This Is Not a Game (40 page)

The killer can be somewhere else when the bomb goes off,
Murdoch had said.
A bomb is a lot more anonymous than a gun. With a gun you have to be on the scene when the killing takes place.

Do they really do what you tell them to?
BJ had asked.

Yes
, Dagmar had said.
They do.

She called up the complete list of players who had registered for
The Long Night of Briana Hall.
They had all provided their phone numbers, email addresses, and street addresses.

It was possible to sort the list for all those who were in one category or other, an area code or zip code. She sorted for area codes in the Los Angeles area, 213, 818, 747, 323, and the others, including those used by cell phones. She made a point of excluding BJ’s number, and then she sent the rest the same email.

Greetings:

This is Dagmar Shaw, executive producer of Great Big Idea games.

It’s come to our attention that someone may be piggybacking their own game off our own game about Briana Hall. This person may have sent some of you on a live event on Wednesday afternoon or evening.

These missions were not a part of our own game.

We hope that those of you who took these missions had a good time, but we want to make certain that none of you were defrauded or humiliated in some way. If you were contacted by anyone about this event or any other that has not appeared on our
Briana Hall
site, I would like to know about it.

If you have been contacted, please email me at this address.

And please don’t tell anyone else or put this online, because we don’t want people to start distrusting our genuine messages, puzzles, and clues.

Sincerely,

Dagmar Shaw

 

It didn’t take long for the email to generate an answer.

 

I was part of the live event on Wednesday night. I was supposed to be working for David. He called me and asked me to carry a disk with information from Cullen’s firm that Briana would need to expose the rogue traders.

I took it from Topanga Canyon over to Venice. I hope that’s okay.

Disk?
Dagmar thought.
Venice?

For a moment her whole fantasy seemed to tremble on the edge of dissolution. She looked up Desi’s number and called. A woman answered.

“Is Desi there? ” Dagmar asked.

“Desi? ” The woman seemed genuinely puzzled.

“I’m sorry,” Dagmar said. “Desi is his handle. Is there someone in the house who plays online games? ”

“Oh.” The woman’s voice was amused. “That would be Jeremiah.”

Jeremiah?
Dagmar thought. She heard the sound of a phone being picked up by another hand.

“Yes? ” The deep baritone had a resonant James Earl Jones quality to it that suggested an actor or disk jockey, a singer or a preacher, someone used to projecting a trained voice to an audience.

“This is Dagmar Shaw,” she said. “Thanks for responding to my email.”

“No problem,” said Desi. “I hope what I did was all right.”

“Oh, we’re not worried about that. We just hope you weren’t the victim of some kind of practical joke.”

“No,” Desi said. “It was kind of fun, actually.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“Well,” said Desi, “it started when I got a call from David.”

David was a fictional character, Maria Perry’s gay friend. His part in Briana’s story was minor, which made David a good choice, because he never appeared on any of the game’s audio files. When BJ called, he wouldn’t have had to worry about matching an actor’s voice.

“David asked me if I was willing to perform a special favor for Briana on Wednesday night. I was asked to pick up a disk that had been hidden by Maria in Topanga Canyon. I got the disk and put it in a bag from Burger King as I was instructed to do, and then I carried it to Venice Beach and put it in a certain trash can there. Then I went home.

“I was asked not to talk about it or write about it online, and I haven’t.”

For players not to post online about their game experiences was very unusual. ARGs were social games; sharing the experience was a part of the game’s raison d’être.

“What reason did David give?” she asked.

“He said it was a special mission, just for me. Sort of a reward for being a special friend of Briana’s, and that if I told anyone about it, they might get jealous.”

Dagmar considered this. “Did you copy what was on the disk?” she asked.

“I thought about it, but I was told it was encrypted and that I couldn’t read it, so I didn’t.”

“All right,” she said. “Well, thanks.”

There was a moment of silence, and then the deep voice spoke.

“What should I do if David calls again?”

“Say yes, if you like. But call me to let me know what you’re being asked to do.”

She gave Desi her mobile number and then said good-bye.

She turned back to her computer and saw that two more people had answered her email. She didn’t think she knew either of them personally, though it was possible they’d been in the crowd at certain live events.

Dagmar called them and got more of the story. By the time she’d finished with them, others had responded to her email.

Within an hour she had laid out the entire plot.

David had asked the players to help get Briana some of the IP addresses that would be used to perpetrate the bad guys’ stock manipulation. Since IP addresses would turn up in the game the following Wednesday as part of the players’ bot hunt, this was actually a plausible thing for the players to do.

Different players were asked to do different things. Some were asked to move the data on its disk from one place to another. Others were asked to shuttle a PC tower from Griffith Observatory to the deserted Cathay Bank parking lot in Chinatown. Others were asked to help move a flat-screen monitor. Still others hand-carried a greeting card from place to place.

“Did you read the greeting card?” Dagmar asked.

“Yes. The envelope was open.”

“What kind of card was it?”

“One of those ‘Thinking of You’ cards. It had some poetry on it. I copied it down—”

“No, that doesn’t matter. Was there a message? ”

“Yeah, I copied that, too. It said,
You want to play t
his
on t
his
. With
this
being underlined. And it was signed,
Love, D.
”

Dagmar stared in cold horror at the wall opposite her chair. The players would have read
D.
for David, but Charlie would have thought it stood for Dagmar.

Charlie knew the Maffya was after him and might have hesitated to plug in an anonymous computer that appeared magically on his doorstep. But if he’d thought it was from Dagmar, he’d have tried to play the disk without question.

