FROM: LadyDayFan
Dagmar Shaw, whom most of you know as the executive producer of games like Curse of the Golden Nagi and Shadow Pattern, is stuck in Jakarta, where supplies of food and medicine are running out and people are being killed. We all saw the hotel burn. Dagmar wants to get out and the government ain’t helping.
Her original email is here and describes her situation.
It’s possible that our combined efforts may be of assistance.
I have set up several topics.
News and Rumors has to do with the situation in Jakarta, Indonesia, etc. Please post any information, along with a link to the source. Finance has to do with money issues. As detailed in her email, Dagmar has only a small amount of viable currency. If we can find a channel, possibly we could get money to her or otherwise finance an escape.
I have set up a special PayPal account to which people can contribute. Details are in the Finance topic.
The Escape Topic has to do with actual plans to move Dagmar to someplace safe.
We’ll keep this topic as an arena for general discussion.
TINAG… I think.
FROM: Hanseatic
TINAG, hell! I think it’s a damn game! But I’m willing to play.
FROM: Corporal Carrot
TINAG?
FROM: LadyDayFan
This Is Not A Game.
FROM: Corporal Carrot
Thanks.
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
Corporal Carrot, TINAG is an ARG design aesthetic. The characters are required to believe they live in the real world, the puppetmasters are required to make a world that is internally consistent, and players should be able to function in the world as well as the characters.
FROM: Hippolyte
This really isn’t a game! I got email from Dagmar yesterday. She’s really stranded in Jakarta, where the hotel burned and all those people were killed.
How much should we contribute to PayPal?
FROM: LadyDayFan
Twenty bucks each?
FROM: HexenHase
Chatsworth, I disagree with you about TINAG. The effects you describe are entirely the result of the puppetmasters’ abilities to skillfully craft a game while remaining behind the curtain. The fictional characters are actors scripted by the puppetmasters— if the scripts don’t work, the players will never believe the game world is real, and the illusion fails.
<posts deleted>
FROM: LadyDayFan
I have removed twelve flamewar posts to the Hell Topic.
Civil discussions of game aesthetics may take place in the Meta Topic.
If this continues, someone is going to lose access privileges.
FROM: HexenHase
Sorry.
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
Me too. I’ll make nice from now on.
FROM: Joe Clever
I would like to state for the record that I think it’s a game. But I’m always willing to play along, even if it’s going to cost me twenty bucks.
FROM: Hippolyte
It’s not a game, Joe. But feel free to hack the Indonesian military if it makes you happy.
FROM: HexenHase
I can’t believe we’re engaging with Joe Clever on this or any topic! That cheating shit-for-brains!
FROM: Corporal Carrot
Careful, Hexen. Don’t start another flamewar.
FROM: LadyDayFan
Don’t worry, Corporal Carrot. Abusing Joe Clever is an Our Reality tradition.
FROM: Corporal Carrot
Can I ask why?
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
Because the crap-head’s style of play totally violates the spirit of TINAG. He cheats.
FROM: Joe Clever
It’s not cheating when there aren’t any rules.
FROM: HexenHase
There are rules to any community, whether they’re written down or not. We agree not to poke behind the scenes because it spoils the fun for all of us.
Corporal Carrot: What Joe Clever does is dumpster-dive Great Big Idea to find clues that might have accidentally been thrown away. He followed the actors around to see if they might accidentally drop a script. And he twice hacked Great Big Idea to locate pages that hadn’t yet been uploaded to the Web.
FROM: Joe Clever
You say that as if I should be embarrassed. What I do is win games.
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
Joe Clever is a complete egomaniac. Totally ruthless. Borderline sociopath. Probably crazy.
My guess is that he lives in his mother’s basement and has no friends.
We despise him.
FROM: Joe Clever
What I have done is to recognize that ARGs are in fact games. That’s what the G in ARG stands for!
Games have winners and losers. I am a winner. You people are losers.
FROM: LadyDayFan
Are we not overwhelmed by Mr. Clever’s personal charm?
FROM: HexenHase
And he’s even more charming in person.
FROM: Corporal Carrot
Can’t you ban him from the bulletin board?
FROM: LadyDayFan
I could, but he would immediately rejoin with a new handle.
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
Ahem. Aren’t we supposed to be talking about Dagmar?
FROM: LadyDayFan
Good point. We need to get back to Indonesia.
FROM: Joe Clever
It’s a game.
FROM: LadyDayFan
You go on thinking that, J. C.
FROM: Desi
I’ve just found this topic. My god! I can’t believe we’re actually doing this.
I don’t know if this will be of any use, but one of my cubicle mates ranks high in penchak silat, or however it’s spelled. I’ll see if his school has any connections to martial arts groups in Jakarta.
FROM: LadyDayFan
Desi, that would be great.
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
I took a scuba vacation in Bali a few years ago. Maybe I can contact those people and see if they know anyone with a boat in Jakarta.
FROM: Corporal Carrot
You guyz are acting like this is real.
FROM: LadyDayFan
TINAG, my friends. TINAG.
Dagmar plunged into the water, bubbles erupting around her. She arched her back, feeling the bubbles stream along her legs and the sensitive flesh of her neck, and rose through the dark water until her head broke the surface.
The night loomed around her, silent, the stars muted by wisps of cloud.
She began her laps. Arms, legs, lungs in synchrony, the warm water a midnight dream.
Her future, even her continued existence, was a question mark.
Swimming nightly laps was a defiance of that uncertainty, a statement that she was still an actor on her own stage. That there was still something in which her own will could alter events.
Even if it was just swimming, at night, hidden from the world.
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
Sorry, but I’ve worked the Bali dive boat connection, and it didn’t pan out.
FROM: Joe Clever
We might try sportfishermen. Do you think any of them would have a Web site?
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
I’ll check.
I’ve been doing some thinking. We’ve got three possibilities for getting Dagmar out of Jakarta. Air, water, land.
