There was a pounding on the front door, and shouting. Dagmar shrieked at Ismet not to open the door and let in more of the enemy, but he did anyway, and there was the guard from the RAF Regiment. She screamed at the sight of his assault rifle. His radio crackled loud in the air.
Dagmar shivered and wept and flailed her fists as the Indonesian men circled her. Ismet and the guard had a brief conversation.
“Could you get her a blanket, perhaps?” the corporal said. “I don’t like to see her naked like that.”
Ismet went to the bedroom and returned with a sheet. He approached Dagmar carefully and offered the sheet. Dagmar snatched it and covered herself. The Indonesian men leered at her.
“I don’t know what to do,” Ismet said. “I tried holding her, but—”
“Will you stop talking like idiots and help me!” Dagmar demanded. Ismet reached for her.
The corporal shook his head. “No,” he said. “Don’t touch. She’ll read it as a threat.” He unslung the rifle from around his neck and put it out of sight in the kitchen.
“Let me try something,” he said. “One of my mates was in Afghanistan—came back with a similar problem.”
He crouched near Dagmar’s feet. Dagmar drew her legs up, away from him, and threatened him with her claws.
“Miss,” he said. “I’d like you to look at the sheet. Could you do that for me?”
She considered the request and wondered if it was a way to divert her attention so that he could attack. But she decided she could spare the sheet a glimpse and look at it.
The sheet, left behind by the apartment’s actual tenants, was fine white cotton with a wide blue Mediterranean stripe. There was the faint aroma of myrrh, Ismet’s scent.
“See how stripy it is, miss?” the corporal said. “How smooth?”
“Yes,” she said through clenched teeth. Light gleamed wickedly on the Indonesian blades that menaced her.
“Blue and white,” the corporal went on, “that’s the Greek national colors, miss. It’s like their flag.”
Dagmar wiped tears from her eyes and considered the sheet and the Greek flag and wondered if she was going to be buried under the Greek flag.
“Maybe you’d like to look at the couch?” the corporal suggested. “It’s a different shade of blue, isn’t it?”
Slowly the corporal called her attention to the actuality that surrounded her: the couch of robin’s egg blue, the lamp with its parchment shade, the ceiling fan with blades that shone with their brass fittings. It was the reality that Dagmar had all along knew was present, lying like an underground river running quietly beneath a surface filled with overwhelming terror and menace. Once her attention was drawn to the quotidian world, the horrors—the Indonesians with their knives and ferocious eyes—began to seem less plausible.
Over time they faded away, though she could still feel their presence, clustered in some other dimension separated from hers only by the thinnest possible membrane.
Dagmar found herself lying naked in the front room, her hand clutching the sheet up to her neck. The soft-voiced corporal squatted at her feet in his camouflage battle dress. Ismet, wearing only his trousers, stood guard by the door, keeping out the others who Dagmar sensed were clustered on the balcony.
The corporal smiled at her. He was dark and square headed, the sleeves of his battle dress peeled back from hairy arms.
“Are you feeling better, miss?” he asked.
Her heart was racing like the engine of a Ferrari.
“I think so,” she said. The words felt strange in her mouth, as if she’d never spoken before.
“If you have this problem again, miss,” he said, “you just concentrate on your surroundings. The furniture, the ceiling, your clothes—whatever you’ve got around you, right?”
“All right,” she said.
He winked a bright brown eye and grinned at her.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Poole, miss,” he said. “Roger Poole.”
“Thank you, Roger Poole,” Dagmar said.
“Perhaps you could do with a bit of refreshment,” Poole said. “A cup of tea, perhaps?”
“Yes. Why not?” She found herself willing to follow any suggestion at all.
Poole rose carefully to his feet, watching her carefully to make certain she didn’t see the movement as a threat. He walked to the kitchen. Ismet approached, watching from a carefully calculated distance.
“I think I’d like to wash my face,” she said.
“Of course,” he said. Ismet moved toward her to offer a hand, then stepped back. It was the first time Dagmar had ever seen him when he didn’t know how to behave. It was almost comical.
Dagmar wrapped the sheet more securely around herself and rose to her feet. A narcotic eddy seemed to swirl into her head, and for a moment she tottered on her feet. She put a hand on the wall to steady herself and then walked to the bathroom.
While she was washing she heard Poole make a report on his radio and Ismet open the door to tell everyone there that whatever happened was over, they could leave. Dagmar ignored this, toweled her face, and looked at herself in the mirror—she saw an older woman there, pale and prematurely aged, hair in disarray, skin sallow in the overhead light. She stared at herself for a moment, stared into her own bleak future, and then picked up her comb. She arranged her hair and then went to the bedroom to put on some clothes.
When she returned, she saw Poole and Ismet both looking at her with cautious anticipation.
“It’s over,” she said. “I’ll be all right.”
Till next time, she thought. Which was probably what they were thinking as well.
Poole had the kettle on and had found teas on the kitchen counter. Dagmar picked a Darjeeling over something herbal—she didn’t want to be eased back into a sleep where the hallucination could strike again; she much preferred staying awake till dawn.
