Secondhand Sorcery

They left the RV behind outside Ankara, entering the city in four different nondescript vehicles which parked at four separate sites, each an apartment building with several long-time tenants who happened to be old friends of Mr. Yefimov’s. Nadia and Fatima moved in with their “aunt” Aishat, who had told her landlord several days in advance and agreed to a steep increase in her rent. Nadia had a fresh coat of fake tan and black hair dye; nothing could make Fatima look like much like either of them, thanks to Omar Alvarez’s part-African heritage, but they had official-looking adoption papers ready in case anybody cared. Which nobody did.

They’d already had their measurements taken before they left Moldova. Their new uniforms were ready for them when they arrived, looking fresh and crisp with “Yeni Başlangıç Akademisi” emblems on their jackets. The school didn’t actually exist beyond a buggy website, but they didn’t intend to attract enough interest for anybody to look that up. With the shoes shined and the socks pulled up, they looked sickeningly innocent, and that was the point.

“I can’t pass for family, obviously, but I’ll be just three stories down if you need me, and don’t hesitate to call if you want anything Aishat can’t get you,” Mila told them. “Mr. Yefimov is also available around the clock, though of course you shouldn’t call him unless it’s something urgent.”

“And in the meantime,” Fatima said, “we’ll be doing what?” She glanced over at Aishat, who didn’t look back. Their pretend aunt was a fortysomething veteran of the Soviet Army—and that was about all they knew about her. She looked like she didn’t much care about having two teenage girls underfoot all of a sudden, one way or another.

“You’ll be settling in,” Mila told her. “Making little trips around, familiarizing yourself with the local geography. Nothing more exciting than that for at least the next twenty-four hours, while we’re still gathering intelligence. Feel free to use the television or browse the internet.” She put a funny emphasis on the last three words, which Nadia took to mean that their internet use would be monitored but Mila was too polite to say so.

So they settled in. The transition was jarring, even unnerving; Mila wanted to know where they were at all times, but otherwise they were free to go where and do what they pleased so long as it was not conspicuous or illegal. She even offered to get them concert or theater tickets, if they liked—the Russian government allowed its oprichniki a generous stipend. So had Titus, if it came to that, but the degree of freedom was unheard of. Mila didn’t even expect them to wear masks!

In practice, they still had to stay home during school hours, since teenage girls wandering the streets of Ankara at that time was inherently conspicuous. This meant a lot of time yammering with Fatima, flipping through local TV and picking up the odd bit of vocabulary while Aishat sat indifferently in the corner, playing with her phone. When they got sick of television—which didn’t take long, given that they hardly understood it—they tried the computer.

This was more interesting. Neither of them had much previous experience with the internet; even their Marshall-family-issue phones had only limited texting and game functions, no browsers. Aishat’s computer, which she never seemed to use, promised them vast access to the outside world. But it didn’t quite keep that promise. Hunched over the device together, working out its use by trial and error, Nadia and Fatima soon learned that it was deliberately crippled in several ways.

Most importantly, the device was apparently programmed not to make any parts of a web page that would allow them to type text on a prompt. They tried various search engines; each one’s home page rendered with the little box missing. They eventually learned that they could use the same engines by typing into the bar at the top of the browser, but the restriction was bizarre and often frustrating, because even they knew this was not how things were supposed to work.

“Are they trying to make us mad on purpose?” Fatima demanded. “This is bullshit!”

“Probably they are only making sure we cannot communicate with anybody, and this was the simplest way to do it,” Nadia glumly assessed. “It doesn’t have e-mail, either.”

“What dinosaur uses e-mail anyway?” Fatima huffed. “And I’m not going to go chat on Fidget or whatever, everybody knows that’s just old pedos and little freaks like Ruslan.”

“Well, if you did go there, you couldn’t type anything. They barely know us, we are underage, and they have a lot riding on this operation. Of course they will not trust us with security.”

“Wait, what? Are you defending them now?”

Nadia shrugged. “Only trying to think of what Mila would say, if we asked her.” Mila said a lot of things like that. She could reframe any complaint so you sounded unreasonable for wanting things differently. Nadia had to admit that Mila was probably right at least some of the time, but she had learned to stop asking some kinds of questions.

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Fatima told her in disgust. After a few more minutes of fiddling she got bored and fired up some video game thing on the television. Aishat came and sat down beside her, picking up a second controller without a word, and the two of them were soon zooming around a cartoon racetrack throwing bizarre objects at each other.

Nadia wasn’t ready to give up on the computer just yet. She used the keyboard very slowly, but with a little practice she was able to look things up. It took still more practice to correctly spell “Sartre” and learn that the man himself probably would not have approved of anything Russia was doing here. But then, he was apparently some kind of communist, so there was no guessing what kind of terrible things he would have made excuses for.

From there she went on to other things Mila had told her about: the Treaty of Lausanne, the fate of Turkey’s Greeks, Armenians, and Kurds, the years of violence in the Caucasus, the July-and-August War, the sinkings of the Saratov and Grozny. Every incident linked to a dozen other things, all tied up in the deaths of the Ottoman Empire and the Soviet Union somehow. The Russian or Soviet side was rarely innocent, either. It was hard to say whether Russia’s current war with Turkey was really “justified” or not; could you justify anything that killed so many people?

