Deep State ds-2

by Walter Jon Williams

  Dagmar hoped to hell that they wouldn’t take their skills into the private sector and become her competition. They seemed fearsomely intelligent.

  She was just getting acquainted with these when a dignified, well-dressed man entered and was introduced as Alparslan Topal, the observer from the Turkish government-in-exile currently residing in Rome. Dagmar figured he wasn’t using a code name. Topal had a white mustache and exquisite manners and bowed over Dagmar’s hand as he was introduced.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Dagmar said.

  Topal’s soft eyes looked into hers.

  “I hope you will be able to relieve my distressed country,” he said.

  Dagmar was a bit startled by this direct appeal.

  “I hope I won’t disappoint,” she said.

  The last man to arrive used the code name Byron. He was a short, pinch-faced man who wore a tropical shirt and sandals made of auto tires and in no way resembled the poet. Unless, of course, the poet had shaggy hair on the backs of his hands.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he told Lincoln. “I was off trying to help out Camera Team C.”

  “They were having a problem?”

  “Unfortunately, your tech guy didn’t quite understand the fine points of the uplink.”

  Lincoln raised his eyebrows. “I hope you straightened him out.”

  “I did,” Byron said. He looked over the ops room, at the blank displays, the evil-eye amulets, the oversized portrait of Ataturk.

  “Quite a group, is it?” he said.

  Inspiration struck Dagmar. She grinned.

  “We’re calling it the Lincoln Brigade,” she said.

  “As I understand it,” Dagmar said later as she stopped by Lincoln’s office, “the Gray Wolves are your people, right?”

  Lincoln adjusted himself in his Aeron chair.

  “Not anymore,” he said. “That was an arrangement between our grandfathers and their grandfathers.”

  “But the Americans,” Dagmar persisted, “created them, right? Created the Deep State and Counter-Guerilla and Ergenekon and the Gray Wolves?”

  She had made a point of doing her homework, looking up decades-old history on Web sites that glowed with speculation and paranoia, all of which suggested that Turkey had been run for seventy-odd years by a creepy little cabal of military men and politicians known euphemistically as the “Deep State.”

  Lincoln seemed just a little bit sullen.

  “Stalin shifted whole armies to the Turkish border in ’48,” he said. “He demanded that Turkey open the Bosporus. For all anyone knew, he was about to invade.” He shrugged. “So yes, we- our grandfathers-created a lot of things,” he said. “We created stay-behind organizations in every state in Europe, to lead the resistance in case the Russians marched in.”

  “Gladio used Nazis,” said Dagmar.

  “Not in Turkey,” Lincoln said. “No Nazis there. But yes, Gladio used lots of people. People who were willing to do things to communists, and not all these people were Gandhi.” His look was severe. “But let’s not forget that Stalin wasn’t Gandhi, either. He killed something like fifty million people, half of them his own citizens.”

  “Granted,” Dagmar said.

  Lincoln’s mouth narrowed into an angry line. “But what we didn’t do,” he said, “was tell the Deep State to take over the heroin traffic running through Asia Minor. And we didn’t tell them to start overthrowing democratic governments once the damn communists went away.”

  “Without a Soviet invasion,” Dagmar said, “they were bound to get into mischief. My, uh, grandfather might have foreseen that.”

  Lincoln’s expression was savage. “We need to get rid of those dinosaur generals. They’re a fucking embarrassment.”

  “Kill the dinosaurs,” Dagmar said. “Check.”

  Maybe she could embarrass them to death.

  Dagmar had imagined clandestine agents inserted into Anatolia, then working under deep cover to build networks that would strike when the time was right. But Lincoln informed her that the networks already existed.

  There were the networks of the political parties and their supporters, all of whom were out of power, out of work, and already organized. There were government workers, annoyed at interference from their new superiors. The religious who wanted to practice their faith free of government harassment. Members of the military and police who had been dismissed as politically unreliable. Students furious at restrictions on academic freedom and rejoicing in their own natural anarchy.

  Members of the cultures, and subcultures, spawned by social networks such as Facebook, Ozone, and Taraa.

  And there were the poor, especially the urban poor who squatted around the major cities in their improvised, ramshackle communities. The generals were busy placating-or threatening-the rich and powerful, whom they viewed as a greater threat to their legitimacy: they had no time or funds or inclination to raise the hopes of those living in poverty with anything except rhetoric.

