Walter Williams - Deep State

The flash and explosion ended the transmission. Dagmar hoped the Wolf had been caught in the backblast.

She tried to speak, failed, tried again.

“Copies of this have to go out,” she said. “Load it onto every server on the planet.”

“No,” said Lincoln.

Dagmar was outraged. She broke free of Ismet’s arms and swung her chair to him.

“What do you mean, no? This is-”

“We wait,” Lincoln said. “We wait till the government announces that terrorists have blown up a bus, and then we send out this video to prove what lying bastards they are.”

So the Lincoln Brigade did what it normally did with video footage of a demonstration: edited it, sent it to reporters and news agencies, put it on Web pages. They began the lengthy business of assembling the augmented reality version of the demo. Dagmar worked numbly, phantom gunshots rattling in her ears.

At eight P.M. a government minister announced that terrorists, led by Ankara’s former mayor, had blown up a bus in the wake of an illegal demonstration. Erez and a number of his associates were being sought by the police.

Tuna’s final video was posted on Web sites and sent to news organizations. It went viral very quickly-within hours, Dagmar figured, it would be ubiquitous. A new wanted poster was created for the boy who had shot him.

After ten thirty, most of the Brigade were sent home with their RAF escorts. Lincoln had a conference with Ismet first, then called Dagmar in.

He held out the hard drive with the email addresses on it.

“It’s now or never,” he said. “You need to tell everyone to head for Ankara. It’s time the people took their government back.”

He followed as Dagmar took the hard drive to her office and invited everyone on the list to come to Ankara and be slaughtered. She unplugged the drive and gave it back to Lincoln.

“I want a memorial for my friends,” she said.

“Of course.”

“Tomorrow afternoon, but we’ll let everyone know first thing in the morning, so they’ll have time to decide what they’re going to say.”

He bowed his shaggy head gravely.

“Whatever you like,” he said.

The RAF Police escort took Dagmar to her apartment. She nodded to the corporal from the RAF Regiment at the bottom of the stair, then walked up the stair to her own floor.

“This is bullshit!” Byron’s angry voice boiled out of an open window. “We’re not safe here! Packed in like this, one RPG could kill us all!”

Consistency, she thought, was certainly Byron’s strong point.

Ismet opened his door as she passed.

“I got a pizza on my way home,” he said. “Shall I come over?”

Ismet, she realized, had lost a roommate as well. Tuna’s belongings were still in the apartment, a reminder of the friend who would never return. Like the Nutella that haunted Dagmar’s fridge, a visitation from Judy that she would never eat but never remove.

“Give me time to shower,” she said.

Under the stream of water she tried to scrub away the sweat and sorrow, the mourning and misery. The result was only an increased consciousness of her own wretched failure. She dried her gray hair, put on a new T-shirt and underwear and a pair of khaki shorts. Trailed by the scent of green tea shampoo, she made herself a gin and tonic and sat by the window and tried to make sense of the thoughts that gyred in her head.

Byron too angry, she thought, Lloyd too calm. Helmuth and Magnus too stoned.

This wasn’t data; it was just noise. There wasn’t a pattern to be found in it.

Tuna and Judy too dead, she thought. There was your pattern.

Ismet knocked and called softly from outside. Dagmar let him in. The cardboard box he carried smelled of garlic and oregano. When the toaster talked to him, he gave a jump, then laughed.

She rattled her glass at him. “Want a drink?”

He raised a can of lager. “I brought my own,” he said.

He put the cardboard box on the kitchen table, and Dagmar brought plates from the cupboard. She freshened her drink and brought it to the table.

The pizza had been made with feta and chunks of a local sausage that tasted of fennel and goat. It wasn’t entirely awful. Dagmar discovered that she was ravenous and ate her first piece very quickly.

“We’ll be doing a memorial for Tuna and Judy tomorrow afternoon,” Dagmar said.

“I won’t be able to attend,” he said. “I’ll be on my way to Ankara.”

She looked at him in shock, then looked away.

Of course he’d be going, she thought. The time for the final confrontation had come, the time when the demonstrators would either take their government back or be crushed in blood, and Ismet was a part of that.

She’d sent out the orders for everyone else less than an hour before. She didn’t know why she hadn’t realized that Ismet would be included in the next action.

“I won’t be going across the Green Line this time,” Ismet said in his matter-of-fact way. “They might have my description. So I’ll have to fly to Athens, then to Sofia, and take the train to Istanbul and on to Ankara.”

“I’ll pack you a lunch,” she said. It was only a practical thing, but it was all she could manage to say. She couldn’t ask the questions that were really in her mind, like Do you think it’s hopeless? Or What are your odds of survival?

She reached for her drink, and it almost slipped through her grease-stained fingers. She wiped her fingers and the glass with a paper napkin.

“Bozbeyli knows about us,” she said. “Why hasn’t he told everyone?”

Ismet reached for another piece of pizza.

“He must have other plans,” he said.

“Can we guess what they are?”

Ismet, mouth full of pizza, gave a jerk of one shoulder, a Turkish way of saying, “I don’t care.”

She decided that she shouldn’t harass him: he’d had a worse day than she had, and his days weren’t going to get better anytime soon.

So she asked him if he’d heard from his grandmother and what she’d think of his having an American girlfriend and more about the nomad life on the Anatolian south coast. The change of subject seemed welcome.

They went to bed and his touch set her skin alight. She pressed herself to him, desperate for the reassurance of his body, the solid businesslike whole of him that she could cling to. Ismet was hers, at least for the next few hours.

Even through her pleasure she could hear the whisper in her mind, the voice that suggested that she might already be in mourning for him.

The rioters came in the night, breaking down the wards that Dagmar had so carefully set. Suddenly they were there-bare-chested Indonesian men, rags tied around their heads, hands brandishing machetes or Japanese swords or wavy-edged blades.

She lunged out of bed screaming and fought her way through the intruders into the living room. Ismet called her name over and over and tried to catch her, but she flailed at him and broke free. The coffee table caught the backs of her knees and she tumbled over, still thrashing at the weapons that menaced her… wheezing for breath, she backed into a corner of the room, hitting and kicking at Ismet when he came too close.

There was a pounding on the front door, and shouting. Dagmar shrieked at Ismet not to open the door and let in more of the enemy, but he did anyway, and there was the guard from the RAF Regiment. She screamed at the sight of his assault rifle. His radio crackled loud in the air.

Dagmar shivered and wept and flailed her fists as the Indonesian men circled her. Ismet and the guard had a brief conversation.

“Could you get her a blanket, perhaps?” the corporal said. “I don’t like to see her naked like that.”

Ismet went to the bedroom and returned with a sheet. He approached Dagmar carefully and offered the sheet. Dagmar snatched it and covered herself. The Indonesian men leered at her.