Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

“That’s good,” she said, “because I’ve got a job for you.”

“A job? ” For the first time, he seemed surprised.

“Not for money,” she said, and then corrected herself. “Not unless you want money, I mean. What I want is for you to find the killer.”

He frowned. “That Litvinov guy? It looked like he wasn’t part of the game.”

“He is now,” Dagmar said.

Joe Clever considered this. “Interesting,” he said.

“When you find him,” Dagmar said, “don’t approach him or anything. Just let me know-me or the police.”

He scratched his chin. “Where do I start? ”

“If I knew,” she said, “I couldn’t tell you. I’m the puppetmaster. I’m the one who decides what the puzzles are.”

“Yeah.” He offered a faint smile. “It’s a cool idea, Dagmar.”

And it would get Joe Clever out of her hair while she had the office scanned for bugs and shifted details of the game around to make worthless any information he might have discovered through eavesdropping.

A look of uncertainty crossed Joe Clever’s face. “Can I play the game and look for Litvinov at the same time? ”

“Yes. But you get more coolness points for Litvinov.”

He nodded. “Okay. Great. I’ll do it.”

“Thanks.”

“Oh-” Joe Clever looked over Dagmar’s head toward her apartment. “I should tell you. Some guy went into your apartment about an hour ago.”

Dagmar was staggered. “What? ” she asked. “Who? ”

“I don’t know, but he had a key. Let me show you.”

He reached into the van’s interior for his laptop, pulled it toward him, and bent to use the touch pad. A film appeared, and she saw a dumpy, middle-aged man approach her apartment, look over his shoulder, then insert a key and enter.

“That’s the building manager,” Dagmar said. “Richardson.”

“He was in your place for six minutes.”

Dagmar stared at the picture. “What the hell for?” she wondered.

“I suppose he could have been there to repair something,” Joe Clever said, “but my guess is that he was poking around in your underwear drawer.”

“He what? ” Rage filled Dagmar’s heart. “How do you know? ”

“I think it was the expression on his face when he left.” He tapped buttons and fast-forwarded to the moment when the manager left her apartment.

The man did manage to look both furtive and smug.

“The bastard!” Dagmar said. “I’m going to check!”

She swung away from the van, but Joe Clever called her back.

“You forgot your dinner.”

She took the fast-food bag from his hand and marched to her apartment.

Normally the problem with her underwear drawer would have been that it was too disorganized to actually tell if anything was missing: it wasn’t as if she bothered to line up and number her underpants. But there was no clean underwear.

She’d remembered that she’d thought she’d had enough to last her the next few days, and then thought she’d miscounted.

But she hadn’t miscounted after all. The superintendent had been in her drawer, just as Joe Clever had suggested.

Filled with fury, she stepped out onto the balcony that overlooked the courtyard and looked down. There, carrying out a garbage bag from the clubhouse, was the creep himself.

“Hey!” she called. “Richardson!”

Faces looked up at her from around the classic 1970s coffin-shaped swimming pool. Two young women tanned there, model-slash-actresses with large breasts that pointed skyward in a clearly artificial way, and a short distance away from them was an elderly man who swam slow laps every afternoon and then sat on a chaise longue to dry out and absorb some warmth from the sun.

Richardson looked up at her and shielded his eyes from the glare.

“Do you need something? ” he asked.

“I need you to stay the hell out of my underwear drawer, you fucking creep!” Dagmar yelled. “Come in my apartment again, and I’ll kick your ass!”

She watched as a series of complicated expressions crossed Richardson’s face. Whatever the reaction was, it wasn’t that of an innocent man.

Busted! she thought, triumphant.

Richardson shuffled a step closer.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“I’ve got video, you fucking pervert! ” Dagmar shouted. “You wanna watch it? ”

Even from the third-floor balcony she could see the color drain from Richardson’s face. Enlightenment dawned across the faces of the model-slash-actresses. Perhaps they had missed a few items themselves.

Richardson dropped the garbage bag and flapped his hands in a vague way. Dagmar found that infuriating.

“I’ll have your job, prick!” she shouted, and then she went back into her apartment and slammed the door.

The one good thing about surviving the Indonesian holocaust, she thought, was that she was no longer afraid of anyone who wasn’t carrying a gun or a damn big knife.

A new digital dead bolt was installed on Dagmar’s apartment door early the following morning. A few hours later a pair of private security contractors, wearing identical tan blazers, swept through the Great Big Idea offices and failed to find any eavesdropping gear planted there by Joe Clever or anybody else. To counter the laser eavesdropping system, they were happy to sell Dagmar white-noise generators to provide interference, and detectors to sound an alarm when a laser was directed at the room.

“I want a death ray,” she told them, “to shoot back.” Her science fiction background coming to the fore.

“If you shoot a laser back at them,” one man said, “you could blind them.”

“They could blind me.”

They nodded.

“True,” one said. “They could.”

In any case, the Tan Blazer Men doubted that Joe Clever could get close enough to the building to hear much of anything, not without being seen.

“It depends on how good his software is at sorting signal from interference.”

“Great,” Dagmar said. “I could have been blinded for nothing.”

Dagmar tried to pass the news to Charlie, but his secretary, Karin, said that Charlie had called in and said he wouldn’t be coming to the office today.

Maybe sorting out Austin’s company was a knottier problem than he’d anticipated.

Dagmar looked out the window to see if the Dodge van was visible before calling in her design team and letting them know that their meeting of two days before had possibly been compromised and that they were going to have to rework everything that had been decided on that day.

They were in a vengeful mood. They decided not only to shift all the game goodies to different locations, but to lay ambushes in the compromised areas.

“Anyone going into Planet Nine and looking under that gantry is going to find three heavily armed sharpshooters from Team Evil who are going to take him apart!”

Or so Helmuth, her head programmer, proclaimed. Dagmar waved a hand to give the plan her blessing.

“And if they find any of the pages we discussed,” Dagmar said, “we’ll fill them with information that leads nowhere.”

“Information,” Helmuth said darkly, “written in Estonian.”

It was only after the meeting that Dagmar had a chance to go online and see what had been happening in the game world.

Joe Clever’s video of Austin’s death, which Video Us had not as yet removed, had generated more than eleven million hits.

And in the past forty-eight hours, another 3,600,000 people had joined The Long Night of Briana Hall.

Ghouls, she thought.

She checked her email, and all sense of accomplishment evaporated.

FROM: Siyed Prasad

SUBJECT: Holiday in L.A.