This Is Not a Game

by Walter Jon Williams

  Chinese sovereign wealth funds were dumping bonds, American and others, in order to free the cash to defend the yuan, and bond markets were tottering worldwide. As a consequence the American dollar was plunging, and the dollar wasn’t even the target of the attack. The Chinese government had been reduced to uttering threats against whatever foreign governments were behind the attacks. Dagmar wondered if an actual war could start over this.

  The talking heads on CNN were surprised over the attack, since it had been widely assumed that it had been Chinese traders who had led the assault on other currencies. Were the Chinese attacking their own currency? Were other traders attacking China by way of retaliation? Or was the whole Chinese trader story a myth?

  Dagmar, with better information, wondered how the actual Chinese traders-the ones who had followed Charlie’s gold-mining bots in the currency markets-were responding to the crisis. Patriotic traders would surely pour their profits into defending the yuan, risking their money. Pragmatic traders would follow the bots again, risking lives and livelihoods if the Chinese government chose to take their resentment out of the electronic world and convert it to real-world shackles and bullets.

  Whatever was going on behind the scenes in China, Dagmar imagined that there was cheering in Jakarta.

  After checking out of the hotel, she bought new clothes and a traveling case, changed in the restroom of a coffee shop that served her a peculiarly Filipino version of an American breakfast, bacon and eggs Luzonized, and showed up late for work to find that no one had missed her.

  She spent half the day writing scripts for Briana Hall and the other half dealing with emails from brokerage houses. She had a midafternoon meal of vaguely Thai noodles-chicken, chiles, and cilantro-from the coffee shop on the ground floor and was walking across Finnish porphyry to the elevator when “Harlem Nocturne” began to sound from her handheld. She looked at the display and saw it was BJ.

  She felt a prickle of heat across her skin, and her knees seemed briefly to buckle. She took a breath of air and it felt like her first breath in hours.

  She sat down on the polished granite ledge that separated the elevator area from the atrium. Her heart beat in her ribs like a prisoner throwing herself headfirst against the bars.

  BJ had been unable to restrain his curiosity, she told herself. He’d been staking out her apartment last night and he hadn’t seen her come home. He didn’t know about her reaction to Siyed’s death or to Charlie’s.

  Dagmar told herself that he was going to try to get information from her so that he could kill her. She admonished herself to keep this surmise in the forefront of her mind.

  She put the phone to her ear. “This is Dagmar.”

  “Hey,” said BJ. “How’s it going?”

  “Life sucks,” Dagmar said with perfect truth.

  “Yeah,” BJ said. “I’m sorry if what happened to Charlie is causing you grief.”

  “That’s two of my best friends murdered,” Dagmar said. Fury rose in her as she spoke. One of her fists punched the granite ledge on which she sat. Gratifying pain crackled from her knuckles.

  “Well, you know,” BJ said, “I won’t pretend that I’m in mourning over Charlie, but I care about you. Do you want to get together and talk?”

  “I can’t,” Dagmar said. “I’ve got too fucking much to do.”

  “I could get Chinese takeout and bring it to your apartment,” he said.

  “I’m not at my apartment anymore. I’m hiding out at a hotel.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Two reasons,” Dagmar said. “First, I think I might be next on the killer’s agenda.”

  “I thought the killer was caught,” BJ said.

  “One of them was,” Dagmar said.

  “But…” He hesitated while he tried to decide which of several possible scripts to follow. “Why would the Russian Maffya be after you?” he said finally.

  “I can’t tell you. But I have another reason-which is that the police have pretty much told me that I’m a suspect in three murders. So if I meet with you and I’m being followed, it might lead the cops to you.”

  Chew on that, she thought.

  Maybe it would keep him from following her.

  “I can bring Chinese to your hotel,” he said.

  What he should have said, Dagmar told herself, was Three murders? Because he wasn’t supposed to know about Siyed.

  That, Dagmar thought, was a misstep.

  “Maybe some other time,” she said. “I’ve really got to run right now.”

