Deep State ds-2

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Yeah,” Dagmar said. “Spare me your D.C. freakin’ turf wars.”

  “Anyway,” Lincoln went on, “two technicians with training in the Zap took a copy of the command software to Turkey in a laptop. So that the secret would be safe in the event of the laptop going astray, the software itself was booby-trapped-it required a password within one minute of the laptop’s booting, or it would erase itself. The two techs were able to get into the Syrian defense net and bring it down for the one hour and ten minutes necessary to ensure the success of the Israeli strike.

  “And then-just hours later-Bozbeyli took over Turkey. We didn’t want to send the laptop home through what might be civil disorder, so the laptop stayed on the mountain until Bozbeyli got worried that the listening station might be reporting his own phone calls, and sent in the military to shut it down.”

  He spread his hands in a helpless gesture.

  “There was a mix-up. Byron and Magnus got away, but the Turkish military got the laptop with the controls to the High Zap on it. And-as is now apparent-our safeguards failed, and the black hats have now broken into the program and figured out how to use it.”

  Dagmar was waving her hands, trying frantically to stop the flow of words.

  “Byron and Magnus?” she said. “Kilt Boy and Angry Man gave the Zap away?”

  Lincoln pursed his lips in a gesture of deliberate patience. “Not gave,” he said.

  “And you’re still employing them?”

  “It wasn’t precisely their fault,” Lincoln said vaguely. “And they’re qualified for what they’re doing here. And they have first-hand experience with the Zap; we figured they’d have a better idea than most whether the Zap was being used and where, and what countermeasures might be taken.”

  Dagmar gazed at Lincoln in weary amazement. She pictured Byron and Magnus high up on the curtain of mountains that rimmed Turkey on the east, bickering and snapping at each other.

  At least there were no go-karts to crash up there.

  “What did the Turks think of the kilt?” Dagmar asked.

  “I’m sure they never saw it.” Lincoln flapped a hand. “Magnus would have been instructed to dress inconspicuously.”

  Dagmar looked at Lincoln. Her fingers tightened on the arms of her chair as anger simmered in her consciousness.

  “So,” she said, “this whole affair-bringing democracy and a legitimate government back to our allies the Turks-all that is just a way of getting the Zap back?”

  Lincoln suddenly looked very tired. He waved a hand.

  “Not just,” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” Dagmar said.

  He turned to her, his face open, his eyes wide.

  “You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to,” he said, “but I really want this to work. I like the Turks; I want this region to have a functioning republic; I want the Turks to choose their own leaders. But my leaders… they approved this project because the government-in-exile agreed that the Zap would be returned when they came back to power.” He turned away, waved a hand again. “Maybe I’m just the perfect idiot for this operation.”

  Dagmar shook her head. She felt as if her internal buffer had completely filled with unprocessed information and was unable to make headway on any of it.

  She threw open her hands.

  “What are we supposed to do now, Lincoln?” she asked. “I’m completely four-oh-four, here.”

  Lincoln suddenly seemed very small. His voice seemed to come from far away.

  “Defeat the Zap. Somehow.”

  Suddenly her anger came to the boil. Judy and Tuna and a lot of Turkish citizens had died because Lincoln was hoping to beat the High Zap to the punch, and now he and they had lost… lost the whole war because it turned out the enemy had a trump card to play, the Internet equivalent of a thermonuclear bomb, and had possessed the trump all along, right from the beginning.

  In rage Dagmar slapped both hands on Lincoln’s desk. The sound made them both jump.

  “That’s it?” she demanded. “That’s your whole idea?”

  He sat in his chair without moving. She could barely hear him as he spoke.

  “It’s the only idea we’re left with.”

  Her hand stung.

  “Jesus Christ, Lincoln!” she said. “No wonder I’m going crazy!”

  He gathered himself again, blue eyes glittering behind smoked lenses.

  “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “But you can think of yourself as lucky. You can go back to your life when this is over, and create amusements that will thrill your audience of millions. I, on the other hand-” He bent to cough, the sound drawn far from his interior, like the rattle of a dying man. “I have to report to my superiors that every course of action I’d advocated was wrong, that the whole enterprise was a miserable failure and a waste of resources, and that I killed a lot of people for worse than nothing.” His voice turned savage. “This is my swan song, you know. My last roundup. I’d hoped to have a little success to console myself with in my wilderness years, but now I’ll have nothing to reflect on but the knowledge that I’m a useless failure.”

  She rose from her chair, far too weary and burdened for sympathy.

  “Yeah, you do that,” she said. “Meanwhile, I’ll try to think of some fucking useful thing to do to fight this plague.”

  She opened the door, stepped into the ops room, closed the door behind her.

  “Update?” she said.

  “No change,” said Richard. He sat at his desk with a frustrated expression, his fingers tapping the arms of his chair, his Converse sneaks rapping the floor.

  Impotence did not suit him.

  Dagmar looked over what remained of the Lincoln Brigade, trapped here in this little pocket universe by the suddenly narrowed horizons of their own electronics: Helmuth and Richard, Ismet with his bruised face, Lola, the curly-haired Guardian Sphinx, securing the door, Lloyd on his way from the break room with a cup of coffee in his hand, Byron and Magnus gazing at her with insipid faces.

