Deep State Read online

  A savage grimace crossed Chas’s face. Jerry shuddered in the cold.

  “Okay,” Chas said. “In that case, get on the E90 and head west till morning. Then buy a phone with prepaid minutes and make your call.”

  “Fine.”

  Jerry decided that he officially no longer gave a damn about his instructions. He just wanted to get out of the freaking cold.

  “I’ll open the gate and get the truck out of the way,” Chas said.

  “Fine.” Jerry’s teeth were chattering. “Bye.”

  He dropped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. The car wasn’t any warmer, but at least he was out of the wind.

  Jerry experimented with the VW’s dashboard controls while Chas got in the Mercedes truck and backed it out of their way. He put the car in gear and inched forward, then when Chas swung the gate open put the accelerator down. The tires spun on ice, then caught bare rock and hurled the car forward. The VW sped through the gate and began the long trip down the mountain.

  The road had been plowed after the last storm, but the wind was ever present and there were new drifts everywhere. The road surface was stone or gravel plated with ice. There were no guardrails, and a mistake would send them over a cliff, or into a stand of pine where they’d hang suspended until they starved or someone came and rescued them.

  The idiocy and danger of their situation drove Jerry into a fury. He attacked the mountain as if the Volkswagen were a tank rather than a reasonably priced coupé. Twice he skidded off the road and bounced the car off banks of snow piled up in corners by the snowplow. He smashed through drifts as if the car had a blade on the front. He cursed continually as he worked the stick shift, and in his terror and anger he forgot all about being cold.

  “Jesus, Jer!” Denny said. “Are you sure you know how to drive on ice?”

  “Better than you do, Florida Boy,” Jerry said.

  Denny’s weird shrunken monkey face contorted with fear. “I went to MIT!” he said. “It snows in Massachusetts! Maybe I better drive!”

  “You didn’t have a car when we were at MIT. You had a Schwinn. I remember.”

  “Fuck!” Denny shrieked as the wheels spun uselessly on ice and the car began a sideways drift toward yawning, empty space… and then one wheel hit some gravel, gained purchase on the road, and the car lurched back onto the correct trajectory.

  “Will you please take it easy?” Denny cried.

  “Shut the fuck up.” The drive was taking too much of Jerry’s concentration for him to deal with anyone’s fear but his own.

  The VW lurched and skidded its way down the mountain. Short of the T-intersections Jerry turned off the lights so that if the army was in the area, they wouldn’t see the VW turning off the road to the listening station.

  “What the—” Denny began.

  “Shut up.”

  Jerry pulled up to the intersection, the darkened car skidding the last few meters, and then turned left and pulled onto clean, dry, two-lane asphalt. Denny gave a cry of relief.

  “Look behind,” Jerry said. “See if they’re coming.”

  Denny turned to peer through the rear window. It took a moment for the banks of snow on the side of the road to open and give Denny a view of the mountain behind them.

  “Holy crap,” he said. “There they are!”

  “How many?”

  “Looks like four or five vehicles. Like a convoy. I can see their lights like a mile away.”

  Jerry backed off the accelerator and downshifted. He didn’t want to have to brake and give their position away with a flash of the brake lights.

  “Tell me what’s happening,” he said. The VW bounced over frost heaves.

  Denny rocked back and forth to keep the vehicles in sight. “I—I can’t see them,” he said. “Trees in the way.”

  “Keep looking.”

  The tires drummed through potholes as Jerry took the VW through an S curve, and then he ended up on a broad curve of mountain that provided a perfect view of the road behind them.

  “I see them!” Denny said. “They’re coming up to the intersection!”

  Jerry slowed again to let Denny keep the vehicles in sight.

  “They’re stopping! They’re turning! They’re heading up to the station!”

  Relief gushed out of Jerry’s throat in a long sigh. He accelerated and shifted into third and let a curve carry him out of sight of the vehicles behind. When Denny assured him that they were out of sight of the other vehicles, Jerry snapped on the lights and accelerated to eighty kilometers per hour, which was as fast as he was willing to go on a strange mountain at night.

