This Is Not a Game (31 page)

Dagmar cursed under her breath and then remembered that she lived in the twenty-first century. Within seconds, her computer displayed a London telephone directory, with the Prasads’ phone number.

She looked at the number, took a swig of coffee, and wished the coffee was something stronger.

Call now,
she thought.
Before you lose your nerve.

She reached for her handheld; then—hearing voices in the hall outside—she closed her office door and locked it.

Dagmar returned to her office chair, began to punch in Manjari’s number, then stopped to wonder just what the hell she was going to say.

She had no damn idea.

Dagmar erased the number from the display, stared at the phone’s screen for a moment, then reached for a pen and paper and began to jot down talking points. She was happiest when following a script, preferably of her own devising.

Not my fault!
she wrote, and underlined the words. Which was stretching the truth a bit, but Dagmar felt it was a positive start.

She stared at the paper for a long moment, then underlined
Not my fault!
a second time.

A few minutes later, the list read as follows.

She looked at the list for a moment, then decided the four points pretty much covered everything she intended to say. She punched in Manjari’s number, then hit Send.

Her heart rapped a quick rhythm as she raised the phone to her ear.

“Hello?”

The voice seemed strangely normal. Dagmar had expected an angry voice, or a tearful voice, or a snappish voice. Anything but this sunny-afternoon-in-London voice.

“Is this Manjari?” Dagmar asked.

“Yes. Who is this?”

Dagmar cast a desperate look at her list and spoke. “This is Dagmar.”

There was a moment’s pause, one that lasted a beat longer than the satellite lag, and then: “I’m sorry?”

“Dagmar Sh-shaw,” she said, annoyed at her sudden nervous stammer. “From Los Angeles.”

“Oh,” Manjari said. “Dagmar, of course.”

Of course,
Dagmar thought in fury.
The woman who slept with your husband
.

There was an expectant pause. Dagmar gave another glance at her list and spoke.

“I wanted to say,” she said, “that whatever Siyed told you about me, it isn’t true.”

Dagmar’s heart beat four times in the ensuing pause.

“I’m sorry. What did he say, exactly?”

The tone of Manjari’s reply, the genuine puzzlement, clued Dagmar to the actual situation. Which was that Siyed—already a proven liar—had lied again.

He
hadn’t
told Manjari he was involved with Dagmar. He hadn’t told his wife that he was leaving her. He had just told Dagmar that as a ploy to win her over.

It was Dagmar, just now, who had told Manjari that something was badly wrong.

Dagmar’s mind thrashed for an escape route.

“All right,” she said quickly. “Obviously we’ve had a miscommunication.”

“Yes?” Manjari said. “Are you in London?”

“No,” Dagmar said. “I’m in L.A. But I need to tell you ...” Her mind spun like a broken clutch. “I think Siyed is having some kind of breakdown out here. I think it’s ...” Imagination failed her. “It’s just Hollywood,” she finished lamely. “It happens.”

“Is he in hospital?” Manjari asked. For the first time there was urgency in her voice.

“No. But he turned up last night, and he said some things—he was irrational.”

“What sort of things did he say?”

“I ... I don’t remember, really. It doesn’t matter.” She tried to put as much kindness into her words as possible. “You should call Siyed and tell him to come home. All right?”

“Tell him to come home,” Manjari repeated.

“Yes,” Dagmar said, and then a piece of maliciousness entered her mind.

“Tell him that I told you to call,” she said.

“I ...” Manjari seemed bewildered. “I’ll call him.”

Dagmar reached for the piece of paper with her talking points, crumpled it, and tossed it in the wastebasket.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said. “But I think it’s best.”

 

Dagmar unlocked her office door and propped it open. The suspense and panic and determination that had filled her during the phone call had drained away, and she felt strangely hollow.

She thought about Siyed flying away on a big silver plane. Crossing paths with Charlie, flying in.

Charlie. How could she tell Charlie that she knew what he was up to?