The three of them sat in the dinette and drank tea and chatted for an hour—chatted about nothing, because Poole proved an expert at harmless blather. He talked about football, pop stars, movies, anything airy and unlikely to send Dagmar back into whatever psychic mine field she’d stumbled into.
After it became obvious that Dagmar was unlikely to relapse into a raving, weeping maniac, Poole washed his cup in the sink, picked up his rifle, said his polite good-byes. He made sure they knew that he’d be on guard till six, then let himself out.
Dagmar looked in wonder at the closed door. “The kindness of strangers…” she murmured.
Ismet placed his cup carefully in his saucer.
“Has this happened before?” he asked.
“It wasn’t this bad, usually.”
“This bad? Like with police breaking down the door?”
Dagmar shook her head.
“No police,” she said.
“How long has it been going on?”
She looked down at her teacup.
“Three years. Since my friends were killed.”
He studied her through his spectacles for a long moment.
“Are you… in treatment?” he asked.
She ran her fingers through her gray hair. “I figured it would get better on its own. And it was, mostly, until I came here. And now, with people getting killed, it’s all coming back.”
“Do you think you should see a doctor?”
Dagmar shook her head.
“I have this job. I run a company.” She laughed. “I’m running a fucking revolution, for Christ’s sake! I can’t afford any downtime. And I’m often running my company on borrowed money—and there’s no way a bank is going to loan money to a crazy person. And—” She shook her head. “We can’t afford insurance to cover mental disorders, so I’d basically be on my own.”
He considered this, head tilted.
“I think you should see a doctor, anyway.”
She waved a hand. “After this is all over.”
Apparently Ismet decided not to press the point.
&nbs
p; “I’m going to go on the balcony and smoke a cigarette, okay?” he said.
“By all means.”
He rose from his chair.
“I only smoke when I’m under stress,” he said.
She had already observed this. She offered a faint smile.
“No time like the present,” she said.
He collected his shirt and cigarette pack from the bedroom, then stepped out onto the balcony.
Poor man, she thought. He signed up a gaming genius and got a crazy person instead.
Dagmar sighed, rose, washed the tea things. When he returned, she waited on the living room couch. She looked at him, patted the cushion beside her.
He joined her, carrying with him a pleasantly sweet odor of tobacco. She kissed him and rested her head on his shoulder; he put an arm around her.
“It’s all right if I touch you now?” he said.
“You can touch me any time I’m not raving.”
“Okay.” He kissed her forehead. There was bristle on his chin. She nestled against his warmth.
“You don’t want to go to bed?” he asked.
“No.” The bed had betrayed her to the enemy; she didn’t want to lie in it again.
She didn’t want to fall asleep, so she talked. She told Ismet about her girlhood in Ohio, her drunken father, her passive but persistent mother. She told him about her time at Caltech, her marriage to an English chemistry professor, her life in England, and her divorce.
“I’m deeply flawed,” she said. “You should know that.”
Then she reflected that he’d probably worked that out on his own.
She spoke of her return to California to reunite with her friends and start a game company. She told him about being caught in the Indonesian revolt, about Austen’s and Charlie’s getting killed, about the Maffya hit man she’d tracked through the Briana Hall ARG. She stopped short of telling him how she resolved the problem—she wasn’t that crazy, not yet.
Maybe, toward dawn, she drowsed. She only knew that the daylight caught her by surprise and that she rose from the couch with her mind in a whirl, unclear how she got here, misplaced on Aphrodite’s Island, surrounded by the spirits of the dead, lost in the bright Mediterranean air.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
FROM: Rahim
The following proxy sites are still unblocked. Please pass this on to anyone in Turkey.
97.107.137.80:3128
200.65.127.161:3128
202.94.144.73:80
129.82.12.188:3128
212.123.91.165:8080
71.48.222.54:11764
60.6.205.26:808
The following are no longer working:
8.191.16.126:8080
91.103.236.195:8080
193.30.164.3:8080
62.75.219.25:8080
Breakfast was coffee, along with leftover pizza. The latter had not been improved with age. The toaster still talked whenever anyone got near.
The apartment’s little shower was too small to hold Ismet and Dagmar both, so they showered separately, then rejoined just in time for Dagmar to kiss Ismet good-bye. His RAF guard checked the Ford to make certain it hadn’t been wired with explosives in the night, and then he was gone, off to the war.
Dagmar watched Ismet drive away with a sense of emptiness that she hadn’t expected. It was as if all her capacity for emotion had been used up the previous night.
She rather hoped that was the case. At the moment, being an icy logic robot seemed a pretty attractive job.
She took a vacuum flask of coffee and walked down the stairs to encounter a guard from the RAF Regiment. He was a black man with gold-rimmed shades and enormous corded forearms that seemed to burst from the rolled-up sleeves of his battle dress.
“Excuse me,” she said.
“Yes, miss?”
“Do you know Corporal Poole?”
The man smiled. “Pooley? Yeah.”
“He did me a favor last night, and I’d like to buy him a present. Do you have any idea what he’d like?”
