Deep State ds-2

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Byron and Magnus,” he said, “have confessed to informing the Turkish government of our projects and our whereabouts. They were responsible for Judy’s death.”

  Helmuth and Richard looked at him in shock. “Why?” Richard demanded.

  “We’re in the process of finding that out. Interrogations are proceeding.” He looked down at Dagmar. “Any developments here?”

  Dagmar offered him a summary of their discussion.

  “Oh lord,” he said. “Next you’ll be wanting to go back to DOS.”

  “DOS?” Dagmar asked. “Which DOS?”

  “MS-DOS,” Lincoln said. “Pre-Windows Microsoft operating system. There’s no TCP/IP stack in there anywhere.”

  Dagmar’s first computer had run Windows, and MS-DOS was as foreign to her as, say, Plankalkul.

  “So,” she said. “Why can’t we use it?”

  “Because-” A slow light seemed to kindle in Lincoln’s eyes. “Because it’s awkward and horrible and slow and primitive. Because you’ll have to type orders onto a command line instead of just clicking on something. It’s not flexible and will only perform limited tasks. And you might end up trying to communicate over a 300bps acoustic coupler, assuming you could steal one from a museum.”

  “And it bypasses the Zap, right?”

  “Yes,” Lincoln said. “When you’re running DOS, you don’t even have an IP address.”

  “And will it run on our computers?”

  “I…” He hesitated. “I don’t know why not. You might have to do some special formatting or boot from disks.”

  “We can create a virtual machine that runs DOS,” Richard said. “DOS will see the processor as an-” He looked at Lincoln. “Intel 8086?” he asked. “Eight-oh-eight-eight? Whatever.”

  Dagmar turned to Helmuth and Richard. “See if you can download a copy over a cell modem. Set it up on a computer and see what we can do.”

  “Modems are going to be a problem,” Lincoln said. “Modem command strings have evolved in the last few decades. I doubt that any of our modems will be able to communicate using DOS.”

  “We’ll find some,” Dagmar said. “And when we find them online, there is UPS. There is FedEx. We will prevail.”

  Richard looked with some amusement at his display.

  “Did you know,” he said, “that there’s a Usenet topic called alt.comp.DOSRULES?”

  “There’s still Usenet?” Lola asked. Lincoln looked at her.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “people actually go online to exchange information, instead of to look stuff up, play games, or to advertise themselves.”

  Lola took a step back.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “And furthermore,” Lincoln insisted, “Usenet isn’t a damned dinosaur; it’s extremely robust. It’s not on a single computer somewhere; it’s on millions of computers throughout the world. Just try knocking that out.”

  “Okay!” Lola said, more brightly, and made a patting gesture, as if she were calming an agitated but senile patient.

  Dagmar smiled. “Will I find posts from Chatsworth on Usenet?” she asked.

  “May not be the same Chatsworth,” Lincoln said.

  “Do you know what I’m picturing?” Dagmar asked. “I’m picturing old alt-dot-DOS geezer-geeks rocking on their front porches and stamping their canes and talking about the days when bulletin board systems roamed the world.”

  She heard the room’s printer start, and then Ismet rose slowly to his feet and walked to where the printer sat on its table.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  “Just taking care of business,” he said.

  He took some papers out of the printer, then took scissors and carefully trimmed them. He limped to the wall beneath Ataturk’s portrait and picked up the hammer and tacks that waited there.

  Below Ataturk’s blue-eyed glare, below the trophies from earlier demonstrations, Ismet nailed a pashmina scarf, a greeting card, and photographs of Judy and Tuna. Judy’s picture had been taken from her own Web site, and Tuna’s image had been pulled from one of the team’s unedited videos, and it showed him in Istanbul at the first demo, with a shopping bag and a bouquet of brilliant flowers.

  Dagmar’s heart rose into her throat as she saw Ismet’s dogged act of devotion, as she saw the photos of the two lost members of the Lincoln Brigade. She remembered with a stab of guilt that she had planned a memorial for Judy and Tuna for that afternoon, but that the events of the day had been allowed to overtake it.

