Deep State ds-2

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Save some for me, love!” he called over his shoulder, and then ran over a skateboard that some child had left in the road. The bicycle wobbled, and the airman tottered and spilled onto the curb. Dagmar burst into uncharitable laughter.

  Ismet got in his Ford and drove off. Dagmar decided not to run alongside waving a handkerchief-his handkerchief, actually, which she’d absently put in her own pocket at the beach in Kouklia. She stared after him for a long while, the handkerchief wadded in her fist, while she ignored the airman dusting himself off and pushing off on his bike.

  More than ever, she wasn’t in a mood to join Helmuth’s party, and so decided she might as well get some work done.

  She shambled over to the ops center, where she found Lincoln and Byron, beneath Ataturk’s fierce gaze, supervising the last remaining details of the Antalya action. The place smelled of stale flowers and cold pizza.

  “Rafet and the crew are in the clear,” Lincoln said. “Rafet’s at the airport buying a ticket back to Cyprus. The rest are back at the safe house with their equipment.”

  “Lovely,” said Dagmar. She looked up at a BBC news program, running in silence, that showed a fifteen-second clip of the demo that she had fed them less than an hour earlier. Towels and flags waved from the town hall, while Rafet-suitably blurred-bounced and played his drum.

  “I never figured I’d be working alongside Muslim clergy,” Dagmar said. “He is clergy, right?”

  “No,” Lincoln said, “but the people who sent him are. And they’re the right kind of Muslim clergy. Progressive, scientifically literate, tolerant.”

  “And extremely polite,” Dagmar said.

  “Thanks to Riza Tek, all praise to his name.” Lincoln’s face darkened. “If we fail here, our movement may fall to the wrong kind of Muslim theologians.”

  “If we fail,” Dagmar said, “there may only be fanatics left.”

  Byron gave her a searching look from over his shoulder. His face looked permanently pinched. Dagmar wondered if he’d been ill.

  Lincoln scrubbed his hands together.

  “But failure isn’t going to happen!” he declared. “We’re going to conduct a model twenty-first-century people power insurrection, and we’re going to make the Turkish generals look like idiots! They’ve all got a pre-Internet mind-set-they think that once they’ve got the newspapers and broadcast stations, they have a monopoly on communications. We’re going to overthrow them by making them ridiculous. We’ll make them irrelevant! The entire population will just ignore them! They’ll fold up and leave out of sheer embarrassment!”

  Dagmar dropped into a chair. “I like it when you get on a soapbox,” she said.

  “The generals aren’t unlike some of my own superiors,” Lincoln said. “Start talking about leet, or Ozone, or the IP crisis that’s coming up, or even text messaging for heaven’s sake, and you just get a blank look.”

  Dagmar looked at him. “How did you get them to approve me?” she asked. “How did you explain what it is that I do?”

  Lincoln sighed. “I called in a lot of favors,” he said.

  “No kidding,” she said.

  “Besides,” he said, “I reckon we’re up against a deadline. Right now the generals are reflexively pro-Western, because they always have been. They’re nationalist; they’re procapitalist; they’re anti-communist; they’d never deal with the Soviets. But the Soviets are gone now-and they’ve left Russians behind.

  “Everyone’s a capitalist now,” Lincoln went on, “but there are democratic capitalists and crony capitalists and state capitalists and authoritarian capitalists and everything in between. The Bozbeyli regime has a lot more in common ideologically with Moscow now than with Washington-but they’ve got such a Cold War anti-Soviet mind-set that they haven’t figured it out yet. I want to knock them down before they turn into Russia’s best friend on the Black Sea.”

  “And the Bosporus,” Dagmar said.

  Lincoln nodded. “Indeed,” he said.

  Sudden insight flashed into Dagmar’s mind. She looked at Lincoln in wonder.

  “Am I correct in assuming that this operation is really aimed at Russia?” Dagmar said. “That once we do our proof-of-concept, you’re planning to scale all this up and go after Kremlin autocrats?”

  “Everything,” said Lincoln, smiling benignly, “is rehearsal for something else.”

  It was ten A.M. in California, and Dagmar was on the phone to Calvin, her head writer for the Seagram’s game.

  “I screwed up bad,” he said. “And all because I love my dog.”

