Walter Williams - Deep State

“You’ve pimped out your office,” Dagmar observed.

“Note the other feature.” He pointed at the wall, to a poster where a silhouette of a sinking aircraft carrier was accompanied by the slogan LOOSE TWEETS SINK FLEETS.

“This has all the potential of a security nightmare,” Lincoln said. “We’ve got to be very strict, very correct, from the start. Particularly about code names.”

“We did all right during Stunrunner,” Dagmar said. “And we were in Turkey then, right in the security zone, with hundreds of gamers surrounding us and eager to find out our secrets.”

“The problem with Cyprus,” Lincoln said, “is that it’s lousy with spies.”

“Ha. You should feel right at home.”

“Cyprus is a crossroads,” Lincoln said. “Here we’ve got Turkish nationalist fanatics and Greek nationalist fanatics. We’ve got Greek spies, Turkish spies, Syrian and Egyptian spies, Israeli spies, British and American spies.”

“And there’s us,” Dagmar said.

Lincoln looked at her with great seriousness. “We’re not actually spies,” Lincoln said. “We’re special ops.”

“Oh,” she said, startled. “Sorry.”

“I want to give a special warning.” Lincoln gave her a stern look. “There’s a Russian colony down the road in Limassol, and I want you to stay away from them.”

Dagmar smiled. “Afraid I’ll spill everything to Rosa Klebb?”

“I’m afraid you’ll be drugged, raped, robbed, and murdered,” Lincoln said. “Some of those guys are old-school Russian Maffya left over from the day when Cyprus was the money-laundering capital of the world.”

Uneasiness fluttered in Dagmar’s belly. Her smile froze to her face.

She had a bad history with the Russian Maffya.

“I was station chief in Nicosia in the nineties,” Lincoln went on. “At least a couple hundred billion dollars flowed through here to tax havens in the West, and I drove myself crazy trying to keep track of it all. Russia went bankrupt, but Cyprus practically had a golden age, if you don’t count the bombings and shootings.” He saw Dagmar’s face, and his expression softened. “Sorry,” he said, misinterpreting. “I didn’t mean to shock you.”

Dagmar decided she wasn’t going to think about Austin’s death right now.

“I’m not shocked,” she said. “But sometimes I forget that we’re here doing something, uh, real.”

“Maybe,” Lincoln ventured, “it’s best if you think of it as a game.”

Dagmar thought of bullets, bodies, smoke floating over cities. From the nearby runway came the sound of a flight jet aircraft launching into the air, a sound that lent an uneasy reality to Dagmar’s thoughts.

“I don’t know if I can,” she said.

“Games are what you’re good at,” Lincoln said. “Leave the rest to me.”

“I’ll do that.” The affirmation, she thought, was something closer to a prayer than to anything like a firm resolution.

“And-speaking of the Russians…” Lincoln’s face took on an amused caste. “There are a lot of Russian women here, in the bars. Some are prostitutes, some aren’t, but they’re all looking for husbands to carry them off to the good life in the West.”

Dagmar raised an eyebrow and looked at him.

“And you think this would interest me because…?”

“Not you,” he said. “But you might pass a warning on to your boys. We wouldn’t like to have any of them rushing to the rescue of someone named Natasha and ending up paying thousands of dollars to a Russian pimp.”

Dagmar considered Richard’s habit of going to a foreign country and buying everything on offer and nodded.

“I’ll spread the word,” she said.

There was a knock on the door. Lincoln looked up.

“Come in,” he said.

The man who entered wore a uniform. He had tight-curled black hair, Mediterranean blue eyes, and a brilliant white smile.

“Chatsworth,” he said. For a moment Dagmar wondered if Alvarez knew Lincoln from online gaming, but then she remembered the code protocols.

“Ah.” Lincoln rose, and shook hands across the desk with the new arrival. “This is Squadron Leader Alvarez, our RAF liaison.”

“Good to meet you, Briana,” said Alvarez. Dagmar rose and shook his hand and was proud of herself for answering to the alias without hesitation.

They needed an RAF liaison because Lincoln and Dagmar were running their operation from England. It just wasn’t the England made up mostly of a big island off the northwest coast of Europe.

The operation would be run from England-in-Cyprus, from RAF Akrotiri-an air base that was, legally, British territory, as British as toffee and binge drinking.

Dagmar’s team of game geeks would work from rooms overlooking Akrotiri’s enormous runway. The British air base was vast, and Dagmar’s people would hide in plain sight amid thousands of RAF personnel and civilian employees, who in turn were dropped amid the population of the island of Cyprus. Dagmar and her friends would share housing in the married officers’ quarters, shop for food at the NAAFI, and run their games through British servers.

Alvarez turned to her.

“Are you settling in?”

“So far,” Dagmar said, “it’s been enlightening.”

Dagmar left Lincoln with Squadron Leader Alvarez and returned to the ops room, where her heart gave a leap as she saw Tuna Saltik standing on one of the office chairs, pinning to the wall an enormous poster of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Her heart jumped again as she recognized Ismet standing next to him, helping him hold the poster straight. There was another with them, a man with shockingly bright blond hair. All three wore summerweight coats and ties.

She ran up to Ismet and gave him a hug from behind. He stiffened in surprise, then turned around. His eyes widened with pleasure, and then he hugged her and kissed both her cheeks.

“Lovely to see you!” he said.

“How’s your granny?” Dagmar asked.

“Much better, thank you. Back in her home.”

“You mean her tent?”

Tuna grinned down at Dagmar from under his arm as he held out the poster.

“Good to see you!” he said. “I’ll hug you later.”

“I’ll look forward to it.”

Ismet offered a hand. “I’m Estragon, by the way.”

Dagmar took the hand. “Briana.”

“I’m Vladimir!” called Tuna from somewhere in his own armpit.

Vladimir and Estragon, Dagmar thought. Right.

“You’re showing off your college education,” Dagmar said.

Ismet flushed slightly. “Maybe,” he said. He nodded at the man with surfer blond hair.

“This is Rafet.”

“Pleased to meet you.” Rafet and Dagmar shook hands.

“Rafet,” said Ismet, smiling, “is a dervish.”

Dagmar turned to Rafet.

“Do you whirl?”

He smiled with brilliant white teeth.

“No,” he said. “I’m not in the Mevlani organization. I follow Hacy Babur Khan.”

Dagmar’s question had been facetious-she had thought Ismet was joking when he said Rafet was a dervish. But now Dagmar began to think that Rafet really was a dervish, whatever being a dervish meant in the modern world.

She decided to make the next question a bland one.

“Where did you learn your English?”

“My dervish lodge is in the U.S. In Niagara Falls.”

“Ah,” Dagmar said, uncertain how to respond to this without demonstrating her own abysmal ignorance.

“Rafet,” said Ismet helpfully, “represents the Tek Organization.”

Dagmar decided not to ask any more questions and instead to quietly, privately wiki everything as soon as she could.

Tuna jumped down off the chair and gave Dagmar a one-armed hug while his other arm gestured at Ataturk.

“Is the picture straight?”