Dagmar lived on the top floor so that when the Big One hit, she’d pancake on the people below and not be pancaked herself. She figured that was only sensible.
Even though Charlie paid her very well, she still couldn’t afford California real estate, and she didn’t have time to take care of a house anyway. So she put her money where Charlie and Austin told her to put it, and watched it grow with a kind of abstract joy completely void of comprehension.
She’d grown up poor, in apartments of decreasing splendor off Detroit Avenue in Cleveland. She knew the value of a dollar, of twenty dollars, of a hundred.
The kind of numbers that Charlie dealt with every day were beyond her ken. A hundred thousand dollars was a statistic. A million a fantasy.
She had a couple of hundred thousand in the market, but it was just Monopoly money to her.
Monopoly money that was growing. Regular paychecks and a rising market, she had found, were a good reinforcement.
She parked in front of the ginkgo bush, took her beef bowl in its white paper bag from the worn passenger seat of the Prius, and legged out of the car. She was about to give her thumbprint to the electronic lock on the wrought-iron gate when she noticed the white Dodge van parked in one of the building’s visitor spaces.
The van, she saw, had a satellite uplink. If she hadn’t had a very paranoid twenty-four hours, she might not have noticed the detail.
Andy’s Electronic Service, she read on the door.
Dagmar walked along the wrought-iron gate and placed herself directly between the car and her apartment door, on the third-floor corner.
The sight lines were perfect. Whoever was in the van had an unobstructed view of the front of her apartment.
Anger crackled along her nerves. She pulled her handheld from its holster, opened a file, thumbed in the license number, and mailed it to herself. Then she stalked up to the van and peered through the dark glass of the driver’s-side window. Joe Clever’s surprised face stared at her for a brief second before he vanished into the back of the vehicle. She walked to the rear of the van and banged on the door.
“Hey!” she shouted. “Come out of there!”
She kicked the door.
“I can stay here all day, motherfucker!” she yelled. “Get your ass out here!”
“Don’t dent my van!” came a muffled voice. “I’m coming out!”
One of the rear doors opened, and Joe Clever climbed out, lanky body unfolding as he dropped his sneakers onto the pavement. He was over six feet, appeared to be in his twenties, and had a stoop and dark hair that looked as if he cut it himself with scissors and a pair of mirrors.
Type One Geek.
“Hi, Dagmar,” he said. “Haven’t seen you since the dinner.”
Dagmar had given a dinner at an Indonesian restaurant for those members of the Group Mind who had helped her escape from Indonesia, or at least those who had been able to make it to L.A.
“You’ve seen me since the dinner,” Dagmar said. “It’s just that I haven’t seen you.”
He grinned. He didn’t seem the least embarrassed.
“Yeah!” he said. He stepped to the side so that Dagmar could see the interior of the van. “Pretty cool, huh? ”
“Why don’t you give me the tour? ” Dagmar said.
So he showed her the van, the two-way-mirror side and rear windows, the Pentax on its mount, the lenses sitting in foam in their shockproof steel carrying case, the telescope, the binoculars, and the elegant NKVD-surplus monocular that could be worn on the finger like a ring. Electronic images fed into a laptop computer, which could then upload anything via the satellite uplink.
There was more than one computer, and an online game was frozen on one monitor, something he’d been playing when she showed up.
The van smelled like old fast-food cartons, which it contained in large numbers.
He didn’t show her what she suspected was audio equipment, so Dagmar made a point of asking about it. He showed her his Big Ears, and some smaller surveillance gear he’d purchased in some neighborhood spy store.
So, Dagmar thought, her own office wasn’t secure, not with the big glass window that could be used as a diaphragm for the laser signal.
She’d have to call in some countersurveillance experts.
“I’ve even got some oscilloscopes,” he said. “They don’t really have any function or anything, but I think they’re cool.” Green standing waves hummed in the displays.
“Nice mad-scientist decor,” Dagmar said. “All you need is a Tesla coil.”
“Thanks!” He opened the squeaking lid of a large cooler. “Want a drink to go with your dinner? ”
She chose a lemonade, then climbed out of the van and blinked in the bright California sun. She turned to Joe Clever as he joined her on the asphalt.
“What do you do for a living, anyway? ” she asked.
He adjusted his spectacles. “I play games full-time.”
“I don’t think that pays very well,” Dagmar said.
Joe Clever grinned. “My grandma died and left me an income. Not a big one, I’m not rich or anything-the van is six years old-but I don’t have to work, and sometimes I’ll buy myself a trip to Bangalore or someplace.”
Dagmar looked at the van and the blinking oscilloscopes.
“That’s good,” she said, “because I’ve got a job for you.”
“A job? ” For the first time, he seemed surprised.
“Not for money,” she said, and then corrected herself. “Not unless you want money, I mean. What I want is for you to find the killer.”
He frowned. “That Litvinov guy? It looked like he wasn’t part of the game.”
“He is now,” Dagmar said.
Joe Clever considered this. “Interesting,” he said.
“When you find him,” Dagmar said, “don’t approach him or anything. Just let me know-me or the police.”
