“I thought your uncle sold carpets in Istanbul.”
Ismet smiled. “That’s Uncle Ertac,” he said. “It was my uncle Fuad who sold manuscripts up here in the castle.”
“Manuscripts? Like original handwritten manuscripts?”
“Old Ottoman books,” Ismet said. “Printed books. They were in the old Arab script, which no one reads anymore, but they had beautiful illustrations done by hand. So Fuad cut up the books and sold the pages that had pictures on them.”
Dagmar wasn’t sure how to view this literary vandalism.
“Is that allowed?” she said.
Ismet shrugged.
“Apparently it is. Now that the original books are becoming rare, he finds vintage paper and then hires artists to paint pictures in the old Persian style.”
Dagmar was curious. “Does he tell his customers that the pictures are modern?”
Ismet smiled thinly. “I’m certain that he does.”
Dagmar looked up as the teenage girls began to shriek with laughter. Still laughing, they walked rapidly along the old wall to the main body of the tower.
Dagmar’s handheld began to play “ ’Round Midnight.” She answered.
“If the wicked are lurking,” Lincoln said, “they’re pretty well hidden.”
“They generally are,” said Dagmar.
“If the government’s going to give us trouble,” Lincoln said, “it’s going to be in Istanbul.”
“Thanks so much,” Dagmar said, “for massively increasing my paranoia.”
“It’s my job,” Lincoln explained. “Have a lovely evening.”
Dagmar returned her handheld to its holster. Ismet, Richard, and Tuna were looking at her expectantly.
“Lincoln says the hotel’s okay,” she said, and then added, “for now.”
Tuna curled his lip in contempt of the government, stuck his hands in his jacket pockets, and walked back along the top of the old wall to the main body of the tower. Richard fell into his wake. Ismet and Dagmar were left alone on the bastion.
“You were raised in Ankara?” Dagmar asked.
Ismet adjusted his spectacles.
“I lived here for a while. My father is an economist and has worked all over the world-China, Egypt, Germany, England, and Canada. He spent three years in Ankara teaching at the university.”
“You speak American English.”
“I got my degree in the States. In Bellingham.”
“You were planning a career in public relations?”
He looked at her. “No. My degree is in journalism. I still freelance, but PR is a better paycheck.”
“Yes. Print media is dead, or so I keep hearing.”
“You changed your career, too,” Ismet said.
“Yes.” Once she had been a science fiction writer. “How did you know?”
“I looked up your Wikipedia entry.”
She did that herself, now and again. Originally out of vanity, she supposed, but now just to count the inaccuracies. Her biography was really an astounding collection of misinformation, alleviated only by wild speculation.
She never corrected the inaccuracies. She understood that the subject herself could never do that. She’d have to find some authority to quote in rebuttal-but she didn’t know any authorities on herself other than herself.
“The entry mentioned that trouble you had,” Ismet said. “When your friends were killed.”
A chill wind brushed Dagmar’s spine. She felt herself straighten.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” she said.
Ismet was alarmed. “Oh!” he said. “I didn’t mean to offend!”
“No offense,” Dagmar said, and waved a hand dismissively. But she wasn’t about to talk about any of that to a journalist, not even if she was off-the-record.
She realized she had better look up her Wikipedia entry as soon as possible.
Sometimes, she reflected, it was possible to access too much knowledge.
They stayed on the battlements till the last of the sunset faded from the western horizon. All about them were the soft lights of the city, the tall office buildings, the flashing lights on the broadcast towers. Then they went back down the steep, dark stair to their waiting taxi.
Dagmar had the driver drop them a block from their hotel, and they approached carefully and scouted the lobby through plate-glass windows before entering. No one paid them any attention except the young blonde woman behind the desk, who smiled in greeting.
When Dagmar arrived at her room she changed into her khakis and an old giveaway T-shirt from a long-forgotten start-up. Everything else, except for her bathroom case, she packed, and then she blocked the door with her bags to keep anyone from forcing his way in.
