This Is Not a Game Read online

  “I write computer games,” she said.

  “Computer games! Excellent!” The cop made a gun with his two hands and made machine-gun sounds. “Felony Maximum IV!” he said. “I always take the MAC-10.”

  Dagmar had never played Felony Maximum, but it seemed wise to agree.

  “The MAC-10 is good,” she said.

  The car took another turn, and there, visible through the windshield, was the shining monolith of the Royal Jakarta Hotel. The car rocketed under the portico, and the driver stomped on the brakes, bringing the vehicle to a juddering halt.

  “Thank you!” Dagmar said. “Thank you very much!”

  She tried to open the door and found it wouldn’t open from the inside. The driver barked some impatient commands at the Sikh doorman-the same one who had been on duty in the morning-and then the doorman opened the car door and she stepped out.

  “Thank you!” she said to the driver, who ignored her and sped away.

  The Sikh was holding the hotel door for her. She looked up and down the facade of the hotel and saw broken windows. Hotel workers had already cleaned up the glass. A hundred yards farther down the street was an overturned minibus that had been set on fire. Greasy smoke hung in the brilliant tropical air.

  No bodies, at least. A small favor, this.

  Dagmar walked into the hotel, nodded to the doorman’s “Good afternoon, miss,” and went to Mr. Tong’s office. Mr. Tong was alone-apparently he’d already discouraged everyone who needed discouraging-and he looked up as she knocked on the doorframe.

  “Miss Shaw?” he said. “Nothing’s changed, I’m afraid.”

  “There’s a man,” Dagmar said, “who needs an ambulance.”

  Together they got a map of the area, and Dagmar reconstructed her morning walk and the location of the music store. Mr. Tong made the call, then looked up at Dagmar.

  “I’ve told them,” he said. “But I don’t know if they’ll come.”

  Dagmar thanked Mr. Tong and left, trying to think if there was anything else she could do. Short of going back out onto the streets, there was nothing.

  She went to her room and took off her sweat-stained clothing and stood in the shower for a long while. Then she lay naked on her sweet-smelling sheets and turned on a news program and heard the reporter from Star TV talk about “anti-Chinese rioting.”

  Anti-Chinese? she wondered. From what she could see, the rioters hadn’t much seemed to care whose stuff they were looting.

  The reporter went on to talk about an “unconfirmed number of deaths,” and the report was accompanied by video, mostly from cell phones, that had captured bits of the action.

  CNN showed no video of the riot but broadcast a lengthy discussion of the causes of the currency collapse.

  “The government went on a spending spree before the last election,” said the Confident Analyst. “It won them reelection, but they ran through almost all their foreign currency reserves just at the moment when the price of oil went soft. Then they made matters worse by keeping their current account deficit a state secret-and when that secret leaked, it was all over.”

  All cancel, Dagmar thought.

  CHAPTER FIVE This Is Not a Hiding Place

  Start with a woman in a hotel room, Dagmar thought. Because there’s nowhere else to go, because all her options are gone. Because a stranger’s voice on the phone has told her to stay in this place until she’s told to go somewhere else.

  From there, reaching back in time, her story unfolds. Perhaps in reverse order. That would be a nifty trick.

  Except that you have to find the story. It’s not all in one place, as it would be in a novel or a movie. It’s scattered out all through the world, and most of it’s in electronic form.

  That’s the sort of story Dagmar writes.

  At the beginning of the sort of game that Dagmar designs for a living, you go down the rabbit hole. That’s what it’s actually called, “rabbit hole.” The rabbit hole draws you into a Looking-Glass Land-okay, Dagmar knows, she’s mixing the two Alice stories-a Looking-Glass Land where the truth lies, and where, unlike in real life, you can look behind the mirrors to find out what it is.

  A rabbit hole could be anything. A jar of honey that appeared in the mail, a data stick found in a washroom, an online poker site. A wedding in Bengaluru, a ticket to Jakarta. A virus loaded onto your phone.

