This Is Not a Game Read online

  and share their food with her, and they’ll take her anywhere that

  doesn’t involve danger to their own people.

  Their style is called Bayangan Prajurit Pentjak Silat. My impression

  is that they’ll take money if we give it to them, but their religion

  obliges them to do charitable acts, so they don’t insist on being

  paid.

  Here’s the problem. Dagmar’s hotel is being guarded by a group

  that Bayangan Prajurit doesn’t get along with. The hotel guards are

  allied with the military, and their organization is headed by a general.

  Bayangan Prajurit are pro-democracy and they won’t cooperate

  with the hotel guards in any way.

  Anybody have any ideas? Do we have to get Dagmar away from her

  own guards?

  By the next morning a food shipment had arrived, and for breakfast, Dagmar gorged on Southeast Asia’s finest, freshest, most glorious fruit.

  The military were providing food to their allies in the city, and the Bersih Jantung were willing to supply the hotel. Dagmar presumed there were vast bribes involved, money shifting around offshore, where the banks still worked.

  There was an upside, Dagmar supposed, to dealing with a corrupt military.

  “What’s the word?” Dagmar asked.

  “Whatever the word is,” said Tomer Zan, “it’s not a good one. Our people have had a chance to look at this helicopter, and it’s a piece of shit. The maintenance logs are incomplete or nonsensical or forged in some obvious way, and it’s clear we’ll have to do a complete overhaul on the machine before we dare fly it out to you.”

  The dry monsoon, which had ceased to be dry, spattered rain against her hotel window. Dagmar let the space of three seconds go by in order to demonstrate to Zan her displeasure.

  “How long will the overhaul take?” she asked.

  “Depends on whether new parts are required. And of course, what parts.”

  Dagmar let more time pass.

  “Why don’t you hire one of the helicopters that took the Indians or the Japanese out?”

  “They were military aircraft, darling. They don’t rent them.”

  “Zelazni Associates has an air division,” she said. “I saw it on your Web page. Can’t you fly me out in one of your own aircraft?”

  “We don’t have helicopters, darling. We fly helicopters, we maintain helicopters, but we don’t own them. What we have are fixed-wing transport aircraft to help move our people and their equipment.”

  “Can’t you put a helicopter on one of your transport planes and fly it out here?”

  Now it was Zan’s turn to be silent.

  “Our planes aren’t big enough,” he said.

  “Maybe you could find a bigger one.”

  “I’ll look at what’s possible,” Zan said after another pause. Meaning, Dagmar supposed, what Charlie was willing to pay for.

  “I should let you know,” she said, “that another group is trying to help me leave Indonesia. They’ve actually made some progress.”

  “Another group?” Zan’s query was cautious.

  “I’ll email you the Web page.”

  Maybe, she thought, he’d enjoy the fanfic after all.

  FROM: Hanseatic

  This game is amazing. How did Great Big Idea get the Indonesian

  government to cooperate with all this?

  FROM: LadyDayFan

  TINAG.

  FROM: Hanseatic

  Yah, right. My guess is the setup is something like this: we get 200

  points for getting Dagmar out of Jakarta to someplace safer, 500

  points if we get her out of Indonesia entirely, and 1,000 points for

  Total World Domination.

  FROM: LadyDayFan

  You’re joking, right?

  FROM: Hippolyte

  Hanseatic, this really isn’t a game.

  FROM: Hanseatic

  Maybe yes, maybe no. But what difference does it make?

  “Are these people serious?” Tomer Zan asked.

  “Some of them.”

  “Who are they, exactly?”

  “The ones I know, I don’t know well,” Dagmar said. “The rest are just handles they use online.”

  “Are they Indonesia specialists?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “How well do you trust them?”

  More than I trust you, Dagmar thought.

  “I don’t think they would deliberately mislead me,” she said.

  “I’m going to fly to Singapore myself, to take charge of this,” Zan said. “If you don’t hear from me for the next day or two, that’s why.”

  Competition, Dagmar thought, seemed to have heightened Zan’s sense of urgency.

  That night, Star TV reported that the American ambassador and his family had been evacuated from Jakarta by some kind of U.S. Special Forces unit. The report made the ambassador seem brilliant and courageous, a combination of Rambo and Jack Kennedy.

  In the face of this bold, blazing adventure, the fact that the ambassador had abandoned his post, all his subordinates, and every U.S. citizen in Jakarta seemed hardly worth mentioning.

  FROM: Joe Clever

  I had to walk him through it, but we’ve succeeded in setting Widjihartani

  up with his own PayPal account. He can transfer money

  from there into his bank account in unlimited amounts, but the

  bottleneck is the bank, which will only allow him to withdraw a certain

  mount.

  I’m checking into whether the bank will allow him to borrow money

  against the money already in his account. That way he can get a lot

  of cash at once.

  Dagmar had just finished her nightly swim when she heard the roar of vehicles. She threw her towel around her shoulders and walked to the edge of the terrace, then looked down through the screen of trees to the street below.

