Deep State

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Duplicity in a Coed Pet-In

It was sabotage, she supposed. Not that she cared, and her guess was that Lincoln didn’t, either.

The MS-DOS-capable modems were packed carefully away. Dagmar had to send out one last command, the final message canceling the demonstration that had been previously scheduled for that day… and when she had the portable memory in her hands she copied it to the memory in her personal handheld, the one she’d carried into the ops room that morning, because that was the phone that Slash Berzerker had called and that she could use to call him back.

Dagmar planned to take nothing but the modems and the information. Everything else could be replaced or rebuilt. They all had their own hardware. They were running their bulletin board system on a machine in Luxembourg owned by a colleague of Dan the DOS Man.

We are the junkware, she thought.

Everything else was turned in-the flash drives, the portable disk drives, the phones that hadn’t ever been allowed to leave the ops room. Lola checked the bar codes, did the inventory, and didn’t seem to notice the personal phone that Dagmar wore in its holster at her waist.

The new modems had never been entered in the inventory, and no one seemed to care that Richard and Helmuth carried them out in a cardboard box.

“Souvenirs,” they said.

Helmuth and Richard would be flying to Germany, to bask in luxury at a Sheraton in Frankfurt. In a suite paid for by Attila Gordon, they would try to keep the revolution on its feet.

Ismet and Dagmar had their own destination, in Uzbekistan.

Videos of demonstrations were uploaded from Pakistan, Egypt, and the Philippines. Revolution creep. Kronsteen, Dagmar supposed, trying to devalue the rebellion on his own doorstep.

Late that afternoon Dagmar tracked Lincoln to his office and found him pulling documents from his safe and putting them through a shredder. Something blue glinted amid the strips of paper in the wastebasket. She recognized an evil-eye amulet-flawed, apparently, having failed to keep the mission from catastrophe.

“What happens to Byron and Magnus?” she asked.

“Dennis and Jerry,” Lincoln said. “Their real names.” He fed another document into the shredder, his eyes not meeting hers. She sensed an evasion.

“What happens to them?” she asked. “Do they get tried here? Back in the States?”

“No trial. Nothing.”

She opened her mouth to speak-to yell- but he raised his head and lifted a hand.

“This isn’t an operation we can ever acknowledge took place,” he said. “Putting them on trial would reveal what we tried to accomplish here. So no trial’s ever going to happen.”

“They’re going to get away with-”

Lincoln shrugged. Defeat had dug deep trenches in his cheeks, at the corners of his eyes.

“Oh, they’ll lose their security clearance. They’ll lose their jobs. But they’ll be at liberty, and they’re talented, so I expect they’ll find work somewhere, and never have to see us or each other ever again.”

Dagmar clenched her teeth. “Does Byron and Magnus’s Turkish control know they’ve been arrested?”

Lincoln shook his head and dropped another piece of paper in the shredder. “Probably not,” he said. “Not unless he has some other source of information beyond those two.”

“How did they communicate with him?”

The shredder hummed. “Letter drop via Gmail. The same way you send a message to Rafet.”

“Can we send them a message pretending to be Byron and Magnus?”

He frowned, looked up at her.

“To what end?”

“To burn them so the Turks will never trust them again.”

Lincoln’s blue eyes turned inward. He frowned down at the pages in his hand. “What’s your idea?” he asked.

“Send a message to confirm that we’re shutting down here and everyone is going home-except for me and Ismet, maybe. We’re flying somewhere in Europe to meet an important contact to gain information about the Zap.”

Lincoln frowned. “Where?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Dagmar said. “The point is that when the Turks send a team to observe us or take us out, they get arrested by someone you’ve warned in advance.”

Lincoln reached down and turned off the shredder. He squared his remaining papers and leaned back in his chair.

“Let me think.” Frown lines appeared between his eyebrows. “I think I can manage it,” he decided. “We’ll send them to Berlin and say the meet is in the Hotel Pariser Platz-that’s practically next door to the BfV office in Berlin.” His eyes sparkled. “And I know just who to call.”

Dagmar tried not to show herself as eager as she felt. “So you’ll do it?”

“Yes. Why not?” He shrugged. “A last little prank, before we fly off to wretchedness and defeat.”

What she hoped was that Bozbeyli’s first team-the people he most relied upon to travel to foreign countries and to carry out covert actions-would be busy in Germany, and preferably under arrest, when Dagmar was off in Uzbekistan.

She and Lincoln composed the message, and it was placed in Byron’s Gmail account. It placed the meet in the bar of the Pariser Platz at 1700 the next day. Either Byron’s control would pick it up or not. Either Bozbeyli’s A Team would be diverted to Berlin or not. Either Dagmar would have a little revenge or she wouldn’t.

At least she’d have the satisfaction of a little Parthian shot, firing over the rump of her pony as the Lincoln Brigade fled in disorganized retreat.

She stepped out of Lincoln’s office and looked over the wreckage of the office. Kemal Ataturk looked back at her with his stern sapphire gaze. Beneath him were the Lincoln Brigade’s trophies: the DVD, the wilted flowers, the sad, sagging stuffed bear. The photos of Judy and Tuna, looking out from a world in which they had not been murdered, from a place where they still lived, laughed, and looked forward to the triumphs their lives would bring.

Dagmar took a step toward the wall, to take the memorial down, and then hesitated.

No, she thought. Let it remain. Let it stay on Cyprus like the ancient memorials of the island, like the stone wanassa in its ancient temple, a mystery to those who came after, a phantom touch to their nerves, their hearts. Let it tell them, she thought, that something had happened here, something at once sad and profound, something that had started as an insanely fun activity by well-meaning people but had turned into death and betrayal and failure.

Let it stay, she thought. Let it remain, a memorial of our own delusion and foundered innocence.

Disorder in a U.S. Benz Kit

When Lola offered to make travel arrangements, Dagmar said she’d make her own. The next morning, Monday, she hugged Lincoln good-bye at the Nicosia airport. He felt like a sack half-filled with straw. She had told him that she would be flying out later.

She kissed his cheek.

“Stay in touch,” she said.

He looked at her, watery blue eyes over the metal rims of his glasses.

“Forgive me?” he asked.

He had lied to her and marched the both of them straight into catastrophe, but he had been as blind and betrayed as she and was now returning home to his own professional purgatory. She couldn’t bring herself to hate him.

“Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

She watched Lincoln and the others walk through the gate to their waiting aircraft, and then Dagmar turned away and used her phone’s satellite function to call Rafet. She explained the situation to him.

“You can wait for Chatsworth’s instructions for exfiltration,” she said, “or you could carry on, with the understanding that you’re working for a purely private concern.”

Otherwise known, she thought, as a demented rock star.

She told him to consult with the Skunk Works operators and the camera techs, come to a decision concerning what they wanted to do, and then call her back on her private number.

Dagmar’s next journey took her to the honey-colored Gulfstream 550 waiting in the section of the airport reserved for private planes. Stairs were already pushed up to the open door. She climbed the stairs and stepped aboard, and a smiling, shaggy-haired man greeted her.

“Name’s Martin,” he said, shaking hands. He spoke with a West Country accent. “Attila would be here himself, but he had a press conference in Glasgow to announce his new justice initiative.”

“And what would that be?” Dagmar asked.

“He’s setting up a legal fund to aid the defense of those arrested during the demonstrations.”

“That’s assuming there will actually be trials,” Dagmar said.

Martin looked surprised. “Won’t there be?” he said.

Dagmar shrugged, then introduced Ismet. Martin showed them to some seats in the rear of the aircraft, for takeoff.

The Gulfstream featured mahogany paneling, gold-plated fixtures, a large oval table of what seemed to be polished black marble, and softly glowing leather couches. Postimpressionist watercolors hung from the bulkheads. Martin showed them to some more conventional seats for takeoff.

“Does Attila actually own this jet?” Dagmar asked.

“No, he rented it from a company in Rome. Can I get you any drinks?”

Ismet asked for orange juice. Dagmar, more interested perhaps in relaxation, ordered a gin and tonic.

One of the two smiling cabin attendants came with their drinks a few minutes later. The attendants were both tall and well-groomed, attractive, and female. They spoke with Italian and French accents, respectively. As there was no eye candy for the heterosexual female, Dagmar gathered that the plane’s usual customers were rich men.

The attendants made sure Dagmar and Ismet were strapped in, and the Gulfsteam taxied to the runway, joined the queue behind a Boeing 737, and in its turn launched itself into the air.

The plane refueled in Bucharest, then crossed the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and the Caspian Sea. They kept well clear of Turkish airspace. The cabin attendants served champagne, caviar, blinis, beef stroganoff, and a hearty red burgundy, all appropriate enough for flying over the former Soviet Union. Dessert was bananas caramelized in butter, spices, and brown sugar, then expertly flamed with cognac by the Italian attendant. A movie was offered but declined. The Gulfstream flew over a triangle of Kazakhstan and then entered Uzbek airspace.

