The Manolo Matrix (23 page)

She shook her head. “Sorry.”

“The dentist is this total sadist. And he’s got this great song, and one of the lines is about how he’d poison guppies.”

“Poison,” she repeated, her voice toneless.

“Nothing’s changed, Jenn,” he said, taking her hand. “Ten, remember? Just the same as always.”

“Right. You’re right. Of course, you’re right.” She frowned. “Nothing’s changed, but…I just don’t see how I could have been poisoned. Or has it happened yet? Is someone going to run by and tackle me and shove a needle in my arm? Force feed me a vial of poison? I don’t get it.”

“You don’t have to get it. You just have to solve it.”

“What if there’s another message?”

He shook his head, not following.

“On PSW! There’s a message center. I pulled up the first one that gave me your profile. But we haven’t checked to see if there’s anything inyour message area. Maybe we’re supposed to have more information.”

“You’re right,” he said, already pulling up the browser on her laptop. He headed over the the PSW

website, navigated to the player login screen, then stopped. “Shit,” he said.

“What?”

“I made up a login and password that time. I just wanted to poke around. I wasn’t playing the
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game.

Hell, I wasn’t even officially investigating.”

“So?”

“So I don’t know offhand what the login was. Much less the password.”

“Oh.”

That stumped them both for a few minutes, and he cursed himself for not having used something simple and memorable. He was still berating himself when Jenn bounced back to life.

“Wait! Login to my message center and pull up your profile.”

“Okay.” He started to type. “What’s your—”

“I’ll do it. It’ll be faster.”

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So while he looked on, she typed in a username, then a password. The screen changed, a message appeared, and Devlin got that sick sense in his gut as he saw what he already knew: That she really had received twenty large. And that he really was marked for death in this fucked up version ofThe Amazing

Race.

“Here,” she said, pointing at the profile she’d pulled up. “See? At the bottom is says your username.

G-Man. No password, though.”

“I’ve got one I use exclusively,” he said, tugging his mind back to the problem. “Let’s give it a shot.”

She nodded, then went back to the main page for the message center. He typed “G-Man” into the username box, then “TimothyJ5,” for his first stage role and age. He hitENTER and waited for his messages to come up.

“Invalid Password. Please Try Again.”

“Fuck. Hold on.” He took another shot, trying his birthdate just for the hell of it.

“Invalid Password. Please Try Again.”

“Goddammit!” He slammed his hand down, making the desk jump. “Fucking machine!”

“Hang on,” she said, her voice soft and soothing. She took his hand, twining her fingers through his.

“There’s got to be a way in. They wouldn’t have given us the username only to screw us over with the password.”

His heart was still pounding, but he managed to calm down enough to look at her. Really look at her.

“You’re a rather amazing woman, Jennifer Crane.”

She smirked. “Tell my mother. Better yet, tell me tomorrow, right about now.”

“You’ve got a deal.” He pointed to the computer. “Were you just trying to calm me down, or do you have an idea?”

She didn’t bother answering, just shifted the laptop so that she could maneuver, moused up to the password slot, and typed. She hitENTER , the computer did its thing, and suddenly they were in.

“Well, fuck me,” Devlin said. “What was the password?”

She smiled, totally triumphant. “PSW. What else?” She laughed, obviously delighted with herself, then navigated them into the message center.

“You have one new message.”

She met his eyes. “Should we?”

“Hell, yes.”

She nodded, took a deep, audible breath, then clicked the hyperlink. And as soon as the message came up, David wanted to hit the damn computer again. More, he wanted to hit whoever was
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behind this

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bullshit.

Beside him, Jenn didn’t look nearly as angry. But her eyes never left the screen as she reached for his hand.

“Fuck,” she said.

“I know.”

They stared at the message that filled the screen. A message that told them what they already knew, but now had it spelled out in black and white:

>>http://www.playsurvivewin.com<<

PLAY.SURVIVE.WIN

>>>WELCOME TO REPORTING CENTER<<<

ONE NEW MESSAGE

REPORT NO. A-0002

Filed By: Identity Blocked

Subject: Status update.

