Deep State ds-2

by Walter Jon Williams

  When he wasn’t arguing with Ismet, Lincoln spent most of the day in his office, sending coded messages to his superiors, receiving intelligence in return, and arguing with the Brits. He emerged in late afternoon to announce that a general strike was going to be called in three days’ time. It was time, he thought, to test soft power against the might of the junta.

  Dagmar slept alone that night. No ghosts walked.

  Monday featured clashes in Kizilay, a rally in Bursa, and small demonstrations elsewhere. Rafet’s demonstration in Ulus was called off when police flooded the area before the demonstrators could get there. This meant that the government had gotten inside the Brigade’s communications loop-they’d turned someone or gotten hold of a cell phone, or someone had unwittingly recruited an informer. But this had been anticipated and the next day’s orders sent people off into a dozen districts, carrying a wide variety of ordinary objects found about the home. Those carrying paperback books, playing cards, pillows, and decks of index cards succeeded in their meet-ups and had successful minidemonstrations that dispersed before the authorities could arrive. But those carrying small jars of condiments were swarmed by police, demonstrating that the condiment carriers’ sub-network had been compromised.

  That compromised sub-network would be frozen out of future actions, unless of course they were needed to draw police away from something more crucial.

  In late afternoon Ismet was checking the video of a demo that had just been uploaded, and he gave a call. Soon the video was being broadcast by the big wall-mounted flatscreen above Helmuth’s desk. It showed a file of demonstrators marching past the camera, chanting and waving fists and signs. They carried CDs and towels. There was no audio.

  “This demo is supposed to have taken place in Diyarbakyr this morning,” Ismet said. “The signs are calling for independence for Kurdistan and praising the PPK.”

  “Crap,” Dagmar said. The actions were supposed to be about democracy for Turkey, not self-determination for one of its minorities. Now the authorities could point to the demonstration and say that the movement wasn’t really about political freedom but Kurdish separatism.

  “This doesn’t make sense in a lot of ways,” Lloyd said. “Are you sure it’s supposed to be Diyarbakyr?”

  “Yes.”

  “Diyarbakyr is the largest Kurdish city in the country,” Lloyd said. “But it’s also the largest garrison town. There’s the whole Seventh Army Corps in Diyarbakyr to make sure demonstrations like this don’t happen.”

  Dagmar perched on the edge of Richard’s desk and considered the video. “Could the government be gaming us again?” she asked. “Trying to split the movement?”

  Lloyd fingered his chin. “I’d say it has to be that way.”

  “Right,” Dagmar said. “Let’s watch the video again and look for proof.”

  On the second viewing, Lloyd jabbed a finger at the screen. “Stop,” he called. Ismet pressed the Pause button. “Back up.” Ismet reversed the video’s direction, staying in slow motion. Marchers creeped past, moving backward, swallowing their unheard chanted words.

  “There. Stop.” The picture froze. Lloyd studied it.

  “See the man on the left?” he said. “Red tie? Dark glasses?”

  Dagmar located him.

  “Yes.”

  “I think that’s Muammar Sengor.”

  The name meant nothing to Dagmar. Ismet adjusted his spectacles and studied the figure.

  “Yes,” he said. “That could be him.”

  “Let’s see if Chatsworth recognizes him.”

  Lincoln was brought from his office to view the video. He shook his head.

  “I don’t know Sengor. After my time. Sorry.”

  “I’ve got his Web page here.” Lloyd brought the page up on another screen. It showed a smiling Sengor under a patriotic red banner featuring Turkish stars and crescents. He was a handsome man, in his thirties, with a mustache and a bright white smile.

  “It looks like him, all right,” Ismet said. “He’s even got a red tie in his official photo. Maybe even the same one.”

  Dagmar cleared her throat. The others turned to her.

  “I’m all four-oh-four,” she said. “Who is this freakin’ Sengor?”

