Deep State

by Walter Jon Williams

  “I’ve never worked for the government,” Dagmar said.

  “Hoh. You have such a treat in store for you.” Byron’s face reddened. “Uncle Sam is about fifty years behind in their computer protocols, which still assume that everyone is working on a big mainframe. You have to do certain tasks in a certain order, and fill out all the paperwork on it in a certain order, and the odds are about ninety-nine to one that the tasks and the paperwork have nothing to do with the actual work you were hired to do.” He looked up at her with a glare of surprising hostility.

  “There was a period when I was doing computer security at a major government lab—I won’t mention which one. The computers we were working on were riddled with unknown intruders—hundreds of them!—I mean, those people were practically waving at us! But I couldn’t do a single thing about them—not a single thing!—because I spent about seventy hours each week dealing with assigned tasks and paperwork. And after I broke my heart on that job for a couple years, I quit and went into the private sector.” He shrugged. “At least I’m making a lot more money than the idiots I was working for back then.”

  Dagmar, whose whole business was based on secure computers, was startled by this outburst.

  “Computer security isn’t exactly rocket science,” she said.

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Byron said, “but the U.S. doesn’t exactly do rocket science anymore, either.”

  Dagmar decided to change the subject before she completely lost any faith in her own project.

  “Have you worked with Magnus before?” she asked.

  “Tell you the truth,” Byron said, “I’m surprised to see him here.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, I have worked with him before, and he’s not the best at the kind of improvisation you’re doing.”

  “Really?”

  “He really needs a script to work from. I’m much better extemporizing than he is.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Dagmar said.

  She tried to view this information by considering the source. Byron’s character type was not exactly uncommon in computer circles: he was boastful about his own abilities and disparaging of everyone else. He was also, Dagmar thought, very, very angry.

  Byron was Angry Man, she decided. And Magnus was Kilt Boy. At this point Lola and Lloyd weren’t anything more than the Interns. She’d get to know them better later.

  At this point a pair of RAF officers, Roy and McCubbin, the latter known as the Mick, appeared and offered to freshen their glasses. The officers were fair and freckled and pilots, with splotches of pink sunburn on their cheeks and noses, and Dagmar and Judy were pleased to invite them to the party.

  The lads were delighted to learn that Dagmar and Judy were unattached. They were also pleased to learn that Dagmar had lived in England, having once been married to a Brit. It required quite a lot of amiable conversation to establish the fact that they had absolutely no acquaintances in common.

  Roy was drunk when he arrived and got more drunk as Happy Hour went on, though pleasantly so. Eventually, though, he grew nearly comatose and the Mick’s wedding ring became impossible to ignore, and so Dagmar and Judy collected the lads’ cell phone numbers, and—declining the offer of escort—walked along with Byron to their apartments in the married officers’ quarters, long, low apartment blocks with tiny little yards strewn with the bright plastic toys of the officers’ children. The scent of charcoal was on the air, from the backyards where pink-skinned RAF officers, cold bottles in their hands, congregated in the evenings around grills with their mates and families.

  Palm trees, bottles clinking, the scent of proteins cooking, and the sounds of sports floating from TV sets… to Dagmar it seemed like some kind of retro LA scene. Like Hawthorne, maybe.

  “I’m going to call my wife,” Byron said, and gave a jerky wave of his arm as he turned onto the walk that led to his apartment. Dagmar and Judy kept on a few more doors, then passed into their own unit. Dagmar held up the napkin with the pilots’ phone numbers.

  “Do you want this?”

  Judy flicked her hair. Her plastic crown glittered. “Toss it,” she said.

  Dagmar dropped the napkin into the trash. Judy went into the bathroom to take her evening shower. Dagmar opened the fridge, poured herself a glass of orange juice, then went to the dinette and booted her laptop.

  She was not yet finished with her work for the day. Back in Los Angeles, her company was hip deep in the run-up to the Seagram’s game. She had to check her email for the updates, then make phone calls if intervention seemed necessary.

