212.123.91.165:8080
71.48.222.54:11764
60.6.205.26:808
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8.191.16.126:8080
91.103.236.195:8080
193.30.164.3:8080
62.75.219.25:8080
Breakfast was coffee, along with leftover pizza. The latter had not been improved with age. The toaster still talked whenever anyone got near.
The apartment’s little shower was too small to hold Ismet and Dagmar both, so they showered separately, then rejoined just in time for Dagmar to kiss Ismet good-bye. His RAF guard checked the Ford to make certain it hadn’t been wired with explosives in the night, and then he was gone, off to the war.
Dagmar watched Ismet drive away with a sense of emptiness that she hadn’t expected. It was as if all her capacity for emotion had been used up the previous night.
She rather hoped that was the case. At the moment, being an icy logic robot seemed a pretty attractive job.
She took a vacuum flask of coffee and walked down the stairs to encounter a guard from the RAF Regiment. He was a black man with gold-rimmed shades and enormous corded forearms that seemed to burst from the rolled-up sleeves of his battle dress.
“Excuse me,” she said.
“Yes, miss?”
“Do you know Corporal Poole?”
The man smiled. “Pooley? Yeah.”
“He did me a favor last night, and I’d like to buy him a present. Do you have any idea what he’d like?”
The smile broadened, and the guard took off his shades, revealing a pair of lopsided brown eyes, the right much higher than the left.
“Pooley’s a Johnnie Walker man, last I heard.”
“Right,” Dagmar said. “Thanks.”
Anxiety returned as her guard drove her to the ops center. She could picture herself walking in to silence, to the watchful eyes of those who knew she had gone mad the previous night.
But that wasn’t what happened. As Dagmar came into the ops center carrying her flask of coffee, she saw activity, people talking and staring at one another’s flatscreens.
Something was going on.
But before she could find out what, Lincoln intercepted her in the hall and gestured her into his office. He closed the door behind her and waited to speak until after she’d sat in the visitor’s chair. He didn’t sit himself; he hovered over her, one hand on the back of her chair.
“Are you going to be all right today?” he asked in a low voice.
She gave a brittle laugh.
“I’ll be as all right as I ever am,” she said.
“That was a pretty serious report I got.”
She looked at him. The blue eyes behind the Elvis glasses were concerned and just a little uneasy.
“It was a serious attack,” she said.
“Are you likely to have another?”
Dagmar felt her teeth clack together, some kind of strange nervous reaction. She willed her jaws apart.
“Depends,” she said, “on how many more of us get killed.”
“I’d like you to see a doctor.”
She forced a shrug. “If you think it’ll do any good. And so long as no record of the visit will ever exist to fuck up my insurance situation.”
“The patient’s name will be Briana.” Lincoln moved toward his desk. “Shall I make you an appointment with one of the doctors here on the base?”
“Okay.” She started to stand, then hesitated.
“One other thing,” she said.
“Yes?” His hand on the telephone.
“Make sure I don’t have to tell the doc about how I got this way.”
She left him to chew on that and headed for the ops room to see what was stirring.
Tuna’s killer had been quickly identified by the Group Mind, along with the others in his unit. In response to the killing, the government had announced that the Gray Wolves were being taken off the streets and would no longer be used as a police auxiliary.
Probably that meant that the next time the Wolves conducted a massacre they’d be in civilian dress.
The announcement had heartened the opposition, and now Ankara was a mass of disorder. There appeared to be a number of different demonstrations-or full-fledged riots-and there were videos of demonstrators throwing rocks, of pepper gas being hurled into a chanting crowd, of armored personnel carriers from the army taking up station in front of official-looking buildings, of a police charge on motorcycles. A lot of the action seemed to be taking place on the campuses of Ankara’s dozen or more universities. Hundreds of videos and pictures were being uploaded on dozens of Web sites, along with a lot of frantic text in Turkish and broken English.
Dagmar contacted Rafet on satellite phone using encrypted VoIP, but he knew only what he could see from the safe house in Ulus, and that wasn’t much. After consultation with Lincoln, it was decided to use some of the Skunk Works drones to cruise over other parts of the city.
Therefore it was pure luck that a drone caught Erez, Ankara’s former mayor, marching with a crowd of hundreds into the Ministry of Labor and Social Security-they seized the building, invited the regular workers to leave except for those who wished to join the revolution, hoisted the flag of Erez’s banned party beneath the Turkish ensign on the roof, and barricaded the doors against any counterattack. There had been police guards outside the building, but these were severely outnumbered and faded away.
The building was an enormous blocky towerlike structure, glass and cyclopean concrete bulwarks, set in the middle of parks and parking lots and only a short distance from the Ataturk Mausoleum. It would be easy to defend, assuming the mayor’s followers were up to defending it.
Soon videos appeared on the Web of the quondam mayor announcing the formation of a provisional government with himself at its head. He invited the people of Ankara to his little fortress to help defend it.
“Is this Yeltsin standing on the tank at the Russian White House?” Dagmar wondered aloud.
“Could be more like Jim Bowie falling down drunk at the Alamo,” Lincoln muttered. “But I need to talk to that man.”
He went to his office to send off messages. The drama in Ankara continued-and then came the announcement that the mayor of Bodrum, acting in concert with the governor of Mula Province, had ordered local forces to seal off the Bodrum Peninsula, which he was now prepared to defend against the military government. Bodrum, the fashionable resort town known in ancient times as Halicarnassus, was now in a state of self-imposed siege.
“That’s not gonna last,” Richard remarked. “The Turks have a freakin’ navy. They can just sail around that stupid blockade and land however many troops they want.”
Hellmuth nodded. “Our allies could benefit from having played more strategy games in their youth, that’s for sure.”
More news came in, of demonstrations in Manisa, in Denizli, in Edirne, and once again in Trabzon. It was Friday afternoon and a lot of people had started the weekend early, swarming the streets. Hundreds were now waving banners from atop Ataturk Stadium in Beyolu, across the Golden Horn from Istanbul. The reaction of the authorities varied: some demonstrations were attacked, others blockaded; others proceeded without opposition. Though Turkish networks didn’t mention the demos at all, international news networks were reporting the events live, though their reportage tended to rely heavily on amateur video downloaded from the Web pages created and maintained by the Lincoln Brigade.
Alparslan Topal, the political liaison with the Turkish government-in-exile, appeared in the ops room. Dagmar hadn’t seen him in days. He went into conference with Lincoln behind closed doors.
Lola was sent out for sandwiches. Dagmar realized with a guilty start that she had intended a memorial to Tuna and Judy this afternoon and she hadn’t even announced it.
At that moment her satellite phone rang.
“Briana,” she answered.
“This is Ismet. I’m in hospital.”
Driving to the airport in Nikosia he had encountered a police roadblock and upon showing his Turkish passport had been pulled out of the car by Greek Cypriot cops, who had then beaten the shit out of him. If they’d had any reason other than the fact of his Turkish passport, they hadn’t mentioned it.