Deep State

ACT 2
CHAPTER SIX

After Bulgaria-which was lovely, exactly the vacation Dagmar needed, sipping gin and tonics as she reclined on a chaise set on a couple of Aheloy’s fifty-six thousand square meters of beach while about eighteen varieties of barely clothed male flesh competed to keep her drink topped up-so after the return to California, and after the set of pitches failed, there was nothing to do but take Lincoln up on his offer. So she found herself on the island of Cyprus, in a set of offices overlooking a British runway baking in the Mediterranean sun.

The building was old but well maintained, and featureless in what Dagmar came to recognize as a military absence of style, efficiency combined with cheapness and an almost fetishistic lack of anything approaching aesthetics-aluminium-framed windows overlooked the runway’s vast expanse, high ceilings with fans and ranked fluorescents, walls thick with decades-old ochre yellow paint and featureless save for pinholes where picture hooks had once been, or placards announcing what to do in case of fire or in the event of an interruption in electric service. Out of some warehouse had come graceless furniture made of metal and painted in unaesthetic colors that only the military employed, as if marking their property by the application of a coat of Ugly.

The noise from the runway was continuous; the windows rattled in their frames; the fluorescent light seemed to strobe in some hard-to-define, headache-inducing way. Air-conditioning had been retrofitted into the building in ways that made sense only to the British, resulting in zones of wintry climate that alternated with areas of Sahara heat. The lavatories featured the world’s most useless and inefficient toilet paper, which Dagmar could only conclude was created to some ancient wartime government specification, from a time when only cheap pulp paper, filled with little chunks of actual undigested wood, was available.

Piled on the metal desks were cardboard boxes full of thousands of dollars’ worth of computer equipment: flat-screen monitors, office towers crammed with the latest in graphic interfaces, a million times more processing capacity than the entire Manhattan Project, DVD burners, modems, printers. Other boxes held software: office suites, programs for editing video and graphics, software packaging for budgeting and ultrafast communication.

“The T3 connection is already installed,” Lincoln said.

He showed Dagmar and her posse their work space with what seemed to be a sense of pride. They shuffled along after him, jet-lagged, not quite believing they were actually here.

Lincoln made a grand gesture taking in the room, the metal desks, the computers and software in their boxes.

“Welcome to the ops room,” he said.

Ops room, Dagmar thought.

“Back home,” she said, “we’d just call it an office.”

It was almost as if Dagmar had decided to remake Stunrunner. Richard the Assassin had come along, tickled to use his computer-ninja skills on real-world applications. Dagmar had hired Judy again, not so much because she needed a puzzle designer as because Judy had a talent for creating and controlling intricate situations. And Dagmar had brought along her head programmer, a German who bore the name Helmuth von Moltke, a moniker he’d inherited from an ancestor who had once conquered France.

Helmuth dressed better than anyone else in the party, in gray cashmere slacks, a starched white shirt with chunky gold cuff links, and a dark Nehru jacket, a fashion choice that put him in a league with a whole series of Bond villains, including Dr. No, Hugo Drax, and the impeccably groomed Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Helmuth was, generally speaking, a match for any creature of Ian Fleming’s imagination. In his circuits of the Earth, the sleekly blond Helmuth occupied the Party Orbit: he girdled the world looking for bars, music, and lonely females. In LA, he seemed to spend half his life on the Sunset Strip and had apparently done away with any need for sleep-a useful skill in a programmer at any time.

The rest of the Great Big Idea staff remained in Simi Valley, though their expertise and advice could be called upon at any time. In any case, they would all be very busy-the Seagram’s people had reconsidered, and Great Big Idea was now prepping a full-fledged ARG for them. This was the first Great Big Idea game that Dagmar would not actually write herself, and even though she’d hired a substitute who seemed professional and imaginative and who was even willing to relocate to California for three months, a low twelve-volt anxiety now hummed in Dagmar’s nerves, sixteen cycles per second of uncertainty and unease.

Lincoln invited Dagmar into his office while Helmuth, Richard, and Judy began to pillage the cardboard boxes. The ops room and the hardware would be set up and configured to their specifications.

Lincoln’s office had the same bare, dull yellow walls as the ops room, and he had a metal desk identical to the others. There was a safe with a digital lock, and Lincoln had also equipped himself with an Aeron office chair, a marvel of lightweight alloy, pneumatics, and material science. He sat in this and leaned back with a blissful smile.

“You’ve pimped out your office,” Dagmar observed.

“Note the other feature.” He pointed at the wall, to a poster where a silhouette of a sinking aircraft carrier was accompanied by the slogan LOOSE TWEETS SINK FLEETS.

“This has all the potential of a security nightmare,” Lincoln said. “We’ve got to be very strict, very correct, from the start. Particularly about code names.”

“We did all right during Stunrunner,” Dagmar said. “And we were in Turkey then, right in the security zone, with hundreds of gamers surrounding us and eager to find out our secrets.”

“The problem with Cyprus,” Lincoln said, “is that it’s lousy with spies.”

“Ha. You should feel right at home.”

“Cyprus is a crossroads,” Lincoln said. “Here we’ve got Turkish nationalist fanatics and Greek nationalist fanatics. We’ve got Greek spies, Turkish spies, Syrian and Egyptian spies, Israeli spies, British and American spies.”

“And there’s us,” Dagmar said.

Lincoln looked at her with great seriousness. “We’re not actually spies,” Lincoln said. “We’re special ops.”

“Oh,” she said, startled. “Sorry.”

“I want to give a special warning.” Lincoln gave her a stern look. “There’s a Russian colony down the road in Limassol, and I want you to stay away from them.”

Dagmar smiled. “Afraid I’ll spill everything to Rosa Klebb?”

“I’m afraid you’ll be drugged, raped, robbed, and murdered,” Lincoln said. “Some of those guys are old-school Russian Maffya left over from the day when Cyprus was the money-laundering capital of the world.”

