“You have whatever’s necessary,” Dagmar said.
Richard’s tone brightened instantly. “Excellent! Are you at the hotel now?”
“We’re on our way there.”
“Avoid the hippodrome, then. There’s some kind of political demonstration going on.”
Dagmar glanced up as she remembered the aerial drone speeding off. Anxiety roiled in her stomach.
“We’ll do that,” she said.
The soldiers at the palace gate seemed more alert. Their officer was talking urgently on a cell phone.
Dagmar warned everyone about the demonstration at the hippodrome. She and her party panted up the steep road, past the great shambling mass of Hagia Sofia, and into the area between the old church and the Blue Mosque. A scrum of tourist buses stood like a wall across their path. Diesel exhaust brushed her face with its warm breath as she wove between the buses. Her head swam as it filled with fumes. As she stepped from the road to the park on the far side, a solemn Japanese man aboard one of the buses raised a camera and snapped her picture.
Ahead were paths, flowers, palm trees, hedges, a broad circular fountain, and the Blue Mosque. The surveillance drone turned gentle ovals overhead. Dagmar dodged a carpet seller before he could even begin his sales pitch-her reflexes were improving with experience-and then her nerves jolted to the sound of gunfire.
Shotguns! she recognized, and hunched involuntarily as if expecting a round of buckshot between the shoulder blades. She wasn’t hit and then looked wildly for the source of the firing.
White smoke poppies blossomed across the park, followed by the hollow roar of a crowd, a roar mixed with screams and shrieks. Dagmar knew the sound too well and realized the shotguns hadn’t been targeting people but had lofted pepper gas into a crowd that, on the far side of the park bushes, she hadn’t realized was so close…
“Run!” Tuna bellowed. Perhaps it was the wrong thought.
Adrenaline boomed in Dagmar’s veins. She couldn’t think of any place to run to except for the hotel, diagonally across the park, and she started a dash in that direction, knowing even as she ran that her path would take her unnervingly close to the spreading white smoke.
Behind, she heard Tuna’s cry of disgust, or despair, but her feet were already moving.
Dagmar was nearing the fountain when a wave of people came stumbling out of the smoke, weeping. The demonstrators had dressed well that morning: the men were in coats and ties, the women in neat suits or headscarves. They were less neat now: crying, sobbing, cursing, faces stained with slobber or with blood… Some dragged signs and bedraggled Turkish flags. A few threw themselves bodily into the fountain in order to rinse pepper gas from their eyes.
The refugees lurched across Dagmar’s path, stumbling over hedges or sprawling across the neat white shin-high cast-iron rails intended to keep people off the lawn. Dagmar dodged, jumped over one of the white rails, ran madly across a brilliant green lawn. The air was full of shrieks.
An adolescent girl tripped and flopped directly across Dagmar’s path, eyes wide, Adidas-clad feet kicking in the air… Dagmar bent to help her rise, then gasped as a dark figure loomed between her and the sun-a man in a helmet and a blue uniform, dilated mad eyes staring at her through the plastic goggles of a respirator, weapon raised to strike…
“This way.” A hand seized Dagmar’s sleeve and snatched her away from the descending club. Dagmar felt the breeze of its passage on her face. The policeman raised the club to strike again, and then Tuna lunged into the scene: the big man clotheslined the cop neatly across the throat just under the respirator’s seal, and the man flew right into the air, feet rising clean over his head, before he dropped to the grass with a satisfying thud.
In what seemed about two seconds, Tuna ripped the gas mask off, grabbed the cop’s club, and smashed him in the face with it a half-dozen times. At which point Ismet took Tuna’s shoulder as well, firm grip on the sturdy tweed jacket, and repeated his instruction.
“This way.”
One hand on Dagmar’s shoulder, the other on Tuna’s, Ismet efficiently guided them through the park, past the berserk masked cops, the shrieking demonstrators, the bewildered, terrified tourists clumping together for safety… The girl in the Adidas had disappeared. Ismet led Dagmar and Tuna to the steep stair that led down to the Cavalry Bazaar. Dagmar and her escort funneled down the stair along with a couple dozen other refugees, then jogged as quickly as they could through the narrow lane between tony shops selling textiles and ceramics, old cavalry mews converted to a high-class shopping mall.
