Walter Williams - Deep State

“Yeah,” Dagmar said. “Spare me your D.C. freakin’ turf wars.”

“Anyway,” Lincoln went on, “two technicians with training in the Zap took a copy of the command software to Turkey in a laptop. So that the secret would be safe in the event of the laptop going astray, the software itself was booby-trapped-it required a password within one minute of the laptop’s booting, or it would erase itself. The two techs were able to get into the Syrian defense net and bring it down for the one hour and ten minutes necessary to ensure the success of the Israeli strike.

“And then-just hours later-Bozbeyli took over Turkey. We didn’t want to send the laptop home through what might be civil disorder, so the laptop stayed on the mountain until Bozbeyli got worried that the listening station might be reporting his own phone calls, and sent in the military to shut it down.”

He spread his hands in a helpless gesture.

“There was a mix-up. Byron and Magnus got away, but the Turkish military got the laptop with the controls to the High Zap on it. And-as is now apparent-our safeguards failed, and the black hats have now broken into the program and figured out how to use it.”

Dagmar was waving her hands, trying frantically to stop the flow of words.

“Byron and Magnus?” she said. “Kilt Boy and Angry Man gave the Zap away?”

Lincoln pursed his lips in a gesture of deliberate patience. “Not gave,” he said.

“And you’re still employing them?”

“It wasn’t precisely their fault,” Lincoln said vaguely. “And they’re qualified for what they’re doing here. And they have first-hand experience with the Zap; we figured they’d have a better idea than most whether the Zap was being used and where, and what countermeasures might be taken.”

Dagmar gazed at Lincoln in weary amazement. She pictured Byron and Magnus high up on the curtain of mountains that rimmed Turkey on the east, bickering and snapping at each other.

At least there were no go-karts to crash up there.

“What did the Turks think of the kilt?” Dagmar asked.

“I’m sure they never saw it.” Lincoln flapped a hand. “Magnus would have been instructed to dress inconspicuously.”

Dagmar looked at Lincoln. Her fingers tightened on the arms of her chair as anger simmered in her consciousness.

“So,” she said, “this whole affair-bringing democracy and a legitimate government back to our allies the Turks-all that is just a way of getting the Zap back?”

Lincoln suddenly looked very tired. He waved a hand.

“Not just,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” Dagmar said.

He turned to her, his face open, his eyes wide.

“You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to,” he said, “but I really want this to work. I like the Turks; I want this region to have a functioning republic; I want the Turks to choose their own leaders. But my leaders… they approved this project because the government-in-exile agreed that the Zap would be returned when they came back to power.” He turned away, waved a hand again. “Maybe I’m just the perfect idiot for this operation.”

Dagmar shook her head. She felt as if her internal buffer had completely filled with unprocessed information and was unable to make headway on any of it.

She threw open her hands.

“What are we supposed to do now, Lincoln?” she asked. “I’m completely four-oh-four, here.”

Lincoln suddenly seemed very small. His voice seemed to come from far away.

“Defeat the Zap. Somehow.”

Suddenly her anger came to the boil. Judy and Tuna and a lot of Turkish citizens had died because Lincoln was hoping to beat the High Zap to the punch, and now he and they had lost… lost the whole war because it turned out the enemy had a trump card to play, the Internet equivalent of a thermonuclear bomb, and had possessed the trump all along, right from the beginning.

In rage Dagmar slapped both hands on Lincoln’s desk. The sound made them both jump.

“That’s it?” she demanded. “That’s your whole idea?”

He sat in his chair without moving. She could barely hear him as he spoke.

“It’s the only idea we’re left with.”

Her hand stung.

“Jesus Christ, Lincoln!” she said. “No wonder I’m going crazy!”

He gathered himself again, blue eyes glittering behind smoked lenses.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “But you can think of yourself as lucky. You can go back to your life when this is over, and create amusements that will thrill your audience of millions. I, on the other hand-” He bent to cough, the sound drawn far from his interior, like the rattle of a dying man. “I have to report to my superiors that every course of action I’d advocated was wrong, that the whole enterprise was a miserable failure and a waste of resources, and that I killed a lot of people for worse than nothing.” His voice turned savage. “This is my swan song, you know. My last roundup. I’d hoped to have a little success to console myself with in my wilderness years, but now I’ll have nothing to reflect on but the knowledge that I’m a useless failure.”

She rose from her chair, far too weary and burdened for sympathy.

“Yeah, you do that,” she said. “Meanwhile, I’ll try to think of some fucking useful thing to do to fight this plague.”

She opened the door, stepped into the ops room, closed the door behind her.

“Update?” she said.

“No change,” said Richard. He sat at his desk with a frustrated expression, his fingers tapping the arms of his chair, his Converse sneaks rapping the floor.

Impotence did not suit him.

Dagmar looked over what remained of the Lincoln Brigade, trapped here in this little pocket universe by the suddenly narrowed horizons of their own electronics: Helmuth and Richard, Ismet with his bruised face, Lola, the curly-haired Guardian Sphinx, securing the door, Lloyd on his way from the break room with a cup of coffee in his hand, Byron and Magnus gazing at her with insipid faces.

Those two, she thought, had started the whole project by losing the High Zap in the first place.

She thought of them running down the mountain ahead of Bozbeyli’s thugs, juggling the laptop and dropping it or forgetting it in a hotel room, or whatever they were supposed to have done, and then she realized that the more she considered it, the less she believed it.

Dagmar turned, opened the door, and went into Lincoln’s office again. He was still in his chair, turned away from her, frowning in silence at the wall.

“Byron and Magnus,” she said. “How’d they lose the Zap?”

Lincoln didn’t bother turning toward her.

“Like I said. A mix-up. They grabbed the wrong computer and left the laptop at the listening station, where the military found it.”

“And then what did they do?”

“They got away. In a car.” He looked up at her, puzzlement in his blue eyes.

“Why are you asking?”

“How long were they out of touch?”

“Twenty-four hours or so. They had to be careful. They were in Kurdish country and the military were all over the place.” He frowned. “But it doesn’t matter,” he said. “They left the computer behind, they didn’t lose it on the trip out.”

“What I’m trying to tell you,” Dagmar said, “is that it was Byron and Magnus who gave us to Bozbeyli. One or both of them, and I’m betting both.”

Lincoln’s blue eyes opened wide. He swung his chair toward her.

“How do you reckon that?”

“My guess is that when they were on their own, they ran into a roadblock and got arrested. I think they both spilled everything they knew, and that’s how the bad guys were able to beat the safeguards on the laptop. I also think they’ve been in touch with Turkish intelligence since.”