Roy was drunk when he arrived and got more drunk as Happy Hour went on, though pleasantly so. Eventually, though, he grew nearly comatose and the Mick’s wedding ring became impossible to ignore, and so Dagmar and Judy collected the lads’ cell phone numbers, and-declining the offer of escort-walked along with Byron to their apartments in the married officers’ quarters, long, low apartment blocks with tiny little yards strewn with the bright plastic toys of the officers’ children. The scent of charcoal was on the air, from the backyards where pink-skinned RAF officers, cold bottles in their hands, congregated in the evenings around grills with their mates and families.
Palm trees, bottles clinking, the scent of proteins cooking, and the sounds of sports floating from TV sets… to Dagmar it seemed like some kind of retro LA scene. Like Hawthorne, maybe.
“I’m going to call my wife,” Byron said, and gave a jerky wave of his arm as he turned onto the walk that led to his apartment. Dagmar and Judy kept on a few more doors, then passed into their own unit. Dagmar held up the napkin with the pilots’ phone numbers.
“Do you want this?”
Judy flicked her hair. Her plastic crown glittered. “Toss it,” she said.
Dagmar dropped the napkin into the trash. Judy went into the bathroom to take her evening shower. Dagmar opened the fridge, poured herself a glass of orange juice, then went to the dinette and booted her laptop.
She was not yet finished with her work for the day. Back in Los Angeles, her company was hip deep in the run-up to the Seagram’s game. She had to check her email for the updates, then make phone calls if intervention seemed necessary.
Dagmar slipped her keyboard out of its tube, then unrolled it. She preferred a full-sized keyboard to the smaller one on her laptop and carried one with her-flexible rubberized plastic, powered by a rechargeable battery, with genuine contacts beneath the keys that gave a pleasing tactile feel beneath her fingertips. It connected wirelessly to her laptop-she’d turned the screen around so that she wouldn’t have the unused keyboard between herself and the image.
The Seagram’s game seemed to have a greater reality, even at this distance, than her own enterprise here in Cyprus. Possibly because the goal-to sell whiskey or, at any rate, to make whiskey cool-seemed more well defined than her own.
She was used to telling people what to do-her fictional creations, her employees, the players-but she lacked confidence in the idea that she could really give orders to an entire nationality. Somehow her vanity had never extended to that.
She waved a hand, like a sorcerer incanting a spell.
You all be good, now, she thought. And then added, You, too, Bozbeyli.
A conventional insurrection stockpiled arms and explosives. Dagmar’s revolt would stockpile cell phones.
Cell phones had already been acquired and warehoused in safe houses in major cities. So were video cameras, transmitters, antennae, satellite uplinks, and of course the Hot Koans.
The revolution would be televised. And tweeted, blogged, attached to emails, YouTubed, Ozoned, googled, edited, remixed, and set to a catchy sound track. It would be bounced to High Earth Orbit and back. It would be carried live on BBC, on CNN, on Star TV, on every other electronic medium dreamed up by an inventive humanity.
What Dagmar could only hope was that none of these media would be transmitting pictures of a bloody massacre.
“The lawyers aren’t going to let any of this happen,” Lincoln said, “unless the President signs an executive order. He hasn’t done that yet, but I think he will before too much longer.”
“This is too much for me,” Dagmar said.
The call for the midday prayer had gone out from the Blue Mosque. Dagmar sat among her travel documents for Bulgaria, still stunned by what Lincoln was asking of her.
Less than twenty-four hours earlier she had been cowering in her bathroom, trying to hide from phantom Indonesian attackers. She wondered if Lincoln would want her for this job if he knew she was mentally-what was the appropriate word? Challenged? Compromised?
He looked at her, the gray light of the mosque shining off the metal rims of his shades.
“Look,” he said. “Once that order is signed, this operation is going forward. I have some talented people I can employ, and I’m sure they’ll do a good job. But-” He raised a blunt finger. “They won’t be as good as you. And if they aren’t as good, we could lose some people that we wouldn’t otherwise have lost.” He shook his large white head. “If you do this,” he said, “you could save lives.”
It was that argument, Dagmar reflected later, that had overcome her last resistance.
I am such a freaking bleeding heart, she thought. She could only hope that Lincoln was right that she would save lives and not lose them.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Oh eight hundred. Dagmar cycled to the ops center, then realized she had forgotten the ID card she was supposed to wear around her neck, the card that not only held her picture but also could be used on the door’s card reader to pass her into the center. She looked up at the camera above the door and gave an apologetic wave, then waited for someone to open the door for her. When this didn’t happen, she knocked.
Eventually Lola, the wavy-haired intern, opened the door for her. Lola was dressed in a blue suit-a change from yesterday’s gray one-and she looked at Dagmar with cool intelligence.
“Yes?” she said.
“Thanks for opening the door.” Dagmar moved to walk past Lola, but the other woman blocked her.
“Don’t you have your ID?” Lola asked.
“I forgot it in my apartment.”
“I can’t let you in without it.”
Dagmar looked at her in surprise.
“But you know me,” she said.
“Yes, but I also need to know where your card is. You can’t leave that lying around.”
Dagmar opened her mouth to protest, but a look at Lola told her that further argument was pointless, so she turned around, cycled back to her apartment, picked up the ID card from the kitchen table where she’d left it, hung the card around her neck on its lanyard, and returned to ops.
She was beginning to think Byron might have a point about the stupid security rules attending this kind of operation. Besides the fetish for code names and ID cards, there had also been an inventory of every electronic device that Dagmar had brought with her-her handheld, her laptop-which had to stay in her apartment. For the ops room she had a new cell phone, laptop, and desktop computer, all dedicated to the exercise, and which could not be taken out of the ops center. The phones, she noticed, had their camera functions disabled. The computers had most of their USB ports soldered shut, and all data was available only on portable memory, which was locked in the safe at night. Each flash memory or portable drive featured a sticker with a bar code-Lola scanned these when the members of the Brigade checked them out, then scanned them in again at the end of the day. It was not totally impossible to steal data, she supposed, but it would be very inconvenient and require a certain amount of nerve.
The worst threat to security, Dagmar thought, came from the fact that the computers were connected to the Internet. In a truly secure operation, any machine containing sensitive information would either have no outside connections at all or connect only to a secure local area network. Any machine connected to the outside created an opportunity for intruders.
Dagmar would have to trust the counterintrusion skills of Richard the Assassin. He was brilliant about keeping crackers out of the Great Big Idea file system, and those he’d battled on behalf of the company were the best on the planet.