Daemon

Chapter 34://Sacculina

“What the hell is going on with these numbers, people?” Russell Vanowen, Jr., looked up from the P&Ls in his executive financial summary. He frowned down the burled walnut table running the length of his paneled corporate boardroom. The familiar faces of two dozen Leland board members and senior executives stared back. The faces were all the more familiar because he served on their boards, too. “I’ve got seven divisions running over budget, with only IT on target. What the hell is going on here? Why didn’t I receive any guidance on this?”

Harris Brieknewcz, the CFO, shook his head slowly. “Russ, let me stop you right there. These numbers are wrong.”

“Wrong? How are they wrong?”

“Wrong as in not right. Look…” He slid an open binder across the table. Other execs passed it on to Vanowen. “This is what we’re getting from our off-line systems.”

“What the hell, Harris—you mean spreadsheets? You’re passing me spreadsheets? Why did I spend fifty million dollars on a real-time enterprise accounting system if we can just use spreadsheets?”

“The accounting system is wrong. Things are being assigned to the wrong cost centers.”

“Forget cost centers—we’re sixty million dollars over budget this month. It doesn’t matter how you move the shells around. You’ll still have the same number of shells.”

“Yes, but the numbers aren’t being assigned to the correct cost centers—”

“Well, then your people are screwing up the entries—”

“They’re not screwing up the data entry, Russ. We’re not sixty million dollars off the mark this month from keying errors. I had my people start recording these problems because—”

“Why is this the first I’ve heard about it?”

Brieknewcz stopped, girded himself, then continued. “You haven’t heard about it because Lindhurst told me they’d fix it. It’s under his purview, not mine. IT runs the accounting system.”

Milton Hewitt, the executive VP of the brokerage division, leaned forward. “He’s right, Russ. Our cost centers are under budget this period, and we exceeded our revenue targets. But these reports coming out of the accounting system are all screwed up.”

Several others voiced their agreement.

Vanowen threw up his hands. “Jesus H. fucking Christ…” He looked around. “Lindhurst! Where’s Lindhurst?”

Everyone glanced around theatrically. They knew he wasn’t present. Again.

Vanowen dropped his leather folio onto the table with a bang. “Goddamnit! Janice!”

The disembodied voice of Vanowen’s secretary carried over from somewhere among the chairs lining the wall. “Yes, Russ.”

“Is Lindhurst in today? Has he been reminded of this meeting? The monthly board meeting?”

“I checked his calendar. He should be in. I phoned him this morning.”

“And what did he say?”

“Voice mail. I left three messages. And I e-mailed him.”

“Goddamnit! Did you call his cell phone?”

“Voice mail. Voice mail on his home and car phones, too.”

Chris Hempers, the COO, raised a finger to call attention to himself. “I flew to the trade summit in Montreal with him yesterday.”

“He left town with this going on? Is he back in the office?”

Hempers nodded. “We took one of the Gulfstreams—Ludivic, Ryans, Lindhurst, and I.”

Several voices said simultaneously, “He’s here.”

They smelled blood—a career being cut short—and the possibility of a high-level opening for a friend or relation.

Vanowen was building a head of steam—for which he was justifiably famous. “Well, now I know why he doesn’t want to be here. His folks have screwed up the accounting system, and they hid the problems from me. I hope Lindhurst has a drug problem, because that’s about the only thing that would explain this. Janice, get him on this phone right now.” He pointed to the cutting-edge speakerphone in the center of the tabletop.

“I just tried his line again, Russ. Voice mail.”

“Goddamnit!” Vanowen glanced around. “Board members, please carry on with the agenda. Ryans, you preside. I’m going to retrieve our Mr. Lindhurst, and we’ll get to the bottom of this right now.”

Like most companies, Leland Equity Group maintained a data center where no window offices would be lost—in the basement. Thus, Leland’s fifty-story office tower had several temperature-controlled subbasements linked directly into the fiber optic network running beneath the streets of downtown Chicago. From the subbasement the IT department’s tendrils spread to every corner of the building, snaking up all fifty floors through trunk lines that fanned out on each floor to tap every employee individually.

As Vanowen took the separate bank of elevators leading into the basement, he realized how like the Sacculina parasite the IT department was. And lately it had been growing. Without authorization.

Lindhurst said he’d taken care of this.

Months ago, Lindhurst had moved from his corner office on the forty-ninth floor into the windowless bowels of the building. It was an unprecedented gesture of hands-on management. To Vanowen’s delight, Lindhurst presided over a two-month bloodbath of IT layoffs. Purging the department of “questionable individuals,” cleansing the global organization, and hiring new people who had no doubt where their loyalties should lie. And Leland Equity not only remained, it thrived like never before. The would-be Daemon was stopped—Lindhurst had succeeded, and not a word about their little “difficulty” had made it into the press. The problem was gone.

But now something frightening was happening. The accounting system was wrong. They were a private equity house, for chrissakes. They had to know how to add and subtract numbers.

Vanowen was starting to wonder whether Lindhurst had manufactured this whole threat. Was he that ambitious? Was he that clever?

No way.

Lindhurst certainly had his little fiefdom locked down tight now. Even Vanowen had to order lobby security to enter a code into the keypad in the elevators to get them to move down into the subbasement. The place was like a missile silo. Perhaps Lindhurst was getting too distant from upper management. Perhaps it was time to pull him back into the executive suite. Or to fire him. Vanowen pondered this as the elevator doors opened onto a long, featureless white hallway on level B-2. Uncharacteristically, the hall ran straight ahead, no right or left. Vanowen had never been down here. The corridor stretched for what looked like a hundred feet or more. It had the plastic smell of new construction. Not a sign, a receptionist desk, or anything. He hesitated a moment.

But Vanowen still felt a bit of anger, so he strode out and down the hall, his expensive shoes clacking on the black tile floor.

What the hell kind of place is this?

He tried to recall any descriptions of the IT department by other executives, but came up empty. He kept clicking down the interminable hallway. There were no doors. He squinted ahead, but the hallway somehow seemed to disappear in a dim blackness. Surely he should be able to see the end of it.

He glanced back at the elevator door. It was nearly a hundred feet back. Could they have mistakenly sent him to the storage floor?

He turned front again and peered into the distance. Damnedest thing.

Then something impossible happened. A female voice spoke to him from the air six inches in front of his face. “Why have you come here?”

Vanowen jumped back three feet and nearly fell on his ass. His gasp echoed down the hallway in both directions. He took a moment to catch his breath. He held his chest, still gasping for air. Was he having a coronary?

The voice spoke again, from that spot in midair. “You were commanded to stay out of this place.”

It was like a ghost. But it was a computer voice, wasn’t it? He could just get a hint of artificiality in it. British. Leland had a sophisticated voice response system on their customer service phone lines. Lindhurst had demonstrated it to the board last year. It reduced call center costs by 90 percent—it was cheaper than India. But it didn’t speak in midair.

This was just a trick.

Vanowen was getting his wits back. And his anger. This prank was way out of line. “Lindhurst! Get me Lindhurst, goddamnit!” Vanowen’s voice echoed. “I will not be treated this way!”

“QUIET!” The word was so loud it ripped the fabric of the air around him. It was a physical presence that bowled him over and sent him sprawling backward, where he lay in the hallway, dazed. His ears were ringing. His eyes watering. It was possibly the loudest sound he’d ever experienced.

He felt a trickle running from his right nostril, and he dabbed a hand up—coming back with blood. “Jesus…” He pulled a silk handkerchief from his pocket and held it to his face. His hands were trembling uncontrollably.

It quickly swelled to panic. He crawled on his hands and knees, then got to his feet and started running back the way he came. He hadn’t actually run in years, but adrenaline carried him the hundred feet back to the elevator. He arrived panting and nearly hysterical.

But there was no button. The elevator doors were like brushed steel gates. This was impossible. There was no call button. How could there be no button?

The Voice was right beside his ear, as if he hadn’t moved. He could feel the air vibrating. “Your company belongs to me now. Your divisions will obey their new budgets. If any division heads object, send them to me.”

Vanowen’s hands were still trembling. It was Lindhurst. Lindhurst was…or someone was behind this. It was extortion. This was a scare tactic.

“Of course, you doubt that I am real. You doubt that I am Sobol’s Daemon, and you doubt that my power spans the globe. I will prove to you the extent of my reach.” There was a pause. “I just caused you millions of dollars in personal losses. Losses across your portfolio and unrelated to this company. You will either learn from this event, or I will seize your personal wealth and eject you from this company. I will be watching you. Do you understand this final warning?”

Vanowen stared at the air, still trembling. Waiting for it to end.

“DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” He was covering his ears and face with the handkerchief—practically weeping.

The elevator doors suddenly opened, and Vanowen fell inside. He scrambled on his hands and knees and curled up in the farthest corner.

The Voice spoke again, but from the hallway, as if it were standing there, seeing him off. “If you fight me, I will only hurt you more.”

With that, the elevator doors slammed together with frightful force. The car began to ascend.

Vanowen sat there shaking, blood running down his face.

Vanowen spent the remainder of the afternoon in a daze in his corner office, receiving a parade of phone calls from his attorneys and brokers. Millions of dollars had disappeared from his dozens of brokerage and bank accounts. More worrisome were the missing funds in the half-dozen offshore holding companies and the two dozen limited partnerships in which he held assets—some of which were secret even to his wife, much less people at Leland. All told, almost 10 percent of his wealth had disappeared in the blink of an eye. He had just lost eighty million dollars at separate institutions—some of which he held under assumed names.

As he sat there, still shaking, he suddenly realized the enormity of the monster that had just brushed past him. It was colossally huge. And as powerful as he had always felt, he felt insignificant before it.

He was now an employee of Daemon Industries LLC.

