that the police's new theory was that Royal's disappearance was part of a publicity stunt.

They didn't seem to believe that Chelsea and Viking Software had been trying to keep Royal's absence secret. “After all,” the lead detective told Chelsea, “you've been camped on our doorstep making a fuss for most of the last week. You've done your jobs as concerned citizens; now let us do our jobs. The only thing you should worry about at the moment is keeping your noses clean. If any of you are involved in this stunt, then you could all be in big trouble. Let the Jewel Ridge PD worry about Steven Royal. This car wreck proves he's lurking around here somewhere.

“And you, Hardy boys,” the detective continued, “make sure you stay out of the way of our investigation.
Maybe the police in Bayport need help from amateurs, but in Jewel Ridge, we do things by the book.”

Frank and Joe silently decided not to turn the mechanical spider over to the cops, though they did mention the ransacking of Tochi's house. By the time the trio got back into Chelsea's apartment, the pizza they'd ordered had been cold a long time. They stuffed it into the fridge and went straight to bed.

They were awakened late the next morning by the repeated ringing of Chelsea's doorbell. Joe roused himself from the couch and answered the intercom. “Yeah,” he said sleepily. “What is it?”

“It's me, Phil,” said a voice on the other end of the intercom. “Buzz me in, will you?” Joe pressed the buzzer and a minute later Phil came through the door, looking well-rested and eager to begin working. Frank got out of the recliner and Chelsea joined them from the other room.

The four friends sat around Chelsea's dining room table and had granola and milk for breakfast. They brought Phil up to date on everything that had happened the last two days. The Hardys also pulled out the remains of the mechanical spider for Phil to see.

“Seems to me,” Phil said between mouthfuls of cereal, “that you could buy most of the material in this spider at an electronics supply store.
Though some of it looks like it might have been scavenged from toys.”

“Which could point to Tochi's involvement,” Joe said.

Phil nodded as he ate. “Mm. Or someone with that amount of skill.”

“Chelsea,” Frank said, “what do you make of the clue we found inside the spider? I thought the forest reference meant the Forest of Chaos game and the caverns meant the Caverns of Chaos game. That would make sense since Caverns was the first game and
primeval
means ‘original.' But I can't imagine that Royal hid clues to finding the prototype in those old games. No one thinks that far ahead.”

“Could the forest and the cave be real places?” Joe asked. “And if they are, where are they?”

Chelsea's eyes lit up. “They
could
be,” she said. “When I was reading up on Royal when Viking brought him on board, I read a lot of magazine articles on the origin of the Chaos series.

“Royal and Sakai used to go camping in Kendall State Park, in western Massachusetts. According to one article, the two of them got the idea for the original Caverns of Chaos game when they found a hidden cave somewhere in the park.

“The reporter couldn't find any record of such a cave, but he couldn't prove it didn't exist, either. Royal claimed that he and Sakai had hidden the
cave entrance to keep out snoopers. He wouldn't say where it was. Even though nobody's found it since then, maybe it
is
a real place,” Chelsea concluded.

“And if it is,” Frank said, “then the prototype—the treasure—might be there. That's what the clue implies, anyway. That cave would be the place where the whole Chaos series originated. It makes sense.”

“So all we have to do is find this cave that may or may not exist,” Joe said. “I wonder if this'd be any easier if I'd played the third game.”