This Is Not a Game (29 page)

But in that case, why the deception over the twelve billion?

It doesn’t entirely add up.

 

It doesn’t entirely add up,
Dagmar read.

No, she thought, it didn’t.

Because
she
knew, unlike the gamers, that the figure in the Forlorn Hope account was real.

And she also knew that there was no way that Charlie, successful as he was, could have made that kind of money legally.

She reached blindly for her cup of tea, drank, replaced the tea on its St. Pauli Girl coaster.

Across her office, a leaf fell from one of Siyed’s bouquets.

Her sense of scale was completely wrong where Charlie was concerned. He was
huge.
He was like the Medellin cartel, like the Burmese junta, like the smiling president of oil-rich Nigeria with his Swiss accounts and white cotton-lined cardboard boxes full of blood diamonds.

Charlie’s Godzilla-size footprints ought to be all over the world.

And the fact that they weren’t—the fact that Charlie was masquerading as a modest software entrepreneur in the San Fernando Valley—meant that Charlie had left the real world altogether and now lived somewhere in supervillain territory. He was Magneto. He was Lex Luthor. He was Doctor Doom.

He was the Napoleon of Crime.

When the hell had Charlie found time to develop this secret life? Certainly not in the years since Dagmar had begun working for him. She’d seen him nearly every day, and she’d never once seen him meeting with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.

Probably the meetings took place in his secret base in a dormant volcano.

Was even the Russian Maffya worth twelve billion? In
cash?
Dagmar doubted it.

Unless, of course, Charlie
owned
the Russian Maffya. Given what she’d just discovered, she wouldn’t put it past him.

Charlie, I’ve got to see you. Are you still at the Roosevelt?

 

There was no answer to the email. Repeated phone calls were answered only by voice mail. Dagmar left a series of messages and then in her frustration drove down the 101 to Hollywood. She banged on the cabana door, which was opened by a fat, middle-aged man wearing nothing but a towel. He smelled strongly of cigars, and behind him were a pair of Hollywood rent-boys who gazed at Dagmar from over his hairy shoulders. Dagmar apologized and shuffled away.

Fucking Charlie,
she thought.

She had to talk to somebody or she would explode. She called BJ and suggested they meet for dinner.

“Are you in the valley? ” he asked.

“I’m in Hollywood.”

“I know a little place on Olympic near Koreatown. Want to check it out? ”

When she got in her car, she unholstered her phone and prodded the icon for email. Charlie’s name leaped off the list. She retrieved the email and narrowed her eyes as she peered at the small screen.

 

 

Damn right we’ve got to meet. But I’m in Chicago right now and
won’t be back for a couple days.

 

I’ve got some ideas for the game. Don’t worry, nobody buys anything
this time.

 

“Damn you, Charlie!” Dagmar shouted.

A pair of tourists walking past gave her a quick glance, then just as quickly turned away.

Dagmar decided she didn’t care if they thought she was crazy, and pounded the steering wheel with her fists until her phalanges felt they’d been slammed by a crowbar. She slumped in her seat, breathless.

Suddenly she missed Austin very much.

There was a burning in the back of her sinus. She dabbed tears away with the back of her wrist.

She hadn’t had time to mourn him. Everything since Austin’s death had been constant movement, dreadful pressure, frantic improvisation. All tangled up, one way or another, with
The Long Night of Briana Hall
and the decision to use the game to solve real-world problems.

That had been her decision, she realized. She’d pressed Charlie to permit it.

She realized, as she searched for a tissue to wipe away the tears, that she was as crazy as he was.

 

B J’s restaurant turned out to specialize in egg dishes. It was the kind of place that would serve you breakfast eighteen hours out of twenty-four.

“Be sure to order the candied pepper bacon,” BJ advised.

“Candied pepper bacon,” Dagmar repeated.

“Sounds weird, but it’s good. Try it.”

