Deep State

CHAPTER NINE

The police headquarters filled with RAF Police in their white caps and soldiers from the RAF Regiment in camouflage battle dress. Dagmar, curled on her chair in the hall, felt herself cringing away from the parade of firearms that marched past her.

Squadron Leader Alvarez turned up, the group’s intelligence liaison; he scowled as he scanned the room, and went into conference with other officers. A pair of Royal Marines arrived, from off the patrol boats that cruised offshore, and then the first of Dagmar’s own people appeared-Lola scowling at the world through a mop of tangled hair, and Byron bewildered, fearful, blinking sleep from his eyes, having been first roused from his bed by a phone call telling him to secure their doors, then taken by military police to their headquarters.

It was time for Dagmar to be the boss again.

So she uncurled from her chair, went to the two, and told them there was a security problem. She showed them where the coffee machine waited, told them to find a seat.

When Ismet was brought in, his glasses cockeyed on his face, she went to him in silence and put her arms around him and stayed there, leaning against him, for a long, desperate moment.

“Judy is dead,” she said. “Shot.” She spoke quietly so the others wouldn’t hear. She felt his muscles tighten at her words.

“The killer shot at me, too,” she said.

Being shot at, she realized, was something new that she and Ismet had in common.

“I’m so sorry,” Ismet said. His voice was breathless. “What can I do?”

What can I do? That was always his question, as if he saw the world as a series of technical problems to be overcome.

Some problems, she thought, were beyond help.

More members of the Lincoln Brigade arrived, and Dagmar counted heads-everyone was present save for Rafet and Tuna, on their way to the mainland, and Lincoln, Helmuth, and Magnus. Cold terror crawled up her spine as she pictured Lincoln, Helmuth, and Magnus lying slaughtered in their beds, the Brigade’s mission a failure, their sole triumph the slaughter of its own recruits… and then Lincoln walked through the glass doors at the end of the hall, eyes hidden behind his metal-rimmed shades, his feet marching in step with his two white-capped escorts; and he walked past Dagmar with a curt nod and went straight into conference with Alvarez.

The door closed behind Lincoln, and then through the wood paneling Dagmar heard his voice raised: “What the hell is going on in this fucking establishment?”-after which somebody, presumably, calmed him down, because Dagmar heard nothing more.

A police corporal arrived to report that Helmuth and Magnus were not in their quarters. In a burst of relief it occurred to Dagmar that they needn’t have been victims of assassins-instead they were probably in Limassol indulging in their usual nightly depravities. She would call them on her handheld if she had it, but she didn’t have it with her.

Instead she told the corporal to alert the guard at the gate to escort Magnus and Helmuth to the police station as soon as they arrived.

The door to the office opened, and Alvarez summoned Dagmar. Police officers filed out as she took a chair, leaving only Alvarez, Lincoln, and a police lieutenant Dagmar had never met. Lincoln’s jaw muscles were clenched in what seemed to be rage.

The room was a meeting or interview room, with a cheap table and chairs and walls crusted with decades of thick ochre paint. Faded safety notices were posted on the walls. There was a faint odor of disinfectant. The police lieutenant turned on a recorder, put it on the table, and then opened his notebook and clicked his ballpoint.

Recorder and notebook. Clearly someone who believed in backup.

On the whole this was not unlike the last police station, the last interrogation in Hollywood, three years ago.

Alvarez looked at her.

“I’d like to begin by saying,” he said, “how sorry the establishment at RAF Akrotiri is at the loss of your colleague. And I want to say that we’re going to make certain that nothing like this happens again.”

Dagmar held his blue eyes for a moment, then turned away. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

“You’ll all be moved to new quarters,” Alvarez said. “And you’ll be under constant police guard as long as you remain on Cyprus.”

Dagmar nodded. As she looked down she saw the display on the police lieutenant’s recorder and saw that it was automatically transcribing the words, little black letters crawling like ants across the glowing screen.

