FROM: Siyed Prasad
SUBJECT: Re: Holiday in L.A.
Dear Dagmar,
I know that you are very busy right now, but I simply must see you. Ever since our wonderful time together, I can think of no one but you. You possess my every waking thought, and you invade my dreams as well. I try to concentrate on work, but all I see is your beautiful face before me.
My dearest, we must meet. Name the time and the place, and I will fly to your side!
Your devoted,
Siyed
FROM: Dagmar Shaw
SUBJECT: Re: Holiday in L.A.
Go back to your wife.
Dagmar
FROM: Siyed Prasad
SUBJECT: Re: Holiday in L.A.
Dear Dagmar,
I don’t care about my wife. I don’t care about anyone but you. I will leave my wife if you desire it. I will leave my family, my country, everything.
Just let us be together. You mean everything to me.
Your desperate,
Siyed
FROM: Dagmar Shaw
SUBJECT: Re: Holiday in L.A.
You don’t deserve Manjari. Bugger off. Go away.
Dagmar
Twenty-five million dollars, Dagmar thought.
Numbers like that were as far beyond her understanding as the analysis of, for example, continuous tangent vector fields, but still she knew that money like that didn’t come from just anywhere.
The money didn’t seem to be in anyone’s budget. It was possible, she supposed, that Charlie shifted it to the Atreides account from another part of the company, but that sort of thing wouldn’t go unnoticed for long.
He had to have gotten it from somewhere.
Somebody earned this money, she thought. Either Charlie earned it, or the person who earned it gave it to Charlie. Or someone stole it. Or Charlie stole it.
Money will get you through times of inadequate staffing, Charlie had said, better than inadequate staffing will get you through times of no money.
The keys to the kingdom, Charlie had called it. Twice.
Did she want to turn those keys? she wondered. Did she want to find what Charlie was hiding in his kingdom?
Because right at this moment she had somewhere between one million and three million players who could help her.
She leaned back in her office chair and reached blindly for her teacup. She took a drink of the jasmine tea, replaced the cup, swallowed without tasting.
It was past eleven at night, and Dagmar was alone in her office. The aroma of the jasmine tea blended with the scent of the flowers that Siyed continued to send, one new arrival every morning. Every horizontal surface in the untidy office now had its elaborate arrangement, and the flowers weren’t dying fast enough to be replaced by the new arrivals, so Dagmar had begun to give the bouquets away. Soft floral scents floated through half the doors in the company, mingling on occasion with the odor of Jack Stone’s Frito pies.
Dagmar decided she didn’t want to think about the keys to the kingdom for the next, say, six minutes, so she touched the screen and brought up some other work, some of B J’s, and she sat at her desk for the next few minutes and edited it.
She had known B J was good at plotting, but she hadn’t known whether his writing would be adequate for her purposes. He wrote her lively emails, but that didn’t mean he had a sense of story or structure. That’s why she’d had him creating phony documents, because documents had a structure that would be easier for B J to follow.
He’d turned out to be more than a satisfactory writer, though he was unfamiliar with the concise style required, and needed editing. Dagmar was relieved. Her instincts in hiring B J had been correct.
And of course B J’s presence had the potential to really make Charlie insane, which as far as Dagmar was concerned was a bonus, even if— as Dagmar intended— Charlie never found out that B J had been hired.
Dagmar saved the changes on B J’s work, then touched the screen and brought up the page that had her worried.
She had the number of the Atreides account. She had the time of the electronic fund transfer that had dumped the twenty-five mil into the account. She had the tracking number of the fund transfer itself.
The Long Night of Briana Hall had a financial dimension, the stock swindle that had motivated the murder of one of Briana’s ex-boyfriends. The murky financial history behind the killing was part of the game.
Dagmar could put the real numbers into the game, ghosting them in as part of the game’s fiction. Real people, players, would then try to find out where the money came from, who the account belonged to, and possibly even how much was in it. Possibly, among the millions of people who had signed up for the game, there would be one person who had the tools, or the access, to find all that out.
