Deep State ds-2

by Walter Jon Williams

  Dagmar looked up at the antenna that reared above the town.

  “Right,” she said, and put the Niva in gear.

  “How is your Uzbek, by the way?” she asked.

  “Nonexistent,” Ismet said. “Uzbek is about as close to modern Turkish as German is to English.”

  “You managed to talk to them, though. And Ulugbek.”

  “We found a few words in common.”

  “Whoah!” They had come to the edge of town, and Dagmar braked at the prow of a strange duck-billed vehicle looming around the corner of a mud wall. The other machine didn’t move, and Dagmar realized it was just parked there.

  She slowly pulled ahead and saw that she had been startled by a battered old armored vehicle with eight huge tires, its steel flanks studded with little portholes. The original olive drab paint had flaked off it, and it was now spattered with rust, like an old boulder that had been scabbed with fungus.

  “Lots of old Soviet military gear lying around the provinces,” Ismet said.

  “There are license plates on it,” she said. “Someone must drive the thing.”

  The armored vehicle was set up to pull what looked like a long homemade trailer, with a lot of old pipe stacked on it.

  “Maybe the owner digs wells,” Ismet said.

  The Niva descended into a gulch behind the town, then climbed up the other side. Ahead Dagmar saw a two-rut road running past the face of the bluffs, weaving between boulders that had been eroded from above and tumbled down the slope. They came around one craggy rock and saw that a new road had been blazed up the face of the bluffs. She shifted the vehicle into four-wheel drive, cranked the wheel over, and the Niva began to lurch upward.

  As they came around a curve they had a view of the oasis and the desert below.

  “Look there,” Ismet said.

  Dagmar braked and saw a red rooster tail crossing the desert, moving fast in their direction.

  “That would be our friends from the airport,” Ismet said. “I don’t think Babur was able to hold them for very long.”

  “They’ve got a lot faster car than we do,” Dagmar said. She looked at him. “What do we do now? We’re stuck on this hill.”

  “Go up to the top,” Ismet said. “We can’t turn around here.”

  The Niva jounced to the top of the road. The tower and the receiver dishes were surrounded by chain link and razor wire. But beyond the tower, to Dagmar’s surprise, she saw a yurt, the round felt-walled dwelling that had been a home to the steppe peoples for millennia. Ismet’s nomad relatives still lived in similar tents, at least part of the year.

  Next to the yurt sat a Volkswagen Rabbit that seemed about the same vintage as the armored vehicle she’d seen in the oasis.

  “I’ll drive,” Ismet said. He jumped out of the passenger door, then paused to look down as the strange car entered the village. “Take your gun.”

  Heart pounding, Dagmar reached for the gun and its holster and jammed the holster into the back of her jeans.

  “What are you doing?”

  He turned to look at her. Bruises bled down his face.

  “I’m going to lead them off into the desert,” he said. “Once we’re away, you get Slash into his car”-jerking his head toward the Rabbit-“and then you get him to Zarafshan.”

  Ismet jumped into the Niva, and there was a shriek of gears as he put it in reverse. As he backed, then turned and began rocking down the bluff, Dagmar was aware that a young man had come out of the yurt and was watching her.

  He was small boned and pale skinned, and he huddled in a sheepskin overcoat. He had a unibrow over large brown eyes, and he watched them with a little frown on his face.

  She was surprised to see that he was propped up on metal forearm crutches. None of the online material she’d seen about him indicated that he had trouble walking.

  Dagmar approached him.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’m Briana. I talked to you on the phone.”

  Comprehension dawned on the young man’s face, though he still seemed wary.

  “I’m Nimet Uruisamoglu,” he said.

  “Otherwise known as Slash Berzerker.”

  He flushed slightly. “I started using that name,” he said, “when I was fourteen.”

  Dagmar stepped close.

  “You used that name a few months ago,” she said. “When you did some work for the Turkish government.”

  His unibrow darkened, and he looked suspicious.

  “What does that matter?” he said.