  “The unfortunate thing about the Kurds,” Lloyd said, “is that they’ve never been politically united. Some are assimilated into Turkish society-Turkey has had Kurdish generals, Kurdish presidents-and others are tribal and owe allegiance to their sheikhs. The Kurds don’t have a common religion-there are Jewish Kurds and Christian Kurds and Yezidis, and even the Muslims are divided between Sunni and Alevi. There are regional dialects of the Kurdish language that make it difficult for Kurds to communicate with each other. And just to complicate things, some Kurds don’t even speak Kurdish; they speak Aramaic. When the PKK started calling for an independent Kurdistan, a lot of Kurds probably wouldn’t have understood what they were talking about. Ethnic identity has always been a little slippery.”

  He raised a hand toward Sengor’s picture and waved his fingers as if trying to grasp at something elusive.

  “Sengor operates in this realm of ambiguity very well. He’s an assimilated Kurd who has his own political party based in eastern Turkey. He’s supposed to be Alevi, though that’s unofficial. He’s been a supporter of the military government from the start.” His glance shifted to the smiling man on his official Web page. “He’s also said to be a gangster. Probably has a piece of the heroin trade, and is supposed to loan gunmen to the government to kill moderate Kurds.”

  “Right.” Dagmar pointed at the frozen picture of the demonstration. “So now we’ve got him dead to rights, leading a phony demonstration intended to discredit the revolutionary movement. We put out our disclaimer right away.”

  “That may not be Sengor,” Ismet pointed out.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Dagmar said. “The man in the red tie is Sengor from now on.”

  Ismet and Lloyd went to work on updating the Web pages with the video while simultaneously debunking it in English and in Turkish.

  Dagmar followed Lincoln back into his office.

  “Do we have to keep calling you ‘Chatsworth’?” she asked. “Everyone left in the group knows your real name.”

  “Squadron Leader Alvarez doesn’t know my name,” he said. “Neither does Alparslan Topal, or any of the people here at the aerodrome.” He took papers off his desk and locked them in his safe. “Now that we’re in the habit of maintaining security, let’s keep doing it. Just in case.”

  Dagmar dropped into one of the chrome-and-vinyl seats.

  “Someone in the Turkish government is trying to play us,” she said. “It’s not Bozbeyli or the generals-those were the people who sent gunmen to kill me. This is someone new.”

  Interest glimmered in Lincoln’s blue eyes.

  “That’s possible,” he said.

  “You’ve got access to intelligence reports,” Dagmar said. “Do you have any idea who this new person might be?”

  Lincoln seemed to give the idea thorough consideration. His eyebrows went up.

  “The man who reengineered the High Zap?” he said.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Dagmar said. “Do you have any reports on whatever team deconstructed the Zap?”

  Lincoln spread his hands. “I have no information here. I’ll make inquiries.” He tilted his head. “But this… gamester.”

  “Kronsteen,” Dagmar said. “The chess player in From Russia with Love.”

  “Kronsteen,” Lincoln echoed. “Do you have any idea what he’ll do next?”

  “He’ll do whatever he can to divide us. He just uploaded a video showing that the rebellion was all about Kurdish independence.” Lincoln began to speak, but Dagmar held up a hand. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I handled it.”

  He nodded. “I applaud your initiative.”

  “But what other splits can be engineered in our alliance?”

  “Religious Turks versus seculars,” Lincoln said i
mmediately. And then, on reflection, “Rich versus poor. City versus rural. Sophisticated, Westernized Istanbul versus the patriotic heartland.” He flapped a hand. “Any society has similar fault lines. And any popular movement.”

  “He’ll have a hard time taking this line if he goes too far,” Dagmar said. “Within forty-eight hours he’s already told us that the rebellion is about both a Scottish rock star and Kurdish separatism.”

  “Next,” said Lincoln, “it’ll be a candy mint and a breath mint.”

  “You’re dating yourself.”

  Lincoln sighed. “I roll deep,” he said. He looked up.

  “By the way,” he said, “we may be wearing out our welcome from our friends the Brits. A general officer pointed out to me this morning that we can do our job anywhere-which is true enough-and asked when I thought I’d be finishing up here. I think getting hit with the High Zap has strained their hospitality.”

  Dagmar considered this. Moving wasn’t necessarily a bad idea.

