Deep State

CHAPTER ELEVEN

FROM: Rahim

The following proxy sites are still unblocked. Please pass this on to anyone in Turkey.

97.107.137.80:3128

200.65.127.161:3128

202.94.144.73:80

129.82.12.188:3128

212.123.91.165:8080

71.48.222.54:11764

60.6.205.26:808

The following are no longer working:

8.191.16.126:8080

91.103.236.195:8080

193.30.164.3:8080

62.75.219.25:8080

Breakfast was coffee, along with leftover pizza. The latter had not been improved with age. The toaster still talked whenever anyone got near.

The apartment’s little shower was too small to hold Ismet and Dagmar both, so they showered separately, then rejoined just in time for Dagmar to kiss Ismet good-bye. His RAF guard checked the Ford to make certain it hadn’t been wired with explosives in the night, and then he was gone, off to the war.

Dagmar watched Ismet drive away with a sense of emptiness that she hadn’t expected. It was as if all her capacity for emotion had been used up the previous night.

She rather hoped that was the case. At the moment, being an icy logic robot seemed a pretty attractive job.

She took a vacuum flask of coffee and walked down the stairs to encounter a guard from the RAF Regiment. He was a black man with gold-rimmed shades and enormous corded forearms that seemed to burst from the rolled-up sleeves of his battle dress.

“Excuse me,” she said.

“Yes, miss?”

“Do you know Corporal Poole?”

The man smiled. “Pooley? Yeah.”

“He did me a favor last night, and I’d like to buy him a present. Do you have any idea what he’d like?”

The smile broadened, and the guard took off his shades, revealing a pair of lopsided brown eyes, the right much higher than the left.

“Pooley’s a Johnnie Walker man, last I heard.”

“Right,” Dagmar said. “Thanks.”

Anxiety returned as her guard drove her to the ops center. She could picture herself walking in to silence, to the watchful eyes of those who knew she had gone mad the previous night.

But that wasn’t what happened. As Dagmar came into the ops center carrying her flask of coffee, she saw activity, people talking and staring at one another’s flatscreens.

Something was going on.

But before she could find out what, Lincoln intercepted her in the hall and gestured her into his office. He closed the door behind her and waited to speak until after she’d sat in the visitor’s chair. He didn’t sit himself; he hovered over her, one hand on the back of her chair.

“Are you going to be all right today?” he asked in a low voice.

She gave a brittle laugh.

“I’ll be as all right as I ever am,” she said.

“That was a pretty serious report I got.”

She looked at him. The blue eyes behind the Elvis glasses were concerned and just a little uneasy.

“It was a serious attack,” she said.

“Are you likely to have another?”

Dagmar felt her teeth clack together, some kind of strange nervous reaction. She willed her jaws apart.

“Depends,” she said, “on how many more of us get killed.”

“I’d like you to see a doctor.”

She forced a shrug. “If you think it’ll do any good. And so long as no record of the visit will ever exist to fuck up my insurance situation.”

“The patient’s name will be Briana.” Lincoln moved toward his desk. “Shall I make you an appointment with one of the doctors here on the base?”

“Okay.” She started to stand, then hesitated.

“One other thing,” she said.

“Yes?” His hand on the telephone.

“Make sure I don’t have to tell the doc about how I got this way.”

She left him to chew on that and headed for the ops room to see what was stirring.

Tuna’s killer had been quickly identified by the Group Mind, along with the others in his unit. In response to the killing, the government had announced that the Gray Wolves were being taken off the streets and would no longer be used as a police auxiliary.

Probably that meant that the next time the Wolves conducted a massacre they’d be in civilian dress.

The announcement had heartened the opposition, and now Ankara was a mass of disorder. There appeared to be a number of different demonstrations-or full-fledged riots-and there were videos of demonstrators throwing rocks, of pepper gas being hurled into a chanting crowd, of armored personnel carriers from the army taking up station in front of official-looking buildings, of a police charge on motorcycles. A lot of the action seemed to be taking place on the campuses of Ankara’s dozen or more universities. Hundreds of videos and pictures were being uploaded on dozens of Web sites, along with a lot of frantic text in Turkish and broken English.

Dagmar contacted Rafet on satellite phone using encrypted VoIP, but he knew only what he could see from the safe house in Ulus, and that wasn’t much. After consultation with Lincoln, it was decided to use some of the Skunk Works drones to cruise over other parts of the city.