Would the twenty thousand people currently living in Fatih, including almost all of the few ethnic Greeks left in Turkey, be massacred if it was taken back? Possibly. Did that make it fair to start trouble here in Ankara, to force the Turks to surrender the district? Possibly not. Did fairness even matter in war? Who did Nadia want to win? Was it sensible to expect Mila to be fair and honest with her, when the Coalition had been willing to make deals with someone like Titus? If she didn’t pick any side at all in this fight, was she really guilty of allowing it to continue? How much power did someone like Nadia really have?

She didn’t know. She just didn’t know. So she clicked the X on the browser, and went to see if Fatima and Aishat would let her race too. Let Sartre think what he liked about that; he was dead, and Nadia didn’t have to listen to him.

A few hours after noon they were released onto Ankara’s streets, bare-faced and invisible in their tidy uniforms. Their inability to speak Turkish hardly mattered once Mila gave them a music player and a set of headphones apiece; they could stroll down the sidewalk bobbing their heads and nobody would even try to talk to them. Mila herself kept a discreet distance, walking a few hundred feet behind them in a fashionable woman’s business suit while holding an endless phone conversation in English. They never quite left her sight, and if they looked lost or in need of help she could push a button on her phone and instantly speak directions into their headphones with nobody the wiser.

Their first full day in Ankara—a Friday—they went to the movies, where they watched a silly comedy-drama about a rural Anatolian landowner trying (as far as Nadia could tell) to marry off his daughters. It was still afternoon and the theater was virtually deserted, so they felt free to talk through the whole thing, making fun of the acting and inventing increasingly implausible ‘translations’ of what the characters had just said. By the end of it they were laughing so hard they could barely breathe, and Nadia had almost forgotten why they were in Ankara in the first place. They met up with the boys for dinner at a nice restaurant, where Hamza and Yuri told them of Ruslan’s brave attempt to tend their goal against a small army of local preteen soccer fanatics.

“Final score was eight to two,” Yuri concluded. “Our win. The little bastards thought they could outnumber us, but they weren’t ready for boss-man Hamza’s righteous slide tackle. Knocked down three in one go.” Hamza shook his head, but smiled into his drink.

Fatima was skeptical. “Is that even legal?”

“Who cares? The ‘referee’ was just some random old guy from the park, might have been homeless. He yelled at the kids when they complained, told them to get tough, and started talking about his time in the war. They dropped it. Anyway, nobody got seriously hurt, and we kicked some ass. End of story.”

The fun ended at 2100, when they were gathered together at Mr. Yefimov’s place to discuss strategy. Sergei Yevgenyevich Yefimov was right at the boundary line between middle-aged and elderly. Every time Nadia saw him, he was dressed in a long grey wool coat with matching grey hat, over a grey business suit. He had a mustache and receding hairline almost exactly the same shade, eyes only a touch darker, and did his best to give the appearance of an overwhelming greyness of personality and outlook. Not dreary exactly, but somber, official, and unvarying; Nadia always got the impression that she could have inflated and popped a paper bag right next to his ear, and he would have instantly but without flinching have turned to ask her politely not to do it again. The air of dignity about him could have deflected small arms fire.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he gravely began, “I thank you for your continued willingness to assist in securing the historic Slavic heartland and its periphery against the depredations of Western imperialists and adventurers.” He said it all in one majestic breath, measured and stately, and with no indication that he was addressing a group of teenagers, one of whom still had a bit of ketchup at the corner of his mouth. “Tomorrow we begin operations to relieve pressure on our beleaguered forces at Constantinople. The most meticulous coordination and compliance will be necessary for our success.”

It was really happening. Nadia could hardly believe it. She still wasn’t sure whether she ought to be a part of it or not, but Mr. Yefimov spoke smoothly and with confidence, outlining what must be done and in what order. She could not bring herself even to interrupt him, let alone to run away, to turn herself in as an escaped weapon of war, in a strange city, in a strange country, and to take her chances with other men in suits who might mean no better, while her family suffered the consequences of her betrayal.

Mr. Sartre had written about this, too. She’d read it this afternoon: a girl meets a boy, who tells her she is pretty and puts his hand on hers. She knows his intentions, she knows where it is heading, but to either accept or refuse him would be difficult, so she puts it off. She permits her hand to lie there a while, and his on top of it, as if it were just some object that had nothing to do with her …

Yefimov spoke for fifteen minutes, and made sure they all understood their parts. Nadia agreed to do hers at the same time as the others. The meeting ended, and they went home. Nadia lingered over her prayers until she fell asleep on the carpet, and the morning came too soon.

Even morning was not the end of it, because President Değirmenci—the one Turk in the whole country who absolutely had to be in position for this—had decided to delay his return to the capital for a few hours while he attended further talks about the situation in Istanbul. Nadia should have been relieved, or at least amused by the irony. Instead she was angry. More hours of delay, uncertainty, of … of what? Was it possible to feel regret in advance?

