Walter Williams - Deep State

Richard considered the question, looked at his chronograph, then considered some more.

“Well,” he said. “They do know we’re here. But all the attacks so far have been on Web pages hosted by our proxy sites, and pretty much stopped there.” He reached for his phone. “I’ll call the base computer centre.” He pressed buttons on his phone, then stopped and looked at the display.

“Out of Area,” he reported in surprise.

“Use the ground line,” Dagmar said. She went to her own office, took her own phone from the desk, and tapped the screen to bring it to life.

Out of Area, she read. Plenty of juice in the battery, but no bars.

When she returned to the ops room, she saw everyone sitting very still and watching Richard as he listened on the ground line to someone at RAF Akrotiri’s computer centre.

“Right,” he said. “Thank you.”

Richard turned to Dagmar.

“They’re having router trouble,” he said. “It’s affecting the whole base.”

“Any time estimate,” Dagmar said, “for when they’ll have it up?”

“No.”

“Any idea of why cell phones are down?”

“He didn’t know they were down until I told him.”

The computer centre at Akrotiri was enormous. It shuffled vast quantities of electronic intelligence from the Middle East to GCHQ in Cheltenham, an installation that was sort of the Barclays Bank of ELINT. Dagmar wondered if she should send Richard down to help the computer centre diagnose its problems, then decided against it-there was no way Richard would have clearance to muck about with their routers. And then she noticed that Byron and Magnus were staring at each other, each with the same expression, stricken and yet glowing with a kind of awe.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Holy fuck,” Byron said.

Magnus turned to Dagmar.

“It’s the High Zap,” he said.

It seemed visibly darker outside, as if a cloud had just smothered the sun. A flight of jets roared overhead, rattling the window in its pane and burying beneath its thunder the sound of ceiling fans and computer cooling systems. Dagmar’s heart churned in her chest, as if she were on the edge of panic. Suddenly she was probing the edges of her perceptions, looking for the clues that a burning Ford or a line of police or a horde of knife-wielding Indonesians was about to come storming through the doors of her consciousness.

Not now, she thought. She couldn’t have a flashback now.

She and Magnus and Byron stared at each other until the jet blast faded. Dagmar tried to regain control of her heart, her breath.

“High Zap,” she said, her mouth dry. “What’s that?”

Byron swallowed, suddenly nervous.

“We can’t tell you.”

Magnus inclined his head toward Lincoln’s office. “Ask Chatsworth,” he said.

Dagmar looked at Chatsworth’s office door, then realized there was something she had to do first.

“In a minute,” she said, and looked at the phone in her hand.

Out of Area, it said. She triggered the VoIP function and saw that it was down as well.

Dagmar enabled the sat phone function. Her nerves tautened as the word Connecting swam into sight on the display, repeating over and over again without any actual connection taking place, and then she almost sagged with relief as her handheld indicated that a signal had reached the satellite and been bounced back.

She walked around the room until she found an area with the strongest signal-sat phones didn’t work well indoors-and then thumbed in Rafet’s number in Ankara. Relief flooded her as the ring tone sang in her ear.

Lincoln had thoughtfully provided the Brigade with sat phones that could connect directly to the satellite, instead of having to go through a ground station at one end or the other.

Rafet answered on the second ring.

“This is Ankara,” he said, in English.

“This is Briana,” Dagmar said. “We’re having some trouble with communications here, and I thought I’d better alert you.”

“Here also,” Rafet said. “Our cell phones are out, and the government seems to have turned off the Internet.”

Dagmar’s head swam.

“That’s happening here as well,” she said.

“So the only way we can communicate is with the satellite phone?”

“Apparently.”

Or send a telegram, she thought. Or a carrier pigeon.

It was a little late in the game to equip every revolutionary with a satellite phone, and in any case she couldn’t afford it. Her plans were in serious trouble.

“Use this phone for primary communication till the Net comes back up,” Dagmar said. “Any word from the drones?”

“The drones haven’t finished their missions yet. But at least they’re still following orders.”

“That’s good news, at least.”

She ended the call and went to Lincoln’s office-knocked once and then opened the door. Lincoln sat at his desk and was staring at his phone while annoyance firmed his face.

“My phone’s stopped working,” he said. “Just as I was about to talk the mayor of Bodrum.”

“Cells and the Internet are down,” Dagmar said. “Byron and Magnus say it’s the High Zap.”

Lincoln’s mouth opened and the air came out of him in a soft sigh. He seemed to deflate, crumpling into himself like a pumpkin left too long on the shelf.

He was still looking at his phone. He put the phone on the desk and turned to Dagmar. His face was gray.

“Well,” he said. “That’s one we’ve lost.”

“Lost what?” Dagmar demanded. “Phones? The Internet?”

“The war.” Lincoln visibly pulled himself together, his shoulders rising, back growing straight. His hands wandered over his torso as if reassuring himself of his own continued existence. Then he turned to Dagmar, his blue eyes hard.

“Close the door,” he said.

Dagmar did so. She sat on one of the brown metal chairs. Lincoln adjusted himself in his Aeron and leaned toward her.

“Are satellite phones working?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“In that case I need you to call your company in California-we’ve got to see how widespread the damage is.”

A cold wind blew up Dagmar’s spine. This couldn’t be worldwide, she told herself.

She punched the number on her handheld. In the meantime Lincoln was launching his phone’s own satellite function.

In Simi Valley, Helmuth’s assistant Marcie answered the phone.

“Hi, Marcie, this is Dagmar. Any problem with the game?”

“Ah-” Marcie seemed surprised. “No, not that I’ve heard of.”

“Could you call up the Handelcorp Web page? Because I’m seeing some strange stuff, here.”

She heard fingers tapping a keyboard, followed by the slap of the Enter key.

“Everything looks good here,” Marcie said.

“You called it up from the Internet, not our own internal database?”

“Yes.”

“Check to see if the links are working.”

Marcie reported that everything seemed to be in order.

“No problem with the servers? The routers?”

“No. I’d hear the screaming if there were.”

“Right. Thanks. It just must be the local ISP that’s buggering up my signal.”

She pressed the End key and listened to the last few sentences of Lincoln’s conversation with whomever it was he’d called.

“You’ll have to do the checking yourself,” he said. “I’m not in a position to do anything, here.”

Lincoln ended his call and looked at her.

“Everything’s fine in Washington except the weather,” he said.

“Good,” she said.

“I should have realized the problem was local when you told me the satellites were still working.”

It can take out communications satellites? she thought.