Members of the Great Big Idea technical staff passed by, ready for the game update. Soon—four o’clock in London—players would be assembling beneath the shadow of the old Gothic pile of Lincoln’s Inn. Streaming video, taken by a freelance crew frequently employed by Great Big Idea, already showed several dozen people gathered in an expectant crowd. Each held a silver DVD in a transparent jewel case, a sign that they were part of the game.

The barristers of Lincoln’s Inn, who might normally resent a crowd on their doorstep, were presumably spending their Saturday afternoon at home.

Dagmar moved into the big conference room for the update and found it full of laptops and cables. Siyed’s flowers drooped and sagged everywhere. Her mantra glowed on one wall monitor.

BJ wandered in, holding a twenty-four-ounce foam cup of coffee, and hugged Dagmar hello. Dagmar realized that BJ had shaved off his muttonchops, leaving only the modest mustache he’d worn as long as she’d known him. The change, she thought, made him look younger.

“Congratulate me,” he said. “I think I’ve got a new job.”

Dagmar looked at him in surprise. Hesitation tripped her tongue before she could offer congratulations.

“Don’t worry,” he said, anticipating her. “I won’t start the new job till we finish
Briana Hall.
”

Dagmar brightened. “Good news, then,” she said. “Where will you be working?”

BJ grinned, then hesitated. “I don’t think I should actually say.”

“Can you tell me,” Dagmar asked, “if it’s a crap job or a shit job?”

BJ laughed. “Neither. It’s a
real
job. A total, stone opportunity.”

“Well.” Dagmar reached up a hand and touched his newly shaven cheek. “I’m guessing that whoever they are, they have a hair policy.”

He laughed again.

“No,” he said. “I just figured I should try to blend in with the other tycoons.”

She looked at him. “Tycoons, huh?”

He gave a lazy shrug.

“We’ll see,” he said. “Yeah.”

“All right,” she said. “Be mysterious if you want to.”

Dagmar and the others watched the live feed. At four o’clock London time, a car drew up to Lincoln’s Inn, and Anne stepped out, followed by jerking camera crews. Anne was a sweet-voiced, petite English Rose who headed Great Big Idea’s small office in London and from there ran all European live events.

To anyone who flashed her a DVD, Anne handed a sheet of xeroxed paper containing clues. The first of these, when properly decoded, sent players southwest across the pleasant green of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where they would encounter a man with a sign that said “Free Time Travel.”

When a player approached this man, she would be given a headset that was cabled to a high-powered laptop computer. The headset featured a screen that would drop down over the right eye. When the player moved her head in the correct direction, her left eye would show her the sights of a Holborn Saturday afternoon while the screen would show a different image, a scene from the “past”—the fictional past of
The Long Night of Briana Hall.

The scene showed Vlatko, the amoral mercenary who was assisting the terrorists, meeting one of his contacts in London.

Cameras wandered along with the crowd, broadcasting the event live to anyone who cared to watch.

When a player had seen Vlatko and had a chance to identify the contact, the player would follow the next clue north to Red Lion Square, where another vendor would offer another headset and another free trip into the past, a trip that would reveal another of Vlatko’s contacts.

And from thence to Gray’s Inn Gardens, and from there to New Square, again under the shadow of Lincoln’s Inn, on each occasion learning the identity of one of Vlatko’s associates. At the end of the journey, the players would know all of Vlatko’s London network and begin to follow their tracks and dissect the attackers’ plot.

Which would culminate next Saturday, when the players would deploy the Tapping the Source scanners in fifty cities across the world.

So far, Great Big Idea had spent more than two and a half million dollars of Charlie’s money shipping nearly sixty-five thousand scanners to players all over the world. Several thousand more dollars had been spent paying for extra warehouse help to make sure that the scanners were shipped on time, an act of generosity that had left the management reeling at Tapping the Source.

The Long Night of Briana Hall
was probably going to be the least profitable online game in history. Not that Dagmar much cared—if it ran overbudget, that was all the fault of her boss.

Who, it had to be admitted, seemed to have plenty of extra money anyway.