If we use an aircraft, the aircraft has to find a place to land, and then we’ll have to move Dagmar to that place by car or bus or some other form of ground transport. In addition, the Indonesian military isn’t allowing anyone into their airspace, so any aircraft runs a risk of being shot down.
If we use a boat, then we still have to bring Dagmar to the boat by ground transport. It’s not clear whether the Indonesian navy is blockading Jakarta by sea or how effective the blockade is.
If it’s possible to move Dagmar out of Jakarta by ground transport (say, by bribing or otherwise coming to an understanding with the military), then even if she doesn’t leave the country, she would be safer than she is now. Even though she’d still be in Indonesia, she’d be outside the area of complete chaos.
FROM: Hanseatic
Have you considered a seaplane or flying boat?
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
No, I hadn’t. Good idea.
FROM: Vikram
I have an uncle who’s being evacuated with the Indian nationals today or tomorrow. Once he’s out of Jakarta, I will try to contact him and find out if there’s anyone we can contact.
FROM: Desi
I got lucky with the silat connection! My friend’s teacher is affiliated with a school in Jakarta. He’s checking with them.
FROM: LadyDayFan
Great news!
FROM: Desi
We might be able to hook Dagmar up with her own bodyguard of martial artists! How cool is that?
“How are you, darling?” asked Tomer Zan.
“I’m trying to keep my chin up,” Dagmar said.
“That’s good. I just wanted you to know that we got another helicopter. It’s a Spirit, it’s got a much longer range than the Huey, so we’ll be able to stage from farther out at sea.”
“Good to know.”
“It’s on its way from the Philippines now. So we should be set in just a few days.”
“What happened,” Dagmar asked, “to the old helicopter?”
“Yes. Well.” Dagmar sensed considerable reluctance. “It was trying to land on our ship, and the winds were gusty, so it crashed into the superstructure. So we need a new ship and a new helicopter.”
“Was anyone hurt?” Dagmar felt the depression that propelled her words.
There was a brief silence, and then, “The crew of the helicopter was killed. There were some injuries on the ship, too, because there was a fire. The radio room got burned— that’s why we didn’t hear from them.”
It seemed to Dagmar as if her heart slowed, extending the long silence between beats. The breath that she drew into her lungs took an eon. Then time seemed to speed up as she hurled the words into the world.
“Oh Christ, I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s not your fault, darling,” Zan said.
Dagmar didn’t answer.
“We’re professionals,” Zan said. “All our people have been soldiers. We understand the risks we take.”
“I’m not a soldier,” Dagmar said. “Nothing’s prepared me for this.”
“We’re coming to get you,” said Zan. “That’s what you need to think about.”
“I’ll try,” she said.
“We’re coming soon.”
After the phone call came to an end, Dagmar closed her eyes and fell into a dark, liquid sorrow, a grief the temperature of blood.
FROM: Joe Clever
I’ve found a boat and a captain. He’s a fisherman named Widjihartani, and he operates from a port in West Java called Pelabuhan Ratu. It’s something like five or six hours from Jakarta by sea.
He’s willing to take a passenger anywhere, provided his fuel and time are paid for. All the way to Singapore, if we want.
He says that Jakarta is technically under a blockade by the navy, but they let fishermen through because they are too necessary to the economy to let them go under.
FROM: Corporal Carrot
FROM: LadyDayFan
Is Widjihartani his first name or his last name? Are you sure he’s reliable?
FROM: Corporal Carrot
What do they call him for short?
FROM: Joe Clever
Widjihartani is the only name he’s got. Lots of Indonesians have only one name.
I spoke to him on the phone. His English is pretty good, he takes tourists out for fishing and sightseeing.
He seemed pretty clearheaded, really. But he didn’t know how he could afford the fuel, and with the banks in the state they are, it’s unclear how we can get money to him.
FROM: Hippolyte
I found Pelabuhan Ratu on Google Earth!
FROM: LadyDayFan
Can we set him up with a PayPal account? Then we could put money into it, and he could withdraw it whenever the bank lets him.
FROM: Joe Clever
I’ll check.
From the restaurant, Dagmar could see the Indian nationals evacuating, the line of helicopters parading neatly across the horizon.
The Chinese were going out in the morning, by sea, and the Singaporeans the next day. Even little Singapore could stage a proper evacuation, complete with a landing by their elite Gurkha troops.
The only nationality that wasn’t evacuating, besides the Americans, was the Australians. The Indonesians were still angry at the Australians over Timor and weren’t letting Australian ships into their waters.
For a moment, watching the Indians go, Dagmar felt a spasm of pure hatred for her own nation. Her country had lost the ability to do anything but make fast food and bad Hollywood blockbusters. Every city would have its very own Katrina, and the United States of America in its greatness and piety would do nothing before or after. At the embassy they handed out lies as if they were the White House budget office.
Even the saving of human life had been privatized. If you could afford your own security outfit to rescue you with its helicopters, then you were granted life; if you couldn’t, you were beneath your nation’s notice.
For a brief, fierce instant she wanted to see her own country burn, just as the Palms had burned.
Then the anger faded, and she looked down at the fried rice that was her supper.
Dutifully, she ate it to the last grain.
FROM: Simone
LadyDayFan, can you set up a fanfic topic?
FROM: LadyDayFan
Fanfic? You want to write fan fiction about Dagmar?
FROM: Simone
Yeah. She’s cool.
FROM: Hanseatic
<glyph of astonishment>
FROM: LadyDayFan
Well. This is against my better judgment, but here you go.
“Where are you from?” asked the young man with the halberd.
“Los Angeles.”
“That is near Hollywood?”
“Yes.”
“That must be very interesting.”
Dagmar understood that in the Q-and-A conversations favored by the Indonesians, both sides were supposed to ask questions.
“Are you from Jakarta?” she asked.
Paying her ritual morning visit to the concierge— which, following Zan’s advice, she did at a different hour each morning— Dagmar had discovered that the hotel was now guarded by men with medieval weapons. They wore kilts over baggy pants, with short jackets, round pitji hats, and sashes in bright primary colors. The outfits of the young men were black, and of the older men, white. They carried long knives, spears, sticks, and blades on the ends of sticks. They clustered by the hotel entrances and smiled and bowed at anyone walking by. They were making a clear effort not to seem threatening.