“Miss Briana,” said the lieutenant, “my name is Vaughan.”

Vaughan was straw haired and lanky, dark eyed, with a trace of Devon in his voice. He was young, twenty-two or — three. Dagmar nodded at him.

“I’d like to know, miss,” Vaughan said, “if you got a good look at the killers.”

“Killers?” Dagmar looked up in surprise. “There was more than one?”

“Other witnesses saw at least two.”

“I saw just one.” She called the face back to her mind, then shook her head.

“I only saw him for a second,” she said. “He had dark hair and a mustache. He looked like half the men on this island.”

“Tall? Short?”

Dagmar thought for a moment. “A little shorter than me. Average for a Turk, maybe.”

“How old?”

“Thirty?” she asked herself. “Thirty-five? Not young.”

Vaughan looked at his notes.

“Did you by any chance move your bed to an unusual angle in your bedroom?”

Both Lincoln and Alvarez were surprised by the question.

“Yes,” Dagmar said. “I did.”

Vaughan nodded. “Thank you, miss,” he said. “We were trying to figure out why the assassins would move your furniture.” He looked up from the notebook. “Why do you have your bed like that, by the way?”

“I-” Dagmar started, then shook her head. “It keeps the bad dreams away,” she said.

Lincoln and Alvarez were at first surprised, then seemed a little uncomfortable with their new knowledge. Vaughan just gave a brisk nod and jotted briefly in his notebook.

“That makes perfect sense, miss,” he said. “Thank you.”

Vaughan asked for Dagmar’s movements on the night, and she provided them.

Lincoln asked if she’d told anyone outside of the Brigade where she lived. She said she hadn’t. While Vaughan was jotting this down, Lincoln spoke up.

“And the action yesterday,” he said. “Who knew its location?”

“You already know the answer,” Dagmar said. “You and me and Ismet. And though the camera teams were staying in Salihi, they might have had a good idea they were going to Izmir next.”

“You didn’t tell anyone else?”

“Not till I sent orders to the camera teams.”

“Right.” Lincoln rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “I suppose that’s all, for now.”

But Dagmar had her own question ready. She looked at Alvarez.

“How did the killers get on the base? You’ve got checkpoints, patrols…” She waved an arm seaward. “Ships.”

Vaughan delicately chewed his lower lip.

“It’s a very large perimeter, I’m afraid,” he said. “It’s difficult to guard it all. They could have gone under or over the fence; they might have come in by small boat.” He gave a sigh. “They might have faked some ID. Or the ID may have been real-there are thousands of local civilians who work here at the aerodrome.” Determination crossed his features. “At least we can hope that they won’t escape.”

Yes, Dagmar thought. Let’s hope.

When she stood to leave, Lincoln rose and joined her. He put a hand on her arm before she could reach for the doorknob.

“We’ve got to tell them,” Lincoln said.

“I’ll do it.”

“Are you sure?”

She nodded. He released her arm and she opened the door and went into the hallway where the Brigade waited. Helmuth and Magnus, she saw, had returned from Limassol and joined the others.

They all looked at her, and suddenly Dagmar couldn’t say a word. She could barely look at them. Lincoln waited barely two seconds before he spoke himself.

“Wordz,” Lincoln said, “has been murdered. Briana was shot at but got away.”

Dagmar saw them turn to her in shock. Her eyes skittered away from theirs.

“The killers knew exactly where to go,” Lincoln added, “and that indicates a very dangerous security breach. So in the course of the next few hours, we’re going to be asking you some very serious questions, and I would appreciate truthful answers.”

A moment of clarity descended on Dagmar. Someone had pinpointed her, had pointed out her apartment to the assassins. Had set her up, and Judy as well, to be murdered.

She rather doubted that person was going to start telling the truth about it now.

Lincoln, Alvarez, and Vaughan conducted the interrogations. Those who weren’t being interviewed were given police escorts to their apartments, to pack their belongings and carry them away. Dagmar didn’t think she could face the crime scene, so she stayed in the police HQ while two very kind policewomen volunteered to get her things.

