Deep State

by Walter Jon Williams

  Recorder and notebook. Clearly someone who believed in backup.

  On the whole this was not unlike the last police station, the last interrogation in Hollywood, three years ago.

  Alvarez looked at her.

  “I’d like to begin by saying,” he said, “how sorry the establishment at RAF Akrotiri is at the loss of your colleague. And I want to say that we’re going to make certain that nothing like this happens again.”

  Dagmar held his blue eyes for a moment, then turned away. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

  “You’ll all be moved to new quarters,” Alvarez said. “And you’ll be under constant police guard as long as you remain on Cyprus.”

  Dagmar nodded. As she looked down she saw the display on the police lieutenant’s recorder and saw that it was automatically transcribing the words, little black letters crawling like ants across the glowing screen.

  “Miss Briana,” said the lieutenant, “my name is Vaughan.”

  Vaughan was straw haired and lanky, dark eyed, with a trace of Devon in his voice. He was young, twenty-two or -three. Dagmar nodded at him.

  “I’d like to know, miss,” Vaughan said, “if you got a good look at the killers.”

  “Killers?” Dagmar looked up in surprise. “There was more than one?”

  “Other witnesses saw at least two.”

  “I saw just one.” She called the face back to her mind, then shook her head.

  “I only saw him for a second,” she said. “He had dark hair and a mustache. He looked like half the men on this island.”

  “Tall? Short?”

  Dagmar thought for a moment. “A little shorter than me. Average for a Turk, maybe.”

  “How old?”

  “Thirty?” she asked herself. “Thirty-five? Not young.”

  Vaughan looked at his notes.

  “Did you by any chance move your bed to an unusual angle in your bedroom?”

  Both Lincoln and Alvarez were surprised by the question.

  “Yes,” Dagmar said. “I did.”

  Vaughan nodded. “Thank you, miss,” he said. “We were trying to figure out why the assassins would move your furniture.” He looked up from the notebook. “Why do you have your bed like that, by the way?”

  “I—” Dagmar started, then shook her head. “It keeps the bad dreams away,” she said.

  Lincoln and Alvarez were at first surprised, then seemed a little uncomfortable with their new knowledge. Vaughan just gave a brisk nod and jotted briefly in his notebook.

  “That makes perfect sense, miss,” he said. “Thank you.”

  Vaughan asked for Dagmar’s movements on the night, and she provided them.

  Lincoln asked if she’d told anyone outside of the Brigade where she lived. She said she hadn’t. While Vaughan was jotting this down, Lincoln spoke up.

  “And the action yesterday,” he said. “Who knew its location?”

  “You already know the answer,” Dagmar said. “You and me and Ismet. And though the camera teams were staying in Salihi, they might have had a good idea they were going to Izmir next.”

  “You didn’t tell anyone else?”

  “Not till I sent orders to the camera teams.”

  “Right.” Lincoln rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “I suppose that’s all, for now.”

  But Dagmar had her own question ready. She looked at Alvarez.

  “How did the killers get on the base? You’ve got checkpoints, patrols…” She waved an arm seaward. “Ships.”

  Vaughan delicately chewed his lower lip.

  “It’s a very large perimeter, I’m afraid,” he said. “It’s difficult to guard it all. They could have gone under or over the fence; they might have come in by small boat.” He gave a sigh. “They might have faked some ID. Or the ID may have been real—there are thousands of local civilians who work here at the aerodrome.” Determination crossed his features. “At least we can hope that they won’t escape.”

  Yes, Dagmar thought. Let’s hope.

  When she stood to leave, Lincoln rose and joined her. He put a hand on her arm before she could reach for the doorknob.

  “We’ve got to tell them,” Lincoln said.

  “I’ll do it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. He released her arm and she opened the door and went into the hallway where the Brigade waited. Helmuth and Magnus, she saw, had returned from Limassol and joined the others.

  They all looked at her, and suddenly Dagmar couldn’t say a word. She could barely look at them. Lincoln waited barely two seconds before he spoke himself.

