Deep State

CHAPTER FIVE

Dagmar spent the next fifteen minutes shivering in the bathroom of her hotel room. She knew there were police standing just outside the bathroom door-Indonesian cops, with riot shields and samurai helmets with metal plates protecting their necks-and that they were waiting for her with weapons raised. She knew that she would be smashed to the ground the second she left the security of the bathroom.

In Jakarta she had learned to recognize the smell of burning human flesh. Shuddering on the commode, she wept as the scorching, greasy smell filled her nostrils.

Reality returned in its slow, relentless way. The scent faded. Dagmar spent a moment just staring at the washroom door, then rose, wiped her eyes, washed her face, and took the elevator to the rooftop bar of the hotel.

Her team awaited her. The day’s newspapers, with their pictures of Dagmar and Bozbeyli, had been neatly folded and placed on a glass table; a smiling, efficient employee in a bow tie now stood behind the bar, waiting for the day’s drinkers.

How normal it is, Dagmar marveled.

The waiter offered her tea and poured it into a tulip-shaped glass with great efficiency, from a copper teapot decorated with elegant filigree.

The Turks were damned serious about their tea, Dagmar thought. Thank God.

She clutched the teacup like a Titanic survivor snatching a life preserver. It had been a little over an hour since she had left the bar on her reconnaissance to Gulhane Park, but it seemed like days ago. As she was looking through the glass walls over the roofs of Sultanahmet, it was impossible to see that there had been a disturbance at all: the gulls still circled the Blue Mosque; the Sea of Marmara still blazed with azure beauty; the sound of the muezzins still echoed in the streets.

The demonstration seemed to have fallen clean out of history. Dagmar assumed there would be nothing in the news about it. Pictures snapped by tourists might be the only evidence that anything had ever happened, that and the broken heads and bones of the regime’s victims.

“I told you not to go there,” Richard said. He had avoided the demo entirely by detouring around the back end of the Blue Mosque. “What were you doing in the middle of it?”

“You said not to go to the hippodrome,” Judy said. Her voice was intense. “We went through the park.”

“We couldn’t see any of it until they were there,” Dagmar said. “And then it was too late.”

She reached for her glass of tea. Her hand shook, so she held the tulip glass in both hands and sipped from it. She looked at Ismet.

“I should thank you,” she said. “You kept me from being clubbed.”

“You’re welcome,” Ismet said. His brown eyes looked at her through his dark-rimmed spectacles. His face took on a look of concern.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “Can I get you a drink or… something?”

“Sorry. Bad memories.” Dagmar shivered to a surge of adrenaline. “I’m as all right as I’m going to be.”

She turned to Tuna.

“You saved us both,” she said. “If you hadn’t taken that cop out of the picture…”

“Bastard deserved it!” Tuna said.

“No doubt. But-”

Lincoln made a covert finger-to-lips gesture, then nodded to the ultrapolite barman. Paranoia seemed to flood the air like a faint whiff of tear gas. Tuna saw the gesture, shrugged, and changed the subject to something else equally explosive.

“I did military service when I was a young man,” he said. “I was stationed in?yrnak Province-lots of Kurds there. And do you know what my commander was doing?”

His voice grew louder, more indignant. Lincoln made his gesture again and was ignored.

“The army was in the spare parts business,” Tuna said. “People-just ordinary people-were being shot for their kidneys. Then the kidneys were sold on the international market for fifty-five thousand euros apiece-and the sad bastards who got shot were written up as Kurdish terrorists.”

Dagmar was staggered. “Organlegging?” she said.

Judy seemed equally appalled. “Has this been confirmed?” she asked. Like there were some NGOs that could be called in to verify a story like this, Pathologists Without Borders or something…

“I saw it,” Tuna said. His mouth quirked. “Or I saw the bodies, anyway. The colonel had some special killers who did the shootings for him. Everyone out there knew what was going on.” He made a pistol with two fingers and mimed a shot. “And do you know who the colonel reported to? General Dursun.” He slapped himself on the chest. “Our new prime minister.” He looked at Dagmar. “One of the old men you met at the Pink House. The fucker.”

