This Is Not a Game (27 page)

The other talking head twinkled. “They call it neoconservatism here in America,” she said.

They laughed. The first talking head twinkled back.

“That’s right,” he said. “And if Chile falls, the rest of Latin America is just that much closer to economic apocalypse.”

Dagmar clenched her hands to keep them from trembling. The scent of burning Glodok came faintly to her nostrils.

She paid for the dinner with her company card, then drove BJ back to the AvN Soft building to pick up his car.

BJ stood for a long moment by Dagmar’s car, staring up at the darkened glass tower with only a few windows illuminated, where the service was cleaning or some programmer was pulling an all-nighter.

“This sure has been one damn weird day,” he said.

“True,” Dagmar said. She put her arms around his burly body, rested her head against his shoulder. He smelled pleasantly of steak and strawberries and coffee and himself. His arms came around her.

“Thanks for doing this,” he said.

“No problem.”

“And thanks for listening.” He took a deep breath. “You know, I hadn’t told that story to anyone before. I didn’t know if anyone would believe me.”

“I don’t know what to think,” Dagmar said. He stiffened, and she added quickly, “Not about you, but about Charlie.”

“Be careful around him,” BJ said. “I think he’s connected to all the wrong people.”

“I think you’re right.”

She released BJ and stepped back.

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” she said. “Have a safe drive home.”

“And you.”

Dagmar sat in her Prius and watched BJ’s old Chevrolet turn out of the parking lot and onto the frontage road. He had once owned a BMW, she remembered—he’d emailed her a picture of it.

He was just so
different
. She had a hard time reconciling the old hard-charging, energetic, arrogant BJ with the diffident, frustrated man she’d met today.

She wondered what made the difference.

Failure, she thought. Failure was all it took.

 

 

 

 

Dear Dagmar,

 

I know that you are very busy right now, but I simply must see you. Ever since our wonderful time together, I can think of no one but you. You possess my every waking thought, and you invade my dreams as well. I try to concentrate on work, but all I see is your beautiful face before me.

 

My dearest, we must meet. Name the time and the place, and I will fly to your side!

 

Your devoted,

 

Siyed

 

 

Go back to your wife.

 

Dagmar

Dear Dagmar,

I don’t care about my wife. I don’t care about anyone but you. I will
leave my wife if you desire it. I will leave my family, my country,
everything.

Just let us be together. You mean everything to me.

Your desperate,

Siyed

 

You don’t deserve Manjari. Bugger off. Go away.

Dagmar

 

Twenty-five million dollars,
Dagmar thought.

Numbers like that were as far beyond her understanding as the analysis of, for example, continuous tangent vector fields, but still she knew that money like that didn’t come from just anywhere.

The money didn’t seem to be in anyone’s budget. It was possible, she supposed, that Charlie shifted it to the Atreides account from another part of the company, but that sort of thing wouldn’t go unnoticed for long.

He had to have gotten it from
somewhere.

Somebody earned this money, she thought. Either Charlie earned it, or the person who earned it gave it to Charlie. Or someone stole it. Or Charlie stole it.

Money will get you through times of inadequate staffing,
Charlie had said,
better than inadequate staffing will get you through times of no money.

The keys to the kingdom,
Charlie had called it. Twice.

Did she want to turn those keys? she wondered. Did she want to find what Charlie was hiding in his kingdom?

Because right at this moment she had somewhere between one million and three million players who could help her.

She leaned back in her office chair and reached blindly for her teacup. She took a drink of the jasmine tea, replaced the cup, swallowed without tasting.

It was past eleven at night, and Dagmar was alone in her office. The aroma of the jasmine tea blended with the scent of the flowers that Siyed continued to send, one new arrival every morning. Every horizontal surface in the untidy office now had its elaborate arrangement, and the flowers weren’t dying fast enough to be replaced by the new arrivals, so Dagmar had begun to give the bouquets away. Soft floral scents floated through half the doors in the company, mingling on occasion with the odor of Jack Stone’s Frito pies.

Dagmar decided she didn’t want to think about the keys to the kingdom for the next, say, six minutes, so she touched the screen and brought up some other work, some of BJ’s, and she sat at her desk for the next few minutes and edited it.

She had known BJ was good at plotting, but she hadn’t known whether his writing would be adequate for her purposes. He wrote her lively emails, but that didn’t mean he had a sense of story or structure. That’s why she’d had him creating phony documents, because documents had a structure that would be easier for BJ to follow.

He’d turned out to be more than a satisfactory writer, though he was unfamiliar with the concise style required, and needed editing. Dagmar was relieved. Her instincts in hiring BJ had been correct.

And of course BJ’s presence had the potential to really make Charlie insane, which as far as Dagmar was concerned was a bonus, even if—as Dagmar intended—Charlie never found out that BJ had been hired.

Dagmar saved the changes on BJ’s work, then touched the screen and brought up the page that had her worried.

She had the number of the Atreides account. She had the time of the electronic fund transfer that had dumped the twenty-five mil into the account. She had the tracking number of the fund transfer itself.

The Long Night of Briana Hall
had a financial dimension, the stock swindle that had motivated the murder of one of Briana’s ex-boyfriends. The murky financial history behind the killing was part of the game.

Dagmar could put the real numbers into the game, ghosting them in as part of the game’s fiction. Real people, players, would then try to find out where the money came from, who the account belonged to, and possibly even how much was in it. Possibly, among the millions of people who had signed up for the game, there would be one person who had the tools, or the access, to find all that out.

The question was whether Dagmar really wanted all that to happen, whether she wanted a look into Charlie’s secret world.

