Deep State

by Walter Jon Williams

  “How do you know that?”

  “I asked Lincoln.”

  Dagmar was so surprised that she found a laugh bubbling up from her throat. “You asked Lincoln?”

  “I thought he must have a file on you. I thought he would know.”

  “What did he say?”

  She could hear his smile as he spoke.

  “He said, ‘Dagmar is definitely not scary, but you should still be careful not to piss her off.’ ”

  She laughed again, leaning against his warm weight. “Right,” she said. “Get me mad at you, I’ll send the Group Mind to turn your hard drive into porridge.”

  “No. You’ll send someone like me to organize a flash mob and paintball my car.”

  Dagmar smiled. She looked at one of the other couples walking along the shore, a pair of Brits judging by their sunburns, their trousers rolled up as they waded ankle deep in Aphrodite’s foam. The two of them happy, free of the knowledge that a presentiment of death had floated past, just beyond the limit of their perception…

  Dagmar’s forebodings were usually insignificant—she had the kind of imagination that threw a million obstacles into her path. She could either work to avoid the barriers or—more usually—watch them turn to vapor in the sunlight of reality. But this magical place, this seascape torn from the womb of the goddess herself, seemed to give to Dagmar’s fears the chill force of prophecy… She wondered if dread generated in this landscape was more significant than dread generated elsewhere.

  But if that was the case, she thought, then so was love. So was desire. So was lying on this magic earth and rising very lustful, to the ranting dismay of medieval theologians.

  She let the landscape speak to her. She turned in Ismet’s arms and began to kiss him.

  “Very nice.” This time it was his turn to say it.

  She kissed his chin. Surf boiled up from the heart of the sea.

  “Let’s take a walk, then,” she said. She took his hand and led him down the beach, intent on behaving like the other couples, swinging their clasped hands and playing tag with the sea.

  And—in Dagmar’s case, anyway—trying to ignore the palpable sense of doom that lurked in the back of her skull.

  They walked. They kissed. They let the sea stream over their toes. They looked at shells and rocks and some jellyfish tossed on the shore, deflated domes glistening crumpled on the stones like empty plastic bags.

  They went up to Kouklia and looked at what remained of Aphrodite’s temple—there wasn’t much left, not since someone in the Middle Ages had built a sugar works on it.

  By the time Ismet and Dagmar returned to Akrotiri, Tuna had come across from the Turkish side of the island and was delivering his report to Lincoln. There were a number of contacts referred to by code names, and even Dagmar didn’t know who they were. It made the whole business more opaque than she would have liked. And the whole time she was listening to the report, she was thinking about dragging Ismet off to bed.

  Which she finally accomplished at twilight, leading him by the hand to her apartment, where she was pleased to hear the sound of the shower, presumably with Judy in it. Dagmar was happy about this coincidence—it avoided the awkward scene in which Dagmar and Ismet were forced to chat up Judy for an indeterminate period of time, pretending all was normal when all they really wanted to do was shag.

  Best to postpone the awkwardness to the next morning, when Ismet’s turning up at the breakfast table would explain everything.

  She took Ismet straight to the bedroom, then closed the door behind her. He was watching her with what seemed to be extreme interest.

  “Why do you have your bed turned at an angle?” he asked.

  She shrugged: too long to explain. “I’m an angular kind of person,” she said.

  Dagmar turned off the light. Ismet was outlined by the yellow streetlight seeping through a chink in the curtains. His glasses seemed to glow, like the eyes of a cartoon villain. Dagmar stepped closer, put her arms around him, and began to kiss him. He responded with enthusiasm. Myrrh swam through her senses. His glasses mashed her cheek. She took them off, along with everything else he was wearing. He was preposterously erect, and she was flattered by this diverting evidence of his desire.

  A metaphorically apt jet roared along Akrotiri’s long runway and hurled itself into the sky. The windowpane trembled to its acceleration.