  Dagmar drew her legs up into her seat and contemplated the gin and tonic in her hand. She could scent juniper berry and fresh-cut lime fizzing from the drink.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “Harry’s got a dog in the story, right? It scares away Murchison when he tries to break into Sandee’s place.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Dagmar sipped her drink. She glanced at the kitchen and saw that the water was boiling for pasta.

  “So I gave my own dog’s name to Harry’s dog. Perpetual Misery-Perpy for short.”

  Dagmar felt a warning prickle on the back of her neck.

  “And,” she said, “the players googled Perpetual Misery plus Dog and found you.”

  “Worse than that. Perpetual Misery has a MySpace page.”

  “Oh my Christ!” Dagmar put her drink down.

  “They call me,” Calvin said miserably. “They call me to ask for information about Harry and Sandee. I tell them I never heard of them, but they keep calling. When I don’t answer, the buffer on the answering machine fills up.” He gave a despairing sigh. “Perpy has thousands of new friends on MySpace.”

  “Jesus, Calvin.”

  “They’re camped out in front of my house,” Calvin said. “They follow me when I go to the store.”

  Dagmar tried to suppress her annoyance. Calvin had tried to play cute with the game, to sneak a little joke by the players, and he hadn’t realized that they’d jump all over something like that. And now he’d put the whole game in jeopardy.

  “They’re waiting for you to slip up,” she said. “They’re hoping you’ll leave data where they can find it, or leave a script behind. You’ve got to secure everything connected with the game.”

  “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “Calvin.” She spoke as patiently as she could. “Do you have any notes on paper? Any printouts lying around where people can find them?”

  Item by item, Dagmar walked him through a procedure for sanitizing his house, his computer, and his handheld.

  She hadn’t needed Lincoln to teach her these things.

  “I’ll have Richard call you about computer security,” Dagmar said, and pressed the End button.

  She looked sadly at her drink, now heavily watered by melting ice, and sighed.

  She was trying to run two jobs at a distance, each at least as complex as the other. She didn’t feel completely on top of either task, especially as she was working with people who were less experienced than she at any of this.

  She comforted herself with the thought that, if there had to be a security breach on one of her operations, at least it was best that it was Calvin’s.

  If Calvin’s operation was breached, no people would die.

  The next day Lincoln’s predictions seemed to come true, as word arrived of another mass demonstration in Trabzon, a city on the Black Sea. Lincoln called an emergency meeting in the ops room in order to figure out what was happening.

  Dagmar scanned video and photos uploaded onto anti-government sites. She saw banners waving under cloudy skies, water looking frigid and gray, ships nosed up to piers.

  “It’s at the waterfront,” Magnus said a little too obviously. He was hungover from the previous day’s celebrations and sucked down coffee as fast as he could pour it.

  “Video quality isn’t bad,” Helmuth judged.

  “This isn’t one of ours!” Lincoln said. “This is going off the rails faster t
han I imagined!”

  Dagmar looked at him in surprise. “That’s a good thing?” she asked.

  “Look,” Lincoln said. “We’re astroturfing them! We’re trying to convince everyone that this is a grassroots Turkish movement. And now it’s actually become one!” He gestured grandly at the screen. “These people put it all together themselves!” He frowned at the screen. “Let’s hope they don’t cock it up for all of us.”

  The crowd was small but very enthusiastic. Apparently under the illusion that the items were symbolically important, they carried flowers, DVDs, towels, and photos. They made piles and designs out of these items and spray-painted slogans on the sidewalk. It was everything they’d seen done in videos.

  And then they sang “Istiklal Mars?i” and dispersed, presumably to upload their pictures and videos to political and social networking sites throughout cyberspace.

  The Lincoln Brigade looked at one another. Lincoln grinned.

  “We taught them well,” he said.

  “I have a Hot Koan,” Richard said. They turned to him.

  “Dagmar makes a revolution out of processors, connectors, routers, and Web pages,” Richard said. “But take away the processors, connectors, routers, and Web pages and what is left?

  “Trabzon.”

  The action in Izmir went wrong at the beginning. It was scheduled to take place at noon in the old Konak section of the city, in a large park at the waterfront with more stunning sea views, a pier, and a picturesque gingerbread clock tower. The place was also conveniently close to the city hall should another march on a symbol of authority prove possible. But it seemed that after two waterfront demonstrations in Antalya and Trabzon the authorities must have decided waterfront parks were too great a temptation to sedition. A whole company of police moved into the park on Monday morning, bringing with them an armored car.

