Deep State

CHAPTER TWO

Primary Turns Solid Dangerously

The explosion smelled of roses. The scent was strong enough to turn Dagmar’s stomach.

It was a conflation of memory, she knew. It was only after the explosion that she’d smelled the roses in her car. But here the two memories were mashed together.

It wasn’t one of the flashbacks, Dagmar thought. It was a dream. She knew it was a dream because she could take some measures to control it.

She couldn’t alter the dream’s subject, that last explosion in LA. The green Ford parked with its view of the city, beyond it the webs of lights strung across the night, Century City a brilliant outpost in the darkness. Then the bubble of fire that exploded from the car, the light magnified a hundred times by gridded reflections on the glass-walled office building that stood over the parking lot. The clang as the car roof landed on the asphalt, followed shortly by the hood, and then the little sparkles as the incendiaries rained down like the remains of an Independence Day firework…

The explosion repeated itself over and over-not with startling rapidity, as it had in real life, but in ultraslow motion, like in an action film. It was the fact of its being so much like a movie that helped convince Dagmar that this was a dream.

Over and over again, the life in the car ended.

She couldn’t manage to alter the event itself-she couldn’t make the pieces of the car fly back together, couldn’t restore her lover’s life-but she could act in other ways to make the dream harmless.

Dagmar gave the image a sound track-Rossini’s overture to The Thieving Magpie. The music was filled with drama so overblown as to become comic, the tension undermined by the oboe and flutes chortling away in the background, parodied by a platoon of rapping snares… the humorous sounds helped to neutralize the horror of the image, introduce a farcical element.

She distanced the image still further. She built a proscenium stage around the explosion, in hopes of reinforcing the idea that this wasn’t really happening, that it was just opera or melodrama or some kind of boring art film hoping to make its point by showing the same dumb thing happening over and over.

She thought about pulling back the camera a little farther, showing the heads of the audience as they stared at the explosion, and at that point she woke up.

She was in a hotel, and for a moment panic flooded her, and she thought she might be having a flashback for real.

It wasn’t the hotel in Jakarta, she told herself. She wasn’t lying naked in the tropical heat, helpless amid a civilization that was coming apart, that was dying in riot and arson and looting.

Dagmar was in the hotel room in Selcuk, and she had taken steps to make certain it was not and could never be the room in Jakarta. She’d turned the bed at a diagonal, instead of square to the wall as it had been in Jakarta, and she’d made sure the windows were to her right and not to the left, and therefore there was no reason, none whatsoever, to have a flashback at this time…

She turned on the light. The room was not at all like the one in Jakarta, with its television and its minibar and its tropical heat. Instead she was in a boutique hotel with a view of the mosque and a tile mosaic of an old man gazing down at a group of turtles, some Turkish folk motif that she didn’t understand.

This was not Jakarta. But the terror that was Jakarta was still somewhere in the back of her mind, threatening to break out, and that terror kept her awake, kept her sitting in bed with the light on until long after the muezzin called out the early morning prayer and light began to glint on the mosque dome and she heard the first sounds of traffic filling the streets.

Saint Paul Railed Against Breastwork Here

Dagmar watched as the gamers poured into the great stone theater. It was just after eight in the morning and the theater was still in the deep, long shadow of Mount Panayir; the air was cool and scented by the pines that lined the long walk from the entrance. Mourning doves called nearby; a stork clacked from the untidy nest it had built atop one of the stone arches.

The usual crowds of visitors, reinforced by tourists bused in from cruise ships docking in Izmir, had not yet arrived-aside from the doves and the storks, the gamers had the place nearly to themselves.

Cameras were held high overhead as they panned across the stone seats. Cameras in the hands of Dagmer’s employees gazed back-the whole event was being streamed live to players who couldn’t attend in person.

The flood of gamers slowed to a trickle, and then Mehmet entered. Mehmet scanned the crowd till he saw Dagmar and then gave her a nod from under the brim of his ball cap.

Dagmar gave him a half salute, raising two fingers to the brim of her panama hat. Then she stood and joined him in front of the worn pillars of the proscenium.

