FROM: LadyDayFan
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“I haven’t been here since Charlie had me thrown out,” B J said. He had contributed his thumbprint to the database at the new security station and now stood in the AvN Soft atrium, looking past potted palm trees to the upper reaches of the office tower.
“I had one security guy on each arm,” he said. “Two guys came behind with cardboard boxes of stuff from my office.” He pointed upward, at the eighth-floor balcony. “And Charlie was up there, watching. He didn’t say a damn word. He just watched.”
He stood there, scowling defiantly up at the place Charlie had occupied on that day. He wore Levi’s worn smooth and pale, and a polyester knit shirt strained by his broad shoulders.
“Is there going to be a problem?” Dagmar asked.
He looked at her with his blue eyes.
“Nope,” he said. “Not at all.”
“Oh, Dagmar!” the receptionist, Luci, called from her desk. “I forgot to tell you! Someone sent you a present.”
She reached behind her chair and lifted up a vase filled with at least three dozen white roses. She put the vase on her desk and fanned out the flowers, producing a brief rose-scented breeze.
“My God,” said Dagmar.
“Someone sure loves you,” Luci said.
Maybe it’s Charlie, Dagmar thought. Maybe he’s trying to make up for what he did to me yesterday.
She reached for the envelope attached to the display, opened it, and read it.
I’m so very sorry that you were unable to join me for dinner yesterday evening, she read. Perhaps tonight? Your very own, Siyed.
“Crap,” she said, and crumpled the card.
“Goodness!” said Luci. “Who is it?”
Dagmar gave the short form. “Short psycho married foreigner,” she said.
Luci gave a knowing nod. B J chuckled. He picked up the vase.
“Well, if he’s a bastard, it isn’t the flowers’ fault,” he said. “Where shall we take them?”
They went to her office, where they cleared some of the rubble off a shelf and made a place for the vase. The soft scent of the roses floated through the room. Dagmar called Contracts and told them she needed a freelancer contract rushed through. She gave them B J’s name, address, and Social Security number and told them he was going to be paid two thousand dollars per week.
“And backdate the contract to Monday,” she said.
That way, B J could pick up his first check on Friday. Which, since he had quit his IT job for this, was the least she could do.
“Thanks,” B J said, looking out her window at the highway down below. “Now can you tell me what the hell I’m doing here?”
“Have a seat.”
He moved file folders from one of the chairs and sat in it. She explained what was happening in The Long Night of Briana Hall and how all that would have to change. She called up a flow chart of the action, put it on the big plasma monitor on the wall, and walked him through it.
He adjusted his rimless spectacles and pursed his lips in thought. “So Briana’s suspected of two murders, right?”
“Yes.”
“And the murders aren’t actually connected?”
“No. It just seems that way to the cops.”
B J rubbed his chin. “That’s a coincidence,” he said. “I don’t like coincidences in fiction. I see enough of them in real life.”
Dagmar smiled, then gestured at the chart. “The cops don’t believe in coincidence, either. But the players are going to prove them wrong.”
“So one of the murders is committed by a terrorist, and the other was done by people involved in some kind of securities fraud.”
“Right.”
“Can we connect them in some way?”
She blinked at him. “How?”
“Well,” said B J, “let’s say that the people involved in the fraud know that the terrorists are about to strike. So they’re planning on— I don’t know— shorting S&Ps or something, knowing they’re going to go down.”
“Ah. Like al Qaeda was supposed to have done— manipulated stocks just before 9/11.”
“Exactly.”
Dagmar leaned back in her chair. Possibilities cascaded through her mind.
“Yes,” she said. “We could do that. But in that case the players are only confirming what the authorities actually believe. It’s more dramatically satisfying for a player to prove an NPC wrong than to show he’s been right all along.”
“Then you make it a triple-layered puzzle,” B J said. “Level one is solved by the cops, who think Briana’s guilty. Level two will be solved by the players, who will prove that the crimes are unrelated and that Briana is innocent of the murders. And then the players unravel the third layer, which shows that the crimes are related after all but that Briana is still innocent.”
Dagmar looked at B J and grinned.
“Yeah,” she said. “We could work it that way.”
She couldn’t help being grateful for someone who was actually trying to solve her problems.