  Suddenly impatient, she tore off her own clothes and composed herself on the bed. Unable to judge the irregular angle of the bed in the dark, he barked his knees on the frame, then lay by her side. She kissed him again. His flesh warmed hers; his touch lit up her nerves. He shivered as she licked the sensitive flesh of his throat. She began to remember, after this long hiatus, what this sex thing was all about.

  Ismet turned out to be something of a technician. He offered experimental caresses, observed her closely, then either increased his efforts or went on to something else. Five minutes of this and Dagmar felt her body on the verge of dissolving into magma.

  Dagmar took a breath and decided to let the Wanassa, the Queen, take over.

  Which famous sixties spy are you? The old Internet quiz came to Dagmar’s mind as she lay curled on her bed, with Ismet sleeping in the fetal position inside her arc, his pale body outlined by the streetlight outside. The sheet was rucked up under them, tangled about their feet. They were two commas, side by side on crumpled paper.

  Not spy, she corrected mentally. Special ops.

  It wasn’t like she’d encountered sixties operatives on their first go-around. She’d been born over twenty years after the first Bond film. But she’d seen all the films and read all the books, as homework for the Stunrunner game—and the other spies she’d encountered here or there on DVD or late-night cable, and in many cases read the books that had inspired them. The sixties interested her, as the decade when everything that hadn’t gone right had gone so horribly wrong.

  Ismet wasn’t James Bond—he lacked Bond’s glamor and gadgets. He didn’t have John Steed’s brolly or wardrobe. Briefly she considered Quiller—Ismet possessed something like Quiller’s omnicompetence, but ultimately he lacked, so far as she knew, his tragic spirit.

  She considered and dismissed the Man from U.N.C.L.E. Thoughts of the Man from O.R.G.Y. made her smile and impelled her to kiss Ismet’s shoulder. She would have to subject Ismet to more testing before she could report on that hypothesis.

  She mentally paged through John le Carré’s works. Ismet was too young to be George Smiley and furthermore had never been miserably married to some bitch-queen of an upper-class vampire. She wondered if Ismet could be any of the other characters at le Carré’s Circus, but she couldn’t remember enough about any of them. (There was a Hungarian named Esterhase, right?)

  And then she recalled Deighton’s nameless spy from The Ipcress File. That role seemed to fit Ismet better: quiet, unassuming, competent, and rather exciting once he took his glasses off.

  Well then. Perhaps Ismet should get Ipcress as a new code name.

  Ismet shifted in his sleep, rolling onto his back. Dagmar put an arm across his chest and rested her head on his shoulder. One arm came around her, held her close.

  She breathed in the scent of him, myrrh and sweat, breath and sex, and closed her eyes, content to be in the circuit of her lover’s arms.

  Ismet left after breakfast to bathe and change clothes, leaving Dagmar and Judy across the table with its litter of teacups, its plates of goat cheese, olives, bread, fruit, and Judy’s jar of Nutella. Judy looked after the departing Ismet, then turned to Dagmar.

  “I wasn’t entirely surprised,” she said.

  “You probably heard us,” Dagmar said.

  “Not me. Slept like a rock.” She carefully spread Nutella onto a piece of bread. “Still, I’m a little envious.”

  “No luck with Rafet?”

  “I can’t seem to ever find him,” Judy said. “He’s either over across the Green Line doing training, or in conference with Lincoln or with Al
parslan the government guy, or working out in the gym, or doing tai chi—I guess it’s tai chi—in his backyard. And now he’s off to… to wherever the next target is.”

  “No ecstatic drumming?”

  She looked forlorn. “No ecstacy of any sort, unfortunately.”

  Dagmar was tempted once again to remind Judy that they were on an air base loaded with single men, but the thought was interrupted by total surprise at what Judy said next.

  “I guess you’re just lucky,” Judy said, half-yawning as she stretched her tattooed arms out wide, “that you’ve got your two men.”

  “Two?” Dagmar said, too startled to manage more than the single syllable.

  “Ismet and Lincoln,” Judy said.

  Dagmar barked out an astonished laugh. “You think I’m involved with Lincoln?” she said.

  Judy stuck a finger inside her spectacles and wiped sleep from her eyes.

