Deep State

ACT 3 CHAPTER TWELVE

It seemed visibly darker outside, as if a cloud had just smothered the sun. A flight of jets roared overhead, rattling the window in its pane and burying beneath its thunder the sound of ceiling fans and computer cooling systems. Dagmar’s heart churned in her chest, as if she were on the edge of panic. Suddenly she was probing the edges of her perceptions, looking for the clues that a burning Ford or a line of police or a horde of knife-wielding Indonesians was about to come storming through the doors of her consciousness.

Not now, she thought. She couldn’t have a flashback now.

She and Magnus and Byron stared at each other until the jet blast faded. Dagmar tried to regain control of her heart, her breath.

“High Zap,” she said, her mouth dry. “What’s that?”

Byron swallowed, suddenly nervous.

“We can’t tell you.”

Magnus inclined his head toward Lincoln’s office. “Ask Chatsworth,” he said.

Dagmar looked at Chatsworth’s office door, then realized there was something she had to do first.

“In a minute,” she said, and looked at the phone in her hand.

Out of Area, it said. She triggered the VoIP function and saw that it was down as well.

Dagmar enabled the sat phone function. Her nerves tautened as the word Connecting swam into sight on the display, repeating over and over again without any actual connection taking place, and then she almost sagged with relief as her handheld indicated that a signal had reached the satellite and been bounced back.

She walked around the room until she found an area with the strongest signal-sat phones didn’t work well indoors-and then thumbed in Rafet’s number in Ankara. Relief flooded her as the ring tone sang in her ear.

Lincoln had thoughtfully provided the Brigade with sat phones that could connect directly to the satellite, instead of having to go through a ground station at one end or the other.

Rafet answered on the second ring.

“This is Ankara,” he said, in English.

“This is Briana,” Dagmar said. “We’re having some trouble with communications here, and I thought I’d better alert you.”

“Here also,” Rafet said. “Our cell phones are out, and the government seems to have turned off the Internet.”

Dagmar’s head swam.

“That’s happening here as well,” she said.

“So the only way we can communicate is with the satellite phone?”

“Apparently.”

Or send a telegram, she thought. Or a carrier pigeon.

It was a little late in the game to equip every revolutionary with a satellite phone, and in any case she couldn’t afford it. Her plans were in serious trouble.

“Use this phone for primary communication till the Net comes back up,” Dagmar said. “Any word from the drones?”

“The drones haven’t finished their missions yet. But at least they’re still following orders.”

“That’s good news, at least.”

She ended the call and went to Lincoln’s office-knocked once and then opened the door. Lincoln sat at his desk and was staring at his phone while annoyance firmed his face.

“My phone’s stopped working,” he said. “Just as I was about to talk the mayor of Bodrum.”

“Cells and the Internet are down,” Dagmar said. “Byron and Magnus say it’s the High Zap.”

Lincoln’s mouth opened and the air came out of him in a soft sigh. He seemed to deflate, crumpling into himself like a pumpkin left too long on the shelf.

He was still looking at his phone. He put the phone on the desk and turned to Dagmar. His face was gray.

“Well,” he said. “That’s one we’ve lost.”

“Lost what?” Dagmar demanded. “Phones? The Internet?”

“The war.” Lincoln visibly pulled himself together, his shoulders rising, back growing straight. His hands wandered over his torso as if reassuring himself of his own continued existence. Then he turned to Dagmar, his blue eyes hard.

“Close the door,” he said.

Dagmar did so. She sat on one of the brown metal chairs. Lincoln adjusted himself in his Aeron and leaned toward her.

“Are satellite phones working?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“In that case I need you to call your company in California-we’ve got to see how widespread the damage is.”

A cold wind blew up Dagmar’s spine. This couldn’t be worldwide, she told herself.

She punched the number on her handheld. In the meantime Lincoln was launching his phone’s own satellite function.

In Simi Valley, Helmuth’s assistant Marcie answered the phone.

“Hi, Marcie, this is Dagmar. Any problem with the game?”

“Ah-” Marcie seemed surprised. “No, not that I’ve heard of.”

