Lincoln’s door was open. He sat behind his desk, stretched out on his Aeron chair like a piece of driftwood left by the tide. He saw Dagmar and offered a weary smile.
“You go on knockin’ them into the weeds, okay?” he said.
“I’m embarrassed,” she said. She raised a hand to the pain in her throat-she’d strained her vocal cords shouting.
Lincoln waved a dismissive hand. “It was educational,” he said. “I’m sure we all learned something.”
We all learned that I’m crazy, Dagmar thought.
“If you want your phone and laptop,” Lincoln said, “you can have them. I know you aren’t working with the black hats.”
She took her electronics, walked past Lola and down the stairs to meet the two kind, soft-spoken policewomen who had gathered her belongings and moved them to her new quarters.
She had been put into a room with a single bedroom and without Ismet in evidence-evidently Lincoln had conceded on the point of sex but not on living arrangements. Her apartment was on the second floor of a two-storey apartment block, and there were RAF Police guards in white caps guarding all possible approaches. Snipers in the trees for all she knew.
She was still in married personnel quarters-an RAF family had been pitched out of their home to make a safer place for her. Their personal items were gone, but she could still smell the bacon they’d cooked for breakfast and the scent of aftershave and herbal body wash in the bathroom. She found a note on the breakfast table, in round handwriting with circular dots above the j’s and i’s.
We hope you enjoy our home.
The hot water takes a little time to come on in the bathroom, and sometimes you need to jiggle the handle on the toilet to stop it running.
Dagmar smiled at the sweet air of hospitality, then went to the kitchen to find her gin. As she passed the toaster, it started talking to her in Greek. She jumped a foot in surprise and banged her hip on the counter.
She stepped closer to the toaster again. The Greek voice resumed. She recognized only the word tost.
She examined the toaster but couldn’t find a way to turn the voice off. Maybe the British family hadn’t managed to turn it off, either. She gave up and put the toaster back on the counter.
The contents of the refrigerator spoke more eloquently than the toaster.
The policewomen hadn’t known which items belonged to Judy and which to Dagmar, so they’d brought everything. There was the soy milk that Judy liked and her goat cheese and the Nutella she enjoyed at breakfast.
Sadness fell on Dagmar like cool rain. She closed the refrigerator door, mixed her drink, then left the bottles on the counter rather than open the door to be met again with the ghost of Judy’s absence.
Dinner was a frozen meal of pasta primavera heated in the microwave. The creators of the meal apparently hadn’t known what primavera actually meant: the vegetables were tired and old and tasteless. She had just finished when there was a soft knock on her door.
She had relearned caution in the last twenty-four hours. She took a one-second glance through the front curtains, saw Ismet’s silhouette, and opened the door. He kissed her hello, then stepped back to look at her.
“Now I know why Lincoln advised me not to piss you off.”
Dagmar felt her cheeks flush.
“I could have handled that better,” she said.
“I’d have shot him in the head,” Ismet said. She couldn’t quite tell whether he was joking or not.
She took his arm, led him toward the couch.
“Please,” she said. “Let’s not talk about shooting.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
They sat. Ismet winced, reached behind the cushion, and drew out a leatherette case with a small pair of binoculars.
“Maybe your hosts watch birds,” he said. He put the binoculars on the coffee table.
She put a hand on his thigh, rested her head on his shoulder. He put his arm around her. Her head swam, perhaps at his scent, perhaps at her own weariness. Somewhere, just beneath her consciousness, she heard the sound of the sea grating up the shingle at Kouklia. Aphrodite sent a simmering warmth through her groin.
And then she heard Lincoln’s voice. When you turn someone, you get him back to his normal life as soon as possible. She felt herself stiffen at the memory.
Ismet turned out to be sensitive to her body language.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Practically everything. Lots.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Lots.”
She buried her face in the juncture between his neck and shoulder. He stroked her. She kissed his neck, then licked him there, felt his taste shock her nerves into life.
Ismet brought his lips to hers. They kissed for a long time. Her hands reached for the buttons of his shirt, but then she hesitated.
Damn this, she thought. Damn this work. It acts against all trust, all humanity.
He had brought her to his own apartment that night, she remembered. Because his roommate was away and there was more privacy.
But if he’d known that her place was going to be hit and he’d wanted to save her, he would have done exactly that. She’d gone back to her own place only because he’d fallen asleep and she’d wanted a toothbrush.
She wondered how plausible that was. At least that scenario meant Ismet didn’t want her killed.
She didn’t know what to believe. And of course it had to be admitted that she had a bad history with men.
She leaned on his shoulder again, sighed.
“I’m too tired to do anything else,” she said.
“I understand.”
“I’d like you to stay tonight, though.”
He kissed her cheek.
“Of course.”
Tomorrow, she thought, we’ll have the lie detector tests. Then we’ll know, maybe.
He helped her turn the bed to a forty-five-degree angle to the wall. He made no comment as he did so.
The sheets were clean, white with a wide blue stripe and a floral scent-the anonymous British family had made the bed before departing. Dagmar and Ismet slept curled into each other, like a set of quotation marks with no text between them.
In the morning, when she woke, she was astonished that no soldiers had marched through the night, that her mind had not been filled with explosions and blood.
That she could wake on a sunny morning and-for a brief, blessed moment-not feel the feather touch of fear on her nerves.
CHAPTER TEN
Dagmar felt that as the leader, she should take one for the team, and so she took the polygraph test along with the others. It was only when she was wired into the machine, as the strap went around her rib cage under her breasts, that she realized that she might be asked some questions she didn’t want to answer.
The interview took place in a small, warm room in the headquarters building. The operator was a young man with freckles and a truly unattractive set of National Health spectacles. He had a list of questions on an electric display pad and a booklet that turned out to be the operator’s manual for the machine. Sometimes, as he wired Dagmar into her chair, he had to flip to one page or another for instructions.
She thought this particular voodoo wasn’t very convincing.
The operator had a soft, professional voice, and he kept out of sight, working the machine behind Dagmar’s back, so that his words seemed to drift to Dagmar from the sky, as if from an inquisitive angel.
“Are you a citizen of the United States?”
“Yes.”
“Are you female?”
“Yes.”
Baseline questions designed to establish a kind of psychic background hum against which answers to the more provocative questions could be measured.
“Have you ever stolen money?”
“Yes.” After a slight mental stammer.