She ordered an omelette with an English muffin and the candied pepper bacon. BJ ordered corned beef hash with poached eggs on top.

The restaurant had about twelve different kinds of iced tea, and Dagmar asked which one of them had caffeine. The waiter just stared at her, as if no one had ever asked about caffeine before.

No caffeine,
she thought.
Check.

“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll have the French press.”

The waiter had barely gone to place their order when Dagmar exploded.

“Fucking Charlie,” she said, “has sent me an email telling me he’s going to screw with the game again. But he hasn’t told me how or why or when, and now I’m going crazy.”

BJ looked at her intently through his spectacles. He had arrived in worn blue jeans and a T-shirt so old that its original blue had turned to purple. He hadn’t shaved in several days.

He smelled of lavender soap. That was nice.

“What did Charlie say, exactly?” BJ said.

“Hardly anything, just that he had another idea. That’s what’s making me nuts.” She waved her hands. “We may as well stop working. We’re going to have to change it all anyway.”

BJ gave a shrug. “All I can say is that he’s behaving true to form.”

“I went to his cabana at the Roosevelt and found he’d left. He’s gone to Chicago!”

Surprise passed across BJ’s features. “Chicago? Did he say why?” “No.”

“No.”

 

He rubbed his chin. “Do you think he’s still hiding from the Maffya? ”

“I don’t know what to think!”

Dagmar wished she still had the steering wheel in front of her so that she could punch it again.

BJ pursed his lips, looked thoughtful. “Do you think he’s testing you? ”

Dagmar blinked at him. “Why would he do that? ”

“To find out if you’re—I don’t know—really loyal? ”

Dagmar considered this.

“That doesn’t make much sense,” she said. “I’ve never had any tension with him till now. He has no reason to think me anything other than a loyal employee.” Frustration bubbled in her veins. “He
picked
me, for God’s sake!”

“He’s under pressure now. His backers, or the Russian Maffya, or whoever it is that’s giving him trouble—he can’t lash out at
them.
It’s got to be the people around him.”

She looked at him curiously. “Did he do that to you? ” she asked.

BJ shrugged his big shoulders. “Now and then,” he said. “Little ways, mostly. He’d demand that I abandon my own ideas and adopt his, that sort of thing. It made no sense, but it was his way of controlling things, and early on I agreed with him against my better judgment. It was when I began to stand up to him that he decided I was disloyal, and then he barely spoke to me.”

“It’s got me so
crazy.
” She made claws of her hands and rent the air with her nails.

“Well,” BJ said, “I wish I could help.”

“You
are
helping,” she said. She put her hand over his. “You’re the only person I can talk to.”

His blue eyes looked into hers. “It’s the same with me,” he said.

The waiter arrived with their drinks, iced tea for BJ and the French press for Dagmar. She reached for the pot and pushed the plunger down, then poured.

“Not bad,” she judged.

This much coffee this late, she knew, she’d be up to 3 A.M.

Not that she didn’t have plenty of work to do.

She looked at BJ. “Something I’ve always wondered,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows. “About Charlie?”

“About you.”

A dubious look crossed his face.

“If you don’t mind,” Dagmar said.

He spread his big hands. “Ask, if you want.”

“You went down with AvN Soft, okay,” Dagmar said. “But you were still smart. You still had talent. You had experience.”

He nodded.

“What you want to know,” he said, “is how I ended up at a place like Spud LLC?”

“At the very least,” she said, “you could be working as a programmer, earning a lot more money than doing customer service.”

“I hate to say this,” BJ said, “because it sounds paranoid. But I got blackballed.”

Dagmar was surprised. “By whom?”

“Charlie and his friends. Austin in particular.” Before Dagmar could protest, BJ held up a hand.

