Tension sang through her muscles as she realized that the second dust trail was caused by a vehicle moving toward her.
But whose car was it? she wondered. She reached for her handheld, called up the satellite function, and speed-dialed Ismet.
The ring signal went on for a long time. Dagmar held her breath as the signal went on and on.
Finally she pressed End and returned the phone to its holster. Despair gave a little wail somewhere in her psyche.
She forced herself to remain calm as she walked back to the yurt. She opened the door and went in.
“How long?” she asked.
Uruisamoglu looked briefly up. “Not long,” he said.
“We don’t have much time.”
He circled his hand in that Turkish way that meant he’d heard all this so many times before.
She could carry him out on her back, she thought. But she couldn’t see herself clambering along the bluffs that way.
She would just have to buy him time.
Dagmar went out onto the plateau again and tried to work out how the car would come up and where she should hide so that they couldn’t see her until the shooting started and where she would stay in cover. She tried several places and checked the field of fire from each. Again she tried to remember what she’d learned in first-person shooter games.
She’d never gotten as good as the best players, the ones who could just run into the middle of a firefight, shoot in all directions while running, killing all the Nazis or the zombies or the Nazi zombies, and never come to harm. Instead she preferred to be a kind of sniper, to settle under cover somewhere and pick the enemy off one by one.
That was the only thing she could do here, fire from ambush. She wasn’t a gunfighter, and unlike her character in the video games, she couldn’t be sure of hitting anything with a pistol she’d never fired.
The dust plume came closer. Dagmar chose her spot, then jogged back to the yurt. Uruisamoglu was still coding, bent over his work.
“Soon,” he said.
“Call me when you’re ready.”
He waved a hand, telling her to push off. She swallowed her resentment, then returned to her chosen place.
It was another ten minutes before she heard the car laboring up the narrow road. Even though she knew it was coming, she still managed surprise when it finally came into her view.
The car had taken a pounding. The windshield had caved in, leaving only a few silver-glinting remnants around the edges. The body was dinged and covered in dust, one headlight was smashed, and a front fender was flapping loose. The car was a piece of junk now, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that there were still killers in it.
She found it all intensely interesting. Oddly, she wasn’t afraid. A short while ago Dagmar had been terrified of hallucinations, but now that the black hats had arrived, the men who could actually kill her, she didn’t find them frightening at all.
Dagmar rested her pistol on the rock in front of her and fired. She counted five shots, the pistol kicking against her hand each time, a jolt of pain going up her bruised arm, and she felt a rush of intense pleasure as she saw the sparks thrown up by a bullet as it splashed on the hood.
The driver slammed the brakes, then threw the car into reverse and backed away. A laugh burst past Dagmar’s lips as she saw the enemy retreating, and she fired another shot. Someone fired back at her through the windshield-she saw the flash-but the bullet flew away into nothing.
Dagmar thought that she should move now they knew her position, and so she shifted to another of the places she had chosen. She leaned far out from her cover to observe the enemy.
The car backed all the way to the bottom of the bluff, and then the passengers got out. There were still four of them, still in coats and ties, three in dark jackets, one in beige. They consulted with one another briefly, and then the three in dark jackets began to advance up the road. From their posture-crouched down with hands held together in front-it was clear they were holding pistols.
The other one, the one in the light-colored suit, stayed by the car and watched with his arms akimbo. He seemed to be intrigued by what was going on.
The shooters were going to be a lot harder to stop this time. But at least they had only short-range weapons-they’d come prepared to kill a crippled computer scientist in a yurt, not engage in a prolonged firefight.
“Briana! Briana!” Uruisamoglu’s voice came from the yurt.
Dagmar hesitated, then broke cover and ran for the yurt. She opened the door.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I’ve done it. I need you to put in your password.”
She ran to him, dropped to her knees, and turned his laptop to her. Passwords swarmed through her mind. It had run blank.
She typed “CONSTANTINOPLE1453,” then hit Enter. It was a password that the computers at NSA or other agencies would have no trouble cracking, but she couldn’t think of anything else. When she had the opportunity she’d change it.
“Good,” Uruisamoglu said. “Now I send it out.”
Dagmar jumped to her feet and ran back to her position. The gunmen were a lot closer now. She rested the gun on a rock, aimed, and fired.
The bullet kicked up sand near one of the gunmen’s feet, and they all scattered into cover. Return fire began to come up the hill. The bullets sounded like firecrackers going off over Dagmar’s head.
There was excitement in being shot at, but the emotion was strangely flattened. This wasn’t as involving as a video game. A video game would have better sound effects.
Whenever she saw one of the gunmen she fired, but they were darting from cover to cover and she could never get one in her sights. She emptied her magazine and reached for her second. After that, she realized, she’d be out of bullets.
A bullet whined off the rock close to Dagmar’s hand. Her heart leaped. One of the gunman had worked his way onto her flank. She fired wildly at him, jumped to her feet, and ran back to another rock. Bullets snapped through the air near her.
She was breathless. The video game had just gone to another level of intensity. Hordes of zombies would arrive at any second.
Eventually the gunmen drove her all the way back to the yurt. She didn’t know how many bullets she had left, but she knew it wasn’t many. She dived through the door and dropped prone onto the carpet.
Uruisamoglu, still sitting on his pillow, looked at her.
“What’s going on?” he said.
It was the most ridiculous question she’d ever heard. “We’re trying to kill each other,” she explained, as if to a child. “You’d better get down.”
I am about to be killed by three men in ties, she thought.
Someone started firing through the felt walls of the yurt. Uruisamoglu dropped to the floor. His brown eyes were huge.
Voices cried out in Turkish. Uruisamoglu looked at Dagmar.
“They want us to surrender,” he said.
“They’re here to kill you,” Dagmar said. “But you can surrender if you want.”
“They have no reason to kill me anymore,” Uruisamoglu said. “The Internet’s back. It’s all out of my hands.”
And entirely in mine, Dagmar thought. They’d torture her to get her password.
More bullets began ripping through the felt. One whined off the pellet stove. Uruisamoglu’s maps crackled as bullets snapped through them. Dagmar reached for pillows and began to build bulwarks. The gunmen kept shouting.
At least they’re not hallucinations, she thought, and almost laughed.
The gunmen called for surrender again. They were probably not looking forward to charging in through the single door.
Dagmar didn’t answer. Another pair of shots came in. Maybe, Dagmar thought, they were running low on ammunition as well.