Deep State

CHAPTER EIGHT

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Dagmar’s first action-the proof-of-concept-would take place in Istanbul. In Beyazit Square, before the tall gate that marked the entrance to Istanbul University.

Even most of the Lincoln Brigade didn’t know the target. Of those remaining in Cyprus, only Dagmar and Lincoln were aware.

Dagmar had the explosion dream the night before the Istanbul action, the Ford blowing up again and again, the fire blossoming in a great golden bubble, the incendiaries raining down, bouncing along the pavement like flaming bystanders fleeing the scene of a catastrophe. Dagmar woke in her cockeyed bed, the room wheeling around her, terror clutching at her throat.

She nerved herself for the day with coffee and her lucky RIOT NRRD T-shirt, then went to the ops room early and buried herself in last-minute planning.

There would be a lot of spam to send out today.

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The students at the university were natural allies. Other groups would be called in as well.

Dagmar frowned down at the message glowing in the flatscreen before her. Send the message and everyone was committed. The revolution-or its horrific suppression-was on its way.

It had been Dagmar’s idea to use spam as a means of coordinating political action. Not the disgust or annoyance that was the usual response to a message offering penis enlargement, a fortune waiting in Nigeria, or investment advice, but a message hidden somewhere in the text that only an insurrectionist could read.

A 419 scam, for example, could contain instructions-“seven,” the numeral 8-that told the recipient where they could find a clean cell phone. An offer for a drawing could offer instructions for what to bring to the next event-a photograph, a bouquet of flowers-and suggest a time frame, the twenty-four hours preceding noon on Thursday.

The code was simple because it would have to be understood by ordinary people. Dagmar could have used steganography, for instance a message hidden inside the code for a digital photograph of an object displayed on eBay or hidden in the code for an old, obsolete Web page. She could have used public key encryption or more elaborate coding systems provided by her employer. But targets openly receiving coded messages would attract attention and decoding took time, and even so most of the people involved had no technical expertise in using such systems-after all, otherwise intelligent users routinely managed to fumble even simple programs like Outlook Express.

Dagmar had therefore opted for speed over security-she hoped to put her actions together so quickly that even if the government deduced the target, they would be unable to respond in time.

She was putting her revolution together like a flash mob. They would arrive all at the same time, they would make their point, and then they would disperse before the authorities could react.

Or so Dagmar hoped, anyway.

The final message, the one on Dagmar’s screen, gave map coordinates for the action based on a standard map of Istanbul-E-8, the numeral 8 in the text, E being the first letter of the second sentence. The last sentence gave the time for the action-six P.M. on Wednesday.

It was now a few minutes before four. She looked up at the wall clock, ticking away next to the ferocious picture of Ataturk. Biz bize benzeriz, she read.

She looked around the room. Lincoln, Ismet, Rafet the well-spoken dervish, Judy Strange, Helmuth the head programmer, Alparslan Topal the representative from the government-in-exile, and Richard the Assassin in his white Converse sneaks. Ataturk’s pale ferocious gaze embraced them all.

Well, she thought. We are like ourselves. And no one else.

She looked at the wall clock again: 3:58.

Lincoln, kicking his legs as he sat on a table by the window, took pity on her.

“Go ahead and send the message early,” he said. “Our kids haven’t had much of a chance to practice.”

She looked at him with gratitude.

“Right,” she said.

And pressed the Send key.

There was a hierarchy in the networks that would respond to the message. They were organized along the classic covert cell structure, with each member of a cell known only to members of that particular cell and to the cell members whom each member would in turn recruit. If a member was caught or turned, there were only a few individuals he could betray. There was also a colossal redundancy built into the system.

Dagmar’s message went to the network heads in the Istanbul area-union bosses, academics, political organizers, religious authorities, student leaders. Once they decoded its simple meaning, they contacted those in their cell by whatever electronic means they had agreed on. These contacted those below, and so on, in the model of a phone tree.

All of this happened outside Dagmar’s purview. There was very little to do for the next couple hours but keep in touch with the camera teams, with Lloyd’s remote-control airmen, and with Tuna. And since communications protocols forbade anything but the most necessary messages, the messages were few and far between.

Dagmar went to the break room for more coffee and ran into Lincoln seated on a plastic chair peeling an apple, the spiral uncoiling beautifully into a serviette unfolded on his lap.

“That’s nicely done,” she said, impressed.

“It’s about the only real skill I have,” Lincoln said.

“I don’t know about that. You talked all these people into joining you here.”

He looked up, amused. “I offered the chance to intelligently use computers in a beautiful foreign location,” he said. “To a certain kind of person, that kind of offer sells itself.”

“And how did you come up with Lloyd?” Dagmar said. “Turkish-speaking Kurdish-Azeri American citizens with a background in model rocketry can’t be exactly thick on the ground in D.C.”

Lincoln frowned. “Azeri?” he asked. “Do you by any chance mean Alevi?”

Dagmar felt heat rise to her cheeks. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I meant.”

“I didn’t know he was Alevi,” Lincoln said. “But I damn well know he wasn’t from Azerbaijan.”

Dagmar nodded. “Lloyd is Alevi, whatever that actually means. And he’s a little nervous around Rafet, I guess for reasons of history.”

Lincoln seemed annoyed at himself. “He’s Turkish, I knew he was Muslim, and I assumed Sunni even thought I should have known better.” He decided to be amused. “But his dad wasn’t exactly a barefoot persecuted little Kurdish refugee from eastern Turkey; he was a military attache in Washington for many years, and he retired a colonel.”

Dagmar blinked. “Really. Lloyd hadn’t given me that impression.”

“Oh yeah.” Lincoln’s penknife neatly quartered the apple as he spoke, then began to cut out the core. “Lloyd’s dad returned to D.C. after he retired, joined a company that provides security to businessmen, and started a second family with a much younger American wife. He’s still going strong, so far as I know. Lloyd would be their eldest.”

Dagmar considered this. “If Lloyd’s dad is a high-ranking military officer, does that mean his sympathies might lie with Bozbeyli?”

Lincoln sliced off a chunk of apple, chewed, swallowed.

“His file says not.”

“Oh,” Dagmar said. “That settles it, then.”

The amused sparkle in Lincoln’s eye was muted by the shadowy lenses of his glasses.

“Do you think we should send him home?”

“I-” Dagmar was too surprised to formulate an immediate response. “I don’t see why we should,” she said. “If you believe the file.”

“The file’s probably crap,” Lincoln said. “But I’m less concerned with the father than the fact that the son gave you personal information that he was supposed to keep to himself.”

Dagmar felt a sudden flutter of panic that she might have compromised one of her employees.

“He told it to me privately,” she said, “by way of explaining why he didn’t speak more openly the day before, when Rafet and the other Turks were pressing him for details about his background.”

“Ah.” Lincoln ate another chunk of apple. “That’s probably all right, then.”

Relief flew through Dagmar at the thought that she might have shoved Lloyd out of the way of a bullet.

“Besides,” she said. “We can’t do without the air force.”

“No,” said Lincoln, and looked at a chunk of apple poised on the tip of his penknife. “I suppose we can’t.”

“I have another Hot Koan,” Richard said.

Dagmar watched on the flatscreen as Tuna walked along Ordu Road toward Beyazit Square. He wore a dark jacket, tie, shades, and polished shoes. Though he had a wide-brimmed hat pulled down to hide his face, his big body and loping gait were unmistakable. Eye-catching as well was the enormous bouquet of lilies he carried in one big hand. He carried a shopping bag with the corner of a manila envelope, an envelope that presumably contained a photograph. A beautiful bouquet of seasonal flowers, or a special photograph session for you and your family…

Tuna’s image was eclipsed by a line of red tram cars. Dagmar shifted her gaze to another monitor, one with a wider angle, and waited for Tuna to reappear.

“Tell me,” she said.

“The novice came to Dagmar,” Richard said, “and he said, ‘I have tried to hot-swap my PS/2 connector, and now my motherboard has been slagged.’

“ ‘In that case,’ said Dagmar, “make coffee.’

“Hearing this”-Richard smiled-“the novice was enlightened.”

Dagmar laughed. “I wish I was really as wise as you make out,” she said.

Richard only offered her a Buddha smile. Dagmar found Tuna again on the video, the flowers flopping over one shoulder.

Tuna and a small group of technicians had spent the morning making certain that the demo would receive full electronic coverage. Cameras and their operators were ready in windows of three of the many hotels that lined the road opposite Beyazit Square. Hot Koans had been scattered like birdseed all around the target, plastic hot pink rectangles sitting under furniture, on rooftops, lying in flower beds, their ad hoc mesh network pumping the signal to the antenna in a rented room several streets away, which then relayed them to the server on Seraglio Point that Lincoln had installed during the Stunrunner game.

The two nearby police stations, west on Mustafa Kemal Street and east on Kadirga Limani, were also under video surveillance, both from small battery-operated cameras fixed to buildings and streetlights and from airborne cameras belonging to the Anatolian Skunk Works. Dagmar had worried about the Beyazit Square location simply because it was so close to the police, but hadn’t found anywhere else more suitable-there were police everywhere in the modern city, but at least in this area there were no military…

Without looking left or right, Tuna strolled into the square, flowers bobbing. Other people seemed to be carrying flowers here and there.