There was a moment of silence. Dagmar sipped her tea, put the clear tulip glass back in its saucer. Glass rattled.

“Well,” Lincoln said. “That’s who we’re dealing with. The question is, do we go on with the live event tomorrow?”

Tuna waved a hand. “Of course we should.”

Dagmar decided that Tuna’s breezy confidence was perhaps a little premature.

“The players are across the bridge in Beyolu,” Dagmar said. “They’re far away from what happened this morning.”

“And they won’t hear about it,” Ismet said.

Which meant, Dagmar thought, that the situation hasn’t changed, as far as the game went. The idea struck Dagmar with surprising force. She resisted the notion: she preferred to think that because she had changed, so had everything else.

But no. It hadn’t. She still had six or seven hundred gamers on buses-at this hour scheduled to visit the Grand Bazaar, fine shopping since 1461, a last chance to buy carpets or meerschaum, spices or ceramics, brassware or leather goods, before they bade farewell to James Bond’s glittering world on Saturday.

Later this afternoon they would visit the Suleiman Mosque and then Hagia Sofia, assuming the authorities hadn’t closed it in the aftermath of the riot-but by that point, she reckoned, any sign of the demonstration would have been long since cleaned up.

The gamers were in no more danger than they had been two hours earlier. Or no less danger. It was all a big unknown, but for the life of her Dagmar couldn’t see why the government would bother to harass them.

“Let’s go,” she said. “We can always call it off tomorrow, if there’s a revolution in the streets-and if there’s trouble, we’ll just distribute the puzzles in the hotel instead of on the excursion.”

Judy sighed and adjusted her spectacles.

“I suppose,” she said, “that means there have to be puzzles.”

“I’m afraid so,” said Dagmar.

Laptops, netbooks, and phones were deployed. The history and sights of the Bosporus were brought to blazing life on screens and salient facts and images copied to files. Judy had a program for creating crosswords: she and Tuna huddled over her screen, working in intent collaboration as they tried to find clues that would be roughly equivalent in both Turkish and English and to find answers that would work in both the Turkish and English alphabets. This was accomplished by instructing the program to ignore the difference between c and c, i and y, S? and s. Fortunately, the program didn’t care how the words were actually pronounced.

Ismet watched with interest-he hadn’t actually seen one of these brainstorming sessions before-and offered some helpful suggestions. Mehmet turned up to let them know that Zafer Musa had taken Feroz to a clinic in Izmir and that the bus driver had been patched up. Lincoln told Dagmar to see that the bus driver got a generous bonus, then got brandy from the bar, sipped and listened, and-judging from the smile on his face-went to his happy place, wherever that was.

Richard, with help from Mehmet, found all the hardware he needed online or by phone and set off to collect it.

The waiter produced menus, and food was ordered from the restaurant downstairs. The bar was filled with the scents of kofte, baked chicken wings, kebaps strong with the aroma of cumin. Baklava made its appearance, Turkish-style with pistachios, and the waiter offered small cups of Turkish coffee that soon had everyone as wired as if they’d been mainlining Red Bull for the past three days.

In late afternoon, Lincoln received a call from the police. The permit to use Gulhane Park had been canceled, due to “unforseen complications.” Lincoln thanked the caller and hung up.

The plotting session went on.

By evening, Richard had his gear in a rented van and he and Mehmet and the team’s three hired cameramen were practicing with the technology. The crossword was finished, and Judy dashed off to her room, where she had a printer that would run off hundreds of copies in the next hour.