Chapter 35:// Cruel Calculus

Ops Center 1 was the National Security Agency’s mission control room. Dozens of plasma screens lined its walls, displaying real-time data from around the world in vibrant colors and vector graphics. There were color-coded diagrams of telecom, satellite, and Internet traffic. Other screens displayed current satellite coverage zones and still others showed the status of seabed acoustic sensors, missile launch monitors, the location of radar, radio, seismic, and microwave listening posts. The moderately sized room had a central control board, but individual workstations were arrayed around it in aisles. Each was manned by a specialist case officer: Latin America, the Middle East, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, the Drug Interdiction Task Force, and on and on.

Uniformed military personnel dominated the space. They were relatively young people for the most part, not the seasoned analysts who developed strategy but the younger officers who worked in the world of operations, monitoring the data feeds. They were the nerve endings of the United States.

They were especially keyed up as they watched the large central screen and its digital world map. Hundreds of red dots on that map were scattered throughout North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. And in this business, red dots meant trouble.

Dr. Natalie Philips stood behind the central control board operator. A three-star general and the NSA’s deputy director, Chris Fulbright, stood alongside her. Fulbright had the earnest, soft-spoken manner of a high school guidance counselor, but his mild demeanor masked a steely-eyed pragmatism. Philips knew that mild-mannered people did not rise to Mahogany Row.

She gestured to the digital map filling the screen. “Approximately thirty-eight hundred corporate networks in sixteen countries have been hijacked by an unknown entity—and these are just the ones we know about. We have good reason to believe the entity is Sobol’s Daemon.”

The general stared at the screen. “Sergeant, notify the Joint Chiefs; inform them that we are under attack.”

The board operator looked up. “Already taken care of, sir.”

The general looked to Philips again. “Where are the attacks coming from?”

Philips stared at the world map. “You mean where did they come from, General. The battle is long over.”

“What the hell is she talking about?”

Deputy Director Fulbright interceded. “She means these networks were compromised some time ago. We’re only learning about it just now.”

The general’s nostrils flared. He looked darkly at Philips. “How is it possible no one noticed these networks go down?”

“Because they didn’t go down. They’re still operating normally.”

The general looked confused.

Philips explained. “Someone took them over, and they’re running them as if they own them.”

The general gestured to the screens. “Why wasn’t this detected? Our systems should have sounded the alarm the moment anomalous IP traffic patterns occurred. Isn’t that what the neural logic farm is for?”

Philips was calm. “It wasn’t detected, General, because there were no anomalous traffic patterns to detect. The Daemon is not an Internet worm or a network exploit. It doesn’t hack systems. It hacks society.”

The general looked again to Fulbright.

Fulbright obliged. “Dr. Philips discovered the back door in Sobol’s video games some months ago. One that allowed users to enter secret maps and be exposed to the Daemon’s recruitment efforts.”

The general nodded impatiently. “So the Daemon recruited people to compromise these corporate networks on its behalf?”

“Yes. We believe it coordinated the activities of thousands of people who had no individual knowledge of each other.”

“The Daemon Task Force was supposed to detect and infiltrate these terror cells.”

Philips regarded the general with deliberate patience. “Our monitoring resulted in several dozen arrests, but the Daemon network is massively parallel—no one person or event is critical to its survival. It has no ringleaders and no central point of failure. And no central repository of logic. None of the Daemon’s agents knows anything more than a few seconds in advance, so informants have been useless. It also seems highly adept at detecting monitoring.”

“Forget arrests. What about infiltration?”

“We’ve been working with the interagency Task Force, but progress has been slow. My people are not undercover operatives—they know far too many national secrets to be put at risk of capture—and the operatives who’ve been brought forward from Langley and Quantico are not expert enough in the lingo and culture of computer gaming—or cryptography and IP network architecture for that matter. A third of them are evangelicals with little or no experience in online gaming. Developing their skills will take time. We’re painfully short of suitable recruits.”

The general pounded his hand on a chair back in frustration. “Goddamnit, this thing is running circles around us.” He looked to Philips again. “How does recruiting kids through video games translate into taking over corporate networks?”

Philips was looking at the big screen. “Because it didn’t recruit kids. Have a look at the demographics of video game sales. The biggest market segment is young men aged eighteen to twenty-eight.”

Fulbright nodded. “IT workers.”

“Maybe.” She turned to them both. “It could be any mid-to low-level employee. Not necessarily an IT staffer. Their efforts would be augmented by a massively parallel cyber organism that coordinates the efforts of thousands of other people—and it can pay.”

The general tried to wrap his head around it. “But why would employees want to destroy their own company? It doesn’t make sense.”

“There are always disgruntled or greedy people. The Daemon most likely deals them in.”

The general had murder in his eyes. “These terrorists need to be found and shot.”

“Careful. The Daemon has already destroyed two dozen companies that disobeyed its instructions. Among the currently infected are several multibillion-dollar corporations, representing a cross section of strategic industries—energy, finance, high-tech, biotech, media, manufacturing, food, transportation. The targets were obviously selected to maximize economic and social disruption in the event of their collapse.”

The general was starting to see the big picture. “This is no different from a strategic bombing campaign. This Daemon could gut the global economy. What are our options?”

She sighed. “Before we knew the extent of the infection, we attempted to penetrate a couple of compromised networks. But our intrusion attempts were detected and the target networks—and thus, the companies themselves—were destroyed by the Daemon in retribution.

“Wiretaps and surveillance of individual employees by the FBI resulted in similar retribution. Apparently, the Daemon does not hesitate to destroy the companies it has taken hostage. Further infiltration attempts have been put on hold until new strategies can be developed.”

“Doctor, I repeat: what are our options?”

Philips paused. “Right now we have only one: inform the public. Tell them what’s happening.”

“That’s crazy talk. The stock market would crash.”

Fulbright pointed them to a side conference room and spoke softly. “Please, let’s continue this discussion behind closed doors. Everyone here may be cleared top-secret, but they all have retirement funds.”

They entered a small conference room, and the deputy director closed the door behind them.

The general glared at Philips. “Doctor, what would informing the public accomplish other than to destroy the 401(k)s of millions of taxpayers?”

“Right now Sobol has you exactly where he wants you. His Daemon can prey upon millions of unsuspecting people because we haven’t warned anyone. At some point the Daemon is going to show itself—and we’ll lose all credibility with the public. Look, announce its existence before you’re forced to, and we’ll have billions of allies to help us destroy it.”

Fulbright shook his head. “It’s not that simple, Doctor. A news headline announcing that the Daemon exists might trigger a Daemon event—possibly the deletion of all data in these compromised networks. It could cause financial Armageddon. It could cripple the world economy and lead to widespread conflict—even thermonuclear war. We can’t risk that possibility.”

Philips didn’t blink. “That’s an extreme conclusion.”

“Extreme conclusions are what I’m paid to come to.”

“Do you ever plan on telling the public?”

“We’ll inform them after we’ve developed a countermeasure.”

“But that might be never.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Sir?”

“Yes, Doctor?”

“If you don’t intend to announce the existence of the Daemon, then I hope you’re planning to intervene on behalf of Peter Sebeck.”

The general looked to her. “The cop on death row?”

“His appeals are moving through the federal courts unusually fast. He’s scheduled to die by lethal injection.”

Fulbright didn’t respond immediately. “I’ll take that under advisement, Doctor.”

“You could fake his execution—”

“This might seem harsh, but Peter Sebeck must suffer the full penalty demanded by law—and the sooner the better. Faking his execution would risk tipping our hand to the Daemon.”

“Sir, please—”

“Philips, you yourself said that the Daemon has operatives in thousands of organizations. It could also have operatives in the penal system or law enforcement. So we must take the safe course. Sebeck is a casualty of this war, Doctor. You must put him out of your mind and concentrate on saving the lives and property of millions more Americans.”

Philips stared at him for a moment. “But surely we—”

“There is no ‘but,’ Doctor. Please focus on your work.”

She was about to speak again when the general leaned in.

“Any word from Jon Ross?”

Philips was still distracted but collected herself. “Not recently.”

The general nodded. “There’s a hacker we need in custody ASAP. All these hackers should be rounded up and shot.”

She eyed the general. “I’m a hacker, General, and if it weren’t for people like Jon Ross, we’d be in far worse shape than we are now.”

Fulbright kept his eyes on her. “Find him. We need him on the Joint Task Force. Tell him we’ll offer amnesty and U.S. citizenship, if you think it will matter. Just get him here. In the meantime, I need you and your people focused and working to find a way to stop this thing. Is that clear?”

She did not respond with enthusiasm. “Yes, sir.”

Fulbright didn’t relent. “Are we clear on this?”

“Sir, I—”

“You are a perceptive woman, Natalie. You, of all people, should be able to do the math on this. If we risk the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people to save the life of a single man, we’ll be guilty of a heinous crime. Do you see the truth of this?”

She nodded after a moment.

“Now perhaps you can gain some appreciation for the cruel calculus I’m forced to use every day.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “Your heart is in the right place. There’s nothing wrong with that. But keep a sense of perspective. Ask yourself how many children you’d be willing to sacrifice so that Detective Sebeck can live.”

Philips realized he was right.

The general cleared his throat. “I need to report back to the Pentagon.”

Philips turned to the deputy director. He nodded. She called after the general. “There’s more, sir.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“I detected something unusual emanating from the networks of Daemon-infected companies. It’s a pulse—an IP beacon of sorts. The tech industry calls these ‘heartbeats.’ This one consists of a lengthy burst of packets issuing from TCP port 135 at a predictable interval and bit length. Once we noticed the beacon was present at infected companies, we started looking for it elsewhere on the Internet. We found it echoing all over. That’s how we estimate that thirty-eight hundred corporations have been compromised. Some of those companies might not even know they’re infected yet.”

