FROM: Vikram
It took me a couple days, but I’ve been able to discover that the twenty-five million was transmitted from the United Bank of Cayman, from an account owned by a company called Forlorn Hope Ltd.
In the incorporation pages, the officers of Forlorn Hope include Charles Ruff of Los Angeles, California, and Anthony and Marcia Ruff of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, all in the USA.
The balance of the account, as of 1600 hours Cayman time yesterday, was $12, 344,946, 873.23, all in US dollars.
FROM: Corporal Carrot
How much???
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
May I ask how you acquired this information, Vikram?
FROM: Vikram
I don’t want to say much here, for obvious reasons, but I’m from the Indian subcontinent and I come from a family connected with a merchant bank.
Everyone in the world is six degrees of separation from everyone else, but I only needed to go through two degrees to acquire this information.
FROM: Corporal Carrot
You’re with a merchant bank? Like the United Bank of Cayman?
FROM: Vikram
Well, no. I’m not connected with that institution. And I didn’t say that I was with any bank, just that members of my family are.
FROM: Corporal Carrot
You’re just connected, period.
You know, I figured it would be Chatty who’d bust this one.
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
Corporal Carrot overestimates my powers.
But still, I find this interesting in terms of the game. Charles Ruff owns Great Big Idea and what his Wikipedia profile states is a profitable software company. I assume the other two corporate officers are his parents or other relations.
In addition to the late Austin Katanyan, that’s three more real, living people who have appeared in Motel Room Blues. What are we to make of this?
As I don’t believe that Mr. Ruff, wealthy as he may be, actually has twelve billion dollars lying around in cash, I also wondered how he managed to insert that figure in his bank balance, such that Vikram was able to discover it. How are we to read that?
Or is it that we really weren’t intended to backtrack the money transfer, just to accept that it was part of whatever scheme Cullen’s traders were up to?
But in that case, why the deception over the twelve billion?
It doesn’t entirely add up.
It doesn’t entirely add up, Dagmar read.
No, she thought, it didn’t.
Because she knew, unlike the gamers, that the figure in the Forlorn Hope account was real.
And she also knew that there was no way that Charlie, successful as he was, could have made that kind of money legally.
She reached blindly for her cup of tea, drank, replaced the tea on its St. Pauli Girl coaster.
Across her office, a leaf fell from one of Siyed’s bouquets.
Her sense of scale was completely wrong where Charlie was concerned. He was huge. He was like the Medellin cartel, like the Burmese junta, like the smiling president of oil-rich Nigeria with his Swiss accounts and white cotton-lined cardboard boxes full of blood diamonds.
Charlie’s Godzilla-size footprints ought to be all over the world.
And the fact that they weren’t— the fact that Charlie was masquerading as a modest software entrepreneur in the San Fernando Valley— meant that Charlie had left the real world altogether and now lived somewhere in supervillain territory. He was Magneto. He was Lex Luthor. He was Doctor Doom.
He was the Napoleon of Crime.
When the hell had Charlie found time to develop this secret life? Certainly not in the years since Dagmar had begun working for him. She’d seen him nearly every day, and she’d never once seen him meeting with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.
Probably the meetings took place in his secret base in a dormant volcano.
Was even the Russian Maffya worth twelve billion? In cash? Dagmar doubted it.
Unless, of course, Charlie owned the Russian Maffya. Given what she’d just discovered, she wouldn’t put it past him.
FROM: Dagmar Shaw
SUBJECT: Meeting
Charlie, I’ve got to see you. Are you still at the Roosevelt?
There was no answer to the email. Repeated phone calls were answered only by voice mail. Dagmar left a series of messages and then in her frustration drove down the 101 to Hollywood. She banged on the cabana door, which was opened by a fat, middle-aged man wearing nothing but a towel. He smelled strongly of cigars, and behind him were a pair of Hollywood rent-boys who gazed at Dagmar from over his hairy shoulders. Dagmar apologized and shuffled away.
