Deep State

by Walter Jon Williams

  No patriotic Turk would want to see demonstrators scrawling over Atatürk’s monument.

  Cards were laid out in colorful patterns, in messages, stuck in the windowsills of the office buildings that overlooked the square. Cards were stood on end and stacked atop one another in towers. Scarves were draped over the statues, hung from neighboring buildings, the antennae of the cars trapped in the massive traffic jam caused by the demonstration.

  A man in a shabby jacket who earned his living selling pigeon feed off a table made of a cardboard box was so covered in scarves that he looked like the most colorful mummy in the world.

  Rafet finally shoved his way through the crowd, jumped up on the monument’s foundation, and began to bang his drum. He led the crowd through the usual series of marches and patriotic songs.

  “This is the biggest crowd yet!” Lincoln said, and raised a clenched fist into the air.

  Only a few days, Dagmar remembered, after the last demo had been shot to bits. The Turks were tough.

  The Skunk Works drones showed a few police hanging a respectful distance from the crowd, none of a mind to interfere. The crowd so outnumbered them that they had opted for prudence, even if they were armed and the crowd was not.

  Three men in suits and ties jumped up next to Rafet. They pulled scarves off their faces and began to harangue the crowd. Cameras jumped and focused on them.

  “Who are these guys?” Dagmar demanded.

  Ismet listened for a moment.

  “Politicians,” he said. “The one in the middle is a guy named Erez—used to be mayor until the generals fired him and banned his party. I didn’t catch the other names.”

  The politicians shouted on, mostly inaudible. The crowd cheered them anyway.

  “Someone’s trying to hijack our revolution,” Helmuth said. He sounded offended.

  “That’s supposed to happen,” Lincoln said. “It’s not our revolution anyway.”

  Tuna’s video glasses began to pan wildly overhead.

  “Police drone,” he said in English. “It’s up on the north side, moving east.”

  Lloyd began giving orders to his air force. He was so busy with this that he lost track of the images coming in from the Skunk Works drones, and when he caught up he gave a shout.

  “Police convoy coming up from Kizilay!” he said. “Another forming in the Dikmen police complex!”

  Dagmar spoke directly to Tuna and Rafet.

  “Time to disperse,” she said. “Police are coming from the south.”

  The two acknowledged. Lloyd sent the same message to the camera teams.

  Tuna and Rafet raised bullhorns and told everyone to go home. Greeting cards fluttered silver in the air, shimmering like the leaves of olive trees.

  For the next few minutes Dagmar was diverted by the entertaining sight of one of the Skunk Works wedges trying to bring down the police drone. The pilot kept missing, and the police drone kept turning its lazy circles undisturbed, like a blind man wandering in a bullring. Finally the wedge managed to clip its target’s tail, and presumably the police drone went down—it was impossible to know for certain, because the video feed from the Skunk Works craft went black at the instant of the crash.

  Lloyd told the operator to trigger the sequence that would send the drone navigating via GPS to its launch point. They would have to hope for the best.

  Dagmar turned back to the screen that was still showing Tuna’s point of view. Tuna was looking down at his cell phone and yanking it apart. He pulled out the SIM chip, snapped it in half, and let it fall onto the road. Then he looked up.

  He was traveling uphill on a narrow lane between shops and office buildings. Dagmar caught a glimpse of a store called Toys Aras, its façade covered with cavorting Disney characters. How many trademark violations, she wondered, could be packed into a single image?

  There were still a large number of the demonstrators walking along with Tuna, but they were rapidly transforming themselves into ordinary, unremarkable people. Hats and scarves were removed. Leftover greeting cards were being stashed atop piles of merchandise or handed to bystanders. Some of the women who, like pious Muslims, had attended the demo with their hair hidden now uncovered to reveal themselves as modern businesswomen in Nikes and designer sunglasses, with BlackBerry earpieces glittering from beneath their hair. Scarves were set decorating the street stalls.

  The narrow street came out on a major artery, and Tuna’s long legs carried him along, dodging other pedestrians. A minibus with a blue body and tan roof came into sight, and Tuna flagged it down. A door on the right flank opened with a hiss of compressed air, and Tuna stepped aboard.

