This Is Not a Game (13 page)

Suddenly she saw it, hovering right above her. There were no wings and no tail structure—the thing was just an aerodynamic shape, like an elongated Frisbee, black against the opalescent cloud. It made a sound like a crowd in a distant stadium, a far-off roaring, and Dagmar realized it was propelled by arrays of the same miniturbines that served as backup power for her computer. There had to be some method of directing the thrust so that the machine could hover or fly in any direction. From the smell, Dagmar assumed the machine was loaded with some form of high-powered aviation fuel, as opposed to the stuff in her computer, a substance that, at the insistence of the Department of Homeland Security, couldn’t burn fast enough to be used to blow up an airplane.

“I see it!” she said into her phone. “It’s right over my head!”

“How far above you?”

“Maybe twenty feet. It’s hard to say. I can’t tell how large it is.”

“We’ll take it down three meters.”

The tone of the turbines shifted, and the machine wafted gently toward Dagmar. The hydrocarbon smell grew stronger.

“Right,” Mordechai said. “We’ve got you. It was hard picking you out from the background. Stand by.”

The drone was, Dagmar guessed, about eight feet long. Despite the gusting of the monsoon, the machine hovered with perfect stillness in the air, its fly-by-wire computer adjusting to every shift of the wind.

“Hold out your hand,” Mordechai said. There was amusement in his voice.

Dagmar put out her right hand, her left hand still holding the phone to her ear. The package dropped and bounced off Dagmar’s forearm, then fell to the rooftop with a little slap.

“Have you got it?” Mordechai asked.

Dagmar knelt, swept her hand over the roof, and found the package. Her fingers closed around it.

“I have it,” she said.

She straightened and looked up in time to see the drone take off, its low roar increasing as it turned northeast and flew away with surprising rapidity. She watched it until it disappeared into the night.

“You want to be careful with that money,” Mordechai said. “What you had before was maybe not worth killing over, but what you’ve got now can get you killed very fast.”

Dagmar felt an invisible hand clamp over her throat. She managed to speak in a kind of whisper.

“How much is it?” she said.

“Two thousand dollars. That should pay for a boat to take you away. Now listen.”

He told her that she should split the package up once she got it to her room, carry it in different places so she wouldn’t be peeling bills off a huge roll and offering someone far too much temptation.

“Right,” she said. “No temptation. Got it.”

 

Widjihartani’s got money for fuel. I don’t know how. Apparently
Charlie arranged it.

Widji’s on the way to Jakarta, and he’s got a satellite phone so
that he can be told where he needs to anchor. Or dock, as the case
may be.

Sea rescue is go!

 

Bayangan Prajurit is go!

 

Evacuation is go!

Thunderbirds are go!

 

Sorry about that last, by the way. My enthusiasm got the better
of me.

 

That’s all right. I knew
someone
was going to say it.

 

Dagmar helped the Tippels move eight floors up from their looted hotel room. It took the elderly couple a long time to slog their way up the stairs—the elevators, when they were working, were now reserved for looters.

None of them had eaten in more than twenty-four hours, and Dagmar gave her guests the stale rolls she’d smuggled out of the breakfast room five days ago. She couldn’t do anything about the temperature: the power had been out for fifteen or sixteen hours, and the room was at least a hundred degrees—and since it was a modern hotel, all glass and steel, there was no way to open a window.

She had considered offering to take them with her when she made her exit, but the European Union was in the process of arranging an evacuation, and the Tippels had decided to wait. Dagmar asked how they planned to get past the looters.

“The looters have no reason to stop anyone from leaving,” Anna Tippel said.

What, Dagmar wondered, did
reason
have to do with anything?

Be in the northwest stairwell at 1600 hours.
It was the stair farthest from the front doors, and one that the looters weren’t using: the Bayangan Prajurit didn’t want to risk a collision with whatever group was gutting the hotel.

