She wandered to the break room, looked at the lunch she had waiting in the fridge, then closed the fridge door and went back to ops.
Along the way she felt a firm hand on her elbow, and she looked up to see Lincoln. Wordlessly he led her to his office. He sat her in a chair, then took his place behind his desk.
“I need to know,” he said, “if you told anyone about the target.”
She looked at him in surprise, a surprise that was soon followed by dread.
“No,” she said. “You and I worked out where the demo was going to happen, along with Ismet.”
Lincoln glanced at his safe. “I lock everything up at the end of the day. I don’t commit anything to electronic form.”
Dagmar threw her hands wide.
“I haven’t talked about this at all, Lincoln,” she said.
“Or written it down? Or emailed it?”
“No. Of course not.”
Lincoln looked fixedly at a corner of his desk, his jaw muscles working in accompaniment to his thoughts.
“It could be a complete coincidence,” he said. “Those Wolves might just have been on the scene-or were pulling some kind of unrelated security detail on campus. And there are a thousand ways our system can be compromised. We could have an informer somewhere in the network, or somebody’s girlfriend could have found out he’s cheating and told the cops to get even…” He looked up. “Speed is of the essence. We’ve got to put these events together faster than the authorities can react to informers.”
Dagmar pressed her hands together, trying to stop the shaking.
Lincoln frowned.
“Dagmar,” he said, “I need you to pull yourself together.”
She shrank beneath his cold gaze.
“I keep thinking about Ismet,” she said.
“There’s nothing you can do about him.”
“I keep thinking that I’ve killed another one.” Another lover, she meant.
Lincoln’s mouth twisted in a kind of snarl.
“Well,” he said, “you haven’t. And the fact is people have been dying all along-journalists, missionaries, Kurds, Alevis, labor leaders, even the odd tourist… It’s been going on all along, and neither of us are going to stop it completely; we can just make it mean something, maybe…”
Dagmar wanted to say that Ismet meant more to her than some political principle, but the words crumbled into dust before she could even utter them.
“I need you to help get those videos into shape, and uploaded,” Lincoln said. “I want Turkish public opinion outraged by this. Because we want the outrage we feel to be felt by everybody.”
Dagmar obeyed numbly. The Turkish government had issued a list of Web sites that were to be blocked. Turk Telekom was too big to ignore the order, but many local ISPs were slow to get the order or slow to enforce it.
Still, Dagmar was staying ahead of the authorities. For the next few hours she edited video, uploaded it, made sure it was posted on new sites that the Turkish government hadn’t managed to ban yet. She helped Magnus and Byron create new proxy sites so that people in Turkey could view the videos and send messages to one another without the government intercepting them. Distantly she could hear the thump of shotguns, the cries of wounded and dying, the amplified, incomprehensible snarl of anger coming from bullhorns… it’s as if she were listening to a radio station from a parallel world, where the events of her past were repeated over and over again.
As she worked, Ataturk fixed his ferocious gaze upon her from his place on the wall.
It was nearly dinnertime before she heard from Ismet.
His message appeared on a Gmail account they shared. Gmail accounts were perfect for covert work, provided that everyone involved had a password and access to the account.
Dagmar would, for example, write an email giving details of the next demo, then not send it. Ismet or Tuna or Rafet, who knew the password, could open the email, make their own comments, then log off, again without sending it. This could continue for any number of iterations, and then the email could be erased without ever being sent.
As long as the email wasn’t actually sent anywhere, it couldn’t be intercepted. Gmail was a surprisingly secure method of communication, so long as you didn’t actually send any Gmail.
As Dagmar was working elsewhere, she kept checking the Gmail account she shared with Ismet, and she felt her heart give a lurch as she found an unsent email waiting for her.
I was pinned down in the park for hours. Had to destroy phone.
IM ok now. Izmir too dangerous, safe house abandoned. I am writing from hotel in Selcuk. Will go to Bodrum tomorrow and fly home from there.
Estragon.
Dagmar waited till her body caught up to her racing thoughts, till she could assure herself that her heartbeat and breath were functioning in the same time as her mind. Then-fingers shaking-she typed her own brief answer.
Love you Briana.
She checked in again for the rest of the night, but there was no reply.
FROM: Rahim
The following proxy sites are still unblocked. Please pass this on to anyone interested in finding out what’s going on in Turkey.
128.112.139.28 port 3124
RT 218.128.112.18:8080
218.206.94.132:808
218.253.65.99:808
219.50.16.70:8080
By morning, the official total from the action was eleven dead, twenty-eight wounded. Rumors had it the totals were higher.
How many people have to die, Dagmar thought, before it all stops being cool? Before it stops being insanely fun?
One. Just one.
Originally, the government bulletin had claimed “terrorist violence by unknown subversive elements.” But faced with the videos, the posters, by ten in the morning it announced that the Gray Wolves had been taken into custody for questioning.
“They’re not in jail,” Lincoln said. “They’re in protective custody to keep them from being lynched by their neighbors.”
“Too bad we can’t arrange a jailbreak,” Dagmar said.
“It was a bad idea to put the Gray Wolves in uniform,” said Lincoln. “A government can always use a shadowy, anonymous group for assassination and random violence. Once everyone knows who they are, it’s a lot harder to hide in the shadows.” He smiled, nodded. “Those bastards have had it.”
Dagmar went to bed at midmorning and arose midafternoon to wait for Ismet.
He looked like a wreck-unshaven, pale, smelling of sweat and tobacco. Dagmar held him for a long time after he staggered out of his Ford, then joined him for the debriefing, which was mercifully brief.
“We knew one of these would go wrong sooner or later,” Lincoln said. “This one wasn’t anybody’s fault. We learn and move on.”
Dagmar returned with Ismet to the apartment he shared with Tuna. Tuna and Rafet had both gone, on their way to an action in Ankara, and Dagmar relished the chance to be alone with Ismet. But he was exhausted, and when Dagmar left briefly to fetch soft drinks from the fridge he fell asleep fully clothed on the sofa. Dagmar wanted to stay with him, but her mouth tasted foul, her skin smelled of chemical anxiety, and she badly wanted to brush her teeth. She left a note saying she’d be back soon, then kissed Ismet, turned out the lights, and walked to her own place. She’d get a change of clothes and a toothbrush, then return.
Cypress smells were in the air. The airfield was silent. Dagmar’s apartment was dark-apparently Judy hadn’t expected her to return. She walked onto the porch, fished in her cargo pants for keys, and noticed the door was standing open.
A cold warning finger touched her neck. She stepped to the side of the door, between it and the window into the living room, and then reached around the corner to flick on the living room light.
The curtain was only partly drawn. She looked in to see a man quickly emerge from Judy’s bedroom into the hall-a man she didn’t know, mustached, dressed in dark clothes. A long pistol was in one hand. He looked up at the window and saw Dagmar the instant that she saw him.