The question was whether Dagmar really wanted all that to happen, whether she wanted a look into Charlie’s secret world.
Or should she even be bothering with this, with the Latin American currencies in freefall and tens of millions of people’s savings having just floated off into the slipstream . . .
Atreides LLC. Named after the House of Atreus, lords of Mycenae, who had torn themselves to bits in a multigenerational fratricide that had involved nephews baked into pies, husbands hacked with axes, Furies pursuing mad children from one futile sanctuary to the next, all the bloody and baroque ways the ancients had of torturing and offing one another… that, and the Trojan War, too.
Dagmar was certain that one friend had already died as a result of whatever was going on in Charlie’s life. If Dagmar began poking around, was it possible that she might start another round of fratricide?
Might she become a target herself?
Or worse, would Charlie find out and fire her ass from the only job she’d ever really loved?
The truth shall set you free. She wanted the truth, but she didn’t want to be free from Great Big Idea.
Keys to the kingdom, she thought.
Austin was dead, and Charlie was going mad, and she didn’t know why.
She added the account number and the tracking number, saved the work, and then sent it to Ninja Ned in the Graphics Department to be stegged into a facsimile memo that would appear on a hidden Web page that would only be opened when someone playing Briana Hall solved a puzzle.
Puzzles, she decided, were going to fall.
The scent of Siyed’s flowers hovered in the air. Dagmar sat on the edge of the desk in her office and looked at the plasma screen on the wall, then down at the speakerphone that sat on the desk by her right hip. She wore her panama hat as if it carried an alternate personality she could adopt. Adrenaline keened in her nerves, like the scraping of a fiddle.
B J leaned against the window, and Helmuth lounged in Dagmar’s office chair, from which he had just sent out the game’s latest update. His index finger lazily moved over the screen, touching buttons— some of them well hidden— that caused newly loaded Web pages to flash on-screen.
Dagmar watched the wall screen, where the same pages paraded one after the other.
There. The document with the bank account, the numbers that were the key to Charlie’s secrets.
“Looks like everything loaded,” Helmuth said.
If all the pages hadn’t gone up at once, confusion and catastrophe could have resulted. But Dagmar’s suspense did not diminish as Helmuth spoke. She was in Charlieland now, and the suspense wouldn’t go away until she found her way out.
Helmuth began tapping on Dagmar’s ten-key pad. More pages leaped into view, each stacked atop the next. A video began playing, Terri Griff as Briana Hall fleeing from the bad guys who had just whacked Cullen.
“Excellent,” Helmuth said. “So far all the features are working.”
“How many hits are we getting?” Dagmar asked through her dry mouth. She reached for her cup of tea.
Helmuth caressed the screen with his fingers. Data leaped onto the plasma screen. “The page that you’re most interested in,” he said, “has a couple of dozen so far.”
Helmuth was wrong: that wasn’t the page Dagmar was most interested in. But that was fine, too. If the nervousness showed, she had other reasons to be nervous.
“Damn,” said B J. “These people are quick.”
“Quick they are,” said Dagmar. Laughing. Nervously.
Adrenaline fired a rocket up Dagmar’s spine. In a few moments, after players destegged the memo, they would call Briana’s best friend, Maria Perry. Who, played by Dagmar, would answer.
They watched the hits increase. Tens of thousands of people had noted the update by now, and the number was increasing exponentially as each informed everyone on his network.
Pages that were hidden by puzzles began to open. Dagmar looked down at the speakerphone.
Which rang, right on cue. It was a dedicated line, so she knew no one but a player was on the other end.
She pressed the answer button.
“Hello?” she said.
“Is this Maria Perry?”
The male voice had a strong accent, Dagmar guessed Korean or Japanese. She wondered if the caller was phoning from Asia.