“Now,” B J said, “tell me how this Russian assassin is connected to everything.”
Dagmar took a long breath and slowly exhaled.
“That,” she said, “is really complicated.”
She told him. His blue eyes widened.
“This is the guy who killed Austin? You’ve got hundreds of thousands of people trying to find a real killer?”
“Millions,” said Dagmar.
“Holy Christ.” His arms made a hopeless, flopping gesture. “I have no idea what to say to that.”
“The problem is that they aren’t finding him. We’ve got to give them other things to work on until Litvinov surfaces. And if he doesn’t surface, we’ve got to give the players a satisfactory resolution to that plot.”
B J scrubbed his face with both hands. “I can’t believe this.”
“Wait,” Dagmar said, “till you hear what Charlie wants to do with the water samplers.”
She was in the middle of her explanation when her desk phone rang.
“Dagmar,” she answered.
“Did you get my present, love?” asked Siyed.
Her heart gave a guilty lurch at the sound of the East London accent.
“Thanks for the flowers,” she said, “but I’m too busy to see you.”
Across the desk, B J smiled.
“Please, Dagmar,” said Siyed. “I’ve come all this way.”
“Sorry, no,” said Dagmar. “There’s this problem about your being married.”
“ I —” And at that moment Dagmar’s handheld began to play “Harlem Nocturne.”
“My other phone’s ringing,” Dagmar said. “Gotta go.”
The display on the handheld showed it was Charlie calling. The sight of his name brought a flash of paranoia, and she wondered if one of Charlie’s spies could have seen her bring B J into the building.
She didn’t think there was anyone but Charlie at AvN Soft who dated from B J’s time, but perhaps she was wrong.
Her hands were clumsy in removing the phone from its holster, and in pressing the Send button to answer.
“Yes,” she said into the phone.
“Dagmar,” said Charlie, “are you ready for the keys to the kingdom?”
Her head swam. It took her a moment to orient herself to an entirely different context, and then she reached for her stylus.
“Okay,” she said.
Charlie gave her an account number and a complicated password, a random mix of letters and numerals. Dagmar jotted it down on her handheld display and saved it to a text file.
“Got it,” she said.
“Right,” Charlie said. “That’s your budget for the game. If you need more, let me know.”
“Will do,” she said. “Whose name is the account under?”
“Atreides LLC,” Charlie said. “It’s a corporation I created years ago but never got around to using.”
“You named the company after the family in Aeschylus?” Dagmar asked.
“No.” Blankly. “I named it after the family in Dune.”
“Right,” Dagmar said. “Of course.”
Sometimes she forgot what subculture she was living in.
“I’ll need a good accounting at the end of this,” Charlie said.
“You’ll get one,” Dagmar said. With B J’s payment listed as “Consultant fee,” and no names mentioned.
“How’s the game moving?” he asked.
“I believe I gave you my views yesterday,” said Dagmar.
“Just do it,” Charlie said, and hung up.
B J was watching her. Amusement glittered behind his spectacles.
“You have a very complex life,” he said.
“No kidding. Excuse me for a moment.”
She used her trackball to take her to the Wells Fargo page and then typed in the account number and password.
Charlie had given her an account with twenty-five million dollars.
She stared for a long moment.
Curse of the Golden Nagi had been budgeted at four million, with live events on three continents. The Long Night of Briana Hall had a budget double that of Golden Nagi, much of which had already been spent on professionally produced, professionally acted video, by far the most expensive item in the budget. Now Charlie had given her more than triple that sum, in addition to the eight million already in the budget.
The keys to the kingdom indeed.
If Dagmar couldn’t do what Charlie wanted on this game, she thought, it was because it simply couldn’t be done.
At one o’clock, Dagmar had an emergency meeting with the Great Big Idea creative team, fourteen people altogether, with the exception of one woman who was in Amsterdam setting up the weekend’s live event.
She couldn’t stop herself from peering out the window blinds of the conference room, to make sure that Joe Clever wasn’t lurking somewhere with his Big Ears. No eavesdroppers were visible. She turned on the white-noise generators anyway, and the meeting proceeded with a kind of distant waterfall hiss in the background.
When Helmuth entered, Dagmar introduced B J.
“Helmuth von Moltke,” Helmuth said, offering his hand.
