Walter Williams - Deep State

But if that was the case, she thought, then so was love. So was desire. So was lying on this magic earth and rising very lustful, to the ranting dismay of medieval theologians.

She let the landscape speak to her. She turned in Ismet’s arms and began to kiss him.

“Very nice.” This time it was his turn to say it.

She kissed his chin. Surf boiled up from the heart of the sea.

“Let’s take a walk, then,” she said. She took his hand and led him down the beach, intent on behaving like the other couples, swinging their clasped hands and playing tag with the sea.

And-in Dagmar’s case, anyway-trying to ignore the palpable sense of doom that lurked in the back of her skull.

They walked. They kissed. They let the sea stream over their toes. They looked at shells and rocks and some jellyfish tossed on the shore, deflated domes glistening crumpled on the stones like empty plastic bags.

They went up to Kouklia and looked at what remained of Aphrodite’s temple-there wasn’t much left, not since someone in the Middle Ages had built a sugar works on it.

By the time Ismet and Dagmar returned to Akrotiri, Tuna had come across from the Turkish side of the island and was delivering his report to Lincoln. There were a number of contacts referred to by code names, and even Dagmar didn’t know who they were. It made the whole business more opaque than she would have liked. And the whole time she was listening to the report, she was thinking about dragging Ismet off to bed.

Which she finally accomplished at twilight, leading him by the hand to her apartment, where she was pleased to hear the sound of the shower, presumably with Judy in it. Dagmar was happy about this coincidence-it avoided the awkward scene in which Dagmar and Ismet were forced to chat up Judy for an indeterminate period of time, pretending all was normal when all they really wanted to do was shag.

Best to postpone the awkwardness to the next morning, when Ismet’s turning up at the breakfast table would explain everything.

She took Ismet straight to the bedroom, then closed the door behind her. He was watching her with what seemed to be extreme interest.

“Why do you have your bed turned at an angle?” he asked.

She shrugged: too long to explain. “I’m an angular kind of person,” she said.

Dagmar turned off the light. Ismet was outlined by the yellow streetlight seeping through a chink in the curtains. His glasses seemed to glow, like the eyes of a cartoon villain. Dagmar stepped closer, put her arms around him, and began to kiss him. He responded with enthusiasm. Myrrh swam through her senses. His glasses mashed her cheek. She took them off, along with everything else he was wearing. He was preposterously erect, and she was flattered by this diverting evidence of his desire.

A metaphorically apt jet roared along Akrotiri’s long runway and hurled itself into the sky. The windowpane trembled to its acceleration.

Suddenly impatient, she tore off her own clothes and composed herself on the bed. Unable to judge the irregular angle of the bed in the dark, he barked his knees on the frame, then lay by her side. She kissed him again. His flesh warmed hers; his touch lit up her nerves. He shivered as she licked the sensitive flesh of his throat. She began to remember, after this long hiatus, what this sex thing was all about.

Ismet turned out to be something of a technician. He offered experimental caresses, observed her closely, then either increased his efforts or went on to something else. Five minutes of this and Dagmar felt her body on the verge of dissolving into magma.

Dagmar took a breath and decided to let the Wanassa, the Queen, take over.

Which famous sixties spy are you? The old Internet quiz came to Dagmar’s mind as she lay curled on her bed, with Ismet sleeping in the fetal position inside her arc, his pale body outlined by the streetlight outside. The sheet was rucked up under them, tangled about their feet. They were two commas, side by side on crumpled paper.

Not spy, she corrected mentally. Special ops.

It wasn’t like she’d encountered sixties operatives on their first go-around. She’d been born over twenty years after the first Bond film. But she’d seen all the films and read all the books, as homework for the Stunrunner game-and the other spies she’d encountered here or there on DVD or late-night cable, and in many cases read the books that had inspired them. The sixties interested her, as the decade when everything that hadn’t gone right had gone so horribly wrong.

Ismet wasn’t James Bond-he lacked Bond’s glamor and gadgets. He didn’t have John Steed’s brolly or wardrobe. Briefly she considered Quiller-Ismet possessed something like Quiller’s omnicompetence, but ultimately he lacked, so far as she knew, his tragic spirit.

She considered and dismissed the Man from U.N.C.L.E. Thoughts of the Man from O.R.G.Y. made her smile and impelled her to kiss Ismet’s shoulder. She would have to subject Ismet to more testing before she could report on that hypothesis.

She mentally paged through John le Carre’s works. Ismet was too young to be George Smiley and furthermore had never been miserably married to some bitch-queen of an upper-class vampire. She wondered if Ismet could be any of the other characters at le Carre’s Circus, but she couldn’t remember enough about any of them. (There was a Hungarian named Esterhase, right?)

And then she recalled Deighton’s nameless spy from The Ipcress File. That role seemed to fit Ismet better: quiet, unassuming, competent, and rather exciting once he took his glasses off.

Well then. Perhaps Ismet should get Ipcress as a new code name.

Ismet shifted in his sleep, rolling onto his back. Dagmar put an arm across his chest and rested her head on his shoulder. One arm came around her, held her close.

She breathed in the scent of him, myrrh and sweat, breath and sex, and closed her eyes, content to be in the circuit of her lover’s arms.

Ismet left after breakfast to bathe and change clothes, leaving Dagmar and Judy across the table with its litter of teacups, its plates of goat cheese, olives, bread, fruit, and Judy’s jar of Nutella. Judy looked after the departing Ismet, then turned to Dagmar.

“I wasn’t entirely surprised,” she said.

“You probably heard us,” Dagmar said.

“Not me. Slept like a rock.” She carefully spread Nutella onto a piece of bread. “Still, I’m a little envious.”

“No luck with Rafet?”

“I can’t seem to ever find him,” Judy said. “He’s either over across the Green Line doing training, or in conference with Lincoln or with Alparslan the government guy, or working out in the gym, or doing tai chi-I guess it’s tai chi-in his backyard. And now he’s off to… to wherever the next target is.”

“No ecstatic drumming?”

She looked forlorn. “No ecstacy of any sort, unfortunately.”

Dagmar was tempted once again to remind Judy that they were on an air base loaded with single men, but the thought was interrupted by total surprise at what Judy said next.

“I guess you’re just lucky,” Judy said, half-yawning as she stretched her tattooed arms out wide, “that you’ve got your two men.”

“Two?” Dagmar said, too startled to manage more than the single syllable.

“Ismet and Lincoln,” Judy said.

Dagmar barked out an astonished laugh. “You think I’m involved with Lincoln?” she said.

Judy stuck a finger inside her spectacles and wiped sleep from her eyes.

“Not sexually,” she said. “But-you know-it’s clear that you’ve got a special relationship with him.”

Dagmar was alarmed. She wondered if everyone was thinking this.

“He’s the guy I work for!” she said.

“He’s a smart, charming older man,” Judy said. “And you’re someone in need of a father.” She cocked her head, considering. “I’m a bit attracted to him myself on that account, my own dad being absent most of my life.”