Deep State ds-2

by Walter Jon Williams

  “You’ve put everything you’ve got into the company,” Helmuth said. “You can’t put that kind of energy into fixing a whole country. It’s just not possible.”

  She licked her lips. “I’ve just sent out notices for tomorrow’s demo.”

  Helmuth’s eyes turned stony. “Dagmar, Lincoln and his crew failed us. They were supposed to keep us safe, but instead they put us in the same room with someone who sent a hit squad to kill you. It’s their fuckup. Nobody’s going to blame you if you walk out.”

  “Let me think about it,” Dagmar said. “I’ll give you an answer soon.”

  A dissatisfied look crossed Helmuth’s face. He rose from the chair.

  “Think hard, Dagmar,” he said. “And let’s get the hell back to California.”

  He left, closing the door softly behind him. She looked after him and tried to think of nothing at all.

  Dagmar took the hard drive and her memory stick with the addresses on it and gave them to Lola to be locked in Lincoln’s safe. She went to the ops room, where most of her crew were standing around waiting for the police escort to their new quarters.

  Ismet stood behind his desk. He was looking across at the picture of Ataturk. His eyes were dark wells behind the spectacles. She drifted to his side, but he seemed not to notice her.

  Ismet appeared to come to a decision. He bent down to his desk, opened a drawer, and took out a small stuffed bear and a box of Turkish delight. He went to the wall, picked up the hammer and box of nails that waited there, and nailed the items next to the trophies from the other missions, the flowers, the towel, the photo, the DVD.

  He turned and faced the others. His expression was defiant.

  Dagmar’s heart soared. She wanted to applaud.

  Ismet marched back to his desk and she put her arms around him.

  Lola came to tell them that their escorts had arrived. Lincoln appeared from his office, shambling stiff legged, his face haggard.

  “We will be retaining your personal electronics for the next twenty-four hours,” he said.

  “God damn it!” Byron said, and swung a fist through the air so hard that it spun him around ninety degrees.

  “We’ll be cloning your hard drives,” Lincoln said, “and looking through them.”

  “I have a family, damn it!” Byron called. “I need to talk to them!”

  “If you wish to contact your family or send messages,” Lincoln said, “you’ll have to do it with me or Lola observing-preferably soon, because we’ll want dinner at some point.”

  “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Byron kicked a chair across the ops room. Angry Man, Dagmar thought, throwing a tantrum.

  Dagmar felt her nerves go nova. She strode to Byron’s side and shouted in his ear.

  “Shut the fuck up, you useless whining cocksucker!” she screamed. He jumped and turned to her, round eyes white in his red face.

  “We lost a friend today, and all you can do is snivel!” Dagmar shouted. “Snivel like a little bitch!”

  Byron began to back away. Dagmar pursued.

  “It’s time you learned that this isn’t all about you!” Dagmar said. “If I hear another complaint from you, I’m going to kick you down the fucking stairs!”

  Byron had backed up against a desk. Dagmar crowded him close.

  “Jesus, Dagmar!” he said.

  Dagmar pointed to the exit.

  “You have my permission to leave the ops center,” she said.

  Byron edged down the length of the desk, then stepped into the aisle and walked toward the exit, putting his feet down carefully, as if he might cut himself on glass. The others silently parted for him. Dagmar found herself shivering and realized her chin was wet.

  Lord, she thought, had she been shrieking at Byron and drooling? Here he was pitching his little emo fit and was then confronted with a shrieking, dribbling madwoman, rabid as a vampire bat.

  With a quivering hand she reached for a hankerchief and swabbed her chin and lips. Her knees suddenly seemed very weak, and she leaned against the desk.

  Gunfire crackled dimly somewhere in her awareness. She tried to shut it off, concentrate on the sound of the ceiling fan ticking over her head.

  No one seemed to be looking at her. In the wake of the scene they all seemed to have found something else with which to busy themselves.

  Dagmar thought of the break room and thought that perhaps her knees would support her the short distance. She passed by Helmuth at his desk, and he looked at her sidelong.

  “Guess that was my answer,” he said. Dagmar said nothing.

  In the break room she sat on the little yellow plastic-covered love seat and got a lemonade from the fridge. She sipped her drink and waited till she heard the others leave, then rose and went back to the ops room.

  Lola, the Guardian Sphinx, was still at her desk at the end of the hall, her head bent over her work. Dagmar walked across the room to the hall, checked her own office to make sure everything was turned off, then closed the door and walked on.

  Lincoln’s door was open. He sat behind his desk, stretched out on his Aeron chair like a piece of driftwood left by the tide. He saw Dagmar and offered a weary smile.

  “You go on knockin’ them into the weeds, okay?” he said.

  “I’m embarrassed,” she said. She raised a hand to the pain in her throat-she’d strained her vocal cords shouting.

  Lincoln waved a dismissive hand. “It was educational,” he said. “I’m sure we all learned something.”

  We all learned that I’m crazy, Dagmar thought.

  “If you want your phone and laptop,” Lincoln said, “you can have them. I know you aren’t working with the black hats.”