Therefore it was pure luck that a drone caught Erez, Ankara’s former mayor, marching with a crowd of hundreds into the Ministry of Labor and Social Security-they seized the building, invited the regular workers to leave except for those who wished to join the revolution, hoisted the flag of Erez’s banned party beneath the Turkish ensign on the roof, and barricaded the doors against any counterattack. There had been police guards outside the building, but these were severely outnumbered and faded away.

The building was an enormous blocky towerlike structure, glass and cyclopean concrete bulwarks, set in the middle of parks and parking lots and only a short distance from the Ataturk Mausoleum. It would be easy to defend, assuming the mayor’s followers were up to defending it.

Soon videos appeared on the Web of the quondam mayor announcing the formation of a provisional government with himself at its head. He invited the people of Ankara to his little fortress to help defend it.

“Is this Yeltsin standing on the tank at the Russian White House?” Dagmar wondered aloud.

“Could be more like Jim Bowie falling down drunk at the Alamo,” Lincoln muttered. “But I need to talk to that man.”

He went to his office to send off messages. The drama in Ankara continued-and then came the announcement that the mayor of Bodrum, acting in concert with the governor of Mula Province, had ordered local forces to seal off the Bodrum Peninsula, which he was now prepared to defend against the military government. Bodrum, the fashionable resort town known in ancient times as Halicarnassus, was now in a state of self-imposed siege.

“That’s not gonna last,” Richard remarked. “The Turks have a freakin’ navy. They can just sail around that stupid blockade and land however many troops they want.”

Hellmuth nodded. “Our allies could benefit from having played more strategy games in their youth, that’s for sure.”

More news came in, of demonstrations in Manisa, in Denizli, in Edirne, and once again in Trabzon. It was Friday afternoon and a lot of people had started the weekend early, swarming the streets. Hundreds were now waving banners from atop Ataturk Stadium in Beyolu, across the Golden Horn from Istanbul. The reaction of the authorities varied: some demonstrations were attacked, others blockaded; others proceeded without opposition. Though Turkish networks didn’t mention the demos at all, international news networks were reporting the events live, though their reportage tended to rely heavily on amateur video downloaded from the Web pages created and maintained by the Lincoln Brigade.

Alparslan Topal, the political liaison with the Turkish government-in-exile, appeared in the ops room. Dagmar hadn’t seen him in days. He went into conference with Lincoln behind closed doors.

Lola was sent out for sandwiches. Dagmar realized with a guilty start that she had intended a memorial to Tuna and Judy this afternoon and she hadn’t even announced it.

At that moment her satellite phone rang.

“Briana,” she answered.

“This is Ismet. I’m in hospital.”

Driving to the airport in Nikosia he had encountered a police roadblock and upon showing his Turkish passport had been pulled out of the car by Greek Cypriot cops, who had then beaten the shit out of him. If they’d had any reason other than the fact of his Turkish passport, they hadn’t mentioned it.

His injuries involved cuts, bruises, sprains, and a possible concussion.

“I’ll come get you,” Dagmar said.

In a white-hot rage, Dagmar stormed into Lincoln’s office to tell him what had happened. He was waiting on the phone-apparently whoever he was talking to had put him on hold.

“You are not leaving,” he said. “There’s too much happening here. I’ll send some of our guards to bring him.”

“But-”

Lincoln pointed back to the ops room. The sympathy he had demonstrated earlier seemed to have faded.

“Go do your job,” he said.

She went, impatient, still furious.

Ismet came in about ninety minutes later. His lips were cut and swollen, one eye was blackened, and there were random cuts and bruises scattered over his face. His glasses were held together with tape. He walked like someone who had been kicked several times in the kidneys.

Dagmar went to him and gently embraced him. He smelled of disinfectant, adhesive, and blood. She kissed an unbruised part of his cheek.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

He spoke carefully through his cut lips.

“Pain pills help,” he said.

Lincoln heard his voice and came out of his office.

“Fuck!” he said. “We can’t send you into Turkey like this.”

Dagmar turned to him. “No,” she said. “You can’t.”

Lincoln made a disgusted gesture.

“A face that marked up, you’d stand out.”

Ismet spoke with careful dignity. “I’ll get better,” he said.

“Come into my office,” Lincoln said.

Dagmar winced at the careful way Ismet lowered himself into a chair. Alparslan Topal was already in the second chair, so Dagmar remained standing. While Topal commisserated with Ismet, Lincoln asked her to close the door, which she did.

“We’ve both spoken to ex-mayor Erez on the phone,” Lincoln said. “I’ve been able to assure him of support provided that he modifies his original statement proclaiming himself head of the government. Instead he’ll say that he’s the provisional head, until the elected prime minister and president can return to power.”

