“How many IP addresses left?”

“Thousands. Maybe hundreds of thousands-I haven’t looked.”

Richard blinked. It was one thing to test your ninja mettle against a cunning opponent; it was another to slave over a keyboard in order to type in zillions of addresses.

“Let’s call it a day’s work, shall we?” he said.

“Now you understand,” said Dagmar, “why we want millions of players to work with these IP addresses.”

He nodded.

She raised her arms and stretched, opening her chest, filling her lungs with air.

One of Richard’s other machines gave a chime. He wheeled his office chair to another part of his desk and frowned at the display.

“Someone’s trying to go through the firewall,” he said.

“Not one of the targets?”

“No. They’d be identified by IP address only. This is someone at the company.” He paused as he read the monitor, then turned to look over his shoulder at Dagmar.

“It’s you,” he said.

She looked at him in surprise.

“What do you mean? ” she asked.

“It’s someone using your account.”

She bolted out of her chair to look at the display. “Who?”

Richard shrugged. “He’s calling from off-site,” he said. He frowned at the screen for a moment. “We could let him do what he wants,” he said, “and find out what he’s after.”

“Have you got a secure copy of the patch?”

Richard wheeled to the computer with the patch on it, pulled the memory stick, and held it so that Dagmar could see it. She took the stick from his hand. That left only the copy on the hard drive.

Richard let the intruder through the firewall, and they watched as Patch 2.0 was overwritten by something else.

“Slightly smaller file size,” Richard said after a few minutes’ analysis. “Still an executable file. Best guess is that it’s an earlier version of the patch.”

“Or a patch that’s been rewritten.”

Richard frowned. “Let’s do a comparison.”

More firewalls, software run, code rolling at near light speed on the monitors.

“There’s a difference,” Richard said, pointing. Code highlighted in blinking red. Dagmar narrowed her eyes, looked from one screen to the next.

“It’s a bank routing code,” Dagmar said. “The… intruder”-the other me-“he’s changing the program to send money to a different account.” She looked at the prefix. “An account in a different country, I think.”

Richard’s scanning program found other changes. Dagmar scanned the symbols and compared one to the next and tried to summon the programming skills she’d once possessed.

You could tell the difference between the programmers. The original code was elegant and concise; the new stuff consisted of code laid down in huge swaths, clumsy and overhasty.

But it would work, this new code. It would work perfectly well.

“Charlie’s patch,” she said, “sends the patch to every other bot the program knows about, then turns the bot off. But that feature has been deleted in this new one. It just lets the program run.”

“But it changes the bot’s owner.”

“Yes. All the profits get sent to the new account.”

Richard nodded. “Elegant,” he said. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

The new boss kills people, she thought. Dips nails in rat poison and packs them around explosive cores.

He looked at her. “Which one of the bosses is the bomber? Which is the Maffya?”

She thought about it. “Does it matter?”

Richard’s face took on a grim cast. He rolled his chair to a third machine and began typing.

“I’m going to find out what our intruder’s been up to.”

He scanned data for a moment, then turned to Dagmar again.

“You’ve been in all sorts of places where you’re not allowed,” he said. “Someone’s given you superuser status.”

“Who can do that?” Dagmar asked.

“Me. And Charlie Ruff, but he’s dead.”

“Can you find out who made me a superuser?”

More tapping. He frowned. “Someone who shouldn’t be a superuser, either, but he is. He has the handle CRAPJOB.”

A thousand pieces fell into place in Dagmar’s head, an action like a reverse explosion, a million bits of shrapnel flying together to form a perfect, seamless platonic solid.

She was astonished there was no sound. She should have heard the universe cracking.

Her heart and the jolt of adrenaline caught up long after the moment of comprehension, too late, useless for anything except making her hands tremble…

Richard tapped his keyboard. “Man!” he said. “That CRAPJOB account is only three days old! And then all CRAPJOB did was grant you superuser status, and since then all the activity’s been on your account.”

He turned, looked over his shoulder. “Any idea who this is?”

Dagmar shook her head. Unconvincingly, she thought.

Richard turned back to his machine. “I’ll cancel that account,” he said. “And yours. And then we’ll give you a new account.”

“No!” Dagmar lunged from her chair and put her hand over his. Richard looked at her in surprise.

“What’s the matter?”

“When you’re played,” Dagmar said, “you play back.”

Richard’s eyes narrowed in thought.

“We tell him what he wants to know,” Dagmar said. “And then we pull the rug out from under him.”

Richard the Assassin looked at her with a growing admiration.

“Excellent,” he said.

Dagmar cleaned her office. Dropping Siyed’s faded flowers, one pot after another, into the trash can, the series of clangs ringing off the walls, echoing down the hall.

A warning Klaxon.

Dagmar on the warpath. Stay away.

She picked up the trash can with its ceramic, earth, and plant matter and carried it away in a swirl of dry petals. She didn’t have a place to put it, really, so she took it to the break room and swapped it for the trash can there. It held only used tea bags, foil packets that had once contained instant hot chocolate, and an empty donut box.

It was a lot lighter.

He had trapdoors everywhere, Charlie had said. He’d been thinking about doing a scorched-earth on the company long before I took control… Wiping out everything before the creditors could have it, or lurking in the computers in order to sabotage our successors or to steal things. Bad as the damn Soong. He could have ended up in jail!

Except that Charlie had locked him out before he could do any damage. It had been Dagmar herself who gave him a computer, an account, and a paycheck. Once he had access, he used one of his trapdoors to create CRAPJOB and alter Dagmar’s own account so that he could use it to go anywhere in AvN Soft’s system.

The balance of the account, as of 1600 hours Cayman time yesterday, was $12,344,946,873.23, all in U.S. dollars.

That had been posted on Our Reality Network, where anyone could read it. The players assumed the numbers had been made up, but Dagmar had known they were real.

And one other person had seen that number and realized right away what Charlie had done, and had known how to turn the whole thing to his own advantage.

Figueroa? That’s on Figueroa, right?

My God, she’d spoken Charlie’s location aloud right in front of him.

She remembered him standing ten feet away, sipping his coffee, pretending he wasn’t listening.

She remembered him in the steak house, the dull fury in his eyes as he talked about Charlie stealing his company.

Dagmar went into her office and dropped the trash can next to her desk. Another clang.

She grabbed a dusty stack of papers from her shelf and, without looking at them, dumped them in the trash. They’d been there for months: if they were important, she’d have needed them by now.

You are helping, she’d said. You’re the only person I can talk to.

And then she’d handed him all he needed in order to kill Charlie and collect millions. Billions.