B J raised his eyebrows. “Von Moltke?” he asked.
“Programmer by day,” said Helmuth. “Eurotrash by night.”
Helmuth, descended from a German general, was a sleek, handsome young man, still under thirty. He wore cashmere slacks, a T-shirt with the Ferrari stallion, and a jacket of paper-thin, featherlight leather made in Buenos Aires. He was known to spend most of his nights partying on the Sunset Strip. When or if he slept was unknown.
Jack Stone ambled in next. He was the puzzle designer and a Type Two Geek, which was basically a Type One plus about eighty pounds. He lived, ate, and breathed puzzles, at least when he wasn’t living, eating, and breathing Frito pies, which he made himself by lining a bowl with Fritos, pouring Wolf brand chili on top, and putting the result in the microwave. When it was hot, he’d throw grated jack cheese on top. Even other Type Twos couldn’t abide the result.
Fortunately he hadn’t brought a Frito pie with him this time. Instead he had a plastic sack filled with miniature candy bars, which he would eat like popcorn.
Dagmar introduced B J as “Boris, who’s going to help with the writing.” The others paid no attention to B J after that. Writing wasn’t interesting to them.
When everyone arrived, Dagmar demonstrated one of the Tapping the Source units and explained Charlie’s latest nonnegotiable demands.
“You’re changing the story after the launch?” demanded Helmuth.
“No point in whining,” Dagmar said. “I’ve already whined to Charlie, and Charlie isn’t listening.”
So of course they whined some more. Dagmar let them.
“We have the budget on this one,” Dagmar said. “If you need help, we’ll hire anyone who can provide it. Freelance programmers, design studios, you name it. Start calling them now, if you think you’ll need them down the line.”
“The players are going to hate this!” Jack protested. “They went nuts when they had to buy that ninjaware. They’re going to be even more crazed when they have to buy these damn water-quality units.”
“I’ve got a work-around,” Dagmar said, and smiled. “We buy the units for them.”
They looked at her. She shrugged.
“Maybe not for all of them,” she conceded, “but the budget will buy a lot of forty-dollar boxes.”
After that, it went a little easier.
After the meeting, Dagmar and B J went to her office to replot Briana Hall. The scent of Siyed’s roses saturated the air. Drinking coffee and eating Pop-Tarts from the snack station, they worked over Dagmar’s interactive monitors and saw their changes appear instantly on the big wall plasma screen, complete with colored arrows that showed how the complex plot elements were connected.
B J was as devious a story craftsman as Dagmar remembered from their college days. He had an instinctive gift for the twist, the reveal, the snapper that would whip the story in an unanticipated direction, like a rocket slinging around the moon en route to some distant world.
“Right,” Dagmar said finally. “Let me put you to work writing the various documents relating to the backstory. I’ll do the audio, video, and comic scripts, because I’m familiar with the format.”
B J shrugged. “That should work.”
This meant that B J would be spending his days creating the text for phony documents, everything from school reports to classified government intelligence assessments, newspaper articles to blog entries, birth certificates to death certificates. The Graphics Department would then turn the text into facsimiles of the actual documents. An ARG thrived on its virtual paper trail— puzzles led to documents, documents contained more puzzles, the puzzles led to more documents, the documents led to revelations.
“You might as well work from home,” Dagmar told him. “We don’t have an office for you here.”
“And besides,” B J said, “I might run into Charlie in the elevator.”
“Like I care?” Dagmar snarled. And then wondered if she actually meant what she’d just said.
Dagmar looked out her office window and was surprised to discover it was night. She looked at the time on her monitor screen and saw it was after nine o’clock.
She realized she was very hungry. The coffee shop in the atrium closed at nine, so there was no food in the building unless she wanted something from a vending machine, or more Pop-Tarts. At this hour, neither option seemed attractive.
“Want to get dinner?” she asked. “Charlie’s paying.”
B J grinned. “That’s an offer I can’t refuse.”
They found a steak house open on Ventura, one with dim lighting in 1950s colored-glass sconces, battered dark wood tables, and red-and-white-checked tablecloths. Dagmar ordered a margarita and a medium-rare rib eye. She didn’t eat much red meat, but on this evening she planned on making a sizzling, juicy exception.
