Alaydin says:
I think Uzbekistan.
Hanseatic says:
This is beginning to sound suspicious. Maybe he’s been sent out of the country for a reason, like to make it hard for us to locate him.
ReVerb says:
He may be hacking Harry’s accounts from Uzbekistan.
Alaydin says:
Not same guy!
Chatsworth Osborne Jr. says:
Easiest way to prove that is to contact him. He’s the only lead we’ve got.
Alaydin says:
I think you’re crazy, but ok. N.Ü[email protected].
Chatsworth Osborne Jr. says:
Thanks!
“Nicely done, there, Chatsworth,” Dagmar said.
“Sometimes you just have to nag them,” Lincoln said, still bent over his keyboard. The Our Reality Network live feed glimmered in his Elvis glasses.
“I’ve got Haseki Network’s English-language home page,” Richard said. “Offices in Turkey, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan. Mission statement: ‘To provide wireless access where users in the past did not have access to high speed, high performance, networked communications. To provide long range point-to-point and point-to-multipoint wireless connections. To provide a high level of support to our networks and users.’ ”
“Slogan,” Helmuth said, reading over Richard’s shoulder, “ ‘Now Your Community is the Whole World.’ ”
“When these guys are done,” Richard said, “everyone in the ’Stans will be able to receive hot take-out pizza within twenty minutes.”
Helmuth frowned.
“I don’t see the connection between Haseki and the High Zap,” he said. “These guys are a wireless company, not a bunch of spook hackers.”
Lloyd clicked from screen to screen.
“The Turkish pages aren’t quite identical to the English pages,” he said. “There’s a news page in Turkish that mentions that Haseki has completed on schedule a Turkish-inspired, Turkish-engineered secure communications network for the military.”
“Bingo,” said Richard.
“Still not proven,” Helmuth said.
“Slash’s name is Nimet Üruisamoglu,” Lloyd read from the company Web page. “He’s listed as Vice President, Chief Programmer, Director of Operations (Uzbekistan). A recent promotion, apparently.”
Helmuth laughed. “He doesn’t get credit for being Chief Zombie Killer?”
“His talent for slaughtering the undead,” Richard said, “remains unrecognized.”
Dagmar, meanwhile, had called up an email program and had typed in Üruisamoglu’s email address. She paused as she contemplated the subject line.
“He’s about to get hundreds of insane emails from players all over the world,” she said. “How can I make sure that mine is the email he’s going to open?”
“Offer him money in the subject line,” Lincoln suggested. He was still watching the Seagram’s mystery unfold on the live feed.
“If I do that,” Dagmar said, “he’ll think it’s spam.”
“Tell him you want to hire him for a job,” Richard suggested. “Mention Alaydin. Mention stuff from the Haseki Web page.”
“Let me write the message in Turkish,” Ismet said.
“Oh.” Dagmar waved a hand. “Silly of me not to think of that.”
They considered the content, then had Ismet draft an email offering a chance for Üruisamoglu to take a well-paid but mysterious contract in Western Europe, and to call Dagmar on her handheld.
“Send several of them,” Dagmar said, “with somewhat different content. Just in case he skips over the first few.”
“I will,” Ismet said. “But let’s hope he’s not on strike.”
Lincoln turned away from the live feed and turned to Dagmar.
“The Group Mind found Slash Berzerker in about twenty minutes,” he said. “How long did you expect it would take?”
“A couple hours,” Dagmar said. “We got a little bit lucky.”
“Even though I’m a part of it,” Lincoln said, “I’m always surprised how quickly these missions are completed.”
Dagmar smiled. “Things happen fast when you’ve got tens of thousands of little worker bees to do the job for you.”
Lloyd was still looking at his display.
“Üruisamoglu hasn’t exactly been hiding his light under a bushel,” he said. “He’s kind of an IT superstar. I did a search on his name and came up with over a hundred thousand hits.” He gestured toward his display. “He’s an MIT graduate. He’s only twenty-six. He goes to a lot of conventions, gives a lot of speeches. I’ve got the text for a lot of this stuff here.”
