Not that Helmuth ever Hellmouthed himself; he would always turn up at the office in the morning perfectly groomed and perfectly tailored and from his own invincible height survey his victims with a smile of brilliant white cosmopolitan superiority.
Perhaps, Dagmar thought, she ought to give the lads a warning.
“We start again at oh eight hundred,” she said. “Don’t lose too much sleep.”
Judy stood. She wore another of her series of rhinestone-covered plastic crowns, this one tiny and pinned to the crown of her head, like that of a beauty queen.
“You could just walk to the officers’ club,” she said. Then she raised an arm and sniffed her armpit. “I’ll go if I don’t smell too skanky,” she added.
“You’re no worse than me,” Dagmar said. Which was, unfortunately, true. She turned to the others. “Officers’ club, everyone?”
“Not me,” Helmuth said. “I want to go somewhere I don’t have to hear jets taking off every three minutes.”
He and Magnus retired to whatever desperate pleasures awaited them. Lincoln went into his office. The interns began to clean up what was left of the buffet. That left Dagmar, Judy, and Byron for the officers’ club.
Dagmar gave an automatic glance around the room for Ismet, then remembered that he, Rafet, and Tuna were elsewhere. They weren’t techs; they weren’t part of Dagmar’s game except as pawns. They were being trained as field agents, and what they did they would do in Turkey.
All of which left Dagmar uneasy. She didn’t want to send people she actually knew into danger.
It would be bad enough if her pawns were faceless.
The trio walked to the officers’ club over burning hot pavement that smelled of rubber and jet fuel. They were all honorary British officers, with photo ID cards worn on lanyards around their necks, and entitled to drink with the RAF’s finest.
The club was a little bit of Britain: dark paneling, brass, slot machines, a snooker table, Real Ale, the scent of chips frying. Yorkshire-accented hip-hop rocked from the jukebox. Not a lot of customers, even though Happy Hour had just started.
They found a round table in what passed for a quiet corner. Photos of 1950s aircraft decorated the walls. Dagmar got a gin and tonic, Judy a ginger beer, and Byron a single malt, water back. Thirsty, he gulped the water first. As he dropped his glass to the table, Dagmar saw the wedding ring.
“You’re married?” she said.
Byron nodded. “Wife. Daughter. I’ll call home later tonight.”
“How old is your girl?”
“Six weeks.” He pulled out a billfold and offered a picture of a goggle-eyed infant. Judy and Dagmar made appropriate noises.
“I have more pictures on my laptop,” he said. “But I’m not allowed to bring it into the ops center.”
“If I remember the security briefing correctly, you’re not supposed to show us even this photo,” Judy said. “Let alone in a public place like a bar.”
“Right,” Dagmar said. “We will stop oohing over Byron’s child at once.”
“Can I see the picture again?” Judy asked.
Dagmar sipped her drink, looked around the club once more, and caught a number of the officers casually scoping the two new women who had just walked into their dark-paneled sanctum and doubtless wondering which of them belonged to Byron and whether the other was free…
When in contact with the locals the Lincoln Brigade had been told to say they were here to do something with the computers. Local curiosity probably wouldn’t extend much past that-if it did, they could just say that they couldn’t talk about their work.
Dagmar turned to Byron.
“Have you ever done this sort of thing before?” she asked.
Byron seemed doubtful. “I don’t think anyone has.”
“I mean-you know-covert, secret stuff.”
“Oh. Sure.” He tasted his drink, splashed a bit of water into it, then tasted again. “I mean, I’m a contractor, Magnus and I work for the same company, and they work almost exclusively for the government. And that includes three-letter organizations that make me sign secrecy agreements.” He shrugged, sipped again at his whisky. “The security rules are usually idiotic-in fact, it’s impossible to do my job if I follow them all.”
“What do you mean?”
Exasperation distorted his pinched face.
“The hoops I have to jump through to take my work home are ridiculous,” he said. “And often I have to take it home-there’s no way to do the work on-site.”
“Why?” Judy asked.
“There are a whole long list of Web pages that I’m not allowed to access from government computers-but often as not, these are the pages that contain the information necessary to do my work, or that have the software tools I need to do it. So”-snarling-“I have to take the classified material home, so that I can put it on my own computer, from which I can access the necessary information.” He shook his head. “It’s all maddening. Someday the military and intelligence branches of the government are going to completely freeze, because no one will be allowed to see or do anything.”
“I’ve never worked for the government,” Dagmar said.
“Hoh. You have such a treat in store for you.” Byron’s face reddened. “Uncle Sam is about fifty years behind in their computer protocols, which still assume that everyone is working on a big mainframe. You have to do certain tasks in a certain order, and fill out all the paperwork on it in a certain order, and the odds are about ninety-nine to one that the tasks and the paperwork have nothing to do with the actual work you were hired to do.” He looked up at her with a glare of surprising hostility.
“There was a period when I was doing computer security at a major government lab-I won’t mention which one. The computers we were working on were riddled with unknown intruders-hundreds of them! — I mean, those people were practically waving at us! But I couldn’t do a single thing about them-not a single thing! — because I spent about seventy hours each week dealing with assigned tasks and paperwork. And after I broke my heart on that job for a couple years, I quit and went into the private sector.” He shrugged. “At least I’m making a lot more money than the idiots I was working for back then.”
Dagmar, whose whole business was based on secure computers, was startled by this outburst.
“Computer security isn’t exactly rocket science,” she said.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Byron said, “but the U.S. doesn’t exactly do rocket science anymore, either.”
Dagmar decided to change the subject before she completely lost any faith in her own project.
“Have you worked with Magnus before?” she asked.
“Tell you the truth,” Byron said, “I’m surprised to see him here.”
“How so?”
“Well, I have worked with him before, and he’s not the best at the kind of improvisation you’re doing.”
“Really?”
“He really needs a script to work from. I’m much better extemporizing than he is.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Dagmar said.
She tried to view this information by considering the source. Byron’s character type was not exactly uncommon in computer circles: he was boastful about his own abilities and disparaging of everyone else. He was also, Dagmar thought, very, very angry.
Byron was Angry Man, she decided. And Magnus was Kilt Boy. At this point Lola and Lloyd weren’t anything more than the Interns. She’d get to know them better later.
At this point a pair of RAF officers, Roy and McCubbin, the latter known as the Mick, appeared and offered to freshen their glasses. The officers were fair and freckled and pilots, with splotches of pink sunburn on their cheeks and noses, and Dagmar and Judy were pleased to invite them to the party.
The lads were delighted to learn that Dagmar and Judy were unattached. They were also pleased to learn that Dagmar had lived in England, having once been married to a Brit. It required quite a lot of amiable conversation to establish the fact that they had absolutely no acquaintances in common.