Inspiration struck Dagmar. She grinned.
“We’re calling it the Lincoln Brigade,” she said.
“As I understand it,” Dagmar said later as she stopped by Lincoln’s office, “the Gray Wolves are your people, right?”
Lincoln adjusted himself in his Aeron chair.
“Not anymore,” he said. “That was an arrangement between our grandfathers and their grandfathers.”
“But the Americans,” Dagmar persisted, “created them, right? Created the Deep State and Counter-Guerilla and Ergenekon and the Gray Wolves?”
She had made a point of doing her homework, looking up decades-old history on Web sites that glowed with speculation and paranoia, all of which suggested that Turkey had been run for seventy-odd years by a creepy little cabal of military men and politicians known euphemistically as the “Deep State.”
Lincoln seemed just a little bit sullen.
“Stalin shifted whole armies to the Turkish border in ’48,” he said. “He demanded that Turkey open the Bosporus. For all anyone knew, he was about to invade.” He shrugged. “So yes, we- our grandfathers-created a lot of things,” he said. “We created stay-behind organizations in every state in Europe, to lead the resistance in case the Russians marched in.”
“Gladio used Nazis,” said Dagmar.
“Not in Turkey,” Lincoln said. “No Nazis there. But yes, Gladio used lots of people. People who were willing to do things to communists, and not all these people were Gandhi.” His look was severe. “But let’s not forget that Stalin wasn’t Gandhi, either. He killed something like fifty million people, half of them his own citizens.”
“Granted,” Dagmar said.
Lincoln’s mouth narrowed into an angry line. “But what we didn’t do,” he said, “was tell the Deep State to take over the heroin traffic running through Asia Minor. And we didn’t tell them to start overthrowing democratic governments once the damn communists went away.”
“Without a Soviet invasion,” Dagmar said, “they were bound to get into mischief. My, uh, grandfather might have foreseen that.”
Lincoln’s expression was savage. “We need to get rid of those dinosaur generals. They’re a fucking embarrassment.”
“Kill the dinosaurs,” Dagmar said. “Check.”
Maybe she could embarrass them to death.
Dagmar had imagined clandestine agents inserted into Anatolia, then working under deep cover to build networks that would strike when the time was right. But Lincoln informed her that the networks already existed.
There were the networks of the political parties and their supporters, all of whom were out of power, out of work, and already organized. There were government workers, annoyed at interference from their new superiors. The religious who wanted to practice their faith free of government harassment. Members of the military and police who had been dismissed as politically unreliable. Students furious at restrictions on academic freedom and rejoicing in their own natural anarchy.
Members of the cultures, and subcultures, spawned by social networks such as Facebook, Ozone, and Taraa.
And there were the poor, especially the urban poor who squatted around the major cities in their improvised, ramshackle communities. The generals were busy placating-or threatening-the rich and powerful, whom they viewed as a greater threat to their legitimacy: they had no time or funds or inclination to raise the hopes of those living in poverty with anything except rhetoric.
All these networks already existed. All that was necessary was to mobilize them and to convince them that they could act with reasonable safety.
Even the poor, Dagmar was told, had cell phones.
The bus was back. The bus that the police had confiscated outside Izmir had been returned to Lincoln’s company once Stunrunner was over and it no longer mattered. The bus was so heavily customized that it would be difficult to sell, so Bear Cat had garaged it till now, when Lincoln was going to make use of it.
Right now the bus was across the Green Line in the Turkish part of Cyprus, following the unit’s three camera teams. The camera teams-all Turks-were making videos of towns and scenery, nothing remotely governmental, military, or classifiable, so as not to attract official interest… the bus captured the video, streamed it along the uplink to a satellite, and then down again to RAF Akrotiri, where it appeared on the Lincoln Brigade’s monitors. There the ops room team practiced storing the raw video, editing and manipulating the pictures, then uploading them to dummy, practice sites to which only they had access.
The satellite link with the camera teams was theoretically two-way, with the ops room able to ask the cameramen to give them specific shots. This was the element that caused the most trouble: an alarming percentage of the communications failed, mostly through human error.
Dagmar was supposed to be in charge, under Lincoln. She’d done this sort of thing before, at most of Great Big Idea’s live events, but in California she had a practiced, well-drilled team and they knew what videos to take without her telling them. Dagmar kept making the mistake of thinking her current team knew more about what they were doing than they actually did.
Part of the problem was the enormous variety in the hardware. There were covert cameras hidden in sunglasses or ordinary spectacles, complete with a laser heads-up display that would imprint incoming text messages right onto the retina. But these weren’t very flexible and didn’t record as many megapixels of reality as would sometimes be required, so the techs were required to get comfortable with other gear: small video cameras that would fit into the hand, cell phone cameras, large professional units capable of sucking up vast amounts of bandwidth.
The team was aided by what they were calling Hot Koans, their own pronunciation for Hot Xoan, the Vietnamese company that produced them. These were small, battery-powered wireless repeaters capable of spontaneously assembling into an ad hoc mesh network. Each of the repeaters, which came in a small, plastic box colored bubble-gum pink, had a range of a few hundred meters, and signal could be passed up and down the network to a receiver well out of sight of the camera, computer, or cell phone that had produced it. The repeaters would keep working as long as their battery lasted, which was around forty-eight hours.
Richard had found these and had ordered thousands of them. An area could be saturated with Hot Koans, providing massive redundancy to any communications and keeping the receiver well out of danger.
The Hot Koans-which turned out to have a much greater range than advertised-were about the only success on that first dreary day of training. The team was overwhelmed by all the new technology. By four in the afternoon Lincoln called it a day: “We’ll get more practice tomorrow.”
Dagmar was exhausted. She dropped into her chair, winced at the sudden pain in her lower back, and wished she’d had the foresight to buy herself an Aeron.
“I have a Hot Koan,” Richard said.
Dagmar turned to him. “Yes?”
Richard tented his fingers. “A player came to Dagmar and asked, ‘Does the ARG have Buddha nature?’
“Dagmar replied, ‘That would make a pretty good story.’
“Hearing this, the player was enlightened.”
Richard’s effort was well within a well-established tradition of creating enigmatic hacker koans that had to do with computers and computer people. Dagmar grinned, then winced at a stab of pain from her back.
Helmuth, however, seemed impervious to fatigue. He jumped up, turned to the room in general, and said, “Anyone for finding something to drink off base?”
Byron turned toward him, looking as if he was interested. Magnus stood, grinned, raised an arm.
“A drink sounds good,” Magnus said.
Byron hesitated, then frowned. “Too much jet lag,” he said.
Dagmar considered that Byron might have just had a narrow escape. Neither was quite aware of the hazards of a night out with Helmuth, of waking draped over some piece of furniture, a headache stabbing shivs into your eyes, your mouth tasting as if it had been used to put out cigars, the bathroom sink splashed with vomit, your cuffs spattered with someone else’s blood, and your underwear turned backward. At Great Big Idea this was known as “being Hellmouthed.”