  She rose from her chair.

  “We’ll get on with our experiments in a minute,” she said. “But right now, I think we should take a few minutes to remember our lost friends.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Dan the DOS Man says:

  The best place to find a dos-compatible modem is in an antique store. Not necessarily a store that sells antiques, though you can find them there, but a genuinely old shop with a modem they’ve had no reason to change in years. Say the store sends a few credit card checks every day, you don’t need an up-to-date modem for that.

  You can offer them a free new modem. They may be agreeable to the swap. Of course you can always give them money.

  Briana says:

  How do I configure a modem for DOS?

  Dan the DOS Man says:

  What program are you using the modem for in dos? That program should have a setup program for the modem. If it is an internal modem, you may have to go into BIOS and disable the com port that you will be using for the modem.

  Dos-capable modems DO NOT USE DRIVERS. If you have a Winmodem you’re out of luck. To test: if the modem is on com2, go to dos and type atdt5551212›com2. You might get lucky and hear the modem dial.

  Use a hayes compatible modem if you can. Do not use a usb cable as dos doesn’t have that many drivers available. Like, none.

  Its best to get an external modem. Most internal modems made now are software based and won’t work with dos. Many dos programs can’t detect com3 and com4.

  By the way, be careful if you have a PS2 mouse. An internal hardware modem on com1 or 2 would sometimes conflict with a PS2 mouse. A PS2 mouse is on irq 12, which is okay, but it uses the same serial paths as com1 and com2 to connect to the pci buss. So be wary.

  Briana says:

  Thnx.

  Dan the DOS Man says:

  We prefer complete sentences on this bulletin board, Briana. And no slang derived from inferior and incomplete forms of communication such as text messaging.

  Briana says:

  I totally respect your old-school ethic, boss. Many thanks.

  Dagmar contemplated the contents of the bulletin board on her handheld and saved them. She nodded to the RAF guard outside the building-her satellite phone had decided not to work under a roof-and then climbed the stair back to the ops room.

  “You know,” she said, entering, “DOS is actually kind of cool.”

  Helmuth glanced up briefly from his workstation.

  “We’re going to make it cooler,” he said.

  Helmuth and Richard had gotten their virtual MS-DOS machine working inside Richard’s computer the previous evening. But none of the modems in the room were compatible with DOS, so everyone had left the ops room except Lloyd, who was left behind to monitor any new uploads or other developments on the Brigade’s various Web pages. He would be relieved about midnight by Lola, who would in turn be relieved by Richard.

  Dagmar and their RAF guards had helped Ismet up the stairs to his apartment. His bruises had widened and deepened since the morning, and he looked worse than ever, his face a Rorschach nightmare of purple and yellow and white.

  She offered to help Ismet bathe, but he declined. Instead he lay on his sofa, propped up on pillows, while Dagmar sat crosslegged on the floor by his side.

  “Can I get you something to eat?” she asked.

  “Possibly soup,” he said. “I don’t have much of an appetite.”

  “Would you like anything to drink?”
r />   “Tea. Any kind.”

  She found Turkish tea and a soup can labeled YOURT CORBASI in the cabinet. Apparently Ismet had brought food supplies across the island from the Turkish side. She poured the soup into a pot and examined it, finding only rice and yogurt and spices-nothing that would be hard for bruised lips and loose teeth to chew-and it smelled faintly appetizing, though with the peculiar heavy aroma common to canned soups.

  Ismet came to the dining table to eat. He handled his spoon with care, trying not to splash liquid on the gauze bandages that wrapped two fingers of his right hand.

  Watching him was painful. Dagmar wanted to take the spoon herself and feed him, except that she knew he was the kind of man who wouldn’t appreciate being spoon-fed. Instead she sat at the kitchen table as a host of anxieties warred in her nerves. She kept a towel in her lap in case he spilled something.

  The previous evening she’d had the sense that he would fly today to his death. Instead he’d been saved from that fate by a savage beating, and she felt a strange gratitude to whatever brutal Cypriot cops had rescued Ismet from a deadlier peril. She would have him at least till the bruises faded-and she knew she needed him badly, needed some anchor in this mire of treachery and mendacity, the hopeful, hopeless revolution that had at its heart a misplaced piece of code.

