“What if it’s Harry’s job to keep Sandee together? Maybe that’s what he’s there for.”
There was another moment of silence.
“So what you’re suggesting,” Calvin said, “is that Harry isn’t Frodo, he’s Sam.”
“Yes,” Dagmar said. “That’s what I was suggesting.” The Tolkien analogy hadn’t occurred to her, but it seemed appropriate.
“I don’t know,” Calvin said. “I had such big plans for Harry.”
Dagmar suspected that Calvin was very fond of Harry, identifying perhaps with the character’s haplessness. The fondness was blinding Calvin to the character’s true arc, which Dagmar was pretty sure meant that Harry wasn’t the Hero, he was the Hero’s Best Friend.
“I think this will work,” Dagmar said. “And the players will like helping Sandee surmount her troubles.”
“Maybe they can guide her to a good shrink,” Calvin muttered.
“I think this is our solution,” Dagmar said. “I think this is how it goes.”
Calvin conceded defeat. “Let me think,” he said, “how to present this.”
I am Plot Queen, Dagmar thought in quiet triumph. I may sleep in a crooked bed, but I can make a story dance.
If only, she thought, she was as good at creating a happy ending in real life as in her fictions.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Welcome to Çankaya Wireless Network. Customer service is our most important product! We work constantly to expand our network throughout the Turkish-speaking world.
Anyone signing up to our network in the next month will be entered into a special drawing. Prizes may include cash, a beautiful bouquet of seasonal flowers, or a special photograph session for you and your family! The next drawing will take place by noon on Thursday!
Dagmar’s first action—the proof-of-concept—would take place in Istanbul. In Beyazit Square, before the tall gate that marked the entrance to Istanbul University.
Even most of the Lincoln Brigade didn’t know the target. Of those remaining in Cyprus, only Dagmar and Lincoln were aware.
Dagmar had the explosion dream the night before the Istanbul action, the Ford blowing up again and again, the fire blossoming in a great golden bubble, the incendiaries raining down, bouncing along the pavement like flaming bystanders fleeing the scene of a catastrophe. Dagmar woke in her cockeyed bed, the room wheeling around her, terror clutching at her throat.
She nerved herself for the day with coffee and her lucky RIOT NRRD T-shirt, then went to the ops room early and buried herself in last-minute planning.
There would be a lot of spam to send out today.
Have you considered taking advantage of the 108 digital television channels offered by Çankaya Wireless Network? Each is delivered with crystal-clear perfection! We have six plans, and one of them is certain to be suitable to your budget!
The students at the university were natural allies. Other groups would be called in as well.
Dagmar frowned down at the message glowing in the flatscreen before her. Send the message and everyone was committed. The revolution—or its horrific suppression—was on its way.
It had been Dagmar’s idea to use spam as a means of coordinating political action. Not the disgust or annoyance that was the usual response to a message offering penis enlargement, a fortune waiting in Nigeria, or investment advice, but a message hidden somewhere in the text that only an insurrectionist could read.
A 419 scam, for example, could contain instructions—“seven,” the numeral 8—that told the recipient where they could find a clean cell phone. An offer for a drawing could offer instructions for what to bring to the next event—a photograph, a bouquet of flowers—and suggest a time frame, the twenty-four hours preceding noon on Thursday.
The code was simple because it would have to be understood by ordinary people. Dagmar could have used steganography, for instance a message hidden inside the code for a digital photograph of an object displayed on eBay or hidden in the code for an old, obsolete Web page. She could have used public key encryption or more elaborate coding systems provided by her employer. But targets openly receiving coded messages would attract attention and decoding took time, and even so most of the people involved had no technical expertise in using such systems—after all, otherwise intelligent users routinely managed to fumble even simple programs like Outlook Express.
Dagmar had therefore opted for speed over security—she hoped to put her actions together so quickly that even if the government deduced the target, they would be unable to respond in time.