She was ready to hit the ground running.
Experience had shown her the value of a fast getaway.
CHAPTER FOUR
Dagmar’s posse rose early and were first in line for the hotel’s breakfast buffet. They saw no secret police; they saw no gamers. The players had been booked in a different hotel, to discourage them from harassing the puppetmasters or breaking into their rooms in search of information.
Where the secret police might be hiding was another matter.
Dagmar carried her bags down to breakfast, not wanting to leave her hard drive in a place where someone could steal or damage it. Afterward she piled her bags into a taxi for an uneventful ride to the airport. While waiting for the Turkish Air flight, she heard from Mehmet that the players had gotten into their buses without incident and were on their way to the airport. To avoid unnecessary interaction with the puppetmasters, they had been scheduled on later flights.
Another meal was served on the flight to Istanbul-Dagmar was amazed at the efficiency of the cabin attendants, who got food and drinks served and cleared in only forty minutes. Two vans had been hired to take them to their hotel. Their luggage nearly filled the first van, leaving room for two people: Dagmar found herself in the van with Judy, the puzzle designer, who was chatting happily on her handheld. The van pulled away from the curb.
“Love you!” Judy said cheerfully into the phone, and holstered it.
Judy wore a long-sleeved blouse that left only rag ends of her tattoos visible at the wrists. She held back her black hair with a plastic headband that had a crown on it, gold-painted points that haloed her head and made her look like a somewhat less spiky version of the Statue of Liberty, albeit one with a lot of mascara and corpse green eye shadow. Her necklace stared out at the world with a couple dozen blue eyes, made up as it was of Turkish evil-eye amulets mounted in silver; she also wore matching earrings and a bracelet.
“Who were you talking to?” Dagmar asked.
“My dad.” Judy grinned. “He worries when I fly-I always call him after I land to tell him I’m okay.”
“You must be close.”
Dagmar didn’t know what it was like to be close to a father-it was an alien concept to her, like knowing what it was like to be an Australian aborigine or a member of the Rosicrucians.
“The funny thing is,” Judy said, “is that Dad flies all the time and it doesn’t bother him at all. He only gets all worried when I fly.”
“What does your dad do?” Dagmar asked.
“He’s a rock star.”
Dagmar smiled. “I guess he must be, if he worries about you like that.”
Judy laughed. “No, really!” she said. “My dad’s Odis Strange, of Andalusian God.”
Dagmar blinked.
“You know,” she said, “when a person says that someone else is a rock star, usually it’s a metaphor.”
Andalusian God had been huge when Dagmar was in nappies. Her parents had their discs, and their single “Nad Roast” was always playing on the jukebox in whatever depressing Cleveland bar her father was working.
She remembered Odis Strange on the cover of Living the Life Atomic, Andalusian God’s first CD. He wore a dark five o’clock shadow, a Levi’s jacket with the sleeves ripped off, lots of
stainless-steel jewelry, and hair that was greased up high in a mock-rockabilly pompadour.
She didn’t see much of a resemblance in Judy. Probably she took after her mother.
“I didn’t really know him till I was sixteen or so,” Judy said. “That’s when Dad sobered up and remembered he’d had a family back in the nineties.” She laughed. “He’s really sweet. He looks after me. He paid for my new teeth.” She tapped a brilliant white incisor with a fingernail. “Implants. Even when he was away, his management sent money.”
“That’s great,” Dagmar said. Father-daughter bonding was really not her thing.
“We’ve known each other for months,” Dagmar said. “Why haven’t I known about your dad?”
“People try to use me to get to him,” Judy said. “I’m cautious about who I talk to.”
“That’s sensible,” Dagmar said.
Judy’s eyes blinked brightly at Dagmar from behind her black-rimmed glasses. “And your dad?” she asked.
“He was an alcoholic,” Dagmar said. “He’s dead now.”
“Oh.” Judy’s face fell. “Sorry.”
Dagmar shrugged. “It happens.”
