Walter Williams - Deep State

Lincoln’s door was closed. Dagmar tried to decide what she felt about Lincoln, what she had decided about him. He was either a complete manipulative bastard or as much a fool as she.

Or both, she thought. No reason he couldn’t be both.

Dagmar explained her ideas to what was left of her posse, and they began to make plans to travel to Limassol in search of old modems. They would be like the evil sorcerer in Aladdin, offering to trade new lamps for old.

Lincoln had come out of his office partway through her exposition. She was too far into her spiel to interrupt herself to decide whether she hated him or not, so she ignored him until he offered a suggestion.

“You might not need to go to Limassol for modems. Akrotiri is huge, and has its own shops and supplies. You might be able to make your deals here.”

“Not necessarily,” Helmuth said. “Those old modems might be the only cybernetic gear in those shops still working. They might not want to part with them.”

“Your guards can’t requisition civilian gear,” Lincoln said, “and they won’t intimidate anyone on purpose, but they’re in uniform and carrying guns. They will lend a certain authority to any request you might make.”

Dagmar was alarmed by this train of thought. “Be polite,” she said.

Richard raised a hand, then spoke.

“We’d have an idea of whether an external modem will work with DOS by looking at the cabling, couldn’t we?” he said. “No modem with a USB would function with DOS. Nor would Ethernet, right?”

“You can run an Ethernet IPX network out of DOS,” Helmuth said. “I found the instructions online last night while I was researching our brave new operating system.”

“And there’s no TCP/IP?” Dagmar asked.

“There doesn’t have to be. You can set it up either way.”

“Terrific,” Dagmar said. “We grab those modems, too.”

“My point is,” Richard said, “that if you find a modem with a twelve-pin cable-or would it be thirty-two? — you make an offer on the spot.”

“We are the junkware,” Dagmar said. Their new slogan.

“I’ll arrange for your escort,” Lincoln said. As he walked toward his office, he glanced over his shoulder at Dagmar and gave her a look. She followed.

“I’ve got transcripts of Magnus’s and Byron’s confessions,” he said, once they were alone. “The Turks caught them at a roadblock outside of?yrnak, practically the minute they came down off the mountains, and the Jandarma so terrified them that they stopped thinking.” He shook his head. “They fell for the oldest trick in the world. They were put in separate rooms, and each was told that the other had started talking, and that whoever gave the Jandarma the most information would be treated leniently. They ended up competing to see how fast they could give their secrets away.”

“Don’t those idiots watch cop shows?” Dagmar said. “They should know better than to tumble for that one.”

Lincoln’s blue eyes grew serious. “They weren’t exactly in a position to demand a lawyer,” he said. “And the Jandarma don’t bother with explaining Miranda rights.”

“That doesn’t explain why they sold me and Judy months later,” Dagmar said.

“They were being blackmailed,” Lincoln said. “The Turks recorded them spilling everything they knew about the Zap, and threatened to release the videos if they didn’t, ah, keep in touch. If those videos had been released, they would have lost their security clearances and all their government contracts.” He offered a cynical laugh. “They’re still blaming each other. They still haven’t worked out how they were played.”

Dagmar narrowed her eyes.

“And you hired these bozos,” she said.

Lincoln passed a hand over his forehead.

“It wasn’t one of my better decisions,” he said. “But at least they’re working for us now.”

“Oh,” Dagmar said. “Swell. Just swell.”

He offered a grim smile.

“I believe it’s been brought home to them that they had confessed not only to espionage on behalf of a foreign power but to being members of a conspiracy to murder an American citizen and were also accessories after the fact. Lieutenant Vaughan and I staged an argument in front of them over whether or not the trial would take place in the UK-I wanted to extradite them to Virginia, which still has the death penalty.” He nodded. “So yes-now they’re being very cooperative. We can use them to feed false information to their contact in Limassol, if we can figure out what would completely mislead them.”

“Have them send their assassins in again,” Dagmar said. “That’s the only way we’ll catch those bastards.”

“I doubt they’d send in gunmen again,” Lincoln said. “Not with the base on the alert.”

Dagmar looked at him sourly.

“I’ll try to think of something to tell the Turks that will really fuck them,” she said. “But in the meantime I’ve got to try to work around the technology that those idiots gave to the black hats.”

Lincoln nodded.

“You do that,” he said.

The modem expeditions went reasonably well. Lola and Lloyd did their best on the Akrotiri aerodrome and scavenged three modems, which they took back to the ops room to see if they’d work with Richard’s virtual DOS environment. Helmuth guided Richard and Dagmar through Limassol, first to an electronics store where they bought an armful of the latest internal and external modems, then to the waterfront, where they began moving through a series of small cafes and shops.

“You no want jacket? Nice handbag?”

The merchant at the leather goods store, a portly man with a mustache, was puzzled by Dagmar’s line of inquiry.

Dagmar hadn’t so much as cast an eye over the store’s merchandise before leaning over the counter and noting the dusty modem keeping track of credit card sales. Now she took a look at the coats and jackets hanging on the racks. Some of them seemed quite nice.

“I’ll buy a jacket if you’ll give me your modem,” she said.

This was an offer that was more to the store owner’s taste-he understood this kind of bargain better than he could comprehend a strange offer simply to buy his antique modem. The last transaction processed on the modem was a double-breasted belted jacket made of shiny, butter-smooth brown leather, cost 135. It fit Dagmar as if it had been tailored for her. The credit card receipt would be submitted to Lincoln as a business expense. As far as Dagmar was concerned, this was a win-win transaction.

This was Dagmar’s only success of the morning, but Helmuth and Richard bagged two modems apiece, and they were in an upbeat mood as they met in a cafe for a lunch expertly cut from a sizzling cone of pressed beef and lamb by-products. The gyros were as good as any Dagmar had eaten. She received a number of compliments on her jacket.

Their guards, discreetly armed, sat at their own table and ate burgers.

After eating, they ordered Turkish coffee, dark as molasses and nearly as sweet, guaranteed to keep their energy levels high through the afternoon.

Richard showed off his own major purchase-an entire computer, an ancient PC clone in a heavy steel case, which Richard had bought for the sake of its internal modem. The purchase had taken a fair amount of bargaining, with the owner convinced he was somehow being swindled. In the end Richard had simply taken the man to an electronics store and bought him a completely new fully tricked-out office machine, complete with a printer.

“I think I got the better deal,” Dagmar said, admiring her jacket.

“Not really,” Richard said. “The modem is one thing, but this is another.” He pulled the keyboard out of the shopping bag in which he had carried his prize.