Dagmar cleaned her office. Dropping Siyed’s faded flowers, one pot after another, into the trash can, the series of clangs ringing off the walls, echoing down the hall.
A warning Klaxon.
Dagmar on the warpath. Stay away.
She picked up the trash can with its ceramic, earth, and plant matter and carried it away in a swirl of dry petals. She didn’t have a place to put it, really, so she took it to the break room and swapped it for the trash can there. It held only used tea bags, foil packets that had once contained instant hot chocolate, and an empty donut box.
It was a lot lighter.
He had trapdoors everywhere, Charlie had said. He’d been thinking about doing a scorched-earth on the company long before I took control… Wiping out everything before the creditors could have it, or lurking in the computers in order to sabotage our successors or to steal things. Bad as the damn Soong. He could have ended up in jail!
Except that Charlie had locked him out before he could do any damage. It had been Dagmar herself who gave him a computer, an account, and a paycheck. Once he had access, he used one of his trapdoors to create CRAPJOB and alter Dagmar’s own account so that he could use it to go anywhere in AvN Soft’s system.
The balance of the account, as of 1600 hours Cayman time yesterday, was $12,344,946,873.23, all in U.S. dollars.
That had been posted on Our Reality Network, where anyone could read it. The players assumed the numbers had been made up, but Dagmar had known they were real.
And one other person had seen that number and realized right away what Charlie had done, and had known how to turn the whole thing to his own advantage.
Figueroa? That’s on Figueroa, right?
My God, she’d spoken Charlie’s location aloud right in front of him.
She remembered him standing ten feet away, sipping his coffee, pretending he wasn’t listening.
She remembered him in the steak house, the dull fury in his eyes as he talked about Charlie stealing his company.
Dagmar went into her office and dropped the trash can next to her desk. Another clang.
She grabbed a dusty stack of papers from her shelf and, without looking at them, dumped them in the trash. They’d been there for months: if they were important, she’d have needed them by now.
You are helping, she’d said. You’re the only person I can talk to.
And then she’d handed him all he needed in order to kill Charlie and collect millions. Billions.
He had played her. He had played her totally.
His games back at Caltech had always been about deviousness and betrayal. All the nonplayer characters in the games had their own agenda. They all functioned within ruthless, logical parameters. They were all treacherous, all faithless, all false. Charlie, Dagmar, and Austin had grown to trust the fact that they would be stabbed in the back sooner or later.
Dagmar hadn’t realized that the games were autobiography. All those false-hearted mercenaries, recreant knights, and traitorous grandmothers were the same person.
They were all BJ.
All along he had been telling the world how his mind worked, and everyone had thought it was fiction.
She could reconstruct his chain of logic.
Charlie and BJ had worked on Rialto together. They both created the algorithm that the agents used to acquire knowledge and evolve new strategies.
Why, he must have wondered, should Charlie be the only one to profit?
Charlie had cheated him. Let the company go into bankruptcy just so that he could buy it with money he’d earned on the sly.
Charlie owed him. Owed him on the business, the money, the clothes, the cars, the homes. Owed him half of everything.
Charlie wasn’t paying that debt-and the debt was greater than BJ had ever imagined, half of twelve billion, as he had just discovered. So when chance made the opportunity not only desirable but profitable, Charlie was punished by having his face shredded from his skull with sixpenny nails.
Which didn’t quite solve the problem, because it only reduced the number of people who knew about the gold-farming bots from three to two.
Dagmar had to be dealt with, too.
Because, in this line of utilitarian reasoning, Dagmar was just another obstacle.
Dagmar found another pile of old papers and heaved them into the trash. The can rocked; a small cloud of dust rose.
She looked at the rocking trash can and dared it to tip over.
It chose obedience and returned to an upright setting.
Richard entered the room on his silent white Converse sneaks, a laptop in his hands. His nose wrinkled at the scent of dust.
“I’ve got your new machine. And your new account.”
“Very good.”
She dumped another stack of papers to clear a space on the desk, and Richard put the machine down.
By then, Richard had found out how Dagmar’s account had been compromised. A keystroke monitor had been installed on her office computer, one that recorded every single letter or numeral that she typed and made it available for download by someone else. It had given away her passwords, which were the keys to everything else. BJ had found Patch 2.0 on the IMAP server and acted to replace it with his own, searching through the entire system for the patch and its copies, then overwriting them with the patch that had the number of his own offshore account.
I’m looking for the script for Week Six, Part One, BJ had said. She’d found him using her computer. He had just installed the keystroke monitor.
Dagmar should have recognized BJ’s careless, sloppy coding. He was always in too much of a hurry for elegant code.
Richard set up the computer and connected it with a cable to the AvN Soft network.
“You don’t use the wireless network now,” Richard said. “You don’t know who’s going to be listening.”
“Check,” Dagmar said.
Her old computer would be used entirely for routine correspondence, and for anything she wanted BJ to know.
Richard handed her a portable memory card. “Here’s all the details of Charlie’s correspondence with the brokerage firms.”
“Thanks.”
The new computer, with her new online identity, would be used for anything important.
She booted the new computer, paged through Charlie’s email on the memory card, and wrote the first of several emails to the officers of various brokerage firms. She let them know that, after Mr. Ruff’s unfortunate death, she was now handling the matter of the bootleg Rialto programs, and she hoped to continue the same degree of cooperation, particularly in the matter of the trades for Tapping the Source Ltd. on the following Monday.
She sent that letter eighteen times. A brief business letter, eighteen times, to help save the world.
She got out a notepad and wrote a list of things to do.
• Contact players
• Follow up emails to brokers
• Manage Saturday upload
• Hide
With someone-with BJ, since she had to think of him as the enemy now-with BJ staking out her apartment, there was no way she’d return there. She’d have to find a hotel or something and hope it worked out better for her than for Charlie.
BJ, she thought, could have killed Siyed easily. With his big hands and powerful arms and shoulders, he could have hammered the little man to the ground with only his fists.
Dagmar wondered if he had bruises and cuts. If so, he would be avoiding her until he healed.
She stared out the window into the parking lot. Sudden hot rage flooded her. BJ had reached through her to kill Charlie. He had used her-used her very own tools-to deceive, to manipulate, and to kill.
She tilted her head back and screamed, a hoarse cry of fury and frustration and grief. Her ears rang with the sound.
After her shriek, the silence of the building seemed profound.
In a storm of anger she reached for her pen and added a new item to the list.
• Fuck up BJ
Her actual job title was executive producer, but the players called her puppetmaster.
She hadn’t lived up to the name. She’d been dancing at the ends of someone else’s strings, a perfect, cooperative pawn in someone else’s fantasy of power and murder.
It was time to show BJ just who the real puppetmaster was.
Then she put the pen down on the desk and thought about nothing else for a long while.
“Are you all right? ”
Dagmar considered her answer while she turned the notebook over so that Helmuth couldn’t read her notes.
It was safe to say, she thought, that she was not all right.
She swung her chair around to face him. He stood in the doorway, a concerned look on his handsome blond head.
“I had to identify Charlie’s body,” she said. Explaining about Siyed, she’d decided, would have taken too much energy.
“I’m sorry,” Helmuth said.
“I couldn’t identify him,” Dagmar said. “He was too torn up.”
Helmuth seemed not to know where to go from there. He took a step into the room and raised his arms. Dagmar rose from her chair and hugged him.
Perhaps she felt a little better.
They surrendered their embrace. “Some of us are going out for pizza,” Helmuth said. “Want to come? ”
She shook her head. “I have too much work.”
“Should we bring some pizza back for you?”
“That would be nice, yes.”
“Your friend Boris did well last night.”
The words sent a shock through her. Her mind whirled. Her shock must have been clear, because Helmuth clarified.
“The mix-up about Banana Split,” he said.
“Oh.” A hollow laugh rose from her chest. “I’d forgotten about all that.”
“Boris went into one of the chat rooms on Planet Nine and waited for some of the players to come in-they’ve started hanging around Joe’s Joint and the Galaxy, like they were real clubs. Desi was there, and Corporal Carrot, and some others. And Boris started up a conversation about hauling asteroid ore to the smelters at the New Dome on Mars, and along the way he mentioned he’d like to ski the Banana Split someday.” He laughed. “You should have seen how fast they all left the room! Boris was all alone, talking to himself!”
“He’s slick,” Dagmar said.
Helmuth nodded approvingly.
“He calls you Hellmouth, by the way,” Dagmar said. “After the other night.”
Helmuth smiled. “I bait the hook of temptation,” he said, “but do they bite? ”
“How late were you out? ”
“Three or four, I think.”
“Well,” Dagmar said, “be careful he doesn’t corrupt you.”
After Helmuth left, Dagmar sat before her computer again. BJ had been out with Helmuth all of Wednesday night and well into Thursday morning, when Charlie had died.
BJ had gone out with Helmuth to establish his alibi, and then compounded the alibi by sending Dagmar a letter filled with Internet cant, one that arrived in her mailbox at a certain time. Charlie died a short time afterward, which gave BJ a small window to actually plant the bomb himself, but BJ had probably intended the bomb to explode sometime Wednesday night.
The killer can be somewhere else when the bomb goes off, Murdoch had said. A bomb is a lot more anonymous than a gun. With a gun you have to be on the scene when the killing takes place.
Do they really do what you tell them to? BJ had asked.
Yes, Dagmar had said. They do.
She called up the complete list of players who had registered for The Long Night of Briana Hall. They had all provided their phone numbers, email addresses, and street addresses.
It was possible to sort the list for all those who were in one category or other, an area code or zip code. She sorted for area codes in the Los Angeles area, 213, 818, 747, 323, and the others, including those used by cell phones. She made a point of excluding BJ’s number, and then she sent the rest the same email.