“Well,” B J said, “as long as Charlie’s paying.” He ordered the same thing, only with a shrimp cocktail for an appetizer and king crab legs draped over his steak.
“At this rate,” Dagmar said, “it won’t be long before you bring Charlie to his knees.”
“I wish,” B J muttered.
Dagmar looked at him. “What would it take,” she said, “for you and Charlie to be friends again?”
“Well,” said B J, “he could give my half of the company back.”
“He doesn’t actually own the company,” Dagmar said. “It’s his investors.”
B J raised an eyebrow. “You ever met one of these investors? Seen one? Heard their names?”
“No,” Dagmar said. “But then I’m not involved with Charlie on that level.”
“I don’t think anyone is,” B J said. “I think there’s a reason no one’s ever seen the people who rescued the company.”
Dagmar felt suspicion sing in her bones, a deep, subdural hum of mistrust. The day’s anger and the complex logistics and plotting session had kept a lid on her speculations, but now her doubts flooded her.
“Any idea,” she asked, “why Charlie’s angels are so mysterious?”
“Nope.” He scratched one of his muttonchops. “My best guess is that they’re involved in some kind of tax-fraud scheme. Or maybe the investors are laundering money through AvN Soft.”
Dagmar leaned toward B J over the table.
“How would that work, exactly?” she said.
“If they’re laundering money, they’d just overpay for AvN’s services. How are the IRS auditors going to know how much our autonomous agents are worth? As long as Charlie pays taxes on the money that’s rolling in, the IRS and everyone else are happy.”
Dagmar nodded. That seemed plausible enough. And she hadn’t failed to notice that “our.”
The margaritas and the shrimp cocktail arrived. The prawns were vast and pink, like tongues lolling from the rim of a cocktail glass. B J offered Dagmar one, and she took it. It had that bland, farmed taste that suggested it had never been anywhere near an ocean, but even so, it whetted Dagmar’s appetite.
B J gave her a calculating look.
“You’re thinking about that Russian assassin, aren’t you?” he said. “You think Charlie’s involved with the Maffya.”
“The assassin,” said Dagmar, “is a problem to which I have no ready answer.”
“So you’re trying to track the killer through the game.” Thoughtfully, B J picked up a shrimp, then replaced it on the rim of the cocktail glass. “And you have to hope that he’ll have some answers once he’s picked up. I have to give you credit for optimism.”
“Foolhardy though it may be.”
Feeling foolhardy and hopeful, she licked the rim of her glass and took a swallow of her drink. Tongues of tequila fire sped along her veins.
“There’s more than one Charlie Ruff,” B J said. “There’s the one you’ve known all these years, and then there’s the other one.” His gaze darkened. “You’re starting to meet that other one now. I met him six years ago.”
“And what’s he like, this other Charlie?”
B J took a thoughtful drink of his margarita.
“At some point,” he said, “Charlie has to be the winner. And with him it’s a zero-sum game— if he’s the winner, that means everyone else has to lose.”
Dagmar considered this. “What kind of game is he playing with me, then?” she asked.
“He hired you to run his game company because he thought the games would be cool,” B J said. “You succeeded. You made the games cool. But now Charlie figures your cool quotient is bigger than his, so he’s got to take you down a peg.”
“So he’s doing this just to humiliate me?” Dagmar didn’t find the theory entirely convincing.
“That, and the fact that he’s learned enough about ARGs to think he can run one,” B J said. “That’s what happened at AvN Soft. He thought he’d learned enough about my end of the business to tell me what to do, and he started trying to do my job as well as his.” He flapped his big hands. “We both went down in flames. But he found those mysterious backers, and I didn’t. So I got thrown out of the building, and Charlie sat up on the balcony and watched and never said a word.”
Dagmar took a contemplative sip of her drink. You’re going to do this, Dagmar, Charlie had said. Because you owe me, and you know it.
“I can see that, I suppose,” she said. “But why now? If Charlie is really involved with the Maffya, and there is an assassin running around looking for him, you’d think he’d have other things to do besides prove to himself that he can boss me around.”
B J lifted his shoulders in a half shrug. “He can be erratic if he’s under pressure. Trust me, I know. He can be crazy.”
Dagmar thought about this while B J ate a prawn.
“So,” she said, “tell me what happened with you and Charlie and AvN Soft.”
