FROM: Dagmar Shaw
SUBJECT: L.A. Games
This is Dagmar Shaw, of Great Big Idea Productions, the company that is bringing you the ARG about Briana Hall.
We’ve managed to confirm that someone else is running live events that are piggybacking off our game about Briana Hall. These games do not seem to be pranks, but genuine live events running in parallel with our own.
Players should feel free to participate in these events if they feel so inclined, but please be aware that Great Big Idea does not sponsor them, and that discoveries made during the course of these adventures may or may not constitute actual answers to Great Big Idea puzzles.
We would like to continue monitoring this situation, however, so if you hear from anyone asking you to participate in a live event in the next few weeks, please contact me by responding to this email, and please include your phone number.
Please do not post about this on any of the regular forums, because it might confuse our other players about what’s going on.
Thank you,
Dagmar Shaw
Dagmar spent Thursday night in the Best Western in Chinatown, a short distance from the Cathay Bank parking lot that had briefly held components of the bomb that had killed Charlie. She had left her Prius in the AvN Soft parking lot, parked directly under the glassy eye of a security camera, and had rented one of the new Mercedes two-seater sports cars from Enterprise, which delivered the vehicle right to the doors of the office tower. She had redlined the Mercedes as she drove out of the Valley, probably tripping half a dozen automatic cameras and generating a couple of thousand dollars in the outrageous fines that California’s broken government extorted from its citizens, but at least she knew she hadn’t been followed.
The morning news was full of alarmed chatter about the assault on the Chinese yuan, something that Dagmar had missed in the traumas of the previous day. The markets in China, where it was already Saturday, were closed, but the fury continued on other exchanges.
The yuan seemed to be in serious danger. Political pressure had forced the yuan to decouple from the dollar a few years earlier, and now a currency much abused by China’s slowing growth, political demands, and inflation was showing its vulnerability. No one knew whether China’s economic statistics were genuine or mere vapor. Maybe the Chinese themselves didn’t know. In any case they were now paying the cost of their lack of transparency.
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 B J.
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.
B J 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 B J. “How’s it going?”
“Life sucks,” Dagmar said with perfect truth.
“Yeah,” B J 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,” B J 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,” B J 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,” B J 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 B J face-to-face and hope that he couldn’t guess what she knew.
“You have a cut on your face,” Dagmar said.
The cut was just below B J’s left eye, a thin little half circle of red. Probably made by Siyed’s fingernail as he tried to push B J away while B J pounded the life out of him.
“Kitchen accident,” B J 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.
B J 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 B J, “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 B J so he wouldn’t follow her home.
At some point, civility required that she view B J’s new car. Dagmar followed B J to the elevator 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 B J 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 B J 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 B J investigated and then let go on grounds of insufficient evidence. That would be a triumph for him: that would be B J 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.” B J 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.” B J 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 B J 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 B J, 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.
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 table 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 B J’s head, and slapping him across the face.
Only the remains of her sanity, dangling above the abyss with quivering fingers, kept her still.
B J, 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. B J 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 B J 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.
If he had been foolish enough to use his own phone when contacting the players he’d used to deliver the bomb to the Fig, he’d have hanged himself— but Dagmar knew that B J was smarter than that. Dagmar knew he would have used what on TV crime shows was called a burner— a cell phone with prepaid hours, purchased anonymously and after the crime destroyed.
There was nothing in any of this that would indict B J, let alone convict him.
A bigger demonstration would be required.
In the morning she took Hollywood Boulevard west, toward the ocean, and found a place to park near where it became Sunset Boulevard. Between two shabby old office buildings, and beneath a billboard for Ray Corrigan’s new blockbuster, she found an old, steep stairway that connected Sunset and Santa Monica boulevards, and from this vantage viewed the building that contained Katanyan Associates.
She had been there many times, but she thought it might be useful to refresh her memory. The building was a four-story structure of dark glass. Austin’s company occupied the second floor. Cars were parked on a kind of concrete shelf cantilevered out over the slope, with a view of Century City beyond. There was a booth for a gate guard, but it was manned only during working hours.
The building across the street had CCTV cameras on its roof, but these were drooping downward— broken or unused.