  All these networks already existed. All that was necessary was to mobilize them and to convince them that they could act with reasonable safety.

  Even the poor, Dagmar was told, had cell phones.

  The bus was back. The bus that the police had confiscated outside Izmir had been returned to Lincoln’s company once Stunrunner was over and it no longer mattered. The bus was so heavily customized that it would be difficult to sell, so Bear Cat had garaged it till now, when Lincoln was going to make use of it.

  Right now the bus was across the Green Line in the Turkish part of Cyprus, following the unit’s three camera teams. The camera teams-all Turks-were making videos of towns and scenery, nothing remotely governmental, military, or classifiable, so as not to attract official interest… the bus captured the video, streamed it along the uplink to a satellite, and then down again to RAF Akrotiri, where it appeared on the Lincoln Brigade’s monitors. There the ops room team practiced storing the raw video, editing and manipulating the pictures, then uploading them to dummy, practice sites to which only they had access.

  The satellite link with the camera teams was theoretically two-way, with the ops room able to ask the cameramen to give them specific shots. This was the element that caused the most trouble: an alarming percentage of the communications failed, mostly through human error.

  Dagmar was supposed to be in charge, under Lincoln. She’d done this sort of thing before, at most of Great Big Idea’s live events, but in California she had a practiced, well-drilled team and they knew what videos to take without her telling them. Dagmar kept making the mistake of thinking her current team knew more about what they were doing than they actually did.

  Part of the problem was the enormous variety in the hardware. There were covert cameras hidden in sunglasses or ordinary spectacles, complete with a laser heads-up display that would imprint incoming text messages right onto the retina. But these weren’t very flexible and didn’t record as many megapixels of reality as would sometimes be required, so the techs were required to get comfortable with other gear: small video cameras that would fit into the hand, cell phone cameras, large professional units capable of sucking up vast amounts of bandwidth.

  The team was aided by what they were calling Hot Koans, their own pronunciation for Hot Xoan, the Vietnamese company that produced them. These were small, battery-powered wireless repeaters capable of spontaneously assembling into an ad hoc mesh network. Each of the repeaters, which came in a small, plastic box colored bubble-gum pink, had a range of a few hundred meters, and signal could be passed up and down the network to a receiver well out of sight of the camera, computer, or cell phone that had produced it. The repeaters would keep working as long as their battery lasted, which was around forty-eight hours.

  Richard had found these and had ordered thousands of them. An area could be saturated with Hot Koans, providing massive redundancy to any communications and keeping the receiver well out of danger.

  The Hot Koans-which turned out to have a much greater range than ad
vertised-were about the only success on that first dreary day of training. The team was overwhelmed by all the new technology. By four in the afternoon Lincoln called it a day: “We’ll get more practice tomorrow.”

  Dagmar was exhausted. She dropped into her chair, winced at the sudden pain in her lower back, and wished she’d had the foresight to buy herself an Aeron.

  “I have a Hot Koan,” Richard said.

  Dagmar turned to him. “Yes?”

  Richard tented his fingers. “A player came to Dagmar and asked, ‘Does the ARG have Buddha nature?’

  “Dagmar replied, ‘That would make a pretty good story.’

  “Hearing this, the player was enlightened.”

  Richard’s effort was well within a well-established tradition of creating enigmatic hacker koans that had to do with computers and computer people. Dagmar grinned, then winced at a stab of pain from her back.

  Helmuth, however, seemed impervious to fatigue. He jumped up, turned to the room in general, and said, “Anyone for finding something to drink off base?”

  Byron turned toward him, looking as if he was interested. Magnus stood, grinned, raised an arm.

  “A drink sounds good,” Magnus said.

  Byron hesitated, then frowned. “Too much jet lag,” he said.

  Dagmar considered that Byron might have just had a narrow escape. Neither was quite aware of the hazards of a night out with Helmuth, of waking draped over some piece of furniture, a headache stabbing shivs into your eyes, your mouth tasting as if it had been used to put out cigars, the bathroom sink splashed with vomit, your cuffs spattered with someone else’s blood, and your underwear turned backward. At Great Big Idea this was known as “being Hellmouthed.”

  Not that Helmuth ever Hellmouthed himself; he would always turn up at the office in the morning perfectly groomed and perfectly tailored and from his own invincible height survey his victims with a smile of brilliant white cosmopolitan superiority.