The gamers occupied a small fraction of the twenty-five thousand stone seats that the Greeks and Romans had dug into the flank of the mountain. In this theater the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Plautus had been performed. Gladiators had fought and died here. The stage had been flooded for aquatic spectacles, perhaps miniature naval battles. Saint Paul had preached in this place, and been driven out by rioters calling on the name of holy Artemis.

Even Elton John had performed in this place, Captain Fantastic himself, a concert broadcast to the whole world.

The Theater of Ephesus had seen all this in the two thousand years of its history, and now it was going to see something new.

“Gunaydin!” she called, Turkish for “good morning.” “Can you hear me?”

The theater’s superb acoustics echoed her own words back to her. She had more or less worked out she wouldn’t be needing the lapel mic she had pinned to her T-shirt, and she didn’t turn on the battery pack clipped to her waist.

“On behalf of Universal Exports, Limited,” she said, “I would like to thank you for your help in assisting our salesman, Mr. Bond, escape from his troubles in Antalya. And I know you will join with me in sending condolences to the family of Semiramis Orga.”

She signaled to Mehmet, and he translated the words into Turkish. Of the six or seven hundred gamers present, most were Turks, and most of these were new to alternate reality games.

They were picking up the basics pretty quickly, though.

“Unfortunately,” Dagmar continued, “we are still unable to locate Mr. Bond. We believe that he may be in this area, and one among you discovered what seems to be a crossword puzzle partly filled out in his hand. I have provided copies for each of you, and you’re each welcome to take one. The puzzle is called ‘Ephesus,’ and the answers seem to mostly involve this area. Perhaps the answers may help you determine Mr. Bond’s location.”

While Mehmet translated this, Dagmar returned to her seat and a large wheeled cooler, which she pulled out along the front of the proscenium. She opened the cooler to reveal stacks of printed crossword puzzles. The clues were written in both Turkish and English, and the answers, most of which had to do with Ephesian history and with inscriptions on the monuments, would be the same in any language.

She broke the stacks of puzzles into smaller stacks and distributed them between the many pillars of the proscenium. Then she invited the gamers to come down and each take one.

Which they did. At great speed. And then, organizing into groups, they dispersed all over the ancient city with their cameras, their phones, their maps, their Baedekers, and their Lonely Planet guides. Dagmar’s camera crews followed them, eavesdropping on their conversations.

The puzzle and the clues would be scanned and uploaded to networking sites so that people off-site could work on them. People would be calling up the Internet on their handhelds so that they could google answers to the clues. Turkish clues would be translated into English, and vice versa, in hopes of gaining additional insight. Pictures would be taken of inscriptions, and of maps, and of monuments, and then the players would share the pictures with one another, or upload them so that others might have a crack at deciphering any mysteries they might contain.

And somehow, when all those pictures and clues and answers were jigsawed together, they would provide a form of aid to the world’s most famous fictional spy, who lurked somewhere in the landscape near Ephesus, just beyond your eyeblink, or humming somewhere in the electronic landscape, or in the stream of celluloid running before the great blazing unwinking eye, images focused on the blank white screen that might just exist solely in your mind…

Type of Whiskey Minus Two

Dagmar walked with Mehmet down the pine-shaded road that led to the entrance to the site. Behind her, gamers and cameramen were flooding over the ancient city like an invasion of driver ants.

She had gotten her ass saved by James Bond four months earlier. She supposed that might make her a Bond girl-possibly, at thirty-three, the oldest ever.

Six or seven years earlier, when her creative skills had been paired with her friend Charlie’s money, she had built her company, Great Big Idea, into a powerhouse in the world of alternate reality games, or ARGs. But then Charlie had died-been murdered, actually-and his various business interests had been “rationalized,” as the jargon had it, by his corporate heirs. Great Big Idea had been cut loose, left to fend for itself in a sea now swarming with other companies promising to deliver equally terrific cross-platform viral advertising.

The company in fact did reasonably well most of the time, but there were times when Great Big Idea needed injections of cash to pay rent and make its payroll. In the past she could go to Charlie for a short-term loan from one of his other businesses, but now she had to establish relationships with financial institutions, like banks.

Explaining an alternate reality game to a banker was a daunting experience. It’s an online game? Yes, except when it’s out in the real world. The real world? Yes, we send players all over the world on live events. And the players pay for this entertainment? No, we give it away free and charge sponsors for our services.

