Deep State

by Walter Jon Williams

  Ismet seemed delighted.

  “Do you get good at escape and evasion?”

  “Escape and evasion?” It sounded like a course in commando school. “I don’t know about that,” she said, “but I’ve gotten good at hiding things.”

  He smiled. “Tomorrow,” he said, “you’re going to hide seven hundred people.”

  “Let’s hope,” said Dagmar, “that I do.”

  He raised his Efes to his lips. “I think we’ll be fine,” he said.

  She looked at Ismet with a sudden flare of interest. She’d met him only the day before, but since then he had so efficiently inserted himself into her process that she hadn’t noticed till now.

  “You keep saving me,” she said. “Yesterday from social embarrassment, this morning from getting knocked into the hospital. Is this sort of thing normal for you?”

  One of Ismet’s small hands made a circular motion in the air, a local gesture that Dagmar knew meant something like, “Oh yes, I’ve done that countless times.”

  His actual words were a little more modest.

  “Lincoln told me to be useful,” he said.

  She narrowed her eyes. “How long,” she said, “do I get to keep you?”

  Dagmar saw a little flare of light behind the spectacles, as if he’d only just now realized that there was flirtation going on.

  “I work for Lincoln,” he said. “Or rather, my PR firm does. You could request that I be kept around to rescue you when necessary.”

  “Maybe I shall,” Dagmar said.

  Tuna came barging up, a drink in his hand and wrapped in a cloud of harsh tobacco fumes.

  “Shall we eat?” he said. “I’m hungry.”

  Dagmar turned her eyes from Ismet with a degree of reluctance.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s probably time we did.”

  Hippolyte says:

  Oh, goodie! A boat ride!

  Burçak says:

  I wish I had brought a coat. Going to be cold out on the water.

  Corporal Carrot says:

  Wish I had Dramamine. I get seasick.

  The next morning Dagmar stood above the golden span of the Bosporus Bridge from the vantage point on the steep hill of Ortaköy. Excursion boats drew their wakes across the deep slate of the straits below, tiny little water bugs alongside the enormous tidal surge given off by a brilliant white cruise ship so enormous that it seemed like a piece of the continent broken off and adrift.

  A blustery cold wind blew from the Black Sea, and Dagmar wore a jacket against the chill, with the brim of a baseball cap shading her eyes from the sun, still low in the eastern sky. Behind her was Richard’s new electronic marvel, his rented gear packed into a Ford van, with an antenna strung from the van to a nearby plane tree, and another directional antenna mounted on a long wood plank aimed at Lincoln’s bunkered router up above Seraglio Point. A generator rumbled from a yellow trailer, spitting diesel smoke into the brisk wind.

  They could have just grabbed a local signal—the area was saturated with IT—but the local bandwidth might not be up to the task. Their own gear, however improvised, was to be preferred…

  “Reception is brilliant!” Richard called. “If only the rest of the world is getting it…”

  He was busy on the phone to Great Big Idea HQ in Simi Valley, where it was late Friday night. Tens of thousands of American gamers, it was hoped, were awake to watch the game’s conclusion on live feed.

  At least they would, if Richard’s jury rig worked.

  The live event had gone perfectly to this point. Buses had taken the gamers from their digs in Beyolu to the quay in Ortaköy, where they filed happily aboard their excursion boats in the shadow of the district’s elaborate Mediciye Mosque, a structure that looked—to Dagmar, on her hill—like a Mississippi steamboat, with two filigreed funnel/minarets, an arched dome with a silhouette like an amidships paddlebox, and gingerbread dripping from the Texas deck… she wondered if the mosque’s nineteenth-century architects had in mind the era’s steamboats, chugging up and down the Bosporus in plain sight of the structure.

  “Five by five! Five by five!” Richard shouted. By which Dagmar concluded that Simi Valley was receiving the transmissions just fine and that soon the finale of the Stunrunner game would be played out to its worldwide audience.

  Dagmar got out her handheld and was aware of Ismet by her side mirroring her gesture. She looked over her shoulder to see Richard making a third call from his own phone, so that the guides on the three boats would get the message at the same time, and all three feeds would soon offer the last set of instructions given to the players.