  Perhaps, Dagmar thought, she ought to give the lads a warning.

  “We start again at oh eight hundred,” she said. “Don’t lose too much sleep.”

  Judy stood. She wore another of her series of rhinestone-covered plastic crowns, this one tiny and pinned to the crown of her head, like that of a beauty queen.

  “You could just walk to the officers’ club,” she said. Then she raised an arm and sniffed her armpit. “I’ll go if I don’t smell too skanky,” she added.

  “You’re no worse than me,” Dagmar said. Which was, unfortunately, true. She turned to the others. “Officers’ club, everyone?”

  “Not me,” Helmuth said. “I want to go somewhere I don’t have to hear jets taking off every three minutes.”

  He and Magnus retired to whatever desperate pleasures awaited them. Lincoln went into his office. The interns began to clean up what was left of the buffet. That left Dagmar, Judy, and Byron for the officers’ club.

  Dagmar gave an automatic glance around the room for Ismet, then remembered that he, Rafet, and Tuna were elsewhere. They weren’t techs; they weren’t part of Dagmar’s game except as pawns. They were being trained as field agents, and what they did they would do in Turkey.

  All of which left Dagmar uneasy. She didn’t want to send people she actually knew into danger.

  It would be bad enough if her pawns were faceless.

  The trio walked to the officers’ club over burning hot pavement that smelled of rubber and jet fuel. They were all honorary British officers, with photo ID cards worn on lanyards around their necks, and entitled to drink with the RAF’s finest.

  The club was a little bit of Britain: dark paneling, brass, slot machines, a snooker table, Real Ale, the scent of chips frying. Yorkshire-accented hip-hop rocked from the jukebox. Not a lot of customers, even though Happy Hour had just started.

  They found a round table in what passed for a quiet corner. Photos of 1950s aircraft decorated the walls. Dagmar got a gin and tonic, Judy a ginger beer, and Byron a single malt, water back. Thirsty, he gulped the water first. As he dropped his glass to the table, Dagmar saw the wedding ring.

  “You’re married?” she said.

  Byron nodded. “Wife. Daughter. I’ll call home later tonight.”

  “How old is your girl?”

  “Six weeks.” He pulled out a billfold and offered a picture of a goggle-eyed infant. Judy and Dagmar made appropriate noises.

  “I have more pictures on my laptop,” he said. “But I’m not allowed to bring it into the ops center.”

  “If I remember the security briefing correctly, you’re not supposed to show us even this photo,” Judy said. “Let alone in a public place like a bar.”

  “Right,” Dagmar said. “We will stop oohing over Byron’s child at once.”

  “Can I see the picture again?” Judy asked.

  Dagmar sipped her drink, looked around the club once more, and caught a number of the officers casually scoping the two new women who had just walked into their dark-paneled sanctum and doubtless wondering which of them belonged to Byron and whether the other was free…

  When in contact with the locals the Lincoln Brigade had been told to say they were here to do something with the computers. Local curiosity probably wouldn’t extend much past that-if it did, they could just say that they couldn’t talk about their work.

  Dagmar turned to Byron.

  “Have you ever done this sort of thing before?” she asked.

  Byron seemed doubtful. “I don’t think anyone has.”

  “I mean-you know-covert, secret stuff.”

  “Oh. Sure.” He tasted his drink, splashed a bit of water into it, then tasted again. “I mean, I’m a contractor, Magnus and I work for the same company, and they work almost exclusively for the government. And that includes three-letter organizations that make me sign secrecy agreements.” He shrugged, sipped again at his whisky. “The security rules are usually idiotic-in fact, it’s impossible to do my job if I follow them all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Exasperation distorted his pinched face.

  “The hoops I have to jump through to take my work home are ridiculous,” he said. “And often I have to take it home-there’s no way to do the work on-site.”

  “Why?” Judy asked.

  “There are a whole long list of Web pages that I’m not allowed to access from government computers-but often as not, these are the pages that contain the information necessary to do my work, or that have the software tools I need to do it. So”-snarling-“I have to take the classified material home, so that I can put it on my own computer, from which I can access the necessary information.” He shook his head. “It’s all maddening. Someday the military and intelligence branches of the government are going to completely freeze, because no one will be allowed to see or do anything.”

  “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 sta
rtled 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.