  And where the rabbit hole took you was a place that was just like your own place, except there was another reality hidden there.

  In Looking-Glass Land the truth was hidden in source code, layered into Photoshop, transmitted in Morse, hidden in music files, whispered in Swedish or Shanghainese or Yiddish. Secrets were revealed in table talk on poker sites, found in genealogical charts, written with spray enamel on the sides of buildings.

  Dagmar figures that some of the woman’s backstory has to be found in Planet Nine. Or on Planet Nine. Because that’s where this thing has to start.

  From: Dagmar

  Subject: Indonesia Fubar

  Charlie, I never made it to Bali. I’m stuck in the Royal Jakarta Hotel. There’s rioting all around and people are getting killed. The airports are closed and I can’t get out. I’ve got $180 in hard currency and some credit cards that I can’t use because the banks are all shut down.

  I’ve called the embassy and they put my name on a list. They say that if the situation warrants, they will stage an evacuation. They also say in the meantime I might as well stay here, because it’s as safe as anyplace.

  Any suggestions? You or Austin wouldn’t happen to know anyone out here with a helicopter, would you?

  Elevator music-saccharine Indonesian pop-tinkled from speakers in the breakfast room. A lavish buffet had been set up for hotel guests: coffee, tea, fruit juices, and a bewildering amount of food, both Indonesian and Western.

  Meals were no longer served on the third-floor terrace. Hotel management had apparently decided it was safer to keep their guests under cover.

  “Did you see the pillar of smoke?” asked Mrs. Tippel.

  “Yes.”

  Dagmar hadn’t been able to miss it: her windows faced northwest, and from the fourteenth floor she had an excellent view of the part of the city that was on fire.

  “That’s Glodok,” the Dutch woman said. “It’s where the Chinese people live.”

  The elevator music tinkled on.

  “In the sixties,” said her husband, “the Chinese were killed because they were Communists. In ’ninety-eight they were killed because they were capitalists. Now they’re being killed for capitalism again.”

  “Scapegoats,” said Mrs. Tippel.

  “Yes, yes.” Mr. Tippel’s blue eyes were sad. “The government or the military always need to blame others for their mistakes. And now the Chinese will pay for all the mistakes that the government made before the election.”

  “And even if there were Chinese traders who attacked the rupiah,” said Mrs. Tippel, “they weren’t here in Indonesia. They were in Hong Kong or Shanghai or somewhere.”

  The elderly Dutch couple had seen Dagmar wandering through the breakfast room with her fruit plate and invited her to join them.

  Dagmar tasted a piece of fruit from her plate and paused for a moment to savor the astonishing bright taste. Then Mr. Tippel began to talk, and Dagmar lost interest in breakfast.

  “In ’ninety-eight it was terrible,” said Mr. Tippel. “The military had just lost power, and they thought that if there was enough chaos, they would be called back. So the riots were actually led by the military.”

  “There were rape squads,” said Mrs. Tippel.

  Dagmar opened her mouth, closed it, strove for a response.

  “Is that what’s happening now?” she asked.

  The Tippels looked at each other.

  “Who knows?” said Mr. Tippel. “The army’s up to something, though. They have the city under siege.”

  All those games she’d played, Dagmar thought as the elevator music tinkled in the background. A
ll those dungeon crawls and conflicts and mysteries, all those battles, skirmishes, raids, and sieges. All those rolls of a twenty-sided die, all those experience points.

  And none of them worth a damn. She had no idea how to behave in a city being blockaded by its own military. She hadn’t known what to do in the face of a mob other than to lock herself in a toilet.

  As far as action in the real world was concerned, all those games had been a complete waste of time.

  When her ring tone went off-the first few bars of “Harlem Nocturne,” the Johnny Otis version-Dagmar didn’t notice right away. The sounds blended too well with Indonesian elevator music. And then she realized someone was calling her, and she snatched at the phone.

  “Dagmar?” said Charlie. “Are you still in Jakarta?”