She was putting her revolution together like a flash mob. They would arrive all at the same time, they would make their point, and then they would disperse before the authorities could react.
Or so Dagmar hoped, anyway.
The final message, the one on Dagmar’s screen, gave map coordinates for the action based on a standard map of Istanbul—E-8, the numeral 8 in the text, E being the first letter of the second sentence. The last sentence gave the time for the action—six P.M. on Wednesday.
It was now a few minutes before four. She looked up at the wall clock, ticking away next to the ferocious picture of Atatürk. Biz bize benzeriz, she read.
She looked around the room. Lincoln, Ismet, Rafet the well-spoken dervish, Judy Strange, Helmuth the head programmer, Alparslan Topal the representative from the government-in-exile, and Richard the Assassin in his white Converse sneaks. Atatürk’s pale ferocious gaze embraced them all.
Well, she thought. We are like ourselves. And no one else.
She looked at the wall clock again: 3:58.
Lincoln, kicking his legs as he sat on a table by the window, took pity on her.
“Go ahead and send the message early,” he said. “Our kids haven’t had much of a chance to practice.”
She looked at him with gratitude.
“Right,” she said.
And pressed the Send key.
There was a hierarchy in the networks that would respond to the message. They were organized along the classic covert cell structure, with each member of a cell known only to members of that particular cell and to the cell members whom each member would in turn recruit. If a member was caught or turned, there were only a few individuals he could betray. There was also a colossal redundancy built into the system.
Dagmar’s message went to the network heads in the Istanbul area—union bosses, academics, political organizers, religious authorities, student leaders. Once they decoded its simple meaning, they contacted those in their cell by whatever electronic means they had agreed on. These contacted those below, and so on, in the model of a phone tree.
All of this happened outside Dagmar’s purview. There was very little to do for the next couple hours but keep in touch with the camera teams, with Lloyd’s remote-control airmen, and with Tuna. And since communications protocols forbade anything but the most necessary messages, the messages were few and far between.
Dagmar went to the break room for more coffee and ran into Lincoln seated on a plastic chair peeling an apple, the spiral uncoiling beautifully into a serviette unfolded on his lap.
“That’s nicely done,” she said, impressed.
“It’s about the only real skill I have,” Lincoln said.
“I don’t know about that. You talked all these people into joining you here.”
He looked up, amused. “I offered the chance to intelligently use computers in a beautiful foreign location,” he said. “To a certain kind of person, that kind of offer sells itself.”
“And how did you come up with Lloyd?” Dagmar said. “Turkish-speaking Kurdish-Azeri American citizens with a background in model rocketry can’t be exactly thick on the ground in D.C.”
Lincoln frowned. “Azeri?” he asked. “Do you by any chance mean Alevi?”
Dagmar felt heat rise to her cheeks. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I meant.”
“I didn’t know he was Alevi,” Lincoln said. “But I damn well know he wasn’t from Azerbaijan.”
Dagmar nodded. “Lloyd is Alevi, whatever that actually means. And he’s a little nervous around Rafet, I guess for reasons of history.”
Lincoln seemed annoyed at himself. “He’s Turkish, I knew he was Muslim, and I assumed Sunni even thought I should have known better.” He decided to be amused. “But his dad wasn’t exactly a barefoot persecuted little Kurdish refugee from eastern Turkey; he was a military attaché in Washington for many years, and he retired a colonel.”
Dagmar blinked. “Really. Lloyd hadn’t given me that impression.”
“Oh yeah.” Lincoln’s penknife neatly quartered the apple as he spoke, then began to cut out the core. “Lloyd’s dad returned to D.C. after he retired, joined a company that provides security to businessmen, and started a second family with a much younger American wife. He’s still going strong, so far as I know. Lloyd would be their eldest.”
Dagmar considered this. “If Lloyd’s dad is a high-ranking military officer, does that mean his sympathies might lie with Bozbeyli?”
Lincoln sliced off a chunk of apple, chewed, swallowed.
“His file says not.”
