Deep State

by Walter Jon Williams

  Where’s Ismet? Her eyes turned to the other video feeds. The other camera operators were still fleeing through trees with the crowd, transmitting disjointed flashes of green, of flowers, of scattered, sobbing people. She could hear nothing on her audio. The breathing had stopped.

  And then—coming right through the trees—a line of men. Five or six, gray uniforms, guns leveled… and in the fragment of time it took Dagmar to realize what was going on the guns fired.

  Bullets ripped into tree trunks, leaves, flesh. Screams echoed from tree to tree. The whole crowd moaned, a kind of universal sigh of despair, and then they turned and began to run in another direction.

  Dagmar realized that her VoIP line was dead, that Ismet had hung up or that the phone had been destroyed. She frantically tried to reconnect. She couldn’t even get a ring signal.

  She looked down at her hands and saw that she was wringing them in an agony of helplessness.

  “Camera Three?” Lincoln said. “Who’s Camera Three?”

  Camera Three was down, lying in the grass, the image tilted. The audio transmitted little determined grunts, as if someone repeatedly was trying to rise but failing.

  “Code name Kamber,” Termite said.

  The shooting had stopped—there had just been that volley to turn them, and then the guns had fallen silent.

  “Get me pictures of those new shooters,” Lincoln said. The helicopter made another circle, came over the park at another angle.

  Dagmar’s eyes swept from screen to screen, desperate for a glimpse of Ismet. There was only chaos in the video, fragments of the desperate crowd in motion—all except Camera Three, lying aslant in the grass.

  Dagmar wondered if there were more Gray Wolves—if another line of paramilitaries would appear from another direction, turning the crowd again, sending it staggering back into another hail of bullets.

  There was motion on Camera Three. Dagmar looked, saw three Gray Wolves step into the frame. They stopped, relaxed, smiled at one another. The one in the middle lit a cigarette, and the others clustered around to share his lighter.

  Hot anger replaced Dagmar’s helplessness. Remember those faces, she thought.

  She looked at the other video feeds, and then she saw a camera burst out of the trees, seeing a street, cars, a minibus… signs and businesses and satellite dishes… he was out of the woods.

  Other camera operators broke free. Survivors of the crowd staggered out of the trees, sobbing, screaming, supporting one another… Dagmar’s heart gave a leap as she thought she saw Ismet, but then she realized it was someone else.

  The video images crossed the road, dodging cars, and were free in Buca. Other people bustled toward them, late arrivals carrying stuffed animals and boxes of candy. Dagmar saw the horror on their faces as they saw the demonstrators staggering toward them.

  They hadn’t been surrounded, Dagmar realized. The Wolves came at them from two directions but left the other exits uncovered.

  The helicopters swooped in, providing pictures of the second group of killers. There were six of them in total. None of them heard the whisper of the copters or looked up to see the hovering cameras.

  Where is Ismet? Dagmar’s brain repeated the question over and over.

  Lincoln looked at the flatscreens. In profile he looked like some kind of ferocious Old Testament prophet.

  “Get the images of those Gray Wolves,” he said. “I want a portrait of each of them that their mothers will be proud of. I want them as recognizable as possible.”

  Helmuth and the others turned to their keyboards.

  “You know,” Helmuth said, “when actors on a TV show enlarge a video image, there’s actually more detail.”

  “Can we have that software?” Magnus asked.

  Within an hour they had good portraits of the eight Wolves they’d caught on video and created posters for distribution on the Internet.

  WANTED, the posters read. FOR MURDER OF TURKISH CITIZENS.

  Within four hours, the public had provided names for each of the faces. An hour after that, they had addresses and other data. Within six, they had names for the others Wolves in their unit.

  While this went on, the Brigade worked on creating an augmented reality version of the demo. The piles of stuffed animals, the jackdaws, the rain, the scattered bodies… all would be available, perpetually, for anyone walking through the park.

  In electronic form, the dead would die forever.

  No word came from Ismet. Dagmar sat at her workstation or roamed aimlessly over the ops room.

