Deep State

CHAPTER TEN

Dagmar felt that as the leader, she should take one for the team, and so she took the polygraph test along with the others. It was only when she was wired into the machine, as the strap went around her rib cage under her breasts, that she realized that she might be asked some questions she didn’t want to answer.

The interview took place in a small, warm room in the headquarters building. The operator was a young man with freckles and a truly unattractive set of National Health spectacles. He had a list of questions on an electric display pad and a booklet that turned out to be the operator’s manual for the machine. Sometimes, as he wired Dagmar into her chair, he had to flip to one page or another for instructions.

She thought this particular voodoo wasn’t very convincing.

The operator had a soft, professional voice, and he kept out of sight, working the machine behind Dagmar’s back, so that his words seemed to drift to Dagmar from the sky, as if from an inquisitive angel.

“Are you a citizen of the United States?”

“Yes.”

“Are you female?”

“Yes.”

Baseline questions designed to establish a kind of psychic background hum against which answers to the more provocative questions could be measured.

“Have you ever stolen money?”

“Yes.” After a slight mental stammer.

She’d actually been reclaiming the money that her father had stolen from her, but the protocols here did not involve long explanations.

“Are you working in collaboration with the intelligence service of a country other than the United States?”

“No.”

“Do you reside in California?”

“Yes.”

The operator alternated provocative questions with innocuous ones, the better to measure the jump in Dagmar’s response.

“Do you work in an office?”

“Yes.”

“Are you in the pay of a foreign government?”

“No.”

“Have you ever cheated on a school exam?”

“No.”

If she had, she couldn’t remember it.

“Have you ever engaged in a conspiracy to commit murder?”

Well, there it was.

“Yes,” she said.

There was a two-second hesitation before the next question, which was, “Do you own an automobile?”

She was nearly as surprised as the operator. She hadn’t intended to answer in the affirmative; she’d just fallen into the rhythm of giving truthful answers. She considered what answer she should have given-a denial would almost certainly have been detected as a lie. The leap her heart gave at the question would have given her away.

Maybe she just really wanted to talk about it. Confess to somebody.

Still, she wasn’t under oath. None of this could be used as evidence. And anyway, it would only confirm what Lincoln already suspected.

Dagmar went on answering questions. She admitted to using marijuana, denied using cocaine.

More questions came along, each layered between trivialities so quotidian that the crucial questions might as well have been shouted aloud.

“Did you kill Judy Strange?”

“No.”

“Do you know who killed Judy Strange?”

“No.”

“Have you ever killed someone?”

“Yes.”

The operator was beyond surprise by now. The next question-about whether or not she liked football-came right on schedule.

“Did you engage in a conspiracy to kill Judy Strange?”

“No.”

“Did you tell anyone about the location of the apartment you shared with Judy Strange?”

“No.”

The operator gave her a thoughtful look as she rose from the chair at the end of the interview.

She let her police escort take her back to the ops room, where she began her prep for the day’s operation. Other members of her crew joined her as their own interviews were completed. Byron arrived last, averting his eyes. As she moved around the room, she could hear him breathing heavily through his nose.

Lincoln returned to the ops room after being briefed by the polygraph operator and called Dagmar into his office. She could see herself reflected in his shades as she took her seat.

“The test suggests you have no complicity in Judy’s death,” he said.

Dagmar nodded.

“The operator offered an advisory of his own, however.”

Dagmar thought about it. “I’d prefer to leave it to my imagination,” she said.

He looked at her, folded his hands on the table.

“This is the point at which I’m supposed to say, ‘If we don’t clear this up, you could be in trouble.’ ”

“Unless you intend to extradite me to Indonesia,” Dagmar said, “there’s not a lot of point in digging any further.”

Lincoln frowned in surprise.

“Indonesia,” he repeated.

“There’s a lot of the Indonesian story I haven’t told anyone.”

Having spent the morning telling the truth, she was now madly sowing lies. Her frantic inventions looped the trail of her life back on itself, obscuring her footprints by running over them with another set of her tracks, all in hopes of concealing her past sins in California.

Lincoln considered this, then held out a hand.

“I said at the beginning,” he said, “that I didn’t want to know anything.”

She nodded.

“I’ll stand by that statement,” he said.

Dagmar was only too pleased to escape the subject. “How about Ismet?” she asked.

“Also cleared. But we have anomalous readings elsewhere.”

“Yes?”

Lincoln opened a manila folder, looked at his own handwritten notes.

“Byron was so angry at being polygraphed that his responses were completely off the scale. The operator was unable to get a baseline to make a judgment concerning what answers were deceptive or not. It’s as if Byron answered every single question by screaming and throwing a desk across the room. His blood pressure was so high the operator was afraid he was going to have a stroke.”

“Interesting,” Dagmar said. She really didn’t know what else to say. Angry Man was staying in character.

“On the other end of the scale, Lloyd was uncannily calm throughout his interview. He passed with flying colors, but his lack of normal response indicated that he might have been trained in techniques for beating a polygraph.”

Lloyd’s father was a retired colonel, Dagmar remembered, perhaps a supporter of the new regime.

“Was he trained to defeat polygraphs by the Company?” she asked.

“I’ll ask him. But of course he’s been polygraphed before as a matter of course. He might just be able to relax through the whole thing.”

