“I’ll spread the word,” she said.
There was a knock on the door. Lincoln looked up.
“Come in,” he said.
The man who entered wore a uniform. He had tight-curled black hair, Mediterranean blue eyes, and a brilliant white smile.
“Chatsworth,” he said. For a moment Dagmar wondered if Alvarez knew Lincoln from online gaming, but then she remembered the code protocols.
“Ah.” Lincoln rose, and shook hands across the desk with the new arrival. “This is Squadron Leader Alvarez, our RAF liaison.”
“Good to meet you, Briana,” said Alvarez. Dagmar rose and shook his hand and was proud of herself for answering to the alias without hesitation.
They needed an RAF liaison because Lincoln and Dagmar were running their operation from England. It just wasn’t the England made up mostly of a big island off the northwest coast of Europe.
The operation would be run from England-in-Cyprus, from RAF Akrotiri-an air base that was, legally, British territory, as British as toffee and binge drinking.
Dagmar’s team of game geeks would work from rooms overlooking Akrotiri’s enormous runway. The British air base was vast, and Dagmar’s people would hide in plain sight amid thousands of RAF personnel and civilian employees, who in turn were dropped amid the population of the island of Cyprus. Dagmar and her friends would share housing in the married officers’ quarters, shop for food at the NAAFI, and run their games through British servers.
Alvarez turned to her.
“Are you settling in?”
“So far,” Dagmar said, “it’s been enlightening.”
Dagmar left Lincoln with Squadron Leader Alvarez and returned to the ops room, where her heart gave a leap as she saw Tuna Saltik standing on one of the office chairs, pinning to the wall an enormous poster of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Her heart jumped again as she recognized Ismet standing next to him, helping him hold the poster straight. There was another with them, a man with shockingly bright blond hair. All three wore summerweight coats and ties.
She ran up to Ismet and gave him a hug from behind. He stiffened in surprise, then turned around. His eyes widened with pleasure, and then he hugged her and kissed both her cheeks.
“Lovely to see you!” he said.
“How’s your granny?” Dagmar asked.
“Much better, thank you. Back in her home.”
“You mean her tent?”
Tuna grinned down at Dagmar from under his arm as he held out the poster.
“Good to see you!” he said. “I’ll hug you later.”
“I’ll look forward to it.”
Ismet offered a hand. “I’m Estragon, by the way.”
Dagmar took the hand. “Briana.”
“I’m Vladimir!” called Tuna from somewhere in his own armpit.
Vladimir and Estragon, Dagmar thought. Right.
“You’re showing off your college education,” Dagmar said.
Ismet flushed slightly. “Maybe,” he said. He nodded at the man with surfer blond hair.
“This is Rafet.”
“Pleased to meet you.” Rafet and Dagmar shook hands.
“Rafet,” said Ismet, smiling, “is a dervish.”
Dagmar turned to Rafet.
“Do you whirl?”
He smiled with brilliant white teeth.
“No,” he said. “I’m not in the Mevlani organization. I follow Hacy Babur Khan.”
Dagmar’s question had been facetious-she had thought Ismet was joking when he said Rafet was a dervish. But now Dagmar began to think that Rafet really was a dervish, whatever being a dervish meant in the modern world.
She decided to make the next question a bland one.
“Where did you learn your English?”
“My dervish lodge is in the U.S. In Niagara Falls.”
“Ah,” Dagmar said, uncertain how to respond to this without demonstrating her own abysmal ignorance.
“Rafet,” said Ismet helpfully, “represents the Tek Organization.”
Dagmar decided not to ask any more questions and instead to quietly, privately wiki everything as soon as she could.
Tuna jumped down off the chair and gave Dagmar a one-armed hug while his other arm gestured at Ataturk.
“Is the picture straight?”
Dagmar looked up and received the poster’s full impact. The picture was based on an old photograph, but somewhere down the line the photograph had been hand-colored in eerie pastels, and the result was nothing short of terrifying. Larger than life-sized, the Father of the Nation wore a fur Cossack hat and a civilian tailcoat with a standing collar and tie. He scowled down from the wall, his unnaturally pink cheeks a startling contrast to his uncanny blue eyes.
The look in the eyes sent a shudder up Dagmar’s spine.
In her time in Turkey, Dagmar had seen a great many pictures of Ataturk. Most businesses had a photo displayed somewhere, and Ataturk busts and statues were common in Turkish towns and public buildings.
What had surprised her was the variety of Ataturks on display. There was no standard representation. There were benign Ataturks, dignified Ataturks, and amused Ataturks that emphasized the impish upward tilt of his eyebrows. There were Ataturks with mustaches and Ataturks without mustaches. There were dapper Ataturks wearing tails and carrying a top hat, statesmanlike Ataturks standing amid a group of ministers and comrades, commanding Ataturks in military uniform.
And then there were the scary Ataturks, a surprising number of them. This one, with his glaring eyes and upswept eyebrows, looked absolutely diabolical. He looked like the villain in a bad fantasy film. Below the image, in a blue typeface that matched the Gazi’s eyes, were the words Biz bize benzeriz.
Something in Dagmar shrank from having this frightening icon gazing down at her for the length of the operation.
“The picture looks straight enough,” Dagmar said. She pointed at the letters. “What does it say?”
Ismet answered. “It says: ‘We are like ourselves.’ ”
Dagmar looked around the room, at the piles of cardboard boxes, at Helmuth and Richard and Judy all laboring under Ataturk’s iron gaze.
“Well,” she said. “That’s true enough.”
What she actually wanted to say was, Are you sure you want this Ataturk? But she couldn’t quite bring herself to speak the words aloud.
The cult of Ataturk was something Dagmar understood only in part. The United States of America had many founders: Franklin, Washington, the Adams cousins, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Tom Paine, and even people such as Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr had done their bit to define the new republic… but Turkey had only Ataturk. He was the arrow-straight dividing line between the shambling old Asiatic Ottoman Empire and modern, Western-leaning Turkey. Like any decent Founding Father he had thrashed the British, and after that he’d remade the country in his own stern image: he’d adopted the Roman alphabet and Gregorian calendar; given civil rights to women; made Turks adopt surnames; driven religion and its symbols out of public life; built a public education system from scratch; defeated enemies foreign and domestic; created a parliamentary system; promoted Western ideas of art, music, and culture. He’d also done away with the Muslim prohibition of alcohol-a mistake in his case, as he died young of cirrhosis.
Turks revered Ataturk the way hardline Marxists revered Lenin, the way gays revered Judy Garland, the way Americans revered their pop stars up till the very second before they pissed all over them. Dagmar got that.
What she didn’t understand was this fiendish image on the wall of the ops room. She didn’t want it there, but she didn’t know how to say it without setting off some kind of atavistic Ataturk-inspired defense mechanism and getting her Turkish comrades mad at her.
“We brought presents!” Tuna said. He reached his big hand into a pink plastic bag and pulled out a fistful of blue and white amulets, the kind that Turks deployed against the evil eye. He, Ismet, and Rafet immediately began fixing the amulets to every vertical surface.
Judy watched them with interest. She turned to Dagmar.