It’s going to happen Tuesday night, she thought. When you’ve got Aram for your alibi.
It was lucky that Katanyan Associates was only a short distance from the New Hollywood Inn.
That would make things easier.
Richard the Assassin sat behind his long, curving row of consoles, screen images winking in his eyes. Ninjas glared down from the upper shelves, fierce eyes gazing from masked faces.
“CRAPJOB’s starting to scare me,” he said. “He’s using your account to build a program that’s going to cause major damage. When he gives the word, it’s going to trash every record on our servers, starting with all Great Big Idea’s games, then going on to email and accounting files, then demolishing everything in AvN Soft that it can reach. We’ve got backups off-site, of course, but we can’t swear that every single thing is backed up.”
“He won’t move till after the Wednesday update,” Dagmar said. “He can’t afford to destroy anything until the players send his patch out.”
“I’m still worried,” said Richard.
She looked at him. “All right,” she said. “If we don’t track this guy down by Tuesday six P.M., lock him out. Eliminate his account, wipe out his little data bomb, and make sure —” She leaned forward, intent. “Make sure it’s Charlie’s patch that goes out to the players, not anything else.”
Richard shrugged. “Of course.”
Dagmar began to speak, then hesitated, then spoke anyway. Any residual loyalty to B J had vanished at the point at which she’d seen him stalking up and down outside her conjectural motel room.
“While you’re doing that,” she said, “eliminate Boris Bustretski’s account.”
Richard raised his eyebrows. “You think he’s CRAPJOB?”
“CRAPJOB appeared after B J came on as a freelancer.”
The eyebrows lifted another millimeter.
“B J?”
“He’s an old friend,” Dagmar said, “but I don’t trust him.”
Richard made a sweeping motion with his hand, clean as the slice of a ninja sword.
“It’s done,” he said.
FROM: Consuelo
SUBJECT: Porn Invasion
Hey, Dagmar—
Why has my hard drive filled up with this awful Asian porn?
Is this any way for a detective to treat his partner?
Joe
FROM: Dagmar Shaw
SUBJECT: Re: Porn Invasion
Andy,
Your hard drive should keep its fly zipped.
Good detectives don’t go anywhere without a warrant.
Dagmar
FROM: Consuelo
SUBJECT: Re: re: Porn Invasion
Darn it, Dagmar, I thought we were friends!
FROM: Hippolyte
SUBJECT: Re: L.A. Games
Hi, Dagmar,
I’ve got the phone call from David! I’m supposed to help deliver data to Maria so that she can get it to Briana.
I told David yes. He said it’s going down Tuesday night.
My phone is (714) 756-0578.
H.
“Okay,” said Dagmar. “So the data stick is going to be hidden in a vase of flowers?”
She was speaking not to Hippolyte, to whom she had talked earlier in the day, but to a player named GIAWOL, whom she did not know. GIAWOL had a clenched-sounding voice, as if he were afraid to let his lower teeth get too far from his upper. Possibly, Dagmar thought, he had a pipe in his mouth.
“Yes,” GIAWOL said. Dagmar knew that his name was an acronym for Gaming is a way of life.
“I don’t know that it’s a data stick, exactly,” he said, “only that I’m supposed to put it in the vase. And that once I deliver it to Maria, I’m supposed to text-message David at a certain number.”
“Can you give me the number?”
GIAWOL did. Dagmar wrote it down. It was a number she didn’t recognize.
B J’s latest cell phone burner.
“Where are you supposed to deliver the flowers?” Dagmar asked.
“Someplace called the New Hollywood Inn,” GIAWOL said. “Room one one eight.”
Dagmar felt the flush of anger on her skin.
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Just that I’m to say it’s from the management.”
“Of the motel?”
“Yes. It’s supposed to be thanks for staying there for so long.” There was a hesitation. “Can I make a request?”
“Of course.”
“More mathematical puzzles,” GIAWOL said. “I love those.”
She smiled. “I’ll make a note of it.”
“Also, the destegging program you people use only works with a PC. I’m a Mac user.”
“I’ll pass that on to them.”
Over Monday afternoon she had tracked the evolution of B J’s plot. It featured sending players along the same wandering courses that he’d used in his last scheme, followed by a player’s uniting the data with the “ package”— in this case a vase of flowers— and delivering them to a motel room door.