“Could you call up the Handelcorp Web page? Because I’m seeing some strange stuff, here.”

She heard fingers tapping a keyboard, followed by the slap of the Enter key.

“Everything looks good here,” Marcie said.

“You called it up from the Internet, not our own internal database?”

“Yes.”

“Check to see if the links are working.”

Marcie reported that everything seemed to be in order.

“No problem with the servers? The routers?”

“No. I’d hear the screaming if there were.”

“Right. Thanks. It just must be the local ISP that’s buggering up my signal.”

She pressed the End key and listened to the last few sentences of Lincoln’s conversation with whomever it was he’d called.

“You’ll have to do the checking yourself,” he said. “I’m not in a position to do anything, here.”

Lincoln ended his call and looked at her.

“Everything’s fine in Washington except the weather,” he said.

“Good,” she said.

“I should have realized the problem was local when you told me the satellites were still working.”

It can take out communications satellites? she thought.

Lincoln interlaced his fingers, making a single large fist. He placed the doubled fist on the desk before him and leaned toward her.

“The High Zap isn’t the real name,” he said. “But that’s what we’ll call it, okay?”

“Call what? What are we talking about, Lincoln?”

His lips thinned. His clenched fists thumped once, lightly, on the desk.

“It’s hard to know where to begin,” he said.

“The beginning usually works,” Dagmar said.

“Fine.” The fists thumped again on the desk.

“Back in ’91,” Lincoln said, “a U.S.-led coalition launched Operation Desert Storm to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait. The allied air forces very quickly achieved superiority in the air and began destroying ground targets virtually at will.

“Throughout the Middle East,” he went on, “a rumor spread that the Iraqi air defenses had been knocked out by a computer virus smuggled into an Iraqi defense facility in a printer. The program was supposed to be called ‘Devouring Windows.’ This rumor persists unto the present day.”

Dagmar mentally reviewed the state of cyber arts in 1991, a task made a little uncertain by the fact she’d been a child at the time.

“That couldn’t have happened,” she said. “Right?”

“No.” Lincoln was scornful. “The story originated as an April Fool joke in InfoWorld magazine. The reason Iraqi air defense sites went down is that we were burying them in cluster bombs.”

“That’s what I’d figure,” Dagmar said.

“So after the war was over, and the rumor started going around, people in Washington-and I was one of them-began to wonder, Well, why can’t we? We-the U.S. government, I mean-created the Internet; we should have the keys to take it down.”

He unclenched his hands and spread them flat on the desk. “It took twenty years and a lot of black ops dollars, but eventually we had the High Zap.” He looked around, at the invisible electronic networks that surrounded his cube of an office.

“Now,” he said. “We’re the High Zap’s prisoner.”

Dagmar considered this.

“How does it work?” she asked.

One hand twirled in the air, summoning up a memory.

“Remember back in the nineties, when people were talking about the ‘Java revolution’?”

“Vaguely.”

“Java creates a virtual machine inside the computer that can run programs of its own. The High Zap isn’t written in Java, but the program works the same way-it creates a very simple, very clean little engine inside a router, living between layers of the TCP/IP. When it’s activated, it refuses any packet that doesn’t have the right prefix. Communication is disabled. So communication is completely shut down until a preset time of deactivation has been reached, or until an order arrives that has the correct code prefix ordering it to quit.”

“And in the meantime,” Dagmar said, “the Internet works perfectly well for anyone with the right codes.”

“Correct.”

“How does the Zap get into the router?” Dagmar asked.

Lincoln narrowed his eyes. “That was another technical problem that took a lot of years to solve. Suffice it to say that it was solved, and that it’s now in every router made in the last six or seven years.”

Does it propagate like a virus? Dagmar wondered. But no-routers were different, had different doors into them, and in any case they were made to route information onward, not keep it in memory… But that meant the Zap had to be installed in them, at the factory, and that didn’t make sense, either, because routers were made in so many different countries by so many different companies.

