Dagmar shrank from this idea. Carrying the live events as they happened, to connect the players on the ground with the many more players who participated only through electronic forums, was a Great Big Idea trademark.
“Not necessarily,” Dagmar said to Lincoln. “You still have your massive server set up in Istanbul, right? What the bus has is all the equipment we need to connect the camera feed to the servers-and it’s got all our vidcams, too. So what we need to do is get some new cameras, and then get a connection between our cameras and your server. We don’t technically need the bus for that, but we need something.”
She looked at her speed dial. “I’ll get ahold of Richard.”
Richard wasn’t answering his phone, so Dagmar left voice mail. She holstered her handheld and looked at the others.
“Whether it’s safe to continue at all,” she said, “is another issue.”
“Bah,” Tuna said. “Let them do whatever they like.”
“No,” Dagmar said. “Let’s not.” She looked ruefully at the furniture, the scattered papers, and nudged a chair with her foot.
“Have a seat, everyone,” she said.
They sat-except for Lincoln, who hadn’t ever risen from his chair. Before Dagmar sat, she walked to the window, stooped, and picked up the scattered newspapers. She stacked them in a rough pile, dropped them on a table, and then took her seat.
“We have permission to run an event in Gulhane Park tomorrow morning,” she said. “So the government knows where we’re going to be, and when. And they’ve taken away our ability to cover the game live, so maybe they think they can take some kind of action against us-attack us, even.”
“The players are going to all have cell phone cameras,” Judy said. “And a lot will have video cameras, as well. There’s no way”
Ismet knotted his long fingers. “But does the government know that?” he said. “The Internet didn’t exist when the generals were young. I don’t know whether they understand anything like what your game represents.”
Dagmar recalled the three elderly men and felt doubt slide into her mind.
“Presumably they have younger advisors,” she said uncertainly.
Tuna made a fist of one big hand and bounced it on his knee.
“They know nothing,” he said. “They’re fools; they’re ridiculous.”
“Dare we take the chance?” Judy said. “If they know nothing, doesn’t that make it more dangerous? They could order these Gray Wolves to attack us thinking no one would ever know, and even if a thousand pictures are taken on cell phones, we’d still be attacked.”
Dagmar turned to Lincoln, who was frowning down at the floor between his sandals.
“Lincoln?” Dagmar said.
“I’m thinking,” he said. “I’m trying to work out how much the generals care about world opinion.”
“They seem to care about my opinion,” Dagmar said.
“This game is huge,” Lincoln said. “The generals have every reason to want it to succeed. Attacking a bunch of foreigners in a park isn’t the sort of thing that would bring millions of tourist euros to their country, and so…”
He let the words trail away. He closed his eyes and was silent for a long, long moment. He nodded a few times. Dagmar began to wonder if he’d fallen asleep.
And then Lincoln lifted his head, looked at Dagmar through his Elvis glasses, and shook his head.
“Nope,” he said. “You can’t risk it.”
“Why?” Dagmar asked.
“Because,” Lincoln said, “I could be wrong.”
Anger clamped around Dagmar’s heart like a grim little fist. She wanted to jump, rage, wave her arms. Instead she took a long breath and spoke.
“I really want to stick it to these people,” she said.
“Yes!” Tuna said. He pumped a hand in the air. “Yes, very good!”
Lincoln was still looking at Dagmar, his eyes narrowed, as if he was studying her.
“How?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“What are our goals?” Lincoln said. “To damage the regime in some way? To cock a snook at the generals?”
“Cock a what?” This clearly was a new expression for Mehmet.
Lincoln continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted.
“Or are we abandoning the game?” he said. “Or carrying it on in spite of the possible dangers? Or altering the gaming experience somehow?”
The options spun in Dagmar’s head. She returned Lincoln’s look.
“You hired me, Lincoln,” she said. “You have to approve whatever gets decided. And more importantly, you have to fund it.”