Uneasiness fluttered in Dagmar’s belly. Her smile froze to her face.

She had a bad history with the Russian Maffya.

“I was station chief in Nicosia in the nineties,” Lincoln went on. “At least a couple hundred billion dollars flowed through here to tax havens in the West, and I drove myself crazy trying to keep track of it all. Russia went bankrupt, but Cyprus practically had a golden age, if you don’t count the bombings and shootings.” He saw Dagmar’s face, and his expression softened. “Sorry,” he said, misinterpreting. “I didn’t mean to shock you.”

Dagmar decided she wasn’t going to think about Austin’s death right now.

“I’m not shocked,” she said. “But sometimes I forget that we’re here doing something, uh, real.”

“Maybe,” Lincoln ventured, “it’s best if you think of it as a game.”

Dagmar thought of bullets, bodies, smoke floating over cities. From the nearby runway came the sound of a flight jet aircraft launching into the air, a sound that lent an uneasy reality to Dagmar’s thoughts.

“I don’t know if I can,” she said.

“Games are what you’re good at,” Lincoln said. “Leave the rest to me.”

“I’ll do that.” The affirmation, she thought, was something closer to a prayer than to anything like a firm resolution.

“And-speaking of the Russians…” Lincoln’s face took on an amused caste. “There are a lot of Russian women here, in the bars. Some are prostitutes, some aren’t, but they’re all looking for husbands to carry them off to the good life in the West.”

Dagmar raised an eyebrow and looked at him.

“And you think this would interest me because…?”

“Not you,” he said. “But you might pass a warning on to your boys. We wouldn’t like to have any of them rushing to the rescue of someone named Natasha and ending up paying thousands of dollars to a Russian pimp.”

Dagmar considered Richard’s habit of going to a foreign country and buying everything on offer and nodded.

“I’ll spread the word,” she said.

There was a knock on the door. Lincoln looked up.

“Come in,” he said.

The man who entered wore a uniform. He had tight-curled black hair, Mediterranean blue eyes, and a brilliant white smile.

“Chatsworth,” he said. For a moment Dagmar wondered if Alvarez knew Lincoln from online gaming, but then she remembered the code protocols.

“Ah.” Lincoln rose, and shook hands across the desk with the new arrival. “This is Squadron Leader Alvarez, our RAF liaison.”

“Good to meet you, Briana,” said Alvarez. Dagmar rose and shook his hand and was proud of herself for answering to the alias without hesitation.

They needed an RAF liaison because Lincoln and Dagmar were running their operation from England. It just wasn’t the England made up mostly of a big island off the northwest coast of Europe.

The operation would be run from England-in-Cyprus, from RAF Akrotiri-an air base that was, legally, British territory, as British as toffee and binge drinking.

Dagmar’s team of game geeks would work from rooms overlooking Akrotiri’s enormous runway. The British air base was vast, and Dagmar’s people would hide in plain sight amid thousands of RAF personnel and civilian employees, who in turn were dropped amid the population of the island of Cyprus. Dagmar and her friends would share housing in the married officers’ quarters, shop for food at the NAAFI, and run their games through British servers.

Alvarez turned to her.

“Are you settling in?”

“So far,” Dagmar said, “it’s been enlightening.”

Dagmar left Lincoln with Squadron Leader Alvarez and returned to the ops room, where her heart gave a leap as she saw Tuna Saltik standing on one of the office chairs, pinning to the wall an enormous poster of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Her heart jumped again as she recognized Ismet standing next to him, helping him hold the poster straight. There was another with them, a man with shockingly bright blond hair. All three wore summerweight coats and ties.

She ran up to Ismet and gave him a hug from behind. He stiffened in surprise, then turned around. His eyes widened with pleasure, and then he hugged her and kissed both her cheeks.

“Lovely to see you!” he said.

“How’s your granny?” Dagmar asked.

“Much better, thank you. Back in her home.”

“You mean her tent?”

Tuna grinned down at Dagmar from under his arm as he held out the poster.

“Good to see you!” he said. “I’ll hug you later.”

“I’ll look forward to it.”

Ismet offered a hand. “I’m Estragon, by the way.”

Dagmar took the hand. “Briana.”

“I’m Vladimir!” called Tuna from somewhere in his own armpit.

Vladimir and Estragon, Dagmar thought. Right.

“You’re showing off your college education,” Dagmar said.

Ismet flushed slightly. “Maybe,” he said. He nodded at the man with surfer blond hair.

“This is Rafet.”

“Pleased to meet you.” Rafet and Dagmar shook hands.

“Rafet,” said Ismet, smiling, “is a dervish.”

Dagmar turned to Rafet.

“Do you whirl?”

He smiled with brilliant white teeth.

“No,” he said. “I’m not in the Mevlani organization. I follow Hacy Babur Khan.”

Dagmar’s question had been facetious-she had thought Ismet was joking when he said Rafet was a dervish. But now Dagmar began to think that Rafet really was a dervish, whatever being a dervish meant in the modern world.

She decided to make the next question a bland one.

“Where did you learn your English?”

“My dervish lodge is in the U.S. In Niagara Falls.”

“Ah,” Dagmar said, uncertain how to respond to this without demonstrating her own abysmal ignorance.

“Rafet,” said Ismet helpfully, “represents the Tek Organization.”

Dagmar decided not to ask any more questions and instead to quietly, privately wiki everything as soon as she could.

Tuna jumped down off the chair and gave Dagmar a one-armed hug while his other arm gestured at Ataturk.

“Is the picture straight?”

Dagmar looked up and received the poster’s full impact. The picture was based on an old photograph, but somewhere down the line the photograph had been hand-colored in eerie pastels, and the result was nothing short of terrifying. Larger than life-sized, the Father of the Nation wore a fur Cossack hat and a civilian tailcoat with a standing collar and tie. He scowled down from the wall, his unnaturally pink cheeks a startling contrast to his uncanny blue eyes.