“Any of it in English?” Lincoln asked.
“Most of it, in fact.”
“Anything political? Anything to indicate whether or not he supports the junta?”
Lloyd shook his head.
“Not so far,” he said. “But of course he reverse-engineered the Zap for them.”
“It might have been just a job he was paid to do,” Lincoln said. “He might just be a mercenary—which is good, from our point of view.” He looked up. “Just keep looking,” Lincoln said. “We need to know how to approach him.”
He turned to Ismet.
“Ideally,” he said, “I’d like to get a special ops team to just grab him and drag him to whatever American military bases are still in the ’Stans. But it may take too long to put a snatch team together.” He looked at Ismet. “So you’ll have to go in and make the approach.”
Dagmar’s heart gave a lurch.
At least, she thought, Ismet wouldn’t be going into the street fighting in Turkey.
“What are we trying to get him to do?” Ismet asked.
“The fact that he signed his work,” Lincoln said, “suggests that he compiled it himself, using his own personal compiler and algorithm. And the sort of people who compile programs themselves and then stick their own badge on them are very likely the sort of people who might well leave a back door into the program—they don’t code it into a program, because someone might notice; they add the back door when compiling it.”
“Ah.” Ismet nodded. “So I make contact, I get him to alter the Zap—”
“Putting a gun to his head if necessary,” Lincoln said.
Ismet shook his head. “It won’t work,” he said. “I’ll use the gun if I have to, but the fact is that I’m a journalist. He’ll know within ten seconds whether I have the knowledge to follow his work—and then he’ll make an idiot out of me. How am I going to know if he’s doing what I tell him to? Whether I have the gun or not, Slash is the one who will have the advantage.”
Lincoln turned somber. He looked over the others, as if numbering them in his head.
“I’ll go in,” Lloyd said. “I speak Turkish. I’ve shot a pistol once or twice.”
Lincoln looked at him for a moment, then shook his head.
U.S. citizen, Dagmar thought. Lincoln can’t put him in danger. Not without special permission, anyway.
Lincoln rose. “I’ll get busy talking to the good folks in Virginia,” he said. “I want the rest of you to prep for your encounter with Slash. He’s got a lot of speeches and so forth online—read them; try to figure what it is he wants. Try to work out what we can offer him, or pretend to offer him.” He gave the room a lowering look.
“We just may have to seduce the bastard,” he said. “You figure out what to say, how to say it.”
Seduce someone called Slash Berzerker, Dagmar thought. How hard can that be?
LadyDayFan says:
Assuming that this Üruisamoglu is in fact our Slash Berzerker, and assuming that he answers any of our emails, we should put our heads together and work out what questions we’re going to ask him. Should we ask him about Harry right off the bat?
Vikram says:
BTW, have you heard that the Internet is down in New York? I just heard the report here in Bengaluru.
Hippolyte says:
&n
bsp; The whole Internet? Doesn’t seem very likely.
Corporal Carrot says:
I just checked the news crawl on CNN. They also report that New York is down.
Hippolyte says:
ReVerb is New York based. Are you still here, ReVerb?
Corporal Carrot says:
ReVerb? (ReVerb, reverb, reverb… )
Big echo in here.
LadyDayFan says:
Yeah. Big hollow echo.
I think we’ve lost the Apple.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
FROM: Rahim
The following proxy sites are still unblocked. Please let any friends in Turkey know this.
86.101.185.112:8080
86.101.185.109:8080
69.92.182.124:2100
128.112.139.28:3124
198.144.36.172:5555
“ ’Round Midnight” brought Dagmar up from sleep. She flailed awake, arms flying, then knocked her handheld off the bedstand and then had to look under the bed for it.