  “That was close!” Denny said.

  “I don’t want you complaining about my driving again,” Jerry said.

  Denny took several long breaths, like a runner at the end of a sprint.

  “Can I turn down the heater? It’s really warm in here.”

  It wasn’t just warm now; it was hot. Jerry hadn’t noticed.

  “Sure,” he said.

  Jerry drove on another ten klicks and then saw the sign for the Monastery of Didymus Thomas. The monks, ethnic Kurds, were Assyrian Christians, a sect of which Jerry had been completely ignorant until he’d been driven past the monastery on his way up the mountain. The monastery was literally perched on a cliff face, the monks living in caves hollowed out of the mountainside. The only way out of the monastery was to be lowered to the ground in a huge basket.

  At the moment, presumably, the monks were all in their eyrie, shivering in their beds.

  Jerry downshifted and swung the car into the monks’ parking lot.

  “What’s the matter?” Denny said. “You want to change drivers?”

  “Get the laptop out of the trunk. I want to zero the hard drive.”

  Denny looked at him doubtfully.

  “We’re not supposed to do that,” he said.

  “Look,” Jerry said. “We’re going down into the Kurdish part of the country. There’s got to be a big Turkish military presence there, and I don’t even know if there’s a curfew or not. We’re very likely to get stopped, and I don’t want to get stopped with a software bomb in the trunk. We look suspicious enough as it is.”

  Denny thought about this for a moment and then nodded.

  “On your head be it,” he said, and opened his door.

  Thanks a lot, Jerry thought, and sprang the trunk latch.

  When Denny returned, Jerry saw the case and knew that they were totally fucked.

  Totally, he thought. Totally totally totally. Totally.

  Denny saw Jerry’s stricken expression. He looked at Jerry with his strange monkey face.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Jerry pointed at the case.

  “Dude,” he said. “That’s my Xbox.”

  ACT 1

  CHAPTER ONE

  FROM: LadyDayFan

  Hey! I have received word of a Facebook site featuring this coded message.

  Not to give it away or anything, but it looks like James Bond needs our help!

  FROM: Corporal Carrot

  The blond or one of the others?

  FROM: ReVerb

  George Lazenby could really use us!

  FROM: Vikram

  Why us? Is Q on vacation or something?

  FROM: LadyDayFan

  I have started the usual series of topics under the title From Isfahan, with Love.

  Newcomers to this forum should check out Tips for Beginners. I also recommend my latest guide on Netiquette, which might just stop some flamewars before they begin.

  FROM: HexenHase

  Excuse me, but I must have missed something. Why Isfahan?

  FROM: Corporal Carrot

  For the Isfahan thing, check out this link.

  FROM: HexenHase

  Oh. Sorry. Got it now.

  FROM: LadyDayFan

  If you’ll look here you’ll find a crossword puzzle, which seems to have been left behind by an enemy agent. Does anyone know a six-letter wor
d for “Meleagris covers mostly Anatolia”?

  FROM: Corporal Carrot

  TURKEY! We’re off again!

  CHAPTER TWO

  Primary Turns Solid Dangerously

  The explosion smelled of roses. The scent was strong enough to turn Dagmar’s stomach.

  It was a conflation of memory, she knew. It was only after the explosion that she’d smelled the roses in her car. But here the two memories were mashed together.

  It wasn’t one of the flashbacks, Dagmar thought. It was a dream. She knew it was a dream because she could take some measures to control it.

  She couldn’t alter the dream’s subject, that last explosion in LA. The green Ford parked with its view of the city, beyond it the webs of lights strung across the night, Century City a brilliant outpost in the darkness. Then the bubble of fire that exploded from the car, the light magnified a hundred times by gridded reflections on the glass-walled office building that stood over the parking lot. The clang as the car roof landed on the asphalt, followed shortly by the hood, and then the little sparkles as the incendiaries rained down like the remains of an Independence Day firework…

  The explosion repeated itself over and over—not with startling rapidity, as it had in real life, but in ultraslow motion, like in an action film. It was the fact of its being so much like a movie that helped convince Dagmar that this was a dream.

