Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

The truth shall set you free. She wanted the truth, but she didn’t want to be free from Great Big Idea.

Keys to the kingdom, she thought.

Austin was dead, and Charlie was going mad, and she didn’t know why.

She added the account number and the tracking number, saved the work, and then sent it to Ninja Ned in the Graphics Department to be stegged into a facsimile memo that would appear on a hidden Web page that would only be opened when someone playing Briana Hall solved a puzzle.

Puzzles, she decided, were going to fall.

The scent of Siyed’s flowers hovered in the air. Dagmar sat on the edge of the desk in her office and looked at the plasma screen on the wall, then down at the speakerphone that sat on the desk by her right hip. She wore her panama hat as if it carried an alternate personality she could adopt. Adrenaline keened in her nerves, like the scraping of a fiddle.

BJ leaned against the window, and Helmuth lounged in Dagmar’s office chair, from which he had just sent out the game’s latest update. His index finger lazily moved over the screen, touching buttons-some of them well hidden-that caused newly loaded Web pages to flash on-screen.

Dagmar watched the wall screen, where the same pages paraded one after the other.

There. The document with the bank account, the numbers that were the key to Charlie’s secrets.

“Looks like everything loaded,” Helmuth said.

If all the pages hadn’t gone up at once, confusion and catastrophe could have resulted. But Dagmar’s suspense did not diminish as Helmuth spoke. She was in Charlieland now, and the suspense wouldn’t go away until she found her way out.

Helmuth began tapping on Dagmar’s ten-key pad. More pages leaped into view, each stacked atop the next. A video began playing, Terri Griff as Briana Hall fleeing from the bad guys who had just whacked Cullen.

“Excellent,” Helmuth said. “So far all the features are working.”

“How many hits are we getting?” Dagmar asked through her dry mouth. She reached for her cup of tea.

Helmuth caressed the screen with his fingers. Data leaped onto the plasma screen. “The page that you’re most interested in,” he said, “has a couple of dozen so far.”

Helmuth was wrong: that wasn’t the page Dagmar was most interested in. But that was fine, too. If the nervousness showed, she had other reasons to be nervous.

“Damn,” said BJ. “These people are quick.”

“Quick they are,” said Dagmar. Laughing. Nervously.

Adrenaline fired a rocket up Dagmar’s spine. In a few moments, after players destegged the memo, they would call Briana’s best friend, Maria Perry. Who, played by Dagmar, would answer.

They watched the hits increase. Tens of thousands of people had noted the update by now, and the number was increasing exponentially as each informed everyone on his network.

Pages that were hidden by puzzles began to open. Dagmar looked down at the speakerphone.

Which rang, right on cue. It was a dedicated line, so she knew no one but a player was on the other end.

She pressed the answer button.

“Hello? ” she said.

“Is this Maria Perry? ”

The male voice had a strong accent, Dagmar guessed Korean or Japanese. She wondered if the caller was phoning from Asia.

“This is Maria,” Dagmar said. “Who is this?”

“This is…” There was a hesitation. Dagmar was familiar with the phenomenon: the player wasn’t sure whether to use his own name or his online handle.

“This is Roh,” he said finally.

“I don’t believe I know you, Roh.” Dagmar tried to sound as harassed and paranoid as Maria was by now, the fourth week in which she was serving as the chief line of defense between her friend Briana and the people who wanted to kill or arrest her.

“I want to help Briana,” Roh said.

“Briana who? ”

“Briana Hall. She is on your Facebook page as your friend.”

“Okay,” Dagmar said. “So I know Briana. But I still don’t know you.”

“You must give Briana a message.”

“What makes you think I know how to reach Briana? ”

“She-she says that you are helping her.”

“Well,” Dagmar said, “if you know her that well, you can give her the message yourself.”

There was a moment of panicked silence.

“You sound like a cop,” Dagmar said. “You sound like you’re trying to trap me.”

“I am not a police,” said Roh.

“Prove it,” said Dagmar.

Again there was silence.

“I’m busy,” Dagmar said. “Talk fast.”

Silence.

“Nice try, Detective,” Dagmar said, and hung up.

BJ looked at her.

“Damn,” he said. “You’re brutal.”

The phone rang an instant later.

“Hello?”

“May I speak to Maria, please?”

Dagmar thought she recognized the voice as an L.A.-based gamer who went by the handle of Hippolyte. And Hippolyte probably recognized Dagmar as well.

TINAG, Dagmar thought. This conversation would only work if both of them stayed in character and ignored the fact that this was a game.

“This is Maria,” she said.

“I know you’ve been a friend of Briana Hall’s since you were at Central High,” Hippolyte said. “I’d like you to send her a message.”

“How do I know,” Dagmar said, “that you’re not the police trying to trap me?”

“The police don’t know about George Weston and his Firebird at the junior prom,” Hippolyte said. “Only someone who knew Briana would know something like that.”

“Okayyy.” Dagmar tried to sound as if she were reluctant to be convinced.

“And then there’s your friend David. He’s gay, but he hasn’t come out to his family or to his boss.”

Dagmar tried to sound as if this last data point had made up her mind.

“What message do you need to send? ”

“I need Briana to know that Rita is working with the police. Briana can’t trust her.”

“Rita? Are you sure?”

“She’s got her phone bugged by the NYPD. They’re just waiting for Briana to call.”

“If that’s the case,” Dagmar said, “then somebody else is going to have to move the package.”

“The package with the evidence from Cullen’s firm?”

Dagmar grinned at Helmuth and gave him a thumbs-up. Hippolyte was right on top of the story.

Hippolyte had given Maria the three pieces of information necessary for the game to proceed. She had to come up with some persuasive background to convince Maria that she was Briana’s friend-the junior prom story was one of several, as were the facts about Maria’s friend David-and then the information about Rita and the knowledge of what was in the package.

“That’s right,” Dagmar said. “The package has been hidden, and there’s a letter in the mail telling Rita where to find it. Somebody’s got to move it before Rita tells the police.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s in Grand Army Plaza, on top of the plinth of Gouverneur Warren’s statue.”

There was a moment of surprise.

“Where’s Grand Army Plaza?” Hippolyte asked.

“ Brooklyn. Are you anywhere near Brooklyn? ”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Hippolyte. Hippolyte was in Southern California, but there were plenty of other players in the New York area who could be counted on to fetch the package.

“How do you spell Gouverneur? ” Hippolyte asked.

Dagmar spelled it for her.

“What should be done with the package? ” Hippolyte asked.

“Send it to Iris Fitzgerald, General Delivery, West Hollywood, nine zero zero four six.”

Which, since Iris Fitzgerald had been established as an alias used by Briana Hall, would serve as a clue to Briana’s location.

The incriminating document, stolen by Cullen before his murder, was a list of fifty cities beneath the words “Water Sources,” which set up the Charlie-mandated subplot involving the contamination of water sources and the boxes from Tapping the Source. And the page also contained a watermark that hid a clue to something else.