Deep State

by Walter Jon Williams

  “And the revolution?”

  Lincoln rose to his feet. Atatürk glowered over his shoulder.

  “The Turks are on their own,” Lincoln said. He began to walk past Dagmar to his office.

  She put out a hand to stop him. When the hand touched his chest, he stopped then looked at her.

  “Lincoln,” she said, “you can’t do this. There has to be an alternative.”

  His face reddened.

  “I argued with them all night long!” he said. He sliced the edge of one hand across his jugular. “They cut my fucking throat, okay? We’re finished.”

  He pushed past her and walked toward his office. She turned to Ismet and saw her own stricken look mirrored in his eyes. She drew him to her and pressed her face to his shoulder.

  People were dying in Turkey, she thought. Dying.

  She looked out at the ops room and thought about what they’d done.

  They had their MS-DOS network ready to function in case of an attack by the Zap. They had Rafet and his crew in place in the capital. They had dozens of Web pages filled with videos, photos, and propaganda. They had the portable memory with contact information for whole networks of rebels. They had a general strike in progress, one that seemed to be going well.

  But the generals had the High Zap, and that trumped everything. They could take down New York, Washington, the country, the world.

  Helmuth and Richard walked in together and headed at once for the break room for coffee.

  Her posse was down to three, she thought. Richard and Helmuth she paid herself, and she knew that Ismet would soldier on. The three Company employees would have no choice but to return to the States. The Lincoln Brigade didn’t even have Lincoln any longer.

  She reached for her handheld and looked in the directory for Ian Attila Gordon.

  “This is Dagmar Shaw,” she said when he answered. “This time I need you to hire me for real.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Duplicity in a Coed Pet-In

  It was sabotage, she supposed. Not that she cared, and her guess was that Lincoln didn’t, either.

  The MS-DOS-capable modems were packed carefully away. Dagmar had to send out one last command, the final message canceling the demonstration that had been previously scheduled for that day… and when she had the portable memory in her hands she copied it to the memory in her personal handheld, the one she’d carried into the ops room that morning, because that was the phone that Slash Berzerker had called and that she could use to call him back.

  Dagmar planned to take nothing but the modems and the information. Everything else could be replaced or rebuilt. They all had their own hardware. They were running their bulletin board system on a machine in Luxembourg owned by a colleague of Dan the DOS Man.

  We are the junkware, she thought.

  Everything else was turned in—the flash drives, the portable disk drives, the phones that hadn’t ever been allowed to leave the ops room. Lola checked the bar codes, did the inventory, and didn’t seem to notice the personal phone that Dagmar wore in its holster at her waist.

  The new modems had never been entered in the inventory, and no one seemed to care that Richard and Helmuth carried them out in a cardboard box.

  “Souvenirs,” they said.

  Helmuth and Richard would be flying to Germany, to bask in luxury at a Sheraton in Frankfurt. In a suite paid for by Attila Gordon, they would try to keep the revolution on its feet.

  Ismet and Dagmar had their own destination, in Uzbekistan.

  Videos of demonstrations were uploaded from Pakistan, Egypt, and the Philippines. Revolution creep. Kronsteen, Dagmar supposed, trying to devalue the rebellion on his own doorstep.

  Late that afternoon Dagmar tracked Lincoln to his office and found him pulling documents from his safe and putting them through a shredder. Something blue glinted amid the strips of paper in the wastebasket. She recognized an evil-eye amulet—flawed, apparently, having failed to keep the mission from catastrophe.

  “What happens to Byron and Magnus?” she asked.

  “Dennis and Jerry,” Lincoln said. “Their real names.” He fed another document into the shredder, his eyes not meeting hers. She sensed an evasion.

  “What happens to them?” she asked. “Do they get tried here? Back in the States?”

  “No trial. Nothing.”

  She opened her mouth to speak—to yell— but he raised his head and lifted a hand.

  “This isn’t an operation we can ever acknowledge took place,” he said. “Putting them on trial would reveal what we tried to accomplish here. So no trial’s ever going to happen.”