The general was nonplussed. “What’s the purpose of this ‘IP beacon’?”

“That was the question. We first thought it might be a signal to indicate a company was a Daemon host. But then the signal wouldn’t need to be so long—and each burst is a pretty long stream of data. It’s always identical for a single company, but never the same between two different companies. And all companies project it in a sequence—like a chain. A pulse from Company A is sent to Company B, then from Company B to Company C, and so on until we start back at Company A again. Stranger still, when our infiltration attempt caused one company to be destroyed, another beacon appeared at a new company to take its place, and it exactly matched the beacon that was lost.”

She paused. “That’s when I first suspected this was a multipart message.”

“The companies are communicating with each other?”

“No. They’re communicating to us.”

The general weighed what that meant. He regarded Philips with something akin to dread. “What are they saying?”

“The message was encoded with a 128-bit block cipher. It took us weeks to decrypt—and that was on Cold Iron. The good news is that, besides the Japanese and maybe the Chinese, it will take other nations years to decrypt, so we’re convinced that Sobol intended it for us. When we assembled the constituent pieces from all the beacons at all the companies, we discovered a single, very large GNU compressed file. When we extracted the package contents, we found two things: an API and an MPEG video file.”

“What’s an API?”

“It’s an application programming interface—rules for controlling a process. It’s basically a guide for communicating with—and possibly controlling—the Daemon.”

“Good lord! Why would Sobol give us that?”

“I think it’s a trap, sir.”

“What sort of control is it saying it will give us?”

“We’ve only begun our analysis, but the most significant function we’ve discovered is in the Daemon’s Ragnorok class library. It’s a function named Destroy. It accepts a country code and a tax ID as arguments. We believe that invoking it destroys all the data in the target company.”

The general thought about this. “My God…why would he give that to us?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“You said there was a video. What did the video contain?”

Philips took a deep breath. “Something you need to carry up the chain of command.”

In the boardroom of building OPS-2B, the group of agency directors sat arrayed around a broad mahogany conference table. The tension was thick as ominous looks passed from one director to the next. Their host opened the emergency meeting.

NSA: “Gentlemen, you are all aware of the gravity of the current situation. I’ve brought in representatives from both Computer Systems Corporation and its subsidiary, EndoCorp, to provide additional technical expertise in this matter. These are the same folks who built the FBI’s new case management system. They are cleared UMBRA, so we may speak freely. Some of you have already worked together at NBP-1.”

Both representatives gave dour nods. They were in their forties and looked more conservative than the window mannequins in the FBI gift shop.

NSA: “What you’re about to see is a matter of the utmost secrecy. Were this information to be made public, there is every likelihood that the world economy would falter.” He let it sink in. “A-Group has decrypted a video message from Matthew Sobol.”

An animated buzz spread through the room. He waited until it died down.

NSA: “We’re going to screen that video. Watch it carefully, and we’ll discuss it afterward. Lights, please.”

The lights dimmed, and a plasma screen set into the wall glowed to life. In a moment Matthew Sobol appeared in high-definition color. The image was so clear it seemed as if a window had opened in the side of the somber boardroom. Sobol stood outdoors, in the sun on high ground overlooking the ocean. He was dressed in khakis and a pressed linen shirt. He looked normal, healthy, the breeze tossing his hair.

Sobol betrayed no emotion. He stared into the camera for several moments before speaking. “They built a twenty-trillion-dollar house of cards. Then they told you to guard it. And they call me insane.”

Sobol started to walk along the cliff’s edge. The camera followed him, Steadicam-like, in medium close-up. “Technology. It is the physical manifestation of the human will. It began with simple tools. Then came the wheel, and on it goes to this very day. Civilizations rise and fall based on technological innovation. Bronze falls to iron. Iron falls to steel. Steel falls to gunpowder. Gunpowder falls to circuitry.” Sobol looked toward the camera again. “For those among you who don’t understand what’s happening, let me explain: the Great Diffusion has begun—an era when the nation state dissolves. Technology will cause this. As countries compete for markets in the global economy, diffusion of high technology will accelerate. It will result in a diffusion of power. And diffusion of power will make countries an ineffective organizing principle. At first, marginal governments will fail. Larger states will not be equipped to intercede effectively. These lawless regions will become breeding grounds for international crime and terrorism. Threats to centralized authority will multiply. Centralized power will be defenseless against these distributed threats. You have already experienced the leading edge of this wave.”

Sobol stopped walking and gazed longingly out at the ocean. In a moment he turned to the camera again.

“My Daemon is not your enemy. And thankfully it cannot be stopped. By anyone or anything. It is neither good nor evil. It is like fire, and it will burn those who do not learn to use it. It will burn the enemies of reason. It will burn the hypocrites and the fools. Use the tools I’ve given you, and the Daemon will become a valuable resource. Or, if you prefer, don’t. Remember that the Daemon is now firmly established throughout the world. Other cultures will use these tools, even if you do not.”

He stared straight into the camera. “There will be violence soon. It will shock you with its scope and ferocity. Don’t waste your time interceding. It isn’t directed at you. It is directed at other parasites in the network.

“Distributed daemons are a foregone conclusion in the coming world. You should befriend this one. Because the next daemon might not be so friendly. And, unlike your current leaders, my Daemon can protect you from your enemies.”

The video ended, and the lights came up.

Everyone looked suddenly haggard.

CIA: “Jumping Jesus…”

NSA: “Gentlemen, you’ve seen the devil himself, and now we need to figure out what to do about him.”

CIA: “Forget him. What can we do to stop his Daemon?”

DARPA: “We need to destroy the Daemon’s darknet, that’s what we need to do. This message is just propaganda. Another misdirection.”

CSC: “Destroying the Daemon will require a coordinated cyber attack on numerous corporate data systems. An attack unprecedented in scale—a digital D-Day.”

DARPA: “Too risky. One misstep, and the Daemon destroys thousands of companies.”

EndoCorp: “We can’t just let this thing take over. Whatever the cost.”

FBI: “What does Sobol mean when he says there’ll be violence? Is he talking revolution?”

DARPA: “He’s a megalomaniac.”

DIA: “If he means revolution, we should have troops in the streets. Sobol could be planning a coup.”

NSA: “The markets are already shaky. Mobilizing troops and declaring martial law will cause a panic.”

CSC: “We have private security forces available.”

CIA: “He said we weren’t the target.”

FBI: “You’re not going to take him at his word, are you?”

DIA: “He did say nation states were doomed.”

CIA: “Yes, but he didn’t say he would be the instrument of their destruction. He could be warning us.”

FBI: “You’re starting to worry me.”

CIA: “I don’t mean that Sobol is on our side. I think he’s an evil bastard—I mean was an evil bastard—but he had a demented vision that I think we should try to wrap our heads around. He talked about small groups—‘The Great Diffusion’ is how he termed it. That small groups would be battling nation states.”

DARPA: “Sobol mentioned lawless regions and failed states. What if he was talking about terrorism?”

DIA: “Terrorists use our own technology against us.”

CIA: “And so do international crime rings. Does Sobol think his Daemon could be used against terrorism and transnational crime?”

DARPA: “It took over the online porn and gambling industries easily enough.”

NSA: “We’ve got to get a handle on this.”

EndoCorp: “Gentlemen, this Daemon is comprised of distributed networked systems with a companion human network. This is no different from many enemies we’ve already defeated.”

DARPA: “I think it’s clearly different.”

EndoCorp: “In specifics, maybe, but not in the abstract. Whether he’s dead or alive, Sobol’s network can be disrupted and his people put to flight. In order to knock out his human network, we need to hit them hard and hit them everywhere—keep them on the run and keep them looking over their shoulder.”

CSC: “And in order to prevent the various Daemon components from interacting, we stage a regional power outage immediately preceding operations. We exert our control over major media outlets to prevent the Daemon from reading the news—or we fabricate the news to suit our purposes.”

The directors seemed taken aback by the sudden turn in the discussion.

NSA: “What about the Daemon’s human operatives? Wouldn’t they still be able to communicate?”

EndoCorp: “This is classic infowar—which we invented. We have highly skilled cyber and electronic warfare experts. We’ll be monitoring Daemon activities in coming weeks. And as for the Daemon’s human operatives: they won’t stand up long against ex–Special Forces soldiers. We’ve operated successfully in Colombia against left-wing rebels and narco-terrorists, and in sub-Saharan Africa against Islamic rebels. Our men operate in small groups with minimal supervision—no legislative oversight necessary.”

CIA: “That’s fine in Colombia and sub-Saharan Africa, but how the hell are you going to sell that in Columbus, Ohio? And how do you tell friend from foe in a tech park server room?”

EndoCorp: “You don’t. We move in our own people to operate the data centers and detain the current staff until we can satisfy ourselves that they pose no risk.”

NSA: “This is crazy talk. You can’t round up IT workers in thousands of companies. You don’t have the manpower, for one thing. Also, a substantial percentage of the infected sites are in foreign countries. Most Fortune 500 companies have their back-office data processing operations in India and Southeast Asia.”

EndoCorp: “Borders mean nothing to us. We have private military provider and support firms in place in twenty-five countries, incorporated under a hundred different names. And we have influential voices in dozens more countries. Certain financial interests currently at risk are willing to underwrite this effort to protect the global economy.”

NSA: “The moment you attack, the Daemon will destroy the infected networks.”

FBI: “He’s right. There are too many targets to hit all at once.”

The CSC representative looked soberly around the table.

CSC: “That’s correct. That’s why we need to pick and choose. If we defend a cross-section of Western interests in numerous industries, the global economy can achieve survivability. But only if strategic investments are made in the shares of selected survivors. This can defray the loss of the other companies.”

The directors were speechless for a moment.

DARPA: “What about these ‘tools’ that Sobol mentioned?”

The faces shifted in his direction.

