This Is Not a Game (43 page)

The clerk gazed at her from sad, idiotproof eyes. “You must promise to use this only for good,” he told her.

She looked at him.

“I’m innocent as chocolate syrup,” she told him.

She drove to BJ’s apartment. She’d never been there before, but the address was available in the contract he’d signed with Great Big Idea.

It wasn’t in a good part of L.A. The small building, with clap-board walls and a shake roof, was ramshackle and contained no more than four apartments. Two vehicles sat in the parking lot on concrete blocks. In this district her Mercedes coupe glowed like a beacon.

Dagmar circled the apartment and saw neither the Phalanx nor BJ’s old Chevy. She parked half a block away, in a place where her car was shaded from the streetlight by an overgrown willow, and shifted to the passenger seat. She remembered reading somewhere that a person sitting in the passenger seat was less conspicuous than someone behind the wheel.

She reclined the seat as far as possible, pulled her panama hat partly down her face, and waited for the rumble of the Ford’s V-8. When BJ arrived and went to bed, she intended to slip out and put the RFID scanner beneath his car to catch the signals from his remote, then retrieve the scanner after he left.

The Phalanx didn’t come. She waited for hours, enduring the occasional scrutiny of young men walking past along the broken sidewalk. When they began to crowd the Mercedes, either to admire the car or to steal it, she raised her seat to make herself more visible and pretended to be talking on the phone. The young men, surprised and suddenly self-conscious, retreated. No one really bothered her.

Eventually even the drifting knots of young men went to bed. Dagmar drowsed and periodically scanned the apartment building with night binoculars. BJ hadn’t come home.

He was wherever he was building the bomb, she thought. Where he was carefully crafting the instrument that would kill her.

When dawn began to feather the leaves of the willow tree overhead, Dagmar got out of the car and stretched aching limbs. She retreated to her motel room for a shower and an hour’s jangled sleep, and the alarm function in her phone woke her promptly at seven.

Dagmar looked at the phone and dreaded what was going to happen next. She tasted stomach acid in the back of her throat.

She took a deep breath and pressed buttons for the speed dial.

When BJ answered, she said, “Let’s have breakfast. I need to talk to someone.”

He cleared his throat, and when his voice emerged it was thick with sleep.

“Dagmar? Are you all right?”

“No,” she said. “I’m not.”

The morning news was about the continued attack on the yuan. The Chinese currency had lost at least half its value, neatly canceling half the value of the obsessive savings of hundreds of millions of people, most of them poor. Rioters had trashed a train station in Guangzhou and broken bank windows on the Shanghai Bund. The dollar was losing value as well, and the Chinese government was still uttering threats.

She wondered if anyone other than she and BJ had yet realized that the attacks were coming from a botnet.

Dagmar and BJ met near Koreatown, in the egg-themed restaurant where they’d dined before Charlie had been killed. BJ had been planning to kill Charlie then, Dagmar thought, because the twelve-billion-dollar figure had shown up on Our Reality Network earlier in the day, and BJ would have known at once what it meant.

Dagmar arrived at the restaurant first and sat with her back to the wall and ordered coffee. BJ arrived fifteen minutes later, heralded by the bass vibrato of the Ford. He was unshaven and dressed in worn jeans and a faded T. Apparently, she thought, tycoon wear and bomb factories did not mix.

Dagmar managed not to hurl the coffee in his face. Instead she steeled herself and rose to embrace him. She smelled the familiar lavender soap and her stomach turned over.

“What’s going on? ” he asked. “You look awful.”

She seated herself. “Three friends dead. Cops on my tail. No sleep. And the game updates tomorrow.”

This time BJ remembered he wasn’t supposed to know about Siyed.

“
Three
friends? ” he asked.

She told him about Siyed, and while she did, she watched him. The calculation behind his reactions seemed plain, the falsity enormous. There was a little delay behind every response, as he tried to decide how to react. He did everything but wave a placard saying “Murderous Sociopath.”

How, she wondered, had she not noticed any of this till now?