  A convoy of half a dozen cars had just driven up beneath the Royal Jakarta’s portico. The Bersih Jantung guards were running to the cars and leaping inside. Their long, strange weapons thrust awkwardly from the windows as the vehicles sped away.

  The last to leave was one of the older men in white. He jumped into a minibus without looking back, and then all Dagmar could see were the red taillights receding along the boulevard.

  The hotel’s guards had jumped ship.

  FROM: Charlie Ruff

  I’m Charlie Ruff. Some of you may know me. I’m Dagmar’s boss, and

  Great Big Idea was my great big idea.

  Dagmar has alerted me to the existence of this conspiracy, and I’d

  like to put your financing on a more professional basis.

  Basically, I’ll be paying for anything that leads to Dagmar’s escape

  from Indonesia.

  Please, let me know what you need.

  The looters arrived while Dagmar was paying her morning call on the concierge, a visit that neither enjoyed but that both recognized was inevitable. Dagmar asked whether anything had changed, and the concierge always said that nothing had.

  “What happened to Bersih Jantung?” Dagmar asked the concierge.

  “Their neighborhood was attacked,” the woman said. “The men left to protect their families.”

  It was then that the first vehicles arrived. Dagmar turned at the sound of squealing brakes. Through the glass door of the concierge’s office she saw the small blue bus drawing up under the portico. Men jumped out, some of them armed with the same freakish weapons that the Bersih Jantung had carried.

  They didn’t wear uniforms. They wore tropical shirts and T-shirts with the names of bands on them and baseball caps and headscarves and pitji hats. They looked more like the rioters Dagmar had encountered on the first day than anyone’s martial Islamic association.

  Her heart gave such a violent lurch that her first grab for the door handle missed. She tried again, moved quickly into the lobby, a
nd faded as fast as she could in the direction of the elevators. She scuttled to the double row of polished metal doors and jabbed at the call button.

  Other vehicles had drawn up behind the bus, and more men were piling out. There was no one to stop them-the Sikh doormen hadn’t been seen for days, and Dagmar presumed they had been evacuated along with the other Indian nationals.

  The leader entered. He had a Japanese long sword stuck in his belt. One of the managers made a diffident approach, and the leader told him to stand back, which he did. A mob of people followed him into the lobby.

  Some of the invaders pushed hand trucks. Several seized the carts the bellmen used to carry luggage. One white-haired man had a list written in an old school notebook.

  The leader drew his katana and made a broad gesture in the direction of the lounge. A dozen of his followers charged into the lounge and ran behind the bar. Bottles of liquor were piled on the bar to be swept up later. The bar television was torn from its moorings, and another looter moved a chair so that he could stand on it and disconnect another television that was mounted high in a corner.

  Hotel employees clumped in one area of the lobby and did nothing.

  The elevator dinged, and Dagmar ran for it. While she counted the seconds until the door closed, she remembered the six exits from the lobby that Tomer Zan had told her to locate, and realized that she should have used one of them.

  Instead she’d panicked and run for the elevators.

  It occurred to her that she was really unequipped for this kind of life.

  The doors closed with an infuriating lack of haste, and Dagmar began her rise to her precarious aerie on the fourteenth floor.

  FROM: Dagmar

  Okay, this is it. The martial arts association that was guarding the

  hotel fled last night, and today the looters moved in. It’s not spontaneous

  looting this time; it’s highly organized. I can look out the

  window and see trucks moving off with televisions, toilets, sinks,

  microwaves, and the gas ranges from the kitchen. I guess I’ve had

  my last hot meal. Or maybe my last meal of any sort, since they’ve

  probably taken all the food as well.

  The looters are armed with swords, knives, and spears. I haven’t

  heard of them attacking anyone, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t

  happened.

  I need out of this hotel, and I need to go now. Any ideas?

  “Is this Dagmar?”

  A strange male voice, very deep and authoritative, with the same accent as Tomer Zan.

  “Yes,” Dagmar said.

  “My name is Mordechai Weitzman. I’m calling for Tomer Zan, who is in transit to Singapore and can’t speak right now.”

  “Yes!” said Dagmar. “Hello!”

  “We got your email. Can you get onto the roof later tonight?”

  Dagmar’s heart gave a leap of delight at the prospect of the helicopter finally arriving.

  “Yes!” she said. “Yes, of course!”

  “The package should arrive about midnight Jakarta time, but it may be delayed. You’ve got to be ready when it comes.”

  Her mind seemed to skip several tracks, like a needle hurled across an old LP.

  “Package?” she said.

  “We’re sending you a package of dollars. They may help you acquire food and other supplies until we can arrive to pick you up.”

  Dagmar felt her sudden joy evaporate.

  “You’re dropping money, but you’re not picking me up?”

  “We’re sending it on a surveillance drone. It’s not big enough to carry you.”

  “Shit!” Dagmar kicked the chest of drawers in her room: it banged solidly against the wall. “There are armed men in the hotel! I need to get out of here now!”

  “You need to stay in your room.”

  “I am in my fucking room!”

  At that moment the lights died, and the air-conditioning whimpered to a stop.

  “I am in my fucking room,” Dagmar announced, “in the fucking dark.” She was not unaware of a degree of melodrama in her delivery.