  The minibus was a dolmuş, a kind of cross between a bus and taxi. Dolmuş was a word that literally meant “stuffed,” as in grape leaves, but this minibus was only moderately full, with maybe fifteen people crammed into spaces meant for twelve. Tuna was one of those without a seat.

  There was no room for Tuna to approach the front of the bus, so other passengers passed his five-lira note to the driver and then carried his change back. From the little Dagmar could see over the heads of the passengers, it seemed as if the driver was very confident in his ability to drive, smoke, make change, and chat on his phone all at the same time.

  The dolmuş traveled along at a fine clip until it ran into a jam of vehicles. Horns sounded in vexation. The driver threw up his hands and engaged in what seemed to be a long monologue in which his grievances against the universe were discussed at length.

  The creeping pace taxed the patience of a number of the passengers, who left in a clump. Tuna found a seat that had just been vacated. It was upholstered in an unhealthy-seeming aquamarine inflamed by abstract orange-red patterns.

  “Well,” he ventured to mutter, in English, “it looks like this may take a little while.”

  Dagmar was surprised that she could still see his video. She would have thought that there would be a hill or something else interfering with the line of sight between Tuna and the receivers that Lincoln had emplaced back in the summer.

  The Hot Koans were really doing their job.

  “Looks like we’ve lost the drone,” Lloyd said. “If it was coming back, it would have arrived by now.”

  “Any idea where it went?” Richard asked.

  “None. Probably landed on a roof somewhere. We should hope it got completely smashed up.”

  An instant message appeared on Dagmar’s computer; she checked to find that the camera team was now in the safe house. In another minute, she received a text that Rafet was approaching the Haci Bayram Mosque, where he would destroy his cell phone and then attend the next service. Only Tuna was still at large.

  She looked up at Tuna’s feed and felt her heart sink. Her hands clamped on the arms of her chair.

  The minibus had stopped, and a tall paramilitary had just stepped aboard. He carried an Uzi submachine gun around his neck, and his eyes looked at the passengers insolently from beneath the brim of his baseball cap.

  Roadblock, Dagmar thought. Gray Wolves. Oh shit.

  The Wolf was in his late teens, with a mustache and a ring glittering in one ear. He’d stuck a huge saw-toothed knife in his belt, not bothering with a sheath. By his appearance he was young and inexperienced and arrogant and stupid, and Dagmar knew at once that he was going to be trouble.

  The Wolf rapped out commands. Dagmar jumped as Ismet’s voice came close to her ear.

  “He’s asking for identification.”

  The video image panned down to Tuna’s big hands, reaching into his jacket for his ID. Then the image panned up again.

  The Gray Wolf checked the two passengers at the front of the bus, both elderly men, then moved to a middle-aged woman sitting with a pair of shopping bags on her lap. She reached into her handbag for her identification and knocked one of her shopping bags to the floor. She gave a cry and bent down to retrieve her groceries.

  The Wolf yelled at her to get back into her seat and show her ID. He prodded her with the barrel
of his gun, and she slid back into her seat with a sob of terror.

  Tomatoes rolled on the floor of the bus.

  The woman reached for her handbag with shaking hands and knocked it to the floor. She reached for it, then drew her hand back, afraid of the gun, afraid of doing the wrong thing.

  Suddenly one of the elderly men was standing and yelling at the Wolf.

  “He asks the Wolf to have some respect,” Ismet said.

  The Gray Wolf was clearly telling the old man to shut up. The old man stepped into the narrow aisle and approached the Wolf.

  “He says he’s not afraid,” Ismet said. “He says he fought for the fatherland.”

  The Gray Wolf continued to shout back. Ismet didn’t bother to translate.

  The old man pounded his thin chest with a fist.

  “He says he was with the navy in ’74,” Ismet said. “He says he helped to land the army on Cyprus.”

  The boy’s answer was clearly something along the lines of “Who gives a shit?”

  Tuna’s point of view kept moving slightly, as if he was quietly shifting his position before going into action. Dagmar watched in horrified fascination, barely breathing. All she could think of was that everyone in the bus was about to die.

