“I’d appreciate it.”
“But in the meantime I need to find out as much as I can about Charlie. So I need to find out what happened to AvN Soft.”
He glanced away, a rueful smile on his lips, then turned back to her and visibly steeled himself, squaring his shoulders, sitting more rigidly in his seat.
“Right,” he said. “We started by calling ourselves Advanced von Neumann Software, because our agents were meant to reproduce themselves. But that ended up being misleading, because von Neumann machines are self-replicating machines, not software, so we settled for AvN Soft. We started in this old building down in Culver City-it had been an old movie-production facility, and by that I mean old. There was junk in there dating from the forties. I wanted to put it on eBay and sell it to collectors, but Charlie insisted we didn’t have time, so we just paid the trash men to haul it away. And then we had to retrofit the whole building to modern standards-my God, there was no high-speed Internet anywhere in the building, let alone a T3 connection. And while that was going on, we found the asbestos in the ceiling. So that meant more delays and more money down the drain and guys in moon suits covering half the building in plastic sheeting.
“So then that’s the situation we were in when Soong Scientific went bankrupt. You remember them? ”
“No,” Dagmar said.
“They were bleeding-edge for, like, three years-but it turned out the bleeding edge was nothing but vapor, and when their CEO was arrested by the Chinese government for fraud and bribery and shot in the back of the head, his office tower in the valley became available. I talked Charlie into moving because we could buy the building cheap and it would save money in the long run. But that meant more discussion with the VC people, and more delay and more money…” He waved a hand. “Well. You can imagine.”
“I’ve heard Austin describe start-ups. This sounds sort of typical.”
“It felt like we were going off into the wilderness,” BJ said, “felling trees with hand tools, and putting up cabins. It felt like we were fighting bears with stone axes and eating them raw. It felt as if nobody had ever done any of this before. It felt like we had to invent everything from scratch.”
“Didn’t you have a business plan? ”
“Sure we did. But what did the business plan say about asbestos? What did it say about contractors that never showed up to do their work, about a project manager who found Jesus and ran away to a fundamentalist Bible camp in Arkansas, about old Soong servers that were riddled with Chinese trapdoors and had to be replaced-Christ, those Soong people were devious! The business plan didn’t last ten seconds. We were up the creek without a map.”
The waitress brought BJ’s coffee and dessert, but BJ’s story had gained momentum, and he ignored the food placed before him. He jabbed the air with a stubby finger.
“The fact was,” he said, “that Charlie and the development team were wandering in circles trying to get the product finished. I kept having to adjust the business strategy because the software kept mutating out from under me. And there were always choices to make-either do something half-assed now, or make a commitment to the long haul and do it right. I always made the choice that would pay off in the long run. I began by assuming the company would be there forever. The only times I compromised were when Charlie talked me into it-he was always looking over my shoulder and arguing with me instead of doing his own work.”
He spread his hands. “And I was right, wasn’t I? Charlie’s reaping the benefits of all my long-range planning. I’m just not there to share it with him.”
Dagmar nodded. “So how did it end? ”
“It was the first release that killed us,” BJ said. “Rialto was eight months late. There were bugs. The user interface sucked. What we had was a data-mining agent that would analyze publically available financial information-everything from stock market quotes to remittances to exchange rates to raw materials prices to employment rates-and it would make predictions. It would make the trades itself, if you wanted it that way.
“The problem was”-fervor shone in BJ’s eyes-“there was already plenty of software on the market that did that. The competition was fierce. Credit Suisse, for example, had an alg program that would analyze eight thousand stocks per second and trade based on predictions set three minutes ahead. Each trade took about a millisecond. They’ve probably got a better system now.
“And let’s face it, Release 1.0 just wasn’t all that successful in the beginning-Rialto was designed to evolve, not to be brilliant right from the start. It was hard to explain that to the customers. Word of mouth in the marketplace destroyed us.” He shrugged. “It’s very successful now, I understand.”
“That’s what I hear,” said Dagmar.
“After that,” BJ said, “the money ran out. We had five or six other projects in the pipeline, but it was too late. We kept having to lay off staff. I called every venture capitalist in America and every European merchant bank, trying to raise funds to keep us afloat. Eventually it was just Charlie and me and maybe half a dozen other people in this empty building. He was immersed in programming, trying to keep one of the other projects afloat-and whenever he saw me, he’d just start yelling that it was all my fault. He’d gone totally insane.
“Our options ran out. We declared bankruptcy, and all the assets were seized by our creditors. We’d pledged our copyrights and our own shares against our financing, so we were left with nothing. We stayed in our offices, because the building hadn’t been sold yet and our creditors hadn’t gotten around to throwing us out. And then”-he shrugged again-“Charlie’s backers turned up. They bought the company from the VC people for pennies on the dollar. They retained Charlie and threw me out.”
His blue eyes gave Dagmar a defiant look. “Russian Maffya?” he said. “You tell me.”
Dagmar was silent. BJ took a fork and jabbed it angrily into his shortcake.
“The least I could get out of all that,” he said from around his dessert, “is a damn meal.”
“Be my guest,” Dagmar murmured.
