Fly this bomb to where it belongs, Tony Stark, she thought. But Tony was busy posing with a couple of kids from the Midwest and failed to hear her mental command.

Eventually she got to the top of the street, where Hollywood became Sunset, and found a place to park. She took out the vase, hesitated, then opened the trunk and dumped all the flowers inside. With the vase itself swinging at the end of her arm, she located the two office buildings and walked down the dark, narrow old stair to Santa Monica Boulevard.

The blue-windowed office building stood across the street. There were lots of lights on the second floor, where Katanyan Associates was hosting a party for its new manager. Dagmar shifted the vase from the arm that was cramping to the arm that was not.

Its green color fluorescing in the light of a streetlamp, BJ’s Phalanx sat in the parking lot.

Dagmar took a breath, tilted her hat so that anyone on the second floor couldn’t see her face, and stepped into the night street.

This Is Not a Game

She felt the flush of danger on her skin. Her pulse was rapid but not frantic. She remembered being far more frightened in Jakarta.

She’d learned a few things since then. And besides, L.A. was her town.

Dagmar wanted the bomb inside BJ’s car because that would indicate that the bomb belonged to him. If she put the bomb underneath the Phalanx, he would be a victim.

She didn’t want him victimized. She wanted him indicted.

She would plant the bomb in his car and then send a text to the number that David had given to GIAWOL. BJ, assuming that Dagmar had been given the bomb, would use his burner to call the phone in the bomb and would then turn in surprise and shock as the Katanyan Associates windows reflected the orange flower of flame that burst from his own vehicle, and all his hopes and expectations were blown to smithereens.

Even Special Agent Landreth of the FBI would realize that there had to be a connection between this bomb and the identical weapon that had killed Charlie Ruff. The easiest explanation was that BJ had accidentally blown up his own vehicle with his own weapon.

There would be an investigation. In time, bomb materials would be found, as well as the place where BJ had assembled the bomb. And Dagmar would be questioned again.

BJ always had a grudge against Charlie, she would say. He thought Charlie had cheated him out of his company.

BJ would go to prison, possibly the gas chamber. He’d lose his job with Aram, and his attempt to subvert the gold-farming bots would fail.

He’d have nothing. He’d have less than he had when this whole adventure started.

Dagmar would tangle him in his own puppet strings and hang him out to twist slowly in the wind.

She glanced at the CCTV on the neighboring building and saw the cameras still dangling at a useless angle. Dagmar passed the empty guard box standing sentry in the parking lot and walked to BJ’s car. He had parked on the south side of the parking ramp, with a view of his new domain. L.A. shimmered below her, a skein of lights stretching all the way to the Pacific. Dagmar reached into her pocket and pulled out her cloned Phalanx remote, and she pressed the button.

Dagmar heard the solid chunk of a door lock opening. She pulled the sleeve of her cardigan over her fingers, crouched down by the low car, and opened the door without leaving fingerprints. She tilted the seat forward, scrubbed fingerprints off the vase with her cardigan, and tucked the vase behind the driver’s seat. She pushed the seat back into place.

She looked up at the building. Silhouettes wandered behind the lit windows. She didn’t recognize BJ or anyone else.

She rose, tilted her hat again to obscure her face from the new direction, and left the parking lot. Success tingled in her fingers and toes.

Her feet bounded up the old concrete stair. She neared the top, and breathing with exertion, she turned and gazed down over the parking lot.

The neon green Phalanx was visible, its color brilliant under the light. She reached into a pocket for the cell phone she’d bought just that afternoon, her very own burner.

“What are we going to do tonight, Brain?” she asked.

The answer seemed to hang pregnant in the air, so she spoke it aloud.

“What we do every night, Pinky,” she said. “Try to take over the world!”

Flowers delivered. Maria delighted.

She texted to the number GIAWOL had sent her, and pressed Send.

Cars hissed by on Sunset. Her heart beat double-time in her throat. Nothing happened.

Several minutes went by while Dagmar’s unease increased. She wondered frantically if she had miscalculated completely, if this was all some insane fantasy she’d cobbled together out of stray facts and paranoia.

Maybe it wasn’t a command-detonated bomb at all, she thought. Maybe it was a time bomb, scheduled to go off at 2 A.M. or something.

But in that case, why the text message? That was a breach in security, though a small one. There was no reason for it unless it was timed somehow to the bomb’s detonation.

A figure appeared in the parking lot below, and she recognized BJ at once. His big body moved with a jaunty stride, as if he were on top of the world. He was wearing tycoon clothes, a dark suit. A bright tie glowed at his throat in the light of the streetlamps.

BJ stepped toward the Phalanx and reached into a pocket for a remote. He opened the car door, put the remote away, reached into a pocket for something else. Something small.

Dagmar felt her insides twist. She stopped herself from calling out.

BJ dropped into the car. It lurched under his considerable weight. Seconds ticked by. Perhaps he was gazing through the windshield at his new domain, at the Los Angeles that lay before him, spread out like a harlot on a mattress.

In the merest fragment of a second, the explosion happened. The explosion was faster than in movies. In films, Dagmar realized, explosions are slowed down so you can see them. In reality, they’re too fast for the eye to catch.

Clangs echoed up the stair as pieces of the Phalanx began raining down. The part of the car that remained on the ground caught fire instantly and burned with a brilliant flame. Little fiery pellets fell over the parking lot, burning with bright chemical fire, and Dagmar realized they were incendiaries.

If the bomb hadn’t killed her directly, she realized, she was meant to burn to death in her motel room or choke to death on smoke.

She couldn’t see BJ amid the flames. She knew only that he hadn’t gotten out of the car.

She wondered if he had died happy. Knowing that he was a fraction of a second from erasing the last obstacle between him and his prospects. Pleased with his new job, with the billions that the software agents would soon be dropping into his account, with his future as a tycoon.

Or in that last fragment of a second, had he heard the cell phone detonator chirp from behind his driver’s seat and realized that it had all gone horribly wrong?

Dagmar returned to her own car, which was filled by now with a horrid rose scent. She stopped at a filling station and hurled all the flowers into a rubbish can, along with the cloned remote and the cell phone burner, both rubbed clean of fingerprints.

When she got to her motel room, she began taking apart all her surveillance gear. She thought that maybe she should erase all the evidence she’d gathered, in case it ended up pointing toward her.

Then she thought she might want to keep it, to prove that BJ was whatever it was that BJ was.

“This is not a game,” she reminded herself.