“Hello, Chatsworth.” Tuna’s headset carried his words into the ops room. “I’m feeling a little lonely here.”

“We see more flowers than you do,” Dagmar answered hopefully.

Tuna stood in the middle of the square, conspicuously large, conspicuously colorful. Pushcart vendors sold roasted ears of maize and simit. A group of girls in headscarves and long coats entered the frame from the direction of the university, all clustered around a pot of flowers. A man in a neat fedora, carrying long-stemmed roses, walked in from across Ordu Road.

How many people in a given area could carry bouquets, Dagmar wondered, before they all began to look suspicious?

“Here we go!” called Lincoln. He was looking at another monitor, its view provided by a camera with a different angle on the proceedings.

This was focused on the main gate of the university, a Roman triumphal arch as viewed through some kind of strange nineteenth-century cross-cultural Oriental-baroque lens. A line of students was pouring out of the central Moroccon horseshoe arch, each waving a bouquet of flowers on high. Gold sunlight glittered on photographs held above their heads.

Dagmar’s heart gave a leap as she realized that this might actually work.

Tuna turned, saw the students pouring into the square, and practically ran to join them, waving his bouquet like a marshal’s baton.

Tuna had not been in contact with any of these people. He didn’t know any of them, and they didn’t know him.

They were the faceless members of an orchestra that Tuna would try to conduct.

Over the heads of the students, a banner unrolled. GENERALS OUT! it said, in English.

Whoever had written it seemed fully aware of the practical necessities of modern international communication, among them the requirement that it be done in a language other than Turkish.

The girls in headscarves had joined the crowd, offering their pot of flowers. People brandished cell phones and snapped pictures. More banners and signs were raised. The pushcart vendors watched in surprise as the square began to fill. Tuna dipped into his shopping bag and pulled out an electric megaphone. Dagmar winced and turned down the volume on her headset as Tuna began bellowing instructions to the crowd.

Dagmar had a good idea what Tuna was telling them. In answer to his call, the crowd began to break into smaller groups.

Make a memorial to the victims of the regime! That’s why they had been instructed to bring flowers-a token that did double duty, as identification, so that people would know not to trust anyone who hadn’t turned up with the proper tokens

Flowers began to be piled into pyramids, scattered into elaborate designs. Photos were added to the pictures-photos of exiled or imprisoned politicians, national heroes like Ataturk, movie or pop stars, sports figures cut from the pages of newspapers or magazines.

While this was going on, Tuna led a group, including most of those carrying signs, to block Ordu Road on the southern perimeter of the square. If the blocked traffic backed up, police would have a much harder time getting through the demonstration.

The crowd began to sing. The song was in march time and everyone knew the words, so Dagmar assumed it was patriotic.

Blocked traffic on the road honked. Dagmar had spent enough time in Turkey to know the language of the auto honk, which ranged from the little blip that said, in a perfectly friendly way, Hey, I’m here! to the deliberate long honk that meant, Get out of the way, and the more persistent repeated blasts that might mean, You are an idiot, or I have found your attitude deficient and will very shortly correct it in a vigorous manner.

The auto horns on Ordu Road progressed through all these stages and then fell into baffled silence. The patriotic singers marched on. Bouquets waved in time to the music. A tram bell rang repeatedly offscreen, but the tram never appeared-apparently jammed autos had blocked it.

The crowd kept getting bigger. Passersby, without flowers or photos, were inspired to join the party. The group finished the song and started on another. Cell phone cameras captured everything.

One of the cameras in the hotel rooms jerked, then shifted and refocused. Dagmar tensed at the sight of a pair of police standing a couple hundred feet down Ordu Road. They were watching the demo with interest and speaking on their walkie-talkies, but they seemed disinclined to interfere.

The fact that they were heavily outnumbered might have contributed to their passive stance.

Dagmar told Tuna about the cops.

“Okay,” he said. He didn’t sound very alarmed and craned his neck to observe the police who were, at that instant, observing him.

“We’ve got a police drone over the square,” Lloyd said. “We’re going to try to take it down.”

Dagmar drifted over to Lloyd’s station, looking over his shoulder at his multiple screens, each relaying the images sent by one of the drones of the Anatolian Skunk Works. Lloyd pressed one image, and it expanded to cover two screens. The target drone, painted the same shade of blue and white as a police car, floated against a background of gray cloud, its starboard wing dipped as the drone circled the demonstration at Beyazit Square. The picture from the Skunk Works wedge was poured through colossally fast, efficient processors, and it came out as brilliant and clear as if it were being lit and shot by Hollywood professionals.

The hunter-killer wedge hovered closer, and now Dagmar could read POLIS written on the fuselage of the craft.

Lloyd spoke to the wedge operator in Turkish, and the machine oriented itself carefully, then raced forward.

There was a sharp, blurry succession of images, too incoherent for even the fast image processors to make sense of. The horizon seemed to flip a couple times, and then the wedge’s guidance program took over, and suddenly it was sailing upright, apparently undamaged, through the sky.

Lloyd punched a fist into the air.

“Wedges rule!” he said-and then something caught his eye, and he pressed another image to enlarge it, succeeding just in time to catch an image of the broken police drone, one wing spinning in its slipstream, as it caromed off the roof of a stalled tram.

We own the skies, Dagmar thought incredulously.

The demo went on. More people kept joining, most carrying bouquets, some attracted by texting friends. A young woman, laughing at her own daring, ran up to the two police and handed them each a bouquet. The police politely accepted, and the girl ran back.

“Like wow,” said Lincoln deliberately. “I just had a sixties flashback.”

There was the hoot of a police siren, and another police officer on a motorcycle came weaving through the stalled traffic to join the two police. Dagmar guessed the officer on duty had arrived. He chatted with the two cops, then spoke into his lapel mike.

“They’re mounting up,” Richard said. He pointed at the camera fixed at the Mustafa Kemal station. Police were leaving the station, piling into vehicles, motorcycles, and a bus. They wore riot gear, helmets and body armor and plastic shields. Automatic weapons were strapped across their chests.

Dagmar shivered as memory stroked her spine with soft, cold fingers.

Even before the coup, Turkish police had routinely used torture on suspects. “Usually just the ones they think are guilty,” Lincoln had said, with small comfort. Suddenly Dagmar felt a strong need to get everyone in the demo to safety.

“Tuna, time to break it up,” Dagmar called. “Police coming up Mustafa Kemal.” She saw Tuna nod, then raise the megaphone to his lips and bellow orders. The people near him reacted.

Tuna walked back onto the square, shouting. The singing faltered but then strengthened again as the people got the message and began to disperse.

The signs and banners, and flowers and photos, were left behind, brilliant color against the rough gray stone of the square, beneath the big Turkish flag that flew before the university gate. There were pyramids of blossoms, photos of celebrities laid out in suggestive couplings, flowers that spelled out political messages, pictures of the junta defaced with mustaches and beards and devil horns, blooms that formed the Turkish star and crescent, serpents of flowers with human photo heads…

The pushcart vendors, covered in flowers, stood amid the colorful debris with smiles on their faces. They’d done good business amid the holiday atmosphere.

One of the advantages of the Beyazit Square location was that there were so many ways to leave the area. People could retreat back into the huge university complex or head across Ordu Road into an area filled with hotels and tourists, places where police might be reluctant to charge. They could go into the Beyazit Mosque that stood on the east side of the square. A few paces farther was the Grand Bazaar, with its maze of narrow streets and its hundreds of shops.

Once they’d dropped their bouquets and photographs, the members of the crowd carried nothing that would mark them to the police, particularly if they dropped the hats and scarves and masks they’d used to shroud their identities.

And Tuna-whom Dagmar had last seen hustling in the direction of the Grand Bazaar-would be clean once he broke the SIM card and dumped the phone in some convenient receptacle.

He was a writer and translator. He lived in Istanbul. He had every excuse for being where he was.

When the police finally fought their way through the traffic tangle, there were only a few pedestrians on the square, along with the flowers and photos and pushcart vendors.

No demonstration, no riot, no reason for police to be there at all.

Dagmar looked at Lincoln standing across the room, standing with a cup of coffee in his hand. He looked at her and silently mouthed a pair of words.

Insanely fun.

She nodded. Yes. It was. She bent over her keyboard.

As soon as Tuna was safely away, she was busy supervising the viewing, editing, and distribution of the masses of video that had been collected during the demo. These were edited into ten- and fifteen-second clips for distribution to television outlets, while the rest was uploaded onto sites with names like downwiththedictators.org and restoretheconstitution.net. The videos were edited slightly, to make the crowd look bigger than it was or to blur images where faces were too recognizable.

Most of the job, however, was out of her hands. The images and video taken by the demonstrators themselves would soon be everywhere, viewed on file-sharing and social-networking sites, sent from one phone to the next, used as wallpaper, submitted to media.

No one had died. It was possible that no one would even be arrested.

The proof-of-concept had proved itself.

