Walter Williams - Deep State

“Can I see the picture again?” Judy asked.

Dagmar sipped her drink, looked around the club once more, and caught a number of the officers casually scoping the two new women who had just walked into their dark-paneled sanctum and doubtless wondering which of them belonged to Byron and whether the other was free…

When in contact with the locals the Lincoln Brigade had been told to say they were here to do something with the computers. Local curiosity probably wouldn’t extend much past that-if it did, they could just say that they couldn’t talk about their work.

Dagmar turned to Byron.

“Have you ever done this sort of thing before?” she asked.

Byron seemed doubtful. “I don’t think anyone has.”

“I mean-you know-covert, secret stuff.”

“Oh. Sure.” He tasted his drink, splashed a bit of water into it, then tasted again. “I mean, I’m a contractor, Magnus and I work for the same company, and they work almost exclusively for the government. And that includes three-letter organizations that make me sign secrecy agreements.” He shrugged, sipped again at his whisky. “The security rules are usually idiotic-in fact, it’s impossible to do my job if I follow them all.”

“What do you mean?”

Exasperation distorted his pinched face.

“The hoops I have to jump through to take my work home are ridiculous,” he said. “And often I have to take it home-there’s no way to do the work on-site.”

“Why?” Judy asked.

“There are a whole long list of Web pages that I’m not allowed to access from government computers-but often as not, these are the pages that contain the information necessary to do my work, or that have the software tools I need to do it. So”-snarling-“I have to take the classified material home, so that I can put it on my own computer, from which I can access the necessary information.” He shook his head. “It’s all maddening. Someday the military and intelligence branches of the government are going to completely freeze, because no one will be allowed to see or do anything.”

“I’ve never worked for the government,” Dagmar said.

“Hoh. You have such a treat in store for you.” Byron’s face reddened. “Uncle Sam is about fifty years behind in their computer protocols, which still assume that everyone is working on a big mainframe. You have to do certain tasks in a certain order, and fill out all the paperwork on it in a certain order, and the odds are about ninety-nine to one that the tasks and the paperwork have nothing to do with the actual work you were hired to do.” He looked up at her with a glare of surprising hostility.

“There was a period when I was doing computer security at a major government lab-I won’t mention which one. The computers we were working on were riddled with unknown intruders-hundreds of them! — I mean, those people were practically waving at us! But I couldn’t do a single thing about them-not a single thing! — because I spent about seventy hours each week dealing with assigned tasks and paperwork. And after I broke my heart on that job for a couple years, I quit and went into the private sector.” He shrugged. “At least I’m making a lot more money than the idiots I was working for back then.”

Dagmar, whose whole business was based on secure computers, was startled by this outburst.

“Computer security isn’t exactly rocket science,” she said.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Byron said, “but the U.S. doesn’t exactly do rocket science anymore, either.”

Dagmar decided to change the subject before she completely lost any faith in her own project.

“Have you worked with Magnus before?” she asked.

“Tell you the truth,” Byron said, “I’m surprised to see him here.”

“How so?”

“Well, I have worked with him before, and he’s not the best at the kind of improvisation you’re doing.”

“Really?”

“He really needs a script to work from. I’m much better extemporizing than he is.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Dagmar said.

She tried to view this information by considering the source. Byron’s character type was not exactly uncommon in computer circles: he was boastful about his own abilities and disparaging of everyone else. He was also, Dagmar thought, very, very angry.

Byron was Angry Man, she decided. And Magnus was Kilt Boy. At this point Lola and Lloyd weren’t anything more than the Interns. She’d get to know them better later.

At this point a pair of RAF officers, Roy and McCubbin, the latter known as the Mick, appeared and offered to freshen their glasses. The officers were fair and freckled and pilots, with splotches of pink sunburn on their cheeks and noses, and Dagmar and Judy were pleased to invite them to the party.

The lads were delighted to learn that Dagmar and Judy were unattached. They were also pleased to learn that Dagmar had lived in England, having once been married to a Brit. It required quite a lot of amiable conversation to establish the fact that they had absolutely no acquaintances in common.

Roy was drunk when he arrived and got more drunk as Happy Hour went on, though pleasantly so. Eventually, though, he grew nearly comatose and the Mick’s wedding ring became impossible to ignore, and so Dagmar and Judy collected the lads’ cell phone numbers, and-declining the offer of escort-walked along with Byron to their apartments in the married officers’ quarters, long, low apartment blocks with tiny little yards strewn with the bright plastic toys of the officers’ children. The scent of charcoal was on the air, from the backyards where pink-skinned RAF officers, cold bottles in their hands, congregated in the evenings around grills with their mates and families.

Palm trees, bottles clinking, the scent of proteins cooking, and the sounds of sports floating from TV sets… to Dagmar it seemed like some kind of retro LA scene. Like Hawthorne, maybe.

“I’m going to call my wife,” Byron said, and gave a jerky wave of his arm as he turned onto the walk that led to his apartment. Dagmar and Judy kept on a few more doors, then passed into their own unit. Dagmar held up the napkin with the pilots’ phone numbers.

“Do you want this?”

Judy flicked her hair. Her plastic crown glittered. “Toss it,” she said.

Dagmar dropped the napkin into the trash. Judy went into the bathroom to take her evening shower. Dagmar opened the fridge, poured herself a glass of orange juice, then went to the dinette and booted her laptop.

She was not yet finished with her work for the day. Back in Los Angeles, her company was hip deep in the run-up to the Seagram’s game. She had to check her email for the updates, then make phone calls if intervention seemed necessary.

Dagmar slipped her keyboard out of its tube, then unrolled it. She preferred a full-sized keyboard to the smaller one on her laptop and carried one with her-flexible rubberized plastic, powered by a rechargeable battery, with genuine contacts beneath the keys that gave a pleasing tactile feel beneath her fingertips. It connected wirelessly to her laptop-she’d turned the screen around so that she wouldn’t have the unused keyboard between herself and the image.

The Seagram’s game seemed to have a greater reality, even at this distance, than her own enterprise here in Cyprus. Possibly because the goal-to sell whiskey or, at any rate, to make whiskey cool-seemed more well defined than her own.

She was used to telling people what to do-her fictional creations, her employees, the players-but she lacked confidence in the idea that she could really give orders to an entire nationality. Somehow her vanity had never extended to that.

She waved a hand, like a sorcerer incanting a spell.

You all be good, now, she thought. And then added, You, too, Bozbeyli.