Deep State

CHAPTER SEVEN

Oh eight hundred. Dagmar cycled to the ops center, then realized she had forgotten the ID card she was supposed to wear around her neck, the card that not only held her picture but also could be used on the door’s card reader to pass her into the center. She looked up at the camera above the door and gave an apologetic wave, then waited for someone to open the door for her. When this didn’t happen, she knocked.

Eventually Lola, the wavy-haired intern, opened the door for her. Lola was dressed in a blue suit-a change from yesterday’s gray one-and she looked at Dagmar with cool intelligence.

“Yes?” she said.

“Thanks for opening the door.” Dagmar moved to walk past Lola, but the other woman blocked her.

“Don’t you have your ID?” Lola asked.

“I forgot it in my apartment.”

“I can’t let you in without it.”

Dagmar looked at her in surprise.

“But you know me,” she said.

“Yes, but I also need to know where your card is. You can’t leave that lying around.”

Dagmar opened her mouth to protest, but a look at Lola told her that further argument was pointless, so she turned around, cycled back to her apartment, picked up the ID card from the kitchen table where she’d left it, hung the card around her neck on its lanyard, and returned to ops.

She was beginning to think Byron might have a point about the stupid security rules attending this kind of operation. Besides the fetish for code names and ID cards, there had also been an inventory of every electronic device that Dagmar had brought with her-her handheld, her laptop-which had to stay in her apartment. For the ops room she had a new cell phone, laptop, and desktop computer, all dedicated to the exercise, and which could not be taken out of the ops center. The phones, she noticed, had their camera functions disabled. The computers had most of their USB ports soldered shut, and all data was available only on portable memory, which was locked in the safe at night. Each flash memory or portable drive featured a sticker with a bar code-Lola scanned these when the members of the Brigade checked them out, then scanned them in again at the end of the day. It was not totally impossible to steal data, she supposed, but it would be very inconvenient and require a certain amount of nerve.

The worst threat to security, Dagmar thought, came from the fact that the computers were connected to the Internet. In a truly secure operation, any machine containing sensitive information would either have no outside connections at all or connect only to a secure local area network. Any machine connected to the outside created an opportunity for intruders.

Dagmar would have to trust the counterintrusion skills of Richard the Assassin. He was brilliant about keeping crackers out of the Great Big Idea file system, and those he’d battled on behalf of the company were the best on the planet.

She reflected that she and the world in general were lucky that Richard had chosen to ally himself with the Forces of Good.

On her return to the ops center Dagmar encountered Magnus, whose kilt was hiked up to highly unacceptable levels as he cycled to work on his bike. Fortunately, by the time she caught up to him he’d dismounted and was stowing his bike in the rack.

It was a different kilt, she realized, than the one he’d worn the day before. The man had at least two Utilikilts.

That was hard-core Geek.

“Morning,” she said.

“Hi, Briana.”

He waited for her to finish racking her bike. She looked at him curiously, looking for signs that he’d been Hellmouthed the night before. He seemed fine, maybe a little tired.

“Did you have a good night?”

“Limassol is a happenin’ town,” he said cheerfully.

She looked at him. “You got the lecture about the Russian hookers, right?”

Magnus laughed. “One of them came right up to me off the dance floor and wiped her face on my T-shirt,” he said.

Dagmar was curious. “What did you do?”

“I blew her off.” He laughed again. “Jesus Christ, it’s not like I want whore sweat on my clothes.”

They walked toward the door of the building. Two airmen came out, and one politely held the door for them. Dagmar thanked him as she entered, and then she and Magnus walked up the stairs to the ops center.

“Are you settling in?” she said. “Any problems?”

“None to speak of,” he said. “It’s a more interesting job than the government usually gives me.”

She remembered Angry Man Byron’s complaints the previous day and asked if he found the security rules too restrictive. He shrugged.

“They do get in the way. But it’s not too bad here-I mean, if we’re not all in the ops center anyway, we’re not working, right? This isn’t the kind of job you bring home with you.”

“True enough.”

She came to the door of the ops center, waved at the camera, and snicked her card through the reader. The lock buzzed open, and Dagmar pushed the heavy steel door open.

Lola looked up from her desk as they entered. Dagmar waved the ID at her, and Lola nodded expressionlessly.

Dagmar stopped in the door to the break room, where yesterday there had been the breakfast buffet, and saw that today no food had been provided. Yesterday she had eaten breakfast and then found out about the buffet; today she had assumed there would be a buffet and not eaten breakfast.

She sensed that the primary theme for the day had already been set: whatever she did or thought was going to be wrong.

She paused by her office door and let Magnus walk past her into the ops center, T-shirt, kilt, thin hairy legs, and flapping sandals.

Part of the secret of the Scots kilt, she decided, was the long stockings. They limited the amount of unattractive pale flesh visible to the onlooker. They suggested curvy calves even if the calves in question were matchsticks.

Magnus hadn’t quite learned what made a kilt work and what didn’t. But it wasn’t Dagmar’s job to tell him.

Though probably she was going to have to tell him how to ride a bicycle in a skirt, just to keep him out of the hands of the RAF Police.

We are like ourselves, Dagmar thought, and walked into her kingdom.