Banks seemed unable to entirely reconcile themselves to this business model.

During the dry periods she’d kept the company going with her own money, paying herself back when she found a client. Until, earlier in the year, she had failed to find a client at all.

In March she had fired eight of her friends. She would have fired the rest in April except that James Bond had come to her rescue.

The new Bond movie, Stunrunner, would open in August. It was pretty much a remake of From Russia with Love, itself a film shot largely in Turkey-though instead of the maguffin being a Soviet coding machine that needed to be smuggled across the Balkans, it was Iranian nuclear secrets that needed to be got across Anatolia, with a climax filmed as a boat chase through the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul.

James Bond would be played by a new actor-Ian Attila Gordon, a Scots pop star new to the business of acting. He was also the first Bond since Connery to speak with a Scots accent and the first with a visible tattoo, a large, colorful one on his neck that loomed above the wing collar of his tuxedo.

The studio seemed a little nervous about the film, and about the Bond franchise in particular, which was suspected of being on the wane.

At any rate, Dagmar was told that the studio would very much like a state-of-the-art viral-marketing campaign for the film and would like it to take place in Turkey, tracing Bond’s route across the country.

“Turkey?” Dagmar had asked. “Isn’t Turkey like a military dictatorship now?”

“The movie was shot before the coup,” Lincoln had explained. “And sad though the political situation may be, the studio would like its investment back.”

And so would I, Dagmar thought, thinking of her savings that were on the brink of extinction, all eaten by her company.

“I don’t have a good history with military governments,” she said. In a dark corner of her mind she could hear automatic weapons rattling, see bodies sprawled on the street, a great pillar of smoke that marked a massacre, roads lined with broken glass and burning autos.

Lincoln gave her a mild look.

“You handled yourself well,” he said.

“I was scared spitless the whole time.”

“This time,” said Lincoln, “you’ll have a whole posse to keep you out of trouble. I’ll be there myself.”

The game, Dagmar considered, would bring some money to Turkey, of which the generals would no doubt get their share. But Dagmar could make sure the game wouldn’t have to support the generals in any other way.

And she could make payroll. Her friends wouldn’t all be thrown out into the world.

And all that was required was she pretended that a few generals didn’t exist. And, it had to be admitted, she already did that every day.

“There’s never been a full-scale ARG in Turkey,” Lincoln said. “I expect it’ll be huge.”

“Is there enough of an IT backbone in Turkey to run one of these?”

“Turkey is supersaturated with IT,” Lincoln said. “They’re completely wired. A goodly percentage of the world’s hackers come from Turkey.”

Lincoln Jennings worked for Bear Cat, a public relations company that represented the studio. Dagmar had met him before, but not under that name-she’d encountered only his online handle, which was “Chatsworth Osborne Jr.” He was a complete alternate reality geek-a dedicated player of ARGs himself-and now he had the budget to stage one himself.

He was pretty well over the moon about it. This was some kind of long-buried dream for him.

A six-week game in two languages, with live-action meet-ups in a foreign country? Dagmar charged Lincoln a lot. She had to pay herself all the money she’d loaned the company, she had to rehire as much staff as she could, and she had to have enough left over to survive the next dry period. She built escalator clauses into the contract, getting a bonus if more than the usual number of people actually signed up to play. During the course of her job, she’d be getting several checks, each for seven figures.

The game she created took place around the margins of the movie’s action. Stunrunner had a straightforward script: a long series of encounters, some violent, some sexual, separated by chase scenes that took Bond through Turkey’s most iconic scenery, from Mount Ararat to the dome of the Blue Mosque. In Dagmar’s hands the story became much larger, sprawling out from the movie’s spare story line. She made use of the characters from the movie and added a couple dozen of her own, either on Bond’s team, the Iranians’, or members of a freelance group of mercenaries who wanted the Iranian secrets for their own reasons. She was tempted to make them SPECTRE but decided against it. The Bond films seemed to have forgotten about SPECTRE.

The film’s Operation Stunrunner, in which Bond first was inserted into Iran, then made his thrilling escape, in Dagmar’s hands took on a far more Byzantine aspect, now not simply about the mullahs’ nuclear secrets but about security in the Strait of Hormuz, about the mercenary outfit’s attempt to hijack an oil tanker, and about Semiramis Orga’s attempt to establish herself as an opium smuggler.