FROM: Dagmar Shaw
SUBJECT: L.A. Games
Greetings:
This is Dagmar Shaw, executive producer of Great Big Idea games.
It’s come to our attention that someone may be piggybacking their own game off our own game about Briana Hall. This person may have sent some of you on a live event on Wednesday afternoon or evening.
These missions were not a part of our own game.
We hope that those of you who took these missions had a good time, but we want to make certain that none of you were defrauded or humiliated in some way. If you were contacted by anyone about this event or any other that has not appeared on our Briana Hall site, I would like to know about it.
If you have been contacted, please email me at this address.
And please don’t tell anyone else or put this online, because we don’t want people to start distrusting our genuine messages, puzzles, and clues.
Sincerely,
Dagmar Shaw
It didn’t take long for the email to generate an answer.
FROM: Desi
SUBJECT: re: L.A. Games
I was part of the live event on Wednesday night. I was supposed to be working for David. He called me and asked me to carry a disk with information from Cullen’s firm that Briana would need to expose the rogue traders.
I took it from Topanga Canyon over to Venice. I hope that’s okay.
Disk? Dagmar thought. Venice?
For a moment her whole fantasy seemed to tremble on the edge of dissolution. She looked up Desi’s number and called. A woman answered.
“Is Desi there? ” Dagmar asked.
“Desi? ” The woman seemed genuinely puzzled.
“I’m sorry,” Dagmar said. “Desi is his handle. Is there someone in the house who plays online games? ”
“Oh.” The woman’s voice was amused. “That would be Jeremiah.”
Jeremiah? Dagmar thought. She heard the sound of a phone being picked up by another hand.
“Yes? ” The deep baritone had a resonant James Earl Jones quality to it that suggested an actor or disk jockey, a singer or a preacher, someone used to projecting a trained voice to an audience.
“This is Dagmar Shaw,” she said. “Thanks for responding to my email.”
“No problem,” said Desi. “I hope what I did was all right.”
“Oh, we’re not worried about that. We just hope you weren’t the victim of some kind of practical joke.”
“No,” Desi said. “It was kind of fun, actually.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“Well,” said Desi, “it started when I got a call from David.”
David was a fictional character, Maria Perry’s gay friend. His part in Briana’s story was minor, which made David a good choice, because he never appeared on any of the game’s audio files. When BJ called, he wouldn’t have had to worry about matching an actor’s voice.
“David asked me if I was willing to perform a special favor for Briana on Wednesday night. I was asked to pick up a disk that had been hidden by Maria in Topanga Canyon. I got the disk and put it in a bag from Burger King as I was instructed to do, and then I carried it to Venice Beach and put it in a certain trash can there. Then I went home.
“I was asked not to talk about it or write about it online, and I haven’t.”
For players not to post online about their game experiences was very unusual. ARGs were social games; sharing the experience was a part of the game’s raison d’être.
“What reason did David give?” she asked.
“He said it was a special mission, just for me. Sort of a reward for being a special friend of Briana’s, and that if I told anyone about it, they might get jealous.”
Dagmar considered this. “Did you copy what was on the disk?” she asked.
“I thought about it, but I was told it was encrypted and that I couldn’t read it, so I didn’t.”
“All right,” she said. “Well, thanks.”
There was a moment of silence, and then the deep voice spoke.
“What should I do if David calls again?”
“Say yes, if you like. But call me to let me know what you’re being asked to do.”
She gave Desi her mobile number and then said good-bye.
She turned back to her computer and saw that two more people had answered her email. She didn’t think she knew either of them personally, though it was possible they’d been in the crowd at certain live events.
Dagmar called them and got more of the story. By the time she’d finished with them, others had responded to her email.
Within an hour she had laid out the entire plot.
David had asked the players to help get Briana some of the IP addresses that would be used to perpetrate the bad guys’ stock manipulation. Since IP addresses would turn up in the game the following Wednesday as part of the players’ bot hunt, this was actually a plausible thing for the players to do.
Different players were asked to do different things. Some were asked to move the data on its disk from one place to another. Others were asked to shuttle a PC tower from Griffith Observatory to the deserted Cathay Bank parking lot in Chinatown. Others were asked to help move a flat-screen monitor. Still others hand-carried a greeting card from place to place.
“Did you read the greeting card?” Dagmar asked.
“Yes. The envelope was open.”
“What kind of card was it?”
“One of those ‘Thinking of You’ cards. It had some poetry on it. I copied it down-”
“No, that doesn’t matter. Was there a message? ”
“Yeah, I copied that, too. It said, You want to play this on this. With this being underlined. And it was signed, Love, D.”
Dagmar stared in cold horror at the wall opposite her chair. The players would have read D. for David, but Charlie would have thought it stood for Dagmar.
Charlie knew the Maffya was after him and might have hesitated to plug in an anonymous computer that appeared magically on his doorstep. But if he’d thought it was from Dagmar, he’d have tried to play the disk without question.
Dagmar felt her skin tighten in a wave of cold fear.
“Dagmar? ” asked the player. “Are you still there? ”
“Yes. I’m still here.” She rubbed her forehead. “Was the note handwritten?”
“Yes. Blue ballpoint.”
She hadn’t known one way or another if BJ had any talents as a forger, but there were enough samples of her handwriting around the Great Big Idea offices to give him a good start.
Her calls continued. She found that it was Corporal Carrot who had carried the united PC, monitor, greeting card, and data disk, all packed in a single box, to the Figueroa Hotel.
“I got instructions to put the box at a particular place,” he said. He sounded like a teenager. “Right at the door outside the Medina Suite.” There was a pause. “This didn’t have anything to do with the bombing, did it? I’ve been worried about that ever since I saw that Charles Ruff had been killed.”
Dagmar unclenched her jaw muscles.
“Don’t worry about that,” she said.
“Oh, good!” The relief in Carrot’s voice was clear. “That’s great!”
The last thing Dagmar needed was speculation about whether players in one of her games had been used in a terrorist event.
Even if it was true. Especially if it was true. It would cast every future ARG under suspicion, it wouldn’t do the players any good, and it wouldn’t help to catch the killer.
She told Carrot that if David called again, he was free to say yes, but that he should call her right away.
She could see now how Charlie had died. He’d finished his work on Patch 2.0, emailed the result to Dagmar, and then gone out for breakfast, or to put one of his empty Cokes in the flat, or left the room for some other reason. The box had been placed right in front of his door. Computer, monitor, disk, and greeting card. He’d read the note allegedly from Dagmar, then attached the monitor to the computer, plugged it in, and turned the computer on.
That’s when the bomb went off. Or maybe BJ had worked it so that the bomb was detonated when Charlie opened the door to insert the data disk. Charlie would have been right there, peering at the machine at close range through his glasses, when the gunpowder detonated.
Pain brought Dagmar out of her reverie. She looked down at her hands and saw that her fists had been clenched so hard that her fingernails had dug hard into her palms.
Killing was too good for BJ.
From outside the office, Dagmar heard the chime of the elevator. She looked out the windows and saw that it had gotten dark, that long lines of red and white auto lights were pouring past on the 101.
She heard footsteps coming toward her across the tile floor, and then she remembered that she was alone in the Great Big Idea offices, and that she’d given BJ access to the building.
Her heart gave a sickening lurch. She jumped out of her chair so quickly that her chair shot backward along its rollers and crashed into a shelf. Her nerves leaped.
Great, she thought. She’d just told him where she was.
She darted around the office looking for a weapon. She clutched at a pair of scissors and then thought of how useless they’d be against BJ’s powerful arms and big hands. Hands that had already broken Siyed’s body.
Belatedly she realized she could call for help. She reached for her phone with the hand that wasn’t holding scissors, punched 911, and was in the process of pressing Send when Helmuth appeared in the doorway carrying a pizza box.
They stared at each other for a moment in mutual surprise.
“God in heaven, Dagmar,” Helmuth said. “You look like hell.”
Carefully, Dagmar pressed End before the operator could pick up.
“Sorry,” she said. “I forgot you were coming back.”
Helmuth smiled. “Who did you think I was, Jack the Ripper? ”
“Close enough.”
He offered the pizza box. “There’s pepperoni, there’s a slice with mushrooms, and a couple slices of a rather tasty Hawaiian barbecue chicken with pineapple.”
“Great,” Dagmar said. She summoned the will not to faint dead away.
“Sorry I scared you,” Helmuth said.
She put down the scissors and pressed her trembling hands together.
“I think I’m getting used to it,” she said.
FROM: Dagmar Shaw
SUBJECT: L.A. Games
This is Dagmar Shaw, of Great Big Idea Productions, the company that is bringing you the ARG about Briana Hall.
We’ve managed to confirm that someone else is running live events that are piggybacking off our game about Briana Hall. These games do not seem to be pranks, but genuine live events running in parallel with our own.
Players should feel free to participate in these events if they feel so inclined, but please be aware that Great Big Idea does not sponsor them, and that discoveries made during the course of these adventures may or may not constitute actual answers to Great Big Idea puzzles.
We would like to continue monitoring this situation, however, so if you hear from anyone asking you to participate in a live event in the next few weeks, please contact me by responding to this email, and please include your phone number.
Please do not post about this on any of the regular forums, because
it might confuse our other players about what’s going on.
Thank you,
Dagmar Shaw
This Is Not Finance
Dagmar spent Thursday night in the Best Western in Chinatown, a short distance from the Cathay Bank parking lot that had briefly held components of the bomb that had killed Charlie. She had left her Prius in the AvN Soft parking lot, parked directly under the glassy eye of a security camera, and had rented one of the new Mercedes two-seater sports cars from Enterprise, which delivered the vehicle right to the doors of the office tower. She had redlined the Mercedes as she drove out of the Valley, probably tripping half a dozen automatic cameras and generating a couple of thousand dollars in the outrageous fines that California’s broken government extorted from its citizens, but at least she knew she hadn’t been followed.