After the interrogations were over, the Brigade was carried in police vehicles to the ops center, where without sleep and without cheer, smelling of unwashed bodies and uncertainty, they attempted to do their normal day’s work. The hallway to the bathroom was full of personal possessions fetched from their apartments: their personal electronics were stored in metal lockers outside the secure area.

The Brigade stared dully at the screens as they caught up on the news.

The Izmir slaughter had outraged the Turkish nation-the government story had been unconvincing even before it had been shown to be an absurd lie, and the videos and pictures of the massacres were all too available to anyone with access to a computer or to foreign television. Angry posts had appeared on political Web sites, pictures of the dead on lampposts and street corners, copies of the wanted posters everywhere. The junta had failed entirely to keep ahead of the story.

A massive demonstration had spontaneously organized in the city of Konya, where Anatolia’s center of conservative Islam was marked by a green-tiled conical tower that stood above the elaborate tomb of Mevlana, the great poet who had founded the Whirling Dervishes. Lincoln and Dagmar had avoided setting any actions in Konya in order to avoid accusations of being religious reactionaries. But the city’s residents had managed to mobilize themselves, and it was a vast, angry stream of thousands that circled the city’s brown stone Alaeddin Mosque, stopping traffic on the semicircular boulevard and filling the mosque’s shady park, shouting slogans and singing patriotic songs. They carried stuffed animals and boxes of Turkish delight, memorials to those who had died two days before.

Lincoln and Dagmar had planned the first series of hit-and-run demos to show the population that it was safe to defy the government. Ironically, it was the demonstration where people were killed that had outraged the people to the point where they were organizing themselves into large actions.

It took at least a couple hours for the police to work up the nerve or gather the reinforcements to deal with the demo, and when they charged the demonstrators they were met with a storm of rocks, bottles, and other improvised weapons. Flowers of pepper gas blossomed among the trees of the park. There was resistance-videos had actually been uploaded by people sitting in jail cells, people whose phones had not yet been confiscated. Dagmar guessed that a few hundred people, at least, were clubbed to the ground and arrested or-if they were lucky-carried in handcuffs to a hospital.

Most of the protestors seemed to have simply found an exit once things got dangerous. They were all networked-only a few would have had to find an actual way out and alerted the rest by phone or electronic text.

The demonstrators didn’t have the capability to upload their images real-time, so Dagmar had to search online sources for videos that had been posted hours after the event and try to arrange them in some kind of chronology. Ismet and Lloyd had to translate all the dialogue. All the cumbersome difficulty only added to the frustrations of the day.

Eventually the videos were cataloged and a narrative superimposed on the action. The narrative had to do with freedom-loving resisters in pitched combat with faceless totalitarians and may have possessed only a tangential resemblance to reality-for starters, Dagmar had no idea whether the demonstrators, taken as a whole, were any more committed to democracy than the current regime or would, if given power, set up an equally authoritarian state but with a different agenda. Yet her narrative would serve for present purposes, and the better-quality videos were sent out to the usual media outlets, while the rest were duplicated and catalogued on Web sites hosted throughout the world.

Dagmar worked amid a leaden cloud of despair. It was not just that Judy had been murdered; it was not just that Dagmar worked in a room with someone who had betrayed her; it was not merely that her entire project was now ringed with violence-it was the certain knowledge that her own nerves were not up to coping with any of this.

She could sense panic fluttering in her heart. Sour-scented sweat gathered in the hollow of her throat. Phantom movements in her peripheral vision seemed forever on the verge of resolving into images of Indonesian rioters armed with cleavers, Jakarta police with shotguns, thick-necked assassins from the Russian Maffya. Her mind seemed on the verge of exploding in a bubble of fire, just as the Ford had exploded on that cool Los Angeles night three years before.

Somehow the nightmare did not manifest. Somehow she managed to do her work, think her thoughts, interact with her posse. Somehow she kept herself from crumbling.

