This Is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams Read Free Book Online

phone number and email, and we’ll see what they can arrange.”
    “Good,” Dagmar said, and then she added, “Thanks, Charlie.”
    “No problem.”
    “You keep saving me,” she said.
    “I haven’t saved you yet, ” he said. “And if I’m going to, I’d better hang up and contact the troops.”
    “I love you, Charlie,” Dagmar said with sudden urgency.
    There was a moment of silence as Charlie dealt with his surprise.
    “I’m fond of you, too,” he said. “Whatever you do, don’t leave the hotel.”
    “No problem there.”
    “Take care. Someone will call soon.”
    “Thanks!” But Charlie had hung up.
    Dagmar reluctantly closed the phone and returned it to her belt.
    “Your boyfriend?” asked Mrs. Tippel.
    Dagmar shook her head. “My boss.”
    Mrs. Tippel seemed a little surprised.
    “He must be a good employer,” she said.
    He’s hiring mercenaries to rescue me, Dagmar almost said. But she reflected that so far as she knew, no mercenaries were coming for the Tippels or for anyone else in the breakfast room, and that to mention her good fortune might seem tactless, as if she were boasting about her return to the life of a privileged Westerner.
    “We went to college together,” she said.
    Hiring mercenaries, she thought.
    It was like something you’d do in a game.
     
    After breakfast, Dagmar checked with Mr. Tong to see if anything had changed, and found that nothing had. So she went to her room, booted her ultrathin computer, and checked her email.
    Her handheld could do anything her computer could, but she preferred a standard keyboard to having to thumb long messages on the phone’s little keypad. She wiped out spam, answered some routine queries, and sent messages to friends about her situation. She wrote about the riot and about being trapped in the music store, and about the bodies she thought she’d seen on the trip to the hotel.
    As she typed on the familiar keyboard, in the hotel room that smelled of clean sheets, with the hushed sound of the air-conditioning in the background and the room’s coffeemaker hissing and snorting as it provided Dagmar’s caffeine fix, the previous day’s hazards began to seem unreal, a brief dip into a nightmare that had been banished by the morning’s strong tropical light.
    The plangent sounds of Johnny Otis echoed in the room. Dagmar snatched at her phone. The number flashing in the display had a country code she didn’t recognize.
    “Hello?” she said cautiously.
    “Is this Dagmar Shaw?”
    The male voice had some kind of Eastern European accent.
    “Yes,” she said.
    “My name is Tomer Zan,” the man said. “I work for Zelazni Associates. Your employer, Mr. Ruff, has retained us to see about your safety.”
    Dagmar restrained her impulse to begin a joyful bouncing on the mattress.
    “Yes,” she said. “He told me to expect your call.”
    “Can you describe your situation, please?”
    She did. She mentioned the riot the previous day, and being trapped in the music store, and the fact that she had $180 in cash. She told Tomer Zan that she was on the fourteenth floor of the hotel, with a view to the northwest. She mentioned that meals were no longer being served on the third-floor terrace because the hotel management considered it unsafe.
    “I’m looking at a satellite picture of your hotel on Google Earth,” Zan said, “and I can tell you right now that I don’t like it. You’re too close to that traffic circle with the Welcome Statue, you’re too close to the government buildings that are going to be targets for demonstrators. The natural path for marches or riots runs right past your front door.”
    “Great,” Dagmar said.
    “We’re going to try to move you someplace safer. But we don’t have any assets in Jakarta, so that may not be possible for a few days.”
    Dagmar felt her mouth go dry.
    “You don’t have anybody in Jakarta?” she asked.
    “No, we don’t.”
    “So why did Charlie hire you?”
    “Because,” Zan