“What support can you give him?” Dagmar said.

“Money,” Lincoln said. “Funds to help certain people see the wisdom of democracy. Money to provide a secure retirement for certain officers. And-” He waved a hand in the direction of the ops room. “We have some intelligence that might be useful to him. We’ve got Rafet on the scene, and the Skunk Works, and our various networks. We have to decide what they’re going to do.”

“Something a little less hazardous, I hope,” Dagmar said, “than forting up in a government ministry and waiting for the government to come and kill them.”

Alparslan Topal winced a little at the thought.

“Perhaps Rafet needs to do something more active,” Lincoln said. “You need to get into the ops room and work out what’s necessary, and how to do it.”

Indignation straightened her spine.

“I have damn little information to work with,” she said. “We’ve only got what the demonstrators themselves are putting online, plus some footage from the drones.”

“Make your best guess,” said Lincoln. “Get Rafet and everyone the network can reach on the streets tomorrow, supporting Erez and the elected government.”

Dagmar glanced at Ismet.

“I was hoping to get Is-Estragon comfortably settled in his bed, with his medicines and-”

“We’ve got guards that can do that,” Lincoln said.

“I’d rather stay here,” Ismet said. “I won’t be any more or less comfortable in the ops room than at home, and I might be useful.”

Dagmar saw Ismet settled into his desk chair, then got the disk with the email addresses on it and sent out a preparatory email telling people to be ready before noon the next day. She returned to the ops room and asked for updates. Nothing startlingly new had happened, only more of the same. The Skunk Works drones were having their batteries recharged.

While going about their normal tasks the Lincoln Brigade discussed their options. All agreed that Rafet and the various Brigade-controlled networks should create a major demonstration or marches while the authorities were distracted by demonstrations elsewhere, but it was difficult to tell where some of the actions already were and therefore what locations were safe. And of course it was completely impossible to tell which locations would be safe the next day.

They already had scouting reports on any number of locations, all completed before any actions had even started. Dagmar chose three, then sent orders to the Skunk Works for drones to scout them before nightfall.

It was while Dagmar awaited the news from the drones that she heard a series of exclamations from others in the ops room, all in about a ten-second period.

“Damn!” muttered Richard.

“Fuck!” said Byron.

“Crap!” From Magnus.

Dagmar looked up.

“What’s up?”

“408 Request Timeout,” Richard said. “And I’m looking for a page I just uploaded onto a server I know is there.”

“Allah kahretsin s?u Interneti!” Lloyd snarled at his computer through half-clenched teeth.

“Download’s frozen,” Magnus said. He reached for his mouse. “I’ll cancel and restart.”

“And with me it’s an upload,” Byron said. “Motherfucker!”

“408 Request Timeout,” Magnus said.

“408,” said Helmuth. He looked up at Dagmar. “What’s next? 418 I’m a Teapot?”

Dagmar thought for a moment, then turned to Richard. “Are we being attacked?”

Richard considered the question, looked at his chronograph, then considered some more.

“Well,” he said. “They do know we’re here. But all the attacks so far have been on Web pages hosted by our proxy sites, and pretty much stopped there.” He reached for his phone. “I’ll call the base computer centre.” He pressed buttons on his phone, then stopped and looked at the display.

“Out of Area,” he reported in surprise.

“Use the ground line,” Dagmar said. She went to her own office, took her own phone from the desk, and tapped the screen to bring it to life.

Out of Area, she read. Plenty of juice in the battery, but no bars.

When she returned to the ops room, she saw everyone sitting very still and watching Richard as he listened on the ground line to someone at RAF Akrotiri’s computer centre.

“Right,” he said. “Thank you.”

Richard turned to Dagmar.

“They’re having router trouble,” he said. “It’s affecting the whole base.”

“Any time estimate,” Dagmar said, “for when they’ll have it up?”

“No.”

“Any idea of why cell phones are down?”

“He didn’t know they were down until I told him.”

The computer centre at Akrotiri was enormous. It shuffled vast quantities of electronic intelligence from the Middle East to GCHQ in Cheltenham, an installation that was sort of the Barclays Bank of ELINT. Dagmar wondered if she should send Richard down to help the computer centre diagnose its problems, then decided against it-there was no way Richard would have clearance to muck about with their routers. And then she noticed that Byron and Magnus were staring at each other, each with the same expression, stricken and yet glowing with a kind of awe.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Holy fuck,” Byron said.

Magnus turned to Dagmar.

“It’s the High Zap,” he said.