NSA: “It’s a programming interface of some type included in Sobol’s message. Group A has a team analyzing the components now. They suspect Sobol might be extending some form of communication with his Daemon. Perhaps even rudimentary control.”

FBI: “What kind of control?”

NSA: “For starters, there’s a function that, on demand, destroys the data of any chosen Daemon-infected company.”

Everyone immediately grasped the significance of this.

DARPA: “And this is still being broadcast around the world in an encrypted beacon?”

NSA: “Yes. Which means it’s only a matter of time until other governments have this knowledge, too.”

CIA: “Sobol’s forcing our hand.”

DARPA: “We’ll need to see that API as soon as possible. It could provide intelligence on the topology of the Daemon’s darknet.”

FBI: “You’re not seriously suggesting we start communicating with this thing? We don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

NSA: “No one’s negotiating with anyone. This is an object library. We’re analyzing it.”

FBI: “Look, we’ve been messing around long enough. We need to kill it. It’s taken over a big chunk of the Fortune 500, and it can cause irreparable harm to this nation.”

CSC: “To the global economy.”

NSA: “That’s the whole point: if we make one move against it, the Daemon will flush all that corporate data down the toilet. And if we ignore it, then some other government might invoke the Destroy function to attack us.”

CSC: “We must attack it.”

NSA: “I don’t think losing three quarters of the companies is an option.”

EndoCorp: “You need to move on Sobol’s organization. Infiltrate it, identify all the ringleaders, nab them, turn the screws on them, and roll their whole damned group. We’ve done it before.”

CSC: “You’ll need handpicked teams.”

NSA: “Gentlemen, I hope we’re not disturbing your meeting.”

They looked impassively at the director.

Chapter 36:// The Powers That Be

A gleaming Dassault business jet taxied out of the darkness and into a brightly lit, spotlessly clean hangar. It rolled to a stop alongside a black Cadillac Escalade and a Chevy Suburban. The aircraft engines whined to a stop as men in suits removed their ear protection and approached the plane.

The jet door was pulled open, letting down a short row of steps. In a moment Russell Vanowen, Jr., stepped from the plane, as always looking resplendent in a bespoke, black pinstriped suit. He cast his commanding gaze around the hangar. Everything looked secure. Only his hired security team was present. Korr Security Services—ex–Special Forces soldiers. Smart, capable, trustworthy.

He strode toward the Escalade as one of his half dozen bodyguards stepped up to meet him.

The man reflexively saluted, then stopped in mid-salute with some embarrassment. “Good evening, Mr. Vanowen, your guest is waiting, sir.”

Vanowen nodded slightly in acknowledgment.

The guard opened the passenger door of the Escalade. Vanowen noted with satisfaction the thickness of the door. Kevlar laminate armor and inch-thick bulletproof glass. It was a discreet business tank.

Vanowen ducked inside and was unsurprised to see a man waiting for him in the plush backseat. The man was in his forties, dressed in a sports coat and black shirt. He had buzz­cut hair and a firm jaw line—definite military look. They called him The Major, but that’s all Vanowen knew about him. They had never met, but both of them knew their roles well.

Vanowen settled into the empty seat. The door closed behind them with a tight thwup.

The Major did not extend his hand. “You’re seven minutes late.”

Vanowen nodded. “Yes, and so we need to hurry. I’m scheduled to make a keynote speech tonight at the convention center downtown.” Vanowen narrowed his eyes. “You’re certain you weren’t followed?”

The Major ignored the question. “Get us moving.”

Vanowen saw through the partition glass that the driver and a bodyguard were now sitting up front. He hit the intercom. “Downtown Biltmore.”

“They’re getting the bags off the plane, sir.”

“Have them catch up with us at the hotel. Just get us moving.”

“Roger that, Mr. Vanowen.”

Vanowen turned back to The Major. “My sources tell me the Feds know which companies are infected by the Daemon.”

The Major showed no reaction.

Vanowen continued. “And that only a minority of these companies are expected to survive.”

The Escalade was now moving through the hangar doors and into the night.

The Major looked out the window. “If I were in a position to confirm such information—”

“I already know it’s true. What I need from you is the list of infected companies.”

The Major didn’t blink. “Why do you think I’m here?”

Vanowen was uncharacteristically surprised. He tried to find something to say. “Oh…I see.”

“Leland Equity has friends in high places, Mr. Vanowen.”

The Major reached into his jacket pocket. “You seem to be under the impression that you have to save face. You weren’t the only one to get caught in the Daemon’s web.” The Major produced a glossy brochure from his jacket. “But as it turns out, our Mr. Sobol may have inadvertently handed us the investment opportunity of a lifetime.” He handed the brochure to a suspicious Vanowen.

“What’s this?” Vanowen read the title: Annual Children’s Hospital Golf Classic. “Is this a joke?”

The Major tapped the brochure. “Flip it open.”

Vanowen did so. Inside the tri-fold was a long list of charity sponsors—company after company. Vanowen looked up to his guest.

“I had operations print it. We’re expecting a data loss event of cataclysmic proportions within the next six months. That’s a list of public companies targeted for special protection by public and private militaries. Now you know how to restructure your portfolio. If anyone else sees it, it’s just a charity brochure.”

Vanowen smiled broadly. “And how much will Leland be donating to the Children’s Golf Classic?”

The Major turned to look out the tinted windows into the night. “It’s not for your benefit that you’re being told. Although I’m sure you’ll do very well also.”

“Perhaps I can offer you a commission for your investment advice?”

The Major looked blankly at him. “I’m just one of Leland’s investors, Mr. Vanowen. Do your job, and we’ll have no reason to speak again.”

Vanowen nodded vigorously. “Of course.” He folded the brochure and placed it in his suit pocket.

The Major pointed. “That list doesn’t get entered into a computer. It doesn’t get photocopied, and it doesn’t get reported to anyone else without the approval of my superiors. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“You know what would happen if you were to lie to me?”

Vanowen made eye contact. “Yes.”

“Good. Make sure you remember it.”

Vanowen sighed dramatically. “Well…what sort of ‘special protection’ will these companies enjoy?”

“There’s a Daemon Task Force—run by an NSA cryptologist. Young black lady. Very sharp. She’s beginning to unravel the Daemon’s design.”

“But if they figure out a way to stop the Daemon, then our investment opportunity is…” Vanowen’s voice trailed off.

“We don’t intend to stop the Daemon. It’s too valuable. The goal is to control it. The task force has made progress in just that area.”

“Control it?” Vanowen considered this. “Then we would still get our opportunity—”

“But with greater precision and total deniability. The Daemon could become a powerful economic weapon—particularly against the ascendant economies of Asia.”

Vanowen thought of the possibilities. “So the Daemon is not invincible, after all…” He gestured to the nearby wet bar. “A scotch to celebrate?”

The Major shook his head. “It’s a bit premature to be celebrating. In any event, I’ll be leaving you in a moment.” He clicked on his own intercom button. “Roberts, leave me off at the next crossroads.”

“Affirmative, sir.”

Vanowen raised his eyebrows, surprised that The Major knew his driver’s name.

“Nothing has been left to chance, Mr. Vanowen. You have important work to do for us. See that you achieve your objectives.”

In a moment the Escalade slowed at a rural intersection—two county roads meeting in the middle of nowhere beneath a lamp swirling with moths. The Major turned to Vanowen. “We never met.” He was gone before Vanowen could say a word. The doors locked immediately after him. Vanowen watched a sedan emerge from the shadows to meet The Major. In a moment, Vanowen’s Escalade was moving on, back into the darkness on the other side of the intersection and down the country road, toward a smudge of light on the horizon. Distant suburban sprawl.

Vanowen exhaled in relief. That had gone extraordinarily well. Better than he could have imagined. So the wise men weren’t holding him responsible? The Daemon was widespread. He found it strangely reassuring—especially since the powers that be weren’t even fazed. Matthew Sobol had underestimated them, and they were already taking steps to turn this situation to their advantage. In fact, he was going to have that celebratory scotch, after all.

Vanowen pulled a bottle of thirty-year-old Macallan from the mini-bar and poured three fingers, neat. He lifted the glass and sighed again in satisfaction, appreciating the caramel color against the backdrop of the headlights. Not only was he going to free himself of the Daemon, but he stood to make billions doing it. This was the very essence of capitalism: thriving on chaos. True, there would be a temporary economic meltdown, but like pruning a tree, it would grow back fuller and healthier than before. But thoroughly under their control. He raised his glass and toasted. “Here’s to you, Mr. Sobol.”

Beyond his scotch glass, Vanowen glimpsed a dark shadow growing ahead. Half a second later it came screaming out of the blackness. It was a car with its headlights off. Vanowen’s driver screamed.

A Lincoln Town Car nailed the Escalade dead-center in the front grill at a combined speed of over 150 mph—instantly pancaking the sedan up to its rear passenger seat with a powerful BOOM and flattening the armored Escalade up to its front windshield. This sent the Escalade’s V10 engine plowing into the front seat and blasted the inch-thick windshield out of its mountings, where it tumbled crazily hundreds of yards down the road.

After the initial impact, the wreckage of the Escalade sheared away from the Town Car and went into a wild roll, sending pieces of metal and armored doors flying. What remained of the SUV landed upside down in the opposite lane nearly a hundred yards farther on. Smoke and steam billowed from the wreck.

After a few moments of dead silence, headlights appeared in the distance, back the way the Escalade had come. They grew rapidly brighter, accompanied by the growling of a powerful engine. Soon, a black convertible Mercedes SL Sports Coupe arrived and rolled to a stop near the start of the debris field. Its xenon headlights were aimed at the wreckage of the overturned Escalade, bathing it in white light.

Twin black Lincoln Town Cars, with their headlights off, pulled up behind the Mercedes like guardians. The throbbing engine of the coupe cut off, but the headlights stayed on.