  Dagmar slipped her keyboard out of its tube, then unrolled it. She preferred a full-sized keyboard to the smaller one on her laptop and carried one with her—flexible rubberized plastic, powered by a rechargeable battery, with genuine contacts beneath the keys that gave a pleasing tactile feel beneath her fingertips. It connected wirelessly to her laptop—she’d turned the screen around so that she wouldn’t have the unused keyboard between herself and the image.

  The Seagram’s game seemed to have a greater reality, even at this distance, than her own enterprise here in Cyprus. Possibly because the goal—to sell whiskey or, at any rate, to make whiskey cool—seemed more well defined than her own.

  She was used to telling people what to do—her fictional creations, her employees, the players—but she lacked confidence in the idea that she could really give orders to an entire nationality. Somehow her vanity had never extended to that.

  She waved a hand, like a sorcerer incanting a spell.

  You all be good, now, she thought. And then added, You, too, Bozbeyli.

  A conventional insurrection stockpiled arms and explosives. Dagmar’s revolt would stockpile cell phones.

  Cell phones had already been acquired and warehoused in safe houses in major cities. So were video cameras, transmitters, antennae, satellite uplinks, and of course the Hot Koans.

  The revolution would be televised. And tweeted, blogged, attached to emails, YouTubed, Ozoned, googled, edited, remixed, and set to a catchy sound track. It would be bounced to High Earth Orbit and back. It would be carried live on BBC, on CNN, on Star TV, on every other electronic medium dreamed up by an inventive humanity.

  What Dagmar could only hope was that none of these media would be transmitting pictures of a bloody massacre.

  “The lawyers aren’t going to let any of this happen,” Lincoln said, “unless the President signs an executive order. He hasn’t done that yet, but I think he will before too much longer.”

  “This is too much for me,” Dagmar said.

  The call for the midday prayer had gone out from the Blue Mosque. Dagmar sat among her travel documents for Bulgaria, still stunned by what Lincoln was asking of her.

  Less than twenty-four hours earlier she had been cowering in her bathroom, trying to hide from phantom Indonesian attackers. She wondered if Lincoln would want her for this job if he knew she was mentally—what was the appropriate word? Challenged? Compromised?

  He looked at her, the gray light of the mosque shining off the metal rims of his shades.

  “Look,” he said. “Once that order is signed, this operation is going forward. I have some talented people I can employ, and I’m sure they’ll do a good job. But—” He raised a blunt finger. “They won’t be as good as you. And if they aren’t as good, we could lose some people that we wouldn’t otherwise have lost.” He shook his large white head. “If you do this,” he said, “you could save lives.”

  It was that argument, Dagmar reflected later, that had overcome her last resistance.

  I am such a freaking bleeding heart, she thought. She could only hope that Lincoln was right that she would save lives and not lose them.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Oh eight hundred. Dagmar cycled to the ops center, then realized she had forgotten the ID card she was supposed to wear around her neck, the card that not only held her picture but also could be used on the door’s card reader to pass her into
the center. She looked up at the camera above the door and gave an apologetic wave, then waited for someone to open the door for her. When this didn’t happen, she knocked.

  Eventually Lola, the wavy-haired intern, opened the door for her. Lola was dressed in a blue suit—a change from yesterday’s gray one—and she looked at Dagmar with cool intelligence.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Thanks for opening the door.” Dagmar moved to walk past Lola, but the other woman blocked her.

  “Don’t you have your ID?” Lola asked.

  “I forgot it in my apartment.”

  “I can’t let you in without it.”

  Dagmar looked at her in surprise.

  “But you know me,” she said.

  “Yes, but I also need to know where your card is. You can’t leave that lying around.”

  Dagmar opened her mouth to protest, but a look at Lola told her that further argument was pointless, so she turned around, cycled back to her apartment, picked up the ID card from the kitchen table where she’d left it, hung the card around her neck on its lanyard, and returned to ops.

