Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

Elsewhere among the uploads was a page that would allow players to order Tapping the Source boxes for free. Great Big Idea, with its twenty-five-million-dollar slush fund, was going to buy the players their toys.

“Have you got that?” Dagmar asked.

“Nine zero zero four six,” Hippolyte repeated.

“Thanks,” Dagmar said. “You’ve been a great help.”

And then Dagmar stabbed the button to hang up, slid off her desk, and punched the air.

BJ, still leaning on the window, looked up at her. “Do they really do what you tell them to? ”

“Yes,” Dagmar said. “They do.”

The phone rang again, then went to voice mail, a brief message telling any caller that Maria Perry was no longer at this number. Dagmar picked up the phone and turned off its ringer.

Players might be calling this number all day, hundreds or thousands of them, but to no purpose: Hippolyte had scooped them all.

Helmuth, in the meantime, was tapping his keyboard. He was a precise two-finger typist, and the taps and clicks rattled out in a steady rhythm.

He stopped his typing, then leaned away from the screen.

“Okay,” he said, “now there’s a sound file of your conversation on the archive page. If the player forgets how to spell Gouverneur, the recording will remind her.”

“That was Hippolyte, I think,” Dagmar said.

Helmuth lifted an eyebrow. “Smart girl,” he said. He rose, took his leather jacket from the back of Dagmar’s chair, and shrugged into it.

“I’ve got a meeting,” he said, “with one of our freelance programmers who has been fucking up in a truly hideous and original way. Wish us both luck.”

“Luck,” Dagmar said. Helmuth left.

BJ was looking at the wall screen.

“Is there some way of following the players in real time?” he asked.

“You could count the number of hits. Or you could go on Our Reality Network and watch them work out the puzzles.”

He took a step toward Dagmar’s computer, then hesitated.

“Can I do that here? ” he asked.

“Sure. Be my guest.”

BJ sat at Dagmar’s computer and reached for the keyboard. Dagmar laid a warning hand over his, then used her other hand to reach for the Shift key and hold it down.

“Go to Our Reality Network,” she said.

The browser immediately loaded the ORN’s home page.

“There you go,” Dagmar said.

He looked up at her. “Thanks,” he said.

She stood back, her palm warm from the touch of BJ’s hand.

He watched with undivided attention as the players unraveled the latest mysteries. Dagmar sat in the other chair and watched on the wall screen as the players located the hidden files and encrypted messages. It took them about three hours before they’d found all the hidden Web pages, revealed the video and audio files, and arranged for someone in Brooklyn to pick up Cullen’s hidden document from Grand Army Plaza.

The only puzzle they hadn’t solved was the key to Charlieland. The routing number told them that the twenty-five mil had gone into a Wells Fargo account, but they’d been given that.

There was nothing yet about where the money had come from.

Frustration beat a tattoo on the inside of Dagmar’s skull. She’d risked her job for this, and it wasn’t working. She rubbed her eyes.

BJ leaned back in his chair, his eyes still fixed on the screen.

“You know,” he said, “I could really enjoy becoming a puppetmaster.”

“You already are one,” Dagmar said. She rose from her chair, stood on her tiptoes, stretched.

He smiled, watching her. “I’m a last-second, highly spur-of-the-moment PM at best.”

“You’ve been doing very well.”

“I just hit a snag, though.”

She looked down at him. “Yes? ”

“My laptop’s down.”

“What’s wrong with it? ”

“I think the fan failed, and then everything cooked.” He shook his head. “It’s nothing but a doorstop now. But then it was an antiquated piece of junk anyway.”

“You have another computer, right?”

“No. My high-powered computer was the one at work, but I quit that job to take this one.” He shrugged. “Well, I can afford a hot computer now, thanks to you.”

Dagmar thought for a moment. “You don’t have to buy one right away,” she said. “I’ll give you one.”

He was startled. “You have a spare? ”

“I don’t, but the company does.” She walked toward the door and gestured for him to follow.

“It’s time,” she said, “to visit the assassin.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Not the Russian one?”

Suddenly the situation wasn’t amusing.

“No,” she said curtly. “We have an assassin of our own.”

He then rose heavily from his chair.

“Sure,” he said. “Sounds like…” He hesitated. “Fun,” he said.

AvN Soft’s network security guy worked out of the fifth floor and basked in his nickname of Richard the Assassin. The name was actually on his desk nameplate. He was a young olive-skinned man in his early twenties who favored black jeans and T-shirts, which he wore with white Converse sneakers. Action figures of ninjas lined his top rank of shelves. He was relentless in guarding the security of AvN Soft from spam, malware, intruders, and people like Joe Clever.

Richard had a personal grudge against Joe Clever, who had actually breached his security on two occasions, and he swore that the next time Clever came calling, he’d flood Clever’s machine with a program that would do nothing but load thousands of pop-ups from fifth-rate Singapore porn sites, the kind with businesslike, thick-bodied hookers performing listless acts in badly lit rooms.

Richard checked out a laptop to BJ, gave him a temporary password, made certain he could access the office net, and packed the computer in a green cardboard box with a plastic carrying handle. He told BJ never to use the password on a Wi-Fi connection, even on a private network, and handed BJ an Ethernet connector.

“This is your best friend,” he said.

BJ looked at the cable with a bemused expression.

“Hello, best friend,” he said.

“You’re friend’s paranoia is really impressive,” BJ told Dagmar as they left.

“Remind me to tell you about Joe Clever,” Dagmar said.

BJ headed for the elevators, but Dagmar checked him.

“This way,” she said.

“Where are we going? ”

“Accounting.”

At Accounting, Dagmar arranged for BJ to be air-expressed the latest office suite compatible with everything used at AvN Soft. Word processor, spreadsheet, browser, presentation software, video and audio editors, Web page builder, SFTP ware, templates for standardized business forms, a miniaturized research library on disk, a word processor that offered film and TV script format-even interest-rate calculators and software used for making investments and planning retirement. Thousands of dollars’ worth of software altogether, all to be delivered to BJ’s apartment the next day courtesy of Federal Express.

“Uhh, thanks,” said BJ, a little stunned.

“Might as well get the total upgrade. We’re spending Charlie’s money like water, anyway.”

BJ tweaked a little smile. “I’m all for doing that.”

They went to the elevators, and Dagmar pushed the down button.

BJ turned to her. “So tell me about Joe Clever.”

A brief outline of Joe Clever’s infamous career lasted them the length of the elevator journey and the return to Dagmar’s office.

“You see anyone following you home,” Dagmar said, “it’s probably Joe Clever, or one of the other stalkers.” She looked at him. “In fact, you’re a prime target. You’re new to the game, and he might think you’d be careless with a computer or with documents.”