  “They’re going to get away with—”

  Lincoln shrugged. Defeat had dug deep trenches in his cheeks, at the corners of his eyes.

  “Oh, they’ll lose their security clearance. They’ll lose their jobs. But they’ll be at liberty, and they’re talented, so I expect they’ll find work somewhere, and never have to see us or each other ever again.”

  Dagmar clenched her teeth. “Does Byron and Magnus’s Turkish control know they’ve been arrested?”

  Lincoln shook his head and dropped another piece of paper in the shredder. “Probably not,” he said. “Not unless he has some other source of information beyond those two.”

  “How did they communicate with him?”

  The shredder hummed. “Letter drop via Gmail. The same way you send a message to Rafet.”

  “Can we send them a message pretending to be Byron and Magnus?”

  He frowned, looked up at her.

  “To what end?”

  “To burn them so the Turks will never trust them again.”

  Lincoln’s blue eyes turned inward. He frowned down at the pages in his hand. “What’s your idea?” he asked.

  “Send a message to confirm that we’re shutting down here and everyone is going home—except for me and Ismet, maybe. We’re flying somewhere in Europe to meet an important contact to gain information about the Zap.”

  Lincoln frowned. “Where?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Dagmar said. “The point is that when the Turks send a team to observe us or take us out, they get arrested by someone you’ve warned in advance.”

  Lincoln reached down and turned off the shredder. He squared his remaining papers and leaned back in his chair.

  “Let me think.” Frown lines appeared between his eyebrows. “I think I can manage it,” he decided. “We’ll send them to Berlin and say the meet is in the Hotel Pariser Platz—that’s practically next door to the BfV office in Berlin.” His eyes sparkled. “And I know just who to call.”

  Dagmar tried not to show herself as eager as she felt. “So you’ll do it?”

  “Yes. Why not?” He shrugged. “A last little prank, before we fly off to wretchedness and defeat.”

  What she hoped was that Bozbeyli’s first team—the people he most relied upon to travel to foreign countries and to carry out covert actions—would be busy in Germany, and preferably under arrest, when Dagmar was off in Uzbekistan.

  She and Lincoln composed the message, and it was placed in Byron’s Gmail account. It placed the meet in the bar of the Pariser Platz at 1700 the next day. Either Byron’s control would pick it up or not. Either Bozbeyli’s A Team would be diverted to Berlin or not. Either Dagmar would have a little revenge or she wouldn’t.

  At least she’d have the satisfaction of a little Parthian shot, firing over the rump of her pony as the Lincoln Brigade fled in disorganized retreat.

  She stepped out of Lincoln’s office and looked over the wreckage of the office. Kemal Atatürk looked back at her with his stern sapphire gaze. Beneath him were the Lincoln Brigade’s trophies: the DVD, the wilted flowers, the sad, sagging stuffed bear. The photos of Judy and Tuna, looking out from a world in which they had not been murdered, from a place where they still lived, laughed, and looked forward to the triumphs their lives would bring.

  Dagmar took a step toward the wall, to take the memorial down, an
d then hesitated.

  No, she thought. Let it remain. Let it stay on Cyprus like the ancient memorials of the island, like the stone wanassa in its ancient temple, a mystery to those who came after, a phantom touch to their nerves, their hearts. Let it tell them, she thought, that something had happened here, something at once sad and profound, something that had started as an insanely fun activity by well-meaning people but had turned into death and betrayal and failure.

  Let it stay, she thought. Let it remain, a memorial of our own delusion and foundered innocence.

  Disorder in a U.S. Benz Kit

  When Lola offered to make travel arrangements, Dagmar said she’d make her own. The next morning, Monday, she hugged Lincoln good-bye at the Nicosia airport. He felt like a sack half-filled with straw. She had told him that she would be flying out later.

  She kissed his cheek.

  “Stay in touch,” she said.

  He looked at her, watery blue eyes over the metal rims of his glasses.

  “Forgive me?” he asked.

  He had lied to her and marched the both of them straight into catastrophe, but he had been as blind and betrayed as she and was now returning home to his own professional purgatory. She couldn’t bring herself to hate him.