The bar was filled with drinkers, cigarette smoke, and ghastly Central European pop music. Tuna went to the bar to smoke a cigarette and order a celebratory raky. Lincoln went out onto the balcony, away from the music, to phone the operator of the excursion boats they were renting and to give the man the number of his corporate credit card. That left Dagmar and Ismet sitting in adjoining chairs. Dagmar shifted the weight of her laptop in order to ease a cramp in one hamstring.

“Thanks again for helping,” she said.

“I enjoy watching you work,” he said. “It’s all so intricate. Do you normally do your job under such pressure?”

“Normally we don’t work under the threat of physical violence,” Dagmar said, “but there’s always a lot of things that have to be done at the last second. And we have to keep things away from the spies.”

He was genuinely surprised. His brows lifted well up above the line of his spectacles.

“Spies?”

“There are players who stalk us-try to hack our computers, or steal scripts from the actors, or follow us around in hopes that we’ll drop a clue.”

Ismet seemed delighted.

“Do you get good at escape and evasion?”

“Escape and evasion?” It sounded like a course in commando school. “I don’t know about that,” she said, “but I’ve gotten good at hiding things.”

He smiled. “Tomorrow,” he said, “you’re going to hide seven hundred people.”

“Let’s hope,” said Dagmar, “that I do.”

He raised his Efes to his lips. “I think we’ll be fine,” he said.

She looked at Ismet with a sudden flare of interest. She’d met him only the day before, but since then he had so efficiently inserted himself into her process that she hadn’t noticed till now.

“You keep saving me,” she said. “Yesterday from social embarrassment, this morning from getting knocked into the hospital. Is this sort of thing normal for you?”

One of Ismet’s small hands made a circular motion in the air, a local gesture that Dagmar knew meant something like, “Oh yes, I’ve done that countless times.”

His actual words were a little more modest.

“Lincoln told me to be useful,” he said.

She narrowed her eyes. “How long,” she said, “do I get to keep you?”

Dagmar saw a little flare of light behind the spectacles, as if he’d only just now realized that there was flirtation going on.

“I work for Lincoln,” he said. “Or rather, my PR firm does. You could request that I be kept around to rescue you when necessary.”

“Maybe I shall,” Dagmar said.

Tuna came barging up, a drink in his hand and wrapped in a cloud of harsh tobacco fumes.

“Shall we eat?” he said. “I’m hungry.”

Dagmar turned her eyes from Ismet with a degree of reluctance.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s probably time we did.”

Hippolyte says:

Oh, goodie! A boat ride!

Burcak says:

I wish I had brought a coat. Going to be cold out on the water.

Corporal Carrot says:

Wish I had Dramamine. I get seasick.

The next morning Dagmar stood above the golden span of the Bosporus Bridge from the vantage point on the steep hill of Ortakoy. Excursion boats drew their wakes across the deep slate of the straits below, tiny little water bugs alongside the enormous tidal surge given off by a brilliant white cruise ship so enormous that it seemed like a piece of the continent broken off and adrift.

A blustery cold wind blew from the Black Sea, and Dagmar wore a jacket against the chill, with the brim of a baseball cap shading her eyes from the sun, still low in the eastern sky. Behind her was Richard’s new electronic marvel, his rented gear packed into a Ford van, with an antenna strung from the van to a nearby plane tree, and another directional antenna mounted on a long wood plank aimed at Lincoln’s bunkered router up above Seraglio Point. A generator rumbled from a yellow trailer, spitting diesel smoke into the brisk wind.

They could have just grabbed a local signal-the area was saturated with IT-but the local bandwidth might not be up to the task. Their own gear, however improvised, was to be preferred…

“Reception is brilliant!” Richard called. “If only the rest of the world is getting it…”

He was busy on the phone to Great Big Idea HQ in Simi Valley, where it was late Friday night. Tens of thousands of American gamers, it was hoped, were awake to watch the game’s conclusion on live feed.

At least they would, if Richard’s jury rig worked.