“I’m not the creative presence here,” Lincoln said. “Before I can endorse an idea, I have to know what it is.”
Judy Strange took a sip of her coffee, then made a face and put the cup on the table.
“Well,” she said, “if it’s dangerous to run the live event, we’ll have to cancel it.”
Dagmar felt a stubborn resistance build in her to the idea.
“With all respect to Lincoln’s list,” she said, “I think it’s a little out of our league to damage the regime, though I don’t mind cocking the odd snook…” She raised a hand as Mehmet was about to interrupt again. “… so long as it won’t get us thrown in jail.” She turned to Judy. “And as for the game,” she said, “maybe we can alter it so we won’t be running a risk.”
Judy leaned closer to her.
“How?” she said.
Dagmar shifted her gaze to the others.
“I don’t know,” she confessed. “We’ll need to work that out.” She felt the urge to move, to think on her feet, and she surged to her feet.
“Let’s take a walk. Let’s go to Gulhane Park.”
The park was within easy walking distance of the hotel. Their path took them past both the Blue Mosque and its great, crumbling ancestor, Hagia Sofia, which faced each other across tourist-choked roads and a large garden blazing with summer flowers. Along one side of the mosque was the old Byzantine hippodrome, still a long ovoid in shape but now another park. Vast numbers of tourists, far outnumbering the locals, moved among the radiant flowers, past the silver waters of the fountains. Sometimes the tourists swarmed in huge packs, marching along behind their guides, amid air scented with roses and diesel.
She wondered if she could hide her players among the tourists, her buses amid the tour buses. It certainly seemed possible.
But then she looked up and saw the streetlights with their quaint, lacy white heads, and the CCTV cameras attached. A group of soldiers stood by one of the fountains.
It wasn’t necessarily the malevolence of the generals that had put these measures here, she thought. There were all sorts of reasons that this area should be secure-many foreign visitors, irreplaceable public monuments, heavy traffic.
But even so, the brilliant sun-filled park flanked by the two huge domed structures now seemed just a little sinister, just a little too much like a trap waiting to be sprung. Dagmar headed north, skirting Justinian’s old church, then descended a steep road while streetcars hummed past her. Men on the sidewalk shilled for carpet stores and restaurants.
At the bottom of the hill they encountered the outer wall of the shambling Topkapy Palace, with two arched, open gates. Soldiers in white helmets stood by the entrance.
Feeling a shiver of apprehension, Dagmar walked through the gate.
Topkapy was built in a series of irregular, walled courtyards, one set inside the next like nesting dolls. In the center was the harem, where the sultan would have lived with his concubines, children, and mother.
During the course of scouting locations for the live events, Dagmar had learned from Mehmet that the sultan’s harem had been a far cry from the sybaritic paradise imagined by the Western-male-imagination. The harem had actually been run by the sultan’s mother, who made all the important decisions, including which of the concubines slept with the sultan and when and how often. The sultan wouldn’t have gotten t
o arrange his household to suit himself until his mother died, if then.
But Dagmar wasn’t going farther into the palace, let alone to the harem. Instead she turned left, passed a group of pushcart vendors selling roast chestnuts and simit- a kind of cross between a bagel and pretzel-and walked into Gulhane Park, which was actually between the outer two walls of the palace. The ground sloped down toward the Golden Horn, the path bordered by flower beds and a double row of giant plane trees. The rest of the palace loomed above them on the right, invisible behind the wall that crowned the hill.
A ship’s horn sounded up from the harbor below. Soft morning light filtered down through the leaves of the trees. Somewhere a child laughed.
“It’s a pity we’re not here in spring,” Ismet said. “During the Tulip Festival, there are tulips in all these flower beds. Some of them very exotic.”
“I always thought tulips were a Dutch thing,” Judy said.
“The Dutch got their tulips from Turkey,” Ismet said. “That’s why there was such speculation in tulips at first-they were Eastern and exotic.”
“Speculation?” Judy asked.
