Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

Dagmar spent Thursday night in the Best Western in Chinatown, a short distance from the Cathay Bank parking lot that had briefly held components of the bomb that had killed Charlie. She had left her Prius in the AvN Soft parking lot, parked directly under the glassy eye of a security camera, and had rented one of the new Mercedes two-seater sports cars from Enterprise, which delivered the vehicle right to the doors of the office tower. She had redlined the Mercedes as she drove out of the Valley, probably tripping half a dozen automatic cameras and generating a couple of thousand dollars in the outrageous fines that California’s broken government extorted from its citizens, but at least she knew she hadn’t been followed.

The morning news was full of alarmed chatter about the assault on the Chinese yuan, something that Dagmar had missed in the traumas of the previous day. The markets in China, where it was already Saturday, were closed, but the fury continued on other exchanges.

The yuan seemed to be in serious danger. Political pressure had forced the yuan to decouple from the dollar a few years earlier, and now a currency much abused by China’s slowing growth, political demands, and inflation was showing its vulnerability. No one knew whether China’s economic statistics were genuine or mere vapor. Maybe the Chinese themselves didn’t know. In any case they were now paying the cost of their lack of transparency.

Chinese sovereign wealth funds were dumping bonds, American and others, in order to free the cash to defend the yuan, and bond markets were tottering worldwide. As a consequence the American dollar was plunging, and the dollar wasn’t even the target of the attack. The Chinese government had been reduced to uttering threats against whatever foreign governments were behind the attacks. Dagmar wondered if an actual war could start over this.

The talking heads on CNN were surprised over the attack, since it had been widely assumed that it had been Chinese traders who had led the assault on other currencies. Were the Chinese attacking their own currency? Were other traders attacking China by way of retaliation? Or was the whole Chinese trader story a myth?

Dagmar, with better information, wondered how the actual Chinese traders-the ones who had followed Charlie’s gold-mining bots in the currency markets-were responding to the crisis. Patriotic traders would surely pour their profits into defending the yuan, risking their money. Pragmatic traders would follow the bots again, risking lives and livelihoods if the Chinese government chose to take their resentment out of the electronic world and convert it to real-world shackles and bullets.

Whatever was going on behind the scenes in China, Dagmar imagined that there was cheering in Jakarta.

After checking out of the hotel, she bought new clothes and a traveling case, changed in the restroom of a coffee shop that served her a peculiarly Filipino version of an American breakfast, bacon and eggs Luzonized, and showed up late for work to find that no one had missed her.

She spent half the day writing scripts for Briana Hall and the other half dealing with emails from brokerage houses. She had a midafternoon meal of vaguely Thai noodles-chicken, chiles, and cilantro-from the coffee shop on the ground floor and was walking across Finnish porphyry to the elevator when “Harlem Nocturne” began to sound from her handheld. She looked at the display and saw it was BJ.

She felt a prickle of heat across her skin, and her knees seemed briefly to buckle. She took a breath of air and it felt like her first breath in hours.

She sat down on the polished granite ledge that separated the elevator area from the atrium. Her heart beat in her ribs like a prisoner throwing herself headfirst against the bars.

BJ had been unable to restrain his curiosity, she told herself. He’d been staking out her apartment last night and he hadn’t seen her come home. He didn’t know about her reaction to Siyed’s death or to Charlie’s.

Dagmar told herself that he was going to try to get information from her so that he could kill her. She admonished herself to keep this surmise in the forefront of her mind.

She put the phone to her ear. “This is Dagmar.”

“Hey,” said BJ. “How’s it going?”

“Life sucks,” Dagmar said with perfect truth.

“Yeah,” BJ said. “I’m sorry if what happened to Charlie is causing you grief.”

“That’s two of my best friends murdered,” Dagmar said. Fury rose in her as she spoke. One of her fists punched the granite ledge on which she sat. Gratifying pain crackled from her knuckles.

“Well, you know,” BJ said, “I won’t pretend that I’m in mourning over Charlie, but I care about you. Do you want to get together and talk?”

“I can’t,” Dagmar said. “I’ve got too fucking much to do.”

“I could get Chinese takeout and bring it to your apartment,” he said.

“I’m not at my apartment anymore. I’m hiding out at a hotel.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“Why?” he asked.

“Two reasons,” Dagmar said. “First, I think I might be next on the killer’s agenda.”

“I thought the killer was caught,” BJ said.

“One of them was,” Dagmar said.

“But…” He hesitated while he tried to decide which of several possible scripts to follow. “Why would the Russian Maffya be after you?” he said finally.

“I can’t tell you. But I have another reason-which is that the police have pretty much told me that I’m a suspect in three murders. So if I meet with you and I’m being followed, it might lead the cops to you.”

Chew on that, she thought.

Maybe it would keep him from following her.

“I can bring Chinese to your hotel,” he said.

What he should have said, Dagmar told herself, was Three murders? Because he wasn’t supposed to know about Siyed.

That, Dagmar thought, was a misstep.

“Maybe some other time,” she said. “I’ve really got to run right now.”

“See you tomorrow,” BJ said.

An alarm jolted through her nerves. “Tomorrow?” she said.

“The update.”

“Oh. Right. Bye.”

After the call ended, she stared at the phone’s display until it went dark.

Tomorrow, she thought.

She would have to meet BJ face-to-face and hope that he couldn’t guess what she knew.

This Is Not a Dinner

“You have a cut on your face,” Dagmar said.

The cut was just below BJ’s left eye, a thin little half circle of red. Probably made by Siyed’s fingernail as he tried to push BJ away while BJ pounded the life out of him.

“Kitchen accident,” BJ said.

“With what?” She was feeling reckless and wanted to torment him or at least make him improvise.

“Oh,” he said. He scratched a sideburn with one blunt finger. “I have this sort of magnet thingy over the sink where I stick my knives, and I bumped into the counter and knocked one of the knives off, and it hit me.”

“You could have lost your eye,” Dagmar said.

BJ shrugged. “Maybe,” he said.

He had progressed another step toward acquiring tycoon wear, with a soft cream-colored shirt, a sumptuous tie, and an Italian summer-weight jacket of pastel-colored linen. The fine clothing, rather than embellish his appearance, seemed rather to accent his thick neck and steelworker’s shoulders and long arms.

“I’ve got to show you my new car,” he said. “I’ve finally got rid of the Chevy.”

“We’ve got an update to do,” Dagmar said.

“I meant later.”

Around them, Helmuth and the technical staff were monitoring the progress of the players as they sampled one body of water after another-thousands altogether, on five continents. A running count was kept of the number of times the Tapping the Source units detected phenolphthalein, which Dagmar’s agents had added to streams, fountains, creeks, and ponds earlier in the day. The chemical itself was harmless, its chief property being to turn purple in an acid environment.