Semiramis Orga, by the way, was a character from the movie, the bad Bond girl who gets killed about a third of the way in. (The less bad Bond girl, the one converted to virtue by a night with Bond and who flew off with him in the end, was a Brit named Evelyn Modestbride.)

Dagmar’s story was told in many different ways. Radio plays, short films, coded messages, comic strips, pictures with coded messages between the Photoshopped layers, sound files with text hidden in the code.

Then, as if the story wasn’t complex enough, Dagmar broke it up into bits, fragments that would be hidden online on Web pages, buried in source code, sent in email, and even available in plain sight if you just knew where to look.

Many of the game’s puzzles had a crossword theme. That was Dagmar’s idea, inspired by the notion that the answers-if they stuck very carefully to the Turkish setting and to elements of the Stunrunner story-would be the same no matter which language the clues were given in. Turkish, like English, was written in the Latin alphabet. She wouldn’t have to explain to players how the puzzles were supposed to work or cut across too many cross-cultural divides. Dagmar hired a crossword designer and signed her to nondisclosure agreements the length and complexity of which surprised her.

It was the task of the players-ostensibly working to assist Bond’s front company, Universal Exports-to tease out the hidden history of Operation Stunrunner, to locate the fleeing Bond and help him escape from his enemies. In the early days of the game the players had kept running across an ad for the Mystery Tour, a twelve-day journey across Turkey, with absolutely no itinerary given.

Within the game, there was a lot of hype given to the Mystery Tour. The players were always overhearing nonplayer characters talking about it.

There was a certain amount of suspense about this game element. Everyone wondered if players would actually fly across an ocean on just a few weeks’ notice, all in order to get on a bus with absolutely no idea where it was going.

Indeed they would. And they were joined by a lot of Turkish players who were deeply enthusiastic about such a large-scale game appearing in their country and in their own language.

Even though the work schedule was still frantic and though there were two live events after this one, Dagmar had felt a giddy sense of relief ever since the Mystery Tour’s passenger manifest had topped two hundred and then kept growing till the buses were filled with nearly seven hundred people. Nearly 2 million others were participating online.

The Mystery Tour players had witnessed a villain’s breathtaking helicopter escape past the great stone heads of Mount Nemrut. They had pursued clues through the canyons and spectacular stone chimneys of Cappadocia and tracked the killer of Semiramis Orga through the ruins of ancient Perge. Now they were hunting Bond through Ephesus while conferring online with others who were playing from their homes and offices.

This was another freaking great triumph for Dagmar and Great Big Idea, is what this was.

Give me a big enough budget, Dagmar thought, and I’ll convince millions of people that you’re cool.

And how much, she asked herself rhetorically, is that worth?

Lots, she thought. To certain people, anyway.

Her thoughts froze at the sight of a pair of armed police. They were ambling along the tree-lined road toward Dagmar and Mehmet-paying them no attention, grinning and bantering with each other.

But the machine pistols they carried weren’t banter. They were the voice of the new regime.

Maybe, she thought, these two weren’t supporters of the generals. Maybe they were just ordinary cops, not fascists or murderers. Maybe they hated the new government, the new restrictions, the new gangster paramilitaries who were strutting in the sun of the generals’ protection.

And maybe they didn’t. Maybe they were loathsome creeps who supported martial law and tortured suspects with cattle prods.

The point was that Dagmar couldn’t know what they were, nor could anyone else. She had no choice but to be afraid. It was the only rational option.

And the police would sense that. Even if they didn’t support the junta, they’d sense the fear and resentment of the population, and that would put the police and the people on different sides of a gulf that was going to get wider and wider as the situation went on.

The first thing that totalitarianism did, she thought, was equalize suspicion among the whole population. Anyone could be a suspect; anyone could be an informer; anyone could be a killer, in or out of uniform.

Mehmet protectively stepped in front of Dagmar as they walked, leaving the rest of the road to the police. The cops smiled and nodded as they passed, and Dagmar smiled and nodded back. She felt that they had to know that her gesture was clearly forced, clearly false.