So she paced a hole in the floor, while Fatima, on her fifth cigarette of the morning, yelled at her to settle down and stop freaking out. Aishat got annoyed by their bickering and called for Mila, who told Nadia that she understood how she was feeling until Nadia felt ready to strangle her. Instead she started to hyperventilate, and ran into her room and locked the door so Mila was forced to speak soothingly through it, which muffled her voice.

Lunch came, and she did not eat. Mila, alarmed, made phone calls, and before long Hamza and Yefimov were also standing outside the door, trying and failing to make her talk. Nadia put her pillow over her head, willing the future to go away if she could only shut her eyes tight enough. Gospodi Iisuse Khriste, Syne Bozhiy, pomiluy mya greshnuyu … but she was refusing to help herself. What form could divine mercy take?

At length they took the hinges off the door, and Nadia found herself peeled off the bed so she could look at Yefimov through blurry eyes while he lectured her gravely on the potential consequences of failure. For herself, for her family, for this country, for the men and women in Constantinople, for Russia, for the world. All the while, Mila was beside her, an arm around her, interjecting soothing words.

The deadline saved her. Aziz called to tell them the president’s plane was landing already, the day was wearing on, and they had positions to get to. Nadia was hauled upright and dragged down to the car, too numb to resist. Either she would do her duty for her own ancestral Motherland, Yefimov said, or she would not. Whichever she chose, the rest of the operation would proceed as planned.

There were five sites, to be struck as close to simultaneously as possible. Nadia and Fatima would be taking the General Directorate of Security together. Snowdrop—whose emissor they still hadn’t met—would go for the state-run Turkish Radio and Television station. Ruslan was bound for the enormous tomb of Kemal Ataturk near the city’s center, though not to do anything in particular. Just frighten the tourists, really.

The real work would go to Hamza and Yuri. Rhadamanthus would be rampaging through the ministry district a short distance south of the tomb, taking out the Chiefs of Staff first, moving on to the others as time permitted, and specifically sparing Parliament. They would need somebody left to bargain with after Yuri and Shum-Shum incinerated the president’s palace at Çankaya Köşkü.

It was … audacious. That was the word Yefimov used for it. An audacious plan. Also brutal, and cruel, and Nadia had no idea if whoever survived it would agree to surrender Fatih or simply dig in their heels first. One way or another, they were apparently going to do it. They were already in the car. Everything would begin when they arrived.

They didn’t speak in transit. Nadia sat by one window, Fatima by the other, leaving a vast estate of backseat between them. Now and again Fatima would turn her head and open her mouth to speak, and Nadia would look at her, and she would shut her mouth again, shake her head, and return to looking out the window. Nadia tried to unfocus her eyes, to let the living city turn into a smear of walls and windows that would not care if they were hurt. Fatih had not been half so difficult; nobody had been so cruel as to pretend she had a choice.

But Mila, she noted, was nowhere in sight now. Their only escort for the mission would be their driver, who had a submachine gun wedged into the console between the seats. Nadia had learned to treat men with guns like electric fences. They marked boundaries, and promised to hurt if you got too close, but could be otherwise ignored.

For some reason, one of Mila’s stories came back into Nadia’s mind. She had many stories, or anecdotes, or whatever you wanted to call them. All about smart-sounding things and people proving she was right. One of them was about a prince in India, about to begin a battle against his own family. The prince stopped and asked his charioteer if he was right to kill, or if he should walk away. The charioteer replied by telling him that obedience to principle was more important than anything else, and teaching the prince, right then and there on the battlefield, all about his religious duty to wage war when it was necessary and right. What would this modern ‘charioteer,’ with his clunky gun and his dark suit, tell her if she asked him the same question? Nothing so eloquent, certainly.

Abruptly the car swerved into the parking lot of a small cafe. Across the street Nadia saw a gigantic building, larger than a hotel, at least ten stories of tan brick with reddish-brown accents, draped in huge, bright red Turkish flags. They were here.

“Hey,” Fatima said, reaching across the gulf of upholstered seating between them. “You ready?” Nadia didn’t answer, only opened the door and got out. Fatima followed. “Guess so. All right, I’ll be starting, and if you’re ready, you harmonize. Should work fine. Remember, whatever you’re feeling now, scared or sad or whatever, it all goes away as soon as the familiars come out. So it’s okay, right?”

Yes. That was true. That was something.

The driver was still in the car, rummaging in the glove compartment. He got out—leaving his gun behind—with a little red thing like a thermos, which he gave to Fatima with ludicrous delicacy. He wasn’t any kind of paraphysical agent, only a security hoodlum; the idea of handling that much stored ectoplasm obviously terrified him. Something about the sight made Nadia feel stronger.

“All right, so I’ve got the kitty. All we’re waiting on is the signal.” For twenty or thirty seconds they stood there in silence, two girls holding a thermos in a cafe parking lot. The lot was nearly empty, but probably somebody inside was giving them funny looks. It might not matter. “On second thought, maybe we ought to—“

An electronic squawk came from inside the car, and the driver leaned out to give them a thumbs-up. “Never mind. All right, on three.” She gripped the red plastic container and its white lid tightly. “One, two—“