  “We are coming as soon as we can,” said Weitzman. “But we need a working aircraft.”

  “The world is full of aircraft!” Dagmar said. “They’ve been flying in and out of here for days. They could even spare one to fly out the American ambassador!”

  “Now that was a profile in courage, wasn’t it?” There was cold humor in Weitzman’s voice.

  “I’d say,” Dagmar said, “that the Alamo spirit is definitely dead.”

  On the roof at eleven, she thought.

  And fuck you, Mordechai, whoever you are.

  FROM: Desi

  I’ve emailed the Bayangan Prajurit people, but it’s the middle of

  the night in Indonesia and it may be a while before we hear from them.

  I did hear what happened with Bersih Jantung. They’re pro-military,

  remember, and the army was supplying them with food, fuel, and

  other black market items. So their neighbors, who all hate the military,

  decided to hijack their latest convoy and steal their food and stuff.

  Which they did. Successfully.

  Bayangan Prajurit claims they weren’t involved, but they’re very

  pleased with this development, and they had a hard time keeping

  a straight face.

  Dagmar stood atop the silent, dark tower as the monsoon spat warm drizzle in her face. She hoped that the reconnaissance craft would be able to find her through the cloud cover.

  If it was like everything else Zelazni had tried so far, it would drop into the ocean somewhere west of Krakatoa.

  As she looked over the edge, she could see that lack of electricity hadn’t stopped the looters. They were working by flashlight, and now they were loading mattresses and chests of drawers into their trucks.

  They’d finished looting the ground floors, she saw, and had started on the guest rooms. The power outage meant they weren’t going to get to the fourteenth floor anytime soon, but Dagmar had considerable respect for their industry and assumed they would reach her eventually.

  And besides, sooner or later she was going to have to descend to the ground in search of food and water.

  Around her, the city was dark except for a few fires burning here and there. The locals were still exercising blazing benevolence upon their neighbors.

  She could see the pool down below, on the third-floor terrace.

  She had decided against her nightly swim. Her courage did not extend to defiance of mobs with spears and knives.

  Not that her courage had done anything so far but fail her.

  She gave a jump as her phone let out a bray. She answered.

  “Are you on the roof?” said Mordechai.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  She ransacked a mental map. “Northeast corner,” she said.

  “Stay back from the edge. We don’t want the package dropping to the street.”

  She stepped back until she came up against one of the roof structures. Water dripped down her neck, a surprising splash of warmth, and she took a step forward.

  “Any minute now,” said Mordechai.

  Dagmar scanned the sky. A flurry of rain pelted down for a few seconds, then ceased. Then there was a faint whooshing noise, and the wind carried a warm breath of burned hydrocarbon.

  Suddenly she saw it, hovering right above her. There were no wings and no tail structure-the thing was just an aerodynamic shape, like an elongated Frisbee, black against the opalescent cloud. It made a sound like a crowd in a distant stadium, a far-off roaring, and Dagmar realized it was propelled by arrays of the same miniturbines that served as backup power for her computer. There had to be some method of directing the thrust so that the machine could hover or fly in any direction. From the smell, Dagmar assumed the machine was loaded with some form of high-powered aviation fuel, as opposed to the stuff
in her computer, a substance that, at the insistence of the Department of Homeland Security, couldn’t burn fast enough to be used to blow up an airplane.

  “I see it!” she said into her phone. “It’s right over my head!”

  “How far above you?”

  “Maybe twenty feet. It’s hard to say. I can’t tell how large it is.”

  “We’ll take it down three meters.”

  The tone of the turbines shifted, and the machine wafted gently toward Dagmar. The hydrocarbon smell grew stronger.

  “Right,” Mordechai said. “We’ve got you. It was hard picking you out from the background. Stand by.”

  The drone was, Dagmar guessed, about eight feet long. Despite the gusting of the monsoon, the machine hovered with perfect stillness in the air, its fly-by-wire computer adjusting to every shift of the wind.

  “Hold out your hand,” Mordechai said. There was amusement in his voice.

  Dagmar put out her right hand, her left hand still holding the phone to her ear. The package dropped and bounced off Dagmar’s forearm, then fell to the rooftop with a little slap.

  “Have you got it?” Mordechai asked.

  Dagmar knelt, swept her hand over the roof, and found the package. Her fingers closed around it.

  “I have it,” she said.

  She straightened and looked up in time to see the drone take off, its low roar increasing as it turned northeast and flew away with surprising rapidity. She watched it until it disappeared into the night.

  “You want to be careful with that money,” Mordechai said. “What you had before was maybe not worth killing over, but what you’ve got now can get you killed very fast.”

  Dagmar felt an invisible hand clamp over her throat. She managed to speak in a kind of whisper.

  “How much is it?” she said.

  “Two thousand dollars. That should pay for a boat to take you away. Now listen.”

  He told her that she should split the package up once she got it to her room, carry it in different places so she wouldn’t be peeling bills off a huge roll and offering someone far too much temptation.

  “Right,” she said. “No temptation. Got it.”