The look in the eyes sent a shudder up Dagmar’s spine.

In her time in Turkey, Dagmar had seen a great many pictures of Ataturk. Most businesses had a photo displayed somewhere, and Ataturk busts and statues were common in Turkish towns and public buildings.

What had surprised her was the variety of Ataturks on display. There was no standard representation. There were benign Ataturks, dignified Ataturks, and amused Ataturks that emphasized the impish upward tilt of his eyebrows. There were Ataturks with mustaches and Ataturks without mustaches. There were dapper Ataturks wearing tails and carrying a top hat, statesmanlike Ataturks standing amid a group of ministers and comrades, commanding Ataturks in military uniform.

And then there were the scary Ataturks, a surprising number of them. This one, with his glaring eyes and upswept eyebrows, looked absolutely diabolical. He looked like the villain in a bad fantasy film. Below the image, in a blue typeface that matched the Gazi’s eyes, were the words Biz bize benzeriz.

Something in Dagmar shrank from having this frightening icon gazing down at her for the length of the operation.

“The picture looks straight enough,” Dagmar said. She pointed at the letters. “What does it say?”

Ismet answered. “It says: ‘We are like ourselves.’ ”

Dagmar looked around the room, at the piles of cardboard boxes, at Helmuth and Richard and Judy all laboring under Ataturk’s iron gaze.

“Well,” she said. “That’s true enough.”

What she actually wanted to say was, Are you sure you want this Ataturk? But she couldn’t quite bring herself to speak the words aloud.

The cult of Ataturk was something Dagmar understood only in part. The United States of America had many founders: Franklin, Washington, the Adams cousins, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Tom Paine, and even people such as Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr had done their bit to define the new republic… but Turkey had only Ataturk. He was the arrow-straight dividing line between the shambling old Asiatic Ottoman Empire and modern, Western-leaning Turkey. Like any decent Founding Father he had thrashed the British, and after that he’d remade the country in his own stern image: he’d adopted the Roman alphabet and Gregorian calendar; given civil rights to women; made Turks adopt surnames; driven religion and its symbols out of public life; built a public education system from scratch; defeated enemies foreign and domestic; created a parliamentary system; promoted Western ideas of art, music, and culture. He’d also done away with the Muslim prohibition of alcohol-a mistake in his case, as he died young of cirrhosis.

Turks revered Ataturk the way hardline Marxists revered Lenin, the way gays revered Judy Garland, the way Americans revered their pop stars up till the very second before they pissed all over them. Dagmar got that.

What she didn’t understand was this fiendish image on the wall of the ops room. She didn’t want it there, but she didn’t know how to say it without setting off some kind of atavistic Ataturk-inspired defense mechanism and getting her Turkish comrades mad at her.

“We brought presents!” Tuna said. He reached his big hand into a pink plastic bag and pulled out a fistful of blue and white amulets, the kind that Turks deployed against the evil eye. He, Ismet, and Rafet immediately began fixing the amulets to every vertical surface.

Judy watched them with interest. She turned to Dagmar.

“Do they really believe in the evil eye?” she asked.

“I don’t know. But we need all the mojo we can get.”

“And here’s one for your office.” Ismet, handing Dagmar an amulet.

“Thank you.”

It was a nice one, shaped like a military medal, with the dangling eye made of heavy glass, better quality than the cheap plastic amulets available everywhere in Turkey.

After the amulets were hung, everyone pitched in with putting the ops room together. By early evening flat-screen monitors glowed from the walls and from each of the desks, towers hummed, printers were set up in corners, and Mr. Coffee sat atop a table in the break room.

“The rest of the team will be here tomorrow,” Lincoln said. “First briefing at oh eight hundred.”

Dagmar raised a hand. “Will we always be using military time?” she asked.

He smiled. “You should be thankful we’re not using Zulu Time,” he said.

Dagmar had never heard of Zulu Time in her life.

“I guess I should be,” she said.

Before the flight to Cyprus, Dagmar had a series of meetings with Lincoln in California. They met at a sushi place in Studio City, where they talked about gaming and other harmless topics-the actual purpose of their meeting couldn’t be discussed in public places like restaurants.

Chopsticks in his hand, Lincoln lightly dipped his Crunchy Crab Roll in soy sauce. Dagmar observed the hand.

“You don’t wear a wedding ring,” she said.

The crab roll paused halfway to Lincoln’s lips.

“I was married twice. Divorced both times. The job is hard on marriage.” His mouth quirked in a little smile. “Though I have to admit that, sometimes, what I do is insanely fun.”

“Any children?”

Lincoln, chewing, nodded. He swallowed, then took a taste of iced tea.

“Two daughters,” he said. “Both grown, both doing well.” He looked wistful. “One of them lives in New Zealand. I see her every two or three years. The other blamed me for the divorce, and I haven’t heard from her in more than a decade.”

Sadness brushed Dagmar’s nerves. She shook her head.

“Sorry,” she said.

“I keep tabs on her,” Lincoln said. “Because, you know, I can- so I know that she’s all right.” His mouth took on a rueful slant. “But part of me wishes she’d run into the kind of trouble that only her dad can get her out of.”

Dagmar’s sadness swelled. She had similar foolish fantasies herself, that Charlie or Austin or Siyed would walk through the door, surprisingly alive, and with an elaborate story that explained how it had been someone else who had died, somebody else’s corpses that Dagmar had seen, and that the whole affair had been an elaborate but necessary deception in order to thwart some unimaginable villainy…

But of course that wouldn’t happen. Austin and Charlie wouldn’t be coming back from the falls at Reichenbach, and sometimes families came apart that shouldn’t, and sometimes families stayed together that should have come apart. And sometimes two lonely people consoled themselves with sushi and avoided talking about what had brought them together in the first place.