  The Wolf jabbed the old man with his gun. The old man clearly told him to stop. The Wolf poked him again—and the old man, with admirable timing, slapped the gun away.

  The machine pistol went off and put two rounds into the lady with the groceries. Dagmar gave a cry.

  Arterial blood spattered from the lady’s throat and she began to shriek.

  The Gray Wolf stared.

  The old man shouted out two angry syllables, threw himself on the Gray Wolf, and tried to wrestle the gun away. The boy shoved the old man back into his seat and then brought his gun around and fired more rounds. Blood flew. The old man collapsed into the lap of the second elderly man, who recoiled. The driver, who seemed to have caught a round himself, was shouting.

  The woman with the groceries kept screaming while trying to plug the hole in her neck. Her vegetables rolled around the floor of the bus.

  Dagmar watched as the wide eyes of the Gray Wolf surveyed the situation, as his mind tried to grasp the significance of what had happened.

  Tuna watched as the boy’s mind failed to find anything within itself but the necessity to keep pulling the trigger.

  Tuna charged, of course, but by then it was too late.

  Tears streamed from Dagmar’s eyes as she stared at the blank screen. The video shades continued to record after Tuna had been shot, though the angle showed only boots and the floor. The audio continued to record shots and screams for another fifteen or twenty seconds. Now there were boots marching back and forth, sounds of traffic and distant conversation, the Wolf apparently talking with his teammates.

  Ismet was holding her from behind, crouched down behind her with his warm cheek laid against the side of her head. She wiped tears from her face with the back of her hand.

  “What’s that?” she said. Something was moving in a corner of the frame.

  “Jerrican,” someone said.

  A red plastic container for gasoline. There were flashes of gold, the sound of gurgling.

  “No,” Ismet said, appalled.

  “They’re going to torch it,” Magnus said.

  The flash and explosion ended the transmission. Dagmar hoped the Wolf had been caught in the backblast.

  She tried to speak, failed, tried again.

  “Copies of this have to go out,” she said. “Load it onto every server on the planet.”

  “No,” said Lincoln.

  Dagmar was outraged. She broke free of Ismet’s arms and swung her chair to him.

  “What do you mean, no? This is—”

  “We wait,” Lincoln said. “We wait till the government announces that terrorists have blown up a bus, and then we send out this video to prove what lying bastards they are.”

  So the Lincoln Brigade did what it normally did with video footage of a demonstration: edited it, sent it to reporters and news agencies, put it on Web pages. They began the lengthy business of assembling the augmented reality version of the demo. Dagmar worked numbly, phantom gunshots rattling in her ears.

  At eight P.M. a government minister announced that terrorists, led by Ankara’s former mayor, had blown up a bus in the wake of an illegal demonstration. Erez and a number of his associates were being sought by the police.

  Tuna’s final video was posted on Web sites and sent to news organizations. It went viral very quickly—within hours, Dagmar figured, it would be ubiquitous. A new wanted poster was created for the boy who had shot him.

  After ten thirty, most of the Brigade were sent home with their RAF escorts. Lincoln had a conference with Ismet first, then called Dagmar in.

  He held out the hard drive with the email addresses on it.

  “It’s now or never,” he said. “You need to tell everyone to head for Ankara. It’s time the people took their government back.”

  He followed as Dagmar took the hard drive to her office and invited everyone on the list to come to Ankara and be slaughtered. She unplugged the drive and gave it back to Lincoln.

  “I want a memorial for my friends,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon, but we’ll let everyone know first thing in the morning, so they’ll have time to decide what they’re going to say.”

  He bowed his shaggy head gravely.

  “Whatever you like,” he said.

  The RAF Police escort took Dagmar to her apartment. She nodded to the corporal from the RAF Regiment at the bottom of the stair, then walked up the stair to her own floor.

  “This is bullshit!” Byron’s angry voice boiled out of an open window. “We’re not safe here! Packed in like this, one RPG could kill us all!”

  Consistency, she thought, was certainly Byron’s strong point.

