A Game Called Chaos Read online

  Frank nodded. The two of them left the warehouse and sprinted up the hill to the mansion. The house wasn’t in much better repair than the rest of the town. It was a huge shell of a place with columns beside the entrance and gables on the roof. One solitary tower stretched above the roofline, but the light inside it—which the Hardys had seen previously—was out.

  Despite its dilapidated appearance, the mansion did sport a new mat on the doorstep emblazoned with the word Welcome in bright red letters. As Frank and Joe studied the entryway, they heard a crash from somewhere back in the village.

  “What do you think that was?” Frank asked.

  “I think probably old Scavenger decided to go through that window after all,” Joe said. They could hear the strange whistling again, which seemed to be coming from the tower of the house.

  “Then let’s get inside and out of his range,” Frank said. “Maybe we can stop that whistling, too. I’d bet Cross has a loudspeaker up in that tower. Taking it out might slow Scavenger.” He was about to turn the doorknob when Joe stopped him.

  “Wait,” Joe said. “In School of Chaos most of the doors were booby-trapped.” He pushed aside the doormat with his foot. Under it, the porch showed a suspicious seam. Carefully avoiding that spot, Joe opened the door.

  Where the mat had been, a trapdoor opened. Frank and Joe looked into the hole but couldn’t see the bottom. They stepped around it, entered the house, and closed the door behind them.

  “That was in the second game?” Frank asked.

  Joe nodded. “Yeah. Now that I think of it, we haven’t run into any traps that weren’t in the first two games—or the upcoming one. Nothing from the third game. Not even Bombo Bear. I wonder why?”

  “Maybe Cross only wants to use game elements that her family worked on,” Frank said.

  “Could be that ties into the ‘My past is the key to the future’ clue,” Joe said.

  Frank knitted his brow and said, “Hmm.”

  “What is it?” Joe asked.

  “I just had an idea about Regina Cross,” Frank said. “Where to, now?”

  “Either up or down,” Joe said. “Prisoners are always kept in the tower or the dungeon.”

  Just at that moment, the grandfather clock at the far end of the hall struck thirteen.

  “Duck!” Joe shouted.

  The Hardys ducked just as the clock face popped open and its hands shot down the corridor like arrows. They thunked harmlessly into the frame of the door.

  “Thanks for the warning,” Frank said.

  Joe nodded. “School of Chaos had deadly clocks. Made recess interesting. So, up or down?”

  “I’m betting that the light in the tower was a red herring,” Frank said. “The whistling probably is, too, come to think of it. Let’s see if we can find a way down.”

  The brothers cautiously searched the first floor of the mansion. “If we can find the kitchen,” Frank said, “we can probably find the cellar door. Most old houses used the cellar for cold food storage.”

  “Well, we won’t be using our noses to find the kitchen,” Joe said. “Smells like all Regina Cross has been cooking in here is mildew. She really needs to get a better housekeeper.”

  They avoided an electrified rug in the living room and eventually made their way to the back of the house and the kitchen. Sure enough, one door in the kitchen opened onto a long descending staircase. Frank found a light switch and turned it on.

  The stairs led down to a flagstone floor some twenty feet below. “Hold on to the railings,” Joe said. “I have a bad feeling about these stairs.”

  He and Frank gripped the railings tightly as they went down the stairs. Good thing, too, because when they were halfway down, the stairs flattened under them and turned into a steep ramp. The Hardys’ feet slipped out from under them, but their grip on the rails kept them from sliding into the pit that opened up at the bottom of the slide.

  Using their arms like gymnasts on the parallel bars, they edged down the railings and then jumped off the sides near the bottom, landing on either side of the pit. Frank looked down into the hole. “Spikes at the bottom,” he said “Nasty. Our hostess plays rough.”

  “No wonder she doesn’t have many visitors,” Joe said.

  They could hear some muffled sounds coming from beyond a door in the cellar’s far wall. The Hardys opened the door cautiously, first checking to make sure that no trapdoors would open under them. But as the door swung open, a cobra sprang out.

  Frank and Joe jumped back. “Mechanical?” Frank asked. The six-foot snake seemed focused on him, its head weaving back and forth slightly.

