She had no damn idea.

Dagmar erased the number from the display, stared at the phone’s screen for a moment, then reached for a pen and paper and began to jot down talking points. She was happiest when following a script, preferably of her own devising.

Not my fault! she wrote, and underlined the words. Which was stretching the truth a bit, but Dagmar felt it was a positive start.

She stared at the paper for a long moment, then underlined Not my fault! a second time.

A few minutes later, the list read as follows.

I’m not involved with S.

S. has invented this fantasy about me

Please call S. and tell him to come home

Not my fault!

She looked at the list for a moment, then decided the four points pretty much covered everything she intended to say. She punched in Manjari’s number, then hit Send.

Her heart rapped a quick rhythm as she raised the phone to her ear.

“Hello?”

The voice seemed strangely normal. Dagmar had expected an angry voice, or a tearful voice, or a snappish voice. Anything but this sunny-afternoon-in-London voice.

“Is this Manjari?” Dagmar asked.

“Yes. Who is this?”

Dagmar cast a desperate look at her list and spoke. “This is Dagmar.”

There was a moment’s pause, one that lasted a beat longer than the satellite lag, and then: “I’m sorry?”

“Dagmar Sh-shaw,” she said, annoyed at her sudden nervous stammer. “From Los Angeles.”

“Oh,” Manjari said. “Dagmar, of course.”

Of course, Dagmar thought in fury. The woman who slept with your husband.

There was an expectant pause. Dagmar gave another glance at her list and spoke.

“I wanted to say,” she said, “that whatever Siyed told you about me, it isn’t true.”

Dagmar’s heart beat four times in the ensuing pause.

“I’m sorry. What did he say, exactly?”

The tone of Manjari’s reply, the genuine puzzlement, clued Dagmar to the actual situation. Which was that Siyed-already a proven liar-had lied again.

He hadn’t told Manjari he was involved with Dagmar. He hadn’t told his wife that he was leaving her. He had just told Dagmar that as a ploy to win her over.

It was Dagmar, just now, who had told Manjari that something was badly wrong.

Dagmar’s mind thrashed for an escape route.

“All right,” she said quickly. “Obviously we’ve had a miscommunication.”

“Yes?” Manjari said. “Are you in London?”

“No,” Dagmar said. “I’m in L.A. But I need to tell you…” Her mind spun like a broken clutch. “I think Siyed is having some kind of breakdown out here. I think it’s…” Imagination failed her. “It’s just Hollywood,” she finished lamely. “It happens.”

“Is he in hospital?” Manjari asked. For the first time there was urgency in her voice.

“No. But he turned up last night, and he said some things-he was irrational.”

“What sort of things did he say?”

“I… I don’t remember, really. It doesn’t matter.” She tried to put as much kindness into her words as possible. “You should call Siyed and tell him to come home. All right?”

“Tell him to come home,” Manjari repeated.

“Yes,” Dagmar said, and then a piece of maliciousness entered her mind.

“Tell him that I told you to call,” she said.

“I…” Manjari seemed bewildered. “I’ll call him.”

Dagmar reached for the piece of paper with her talking points, crumpled it, and tossed it in the wastebasket.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said. “But I think it’s best.”

Dagmar unlocked her office door and propped it open. The suspense and panic and determination that had filled her during the phone call had drained away, and she felt strangely hollow.

She thought about Siyed flying away on a big silver plane. Crossing paths with Charlie, flying in.

Charlie. How could she tell Charlie that she knew what he was up to?

Members of the Great Big Idea technical staff passed by, ready for the game update. Soon-four o’clock in London-players would be assembling beneath the shadow of the old Gothic pile of Lincoln’s Inn. Streaming video, taken by a freelance crew frequently employed by Great Big Idea, already showed several dozen people gathered in an expectant crowd. Each held a silver DVD in a transparent jewel case, a sign that they were part of the game.

The barristers of Lincoln’s Inn, who might normally resent a crowd on their doorstep, were presumably spending their Saturday afternoon at home.

Dagmar moved into the big conference room for the update and found it full of laptops and cables. Siyed’s flowers drooped and sagged everywhere. Her mantra glowed on one wall monitor.

Read the Schedule

Know the Schedule

Love the Schedule

BJ wandered in, holding a twenty-four-ounce foam cup of coffee, and hugged Dagmar hello. Dagmar realized that BJ had shaved off his muttonchops, leaving only the modest mustache he’d worn as long as she’d known him. The change, she thought, made him look younger.

“Congratulate me,” he said. “I think I’ve got a new job.”

Dagmar looked at him in surprise. Hesitation tripped her tongue before she could offer congratulations.

“Don’t worry,” he said, anticipating her. “I won’t start the new job till we finish Briana Hall.”

Dagmar brightened. “Good news, then,” she said. “Where will you be working?”

BJ grinned, then hesitated. “I don’t think I should actually say.”

“Can you tell me,” Dagmar asked, “if it’s a crap job or a shit job?”

BJ laughed. “Neither. It’s a real job. A total, stone opportunity.”

“Well.” Dagmar reached up a hand and touched his newly shaven cheek. “I’m guessing that whoever they are, they have a hair policy.”

He laughed again.

“No,” he said. “I just figured I should try to blend in with the other tycoons.”

She looked at him. “Tycoons, huh?”

He gave a lazy shrug.

“We’ll see,” he said. “Yeah.”

“All right,” she said. “Be mysterious if you want to.”

Dagmar and the others watched the live feed. At four o’clock London time, a car drew up to Lincoln’s Inn, and Anne stepped out, followed by jerking camera crews. Anne was a sweet-voiced, petite English Rose who headed Great Big Idea’s small office in London and from there ran all European live events.

To anyone who flashed her a DVD, Anne handed a sheet of xeroxed paper containing clues. The first of these, when properly decoded, sent players southwest across the pleasant green of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where they would encounter a man with a sign that said “Free Time Travel.”

When a player approached this man, she would be given a headset that was cabled to a high-powered laptop computer. The headset featured a screen that would drop down over the right eye. When the player moved her head in the correct direction, her left eye would show her the sights of a Holborn Saturday afternoon while the screen would show a different image, a scene from the “past”-the fictional past of The Long Night of Briana Hall.

The scene showed Vlatko, the amoral mercenary who was assisting the terrorists, meeting one of his contacts in London.

Cameras wandered along with the crowd, broadcasting the event live to anyone who cared to watch.

When a player had seen Vlatko and had a chance to identify the contact, the player would follow the next clue north to Red Lion Square, where another vendor would offer another headset and another free trip into the past, a trip that would reveal another of Vlatko’s contacts.

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.