BJ ate his dessert in wrathful silence. Dagmar’s mind spun in circles, trying to reconcile BJ’s story of AvN Soft’s fall with those of Charlie and Austin.
In any case, the story seemed to cast very little light on Charlie’s current behavior.
The waitress arrived to ask if they wanted anything else. Dagmar looked over her shoulder and saw they were alone in the dining room. The loudest sound from the bar was a cable news channel. Dagmar said they’d have the check and then went to the ladies’.
Her route passed through the bar, and something, some dreadful sense of déjà vu, made her look at the news program perched on its plasma screen above the bar.
The crawl at the bottom of the screen read Bolivian Currency Collapse.
A shiver ran up her spine.
She remembered watching the same network talking heads five months before, from the bar in the Royal Jakarta.
“Apparently the same traders have now switched their focus to Chile,” one said. “Chile’s the IMF’s poster boy in South America, a perfect example of the neoliberal economic model…”
The other talking head twinkled. “They call it neoconservatism here in America,” she said.
They laughed. The first talking head twinkled back.
“That’s right,” he said. “And if Chile falls, the rest of Latin America is just that much closer to economic apocalypse.”
Dagmar clenched her hands to keep them from trembling. The scent of burning Glodok came faintly to her nostrils.
She paid for the dinner with her company card, then drove BJ back to the AvN Soft building to pick up his car.
BJ stood for a long moment by Dagmar’s car, staring up at the darkened glass tower with only a few windows illuminated, where the service was cleaning or some programmer was pulling an all-nighter.
“This sure has been one damn weird day,” he said.
“True,” Dagmar said. She put her arms around his burl
y body, rested her head against his shoulder. He smelled pleasantly of steak and strawberries and coffee and himself. His arms came around her.
“Thanks for doing this,” he said.
“No problem.”
“And thanks for listening.” He took a deep breath. “You know, I hadn’t told that story to anyone before. I didn’t know if anyone would believe me.”
“I don’t know what to think,” Dagmar said. He stiffened, and she added quickly, “Not about you, but about Charlie.”
“Be careful around him,” BJ said. “I think he’s connected to all the wrong people.”
“I think you’re right.”
She released BJ and stepped back.
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” she said. “Have a safe drive home.”
“And you.”
Dagmar sat in her Prius and watched BJ’s old Chevrolet turn out of the parking lot and onto the frontage road. He had once owned a BMW, she remembered-he’d emailed her a picture of it.
He was just so different. She had a hard time reconciling the old hard-charging, energetic, arrogant BJ with the diffident, frustrated man she’d met today.
She wondered what made the difference.
Failure, she thought. Failure was all it took.
CHAPTER NINETEEN This Is Not Treason
FROM: Siyed Prasad
SUBJECT: Re: Holiday in L.A.
Dear Dagmar,
I know that you are very busy right now, but I simply must see you. Ever since our wonderful time together, I can think of no one but you. You possess my every waking thought, and you invade my dreams as well. I try to concentrate on work, but all I see is your beautiful face before me.
My dearest, we must meet. Name the time and the place, and I will fly to your side!
Your devoted,
Siyed
FROM: Dagmar Shaw
SUBJECT: Re: Holiday in L.A.
Go back to your wife.
Dagmar
FROM: Siyed Prasad
SUBJECT: Re: Holiday in L.A.
Dear Dagmar,
I don’t care about my wife. I don’t care about anyone but you. I will
leave my wife if you desire it. I will leave my family, my country,
everything.
Just let us be together. You mean everything to me.
Your desperate,
Siyed
FROM: Dagmar Shaw
SUBJECT: Re: Holiday in L.A.
You don’t deserve Manjari. Bugger off. Go away.
Dagmar
Twenty-five million dollars, Dagmar thought.
Numbers like that were as far beyond her understanding as the analysis of, for example, continuous tangent vector fields, but still she knew that money like that didn’t come from just anywhere.
The money didn’t seem to be in anyone’s budget. It was possible, she supposed, that Charlie shifted it to the Atreides account from another part of the company, but that sort of thing wouldn’t go unnoticed for long.
He had to have gotten it from somewhere.
Somebody earned this money, she thought. Either Charlie earned it, or the person who earned it gave it to Charlie. Or someone stole it. Or Charlie stole it.
Money will get you through times of inadequate staffing, Charlie had said, better than inadequate staffing will get you through times of no money.
The keys to the kingdom, Charlie had called it. Twice.
Did she want to turn those keys? she wondered. Did she want to find what Charlie was hiding in his kingdom?
Because right at this moment she had somewhere between one million and three million players who could help her.
She leaned back in her office chair and reached blindly for her teacup. She took a drink of the jasmine tea, replaced the cup, swallowed without tasting.
It was past eleven at night, and Dagmar was alone in her office. The aroma of the jasmine tea blended with the scent of the flowers that Siyed continued to send, one new arrival every morning. Every horizontal surface in the untidy office now had its elaborate arrangement, and the flowers weren’t dying fast enough to be replaced by the new arrivals, so Dagmar had begun to give the bouquets away. Soft floral scents floated through half the doors in the company, mingling on occasion with the odor of Jack Stone’s Frito pies.