  Wandering, she looked out the window at the airfield and saw lines of Indonesian police marching down the runway. She shut her eyes, then the blinds.

  She wandered to the break room, looked at the lunch she had waiting in the fridge, then closed the fridge door and went back to ops.

  Along the way she felt a firm hand on her elbow, and she looked up to see Lincoln. Wordlessly he led her to his office. He sat her in a chair, then took his place behind his desk.

  “I need to know,” he said, “if you told anyone about the target.”

  She looked at him in surprise, a surprise that was soon followed by dread.

  “No,” she said. “You and I worked out where the demo was going to happen, along with Ismet.”

  Lincoln glanced at his safe. “I lock everything up at the end of the day. I don’t commit anything to electronic form.”

  Dagmar threw her hands wide.

  “I haven’t talked about this at all, Lincoln,” she said.

  “Or written it down? Or emailed it?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  Lincoln looked fixedly at a corner of his desk, his jaw muscles working in accompaniment to his thoughts.

  “It could be a complete coincidence,” he said. “Those Wolves might just have been on the scene—or were pulling some kind of unrelated security detail on campus. And there are a thousand ways our system can be compromised. We could have an informer somewhere in the network, or somebody’s girlfriend could have found out he’s cheating and told the cops to get even…” He looked up. “Speed is of the essence. We’ve got to put these events together faster than the authorities can react to informers.”

  Dagmar pressed her hands together, trying to stop the shaking.

  Lincoln frowned.

  “Dagmar,” he said, “I need you to pull yourself together.”

  She shrank beneath his cold gaze.

  “I keep thinking about Ismet,” she said.

  “There’s nothing you can do about him.”

  “I keep thinking that I’ve killed another one.” Another lover, she meant.

  Lincoln’s mouth twisted in a kind of snarl.

  “Well,” he said, “you haven’t. And the fact is people have been dying all along—journalists, missionaries, Kurds, Alevis, labor leaders, even the odd tourist… It’s been going on all along, and neither of us are going to stop it completely; we can just make it mean something, maybe…”

  Dagmar wanted to say that Ismet meant more to her than some political principle, but the words crumbled into dust before she could even utter them.

  “I need you to help get those videos into shape, and uploaded,” Lincoln said. “I want Turkish public opinion outraged by this. Because we want the outrage we feel to be felt by everybody.”

  Dagmar obeyed numbly. The Turkish government had issued a list of Web sites that were to be blocked. Türk Telekom was too big to ignore the order, but many local ISPs were slow to get the order or slow to enforce it.

  Still, Dagmar was staying ahead of the authorities. For the next few hours she edited video, uploaded it, made sure it was posted on new sites that the Turkish government hadn’t managed to ban yet. She helped Magnus and Byron create new proxy sites so that people in Turkey could view the videos and send messages to one another without the government intercepting them. Distantly she could hear the thump of shotguns, the cries of wounded and dying, the amplified, incomprehensible snarl of anger comi
ng from bullhorns… it’s as if she were listening to a radio station from a parallel world, where the events of her past were repeated over and over again.

  As she worked, Atatürk fixed his ferocious gaze upon her from his place on the wall.

  It was nearly dinnertime before she heard from Ismet.

  His message appeared on a Gmail account they shared. Gmail accounts were perfect for covert work, provided that everyone involved had a password and access to the account.

  Dagmar would, for example, write an email giving details of the next demo, then not send it. Ismet or Tuna or Rafet, who knew the password, could open the email, make their own comments, then log off, again without sending it. This could continue for any number of iterations, and then the email could be erased without ever being sent.

  As long as the email wasn’t actually sent anywhere, it couldn’t be intercepted. Gmail was a surprisingly secure method of communication, so long as you didn’t actually send any Gmail.

  As Dagmar was working elsewhere, she kept checking the Gmail account she shared with Ismet, and she felt her heart give a lurch as she found an unsent email waiting for her.

  I was pinned down in the park for hours. Had to destroy phone.

  IM ok now. Izmir too dangerous, safe house abandoned. I am writing from hotel in Selçuk. Will go to Bodrum tomorrow and fly home from there.

