Another screen showed a site with the crossword puzzle, where Dagmar’s crossword designer Judy Strange was monitoring the players’ progress in solving her clues.
“I thought they’d take forever on the one about Lysimachus,” she said as Dagmar looked over her shoulder. “They got that right away.”
“Never underestimate their mastery of trivia,” Dagmar said.
“No, I won’t,” said Judy. She was a short, intense woman with dark-rimmed glasses and abundant dark hair partially confined by a rhinestone-studded plastic tiara. A dozen semiprecious stones glittered on the piercings in each ear. She wore long sleeves to cover tattoos that ran down to her wrists-she and Dagmar had both judged that Turkey wasn’t really ready for a glimpse of Judy’s body art.
Her body was craned forward to study the screen from just a few inches away. Judy wasn’t shortsighted, Dagmar had concluded, she was just overintense.
“ ‘Imperator,’ ” she muttered. The players had just solved another one.
Dagmar patted Judy’s shoulder, a coach encouraging a valuable player, and made her way toward the rear of the bus. On the way she paused by the cooler built into the aisle behind the side door and opened the lid. Briefly she contemplated a beer-drinking an Efes in the city, Ephesus, that had inspired its name would be a singularly appropriate thing. But she decided that a beer shortly after eight in the morning was degenerate behavior even for her and dutifully pulled out a plastic bottle of water. She went to the door that sealed off the rear third of the bus, knocked, and entered.
The back of the bus had been transformed into a lounge/study for Dagmar and her senior project heads. There was a long central table and plush benches along the sides and back. And, because this was the sort of place it was, there were the flatscreens and keyboards, too.
Lincoln sat on one of the benches, eating a honeyed pastry he’d bought from one of the vendors. He pointed vaguely at the screens.
“It seems to be going well,” he said.
“So far,” Dagmar said, crossing her fingers, “so good.”
She had never bossed a game so logistically complex as this one, concluding as it did in a twelve-day tour of a foreign country, with six live events scheduled in six locations-unique in the annals of gaming, and something Dagmar hoped she’d never have to do again.
Yet Ephesus was the fourth event, and so far nothing had gone wrong. If only fortune held through Ankara and Istanbul, she would dutifully give thanks to her long-overstretched luck and return, for a week’s vacation, to the beaches of Antalya.
Dagmar opened the water bottle, took a long drink, and sat opposite Lincoln. Lincoln gave her a blissful grin, and Dagmar was reminded that while she was working, Lincoln was having the time of his life.
Lincoln was, she supposed, in his sixties. He had a large, noble head, with graying hair worn over the tops of his ears and sideburns stretched halfway down his jaw. He wore metal-rimmed sunglasses that would have done credit to the face of Elvis.
Dagmar supposed Lincoln had been quite a lad, back in the days of Disco Fever.
He licked honey from his fingers.
“How are plans for Ankara shaping up?” he asked.
“Pretty well. Too much depends on how the players react to today’s update.” She took off her panama hat and ran her fingers through the hair that had gone gray while she was still a teenager.
“Sometimes I hate our kind of synergy,” she said.
“The synergy’s the coolest thing about it.”
“I know.”
“So you hate the coolest thing about the work you do.”
Dagmar shrugged. “Who among us is not a mass of contradiction?” She looked at him narrowly. “You, for instance,” she added.
He returned an amused look as he brushed crumbs from his embroidered Guatemalan peasant shirt.
“Oh yes,” Dagmar insisted. “My tech guy Richard has been with your techs on all your installations. You’ve been installing these colossal servers heavily wired into the local infrastructure, and everything’s got all satellite uplink capability.”
Lincoln affected surprise at the question. “You do that, when you have to.”
“Sure, when I have to. In places like rural Cappadocia and Mount Nemrut. But in Ankara? And Istanbul? They’re all heavily wired already; it’s easier to get bandwidth that’s already in place.”
He lifted his shoulders. “There’s a lot of money at stake. I want to be thorough.”
“And we’re the people who know better than anyone what kind of hardware we need on-site. Normally we install everything and link it up. But you have your own people for that.”
“I’m in the media business myself,” Lincoln said. “Why should I pay you to do a job that can be done by my own employees?”
Dagmar pointed her water bottle at him.
“When we install stuff,” she said, “it’s just for the live event, just to transmit the live feed; we take it out later and reuse it. But Richard tells me that it would take a lot of effort to rip your hardware out. For all intents and purposes, it’s permanently installed, as if you expect this game to go on past the final event on Saturday.”
She cocked her head and looked at him.
“What game are you running, Lincoln? What are you really doing here?”
He laughed.
“I’m not going into competition with you,” he said, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“If you were, you wouldn’t be doing it from here anyway. And if you want to run Turkish ARGs, be my guest.”
Lincoln shook his head.
“We ran the numbers,” he said. “It was cheaper to leave the gear in place, and resell it to local IT companies.”
“Local IT companies wouldn’t leave them in place,” Dagmar said. “They’d move all the equipment to their own server farms. So mooring everything the way you have doesn’t make sense.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“I must be incompetent, then.”
Dagmar fixed him with a long stare.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think you’re up to something I’m not supposed to know about.”
He looked away.
“I can’t say yes or no to that,” he said.
Anger sizzled along Dagmar’s nerves.
The last time she’d had a boss who kept secrets from her, people had been killed.
Rather than screaming and smashing Lincoln on the head with the water bottle, she decided to use sweet reason.
“We’re in a military dictatorship here,” she said. “I need to know if this is something that will put my people in danger.”
Lincoln seemed surprised.
“No,” he said. “Not at all.”
“You’re not helping the generals, are you?”
He shook his head.
“Maybe I can tell you soon,” he said. “But not now.” He turned to her, and she could see his blue eyes gazing at her from behind his Elvis glasses. “But in the meantime,” he said, “there’s some important diplomacy in your immediate future.”
Dagmar was instantly wary.
“With whom?”
He smiled.
“Have I mentioned that I enjoy your correct grammar?”
“Who with?” she said.
He sighed and put both hands flat on the table.
“The junta,” he said. “I’ve received an invitation for you, from General Bozbeyli’s office. They’ve invited you and your staff to a reception at the presidential palace, two nights from now. Thursday.”
Dagmar was horrified.
“You’re joking!” she said.
“The game’s been getting a lot of publicity,” Lincoln said, “and the movie is going to be the best thing for Turkish tourism since the last Bond movie shot here. So the generals want to associate themselves with all this glamor and success, and show how hip they are to modern technology and culture. So you are going to the palace to be thanked for all you’ve done for the nation.”
“There’s a live event on Thursday,” Dagmar said. “And after that there’ll be plenty of work to do, preparing for the finale in Istanbul.”