It turns out that Lloyd, the intern, was in charge of the unit’s air force. He had been a model rocket hobbyist in high school, and apparently that qualified him to wrangle a whole fleet of radio-controlled drones.

Lloyd invited Dagmar and Lincoln to his workstation for a status report. Lloyd’s scarred metal desk was directly beneath one of the ceiling fans; the fan gave a regular mechanical chirp as it drove cold air down on Dagmar’s head.

Dagmar guessed that Lloyd had graduated from college a couple years ago. He was a little shorter than average height and had rimless spectacles. He wore soft gray slacks and a Van Heusen shirt with a faint lilac stripe, long sleeved against the artificial chill.

He was Air Force Brat, Dagmar thought. And Lola was the Guardian Sphinx.

“We’ve got two types of drones,” Lloyd explained. He had loaded videos of the tests in his desktop computer. “One is a model helicopter with an off-the-shelf zoom lens.” The video showed a flying machine so bare and basic that it looked as if it had been assembled out of carbon-fiber fishing rods and leftover circuit boards. There were two rotors, surprisingly silent, with a package slung between them that consisted of three cameras, each equipped with a different lens and capable of independent tracking. On the video the copter bounded into the air like a jumping spider, then zigzagged around the sky with sufficient speed and agility that the video had trouble tracking it. It made a faint whooshing sound, like Superman passing far overhead.

“It’s got GPS,” Lloyd said. “You tell it where to go, and it goes there, and if you’ve got the coordinates of the target, it will point the camera there without a human operator having to manually adjust it. We figure to use these for reconnaissance-keep tabs on nearby police stations or army barracks.”

“How close does the operator have to be?” Dagmar asked.

“Doesn’t even have to be within sight,” Lloyd said. “The operator won’t be anywhere near the action, and the helo can automatically return to the GPS coordinates from which it was launched, or anywhere else within its range.”

There were more videos, these taken by the copters’ onboard cameras, their occasional jerkiness smoothed by computer enhancement. The lenses, generic products of some anonymous Southeast Asian factory, were capable of remarkable performance: Dagmar could make out individual faces as the helos floated unseen, unheard, over Limassol.

The sounds of the operators came over the sound track, all speaking Turkish. Dagmar listened, frowned.

“Is that your voice?” she asked.

Lloyd gave her a guileless look. “Yes.”

“You speak Turkish?”

“I do.”

She waited for a moment in case Lloyd wanted to offer an explanation, but he only offered a tight little smile and then went on with his talk. The rules said they weren’t to tell each other anything of a personal nature, and Lloyd was clearly a rule follower.

“Our second drone,” he said, “is another VTOL-we can fly them both off roofs, or from roads or parks. But the second one also has anti-air capability. It’s a flying wedge, basically.”

“Sorry?” Dagmar asked.

Lloyd looked at her, solemn dark eyes behind spectacles.

“Do you ever watch World War: Robot?”

“No.”

“It’s one of those programs where homebuilt robots fight each other. And the basic rule for robot combat is that wedges rule.”

Dagmar’s mind swam. “Sorry,” she said, “but I’m still four-oh-four.”

Lloyd’s hands swooped descriptively in the air. “A wedge is just a robot with a wedge-shaped cross section,” he said. “They’re used for ramming-they hit the other robot at high speed and just fling it in the air.”

“Okay.”

“So what we did was adapt the wedge to aerial combat. We’ve got a hard plastic wedge kept aloft by arrays of miniturbines. It’s got several cameras, a GPS, and a top speed of about forty knots if we really want to burn through the fuel. Stability is achieved by fly-by-wire computer guidance-you really can’t turn the thing upside down even if you try. The idea is to fly it against police drones and bring them down by ramming. It’s a type of attack the Russians call taran.”

Dagmar looked at him. “The Russians use planes to ram?”

Lloyd nodded. “They train for it. Even now.”

Dagmar blinked.

“That’s hard-core,” she said.

Lloyd nodded. “Glad we never had to fight those guys.”

The video made the tactic clearer. The flying wedge brought down a whole series of target drones. Usually the wedge tumbled for a second or two but righted itself. On a couple occasions the wedge lost control and crashed.

Dagmar had encountered miniturbine-powered drones before-she remembered the thing hovering over her in the humid night, the hydrocarbon smell of its breath. She thought for a moment, then looked at Lloyd.

“This all seems very sophisticated,” she said. “But what we’re supposed to be leading is a grassroots rebellion springing spontaneously from the population. If we start flying machinery this complex against them, it’s going to be clear that someone’s behind it.”

“This was discussed,” Lincoln remarked, from behind Dagmar’s shoulder. Dagmar gave a little jump at the unexpected sound.

“The wedge is made from generic materials,” Lloyd said. “The miniturbine arrays are available by mail-order. Even the fly-by-wire software is available from hobbyists online-I was kind of amazed to discover that it actually works.”

“Hm.” Dagmar looked at the screen, saw flying wedges hit drones time after time.

“Well,” she said. “I guess it all seems fine.”

Lloyd offered a satisfied smile.

“Now,” he said, “we need to coordinate the air force with your teams.”