“This is Maria,” Dagmar said. “Who is this?”
“This is . . .” There was a hesitation. Dagmar was familiar with the phenomenon: the player wasn’t sure whether to use his own name or his online handle.
“This is Roh,” he said finally.
“I don’t believe I know you, Roh.” Dagmar tried to sound as harassed and paranoid as Maria was by now, the fourth week in which she was serving as the chief line of defense between her friend Briana and the people who wanted to kill or arrest her.
“I want to help Briana,” Roh said.
“Briana who?”
“Briana Hall. She is on your Facebook page as your friend.”
“Okay,” Dagmar said. “So I know Briana. But I still don’t know you.”
“You must give Briana a message.”
“What makes you think I know how to reach Briana?”
“ She— she says that you are helping her.”
“Well,” Dagmar said, “if you know her that well, you can give her the message yourself.”
There was a moment of panicked silence.
“You sound like a cop,” Dagmar said. “You sound like you’re trying to trap me.”
“I am not a police,” said Roh.
“Prove it,” said Dagmar.
Again there was silence.
“I’m busy,” Dagmar said. “Talk fast.”
Silence.
“Nice try, Detective,” Dagmar said, and hung up.
B J looked at her.
“Damn,” he said. “You’re brutal.”
The phone rang an instant later.
“Hello?”
“May I speak to Maria, please?”
Dagmar thought she recognized the voice as an L.A.-based gamer who went by the handle of Hippolyte. And Hippolyte probably recognized Dagmar as well.
TINAG, Dagmar thought. This conversation would only work if both of them stayed in character and ignored the fact that this was a game.
“This is Maria,” she said.
“I know you’ve been a friend of Briana Hall’s since you were at Central High,” Hippolyte said. “I’d like you to send her a message.”
“How do I know,” Dagmar said, “that you’re not the police trying to trap me?”
“The police don’t know about George Weston and his Firebird at the junior prom,” Hippolyte said. “Only someone who knew Briana would know something like that.”
“Okayyy.” Dagmar tried to sound as if she were reluctant to be convinced.
“And then there’s your friend David. He’s gay, but he hasn’t come out to his family or to his boss.”
Dagmar tried to sound as if this last data point had made up her mind.
“What message do you need to send?”
“I need Briana to know that Rita is working with the police. Briana can’t trust her.”
“Rita? Are you sure?”
“She’s got her phone bugged by the NYPD. They’re just waiting for Briana to call.”
“If that’s the case,” Dagmar said, “then somebody else is going to have to move the package.”
“The package with the evidence from Cullen’s firm?”
Dagmar grinned at Helmuth and gave him a thumbs-up. Hippolyte was right on top of the story.
Hippolyte had given Maria the three pieces of information necessary for the game to proceed. She had to come up with some persuasive background to convince Maria that she was Briana’s friend— the junior prom story was one of several, as were the facts about Maria’s friend David— and then the information about Rita and the knowledge of what was in the package.
“That’s right,” Dagmar said. “The package has been hidden, and there’s a letter in the mail telling Rita where to find it. Somebody’s got to move it before Rita tells the police.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s in Grand Army Plaza, on top of the plinth of Gouverneur Warren’s statue.”
There was a moment of surprise.
“Where’s Grand Army Plaza?” Hippolyte asked.
“Brooklyn. Are you anywhere near Brooklyn?”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Hippolyte. Hippolyte was in Southern California, but there were plenty of other players in the New York area who could be counted on to fetch the package.
“How do you spell Gouverneur?” Hippolyte asked.
Dagmar spelled it for her.
“What should be done with the package?” Hippolyte asked.
“Send it to Iris Fitzgerald, General Delivery, West Hollywood, nine zero zero four six.”
Which, since Iris Fitzgerald had been established as an alias used by Briana Hall, would serve as a clue to Briana’s location.