“Okay.” Not knowing what that meant.

She seemed to specialize in not knowing anything about Lloyd.

Lincoln scrubbed his chin with his hand.

“Polygraphs aren’t reliable at the best of times,” he said. “Even the most optimistic of the polygraph experts claims only a ninety percent reliability-and that means one in ten black hats walks. And agents would have been trained in beating a lie detector, so the failure rate there is much larger.”

“So,” Dagmar asked, “why are we bothering with the polygraph at all?”

Lincoln sighed. “Because it’s what we’ve got. I can’t afford to ignore any tools at my disposal-and besides, we hit the occasional jackpot.” He waved his notes. “Two of the subjects indicated persistent patterns of deception,” he said. “Helmuth and Magnus.”

Dagmar actually felt her mouth drop open in complete amazement.

“Helmuth?” she said.

“Yes.”

“My Eurotrash?”

Lincoln gave her a cold glance.

“If he doesn’t clear this up,” he said, “there could be trouble.”

“And how is it cleared up, exactly?”

Lincoln spread his hands. “Further interviews.”

“Like you’re doing now.”

“Yes.” His shades gazed at Dagmar in their unblinking way. “Do you want to try getting to the bottom of it? Or should I?”

Dagmar considered that her preexisting rapport might do well with Helmuth. Besides, she had enough experience as his boss to maybe know when he was lying.

“I’ll take Byron,” Lincoln said.

Dagmar called Helmuth into her office. Today he wore soft wool slacks, a polo shirt, and retro Italian shoes with a little gold chain across the instep.

“There’s a problem with your polygraph results,” she said.

“Really?” he said. His eyebrows lifted in an expression of perfect innocence, an expression that only irritated her.

“You lied like a fucking rug,” Dagmar said as viciously as she could. “And I want to know about it.”

For perhaps the first time in her experience, Helmuth seemed physically uncomfortable. He shifted in his chair, patted his sleek hair, and pursed his lips.

“It has nothing to do with what we’re doing here. Or with Judy being killed.”

“Yes?”

He gave her a quick glance.

“There are certain things I’m not prepared to admit to the government,” he said. “That’s all.”

“Such as?”

He gave her a stony look.

“Things that could get my green card revoked,” he said. “Which would mean I’d have to lose my lovely job working for you in Los Angeles and return to Germany.”

“You may have lost that anyway,” Dagmar said.

Again Helmuth shifted in his seat.

“Are you going to tell Lincoln?” he asked.

“Depends.”

He looked at the floor for a moment, then looked up.

“I found a hookah bar in Limassol where we could buy hash,” Helmuth said. “Magnus and I have been going there every night before we head to the clubs.”

Dagmar rolled her eyes. “For Christ’s sake!”

Helmuth’s eyes flashed “You can’t believe the hashish that comes through Cyprus!” he said. “Moroccan, Syrian, Afghan… blond from Lebanon, bhang from Kashmir. It’s a connoisseur’s paradise!”

“Are you out of your mind?” Dagmar demanded. “You didn’t remember who you’re working for?”

Helmuth gave her a cool look.

“I’m working for you, I believe.”

“That,” said Dagmar, “is what we’re here to decide.”

He looked away. A jaw muscle ticked angrily in one cheek.

“Anything else?” Dagmar asked. “Any other little sins I should know about?” He didn’t answer, so she named a few: “Women? Cocaine? Meth?”

Helmuth flapped a hand. “Of course there were women. I can give you names if you like. But none of them asked me where they could find you or Judy, and I never told them what I was doing here.”

“How about Magnus?”

“He’s a pro, is Magnus. He was after pussy, okay, but he wouldn’t give information for it. Not when he had money, and he’s got plenty of dollars in those little kilt pockets.” Helmuth rolled his eyes. “Christ, he’s got a house in northern Virginia that looks like Tara.”

“Anything else?”

He gave her a resentful look.

“Like what?”

Dagmar waved her hands. “Fuck, Helmuth,” she said, “how the hell should I know? Black market activities? Artifacts stolen from archaeological sites? Complicated financial instruments designed to destroy Western economies?”

Helmuth dared to offer a sneer.

“Child’s play,” he said. “I gave all that up years ago.”

“Boys being boys, according to our little Pip.” Dagmar reporting later, to Lincoln in his office.

“Boys doing what, exactly?” Lincoln asked.

“I believe it all falls into the category of ‘victimless crimes.’ ”

Lincoln gave her a bleak look. “You should have seen Cyprus back in the day. Victimless crimes everywhere you looked. All the victims would just…” He twiddled fingers in the air. “Disappear. Or sometimes simply fly into pieces.”

Dagmar dropped into a chair.

“How’d you do with Magnus?”

“Denied everything.” He snorted. “Arrogant kilt-wearing shit.”

“You might polygraph them again, and avoid those questions about past criminal behavior. Just ask about foreign governments and assassination and Judy.”

Lincoln’s face wrinkled, as if he’d just bitten into a lemon.

“I’ll do that. And-since I don’t think this local guy is very experienced-I’m sending for another operator from Langley.”

Another voodoo priest, Dagmar thought.

“And how long will that take?”

“They take the murder of U.S. citizens pretty seriously. A few days, I’d guess.”