B J made a face. “This isn’t my favorite topic.”
“I’ve had Charlie’s story,” Dagmar said. “I’ve had enough from you to know how you feel about it, but not what actually happened.”
B J said nothing for a while, just ate the last prawn. Then he touched his lips with his napkin and pushed the cocktail glass away.
“Okay,” he said. “We both came up with the ideas that made the autonomous software agents work. That was in one of those late-night bull sessions where we were both flinging theory around, and by five in the morning we’d nailed down our particular approach to intelligent, distributed, self-replicating, self-evolving agents. We knew that was what we wanted to spend the next ten years working on.
“And then we had to divide up the work, and that was pure chance. I’d been a project manager for Crassus Software, and I knew how to run an office, so I ran the business side. And by default that put Charlie in charge of creating the software— though in the early days we both worked on that. He was better at line-by-line coding, anyway.”
He sipped his drink, then put the heavy glass down on the checked tablecloth.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “It wasn’t Charlie who cold-called venture capital firms and who convinced them to take a chance on a couple of twenty-five-year-old software engineers and their wonky ideas about self-evolving software. It wasn’t Charlie who raised the millions to start the company and fill that office tower with software engineers. It wasn’t Charlie who did any of that.”
She looked at his stubborn, defiant face, and she nodded. “Did Austin help?”
“Right then, Austin was in New York working for Morgan Stanley. But he put us in touch with some people.”
“Go on,” she said, but at that point the steaks arrived, sizzling on hot metal plates set into wooden platters, and they paused for appreciation.
“Eat while it’s hot,” B J said, and picked up his steak knife.
“So,” Dagmar said, “did you get the big office building right away, or —”
He gave her an amused look from over the rims of his spectacles.
“I’m not talking about this,” he said, “till my surf and turf is history.”
Dagmar sighed and picked up her knife. She carved a piece of her rib eye, inhaled its savor, then placed it on her tongue. Juices awakened tired taste buds.
Oh my. Where had this steak been all her life?
B J was using some highly specialized tools to crack open a king crab leg. The carapace snapped; a tiny piece of shrapnel hit Dagmar on the cheek. She flicked it away and reached for her drink.
When the waitress came back with a plate for empty crab shells, Dagmar called for another round of margaritas. She ate her meal with languid pleasure and watched B J wrestle with his crab legs. By the time the last chunk of crabmeat had been dipped in lemon butter and consumed, Dagmar was well into her second margarita and was willing to view the world from on high, enthroned, like a pagan god, amid a benign radiance.
B J pushed away his plate.
“That was the best meal I’ve had in a long time,” he said.
Dagmar lifted her arms and stretched.
“Ready for dessert?” she asked.
B J laughed. “Maybe I’d better digest a bit first.”
She looked at her watch and saw that it was a quarter after eleven. The dining room was nearly empty, and the noise from the bar had faded.
The waitress cleared their plates and asked if they wanted dessert. Dagmar allowed as how they’d look at menus. The waitress moved away, balancing plates on her arms. Dagmar watched her.
“I’m always glad when I find a waitress who’s just a waitress,” Dagmar said.
“What do you mean?”
“One who’s not”— Dagmar tilted her head and assumed a perky voice— “ ‘Hello, my name is Marcie and I’ll be your waitress tonight. I’d like to recommend the swordfish, and just in case you’re someone important I’d really really really like to be in your next motion picture.’ ”
B J grinned. “You don’t get that in the Valley so much, I bet.”
“They’re everywhere.”
The waitress— whose name was not Marcie— returned with the dessert menu on laminated cards. Dagmar was too full to eat anything more, but she looked at the list for form’s sake. Her glance lifted from the list of desserts to look at B J.
It struck her that, despite the way he’d been neglecting himself, he was still a very attractive man. B J gazed down at the menu with a relaxed expression, his blue eyes half-lidded behind their spectacles, and Dagmar considered how few of her memories involved his being relaxed. In school he had always been on the hustle: planning his future, sucking up information, writing vast amounts of sloppy code because he was in too much of a hurry to make it clean. Eventually the hustle had grown so all-encompassing that it had squeezed Dagmar out of his life without anyone quite noticing.
B J had never allowed himself to be bored. Dagmar wondered if he was bored now.
