“I know we made the benchmarks,” Austin said. “And the next step is the release. So we’ve got to stick with the plan, all right?” There was a pause, and then Austin said, “I’m sure it’s a great idea. But save it for Release 2.0.” His heel tapped with impatience on the imported Finnish porphyry of the atrium floor. “Dude,” he said, “we’ve had this conversation.”

Dagmar waited for the dialogue to end so that she could thank Austin for lunch. Charlie arrived first, padding through the atrium in blue suede Adidas.

Like Austin, Charlie was a Type One Geek, tall and thin, with a balding head. He wore dark-rimmed spectacles, chinos, and a Versace sports shirt of the same pastel shade as Austin’s.

“No,” Austin said firmly. “You’re sticking with the strategic plan. Because if you don’t, I’m going to spank you hard. Got that? ”

Charlie listened with a grin on his face until the conversation was over.

“That wasn’t BJ, was it? ” he asked.

Then there was a moment of awkward silence as he and Austin recalled Dagmar’s relationship with BJ, and then Dagmar reached out to pat Austin’s arm.

“You can say what you like-I haven’t slept with BJ in ten years. Thanks for lunch. I’ve got a meeting of my own. Have a good time.”

She took the elevator to Great Big Idea, which was on the third floor. She had a meeting of her creative team-while she did most of the writing, other people handled Web design, graphic art, audio, video, and the more complex and technical sorts of puzzles for which the form was known. The meeting took place in a boardroom covered with charts and schedules drawn on whiteboard and glittering from plasma screens.

On the largest screen, Dagmar’s mantra glowed, one line following the next on infinite repeat:

Read the Schedule

Know the Schedule

Love the Schedule

The meeting was to make certain that everyone had taken the mantra to heart, and Dagmar was pleased to discover that for once, nothing had gone pear-shaped. Everyone was making the deadlines. The number of people who had joined the game was now more than eight hundred thousand and still climbing.

After the meeting broke up, Dagmar helped herself to a cup of coffee from the machine and walked to the boardroom’s floor-to-ceiling window to gaze across the Ventura Highway to the Santa Monica Mountains, dull brown against the brilliant California sky.

The players were calling the game Motel Room Blues. Her own name for it was The Long Night of Briana Hall.

Either would do. The important thing was the hundreds of thousands of players, who, if they could be persuaded to join Planet Nine, would quadruple its membership.

She looked down at the parking lot just as Austin started to cross it toward his Corvette. His head was shaded by his Yankees cap, and he carried his keys in one hand.

Dagmar’s attention was caught by motion in a corner of the parking lot-a motorcycle had just bounced across the low concrete berm that separated the AvN parking lot from the Chili’s restaurant next door. The bike accelerated as it moved along the row of cars. It was a green and white Kawasaki, and the rider wore what looked like brand-new riding leathers and a black helmet with a visor. Dagmar could hear the bike’s whine from her third-floor perch.

Austin had heard the machine and had politely stopped to let it pass. Instead the motorcycle slowed and came to a stop, as if the rider were going to ask Austin a question.

The rider drew a pistol from his green and white jacket and shot Austin five times. At each report the glass window rattled in its frame.

Dagmar’s heart lurched with each shot. A scream seemed to crouch somewhere in her throat, ready to spring. She stared as Austin fell, as the biker calmly put away his pistol and accelerated.

Dagmar clawed for her cell phone and tried to punch 911 while still keeping her eyes on the biker. She hit 611 instead.

The biker couldn’t get into the Gap parking lot-there was a fence with a three-foot-high cable stretched across a series of posts-so he turned left at the end of the row of cars and then, almost casually, made his way out of the parking lot and down the frontage road, where he accelerated out of sight.

Dagmar looked down at Austin in the parking lot and felt herself fill with despair.

Her fingers trembled, but she managed 911 on the third try.

That is so cool, thought Andy. I wonder how they knew I was looking.

Andy-better known by his online handle Joe Clever-was in his James Bond van parked in a strip mall across the highway from AvN Soft and Great Big Idea. The van was a new idea-he’d bought a used Dodge and equipped it for surveillance, with cameras hidden behind two-way-mirror windows, a satellite uplink, a cooler for the Mountain Dew and Red Bull he drank during the course of his researches, and a camp bed for when the caffeine finally wore off. He was divided on the notion of adding a chemical toilet-it would smell, but it meant he didn’t have to abandon his researches to haunt the rest rooms at Starbucks or Burger King.

He’d equipped the van with a number of plastic placards that he could stick to the door with built-in magnets. The current one told observers that the van belonged to Andy’s Electronic Service.

He was considering getting himself a surveillance drone, like those used by the police, highway patrol, and traffic reporters. They were cheap enough to make-just a big model plane with an onboard camera controllable from the ground. He didn’t need one of the fancy ones with the miniturbines.

Maybe, he’d thought, he could mount a launch rail on top of the van.

Andy had been using his Big Ears, bouncing a laser off the boardroom window at Great Big Idea, to listen to Dagmar’s meeting with her team. The reception had been wretched-the van was too far away, on the far side of the highway-and the air-conditioning must have been blowing right onto the window glass, because the sound was horribly distorted. Yet he had caught a few names that were probably characters who would be introduced into the game, and a few interesting phrases like “the cold-data store under the gantry at Mars Port,” which would be a place to pick up a clue if he only knew when it would be there.

He’d have to make sure that Consuelo-his new handle, chosen for this game-would be in the online world of Planet Nine, and at Mars Port under the gantry, at the right time.

If only he’d managed to hear which gantry.

It was while listening to the wild distortions on his Big Ears that he’d first caught sight of the motorcyclist. He was passing up and down the frontage road slowly, keeping an eye on the AvN Soft building the entire way. Andy had watched the rider take note of the CCTV camera above the entrance to the AvN parking lot, and he wondered if the rider had also seen the camera on the front door.

Andy assumed that he had a rival. He wasn’t pleased by this prospect; he very much preferred to be the only Dumpster diver on any game. But the driver seemed a little ill-equipped for espionage. The Kawasaki was nice, but it wasn’t even an anonymous SUV, let alone the spy van that Andy had assembled for himself.

The cyclist had eventually parked himself in the Chili’s parking lot out of sight of any cameras. When he took off his helmet to smoke a cigarette, Andy got out the Pentax and the big zoom lens. The rider was an impressive figure: in his twenties, tall, thick-necked, with big ears and reddish blond hair styled in a flattop. He wore gleaming-new riding leathers and clunky, thick-soled boots, and he looked like an actor playing a heavy.

Which wasn’t necessarily unusual: L.A. was full of underemployed actors. Sometimes, if you ate in restaurants, everyone on the wait staff seemed to be giving auditions.