“I-” Dagmar started, then shook her head. “It keeps the bad dreams away,” she said.
Lincoln and Alvarez were at first surprised, then seemed a little uncomfortable with their new knowledge. Vaughan just gave a brisk nod and jotted briefly in his notebook.
“That makes perfect sense, miss,” he said. “Thank you.”
Vaughan asked for Dagmar’s movements on the night, and she provided them.
Lincoln asked if she’d told anyone outside of the Brigade where she lived. She said she hadn’t. While Vaughan was jotting this down, Lincoln spoke up.
“And the action yesterday,” he said. “Who knew its location?”
“You already know the answer,” Dagmar said. “You and me and Ismet. And though the camera teams were staying in Salihi, they might have had a good idea they were going to Izmir next.”
“You didn’t tell anyone else?”
“Not till I sent orders to the camera teams.”
“Right.” Lincoln rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “I suppose that’s all, for now.”
But Dagmar had her own question ready. She looked at Alvarez.
“How did the killers get on the base? You’ve got checkpoints, patrols…” She waved an arm seaward. “Ships.”
Vaughan delicately chewed his lower lip.
“It’s a very large perimeter, I’m afraid,” he said. “It’s difficult to guard it all. They could have gone under or over the fence; they might have come in by small boat.” He gave a sigh. “They might have faked some ID. Or the ID may have been real-there are thousands of local civilians who work here at the aerodrome.” Determination crossed his features. “At least we can hope that they won’t escape.”
Yes, Dagmar thought. Let’s hope.
When she stood to leave, Lincoln rose and joined her. He put a hand on her arm before she could reach for the doorknob.
“We’ve got to tell them,” Lincoln said.
“I’ll do it.”
“Are you sure?”
She nodded. He released her arm and she opened the door and went into the hallway where the Brigade waited. Helmuth and Magnus, she saw, had returned from Limassol and joined the others.
They all looked at her, and suddenly Dagmar couldn’t say a word. She could barely look at them. Lincoln waited barely two seconds before he spoke himself.
“Wordz,” Lincoln said, “has been murdered. Briana was shot at but got away.”
Dagmar saw them turn to her in shock. Her eyes skittered away from theirs.
“The killers knew exactly where to go,” Lincoln added, “and that indicates a very dangerous security breach. So in the course of the next few hours, we’re going to be asking you some very serious questions, and I would appreciate truthful answers.”
A moment of clarity descended on Dagmar. Someone had pinpointed her, had pointed out her apartment to the assassins. Had set her up, and Judy as well, to be murdered.
She rather doubted that person was going to start telling the truth about it now.
Lincoln, Alvarez, and Vaughan conducted the interrogations. Those who weren’t being interviewed were given police escorts to their apartments, to pack their belongings and carry them away. Dagmar didn’t think she could face the crime scene, so she stayed in the police HQ while two very kind policewomen volunteered to get her things.
After the interrogations were over, the Brigade was carried in police vehicles to the ops center, where without sleep and without cheer, smelling of unwashed bodies and uncertainty, they attempted to do their normal day’s work. The hallway to the bathroom was full of personal possessions fetched from their apartments: their personal electronics were stored in metal lockers outside the secure area.
The Brigade stared dully at the screens as they caught up on the news.
The Izmir slaughter had outraged the Turkish nation-the government story had been unconvincing even before it had been shown to be an absurd lie, and the videos and pictures of the massacres were all too available to anyone with access to a computer or to foreign television. Angry posts had appeared on political Web sites, pictures of the dead on lampposts and street corners, copies of the wanted posters everywhere. The junta had failed entirely to keep ahead of the story.
A massive demonstration had spontaneously organized in the city of Konya, where Anatolia’s center of conservative Islam was marked by a green-tiled conical tower that stood above the elaborate tomb of Mevlana, the great poet who had founded the Whirling Dervishes. Lincoln and Dagmar had avoided setting any actions in Konya in order to avoid accusations of being religious reactionaries. But the city’s residents had managed to mobilize themselves, and it was a vast, angry stream of thousands that circled the city’s brown stone Alaeddin Mosque, stopping traffic on the semicircular boulevard and filling the mosque’s shady park, shouting slogans and singing patriotic songs. They carried stuffed animals and boxes of Turkish delight, memorials to those who had died two days before.
Lincoln and Dagmar had planned the first series of hit-and-run demos to show the population that it was safe to defy the government. Ironically, it was the demonstration where people were killed that had outraged the people to the point where they were organizing themselves into large actions.
It took at least a couple hours for the police to work up the nerve or gather the reinforcements to deal with the demo, and when they charged the demonstrators they were met with a storm of rocks, bottles, and other improvised weapons. Flowers of pepper gas blossomed among the trees of the park. There was resistance-videos had actually been uploaded by people sitting in jail cells, people whose phones had not yet been confiscated. Dagmar guessed that a few hundred people, at least, were clubbed to the ground and arrested or-if they were lucky-carried in handcuffs to a hospital.
Most of the protestors seemed to have simply found an exit once things got dangerous. They were all networked-only a few would have had to find an actual way out and alerted the rest by phone or electronic text.
The demonstrators didn’t have the capability to upload their images real-time, so Dagmar had to search online sources for videos that had been posted hours after the event and try to arrange them in some kind of chronology. Ismet and Lloyd had to translate all the dialogue. All the cumbersome difficulty only added to the frustrations of the day.
Eventually the videos were cataloged and a narrative superimposed on the action. The narrative had to do with freedom-loving resisters in pitched combat with faceless totalitarians and may have possessed only a tangential resemblance to reality-for starters, Dagmar had no idea whether the demonstrators, taken as a whole, were any more committed to democracy than the current regime or would, if given power, set up an equally authoritarian state but with a different agenda. Yet her narrative would serve for present purposes, and the better-quality videos were sent out to the usual media outlets, while the rest were duplicated and catalogued on Web sites hosted throughout the world.
Dagmar worked amid a leaden cloud of despair. It was not just that Judy had been murdered; it was not just that Dagmar worked in a room with someone who had betrayed her; it was not merely that her entire project was now ringed with violence-it was the certain knowledge that her own nerves were not up to coping with any of this.
She could sense panic fluttering in her heart. Sour-scented sweat gathered in the hollow of her throat. Phantom movements in her peripheral vision seemed forever on the verge of resolving into images of Indonesian rioters armed with cleavers, Jakarta police with shotguns, thick-necked assassins from the Russian Maffya. Her mind seemed on the verge of exploding in a bubble of fire, just as the Ford had exploded on that cool Los Angeles night three years before.
Somehow the nightmare did not manifest. Somehow she managed to do her work, think her thoughts, interact with her posse. Somehow she kept herself from crumbling.