Lincoln had spent the morning in his office, talking on the phone or sending encrypted messages to his superiors. He came out at midafternoon, just as Dagmar figured that Rafet and Tuna were landing at the Ankara airport. She was working the Gmail accounts she shared with them, to tell them that Judy had been targeted by assassins.

“Traitor may have given names, dates, and descriptions to the authorities,” she wrote. “Make certain you’re not under observation and proceed with caution.”

She’d argued for canceling the action entirely. Lincoln had overruled her.

“Excuse me, everybody,” Lincoln called. The tapping of keyboards ceased; faces turned to Lincoln. Even Ataturk seemed to be paying attention.

“We’ve got new rules,” Lincoln said. “For the rest of our time here, you will be escorted and guarded by RAF Police or other military personnel. You will not travel without a guard-if for some reason a guard isn’t available to take you somewhere, you are to stay where you are, and call for assistance at a number I’ll give you.

“You will no longer have access to your own cars. We don’t want anyone putting a bomb under one of them. If you need a ride somewhere, one of your guards will drive you.

“No one will be leaving RAF Akrotiri for any purposes whatever, save as our mission requires.” He looked at Helmuth. “No more barhopping in Limassol, I’m afraid.”

Helmuth looked as if he was going to comment, then shrugged.

Maybe he figured he could amuse himself by corrupting his bodyguards.

“You are all being moved to a single apartment block,” Lincoln said, “where you will be under guard twenty-four hours per day. You will be free to move around the aerodrome, provided you have proper escort.”

Byron raised a hand.

“When I took on this job,” he said, “I didn’t agree to be shot at.”

“You haven’t been.”

Byron reddened. His pinched face turned resentful.

“I’ve got a family waiting for me in the States,” he said. “I’m not going to risk coming home in a box.”

“Follow instructions,” Lincoln said, “and that won’t happen.”

Angry Man banged a fist on his desk.

“This isn’t in my contract!” he said.

“I think that you’ll find that it is,” Lincoln said. “If you like, we can go into my office and look at it together.”

Byron had turned a brilliant scarlet. His eyes seemed ready to pop from his head. Dagmar wondered if he was going to have a stroke.

“Fuck that!” Byron said. “You can’t stop me from leaving!”

Lincoln considered this for half a second.

“I think that perhaps I can. And in any case I have legal options-there’s a substantial financial penalty if you walk off the job, as I’m sure you know.”

Byron glared but had no answer. Lincoln turned to Dagmar.

“Briana,” he said, “can I see you in my office?”

Dagmar gave Byron what was meant to be a sympathetic look, then followed Lincoln into his office. The room smelled of stale coffee.

“Close the door, please.”

Lincoln sank into his Aeron chair as Dagmar shut the door. She took her own seat and watched as Lincoln took off his metal-rimmed shades, closed his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“I’m in charge of quartering you all,” he said, “and I thought I’d ask what kind of arrangements you want. I could put you in an apartment by yourself, but I don’t know if you’d be comfortable living alone.”

“Put me in with Ismet,” Dagmar said.

Lincoln lowered his hand and opened his eyes. The blue irises seemed washed out, and his lower lids sagged down his cheeks, revealing crescents of red flesh.

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” he said.

Dagmar sighed. “Oh, Lincoln,” she said. “Is it that I’ll be living openly with a guy, or-”

“No,” Lincoln said. “Nothing like that.” He reached for his glasses and adjusted them over his temples.

“It has occurred to you,” he said, “that it was one of our own group who set you up to be killed?”

She looked at him levelly. “Yes,” she said. “That thought had crossed my mind.”

He nodded.

“I take it,” she said, “that no one rushed to confess.”

“It’s possible the fault might lie somewhere else,” Lincoln said. “Someone on the British side. The people who quartered you in the first place, for instance. Someone in the base commander’s office. None of them should have known who you actually were, but there might have been some talk, or a document left out of the safe at the wrong time.”