  “See you tomorrow,” BJ said.

  An alarm jolted through her nerves. “Tomorrow?” she said.

  “The update.”

  “Oh. Right. Bye.”

  After the call ended, she stared at the phone’s display until it went dark.

  Tomorrow, she thought.

  She would have to meet BJ face-to-face and hope that he couldn’t guess what she knew.

  This Is Not a Dinner

  “You have a cut on your face,” Dagmar said.

  The cut was just below BJ’s left eye, a thin little half circle of red. Probably made by Siyed’s fingernail as he tried to push BJ away while BJ pounded the life out of him.

  “Kitchen accident,” BJ said.

  “With what?” She was feeling reckless and wanted to torment him or at least make him improvise.

  “Oh,” he said. He scratched a sideburn with one blunt finger. “I have this sort of magnet thingy over the sink where I stick my knives, and I bumped into the counter and knocked one of the knives off, and it hit me.”

  “You could have lost your eye,” Dagmar said.

  BJ shrugged. “Maybe,” he said.

  He had progressed another step toward acquiring tycoon wear, with a soft cream-colored shirt, a sumptuous tie, and an Italian summer-weight jacket of pastel-colored linen. The fine clothing, rather than embellish his appearance, seemed rather to accent his thick neck and steelworker’s shoulders and long arms.

  “I’ve got to show you my new car,” he said. “I’ve finally got rid of the Chevy.”

  “We’ve got an update to do,” Dagmar said.

  “I meant later.”

  Around them, Helmuth and the technical staff were monitoring the progress of the players as they sampled one body of water after another-thousands altogether, on five continents. A running count was kept of the number of times the Tapping the Source units detected phenolphthalein, which Dagmar’s agents had added to streams, fountains, creeks, and ponds earlier in the day. The chemical itself was harmless, its chief property being to turn purple in an acid environment.

  Every time six of the contaminated water sources were detected, another page was loaded to the Briana Hall site. Each led to other pages filled with clues to puzzles that would keep the players busy, it was hoped, for at least a few hours.

  This played out over the latter half of the morning and most of the afternoon. Early in the day, eating a tasteless cruller from the box she’d brought in, Dagmar had announced that everyone was invited to dine at a nearby Italian restaurant that night, courtesy of the company. She had already called and made the arrangements; she only needed a head count.

  No one was immune to the attractions of free food. She called the restaurant and finalized the number.

  “Twelve people,” she said.

  “Thirteen,” said BJ, “counting you.”

  “Thirteen,” Dagmar said.

  Food and soft drinks were free, she explained to her guests, but she knew Helmuth and a few of the others too well to offer free alcohol.

  The restaurant was a decoy. She had no intention of being the thirteenth person at that meal, but intended to call in sick. She wouldn’t stiff the restaurant, which already had her business card number.

  It was all a way of getting away from BJ so he wouldn’t follow her home.

  At some point, civility required that she view BJ’s new car. Dagmar followed BJ to the el
evator and rode with him in silence. He seemed aware that something was wrong, and she sensed wariness beneath the casual, pleasant pose. She looked at his hands and saw that a knuckle had been cut, but a cut could appear on a knuckle for all sorts of innocent reasons. There was a cut on one of Dagmar’s knuckles at that very moment, and she had no idea how it got there.

  The killer might have used a club or a pipe or something.

  Right. The thought of an angry BJ coming after her with a baseball bat sent a quaver along her nerves.

  She turned her mind from nightmare imagination to analysis, a welcome shift. If, she considered, Siyed had cut BJ under the eye with a fingernail, would scrapings of that nail provide the DNA that could send him to prison?

  Maybe. Maybe not.

  The last thing she wanted was BJ investigated and then let go on grounds of insufficient evidence. That would be a triumph for him: that would be BJ killing Charlie and then rubbing her face in it.

  The car was a Ford Phalanx, slightly used, with a locust-green low-slung monocoque body and a hard top that disappeared, on command, into what proved a surprisingly large trunk.

