Walter Williams - Deep State

Even the poor, Dagmar was told, had cell phones.

The bus was back. The bus that the police had confiscated outside Izmir had been returned to Lincoln’s company once Stunrunner was over and it no longer mattered. The bus was so heavily customized that it would be difficult to sell, so Bear Cat had garaged it till now, when Lincoln was going to make use of it.

Right now the bus was across the Green Line in the Turkish part of Cyprus, following the unit’s three camera teams. The camera teams-all Turks-were making videos of towns and scenery, nothing remotely governmental, military, or classifiable, so as not to attract official interest… the bus captured the video, streamed it along the uplink to a satellite, and then down again to RAF Akrotiri, where it appeared on the Lincoln Brigade’s monitors. There the ops room team practiced storing the raw video, editing and manipulating the pictures, then uploading them to dummy, practice sites to which only they had access.

The satellite link with the camera teams was theoretically two-way, with the ops room able to ask the cameramen to give them specific shots. This was the element that caused the most trouble: an alarming percentage of the communications failed, mostly through human error.

Dagmar was supposed to be in charge, under Lincoln. She’d done this sort of thing before, at most of Great Big Idea’s live events, but in California she had a practiced, well-drilled team and they knew what videos to take without her telling them. Dagmar kept making the mistake of thinking her current team knew more about what they were doing than they actually did.

Part of the problem was the enormous variety in the hardware. There were covert cameras hidden in sunglasses or ordinary spectacles, complete with a laser heads-up display that would imprint incoming text messages right onto the retina. But these weren’t very flexible and didn’t record as many megapixels of reality as would sometimes be required, so the techs were required to get comfortable with other gear: small video cameras that would fit into the hand, cell phone cameras, large professional units capable of sucking up vast amounts of bandwidth.

The team was aided by what they were calling Hot Koans, their own pronunciation for Hot Xoan, the Vietnamese company that produced them. These were small, battery-powered wireless repeaters capable of spontaneously assembling into an ad hoc mesh network. Each of the repeaters, which came in a small, plastic box colored bubble-gum pink, had a range of a few hundred meters, and signal could be passed up and down the network to a receiver well out of sight of the camera, computer, or cell phone that had produced it. The repeaters would keep working as long as their battery lasted, which was around forty-eight hours.

Richard had found these and had ordered thousands of them. An area could be saturated with Hot Koans, providing massive redundancy to any communications and keeping the receiver well out of danger.

The Hot Koans-which turned out to have a much greater range than advertised-were about the only success on that first dreary day of training. The team was overwhelmed by all the new technology. By four in the afternoon Lincoln called it a day: “We’ll get more practice tomorrow.”

Dagmar was exhausted. She dropped into her chair, winced at the sudden pain in her lower back, and wished she’d had the foresight to buy herself an Aeron.

“I have a Hot Koan,” Richard said.

Dagmar turned to him. “Yes?”

Richard tented his fingers. “A player came to Dagmar and asked, ‘Does the ARG have Buddha nature?’

“Dagmar replied, ‘That would make a pretty good story.’

“Hearing this, the player was enlightened.”

Richard’s effort was well within a well-established tradition of creating enigmatic hacker koans that had to do with computers and computer people. Dagmar grinned, then winced at a stab of pain from her back.

Helmuth, however, seemed impervious to fatigue. He jumped up, turned to the room in general, and said, “Anyone for finding something to drink off base?”

Byron turned toward him, looking as if he was interested. Magnus stood, grinned, raised an arm.

“A drink sounds good,” Magnus said.

Byron hesitated, then frowned. “Too much jet lag,” he said.

Dagmar considered that Byron might have just had a narrow escape. Neither was quite aware of the hazards of a night out with Helmuth, of waking draped over some piece of furniture, a headache stabbing shivs into your eyes, your mouth tasting as if it had been used to put out cigars, the bathroom sink splashed with vomit, your cuffs spattered with someone else’s blood, and your underwear turned backward. At Great Big Idea this was known as “being Hellmouthed.”

Not that Helmuth ever Hellmouthed himself; he would always turn up at the office in the morning perfectly groomed and perfectly tailored and from his own invincible height survey his victims with a smile of brilliant white cosmopolitan superiority.

Perhaps, Dagmar thought, she ought to give the lads a warning.

“We start again at oh eight hundred,” she said. “Don’t lose too much sleep.”

Judy stood. She wore another of her series of rhinestone-covered plastic crowns, this one tiny and pinned to the crown of her head, like that of a beauty queen.

“You could just walk to the officers’ club,” she said. Then she raised an arm and sniffed her armpit. “I’ll go if I don’t smell too skanky,” she added.

“You’re no worse than me,” Dagmar said. Which was, unfortunately, true. She turned to the others. “Officers’ club, everyone?”

“Not me,” Helmuth said. “I want to go somewhere I don’t have to hear jets taking off every three minutes.”

He and Magnus retired to whatever desperate pleasures awaited them. Lincoln went into his office. The interns began to clean up what was left of the buffet. That left Dagmar, Judy, and Byron for the officers’ club.

Dagmar gave an automatic glance around the room for Ismet, then remembered that he, Rafet, and Tuna were elsewhere. They weren’t techs; they weren’t part of Dagmar’s game except as pawns. They were being trained as field agents, and what they did they would do in Turkey.

All of which left Dagmar uneasy. She didn’t want to send people she actually knew into danger.

It would be bad enough if her pawns were faceless.

The trio walked to the officers’ club over burning hot pavement that smelled of rubber and jet fuel. They were all honorary British officers, with photo ID cards worn on lanyards around their necks, and entitled to drink with the RAF’s finest.

The club was a little bit of Britain: dark paneling, brass, slot machines, a snooker table, Real Ale, the scent of chips frying. Yorkshire-accented hip-hop rocked from the jukebox. Not a lot of customers, even though Happy Hour had just started.

They found a round table in what passed for a quiet corner. Photos of 1950s aircraft decorated the walls. Dagmar got a gin and tonic, Judy a ginger beer, and Byron a single malt, water back. Thirsty, he gulped the water first. As he dropped his glass to the table, Dagmar saw the wedding ring.

“You’re married?” she said.

Byron nodded. “Wife. Daughter. I’ll call home later tonight.”

“How old is your girl?”

“Six weeks.” He pulled out a billfold and offered a picture of a goggle-eyed infant. Judy and Dagmar made appropriate noises.

“I have more pictures on my laptop,” he said. “But I’m not allowed to bring it into the ops center.”

“If I remember the security briefing correctly, you’re not supposed to show us even this photo,” Judy said. “Let alone in a public place like a bar.”

“Right,” Dagmar said. “We will stop oohing over Byron’s child at once.”