She ducked away from the window as the glass shivered to the bullet’s impact. She didn’t hear a shot, only a mechanical clacking noise.
She ran, and as she ran she thought to scream. The scream came out wrong-she hoped for the piercing sound of a cheerleader trapped in a horror movie basement, but instead she found that terror had somehow thickened her vocal cords and she could only manage a kind of baritone moan.
“Help!” she rumbled. “Help me!”
Dagmar heard footsteps behind her. A bullet struck sparks from the street near her feet.
“Help!” she groaned. Another bullet cracked past her ear.
However she was saying it, the urgency must have told. Porch lights were snapping on. A door creaked as it opened. The footsteps behind her stopped suddenly, and then she heard the footsteps again, in retreat.
When the RAF Police finally came, they found Judy lying dead in her room.
Which sixties spy are you? Dagmar thought. She was curled in a chair at the offices of the RAF Police, her knees drawn up, her forearms embracing her shins.
She’d decided that Ismet was the character from Ipcress File. But who was she?
There weren’t a lot of options, and the problem was that most of them were superwomen. Emma Peel and Modesty Blaise were too beautiful, too perfect, too intimidating-and besides, Dagmar was absolutely certain that she would not be flattered by a black spandex catsuit.
Mentally she paged through the available options, and then-a cold finger running up her spine-she realized her true identity. She was Jill or Tilly Masterson. She was Fiona Volpe; she was Aki; she was Tracy di Vicenzo. She was Semiramis Orga.
She was the woman who was in the spy business but lacked the necessary skills and experience, who was completely out of her depth, who tried her best but fell afoul of the villain anyway.
Dagmar was the good-hearted but clueless girl who died in the first half of the Bond films.
Of all the characters in the drama, she was the one the audience absolutely knew would not survive.
CHAPTER NINE
The police headquarters filled with RAF Police in their white caps and soldiers from the RAF Regiment in camouflage battle dress. Dagmar, curled on her chair in the hall, felt herself cringing away from the parade of firearms that marched past her.
Squadron Leader Alvarez turned up, the group’s intelligence liaison; he scowled as he scanned the room, and went into conference with other officers. A pair of Royal Marines arrived, from off the patrol boats that cruised offshore, and then the first of Dagmar’s own people appeared-Lola scowling at the world through a mop of tangled hair, and Byron bewildered, fearful, blinking sleep from his eyes, having been first roused from his bed by a phone call telling him to secure their doors, then taken by military police to their headquarters.
It was time for Dagmar to be the boss again.
So she uncurled from her chair, went to the two, and told them there was a security problem. She showed them where the coffee machine waited, told them to find a seat.
When Ismet was brought in, his glasses cockeyed on his face, she went to him in silence and put her arms around him and stayed there, leaning against him, for a long, desperate moment.
“Judy is dead,” she said. “Shot.” She spoke quietly so the others wouldn’t hear. She felt his muscles tighten at her words.
“The killer shot at me, too,” she said.
Being shot at, she realized, was something new that she and Ismet had in common.
“I’m so sorry,” Ismet said. His voice was breathless. “What can I do?”
What can I do? That was always his question, as if he saw the world as a series of technical problems to be overcome.
Some problems, she thought, were beyond help.
More members of the Lincoln Brigade arrived, and Dagmar counted heads-everyone was present save for Rafet and Tuna, on their way to the mainland, and Lincoln, Helmuth, and Magnus. Cold terror crawled up her spine as she pictured Lincoln, Helmuth, and Magnus lying slaughtered in their beds, the Brigade’s mission a failure, their sole triumph the slaughter of its own recruits… and then Lincoln walked through the glass doors at the end of the hall, eyes hidden behind his metal-rimmed shades, his feet marching in step with his two white-capped escorts; and he walked past Dagmar with a curt nod and went straight into conference with Alvarez.
The door closed behind Lincoln, and then through the wood paneling Dagmar heard his voice raised: “What the hell is going on in this fucking establishment?”-after which somebody, presumably, calmed him down, because Dagmar heard nothing more.
A police corporal arrived to report that Helmuth and Magnus were not in their quarters. In a burst of relief it occurred to Dagmar that they needn’t have been victims of assassins-instead they were probably in Limassol indulging in their usual nightly depravities. She would call them on her handheld if she had it, but she didn’t have it with her.
Instead she told the corporal to alert the guard at the gate to escort Magnus and Helmuth to the police station as soon as they arrived.
The door to the office opened, and Alvarez summoned Dagmar. Police officers filed out as she took a chair, leaving only Alvarez, Lincoln, and a police lieutenant Dagmar had never met. Lincoln’s jaw muscles were clenched in what seemed to be rage.
The room was a meeting or interview room, with a cheap table and chairs and walls crusted with decades of thick ochre paint. Faded safety notices were posted on the walls. There was a faint odor of disinfectant. The police lieutenant turned on a recorder, put it on the table, and then opened his notebook and clicked his ballpoint.
Recorder and notebook. Clearly someone who believed in backup.
On the whole this was not unlike the last police station, the last interrogation in Hollywood, three years ago.
Alvarez looked at her.
“I’d like to begin by saying,” he said, “how sorry the establishment at RAF Akrotiri is at the loss of your colleague. And I want to say that we’re going to make certain that nothing like this happens again.”
Dagmar held his blue eyes for a moment, then turned away. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
“You’ll all be moved to new quarters,” Alvarez said. “And you’ll be under constant police guard as long as you remain on Cyprus.”
Dagmar nodded. As she looked down she saw the display on the police lieutenant’s recorder and saw that it was automatically transcribing the words, little black letters crawling like ants across the glowing screen.
“Miss Briana,” said the lieutenant, “my name is Vaughan.”
Vaughan was straw haired and lanky, dark eyed, with a trace of Devon in his voice. He was young, twenty-two or — three. Dagmar nodded at him.
“I’d like to know, miss,” Vaughan said, “if you got a good look at the killers.”
“Killers?” Dagmar looked up in surprise. “There was more than one?”
“Other witnesses saw at least two.”
“I saw just one.” She called the face back to her mind, then shook her head.
“I only saw him for a second,” she said. “He had dark hair and a mustache. He looked like half the men on this island.”
“Tall? Short?”
Dagmar thought for a moment. “A little shorter than me. Average for a Turk, maybe.”
“How old?”
“Thirty?” she asked herself. “Thirty-five? Not young.”
Vaughan looked at his notes.
“Did you by any chance move your bed to an unusual angle in your bedroom?”
Both Lincoln and Alvarez were surprised by the question.
“Yes,” Dagmar said. “I did.”
Vaughan nodded. “Thank you, miss,” he said. “We were trying to figure out why the assassins would move your furniture.” He looked up from the notebook. “Why do you have your bed like that, by the way?”