The morning news was full of alarmed chatter about the assault on the Chinese yuan, something that Dagmar had missed in the traumas of the previous day. The markets in China, where it was already Saturday, were closed, but the fury continued on other exchanges.
The yuan seemed to be in serious danger. Political pressure had forced the yuan to decouple from the dollar a few years earlier, and now a currency much abused by China’s slowing growth, political demands, and inflation was showing its vulnerability. No one knew whether China’s economic statistics were genuine or mere vapor. Maybe the Chinese themselves didn’t know. In any case they were now paying the cost of their lack of transparency.
Chinese sovereign wealth funds were dumping bonds, American and others, in order to free the cash to defend the yuan, and bond markets were tottering worldwide. As a consequence the American dollar was plunging, and the dollar wasn’t even the target of the attack. The Chinese government had been reduced to uttering threats against whatever foreign governments were behind the attacks. Dagmar wondered if an actual war could start over this.
The talking heads on CNN were surprised over the attack, since it had been widely assumed that it had been Chinese traders who had led the assault on other currencies. Were the Chinese attacking their own currency? Were other traders attacking China by way of retaliation? Or was the whole Chinese trader story a myth?
Dagmar, with better information, wondered how the actual Chinese traders-the ones who had followed Charlie’s gold-mining bots in the currency markets-were responding to the crisis. Patriotic traders would surely pour their profits into defending the yuan, risking their money. Pragmatic traders would follow the bots again, risking lives and livelihoods if the Chinese government chose to take their resentment out of the electronic world and convert it to real-world shackles and bullets.
Whatever was going on behind the scenes in China, Dagmar imagined that there was cheering in Jakarta.
After checking out of the hotel, she bought new clothes and a traveling case, changed in the restroom of a coffee shop that served her a peculiarly Filipino version of an American breakfast, bacon and eggs Luzonized, and showed up late for work to find that no one had missed her.
She spent half the day writing scripts for Briana Hall and the other half dealing with emails from brokerage houses. She had a midafternoon meal of vaguely Thai noodles-chicken, chiles, and cilantro-from the coffee shop on the ground floor and was walking across Finnish porphyry to the elevator when “Harlem Nocturne” began to sound from her handheld. She looked at the display and saw it was BJ.
She felt a prickle of heat across her skin, and her knees seemed briefly to buckle. She took a breath of air and it felt like her first breath in hours.
She sat down on the polished granite ledge that separated the elevator area from the atrium. Her heart beat in her ribs like a prisoner throwing herself headfirst against the bars.
BJ had been unable to restrain his curiosity, she told herself. He’d been staking out her apartment last night and he hadn’t seen her come home. He didn’t know about her reaction to Siyed’s death or to Charlie’s.
Dagmar told herself that he was going to try to get information from her so that he could kill her. She admonished herself to keep this surmise in the forefront of her mind.
She put the phone to her ear. “This is Dagmar.”
“Hey,” said BJ. “How’s it going?”
“Life sucks,” Dagmar said with perfect truth.
“Yeah,” BJ said. “I’m sorry if what happened to Charlie is causing you grief.”
“That’s two of my best friends murdered,” Dagmar said. Fury rose in her as she spoke. One of her fists punched the granite ledge on which she sat. Gratifying pain crackled from her knuckles.
“Well, you know,” BJ said, “I won’t pretend that I’m in mourning over Charlie, but I care about you. Do you want to get together and talk?”
“I can’t,” Dagmar said. “I’ve got too fucking much to do.”
“I could get Chinese takeout and bring it to your apartment,” he said.
“I’m not at my apartment anymore. I’m hiding out at a hotel.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Why?” he asked.
“Two reasons,” Dagmar said. “First, I think I might be next on the killer’s agenda.”
“I thought the killer was caught,” BJ said.
“One of them was,” Dagmar said.
“But…” He hesitated while he tried to decide which of several possible scripts to follow. “Why would the Russian Maffya be after you?” he said finally.
“I can’t tell you. But I have another reason-which is that the police have pretty much told me that I’m a suspect in three murders. So if I meet with you and I’m being followed, it might lead the cops to you.”
Chew on that, she thought.
Maybe it would keep him from following her.
“I can bring Chinese to your hotel,” he said.
What he should have said, Dagmar told herself, was Three murders? Because he wasn’t supposed to know about Siyed.
That, Dagmar thought, was a misstep.
“Maybe some other time,” she said. “I’ve really got to run right now.”
“See you tomorrow,” BJ said.
An alarm jolted through her nerves. “Tomorrow?” she said.
“The update.”
“Oh. Right. Bye.”
After the call ended, she stared at the phone’s display until it went dark.
Tomorrow, she thought.
She would have to meet BJ face-to-face and hope that he couldn’t guess what she knew.
This Is Not a Dinner
“You have a cut on your face,” Dagmar said.
The cut was just below BJ’s left eye, a thin little half circle of red. Probably made by Siyed’s fingernail as he tried to push BJ away while BJ pounded the life out of him.
“Kitchen accident,” BJ said.
“With what?” She was feeling reckless and wanted to torment him or at least make him improvise.
“Oh,” he said. He scratched a sideburn with one blunt finger. “I have this sort of magnet thingy over the sink where I stick my knives, and I bumped into the counter and knocked one of the knives off, and it hit me.”
“You could have lost your eye,” Dagmar said.
BJ shrugged. “Maybe,” he said.
He had progressed another step toward acquiring tycoon wear, with a soft cream-colored shirt, a sumptuous tie, and an Italian summer-weight jacket of pastel-colored linen. The fine clothing, rather than embellish his appearance, seemed rather to accent his thick neck and steelworker’s shoulders and long arms.
“I’ve got to show you my new car,” he said. “I’ve finally got rid of the Chevy.”
“We’ve got an update to do,” Dagmar said.
“I meant later.”
Around them, Helmuth and the technical staff were monitoring the progress of the players as they sampled one body of water after another-thousands altogether, on five continents. A running count was kept of the number of times the Tapping the Source units detected phenolphthalein, which Dagmar’s agents had added to streams, fountains, creeks, and ponds earlier in the day. The chemical itself was harmless, its chief property being to turn purple in an acid environment.
Every time six of the contaminated water sources were detected, another page was loaded to the Briana Hall site. Each led to other pages filled with clues to puzzles that would keep the players busy, it was hoped, for at least a few hours.
This played out over the latter half of the morning and most of the afternoon. Early in the day, eating a tasteless cruller from the box she’d brought in, Dagmar had announced that everyone was invited to dine at a nearby Italian restaurant that night, courtesy of the company. She had already called and made the arrangements; she only needed a head count.
No one was immune to the attractions of free food. She called the restaurant and finalized the number.
“Twelve people,” she said.
“Thirteen,” said BJ, “counting you.”
“Thirteen,” Dagmar said.
Food and soft drinks were free, she explained to her guests, but she knew Helmuth and a few of the others too well to offer free alcohol.
The restaurant was a decoy. She had no intention of being the thirteenth person at that meal, but intended to call in sick. She wouldn’t stiff the restaurant, which already had her business card number.
It was all a way of getting away from BJ so he wouldn’t follow her home.
At some point, civility required that she view BJ’s new car. Dagmar followed BJ to the elevator and rode with him in silence. He seemed aware that something was wrong, and she sensed wariness beneath the casual, pleasant pose. She looked at his hands and saw that a knuckle had been cut, but a cut could appear on a knuckle for all sorts of innocent reasons. There was a cut on one of Dagmar’s knuckles at that very moment, and she had no idea how it got there.
The killer might have used a club or a pipe or something.
Right. The thought of an angry BJ coming after her with a baseball bat sent a quaver along her nerves.
She turned her mind from nightmare imagination to analysis, a welcome shift. If, she considered, Siyed had cut BJ under the eye with a fingernail, would scrapings of that nail provide the DNA that could send him to prison?
Maybe. Maybe not.
The last thing she wanted was BJ investigated and then let go on grounds of insufficient evidence. That would be a triumph for him: that would be BJ killing Charlie and then rubbing her face in it.
The car was a Ford Phalanx, slightly used, with a locust-green low-slung monocoque body and a hard top that disappeared, on command, into what proved a surprisingly large trunk.
“Good lord,” Dagmar said.
“V-eight, turbocharged.” BJ was smiling as the wind tossed his fair hair. “The original owner put thirty-five hundred miles on it, and then his boss gave him a company car-a Bentley coupé, believe it or not, and this became redundant. Those thirty-five hundred miles cut the original price nearly in half.”
He had said “coupé,” not “coupe” as Americans do. She walked around the machine.
“It just screams, Fuck the environment, doesn’t it?” she said.
He laughed. “I thought that was the California state motto. Oh no, my mistake-the motto is I’ve got mine.”
She looked at him. “Aram must be paying you well.”
“So are you.” BJ opened the passenger door. “Want to go for a ride?”
“Maybe later.” She shaded her eyes with her hand and blinked. “I think I’m getting a headache.”
“Sorry to hear it.” His face softened into an expression of concern. He closed the door and approached her. “You’ve had a hard time.”
He offered a comforting embrace and she took it, thinking as she gazed blankly over his big shoulder that her rented Mercedes two-seater would probably not be able to outrun the Ford, not with its body designed by French aeronautical engineers and housing eight cylinders of Detroit iron.
The Italian restaurant deception would be necessary, then.
