Walter Williams - Deep State

“Well,” she said, “go with God.” And then she remembered why she’d called Richard in the first place. She explained about Feroz and the missing bus.

“We need to replace everything on the bus, and get the receiver and uplink somewhere above the Bosporus where everyone on the boats can broadcast to it.”

“Well.” Richard was suddenly thoughtful. “I think it’s do-able. What kind of expense account do I have?”

“You have whatever’s necessary,” Dagmar said.

Richard’s tone brightened instantly. “Excellent! Are you at the hotel now?”

“We’re on our way there.”

“Avoid the hippodrome, then. There’s some kind of political demonstration going on.”

Dagmar glanced up as she remembered the aerial drone speeding off. Anxiety roiled in her stomach.

“We’ll do that,” she said.

The soldiers at the palace gate seemed more alert. Their officer was talking urgently on a cell phone.

Dagmar warned everyone about the demonstration at the hippodrome. She and her party panted up the steep road, past the great shambling mass of Hagia Sofia, and into the area between the old church and the Blue Mosque. A scrum of tourist buses stood like a wall across their path. Diesel exhaust brushed her face with its warm breath as she wove between the buses. Her head swam as it filled with fumes. As she stepped from the road to the park on the far side, a solemn Japanese man aboard one of the buses raised a camera and snapped her picture.

Ahead were paths, flowers, palm trees, hedges, a broad circular fountain, and the Blue Mosque. The surveillance drone turned gentle ovals overhead. Dagmar dodged a carpet seller before he could even begin his sales pitch-her reflexes were improving with experience-and then her nerves jolted to the sound of gunfire.

Shotguns! she recognized, and hunched involuntarily as if expecting a round of buckshot between the shoulder blades. She wasn’t hit and then looked wildly for the source of the firing.

White smoke poppies blossomed across the park, followed by the hollow roar of a crowd, a roar mixed with screams and shrieks. Dagmar knew the sound too well and realized the shotguns hadn’t been targeting people but had lofted pepper gas into a crowd that, on the far side of the park bushes, she hadn’t realized was so close…

“Run!” Tuna bellowed. Perhaps it was the wrong thought.

Adrenaline boomed in Dagmar’s veins. She couldn’t think of any place to run to except for the hotel, diagonally across the park, and she started a dash in that direction, knowing even as she ran that her path would take her unnervingly close to the spreading white smoke.

Behind, she heard Tuna’s cry of disgust, or despair, but her feet were already moving.

Dagmar was nearing the fountain when a wave of people came stumbling out of the smoke, weeping. The demonstrators had dressed well that morning: the men were in coats and ties, the women in neat suits or headscarves. They were less neat now: crying, sobbing, cursing, faces stained with slobber or with blood… Some dragged signs and bedraggled Turkish flags. A few threw themselves bodily into the fountain in order to rinse pepper gas from their eyes.

The refugees lurched across Dagmar’s path, stumbling over hedges or sprawling across the neat white shin-high cast-iron rails intended to keep people off the lawn. Dagmar dodged, jumped over one of the white rails, ran madly across a brilliant green lawn. The air was full of shrieks.

An adolescent girl tripped and flopped directly across Dagmar’s path, eyes wide, Adidas-clad feet kicking in the air… Dagmar bent to help her rise, then gasped as a dark figure loomed between her and the sun-a man in a helmet and a blue uniform, dilated mad eyes staring at her through the plastic goggles of a respirator, weapon raised to strike…

“This way.” A hand seized Dagmar’s sleeve and snatched her away from the descending club. Dagmar felt the breeze of its passage on her face. The policeman raised the club to strike again, and then Tuna lunged into the scene: the big man clotheslined the cop neatly across the throat just under the respirator’s seal, and the man flew right into the air, feet rising clean over his head, before he dropped to the grass with a satisfying thud.

In what seemed about two seconds, Tuna ripped the gas mask off, grabbed the cop’s club, and smashed him in the face with it a half-dozen times. At which point Ismet took Tuna’s shoulder as well, firm grip on the sturdy tweed jacket, and repeated his instruction.

“This way.”

One hand on Dagmar’s shoulder, the other on Tuna’s, Ismet efficiently guided them through the park, past the berserk masked cops, the shrieking demonstrators, the bewildered, terrified tourists clumping together for safety… The girl in the Adidas had disappeared. Ismet led Dagmar and Tuna to the steep stair that led down to the Cavalry Bazaar. Dagmar and her escort funneled down the stair along with a couple dozen other refugees, then jogged as quickly as they could through the narrow lane between tony shops selling textiles and ceramics, old cavalry mews converted to a high-class shopping mall.

“Where are Lincoln and Judy?” Dagmar gasped, looking over her shoulder.

“We were following you,” Tuna said.

“Are they all right?” Dagmar asked, completely conscious of the uselessness of the question. Either they were okay or they weren’t.

Tuna looked at the bloody club in his hand and then hurled it aside with an expression of disgust. The sudden bright clacking sound of the club hitting the pavement made bystanders jump.

Ismet guided them out of the bazaar and to their hotel. In the street they encountered Lincoln, Judy, and Mehmet, who had taken a more rational route around the trouble. They looked at Dagmar with relief.

“You ran right into it!” Judy said to Dagmar.

“Yes,” Dagmar said. “I did.”

Whatever it was, Dagmar thought, she was always running toward it, or knee-deep in it, or falling face-first into it, or failing to claw her way free of it.

“It’s how I roll,” she said.

Dagmar spent the next fifteen minutes shivering in the bathroom of her hotel room. She knew there were police standing just outside the bathroom door-Indonesian cops, with riot shields and samurai helmets with metal plates protecting their necks-and that they were waiting for her with weapons raised. She knew that she would be smashed to the ground the second she left the security of the bathroom.

In Jakarta she had learned to recognize the smell of burning human flesh. Shuddering on the commode, she wept as the scorching, greasy smell filled her nostrils.

Reality returned in its slow, relentless way. The scent faded. Dagmar spent a moment just staring at the washroom door, then rose, wiped her eyes, washed her face, and took the elevator to the rooftop bar of the hotel.

Her team awaited her. The day’s newspapers, with their pictures of Dagmar and Bozbeyli, had been neatly folded and placed on a glass table; a smiling, efficient employee in a bow tie now stood behind the bar, waiting for the day’s drinkers.

How normal it is, Dagmar marveled.

The waiter offered her tea and poured it into a tulip-shaped glass with great efficiency, from a copper teapot decorated with elegant filigree.

The Turks were damned serious about their tea, Dagmar thought. Thank God.

She clutched the teacup like a Titanic survivor snatching a life preserver. It had been a little over an hour since she had left the bar on her reconnaissance to Gulhane Park, but it seemed like days ago. As she was looking through the glass walls over the roofs of Sultanahmet, it was impossible to see that there had been a disturbance at all: the gulls still circled the Blue Mosque; the Sea of Marmara still blazed with azure beauty; the sound of the muezzins still echoed in the streets.