“Ha,” Dagmar said. “As if my job wasn’t complex enough.”

Lloyd smiled. “I’ll do most of the work, if that’s all right with you.”

Dagmar could think of no objection to this.

“I was thinking,” Lloyd said, “that we might want to give the air unit a name.”

“Free Turkish Air Force?” Lincoln said. “Ataturk Air Force?”

“Royal Chatsworth Air Force?” said Dagmar, with a look at Lincoln. He returned the compliment.

“Briana’s Airmen?”

“My policy is to remain anonymous,” Dagmar said. “How about the Anatolian Skunk Works?”

Lincoln thought about that for a moment.

“I like it,” he said.

“Words,” Dagmar said. “They’re my job.”

Over the next two days Dagmar’s teams gradually improved their performance. The camera teams shot videos of birds, of the model helicopters, of tractors rolling down country roads, of freighters cruising along the blue Mediterranean horizon. Until Team C’s cameras lost their uplink all at once and they failed to reestablish contact.

Dagmar turned to Byron.

“You handled this last time, right?” she said.

He looked up at her.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll try to talk them through the fix.”

This failed, even with Lloyd interpreting. Dagmar turned to Byron again.

“Can you go north and help them?”

He looked up at her, eyes glittering in his pinched face.

“No way!” he said. “The north side of the island is run by the people we’re trying to subvert. I’m not going over there.”

“It’ll be very inconvenient,” Dagmar pointed out, “to have to send all Team C back and their gear through the checkpoints in Nicosia.”

Angry Man flushed. “It’ll be even more inconvenient if I’m picked up by the Turkish Cypriot police and tortured,” Byron said. He pointed down the corridor, toward Lincoln’s office.

“Ask Chatsworth,” he said. “I don’t have to go over the Green Line.”

“I’m not ordering you,” Dagmar said.

Byron folded his arms.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Orders or not, I’m not going. It’s in my contract.”

Dagmar paused and felt everyone in the ops room looking at her. She sensed that her authority was teetering on the brink of an undefined precipice.

She knew she wasn’t any good at being a tyrant. She owned a company, but she wasn’t an authoritarian boss-rather than imposing her will on her subordinates, she relied on shared enthusiasm to achieve results-and so she wasn’t quite sure how to deal with Byron’s defiance, especially if he was right.

“Well,” she said lightly. “If it’s a contract, and you can’t be tortured over there, then we’ll have to find a way to torture you here.” She looked at him for a moment, long enough to see him shift uneasily in his chair, and then she nodded.

“Try and fix their problem again,” she said. “And if that doesn’t work, try a third time.”

It took an afternoon, and eventually Magnus and Helmuth were both called in. It was Magnus who solved the crisis, by moving a certain jumper from its slave to its master setting. It was a nice piece of long-distance diagnosis, and Magnus seemed very pleased with himself for providing the answer.

So much, Dagmar thought, for Byron’s claim that Kilt Boy wasn’t able to think on his feet.

“Yes,” Lincoln said later, when Dagmar reported the problem and its solution. “It is in Byron’s contract-and Magnus’s, too-that they’re not to be deployed in the field. In fact, it’s Company policy not to use American citizens in situations where they might be in jeopardy.”

“Okay,” Dagmar said. “I didn’t know that.”

Lincoln swiveled his Aeron chair toward his safe. Keeping his body between Dagmar and the digital lock, he opened the safe door.

“You’re not cleared to view their contracts,” he said. “So that’s understandable.” He looked over his shoulder. “Plus you’ve seen all those spy movies, where sinister Agency masterminds put ordinary people in deadly situations over and over.”

“Is there anything else,” Dagmar asked, “that I need to know that’s in documents I’m not cleared for?”

Lincoln swung his chair toward his desk. “I’m sure there is,” he said cheerfully. “That’s how our business works.”

“Terrific.”

Lincoln opened the safe, then took the day’s papers and portable memory and locked them away. Dagmar heard bolts chunking home. An LED on the door turned from green to red. Lincoln straightened and looked at her.

“Buy you dinner?” he offered.

“Sure,” Dagmar said. “Why not?”

It wasn’t like she had a more exciting evening planned.

Dinner was takeout from an Indian place just outside Akrotiri’s gates. Lincoln found a parking place overlooking the Mediterranean, and the two balanced paper containers of vindaloo and steaming-hot samosas on lichen-scarred boulders while white surf boomed against the ruddy, broken cliff beneath their feet.

Dagmar slurped her mango lassi.

“When I met him that time,” she said, “Bozbeyli said that the army generals who led previous coups all returned to the barracks.”

Lincoln tilted his hat to the west, the better to intercept the sun, and nodded.

“They did,” he said.

“So why are we doing this, then?” she said. “Why aren’t we waiting for the junta to just go home?”

“Bozbeyli’s different,” Lincoln said. “The previous military governments were composed of genuine patriots who believed they were acting in the country’s best interests. You didn’t see them behaving like military rulers elsewhere-after their retirement, they weren’t living in palaces, they weren’t hanging out with movie stars, and they didn’t have big Swiss bank accounts.”

“But Bozbeyli’s in it for the money.”