And in the meantime Dagmar would be living under guard, along with the person who had betrayed her.

At least Ismet had done well on the polygraph. That was something, anyway.

“I need the drive with the email addresses,” Dagmar said. “Time to send out the two-hour warning.”

Lincoln turned to his safe, reached for the number pad.

“Avert your eyes, now.”

Have you considered taking advantage of the 105 digital television channels offered by Cankaya Wireless Network? Each is delivered with crystal-clear perfection! We have eight plans, and one of them is certain to be suitable to your budget!

Tuna wore video specs for the demo. Somehow his peculiar shambling gait translated to the subjective image: Dagmar, watching a flatscreen in the ops center, knew she was Tuna’s point of view because no one else walked like that. He was marching along Anafartalar, a street named after one of Ataturk’s victories over the British.

Dagmar and Lincoln had chosen rush hour for the action again, and the streets were clogged-a good thing, since it would hinder police reaction.

Tuna dodged off the main street and took a secondary street parallel to Anafartalar. There had been a bombing on Anafartalar some years earlier, and there were CCTV cameras there now, as well as other cameras atop the Sumer Bank across the street.

While Tuna wasn’t under observation he changed his appearance. He paused to reach into his shopping bag for a scarf, which he wrapped around his lower face with a sound that whispered against his microphone, and then a hat that he pulled low over his forehead, cutting off the very top of the video image. Then Tuna hurried on, toward the crowd that could already be seen clustering ahead of him.

The buildings to Tuna’s right opened up, and there was Ulus Square, with its equestrian statue of Ataturk on its plinth. Dagmar recognized it perfectly well-she remembered passing by it in August, on her way to Ankara’s citadel.

Great Big Idea had returned to the Turkish capital for the first time since Dagmar and the others, glancing nervously over their shoulders, had scuttled away back in August. It was hoped they wouldn’t have to run again-if this demo worked, there would be demos every day here, until the generals were driven from the capital or until the resistance was broken.

Anger and outrage was exploding out of the people now. The killings in Izmir had created a fury that might be enough to propel the dissidents into the houses of government.

Video images from the Skunk Works drone overhead showed that Ulus Square was already full, thousands of people standing packed into the small area, with long ropes of people stretched from the square along every major street.

The image on the flatscreen lurched wildly as Tuna vaulted from the road to the elevated square, then looked out over a sea of heads. He was considerably taller than the average Turkish citizen, and he could see clean to the giant bronze statues at the base of Ataturk’s plinth.

The place reeked of symbolism. Across the road from Ataturk’s statue was the former parliament building, now the Museum of the War of Salvation. Down Ataturk Boulevard was the colorful Victorian-Seljuk pile of the Ankara Palace, the state guesthouse where Ataturk had resided while leading his revolution.

Dagmar could scarcely imagine a better place for a demonstration against the junta, unless it was the Pink House itself.

The image panned down as Tuna reached into his shopping bag for a bullhorn, and then he raised the out-of-focus implement to his lips. Ismet translated Tuna’s words as they came from the speakers.

“Take out your greeting cards! Write a message on them, and bring them to the monument!”

Tuna repeated the message several times. Heads bowed as the crowd brought greeting cards out of bundles, bags, and pockets. But though there was a movement toward the plinth, somehow the crowd seemed stalled.

“There’s a problem,” Lincoln said. He turned to Lloyd. “Can you get us a close-up of what’s happening at the statue?”

“Where’s Rafet?” Dagmar asked.

“Caught in the crowd across the street,” Helmuth said.

Tuna was shouldering his way through the crowd, and then Dagmar’s heart lurched as she saw the danger through Tuna’s eyes.

The army had put a pair of armed guards on the monument. They were in ceremonial blue tunics, with white belts and white gloves, and clearly intended as a symbolic presence. Their white helmets somewhat resembled those of the Keystone Kops.

But the guards’ helmets were not amusing, and their assault rifles were not symbolic. They were real, and they were being brandished at the crowd by the white-gloved hands.

The soldiers had mounted the monument’s square foundation, then backed up to the base of the Ataturk plinth and now had nowhere left to go. The crowd formed a half circle around them, silent except for the clicking sound coming from cell phone cameras recording the guards’ dilemma. The guards’ shoulders were touching-they were giving each other what support they could-and their wide eyes stared wildly at the crowd that had materialized before them.

They probably weren’t paying a lot of attention to the hands holding colorful greeting cards. It was the masked, advancing, sinister faces that they would find threatening.

Anything could happen now. If the soldiers panicked they could mow down scores of the close-packed demonstrators before they themselves were either torn to bits or left alone on the scene of their bloody triumph. If the mood of the crowd turned to anger, a mob could attack the guards and bloodied or murdered soldiers seen lying at the feet of Ataturk would be a propaganda triumph for the military government.

Christ, Dagmar thought. Why does it have to be Tuna? Tuna was hot tempered and utterly fearless-of all her crew, Tuna would be the one to lose his patience and charge the guards.

Tuna muttered into his microphone.

“You didn’t scout the target?” Ismet translated.

“Rafet checked it yesterday,” Dagmar said. She didn’t bother to transmit the answer-she didn’t want to distract Tuna when he was confronted by armed soldiers.

