“Aheloy is the place to relax, all right.” Lincoln was confident. “I put you in a bed-and-breakfast—you have a very nice bedsit, and you’ve got your own entrance to the garden, so you’ll have privacy.”
“Ah. Thanks.” She fumbled with the envelope, saw schedules, tickets, printouts. No pictures of the garden or the bedsit.
“People from all over Europe go to Bulgaria’s beaches for vacation,” Lincoln said. “Lots from Russia and Ukraine. And a great many Brits, because Bulgaria’s still a place they can afford.”
“Okay.” She was still not entirely pleased, though she couldn’t have said why.
“I’ve arranged for a car and driver to pick you up at the station, take you straight to the B-and-B; you can walk to the beach and be in the water by one thirty in the afternoon.”
“Thanks.” She peered again at the documents, then looked up at Lincoln. “Is anyone else coming?” she asked.
He seemed surprised. “Everyone else is going home tomorrow. Or so I thought.”
“And you?” Because a sliver of ice-cold paranoia had slipped into her brain and for a moment she wondered if she would arrive in Aheloy only to find Lincoln there, with roses and chocolates and a box of condoms, ready to launch himself on top of her once he’d gotten her in his secluded little love trap…
She’d never gotten anything like a sexual vibe from Lincoln, but then she’d been wrong before.
“I’m flying to New York tomorrow morning,” Lincoln said. He peered at her. “Don’t you like Bulgaria?”
“I don’t know enough to know whether I like Bulgaria or not. All I know is that I like their shoes.”
“I considered sending you to Rhodes,” Lincoln said. “But there are no air connections between Greece and Turkey right now, you’d have to fly through Bulgaria anyway, so I figured once there you might as well…” He flapped his hands.
“I’m sure it will be fine,” Dagmar said. “Thank you.”
“If you hate it, you can make other plans. But you’ll have to pay for them yourself.”
She patted his arm. “That’s fine. I appreciate your… kindness.”
He smiled, then swept out an arm.
“Why don’t you have a seat? Because I have another business proposition for you.”
Dagmar glanced around and decided on the window seat. Lincoln took the creaking wooden chair that went with the rococo desk.
“Does Great Big Idea have any commitments after this?” he asked.
“Nothing signed,” Dagmar said. “I’ve got three pitches coming up, one to Seagram’s, one to a Korean software firm, and another to a cable company that wants original content.”
“Television company?” His eyebrows lifted. “You’ll be doing television?”
“Television and game both,” Dagmar said. “The two will be linked.”
Lincoln was impressed. “Must pay well.”
“Television pays well because the content provider has to wade through endless network hassle in order to do her job,” Dagmar said. “Frankly, if it weren’t for a whole season’s worth of checks, I’d rather sell the whiskey.”
Lincoln smiled. “Not the software?”
“The Koreans want us to tell them how to sell their product,” Dagmar said. “I don’t think they have much of a future in the North American market.”
“So you might,” Lincoln said, “have room for another project.”
Dagmar waved an arm.
“Bear Cat wants another ARG?”
“Not Bear Cat.”
She settled into the window seat and gave him a level look.
“I suppose you’re going to explain to me why you’ve been emplacing servers all over Turkey.”
Gracefully he shifted course.
“You did a brilliant thing in the last twenty-four hours,” Lincoln said. “You faked out the generals and made them look a bit silly and satisfied your customer base.”
“I made myself a nervous wreck.”
“I gather that’s… normal in your line of work.”
“Anxiety’s normal. Physical danger isn’t.”
Except for me, she thought. My friends get to die for me.
Lincoln placed his elbows on the chair arms and steepled his fingers before him.
“I have… friends,” he said. “Contacts. And when The Long Night of Briana Hall came online a few years ago, and your friends were killed…”
Dagmar flashed him a warning look. “I don’t talk about that,” she said.
