He had said “coupé,” not “coupe” as Americans do. She walked around the machine.

“It just screams, Fuck the environment, doesn’t it?” she said.

He laughed. “I thought that was the California state motto. Oh no, my mistake-the motto is I’ve got mine.”

She looked at him. “Aram must be paying you well.”

“So are you.” BJ opened the passenger door. “Want to go for a ride?”

“Maybe later.” She shaded her eyes with her hand and blinked. “I think I’m getting a headache.”

“Sorry to hear it.” His face softened into an expression of concern. He closed the door and approached her. “You’ve had a hard time.”

He offered a comforting embrace and she took it, thinking as she gazed blankly over his big shoulder that her rented Mercedes two-seater would probably not be able to outrun the Ford, not with its body designed by French aeronautical engineers and housing eight cylinders of Detroit iron.

The Italian restaurant deception would be necessary, then.

“Speaking of Aram,” he said as they returned to the office tower, “he’s flying into town tomorrow night. I’ve got a meeting with him on Monday, and then he and I will have our first meeting with the staff at the company on Tuesday. Then he’s throwing a welcome dinner and reception for me.”

“Where?” she asked.

“At Katanyan Associates. The dinner will be catered.”

She wondered about the meeting, if one of Austin’s partners would ask, Say, aren’t you the BJ that Austin always said was, like, the worst businessman in the history of the world?

How jolly the dinner would be afterward.

They could hear Helmuth’s fury as soon as they arrived at the third floor.

“Goddam it! What shit-head decided that HTML was going to be case sensitive!”

Upload not going well, Dagmar concluded.

The afternoon ended with all pages, puzzles, sound files, and videos loaded and available to the gamers, and with the computers at Tapping the Source bulging with useful data.

They were going to be very surprised, Dagmar thought, by what happened to their stock on Monday.

“I’ll meet you all at the restaurant,” Dagmar said. “I’ve got to do some shopping in the meantime.”

She waited in her office until she saw the green monocoque body cross the 101 and head toward Ventura, where the restaurant waited. She looked up, saw a familiar white Dodge van in the parking lot across the freeway. She got out her handheld and hit the speed dial.

“Andy,” she said when Joe Clever answered, “I’m looking at you right now. And if you damage my retinas with that laser, I’m going to cross the highway and rip out your fucking lungs.”

“I couldn’t get anything with the Big Ears,” Andy complained. “You’ve got too many computers pumping heat into the room.”

Quiet triumph sizzled in Dagmar’s heart.

“I got one of the puzzles on my own, though,” he said. “The one about what happened to Cullen’s hat.”

“I have some questions,” she said, “about the snoop-and-poop business.”

She’d claimed to have shopping to do as a way of getting rid of BJ, and now she did have shopping to do, buying the gear on Joe Clever’s list. Night-surveillance scopes, cameras, video recorders, little cameras on wires narrow enough to go down someone’s gullet.

She called Helmuth and told him to give everyone her apologies. She had a headache, and she was going home. She’d see them all on Monday.

“Get a receipt from the restaurant at the end of the evening,” she told him.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Helmuth asked.

“I’ll be fine,” she said.

Then came the search for the perfect motel. She found it finally off the Hollywood Freeway, a place that looked as if it had been built as a Ramada Inn or a Travelodge but, in the decades since its construction, had probably been sold to Arabs, who sold it to Indians, who sold it to Chinese, who sold it to Koreans, who sold it finally to refugees from Bangladesh. The white building, with its rust-colored stains, sprawled around a series of courtyards, and there was nothing to stop anyone from walking right off the street to any of the rooms. The large swimming pool, where she might have done laps, had been filled with earth and turned into a rather shabby garden.

When she checked in, the scent of Indian cuisine filled the office, cardamom and cloves, cumin and cinnamon. The manager, a small, dark man with well-oiled hair, sat behind bulletproof Perspex.

“What are you cooking?” she asked.

“Tacos,” he said.

She ate her own dinner in a Teriyaki chicken joint as she thought wistfully of Bengali tacos, then returned to her motel room to set up and test her gear. Everything worked smoothly, as advertised.

She slept fitfully, if at all.

This Is Not a Trap

FROM: Dagmar Shaw

SUBJECT: Where I’m At

Hi, Mom,

I’m not at home right now, so if you called the landline you wouldn’t

have got me. I’m staying in a motel here in L.A., just to get away

from distraction and get some work done. The game will be done in

another couple weeks, and then I can take some time off.

I tried to call you on my cell phone but for some reason I couldn’t

get a signal. I’m at the New Hollywood Inn, rm 118, and the phone

here is 818-733-3991.

I’ll try to call you later today.

Love,

D.

Dagmar had logged on to the AvN Soft servers using her old ID and password. She imagined the message lying there on the IMAP server, waiting for CRAPJOB to log on and discover her secret location.

Except that the email was a lie. She wasn’t actually sleeping in room 118-inspired by the way that Joe Clever had stalked Litvinov, she had taken a room across the courtyard, 115, separated from it by the shrubs of the filled-in swimming pool. She had rented 118 as well, paying in cash shoved beneath the bulletproof screen, because she didn’t want to be responsible for the lives of any innocent tourists who might camp there.

Now, though, she considered shifting to the decoy room, at least for the rest of the afternoon. She had a feeling that CRAPJOB might want to confirm her location.

She got her laptop and her room key, with its diamond-shaped plastic tag, and crossed the old swimming pool. She spent the afternoon working there, in the clean Lysol scent of the room, at the little round table by the window, where she became sufficiently engrossed in her work to give a start when the phone rang.

Her pulse raging, Dagmar stepped across the room and picked up the old-fashioned heavy black handset.

“This is Dagmar,” she said, and was answered only by a soft click.

“Hello to you, too,” she responded, fear turning in an instant to fury.

She mussed the bed in order to convince any enemy reconnaissance, and the maids, that the bed had been slept in. She drew the drapes, left a light on above the stained vanity mirror in the back of the room, and then withdrew to the safety of room 115.

The scout crept in a little after ten. The court was well-enough lit at night that the night-vision camera was hardly necessary; the video monitor clearly showed the wide-shouldered man enter from the street and slowly stroll the length of the walk in front of room 118. On the return journey, a few minutes later, the man stopped near 118 and studied the steel door in its orange steel frame. Fair hair glinted from beneath a dark cap.

Dagmar was amazed by her sudden rage. It was all she could do to keep herself from hurling open her door, striding across the swimming pool, ripping the cap from BJ’s head, and slapping him across the face.

Only the remains of her sanity, dangling above the abyss with quivering fingers, kept her still.

BJ, having seen what he came to see, ambled back to the street. A few minutes later she heard the big V-8 thunder into life, then roar away.