  Over and over again, the life in the car ended.

  She couldn’t manage to alter the event itself—she couldn’t make the pieces of the car fly back together, couldn’t restore her lover’s life—but she could act in other ways to make the dream harmless.

  Dagmar gave the image a sound track—Rossini’s overture to The Thieving Magpie. The music was filled with drama so overblown as to become comic, the tension undermined by the oboe and flutes chortling away in the background, parodied by a platoon of rapping snares… the humorous sounds helped to neutralize the horror of the image, introduce a farcical element.

  She distanced the image still further. She built a proscenium stage around the explosion, in hopes of reinforcing the idea that this wasn’t really happening, that it was just opera or melodrama or some kind of boring art film hoping to make its point by showing the same dumb thing happening over and over.

  She thought about pulling back the camera a little farther, showing the heads of the audience as they stared at the explosion, and at that point she woke up.

  She was in a hotel, and for a moment panic flooded her, and she thought she might be having a flashback for real.

  It wasn’t the hotel in Jakarta, she told herself. She wasn’t lying naked in the tropical heat, helpless amid a civilization that was coming apart, that was dying in riot and arson and looting.

  Dagmar was in the hotel room in Selçuk, and she had taken steps to make certain it was not and could never be the room in Jakarta. She’d turned the bed at a diagonal, instead of square to the wall as it had been in Jakarta, and she’d made sure the windows were to her right and not to the left, and therefore there was no reason, none whatsoever, to have a flashback at this time…

  She turned on the light. The room was not at all like the one in Jakarta, with its television and its minibar and its tropical heat. Instead she was in a boutique hotel with a view of the mosque and a tile mosaic of an old man gazing down at a group of turtles, some Turkish folk motif that she didn’t understand.

  This was not Jakarta. But the terror that was Jakarta was still somewhere in the back of her mind, threatening to break out, and that terror kept her awake, kept her sitting in bed with the light on until long after the muezzin called out the early morning prayer and light began to glint on the mosque dome and she heard the first sounds of traffic filling the streets.

  Saint Paul Railed Against Breastwork Here

  Dagmar watched as the gamers poured into the great stone theater. It was just after eight in the morning and the theater was still in the deep, long shadow of Mount Panayir; the air was cool and scented by the pines that lined the long walk from the entrance. Mourning doves called nearby; a stork clacked from the untidy nest it had built atop one of the stone arches.

  The usual crowds of visitors, reinforced by tourists bused in from cruise ships docking in Izmir, had not yet arrived—aside from the doves and the storks, the gamers had the place nearly to themselves.

  Cameras were held high overhead as they panned across the stone seats. Cameras in the hands of Dagmer’s employees gazed back—the whole event was being streamed live to players who couldn’t attend in person.

  The flood of gamers slowed to a trickle, and then Mehmet entered. Mehmet scanned the crowd till he saw Dagmar and then gave her a nod from under the brim of his ball cap.

  Dagmar gave him a half salute, raising two fingers to the brim of her panama hat. Then she stood and joined him in front of the worn pillars of the proscenium.

  The gamers occupied a small fraction of the twenty-five thousand stone seats that the Greeks and Romans had dug into the flank of the mountain. In this theater the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Plautus had been performed. Gladiators had fought and died here. The stage had been flooded for aquatic spectacles, perhaps miniature naval battles. Saint Paul had preached in this place, and been driven out by rioters calling on the name of holy Artemis.

  Even Elton John had performed in this place, Captain Fantastic himself, a concert broadcast to the whole world.

  The Theater of Ephesus had seen all this in the two thousand years of its history, and now it was going to see something new.