The concept showed that action against the government was possible, that it would be seen, and that it would be safe. It showed that you, too, could prank the government.

You could make your overlords ridiculous. And all you’d need would be access to a computer, and a cell phone.

They had promised to make the nation safe from people like you, but you could make them liars.

The fact that the demo hadn’t, objectively speaking, accomplished anything was irrelevant. No buildings were occupied, no security agencies compromised; no centers of power were seized.

All that would happen later.

The next stage was to make the military government irrelevant. Not merely to congregate at but to occupy public spaces and public buildings and meanwhile flood all media channels with propaganda, urging everyone-the security forces in particular-to join them.

That was the essence of the people power revolt-to walk away from the established government and set up your own, virtual government. If the majority of the population chose to recognize the virtual government rather than the traditional one, the generals would end up alone in their palace, trying to get someone to take their phone calls while their own televisions broadcast a message transmitted by their enemies. Recent history was loaded with examples, iconic moments in the transition of power: Enrile crossing EDSA from Camp Aguinaldo; Yeltsin standing atop a tank in front of the Russian White House; Ljubisav?okic? charging the Belgrade broadcast station on his bulldozer; a crowd of Georgians, armed with nothing but roses, driving Eduard Shevardnadze from his own parliament building; Yuschenko taking the presidential oath in a half-deserted room in Ukraine…

All moments when tyranny cracked.

It wasn’t a question of whether the generals would use force to maintain their position. That was a given. They’d taken power through a coordinated series of assassinations of journalists, politicians, Christian missionaries, intellectuals, labor leaders, and Kurdish heroin dealers. Presumably they would not be overly disturbed if their tanks’ treads were dyed red by the crushed bodies of their enemies.

But the tank drivers were another matter. They were vulnerable to propaganda, and more important, they were vulnerable to their own humanity. Once the generals’ instruments of power refused their orders, the generals were finished.

In the Philippines, in Serbia, in Georgia and Ukraine, the tank drivers had balked. In Iran and China and Burma, the tankers had obeyed orders.

Dagmar looked around the room in a sudden surge of joy.

We are like ourselves, she thought, and no one else.

Within an hour, a bouquet of flowers and a photo of an anonymous seascape had been nailed to the wall of the ops room, just beneath Ataturk’s ferocious gaze.

After everything had been collaged together, the demo would be re-created in an augmented reality environment. People could go to Beyazit Square, now or at any point in the future, and if they wore the right goggles or had the right app for their handheld or had the proper helmet with a heads-up display, they would see the demonstration superimposed on the environment. They could participate vicariously in the demo; they could walk through it as if it were actually happening in their present.

They could lay flowers and photographs on the ground and photograph them and then upload them to the AR site, where the pictures would be added to the virtual environment.

It was possible that more people would participate in the demo afterward than were present at the actual event.

For years after the demo-perhaps forever-the AR of the demo would be available to anyone with the right equipment. People taking a picture of the university’s baroque gate would see an icon on their phone, or people scrolling along a map of Istanbul would see a symbol and click it, and instantly the demonstration would come to life, flowers and photos and bemused pushcart vendors.

Perhaps they would know it as the moment that Turkey began its entry into the twenty-first century. Or perhaps it would be known as another moment of false hope before the advance was turned back.

But in any case the monument was there, gleaming in the electronic world that lives alongside your own, eternal and evolving, and whatever the Bozbeyli regime did, they could not erase it.

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There was a grinding sound as the sea came over the shingle, the sound of thousands of small stones tumbling. The sea reached for Dagmar’s sandals with foam fingers, failed, withdrew. Stone rattled again on stone. The air tasted of iodine and salt.

“And there,” said Ismet, pointing, “the goddess was born.”

White clouds tumbled on the horizon. A great ruddy rock reared up above the shingle beach, ran to the water’s edge, then fell to the sea. Just offshore was a pair of huge stones, one large and craggy, one smaller and phallic. Maybe there had only been one giant rock on the day when Paphian Aphrodite had risen from the foam, here where the foam after many ages still, perpetually, anointed her birthplace.

There were only a few people on the beach, but they came in pairs. Even now Aphrodite attracted courting couples.

Visions of the Botticelli Birth of Venus floated in Dagmar’s mind. The delicate Italian scene, seashell and Boreals, the welcoming nymph or goddess or whatever she was in her spangled dress, and the improbably long-necked Venus herself, draped in her own red-gold hair… all these imagined elements were too delicate to have actually taken place in this primal landscape, all sea and wind and stark stone.

If a goddess ever landed here, a goddess shaped by this landscape, the ground would have shaken beneath her footfalls.

“Aphrodite was worshiped here since at least 3800 BCE,” Ismet said. Dagmar considered the dates.

“Aphrodite actually goes back that far?”

“She had many names over the years,” he said. “The Cypriots just called her Wanassa-the Queen.”

Dagmar turned to look at him. He stood farther up the shingle and was therefore a little taller than she; the Mediterranean gleamed in his sunglasses, stone and sea and white foam. He was dressed with care in a striped seersucker summer jacket. A little spot of sunburn glowed high on each cheek.

“How do you know all this?” she said.

He gave an embarrassed smile. “I looked it up in the guidebook on the shelf in the break room,” he said.

“Ah,” she said. “So you don’t have hidden depths.”

“Apparently not.” Politely.

She turned back to the sea and imagined the goddess rising, sea sluicing off naked shoulders. A wave spattered Dagmar’s toes with chill water.

“Tell me more,” she said.

“The goddess was worshiped till nearly modern times, centuries after the Christians officially suppressed the cult. Girls would come here, or to the ruins of the temple, and make offerings or anoint the goddess with olive oil, hoping for…” He hesitated. “Fertility, I suppose. There was a fourteenth-century Christian writer who complained that if you slept on the ground here, you arose… very lustful.”

She smiled to herself. She rather liked Ismet’s shyness in sexual matters.

“The statue survived all those centuries?” she asked.

“The goddess was older than any statue. The Aphrodite worshiped here took the form of a cone-shaped rock. It’s in the museum in Lefkos?a.” Giving the Turkish pronunciation of the capital city the Greeks called Lefkosia, a word that Franks like Dagmar mispronounced as “Nicosia.”

Sea boomed on the great stone. A Royal Navy patrol boat ghosted on the edge of the horizon. She turned again to Ismet.

“So Aphrodite was really a stone phallus?”

He turned slightly away, still a little shy.

“Apparently,” he said.

“Wouldn’t you just know it?” she said, not exactly sure exactly what she meant.

“Ancient coins show the cone beneath a crescent and star,” Ismet said. “Just like the ones on the Turkish flag.”

The sea heaved, shifting tons of grating stone.

The day after the demo in Istanbul was a day off for Dagmar’s crew. Tuna was flying in for a debriefing, and Rafet the dervish was en route to Antalya to set up the next action, which would take place the day after tomorrow.

Most of the Lincoln Brigade had gone to the beach-not the beach here at Kouklia but the British beach on the aerodrome, as much a part of Merrie England as Brighton itself and kept free of waterborne terrorists by gray Royal Navy patrol craft, cutting back and forth on the horizon like metal sharks… Richard and Judy had expressed interest in Banana Boating, an entertainment in which they would straddle a giant yellow banana-shaped craft that would be pulled at a rollicking pace behind a speedboat.

Dagmar had begged off riding the giant banana in favor of history and archaeology, and Ismet had offered to drive.

Dagmar looked up and down the beach.

“Only couples come here,” she said.

“It seems so.”

She stepped close to him. Ismet accepted her kiss with his usual courtly gravity. Dagmar couldn’t quite tell if he was enthusiastic or not, so she kissed him some more. Presently he grew more animated. His skin had a spicy scent of some exotic mixture of aromatic Eastern oils… They put their arms around each other and kissed for a long time.

Dagmar plucked the handkerchief from his jacket pocket and dabbed her lips.

“That was nice,” she said.

“It was. Very.”

“I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while now.”

“So have I. But”-a ghost of a smile-“I’m just the employee. I couldn’t make the first move.”

“No,” Dagmar said. “Sexual harassment is supposed to come from the boss.”

She kissed him some more. Then there was a bang, and she jumped in his arms. She looked up wildly, saw and heard a battered blue Ford truck backfiring another cloud of blue smoke.

“Christ,” she said, shuddering.

Ismet stroked her back. “Just a truck,” he said. His lips sought hers.

“This may not be a good idea,” she said, and slipped from his embrace.

His face showed sudden concern and surprise.

“You’re not suddenly worried about being my boss?”

Surf boomed. Dagmar shook her head. His handkerchief was twisted between her fingers.

“I have a bad history with men,” she said.

“So it’s not that I’m Turkish? Or a Muslim?”

“My last lover was murdered,” she said.

His mouth opened, closed.

“And an ex-lover was killed around the same time. And my two best friends. And-” Dagmar gestured at him with his own handkerchief.

“You’re a spy, aren’t you?” she said. She gave a laugh, a little bubble of hysteria bursting from her lips. “You’re crossing the border into enemy territory in a couple days, and you could be caught or killed or beaten or put in prison…”

Ismet reached her. She shuddered at the touch of his fingers on her arms.

