Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

“Okay,” she said. “Next question.” She looked over her shoulder, made certain the corridor was empty. “Are you involved with the Maffya? ”

Charlie was beyond astonishment. The question left him openmouthed.

“Me? ” he managed.

“Yes.”

He put a hand on her arm.

“Dagmar,” he said, “I make software. I make autonomous agents to help business and government manage complex systems.” He gave an incredulous laugh. “I help ordinary people make shopping decisions. I help filter spam, for Christ’s sake.”

Dagmar licked dry lips.

“You have these foreign backers,” she said. “None of us have ever met them.”

Again he gave a laugh.

“No,” he said. “None of them are Russian.”

Then he stepped back, put both his hands on the sides of his head in a parody of astonishment.

“Dagmar! ” His voice rose to a kind of geeky shriek, unusual in a man of his height and dignity. “How long have we known each other? I can’t believe you’ve been thinking this!”

Dagmar felt heat rise to her cheeks.

“Sorry,” she said. “But it occurred to me that the killer might have been after you, not Austin.”

He looked at her in sudden silence, and lowered his hands. “What do you mean? ”

“You’re the same physical type. You wear glasses and he didn’t, but he was wearing shades. Your faces are different, but behind the cap and sunglasses, that might not have been apparent. You were even wearing the same color shirt.”

Charlie raised his arms again and looked at his new shirt.

“Jesus, Dagmar,” he said.

“Okay.” Dagmar waved a hand. “I’m clearly out of my mind. Go to your meeting, okay? ”

“Sure.” He reached for the elevator button and pressed it, then shook his head.

“Damn,” he said. “You’re fucking scary, you know that? ”

Dagmar ventured a tight little smile.

“PTSD,” she said. “But I’m learning how to manage it.”

Exhausted, Dagmar went home in midafternoon. On the way she stopped at a Beef Bowl drive-through, and the scent of the beef, rice, and ginger rising in her dented old Prius rekindled her faded appetite.

It had been a long time since that piece of toast.

Dagmar lived in a two-room apartment in the valley, less than two miles from AvN Soft. The building had been built in the 1970s, was three stories tall, and surrounded a courtyard with palm trees, a swimming pool, and a clubhouse with a couple of Ping-Pong tables and humming soda machines.

Dagmar lived on the top floor so that when the Big One hit, she’d pancake on the people below and not be pancaked herself. She figured that was only sensible.

Even though Charlie paid her very well, she still couldn’t afford California real estate, and she didn’t have time to take care of a house anyway. So she put her money where Charlie and Austin told her to put it, and watched it grow with a kind of abstract joy completely void of comprehension.

She’d grown up poor, in apartments of decreasing splendor off Detroit Avenue in Cleveland. She knew the value of a dollar, of twenty dollars, of a hundred.

The kind of numbers that Charlie dealt with every day were beyond her ken. A hundred thousand dollars was a statistic. A million a fantasy.

She had a couple of hundred thousand in the market, but it was just Monopoly money to her.

Monopoly money that was growing. Regular paychecks and a rising market, she had found, were a good reinforcement.

She parked in front of the ginkgo bush, took her beef bowl in its white paper bag from the worn passenger seat of the Prius, and legged out of the car. She was about to give her thumbprint to the electronic lock on the wrought-iron gate when she noticed the white Dodge van parked in one of the building’s visitor spaces.

The van, she saw, had a satellite uplink. If she hadn’t had a very paranoid twenty-four hours, she might not have noticed the detail.

Andy’s Electronic Service, she read on the door.

Dagmar walked along the wrought-iron gate and placed herself directly between the car and her apartment door, on the third-floor corner.

The sight lines were perfect. Whoever was in the van had an unobstructed view of the front of her apartment.

Anger crackled along her nerves. She pulled her handheld from its holster, opened a file, thumbed in the license number, and mailed it to herself. Then she stalked up to the van and peered through the dark glass of the driver’s-side window. Joe Clever’s surprised face stared at her for a brief second before he vanished into the back of the vehicle. She walked to the rear of the van and banged on the door.

“Hey!” she shouted. “Come out of there!”

She kicked the door.

“I can stay here all day, motherfucker!” she yelled. “Get your ass out here!”

“Don’t dent my van!” came a muffled voice. “I’m coming out!”

One of the rear doors opened, and Joe Clever climbed out, lanky body unfolding as he dropped his sneakers onto the pavement. He was over six feet, appeared to be in his twenties, and had a stoop and dark hair that looked as if he cut it himself with scissors and a pair of mirrors.

Type One Geek.

“Hi, Dagmar,” he said. “Haven’t seen you since the dinner.”

Dagmar had given a dinner at an Indonesian restaurant for those members of the Group Mind who had helped her escape from Indonesia, or at least those who had been able to make it to L.A.

“You’ve seen me since the dinner,” Dagmar said. “It’s just that I haven’t seen you.”

He grinned. He didn’t seem the least embarrassed.

“Yeah!” he said. He stepped to the side so that Dagmar could see the interior of the van. “Pretty cool, huh? ”

“Why don’t you give me the tour? ” Dagmar said.

So he showed her the van, the two-way-mirror side and rear windows, the Pentax on its mount, the lenses sitting in foam in their shockproof steel carrying case, the telescope, the binoculars, and the elegant NKVD-surplus monocular that could be worn on the finger like a ring. Electronic images fed into a laptop computer, which could then upload anything via the satellite uplink.

There was more than one computer, and an online game was frozen on one monitor, something he’d been playing when she showed up.

The van smelled like old fast-food cartons, which it contained in large numbers.

He didn’t show her what she suspected was audio equipment, so Dagmar made a point of asking about it. He showed her his Big Ears, and some smaller surveillance gear he’d purchased in some neighborhood spy store.

So, Dagmar thought, her own office wasn’t secure, not with the big glass window that could be used as a diaphragm for the laser signal.

She’d have to call in some countersurveillance experts.

“I’ve even got some oscilloscopes,” he said. “They don’t really have any function or anything, but I think they’re cool.” Green standing waves hummed in the displays.

“Nice mad-scientist decor,” Dagmar said. “All you need is a Tesla coil.”

“Thanks!” He opened the squeaking lid of a large cooler. “Want a drink to go with your dinner? ”

She chose a lemonade, then climbed out of the van and blinked in the bright California sun. She turned to Joe Clever as he joined her on the asphalt.

“What do you do for a living, anyway? ” she asked.

He adjusted his spectacles. “I play games full-time.”

“I don’t think that pays very well,” Dagmar said.

Joe Clever grinned. “My grandma died and left me an income. Not a big one, I’m not rich or anything-the van is six years old-but I don’t have to work, and sometimes I’ll buy myself a trip to Bangalore or someplace.”

Dagmar looked at the van and the blinking oscilloscopes.