Fucking Charlie, she thought.
She had to talk to somebody or she would explode. She called B J and suggested they meet for dinner.
“Are you in the valley?” he asked.
“I’m in Hollywood.”
“I know a little place on Olympic near Koreatown. Want to check it out?”
When she got in her car, she unholstered her phone and prodded the icon for email. Charlie’s name leaped off the list. She retrieved the email and narrowed her eyes as she peered at the small screen.
FROM:Charlie Ruff
SUBJECT: Re: Meeting
Damn right we’ve got to meet. But I’m in Chicago right now and won’t be back for a couple days.
I’ve got some ideas for the game. Don’t worry, nobody buys anything this time.
“Damn you, Charlie!” Dagmar shouted.
A pair of tourists walking past gave her a quick glance, then just as quickly turned away.
Dagmar decided she didn’t care if they thought she was crazy, and pounded the steering wheel with her fists until her phalanges felt they’d been slammed by a crowbar. She slumped in her seat, breathless.
Suddenly she missed Austin very much.
There was a burning in the back of her sinus. She dabbed tears away with the back of her wrist.
She hadn’t had time to mourn him. Everything since Austin’s death had been constant movement, dreadful pressure, frantic improvisation. All tangled up, one way or another, with The Long Night of Briana Hall and the decision to use the game to solve real-world problems.
That had been her decision, she realized. She’d pressed Charlie to permit it.
She realized, as she searched for a tissue to wipe away the tears, that she was as crazy as he was.
B J’s restaurant turned out to specialize in egg dishes. It was the kind of place that would serve you breakfast eighteen hours out of twenty-four.
“Be sure to order the candied pepper bacon,” B J advised.
“Candied pepper bacon,” Dagmar repeated.
“Sounds weird, but it’s good. Try it.”
She ordered an omelette with an English muffin and the candied pepper bacon. B J ordered corned beef hash with poached eggs on top.
The restaurant had about twelve different kinds of iced tea, and Dagmar asked which one of them had caffeine. The waiter just stared at her, as if no one had ever asked about caffeine before.
No caffeine, she thought. Check.
“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll have the French press.”
The waiter had barely gone to place their order when Dagmar exploded.
“Fucking Charlie,” she said, “has sent me an email telling me he’s going to screw with the game again. But he hasn’t told me how or why or when, and now I’m going crazy.”
B J looked at her intently through his spectacles. He had arrived in worn blue jeans and a T-shirt so old that its original blue had turned to purple. He hadn’t shaved in several days.
He smelled of lavender soap. That was nice.
“What did Charlie say, exactly?” B J said.
“Hardly anything, just that he had another idea. That’s what’s making me nuts.” She waved her hands. “We may as well stop working. We’re going to have to change it all anyway.”
B J gave a shrug. “All I can say is that he’s behaving true to form.”
“I went to his cabana at the Roosevelt and found he’d left. He’s gone to Chicago!”
Surprise passed across B J’s features. “Chicago? Did he say why?”
“No.”
He rubbed his chin. “Do you think he’s still hiding from the Maffya?”
“I don’t know what to think!”
Dagmar wished she still had the steering wheel in front of her so that she could punch it again.
B J pursed his lips, looked thoughtful. “Do you think he’s testing you?”
Dagmar blinked at him. “Why would he do that?”
“To find out if you’re— I don’t know— really loyal?”
Dagmar considered this.
“That doesn’t make much sense,” she said. “I’ve never had any tension with him till now. He has no reason to think me anything other than a loyal employee.” Frustration bubbled in her veins. “He picked me, for God’s sake!”
“He’s under pressure now. His backers, or the Russian Maffya, or whoever it is that’s giving him trouble— he can’t lash out at them. It’s got to be the people around him.”
She looked at him curiously. “Did he do that to you?” she asked.