Mr. Tong had never reappeared, and his place seemed taken permanently by the young woman in the Muslim headdress. She told Dagmar that the hotel had hired a group of martial artists to secure the hotel.
“What is your group called?” Dagmar asked. Maybe Tomer Zan would know something about them.
“We are the Tanah Abang Bersih Jantung Association.” The young man touched his chest. “Bersih Jantung means ‘pure heart.’ ”
“And the other part?”
“Tanah Abang? That is our kampung— our neighborhood, near this hotel.” He looked at her with curiosity. “Do you like Miley Cyrus?” he asked.
“Miley?” Dagmar said. “I think she’s swell.”
“Bersih Jantung?” asked Tomer Zan that evening. “How do you spell it?”
“It means ‘pure heart,’ ” Dagmar said.
“What is the attitude of these people?” Zan asked. “Are they disciplined? Do you feel safe around them?”
“They seem friendly. They like Miley Cyrus, for heaven’s sake! There are some older men in white who give the orders. They’re trying not to be scary.”
“That’s good. Just remember that this can change at any second. You should be alert to any sign that their attitude is changing. Remember, these are the people that invented the word amok. Well, actually they call it mataglap, but amok is what they mean.”
Great, Dagmar thought. Let’s by all means look inside that silver lining to find that all-consuming black hole.
“How’s the helicopter?” she asked.
“It should be in Singapore tomorrow,” said Zan.
Dagmar wondered whether to tell Zan about the amateur efforts to rescue her that were centered on the Our Reality bulletin board, efforts she had been following online with great attention.
She decided against it.
Let them compete, she thought. Let the free market system prevail.
Besides, she thought that Zan probably wasn’t into fan fiction.
FROM: Desi
My friend has checked with his school’s silat guru in Jakarta, and he’s willing to help Dagmar. As an act of charity, they’ll take her in and share their food with her, and they’ll take her anywhere that doesn’t involve danger to their own people.
Their style is called Bayangan Prajurit Pentjak Silat. My impression is that they’ll take money if we give it to them, but their religion obliges them to do charitable acts, so they don’t insist on being paid.
Here’s the problem. Dagmar’s hotel is being guarded by a group that Bayangan Prajurit doesn’t get along with. The hotel guards are allied with the military, and their organization is headed by a general. Bayangan Prajurit are pro-democracy and they won’t cooperate with the hotel guards in any way.
Anybody have any ideas? Do we have to get Dagmar away from her own guards?
By the next morning a food shipment had arrived, and for breakfast, Dagmar gorged on Southeast Asia’s finest, freshest, most glorious fruit.
The military were providing food to their allies in the city, and the Bersih Jantung were willing to supply the hotel. Dagmar presumed there were vast bribes involved, money shifting around offshore, where the banks still worked.
There was an upside, Dagmar supposed, to dealing with a corrupt military.
“What’s the word?” Dagmar asked.
“Whatever the word is,” said Tomer Zan, “it’s not a good one. Our people have had a chance to look at this helicopter, and it’s a piece of shit. The maintenance logs are incomplete or nonsensical or forged in some obvious way, and it’s clear we’ll have to do a complete overhaul on the machine before we dare fly it out to you.”
The dry monsoon, which had ceased to be dry, spattered rain against her hotel window. Dagmar let the space of three seconds go by in order to demonstrate to Zan her displeasure.
“How long will the overhaul take?” she asked.
“Depends on whether new parts are required. And of course, what parts.”
Dagmar let more time pass.
“Why don’t you hire one of the helicopters that took the Indians or the Japanese out?”
“They were military aircraft, darling. They don’t rent them.”
“Zelazni Associates has an air division,” she said. “I saw it on your Web page. Can’t you fly me out in one of your own aircraft?”
“We don’t have helicopters, darling. We fly helicopters, we maintain helicopters, but we don’t own them. What we have are fixed-wing transport aircraft to help move our people and their equipment.”
“Can’t you put a helicopter on one of your transport planes and fly it out here?”
Now it was Zan’s turn to be silent.
“Our planes aren’t big enough,” he said.
“Maybe you could find a bigger one.”
“I’ll look at what’s possible,” Zan said after another pause. Meaning, Dagmar supposed, what Charlie was willing to pay for.
“I should let you know,” she said, “that another group is trying to help me leave Indonesia. They’ve actually made some progress.”
“Another group?” Zan’s query was cautious.
“I’ll email you the Web page.”
Maybe, she thought, he’d enjoy the fanfic after all.
FROM: Hanseatic
This game is amazing. How did Great Big Idea get the Indonesian government to cooperate with all this?
FROM: LadyDayFan
TINAG.
FROM: Hanseatic
Yah, right. My guess is the setup is something like this: we get 200 points for getting Dagmar out of Jakarta to someplace safer, 500 points if we get her out of Indonesia entirely, and 1,000 points for Total World Domination.
FROM: LadyDayFan
You’re joking, right?
FROM: Hippolyte
Hanseatic, this really isn’t a game.
FROM: Hanseatic
Maybe yes, maybe no. But what difference does it make?
“Are these people serious?” Tomer Zan asked.
“Some of them.”
“Who are they, exactly?”
“The ones I know, I don’t know well,” Dagmar said. “The rest are just handles they use online.”
“Are they Indonesia specialists?”
“I don’t think so.”
“How well do you trust them?”
More than I trust you, Dagmar thought.
“I don’t think they would deliberately mislead me,” she said.
“I’m going to fly to Singapore myself, to take charge of this,” Zan said. “If you don’t hear from me for the next day or two, that’s why.”
Competition, Dagmar thought, seemed to have heightened Zan’s sense of urgency.
* * *
That night, Star TV reported that the American ambassador and his family had been evacuated from Jakarta by some kind of U.S. Special Forces unit. The report made the ambassador seem brilliant and courageous, a combination of Rambo and Jack Kennedy.
