Another meal was served on the flight to Istanbul-Dagmar was amazed at the efficiency of the cabin attendants, who got food and drinks served and cleared in only forty minutes. Two vans had been hired to take them to their hotel. Their luggage nearly filled the first van, leaving room for two people: Dagmar found herself in the van with Judy, the puzzle designer, who was chatting happily on her handheld. The van pulled away from the curb.
“Love you!” Judy said cheerfully into the phone, and holstered it.
Judy wore a long-sleeved blouse that left only rag ends of her tattoos visible at the wrists. She held back her black hair with a plastic headband that had a crown on it, gold-painted points that haloed her head and made her look like a somewhat less spiky version of the Statue of Liberty, albeit one with a lot of mascara and corpse green eye shadow. Her necklace stared out at the world with a couple dozen blue eyes, made up as it was of Turkish evil-eye amulets mounted in silver; she also wore matching earrings and a bracelet.
“Who were you talking to?” Dagmar asked.
“My dad.” Judy grinned. “He worries when I fly-I always call him after I land to tell him I’m okay.”
“You must be close.”
Dagmar didn’t know what it was like to be close to a father-it was an alien concept to her, like knowing what it was like to be an Australian aborigine or a member of the Rosicrucians.
“The funny thing is,” Judy said, “is that Dad flies all the time and it doesn’t bother him at all. He only gets all worried when I fly.”
“What does your dad do?” Dagmar asked.
“He’s a rock star.”
Dagmar smiled. “I guess he must be, if he worries about you like that.”
Judy laughed. “No, really!” she said. “My dad’s Odis Strange, of Andalusian God.”
Dagmar blinked.
“You know,” she said, “when a person says that someone else is a rock star, usually it’s a metaphor.”
Andalusian God had been huge when Dagmar was in nappies. Her parents had their discs, and their single “Nad Roast” was always playing on the jukebox in whatever depressing Cleveland bar her father was working.
She remembered Odis Strange on the cover of Living the Life Atomic, Andalusian God’s first CD. He wore a dark five o’clock shadow, a Levi’s jacket with the sleeves ripped off, lots of stainless-steel jewelry, and hair that was greased up high in a mock-rockabilly pompadour.
She didn’t see much of a resemblance in Judy. Probably she took after her mother.
“I didn’t really know him till I was sixteen or so,” Judy said. “That’s when Dad sobered up and remembered he’d had a family back in the nineties.” She laughed. “He’s really sweet. He looks after me. He paid for my new teeth.” She tapped a brilliant white incisor with a fingernail. “Implants. Even when he was away, his management sent money.”
“That’s great,” Dagmar said. Father-daughter bonding was really not her thing.
“We’ve known each other for months,” Dagmar said. “Why haven’t I known about your dad?”
“People try to use me to get to him,” Judy said. “I’m cautious about who I talk to.”
“That’s sensible,” Dagmar said.
Judy’s eyes blinked brightly at Dagmar from behind her black-rimmed glasses. “And your dad?” she asked.
“He was an alcoholic,” Dagmar said. “He’s dead now.”
“Oh.” Judy’s face fell. “Sorry.”
Dagmar shrugged. “It happens.”
Her mother had worked hard to keep Dagmar from becoming one of those kids who came to school smelling funny. Trying somehow to evade or at least ignore her downwardly mobile status, Dagmar had found refuge in geek culture: science fiction, fantasy gaming, computer-moderated social networks where people didn’t know or care that she lived in a shabby flat off Detroit Avenue in Cleveland.
And there had been books. Cleveland might have been a decaying postindustrial polis that had failed to negotiate the collapse of its tax base, but in its glory days it had built great public libraries, and libraries were cheap, a big advantage in a household where the television could at any moment be sold to pay for vodka. Even at his most intoxicated, Dagmar’s father knew it was pointless to try to pawn library books.
“My dad was never around when he was high,” Judy said. “And he was high for years. But he wasn’t violent or anything.”
“Nor mine.” Dagmar really didn’t want to talk about this. “He was a sloppy drunk, not an angry drunk.”
And a thieving drunk, whom Dagmar did not propose at any point in the next several centuries to forgive.
“Look at all the ships,” Dagmar said.
Judy seemed relieved to change the subject. They turned toward the Sea of Marmara, where dozens of cargo ships schooled in the blue water, waiting for a crew, a destination, a cargo, or a pilot to take them up the Bosporus.
The ships were freelancing, Dagmar thought, just like herself and her crew.
Give them a destination and they’d amaze you with how they got there.
In Istanbul the Great Big Idea crew was booked into a small boutique hotel, a converted Ottoman mansion in the tourist paradise of Sultanahmet, while the players stayed in a pair of larger, more group-oriented hotels in Beyolu, across the Golden Horn. The party’s rooms weren’t ready when they arrived, at 8:45 in the morning, so Dagmar and her planners agreed to gather in the rooftop lounge to plan the next day’s live event, the game’s finale.
The lounge had a bar at one end, closed at this hour of the morning, and glass walls that gazed out upon the Sea of Marmara, the deep blue water where dozens of freighters waited their turn to steam up the Bosporus or to moor at the piers of the Asian shore. In the other direction were the dome and six minarets of the Blue Mosque, pale gray against the azure sky.
When Dagmar came up the clanking old elevator, she found Lincoln sprawled on a couch gazing at the sea, his loopy grin on his face. He was still having the time of his life.
Dagmar, less sanguine, stood by the glass wall and watched a host of gulls, wind beneath their wings, sweep in a perpetual gyre around the minarets of the mosque. Anxiety scrabbled at her nerves with rusty iron claws. The lack of information made speculation impossible.
She didn’t know if she was safe, if any of her group were safe. She didn’t know if the players would be molested when they assembled in Gulhane Park on Saturday morning.
The most ambitious ARG of all time could end up with people dead. That wasn’t how she had intended to go down in history.
She hadn’t killed players yet, though with other people her record wasn’t quite so pristine.
The doors to the creaking elevator rolled open, and Ismet arrived carrying a stack of newspapers. He paused, looking for Dagmar, and then offered her the papers in a hopeless gesture.
“I’m afraid you’re famous,” he said.
He spread the newspapers over one of the low tables. There was a picture of her with Bozbeyli on every paper, either shaking hands with him or sitting next to him. In every picture he was erect and masterful, his eyes alert and commanding. In each image she looked humble and submissive, her eyes turned to the Great Man for instruction.
None of the pictures hinted at the quantity of the president’s rouge and hair dye.
“Would you like me to translate the text?” Ismet asked. “It’s pretty much the same in each paper.”
Dagmar felt her stomach turn over.
“I can imagine what it says.”
Lincoln picked up a section of newspaper, took reading glasses from the pocket of his shirt, and held them halfway between his eyes and the text. “You’re quoted as saying that the whole world knows the danger of terrorism,” he said. “And that even a civilization five thousand years old can be threatened by the bombs of madmen.”
Dagmar stared at him.
“You read Turkish?”
She hadn’t heard him speak the language to anyone, not beyond more than a few tourist phrases.