The noise from the runway was continuous; the windows rattled in their frames; the fluorescent light seemed to strobe in some hard-to-define, headache-inducing way. Air-conditioning had been retrofitted into the building in ways that made sense only to the British, resulting in zones of wintry climate that alternated with areas of Sahara heat. The lavatories featured the world’s most useless and inefficient toilet paper, which Dagmar could only conclude was created to some ancient wartime government specification, from a time when only cheap pulp paper, filled with little chunks of actual undigested wood, was available.
Piled on the metal desks were cardboard boxes full of thousands of dollars’ worth of computer equipment: flat-screen monitors, office towers crammed with the latest in graphic interfaces, a million times more processing capacity than the entire Manhattan Project, DVD burners, modems, printers. Other boxes held software: office suites, programs for editing video and graphics, software packaging for budgeting and ultrafast communication.
“The T3 connection is already installed,” Lincoln said.
He showed Dagmar and her posse their work space with what seemed to be a sense of pride. They shuffled along after him, jet-lagged, not quite believing they were actually here.
Lincoln made a grand gesture taking in the room, the metal desks, the computers and software in their boxes.
“Welcome to the ops room,” he said.
Ops room, Dagmar thought.
“Back home,” she said, “we’d just call it an office.”
It was almost as if Dagmar had decided to remake Stunrunner. Richard the Assassin had come along, tickled to use his computer-ninja skills on real-world applications. Dagmar had hired Judy again, not so much because she needed a puzzle designer as because Judy had a talent for creating and controlling intricate situations. And Dagmar had brought along her head programmer, a German who bore the name Helmuth von Moltke, a moniker he’d inherited from an ancestor who had once conquered France.
Helmuth dressed better than anyone else in the party, in gray cashmere slacks, a starched white shirt with chunky gold cuff links, and a dark Nehru jacket, a fashion choice that put him in a league with a whole series of Bond villains, including Dr. No, Hugo Drax, and the impeccably groomed Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
Helmuth was, generally speaking, a match for any creature of Ian Fleming’s imagination. In his circuits of the Earth, the sleekly blond Helmuth occupied the Party Orbit: he girdled the world looking for bars, music, and lonely females. In LA, he seemed to spend half his life on the Sunset Strip and had apparently done away with any need for sleep-a useful skill in a programmer at any time.
The rest of the Great Big Idea staff remained in Simi Valley, though their expertise and advice could be called upon at any time. In any case, they would all be very busy-the Seagram’s people had reconsidered, and Great Big Idea was now prepping a full-fledged ARG for them. This was the first Great Big Idea game that Dagmar would not actually write herself, and even though she’d hired a substitute who seemed professional and imaginative and who was even willing to relocate to California for three months, a low twelve-volt anxiety now hummed in Dagmar’s nerves, sixteen cycles per second of uncertainty and unease.
Lincoln invited Dagmar into his office while Helmuth, Richard, and Judy began to pillage the cardboard boxes. The ops room and the hardware would be set up and configured to their specifications.
Lincoln’s office had the same bare, dull yellow walls as the ops room, and he had a metal desk identical to the others. There was a safe with a digital lock, and Lincoln had also equipped himself with an Aeron office chair, a marvel of lightweight alloy, pneumatics, and material science. He sat in this and leaned back with a blissful smile.
“You’ve pimped out your office,” Dagmar observed.
“Note the other feature.” He pointed at the wall, to a poster where a silhouette of a sinking aircraft carrier was accompanied by the slogan LOOSE TWEETS SINK FLEETS.
“This has all the potential of a security nightmare,” Lincoln said. “We’ve got to be very strict, very correct, from the start. Particularly about code names.”
“We did all right during Stunrunner,” Dagmar said. “And we were in Turkey then, right in the security zone, with hundreds of gamers surrounding us and eager to find out our secrets.”
“The problem with Cyprus,” Lincoln said, “is that it’s lousy with spies.”
“Ha. You should feel right at home.”
“Cyprus is a crossroads,” Lincoln said. “Here we’ve got Turkish nationalist fanatics and Greek nationalist fanatics. We’ve got Greek spies, Turkish spies, Syrian and Egyptian spies, Israeli spies, British and American spies.”
“And there’s us,” Dagmar said.
Lincoln looked at her with great seriousness. “We’re not actually spies,” Lincoln said. “We’re special ops.”
“Oh,” she said, startled. “Sorry.”
“I want to give a special warning.” Lincoln gave her a stern look. “There’s a Russian colony down the road in Limassol, and I want you to stay away from them.”
Dagmar smiled. “Afraid I’ll spill everything to Rosa Klebb?”
“I’m afraid you’ll be drugged, raped, robbed, and murdered,” Lincoln said. “Some of those guys are old-school Russian Maffya left over from the day when Cyprus was the money-laundering capital of the world.”
Uneasiness fluttered in Dagmar’s belly. Her smile froze to her face.
She had a bad history with the Russian Maffya.
“I was station chief in Nicosia in the nineties,” Lincoln went on. “At least a couple hundred billion dollars flowed through here to tax havens in the West, and I drove myself crazy trying to keep track of it all. Russia went bankrupt, but Cyprus practically had a golden age, if you don’t count the bombings and shootings.” He saw Dagmar’s face, and his expression softened. “Sorry,” he said, misinterpreting. “I didn’t mean to shock you.”
Dagmar decided she wasn’t going to think about Austin’s death right now.
“I’m not shocked,” she said. “But sometimes I forget that we’re here doing something, uh, real.”
“Maybe,” Lincoln ventured, “it’s best if you think of it as a game.”
Dagmar thought of bullets, bodies, smoke floating over cities. From the nearby runway came the sound of a flight jet aircraft launching into the air, a sound that lent an uneasy reality to Dagmar’s thoughts.
“I don’t know if I can,” she said.
“Games are what you’re good at,” Lincoln said. “Leave the rest to me.”
“I’ll do that.” The affirmation, she thought, was something closer to a prayer than to anything like a firm resolution.
“And-speaking of the Russians…” Lincoln’s face took on an amused caste. “There are a lot of Russian women here, in the bars. Some are prostitutes, some aren’t, but they’re all looking for husbands to carry them off to the good life in the West.”
Dagmar raised an eyebrow and looked at him.
“And you think this would interest me because…?”
“Not you,” he said. “But you might pass a warning on to your boys. We wouldn’t like to have any of them rushing to the rescue of someone named Natasha and ending up paying thousands of dollars to a Russian pimp.”
Dagmar considered Richard’s habit of going to a foreign country and buying everything on offer and nodded.