In the face of this bold, blazing adventure, the fact that the ambassador had abandoned his post, all his subordinates, and every U.S. citizen in Jakarta seemed hardly worth mentioning.
FROM: Joe Clever
I had to walk him through it, but we’ve succeeded in setting Widjihartani up with his own PayPal account. He can transfer money from there into his bank account in unlimited amounts, but the bottleneck is the bank, which will only allow him to withdraw a certain amount.
I’m checking into whether the bank will allow him to borrow money against the money already in his account. That way he can get a lot of cash at once.
Dagmar had just finished her nightly swim when she heard the roar of vehicles. She threw her towel around her shoulders and walked to the edge of the terrace, then looked down through the screen of trees to the street below.
A convoy of half a dozen cars had just driven up beneath the Royal Jakarta’s portico. The Bersih Jantung guards were running to the cars and leaping inside. Their long, strange weapons thrust awkwardly from the windows as the vehicles sped away.
The last to leave was one of the older men in white. He jumped into a minibus without looking back, and then all Dagmar could see were the red taillights receding along the boulevard.
The hotel’s guards had jumped ship.
FROM: Charlie Ruff
I’m Charlie Ruff. Some of you may know me. I’m Dagmar’s boss, and Great Big Idea was my great big idea.
Dagmar has alerted me to the existence of this conspiracy, and I’d like to put your financing on a more professional basis.
Basically, I’ll be paying for anything that leads to Dagmar’s escape from Indonesia.
Please, let me know what you need.
The looters arrived while Dagmar was paying her morning call on the concierge, a visit that neither enjoyed but that both recognized was inevitable. Dagmar asked whether anything had changed, and the concierge always said that nothing had.
“What happened to Bersih Jantung?” Dagmar asked the concierge.
“Their neighborhood was attacked,” the woman said. “The men left to protect their families.”
It was then that the first vehicles arrived. Dagmar turned at the sound of squealing brakes. Through the glass door of the concierge’s office she saw the small blue bus drawing up under the portico. Men jumped out, some of them armed with the same freakish weapons that the Bersih Jantung had carried.
They didn’t wear uniforms. They wore tropical shirts and T-shirts with the names of bands on them and baseball caps and headscarves and pitji hats. They looked more like the rioters Dagmar had encountered on the first day than anyone’s martial Islamic association.
Her heart gave such a violent lurch that her first grab for the door handle missed. She tried again, moved quickly into the lobby, and faded as fast as she could in the direction of the elevators. She scuttled to the double row of polished metal doors and jabbed at the call button.
Other vehicles had drawn up behind the bus, and more men were piling out. There was no one to stop them— the Sikh doormen hadn’t been seen for days, and Dagmar presumed they had been evacuated along with the other Indian nationals.
The leader entered. He had a Japanese long sword stuck in his belt. One of the managers made a diffident approach, and the leader told him to stand back, which he did. A mob of people followed him into the lobby.
Some of the invaders pushed hand trucks. Several seized the carts the bellmen used to carry luggage. One white-haired man had a list written in an old school notebook.
The leader drew his katana and made a broad gesture in the direction of the lounge. A dozen of his followers charged into the lounge and ran behind the bar. Bottles of liquor were piled on the bar to be swept up later. The bar television was torn from its moorings, and another looter moved a chair so that he could stand on it and disconnect another television that was mounted high in a corner.
Hotel employees clumped in one area of the lobby and did nothing.
The elevator dinged, and Dagmar ran for it. While she counted the seconds until the door closed, she remembered the six exits from the lobby that Tomer Zan had told her to locate, and realized that she should have used one of them.
Instead she’d panicked and run for the elevators.
It occurred to her that she was really unequipped for this kind of life.
The doors closed with an infuriating lack of haste, and Dagmar began her rise to her precarious aerie on the fourteenth floor.
FROM: Dagmar
Okay, this is it. The martial arts association that was guarding the hotel fled last night, and today the looters moved in. It’s not spontaneous looting this time; it’s highly organized. I can look out the window and see trucks moving off with televisions, toilets, sinks, microwaves, and the gas ranges from the kitchen. I guess I’ve had my last hot meal. Or maybe my last meal of any sort, since they’ve probably taken all the food as well.
The looters are armed with swords, knives, and spears. I haven’t heard of them attacking anyone, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.
I need out of this hotel, and I need to go now. Any ideas?
“Is this Dagmar?”
A strange male voice, very deep and authoritative, with the same accent as Tomer Zan.
“Yes,” Dagmar said.
“My name is Mordechai Weitzman. I’m calling for Tomer Zan, who is in transit to Singapore and can’t speak right now.”
“Yes!” said Dagmar. “Hello!”
“We got your email. Can you get onto the roof later tonight?”
Dagmar’s heart gave a leap of delight at the prospect of the helicopter finally arriving.
“Yes!” she said. “Yes, of course!”
“The package should arrive about midnight Jakarta time, but it may be delayed. You’ve got to be ready when it comes.”
Her mind seemed to skip several tracks, like a needle hurled across an old LP.
“Package?” she said.
“We’re sending you a package of dollars. They may help you acquire food and other supplies until we can arrive to pick you up.”
Dagmar felt her sudden joy evaporate.
“You’re dropping money, but you’re not picking me up?”
“We’re sending it on a surveillance drone. It’s not big enough to carry you.”
“Shit!” Dagmar kicked the chest of drawers in her room: it banged solidly against the wall. “There are armed men in the hotel! I need to get out of here now!”
“You need to stay in your room.”
“I am in my fucking room!”
At that moment the lights died, and the air-conditioning whimpered to a stop.
“I am in my fucking room,” Dagmar announced, “in the fucking dark.” She was not unaware of a degree of melodrama in her delivery.
“We are coming as soon as we can,” said Weitzman. “But we need a working aircraft.”
“The world is full of aircraft!” Dagmar said. “They’ve been flying in and out of here for days. They could even spare one to fly out the American ambassador!”
