Critical Asset

by Ian Tonnessen

  “It looks that way. Sidorov already uploaded the lobby video data to headquarters for facial recognition, but there were no good visible angles of the girls. Street cameras caught them entering a taxi, and city traffic data showed that it dropped them off at the Detskiy food court.”

  “I’ll have someone contact the escort agencies around the city, see if they can find out who they were. But the girls walked out at noon?”

  “Yes, sir. The hazmat teams estimated that Vedenin’s been dead since around one o’clock, though, over an hour after the girls left. Looks like he was asleep at the time.”

  The detective studied the body. At first glance it looked like alcohol poisoning, and normally that might be the presumption before being carried off to autopsy. The body had a faint bluish tint to it, and Vedenin had urinated on himself while in bed. There were no marks on the body or other signs of trauma. But the circumstances weren’t normal. Some other poison?

  “Did they check the air for toxins?”

  “Yes, sir. First thing. They’re getting samples to their lab for trace analysis, but they pronounced the air safe to breathe.”

  “This guy may have been poisoned. Escaping gas would explain the old folks who got sick just by walking past the door.”

  “Maybe it’s just alcohol poisoning, sir, and the elderly couple was a coincidence. Who commits a murder by pumping gas into a sleeping man’s room?”

  The detective scrolled through his tablet as more information came in. Police cyber division discovered that the evening before, Yuri Vedenin had booked a holiday to the Caribbean, ten days round-trip. He was set to leave on an overnight flight in seven hours. Somewhere beautiful and warm many time zones away where the days would align with this night-shift worker’s hours, the detective figured. So if this was murder, did the killer not want to wait until after Yuri had returned? If so, would he have preferred to kill him later than this? Was this scene produced in haste? And who the hell does kill someone with gas?

  “Let’s get forensics to take him away. I need those autopsy results.”

  “This young guy probably has medical nanosensors in his blood. They should record any serious abnormalities, so the autopsy ought to be simple.”

  “Ought to be, yeah. If not, chemical testing in the morgue should yield some answers. But I suspect the answers might raise a host of other questions.”

  His tablet chimed with another data update from headquarters: the case might be linked to the young man’s supervisor at Engels Spaceport named Oleg Kozlov. Kozlov’s wife reported him missing only eighteen hours earlier, and headquarters informed the detective that his name was now in the queue and would be listed as missing in six hours. Tracking data from his car traced it to a parking lot a few miles from the spaceport, seemingly abandoned. Now, one of his assistants was found dead.

  “Officer, tell the reporters in the lobby that I’ll come down to take some questions in fifteen minutes. Until we know otherwise, this is a homicide case.”

  CHAPTER 4

  RFSS Kostroma

  1620Z, 23 December 2065

  It was eleven hours since the Kostroma launched, and Aydin Demirci’s eyelids were heavy. There hadn’t been much sleep for anyone during the cold night in the cargo lift while they waited for the launch. He and the twelve MAK troops with him were stuffed inside a section of a cargo hold with empty racks intended for refrigerated food and other consumables, and there wasn’t much room to move. Six at a time took turns sitting or lying down to catch up on sleep while the others stood still in the narrow aisle between the supply racks. There was nothing else to do. This part might actually be easier, he figured, if there was zero gravity in the supply modules. But there was exactly 1g, thanks to the ship’s parallel grav plates, and the gravity bubble included the cargo holds.

  Demirci stood with his back against a bulkhead, his arms folded as he listened to Sergeant Kervan snoring at his feet. Demirci chuckled. The first day I’ve ever been in space, and this is how I’m spending it, he thought, rolling his eyes. There was an hour left before it was time to wake Kervan for Aydin’s own turn to lie on the cold floor, but he doubted that he’d fall asleep with the same ease as the sergeant.

  I’ll need whatever sleep I can get, even a couple hours. There were only four hours left until it was time for the stowaways to seize the ship, and then another seventeen hours before the ship docked at Dirac Station. By Demirci’s own timetable, which he was trying in vain to ignore, he had little over twenty-one hours left to live.