The live event had gone perfectly to this point. Buses had taken the gamers from their digs in Beyolu to the quay in Ortakoy, where they filed happily aboard their excursion boats in the shadow of the district’s elaborate Mediciye Mosque, a structure that looked-to Dagmar, on her hill-like a Mississippi steamboat, with two filigreed funnel/minarets, an arched dome with a silhouette like an amidships paddlebox, and gingerbread dripping from the Texas deck… she wondered if the mosque’s nineteenth-century architects had in mind the era’s steamboats, chugging up and down the Bosporus in plain sight of the structure.

“Five by five! Five by five!” Richard shouted. By which Dagmar concluded that Simi Valley was receiving the transmissions just fine and that soon the finale of the Stunrunner game would be played out to its worldwide audience.

Dagmar got out her handheld and was aware of Ismet by her side mirroring her gesture. She looked over her shoulder to see Richard making a third call from his own phone, so that the guides on the three boats would get the message at the same time, and all three feeds would soon offer the last set of instructions given to the players.

“Universal Exports thanks you for your assistance to our sales associate Mr. Bond. We are pleased to report that he has returned to England in complete safety. But we would appreciate your assistance in helping to clarify a few final details…”

And the players were off.

Alaydin says:

“Foundation laid by lo’s grandson, where Yeats invoked mechanical bird.” wtf? 9 ltrs.

LadyDayFan says:

Googling Yeats + mechanical + bird gives a poem called “Sailing to Byzantium.”

Classicist says:

BYZANTIUM. lo’s grandson was Prince Byzas, who founded the city.

ReVerb says:

“Abdulmecid filled the Sultan’s garden here.” 10 letters.

Burcak says:

EZ, if yr Turk. DOLMABAHCE Palice. Dolma + bahce = filled + garden

Hanseatic says:

“Motivated by gadfly’s tongue, heifer drives Henry’s car.” 8 ltrs.

Desi says:

Henry’s car would be a Ford.

Classicist says:

BOSPORUS. lo was turned into a cow and driven across the Bosporus by a stinging fly. Bosporus is Greek for “cow-ford.”

Corporal Carrot says:

Do you have to have a doctorate in classics to get this stuff?

Maui says:

“Where snakes, pink lions, and Mad Fuat got their yah-yahs out.” (7 ltrs)

Classicist says:

I suspect my degree isn’t going to help with this one.

Burcak says:

Yah is Turkish for “mansion on water.” But which one?

LadyDayFan says:

Googling like fury here…

Snakes, Pink Lion, Egyptian, and Mad Fuat are all yahs along the Bosporus.

(Crescent and Star, Stephen Kinzer, p. 197.)

Hippolyte says:

But where are they?

Corporal Carrot says:

Realty Web page says Egyptian yah is for sale. Address in ORTAKOY.

ReVerb says:

Brilliant! We’re on our way!

The players in their boats laid little white tracks on the blue. Standing on the hill of Ortakoy, Dagmar finished her call and cast a glance at Ismet. He was dressed in his tan blazer and tie, and the blustery wind had brought a little color to his cheeks. He looked down at the distant Bosporus traffic as he held his phone to his ear, then nodded, smiled, and returned the phone to his pocket.

He looked up and smiled. The wind tossed his hair.

“What are you doing after this?” she asked.

“Back to working for our regular clients. I think the next job has to do with advertising a new series of electronic switches, mainly in trade journals.”

“Sounds peaceful.”

“Oh yes.” Ismet threw out an arm, at the spectacular Bosporus scene, the electronic world, at Stunrunner sizzling invisibly through the ether, its video streams reaching to outer space and back.

“This is the most fun I’ve had in ages!” he said.

“Other than the riot and the anxiety.”

He made an equivocal gesture.

“That’s my country now,” he said. “That sort of thing can happen at any time.”

Dagmar hadn’t been able to continue her brief flirtation with Ismet during the group dinner of the previous night, with everyone talking at once and passing mezes and drinks back and forth-and afterward she’d been too tired, her system having crashed after too many early mornings, too many nights on the go, and always worried that she, her friends, her charges, could end up on the points of bayonets…

And besides, she’d been having second thoughts. She had a bad history with office romance.

