Walter Williams - Deep State

Lincoln considered this, scrubbing his hands up and down his cheeks.

“There’s not a lot of evidence, there,” he said. “And they weren’t out of touch for long.”

“You said yourself,” Dagmar said, “that when you turn someone, you try to get them back to their normal life as soon as possible.”

Lincoln nodded, conceding the point. His expression remained unconvinced.

“Lincoln,” Dagmar said, “they hate each other. They’re sharing an apartment, but they never spend time together-Magnus is always off in Limassol with Helmuth, and Byron stays here sending emails to his family. When they do communicate, they argue. Each is always slagging the other behind the other’s back. The poison broke out on the go-kart track, remember; they spent the whole time attacking each other. It’s as if they’re blaming each other for something. Something they can’t talk about.”

“That doesn’t mean…” Lincoln began.

“Byron is scared to death, Lincoln,” Dagmar said, then reiterated: “Scared. To. Death. Of the Turks, of this whole enterprise. It’s one thing for him not to want to go to the Turkish side of the island; it’s another to overreact the way he did. I think it’s because he knows what it is to be a prisoner, he knows what they can do. If he’s still cooperating, it’s because he’s too afraid not to-they threw such a scare into him, it lasted all the way across the Atlantic. And if Magnus is still a part of it, maybe it’s because he’s afraid, maybe because he’s getting other inducements.”

Dagmar leaned forward and leaned her knuckles on Lincoln’s desk.

“They fingered Judy and me, Lincoln,” she said. “The Turks asked where we were living, and they gave up the information. They both failed their polygraph, remember. It’s time to haul them in.”

Lincoln reached for the landline, then hesitated with his hand on the telephone.

“I don’t know,” Dagmar said, “how long I can keep up the pretense of not knowing. So do something fast.”

When she left the office he was punching numbers into the phone.

In the ops room she looked around again and saw Web pages flashing on Richard’s display, with Helmuth looking over his shoulder. She half-ran to Richard’s desk.

“What’s happening?” she said, half-running to his place. “Is the Net back up?”

“I’m using a satellite phone as a modem,” Richard said.

“Ah. Right.”

She should have thought of that herself. It was what she’d done in Indonesia.

Dagmar had her own satellite phone, as did Helmuth and Ismet. She looked at Magnus and Byron-she hoped she wasn’t glaring too obviously-and considered asking Lola to requisition a couple more sat phones.

“Ankara’s still blacked out,” Richard said. “There’s no news from there that’s less than an hour old.” He pointed at a video that had been uploaded via one of their proxy sites. “But there’s still action going on in other parts of the country. A demonstration in Antalya, another big one in Konya. It looks like the demo in Istanbul has been suppressed-I saw some pictures earlier of some fighting in that stadium.”

Unleashing the Zap on their own capital had given the authorities a huge advantage over their opponents-not only could the opposition no longer easily mobilize their people and get their propaganda before the public, but the police and military had an entire radio net that would be unaffected, and they could muster their own forces and move them without difficulty.

Dagmar didn’t hold a lot of hope for Mayor Erez holding out in his stolen ministry building.

She looked up as the door to Lincoln’s office opened. But Lincoln didn’t come into the ops room; he walked down the hallway to greet Squadron Commander Alvarez as he entered.

Alvarez was followed by a squad of RAF Police, along with Lieutenant Vaughan. They took Magnus and Byron away. Lincoln followed them out.

The others looked to Dagmar for an answer.

“I think we should assume it’s going to be just the few of us for a while,” she said.

They looked at her in silence.

“Here’s what’s happening to our little world,” Dagmar said. She gave the others a brief explanation of what the High Zap was and what it did. She left out the history; she left out the part played by Byron and Magnus.

“We need to get the Zap back,” she finished.

“I think we just did,” said Richard. He had listened to Dagmar’s lecture with wide eyes, clearly impressed by the ultimate ninja software that had evaded all his firewalls and wrecked his plans, leaving him unable to so much as shift the bits of wreckage around.

Helmuth seemed puzzled.

“We’re supposed to beat this thing,” he said. “Just the”-he looked over his shoulder at where Lola was guarding the door-“the six of us.”

Ismet shifted carefully in his chair. The pain that twitched its way across his face sent a knife through Dagmar’s heart.

“Leave me out of it,” Ismet said. “I’m not a computer engineer; I’m in advertising.”

“We five,” Helmuth corrected.

“Yes,” Dagmar said. “We five.”

Helmuth gave a laugh.

“Well,” he said. “At least we have a clear idea of the odds against us.”

“We’ve done the impossible before,” Dagmar said. “Remember Curse of the Golden Nagi?”

Richard indicated his own modified computer, with its satellite phone cabled in.

“Satellite modems would seem to be the way to go,” he said.

“The Zap can take down satellites,” Dagmar said. “And if not them, then their ground stations.”

“Then telephones,” said Lloyd. “Telephony doesn’t use TCP/IP. We just need to insulate the switching stations against the Zap.”

“How?” Dagmar asked.

He gave the question a moment’s thought. “Really old routers?” he offered. “From before they were all infected?”

“Right,” Richard said. “We could advertise for them on craigslist.”

Dagmar looked at him.

“No mockery, Richard,” she said. “All desperate ideas are being considered here.”

“Check,” said Richard. He gave his glittering Girard Perregaux chronograph a look. It was becoming a nervous tic, Dagmar thought-he didn’t have to take his eyes off his flatscreen to know what time it was-but it seemed as if he wanted to reassure himself the item was still on his wrist.

“You know,” he said. “Maybe I should call the computer centre and let them know what the problem is. They might be able to get some of their routers offline and restore at least some service.”

Dagmar waved a hand. “Carry on.”

Richard picked up the handset on his desk, listened for a moment, then returned it.

“No dial tone,” he said. He picked up the handset, then joggled the switch on the cradle several times. Eventually Dagmar could faintly hear the distant sound of a dial tone whining from the earpiece of Richard’s handset.

“Not all the switches are down,” he said, and punched numbers into the handset.

Ismet grasped both arms of his chair, then levered himself to his feet. Dagmar felt a mental shudder as she saw the look of pain on his face.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “Do you need to go lie down?”

“I’ll stay here,” he said. “I can’t help you with your discussion, so I’m just going to go monitor my station.”

He walked toward his desk, then paused at the sound of Eurofighters overhead. He cocked his head and listened.

“I think that’s the same flight we’ve been hearing since the Zap hit,” he said. “I think they’re circling and waiting for air traffic control to come back online.”

“But the traffic control is radio,” Dagmar said. “The Zap wouldn’t take it out.”