This Is Not a Game (19 page)

“Yeah.” He offered a faint smile. “It’s a cool idea, Dagmar.”

And it would get Joe Clever out of her hair while she had the office scanned for bugs and shifted details of the game around to make worthless any information he might have discovered through eavesdropping.

A look of uncertainty crossed Joe Clever’s face. “Can I play the game and look for Litvinov at the same time? ”

“Yes. But you get more coolness points for Litvinov.”

He nodded. “Okay. Great. I’ll do it.”

“Thanks.”

“Oh—” Joe Clever looked over Dagmar’s head toward her apartment. “I should tell you. Some guy went into your apartment about an hour ago.”

Dagmar was staggered. “What? ” she asked. “Who? ”

“I don’t know, but he had a key. Let me show you.”

He reached into the van’s interior for his laptop, pulled it toward him, and bent to use the touch pad. A film appeared, and she saw a dumpy, middle-aged man approach her apartment, look over his shoulder, then insert a key and enter.

“That’s the building manager,” Dagmar said. “Richardson.”

“He was in your place for six minutes.”

Dagmar stared at the picture. “What the hell for?” she wondered.

“I suppose he could have been there to repair something,” Joe Clever said, “but my guess is that he was poking around in your underwear drawer.”

“He
what?
” Rage filled Dagmar’s heart. “How do you know? ”

“I think it was the expression on his face when he left.” He tapped buttons and fast-forwarded to the moment when the manager left her apartment.

The man
did
manage to look both furtive and smug.

“The bastard!” Dagmar said. “I’m going to check!”

She swung away from the van, but Joe Clever called her back.

“You forgot your dinner.”

She took the fast-food bag from his hand and marched to her apartment.

Normally the problem with her underwear drawer would have been that it was too disorganized to actually tell if anything was missing: it wasn’t as if she bothered to line up and number her underpants. But there
was
no clean underwear.

She’d remembered that she’d thought she’d had enough to last her the next few days, and then thought she’d miscounted.

But she hadn’t miscounted after all. The superintendent had been in her drawer, just as Joe Clever had suggested.

Filled with fury, she stepped out onto the balcony that overlooked the courtyard and looked down. There, carrying out a garbage bag from the clubhouse, was the creep himself.

“Hey!” she called. “Richardson!”

Faces looked up at her from around the classic 1970s coffin-shaped swimming pool. Two young women tanned there, model-slash-actresses with large breasts that pointed skyward in a clearly artificial way, and a short distance away from them was an elderly man who swam slow laps every afternoon and then sat on a chaise longue to dry out and absorb some warmth from the sun.

Richardson looked up at her and shielded his eyes from the glare.

“Do you need something? ” he asked.

“I need you to stay the hell out of my underwear drawer, you fucking creep!” Dagmar yelled. “Come in my apartment again, and I’ll kick your ass!”

She watched as a series of complicated expressions crossed Richardson’s face. Whatever the reaction was, it wasn’t that of an innocent man.

Busted!
she thought, triumphant.

Richardson shuffled a step closer.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“
I’ve got video, you fucking pervert!
” Dagmar shouted. “
You wanna watch it?
”

Even from the third-floor balcony she could see the color drain from Richardson’s face. Enlightenment dawned across the faces of the model-slash-actresses. Perhaps they had missed a few items themselves.

Richardson dropped the garbage bag and flapped his hands in a vague way. Dagmar found that infuriating.

“I’ll have your job, prick!” she shouted, and then she went back into her apartment and slammed the door.

The one good thing about surviving the Indonesian holocaust, she thought, was that she was no longer afraid of anyone who wasn’t carrying a gun or a damn big knife.

A new digital dead bolt was installed on Dagmar’s apartment door early the following morning. A few hours later a pair of private security contractors, wearing identical tan blazers, swept through the Great Big Idea offices and failed to find any eavesdropping gear planted there by Joe Clever or anybody else. To counter the laser eavesdropping system, they were happy to sell Dagmar white-noise generators to provide interference, and detectors to sound an alarm when a laser was directed at the room.

“I want a death ray,” she told them, “to shoot back.” Her science fiction background coming to the fore.

“If you shoot a laser back at them,” one man said, “you could blind them.”

“They could blind
me.
”

They nodded.

“True,” one said. “They could.”

In any case, the Tan Blazer Men doubted that Joe Clever could get close enough to the building to hear much of anything, not without being seen.

“It depends on how good his software is at sorting signal from interference.”

“Great,” Dagmar said. “I could have been blinded for
nothing.
”

Dagmar tried to pass the news to Charlie, but his secretary, Karin, said that Charlie had called in and said he wouldn’t be coming to the office today.

Maybe sorting out Austin’s company was a knottier problem than he’d anticipated.

Dagmar looked out the window to see if the Dodge van was visible before calling in her design team and letting them know that their meeting of two days before had possibly been compromised and that they were going to have to rework everything that had been decided on that day.

They were in a vengeful mood. They decided not only to shift all the game goodies to different locations, but to lay ambushes in the compromised areas.

“Anyone going into
Planet Nine
and looking under that gantry is going to find three heavily armed sharpshooters from Team Evil who are going to take him apart!”

Or so Helmuth, her head programmer, proclaimed. Dagmar waved a hand to give the plan her blessing.

“And if they find any of the pages we discussed,” Dagmar said, “we’ll fill them with information that leads nowhere.”

“Information,” Helmuth said darkly, “written in Estonian.”