“I’m not a spy,” he said.

“Right. You’re special ops.”

“I’m a journalist. I’ll have reasons for being where I am, for asking questions, for being at a demonstration. Even if I’m arrested, there’ll be no reason to hold me.”

“Try that line of argument with a bullet or a bomb,” she said savagely. “Bullets don’t much care about your reasons.”

She had firsthand experience with bullets and bombs. And bludgeons. And other forms of death that lurked in humanity’s collective dark unconscious.

Dagmar took off her shades and rubbed a hand across both eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just so completely not over it. What happened in LA.”

“You said you wouldn’t talk about it.”

“I am not talking about it,” Dagmar said.

Ismet scrutinized her. “May I touch you?” he asked.

She lifted her chin, stared defiantly out to sea as if she could see, just above the horizon, some hopeful star that she could follow. Instead she saw only the patrol boat, flashing a signal lamp at some shadowy craft over the horizon.

“Yes,” she said. “Please.”

His arms went around her. She wrapped herself in his embrace as if it were a blanket.

“You’re not some kind of curse.” His voice came quiet to her ear. Warm breath moistened her neck. His myrrh scent flooded her senses.

“You don’t kill men with your spell,” he said. “You’ve just been in some dark places, that’s all. Along with some of your friends.”

“How do you know that?”

“I asked Lincoln.”

Dagmar was so surprised that she found a laugh bubbling up from her throat. “You asked Lincoln?”

“I thought he must have a file on you. I thought he would know.”

“What did he say?”

She could hear his smile as he spoke.

“He said, ‘Dagmar is definitely not scary, but you should still be careful not to piss her off.’ ”

She laughed again, leaning against his warm weight. “Right,” she said. “Get me mad at you, I’ll send the Group Mind to turn your hard drive into porridge.”

“No. You’ll send someone like me to organize a flash mob and paintball my car.”

Dagmar smiled. She looked at one of the other couples walking along the shore, a pair of Brits judging by their sunburns, their trousers rolled up as they waded ankle deep in Aphrodite’s foam. The two of them happy, free of the knowledge that a presentiment of death had floated past, just beyond the limit of their perception…

Dagmar’s forebodings were usually insignificant-she had the kind of imagination that threw a million obstacles into her path. She could either work to avoid the barriers or-more usually-watch them turn to vapor in the sunlight of reality. But this magical place, this seascape torn from the womb of the goddess herself, seemed to give to Dagmar’s fears the chill force of prophecy… She wondered if dread generated in this landscape was more significant than dread generated elsewhere.

But if that was the case, she thought, then so was love. So was desire. So was lying on this magic earth and rising very lustful, to the ranting dismay of medieval theologians.

She let the landscape speak to her. She turned in Ismet’s arms and began to kiss him.

“Very nice.” This time it was his turn to say it.

She kissed his chin. Surf boiled up from the heart of the sea.

“Let’s take a walk, then,” she said. She took his hand and led him down the beach, intent on behaving like the other couples, swinging their clasped hands and playing tag with the sea.

And-in Dagmar’s case, anyway-trying to ignore the palpable sense of doom that lurked in the back of her skull.

They walked. They kissed. They let the sea stream over their toes. They looked at shells and rocks and some jellyfish tossed on the shore, deflated domes glistening crumpled on the stones like empty plastic bags.

They went up to Kouklia and looked at what remained of Aphrodite’s temple-there wasn’t much left, not since someone in the Middle Ages had built a sugar works on it.

By the time Ismet and Dagmar returned to Akrotiri, Tuna had come across from the Turkish side of the island and was delivering his report to Lincoln. There were a number of contacts referred to by code names, and even Dagmar didn’t know who they were. It made the whole business more opaque than she would have liked. And the whole time she was listening to the report, she was thinking about dragging Ismet off to bed.

Which she finally accomplished at twilight, leading him by the hand to her apartment, where she was pleased to hear the sound of the shower, presumably with Judy in it. Dagmar was happy about this coincidence-it avoided the awkward scene in which Dagmar and Ismet were forced to chat up Judy for an indeterminate period of time, pretending all was normal when all they really wanted to do was shag.

Best to postpone the awkwardness to the next morning, when Ismet’s turning up at the breakfast table would explain everything.

She took Ismet straight to the bedroom, then closed the door behind her. He was watching her with what seemed to be extreme interest.

“Why do you have your bed turned at an angle?” he asked.

She shrugged: too long to explain. “I’m an angular kind of person,” she said.

Dagmar turned off the light. Ismet was outlined by the yellow streetlight seeping through a chink in the curtains. His glasses seemed to glow, like the eyes of a cartoon villain. Dagmar stepped closer, put her arms around him, and began to kiss him. He responded with enthusiasm. Myrrh swam through her senses. His glasses mashed her cheek. She took them off, along with everything else he was wearing. He was preposterously erect, and she was flattered by this diverting evidence of his desire.

A metaphorically apt jet roared along Akrotiri’s long runway and hurled itself into the sky. The windowpane trembled to its acceleration.

Suddenly impatient, she tore off her own clothes and composed herself on the bed. Unable to judge the irregular angle of the bed in the dark, he barked his knees on the frame, then lay by her side. She kissed him again. His flesh warmed hers; his touch lit up her nerves. He shivered as she licked the sensitive flesh of his throat. She began to remember, after this long hiatus, what this sex thing was all about.

Ismet turned out to be something of a technician. He offered experimental caresses, observed her closely, then either increased his efforts or went on to something else. Five minutes of this and Dagmar felt her body on the verge of dissolving into magma.

Dagmar took a breath and decided to let the Wanassa, the Queen, take over.

Which famous sixties spy are you? The old Internet quiz came to Dagmar’s mind as she lay curled on her bed, with Ismet sleeping in the fetal position inside her arc, his pale body outlined by the streetlight outside. The sheet was rucked up under them, tangled about their feet. They were two commas, side by side on crumpled paper.

Not spy, she corrected mentally. Special ops.

It wasn’t like she’d encountered sixties operatives on their first go-around. She’d been born over twenty years after the first Bond film. But she’d seen all the films and read all the books, as homework for the Stunrunner game-and the other spies she’d encountered here or there on DVD or late-night cable, and in many cases read the books that had inspired them. The sixties interested her, as the decade when everything that hadn’t gone right had gone so horribly wrong.

Ismet wasn’t James Bond-he lacked Bond’s glamor and gadgets. He didn’t have John Steed’s brolly or wardrobe. Briefly she considered Quiller-Ismet possessed something like Quiller’s omnicompetence, but ultimately he lacked, so far as she knew, his tragic spirit.

She considered and dismissed the Man from U.N.C.L.E. Thoughts of the Man from O.R.G.Y. made her smile and impelled her to kiss Ismet’s shoulder. She would have to subject Ismet to more testing before she could report on that hypothesis.

She mentally paged through John le Carre’s works. Ismet was too young to be George Smiley and furthermore had never been miserably married to some bitch-queen of an upper-class vampire. She wondered if Ismet could be any of the other characters at le Carre’s Circus, but she couldn’t remember enough about any of them. (There was a Hungarian named Esterhase, right?)

And then she recalled Deighton’s nameless spy from The Ipcress File. That role seemed to fit Ismet better: quiet, unassuming, competent, and rather exciting once he took his glasses off.

Well then. Perhaps Ismet should get Ipcress as a new code name.

Ismet shifted in his sleep, rolling onto his back. Dagmar put an arm across his chest and rested her head on his shoulder. One arm came around her, held her close.

She breathed in the scent of him, myrrh and sweat, breath and sex, and closed her eyes, content to be in the circuit of her lover’s arms.

Ismet left after breakfast to bathe and change clothes, leaving Dagmar and Judy across the table with its litter of teacups, its plates of goat cheese, olives, bread, fruit, and Judy’s jar of Nutella. Judy looked after the departing Ismet, then turned to Dagmar.

“I wasn’t entirely surprised,” she said.

“You probably heard us,” Dagmar said.

“Not me. Slept like a rock.” She carefully spread Nutella onto a piece of bread. “Still, I’m a little envious.”

“No luck with Rafet?”

“I can’t seem to ever find him,” Judy said. “He’s either over across the Green Line doing training, or in conference with Lincoln or with Alparslan the government guy, or working out in the gym, or doing tai chi-I guess it’s tai chi-in his backyard. And now he’s off to… to wherever the next target is.”

“No ecstatic drumming?”

She looked forlorn. “No ecstacy of any sort, unfortunately.”

Dagmar was tempted once again to remind Judy that they were on an air base loaded with single men, but the thought was interrupted by total surprise at what Judy said next.

“I guess you’re just lucky,” Judy said, half-yawning as she stretched her tattooed arms out wide, “that you’ve got your two men.”

“Two?” Dagmar said, too startled to manage more than the single syllable.

“Ismet and Lincoln,” Judy said.

Dagmar barked out an astonished laugh. “You think I’m involved with Lincoln?” she said.

Judy stuck a finger inside her spectacles and wiped sleep from her eyes.