“Let’s talk about Tulip Mania later,” Dagmar said. She slowed, then stepped off the path to stand before a statue of Ataturk. Uptilted eyebrows gave the Republic’s founder an elfin caste. She returned his skeptical gaze, then looked at the park around her for the first time since her original scouting trip nine weeks before. Lincoln voiced her thoughts aloud before she could speak.
“This place is unusable,” Lincoln said. “I know why we picked it for the live event-it has limited access, so the players won’t get lost, and yet it’s open, and we can hide a lot of things in here for the players to find. But as far as keeping our people secure, it’s hopeless.” He waved a hand up to the palace. “People on that wall will see everything we do. And we can be completely bottled by closing the two entrances.”
Judy looked around with apprehension on her face, as if she were already seeing the tanks closing in.
“Where else can we go?” Dagmar asked.
There was silence for a moment. Then Ismet cleared his throat.
“Does it have to be Istanbul?” he said. “Can we move the players out of the city?”
“The players are already in Beyolu,” Judy said. “Can we do the event there?”
“Taksim Square?” Dagmar said hopefully. It was the only Beyolu landmark she could remember.
“No,” Ismet said. “Beyolu is full of foreign embassies. The security’s too high.”
“My wife and I live on the Asia side, in Uskudar,” Mehmet said. “We could drive the buses across the bridge, and stage the event there. There are plenty of parks.”
Ismet frowned. “And also the military barracks at Selimiye.”
Mehmet’s expression fell. The group stood for a moment, their general gloom a contrast to the cheerful green of the park, the packs of children with their ice cream, the teens with their MP3 players, the gulls calling overhead.
Ismet looked up and shaded his eyes with his hand. “Look there,” he said, and pointed.
Dagmar followed his gaze and saw a small aircraft silhouetted against the sky, orbiting a few hundred meters above the palace.
“Surveillance drone,” Lincoln said.
High-tech military surveillance drones-the kind that could fly thousands of miles, loiter for hours over the target, and drop bombs or missiles-these were expensive and cost millions of dollars each. But low-tech drones, essentially large model aircraft with Japanese lenses, digital video, and uplink capability, could be built in someone’s garage, for a few thousand dollars.
They were all over the place in California now, where Dagmar lived-floating above the freeways to clock speeders, racing to crime sites to track felons, shadowing celebrities on behalf of paparazzi, and ogling sunbathers at the Playboy Mansion. The drones were cheap enough so that the highway patrol could afford them, as could local TV stations, celebrity magazines, private detectives, and hobbyists who collected candid videos the way other people collected stamps.
“Do you think it’s tracking us?” Judy asked.
“Probably not,” said Lincoln. “I doubt we’re worth following. It’s probably looking for suspicious people around the historic sites.”
Anger simmered in Dagmar as she scowled up at the drone. If the military government was using these cheap flying remotes, they could shift their focus of attention from one place to another very fast. One place, she thought, might be as dangerous as the next.
She let her gaze fall from the bright sky and blinked the dazzle from her gaze as she looked at the silver-green bark of the nearest plane tree. The sound of a ship’s horn floated again on the air.
“There,” she said, pointing north, toward the Golden Horn.
“Yes?” Lincoln said. He peered at the tree-shrouded horizon and narrowed his eyes as he tried to see what she was pointing at.
“We have the event on the water,” she said. “Rent some excursion boats, take a cruise. They won’t be able to harass us unless they scramble the navy and board us.”
Lincoln turned to Mehmet.
“Can we rent boats for seven hundred people on twenty-four hours’ notice?” he asked.
Mehmet gave a slow, thoughtful nod.
“There are a lot of excursion boats in Istanbul, and a good many are tied up three deep waiting for customers. But it would depend on what you’re willing to pay.”
Lincoln raised a hand in a gesture of pure noblesse, like a grand cardinal-archbishop giving a blessing.
“Whatever it takes,” he said.