  “We need to shift to a place with a lot of bandwidth,” she said.

  “And we won’t have Byron and Magnus to give our location away,” Lincoln said.

  Dagmar narrowed her eyes.

  “Indeed,” she said. “How much time do we have?”

  “Negotiations are in progress on a number of fronts. dai Military Base has been mentioned-that’s in Latvia. So have bases in Germany.”

  “I don’t have the appropriate wardrobe for Latvia,” Dagmar said. “I’m used to Southern California, for heaven’s sake.”

  “I believe you can afford a coat on what we’re paying you,” Lincoln said.

  “I can’t get another wardrobe out of Uncle Sam?”

  “We don’t have a regular supplier,” Lincoln said, “for T-shirts branded with the logos of failed start-ups.”

  Dagmar gave a laugh.

  “Touche,” she said. She thought for a moment.

  “We’ve got Byron and Magnus locked up here, right?” she said. “Why don’t we have one of them tell the Turks that we’ve got evicted and that out little project is canceled?” She thought for a moment. “Byron, for preference. If he defects, he won’t see his family again.”

  Lincoln laughed.

  “You’re starting to think like me,” he said.

  “And that,” Dagmar said, “is terrifying as hell.”

  By the next morning Rafet had a backup MS-DOS machine set up inside the safe house, with a modem scavenged from a carpet shop. Instructions for joining the DOS network had gone out to the various heads of the various sub-networks. Richard had put together a bulletin board system within DOS, where instructions to the network could be posted. In the event that the Zap struck Ankara again, Rafet would use a landline to call out of the country, to a number set up in Luxembourg. The Luxembourg number would automatically be forwarded to another number, this one in Milan, and so until it reached the computer humming away in Akrotiri.

  If the High Zap lasted long enough, the landlines would go down as well, but Dagmar hoped the Turks wouldn’t dare to keep their own cities blacked out for very long. They wouldn’t want to crash their own economy, which like the rest of the world was now dependent on the Internet.

  Next morning the military staged a formal military parade down Ataturk Boulevard in Ankara, the Sixty-sixth Motorized Infantry Brigade returning to the scene of their triumph. The junta stood on a reviewing platform in Cankaya and distributed medals. Whose morale the parade was intended to boost was open to question.

  What this meant, practically speaking, was that the military and police were busy guarding the parade route, which allowed Rafet to lead a demo near the Cebeci Campus of Ankara University. A swath of old houses had been demolished and not yet replaced, and the demonstrators made a brave sight, waving flags among the ruins and carrying signs in support of the next day’s general strike.

  The first amateur videos being uploaded, however, seemed to be from some other place altogether. These featured men in shades and galabia and white keffiyehs, who carried flowers and paperback books and waved signs in Arabic. They marched down a wide boulevard past white-walled stucco buildings. Palm trees waved on the horizon.

  “What the hell?” Helmuth demanded.

  The video was put up on one of the big wall screens. Dagmar studied it.

  “No one here reads Arabic, right?”

  “A little,” said Ismet. “But they’re not really showing us the signs; the writing isn’t big enough.” He squinted at the signs. “It’s very idiomatic. I doubt I can make much sense of it.”

  “The point is,” Dagmar said, “this isn’t anywhere in Turkey, right? Not even in the far southeast, where there are lots of Arabs?”

  Ismet shook his head. “The Gulf States, maybe? Yemen?”

  The Arab men reached a park featuring a geodesic-looking jungle gym. Glittering glass buildings shimmered on the horizon. Mercedes and BMWs prowled past the camera. The men began to create designs with their books and flowers.

  “Qatar?” Lloyd wondered. “Bahrain?”

  “What is going on over there?” Richard wondered aloud.

  Helmuth slapped his hand to his forehead. “Fuck,” said Helmuth. “It’s revolution creep.” He was utterly disgusted.

  Dagmar looked at him, mouth open.

  “Revolution creep,” she said. “That’s it.”