She located the phone by its glowing screen and grabbed it. She brushed dust from the display, looked blearily at the glowing numbers, and saw Uzbekistan’s country code.
Her heart crashed to a sudden surge of adrenaline. She pressed Send.
“This is—” She coughed. “This is Briana.”
“Hello.” A light, young voice. “You left a message for me to call you. This is Nimet Üruisamoglu.”
His voice lilted the unlikely-sounding name, made it almost melodic.
“I’m very pleased to reach you,” Dagmar said. She swung her legs out of bed, planted bare feet on the floor. She rose naked and went to the closet for a robe.
“I work for an American IT company,” Dagmar said. “We were very impressed by a talk you gave in Germany a couple years ago.”
“Which one?” Slash sounded pleased and upbeat.
Dagmar found her robe and got one arm in but couldn’t manage the second arm without taking the phone from her ear.
“Ah—” she said, momentarily distracted. “That would be ‘Toward the Creation of Neural-Based Communications Systems.’ ”
Ismet appeared—he’d been in the kitchen brewing coffee—and he used one hand to hold the phone to Dagmar’s ear while using the other to guide her arm into the empty sleeve. She shrugged on the robe and gave Ismet a grateful look.
“I’m very pleased that you remember that talk,” Slash said.
Dagmar had studied Slash’s speeches through online transcripts and chosen the one that seemed the most heartfelt. The speech had been nearly utopian—Slash had envisioned the Internet carrying not simply verbal or written communication, but information about emotional states, transmitted in a kind of holographic form by brain-scanning hardware.
Once people were able to understand one another’s true feelings, Slash had suggested, it would lead to greater peace among peoples, possibly the abolition of war itself.
Dagmar, for her own part, had little interest in being able to read the emotions of those she met on the Internet. She knew there were monsters in the human psyche. She had enough creatures lurching about in her own brain, and she preferred to keep them private: she didn’t want to broadcast hallucinations of Indonesian rioters or Maffya triggermen to everyone she met, and she very much preferred not to encounter their own needy, ever-hungry Creatures from the Id.
When people found out what others were really like, she thought, there would be more wars than peace treaties.
“We found the ideas visionary,” Dagmar said. “And I’m pleased to tell you that we may be in a situation to bring your ideas into being.”
“But the talk—” Slash stammered a bit. “It was what you call blue-sky. A kind of thought experiment.”
“Thanks to our proprietary hardware,” Dagmar said, “your vision is a lot closer to reality than you might think.”
There was a pause for Slash to digest this.
It was not, she knew, implausible. There were already scanners that could read the areas of the brain that processed speech, so that the scanner would be able to “hear” the words the subject was listening to or be able to print the words the subject was thinking. Processing more complex brain signals such as emotions, she thought, was only a matter of time.
“What company did you say you work for?” he said.
“I can’t actually tell you until nondisclosure agreements are in place,” Dagmar said. “But the hardware exists, and tests are very promising. Our software at the moment is a kloodge—we could really use a software overhaul—but we also need a vision such as the one you articulated in your German talk.”
“I—that’s very interesting.” He sounded cautiously interested.
Ismet appeared again, bringing a cup of coffee. He pressed it into Dagmar’s free hand, and she took a hasty swallow. Coffee scalded its way down her throat.
“I’d very much like to get in the same room with you to discuss this,” she said. “Do you think you can fly back to Germany to meet me?”
Germany, where there were plenty of American special ops teams, and military bases where Slash Berzerker could be debriefed.
“I—I’d like to,” Slash said. “But unfortunately my next few weeks are committed.”
“Oh?” Dagmar tried to sound disappointed. “Where are you?”
“Uzbekistan.”
“Really?” Dagmar made an effort to seem genuinely surprised. “Well,” she said. “We have people in Europe who might be able to meet with you there. Where in Uzbekistan are you?”
“Unfortunately, I’m in a place that’s completely remote. I’m near an oasis called Chechak in the north of the country.”