In a few moments the door opened, and the dark form of the driver strode calmly into the light of his own headlights.

Brian Gragg gazed intently at the wreckage.

He was reborn. Gone without a trace were the tattoos and the piercings and the unkempt hair. In their place was a perfectly groomed and successful-looking young man. Dressed as Sobol might dress, all in black with tailored slacks, silk shirt, and sports coat. Except for the black synthex gloves and sports glasses he wore, he looked like any other Austin tech entrepreneur. He was now invisible to authority. A man of substance.

He sniffed the night air. It was thick with moisture and the aroma of field grass. The din of crickets filled his ears. He was never more alive than now. Never more happy. And never before could he see with such clarity. He could feel the world for miles around. Law enforcement GPS units, Faction members, and AutoM8 packs networked in the surrounding countryside—feeding their discoveries to him, like a wizard’s familiars.

Gragg felt the tingling of the Third Eye on his stomach and back. The Third Eye was another of the miracles that Sobol had bestowed upon him. It was a form-fitting conductive shirt worn next to the skin—but it wasn’t a garment. It was a haptic device that helped him use his body’s largest organ—his skin—as another, all-seeing eye. An eye that never blinked, and an eye that could see around him in 360 degrees or halfway around the world, if he wished.

It worked by sending tiny electrical impulses to excite the nerve endings in his skin, much like a computer monitor projected pixels onto a screen. The microscopic electrical impulses represented data—from blips on a radar screen to full-blown visual displays. But what amazed Gragg was how the brain learned to accept input from this new source as if it were just another organ. Just another eye.

He felt the networks around him, but he could do more than just feel them.

Gragg motioned with his gloved hands. Suddenly the headlights of the twin Town Cars flicked on. The cars roared forward and deployed on either side of the road at his command, illuminating the entire crash scene. Gragg halted them with a wave of his hand.

Glittering pieces of metal and plastic littered the roadway. Now he could see the pancaked wreckage of the AutoM8 he’d used in the attack. It was lying backward in a ditch along the road about fifty feet ahead. Smoking like a distillery. Only the rear half remained.

Gragg relaxed his arms and then cracked his knuckles. He strode toward the wreckage of the Escalade.

Both the driver and the front passenger were clearly dead. Someone’s intestines spilled out over the twisted frame and looped along the ground. The smell of butyric acid and bile was mercifully masked by the odor of antifreeze and burning plastic.

Gragg heard whimpering. He moved to the rear passenger compartment and peered through the empty, twisted door frame. Inside, he saw only a jumble of spent airbags, white packing powder, and shattered glass.

Gragg listened intently, following the sound around to the other side of the wreck, where he soon saw the bloody and quivering form of Russell Vanowen lying twisted on his back on the pavement nearby.

Gragg took measured steps to look down on him, careful to avoid the pool of blood forming on one side.

Vanowen’s head and face were covered in blood. His right arm was mangled—splintered bones sticking through his torn sleeve. A long, slow groan came out of his toothless mouth and formless, swollen face. His nose was almost completely flat.

Gragg regarded him icily.

He leaned down and with his gloved hands pulled back Vanowen’s blood-soaked suit jacket.

The wounded man’s chest heaved, and his eyes stared in stark terror as Gragg lifted out the bloody brochure for the Children’s Golf Classic. Gragg shook some of the blood off it and flipped it open. He held it to the light.

It was still legible.

Gragg took out his cell phone and clicked a digital picture of it. Then he folded the brochure and slipped it back into Vanowen’s chest pocket.

Gragg stood and turned to leave.

Vanowen’s groan ascended to a wail as he reached out toward Gragg with his good arm.

Gragg stopped. He paused a moment before turning around, then kneeled down and grabbed Vanowen’s swollen face with his gloved hand, causing the man to scream in agony. “Shhh…I’ll go up a level for this. Maybe I should thank you, Russell.” He searched Vanowen’s bloody eyes for something worthwhile. “But then again, fuck you, you worthless piece of shit.”

Tears streamed down Vanowen’s cheeks. He was insane with fear and pain.

There wasn’t an ounce of pity in Gragg’s eyes. “If you see Matthew Sobol, be sure to tell him Loki said hello.”

Gragg stood, straightened his jacket, and walked toward his Mercedes. He motioned with a gloved hand, and one of the Lincoln Town Cars screeched forward.

The headlights flashed in Vanowen’s eyes as he shrieked.

The car crushed him under its wheels and dragged his corpse some ways down the road before it fell free. The black AutoM8 raced off into the night.

Gragg curled a finger at his Mercedes, and the car rolled forward to meet him. The driver’s door swung open as it came alongside him.

Gragg concentrated on his Third Eye. He felt his distant AutoM8s following the car of the mysterious man whom Vanowen had met at the municipal airfield. Gragg brought the dashboard video of a trailing AutoM8 up onto his heads-up display—projecting onto one lens of his glasses. The infrared camera miles away showed the man’s car heading south toward the interstate. There were two occupants. Gragg scanned the target car’s license plate and retrieved its DMV records.

Federal Fleet Vehicle—no data

Gragg smiled to himself. The Daemon Task Force, eh?

He was closing in on them. He was mapping the topology of the plutocrats’ elusive network—The Money Power. They were up to something. This man would help Gragg find out what.

These plutocrats were men of limited vision who needed to be swept aside. Men from a previous age. An age of oil and heavy industry. But the distributed technocracy would soon rise, and Gragg would be there at Sobol’s side for the dawn of a new age. An age of immortals. A second Age of Reason.

Gragg’s eyes narrowed at the video image of the man’s car.

There would be no mercy for those who stood in the way.

Chapter 37:// Cogs in the Machine

The Haas mini mill was a miracle of modern engineering—a computer-controlled metal lathe, drill press, and router all rolled into one. The Haas could download a 3-D computer model into memory and from it produce a custom metal or plastic part cut and shaped to exacting specifications. It was essentially a self-enclosed, water-cooled machine-parts factory packed into a housing the size of a hot dog cart.

Linked to the Web, it almost became a 3-D fax machine—plans sent in digitally at one end emerged at the other as finished parts. The input could originate from any corner of the world via Internet or phone. All that was required was a human being to serve the Haas. To feed it the raw materials the plans required. To protect and maintain it. Man serving machine.

But Kurt Voelker and his crew loved their machines. The machines gave them entrée into the Daemon network. The Daemon network gave them a future.

They had progressed significantly since their first AutoM8. Their Sacramento machine shop now boasted three half-million-dollar computer-controlled milling machines, running full-time off dual cable and satellite Internet connections. They were producing parts at an accelerating pace—but the Daemon had forbidden their company from growing larger. Three machines were the maximum they were permitted to possess. True, they’d generated three million in revenue last year and taken home hundreds of thousands of dollars each—but Voelker chafed against the prohibition to stay small.

Still, he knew better than to protest to Sobol’s Daemon. It had grown phenomenally in power. Better to give thanks for their good fortune.

Voelker lifted his safety goggles and glanced around the cluttered shop. It was thirty thousand square feet of 1930s factory floor. Brick walls, twenty-foot ceilings, skylights, and concrete floors. The smell of oil, burnt metal, and ozone from arc welding filled the air. Parts littered workbenches, and a dozen brand-new vehicles stood in varying stages of completion. Voelker’s company was officially a fleet vehicle customization business—licensed to operate by the AQMD. A legitimate California corporation. Their close ties to major car leasing companies, on-time tax payments, and contributions to civic causes put them above reproach. They had friends in high places now. High-powered attorneys would slide down the fire pole in their defense if anyone so much as looked at them cross-eyed. God help anyone who tried to shake them down or impede their business. There was a Daemon work request for just such contingencies. Their future was secure.

Voelker saw Tingit Khan and Rob McCruder struggling with the steering column of a new AutoM8 variant—a 400-horsepower Mustang interceptor. They were bitching at each other like brothers, as always. Voelker smiled to himself. They were like a family. A family with a stern authority figure that would flay the flesh from their bones if they stepped out of line for even an instant.

Still. The rules were clear, the work always changing, and the rewards enormous. Barely in their mid-twenties, they were all millionaires on paper. They would receive five weeks’ vacation every year. Retirement with benefits in twenty years. They received financial advice money couldn’t buy. Their medical plan, too, was top-notch. The Daemon took care of its own.

Voelker turned toward his Haas milling machine. It was busy churning out grooved steel plates, six inches long and an inch wide. He had no idea what they were for. But they had a work order for three hundred copies. Some strategic plan somewhere required them. A plan born in the mind of a dead genius and enacted now, when the time was right. But right for what? Only the Daemon knew. Certainly no one among the living did.

Voelker took one of the finished plates and placed it in a laser scanner. He tapped a button and the object was instantly measured at two thousand critical points for accuracy. It was dead-on. It was always dead-on. The Haas knew what it was doing.

A two-tone chime came in over the loudspeakers. Voelker, Khan, and McCruder looked up at the same time, then at each other. They all knew what it meant. New plans were in the queue.

Voelker motioned to them. I got it. They looked back down and kept working on the Mustang, while Voelker took off his gloves. He moved to a nearby computer workstation.

A new 3-D plan file was in their company inbox. He noticed from the byte count that it was a big one. He moved it into a central share and then opened it in AutoCAD. It took several seconds, even on his powerful Unix workstation.

When it was finished loading, he stared for some moments at the wire frame model now rotating in three dimensions on his screen. Ours is not to wonder why, but to do or…

What the hell was he looking at? He turned back to the Mustang. “Guys, get over here and look at this.”

Khan wiped his forehead, smudging grease across it. “Later, man. This steering column’s a bitch.”

“No. I think you should take a look at this now.”

Khan rolled his eyes dramatically, then tapped forcefully on McCruder’s shoulder.