Or should she even be bothering with this, with the Latin American currencies in freefall and tens of millions of people’s savings having just floated off into the slipstream . . .

Atreides LLC.
Named after the House of Atreus, lords of Mycenae, who had torn themselves to bits in a multigenerational fratricide that had involved nephews baked into pies, husbands hacked with axes, Furies pursuing mad children from one futile sanctuary to the next, all the bloody and baroque ways the ancients had of torturing and offing one another . . . that, and the Trojan War, too.

Dagmar was certain that one friend had already died as a result of whatever was going on in Charlie’s life. If Dagmar began poking around, was it possible that she might start another round of fratricide?

Might she become a target herself?

Or worse, would Charlie find out and fire her ass from the only job she’d ever really loved?

The truth shall set you free.
She wanted the truth, but she didn’t want to be free from Great Big Idea.

Keys to the kingdom,
she thought.

Austin was dead, and Charlie was going mad, and she didn’t know why.

She added the account number and the tracking number, saved the work, and then sent it to Ninja Ned in the Graphics Department to be stegged into a facsimile memo that would appear on a hidden Web page that would only be opened when someone playing
Briana Hall
solved a puzzle.

Puzzles, she decided, were going to fall.

 

The scent of Siyed’s flowers hovered in the air. Dagmar sat on the edge of the desk in her office and looked at the plasma screen on the wall, then down at the speakerphone that sat on the desk by her right hip. She wore her panama hat as if it carried an alternate personality she could adopt. Adrenaline keened in her nerves, like the scraping of a fiddle.

BJ leaned against the window, and Helmuth lounged in Dagmar’s office chair, from which he had just sent out the game’s latest update. His index finger lazily moved over the screen, touching buttons—some of them well hidden—that caused newly loaded Web pages to flash on-screen.

Dagmar watched the wall screen, where the same pages paraded one after the other.

There. The document with the bank account, the numbers that were the key to Charlie’s secrets.

“Looks like everything loaded,” Helmuth said.

If all the pages hadn’t gone up at once, confusion and catastrophe could have resulted. But Dagmar’s suspense did not diminish as Helmuth spoke. She was in Charlieland now, and the suspense wouldn’t go away until she found her way out.

Helmuth began tapping on Dagmar’s ten-key pad. More pages leaped into view, each stacked atop the next. A video began playing, Terri Griff as Briana Hall fleeing from the bad guys who had just whacked Cullen.

“Excellent,” Helmuth said. “So far all the features are working.”

“How many hits are we getting?” Dagmar asked through her dry mouth. She reached for her cup of tea.

Helmuth caressed the screen with his fingers. Data leaped onto the plasma screen. “The page that
you’re
most interested in,” he said, “has a couple of dozen so far.”

Helmuth was wrong: that
wasn’t
the page Dagmar was most interested in. But that was fine, too. If the nervousness showed, she had other reasons to be nervous.

“Damn,” said BJ. “These people are quick.”

“Quick they are,” said Dagmar. Laughing. Nervously.

Adrenaline fired a rocket up Dagmar’s spine. In a few moments, after players destegged the memo, they would call Briana’s best friend, Maria Perry. Who, played by Dagmar, would answer.

They watched the hits increase. Tens of thousands of people had noted the update by now, and the number was increasing exponentially as each informed everyone on his network.

Pages that were hidden by puzzles began to open. Dagmar looked down at the speakerphone.

Which rang, right on cue. It was a dedicated line, so she knew no one but a player was on the other end.

She pressed the answer button.

“Hello? ” she said.

“Is this Maria Perry? ”

The male voice had a strong accent, Dagmar guessed Korean or Japanese. She wondered if the caller was phoning from Asia.

“This is Maria,” Dagmar said. “Who is this?”

“This is . . .” There was a hesitation. Dagmar was familiar with the phenomenon: the player wasn’t sure whether to use his own name or his online handle.

“This is Roh,” he said finally.

“I don’t believe I know you, Roh.” Dagmar tried to sound as harassed and paranoid as Maria was by now, the fourth week in which she was serving as the chief line of defense between her friend Briana and the people who wanted to kill or arrest her.

“I want to help Briana,” Roh said.

“Briana who? ”

“Briana Hall. She is on your Facebook page as your friend.”

“Okay,” Dagmar said. “So I know Briana. But I still don’t know
you.
”

“You must give Briana a message.”

“What makes you think I know how to reach Briana? ”

“She—she says that you are helping her.”

“Well,” Dagmar said, “if you know her that well, you can give her the message yourself.”

There was a moment of panicked silence.

“You sound like a cop,” Dagmar said. “You sound like you’re trying to trap me.”

“I am not a police,” said Roh.

“Prove it,” said Dagmar.

Again there was silence.

“I’m busy,” Dagmar said. “Talk fast.”

Silence.

“Nice try, Detective,” Dagmar said, and hung up.

BJ looked at her.

“Damn,” he said. “You’re brutal.”

The phone rang an instant later.

“Hello?”

“May I speak to Maria, please?”

Dagmar thought she recognized the voice as an L.A.-based gamer who went by the handle of Hippolyte. And Hippolyte probably recognized Dagmar as well.

TINAG,
Dagmar thought. This conversation would only work if both of them stayed in character and ignored the fact that this was a game.

“This is Maria,” she said.

“I know you’ve been a friend of Briana Hall’s since you were at Central High,” Hippolyte said. “I’d like you to send her a message.”

“How do I know,” Dagmar said, “that you’re not the police trying to trap me?”

“The police don’t know about George Weston and his Firebird at the junior prom,” Hippolyte said. “Only someone who knew Briana would know something like that.”