After lunch Lincoln took Dagmar to the Bear Cat offices to discuss their plans for the Cyprus excursion. Lincoln had an office with an Aeron chair, a view of the Santa Monica Mountains, and framed photos of media campaigns in which he’d been involved, with Stunrunner given the pride of place, Ian Attila Gordon in his tux gazing out of the frame, his elegant little Walther automatic in his hand.

“You get to pick your code name,” Lincoln told her.

“Wow,” Dagmar said. “We really are living in Spy Land.”

“Special ops.” Patiently. “We’re not after intelligence; we do things.”

“Sorry.” Dagmar was amused. “I’ll try to remember.”

“The computer has to approve the name,” Lincoln said. “You can’t take a name that’s already in use, and you can’t do anything obscene, but other than that, you’re reasonably free. It should be something you can remember and easily answer to.” He looked at her over his Elvis glasses. “I’m using Chatsworth.” From the handle he’d used in online games, Chatsworth Osborne Jr.

“Does the name mean anything?” Dagmar asked. “Or did you make it up?”

He offered a little smile. “Chatsworth was the name of a playboy character in a sixties sitcom,” he said.

She looked at him, at the bubble hair and Elvis glasses.

“Were you a playboy?” she asked.

“What makes you think I’m not a playboy now?” he asked. She laughed. He considered being offended, then shrugged. “But no, it’s kind of a complicated joke. The Company was founded by a certain type of character-East Coast, Old Money, loyal Republicans-and I fit that description, sort of, at least when I was younger.” He smiled nostalgically. “I worked for Barry Goldwater alongside Hillary Clinton, do you believe it?”

“You really knew her?”

He waved a hand vaguely. “We met, here and there. I didn’t know her well.” He smiled. “She was too serious for me.”

“Ah,” Dagmar said. “You were a playboy, then.”

“I was a spoiled rich kid,” Lincoln said. “ ‘Chatsworth Osborne’ is what I’d have become if I hadn’t gone into government service, so it’s the name I use when I’m enjoying my harmless entertainments.”

“Like overthrowing a foreign government.”

“Like that.” Lincoln said. He cocked his head and looked at her. “Your code name?”

Dagmar thought for a moment.

“Briana,” she said.

After Briana Hall, the fugitive found alone in a rented room at the beginning of Dagmar’s best-known game, and whose dilemma mirrored certain aspects of Dagmar’s past.

“Motel Room Blues,” Lincoln said. “Very good.”

Dagmar’s other employees were given code names as well. The problem with renaming her employees, Dagmar considered, was that she knew all of them by their real names. She was bound to slip sooner or later.

Judy decided, logically enough, to name herself Wordz. Richard the Assassin called himself Ishikawa, after-of course-a famous ninja. The programming chief, Helmuth, decided he wanted to be called Pip. Dagmar did not think the reference was literary and decided she didn’t want to know what other inspiration might have leaked into his alcohol-tolerant brain.

She hoped she could keep all the names straight and remember to use them in front of other people. Lincoln said to use the code names all the time, but Dagmar was sure she couldn’t.

It was at the Bear Cat offices that Lincoln presented her with the contract, pages and pages of documents that featured, on the first page, a sum even greater than that she’d earned for Stunrunner.

“I’ll have to show this to our lawyer,” she said.

“He can’t see Appendix A,” Lincoln said. “He’s not cleared for that.”

In the two-bedroom apartment she shared with Judy in the married officers’ quarters, Dagmar opened a bottle of Bass Ale and fired up her laptop. She looked up Zulu Time, which was apparently military-speak for Greenwich Mean Time, and then googled both “dervish lodge” and “Niagara Falls.”

Naturally, Rafet’s dervish lodge had a Web page. Rafet and his comrades followed Hacy Babur Khan, a Sufi saint who had lived in Herat three centuries ago. There he founded an order of dervishes that followed his regulations for spiritual practice, among which included, according to the article, “ecstatic drumming.” “Which,” the article continued, “has resulted in occasional persecution by more orthodox Sunnis.”

The dervishes lived in communal lodges, practiced austerity and poverty, drummed, and sang hymns written mostly by Hacy Babur Khan and his successors. The Web page maintained by the Niagara Falls lodge mentioned that it was founded in 1999, played host to a couple dozen dervishes at any one time, and offered demonstrations of drumming to the public several times each year.

That led to a query about the Tek Organization, which Dagmar at first misspelled as “Tech.” The search engine obligingly offered a correction, and she found that a Turkish imam named Riza Tek had founded the worldwide eponymous religious organization, which had branches in at least fifty countries. The Tek Organization ran charities, schools, and broadcast stations; it owned hospitals and newspapers; it had a large publishing house that put out books, magazines on news and religion, and a very impressive-looking science magazine… none of which, alas, Dagmar could read, as they were in Arabic and every known Turkish dialect but not English.

Turkish nationalists thought that Riza Tek was a fanatical God-inspired reactionary. Fanatical God-inspired reactionaries, the sort who belonged to or spoke for organizations that practiced suicide bombing, had a contrary view: they thought Riza Tek was a creation of the CIA.

Any relationship between the Tek Organization and the dervish lodge in Niagara Falls remained purely speculative.

Dagmar looked up from her laptop as Judy came into the room from the bathroom, where she’d been taking a shower. She wore a tank top that showed off her tattoo sleeves, color reaching from her wrists up her arms, over the yoke of her shoulders, and down her back. The tattoos didn’t seem to represent anything concrete but seemed inspired by physiology: they suggested, rather than depicted, muscles, bone, and a circulatory system. This gave Judy’s body an unearthly aspect, as if there were some whole other form, or other creature, hidden just beneath her skin. Dagmar would have found it repellent if she hadn’t so admired the art of it.

As Judy walked she clicked her tongue piercing against her teeth, giving her movement a rhythm track. A scent of honeysuckle soap trailed her to an armchair, where she sat, picked up her netbook, and booted it. While she waited for the first screen to appear, she looked up at Dagmar.