  “Wordz,” Lincoln said, “has been murdered. Briana was shot at but got away.”

  Dagmar saw them turn to her in shock. Her eyes skittered away from theirs.

  “The killers knew exactly where to go,” Lincoln added, “and that indicates a very dangerous security breach. So in the course of the next few hours, we’re going to be asking you some very serious questions, and I would appreciate truthful answers.”

  A moment of clarity descended on Dagmar. Someone had pinpointed her, had pointed out her apartment to the assassins. Had set her up, and Judy as well, to be murdered.

  She rather doubted that person was going to start telling the truth about it now.

  Lincoln, Alvarez, and Vaughan conducted the interrogations. Those who weren’t being interviewed were given police escorts to their apartments, to pack their belongings and carry them away. Dagmar didn’t think she could face the crime scene, so she stayed in the police HQ while two very kind policewomen volunteered to get her things.

  After the interrogations were over, the Brigade was carried in police vehicles to the ops center, where without sleep and without cheer, smelling of unwashed bodies and uncertainty, they attempted to do their normal day’s work. The hallway to the bathroom was full of personal possessions fetched from their apartments: their personal electronics were stored in metal lockers outside the secure area.

  The Brigade stared dully at the screens as they caught up on the news.

  The Izmir slaughter had outraged the Turkish nation—the government story had been unconvincing even before it had been shown to be an absurd lie, and the videos and pictures of the massacres were all too available to anyone with access to a computer or to foreign television. Angry posts had appeared on political Web sites, pictures of the dead on lampposts and street corners, copies of the wanted posters everywhere. The junta had failed entirely to keep ahead of the story.

  A massive demonstration had spontaneously organized in the city of Konya, where Anatolia’s center of conservative Islam was marked by a green-tiled conical tower that stood above the elaborate tomb of Mevlana, the great poet who had founded the Whirling Dervishes. Lincoln and Dagmar had avoided setting any actions in Konya in order to avoid accusations of being religious reactionaries. But the city’s residents had managed to mobilize themselves, and it was a vast, angry stream of thousands that circled the city’s brown stone Alaeddin Mosque, stopping traffic on the semicircular boulevard and filling the mosque’s shady park, shouting slogans and singing patriotic songs. They carried stuffed animals and boxes of Turkish delight, memorials to those who had died two days before.

  Lincoln and Dagmar had planned the first series of hit-and-run demos to show the population that it was safe to defy the government. Ironically, it was the demonstration where people were killed that had outraged the people to the point where they were organizing themselves into large actions.

  It took at least a couple hours for the police to work up the nerve or gather the reinforcements to deal with the demo, and when they charged the demonstrators they were met with a storm of rocks, bottles, and other improvised weapons. Flowers of pepper gas blossomed among the trees of the park. There was resistance—videos had actually been uploaded by people sitting in jail cells, people whose phones had not yet been confiscated. Dagmar guessed that a few hundred people, at least, were clubbed to the ground and arrested or—if they were lucky
—carried in handcuffs to a hospital.

  Most of the protestors seemed to have simply found an exit once things got dangerous. They were all networked—only a few would have had to find an actual way out and alerted the rest by phone or electronic text.

  The demonstrators didn’t have the capability to upload their images real-time, so Dagmar had to search online sources for videos that had been posted hours after the event and try to arrange them in some kind of chronology. Ismet and Lloyd had to translate all the dialogue. All the cumbersome difficulty only added to the frustrations of the day.

  Eventually the videos were cataloged and a narrative superimposed on the action. The narrative had to do with freedom-loving resisters in pitched combat with faceless totalitarians and may have possessed only a tangential resemblance to reality—for starters, Dagmar had no idea whether the demonstrators, taken as a whole, were any more committed to democracy than the current regime or would, if given power, set up an equally authoritarian state but with a different agenda. Yet her narrative would serve for present purposes, and the better-quality videos were sent out to the usual media outlets, while the rest were duplicated and catalogued on Web sites hosted throughout the world.