“I don’t want you to.” He spoke quickly. “I don’t actually want to know anything.” He relaxed a little, leaned back against the chair’s pink satin cushion. “I just want to say that I looked into some things—where your friend Charlie’s money came from, for one thing—and I read some reports from the FBI and the LAPD, and I drew my own conclusions.”
Dagmar tensed. Lincoln looked at her.
“You handled yourself well,” he said. “That’s all I’m saying. I’m not making judgments; I’m not making accusations. But from where I’m standing, you did well.”
“You don’t know what I did.”
“I don’t,” Lincoln said. “Not really. I only have my guesses.” He raised a hand as she prepared again to object. “And as I said, I don’t want to know—so if you ever have the urge to confess anything, don’t do it to me.”
What makes you think I have anything to confess? she thought—and then decided she didn’t actually want the answer to that question.
“And—as far as the botnet goes—you did well there, too.”
A cold shaft of terror pierced her. Panic yammered in the back of her head. Lincoln knew about that?
Dagmar decided to counterattack. She glared at him.
“So who the hell are you, really?” she demanded. “I checked out Bear Cat, it’s a real outfit, and you’re there on the Web page, but who are you really? Publicity flacks don’t have access to FBI reports.”
He smiled thinly. “I’m not a flack; I’m an account executive. You should know the terminology; you’re in the advertising business.”
“Sorry.” She put as much sarcasm into the single word as she could.
“Sometimes I’m in a position to rain money on Bear Cat,” Lincoln said. “And in return they’re kind enough to provide me with credentials.”
A lightning revelation seemed to strobe across the inside of Dagmar’s skull.
“Oh Christ,” she said, “you’re not telling me you’re some kind of spy.” She began to laugh. “A spy using a James Bond film as a cover! Talk about postmodern!”
“I used to be a spy,” Lincoln said. “I was a spy for thirty years.” He gave a little amused bow from the waist. “Now I’m a consultant. Advertising, and other things. Consulting pays much better.”
She just looked at him.
“And you’re telling me this because…?”
“I want to hire Great Big Idea,” Lincoln said, “to do just what you’ve been doing.”
“Which is what?”
Lincoln waved a hand in an elaborate pattern as he spoke.
“What do you do in your games, Dagmar? You teach people how to use and break codes, to do detailed research, to solve intricate puzzles. You provide raw data, which the players must put into usable form. You send people on missions into the real world to find information or locate objects. Your players have to find hidden motivations and meanings, distinguish truth from fancy. You organize events, both online and in the real world, in which complete strangers unite to complete a common task.”
He blinked his blue eyes at her.
“Do you know what those skills are, Dagmar? Those are practical intelligence skills. I want you to do a project for us.”
She blinked at him. “So you want me to create a game? For the CIA, or the NSA, or whatever it is you actually work for? To train people how to do their jobs.”
“That,” said Lincoln, “would tread on too many toes. We already have plenty of training facilities and trai
ners.”
“What, then?”
Lincoln smiled and then told her.
She would have laughed, if she hadn’t been so surprised.
ACT 2
CHAPTER SIX
After Bulgaria—which was lovely, exactly the vacation Dagmar needed, sipping gin and tonics as she reclined on a chaise set on a couple of Aheloy’s fifty-six thousand square meters of beach while about eighteen varieties of barely clothed male flesh competed to keep her drink topped up—so after the return to California, and after the set of pitches failed, there was nothing to do but take Lincoln up on his offer. So she found herself on the island of Cyprus, in a set of offices overlooking a British runway baking in the Mediterranean sun.
The building was old but well maintained, and featureless in what Dagmar came to recognize as a military absence of style, efficiency combined with cheapness and an almost fetishistic lack of anything approaching aesthetics—aluminium-framed windows overlooked the runway’s vast expanse, high ceilings with fans and ranked fluorescents, walls thick with decades-old ochre yellow paint and featureless save for pinholes where picture hooks had once been, or placards announcing what to do in case of fire or in the event of an interruption in electric service. Out of some warehouse had come graceless furniture made of metal and painted in unaesthetic colors that only the military employed, as if marking their property by the application of a coat of Ugly.