“When Austin moved back to California,” BJ said, “I went to him to start a new company. My idea involved creating a peer-to-peer network for cell phones, so they wouldn’t depend so completely on cell phone towers.” He leaned toward her across the table. “When Hurricane Katrina hit,” he said, “the cell phone towers in New Orleans went down. People couldn’t call out. Maybe thousands died because they couldn’t tell emergency services where they were. If the phones had been connected with a peer-to-peer network, so that they could talk directly to each other instead of to a tower, the messages could have chained together until they reached an intact tower.”

Dagmar was impressed. “That’s a great idea.”

“It would be ideal in any emergency situation—California’s natural for it, because of the earthquakes. So I went to Austin with the idea of developing it.”

“He turned you down?”

“No. What Austin did was try to saddle me with a partner to handle the business end. He insisted I had to follow the guy’s orders whenever it came to a business decision.”

Dagmar remembered Austin on the phone to his client, insisting that the business plan be followed.
Dude, we’ve
had
this conversation.

“What did you do?” she asked.

Anger burned in BJ’s eyes. “I turned Austin down. I wasn’t going to have some stranger telling me what to do.” He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “But then whenever I went to some other venture capitalist, it turned out he had the same stipulation. Turns out that Charlie or Austin had been there ahead of me, telling everyone the official version of how AvN Soft went down, and everyone believed them instead of me.”

“Come on,” Dagmar said. “I can’t see them calling everyone in the industry just to get back at you.”

“Believe it how you want,” BJ said. There was belligerence in his tone. “I’m just telling you what happened.”

Dagmar decided to skate away to another subject.

“But why Spud, then?” she asked. “There must be a thousand better jobs.”

BJ gave a bitter little laugh and took a sip of his iced tea.

“I decided that rather than take a crap job, I’d take a shit job.”

Dagmar found herself laughing.

“Perhaps,” she said, “you’d better make that distinction clearer.”

He scratched his chin. “Okay,” he said. “When you know a job is shit going in, then it’s a shit job. It’s
honest
about being a shit job. That was my job at Spud.”

“Okay,” Dagmar said.

“But a crap job is a shit job with
pretensions.
You get paid more, maybe, but it’s only because you have to work twelve-hour days in a cubicle doing work that’s beyond tedious, all with fuck-wit managers on your case every minute of the day. Crap jobs aren’t for bright people, they’re for Dilberts. And I’m not a Dilbert.”

Dagmar looked at him and shook her head.

“No,” she said, “you’re not.”

Their dinner arrived. Dagmar’s omelette was fluffy and moist, and her home fries had a surprising, delightful herbal taste.

“These are the best home fries I’ve ever had,” she said.

BJ grinned. “There was a reason I recommended this place.”

She tried the candied pepper bacon. It was very good.

“I didn’t think you could improve
bacon,
” she said.

“Told you it was good.”

They talked about jobs through their meal, trying to distinguish shit jobs from crap jobs. BJ had endured many worse jobs than the one at Spud. Dagmar had experienced plenty of both, working as a teenager in Cleveland, where she had dealt in addition with the hazard of a father who would steal her money and valuables.

“And in England?” BJ asked. “You worked there?”

“Under the table,” she said, “because of immigration. But then I started selling stories, and that was very nice. The best job I’ve ever had.”

“I imagine it would be.” He tilted his head. “And—Aubrey, was that his name? How did he feel about the writing?”

“He was proud of me.”

BJ nodded. “But the marriage still didn’t work.”

She looked at him. “I married him on the rebound. Never a good idea.”

BJ held her gaze for a moment, then looked away. “Seeing anyone now?”

Dagmar tried to work out a way of explaining how she had been Promiscuous Girl back in England, and that while her morals hadn’t improved since, her work hours had increased and so her flings were few and far between. She gave up.

“I’m celibate on account of a seventy-hour workweek,” she said.

“Typical geek,” he said. “A geek with a crap job and a crap boss.”

“I’m being paid very well for all those hours,” Dagmar pointed out.

“You’re being paid well to burn yourself out, after which the money and the job will disappear and you’ll be in your late thirties with no current job skills. That’s the very definition of a crap job.”