“Is there some reason,” she asked, “why you moved your bed so it’s on a diagonal?”

Dagmar’s nerves hummed a warning. She didn’t know Judy well enough to trust her with the answer.

For that matter, she didn’t know anyone well enough.

“It’s a luck thing,” she said vaguely.

Judy nodded, as if that made sense.

“I notice that you drink,” she said.

Dagmar glanced at her Bass Ale, then looked back at Judy.

“I do,” she said.

“Aren’t you worried you might have inherited your father’s alcoholism gene?”

Dagmar looked at her drink again and considered telling Judy to piss up a rope.

“I’m not going to worry,” she said, “until I find myself drinking the same cheap crap my dad did.”

“With my dad’s history,” Judy said, “I’m not getting high, ever.”

Dagmar looked at the tattoos, the rows of piercings lining Judy’s ears.

No, she thought, you don’t use; you just got addicted to pain instead. Getting jabbed thousands of times with a needle-now that wasn’t extreme, was it?

In any case, Dagmar was not in the mood to be dictated to by some kind of tattooed Goth puritan. She picked up her ale and waved it vaguely.

“Whatever works,” she said.

“What do you think of Rafet?” Judy asked.

Dagmar offered her laptop. “I can show you my research.”

“I think he’s totally hot,” Judy said with sudden enthusiasm. “D’you think he’s free?”

“I think God’s got him,” Dagmar said. “He’s supposed to be some kind of monk.”

Judy’s eyes widened. “They have monks?”

Dagmar offered the laptop again. “Check it out.”

Judy set aside her netbook and took Dagmar’s computer. Her brows drew together as she read about the Niagara lodge.

“It says they’re committed to poverty and austerity,” she said. “There’s nothing about chastity.”

“Well,” said Dagmar. “Good luck with all that.”

Judy handed the laptop back.

“Whatever you do,” Dagmar said, “don’t try to seduce him with alcohol.”

Lincoln-in his hotel room in Istanbul, the tickets and itinerary for Dagmar’s Bulgaria trip scattered on the table-watched Dagmar’s turmoil with perfect calm.

“Are you serious?” Dagmar asked, staring into Lincoln’s blue eyes. “You want me to astroturf an entire country?”

“A little guidance is all they need,” Lincoln said. “They’ll do all the hard lifting, not us.”

“They’re going to get killed,” Dagmar said. “Look what happened in Iran. In China. They were trying to do exactly this kind of thing and the government answered with bullets.”

Lincoln affected to consider this.

“If we do this right,” he said, “maybe not so many. Maybe none at all.”

“Tens of thousands died in China!”

Lincoln’s lips firmed.

“They didn’t have us to guide them. But if people choose to take that risk-if they think their political freedom is worth risking their lives-then they also deserve our help.”

Dagmar resisted this logic.

“If people got killed,” she said, “it would be my fault.”

“No.” Lincoln was firm. “It would be the fault of the bastards who killed them.”

Dagmar was beginning to suspect that there were a few too many bastards in this picture.

The 0800 briefing began with a buffet of local breads, olives, tomatoes, cucumbers, hard-boiled eggs, and the best watermelon Dagmar had ever tasted in her life. She looked sadly at the buffet and regretted the Weetabix she’d just had for breakfast. Nobody had told her there would be food.

A pack of strangers filled the room, and Dagmar wondered if they’d just come for the buffet before she realized they were all Lincoln’s people from the States. Magnus was tall, well over six feet, and thin-what Dagmar thought of as a Geek, Type One-and was a programmer. He wore a Daffy Duck T-shirt, and his scrawny, hairy legs were revealed by a Utilikilt, a signal garment of the geek.

This was, Dagmar reflected, a British air base, the personnel of which were certain to have a fair number of Scots. She wondered what the Scots would think of Magnus and his Utilikilt and what Magnus would think of the Scots.

Scots, she thought, looked very well in kilts. Or at least those who didn’t knew better than to wear one.

Why was it so different for the Americans?

Lola and Lloyd-whose names, echoing each other, demonstrated the hazards of letting people coordinate their own code names-were well-dressed white people in their early twenties whom Lincoln introduced as interns. Efficient, wavy-haired Lola, businesslike in a gray summer suit, was in charge of the buffet and also of the ID badges that she handed out. The interns were Company, here to learn what Dagmar did, so that they could do it without her later.

Dagmar hoped to hell that they wouldn’t take their skills into the private sector and become her competition. They seemed fearsomely intelligent.

She was just getting acquainted with these when a dignified, well-dressed man entered and was introduced as Alparslan Topal, the observer from the Turkish government-in-exile currently residing in Rome. Dagmar figured he wasn’t using a code name. Topal had a white mustache and exquisite manners and bowed over Dagmar’s hand as he was introduced.

“Pleased to meet you,” Dagmar said.

Topal’s soft eyes looked into hers.

“I hope you will be able to relieve my distressed country,” he said.

Dagmar was a bit startled by this direct appeal.

“I hope I won’t disappoint,” she said.

The last man to arrive used the code name Byron. He was a short, pinch-faced man who wore a tropical shirt and sandals made of auto tires and in no way resembled the poet. Unless, of course, the poet had shaggy hair on the backs of his hands.

“Sorry I’m late,” he told Lincoln. “I was off trying to help out Camera Team C.”

“They were having a problem?”

“Unfortunately, your tech guy didn’t quite understand the fine points of the uplink.”

Lincoln raised his eyebrows. “I hope you straightened him out.”

“I did,” Byron said. He looked over the ops room, at the blank displays, the evil-eye amulets, the oversized portrait of Ataturk.

“Quite a group, is it?” he said.

Inspiration struck Dagmar. She grinned.

“We’re calling it the Lincoln Brigade,” she said.

“As I understand it,” Dagmar said later as she stopped by Lincoln’s office, “the Gray Wolves are your people, right?”

Lincoln adjusted himself in his Aeron chair.

