Walter Williams - Deep State

“Does the name mean anything?” Dagmar asked. “Or did you make it up?”

He offered a little smile. “Chatsworth was the name of a playboy character in a sixties sitcom,” he said.

She looked at him, at the bubble hair and Elvis glasses.

“Were you a playboy?” she asked.

“What makes you think I’m not a playboy now?” he asked. She laughed. He considered being offended, then shrugged. “But no, it’s kind of a complicated joke. The Company was founded by a certain type of character-East Coast, Old Money, loyal Republicans-and I fit that description, sort of, at least when I was younger.” He smiled nostalgically. “I worked for Barry Goldwater alongside Hillary Clinton, do you believe it?”

“You really knew her?”

He waved a hand vaguely. “We met, here and there. I didn’t know her well.” He smiled. “She was too serious for me.”

“Ah,” Dagmar said. “You were a playboy, then.”

“I was a spoiled rich kid,” Lincoln said. “ ‘Chatsworth Osborne’ is what I’d have become if I hadn’t gone into government service, so it’s the name I use when I’m enjoying my harmless entertainments.”

“Like overthrowing a foreign government.”

“Like that.” Lincoln said. He cocked his head and looked at her. “Your code name?”

Dagmar thought for a moment.

“Briana,” she said.

After Briana Hall, the fugitive found alone in a rented room at the beginning of Dagmar’s best-known game, and whose dilemma mirrored certain aspects of Dagmar’s past.

“Motel Room Blues,” Lincoln said. “Very good.”

Dagmar’s other employees were given code names as well. The problem with renaming her employees, Dagmar considered, was that she knew all of them by their real names. She was bound to slip sooner or later.

Judy decided, logically enough, to name herself Wordz. Richard the Assassin called himself Ishikawa, after-of course-a famous ninja. The programming chief, Helmuth, decided he wanted to be called Pip. Dagmar did not think the reference was literary and decided she didn’t want to know what other inspiration might have leaked into his alcohol-tolerant brain.

She hoped she could keep all the names straight and remember to use them in front of other people. Lincoln said to use the code names all the time, but Dagmar was sure she couldn’t.

It was at the Bear Cat offices that Lincoln presented her with the contract, pages and pages of documents that featured, on the first page, a sum even greater than that she’d earned for Stunrunner.

“I’ll have to show this to our lawyer,” she said.

“He can’t see Appendix A,” Lincoln said. “He’s not cleared for that.”

In the two-bedroom apartment she shared with Judy in the married officers’ quarters, Dagmar opened a bottle of Bass Ale and fired up her laptop. She looked up Zulu Time, which was apparently military-speak for Greenwich Mean Time, and then googled both “dervish lodge” and “Niagara Falls.”

Naturally, Rafet’s dervish lodge had a Web page. Rafet and his comrades followed Hacy Babur Khan, a Sufi saint who had lived in Herat three centuries ago. There he founded an order of dervishes that followed his regulations for spiritual practice, among which included, according to the article, “ecstatic drumming.” “Which,” the article continued, “has resulted in occasional persecution by more orthodox Sunnis.”

The dervishes lived in communal lodges, practiced austerity and poverty, drummed, and sang hymns written mostly by Hacy Babur Khan and his successors. The Web page maintained by the Niagara Falls lodge mentioned that it was founded in 1999, played host to a couple dozen dervishes at any one time, and offered demonstrations of drumming to the public several times each year.

That led to a query about the Tek Organization, which Dagmar at first misspelled as “Tech.” The search engine obligingly offered a correction, and she found that a Turkish imam named Riza Tek had founded the worldwide eponymous religious organization, which had branches in at least fifty countries. The Tek Organization ran charities, schools, and broadcast stations; it owned hospitals and newspapers; it had a large publishing house that put out books, magazines on news and religion, and a very impressive-looking science magazine… none of which, alas, Dagmar could read, as they were in Arabic and every known Turkish dialect but not English.

Turkish nationalists thought that Riza Tek was a fanatical God-inspired reactionary. Fanatical God-inspired reactionaries, the sort who belonged to or spoke for organizations that practiced suicide bombing, had a contrary view: they thought Riza Tek was a creation of the CIA.

Any relationship between the Tek Organization and the dervish lodge in Niagara Falls remained purely speculative.

Dagmar looked up from her laptop as Judy came into the room from the bathroom, where she’d been taking a shower. She wore a tank top that showed off her tattoo sleeves, color reaching from her wrists up her arms, over the yoke of her shoulders, and down her back. The tattoos didn’t seem to represent anything concrete but seemed inspired by physiology: they suggested, rather than depicted, muscles, bone, and a circulatory system. This gave Judy’s body an unearthly aspect, as if there were some whole other form, or other creature, hidden just beneath her skin. Dagmar would have found it repellent if she hadn’t so admired the art of it.

As Judy walked she clicked her tongue piercing against her teeth, giving her movement a rhythm track. A scent of honeysuckle soap trailed her to an armchair, where she sat, picked up her netbook, and booted it. While she waited for the first screen to appear, she looked up at Dagmar.

“Is there some reason,” she asked, “why you moved your bed so it’s on a diagonal?”

Dagmar’s nerves hummed a warning. She didn’t know Judy well enough to trust her with the answer.

For that matter, she didn’t know anyone well enough.

“It’s a luck thing,” she said vaguely.

Judy nodded, as if that made sense.

“I notice that you drink,” she said.

Dagmar glanced at her Bass Ale, then looked back at Judy.

“I do,” she said.

“Aren’t you worried you might have inherited your father’s alcoholism gene?”

Dagmar looked at her drink again and considered telling Judy to piss up a rope.

“I’m not going to worry,” she said, “until I find myself drinking the same cheap crap my dad did.”

“With my dad’s history,” Judy said, “I’m not getting high, ever.”

Dagmar looked at the tattoos, the rows of piercings lining Judy’s ears.

No, she thought, you don’t use; you just got addicted to pain instead. Getting jabbed thousands of times with a needle-now that wasn’t extreme, was it?

In any case, Dagmar was not in the mood to be dictated to by some kind of tattooed Goth puritan. She picked up her ale and waved it vaguely.

“Whatever works,” she said.

“What do you think of Rafet?” Judy asked.

Dagmar offered her laptop. “I can show you my research.”

“I think he’s totally hot,” Judy said with sudden enthusiasm. “D’you think he’s free?”

“I think God’s got him,” Dagmar said. “He’s supposed to be some kind of monk.”

Judy’s eyes widened. “They have monks?”

Dagmar offered the laptop again. “Check it out.”

Judy set aside her netbook and took Dagmar’s computer. Her brows drew together as she read about the Niagara lodge.

“It says they’re committed to poverty and austerity,” she said. “There’s nothing about chastity.”

“Well,” said Dagmar. “Good luck with all that.”

Judy handed the laptop back.

“Whatever you do,” Dagmar said, “don’t try to seduce him with alcohol.”