Report:

Secondary subject located and encounter successfully orchestrated.

Time-release toxin delivered.

Initial message to primary subject in transit.

Warning and incentive message to secondary subject in transit.

Game currently proceeding on schedule.

>>>End Report<<

“Time-release toxin,” she finally said. “Well, I guess that explains that.”

He reached out, turned her until she was facing him. “There’s nothing here—nothing—that we didn’t already know. Something bad is going to happen if we don’t solve these clues in time. We knew that.

Nothing’s changed. We just need to focus on finding the answer.”

“Right. Of course.” Her brow furrowed and she shivered, then hugged herself.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Just a chill.” She pressed her hand to her forehead. “Do you think I’m getting a fever?”

A wave of fear built in his gut—what if the timing was off? What if they were already too late to find an antidote?—but he kept his expression calm and certain. “You’re just scared. You’re projecting. Now you’re playing the role of the sick victim.Don’t. Play the role of the survivor.”

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“I don’t—”

“No.”He pressed his finger over her lips. “You’re the heroine of this story, Jennifer. And the heroine doesn’t die. And she doesn’t lose focus. Now, is that a role you can play?”

She nodded, a little weak, but definitive.

“Good. Because if you can’t, I may have to cast someone else in the part.”

She actually smiled at that, and his heart lifted. “Yeah? For the first time in my life, I’m thinking maybe it’s time to back out of a role.”

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“Chance of a lifetime, kid,” he said, and squeezed her fingers.

“The show must go on,” she retorted.

Since he couldn’t think of any more clichés, he tapped the computer. “Back to work,” he said, then navigated back to the screen with their clue.

“Right,” she said. “Just like the song say.”

“All the livelong day,” he responded, finishing the line of lyrics fromWorking. They shared a quick grin, then both focused on the screen. “I think I’ve got the next line,” he said, after a few minutes.

“Yeah?” She leaned in close and looked at the pad where he’d written the next bit: So scurry, scurry like gaggling geese, Run to Bishop to make your peace.

“Oklahoma!‘Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry, when I take you out in my surrey.’ From

‘Surrey With the Fringe on Top.’ Great song,” she said. “Except now it’s going to be going through my head for the rest of the night.”

“There’s no production ofOklahoma! going on right now. Not that I know of, anyway. Are we supposed to find a surrey? We’re in Manhattan for Christ’s sake, not out on the prairie. Where are we supposed to—oh.”

“The park,” he said, certain she’d come to the same conclusion he had.

She nodded. “That has to be it. Except what’s the Bishop thing?”

“You ever take one of those rides? Talk with the driver?”

“No. And isn’t the point of those things to be romantic? What on earth were you doing talking with the driver?”

“Bad date,” he said. “And very beside the point.”

“Which is?”

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“The horses have names. I remember the one pulling our cart was Thibideaux.”

“So maybe there’s a horse named Bishop.”

“Exactly.”

“Okay, but what about the rest of the clue? The clock and the petals and the ever-so-encouraging reference to being dead? And what are we supposed to do once we find this horse?”

“I don’t know.”

“And what about the stalling reference? Are we supposed to go to the horse stalls? Or are we supposed to find the horse with his carriage?”

Devlin frowned. He’d been imagining a scenario where they found the horse, found the carriage, then found the answer. The possibility that the answer might not be there—that they might have to go to the stables—frustrated him. Especially since he had no idea where the stables might be.

“Dev?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “First we need to find Bishop. After that, everything else will fall into place.”

“You’re sure?”

“No,” he said. “But I believe in positive thinking.”

“Me too,” she said, then stood up. “Let’s go.”

He grabbed her tote bag for her, and she headed toward the door, pulling it open, and then letting out a scream that just about ripped his heart.