  “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

  She watched Lincoln and the others walk through the gate to their waiting aircraft, and then Dagmar turned away and used her phone’s satellite function to call Rafet. She explained the situation to him.

  “You can wait for Chatsworth’s instructions for exfiltration,” she said, “or you could carry on, with the understanding that you’re working for a purely private concern.”

  Otherwise known, she thought, as a demented rock star.

  She told him to consult with the Skunk Works operators and the camera techs, come to a decision concerning what they wanted to do, and then call her back on her private number.

  Dagmar’s next journey took her to the honey-colored Gulfstream 550 waiting in the section of the airport reserved for private planes. Stairs were already pushed up to the open door. She climbed the stairs and stepped aboard, and a smiling, shaggy-haired man greeted her.

  “Name’s Martin,” he said, shaking hands. He spoke with a West Country accent. “Attila would be here himself, but he had a press conference in Glasgow to announce his new justice initiative.”

  “And what would that be?” Dagmar asked.

  “He’s setting up a legal fund to aid the defense of those arrested during the demonstrations.”

  “That’s assuming there will actually be trials,” Dagmar said.

  Martin looked surprised. “Won’t there be?” he said.

  Dagmar shrugged, then introduced Ismet. Martin showed them to some seats in the rear of the aircraft, for takeoff.

  The Gulfstream featured mahogany paneling, gold-plated fixtures, a large oval table of what seemed to be polished black marble, and softly glowing leather couches. Postimpressionist watercolors hung from the bulkheads. Martin showed them to some more conventional seats for takeoff.

  “Does Attila actually own this jet?” Dagmar asked.

  “No, he rented it from a company in Rome. Can I get you any drinks?”

  Ismet asked for orange juice. Dagmar, more interested perhaps in relaxation, ordered a gin and tonic.

  One of the two smiling cabin attendants came with their drinks a few minutes later. The attendants were both tall and well-groomed, attractive, and female. They spoke with Italian and French accents, respectively. As there was no eye candy for the heterosexual female, Dagmar gathered that the plane’s usual customers were rich men.

  The attendants made sure Dagmar and Ismet were strapped in, and the Gulfsteam taxied to the runway, joined the queue behind a Boeing 737, and in its turn launched itself into the air.

  The plane refueled in Bucharest, then crossed the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and the Caspian Sea. They kept well clear of Turkish airspace. The cabin attendants served champagne, caviar, blinis, beef stroganoff, and a hearty red burgundy, all appropriate enough for flying over the former Soviet Union. Dessert was bananas caramelized in butter, spices, and brown sugar, then expertly flamed with cognac by the Italian attendant. A movie was offered but declined. The Gulfstream flew over a triangle of Kazakhstan and then entered Uzbek airspace.

  “The nearest airport—the nearest we can set this down, I mean—the nearest to your destination is in a town called Zarafshan,” Martin said. “We’ve got a car lined up for you. Attila also explained that you might be wanting these.”

  He produced a series of cases and produced a pair of Beretta 9mm pistols in holsters and a lightweight semiautomatic shotgun in a nylon scabbard. Dagmar was surprised.

  “How did you get these on such short notice?” she asked.

  “We were in Italy,” Martin said. “It’s the second-largest arms exporter in the world. They have strict regulations if you live there, but if you’re taking the goods out of the country, they practically have a take-away window.”

  Ismet looked at Dagmar.

  “Do you know how to shoot?”

  “I’ve fired pistols,” she said. “Not recently, though.”

  Not, in fact, since she was a teenager and briefly had a boyfriend who was a firearms enthusiast.

  “Maybe we’d better give you a refresher.”

  He very competently field-stripped one of the Berettas, reassembled it, and dry-fired it.

  “You’ve had practice,” Dagmar said.

  “I was in the army.”

  “You were?” She was surprised.

  “All Turkish men are required to serve. I got to be an officer because I’d been to university, so it wasn’t bad.”

  “What did you do in the army?” Dagmar asked.

  “Public relations for the Fifth Corps in Thrace.” He smiled. “My service was pretty dull, which was fine with me.”

