“Any of it in English?” Lincoln asked.
“Most of it, in fact.”
“Anything political? Anything to indicate whether or not he supports the junta?”
Lloyd shook his head.
“Not so far,” he said. “But of course he reverse-engineered the Zap for them.”
“It might have been just a job he was paid to do,” Lincoln said. “He might just be a mercenary-which is good, from our point of view.” He looked up. “Just keep looking,” Lincoln said. “We need to know how to approach him.”
He turned to Ismet.
“Ideally,” he said, “I’d like to get a special ops team to just grab him and drag him to whatever American military bases are still in the ’Stans. But it may take too long to put a snatch team together.” He looked at Ismet. “So you’ll have to go in and make the approach.”
Dagmar’s heart gave a lurch.
At least, she thought, Ismet wouldn’t be going into the street fighting in Turkey.
“What are we trying to get him to do?” Ismet asked.
“The fact that he signed his work,” Lincoln said, “suggests that he compiled it himself, using his own personal compiler and algorithm. And the sort of people who compile programs themselves and then stick their own badge on them are very likely the sort of people who might well leave a back door into the program-they don’t code it into a program, because someone might notice; they add the back door when compiling it.”
“Ah.” Ismet nodded. “So I make contact, I get him to alter the Zap-”
“Putting a gun to his head if necessary,” Lincoln said.
Ismet shook his head. “It won’t work,” he said. “I’ll use the gun if I have to, but the fact is that I’m a journalist. He’ll know within ten seconds whether I have the knowledge to follow his work-and then he’ll make an idiot out of me. How am I going to know if he’s doing what I tell him to? Whether I have the gun or not, Slash is the one who will have the advantage.”
Lincoln turned somber. He looked over the others, as if numbering them in his head.
“I’ll go in,” Lloyd said. “I speak Turkish. I’ve shot a pistol once or twice.”
Lincoln looked at him for a moment, then shook his head.
U.S. citizen, Dagmar thought. Lincoln can’t put him in danger. Not without special permission, anyway.
Lincoln rose. “I’ll get busy talking to the good folks in Virginia,” he said. “I want the rest of you to prep for your encounter with Slash. He’s got a lot of speeches and so forth online-read them; try to figure what it is he wants. Try to work out what we can offer him, or pretend to offer him.” He gave the room a lowering look.
“We just may have to seduce the bastard,” he said. “You figure out what to say, how to say it.”
Seduce someone called Slash Berzerker, Dagmar thought. How hard can that be?
LadyDayFan says:
Assuming that this Uruisamoglu is in fact our Slash Berzerker, and assuming that he answers any of our emails, we should put our heads together and work out what questions we’re going to ask him. Should we ask him about Harry right off the bat?
Vikram says:
BTW, have you heard that the Internet is down in New York? I just heard the report here in Bengaluru.
Hippolyte says:
The whole Internet? Doesn’t seem very likely.
Corporal Carrot says:
I just checked the news crawl on CNN. They also report that New York is down.
Hippolyte says:
ReVerb is New York based. Are you still here, ReVerb?
Corporal Carrot says:
ReVerb? (ReVerb, reverb, reverb…)
Big echo in here.
LadyDayFan says:
Yeah. Big hollow echo.
I think we’ve lost the Apple.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
FROM: Rahim
The following proxy sites are still unblocked. Please let any friends in Turkey know this.
86.101.185.112:8080
86.101.185.109:8080
69.92.182.124:2100
128.112.139.28:3124
198.144.36.172:5555
“ ’Round Midnight” brought Dagmar up from sleep. She flailed awake, arms flying, then knocked her handheld off the bedstand and then had to look under the bed for it.
She located the phone by its glowing screen and grabbed it. She brushed dust from the display, looked blearily at the glowing numbers, and saw Uzbekistan’s country code.
Her heart crashed to a sudden surge of adrenaline. She pressed Send.
“This is-” She coughed. “This is Briana.”
“Hello.” A light, young voice. “You left a message for me to call you. This is Nimet Uruisamoglu.”
His voice lilted the unlikely-sounding name, made it almost melodic.
“I’m very pleased to reach you,” Dagmar said. She swung her legs out of bed, planted bare feet on the floor. She rose naked and went to the closet for a robe.
“I work for an American IT company,” Dagmar said. “We were very impressed by a talk you gave in Germany a couple years ago.”
“Which one?” Slash sounded pleased and upbeat.
Dagmar found her robe and got one arm in but couldn’t manage the second arm without taking the phone from her ear.
“Ah-” she said, momentarily distracted. “That would be ‘Toward the Creation of Neural-Based Communications Systems.’ ”
Ismet appeared-he’d been in the kitchen brewing coffee-and he used one hand to hold the phone to Dagmar’s ear while using the other to guide her arm into the empty sleeve. She shrugged on the robe and gave Ismet a grateful look.
“I’m very pleased that you remember that talk,” Slash said.
Dagmar had studied Slash’s speeches through online transcripts and chosen the one that seemed the most heartfelt. The speech had been nearly utopian-Slash had envisioned the Internet carrying not simply verbal or written communication, but information about emotional states, transmitted in a kind of holographic form by brain-scanning hardware.
Once people were able to understand one another’s true feelings, Slash had suggested, it would lead to greater peace among peoples, possibly the abolition of war itself.
Dagmar, for her own part, had little interest in being able to read the emotions of those she met on the Internet. She knew there were monsters in the human psyche. She had enough creatures lurching about in her own brain, and she preferred to keep them private: she didn’t want to broadcast hallucinations of Indonesian rioters or Maffya triggermen to everyone she met, and she very much preferred not to encounter their own needy, ever-hungry Creatures from the Id.
When people found out what others were really like, she thought, there would be more wars than peace treaties.