Lincoln cut a samosa with his plastic knife and fork, then thoughtfully chewed a piece. Dagmar caught a whiff of cumin on the wind.

“When Ataturk first created the country,” he said, “he called it the Republic of Turks and Kurds. But over time the Kurds got sort of left out, and the government decided as more or less official policy that everyone in Turkey was a Turk by definition. The Kurds, according to this scheme, were just Turks who hadn’t quite learned to be Turks yet, and so they had to be made to be proper Turks, and they were to be educated in Turkish and forbidden to speak their own language.” He waved his plastic fork. “Just as all Turkish Muslims were, by definition, Sunni Muslims-which left out a very large minority of Alevi Muslims… Christians and Jews can have churches and synagogues, but the Alevis can’t have mosques and have to meet in private homes, because all Muslims are officially Sunni, and so are all the mosques.”

He looked up suddenly. “Are you following this?” he asked.

“What are Alevis?” Dagmar asked.

Lincoln flapped a hand. “Too complicated.”

Dagmar reflected that this was not unlike everything else in Turkey.

“Okay,” she said.

“I was talking about the Kurds, anyway,” Lincoln said. “So-given that the Turks were trying to extinguish their language and culture-a lot of them were less than pleased with the situation, and back in the nineties there was a genuinely dangerous Kurdish insurgency led by a party called the PKK. Which was mainly financed by Syria but also in part by Kurdish heroin dealers who were importing Afghan and Iranian narcotics along the traditional drug highway to the West. The Turkish authorities didn’t see why the heroin money should go to the insurrection, so they sent right-wing gangsters and the Gray Wolves and government assassins to kill the heroin dealers and take over their networks-and they largely succeeded. And then the heroin money started percolating up into the system, and before long the war was just too profitable to allow it to end, even after the insurgency had been crushed through the usual deportations, killings, and random acts of terror.

“After which”-waving a bit of tikka masala on his plastic fork-“there was the Susurluk incident, where a Mercedes truck squashed an auto that held a police chief, a wanted heroin dealer and assassin, and a Kurdish member of parliament, along with the gangster’s mistress, drugs, and a hell of a lot of firearms. And the heroin dealer was carrying ID issued by the minister of the interior, which showed that both sides of the insurrection were hip deep in collusion. After that it was clear that the war was just being continued for all the drug money, and the Deep State was exposed and faded away, along with the war. For a while.”

But the money, Lincoln continued, was still there. And the heroin was still there. And it became impossible for either the PKK or the authorities to resist all that, and so the war picked up again, and this time the death squads were killing moderate Kurds, anyone who suggested compromise was possible… the elected moderate Islamic government kept trying to make peace on terms that were unacceptable to the military, such as admitting that Kurds are Kurds and not Turks… and then the government started making remarkably clumsy efforts to assert its control of the military, by promoting Islamists to field command. And the result was a series of bombings and assassinations that served as the provocation for Bozbeyli and his clique to take command and restore order, essentially by canceling the chaos they themselves had provoked…

“I don’t think the junta’s going back to the barracks,” Lincoln said. “Their profits are too big, and they’re finding life pretty easy right now.” He gestured toward the booming vastness of the sea. “Bozbeyli and his gang are the last of their kind-Turkey’s right on the verge of becoming a glorious twenty-first-century success, and I don’t want it devolving into a narco-terrorist state on NATO’s southern flank. So that’s why we’re here.”

“Yeah, well,” Dagmar said. “I’m good with all that.”

“I’m simplifying enormously,” said Lincoln.

“I figured.”

“And besides,” Lincoln said, “what we’re going to do is genuinely cool.”

Dagmar nodded. “I got that, too.”

How many people have to die, she wondered, before it all stops being cool?

The jukebox in the officers’ club was playing Carl Perkins’s “Dixie Fried.” It was the end of Happy Hour and the place was full: Dagmar and her crew hadn’t been able to get a large enough table, so all six were clumped around a small, round table barely large enough to hold their drinks.

Ismet, Tuna, and Rafet had returned after four days on the other side of the Green Line, working there with the camera teams and the Anatolian Skunk Works. Judy and the Turkish-speaking intern, Lloyd, had also come along. Rafet and Judy were sipping their soft drinks; the rest had lager.

Dagmar looked at Ismet and Tuna.

“Have you been working for Li-for Chatsworth all along?” she asked.

Ismet seemed surprised by the question.

“You mean, during the Stunrunner game?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“No. We got recruited later.”

Tuna put a big fist around his pint glass. “I think, uh, Chatsworth decided we were politically sound.”

Certainly, Dagmar thought, during Stunrunner they had both demonstrated opposition to the regime. And they knew a lot of people and could bring other recruits into the scheme.

And, of course, that meant no highly trained Company employee would be put at risk: only Turkish natives would be in danger. They were completely expendable. It was this realization that made Dagmar feel as if her ribs were closing in on her heart.

“My boss was willing to let me take leave,” Ismet said. “He’s not doing that well anyway, since firms with contacts in the government are getting most of the business.”

Dagmar cast a glance at Judy and Rafet: they seemed to be having a quiet conversation on their own, inaudible over Perkins’s vocal. She turned to Lloyd.