B J shrugged his big shoulders. “Now and then,” he said. “Little ways, mostly. He’d demand that I abandon my own ideas and adopt his, that sort of thing. It made no sense, but it was his way of controlling things, and early on I agreed with him against my better judgment. It was when I began to stand up to him that he decided I was disloyal, and then he barely spoke to me.”
“It’s got me so crazy.” She made claws of her hands and rent the air with her nails.
“Well,” B J said, “I wish I could help.”
“You are helping,” she said. She put her hand over his. “You’re the only person I can talk to.”
His blue eyes looked into hers. “It’s the same with me,” he said.
The waiter arrived with their drinks, iced tea for B J and the French press for Dagmar. She reached for the pot and pushed the plunger down, then poured.
“Not bad,” she judged.
This much coffee this late, she knew, she’d be up to 3 A.M.
Not that she didn’t have plenty of work to do.
She looked at B J. “Something I’ve always wondered,” she said.
He raised his eyebrows. “About Charlie?”
“About you.”
A dubious look crossed his face.
“If you don’t mind,” Dagmar said.
He spread his big hands. “Ask, if you want.”
“You went down with AvN Soft, okay,” Dagmar said. “But you were still smart. You still had talent. You had experience.”
He nodded.
“What you want to know,” he said, “is how I ended up at a place like Spud LLC?”
“At the very least,” she said, “you could be working as a programmer, earning a lot more money than doing customer service.”
“I hate to say this,” B J said, “because it sounds paranoid. But I got blackballed.”
Dagmar was surprised. “By whom?”
“Charlie and his friends. Austin in particular.” Before Dagmar could protest, B J held up a hand.
“When Austin moved back to California,” B J said, “I went to him to start a new company. My idea involved creating a peer-to-peer network for cell phones, so they wouldn’t depend so completely on cell phone towers.” He leaned toward her across the table. “When Hurricane Katrina hit,” he said, “the cell phone towers in New Orleans went down. People couldn’t call out. Maybe thousands died because they couldn’t tell emergency services where they were. If the phones had been connected with a peer-to-peer network, so that they could talk directly to each other instead of to a tower, the messages could have chained together until they reached an intact tower.”
Dagmar was impressed. “That’s a great idea.”
“It would be ideal in any emergency situation— California’s natural for it, because of the earthquakes. So I went to Austin with the idea of developing it.”
“He turned you down?”
“No. What Austin did was try to saddle me with a partner to handle the business end. He insisted I had to follow the guy’s orders whenever it came to a business decision.”
Dagmar remembered Austin on the phone to his client, insisting that the business plan be followed. Dude, we’ve had this conversation.
“What did you do?” she asked.
Anger burned in B J’s eyes. “I turned Austin down. I wasn’t going to have some stranger telling me what to do.” He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “But then whenever I went to some other venture capitalist, it turned out he had the same stipulation. Turns out that Charlie or Austin had been there ahead of me, telling everyone the official version of how AvN Soft went down, and everyone believed them instead of me.”
“Come on,” Dagmar said. “I can’t see them calling everyone in the industry just to get back at you.”
“Believe it how you want,” B J said. There was belligerence in his tone. “I’m just telling you what happened.”
Dagmar decided to skate away to another subject.
“But why Spud, then?” she asked. “There must be a thousand better jobs.”
B J gave a bitter little laugh and took a sip of his iced tea.
“I decided that rather than take a crap job, I’d take a shit job.”
Dagmar found herself laughing.
“Perhaps,” she said, “you’d better make that distinction clearer.”
He scratched his chin. “Okay,” he said. “When you know a job is shit going in, then it’s a shit job. It’s honest about being a shit job. That was my job at Spud.”
“Okay,” Dagmar said.
“But a crap job is a shit job with pretensions. You get paid more, maybe, but it’s only because you have to work twelve-hour days in a cubicle doing work that’s beyond tedious, all with fuck-wit managers on your case every minute of the day. Crap jobs aren’t for bright people, they’re for Dilberts. And I’m not a Dilbert.”
Dagmar looked at him and shook her head.