  The software business had always been prone to what was called scope creep or feature creep, in which shiny, attractive, but poorly conceived new features were added to projects that had already been approved, usually without any changes in budgets or deadlines. The result would be a large, unwieldy, badly functioning piece of bloatware, a prime example being Windows Vista, which jammed together the features of two separate projects, Longhorn and Blackcomb, then jettisoned the original source code to produce a program that glittered with surface appeal but operated with less efficiency than its predecessor. Vista’s problems were eventually fixed, but the damage to Microsoft’s reputation had been done.

  In Dagmar’s business, scope creep was a deadly danger. Plots could have so many elements and dimensions that they would run completely out of control. So could the software projects, and the video and audio. Half the anxiety of her job was making sure her projects were streamlined enough to be online by the deadline.

  Richard looked at Helmuth.

  “They’re using our tactics,” he said. “But it doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

  “Yes,” Dagmar said. “We sent the meme out into the world, and now anyone can use it.” And then she studied the men putting down books on the ground, setting them in patterns that might be Arabic writing.

  “I wonder if it’s Kronsteen,” she said.

  Ismet looked up at her. Dagmar explained.

  “We’ll know if it’s Kronsteen behind it,” Ismet said, “if there are a lot more demos like this in different parts of the world. Because then he’ll be trying to trivialize the whole process, show it’s just a game that people are playing.”

  “Yeah,” Richard said. “If people are suddenly using these techniques to protest the appointment of a dogcatcher in Aswa-n, then it’s Kronsteen behind it.”

  Kronsteen’s work was revealed later in the day, when Turkish television released an interview with an imam who had allegedly defected from the Tek Organization. He proclaimed that Riza Tek’s goal was to restore the caliphate and establish sharia law in Turkey and that Tek’s money was behind the rebellion.

  “Now we’re a Scots rock star, Kurdish rebels, and religious zealots,” Dagmar said.

  “We contain multitudes,” Richard said. Dagmar looked at him in surprise. She hadn’t reckoned him as the sort of person who would know Whitman.

  She turned to Ismet. “Estragon,” she said, “can you write an editorial pointing out the insanity of all these competing claims?”

  “The nationalists aren’t going to see contradictions in this,” Lloyd said. “They’re going to see conspiracy.”

  �
��Well,” Dagmar said. “Then let’s give them one.”

  They began the editing and uploading of the various videos. Ismet wrote an editorial denouncing the imam and pointed out that his own government said that the rebels were working for a Scotsman.

  Lincoln had been away for most of the day. As evening came on, he arrived and called Dagmar into his office. He held out a sheet of paper.

  “I’ve been on the phone with the team in the States working on the High Zap. Turns out they have a clue as to the team-or more likely the individual-who reverse-engineered the High Zap.”

  “They recognized the way he codes?”

  Lincoln looked disgusted. “They haven’t managed to decompile the Turkish version yet. Whatever algorithm the guy used was elaborate beyond description.” He looked at Dagmar. “He signed it after he compiled it-they must have let him compile it himself.” He looked skeptical. “Problematic from the security point of view.”

  “Maybe they were in a hurry.”

  “Anyway.” He opened his briefcase and took out a single sheet of paper. “He signed it with his handle, but we don’t know who the handle belongs to. He calls himself ‘Slash Berzerker.’ ”

  He put the paper on the table and turned it so that Dagmar could read it.

  “Slash Berzerker?” Dagmar said. “What is he, fourteen?” She looked at the paper and checked the spelling. “Fourteen,” she said, “and a bad speller?”

  Lincoln only shrugged, then retrieved the paper.

  “Are you going to burn that?” Dagmar asked.

  “If you want me to.”

  “I’ve never seen a spy burn an important paper before.”

  Lincoln shrugged again. “Whatever lifts your luggage.”

  He crumpled the paper, then looked around the room.

  “I don’t have an ashtray,” he said.

  She grinned. “You could swallow it.”

  Lincoln put the crumped paper on top of his safe, rummaged in his desk for a disposable lighter, and then set fire to the paper. It burned into a gray ash, and the smell of burning began to fill the office. Lincoln batted at the air to disperse the smoke.

  “The things I do for people,” he muttered. “Are you satisfied now?”