“The nearest airport-the nearest we can set this down, I mean-the nearest to your destination is in a town called Zarafshan,” Martin said. “We’ve got a car lined up for you. Attila also explained that you might be wanting these.”

He produced a series of cases and produced a pair of Beretta 9mm pistols in holsters and a lightweight semiautomatic shotgun in a nylon scabbard. Dagmar was surprised.

“How did you get these on such short notice?” she asked.

“We were in Italy,” Martin said. “It’s the second-largest arms exporter in the world. They have strict regulations if you live there, but if you’re taking the goods out of the country, they practically have a take-away window.”

Ismet looked at Dagmar.

“Do you know how to shoot?”

“I’ve fired pistols,” she said. “Not recently, though.”

Not, in fact, since she was a teenager and briefly had a boyfriend who was a firearms enthusiast.

“Maybe we’d better give you a refresher.”

He very competently field-stripped one of the Berettas, reassembled it, and dry-fired it.

“You’ve had practice,” Dagmar said.

“I was in the army.”

“You were?” She was surprised.

“All Turkish men are required to serve. I got to be an officer because I’d been to university, so it wasn’t bad.”

“What did you do in the army?” Dagmar asked.

“Public relations for the Fifth Corps in Thrace.” He smiled. “My service was pretty dull, which was fine with me.”

He gave Dagmar a brief course in use of the pistol. She expressed surprise at the pistol’s light weight, but Ismet pointed out that adding a magazine stuffed with bullets would increase its mass by a considerable amount.

Dagmar put the pistol down on the marble tabletop. Her hands had a light coating of gun oil, and she reached for a napkin.

“Do you think I might actually need to use this gun?” she said.

“If Slash is not amenable to money,” he said. “We’ve got to make a credible threat.”

“You know,” she said, “I think we have not worked out all the contingencies of this plan.”

“Speaking of money,” Martin said. He took another package down from an overhead compartment and opened it in front of them. Packages of Bank of England notes fell out on the table.

“Pounds sterling,” he said. “Ten thousand.”

Dagmar looked in amazement at Ismet. “We’ve been working for the U.S. government,” he said. “And you know what? They’re pikers.”

One of the cabin attendants appeared. She looked at the guns and money on the table as if they were no more unusual on the plane than copies of Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, then turned to Dagmar.

“I’m afraid our landing may be delayed,” she said. “The pilot is having trouble raising ground control.”

A cold warning shimmered up Dagmar’s spine.

“I wonder,” she said, “how much of the gear on this plane runs on TCP/IP.”

“Tell the pilot,” Ismet said, “to go ahead and land at Zarafshan whether he can raise them or not.”

The attendant looked dubious. “Well,” she said, “I-”

“We have to land somewhere.” Ismet was practical. “It may as well be where we want to go.”

Dagmar unholstered her phone and tried to get a cell phone signal.

“Cell networks still okay,” she said. “But VoIP is definitely down.” She pressed virtual buttons. “I can still get GPS, so the problem is local.”

“Local to Zarafshan,” Ismet asked, “or to all of Uzbekistan?”

Dagmar didn’t have an answer for that. Instead she looked at Martin.

“Attila rented this aircraft, right?” she said. “Did he make any effort to disguise the fact? Working through a shell corporation or anything?”

Bemusement crossed Martin’s face.

“He sent me down with his credit card,” Martin said. “IAG Productions.”

“And I presume the pilot filed a flight plan? Saying he was going to Cyprus, then to Uzbekistan?”

“I imagine so, yeah.”

The generals could be expected to keep a watch on the man who had declared himself an enemy of their regime. Attila might as well have drawn a flaming arrow in the sky pointing to their destination.

Dagmar turned to Ismet.

“The plane and the guns and money are nice,” she said. “But the advantages of working for a covert branch of the U.S. government are now a lot more apparent.”

One of the cabin attendants approached.

“Excuse me, miss, but is that a cell phone you’re using?”

“I’ve got EDET; I can use it on a plane.”

“Oh. Very well, then.”

Dagmar gave a jump as the phone rang in her hand. She saw it was Helmuth.

“Turkey’s down,” he said. “The whole country, plus a chunk of Greece and Bulgaria.”

“So is Uzbekistan. How’s the DOS network doing?”

“Working so far. The landlines are holding up, at least for now.”

“What’s happening?”

“A bunch of politicans have taken over the old parliament building. The one right near the Ataturk statue in Ulus, where Tuna had his action.”

“Don’t send Rafet in there. The last time people tried to seize a building, it just made targets out of them.”

“I’ll tell Rafet.”

“Anything else?”

She could almost hear the smile in Helmuth’s voice. “The German news is full of it. The cops arrested some terrorists in a Berlin hotel-all heavily armed.”

Dagmar gave a triumphant laugh. The first team was out of the picture, and Byron was burned.

Helmuth rang off. The guns were packed away, then stowed in overhead compartments. The money went into pockets and luggage. Dagmar went to look out the window. They were circling a town set in a sandy desert, the Kyzyl Kum, which covered at least half the country. The dunes stood out a brilliant red against deep shadows cast by the westering sun. The town was very, very green-it was amazing in its greenness, especially as contrasted with the brown and rust and alkali that surrounded it. On one side of the town were some kind of mining works, tailing ponds, paved roads. On the other side was the airport, a single strip.

The Gulfstream passed slowly over the airport. Dagmar could see commercial aircraft sitting on concrete aprons near the terminal. There didn’t seem to be any planes preparing to take off.

The voice of the pilot-a pleasant Aussie accent-issued from the PA.

“Please prepare for landing.”

Ismet and Dagmar shifted to seats with belts. The Gulfstream went into a steep dive, pulled out, touched the end of the runway, bounced, landed again.

Dagmar concluded that the pilot wanted to get out of the way of any other aircraft that might be trying to land, and quickly.

She approved. The faster this was dealt with, the better.

Deranged Scot Sum Amounts to Local Habits

The Gulfstream pulled into an area reserved for foreign aircraft. A polished Honda sedan drew up as the attendants were opening the door, and a man in a uniform got out.

He came aboard the plane and took care of the customs details, stamped Dagmar’s and Ismet’s passports, and welcomed them to Uzbekistan. Dagmar considered how many long lines she’d stood in at passport control throughout the world, and she turned to Ismet.

“The rich are different from you and me,” she said.

“So I understand.”

As the customs officer returned to his Honda, a bright yellow vehicle drew up. It resembled a smallish Jeep and was accessorized with running boards, bullbars, and spotlights. A teardrop-shaped luggage compartment was attached to the roof. It looked rather sporty.

“What is that?” Dagmar asked.

“That’s a Lada Niva four-wheel drive,” Ismet said. “You haven’t seen one before?”

“If I have, I probably figured it was a Kawasaki or something.”

“I think it’s ours.”

A man in a suit and tie got out of the Niva. He spoke a sort of English, and he showed Ismet and Dagmar the vehicle. The vehicle seemed rugged enough and ran well for all that the odometer showed 165,000 kilometers. Red plastic jerricans of gasoline had been loaded into the rear compartment for crossing the Kyzyl Kum. Ismet and Dagmar signed papers, and Martin presented a credit card. The gentleman, who had introduced himself as Babur, copied down the number carefully.

“Do you have Internet?” Dagmar asked.

“No,” the man said. “No Internet today.” He didn’t sound as if it was that unusual an occurrence.

Jet noise sounded in the air. Dagmar looked up, held up a hand against the sun that squatted near the western horizon, and saw a jet come into view, a smaller craft than the Gulfsteam. It cruised slowly over the airfield, much as the Gulfstream had done.

Turkish air force markings were clear on the fuselage. Dagmar’s heart leaped into her throat.

“Look!” She pointed wildly. Ismet looked up.

“Orospu cocug u!” he snarled. It must have been impolite, because Babur looked a little shocked-Uzbek was a Turkic language, and obscenity probably carried across language barriers easier than anything else.

Dagmar looked across the pavement at the customs officer in his Honda. He probably knew the other plane was coming, that’s why he was still waiting here.

Dagmar stepped closer to Babur and lightly touched his arm, then pointed toward the Turkish jet.

“Are you renting them a car?” she said.

“Yes. If you can drive me back to my office, I can bring it.”

“I wonder,” Dagmar said, “if you can offer me some help?”

Babur smiled pleasantly. “Of course, miss.”

“That plane is bringing some people we don’t want to meet. Could you possibly delay bringing their car?”

Babur spread his hands. “Miss, I can’t possibly-”

Dagmar reached into her pocket and withdrew a bundle of English currency. Babur’s eyes locked onto the monarch’s portrait, and his words came to a halt.

Dagmar peeled off five hundred-pound notes and handed them to Babur. He looked both pleased and confused.