The police passed and went back to their own conversation.

The tension trickled slowly out of Dagmar’s spine, the fear as it ebbed being replaced by anger.

Damn it, she thought. This was a lovely country. It wasn’t fair that she had to be afraid of the people who ran it.

Learned Chatter Scrambles Peen

Alaydin says:

6 Across. Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus… WTF? Something after that?

Classicist says:

Imperator, maybe?

Alaydin says:

11 letters.

Hippolyte says:

“Ant Only Loses 1, Clips Her.”

Desi says:

Ant Only minus 1 is Antony. Was Mark Antony here?

Corporal Carrot says:

The Roman or the singer?

Alaydin says:

Elton J. was here.

Corporal Carrot says:

If you clip her, does that turn her into a he?

Hippolyte says:

7 ltrs.

Classicist says:

ARSINOE. Antony had Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoe IV murdered in Ephesus. Right in the Artemisium.

Hippolyte says:

Thanks! Artemisium answrs 5 dn, btw.

Burcak says:

omg! 6 across! mithridates!

Classicist says:

How do you know?

Hippolyte says:

I’m standing right next to B’cak and looking at it. C Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus Mithridates. Inscribed on the biggest gate in town!

Classicist says:

There’s got to be a story behind that!

ReVerb says:

I’m standing next to a building marked “porneion.” Does that mean what I think it does?

Hanseatic says:

Hey! There’s a wreath on Arsinoe’s tomb! Semiramis Orga’s name is on the ribbon! I’m uploading a picture!

Culinary Institute of America, Initially

Dagmar and Mehmet walked through the gate of the ancient city into the parking lot, where tour buses and visitors’ cars were parked next to stands offering guidebooks, postcards, porcelain, soft drinks, Turkish delight, jewelry, apple tea, textiles, ice cream, hand-carved meerschaum pipes, brassware, and camel rides.

Dagmar hadn’t yet seen a camel in Turkey that didn’t have a tourist on it. But then she was here on the wrong day for the camel fighting, apparently another local attraction.

As Dagmar stepped into the parking lot she was immediately surrounded by hucksters offering their wares. Ten postcards one euro. Scarves genuine pashmina pashmina. Guidebook Ephesus, beautiful pictures. My place has everything but customers, please come in. Ten postcards one euro. Ten postcards one euro. Ten postcards…

Dagmar smiled at them all politely but otherwise didn’t respond. Not even to the sign that offered, with unusual frankness, GENUINE FAKE WATCHES.

One bus stood out from the others, with a telescoping antenna that towered as high as the nearby cypress trees. The antenna captured the live feed from Dagmar’s cameramen and relayed it to nearby Selcuk, where Lincoln’s technicians had installed a colossal IT structure that featured high-bandwidth connections to the Internet along with a satellite uplink. The rig provided many more baud than Dagmar would actually need, though she was grateful for the room to maneuver.

Dagmar knocked on the door, and the bus driver, Feroz, opened the door with a hiss of hydraulics. Dagmar bounced up into the interior, happy to be liberated from the hucksters and their polite insistence that she buy their tourist crap. Mehmet came aboard, and Dagmar made way for him as she looked around at a mobile headquarters that would have done Ernst Stavro Blofeld proud.

The side windows in the fore part of the bus had been blacked out. Flatscreens were everywhere, most of them carrying live feed from the cameras that were following the players around Ephesus. Others were turned to sites where gamers were meeting online and exchanging information, others to pages from the game that were due to receive updates.

Another screen showed a site with the crossword puzzle, where Dagmar’s crossword designer Judy Strange was monitoring the players’ progress in solving her clues.

“I thought they’d take forever on the one about Lysimachus,” she said as Dagmar looked over her shoulder. “They got that right away.”

“Never underestimate their mastery of trivia,” Dagmar said.

“No, I won’t,” said Judy. She was a short, intense woman with dark-rimmed glasses and abundant dark hair partially confined by a rhinestone-studded plastic tiara. A dozen semiprecious stones glittered on the piercings in each ear. She wore long sleeves to cover tattoos that ran down to her wrists-she and Dagmar had both judged that Turkey wasn’t really ready for a glimpse of Judy’s body art.