The Air Force Brat was a quiet dark-haired young man, dressed in a soft chambray shirt and cords.

“How did you learn to speak Turkish?” she asked.

Lloyd seemed a little surprised to be included in the conversation.

“I’m, uh-not sure I’m supposed to tell you.”

“He speaks with an American accent,” Tuna offered.

“Well,” Lloyd said. “My father is from Turkey, but I was born in the States.”

“Do you have dual citizenship, then?” Dagmar asked.

“I have a Turkish passport,” Lloyd said, “but I’ve never used it.”

He was so clearly uncomfortable with the questions that Dagmar decided to change the subject. She looked at Ismet.

“You said your grandmother was raised a nomad,” she said.

Ismet adjusted his spectacles. “Yes. She was a Yoruk. There are nomads in Turkey, even now.”

“Why do they… do what they do? Keep on the move?”

“They follow their herds. In the winter they’re on the south coast near Konya-actually most of them now have regular winter houses-but in the summer the sun cooks the grazing, so they move up to the high pastures in the Tauros Mountains and live in big black goatskin tents.” He took a sip of his lager. “They’re very poor, but then they need very little they can’t provide for themselves.”

Lloyd spoke, surprising Dagmar.

“Some nomads,” he added, “travel because they’re poor-they don’t own any land of their own; they have to keep on the move, and graze their animals on the highway right-of-way or places that no one actually owns.”

Dagmar remembered that this was a country where every city was surrounded by illegal settlements, lived in by poverty-stricken refugees from the country. She turned back to Ismet.

“And your grandmother married out?”

“She had an arranged marriage with the son of a merchant. The son was able to give the Yoruk access to things they needed, and the Yoruk provided the merchant with a steady supply of cheese, butter, hides, kilims, and so on.”

Dagmar asked if he still had nomad relatives.

“Yes, certainly. I used to visit them during my school breaks.” He gave a nostalgic smile. “That’s really the old Turkish lifestyle, isn’t it? Living in a tent, lying on carpets, eating meat and cheese and milk, cooking everything on a brazier. Our ancestors lived that way for thousands of years.”

“Sounds like an ideal vacation for a boy.”

Ismet shrugged. “I didn’t appreciate it as much as I should have-I missed my rap music and the Internet. And I’m afraid I was bored looking after the sheep.” He smiled again. “I enjoyed riding the horses, though. I’d shoot my toy bow from horseback and pretend I was a Gazi.”

“I’d like to meet your nomad relatives,” Dagmar said.

Ismet absorbed this with interest, eyes bright behind his spectacles.

“Once the generals are gone,” he said, “I’d be happy to introduce you.”

“I wish I was up in the mountains now,” Tuna said. “It’s so bloody hot here.” He pressed his pint glass to his forehead but then took the glass away and scowled at it-the lager, not very cool to begin with, was by now room temperature.

“At least you’re getting away from Akrotiri now and again,” Dagmar said. “I’m tired of being cooped up here within smelling distance of the runway.”

“If you have free time,” Ismet said, his eyes still bright, “I have a car. I can take you out to see the sights.”

Dagmar felt a warm current of pleasure at the thought of Ismet and his car and the whole Island of Aphrodite to lose themselves in.

“Are you all right,” Dagmar asked, “here on the Greek side of the line?”

Tensions at the moment were high. Cyprus was still divided into the official, UN-recognized Greek south and the Turkish north, the latter of which since the invasion of 1974 had been organized as a republic recognized only by Turkey. Persistent attempts to solve the crisis on the part of the UN and the EU had resulted in a certain softening of attitudes: the situation hadn’t been resolved, but it had grown more blurry, more complex, more nuanced.

But General Bozbeyli’s regime had hardened things again, had thrown all of Cyprus into stark light and shadow. Though the situation technically hadn’t changed, though no agreements had been abrogated, a series of belligerent proclamations by the military government had heartened the Turkish nationalists and driven the Greeks into a frenzy of resentment. Both sides were demonstrating. No one was brandishing guns yet, but it was clear that guns could be brandished, that shots could be fired, armies and navies mobilized, the whole of the region brought into bloody chaos.

Was that to Bozbeyli’s advantage? Dagmar wondered. Would he start a war if he felt threatened?

It was all too easy to see disaster looming everywhere she looked.

“I’ll be all right,” Ismet said. “I can pass for an American. And of course I’ll be with you, and-” His smile brightened. “If I get into trouble, you can rescue me.”

Again Dagmar felt that tingle of pleasure at the touch of Ismet’s brown eyes.

Tuna leaned forward over the table, his big fist dropping his empty lager glass on the table. Dagmar turned to him.

“I was wondering,” he said, “if you can give me some advice.”

Dagmar blinked. “If I can.”

“I’m trying to work out how to get published in the States.” He frowned. “I get good reviews, but nobody in America reads reviews that aren’t in English.”

Dagmar almost laughed but caught herself in time. People were always asking her how to get published or how to get into game writing: they were always disappointed when the answer involved hard work instead of knowing some kind of secret password.

But Tuna wasn’t a wannabe; he was a successful author in his own country. So she gave Tuna what advice she could-which wasn’t very encouraging. American publishers would only look at manuscripts already in English, and even then-with the whole ramshackle edifice of publishing perpetually teetering on the edge of the void-the odds were not good.

