Walter Williams - Deep State

Dagmar dropped into one of the chrome-and-vinyl seats.

“Someone in the Turkish government is trying to play us,” she said. “It’s not Bozbeyli or the generals-those were the people who sent gunmen to kill me. This is someone new.”

Interest glimmered in Lincoln’s blue eyes.

“That’s possible,” he said.

“You’ve got access to intelligence reports,” Dagmar said. “Do you have any idea who this new person might be?”

Lincoln seemed to give the idea thorough consideration. His eyebrows went up.

“The man who reengineered the High Zap?” he said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Dagmar said. “Do you have any reports on whatever team deconstructed the Zap?”

Lincoln spread his hands. “I have no information here. I’ll make inquiries.” He tilted his head. “But this… gamester.”

“Kronsteen,” Dagmar said. “The chess player in From Russia with Love.”

“Kronsteen,” Lincoln echoed. “Do you have any idea what he’ll do next?”

“He’ll do whatever he can to divide us. He just uploaded a video showing that the rebellion was all about Kurdish independence.” Lincoln began to speak, but Dagmar held up a hand. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I handled it.”

He nodded. “I applaud your initiative.”

“But what other splits can be engineered in our alliance?”

“Religious Turks versus seculars,” Lincoln said immediately. And then, on reflection, “Rich versus poor. City versus rural. Sophisticated, Westernized Istanbul versus the patriotic heartland.” He flapped a hand. “Any society has similar fault lines. And any popular movement.”

“He’ll have a hard time taking this line if he goes too far,” Dagmar said. “Within forty-eight hours he’s already told us that the rebellion is about both a Scottish rock star and Kurdish separatism.”

“Next,” said Lincoln, “it’ll be a candy mint and a breath mint.”

“You’re dating yourself.”

Lincoln sighed. “I roll deep,” he said. He looked up.

“By the way,” he said, “we may be wearing out our welcome from our friends the Brits. A general officer pointed out to me this morning that we can do our job anywhere-which is true enough-and asked when I thought I’d be finishing up here. I think getting hit with the High Zap has strained their hospitality.”

Dagmar considered this. Moving wasn’t necessarily a bad idea.

“We need to shift to a place with a lot of bandwidth,” she said.

“And we won’t have Byron and Magnus to give our location away,” Lincoln said.

Dagmar narrowed her eyes.

“Indeed,” she said. “How much time do we have?”

“Negotiations are in progress on a number of fronts. dai Military Base has been mentioned-that’s in Latvia. So have bases in Germany.”

“I don’t have the appropriate wardrobe for Latvia,” Dagmar said. “I’m used to Southern California, for heaven’s sake.”

“I believe you can afford a coat on what we’re paying you,” Lincoln said.

“I can’t get another wardrobe out of Uncle Sam?”

“We don’t have a regular supplier,” Lincoln said, “for T-shirts branded with the logos of failed start-ups.”

Dagmar gave a laugh.

“Touche,” she said. She thought for a moment.

“We’ve got Byron and Magnus locked up here, right?” she said. “Why don’t we have one of them tell the Turks that we’ve got evicted and that out little project is canceled?” She thought for a moment. “Byron, for preference. If he defects, he won’t see his family again.”

Lincoln laughed.

“You’re starting to think like me,” he said.

“And that,” Dagmar said, “is terrifying as hell.”

By the next morning Rafet had a backup MS-DOS machine set up inside the safe house, with a modem scavenged from a carpet shop. Instructions for joining the DOS network had gone out to the various heads of the various sub-networks. Richard had put together a bulletin board system within DOS, where instructions to the network could be posted. In the event that the Zap struck Ankara again, Rafet would use a landline to call out of the country, to a number set up in Luxembourg. The Luxembourg number would automatically be forwarded to another number, this one in Milan, and so until it reached the computer humming away in Akrotiri.

If the High Zap lasted long enough, the landlines would go down as well, but Dagmar hoped the Turks wouldn’t dare to keep their own cities blacked out for very long. They wouldn’t want to crash their own economy, which like the rest of the world was now dependent on the Internet.

Next morning the military staged a formal military parade down Ataturk Boulevard in Ankara, the Sixty-sixth Motorized Infantry Brigade returning to the scene of their triumph. The junta stood on a reviewing platform in Cankaya and distributed medals. Whose morale the parade was intended to boost was open to question.

What this meant, practically speaking, was that the military and police were busy guarding the parade route, which allowed Rafet to lead a demo near the Cebeci Campus of Ankara University. A swath of old houses had been demolished and not yet replaced, and the demonstrators made a brave sight, waving flags among the ruins and carrying signs in support of the next day’s general strike.

The first amateur videos being uploaded, however, seemed to be from some other place altogether. These featured men in shades and galabia and white keffiyehs, who carried flowers and paperback books and waved signs in Arabic. They marched down a wide boulevard past white-walled stucco buildings. Palm trees waved on the horizon.

“What the hell?” Helmuth demanded.

The video was put up on one of the big wall screens. Dagmar studied it.

“No one here reads Arabic, right?”

“A little,” said Ismet. “But they’re not really showing us the signs; the writing isn’t big enough.” He squinted at the signs. “It’s very idiomatic. I doubt I can make much sense of it.”

“The point is,” Dagmar said, “this isn’t anywhere in Turkey, right? Not even in the far southeast, where there are lots of Arabs?”

Ismet shook his head. “The Gulf States, maybe? Yemen?”

The Arab men reached a park featuring a geodesic-looking jungle gym. Glittering glass buildings shimmered on the horizon. Mercedes and BMWs prowled past the camera. The men began to create designs with their books and flowers.

“Qatar?” Lloyd wondered. “Bahrain?”

“What is going on over there?” Richard wondered aloud.

Helmuth slapped his hand to his forehead. “Fuck,” said Helmuth. “It’s revolution creep.” He was utterly disgusted.

Dagmar looked at him, mouth open.

“Revolution creep,” she said. “That’s it.”

The software business had always been prone to what was called scope creep or feature creep, in which shiny, attractive, but poorly conceived new features were added to projects that had already been approved, usually without any changes in budgets or deadlines. The result would be a large, unwieldy, badly functioning piece of bloatware, a prime example being Windows Vista, which jammed together the features of two separate projects, Longhorn and Blackcomb, then jettisoned the original source code to produce a program that glittered with surface appeal but operated with less efficiency than its predecessor. Vista’s problems were eventually fixed, but the damage to Microsoft’s reputation had been done.

In Dagmar’s business, scope creep was a deadly danger. Plots could have so many elements and dimensions that they would run completely out of control. So could the software projects, and the video and audio. Half the anxiety of her job was making sure her projects were streamlined enough to be online by the deadline.