“Speaking of Aram,” he said as they returned to the office tower, “he’s flying into town tomorrow night. I’ve got a meeting with him on Monday, and then he and I will have our first meeting with the staff at the company on Tuesday. Then he’s throwing a welcome dinner and reception for me.”
“Where?” she asked.
“At Katanyan Associates. The dinner will be catered.”
She wondered about the meeting, if one of Austin’s partners would ask, Say, aren’t you the BJ that Austin always said was, like, the worst businessman in the history of the world?
How jolly the dinner would be afterward.
They could hear Helmuth’s fury as soon as they arrived at the third floor.
“Goddam it! What shit-head decided that HTML was going to be case sensitive!”
Upload not going well, Dagmar concluded.
The afternoon ended with all pages, puzzles, sound files, and videos loaded and available to the gamers, and with the computers at Tapping the Source bulging with useful data.
They were going to be very surprised, Dagmar thought, by what happened to their stock on Monday.
“I’ll meet you all at the restaurant,” Dagmar said. “I’ve got to do some shopping in the meantime.”
She waited in her office until she saw the green monocoque body cross the 101 and head toward Ventura, where the restaurant waited. She looked up, saw a familiar white Dodge van in the parking lot across the freeway. She got out her handheld and hit the speed dial.
“Andy,” she said when Joe Clever answered, “I’m looking at you right now. And if you damage my retinas with that laser, I’m going to cross the highway and rip out your fucking lungs.”
“I couldn’t get anything with the Big Ears,” Andy complained. “You’ve got too many computers pumping heat into the room.”
Quiet triumph sizzled in Dagmar’s heart.
“I got one of the puzzles on my own, though,” he said. “The one about what happened to Cullen’s hat.”
“I have some questions,” she said, “about the snoop-and-poop business.”
She’d claimed to have shopping to do as a way of getting rid of BJ, and now she did have shopping to do, buying the gear on Joe Clever’s list. Night-surveillance scopes, cameras, video recorders, little cameras on wires narrow enough to go down someone’s gullet.
She called Helmuth and told him to give everyone her apologies. She had a headache, and she was going home. She’d see them all on Monday.
“Get a receipt from the restaurant at the end of the evening,” she told him.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Helmuth asked.
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
Then came the search for the perfect motel. She found it finally off the Hollywood Freeway, a place that looked as if it had been built as a Ramada Inn or a Travelodge but, in the decades since its construction, had probably been sold to Arabs, who sold it to Indians, who sold it to Chinese, who sold it to Koreans, who sold it finally to refugees from Bangladesh. The white building, with its rust-colored stains, sprawled around a series of courtyards, and there was nothing to stop anyone from walking right off the street to any of the rooms. The large swimming pool, where she might have done laps, had been filled with earth and turned into a rather shabby garden.
When she checked in, the scent of Indian cuisine filled the office, cardamom and cloves, cumin and cinnamon. The manager, a small, dark man with well-oiled hair, sat behind bulletproof Perspex.
“What are you cooking?” she asked.
“Tacos,” he said.
She ate her own dinner in a Teriyaki chicken joint as she thought wistfully of Bengali tacos, then returned to her motel room to set up and test her gear. Everything worked smoothly, as advertised.
She slept fitfully, if at all.
This Is Not a Trap
FROM: Dagmar Shaw
SUBJECT: Where I’m At
Hi, Mom,
I’m not at home right now, so if you called the landline you wouldn’t
have got me. I’m staying in a motel here in L.A., just to get away
from distraction and get some work done. The game will be done in
another couple weeks, and then I can take some time off.
I tried to call you on my cell phone but for some reason I couldn’t
get a signal. I’m at the New Hollywood Inn, rm 118, and the phone
here is 818-733-3991.
I’ll try to call you later today.
Love,
D.
Dagmar had logged on to the AvN Soft servers using her old ID and password. She imagined the message lying there on the IMAP server, waiting for CRAPJOB to log on and discover her secret location.
Except that the email was a lie. She wasn’t actually sleeping in room 118-inspired by the way that Joe Clever had stalked Litvinov, she had taken a room across the courtyard, 115, separated from it by the shrubs of the filled-in swimming pool. She had rented 118 as well, paying in cash shoved beneath the bulletproof screen, because she didn’t want to be responsible for the lives of any innocent tourists who might camp there.
Now, though, she considered shifting to the decoy room, at least for the rest of the afternoon. She had a feeling that CRAPJOB might want to confirm her location.
She got her laptop and her room key, with its diamond-shaped plastic tag, and crossed the old swimming pool. She spent the afternoon working there, in the clean Lysol scent of the room, at the little round table by the window, where she became sufficiently engrossed in her work to give a start when the phone rang.
Her pulse raging, Dagmar stepped across the room and picked up the old-fashioned heavy black handset.
“This is Dagmar,” she said, and was answered only by a soft click.
“Hello to you, too,” she responded, fear turning in an instant to fury.
She mussed the bed in order to convince any enemy reconnaissance, and the maids, that the bed had been slept in. She drew the drapes, left a light on above the stained vanity mirror in the back of the room, and then withdrew to the safety of room 115.
The scout crept in a little after ten. The court was well-enough lit at night that the night-vision camera was hardly necessary; the video monitor clearly showed the wide-shouldered man enter from the street and slowly stroll the length of the walk in front of room 118. On the return journey, a few minutes later, the man stopped near 118 and studied the steel door in its orange steel frame. Fair hair glinted from beneath a dark cap.
Dagmar was amazed by her sudden rage. It was all she could do to keep herself from hurling open her door, striding across the swimming pool, ripping the cap from BJ’s head, and slapping him across the face.
Only the remains of her sanity, dangling above the abyss with quivering fingers, kept her still.
BJ, having seen what he came to see, ambled back to the street. A few minutes later she heard the big V-8 thunder into life, then roar away.
Dagmar began to take full breaths again. Her hands shivered as the anger receded, like the tide, in waves-the fury building, then falling, then returning, but each time diminished, with the pulses of lucidity lasting longer.
Coldly she considered what evidence she had just collected. BJ had come to her motel room, had stalked around outside, had left. Dagmar understood the homicidal intent, but would Murdoch? Would a jury?
She was inclined to think not.
She doubted that BJ would have bomb-building supplies in his apartment-if he wasn’t hiding them from the police, he was certainly hiding them from his roommate, Jacen. They might find evidence on his computer that he was CRAPJOB, but if he’d been smart, he would have used computers rented at Kinko’s or borrowed at the library.
If he had been foolish enough to use his own phone when contacting the players he’d used to deliver the bomb to the Fig, he’d have hanged himself-but Dagmar knew that BJ was smarter than that. Dagmar knew he would have used what on TV crime shows was called a burner-a cell phone with prepaid hours, purchased anonymously and after the crime destroyed.
There was nothing in any of this that would indict BJ, let alone convict him.
A bigger demonstration would be required.
In the morning she took Hollywood Boulevard west, toward the ocean, and found a place to park near where it became Sunset Boulevard. Between two shabby old office buildings, and beneath a billboard for Ray Corrigan’s new blockbuster, she found an old, steep stairway that connected Sunset and Santa Monica boulevards, and from this vantage viewed the building that contained Katanyan Associates.
She had been there many times, but she thought it might be useful to refresh her memory. The building was a four-story structure of dark glass. Austin’s company occupied the second floor. Cars were parked on a kind of concrete shelf cantilevered out over the slope, with a view of Century City beyond. There was a booth for a gate guard, but it was manned only during working hours.
The building across the street had CCTV cameras on its roof, but these were drooping downward-broken or unused.
It’s going to happen Tuesday night, she thought. When you’ve got Aram for your alibi.
It was lucky that Katanyan Associates was only a short distance from the New Hollywood Inn.
That would make things easier.
This Is Not an Assassin
Richard the Assassin sat behind his long, curving row of consoles, screen images winking in his eyes. Ninjas glared down from the upper shelves, fierce eyes gazing from masked faces.
“CRAPJOB’s starting to scare me,” he said. “He’s using your account to build a program that’s going to cause major damage. When he gives the word, it’s going to trash every record on our servers, starting with all Great Big Idea’s games, then going on to email and accounting files, then demolishing everything in AvN Soft that it can reach. We’ve got backups off-site, of course, but we can’t swear that every single thing is backed up.”
“He won’t move till after the Wednesday update,” Dagmar said. “He can’t afford to destroy anything until the players send his patch out.”
“I’m still worried,” said Richard.
She looked at him. “All right,” she said. “If we don’t track this guy down by Tuesday six P.M., lock him out. Eliminate his account, wipe out his little data bomb, and make sure-” She leaned forward, intent. “Make sure it’s Charlie’s patch that goes out to the players, not anything else.”
Richard shrugged. “Of course.”
Dagmar began to speak, then hesitated, then spoke anyway. Any residual loyalty to BJ had vanished at the point at which she’d seen him stalking up and down outside her conjectural motel room.
“While you’re doing that,” she said, “eliminate Boris Bustretski’s account.”
Richard raised his eyebrows. “You think he’s CRAPJOB? ”
“CRAPJOB appeared after BJ came on as a freelancer.”
The eyebrows lifted another millimeter.
“BJ? ”
“He’s an old friend,” Dagmar said, “but I don’t trust him.”
Richard made a sweeping motion with his hand, clean as the slice of a ninja sword.
“It’s done,” he said.
FROM: Consuelo
SUBJECT: Porn Invasion
Hey, Dagmar-
Why has my hard drive filled up with this awful Asian porn?
Is this any way for a detective to treat his partner?
Joe
FROM: Dagmar Shaw
SUBJECT: Re: Porn Invasion
Andy,
Your hard drive should keep its fly zipped.