Tuna paused for a moment, and then he stepped onto the monument’s meter-high foundation. Dagmar gasped, heart thundering, as both rifles swung toward her-toward him- and then he raised his hands, one of them still clutching his bullhorn. He spoke in a soft voice.

“Please, brothers,” Ismet translated. “Don’t shoot.”

The soldiers shuffled a little, but they didn’t lower their weapons.

“Brothers,” Tuna said, “we just want to write some postcards. We’re not here to attack you.”

The soldiers looked nervously at each other, and their white-gloved hands loosened their grips on their rifles.

Tuna continued to speak in his soft voice.

“If you wish to leave,” he said, “we’ll make a way for you.” He turned back to the crowd. “Make a path for the brave soldiers!” he called.

In silence, the crowd parted, creating a narrow lane leading across the road toward the old parliament building. Tuna turned back to the soldiers. Their terrified eyes looked like craters in their heads.

“Please, brothers,” Tuna said. “Leave in peace.”

“Inshallah,” Ismet muttered.

The moment that followed seemed to go on forever. The soldiers looked at each other, then at Tuna, then at the lane that had been cleared for them.

And then they raised the barrels of their weapons and walked toward their escape route.

Dagmar, her head swimming, let go the breath she’d been holding since the start of the confrontation.

“Thank you, brothers!” Tuna called. “We know you are not our enemies!” And then, to the crowd, “Give these brave soldiers some presents!”

A woman in the crowd handed one of the soldiers a colorful scarf as he passed, and the soldier, a little embarrassed, took it. There was a cheer and applause and then more scarves. The last the cameras saw of the soldiers, they were walking through the crowd nearly buried beneath great armsful of pashmina blossoms.

Tuna raised his bullhorn.

“Now, let us write on our cards, and make a memorial! And,” he added, “be sure not to vandalize the statue!”

No patriotic Turk would want to see demonstrators scrawling over Ataturk’s monument.

Cards were laid out in colorful patterns, in messages, stuck in the windowsills of the office buildings that overlooked the square. Cards were stood on end and stacked atop one another in towers. Scarves were draped over the statues, hung from neighboring buildings, the antennae of the cars trapped in the massive traffic jam caused by the demonstration.

A man in a shabby jacket who earned his living selling pigeon feed off a table made of a cardboard box was so covered in scarves that he looked like the most colorful mummy in the world.

Rafet finally shoved his way through the crowd, jumped up on the monument’s foundation, and began to bang his drum. He led the crowd through the usual series of marches and patriotic songs.

“This is the biggest crowd yet!” Lincoln said, and raised a clenched fist into the air.

Only a few days, Dagmar remembered, after the last demo had been shot to bits. The Turks were tough.

The Skunk Works drones showed a few police hanging a respectful distance from the crowd, none of a mind to interfere. The crowd so outnumbered them that they had opted for prudence, even if they were armed and the crowd was not.

Three men in suits and ties jumped up next to Rafet. They pulled scarves off their faces and began to harangue the crowd. Cameras jumped and focused on them.

“Who are these guys?” Dagmar demanded.

Ismet listened for a moment.

“Politicians,” he said. “The one in the middle is a guy named Erez-used to be mayor until the generals fired him and banned his party. I didn’t catch the other names.”

The politicians shouted on, mostly inaudible. The crowd cheered them anyway.

“Someone’s trying to hijack our revolution,” Helmuth said. He sounded offended.

“That’s supposed to happen,” Lincoln said. “It’s not our revolution anyway.”

Tuna’s video glasses began to pan wildly overhead.

“Police drone,” he said in English. “It’s up on the north side, moving east.”

Lloyd began giving orders to his air force. He was so busy with this that he lost track of the images coming in from the Skunk Works drones, and when he caught up he gave a shout.

“Police convoy coming up from Kizilay!” he said. “Another forming in the Dikmen police complex!”

Dagmar spoke directly to Tuna and Rafet.

“Time to disperse,” she said. “Police are coming from the south.”

The two acknowledged. Lloyd sent the same message to the camera teams.

Tuna and Rafet raised bullhorns and told everyone to go home. Greeting cards fluttered silver in the air, shimmering like the leaves of olive trees.

For the next few minutes Dagmar was diverted by the entertaining sight of one of the Skunk Works wedges trying to bring down the police drone. The pilot kept missing, and the police drone kept turning its lazy circles undisturbed, like a blind man wandering in a bullring. Finally the wedge managed to clip its target’s tail, and presumably the police drone went down-it was impossible to know for certain, because the video feed from the Skunk Works craft went black at the instant of the crash.

Lloyd told the operator to trigger the sequence that would send the drone navigating via GPS to its launch point. They would have to hope for the best.

Dagmar turned back to the screen that was still showing Tuna’s point of view. Tuna was looking down at his cell phone and yanking it apart. He pulled out the SIM chip, snapped it in half, and let it fall onto the road. Then he looked up.

He was traveling uphill on a narrow lane between shops and office buildings. Dagmar caught a glimpse of a store called Toys Aras, its facade covered with cavorting Disney characters. How many trademark violations, she wondered, could be packed into a single image?

