Deep State

by Walter Jon Williams

  He returned an amused look as he brushed crumbs from his embroidered Guatemalan peasant shirt.

  “Oh yes,” Dagmar insisted. “My tech guy Richard has been with your techs on all your installations. You’ve been installing these colossal servers heavily wired into the local infrastructure, and everything’s got all satellite uplink capability.”

  Lincoln affected surprise at the question. “You do that, when you have to.”

  “Sure, when I have to. In places like rural Cappadocia and Mount Nemrut. But in Ankara? And Istanbul? They’re all heavily wired already; it’s easier to get bandwidth that’s already in place.”

  He lifted his shoulders. “There’s a lot of money at stake. I want to be thorough.”

  “And we’re the people who know better than anyone what kind of hardware we need on-site. Normally we install everything and link it up. But you have your own people for that.”

  “I’m in the media business myself,” Lincoln said. “Why should I pay you to do a job that can be done by my own employees?”

  Dagmar pointed her water bottle at him.

  “When we install stuff,” she said, “it’s just for the live event, just to transmit the live feed; we take it out later and reuse it. But Richard tells me that it would take a lot of effort to rip your hardware out. For all intents and purposes, it’s permanently installed, as if you expect this game to go on past the final event on Saturday.”

  She cocked her head and looked at him.

  “What game are you running, Lincoln? What are you really doing here?”

  He laughed.

  “I’m not going into competition with you,” he said, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “If you were, you wouldn’t be doing it from here anyway. And if you want to run Turkish ARGs, be my guest.”

  Lincoln shook his head.

  “We ran the numbers,” he said. “It was cheaper to leave the gear in place, and resell it to local IT companies.”

  “Local IT companies wouldn’t leave them in place,” Dagmar said. “They’d move all the equipment to their own server farms. So mooring everything the way you have doesn’t make sense.”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “I must be incompetent, then.”

  Dagmar fixed him with a long stare.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think you’re up to something I’m not supposed to know about.”

  He looked away.

  “I can’t say yes or no to that,” he said.

  Anger sizzled along Dagmar’s nerves.

  The last time she’d had a boss who kept secrets from her, people had been killed.

  Rather than screaming and smashing Lincoln on the head with the water bottle, she decided to use sweet reason.

  “We’re in a military dictatorship here,” she said. “I need to know if this is something that will put my people in danger.”

  Lincoln seemed surprised.

  “No,” he said. “Not at all.”

  “You’re not helping the generals, are you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Maybe I can tell you soon,” he said. “But not now.” He turned to her, and she could see his blue eyes gazing at her from behind his Elvis glasses. “But in the meantime,” he said, “there’s some important diplomacy in your immediate future.”

  Dagmar was instantly wary.

  “With whom?”

  He smiled.

  “Have I mentioned that I enjoy your correct grammar?”

  “Who with?” she said.

  He sighed and put both hands flat on the table.

  “The junta,” he said. “I’ve received an invitation for you, from General Bozbeyli’s office. They’ve invited you and your staff to a reception at the presidential palace, two nights from now. Thursday.”

  Dagmar was horrified.

  “You’re joking!” she said.

  “The game’s been getting a lot of publicity,” Lincoln said, “and the movie is going to be the best thing for Turkish tourism since the last Bond movie shot here. So the generals want to associate themselves with all this glamor and success, and show how hip they are to modern technology and culture. So you are going to the palace to be thanked for all you’ve done for the nation.”

  “There’s a live event on Thursday,” Dagmar said. “And after that there’ll be plenty of work to do, preparing for the finale in Istanbul.”

  He looked at her levelly. “Dagmar,” he said, “refusing this invitation would put your people in danger. And yourself. And the hundreds of civilians you’re carting around the country by plane and bus. Not to mention the millions invested in the game.”

  “I don’t want to be used to validate this government in any way.”

  “You can say whatever you like after you leave the country,” Lincoln said. “But two nights from now, you’re going to talk to Bozbeyli about what a wonderful time you’re having in his country, and compliment him on his choice of ties.”