Her last lover, an actor she’d hired for one of her projects, had (1) turned out to be married and (2) been savagely murdered and, furthermore, had been killed on her account. That was two reasons for feeling guilty and miserable-more if you considered the wife.

He hadn’t been the last to die, either.

In the aftermath Dagmar had decided that the only remaining morally defensible position was to forget the world of relationships and concentrate on work. Which she had, for three years.

But still, she was planning a week’s vacation after the live event, the first vacation since the one that had gone so disastrously wrong in Jakarta. And the week could be a lot more fun with someone else along.

“Where do you actually live?” she asked.

He nodded across the water. “The Asia side, in Uskudar. I share an apartment with a colleague.”

“So you take the ferry every day?”

He made an equivocal gesture. “The ferry, the train, aircraft… I travel all over the place. I rent a single room in Ankara because we lobby the government, but I may have to give it up. The generals have their own structures in place, and a very firm idea of which interests they have to placate. They don’t respond to our efforts.” He tossed his head back. “Call me another dissatisfied customer of the regime.”

Richard stuck his head out of the van.

“Look at this! It’s beautiful!”

She turned and stepped up into the van and duckwalked to a better view, leaving the world of reverie for the more immediate sphere of video. The multiple feeds were indeed beautiful, digital icons of the packed tour boats hissing through the water, flags snapping, old Ottoman mansions lining the shores, most of them beautifully restored and probably worth millions, gamers bent over their puzzles, the sharp wind ruffling their hair… astern loomed the towers of the Bosphorus Bridge, the roadway suspended by a web of sun-etched cable. Dagmar’s heart leaped.

“Are those dolphins?” she cried.

“Yes.” Ismet peered into the van, shading his eyes with a hand.

“ ‘That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.’ ” Quoting Yeats.

Ismet looked at her curiously. “Did you say gong?”

Dagmar smiled.

“Yes,” she said. “I did. But Yeats said it first.”

They were back to the hotel in time for lunch. Richard would return his borrowed electric gear and everyone would have the afternoon off, after which they’d drive over the Golden Horn to a farewell dinner with the players, held in an enormous hotel ballroom. After that the players would go to a specially arranged screening of Stunrunner, which had opened worldwide the previous night, while the puppetmasters-who had already seen the movie dozens of times, on discs that came complete with their very own nondisclosure agreements and prepaid FedEx return envelopes-would go with the techs to the VIP suite in a Beyolu club, where the celebration would go on until exhaustion overtook them all-in Dagmar’s case, most likely before midnight.

Lunch, though, was not a planned event. Dagmar thought she might see if Ismet might want to join her for a midday snack at one of the cafes up the street.

But first she ran into Lincoln in the lobby of the hotel. He’d watched the game finale on his laptop, and when she walked through the door he rose to give her a rib-shattering embrace.

“Brilliant!” he said. “Absolutely brilliant!”

“Thank you,” she said. She felt as if her lungs had just been crushed.

He released her and stepped back. Dagmar gasped in oxygen.

“Dagmar,” Lincoln said. “Could I see you privately sometime this afternoon?”

“Sure.”

She cast a glance over her shoulder, where Richard, Tuna, and a half-dozen techs were trooping into the hotel. Cameras and tripods were tucked under their arms. Cables dragged empty metal sockets across the brown tile of the hotel foyer. Ismet was visible through the front window, talking on his phone.

“After lunch?” she suggested hopefully.

He nodded. “Call me when you have a moment. I’ll probably be somewhere in the hotel.” He looked up at the party of techs. “Can I help you with anything?”

