Deep State ds-2

by Walter Jon Williams

Dagmar looked up and received the poster’s full impact. The picture was based on an old photograph, but somewhere down the line the photograph had been hand-colored in eerie pastels, and the result was nothing short of terrifying. Larger than life-sized, the Father of the Nation wore a fur Cossack hat and a civilian tailcoat with a standing collar and tie. He scowled down from the wall, his unnaturally pink cheeks a startling contrast to his uncanny blue eyes.

  The look in the eyes sent a shudder up Dagmar’s spine.

  In her time in Turkey, Dagmar had seen a great many pictures of Ataturk. Most businesses had a photo displayed somewhere, and Ataturk busts and statues were common in Turkish towns and public buildings.

  What had surprised her was the variety of Ataturks on display. There was no standard representation. There were benign Ataturks, dignified Ataturks, and amused Ataturks that emphasized the impish upward tilt of his eyebrows. There were Ataturks with mustaches and Ataturks without mustaches. There were dapper Ataturks wearing tails and carrying a top hat, statesmanlike Ataturks standing amid a group of ministers and comrades, commanding Ataturks in military uniform.

  And then there were the scary Ataturks, a surprising number of them. This one, with his glaring eyes and upswept eyebrows, looked absolutely diabolical. He looked like the villain in a bad fantasy film. Below the image, in a blue typeface that matched the Gazi’s eyes, were the words Biz bize benzeriz.

  Something in Dagmar shrank from having this frightening icon gazing down at her for the length of the operation.

  “The picture looks straight enough,” Dagmar said. She pointed at the letters. “What does it say?”

  Ismet answered. “It says: ‘We are like ourselves.’ ”

  Dagmar looked around the room, at the piles of cardboard boxes, at Helmuth and Richard and Judy all laboring under Ataturk’s iron gaze.

  “Well,” she said. “That’s true enough.”

  What she actually wanted to say was, Are you sure you want this Ataturk? But she couldn’t quite bring herself to speak the words aloud.

  The cult of Ataturk was something Dagmar understood only in part. The United States of America had many founders: Franklin, Washington, the Adams cousins, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Tom Paine, and even people such as Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr had done their bit to define the new republic… but Turkey had only Ataturk. He was the arrow-straight dividing line between the shambling old Asiatic Ottoman Empire and modern, Western-leaning Turkey. Like any decent Founding Father he had thrashed the British, and after that he’d remade the country in his own stern image: he’d adopted the Roman alphabet and Gregorian calendar; given civil rights to women; made Turks adopt surnames; driven religion and its symbols out of public life; built a public education system from scratch; defeated enemies foreign and domestic; created a parliamentary system; promoted Western ideas of art, music, and culture. He’d also done away with the Muslim prohibition of alcohol-a mistake in his case, as he died young of cirrhosis.

  Turks revered Ataturk the way hardline Marxists revered Lenin, the way gays revered Judy Garland, the way Americans revered their pop stars up till the very second before they pissed all over them. Dagmar got that.

  What she didn’t understand was this fiendish image on the wall of the ops room. She didn’t want it there, but she didn’t know how to say it without setting off some kind of atavistic Ataturk-inspired defense mechanism and getting her Turkish comrades mad at her.

  “We brought presents!” Tuna said. He reached his big hand into a pink plastic bag and pulled out a fistful of blue and white amulets, the kind that Turks deployed against the evil eye. He, Ismet, and Rafet immediately began fixing the amulets to every vertical surface.

  Judy watched them with interest. She turned to Dagmar.

  “Do they really believe in the evil eye?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. But we need all the mojo we can get.”

  “And here’s one for your office.” Ismet, handing Dagmar an amulet.

  “Thank you.”

  It was a nice one, shaped like a military medal, with the dangling eye made of heavy glass, better quality than the cheap plastic amulets available everywhere in Turkey.

  After the amulets were hung, everyone pitched in with putting the ops room together. By early evening flat-screen monitors glowed from the walls and from each of the desks, towers hummed, printers were set up in corners, and Mr. Coffee sat atop a table in the break room.

  “The rest of the team will be here tomorrow,” Lincoln said. “First briefing at oh eight hundred.”

  Dagmar raised a hand. “Will we always be using military time?” she asked.