“The Zap can be localized, as it seems to be here,” Lincoln was saying. “The command can be sent to a particular router, and then forwarded to any other router that responds to a ping in a time of a given fraction of a light-second. Of course, if the area is wide enough, it can go clear up to the Clarke Orbit.” He flapped a hand in the general direction of the satellite that had just carried their voices to North America.

“The moon is only-what?” Dagmar tried to remember the figure. “Half a light-second away?”

“Let’s just say the Zap has all the reach it needs,” Lincoln said.

Dagmar’s mind flailed like a drowning man through the sea of fresh information.

“The Zap takes down TCP/IP?” she said.

“Yes.”

“But cell phones don’t use TCP/IP, and they’re down.”

“Telephones use PSTN protocol,” Lincolon said. “But the controls for the telephone relays use TCP/IP-or they do unless they’re old-fashioned mechanical relays. So the Zap guarantees a slow degradation of phone service-the phones will be all right until you need to give them an order through TCP/IP, and then they start going mad, and then the network goes into a death spiral and crashes.” He gestured to his cell phone. “Apparently the local net ran into a whole complex series of problems and went down fast.”

“Jesus,” Dagmar muttered. “Is there more bad news?”

“Lots,” Lincoln said dryly. “TCP/IP is used by all modern military networks. All modern military satellites. All email. All social media. All local area networks. Voice over Internet. The entirety of the World Wide Web.”

An objection occurred to Dagmar.

“But this was designed to bring down military networks, right?” Dagmar said. “Aren’t they kept physically apart from other networks? How do you get to them?”

Lincoln raised an eyebrow. “In the event that we can’t bring down an enemy by preventing them from ordering online merchandise, sending text messages, and participating in flamewars, we can trash a military net provided we can gain access.”

“All it would take,” Dagmar said, “is a connection left open at the right moment. But you can’t count on that.”

“It could be engineered. Or…” He sucked in breath through clenched teeth. “Actually, that’s where our problems started. Because it wasn’t enough to own the Internet equivalent of an End of Times plague for the Internet, some of our politicians wanted to actually use it.”

“So Bozbeyli is just retaliating?” Dagmar asked. “Or-”

“It wasn’t used on Bozbeyli,” Lincoln said. “Back last spring, the Zap was used on our friends the Syrians-and for good reason, because they were continuing their never-ending quest for weapons of mass destruction. The Israelis wanted to stage an air raid on several sites simultaneously, and they wanted the Syrian air defenses down while they did it.”

“So you start with the rumor of a secret method for crashing an air defense network,” Dagmar said, “and then you end up with an actual secret method for crashing an air defense network.” She shook her head. “You people are too literal minded.”

Lincoln was grim. “I’m a little too close to the action to appreciate any irony, thanks.” He leaned back in his Aeron chair. Cold anger haunted his eyes. “I was against the action, quite frankly. I thought the Internet Apocalypse was too big a weapon to use against gnats-I argued that it needed to be held in reserve for a real emergency.”

“But you were overruled.”

Lincoln shrugged. “I can see their point,” he said. “It was in the best possible cause-and I supposed that, if we acted to confirm the 1991 rumor, it would only add to our mystical air of omnipotence.”

“But,” Dagmar pointed out, “to knock out the Syrian air defense, you still had to get into a military network, not just the Internet.”

“You are not cleared for knowing how we could do that,” Lincoln said. “But we could- provided that we made use of some highly advanced equipment available in a listening station in the mountains of southeastern Turkey-which itself exists only because the National Security Agency, which is normally tasked with electronic spying in that area, wouldn’t share their raw data with us, only their conclusions.” His face assumed the caste of indignation. “When we’d ask how they knew what they claimed to know, they’d just say they couldn’t give us that information. It was… vexing. So we got some black ops dollars and built our own station, and once we could fact-check them, the NSA grew a lot more tractable. But I digress…”

“Yeah,” Dagmar said. “Spare me your D.C. freakin’ turf wars.”