Good detectives don’t go anywhere without a warrant.
Dagmar
FROM: Consuelo
SUBJECT: Re: re: Porn Invasion
Darn it, Dagmar, I thought we were friends!
FROM: Hippolyte
SUBJECT: Re: L.A. Games
Hi, Dagmar,
I’ve got the phone call from David! I’m supposed to help deliver data
to Maria so that she can get it to Briana.
I told David yes. He said it’s going down Tuesday night.
My phone is (714) 756-0578.
H.
“Okay,” said Dagmar. “So the data stick is going to be hidden in a vase of flowers? ”
She was speaking not to Hippolyte, to whom she had talked earlier in the day, but to a player named GIAWOL, whom she did not know. GIAWOL had a clenched-sounding voice, as if he were afraid to let his lower teeth get too far from his upper. Possibly, Dagmar thought, he had a pipe in his mouth.
“Yes,” GIAWOL said. Dagmar knew that his name was an acronym for Gaming is a way of life.
“I don’t know that it’s a data stick, exactly,” he said, “only that I’m supposed to put it in the vase. And that once I deliver it to Maria, I’m supposed to text-message David at a certain number.”
“Can you give me the number?”
GIAWOL did. Dagmar wrote it down. It was a number she didn’t recognize.
BJ’s latest cell phone burner.
“Where are you supposed to deliver the flowers?” Dagmar asked.
“Someplace called the New Hollywood Inn,” GIAWOL said. “Room one one eight.”
Dagmar felt the flush of anger on her skin.
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Just that I’m to say it’s from the management.”
“Of the motel?”
“Yes. It’s supposed to be thanks for staying there for so long.” There was a hesitation. “Can I make a request?”
“Of course.”
“More mathematical puzzles,” GIAWOL said. “I love those.”
She smiled. “I’ll make a note of it.”
“Also, the destegging program you people use only works with a PC. I’m a Mac user.”
“I’ll pass that on to them.”
Over Monday afternoon she had tracked the evolution of BJ’s plot. It featured sending players along the same wandering courses that he’d used in his last scheme, followed by a player’s uniting the data with the “package”-in this case a vase of flowers-and delivering them to a motel room door.
His bomb-making skills had evolved, clearly. The last bomb had been triggered when Charlie turned on the computer or opened the door to the CD player. This one would be command-detonated, presumably by cell phone. It would have to be assumed that Dagmar would be averse to plugging in any strange computers delivered to her door, so when GIAWOL sent the text message that the flowers had been delivered, BJ in turn would call the cell phone hidden in the flower vase. Which would trigger the bomb, thus ending BJ’s problems. And Dagmar’s, of course.
An abstract kind of pity, devoid of genuine sadness or compassion, floated through Dagmar’s mind.
Poor BJ, she thought. He’s only got the one trick.
He’s not puppetmaster enough to save himself.
FROM: Maria Perry
SUBJECT: Ford Phalanx
I’ve located Cullen’s briefcase. It’s in a late-model Ford Phalanx
parked in the Coolomb Corporation garage!
Is there any way I can break into the car without setting off the
alarm? I don’t need to steal the car, I just need to get into it!
Maria
FROM: Desi
SUBJECT: Re: Ford Phalanx
Maria,
This company sells custom lockpick sets for specific models of cars.
If the Phalanx has keyless entry, then of course this won’t work.
FROM: ReVerb
SUBJECT: Re: Ford Phalanx
Pity it’s not the late nineties, when GM cars had keys so
interchangeable that you could randomly insert your key into a strange
lock with a 50% chance it would open. Of course the Phalanx isn’t
GM, but I can’t resist an interesting bit of trivia!
You might try ordering some of these tools from this online catalog.
These are the tools used by professionals, legit and otherwise,
to break into cars.
The tools don’t seem to have names, just catalog numbers.
FROM: Atenveldt
SUBJECT: Re: Ford Phalanx
Maria, the Phalanx has keyless entry. There isn’t a conventional
lock anywhere on the vehicle. The driver carries a sort of seedpod-
shaped cartridge with an active (battery-operated) RFID tag that
scanners in the car will recognize. The car won’t start without the
RFID tag inside.
RFIDs, of course, have a well-known problem, which is that they
broadcast to all the wrong scanners as well as the right ones.
What I would do is this: I’d get an RFID scanner somewhere near
that car to record the signal the pod emits when it tells the Phalanx
to open its doors. Then you create an electronic duplicate of the
signal, and the car is yours!
And the car is mine, Dagmar thought.
Two players she’d never heard from had jumped out of the electronic world to answer Maria’s question. She could always count on the Group Mind.
It was time for another visit to the electronics store.
This Is Not Breakfast
It was typical of L.A. that the surveillance store was open till midnight-after all, one never knew at what hour one’s husband, or one’s banker, would choose to cheat. The clerk sold her a battery-powered RFID scanner and a device for cloning the captured signals. Both boxes were compact and idiotproof-stupid criminals, after all, used them every day, usually to steal someone’s identity when the victim swiped a credit card while making a purchase, or when they were carrying one of the new American passports, which the government had insisted could only be detected at a range of four inches, even in the face of objective tests that demonstrated their vulnerability at a range of ten meters or more.
The clerk gazed at her from sad, idiotproof eyes. “You must promise to use this only for good,” he told her.
She looked at him.
“I’m innocent as chocolate syrup,” she told him.
She drove to BJ’s apartment. She’d never been there before, but the address was available in the contract he’d signed with Great Big Idea.
It wasn’t in a good part of L.A. The small building, with clap-board walls and a shake roof, was ramshackle and contained no more than four apartments. Two vehicles sat in the parking lot on concrete blocks. In this district her Mercedes coupe glowed like a beacon.
Dagmar circled the apartment and saw neither the Phalanx nor BJ’s old Chevy. She parked half a block away, in a place where her car was shaded from the streetlight by an overgrown willow, and shifted to the passenger seat. She remembered reading somewhere that a person sitting in the passenger seat was less conspicuous than someone behind the wheel.
She reclined the seat as far as possible, pulled her panama hat partly down her face, and waited for the rumble of the Ford’s V-8. When BJ arrived and went to bed, she intended to slip out and put the RFID scanner beneath his car to catch the signals from his remote, then retrieve the scanner after he left.
The Phalanx didn’t come. She waited for hours, enduring the occasional scrutiny of young men walking past along the broken sidewalk. When they began to crowd the Mercedes, either to admire the car or to steal it, she raised her seat to make herself more visible and pretended to be talking on the phone. The young men, surprised and suddenly self-conscious, retreated. No one really bothered her.
Eventually even the drifting knots of young men went to bed. Dagmar drowsed and periodically scanned the apartment building with night binoculars. BJ hadn’t come home.
He was wherever he was building the bomb, she thought. Where he was carefully crafting the instrument that would kill her.
When dawn began to feather the leaves of the willow tree overhead, Dagmar got out of the car and stretched aching limbs. She retreated to her motel room for a shower and an hour’s jangled sleep, and the alarm function in her phone woke her promptly at seven.
Dagmar looked at the phone and dreaded what was going to happen next. She tasted stomach acid in the back of her throat.
She took a deep breath and pressed buttons for the speed dial.
When BJ answered, she said, “Let’s have breakfast. I need to talk to someone.”
He cleared his throat, and when his voice emerged it was thick with sleep.
“Dagmar? Are you all right?”
“No,” she said. “I’m not.”
The morning news was about the continued attack on the yuan. The Chinese currency had lost at least half its value, neatly canceling half the value of the obsessive savings of hundreds of millions of people, most of them poor. Rioters had trashed a train station in Guangzhou and broken bank windows on the Shanghai Bund. The dollar was losing value as well, and the Chinese government was still uttering threats.
She wondered if anyone other than she and BJ had yet realized that the attacks were coming from a botnet.
Dagmar and BJ met near Koreatown, in the egg-themed restaurant where they’d dined before Charlie had been killed. BJ had been planning to kill Charlie then, Dagmar thought, because the twelve-billion-dollar figure had shown up on Our Reality Network earlier in the day, and BJ would have known at once what it meant.
Dagmar arrived at the restaurant first and sat with her back to the wall and ordered coffee. BJ arrived fifteen minutes later, heralded by the bass vibrato of the Ford. He was unshaven and dressed in worn jeans and a faded T. Apparently, she thought, tycoon wear and bomb factories did not mix.
Dagmar managed not to hurl the coffee in his face. Instead she steeled herself and rose to embrace him. She smelled the familiar lavender soap and her stomach turned over.
“What’s going on? ” he asked. “You look awful.”
She seated herself. “Three friends dead. Cops on my tail. No sleep. And the game updates tomorrow.”
This time BJ remembered he wasn’t supposed to know about Siyed.
“Three friends? ” he asked.
She told him about Siyed, and while she did, she watched him. The calculation behind his reactions seemed plain, the falsity enormous. There was a little delay behind every response, as he tried to decide how to react. He did everything but wave a placard saying “Murderous Sociopath.”
How, she wondered, had she not noticed any of this till now?
They had known each other for thirteen or fourteen years. They had been lovers for nine months of that. She had adored him at the start of the relationship, had been secretly relieved when he broke it off, and had been twisted enough by the rejection to marry a man she didn’t love.
She and BJ had been working together for weeks, and she’d sat opposite him at desks and tables and heard his stories of the fall of AvN Soft and seen his blue eyes glitter with anger at Charlie, and she hadn’t seen any of the mendacity, any of the self-interest, any of the plotting.
Charlie had told her over and over about BJ. So had Austin. She hadn’t thought they were lying; she had just thought they were prejudiced.
She hadn’t seen any of what BJ had created. She, so good at plots, at hiding and detecting, had gone on thinking of BJ as her friend-and not only that, but her friend of last resort.