Her mother had worked hard to keep Dagmar from becoming one of those kids who came to school smelling funny. Trying somehow to evade or at least ignore her downwardly mobile status, Dagmar had found refuge in geek culture: science fiction, fantasy gaming, computer-moderated social networks where people didn’t know or care that she lived in a shabby flat off Detroit Avenue in Cleveland.
And there had been books. Cleveland might have been a decaying postindustrial polis that had failed to negotiate the collapse of its tax base, but in its glory days it had built great public libraries, and libraries were cheap, a big advantage in a household where the television could at any moment be sold to pay for vodka. Even at his most intoxicated, Dagmar’s father knew it was pointless to try to pawn library books.
“My dad was never around when he was high,” Judy said. “And he was high for years. But he wasn’t violent or anything.”
“Nor mine.” Dagmar really didn’t want to talk about this. “He was a sloppy drunk, not an angry drunk.”
And a thieving drunk, whom Dagmar did not propose at any point in the next several centuries to forgive.
“Look at all the ships,” Dagmar said.
Judy seemed relieved to change the subject. They turned toward the Sea of Marmara, where dozens of cargo ships schooled in the blue water, waiting for a crew, a destination, a cargo, or a pilot to take them up the Bosporus.
The ships were freelancing, Dagmar thought, just like herself and her crew.
Give them a destination and they’d amaze you with how they got there.
In Istanbul the Great Big Idea crew was booked into a small boutique hotel, a converted Ottoman mansion in the tourist paradise of Sultanahmet, while the players stayed in a pair of larger, more group-oriented hotels in Beyolu, across the Golden Horn. The party’s rooms weren’t ready when they arrived, at 8:45 in the morning, so Dagmar and her planners agreed to gather in the rooftop lounge to plan the next day’s live event, the game’s finale.
The lounge had a bar at one end, closed at this hour of the morning, and glass walls that gazed out upon the Sea of Marmara, the deep blue water where dozens of freighters waited their turn to steam up the Bosporus or to moor at the piers of the Asian shore. In the other direction were the dome and six minarets of the Blue Mosque, pale gray against the azure sky.
When Dagmar came up the clanking old elevator, she found Lincoln sprawled on a couch gazing at the sea, his loopy grin on his face. He was still having the time of his life.
Dagmar, less sanguine, stood by the glass wall and watched a host of gulls, wind beneath their wings, sweep in a perpetual gyre around the minarets of the mosque. Anxiety scrabbled at her nerves with rusty iron claws. The lack of information made speculation impossible.
She didn’t know if she was safe, if any of her group were safe. She didn’t know if the players would be molested when they assembled in Gulhane Park on Saturday morning.
The most ambitious ARG of all time could end up with people dead. That wasn’t how she had intended to go down in history.
She hadn’t killed players yet, though with other people her record wasn’t quite so pristine.
The doors to the creaking elevator rolled open, and Ismet arrived carrying a stack of newspapers. He paused, looking for Dagmar, and then offered her the papers in a hopeless gesture.
“I’m afraid you’re famous,” he said.
He spread the newspapers over one of the low tables. There was a picture of her with Bozbeyli on every paper, either shaking hands with him or sitting next to him. In every picture he was erect and masterful, his eyes alert and commanding. In each image she looked humble and submissive, her eyes turned to the Great Man for instruction.
None of the pictures hinted at the quantity of the president’s rouge and hair dye.
“Would you like me to translate the text?” Ismet asked. “It’s pretty much the same in each paper.”
Dagmar felt her stomach turn over.
“I can imagine what it says.”
Lincoln picked up a section of newspaper, took reading glasses from the pocket of his shirt, and held them halfway between his eyes and the text. “You’re quoted as saying that the whole world knows the danger of terrorism,” he said. “And that even a civilization five thousand years old can be threatened by the bombs of madmen.”
Dagmar stared at him.
“You read Turkish?”
She hadn’t heard him speak the language to anyone, not beyond more than a few tourist phrases.