His bomb-making skills had evolved, clearly. The last bomb had been triggered when Charlie turned on the computer or opened the door to the CD player. This one would be command-detonated, presumably by cell phone. It would have to be assumed that Dagmar would be averse to plugging in any strange computers delivered to her door, so when GIAWOL sent the text message that the flowers had been delivered, B J in turn would call the cell phone hidden in the flower vase. Which would trigger the bomb, thus ending B J’s problems. And Dagmar’s, of course.
An abstract kind of pity, devoid of genuine sadness or compassion, floated through Dagmar’s mind.
Poor BJ, she thought. He’s only got the one trick.
He’s not puppetmaster enough to save himself.
FROM: Maria Perry
SUBJECT: Ford Phalanx
I’ve located Cullen’s briefcase. It’s in a late-model Ford Phalanx parked in the Coolomb Corporation garage!
Is there any way I can break into the car without setting off the alarm? I don’t need to steal the car, I just need to get into it!
Maria
FROM: Desi
SUBJECT: Re: Ford Phalanx
Maria,
This company sells custom lockpick sets for specific models of cars.
If the Phalanx has keyless entry, then of course this won’t work.
FROM: ReVerb
SUBJECT: Re: Ford Phalanx
Pity it’s not the late nineties, when GM cars had keys so interchangeable that you could randomly insert your key into a strange lock with a 50% chance it would open. Of course the Phalanx isn’t GM, but I can’t resist an interesting bit of trivia!
You might try ordering some of these tools from this online catalog. These are the tools used by professionals, legit and otherwise, to break into cars.
The tools don’t seem to have names, just catalog numbers.
FROM: Atenveldt
SUBJECT: Re: Ford Phalanx
Maria, the Phalanx has keyless entry. There isn’t a conventional lock anywhere on the vehicle. The driver carries a sort of seedpod-shaped cartridge with an active ( battery-operated) RFID tag that scanners in the car will recognize. The car won’t start without the RFID tag inside.
RFIDs, of course, have a well-known problem, which is that they broadcast to all the wrong scanners as well as the right ones.
What I would do is this: I’d get an RFID scanner somewhere near that car to record the signal the pod emits when it tells the Phalanx to open its doors. Then you create an electronic duplicate of the signal, and the car is yours!
And the car is mine, Dagmar thought.
Two players she’d never heard from had jumped out of the electronic world to answer Maria’s question. She could always count on the Group Mind.
It was time for another visit to the electronics store.
It was typical of L.A. that the surveillance store was open till midnight— after all, one never knew at what hour one’s husband, or one’s banker, would choose to cheat. The clerk sold her a battery-powered RFID scanner and a device for cloning the captured signals. Both boxes were compact and idiotproof— stupid criminals, after all, used them every day, usually to steal someone’s identity when the victim swiped a credit card while making a purchase, or when they were carrying one of the new American passports, which the government had insisted could only be detected at a range of four inches, even in the face of objective tests that demonstrated their vulnerability at a range of ten meters or more.
The clerk gazed at her from sad, idiotproof eyes. “You must promise to use this only for good,” he told her.
She looked at him.
“I’m innocent as chocolate syrup,” she told him.
She drove to B J’s apartment. She’d never been there before, but the address was available in the contract he’d signed with Great Big Idea.
It wasn’t in a good part of L.A. The small building, with clapboard walls and a shake roof, was ramshackle and contained no more than four apartments. Two vehicles sat in the parking lot on concrete blocks. In this district her Mercedes coupe glowed like a beacon.
Dagmar circled the apartment and saw neither the Phalanx nor B J’s old Chevy. She parked half a block away, in a place where her car was shaded from the streetlight by an overgrown willow, and shifted to the passenger seat. She remembered reading somewhere that a person sitting in the passenger seat was less conspicuous than someone behind the wheel.
She reclined the seat as far as possible, pulled her panama hat partly down her face, and waited for the rumble of the Ford’s V-8. When B J arrived and went to bed, she intended to slip out and put the RFID scanner beneath his car to catch the signals from his remote, then retrieve the scanner after he left.
