Hide/Seek/NYC: RUNDOWN: Day 7, 12/5/00

DAY 7 RUNDOWN

Minutes after noon on Tuesday, Fugitive Chris met his captor on the streets of Lower Manhatan, becoming the first of the three Hide/Seek/NYC Fugitives to be apprehended. His days on the lam are over.

"You know how they say that when criminals finally get caught, they say they're relieved to be off the streets?" Chris said in a post-capture interview at Hide/Seek/NYC Command. "That's how I feel right now."

The Chinatown/City Hall neighborhood Day Task -- buy a whole fish and then take a picture of the fish and a city official outside City Hall or the Tweed Courthouse -- baffled the three Fugitives for most of the morning. Zoe alone made four failed attempts to submit acceptable evidence for task completion.

But only Chris fell victim to his lingering around the neighborhood with a whole fish. The salient details of the catch are as follows:

At approximately 12:00 PM, Chris approached a construction foreman sitting at a card table underneath scaffolding in front of Tweed Courthouse on Chambers St. to ask him if he was a city official. It was Chris's second encounter with the man, a big and burly fellow. Earlier in the day, at about 10:00 AM, when Chris was still unclear about the exact details of the Task, he had queried the man about the location of City Hall.
Between Chris's first and second encounter, the foreman met both Fugitive Jason and webHunter Roger Ziegler, in that order. Jason was trying to nail down the pieces of the Clue and Ziegler wanted to know if the man had been approached by anyone carrying a fish, asking questions. The foreman said he had been -- twice. Ziegler asked the foreman if he'd point them out next time he saw them. He said he would, and Ziegler decided to hang around at the card table.
When Chris returned to the foreman and the card table at 12:00 PM, Ziegler was there with him. The foreman tipped Ziegler off, and the catch was made.

Calm and collected hours after the catch, Chris was clearly surprised at the moment he fell prey to the day's webHunter, Manhattan resident Roger Ziegler.

"He was so dejected when I caught him," Ziegler reported at 1:00 PM. "His face sank and he was obviously crestfallen. Life is rough on the mean streets of Manhattan."

Ziegler wandered aimlessly around the neighborhood in the early morning until he received this tip from Rhode Island-based Internet Viewer Jeremy Howard: "Rudy's throne. (as in Guliani) (or however you spell that!)" That led Ziegler to City Hall, where the excitement would soon transpire.

Howard emailed again at 12:05 PM, urging Ziegler to stay the course. "They keep on messing up the clue, not that I know what the fish part is myself," he wrote, "but just stalk city hall and success will be yours!"

But success already was Ziegler's. At just after noon, he sent this report: "The tiger has pounced. The Japanese say 'everything takes time and patience.'"

Command quickly hit the scene and verified the catch. The construction foreman helped to reconstruct the action. "Aw, it was thrilling," he said. "It was awesome!"

After the verification, Command aborted the Day Task for Zoe, but later learned that she had just completed it, scoring a photo of herself with a member of Mayor Giuliani's staff -- and a fish.

The abort also did not affect Jason, who had submitted acceptable evidence at 11:52 AM. With the three points, he increased his lead over Zoe to two in what now becomes a two-horse points race (points will determine the winner if both Zoe and Jason are still on the streets at 5:00 PM on Dec. 15).

But neither Jason nor Zoe reveled in their colleague's misfortune.

"I'm sad about the capture," Zoe said during her 1:00 PM check-in. "I feel like my heart has been ripped in thirds. Tell Chris I'll miss him."

Jason chimed in at 3:30 PM: "Hide/Seek/NYC is just like war. When someone else goes down, you think, thank god it's not me. Then the grief sets in. I think I'm going to have a drink to a fallen comrade."