There were still a large number of the demonstrators walking along with Tuna, but they were rapidly transforming themselves into ordinary, unremarkable people. Hats and scarves were removed. Leftover greeting cards were being stashed atop piles of merchandise or handed to bystanders. Some of the women who, like pious Muslims, had attended the demo with their hair hidden now uncovered to reveal themselves as modern businesswomen in Nikes and designer sunglasses, with BlackBerry earpieces glittering from beneath their hair. Scarves were set decorating the street stalls.

The narrow street came out on a major artery, and Tuna’s long legs carried him along, dodging other pedestrians. A minibus with a blue body and tan roof came into sight, and Tuna flagged it down. A door on the right flank opened with a hiss of compressed air, and Tuna stepped aboard.

The minibus was a dolmu? a kind of cross between a bus and taxi. Dolmu? was a word that literally meant “stuffed,” as in grape leaves, but this minibus was only moderately full, with maybe fifteen people crammed into spaces meant for twelve. Tuna was one of those without a seat.

There was no room for Tuna to approach the front of the bus, so other passengers passed his five-lira note to the driver and then carried his change back. From the little Dagmar could see over the heads of the passengers, it seemed as if the driver was very confident in his ability to drive, smoke, make change, and chat on his phone all at the same time.

The dolmu? traveled along at a fine clip until it ran into a jam of vehicles. Horns sounded in vexation. The driver threw up his hands and engaged in what seemed to be a long monologue in which his grievances against the universe were discussed at length.

The creeping pace taxed the patience of a number of the passengers, who left in a clump. Tuna found a seat that had just been vacated. It was upholstered in an unhealthy-seeming aquamarine inflamed by abstract orange-red patterns.

“Well,” he ventured to mutter, in English, “it looks like this may take a little while.”

Dagmar was surprised that she could still see his video. She would have thought that there would be a hill or something else interfering with the line of sight between Tuna and the receivers that Lincoln had emplaced back in the summer.

The Hot Koans were really doing their job.

“Looks like we’ve lost the drone,” Lloyd said. “If it was coming back, it would have arrived by now.”

“Any idea where it went?” Richard asked.

“None. Probably landed on a roof somewhere. We should hope it got completely smashed up.”

An instant message appeared on Dagmar’s computer; she checked to find that the camera team was now in the safe house. In another minute, she received a text that Rafet was approaching the Haci Bayram Mosque, where he would destroy his cell phone and then attend the next service. Only Tuna was still at large.

She looked up at Tuna’s feed and felt her heart sink. Her hands clamped on the arms of her chair.

The minibus had stopped, and a tall paramilitary had just stepped aboard. He carried an Uzi submachine gun around his neck, and his eyes looked at the passengers insolently from beneath the brim of his baseball cap.

Roadblock, Dagmar thought. Gray Wolves. Oh shit.

The Wolf was in his late teens, with a mustache and a ring glittering in one ear. He’d stuck a huge saw-toothed knife in his belt, not bothering with a sheath. By his appearance he was young and inexperienced and arrogant and stupid, and Dagmar knew at once that he was going to be trouble.

The Wolf rapped out commands. Dagmar jumped as Ismet’s voice came close to her ear.

“He’s asking for identification.”

The video image panned down to Tuna’s big hands, reaching into his jacket for his ID. Then the image panned up again.

The Gray Wolf checked the two passengers at the front of the bus, both elderly men, then moved to a middle-aged woman sitting with a pair of shopping bags on her lap. She reached into her handbag for her identification and knocked one of her shopping bags to the floor. She gave a cry and bent down to retrieve her groceries.

The Wolf yelled at her to get back into her seat and show her ID. He prodded her with the barrel of his gun, and she slid back into her seat with a sob of terror.

Tomatoes rolled on the floor of the bus.

The woman reached for her handbag with shaking hands and knocked it to the floor. She reached for it, then drew her hand back, afraid of the gun, afraid of doing the wrong thing.

Suddenly one of the elderly men was standing and yelling at the Wolf.

“He asks the Wolf to have some respect,” Ismet said.

The Gray Wolf was clearly telling the old man to shut up. The old man stepped into the narrow aisle and approached the Wolf.

“He says he’s not afraid,” Ismet said. “He says he fought for the fatherland.”

The Gray Wolf continued to shout back. Ismet didn’t bother to translate.

The old man pounded his thin chest with a fist.

“He says he was with the navy in ’74,” Ismet said. “He says he helped to land the army on Cyprus.”

The boy’s answer was clearly something along the lines of “Who gives a shit?”

Tuna’s point of view kept moving slightly, as if he was quietly shifting his position before going into action. Dagmar watched in horrified fascination, barely breathing. All she could think of was that everyone in the bus was about to die.

The Wolf jabbed the old man with his gun. The old man clearly told him to stop. The Wolf poked him again-and the old man, with admirable timing, slapped the gun away.

The machine pistol went off and put two rounds into the lady with the groceries. Dagmar gave a cry.

Arterial blood spattered from the lady’s throat and she began to shriek.

The Gray Wolf stared.

The old man shouted out two angry syllables, threw himself on the Gray Wolf, and tried to wrestle the gun away. The boy shoved the old man back into his seat and then brought his gun around and fired more rounds. Blood flew. The old man collapsed into the lap of the second elderly man, who recoiled. The driver, who seemed to have caught a round himself, was shouting.

The woman with the groceries kept screaming while trying to plug the hole in her neck. Her vegetables rolled around the floor of the bus.