“We found the ideas visionary,” Dagmar said. “And I’m pleased to tell you that we may be in a situation to bring your ideas into being.”
“But the talk-” Slash stammered a bit. “It was what you call blue-sky. A kind of thought experiment.”
“Thanks to our proprietary hardware,” Dagmar said, “your vision is a lot closer to reality than you might think.”
There was a pause for Slash to digest this.
It was not, she knew, implausible. There were already scanners that could read the areas of the brain that processed speech, so that the scanner would be able to “hear” the words the subject was listening to or be able to print the words the subject was thinking. Processing more complex brain signals such as emotions, she thought, was only a matter of time.
“What company did you say you work for?” he said.
“I can’t actually tell you until nondisclosure agreements are in place,” Dagmar said. “But the hardware exists, and tests are very promising. Our software at the moment is a kloodge-we could really use a software overhaul-but we also need a vision such as the one you articulated in your German talk.”
“I-that’s very interesting.” He sounded cautiously interested.
Ismet appeared again, bringing a cup of coffee. He pressed it into Dagmar’s free hand, and she took a hasty swallow. Coffee scalded its way down her throat.
“I’d very much like to get in the same room with you to discuss this,” she said. “Do you think you can fly back to Germany to meet me?”
Germany, where there were plenty of American special ops teams, and military bases where Slash Berzerker could be debriefed.
“I–I’d like to,” Slash said. “But unfortunately my next few weeks are committed.”
“Oh?” Dagmar tried to sound disappointed. “Where are you?”
“Uzbekistan.”
“Really?” Dagmar made an effort to seem genuinely surprised. “Well,” she said. “We have people in Europe who might be able to meet with you there. Where in Uzbekistan are you?”
“Unfortunately, I’m in a place that’s completely remote. I’m near an oasis called Chechak in the north of the country.”
“How do you spell Chechak?”
From over the lip of her coffee cup Dagmar gave Ismet a wild grin.
This might just work out.
“Tell me about Uzbekistan,” Dagmar said. “The last I heard, they were killing each other.”
She and Ismet were in the backseat of the car, being driven to the ops center by their guards. He looked thoughtful.
“Last year they went through another phase of, ah, post-Karimov adjustment. But they’re quiet now.”
“Who’s running the place?”
“A coalition of political parties dividing all the uranium money while it lasts. Or maybe the uranium interests just bought the political parties. I’m sure it’s hard to tell.”
Dagmar shook her head. “Are they friendly to the U.S.?”
“They’re friendly to the American dollar.”
Dagmar nodded. “Sounds like people we can work with,” she said.
She was nearly skipping in delight when she entered the ops center, but the sight of Lincoln drained the joy from her. He slumped in a chair beneath the picture of Ataturk, a wisp of hair hanging in his face, his face gray and old. A corner of his mouth sagged, as if he’d been hit by a stroke.
Dagmar stopped dead in her tracks and looked at the others. Lloyd and Lola were busy at their desks, expressionless, and the others hadn’t arrived yet. Dagmar gathered herself and walked to Lincoln.
“What’s wrong?”
“The High Zap hit New York yesterday,” Lincoln said. “Just before the stock market closed.”
A shock wave rolled through Dagmar till it rebounded off the inside of her skull.
“How long did it last?”
“Only twenty minutes. But that was enough for Bozbeyli to make his point.”
Dagmar decided to emphasize the optimistic. “I’ve talked to Slash Berzerker,” Dagmar said. “I knew where he is-alone, apparently, at an oasis called Chechak.”
Lincoln slowly shook his head. “Doesn’t matter,” he said.
“All you have to do is send someone to talk to him,” Dagmar said. “Some of those Special Forces guys you were talking about, plus a technician or two smart enough to understand how to rewire the Zap-hell, the techs don’t even have to be there in person, just observing in via satellite.”
Lincoln waved a hand.
“No,” he said. “We can’t do any of that. They’ve canceled our operation.”
Dagmar could only stare at him. She heard Ismet walk up behind her, put his arm around her waist.
Lincoln looked up at her.
“From my superiors’ point of view,” he said, “this op is a complete disaster. We’ve destabilized an ally, crashed the New York Stock Exchange, lost billions of dollars-”
“The stocks will rebound,” Dagmar said.
“I didn’t mean the stocks.” Lincoln’s tone was savage. “I meant we lost the money. Do you know how much electronic money moves in and out of New York on a given day? How many billions in exchanges were disrupted? Not just the stock market, but the Federal Reserve, the other banks…”
“Oh, come on,” Dagmar said. “I could believe those transfers were disrupted, but I can’t believe they were lost. There’s all sorts of error checking-”
“They’re checking all those errors now, believe me,” Lincoln said. He looked up at Dagmar, his blue eyes wavering behind the tinted lenses.
“When a quake hits Wall Street, it’s the foundations of Washington that shake,” he said. “Our government is now going to great efforts to convince the Turkish generals that we have their best interests at heart, and that our diplomats and agents will stop trying to subvert the Turkish military. Our op is shut down as of today-we pack up the gear, and head back to the States by the first available transport.”
“The first real cyberwar,” Dagmar says, “and the U.S. surrenders?”
“That’s what you do,” Lincoln said, “when the apocalypse that the action was trying to prevent is triggered by the action.” He shrugged. “They’ll probably try for some kind of technological fix-figure out a way to neutralize the Zap, or supplant it with Zap 2.0.”
“And Rafet?” Dagmar asked. “The camera crew? What happens to them?”
“They’ll be exfiltrated,” Lincoln said. “Rafet will go back to his dervish lodge, and the rest-” He shrugged. “Will return to their lives.”
“And the revolution?”
Lincoln rose to his feet. Ataturk 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. Th
ey 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.”
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