“Not sexually,” she said. “But-you know-it’s clear that you’ve got a special relationship with him.”

Dagmar was alarmed. She wondered if everyone was thinking this.

“He’s the guy I work for!” she said.

“He’s a smart, charming older man,” Judy said. “And you’re someone in need of a father.” She cocked her head, considering. “I’m a bit attracted to him myself on that account, my own dad being absent most of my life.”

Dagmar couldn’t decide whether to laugh or express outrage. She ended up saying nothing.

Judy took an olive from a plate, bit it, grimaced, and swallowed. Apparently her palate wasn’t ready for olives for breakfast.

“Put some Nutella on it,” Dagmar advised.

“He’s not your father, is my point,” Judy said. “He’s here to do a job, and if getting it done means treating you like a favorite daughter, then that’s what he’ll do. But if the job called for it, he could be someone else’s daddy tomorrow.”

“Our relationship,” said Dagmar, “is professional.”

“That’s for the best,” Judy said, her tone skeptical. “Because Lincoln isn’t just some eccentric old geezer with a game fixation, he’s a general trying to start a revolution. And that means he’s going to get people killed.”

“He’s not bloodthirsty,” Dagmar protested. “He’s not sending out assassins.”

“No,” Judy said, “not that we know about, anyway. It’s our own people that are going to get killed if these demos go wrong. It’s Lincoln who’s decided to accept that loss, if it happens.”

So have I, Dagmar thought. Instead she just repeated what Lincoln had said on that last day in Istanbul.

“That would be the fault of the bastards who kill them.”

Judy shrugged her inked shoulders.

“I’d say there’s enough responsibility to go around.”

Dagmar looked at Judy, her eyes narrow.

“And your responsibility?” she asked.

A tremor crossed Judy’s face. “I’m complicit,” she said. “I got carried away by the sheer coolness of it all.”

“Well.” Dagmar rose and reached for the teapot. “From this point on, I’m going to be heavily invested in keeping my boyfriend alive.”

Judy looked at her with bleak sleepy eyes.

“May you succeed,” she said, “in all your endeavors.”

Have you considered taking advantage of the 103 digital television channels offered by Cankaya Wireless Network? Great care is taken to make all our plans affordable! Any one of our eleven plans is certain to be suitable to your budget!

There was Rafet, his brilliant yellow hair covered by a sun hat, dancing at the head of several thousand people. He was holding a double-ended drum and was banging away and jumping up and down and everyone around him was singing.

Ecstatic drumming indeed, Dagmar thought.

The new anti-government action was under way. It was ten A.M. on Saturday, and the demo had been swollen by thousands who had the day off.

The action was taking place in Karaaliolu Park, in Antalya, Turkey’s largest city on its Mediterranean coast. The park was blessed with a spectacular location, perched on a cliff above the sea, so every video on Dagmar’s array of flatscreens showed a spectacular view of ocean, cliff, clouds, rows of palm trees, sailboats, fountains, the ochre-colored walls of a castle, all dominated by the Tauros Mountains, snowcapped even this early in autumn. There was also some of the oddest public art Dagmar had ever seen-a statue of a bellicose mustached man with Popeye arms and what looked like a baseball cap tilted back on his head; an ancient spear-carrying warrior with a flat helmet, Don Quixote perhaps as conceived by Picasso; something that resembled in silhouette a two-horned Maurice Sendak monster; and strangest of all a huge groping hand apparently called Blessing Agriculture, Geology, Earth, Ground, Land, Soil, probably every synonym available in a Turkish thesaurus for dirt.

Maybe the Turks just hadn’t gotten the hang of statues yet. Ataturk had imposed statues on his nation, which had previously adhered to the Islamic ban on human representation-and so the newly liberated citizens had started off by planting statues of Ataturk everywhere, which no doubt earned the Gazi’s approval. Since then they seemed to have gone a bit off the rails.

Maybe, Dagmar thought charitably, they all made better sense in context.

The crowds had been told to bring DVDs and towels, and they did. The DVDs were held high, glittering in the sun, and Dagmar caught glimpses of packages bearing the images of Rocky, Celine Dion, Sean Connery, ABBA, and Cuneyt Arkyn, the actor who had achieved a kind of international infamy as the Turkish Luke Skywalker… The towels, mostly huge beach towels striped green and yellow and pink, were wrapped around faces to conceal identities. Brilliant color danced in the morning light.

“It looks like a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy convention,” Dagmar said.

“I was just thinking that,” said Richard.

Signs with bloodred letters waved against the blue sky. The crowd sang. The Star and Crescent flapped in the sea breeze. The video jerked and wobbled.

In Istanbul the cameras has been concealed in hotel rooms across the street from the demo. Here there was no way to hide them, so Rafet’s crew of support techs wandered amid the crowd. Some carried cameras, others wore sunglasses with video and audio pickups, and they lacked the motion-inhibiting qualities of camera tripods. These did their best to stand still and pan the scene, but every so often they’d get jogged by a member of the crowd or have to move from one setup to another or just get carried away and start dancing. More video came in from the drones of the Anatolian Skunk Works.

Oh well. Dagmar knew they could stabilize the video in postproduction.

Still rapping on his drum, Rafet led the group of dancers away from the cliff, somewhat to Dagmar’s relief. Her imagination, the one that obsessed on every conceivable thing that could go wrong, had foreseen a line of bayonet-wielding soldiers driving the protestors over the cliff into the sea.

But, Tuna and Lincoln had pointed out, there would be a lot of foreigners in the park. Foreigners provided a measure of protection: even Bozbeyli would see the disadvantage of conducting a bayonet charge where foreign visitors would be caught up in it. The bad headlines he’d gotten from the hippodrome riot should have been an object lesson to him.

So far Tuna and Lincoln had been proved right: the watchers on the local police stations hadn’t reported any movement at all. Maybe no one had even called the police or the army.

Rafet danced along the path, the tails of his towel floating out behind him. He was wearing video shades, but the image he broadcast was a hopeless bouncy blur-looking at it was like jabbing needles into Dagmar’s eyeballs. The audio feed delivered a complex series of drumbeats, Rafet’s panting breath, and the sound of shoes crunching on gravel.

Rafet led the group past a round fountain that shot a tall spear of foam into the sky, then into the square in front of the Antalya City Hall. The place was a tidy white structure with balconies and a portico and looked as if it had been put up by some European power’s Colonial Office-even though Antalya hadn’t been colonized since the Turks themselves had done it a thousand years ago, they had somehow locked into the colonial style perfectly well.

It was the weekend and no one was inside the building-the place wasn’t even guarded-but that didn’t matter as far as the audience for the video was concerned. What the pictures would show would be thousands of demonstrators waving their banners in front of the center of local power… and they would also see no response from the authorities.

The demonstrators began a new song, a triumphalist slow march. Sonorous chords boomed out. Turkish flags waved. Everyone stood still for the song, even Rafet.

Dagmar looked over her shoulder at Ismet. “This would be the national anthem?”

“Yes. ‘I-stiklal Mars?i.’ ”

Dagmar nodded. “It just sounds like a national anthem.”

The song came to a resounding conclusion after two stanzas. Then Rafet rapped for attention on his drum. The sunglass-cameras resolutely pointed away from him: no solid image of the dancing dervish would make it into any of the Lincoln Brigade’s videos. Rafet shouted out in Turkish, and the crowd responded. They made the same sort of spontaneous art made at the other demo in Istanbul, DVDs laid out in patterns on the square, stacked in interesting ways, layered on the town hall steps, or set winking in the windows. Enterprising young men scaled the pillars supporting the portico and draped towels off the portico rail. More towels were hung from the rail that topped the wings of the building. Anti-government banners were raised on the town hall’s three flagstaffs.

Dagmar could only guess what General Bozbeyli would make of this.

DVDs in the windows? he might mutter. What DVDs were these? Were they anti-government DVDs? No? Rocky IV?

What do the DVDs represent? Is this supposed to be some kind of DVD revolution?

And what about the towels? Is this some kind of attack on Turkishness through the symbolism of the Turkish towel? What signals are these people sending?

Call the head of the Jandarma! Call the mayors! We need to find out what all this means!

Dagmar was in on the secret: the items meant nothing. They transmitted no message. In order to fully comprehend the meaning of the demos, you had to be hip enough to understand that the DVDs, the towels, the photographs, and the flowers meant nothing at all! They were just convenient articles that people could carry that marked them as part of the flash mob aimed at the government.

The generals would never grok that. Never. They’d grope in the dark for meaning and come up with nothing-which was in fact the answer, but they’d never understand that.

A picnic spirit had begun to possess the protestors. More songs were sung. People linked arms and swayed in time to the music. No warning was sent from Lloyd, whose drones monitored the police and army-either the authorities didn’t care or were baffled or were waiting for instructions from somewhere up the line or no one had let them know what was going on.

“This isn’t a demonstration,” Lincoln said, with apparent pleasure. “It’s a damn love-in.”

“Chatsworth,” Dagmar said. “What happens if the police don’t move? Do we let this go on?”

Lincoln leaned closer to one of the monitors, his Elvis glasses sliding down his nose. He frowned, leaned back.