Her body was craned forward to study the screen from just a few inches away. Judy wasn’t shortsighted, Dagmar had concluded, she was just overintense.

“ ‘Imperator,’ ” she muttered. The players had just solved another one.

Dagmar patted Judy’s shoulder, a coach encouraging a valuable player, and made her way toward the rear of the bus. On the way she paused by the cooler built into the aisle behind the side door and opened the lid. Briefly she contemplated a beer-drinking an Efes in the city, Ephesus, that had inspired its name would be a singularly appropriate thing. But she decided that a beer shortly after eight in the morning was degenerate behavior even for her and dutifully pulled out a plastic bottle of water. She went to the door that sealed off the rear third of the bus, knocked, and entered.

The back of the bus had been transformed into a lounge/study for Dagmar and her senior project heads. There was a long central table and plush benches along the sides and back. And, because this was the sort of place it was, there were the flatscreens and keyboards, too.

Lincoln sat on one of the benches, eating a honeyed pastry he’d bought from one of the vendors. He pointed vaguely at the screens.

“It seems to be going well,” he said.

“So far,” Dagmar said, crossing her fingers, “so good.”

She had never bossed a game so logistically complex as this one, concluding as it did in a twelve-day tour of a foreign country, with six live events scheduled in six locations-unique in the annals of gaming, and something Dagmar hoped she’d never have to do again.

Yet Ephesus was the fourth event, and so far nothing had gone wrong. If only fortune held through Ankara and Istanbul, she would dutifully give thanks to her long-overstretched luck and return, for a week’s vacation, to the beaches of Antalya.

Dagmar opened the water bottle, took a long drink, and sat opposite Lincoln. Lincoln gave her a blissful grin, and Dagmar was reminded that while she was working, Lincoln was having the time of his life.

Lincoln was, she supposed, in his sixties. He had a large, noble head, with graying hair worn over the tops of his ears and sideburns stretched halfway down his jaw. He wore metal-rimmed sunglasses that would have done credit to the face of Elvis.

Dagmar supposed Lincoln had been quite a lad, back in the days of Disco Fever.

He licked honey from his fingers.

“How are plans for Ankara shaping up?” he asked.

“Pretty well. Too much depends on how the players react to today’s update.” She took off her panama hat and ran her fingers through the hair that had gone gray while she was still a teenager.

“Sometimes I hate our kind of synergy,” she said.

“The synergy’s the coolest thing about it.”

“I know.”

“So you hate the coolest thing about the work you do.”

Dagmar shrugged. “Who among us is not a mass of contradiction?” She looked at him narrowly. “You, for instance,” she added.

He returned an amused look as he brushed crumbs from his embroidered Guatemalan peasant shirt.

“Oh yes,” Dagmar insisted. “My tech guy Richard has been with your techs on all your installations. You’ve been installing these colossal servers heavily wired into the local infrastructure, and everything’s got all satellite uplink capability.”

Lincoln affected surprise at the question. “You do that, when you have to.”

“Sure, when I have to. In places like rural Cappadocia and Mount Nemrut. But in Ankara? And Istanbul? They’re all heavily wired already; it’s easier to get bandwidth that’s already in place.”

He lifted his shoulders. “There’s a lot of money at stake. I want to be thorough.”

“And we’re the people who know better than anyone what kind of hardware we need on-site. Normally we install everything and link it up. But you have your own people for that.”

“I’m in the media business myself,” Lincoln said. “Why should I pay you to do a job that can be done by my own employees?”

Dagmar pointed her water bottle at him.

“When we install stuff,” she said, “it’s just for the live event, just to transmit the live feed; we take it out later and reuse it. But Richard tells me that it would take a lot of effort to rip your hardware out. For all intents and purposes, it’s permanently installed, as if you expect this game to go on past the final event on Saturday.”

She cocked her head and looked at him.

“What game are you running, Lincoln? What are you really doing here?”

He laughed.

“I’m not going into competition with you,” he said, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“If you were, you wouldn’t be doing it from here anyway. And if you want to run Turkish ARGs, be my guest.”

Lincoln shook his head.

“We ran the numbers,” he said. “It was cheaper to leave the gear in place, and resell it to local IT companies.”

