This Is Not a Game (44 page)

Its green color fluorescing in the light of a streetlamp, BJ’s Phalanx sat in the parking lot.

Dagmar took a breath, tilted her hat so that anyone on the second floor couldn’t see her face, and stepped into the night street.

She felt the flush of danger on her skin. Her pulse was rapid but not frantic. She remembered being far more frightened in Jakarta.

She’d learned a few things since then. And besides, L.A. was
her
town.

Dagmar wanted the bomb
inside
BJ’s car because that would indicate that the bomb belonged to him. If she put the bomb underneath the Phalanx, he would be a victim.

She didn’t want him victimized. She wanted him indicted.

She would plant the bomb in his car and then send a text to the number that David had given to GIAWOL. BJ, assuming that Dagmar had been given the bomb, would use his burner to call the phone in the bomb and would then turn in surprise and shock as the Katanyan Associates windows reflected the orange flower of flame that burst from his own vehicle, and all his hopes and expectations were blown to smithereens.

Even Special Agent Landreth of the FBI would realize that there had to be a connection between this bomb and the identical weapon that had killed Charlie Ruff. The easiest explanation was that BJ had accidentally blown up his own vehicle with his own weapon.

There would be an investigation. In time, bomb materials would be found, as well as the place where BJ had assembled the bomb. And Dagmar would be questioned again.

BJ always had a grudge against Charlie,
she would say.
He thought Charlie had cheated him out of his company.

BJ would go to prison, possibly the gas chamber. He’d lose his job with Aram, and his attempt to subvert the gold-farming bots would fail.

He’d have nothing. He’d have less than he had when this whole adventure started.

Dagmar would tangle him in his own puppet strings and hang him out to twist slowly in the wind.

She glanced at the CCTV on the neighboring building and saw the cameras still dangling at a useless angle. Dagmar passed the empty guard box standing sentry in the parking lot and walked to BJ’s car. He had parked on the south side of the parking ramp, with a view of his new domain. L.A. shimmered below her, a skein of lights stretching all the way to the Pacific. Dagmar reached into her pocket and pulled out her cloned Phalanx remote, and she pressed the button.

Dagmar heard the solid chunk of a door lock opening. She pulled the sleeve of her cardigan over her fingers, crouched down by the low car, and opened the door without leaving fingerprints. She tilted the seat forward, scrubbed fingerprints off the vase with her cardigan, and tucked the vase behind the driver’s seat. She pushed the seat back into place.

She looked up at the building. Silhouettes wandered behind the lit windows. She didn’t recognize BJ or anyone else.

She rose, tilted her hat again to obscure her face from the new direction, and left the parking lot. Success tingled in her fingers and toes.

Her feet bounded up the old concrete stair. She neared the top, and breathing with exertion, she turned and gazed down over the parking lot.

The neon green Phalanx was visible, its color brilliant under the light. She reached into a pocket for the cell phone she’d bought just that afternoon, her very own burner.

“What are we going to do tonight, Brain?” she asked.

The answer seemed to hang pregnant in the air, so she spoke it aloud.

“What we do every night, Pinky,” she said. “Try to take over the world!”

She texted to the number GIAWOL had sent her, and pressed Send.

Cars hissed by on Sunset. Her heart beat double-time in her throat. Nothing happened.

Several minutes went by while Dagmar’s unease increased. She wondered frantically if she had miscalculated completely, if this was all some insane fantasy she’d cobbled together out of stray facts and paranoia.

Maybe it wasn’t a command-detonated bomb at all, she thought. Maybe it was a time bomb, scheduled to go off at 2 A.M. or something.

But in that case, why the text message? That was a breach in security, though a small one. There was no reason for it unless it was timed somehow to the bomb’s detonation.

A figure appeared in the parking lot below, and she recognized BJ at once. His big body moved with a jaunty stride, as if he were on top of the world. He was wearing tycoon clothes, a dark suit. A bright tie glowed at his throat in the light of the streetlamps.