The incriminating document, stolen by Cullen before his murder, was a list of fifty cities beneath the words “Water Sources,” which set up the Charlie-mandated subplot involving the contamination of water sources and the boxes from Tapping the Source. And the page also contained a watermark that hid a clue to something else.
Elsewhere among the uploads was a page that would allow players to order Tapping the Source boxes for free. Great Big Idea, with its twenty-five-million-dollar slush fund, was going to buy the players their toys.
“Have you got that?” Dagmar asked.
“Nine zero zero four six,” Hippolyte repeated.
“Thanks,” Dagmar said. “You’ve been a great help.”
And then Dagmar stabbed the button to hang up, slid off her desk, and punched the air.
B J, still leaning on the window, looked up at her. “Do they really do what you tell them to?”
“Yes,” Dagmar said. “They do.”
The phone rang again, then went to voice mail, a brief message telling any caller that Maria Perry was no longer at this number. Dagmar picked up the phone and turned off its ringer.
Players might be calling this number all day, hundreds or thousands of them, but to no purpose: Hippolyte had scooped them all.
Helmuth, in the meantime, was tapping his keyboard. He was a precise two-finger typist, and the taps and clicks rattled out in a steady rhythm.
He stopped his typing, then leaned away from the screen.
“Okay,” he said, “now there’s a sound file of your conversation on the archive page. If the player forgets how to spell Gouverneur, the recording will remind her.”
“That was Hippolyte, I think,” Dagmar said.
Helmuth lifted an eyebrow. “Smart girl,” he said. He rose, took his leather jacket from the back of Dagmar’s chair, and shrugged into it.
“I’ve got a meeting,” he said, “with one of our freelance programmers who has been fucking up in a truly hideous and original way. Wish us both luck.”
“Luck,” Dagmar said. Helmuth left.
B J was looking at the wall screen.
“Is there some way of following the players in real time?” he asked.
“You could count the number of hits. Or you could go on Our Reality Network and watch them work out the puzzles.”
He took a step toward Dagmar’s computer, then hesitated.
“Can I do that here?” he asked.
“Sure. Be my guest.”
B J sat at Dagmar’s computer and reached for the keyboard. Dagmar laid a warning hand over his, then used her other hand to reach for the Shift key and hold it down.
“Go to Our Reality Network,” she said.
The browser immediately loaded the ORN’s home page.
“There you go,” Dagmar said.
He looked up at her. “Thanks,” he said.
She stood back, her palm warm from the touch of B J’s hand.
He watched with undivided attention as the players unraveled the latest mysteries. Dagmar sat in the other chair and watched on the wall screen as the players located the hidden files and encrypted messages. It took them about three hours before they’d found all the hidden Web pages, revealed the video and audio files, and arranged for someone in Brooklyn to pick up Cullen’s hidden document from Grand Army Plaza.
The only puzzle they hadn’t solved was the key to Charlieland. The routing number told them that the twenty-five mil had gone into a Wells Fargo account, but they’d been given that.
There was nothing yet about where the money had come from.
Frustration beat a tattoo on the inside of Dagmar’s skull. She’d risked her job for this, and it wasn’t working. She rubbed her eyes.
B J leaned back in his chair, his eyes still fixed on the screen.
“You know,” he said, “I could really enjoy becoming a puppetmaster.”
“You already are one,” Dagmar said. She rose from her chair, stood on her tiptoes, stretched.
He smiled, watching her. “I’m a last-second, highly spur-of-the-moment PM at best.”
“You’ve been doing very well.”
“I just hit a snag, though.”
She looked down at him. “Yes?”
“My laptop’s down.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“I think the fan failed, and then everything cooked.” He shook his head. “It’s nothing but a doorstop now. But then it was an antiquated piece of junk anyway.”
“You have another computer, right?”
“No. My high-powered computer was the one at work, but I quit that job to take this one.” He shrugged. “Well, I can afford a hot computer now, thanks to you.”