Dagmar watched as the wide eyes of the Gray Wolf surveyed the situation, as his mind tried to grasp the significance of what had happened.

Tuna watched as the boy’s mind failed to find anything within itself but the necessity to keep pulling the trigger.

Tuna charged, of course, but by then it was too late.

Tears streamed from Dagmar’s eyes as she stared at the blank screen. The video shades continued to record after Tuna had been shot, though the angle showed only boots and the floor. The audio continued to record shots and screams for another fifteen or twenty seconds. Now there were boots marching back and forth, sounds of traffic and distant conversation, the Wolf apparently talking with his teammates.

Ismet was holding her from behind, crouched down behind her with his warm cheek laid against the side of her head. She wiped tears from her face with the back of her hand.

“What’s that?” she said. Something was moving in a corner of the frame.

“Jerrican,” someone said.

A red plastic container for gasoline. There were flashes of gold, the sound of gurgling.

“No,” Ismet said, appalled.

“They’re going to torch it,” Magnus said.

The flash and explosion ended the transmission. Dagmar hoped the Wolf had been caught in the backblast.

She tried to speak, failed, tried again.

“Copies of this have to go out,” she said. “Load it onto every server on the planet.”

“No,” said Lincoln.

Dagmar was outraged. She broke free of Ismet’s arms and swung her chair to him.

“What do you mean, no? This is-”

“We wait,” Lincoln said. “We wait till the government announces that terrorists have blown up a bus, and then we send out this video to prove what lying bastards they are.”

So the Lincoln Brigade did what it normally did with video footage of a demonstration: edited it, sent it to reporters and news agencies, put it on Web pages. They began the lengthy business of assembling the augmented reality version of the demo. Dagmar worked numbly, phantom gunshots rattling in her ears.

At eight P.M. a government minister announced that terrorists, led by Ankara’s former mayor, had blown up a bus in the wake of an illegal demonstration. Erez and a number of his associates were being sought by the police.

Tuna’s final video was posted on Web sites and sent to news organizations. It went viral very quickly-within hours, Dagmar figured, it would be ubiquitous. A new wanted poster was created for the boy who had shot him.

After ten thirty, most of the Brigade were sent home with their RAF escorts. Lincoln had a conference with Ismet first, then called Dagmar in.

He held out the hard drive with the email addresses on it.

“It’s now or never,” he said. “You need to tell everyone to head for Ankara. It’s time the people took their government back.”

He followed as Dagmar took the hard drive to her office and invited everyone on the list to come to Ankara and be slaughtered. She unplugged the drive and gave it back to Lincoln.

“I want a memorial for my friends,” she said.

“Of course.”

“Tomorrow afternoon, but we’ll let everyone know first thing in the morning, so they’ll have time to decide what they’re going to say.”

He bowed his shaggy head gravely.

“Whatever you like,” he said.

The RAF Police escort took Dagmar to her apartment. She nodded to the corporal from the RAF Regiment at the bottom of the stair, then walked up the stair to her own floor.

“This is bullshit!” Byron’s angry voice boiled out of an open window. “We’re not safe here! Packed in like this, one RPG could kill us all!”

Consistency, she thought, was certainly Byron’s strong point.

Ismet opened his door as she passed.

“I got a pizza on my way home,” he said. “Shall I come over?”

Ismet, she realized, had lost a roommate as well. Tuna’s belongings were still in the apartment, a reminder of the friend who would never return. Like the Nutella that haunted Dagmar’s fridge, a visitation from Judy that she would never eat but never remove.

“Give me time to shower,” she said.

Under the stream of water she tried to scrub away the sweat and sorrow, the mourning and misery. The result was only an increased consciousness of her own wretched failure. She dried her gray hair, put on a new T-shirt and underwear and a pair of khaki shorts. Trailed by the scent of green tea shampoo, she made herself a gin and tonic and sat by the window and tried to make sense of the thoughts that gyred in her head.

Byron too angry, she thought, Lloyd too calm. Helmuth and Magnus too stoned.

This wasn’t data; it was just noise. There wasn’t a pattern to be found in it.

Tuna and Judy too dead, she thought. There was your pattern.

Ismet knocked and called softly from outside. Dagmar let him in. The cardboard box he carried smelled of garlic and oregano. When the toaster talked to him, he gave a jump, then laughed.

She rattled her glass at him. “Want a drink?”

He raised a can of lager. “I brought my own,” he said.

He put the cardboard box on the kitchen table, and Dagmar brought plates from the cupboard. She freshened her drink and brought it to the table.

The pizza had been made with feta and chunks of a local sausage that tasted of fennel and goat. It wasn’t entirely awful. Dagmar discovered that she was ravenous and ate her first piece very quickly.

“We’ll be doing a memorial for Tuna and Judy tomorrow afternoon,” Dagmar said.

“I won’t be able to attend,” he said. “I’ll be on my way to Ankara.”

She looked at him in shock, then looked away.

Of course he’d be going, she thought. The time for the final confrontation had come, the time when the demonstrators would either take their government back or be crushed in blood, and Ismet was a part of that.

She’d sent out the orders for everyone else less than an hour before. She didn’t know why she hadn’t realized that Ismet would be included in the next action.