  “Universal Exports thanks you for your assistance to our sales associate Mr. Bond. We are pleased to report that he has returned to England in complete safety. But we would appreciate your assistance in helping to clarify a few final details…”

  And the players were off.

  Alaydin says:

  “Foundation laid by lo’s grandson, where Yeats invoked mechanical bird.” wtf? 9 ltrs.

  LadyDayFan says:

  Googling Yeats + mechanical + bird gives a poem called “Sailing to Byzantium.”

  Classicist says:

  BYZANTIUM. lo’s grandson was Prince Byzas, who founded the city.

  ReVerb says:

  “Abdülmecid filled the Sultan’s garden here.” 10 letters.

  Burçak says:

  EZ, if yr Turk. DOLMABAHÇE Palice. Dolma + bahçe = filled + garden

  Hanseatic says:

  “Motivated by gadfly’s tongue, heifer drives Henry’s car.” 8 ltrs.

  Desi says:

  Henry’s car would be a Ford.

  Classicist says:

  BOSPORUS. lo was turned into a cow and driven across the Bosporus by a stinging fly. Bosporus is Greek for “cow-ford.”

  Corporal Carrot says:

  Do you have to have a doctorate in classics to get this stuff?

  Maui says:

  “Where snakes, pink lions, and Mad Fuat got their yah-yahs out.” (7 ltrs)

  Classicist says:

  I suspect my degree isn’t going to help with this one.

  Burçak says:

  Yah is Turkish for “mansion on water.” But which one?

  LadyDayFan says:

  Googling like fury here…

  Snakes, Pink Lion, Egyptian, and Mad Fuat are all yahs along the Bosporus.

  (Crescent and Star, Stephen Kinzer, p. 197.)

  Hippolyte says:

  But where are they?

  Corporal Carrot says:

  Realty Web page says Egyptian yah is for sale. Address in ORTAKÖY.

  ReVerb says:

  Brilliant! We’re on our way!

  The players in their boats laid little white tracks on the blue. Standing on the hill of Ortaköy, Dagmar finished her call and cast a glance at Ismet. He was dressed in his tan blazer and tie, and the blustery wind had brought a little color to his cheeks. He looked down at the distant Bosporus traffic as he held his phone to his ear, then nodded, smiled, and returned the phone to his pocket.

  He looked up and smiled. The wind tossed his hair.

  “What are you doing after this?” she asked.

  “Back to working for our regular clients. I think the next job has to do with advertising a new series of electronic switches, mainly in trade journals.”

  “Sounds peaceful.”

  “Oh yes.” Ismet threw out an arm, at the spectacular Bosporus scene, the electronic world, at Stunrunner sizzling invisibly through the ether, its video streams reaching to outer space and back.

  “This is the most fun I’ve had in ages!” he said.

  “Other than the riot and the anxiety.”

  He made an equivocal gesture.

  “That’s my country now,” he said. “That sort of thing can happen at any time.”

  Dagmar hadn’t been able to continue her brief flirtation with Ismet during the group dinner of the previous night, with everyone talking at once and passing
mezes and drinks back and forth—and afterward she’d been too tired, her system having crashed after too many early mornings, too many nights on the go, and always worried that she, her friends, her charges, could end up on the points of bayonets…

  And besides, she’d been having second thoughts. She had a bad history with office romance.

  Her last lover, an actor she’d hired for one of her projects, had (1) turned out to be married and (2) been savagely murdered and, furthermore, had been killed on her account. That was two reasons for feeling guilty and miserable—more if you considered the wife.

  He hadn’t been the last to die, either.

  In the aftermath Dagmar had decided that the only remaining morally defensible position was to forget the world of relationships and concentrate on work. Which she had, for three years.

  But still, she was planning a week’s vacation after the live event, the first vacation since the one that had gone so disastrously wrong in Jakarta. And the week could be a lot more fun with someone else along.

  “Where do you actually live?” she asked.