“Not anymore,” he said. “That was an arrangement between our grandfathers and their grandfathers.”

“But the Americans,” Dagmar persisted, “created them, right? Created the Deep State and Counter-Guerilla and Ergenekon and the Gray Wolves?”

She had made a point of doing her homework, looking up decades-old history on Web sites that glowed with speculation and paranoia, all of which suggested that Turkey had been run for seventy-odd years by a creepy little cabal of military men and politicians known euphemistically as the “Deep State.”

Lincoln seemed just a little bit sullen.

“Stalin shifted whole armies to the Turkish border in ’48,” he said. “He demanded that Turkey open the Bosporus. For all anyone knew, he was about to invade.” He shrugged. “So yes, we- our grandfathers-created a lot of things,” he said. “We created stay-behind organizations in every state in Europe, to lead the resistance in case the Russians marched in.”

“Gladio used Nazis,” said Dagmar.

“Not in Turkey,” Lincoln said. “No Nazis there. But yes, Gladio used lots of people. People who were willing to do things to communists, and not all these people were Gandhi.” His look was severe. “But let’s not forget that Stalin wasn’t Gandhi, either. He killed something like fifty million people, half of them his own citizens.”

“Granted,” Dagmar said.

Lincoln’s mouth narrowed into an angry line. “But what we didn’t do,” he said, “was tell the Deep State to take over the heroin traffic running through Asia Minor. And we didn’t tell them to start overthrowing democratic governments once the damn communists went away.”

“Without a Soviet invasion,” Dagmar said, “they were bound to get into mischief. My, uh, grandfather might have foreseen that.”

Lincoln’s expression was savage. “We need to get rid of those dinosaur generals. They’re a fucking embarrassment.”

“Kill the dinosaurs,” Dagmar said. “Check.”

Maybe she could embarrass them to death.

Dagmar had imagined clandestine agents inserted into Anatolia, then working under deep cover to build networks that would strike when the time was right. But Lincoln informed her that the networks already existed.

There were the networks of the political parties and their supporters, all of whom were out of power, out of work, and already organized. There were government workers, annoyed at interference from their new superiors. The religious who wanted to practice their faith free of government harassment. Members of the military and police who had been dismissed as politically unreliable. Students furious at restrictions on academic freedom and rejoicing in their own natural anarchy.

Members of the cultures, and subcultures, spawned by social networks such as Facebook, Ozone, and Taraa.

And there were the poor, especially the urban poor who squatted around the major cities in their improvised, ramshackle communities. The generals were busy placating-or threatening-the rich and powerful, whom they viewed as a greater threat to their legitimacy: they had no time or funds or inclination to raise the hopes of those living in poverty with anything except rhetoric.

All these networks already existed. All that was necessary was to mobilize them and to convince them that they could act with reasonable safety.

Even the poor, Dagmar was told, had cell phones.

The bus was back. The bus that the police had confiscated outside Izmir had been returned to Lincoln’s company once Stunrunner was over and it no longer mattered. The bus was so heavily customized that it would be difficult to sell, so Bear Cat had garaged it till now, when Lincoln was going to make use of it.

Right now the bus was across the Green Line in the Turkish part of Cyprus, following the unit’s three camera teams. The camera teams-all Turks-were making videos of towns and scenery, nothing remotely governmental, military, or classifiable, so as not to attract official interest… the bus captured the video, streamed it along the uplink to a satellite, and then down again to RAF Akrotiri, where it appeared on the Lincoln Brigade’s monitors. There the ops room team practiced storing the raw video, editing and manipulating the pictures, then uploading them to dummy, practice sites to which only they had access.

The satellite link with the camera teams was theoretically two-way, with the ops room able to ask the cameramen to give them specific shots. This was the element that caused the most trouble: an alarming percentage of the communications failed, mostly through human error.

Dagmar was supposed to be in charge, under Lincoln. She’d done this sort of thing before, at most of Great Big Idea’s live events, but in California she had a practiced, well-drilled team and they knew what videos to take without her telling them. Dagmar kept making the mistake of thinking her current team knew more about what they were doing than they actually did.

Part of the problem was the enormous variety in the hardware. There were covert cameras hidden in sunglasses or ordinary spectacles, complete with a laser heads-up display that would imprint incoming text messages right onto the retina. But these weren’t very flexible and didn’t record as many megapixels of reality as would sometimes be required, so the techs were required to get comfortable with other gear: small video cameras that would fit into the hand, cell phone cameras, large professional units capable of sucking up vast amounts of bandwidth.

The team was aided by what they were calling Hot Koans, their own pronunciation for Hot Xoan, the Vietnamese company that produced them. These were small, battery-powered wireless repeaters capable of spontaneously assembling into an ad hoc mesh network. Each of the repeaters, which came in a small, plastic box colored bubble-gum pink, had a range of a few hundred meters, and signal could be passed up and down the network to a receiver well out of sight of the camera, computer, or cell phone that had produced it. The repeaters would keep working as long as their battery lasted, which was around forty-eight hours.

Richard had found these and had ordered thousands of them. An area could be saturated with Hot Koans, providing massive redundancy to any communications and keeping the receiver well out of danger.

The Hot Koans-which turned out to have a much greater range than advertised-were about the only success on that first dreary day of training. The team was overwhelmed by all the new technology. By four in the afternoon Lincoln called it a day: “We’ll get more practice tomorrow.”

Dagmar was exhausted. She dropped into her chair, winced at the sudden pain in her lower back, and wished she’d had the foresight to buy herself an Aeron.

“I have a Hot Koan,” Richard said.

Dagmar turned to him. “Yes?”

Richard tented his fingers. “A player came to Dagmar and asked, ‘Does the ARG have Buddha nature?’

“Dagmar replied, ‘That would make a pretty good story.’

“Hearing this, the player was enlightened.”

Richard’s effort was well within a well-established tradition of creating enigmatic hacker koans that had to do with computers and computer people. Dagmar grinned, then winced at a stab of pain from her back.

