He waved a finger over the laser sensor to bring up the data, looked up.
“One hour, thirty-nine minutes,” he said. “Give or take.”
“Can you do the job in that time?”
He shook his head and lifted his shoulders, a Turkish gesture that meant “I don’t know.”
“Conserve power.”
Dagmar went to the door and looked out. Two vehicles were laying dust trails along the road in the distance. She could hear the popping of shots.
She and Ismet should have come up with a better plan, she thought. Though as it happened she couldn’t think of one.
Her phone rang, Helmuth calling from Frankfurt.
“Yes?”
“We’re getting reports of riots all over Turkey.”
Dagmar gave a weary laugh. “Losing the Internet didn’t make people stay home; it just pissed them off.”
“They were already on strike—maybe they didn’t need the Internet so much.”
The distant dust trails vanished into the shimmer of the horizon. Dagmar could smell smoke drifting up from the village below.
“What’s happening with the old parliament building?” she asked.
“Nothing yet. I’d expect the army to turn up, though.” There was a pause. “We also got one report from the east of Turkey, saying the commander of the Second Army has been removed.”
“Hm.” Dagmar peered at the horizon, saw nothing. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“I don’t know. We need Chatsworth to tell us what it means.”
Dagmar considered this and wondered what Lincoln’s reaction would be if she told him she was in Uzbekistan.
“You could ask Ismet,” Helmuth suggested.
“Last I saw,” Dagmar said, “Ismet was driving across the desert being pursued by Turkish gunmen.”
There was a long pause.
“Okay,” Dagmar said. “Here’s what’s happening.”
She gave a brief outline of the situation. Helmuth muttered something in German under his breath. “So you can’t get out?”
“No.”
She could hear Helmuth thinking. “I have an idea,” he said. “But you’re not going to like it.”
She cast a glance back into the yurt, at Üruisamoglu sitting motionless at his computer, watching her with his large brown eyes.
“I’m open to suggestions,” she said.
“Shoot the kid,” Helmuth said. “He works for the damn narco-Nazis anyway, so he’s no loss. Take his laptop, grab some supplies, and take off on foot. Hide until the bad guys go away, or until you can reestablish contact with Ismet.”
Dagmar felt her mouth go dry.
“That’s… going to be hard,” she said.
“Can you think of a better idea?”
She gave the matter some thought. “I’ll have to get back to you,” she said. She pressed End and put the phone back in its holster. She looked at Üruisamoglu.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“It would go faster with music.”
She gave him an icy look. “Then sing,” she said.
She left the yurt and gazed out to the east, where Ismet and his pursuers had disappeared. She saw no dust plumes, heard no vehicle noises or gunshots on the wind.
Dagmar rubbed her sore forearms with her hands. She thought about Ismet dead, Ismet burning in his car, Ismet lying wounded on the sand. Tears stung her eyes.
She had bravely struck off on her own, without any of her support system, and led her lover straight into a fiasco and probably got him killed.
She couldn’t save Ismet. She couldn’t save Üruisamoglu, and she knew she couldn’t kill him. She was useless.
She was Semiramis Orta. She was the spy who failed.
Dagmar clenched her fists, her teeth. Her thin leather jacket didn’t seem able to keep out the cold wind at all. She shivered.
God damn it, she thought. Haven’t I learned anything?
Apparently not.
She returned to the yurt and looked over Üruisamoglu’s shoulder. He was coding: she recognized structure and syntax but couldn’t place the lines in any context. Slash couldn’t help clarify; he was off somewhere in his own Deep State—not in the cabal that had taken power in Turkey, but inside the internal realm where art and code and human mind all came together, where mad imagination ran in tandem with the discipline of science, a rigorous internal dreaming that flowed down the arms and through the fingers into the keyboard and then out into the world…
Oblivious to her, Üruisamoglu was humming to himself as he worked. Needing the music.
She followed the coding. She did very little coding herself these days, she had Helmuth and others for that, but she still appreciated coding as an art form, and Üruisamoglu was very good. His syntax was clean, he was well organized, and he made few mistakes.
And the original code, the code he was modifying, was astounding. She had never seen anything so clean.
Dagmar looked up as she heard a noise outside the yurt. Sudden terror clutched her. Her heart crashed against her ribs.
Someone was outside.
As quietly as possible, she groped for the pistol at the small of her back. She failed on the first try and on the second managed to ease the Beretta from the holster. She stepped back, looked at the weapon, and remembered how to work it. She took the safety off and pushed the slide back, then let it go. She saw the shiny brass cartridge go into the breech as the slide snapped forward with a clack.
She saw Üruisamoglu jump. He spun around and saw the gun in her hand.
“Ananin ami!” he said. He sounded disgusted.
“I thought I heard something.”
“Don’t do that!” He was shaking a finger. “Don’t do that!”
Dagmar stepped around him, walking toward the door of the yurt. She wondered how long she had been watching Üruisamoglu at work, whether she’d become so absorbed in the coding that she hadn’t heard someone approach the tent.