“I can translate the work myself,” Tuna said. “But I’m not good enough to write literary English; it would need polishing.”

Dagmar said she’d try to find someone interested in polishing up the translation of a foreign writer. Tuna seemed disappointed-perhaps he was hoping that Dagmar would volunteer. But Dagmar had no time for such ventures, and in any case her connections in publishing were almost a decade out-of-date.

“Well, thanks.” Tuna stood, empty glass in his hand. “More drinks?”

Dagmar considered her mostly empty glass and was on the verge of saying yes when she realized what was playing on the jukebox. Ian Attila Gordon, pop star turned James Bond, singing the bombastic theme to the film Stunrunner.

“Hey!” Dagmar said. “It’s our theme song!”

They all listened for a second or two, and then laughter gusted out.

“Overproduced,” sniffed Tuna.

“We are Bond!” Judy cried, punching the air.

It occurred to Dagmar at that instant that they weren’t Bond at all, they were the sort of people that Bond routinely destroyed-the subversive technophiles operating from a secret headquarters on a sea-girt island, engaged in covertly, busily undermining the order that Bond represented.

They weren’t Bond. They were the Rebel Alliance from Star Wars, trying with desperate idealism and kludged-together tech to restore an imperfect republic that had barely worked in the first place.

Fortunately, she thought, Bozbeyli wasn’t Darth Vader, he was just a painted-up heroin dealer.

But Dagmar was very tired and a little drunk and felt unable to explain this to the others. So she punched the air and cried, “We are Bond!” and signaled Tuna to bring her another drink.

It was early evening, and the scent of jet fuel mingled with the charcoal smoke from the backyard barbecues. “Do you know,” Judy said as they cycled home together, “that you don’t have to be a Muslim to be a dervish?”

Dagmar looked at her. “Rafet’s kind of dervish, you mean?”

“I… guess so.” Judy’s eyes narrowed in thought, and she clacked her tongue piercing against her upper teeth. “He said that anyone with a heart open to the Divine was welcome at his services.”

Dagmar cast her mind back to the Web page of the Niagara lodge, the description of the services. She had to speak loudly over the sound of a landing Skylifter.

“Don’t they sing verses from the Koran?” she shouted. “I mean, they may be open to all faiths, but those faiths are going to spend a lot of time listening to the Complete Works of Mohammed and singing songs in praise of Allah.”

“Rafet only talked about the drumming,” Judy answered.

“But you and he are getting on?”

Judy seemed doubtful. Sunset colors glowed on her tattoo sleeves. She clacked her tongue piercing against her teeth in rhythm.

“I suppose. He didn’t ask me out or anything.”

“You could ask him.”

“Mm.” Doubtfully. “What’s my opening? He’s talking about God and mystic oneness, and I pop up and say, ‘By the way, Terrorslash III is showing at the base cinema, want to go?’ ”

Dagmar had no advice on this matter.

“Ismet offered to take me out,” she said.

Judy raised an eyebrow. “The quiet one? You like the quiet ones?”

“I like the intelligent and undemanding ones.”

“I see.” Nodding.

“You know,” Dagmar said, “this is a military base loaded with guys. Does it have to be the monk?”

Judy laughed. “He’s just so pretty!”

Dagmar could only agree. “Maybe that’s why God picked him,” she said.

Judy gave her an odd look. Then she shook her head.

“By the way,” she said, “my dad knows Ian Attila Gordon.”

Dagmar looked at her. “Really?”

“Yeah. Ian’s a big fan of his. Sometimes they do benefits together.” She laughed. “Dad says he’s a complete tosser.”

“I didn’t think he was that great a Bond.”

Judy winked. “We’re better, yah?” Dagmar smiled wanly. Judy jumped off her bike and turned up the short walk to their apartment. Dagmar followed.

“Dad said that he hoped Ian would make a success as an actor,” she said, “because his musical career wasn’t going anywhere.”

“He’s got a big album coming up in a few weeks,” Dagmar said. “I saw posters at the airport.”

Keys flashed in the light of the setting sun; the apartment door opened. Somewhere, a jet engine fired off its afterburner: the vast noise diminished to a muffled roar as soon as the door was closed.

“Ian’s album is a huge mess,” Judy said. “That’s the word from the producer. It should have come out along with the movie, but it was delayed.” She looked up. “Can I use the shower first?”

Dagmar gave a wave of her hand.

It was time to call California and get the bad news about the Seagram’s game.

“I’m sorry I was so evasive yesterday,” Lloyd said. It was early morning, and he had clearly been waiting for her outside the ops center door.

“No problem,” Dagmar said as she racked her bike. “We’re really not supposed to give personal information. Especially in public places like bars.”

“It’s just that my father is an Alevi Kurd and I have to be careful what I say around Sunni Turks.”

Dagmar opened her mouth, then closed it and nodded.

“I don’t know what their attitude is to Kurds,” Lloyd went on. “And I’m pretty sure Rafet would consider Alevis to be heretics-and he’s a Islamist and most Alevis tend to be secularists, and that on top of the Kurd thing… And of course he’s my roommate, so that makes it worse.”

