Then there came the first shots, and the startled jackdaws leaped into the air.
Dagmar’s body jerked beneath a tsunami of adrenaline. She stared at the screens as her fingers clenched the arms of her chair, physically nailing her to the spot as she fought the instinct that wanted to send her senselessly running from the scene…
The shots seemed to echo forever among the trees. People fell; screams rose; the video image jerked wildly. “Ismet!” she called into her headset mic. “Where are you?”
Memories poured into her mind… she remembered fallen banners, sprawled bodies on the street, the Palms hotel as it burned, the fires lapping upward one storey at a time. The scent of burning flesh stung her nostrils, a memory so strong that tears stung her eyes in reaction…
Hundreds of people sprawled on the wet grass, heads up, looking wildly for the source of the shooting. Pyramids of stuffies were knocked over: plush animals stared at the sky with shiny, dead eyes.
“Are you all right?” Dagmar cried. She could hear someone breathing on the line, Ismet presumably, but he wasn’t talking.
“Are you all right?” she demanded. Still no answer.
More shots. More cries. And now the crowd rose to its feet and began to run, a vast screaming mass. The camera crew ran as well. The shooting was a continuous drumroll, full automatic fire spraying the crowd. Dagmar swept tears from her eyes and looked from screen to screen, trying to find a glimpse of Ismet.
“Lloyd!” Lincoln called. “Get a drone over to the shooters! I want their pictures! Get a message to the camera teams!”
Richard, Helmut, and Magnus sent frantic messages. Dagmar was too caught up in her own agony: Lincoln’s urgency didn’t quite penetrate her own.
Most of the cameramen were caught up in the rout, running from tree to tree and kicking up silver sheets of water from puddles, but the dozens of Hot Koans scattered over the park transmitted the video faithfully. One cameraman put a hand in front of his lens and extruded a middle finger, an answer to the request for close-ups of the assassins. But Lloyd’s team answered the call, and one of the helicopter gyred over the park, lens questing, and found two men advancing from the direction of the university. They carried submachine guns in their hands and wore the uniform of the Gray Wolves. They walked among bodies sprawled like stuffed animals, wounded crying or trying to crawl away, piles of rain-soaked animals and spilled boxes of candy.
“Get me their faces!” Lincoln demanded. The helicopter made another pass, this time at a lower angle, and Dagmar could see the killers clearly. Young, laughing, pleased with themselves and the notion that their heroin-dealing superiors were safe for another day. They carried their weapons leveled in front of them but made no attempt to fire into the running crowd. One turned his chin into his collar to speak into a lapel mic.
Lincoln frowned. “I don’t like that,” he said. He turned to Lloyd. “Tell the pilots to circle the park again. There may be more of them that we can’t see.”
The image jerked, danced, fragmented.
Where’s Ismet? Her eyes turned to the other video feeds. The other camera operators were still fleeing through trees with the crowd, transmitting disjointed flashes of green, of flowers, of scattered, sobbing people. She could hear nothing on her audio. The breathing had stopped.
And then-coming right through the trees-a line of men. Five or six, gray uniforms, guns leveled… and in the fragment of time it took Dagmar to realize what was going on the guns fired.
Bullets ripped into tree trunks, leaves, flesh. Screams echoed from tree to tree. The whole crowd moaned, a kind of universal sigh of despair, and then they turned and began to run in another direction.
Dagmar realized that her VoIP line was dead, that Ismet had hung up or that the phone had been destroyed. She frantically tried to reconnect. She couldn’t even get a ring signal.
She looked down at her hands and saw that she was wringing them in an agony of helplessness.
“Camera Three?” Lincoln said. “Who’s Camera Three?”
Camera Three was down, lying in the grass, the image tilted. The audio transmitted little determined grunts, as if someone repeatedly was trying to rise but failing.
“Code name Kamber,” Termite said.
The shooting had stopped-there had just been that volley to turn them, and then the guns had fallen silent.
“Get me pictures of those new shooters,” Lincoln said. The helicopter made another circle, came over the park at another angle.
Dagmar’s eyes swept from screen to screen, desperate for a glimpse of Ismet. There was only chaos in the video, fragments of the desperate crowd in motion-all except Camera Three, lying aslant in the grass.
Dagmar wondered if there were more Gray Wolves-if another line of paramilitaries would appear from another direction, turning the crowd again, sending it staggering back into another hail of bullets.
There was motion on Camera Three. Dagmar looked, saw three Gray Wolves step into the frame. They stopped, relaxed, smiled at one another. The one in the middle lit a cigarette, and the others clustered around to share his lighter.
Hot anger replaced Dagmar’s helplessness. Remember those faces, she thought.
She looked at the other video feeds, and then she saw a camera burst out of the trees, seeing a street, cars, a minibus… signs and businesses and satellite dishes… he was out of the woods.
Other camera operators broke free. Survivors of the crowd staggered out of the trees, sobbing, screaming, supporting one another… Dagmar’s heart gave a leap as she thought she saw Ismet, but then she realized it was someone else.
The video images crossed the road, dodging cars, and were free in Buca. Other people bustled toward them, late arrivals carrying stuffed animals and boxes of candy. Dagmar saw the horror on their faces as they saw the demonstrators staggering toward them.
They hadn’t been surrounded, Dagmar realized. The Wolves came at them from two directions but left the other exits uncovered.
The helicopters swooped in, providing pictures of the second group of killers. There were six of them in total. None of them heard the whisper of the copters or looked up to see the hovering cameras.
Where is Ismet? Dagmar’s brain repeated the question over and over.
Lincoln looked at the flatscreens. In profile he looked like some kind of ferocious Old Testament prophet.
“Get the images of those Gray Wolves,” he said. “I want a portrait of each of them that their mothers will be proud of. I want them as recognizable as possible.”
Helmuth and the others turned to their keyboards.
“You know,” Helmuth said, “when actors on a TV show enlarge a video image, there’s actually more detail.”
“Can we have that software?” Magnus asked.
Within an hour they had good portraits of the eight Wolves they’d caught on video and created posters for distribution on the Internet.
WANTED, the posters read. FOR MURDER OF TURKISH CITIZENS.
Within four hours, the public had provided names for each of the faces. An hour after that, they had addresses and other data. Within six, they had names for the others Wolves in their unit.
While this went on, the Brigade worked on creating an augmented reality version of the demo. The piles of stuffed animals, the jackdaws, the rain, the scattered bodies… all would be available, perpetually, for anyone walking through the park.
In electronic form, the dead would die forever.
No word came from Ismet. Dagmar sat at her workstation or roamed aimlessly over the ops room.
Wandering, she looked out the window at the airfield and saw lines of Indonesian police marching down the runway. She shut her eyes, then the blinds.