  Dagmar worked amid a leaden cloud of despair. It was not just that Judy had been murdered; it was not just that Dagmar worked in a room with someone who had betrayed her; it was not merely that her entire project was now ringed with violence—it was the certain knowledge that her own nerves were not up to coping with any of this.

  She could sense panic fluttering in her heart. Sour-scented sweat gathered in the hollow of her throat. Phantom movements in her peripheral vision seemed forever on the verge of resolving into images of Indonesian rioters armed with cleavers, Jakarta police with shotguns, thick-necked assassins from the Russian Maffya. Her mind seemed on the verge of exploding in a bubble of fire, just as the Ford had exploded on that cool Los Angeles night three years before.

  Somehow the nightmare did not manifest. Somehow she managed to do her work, think her thoughts, interact with her posse. Somehow she kept herself from crumbling.

  Lincoln had spent the morning in his office, talking on the phone or sending encrypted messages to his superiors. He came out at midafternoon, just as Dagmar figured that Rafet and Tuna were landing at the Ankara airport. She was working the Gmail accounts she shared with them, to tell them that Judy had been targeted by assassins.

  “Traitor may have given names, dates, and descriptions to the authorities,” she wrote. “Make certain you’re not under observation and proceed with caution.”

  She’d argued for canceling the action entirely. Lincoln had overruled her.

  “Excuse me, everybody,” Lincoln called. The tapping of keyboards ceased; faces turned to Lincoln. Even Atatürk seemed to be paying attention.

  “We’ve got new rules,” Lincoln said. “For the rest of our time here, you will be escorted and guarded by RAF Police or other military personnel. You will not travel without a guard—if for some reason a guard isn’t available to take you somewhere, you are to stay where you are, and call for assistance at a number I’ll give you.

  “You will no longer have access to your own cars. We don’t want anyone putting a bomb under one of them. If you need a ride somewhere, one of your guards will drive you.

  “No one will be leaving RAF Akrotiri for any purposes whatever, save as our mission requires.” He looked at Helmuth. “No more barhopping in Limassol, I’m afraid.”

  Helmuth looked as if he was going to comment, then shrugged.

  Maybe he figured he could amuse himself by corrupting his bodyguards.

  “You are all being moved to a single apartment block,” Lincoln said, “where you will be under guard twenty-four hours per day. You will be free to move around the aerodrome, provided you have proper escort.”

  Byron raised a hand.

  “When I took on this job,” he said, “I didn’t agree to be shot at.”

  “You haven’t been.”

  Byron reddened. His pinched face turned resentful.

  “I’ve got a family waiting for me in the States,” he said. “I’m not going to risk coming home in a box.”

  “Follow instructions,” Lincoln said, “and that won’t happen.”

  Angry Man banged a fist on his desk.

  “This isn’t in my contract!” he said.

  “I think that you’ll find that it is,” Lincoln said. “If you like, we can go into my office and look at it together.”

  Byron had turned a brilliant scarlet. His eyes seemed ready to pop from his head. Dagmar wondered if he was going to have a stroke.

  “Fuck that!” Byron said. “You can’t stop me from leaving!”

  Lincoln considered this for half a second.

  “I think that perhaps I can. And in any case I have legal options—there’s a substantial financial penalty if you walk off the job, as I’m sure you know.”

  Byron glared but had no answer. Lincoln turned to Dagmar.

  “Briana,” he said, “can I see you in my office?”

  Dagmar gave Byron what was meant to be a sympathetic look, then followed Lincoln into his office. The room smelled of stale coffee.

  “Close the door, please.”

  Lincoln sank into his Aeron chair as Dagmar shut the door. She took her own seat and watched as Lincoln took off his metal-rimmed shades, closed his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “I’m in charge of quartering you all,” he said, “and I thought I’d ask what kind of arrangements you want. I could put you in an apartment by yourself, but I don’t know if you’d be comfortable living alone.”