  “Good lord,” Dagmar said.

  “V-eight, turbocharged.” BJ was smiling as the wind tossed his fair hair. “The original owner put thirty-five hundred miles on it, and then his boss gave him a company car-a Bentley coupé, believe it or not, and this became redundant. Those thirty-five hundred miles cut the original price nearly in half.”

  He had said “coupé,” not “coupe” as Americans do. She walked around the machine.

  “It just screams, Fuck the environment, doesn’t it?” she said.

  He laughed. “I thought that was the California state motto. Oh no, my mistake-the motto is I’ve got mine.”

  She looked at him. “Aram must be paying you well.”

  “So are you.” BJ opened the passenger door. “Want to go for a ride?”

  “Maybe later.” She shaded her eyes with her hand and blinked. “I think I’m getting a headache.”

  “Sorry to hear it.” His face softened into an expression of concern. He closed the door and approached her. “You’ve had a hard time.”

  He offered a comforting embrace and she took it, thinking as she gazed blankly over his big shoulder that her rented Mercedes two-seater would probably not be able to outrun the Ford, not with its body designed by French aeronautical engineers and housing eight cylinders of Detroit iron.

  The Italian restaurant deception would be necessary, then.

  “Speaking of Aram,” he said as they returned to the office tower, “he’s flying into town tomorrow night. I’ve got a meeting with him on Monday, and then he and I will have our first meeting with the staff at the company on Tuesday. Then he’s throwing a welcome dinner and reception for me.”

  “Where?” she asked.

  “At Katanyan Associates. The dinner will be catered.”

  She wondered about the meeting, if one of Austin’s partners would ask, Say, aren’t you the BJ that Austin always said was, like, the worst businessman in the history of the world?

  How jolly the dinner would be afterward.

  They could hear Helmuth’s fury as soon as they arrived at the third floor.

  “Goddam it! What shit-head decided that HTML was going to be case sensitive!”

  Upload not going well, Dagmar concluded.

  The afternoon ended with all pages, puzzles, sound files, and videos loaded and available to the gamers, and with the computers at Tapping the Source bulging with useful data.

  They were going to be very surprised, Dagmar thought, by what happened to their stock on Monday.

  “I’ll meet you all at the restaurant,” Dagmar said. “I’ve got to do some shopping in the meantime.”

  She waited in her office until she saw the green monocoque body cross the 101 and head toward Ventura, where the restaurant waited. She looked up, saw a familiar white Dodge van in the parking lot across the freeway. She got out her handheld and hit the speed dial.

  “Andy,” she said when Joe Clever answered, “I’m looking at you right now. And if you damage my retinas with that laser, I’m going to cross the highway and rip out your fucking lungs.”

  “I couldn’t get anything with the Big Ears,” Andy complained. “You’ve got too many computers pumping heat into the room.”

  Quiet triumph sizzled in Dagmar’s heart.

  “I got one of the puzzles on my own, though,” he said. “The one about what happened to Cullen’s hat.”

  “I have some questions,” she said, “about the snoop-and-poop business.”

  She’d claimed to have shopping to do as a way of getting rid of BJ, and now she did have shopping to do, buying the gear on Joe Clever’s list. Night-surveillance scopes, cameras, video recorders, little cameras on wires narrow enough to go down someone’s gullet.

  She called Helmuth and told him to give everyone her apologies. She had a headache, and she was going home. She’d see them all on Monday.

  “Get a receipt from the restaurant at the end of the evening,” she told him.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Helmuth asked.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said.

  Then came the search for the perfect motel. She found it finally off the Hollywood Freeway, a place that looked as if it had been built as a Ramada Inn or a Travelodge but, in the decades since its construction, had probably been sold to Arabs, who sold it to Indians, who sold it to Chinese, who sold it to Koreans, who sold it finally to refugees from Bangladesh. The white building, with its rust-colored stains, sprawled around a series of courtyards, and there was nothing to stop anyone from walking right off the street to any of the rooms. The large swimming pool, where she might have done laps, had been filled with earth and turned into a rather shabby garden.