“Right,” Dagmar said. “Understood.” Not understanding this at all.

Lloyd gave a nervous smile and touched her arm. “Thanks.”

“Rafet says that his outfit is open to all,” Dagmar said.

“By all,” Lloyd said, “he may not actually include Alevi.” He shrugged. “Or he may. I don’t know.”

“Okay,” Dagmar said.

“Look,” Lloyd said. “There are a lot of Alevis in Turkey-more than most Sunni Turks think. The head of the last commission that was supposed to arrive at an estimate ended up dead in a mysterious auto accident, and that was before the military took over.”

Dagmar, pretending she understood, gave a careful nod. For a country of modest size, she thought, Turkey’s politics were beyond intricate.

“Sometimes,” Lloyd said, “they just kill us.”

“Ah.” This was the best response she could manage, given the depth of the sea of ignorance in which she swam.

She was unable to decide if Lloyd was a complete paranoid or not, so when she had a moment to herself she wikied as much of this as she could, and then understood even less than she had before.

Sometimes they just kill us, she thought.

Sadly, it seemed, there was no branch of the human race to which this statement did not apply.

Two-cycle engines spit oil-tinged exhaust into the air. Tires shrieked and scrambled for traction on the corners. Dagmar wasn’t used to driving this close to the ground: the surface of the track seemed threateningly close as it passed beneath her. Tuna made an effort to pass her on the left; she moved to cut him off.

She had seized the lead early in the race-she was an early adapter of technology, even if the technology was mechanical and considerably older than she was.

RAF Akrotiri was a full-service air base: it even had a go-kart track. And after five days’ hard work, Lincoln had decreed an afternoon of fun, a cookout followed by racing. The day had cooperated: morning showers had been followed by mellow afternoon sun.

Dagmar glanced over her shoulder, saw Ismet pulling up on the right, and swerved to block him. He had to brake and fell back. She hugged the inside on a corner; then as she came out onto the straight she swung out into the middle of the track, ready to block any challenger. Tuna rolled up on the left again, and she swerved to stay in his way.

She looked over her shoulder to see if Ismet was coming up on the right. He had pulled up even with Tuna, but his little two-cycle engine didn’t seem to have the power to overtake the leader. He looked at Dagmar, and as their eyes met, a silent signal passed between them.

Tuna was boxed in, Dagmar ahead of him, Ismet on his left, the grass outfield on his right. Dagmar slowed, and Ismet turned the steering wheel and swerved to his right, right into Tuna.

The two go-karts collided, then rebounded. Ismet swerved wildly to the far side of the track before he regained control, and Tuna went clear into the grass and hit a wide, shallow puddle left behind by the morning’s rain: a tall rainbow sheet of water sprayed high in the air as his kart stopped dead. Dagmar cackled and accelerated away. She could hear Tuna’s roars of frustration fade behind her.

When she passed the start line, the race course manager was holding out a sign that said: NO BUMPING. Dagmar gave her a cheerful wave and raced past.

She managed to keep ahead of Ismet until she came up behind Magnus and Byron. She was surprised they were so far behind that she was on the verge of lapping them, and then she saw that Angry Man and Kilt Boy were not so much racing as restaging the naval battle from Ben-Hur. The two karts were ramming each other, bounding apart, then ramming again. A considerable slipstream blew up Magnus’s kilt, flapping it in his face, but it didn’t seem to affect the ferocity of his driving. Neither driver spoke or gestured or gave any other indication they were angry at each other: they let their vehicles do the talking.

It seemed dangerous to go near them-and Dagmar didn’t want to see up the kilt anyway-so she slowed and followed the two lurching, ramming, grating go-karts around the track to the start line, where the manager black-flagged both Magnus and Byron and sent them off the course. Dagmar accelerated again and again found herself in the lead, but by this point no one was racing anymore.

Dagmar seemed to have won. Or so she surmised.

“What the hell was that about?” Dagmar asked Lincoln later, after she’d unstrapped herself from her kart.

Lincoln wore a tropical shirt and a broad sun hat and carried a bottle of Fanta. In the tropical sun his Elvis shades had turned a deep black. He was amused.

“Healthy competition, I guess. We’re going to need that kind of aggression two days from now.”

She gave him a surprised look.

“Two days?”

“That’s when we hit the first target. The camera crews, the bus, and the air unit are already on their way to the mainland, and Tuna will fly out tomorrow.”

Dagmar felt herself rearing like a startled horse.

“Are you serious? Our exercises have been complete shambles.”

Lincoln gave an amused smile. “Perhaps from the point of view of someone who produces professional videos. But in fact everyone’s gotten better, and in any case we’re not trying to make everything look like Hollywood-if all the video looks too professional, it’ll be obvious that professionals are involved. It seems to me that everyone’s doing well enough.”

Dagmar was astounded. “Well enough?” she repeated, and shook her head. Lincoln was clearly out of his mind.

“Lin-Chatsworth, it’s got to be better than that! This thing could be a catastrophe!”

He raised a hand. “We do not have world enough and time,” he said. “We have to move forward.”

She looked at him.

“Is there some particular reason why it has to happen now?”