  “Because the government figured out that you put in a back door when you compiled that program and now they’ve sent people to kill you.” She pointed over the edge of the bluff, toward the village.

  “They’re in Chechak now. As soon as they work out where you are, they’re coming up here. Of course maybe they already know that you’re here.”

  Slash scowled, deep lines forming in his forehead. The scowl was too old an expression for his young face. His hands clenched on the handgrips of his crutches.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  Dagmar was very aware of the pistol pressing against her spine. She took another step toward Uruisamoglu, hands rubbing her sore forearms.

  “They let you compile the program yourself, using your own algorithms. That wasn’t a smart thing to do, but then they’re not very bright about computers, are they?”

  His dark eyes studied her. His upper lip gave a twitch.

  “They said it was a weapon,” he said. “They said it was something they’d found in a government router, probably planted by a Chinese botnet.”

  “It is a weapon,” Briana said. “And the generals are using it now. They shut down New York the other day, and now they’ve shut down all of Turkey and all of Uzbekistan.”

  Uruisamoglu’s lips parted in surprise.

  “That’s what’s happening here?” he said.

  “Oh yes.”

  “I thought our stupid subcontractors in Tashkent had accidentally switched us off. I tried to text them about it, but wireless was down, too.”

  “They shut down Uzbekistan because they didn’t want you to get a warning that you were about to be killed.”

  His unibrow knit again. “And who are you, exactly?”

  “I work for Ian Attila Gordon.” She couldn’t help but laugh as she said it.

  “The rock star?” Uruisamoglu was deeply surprised. “The man who’s trying to overthrow the government?”

  “The man who’s trying to overthrow the government that’s trying to kill you. Yes, that man.”

  Dagmar could hear the sounds of a car grinding at the base of the bluff. She gave Uruisamoglu a warning look, then crouched down to creep carefully to the edge of the bluff.

  A dark sedan was winding along the road. It looked not so much as if it had driven across the desert as physically attacked it: the car was covered in red dust, and there were several fresh dings on the paintwork.

  “What-?” Uruisamoglu’s voice.

  She realized that he had followed her and he was now silhouetted on the skyline.

  “Get down!”

  She grabbed his sheepskin coat and pulled him off his crutches. He gave a cry and fell heavily onto the ground. She was afraid he’d cry out and she put a hand over his mouth. His eyes were very large.

  The sedan ground on, kicking up alkaline dust. She could see Ismet and the Niva pulled off the road, behind a large block of stone that had at some point in the past tumbled down the bluffs. Ismet was standing by the car, his right arm by his side.

  The sedan came closer. Then Ismet stepped out from cover, his right arm pointing at the car.

  The sound of rapid fire echoed up the bluffs. The sedan slammed to a halt, then went into reverse. Ismet kept firing. The sedan slewed off the road, and its doors opened. Four men in suits tumbled out of the car and sought cover.

  Ismet jumped into the Niva and gunned the vehicle onto the road.

  Now it was the others
who fired-three of them, Dagmar saw, had pistols. Dagmar felt her nerves leap with every shot. She heard a few bangs as rounds struck the Niva, but the Russian jeep pulled away in a swirl of dust.

  The Turkish gunmen ran back to their car. The engine raced. The fourth man-the gunmen had dark suits; he wore something sand colored-was late in getting to the car, and she heard impatient commands. Then doors slammed, and the sedan was racing away.

  “Okay,” Dagmar said. “Now we get in your car and we run like hell.”

  Uruisamoglu looked at her.

  “We can’t,” he said. “The car’s broken down. They were going to bring me a new one in a day or two.”

  Dagmar watched the Niva and its pursuer racing away along the bluffs.

  “Okay,” she said. “We’ve got to get down to the village and get a ride.”

  He spread his hands, indicating his crumpled body, the metal crutches.

  “How?” he said.

  Dagmar was having a hard time believing how quickly it had all gone wrong.

  “Let me help you up.” She tugged on the sheepskin and helped him rise. He hobbled toward the yurt, and she followed.

