THE GAME

5 hr 17 min to Birth

"I understand your position and expected that we would have philosophical differences," Nemo replied. "It is for precisely this reason that I am forcing you to play this game. The good news is that, if you play well, you will get exactly what you want -- the opportunity to meet me."

"We will not play the game," Flannigan declared.

"I regret having to take Raymond's life, and also having to risk your lives," Nemo said. "As I said, I am not a psychopath, and I derive no particular pleasure in playing with anyone's life."

"We will NOT play."

"Here are the rules," Nemo continued. "It is a game of hide-and-go-seek. I am hiding, and it is your job to find me. Each and any of you who has found me within twenty minutes will live. Any of you who has not found me within twenty minutes will die."

"We are NOT playing, Nemo," Flannigan shouted.

"To keep you moving," Nemo said, "I will kill one of you after ten minutes -- the one of you who is farthest from finding me."

The four of them continued to stare up at the ceiling. But the disembodied voice had nothing else to say.

Gene fiddled with the sports watch on his wrist. "I'd better start a timer," he said.

Simon swept an arm impatiently. "Well, what are we waiting for?" Arms flailing, he paced down the narrow passageway, in the direction of the front of town.

"Wait!" Flannigan said. "Nobody is moving a muscle."

Simon looked over his shoulder with a grimace, but kept walking.

Flannigan quickly withdrew a tiny pistol and held it by her waist. "Stop now."

He stopped. "Go ahead and shoot me," he sneered. "It will increase your own odds of dying."

"We're not playing this game," Flannigan said. "He can't make us play. We're all going to sit here and let the clock run out."

"He'll kill us then," Simon retorted.

"Most likely not," Flannigan said. "Because in that case he won't have gotten what he wanted, which was for us to play the game. Evidently he wants us to find him, or at least try to find him."

"He might still kill us," Simon said. "What do you think he'll do if we don't play?"

Flannigan considered his question. If we don't play....he'll probably kill one of us. To show us that we still have to play, or if we don't, we're all certain to die. Nemo had set up the game well. If they played, he would kill one of them after ten minutes, as he said. If they didn't play, it would still make sense for him to kill one of them, so they would get serious and start playing.

She thought of the satellite phone, which was still hoisted awkwardly under her arm and hiking up her blouse and suit jacket. That wouldn't help. And the walkie-talkie. How fast could Sam get here? Half an hour? There was no time. Plus Nemo would see her on the walkie-talkie and might retaliate.

Gene spoke up. "I think we should play," he said.

"Why's that," Flannigan asked. Gene's suggestion violated the rules of dealing with terrorists. But she had been instructed to let Gene call the shots -- even if he didn't fully realize that he was.

"Nemo would most likely give us a game that we have a chance of winning," Gene explained. "In that case, he has judged that the difficulty of this game is reasonable, given our abilities. But since he doesn't know too much about us, it is likely that he has underestimated our abilities." Flannigan knew what he meant: Nemo made this puzzle for smart people. But I should be able to solve it easily.

The clock was ticking. "Okay," she said. "If we go back to the control room, he might be there. Or otherwise we can use the monitoring tools there to try to pick him up. The important thing is that we stick together and operate as a team. That is an order. We're going to find him in ten minutes, and none of us is going to die."

Quickly and quietly, they wound their way back through the maze, Gene leading the way. In ten minutes, Nemo would kill the person who was farthest from finding him. Flannigan considered the effect that threat would have on the group: each of them would compete with the others near the end, to try not to be the farthest away. He's trying to divide us, she thought. To get us not to cooperate.

They reached the front of the fake town.

"Can we open the door?" Simon remarked. He moved forward and tried it; it opened.

"He's giving us free passage to try to find him," Flannigan supposed.

In front of them was the door to the tiny changing room, but they weren't going in there. They turned, walking along the large one-way mirror that looked into the testing area. They came to a blank door that read CONTROL ROOM.

"Here goes nothing," Simon declared. He pushed the door and it opened.

There was no one there. The control room was small, with room only for three computers in a row, one chair at each computer. They all faced out into the testing room, which was visible once again through a one-way mirror.

How had Nemo run the "test" to execute Raymond? Flannigan considered the possibilities: he had been here and left. Or he had hacked into these computers remotely. Or maybe the tests could be run from somewhere else.

She gestured for the three men to sit at the computers. Gene sat at the far computer, Kenny in the middle, and Simon closest to the door. Each of them attempted to acquaint himself quickly with the computer system and look for clues to Nemo's whereabouts. She stood behind Gene's chair and looked over his shoulder as he clicked about.

Simon excelled at this task. "Here's a layout of the building," he said. The screen showed a floor plan, colored with diffuse blue and red patches. "It's a heat map. The hot spots are living things."

Flannigan pointed to a pink spot inside the testing room, inside the maze. "Is that him?"

"That's Raymond," Simon corrected. "It's pink, cooling on the way to blue." He pointed to two other spots: one was in the hallway to their wing of the building, outside the door of the little changing room. Another blotch was in the lobby area. "These blotches are cooling down also."

"Security guards," Flannigan said. Two more, she thought. That means we're on our own.

"That explains why they haven't come to our rescue," Simon remarked. He continued to scan the map. "There are no other blotches in the building. It's empty."

This is not good, Flannigan thought. She looked at her watch. "We have five minutes," she said.

"Well, how about that," Gene said. He was talking about something else. Flannigan looked down at Gene's computer. He had Google chat open, and he had initiated a chat with Nemo.

Simon opened his own Google chat and got on a separate conversation with Nemo. Kenny did the same. Nemo got what he wanted: everyone working separately, Flannigan thought. Maybe it's just as well. Maybe one of us will get the answer. They had five minutes until Nemo would send the flybots for another victim.