Dead Man Gaming Read online

  If I did it, and I got caught, I was looking at 20 to life. California had passed a three-strike law a couple of years ago, which said that anybody convicted three times of a felony would go away for life.

  I would probably die in prison.

  But if I didn’t do it, my best friend’s little brother was a dead man.

  Or… even worse… they would kill my best friend.

  I wrestled with my conscience like I was wrestling the devil. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life, and at the end of it, sweat was pouring down my face.

  I didn’t want to say it – I hated to say it – but I finally did.

  “One job,” I said, my voice shaking. “You understand? One time. Then I’m OUT.”

  “Jimmy, thank you – THANK you – ”

  “Seriously, after this, I am out forever. Even if Leo gets in trouble again, I’m OUT. It’ll be on him.”

  “Yeah, yeah, of course. Dude, I’ll give you all the rest of the money – ”

  “I don’t want it,” I said angrily. “I’m only doing this because of your family. I won’t let you lose Leo – and I’m not gonna lose you. That’s the only reason I’m doing it. Any money over and above what Leo owes, you take it – I don’t want a penny of it. I want to be free and clear with nothing on my conscience. Understood?”

  “Understood. Thank you, Jimmy – I swear to God you won’t regret this.”

  Famous last words.

  6

  The target was a warehouse in the industrial part of downtown LA. According to Rod, the business wholesaled some sort of expensive machinery – and because of an accounting quirk, they always had a ton of cash on hand at the end of the business quarter.

  Rod had an inside man who was able to give us the layout of the place and the schedule for the night guard. For a place with 300 grand in a safe, they were surprisingly lax on security. One rent-a-cop with a flashlight and a taser doing 45-minute rounds – which means we had roughly a 30-minute window to get in and get out before he came back.

  It was a Browning, though, which meant it was doable.

  We couldn’t wait. The money was sitting in the safe for the next two days – but after that, it was getting deposited in the bank. The next chance wouldn’t come around for three months. Way too late for Rod and Leo.

  That was how I found myself in a deserted warehouse not even 36 hours after I’d just gotten out of prison.

  We drove up just after 11PM . There was only one car in the parking lot, and the rest of the neighborhood was deserted.

  “Thanks again for doing this, Jimmy,” Rod said.

  “Let’s just get it done.”

  Sitting there in Rod’s truck, I had a bad, bad feeling I couldn’t shake. It felt exactly like right before the last job when I got busted.

  I told myself I was being superstitious.

  We have an inside man. The entire place is completely shut down. It’s a Browning. There’s nobody in sight. We can do this.

  We got out of the truck and snuck over to the front door. Ron bypassed the security system – he was always the alarms guy – and I picked the lock.

  Easy-peasy Japonesy.

  We found the safe exactly where the inside man told us it would be – in an office on the second floor. I got out my bag of tools.

  “I’m gonna go wait downstairs,” Rod said. “I’ll let you know if anybody comes.”

  I nodded and watched him walk out, then started in on the safe.

  I began by drilling a hole with my industrial, diamond-tooth drill. The idea was to create a tiny hole I could sneak a fiber optic line inside of, so I could see the bolts and what was going on.

  I guess the sound of the drill covered everything up, because I didn’t hear them.

  I didn’t even know they were there until the flashlights lit up the entire room.

  As soon as I stopped the drill, I heard the unmistakable sound of a shotgun racking.

  Sha-CHUNK.

  “FBI! Put your hands where we can see them!”

  My heart literally stopped in my chest. For a second I thought I was gonna die from fear.

  As I put my hands in the air and slowly stood up and turned around, I only had two thoughts in my head:

  What happened to Rod?

  and

  I’m sorry, Grandma. I’m so, so sorry.

  7

  An hour later I was sitting by myself in a crappy interrogation room in LAPD headquarters downtown, thinking about how severely I had screwed up my life. Again.

  I replayed every time my older brother had put me down for breaking the law.

  I thought over and over about how I was going to have to explain this to my grandmother and mom.

  But most of all, I just kept agonizing about how I wished I’d never said ‘yes.’

  I kept coming back to two things that would jolt me out of my self-pity parade:

  Now Leo’s going to die, was one.

  The other was, What the hell happened to Rod?

  I sat in that blank, scuffed-up, off-white room for two hours before the suits came in.

  There were two of them. A middle-aged white guy in a crisp suit, and a really hot Hispanic woman in a jacket, slacks, and blouse. Shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes, red lips, incredible figure.

  Ha. I was horny even when I was staring down the barrel of twenty to life.

  So sue me. I hadn’t gotten laid in six years.

  Probably wasn’t going to be for another couple of decades, either.

  The old guy sat on the other side of the table and plopped down a big manila folder on the desk. The woman stood in the background looking at me angrily, arms crossed.

  “James ‘Jimmy’ Stanislavsky,” the old guy said. “I’m Agent Dobbs of the FBI. This is Agent Alvarez.”

  I just looked back at them, saying nothing – though I couldn’t help thinking, What’s the FBI doing here instead of the LAPD?

