“Do they really believe in the evil eye?” she asked.
“I don’t know. But we need all the mojo we can get.”
“And here’s one for your office.” Ismet, handing Dagmar an amulet.
“Thank you.”
It was a nice one, shaped like a military medal, with the dangling eye made of heavy glass, better quality than the cheap plastic amulets available everywhere in Turkey.
After the amulets were hung, everyone pitched in with putting the ops room together. By early evening flat-screen monitors glowed from the walls and from each of the desks, towers hummed, printers were set up in corners, and Mr. Coffee sat atop a table in the break room.
“The rest of the team will be here tomorrow,” Lincoln said. “First briefing at oh eight hundred.”
Dagmar raised a hand. “Will we always be using military time?” she asked.
He smiled. “You should be thankful we’re not using Zulu Time,” he said.
Dagmar had never heard of Zulu Time in her life.
“I guess I should be,” she said.
Before the flight to Cyprus, Dagmar had a series of meetings with Lincoln in California. They met at a sushi place in Studio City, where they talked about gaming and other harmless topics-the actual purpose of their meeting couldn’t be discussed in public places like restaurants.
Chopsticks in his hand, Lincoln lightly dipped his Crunchy Crab Roll in soy sauce. Dagmar observed the hand.
“You don’t wear a wedding ring,” she said.
The crab roll paused halfway to Lincoln’s lips.
“I was married twice. Divorced both times. The job is hard on marriage.” His mouth quirked in a little smile. “Though I have to admit that, sometimes, what I do is insanely fun.”
“Any children?”
Lincoln, chewing, nodded. He swallowed, then took a taste of iced tea.
“Two daughters,” he said. “Both grown, both doing well.” He looked wistful. “One of them lives in New Zealand. I see her every two or three years. The other blamed me for the divorce, and I haven’t heard from her in more than a decade.”
Sadness brushed Dagmar’s nerves. She shook her head.
“Sorry,” she said.
“I keep tabs on her,” Lincoln said. “Because, you know, I can- so I know that she’s all right.” His mouth took on a rueful slant. “But part of me wishes she’d run into the kind of trouble that only her dad can get her out of.”
Dagmar’s sadness swelled. She had similar foolish fantasies herself, that Charlie or Austin or Siyed would walk through the door, surprisingly alive, and with an elaborate story that explained how it had been someone else who had died, somebody else’s corpses that Dagmar had seen, and that the whole affair had been an elaborate but necessary deception in order to thwart some unimaginable villainy…
But of course that wouldn’t happen. Austin and Charlie wouldn’t be coming back from the falls at Reichenbach, and sometimes families came apart that shouldn’t, and sometimes families stayed together that should have come apart. And sometimes two lonely people consoled themselves with sushi and avoided talking about what had brought them together in the first place.
After lunch Lincoln took Dagmar to the Bear Cat offices to discuss their plans for the Cyprus excursion. Lincoln had an office with an Aeron chair, a view of the Santa Monica Mountains, and framed photos of media campaigns in which he’d been involved, with Stunrunner given the pride of place, Ian Attila Gordon in his tux gazing out of the frame, his elegant little Walther automatic in his hand.
“You get to pick your code name,” Lincoln told her.
“Wow,” Dagmar said. “We really are living in Spy Land.”
“Special ops.” Patiently. “We’re not after intelligence; we do things.”
“Sorry.” Dagmar was amused. “I’ll try to remember.”
“The computer has to approve the name,” Lincoln said. “You can’t take a name that’s already in use, and you can’t do anything obscene, but other than that, you’re reasonably free. It should be something you can remember and easily answer to.” He looked at her over his Elvis glasses. “I’m using Chatsworth.” From the handle he’d used in online games, Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
“Does the name mean anything?” Dagmar asked. “Or did you make it up?”
He offered a little smile. “Chatsworth was the name of a playboy character in a sixties sitcom,” he said.
She looked at him, at the bubble hair and Elvis glasses.
“Were you a playboy?” she asked.
“What makes you think I’m not a playboy now?” he asked. She laughed. He considered being offended, then shrugged. “But no, it’s kind of a complicated joke. The Company was founded by a certain type of character-East Coast, Old Money, loyal Republicans-and I fit that description, sort of, at least when I was younger.” He smiled nostalgically. “I worked for Barry Goldwater alongside Hillary Clinton, do you believe it?”
“You really knew her?”
He waved a hand vaguely. “We met, here and there. I didn’t know her well.” He smiled. “She was too serious for me.”
“Ah,” Dagmar said. “You were a playboy, then.”
“I was a spoiled rich kid,” Lincoln said. “ ‘Chatsworth Osborne’ is what I’d have become if I hadn’t gone into government service, so it’s the name I use when I’m enjoying my harmless entertainments.”
“Like overthrowing a foreign government.”
“Like that.” Lincoln said. He cocked his head and looked at her. “Your code name?”
Dagmar thought for a moment.
“Briana,” she said.
After Briana Hall, the fugitive found alone in a rented room at the beginning of Dagmar’s best-known game, and whose dilemma mirrored certain aspects of Dagmar’s past.
“Motel Room Blues,” Lincoln said. “Very good.”
Dagmar’s other employees were given code names as well. The problem with renaming her employees, Dagmar considered, was that she knew all of them by their real names. She was bound to slip sooner or later.
Judy decided, logically enough, to name herself Wordz. Richard the Assassin called himself Ishikawa, after-of course-a famous ninja. The programming chief, Helmuth, decided he wanted to be called Pip. Dagmar did not think the reference was literary and decided she didn’t want to know what other inspiration might have leaked into his alcohol-tolerant brain.
She hoped she could keep all the names straight and remember to use them in front of other people. Lincoln said to use the code names all the time, but Dagmar was sure she couldn’t.
It was at the Bear Cat offices that Lincoln presented her with the contract, pages and pages of documents that featured, on the first page, a sum even greater than that she’d earned for Stunrunner.
“I’ll have to show this to our lawyer,” she said.
“He can’t see Appendix A,” Lincoln said. “He’s not cleared for that.”
In the two-bedroom apartment she shared with Judy in the married officers’ quarters, Dagmar opened a bottle of Bass Ale and fired up her laptop. She looked up Zulu Time, which was apparently military-speak for Greenwich Mean Time, and then googled both “dervish lodge” and “Niagara Falls.”
Naturally, Rafet’s dervish lodge had a Web page. Rafet and his comrades followed Hacy Babur Khan, a Sufi saint who had lived in Herat three centuries ago. There he founded an order of dervishes that followed his regulations for spiritual practice, among which included, according to the article, “ecstatic drumming.” “Which,” the article continued, “has resulted in occasional persecution by more orthodox Sunnis.”
The dervishes lived in communal lodges, practiced austerity and poverty, drummed, and sang hymns written mostly by Hacy Babur Khan and his successors. The Web page maintained by the Niagara Falls lodge mentioned that it was founded in 1999, played host to a couple dozen dervishes at any one time, and offered demonstrations of drumming to the public several times each year.
That led to a query about the Tek Organization, which Dagmar at first misspelled as “Tech.” The search engine obligingly offered a correction, and she found that a Turkish imam named Riza Tek had founded the worldwide eponymous religious organization, which had branches in at least fifty countries. The Tek Organization ran charities, schools, and broadcast stations; it owned hospitals and newspapers; it had a large publishing house that put out books, magazines on news and religion, and a very impressive-looking science magazine… none of which, alas, Dagmar could read, as they were in Arabic and every known Turkish dialect but not English.