They had known each other for thirteen or fourteen years. They had been lovers for nine months of that. She had adored him at the start of the relationship, had been secretly relieved when he broke it off, and had been twisted enough by the rejection to marry a man she didn’t love.

She and BJ had been working together for weeks, and she’d sat opposite him at desks and tables and heard his stories of the fall of AvN Soft and seen his blue eyes glitter with anger at Charlie, and she hadn’t seen any of the mendacity, any of the self-interest, any of the plotting.

Charlie had told her over and over about BJ. So had Austin. She hadn’t thought they were lying; she had just thought they were prejudiced.

She hadn’t seen any of what BJ had created. She, so good at plots, at hiding and detecting, had gone on thinking of BJ as her friend—and not only that, but her friend of last resort.

Dagmar could only conclude that she was as broken as he was.

“Staying out of sight is probably a good idea,” BJ said. “It’ll give them time to find out who really did it. And you should get some rest, you look like you haven’t slept in a week.”

Go stay in your hotel room,
Dagmar translated,
where I can get to you with my bomb.

“Yeah,” she said. “But there’s the big update tomorrow.”

“It’s all set up, right?” he said. “You don’t even need to
be
there. Any last-minute writing or anything, I’ll handle it.”

“You’re spending the day with Aram, I thought.”

He gave one of his big-shouldered shrugs. “I’ll work all night, if I have to.”

BJ went on to talk about Aram Katanyan, about how he’d made the connection at Austin’s memorial service, then kept in touch. He’d known that Aram would have a lot to say about what happened to Katanyan Associates, and so BJ had kept stressing his qualifications for the job. He’d talked about how long he’d known Austin, how they’d met over gaming. Eventually it was Aram, not BJ, who had first brought up the matter of his coming in as acting head of the firm.

BJ was bouncy and confident and pleased with himself. A few weeks ago, she’d seen him baffled and defeated. Now he was much more like the BJ she’d met at Caltech, the one who’d walk up to you and tell you how smart he was and how successful he was going to be.

All it took to create this change, she thought, was killing a couple of people and getting away with it.

Suddenly she realized why she’d been so blind.
I haven’t been in his way till now.
She’d been trying to help BJ, not prevent him from doing anything he’d wanted to do. What little she’d had, she’d offered freely. She’d never thwarted him, and he’d never turned into any of those people in his games, the two-faced gutter crawlers that stood ready to betray everyone in sight.

She looked down at the table. BJ’s plate was empty. Her own blueberry and pecan pancakes had been more torn to shreds than eaten. The smell of candied pepper bacon hung in the air.

She’d never be able to eat candied pepper bacon again.

“Can we go for a ride in your car?” she asked.

Surprise blinked in his blue eyes.

“Sure,” he said.

“Can I drive?”

She left money on the table for breakfast, and they stepped out into yet another brilliant Los Angeles morning. She held out a hand.

“The key?” she asked.

BJ fished in his pocket and found the remote.

“You press the—”

“I know.”

She had the scanner in her handbag. She held the bag out and the remote next to it and pressed the button to open the car.

Inches away, the scanner should have picked up the signal.

The car folded around her like a body stocking. The whole vehicle shivered to the big engine. She took the car through the parking lot, then hurled it onto the street like a lioness accelerating after an antelope.

“Jeez,” BJ said, surprised.

The back end swung around, clawing for traction, as she turned onto Interstate 10. There was a hesitation, and then the turbocharger kicked in and punched her back in the seat. Lips skinned back from her teeth in a reckless grin. Methodically she clocked through the gears, and she headed for Pomona as fast as the V-8 would take her. If the automated traffic cameras clocked her at 120, BJ could just suck the fines.

From his damn jail cell.

It had occurred to Dagmar that BJ might try to kill her when they were alone. She doubted it, however. He would view it as too risky: someone could see him, something could go wrong. Better to have his puppets deliver Dagmar’s death later, in the sanctuary that she didn’t realize had been compromised.

But just in case he was tempted to do something, Dagmar wanted him too terrified to act.

She got off the freeway, fishtailed around a couple of intersections, and returned to the interstate, heading west into L.A. She returned to the restaurant parking lot, put the Phalanx in neutral, and pulled the parking brake.

