Walter Williams - Deep State

He joined her, carrying with him a pleasantly sweet odor of tobacco. She kissed him and rested her head on his shoulder; he put an arm around her.

“It’s all right if I touch you now?” he said.

“You can touch me any time I’m not raving.”

“Okay.” He kissed her forehead. There was bristle on his chin. She nestled against his warmth.

“You don’t want to go to bed?” he asked.

“No.” The bed had betrayed her to the enemy; she didn’t want to lie in it again.

She didn’t want to fall asleep, so she talked. She told Ismet about her girlhood in Ohio, her drunken father, her passive but persistent mother. She told him about her time at Caltech, her marriage to an English chemistry professor, her life in England, and her divorce.

“I’m deeply flawed,” she said. “You should know that.”

Then she reflected that he’d probably worked that out on his own.

She spoke of her return to California to reunite with her friends and start a game company. She told him about being caught in the Indonesian revolt, about Austen’s and Charlie’s getting killed, about the Maffya hit man she’d tracked through the Briana Hall ARG. She stopped short of telling him how she resolved the problem-she wasn’t that crazy, not yet.

Maybe, toward dawn, she drowsed. She only knew that the daylight caught her by surprise and that she rose from the couch with her mind in a whirl, unclear how she got here, misplaced on Aphrodite’s Island, surrounded by the spirits of the dead, lost in the bright Mediterranean air.

FROM: Rahim

The following proxy sites are still unblocked. Please pass this on to anyone in Turkey.

97.107.137.80:3128

200.65.127.161:3128

202.94.144.73:80

129.82.12.188:3128

212.123.91.165:8080

71.48.222.54:11764

60.6.205.26:808

The following are no longer working:

8.191.16.126:8080

91.103.236.195:8080

193.30.164.3:8080

62.75.219.25:8080

Breakfast was coffee, along with leftover pizza. The latter had not been improved with age. The toaster still talked whenever anyone got near.

The apartment’s little shower was too small to hold Ismet and Dagmar both, so they showered separately, then rejoined just in time for Dagmar to kiss Ismet good-bye. His RAF guard checked the Ford to make certain it hadn’t been wired with explosives in the night, and then he was gone, off to the war.

Dagmar watched Ismet drive away with a sense of emptiness that she hadn’t expected. It was as if all her capacity for emotion had been used up the previous night.

She rather hoped that was the case. At the moment, being an icy logic robot seemed a pretty attractive job.

She took a vacuum flask of coffee and walked down the stairs to encounter a guard from the RAF Regiment. He was a black man with gold-rimmed shades and enormous corded forearms that seemed to burst from the rolled-up sleeves of his battle dress.

“Excuse me,” she said.

“Yes, miss?”

“Do you know Corporal Poole?”

The man smiled. “Pooley? Yeah.”

“He did me a favor last night, and I’d like to buy him a present. Do you have any idea what he’d like?”

The smile broadened, and the guard took off his shades, revealing a pair of lopsided brown eyes, the right much higher than the left.

“Pooley’s a Johnnie Walker man, last I heard.”

“Right,” Dagmar said. “Thanks.”

Anxiety returned as her guard drove her to the ops center. She could picture herself walking in to silence, to the watchful eyes of those who knew she had gone mad the previous night.

But that wasn’t what happened. As Dagmar came into the ops center carrying her flask of coffee, she saw activity, people talking and staring at one another’s flatscreens.

Something was going on.

But before she could find out what, Lincoln intercepted her in the hall and gestured her into his office. He closed the door behind her and waited to speak until after she’d sat in the visitor’s chair. He didn’t sit himself; he hovered over her, one hand on the back of her chair.

“Are you going to be all right today?” he asked in a low voice.

She gave a brittle laugh.

“I’ll be as all right as I ever am,” she said.

“That was a pretty serious report I got.”

She looked at him. The blue eyes behind the Elvis glasses were concerned and just a little uneasy.

“It was a serious attack,” she said.

“Are you likely to have another?”

Dagmar felt her teeth clack together, some kind of strange nervous reaction. She willed her jaws apart.

“Depends,” she said, “on how many more of us get killed.”

“I’d like you to see a doctor.”

She forced a shrug. “If you think it’ll do any good. And so long as no record of the visit will ever exist to fuck up my insurance situation.”

“The patient’s name will be Briana.” Lincoln moved toward his desk. “Shall I make you an appointment with one of the doctors here on the base?”

“Okay.” She started to stand, then hesitated.

“One other thing,” she said.

“Yes?” His hand on the telephone.

“Make sure I don’t have to tell the doc about how I got this way.”

She left him to chew on that and headed for the ops room to see what was stirring.

Tuna’s killer had been quickly identified by the Group Mind, along with the others in his unit. In response to the killing, the government had announced that the Gray Wolves were being taken off the streets and would no longer be used as a police auxiliary.

Probably that meant that the next time the Wolves conducted a massacre they’d be in civilian dress.

The announcement had heartened the opposition, and now Ankara was a mass of disorder. There appeared to be a number of different demonstrations-or full-fledged riots-and there were videos of demonstrators throwing rocks, of pepper gas being hurled into a chanting crowd, of armored personnel carriers from the army taking up station in front of official-looking buildings, of a police charge on motorcycles. A lot of the action seemed to be taking place on the campuses of Ankara’s dozen or more universities. Hundreds of videos and pictures were being uploaded on dozens of Web sites, along with a lot of frantic text in Turkish and broken English.

Dagmar contacted Rafet on satellite phone using encrypted VoIP, but he knew only what he could see from the safe house in Ulus, and that wasn’t much. After consultation with Lincoln, it was decided to use some of the Skunk Works drones to cruise over other parts of the city.

Therefore it was pure luck that a drone caught Erez, Ankara’s former mayor, marching with a crowd of hundreds into the Ministry of Labor and Social Security-they seized the building, invited the regular workers to leave except for those who wished to join the revolution, hoisted the flag of Erez’s banned party beneath the Turkish ensign on the roof, and barricaded the doors against any counterattack. There had been police guards outside the building, but these were severely outnumbered and faded away.

The building was an enormous blocky towerlike structure, glass and cyclopean concrete bulwarks, set in the middle of parks and parking lots and only a short distance from the Ataturk Mausoleum. It would be easy to defend, assuming the mayor’s followers were up to defending it.

Soon videos appeared on the Web of the quondam mayor announcing the formation of a provisional government with himself at its head. He invited the people of Ankara to his little fortress to help defend it.

“Is this Yeltsin standing on the tank at the Russian White House?” Dagmar wondered aloud.

“Could be more like Jim Bowie falling down drunk at the Alamo,” Lincoln muttered. “But I need to talk to that man.”