  Fear and fury pulsed through Dagmar with every throb of her heart. She gave an angry laugh.

  “I have a personal history with military governments,” she said, “and it’s not good.”

  “Last time,” said Lincoln, “they didn’t invite you to the palace.”

  “Ha. That’s supposed to make me feel safer? I—”

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Come in!” Dagmar snarled. She didn’t want an interruption now, not when she had a full-blown tantrum she wanted to throw.

  Mehmet opened the door far enough for his head and his baseball cap.

  “The crossword puzzle has been solved,” he said. “Time for the update.”

  “Did they find the wreath?” Dagmar asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And the coded message on the back of the ribbon?”

  “Yes, they did.”

  Dagmar grabbed her hat and her water bottle and rose. The players had done their part; now she would have to do hers.

  The players had solved all available puzzles, and now an upgrade would refresh some established Web pages with new information, and this information—much of it in puzzle form—would lead to other Web pages and other puzzles, all newly uploaded.

  Dagmar would stage-manage the update from the trailer in Ephesus, but the update wouldn’t actually be happening from there. Her staff in the Simi Valley offices were much better able to handle the technical details, but she wanted to be on hand in case there were problems.

  Not that she could fix them; she just wanted to fret anxiously alongside her team.

  She took her phone out of its holster and pressed the speed dial for the Simi Valley office, where—after midnight, California time—Helmuth and Mike and the others were presumably standing by. Her phone used Voice-over-Internet Protocol, which made sense because it could grab the signal from only a few feet away, right in the trailer, and because the phone came right out of the box with military-grade encryption, which minimized the chance of any of the players stealing her signal and trying to read game clues.

  As she passed the door she turned to look back at Lincoln, who looked pointedly at her faded T-shirt and khakis.

  “Buy a nice dress,” he said. “Shoes, clutch purse, et cetera. And put the boys in suits and ties.”

  Dagmar glared at him.

  “This is so going on your bill,” she said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Dagmar spent much of the next two days in a frantic search for appropriate clothing—and not just for herself but for the two members of her team who were to accompany her. Tuna Saltik, her Turkish co-writer, at least owned a suit, even if he didn’t have it with him, but Richard, her tech and security specialist, had never worn a suit and never even owned a tie. She not only had to find her own outfit she also had to shepherd Richard through the process.

  Richard was known in the office as Richard the Assassin, a name derived from the highly imaginative acts of vengeance he carried out upon players who tried to hack
illicit information out of Great Big Idea. He was a trim, olive-skinned young man who favored white Converse sneakers that contrasted with the ninja-dark shade of his T-shirts and jeans. Dagmar couldn’t remember when he’d dressed otherwise.

  It was only to be expected that on his first trip to a boutique he revealed himself as a closet fashion slut and, furthermore, a fashion slut with luxurious tastes in fabric and style. He’d chosen a gorgeous suit of cashmere, gray with a subtle blue pinstripe, a tie of hand-painted Chinese silk, and Italian wingtips allegedly made by hand. Dagmar had flat refused to authorize the shoes for the expense account, but Richard had brought out his own credit card for the shoes and had then gone on to accessorize himself with a Girard Perregaux chronograph on a gold band—“chronograph” being what you called a watch when it cost over ten thousand dollars. Dagmar wasn’t aware that she paid Richard enough to afford such things.

  Dagmar was even more surprised to discover that this was the first watch he’d ever owned.

  “Up till now,” he said, “I just looked at my phone when I wanted to know the time.”

  “You do know you can get a Timex for under fifty bucks, right?” Dagmar said.

  He held out his arm to admire the glittering object on his wrist.

  “I’ll never have to buy another watch, ever,” he said.

  “At these prices,” said Dagmar, “you’d better hope so.”

  “By the way,” Richard said, “can you teach me how to tie my tie?”