Dagmar could only conclude that she was as broken as he was.
“Staying out of sight is probably a good idea,” BJ said. “It’ll give them time to find out who really did it. And you should get some rest, you look like you haven’t slept in a week.”
Go stay in your hotel room, Dagmar translated, where I can get to you with my bomb.
“Yeah,” she said. “But there’s the big update tomorrow.”
“It’s all set up, right?” he said. “You don’t even need to be there. Any last-minute writing or anything, I’ll handle it.”
“You’re spending the day with Aram, I thought.”
He gave one of his big-shouldered shrugs. “I’ll work all night, if I have to.”
BJ went on to talk about Aram Katanyan, about how he’d made the connection at Austin ’s memorial service, then kept in touch. He’d known that Aram would have a lot to say about what happened to Katanyan Associates, and so BJ had kept stressing his qualifications for the job. He’d talked about how long he’d known Austin, how they’d met over gaming. Eventually it was Aram, not BJ, who had first brought up the matter of his coming in as acting head of the firm.
BJ was bouncy and confident and pleased with himself. A few weeks ago, she’d seen him baffled and defeated. Now he was much more like the BJ she’d met at Caltech, the one who’d walk up to you and tell you how smart he was and how successful he was going to be.
All it took to create this change, she thought, was killing a couple of people and getting away with it.
Suddenly she realized why she’d been so blind. I haven’t been in his way till now. She’d been trying to help BJ, not prevent him from doing anything he’d wanted to do. What little she’d had, she’d offered freely. She’d never thwarted him, and he’d never turned into any of those people in his games, the two-faced gutter crawlers that stood ready to betray everyone in sight.
She looked down at the table. BJ’s plate was empty. Her own blueberry and pecan pancakes had been more torn to shreds than eaten. The smell of candied pepper bacon hung in the air.
She’d never be able to eat candied pepper bacon again.
“Can we go for a ride in your car?” she asked.
Surprise blinked in his blue eyes.
“Sure,” he said.
“Can I drive?”
She left money on the table for breakfast, and they stepped out into yet another brilliant Los Angeles morning. She held out a hand.
“The key?” she asked.
BJ fished in his pocket and found the remote.
“You press the-”
“I know.”
She had the scanner in her handbag. She held the bag out and the remote next to it and pressed the button to open the car.
Inches away, the scanner should have picked up the signal.
The car folded around her like a body stocking. The whole vehicle shivered to the big engine. She took the car through the parking lot, then hurled it onto the street like a lioness accelerating after an antelope.
“Jeez,” BJ said, surprised.
The back end swung around, clawing for traction, as she turned onto Interstate 10. There was a hesitation, and then the turbocharger kicked in and punched her back in the seat. Lips skinned back from her teeth in a reckless grin. Methodically she clocked through the gears, and she headed for Pomona as fast as the V-8 would take her. If the automated traffic cameras clocked her at 120, BJ could just suck the fines.
From his damn jail cell.
It had occurred to Dagmar that BJ might try to kill her when they were alone. She doubted it, however. He would view it as too risky: someone could see him, something could go wrong. Better to have his puppets deliver Dagmar’s death later, in the sanctuary that she didn’t realize had been compromised.
But just in case he was tempted to do something, Dagmar wanted him too terrified to act.
She got off the freeway, fishtailed around a couple of intersections, and returned to the interstate, heading west into L.A. She returned to the restaurant parking lot, put the Phalanx in neutral, and pulled the parking brake.
“As expensive mechanical substitute penises go,” she said, “this one’s the cat’s pajamas.”
“Uh, yeah,” BJ said. His eyes were wide.
She looked at him. “See you tomorrow,” she said. “At the update.”
His blue eyes looked into hers with perfect certainty.
“See you there,” he said.
See you in hell, she thought.
This Is Not a Florist
From room 115 in the New Hollywood Inn, Dagmar waited while BJ’s plot unfolded. Her room smelled of the Thai takeout she hadn’t been able to bring herself to eat. The cameras reported only the usual tourists-a worried Chinese mother with a pack of small children, a solemn South American with a camera, a disorganized family, running between their room and their car, chattering in Finnish or Estonian or some other unlikely language.
She’d received a message from Richard the Assassin that CRAPJOB’s online privileges had been canceled. So had BJ’s. So had Dagmar’s old account. All copies of Charlie’s patch had been reverted to the archived copy of Patch 2.0.
Dagmar supposed that BJ wouldn’t have discovered any of these changes as yet. Not if he was being feted by Aram.
CNN informed her that the attacks on the Chinese yuan had ceased. The bots had done as much damage as they could and left riots and anger behind.
Dagmar watched the monitor. More children, more tourists.
At last came a stout man staggering under a huge burden of flowers. Dagmar opened her door and met him on the doorstep of room 118. She put her key in the door.
“Maria?” he asked. “Maria Perry?”
She looked up. “Yes?”
He was a portly man around sixty, with white hair tied in a ponytail, gold-rimmed spectacles, and a cheerful red face. Dots of sweat marked his forehead.
“The management”-pant-“wanted me to give you this.” Panting. “It’s for being”-pant-“such a good customer.”
Dagmar tried to feign surprise. The vase was large and ugly, black ceramic, with reliefs of strange Polynesian tiki monsters. A huge spray of long-stemmed roses fanned from the opening at the top, the flowers white but rimmed delicately with pink. Below was a crazed mix of colorful blossoms: mums and carnations and black and yellow lilies, plus baby’s breath and other flowers that Dagmar couldn’t identify.
Dagmar opened the door of 118 and took the vase from GIAWOL, who immediately dissolved into a paroxysm of coughing. The vase was heavy with its presumed cargo of nails and gunpowder, and Dagmar wrestled it into the room and put it on the scarred old table. The scent of the roses mixed strangely with the Lysol smell of the room.
She turned back to GIAWOL, who had recovered from his coughing fit.
“Thank you,” she said, and raised a finger to her lips. “Remember not to send that text. And don’t tell anyone-they might be jealous.”
His grin was infectious. “Sure. Enjoy the flowers-Maria.”
Still grinning, he walked away. Dagmar watched him go, then closed the door and contemplated the enormous floral display.
Flowers, she thought, were really Siyed’s weapon, not BJ’s. BJ was running out of ideas.
She returned to 115, got her panama hat and a cardigan against the growing October chill. She went back to 118, collected the enormous vase with its extravagant spray of blossoms, and walked toward the street, flowers bobbing over her head like the feathers of a Lakota headdress.
Her rented car was a two-seater, so she secured the vase between the passenger seat and the shelf behind, then drove to Hollywood. Progress along the famous boulevard was slow, the pavement packed with traffic and mobs of tourists who looked even more bewildered than they did in daylight. Out-of-work actors walked up and down the sidewalks dressed as superheroes and offered to let visitors take their picture for a small fee.
Fly this bomb to where it belongs, Tony Stark, she thought. But Tony was busy posing with a couple of kids from the Midwest and failed to hear her mental command.
Eventually she got to the top of the street, where Hollywood became Sunset, and found a place to park. She took out the vase, hesitated, then opened the trunk and dumped all the flowers inside. With the vase itself swinging at the end of her arm, she located the two office buildings and walked down the dark, narrow old stair to Santa Monica Boulevard.
The blue-windowed office building stood across the street. There were lots of lights on the second floor, where Katanyan Associates was hosting a party for its new manager. Dagmar shifted the vase from the arm that was cramping to the arm that was not.
Its green color fluorescing in the light of a streetlamp, BJ’s Phalanx sat in the parking lot.
Dagmar took a breath, tilted her hat so that anyone on the second floor couldn’t see her face, and stepped into the night street.
This Is Not a Game
She felt the flush of danger on her skin. Her pulse was rapid but not frantic. She remembered being far more frightened in Jakarta.
She’d learned a few things since then. And besides, L.A. was her town.
Dagmar wanted the bomb inside BJ’s car because that would indicate that the bomb belonged to him. If she put the bomb underneath the Phalanx, he would be a victim.
She didn’t want him victimized. She wanted him indicted.
She would plant the bomb in his car and then send a text to the number that David had given to GIAWOL. BJ, assuming that Dagmar had been given the bomb, would use his burner to call the phone in the bomb and would then turn in surprise and shock as the Katanyan Associates windows reflected the orange flower of flame that burst from his own vehicle, and all his hopes and expectations were blown to smithereens.
Even Special Agent Landreth of the FBI would realize that there had to be a connection between this bomb and the identical weapon that had killed Charlie Ruff. The easiest explanation was that BJ had accidentally blown up his own vehicle with his own weapon.
There would be an investigation. In time, bomb materials would be found, as well as the place where BJ had assembled the bomb. And Dagmar would be questioned again.
BJ always had a grudge against Charlie, she would say. He thought Charlie had cheated him out of his company.
BJ would go to prison, possibly the gas chamber. He’d lose his job with Aram, and his attempt to subvert the gold-farming bots would fail.
He’d have nothing. He’d have less than he had when this whole adventure started.
Dagmar would tangle him in his own puppet strings and hang him out to twist slowly in the wind.
She glanced at the CCTV on the neighboring building and saw the cameras still dangling at a useless angle. Dagmar passed the empty guard box standing sentry in the parking lot and walked to BJ’s car. He had parked on the south side of the parking ramp, with a view of his new domain. L.A. shimmered below her, a skein of lights stretching all the way to the Pacific. Dagmar reached into her pocket and pulled out her cloned Phalanx remote, and she pressed the button.
