This Is Not a Game (25 page)

Dagmar looked at BJ and grinned.

“Yeah,” she said. “We could work it that way.”

She couldn’t help being grateful for someone who was actually trying to
solve
her problems.

“Now,” BJ said, “tell me how this Russian assassin is connected to everything.”

Dagmar took a long breath and slowly exhaled.

“That,” she said, “is really complicated.”

She told him. His blue eyes widened.

“This is the guy who killed
Austin?
You’ve got hundreds of thousands of people trying to find a
real killer?
”

“Millions,” said Dagmar.

“Holy Christ.” His arms made a hopeless, flopping gesture. “I have no idea what to say to that.”

“The problem is that they
aren’t
finding him. We’ve got to give them other things to work on until Litvinov surfaces. And if he
doesn’t
surface, we’ve got to give the players a satisfactory resolution to that plot.”

BJ scrubbed his face with both hands. “I can’t believe this.”

“Wait,” Dagmar said, “till you hear what Charlie wants to do with the water samplers.”

She was in the middle of her explanation when her desk phone rang.

“Dagmar,” she answered.

“Did you get my present, love? ” asked Siyed.

Her heart gave a guilty lurch at the sound of the East London accent.

“Thanks for the flowers,” she said, “but I’m too busy to see you.”

Across the desk, BJ smiled.

“Please, Dagmar,” said Siyed. “I’ve come all this way.”

“Sorry, no,” said Dagmar. “There’s this problem about your being married.”

“I—” And at that moment Dagmar’s handheld began to play “Harlem Nocturne.”

“My other phone’s ringing,” Dagmar said. “Gotta go.”

The display on the handheld showed it was Charlie calling. The sight of his name brought a flash of paranoia, and she wondered if one of Charlie’s spies could have seen her bring BJ into the building.

She didn’t think there was anyone but Charlie at AvN Soft who dated from BJ’s time, but perhaps she was wrong.

Her hands were clumsy in removing the phone from its holster, and in pressing the Send button to answer.

“Yes,” she said into the phone.

“Dagmar,” said Charlie, “are you ready for the keys to the kingdom? ”

Her head swam. It took her a moment to orient herself to an entirely different context, and then she reached for her stylus.

“Okay,” she said.

Charlie gave her an account number and a complicated password, a random mix of letters and numerals. Dagmar jotted it down on her handheld display and saved it to a text file.

“Got it,” she said.

“Right,” Charlie said. “That’s your budget for the game. If you need more, let me know.”

“Will do,” she said. “Whose name is the account under? ”

“Atreides LLC,” Charlie said. “It’s a corporation I created years ago but never got around to using.”

“You named the company after the family in Aeschylus? ” Dagmar asked.

“No.” Blankly. “I named it after the family in
Dune.
”

“Right,” Dagmar said. “Of course.”

Sometimes she forgot what subculture she was living in.

“I’ll need a good accounting at the end of this,” Charlie said.

“You’ll get one,” Dagmar said. With BJ’s payment listed as “Consultant fee,” and no names mentioned.

“How’s the game moving? ” he asked.

“I believe I gave you my views yesterday,” said Dagmar.

“Just do it,” Charlie said, and hung up.

BJ was watching her. Amusement glittered behind his spectacles.

“You have a very complex life,” he said.

“No kidding. Excuse me for a moment.”

She used her trackball to take her to the Wells Fargo page and then typed in the account number and password.

Charlie had given her an account with twenty-five million dollars.

She stared for a long moment.

Curse of the Golden Nagi
had been budgeted at four million, with live events on three continents.
The Long Night of Briana Hall
had a budget double that of
Golden Nagi,
much of which had already been spent on professionally produced, professionally acted video, by far the most expensive item in the budget. Now Charlie had given her more than triple that sum, in addition to the eight million already in the budget.

The keys to the kingdom indeed.

If Dagmar couldn’t do what Charlie wanted on this game, she thought, it was because it simply couldn’t be done.

 

At one o’clock, Dagmar had an emergency meeting with the Great Big Idea creative team, fourteen people altogether, with the exception of one woman who was in Amsterdam setting up the weekend’s live event.