“Share this with the people you work with,” Dagmar said. “Tell them to go to dinner. Tell them to have dinner for a long time.”

The notes vanished into a pocket of Babur’s neat suit.

“Yes, miss,” he said.

“If they find you and ask why you can’t help them, tell them you can’t do anything without the Internet.”

Over Babur’s shoulder, Dagmar saw a smile flash across Ismet’s face.

“And if their car has a mechanical problem,” Dagmar said, “I would also be very grateful.” She leaned a little closer and spoke over the sound of the jet. “If this works out to my satisfaction,” she said, “I will give you another bonus payment when I return the Niva.”

Babur’s head bobbed.

“Yes, miss,” he said. “Very good.”

Baggage was loaded into the Niva. Dagmar was nervous about loading guns into the car right in front of the customs inspector, but he never looked up from whatever document he was reading.

They also took everything from the jet’s refrigerator that didn’t require cooking: bread, crackers, cans of beluga caviar, cold cuts, hard-boiled eggs, cheese, some beautiful Italian heritage pears, soft drinks, Rock Star, and bottles of water.

They figured they wouldn’t have time to stop at a restaurant for a leisurely meal.

The cabin attendants, wearing identical bemused expressions, loaded the spoil into plastic sacks and handed it over. Dagmar said good-bye to Martin on the runway apron.

“You might want to hire a guard on the plane till we leave,” she said. She had to shout over the sound of the Turkish jet cruising low over the airfield, one wing tipped down so the crew could view the runways.

“Sorry?” Martin said.

“That plane.” She pointed. “They’re going to want to kill us. Don’t let them sabotage the jet.”

Comprehension stitched its way across Martin’s features, as if different parts of his face got the message at different times. Dagmar managed to restrain her laughter; then she shook his hand and ran for the Niva.

They drove Babur to his office near the field and left him counting his pound notes.

“You did that very well,” Ismet said. “I couldn’t have improved on it.”

“He’s not the first guy I’ve bribed. You should have seen me handing hundred-dollar bills to New York’s finest when we did the Harry’s Crew live event in Washington Square Park.”

“I expect you just gave Babur a month’s salary or more.”

Dagmar touched the evil eye amulet that dangled from the rearview mirror. “Let’s hope that the men in that plane don’t have much cash on them.”

Zarafshan had an antique feel. The roads weren’t in good condition. The town was filled with enormous squat Soviet-era apartment blocs, not all in good repair. They seemed a similar vintage and shared some of the impersonality of the buildings at Akrotiri. One of the buildings seemed to have burned in the country’s latest flurry of post-Karimov adjustment.

On the road, a host of vintage Toyotas, Renaults, and Protons testified to a thriving gray market in automobiles. Some of the buildings had metal-and-plastic signs that reminded Dagmar of old Californian road signs from the 1950s, with stylish rockets, satellites, and planets. Decor from the Atomic Cafe.

“The Zap has bombed this place back to the Space Age,” she said.

Ismet smiled. “Good line,” he said.

“I stole the sentiment from a Richard Buttner story.”

Dagmar craned her head to see if she could find the Turkish airplane. It was on approach to the runway, dropping toward the ground with wheels extended.

She hoped Babur and his fellow employees were having a wonderful time, somewhere else.

Then Zarafshan simply ended, and they were in the Kyzyl Kum, on a two-lane blacktop, old and patched but absolutely arrow straight. Massive, soaring alloy towers carried power lines alongside the road, marching off to the vanishing point on the horizon, the setting sun turning the insulators to red jewels.

On the edge of the desert was a Soviet-era tank, abandoned and with dust drifting over the treads. The huge gun pointed at empty desert. The crew seemed to have just parked it there one day, left, and never returned.

The Niva’s engine screamed. The four-by-four rattled, bumped, jounced. The tires thundered on the patched road.

“I don’t think I can get above a hundred ten,” Ismet said. “The engine isn’t big enough, and it’s old.”

That was something like seventy miles per hour, Dagmar calculated. Not too great.

“Let’s hope the… the black hats… don’t get a faster car.”

She should have ordered a BMW or something, she thought. Attila could afford it.

The desert was reddish sand covered with sparse grass and scrub. Sometimes there were dunes, but mostly it was just flat. Dagmar saw sheep, goats, and occasional camels, their two humps drooping like old, shaggy haystacks.

There were occasional oases, with mud-brick buildings on perfectly straight Soviet-engineered local roads. The fields were very green until the green simply ended, and there the red sands began.

As the sun settled on the horizon the desert took on a brief, roseate beauty, the shadows stark, the sand glowing watermelon red. And then, the sun gone, everything began to fade through gray to black.

Dagmar wondered what the Turks following them were actually after. Would they try to kidnap Slash in order to silence him or simply kill him? Or were they after her and Ismet?

She supposed they’d take whatever they could get. There didn’t seem to be a lot of law and order here.

She wondered if the men who had killed Judy were among them. The thought made her turn in her seat, rummage through the bags behind them, and produce a pistol. She fed bullets into a magazine, then slipped the magazine into place with a satisfying click.

They were the second team, she reminded herself. The first team had gotten arrested in Berlin.

The thought didn’t make her feel any safer. She loaded a second magazine anyway, then put the pistol and the spare in the holster.

They paused after a couple hours. Full night had descended, with a chill wind that cut through Dagmar’s thin leather jacket as she stepped into the desert for a quiet, private pee. When she returned, she found Ismet assembling and loading the shotgun and the other pistol. Then she ate a hard-boiled egg, took a swig of Rock Star, and got behind the wheel.

The Niva would not win prizes for comfort, but it got the job done. The manual shift stuck a bit and the wheel punched her hands every time the vehicle hit a bump, but none of the gauges were in the red and the engine kept turning despite what sounded like its desperate wails for help.

She knew she had to make a left turn here somewhere. She had gotten the latitude and longitude from a Google Earth map and programed these into the GPS on her handheld, but the numbers were, she suspected, fairly approximate. Ismet seemed somehow to have fallen asleep.

There were always tracks leaving the road, most of them probably going to someone’s sheep camp. She didn’t know which, if any of them, she should take.

If all else failed, the Niva was perfectly capable of driving cross-country.

When the turn finally came she sped right past, then braked and skidded to a stop. Ismet gave a cry and stared wildly in all directions, looking for attackers. It took Dagmar several tries to find reverse with the shift, and then she backed to where a sign pointed to Chechak, giving the name in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.

The turnoff was dirt and broad enough for two trucks to pass abreast, not just a two-rut track like most of the others. The sign was wood and had been jammed in the earth fairly recently, presumably to guide trucks bringing supplies to Slash Berzerker’s IT project.

Dagmar put the Niva into four-wheel drive-fortunately she didn’t have to get out of the vehicle and mess with locking hubs. Then she jammed her foot down on the accelerator and felt the Niva lurch forward. She steered into the sign and the bullbars smashed it flat with a satisfying crack of splintered wood. Grinning, she steered onto the turnoff and punched the accelerator again. She looked over her shoulder and could see red sand flying in the taillights as the wheels threw up a rooster tail to mark their passage.

The road was mostly sand, but heavy vehicles had compressed it and the four-wheel drive wasn’t necessary for traction. She shifted into rear-wheel drive and was soon moving as fast as she dared, about fifty kilometers per hour, dodging potholes and drifts, the back end of the Niva fishtailing through her last-second swerves. The road was for the most part straight, but there were sudden and unanticipated turns or dips or climbs or places where the road had been washed out by a flash flood and she had to shift to four-wheel drive to get through it.

Her GPS showed her that she was getting closer to her destination.

And then the road took a precise right-angle turn to the left, completely unmarked and unexpected, and Dagmar was going too fast to stop or to make the turn. A wall of red sand appeared before them. The Niva struck the sand in an explosion of ruddy dust and suddenly they were airborne. Ismet woke with a yell. Panic flooded Dagmar as she felt weightlessness, and then the vehicle came down with a crash and she was thrown forward against her shoulder belt. Pain flared from forearms braced against the steering wheel. Her foot braced to shove the brake pedal all the way to the floor.

The Niva wasn’t moving. Dagmar sat gasping for breath, her heart hammering, a stretch of featureless sand stretching out before the headlamps.

“Are you all right?” Ismet said.

Dagmar blinked. “I think so.”

She looked around and saw that the vehicle seemed to be intact. She put the Niva into four-wheel drive, then shifted into reverse. Sand flew from the wheels, but the four-by-four wouldn’t move. The Niva wouldn’t go forward, either.

“Let me see what’s happening.” Ismet opened his door and stepped out. A blast of icy wind blew into the vehicle, and Dagmar shivered. Ismet circled the Niva and then came to Dagmar’s door. Dagmar rolled down her window, then shivered to another cold gust.

“We’re hung up,” Ismet said. “We’re not going anywhere.”

