The first amateur videos being uploaded, however, seemed to be from some other place altogether. These featured men in shades and galabia and white keffiyehs, who carried flowers and paperback books and waved signs in Arabic. They marched down a wide boulevard past white-walled stucco buildings. Palm trees waved on the horizon.
“What the hell?” Helmuth demanded.
The video was put up on one of the big wall screens. Dagmar studied it.
“No one here reads Arabic, right?”
“A little,” said Ismet. “But they’re not really showing us the signs; the writing isn’t big enough.” He squinted at the signs. “It’s very idiomatic. I doubt I can make much sense of it.”
“The point is,” Dagmar said, “this isn’t anywhere in Turkey, right? Not even in the far southeast, where there are lots of Arabs?”
Ismet shook his head. “The Gulf States, maybe? Yemen?”
The Arab men reached a park featuring a geodesic-looking jungle gym. Glittering glass buildings shimmered on the horizon. Mercedes and BMWs prowled past the camera. The men began to create designs with their books and flowers.
“Qatar?” Lloyd wondered. “Bahrain?”
“What is going on over there?” Richard wondered aloud.
Helmuth slapped his hand to his forehead. “Fuck,” said Helmuth. “It’s revolution creep.” He was utterly disgusted.
Dagmar looked at him, mouth open.
“Revolution creep,” she said. “That’s it.”
The software business had always been prone to what was called scope creep or feature creep, in which shiny, attractive, but poorly conceived new features were added to projects that had already been approved, usually without any changes in budgets or deadlines. The result would be a large, unwieldy, badly functioning piece of bloatware, a prime example being Windows Vista, which jammed together the features of two separate projects, Longhorn and Blackcomb, then jettisoned the original source code to produce a program that glittered with surface appeal but operated with less efficiency than its predecessor. Vista’s problems were eventually fixed, but the damage to Microsoft’s reputation had been done.
In Dagmar’s business, scope creep was a deadly danger. Plots could have so many elements and dimensions that they would run completely out of control. So could the software projects, and the video and audio. Half the anxiety of her job was making sure her projects were streamlined enough to be online by the deadline.
Richard looked at Helmuth.
“They’re using our tactics,” he said. “But it doesn’t have anything to do with us.”
“Yes,” Dagmar said. “We sent the meme out into the world, and now anyone can use it.” And then she studied the men putting down books on the ground, setting them in patterns that might be Arabic writing.
“I wonder if it’s Kronsteen,” she said.
Ismet looked up at her. Dagmar explained.
“We’ll know if it’s Kronsteen behind it,” Ismet said, “if there are a lot more demos like this in different parts of the world. Because then he’ll be trying to trivialize the whole process, show it’s just a game that people are playing.”
“Yeah,” Richard said. “If people are suddenly using these techniques to protest the appointment of a dogcatcher in Aswa-n, then it’s Kronsteen behind it.”
Kronsteen’s work was revealed later in the day, when Turkish television released an interview with an imam who had allegedly defected from the Tek Organization. He proclaimed that Riza Tek’s goal was to restore the caliphate and establish sharia law in Turkey and that Tek’s money was behind the rebellion.
“Now we’re a Scots rock star, Kurdish rebels, and religious zealots,” Dagmar said.
“We contain multitudes,” Richard said. Dagmar looked at him in surprise. She hadn’t reckoned him as the sort of person who would know Whitman.
She turned to Ismet. “Estragon,” she said, “can you write an editorial pointing out the insanity of all these competing claims?”
“The nationalists aren’t going to see contradictions in this,” Lloyd said. “They’re going to see conspiracy.”
“Well,” Dagmar said. “Then let’s give them one.”
They began the editing and uploading of the various videos. Ismet wrote an editorial denouncing the imam and pointed out that his own government said that the rebels were working for a Scotsman.
Lincoln had been away for most of the day. As evening came on, he arrived and called Dagmar into his office. He held out a sheet of paper.
“I’ve been on the phone with the team in the States working on the High Zap. Turns out they have a clue as to the team-or more likely the individual-who reverse-engineered the High Zap.”
“They recognized the way he codes?”
Lincoln looked disgusted. “They haven’t managed to decompile the Turkish version yet. Whatever algorithm the guy used was elaborate beyond description.” He looked at Dagmar. “He signed it after he compiled it-they must have let him compile it himself.” He looked skeptical. “Problematic from the security point of view.”
“Maybe they were in a hurry.”
“Anyway.” He opened his briefcase and took out a single sheet of paper. “He signed it with his handle, but we don’t know who the handle belongs to. He calls himself ‘Slash Berzerker.’ ”
He put the paper on the table and turned it so that Dagmar could read it.
“Slash Berzerker?” Dagmar said. “What is he, fourteen?” She looked at the paper and checked the spelling. “Fourteen,” she said, “and a bad speller?”
Lincoln only shrugged, then retrieved the paper.
“Are you going to burn that?” Dagmar asked.
“If you want me to.”
“I’ve never seen a spy burn an important paper before.”
Lincoln shrugged again. “Whatever lifts your luggage.”
He crumpled the paper, then looked around the room.
“I don’t have an ashtray,” he said.
She grinned. “You could swallow it.”
Lincoln put the crumped paper on top of his safe, rummaged in his desk for a disposable lighter, and then set fire to the paper. It burned into a gray ash, and the smell of burning began to fill the office. Lincoln batted at the air to disperse the smoke.
“The things I do for people,” he muttered. “Are you satisfied now?”
“Yeah.” Dagmar rose from her chair. “Because I know exactly how I’m going to find Mr. Berzerker.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
FROM: Hastur
Mad kung fu proxy for Turkey peoples.
82.215.28.123
Ports 39000-39013
Dagmar sat on her couch, gin and tonic in her hand. Her feet were raised on a pillow, her toes waving at her. She could feel little molecules of alcohol traveling through her body, each going about its happy business of unknitting a ravel’d sleave of care. Or two.
Her phone was pressed to her ear, and California was on the other end of the connection.
“All right,” Dagmar said. “You’ve got Murchison’s henchman, right?”
“Yes,” Calvin said. “Brickman. He’s going to steal Harry’s identity and commit enough fraud to get the police after Harry.”
“Okay,” Dagmar said. “I want you to give Brickman an online handle, okay?”
Calvin was bewildered.
“Why? He doesn’t need one.”
“Write this down,” Dagmar said. “His handle is going to be ‘Slash Berzerker.’ That’s Berzerker with a z.”
“Slash Berzerker?” The words were interrupted by little half breaths as Calvin bent to scrawl the name on a pad.
“You got that? Two words, Berzerker with a z.”
Dagmar heard the tinkling noise of Calvin putting down his pencil.
“Dagmar,” he said. “Brickman wouldn’t use a handle like Slash Berzerker. He’s a total professional; he’s been pirating identities for years. He wouldn’t use a noob-sounding name like that.”