“As expensive mechanical substitute penises go,” she said, “this one’s the cat’s pajamas.”

“Uh, yeah,” BJ said. His eyes were wide.

She looked at him. “See you tomorrow,” she said. “At the update.”

His blue eyes looked into hers with perfect certainty.

“See you there
,
” he said.

See you in hell,
she thought.

From room 115 in the New Hollywood Inn, Dagmar waited while BJ’s plot unfolded. Her room smelled of the Thai takeout she hadn’t been able to bring herself to eat. The cameras reported only the usual tourists—a worried Chinese mother with a pack of small children, a solemn South American with a camera, a disorganized family, running between their room and their car, chattering in Finnish or Estonian or some other unlikely language.

She’d received a message from Richard the Assassin that CRAPJOB’s online privileges had been canceled. So had BJ’s. So had Dagmar’s old account. All copies of Charlie’s patch had been reverted to the archived copy of Patch 2.0.

Dagmar supposed that BJ wouldn’t have discovered any of these changes as yet. Not if he was being feted by Aram.

CNN informed her that the attacks on the Chinese yuan had ceased. The bots had done as much damage as they could and left riots and anger behind.

Dagmar watched the monitor. More children, more tourists.

At last came a stout man staggering under a huge burden of flowers. Dagmar opened her door and met him on the doorstep of room 118. She put her key in the door.

“Maria?” he asked. “Maria Perry?”

She looked up. “Yes?”

He was a portly man around sixty, with white hair tied in a ponytail, gold-rimmed spectacles, and a cheerful red face. Dots of sweat marked his forehead.

“The management”—pant—“wanted me to give you this.” Panting. “It’s for being”—pant—“such a good customer.”

Dagmar tried to feign surprise. The vase was large and ugly, black ceramic, with reliefs of strange Polynesian tiki monsters. A huge spray of long-stemmed roses fanned from the opening at the top, the flowers white but rimmed delicately with pink. Below was a crazed mix of colorful blossoms: mums and carnations and black and yellow lilies, plus baby’s breath and other flowers that Dagmar couldn’t identify.

Dagmar opened the door of 118 and took the vase from GIAWOL, who immediately dissolved into a paroxysm of coughing. The vase was heavy with its presumed cargo of nails and gunpowder, and Dagmar wrestled it into the room and put it on the scarred old table. The scent of the roses mixed strangely with the Lysol smell of the room.

She turned back to GIAWOL, who had recovered from his coughing fit.

“Thank you,” she said, and raised a finger to her lips. “Remember not to send that text. And don’t tell anyone—they might be jealous.”

His grin was infectious. “Sure. Enjoy the flowers—Maria.”

Still grinning, he walked away. Dagmar watched him go, then closed the door and contemplated the enormous floral display.

Flowers, she thought, were really Siyed’s weapon, not BJ’s. BJ was running out of ideas.

She returned to 115, got her panama hat and a cardigan against the growing October chill. She went back to 118, collected the enormous vase with its extravagant spray of blossoms, and walked toward the street, flowers bobbing over her head like the feathers of a Lakota headdress.

Her rented car was a two-seater, so she secured the vase between the passenger seat and the shelf behind, then drove to Hollywood. Progress along the famous boulevard was slow, the pavement packed with traffic and mobs of tourists who looked even more bewildered than they did in daylight. Out-of-work actors walked up and down the sidewalks dressed as superheroes and offered to let visitors take their picture for a small fee.

Fly this bomb to where it belongs, Tony Stark,
she thought. But Tony was busy posing with a couple of kids from the Midwest and failed to hear her mental command.

Eventually she got to the top of the street, where Hollywood became Sunset, and found a place to park. She took out the vase, hesitated, then opened the trunk and dumped all the flowers inside. With the vase itself swinging at the end of her arm, she located the two office buildings and walked down the dark, narrow old stair to Santa Monica Boulevard.

The blue-windowed office building stood across the street. There were lots of lights on the second floor, where Katanyan Associates was hosting a party for its new manager. Dagmar shifted the vase from the arm that was cramping to the arm that was not.