The Phalanx didn’t come. She waited for hours, enduring the occasional scrutiny of young men walking past along the broken sidewalk. When they began to crowd the Mercedes, either to admire the car or to steal it, she raised her seat to make herself more visible and pretended to be talking on the phone. The young men, surprised and suddenly self-conscious, retreated. No one really bothered her.
Eventually even the drifting knots of young men went to bed. Dagmar drowsed and periodically scanned the apartment building with night binoculars. B J hadn’t come home.
He was wherever he was building the bomb, she thought. Where he was carefully crafting the instrument that would kill her.
When dawn began to feather the leaves of the willow tree overhead, Dagmar got out of the car and stretched aching limbs. She retreated to her motel room for a shower and an hour’s jangled sleep, and the alarm function in her phone woke her promptly at seven.
Dagmar looked at the phone and dreaded what was going to happen next. She tasted stomach acid in the back of her throat.
She took a deep breath and pressed buttons for the speed dial.
When B J answered, she said, “Let’s have breakfast. I need to talk to someone.”
He cleared his throat, and when his voice emerged it was thick with sleep.
“Dagmar? Are you all right?”
“No,” she said. “I’m not.”
The morning news was about the continued attack on the yuan. The Chinese currency had lost at least half its value, neatly canceling half the value of the obsessive savings of hundreds of millions of people, most of them poor. Rioters had trashed a train station in Guangzhou and broken bank windows on the Shanghai Bund. The dollar was losing value as well, and the Chinese government was still uttering threats.
She wondered if anyone other than she and B J had yet realized that the attacks were coming from a botnet.
Dagmar and B J met near Koreatown, in the egg-themed restaurant where they’d dined before Charlie had been killed. B J had been planning to kill Charlie then, Dagmar thought, because the twelve-billion-dollar figure had shown up on Our Reality Network earlier in the day, and B J would have known at once what it meant.
Dagmar arrived at the restaurant first and sat with her back to the wall and ordered coffee. B J arrived fifteen minutes later, heralded by the bass vibrato of the Ford. He was unshaven and dressed in worn jeans and a faded T. Apparently, she thought, tycoon wear and bomb factories did not mix.
Dagmar managed not to hurl the coffee in his face. Instead she steeled herself and rose to embrace him. She smelled the familiar lavender soap and her stomach turned over.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “You look awful.”
She seated herself. “Three friends dead. Cops on my tail. No sleep. And the game updates tomorrow.”
This time B J remembered he wasn’t supposed to know about Siyed.
“Three friends?” he asked.
She told him about Siyed, and while she did, she watched him. The calculation behind his reactions seemed plain, the falsity enormous. There was a little delay behind every response, as he tried to decide how to react. He did everything but wave a placard saying “Murderous Sociopath.”
How, she wondered, had she not noticed any of this till now?
They had known each other for thirteen or fourteen years. They had been lovers for nine months of that. She had adored him at the start of the relationship, had been secretly relieved when he broke it off, and had been twisted enough by the rejection to marry a man she didn’t love.
She and B J had been working together for weeks, and she’d sat opposite him at desks and tables and heard his stories of the fall of AvN Soft and seen his blue eyes glitter with anger at Charlie, and she hadn’t seen any of the mendacity, any of the self-interest, any of the plotting.
Charlie had told her over and over about B J. So had Austin. She hadn’t thought they were lying; she had just thought they were prejudiced.
She hadn’t seen any of what B J had created. She, so good at plots, at hiding and detecting, had gone on thinking of B J as her friend— and not only that, but her friend of last resort.
Dagmar could only conclude that she was as broken as he was.
“Staying out of sight is probably a good idea,” B J said. “It’ll give them time to find out who really did it. And you should get some rest, you look like you haven’t slept in a week.”
Go stay in your hotel room, Dagmar translated, where I can get to you with my bomb.
“Yeah,” she said. “But there’s the big update tomorrow.”
“It’s all set up, right?” he said. “You don’t even need to be there. Any last-minute writing or anything, I’ll handle it.”
“You’re spending the day with Aram, I thought.”
He gave one of his big-shouldered shrugs. “I’ll work all night, if I have to.”