  She was beginning to think Byron might have a point about the stupid security rules attending this kind of operation. Besides the fetish for code names and ID cards, there had also been an inventory of every electronic device that Dagmar had brought with her—her handheld, her laptop—which had to stay in her apartment. For the ops room she had a new cell phone, laptop, and desktop computer, all dedicated to the exercise, and which could not be taken out of the ops center. The phones, she noticed, had their camera functions disabled. The computers had most of their USB ports soldered shut, and all data was available only on portable memory, which was locked in the safe at night. Each flash memory or portable drive featured a sticker with a bar code—Lola scanned these when the members of the Brigade checked them out, then scanned them in again at the end of the day. It was not totally impossible to steal data, she supposed, but it would be very inconvenient and require a certain amount of nerve.

  The worst threat to security, Dagmar thought, came from the fact that the computers were connected to the Internet. In a truly secure operation, any machine containing sensitive information would either have no outside connections at all or connect only to a secure local area network. Any machine connected to the outside created an opportunity for intruders.

  Dagmar would have to trust the counterintrusion skills of Richard the Assassin. He was brilliant about keeping crackers out of the Great Big Idea file system, and those he’d battled on behalf of the company were the best on the planet.

  She reflected that she and the world in general were lucky that Richard had chosen to ally himself with the Forces of Good.

  On her return to the ops center Dagmar encountered Magnus, whose kilt was hiked up to highly unacceptable levels as he cycled to work on his bike. Fortunately, by the time she caught up to him he’d dismounted and was stowing his bike in the rack.

  It was a different kilt, she realized, than the one he’d worn the day before. The man had at least two Utilikilts.

  That was hard-core Geek.

  “Morning,” she said.

  “Hi, Briana.”

  He waited for her to finish racking her bike. She looked at him curiously, looking for signs that he’d been Hellmouthed the night before. He seemed fine, maybe a little tired.

  “Did you have a good night?”

  “Limassol is a happenin’ town,” he said cheerfully.

  She looked at him. “You got the lecture about the Russian hookers, right?”

  Magnus laughed. “One of them came right up to me off the dance floor and wiped her face on my T-shirt,” he said.

  Dagmar was curious. “What did you do?”

  “I blew her off.” He laughed again. “Jesus Christ, it’s not like I want whore sweat on my clothes.”

  They walked toward the door of the building. Two airmen came out, and one politely held the door for them. Dagmar thanked him as she entered, and then she and Magnus walked up the stairs to the ops center.

  “Are you settling in?” she said. “Any problems?”

  “None to speak of,” he said. “It’s a more interesting job than the government usually gives me.”

  She remembered Angry Man Byron’s complaints the previous day and asked if he found the security rules too restrictive. He shrugged.

  “They do get in the way. But it’s not too bad here—I mean, if we’re not all in the ops center anyway, we’re not working, right? This isn’t the kind of job you bring home with you.”

  “True enough.”

  She came to the door of the ops center, waved at the camera, and snicked her card through the reader. The lock buzzed open, and Dagmar pushed the heavy steel door open.

  Lola looked up from her desk as they entered. Dagmar waved the ID at her, and Lola nodded expressionlessly.

  Dagmar stopped in the door to the break room, where yesterday there had been the breakfast buffet, and saw that today no food had been provided. Yesterday she had eaten breakfast and then found out about the buffet; today she had assumed there would be a buffet and not eaten breakfast.

  She sensed that the primary theme for the day had already been set: whatever she did or thought was going to be wrong.

  She paused by her office door and let Magnus walk past her into the ops center, T-shirt, kilt, thin hairy legs, and flapping sandals.

  Part of the secret of the Scots kilt, she decided, was the long stockings. They limited the amount of unattractive pale flesh visible to the onlooker. They suggested curvy calves even if the calves in question were matchsticks.

  Magnus hadn’t quite learned what made a kilt work and what didn’t. But it wasn’t Dagmar’s job to tell him.