“Now that was a profile in courage, wasn’t it?” There was cold humor in Weitzman’s voice.
“I’d say,” Dagmar said, “that the Alamo spirit is definitely dead.”
On the roof at eleven, she thought.
And fuck you, Mordechai, whoever you are.
FROM: Desi
I’ve emailed the Bayangan Prajurit people, but it’s the middle of the night in Indonesia and it may be a while before we hear from them. I did hear what happened with Bersih Jantung. They’re pro-military, remember, and the army was supplying them with food, fuel, and other black market items. So their neighbors, who all hate the military, decided to hijack their latest convoy and steal their food and stuff.
Which they did. Successfully.
Bayangan Prajurit claims they weren’t involved, but they’re very pleased with this development, and they had a hard time keeping a straight face.
Dagmar stood atop the silent, dark tower as the monsoon spat warm drizzle in her face. She hoped that the reconnaissance craft would be able to find her through the cloud cover.
If it was like everything else Zelazni had tried so far, it would drop into the ocean somewhere west of Krakatoa.
As she looked over the edge, she could see that lack of electricity hadn’t stopped the looters. They were working by flashlight, and now they were loading mattresses and chests of drawers into their trucks.
They’d finished looting the ground floors, she saw, and had started on the guest rooms. The power outage meant they weren’t going to get to the fourteenth floor anytime soon, but Dagmar had considerable respect for their industry and assumed they would reach her eventually.
And besides, sooner or later she was going to have to descend to the ground in search of food and water.
Around her, the city was dark except for a few fires burning here and there. The locals were still exercising blazing benevolence upon their neighbors.
She could see the pool down below, on the third-floor terrace.
She had decided against her nightly swim. Her courage did not extend to defiance of mobs with spears and knives.
Not that her courage had done anything so far but fail her.
She gave a jump as her phone let out a bray. She answered.
“Are you on the roof?” said Mordechai.
“Yes.”
“Where?”
She ransacked a mental map. “Northeast corner,” she said.
“Stay back from the edge. We don’t want the package dropping to the street.”
She stepped back until she came up against one of the roof structures. Water dripped down her neck, a surprising splash of warmth, and she took a step forward.
“Any minute now,” said Mordechai.
Dagmar scanned the sky. A flurry of rain pelted down for a few seconds, then ceased. Then there was a faint whooshing noise, and the wind carried a warm breath of burned hydrocarbon.
Suddenly she saw it, hovering right above her. There were no wings and no tail structure— the thing was just an aerodynamic shape, like an elongated Frisbee, black against the opalescent cloud. It made a sound like a crowd in a distant stadium, a far-off roaring, and Dagmar realized it was propelled by arrays of the same miniturbines that served as backup power for her computer. There had to be some method of directing the thrust so that the machine could hover or fly in any direction. From the smell, Dagmar assumed the machine was loaded with some form of high-powered aviation fuel, as opposed to the stuff in her computer, a substance that, at the insistence of the Department of Homeland Security, couldn’t burn fast enough to be used to blow up an airplane.
“I see it!” she said into her phone. “It’s right over my head!”
“How far above you?”
“Maybe twenty feet. It’s hard to say. I can’t tell how large it is.”
“We’ll take it down three meters.”
The tone of the turbines shifted, and the machine wafted gently toward Dagmar. The hydrocarbon smell grew stronger.
“Right,” Mordechai said. “We’ve got you. It was hard picking you out from the background. Stand by.”
The drone was, Dagmar guessed, about eight feet long. Despite the gusting of the monsoon, the machine hovered with perfect stillness in the air, its fly-by-wire computer adjusting to every shift of the wind.
“Hold out your hand,” Mordechai said. There was amusement in his voice.
Dagmar put out her right hand, her left hand still holding the phone to her ear. The package dropped and bounced off Dagmar’s forearm, then fell to the rooftop with a little slap.
“Have you got it?” Mordechai asked.
Dagmar knelt, swept her hand over the roof, and found the package. Her fingers closed around it.
“I have it,” she said.
She straightened and looked up in time to see the drone take off, its low roar increasing as it turned northeast and flew away with surprising rapidity. She watched it until it disappeared into the night.
“You want to be careful with that money,” Mordechai said. “What you had before was maybe not worth killing over, but what you’ve got now can get you killed very fast.”
Dagmar felt an invisible hand clamp over her throat. She managed to speak in a kind of whisper.
“How much is it?” she said.
“Two thousand dollars. That should pay for a boat to take you away. Now listen.”
He told her that she should split the package up once she got it to her room, carry it in different places so she wouldn’t be peeling bills off a huge roll and offering someone far too much temptation.
“Right,” she said. “No temptation. Got it.”
FROM: Joe Clever
Widjihartani’s got money for fuel. I don’t know how. Apparently Charlie arranged it.
Widji’s on the way to Jakarta, and he’s got a satellite phone so that he can be told where he needs to anchor. Or dock, as the case may be.
Sea rescue is go!
FROM: Desi
Bayangan Prajurit is go!
FROM: LadyDayFan
Evacuation is go!
FROM: Corporal Carrot
Thunderbirds are go!
FROM: Corporal Carrot
Sorry about that last, by the way. My enthusiasm got the better of me.
FROM: Hanseatic
That’s all right. I knew someone was going to say it.
Dagmar helped the Tippels move eight floors up from their looted hotel room. It took the elderly couple a long time to slog their way up the stairs— the elevators, when they were working, were now reserved for looters.
None of them had eaten in more than twenty-four hours, and Dagmar gave her guests the stale rolls she’d smuggled out of the breakfast room five days ago. She couldn’t do anything about the temperature: the power had been out for fifteen or sixteen hours, and the room was at least a hundred degrees— and since it was a modern hotel, all glass and steel, there was no way to open a window.
She had considered offering to take them with her when she made her exit, but the European Union was in the process of arranging an evacuation, and the Tippels had decided to wait. Dagmar asked how they planned to get past the looters.