Dagmar decided she didn’t want to think about the keys to the kingdom for the next, say, six minutes, so she touched the screen and brought up some other work, some of BJ’s, and she sat at her desk for the next few minutes and edited it.
She had known BJ was good at plotting, but she hadn’t known whether his writing would be adequate for her purposes. He wrote her lively emails, but that didn’t mean he had a sense of story or structure. That’s why she’d had him creating phony documents, because documents had a structure that would be easier for BJ to follow.
He’d turned out to be more than a satisfactory writer, though he was unfamiliar with the concise style required, and needed editing. Dagmar was relieved. Her instincts in hiring BJ had been correct.
And of course BJ’s presence had the potential to really make Charlie insane, which as far as Dagmar was concerned was a bonus, even if-as Dagmar intended-Charlie never found out that BJ had been hired.
Dagmar saved the changes on BJ’s work, then touched the screen and brought up the page that had her worried.
She had the number of the Atreides account. She had the time of the electronic fund transfer that had dumped the twenty-five mil into the account. She had the tracking number of the fund transfer itself.
The Long Night of Briana Hall had a financial dimension, the stock swindle that had motivated the murder of one of Briana’s ex-boyfriends. The murky financial history behind the killing was part of the game.
Dagmar could put the real numbers into the game, ghosting them in as part of the game’s fiction. Real people, players, would then try to find out where the money came from, who the account belonged to, and possibly even how much was in it. Possibly, among the millions of people who had signed up for the game, there would be one person who had the tools, or the access, to find all that out.
The question was whether Dagmar really wanted all that to happen, whether she wanted a look into Charlie’s secret world.
Or should she even be bothering with this, with the Latin American currencies in freefall and tens of millions of people’s savings having just floated off into the slipstream…
Atreides LLC. Named after the House of Atreus, lords of Mycenae, who had torn themselves to bits in a multigenerational fratricide that had involved nephews baked into pies, husbands hacked with axes, Furies pursuing mad children from one futile sanctuary to the next, all the bloody and baroque ways the ancients had of torturing and offing one another… that, and the Trojan War, too.
Dagmar was certain that one friend had already died as a result of whatever was going on in Charlie’s life. If Dagmar began poking around, was it possible that she might start another round of fratricide?
Might she become a target herself?
Or worse, would Charlie find out and fire her ass from the only job she’d ever really loved?
The truth shall set you free. She wanted the truth, but she didn’t want to be free from Great Big Idea.
Keys to the kingdom, she thought.
Austin was dead, and Charlie was going mad, and she didn’t know why.
She added the account number and the tracking number, saved the work, and then sent it to Ninja Ned in the Graphics Department to be stegged into a facsimile memo that would appear on a hidden Web page that would only be opened when someone playing Briana Hall solved a puzzle.
Puzzles, she decided, were going to fall.
The scent of Siyed’s flowers hovered in the air. Dagmar sat on the edge of the desk in her office and looked at the plasma screen on the wall, then down at the speakerphone that sat on the desk by her right hip. She wore her panama hat as if it carried an alternate personality she could adopt. Adrenaline keened in her nerves, li
ke the scraping of a fiddle.
BJ leaned against the window, and Helmuth lounged in Dagmar’s office chair, from which he had just sent out the game’s latest update. His index finger lazily moved over the screen, touching buttons-some of them well hidden-that caused newly loaded Web pages to flash on-screen.
Dagmar watched the wall screen, where the same pages paraded one after the other.
There. The document with the bank account, the numbers that were the key to Charlie’s secrets.
“Looks like everything loaded,” Helmuth said.
If all the pages hadn’t gone up at once, confusion and catastrophe could have resulted. But Dagmar’s suspense did not diminish as Helmuth spoke. She was in Charlieland now, and the suspense wouldn’t go away until she found her way out.
Helmuth began tapping on Dagmar’s ten-key pad. More pages leaped into view, each stacked atop the next. A video began playing, Terri Griff as Briana Hall fleeing from the bad guys who had just whacked Cullen.
“Excellent,” Helmuth said. “So far all the features are working.”
“How many hits are we getting?” Dagmar asked through her dry mouth. She reached for her cup of tea.
Helmuth caressed the screen with his fingers. Data leaped onto the plasma screen. “The page that you’re most interested in,” he said, “has a couple of dozen so far.”
Helmuth was wrong: that wasn’t the page Dagmar was most interested in. But that was fine, too. If the nervousness showed, she had other reasons to be nervous.
“Damn,” said BJ. “These people are quick.”
“Quick they are,” said Dagmar. Laughing. Nervously.
Adrenaline fired a rocket up Dagmar’s spine. In a few moments, after players destegged the memo, they would call Briana’s best friend, Maria Perry. Who, played by Dagmar, would answer.
They watched the hits increase. Tens of thousands of people had noted the update by now, and the number was increasing exponentially as each informed everyone on his network.
Pages that were hidden by puzzles began to open. Dagmar looked down at the speakerphone.
This Is Not a Game Page 20