Rage flooded her veins. Dagmar freed herself from her shoulder belt and stepped out onto the Kyzyl Kum.

Sand had been piled just where the road turned, a man-made dune that had since been sculpted into smooth curves by the wind. Either the sand had been scraped from the road and just dumped there or it had been placed there to stop cars that failed to make the turn, a duty that it had performed with faultless efficiency.

The Niva had climbed to the top of the dune, then lost momentum and hung itself on the crest. The sand supported the frame at its midpoint, with the wheels dangling off to either side, unable to gain enough traction to move the vehicle.

“Shit fuck shit!” Dagmar restrained herself from kicking the tires.

“We could dig it out,” Ismet said. “Do we have a shovel?”

A search revealed that a shovel was not part of the Niva’s standard equipment.

“We’ll have to use our hands,” Dagmar said. She was frozen to the bone and was keeping her teeth from chattering only with effort.

Ismet peered out into the night. He pointed. “I see a light out there,” he said. “I can’t tell how far it is, not over a flat desert. But they probably have a car or a truck, and we might be able to rent it.”

Dagmar narrowed her eyes and peered at the light. It was faint and seemed to glow from somewhere on the edge of the world.

“I’ll walk it,” Ismet said. He pulled the hood of his windbreaker over his head, then looked back at Dagmar. The headlamps gleamed off his spectacles. He touched her arm.

“Get in the car and stay warm,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.”

Dagmar could only nod in agreement. Ismet equipped himself with a water bottle and some of Dagmar’s hundred-pound notes and walked off into the darkness. Dagmar got back in the Niva and cranked up the heater as far as it would go.

As the heater filled the cabin with warmth she began to regret not going off with Ismet. The Turkish gunmen, she thought, could arrive while Ismet was away, and they would see the Niva illuminated in the white splash of its own headlights. If they stopped to investigate, Dagmar would have a hard time explaining that she was just an innocent tourist who took a wrong turn.

She could become less conspicuous by turning off the lights, but then Ismet might not be able to find his way back.

Thoughts of the Turkish assassins sent her digging for her pistol. It had flown forward in the crash and ended up in the footwell. She clipped the holster to her belt. Her search had revealed some of the food they’d plundered from the Gulfstream, and so she made herself some sandwiches with the cheeses and cold cuts and ate them.

She decided that if she saw or heard a car coming, she’d turn off the lights, run into the desert, and hide. If it was Ismet, she’d emerge. If it wasn’t, she’d wait for the newcomers to leave.

The cabin was pleasantly warm. She unzipped her leather jacket and reclined the seat. Pain throbbed in her forearms. The desert stretched ahead of her in the headlights, featureless, monotonous. Dagmar closed her eyes.

She must have slept, because she came awake suddenly to the sound of metal on metal. She looked around wildly, clutched at the pistol, and threw the door open. She jumped onto the sand, hand still on the pistol, her head swiveling madly as she tried to make out where the sound was coming from.

“Dagmar, it’s me.” Ismet’s voice.

She sagged with the release of terror. She stepped away from the Niva and saw two large moving shapes looming against the Milky Way. A sound like an enormous belch sounded in the air. In sheer astonishment she beheld a pair of Bactrian camels, their breath steaming in the air.

“This is Ulugbek,” Ismet said from atop the camel on the right. “I found him at his sheep camp. His brother is away with the truck, so we rented these instead.”

From out of the darkness she saw Ulugbek’s smile under a dark mustache. “Assalomu alaykum!” he called.

“Gunaydin,” she ventured, not knowing if the Turkish greeting would translate or not.

Ulugbek kicked one leg over the front hump of his camel and dropped to the sand. He wore boots and a parka with a MontBell label. He approached Ismet’s camel, gave it a series of clucks and commands, and compelled it to kneel. Ismet dismounted awkwardly, staggered on the sand, and recovered.

Ulugbek approached Dagmar and gave her a warm, extended hug. “Hayirli tong!” he said cheerfully. He smelled pleasantly enough of strong tobacco. At a loss for what to do, she patted him on the back.

Ulugbek hugged her twice more, then set to work. The camels were already wearing leather harnesses-that’s what Dagmar had heard jingling-and Ulugbek hooked them to nylon towing straps, which he then attached to the Niva’s rear bumper. The camels farted and belched. Dagmar and Ismet watched, both shivering in the cold.

“We and the black hats are in a low-speed chase,” Dagmar said. “We’re moving at camel speed.”

“Camels can go pretty fast,” Ismet said. “I just found out.”

Ulugbek gestured for someone to get into the Niva. Dagmar did so and put the four-by-four into reverse. Ulugbek gave a yell and began hitting the camels with a stick. The animals lurched forward into the harnesses, Dagmar gunned the engine, and the Niva rocked back. Red sand flew from the wheels.

It didn’t work; the Niva was still hung on the sand. But Ulugbek had thought ahead and strapped a shovel to his saddle. More sand flew as he dug sand from beneath the Niva, and then the camels were driven forward again.

Still the Niva didn’t move. Ulugbek was indomitable: he shifted more sand, then geed up the camels a third time. The Niva lurched backward, then hung. Ulugbek applied himself to the shovel, and more sand flew.

The eastern horizon was turning pale before the Niva finally came free. Ulugbek unhooked the tow straps, then came to Dagmar’s door. Dagmar opened the door, and Ulugbek stepped forward and embraced her.

More hugs were in order, apparently. Dagmar submitted with a good grace despite the fact that Ulugbek’s efforts at digging had left him covered in sand and sweat. Ismet tipped Ulugbek a can of caviar and then waved farewell as Dagmar gunned the engine and sped in the direction of Chechak.

Ismet sagged in his seat. “My god,” he said. “I never want to ride a camel again.”

“Was it painful?”

“It was too far above the ground,” Ismet said. “I was afraid I’d fall off and break an arm.”

When the rising sun at last blazed above the horizon, it showed a dark blotch on the watermelon red sands, a black oasis lying under chalky sandstone mesa. A cluster of receiver dishes and a cell phone tower stood atop the bluff.

“We’re there,” Dagmar said.

Ismet looked at the new world and yawned.

“Should I open a can of caviar?”

“That might be a little premature. Have a pear.”

The oasis grew closer. Houses of mud brick lined roads of sand. There was a general store with gas pumps out front, a coffeehouse, a tiny mosque with a metal dome that looked prefabricated, and several obese dogs lying in the early morning sunshine.

Dagmar slowed as she came into the town. Her GPS said that they had arrived. Wind blew the Niva’s rooster tail of dust over the car, and she peered through the ruddy dust. The town’s two commercial businesses both seemed closed. No one was yet on the streets.

In the sudden silence, she heard a tinkling waterfall sound. She wondered if it was wind chimes or perhaps a fountain.

She tried to phone Uruisamoglu for directions, but the cell network was down.

“God damn it!” she said.

“Go to the mosque,” Ismet said.

As she drove to the mosque she discovered the source of the tinkling sound: goats’ bells, each tuned to a different note. The herd passed in front of her, urged on by an elderly man in felt boots and an olive green Russian army anorak trimmed with rabbit fur.

More elderly men were found at the mosque, where the dawn service had just ended. They stood in their white skullcaps, carrying their beads and talking with one another. Ismet got out of the Niva, approached, and had a lengthy conversation. He got back in the Niva and gestured toward the bluffs.

“Slash is only in the most obvious place for an IT guy,” he said.

Dagmar looked up at the antenna that reared above the town.

“Right,” she said, and put the Niva in gear.

“How is your Uzbek, by the way?” she asked.

“Nonexistent,” Ismet said. “Uzbek is about as close to modern Turkish as German is to English.”

“You managed to talk to them, though. And Ulugbek.”

“We found a few words in common.”

“Whoah!” They had come to the edge of town, and Dagmar braked at the prow of a strange duck-billed vehicle looming around the corner of a mud wall. The other machine didn’t move, and Dagmar realized it was just parked there.

She slowly pulled ahead and saw that she had been startled by a battered old armored vehicle with eight huge tires, its steel flanks studded with little portholes. The original olive drab paint had flaked off it, and it was now spattered with rust, like an old boulder that had been scabbed with fungus.

“Lots of old Soviet military gear lying around the provinces,” Ismet said.

“There are license plates on it,” she said. “Someone must drive the thing.”

The armored vehicle was set up to pull what looked like a long homemade trailer, with a lot of old pipe stacked on it.

“Maybe the owner digs wells,” Ismet said.

The Niva descended into a gulch behind the town, then climbed up the other side. Ahead Dagmar saw a two-rut road running past the face of the bluffs, weaving between boulders that had been eroded from above and tumbled down the slope. They came around one craggy rock and saw that a new road had been blazed up the face of the bluffs. She shifted the vehicle into four-wheel drive, cranked the wheel over, and the Niva began to lurch upward.