“Anyway,” Lincoln went on, “two technicians with training in the Zap took a copy of the command software to Turkey in a laptop. So that the secret would be safe in the event of the laptop going astray, the software itself was booby-trapped-it required a password within one minute of the laptop’s booting, or it would erase itself. The two techs were able to get into the Syrian defense net and bring it down for the one hour and ten minutes necessary to ensure the success of the Israeli strike.

“And then-just hours later-Bozbeyli took over Turkey. We didn’t want to send the laptop home through what might be civil disorder, so the laptop stayed on the mountain until Bozbeyli got worried that the listening station might be reporting his own phone calls, and sent in the military to shut it down.”

He spread his hands in a helpless gesture.

“There was a mix-up. Byron and Magnus got away, but the Turkish military got the laptop with the controls to the High Zap on it. And-as is now apparent-our safeguards failed, and the black hats have now broken into the program and figured out how to use it.”

Dagmar was waving her hands, trying frantically to stop the flow of words.

“Byron and Magnus?” she said. “Kilt Boy and Angry Man gave the Zap away?”

Lincoln pursed his lips in a gesture of deliberate patience. “Not gave,” he said.

“And you’re still employing them?”

“It wasn’t precisely their fault,” Lincoln said vaguely. “And they’re qualified for what they’re doing here. And they have first-hand experience with the Zap; we figured they’d have a better idea than most whether the Zap was being used and where, and what countermeasures might be taken.”

Dagmar gazed at Lincoln in weary amazement. She pictured Byron and Magnus high up on the curtain of mountains that rimmed Turkey on the east, bickering and snapping at each other.

At least there were no go-karts to crash up there.

“What did the Turks think of the kilt?” Dagmar asked.

“I’m sure they never saw it.” Lincoln flapped a hand. “Magnus would have been instructed to dress inconspicuously.”

Dagmar looked at Lincoln. Her fingers tightened on the arms of her chair as anger simmered in her consciousness.

“So,” she said, “this whole affair-bringing democracy and a legitimate government back to our allies the Turks-all that is just a way of getting the Zap back?”

Lincoln suddenly looked very tired. He waved a hand.

“Not just,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” Dagmar said.

He turned to her, his face open, his eyes wide.

“You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to,” he said, “but I really want this to work. I like the Turks; I want this region to have a functioning republic; I want the Turks to choose their own leaders. But my leaders… they approved this project because the government-in-exile agreed that the Zap would be returned when they came back to power.” He turned away, waved a hand again. “Maybe I’m just the perfect idiot for this operation.”

Dagmar shook her head. She felt as if her internal buffer had completely filled with unprocessed information and was unable to make headway on any of it.

She threw open her hands.

“What are we supposed to do now, Lincoln?” she asked. “I’m completely four-oh-four, here.”

Lincoln suddenly seemed very small. His voice seemed to come from far away.

“Defeat the Zap. Somehow.”

Suddenly her anger came to the boil. Judy and Tuna and a lot of Turkish citizens had died because Lincoln was hoping to beat the High Zap to the punch, and now he and they had lost… lost the whole war because it turned out the enemy had a trump card to play, the Internet equivalent of a thermonuclear bomb, and had possessed the trump all along, right from the beginning.

In rage Dagmar slapped both hands on Lincoln’s desk. The sound made them both jump.

“That’s it?” she demanded. “That’s your whole idea?”

He sat in his chair without moving. She could barely hear him as he spoke.

“It’s the only idea we’re left with.”

Her hand stung.

“Jesus Christ, Lincoln!” she said. “No wonder I’m going crazy!”

He gathered himself again, blue eyes glittering behind smoked lenses.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “But you can think of yourself as lucky. You can go back to your life when this is over, and create amusements that will thrill your audience of millions. I, on the other hand-” He bent to cough, the sound drawn far from his interior, like the rattle of a dying man. “I have to report to my superiors that every course of action I’d advocated was wrong, that the whole enterprise was a miserable failure and a waste of resources, and that I killed a lot of people for worse than nothing.” His voice turned savage. “This is my swan song, you know. My last roundup. I’d hoped to have a little success to console myself with in my wilderness years, but now I’ll have nothing to reflect on but the knowledge that I’m a useless failure.”

