Walter Williams - Deep State

“I’m afraid you’re famous,” he said.

He spread the newspapers over one of the low tables. There was a picture of her with Bozbeyli on every paper, either shaking hands with him or sitting next to him. In every picture he was erect and masterful, his eyes alert and commanding. In each image she looked humble and submissive, her eyes turned to the Great Man for instruction.

None of the pictures hinted at the quantity of the president’s rouge and hair dye.

“Would you like me to translate the text?” Ismet asked. “It’s pretty much the same in each paper.”

Dagmar felt her stomach turn over.

“I can imagine what it says.”

Lincoln picked up a section of newspaper, took reading glasses from the pocket of his shirt, and held them halfway between his eyes and the text. “You’re quoted as saying that the whole world knows the danger of terrorism,” he said. “And that even a civilization five thousand years old can be threatened by the bombs of madmen.”

Dagmar stared at him.

“You read Turkish?”

She hadn’t heard him speak the language to anyone, not beyond more than a few tourist phrases.

Lincoln shrugged and put away his glasses.

“I read a lot of languages,” he said.

“You were also on the television news this morning,” Ismet told her.

Dagmar sank into her chair.

“This is going to be everywhere,” she said. “On blogs, on Our Reality Network, on Ozone, everywhere.”

“You can issue a denial,” Lincoln said. “A correction. When you get home.”

“I know how memes propagate on the freakin’ Web,” Dagmar said. “No correction will ever catch up with the original story. For the rest of my life I’m going to be the game designer who brownnoses dictators.”

She closed her eyes and let herself pitch backward onto the cushions, as if falling into her own personal hell.

Behind her, the elevator doors rattled open.

“Dagmar?”

She opened her eyes, turned, and saw Mehmet. He had a concerned look on his face and his cell phone in his hand, and-because Mehmet wasn’t part of the creative team and it wasn’t his job to be here-his arrival set a new anxiety gnawing at Dagmar’s vitals.

“Yes?” Dagmar said.

Mehmet approached.

“I got a call from Feroz. The headquarters bus was stopped and he was arrested.”

The news startled her. Dagmar jumped to her feet.

“Arrested? Can we get him a lawyer?”

“Stopped where?” Lincoln asked.

“Just outside Izmir.” Mehmet turned to Dagmar. “He’s been released,” he said. “But they beat him, and then they took the bus.”

“Beat him?” Dagmar’s bafflement warred with her rising outrage. “Why beat Feroz? He’s just the bus driver we hired.” She turned to Lincoln. “Can we contact the embassy?”

“Feroz is Turkish,” Lincoln said. “Our embassy can’t help.”

Dagmar was disgusted at the idiocy of her own question. She threw out her arms in annoyance at her own thundering great stupidity.

Lincoln continued to ponder the issue. “Probably that’s why they picked Feroz, because they could punish us without causing a diplomatic problem.”

Dagmar turned back to Mehmet.

“Does he need a hospital?”

“He says he’s afraid to go. They might get his name from the hospital records.”

“They don’t have his name?”

“They didn’t look at his identification. They just took him out of the bus and started hitting him.”

Dagmar pulled out her handheld and went over her list of contacts.

“Zafer Musa?” she asked, to no one in particular, and then pressed the Enter button.

Zafer Musa, a matronly woman married to an Australian, was Dagmar’s go-to person in Izmir-Zafer had helped to set up lodging and transportation for the gamers and had cleared the game with the various bureaucracies that had a say in whether Ephesus could be used as a site for the game.

Zafer answered. A many-sided conversation ensued, in which Zafer agreed to pick up Feroz and take him to a clinic, have him use a false name, and pay for his treatment with cash. Dagmar would reimburse any expense.

“Have her take a camera,” Lincoln said. “We want pictures.”

Dagmar gave Lincoln a look, then nodded. She told Zafer to take pictures and then ended the call.

She turned to Lincoln. “We need to hire a bus driver. Quick.”

Mehmet shook his head.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “They kept the bus. The Gray Wolves kept the bus.”

So now all the electronics were gone. The cameras, the satellite uplink, the wireless net, the displays. Dagmar reached down to the table, picked up Ismet’s newspapers, and hurled them against the glass wall overlooking the sea.

The papers proved a completely inadequate weapon. They blossomed out, touched the wall with a sigh, and drifted to the floor.

“We are hopelessly in the shit,” Dagmar said. “We are the fucking falling newspapers, and someone’s going to come along and step on us.”

The elevator wheezed open, and Tuna entered with Judy Strange. They carried cups of Turkish coffee and plates of vegetables and gozleme, cheese-stuffed pancakes, all of which they’d carried up from the hotel buffet. They looked at the tense little scene, the scattered newspapers, Mehmet with his cell phone half-raised.

“What is it?” Judy asked.

A long, disjointed explanation followed.

“It’s not the end of the world,” Lincoln said. “Tomorrow’s event can still take place. We just won’t be able to carry it live.”

Dagmar shrank from this idea. Carrying the live events as they happened, to connect the players on the ground with the many more players who participated only through electronic forums, was a Great Big Idea trademark.

“Not necessarily,” Dagmar said to Lincoln. “You still have your massive server set up in Istanbul, right? What the bus has is all the equipment we need to connect the camera feed to the servers-and it’s got all our vidcams, too. So what we need to do is get some new cameras, and then get a connection between our cameras and your server. We don’t technically need the bus for that, but we need something.”

She looked at her speed dial. “I’ll get ahold of Richard.”

Richard wasn’t answering his phone, so Dagmar left voice mail. She holstered her handheld and looked at the others.

“Whether it’s safe to continue at all,” she said, “is another issue.”

“Bah,” Tuna said. “Let them do whatever they like.”

“No,” Dagmar said. “Let’s not.” She looked ruefully at the furniture, the scattered papers, and nudged a chair with her foot.

“Have a seat, everyone,” she said.

They sat-except for Lincoln, who hadn’t ever risen from his chair. Before Dagmar sat, she walked to the window, stooped, and picked up the scattered newspapers. She stacked them in a rough pile, dropped them on a table, and then took her seat.

“We have permission to run an event in Gulhane Park tomorrow morning,” she said. “So the government knows where we’re going to be, and when. And they’ve taken away our ability to cover the game live, so maybe they think they can take some kind of action against us-attack us, even.”

“The players are going to all have cell phone cameras,” Judy said. “And a lot will have video cameras, as well. There’s no way”

Ismet knotted his long fingers. “But does the government know that?” he said. “The Internet didn’t exist when the generals were young. I don’t know whether they understand anything like what your game represents.”

Dagmar recalled the three elderly men and felt doubt slide into her mind.

“Presumably they have younger advisors,” she said uncertainly.