  Dagmar’s heart gave a foolish leap at the sound of his voice. “Yes!” she said. “Yes, I’m still here.”

  “Okay. I’ll arrange to get you out, then.”

  “Good! Good!” Dagmar realized she was babbling and made an effort to achieve rational communication.

  “How are you going to manage it?” she asked. “Because the embassy-”

  “I’ve been with the Planet Nine people all day and only just got your email,” Charlie said. “But I already know enough to realize that the embassy’s fucked. They can’t evacuate you because all our military assets are tied up in the current Persian Gulf crisis, and my guess is that our government is too proud to ask anyone else to do it.”

  That sounded like Uncle Sam all right, Dagmar thought.

  “So,” she said, “what next?”

  “Lucky for you I’m a multimillionaire,” Charlie said. “I’m going to get in touch with some security firms, and we’re going to stage our own private evacuation. If necessary, we’ll fly you off the hotel roof in a helicopter.”

  Dagmar paused a moment to picture this.

  “Big box office,” she said.

  “Does your handheld have a GPS feature?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me your coordinates, then.”

  As the Tippels watched with interest, Dagmar thumbed a button, and her coordinates flashed onto the phone’s screen.

  “Six degrees eleven minutes thirty-one point eight seconds south, a hundred six degrees forty-nine minutes nineteen point four eight seconds east.”

  “Got it,” he said. “I’ll give them your coordinates and phone number and email, and we’ll see what they can arrange.”

  “Good,” Dagmar said, and then she added, “Thanks, Charlie.”

  “No problem.”

  “You keep saving me,” she said.

  “I haven’t saved you yet,” he said. “And if I’m going to, I’d better hang up and contact the troops.”

  “I love you, Charlie,” Dagmar said with sudden urgency.

  There was a moment of silence as Charlie dealt with his surprise.

  “I’m fond of you, too,” he said. “Whatever you do, don’t leave the hotel.”

  “No problem there.”

  “Take care. Someone will call soon.”

  “Thanks!” But Charlie had hung up.

  Dagmar reluctantly closed the phone and returned it to her belt.

  “Your boyfriend?” asked Mrs. Tippel.

  Dagmar shook her head. “My boss.”

  Mrs. Tippel seemed a little surprised.

  “He must be a good employer,” she said.

  He’s hiring mercenaries to rescue me, Dagmar almost said. But she reflected that so far as she knew, no mercenaries were coming for the Tippels or for anyone else in the breakfast room, and that to mention her good fortune might seem tactless, as if she were boasting about her return to the life of a privileged Westerner.

  “We went to college together,” she said.

  Hiring mercenaries, she thought.

  It was like something you’d do in a game.

  After breakfast, Dagmar checked with Mr. Tong to see if anything had changed, and found that nothing had. So she went to her room, booted her ultrathin computer, and checked her email.

  Her handheld could do anything her computer could, but she preferred a standard keyboard to having to thumb long messages on the phone’s little keypad. She wiped out spam, answered some routine queries, and sent messages to friends about her situation. She wrote about the riot and about being trapped in the music store, and about the bodies she thought she’d seen on the trip to the hotel.

  As she typed on the familiar keyboard, in the hotel room that smelled of clean sheets, with the hushed sound of the air-conditioning in the background and the room’s coffeemaker hissing and snorting as it provided Dagmar’s caffeine fix, the previous day’s hazards began to seem unreal, a brief dip into a nightmare that had been banished by the morning’s strong tropical light.

  The plangent sounds of Johnny Otis echoed in the room. Dagmar snatched at her phone. The number flashing in the display had a country code she didn’t recognize.

  “Hello?” she said cautiously.

  “Is this Dagmar Shaw?”

  The male voice had some kind of Eastern European accent.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “My name is Tomer Zan,” the man said. “I work for Zelazni Associates. Your employer, Mr. Ruff, has retained us to see about your safety.”