She couldn’t stop herself from peering out the window blinds of the conference room, to make sure that Joe Clever wasn’t lurking somewhere with his Big Ears. No eavesdroppers were visible. She turned on the white-noise generators anyway, and the meeting proceeded with a kind of distant waterfall hiss in the background.

When Helmuth entered, Dagmar introduced BJ.

“Helmuth von Moltke,” Helmuth said, offering his hand.

BJ raised his eyebrows. “Von Moltke? ” he asked.

“Programmer by day,” said Helmuth. “Eurotrash by night.”

Helmuth, descended from a German general, was a sleek, handsome young man, still under thirty. He wore cashmere slacks, a T-shirt with the Ferrari stallion, and a jacket of paper-thin, featherlight leather made in Buenos Aires. He was known to spend most of his nights partying on the Sunset Strip. When or if he slept was unknown.

Jack Stone ambled in next. He was the puzzle designer and a Type Two Geek, which was basically a Type One plus about eighty pounds. He lived, ate, and breathed puzzles, at least when he wasn’t living, eating, and breathing Frito pies, which he made himself by lining a bowl with Fritos, pouring Wolf brand chili on top, and putting the result in the microwave. When it was hot, he’d throw grated jack cheese on top. Even other Type Twos couldn’t abide the result.

Fortunately he hadn’t brought a Frito pie with him this time. Instead he had a plastic sack filled with miniature candy bars, which he would eat like popcorn.

Dagmar introduced BJ as “Boris, who’s going to help with the writing.” The others paid no attention to BJ after that. Writing wasn’t interesting to them.

When everyone arrived, Dagmar demonstrated one of the Tapping the Source units and explained Charlie’s latest nonnegotiable demands.

“You’re changing the story
after the launch?
” demanded Helmuth.

“No point in whining,” Dagmar said. “I’ve already whined to Charlie, and Charlie isn’t listening.”

So of course they whined some more. Dagmar let them.

“We have the budget on this one,” Dagmar said. “If you need help, we’ll hire anyone who can provide it. Freelance programmers, design studios, you name it. Start calling them
now,
if you think you’ll need them down the line.”

“The players are going to
hate
this!” Jack protested. “They went nuts when they had to buy that ninjaware. They’re going to be even more crazed when they have to buy these damn water-quality units.”

“I’ve got a work-around,” Dagmar said, and smiled. “We buy the units
for
them.”

They looked at her. She shrugged.

“Maybe not for
all
of them,” she conceded, “but the budget will buy a
lot
of forty-dollar boxes.”

After that, it went a little easier.

 

After the meeting, Dagmar and BJ went to her office to replot
Briana Hall.
The scent of Siyed’s roses saturated the air. Drinking coffee and eating Pop-Tarts from the snack station, they worked over Dagmar’s interactive monitors and saw their changes appear instantly on the big wall plasma screen, complete with colored arrows that showed how the complex plot elements were connected.

BJ was as devious a story craftsman as Dagmar remembered from their college days. He had an instinctive gift for the twist, the reveal, the snapper that would whip the story in an unanticipated direction, like a rocket slinging around the moon en route to some distant world.

“Right,” Dagmar said finally. “Let me put you to work writing the various documents relating to the backstory. I’ll do the audio, video, and comic scripts, because I’m familiar with the format.”

BJ shrugged. “That should work.”

This meant that BJ would be spending his days creating the text for phony documents, everything from school reports to classified government intelligence assessments, newspaper articles to blog entries, birth certificates to death certificates. The Graphics Department would then turn the text into facsimiles of the actual documents. An ARG thrived on its virtual paper trail—puzzles led to documents, documents contained more puzzles, the puzzles led to more documents, the documents led to revelations.

“You might as well work from home,” Dagmar told him. “We don’t have an office for you here.”

“And besides,” BJ said, “I might run into Charlie in the elevator.”

“Like I care? ” Dagmar snarled. And then wondered if she actually meant what she’d just said.

Dagmar looked out her office window and was surprised to discover it was night. She looked at the time on her monitor screen and saw it was after nine o’clock.

She realized she was very hungry. The coffee shop in the atrium closed at nine, so there was no food in the building unless she wanted something from a vending machine, or more Pop-Tarts. At this hour, neither option seemed attractive.