  And what the hell was in that safe?

  Dobbs smiled – though not in a friendly way. “Not even out for 48 hours, and just itching to go back in.”

  “It’s not like that,” I protested gloomily.

  “No? What’s it like, then? You thought you’d been granted a free hall pass to go back to your life of crime? You thought you had superpowers?”

  “My best friend’s little brother is into some people for a hundred grand, and I – ”

  “Don’t care,” Dobbs interrupted. “I’m sure it’s the biggest sob story of all time – I can hear the violins playing as we speak – but I don’t care. What I do care about is we caught you in the middle of a robbery, red-handed.”

  “He’s going to die!”

  “Then he should go to the cops.”

  “But if he does that then my best friend’s going to die!”

  “Then they should all go to the cops,” Dobbs said in a tired voice. “Let’s stop focusing on other people’s troubles for a minute, because you’ve got plenty of your own. This is your third strike. You know what that means under current California law?”

  I bent over and put my head in my hands. “Yes.”

  “You’re going back in for 20 to life, my friend.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  I heard Dobbs flip open the file. I glanced up. He was looking at the papers inside now. “You were in prison for – what, six years? Sentenced you to 12 but you got out on good behavior, right?”

  “Look,” I grumbled, “you caught me red-handed. Can I just talk to my lawyer?”

  “You didn’t answer the question. You were in prison for six years, right?”

  I didn’t see the point of this. Why were they torturing me? They had me dead to rights – what were they looking for, a confession?

  But why weren’t they asking for one, then?

  “Yeah,” I mumbled.

  “How did you manage to survive all that time on the inside?”

  I frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “You don’t
exactly strike me as the cage fighter type. How’d you survive in prison?”

  “I’m good at not pissing people off.”

  Dobbs smiled wryly. “Except for the cops.”

  “Except for the cops,” I sighed.

  “Were you ever…” Dobbs paused, and I could tell exactly what he was insinuating by the next word. “…‘attacked’ in prison?”

  “No I was not, though I don’t see why that’s any of your business, or why the hell you care, since you’re going to be sending me back.”

  Dobbs ignored me and flipped through the papers in my file again. “You grandmother speaks Russian?”

  “Yeah. She was an immigrant from Russia. So was my dad.”

  “He died when you were young, right?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “You speak Russian?”

  “What does this have to do with me going to prison for 20 to life?”

  “Just answer the question. Do you speak Russian?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I understand it – I speak a little, but I mostly just understand it.”

  “Did you associate with Russian gangs in prison?”

  Where the hell was this going?

  “I knew them, but I didn’t ‘associate’ with them.”

  “How would you describe your relationship with Russian inmates?”

  “I stayed the hell out of their way.”

  “Does the Russian mafia have any sort of bounty on your head?”

  “No.”

  “Do they owe you any favors?”

  “No.”

  “Would you say, that you are basically an unknown quantity to them?”

  I didn’t know what kind of mind games they were trying to pull, but I snapped. “What the hell is this? I thought you guys just wanted to send me down the river for 20 years. You have an open-and-shut case. Why are we talking about this?”

  Dobbs folded his hands and fixed me with a piercing stare. “Because we have an open-and-shut case, and we could send you down the river for 20 years… unless you cooperate with us.”

  Ohhhhhhhh. So that’s it.

  “I’m not snitching. Plus, I don’t have anything to snitch about.”

  “We’re not talking about snitching. We’re talking about infiltration.”

  I stared at him, totally caught off guard. “You want me to go undercover into a Russian gang?”

  “Yes.”

  Holy SHIT.

  “You might as well just kill me now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Russians sure will once they find out I’m working for you.”

  “That’s the beauty of it. They’ll never know your real identity, and there’s no way they can kill you.” Dobbs paused, then muttered, “Well, there’s no way they can kill you for real.”

  “…what?!”

  “It’s simple, Jimmy,” Dobbs said, and gave me a smile. “We don’t want you to infiltrate the Russian mafia in prison. We want you to do it in a videogame.”

  8

  Of all the weird-ass things anybody’d ever said to me in my entire life, I think that was the weirdest. It even beat what crazy homeless people shouted at me in the subway.

  “Infiltrate the Russian mafia in a video game? What the hell are you talking about?”

  Dobbs settled back in his chair. “Lots changed since you went into prison. You know much about what’s happened in the world of technology the last six years? Specifically the last four years?”

  I’m a relatively bright guy, but I’m more street smart. I didn’t exactly read Scientific American in prison.

  “Not really, no.”

  “They’ve had astounding revolutions in quantum computing. You know anything about quantum physics, Jimmy?” Dobbs asked. I could hear the sarcasm and condescension in his voice.

  “Just that’s it about real small stuff. Smaller than atoms.”

  “True,” Dobbs said, and he eased up on the sarcasm. “You’re right about the subatomic part. Anyway, they applied it to technology while you were in the clink, and now we’ve got computers – not all of them, but some very expensive ones owned by the government and some very big companies – that are a million times more powerful than the ones you and I use.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  “Video games were one of the things it revolutionized. You know there are video games you can play now where they basically beam the game inside your head? It’s so realistic you actually think that it’s real.”