  “Günaydin!” she called, Turkish for “good morning.” “Can you hear me?”

  The theater’s superb acoustics echoed her own words back to her. She had more or less worked out she wouldn’t be needing the lapel mic she had pinned to her T-shirt, and she didn’t turn on the battery pack clipped to her waist.

  “On behalf of Universal Exports, Limited,” she said, “I would like to thank you for your help in assisting our salesman, Mr. Bond, escape from his troubles in Antalya. And I know you will join with me in sending condolences to the family of Semiramis Orga.”

  She signaled to Mehmet, and he translated the words into Turkish. Of the six or seven hundred gamers present, most were Turks, and most of these were new to alternate reality games.

  They were picking up the basics pretty quickly, though.

  “Unfortunately,” Dagmar continued, “we are still unable to locate Mr. Bond. We believe that he may be in this area, and one among you discovered what seems to be a crossword puzzle partly filled out in his hand. I have provided copies for each of you, and you’re each welcome to take one. The puzzle is called ‘Ephesus,’ and the answers seem to mostly involve this area. Perhaps the answers may help you determine Mr. Bond’s location.”

  While Mehmet translated this, Dagmar returned to her seat and a large wheeled cooler, which she pulled out along the front of the proscenium. She opened the cooler to reveal stacks of printed crossword puzzles. The clues were written in both Turkish and English, and the answers, most of which had to do with Ephesian history and with inscriptions on the monuments, would be the same in any language.

  She broke the stacks of puzzles into smaller stacks and distributed them between the many pillars of the proscenium. Then she invited the gamers to come down and each take one.

  Which they did. At great speed. And then, organizing into groups, they dispersed all over the ancient city with their cameras, their phones, their maps, their Baedekers, and their Lonely Planet guides. Dagmar’s camera crews followed them, eavesdropping on their conversations.

  The puzzle and the clues would be scanned and uploaded to networking sites so that people off-site could work on them. People would be calling up the Internet on their handhelds so that they could google answers to the clues. Turkish clues would be translated into English, and vice versa, in hopes of gaining additional insight. Pictures would be taken of inscriptions, and of maps, and of monuments, and then the players would share t
he pictures with one another, or upload them so that others might have a crack at deciphering any mysteries they might contain.

  And somehow, when all those pictures and clues and answers were jigsawed together, they would provide a form of aid to the world’s most famous fictional spy, who lurked somewhere in the landscape near Ephesus, just beyond your eyeblink, or humming somewhere in the electronic landscape, or in the stream of celluloid running before the great blazing unwinking eye, images focused on the blank white screen that might just exist solely in your mind…

  Type of Whiskey Minus Two

  Dagmar walked with Mehmet down the pine-shaded road that led to the entrance to the site. Behind her, gamers and cameramen were flooding over the ancient city like an invasion of driver ants.

  She had gotten her ass saved by James Bond four months earlier. She supposed that might make her a Bond girl—possibly, at thirty-three, the oldest ever.

  Six or seven years earlier, when her creative skills had been paired with her friend Charlie’s money, she had built her company, Great Big Idea, into a powerhouse in the world of alternate reality games, or ARGs. But then Charlie had died—been murdered, actually—and his various business interests had been “rationalized,” as the jargon had it, by his corporate heirs. Great Big Idea had been cut loose, left to fend for itself in a sea now swarming with other companies promising to deliver equally terrific cross-platform viral advertising.

  The company in fact did reasonably well most of the time, but there were times when Great Big Idea needed injections of cash to pay rent and make its payroll. In the past she could go to Charlie for a short-term loan from one of his other businesses, but now she had to establish relationships with financial institutions, like banks.

  Explaining an alternate reality game to a banker was a daunting experience. It’s an online game? Yes, except when it’s out in the real world. The real world? Yes, we send players all over the world on live events. And the players pay for this entertainment? No, we give it away free and charge sponsors for our services.