Her calls continued. She found that it was Corporal Carrot who had carried the united PC, monitor, greeting card, and data disk, all packed in a single box, to the Figueroa Hotel.

“I got instructions to put the box at a particular place,” he said. He sounded like a teenager. “Right at the door outside the Medina Suite.” There was a pause. “This didn’t have anything to do with the bombing, did it? I’ve been worried about that ever since I saw that Charles Ruff had been killed.”

Dagmar unclenched her jaw muscles.

“Don’t worry about that,” she said.

“Oh, good!” The relief in Carrot’s voice was clear. “That’s great!”

The last thing Dagmar needed was speculation about whether players in one of her games had been used in a terrorist event.

Even if it was true. Especially if it was true. It would cast every future ARG under suspicion, it wouldn’t do the players any good, and it wouldn’t help to catch the killer.

She told Carrot that if David called again, he was free to say yes, but that he should call her right away.

She could see now how Charlie had died. He’d finished his work on Patch 2.0, emailed the result to Dagmar, and then gone out for breakfast, or to put one of his empty Cokes in the flat, or left the room for some other reason. The box had been placed right in front of his door. Computer, monitor, disk, and greeting card. He’d read the note allegedly from Dagmar, then attached the monitor to the computer, plugged it in, and turned the computer on.

That’s when the bomb went off. Or maybe BJ had worked it so that the bomb was detonated when Charlie opened the door to insert the data disk. Charlie would have been right there, peering at the machine at close range through his glasses, when the gunpowder detonated.

Pain brought Dagmar out of her reverie. She looked down at her hands and saw that her fists had been clenched so hard that her fingernails had dug hard into her palms.

Killing was too good for BJ.

From outside the office, Dagmar heard the chime of the elevator. She looked out the windows and saw that it had gotten dark, that long lines of red and white auto lights were pouring past on the 101.

She heard footsteps coming toward her across the tile floor, and then she remembered that she was alone in the Great Big Idea offices, and that she’d given BJ access to the building.

Her heart gave a sickening lurch. She jumped out of her chair so quickly that her chair shot backward along its rollers and crashed into a shelf. Her nerves leaped.

Great, she thought. She’d just told him where she was.

She darted around the office looking for a weapon. She clutched at a pair of scissors and then thought of how useless they’d be against BJ’s powerful arms and big hands. Hands that had already broken Siyed’s body.

Belatedly she realized she could call for help. She reached for her phone with the hand that wasn’t holding scissors, punched 911, and was in the process of pressing Send when Helmuth appeared in the doorway carrying a pizza box.

They stared at each other for a moment in mutual surprise.

“God in heaven, Dagmar,” Helmuth said. “You look like hell.”

Carefully, Dagmar pressed End before the operator could pick up.

“Sorry,” she said. “I forgot you were coming back.”

Helmuth smiled. “Who did you think I was, Jack the Ripper? ”

“Close enough.”

He offered the pizza box. “There’s pepperoni, there’s a slice with mushrooms, and a couple slices of a rather tasty Hawaiian barbecue chicken with pineapple.”

“Great,” Dagmar said. She summoned the will not to faint dead away.

“Sorry I scared you,” Helmuth said.

She put down the scissors and pressed her trembling hands together.

“I think I’m getting used to it,” she said.

FROM: Dagmar Shaw

SUBJECT: L.A. Games

This is Dagmar Shaw, of Great Big Idea Productions, the company that is bringing you the ARG about Briana Hall.

We’ve managed to confirm that someone else is running live events that are piggybacking off our game about Briana Hall. These games do not seem to be pranks, but genuine live events running in parallel with our own.

Players should feel free to participate in these events if they feel so inclined, but please be aware that Great Big Idea does not sponsor them, and that discoveries made during the course of these adventures may or may not constitute actual answers to Great Big Idea puzzles.

We would like to continue monitoring this situation, however, so if you hear from anyone asking you to participate in a live event in the next few weeks, please contact me by responding to this email, and please include your phone number.

Please do not post about this on any of the regular forums, because

it might confuse our other players about what’s going on.

Thank you,

Dagmar Shaw

This Is Not Finance

Dagmar spent Thursday night in the Best Western in Chinatown, a short distance from the Cathay Bank parking lot that had briefly held components of the bomb that had killed Charlie. She had left her Prius in the AvN Soft parking lot, parked directly under the glassy eye of a security camera, and had rented one of the new Mercedes two-seater sports cars from Enterprise, which delivered the vehicle right to the doors of the office tower. She had redlined the Mercedes as she drove out of the Valley, probably tripping half a dozen automatic cameras and generating a couple of thousand dollars in the outrageous fines that California’s broken government extorted from its citizens, but at least she knew she hadn’t been followed.

The morning news was full of alarmed chatter about the assault on the Chinese yuan, something that Dagmar had missed in the traumas of the previous day. The markets in China, where it was already Saturday, were closed, but the fury continued on other exchanges.

The yuan seemed to be in serious danger. Political pressure had forced the yuan to decouple from the dollar a few years earlier, and now a currency much abused by China’s slowing growth, political demands, and inflation was showing its vulnerability. No one knew whether China’s economic statistics were genuine or mere vapor. Maybe the Chinese themselves didn’t know. In any case they were now paying the cost of their lack of transparency.

Chinese sovereign wealth funds were dumping bonds, American and others, in order to free the cash to defend the yuan, and bond markets were tottering worldwide. As a consequence the American dollar was plunging, and the dollar wasn’t even the target of the attack. The Chinese government had been reduced to uttering threats against whatever foreign governments were behind the attacks. Dagmar wondered if an actual war could start over this.

The talking heads on CNN were surprised over the attack, since it had been widely assumed that it had been Chinese traders who had led the assault on other currencies. Were the Chinese attacking their own currency? Were other traders attacking China by way of retaliation? Or was the whole Chinese trader story a myth?

Dagmar, with better information, wondered how the actual Chinese traders-the ones who had followed Charlie’s gold-mining bots in the currency markets-were responding to the crisis. Patriotic traders would surely pour their profits into defending the yuan, risking their money. Pragmatic traders would follow the bots again, risking lives and livelihoods if the Chinese government chose to take their resentment out of the electronic world and convert it to real-world shackles and bullets.

Whatever was going on behind the scenes in China, Dagmar imagined that there was cheering in Jakarta.