Lincoln waved his Fanta.

“It should have happened months ago, okay? And now I don’t want any delays, because that gives the people in D.C. time to get nervous, and then fly in to interfere-” His glasses slipped down his nose, and he looked at Dagmar over the metal rims with his soft blue eyes.

“We’ll make mistakes,” he said. “We won’t be perfect. But Bozbeyli’s been in charge over there long enough.”

“Another week and we could-”

He put a hand on her shoulder.

“You’re the best, Dagmar. You’re the best hope we have. And I have utter confidence in you.”

Frustration and vanity danced an exasperating little tango in Dagmar’s skull.

“I’m only one person,” she said, suddenly forlorn. “Turkey is a whole country.”

“I saw you knock Tuna into the weeds just now,” Lincoln said. “I figure you’ll know what to do, when the time comes.”

If I’m not huddled in the corner, Dagmar thought, hiding from phantom Indonesians.

But sensibly enough, she kept that thought to herself.

“There’s something not quite right here,” Dagmar said.

“I know,” said Calvin.

“But I can’t put my finger on it.”

“Neither can I.”

Calvin was the writer Dagmar had hired to script the game for Seagram’s. Like Dagmar, he was a science fiction writer whose career had collapsed-in his case, because his publisher had been so enthusiastic about his first novel that they had printed no fewer than thirty thousand hardback copies, of which they had sold six thousand. What would normally have been a very respectable sale for a first novel had become a horrific financial loss for the company, a loss for which the author-as always-had been blamed. The second and third books, already under contract when the first book appeared, had received no promotion, and their publication had been delayed for years when their places on the schedule had been taken by books about which the publisher was more enthusiastic.

By the end of this purgatory Calvin’s writing career was as dead as a can of Potted Meat Product, and when Dagmar called he had been supporting himself by ghostwriting erotica for the online journals of porn stars out of the San Fernando Valley. He’d been very happy to accept Dagmar’s offer for work that didn’t involve rapturous close-up descriptions of the money shot.

Long-distance from Cyprus, Dagmar had to walk Calvin through the process of writing an ARG. Copies of the work were emailed to Dagmar, and she made notes and changes and emailed them back. And at least once each day there was a phone call filled with desperation and last-minute improvisation.

“So we’ve got Harry and Sandee trying to get to Lake Louise in Alberta,” Calvin said. “And all they have is a few dollars, a Swiss Army knife, and a bottle of whiskey-the latter being product placement. And Sandee is falling apart because she’s just seen her son murdered, so Harry has to take charge and turn hero.”

“With the help of the players,” Dagmar said.

“Of course.”

Dagmar thought about this for a moment.

“Why,” Dagmar asked, “am I not seeing this?”

There was a long silence while Calvin considered his character outline.

“Harry hasn’t been a leader up to that point,” Calvin said. “All he’s done is follow Sandee around, and when she’s not around he wanders in circles.”

“That’s right,” Dagmar said.

“The players are going to help him out, of course.”

“It still has to be plausible,” Dagmar said.

There was another long moment, and then Calvin spoke. The words came slowly, as he thought them out. Dagmar could almost hear the slow clank of gears turning in his head.

“I can put in a flashback,” he said. “I can show him being heroic at some point in the past.”

“No flashbacks,” Dagmar said. “Flashbacks are deadly. They confuse the hell out of everybody because the games take place in a kind of eternal present-flashbacks break continuity.”

“Okay.” Calvin’s gears ground slowly on. “I can-I can foreshadow it somehow.”

Dagmar thought about this.

“You’d have to start back on week one, and week one is launching in two days. You’d have to rewrite scenes that are already completed.”

“Well. I could.”

“You’ve already written a lot of material that shows that Harry isn’t a hero,” Dagmar said.

“Well.” Thoughtfully. “I could change all that in the rewrites.”

“Maybe he’s not the hero,” Dagmar said. “Maybe Sandee is the hero.”

“But Sandee’s going to fall apart. She’s going to have a breakdown in week three.”

“What if it’s Harry’s job to keep Sandee together? Maybe that’s what he’s there for.”

There was another moment of silence.

“So what you’re suggesting,” Calvin said, “is that Harry isn’t Frodo, he’s Sam.”

“Yes,” Dagmar said. “That’s what I was suggesting.” The Tolkien analogy hadn’t occurred to her, but it seemed appropriate.

“I don’t know,” Calvin said. “I had such big plans for Harry.”

Dagmar suspected that Calvin was very fond of Harry, identifying perhaps with the character’s haplessness. The fondness was blinding Calvin to the character’s true arc, which Dagmar was pretty sure meant that Harry wasn’t the Hero, he was the Hero’s Best Friend.

“I think this will work,” Dagmar said. “And the players will like helping Sandee surmount her troubles.”

“Maybe they can guide her to a good shrink,” Calvin muttered.

“I think this is our solution,” Dagmar said. “I think this is how it goes.”

Calvin conceded defeat. “Let me think,” he said, “how to present this.”

I am Plot Queen, Dagmar thought in quiet triumph. I may sleep in a crooked bed, but I can make a story dance.

If only, she thought, she was as good at creating a happy ending in real life as in her fictions.