  She could go down to the village, she thought. Get a car, bring it back up the bluffs. But that would leave Uruisamoglu unguarded. The assassins could return and kill him.

  “All right,” she said. “You’ve got a back door into the program. So use it.”

  Spear Point Flies to Hooters

  The yurt was cozy, build on a wooden stage above the ground, with Oriental rugs on the floor and a pellet wood stove. It had a wooden door, a bed on a platform, a large desktop computer, equipment for making tea and warming food. A wood-lattice framework supported the felt walls. There were maps and photos of the Kyzyl Kum, with marks where Uruisamoglu was weaving together his IT infrastructure. He lowered himself carefully onto a large pillow and pulled out his laptop.

  “The program will be in your router here,” Dagmar said. “You need to configure it so that it will obey you-obey my- orders.”

  “That’s going to take a while.”

  Dagmar was surprised.

  “Why?” she said. “All you have to do is use your back door to get into the program, change the government’s password to your own-to my own-and then tell the program to go dormant again.”

  Uruisamoglu’s unibrow grew darker as he frowned.

  “It’s not that simple,” he said. “The program’s… different now.”

  Dagmar felt a sudden, raging certainty that the kid was lying. She could feel a mad itch where the gun dug into her spine.

  “Tell me quick!” she snapped.

  The unibrow lifted. He seemed impressed by the force of her anger. Not in a frightened way, exactly, but in a way that absorbed his attention. As if he found strong emotions somehow alien but still the subject of intense interest.

  “Okay,” he said. “The government was afraid of someone doing… exactly what you want me to do. So when I try to change the program, it queries a central server in Ankara for permission.”

  Dagmar felt a snarl tug at her lips. She wasn’t believing this. “It can contact the central server even when the Net’s down?”

  “Yes. It will have the correct codes to pass the message through any affected routers.” He looked down at his keyboard. “I can get into the central server, I think, because I compiled that program, too, but I’ll have to work out how to structure my attack. And I’ll have to make certain that Korkut or the other system administrators don’t see me working.”

  “Korkut? Who’s Korkut?”

  “He’s head of computer security for the Intelligence Section. He’s smart. I worked for him.”

  Korkut, she thought. She wondered if he was the man she had called Kronsteen, the man who had been behind the attempts to discredit her.

  “He was down there,” Uruisamoglu said. He gestured toward where the sedan was roaring off in pursuit. “Korkut was the man in the light-colored suit.”

  He was the one who wasn’t shooting, Dagmar thought. The one the others were yelling at.

  Korkut was the geek the assassins had brought along, to make sure Uruisamoglu didn’t try to put one over on them.

  Dagmar had a lot of questions about Korkut, but she didn’t have the time to ask them. Anger jittered in her nerves. But the more she thought about what he’d told her, the more plausible it seemed.

  “Better get busy, then,” she said.

  He didn’t answer. Instead he put earbuds into his ears, then began to type. After a few minutes he began to sway back and forth to his music. Dagmar watched him, then ran up to him and pulled one of the buds out of his ears.

  “Are you listening to music?” she demanded.

  He looked up in surprise. She could hear tinny Europop sounds coming from the bud dangling from her hand.

  “What’s the problem?” he asked.

  “You can’t listen to music!” she said. “You’ll deplete your battery power!”

  “I always listen to music when I work.”

  “Not this time.”

  She pulled the cord from his laptop and confiscated the earbuds. He looked at her in fury.

  “Do you have a miniturbine array for recharging?” she demanded.

  Uruisamoglu looked disgusted. “No. I normally have electricity here, but it went out along with everything else.”

  Dagmar clenched her teeth. She had a recharging unit in her luggage, but her luggage was still in the Niva.

  “How much power do you have in your laptop, anyway?”

  He waved a finger over the laser sensor to bring up the data, looked up.

  “One hour, thirty-nine minutes,” he said. “Give or take.”

  “Can you do the job in that time?”

