Walter Williams - Deep State

Tuna made a fist of one big hand and bounced it on his knee.

“They know nothing,” he said. “They’re fools; they’re ridiculous.”

“Dare we take the chance?” Judy said. “If they know nothing, doesn’t that make it more dangerous? They could order these Gray Wolves to attack us thinking no one would ever know, and even if a thousand pictures are taken on cell phones, we’d still be attacked.”

Dagmar turned to Lincoln, who was frowning down at the floor between his sandals.

“Lincoln?” Dagmar said.

“I’m thinking,” he said. “I’m trying to work out how much the generals care about world opinion.”

“They seem to care about my opinion,” Dagmar said.

“This game is huge,” Lincoln said. “The generals have every reason to want it to succeed. Attacking a bunch of foreigners in a park isn’t the sort of thing that would bring millions of tourist euros to their country, and so…”

He let the words trail away. He closed his eyes and was silent for a long, long moment. He nodded a few times. Dagmar began to wonder if he’d fallen asleep.

And then Lincoln lifted his head, looked at Dagmar through his Elvis glasses, and shook his head.

“Nope,” he said. “You can’t risk it.”

“Why?” Dagmar asked.

“Because,” Lincoln said, “I could be wrong.”

Anger clamped around Dagmar’s heart like a grim little fist. She wanted to jump, rage, wave her arms. Instead she took a long breath and spoke.

“I really want to stick it to these people,” she said.

“Yes!” Tuna said. He pumped a hand in the air. “Yes, very good!”

Lincoln was still looking at Dagmar, his eyes narrowed, as if he was studying her.

“How?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“What are our goals?” Lincoln said. “To damage the regime in some way? To cock a snook at the generals?”

“Cock a what?” This clearly was a new expression for Mehmet.

Lincoln continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted.

“Or are we abandoning the game?” he said. “Or carrying it on in spite of the possible dangers? Or altering the gaming experience somehow?”

The options spun in Dagmar’s head. She returned Lincoln’s look.

“You hired me, Lincoln,” she said. “You have to approve whatever gets decided. And more importantly, you have to fund it.”

“I’m not the creative presence here,” Lincoln said. “Before I can endorse an idea, I have to know what it is.”

Judy Strange took a sip of her coffee, then made a face and put the cup on the table.

“Well,” she said, “if it’s dangerous to run the live event, we’ll have to cancel it.”

Dagmar felt a stubborn resistance build in her to the idea.

“With all respect to Lincoln’s list,” she said, “I think it’s a little out of our league to damage the regime, though I don’t mind cocking the odd snook…” She raised a hand as Mehmet was about to interrupt again. “… so long as it won’t get us thrown in jail.” She turned to Judy. “And as for the game,” she said, “maybe we can alter it so we won’t be running a risk.”

Judy leaned closer to her.

“How?” she said.

Dagmar shifted her gaze to the others.

“I don’t know,” she confessed. “We’ll need to work that out.” She felt the urge to move, to think on her feet, and she surged to her feet.

“Let’s take a walk. Let’s go to Gulhane Park.”

The park was within easy walking distance of the hotel. Their path took them past both the Blue Mosque and its great, crumbling ancestor, Hagia Sofia, which faced each other across tourist-choked roads and a large garden blazing with summer flowers. Along one side of the mosque was the old Byzantine hippodrome, still a long ovoid in shape but now another park. Vast numbers of tourists, far outnumbering the locals, moved among the radiant flowers, past the silver waters of the fountains. Sometimes the tourists swarmed in huge packs, marching along behind their guides, amid air scented with roses and diesel.

She wondered if she could hide her players among the tourists, her buses amid the tour buses. It certainly seemed possible.

But then she looked up and saw the streetlights with their quaint, lacy white heads, and the CCTV cameras attached. A group of soldiers stood by one of the fountains.

It wasn’t necessarily the malevolence of the generals that had put these measures here, she thought. There were all sorts of reasons that this area should be secure-many foreign visitors, irreplaceable public monuments, heavy traffic.

But even so, the brilliant sun-filled park flanked by the two huge domed structures now seemed just a little sinister, just a little too much like a trap waiting to be sprung. Dagmar headed north, skirting Justinian’s old church, then descended a steep road while streetcars hummed past her. Men on the sidewalk shilled for carpet stores and restaurants.

At the bottom of the hill they encountered the outer wall of the shambling Topkapy Palace, with two arched, open gates. Soldiers in white helmets stood by the entrance.

Feeling a shiver of apprehension, Dagmar walked through the gate.

Topkapy was built in a series of irregular, walled courtyards, one set inside the next like nesting dolls. In the center was the harem, where the sultan would have lived with his concubines, children, and mother.

During the course of scouting locations for the live events, Dagmar had learned from Mehmet that the sultan’s harem had been a far cry from the sybaritic paradise imagined by the Western-male-imagination. The harem had actually been run by the sultan’s mother, who made all the important decisions, including which of the concubines slept with the sultan and when and how often. The sultan wouldn’t have gotten to arrange his household to suit himself until his mother died, if then.

But Dagmar wasn’t going farther into the palace, let alone to the harem. Instead she turned left, passed a group of pushcart vendors selling roast chestnuts and simit- a kind of cross between a bagel and pretzel-and walked into Gulhane Park, which was actually between the outer two walls of the palace. The ground sloped down toward the Golden Horn, the path bordered by flower beds and a double row of giant plane trees. The rest of the palace loomed above them on the right, invisible behind the wall that crowned the hill.

A ship’s horn sounded up from the harbor below. Soft morning light filtered down through the leaves of the trees. Somewhere a child laughed.

“It’s a pity we’re not here in spring,” Ismet said. “During the Tulip Festival, there are tulips in all these flower beds. Some of them very exotic.”

“I always thought tulips were a Dutch thing,” Judy said.

“The Dutch got their tulips from Turkey,” Ismet said. “That’s why there was such speculation in tulips at first-they were Eastern and exotic.”

“Speculation?” Judy asked.

“Let’s talk about Tulip Mania later,” Dagmar said. She slowed, then stepped off the path to stand before a statue of Ataturk. Uptilted eyebrows gave the Republic’s founder an elfin caste. She returned his skeptical gaze, then looked at the park around her for the first time since her original scouting trip nine weeks before. Lincoln voiced her thoughts aloud before she could speak.

“This place is unusable,” Lincoln said. “I know why we picked it for the live event-it has limited access, so the players won’t get lost, and yet it’s open, and we can hide a lot of things in here for the players to find. But as far as keeping our people secure, it’s hopeless.” He waved a hand up to the palace. “People on that wall will see everything we do. And we can be completely bottled by closing the two entrances.”