“The looters have no reason to stop anyone from leaving,” Anna Tippel said.
What, Dagmar wondered, did reason have to do with anything?
Be in the northwest stairwell at 1600 hours. It was the stair farthest from the front doors, and one that the looters weren’t using: the Bayangan Prajurit didn’t want to risk a collision with whatever group was gutting the hotel.
Dagmar was ready a quarter of an hour early, sitting in the hot, stale air of the staircase and waiting for the sound of her rescuers. She had her satellite phone on her belt and her laptop in a rucksack— in view of the amount of cash she had on her person, she was no longer worried about someone killing her just for her computer. Her bag held toiletries and a change of clothing. She wore her panama hat on her gray hair and Reeboks on her feet and couldn’t tell if her current mood of buoyant optimism was a good thing or not.
Perhaps she was light-headed with lack of food.
Minutes crept by. Sweat dripped off Dagmar’s nose and splashed on the concrete stair landing. At 1600 hours she cracked open the steel door to see if the Bayangan Prajurit had used stealthy martial arts skills to creep up without her hearing them, but the street was empty except for a few nervous-looking civilians scuttling in the shadows. Hot air blasted through the open door, and she closed it quickly. Frustration clattered in her nerves.
In another ten minutes she was convinced that the whole rescue had been an absurd fantasy, some kind of wild delusion that had possessed LadyDayFan and all the others. A bunch of game hobbyists, planning a real-life rescue half a world away? Insane.
She paced back and forth along the landing, muscles trembling with anger. She checked her phone repeatedly to make sure no one had left her a message, either voice mail or email.
Through the steel door she heard the sound of a vehicle. Doors slammed. More doors slammed than would have been present on a single vehicle, so there was more than one.
Dagmar’s heart raced. She tipped back her hat and wiped sweat from her forehead with an already-soaked handkerchief.
Through the door, she heard Javanese voices.
They could be Bayangan Prajurit. Or looters. Or killers.
She looked at her phone again, saw that no message waited, then returned it to its holster.
The stairwell was more airless than ever. For some reason she thought of the skating rink in the shopping center down the street, trendy young people turning slow circles to pop tunes recorded before Dagmar was born.
Oh hell, she thought. Now or never.
She clutched the door’s locking bar with white-knuckled hands, then pushed the door open a foot or so. The hinges groaned, and Dagmar’s nerves shrieked in response.
As she stared out, she saw a group of Javans looking back at her. There were about ten of them altogether, and three small cars. The men didn’t wear uniforms like the Bersih Jantung Association—- they were in ordinary street wear— but the oldest of them, a compact, fit-looking man of fifty or so, wore a loose white top and trousers, with a brilliantly colored wraparound knee-length kilt. All had weapons thrust into their belts or sashes, and each of the men wore a kopiah head wrap, blue with a white pattern, with two subdued little peaks on the top of the head, as if to cover a pair of small horns.
In the States, the kopiah would have made a particularly stylish do-rag.
One young woman was with them. She was still in her teens and was taller than the leader, wearing a wide-sleeved blouse in tropical colors and dark pantaloons. Metal-rimmed glasses were set on her squarish face. Her hair was pulled back in a little bun, and she had a long, sheathed knife thrust through her belt.
When she saw Dagmar, her mouth opened, revealing prominent teeth in a brilliant smile.
The older man looked at Dagmar.
“Dogma?” he said.
“Yes,” Dagmar said. “I’m Dagmar.”
“Please,” said the man, with a stiff little bow. He made a gesture toward a white sedan.
A young man in a wife-beater shirt jumped to open the rear door. Another opened the trunk and walked toward Dagmar with hands outstretched to take her bag.
The young woman approached first, stepping in front of the young man. She was still smiling.
“I’m Putri,” she said. “Please come with us.”
“Yes,” Dagmar said. “Thank you.”
She pushed the door open all the way and stepped onto the sidewalk. Afternoon heat shimmered up around her: the atmosphere seemed scarcely more breathable than the close air in the stairwell. The young man bustled up around Putri and took Dagmar’s bag, then waited expectantly for the knapsack. Dagmar shrugged out of the shoulder straps and handed the computer ruck to him. He put both in the trunk and slammed the lid.
Dagmar stepped into the car. It smelled of tobacco, cloves, and hot plastic. One of the young men, very polite, closed the door for her.
Putri trotted around the car and joined Dagmar in the backseat. The older man gave a quiet command and the others ran into their cars. The three vehicles made U-turns and sped away.
Dagmar looked over her shoulder to see the Royal Jakarta receding.
Putri was still smiling at her.
“Where are you from?” the girl asked.
Dagmar laughed and told her.
FROM: Desi
My friend Eric tells me that Bayangan means “phantom” or “shadow,” and that Prajurit is “warrior.” So the Bayangan Prajurit are Phantom Warriors. Pretty cool, huh?
FROM: Hanseatic
Phantom Warriors? Are they like Indonesian ninjas or what?
FROM: Desi
I don’t think so. I think it’s just one of those elaborate names that martial artists use, like Golden Crane White Tiger Long Fist Kung Fu. But I could be wrong.
The Bayangan Prajurit convoy avoided the highways and worked their way east and north in short legs, sometimes backtracking when they didn’t like the look of an area. The older man, whose name, according to Putri, was Mr. Abu Bakar, was on his cell phone continuously— negotiating, Putri said, with groups that controlled the neighborhoods they were passing through.
When they had to take an overpass over a highway, or a bridge across one of the city’s many canals, one car was sent forward to scout, to make certain there was no ambush. Some of the bridges had roadblocks on them, cars drawn across the roadway, and then Abu Bakar came forward to negotiate. Sometimes they were turned away and had to find an alternate route. On other occasions, Abu Bakar paid a toll with sacks of rice that were carried in the lead vehicle.
Jakarta was like Los Angeles in a way, a series of small towns blended together. Some areas featured tall glass office buildings or apartments; some had private homes; some had apartment buildings clustered together. The homes were quiet; businesses were shuttered.