  Estragon.

  Dagmar waited till her body caught up to her racing thoughts, till she could assure herself that her heartbeat and breath were functioning in the same time as her mind. Then—fingers shaking—she typed her own brief answer.

  Love you Briana.

  She checked in again for the rest of the night, but there was no reply.

  FROM: Rahim

  The following proxy sites are still unblocked. Please pass this on to anyone interested in finding out what’s going on in Turkey.

  128.112.139.28 port 3124

  RT 218.128.112.18:8080

  218.206.94.132:808

  218.253.65.99:808

  219.50.16.70:8080

  By morning, the official total from the action was eleven dead, twenty-eight wounded. Rumors had it the totals were higher.

  How many people have to die, Dagmar thought, before it all stops being cool? Before it stops being insanely fun?

  One. Just one.

  Originally, the government bulletin had claimed “terrorist violence by unknown subversive elements.” But faced with the videos, the posters, by ten in the morning it announced that the Gray Wolves had been taken into custody for questioning.

  “They’re not in jail,” Lincoln said. “They’re in protective custody to keep them from being lynched by their neighbors.”

  “Too bad we can’t arrange a jailbreak,” Dagmar said.

  “It was a bad idea to put the Gray Wolves in uniform,” said Lincoln. “A government can always use a shadowy, anonymous group for assassination and random violence. Once everyone knows who they are, it’s a lot harder to hide in the shadows.” He smiled, nodded. “Those bastards have had it.”

  Dagmar went to bed at midmorning and arose midafternoon to wait for Ismet.

  He looked like a wreck—unshaven, pale, smelling of sweat and tobacco. Dagmar held him for a long time after he staggered out of his Ford, then joined him for the debriefing, which was mercifully brief.

  “We knew one of these would go wrong sooner or later,” Lincoln said. “This one wasn’t anybody’s fault. We learn and move on.”

  Dagmar returned with Ismet to the apartment he shared with Tuna. Tuna and Rafet had both gone, on their way to an action in Ankara, and Dagmar relished the chance to be alone with Ismet. But he was exhausted, and when Dagmar left briefly to fetch soft drinks from the fridge he fell asleep fully clothed on the sofa. Dagmar wanted to stay with him, but her mouth tasted foul, her skin smelled of chemical anxiety, and she badly wanted to brush her teeth. She left a note saying she’d be back soon, then kissed Ismet, turned out the lights, and walked to her own place. She’d get a change of clothes and a toothbrush, then return.

  Cypress smells were in the air. The airfield was silent. Dagmar’s apartment was dark—apparently Judy hadn’t expected her to return. She walked onto the porch, fished in her cargo pants for keys, and noticed the door was standing open.

  A cold warning finger touched her neck. She stepped to the side of the door, between it and the window into the living room, and then reached around the corner to flick on the living room light.

  The curtain was only partly drawn. She looked in to see a man quickly emerge from Judy’s bedroom into the hall—a man she didn’t know, mustached, dressed in dark clothes. A long pistol was in one hand. He looked up at the window and saw Dagmar the instant that she saw him.

  She ducked away from the window as the glass shivered to the bullet’s impact. She didn’t hear a shot, only a mechanical clacking noise.

  She ran, and as she ran she thought to scream. The scream came out wrong—she hoped for the piercing sound of a cheerleader trapped in a horror movie basement, but instead she found that terror had somehow thickened her vocal cords and she could only manage a kind of baritone moan.

  “Help!” she rumbled. “Help me!”

  Dagmar heard footsteps behind her. A bullet struck sparks from the street near her feet.

  “Help!” she groaned. Another bullet cracked past her ear.

  However she was saying it, the urgency must have told. Porch lights were snapping on. A door creaked as it opened. The footsteps behind her stopped suddenly, and then she heard the footsteps again, in retreat.

  When the RAF Police finally came, they found Judy lying dead in her room.

  Which sixties spy are you? Dagmar thought. She was curled in a chair at the offices of the RAF Police, her knees drawn up, her forearms embracing her shins.