“The wedges are going to run out of fuel,” Lloyd pointed out.

Lincoln settled his glasses back on the bridge of his nose. “No sense in waiting for the police to get their shit together,” he said. “We’ve made our larger point. Let’s send ’em home.”

“Right.”

She told Rafet to end the action and sent additional messages to his support team. Rafet looked at one of the nearby cameras, then nodded.

The demonstrators were enjoying themselves too much to leave right away; the demo trailed off in a diminuendo of song and dance and trailing towels.

Helmuth and Tuna nailed a towel and a DVD of The Guns of Navarone, David Niven and Gregory Peck painted in heroic pastels, to the wall next to the towel and bouquet of flowers.

“Who’s for a celebration?” Helmuth cried. “Ouzo! Dolmades! Pizza!”

Magnus turned a little pale at the prospect of an entire long day in Helmuth’s company. Thus far Helmuth was proving a match for all the cocktails, discos, and desperate Russian women of Limassol put together…

Dagmar looked at Ismet, then looked away.

“Maybe later,” she said. “Text me.”

She wouldn’t go. Helmuth’s Rabelaisian idea of a good time had never appealed to her.

And besides, she had to say good-bye to Ismet first.

He was flying away this afternoon to organize Monday’s demo in Izmir. He would cross the Green Line in his car and then fly on to Izmir. To account for the odd stamps on his passport he was writing a series of articles on the Cyprus situation. He had them all on his netbook, along with his notes, if anyone demanded proof.

They had time for a pensive half-hour embrace on the couch in Dagmar’s flat before Ismet’s departure. Ismet was distracted by his upcoming mission and Dagmar by the ton of melancholy that squatted on her heart.

She’d had two whole nights with Ismet and already she was seeing him off to war. Film scenes ran through her mind, scenes in which the tearful girlfriend, running alongside the train, sees her soldier boy off to the Great War, waving a handkerchief at someone named Clive or Sebastian or Reginald leaning out of his train compartment in his flat helmet, the gas mask container bulking up his chest like an extra layer of fat, one pale doomed hand waving as he chugged off to be turned into chutney at Wipers or Vimy Ridge or Passchendaele…

Each repeatedly reassured the other how astoundingly safe Ismet’s task would be, and then Dagmar walked with him to his car. She gave him a fierce kiss and a rib-crushing hug, much to the amusement of an RAF airman sailing past on a bicycle.

“Save some for me, love!” he called over his shoulder, and then ran over a skateboard that some child had left in the road. The bicycle wobbled, and the airman tottered and spilled onto the curb. Dagmar burst into uncharitable laughter.

Ismet got in his Ford and drove off. Dagmar decided not to run alongside waving a handkerchief-his handkerchief, actually, which she’d absently put in her own pocket at the beach in Kouklia. She stared after him for a long while, the handkerchief wadded in her fist, while she ignored the airman dusting himself off and pushing off on his bike.

More than ever, she wasn’t in a mood to join Helmuth’s party, and so decided she might as well get some work done.

She shambled over to the ops center, where she found Lincoln and Byron, beneath Ataturk’s fierce gaze, supervising the last remaining details of the Antalya action. The place smelled of stale flowers and cold pizza.

“Rafet and the crew are in the clear,” Lincoln said. “Rafet’s at the airport buying a ticket back to Cyprus. The rest are back at the safe house with their equipment.”

“Lovely,” said Dagmar. She looked up at a BBC news program, running in silence, that showed a fifteen-second clip of the demo that she had fed them less than an hour earlier. Towels and flags waved from the town hall, while Rafet-suitably blurred-bounced and played his drum.

“I never figured I’d be working alongside Muslim clergy,” Dagmar said. “He is clergy, right?”

“No,” Lincoln said, “but the people who sent him are. And they’re the right kind of Muslim clergy. Progressive, scientifically literate, tolerant.”

“And extremely polite,” Dagmar said.

“Thanks to Riza Tek, all praise to his name.” Lincoln’s face darkened. “If we fail here, our movement may fall to the wrong kind of Muslim theologians.”

“If we fail,” Dagmar said, “there may only be fanatics left.”

Byron gave her a searching look from over his shoulder. His face looked permanently pinched. Dagmar wondered if he’d been ill.

Lincoln scrubbed his hands together.

“But failure isn’t going to happen!” he declared. “We’re going to conduct a model twenty-first-century people power insurrection, and we’re going to make the Turkish generals look like idiots! They’ve all got a pre-Internet mind-set-they think that once they’ve got the newspapers and broadcast stations, they have a monopoly on communications. We’re going to overthrow them by making them ridiculous. We’ll make them irrelevant! The entire population will just ignore them! They’ll fold up and leave out of sheer embarrassment!”

Dagmar dropped into a chair. “I like it when you get on a soapbox,” she said.

“The generals aren’t unlike some of my own superiors,” Lincoln said. “Start talking about leet, or Ozone, or the IP crisis that’s coming up, or even text messaging for heaven’s sake, and you just get a blank look.”

Dagmar looked at him. “How did you get them to approve me?” she asked. “How did you explain what it is that I do?”

Lincoln sighed. “I called in a lot of favors,” he said.

“No kidding,” she said.

“Besides,” he said, “I reckon we’re up against a deadline. Right now the generals are reflexively pro-Western, because they always have been. They’re nationalist; they’re procapitalist; they’re anti-communist; they’d never deal with the Soviets. But the Soviets are gone now-and they’ve left Russians behind.

“Everyone’s a capitalist now,” Lincoln went on, “but there are democratic capitalists and crony capitalists and state capitalists and authoritarian capitalists and everything in between. The Bozbeyli regime has a lot more in common ideologically with Moscow now than with Washington-but they’ve got such a Cold War anti-Soviet mind-set that they haven’t figured it out yet. I want to knock them down before they turn into Russia’s best friend on the Black Sea.”

“And the Bosporus,” Dagmar said.

Lincoln nodded. “Indeed,” he said.

Sudden insight flashed into Dagmar’s mind. She looked at Lincoln in wonder.

“Am I correct in assuming that this operation is really aimed at Russia?” Dagmar said. “That once we do our proof-of-concept, you’re planning to scale all this up and go after Kremlin autocrats?”

“Everything,” said Lincoln, smiling benignly, “is rehearsal for something else.”

It was ten A.M. in California, and Dagmar was on the phone to Calvin, her head writer for the Seagram’s game.

“I screwed up bad,” he said. “And all because I love my dog.”

Dagmar drew her legs up into her seat and contemplated the gin and tonic in her hand. She could scent juniper berry and fresh-cut lime fizzing from the drink.

“Tell me,” she said.

“Harry’s got a dog in the story, right? It scares away Murchison when he tries to break into Sandee’s place.”

“Yeah, okay.” Dagmar sipped her drink. She glanced at the kitchen and saw that the water was boiling for pasta.

“So I gave my own dog’s name to Harry’s dog. Perpetual Misery-Perpy for short.”

Dagmar felt a warning prickle on the back of her neck.

“And,” she said, “the players googled Perpetual Misery plus Dog and found you.”

“Worse than that. Perpetual Misery has a MySpace page.”

“Oh my Christ!” Dagmar put her drink down.

“They call me,” Calvin said miserably. “They call me to ask for information about Harry and Sandee. I tell them I never heard of them, but they keep calling. When I don’t answer, the buffer on the answering machine fills up.” He gave a despairing sigh. “Perpy has thousands of new friends on MySpace.”

“Jesus, Calvin.”

“They’re camped out in front of my house,” Calvin said. “They follow me when I go to the store.”

Dagmar tried to suppress her annoyance. Calvin had tried to play cute with the game, to sneak a little joke by the players, and he hadn’t realized that they’d jump all over something like that. And now he’d put the whole game in jeopardy.

“They’re waiting for you to slip up,” she said. “They’re hoping you’ll leave data where they can find it, or leave a script behind. You’ve got to secure everything connected with the game.”

“I can’t believe this is happening.”

“Calvin.” She spoke as patiently as she could. “Do you have any notes on paper? Any printouts lying around where people can find them?”

Item by item, Dagmar walked him through a procedure for sanitizing his house, his computer, and his handheld.

She hadn’t needed Lincoln to teach her these things.

“I’ll have Richard call you about computer security,” Dagmar said, and pressed the End button.

She looked sadly at her drink, now heavily watered by melting ice, and sighed.

She was trying to run two jobs at a distance, each at least as complex as the other. She didn’t feel completely on top of either task, especially as she was working with people who were less experienced than she at any of this.

She comforted herself with the thought that, if there had to be a security breach on one of her operations, at least it was best that it was Calvin’s.

If Calvin’s operation was breached, no people would die.

The next day Lincoln’s predictions seemed to come true, as word arrived of another mass demonstration in Trabzon, a city on the Black Sea. Lincoln called an emergency meeting in the ops room in order to figure out what was happening.

Dagmar scanned video and photos uploaded onto anti-government sites. She saw banners waving under cloudy skies, water looking frigid and gray, ships nosed up to piers.