  He smiled. “You should be thankful we’re not using Zulu Time,” he said.

  Dagmar had never heard of Zulu Time in her life.

  “I guess I should be,” she said.

  Before the flight to Cyprus, Dagmar had a series of meetings with Lincoln in California. They met at a sushi place in Studio City, where they talked about gaming and other harmless topics-the actual purpose of their meeting couldn’t be discussed in public places like restaurants.

  Chopsticks in his hand, Lincoln lightly dipped his Crunchy Crab Roll in soy sauce. Dagmar observed the hand.

  “You don’t wear a wedding ring,” she said.

  The crab roll paused halfway to Lincoln’s lips.

  “I was married twice. Divorced both times. The job is hard on marriage.” His mouth quirked in a little smile. “Though I have to admit that, sometimes, what I do is insanely fun.”

  “Any children?”

  Lincoln, chewing, nodded. He swallowed, then took a taste of iced tea.

  “Two daughters,” he said. “Both grown, both doing well.” He looked wistful. “One of them lives in New Zealand. I see her every two or three years. The other blamed me for the divorce, and I haven’t heard from her in more than a decade.”

  Sadness brushed Dagmar’s nerves. She shook her head.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “I keep tabs on her,” Lincoln said. “Because, you know, I can- so I know that she’s all right.” His mouth took on a rueful slant. “But part of me wishes she’d run into the kind of trouble that only her dad can get her out of.”

  Dagmar’s sadness swelled. She had similar foolish fantasies herself, that Charlie or Austin or Siyed would walk through the door, surprisingly alive, and with an elaborate story that explained how it had been someone else who had died, somebody else’s corpses that Dagmar had seen, and that the whole affair had been an elaborate but necessary deception in order to thwart some unimaginable villainy…

  But of course that wouldn’t happen. Austin and Charlie wouldn’t be coming back from the falls at Reichenbach, and sometimes families came apart that shouldn’t, and sometimes families stayed together that should have come apart. And sometimes two lonely people consoled themselves with sushi and avoided talking about what had brought them together in the first place.

  After lunch Lincoln took Dagmar to the Bear Cat offices to discuss their plans for the Cyprus excursion. Lincoln had an office with an Aeron chair, a view of the Santa Monica Mountains, and framed photos of media campaigns in which he’d been involved, with Stunrunner given the pride of place, Ian Attila Gordon in his tux gazing out of the frame, his elegant little Walther automatic in his hand.

  “You get to pick your code name,” Lincoln told her.

  “Wow,” Dagmar said. “We really are living in Spy Land.”

  “Special ops.” Patiently. “We’re not after intelligence; we do things.”

  “Sorry.” Dagmar was amused. “I’ll try to remember.”

  “The computer has to approve the name,” Lincoln said. “You can’t take a name that’s already in use, and you can’t do anything obscene, but other than that, you’re reasonably free. It should be something you can remember and easily answer to.” He looked at her over his Elvis glasses. “I’m using Chatsworth.” From the handle he’d used in online games, Chatsworth Osborne Jr.

&nb
sp; “Does the name mean anything?” Dagmar asked. “Or did you make it up?”

  He offered a little smile. “Chatsworth was the name of a playboy character in a sixties sitcom,” he said.

  She looked at him, at the bubble hair and Elvis glasses.

  “Were you a playboy?” she asked.

  “What makes you think I’m not a playboy now?” he asked. She laughed. He considered being offended, then shrugged. “But no, it’s kind of a complicated joke. The Company was founded by a certain type of character-East Coast, Old Money, loyal Republicans-and I fit that description, sort of, at least when I was younger.” He smiled nostalgically. “I worked for Barry Goldwater alongside Hillary Clinton, do you believe it?”

  “You really knew her?”

  He waved a hand vaguely. “We met, here and there. I didn’t know her well.” He smiled. “She was too serious for me.”

  “Ah,” Dagmar said. “You were a playboy, then.”

  “I was a spoiled rich kid,” Lincoln said. “ ‘Chatsworth Osborne’ is what I’d have become if I hadn’t gone into government service, so it’s the name I use when I’m enjoying my harmless entertainments.”

  “Like overthrowing a foreign government.”