He scratched his chin. “Where do I start? ”
“If I knew,” she said, “I couldn’t tell you. I’m the puppetmaster. I’m the one who decides what the puzzles are.”
“Yeah.” He offered a faint smile. “It’s a cool idea, Dagmar.”
And it would get Joe Clever out of her hair while she had the office scanned for bugs and shifted details of the game around to make worthless any information he might have discovered through eavesdropping.
A look of uncertainty crossed Joe Clever’s face. “Can I play the game and look for Litvinov at the same time? ”
“Yes. But you get more coolness points for Litvinov.”
He nodded. “Okay. Great. I’ll do it.”
“Thanks.”
“Oh-” Joe Clever looked over Dagmar’s head toward her apartment. “I should tell you. Some guy went into your apartment about an hour ago.”
Dagmar was staggered. “What? ” she asked. “Who? ”
“I don’t know, but he had a key. Let me show you.”
He reached into the van’s interior for his laptop, pulled it toward him, and bent to use the touch pad. A film appeared, and she saw a dumpy, middle-aged man approach her apartment, look over his shoulder, then insert a key and enter.
“That’s the building manager,” Dagmar said. “Richardson.”
“He was in your place for six minutes.”
Dagmar stared at the picture. “What the hell for?” she wondered.
“I suppose he could have been there to repair something,” Joe Clever said, “but my guess is that he was poking around in your underwear drawer.”
“He what? ” Rage filled Dagmar’s heart. “How do you know? ”
“I think it was the expression on his face when he left.” He tapped buttons and fast-forwarded to the moment when the manager left her apartment.
The man did manage to look both furtive and smug.
“The bastard!” Dagmar said. “I’m going to check!”
She swung away from the van, but Joe Clever called her back.
“You forgot your dinner.�
�
She took the fast-food bag from his hand and marched to her apartment.
Normally the problem with her underwear drawer would have been that it was too disorganized to actually tell if anything was missing: it wasn’t as if she bothered to line up and number her underpants. But there was no clean underwear.
She’d remembered that she’d thought she’d had enough to last her the next few days, and then thought she’d miscounted.
But she hadn’t miscounted after all. The superintendent had been in her drawer, just as Joe Clever had suggested.
Filled with fury, she stepped out onto the balcony that overlooked the courtyard and looked down. There, carrying out a garbage bag from the clubhouse, was the creep himself.
“Hey!” she called. “Richardson!”
Faces looked up at her from around the classic 1970s coffin-shaped swimming pool. Two young women tanned there, model-slash-actresses with large breasts that pointed skyward in a clearly artificial way, and a short distance away from them was an elderly man who swam slow laps every afternoon and then sat on a chaise longue to dry out and absorb some warmth from the sun.
Richardson looked up at her and shielded his eyes from the glare.
“Do you need something? ” he asked.
“I need you to stay the hell out of my underwear drawer, you fucking creep!” Dagmar yelled. “Come in my apartment again, and I’ll kick your ass!”
She watched as a series of complicated expressions crossed Richardson’s face. Whatever the reaction was, it wasn’t that of an innocent man.
Busted! she thought, triumphant.
Richardson shuffled a step closer.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“I’ve got video, you fucking pervert! ” Dagmar shouted. “You wanna watch it? ”
Even from the third-floor balcony she could see the color drain from Richardson’s face. Enlightenment dawned across the faces of the model-slash-actresses. Perhaps they had missed a few items themselves.
Richardson dropped the garbage bag and flapped his hands in a vague way. Dagmar found that infuriating.
“I’ll have your job, prick!” she shouted, and then she went back into her apartment and slammed the door.
The one good thing about surviving the Indonesian holocaust, she thought, was that she was no longer afraid of anyone who wasn’t carrying a gun or a damn big knife.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN This Is Not Simple
A new digital dead bolt was installed on Dagmar’s apartment door early the following morning. A few hours later a pair of private security contractors, wearing identical tan blazers, swept through the Great Big Idea offices and failed to find any eavesdropping gear planted there by Joe Clever or anybody else. To counter the laser eavesdropping system, they were happy to sell Dagmar white-noise generators to provide interference, and detectors to sound an alarm when a laser was directed at the room.
“I want a death ray,” she told them, “to shoot back.” Her science fiction background coming to the fore.
“If you shoot a laser back at them,” one man said, “you could blind them.”
“They could blind me.”
They nodded.
“True,” one said. “They could.”
In any case, the Tan Blazer Men doubted that Joe Clever could get close enough to the building to hear much of anything, not without being seen.
“It depends on how good his software is at sorting signal from interference.”
“Great,” Dagmar said. “I could have been blinded for nothing.”
Dagmar tried to pass the news to Charlie, but his secretary, Karin, said that Charlie had called in and said he wouldn’t be coming to the office today.
Maybe sorting out Austin’s company was a knottier problem than he’d anticipated.
Dagmar looked out the window to see if the Dodge van was visible before calling in her design team and letting them know that their meeting of two days before had possibly been compromised and that they were going to have to rework everything that had been decided on that day.
