This Is Not a Game (23 page)

And then she wondered what she’d sounded like on her own 911 call when Austin was shot, and suddenly she couldn’t watch or listen anymore. She barged out of the studio into the hall with its flickering fluorescent lighting. On the walls were old LP jackets and photographs of celebrities that may or may not have ever recorded there.

Dagmar’s head swam. Her pulse raced. Her flesh prickled with waves of heat. She looked at her hands and saw fluorescents strobing on her, crawling over her skin like ants.

The hall reeked of cigarette ash. Muffled by the studio door, Terri’s screams raked Dagmar’s nerves like rusty nails. Dagmar walked down the hall, through the reception area, and out into the parking lot. She leaned against her car and took deep breaths of the asphalt-scented air. A police siren dopplered up and down on La Brea.

A horrific sense of dread possessed her. She remembered the Palms burning in Jakarta, the pillar of smoke over Glodok, protesters falling under police fire. Sparks flying in the darkness as bullets caromed off the metal bodies of cars.

She imagined bodies lying on La Brea, Century City afire, automatic weapons crackling down in Japantown.

It was all so fragile, she thought. That was really the lesson of Jakarta, how the world could change in an instant. How a nation could fall, a neighborhood burn, a friend lie murdered.

How a general or a politician or a mobster could watch it all and smile.

What am I playing with?
she wondered. She created entertainments based on all this, on violence and mysteries and movements behind the scenes, all the things that might be fun so long as they weren’t actually happening to
you.
And now she had sent people from her strange, insular world of online entertainment to track a genuine killer.

She was, it occurred to her, completely crazy. And Charlie was even crazier.

It was all going to end, she thought, in a rising cloud of ash.

A little farther down La Brea, Dagmar found a convenience store with flyspecked windows and a cashier who carried a pistol on his hip for use in the event of a robbery. She bought two miniature bottles of Cuervo, which she took to the car and drank very fast, one after the other.

She sat in the car and listened to the radio for a while, until the burning in her gut turned to a relaxation that slowly spread to her barbed-wire nerves, and then the radio began to irritate her. They were playing some kind of extended-play nineties music that she didn’t remember from the actual nineties, so she got out of the car to toss the miniatures in the trash, got back in the car, and headed north to Hollywood.

Driving drunk to see your boss,
she thought.
How fucked is
that?

She drove past Scientology’s Norman castle and the sad, tacky souvenir shops. Hollywood was seedier and more depressing every time Dagmar saw it. She saw clouds of tourists wandering the Walk of Fame, lining up to take one another’s pictures. All probably wondering how to get their vacation back.

She gave the car to the valet at the Roosevelt and walked to the pool. The poolside areas were full of people talking on cell phones, doing business. Dagmar walked to Charlie’s cabana and was about to knock when the door opened from the inside. A young woman smiled at her, all bouncing strawberry curls and gleaming teeth.

“Excuse
me,
” the woman said, and slipped out of the cabana to walk back toward the main hotel. Dagmar watched her walking away.

Damn,
she thought.
That girl could wear
anything
and her ass would forgive her.

She entered the cabana. Charlie sat on a striped couch, gazing at the notebook computer that was propped up in front of him on a hassock. Charlie wore one of the complimentary Roosevelt bath-robes and looked down at the display with a frown. Behind him, a portable massage table had been set up and draped with white towels.

“Hello, Mr. Hefner,” Dagmar said.

Charlie glanced toward her, looking at her from over the rims of his spectacles.

“Ah,” he said. “Did you meet Kimba Leigh? That’s not Kimberly, it’s k-i-m-b-a l-e-i-g-h. Two words.”

“Your model/actress/masseuse?” Dagmar asked as she closed the door behind her.

“Not mine,” Charlie said mildly. “She belongs to the hotel. And the person who gives massages is, unfortunately, a fireplug-shaped Arab named Mahmoun.” He turned toward the tray sitting next to him on the couch and removed the shiny metal dome to reveal the plate and sandwich beneath.

“Kimba Leigh brought my French dip,” he said.

Dagmar smiled. “I’ll just bet she did.”

He gave her a tolerant look. “She’s the food and beverage manager. She thinks I’m in the business, so she offers me her special VIP personal service.”

“I bet she does.”

“Would you mind getting me a Coke from the fridge? And help yourself, if you like.”

The air bore a faint undertone of paint in the room, a hint that the place had recently been redecorated. The cabana had a full kitchen and a wet bar prestocked with expensive liquor. The walls were plastered white with ocean turquoise trim. Slate blue drapes had been drawn over the glass wall that looked out onto the pool area. The furniture was the sturdy sort you might find in a Mexican beach resort, wood-framed, with colorful fabrics. The chairs and couch were covered with books and papers, and there was a cluster of featureless white cardboard boxes, each slightly larger than a paperback book, around Charlie’s feet.

Charlie’s Pinky and the Brain stuffies stared down from atop the television cabinet.

Dagmar went to the refrigerator and got one of Charlie’s imported Mexican half-liter Cokes. She reached for a second bottle and hesitated, then closed the fridge, stepped to the bar, and poured herself three fingers’ worth of Tres Generaciones. She had a feeling she might need it by the time her meeting was over.

She returned to the couch and handed Charlie his Coke.

“Have a seat,” he said.

She balanced her glass on the arm of the couch and took a double handful of papers and books and moved them from the couch to one of the chairs.
Double Star,
she saw, by Robert Heinlein.
Introduction to Macroeconomics. Theories of the Great Economists.