  Those two, she thought, had started the whole project by losing the High Zap in the first place.

  She thought of them running down the mountain ahead of Bozbeyli’s thugs, juggling the laptop and dropping it or forgetting it in a hotel room, or whatever they were supposed to have done, and then she realized that the more she considered it, the less she believed it.

  Dagmar turned, opened the door, and went into Lincoln’s office again. He was still in his chair, turned away from her, frowning in silence at the wall.

  “Byron and Magnus,” she said. “How’d they lose the Zap?”

  Lincoln didn’t bother turning toward her.

  “Like I said. A mix-up. They grabbed the wrong computer and left the laptop at the listening station, where the military found it.”

  “And then what did they do?”

  “They got away. In a car.” He looked up at her, puzzlement in his blue eyes.

  “Why are you asking?”

  “How long were they out of touch?”

  “Twenty-four hours or so. They had to be careful. They were in Kurdish country and the military were all over the place.” He frowned. “But it doesn’t matter,” he said. “They left the computer behind, they didn’t lose it on the trip out.”

  “What I’m trying to tell you,” Dagmar said, “is that it was Byron and Magnus who gave us to Bozbeyli. One or both of them, and I’m betting both.”

  Lincoln’s blue eyes opened wide. He swung his chair toward her.

  “How do you reckon that?”

  “My guess is that when they were on their own, they ran into a roadblock and got arrested. I think they both spilled everything they knew, and that’s how the bad guys were able to beat the safeguards on the laptop. I also think they’ve been in touch with Turkish intelligence since.”

  Lincoln considered this, scrubbing his hands up and down his cheeks.

  “There’s not a lot of evidence, there,” he said. “And they weren’t out of touch for long.
”

  “You said yourself,” Dagmar said, “that when you turn someone, you try to get them back to their normal life as soon as possible.”

  Lincoln nodded, conceding the point. His expression remained unconvinced.

  “Lincoln,” Dagmar said, “they hate each other. They’re sharing an apartment, but they never spend time together-Magnus is always off in Limassol with Helmuth, and Byron stays here sending emails to his family. When they do communicate, they argue. Each is always slagging the other behind the other’s back. The poison broke out on the go-kart track, remember; they spent the whole time attacking each other. It’s as if they’re blaming each other for something. Something they can’t talk about.”

  “That doesn’t mean…” Lincoln began.

  “Byron is scared to death, Lincoln,” Dagmar said, then reiterated: “Scared. To. Death. Of the Turks, of this whole enterprise. It’s one thing for him not to want to go to the Turkish side of the island; it’s another to overreact the way he did. I think it’s because he knows what it is to be a prisoner, he knows what they can do. If he’s still cooperating, it’s because he’s too afraid not to-they threw such a scare into him, it lasted all the way across the Atlantic. And if Magnus is still a part of it, maybe it’s because he’s afraid, maybe because he’s getting other inducements.”

  Dagmar leaned forward and leaned her knuckles on Lincoln’s desk.

  “They fingered Judy and me, Lincoln,” she said. “The Turks asked where we were living, and they gave up the information. They both failed their polygraph, remember. It’s time to haul them in.”

  Lincoln reached for the landline, then hesitated with his hand on the telephone.

  “I don’t know,” Dagmar said, “how long I can keep up the pretense of not knowing. So do something fast.”

  When she left the office he was punching numbers into the phone.

  In the ops room she looked around again and saw Web pages flashing on Richard’s display, with Helmuth looking over his shoulder. She half-ran to Richard’s desk.

  “What’s happening?” she said, half-running to his place. “Is the Net back up?”

  “I’m using a satellite phone as a modem,” Richard said.

  “Ah. Right.”

  She should have thought of that herself. It was what she’d done in Indonesia.

  Dagmar had her own satellite phone, as did Helmuth and Ismet. She looked at Magnus and Byron-she hoped she wasn’t glaring too obviously-and considered asking Lola to requisition a couple more sat phones.

  “Ankara’s still blacked out,” Richard said. “There’s no news from there that’s less than an hour old.” He pointed at a video that had been uploaded via one of their proxy sites. “But there’s still action going on in other parts of the country. A demonstration in Antalya, another big one in Konya. It looks like the demo in Istanbul has been suppressed-I saw some pictures earlier of some fighting in that stadium.”

  Unleashing the Zap on their own capital had given the authorities a huge advantage over their opponents-not only could the opposition no longer easily mobilize their people and get their propaganda before the public, but the police and military had an entire radio net that would be unaffected, and they could muster their own forces and move them without difficulty.

  Dagmar didn’t hold a lot of hope for Mayor Erez holding out in his stolen ministry building.

  She looked up as the door to Lincoln’s office opened. But Lincoln didn’t come into the ops room; he walked down the hallway to greet Squadron Commander Alvarez as he entered.

  Alvarez was followed by a squad of RAF Police, along with Lieutenant Vaughan. They took Magnus and Byron away. Lincoln followed them out.