The smile broadened, and the guard took off his shades, revealing a pair of lopsided brown eyes, the right much higher than the left.
“Pooley’s a Johnnie Walker man, last I heard.”
“Right,” Dagmar said. “Thanks.”
Anxiety returned as her guard drove her to the ops center. She could picture herself walking in to silence, to the watchful eyes of those who knew she had gone mad the previous night.
But that wasn’t what happened. As Dagmar came into the ops center carrying her flask of coffee, she saw activity, people talking and staring at one another’s flatscreens.
Something was going on.
But before she could find out what, Lincoln intercepted her in the hall and gestured her into his office. He closed the door behind her and waited to speak until after she’d sat in the visitor’s chair. He didn’t sit himself; he hovered over her, one hand on the back of her chair.
“Are you going to be all right today?” he asked in a low voice.
She gave a brittle laugh.
“I’ll be as all right as I ever am,” she said.
“That was a pretty serious report I got.”
She looked at him. The blue eyes behind the Elvis glasses were concerned and just a little uneasy.
“It was a serious attack,” she said.
“Are you likely to have another?”
Dagmar felt her teeth clack together, some kind of strange nervous reaction. She willed her jaws apart.
“Depends,” she said, “on how many more of us get killed.”
“I’d like you to see a doctor.”
She forced a shrug. “If you think it’ll do any good. And so long as no record of the visit will ever exist to fuck up my insurance situation.”
“The patient’s name will be Briana.” Lincoln moved toward his desk. “Shall I make you an appointment with one of the doctors here on the base?”
“Okay.” She started to stand, then hesitated.
“One other thing,” she said.
“Yes?” His hand on the telephone.
“Make sure I don’t have to tell the doc about how I got this way.”
She left him to chew on that and headed for the ops room to see what was stirring.
Tuna’s killer had been quickly identified by the Group Mind, along with the others in his unit. In response to the killing, the government had announced that the Gray Wolves were being taken off the streets and would no longer be used as a police auxiliary.
Probably that meant that the next time the Wolves conducted a massacre they’d be in civilian dress.
The announcement had heartened the opposition, and now Ankara was a mass of disorder. There appeared to be a number of different demonstrations—or full-fledged riots—and there were videos of demonstrators throwing rocks, of pepper gas being hurled into a chanting crowd, of armored personnel carriers from the army taking up station in front of official-looking buildings, of a police charge on motorcycles. A lot of the action seemed to be taking place on the campuses of Ankara’s dozen or more universities. Hundreds of videos and pictures were being uploaded on dozens of Web sites, along with a lot of frantic text in Turkish and broken English.
Dagmar contacted Rafet on satellite phone using encrypted VoIP, but he knew only what he could see from the safe house in Ulus, and that wasn’t much. After consultation with Lincoln, it was decided to use some of the Skunk Works drones to cruise over other parts of the city.
Therefore it was pure luck that a drone caught Erez, Ankara’s former mayor, marching with a crowd of hundreds into the Ministry of Labor and Social Security—they seized the building, invited the regular workers to leave except for those who wished to join the revolution, hoisted the flag of Erez’s banned party beneath the Turkish ensign on the roof, and barricaded the doors against any counterattack. There had been police guards outside the building, but these were severely outnumbered and faded away.
The building was an enormous block
y towerlike structure, glass and cyclopean concrete bulwarks, set in the middle of parks and parking lots and only a short distance from the Atatürk Mausoleum. It would be easy to defend, assuming the mayor’s followers were up to defending it.
Soon videos appeared on the Web of the quondam mayor announcing the formation of a provisional government with himself at its head. He invited the people of Ankara to his little fortress to help defend it.
“Is this Yeltsin standing on the tank at the Russian White House?” Dagmar wondered aloud.
“Could be more like Jim Bowie falling down drunk at the Alamo,” Lincoln muttered. “But I need to talk to that man.”
He went to his office to send off messages. The drama in Ankara continued—and then came the announcement that the mayor of Bodrum, acting in concert with the governor of Mula Province, had ordered local forces to seal off the Bodrum Peninsula, which he was now prepared to defend against the military government. Bodrum, the fashionable resort town known in ancient times as Halicarnassus, was now in a state of self-imposed siege.
“That’s not gonna last,” Richard remarked. “The Turks have a freakin’ navy. They can just sail around that stupid blockade and land however many troops they want.”
Hellmuth nodded. “Our allies could benefit from having played more strategy games in their youth, that’s for sure.”
More news came in, of demonstrations in Manisa, in Denizli, in Edirne, and once again in Trabzon. It was Friday afternoon and a lot of people had started the weekend early, swarming the streets. Hundreds were now waving banners from atop Atatürk Stadium in Beyolu, across the Golden Horn from Istanbul. The reaction of the authorities varied: some demonstrations were attacked, others blockaded; others proceeded without opposition. Though Turkish networks didn’t mention the demos at all, international news networks were reporting the events live, though their reportage tended to rely heavily on amateur video downloaded from the Web pages created and maintained by the Lincoln Brigade.
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