  I’d heard about some of that in prison. “Isn’t it expensive?”

  “Oh yeah. Not so expensive the average person can’t get in on it, but they’re about the price of a new car.”

  For the first time in the conversation, the hot Hispanic woman spoke up. “More like a used car.”

  Dobbs looked up at her in amusement. “I guess you’d know.”

  “So what does that have to do with the Russian mafia?” I asked.

  “I’m coming to that. You ever hear of the Silk Road?”

  Jeez, this guy bopped all over the place with his questions. It was like watching popcorn pop out of skillet. “Yeah… it was like an Internet website, right? Where you could get drugs?”

  “Drugs, weapons, stolen goods – lots and lots of illegal stuff, including some very evil things as well. Child pornography… women sold into slavery… bad, bad shit. They ran it on the Dark Web – which is basically the underbelly of the internet, inaccessible by regular browsers. You could only get on if you knew where to look and you had the private password. The guys who ran the Silk Road named it after the trade route Marco Polo established with China back in the middle ages. You know about Marco Polo, right?”

  “The swimming pool game?” I said sarcastically.

  Dobbs smiled like he was saying, Smartass. “Well, the Bureau shut it down back in 2013 – then version 2.0 popped back up, and we shut it down again. But no matter how many times we shut it down, somebody else always opened it back up. People want their drugs and very bad things, I guess, and as long as they do, there’s going to be somebody who’s going to sell it to them. Back in the day, it’d take us months of research to find out where they were hiding the Silk Road. It was hidden. But when Silicon Valley perfected quantum computing about four years ago, we were able to do a sweep of the entire dark web. Interpol and the FBI were able to find illegal sites like the Silk Web and shut ‘em down as fast as they could pop back up. I don’t know how it worked, I just know that quantum computers were able to cut through old-style computer networks like a hot knife through butter.

  “In the process, we seized trillions of dollars of black-market money. One of the biggest groups we hit was the Russian mafia. They had to move all their money transactions off-line, back to cold, hard cash. Until they figured out how to get it back online again… which is where the video games come in. That’s where the Russians took all their transactions: into a videogame. The biggest videogame in the world, called DarkWorld. It’s run on a quantum computer – the same videogame they beam into people’s minds who play it.”

  Whoa.

  “You mean… they’re basically running the Silk Road through this videogame?”

  “Exactly. Well, the financial transactions, yes. Not the physical, ‘hold it in your hand’ type stuff. You can’t exactly get high sniffing a line of coke in a video game.”

  The hot Hispanic woman spoke up again. “Actually, you sort of can, since the computer can beam the sensation right into your brain – ”

  Dobbs stared at her.

  She went red in the face. “Not that I’ve ever done anything like that. Sir.”

  As interesting as the idea of virtual drug use was, I had other questions. “If they could find stuff on the Dark Web, why can’t they find the money inside the videogame?”

  “Good question. Again, I don’t understand the specifics, but apparently inside this world, quantum computing can create objects that exist independently of any list on the computer. They’ve more
or less created virtual money – actual, virtual currency that you can physically hold in the game – that can’t be tracked or traced by anybody. The Russians still do all their illegal stuff out in the real world, but all the money gets exchanged over a private gaming system that makes it absolutely impossible for us to track movements of money.”

  “So what does that have to do with me?”

  “We need somebody to infiltrate the Russian gang.”

  “Then I would suggest a Russian.”

  Dobbs shook his head. “In this day and age, the Russian mafia has files on every single Rooskie out there. The mob’s intelligence is almost as good as ours. No, what we need is somebody who’s legitimate – somebody with a criminal background, who can pass in the criminal world, who has a history of being able to charm criminals and gain their trust so they don’t get killed – and specifically, someone with a set of skills that would be very valuable to the Russian mob.”

  “I’m a safecracker. Unless they’ve got safes in this videogame world, I’m of no use to them.”

  Dobbs smiled. “Well, as a matter of fact, they do have safes. Which is why you would be valuable to them.”

  I stared at him. “They have safes in video games?”

  “Special safes, yeah.”

  “Can’t they just… like… type a button and open it?”

  “Doesn’t work like that anymore.”

  “What about quantum computing? You used it to crack the Dark Web, why can’t you use it to crack safes?”

  “Well, since the safes were created with quantum computing, they’d need the next step up from quantum computing to crack ‘em.” Dobbs looked over at the hot Hispanic lady. “What would that be, Agent Martinez?”

  “No idea, sir,” she answered.

  I shook my head. “I’m sure there’s a ton of Russian safecrackers you could recruit instead.”

  “None that aren’t known or employed by the Russians themselves.”

  “You know I’m strictly small-time, right? I did little gigs – no more than a couple hundred G’s. Tonight was going to be my biggest one ever.”

  And I wasn’t even going to keep any of the money.