“Want to get dinner? ” she asked. “Charlie’s paying.”

BJ grinned. “That’s an offer I can’t refuse.”

They found a steak house open on Ventura, one with dim lighting in 1950s colored-glass sconces, battered dark wood tables, and red-and-white-checked tablecloths. Dagmar ordered a margarita and a medium-rare rib eye. She didn’t eat much red meat, but on this evening she planned on making a sizzling, juicy exception.

“Well,” BJ said, “as long as Charlie’s paying.” He ordered the same thing, only with a shrimp cocktail for an appetizer and king crab legs draped over his steak.

“At this rate,” Dagmar said, “it won’t be long before you bring Charlie to his knees.”

“I wish,” BJ muttered.

Dagmar looked at him. “What would it take,” she said, “for you and Charlie to be friends again? ”

“Well,” said BJ, “he could give my half of the company back.”

“He doesn’t actually own the company,” Dagmar said. “It’s his investors.”

BJ raised an eyebrow. “You ever
met
one of these investors? Seen one? Heard their names? ”

“No,” Dagmar said. “But then I’m not involved with Charlie on that level.”

“I don’t think anyone is,” BJ said. “I think there’s a
reason
no one’s ever seen the people who rescued the company.”

Dagmar felt suspicion sing in her bones, a deep, subdural hum of mistrust. The day’s anger and the complex logistics and plotting session had kept a lid on her speculations, but now her doubts flooded her.

“Any idea,” she asked, “why Charlie’s angels are so mysterious?”

“Nope.” He scratched one of his muttonchops. “My best guess is that they’re involved in some kind of tax-fraud scheme. Or maybe the investors are laundering money through AvN Soft.”

Dagmar leaned toward BJ over the table.

“How would that work, exactly? ” she said.

“If they’re laundering money, they’d just overpay for AvN’s services. How are the IRS auditors going to know how much our autonomous agents are worth? As long as Charlie pays taxes on the money that’s rolling in, the IRS and everyone else are happy.”

Dagmar nodded. That seemed plausible enough. And she hadn’t failed to notice that “our.”

The margaritas and the shrimp cocktail arrived. The prawns were vast and pink, like tongues lolling from the rim of a cocktail glass. BJ offered Dagmar one, and she took it. It had that bland, farmed taste that suggested it had never been anywhere near an ocean, but even so, it whetted Dagmar’s appetite.

BJ gave her a calculating look.

“You’re thinking about that Russian assassin, aren’t you?” he said. “You think Charlie’s involved with the Maffya.”

“The assassin,” said Dagmar, “is a problem to which I have no ready answer.”

“So you’re trying to track the killer through the game.” Thoughtfully, BJ picked up a shrimp, then replaced it on the rim of the cocktail glass. “And you have to hope that he’ll have some answers once he’s picked up. I have to give you credit for optimism.”

“Foolhardy though it may be.”

Feeling foolhardy and hopeful, she licked the rim of her glass and took a swallow of her drink. Tongues of tequila fire sped along her veins.

“There’s more than one Charlie Ruff,” BJ said. “There’s the one you’ve known all these years, and then there’s the other one.” His gaze darkened. “You’re starting to meet that other one now. I met him six years ago.”

“And what’s he like, this other Charlie? ”

BJ took a thoughtful drink of his margarita.

“At some point,” he said, “Charlie has to be the winner. And with him it’s a zero-sum game—if he’s the winner, that means everyone else has to lose.”

Dagmar considered this. “What kind of game is he playing with me, then? ” she asked.

“He hired you to run his game company because he thought the games would be cool,” BJ said. “You succeeded. You made the games cool. But now Charlie figures your cool quotient is bigger than his, so he’s got to take you down a peg.”

“So he’s doing this just to humiliate me?” Dagmar didn’t find the theory entirely convincing.

“That, and the fact that he’s learned enough about ARGs to think he can run one,” BJ said. “That’s what happened at AvN Soft. He thought he’d learned enough about my end of the business to tell me what to do, and he started trying to do
my
job as well as his.” He flapped his big hands. “We both went down in flames. But he found those mysterious backers, and I didn’t. So I got thrown out of the building, and Charlie sat up on the balcony and watched and never said a word.”