As they came around a curve they had a view of the oasis and the desert below.

“Look there,” Ismet said.

Dagmar braked and saw a red rooster tail crossing the desert, moving fast in their direction.

“That would be our friends from the airport,” Ismet said. “I don’t think Babur was able to hold them for very long.”

“They’ve got a lot faster car than we do,” Dagmar said. She looked at him. “What do we do now? We’re stuck on this hill.”

“Go up to the top,” Ismet said. “We can’t turn around here.”

The Niva jounced to the top of the road. The tower and the receiver dishes were surrounded by chain link and razor wire. But beyond the tower, to Dagmar’s surprise, she saw a yurt, the round felt-walled dwelling that had been a home to the steppe peoples for millennia. Ismet’s nomad relatives still lived in similar tents, at least part of the year.

Next to the yurt sat a Volkswagen Rabbit that seemed about the same vintage as the armored vehicle she’d seen in the oasis.

“I’ll drive,” Ismet said. He jumped out of the passenger door, then paused to look down as the strange car entered the village. “Take your gun.”

Heart pounding, Dagmar reached for the gun and its holster and jammed the holster into the back of her jeans.

“What are you doing?”

He turned to look at her. Bruises bled down his face.

“I’m going to lead them off into the desert,” he said. “Once we’re away, you get Slash into his car”-jerking his head toward the Rabbit-“and then you get him to Zarafshan.”

Ismet jumped into the Niva, and there was a shriek of gears as he put it in reverse. As he backed, then turned and began rocking down the bluff, Dagmar was aware that a young man had come out of the yurt and was watching her.

He was small boned and pale skinned, and he huddled in a sheepskin overcoat. He had a unibrow over large brown eyes, and he watched them with a little frown on his face.

She was surprised to see that he was propped up on metal forearm crutches. None of the online material she’d seen about him indicated that he had trouble walking.

Dagmar approached him.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m Briana. I talked to you on the phone.”

Comprehension dawned on the young man’s face, though he still seemed wary.

“I’m Nimet Uruisamoglu,” he said.

“Otherwise known as Slash Berzerker.”

He flushed slightly. “I started using that name,” he said, “when I was fourteen.”

Dagmar stepped close.

“You used that name a few months ago,” she said. “When you did some work for the Turkish government.”

His unibrow darkened, and he looked suspicious.

“What does that matter?” he said.

“Because the government figured out that you put in a back door when you compiled that program and now they’ve sent people to kill you.” She pointed over the edge of the bluff, toward the village.

“They’re in Chechak now. As soon as they work out where you are, they’re coming up here. Of course maybe they already know that you’re here.”

Slash scowled, deep lines forming in his forehead. The scowl was too old an expression for his young face. His hands clenched on the handgrips of his crutches.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

Dagmar was very aware of the pistol pressing against her spine. She took another step toward Uruisamoglu, hands rubbing her sore forearms.

“They let you compile the program yourself, using your own algorithms. That wasn’t a smart thing to do, but then they’re not very bright about computers, are they?”

His dark eyes studied her. His upper lip gave a twitch.

“They said it was a weapon,” he said. “They said it was something they’d found in a government router, probably planted by a Chinese botnet.”

“It is a weapon,” Briana said. “And the generals are using it now. They shut down New York the other day, and now they’ve shut down all of Turkey and all of Uzbekistan.”

Uruisamoglu’s lips parted in surprise.

“That’s what’s happening here?” he said.

“Oh yes.”

“I thought our stupid subcontractors in Tashkent had accidentally switched us off. I tried to text them about it, but wireless was down, too.”

“They shut down Uzbekistan because they didn’t want you to get a warning that you were about to be killed.”

His unibrow knit again. “And who are you, exactly?”

“I work for Ian Attila Gordon.” She couldn’t help but laugh as she said it.

“The rock star?” Uruisamoglu was deeply surprised. “The man who’s trying to overthrow the government?”

“The man who’s trying to overthrow the government that’s trying to kill you. Yes, that man.”

Dagmar could hear the sounds of a car grinding at the base of the bluff. She gave Uruisamoglu a warning look, then crouched down to creep carefully to the edge of the bluff.

A dark sedan was winding along the road. It looked not so much as if it had driven across the desert as physically attacked it: the car was covered in red dust, and there were several fresh dings on the paintwork.

“What-?” Uruisamoglu’s voice.

She realized that he had followed her and he was now silhouetted on the skyline.

“Get down!”

She grabbed his sheepskin coat and pulled him off his crutches. He gave a cry and fell heavily onto the ground. She was afraid he’d cry out and she put a hand over his mouth. His eyes were very large.

The sedan ground on, kicking up alkaline dust. She could see Ismet and the Niva pulled off the road, behind a large block of stone that had at some point in the past tumbled down the bluffs. Ismet was standing by the car, his right arm by his side.

The sedan came closer. Then Ismet stepped out from cover, his right arm pointing at the car.

The sound of rapid fire echoed up the bluffs. The sedan slammed to a halt, then went into reverse. Ismet kept firing. The sedan slewed off the road, and its doors opened. Four men in suits tumbled out of the car and sought cover.

Ismet jumped into the Niva and gunned the vehicle onto the road.

Now it was the others who fired-three of them, Dagmar saw, had pistols. Dagmar felt her nerves leap with every shot. She heard a few bangs as rounds struck the Niva, but the Russian jeep pulled away in a swirl of dust.

The Turkish gunmen ran back to their car. The engine raced. The fourth man-the gunmen had dark suits; he wore something sand colored-was late in getting to the car, and she heard impatient commands. Then doors slammed, and the sedan was racing away.

“Okay,” Dagmar said. “Now we get in your car and we run like hell.”

Uruisamoglu looked at her.

“We can’t,” he said. “The car’s broken down. They were going to bring me a new one in a day or two.”

Dagmar watched the Niva and its pursuer racing away along the bluffs.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ve got to get down to the village and get a ride.”

He spread his hands, indicating his crumpled body, the metal crutches.

“How?” he said.

Dagmar was having a hard time believing how quickly it had all gone wrong.

“Let me help you up.” She tugged on the sheepskin and helped him rise. He hobbled toward the yurt, and she followed.

She could go down to the village, she thought. Get a car, bring it back up the bluffs. But that would leave Uruisamoglu unguarded. The assassins could return and kill him.

“All right,” she said. “You’ve got a back door into the program. So use it.”

Spear Point Flies to Hooters

The yurt was cozy, build on a wooden stage above the ground, with Oriental rugs on the floor and a pellet wood stove. It had a wooden door, a bed on a platform, a large desktop computer, equipment for making tea and warming food. A wood-lattice framework supported the felt walls. There were maps and photos of the Kyzyl Kum, with marks where Uruisamoglu was weaving together his IT infrastructure. He lowered himself carefully onto a large pillow and pulled out his laptop.

“The program will be in your router here,” Dagmar said. “You need to configure it so that it will obey you-obey my- orders.”

“That’s going to take a while.”

Dagmar was surprised.

“Why?” she said. “All you have to do is use your back door to get into the program, change the government’s password to your own-to my own-and then tell the program to go dormant again.”

Uruisamoglu’s unibrow grew darker as he frowned.

“It’s not that simple,” he said. “The program’s… different now.”

Dagmar felt a sudden, raging certainty that the kid was lying. She could feel a mad itch where the gun dug into her spine.

“Tell me quick!” she snapped.

The unibrow lifted. He seemed impressed by the force of her anger. Not in a frightened way, exactly, but in a way that absorbed his attention. As if he found strong emotions somehow alien but still the subject of intense interest.

“Okay,” he said. “The government was afraid of someone doing… exactly what you want me to do. So when I try to change the program, it queries a central server in Ankara for permission.”

Dagmar felt a snarl tug at her lips. She wasn’t believing this. “It can contact the central server even when the Net’s down?”

“Yes. It will have the correct codes to pass the message through any affected routers.” He looked down at his keyboard. “I can get into the central server, I think, because I compiled that program, too, but I’ll have to work out how to structure my attack. And I’ll have to make certain that Korkut or the other system administrators don’t see me working.”

“Korkut? Who’s Korkut?”

“He’s head of computer security for the Intelligence Section. He’s smart. I worked for him.”

Korkut, she thought. She wondered if he was the man she had called Kronsteen, the man who had been behind the attempts to discredit her.

“He was down there,” Uruisamoglu said. He gestured toward where the sedan was roaring off in pursuit. “Korkut was the man in the light-colored suit.”

He was the one who wasn’t shooting, Dagmar thought. The one the others were yelling at.

Korkut was the geek the assassins had brought along, to make sure Uruisamoglu didn’t try to put one over on them.

Dagmar had a lot of questions about Korkut, but she didn’t have the time to ask them. Anger jittered in her nerves. But the more she thought about what he’d told her, the more plausible it seemed.