B J went on to talk about Aram Katanyan, about how he’d made the connection at Austin’s memorial service, then kept in touch. He’d known that Aram would have a lot to say about what happened to Katanyan Associates, and so B J had kept stressing his qualifications for the job. He’d talked about how long he’d known Austin, how they’d met over gaming. Eventually it was Aram, not B J, who had first brought up the matter of his coming in as acting head of the firm.
B J was bouncy and confident and pleased with himself. A few weeks ago, she’d seen him baffled and defeated. Now he was much more like the B J she’d met at Caltech, the one who’d walk up to you and tell you how smart he was and how successful he was going to be.
All it took to create this change, she thought, was killing a couple of people and getting away with it.
Suddenly she realized why she’d been so blind. I haven’t been in his way till now. She’d been trying to help B J, not prevent him from doing anything he’d wanted to do. What little she’d had, she’d offered freely. She’d never thwarted him, and he’d never turned into any of those people in his games, the two-faced gutter crawlers that stood ready to betray everyone in sight.
She looked down at the table. B J’s plate was empty. Her own blueberry and pecan pancakes had been more torn to shreds than eaten. The smell of candied pepper bacon hung in the air.
She’d never be able to eat candied pepper bacon again.
“Can we go for a ride in your car?” she asked.
Surprise blinked in his blue eyes.
“Sure,” he said.
“Can I drive?”
She left money on the table for breakfast, and they stepped out into yet another brilliant Los Angeles morning. She held out a hand.
“The key?” she asked.
B J fished in his pocket and found the remote.
“You press the —”
“I know.”
She had the scanner in her handbag. She held the bag out and the remote next to it and pressed the button to open the car.
Inches away, the scanner should have picked up the signal.
The car folded around her like a body stocking. The whole vehicle shivered to the big engine. She took the car through the parking lot, then hurled it onto the street like a lioness accelerating after an antelope.
“Jeez,” B J said, surprised.
The back end swung around, clawing for traction, as she turned onto Interstate 10. There was a hesitation, and then the turbocharger kicked in and punched her back in the seat. Lips skinned back from her teeth in a reckless grin. Methodically she clocked through the gears, and she headed for Pomona as fast as the V-8 would take her. If the automated traffic cameras clocked her at 120, B J could just suck the fines.
From his damn jail cell.
It had occurred to Dagmar that B J might try to kill her when they were alone. She doubted it, however. He would view it as too risky: someone could see him, something could go wrong. Better to have his puppets deliver Dagmar’s death later, in the sanctuary that she didn’t realize had been compromised.
But just in case he was tempted to do something, Dagmar wanted him too terrified to act.
She got off the freeway, fishtailed around a couple of intersections, and returned to the interstate, heading west into L.A. She returned to the restaurant parking lot, put the Phalanx in neutral, and pulled the parking brake.
“As expensive mechanical substitute penises go,” she said, “this one’s the cat’s pajamas.”
“Uh, yeah,” B J said. His eyes were wide.
She looked at him. “See you tomorrow,” she said. “At the update.”
His blue eyes looked into hers with perfect certainty.
“See you there,” he said.
See you in hell, she thought.
From room 115 in the New Hollywood Inn, Dagmar waited while B J’s plot unfolded. Her room smelled of the Thai takeout she hadn’t been able to bring herself to eat. The cameras reported only the usual tourists— a worried Chinese mother with a pack of small children, a solemn South American with a camera, a disorganized family, running between their room and their car, chattering in Finnish or Estonian or some other unlikely language.
She’d received a message from Richard the Assassin that CRAPJOB’s online privileges had been canceled. So had B J’s. So had Dagmar’s old account. All copies of Charlie’s patch had been reverted to the archived copy of Patch 2.0.
Dagmar supposed that B J wouldn’t have discovered any of these changes as yet. Not if he was being feted by Aram.
CNN informed her that the attacks on the Chinese yuan had ceased. The bots had done as much damage as they could and left riots and anger behind.
Dagmar watched the monitor. More children, more tourists.
At last came a stout man staggering under a huge burden of flowers. Dagmar opened her door and met him on the doorstep of room 118. She put her key in the door.
“Maria?” he asked. “Maria Perry?”
She looked up. “Yes?”