  He shook his head and lifted his shoulders, a Turkish gesture that meant “I don’t know.”

  “Conserve power.”

  Dagmar went to the door and looked out. Two vehicles were laying dust trails along the road in the distance. She could hear the popping of shots.

  She and Ismet should have come up with a better plan, she thought. Though as it happened she couldn’t think of one.

  Her phone rang, Helmuth calling from Frankfurt.

  “Yes?”

  “We’re getting reports of riots all over Turkey.”

  Dagmar gave a weary laugh. “Losing the Internet didn’t make people stay home; it just pissed them off.”

  “They were already on strike-maybe they didn’t need the Internet so much.”

  The distant dust trails vanished into the shimmer of the horizon. Dagmar could smell smoke drifting up from the village below.

  “What’s happening with the old parliament building?” she asked.

  “Nothing yet. I’d expect the army to turn up, though.” There was a pause. “We also got one report from the east of Turkey, saying the commander of the Second Army has been removed.”

  “Hm.” Dagmar peered at the horizon, saw nothing. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “I don’t know. We need Chatsworth to tell us what it means.”

  Dagmar considered this and wondered what Lincoln’s reaction would be if she told him she was in Uzbekistan.

  “You could ask Ismet,” Helmuth suggested.

  “Last I saw,” Dagmar said, “Ismet was driving across the desert being pursued by Turkish gunmen.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Okay,” Dagmar said. “Here’s what’s happening.”

  She gave a brief outline of the situation. Helmuth muttered something in German under his breath. “So you can’t get out?”

  “No.”

  She could hear Helmuth thinking. “I have an idea,” he said. “But you’re not going to like it.”

  She cast a glance back into the yurt, at Uruisamoglu sitting motionless at his computer, watching her with his large brown eyes.

  “I’m open to suggestions,” she said.

  “Shoot the kid,” Helmuth said. “He works for the
damn narco-Nazis anyway, so he’s no loss. Take his laptop, grab some supplies, and take off on foot. Hide until the bad guys go away, or until you can reestablish contact with Ismet.”

  Dagmar felt her mouth go dry.

  “That’s… going to be hard,” she said.

  “Can you think of a better idea?”

  She gave the matter some thought. “I’ll have to get back to you,” she said. She pressed End and put the phone back in its holster. She looked at Uruisamoglu.

  “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “It would go faster with music.”

  She gave him an icy look. “Then sing,” she said.

  She left the yurt and gazed out to the east, where Ismet and his pursuers had disappeared. She saw no dust plumes, heard no vehicle noises or gunshots on the wind.

  Dagmar rubbed her sore forearms with her hands. She thought about Ismet dead, Ismet burning in his car, Ismet lying wounded on the sand. Tears stung her eyes.

  She had bravely struck off on her own, without any of her support system, and led her lover straight into a fiasco and probably got him killed.

  She couldn’t save Ismet. She couldn’t save Uruisamoglu, and she knew she couldn’t kill him. She was useless.

  She was Semiramis Orta. She was the spy who failed.

  Dagmar clenched her fists, her teeth. Her thin leather jacket didn’t seem able to keep out the cold wind at all. She shivered.

  God damn it, she thought. Haven’t I learned anything?

  Apparently not.

  She returned to the yurt and looked over Uruisamoglu’s shoulder. He was coding: she recognized structure and syntax but couldn’t place the lines in any context. Slash couldn’t help clarify; he was off somewhere in his own Deep State-not in the cabal that had taken power in Turkey, but inside the internal realm where art and code and human mind all came together, where mad imagination ran in tandem with the discipline of science, a rigorous internal dreaming that flowed down the arms and through the fingers into the keyboard and then out into the world…

  Oblivious to her, Uruisamoglu was humming to himself as he worked. Needing the music.

  She followed the coding. She did very little coding herself these days, she had Helmuth and others for that, but she still appreciated coding as an art form, and Uruisamoglu was very good. His syntax was clean, he was well organized, and he made few mistakes.