  The scene had to be shifted at the last minute, a good deal farther east, to Hasanaga Park in the Buca district. The setting was good-there were ample entrances and exits from the park, and the adjoining Dokuz Eylul University provided potential recruits as well as lots of places to hide-but it took time to scout the location, and that meant the action had to be moved up to six o’clock, pushing close to the deadline sent in email messages.

  The park was wooded and the demonstrators, carrying stuffed animals and boxes of Turkish delight, took a while to find one another and reach critical mass. One of the tech crew while waiting for people to turn up wasted time shooting video of jackdaws on the lawn.

  The demonstrators had been given only two hours’ notice when and where to show up, and it was soon clear that insufficient allowance had been made for delays caused by rush hour traffic. By six o’clock there were only a few hundred people at the action, though more continued to swarm in from all directions.

  The demo began in a brief rain squall. The sound of raindrops slapping tree leaves dominated the audio, and one of the cameras persisted in tracking the flapping jackdaws. Demonstrators began piling their stuffies into pyramids or perching them in trees. Chants of “Down with the generals!” rose bravely against the sound of rattling rain. Turkish delight was eaten or offered to passersby and to birds. The rain diminished, then died away.

  Then there came the first shots, and the startled jackdaws leaped into the air.

  Dagmar’s body jerked beneath a tsunami of adrenaline. She stared at the screens as her fingers clenched the arms of her chair, physically nailing her to the spot as she fought the instinct that wanted to send her senselessly running from the scene…

  The shots seemed to echo forever among the trees. People fell; screams rose; the video image jerked wildly. “Ismet!” she called into her headset mic. “Where are you?”

  Memories poured into her mind… she remembered fallen banners, sprawled bodies on the street, the Palms hotel as it burned, the fires lapping upward one storey at a time. The scent of burning flesh stung her nostrils, a memory so strong that tears stung her eyes in reaction…

  Hundreds of people sprawled on the wet grass, heads up, looking wildly for the source of the shooting. Pyramids of stuffies were knocked over: plush animals stared at the sky with shiny, dead eyes.

  “Are you all right?” Dagmar cried. She could hear someone breathing on the line, Ismet presumably, but he wasn’t talking.

  “Are you all right?” she demanded. Still no answer.

  More shots. More cries. And now the crowd rose to its feet and began to run, a vast screaming mass. The camera crew ran as well. The shooting was a continuous drumroll, full automatic fire spraying the crowd. Dagmar swept tears from her eyes and looked from screen to screen, trying to find a glimpse of Ismet.

  “Lloyd!” Lincoln called. “Get a drone over to the shooters! I want their pictures! Get a message to the camera teams!”

  Richard, Helmut, and Magnus sent frantic messages. Dagmar was too caught up in her own agony: Lincoln’s urgency didn’t quite penetrate her own.

  Most of the cameramen were caught up in the rout, running from tree to tree and kicking up silver sheets of water from puddles, but the dozens of Hot Koans scattered over the park transmitted the video faithfully. One cameraman put a hand in front of his lens and extruded a middle finger, an answer to the request for close-ups of the assassins. But Lloyd’s team answered the call, and one of the helicopter gyred over the park, lens questing, and found two men advancing from the direction of the university. They carried submachine guns in their hands and wore the uniform of the Gray Wolves. They walked among bodies sprawled like stuffed animals, wounded crying or trying to crawl away, piles of rain-soaked animals and spilled boxes of candy.

  “Get me their faces!” Lincoln demanded. The helicopter made another pass, this time at a lower angle, and Dagmar could see the killers clearly. Young, laughing, pleased with themselves and the notion that their heroin-dealing superiors were safe for another day. They carried their weapons leveled in front of them but made no attempt to fire into the running crowd. One turned his chin into his collar to speak into a lapel mic.

  Lincoln frowned. “I don’t like that,” he said. He turned to Lloyd. “Tell the pilots to circle the park again. There may be more of them that we can’t see.”

  The image jerked, danced, fragmented.

  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 para
militaries 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.”