“Oh,” Dagmar said. “That settles it, then.”
The amused sparkle in Lincoln’s eye was muted by the shadowy lenses of his glasses.
“Do you think we should send him home?”
“I—” Dagmar was too surprised to formulate an immediate response. “I don’t see why we should,” she said. “If you believe the file.”
“The file’s probably crap,” Lincoln said. “But I’m less concerned with the father than the fact that the son gave you personal information that he was supposed to keep to himself.”
Dagmar felt a sudden flutter of panic that she might have compromised one of her employees.
“He told it to me privately,” she said, “by way of explaining why he didn’t speak more openly the day before, when Rafet and the other Turks were pressing him for details about his background.”
“Ah.” Lincoln ate another chunk of apple. “That’s probably all right, then.”
Relief flew through Dagmar at the thought that she might have shoved Lloyd out of the way of a bullet.
“Besides,” she said. “We can’t do without the air force.”
“No,” said Lincoln, and looked at a chunk of apple poised on the tip of his penknife. “I suppose we can’t.”
“I have another Hot Koan,” Richard said.
Dagmar watched on the flatscreen as Tuna walked along Ordu Road toward Beyazit Square. He wore a dark jacket, tie, shades, and polished shoes. Though he had a wide-brimmed hat pulled down to hide his face, his big body and loping gait were unmistakable. Eye-catching as well was the enormous bouquet of lilies he carried in one big hand. He carried a shopping bag with the corner of a manila envelope, an envelope that presumably contained a photograph. A beautiful bouquet of seasonal flowers, or a special photograph session for you and your family…
Tuna’s image was eclipsed by a line of red tram cars. Dagmar shifted her gaze to another monitor, one with a wider angle, and waited for Tuna to reappear.
“Tell me,” she said.
“The novice came to Dagmar,” Richard said, “and he said, ‘I have tried to hot-swap my PS/2 connector, and now my motherboard has been slagged.’
“ ‘In that case,’ said Dagmar, “make coffee.’
“Hearing this”—Richard smiled—“the novice was enlightened.”
Dagmar laughed. “I wish I was really as wise as you make out,” she said.
Richard only offered her a Buddha smile. Dagmar found Tuna again on the video, the flowers flopping over one shoulder.
Tuna and a small group of technicians had spent the morning making certain that the demo would receive full electronic coverage. Cameras and their operators were ready in windows of three of the many hotels that lined the road opposite Beyazit Square. Hot Koans had been scattered like birdseed all around the target, plastic hot pink rectangles sitting under furniture, on rooftops, lying in flower beds, their ad hoc mesh network pumping the signal to the antenna in a rented room several streets away, which then relayed them to the server on Seraglio Point that Lincoln had installed during the Stunrunner game.
The two nearby police stations, west on Mustafa Kemal Street and east on Kadirga Limani, were also under video surveillance, both from small battery-operated cameras fixed to buildings and streetlights and from airborne cameras belonging to the Anatolian Skunk Works. Dagmar had worried about the Beyazit Square location simply because it was so close to the police, but hadn’t found anywhere else more suitable—there were police everywhere in the modern city, but at least in this area there were no military…
Without looking left or right, Tuna strolled into the square, flowers bobbing. Other people seemed to be carrying flowers here and there.
“Hello, Chatsworth.” Tuna’s headset carried his words into the ops room. “I’m feeling a little lonely here.”
“We see more flowers than you do,” Dagmar answered hopefully.
Tuna stood in the middle of the square, conspicuously large, conspicuously colorful. Pushcart vendors sold roasted ears of maize and simit. A group of girls in headscarves and long coats entered the frame from the direction of the university, all clustered around a pot of flowers. A man in a neat fedora, carrying long-stemmed roses, walked in from across Ordu Road.
How many people in a given area could carry bouquets, Dagmar wondered, before they all began to look suspicious?
“Here we go!” called Lincoln. He was looking at another monitor, its view provided by a camera with a different angle on the proceedings.