Dagmar heard the solid chunk of a door lock opening. She pulled the sleeve of her cardigan over her fingers, crouched down by the low car, and opened the door without leaving fingerprints. She tilted the seat forward, scrubbed fingerprints off the vase with her cardigan, and tucked the vase behind the driver’s seat. She pushed the seat back into place.
She looked up at the building. Silhouettes wandered behind the lit windows. She didn’t recognize BJ or anyone else.
She rose, tilted her hat again to obscure her face from the new direction, and left the parking lot. Success tingled in her fingers and toes.
Her feet bounded up the old concrete stair. She neared the top, and breathing with exertion, she turned and gazed down over the parking lot.
The neon green Phalanx was visible, its color brilliant under the light. She reached into a pocket for the cell phone she’d bought just that afternoon, her very own burner.
“What are we going to do tonight, Brain?” she asked.
The answer seemed to hang pregnant in the air, so she spoke it aloud.
“What we do every night, Pinky,” she said. “Try to take over the world!”
Flowers delivered. Maria delighted.
She texted to the number GIAWOL had sent her, and pressed Send.
Cars hissed by on Sunset. Her heart beat double-time in her throat. Nothing happened.
Several minutes went by while Dagmar’s unease increased. She wondered frantically if she had miscalculated completely, if this was all some insane fantasy she’d cobbled together out of stray facts and paranoia.
Maybe it wasn’t a command-detonated bomb at all, she thought. Maybe it was a time bomb, scheduled to go off at 2 A.M. or something.
But in that case, why the text message? That was a breach in security, though a small one. There was no reason for it unless it was timed somehow to the bomb’s detonation.
A figure appeared in the parking lot below, and she recognized BJ at once. His big body moved with a jaunty stride, as if he were on top of the world. He was wearing tycoon clothes, a dark suit. A bright tie glowed at his throat in the light of the streetlamps.
BJ stepped toward the Phalanx and reached into a pocket for a remote. He opened the car door, put the remote away, reached into a pocket for something else. Something small.
Dagmar felt her insides twist. She stopped herself from calling out.
BJ dropped into the car. It lurched under his considerable weight. Seconds ticked by. Perhaps he was gazing through the windshield at his new domain, at the Los Angeles that lay before him, spread out like a harlot on a mattress.
In the merest fragment of a second, the explosion happened. The explosion was faster than in movies. In films, Dagmar realized, explosions are slowed down so you can see them. In reality, they’re too fast for the eye to catch.
Clangs echoed up the stair as pieces of the Phalanx began raining down. The part of the car that remained on the ground caught fire instantly and burned with a brilliant flame. Little fiery pellets fell over the parking lot, burning with bright chemical fire, and Dagmar realized they were incendiaries.
If the bomb hadn’t killed her directly, she realized, she was meant to burn to death in her motel room or choke to death on smoke.
She couldn’t see BJ amid the flames. She knew only that he hadn’t gotten out of the car.
She wondered if he had died happy. Knowing that he was a fraction of a second from erasing the last obstacle between him and his prospects. Pleased with his new job, with the billions that the software agents would soon be dropping into his account, with his future as a tycoon.
Or in that last fragment of a second, had he heard the cell phone detonator chirp from behind his driver’s seat and realized that it had all gone horribly wrong?
Dagmar returned to her own car, which was filled by now with a horrid rose scent. She stopped at a filling station and hurled all the flowers into a rubbish can, along with the cloned remote and the cell phone burner, both rubbed clean of fingerprints.
When she got to her motel room, she began taking apart all her surveillance gear. She thought that maybe she should erase all the evidence she’d gathered, in case it ended up pointing toward her.
Then she thought she might want to keep it, to prove that BJ was whatever it was that BJ was.
“This is not a game,” she reminded herself.
So, she thought. What else could she have done?
There wasn’t, and would probably never be, enough evidence to convict BJ of anything. At least not until the bomb went off in his car, which would precipitate a very thorough investigation by some rather thorough government agencies. And by then, BJ being in the car, it was too late.
If she had saved him, then what? He would have beaten her to death and thrown her off the parking jetty into the darkness below.
She could have been smarter or less distracted by events. But she hadn’t been, and instead she had been who she was, so caught up in events that she had never caught up to the truth.
And the truth was four dead by violence, here in L.A. And countless others, in Bolivian mining towns, Indonesian kampungs, burning Cantonese passenger trains…
Her own well-meaning fictions, layered page by page on the so-called World Wide Web, differed from the web of the real world in that they lacked genuine malice. No matter how depraved her imagination when it came to Briana Hall or blood-crazed revenge-maddened nagis, her own work was practically wholesome compared with anything served up by Southeast Asian generals, Chinese mobs, or Arkady Petrovich Litvinov, the scope of whose iniquity had been reduced to the county jail.
These thoughts drifted through Dagmar’s mind as she drowsed amid the disassembled spyware in her Lysol-scented motel room. Throughout her reflections drifted slumber itself, half-submerged on a slow-moving tide of perception.
She woke craving waffles and hearing the sound of rain on the walk outside.
Dagmar ate waffles in a coffee shop on Ventura while the rain turned the street outside into a canal. On the way to the Great Big Idea office, the radio informed her that the assault on the dollar had begun. As soon as the tech team had assembled, she told them to begin the update to The Long Night of Briana Hall. Normally they waited until noon, but the gold-farming bots had not delayed, and neither would she.
“If I were you,” Helmuth said, “I’d slip out and buy as many euros as I could.” He gave her a significant look. “I already did that on Monday.”
“I don’t have that much in cash,” Dagmar said.
“Still.” Still.
Sipping from an insulated mug of Darjeeling tea, Dagmar watched the update from over Helmuth’s shoulder. The well-practiced tech team loaded the day’s series of puzzles. Because the real job came after the puzzles were solved, the puzzles themselves weren’t all that difficult, and the players devoured them with the Internet equivalent of roars of gusto.
Then they encountered the long lists of IP addresses and paused.
LadyDayFan says:
What the hell???
Vikram says:
We’re supposed to cope with all these addresses? Seriously?
Corporal Carrot says:
I’m game! Let’s divide up the numbers!
LadyDayFan says:
Ohmygoddess! This is madness!
Vikram says:
All right, let’s have a show of hands! Who wants a job?
Dagmar watched as the players divided the thousands of numbers among themselves and began posting their successes and failures. They argued about which successes belonged to whom and offered methods of locating the owners of firewalled computers.
The dollar was down 35 percent since the start of the day.
Dagmar bought a sesame chicken salad in the coffee shop downstairs, and the largest, most elaborate latte for dessert afterward. She thought she might as well spend her money now, before it was no longer worth the paper it was printed on.
Chatsworth Osborne Jr. says:
This has to be the biggest feat of social engineering in the history
of the Internet! Or possibly anywhere!
Corporal Carrot says:
It’s pure hackage, man! This is soooooo freaking cool!
No doubt, Dagmar thought, some of the players were decompiling and reverse-engineering Charlie’s patch to figure out what it did and how it worked. But they wouldn’t discover much: it was a patch, not a whole program. It altered some modest bits of code to other bits of code. It gave the address of the Cayman account, but the players already had that address. It didn’t offer any insights into what the original gold-farming bot was for.
Reverse engineering would show that it was a patch designed to tell one piece of a network to shut the entire network down. That was all. And that information happened to fit right in with the premise of Briana Hall, in which the players were called upon to shut down networks of villains.
It was all, amazingly, fitting together.
“Miss Shaw? ”
“Yes?”
Dagmar recognized the voice of Detective Murdoch. She left the conference room and returned to her office.
“Do you know a Boris Bustretski?” he asked.
“Yes.”
There was a little pause-the length, perhaps, of an explosion.
“I’m sorry to tell you he’s been killed in another bombing.”
She let another explosion-pause go by.
“Why would anyone kill BJ?” she asked. “He wasn’t… anybody.”
“Can you tell us more about him?”
“He was my boyfriend ten years ago, before my marriage. We were good friends with Charlie Ruff and Austin Katanyan. But BJ and Charlie started their business together, and they ended up hating each other. BJ acted crazy, and Charlie fired him. Austin didn’t get along with him, either, after that. BJ is-was-still angry about it, after all these years.
“I recently gave BJ a job because I felt sorry for him. But”-she hoped she was convincing-“I don’t know why anyone would kill him. That’s just crazy.”
There was another little pause, another little explosion.
“Had Boris-BJ-ever made threats against Mr. Ruff?”
“None that I took seriously,” Dagmar said.
“What were the nature of the threats?”
In her mind, Dagmar replayed the Phalanx flying apart in flames, one image following the other like frames on a film reel.
“He said that if he could figure out a way to kill Charlie, he would,” Dagmar said. “But he wouldn’t do it if it meant being caught.”
The car burned in Dagmar’s mind, a smear of brilliant orange against the night web of Los Angeles.
“But BJ wasn’t a violent man,” she said. “He wasn’t serious.”
“Can you come down to the station and talk to us?”
“No,” Dagmar said. “Maybe later. Right now I’m in the middle of something at work.”
Whole networks of bots vanished from the world. The threat to the dollar faded by late afternoon, along with the morning’s rainstorm. The Federal Reserve had an emergency meeting; the IMF stepped in; so did European banks; so did sovereign wealth funds from a number of American allies. The value of the dollar began to rise.
Billions, Dagmar thought, were pouring into the United Bank of Cayman as the botnets shut down. At some point, Dagmar was going to have to call Charlie’s parents and tell them how rich they were and urge them to continue Charlie’s generous donations to charities worldwide.
They could keep a billion or two. What the hell.
By evening the dollar was regaining value on Pacific exchanges, where it was already Thursday morning. Eventually it stabilized at about 85 percent of its former value.