“Good luck proving that,” Dagmar said.

“It turns out there’s a polygraph on the base,” Lincoln said. “To deal with security issues, and to vet the civilian workers.” His mouth quirked. “I’m kind of surprised. The Brits-and Europeans generally-tend to think of polygraph evidence as voodoo.”

“Do you?” she asked.

He gave a silent snarl. “Sometimes voodoo works.”

“I thought polygraph evidence wasn’t admissible in court.”

“We’re not going to take the person to court,” Lincoln said savagely. “Or if we do, it’ll be a very private court, which will reach a very private judgment.”

“Well,” Dagmar said. “Tomorrow the polygraph guy will likely find out something. But tonight I’d like to sleep with Ismet.”

“Dagmar,” Lincoln said. “Ismet is a suspect.”

She was exasperated. “I don’t think he-”

“His mission cratered,” Lincoln said. “He went missing for hours, completely out of contact. He never called in-never even sent a text message. He said he destroyed the SIM card on his phone, but we don’t know that.”

Indignation seethed in her blood. “He was pinned down!”

“He could have been captured.” Insistently. “He could have been threatened with torture and turned.”

Dagmar spoke with icy logic. “He flew here the very next day. He didn’t have time to-”

“When you turn someone,” Lincoln said, “you get him back to his normal life as soon as possible, before he has a chance to reconsider and before anyone misses him.”

Dagmar’s mind whirled. “That is absurd,” she said.

Lincoln shrugged. “Maybe,” he said.

“The killers!” Dagmar said. “Are you saying that the assassination was set up after Ismet was turned-if he was, I mean? In less than thirty hours? I’m not the professional here, but I’d imagine those sorts of ops require a little more planning time.”

Lincoln gave a controlled nod.

“Normally,” he conceded. “Unless you’ve got the team already prepped and they just need a location and an order to go.” He gave an uneasy shrug. “No lack of nationalist fanatics with guns over on Turkish Cyprus.”

“It still doesn’t sound very likely. Not if they have to plan to get through a secure perimeter.”

His tone turned savage. He made a cutting gesture with one arm.

“It doesn’t matter what’s likely. It only matters what’s possible. I’ve got to take every possibility into account!” He spread his hands. “Otherwise, we’re wrecked.”

Dagmar considered this.

“Aren’t we wrecked anyway?” she asked. “This operation is no longer covert. Bozbeyli can reveal what he knows whenever he wants, and show that all the demonstrators are nothing but foreign puppets. And instead, he decides to kill us.” She waved a hand. “Why is that?”

“I…” Lincoln hesitated. “I don’t know.”

“Maybe we’d better start trying to work that out.”

“I would like to do that-” Lincoln picked up papers from his desk and waved them. “But I keep being distracted by mundane tasks, such as the necessity of finding places for you all to sleep!” He dropped his hand and the papers to the desk with a thud. Then he sighed, shook his head, and lowered his voice.

“I was going to ask if you wanted to share my suite. I’ve got a spare bedroom, and it’s in a very secure building normally used by visiting VIPs. That’s probably why they didn’t try to whack me.”

Dagmar’s temper faded. She dropped her hands into her lap.

“That’s very kind of you,” she said. “But I’d much rather have my own place. And whether Ismet is officially my roomie or not, I’ll be spending the night with him.”

Lincoln put on his glasses, reached for the papers, and made a note.

“Done,” he said. He looked at her from over the rims of his glasses. “Now that it’s morning in the States, I’ve got to call Judy’s mother and tell her that her daughter is dead.”

Dagmar tried to speak and failed to find the words. Lincoln’s blue eyes seemed to bore into her.

“She was here working on a game,” Lincoln said. “An ARG, for the Turkish market. She was killed in what we believe to be a case of mistaken identity.”

Dagmar nodded dumbly.

“Just in case anyone asks,” Lincoln said. He made a flipping gesture with one hand.

“I think that’s all,” he said.