  When she checked in, the scent of Indian cuisine filled the office, cardamom and cloves, cumin and cinnamon. The manager, a small, dark man with well-oiled hair, sat behind bulletproof Perspex.

  “What are you cooking?” she asked.

  “Tacos,” he said.

  She ate her own dinner in a Teriyaki chicken joint as she thought wistfully of Bengali tacos, then returned to her motel room to set up and test her gear. Everything worked smoothly, as advertised.

  She slept fitfully, if at all.

  This Is Not a Trap

  FROM: Dagmar Shaw

  SUBJECT: Where I’m At

  Hi, Mom,

  I’m not at home right now, so if you called the landline you wouldn’t

  have got me. I’m staying in a motel here in L.A., just to get away

  from distraction and get some work done. The game will be done in

  another couple weeks, and then I can take some time off.

  I tried to call you on my cell phone but for some reason I couldn’t

  get a signal. I’m at the New Hollywood Inn, rm 118, and the phone

  here is 818-733-3991.

  I’ll try to call you later today.

  Love,

  D.

  Dagmar had logged on to the AvN Soft servers using her old ID and password. She imagined the message lying there on the IMAP server, waiting for CRAPJOB to log on and discover her secret location.

  Except that the email was a lie. She wasn’t actually sleeping in room 118-inspired by the way that Joe Clever had stalked Litvinov, she had taken a room across the courtyard, 115, separated from it by the shrubs of the filled-in swimming pool. She had rented 118 as well, paying in cash shoved beneath the bulletproof screen, because she didn’t want to be responsible for the lives of any innocent tourists who might camp there.

  Now, though, she considered shifting to the decoy room, at least for the rest of the afternoon. She had a feeling that CRAPJOB might want to confirm her location.

  She got her laptop and her room key, with its diamond-shaped plastic tag, and crossed the old swimming pool. She spent the afternoon working there, in the clean Lysol scent of the room, at the little round ta
ble by the window, where she became sufficiently engrossed in her work to give a start when the phone rang.

  Her pulse raging, Dagmar stepped across the room and picked up the old-fashioned heavy black handset.

  “This is Dagmar,” she said, and was answered only by a soft click.

  “Hello to you, too,” she responded, fear turning in an instant to fury.

  She mussed the bed in order to convince any enemy reconnaissance, and the maids, that the bed had been slept in. She drew the drapes, left a light on above the stained vanity mirror in the back of the room, and then withdrew to the safety of room 115.

  The scout crept in a little after ten. The court was well-enough lit at night that the night-vision camera was hardly necessary; the video monitor clearly showed the wide-shouldered man enter from the street and slowly stroll the length of the walk in front of room 118. On the return journey, a few minutes later, the man stopped near 118 and studied the steel door in its orange steel frame. Fair hair glinted from beneath a dark cap.

  Dagmar was amazed by her sudden rage. It was all she could do to keep herself from hurling open her door, striding across the swimming pool, ripping the cap from BJ’s head, and slapping him across the face.

  Only the remains of her sanity, dangling above the abyss with quivering fingers, kept her still.

  BJ, having seen what he came to see, ambled back to the street. A few minutes later she heard the big V-8 thunder into life, then roar away.

  Dagmar began to take full breaths again. Her hands shivered as the anger receded, like the tide, in waves-the fury building, then falling, then returning, but each time diminished, with the pulses of lucidity lasting longer.

  Coldly she considered what evidence she had just collected. BJ had come to her motel room, had stalked around outside, had left. Dagmar understood the homicidal intent, but would Murdoch? Would a jury?

  She was inclined to think not.

  She doubted that BJ would have bomb-building supplies in his apartment-if he wasn’t hiding them from the police, he was certainly hiding them from his roommate, Jacen. They might find evidence on his computer that he was CRAPJOB, but if he’d been smart, he would have used computers rented at Kinko’s or borrowed at the library.