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.
“It doesn’t make any sense!” Dagmar protested, and she was right; but she knew it made all the sense that it had to.
Read the Schedule
Know the Schedule
Love the Schedule
Dagmar looked at the words tracking endlessly on the flat-screen wall monitor and permitted herself a small smile. The mass hacking was the last big event of The Long Night of Briana Hall, and after that the game would grow manageable, both for her and her staff.
On Saturday, the Tapping the Source modules had told the players which water sources would be targeted by the terrorists, and allowed them to foil the terror plot. On Wednesday, they had destroyed the financial networks of the money men who had planned to profit from the disruption.
With both sets of major villains defeated, the game turned more intimate. It would all be about Briana Hall’s trying to convince the police that she was innocent in the deaths of her two former boyfriends.
Briana Hall’s life, Dagmar thought, was not unlike her own. Born a refugee in a hotel room, ending as words in a police file.
The web of Los Angeles spread out below her, lines of yellow and red, incandescents and neon and billboards.
The crime-scene tape was gone. The rubble had been swept into boxes to be stared at by experts. A few lights were on at Katanyan Associates, and a few cars remained in the parking lot.
Dagmar stood where the Phalanx had been and looked out at the city. The wind coming up the slope stirred her hair and brought with it the faint scent of eucalyptus.
Her phone sang. She answered.
“Miss Shaw?”
A wry smile touched Dagmar’s lips at the sound of the familiar voice. “You know, Lieutenant Murdoch,” she said, “I believe you know me well enough by now that you might as well call me by my first name.”
“If you like,” Murdoch said.
“How can I help you?”
“I called because I have news,” Murdoch said. “Rather sad news, I’m afraid.”
Police sirens wailed somewhere down in Los Angeles. Billboards flashed, transmitting the code that was commerce.
“Yes?” she said.
“Preliminary DNA evidence has confirmed that it was Mr. Ruff that was killed in the hotel explosion,” Murdoch said. “The preliminary evidence will be confirmed later, when a more thorough analysis is performed, but I’ve never known the preliminary to be wrong.”
“I understand,” Dagmar said.
Murdoch was only telling her what she already knew. Charlie, who despite his best efforts was not Victor von Doom, had not substituted another body for his own and had not gone underground in order to mastermind the collapse of world economies. That was the sort of thing that happened only in fiction-including the sort of fiction Dagmar wrote.
“We’ve also found the place where the bombs were assembled,” Murdoch said. “A hotel room. The tenant had asked not to be disturbed, but after three days the management decided to open the door. When they looked into the tenant’s luggage, they found bomb-making materials and instructions downloaded from the Internet, and called us. Prints taken at the scene match prints taken from Boris Bustretski’s apartment.”
“If there was a late-model laptop, it belongs to my company,” Dagmar said.
“You’ll have to contact the FBI about that,” Murdoch said. “Homeland Security has it all now.”
“Ah,” Dagmar said.
Great Big Idea would probably get the computer back only after time had made it thoroughly obsolete.
“Thank you for calling,” she said.
She holstered her phone and looked out over Los Angeles, feeling the wind lift her hair.
This was what BJ had played for, the view from the corner office, the tycoon car, the tycoon clothes, the tycoon bank account, and all Los Angeles at his feet.
Played and lost. All the brilliant game mastering, the devious plots, the ninja tactics played in World of Cinnabar, hadn’t helped BJ in the end.
The world was just too big. BJ hadn’t been defeated by Dagmar so much as by the Group Mind, lots of little autonomous agents out in the world, each with a skill set and a knowledge set, each with her own motivations, her own joys, her own alternate reality, all networked together in the great gestalt, the great becoming, that was the world.
Dagmar turned, Los Angeles at her back, and walked to her car.