Her feet seemed incredibly distant. She could barely feel them touch the carpets. The gun was heavy in her hand and somehow slippery. It wanted to fall out of her grip. She seemed to hear a thin keening on the air, a cry on the very edge of her hearing.
She was absolutely certain that she could hear someone creeping around outside. Someone who was very possibly waiting for her to come out, so that he could shoot her.
She moved closer to the yurt door.
Then Dagmar heard another noise, off to her right somewhere. She gave a cry and snapped the pistol up to aiming level, ready to fire.
She could fire right through the tent walls. But she couldn’t see out and didn’t trust herself to fire accurately at a sound.
“Did you hear that?” she said. Her voice came out as a husky whisper.
“Hear what?” Üruisamoglu asked.
Dagmar moved closer to the door. If she could fire out, she thought, they could fire in. They could gun her down right where she stood.
She tried to remember all the tactics she had learned playing first-person shooter games. She got down on her knees so as to make a smaller target of herself. She crawled slowly to the door, trying not to make a sound. She knew the enemy were there, waiting.
She thought they were off to the right. She put a hand on the wooden door. Her heart was crashing so loud that she couldn’t hear anything else.
Dagmar pushed the door open with her left hand and thrust the pistol out. Her finger was ready on the trigger. She saw only bare ground, with the view of the Kyzyl Kum beyond.
She shoved the door entirely open, swept the pistol around in an arc. Saw no one.
In a sudden murderous frenzy she ran out onto the wooden platform, then dropped from there onto the ground. She peered under the platform, ready to blast away the legs of anyone standing on the other side, but there was no one.
She ran clean around the yurt. No enemy appeared; no gunmen took shots at her. Wind keened through the tower.
Dagmar paused,
the gun half-lowered, and listened. She heard nothing but the wind. Then she sagged as she realized what had happened.
She had been hallucinating. If she had actually seen any of the enemy, they would have been Indonesian rioters or maybe Maffya hit men.
She had nearly fired through the yurt wall at something that didn’t exist.
Well, she thought, that would have boosted Slash’s confidence.
Dagmar held out the gun, carefully lowered the trigger to the uncocked position, and slid the safety on. Her hands were trembling so savagely that she had a hard time getting the pistol back in its holster.
She went out onto the edge of the plateau and looked out. No vehicles were in sight. She returned to the yurt and tried to give Üruisamoglu a brave smile.
“Must have been an animal,” she said.
“Animal,” he repeated, disbelieving. He was still giving her that odd intense look, as if she were some specimen that he was examining under a magnifying glass.
“How’s the coding going?” she asked.
He seemed unhappy. “I could use some tea.”
There was a hot kettle already on the wood stove, giving off a trickle of steam. Dagmar found a teapot and black tea. A smoky aroma filled the yurt as she made the tea. She gave a cup to Üruisamoglu and took one for herself.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
He looked at her. “What are you, a musician like Gordon?”
She managed a smile. “No. I’m a game designer.”
He shook his head, skeptical.
“I designed the Stunrunner game,” she said. “Your friend Alaydin said you played it.”
Realization came. He rocked back a little. He pointed a finger at her.
“You’re that terrorist woman that Attila Gordon hired. I read about you in the Gazette.”
“I’m not a terrorist,” Dagmar said.
“My god,” he said. “No fucking wonder.” He sipped his tea. “This is a real mess.”
Dagmar could only agree. She looked down at the forearm crutches lying on the carpet beside him.
“Did you have an accident?” she said.
“A truck hit my car. Six months ago. A friend of mine got killed.” He looked up. “That’s when the Intelligence Section came to me with the project. I was able to work while I was in recovery.” He shook his head. “I should never have come out here.”
She looked around the yurt. “Why did you? This is a pretty primitive environment for someone who can’t get around very well.”
He rubbed the lip of the teacup against his chin. “I wanted to be by myself. I’d been in the hospital; I was in recovery for weeks, doing physical therapy.” He looked up at her. “I kept reliving the accident. Every time I saw a truck coming down the road I wanted to run and hide. I kept seeing my friend dead.” He looked down at the laptop screen. “I thought if I came up here, I could forget all that.”
“It’s not so easy,” Dagmar said. “I had some friends killed a few years ago and—it’s not something one forgets.”
Üruisamoglu said nothing, just sipped his tea.
“There are medications that can help,” she said. “You could see a doctor.”
Üruisamoglu pointed at his head, rotated the finger. “I don’t want to lose my edge,” he said. He seemed angry.
“There are anti-anxiety drugs and… and others,” Dagmar said. She waved a hand vaguely. “They’re not supposed to interfere with brain function.”
“Anxiety,” said Üruisamoglu, “is what keeps me going.” His dark eyes flashed beneath the unibrow. “Besides, I don’t want anyone thinking I’m crazy.”
“It’s not crazy; it’s supposed to be—”
Üruisamoglu looked up at her savagely. “Do you want me to do the job, or not?”
Dagmar looked at him.
“Do the job,” she said.
He put his hands on his keyboard and began to type. Dagmar sipped her own tea—it was deep and smoky, with a tang of the woodlands.