“Better get busy, then,” she said.

He didn’t answer. Instead he put earbuds into his ears, then began to type. After a few minutes he began to sway back and forth to his music. Dagmar watched him, then ran up to him and pulled one of the buds out of his ears.

“Are you listening to music?” she demanded.

He looked up in surprise. She could hear tinny Europop sounds coming from the bud dangling from her hand.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

“You can’t listen to music!” she said. “You’ll deplete your battery power!”

“I always listen to music when I work.”

“Not this time.”

She pulled the cord from his laptop and confiscated the earbuds. He looked at her in fury.

“Do you have a miniturbine array for recharging?” she demanded.

Uruisamoglu looked disgusted. “No. I normally have electricity here, but it went out along with everything else.”

Dagmar clenched her teeth. She had a recharging unit in her luggage, but her luggage was still in the Niva.

“How much power do you have in your laptop, anyway?”

He waved a finger over the laser sensor to bring up the data, looked up.

“One hour, thirty-nine minutes,” he said. “Give or take.”

“Can you do the job in that time?”

He shook his head and lifted his shoulders, a Turkish gesture that meant “I don’t know.”

“Conserve power.”

Dagmar went to the door and looked out. Two vehicles were laying dust trails along the road in the distance. She could hear the popping of shots.

She and Ismet should have come up with a better plan, she thought. Though as it happened she couldn’t think of one.

Her phone rang, Helmuth calling from Frankfurt.

“Yes?”

“We’re getting reports of riots all over Turkey.”

Dagmar gave a weary laugh. “Losing the Internet didn’t make people stay home; it just pissed them off.”

“They were already on strike-maybe they didn’t need the Internet so much.”

The distant dust trails vanished into the shimmer of the horizon. Dagmar could smell smoke drifting up from the village below.

“What’s happening with the old parliament building?” she asked.

“Nothing yet. I’d expect the army to turn up, though.” There was a pause. “We also got one report from the east of Turkey, saying the commander of the Second Army has been removed.”

“Hm.” Dagmar peered at the horizon, saw nothing. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“I don’t know. We need Chatsworth to tell us what it means.”

Dagmar considered this and wondered what Lincoln’s reaction would be if she told him she was in Uzbekistan.

“You could ask Ismet,” Helmuth suggested.

“Last I saw,” Dagmar said, “Ismet was driving across the desert being pursued by Turkish gunmen.”

There was a long pause.

“Okay,” Dagmar said. “Here’s what’s happening.”

She gave a brief outline of the situation. Helmuth muttered something in German under his breath. “So you can’t get out?”

“No.”

She could hear Helmuth thinking. “I have an idea,” he said. “But you’re not going to like it.”

She cast a glance back into the yurt, at Uruisamoglu sitting motionless at his computer, watching her with his large brown eyes.

“I’m open to suggestions,” she said.

“Shoot the kid,” Helmuth said. “He works for the damn narco-Nazis anyway, so he’s no loss. Take his laptop, grab some supplies, and take off on foot. Hide until the bad guys go away, or until you can reestablish contact with Ismet.”

Dagmar felt her mouth go dry.

“That’s… going to be hard,” she said.

“Can you think of a better idea?”

She gave the matter some thought. “I’ll have to get back to you,” she said. She pressed End and put the phone back in its holster. She looked at Uruisamoglu.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“It would go faster with music.”

She gave him an icy look. “Then sing,” she said.

She left the yurt and gazed out to the east, where Ismet and his pursuers had disappeared. She saw no dust plumes, heard no vehicle noises or gunshots on the wind.

Dagmar rubbed her sore forearms with her hands. She thought about Ismet dead, Ismet burning in his car, Ismet lying wounded on the sand. Tears stung her eyes.

She had bravely struck off on her own, without any of her support system, and led her lover straight into a fiasco and probably got him killed.

She couldn’t save Ismet. She couldn’t save Uruisamoglu, and she knew she couldn’t kill him. She was useless.

She was Semiramis Orta. She was the spy who failed.

Dagmar clenched her fists, her teeth. Her thin leather jacket didn’t seem able to keep out the cold wind at all. She shivered.

God damn it, she thought. Haven’t I learned anything?

Apparently not.

She returned to the yurt and looked over Uruisamoglu’s shoulder. He was coding: she recognized structure and syntax but couldn’t place the lines in any context. Slash couldn’t help clarify; he was off somewhere in his own Deep State-not in the cabal that had taken power in Turkey, but inside the internal realm where art and code and human mind all came together, where mad imagination ran in tandem with the discipline of science, a rigorous internal dreaming that flowed down the arms and through the fingers into the keyboard and then out into the world…

Oblivious to her, Uruisamoglu was humming to himself as he worked. Needing the music.

She followed the coding. She did very little coding herself these days, she had Helmuth and others for that, but she still appreciated coding as an art form, and Uruisamoglu was very good. His syntax was clean, he was well organized, and he made few mistakes.

And the original code, the code he was modifying, was astounding. She had never seen anything so clean.

Dagmar looked up as she heard a noise outside the yurt. Sudden terror clutched her. Her heart crashed against her ribs.

Someone was outside.

As quietly as possible, she groped for the pistol at the small of her back. She failed on the first try and on the second managed to ease the Beretta from the holster. She stepped back, looked at the weapon, and remembered how to work it. She took the safety off and pushed the slide back, then let it go. She saw the shiny brass cartridge go into the breech as the slide snapped forward with a clack.

She saw Uruisamoglu jump. He spun around and saw the gun in her hand.

“Ananin ami!” he said. He sounded disgusted.

“I thought I heard something.”

“Don’t do that!” He was shaking a finger. “Don’t do that!”

Dagmar stepped around him, walking toward the door of the yurt. She wondered how long she had been watching Uruisamoglu at work, whether she’d become so absorbed in the coding that she hadn’t heard someone approach the tent.

Her feet seemed incredibly distant. She could barely feel them touch the carpets. The gun was heavy in her hand and somehow slippery. It wanted to fall out of her grip. She seemed to hear a thin keening on the air, a cry on the very edge of her hearing.

She was absolutely certain that she could hear someone creeping around outside. Someone who was very possibly waiting for her to come out, so that he could shoot her.

She moved closer to the yurt door.

Then Dagmar heard another noise, off to her right somewhere. She gave a cry and snapped the pistol up to aiming level, ready to fire.

She could fire right through the tent walls. But she couldn’t see out and didn’t trust herself to fire accurately at a sound.

“Did you hear that?” she said. Her voice came out as a husky whisper.

“Hear what?” Uruisamoglu asked.

Dagmar moved closer to the door. If she could fire out, she thought, they could fire in. They could gun her down right where she stood.

She tried to remember all the tactics she had learned playing first-person shooter games. She got down on her knees so as to make a smaller target of herself. She crawled slowly to the door, trying not to make a sound. She knew the enemy were there, waiting.

She thought they were off to the right. She put a hand on the wooden door. Her heart was crashing so loud that she couldn’t hear anything else.

Dagmar pushed the door open with her left hand and thrust the pistol out. Her finger was ready on the trigger. She saw only bare ground, with the view of the Kyzyl Kum beyond.

She shoved the door entirely open, swept the pistol around in an arc. Saw no one.

In a sudden murderous frenzy she ran out onto the wooden platform, then dropped from there onto the ground. She peered under the platform, ready to blast away the legs of anyone standing on the other side, but there was no one.

She ran clean around the yurt. No enemy appeared; no gunmen took shots at her. Wind keened through the tower.

Dagmar paused, the gun half-lowered, and listened. She heard nothing but the wind. Then she sagged as she realized what had happened.

She had been hallucinating. If she had actually seen any of the enemy, they would have been Indonesian rioters or maybe Maffya hit men.

She had nearly fired through the yurt wall at something that didn’t exist.

Well, she thought, that would have boosted Slash’s confidence.

Dagmar held out the gun, carefully lowered the trigger to the uncocked position, and slid the safety on. Her hands were trembling so savagely that she had a hard time getting the pistol back in its holster.

She went out onto the edge of the plateau and looked out. No vehicles were in sight. She returned to the yurt and tried to give Uruisamoglu a brave smile.

“Must have been an animal,” she said.

“Animal,” he repeated, disbelieving. He was still giving her that odd intense look, as if she were some specimen that he was examining under a magnifying glass.

“How’s the coding going?” she asked.

He seemed unhappy. “I could use some tea.”

There was a hot kettle already on the wood stove, giving off a trickle of steam. Dagmar found a teapot and black tea. A smoky aroma filled the yurt as she made the tea. She gave a cup to Uruisamoglu and took one for herself.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome.”

He looked at her. “What are you, a musician like Gordon?”

She managed a smile. “No. I’m a game designer.”

He shook his head, skeptical.

“I designed the Stunrunner game,” she said. “Your friend Alaydin said you played it.”

