“The program will be in your router here,” Dagmar said. “You need to configure it so that it will obey you-obey my- orders.”
“That’s going to take a while.”
Dagmar was surprised.
“Why?” she said. “All you have to do is use your back door to get into the program, change the government’s password to your own-to my own-and then tell the program to go dormant again.”
Uruisamoglu’s unibrow grew darker as he frowned.
“It’s not that simple,” he said. “The program’s… different now.”
Dagmar felt a sudden, raging certainty that the kid was lying. She could feel a mad itch where the gun dug into her spine.
“Tell me quick!” she snapped.
The unibrow lifted. He seemed impressed by the force of her anger. Not in a frightened way, exactly, but in a way that absorbed his attention. As if he found strong emotions somehow alien but still the subject of intense interest.
“Okay,” he said. “The government was afraid of someone doing… exactly what you want me to do. So when I try to change the program, it queries a central server in Ankara for permission.”
Dagmar felt a snarl tug at her lips. She wasn’t believing this. “It can contact the central server even when the Net’s down?”
“Yes. It will have the correct codes to pass the message through any affected routers.” He looked down at his keyboard. “I can get into the central server, I think, because I compiled that program, too, but I’ll have to work out how to structure my attack. And I’ll have to make certain that Korkut or the other system administrators don’t see me working.”
“Korkut? Who’s Korkut?”
“He’s head of computer security for the Intelligence Section. He’s smart. I worked for him.”
Korkut, she thought. She wondered if he was the man she had called Kronsteen, the man who had been behind the attempts to discredit her.
“He was down there,” Uruisamoglu said. He gestured toward where the sedan was roaring off in pursuit. “Korkut was the man in the light-colored suit.”
He was the one who wasn’t shooting, Dagmar thought. The one the others were yelling at.
Korkut was the geek the assassins had brought along, to make sure Uruisamoglu didn’t try to put one over on them.
Dagmar had a lot of questions about Korkut, but she didn’t have the time to ask them. Anger jittered in her nerves. But the more she thought about what he’d told her, the more plausible it seemed.
“Better get busy, then,” she said.
He didn’t answer. Instead he put earbuds into his ears, then began to type. After a few minutes he began to sway back and forth to his music. Dagmar watched him, then ran up to him and pulled one of the buds out of his ears.
“Are you listening to music?” she demanded.
He looked up in surprise. She could hear tinny Europop sounds coming from the bud dangling from her hand.
“What’s the problem?” he asked.
“You can’t listen to music!” she said. “You’ll deplete your battery power!”
“I always listen to music when I work.”
“Not this time.”
She pulled the cord from his laptop and confiscated the earbuds. He looked at her in fury.
“Do you have a miniturbine array for recharging?” she demanded.
Uruisamoglu looked disgusted. “No. I normally have electricity here, but it went out along with everything else.”
Dagmar clenched her teeth. She had a recharging unit in her luggage, but her luggage was still in the Niva.
“How much power do you have in your laptop, anyway?”
He waved a finger over the laser sensor to bring up the data, looked up.
“One hour, thirty-nine minutes,” he said. “Give or take.”
“Can you do the job in that time?”
He shook his head and lifted his shoulders, a Turkish gesture that meant “I don’t know.”
“Conserve power.”
Dagmar went to the door and looked out. Two vehicles were laying dust trails along the road in the distance. She could hear the popping of shots.
She and Ismet should have come up with a better plan, she thought. Though as it happened she couldn’t think of one.
Her phone rang, Helmuth calling from Frankfurt.
“Yes?”
“We’re getting reports of riots all over Turkey.”
Dagmar gave a weary laugh. “Losing the Internet didn’t make people stay home; it just pissed them off.”
“They were already on strike-maybe they didn’t need the Internet so much.”
The distant dust trails vanished into the shimmer of the horizon. Dagmar could smell smoke drifting up from the village below.
“What’s happening with the old parliament building?” she asked.
“Nothing yet. I’d expect the army to turn up, though.” There was a pause. “We also got one report from the east of Turkey, saying the commander of the Second Army has been removed.”
“Hm.” Dagmar peered at the horizon, saw nothing. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“I don’t know. We need Chatsworth to tell us what it means.”
Dagmar considered this and wondered what Lincoln’s reaction would be if she told him she was in Uzbekistan.
“You could ask Ismet,” Helmuth suggested.
“Last I saw,” Dagmar said, “Ismet was driving across the desert being pursued by Turkish gunmen.”
There was a long pause.
“Okay,” Dagmar said. “Here’s what’s happening.”
She gave a brief outline of the situation. Helmuth muttered something in German under his breath. “So you can’t get out?”
“No.”
She could hear Helmuth thinking. “I have an idea,” he said. “But you’re not going to like it.”
She cast a glance back into the yurt, at Uruisamoglu sitting motionless at his computer, watching her with his large brown eyes.
“I’m open to suggestions,” she said.
“Shoot the kid,” Helmuth said. “He works for the damn narco-Nazis anyway, so he’s no loss. Take his laptop, grab some supplies, and take off on foot. Hide until the bad guys go away, or until you can reestablish contact with Ismet.”
Dagmar felt her mouth go dry.
“That’s… going to be hard,” she said.
“Can you think of a better idea?”
She gave the matter some thought. “I’ll have to get back to you,” she said. She pressed End and put the phone back in its holster. She looked at Uruisamoglu.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“It would go faster with music.”
She gave him an icy look. “Then sing,” she said.
She left the yurt and gazed out to the east, where Ismet and his pursuers had disappeared. She saw no dust plumes, heard no vehicle noises or gunshots on the wind.
Dagmar rubbed her sore forearms with her hands. She thought about Ismet dead, Ismet burning in his car, Ismet lying wounded on the sand. Tears stung her eyes.
She had bravely struck off on her own, without any of her support system, and led her lover straight into a fiasco and probably got him killed.
She couldn’t save Ismet. She couldn’t save Uruisamoglu, and she knew she couldn’t kill him. She was useless.
She was Semiramis Orta. She was the spy who failed.
Dagmar clenched her fists, her teeth. Her thin leather jacket didn’t seem able to keep out the cold wind at all. She shivered.
God damn it, she thought. Haven’t I learned anything?
Apparently not.
She returned to the yurt and looked over Uruisamoglu’s shoulder. He was coding: she recognized structure and syntax but couldn’t place the lines in any context. Slash couldn’t help clarify; he was off somewhere in his own Deep State-not in the cabal that had taken power in Turkey, but inside the internal realm where art and code and human mind all came together, where mad imagination ran in tandem with the discipline of science, a rigorous internal dreaming that flowed down the arms and through the fingers into the keyboard and then out into the world…
Oblivious to her, Uruisamoglu was humming to himself as he worked. Needing the music.
She followed the coding. She did very little coding herself these days, she had Helmuth and others for that, but she still appreciated coding as an art form, and Uruisamoglu was very good. His syntax was clean, he was well organized, and he made few mistakes.