  Though probably she was going to have to tell him how to ride a bicycle in a skirt, just to keep him out of the hands of the RAF Police.

  We are like ourselves, Dagmar thought, and walked into her kingdom.

  It turns out that Lloyd, the intern, was in charge of the unit’s air force. He had been a model rocket hobbyist in high school, and apparently that qualified him to wrangle a whole fleet of radio-controlled drones.

  Lloyd invited Dagmar and Lincoln to his workstation for a status report. Lloyd’s scarred metal desk was directly beneath one of the ceiling fans; the fan gave a regular mechanical chirp as it drove cold air down on Dagmar’s head.

  Dagmar guessed that Lloyd had graduated from college a couple years ago. He was a little shorter than average height and had rimless spectacles. He wore soft gray slacks and a Van Heusen shirt with a faint lilac stripe, long sleeved against the artificial chill.

  He was Air Force Brat, Dagmar thought. And Lola was the Guardian Sphinx.

  “We’ve got two types of drones,” Lloyd explained. He had loaded videos of the tests in his desktop computer. “One is a model helicopter with an off-the-shelf zoom lens.” The video showed a flying machine so bare and basic that it looked as if it had been assembled out of carbon-fiber fishing rods and leftover circuit boards. There were two rotors, surprisingly silent, with a package slung between them that consisted of three cameras, each equipped with a different lens and capable of independent tracking. On the video the copter bounded into the air like a jumping spider, then zigzagged around the sky with sufficient speed and agility that the video had trouble tracking it. It made a faint whooshing sound, like Superman passing far overhead.

  “It’s got GPS,” Lloyd said. “You tell it where to go, and it goes there, and if you’ve got the coordinates of the target, it will point the camera there without a human operator having to manually adjust it. We figure to use these for reconnaissance—keep tabs on nearby police stations or army barracks.”

  “How close does the operator have to be?” Dagmar asked.

  “Doesn’t even have to be within sight,” Lloyd said. “The operator won’t be anywhere near the action, and the helo can automatically return to the GPS coordinates from which it was launched, or anywhere else wit
hin its range.”

  There were more videos, these taken by the copters’ onboard cameras, their occasional jerkiness smoothed by computer enhancement. The lenses, generic products of some anonymous Southeast Asian factory, were capable of remarkable performance: Dagmar could make out individual faces as the helos floated unseen, unheard, over Limassol.

  The sounds of the operators came over the sound track, all speaking Turkish. Dagmar listened, frowned.

  “Is that your voice?” she asked.

  Lloyd gave her a guileless look. “Yes.”

  “You speak Turkish?”

  “I do.”

  She waited for a moment in case Lloyd wanted to offer an explanation, but he only offered a tight little smile and then went on with his talk. The rules said they weren’t to tell each other anything of a personal nature, and Lloyd was clearly a rule follower.

  “Our second drone,” he said, “is another VTOL—we can fly them both off roofs, or from roads or parks. But the second one also has anti-air capability. It’s a flying wedge, basically.”

  “Sorry?” Dagmar asked.

  Lloyd looked at her, solemn dark eyes behind spectacles.

  “Do you ever watch World War: Robot?”

  “No.”

  “It’s one of those programs where homebuilt robots fight each other. And the basic rule for robot combat is that wedges rule.”

  Dagmar’s mind swam. “Sorry,” she said, “but I’m still four-oh-four.”

  Lloyd’s hands swooped descriptively in the air. “A wedge is just a robot with a wedge-shaped cross section,” he said. “They’re used for ramming—they hit the other robot at high speed and just fling it in the air.”

  “Okay.”

  “So what we did was adapt the wedge to aerial combat. We’ve got a hard plastic wedge kept aloft by arrays of miniturbines. It’s got several cameras, a GPS, and a top speed of about forty knots if we really want to burn through the fuel. Stability is achieved by fly-by-wire computer guidance—you really can’t turn the thing upside down even if you try. The idea is to fly it against police drones and bring them down by ramming. It’s a type of attack the Russians call taran.”