Anxiety is what keeps me going… I don’t want anyone thinking I’m crazy. Do you want me to do the job, or not? They were all her own excuses for living with her condition. On Üruisamoglu’s lips they sounded pathetic, defensive.
She began to suspect that the excuses didn’t sound any better coming from her.
Üruisamoglu began coding steadily. The tea provided a welcome warmth. Dagmar left the yurt again and walked to the edge of the plateau. If she was going to start hallucinating again, she figured it was best she do it out of Üruisamoglu’s sight.
Okay, she thought. I’ll see a doc. How much worse can it be?
The resolution, she thought, lacked a certain force. Possibly because the likely outcome of her current situation was that she would be killed and that she’d never see that doctor.
She huddled into her thin, useless jacket and shivered. Winds had raised a dust devil down in the sands. She watched it for a while, the swirling sand a silvery glitter in the sun, and then saw another trail of dust rising by the bluffs.
Tension sang through her muscles as she realized that the second dust trail was caused by a vehicle moving toward her.
But whose car was it? she wondered. She reached for her handheld, called up the satellite function, and speed-dialed Ismet.
The ring signal went on for a long time. Dagmar held her breath as the signal went on and on.
Finally she pressed End and returned the phone to its holster. Despair gave a little wail somewhere in her psyche.
She forced herself to remain calm as she walked back to the yurt. She opened the door and went in.
“How long?” she asked.
Üruisamoglu looked briefly up. “Not long,” he said.
“We don’t have much time.”
He circled his hand in that Turkish way that meant he’d heard all this so many times before.
She could carry him out on her back, she thought. But she couldn’t see herself clambering along the bluffs that way.
She would just have to buy him time.
Dagmar went out onto the plateau again and tried to work out how the car would come up and where she should hide so that they couldn’t see her until the shooting started and where she would stay in cover. She tried several places and checked the field of fire from each. Again she tried to remember what she’d learned in first-person shooter games.
She’d never gotten as good as the best players, the ones who could just run into the middle of a firefight, shoot in all directions while running, killing all the Nazis or the zombies or the Nazi zombies, and never come to harm. Instead she preferred to be a kind of sniper, to settle under cover somewhere and pick the enemy off one by one.
That was the only thing she could do here, fire from ambush. She wasn’t a gunfighter, and unlike her character in the video games, she couldn’t be sure of hitting anything with a pistol she’d never fired.
The dust plume came closer. Dagmar chose her spot, then jogged back to the yurt. Üruisamoglu was still coding, bent over his work.
“Soon,” he said.
“Call me when you’re ready.”
He waved a hand, telling her to push off. She swallowed her resentment, then returned to her chosen place.
It was another ten minutes before she heard the car laboring up the narrow road. Even though she knew it was coming, she still managed surprise when it finally came into her view.
The car had taken a pounding. The windshield had caved in, leaving only a few silver-glinting remnants around the edges. The body was dinged and covered in dust, one headlight was smashed, and a front fender was flapping loose. The car was a piece of junk now, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that there were still killers in it.
She found it all intensely interesting. Oddly, she wasn’t afraid. A short while ago Dagmar had been terrified of hallucinations, but now that the black hats had arrived, the men who could actually kill her, she didn’t find them frightening at all.
&nb
sp; Dagmar rested her pistol on the rock in front of her and fired. She counted five shots, the pistol kicking against her hand each time, a jolt of pain going up her bruised arm, and she felt a rush of intense pleasure as she saw the sparks thrown up by a bullet as it splashed on the hood.
The driver slammed the brakes, then threw the car into reverse and backed away. A laugh burst past Dagmar’s lips as she saw the enemy retreating, and she fired another shot. Someone fired back at her through the windshield—she saw the flash—but the bullet flew away into nothing.
Dagmar thought that she should move now they knew her position, and so she shifted to another of the places she had chosen. She leaned far out from her cover to observe the enemy.
The car backed all the way to the bottom of the bluff, and then the passengers got out. There were still four of them, still in coats and ties, three in dark jackets, one in beige. They consulted with one another briefly, and then the three in dark jackets began to advance up the road. From their posture—crouched down with hands held together in front—it was clear they were holding pistols.
The other one, the one in the light-colored suit, stayed by the car and watched with his arms akimbo. He seemed to be intrigued by what was going on.
The shooters were going to be a lot harder to stop this time. But at least they had only short-range weapons—they’d come prepared to kill a crippled computer scientist in a yurt, not engage in a prolonged firefight.
“Briana! Briana!” Üruisamoglu’s voice came from the yurt.
Dagmar hesitated, then broke cover and ran for the yurt. She opened the door.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I’ve done it. I need you to put in your password.”
She ran to him, dropped to her knees, and turned his laptop to her. Passwords swarmed through her mind. It had run blank.
She typed “CONSTANTINOPLE1453,” then hit Enter. It was a password that the computers at NSA or other agencies would have no trouble cracking, but she couldn’t think of anything else. When she had the opportunity she’d change it.
“Good,” Üruisamoglu said. “Now I send it out.”
Dagmar jumped to her feet and ran back to her position. The gunmen were a lot closer now. She rested the gun on a rock, aimed, and fired.
Deep State Page 37