Dagmar thought for a moment. “You don’t have to buy one right away,” she said. “I’ll give you one.”
He was startled. “You have a spare?”
“I don’t, but the company does.” She walked toward the door and gestured for him to follow.
“It’s time,” she said, “to visit the assassin.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Not the Russian one?”
Suddenly the situation wasn’t amusing.
“No,” she said curtly. “We have an assassin of our own.”
He then rose heavily from his chair.
“Sure,” he said. “Sounds like . . .” He hesitated. “Fun,” he said.
AvN Soft’s network security guy worked out of the fifth floor and basked in his nickname of Richard the Assassin. The name was actually on his desk nameplate. He was a young olive-skinned man in his early twenties who favored black jeans and T-shirts, which he wore with white Converse sneakers. Action figures of ninjas lined his top rank of shelves. He was relentless in guarding the security of AvN Soft from spam, malware, intruders, and people like Joe Clever.
Richard had a personal grudge against Joe Clever, who had actually breached his security on two occasions, and he swore that the next time Clever came calling, he’d flood Clever’s machine with a program that would do nothing but load thousands of pop-ups from fifth-rate Singapore porn sites, the kind with businesslike, thick-bodied hookers performing listless acts in badly lit rooms.
Richard checked out a laptop to B J, gave him a temporary password, made certain he could access the office net, and packed the computer in a green cardboard box with a plastic carrying handle. He told B J never to use the password on a Wi-Fi connection, even on a private network, and handed B J an Ethernet connector.
“This is your best friend,” he said.
B J looked at the cable with a bemused expression.
“Hello, best friend,” he said.
“You’re friend’s paranoia is really impressive,” B J told Dagmar as they left.
“Remind me to tell you about Joe Clever,” Dagmar said.
B J headed for the elevators, but Dagmar checked him.
“This way,” she said.
“Where are we going?”
“Accounting.”
At Accounting, Dagmar arranged for B J to be air-expressed the latest office suite compatible with everything used at AvN Soft. Word processor, spreadsheet, browser, presentation software, video and audio editors, Web page builder, SFTP ware, templates for standardized business forms, a miniaturized research library on disk, a word processor that offered film and TV script format— even interest-rate calculators and software used for making investments and planning retirement. Thousands of dollars’ worth of software altogether, all to be delivered to B J’s apartment the next day courtesy of Federal Express.
“Uhh, thanks,” said B J, a little stunned.
“Might as well get the total upgrade. We’re spending Charlie’s money like water, anyway.”
B J tweaked a little smile. “I’m all for doing that.”
They went to the elevators, and Dagmar pushed the down button.
B J turned to her. “So tell me about Joe Clever.”
A brief outline of Joe Clever’s infamous career lasted them the length of the elevator journey and the return to Dagmar’s office.
“You see anyone following you home,” Dagmar said, “it’s probably Joe Clever, or one of the other stalkers.” She looked at him. “In fact, you’re a prime target. You’re new to the game, and he might think you’d be careless with a computer or with documents.”
B J looked at his computer in its cardboard box. “I’ll be prudent, then.”
“That would be good.”
He looked at her. “Doing anything for dinner tonight?”
“I’ll be working late and grabbing a salad in the coffee shop.”
He shrugged. “Too bad. With my computer slagged and my software not arriving till tomorrow, I’ve got a free evening.”
“That means more work for me, unfortunately.”
“I suppose it does.”
She hugged him good-bye and suppressed an urge to kiss his cheek.
It wasn’t as if the last work-related romance had worked out very well.
And she could hardly consider it a good idea to have a boyfriend who made her boss crazy. Or vice versa.
She drifted to the window and watched B J cross the parking lot and put the computer in his old Chevy.
It probably hadn’t been such a good idea to bring B J into Charlieland.
But what choice, she reflected, had Charlie really given her?
A software suite and the loan of a computer were probably the least she could do in compensation.