The noise from the runway was continuous; the windows rattled in their frames; the fluorescent light seemed to strobe in some hard-to-define, headache-inducing way. Air-conditioning had been retrofitted into the building in ways that made sense only to the British, resulting in zones of wintry climate that alternated with areas of Sahara heat. The lavatories featured the world’s most useless and inefficient toilet paper, which Dagmar could only conclude was created to some ancient wartime government specification, from a time when only cheap pulp paper, filled with little chunks of actual undigested wood, was available.
Piled on the metal desks were cardboard boxes full of thousands of dollars’ worth of computer equipment: flat-screen monitors, office towers crammed with the latest in graphic interfaces, a million times more processing capacity than the entire Manhattan Project, DVD burners, modems, printers. Other boxes held software: office suites, programs for editing video and graphics, software packaging for budgeting and ultrafast communication.
“The T3 connection is already installed,” Lincoln said.
He showed Dagmar and her posse their work space with what seemed to be a sense of pride. They shuffled along after him, jet-lagged, not quite believing they were actually here.
Lincoln made a grand gesture taking in the room, the metal desks, the computers and software in their boxes.
“Welcome to the ops room,” he said.
Ops room, Dagmar thought.
“Back home,” she said, “we’d just call it an office.”
It was almost as if Dagmar had decided to remake Stunrunner. Richard the Assassin had come along, tickled to use his computer-ninja skills on real-world applications. Dagmar had hired Judy again, not so much because she needed a puzzle designer as because Judy had a talent for creating and controlling intricate situations. And Dagmar had brought along her head programmer, a German who bore the name Helmuth von Moltke, a moniker he’d inherited from an ancestor who had once conquered France.
Helmuth dressed better than anyone else in the party, in gray cashmere slacks, a starched white shirt with chunky gold cuff links, and a dark Nehru jacket, a fashion choice that put him in a league with a whole series of Bond villains, including Dr. No, Hugo Drax, and the impeccably groomed Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
Helmuth was, generally speaking, a match for any creature of Ian Fleming’s imagination. In his circuits of the Earth, the sleekly blond Helmuth occupied the Party Orbit: he girdled the world looking for bars, music, and lonely females. In LA, he seemed to spend half his life on the Sunset Strip and had apparently done away with any need for sleep—a useful skill in a programmer at any time.
The rest of the Great Big Idea staff remained in Simi Valley, though their expertise and advice could be called upon at any time. In any case, they would all be very busy—the Seagram’s people had reconsidered, and Great Big Idea was now prepping a full-fledged ARG for them. This was the first Great Big Idea game that Dagmar would not actually write herself, and even though she’d hired a substitute who seemed professional and imaginative and who was even willing to relocate to California for three months, a low twelve-volt anxiety now hummed in Dagmar’s nerves, sixteen cycles per second of uncertainty and unease.
Lincoln invited Dagmar into his office while Helmuth, Richard, and Judy began to pillage the cardboard boxes. The ops room and the hardware would be set up and configured to their specifications.
Lincoln’s office had the same bare, dull yellow walls as the ops room, and he had a metal desk identical to the others. There was a safe with a digital lock, and Lincoln had also equipped himself with an Aeron office chair, a marvel of lightweight alloy, pneumatics, and material science. He sat in this and leaned back with a blissful smile.
“You’ve pimped out your office,” Dagmar observed.
“Note the other feature.” He pointed at the wall, to a poster where a silhouette of a sinking aircraft carrier was accompanied by the slogan LOOSE TWEETS SINK FLEETS.
“This has all the potential of a security nightmare,” Lincoln said. “We’ve got to be very strict, very correct, from the start. Particularly about code names.”
“We did all right during Stunrunner,” Dagmar said. “And we were in Turkey then, right in the security zone, with hundreds of gamers surrounding us and eager to find out our secrets.”
“The problem with Cyprus,” Lincoln said, “is that it’s lousy with spies.”
“Ha. You should feel right at home.”
