His injuries involved cuts, bruises, sprains, and a possible concussion.
“I’ll come get you,” Dagmar said.
In a white-hot rage, Dagmar stormed into Lincoln’s office to tell him what had happened. He was waiting on the phone-apparently whoever he was talking to had put him on hold.
“You are not leaving,” he said. “There’s too much happening here. I’ll send some of our guards to bring him.”
“But-”
Lincoln pointed back to the ops room. The sympathy he had demonstrated earlier seemed to have faded.
“Go do your job,” he said.
She went, impatient, still furious.
Ismet came in about ninety minutes later. His lips were cut and swollen, one eye was blackened, and there were random cuts and bruises scattered over his face. His glasses were held together with tape. He walked like someone who had been kicked several times in the kidneys.
Dagmar went to him and gently embraced him. He smelled of disinfectant, adhesive, and blood. She kissed an unbruised part of his cheek.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
He spoke carefully through his cut lips.
“Pain pills help,” he said.
Lincoln heard his voice and came out of his office.
“Fuck!” he said. “We can’t send you into Turkey like this.”
Dagmar turned to him. “No,” she said. “You can’t.”
Lincoln made a disgusted gesture.
“A face that marked up, you’d stand out.”
Ismet spoke with careful dignity. “I’ll get better,” he said.
“Come into my office,” Lincoln said.
Dagmar winced at the careful way Ismet lowered himself into a chair. Alparslan Topal was already in the second chair, so Dagmar remained standing. While Topal commisserated with Ismet, Lincoln asked her to close the door, which she did.
“We’ve both spoken to ex-mayor Erez on the phone,” Lincoln said. “I’ve been able to assure him of support provided that he modifies his original statement proclaiming himself head of the government. Instead he’ll say that he’s the provisional head, until the elected prime minister and president can return to power.”
“What support can you give him?” Dagmar said.
“Money,” Lincoln said. “Funds to help certain people see the wisdom of democracy. Money to provide a secure retirement for certain officers. And-” He waved a hand in the direction of the ops room. “We have some intelligence that might be useful to him. We’ve got Rafet on the scene, and the Skunk Works, and our various networks. We have to decide what they’re going to do.”
“Something a little less hazardous, I hope,” Dagmar said, “than forting up in a government ministry and waiting for the government to come and kill them.”
Alparslan Topal winced a little at the thought.
“Perhaps Rafet needs to do something more active,” Lincoln said. “You need to get into the ops room and work out what’s necessary, and how to do it.”
Indignation straightened her spine.
“I have damn little information to work with,” she said. “We’ve only got what the demonstrators themselves are putting online, plus some footage from the drones.”
“Make your best guess,” said Lincoln. “Get Rafet and everyone the network can reach on the streets tomorrow, supporting Erez and the elected government.”
Dagmar glanced at Ismet.
“I was hoping to get Is-Estragon comfortably settled in his bed, with his medicines and-”
“We’ve got guards that can do that,” Lincoln said.
“I’d rather stay here,” Ismet said. “I won’t be any more or less comfortable in the ops room than at home, and I might be useful.”
Dagmar saw Ismet settled into his desk chair, then got the disk with the email addresses on it and sent out a preparatory email telling people to be ready before noon the next day. She returned to the ops room and asked for updates. Nothing startlingly new had happened, only more of the same. The Skunk Works drones were having their batteries recharged.
While going about their normal tasks the Lincoln Brigade discussed their options. All agreed that Rafet and the various Brigade-controlled networks should create a major demonstration or marches while the authorities were distracted by demonstrations elsewhere, but it was difficult to tell where some of the actions already were and therefore what locations were safe. And of course it was completely impossible to tell which locations would be safe the next day.
They already had scouting reports on any number of locations, all completed before any actions had even started. Dagmar chose three, then sent orders to the Skunk Works for drones to scout them before nightfall.
It was while Dagmar awaited the news from the drones that she heard a series of exclamations from others in the ops room, all in about a ten-second period.
“Damn!” muttered Richard.
“Fuck!” said Byron.
“Crap!” From Magnus.
Dagmar looked up.
“What’s up?”
“408 Request Timeout,” Richard said. “And I’m looking for a page I just uploaded onto a server I know is there.”
“Allah kahretsin s?u Interneti!” Lloyd snarled at his computer through half-clenched teeth.
“Download’s frozen,” Magnus said. He reached for his mouse. “I’ll cancel and restart.”
“And with me it’s an upload,” Byron said. “Motherfucker!”
“408 Request Timeout,” Magnus said.
“408,” said Helmuth. He looked up at Dagmar. “What’s next? 418 I’m a Teapot?”
Dagmar thought for a moment, then turned to Richard. “Are we being attacked?”
Richard considered the question, looked at his chronograph, then considered some more.
“Well,” he said. “They do know we’re here. But all the attacks so far have been on Web pages hosted by our proxy sites, and pretty much stopped there.” He reached for his phone. “I’ll call the base computer centre.” He pressed buttons on his phone, then stopped and looked at the display.
“Out of Area,” he reported in surprise.
“Use the ground line,” Dagmar said. She went to her own office, took her own phone from the desk, and tapped the screen to bring it to life.
Out of Area, she read. Plenty of juice in the battery, but no bars.
When she returned to the ops room, she saw everyone sitting very still and watching Richard as he listened on the ground line to someone at RAF Akrotiri’s computer centre.
“Right,” he said. “Thank you.”
Richard turned to Dagmar.
“They’re having router trouble,” he said. “It’s affecting the whole base.”
“Any time estimate,” Dagmar said, “for when they’ll have it up?”
“No.”
“Any idea of why cell phones are down?”
“He didn’t know they were down until I told him.”
The computer centre at Akrotiri was enormous. It shuffled vast quantities of electronic intelligence from the Middle East to GCHQ in Cheltenham, an installation that was sort of the Barclays Bank of ELINT. Dagmar wondered if she should send Richard down to help the computer centre diagnose its problems, then decided against it-there was no way Richard would have clearance to muck about with their routers. And then she noticed that Byron and Magnus were staring at each other, each with the same expression, stricken and yet glowing with a kind of awe.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Holy fuck,” Byron said.
Magnus turned to Dagmar.
“It’s the High Zap,” he said.
ACT 3
CHAPTER TWELVE
It seemed visibly darker outside, as if a cloud had just smothered the sun. A flight of jets roared overhead, rattling the window in its pane and burying beneath its thunder the sound of ceiling fans and computer cooling systems. Dagmar’s heart churned in her chest, as if she were on the edge of panic. Suddenly she was probing the edges of her perceptions, looking for the clues that a burning Ford or a line of police or a horde of knife-wielding Indonesians was about to come storming through the doors of her consciousness.