“It’s at the waterfront,” Magnus said a little too obviously. He was hungover from the previous day’s celebrations and sucked down coffee as fast as he could pour it.

“Video quality isn’t bad,” Helmuth judged.

“This isn’t one of ours!” Lincoln said. “This is going off the rails faster than I imagined!”

Dagmar looked at him in surprise. “That’s a good thing?” she asked.

“Look,” Lincoln said. “We’re astroturfing them! We’re trying to convince everyone that this is a grassroots Turkish movement. And now it’s actually become one!” He gestured grandly at the screen. “These people put it all together themselves!” He frowned at the screen. “Let’s hope they don’t cock it up for all of us.”

The crowd was small but very enthusiastic. Apparently under the illusion that the items were symbolically important, they carried flowers, DVDs, towels, and photos. They made piles and designs out of these items and spray-painted slogans on the sidewalk. It was everything they’d seen done in videos.

And then they sang “Istiklal Mars?i” and dispersed, presumably to upload their pictures and videos to political and social networking sites throughout cyberspace.

The Lincoln Brigade looked at one another. Lincoln grinned.

“We taught them well,” he said.

“I have a Hot Koan,” Richard said. They turned to him.

“Dagmar makes a revolution out of processors, connectors, routers, and Web pages,” Richard said. “But take away the processors, connectors, routers, and Web pages and what is left?

“Trabzon.”

The action in Izmir went wrong at the beginning. It was scheduled to take place at noon in the old Konak section of the city, in a large park at the waterfront with more stunning sea views, a pier, and a picturesque gingerbread clock tower. The place was also conveniently close to the city hall should another march on a symbol of authority prove possible. But it seemed that after two waterfront demonstrations in Antalya and Trabzon the authorities must have decided waterfront parks were too great a temptation to sedition. A whole company of police moved into the park on Monday morning, bringing with them an armored car.

The scene had to be shifted at the last minute, a good deal farther east, to Hasanaga Park in the Buca district. The setting was good-there were ample entrances and exits from the park, and the adjoining Dokuz Eylul University provided potential recruits as well as lots of places to hide-but it took time to scout the location, and that meant the action had to be moved up to six o’clock, pushing close to the deadline sent in email messages.

The park was wooded and the demonstrators, carrying stuffed animals and boxes of Turkish delight, took a while to find one another and reach critical mass. One of the tech crew while waiting for people to turn up wasted time shooting video of jackdaws on the lawn.

The demonstrators had been given only two hours’ notice when and where to show up, and it was soon clear that insufficient allowance had been made for delays caused by rush hour traffic. By six o’clock there were only a few hundred people at the action, though more continued to swarm in from all directions.

The demo began in a brief rain squall. The sound of raindrops slapping tree leaves dominated the audio, and one of the cameras persisted in tracking the flapping jackdaws. Demonstrators began piling their stuffies into pyramids or perching them in trees. Chants of “Down with the generals!” rose bravely against the sound of rattling rain. Turkish delight was eaten or offered to passersby and to birds. The rain diminished, then died away.

Then there came the first shots, and the startled jackdaws leaped into the air.

Dagmar’s body jerked beneath a tsunami of adrenaline. She stared at the screens as her fingers clenched the arms of her chair, physically nailing her to the spot as she fought the instinct that wanted to send her senselessly running from the scene…

The shots seemed to echo forever among the trees. People fell; screams rose; the video image jerked wildly. “Ismet!” she called into her headset mic. “Where are you?”

Memories poured into her mind… she remembered fallen banners, sprawled bodies on the street, the Palms hotel as it burned, the fires lapping upward one storey at a time. The scent of burning flesh stung her nostrils, a memory so strong that tears stung her eyes in reaction…

Hundreds of people sprawled on the wet grass, heads up, looking wildly for the source of the shooting. Pyramids of stuffies were knocked over: plush animals stared at the sky with shiny, dead eyes.

“Are you all right?” Dagmar cried. She could hear someone breathing on the line, Ismet presumably, but he wasn’t talking.

“Are you all right?” she demanded. Still no answer.

More shots. More cries. And now the crowd rose to its feet and began to run, a vast screaming mass. The camera crew ran as well. The shooting was a continuous drumroll, full automatic fire spraying the crowd. Dagmar swept tears from her eyes and looked from screen to screen, trying to find a glimpse of Ismet.

“Lloyd!” Lincoln called. “Get a drone over to the shooters! I want their pictures! Get a message to the camera teams!”

Richard, Helmut, and Magnus sent frantic messages. Dagmar was too caught up in her own agony: Lincoln’s urgency didn’t quite penetrate her own.

Most of the cameramen were caught up in the rout, running from tree to tree and kicking up silver sheets of water from puddles, but the dozens of Hot Koans scattered over the park transmitted the video faithfully. One cameraman put a hand in front of his lens and extruded a middle finger, an answer to the request for close-ups of the assassins. But Lloyd’s team answered the call, and one of the helicopter gyred over the park, lens questing, and found two men advancing from the direction of the university. They carried submachine guns in their hands and wore the uniform of the Gray Wolves. They walked among bodies sprawled like stuffed animals, wounded crying or trying to crawl away, piles of rain-soaked animals and spilled boxes of candy.

“Get me their faces!” Lincoln demanded. The helicopter made another pass, this time at a lower angle, and Dagmar could see the killers clearly. Young, laughing, pleased with themselves and the notion that their heroin-dealing superiors were safe for another day. They carried their weapons leveled in front of them but made no attempt to fire into the running crowd. One turned his chin into his collar to speak into a lapel mic.

Lincoln frowned. “I don’t like that,” he said. He turned to Lloyd. “Tell the pilots to circle the park again. There may be more of them that we can’t see.”

The image jerked, danced, fragmented.

Where’s Ismet? Her eyes turned to the other video feeds. The other camera operators were still fleeing through trees with the crowd, transmitting disjointed flashes of green, of flowers, of scattered, sobbing people. She could hear nothing on her audio. The breathing had stopped.

And then-coming right through the trees-a line of men. Five or six, gray uniforms, guns leveled… and in the fragment of time it took Dagmar to realize what was going on the guns fired.

Bullets ripped into tree trunks, leaves, flesh. Screams echoed from tree to tree. The whole crowd moaned, a kind of universal sigh of despair, and then they turned and began to run in another direction.

Dagmar realized that her VoIP line was dead, that Ismet had hung up or that the phone had been destroyed. She frantically tried to reconnect. She couldn’t even get a ring signal.

She looked down at her hands and saw that she was wringing them in an agony of helplessness.

“Camera Three?” Lincoln said. “Who’s Camera Three?”

Camera Three was down, lying in the grass, the image tilted. The audio transmitted little determined grunts, as if someone repeatedly was trying to rise but failing.

“Code name Kamber,” Termite said.

The shooting had stopped-there had just been that volley to turn them, and then the guns had fallen silent.

“Get me pictures of those new shooters,” Lincoln said. The helicopter made another circle, came over the park at another angle.

Dagmar’s eyes swept from screen to screen, desperate for a glimpse of Ismet. There was only chaos in the video, fragments of the desperate crowd in motion-all except Camera Three, lying aslant in the grass.

Dagmar wondered if there were more Gray Wolves-if another line of paramilitaries would appear from another direction, turning the crowd again, sending it staggering back into another hail of bullets.

There was motion on Camera Three. Dagmar looked, saw three Gray Wolves step into the frame. They stopped, relaxed, smiled at one another. The one in the middle lit a cigarette, and the others clustered around to share his lighter.

Hot anger replaced Dagmar’s helplessness. Remember those faces, she thought.

She looked at the other video feeds, and then she saw a camera burst out of the trees, seeing a street, cars, a minibus… signs and businesses and satellite dishes… he was out of the woods.

Other camera operators broke free. Survivors of the crowd staggered out of the trees, sobbing, screaming, supporting one another… Dagmar’s heart gave a leap as she thought she saw Ismet, but then she realized it was someone else.

The video images crossed the road, dodging cars, and were free in Buca. Other people bustled toward them, late arrivals carrying stuffed animals and boxes of candy. Dagmar saw the horror on their faces as they saw the demonstrators staggering toward them.

They hadn’t been surrounded, Dagmar realized. The Wolves came at them from two directions but left the other exits uncovered.

The helicopters swooped in, providing pictures of the second group of killers. There were six of them in total. None of them heard the whisper of the copters or looked up to see the hovering cameras.

Where is Ismet? Dagmar’s brain repeated the question over and over.

Lincoln looked at the flatscreens. In profile he looked like some kind of ferocious Old Testament prophet.

“Get the images of those Gray Wolves,” he said. “I want a portrait of each of them that their mothers will be proud of. I want them as recognizable as possible.”

Helmuth and the others turned to their keyboards.

“You know,” Helmuth said, “when actors on a TV show enlarge a video image, there’s actually more detail.”

“Can we have that software?” Magnus asked.

Within an hour they had good portraits of the eight Wolves they’d caught on video and created posters for distribution on the Internet.

WANTED, the posters read. FOR MURDER OF TURKISH CITIZENS.