  He nodded across the water. “The Asia side, in Üsküdar. I share an apartment with a colleague.”

  “So you take the ferry every day?”

  He made an equivocal gesture. “The ferry, the train, aircraft… I travel all over the place. I rent a single room in Ankara because we lobby the government, but I may have to give it up. The generals have their own structures in place, and a very firm idea of which interests they have to placate. They don’t respond to our efforts.” He tossed his head back. “Call me another dissatisfied customer of the regime.”

  Richard stuck his head out of the van.

  “Look at this! It’s beautiful!”

  She turned and stepped up into the van and duckwalked to a better view, leaving the world of reverie for the more immediate sphere of video. The multiple feeds were indeed beautiful, digital icons of the packed tour boats hissing through the water, flags snapping, old Ottoman mansions lining the shores, most of them beautifully restored and probably worth millions, gamers bent over their puzzles, the sharp wind ruffling their hair… astern loomed the towers of the Bosphorus Bridge, the roadway suspended by a web of sun-etched cable. Dagmar’s heart leaped.

  “Are those dolphins?” she cried.

  “Yes.” Ismet peered into the van, shading his eyes with a hand.

  “ ‘That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.’ ” Quoting Yeats.

  Ismet looked at her curiously. “Did you say gong?”

  Dagmar smiled.

  “Yes,” she said. “I did. But Yeats said it first.”

  They were back to the hotel in time for lunch. Richard would return his borrowed electric gear and everyone would have the afternoon off, after which they’d drive over the Golden Horn to a farewell dinner with the players, held in an enormous hotel ballroom. After that the players would go to a specially arranged screening of Stunrunner, which had opened worldwide the previous night, while the puppetmasters—who had already seen the movie dozens of times, on discs that came complete with their very own nondisclosure agreements and prepaid FedEx return envelopes—would go with the techs to the VIP suite in a Beyolu club, where the celebration would go on until exhaustion overtook them all—in Dagmar’s case, most likely before midnight.

  Lunch, though, was not a planned event. Dagmar thought she might see if Ismet might want to join her for a midday snack at one of the cafés up the street.

  But first she ran into Lincoln in the lobby of the hotel. He’d watched the game finale on his laptop, and when she walked through the door he rose to give her a rib-shattering embrace.

  “Brilliant!” he said. “Absolutely brilliant!”

  “Thank you,” she said. She felt as if her lungs had just been crushed.

  He released her and stepped back. Dagmar gasped in oxygen.

  “Dagmar,” Lincoln said. “Could I see you privately sometime this afternoon?”

  “Sure.”

  She cast a glance over her shoulder, where Richard, Tuna, and a half-dozen techs were trooping into the hotel. Cameras and tripods were tucked under their arms. Cables dragged empty metal sockets across the brown tile of the hotel foyer. Ismet was visible through the front window, talking on his phone.

  “After lunch?” she suggested hopefully.

  He nodded. “Call me when you have a moment. I’ll probably be somewhere in the hotel.” He looked up at the party of techs. “Can I help you with anything?”

  Dagmar let Richard and the technicians sort out the gear, with Lincoln’s help. She took a turn around the lobby, waiting for Ismet to finish his conversation. Standing by herself, she felt a sudden rush of triumph surge through her veins, the heat of victory racing through a brain already a bit dazzled by its own ingenuity. Game brilliant, cool, and over; military thugs confounded; vacation in sight; nothing to do but celebrate.

  Optimism seized her. She decided that she would ask Ismet to lunch, spend the night dancing with him in the Beyolu club, maybe drag him off to bed—assuming of course that she didn’t collapse first out of sheer exhaustion.

  Maybe he’d be able to beg off from the week’s work of selling electric switches, head south with her to Antalya, spend a week dividing their time between lounging on the beach and having massively satisfying sex in a darkened hotel room…

  Ismet finished his call and came into the lobby, neatly avoiding the electronic gear now being sorted into piles. He came to Dagmar and said, “I’m afraid I’ve got to leave.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “My sister called.” He gestured with his right hand at the phone held in his left. “My grandma fell and had to go to the hospital.”