Dagmar let Richard and the technicians sort out the gear, with Lincoln’s help. She took a turn around the lobby, waiting for Ismet to finish his conversation. Standing by herself, she felt a sudden rush of triumph surge through her veins, the heat of victory racing through a brain already a bit dazzled by its own ingenuity. Game brilliant, cool, and over; military thugs confounded; vacation in sight; nothing to do but celebrate.

Optimism seized her. She decided that she would ask Ismet to lunch, spend the night dancing with him in the Beyolu club, maybe drag him off to bed-assuming of course that she didn’t collapse first out of sheer exhaustion.

Maybe he’d be able to beg off from the week’s work of selling electric switches, head south with her to Antalya, spend a week dividing their time between lounging on the beach and having massively satisfying sex in a darkened hotel room…

Ismet finished his call and came into the lobby, neatly avoiding the electronic gear now being sorted into piles. He came to Dagmar and said, “I’m afraid I’ve got to leave.”

“Is something wrong?”

“My sister called.” He gestured with his right hand at the phone held in his left. “My grandma fell and had to go to the hospital.”

“Oh no!” Dagmar felt her carnal dreams spin down the drain even as her face and voice made the proper responses. “Is she badly hurt?”

“Broken arm. But she’s very frail and…” He hesitated. “Well, she doesn’t do well in settings like a hospital. She was raised in a nomad family, and had an arranged marriage to my grandfather, who was from the city…” Ismet gave an apologetic smile. “Anyway, I should go translate between her and the modern world.”

Dagmar’s mind swam with questions that she had never before asked any human being: Nomad? Your grandmother’s a nomad? What kind of nomad? Do you still have nomads in your family?

“If you can come to the dinner tonight,” Dagmar said, “or the party afterward, please feel free to join us.”

He seemed agreeable.

“If I can,” he said. “But I should say good-bye now.”

She hugged him and sensed his surprise at the gesture. He had an agreeable scent, a blend of Eastern spices, with a faint undertone of myrrh…

He returned her hug, gently, then went to the others and said his good-byes. Dagmar, aware of a host of possibilities silently drifting away, carried on a tide toward the Dardanelles, turned to Lincoln.

“You know,” she said, “we might as well have that conversation now.”

Lincoln had a corner room on the top floor of the hotel, with a wide bed, a rococo desk with an Internet portal, and broad windows that displayed spectacular views of the Blue Mosque. Another wall featured a dormer window complete with a window seat, and beyond the shambling bulk of Hagia Sofia.

“Nice,” Dagmar said, going to the broad window just as the muezzin began his call. He was echoed almost instantly by the muezzin in the small mosque behind the hotel, the one down by the old Byzantine gate, and then by calls from other small mosques in the area.

It was, Dagmar thought, one of the last times she’d hear this.

“You’re planning on going to Antalya tomorrow?” Lincoln asked.

“Yes,” Dagmar said. “Shouldn’t I?”

“I wouldn’t advise it. I’m not going to be happy until you’re on the far side of the border.”

She shrugged, another dream gone. She turned to face him.

“So much for my vacation,” she said.

“I’ve taken care of that.” Lincoln went the rococo desk and shuffled through folders: he took out an envelope and handed it to her.

“Compliments of Bear Cat,” he said. “First-class train tickets, and a week’s vacation in the beach resort of Aheloy.”

Dagmar blinked. “Where’s that?”

“The Moesian Riviera. Bulgaria.”

“Bulgaria?” Dagmar could only repeat the word.

“Fifty-six thousand square meters of beach in Aheloy,” Lincoln said. “Someone counted. Better beach than the French Riviera, too. Organic farms and vineyards just up the river-you’ll eat and drink extremely well in the local cafes.”

“Okay.” Cautiously. Bulgaria was not exactly what she’d planned.

Lincoln smiled. “I was there a few years after the Wall fell,” he said. “It was very quaint and olde-world, but I imagine it’s more twenty-first century now. And you’ll be just five kilometers from Sunny Beach, which is a hugely overdeveloped beach resort with boutiques and discos and bars, if that sort of thing is your preference.” He peered at her over the metal rims of his Elvis glasses. “I wasn’t sure.”