  Ismet opened his door as she passed.

  “I got a pizza on my way home,” he said. “Shall I come over?”

  Ismet, she realized, had lost a roommate as well. Tuna’s belongings were still in the apartment, a reminder of the friend who would never return. Like the Nutella that haunted Dagmar’s fridge, a visitation from Judy that she would never eat but never remove.

  “Give me time to shower,” she said.

  Under the stream of water she tried to scrub away the sweat and sorrow, the mourning and misery. The result was only an increased consciousness of her own wretched failure. She dried her gray hair, put on a new T-shirt and underwear and a pair of khaki shorts. Trailed by the scent of green tea shampoo, she made herself a gin and tonic and sat by the window and tried to make sense of the thoughts that gyred in her head.

  Byron too angry, she thought, Lloyd too calm. Helmuth and Magnus too stoned.

  This wasn’t data; it was just noise. There wasn’t a pattern to be found in it.

  Tuna and Judy too dead, she thought. There was your pattern.

  Ismet knocked and called softly from outside. Dagmar let him in. The cardboard box he carried smelled of garlic and oregano. When the toaster talked to him, he gave a jump, then laughed.

  She rattled her glass at him. “Want a drink?”

  He raised a can of lager. “I brought my own,” he said.

  He put the cardboard box on the kitchen table, and Dagmar brought plates from the cupboard. She freshened her drink and brought it to the table.

  The pizza had been made with feta and chunks of a local sausage that tasted of fennel and goat. It wasn’t entirely awful. Dagmar discovered that she was ravenous and ate her first piece very quickly.

  “We’ll be doing a memorial for Tuna and Judy tomorrow afternoon,” Dagmar said.

  “I won’t be able to attend,” he said. “I’ll be on my way to Ankara.”

  She looked at him in shock, then looked away.

  Of course he’d be going, she thought. The time for the final confrontation had come, the time
when the demonstrators would either take their government back or be crushed in blood, and Ismet was a part of that.

  She’d sent out the orders for everyone else less than an hour before. She didn’t know why she hadn’t realized that Ismet would be included in the next action.

  “I won’t be going across the Green Line this time,” Ismet said in his matter-of-fact way. “They might have my description. So I’ll have to fly to Athens, then to Sofia, and take the train to Istanbul and on to Ankara.”

  “I’ll pack you a lunch,” she said. It was only a practical thing, but it was all she could manage to say. She couldn’t ask the questions that were really in her mind, like Do you think it’s hopeless? Or What are your odds of survival?

  She reached for her drink, and it almost slipped through her grease-stained fingers. She wiped her fingers and the glass with a paper napkin.

  “Bozbeyli knows about us,” she said. “Why hasn’t he told everyone?”

  Ismet reached for another piece of pizza.

  “He must have other plans,” he said.

  “Can we guess what they are?”

  Ismet, mouth full of pizza, gave a jerk of one shoulder, a Turkish way of saying, “I don’t care.”

  She decided that she shouldn’t harass him: he’d had a worse day than she had, and his days weren’t going to get better anytime soon.

  So she asked him if he’d heard from his grandmother and what she’d think of his having an American girlfriend and more about the nomad life on the Anatolian south coast. The change of subject seemed welcome.

  They went to bed and his touch set her skin alight. She pressed herself to him, desperate for the reassurance of his body, the solid businesslike whole of him that she could cling to. Ismet was hers, at least for the next few hours.

  Even through her pleasure she could hear the whisper in her mind, the voice that suggested that she might already be in mourning for him.

  The rioters came in the night, breaking down the wards that Dagmar had so carefully set. Suddenly they were there—bare-chested Indonesian men, rags tied around their heads, hands brandishing machetes or Japanese swords or wavy-edged blades.

  She lunged out of bed screaming and fought her way through the intruders into the living room. Ismet called her name over and over and tried to catch her, but she flailed at him and broke free. The coffee table caught the backs of her knees and she tumbled over, still thrashing at the weapons that menaced her… wheezing for breath, she backed into a corner of the room, hitting and kicking at Ismet when he came too close.