“How do you spell Chechak?”
From over the lip of her coffee cup Dagmar gave Ismet a wild grin.
This might just work out.
“Tell me about Uzbekistan,” Dagmar said. “The last I heard, they were killing each other.”
She and Ismet were in the backseat of the car, being driven to the ops center by their guards. He looked thoughtful.
“Last year they went through another phase of, ah, post-Karimov adjustment. But they’re quiet now.”
“Who’s running the place?”
“A coalition of political parties dividing all the uranium money while it lasts. Or maybe the uranium interests just bought the political parties. I’m sure it’s hard to tell.”
Dagmar shook her head. “Are they friendly to the U.S.?”
“They’re friendly to the American dollar.”
Dagmar nodded. “Sounds like people we can work with,” she said.
She was nearly skipping in delight when she entered the ops center, but the sight of Lincoln drained the joy from her. He slumped in a chair beneath the picture of Atatürk, a wisp of hair hanging in his face, his face gray and old. A corner of his mouth sagged, as if he’d been hit by a stroke.
Dagmar stopped dead in her tracks and looked at the others. Lloyd and Lola were busy at their desks, expressionless, and the others hadn’t arrived yet. Dagmar gathered herself and walked to Lincoln.
“What’s wrong?”
“The High Zap hit New York yesterday,” Lincoln said. “Just before the stock market closed.”
A shock wave rolled through Dagmar till it rebounded off the inside of her skull.
“How long did it last?”
“Only twenty minutes. But that was enough for Bozbeyli to make his point.”
Dagmar decided to emphasize the optimistic. “I’ve talked to Slash Berzerker,” Dagmar said. “I knew where he is—alone, apparently, at an oasis called Chechak.”
Lincoln slowly shook his head. “Doesn’t matter,” he said.
“All you have to do is send someone to talk to him,” Dagmar said. “Some of those Special Forces guys you were talking about, plus a technician or two smart enough to understand how to rewire the Zap—hell, the techs don’t even have to be there in person, just observing in via satellite.”
Lincoln waved a hand.
/> “No,” he said. “We can’t do any of that. They’ve canceled our operation.”
Dagmar could only stare at him. She heard Ismet walk up behind her, put his arm around her waist.
Lincoln looked up at her.
“From my superiors’ point of view,” he said, “this op is a complete disaster. We’ve destabilized an ally, crashed the New York Stock Exchange, lost billions of dollars—”
“The stocks will rebound,” Dagmar said.
“I didn’t mean the stocks.” Lincoln’s tone was savage. “I meant we lost the money. Do you know how much electronic money moves in and out of New York on a given day? How many billions in exchanges were disrupted? Not just the stock market, but the Federal Reserve, the other banks…”
“Oh, come on,” Dagmar said. “I could believe those transfers were disrupted, but I can’t believe they were lost. There’s all sorts of error checking—”
“They’re checking all those errors now, believe me,” Lincoln said. He looked up at Dagmar, his blue eyes wavering behind the tinted lenses.
“When a quake hits Wall Street, it’s the foundations of Washington that shake,” he said. “Our government is now going to great efforts to convince the Turkish generals that we have their best interests at heart, and that our diplomats and agents will stop trying to subvert the Turkish military. Our op is shut down as of today—we pack up the gear, and head back to the States by the first available transport.”
“The first real cyberwar,” Dagmar says, “and the U.S. surrenders?”
“That’s what you do,” Lincoln said, “when the apocalypse that the action was trying to prevent is triggered by the action.” He shrugged. “They’ll probably try for some kind of technological fix—figure out a way to neutralize the Zap, or supplant it with Zap 2.0.”
“And Rafet?” Dagmar asked. “The camera crew? What happens to them?”
“They’ll be exfiltrated,” Lincoln said. “Rafet will go back to his dervish lodge, and the rest—” He shrugged. “Will return to their lives.”
Deep State Page 33