“Local IT companies wouldn’t leave them in place,” Dagmar said. “They’d move all the equipment to their own server farms. So mooring everything the way you have doesn’t make sense.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“I must be incompetent, then.”

Dagmar fixed him with a long stare.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think you’re up to something I’m not supposed to know about.”

He looked away.

“I can’t say yes or no to that,” he said.

Anger sizzled along Dagmar’s nerves.

The last time she’d had a boss who kept secrets from her, people had been killed.

Rather than screaming and smashing Lincoln on the head with the water bottle, she decided to use sweet reason.

“We’re in a military dictatorship here,” she said. “I need to know if this is something that will put my people in danger.”

Lincoln seemed surprised.

“No,” he said. “Not at all.”

“You’re not helping the generals, are you?”

He shook his head.

“Maybe I can tell you soon,” he said. “But not now.” He turned to her, and she could see his blue eyes gazing at her from behind his Elvis glasses. “But in the meantime,” he said, “there’s some important diplomacy in your immediate future.”

Dagmar was instantly wary.

“With whom?”

He smiled.

“Have I mentioned that I enjoy your correct grammar?”

“Who with?” she said.

He sighed and put both hands flat on the table.

“The junta,” he said. “I’ve received an invitation for you, from General Bozbeyli’s office. They’ve invited you and your staff to a reception at the presidential palace, two nights from now. Thursday.”

Dagmar was horrified.

“You’re joking!” she said.

“The game’s been getting a lot of publicity,” Lincoln said, “and the movie is going to be the best thing for Turkish tourism since the last Bond movie shot here. So the generals want to associate themselves with all this glamor and success, and show how hip they are to modern technology and culture. So you are going to the palace to be thanked for all you’ve done for the nation.”

“There’s a live event on Thursday,” Dagmar said. “And after that there’ll be plenty of work to do, preparing for the finale in Istanbul.”

He looked at her levelly. “Dagmar,” he said, “refusing this invitation would put your people in danger. And yourself. And the hundreds of civilians you’re carting around the country by plane and bus. Not to mention the millions invested in the game.”

“I don’t want to be used to validate this government in any way.”

“You can say whatever you like after you leave the country,” Lincoln said. “But two nights from now, you’re going to talk to Bozbeyli about what a wonderful time you’re having in his country, and compliment him on his choice of ties.”

Fear and fury pulsed through Dagmar with every throb of her heart. She gave an angry laugh.

“I have a personal history with military governments,” she said, “and it’s not good.”

“Last time,” said Lincoln, “they didn’t invite you to the palace.”

“Ha. That’s supposed to make me feel safer? I-”

There was a knock on the door.

“Come in!” Dagmar snarled. She didn’t want an interruption now, not when she had a full-blown tantrum she wanted to throw.

Mehmet opened the door far enough for his head and his baseball cap.

“The crossword puzzle has been solved,” he said. “Time for the update.”

“Did they find the wreath?” Dagmar asked.

“Yes.”

“And the coded message on the back of the ribbon?”

“Yes, they did.”

Dagmar grabbed her hat and her water bottle and rose. The players had done their part; now she would have to do hers.

The players had solved all available puzzles, and now an upgrade would refresh some established Web pages with new information, and this information-much of it in puzzle form-would lead to other Web pages and other puzzles, all newly uploaded.

Dagmar would stage-manage the update from the trailer in Ephesus, but the update wouldn’t actually be happening from there. Her staff in the Simi Valley offices were much better able to handle the technical details, but she wanted to be on hand in case there were problems.

Not that she could fix them; she just wanted to fret anxiously alongside her team.

She took her phone out of its holster and pressed the speed dial for the Simi Valley office, where-after midnight, California time-Helmuth and Mike and the others were presumably standing by. Her phone used Voice-over-Internet Protocol, which made sense because it could grab the signal from only a few feet away, right in the trailer, and because the phone came right out of the box with military-grade encryption, which minimized the chance of any of the players stealing her signal and trying to read game clues.

As she passed the door she turned to look back at Lincoln, who looked pointedly at her faded T-shirt and khakis.

“Buy a nice dress,” he said. “Shoes, clutch purse, et cetera. And put the boys in suits and ties.”

Dagmar glared at him.

“This is so going on your bill,” she said.