  It will at least be a painless end, he told himself, and a noble one. After all the dust settles I’ll end up with much of the blame for the war, and rightly so. ‘The man who started World War Three’, they’ll call me. And he knew that he might never get the credit for the type of peace that would follow it. But that, he repeatedly assured himself, is a reasonable price to pay to change the world.

  The world he was born into was another age. Turkey back then was semi-westernized and secular, in name if not entirely in practice. It had been so ever since Mustafa Kemal Atatürk rose to power in 1923, replacing the Ottoman government with a republic and formally ending its weak caliphate a year later. That would be the last sovereign caliphate the world would see for over a century. The Turkey of Aydin Demirci’s birth was an ally of the west, a member of NATO and a candidate nation for the European Union. Its army was charged with protecting the secularism of its government, its politicians able to speak and debate with a reasonable degree of freedom. A long time ago indeed.

  His father, Yalcin, was a chemist at TÜBİTAK’s Marmara Research Center, the MAM, able to publish his findings as he saw fit and able to correspond freely with colleagues from western nations. After his doctoral dissertation was approved in 2007, Yalcin married Leyla; beautiful and his intellectual equal, a vivacious graduate student from Edirne on the Greek border. Five years later, baby Aydin was born in Istanbul.

  Aydin was an only child and had fond memories of his upbringing. The family lived in Gebze, in the eastern suburbs of Istanbul, while Yalcin worked at the MAM’s Chemistry Institute. Leyla taught molecular physics at Gebze Technical University and had never stopped except for a few months of maternity leave after Aydin was born, but there was never any distance between him and his parents. They lived a cosmopolitan life by Turkish standards. His father took no issue with helping with the laundry or cooking, and his mother never once thought it odd to lecture a university hall mostly filled with male students. There were beach holidays along the Sea of Marmara, visits to European cities when Yalcin travelled for conferences, and six months of a student exchange program for Aydin in Munich when Leyla was a guest lecturer at the Technische Universität. Young Aydin wanted for nothing, and while he was always a quiet, reserved boy who preferred reading to socializing, even before his teens he was showing every bit of promise in science and mathematics as his parents had hoped.

  His parents hadn’t been too incensed over politics in Turkey before the elections of 2028. Living in the west of the country and ensconced in academia and the scientific community, they were baffled at the spectacle of Melik Saglam and the new Democratic Nationalist Party, nicknamed the Silver Wolves. For generations, the Grey Wolves were the youth organization of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party, but the “Silvers” emerged as a union between them and the center-right Justice and Development Party, already a long-governing majority. And they were actually running for office on a pledge that a few decades earlier would have been almost unthinkable: to redraw Turkey’s constitution and re-orient the country towards the Islamic world. After a century of looking in the wrong direction, the Silver Wolves claimed, the glory of Turkey’s past would be reclaimed. They would restore their great nation to its rightful place as a leading power among Muslim countries, with an economy and a military as advanced as those of any western European nation.

  It was against those European nations, and above all against the United States, that Saglam expended the greatest vitriol in h
is rhetoric. For generations, the Silvers ranted, the west had used Turkey like a pawn, even against the nation’s own interests. Used by the Germans against the British in the first world war; used by the West against the nearby Soviets, when a stronger Turkey might have remained neutral; used by the infidel Americans in their wars against Sunnis in Iraq and Syria; even used by the despicable Israelis against all their Muslim neighbors and citizens. But in 2026, after the violent collapse of the House of Saud, the reborn Caliphate in Arabia had shown the world a new way, a way of bold solidarity among the Sunni faithful. The old nation-states drawn by western powers would no longer matter, the United Caliphate claimed, as it began absorbing several of its neighbors as semi-autonomous provinces. Egypt joined in the wake of its own frenzied upheaval in the autumn of ’27. Oman, Yemen, Libya, Qatar, and the U.A.E. followed. Revolution was in the air, the Silver Wolves exulted, time for a new order in the world, and their country would not ignore it. It was time for Turkey to stop being a pawn in the western world and to retake its rightful place as a leader in an Islamic one.

