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 Uruisamoglu 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 Uruisamoglu 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?” Uruisamoglu 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 Uruisamoglu 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 Uruisamoglu 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.”
Uruisamoglu said nothing, just sipped his tea.
“There are medications that can help,” she said. “You could see a doctor.”
Uruisamoglu 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 Uruisamoglu, “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-”
Uruisamoglu 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 Uruisamoglu’s lips they sounded pathetic, defensive.
She began to suspect that the excuses didn’t sound any better coming from her.
Uruisamoglu 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 Uruisamoglu’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 th
in, 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.
Uruisamoglu 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. Uruisamoglu 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.
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!” Uruisamoglu’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,” Uruisamoglu 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.
The bullet kicked up sand near one of the gunmen’s feet, and they all scattered into cover. Return fire began to come up the hill. The bullets sounded like firecrackers going off over Dagmar’s head.
There was excitement in being shot at, but the emotion was strangely flattened. This wasn’t as involving as a video game. A video game would have better sound effects.
Whenever she saw one of the gunmen she fired, but they were darting from cover to cover and she could never get one in her sights. She emptied her magazine and reached for her second. After that, she realized, she’d be out of bullets.
A bullet whined off the rock close to Dagmar’s hand. Her heart leaped. One of the gunman had worked his way onto her flank. She fired wildly at him, jumped to her feet, and ran back to another rock. Bullets snapped through the air near her.
She was breathless. The video game had just gone to another level of intensity. Hordes of zombies would arrive at any second.
Eventually the gunmen drove her all the way back to the yurt. She didn’t know how many bullets she had left, but she knew it wasn’t many. She dived through the door and dropped prone onto the carpet.
Uruisamoglu, still sitting on his pillow, looked at her.
“What’s going on?” he said.
It was the most ridiculous question she’d ever heard. “We’re trying to kill each other,” she explained, as if to a child. “You’d better get down.”
I am about to be killed by three men in ties, she thought.
Someone started firing through the felt walls of the yurt. Uruisamoglu dropped to the floor. His brown eyes were huge.
Voices cried out in Turkish. Uruisamoglu looked at Dagmar.
“They want us to surrender,” he said.
“They’re here to kill you,” Dagmar said. “But you can surrender if you want.”
“They have no reason to kill me anymore,” Uruisamoglu said. “The Internet’s back. It’s all out of my hands.”
And entirely in mine, Dagmar thought. They’d torture her to get her password.
More bullets began ripping through the felt. One whined off the pellet stove. Uruisamoglu’s maps crackled as bullets snapped through them. Dagmar reached for pillows and began to build bulwarks. The gunmen kept shouting.
At least they’re not hallucinations, she thought, and almost laughed.
The gunmen called for surrender again. They were probably not looking forward to charging in through the single door.
Dagmar didn’t answer. Another pair of shots came in. Maybe, Dagmar thought, they were running low on ammunition as well.
&n
bsp; There was a mechanical grinding from outside, the bellowing of engines, the sound of gravel crunching beneath tires. Dagmar wondered if one of the gunmen had gone back for the car.
And then there was more shouting, very desperate sounding, and a lot of shots. A vehicle roared, and Dagmar heard wheels skidding on gravel as it came to a stop right outside the door.
There were huge booms at close range, the sound of a much larger weapon, but no bullets came into the yurt. Then there was a clanking noise, and suddenly Ismet’s voice.
“Dagmar! Are you in there? You and Slash come out-fast!”
Dagmar rose to her knees, her head spinning. Uruisamoglu looked at her blankly. She waved at him.
“Come on!” she said.
He crawled across the carpets, dragging his crutches behind him. Dagmar jumped up, ran back to his position, and grabbed his laptop. She ran to the door of the yurt and opened it.
The vehicle outside had eight huge wheels and a duck-billed ramming prow. There were hatches and periscopes and slits for viewing. Hot exhaust smoked from the engines and fouled the air. It was the armored vehicle they’d seen down in the village.
A hatch had opened between the second and the third wheels. Ismet was inside, gesturing.
“Hurry!”
Bullets cracked through the air. Dagmar dived for the hatch, clambered into the interior. It smelled of dust and stale motor oil.
Ismet leaned out, grabbed Uruisamoglu by the shoulders of his sheepskin jacket, and hauled him bodily into the vehicle. The metal crutches clanged on the metal floor. Ismet slammed the hatch shut and yelled something to the driver in the forward compartment. The engine roar increased and the vehicle lurched into reverse.
There were pinging sounds on the metal walls of the vehicle. Dagmar saw little dimples appearing on the inside of the armor. Someone was shooting at them.
Ismet reached for the shotgun on a metal bench seat, thrust it through one of the ports, and fired. The sound in the small metal compartment was enormous.
The big vehicle lurched off. Dagmar and Uruisamoglu clutched at the metal seats in an attempt to stabilize themselves. Dagmar eventually hauled herself into one of the seats, and she looked out through one of the view slits just as one of Ismet’s shots caught a gunman in the shoulder, spinning him around.
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