Everywhere there was greenery. The Jakartans liked living among trees.
Or perhaps, in the tropics, you couldn’t keep the green from springing up.
Only in the poor areas, the kampungs, were numbers of people seen— their apartments were too small for anything but sleeping, so life had to be lived in the open whether there was a political and economic crisis or not. The destruction of the currency had hit the rich and the middle classes, but the poor had no savings to lose. What they had lost were jobs: in the streets, Dagmar saw people who would normally have been at work playing football or standing in groups or gambling with whatever passed for currency in an economy where the money had become so much toilet paper.
On one occasion she saw them engaged in a sport that looked like volleyball played with the feet, kicking sometimes from a handstand position. The game was fascinating, but the car raced by too quickly for Dagmar to get a good look.
She got on her handheld and sent a message to LadyDayFan, Charlie, and Tomer Zan that she was on her way.
No one tried to stop her from sending the message. If they were kidnappers, she thought hopefully, they would have kept her from communicating.
After two hours of transit, the convoy drew up before a canal, one equipped with a drawbridge of the same type Dagmar had seen in Amsterdam. The drawbridge was up but came down as soon as the cars appeared. Children playing in the canal stared from the water as the cars crossed.
Abu Bakar put down his cell phone for the first time. He turned around in his seat and looked at Dagmar.
“You okay?” he said.
“Okay,” she said.
He gave her an encouraging smile, then faced forward again. Dagmar guessed he had pretty well exhausted his English.
The convoy passed over the bridge, between two shabby canalside warehouses with red tile roofs, and into a residential area. The principal streets were laid out in a grid, but the smaller streets, very narrow, crept and zigzagged between apartment blocks. There were bright plastic awnings, lines hung with laundry, flags, umbrellas— anything, Dagmar suspected, to provide shade. Broken plaster showed that the buildings were made of red brick, with roofs of metal or worn red tile. The structures were old and sagged a bit, sinking into the soft ground. Zigzag cracks demonstrated that bricks were a very poor construction material in an earthquake zone. The tile roofs often had green plants, and even small bushes, sprouting from the crumbling red clay.
The vehicles passed a small neighborhood mosque and drew up in front of a long building. The brick walls had been plastered and painted white, with neat, bright blue and red lettering. Dagmar recognized “Bayangan Prajurit” amid other words she didn’t know.
Doors opened. Abu Bakar opened Dagmar’s door, and said, “Please.”
The building turned out to be the group’s training hall. The place was scrupulously clean. Racks for weapons stood along the walls, half of them empty. A large photo of a distinguished-looking man, perhaps the style’s founder, stood on one wall between a pair of Indonesian flags.
A group of women sat on a raised platform at one end of the room. Cooking smells brightened the air. Dagmar felt her mouth begin to water.
Dagmar removed her shoes at the entrance along with the others. The boy in the wife-beater shirt brought in her baggage and placed it by the door.
Dagmar looked at the springy split-bamboo floor, ideal for percussive exercise, and reflected that in Los Angeles, fashionable homeowners would have paid a lot of money for a floor just like this one.
She turned to Putri. “How long are we staying here?”
“Till the boat comes. The boat won’t come till night.”
“How will we know when the boat arrives?”
“The captain will call on his phone.”
On his satellite phone. Of course.
“Please,” said Putri, waving a hand in the direction of the circle of women. “We thought you might want to eat.”
“Thank you!”
Dagmar approached the platform eagerly. The women looked up at her— they were young girls in their teens under the direction of an older woman, and they had prepared a large pot of rice and a number of other dishes set in a circle around the rice bowl.
One of the girls gave Dagmar a bowl, and she was prepared to seat herself with the others when a thought struck her. She turned to Putri.
“Food must be scarce here,” she said. “I don’t want to take anyone’s food.”
Putri absorbed this, then nodded.
“That is kind of you,” she said. “But in our kampung we have food. One of those gudangs we passed— storage places?”
“Warehouses?”
“Yes. Warehouses. One of the gudangs was full of rice. So now we have a lot of rice, and the head man of our kampung can trade this rice for other kinds of food.” She smiled. “So we are poor here, but not starving.”
“Is Abu Bakar the head man?”
“No. That is Mr. Billy the Kid. You may meet him later.”
Dagmar was hungry but couldn’t keep the question from her lips.
“Billy the Kid? Is that a name his English teacher gave him?”
“No,” Putri said patiently, “it’s his Indonesian name. American names are very popular here, and Mr. Billy the Kid was named after a character played by Paul Newman in the cinema.”
Dagmar could think of no response but a nod.
Dagmar moved to seat herself with the other women, who gladly made room for her. She noticed that several of the young girls carried knives in their belts, and she was pleased that women were allowed to study martial arts here, in a Muslim country. No one had imposed burkas on these women, not yet.
The food was lovely, and carefully prepared. Dagmar praised it extravagantly. Her stomach had shrunk in the day and a half since her last meal, and that helped her eat slowly. The girls were talkative, and those who had English were eager to practice it. Dagmar answered the usual questions and asked questions of her own.
Time passed. The young men wandered in and out. Abu Bakar talked with the older woman, who Putri said was his wife. Dagmar looked out the rear window and saw an undeveloped area, partly under a shallow lake, that stretched from the rear of the building toward an industrial district in the distance. There was a petrochemical smell— perhaps the lake was used for dumping.
The kampung, backed up against this desolate area, with its canal and drawbridges, was practically an island. That made it very defensible, assuming of course that anyone ever found it worth attacking.
The sun drew close to the horizon. The evening call for prayer went up from the neighboring mosque, but those in the training hall ignored it as if it were nothing more than birdsong.
If you were religious enough to pray, Dagmar supposed, you were probably in the mosque already.
As the muezzin fell silent, Dagmar approached Putri. She reached for one of the pockets where she had stashed some of her money, opened the pocket button, and offered Putri three hundred dollars.
“Could you give this to Abu Bakar for me?” she asked. “For the poor people in the kampung?”
