CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN This Is Not Remorse

So, she thought. What else could she have done?

There wasn’t, and would probably never be, enough evidence to convict BJ of anything. At least not until the bomb went off in his car, which would precipitate a very thorough investigation by some rather thorough government agencies. And by then, BJ being in the car, it was too late.

If she had saved him, then what? He would have beaten her to death and thrown her off the parking jetty into the darkness below.

She could have been smarter or less distracted by events. But she hadn’t been, and instead she had been who she was, so caught up in events that she had never caught up to the truth.

And the truth was four dead by violence, here in L.A. And countless others, in Bolivian mining towns, Indonesian kampungs, burning Cantonese passenger trains…

Her own well-meaning fictions, layered page by page on the so-called World Wide Web, differed from the web of the real world in that they lacked genuine malice. No matter how depraved her imagination when it came to Briana Hall or blood-crazed revenge-maddened nagis, her own work was practically wholesome compared with anything served up by Southeast Asian generals, Chinese mobs, or Arkady Petrovich Litvinov, the scope of whose iniquity had been reduced to the county jail.

These thoughts drifted through Dagmar’s mind as she drowsed amid the disassembled spyware in her Lysol-scented motel room. Throughout her reflections drifted slumber itself, half-submerged on a slow-moving tide of perception.

She woke craving waffles and hearing the sound of rain on the walk outside.

Dagmar ate waffles in a coffee shop on Ventura while the rain turned the street outside into a canal. On the way to the Great Big Idea office, the radio informed her that the assault on the dollar had begun. As soon as the tech team had assembled, she told them to begin the update to The Long Night of Briana Hall. Normally they waited until noon, but the gold-farming bots had not delayed, and neither would she.

“If I were you,” Helmuth said, “I’d slip out and buy as many euros as I could.” He gave her a significant look. “I already did that on Monday.”

“I don’t have that much in cash,” Dagmar said.

“Still.” Still.

Sipping from an insulated mug of Darjeeling tea, Dagmar watched the update from over Helmuth’s shoulder. The well-practiced tech team loaded the day’s series of puzzles. Because the real job came after the puzzles were solved, the puzzles themselves weren’t all that difficult, and the players devoured them with the Internet equivalent of roars of gusto.

Then they encountered the long lists of IP addresses and paused.

LadyDayFan says:

What the hell???

Vikram says:

We’re supposed to cope with all these addresses? Seriously?

Corporal Carrot says:

I’m game! Let’s divide up the numbers!

LadyDayFan says:

Ohmygoddess! This is madness!

Vikram says:

All right, let’s have a show of hands! Who wants a job?

Dagmar watched as the players divided the thousands of numbers among themselves and began posting their successes and failures. They argued about which successes belonged to whom and offered methods of locating the owners of firewalled computers.

The dollar was down 35 percent since the start of the day.

Dagmar bought a sesame chicken salad in the coffee shop downstairs, and the largest, most elaborate latte for dessert afterward. She thought she might as well spend her money now, before it was no longer worth the paper it was printed on.

Chatsworth Osborne Jr. says:

This has to be the biggest feat of social engineering in the history

of the Internet! Or possibly anywhere!

Corporal Carrot says:

It’s pure hackage, man! This is soooooo freaking cool!

No doubt, Dagmar thought, some of the players were decompiling and reverse-engineering Charlie’s patch to figure out what it did and how it worked. But they wouldn’t discover much: it was a patch, not a whole program. It altered some modest bits of code to other bits of code. It gave the address of the Cayman account, but the players already had that address. It didn’t offer any insights into what the original gold-farming bot was for.

Reverse engineering would show that it was a patch designed to tell one piece of a network to shut the entire network down. That was all. And that information happened to fit right in with the premise of Briana Hall, in which the players were called upon to shut down networks of villains.

It was all, amazingly, fitting together.

“Miss Shaw? ”

“Yes?”

Dagmar recognized the voice of Detective Murdoch. She left the conference room and returned to her office.

“Do you know a Boris Bustretski?” he asked.

“Yes.”

There was a little pause-the length, perhaps, of an explosion.

“I’m sorry to tell you he’s been killed in another bombing.”

She let another explosion-pause go by.

“Why would anyone kill BJ?” she asked. “He wasn’t… anybody.”

“Can you tell us more about him?”

“He was my boyfriend ten years ago, before my marriage. We were good friends with Charlie Ruff and Austin Katanyan. But BJ and Charlie started their business together, and they ended up hating each other. BJ acted crazy, and Charlie fired him. Austin didn’t get along with him, either, after that. BJ is-was-still angry about it, after all these years.

“I recently gave BJ a job because I felt sorry for him. But”-she hoped she was convincing-“I don’t know why anyone would kill him. That’s just crazy.”

There was another little pause, another little explosion.

“Had Boris-BJ-ever made threats against Mr. Ruff?”

“None that I took seriously,” Dagmar said.

“What were the nature of the threats?”

In her mind, Dagmar replayed the Phalanx flying apart in flames, one image following the other like frames on a film reel.

“He said that if he could figure out a way to kill Charlie, he would,” Dagmar said. “But he wouldn’t do it if it meant being caught.”

The car burned in Dagmar’s mind, a smear of brilliant orange against the night web of Los Angeles.

“But BJ wasn’t a violent man,” she said. “He wasn’t serious.”

“Can you come down to the station and talk to us?”

“No,” Dagmar said. “Maybe later. Right now I’m in the middle of something at work.”

Whole networks of bots vanished from the world. The threat to the dollar faded by late afternoon, along with the morning’s rainstorm. The Federal Reserve had an emergency meeting; the IMF stepped in; so did European banks; so did sovereign wealth funds from a number of American allies. The value of the dollar began to rise.

Billions, Dagmar thought, were pouring into the United Bank of Cayman as the botnets shut down. At some point, Dagmar was going to have to call Charlie’s parents and tell them how rich they were and urge them to continue Charlie’s generous donations to charities worldwide.

They could keep a billion or two. What the hell.

By evening the dollar was regaining value on Pacific exchanges, where it was already Thursday morning. Eventually it stabilized at about 85 percent of its former value.

On Thursday morning, Dagmar went to a meeting with Murdoch and Special Agent Landreth of the FBI, who managed at length to convince her, against her will, that BJ was a killer. That he’d hired Litvinov to kill Austin, that he was responsible for the bomb that killed Charlie, that he’d beaten Siyed to death in a jealous rage, and that finally he’d blown himself up accidentally.