  “Not sexually,” she said. “But—you know—it’s clear that you’ve got a special relationship with him.”

  Dagmar was alarmed. She wondered if everyone was thinking this.

  “He’s the guy I work for!” she said.

  “He’s a smart, charming older man,” Judy said. “And you’re someone in need of a father.” She cocked her head, considering. “I’m a bit attracted to him myself on that account, my own dad being absent most of my life.”

  Dagmar couldn’t decide whether to laugh or express outrage. She ended up saying nothing.

  Judy took an olive from a plate, bit it, grimaced, and swallowed. Apparently her palate wasn’t ready for olives for breakfast.

  “Put some Nutella on it,” Dagmar advised.

  “He’s not your father, is my point,” Judy said. “He’s here to do a job, and if getting it done means treating you like a favorite daughter, then that’s what he’ll do. But if the job called for it, he could be someone else’s daddy tomorrow.”

  “Our relationship,” said Dagmar, “is professional.”

  “That’s for the best,” Judy said, her tone skeptical. “Because Lincoln isn’t just some eccentric old geezer with a game fixation, he’s a general trying to start a revolution. And that means he’s going to get people killed.”

  “He’s not bloodthirsty,” Dagmar protested. “He’s not sending out assassins.”

  “No,” Judy said, “not that we know about, anyway. It’s our own people that are going to get killed if these demos go wrong. It’s Lincoln who’s decided to accept that loss, if it happens.”

  So have I, Dagmar thought. Instead she just repeated what Lincoln had said on that last day in Istanbul.

  “That would be the fault of the bastards who kill them.”

  Judy shrugged her inked shoulders.

  “I’d say there’s enough responsibility to go around.”

  Dagmar looked at Judy, her eyes narrow.

  “And your responsibility?” she asked.

  A tremor crossed Judy’s face. “I’m complicit,” she said. “I got carried away by the sheer coolness of it all.”

  “Well.” Dagmar rose and reached for the teapot. “From this point on, I’m going to be heavily invested in keeping my boyfriend alive.”

  Judy looked at her with bleak sleepy eyes.

  “May you succeed,” she said, “in all your endeavors.”

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  There was Rafet, his brilliant yellow hair covered by a sun hat, dancing at the head of several thousand people. He was holding a double-ended drum and was banging away and jumping up and down and everyone around him was singing.

  Ecstatic drumming indeed, Dagmar thought.

  The new anti-government action was under way. It was ten A.M. on Saturday, and the demo had been swollen by thousands who had the day off.

  The action was taking place in Karaaliolu Park, in Antalya, Turkey’s largest city on its Mediterranean coast. The park was blessed with a spectacular location, perched on a cliff above the sea, so every video on Dagmar’s array of flatscreens showed a spectacular view of ocean, cliff, clouds, rows of palm trees, sailboats, fountains, the ochre-colored walls of a castle, all dominated by the Tauros Mountains, snowcapped even this early in autumn. There was also some of the oddest public art Dagmar had ever seen—a statue of a bellicose mustached man with Popeye arms and what looked like a baseball cap tilted back on his head; an ancient spear-carrying warrior with a flat helmet, Don Quixote perhaps as conceived by Picasso; something that resembled in silhouette a two-horned Maurice Sendak monster; and strangest of all a huge groping hand apparently called Blessing Agriculture, Geology, Earth, Ground, Land, Soil, probably every synonym available in a Turkish thesaurus for dirt.

  Maybe the Turks just hadn’t gotten the hang of statues yet. Atatürk had imposed statues on his nation, which had previously adhered to the Islamic ban on human representation—and so the newly liberated citizens had started off by planting statues of Atatürk everywhere, which no doubt earned the Gazi’s approval. Since then they seemed to have gone a bit off the rails.

  Maybe, Dagmar thought charitably, they all made better sense in context.

  The crowds had been told to bring DVDs and towels, and they did. The DVDs were held high, glittering in the sun, and Dagmar caught glimpses of packages bearing the images of Rocky, Celine Dion, Sean Connery, ABBA, and Cüneyt Arkın, the actor who had achieved a kind of international infamy as the Turkish Luke Skywalker… The towels, mostly huge beach towels striped green and yellow and pink, were wrapped around faces to conceal identities. Brilliant color danced in the morning light.