  “Like that.” Lincoln said. He cocked his head and looked at her. “Your code name?”

  Dagmar thought for a moment.

  “Briana,” she said.

  After Briana Hall, the fugitive found alone in a rented room at the beginning of Dagmar’s best-known game, and whose dilemma mirrored certain aspects of Dagmar’s past.

  “Motel Room Blues,” Lincoln said. “Very good.”

  Dagmar’s other employees were given code names as well. The problem with renaming her employees, Dagmar considered, was that she knew all of them by their real names. She was bound to slip sooner or later.

  Judy decided, logically enough, to name herself Wordz. Richard the Assassin called himself Ishikawa, after-of course-a famous ninja. The programming chief, Helmuth, decided he wanted to be called Pip. Dagmar did not think the reference was literary and decided she didn’t want to know what other inspiration might have leaked into his alcohol-tolerant brain.

  She hoped she could keep all the names straight and remember to use them in front of other people. Lincoln said to use the code names all the time, but Dagmar was sure she couldn’t.

  It was at the Bear Cat offices that Lincoln presented her with the contract, pages and pages of documents that featured, on the first page, a sum even greater than that she’d earned for Stunrunner.

  “I’ll have to show this to our lawyer,” she said.

  “He can’t see Appendix A,” Lincoln said. “He’s not cleared for that.”

  In the two-bedroom apartment she shared with Judy in the married officers’ quarters, Dagmar opened a bottle of Bass Ale and fired up her laptop. She looked up Zulu Time, which was apparently military-speak for Greenwich Mean Time, and then googled both “dervish lodge” and “Niagara Falls.”

  Naturally, Rafet’s dervish lodge had a Web page. Rafet and his comrades followed Hacy Babur Khan, a Sufi saint who had lived in Herat three centuries ago. There he founded an order of dervishes that followed his regulations for spiritual practice, among which included, according to the article, “ecstatic drumming.” “Which,” the article continued, “has resulted in occasional persecution by more orthodox Sunnis.”

  The dervishes lived in communal lodges, practiced austerity and poverty, drummed, and sang hymns written mostly by Hacy Babur Khan and his successors. The Web page maintained by the Niagara Falls lodge mentioned that it was founded in 1999, played host to a couple dozen dervishes at any one time, and offered demonstrations of drumming to the public several times each year.

  That led to a query about the Tek Organization, which Dagmar at first misspelled as “Tech.” The search engine obligingly offered a correction, and she found that a Turkish imam named Riza Tek had founded the worldwide eponymous religious organization, which had branches in at least fifty countries. The Tek Organization ran charities, schools, and broadcast stations; it owned hospitals and newspapers; it had a large publishing house that put out books, magazines on news and religion, and a very impressive-looking science magazine… none of which, alas, Dagmar could read, as they were in Arabic and every known Turkish dialect but not English.

  Turkish nationalists thought that Riza Tek was a fanatical God-inspired reactionary. Fanatical God-inspired reactionaries, the sort who belonged to or spoke for organizations that practiced suicide bombing, had a contrary view: they thought Riza Tek was a creation of the CIA.

  Any relationship between the Tek Organization and the dervish lodge in Niagara Falls remained purely speculative.

  Dagmar looked up from her laptop as Judy came into the room from the bathroom, where she’d been taking a shower. She wore a tank top that showed off her tattoo sleeves, color reaching from her wrists up her arms, over the yoke of her shoulders, and down her back. The tattoos didn’t seem to represent anything concrete but seemed inspired by physiology: they suggested, rather than depicted, muscles, bone, and a circulatory system. This gave Judy’s body an unearthly aspect, as if there were some whole other form, or other creature, hidden just beneath her skin. Dagmar would have found it repellent if she hadn’t so admired the art of it.

  As Judy walked she clicked her tongue piercing against her teeth, giving her movement a rhythm track. A scent of honeysuckle soap trailed her to an armchair, where she sat, picked up her netbook, and booted it. While she waited for the first screen to appear, she looked up at Dagmar.

  “Is there some reason,” she asked, “why you moved your bed so it’s on a diagonal?”

  Dagmar’s nerves hummed a warning. She didn’t know Judy well enough to trust her with the answer.

  For that matter, she didn’t know anyone well enough.

