After the meal Ismet took a pain pill with his last swallow of cooling tea. He looked at her.
“I think I will sleep alone tonight,” he said. He tried to smile with his cracked, bruised lips. “You might roll over in bed and land on me, and that would hurt.”
“I could put a pillow between us.”
His look turned somber.
“If you attacked me again,” he said, “I could not defend myself.”
Shock made her sway in her seat. Tears stung her eyes.
He couldn’t trust her not to go mad on him. That was what he was saying.
“You should stay with someone else tonight,” Ismet said. “Lola, perhaps.”
“I barely know Lola,” she said. Her voice broke on the last word.
“Richard and Helmuth, then. Someone you trust.”
“I trust you.” She heard the wail in her voice and told herself to stop, that her emotional need and his physical pain were incompatible right now. The pain could not be suppressed: therefore her need had to be quashed. She would have to take her own solitude upon herself and live in it at least for a while.
Ismet couldn’t rescue her every single time. He couldn’t save her from the enemies that swam in her own psyche. Those were hers to fight.
“Yes, okay,” she said. “I’ll crash on Richard’s couch.”
She washed Ismet’s bowl and spoon and saw that he was already half-asleep. She helped him back to the couch, then kissed his cheek, felt the bristles sting her lips. She left his apartment and walked to her own-the promise to stay with Richard and Helmuth was already forgotten-and in the borrowed place, surrounded by others’ possessions, she felt the aloneness embrace her.
Without conscious thought Dagmar made tea for herself and put a frozen stuffed pepper in the microwave. She stood for a moment in the kitchen, looking at the furniture and belongings that had been requisitioned for her from another family, and considered the number of betrayals that had brought her to this moment.
Byron and Magnus were vile, but they were at least explicable: whatever reason they had for selling her to Bozbeyli, fear or avarice or opportunism, it was at least an understandable human motivation. They were too transparent to be evil masterminds-they were just very screwed-up human beings, confused, probably deep in denial.
But Lincoln, she thought, was not in denial. He knew what he’d been doing all along. It was Lincoln’s lie that had brought her here, selling her the notion that the U.S. government was so devoted to the notion of democracy in Turkey that it would give her the tools to bring it about.
She should, she considered, just pick up her phone and buy a one-way ticket back to Los Angeles. If the government tried to invoke a penalty clause and evade payment, all she had to do was threaten to talk to the press.
It wasn’t as if she wasn’t an expert at telling convincing stories to strangers. It was only a bonus when the story was true.
Except now, she thought, there were actual revolutionaries in Turkey, whether she had created them or not. And they were fighting the police and the military, staging strikes and demonstrations, occupying a ministry building in Ankara. Living in cages in jails and military bases, screaming under torture, dying, rotting under the ground.
She couldn’t fly to her life in California and leave them behind. Not when there was a hope that she could help them succeed.
And besides, she thought, work was the classic cure for depression. Dagmar hooked her laptop to her satellite phone, downloaded a copy of MS-DOS along with a user’s manual, and ate her stuffed pepper as she began to acquaint herself with the ancient history of personal computing. She visited the alt.comp.DOSRULES forum on Usenet and from this learned of the existence of Dan the DOS Man, along with a number of his colleagues.
Her brain was so charged with her new knowledge and so filled with plans for implementing her ideas that after she fell asleep the nightmares failed to possess her.
In the morning she checked on Ismet and found him in greater pain than he had been the night before. She made him tea, made sure he was comfortable, and then went to the ops center while she conducted her long-distance conversation with Dan.
Soft morning light warmed the ops room, glowed off the ochre yellow walls. The air bore the scent of freshly brewed coffee. The absence of aircraft noise was startling: the planes had all landed, either here or somewhere else, and then not gone up again. The situation was otherwise unchanged: the Zap still possessed Ankara and the southwest corner of Cyprus, including Akrotiri and at least a part of Limassol. Cell phone service and VoIP at Akrotiri were still down, and ground lines were erratic.
Lincoln’s door was closed. Dagmar tried to decide what she felt about Lincoln, what she had decided about him. He was either a complete manipulative bastard or as much a fool as she.
Or both, she thought. No reason he couldn’t be both.
Dagmar explained her ideas to what was left of her posse, and they began to make plans to travel to Limassol in search of old modems. They would be like the evil sorcerer in Aladdin, offering to trade new lamps for old.
Lincoln had come out of his office partway through her exposition. She was too far into her spiel to interrupt herself to decide whether she hated him or not, so she ignored him until he offered a suggestion.
“You might not need to go to Limassol for modems. Akrotiri is huge, and has its own shops and supplies. You might be able to make your deals here.”
“Not necessarily,” Helmuth said. “Those old modems might be the only cybernetic gear in those shops still working. They might not want to part with them.”
“Your guards can’t requisition civilian gear,” Lincoln said, “and they won’t intimidate anyone on purpose, but they’re in uniform and carrying guns. They will lend a certain authority to any request you might make.”
Dagmar was alarmed by this train of thought. “Be polite,” she said.
Richard raised a hand, then spoke.
“We’d have an idea of whether an external modem will work with DOS by looking at the cabling, couldn’t we?” he said. “No modem with a USB would function with DOS. Nor would Ethernet, right?”
“You can run an Ethernet IPX network out of DOS,” Helmuth said. “I found the instructions online last night while I was researching our brave new operating system.”
“And there’s no TCP/IP?” Dagmar asked.
“There doesn’t have to be. You can set it up either way.”
“Terrific,” Dagmar said. “We grab those modems, too.”
“My point is,” Richard said, “that if you find a modem with a twelve-pin cable-or would it be thirty-two? — you make an offer on the spot.”
“We are the junkware,” Dagmar said. Their new slogan.
“I’ll arrange for your escort,” Lincoln said. As he walked toward his office, he glanced over his shoulder at Dagmar and gave her a look. She followed.
“I’ve got transcripts of Magnus’s and Byron’s confessions,” he said, once they were alone. “The Turks caught them at a roadblock outside of?yrnak, practically the minute they came down off the mountains, and the Jandarma so terrified them that they stopped thinking.” He shook his head. “They fell for the oldest trick in the world. They were put in separate rooms, and each was told that the other had started talking, and that whoever gave the Jandarma the most information would be treated leniently. They ended up competing to see how fast they could give their secrets away.”
“Don’t those idiots watch cop shows?” Dagmar said. “They should know better than to tumble for that one.”
Lincoln’s blue eyes grew serious. “They weren’t exactly in a position to demand a lawyer,” he said. “And the Jandarma don’t bother with explaining Miranda rights.”
“That doesn’t explain why they sold me and Judy months later,” Dagmar said.
“They were being blackmailed,” Lincoln said. “The Turks recorded them spilling everything they knew about the Zap, and threatened to release the videos if they didn’t, ah, keep in touch. If those videos had been released, they would have lost their security clearances and all their government contracts.” He offered a cynical laugh. “They’re still blaming each other. They still haven’t worked out how they were played.”