“I saw it,” Tuna said. His mouth quirked. “Or I saw the bodies, anyway. The colonel had some special killers who did the shootings for him. Everyone out there knew what was going on.” He made a pistol with two fingers and mimed a shot. “And do you know who the colonel reported to? General Dursun.” He slapped himself on the chest. “Our new prime minister.” He looked at Dagmar. “One of the old men you met at the Pink House. The fucker.”
There was a moment of silence. Dagmar sipped her tea, put the clear tulip glass back in its saucer. Glass rattled.
“Well,” Lincoln said. “That’s who we’re dealing with. The question is, do we go on with the live event tomorrow?”
Tuna waved a hand. “Of course we should.”
Dagmar decided that Tuna’s breezy confidence was perhaps a little premature.
“The players are across the bridge in Beyolu,” Dagmar said. “They’re far away from what happened this morning.”
“And they won’t hear about it,” Ismet said.
Which meant, Dagmar thought, that the situation hasn’t changed, as far as the game went. The idea struck Dagmar with surprising force. She resisted the notion: she preferred to think that because she had changed, so had everything else.
But no. It hadn’t. She still had six or seven hundred gamers on buses-at this hour scheduled to visit the Grand Bazaar, fine shopping since 1461, a last chance to buy carpets or meerschaum, spices or ceramics, brassware or leather goods, before they bade farewell to James Bond’s glittering world on Saturday.
Later this afternoon they would visit the Suleiman Mosque and then Hagia Sofia, assuming the authorities hadn’t closed it in the aftermath of the riot-but by that point, she reckoned, any sign of the demonstration would have been long since cleaned up.
The gamers were in no more danger than they had been two hours earlier. Or no less danger. It was all a big unknown, but for the life of her Dagmar couldn’t see why the government would bother to harass them.
“Let’s go,” she said. “We can always call it off tomorrow, if there’s a revolution in the streets-and if there’s trouble, we’ll just distribute the puzzles in the hotel instead of on the excursion.”
Judy sighed and adjusted her spectacles.
“I suppose,” she said, “that means there have to be puzzles.”
“I’m afraid so,” said Dagmar.
Laptops, netbooks, and phones were deployed. The history and sights of the Bosporus were brought to blazing life on screens and salient facts and images copied to files. Judy had a program for creating crosswords: she and Tuna huddled over her screen, working in intent collaboration as they tried to find clues that would be roughly equivalent in both Turkish and English and to find answers that would work in both the Turkish and English alphabets. This was accomplished by instructing the program to ignore the difference between c and c, i and y, S? and s. Fortunately, the program didn’t care how the words were actually pronounced.
Ismet watched with interest-he hadn’t actually seen one of these brainstorming sessions before-and offered some helpful suggestions. Mehmet turned up to let them know that Zafer Musa had taken Feroz to a clinic in Izmir and that the bus driver had been patched up. Lincoln told Dagmar to see that the bus driver got a generous bonus, then got brandy from the bar, sipped and listened, and-judging from the smile on his face-went to his happy place, wherever that was.
Richard, with help from Mehmet, found all the hardware he needed online or by phone and set off to collect it.
The waiter produced menus, and food was ordered from the restaurant downstairs. The bar was filled with the scents of kofte, baked chicken wings, kebaps strong with the aroma of cumin. Baklava made its appearance, Turkish-style with pistachios, and the waiter offered small cups of Turkish coffee that soon had everyone as wired as if they’d been mainlining Red Bull for the past three days.
In late afternoon, Lincoln received a call from the police. The permit to use Gulhane Park had been canceled, due to “unforseen complications.” Lincoln thanked the caller and hung up.
The plotting session went on.
By evening, Richard had his gear in a rented van and he and Mehmet and the team’s three hired cameramen were practicing with the technology. The crossword was finished, and Judy dashed off to her room, where she had a printer that would run off hundreds of copies in the next hour.
The bar was filled with drinkers, cigarette smoke, and ghastly Central European pop music. Tuna went to the bar to smoke a cigarette and order a celebratory raky. Lincoln went out onto the balcony, away from the music, to phone the operator of the excursion boats they were renting and to give the man the number of his corporate credit card. That left Dagmar and Ismet sitting in adjoining chairs. Dagmar shifted the weight of her laptop in order to ease a cramp in one hamstring.
“Thanks again for helping,” she said.
“I enjoy watching you work,” he said. “It’s all so intricate. Do you normally do your job under such pressure?”
“Normally we don’t work under the threat of physical violence,” Dagmar said, “but there’s always a lot of things that have to be done at the last second. And we have to keep things away from the spies.”
He was genuinely surprised. His brows lifted well up above the line of his spectacles.
“Spies?”
“There are players who stalk us-try to hack our computers, or steal scripts from the actors, or follow us around in hopes that we’ll drop a clue.”
Ismet seemed delighted.
“Do you get good at escape and evasion?”
“Escape and evasion?” It sounded like a course in commando school. “I don’t know about that,” she said, “but I’ve gotten good at hiding things.”
He smiled. “Tomorrow,” he said, “you’re going to hide seven hundred people.”
“Let’s hope,” said Dagmar, “that I do.”
He raised his Efes to his lips. “I think we’ll be fine,” he said.
She looked at Ismet with a sudden flare of interest. She’d met him only the day before, but since then he had so efficiently inserted himself into her process that she hadn’t noticed till now.
“You keep saving me,” she said. “Yesterday from social embarrassment, this morning from getting knocked into the hospital. Is this sort of thing normal for you?”
One of Ismet’s small hands made a circular motion in the air, a local gesture that Dagmar knew meant something like, “Oh yes, I’ve done that countless times.”
His actual words were a little more modest.
“Lincoln told me to be useful,” he said.
She narrowed her eyes. “How long,” she said, “do I get to keep you?”
Dagmar saw a little flare of light behind the spectacles, as if he’d only just now realized that there was flirtation going on.
“I work for Lincoln,” he said. “Or rather, my PR firm does. You could request that I be kept around to rescue you when necessary.”
“Maybe I shall,” Dagmar said.
Tuna came barging up, a drink in his hand and wrapped in a cloud of harsh tobacco fumes.
“Shall we eat?” he said. “I’m hungry.”
Dagmar turned her eyes from Ismet with a degree of reluctance.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s probably time we did.”
Hippolyte says:
Oh, goodie! A boat ride!
Burcak says:
I wish I had brought a coat. Going to be cold out on the water.
Corporal Carrot says:
Wish I had Dramamine. I get seasick.
The next morning Dagmar stood above the golden span of the Bosporus Bridge from the vantage point on the steep hill of Ortakoy. Excursion boats drew their wakes across the deep slate of the straits below, tiny little water bugs alongside the enormous tidal surge given off by a brilliant white cruise ship so enormous that it seemed like a piece of the continent broken off and adrift.
A blustery cold wind blew from the Black Sea, and Dagmar wore a jacket against the chill, with the brim of a baseball cap shading her eyes from the sun, still low in the eastern sky. Behind her was Richard’s new electronic marvel, his rented gear packed into a Ford van, with an antenna strung from the van to a nearby plane tree, and another directional antenna mounted on a long wood plank aimed at Lincoln’s bunkered router up above Seraglio Point. A generator rumbled from a yellow trailer, spitting diesel smoke into the brisk wind.