Within four hours, the public had provided names for each of the faces. An hour after that, they had addresses and other data. Within six, they had names for the others Wolves in their unit.

While this went on, the Brigade worked on creating an augmented reality version of the demo. The piles of stuffed animals, the jackdaws, the rain, the scattered bodies… all would be available, perpetually, for anyone walking through the park.

In electronic form, the dead would die forever.

No word came from Ismet. Dagmar sat at her workstation or roamed aimlessly over the ops room.

Wandering, she looked out the window at the airfield and saw lines of Indonesian police marching down the runway. She shut her eyes, then the blinds.

She wandered to the break room, looked at the lunch she had waiting in the fridge, then closed the fridge door and went back to ops.

Along the way she felt a firm hand on her elbow, and she looked up to see Lincoln. Wordlessly he led her to his office. He sat her in a chair, then took his place behind his desk.

“I need to know,” he said, “if you told anyone about the target.”

She looked at him in surprise, a surprise that was soon followed by dread.

“No,” she said. “You and I worked out where the demo was going to happen, along with Ismet.”

Lincoln glanced at his safe. “I lock everything up at the end of the day. I don’t commit anything to electronic form.”

Dagmar threw her hands wide.

“I haven’t talked about this at all, Lincoln,” she said.

“Or written it down? Or emailed it?”

“No. Of course not.”

Lincoln looked fixedly at a corner of his desk, his jaw muscles working in accompaniment to his thoughts.

“It could be a complete coincidence,” he said. “Those Wolves might just have been on the scene-or were pulling some kind of unrelated security detail on campus. And there are a thousand ways our system can be compromised. We could have an informer somewhere in the network, or somebody’s girlfriend could have found out he’s cheating and told the cops to get even…” He looked up. “Speed is of the essence. We’ve got to put these events together faster than the authorities can react to informers.”

Dagmar pressed her hands together, trying to stop the shaking.

Lincoln frowned.

“Dagmar,” he said, “I need you to pull yourself together.”

She shrank beneath his cold gaze.

“I keep thinking about Ismet,” she said.

“There’s nothing you can do about him.”

“I keep thinking that I’ve killed another one.” Another lover, she meant.

Lincoln’s mouth twisted in a kind of snarl.

“Well,” he said, “you haven’t. And the fact is people have been dying all along-journalists, missionaries, Kurds, Alevis, labor leaders, even the odd tourist… It’s been going on all along, and neither of us are going to stop it completely; we can just make it mean something, maybe…”

Dagmar wanted to say that Ismet meant more to her than some political principle, but the words crumbled into dust before she could even utter them.

“I need you to help get those videos into shape, and uploaded,” Lincoln said. “I want Turkish public opinion outraged by this. Because we want the outrage we feel to be felt by everybody.”

Dagmar obeyed numbly. The Turkish government had issued a list of Web sites that were to be blocked. Turk Telekom was too big to ignore the order, but many local ISPs were slow to get the order or slow to enforce it.

Still, Dagmar was staying ahead of the authorities. For the next few hours she edited video, uploaded it, made sure it was posted on new sites that the Turkish government hadn’t managed to ban yet. She helped Magnus and Byron create new proxy sites so that people in Turkey could view the videos and send messages to one another without the government intercepting them. Distantly she could hear the thump of shotguns, the cries of wounded and dying, the amplified, incomprehensible snarl of anger coming from bullhorns… it’s as if she were listening to a radio station from a parallel world, where the events of her past were repeated over and over again.

As she worked, Ataturk fixed his ferocious gaze upon her from his place on the wall.

It was nearly dinnertime before she heard from Ismet.

His message appeared on a Gmail account they shared. Gmail accounts were perfect for covert work, provided that everyone involved had a password and access to the account.

Dagmar would, for example, write an email giving details of the next demo, then not send it. Ismet or Tuna or Rafet, who knew the password, could open the email, make their own comments, then log off, again without sending it. This could continue for any number of iterations, and then the email could be erased without ever being sent.

As long as the email wasn’t actually sent anywhere, it couldn’t be intercepted. Gmail was a surprisingly secure method of communication, so long as you didn’t actually send any Gmail.

As Dagmar was working elsewhere, she kept checking the Gmail account she shared with Ismet, and she felt her heart give a lurch as she found an unsent email waiting for her.

I was pinned down in the park for hours. Had to destroy phone.

IM ok now. Izmir too dangerous, safe house abandoned. I am writing from hotel in Selcuk. Will go to Bodrum tomorrow and fly home from there.

Estragon.

Dagmar waited till her body caught up to her racing thoughts, till she could assure herself that her heartbeat and breath were functioning in the same time as her mind. Then-fingers shaking-she typed her own brief answer.

Love you Briana.

She checked in again for the rest of the night, but there was no reply.

FROM: Rahim

The following proxy sites are still unblocked. Please pass this on to anyone interested in finding out what’s going on in Turkey.

128.112.139.28 port 3124

RT 218.128.112.18:8080

218.206.94.132:808

218.253.65.99:808

219.50.16.70:8080

By morning, the official total from the action was eleven dead, twenty-eight wounded. Rumors had it the totals were higher.

How many people have to die, Dagmar thought, before it all stops being cool? Before it stops being insanely fun?

One. Just one.

Originally, the government bulletin had claimed “terrorist violence by unknown subversive elements.” But faced with the videos, the posters, by ten in the morning it announced that the Gray Wolves had been taken into custody for questioning.

“They’re not in jail,” Lincoln said. “They’re in protective custody to keep them from being lynched by their neighbors.”

“Too bad we can’t arrange a jailbreak,” Dagmar said.

“It was a bad idea to put the Gray Wolves in uniform,” said Lincoln. “A government can always use a shadowy, anonymous group for assassination and random violence. Once everyone knows who they are, it’s a lot harder to hide in the shadows.” He smiled, nodded. “Those bastards have had it.”

Dagmar went to bed at midmorning and arose midafternoon to wait for Ismet.

He looked like a wreck-unshaven, pale, smelling of sweat and tobacco. Dagmar held him for a long time after he staggered out of his Ford, then joined him for the debriefing, which was mercifully brief.

“We knew one of these would go wrong sooner or later,” Lincoln said. “This one wasn’t anybody’s fault. We learn and move on.”

Dagmar returned with Ismet to the apartment he shared with Tuna. Tuna and Rafet had both gone, on their way to an action in Ankara, and Dagmar relished the chance to be alone with Ismet. But he was exhausted, and when Dagmar left briefly to fetch soft drinks from the fridge he fell asleep fully clothed on the sofa. Dagmar wanted to stay with him, but her mouth tasted foul, her skin smelled of chemical anxiety, and she badly wanted to brush her teeth. She left a note saying she’d be back soon, then kissed Ismet, turned out the lights, and walked to her own place. She’d get a change of clothes and a toothbrush, then return.

Cypress smells were in the air. The airfield was silent. Dagmar’s apartment was dark-apparently Judy hadn’t expected her to return. She walked onto the porch, fished in her cargo pants for keys, and noticed the door was standing open.

A cold warning finger touched her neck. She stepped to the side of the door, between it and the window into the living room, and then reached around the corner to flick on the living room light.

The curtain was only partly drawn. She looked in to see a man quickly emerge from Judy’s bedroom into the hall-a man she didn’t know, mustached, dressed in dark clothes. A long pistol was in one hand. He looked up at the window and saw Dagmar the instant that she saw him.

She ducked away from the window as the glass shivered to the bullet’s impact. She didn’t hear a shot, only a mechanical clacking noise.

She ran, and as she ran she thought to scream. The scream came out wrong-she hoped for the piercing sound of a cheerleader trapped in a horror movie basement, but instead she found that terror had somehow thickened her vocal cords and she could only manage a kind of baritone moan.

“Help!” she rumbled. “Help me!”

Dagmar heard footsteps behind her. A bullet struck sparks from the street near her feet.

“Help!” she groaned. Another bullet cracked past her ear.

However she was saying it, the urgency must have told. Porch lights were snapping on. A door creaked as it opened. The footsteps behind her stopped suddenly, and then she heard the footsteps again, in retreat.

When the RAF Police finally came, they found Judy lying dead in her room.

Which sixties spy are you? Dagmar thought. She was curled in a chair at the offices of the RAF Police, her knees drawn up, her forearms embracing her shins.

She’d decided that Ismet was the character from Ipcress File. But who was she?

There weren’t a lot of options, and the problem was that most of them were superwomen. Emma Peel and Modesty Blaise were too beautiful, too perfect, too intimidating-and besides, Dagmar was absolutely certain that she would not be flattered by a black spandex catsuit.

Mentally she paged through the available options, and then-a cold finger running up her spine-she realized her true identity. She was Jill or Tilly Masterson. She was Fiona Volpe; she was Aki; she was Tracy di Vicenzo. She was Semiramis Orga.

She was the woman who was in the spy business but lacked the necessary skills and experience, who was completely out of her depth, who tried her best but fell afoul of the villain anyway.

Dagmar was the good-hearted but clueless girl who died in the first half of the Bond films.

Of all the characters in the drama, she was the one the audience absolutely knew would not survive.