Busted! she thought, triumphant.

Richardson shuffled a step closer.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“I’ve got video, you fucking pervert! ” Dagmar shouted. “You wanna watch it? ”

Even from the third-floor balcony she could see the color drain from Richardson’s face. Enlightenment dawned across the faces of the model-slash-actresses. Perhaps they had missed a few items themselves.

Richardson dropped the garbage bag and flapped his hands in a vague way. Dagmar found that infuriating.

“I’ll have your job, prick!” she shouted, and then she went back into her apartment and slammed the door.

The one good thing about surviving the Indonesian holocaust, she thought, was that she was no longer afraid of anyone who wasn’t carrying a gun or a damn big knife.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN This Is Not Simple

A new digital dead bolt was installed on Dagmar’s apartment door early the following morning. A few hours later a pair of private security contractors, wearing identical tan blazers, swept through the Great Big Idea offices and failed to find any eavesdropping gear planted there by Joe Clever or anybody else. To counter the laser eavesdropping system, they were happy to sell Dagmar white-noise generators to provide interference, and detectors to sound an alarm when a laser was directed at the room.

“I want a death ray,” she told them, “to shoot back.” Her science fiction background coming to the fore.

“If you shoot a laser back at them,” one man said, “you could blind them.”

“They could blind me.”

They nodded.

“True,” one said. “They could.”

In any case, the Tan Blazer Men doubted that Joe Clever could get close enough to the building to hear much of anything, not without being seen.

“It depends on how good his software is at sorting signal from interference.”

“Great,” Dagmar said. “I could have been blinded for nothing.”

Dagmar tried to pass the news to Charlie, but his secretary, Karin, said that Charlie had called in and said he wouldn’t be coming to the office today.

Maybe sorting out Austin’s company was a knottier problem than he’d anticipated.

Dagmar looked out the window to see if the Dodge van was visible before calling in her design team and letting them know that their meeting of two days before had possibly been compromised and that they were going to have to rework everything that had been decided on that day.

They were in a vengeful mood. They decided not only to shift all the game goodies to different locations, but to lay ambushes in the compromised areas.

“Anyone going into Planet Nine and looking under that gantry is going to find three heavily armed sharpshooters from Team Evil who are going to take him apart!”

Or so Helmuth, her head programmer, proclaimed. Dagmar waved a hand to give the plan her blessing.

“And if they find any of the pages we discussed,” Dagmar said, “we’ll fill them with information that leads nowhere.”

“Information,” Helmuth said darkly, “written in Estonian.”

It was only after the meeting that Dagmar had a chance to go online and see what had been happening in the game world.

Joe Clever’s video of Austin’s death, which Video Us had not as yet removed, had generated more than eleven million hits.

And in the past forty-eight hours, another 3,600,000 people had joined The Long Night of Briana Hall.

Ghouls, she thought.

She checked her email, and all sense of accomplishment evaporated.

FROM: Siyed Prasad

SUBJECT: Holiday in L.A.

Dagmar my Dear,

I’m going to be in Los Angeles next week to shoot a commercial. My

agent tells me that the Golden Nagi credit has been a big plus! Lots

of people in the business saw it, apparently.

I would like to thank you for the opportunity to work with you, and

all the doors that you have helped to open for me.

Can I take you to dinner?

Your appreciative Siyed

“Oh for God’s sake,” Dagmar said aloud. And then, to the computer, “Return mail.”

FROM: Dagmar Shaw

SUBJECT: re: Holiday in L.A.

Siyed,

I’m working hard on a new project, and I doubt I’ll be able to see

you.

Good luck with the commercial.

Dagmar

Was that curt enough? she wondered.

Get lost, married man.

She began dealing with the problems involved in reworking the game to suggest that Austin’s death was somehow a part of it. She didn’t feel she could say it outright, but she could offer hints that the players were certain to notice.

Dagmar thought that maybe Joe Clever wasn’t clever enough to find Litvinov, but she had more confidence in the entire Group Mind.

Three million people: they had to know something.

Briana Hall, the woman in the hotel room, was hiding from the police, who were under the impression that she had killed two of her former lovers. The game was designed to move both backward and forward in time, following Briana as she fled from the police and attempted to prove herself innocent, and simultaneously going back into the history of the characters to discover their past actions and the reasons for them. The help of the players would be needed in order to accomplish both of these objectives.

One of Briana’s exes had been killed by a sleeper cell of saboteurs who were using a location in the Planet Nine game as a rendezvous-the sometime boyfriend had been a sysop and during the course of his work had overheard some of their conversation.

The other had been killed because he was a minor player in a securities fraud and his cronies erroneously assumed he was under investigation-in fact he had had contact with SEC investigators for an entirely different reason.

Dagmar wondered if that victim could be renamed Austin. But if so, she’d have to change the plot: she didn’t want to make one of her oldest friends guilty of securities fraud, not even in the context of fiction. So she’d have to reengineer the plot in order to provide a reason why he was killed-accidentally-by a hired assassin.

She calculated how to make the plot changes, which she figured would involve a couple of days of rewriting. But there would be more than rewriting, because she’d have to add a whole Maffya subplot, and that would take up a lot of resources.

While thinking this over, she found the card that Lieutenant Murdoch had given her and called him. He was out, but she left a message asking him to return her call.

She was deep into rewriting when “Harlem Nocturne” announced Murdoch’s call. She looked at the time in the corner of her monitor and saw that it was after six o’clock-Murdoch was probably returning all his phone calls before leaving the office.

“This is Dagmar,” she said.

She had met Murdoch the previous day. He was a small, systematic man with a lined face and graying hair. His mouth had the kind of pinched look that suggested false teeth. His questions the other day had been competent and professional, and he’d asked them all without giving the slightest clue what was happening behind his pale blue eyes. He was almost like a character on the old Dragnet program, deadpan and businesslike, but more human, without the TV characters’ utter humorlessness.

“You called? ” he said.

“Yes. I realized that if you give me the name that Litvinov used to enter the country, I could probably find him for you.”

“How could you do that? ” he said after a pause.

Dagmar explained about the game and the fact that she had thousands of detectives eager to set their intelligence on the problem.

“While we appreciate citizen help,” Murdoch began, “I’m not sure that this would be appropriate.”