  She took her electronics, walked past Lola and down the stairs to meet the two kind, soft-spoken policewomen who had gathered her belongings and moved them to her new quarters.

  She had been put into a room with a single bedroom and without Ismet in evidence-evidently Lincoln had conceded on the point of sex but not on living arrangements. Her apartment was on the second floor of a two-storey apartment block, and there were RAF Police guards in white caps guarding all possible approaches. Snipers in the trees for all she knew.

  She was still in married personnel quarters-an RAF family had been pitched out of their home to make a safer place for her. Their personal items were gone, but she could still smell the bacon they’d cooked for breakfast and the scent of aftershave and herbal body wash in the bathroom. She found a note on the breakfast table, in round handwriting with circular dots above the j’s and i’s.

  We hope you enjoy our home.

  The hot water takes a little time to come on in the bathroom, and sometimes you need to jiggle the handle on the toilet to stop it running.

  Dagmar smiled at the sweet air of hospitality, then went to the kitchen to find her gin. As she passed the toaster, it started talking to her in Greek. She jumped a foot in surprise and banged her hip on the counter.

  She stepped closer to the toaster again. The Greek voice resumed. She recognized only the word tost.

  She examined the toaster but couldn’t find a way to turn the voice off. Maybe the British family hadn’t managed to turn it off, either. She gave up and put the toaster back on the counter.

  The contents of the refrigerator spoke more eloquently than the toaster.

  The policewomen hadn’t known which items belonged to Judy and which to Dagmar, so they’d brought everything. There was the soy milk that Judy liked and her goat cheese and the Nutella she enjoyed at breakfast.

  Sadness fell on Dagmar like cool rain. She closed the refrigerator door, mixed her drink, then left the bottles on the counter rather than open the door to be met again with the ghost of Judy’s absence.

  Dinner was a frozen meal of pasta primavera heated in the microwave. The creators of the meal apparently hadn’t known what primavera actually meant: the vegetables were tired and old and tasteless. She had just finished when there was a soft knock on her door.

 
She had relearned caution in the last twenty-four hours. She took a one-second glance through the front curtains, saw Ismet’s silhouette, and opened the door. He kissed her hello, then stepped back to look at her.

  “Now I know why Lincoln advised me not to piss you off.”

  Dagmar felt her cheeks flush.

  “I could have handled that better,” she said.

  “I’d have shot him in the head,” Ismet said. She couldn’t quite tell whether he was joking or not.

  She took his arm, led him toward the couch.

  “Please,” she said. “Let’s not talk about shooting.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  They sat. Ismet winced, reached behind the cushion, and drew out a leatherette case with a small pair of binoculars.

  “Maybe your hosts watch birds,” he said. He put the binoculars on the coffee table.

  She put a hand on his thigh, rested her head on his shoulder. He put his arm around her. Her head swam, perhaps at his scent, perhaps at her own weariness. Somewhere, just beneath her consciousness, she heard the sound of the sea grating up the shingle at Kouklia. Aphrodite sent a simmering warmth through her groin.

  And then she heard Lincoln’s voice. When you turn someone, you get him back to his normal life as soon as possible. She felt herself stiffen at the memory.

  Ismet turned out to be sensitive to her body language.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Practically everything. Lots.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Lots.”

  She buried her face in the juncture between his neck and shoulder. He stroked her. She kissed his neck, then licked him there, felt his taste shock her nerves into life.

  Ismet brought his lips to hers. They kissed for a long time. Her hands reached for the buttons of his shirt, but then she hesitated.

  Damn this, she thought. Damn this work. It acts against all trust, all humanity.

  He had brought her to his own apartment that night, she remembered. Because his roommate was away and there was more privacy.

  But if he’d known that her place was going to be hit and he’d wanted to save her, he would have done exactly that. She’d gone back to her own place only because he’d fallen asleep and she’d wanted a toothbrush.

  She wondered how plausible that was. At least that scenario meant Ismet didn’t want her killed.

  She didn’t know what to believe. And of course it had to be admitted that she had a bad history with men.

  She leaned on his shoulder again, sighed.

  “I’m too tired to do anything else,” she said.

  “I understand.”

  “I’d like you to stay tonight, though.”

  He kissed her cheek.

  “Of course.”

  Tomorrow, she thought, we’ll have the lie detector tests. Then we’ll know, maybe.

  He helped her turn the bed to a forty-five-degree angle to the wall. He made no comment as he did so.

  The sheets were clean, white with a wide blue stripe and a floral scent-the anonymous British family had made the bed before departing. Dagmar and Ismet slept curled into each other, like a set of quotation marks with no text between them.

  In the morning, when she woke, she was astonished that no soldiers had marched through the night, that her mind had not been filled with explosions and blood.

  That she could wake on a sunny morning and-for a brief, blessed moment-not feel the feather touch of fear on her nerves.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Dagmar felt that as the leader, she should take one for the team, and so she took the polygraph test along with the others. It was only when she was wired into the machine, as the strap went around her rib cage under her breasts, that she realized that she might be asked some questions she didn’t want to answer.