  Melik Saglam and his cohorts did not emerge out of thin air, though it may have seemed that way to many outsiders in the 2020s. The Silvers merely ran on, and eventually directed, a river of conservative religious fervor which had been rising in the country for decades. The potency of it tended to be disregarded by academics like Yalcin Demirci and his colleagues. The rubes and malcontents of the country might breed more than the sophisticates, Yalcin figured, but they would never amount to much. In their early days, the Silvers seemed to him like an ugly joke. But the mixture of this conservative zeal, the fallout of a scandal within the leftist People’s Democratic Party, and the economic crash of ’27 – when once again an American economic sneeze had given smaller economies like Turkey’s the flu – compounded to invigorate the Silver Wolves to new heights of popularity.

  At the age of forty-six, Yalcin Demirci decided to become involved in politics. He and three colleagues from work became active in supporting the center-left Republican People’s Party, the CHP. Flaunting his scientific credentials, Yalcin spoke out for the CHP at events held around Gebze and Istanbul during the 2028 campaign, mediocre public speaker though he was. He was in Istanbul the day the first riots broke out in Taksim Square, when a mob of pro-Silver supporters clashed with the rest of the crowd. That was the day the world media witnessed the bizarre sight of Istanbul policemen battling each other.

  Yalcin’s efforts were too little and they were too late. Melik Saglam rose to the presidency with sixty-eight percent of the popular vote, and the Silvers had an insurmountable majority in Parliament. The once calm and erudite Yalcin became embittered at the sight of such people rising to power, insisting that they would throw the whole country backwards. Aydin recalled the dinner conversation on the evening after the election when he and his mother both played the role of optimist, insisting that this was the nation of Kemal Ataturk, and that Saglam and the Silvers were just an aberration. Other countries in the west had elected fiery populist fools only to see the backside of them before long. If nothing else, Aydin thought the Silvers’ policies would not be so unreasonable as Yalcin was cynically imagining. But his father would hear none of it, insisting that lunatics now had their hands on the steering wheel of the country. “The religious and the reactionary,” he warned them, “you cannot trust either. Especially not when they are one and the same.”

  The new government called it the Reawakening. Like the New Deal or the Great Leap Forward, the Reawakening was an umbrella term for a series of policies enacted with one goal: the systematic remodeling of Turkey into an Islamic state. Turkey’s standards of free speech had already descended to a disgraceful level by the mid-2010s thanks to the Silvers’ predecessors in the ruling AKP, but the Reawakening’s first order of business to drive that level even lower. Internet access was restricted – a few sites and web forum types at first, and then more, then some more. All print, television, and radio became regulated by the Department of Cultural Cohesion, itself run by the Ministry of Justice. For his part, Yalcin Demirci protested by emailing his concerns to a colleague in London while he still could, so that his thoughts could be published as an editorial piece in a scientific journal.

  But the subjugation of not only the media but private communication was not met with the level of public revulsion that it once might have received. This was partly because the Reawakening was a gradual process, and the Silvers in Ankara were increasingly controlling the stories anyway, but also because the nation and the whole world was already fixed on another story. In 2028, Turkey withdrew from NATO, immediately replacing its membership there with membership in the Hras al-M’umnyn, the “Guardians of the Faithful” alliance established by the United Caliphate two years before. Turkey, revolutionary Pakistan, and fourteen smaller nations joined the Caliphate in the new alliance, nations with a combined population of eight hundred million, and the phrase “Second Cold War” became commonplace almost overnight.

  Again, Yalcin protested. He and three of his colleagues drove to Incirlik Air Base, recently abandoned by American aircraft, to demonstrate against the arrival of Caliphate liaison officers flown in from Jeddah. It was outside Incirlik that Yalcin tasted tear gas once more, as he had in Istanbul during the election riots. But this time, it was not local police who attacked the small crowd with gas and rubber bullets, but Turkey’s new Cultural Police, paramilitary units drawn from volunteers among Army and police veterans.

