Walter Williams - Deep State

A conventional insurrection stockpiled arms and explosives. Dagmar’s revolt would stockpile cell phones.

Cell phones had already been acquired and warehoused in safe houses in major cities. So were video cameras, transmitters, antennae, satellite uplinks, and of course the Hot Koans.

The revolution would be televised. And tweeted, blogged, attached to emails, YouTubed, Ozoned, googled, edited, remixed, and set to a catchy sound track. It would be bounced to High Earth Orbit and back. It would be carried live on BBC, on CNN, on Star TV, on every other electronic medium dreamed up by an inventive humanity.

What Dagmar could only hope was that none of these media would be transmitting pictures of a bloody massacre.

“The lawyers aren’t going to let any of this happen,” Lincoln said, “unless the President signs an executive order. He hasn’t done that yet, but I think he will before too much longer.”

“This is too much for me,” Dagmar said.

The call for the midday prayer had gone out from the Blue Mosque. Dagmar sat among her travel documents for Bulgaria, still stunned by what Lincoln was asking of her.

Less than twenty-four hours earlier she had been cowering in her bathroom, trying to hide from phantom Indonesian attackers. She wondered if Lincoln would want her for this job if he knew she was mentally-what was the appropriate word? Challenged? Compromised?

He looked at her, the gray light of the mosque shining off the metal rims of his shades.

“Look,” he said. “Once that order is signed, this operation is going forward. I have some talented people I can employ, and I’m sure they’ll do a good job. But-” He raised a blunt finger. “They won’t be as good as you. And if they aren’t as good, we could lose some people that we wouldn’t otherwise have lost.” He shook his large white head. “If you do this,” he said, “you could save lives.”

It was that argument, Dagmar reflected later, that had overcome her last resistance.

I am such a freaking bleeding heart, she thought. She could only hope that Lincoln was right that she would save lives and not lose them.

Oh eight hundred. Dagmar cycled to the ops center, then realized she had forgotten the ID card she was supposed to wear around her neck, the card that not only held her picture but also could be used on the door’s card reader to pass her into the center. She looked up at the camera above the door and gave an apologetic wave, then waited for someone to open the door for her. When this didn’t happen, she knocked.

Eventually Lola, the wavy-haired intern, opened the door for her. Lola was dressed in a blue suit-a change from yesterday’s gray one-and she looked at Dagmar with cool intelligence.

“Yes?” she said.

“Thanks for opening the door.” Dagmar moved to walk past Lola, but the other woman blocked her.

“Don’t you have your ID?” Lola asked.

“I forgot it in my apartment.”

“I can’t let you in without it.”

Dagmar looked at her in surprise.

“But you know me,” she said.

“Yes, but I also need to know where your card is. You can’t leave that lying around.”

Dagmar opened her mouth to protest, but a look at Lola told her that further argument was pointless, so she turned around, cycled back to her apartment, picked up the ID card from the kitchen table where she’d left it, hung the card around her neck on its lanyard, and returned to ops.

She was beginning to think Byron might have a point about the stupid security rules attending this kind of operation. Besides the fetish for code names and ID cards, there had also been an inventory of every electronic device that Dagmar had brought with her-her handheld, her laptop-which had to stay in her apartment. For the ops room she had a new cell phone, laptop, and desktop computer, all dedicated to the exercise, and which could not be taken out of the ops center. The phones, she noticed, had their camera functions disabled. The computers had most of their USB ports soldered shut, and all data was available only on portable memory, which was locked in the safe at night. Each flash memory or portable drive featured a sticker with a bar code-Lola scanned these when the members of the Brigade checked them out, then scanned them in again at the end of the day. It was not totally impossible to steal data, she supposed, but it would be very inconvenient and require a certain amount of nerve.

The worst threat to security, Dagmar thought, came from the fact that the computers were connected to the Internet. In a truly secure operation, any machine containing sensitive information would either have no outside connections at all or connect only to a secure local area network. Any machine connected to the outside created an opportunity for intruders.

Dagmar would have to trust the counterintrusion skills of Richard the Assassin. He was brilliant about keeping crackers out of the Great Big Idea file system, and those he’d battled on behalf of the company were the best on the planet.

She reflected that she and the world in general were lucky that Richard had chosen to ally himself with the Forces of Good.

On her return to the ops center Dagmar encountered Magnus, whose kilt was hiked up to highly unacceptable levels as he cycled to work on his bike. Fortunately, by the time she caught up to him he’d dismounted and was stowing his bike in the rack.

It was a different kilt, she realized, than the one he’d worn the day before. The man had at least two Utilikilts.

That was hard-core Geek.

“Morning,” she said.

“Hi, Briana.”

He waited for her to finish racking her bike. She looked at him curiously, looking for signs that he’d been Hellmouthed the night before. He seemed fine, maybe a little tired.

“Did you have a good night?”

“Limassol is a happenin’ town,” he said cheerfully.

She looked at him. “You got the lecture about the Russian hookers, right?”

Magnus laughed. “One of them came right up to me off the dance floor and wiped her face on my T-shirt,” he said.

Dagmar was curious. “What did you do?”

“I blew her off.” He laughed again. “Jesus Christ, it’s not like I want whore sweat on my clothes.”

They walked toward the door of the building. Two airmen came out, and one politely held the door for them. Dagmar thanked him as she entered, and then she and Magnus walked up the stairs to the ops center.

“Are you settling in?” she said. “Any problems?”

“None to speak of,” he said. “It’s a more interesting job than the government usually gives me.”

She remembered Angry Man Byron’s complaints the previous day and asked if he found the security rules too restrictive. He shrugged.

“They do get in the way. But it’s not too bad here-I mean, if we’re not all in the ops center anyway, we’re not working, right? This isn’t the kind of job you bring home with you.”

“True enough.”

She came to the door of the ops center, waved at the camera, and snicked her card through the reader. The lock buzzed open, and Dagmar pushed the heavy steel door open.

Lola looked up from her desk as they entered. Dagmar waved the ID at her, and Lola nodded expressionlessly.

Dagmar stopped in the door to the break room, where yesterday there had been the breakfast buffet, and saw that today no food had been provided. Yesterday she had eaten breakfast and then found out about the buffet; today she had assumed there would be a buffet and not eaten breakfast.

She sensed that the primary theme for the day had already been set: whatever she did or thought was going to be wrong.

She paused by her office door and let Magnus walk past her into the ops center, T-shirt, kilt, thin hairy legs, and flapping sandals.