She rose and left the room and walked back to ops. The Lincoln Brigade was mostly finished for the day and were quietly packing up their drives and running the bar-code stickers under Lola’s scanner. Dagmar checked the clock on the wall, then went to her own office and sent out the day’s spam.

Welcome to Cankaya Wireless Network. Customer service is our most important product! We work constantly to expand our network throughout the Turkish-speaking world.

Anyone signing up to our network in the next month will be entered into a special drawing. Prizes may include cash, a beautiful scarf, or a box of lovely greeting cards! The next drawing will take place by noon on Thursday!

She had just hit the Send key when her office door opened and Helmuth slipped in. He wore an open-necked shirt and a jacket and trousers of linen. He sat on the brown metal chair and waited for her to acknowledge his presence.

“Yes?” she said.

He gave her a hooded look. “Dagmar,” he said. “What the hell are we doing?”

There were any number of commonplace responses she could have given him, but she didn’t bother. She knew well enough what he meant.

“Jesus, Dagmar,” Helmuth said. “We’re getting people killed. We got Judy killed.”

“I know,” Dagmar said.

“Now we’re in protective custody, stuck in an apartment building surrounded by guards with guns. We’re prisoners.” Helmuth leaned across Dagmar’s desk and spoke in an urgent whisper: “Dagmar, we’re game designers. This isn’t our job.” His hands groped the air as if he were physically searching for words. “Our job is to be cool, to make things cool. We can’t make killings and riots cool. We’re amateurs and we’re fucking everything up.”

Dagmar couldn’t disagree. “What do you want us to do?”

“Leave,” Helmuth said. “Just leave. Go home.”

Dagmar looked down at her desk. “What does Richard think?”

“He’s your happy Zen warrior. He just sits at his desk and makes up koans and pretends to be a ninja. He’ll do whatever you tell him.” He sighed. “You should just quit. That’s all.”

“Like Byron?”

Helmuth’s mouth quirked. “Byron’s afraid for his skin. I’m afraid for the people we’re putting in danger.”

“Wouldn’t they be in more danger if we left?” she said.

He gave her an appraising look. “I’m also afraid for your safety. And your soul.”

Dagmar didn’t have an answer for that. She tried to speak, failed.

“You’ve put everything you’ve got into the company,” Helmuth said. “You can’t put that kind of energy into fixing a whole country. It’s just not possible.”

She licked her lips. “I’ve just sent out notices for tomorrow’s demo.”

Helmuth’s eyes turned stony. “Dagmar, Lincoln and his crew failed us. They were supposed to keep us safe, but instead they put us in the same room with someone who sent a hit squad to kill you. It’s their fuckup. Nobody’s going to blame you if you walk out.”

“Let me think about it,” Dagmar said. “I’ll give you an answer soon.”

A dissatisfied look crossed Helmuth’s face. He rose from the chair.

“Think hard, Dagmar,” he said. “And let’s get the hell back to California.”

He left, closing the door softly behind him. She looked after him and tried to think of nothing at all.

Dagmar took the hard drive and her memory stick with the addresses on it and gave them to Lola to be locked in Lincoln’s safe. She went to the ops room, where most of her crew were standing around waiting for the police escort to their new quarters.

Ismet stood behind his desk. He was looking across at the picture of Ataturk. His eyes were dark wells behind the spectacles. She drifted to his side, but he seemed not to notice her.

Ismet appeared to come to a decision. He bent down to his desk, opened a drawer, and took out a small stuffed bear and a box of Turkish delight. He went to the wall, picked up the hammer and box of nails that waited there, and nailed the items next to the trophies from the other missions, the flowers, the towel, the photo, the DVD.

He turned and faced the others. His expression was defiant.

Dagmar’s heart soared. She wanted to applaud.

Ismet marched back to his desk and she put her arms around him.

Lola came to tell them that their escorts had arrived. Lincoln appeared from his office, shambling stiff legged, his face haggard.

“We will be retaining your personal electronics for the next twenty-four hours,” he said.