BJ stepped toward the Phalanx and reached into a pocket for a remote. He opened the car door, put the remote away, reached into a pocket for something else. Something small.

Dagmar felt her insides twist. She stopped herself from calling out.

BJ dropped into the car. It lurched under his considerable weight. Seconds ticked by. Perhaps he was gazing through the windshield at his new domain, at the Los Angeles that lay before him, spread out like a harlot on a mattress.

In the merest fragment of a second, the explosion happened. The explosion was faster than in movies. In films, Dagmar realized, explosions are slowed down so you can see them. In reality, they’re too fast for the eye to catch.

Clangs echoed up the stair as pieces of the Phalanx began raining down. The part of the car that remained on the ground caught fire instantly and burned with a brilliant flame. Little fiery pellets fell over the parking lot, burning with bright chemical fire, and Dagmar realized they were incendiaries.

If the bomb hadn’t killed her directly, she realized, she was meant to burn to death in her motel room or choke to death on smoke.

She couldn’t see BJ amid the flames. She knew only that he hadn’t gotten out of the car.

She wondered if he had died happy. Knowing that he was a fraction of a second from erasing the last obstacle between him and his prospects. Pleased with his new job, with the billions that the software agents would soon be dropping into his account, with his future as a tycoon.

Or in that last fragment of a second, had he heard the cell phone detonator chirp from behind his driver’s seat and realized that it had all gone horribly wrong?

Dagmar returned to her own car, which was filled by now with a horrid rose scent. She stopped at a filling station and hurled all the flowers into a rubbish can, along with the cloned remote and the cell phone burner, both rubbed clean of fingerprints.

When she got to her motel room, she began taking apart all her surveillance gear. She thought that maybe she should erase all the evidence she’d gathered, in case it ended up pointing toward her.

Then she thought she might want to keep it, to prove that BJ was whatever it was that BJ was.

“This is not a game,” she reminded herself.

 

 

 

 

So, she thought. What else could she have done?

There wasn’t, and would probably never be, enough evidence to convict BJ of anything. At least not until the bomb went off in his car, which would precipitate a very thorough investigation by some rather thorough government agencies. And by then, BJ being in the car, it was too late.

If she had saved him, then what? He would have beaten her to death and thrown her off the parking jetty into the darkness below.

She could have been smarter or less distracted by events. But she hadn’t been, and instead she had been who she was, so caught up in events that she had never caught up to the truth.

And the truth was four dead by violence, here in L.A. And countless others, in Bolivian mining towns, Indonesian kampungs, burning Cantonese passenger trains...

Her own well-meaning fictions, layered page by page on the so-called World Wide Web, differed from the web of the real world in that they lacked genuine malice. No matter how depraved her imagination when it came to
Briana Hall
or blood-crazed revenge-maddened nagis, her own work was practically wholesome compared with anything served up by Southeast Asian generals, Chinese mobs, or Arkady Petrovich Litvinov, the scope of whose iniquity had been reduced to the county jail.

These thoughts drifted through Dagmar’s mind as she drowsed amid the disassembled spyware in her Lysol-scented motel room. Throughout her reflections drifted slumber itself, half-submerged on a slow-moving tide of perception.

She woke craving waffles and hearing the sound of rain on the walk outside.

 

Dagmar ate waffles in a coffee shop on Ventura while the rain turned the street outside into a canal. On the way to the Great Big Idea office, the radio informed her that the assault on the dollar had begun. As soon as the tech team had assembled, she told them to begin the update to
The Long Night of Briana Hall.
Normally they waited until noon, but the gold-farming bots had not delayed, and neither would she.

“If I were you,” Helmuth said, “I’d slip out and buy as many euros as I could.” He gave her a significant look. “I already did that on Monday.”

“I don’t have that much in cash,” Dagmar said.

“Still.”
Still.

