Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

“Okay,” he said. “Only if I catch him alone.”

She stabbed the Stop button and cut off the call. It was only then that her phone chimed to tell her that she had voice mail. Her nerves gave a jolt as she recognized Joe Clever’s voice.

“Dagmar,” he said, “I found Litvinov! He’s in room three twenty-two of the Seahorse Hotel in Santa Monica, registered under the Vilumanis name. I wanted to make sure that it was the right guy, so I got a pizza and went to the door and pretended I was delivering to the wrong room. It was him all right!”

Dagmar stared at the office window, the twilight outside.

“I don’t know what to do now,” Joe Clever went on. “Do I call the police or what?

“He was pretty good,” he added. “He stayed in character the whole time.”

Dagmar had reached for a pen and jotted down the relevant information. It took her a few frantic moments to locate Lieutenant Murdoch’s card, and then when she called, he wasn’t in. She persuaded whoever had answered that it was an emergency, and he told her to hang up and expect a return call from Murdoch.

The call came in two minutes. But by the time the police burst into Litvinov’s room, the assassin was gone.

FROM: Joe Clever

SUBJECT: Re: Stakeout

No, it wasn’t that I alarmed him with the pizza trick. I thought that

went real smooth. I think the police must have made a mistake setting

up their raid.

The Seahorse is a big hotel and I couldn’t watch every exit, so I kept the

front office under surveillance in case Litvinov checked out, but he must

have gone out the back way. His transportation must have been back

there, too, because the police didn’t find his bike or a car or anything.

What do I do now? Keep checking hotels and stuff?

FROM: Dagmar Shaw

SUBJECT: Re: re: Stakeout

Keep checking hotels and stuff.

Don’t contact him this time. Once is intelligible; twice begins to look

like carelessness.

It was hard dealing with Austin’s parents. The mother was prone to silent weeping, and the father was angry. He insisted on going straight to the coroner’s office to make certain that they hadn’t made some kind of mistake. Charlie drove the minivan he’d rented for them, and Dagmar sat in the back with Austin’s mother.

She knew that Austin’s parents had met over gaming, playing D &D back in the seventies. She tried to find the college-aged gamers in them and failed.

She couldn’t bring herself to see Austin’s body. When the father emerged after the viewing, he was pale but angrier than ever. He complained over the forms necessary to ship Austin’s body home to Connecticut and then demanded to meet Lieutenant Murdoch.

Murdoch worked out of the North Hollywood Station, which rather implausibly shared its building with the Studio City Chamber of Commerce. Murdoch had met a lot of grieving parents, fortunately, and met Austin’s father with a bland, helpful demeanor that helped to redirect his anger. He explained that Litvinov would certainly be caught sooner or later, probably when he tried to leave the country, and that a police raid had missed him only by a few minutes the day before, in Santa Monica.

Murdoch tactfully refrained from telling Austin’s parents that the raid had been spoiled when Litvinov was spooked by the appearance on his doorstep of a wild-haired amateur detective claiming to be a pizza delivery man.

Dagmar watched the detectives in their squad room, knowing this would end up in a piece of fiction one day. She noted the metal desks in cubicles, the glowing computers, the pictures of family on the desks, the soft-spoken detectives who contrasted with the wild variety of other people in the room-the slumped or frantic victims, the defiant suspects, the transvestite with the calico dress and the heavy five o’clock shadow, and others too drunk or stoned to do more than sit and stare dully at their surroundings.

Everyone seemed right out of central casting. All that was needed were three sassy hookers.

Lots of guns, she noted. She didn’t know if that made her feel safe or not.

By the time Charlie returned Austin’s parents to their hotel on Cienega, they were clearly exhausted.

“I’ll let you rest,” Charlie said, “and then I’ll take you to Katanyan Associates tomorrow morning.”

Charlie and Dagmar left the room, and Charlie turned to Dagmar. “Can we talk? ”

“Sure.”

“This way.”

Dagmar followed Charlie down the corridor to another hotel room, where his thumbprint opened the lock. She followed him into the room, which turned out to be a corner suite decorated in a Hollywood version of Louis Quinze and scented with sachets of potpourri. A notebook computer sat on a white marble-topped table in the corner, its display showing a Pinky and the Brain screensaver.

“You’re staying in the same hotel? ” Dagmar asked.

“It makes things more convenient.” He went to the minibar and pulled out a half-liter bottle of Coca-Cola-imported from Mexico, where Coke was made with white sugar instead of corn syrup and therefore tasted far better. Charlie had cases of the stuff at his house, and more in a cooler near his office.

“Want something to drink? ” he asked.

She took another Coke. Charlie sat on a patterned armchair and began to unlace his shoes.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “I’m going to try to explain to the Katanyans just how wealthy their son was. Mr. Katanyan’s well off, I think, but as Austin’s heir he’s rich twenty times over.” He ran a hand over his balding head. “My nightmare is that Mr. Katanyan will think he can run his son’s company.”

“He wouldn’t. Would he? ”

“He runs his own import company, why not? But there are some crucial differences between seed-stage venture capital and a family-run Oriental carpet business.”

Dagmar didn’t answer, but instead looked at the minibar.

“Are there peanuts or something in there? ”

“Help yourself.”

She found a packet of peanuts and seated herself on a sofa. Charlie looked at her.

“Now,” he said, “I don’t want you to scream.”

She gave him a narrow look.

“I want you to change the game,” he said, and then cut her off as she was about to protest.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “This will add to the coolness factor.”

“I’m listening,” she said, and put down the packet of peanuts.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ve got more than a million players, right?”

“More than three million, as of this morning.”

“So what if they each received a text message that consisted of one packet of data. Encrypted. And when they decrypted it, they discovered that they still had only one packet of data and that they all had to be combined in the right order for the message to make sense.”

Dagmar looked at him.

“How big is a packet? ” she asked.

“No smaller than twenty bytes, no bigger than sixty.”

“The routing information might be larger than the message.”

“Yes.” Charlie nodded. “It would. But the routing information could be a part of the puzzle. If you include the IP layer, it would include the originating IP address, which could be crucial to finding out who sent the messages.”

Slowly, Dagmar lifted her drink and took a contemplative sip.

“One big problem,” she said, “is that a lot of our players don’t actually play, they just lurk.”

“So make the number of messages smaller and build in a lot of redundancy.”

“Okay. So we break the message into, say, three thousand packets, and we send out multiple copies of each packet until everybody gets one. Then they have to decode the thing, right? ”