Dagmar felt her skin tighten in a wave of cold fear.

“Dagmar? ” asked the player. “Are you still there? ”

“Yes. I’m still here.” She rubbed her forehead. “Was the note handwritten?”

“Yes. Blue ballpoint.”

She hadn’t known one way or another if BJ had any talents as a forger, but there were enough samples of her handwriting around the Great Big Idea offices to give him a good start.

Her calls continued. She found that it was Corporal Carrot who had carried the united PC, monitor, greeting card, and data disk, all packed in a single box, to the Figueroa Hotel.

“I got instructions to put the box at a particular place,” he said. He sounded like a teenager. “Right at the door outside the Medina Suite.” There was a pause. “This didn’t have anything to do with the bombing, did it? I’ve been worried about that ever since I saw that Charles Ruff had been killed.”

Dagmar unclenched her jaw muscles.

“Don’t worry about that,” she said.

“Oh, good!” The relief in Carrot’s voice was clear. “That’s great!”

The last thing Dagmar needed was speculation about whether players in one of her games had been used in a terrorist event.

Even if it was true.
Especially
if it was true. It would cast every future ARG under suspicion, it wouldn’t do the players any good, and it wouldn’t help to catch the killer.

She told Carrot that if David called again, he was free to say yes, but that he should call her right away.

She could see now how Charlie had died. He’d finished his work on Patch 2.0, emailed the result to Dagmar, and then gone out for breakfast, or to put one of his empty Cokes in the flat, or left the room for some other reason. The box had been placed right in front of his door. Computer, monitor, disk, and greeting card. He’d read the note allegedly from Dagmar, then attached the monitor to the computer, plugged it in, and turned the computer on.

That’s when the bomb went off. Or maybe BJ had worked it so that the bomb was detonated when Charlie opened the door to insert the data disk. Charlie would have been right there, peering at the machine at close range through his glasses, when the gunpowder detonated.

Pain brought Dagmar out of her reverie. She looked down at her hands and saw that her fists had been clenched so hard that her fingernails had dug hard into her palms.

Killing was too good for BJ.

From outside the office, Dagmar heard the chime of the elevator. She looked out the windows and saw that it had gotten dark, that long lines of red and white auto lights were pouring past on the 101.

She heard footsteps coming toward her across the tile floor, and then she remembered that she was alone in the Great Big Idea offices, and that she’d given BJ access to the building.

Her heart gave a sickening lurch. She jumped out of her chair so quickly that her chair shot backward along its rollers and crashed into a shelf. Her nerves leaped.

Great, she thought. She’d just told him where she was.

She darted around the office looking for a weapon. She clutched at a pair of scissors and then thought of how useless they’d be against BJ’s powerful arms and big hands. Hands that had already broken Siyed’s body.

Belatedly she realized she could call for help. She reached for her phone with the hand that wasn’t holding scissors, punched 911, and was in the process of pressing Send when Helmuth appeared in the doorway carrying a pizza box.

They stared at each other for a moment in mutual surprise.

“God in heaven, Dagmar,” Helmuth said. “You look like hell.”

Carefully, Dagmar pressed End before the operator could pick up.

“Sorry,” she said. “I forgot you were coming back.”

Helmuth smiled. “Who did you think I was, Jack the Ripper? ”

“Close enough.”

He offered the pizza box. “There’s pepperoni, there’s a slice with mushrooms, and a couple slices of a rather tasty Hawaiian barbecue chicken with pineapple.”

“Great,” Dagmar said. She summoned the will not to faint dead away.

“Sorry I scared you,” Helmuth said.

She put down the scissors and pressed her trembling hands together.

“I think I’m getting used to it,” she said.

 

This is Dagmar Shaw, of Great Big Idea Productions, the company that is bringing you the ARG about Briana Hall.

 

We’ve managed to confirm that someone else is running live events that are piggybacking off our game about Briana Hall. These games do not seem to be pranks, but genuine live events running in parallel with our own.

 

Players should feel free to participate in these events if they feel so inclined, but please be aware that Great Big Idea does not sponsor them, and that discoveries made during the course of these adventures may or may not constitute actual answers to Great Big Idea puzzles.

 

We would like to continue monitoring this situation, however, so if you hear from anyone asking you to participate in a live event in the next few weeks, please contact me by responding to this email, and please include your phone number.

Please do not post about this on any of the regular forums, because
it might confuse our other players about what’s going on.

Thank you,

Dagmar Shaw

Dagmar spent Thursday night in the Best Western in Chinatown, a short distance from the Cathay Bank parking lot that had briefly held components of the bomb that had killed Charlie. She had left her Prius in the AvN Soft parking lot, parked directly under the glassy eye of a security camera, and had rented one of the new Mercedes two-seater sports cars from Enterprise, which delivered the vehicle right to the doors of the office tower. She had redlined the Mercedes as she drove out of the Valley, probably tripping half a dozen automatic cameras and generating a couple of thousand dollars in the outrageous fines that California’s broken government extorted from its citizens, but at least she knew she hadn’t been followed.

The morning news was full of alarmed chatter about the assault on the Chinese yuan, something that Dagmar had missed in the traumas of the previous day. The markets in China, where it was already Saturday, were closed, but the fury continued on other exchanges.

The yuan seemed to be in serious danger. Political pressure had forced the yuan to decouple from the dollar a few years earlier, and now a currency much abused by China’s slowing growth, political demands, and inflation was showing its vulnerability. No one knew whether China’s economic statistics were genuine or mere vapor. Maybe the Chinese themselves didn’t know. In any case they were now paying the cost of their lack of transparency.