  He gave Dagmar a brief course in use of the pistol. She expressed surprise at the pistol’s light weight, but Ismet pointed out that adding a magazine stuffed with bullets would increase its mass by a considerable amount.

  Dagmar put the pistol down on the marble tabletop. Her hands had a light coating of gun oil, and she reached for a napkin.

  “Do you think I might actually need to use this gun?” she said.

  “If Slash is not amenable to money,” he said. “We’ve got to make a credible threat.”

  “You know,” she said, “I think we have not worked out all the contingencies of this plan.”

  “Speaking of money,” Martin said. He took another package down from an overhead compartment and opened it in front of them. Packages of Bank of England notes fell out on the table.

  “Pounds sterling,” he said. “Ten thousand.”

  Dagmar looked in amazement at Ismet. “We’ve been working for the U.S. government,” he said. “And you know what? They’re pikers.”

  One of the cabin attendants appeared. She looked at the guns and money on the table as if they were no more unusual on the plane than copies of Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, then turned to Dagmar.

  “I’m afraid our landing may be delayed,” she said. “The pilot is having trouble raising ground control.”

  A cold warning shimmered up Dagmar’s spine.

  “I wonder,” she said, “how much of the gear on this plane runs on TCP/IP.”

  “Tell the pilot,” Ismet said, “to go ahead and land at Zarafshan whether he can raise them or not.”

  The attendant looked dubious. “Well,” she said, “I—”

  “We have to land somewhere.” Ismet was practical. “It may as well be where we want to go.”

  Dagmar unholstered her phone and tried to get a cell phone signal.

  “Cell networks still okay,” she said. “But VoIP is definitely down.” She pressed virtual buttons. “I can still get GPS, so the problem is local.”

  “Local to Zarafshan,” Ismet asked, “or to all of Uzbekistan?”

  Dagmar didn’
t have an answer for that. Instead she looked at Martin.

  “Attila rented this aircraft, right?” she said. “Did he make any effort to disguise the fact? Working through a shell corporation or anything?”

  Bemusement crossed Martin’s face.

  “He sent me down with his credit card,” Martin said. “IAG Productions.”

  “And I presume the pilot filed a flight plan? Saying he was going to Cyprus, then to Uzbekistan?”

  “I imagine so, yeah.”

  The generals could be expected to keep a watch on the man who had declared himself an enemy of their regime. Attila might as well have drawn a flaming arrow in the sky pointing to their destination.

  Dagmar turned to Ismet.

  “The plane and the guns and money are nice,” she said. “But the advantages of working for a covert branch of the U.S. government are now a lot more apparent.”

  One of the cabin attendants approached.

  “Excuse me, miss, but is that a cell phone you’re using?”

  “I’ve got EDET; I can use it on a plane.”

  “Oh. Very well, then.”

  Dagmar gave a jump as the phone rang in her hand. She saw it was Helmuth.

  “Turkey’s down,” he said. “The whole country, plus a chunk of Greece and Bulgaria.”

  “So is Uzbekistan. How’s the DOS network doing?”

  “Working so far. The landlines are holding up, at least for now.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “A bunch of politicans have taken over the old parliament building. The one right near the Atatürk statue in Ulus, where Tuna had his action.”

  “Don’t send Rafet in there. The last time people tried to seize a building, it just made targets out of them.”

  “I’ll tell Rafet.”

  “Anything else?”

  She could almost hear the smile in Helmuth’s voice. “The German news is full of it. The cops arrested some terrorists in a Berlin hotel—all heavily armed.”

  Dagmar gave a triumphant laugh. The first team was out of the picture, and Byron was burned.

  Helmuth rang off. The guns were packed away, then stowed in overhead compartments. The money went into pockets and luggage. Dagmar went to look out the window. They were circling a town set in a sandy desert, the Kyzyl Kum, which covered at least half the country. The dunes stood out a brilliant red against deep shadows cast by the westering sun. The town was very, very green—it was amazing in its greenness, especially as contrasted with the brown and rust and alkali that surrounded it. On one side of the town were some kind of mining works, tailing ponds, paved roads. On the other side was the airport, a single strip.