“Where are Lincoln and Judy?” Dagmar gasped, looking over her shoulder.
“We were following you,” Tuna said.
“Are they all right?” Dagmar asked, completely conscious of the uselessness of the question. Either they were okay or they weren’t.
Tuna looked at the bloody club in his hand and then hurled it aside with an expression of disgust. The sudden bright clacking sound of the club hitting the pavement made bystanders jump.
Ismet guided them out of the bazaar and to their hotel. In the street they encountered Lincoln, Judy, and Mehmet, who had taken a more rational route around the trouble. They looked at Dagmar with relief.
“You ran right into it!” Judy said to Dagmar.
“Yes,” Dagmar said. “I did.”
Whatever it was, Dagmar thought, she was always running toward it, or knee-deep in it, or falling face-first into it, or failing to claw her way free of it.
“It’s how I roll,” she said.
CHAPTER FIVE
Dagmar spent the next fifteen minutes shivering in the bathroom of her hotel room. She knew there were police standing just outside the bathroom door-Indonesian cops, with riot shields and samurai helmets with metal plates protecting their necks-and that they were waiting for her with weapons raised. She knew that she would be smashed to the ground the second she left the security of the bathroom.
In Jakarta she had learned to recognize the smell of burning human flesh. Shuddering on the commode, she wept as the scorching, greasy smell filled her nostrils.
Reality returned in its slow, relentless way. The scent faded. Dagmar spent a moment just staring at the washroom door, then rose, wiped her eyes, washed her face, and took the elevator to the rooftop bar of the hotel.
Her team awaited her. The day’s newspapers, with their pictures of Dagmar and Bozbeyli, had been neatly folded and placed on a glass table; a smiling, efficient employee in a bow tie now stood behind the bar, waiting for the day’s drinkers.
How normal it is, Dagmar marveled.
The waiter offered her tea and poured it into a tulip-shaped glass with great efficiency, from a copper teapot decorated with elegant filigree.
The Turks were damned serious about their tea, Dagmar thought. Thank God.
She clutched the teacup like a Titanic survivor snatching a life preserver. It had been a little over an hour since she had left the bar on her reconnaissance to Gulhane Park, but it seemed like days ago. As she was looking through the glass walls over the roofs of Sultanahmet, it was impossible to see that there had been a disturbance at all: the gulls still circled the Blue Mosque; the Sea of Marmara still blazed with azure beauty; the sound of the muezzins still echoed in the streets.
The demonstration seemed to have fallen clean out of history. Dagmar assumed there would be nothing in the news about it. Pictures snapped by tourists might be the only evidence that anything had ever happened, that and the broken heads and bones of the regime’s victims.
“I told you not to go there,” Richard said. He had avoided the demo entirely by detouring around the back end of the Blue Mosque. “What were you doing in the middle of it?”
“You said not to go to the hippodrome,” Judy said. Her voice was intense. “We went through the park.”
“We couldn’t see any of it until they were there,” Dagmar said. “And then it was too late.”
She reached for her glass of tea. Her hand sho
ok, so she held the tulip glass in both hands and sipped from it. She looked at Ismet.
“I should thank you,” she said. “You kept me from being clubbed.”
“You’re welcome,” Ismet said. His brown eyes looked at her through his dark-rimmed spectacles. His face took on a look of concern.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Can I get you a drink or… something?”
“Sorry. Bad memories.” Dagmar shivered to a surge of adrenaline. “I’m as all right as I’m going to be.”
She turned to Tuna.
“You saved us both,” she said. “If you hadn’t taken that cop out of the picture…”
“Bastard deserved it!” Tuna said.
“No doubt. But-”
Lincoln made a covert finger-to-lips gesture, then nodded to the ultrapolite barman. Paranoia seemed to flood the air like a faint whiff of tear gas. Tuna saw the gesture, shrugged, and changed the subject to something else equally explosive.