  Dagmar restrained her impulse to begin a joyful bouncing on the mattress.

  “Yes,” she said. “He told me to expect your call.”

  “Can you describe your situation, please?”

  She did. She mentioned the riot the previous day, and being trapped in the music store, and the fact that she had $180 in cash. She told Tomer Zan that she was on the fourteenth floor of the hotel, with a view to the northwest. She mentioned that meals were no longer being served on the third-floor terrace because the hotel management considered it unsafe.

  “I’m looking at a satellite picture of your hotel on Google Earth,” Zan said, “and I can tell you right now that I don’t like it. You’re too close to that traffic circle with the Welcome Statue, you’re too close to the government buildings that are going to be targets for demonstrators. The natural path for marches or riots runs right past your front door.”

  “Great,” Dagmar said.

  “We’re going to try to move you someplace safer. But we don’t have any assets in Jakarta, so that may not be possible for a few days.”

  Dagmar felt her mouth go dry.

  “You don’t have anybody in Jakarta?” she asked.

  “No, we don’t.”

  “So why did Charlie hire you?”

  “Because,” Zan explained patiently, “the companies with assets in Jakarta are all overcommitted right now.”

  Figures, Dagmar thought. She wandered to the window, parted the heavy curtains, and looked down at the street below. There was very little traffic, and none on foot. And no police.

  “We’ll have someone on the ground there in a few days,” Zan said.

  He seemed very confident of this.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “You’re not with anyone?” Zan asked.

  “No. I’m alone.”

  “Okay. I want you to change your schedule every day. Eat meals at different times, and in different restaurants in the hotel, if that’s possible.”

  “Why?”

  “It takes three days to set up a kidnapping. If you keep changing your schedule, that makes an abduction more difficult.”

  Dagmar began to say, But why would they kidnap me? then clacked her teeth shut on the words because they sounded just like the sort of thing a stupid tourist would say.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll do that.”

  “The power supply may be erratic, so keep your cell phone and your computer charged. Buy extra batteries if you can-or make sure your miniturbines have extra fuel.”

  “My phone doesn’t have miniturbines.”

  “Then charge it every chance you can, and buy extra batteries if you can find them in the hotel. And don’t use the
phone for anything except absolutely necessary calls.”

  “All right.”

  “If there’s a store in the hotel where you can buy food, buy all you can. Even if it’s junk food. The average city has only a three-day supply of food, and calories may get scarce.”

  “What do I buy the food with? Do I use my dollars?”

  There was a long moment’s silence.

  “Save the dollars,” Zan said.

  He then went on to tell Dagmar that he wanted her to find six different ways to escape the hotel from her room. And another six exits from every other place she regularly visited within the building.

  “What do I do if I have to leave the hotel?”

  “Find a place of temporary safety, and call me.”

  He went on to tell her not to wear any expensive jewelry or be seen carrying her computer, because that might mark her out as someone worth robbing.

  “Another thing,” he said. “I need you to be on the roof of the hotel at sixteen hundred hours Jakarta time.”

  “This afternoon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “So the satellite can get a look at you. I need you facing east and looking up.”

  Dagmar wondered how much it was costing Charlie to retask someone’s satellite, and decided it was better not to know.

  “You can use my picture on the Great Big Idea Web page,” she said.

  “We’re getting pictures of the roof anyway,” Zan said, “in case we want to extract you from there. So we might as well find out what you look like now.”

  Extract, Dagmar thought.

  “All right,” she said.

  She was placing herself in the hands of experts. Not that it had worked so far.

  Tomer Zan advised her to keep her passport and money on her, preferably in a money belt, or in a pocket that could be buttoned or zipped.

  “I have a pouch I can wear around my neck,” she said. Which she rarely used, because it wasn’t designed for people with tits.

  “That’s good,” Zan said. “Would you like me to repeat any of my instructions?”

  “Change my schedule,” Dagmar said. “Six exits, no jewelry or computer in public, on the roof at sixteen hundred.”