Lincoln shrugged and put away his glasses.
“I read a lot of languages,” he said.
“You were also on the television news this morning,” Ismet told her.
Dagmar sank into her chair.
“This is going to be everywhere,” she said. “On blogs, on Our Reality Network, on Ozone, everywhere.”
“You can issue a denial,” Lincoln said. “A correction. When you get home.”
“I know how memes propagate on the freakin’ Web,” Dagmar said. “No correction will ever catch up with the original story. For the rest of my life I’m going to be the game designer who brownnoses dictators.”
She closed her eyes and let herself pitch backward onto the cushions, as if falling into her own personal hell.
Behind her, the elevator doors rattled open.
“Dagmar?”
She opened her eyes, turned, and saw Mehmet. He had a concerned look on his face and his cell phone in his hand, and-because Mehmet wasn’t part of the creative team and it wasn’t his job to be here-his arrival set a new anxiety gnawing at Dagmar’s vitals.
“Yes?” Dagmar said.
Mehmet approached.
“I got a call from Feroz. The headquarters bus was stopped and he was arrested.”
The news startled her. Dagmar jumped to her feet.
“Arrested? Can we get him a lawyer?”
“Stopped where?” Lincoln asked.
“Just outside Izmir.” Mehmet turned to Dagmar. “He’s been released,” he said. “But they beat him, and then they took the bus.”
“Beat him?” Dagmar’s bafflement warred with her rising outrage. “Why beat Feroz? He’s just the bus driver we hired.” She turned to Lincoln. “Can we contact the embassy?”
“Feroz is Turkish,” Lincoln said. “Our embassy can’t help.”
Dagmar was disgusted at the idiocy of her own question. She threw out her arms in annoyance at her own thundering great stupidity.
Lincoln continued to ponder the issue. “Probably that’s why they picked Feroz, because they could punish us without causing a diplomatic problem.”
Dagmar turned back to Mehmet.
“Does he need a hospital?”
“He says he’s afraid to go. They might get his name from the hospital records.”
“They don’t have hi
s name?”
“They didn’t look at his identification. They just took him out of the bus and started hitting him.”
Dagmar pulled out her handheld and went over her list of contacts.
“Zafer Musa?” she asked, to no one in particular, and then pressed the Enter button.
Zafer Musa, a matronly woman married to an Australian, was Dagmar’s go-to person in Izmir-Zafer had helped to set up lodging and transportation for the gamers and had cleared the game with the various bureaucracies that had a say in whether Ephesus could be used as a site for the game.
Zafer answered. A many-sided conversation ensued, in which Zafer agreed to pick up Feroz and take him to a clinic, have him use a false name, and pay for his treatment with cash. Dagmar would reimburse any expense.
“Have her take a camera,” Lincoln said. “We want pictures.”
Dagmar gave Lincoln a look, then nodded. She told Zafer to take pictures and then ended the call.
She turned to Lincoln. “We need to hire a bus driver. Quick.”
Mehmet shook his head.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “They kept the bus. The Gray Wolves kept the bus.”
So now all the electronics were gone. The cameras, the satellite uplink, the wireless net, the displays. Dagmar reached down to the table, picked up Ismet’s newspapers, and hurled them against the glass wall overlooking the sea.
The papers proved a completely inadequate weapon. They blossomed out, touched the wall with a sigh, and drifted to the floor.
“We are hopelessly in the shit,” Dagmar said. “We are the fucking falling newspapers, and someone’s going to come along and step on us.”
The elevator wheezed open, and Tuna entered with Judy Strange. They carried cups of Turkish coffee and plates of vegetables and gozleme, cheese-stuffed pancakes, all of which they’d carried up from the hotel buffet. They looked at the tense little scene, the scattered newspapers, Mehmet with his cell phone half-raised.
“What is it?” Judy asked.
A long, disjointed explanation followed.
“It’s not the end of the world,” Lincoln said. “Tomorrow’s event can still take place. We just won’t be able to carry it live.”
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