“God damn it!” Byron said, and swung a fist through the air so hard that it spun him around ninety degrees.

“We’ll be cloning your hard drives,” Lincoln said, “and looking through them.”

“I have a family, damn it!” Byron called. “I need to talk to them!”

“If you wish to contact your family or send messages,” Lincoln said, “you’ll have to do it with me or Lola observing-preferably soon, because we’ll want dinner at some point.”

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Byron kicked a chair across the ops room. Angry Man, Dagmar thought, throwing a tantrum.

Dagmar felt her nerves go nova. She strode to Byron’s side and shouted in his ear.

“Shut the fuck up, you useless whining cocksucker!” she screamed. He jumped and turned to her, round eyes white in his red face.

“We lost a friend today, and all you can do is snivel!” Dagmar shouted. “Snivel like a little bitch!”

Byron began to back away. Dagmar pursued.

“It’s time you learned that this isn’t all about you!” Dagmar said. “If I hear another complaint from you, I’m going to kick you down the fucking stairs!”

Byron had backed up against a desk. Dagmar crowded him close.

“Jesus, Dagmar!” he said.

Dagmar pointed to the exit.

“You have my permission to leave the ops center,” she said.

Byron edged down the length of the desk, then stepped into the aisle and walked toward the exit, putting his feet down carefully, as if he might cut himself on glass. The others silently parted for him. Dagmar found herself shivering and realized her chin was wet.

Lord, she thought, had she been shrieking at Byron and drooling? Here he was pitching his little emo fit and was then confronted with a shrieking, dribbling madwoman, rabid as a vampire bat.

With a quivering hand she reached for a hankerchief and swabbed her chin and lips. Her knees suddenly seemed very weak, and she leaned against the desk.

Gunfire crackled dimly somewhere in her awareness. She tried to shut it off, concentrate on the sound of the ceiling fan ticking over her head.

No one seemed to be looking at her. In the wake of the scene they all seemed to have found something else with which to busy themselves.

Dagmar thought of the break room and thought that perhaps her knees would support her the short distance. She passed by Helmuth at his desk, and he looked at her sidelong.

“Guess that was my answer,” he said. Dagmar said nothing.

In the break room she sat on the little yellow plastic-covered love seat and got a lemonade from the fridge. She sipped her drink and waited till she heard the others leave, then rose and went back to the ops room.

Lola, the Guardian Sphinx, was still at her desk at the end of the hall, her head bent over her work. Dagmar walked across the room to the hall, checked her own office to make sure everything was turned off, then closed the door and walked on.

Lincoln’s door was open. He sat behind his desk, stretched out on his Aeron chair like a piece of driftwood left by the tide. He saw Dagmar and offered a weary smile.

“You go on knockin’ them into the weeds, okay?” he said.

“I’m embarrassed,” she said. She raised a hand to the pain in her throat-she’d strained her vocal cords shouting.

Lincoln waved a dismissive hand. “It was educational,” he said. “I’m sure we all learned something.”

We all learned that I’m crazy, Dagmar thought.

“If you want your phone and laptop,” Lincoln said, “you can have them. I know you aren’t working with the black hats.”

She took her electronics, walked past Lola and down the stairs to meet the two kind, soft-spoken policewomen who had gathered her belongings and moved them to her new quarters.

She had been put into a room with a single bedroom and without Ismet in evidence-evidently Lincoln had conceded on the point of sex but not on living arrangements. Her apartment was on the second floor of a two-storey apartment block, and there were RAF Police guards in white caps guarding all possible approaches. Snipers in the trees for all she knew.

She was still in married personnel quarters-an RAF family had been pitched out of their home to make a safer place for her. Their personal items were gone, but she could still smell the bacon they’d cooked for breakfast and the scent of aftershave and herbal body wash in the bathroom. She found a note on the breakfast table, in round handwriting with circular dots above the j’s and i’s.

We hope you enjoy our home.

