Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

And from thence to Gray’s Inn Gardens, and from there to New Square, again under the shadow of Lincoln’s Inn, on each occasion learning the identity of one of Vlatko’s associates. At the end of the journey, the players would know all of Vlatko’s London network and begin to follow their tracks and dissect the attackers’ plot.

Which would culminate next Saturday, when the players would deploy the Tapping the Source scanners in fifty cities across the world.

So far, Great Big Idea had spent more than two and a half million dollars of Charlie’s money shipping nearly sixty-five thousand scanners to players all over the world. Several thousand more dollars had been spent paying for extra warehouse help to make sure that the scanners were shipped on time, an act of generosity that had left the management reeling at Tapping the Source.

The Long Night of Briana Hall was probably going to be the least profitable online game in history. Not that Dagmar much cared-if it ran overbudget, that was all the fault of her boss.

Who, it had to be admitted, seemed to have plenty of extra money anyway.

Dagmar waited for the update that followed the live event-new pages going online with the information that the players had discovered in London, each page loaded with new puzzles that would keep the players busy for, at least, hours.

Or, if they were slipping, days.

Helmuth and his staff were focused on their displays, hands tapping. BJ and Dagmar looked over their shoulders.

“Harlem Nocturne” floated from her handset. Dagmar looked at the screen, saw Charlie’s name, and answered.

“How’s the update going?” Charlie asked.

“We’re in the middle of it.” You bastard. “No problems so far.” You selfish, treacherous bastard.

“I’m back in L.A. We need to meet.”

“Damn right we need to meet,” Dagmar said. She was aware of BJ’s mild gaze, ten feet away.

BJ raised his coffee cup, sipped.

“I’m at the Figueroa Hotel,” Charlie said. “ Medina Suite.”

“Hotel Figueroa? That’s on Figueroa, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Downtown’s a freakin’ desert. Why are you there?”

“It’s next to the Staples Center. Maybe I want to catch a game.”

“Heh. Yeah. Right.”

“Can you make it down as soon as the update’s finished?”

“Yeah. I was going to do a laundry, but I guess I can go on wearing stinky clothes for another day.”

“See you.”

She reholstered her phone and looked at BJ’s expectant face.

“The master calls?” he asked.

She nodded.

He nodded. “Good luck.”

A few minutes later, Helmuth hit Enter one last time, peered at the screen, then pushed his chair back from the table.

“Update’s finished,” he said. “All the pages are up, and all the video files from London are archived for anyone who wants to watch them.”

“Go home, then,” Dagmar told him.

Helmuth yanked the cord from his laptop and closed the computer’s display, then stood. He looked at the wall clock.

“I’ve got time for a nap before my haircut,” he said.

“You sleep?”

Helmuth smiled. “Only on weekend afternoons,” he said.

As Helmuth made his way out, BJ stood, crumpled his empty coffee cup, and tossed it in the recycling.

“I’m ready for a nap myself.”

“If you’re not going to the country club with the other tycoons.”

He grinned and waved on his way out.

Dagmar looked at the time display on her phone. Medina Suite, she thought. On my way.

It was easy to find Figueroa, which was a major street downtown, but the road was one-way going in the wrong direction, and she got lost at least three times trying to find her way around the problem. Once, Dagmar discovered herself on the 110 headed for Long Beach with no clear idea how she got on the freeway. By the time she finished blundering around the basketball arena and the convention center, found the hotel, and gave her car keys to the Figueroa’s valet, her nerves were crackling with fury.

The Figueroa Hotel was in a building that dated back to the 1920s and had been decorated in some kind of Moroccan Iberian frenzy, with a lobby full of wrought-iron lamps, geometric tiles, palms, bougainvillea, and throne-shaped chairs slung with bull hide. As Dagmar passed by the front desk, she heard an unfamiliar clattering and turned to discover the clerk working on an actual typewriter, an IBM Selectric probably manufactured before she was born.

She appreciated the classical touch.

Dagmar found the Medina Suite easily enough, by the flat of Mexican Coke empties sitting outside the massive doors with their iron hinges. Dagmar knocked, and Charlie let her in. Her anger was forgotten in the first glimpse of the room-painted an unlikely Mediterranean blue, with gold curtains, a russet spread on the enormous bed, ballooning striped tent fabric that concealed the ceiling, and a low couch with dangling tassels.

The plush Pinky doll sat in the strange wood-mounted metal bowl that served as a coffee table. The Brain glowered with red eyes from a Moorish cupboard. Charlie’s laptop sat on a desk by the window.

Dagmar looked at Charlie. “Where’s Kimba Leigh when you need her?” she asked.

“Providing room service elsewhere, I guess,” Charlie said. “Sit down.”

The low couch swallowed her. Charlie sat cross-legged on a vast cushion. He hadn’t shaved today. He seemed tired, and discouraged, and more than a little irritated.

In which case, she thought, they were a matched pair.

“So how are things?” she said.

“They suck.” He looked up at her. “I was looking for someone to take Austin ’s place, but that was an impossibility. All the really talented venture capital guys already have terrific jobs that pay them ridiculous profits. So then I thought I’d try to find another firm that would buy Austin’s shares and fold his business into theirs. Which I did-I had a nice deal lined up with a Chicago firm that wanted a presence on the West Coast. But then Austin’s father scotched it.”

“Mr. Katanyan?” Dagmar asked. “Why?”

Charlie’s mouth tightened into a line. “He’s decided to run the business himself. I tried to tell him that VC was a little different from the rug business, but I think that just made him mad.”

He flapped his hands.

“Oh well,” he said. “It’s not my damn business anyway. I was just trying to do Austin’s dad a favor.” He grimaced. “I hope I can sell him my shares, though.”

“You can sell them to someone, I suppose.”

He glared. “Not once someone discovers that the firm’s in the hands of an Armenian American rug seller, no.”

Dagmar almost told him that his billions would be a comfort in this matter, but decided not to.

“You wanted to talk to me about the game,” she said.

He seemed embarrassed. He took off his glasses, looked at them in his hand for a moment, then replaced them.

“Yeah,” he said. “I thought I had a good idea, but I realized it wouldn’t work.”

“Why not?”

“Because it involves the cooperation of too many people who aren’t connected to the game.”

She looked at Pinky, waving from the table with one three-fingered hand.

“Cooperation from whom?”

There was a strange little twitch behind his eyes, as if he first had to decide what piece of the story Dagmar was entitled to know before he could tell her anything.

“It had to do with the game’s… financial dimension,” he said slowly. “You know, the money men who are supposedly going to profit from the terrorist attacks. I thought… I thought the players could track the buy and sell orders coming into the brokerage houses, then-I don’t know-do a little hackage to wreck the bad traders. But so many people trading online are perfectly firewalled-it’s sort of a necessity, come to think of it, if you’re going to start moving money around through the Internet. In the game we might be able to get an IP number, but that won’t necessarily get into the other folks’ computers. It’s just not going to happen.”