Helmuth, however, seemed impervious to fatigue. He jumped up, turned to the room in general, and said, “Anyone for finding something to drink off base?”

Byron turned toward him, looking as if he was interested. Magnus stood, grinned, raised an arm.

“A drink sounds good,” Magnus said.

Byron hesitated, then frowned. “Too much jet lag,” he said.

Dagmar considered that Byron might have just had a narrow escape. Neither was quite aware of the hazards of a night out with Helmuth, of waking draped over some piece of furniture, a headache stabbing shivs into your eyes, your mouth tasting as if it had been used to put out cigars, the bathroom sink splashed with vomit, your cuffs spattered with someone else’s blood, and your underwear turned backward. At Great Big Idea this was known as “being Hellmouthed.”

Not that Helmuth ever Hellmouthed himself; he would always turn up at the office in the morning perfectly groomed and perfectly tailored and from his own invincible height survey his victims with a smile of brilliant white cosmopolitan superiority.

Perhaps, Dagmar thought, she ought to give the lads a warning.

“We start again at oh eight hundred,” she said. “Don’t lose too much sleep.”

Judy stood. She wore another of her series of rhinestone-covered plastic crowns, this one tiny and pinned to the crown of her head, like that of a beauty queen.

“You could just walk to the officers’ club,” she said. Then she raised an arm and sniffed her armpit. “I’ll go if I don’t smell too skanky,” she added.

“You’re no worse than me,” Dagmar said. Which was, unfortunately, true. She turned to the others. “Officers’ club, everyone?”

“Not me,” Helmuth said. “I want to go somewhere I don’t have to hear jets taking off every three minutes.”

He and Magnus retired to whatever desperate pleasures awaited them. Lincoln went into his office. The interns began to clean up what was left of the buffet. That left Dagmar, Judy, and Byron for the officers’ club.

Dagmar gave an automatic glance around the room for Ismet, then remembered that he, Rafet, and Tuna were elsewhere. They weren’t techs; they weren’t part of Dagmar’s game except as pawns. They were being trained as field agents, and what they did they would do in Turkey.

All of which left Dagmar uneasy. She didn’t want to send people she actually knew into danger.

It would be bad enough if her pawns were faceless.

The trio walked to the officers’ club over burning hot pavement that smelled of rubber and jet fuel. They were all honorary British officers, with photo ID cards worn on lanyards around their necks, and entitled to drink with the RAF’s finest.

The club was a little bit of Britain: dark paneling, brass, slot machines, a snooker table, Real Ale, the scent of chips frying. Yorkshire-accented hip-hop rocked from the jukebox. Not a lot of customers, even though Happy Hour had just started.

They found a round table in what passed for a quiet corner. Photos of 1950s aircraft decorated the walls. Dagmar got a gin and tonic, Judy a ginger beer, and Byron a single malt, water back. Thirsty, he gulped the water first. As he dropped his glass to the table, Dagmar saw the wedding ring.

“You’re married?” she said.

Byron nodded. “Wife. Daughter. I’ll call home later tonight.”

“How old is your girl?”

“Six weeks.” He pulled out a billfold and offered a picture of a goggle-eyed infant. Judy and Dagmar made appropriate noises.

“I have more pictures on my laptop,” he said. “But I’m not allowed to bring it into the ops center.”

“If I remember the security briefing correctly, you’re not supposed to show us even this photo,” Judy said. “Let alone in a public place like a bar.”

“Right,” Dagmar said. “We will stop oohing over Byron’s child at once.”

“Can I see the picture again?” Judy asked.

Dagmar sipped her drink, looked around the club once more, and caught a number of the officers casually scoping the two new women who had just walked into their dark-paneled sanctum and doubtless wondering which of them belonged to Byron and whether the other was free…

When in contact with the locals the Lincoln Brigade had been told to say they were here to do something with the computers. Local curiosity probably wouldn’t extend much past that-if it did, they could just say that they couldn’t talk about their work.

Dagmar turned to Byron.

“Have you ever done this sort of thing before?” she asked.

Byron seemed doubtful. “I don’t think anyone has.”

“I mean-you know-covert, secret stuff.”

“Oh. Sure.” He tasted his drink, splashed a bit of water into it, then tasted again. “I mean, I’m a contractor, Magnus and I work for the same company, and they work almost exclusively for the government. And that includes three-letter organizations that make me sign secrecy agreements.” He shrugged, sipped again at his whisky. “The security rules are usually idiotic-in fact, it’s impossible to do my job if I follow them all.”

“What do you mean?”

Exasperation distorted his pinched face.

“The hoops I have to jump through to take my work home are ridiculous,” he said. “And often I have to take it home-there’s no way to do the work on-site.”

“Why?” Judy asked.

“There are a whole long list of Web pages that I’m not allowed to access from government computers-but often as not, these are the pages that contain the information necessary to do my work, or that have the software tools I need to do it. So”-snarling-“I have to take the classified material home, so that I can put it on my own computer, from which I can access the necessary information.” He shook his head. “It’s all maddening. Someday the military and intelligence branches of the government are going to completely freeze, because no one will be allowed to see or do anything.”

“I’ve never worked for the government,” Dagmar said.

“Hoh. You have such a treat in store for you.” Byron’s face reddened. “Uncle Sam is about fifty years behind in their computer protocols, which still assume that everyone is working on a big mainframe. You have to do certain tasks in a certain order, and fill out all the paperwork on it in a certain order, and the odds are about ninety-nine to one that the tasks and the paperwork have nothing to do with the actual work you were hired to do.” He looked up at her with a glare of surprising hostility.

“There was a period when I was doing computer security at a major government lab-I won’t mention which one. The computers we were working on were riddled with unknown intruders-hundreds of them! — I mean, those people were practically waving at us! But I couldn’t do a single thing about them-not a single thing! — because I spent about seventy hours each week dealing with assigned tasks and paperwork. And after I broke my heart on that job for a couple years, I quit and went into the private sector.” He shrugged. “At least I’m making a lot more money than the idiots I was working for back then.”