She looked back at him, into the startling blue eyes.

“Discos, huh?” she said. “Did you spend a lot of time in discos, back in the day?”

“Naturally.” He shrugged. “Disco was quite the cultural revolution, before overpopularity and Saturday Night Fever wrecked everything. The movie left out the gays and the drugs, and that was half the scene.”

Dagmar tried to picture Lincoln young, dancing in the patterned light of a spinning mirror ball, but failed.

Disco. To Dagmar it was just another style of music that had risen and then crashed, back before she was born. Like calypso, or ragtime.

“I don’t think discos are high on my list,” Dagmar said. “I just want to relax.” Her mind spun, trying to come up with objections to Lincoln’s scheme. She knew next to nothing about Bulgaria, nothing whatever about its Riviera. She didn’t even know enough to raise a valid protest.

“Aheloy is the place to relax, all right.” Lincoln was confident. “I put you in a bed-and-breakfast-you have a very nice bedsit, and you’ve got your own entrance to the garden, so you’ll have privacy.”

“Ah. Thanks.” She fumbled with the envelope, saw schedules, tickets, printouts. No pictures of the garden or the bedsit.

“People from all over Europe go to Bulgaria’s beaches for vacation,” Lincoln said. “Lots from Russia and Ukraine. And a great many Brits, because Bulgaria’s still a place they can afford.”

“Okay.” She was still not entirely pleased, though she couldn’t have said why.

“I’ve arranged for a car and driver to pick you up at the station, take you straight to the B-and-B; you can walk to the beach and be in the water by one thirty in the afternoon.”

“Thanks.” She peered again at the documents, then looked up at Lincoln. “Is anyone else coming?” she asked.

He seemed surprised. “Everyone else is going home tomorrow. Or so I thought.”

“And you?” Because a sliver of ice-cold paranoia had slipped into her brain and for a moment she wondered if she would arrive in Aheloy only to find Lincoln there, with roses and chocolates and a box of condoms, ready to launch himself on top of her once he’d gotten her in his secluded little love trap…

She’d never gotten anything like a sexual vibe from Lincoln, but then she’d been wrong before.

“I’m flying to New York tomorrow morning,” Lincoln said. He peered at her. “Don’t you like Bulgaria?”

“I don’t know enough to know whether I like Bulgaria or not. All I know is that I like their shoes.”

“I considered sending you to Rhodes,” Lincoln said. “But there are no air connections between Greece and Turkey right now, you’d have to fly through Bulgaria anyway, so I figured once there you might as well…” He flapped his hands.

“I’m sure it will be fine,” Dagmar said. “Thank you.”

“If you hate it, you can make other plans. But you’ll have to pay for them yourself.”

She patted his arm. “That’s fine. I appreciate your… kindness.”

He smiled, then swept out an arm.

“Why don’t you have a seat? Because I have another business proposition for you.”

Dagmar glanced around and decided on the window seat. Lincoln took the creaking wooden chair that went with the rococo desk.

“Does Great Big Idea have any commitments after this?” he asked.

“Nothing signed,” Dagmar said. “I’ve got three pitches coming up, one to Seagram’s, one to a Korean software firm, and another to a cable company that wants original content.”

“Television company?” His eyebrows lifted. “You’ll be doing television?”

“Television and game both,” Dagmar said. “The two will be linked.”

Lincoln was impressed. “Must pay well.”

“Television pays well because the content provider has to wade through endless network hassle in order to do her job,” Dagmar said. “Frankly, if it weren’t for a whole season’s worth of checks, I’d rather sell the whiskey.”

Lincoln smiled. “Not the software?”

“The Koreans want us to tell them how to sell their product,” Dagmar said. “I don’t think they have much of a future in the North American market.”

“So you might,” Lincoln said, “have room for another project.”