  The others looked to Dagmar for an answer.

  “I think we should assume it’s going to be just the few of us for a while,” she said.

  They looked at her in silence.

  “Here’s what’s happening to our little world,” Dagmar said. She gave the others a brief explanation of what the High Zap was and what it did. She left out the history; she left out the part played by Byron and Magnus.

  “We need to get the Zap back,” she finished.

  “I think we just did,” said Richard. He had listened to Dagmar’s lecture with wide eyes, clearly impressed by the ultimate ninja software that had evaded all his firewalls and wrecked his plans, leaving him unable to so much as shift the bits of wreckage around.

  Helmuth seemed puzzled.

  “We’re supposed to beat this thing,” he said. “Just the”-he looked over his shoulder at where Lola was guarding the door-“the six of us.”

  Ismet shifted carefully in his chair. The pain that twitched its way across his face sent a knife through Dagmar’s heart.

  “Leave me out of it,” Ismet said. “I’m not a computer engineer; I’m in advertising.”

  “We five,” Helmuth corrected.

  “Yes,” Dagmar said. “We five.”

  Helmuth gave a laugh.

  “Well,” he said. “At least we have a clear idea of the odds against us.”

  “We’ve done the impossible before,” Dagmar said. “Remember Curse of the Golden Nagi?”

  Richard indicated his own modified computer, with its satellite phone cabled in.

  “Satellite modems would seem to be the way to go,” he said.

  “The Zap can take down satellites,” Dagmar said. “And if not them, then their ground stations.”

  “Then telephones,” said Lloyd. “Telephony doesn’t use TCP/IP. We just need to insulate the switching stations against the Zap.”

  “How?” Dagmar asked.

  He gave the question a moment’s thought. “Really old routers?” he offered. “From before they were all infected?”

  “Right,” Richard said. “We could advertise for them on craigslist.”

  Dagmar looked at him.

  “No mockery, Richard,” she said. “All desperate ideas are being considered here.”

  “Check,” said Richard. He gave his glittering Girard Perregaux chronograph a look. It was becoming a nervous tic, Dagmar thought-he didn’t have to take his eyes off his flatscreen to know what time it was-but it seemed as if he wanted to reassure himself the item was still on his wrist.

  “You know,” he said. “Maybe I should call the computer centre and let them know what the problem is. They might be able to get some of their routers offline and restore at least some service.”

  Dagmar waved a hand. “Carry on.”

  Richard picked up the handset on his desk, listened for a moment, then returned it.

  “No dial tone,” he said. He picked up the handset, then joggled the switch on the cradle several times. Eventually Dagmar could faintly hear the distant sound of a dial tone whining from the earpiece of Richard’s handset.

  “Not all the switches are down,” he said, and punched numbers into the handset.

  Ismet grasped both arms of his chair, then levered himself to his feet. Dagmar felt a mental shudder as she saw the look of pain on his face.

  “Are you all right?” she asked. “Do you need to go lie down?”

  “I’ll stay here,” he said. “I can’t help you with your discussion, so I’m just going to go monitor my station.”

  He walked toward his desk, then paused at the sound of Eurofighters overhead. He cocked his head and listened.

  “I think that’s the same flight we’ve been hearing since the Zap hit,” he said. “I think they’re circling and waiting for air traffic control to come back online.”

  “But the traffic control is radio,” Dagmar said. “The Zap wouldn’t take it out.”

  “But the radars could be controlled through TCP/IP,” Richard said. “The controllers might not be able to read their screens right now.”

  Dagmar paused for a moment of horror at the thought of aircraft wandering lost across the skies.

  Ismet walked to his desk and sat. He connected his satellite phone to his computer and tilted the phone antenna toward
the windows so that it got better reception. As the discussion developed, Dagmar saw him leaning toward the screen, heard him tapping away on his keyboard

  “Look,” Helmuth said. “Either we go back to Stone Age fossilware or we try to out-evolve the Zap. I say we go forward-there’s got to be a way to put a quick and dirty IP together that will keep this thing out.”

  They discussed this for the next quarter hour and eventually decided that this wasn’t their best allocation of resources.

  “There must be thousands of people in the Greater D.C. area working on this problem right now,” Dagmar said. “They’ll do that job much better than we can. We can’t save the Internet, not from here. What we need to do is save the revolution.”

  The faces that turned to her were bleak.

  “Look,” she said. “If we find a solution, it doesn’t need to be pretty. It just needs to work reasonably well most of the time.”

  Lola rose from her desk and walked to stand in the doorway.

  “There was an ARPANET back before there was TCI/IP,” she said. “It must have used a packet switching system. What was it?”

  Dagmar reached for her sat phone, called up its browser, and called up Wikipedia.

  “Network Control Program,” she said. “NCP. Last used in 1983.”

  “Over thirty years ago,” Helmuth said. “There’s no hardware for it now.”

  Lincoln returned to the ops center at sunset. He walked with a kind of plodding deliberation, as if he were carefully choosing exactly where to place his feet. When he came into the room, he sat on a corner of Byron’s desk and looked at the others.