  “It looks like a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy convention,” Dagmar said.

  “I was just thinking that,” said Richard.

  Signs with bloodred letters waved against the blue sky. The crowd sang. The Star and Crescent flapped in the sea breeze. The video jerked and wobbled.

  In Istanbul the cameras has been concealed in hotel rooms across the street from the demo. Here there was no way to hide them, so Rafet’s crew of support techs wandered amid the crowd. Some carried cameras, others wore sunglasses with video and audio pickups, and they lacked the motion-inhibiting qualities of camera tripods. These did their best to stand still and pan the scene, but every so often they’d get jogged by a member of the crowd or have to move from one setup to another or just get carried away and start dancing. More video came in from the drones of the Anatolian Skunk Works.

  Oh well. Dagmar knew they could stabilize the video in postproduction.

  Still rapping on his drum, Rafet led the group of dancers away from the cliff, somewhat to Dagmar’s relief. Her imagination, the one that obsessed on every conceivable thing that could go wrong, had foreseen a line of bayonet-wielding soldiers driving the protestors over the cliff into the sea.

  But, Tuna and Lincoln had pointed out, there would be a lot of foreigners in the park. Foreigners provided a measure of protection: even Bozbeyli would see the disadvantage of conducting a bayonet charge where foreign visitors would be caught up in it. The bad headlines he’d gotten from the hippodrome riot should have been an object lesson to him.

  So far Tuna and Lincoln had been proved right: the watchers on the local police stations hadn’t reported any movement at all. Maybe no one had even called the police or the army.

  Rafet danced along the path, the tails of his towel floating out behind him. He was wearing video shades, but the image he broadcast was a hopeless bouncy blur—looking at it was like jabbing needles into Dagmar’s eyeballs. The audio feed delivered a complex series of drumbeats, Rafet’s panting breath, and the sound of shoes crunching on gravel.

  Rafet led the group past a round fountain that shot a tall spear of foam into the sky, then into the square in front of the Antalya City Hall. The place was a tidy white structure with balconies and a portico and
looked as if it had been put up by some European power’s Colonial Office—even though Antalya hadn’t been colonized since the Turks themselves had done it a thousand years ago, they had somehow locked into the colonial style perfectly well.

  It was the weekend and no one was inside the building—the place wasn’t even guarded—but that didn’t matter as far as the audience for the video was concerned. What the pictures would show would be thousands of demonstrators waving their banners in front of the center of local power… and they would also see no response from the authorities.

  The demonstrators began a new song, a triumphalist slow march. Sonorous chords boomed out. Turkish flags waved. Everyone stood still for the song, even Rafet.

  Dagmar looked over her shoulder at Ismet. “This would be the national anthem?”

  “Yes. ‘I-stiklâl Mars¸i.’ ”

  Dagmar nodded. “It just sounds like a national anthem.”

  The song came to a resounding conclusion after two stanzas. Then Rafet rapped for attention on his drum. The sunglass-cameras resolutely pointed away from him: no solid image of the dancing dervish would make it into any of the Lincoln Brigade’s videos. Rafet shouted out in Turkish, and the crowd responded. They made the same sort of spontaneous art made at the other demo in Istanbul, DVDs laid out in patterns on the square, stacked in interesting ways, layered on the town hall steps, or set winking in the windows. Enterprising young men scaled the pillars supporting the portico and draped towels off the portico rail. More towels were hung from the rail that topped the wings of the building. Anti-government banners were raised on the town hall’s three flagstaffs.

  Dagmar could only guess what General Bozbeyli would make of this.

  DVDs in the windows? he might mutter. What DVDs were these? Were they anti-government DVDs? No? Rocky IV?

  What do the DVDs represent? Is this supposed to be some kind of DVD revolution?

  And what about the towels? Is this some kind of attack on Turkishness through the symbolism of the Turkish towel? What signals are these people sending?