He was a portly man around sixty, with white hair tied in a ponytail, gold-rimmed spectacles, and a cheerful red face. Dots of sweat marked his forehead.
“The management”— pant— “wanted me to give you this.” Panting. “It’s for being”— pant— “such a good customer.”
Dagmar tried to feign surprise. The vase was large and ugly, black ceramic, with reliefs of strange Polynesian tiki monsters. A huge spray of long-stemmed roses fanned from the opening at the top, the flowers white but rimmed delicately with pink. Below was a crazed mix of colorful blossoms: mums and carnations and black and yellow lilies, plus baby’s breath and other flowers that Dagmar couldn’t identify.
Dagmar opened the door of 118 and took the vase from GIAWOL, who immediately dissolved into a paroxysm of coughing. The vase was heavy with its presumed cargo of nails and gunpowder, and Dagmar wrestled it into the room and put it on the scarred old table. The scent of the roses mixed strangely with the Lysol smell of the room.
She turned back to GIAWOL, who had recovered from his coughing fit.
“Thank you,” she said, and raised a finger to her lips. “Remember not to send that text. And don’t tell anyone— they might be jealous.”
His grin was infectious. “Sure. Enjoy the flowers— Maria.”
Still grinning, he walked away. Dagmar watched him go, then closed the door and contemplated the enormous floral display.
Flowers, she thought, were really Siyed’s weapon, not B J’s. B J was running out of ideas.
She returned to 115, got her panama hat and a cardigan against the growing October chill. She went back to 118, collected the enormous vase with its extravagant spray of blossoms, and walked toward the street, flowers bobbing over her head like the feathers of a Lakota headdress.
Her rented car was a two-seater, so she secured the vase between the passenger seat and the shelf behind, then drove to Hollywood. Progress along the famous boulevard was slow, the pavement packed with traffic and mobs of tourists who looked even more bewildered than they did in daylight. Out-of-work actors walked up and down the sidewalks dressed as superheroes and offered to let visitors take their picture for a small fee.
Fly this bomb to where it belongs, Tony Stark, she thought. But Tony was busy posing with a couple of kids from the Midwest and failed to hear her mental command.
Eventually she got to the top of the street, where Hollywood became Sunset, and found a place to park. She took out the vase, hesitated, then opened the trunk and dumped all the flowers inside. With the vase itself swinging at the end of her arm, she located the two office buildings and walked down the dark, narrow old stair to Santa Monica Boulevard.
The blue-windowed office building stood across the street. There were lots of lights on the second floor, where Katanyan Associates was hosting a party for its new manager. Dagmar shifted the vase from the arm that was cramping to the arm that was not.
Its green color fluorescing in the light of a streetlamp, B J’s Phalanx sat in the parking lot.
Dagmar took a breath, tilted her hat so that anyone on the second floor couldn’t see her face, and stepped into the night street.
She felt the flush of danger on her skin. Her pulse was rapid but not frantic. She remembered being far more frightened in Jakarta.
She’d learned a few things since then. And besides, L.A. was her town.
Dagmar wanted the bomb inside B J’s car because that would indicate that the bomb belonged to him. If she put the bomb underneath the Phalanx, he would be a victim.
She didn’t want him victimized. She wanted him indicted.
She would plant the bomb in his car and then send a text to the number that David had given to GIAWOL. B J, assuming that Dagmar had been given the bomb, would use his burner to call the phone in the bomb and would then turn in surprise and shock as the Katanyan Associates windows reflected the orange flower of flame that burst from his own vehicle, and all his hopes and expectations were blown to smithereens.
Even Special Agent Landreth of the FBI would realize that there had to be a connection between this bomb and the identical weapon that had killed Charlie Ruff. The easiest explanation was that B J had accidentally blown up his own vehicle with his own weapon.
There would be an investigation. In time, bomb materials would be found, as well as the place where B J had assembled the bomb. And Dagmar would be questioned again.
B J always had a grudge against Charlie, she would say. He thought Charlie had cheated him out of his company.
B J would go to prison, possibly the gas chamber. He’d lose his job with Aram, and his attempt to subvert the gold-farming bots would fail.
He’d have nothing. He’d have less than he had when this whole adventure started.