She rose from her chair, far too weary and burdened for sympathy.

“Yeah, you do that,” she said. “Meanwhile, I’ll try to think of some fucking useful thing to do to fight this plague.”

She opened the door, stepped into the ops room, closed the door behind her.

“Update?” she said.

“No change,” said Richard. He sat at his desk with a frustrated expression, his fingers tapping the arms of his chair, his Converse sneaks rapping the floor.

Impotence did not suit him.

Dagmar looked over what remained of the Lincoln Brigade, trapped here in this little pocket universe by the suddenly narrowed horizons of their own electronics: Helmuth and Richard, Ismet with his bruised face, Lola, the curly-haired Guardian Sphinx, securing the door, Lloyd on his way from the break room with a cup of coffee in his hand, Byron and Magnus gazing at her with insipid faces.

Those two, she thought, had started the whole project by losing the High Zap in the first place.

She thought of them running down the mountain ahead of Bozbeyli’s thugs, juggling the laptop and dropping it or forgetting it in a hotel room, or whatever they were supposed to have done, and then she realized that the more she considered it, the less she believed it.

Dagmar turned, opened the door, and went into Lincoln’s office again. He was still in his chair, turned away from her, frowning in silence at the wall.

“Byron and Magnus,” she said. “How’d they lose the Zap?”

Lincoln didn’t bother turning toward her.

“Like I said. A mix-up. They grabbed the wrong computer and left the laptop at the listening station, where the military found it.”

“And then what did they do?”

“They got away. In a car.” He looked up at her, puzzlement in his blue eyes.

“Why are you asking?”

“How long were they out of touch?”

“Twenty-four hours or so. They had to be careful. They were in Kurdish country and the military were all over the place.” He frowned. “But it doesn’t matter,” he said. “They left the computer behind, they didn’t lose it on the trip out.”

“What I’m trying to tell you,” Dagmar said, “is that it was Byron and Magnus who gave us to Bozbeyli. One or both of them, and I’m betting both.”

Lincoln’s blue eyes opened wide. He swung his chair toward her.

“How do you reckon that?”

“My guess is that when they were on their own, they ran into a roadblock and got arrested. I think they both spilled everything they knew, and that’s how the bad guys were able to beat the safeguards on the laptop. I also think they’ve been in touch with Turkish intelligence since.”

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.”

“But the radars could be controlled through TCP/IP,” Richard said. “The controllers might not be able to read their screens right now.”

Dagmar paused for a moment of horror at the thought of aircraft wandering lost across the skies.

Ismet walked to his desk and sat. He connected his satellite phone to his computer and tilted the phone antenna toward the windows so that it got better reception. As the discussion developed, Dagmar saw him leaning toward the screen, heard him tapping away on his keyboard

“Look,” Helmuth said. “Either we go back to Stone Age fossilware or we try to out-evolve the Zap. I say we go forward-there’s got to be a way to put a quick and dirty IP together that will keep this thing out.”

They discussed this for the next quarter hour and eventually decided that this wasn’t their best allocation of resources.

“There must be thousands of people in the Greater D.C. area working on this problem right now,” Dagmar said. “They’ll do that job much better than we can. We can’t save the Internet, not from here. What we need to do is save the revolution.”

The faces that turned to her were bleak.

“Look,” she said. “If we find a solution, it doesn’t need to be pretty. It just needs to work reasonably well most of the time.”

Lola rose from her desk and walked to stand in the doorway.

“There was an ARPANET back before there was TCI/IP,” she said. “It must have used a packet switching system. What was it?”

Dagmar reached for her sat phone, called up its browser, and called up Wikipedia.

“Network Control Program,” she said. “NCP. Last used in 1983.”

“Over thirty years ago,” Helmuth said. “There’s no hardware for it now.”

Lincoln returned to the ops center at sunset. He walked with a kind of plodding deliberation, as if he were carefully choosing exactly where to place his feet. When he came into the room, he sat on a corner of Byron’s desk and looked at the others.

“Byron and Magnus,” he said, “have confessed to informing the Turkish government of our projects and our whereabouts. They were responsible for Judy’s death.”

