The Never Game

Hong turned to Eddie Linn. In a voice just as calm and flat as that with which he’d addressed Shaw, Hong said, “Mr. Linn. At first, when Ms. Towne told me about your conversation with Mr. Trevor today, about insisting you meet with Mr. Shaw... Oh, no need to look confused. Your contract with us allows us to intercept all your communications.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“You didn’t read that. Which is on you. I was saying when Ms. Towne first told me about your disloyalty—”

“It wasn’t—”

The marble gaze from Hong silenced him.

“I believed you would be doing what you’d done at Andrew Trevor’s company: selling code you’d written based on his copyrights to third parties.”

So that was Trevor’s leverage over Linn: this theft.

“It was nothing,” Linn said. “Really. It was code that was just easier for me to write. Anybody could have done it.”

“But anybody didn’t. You did. I’ve always been aware that you might be willing to sell me up the river.” Hong frowned. “Is it ‘up the river’ or ‘down the river’?”

“Down the river,” Shaw said. “From the slave trade. New Orleans. Up the river is something else.”

“Ah.” A look of satisfaction from learning a new fact. “Today, your transgression wasn’t theft of copyrighted material. But it was a betrayal. So your career with HSE is now terminated.”

“No!”

“Since there was the blush of good cause in this whole matter, I will not do what I first thought: to make certain you never work in the tech world again.”

Linn’s eyes widened. Tears glistened. “Will you give me a month? Just to give me a chance to find something new. Please?”

Hong’s steadfast face registered a splinter of disbelief. He glanced at Ms. Towne, who had a hand on her burgeoning stomach. She nodded. Hong continued: “Your office has already been cleaned out and your personal effects are in a van on the way to your house in Sunnyvale. They’ll be left on your back porch, so you’ll want to get there straightaway. After you leave my office, you’ll be escorted to your car and shown off the grounds.”

“My mortgage... I’m already overdue.”

Shaw began to speak. Hong lowered his head and said, “Please, Mr. Shaw. You knew this was a possibility, didn’t you?”

He’d put it about twenty percent.

“Since this incident has had a happy ending and I have lost no secrets or been the victim of sabotage, I’m inclined to help you out, Mr. Shaw. Thinking that this Mr. Thompson, your blogger, was going to expose some secret in the data-mining world, a secret worth killing for? That’s infinitely unlikely. Stealing one’s data? Everyone these days soaks up your data as if using a sponge. The boy making your submarine sandwich at the local franchise, your car repair garage, your coffee shop, your pharmacy, your internet browser — and I’m not even up to credit rating companies, insurers and your doctors. Data is the new oxygen. It’s everywhere. And what happens with an abundance of any product? Its value diminishes. No one would murder for it. You should look elsewhere for your kidnapper. Now, good day.”

He picked up a pencil, examined the tip with approval and pulled an overturned document toward him. He said to himself, “Up the river, down the river.” Another nod.

Hong waited until Shaw and Linn were at the door and could not read the words before turning the sheet faceup.

59

Shaw and Standish were in Joint Major Crimes Task Force Annex No. 1.

The Quick Byte Café.

Standish hung up her phone. “Hong. And the company. Clean as a whistle. Homeland Security, the Bureau, DoD.”

“The Santa Clara County Middle School Board of Supervisors too.”

“The...” Frowning, Standish cast a quick glance. “Oh. A joke. You don’t joke much, Shaw. Well, no. You do. You just don’t smile, so it’s hard to tell.”

She tossed down her pen, with which she’d been recording the results of her calls — doodling, really. She toyed with the heart-shaped earring. “I’ve got to say, we’ve struck out a few times here. Knight. Hong-Sung. You don’t seem as upset as I thought you’d be.”

“Struck out?” Shaw was confused. “Knight got us to Avon. Hong Wei gave us the idea that Thompson probably wasn’t killed because of the data-mining story.”

Her phone hummed. And from the timbre of her voice when she spoke, he knew it was her partner, Karen.

Shaw pulled out his laptop, logged on and ran through the local news feeds once more. His notebook was ready. Of the stories he skimmed, none were relevant to Elizabeth Chabelle’s kidnapping.

There is a little-discussed aspect of survivalism that some people call destiny and some call fate and some, the more earthbound, call coincidence. You’re in a bad way. There is no solution to the crisis you face, one that seems certain to kill you or de-toe you, say, thanks to frostbite.

But then? You survive. With your ten little appendages intact.

Because someone or something intervenes.