Realization came. He rocked back a little. He pointed a finger at her.

“You’re that terrorist woman that Attila Gordon hired. I read about you in the Gazette.”

“I’m not a terrorist,” Dagmar said.

“My god,” he said. “No fucking wonder.” He sipped his tea. “This is a real mess.”

Dagmar could only agree. She looked down at the forearm crutches lying on the carpet beside him.

“Did you have an accident?” she said.

“A truck hit my car. Six months ago. A friend of mine got killed.” He looked up. “That’s when the Intelligence Section came to me with the project. I was able to work while I was in recovery.” He shook his head. “I should never have come out here.”

She looked around the yurt. “Why did you? This is a pretty primitive environment for someone who can’t get around very well.”

He rubbed the lip of the teacup against his chin. “I wanted to be by myself. I’d been in the hospital; I was in recovery for weeks, doing physical therapy.” He looked up at her. “I kept reliving the accident. Every time I saw a truck coming down the road I wanted to run and hide. I kept seeing my friend dead.” He looked down at the laptop screen. “I thought if I came up here, I could forget all that.”

“It’s not so easy,” Dagmar said. “I had some friends killed a few years ago and-it’s not something one forgets.”

Uruisamoglu said nothing, just sipped his tea.

“There are medications that can help,” she said. “You could see a doctor.”

Uruisamoglu pointed at his head, rotated the finger. “I don’t want to lose my edge,” he said. He seemed angry.

“There are anti-anxiety drugs and… and others,” Dagmar said. She waved a hand vaguely. “They’re not supposed to interfere with brain function.”

“Anxiety,” said Uruisamoglu, “is what keeps me going.” His dark eyes flashed beneath the unibrow. “Besides, I don’t want anyone thinking I’m crazy.”

“It’s not crazy; it’s supposed to be-”

Uruisamoglu looked up at her savagely. “Do you want me to do the job, or not?”

Dagmar looked at him.

“Do the job,” she said.

He put his hands on his keyboard and began to type. Dagmar sipped her own tea-it was deep and smoky, with a tang of the woodlands.

Anxiety is what keeps me going… I don’t want anyone thinking I’m crazy. Do you want me to do the job, or not? They were all her own excuses for living with her condition. On Uruisamoglu’s lips they sounded pathetic, defensive.

She began to suspect that the excuses didn’t sound any better coming from her.

Uruisamoglu began coding steadily. The tea provided a welcome warmth. Dagmar left the yurt again and walked to the edge of the plateau. If she was going to start hallucinating again, she figured it was best she do it out of Uruisamoglu’s sight.

Okay, she thought. I’ll see a doc. How much worse can it be?

The resolution, she thought, lacked a certain force. Possibly because the likely outcome of her current situation was that she would be killed and that she’d never see that doctor.

She huddled into her thin, useless jacket and shivered. Winds had raised a dust devil down in the sands. She watched it for a while, the swirling sand a silvery glitter in the sun, and then saw another trail of dust rising by the bluffs.

Tension sang through her muscles as she realized that the second dust trail was caused by a vehicle moving toward her.

But whose car was it? she wondered. She reached for her handheld, called up the satellite function, and speed-dialed Ismet.

The ring signal went on for a long time. Dagmar held her breath as the signal went on and on.

Finally she pressed End and returned the phone to its holster. Despair gave a little wail somewhere in her psyche.

She forced herself to remain calm as she walked back to the yurt. She opened the door and went in.

“How long?” she asked.

Uruisamoglu looked briefly up. “Not long,” he said.

“We don’t have much time.”

He circled his hand in that Turkish way that meant he’d heard all this so many times before.

She could carry him out on her back, she thought. But she couldn’t see herself clambering along the bluffs that way.

She would just have to buy him time.

Dagmar went out onto the plateau again and tried to work out how the car would come up and where she should hide so that they couldn’t see her until the shooting started and where she would stay in cover. She tried several places and checked the field of fire from each. Again she tried to remember what she’d learned in first-person shooter games.

She’d never gotten as good as the best players, the ones who could just run into the middle of a firefight, shoot in all directions while running, killing all the Nazis or the zombies or the Nazi zombies, and never come to harm. Instead she preferred to be a kind of sniper, to settle under cover somewhere and pick the enemy off one by one.

That was the only thing she could do here, fire from ambush. She wasn’t a gunfighter, and unlike her character in the video games, she couldn’t be sure of hitting anything with a pistol she’d never fired.

The dust plume came closer. Dagmar chose her spot, then jogged back to the yurt. Uruisamoglu was still coding, bent over his work.

“Soon,” he said.

“Call me when you’re ready.”

He waved a hand, telling her to push off. She swallowed her resentment, then returned to her chosen place.

It was another ten minutes before she heard the car laboring up the narrow road. Even though she knew it was coming, she still managed surprise when it finally came into her view.

The car had taken a pounding. The windshield had caved in, leaving only a few silver-glinting remnants around the edges. The body was dinged and covered in dust, one headlight was smashed, and a front fender was flapping loose. The car was a piece of junk now, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that there were still killers in it.

She found it all intensely interesting. Oddly, she wasn’t afraid. A short while ago Dagmar had been terrified of hallucinations, but now that the black hats had arrived, the men who could actually kill her, she didn’t find them frightening at all.

Dagmar rested her pistol on the rock in front of her and fired. She counted five shots, the pistol kicking against her hand each time, a jolt of pain going up her bruised arm, and she felt a rush of intense pleasure as she saw the sparks thrown up by a bullet as it splashed on the hood.

The driver slammed the brakes, then threw the car into reverse and backed away. A laugh burst past Dagmar’s lips as she saw the enemy retreating, and she fired another shot. Someone fired back at her through the windshield-she saw the flash-but the bullet flew away into nothing.

Dagmar thought that she should move now they knew her position, and so she shifted to another of the places she had chosen. She leaned far out from her cover to observe the enemy.

The car backed all the way to the bottom of the bluff, and then the passengers got out. There were still four of them, still in coats and ties, three in dark jackets, one in beige. They consulted with one another briefly, and then the three in dark jackets began to advance up the road. From their posture-crouched down with hands held together in front-it was clear they were holding pistols.

The other one, the one in the light-colored suit, stayed by the car and watched with his arms akimbo. He seemed to be intrigued by what was going on.

The shooters were going to be a lot harder to stop this time. But at least they had only short-range weapons-they’d come prepared to kill a crippled computer scientist in a yurt, not engage in a prolonged firefight.

“Briana! Briana!” Uruisamoglu’s voice came from the yurt.

Dagmar hesitated, then broke cover and ran for the yurt. She opened the door.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I’ve done it. I need you to put in your password.”

She ran to him, dropped to her knees, and turned his laptop to her. Passwords swarmed through her mind. It had run blank.

She typed “CONSTANTINOPLE1453,” then hit Enter. It was a password that the computers at NSA or other agencies would have no trouble cracking, but she couldn’t think of anything else. When she had the opportunity she’d change it.

“Good,” Uruisamoglu said. “Now I send it out.”

Dagmar jumped to her feet and ran back to her position. The gunmen were a lot closer now. She rested the gun on a rock, aimed, and fired.

The bullet kicked up sand near one of the gunmen’s feet, and they all scattered into cover. Return fire began to come up the hill. The bullets sounded like firecrackers going off over Dagmar’s head.

There was excitement in being shot at, but the emotion was strangely flattened. This wasn’t as involving as a video game. A video game would have better sound effects.

Whenever she saw one of the gunmen she fired, but they were darting from cover to cover and she could never get one in her sights. She emptied her magazine and reached for her second. After that, she realized, she’d be out of bullets.

A bullet whined off the rock close to Dagmar’s hand. Her heart leaped. One of the gunman had worked his way onto her flank. She fired wildly at him, jumped to her feet, and ran back to another rock. Bullets snapped through the air near her.

She was breathless. The video game had just gone to another level of intensity. Hordes of zombies would arrive at any second.

Eventually the gunmen drove her all the way back to the yurt. She didn’t know how many bullets she had left, but she knew it wasn’t many. She dived through the door and dropped prone onto the carpet.

Uruisamoglu, still sitting on his pillow, looked at her.

“What’s going on?” he said.

It was the most ridiculous question she’d ever heard. “We’re trying to kill each other,” she explained, as if to a child. “You’d better get down.”

I am about to be killed by three men in ties, she thought.

Someone started firing through the felt walls of the yurt. Uruisamoglu dropped to the floor. His brown eyes were huge.

Voices cried out in Turkish. Uruisamoglu looked at Dagmar.

“They want us to surrender,” he said.

“They’re here to kill you,” Dagmar said. “But you can surrender if you want.”

“They have no reason to kill me anymore,” Uruisamoglu said. “The Internet’s back. It’s all out of my hands.”