Helmuth and Richard looked at him in shock. “Why?” Richard demanded.

“We’re in the process of finding that out. Interrogations are proceeding.” He looked down at Dagmar. “Any developments here?”

Dagmar offered him a summary of their discussion.

“Oh lord,” he said. “Next you’ll be wanting to go back to DOS.”

“DOS?” Dagmar asked. “Which DOS?”

“MS-DOS,” Lincoln said. “Pre-Windows Microsoft operating system. There’s no TCP/IP stack in there anywhere.”

Dagmar’s first computer had run Windows, and MS-DOS was as foreign to her as, say, Plankalkul.

“So,” she said. “Why can’t we use it?”

“Because-” A slow light seemed to kindle in Lincoln’s eyes. “Because it’s awkward and horrible and slow and primitive. Because you’ll have to type orders onto a command line instead of just clicking on something. It’s not flexible and will only perform limited tasks. And you might end up trying to communicate over a 300bps acoustic coupler, assuming you could steal one from a museum.”

“And it bypasses the Zap, right?”

“Yes,” Lincoln said. “When you’re running DOS, you don’t even have an IP address.”

“And will it run on our computers?”

“I…” He hesitated. “I don’t know why not. You might have to do some special formatting or boot from disks.”

“We can create a virtual machine that runs DOS,” Richard said. “DOS will see the processor as an-” He looked at Lincoln. “Intel 8086?” he asked. “Eight-oh-eight-eight? Whatever.”

Dagmar turned to Helmuth and Richard. “See if you can download a copy over a cell modem. Set it up on a computer and see what we can do.”

“Modems are going to be a problem,” Lincoln said. “Modem command strings have evolved in the last few decades. I doubt that any of our modems will be able to communicate using DOS.”

“We’ll find some,” Dagmar said. “And when we find them online, there is UPS. There is FedEx. We will prevail.”

Richard looked with some amusement at his display.

“Did you know,” he said, “that there’s a Usenet topic called alt.comp.DOSRULES?”

“There’s still Usenet?” Lola asked. Lincoln looked at her.

“Sometimes,” he said, “people actually go online to exchange information, instead of to look stuff up, play games, or to advertise themselves.”

Lola took a step back.

“Okay,” she said.

“And furthermore,” Lincoln insisted, “Usenet isn’t a damned dinosaur; it’s extremely robust. It’s not on a single computer somewhere; it’s on millions of computers throughout the world. Just try knocking that out.”

“Okay!” Lola said, more brightly, and made a patting gesture, as if she were calming an agitated but senile patient.

Dagmar smiled. “Will I find posts from Chatsworth on Usenet?” she asked.

“May not be the same Chatsworth,” Lincoln said.

“Do you know what I’m picturing?” Dagmar asked. “I’m picturing old alt-dot-DOS geezer-geeks rocking on their front porches and stamping their canes and talking about the days when bulletin board systems roamed the world.”

She heard the room’s printer start, and then Ismet rose slowly to his feet and walked to where the printer sat on its table.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“Just taking care of business,” he said.

He took some papers out of the printer, then took scissors and carefully trimmed them. He limped to the wall beneath Ataturk’s portrait and picked up the hammer and tacks that waited there.

Below Ataturk’s blue-eyed glare, below the trophies from earlier demonstrations, Ismet nailed a pashmina scarf, a greeting card, and photographs of Judy and Tuna. Judy’s picture had been taken from her own Web site, and Tuna’s image had been pulled from one of the team’s unedited videos, and it showed him in Istanbul at the first demo, with a shopping bag and a bouquet of brilliant flowers.

Dagmar’s heart rose into her throat as she saw Ismet’s dogged act of devotion, as she saw the photos of the two lost members of the Lincoln Brigade. She remembered with a stab of guilt that she had planned a memorial for Judy and Tuna for that afternoon, but that the events of the day had been allowed to overtake it.

She rose from her chair.

“We’ll get on with our experiments in a minute,” she said. “But right now, I think we should take a few minutes to remember our lost friends.”