Walter Williams - Deep State

Dagmar decided to emphasize the optimistic. “I’ve talked to Slash Berzerker,” Dagmar said. “I knew where he is-alone, apparently, at an oasis called Chechak.”

Lincoln slowly shook his head. “Doesn’t matter,” he said.

“All you have to do is send someone to talk to him,” Dagmar said. “Some of those Special Forces guys you were talking about, plus a technician or two smart enough to understand how to rewire the Zap-hell, the techs don’t even have to be there in person, just observing in via satellite.”

Lincoln waved a hand.

“No,” he said. “We can’t do any of that. They’ve canceled our operation.”

Dagmar could only stare at him. She heard Ismet walk up behind her, put his arm around her waist.

Lincoln looked up at her.

“From my superiors’ point of view,” he said, “this op is a complete disaster. We’ve destabilized an ally, crashed the New York Stock Exchange, lost billions of dollars-”

“The stocks will rebound,” Dagmar said.

“I didn’t mean the stocks.” Lincoln’s tone was savage. “I meant we lost the money. Do you know how much electronic money moves in and out of New York on a given day? How many billions in exchanges were disrupted? Not just the stock market, but the Federal Reserve, the other banks…”

“Oh, come on,” Dagmar said. “I could believe those transfers were disrupted, but I can’t believe they were lost. There’s all sorts of error checking-”

“They’re checking all those errors now, believe me,” Lincoln said. He looked up at Dagmar, his blue eyes wavering behind the tinted lenses.

“When a quake hits Wall Street, it’s the foundations of Washington that shake,” he said. “Our government is now going to great efforts to convince the Turkish generals that we have their best interests at heart, and that our diplomats and agents will stop trying to subvert the Turkish military. Our op is shut down as of today-we pack up the gear, and head back to the States by the first available transport.”

“The first real cyberwar,” Dagmar says, “and the U.S. surrenders?”

“That’s what you do,” Lincoln said, “when the apocalypse that the action was trying to prevent is triggered by the action.” He shrugged. “They’ll probably try for some kind of technological fix-figure out a way to neutralize the Zap, or supplant it with Zap 2.0.”

“And Rafet?” Dagmar asked. “The camera crew? What happens to them?”

“They’ll be exfiltrated,” Lincoln said. “Rafet will go back to his dervish lodge, and the rest-” He shrugged. “Will return to their lives.”

“And the revolution?”

Lincoln rose to his feet. Ataturk glowered over his shoulder.

“The Turks are on their own,” Lincoln said. He began to walk past Dagmar to his office.

She put out a hand to stop him. When the hand touched his chest, he stopped then looked at her.

“Lincoln,” she said, “you can’t do this. There has to be an alternative.”

His face reddened.

“I argued with them all night long!” he said. He sliced the edge of one hand across his jugular. “They cut my fucking throat, okay? We’re finished.”

He pushed past her and walked toward his office. She turned to Ismet and saw her own stricken look mirrored in his eyes. She drew him to her and pressed her face to his shoulder.

People were dying in Turkey, she thought. Dying.

She looked out at the ops room and thought about what they’d done.

They had their MS-DOS network ready to function in case of an attack by the Zap. They had Rafet and his crew in place in the capital. They had dozens of Web pages filled with videos, photos, and propaganda. They had the portable memory with contact information for whole networks of rebels. They had a general strike in progress, one that seemed to be going well.

But the generals had the High Zap, and that trumped everything. They could take down New York, Washington, the country, the world.

Helmuth and Richard walked in together and headed at once for the break room for coffee.

Her posse was down to three, she thought. Richard and Helmuth she paid herself, and she knew that Ismet would soldier on. The three Company employees would have no choice but to return to the States. The Lincoln Brigade didn’t even have Lincoln any longer.

She reached for her handheld and looked in the directory for Ian Attila Gordon.

“This is Dagmar Shaw,” she said when he answered. “This time I need you to hire me for real.”

Duplicity in a Coed Pet-In

It was sabotage, she supposed. Not that she cared, and her guess was that Lincoln didn’t, either.

The MS-DOS-capable modems were packed carefully away. Dagmar had to send out one last command, the final message canceling the demonstration that had been previously scheduled for that day… and when she had the portable memory in her hands she copied it to the memory in her personal handheld, the one she’d carried into the ops room that morning, because that was the phone that Slash Berzerker had called and that she could use to call him back.

Dagmar planned to take nothing but the modems and the information. Everything else could be replaced or rebuilt. They all had their own hardware. They were running their bulletin board system on a machine in Luxembourg owned by a colleague of Dan the DOS Man.

We are the junkware, she thought.

Everything else was turned in-the flash drives, the portable disk drives, the phones that hadn’t ever been allowed to leave the ops room. Lola checked the bar codes, did the inventory, and didn’t seem to notice the personal phone that Dagmar wore in its holster at her waist.

The new modems had never been entered in the inventory, and no one seemed to care that Richard and Helmuth carried them out in a cardboard box.

“Souvenirs,” they said.

Helmuth and Richard would be flying to Germany, to bask in luxury at a Sheraton in Frankfurt. In a suite paid for by Attila Gordon, they would try to keep the revolution on its feet.

Ismet and Dagmar had their own destination, in Uzbekistan.

Videos of demonstrations were uploaded from Pakistan, Egypt, and the Philippines. Revolution creep. Kronsteen, Dagmar supposed, trying to devalue the rebellion on his own doorstep.

Late that afternoon Dagmar tracked Lincoln to his office and found him pulling documents from his safe and putting them through a shredder. Something blue glinted amid the strips of paper in the wastebasket. She recognized an evil-eye amulet-flawed, apparently, having failed to keep the mission from catastrophe.

“What happens to Byron and Magnus?” she asked.

“Dennis and Jerry,” Lincoln said. “Their real names.” He fed another document into the shredder, his eyes not meeting hers. She sensed an evasion.

“What happens to them?” she asked. “Do they get tried here? Back in the States?”

“No trial. Nothing.”

She opened her mouth to speak-to yell- but he raised his head and lifted a hand.

“This isn’t an operation we can ever acknowledge took place,” he said. “Putting them on trial would reveal what we tried to accomplish here. So no trial’s ever going to happen.”

“They’re going to get away with-”

Lincoln shrugged. Defeat had dug deep trenches in his cheeks, at the corners of his eyes.

“Oh, they’ll lose their security clearance. They’ll lose their jobs. But they’ll be at liberty, and they’re talented, so I expect they’ll find work somewhere, and never have to see us or each other ever again.”

Dagmar clenched her teeth. “Does Byron and Magnus’s Turkish control know they’ve been arrested?”

Lincoln shook his head and dropped another piece of paper in the shredder. “Probably not,” he said. “Not unless he has some other source of information beyond those two.”