Dagmar waved an arm.

“Bear Cat wants another ARG?”

“Not Bear Cat.”

She settled into the window seat and gave him a level look.

“I suppose you’re going to explain to me why you’ve been emplacing servers all over Turkey.”

Gracefully he shifted course.

“You did a brilliant thing in the last twenty-four hours,” Lincoln said. “You faked out the generals and made them look a bit silly and satisfied your customer base.”

“I made myself a nervous wreck.”

“I gather that’s… normal in your line of work.”

“Anxiety’s normal. Physical danger isn’t.”

Except for me, she thought. My friends get to die for me.

Lincoln placed his elbows on the chair arms and steepled his fingers before him.

“I have… friends,” he said. “Contacts. And when The Long Night of Briana Hall came online a few years ago, and your friends were killed…”

Dagmar flashed him a warning look. “I don’t talk about that,” she said.

“I don’t want you to.” He spoke quickly. “I don’t actually want to know anything.” He relaxed a little, leaned back against the chair’s pink satin cushion. “I just want to say that I looked into some things-where your friend Charlie’s money came from, for one thing-and I read some reports from the FBI and the LAPD, and I drew my own conclusions.”

Dagmar tensed. Lincoln looked at her.

“You handled yourself well,” he said. “That’s all I’m saying. I’m not making judgments; I’m not making accusations. But from where I’m standing, you did well.”

“You don’t know what I did.”

“I don’t,” Lincoln said. “Not really. I only have my guesses.” He raised a hand as she prepared again to object. “And as I said, I don’t want to know-so if you ever have the urge to confess anything, don’t do it to me.”

What makes you think I have anything to confess? she thought-and then decided she didn’t actually want the answer to that question.

“And-as far as the botnet goes-you did well there, too.”

A cold shaft of terror pierced her. Panic yammered in the back of her head. Lincoln knew about that?

Dagmar decided to counterattack. She glared at him.

“So who the hell are you, really?” she demanded. “I checked out Bear Cat, it’s a real outfit, and you’re there on the Web page, but who are you really? Publicity flacks don’t have access to FBI reports.”

He smiled thinly. “I’m not a flack; I’m an account executive. You should know the terminology; you’re in the advertising business.”

“Sorry.” She put as much sarcasm into the single word as she could.

“Sometimes I’m in a position to rain money on Bear Cat,” Lincoln said. “And in return they’re kind enough to provide me with credentials.”

A lightning revelation seemed to strobe across the inside of Dagmar’s skull.

“Oh Christ,” she said, “you’re not telling me you’re some kind of spy.” She began to laugh. “A spy using a James Bond film as a cover! Talk about postmodern!”

“I used to be a spy,” Lincoln said. “I was a spy for thirty years.” He gave a little amused bow from the waist. “Now I’m a consultant. Advertising, and other things. Consulting pays much better.”

She just looked at him.

“And you’re telling me this because…?”

“I want to hire Great Big Idea,” Lincoln said, “to do just what you’ve been doing.”

“Which is what?”

Lincoln waved a hand in an elaborate pattern as he spoke.

“What do you do in your games, Dagmar? You teach people how to use and break codes, to do detailed research, to solve intricate puzzles. You provide raw data, which the players must put into usable form. You send people on missions into the real world to find information or locate objects. Your players have to find hidden motivations and meanings, distinguish truth from fancy. You organize events, both online and in the real world, in which complete strangers unite to complete a common task.”

He blinked his blue eyes at her.

“Do you know what those skills are, Dagmar? Those are practical intelligence skills. I want you to do a project for us.”

She blinked at him. “So you want me to create a game? For the CIA, or the NSA, or whatever it is you actually work for? To train people how to do their jobs.”

“That,” said Lincoln, “would tread on too many toes. We already have plenty of training facilities and trainers.”

“What, then?”

Lincoln smiled and then told her.

She would have laughed, if she hadn’t been so surprised.