  “I hope so,” Joe said. He darted forward, grabbed the snake by the tail, and whipped its head against the cellar wall. Sure enough, sparks flew and the snake fell limp in his hands, wires hanging from where its head had been.

  “Snake charmers have nothing on you,” Frank said.

  Joe nodded. “Let’s see who’s behind this door.” Cautiously, the brothers stepped into the room. It was a plain chamber, with a flagstone floor and stone walls. Only one door, the door they came through, led from the room. In the center of the room sat a man tied to a chair. The man appeared to be of medium height and build and had a full beard and long brown hair. He had a gag in his mouth.

  When he saw the Hardys, the man started bouncing up and down in the chair and making the muffled cries the Hardys had heard from outside. Joe dropped the snake at the man’s feet and used his pocketknife to cut the ropes on the man’s legs; Frank freed the man’s upper body. As the ropes fell away from his hands, the man pulled the gag from his mouth.

  “You must be Steven Royal,” Joe said, still working on the lower ropes.

  “She’s crazy!” he said. “She was going to kill me!”

  As he said it, a growl from behind them made the Hardys spin. A panel had opened in the far wall and through it stepped a thin blond woman with dark glasses. At her side loped Scavenger, the half-wolf. She had a loaded repeating crossbow in her hands. The bow was leveled at the Hardys, and she held the wolf by the scruff of the neck to keep it in check.

  Joe, still crouched at the foot of the chair, cut the last of Royal’s ropes and said, “Regina Cross, I presume.”

  15 Double Cross

  * * *

  The woman in the doorway nodded and almost smiled. Scavenger growled at the Hardys and prepared to spring.

  “Actually, she’s not Regina Cross at all,” Frank said. “There is no Regina Cross. There never was. Isn’t that right, Ms. Sakai?”

  Joe whistled. “Of course!”

  “So,” she said, taking off her dark glasses, “you figured out my little secret. I’m impressed.” She pulled off her blond wig as well and shook loose her long black hair. Anne Sakai dropped the wig and glasses to the floor. Slim and athletic, she looked like a video-game heroine come to life.

  “The clues were all there,” Frank said, “but your apparent death kept us from figuring it out too soon. But what Joe said about there being no traps from the third game and ‘My past is the future’ helped me figure it out. You didn’t work on that game, but you did work on the first two and the new one.

  “That made me realize that we’d been misunderstanding part of the riddles,” Frank continued. “If Royal wasn’t running this game, then it couldn’t be his past the riddles referred to. And there was only one other person who had a history with the Chaos series—you. Joe was right about your not wanting to use anything from a game you hadn’t worked on.”

  “Call it vanity,” Sakai said, her voice tinged with sweet venom. “But I just never much liked the work of second-rate hacks. Especially on my project.”

  “That’s why you sent the wolf after us in the forest, rather than a bear,” Joe said, still bent over. As he spoke, his hand found the remains of the mechanical snake on the floor. He tightened his fist around its tail.

  “The bear was a joke,” Sakai said. “And a bad one at that. That whole game was a joke, wasn’t it, Steven?�
��

  Royal turned red. “It was a good game!” he said. “It’s not my fault if the public didn’t like it.”

  “The public didn’t like it because I was the heart and soul of the Chaos series,” Sakai said, fixing Royal with an icy stare. “You were nothing without me.”

  “Well, you were nothing without me, either,” Royal said. He started to step forward, but a growl from Scavenger changed his mind. “That’s why you came crawling back to work on A Town Called Chaos.”

  “There was no Town Called Chaos before I contacted you,” Sakai said. “And there wouldn’t be one without me—and there won’t be.”

  “Royal cut you out of the jackpot, didn’t he?” Frank said, trying to keep her talking. “He’d made sure that he controlled who got paid when the game finally came out.”

  “After all the work I did . . .” Sakai said, smoldering.

  “Ha!” Royal said. “You didn’t do any work on Chaos Three, but I still paid money to your estate—or rather you—for it. It’s only fair that I get that money back on the new game. I paid you for the work you’ve already done, but I won’t share the profits. It’s only fair.”

