“Not just,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” Dagmar said.
He turned to her, his face open, his eyes wide.
“You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to,” he said, “but I really want this to work. I like the Turks; I want this region to have a functioning republic; I want the Turks to choose their own leaders. But my leaders… they approved this project because the government-in-exile agreed that the Zap would be returned when they came back to power.” He turned away, waved a hand again. “Maybe I’m just the perfect idiot for this operation.”
Dagmar shook her head. She felt as if her internal buffer had completely filled with unprocessed information and was unable to make headway on any of it.
She threw open her hands.
“What are we supposed to do now, Lincoln?” she asked. “I’m completely four-oh-four, here.”
Lincoln suddenly seemed very small. His voice seemed to come from far away.
“Defeat the Zap. Somehow.”
Suddenly her anger came to the boil. Judy and Tuna and a lot of Turkish citizens had died because Lincoln was hoping to beat the High Zap to the punch, and now he and they had lost… lost the whole war because it turned out the enemy had a trump card to play, the Internet equivalent of a thermonuclear bomb, and had possessed the trump all along, right from the beginning.
In rage Dagmar slapped both hands on Lincoln’s desk. The sound made them both jump.
“That’s it?” she demanded. “That’s your whole idea?”
He sat in his chair without moving. She could barely hear him as he spoke.
“It’s the only idea we’re left with.”
Her hand stung.
“Jesus Christ, Lincoln!” she said. “No wonder I’m going crazy!”
He gathered himself again, blue eyes glittering behind smoked lenses.
“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “But you can think of yourself as lucky. You can go back to your life when this is over, and create amusements that will thrill your audience of millions. I, on the other hand-” He bent to cough, the sound drawn far from his interior, like the rattle of a dying man. “I have to report to my superiors that every course of action I’d advocated was wrong, that the whole enterprise was a miserable failure and a waste of resources, and that I killed a lot of people for worse than nothing.” His voice turned savage. “This is my swan song, you know. My last roundup. I’d hoped to have a little success to console myself with in my wilderness years, but now I’ll have nothing to reflect on but the knowledge that I’m a useless failure.”
She rose from her chair, far too weary and burdened for sympathy.
“Yeah, you do that,” she said. “Meanwhile, I’ll try to think of some fucking useful thing to do to fight this plague.”
She opened the door, stepped into the ops room, closed the door behind her.
“Update?” she said.
“No change,” said Richard. He sat at his desk with a frustrated expression, his fingers tapping the arms of his chair, his Converse sneaks rapping the floor.
Impotence did not suit him.
Dagmar looked over what remained of the Lincoln Brigade, trapped here in this little pocket universe by the suddenly narrowed horizons of their own electronics: Helmuth and Richard, Ismet with his bruised face, Lola, the curly-haired Guardian Sphinx, securing the door, Lloyd on his way from the break room with a cup of coffee in his hand, Byron and Magnus gazing at her with insipid faces.
Those two, she thought, had started the whole project by losing the High Zap in the first place.
She thought of them running down the mountain ahead of Bozbeyli’s thugs, juggling the laptop and dropping it or forgetting it in a hotel room, or whatever they were supposed to have done, and then she realized that the more she considered it, the less she believed it.
Dagmar turned, opened the door, and went into Lincoln’s office again. He was still in his chair, turned away from her, frowning in silence at the wall.
“Byron and Magnus,” she said. “How’d they lose the Zap?”
Lincoln didn’t bother turning toward her.
“Like I said. A mix-up. They grabbed the wrong computer and left the laptop at the listening station, where the military found it.”
“And then what did they do?”
“They got away. In a car.” He looked up at her, puzzlement in his blue eyes.
“Why are you asking?”
“How long were they out of touch?”
“Twenty-four hours or so. They had to be careful. They were in Kurdish country and the military were all over the place.” He frowned. “But it doesn’t matter,” he said. “They left the computer behind, they didn’t lose it on the trip out.”
“What I’m trying to tell you,” Dagmar said, “is that it was Byron and Magnus who gave us to Bozbeyli. One or both of them, and I’m betting both.”
Lincoln’s blue eyes opened wide. He swung his chair toward her.
“How do you reckon that?”
“My guess is that when they were on their own, they ran into a roadblock and got arrested. I think they both spilled everything they knew, and that’s how the bad guys were able to beat the safeguards on the laptop. I also think they’ve been in touch with Turkish intelligence since.”
Lincoln considered this, scrubbing his hands up and down his cheeks.
“There’s not a lot of evidence, there,” he said. “And they weren’t out of touch for long.”
“You said yourself,” Dagmar said, “that when you turn someone, you try to get them back to their normal life as soon as possible.”
Lincoln nodded, conceding the point. His expression remained unconvinced.
“Lincoln,” Dagmar said, “they hate each other. They’re sharing an apartment, but they never spend time together-Magnus is always off in Limassol with Helmuth, and Byron stays here sending emails to his family. When they do communicate, they argue. Each is always slagging the other behind the other’s back. The poison broke out on the go-kart track, remember; they spent the whole time attacking each other. It’s as if they’re blaming each other for something. Something they can’t talk about.”
“That doesn’t mean…” Lincoln began.
“Byron is scared to death, Lincoln,” Dagmar said, then reiterated: “Scared. To. Death. Of the Turks, of this whole enterprise. It’s one thing for him not to want to go to the Turkish side of the island; it’s another to overreact the way he did. I think it’s because he knows what it is to be a prisoner, he knows what they can do. If he’s still cooperating, it’s because he’s too afraid not to-they threw such a scare into him, it lasted all the way across the Atlantic. And if Magnus is still a part of it, maybe it’s because he’s afraid, maybe because he’s getting other inducements.”
Dagmar leaned forward and leaned her knuckles on Lincoln’s desk.
“They fingered Judy and me, Lincoln,” she said. “The Turks asked where we were living, and they gave up the information. They both failed their polygraph, remember. It’s time to haul them in.”
Lincoln reached for the landline, then hesitated with his hand on the telephone.
“I don’t know,” Dagmar said, “how long I can keep up the pretense of not knowing. So do something fast.”
When she left the office he was punching numbers into the phone.
In the ops room she looked around again and saw Web pages flashing on Richard’s display, with Helmuth looking over his shoulder. She half-ran to Richard’s desk.
“What’s happening?” she said, half-running to his place. “Is the Net back up?”
“I’m using a satellite phone as a modem,” Richard said.
“Ah. Right.”
She should have thought of that herself. It was what she’d done in Indonesia.
Dagmar had her own satellite phone, as did Helmuth and Ismet. She looked at Magnus and Byron-she hoped she wasn’t glaring too obviously-and considered asking Lola to requisition a couple more sat phones.
“Ankara’s still blacked out,” Richard said. “There’s no news from there that’s less than an hour old.” He pointed at a video that had been uploaded via one of their proxy sites. “But there’s still action going on in other parts of the country. A demonstration in Antalya, another big one in Konya. It looks like the demo in Istanbul has been suppressed-I saw some pictures earlier of some fighting in that stadium.”