Walter Williams - Deep State

Dagmar hadn’t been able to continue her brief flirtation with Ismet during the group dinner of the previous night, with everyone talking at once and passing mezes and drinks back and forth-and afterward she’d been too tired, her system having crashed after too many early mornings, too many nights on the go, and always worried that she, her friends, her charges, could end up on the points of bayonets…

And besides, she’d been having second thoughts. She had a bad history with office romance.

Her last lover, an actor she’d hired for one of her projects, had (1) turned out to be married and (2) been savagely murdered and, furthermore, had been killed on her account. That was two reasons for feeling guilty and miserable-more if you considered the wife.

He hadn’t been the last to die, either.

In the aftermath Dagmar had decided that the only remaining morally defensible position was to forget the world of relationships and concentrate on work. Which she had, for three years.

But still, she was planning a week’s vacation after the live event, the first vacation since the one that had gone so disastrously wrong in Jakarta. And the week could be a lot more fun with someone else along.

“Where do you actually live?” she asked.

He nodded across the water. “The Asia side, in Uskudar. I share an apartment with a colleague.”

“So you take the ferry every day?”

He made an equivocal gesture. “The ferry, the train, aircraft… I travel all over the place. I rent a single room in Ankara because we lobby the government, but I may have to give it up. The generals have their own structures in place, and a very firm idea of which interests they have to placate. They don’t respond to our efforts.” He tossed his head back. “Call me another dissatisfied customer of the regime.”

Richard stuck his head out of the van.

“Look at this! It’s beautiful!”

She turned and stepped up into the van and duckwalked to a better view, leaving the world of reverie for the more immediate sphere of video. The multiple feeds were indeed beautiful, digital icons of the packed tour boats hissing through the water, flags snapping, old Ottoman mansions lining the shores, most of them beautifully restored and probably worth millions, gamers bent over their puzzles, the sharp wind ruffling their hair… astern loomed the towers of the Bosphorus Bridge, the roadway suspended by a web of sun-etched cable. Dagmar’s heart leaped.

“Are those dolphins?” she cried.

“Yes.” Ismet peered into the van, shading his eyes with a hand.

“ ‘That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.’ ” Quoting Yeats.

Ismet looked at her curiously. “Did you say gong?”

Dagmar smiled.

“Yes,” she said. “I did. But Yeats said it first.”

They were back to the hotel in time for lunch. Richard would return his borrowed electric gear and everyone would have the afternoon off, after which they’d drive over the Golden Horn to a farewell dinner with the players, held in an enormous hotel ballroom. After that the players would go to a specially arranged screening of Stunrunner, which had opened worldwide the previous night, while the puppetmasters-who had already seen the movie dozens of times, on discs that came complete with their very own nondisclosure agreements and prepaid FedEx return envelopes-would go with the techs to the VIP suite in a Beyolu club, where the celebration would go on until exhaustion overtook them all-in Dagmar’s case, most likely before midnight.

Lunch, though, was not a planned event. Dagmar thought she might see if Ismet might want to join her for a midday snack at one of the cafes up the street.

But first she ran into Lincoln in the lobby of the hotel. He’d watched the game finale on his laptop, and when she walked through the door he rose to give her a rib-shattering embrace.

“Brilliant!” he said. “Absolutely brilliant!”

“Thank you,” she said. She felt as if her lungs had just been crushed.

He released her and stepped back. Dagmar gasped in oxygen.

“Dagmar,” Lincoln said. “Could I see you privately sometime this afternoon?”

“Sure.”

She cast a glance over her shoulder, where Richard, Tuna, and a half-dozen techs were trooping into the hotel. Cameras and tripods were tucked under their arms. Cables dragged empty metal sockets across the brown tile of the hotel foyer. Ismet was visible through the front window, talking on his phone.

“After lunch?” she suggested hopefully.

He nodded. “Call me when you have a moment. I’ll probably be somewhere in the hotel.” He looked up at the party of techs. “Can I help you with anything?”

Dagmar let Richard and the technicians sort out the gear, with Lincoln’s help. She took a turn around the lobby, waiting for Ismet to finish his conversation. Standing by herself, she felt a sudden rush of triumph surge through her veins, the heat of victory racing through a brain already a bit dazzled by its own ingenuity. Game brilliant, cool, and over; military thugs confounded; vacation in sight; nothing to do but celebrate.

Optimism seized her. She decided that she would ask Ismet to lunch, spend the night dancing with him in the Beyolu club, maybe drag him off to bed-assuming of course that she didn’t collapse first out of sheer exhaustion.

Maybe he’d be able to beg off from the week’s work of selling electric switches, head south with her to Antalya, spend a week dividing their time between lounging on the beach and having massively satisfying sex in a darkened hotel room…

Ismet finished his call and came into the lobby, neatly avoiding the electronic gear now being sorted into piles. He came to Dagmar and said, “I’m afraid I’ve got to leave.”

“Is something wrong?”

“My sister called.” He gestured with his right hand at the phone held in his left. “My grandma fell and had to go to the hospital.”

“Oh no!” Dagmar felt her carnal dreams spin down the drain even as her face and voice made the proper responses. “Is she badly hurt?”

“Broken arm. But she’s very frail and…” He hesitated. “Well, she doesn’t do well in settings like a hospital. She was raised in a nomad family, and had an arranged marriage to my grandfather, who was from the city…” Ismet gave an apologetic smile. “Anyway, I should go translate between her and the modern world.”

Dagmar’s mind swam with questions that she had never before asked any human being: Nomad? Your grandmother’s a nomad? What kind of nomad? Do you still have nomads in your family?

“If you can come to the dinner tonight,” Dagmar said, “or the party afterward, please feel free to join us.”

He seemed agreeable.

“If I can,” he said. “But I should say good-bye now.”

She hugged him and sensed his surprise at the gesture. He had an agreeable scent, a blend of Eastern spices, with a faint undertone of myrrh…

He returned her hug, gently, then went to the others and said his good-byes. Dagmar, aware of a host of possibilities silently drifting away, carried on a tide toward the Dardanelles, turned to Lincoln.

“You know,” she said, “we might as well have that conversation now.”

Lincoln had a corner room on the top floor of the hotel, with a wide bed, a rococo desk with an Internet portal, and broad windows that displayed spectacular views of the Blue Mosque. Another wall featured a dormer window complete with a window seat, and beyond the shambling bulk of Hagia Sofia.

“Nice,” Dagmar said, going to the broad window just as the muezzin began his call. He was echoed almost instantly by the muezzin in the small mosque behind the hotel, the one down by the old Byzantine gate, and then by calls from other small mosques in the area.