It was only after the meeting that Dagmar had a chance to go online and see what had been happening in the game world.

Joe Clever’s video of Austin’s death, which Video Us had not as yet removed, had generated more than eleven million hits.

And in the past forty-eight hours, another 3,600,000 people had joined
The Long Night of Briana Hall.

Ghouls,
she thought.

She checked her email, and all sense of accomplishment evaporated.

 

Dagmar my Dear,

I’m going to be in Los Angeles next week to shoot a commercial. My
agent tells me that the
Golden Nagi
credit has been a big plus! Lots
of people in the business saw it, apparently.

I would like to thank you for the opportunity to work with you, and
all the doors that you have helped to open for me.

Can I take you to dinner?

Your appreciative Siyed

“Oh for God’s sake,” Dagmar said aloud. And then, to the computer, “Return mail.”

 

Siyed,

I’m working hard on a new project, and I doubt I’ll be able to see
you.

Good luck with the commercial.

Dagmar

 

Was that curt enough? she wondered.

She began dealing with the problems involved in reworking the game to suggest that Austin’s death was somehow a part of it. She didn’t feel she could say it outright, but she could offer hints that the players were certain to notice.

Dagmar thought that maybe Joe Clever wasn’t clever enough to find Litvinov, but she had more confidence in the entire Group Mind.

Three million people: they had to know
something.

 

Briana Hall, the woman in the hotel room, was hiding from the police, who were under the impression that she had killed two of her former lovers. The game was designed to move both backward and forward in time, following Briana as she fled from the police and attempted to prove herself innocent, and simultaneously going back into the history of the characters to discover their past actions and the reasons for them. The help of the players would be needed in order to accomplish both of these objectives.

One of Briana’s exes had been killed by a sleeper cell of saboteurs who were using a location in the
Planet Nine
game as a rendezvous—the sometime boyfriend had been a sysop and during the course of his work had overheard some of their conversation.

The other had been killed because he was a minor player in a securities fraud and his cronies erroneously assumed he was under investigation—in fact he had had contact with SEC investigators for an entirely different reason.

Dagmar wondered if that victim could be renamed Austin. But if so, she’d have to change the plot: she didn’t want to make one of her oldest friends guilty of securities fraud, not even in the context of fiction. So she’d have to reengineer the plot in order to provide a reason why he was killed—accidentally—by a hired assassin.

She calculated how to make the plot changes, which she figured would involve a couple of days of rewriting. But there would be more than rewriting, because she’d have to add a whole Maffya subplot, and that would take up a lot of resources.

While thinking this over, she found the card that Lieutenant Murdoch had given her and called him. He was out, but she left a message asking him to return her call.

She was deep into rewriting when “Harlem Nocturne” announced Murdoch’s call. She looked at the time in the corner of her monitor and saw that it was after six o’clock—Murdoch was probably returning all his phone calls before leaving the office.

“This is Dagmar,” she said.

She had met Murdoch the previous day. He was a small, systematic man with a lined face and graying hair. His mouth had the kind of pinched look that suggested false teeth. His questions the other day had been competent and professional, and he’d asked them all without giving the slightest clue what was happening behind his pale blue eyes. He was almost like a character on the old
Dragnet
program, deadpan and businesslike, but more human, without the TV characters’ utter humorlessness.

“You called? ” he said.

“Yes. I realized that if you give me the name that Litvinov used to enter the country, I could probably find him for you.”

“How could you do that? ” he said after a pause.

Dagmar explained about the game and the fact that she had thousands of detectives eager to set their intelligence on the problem.

“While we appreciate citizen help,” Murdoch began, “I’m not sure that this would be appropriate.”

“Lieutenant Murdoch,” Dagmar said, “can you call every hotel and motel in Greater Los Angeles to find out if Litvinov, or his alias, is staying there? ”

“No. There are thousands of hotels altogether. We don’t have that kind of manpower.”

“
I
do,” Dagmar said.

There was another pause.

“Here’s what I figured out,” Dagmar said. “Either Litvinov has left town, in which case you’ll have to hope you can get him arrested back home in Saint Petersburg or whatever—”

“He’s based in Hamburg,” Murdoch said.

“Okay,” Dagmar said, “Hamburg. But my point is, either he’s gone, or he’s still in town. And
if
he’s still in town, it’s because he’s realized he shot the wrong man and is still planning on going after his real target. So if he
isn’t
found, someone else could die.”

After a moment of thoughtful silence, Murdoch spoke.

“Let me sleep on it,” he said. “I’ll get back to you tomorrow morning.”

“Thank you,” said Dagmar.

And got busy with her rewrite.

 

 

 

 

I’m going to steal a page from Chatsworth’s book and decline to reveal how I came by this information.

But.

Litvinov, the assassin, entered the country with a Latvian passport under the name Ainars Vilumanis. Latvia is a NATO country and he probably had less difficulty entering than with a Russian passport. Since Litvinov was born in Latvia he probably speaks acceptable Latvian.

As of 9:00PDT this morning he hadn’t used that passport to leave the country. He may still be in the Los Angeles area, and it’s possible we could locate him.

Anyone want to help me try?

 

 

I thought Litvinov had nothing to do with the game.

That’s what I thought, too, and then I saw
this
on Briana’s MySpace page this morning:

Thanks, Consuelo. You’re on the right track
.

I am finding this really intriguing. Can anyone think of another example of a character in a game addressing a player directly?

Only when we’ve screwed up badly and need a nudge to get us back on the right track.