He looked up at her, saw her looking at him, and his lips firmed in a frown.
“I can see that it’s time to pay for this meal,” he said.
Dagmar hadn’t been thinking of their earlier conversation, but she was willing to take advantage of B J when the opportunity arose.
“You can order dessert first,” she said.
When the waitress came back, he ordered coffee and strawberry shortcake. Then he turned to Dagmar.
“Actually,” she said, “I was wondering if you find your life boring.”
“I just left a stupid, dead-end job in customer service,” he said. “I supplement my income with the two most despised activities in online RPGs: I’m a ninja and a gold farmer. All of the above is as repetitive as hell.” He thumped his fingers on the table. “So yes,” he said, “I’m bored.”
“Well,” Dagmar said, “I’ll try to keep things from turning too dull for the next few weeks.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“But in the meantime I need to find out as much as I can about Charlie. So I need to find out what happened to AvN Soft.”
He glanced away, a rueful smile on his lips, then turned back to her and visibly steeled himself, squaring his shoulders, sitting more rigidly in his seat.
“Right,” he said. “We started by calling ourselves Advanced von Neumann Software, because our agents were meant to reproduce themselves. But that ended up being misleading, because von Neumann machines are self-replicating machines, not software, so we settled for AvN Soft. We started in this old building down in Culver City— it had been an old movie-production facility, and by that I mean old. There was junk in there dating from the forties. I wanted to put it on eBay and sell it to collectors, but Charlie insisted we didn’t have time, so we just paid the trash men to haul it away. And then we had to retrofit the whole building to modern standards— my God, there was no high-speed Internet anywhere in the building, let alone a T3 connection. And while that was going on, we found the asbestos in the ceiling. So that meant more delays and more money down the drain and guys in moon suits covering half the building in plastic sheeting.
“So then that’s the situation we were in when Soong Scientific went bankrupt. You remember them?”
“No,” Dagmar said.
“They were bleeding-edge for, like, three years— but it turned out the bleeding edge was nothing but vapor, and when their CEO was arrested by the Chinese government for fraud and bribery and shot in the back of the head, his office tower in the valley became available. I talked Charlie into moving because we could buy the building cheap and it would save money in the long run. But that meant more discussion with the VC people, and more delay and more money . . .” He waved a hand. “Well. You can imagine.”
“I’ve heard Austin describe start-ups. This sounds sort of typical.”
“It felt like we were going off into the wilderness,” B J said, “felling trees with hand tools, and putting up cabins. It felt like we were fighting bears with stone axes and eating them raw. It felt as if nobody had ever done any of this before. It felt like we had to invent everything from scratch.”
“Didn’t you have a business plan?”
“Sure we did. But what did the business plan say about asbestos? What did it say about contractors that never showed up to do their work, about a project manager who found Jesus and ran away to a fundamentalist Bible camp in Arkansas, about old Soong servers that were riddled with Chinese trapdoors and had to be replaced— Christ, those Soong people were devious! The business plan didn’t last ten seconds. We were up the creek without a map.”
The waitress brought B J’s coffee and dessert, but B J’s story had gained momentum, and he ignored the food placed before him. He jabbed the air with a stubby finger.
“The fact was,” he said, “that Charlie and the development team were wandering in circles trying to get the product finished. I kept having to adjust the business strategy because the software kept mutating out from under me. And there were always choices to make— either do something half-assed now, or make a commitment to the long haul and do it right. I always made the choice that would pay off in the long run. I began by assuming the company would be there forever. The only times I compromised were when Charlie talked me into it— he was always looking over my shoulder and arguing with me instead of doing his own work.”
He spread his hands. “And I was right, wasn’t I? Charlie’s reaping the benefits of all my long-range planning. I’m just not there to share it with him.”
Dagmar nodded. “So how did it end?”
“It was the first release that killed us,” B J said. “Rialto was eight months late. There were bugs. The user interface sucked. What we had was a data-mining agent that would analyze publically available financial information— everything from stock market quotes to remittances to exchange rates to raw materials prices to employment rates— and it would make predictions. It would make the trades itself, if you wanted it that way.