Dagmar, whose whole business was based on secure computers, was startled by this outburst.

“Computer security isn’t exactly rocket science,” she said.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Byron said, “but the U.S. doesn’t exactly do rocket science anymore, either.”

Dagmar decided to change the subject before she completely lost any faith in her own project.

“Have you worked with Magnus before?” she asked.

“Tell you the truth,” Byron said, “I’m surprised to see him here.”

“How so?”

“Well, I have worked with him before, and he’s not the best at the kind of improvisation you’re doing.”

“Really?”

“He really needs a script to work from. I’m much better extemporizing than he is.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Dagmar said.

She tried to view this information by considering the source. Byron’s character type was not exactly uncommon in computer circles: he was boastful about his own abilities and disparaging of everyone else. He was also, Dagmar thought, very, very angry.

Byron was Angry Man, she decided. And Magnus was Kilt Boy. At this point Lola and Lloyd weren’t anything more than the Interns. She’d get to know them better later.

At this point a pair of RAF officers, Roy and McCubbin, the latter known as the Mick, appeared and offered to freshen their glasses. The officers were fair and freckled and pilots, with splotches of pink sunburn on their cheeks and noses, and Dagmar and Judy were pleased to invite them to the party.

The lads were delighted to learn that Dagmar and Judy were unattached. They were also pleased to learn that Dagmar had lived in England, having once been married to a Brit. It required quite a lot of amiable conversation to establish the fact that they had absolutely no acquaintances in common.

Roy was drunk when he arrived and got more drunk as Happy Hour went on, though pleasantly so. Eventually, though, he grew nearly comatose and the Mick’s wedding ring became impossible to ignore, and so Dagmar and Judy collected the lads’ cell phone numbers, and-declining the offer of escort-walked along with Byron to their apartments in the married officers’ quarters, long, low apartment blocks with tiny little yards strewn with the bright plastic toys of the officers’ children. The scent of charcoal was on the air, from the backyards where pink-skinned RAF officers, cold bottles in their hands, congregated in the evenings around grills with their mates and families.

Palm trees, bottles clinking, the scent of proteins cooking, and the sounds of sports floating from TV sets… to Dagmar it seemed like some kind of retro LA scene. Like Hawthorne, maybe.

“I’m going to call my wife,” Byron said, and gave a jerky wave of his arm as he turned onto the walk that led to his apartment. Dagmar and Judy kept on a few more doors, then passed into their own unit. Dagmar held up the napkin with the pilots’ phone numbers.

“Do you want this?”

Judy flicked her hair. Her plastic crown glittered. “Toss it,” she said.

Dagmar dropped the napkin into the trash. Judy went into the bathroom to take her evening shower. Dagmar opened the fridge, poured herself a glass of orange juice, then went to the dinette and booted her laptop.

She was not yet finished with her work for the day. Back in Los Angeles, her company was hip deep in the run-up to the Seagram’s game. She had to check her email for the updates, then make phone calls if intervention seemed necessary.

Dagmar slipped her keyboard out of its tube, then unrolled it. She preferred a full-sized keyboard to the smaller one on her laptop and carried one with her-flexible rubberized plastic, powered by a rechargeable battery, with genuine contacts beneath the keys that gave a pleasing tactile feel beneath her fingertips. It connected wirelessly to her laptop-she’d turned the screen around so that she wouldn’t have the unused keyboard between herself and the image.

The Seagram’s game seemed to have a greater reality, even at this distance, than her own enterprise here in Cyprus. Possibly because the goal-to sell whiskey or, at any rate, to make whiskey cool-seemed more well defined than her own.

She was used to telling people what to do-her fictional creations, her employees, the players-but she lacked confidence in the idea that she could really give orders to an entire nationality. Somehow her vanity had never extended to that.

She waved a hand, like a sorcerer incanting a spell.

You all be good, now, she thought. And then added, You, too, Bozbeyli.

A conventional insurrection stockpiled arms and explosives. Dagmar’s revolt would stockpile cell phones.

Cell phones had already been acquired and warehoused in safe houses in major cities. So were video cameras, transmitters, antennae, satellite uplinks, and of course the Hot Koans.

The revolution would be televised. And tweeted, blogged, attached to emails, YouTubed, Ozoned, googled, edited, remixed, and set to a catchy sound track. It would be bounced to High Earth Orbit and back. It would be carried live on BBC, on CNN, on Star TV, on every other electronic medium dreamed up by an inventive humanity.

What Dagmar could only hope was that none of these media would be transmitting pictures of a bloody massacre.

“The lawyers aren’t going to let any of this happen,” Lincoln said, “unless the President signs an executive order. He hasn’t done that yet, but I think he will before too much longer.”

“This is too much for me,” Dagmar said.

The call for the midday prayer had gone out from the Blue Mosque. Dagmar sat among her travel documents for Bulgaria, still stunned by what Lincoln was asking of her.

Less than twenty-four hours earlier she had been cowering in her bathroom, trying to hide from phantom Indonesian attackers. She wondered if Lincoln would want her for this job if he knew she was mentally-what was the appropriate word? Challenged? Compromised?

He looked at her, the gray light of the mosque shining off the metal rims of his shades.

“Look,” he said. “Once that order is signed, this operation is going forward. I have some talented people I can employ, and I’m sure they’ll do a good job. But-” He raised a blunt finger. “They won’t be as good as you. And if they aren’t as good, we could lose some people that we wouldn’t otherwise have lost.” He shook his large white head. “If you do this,” he said, “you could save lives.”

It was that argument, Dagmar reflected later, that had overcome her last resistance.

I am such a freaking bleeding heart, she thought. She could only hope that Lincoln was right that she would save lives and not lose them.