“No,” she said, “you’re not.”
Their dinner arrived. Dagmar’s omelette was fluffy and moist, and her home fries had a surprising, delightful herbal taste.
“These are the best home fries I’ve ever had,” she said.
B J grinned. “There was a reason I recommended this place.”
She tried the candied pepper bacon. It was very good.
“I didn’t think you could improve bacon,” she said.
“Told you it was good.”
They talked about jobs through their meal, trying to distinguish shit jobs from crap jobs. B J had endured many worse jobs than the one at Spud. Dagmar had experienced plenty of both, working as a teenager in Cleveland, where she had dealt in addition with the hazard of a father who would steal her money and valuables.
“And in England?” B J asked. “You worked there?”
“Under the table,” she said, “because of immigration. But then I started selling stories, and that was very nice. The best job I’ve ever had.”
“I imagine it would be.” He tilted his head. “ And— Aubrey, was that his name? How did he feel about the writing?”
“He was proud of me.”
B J nodded. “But the marriage still didn’t work.”
She looked at him. “I married him on the rebound. Never a good idea.”
B J held her gaze for a moment, then looked away. “Seeing anyone now?”
Dagmar tried to work out a way of explaining how she had been Promiscuous Girl back in England, and that while her morals hadn’t improved since, her work hours had increased and so her flings were few and far between. She gave up.
“I’m celibate on account of a seventy-hour workweek,” she said.
“Typical geek,” he said. “A geek with a crap job and a crap boss.”
“I’m being paid very well for all those hours,” Dagmar pointed out.
“You’re being paid well to burn yourself out, after which the money and the job will disappear and you’ll be in your late thirties with no current job skills. That’s the very definition of a crap job.”
Dagmar smiled thinly. “Can we get back to our love lives? Sad to admit, that’s the less depressing subject.”
“It’s like moving from the Valley of the Shadow of Death to the Slough of Despond, but— whatever.” B J gave a self-conscious smile. “I’m celibate on account of poverty,” he said. “The only women who want me are crazy, or single parents who need a father and a second income for their kids.”
“You don’t want to be a father?”
“What I don’t want,” he said, “is to be a stepfather in a trailer court with a swarm of underdisciplined children and no money.”
She nodded. “Yeah. That’s understandable.”
He looked at her, then shrugged and smiled.
“We’re pathetic,” he said, “but at least we’re not in Chile.”
A cold finger brushed her spine. She looked up at him in shock.
“What happened in Chile?” she asked.
“Didn’t you hear? Their currency collapsed today— the Chinese traders again, supposedly. All of South America is on the edge of a depression worse than anything since the nineteen thirties.”
Dagmar sucked in breath. Her mind spun. B J talked on.
“They say the Chinese are taking out their competition, one currency at a time. It makes sense— Indonesia’s got a huge population, and so does Latin America. These are all people who work for coolie wages, just like the Chinese. From the Chinese point of view, it’s best to keep their economies from ever developing.”
Dagmar thought about that, spoke slowly. “So you think it’s Chinese government policy?”
B J shrugged. “Their government can be ruthless, and they’re smart and calculating. We know that.”
Images of Jakarta flashed in Dagmar’s mind— the mobs, the police shooting, the tiny bodies strewn on the pavement. The pillar of smoke over Glodok.
“But,” she said, “if Latin Americans are really desperate, they’ll work for less money than the Chinese.”
“Not if the employers don’t have the resources to pay wages in real money.” B J narrowed his eyes in thought. “Investment will eventually come in, though, right? From other countries. But the country might be China— using the Latin Americans’ own wealth to buy their own factories. It’s a win-win for the Chinese.”
Dagmar decided to change the subject before she lost herself entirely in the nightmare. She gave B J a wan smile.
“You crashed an economy once, right?” she said.
He looked at her in surprise. “Sorry?”
“Austin told me that you and Charlie crashed Lost Empire.”
“Oh.” He gave a grin. “Yeah, we did that.”
