Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

to Maria so that she can get it to Briana.

I told David yes. He said it’s going down Tuesday night.

My phone is (714) 756-0578.

H.

“Okay,” said Dagmar. “So the data stick is going to be hidden in a vase of flowers? ”

She was speaking not to Hippolyte, to whom she had talked earlier in the day, but to a player named GIAWOL, whom she did not know. GIAWOL had a clenched-sounding voice, as if he were afraid to let his lower teeth get too far from his upper. Possibly, Dagmar thought, he had a pipe in his mouth.

“Yes,” GIAWOL said. Dagmar knew that his name was an acronym for Gaming is a way of life.

“I don’t know that it’s a data stick, exactly,” he said, “only that I’m supposed to put it in the vase. And that once I deliver it to Maria, I’m supposed to text-message David at a certain number.”

“Can you give me the number?”

GIAWOL did. Dagmar wrote it down. It was a number she didn’t recognize.

BJ’s latest cell phone burner.

“Where are you supposed to deliver the flowers?” Dagmar asked.

“Someplace called the New Hollywood Inn,” GIAWOL said. “Room one one eight.”

Dagmar felt the flush of anger on her skin.

“Anything else?” she asked.

“Just that I’m to say it’s from the management.”

“Of the motel?”

“Yes. It’s supposed to be thanks for staying there for so long.” There was a hesitation. “Can I make a request?”

“Of course.”

“More mathematical puzzles,” GIAWOL said. “I love those.”

She smiled. “I’ll make a note of it.”

“Also, the destegging program you people use only works with a PC. I’m a Mac user.”

“I’ll pass that on to them.”

Over Monday afternoon she had tracked the evolution of BJ’s plot. It featured sending players along the same wandering courses that he’d used in his last scheme, followed by a player’s uniting the data with the “package”-in this case a vase of flowers-and delivering them to a motel room door.

His bomb-making skills had evolved, clearly. The last bomb had been triggered when Charlie turned on the computer or opened the door to the CD player. This one would be command-detonated, presumably by cell phone. It would have to be assumed that Dagmar would be averse to plugging in any strange computers delivered to her door, so when GIAWOL sent the text message that the flowers had been delivered, BJ in turn would call the cell phone hidden in the flower vase. Which would trigger the bomb, thus ending BJ’s problems. And Dagmar’s, of course.

An abstract kind of pity, devoid of genuine sadness or compassion, floated through Dagmar’s mind.

Poor BJ, she thought. He’s only got the one trick.

He’s not puppetmaster enough to save himself.

FROM: Maria Perry

SUBJECT: Ford Phalanx

I’ve located Cullen’s briefcase. It’s in a late-model Ford Phalanx

parked in the Coolomb Corporation garage!

Is there any way I can break into the car without setting off the

alarm? I don’t need to steal the car, I just need to get into it!

Maria

FROM: Desi

SUBJECT: Re: Ford Phalanx

Maria,

This company sells custom lockpick sets for specific models of cars.

If the Phalanx has keyless entry, then of course this won’t work.

FROM: ReVerb

SUBJECT: Re: Ford Phalanx

Pity it’s not the late nineties, when GM cars had keys so

interchangeable that you could randomly insert your key into a strange

lock with a 50% chance it would open. Of course the Phalanx isn’t

GM, but I can’t resist an interesting bit of trivia!

You might try ordering some of these tools from this online catalog.

These are the tools used by professionals, legit and otherwise,

to break into cars.

The tools don’t seem to have names, just catalog numbers.

FROM: Atenveldt

SUBJECT: Re: Ford Phalanx

Maria, the Phalanx has keyless entry. There isn’t a conventional

lock anywhere on the vehicle. The driver carries a sort of seedpod-

shaped cartridge with an active (battery-operated) RFID tag that

scanners in the car will recognize. The car won’t start without the

RFID tag inside.

RFIDs, of course, have a well-known problem, which is that they

broadcast to all the wrong scanners as well as the right ones.

What I would do is this: I’d get an RFID scanner somewhere near

that car to record the signal the pod emits when it tells the Phalanx

to open its doors. Then you create an electronic duplicate of the

signal, and the car is yours!

And the car is mine, Dagmar thought.

Two players she’d never heard from had jumped out of the electronic world to answer Maria’s question. She could always count on the Group Mind.

It was time for another visit to the electronics store.

This Is Not Breakfast

It was typical of L.A. that the surveillance store was open till midnight-after all, one never knew at what hour one’s husband, or one’s banker, would choose to cheat. The clerk sold her a battery-powered RFID scanner and a device for cloning the captured signals. Both boxes were compact and idiotproof-stupid criminals, after all, used them every day, usually to steal someone’s identity when the victim swiped a credit card while making a purchase, or when they were carrying one of the new American passports, which the government had insisted could only be detected at a range of four inches, even in the face of objective tests that demonstrated their vulnerability at a range of ten meters or more.

The clerk gazed at her from sad, idiotproof eyes. “You must promise to use this only for good,” he told her.

She looked at him.

“I’m innocent as chocolate syrup,” she told him.

She drove to BJ’s apartment. She’d never been there before, but the address was available in the contract he’d signed with Great Big Idea.

It wasn’t in a good part of L.A. The small building, with clap-board walls and a shake roof, was ramshackle and contained no more than four apartments. Two vehicles sat in the parking lot on concrete blocks. In this district her Mercedes coupe glowed like a beacon.

Dagmar circled the apartment and saw neither the Phalanx nor BJ’s old Chevy. She parked half a block away, in a place where her car was shaded from the streetlight by an overgrown willow, and shifted to the passenger seat. She remembered reading somewhere that a person sitting in the passenger seat was less conspicuous than someone behind the wheel.

She reclined the seat as far as possible, pulled her panama hat partly down her face, and waited for the rumble of the Ford’s V-8. When BJ arrived and went to bed, she intended to slip out and put the RFID scanner beneath his car to catch the signals from his remote, then retrieve the scanner after he left.

The Phalanx didn’t come. She waited for hours, enduring the occasional scrutiny of young men walking past along the broken sidewalk. When they began to crowd the Mercedes, either to admire the car or to steal it, she raised her seat to make herself more visible and pretended to be talking on the phone. The young men, surprised and suddenly self-conscious, retreated. No one really bothered her.

Eventually even the drifting knots of young men went to bed. Dagmar drowsed and periodically scanned the apartment building with night binoculars. BJ hadn’t come home.

He was wherever he was building the bomb, she thought. Where he was carefully crafting the instrument that would kill her.

When dawn began to feather the leaves of the willow tree overhead, Dagmar got out of the car and stretched aching limbs. She retreated to her motel room for a shower and an hour’s jangled sleep, and the alarm function in her phone woke her promptly at seven.