“Why the textbooks? ” she asked.

“They have to do with my new project.”

“I’ve never been terribly impressed by Heinlein’s economic theory.”

Charlie smiled. “That’s leisure reading.”

She sat next to him on the couch. On the hassock she could see the computer’s display, and she saw that Charlie had been writing code.

He saw the direction of her glance, then reached out and closed the display.

“What are you doing? ” she asked.

“It’s a special project.” He looked at her. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve written a piece of code? ”

“Six years?” she said. That being the length of time since AvN Soft had really taken off.

“Exactly.” He shrugged. “I
like
to code, but because I’m such a big success, I never do it anymore. So I’m working on a little thing of my own.”

He was going to make her ask him, she realized. So she might as well get it over with.

“What’s it about? ” she asked.

His mouth twitched. “I’d rather not say.”

“But it’s about economics.”

He looked away, at Pinky and the Brain atop the cabinet.

“It has an economic dimension,” he said.

“You’re creating a stock-trading program? ”

He gave her an ambiguous look.

“There are a lot of
those,
” he said. “And AvN Soft already has Rialto.”

“Currency trading? ”

He shrugged.

“The currency traders are really slamming the euro today,” she said.

Charlie shrugged again. “That’s over,” he said. “The central banks intervened, and so did the oil sheiks, to protect all their favorite boutiques.”

“You’d think the sheiks would want their Gucci cheaper.”

“Not if it means the Europeans are so poor they can’t buy petroleum.”

“Ah.” She sipped her tequila. “So who was leading the attack this time? ”

“I believe,” Charlie said carefully, “that the Chinese are getting the blame again.”

“
Was
it the Chinese? ”

“The Chinese were in the pack,” Charlie said, “but it was all really the fault of the French and the Germans. The euro is supported by this complicated agreement among the member communities that establishes various economic targets, like inflation. But the French and the Germans have been cheating since the beginning—they’re the largest economies over there, and they figured they could get away with it. But they left their currency vulnerable, and now they’ve paid the penalty. The euro’s down about thirty percent, last I checked.”

“How’s the dollar? ” she asked.

He lifted his eyebrows. “Knock wood,” he said.

Dagmar watched him as she sipped again at her drink.

“Was it the Russian Maffya that attacked the euro? ” she asked.

Charlie seemed to consider this.

“I doubt they’ve got enough capital to damage a major currency,” he said seriously. He took a large swallow of his Coke, reached for one of the white cardboard boxes piled at his feet. “I didn’t call you here to talk about this, anyway. I want you to take a look at one of these.”

He tossed her the box. The contents were light. She opened the box and took out a recharging unit and a device the size of her phone, covered in gray plastic. There was a small display, two buttons with
Y
and
N
on them, and a kind of clear plastic reservoir on one end, with a green plastic cap.

“What is it? ” she said. “A really stupid computer? ”

“It’s—well, you’d better use mine, I charged it last night.” He dug beneath the remaining papers on the couch, then produced an identical unit. He held down one of the buttons for a few seconds, and then the display lit.

“Go to the sink,” he said, “and fill the reservoir with tap water.”

She raised her eyebrows, but Charlie just looked at her. She took the unit and walked to the kitchen, then popped the bright green top and very carefully ran a little water into the reservoir.

“The unit is waterproof,” Charlie said. “You can submerge it if you like.”

“Do I put the cap back on? ”

“Yes. Then press the Yes button.”

When Dagmar pressed the button, nothing happened. Nothing visible, anyway. Then letters appeared on the display: DRINKING WATER?

“It’s asking if it’s drinking water.”

“Press the Yes button.”

Dagmar did so.

TRANSMIT? read the display.

“Do I want to transmit? ” Dagmar asked.

“Yes.”

Dagmar pressed the Yes button and waited another few seconds. Then the display read: TRANSMISSION COMPLETE.

“Okay,” she said. “That’s done.”

“Right. Empty out the reservoir, then bring the unit back.”

Dagmar did as she was requested, then sat on the couch and gave the unit back to Charlie.

“What we have here,” he said, tossing the unit lightly in one hand, “is a portable water-analysis device combined with a GPS and a satellite transmitter. It’s a civilian offshoot of technology developed for Homeland Security types to identify biological and chemical threats. Within a few seconds, the scanner can analyze water for any of hundreds of common and uncommon pollutants, including bioforms, then transmit the results to a central database, along with GPS coordinates.”

“Interesting,” Dagmar said. Warily, because she had a feeling she knew where Charlie was heading with this.

“Interesting, hell!” Charlie said. “It’s brilliant! Pass out enough of these things, and you can analyze every body of water on the planet, including every source of drinking water. You end up with a complete database of available water sources. Right now, we just added a new entry for tap water in this cabana.”

Dagmar sipped her drink. Tequila fumes flamed up her sinus.

Charlie held up a USB cable. “When you get one of these units,” he said, “you connect it to your computer with the cable, and you get an account with a company up in Portland called Tapping the Source. When you log on, you can read any data that you sent them yourself, so you’ll always know if your own drinking water is safe. But if you want access to the whole database—which a lot of people will—you have to pay a fee.”

Dagmar nodded. “A model of responsible environmental capitalism,” she said.

“Yeah. That’s why I like them.” He looked at her. “That’s why I want you to build these units into the game.”

She had, of course, been expecting something like this. Charlie had no reason to invite her to his cabana other than to screw with her work. But even though she had anticipated him, she still felt the shock, as if he’d just punched her in the ribs.