Sipping from an insulated mug of Darjeeling tea, Dagmar watched the update from over Helmuth’s shoulder. The well-practiced tech team loaded the day’s series of puzzles. Because the real job came after the puzzles were solved, the puzzles themselves weren’t all that difficult, and the players devoured them with the Internet equivalent of roars of gusto.

Then they encountered the long lists of IP addresses and paused.

 

LadyDayFan
says:

What the hell???

 

Vikram
says:

We’re supposed to cope with all these addresses? Seriously?

 

Corporal Carrot
says:

I’m game! Let’s divide up the numbers!

LadyDayFan
says:

Ohmygoddess! This is madness!

 

Vikram
says:

All right, let’s have a show of hands! Who wants a job?

 

Dagmar watched as the players divided the thousands of numbers among themselves and began posting their successes and failures. They argued about which successes belonged to whom and offered methods of locating the owners of firewalled computers.

The dollar was down 35 percent since the start of the day.

Dagmar bought a sesame chicken salad in the coffee shop downstairs, and the largest, most elaborate latte for dessert afterward. She thought she might as well spend her money now, before it was no longer worth the paper it was printed on.

 

Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
says:

This has to be the biggest feat of social engineering in the history
of the Internet! Or possibly anywhere!

 

Corporal Carrot
says:

It’s pure hackage, man! This is soooooo freaking cool!

 

No doubt, Dagmar thought, some of the players were decompiling and reverse-engineering Charlie’s patch to figure out what it did and how it worked. But they wouldn’t discover much: it was a patch, not a whole program. It altered some modest bits of code to other bits of code. It gave the address of the Cayman account, but the players already had that address. It didn’t offer any insights into what the original gold-farming bot was for.

Reverse engineering would show that it was a patch designed to tell one piece of a network to shut the entire network down. That was all. And that information happened to fit right in with the premise of
Briana Hall,
in which the players were called upon to shut down networks of villains.

It was all, amazingly, fitting together.

 

“Miss Shaw? ”

“Yes?”

Dagmar recognized the voice of Detective Murdoch. She left the conference room and returned to her office.

“Do you know a Boris Bustretski?” he asked.

“Yes.”

There was a little pause—the length, perhaps, of an explosion.

“I’m sorry to tell you he’s been killed in another bombing.”

She let another explosion-pause go by.

“Why would anyone kill BJ?” she asked. “He wasn’t...
anybody.
”

“Can you tell us more about him?”

“He was my boyfriend ten years ago, before my marriage. We were good friends with Charlie Ruff and Austin Katanyan. But BJ and Charlie started their business together, and they ended up hating each other. BJ acted crazy, and Charlie fired him. Austin didn’t get along with him, either, after that. BJ is—was—still angry about it, after all these years.

“I recently gave BJ a job because I felt sorry for him. But”—she hoped she was convincing—“I don’t know why anyone would kill him. That’s just crazy.”

There was another little pause, another little explosion.

“Had Boris—BJ—ever made threats against Mr. Ruff?”

“None that I took seriously,” Dagmar said.

“What were the nature of the threats?”

In her mind, Dagmar replayed the Phalanx flying apart in flames, one image following the other like frames on a film reel.

“He said that if he could figure out a way to kill Charlie, he would,” Dagmar said. “But he wouldn’t do it if it meant being caught.”

The car burned in Dagmar’s mind, a smear of brilliant orange against the night web of Los Angeles.

“But BJ wasn’t a violent man,” she said. “He wasn’t serious.”

“Can you come down to the station and talk to us?”

“No,” Dagmar said. “Maybe later. Right now I’m in the middle of something at work.”

 

Whole networks of bots vanished from the world. The threat to the dollar faded by late afternoon, along with the morning’s rainstorm. The Federal Reserve had an emergency meeting; the IMF stepped in; so did European banks; so did sovereign wealth funds from a number of American allies. The value of the dollar began to rise.