Dagmar looked at him. “How did you get them to approve me?” she asked. “How did you explain what it is that I do?”
Lincoln sighed. “I called in a lot of favors,” he said.
“No kidding,” she said.
“Besides,” he said, “I reckon we’re up against a deadline. Right now the generals are reflexively pro-Western, because they always have been. They’re nationalist; they’re procapitalist; they’re anti-communist; they’d never deal with the Soviets. But the Soviets are gone now-and they’ve left Russians behind.
“Everyone’s a capitalist now,” Lincoln went on, “but there are democratic capitalists and crony capitalists and state capitalists and authoritarian capitalists and everything in between. The Bozbeyli regime has a lot more in common ideologically with Moscow now than with Washington-but they’ve got such a Cold War anti-Soviet mind-set that they haven’t figured it out yet. I want to knock them down before they turn into Russia’s best friend on the Black Sea.”
“And the Bosporus,” Dagmar said.
Lincoln nodded. “Indeed,” he said.
Sudden insight flashed into Dagmar’s mind. She looked at Lincoln in wonder.
“Am I correct in assuming that this operation is really aimed at Russia?” Dagmar said. “That once we do our proof-of-concept, you’re planning to scale all this up and go after Kremlin autocrats?”
“Everything,” said Lincoln, smiling benignly, “is rehearsal for something else.”
It was ten A.M. in California, and Dagmar was on the phone to Calvin, her head writer for the Seagram’s game.
“I screwed up bad,” he said. “And all because I love my dog.”
Dagmar drew her legs up into her seat and contemplated the gin and tonic in her hand. She could scent juniper berry and fresh-cut lime fizzing from the drink.
“Tell me,” she said.
“Harry’s got a dog in the story, right? It scares away Murchison when he tries to break into Sandee’s place.”
“Yeah, okay.” Dagmar sipped her drink. She glanced at the kitchen and saw that the water was boiling for pasta.
“So I gave my own dog’s name to Harry’s dog. Perpetual Misery-Perpy for short.”
Dagmar felt a warning prickle on the back of her neck.
“And,” she said, “the players googled Perpetual Misery plus Dog and found you.”
“Worse than that. Perpetual Misery has a MySpace page.”
“Oh my Christ!” Dagmar put her drink down.
“They call me,” Calvin said miserably. “They call me to ask for information about Harry and Sandee. I tell them I never heard of them, but they keep calling. When I don’t answer, the buffer on the answering machine fills up.” He gave a despairing sigh. “Perpy has thousands of new friends on MySpace.”
“Jesus, Calvin.”
“They’re camped out in front of my house,” Calvin said. “They follow me when I go to the store.”
Dagmar tried to suppress her annoyance. Calvin had tried to play cute with the game, to sneak a little joke by the players, and he hadn’t realized that they’d jump all over something like that. And now he’d put the whole game in jeopardy.
“They’re waiting for you to slip up,” she said. “They’re hoping you’ll leave data where they can find it, or leave a script behind. You’ve got to secure everything connected with the game.”
“I can’t believe this is happening.”
“Calvin.” She spoke as patiently as she could. “Do you have any notes on paper? Any printouts lying around where people can find them?”
Item by item, Dagmar walked him through a procedure for sanitizing his house, his computer, and his handheld.
She hadn’t needed Lincoln to teach her these things.
“I’ll have Richard call you about computer security,” Dagmar said, and pressed the End button.
She looked sadly at her drink, now heavily watered by melting ice, and sighed.
She was trying to run two jobs at a distance, each at least as complex as the other. She didn’t feel completely on top of either task, especially as she was working with people who were less experienced than she at any of this.
She comforted herself with the thought that, if there had to be a security breach on one of her operations, at least it was best that it was Calvin’s.
If Calvin’s operation was breached, no people would die.
The next day Lincoln’s predictions seemed to come true, as word arrived of another mass demonstration in Trabzon, a city on the Black Sea. Lincoln called an emergency meeting in the ops room in order to figure out what was happening.
Dagmar scanned video and photos uploaded onto anti-government sites. She saw banners waving under cloudy skies, water looking frigid and gray, ships nosed up to piers.
“It’s at the waterfront,” Magnus said a little too obviously. He was hungover from the previous day’s celebrations and sucked down coffee as fast as he could pour it.
“Video quality isn’t bad,” Helmuth judged.
“This isn’t one of ours!” Lincoln said. “This is going off the rails faster than I imagined!”
Dagmar looked at him in surprise. “That’s a good thing?” she asked.
“Look,” Lincoln said. “We’re astroturfing them! We’re trying to convince everyone that this is a grassroots Turkish movement. And now it’s actually become one!” He gestured grandly at the screen. “These people put it all together themselves!” He frowned at the screen. “Let’s hope they don’t cock it up for all of us.”
The crowd was small but very enthusiastic. Apparently under the illusion that the items were symbolically important, they carried flowers, DVDs, towels, and photos. They made piles and designs out of these items and spray-painted slogans on the sidewalk. It was everything they’d seen done in videos.
And then they sang “Istiklal Mars?i” and dispersed, presumably to upload their pictures and videos to political and social networking sites throughout cyberspace.
The Lincoln Brigade looked at one another. Lincoln grinned.
“We taught them well,” he said.
“I have a Hot Koan,” Richard said. They turned to him.
“Dagmar makes a revolution out of processors, connectors, routers, and Web pages,” Richard said. “But take away the processors, connectors, routers, and Web pages and what is left?
“Trabzon.”
The action in Izmir went wrong at the beginning. It was scheduled to take place at noon in the old Konak section of the city, in a large park at the waterfront with more stunning sea views, a pier, and a picturesque gingerbread clock tower. The place was also conveniently close to the city hall should another march on a symbol of authority prove possible. But it seemed that after two waterfront demonstrations in Antalya and Trabzon the authorities must have decided waterfront parks were too great a temptation to sedition. A whole company of police moved into the park on Monday morning, bringing with them an armored car.
The scene had to be shifted at the last minute, a good deal farther east, to Hasanaga Park in the Buca district. The setting was good-there were ample entrances and exits from the park, and the adjoining Dokuz Eylul University provided potential recruits as well as lots of places to hide-but it took time to scout the location, and that meant the action had to be moved up to six o’clock, pushing close to the deadline sent in email messages.
The park was wooded and the demonstrators, carrying stuffed animals and boxes of Turkish delight, took a while to find one another and reach critical mass. One of the tech crew while waiting for people to turn up wasted time shooting video of jackdaws on the lawn.
The demonstrators had been given only two hours’ notice when and where to show up, and it was soon clear that insufficient allowance had been made for delays caused by rush hour traffic. By six o’clock there were only a few hundred people at the action, though more continued to swarm in from all directions.
The demo began in a brief rain squall. The sound of raindrops slapping tree leaves dominated the audio, and one of the cameras persisted in tracking the flapping jackdaws. Demonstrators began piling their stuffies into pyramids or perching them in trees. Chants of “Down with the generals!” rose bravely against the sound of rattling rain. Turkish delight was eaten or offered to passersby and to birds. The rain diminished, then died away.