  Auditing Richard’s luxurious tastes wasn’t Dagmar’s only problem. Tuna Saltik, the novelist and essayist she’d hired to make certain the game worked in Turkish, hated the new government and didn’t want to go to the reception; he balked at being dragged to the boutique, and he made Dagmar pick out his clothes for him.

  “Maybe I’ll be sick tomorrow,” he said.

  “You’d better not be,” Dagmar said. “The generals are going to know who shows up and who doesn’t. You don’t want to end up on the wrong list.”

  “I’m not afraid of them,” Tuna said.

  “Yes, you are.”

  He glared at her, and she realized that she’d made the mistake of challenging his machismo, or whatever it was Turks possessed that filled the same slot as machismo on the mental motherboard.

  He was a big man, broad shouldered, shaped like a brick. He had a mustache and heavy brows and big hands, and maybe—just maybe—he actually wasn’t afraid.

  “Look,” she said. “You’re a writer. Writers have more ways of subverting the dominant paradigm than anyone else on the planet. Come to the palace with me, pay attention to what happens, and then you can write savage satire about the generals, their wives, and their taste in furniture. Or whatever. Just don’t put the rest of us in danger.”

  “This is not acceptable,” he said, weakening.

  “This is what has to happen. We’re in business; it’s not our job to go to jail.”

  Tuna turned sullen. “My friends will learn about this, and then they’ll think I’m one of them.”

  “Tell your friends,” Dagmar said, “that your Nazi boss made you do it.”

  Which was, she thought, precisely what she was going to tell her friends about Lincoln.

  Time was running out on Thursday when she heard a knock on her hotel room door. She opened it to find a young man dressed soberly in a tan blazer and tie and carrying a netbook in a shoulder bag. He was, she figured, in his late twenties; he was slim and a little bit boyish and had studious brown eyes behind dark-rimmed spectacles.

  “Lincoln sent me,” he said. “We haven’t met, but I’m your advance man. I’ve been doing publicity for you for weeks now.”

  He spoke American English, with only a trace of an accent.

  “You’re Ismet Kadri?” she said. She’d spoken to him on the phone, and they’d exchanged a lot of email.

  “Yes. Pleased to meet you.”

  Dagmar shook his hand. “Come in,” she said.

  Papers, belongings, and electronics were scattered over her hotel room. Ismet gazed at the disorder with mild eyes.

  “Can I help in any way?” he asked.

  “That depends. What can you do?”

  “I can translate for you at the palace. And I can… help arrange your schedule.”

  “Do you have a car?”

  “I have a rental.”

  “Do you know Ankara?”

  “Pretty well. Not like a native, though.”

  “Right. I need to get Tuna and Richard to the tailor for the final fitting. I need to buy some shoes, and get a haircut. And I need to pick up my dress, which should be ready by four o’clock.”

  Ismet looked at his watch.

  “We have very little time,” he said.

  He and Dagmar managed everything except for the haircut—the stylist was backed up, with customers already filling the available chairs. Dagmar hoped that her prematurely gray hair would make up in novelty what it lacked in elegance.

  Fortunately for these last-minute expeditions, Ankara was the capital of the country, a sophisticated, cosmopolitan city with up-to-the-instant shops. Ankara also featured over a dozen universities, the presence of which guaranteed a large number of boutiques overflowing with stylish, often eccentric, and reasonably priced styles.

  Dagmar bought her shoes in one of the latter—chunky yet strangely endearing Bulgarian footwear that looked like something Rosa Klebb might have worn to a fatal meeting with 007. In a more upmarket place in Kizilay she found a glossy Donna Karan gown, slate blue that would set off her gray hair; in another a beaded handbag just big enough to carry a cell phone, a compact, and a tampon; and from a woman at a restored Ulus caravanserai she bought a flowery pashmina shawl to drape around her shoulders.

  She figured she’d be all right as long as she didn’t use the shawl to cover her hair. The military junta were ultranationalists and ultrasecularists, who would rather shoot a pious young Muslim girl than allow her into a school building in a headscarf.

