Dagmar planned to take nothing but the modems and the information. Everything else could be replaced or rebuilt. They all had their own hardware. They were running their bulletin board system on a machine in Luxembourg owned by a colleague of Dan the DOS Man.
We are the junkware, she thought.
Everything else was turned in-the flash drives, the portable disk drives, the phones that hadn’t ever been allowed to leave the ops room. Lola checked the bar codes, did the inventory, and didn’t seem to notice the personal phone that Dagmar wore in its holster at her waist.
The new modems had never been entered in the inventory, and no one seemed to care that Richard and Helmuth carried them out in a cardboard box.
“Souvenirs,” they said.
Helmuth and Richard would be flying to Germany, to bask in luxury at a Sheraton in Frankfurt. In a suite paid for by Attila Gordon, they would try to keep the revolution on its feet.
Ismet and Dagmar had their own destination, in Uzbekistan.
Videos of demonstrations were uploaded from Pakistan, Egypt, and the Philippines. Revolution creep. Kronsteen, Dagmar supposed, trying to devalue the rebellion on his own doorstep.
Late that afternoon Dagmar tracked Lincoln to his office and found him pulling documents from his safe and putting them through a shredder. Something blue glinted amid the strips of paper in the wastebasket. She recognized an evil-eye amulet-flawed, apparently, having failed to keep the mission from catastrophe.
“What happens to Byron and Magnus?” she asked.
“Dennis and Jerry,” Lincoln said. “Their real names.” He fed another document into the shredder, his eyes not meeting hers. She sensed an evasion.
“What happens to them?” she asked. “Do they get tried here? Back in the States?”
“No trial. Nothing.”
She opened her mouth to speak-to yell- but he raised his head and lifted a hand.
“This isn’t an operation we can ever acknowledge took place,” he said. “Putting them on trial would reveal what we tried to accomplish here. So no trial’s ever going to happen.”
“They’re going to get away with-”
Lincoln shrugged. Defeat had dug deep trenches in his cheeks, at the corners of his eyes.
“Oh, they’ll lose their security clearance. They’ll lose their jobs. But they’ll be at liberty, and they’re talented, so I expect they’ll find work somewhere, and never have to see us or each other ever again.”
Dagmar clenched her teeth. “Does Byron and Magnus’s Turkish control know they’ve been arrested?”
Lincoln shook his head and dropped another piece of paper in the shredder. “Probably not,” he said. “Not unless he has some other source of information beyond those two.”
“How did they communicate with him?”
The shredder hummed. “Letter drop via Gmail. The same way you send a message to Rafet.”
“Can we send them a message pretending to be Byron and Magnus?”
He frowned, looked up at her.
“To what end?”
“To burn them so the Turks will never trust them again.”
Lincoln’s blue eyes turned inward. He frowned down at the pages in his hand. “What’s your idea?” he asked.
“Send a message to confirm that we’re shutting down here and everyone is going home-except for me and Ismet, maybe. We’re flying somewhere in Europe to meet an important contact to gain information about the Zap.”
Lincoln frowned. “Where?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Dagmar said. “The point is that when the Turks send a team to observe us or take us out, they get arrested by someone you’ve warned in advance.”
Lincoln reached down and turned off the shredder. He squared his remaining papers and leaned back in his chair.
“Let me think.” Frown lines appeared between his eyebrows. “I think I can manage it,” he decided. “We’ll send them to Berlin and say the meet is in the Hotel Pariser Platz-that’s practically next door to the BfV office in Berlin.” His eyes sparkled. “And I know just who to call.”
Dagmar tried not to show herself as eager as she felt. “So you’ll do it?”
“Yes. Why not?” He shrugged. “A last little prank, before we fly off to wretchedness and defeat.”
What she hoped was that Bozbeyli’s first team-the people he most relied upon to travel to foreign countries and to carry out covert actions-would be busy in Germany, and preferably under arrest, when Dagmar was off in Uzbekistan.
She and Lincoln composed the message, and it was placed in Byron’s Gmail account. It placed the meet in the bar of the Pariser Platz at 1700 the next day. Either Byron’s control would pick it up or not. Either Bozbeyli’s A Team would be diverted to Berlin or not. Either Dagmar would have a little revenge or she wouldn’t.
At least she’d have the satisfaction of a little Parthian shot, firing over the rump of her pony as the Lincoln Brigade fled in disorganized retreat.
She stepped out of Lincoln’s office and looked over the wreckage of the office. Kemal Ataturk looked back at her with his stern sapphire gaze. Beneath him were the Lincoln Brigade’s trophies: the DVD, the wilted flowers, the sad, sagging stuffed bear. The photos of Judy and Tuna, looking out from a world in which they had not been murdered, from a place where they still lived, laughed, and looked forward to the triumphs their lives would bring.
Dagmar took a step toward the wall, to take the memorial down, and then hesitated.
No, she thought. Let it remain. Let it stay on Cyprus like the ancient memorials of the island, like the stone wanassa in its ancient temple, a mystery to those who came after, a phantom touch to their nerves, their hearts. Let it tell them, she thought, that something had happened here, something at once sad and profound, something that had started as an insanely fun activity by well-meaning people but had turned into death and betrayal and failure.
Let it stay, she thought. Let it remain, a memorial of our own delusion and foundered innocence.
Disorder in a U.S. Benz Kit
When Lola offered to make travel arrangements, Dagmar said she’d make her own. The next morning, Monday, she hugged Lincoln good-bye at the Nicosia airport. He felt like a sack half-filled with straw. She had told him that she would be flying out later.
She kissed his cheek.
“Stay in touch,” she said.
He looked at her, watery blue eyes over the metal rims of his glasses.
“Forgive me?” he asked.
He had lied to her and marched the both of them straight into catastrophe, but he had been as blind and betrayed as she and was now returning home to his own professional purgatory. She couldn’t bring herself to hate him.
“Sure,” she said. “Why not?”
She watched Lincoln and the others walk through the gate to their waiting aircraft, and then Dagmar turned away and used her phone’s satellite function to call Rafet. She explained the situation to him.
“You can wait for Chatsworth’s instructions for exfiltration,” she said, “or you could carry on, with the understanding that you’re working for a purely private concern.”
Otherwise known, she thought, as a demented rock star.
She told him to consult with the Skunk Works operators and the camera techs, come to a decision concerning what they wanted to do, and then call her back on her private number.
Dagmar’s next journey took her to the honey-colored Gulfstream 550 waiting in the section of the airport reserved for private planes. Stairs were already pushed up to the open door. She climbed the stairs and stepped aboard, and a smiling, shaggy-haired man greeted her.
“Name’s Martin,” he said, shaking hands. He spoke with a West Country accent. “Attila would be here himself, but he had a press conference in Glasgow to announce his new justice initiative.”
“And what would that be?” Dagmar asked.
“He’s setting up a legal fund to aid the defense of those arrested during the demonstrations.”