Walter Williams - Deep State

“And-as far as the botnet goes-you did well there, too.”

A cold shaft of terror pierced her. Panic yammered in the back of her head. Lincoln knew about that?

Dagmar decided to counterattack. She glared at him.

“So who the hell are you, really?” she demanded. “I checked out Bear Cat, it’s a real outfit, and you’re there on the Web page, but who are you really? Publicity flacks don’t have access to FBI reports.”

He smiled thinly. “I’m not a flack; I’m an account executive. You should know the terminology; you’re in the advertising business.”

“Sorry.” She put as much sarcasm into the single word as she could.

“Sometimes I’m in a position to rain money on Bear Cat,” Lincoln said. “And in return they’re kind enough to provide me with credentials.”

A lightning revelation seemed to strobe across the inside of Dagmar’s skull.

“Oh Christ,” she said, “you’re not telling me you’re some kind of spy.” She began to laugh. “A spy using a James Bond film as a cover! Talk about postmodern!”

“I used to be a spy,” Lincoln said. “I was a spy for thirty years.” He gave a little amused bow from the waist. “Now I’m a consultant. Advertising, and other things. Consulting pays much better.”

She just looked at him.

“And you’re telling me this because…?”

“I want to hire Great Big Idea,” Lincoln said, “to do just what you’ve been doing.”

“Which is what?”

Lincoln waved a hand in an elaborate pattern as he spoke.

“What do you do in your games, Dagmar? You teach people how to use and break codes, to do detailed research, to solve intricate puzzles. You provide raw data, which the players must put into usable form. You send people on missions into the real world to find information or locate objects. Your players have to find hidden motivations and meanings, distinguish truth from fancy. You organize events, both online and in the real world, in which complete strangers unite to complete a common task.”

He blinked his blue eyes at her.

“Do you know what those skills are, Dagmar? Those are practical intelligence skills. I want you to do a project for us.”

She blinked at him. “So you want me to create a game? For the CIA, or the NSA, or whatever it is you actually work for? To train people how to do their jobs.”

“That,” said Lincoln, “would tread on too many toes. We already have plenty of training facilities and trainers.”

“What, then?”

Lincoln smiled and then told her.

She would have laughed, if she hadn’t been so surprised.

After Bulgaria-which was lovely, exactly the vacation Dagmar needed, sipping gin and tonics as she reclined on a chaise set on a couple of Aheloy’s fifty-six thousand square meters of beach while about eighteen varieties of barely clothed male flesh competed to keep her drink topped up-so after the return to California, and after the set of pitches failed, there was nothing to do but take Lincoln up on his offer. So she found herself on the island of Cyprus, in a set of offices overlooking a British runway baking in the Mediterranean sun.

The building was old but well maintained, and featureless in what Dagmar came to recognize as a military absence of style, efficiency combined with cheapness and an almost fetishistic lack of anything approaching aesthetics-aluminium-framed windows overlooked the runway’s vast expanse, high ceilings with fans and ranked fluorescents, walls thick with decades-old ochre yellow paint and featureless save for pinholes where picture hooks had once been, or placards announcing what to do in case of fire or in the event of an interruption in electric service. Out of some warehouse had come graceless furniture made of metal and painted in unaesthetic colors that only the military employed, as if marking their property by the application of a coat of Ugly.

The noise from the runway was continuous; the windows rattled in their frames; the fluorescent light seemed to strobe in some hard-to-define, headache-inducing way. Air-conditioning had been retrofitted into the building in ways that made sense only to the British, resulting in zones of wintry climate that alternated with areas of Sahara heat. The lavatories featured the world’s most useless and inefficient toilet paper, which Dagmar could only conclude was created to some ancient wartime government specification, from a time when only cheap pulp paper, filled with little chunks of actual undigested wood, was available.

Piled on the metal desks were cardboard boxes full of thousands of dollars’ worth of computer equipment: flat-screen monitors, office towers crammed with the latest in graphic interfaces, a million times more processing capacity than the entire Manhattan Project, DVD burners, modems, printers. Other boxes held software: office suites, programs for editing video and graphics, software packaging for budgeting and ultrafast communication.

“The T3 connection is already installed,” Lincoln said.

He showed Dagmar and her posse their work space with what seemed to be a sense of pride. They shuffled along after him, jet-lagged, not quite believing they were actually here.

Lincoln made a grand gesture taking in the room, the metal desks, the computers and software in their boxes.

“Welcome to the ops room,” he said.

Ops room, Dagmar thought.

“Back home,” she said, “we’d just call it an office.”

It was almost as if Dagmar had decided to remake Stunrunner. Richard the Assassin had come along, tickled to use his computer-ninja skills on real-world applications. Dagmar had hired Judy again, not so much because she needed a puzzle designer as because Judy had a talent for creating and controlling intricate situations. And Dagmar had brought along her head programmer, a German who bore the name Helmuth von Moltke, a moniker he’d inherited from an ancestor who had once conquered France.

Helmuth dressed better than anyone else in the party, in gray cashmere slacks, a starched white shirt with chunky gold cuff links, and a dark Nehru jacket, a fashion choice that put him in a league with a whole series of Bond villains, including Dr. No, Hugo Drax, and the impeccably groomed Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Helmuth was, generally speaking, a match for any creature of Ian Fleming’s imagination. In his circuits of the Earth, the sleekly blond Helmuth occupied the Party Orbit: he girdled the world looking for bars, music, and lonely females. In LA, he seemed to spend half his life on the Sunset Strip and had apparently done away with any need for sleep-a useful skill in a programmer at any time.

The rest of the Great Big Idea staff remained in Simi Valley, though their expertise and advice could be called upon at any time. In any case, they would all be very busy-the Seagram’s people had reconsidered, and Great Big Idea was now prepping a full-fledged ARG for them. This was the first Great Big Idea game that Dagmar would not actually write herself, and even though she’d hired a substitute who seemed professional and imaginative and who was even willing to relocate to California for three months, a low twelve-volt anxiety now hummed in Dagmar’s nerves, sixteen cycles per second of uncertainty and unease.

Lincoln invited Dagmar into his office while Helmuth, Richard, and Judy began to pillage the cardboard boxes. The ops room and the hardware would be set up and configured to their specifications.

Lincoln’s office had the same bare, dull yellow walls as the ops room, and he had a metal desk identical to the others. There was a safe with a digital lock, and Lincoln had also equipped himself with an Aeron office chair, a marvel of lightweight alloy, pneumatics, and material science. He sat in this and leaned back with a blissful smile.