  “Doesn’t seem fair to me,” Joe said, slowly standing. He had the snake in his hand but was careful to keep it hidden behind his body as he stood.

  “So, why’d you do it?” Frank asked, drawing Sakai’s attention back to himself. “Why did you fake your own death?”

  “Tax trouble,” Sakai said. “And fans who just wouldn’t leave me alone. When that McLean woman found me in the Caribbean, I knew that I had to drop out of sight permanently. If she could find me so easily, the IRS would have no trouble. And I owed them big time.”

  She seemed to enjoy telling her story, so Frank and Joe let her go on. They exchanged a secret glance, hoping Royal would keep his big mouth shut for a while.

  “But with me ‘dead’ and the money in a Swiss account . . . problem solved.” She smiled.

  “How’d you pull it off,” Joe asked. “It must have been tricky.”

  “Child’s play,” Sakai said. “For someone with my computer skills, creating a new identity was easy. Amazing what a passport computer will do if you just know how to ask it. The plane crash wasn’t any harder. I parachuted out long before the plane hit and then rafted back to the island where I assumed my new life as Regina Cross.”

  “McLean saw you,” Frank said. “But she assumed you were a ghost.”

  “She’s never been very stable,” Sakai said, smiling.

  “Neither have you!” Royal said. He was nervous and sweating profusely.

  For a moment it seemed as though Sakai would shoot him on the spot. Then Joe said, “I disagree. You’ve got to be pretty together to pull off all of this. What I want to know, though, is why you decided to do another game.”

  Sakai frowned. “The money ran out. I’d spent a lot of it buying what’s left of this town and the local amusement park. And living in Switzerland wasn’t cheap, either. That’s why I gave it up and moved home. The only thing Cross Enterprises has left there is a computer hookup in a one-room flat.

  “Plus”—and here her eyes narrowed angrily again—“I didn’t get as much money from Chaos Three as I thought I would.”

  “You shouldn’t have gotten any at all,” Royal said. “You didn’t actually work on the game.”

  “But I created the series,” she said. “That entitled me to my cut. And then you had the gall to try to cut me out of this one as well.”

  “A dead woman would have had a hard time going to court to collect, I imagine,” Frank said. “Is that why you did it, Royal?”

  “Yes . . . No! She owed it to m-me,” Royal stammered.

  “You see why I had no trouble luring him up here,” Sakai said to the Hardys. “Greedy and vain, through and through. His only real talent is self-promotion. You know, I was happy in Switzerland. If Forest of Chaos hadn’t been such a flop, I would never have come back—except to see my Scavenger.” She scratched the wolfdog behind the ears and whistled. The animal barked and stared up at her.

  “Did you know I picked the town in Switzerland where I lived because it was near where Ian Tochi grew up?” she asked Royal. “He told such wonderful stories about the place. He was right about it, too. But Switzerland, just over the border, was better for me because of my—tax situation.”

  She sighed nostalgically. “Such a nice guy, Tochi. He had way more talent than you, Steven. I should have hooked up with him as a partner.”

  As she spoke, Frank got a good grip on the back of the chair Royal had been tied to. He and Joe exchanged glances.

  Sakai smiled a cold smile. “Maybe I will hook up with him after this,” she said. “See, I had planned to ruin Steven’s reputation and then let him go. I’d assume a new identity and start over again; no one would ever believe him. Such an absurd story. Now, however, I’m afraid I’ll have to kill you all.”

  16 The Final Blow

  * * *

  Sakai’s finger tightened on the trigger of the crossbow.

  Before she could pull it, though, Joe lashed out, using the mechanical snake like a whip. The snake smashed into the crossbow, yanking it from Sakai’s hands. Joe brought the snake back on the rebound, hitting Sakai in the ribs. She gasped in pain and surprise and staggered to one side.

  Scavenger leapt forward to protect his mistress, but Frank was ready for him. The elder Hardy, moving like a lion tamer, shoved the chair that Royal had been tied to into the wolf’s face. Scavenger tried to bite Frank through the chair. Frank pushed the chair and twisted, trapping the wolf’s head between the chair’s legs.