“I did military service when I was a young man,” he said. “I was stationed in?yrnak Province-lots of Kurds there. And do you know what my commander was doing?”
His voice grew louder, more indignant. Lincoln made his gesture again and was ignored.
“The army was in the spare parts business,” Tuna said. “People-just ordinary people-were being shot for their kidneys. Then the kidneys were sold on the international market for fifty-five thousand euros apiece-and the sad bastards who got shot were written up as Kurdish terrorists.”
Dagmar was staggered. “Organlegging?” she said.
Judy seemed equally appalled. “Has this been confirmed?” she asked. Like there were some NGOs that could be called in to verify a story like this, Pathologists Without Borders or something…
“I saw it,” Tuna said. His mouth quirked. “Or I saw the bodies, anyway. The colonel had some special killers who did the shootings for him. Everyone out there knew what was going on.” He made a pistol with two fingers and mimed a shot. “And do you know who the colonel reported to? General Dursun.” He slapped himself on the chest. “Our new prime minister.” He looked at Dagmar. “One of the old men you met at the Pink House. The fucker.”
There was a moment of silence. Dagmar sipped her tea, put the clear tulip glass back in its saucer. Glass rattled.
“Well,” Lincoln said. “That’s who we’re dealing with. The question is, do we go on with the live event tomorrow?”
Tuna waved a hand. “Of course we should.”
Dagmar decided that Tuna’s breezy confidence was perhaps a little premature.
“The players are across the bridge in Beyolu,” Dagmar said. “They’re far away from what happened this morning.”
“And they won’t hear about it,” Ismet said.
Which meant, Dagmar thought, that the situation hasn’t changed, as far as the game went. The idea struck Dagmar with surprising force. She resisted the notion: she preferred to think that because she had changed, so had everything else.
But no. It hadn’t. She still had six or seven hundred gamers on buses-at this hour scheduled to visit the Grand Bazaar, fine shopping since 1461, a last chance to buy carpets or meerschaum, spices or ceramics, brassware or leather goods, before they bade farewell to James Bond’s glittering world on Saturday.
Later this afternoon they would visit the Suleiman Mosque and then Hagia Sofia, assuming the authorities hadn’t closed it in the aftermath of the riot-but by that point, she reckoned, any sign of the demonstration would have been long since cleaned up.
The gamers were in no more danger than they had been two hours earlier. Or no less danger. It was all a big unknown, but for the life of her Dagmar couldn’t see why the government would bother to harass them.
“Let’s go,” she said. “We can always call it off tomorrow, if there’s a revolution in the streets-and if there’s trouble, we’ll just distribute the puzzles in the hotel instead of on the excursion.”
Judy sighed and adjusted her spectacles.
“I suppose,” she said, “that means there have to be puzzles.”
“I’m afraid so,” said Dagmar.
Laptops, netbooks, and phones were deployed. The history and sights of the Bosporus were brought to blazing life on screens and salient facts and images copied to files. Judy had a program for creating crosswords: she and Tuna huddled over her screen, working in intent collaboration as they tried to find clues that would be roughly equivalent in both Turkish and English and to find answers that would work in both the Turkish and English alphabets. This was accomplished by instructing the program to ignore the difference between c and c, i and y, S? and s. Fortunately, the program didn’t care how the words were actually pronounced.
Ismet watched with interest-he hadn’t actually seen one of these brainstorming sessions before-and offered some helpful suggestions. Mehmet turned up to let them know that Zafer Musa had taken Feroz to a clinic in Izmir and that the bus driver had been patched up. Lincoln told Dagmar to see that the bus driver got a generous bonus, then got brandy from the bar, sipped and listened, and-judging from the smile on his face-went to his happy place, wherever that was.
Richard, with help from Mehmet, found all the hardware he needed online or by phone and set off to collect it.
The waiter produced menus, and food was ordered from the restaurant downstairs. The bar was filled with the scents of kofte, baked chicken wings, kebaps strong with the aroma of cumin. Baklava made its appearance, Turkish-style with pistachios, and the waiter offered small cups of Turkish coffee that soon had everyone as wired as if they’d been mainlining Red Bull for the past three days.
