This Is Not a Game (14 page)

Doors opened. Abu Bakar opened Dagmar’s door, and said, “Please.”

The building turned out to be the group’s training hall. The place was scrupulously clean. Racks for weapons stood along the walls, half of them empty. A large photo of a distinguished-looking man, perhaps the style’s founder, stood on one wall between a pair of Indonesian flags.

A group of women sat on a raised platform at one end of the room. Cooking smells brightened the air. Dagmar felt her mouth begin to water.

Dagmar removed her shoes at the entrance along with the others. The boy in the wife-beater shirt brought in her baggage and placed it by the door.

Dagmar looked at the springy split-bamboo floor, ideal for percussive exercise, and reflected that in Los Angeles, fashionable homeowners would have paid a lot of money for a floor just like this one.

She turned to Putri. “How long are we staying here?”

“Till the boat comes. The boat won’t come till night.”

“How will we know when the boat arrives?”

“The captain will call on his phone.”

On his satellite phone. Of course.

“Please,” said Putri, waving a hand in the direction of the circle of women. “We thought you might want to eat.”

“Thank you!”

Dagmar approached the platform eagerly. The women looked up at her—they were young girls in their teens under the direction of an older woman, and they had prepared a large pot of rice and a number of other dishes set in a circle around the rice bowl.

One of the girls gave Dagmar a bowl, and she was prepared to seat herself with the others when a thought struck her. She turned to Putri.

“Food must be scarce here,” she said. “I don’t want to take anyone’s food.”

Putri absorbed this, then nodded.

“That is kind of you,” she said. “But in our kampung we have food. One of those
gudangs
we passed—storage places?”

“Warehouses?”

“Yes. Warehouses. One of the
gudangs
was full of rice. So now we have a lot of rice, and the head man of our kampung can trade this rice for other kinds of food.” She smiled. “So we are poor here, but not starving.”

“Is Abu Bakar the head man?”

“No. That is Mr. Billy the Kid. You may meet him later.”

Dagmar was hungry but couldn’t keep the question from her lips.

“Billy the Kid? Is that a name his English teacher gave him?”

“No,” Putri said patiently, “it’s his Indonesian name. American names are very popular here, and Mr. Billy the Kid was named after a character played by Paul Newman in the cinema.”

Dagmar could think of no response but a nod.

Dagmar moved to seat herself with the other women, who gladly made room for her. She noticed that several of the young girls carried knives in their belts, and she was pleased that women were allowed to study martial arts here, in a Muslim country. No one had imposed burkas on these women, not yet.

The food was lovely, and carefully prepared. Dagmar praised it extravagantly. Her stomach had shrunk in the day and a half since her last meal, and that helped her eat slowly. The girls were talkative, and those who had English were eager to practice it. Dagmar answered the usual questions and asked questions of her own.

Time passed. The young men wandered in and out. Abu Bakar talked with the older woman, who Putri said was his wife. Dagmar looked out the rear window and saw an undeveloped area, partly under a shallow lake, that stretched from the rear of the building toward an industrial district in the distance. There was a petrochemical smell—perhaps the lake was used for dumping.

The kampung, backed up against this desolate area, with its canal and drawbridges, was practically an island. That made it very defensible, assuming of course that anyone ever found it worth attacking.

The sun drew close to the horizon. The evening call for prayer went up from the neighboring mosque, but those in the training hall ignored it as if it were nothing more than birdsong.

If you were religious enough to pray, Dagmar supposed, you were probably in the mosque already.

As the muezzin fell silent, Dagmar approached Putri. She reached for one of the pockets where she had stashed some of her money, opened the pocket button, and offered Putri three hundred dollars.

“Could you give this to Abu Bakar for me?” she asked. “For the poor people in the kampung?”

Putri was astonished. For a moment her English deserted her, and she could only nod. She walked to Abu Bakar and gestured for Dagmar to follow. Putri handed Abu Bakar the money, and the two conducted a rapid conversation in Javanese. Then Abu Bakar turned to Dagmar and held out the money.

“He says,” said Putri, “that you don’t have to pay. We are doing this for the sake of our own—” She paused, then made a valiant attempt at the proper English. “For our spirit. For our own development.”

Dagmar’s mind spun. She had wanted this not to be noblesse oblige, a round-eyed female handing out hundred-dollar bills like tips. She genuinely liked these people; she wanted them to be well.

She put out a hand and pressed the bills back toward Abu Bakar.

“For the children,” she said. “For medicine and—whatever.”

Putri translated. Abu Bakar thought for a moment, then gravely put the money into a pocket.

“Thank you, Miss Dogma,” he said.

A cell phone rang. Dagmar recognized a ring tone by Linkin Park. One of the young men answered, then gave the phone to Abu Bakar.

In a few moments everything was motion. Dagmar found herself back in the white sedan with Putri and Abu Bakar, her luggage in the trunk. The convoy moved out, traveling under running lights on the blacked-out streets. They crossed another drawbridge out of the kampung, then turned north. Abu Bakar was back on his cell phone, talking to his friends and allies.

Bags of rice were exchanged, and the group passed through a roadblock into another kampung. The cars passed young men carrying spears and wavy-edged blades. Taillights glowed on the red brick buildings.

The convoy passed through an industrial area, factories looking out with rows of blind glass eyes. Dagmar caught sight of a tank farm off to the left, glowing eerily in the moonlight.