  It was during these months that the sixteen-year old Aydin began to grow as contemptuous of the new government as his father had become. For Aydin, it was not about NATO or Turkey’s international relationships, nor was it even about religion. For him, it was about what he was and was not able to see and read on the internet, and the fear of who else might be reading a message he wanted to write to friends, especially to those few he had in Europe. That, and it was the sight of his father arriving home from Incirlik after being gassed for holding a protest sign.

  Yalcin Demirci left the house a couple evenings a week after that. He never told Aydin or even Leyla where he was going, just that he was “meeting some friends at a restaurant”. It was only four or five times, Aydin would realize in retrospect. He remembered that because on one rainy day in October 2028, his father left home in the morning for work and never returned.

  Leyla Demirci nearly drove herself mad over the following weeks, desperately trying to find out what had happened to him. Three of his colleagues at the institute had disappeared as well. His car had never made it to the institute, and it was not impounded by the local police. It was not left at any nearby bus or train station, or the airport. Leyla knew this because she and Aydin searched all those parking lots. Yalcin still had medical appointments on his calendar, even dry cleaning to pick up the day he vanished. But it was Aydin, not Leyla, who insisted that they restrict their searching to maintain a low profile. He found it easier than she did to finally admit what must have happened: the Cultural Police had abducted him and had probably already killed him. And those same Cultural Police might still be watching the two of them.

  Leyla wanted to leave the country. She sought to travel to friends she and Yalcin had in Germany, with the idea of applying for asylum. But she was unable to even buy a plane ticket the handful of times she tried. Regulations now required a passport number for the sale of any transportation to a foreign country, and the websites and travel agents she tried somehow always rejected her passport. When she finally met with an official who offered her not a visa but a simple round-trip ticket, he explained that it would have to be on the condition that it was only for her but not simultaneously for her son or any other members of her family. She also sensed that he was offering his services for a bribe, but she could not bring herself to offer one. She drew a cold sweat at the idea that he was entrapping her, and that she could be arrested and Aydin taken away from her for daring to flee the country. It was the last time she tried.

  Aydin Dem
irci kept to himself and immersed his energy into his studies. Questions from classmates about what happened to his father were dismissed or even lied about. Sometimes he would admit to someone that his father simply disappeared one day, but he did not dare elaborate on his father’s politics, let alone on suspicions about what had happened to him. Any feelings about Yalcin were buried deep down, and Aydin kept them there day after day.

  And he did not plan revenge. Against whom would he act, anyway? The only target he could think of was the Cultural Police, assuming they were responsible, and what was a young student going to do against them? No, Aydin decided, he was too civilized to sacrifice himself in some futile attempt at vengeance. And he was all his mother had left, anyway. Someone once said that living well was the best revenge. He was just beginning his life, and he decided he would outlast the Silvers, who would lose their grip on power sooner or later.

  The Izmir Institute of Technology remained as open and full as it had ever been, though the Cultural Police kept a watchful eye on the faculty and on student life. Aydin completed his bachelor’s degree in physics with highest honors, graduating in 2034, the year before the university banned female students.

  But before he graduated, he met and fell in love with Dilara. As gregarious as Aydin was introverted, Dilara studied economics at the far larger Ege University. She and Aydin even risked sleeping together many times while they were both unmarried students, careful to avoid any others knowing about it. She also knew that she wasn’t likely to climb high in the male-dominated job market, at least not since the Silvers started driving careerist women back into their homes. But she could still conduct research for her firm without leaving her house, and Aydin felt good at the thought of that as well. No need to undermine their whole lives by taking a stand for women’s rights barely out of college. Things would be set right after some future election. It would be better to play along with the Silvers’ game for now and explore other options later. He married Dilara and decided to stay in academia.