“What?”

Khan pointed. “Goggles says we gotta see the new plans. It’s urgent.”

“Fuck…” McCruder threw down his wrench with a clang, and the two of them strode leisurely toward Voelker’s workstation.

“This had better be good, Kurt.”

Voelker simply gestured to the screen. Both men wrinkled their brows.

“What the?”

“You have got to be kidding me….”

Voelker shook his head.

They exchanged looks. It had always remained unsaid. They knew that some would suffer the Daemon’s wrath. After the events at Sobol’s mansion, the purpose of the AutoM8s could scarcely be a mystery—but they always nursed a hope that perhaps they would be used for transporting critical materials, operatives, or something unimaginably brilliant.

Voelker sighed and sat on a nearby stool.

Khan pointed at the screen. “What is that?”

McCruder pointed, too. “This is serious shit, Kurt.”

Voelker kept his eyes on the floor. “It’s just after-market customization.”

McCruder laughed. “No kidding. That’s not what I mean.”

Khan was nodding. “He’s right, Kurt. This is designed for one thing, and one thing only: killing people.”

They contemplated this silently. This raised the stakes. They were now clearly producing weaponry. The pleasant fiction was over.

Khan added, “I mean, it’s cool-looking and all, but this is real life—not a fucking computer game.”

“What do we do?”

Voelker tapped his fingers on the workbench, thinking. “I’ve almost got the current order filled. While I finish that we can decide the best course of action.”

McCruder threw up his hands. “Like we have any choice, Kurt? If we don’t make these things, our own toys are going to come back to kill us.”

“All right, calm down.”

Khan gripped his own head. “I should have known this was going to happen. It was too perfect.”

McCruder waved it aside. “Let’s stop kidding ourselves. We all know we’re going to build these things—so why go through the theatrics of feeling bad about it?” McCruder grabbed a grease pencil and turned to a whiteboard. He started drawing a casualty list with little human stick figures. “If we don’t make them, someone else will and people will die—along with us. That’s X number of people plus three. If we do make them, then people will die, but not us. That’s X number of people plus zero.” He looked up, vindicated by mathematics. “So we take the course that harms the least number of people.”

Voelker threw a glove at him. “That’s fucking convenient.”

McCruder held up his hands. “Don’t blame me. We all got into this, and I don’t feel like finding out what happens if we quit. Big things are changing in the world—things we can’t stop. We’re just cogs in the machine, and if we malfunction, we’ll be replaced. We owe it to ourselves to survive. Shit, we owe it to ourselves to thrive. That’s what our ancestors did, and that’s what we’re gonna do. It’s our natural fucking purpose.”

Everyone was quiet as they sat listening to the grinding sound coming from the Haas.

Eventually Voelker nodded. “I know you’re right. I just didn’t think I’d ever be playing this role. I wanted to design consumer electronics.”

Khan leaned against the workbench. “I wanted to build suspension bridges. News flash: nobody gives a fuck what we want.”

McCruder rapped his knuckles on the countertop. “So how does the board of Autocracy, Inc., vote? Do we elect to continue in our present endeavor?”

They glanced at each other, then all raised their hands. “Aye.”

McCruder nodded. “The ayes have it. This will make a massively parallel cybernetic organism very happy.” He pointed to the busy Haas. “When are these pieces due?”

Voelker thought for a moment. “They need to be placed at the waypoints by tomorrow, noon.”

McCruder was back to examining the computer screen. “We’ll need time to study these schematics. They look involved.” He peered closely at the screen. “This is serious engineering—look at that flywheel housing—and those hydraulics.”

Voelker nodded. “Graphite-epoxy flywheel spinning at seventy thousand rpm in a vacuum. Floating on a bed of magnetism.”

Khan was pointing at the screen again. “You gotta admit, that’s some cool shit. It even looks nasty. We should render it to see what it looks like in color.”

McCruder ignored him. “When does the first stock unit arrive?”

Voelker grabbed the mouse and navigated to the header of the message. He read for a moment. “Friday.”

McCruder pointed at the Haas. “You need help to finish these pieces on time?”

“No. They’ll be done.”

McCruder started back toward the Mustang. “Then I suggest we study those plans and make sure we’re the best damned cogs the Daemon has.”

Chapter 38:// Assembly

He was a poster child for overdesigned American culture. His square-toed dress shoes had the soles of hiking boots, as though intended to navigate an urban cliff face. His draping dress pants concealed six pockets pleated into its folds, each one with a trademarked name (e.g., E-Pouch), giving him the cargo capacity of a World War I infantryman. Yellow-tint sunglasses wrapped his face, unaccountably designed to withstand the impact of a small-caliber rifle bullet while filtering out UV rays and maximizing visual contrast in a wide range of indoor and outdoor lighting conditions.

In all, his outfit required nearly two thousand man-years of research and development, eight barrels of oil, and sixteen patent and trademark infringement lawsuits. All so he could possess casual style. A style that, in logistical requirements, was comparable to fielding a nineteenth-century military brigade.

But he looked good. Casual.

He walked along the city streets, passing coffee bars and cafés so packed with people that it seemed as if no one had homes to go to. He passed dogs with backpacks and kids wearing Rollerblade sneakers. Everybody with casual style.

It felt good to be among them again. His depression had almost swallowed him whole when his first job was sent offshore. Then his second job. Then his third. Not much call for project managers in the States anymore.

But now he understood again. The world made sense again—and he was still all for progress. Disruptive innovation, they called it. Change was good. Painful, but good. It made you stronger. When you stopped changing, you started dying.

For the first time in years, he knew his situation was secure. He knew he could afford rent—even in his price-inflated neighborhood. That he could dress and live in a style befitting a man of his intelligence and education. He no longer compared unfavorably with people in magazine articles. He was back on track.

He had a purpose. And right now that purpose was to proceed to a specific GPS waypoint and await further instructions from The Voice.

The Voice’s feminine synthetic words came over his wireless earpiece: “Cross the street.”

He obeyed and found himself moving into a crowded retail plaza ringed with national chain stores. The carnival atmosphere was augmented by street performers wearing photo IDs—proof that their family-friendly, drug-tested talents were on an officially sanctioned list in the management office.

The plaza was packed with consumers.

The Voice spoke again. “Waypoint nine attained. Stand by…stand by. Vector 271. Proceed.”

He turned in place, looking closely at a handheld GPS screen until he was facing 271 degrees. Then he proceeded at a normal walking pace as people jostled past him.

“Report ready status of assembly.”

The Daemon’s workshop was open for business. He slipped one hand into his E-Pouch and removed a grooved steel machine part, six inches long. He wrapped his hand around it and kept walking vector 271. “Assembly ready.”

“Prepare to tender.”

He could see the target approaching through the crowd—a twenty-something white kid in parachute pants and a sweatshirt bearing a university acronym. He had the calm, composed look of a Daemon courier. They were on a collision course as people swirled around them like random electrons. The kid extended his right hand as he came forward. They were just feet away.

“Tender assembly on phrase: ‘Hey, Luther.’ Confirm.”

The kid came right up to him, holding forward a different steel part. A cell phone headset was now visible on his close-cropped head. The kid nodded. “Hey, Luther.”

Both men extended their hands and slid the steel parts together. They mated perfectly with a satisfying click.

“Assembly confirmed.”

A pleasant chime sounded over the line. “Operation complete. Twenty network credits. Demobilize.”

The kid took control of the combined parts and continued walking.

The Voice came over the phone headset. “Assembly stage two. Vector 168. Prepare to tender.”

The kid held the assembly down at his side, turned to the appropriate compass direction, and proceeded through the crowd at a brisk walk. In a few moments he and a young woman locked on to each other. She was big-boned, dressed like a businessperson. Utterly invisible to most men. The kid vectored in.

“Tender assembly on phrase: ‘Afternoon, Rudy.’ Confirm.”

The woman nodded as she came up to him, a flip phone handset held to her cheek. “Afternoon, Rudy.”

He placed the two-part assembly into her hand and disappeared into the crowd. “Assembly confirmed.”

A pleasant chime sounded over the line. “Operation complete. Twenty network credits. Demobilize.”

She snapped the kid’s two parts into a yellow plastic base and moved through the crowd, following her new vector.

As he headed back to the parking structure, the kid imagined the tactical assembly now under way; like swarming nanobots amid the mass of shoppers, the Daemon’s distributed assembly plant ran half a dozen independent lines, with no individual having knowledge of anything more than the few seconds in front of them and the mechanics of the single assembly for which they’d be responsible. The parts arrived in place at the moment they were required, The Voice vectoring them into a collision course. Assemblers came and went, passing the assembly on to the next worker in the chain after confirming completion of their step. Redundancy gave high probability that sufficient parts would arrive on station at the appropriate moment, and that waylaid assemblers could be quickly replaced.

What he didn’t know was what they were building. He wondered if he’d ever know.

In the battered lobby of a C-grade office building, a (now) debt-free graduate student faced the wall and clicked a methane-oxide fuel cell battery into place inside a form-fitting plastic handle.

The Voice spoke to him over his earpiece. “Confirm assembly completion.”

He powered the unit up and waited for a diagnostics check. A green light came on. Ready. He lowered the assembly out of sight. “Assembly complete.”

A pause. “Stand by…stand by…”

He looked around the lobby. It was a typical two-story box in a low-end tech park. Security consisted of locked doors with mag-card swipes at the entrances. In other words: no security. Long halls laid with orange indoor-outdoor carpeting crossed each other in a barren atrium in the center of the building.

He waited patiently in a water company uniform, complete with photo ID badge and water-bottle-laden handcart as The Voice kept repeating, “Stand by…” in his ear every ten seconds.

Then it paused. “Vector 209. Prepare to tender completed assembly.”