“On purpose?” B J and Charlie had never been destructive hackers.
“No, it was an accident.” He sipped his iced tea. “When we were shopping AvN Soft around, we both got involved with the game. We spent fourteen hours a day bashing wizards and fighting monsters and stealing treasure. But when the first of the venture capital came in, we had to drop the game and build a real business.”
“So you crashed Lost Empire because you couldn’t play anymore?”
“No.” He gave a little laugh. “It’s kind of embarrassing, what we did, actually. We were so freaking young.”
“Go ahead.”
B J ran a hand through his shaggy blond hair.
“Okay,” he said. “We cashed in all our armor and weapons and magic stuff for the virtual gold pieces they used in the game, and then we put a couple of our software agents to work. We programmed them to make money, so that when we had time to get back to Lost Empire, we’d still be in the game, and with luck in a better position than when we left.”
“You had the software agents play you?”
“Play our characters, yeah. They had our passwords and just stayed logged on twenty-four/seven, buying and selling. It wasn’t hard, if our characters weren’t moving around, just buying stuff in the market in the Old Imperial City, which was basically the market for the whole world. We were, like, testing our work. Doing a proof-of-concept. And the thing worked out— in four weeks Rialto had Lost Empire on its knees. Between the two of us, we had monopolies in lumber mills, flour mills, the woods and fields the lumber and the flour came from, all the mines that produced iron, gems, gold, silver, and copper. We owned all the warehouses. If anyone else competed with us, we’d undersell them and drive them out of business, then buy whatever was left and jack the price up. That way we ended up with all the cash, too. The only thing we couldn’t control was the magic items, because the game produced those on a schedule, or randomly.”
“By ‘we,’ you mean the agents.”
“The software, yeah. And Lost Empire came to a screeching halt. The game masters had to shut everything down, and they confiscated all our property and gave the players a bunch of free game gold to make up for being ripped off.” He laughed. “God, we were infamous. But they didn’t know our real names, just our online identities. Otherwise we might have gotten our asses sued off.”
A cold ice-water thought drenched Dagmar’s brain.
“Is that what the Chinese are doing?” she asked. “In the real world?”
“Using software agents?”
“Yeah.”
B J shook his head. “Lost Empire basically had only a couple of dozen tradeable commodities, that and armor and weapons and magic stuff. The real world has fifty million times as much complexity, and real-world economies have more mechanisms for correcting themselves.” He grinned. “Believe me, Charlie and I discussed this. We had all sorts of fantasies about conquering the real world the same way we conquered Lost Empire.” He shrugged. “But you know how the agents we unleashed on the real-world markets turned out. They’re good, they’re making money for Charlie and everyone who rents one . . .” He laughed. “Nobody owns the planet yet.”
“Guess not.”
Twelve point three billion, she thought. But even that wasn’t enough to bring down a large, diverse, robust economy like that of Chile.
Chad, maybe.
Something else was going on.
She thanked B J for listening, paid for both meals, and took the 101 back to the valley. She worked past ten o’clock, at which point the thought of a swim in her apartment’s pool began to creep softly into her mind. Doing laps in the pool alone in the night, as she’d done in Indonesia. She began to think of the weightlessness, the water caressing her skin, the silence. The eerie glow of the underwater floodlight.
Eventually she couldn’t concentrate on work any longer and drove home.
She parked in front of the ginkgo trees in the parking lot. As she got out of the Prius, the scent of the rotting fruit stung her nostrils, a disgusting combination of vomit and semen that was like a fraternity the morning after the homecoming party, and she stepped away from the smell. She walked to the iron apartment gate and prepared to give the lock her thumbprint. A shadow moved quickly toward her from the darkness between a pair of SUVs, and Dagmar’s nerves gave a shriek.
She tried to get her heart under control and briefly considered flight— no, she realized, he’d probably catch her. If she tried to open the gate, he could pin her against the iron bars. And so— adrenaline booming in her ears like kettledrums— she hastily adjusted her car keys in her hand so the keys were protruding from between her fingers, improvised brass knuckles.