Dagmar was ready a quarter of an hour early, sitting in the hot, stale air of the staircase and waiting for the sound of her rescuers. She had her satellite phone on her belt and her laptop in a rucksack—in view of the amount of cash she had on her person, she was no longer worried about someone killing her just for her computer. Her bag held toiletries and a change of clothing. She wore her panama hat on her gray hair and Reeboks on her feet and couldn’t tell if her current mood of buoyant optimism was a good thing or not.

Perhaps she was light-headed with lack of food.

Minutes crept by. Sweat dripped off Dagmar’s nose and splashed on the concrete stair landing. At 1600 hours she cracked open the steel door to see if the Bayangan Prajurit had used stealthy martial arts skills to creep up without her hearing them, but the street was empty except for a few nervous-looking civilians scuttling in the shadows. Hot air blasted through the open door, and she closed it quickly. Frustration clattered in her nerves.

In another ten minutes she was convinced that the whole rescue had been an absurd fantasy, some kind of wild delusion that had possessed LadyDayFan and all the others. A bunch of game hobbyists, planning a real-life rescue half a world away? Insane.

She paced back and forth along the landing, muscles trembling with anger. She checked her phone repeatedly to make sure no one had left her a message, either voice mail or email.

Through the steel door she heard the sound of a vehicle. Doors slammed. More doors slammed than would have been present on a single vehicle, so there was more than one.

Dagmar’s heart raced. She tipped back her hat and wiped sweat from her forehead with an already-soaked handkerchief.

Through the door, she heard Javanese voices.

They could be Bayangan Prajurit. Or looters. Or killers.

She looked at her phone again, saw that no message waited, then returned it to its holster.

The stairwell was more airless than ever. For some reason she thought of the skating rink in the shopping center down the street, trendy young people turning slow circles to pop tunes recorded before Dagmar was born.

Oh hell, she thought. Now or never.

She clutched the door’s locking bar with white-knuckled hands, then pushed the door open a foot or so. The hinges groaned, and Dagmar’s nerves shrieked in response.

As she stared out, she saw a group of Javans looking back at her. There were about ten of them altogether, and three small cars. The men didn’t wear uniforms like the Bersih Jantung Association—they were in ordinary street wear—but the oldest of them, a compact, fit-looking man of fifty or so, wore a loose white top and trousers, with a brilliantly colored wraparound knee-length kilt. All had weapons thrust into their belts or sashes, and each of the men wore a kopiah head wrap, blue with a white pattern, with two subdued little peaks on the top of the head, as if to cover a pair of small horns.

In the States, the kopiah would have made a particularly stylish do-rag.

One young woman was with them. She was still in her teens and was taller than the leader, wearing a wide-sleeved blouse in tropical colors and dark pantaloons. Metal-rimmed glasses were set on her squarish face. Her hair was pulled back in a little bun, and she had a long, sheathed knife thrust through her belt.

When she saw Dagmar, her mouth opened, revealing prominent teeth in a brilliant smile.

The older man looked at Dagmar.

“Dogma?” he said.

“Yes,” Dagmar said. “I’m Dagmar.”

“Please,” said the man, with a stiff little bow. He made a gesture toward a white sedan.

A young man in a wife-beater shirt jumped to open the rear door. Another opened the trunk and walked toward Dagmar with hands outstretched to take her bag.

The young woman approached first, stepping in front of the young man. She was still smiling.

“I’m Putri,” she said. “Please come with us.”

“Yes,” Dagmar said. “Thank you.”

She pushed the door open all the way and stepped onto the sidewalk. Afternoon heat shimmered up around her: the atmosphere seemed scarcely more breathable than the close air in the stairwell. The young man bustled up around Putri and took Dagmar’s bag, then waited expectantly for the knapsack. Dagmar shrugged out of the shoulder straps and handed the computer ruck to him. He put both in the trunk and slammed the lid.

Dagmar stepped into the car. It smelled of tobacco, cloves, and hot plastic. One of the young men, very polite, closed the door for her.