  “Put me in with Ismet,” Dagmar said.

  Lincoln lowered his hand and opened his eyes. The blue irises seemed washed out, and his lower lids sagged down his cheeks, revealing crescents of red flesh.

  “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” he said.

  Dagmar sighed. “Oh, Lincoln,” she said. “Is it that I’ll be living openly with a guy, or—”

  “No,” Lincoln said. “Nothing like that.” He reached for his glasses and adjusted them over his temples.

  “It has occurred to you,” he said, “that it was one of our own group who set you up to be killed?”

  She looked at him levelly. “Yes,” she said. “That thought had crossed my mind.”

  He nodded.

  “I take it,” she said, “that no one rushed to confess.”

  “It’s possible the fault might lie somewhere else,” Lincoln said. “Someone on the British side. The people who quartered you in the first place, for instance. Someone in the base commander’s office. None of them should have known who you actually were, but there might have been some talk, or a document left out of the safe at the wrong time.”

  “Good luck proving that,” Dagmar said.

  “It turns out there’s a polygraph on the base,” Lincoln said. “To deal with security issues, and to vet the civilian workers.” His mouth quirked. “I’m kind of surprised. The Brits—and Europeans generally—tend to think of polygraph evidence as voodoo.”

  “Do you?” she asked.

  He gave a silent snarl. “Sometimes voodoo works.”

  “I thought polygraph evidence wasn’t admissible in court.”

  “We’re not going to take the person to court,” Lincoln said savagely. “Or if we do, it’ll be a very private court, which will reach a very private judgment.”

  “Well,” Dagmar said. “Tomorrow the polygraph guy will likely find out something. But tonight I’d like to sleep with Ismet.”

  “Dagmar,” Lincoln said. “Ismet is a suspect.”

  She was exasperated. “I don’t think he—”

  “His mission cratered,” Lincoln said. “He went missing for hours, completely out of contact. He never called in—never even sent a text message. He said he destroyed the SIM card on his phone, but we don’t know that.”

  Indignation seethed in her blood. “He was pinned do
wn!”

  “He could have been captured.” Insistently. “He could have been threatened with torture and turned.”

  Dagmar spoke with icy logic. “He flew here the very next day. He didn’t have time to—”

  “When you turn someone,” Lincoln said, “you get him back to his normal life as soon as possible, before he has a chance to reconsider and before anyone misses him.”

  Dagmar’s mind whirled. “That is absurd,” she said.

  Lincoln shrugged. “Maybe,” he said.

  “The killers!” Dagmar said. “Are you saying that the assassination was set up after Ismet was turned—if he was, I mean? In less than thirty hours? I’m not the professional here, but I’d imagine those sorts of ops require a little more planning time.”

  Lincoln gave a controlled nod.

  “Normally,” he conceded. “Unless you’ve got the team already prepped and they just need a location and an order to go.” He gave an uneasy shrug. “No lack of nationalist fanatics with guns over on Turkish Cyprus.”

  “It still doesn’t sound very likely. Not if they have to plan to get through a secure perimeter.”

  His tone turned savage. He made a cutting gesture with one arm.

  “It doesn’t matter what’s likely. It only matters what’s possible. I’ve got to take every possibility into account!” He spread his hands. “Otherwise, we’re wrecked.”

  Dagmar considered this.

  “Aren’t we wrecked anyway?” she asked. “This operation is no longer covert. Bozbeyli can reveal what he knows whenever he wants, and show that all the demonstrators are nothing but foreign puppets. And instead, he decides to kill us.” She waved a hand. “Why is that?”

  “I…” Lincoln hesitated. “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe we’d better start trying to work that out.”

  “I would like to do that—” Lincoln picked up papers from his desk and waved them. “But I keep being distracted by mundane tasks, such as the necessity of finding places for you all to sleep!” He dropped his hand and the papers to the desk with a thud. Then he sighed, shook his head, and lowered his voice.