They were in a vengeful mood. They decided not only to shift all the game goodies to different locations, but to lay ambushes in the compromised areas.
“Anyone going into Planet Nine and looking under that gantry is going to find three heavily armed sharpshooters from Team Evil who are going to take him apart!”
Or so Helmuth, her head programmer, proclaimed. Dagmar waved a hand to give the plan her blessing.
“And if they find any of the pages we discussed,” Dagmar said, “we’ll fill them with information that leads nowhere.”
“Information,” Helmuth said darkly, “written in Estonian.”
It was only after the meeting that Dagmar had a chance to go online and see what had been happening in the game world.
Joe Clever’s video of Austin’s death, which Video Us had not as yet removed, had generated more than eleven million hits.
And in the past forty-eight hours, another 3,600,000 people had joined The Long Night of Briana Hall.
Ghouls, she thought.
She checked her email, and all sense of accomplishment evaporated.
FROM: Siyed Prasad
SUBJECT: Holiday in L.A.
Dagmar my Dear,
I’m going to be in Los Angeles next week to shoot a commercial. My
agent tells me that the Golden Nagi credit has been a big plus! Lots
of people in the business saw it, apparently.
I would like to thank you for the opportunity to work with you, and
all the doors that you have helped to open for me.
Can I take you to dinner?
Your appreciative Siyed
“Oh for God’s sake,” Dagmar said aloud. And then, to the computer, “Return mail.”
FROM: Dagmar Shaw
SUBJECT: re: Holiday in L.A.
Siyed,
I’m working hard on a new project, and I doubt I’ll be able to see
you.
Good luck with the commercial.
Dagmar
Was that curt enough? she wondered.
Get lost, married man.
She began dealing with the problems involved in reworking the game to suggest that Austin’s death was somehow a part of it. She didn’t feel she could say it outright, but she could offer hints that the players were certain to notice.
Dagmar thought that maybe Joe Clever wasn’t clever enough to find Litvinov, but she had more confidence in the entire Group Mind.
Three million people: they had to know something.
Briana Hall, the woman in the hotel room, was hiding from the police, who were under the impression that she had killed two of her former lovers. The game was designed to move both backward and forward in time, following Briana as she fled from the police and attempted to prove herself innocent, and simultaneously going back into the history of the characters to discover their past actions and the reasons for them. The help of the players would be needed in order to accomplish both of these objectives.
One of Briana’s exes had been killed by a sleeper cell of saboteurs who were using a location in the Planet Nine game as a rendezvous-the sometime boyfriend had been a sysop and during the course of his work had overheard some of their conversation.
The other had been killed because he was a minor player in a securities fraud and his cronies erroneously assumed he was under investigation-in fact he had had contact with SEC investigators for an entirely different reason.
Dagmar wondered if that victim could be renamed Austin. But if so, she’d have to change the plot: she didn’t want to make one of her oldest friends guilty of securities fraud, not even in the context of fiction. So she’d have to reengineer the plot in order to provide a reason why he was killed-accidentally-by a hired assassin.
She calculated how to make the plot changes, which she figured would involve a couple of days of rewriting. But there would be more than rewriting, because she’d h
ave to add a whole Maffya subplot, and that would take up a lot of resources.
While thinking this over, she found the card that Lieutenant Murdoch had given her and called him. He was out, but she left a message asking him to return her call.
She was deep into rewriting when “Harlem Nocturne” announced Murdoch’s call. She looked at the time in the corner of her monitor and saw that it was after six o’clock-Murdoch was probably returning all his phone calls before leaving the office.
“This is Dagmar,” she said.
She had met Murdoch the previous day. He was a small, systematic man with a lined face and graying hair. His mouth had the kind of pinched look that suggested false teeth. His questions the other day had been competent and professional, and he’d asked them all without giving the slightest clue what was happening behind his pale blue eyes. He was almost like a character on the old Dragnet program, deadpan and businesslike, but more human, without the TV characters’ utter humorlessness.
“You called? ” he said.
“Yes. I realized that if you give me the name that Litvinov used to enter the country, I could probably find him for you.”
“How could you do that? ” he said after a pause.
Dagmar explained about the game and the fact that she had thousands of detectives eager to set their intelligence on the problem.
“While we appreciate citizen help,” Murdoch began, “I’m not sure that this would be appropriate.”
“Lieutenant Murdoch,” Dagmar said, “can you call every hotel and motel in Greater Los Angeles to find out if Litvinov, or his alias, is staying there? ”
“No. There are thousands of hotels altogether. We don’t have that kind of manpower.”
“I do,” Dagmar said.
There was another pause.
“Here’s what I figured out,” Dagmar said. “Either Litvinov has left town, in which case you’ll have to hope you can get him arrested back home in Saint Petersburg or whatever-”
“He’s based in Hamburg,” Murdoch said.
“Okay,” Dagmar said, “Hamburg. But my point is, either he’s gone, or he’s still in town. And if he’s still in town, it’s because he’s realized he shot the wrong man and is still planning on going after his real target. So if he isn’t found, someone else could die.”
This Is Not a Game Page 14