Dagmar waited for the update that followed the live event—new pages going online with the information that the players had discovered in London, each page loaded with new puzzles that would keep the players busy for, at least, hours.

Or, if they were slipping, days.

Helmuth and his staff were focused on their displays, hands tapping. BJ and Dagmar looked over their shoulders.

“Harlem Nocturne” floated from her handset. Dagmar looked at the screen, saw Charlie’s name, and answered.

“How’s the update going?” Charlie asked.

“We’re in the middle of it.”
You bastard.
“No problems so far.”
You selfish, treacherous bastard.

“I’m back in L.A. We need to meet.”

“Damn right we need to meet,” Dagmar said. She was aware of BJ’s mild gaze, ten feet away.

BJ raised his coffee cup, sipped.

“I’m at the Figueroa Hotel,” Charlie said. “Medina Suite.”

“Hotel Figueroa? That’s
on
Figueroa, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Downtown’s a freakin’ desert. Why are you there?”

“It’s next to the Staples Center. Maybe I want to catch a game.”

“Heh. Yeah. Right.”

“Can you make it down as soon as the update’s finished?”

“Yeah. I was going to do a laundry, but I guess I can go on wearing stinky clothes for another day.”

“See you.”

She reholstered her phone and looked at BJ’s expectant face.

“The master calls?” he asked.

She nodded.

He nodded. “Good luck.”

A few minutes later, Helmuth hit Enter one last time, peered at the screen, then pushed his chair back from the table.

“Update’s finished,” he said. “All the pages are up, and all the video files from London are archived for anyone who wants to watch them.”

“Go home, then,” Dagmar told him.

Helmuth yanked the cord from his laptop and closed the computer’s display, then stood. He looked at the wall clock.

“I’ve got time for a nap before my haircut,” he said.

“You
sleep?
”

Helmuth smiled. “Only on weekend afternoons,” he said.

As Helmuth made his way out, BJ stood, crumpled his empty coffee cup, and tossed it in the recycling.

“I’m ready for a nap myself.”

“If you’re not going to the country club with the other tycoons.”

He grinned and waved on his way out.

Dagmar looked at the time display on her phone.
Medina Suite,
she thought.
On my way.

 

It was easy to find Figueroa, which was a major street downtown, but the road was one-way going in the wrong direction, and she got lost at least three times trying to find her way around the problem. Once, Dagmar discovered herself on the 110 headed for Long Beach with no clear idea how she got on the freeway. By the time she finished blundering around the basketball arena and the convention center, found the hotel, and gave her car keys to the Figueroa’s valet, her nerves were crackling with fury.

The Figueroa Hotel was in a building that dated back to the 1920s and had been decorated in some kind of Moroccan Iberian frenzy, with a lobby full of wrought-iron lamps, geometric tiles, palms, bougainvillea, and throne-shaped chairs slung with bull hide. As Dagmar passed by the front desk, she heard an unfamiliar clattering and turned to discover the clerk working on an actual
typewriter,
an IBM Selectric probably manufactured before she was born.

She appreciated the classical touch.

Dagmar found the Medina Suite easily enough, by the flat of Mexican Coke empties sitting outside the massive doors with their iron hinges. Dagmar knocked, and Charlie let her in. Her anger was forgotten in the first glimpse of the room—painted an unlikely Mediterranean blue, with gold curtains, a russet spread on the enormous bed, ballooning striped tent fabric that concealed the ceiling, and a low couch with dangling tassels.

The plush Pinky doll sat in the strange wood-mounted metal bowl that served as a coffee table. The Brain glowered with red eyes from a Moorish cupboard. Charlie’s laptop sat on a desk by the window.

Dagmar looked at Charlie. “Where’s Kimba Leigh when you need her?” she asked.

“Providing room service elsewhere, I guess,” Charlie said. “Sit down.”

The low couch swallowed her. Charlie sat cross-legged on a vast cushion. He hadn’t shaved today. He seemed tired, and discouraged, and more than a little irritated.