Day 66 - Darwin's Game - Chapter 15 (1820 words)

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DARWIN'S GAME

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 15

Agent Levy was aware what day it was, everyone knew it by now as the week had passed and now a fourth episode of Darwin's Game was due to arrive to the Facts Alone crew, sometime in some mysterious and anonymous method of delivery. They had been watching the business partners for every conceivable moment they could with some obvious and with extensive and totally unseen methods. They had made a strategically important decision to scale back the more obvious methods and work on the longer term strategy of gathering evidence and clues to eventually uncovering the identity of Darwin and making the arrest.

There was an initial plan to watch closely and detain any and all people involved in the delivery of the material, either nabbing the culprit of exposing a weak link in the chain to work back and find the person behind the game, potentially saving the remaining eleven lives, back in week one anyway. That strategy was not going to work, they were not dealing with a low intelligence and low resourced criminal, the opposite of that if anything. So in week three, heading towards episode four arriving, it was time to dial back the immediacy and focus on the long game of collection, analysis and action.

He had taken coffee with Blake and Jacob that day and explained that new tack to them garnering a cynical response of disbelief. They still thought that, like many of the conservative think tankers and pundits, they were in the picture for being behind the whole thing in the first place. They took any news with a grain of salt, knowing full well that their lives were still under the microscope, their phones and server comms being listened in to and that this would not go away, even after the game ended, even if Darwin was caught and they were exonerated.

Plenty of people had an opinion about who Darwin was, the accusations were levelled as 'guesses' but some of the guesses going on in the print media were close to libel and the internet and TV shows were only marginally more effective in legally masking the pointing of fingers at any and all comers. Still while there was widespread opposition to the Game in principle, the personal and private worlds of the law enforcement professionals working the case were at odds with what they were trying to achieve. A number of cops and agents raised the ethics of it and wondered if letting the game play out may not be a win-win situation. These were not innocent people, and what would life be like for them if they survived the Game by some miracle? They could end up profiting from it if they were the one lucky player out of the dozen of hardened offenders selected for some very unnatural selection experiments.

So they dialled back the active investigation and work the leads they had with a lot more focus on the trail leading to now, letting the intervening weeks play out for a while was what almost everyone wanted.

Levy had sent agents to look into the local investigation of Jackson's original report of death at the house fire almost a year ago, but they found nothing and the DNA was a dead end. They exhumed the coffin of Mark Rowlands and found and empty coffin, plenty of Rowlands DNA lining the box and a firm belief that he had been in the ground for at least some of the time. Agents and local police were combing through the medical records, trying to figure out who was paid off at the prison to declare Rowlands dead. Was he taken that long ago by Darwin? Or was it an escape and that he was picked up later?

The digging turned up plenty of guilty people, abuse of prisoners, drug trafficking the penal system and other bonus crimes uncovered, but nothing to show any complicity in the Game or the abduction of the players in it. A number of these had been missing or 'dead' for nine months, so they could have been taken then and hooked up with the larger group over a period of time. They could have started the Game at the moment of them, the youngest joining date, had come into play. They could all be dead by now, they could all be eliminated and there's one survivor out there right now, waiting to be revealed. It was impossible to tell from the detail that was carefully allowed out of the video episodes leaked. There was no audio to linked anything the players said, there was nothing visual in the featureless rooms that housed the games to link any location or time frame.

There were no windows, no sounds, no backdrops or shadows from which you could infer that the Game was being filmed in California, let alone the United States. They were hoping for a clue, even the smallest of things that they could follow up for lead to go on. They had poured over the financial records of everyone in the prison system who had links to the players and found nothing, nothing related to the Games.

It was midday when Levy got word that Jacob was on his way to the office to see him and that Blake was working from his home, an apartment complex where they had people stashed and watching. He put on a fresh pot of coffee and waited for the man to arrive.

It was nearly 1 pm when he realised that Jacob was not coming, he contacted the agent sent to trail the Facts Alone co-founder and got no response. He mobilised the office to track them both down but there was no one picking up their cell phones. GPS monitoring was initiated and both of the phones were showing as the same spot and an armed team was sent to their location with a warning to take caution.

Levy got there moments after the advance team had and they were setting up a perimeter around an abandoned office building in downtown, old and crumbling masonry greeted Dan as he walked up to the entrance, various people milling about him encasing him in a kevlar vest dressing him like royalty instead of someone about to risk their life for a look inside a condemned building. He was following the signal of the GPS on his agents phone and going in alone to the lobby of the decrept structure.

The signal was strong and quite close, but there was no sign of device of owner as he swept through the first floor lobby, a giant open area that looked like the central train station lobby and had once been vibrant and alive with commerce and people doing their daily dash for career and providing for life. He took the stairs to the first floor, the elevators, wrought iron cages on chains, had no power and would have been far from stealthy.

The first floor was dark and he shone his torch around the floor before signalling to the forces outside to secure the exits and sweep the ground floor and the basement for any clues or signs of this being a trap. He kept the number of people entering to a minimum, betting against the distraction tactic of overcommitting too many resources to a single area.

“John?” He called out in the dark, to the agent who was assigned to Jacob that day. There was no response, and he kept looking about and criss crossed the offices from the left to the right from stairway to stairway before moving up to the second floor.

As soon as he opened the nearest door to the stairway a muffled shouting caught his attention and he knew that someone was gagged and nearby, and he took his time rather than rushing headlong to a potential trap.

“John? I'm coming in through the west entrance, I'll be there shortly” he called out, confusing the directions and the expectation of arrival times deliberately and pinpointing where he could hear the muffled noises. A second muffled voice joined in and was set in a different tone and seemed fresher and louder, perhaps it was Jacob and he had not bothered shouting for help until now. They were in the next room over, he could see the silhouettes through the remaining smoked glass of the door to that office, one of the few without the doors and windows smashed or broken down with age.

Levy crept along the wall keeping his head down and his torch off, there was enough light coming down the corridor for him to see, and the office itself was on the outer edge of the floor with lighting from the daylight outside casting the shadows and silhouettes that he could see backlit n the glass windows and walls.

Still kneeling he cautiously turned the door knob easily, it had been lubricated recently. He turned it with a three finger grip trying to preserver the fingerprints that were undoubtedly not here but he'd kick himself if they were and he had obliterated them.

The door swung open and there in the centre of the room was his agent John and the web site founder Jacob, bound and gagged in a chairs aligned back to back. Levy raised a finger to his lips to keep them quiet, but all he got was more noise and an exaggerated rolling of eyes. They thought, believed themselves to be alone clearly, but no chances would be taken.

He called for back up and a CSI team to sweep the floor for clues as he removed the gag from Jacob first then John before noticing that taped to John's chest was an envelope with “For Agent Levy, From Darwin” on it. He pulled it off and knew straight away that there was a disc in it, this was episode 4. Probably not the only copy, that was most likely already in someone’s hands over at Facts Alone and being uploaded and consumed en masse already.

There was definitely a feeling of a Game going on and to Levy's mind it was not just the one that was being drip feed to the waiting public by this sadistic game master, there was the cat and mouse of trying to get the perpetrator, the mastermind. Who was the cat in this scenario though? That was a good question.

He cut the men free and to his credit Jacob did not complain or offer any clues, neither of them had anything to note. They were on the way to meet Levy and then they woke up here maybe twenty minutes ago, an envelope attached and no clues to who or why they were here.

Jacob and Dan's phone both pinged on a text message from Blake, the fourth episode was online now if they were interested.