On Thursday morning, Dagmar went to a meeting with Murdoch and Special Agent Landreth of the FBI, who managed at length to convince her, against her will, that BJ was a killer. That he’d hired Litvinov to kill Austin, that he was responsible for the bomb that killed Charlie, that he’d beaten Siyed to death in a jealous rage, and that finally he’d blown himself up accidentally.
“It doesn’t make any sense!” Dagmar protested, and she was right; but she knew it made all the sense that it had to.
Read the Schedule
Know the Schedule
Love the Schedule
Dagmar looked at the words tracking endlessly on the flat-screen wall monitor and permitted herself a small smile. The mass hacking was the last big event of The Long Night of Briana Hall, and after that the game would grow manageable, both for her and her staff.
On Saturday, the Tapping the Source modules had told the players which water sources would be targeted by the terrorists, and allowed them to foil the terror plot. On Wednesday, they had destroyed the financial networks of the money men who had planned to profit from the disruption.
With both sets of major villains defeated, the game turned more intimate. It would all be about Briana Hall’s trying to convince the police that she was innocent in the deaths of her two former boyfriends.
Briana Hall’s life, Dagmar thought, was not unlike her own. Born a refugee in a hotel room, ending as words in a police file.
The web of Los Angeles spread out below her, lines of yellow and red, incandescents and neon and billboards.
The crime-scene tape was gone. The rubble had been swept into boxes to be stared at by experts. A few lights were on at Katanyan Associates, and a few cars remained in the parking lot.
Dagmar stood where the Phalanx had been and looked out at the city. The wind coming up the slope stirred her hair and brought with it the faint scent of eucalyptus.
Her phone sang. She answered.
“Miss Shaw?”
A wry smile touched Dagmar’s lips at the sound of the familiar voice. “You know, Lieutenant Murdoch,” she said, “I believe you know me well enough by now that you might as well call me by my first name.”
“If you like,” Murdoch said.
“How can I help you?”
“I called because I have news,” Murdoch said. “Rather sad news, I’m afraid.”
Police sirens wailed somewhere down in Los Angeles. Billboards flashed, transmitting the code that was commerce.
“Yes?” she said.
“Preliminary DNA evidence has confirmed that it was Mr. Ruff that was killed in the hotel explosion,” Murdoch said. “The preliminary evidence will be confirmed later, when a more thorough analysis is performed, but I’ve never known the preliminary to be wrong.”
“I understand,” Dagmar said.
Murdoch was only telling her what she already knew. Charlie, who despite his best efforts was not Victor von Doom, had not substituted another body for his own and had not gone underground in order to mastermind the collapse of world economies. That was the sort of thing that happened only in fiction-including the sort of fiction Dagmar wrote.
“We’ve also found the place where the bombs were assembled,” Murdoch said. “A hotel room. The tenant had asked not to be disturbed, but after three days the management decided to open the door. When they looked into the tenant’s luggage, they found bomb-making materials and instructions downloaded from the Internet, and called us. Prints taken at the scene match prints taken from Boris Bustretski’s apartment.”
“If there was a late-model laptop, it belongs to my company,” Dagmar said.
“You’ll have to contact the FBI about that,” Murdoch said. “Homeland Security has it all now.”
“Ah,” Dagmar said.
Great Big Idea would probably get the computer back only after time had made it thoroughly obsolete.
“Thank you for calling,” she said.
She holstered her phone and looked out over Los Angeles, feeling the wind lift her hair.
This was what BJ had played for, the view from the corner office, the tycoon car, the tycoon clothes, the tycoon bank account, and all Los Angeles at his feet.
Played and lost. All the brilliant game mastering, the devious plots, the ninja tactics played in World of Cinnabar, hadn’t helped BJ in the end.
The world was just too big. BJ hadn’t been defeated by Dagmar so much as by the Group Mind, lots of little autonomous agents out in the world, each with a skill set and a knowledge set, each with her own motivations, her own joys, her own alternate reality, all networked together in the great gestalt, the great becoming, that was the world.
Dagmar turned, Los Angeles at her back, and walked to her car.
FROM: LadyDayFan
Motel Room Blues, or The Long Night of Briana Hall, will end on Saturday with a live event in Griffith Park. Presumably we’ll meet Briana, and maybe some of her friends, and help them tidy up the last few bits of plot before the happy ending that we see on the near horizon.
What are we to make of this game?
We’re used to ARGs wandering in and out of the real world, but this one took more twists and sharp turns than any I can remember. We’ve had real-life death wound into the narrative, and we’ve done some real-life detection. We’ve also skied down glaciers on Titan, got drunk in the bars of Mars Port, and engaged in the most outrageous public hacking event in world history.
Is this a model for ARGs of the future? Will we be asked to aid real-world problem solvers with their agendas? And if so, can such a thing possibly be classified as entertainment?
We’re used to following the whims of puppetmasters, but puppetmasters with real-world policies are another matter. Is this a good idea? Should we follow anyone who provides what they say is entertainment, even if it comes with an ideology?
Does it become dangerous when This Is Really Not A Game?
The chatter of players filled the rooms of the Fajita Hut with a constant roar. Dagmar recognized LadyDayFan, Hippolyte, GIAWOL-and of course Joe Clever, who sat alone at his table. No one, in this highly networked group, wanted to be seen talking to him. Even helping to catch Litvinov had not persuaded the others not to shun him, at least in public.
The Griffith Park event had gone well. Despite a day of drizzle, five or six hundred players had turned out to publicly solve a few last-minute puzzles. Briana, played by the actress Terri Griff, had appeared to thank the players for their efforts and then rumbled away in a vintage red Mustang convertible, the personal wheels of Richard the Assassin, who had lent the car for the occasion.
Dagmar watched the event on the live feed. To attend in person would have broken the fourth wall.
The players, buoyed and sad, their collective dream fading, reassembled in the nearby Fajita Hut, a large fast-food place with obsessively clean counters and containers of freshly made tortillas on the buffet. Dagmar, Jack Stone, the puzzle designer, and a few of the minor actors joined them. The fourth wall had, by this time, crumbled to dust.
“What’s coming up next?” asked a young man with bright red hair.
Dagmar finished chewing her pollo asado, swallowed, and spoke.
“Wait and see,” she said. A puppetmaster never revealed anything, not in public.
“I’ve never done one of these before,” he said. “I’m totally stoked.”
Dagmar dabbed a bit of sour cream from her upper lip.
“Are you Corporal Carrot, by any chance?” she asked.
He grinned. “That’s me!”
“I thought I recognized your voice. Big Terry Pratchett fan?”
“Oh! He’s huge!”
In truth, Dagmar had no idea what game project was coming next. There seemed to be a lull in demand for Great Big Idea’s product. She’d have to get out and start stirring the pot.
And furthermore, she had no idea what might become of her job. She didn’t expect that Mr. and Mrs. Ruff would want to run Charlie’s business. They’d sell their interest to someone else, and that someone would send some stern vice president or other with instructions to “rationalize” the business, which was usually done by firing as many people as possible.
Charlie’s main business was his software, of course. The game business would stick out by contrast-the two game businesses, actually, since Great Big Idea and Planet Nine were effectively separate companies.
Of the two, Planet Nine had already generated eight or nine million players. Most of those had joined for free under the eight-week special offer, courtesy of Briana Hall, but a lot of them had sampled Planet Nine’s pleasures while waiting for updates from Dagmar and would probably stay. Planet Nine would most likely have at least a million revenue-generating subscribers.
By contrast, Great Big Idea had just lost a huge amount of money. Millions. Dagmar could always explain that those millions were lost on Charlie Ruff’s direct orders, and that he had provided the millions in question out of his own funds, but this distinction might well be lost on any Harvard MBA intent on proving his worth by slashing costs and jobs.
She supposed that Great Big Idea might be sold to some other, larger game company, where it would remain a square peg in a round hole or be spun off into a company of its own.
In any case, Dagmar had reason to be worried about her professional future.
She could survive, of course, by theft. Nobody knew about Atreides LLC but her, and there were nearly fourteen million dollars left in that account, even after all her lavish spending. But she had every intention of returning the money to AvN Soft.
When all was said and done, she wasn’t a thief. She was a puppetmaster, and she had blown up a former boyfriend, but it had to be said in her favor that stealing was quite beneath her.
Besides, a forensic accountant could turn up that money without a lot of trouble, and Dagmar had no intention of going to jail, not after all this.
“May I join you?”
She recognized the gamer she knew as Hippolyte-a scrawny young woman with straw blond hair. “Of course.”
Hippolyte arranged her thin body on a chair. Her hair was frizzed by the day’s humidity, and she had a smudge of pale green eye shadow between her eyes, which suggested that she’d put on her makeup in great haste that morning, before she’d quite come awake.
“That was a phenomenal game!” Hippolyte said.
“Thank you.”
“Everyone’s talking about how it staked out new ground, solving a crime in the real world and running down an actual criminal.” Hippolyte smiled. “But then you know that, since you read all the posts on Our Reality Network.”
Dagmar, Woman of Mystery, gave an ambiguous shrug.
“But it didn’t solve all the mysteries, did it?” Hippolyte said. “Those other deaths.”
“You couldn’t help,” Dagmar said. “We didn’t have the clues to give you. Nobody had a picture of the perpetrator.”
“They were all your friends, right?” Hippolyte asked. “Even the bomber.”
Dagmar allowed herself a moment of sadness.
“Even the bomber,” she said. “We all knew each other.”
Hippolyte shook her head. “That’s kind of amazing.”
“We all met in college,” Dagmar said. “We were in the same gaming group.”
And then, in front of that audience, she found herself telling that story, about BJ and Austin and Charlie, and the treacherous, devious worlds they had created, when they were all young and games were all they knew of life.