The hot water takes a little time to come on in the bathroom, and sometimes you need to jiggle the handle on the toilet to stop it running.

Dagmar smiled at the sweet air of hospitality, then went to the kitchen to find her gin. As she passed the toaster, it started talking to her in Greek. She jumped a foot in surprise and banged her hip on the counter.

She stepped closer to the toaster again. The Greek voice resumed. She recognized only the word tost.

She examined the toaster but couldn’t find a way to turn the voice off. Maybe the British family hadn’t managed to turn it off, either. She gave up and put the toaster back on the counter.

The contents of the refrigerator spoke more eloquently than the toaster.

The policewomen hadn’t known which items belonged to Judy and which to Dagmar, so they’d brought everything. There was the soy milk that Judy liked and her goat cheese and the Nutella she enjoyed at breakfast.

Sadness fell on Dagmar like cool rain. She closed the refrigerator door, mixed her drink, then left the bottles on the counter rather than open the door to be met again with the ghost of Judy’s absence.

Dinner was a frozen meal of pasta primavera heated in the microwave. The creators of the meal apparently hadn’t known what primavera actually meant: the vegetables were tired and old and tasteless. She had just finished when there was a soft knock on her door.

She had relearned caution in the last twenty-four hours. She took a one-second glance through the front curtains, saw Ismet’s silhouette, and opened the door. He kissed her hello, then stepped back to look at her.

“Now I know why Lincoln advised me not to piss you off.”

Dagmar felt her cheeks flush.

“I could have handled that better,” she said.

“I’d have shot him in the head,” Ismet said. She couldn’t quite tell whether he was joking or not.

She took his arm, led him toward the couch.

“Please,” she said. “Let’s not talk about shooting.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

They sat. Ismet winced, reached behind the cushion, and drew out a leatherette case with a small pair of binoculars.

“Maybe your hosts watch birds,” he said. He put the binoculars on the coffee table.

She put a hand on his thigh, rested her head on his shoulder. He put his arm around her. Her head swam, perhaps at his scent, perhaps at her own weariness. Somewhere, just beneath her consciousness, she heard the sound of the sea grating up the shingle at Kouklia. Aphrodite sent a simmering warmth through her groin.

And then she heard Lincoln’s voice. When you turn someone, you get him back to his normal life as soon as possible. She felt herself stiffen at the memory.

Ismet turned out to be sensitive to her body language.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “Practically everything. Lots.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Lots.”

She buried her face in the juncture between his neck and shoulder. He stroked her. She kissed his neck, then licked him there, felt his taste shock her nerves into life.

Ismet brought his lips to hers. They kissed for a long time. Her hands reached for the buttons of his shirt, but then she hesitated.

Damn this, she thought. Damn this work. It acts against all trust, all humanity.

He had brought her to his own apartment that night, she remembered. Because his roommate was away and there was more privacy.

But if he’d known that her place was going to be hit and he’d wanted to save her, he would have done exactly that. She’d gone back to her own place only because he’d fallen asleep and she’d wanted a toothbrush.

She wondered how plausible that was. At least that scenario meant Ismet didn’t want her killed.

She didn’t know what to believe. And of course it had to be admitted that she had a bad history with men.

She leaned on his shoulder again, sighed.

“I’m too tired to do anything else,” she said.

“I understand.”

“I’d like you to stay tonight, though.”

He kissed her cheek.

“Of course.”

Tomorrow, she thought, we’ll have the lie detector tests. Then we’ll know, maybe.

He helped her turn the bed to a forty-five-degree angle to the wall. He made no comment as he did so.

The sheets were clean, white with a wide blue stripe and a floral scent-the anonymous British family had made the bed before departing. Dagmar and Ismet slept curled into each other, like a set of quotation marks with no text between them.

In the morning, when she woke, she was astonished that no soldiers had marched through the night, that her mind had not been filled with explosions and blood.

That she could wake on a sunny morning and-for a brief, blessed moment-not feel the feather touch of fear on her nerves.