Putri trotted around the car and joined Dagmar in the backseat. The older man gave a quiet command and the others ran into their cars. The three vehicles made U-turns and sped away.

Dagmar looked over her shoulder to see the Royal Jakarta receding.

Putri was still smiling at her.

“Where are you from?” the girl asked.

Dagmar laughed and told her.

 

My friend Eric tells me that
Bayangan
means “phantom” or
“shadow,” and that
Prajurit
is “warrior.” So the Bayangan Prajurit
are Phantom Warriors. Pretty cool, huh?

 

Phantom Warriors? Are they like Indonesian ninjas or what?

 

I don’t think so. I think it’s just one of those elaborate names that
martial artists use, like Golden Crane White Tiger Long Fist Kung
Fu. But I could be wrong.

 

The Bayangan Prajurit convoy avoided the highways and worked their way east and north in short legs, sometimes back-tracking when they didn’t like the look of an area. The older man, whose name, according to Putri, was Mr. Abu Bakar, was on his cell phone continuously—negotiating, Putri said, with groups that controlled the neighborhoods they were passing through.

When they had to take an overpass over a highway, or a bridge across one of the city’s many canals, one car was sent forward to scout, to make certain there was no ambush. Some of the bridges had roadblocks on them, cars drawn across the roadway, and then Abu Bakar came forward to negotiate. Sometimes they were turned away and had to find an alternate route. On other occasions, Abu Bakar paid a toll with sacks of rice that were carried in the lead vehicle.

Jakarta was like Los Angeles in a way, a series of small towns blended together. Some areas featured tall glass office buildings or apartments; some had private homes; some had apartment buildings clustered together. The homes were quiet; businesses were shuttered.

Everywhere there was greenery. The Jakartans liked living among trees.

Or perhaps, in the tropics, you couldn’t keep the green from springing up.

Only in the poor areas, the kampungs, were numbers of people seen—their apartments were too small for anything but sleeping, so life had to be lived in the open whether there was a political and economic crisis or not. The destruction of the currency had hit the rich and the middle classes, but the poor had no savings to lose. What they had lost were jobs: in the streets, Dagmar saw people who would normally have been at work playing football or standing in groups or gambling with whatever passed for currency in an economy where the money had become so much toilet paper.

On one occasion she saw them engaged in a sport that looked like volleyball played with the feet, kicking sometimes from a hand-stand position. The game was fascinating, but the car raced by too quickly for Dagmar to get a good look.

She got on her handheld and sent a message to LadyDayFan, Charlie, and Tomer Zan that she was on her way.

No one tried to stop her from sending the message. If they were kidnappers, she thought hopefully, they would have kept her from communicating.

After two hours of transit, the convoy drew up before a canal, one equipped with a drawbridge of the same type Dagmar had seen in Amsterdam. The drawbridge was up but came down as soon as the cars appeared. Children playing in the canal stared from the water as the cars crossed.

Abu Bakar put down his cell phone for the first time. He turned around in his seat and looked at Dagmar.

“You okay?” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

He gave her an encouraging smile, then faced forward again. Dagmar guessed he had pretty well exhausted his English.

The convoy passed over the bridge, between two shabby canal-side warehouses with red tile roofs, and into a residential area. The principal streets were laid out in a grid, but the smaller streets, very narrow, crept and zigzagged between apartment blocks. There were bright plastic awnings, lines hung with laundry, flags, umbrellas—anything, Dagmar suspected, to provide shade. Broken plaster showed that the buildings were made of red brick, with roofs of metal or worn red tile. The structures were old and sagged a bit, sinking into the soft ground. Zigzag cracks demonstrated that bricks were a very poor construction material in an earthquake zone. The tile roofs often had green plants, and even small bushes, sprouting from the crumbling red clay.

The vehicles passed a small neighborhood mosque and drew up in front of a long building. The brick walls had been plastered and painted white, with neat, bright blue and red lettering. Dagmar recognized “Bayangan Prajurit” amid other words she didn’t know.