  After the meal Ismet took a pain pill with his last swallow of cooling tea. He looked at her.

  “I think I will sleep alone tonight,” he said. He tried to smile with his cracked, bruised lips. “You might roll over in bed and land on me, and that would hurt.”

  “I could put a pillow between us.”

  His look turned somber.

  “If you attacked me again,” he said, “I could not defend myself.”

  Shock made her sway in her seat. Tears stung her eyes.

  He couldn’t trust her not to go mad on him. That was what he was saying.

  “You should stay with someone else tonight,” Ismet said. “Lola, perhaps.”

  “I barely know Lola,” she said. Her voice broke on the last word.

  “Richard and Helmuth, then. Someone you trust.”

  “I trust you.” She heard the wail in her voice and told herself to stop, that her emotional need and his physical pain were incompatible right now. The pain could not be suppressed: therefore her need had to be quashed. She would have to take her own solitude upon herself and live in it at least for a while.

  Ismet couldn’t rescue her every single time. He couldn’t save her from the enemies that swam in her own psyche. Those were hers to fight.

  “Yes, okay,” she said. “I’ll crash on Richard’s couch.”

  She washed Ismet’s bowl and spoon and saw that he was already half-asleep. She helped him back to the couch, then kissed his cheek, felt the bristles sting her lips. She left his apartment and walked to her own-the promise to stay with Richard and Helmuth was already forgotten-and in the borrowed place, surrounded by others’ possessions, she felt the aloneness embrace her.

  Without conscious thought Dagmar made tea for herself and put a frozen stuffed pepper in the microwave. She stood for a moment in the kitchen, looking at the furniture and belongings that had been requisitioned for her from another family, and considered the number of betrayals that had brought her to this moment.

  Byron and Magnus were vile, but they were at least explicable: whatever reason they had for selling her to Bozbeyli, fear or avarice or opportunism, it was at least an understandable human motivation. They were too transparent to be evil masterminds-they were just very screwed-up human beings, confused, probably deep in denial.

  But Lincoln, she thought, was not in denial. He knew what he’d been doing all along. It was Lincoln’s lie that had brought her here, selling her the notion that the U.S. government was so devoted to the notion of democracy in Turkey that it would give her the tools to bring it about.

  She should, she considered, just pick up her phone and buy a one-way ticket back to Los Angeles. If the government tried to invoke a penalty clause and evade payment, all she had to do was threaten to talk to the press.

  It wasn’t as if she wasn’t an expert at telling convincing stories to strangers. It was only a bonus when the story was true.

  Except now, she thought, there were actual revolutionaries in Turkey, whether she had created them or not. And they were fighting the police and the military, staging strikes and demonstrations, occupying a ministry building in Ankara. Living in cages in jails and military bases, screaming under torture, dying, rotting under the ground.

  She couldn’t fly to her life in California and leave them behind. Not when there was a hope that she could help them succeed.

  And besides, she thought, work was the classic cure for depression. Dagmar hooked her laptop to her satellite phone, downloaded a copy of MS-DOS along with a user’s manual, and ate her stuffed pepper as she began to acquaint herself with the ancient history of personal computing. She visited the alt.comp.DOSRULES forum on Usenet and from this learned of the existence of Dan the DOS Man, along with a number of his colleagues.

  Her brain was so charged with her new knowledge and so filled with plans for implementing her ideas that after she fell asleep the nightmares failed to possess her.

  In the morning she checked on Ismet and found him in greater pain than he had been the night before. She made him tea, made sure he was comfortable, and then went to the ops center while she conducted her long-distance conversation with Dan.

  Soft morning light warmed the ops room, glowed off the ochre yellow walls. The air bore the scent of freshly brewed coffee. The absence of aircraft noise was startling: the planes had all landed, either here or somewhere else, and then not gone up again. The situation was otherwise unchanged: the Zap still possessed Ankara and the southwest corner of Cyprus, including Akrotiri and at least a part of Limassol. Cell phone service and VoIP at Akrotiri were still down, and ground lines were erratic.