“I won’t be going across the Green Line this time,” Ismet said in his matter-of-fact way. “They might have my description. So I’ll have to fly to Athens, then to Sofia, and take the train to Istanbul and on to Ankara.”

“I’ll pack you a lunch,” she said. It was only a practical thing, but it was all she could manage to say. She couldn’t ask the questions that were really in her mind, like Do you think it’s hopeless? Or What are your odds of survival?

She reached for her drink, and it almost slipped through her grease-stained fingers. She wiped her fingers and the glass with a paper napkin.

“Bozbeyli knows about us,” she said. “Why hasn’t he told everyone?”

Ismet reached for another piece of pizza.

“He must have other plans,” he said.

“Can we guess what they are?”

Ismet, mouth full of pizza, gave a jerk of one shoulder, a Turkish way of saying, “I don’t care.”

She decided that she shouldn’t harass him: he’d had a worse day than she had, and his days weren’t going to get better anytime soon.

So she asked him if he’d heard from his grandmother and what she’d think of his having an American girlfriend and more about the nomad life on the Anatolian south coast. The change of subject seemed welcome.

They went to bed and his touch set her skin alight. She pressed herself to him, desperate for the reassurance of his body, the solid businesslike whole of him that she could cling to. Ismet was hers, at least for the next few hours.

Even through her pleasure she could hear the whisper in her mind, the voice that suggested that she might already be in mourning for him.

The rioters came in the night, breaking down the wards that Dagmar had so carefully set. Suddenly they were there-bare-chested Indonesian men, rags tied around their heads, hands brandishing machetes or Japanese swords or wavy-edged blades.

She lunged out of bed screaming and fought her way through the intruders into the living room. Ismet called her name over and over and tried to catch her, but she flailed at him and broke free. The coffee table caught the backs of her knees and she tumbled over, still thrashing at the weapons that menaced her… wheezing for breath, she backed into a corner of the room, hitting and kicking at Ismet when he came too close.

There was a pounding on the front door, and shouting. Dagmar shrieked at Ismet not to open the door and let in more of the enemy, but he did anyway, and there was the guard from the RAF Regiment. She screamed at the sight of his assault rifle. His radio crackled loud in the air.

Dagmar shivered and wept and flailed her fists as the Indonesian men circled her. Ismet and the guard had a brief conversation.

“Could you get her a blanket, perhaps?” the corporal said. “I don’t like to see her naked like that.”

Ismet went to the bedroom and returned with a sheet. He approached Dagmar carefully and offered the sheet. Dagmar snatched it and covered herself. The Indonesian men leered at her.

“I don’t know what to do,” Ismet said. “I tried holding her, but-”

“Will you stop talking like idiots and help me!” Dagmar demanded. Ismet reached for her.

The corporal shook his head. “No,” he said. “Don’t touch. She’ll read it as a threat.” He unslung the rifle from around his neck and put it out of sight in the kitchen.

“Let me try something,” he said. “One of my mates was in Afghanistan-came back with a similar problem.”

He crouched near Dagmar’s feet. Dagmar drew her legs up, away from him, and threatened him with her claws.

“Miss,” he said. “I’d like you to look at the sheet. Could you do that for me?”

She considered the request and wondered if it was a way to divert her attention so that he could attack. But she decided she could spare the sheet a glimpse and look at it.

The sheet, left behind by the apartment’s actual tenants, was fine white cotton with a wide blue Mediterranean stripe. There was the faint aroma of myrrh, Ismet’s scent.

“See how stripy it is, miss?” the corporal said. “How smooth?”

“Yes,” she said through clenched teeth. Light gleamed wickedly on the Indonesian blades that menaced her.

“Blue and white,” the corporal went on, “that’s the Greek national colors, miss. It’s like their flag.”

Dagmar wiped tears from her eyes and considered the sheet and the Greek flag and wondered if she was going to be buried under the Greek flag.

“Maybe you’d like to look at the couch?” the corporal suggested. “It’s a different shade of blue, isn’t it?”

Slowly the corporal called her attention to the actuality that surrounded her: the couch of robin’s egg blue, the lamp with its parchment shade, the ceiling fan with blades that shone with their brass fittings. It was the reality that Dagmar had all along knew was present, lying like an underground river running quietly beneath a surface filled with overwhelming terror and menace. Once her attention was drawn to the quotidian world, the horrors-the Indonesians with their knives and ferocious eyes-began to seem less plausible.

Over time they faded away, though she could still feel their presence, clustered in some other dimension separated from hers only by the thinnest possible membrane.

Dagmar found herself lying naked in the front room, her hand clutching the sheet up to her neck. The soft-voiced corporal squatted at her feet in his camouflage battle dress. Ismet, wearing only his trousers, stood guard by the door, keeping out the others who Dagmar sensed were clustered on the balcony.

The corporal smiled at her. He was dark and square headed, the sleeves of his battle dress peeled back from hairy arms.

“Are you feeling better, miss?” he asked.

Her heart was racing like the engine of a Ferrari.

“I think so,” she said. The words felt strange in her mouth, as if she’d never spoken before.

“If you have this problem again, miss,” he said, “you just concentrate on your surroundings. The furniture, the ceiling, your clothes-whatever you’ve got around you, right?”

“All right,” she said.