In late afternoon, Lincoln received a call from the police. The permit to use Gulhane Park had been canceled, due to “unforseen complications.” Lincoln thanked the caller and hung up.
The plotting session went on.
By evening, Richard had his gear in a rented van and he and Mehmet and the team’s three hired cameramen were practicing with the technology. The crossword was finished, and Judy dashed off to her room, where she had a printer that would run off hundreds of copies in the next hour.
The bar was filled with drinkers, cigarette smoke, and ghastly Central European pop music. Tuna went to the bar to smoke a cigarette and order a celebratory raky. Lincoln went out onto the balcony, away from the music, to phone the operator of the excursion boats they were renting and to give the man the number of his corporate credit card. That left Dagmar and Ismet sitting in adjoining chairs. Dagmar shifted the weight of her laptop in order to ease a cramp in one hamstring.
“Thanks again for helping,” she said.
“I enjoy watching you work,” he said. “It’s all so intricate. Do you normally do your job under such pressure?”
“Normally we don’t work under the threat of physical violence,” Dagmar said, “but there’s always a lot of things that have to be done at the last second. And we have to keep things away from the spies.”
He was genuinely surprised. His brows lifted well up above the line of his spectacles.
“Spies?”
“There are players who stalk us-try to hack our computers, or steal scripts from the actors, or follow us around in hopes that we’ll drop a clue.”
Ismet seemed delighted.
“Do you get good at escape and evasion?”
“Escape and evasion?” It sounded like a course in commando school. “I don’t know about that,” she said, “but I’ve gotten good at hiding things.”
He smiled. “Tomorrow,” he said, “you’re going to hide seven hundred people.”
“Let’s hope,” said Dagmar, “that I do.”
He raised his Efes to his lips. “I think we’ll be fine,” he said.
She looked at Ismet with a sudden flare of interest. She’d met him only the day before, but since then he had so efficiently inserted himself into her process that she hadn’t noticed till now.
“You keep saving me,” she said. “Yesterday from social embarrassment, thi
s morning from getting knocked into the hospital. Is this sort of thing normal for you?”
One of Ismet’s small hands made a circular motion in the air, a local gesture that Dagmar knew meant something like, “Oh yes, I’ve done that countless times.”
His actual words were a little more modest.
“Lincoln told me to be useful,” he said.
She narrowed her eyes. “How long,” she said, “do I get to keep you?”
Dagmar saw a little flare of light behind the spectacles, as if he’d only just now realized that there was flirtation going on.
“I work for Lincoln,” he said. “Or rather, my PR firm does. You could request that I be kept around to rescue you when necessary.”
“Maybe I shall,” Dagmar said.
Tuna came barging up, a drink in his hand and wrapped in a cloud of harsh tobacco fumes.
“Shall we eat?” he said. “I’m hungry.”
Dagmar turned her eyes from Ismet with a degree of reluctance.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s probably time we did.”
Hippolyte says:
Oh, goodie! A boat ride!
Burcak says:
I wish I had brought a coat. Going to be cold out on the water.
Corporal Carrot says:
Wish I had Dramamine. I get seasick.
The next morning Dagmar stood above the golden span of the Bosporus Bridge from the vantage point on the steep hill of Ortakoy. Excursion boats drew their wakes across the deep slate of the straits below, tiny little water bugs alongside the enormous tidal surge given off by a brilliant white cruise ship so enormous that it seemed like a piece of the continent broken off and adrift.
A blustery cold wind blew from the Black Sea, and Dagmar wore a jacket against the chill, with the brim of a baseball cap shading her eyes from the sun, still low in the eastern sky. Behind her was Richard’s new electronic marvel, his rented gear packed into a Ford van, with an antenna strung from the van to a nearby plane tree, and another directional antenna mounted on a long wood plank aimed at Lincoln’s bunkered router up above Seraglio Point. A generator rumbled from a yellow trailer, spitting diesel smoke into the brisk wind.
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