He leaped forward, only to have her hold out a hand. “It’s okay, it’s okay. Oh, shit, he scared me.”

Devlin looked around her into the hall and saw the room service cart there, along with a startled-looking waiter in uniform.

“I didn’t mean to scare you, ma’am.”

“Not your fault,” Devlin said. He slipped out, taking Jenn’s hand and tugging her along past the
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cart.

Then he took the cover off one plate and grabbed a strip of bacon. “Want some?” he asked her.

“Because I think we’re getting room service to go.”

JENNIFER

“We’re never going to find a specific horse,” I said. “We don’t even know that this is where he’s working from, especially now that the Plaza is essentially shut down.”

The taxi had dropped us off catty-corner to the Plaza Hotel, soon to be the Plaza condominiums, with

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just a few hotel rooms thrown in for good measure and to appease the locals who’d gone ballistic at the thought of the landmark hotel being transformed into a truly exclusive domain. A compromise had been reached (amazing, really, when you realize both politicians and real estate developers were involved in the squabble) and now the place was undergoing massive renovations.

All of which would be of no interest to me whatsoever, except for the fact that the most popular location from which to hire a carriage and driver for a ride through Central Park was the little area by the statue of

General Sherman just across from the Plaza. And now that there were fewer tourists in the area, there were also fewer carriages.

“We start here,” Devlin said. “We ask all the drivers if they know a horse named Bishop, and if they don’t, we get the name of the company they work out of. I’ll keep asking drivers and you call the companies and do the same. That’s my plan. Direct, to the point, and hopefully brilliant.”

I didn’t have a better plan. Plus, I agreed that his was pretty good. So we headed past General Sherman to the line of carriages. There were only five lined up, and I felt a little twinge of pessimism. It must have shown on my face, too, because Devlin said, “It’s only eight. Still early.

There are probably more carriages coming.”

“Evening is the time for romantic rides,” I said. “And I don’t have until tonight. Hell, I don’t even have until lunch. For all we know, the clue’s just going to lead us somewhere else. Probably all the way down to Battery Park.If we even find the clue in the first place.”

“We’ll find it,” he said.

I wanted to be as confident as he was, but I wasn’t doing a very good job. Still, my pessimism wasn’t going to stop me from doing my damnedest to find Bishop. So while Devlin started at one end of the line, I started at the other.

“Hi,” I said, to a twenty-something driver with a dark brown horse. “That wouldn’t happen to be

Bishop, would it?”

“Nah,” he said. “That’s Roger. Twenty bucks gets you the short tour around. Great way to see the park.

Head back home and tell all your friends.”

“Home’s Midtown,” I said, “but thanks anyway.”

“No prob. Bring a date some night,” he added, but I’d already moved on to the next horse in the carriage line. This one wasn’t Bishop, either, but he did give me good news. So good, in fact, that I

almost kissed the driverand horse. I managed to restrain myself, though I did yell for Devlin at the top of my lungs, causing every tourist and driver in the area to turn and stare.

Devlin raced over. “Bishop?” he said with a glance toward the horse.

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“Not this one, but he says Bishop works this corner.”

“They should be along anytime. He’s usually here before me. Probably already in the park,” the other driver said. I didn’t know his name, but I decided he was my new best friend.

“Should we wait?” Devlin asked. “Do you know for sure he’s here today?”

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The driver shook his head, and I felt the fear well up again. “Sorry. He hardly ever misses a day, so I’d lay odds he’s here. Of course, he coulda gotten an all-day job. Wedding. Someone gettin’

engaged, that kinda thing.”

I met Devlin’s eyes.

“We’ll hope not,” he said.

“We can’t just wait around,” I said. “Tick tick, remember?”

“I know. How long’s the ride through the park?” he asked the driver.

“’Bout twenty minutes.”

“We’ll wait fifteen. He’s not back, we’ll call his boss. Guy must have a cell phone.”

“Sure thing,” the driver said. “He’s with Central Park Carriages. Not my outfit, but a good place.