Walter Williams - Deep State

There was a long silence while Calvin considered his character outline.

“Harry hasn’t been a leader up to that point,” Calvin said. “All he’s done is follow Sandee around, and when she’s not around he wanders in circles.”

“That’s right,” Dagmar said.

“The players are going to help him out, of course.”

“It still has to be plausible,” Dagmar said.

There was another long moment, and then Calvin spoke. The words came slowly, as he thought them out. Dagmar could almost hear the slow clank of gears turning in his head.

“I can put in a flashback,” he said. “I can show him being heroic at some point in the past.”

“No flashbacks,” Dagmar said. “Flashbacks are deadly. They confuse the hell out of everybody because the games take place in a kind of eternal present-flashbacks break continuity.”

“Okay.” Calvin’s gears ground slowly on. “I can-I can foreshadow it somehow.”

Dagmar thought about this.

“You’d have to start back on week one, and week one is launching in two days. You’d have to rewrite scenes that are already completed.”

“Well. I could.”

“You’ve already written a lot of material that shows that Harry isn’t a hero,” Dagmar said.

“Well.” Thoughtfully. “I could change all that in the rewrites.”

“Maybe he’s not the hero,” Dagmar said. “Maybe Sandee is the hero.”

“But Sandee’s going to fall apart. She’s going to have a breakdown in week three.”

“What if it’s Harry’s job to keep Sandee together? Maybe that’s what he’s there for.”

There was another moment of silence.

“So what you’re suggesting,” Calvin said, “is that Harry isn’t Frodo, he’s Sam.”

“Yes,” Dagmar said. “That’s what I was suggesting.” The Tolkien analogy hadn’t occurred to her, but it seemed appropriate.

“I don’t know,” Calvin said. “I had such big plans for Harry.”

Dagmar suspected that Calvin was very fond of Harry, identifying perhaps with the character’s haplessness. The fondness was blinding Calvin to the character’s true arc, which Dagmar was pretty sure meant that Harry wasn’t the Hero, he was the Hero’s Best Friend.

“I think this will work,” Dagmar said. “And the players will like helping Sandee surmount her troubles.”

“Maybe they can guide her to a good shrink,” Calvin muttered.

“I think this is our solution,” Dagmar said. “I think this is how it goes.”

Calvin conceded defeat. “Let me think,” he said, “how to present this.”

I am Plot Queen, Dagmar thought in quiet triumph. I may sleep in a crooked bed, but I can make a story dance.

If only, she thought, she was as good at creating a happy ending in real life as in her fictions.

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Dagmar’s first action-the proof-of-concept-would take place in Istanbul. In Beyazit Square, before the tall gate that marked the entrance to Istanbul University.

Even most of the Lincoln Brigade didn’t know the target. Of those remaining in Cyprus, only Dagmar and Lincoln were aware.

Dagmar had the explosion dream the night before the Istanbul action, the Ford blowing up again and again, the fire blossoming in a great golden bubble, the incendiaries raining down, bouncing along the pavement like flaming bystanders fleeing the scene of a catastrophe. Dagmar woke in her cockeyed bed, the room wheeling around her, terror clutching at her throat.

She nerved herself for the day with coffee and her lucky RIOT NRRD T-shirt, then went to the ops room early and buried herself in last-minute planning.

There would be a lot of spam to send out today.

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The students at the university were natural allies. Other groups would be called in as well.

Dagmar frowned down at the message glowing in the flatscreen before her. Send the message and everyone was committed. The revolution-or its horrific suppression-was on its way.

It had been Dagmar’s idea to use spam as a means of coordinating political action. Not the disgust or annoyance that was the usual response to a message offering penis enlargement, a fortune waiting in Nigeria, or investment advice, but a message hidden somewhere in the text that only an insurrectionist could read.

A 419 scam, for example, could contain instructions-“seven,” the numeral 8-that told the recipient where they could find a clean cell phone. An offer for a drawing could offer instructions for what to bring to the next event-a photograph, a bouquet of flowers-and suggest a time frame, the twenty-four hours preceding noon on Thursday.

The code was simple because it would have to be understood by ordinary people. Dagmar could have used steganography, for instance a message hidden inside the code for a digital photograph of an object displayed on eBay or hidden in the code for an old, obsolete Web page. She could have used public key encryption or more elaborate coding systems provided by her employer. But targets openly receiving coded messages would attract attention and decoding took time, and even so most of the people involved had no technical expertise in using such systems-after all, otherwise intelligent users routinely managed to fumble even simple programs like Outlook Express.

Dagmar had therefore opted for speed over security-she hoped to put her actions together so quickly that even if the government deduced the target, they would be unable to respond in time.

She was putting her revolution together like a flash mob. They would arrive all at the same time, they would make their point, and then they would disperse before the authorities could react.

Or so Dagmar hoped, anyway.

The final message, the one on Dagmar’s screen, gave map coordinates for the action based on a standard map of Istanbul-E-8, the numeral 8 in the text, E being the first letter of the second sentence. The last sentence gave the time for the action-six P.M. on Wednesday.

It was now a few minutes before four. She looked up at the wall clock, ticking away next to the ferocious picture of Ataturk. Biz bize benzeriz, she read.

She looked around the room. Lincoln, Ismet, Rafet the well-spoken dervish, Judy Strange, Helmuth the head programmer, Alparslan Topal the representative from the government-in-exile, and Richard the Assassin in his white Converse sneaks. Ataturk’s pale ferocious gaze embraced them all.

Well, she thought. We are like ourselves. And no one else.

She looked at the wall clock again: 3:58.

Lincoln, kicking his legs as he sat on a table by the window, took pity on her.

“Go ahead and send the message early,” he said. “Our kids haven’t had much of a chance to practice.”

She looked at him with gratitude.

“Right,” she said.

And pressed the Send key.

There was a hierarchy in the networks that would respond to the message. They were organized along the classic covert cell structure, with each member of a cell known only to members of that particular cell and to the cell members whom each member would in turn recruit. If a member was caught or turned, there were only a few individuals he could betray. There was also a colossal redundancy built into the system.