This was focused on the main gate of the university, a Roman triumphal arch as viewed through some kind of strange nineteenth-century cross-cultural Oriental-baroque lens. A line of students was pouring out of the central Moroccon horseshoe arch, each waving a bouquet of flowers on high. Gold sunlight glittered on photographs held above their heads.
Dagmar’s heart gave a leap as she realized that this might actually work.
Tuna turned, saw the students pouring into the square, and practically ran to join them, waving his bouquet like a marshal’s baton.
Tuna had not been in contact with any of these people. He didn’t know any of them, and they didn’t know him.
They were the faceless members of an orchestra that Tuna would try to conduct.
Over the heads of the students, a banner unrolled. GENERALS OUT! it said, in English.
Whoever had written it seemed fully aware of the practical necessities of modern international communication, among them the requirement that it be done in a language other than Turkish.
The girls in headscarves had joined the crowd, offering their pot of flowers. People brandished cell phones and snapped pictures. More banners and signs were raised. The pushcart vendors watched in surprise as the square began to fill. Tuna dipped into his shopping bag and pulled out an electric megaphone. Dagmar winced and turned down the volume on her headset as Tuna began bellowing instructions to the crowd.
Dagmar had a good idea what Tuna was telling them. In answer to his call, the crowd began to break into smaller groups.
Make a memorial to the victims of the regime! That’s why they had been instructed to bring flowers—a token that did double duty, as identification, so that people would know not to trust anyone who hadn’t turned up with the proper tokens
Flowers began to be piled into pyramids, scattered into elaborate designs. Photos were added to the pictures—photos of exiled or imprisoned politicians, national heroes like Atatürk, movie or pop stars, sports figures cut from the pages of newspapers or magazines.
While this was going on, Tuna led a group, including most of those carrying signs, to block Ordu Road on the southern perimeter of the square. If the blocked traffic backed up, police would have a much harder time getting through the demonstration.
The crowd began to sing. The song was in march time and everyone knew the words, so Dagmar assumed it was
patriotic.
Blocked traffic on the road honked. Dagmar had spent enough time in Turkey to know the language of the auto honk, which ranged from the little blip that said, in a perfectly friendly way, Hey, I’m here! to the deliberate long honk that meant, Get out of the way, and the more persistent repeated blasts that might mean, You are an idiot, or I have found your attitude deficient and will very shortly correct it in a vigorous manner.
The auto horns on Ordu Road progressed through all these stages and then fell into baffled silence. The patriotic singers marched on. Bouquets waved in time to the music. A tram bell rang repeatedly offscreen, but the tram never appeared—apparently jammed autos had blocked it.
The crowd kept getting bigger. Passersby, without flowers or photos, were inspired to join the party. The group finished the song and started on another. Cell phone cameras captured everything.
One of the cameras in the hotel rooms jerked, then shifted and refocused. Dagmar tensed at the sight of a pair of police standing a couple hundred feet down Ordu Road. They were watching the demo with interest and speaking on their walkie-talkies, but they seemed disinclined to interfere.
The fact that they were heavily outnumbered might have contributed to their passive stance.
Dagmar told Tuna about the cops.
“Okay,” he said. He didn’t sound very alarmed and craned his neck to observe the police who were, at that instant, observing him.
“We’ve got a police drone over the square,” Lloyd said. “We’re going to try to take it down.”
Dagmar drifted over to Lloyd’s station, looking over his shoulder at his multiple screens, each relaying the images sent by one of the drones of the Anatolian Skunk Works. Lloyd pressed one image, and it expanded to cover two screens. The target drone, painted the same shade of blue and white as a police car, floated against a background of gray cloud, its starboard wing dipped as the drone circled the demonstration at Beyazit Square. The picture from the Skunk Works wedge was poured through colossally fast, efficient processors, and it came out as brilliant and clear as if it were being lit and shot by Hollywood professionals.
Deep State Page 16
