Walter Williams - Deep State

Dagmar could only guess what General Bozbeyli would make of this.

DVDs in the windows? he might mutter. What DVDs were these? Were they anti-government DVDs? No? Rocky IV?

What do the DVDs represent? Is this supposed to be some kind of DVD revolution?

And what about the towels? Is this some kind of attack on Turkishness through the symbolism of the Turkish towel? What signals are these people sending?

Call the head of the Jandarma! Call the mayors! We need to find out what all this means!

Dagmar was in on the secret: the items meant nothing. They transmitted no message. In order to fully comprehend the meaning of the demos, you had to be hip enough to understand that the DVDs, the towels, the photographs, and the flowers meant nothing at all! They were just convenient articles that people could carry that marked them as part of the flash mob aimed at the government.

The generals would never grok that. Never. They’d grope in the dark for meaning and come up with nothing-which was in fact the answer, but they’d never understand that.

A picnic spirit had begun to possess the protestors. More songs were sung. People linked arms and swayed in time to the music. No warning was sent from Lloyd, whose drones monitored the police and army-either the authorities didn’t care or were baffled or were waiting for instructions from somewhere up the line or no one had let them know what was going on.

“This isn’t a demonstration,” Lincoln said, with apparent pleasure. “It’s a damn love-in.”

“Chatsworth,” Dagmar said. “What happens if the police don’t move? Do we let this go on?”

Lincoln leaned closer to one of the monitors, his Elvis glasses sliding down his nose. He frowned, leaned back.

“The wedges are going to run out of fuel,” Lloyd pointed out.

Lincoln settled his glasses back on the bridge of his nose. “No sense in waiting for the police to get their shit together,” he said. “We’ve made our larger point. Let’s send ’em home.”

“Right.”

She told Rafet to end the action and sent additional messages to his support team. Rafet looked at one of the nearby cameras, then nodded.

The demonstrators were enjoying themselves too much to leave right away; the demo trailed off in a diminuendo of song and dance and trailing towels.

Helmuth and Tuna nailed a towel and a DVD of The Guns of Navarone, David Niven and Gregory Peck painted in heroic pastels, to the wall next to the towel and bouquet of flowers.

“Who’s for a celebration?” Helmuth cried. “Ouzo! Dolmades! Pizza!”

Magnus turned a little pale at the prospect of an entire long day in Helmuth’s company. Thus far Helmuth was proving a match for all the cocktails, discos, and desperate Russian women of Limassol put together…

Dagmar looked at Ismet, then looked away.

“Maybe later,” she said. “Text me.”

She wouldn’t go. Helmuth’s Rabelaisian idea of a good time had never appealed to her.

And besides, she had to say good-bye to Ismet first.

He was flying away this afternoon to organize Monday’s demo in Izmir. He would cross the Green Line in his car and then fly on to Izmir. To account for the odd stamps on his passport he was writing a series of articles on the Cyprus situation. He had them all on his netbook, along with his notes, if anyone demanded proof.

They had time for a pensive half-hour embrace on the couch in Dagmar’s flat before Ismet’s departure. Ismet was distracted by his upcoming mission and Dagmar by the ton of melancholy that squatted on her heart.

She’d had two whole nights with Ismet and already she was seeing him off to war. Film scenes ran through her mind, scenes in which the tearful girlfriend, running alongside the train, sees her soldier boy off to the Great War, waving a handkerchief at someone named Clive or Sebastian or Reginald leaning out of his train compartment in his flat helmet, the gas mask container bulking up his chest like an extra layer of fat, one pale doomed hand waving as he chugged off to be turned into chutney at Wipers or Vimy Ridge or Passchendaele…

Each repeatedly reassured the other how astoundingly safe Ismet’s task would be, and then Dagmar walked with him to his car. She gave him a fierce kiss and a rib-crushing hug, much to the amusement of an RAF airman sailing past on a bicycle.

“Save some for me, love!” he called over his shoulder, and then ran over a skateboard that some child had left in the road. The bicycle wobbled, and the airman tottered and spilled onto the curb. Dagmar burst into uncharitable laughter.

Ismet got in his Ford and drove off. Dagmar decided not to run alongside waving a handkerchief-his handkerchief, actually, which she’d absently put in her own pocket at the beach in Kouklia. She stared after him for a long while, the handkerchief wadded in her fist, while she ignored the airman dusting himself off and pushing off on his bike.

More than ever, she wasn’t in a mood to join Helmuth’s party, and so decided she might as well get some work done.

She shambled over to the ops center, where she found Lincoln and Byron, beneath Ataturk’s fierce gaze, supervising the last remaining details of the Antalya action. The place smelled of stale flowers and cold pizza.

“Rafet and the crew are in the clear,” Lincoln said. “Rafet’s at the airport buying a ticket back to Cyprus. The rest are back at the safe house with their equipment.”

“Lovely,” said Dagmar. She looked up at a BBC news program, running in silence, that showed a fifteen-second clip of the demo that she had fed them less than an hour earlier. Towels and flags waved from the town hall, while Rafet-suitably blurred-bounced and played his drum.

“I never figured I’d be working alongside Muslim clergy,” Dagmar said. “He is clergy, right?”

“No,” Lincoln said, “but the people who sent him are. And they’re the right kind of Muslim clergy. Progressive, scientifically literate, tolerant.”

“And extremely polite,” Dagmar said.

“Thanks to Riza Tek, all praise to his name.” Lincoln’s face darkened. “If we fail here, our movement may fall to the wrong kind of Muslim theologians.”

“If we fail,” Dagmar said, “there may only be fanatics left.”

Byron gave her a searching look from over his shoulder. His face looked permanently pinched. Dagmar wondered if he’d been ill.

Lincoln scrubbed his hands together.

“But failure isn’t going to happen!” he declared. “We’re going to conduct a model twenty-first-century people power insurrection, and we’re going to make the Turkish generals look like idiots! They’ve all got a pre-Internet mind-set-they think that once they’ve got the newspapers and broadcast stations, they have a monopoly on communications. We’re going to overthrow them by making them ridiculous. We’ll make them irrelevant! The entire population will just ignore them! They’ll fold up and leave out of sheer embarrassment!”

Dagmar dropped into a chair. “I like it when you get on a soapbox,” she said.

“The generals aren’t unlike some of my own superiors,” Lincoln said. “Start talking about leet, or Ozone, or the IP crisis that’s coming up, or even text messaging for heaven’s sake, and you just get a blank look.”

Dagmar looked at him. “How did you get them to approve me?” she asked. “How did you explain what it is that I do?”

Lincoln sighed. “I called in a lot of favors,” he said.

“No kidding,” she said.

“Besides,” he said, “I reckon we’re up against a deadline. Right now the generals are reflexively pro-Western, because they always have been. They’re nationalist; they’re procapitalist; they’re anti-communist; they’d never deal with the Soviets. But the Soviets are gone now-and they’ve left Russians behind.