  Scavenger yelped and jumped in the air, trying to get the chair off. The back of the chair came off in Frank’s hand. Frank gave the seat of the chair a shove with his foot and the wolf skidded into a corner of the room. He sat there, yelping and trying to get his head out of his wooden prison.

  Before the Hardys could stop her, Sakai picked up the crossbow and fired.

  Frank whipped the chair back in front of his chest and the arrow thonked into it. He flung the wooden fragment at Sakai before she could fire again. It hit her and she fell backward.

  Moving quickly, Frank and Joe yanked Royal through the secret panel Sakai had used to enter the room.

  For a frantic moment Joe looked around. Then he reached up and pulled a lever to one side of the door. The secret panel swung shut. A crossbow bolt thudded into the closed door.

  “Chaos Two,” Joe said by way of explanation. “A lot of the doors in that game were operated by levers.” He took the mechanical snake and jammed its remains against the bottom of the panel as a doorstop. “That should keep her from following us, at least for a while,” he said.

  At the end of the secret passage, the three of them found a spiral staircase leading up. They took it. The stairway led to another secret panel that emptied into the mansion’s library.

  “I don’t know how to thank you guys,” Royal said.

  “Just keep quiet until we’re out of this mess,” Frank said.

  “I hear footsteps,” Joe said. “Looks like we didn’t slow her down for long.”

  Frank picked up a leather-backed library chair and threw it through one of the big windows of the room. “Everybody out!” he said.

  They hustled Royal out the window first and then followed. Frank brought up the rear. As the elder Hardy’s feet hit the uncut lawn outside, a crossbow bolt whizzed over his head. “Keep running,” he called to Joe and Royal.

  Royal stumbled as they reached the street. Frank and Joe had to pull him up and, as they did, Sakai put a crossbow bolt into Joe’s backpack.

  “Joe!” yelled Frank.

  “I’m okay!” Joe said. “It didn’t get through the pack.”

  They ran into the town, trying to put buildings between them and the deadly crossbow. They darted down alleys and cut through deserted structures, dragging Royal with them. Every time they thought it was safe to catch a breather, another crossbow bol
t would whiz by.

  “She knows this town better than we do,” Frank said, panting. “We need to come up with a plan.”

  “I’ve got an idea,” said Joe. “With a little luck, we can take her out.”

  A few minutes later Joe rounded a corner and came face-to-face with Sakai. She fired at him, but he ducked back and the arrow hit a building. Joe took off at top speed, angling for the old warehouse. He knew that sooner or later she’d hit him if he gave her many more chances.

  Sure enough, another shot whizzed by just as he turned into the alley behind the warehouse. Giganto loomed high overhead, mute witness to the deadly chase. But as Joe reached the far end of the alley he tripped. He looked back the way he’d come.

  Anne Sakai came around the corner walking slowly, like a hunter closing in on her prey. She took careful aim at Joe as he lay in the alley.

  “Now, Frank! Now!” Joe yelled.

  “Now, Frank! Now!” Sakai repeated mockingly, closing the distance between them for a better shot.

  Just at that instant, Giganto sprang to life. The ape bellowed his rage and his fist came crashing down. Sakai looked up, too late to get out of the way. The ape’s fist grazed her with enough force to crush her to the ground. The crossbow slipped from Sakai’s hand as she lay unconscious.

  Joe breathed a sigh of relief. The ape stopped moving. Frank and Royal stepped out of the warehouse.

  “Good thing you got that relay cable fixed when you did,” Joe said to Frank. “Another minute and I’d have been shishkebab.”

  “Hey, I’ve always been as good at fixing things as breaking them,” Frank said, smiling.

  Royal looked overjoyed. “You did it! You got her!” he said.

  Joe got up and dusted himself off. “Oh no,” he said. “We didn’t get her. ’Twas the beast that felled the beauty.”

  • • •

  A day later the Hardys found themselves back in the offices of Viking Software.

  It hadn’t taken them long to find Sakai’s SUV behind the mansion. They tied up the woman and sat her in the back of her car. Then they went back to the basement and locked Scavenger in the room where Royal had been held. The wolf proved no trouble this time. Struggling to escape from the chair had exhausted him.