  “Oh no!” Dagmar felt her carnal dreams spin down the drain even as her face and voice made the proper responses. “Is she badly hurt?”

  “Broken arm. But she’s very frail and…” He hesitated. “Well, she doesn’t do well in settings like a hospital. She was raised in a nomad family, and had an arranged marriage to my grandfather, who was from the city…” Ismet gave an apologetic smile. “Anyway, I should go translate between her and the modern world.”

  Dagmar’s mind swam with questions that she had never before asked any human being: Nomad? Your grandmother’s a nomad? What kind of nomad? Do you still have nomads in your family?

  “If you can come to the dinner tonight,” Dagmar said, “or the party afterward, please feel free to join us.”

  He seemed agreeable.

  “If I can,” he said. “But I should say good-bye now.”

  She hugged him and sensed his surprise at the gesture. He had an agreeable scent, a blend of Eastern spices, with a faint undertone of myrrh…

  He returned her hug, gently, then went to the others and said his good-byes. Dagmar, aware of a host of possibilities silently drifting away, carried on a tide toward the Dardanelles, turned to Lincoln.

  “You know,” she said, “we might as well have that conversation now.”

  Lincoln had a corner room on the top floor of the hotel, with a wide bed, a rococo desk with an Internet portal, and broad windows that displayed spectacular views of the Blue Mosque. Another wall featured a dormer window complete with a window seat, and beyond the shambling bulk of Hagia Sofia.

  “Nice,” Dagmar said, going to the broad window just as the muezzin began his call. He was echoed almost instantly by the muezzin in the small mosque behind the hotel, the one down by the old Byzantine gate, and then by calls from other small mosques in the area.

  It was, Dagmar thought, one of the last times she’d hear this.

  “You’re planning on going to Antalya tomorrow?” Lincoln asked.

  “Yes,” Dagmar said. “Shouldn’t I?”

  “I wouldn’t advise it. I’m not going to be happy until you’re on the far side of the border.”

  She shrugged, another dream gone. She turned to face him.

  “So much for my vacation,” she said.

  “I�
��ve taken care of that.” Lincoln went the rococo desk and shuffled through folders: he took out an envelope and handed it to her.

  “Compliments of Bear Cat,” he said. “First-class train tickets, and a week’s vacation in the beach resort of Aheloy.”

  Dagmar blinked. “Where’s that?”

  “The Moesian Riviera. Bulgaria.”

  “Bulgaria?” Dagmar could only repeat the word.

  “Fifty-six thousand square meters of beach in Aheloy,” Lincoln said. “Someone counted. Better beach than the French Riviera, too. Organic farms and vineyards just up the river—you’ll eat and drink extremely well in the local cafés.”

  “Okay.” Cautiously. Bulgaria was not exactly what she’d planned.

  Lincoln smiled. “I was there a few years after the Wall fell,” he said. “It was very quaint and olde-world, but I imagine it’s more twenty-first century now. And you’ll be just five kilometers from Sunny Beach, which is a hugely overdeveloped beach resort with boutiques and discos and bars, if that sort of thing is your preference.” He peered at her over the metal rims of his Elvis glasses. “I wasn’t sure.”

  She looked back at him, into the startling blue eyes.

  “Discos, huh?” she said. “Did you spend a lot of time in discos, back in the day?”

  “Naturally.” He shrugged. “Disco was quite the cultural revolution, before overpopularity and Saturday Night Fever wrecked everything. The movie left out the gays and the drugs, and that was half the scene.”

  Dagmar tried to picture Lincoln young, dancing in the patterned light of a spinning mirror ball, but failed.

  Disco. To Dagmar it was just another style of music that had risen and then crashed, back before she was born. Like calypso, or ragtime.

  “I don’t think discos are high on my list,” Dagmar said. “I just want to relax.” Her mind spun, trying to come up with objections to Lincoln’s scheme. She knew next to nothing about Bulgaria, nothing whatever about its Riviera. She didn’t even know enough to raise a valid protest.