Game Over by Andrew Klavan Read Free Book Online Page A

to argue. Quickly, he pushed past the guard to the elevator. He pushed the button. The elevator buzzed to life. But the box was up top, in the booth. It started to descend slowly. Rick couldn’t wait. He rushed to the stairs.
    The stairs wound up above him a long way. Rick had been working out hard for months, bringing his legs back into shape, but they weren’t wholly healed. They still hurtwhen he pushed too far. They hurt now—hurt like fire—as he bounded up the stairs. He was breathing hard by the time he was halfway to the top. He was clinging to the banister, pulling himself onward despite the pain.
    Now the booth door appeared before him. He was gasping for breath. The pain lanced through his legs with every step he took. He didn’t care. He still had the heart of a football hero, passionate, indomitable. He had woken in agony after some games—lots of games—games in which he’d been tackled hard and driven to the ground again and again. He had woken in agony and gone right back into training. That was who he was. That was what he was like. He was not going to let a little searing physical torture slow him down. He never had before.
    He reached the door. He pushed it open. He saw the soldier at once, lying facedown on the floor in a pool of his own blood. The room was filled with a weird smell, not a human smell, a smell like lightning, air on fire, ozone burning.
    Rick rushed across the booth to the fallen man. He knelt down beside him. He turned him over.
    Dead. A young man, only a little older than Rick. Short, cropped blond hair, blue eyes, open, staring. There was a single wound in his chest. Not a bullet wound. Rick recognized it. He’d seen such wounds before. It was a wound from a sword.
    He understood. The man—the soldier—this RL man—had been struck down by a soldier Boar—a creature from the Realm.
    But how?
    Rick knelt there staring into the soldier’s staring dead eyes.
    Is this a dream?
    It wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t.
    What is going on? he thought. What in the world is happening?

6. CONTRACT KILLER
    HAROLD HEPPLEWHITE, A professional murderer, stepped out of his car into a ghost town. Not long ago—not long ago at all—this had been a working facility, a secret high-tech outpost surrounded by an enclosure that was almost the dark mirror image of the MindWar compound: barbed wire, guard towers, soldiers with machine guns standing watch.
    This, however, was Kurodar’s headquarters, a secret station hidden in deep jungle on a deserted island off the coast of Africa. This was where the Realm was created, where it sprang out of the terrorist’s imagination and spread through cyberspace.
    Hepplewhite looked around him. The once busy compound was all but abandoned now. The barracks were dark and empty. Windows broken. Doors banging in slowly rising wind. The soldiers were gone, the guard towers unmanned. Only a few local men and women wandered here and there. South African natives from poverty-stricken villages, they had been shipped over to the island to do the outpost’s cooking and cleaning. Hepplewhitespotted one of them—a very dark-skinned woman in khaki rags—carrying a pot of some sort of steaming food across the empty area to the large building at the center of the place.
    It was an odd building, this central one. A white, modern, faceless tower without windows. To Hepplewhite, it looked less like a building than some kind of bizarre machine. But there was a door set in the ground floor. As he watched, the woman with the pot disappeared through it.
    Hepplewhite left his car behind and headed after her.
    Harold Hepplewhite was a slender man of medium height with the narrow, intelligent face of a librarian. Oily black hair, slicked back. Mild eyes blinking behind round wire-rimmed glasses. Thin lips decorated with an even thinner mustache. He wore white linen pants and a white linen jacket over a paisley shirt