He winked a bright brown eye and grinned at her.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Poole, miss,” he said. “Roger Poole.”

“Thank you, Roger Poole,” Dagmar said.

“Perhaps you could do with a bit of refreshment,” Poole said. “A cup of tea, perhaps?”

“Yes. Why not?” She found herself willing to follow any suggestion at all.

Poole rose carefully to his feet, watching her carefully to make certain she didn’t see the movement as a threat. He walked to the kitchen. Ismet approached, watching from a carefully calculated distance.

“I think I’d like to wash my face,” she said.

“Of course,” he said. Ismet moved toward her to offer a hand, then stepped back. It was the first time Dagmar had ever seen him when he didn’t know how to behave. It was almost comical.

Dagmar wrapped the sheet more securely around herself and rose to her feet. A narcotic eddy seemed to swirl into her head, and for a moment she tottered on her feet. She put a hand on the wall to steady herself and then walked to the bathroom.

While she was washing she heard Poole make a report on his radio and Ismet open the door to tell everyone there that whatever happened was over, they could leave. Dagmar ignored this, toweled her face, and looked at herself in the mirror-she saw an older woman there, pale and prematurely aged, hair in disarray, skin sallow in the overhead light. She stared at herself for a moment, stared into her own bleak future, and then picked up her comb. She arranged her hair and then went to the bedroom to put on some clothes.

When she returned, she saw Poole and Ismet both looking at her with cautious anticipation.

“It’s over,” she said. “I’ll be all right.”

Till next time, she thought. Which was probably what they were thinking as well.

Poole had the kettle on and had found teas on the kitchen counter. Dagmar picked a Darjeeling over something herbal-she didn’t want to be eased back into a sleep where the hallucination could strike again; she much preferred staying awake till dawn.

The three of them sat in the dinette and drank tea and chatted for an hour-chatted about nothing, because Poole proved an expert at harmless blather. He talked about football, pop stars, movies, anything airy and unlikely to send Dagmar back into whatever psychic mine field she’d stumbled into.

After it became obvious that Dagmar was unlikely to relapse into a raving, weeping maniac, Poole washed his cup in the sink, picked up his rifle, said his polite good-byes. He made sure they knew that he’d be on guard till six, then let himself out.

Dagmar looked in wonder at the closed door. “The kindness of strangers…” she murmured.

Ismet placed his cup carefully in his saucer.

“Has this happened before?” he asked.

“It wasn’t this bad, usually.”

“This bad? Like with police breaking down the door?”

Dagmar shook her head.

“No police,” she said.

“How long has it been going on?”

She looked down at her teacup.

“Three years. Since my friends were killed.”

He studied her through his spectacles for a long moment.

“Are you… in treatment?” he asked.

She ran her fingers through her gray hair. “I figured it would get better on its own. And it was, mostly, until I came here. And now, with people getting killed, it’s all coming back.”

“Do you think you should see a doctor?”

Dagmar shook her head.

“I have this job. I run a company.” She laughed. “I’m running a fucking revolution, for Christ’s sake! I can’t afford any downtime. And I’m often running my company on borrowed money-and there’s no way a bank is going to loan money to a crazy person. And-” She shook her head. “We can’t afford insurance to cover mental disorders, so I’d basically be on my own.”

He considered this, head tilted.

“I think you should see a doctor, anyway.”

She waved a hand. “After this is all over.”

Apparently Ismet decided not to press the point.

“I’m going to go on the balcony and smoke a cigarette, okay?” he said.

“By all means.”

He rose from his chair.

“I only smoke when I’m under stress,” he said.

She had already observed this. She offered a faint smile.

“No time like the present,” she said.

He collected his shirt and cigarette pack from the bedroom, then stepped out onto the balcony.

Poor man, she thought. He signed up a gaming genius and got a crazy person instead.

Dagmar sighed, rose, washed the tea things. When he returned, she waited on the living room couch. She looked at him, patted the cushion beside her.

He joined her, carrying with him a pleasantly sweet odor of tobacco. She kissed him and rested her head on his shoulder; he put an arm around her.

“It’s all right if I touch you now?” he said.

“You can touch me any time I’m not raving.”

“Okay.” He kissed her forehead. There was bristle on his chin. She nestled against his warmth.

“You don’t want to go to bed?” he asked.

“No.” The bed had betrayed her to the enemy; she didn’t want to lie in it again.

She didn’t want to fall asleep, so she talked. She told Ismet about her girlhood in Ohio, her drunken father, her passive but persistent mother. She told him about her time at Caltech, her marriage to an English chemistry professor, her life in England, and her divorce.

“I’m deeply flawed,” she said. “You should know that.”

Then she reflected that he’d probably worked that out on his own.

She spoke of her return to California to reunite with her friends and start a game company. She told him about being caught in the Indonesian revolt, about Austen’s and Charlie’s getting killed, about the Maffya hit man she’d tracked through the Briana Hall ARG. She stopped short of telling him how she resolved the problem-she wasn’t that crazy, not yet.

Maybe, toward dawn, she drowsed. She only knew that the daylight caught her by surprise and that she rose from the couch with her mind in a whirl, unclear how she got here, misplaced on Aphrodite’s Island, surrounded by the spirits of the dead, lost in the bright Mediterranean air.