  Lincoln’s door was closed. Dagmar tried to decide what she felt about Lincoln, what she had decided about him. He was either a complete manipulative bastard or as much a fool as she.

  Or both, she thought. No reason he couldn’t be both.

  Dagmar explained her ideas to what was left of her posse, and they began to make plans to travel to Limassol in search of old modems. They would be like the evil sorcerer in Aladdin, offering to trade new lamps for old.

  Lincoln had come out of his office partway through her exposition. She was too far into her spiel to interrupt herself to decide whether she hated him or not, so she ignored him until he offered a suggestion.

  “You might not need to go to Limassol for modems. Akrotiri is huge, and has its own shops and supplies. You might be able to make your deals here.”

  “Not necessarily,” Helmuth said. “Those old modems might be the only cybernetic gear in those shops still working. They might not want to part with them.”

  “Your guards can’t requisition civilian gear,” Lincoln said, “and they won’t intimidate anyone on purpose, but they’re in uniform and carrying guns. They will lend a certain authority to any request you might make.”

  Dagmar was alarmed by this train of thought. “Be polite,” she said.

  Richard raised a hand, then spoke.

  “We’d have an idea of whether an external modem will work with DOS by looking at the cabling, couldn’t we?” he said. “No modem with a USB would function with DOS. Nor would Ethernet, right?”

  “You can run an Ethernet IPX network out of DOS,” Helmuth said. “I found the instructions online last night while I was researching our brave new operating system.”

  “And there’s no TCP/IP?” Dagmar asked.

  “There doesn’t have to be. You can set it up either way.”

  “Terrific,” Dagmar said. “We grab those modems, too.”

  “My point is,” Richard said, “that if you find a modem with a twelve-pin cable-or would it be thirty-two? — you make an offer on the spot.”

  “
We are the junkware,” Dagmar said. Their new slogan.

  “I’ll arrange for your escort,” Lincoln said. As he walked toward his office, he glanced over his shoulder at Dagmar and gave her a look. She followed.

  “I’ve got transcripts of Magnus’s and Byron’s confessions,” he said, once they were alone. “The Turks caught them at a roadblock outside of?yrnak, practically the minute they came down off the mountains, and the Jandarma so terrified them that they stopped thinking.” He shook his head. “They fell for the oldest trick in the world. They were put in separate rooms, and each was told that the other had started talking, and that whoever gave the Jandarma the most information would be treated leniently. They ended up competing to see how fast they could give their secrets away.”

  “Don’t those idiots watch cop shows?” Dagmar said. “They should know better than to tumble for that one.”

  Lincoln’s blue eyes grew serious. “They weren’t exactly in a position to demand a lawyer,” he said. “And the Jandarma don’t bother with explaining Miranda rights.”

  “That doesn’t explain why they sold me and Judy months later,” Dagmar said.

  “They were being blackmailed,” Lincoln said. “The Turks recorded them spilling everything they knew about the Zap, and threatened to release the videos if they didn’t, ah, keep in touch. If those videos had been released, they would have lost their security clearances and all their government contracts.” He offered a cynical laugh. “They’re still blaming each other. They still haven’t worked out how they were played.”

  Dagmar narrowed her eyes.

  “And you hired these bozos,” she said.

  Lincoln passed a hand over his forehead.

  “It wasn’t one of my better decisions,” he said. “But at least they’re working for us now.”

  “Oh,” Dagmar said. “Swell. Just swell.”

  He offered a grim smile.

  “I believe it’s been brought home to them that they had confessed not only to espionage on behalf of a foreign power but to being members of a conspiracy to murder an American citizen and were also accessories after the fact. Lieutenant Vaughan and I staged an argument in front of them over whether or not the trial would take place in the UK-I wanted to extradite them to Virginia, which still has the death penalty.” He nodded. “So yes-now they’re being very cooperative. We can use them to feed false information to their contact in Limassol, if we can figure out what would completely mislead them.”