Putri was astonished. For a moment her English deserted her, and she could only nod. She walked to Abu Bakar and gestured for Dagmar to follow. Putri handed Abu Bakar the money, and the two conducted a rapid conversation in Javanese. Then Abu Bakar turned to Dagmar and held out the money.
“He says,” said Putri, “that you don’t have to pay. We are doing this for the sake of our own —” She paused, then made a valiant attempt at the proper English. “For our spirit. For our own development.”
Dagmar’s mind spun. She had wanted this not to be noblesse oblige, a round-eyed female handing out hundred-dollar bills like tips. She genuinely liked these people; she wanted them to be well.
She put out a hand and pressed the bills back toward Abu Bakar.
“For the children,” she said. “For medicine and— whatever.”
Putri translated. Abu Bakar thought for a moment, then gravely put the money into a pocket.
“Thank you, Miss Dogma,” he said.
A cell phone rang. Dagmar recognized a ring tone by Linkin Park. One of the young men answered, then gave the phone to Abu Bakar.
In a few moments everything was motion. Dagmar found herself back in the white sedan with Putri and Abu Bakar, her luggage in the trunk. The convoy moved out, traveling under running lights on the blacked-out streets. They crossed another drawbridge out of the kampung, then turned north. Abu Bakar was back on his cell phone, talking to his friends and allies.
Bags of rice were exchanged, and the group passed through a roadblock into another kampung. The cars passed young men carrying spears and wavy-edged blades. Taillights glowed on the red brick buildings.
The convoy passed through an industrial area, factories looking out with rows of blind glass eyes. Dagmar caught sight of a tank farm off to the left, glowing eerily in the moonlight.
The convoy came to a canal, and a roadblock on a bridge. The cars paused on the deserted road. Dagmar saw a Coca-Cola sign hanging loose on a shuttered fast-food place. The lead car moved up to the roadblock; there was some shouted Javanese, then there were cries and martial yells. Dagmar’s heart lurched as she saw moonlight on sharp blades. There were the bangs of weapons striking the car, and then taillights flashed and the car came roaring back as fast as it could come, a mob in pursuit. Abu Bakar yelled out orders. His young driver faced to the rear and put the car in reverse, his face all staring eyes and moist lips. He couldn’t move until the rearmost car reversed, and the rear car wasn’t moving.
Dagmar was aware only of being trapped, that she could die in this car and not know what to do.
There was a metallic noise as Putri drew her knife. Dagmar stared at it. It was unlike any knife she’d ever seen, a nasty S-shaped thing with a bright little hook at the end, just the size to cut off someone’s finger.
TINAG, she thought. This is not a game.
There was a flash, a bang, and a singing of metal. Someone was shooting.
Abu Bakar leaned out the window and yelled at the driver of the rear car. Then all three cars were scrambling backward as fast as they could go. Crumbling brick walls shot past, and parked vehicles. Whoever had the gun held his fire.
After it put some distance between itself and pursuit, the convoy sorted itself out and began moving westward. Abu Bakar shouted into his cell phone. Dagmar tried to slow her racing heart.
“That kampung,” Putri said, her face white, “was captured by friends of the military.” She sheathed her knife.
“I see,” Dagmar said. She was trying not to gasp for breath.
Abu Bakar managed to reroute his convoy. Now the tank farm was on the right. Then Dagmar scented the iodine smell of the sea, and her nerves gave a little thrill. Despite all obstacles, they had managed to come near the sea. The sea, where rescue floated somewhere in the darkness.
The convoy moved east, and now there was water on the left. Then the convoy turned left and was driving down a long jetty. Wooden schooners floated left and right, all in the local style, with a distinctive raked prow. Some had anchored out in the water, where no one could reach them, but some were drawn right to the pier, their fabulously raked stems and bowsprits hanging over the jetty like openmouthed sharks caught in the act of devouring their prey.
The convoy drove unmolested to the end of the pier. Abu Bakar, very calm now, made a call on the cell phone.
Doors opened. People got out of the cars, stretched, breathed in the sea-drenched scent of the land breeze. Dagmar wandered about in a daze.
A boat engine throbbed somewhere in the darkness. The lead car flashed its headlights. Dagmar stared hopefully out to sea, and then she saw it, a blue and white boat with a tall mast and an extravagantly raked stem in the local fashion. The engine cut out, and the boat made a gentle curve and came up broadside to the jetty. Two crew members threw out rope mats to cushion any impact with the pier, then cast lines to lasso bollards with practiced efficiency. Dagmar saw that jerricans of fuel were lashed to the pilot house. A man in a baseball cap peered out of the pilot house and called over.
“Is Dagmar here?”
She wanted to jump in the air, whoop, wave her arms.
“I’m here,” she said, and then realized her voice was pitched too low. “I’m here!” she repeated, louder this time.
“Good! Come on the boat!”
Dagmar took the time to embrace Putri, the girl who had been willing to draw a knife to protect her. She hugged Abu Bakar as well, much to his surprise. And then she let Widjihartani in his baseball cap help her onto the boat. Lines were cast off, and Dagmar’s last view of Indonesia was of her rescuers lined up on the pier, silhouetted against the car lights, waving as she set off on her return to the Western Paradise.
I never got to meet Billy the Kid, she thought.
Maybe next time.
The dawn rose over the moving ocean, throwing the schooner’s long, dark shadow before it over the sea. Red sun twinkled from the wave caps, long rollers driven by the dry monsoon. Java was well out of sight, but there were islands off the starboard bow. Dagmar stared out over the stern and smelled breakfast cooking.
Suddenly “Harlem Nocturne” rang out over the throb of the engine. Dagmar saw “Charlies Friend” on the display, laughed, and answered.
“Hello, darling,” said Tomer Zan. “How are you?”
“I’m in a boat,” Dagmar said, “heading for Singapore.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Good,” Zan said finally. “The helicopter was crap anyway.”
“Well,” said Dagmar, “I’m sure you tried your best.”
No points to you, she thought.
No world domination, no donut.