This was it. The Receiver was coming. He glanced at his GPS and turned to face the security door.

Charles Mosely walked briskly toward the lobby doors. It was a bright spring day under a wide Texas sky. He could see his reflection in the door glass as he approached. He was dressed in a phone company uniform with tool belt, clipboard, and phone headset. He swiped his security card, and the door opened with a buzz.

The Voice spoke on the headset. “Receive assembly on phrase ‘Here it is.’”

Mosely approached a young Asian man standing in the lobby with a handcart piled with five-gallon water cooler jugs. As he walked by, the man extended an odd-looking steel and yellow plastic device to him. It was shaped like a glue gun, with the top section missing—an empty channel with twin grooved steel plates. “Here it is.”

Mosely grabbed it with his work-gloved hands and shoved it into a slot on his utility belt designed specifically for it. He heard the water man exit the lobby doors behind him, but he walked purposefully on his appointed vector, passing a nondescript guy in a pullover shirt bearing some company’s logo. He nodded congenially as he went past, but the guy didn’t acknowledge him in the least. Just some tenant.

“Vector 155,” The Voice said in Mosely’s ear.

That was straight down the corridor. Mosely kept moving down the hall, glancing at office doors.

Suite 500.

Ten minutes ago he thought he was going to tap a phone system. But now in possession of the assembly, he recognized it immediately. He had used it before.

It was an electronic pistol.

Manufactured with bright yellow plastic and brushed steel, it resembled a battery-powered hand tool—it even had a tool company logo on the side. But in reality it was a fully automatic, precision-made handgun. It was nearly 100 percent reliable because it had no moving parts. Instead of a firing pin and complex recoil-based reloading mechanism, an electronic pistol was a fire-by-wire device; the caseless bullets were stacked in a straight line in one of four parallel twelve-inch barrels, and a logic chip fired each bullet independently with bolts of electricity from an onboard battery. The gun was reloaded by slapping on new barrels of ammunition. Mosely had already received three rapid-loaders from a courier out in the street. It was a foolproof, untraceable weapon designed for one thing: killing people at close range.

Suite 710.

He steeled himself. There was a grander purpose at work here. He had to keep reminding himself of that. This wasn’t the same as what he’d done as a teen. He wasn’t doing this for himself. The world was changing. He’d seen it. This was part of the plan. There were no random acts in the plan.

The Voice said, “Stop.”

Suite 1010.

Mosely drew the unloaded pistol, then took the welded-steel barrels from the other side of his tool belt. He slid the two together with a click-clack. It was now loaded and looked very much like a garish, toy laser pistol.

The Voice came to his ears. “Device code…4-9-1-5.”

Mosely flipped the gun and tapped in the four-digit code at the base of the handle. The device was now armed.

He turned to face the door. Then he reached into his pocket and produced a hard plastic door key given to him by a woman out on the street. All master key systems were vulnerable to mathematical reduction.

The Voice continued in his earpiece. “Confirm instruction: kill the occupants of suite…1-0-1-0.”

Mosely closed his eyes. He didn’t relish this. He thought he’d left this behind years ago. But the Daemon had found him out. It knew he had killed before. He took a deep breath, then said, “Instruction confirmed.”

“Proceed.”

Mosely inserted the key, turned it, and pushed the door open. He moved into a cluttered office with shelving piled high with papers and boxes on the far wall. Banks of cheap desktop computers sat atop folding tables. A thirtysomething guy with a sizeable gut turned quickly in his chair to face Mosely. He had a cherry Danish almost up to his mouth.

“You can’t just—”

Mosely raised the pistol and sent a quick burst into the man’s chest—spattering the computer table and back wall with gore. A couple of the frangible rounds slammed into the wall and dissolved into puffs of powder, barely leaving a dent in the drywall.

Frangible rounds still amazed Mosely. The bullets were made of compressed ceramic powder. They retained their hitting power if they hit soft human tissue, but they disappeared in a cloud of dust if they encountered an unyielding surface—like a wall. They were designed to contain a shoot-out within the room where the shooting was taking place, and they also eliminated the risk of ricochets. This last part was of particular concern when you were spraying seven rounds a second in a room ten feet square.

The bloody fat man slumped and fell onto the floor with a thud that shook the room.

Mosely heard movement in the next office, farther in. The squeaking of a desk chair.

“Mav? What was that?”

Mosely advanced quickly, both hands gripping the pistol. No need to worry about their calling the police. Their phones were out by now, and their cell phones would already be jammed.

He stepped into a larger office area containing two desks and a bank of windows looking out onto the back parking lot. A young man stood behind a desk, hand reaching into the center drawer. A look of disbelief on his face. Mosely ripped out a longer burst this time. With the suppressor it sounded like a muted model airplane engine. The wall, windows, and drop ceiling were now spattered with blood. Smoke wafted away from the gun barrel.

Mosely turned as another man screamed in terror. The man ducked behind his desk, dragging a phone with him.

Shit.

Mosely popped the smoking barrels off and clicked on a new set. He advanced, gun ready, and could hear the man sputtering in terror as he tapped at the dead phone. “No! I’ll give you money! Don’t!”

Mosely came around the side of the desk and aimed his gun down at the man cowering against the wall.

“No! Please!”

Mosely hesitated. Goddamnit. It could not be left undone. There was no question.

“No!”

Mosely emptied the barrel into him. The man slumped sideways behind the desk, in a pool of blood, his body twitching. Mosely loaded the last barrel and retraced his steps—putting another couple of shots into the heads of the other two men. He spoke into his headset. “Task complete.”

There was a pause. Then The Voice said, “Confirmed. Two thousand network credits. Demobilize.”

Mosely tapped a sequence of numbers onto a four-key pad on the bottom of the gun and tossed it onto the top of a nearby desk. The weapon started to sizzle and smoke, then the plastic bulk of it began to melt—along with its circuitry.

Mosely took a small semicircular device off his tool belt. The thing resembled a small traveling alarm clock with a rounded bottom. He tapped the same four-key code into the device, then tossed it into the center of the floor, where it rolled around for several moments while Mosely exited the way he came in.

As the device came to rest on its rounded bottom, a pocket laser beamed bright red light onto the stained drop tiles of the ceiling—creating a marquee-like sign in large glowing red letters. The letters spelled out the message the Daemon wanted to send—the message associated with operation 4-9-1-5:

ALL SPAMMERS WILL DIE

Chapter 39:// Closing a Thread

Sebeck sat in the sterile visitor’s room near Lompoc’s death row. His wife, Laura, sat across the table from him, looking down. To Sebeck’s surprise, there was no bulletproof partition separating them here. His last visitation would be face-to-face. Two prison guards stood watch over them from the nearby door.

Laura looked up. “Are they treating you well?”

Sebeck grimaced. “They’re going to kill me this evening.”

She seemed unsure how to respond.

Sebeck just waved it aside. “It’s okay. Normal conversation doesn’t really work in here. Don’t feel bad.”

She sat thin-lipped and tense for several more moments. “Are you afraid?”

Sebeck nodded.

“I don’t know what to do, Pete.”

“I’m sorry about the pension and the life insurance. I hear they canceled them.”

“I just can’t believe this is happening.”

“Neither can I.”

She looked squarely at him. “Tell me again.”

He looked at her. “I didn’t kill anyone, Laura. I committed adultery, but I didn’t do those other things. I would never have harmed Aaron or those other people.”

“They say terrible things about you on TV. It never stops.”

“So I’m told.”

“It’s been real tough on Chris at school.”

They both contemplated this gravely. Then Sebeck motioned to her. “It’s good to see you, Laura.” He smiled weakly. “Given all that I’ve put you through, I wouldn’t blame you for not speaking to me again.”

“I’ve known you my whole life. I couldn’t let you go without saying goodbye.”

He felt a little choked up as she began to cry. He cleared his tight throat. “I know we don’t really love each other. Not in a romantic way. Our marriage seemed like the right thing to do with the baby and all.”

She was crying silently into her hands.

Sebeck continued. “But I think, if I had just had the chance to fall in love with you before all that, I think I would have. I just never had the chance.”

She just wept.

“I love our son, Laura. I want you to know that. And I want Chris to know. I don’t regret having him. I regret how I handled it. And how I blamed everyone else for the decisions I made.”

She looked up. “You were just a boy, Pete. We were both just kids.”

“Sometimes I feel like I still am. Like I’m frozen in time.”

She tried to rein in her tears. “I don’t know what to do.”

Sebeck sighed. “Sell the house. Make sure Chris gets a college education. And then…go fall in love. You deserve to be happy, Laura.”

She was crying harder now.

One of the guards called from the door. “Sebeck. Time’s up.”

Sebeck reached out a hand toward her. They held hands briefly over the table. “Thank you for being kind to me.”

The guards pulled him away, and the last Sebeck saw of her, she was staring at him through tears as he was pushed through the doorway and into the echoing death row wing beyond.

Sebeck lay bound hand and foot by leather buckles and straps. A rubber tube was wrapped tightly around his right arm, bulging the veins. Another brown rubber tube ran from the intravenous line in his arm to the wall, where it disappeared through a small port. Sebeck knew there were several men behind that wall, each preparing lethal doses of sodium thiopental (to knock him out), pancuronium bromide (to stop his breathing), and potassium chloride (to interrupt the electrical signals to his heart). Only one of the IV drips was connected to Sebeck’s tube—so the three executioners would never know who delivered the fatal injection. It was an odd system. One that ignored the fact that people killed each other every day without trying to conceal it. In fact, if he jumped the prison fence, they would gun him down without hesitation.

Looking down at his own body, Sebeck found it funny that he was in better physical shape now than he’d been in a decade. All he’d had to keep himself from going crazy in solitary confinement was endless reps of push-ups and sit-ups. Beneath the 24/7 buzzing fluorescent lights of his cell. He saw the knotted muscles in his arms and it brought back memories of his youth. Of better days.