  The interview took place in a small, warm room in the headquarters building. The operator was a young man with freckles and a truly unattractive set of National Health spectacles. He had a list of questions on an electric display pad and a booklet that turned out to be the operator’s manual for the machine. Sometimes, as he wired Dagmar into her chair, he had to flip to one page or another for instructions.

  She thought this particular voodoo wasn’t very convincing.

  The operator had a soft, professional voice, and he kept out of sight, working the machine behind Dagmar’s back, so that his words seemed to drift to Dagmar from the sky, as if from an inquisitive angel.

  “Are you a citizen of the United States?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you female?”

  “Yes.”

  Baseline questions designed to establish a kind of psychic background hum against which answers to the more provocative questions could be measured.

  “Have you ever stolen money?”

  “Yes.” After a slight mental stammer.

  She’d actually been reclaiming the money that her father had stolen from her, but the protocols here did not involve long explanations.

  “Are you working in collaboration with the intelligence service of a country other than the United States?”

  “No.”

  “Do you reside in California?”

  “Yes.”

  The operator alternated provocative questions with innocuous ones, the better to measure the jump in Dagmar’s response.

  “Do you work in an office?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you in the pay of a foreign government?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever cheated on a school exam?”

  “No.”

  If she had, she couldn’t remember it.

  “Have you ever engaged in a conspiracy to commit murder?”

  Well, there it was.

  “Yes,” she said.

  There was a two-second hesitation before the next question, which was, “Do you own an automobile?”

  She was nearly as surprised as the operator. She hadn’t intended to answer in the affirmative; she’d just fallen into the rhythm of giving truthful answers. She considered what answer she should have given-a denial would almost certainly have been detected as a lie. The leap her heart gave at the question would have given her away.

  Maybe she just really wanted to talk about it. Confess to somebody.

  Still, she wasn’t under oath. None of this could be used as evidence. And anyway, it would only confirm what Lincoln already suspected.

  Dagmar went on answering questions. She admitted to using marijuana, denied using cocaine.

  More questions came along, each layered between trivialities so quotidian that the crucial questions might as well have been shouted aloud.

  “Did you kill Judy Strange?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know who killed Judy Strange?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever killed someone?”

  “Yes.”

  The operator was beyond surprise by now. The next question-about whether or not she liked football-came right on schedule.

  “Did you engage in a conspiracy to kill Judy Strange?”

  “No.”

  “Did you tell anyone about the location of the apartment you shared with Judy Strange?”

  “No.”

  The operator gave her a thoughtful look as she rose from the chair at the end of the interview.

  She let her police escort take her back to the ops room, where she began her prep for the day’s operation. Other members of her crew joined her as their own interviews were completed. Byron arrived last, averting his eyes. As she moved around the room, she could hear him breathing heavily through his nose.

  Lincoln returned to the ops room after being briefed by the polygraph operator and called Dagmar into his office. She could see herself reflected in his shades as she took her seat.

  “The test suggests you have no complicity in Judy’s death,” he said.

  Dagmar nodded.

  “The operator offered an advi
sory of his own, however.”

  Dagmar thought about it. “I’d prefer to leave it to my imagination,” she said.

  He looked at her, folded his hands on the table.

  “This is the point at which I’m supposed to say, ‘If we don’t clear this up, you could be in trouble.’ ”

  “Unless you intend to extradite me to Indonesia,” Dagmar said, “there’s not a lot of point in digging any further.”

  Lincoln frowned in surprise.

  “Indonesia,” he repeated.

  “There’s a lot of the Indonesian story I haven’t told anyone.”

  Having spent the morning telling the truth, she was now madly sowing lies. Her frantic inventions looped the trail of her life back on itself, obscuring her footprints by running over them with another set of her tracks, all in hopes of concealing her past sins in California.

  Lincoln considered this, then held out a hand.

  “I said at the beginning,” he said, “that I didn’t want to know anything.”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll stand by that statement,” he said.

  Dagmar was only too pleased to escape the subject. “How about Ismet?” she asked.

  “Also cleared. But we have anomalous readings elsewhere.”

  “Yes?”

  Lincoln opened a manila folder, looked at his own handwritten notes.

  “Byron was so angry at being polygraphed that his responses were completely off the scale. The operator was unable to get a baseline to make a judgment concerning what answers were deceptive or not. It’s as if Byron answered every single question by screaming and throwing a desk across the room. His blood pressure was so high the operator was afraid he was going to have a stroke.”

  “Interesting,” Dagmar said. She really didn’t know what else to say. Angry Man was staying in character.

  “On the other end of the scale, Lloyd was uncannily calm throughout his interview. He passed with flying colors, but his lack of normal response indicated that he might have been trained in techniques for beating a polygraph.”

  Lloyd’s father was a retired colonel, Dagmar remembered, perhaps a supporter of the new regime.

  “Was he trained to defeat polygraphs by the Company?” she asked.