  She’d decided that Ismet was the character from Ipcress File. But who was she?

  There weren’t a lot of options, and the problem was that most of them were superwomen. Emma Peel and Modesty Blaise were too beautiful, too perfect, too intimidating—and besides, Dagmar was absolutely certain that she would not be flattered by a black spandex catsuit.

  Mentally she paged through the available options, and then—a cold finger running up her spine—she realized her true identity. She was Jill or Tilly Masterson. She was Fiona Volpe; she was Aki; she was Tracy di Vicenzo. She was Semiramis Orga.

  She was the woman who was in the spy business but lacked the necessary skills and experience, who was completely out of her depth, who tried her best but fell afoul of the villain anyway.

  Dagmar was the good-hearted but clueless girl who died in the first half of the Bond films.

  Of all the characters in the drama, she was the one the audience absolutely knew would not survive.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The police headquarters filled with RAF Police in their white caps and soldiers from the RAF Regiment in camouflage battle dress. Dagmar, curled on her chair in the hall, felt herself cringing away from the parade of firearms that marched past her.

  Squadron Leader Alvarez turned up, the group’s intelligence liaison; he scowled as he scanned the room, and went into conference with other officers. A pair of Royal Marines arrived, from off the patrol boats that cruised offshore, and then the first of Dagmar’s own people appeared—Lola scowling at the world through a mop of tangled hair, and Byron bewildered, fearful, blinking sleep from his eyes, having been first roused from his bed by a phone call telling him to secure their doors, then taken by military police to their headquarters.

  It was time for Dagmar to be the boss again.

  So she uncurled from her chair, went to the two, and told them there was a security problem. She showed them where the coffee machine waited, told them to find a seat.

  When Ismet was brought in, his glasses cockeyed on his face, she went to him in silence and put her arms around him and stayed there, leaning against him, for a long, desperate moment.

  “Judy is dead,�
� she said. “Shot.” She spoke quietly so the others wouldn’t hear. She felt his muscles tighten at her words.

  “The killer shot at me, too,” she said.

  Being shot at, she realized, was something new that she and Ismet had in common.

  “I’m so sorry,” Ismet said. His voice was breathless. “What can I do?”

  What can I do? That was always his question, as if he saw the world as a series of technical problems to be overcome.

  Some problems, she thought, were beyond help.

  More members of the Lincoln Brigade arrived, and Dagmar counted heads—everyone was present save for Rafet and Tuna, on their way to the mainland, and Lincoln, Helmuth, and Magnus. Cold terror crawled up her spine as she pictured Lincoln, Helmuth, and Magnus lying slaughtered in their beds, the Brigade’s mission a failure, their sole triumph the slaughter of its own recruits… and then Lincoln walked through the glass doors at the end of the hall, eyes hidden behind his metal-rimmed shades, his feet marching in step with his two white-capped escorts; and he walked past Dagmar with a curt nod and went straight into conference with Alvarez.

  The door closed behind Lincoln, and then through the wood paneling Dagmar heard his voice raised: “What the hell is going on in this fucking establishment?”—after which somebody, presumably, calmed him down, because Dagmar heard nothing more.

  A police corporal arrived to report that Helmuth and Magnus were not in their quarters. In a burst of relief it occurred to Dagmar that they needn’t have been victims of assassins—instead they were probably in Limassol indulging in their usual nightly depravities. She would call them on her handheld if she had it, but she didn’t have it with her.

  Instead she told the corporal to alert the guard at the gate to escort Magnus and Helmuth to the police station as soon as they arrived.

  The door to the office opened, and Alvarez summoned Dagmar. Police officers filed out as she took a chair, leaving only Alvarez, Lincoln, and a police lieutenant Dagmar had never met. Lincoln’s jaw muscles were clenched in what seemed to be rage.

  The room was a meeting or interview room, with a cheap table and chairs and walls crusted with decades of thick ochre paint. Faded safety notices were posted on the walls. There was a faint odor of disinfectant. The police lieutenant turned on a recorder, put it on the table, and then opened his notebook and clicked his ballpoint.