Her reactions had improved since Jakarta. If this guy tried to attack her, she was going to do her level best to fuck him up.
Unless, of course, he was a Russian assassin with a gun, in which case she would die.
The man stepped into the light, and Dagmar saw it was Siyed.
“Shit!” she said. “You scared the piss out of me!”
“I had to see you, love,” Siyed said. His pupils had shrunk to pinpricks in the floodlights. “Dagmar,” he said, “you’re all I can think about.”
“Are you stalking me now?” she demanded. “Go home!” She pointed at the street and talked to him as if he were an overaffectionate dog. “Go home!”
“I can’t!” Siyed staggered toward her. He was a tiny man, only two or three inches over five feet. Once Dagmar had enjoyed the lightness of his frame, the delicacy of his hands and wrists, but now she just wanted to throw him across the parking lot. He wore chinos and a white cotton shirt, and in the glare of the floodlights his dark eyelashes were black commas drawn above and below his eyes.
Her grip on her keys loosened. She couldn’t be afraid of a man shorter than she, even if he was barking mad.
“Dagmar, I love you!” he croaked. “I only want to be with you. You’re like night and day and moon and sun —”
She interrupted before she could become any more cosmic than he had already made her.
“Siyed,” she said, “you’re fucking married! Go back to your wife!”
“I can’t!” he said again. He blinked up at her. “Oh my God,” he said. “You’re so dazzling.”
He fumbled for her hand. She pulled away from him. The stink of the rotting ginkgo fruit lay in the back of her throat like a coating of phlegm that she couldn’t hawk out.
“Go home!” she said again. And then, more gently: “This is California. You can get arrested for this kind of behavior.”
“I can’t go home.” Siyed’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. “I told Manjari about us. I told her we were in love!”
“We’re not!” Dagmar cried. Out of sheer frustration she waved her fist, and Siyed jumped back at the glint of the keys in her hand.
“There’s no obstacle now, love!” Siyed said quickly. “We can be together. I’ve got it all arranged . . .”
“Did you think to ask me about these goddam arrangements first, whatever they are?” she demanded. “Did you think to ask me whether you should tell your wife anything about me?”
“I did it for you!” Siyed said. Tears spilled down his face. “It’s all for the two of us!”
Dagmar turned from him and jabbed at the gate with her thumb.
“I see you around here again, motherfucker,” she said, “I’m having you arrested!”
“But Dagmar… ,” he moaned.
Dagmar swung the creaking iron gate open, then shut. Siyed stepped close to the gate, and the shadow of the bars fell across his face.
“Dagmar!” he cried.
“Go away!”
She stalked toward the stairs, then up and to her apartment, where she had to restrain herself from slamming the door behind her and waking any of the neighbors who hadn’t already been roused by all the shouting.
She didn’t turn on the lights. Instead she went to the window over the sink and looked out to see if Siyed was still in the parking lot.
He was gone, at least from the patch of asphalt she could see through the gate.
He could still be skulking outside her view, though. For a moment she fantasized about calling the cops, and then decided she was too tired to wrangle with Siyed and the police.
Dagmar’s gaze shifted to the pool, glowing Cherenkov blue down in the courtyard, and she felt her energy level subside, swirling into emptiness like the pool draining away.
She wanted to use the pool, but she didn’t want to give Siyed the pleasure of watching her swim, assuming that he was still lurking around.
Goddam it.
Instead of swimming, she opened the refrigerator, and in its light she ate half an eggroll that was left over from a take-out Chinese meal two nights before. The cold grease was rancid on her tongue.
Then, still creeping like a bewildered ninja around her own apartment, she brushed her teeth, washed her face, and went to bed.
In the middle of the night she woke up with a sudden understanding of everything that had happened.
B J was wrong, she thought. And Charlie is riding a tiger.
Poor man, she thought. He can’t get off.
And then: None of us can.