“Cyprus is a crossroads,” Lincoln said. “Here we’ve got Turkish nationalist fanatics and Greek nationalist fanatics. We’ve got Greek spies, Turkish spies, Syrian and Egyptian spies, Israeli spies, British and American spies.”
“And there’s us,” Dagmar said.
Lincoln looked at her with great seriousness. “We’re not actually spies,” Lincoln said. “We’re special ops.”
“Oh,” she said, startled. “Sorry.”
“I want to give a special warning.” Lincoln gave her a stern look. “There’s a Russian colony down the road in Limassol, and I want you to stay away from them.”
Dagmar smiled. “Afraid I’ll spill everything to Rosa Klebb?”
“I’m afraid you’ll be drugged, raped, robbed, and murdered,” Lincoln said. “Some of those guys are old-school Russian Maffya left over from the day when Cyprus was the money-laundering capital of the world.”
Uneasiness fluttered in Dagmar’s belly. Her smile froze to her face.
She had a bad history with the Russian Maffya.
“I was station chief in Nicosia in the nineties,” Lincoln went on. “At least a couple hundred billion dollars flowed through here to tax havens in the West, and I drove myself crazy trying to keep track of it all. Russia went bankrupt, but Cyprus practically had a golden age, if you don’t count the bombings and shootings.” He saw Dagmar’s face, and his expression softened. “Sorry,” he said, misinterpreting. “I didn’t mean to shock you.”
Dagmar decided she wasn’t going to think about Austin’s death right now.
“I’m not shocked,” she said. “But sometimes I forget that we’re here doing something, uh, real.”
“Maybe,” Lincoln ventured, “it’s best if you think of it as a game.”
Dagmar thought of bullets, bodies, smoke floating over cities. From the nearby runway came the sound of a flight jet aircraft launching into the air, a sound that lent an uneasy reality to Dagmar’s thoughts.
“I don’t know if I can,” she said.
“Games are what you’re good at,” Lincoln said. “Leave the rest to me.”
�
��I’ll do that.” The affirmation, she thought, was something closer to a prayer than to anything like a firm resolution.
“And—speaking of the Russians…” Lincoln’s face took on an amused caste. “There are a lot of Russian women here, in the bars. Some are prostitutes, some aren’t, but they’re all looking for husbands to carry them off to the good life in the West.”
Dagmar raised an eyebrow and looked at him.
“And you think this would interest me because…?”
“Not you,” he said. “But you might pass a warning on to your boys. We wouldn’t like to have any of them rushing to the rescue of someone named Natasha and ending up paying thousands of dollars to a Russian pimp.”
Dagmar considered Richard’s habit of going to a foreign country and buying everything on offer and nodded.
“I’ll spread the word,” she said.
There was a knock on the door. Lincoln looked up.
“Come in,” he said.
The man who entered wore a uniform. He had tight-curled black hair, Mediterranean blue eyes, and a brilliant white smile.
“Chatsworth,” he said. For a moment Dagmar wondered if Alvarez knew Lincoln from online gaming, but then she remembered the code protocols.
“Ah.” Lincoln rose, and shook hands across the desk with the new arrival. “This is Squadron Leader Alvarez, our RAF liaison.”
“Good to meet you, Briana,” said Alvarez. Dagmar rose and shook his hand and was proud of herself for answering to the alias without hesitation.
They needed an RAF liaison because Lincoln and Dagmar were running their operation from England. It just wasn’t the England made up mostly of a big island off the northwest coast of Europe.
The operation would be run from England-in-Cyprus, from RAF Akrotiri—an air base that was, legally, British territory, as British as toffee and binge drinking.
Dagmar’s team of game geeks would work from rooms overlooking Akrotiri’s enormous runway. The British air base was vast, and Dagmar’s people would hide in plain sight amid thousands of RAF personnel and civilian employees, who in turn were dropped amid the population of the island of Cyprus. Dagmar and her friends would share housing in the married officers’ quarters, shop for food at the NAAFI, and run their games through British servers.
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