Dagmar would tangle him in his own puppet strings and hang him out to twist slowly in the wind.
She glanced at the CCTV on the neighboring building and saw the cameras still dangling at a useless angle. Dagmar passed the empty guard box standing sentry in the parking lot and walked to B J’s car. He had parked on the south side of the parking ramp, with a view of his new domain. L.A. shimmered below her, a skein of lights stretching all the way to the Pacific. Dagmar reached into her pocket and pulled out her cloned Phalanx remote, and she pressed the button.
Dagmar heard the solid chunk of a door lock opening. She pulled the sleeve of her cardigan over her fingers, crouched down by the low car, and opened the door without leaving fingerprints. She tilted the seat forward, scrubbed fingerprints off the vase with her cardigan, and tucked the vase behind the driver’s seat. She pushed the seat back into place.
She looked up at the building. Silhouettes wandered behind the lit windows. She didn’t recognize B J or anyone else.
She rose, tilted her hat again to obscure her face from the new direction, and left the parking lot. Success tingled in her fingers and toes.
Her feet bounded up the old concrete stair. She neared the top, and breathing with exertion, she turned and gazed down over the parking lot.
The neon green Phalanx was visible, its color brilliant under the light. She reached into a pocket for the cell phone she’d bought just that afternoon, her very own burner.
“What are we going to do tonight, Brain?” she asked.
The answer seemed to hang pregnant in the air, so she spoke it aloud.
“What we do every night, Pinky,” she said. “Try to take over the world!”
She texted to the number GIAWOL had sent her, and pressed Send.
Cars hissed by on Sunset. Her heart beat double-time in her throat. Nothing happened.
Several minutes went by while Dagmar’s unease increased. She wondered frantically if she had miscalculated completely, if this was all some insane fantasy she’d cobbled together out of stray facts and paranoia.
Maybe it wasn’t a command-detonated bomb at all, she thought. Maybe it was a time bomb, scheduled to go off at 2 A.M. or something.
But in that case, why the text message? That was a breach in security, though a small one. There was no reason for it unless it was timed somehow to the bomb’s detonation.
A figure appeared in the parking lot below, and she recognized B J at once. His big body moved with a jaunty stride, as if he were on top of the world. He was wearing tycoon clothes, a dark suit. A bright tie glowed at his throat in the light of the streetlamps.
B J stepped toward the Phalanx and reached into a pocket for a remote. He opened the car door, put the remote away, reached into a pocket for something else. Something small.
Dagmar felt her insides twist. She stopped herself from calling out.
B J dropped into the car. It lurched under his considerable weight. Seconds ticked by. Perhaps he was gazing through the windshield at his new domain, at the Los Angeles that lay before him, spread out like a harlot on a mattress.
In the merest fragment of a second, the explosion happened. The explosion was faster than in movies. In films, Dagmar realized, explosions are slowed down so you can see them. In reality, they’re too fast for the eye to catch.
Clangs echoed up the stair as pieces of the Phalanx began raining down. The part of the car that remained on the ground caught fire instantly and burned with a brilliant flame. Little fiery pellets fell over the parking lot, burning with bright chemical fire, and Dagmar realized they were incendiaries.
If the bomb hadn’t killed her directly, she realized, she was meant to burn to death in her motel room or choke to death on smoke.
She couldn’t see B J amid the flames. She knew only that he hadn’t gotten out of the car.
She wondered if he had died happy. Knowing that he was a fraction of a second from erasing the last obstacle between him and his prospects. Pleased with his new job, with the billions that the software agents would soon be dropping into his account, with his future as a tycoon.
Or in that last fragment of a second, had he heard the cell phone detonator chirp from behind his driver’s seat and realized that it had all gone horribly wrong?
Dagmar returned to her own car, which was filled by now with a horrid rose scent. She stopped at a filling station and hurled all the flowers into a rubbish can, along with the cloned remote and the cell phone burner, both rubbed clean of fingerprints.
When she got to her motel room, she began taking apart all her surveillance gear. She thought that maybe she should erase all the evidence she’d gathered, in case it ended up pointing toward her.
Then she thought she might want to keep it, to prove that B J was whatever it was that B J was.
“This is not a game,” she reminded herself.