The convoy came to a canal, and a roadblock on a bridge. The cars paused on the deserted road. Dagmar saw a Coca-Cola sign hanging loose on a shuttered fast-food place. The lead car moved up to the roadblock; there was some shouted Javanese, then there were cries and martial yells. Dagmar’s heart lurched as she saw moonlight on sharp blades. There were the bangs of weapons striking the car, and then taillights flashed and the car came roaring back as fast as it could come, a mob in pursuit. Abu Bakar yelled out orders. His young driver faced to the rear and put the car in reverse, his face all staring eyes and moist lips. He couldn’t move until the rearmost car reversed, and the rear car wasn’t moving.

Dagmar was aware only of being trapped, that she could die in this car and not know what to do.

There was a metallic noise as Putri drew her knife. Dagmar stared at it. It was unlike any knife she’d ever seen, a nasty S-shaped thing with a bright little hook at the end, just the size to cut off someone’s finger.

TINAG,
she thought.
This is not a game.

There was a flash, a bang, and a singing of metal. Someone was shooting.

Abu Bakar leaned out the window and yelled at the driver of the rear car. Then all three cars were scrambling backward as fast as they could go. Crumbling brick walls shot past, and parked vehicles. Whoever had the gun held his fire.

After it put some distance between itself and pursuit, the convoy sorted itself out and began moving westward. Abu Bakar shouted into his cell phone. Dagmar tried to slow her racing heart.

“That kampung,” Putri said, her face white, “was captured by friends of the military.” She sheathed her knife.

“I see,” Dagmar said. She was trying not to gasp for breath.

Abu Bakar managed to reroute his convoy. Now the tank farm was on the right. Then Dagmar scented the iodine smell of the sea, and her nerves gave a little thrill. Despite all obstacles, they had managed to come near the sea. The sea, where rescue floated somewhere in the darkness.

The convoy moved east, and now there was water on the left. Then the convoy turned left and was driving down a long jetty. Wooden schooners floated left and right, all in the local style, with a distinctive raked prow. Some had anchored out in the water, where no one could reach them, but some were drawn right to the pier, their fabulously raked stems and bowsprits hanging over the jetty like openmouthed sharks caught in the act of devouring their prey.

The convoy drove unmolested to the end of the pier. Abu Bakar, very calm now, made a call on the cell phone.

Doors opened. People got out of the cars, stretched, breathed in the sea-drenched scent of the land breeze. Dagmar wandered about in a daze.

A boat engine throbbed somewhere in the darkness. The lead car flashed its headlights. Dagmar stared hopefully out to sea, and then she saw it, a blue and white boat with a tall mast and an extravagantly raked stem in the local fashion. The engine cut out, and the boat made a gentle curve and came up broadside to the jetty. Two crew members threw out rope mats to cushion any impact with the pier, then cast lines to lasso bollards with practiced efficiency. Dagmar saw that jerricans of fuel were lashed to the pilot house. A man in a baseball cap peered out of the pilot house and called over.

“Is Dagmar here?”

She wanted to jump in the air, whoop, wave her arms.

“I’m here,” she said, and then realized her voice was pitched too low. “I’m here!” she repeated, louder this time.

“Good! Come on the boat!”

Dagmar took the time to embrace Putri, the girl who had been willing to draw a knife to protect her. She hugged Abu Bakar as well, much to his surprise. And then she let Widjihartani in his baseball cap help her onto the boat. Lines were cast off, and Dagmar’s last view of Indonesia was of her rescuers lined up on the pier, silhouetted against the car lights, waving as she set off on her return to the Western Paradise.

I never got to meet Billy the Kid,
she thought.

 

The dawn rose over the moving ocean, throwing the schooner’s long, dark shadow before it over the sea. Red sun twinkled from the wave caps, long rollers driven by the dry monsoon. Java was well out of sight, but there were islands off the starboard bow. Dagmar stared out over the stern and smelled breakfast cooking.

Suddenly “Harlem Nocturne” rang out over the throb of the engine. Dagmar saw “Charlies Friend” on the display, laughed, and answered.

“Hello, darling,” said Tomer Zan. “How are you?”

“I’m in a boat,” Dagmar said, “heading for Singapore.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“Good,” Zan said finally. “The helicopter was crap anyway.”

“Well,” said Dagmar, “I’m sure you tried your best.”

No points to you,
she thought.

It has been pointed out to me that
this image
has appeared briefly on flat-screen billboards in major cities.

 

The image is a
sem@code
, a type of bar code that leads to Web content and, once decoded with the
proper software,
leads us to
this Web page,
where we find still photographs of a young woman in what appears to be an ordinary motel room. We also have an inventory of her possessions.

 

Looks like a rabbit hole to me.

 

I have started the usual series of topics under the name
Motel Room Blues
, which will serve until something better comes along. This announcement will be copied to the
Introduction.

 

Anyone want to play?

 

 

I’m in!

 

 

Me too. And hey, the lady is armed and dangerous. I think that pistol is a Firestar, probably the 9mm M-43 variation.

 

The Firestar is a Spanish pistol. I wonder if it is a clue to her place of origin.

 

 

Her driver’s license is from California and gives her name as Briana Hall. But she’s checked into the motel under the name of Iris Fitzgerald.

 

 

Hey, cool! I’m in!

 

 

If you download the picture of the driver’s license and enlarge it, you find tiny numbers inserted just below the photo: 01100011011101010110110001101100011001010110111000100111011100110010000001100100011001010110000101100100 (if I have that transcribed correctly).

 

Which is binary, and which converted to decimal is 6518124.

 

 

6518124? Is that a phone number?

 

 

But which area code?

 

 

I’ll call them all!

 

 

I’ll have to get on my other computer before I’m able to convert the binary to roman numerals. That could be important, too.

 

 

File the 6518124 until later. I’m sure we’ll need it.