And entirely in mine, Dagmar thought. They’d torture her to get her password.

More bullets began ripping through the felt. One whined off the pellet stove. Uruisamoglu’s maps crackled as bullets snapped through them. Dagmar reached for pillows and began to build bulwarks. The gunmen kept shouting.

At least they’re not hallucinations, she thought, and almost laughed.

The gunmen called for surrender again. They were probably not looking forward to charging in through the single door.

Dagmar didn’t answer. Another pair of shots came in. Maybe, Dagmar thought, they were running low on ammunition as well.

There was a mechanical grinding from outside, the bellowing of engines, the sound of gravel crunching beneath tires. Dagmar wondered if one of the gunmen had gone back for the car.

And then there was more shouting, very desperate sounding, and a lot of shots. A vehicle roared, and Dagmar heard wheels skidding on gravel as it came to a stop right outside the door.

There were huge booms at close range, the sound of a much larger weapon, but no bullets came into the yurt. Then there was a clanking noise, and suddenly Ismet’s voice.

“Dagmar! Are you in there? You and Slash come out-fast!”

Dagmar rose to her knees, her head spinning. Uruisamoglu looked at her blankly. She waved at him.

“Come on!” she said.

He crawled across the carpets, dragging his crutches behind him. Dagmar jumped up, ran back to his position, and grabbed his laptop. She ran to the door of the yurt and opened it.

The vehicle outside had eight huge wheels and a duck-billed ramming prow. There were hatches and periscopes and slits for viewing. Hot exhaust smoked from the engines and fouled the air. It was the armored vehicle they’d seen down in the village.

A hatch had opened between the second and the third wheels. Ismet was inside, gesturing.

“Hurry!”

Bullets cracked through the air. Dagmar dived for the hatch, clambered into the interior. It smelled of dust and stale motor oil.

Ismet leaned out, grabbed Uruisamoglu by the shoulders of his sheepskin jacket, and hauled him bodily into the vehicle. The metal crutches clanged on the metal floor. Ismet slammed the hatch shut and yelled something to the driver in the forward compartment. The engine roar increased and the vehicle lurched into reverse.

There were pinging sounds on the metal walls of the vehicle. Dagmar saw little dimples appearing on the inside of the armor. Someone was shooting at them.

Ismet reached for the shotgun on a metal bench seat, thrust it through one of the ports, and fired. The sound in the small metal compartment was enormous.

The big vehicle lurched off. Dagmar and Uruisamoglu clutched at the metal seats in an attempt to stabilize themselves. Dagmar eventually hauled herself into one of the seats, and she looked out through one of the view slits just as one of Ismet’s shots caught a gunman in the shoulder, spinning him around.

Then the vehicle dropped nose-first onto the narrow road leading to the Kyzyl Kum, and Ismet lost his footing and crashed to the floor on top of Uruisamoglu.

Ismet scrambled into one of the metal seats and then pulled Uruisamoglu into another. The vehicle swayed and crashed. The engine sound was deafening. The passenger compartment smelled of auto exhaust and cordite.

“This is Shemazar!” Ismet pointed to the driver. “He owns this APC.”

Shemazar-a man in late middle age, thin and lined-turned and waved a hand.

“Hi, lady!” he said.

Hi, lady, Dagmar thought. This guy must have apprenticed as a New York cabbie.

The APC jounced to the floor of the desert. Ismet shouted instructions. Shemazar waved, shifted into a lower gear, and deliberately drove the APC over the assassins’ sedan, leaving it a wreck at the foot of the bluff.

Dagmar looked through one of the slits and saw the man in the light-colored suit. He made no attempt to run away but stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the catastrophe with a disgusted look on his face. Though she doubted he could see her, Dagmar waved at him through the port.

Good-bye, Kronsteen, she thought. Just think of it as revolution creep. And then the armored car rolled on.

In a few minutes, they were in the oasis. The Niva waited at Shemazar’s house, much the same except for some bullet holes in the hatchback.

“I led them off as far as I could,” Ismet said. “Their car was faster, but I had four-wheel drive, so whenever they started to catch me I moved into the open desert, and they couldn’t move so fast there. But eventually they realized they weren’t going to get me, so they went back to the yurt. I went cross-country to the village, because I thought I might be able to rent this vehicle.” He patted the armored side. “We’re out another five hundred pounds. Sorry I didn’t return your call, but I was in the middle of negotiations.”

“You keep saving me,” Dagmar said.

He gave her a deadpan look.

“Well,” he said, “you keep running into trouble.”

In the village they transferred to the Niva. Shemazar cackled and insisted on hugging Dagmar multiple times and kissing her on both cheeks. His lips were excessively moist. Under the circumstances, Dagmar felt, she could scarcely object.

“What about the killers?” Dagmar asked as they pulled away. “What if they catch us again?”

“Not likely,” Ismet judged. “We just smashed their car. They’re on foot with a wounded man. Nobody in the village is going to give them a car, because the crazy old guy in the armored car isn’t going to let them. So I’d say they’re walking to Zarafshan.”

Unless, Dagmar thought, they could hook up with Ulugbek and his camels.

Lamprey’s Appendage Sucks on Ale

Ismet got behind the wheel of the Niva and they left the oasis behind. Dagmar called Helmuth and tried to catch up with events in Turkey.

“Turkey’s got Internet again,” Helmuth said. “Everything we’re hearing says that it’s true that the commander of the Second Army got deposed-by his own officers. They’ve declared for the revolution and they’re ready to march on Ankara.”

“The Second Army is in the Kurdish provinces,” Ismet said. “The general would have been one of Bozbeyli’s most loyal subordinates-he was the one who had to keep an eye on the heroin trade. So it’s significant that his own people put him under arrest.”

As they jounced toward Zarafshan on the highway, as the silver high-tension towers marched past like a long row of saluting soldiers, they heard of the cascade of events that spelled the collapse of Bozbeyli’s regime. Other generals-the ones Lincoln had complained were sitting on the fence-began to eye their own subordinates with distrust and to consider that perhaps their choices had been limited to declaring for the rebels or being deposed by their own men.

The First Army commander in Istanbul declared for the rebels, and the Third Army on the Iraq border seemed in chaos, with some units declaring one way and some the other. Only the forces on Cyprus stayed loyal, and they were unable to move to the mainland.

By the time Zarafshan was in sight, it was over. Bozbeyli and the others in his administration had abdicated and flown to Azerbaijan.

“And not only that,” Dagmar said. “It turns out I own the Internet. It all belongs to me.”

Ismet looked at her. Uruisamoglu pointedly did not.

“It’s true,” she said. “Though maybe I’ll give it back.” She cleared her throat. “Maybe. Wouldn’t want to leave it in the wrong hands.”

She reached for her handheld.

“I’m going to call Attila,” she said. “He should know that his triumphant entry into Istanbul is imminent.”

“He should be happy about that,” Ismet said.

“I don’t know. It means he can’t hog the headlines any longer.”

“Tell him to have the jet ready.”

“Yes,” Dagmar said. “Only this time, we don’t file a flight plan.”

Before she could call her phone gave a chirp, and she found that she had a pair of text messages. She called up the first.

Briana love you forever Chatsworth.

A pleasant warmth kindled in the vicinity of her heart. Manipulative old bastard, she thought with affection.

“Lv U2,” she replied.

Dagmar turned to the second message and saw it was much longer. Richard must have typed it on a keyboard, because it had none of the slang and abbreviations you’d expect in a message thumbed onto a phone pad.

“I have been having problems with my printer,” the employee told Dagmar. “Even though the printer was cabled properly to the computer and the driver was installed, and even though the printer responded when it was sent a file, the printer refused to print a document.

“I checked the cable again, and I then uninstalled the printer driver, then reinstalled it. The printer still would not print. Therefore I updated the driver, but the printer still would not function. I swapped out the cables, with no success. I cycled the power on the printer, but still the printer would not print.

“Finally, out of desperation, I uninstalled the operating system, and reinstalled the OS from scratch. And then the printer worked as if nothing had ever been wrong.

“Dagmar, my solution made no sense and was completely inelegant. What am I to understand from this adventure?”

“Persistence,” said Dagmar, “also has merit.”

She looked at the last line and gave a weary laugh. She read it aloud to Ismet and Uruisamoglu, and they both thought it was funny.

CONSTANTINOPLE1453, she thought. She was going to have to change that, and soon.

She opened a can of beluga, and they ate caviar and hard-boiled eggs all the way to the airport, where the Gulfstream waited, glowing in the sun as if it were made of precious metal, its engines already turning over.

The Niva drew up to the stair that waited in front of the Gulfstream’s door. The two cabin attendants were visible at the top of the stairs, waiting with identical white smiles on their faces. The man from customs was in his Honda, and Babur stood waiting for his hundred-pound notes.

Peace oot, Dagmar thought, and reached for her passport.