Mehmet smiled. So did Dagmar. She knew that she could trust in the Turkish willingness to inconvenience themselves in the name of profit.
“What shall I tell them?” Mehmet asked. “Bosporus cruise?”
Dagmar nodded. “Why not?”
Mehmet reached for his handheld and began to page through his rather substantial list of contacts.
Dagmar turned to Lincoln.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Thank you,” said Lincoln. “I’d much prefer my brilliant PR coup not end in broken heads.”
Dagmar turned to Judy.
“I’m afraid this means we’ve got to come up with a whole new crossword puzzle by tomorrow morning.”
Judy was looking inward with her usual fierce concentration.
“I know,” she said.
“Can you do it?”
“I’ll have to, won’t I?” Judy looked across the park at the Golden Horn. “What’s on the Bosporus, anyway? What is there to put in the puzzle?”
“Dolmabahce Palace,” Ismet said. “The Bosporus Bridge. Selimiye Barracks. And…” His voice trailed away. “I’m not sure. I’ve never actually been up the Bosporus.”
“How,” Dagmar asked, “did the Bosporus Bridge avoid being named after Ataturk, like every other major structure in this country?”
He smiled. “There already was an Ataturk bridge, over the Golden Horn.”
“I am enlightened,” Dagmar said.
The party began heading upslope, back to their hotel.
“Fortress of Europe,” Tuna said, adding to the list of Bosporus sites. “Fortress of Asia. That big mosque in Ortakoy, I don’t remember the name of it.”
“Our hotel will have a brochure for cruises,” Dagmar said. “It should list the sights.”
Dagmar’s handheld began to play “ ’Round Midnight.” She reached for it.
“This is Dagmar,” she said.
“This is Richard. I had my phone off. What’s the problem?”
Dagmar was nettled that he had made himself unavailable during work hours.
“Why was your phone turned off?”
“I was with Ismet’s uncle Ertac, haggling over carpets. I didn’t want to be interrupted.”
Dagmar shook her head and sighed.
“What did you buy?”
“Six carpets. One runner for the hallway. Two kilims that I just couldn’
t resist.”
She saw Ismet looking at her and lowered the phone to speak to him.
“Uncle Ertac just scored big,” she said.
Ismet laughed. Dagmar returned to her phone.
“Richard,” she said. “Have you ever been in a foreign country before?”
He was surprised by the question.
“I’ve been to Cabo San Lucas,” he said.
“When you went to Cabo,” said Dagmar, “did you buy everything that was put in front of you?”
“I was in college,” Richard said. “I bought all the beer and tequila in front of me, and maybe even some of the food.”
There was a buzzing overhead. Dagmar looked up to see the drone swoop low and then head out of the park toward the southwest.
“I’m kind of worried that I’ve led you into some kind of horrible temptation,” Dagmar said. “Are you sure you can afford all these things you’re buying?”
“I did have to call the credit card company and argue them into raising my limit,” Richard said. “But the carpets are actually investments. Now there’s more opportunity for women in this country, they’re not going to spend their time sitting at home weaving. The carpets are going to become more rare, and that means more expensive. In time, I’ll be able to sell the carpets for a profit.”
He spoke rapidly, trotting out these ideas with what sounded like considerable pride in their form and originality.
Uncle Ertac, Dagmar realized, might just be the greatest carpet salesman in the world.
“It might take you twenty years to realize your profit,” Dagmar said.
“It’s a more solid investment than the dollar,” Richard said. “Remember what happened to the currency a few years back?”
Dagmar remembered all too well. It occurred to her that she was perhaps the last person on earth to advise anyone on investment strategy.
“Well,” she said, “go with God.” And then she remembered why she’d called Richard in the first place. She explained about Feroz and the missing bus.
“We need to replace everything on the bus, and get the receiver and uplink somewhere above the Bosporus where everyone on the boats can broadcast to it.”
“Well.” Richard was suddenly thoughtful. “I think it’s do-able. What kind of expense account do I have?”
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