  Dagmar herself had no sympathy for religious fundamentalists, but she had every sympathy for their children and thought it was more important to educate young women than to bar the school door with bayonets.

  She managed to get her posse to the hotel lobby on time. Tuna, bulky and uncomfortable in his new suit, was sulking. Richard kept admiring his chronograph. Ismet was all quiet efficiency. And Lincoln was discovered in the hotel lobby, lounging by the fountain in his Guatemalan peasant shirt, duck trousers, and tobacco-colored moccasins.

  Dagmar raged up to him.

  “You’re not ready?” she demanded.

  Lincoln gave her a mild blue-eyed look. “You’re the bright future of multiplatform entertainment,” he said. “I’m just the PR guy. I wasn’t even invited.”

  “So what will you be doing while I’m kowtowing to the junta?”

  “The hotel offers Turkish massage.” He smiled. “I think I owe myself a little relaxation after the rigors of our journey.”

  “Rigors?” she demanded. “Relaxation?” Fury blazed through her. “When do I get to relax?”

  Lincoln winked at her.

  “Saturday night,” he said. “After the game’s over.”

  Dagmar’s hands turned into claws, half-ready to gouge Lincoln’s flesh.

  “Our ride is here,” said Ismet.

  The generals had sent a sky blue limousine to pick up Dagmar’s posse from the hotel, an extended, customized, mirror-polished version of the Grosser Mercedes that movie villains were always driving in seventies action films. Dagmar herded her posse into a passenger compartment that smelled strongly of cigarettes, and slumped onto the backseat, her task done.

  From now on, her fate was up to the gods.

  The gods promptly wrapped the limousine in a traffic jam. Ismet looked out at the cars inching along Atatürk Boulevard, then looked at Dagmar and smiled.

  “You’ve done your best,” he said, “but the rush hour will make us late.”

  As long as it wa
sn’t her fault, Dagmar didn’t much care. Tuna seemed pleased by the delay. Richard looked again at his chronograph.

  “Ankara is built on hills,” Ismet said. “All the traffic runs into the valleys and gets jammed up.”

  “We worked that out when we were planning our live event,” Dagmar said. “That’s why we had our live event this morning in Anıt Kabir Park—lots of ways for Bond to make his escape from the black hats.”

  “Very smart.” Ismet looked at her. “I watched the event online. It seemed to go well.”

  “So far.” Crossing her fingers.

  “The players were enthusiastic. Especially about the Aston Martin.”

  Double-oh-seven’s escape vehicle had been shipped in from a dealer on Cyprus, riding in a truck the entire distance, and would be packed up and taken back the same way.

  “Are you enjoying my country?” Ismet asked.

  “Good beer,” Dagmar said, “and the best fast food in the world. I’m hoping to enjoy everything else once this is over.”

  Ismet grinned. “You haven’t bought a carpet yet?”

  “No.”

  “My people are slipping.”

  Dagmar laughed. “I suppose you have a brother or a cousin who’ll give me a good deal?”

  “An uncle. But he’s in Istanbul.”

  “We’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “He’s in the Cavalry Bazaar,” Ismet said. “I can show you.” He was quite serious.

  Dagmar smiled to herself and turned to watch Ankara roll past. The car lapsed into silence. Hemmed in by tall modern buildings and Ankara’s steep hills, Dagmar began to feel tendrils of claustrophobia sinking into her mind. As the Mercedes moved farther south, she saw the police and military presence deepen. As they passed the Confidence Monument, she saw a group of young men in pearl gray uniforms and baseball caps, machine pistols slung over their shoulders.

  “Gray Wolves,” Ismet said.

  Tuna muttered a few disgusted, inaudible syllables and turned away from the sight.

  “What are they?” Dagmar said. “Some kind of secret police?”

  “Not so secret anymore,” Tuna said in a leaden tone.

  “Officially they’re the youth auxiliary of one of our political parties,” Ismet said. “But now they’re the pets of the new regime.”