“The problem was”— fervor shone in B J’s eyes— “there was already plenty of software on the market that did that. The competition was fierce. Credit Suisse, for example, had an alg program that would analyze eight thousand stocks per second and trade based on predictions set three minutes ahead. Each trade took about a millisecond. They’ve probably got a better system now.
“And let’s face it, Release 1.0 just wasn’t all that successful in the beginning— Rialto was designed to evolve, not to be brilliant right from the start. It was hard to explain that to the customers. Word of mouth in the marketplace destroyed us.” He shrugged. “It’s very successful now, I understand.”
“That’s what I hear,” said Dagmar.
“After that,” B J said, “the money ran out. We had five or six other projects in the pipeline, but it was too late. We kept having to lay off staff. I called every venture capitalist in America and every European merchant bank, trying to raise funds to keep us afloat. Eventually it was just Charlie and me and maybe half a dozen other people in this empty building. He was immersed in programming, trying to keep one of the other projects afloat— and whenever he saw me, he’d just start yelling that it was all my fault. He’d gone totally insane.
“Our options ran out. We declared bankruptcy, and all the assets were seized by our creditors. We’d pledged our copyrights and our own shares against our financing, so we were left with nothing. We stayed in our offices, because the building hadn’t been sold yet and our creditors hadn’t gotten around to throwing us out. And then”— he shrugged again— “Charlie’s backers turned up. They bought the company from the VC people for pennies on the dollar. They retained Charlie and threw me out.”
His blue eyes gave Dagmar a defiant look. “Russian Maffya?” he said. “You tell me.”
Dagmar was silent. B J took a fork and jabbed it angrily into his shortcake.
“The least I could get out of all that,” he said from around his dessert, “is a damn meal.”
“Be my guest,” Dagmar murmured.
B J ate his dessert in wrathful silence. Dagmar’s mind spun in circles, trying to reconcile B J’s story of AvN Soft’s fall with those of Charlie and Austin.
In any case, the story seemed to cast very little light on Charlie’s current behavior.
The waitress arrived to ask if they wanted anything else. Dagmar looked over her shoulder and saw they were alone in the dining room. The loudest sound from the bar was a cable news channel. Dagmar said they’d have the check and then went to the ladies’.
Her route passed through the bar, and something, some dreadful sense of déjà vu, made her look at the news program perched on its plasma screen above the bar.
The crawl at the bottom of the screen read Bolivian Currency Collapse.
A shiver ran up her spine.
She remembered watching the same network talking heads five months before, from the bar in the Royal Jakarta.
“Apparently the same traders have now switched their focus to Chile,” one said. “Chile’s the IMF’s poster boy in South America, a perfect example of the neoliberal economic model . . .”
The other talking head twinkled. “They call it neoconservatism here in America,” she said.
They laughed. The first talking head twinkled back.
“That’s right,” he said. “And if Chile falls, the rest of Latin America is just that much closer to economic apocalypse.”
Dagmar clenched her hands to keep them from trembling. The scent of burning Glodok came faintly to her nostrils.
She paid for the dinner with her company card, then drove B J back to the AvN Soft building to pick up his car.
B J stood for a long moment by Dagmar’s car, staring up at the darkened glass tower with only a few windows illuminated, where the service was cleaning or some programmer was pulling an all-nighter.
“This sure has been one damn weird day,” he said.
“True,” Dagmar said. She put her arms around his burly body, rested her head against his shoulder. He smelled pleasantly of steak and strawberries and coffee and himself. His arms came around her.
“Thanks for doing this,” he said.
“No problem.”
“And thanks for listening.” He took a deep breath. “You know, I hadn’t told that story to anyone before. I didn’t know if anyone would believe me.”
“I don’t know what to think,” Dagmar said. He stiffened, and she added quickly, “Not about you, but about Charlie.”
“Be careful around him,” B J said. “I think he’s connected to all the wrong people.”
“I think you’re right.”
She released B J and stepped back.
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” she said. “Have a safe drive home.”
“And you.”
Dagmar sat in her Prius and watched B J’s old Chevrolet turn out of the parking lot and onto the frontage road. He had once owned a BMW, she remembered— he’d emailed her a picture of it.
He was just so different. She had a hard time reconciling the old hard-charging, energetic, arrogant B J with the diffident, frustrated man she’d met today.
She wondered what made the difference.
Failure, she thought. Failure was all it took.