  “It’s a luck thing,” she said vaguely.

  Judy nodded, as if that made sense.

  “I notice that you drink,” she said.

  Dagmar glanced at her Bass Ale, then looked back at Judy.

  “I do,” she said.

  “Aren’t you worried you might have inherited your father’s alcoholism gene?”

  Dagmar looked at her drink again and considered telling Judy to piss up a rope.

  “I’m not going to worry,” she said, “until I find myself drinking the same cheap crap my dad did.”

  “With my dad’s history,” Judy said, “I’m not getting high, ever.”

  Dagmar looked at the tattoos, the rows of piercings lining Judy’s ears.

  No, she thought, you don’t use; you just got addicted to pain instead. Getting jabbed thousands of times with a needle-now that wasn’t extreme, was it?

  In any case, Dagmar was not in the mood to be dictated to by some kind of tattooed Goth puritan. She picked up her ale and waved it vaguely.

  “Whatever works,” she said.

  “What do you think of Rafet?” Judy asked.

  Dagmar offered her laptop. “I can show you my research.”

  “I think he’s totally hot,” Judy said with sudden enthusiasm. “D’you think he’s free?”

  “I think God’s got him,” Dagmar said. “He’s supposed to be some kind of monk.”

  Judy’s eyes widened. “They have monks?”

  Dagmar offered the laptop again. “Check it out.”

  Judy set aside her netbook and took Dagmar’s computer. Her brows drew together as she read about the Niagara lodge.

  “It says they’re committed to poverty and austerity,” she said. “There’s nothing about chastity.”

  “Well,” said Dagmar. “Good luck with all that.”

  Judy handed the laptop back.

  “Whatever you do,” Dagmar said, “don’t try to seduce him with alcohol.”

  Lincoln-in his hotel room in Istanbul, the tickets and itinerary for Dagmar’s Bulgaria trip scattered on the table-watched Dagmar’s turmoil with perfect calm.

  “Are you
serious?” Dagmar asked, staring into Lincoln’s blue eyes. “You want me to astroturf an entire country?”

  “A little guidance is all they need,” Lincoln said. “They’ll do all the hard lifting, not us.”

  “They’re going to get killed,” Dagmar said. “Look what happened in Iran. In China. They were trying to do exactly this kind of thing and the government answered with bullets.”

  Lincoln affected to consider this.

  “If we do this right,” he said, “maybe not so many. Maybe none at all.”

  “Tens of thousands died in China!”

  Lincoln’s lips firmed.

  “They didn’t have us to guide them. But if people choose to take that risk-if they think their political freedom is worth risking their lives-then they also deserve our help.”

  Dagmar resisted this logic.

  “If people got killed,” she said, “it would be my fault.”

  “No.” Lincoln was firm. “It would be the fault of the bastards who killed them.”

  Dagmar was beginning to suspect that there were a few too many bastards in this picture.

  The 0800 briefing began with a buffet of local breads, olives, tomatoes, cucumbers, hard-boiled eggs, and the best watermelon Dagmar had ever tasted in her life. She looked sadly at the buffet and regretted the Weetabix she’d just had for breakfast. Nobody had told her there would be food.

  A pack of strangers filled the room, and Dagmar wondered if they’d just come for the buffet before she realized they were all Lincoln’s people from the States. Magnus was tall, well over six feet, and thin-what Dagmar thought of as a Geek, Type One-and was a programmer. He wore a Daffy Duck T-shirt, and his scrawny, hairy legs were revealed by a Utilikilt, a signal garment of the geek.

  This was, Dagmar reflected, a British air base, the personnel of which were certain to have a fair number of Scots. She wondered what the Scots would think of Magnus and his Utilikilt and what Magnus would think of the Scots.

  Scots, she thought, looked very well in kilts. Or at least those who didn’t knew better than to wear one.

  Why was it so different for the Americans?

  Lola and Lloyd-whose names, echoing each other, demonstrated the hazards of letting people coordinate their own code names-were well-dressed white people in their early twenties whom Lincoln introduced as interns. Efficient, wavy-haired Lola, businesslike in a gray summer suit, was in charge of the buffet and also of the ID badges that she handed out. The interns were Company, here to learn what Dagmar did, so that they could do it without her later.