Sebeck lay at a slight incline so that he could face the assembled witnesses sitting behind the nearby windows. He felt oddly calm as he regarded them. A mix of curious and angry faces stared back. Some were taking notes.

So this was the death chamber? This was what it felt like to be put to death. His hunch about Sobol had been wrong. The funeral message hadn’t brought forth any rescuer from beyond the grave. It hadn’t even seemed a remote possibility while he lived in the heart of suburbia that he would one day be put to death by the federal government. Yet here he was. He almost laughed. It was so ludicrous he half expected Rod Serling to saunter in and deliver a double-entendre-laden summation of his life. Pete Sebeck, a man whose demons got the better of him…

Was there ever really a Daemon after all? Even if there was, Sebeck had been defeated by it. His relatively brief life had been a complete waste. The only good thing he’d accomplished was his son—ironic since the pregnancy had always seemed like the worst thing that ever happened to him.

He considered that most of the people here really believed that he conspired to murder federal officers. He hardly blamed them for what they were doing. He would have looked on in righteous anger, too.

Just then Sebeck noticed Anji Anderson in the gallery. A flash of anger coursed through him. That was just the last straw—to see that smug, pert face with the slight curl of a smile on the edges of her mouth. Like an evil pixie. Sebeck’s most malevolent stare bored into her. At first she kept the smug look, but soon the trace of a smile faded, and then she finally looked away.

After conferring for a moment with the doctor, the warden leaned down and asked if Sebeck had any last words. He’d been thinking about his last words for several months. For too long, actually. It wasn’t like he was going to win over anyone. He had decided to take the stoic, unflinching approach.

He looked to the mirrored glass of the window concealing the victims’ families. “I didn’t kill your loved ones. I didn’t kill anyone. But if I were in your position, I’d think I was guilty, too. Hopefully, the truth will come out someday, if only so that my son knows his father isn’t a murderer.” He paused. “That’s it, let’s get this over with.”

Almost immediately he felt a warm sensation in his arm. It spread like a wave of numbness over his entire body. It occurred to him that this was the speed of his circulatory system. He also noticed a label on the fluorescent light fixture above him. It read, “30W BALLAST PARABOLIC REFLECTOR.” It was a strange message to depart this life with. So he turned to face the doctor standing nearby, an angular man with cold blue eyes who stared icily back at Sebeck. Even Sebeck couldn’t meet his fierce gaze, so he fixated on the logo on the lapel of the doctor’s lab coat. It read: “Singer/Kellog Medical Services, Inc.”

Sebeck found his eyes getting heavy, and his breathing became labored. He turned back toward the overhead light. As the last of his vision faded, he struggled to maintain a focus on the light. Sebeck realized he had forgotten to appreciate his last sight of this world. It was too late, and he fought for one last glimpse. But everything was blackness. And then it was nothingness, and he fell into a well of emptiness so deep and broad that it was as though the entire universe had ceased to exist.

Detective Sergeant Peter Sebeck died at 6:12 P.M., Pacific Standard Time.

Chapter 40:// A New Dimension

Natalie Philips entered the windowless Daemon Task Force offices well past midnight. She was expecting the place to be nearly deserted, but instead she saw a knot of techs and heavily armed security personnel gathered near the hallway leading to her office. They were engaged in an urgent, hushed discussion. The Major looked up from the center of the huddle as Philips approached. He nodded to her. “How was your trip, Doctor?”

Philips dropped her overnight bag on the floor nearby. “What’s going on?”

The Major thumbed down the hallway. “Your hacker friend is having some sort of episode. He locked himself in conference room B and changed the access codes on us.”

Philips sighed wearily and rubbed her eyes. “How long ago?”

“About an hour. I was preparing to resolve the situation.”

She eyed a guard with a tear gas gun. “That won’t be necessary, Major. I’ll go talk to him.”

The Major grinned coldly. “You’re the boss, Doctor.”

He was mocking her now. She chose to ignore it and tried to pass. He stood in her way.

“You realize I must submit a report to Centcom about this incident.”

“Understood. If you’ll excuse me…”

“Please remind him of the relevant clauses in his amnesty agreement.”

“I’ll be sure to do that. Now, if I’m not mistaken, these men have guard duties. See that they get back to them.” She hefted her bag again, but The Major waited a beat before moving aside and allowing her to pass. She trudged down the hall toward a crack of light under the door of conference room B. Once there, she stared at a red LED display glowing on the door’s proximity card reader. It read: FUCK_OFF. She smiled slightly, then flipped open the reader’s plastic cover to reveal a small ten-key pad underneath. She concentrated for a moment, then tapped in a thirty-two-digit code. Her back door. The door clicked, and she pushed inside.

“Go away.” Ross didn’t even turn around. He stood on the far side of a conference room table crowded with desktop and laptop computers. Lines of text cycled rapidly across all the screens. The rest of the room was strewn with crumpled charts, diagrams, and innumerable fanfold reports that spilled across the floor.

Ross was taking aim with a makeshift pencil dart at a large photo mosaic of Matthew Sobol’s face tacked to the far wall. The picture was tiled together from paper photocopies. A half dozen pencil darts already protruded from Sobol’s face, in addition to hundreds of other tiny holes concentrated mainly between Sobol’s eyes.

Philips took in the scene. “I can’t say this line of research holds much promise.”

Ross inclined his head slightly toward her, recognizing her voice. He hesitated for a moment, dart still poised, then completed his throw. The dart stuck into Sobol’s eyebrow. Ross drew another dart into his throwing hand and said nothing.

Philips closed the door behind her and picked her way across the littered floor, stepping between charts torn from the walls. “What’s going on, Jon?”

“Nothing.” He threw another dart, nailing Sobol in the cheek. “How was Washington?”

“Complicated.”

“There’s a shocker. Another general trying to pack me off to Diego Garcia?” He hurled a dart with great force, burying it deeply in the wall.

Philips walked over to him and dropped her bag onto the conference table. “You may think you’re joking, but you’re not far off. Your insistence on personal anonymity hasn’t helped me defend you. Neither do stunts like this.”

Ross stared at Sobol’s dart-pocked face for a moment, then turned to Philips. “Is it true that they just executed Pete Sebeck?”

Philips looked down. Damn.

“Did they really kill him?”

“Yes. They did.”

Ross tossed another round of darts. “Goddamnit! That’s just great!”

“It couldn’t be helped, Jon.”

“Of course it could be helped”

“Not without risking retribution by the Daemon. It’s already killed tens of thousands. Are you prepared to take responsibility for more?”

“That’s not the issue, and you know it.”

“It is exactly the issue.”

Ross turned and threw his last dart. “Fuck! We should have beaten this goddamn monster by now.”

“Look, the only way to make Sebeck’s sacrifice meaningful is to destroy the Daemon before the public learns of its existence. The financial markets are tumbling on mere rumors. Once the public knows, the financial markets will crash. Those markets support life as we know it. The livelihoods of hundreds of millions are at stake.”

“Well, we’re running out of time, Doctor. The blogosphere is already buzzing.” Ross slumped against the wall.

“There’s no solution but to keep working, Jon.” Philips removed her blazer and laid it neatly over a chair back. She started methodically rolling up her sleeves. “While I was away, did we get any clear-text back from those intercepts I ran through Cold Iron?”

Ross still stared into space.

“Jon!”

He looked up at her, then slowly dragged himself to the table. “Yes. Crypto forwarded a file.” He dropped into a chair and started clattering away at a keyboard.

She nodded, encouraged, and moved over to him. “Good, let’s see it.”

He opened a text file. An endless stream of double-precision numbers filled the screen, alphanumeric characters strewn between them. “Here’s a segment of the clear-text.”

She looked closely at the stream. “GPS coordinates.”

He nodded. “Damned near a terabyte of them. What prompted you to pluck this out of the airwaves?”

She was still examining the numbers. “Sheer volume. This is just a few days’ worth. It’s being broadcast from low-power radio transmitters in eighty countries—tens of thousands of transmitters—and this stream didn’t exist before the Daemon. It’s becoming a background noise that grows louder every day.”

“Yeah, well, this ‘noise’ is nearly a month old, so it’s ancient history.”

“Brute-force cracks at this key length take time, Jon—even for us.” She gestured to the screen. “But what is it? I mean, why would the Daemon bother to encrypt a log of GPS waypoints? Some sort of logistics tracking system?”

“I had some thoughts on that. Notice that the data isn’t all GPS coordinates.” He highlighted a section of the file. “There are these long, solid alphanumeric strings recurring in the data set—like unique identifiers.” He clattered at the keyboard again. “When I parsed the data, I was able to group all the waypoints for a given ID, and when I plot the waypoints in a GIS mapping program”—he launched another program that displayed a map of southern Texas and the Gulf of Mexico.—“I get this.…”

The map filled with dots. Almost every inch was covered.

Philips sighed. “Less than informative.”

He nodded. “At this altitude, perhaps, but when we move in closer, things get clearer….” He zoomed down to an overhead view of the streets in a city; the clean vector lines of named avenues filled the screen with an irregular grid. The data points visibly ran along the lines of the street grid, occasionally veering off the marked roads.

Philips rubbed her face, her exhaustion starting to catch up with her. “Just thousands of data points with no meaningful association.”

Ross turned to her. “Not if I could relate this data with something I knew the Daemon did. Then we’d have a better idea what we’re looking at.” He kept his gaze upon her.

“And did you?”

He turned back to the screen and started tapping at the keyboard again. “The spammer massacre. It was still going on at the time of this intercept. Fifty-two spammers were killed in the region covered by this dataset. Eight killings occurred in the relevant time range. I had Merritt get me the addresses from those eight individual case files, and I keyed them into a GIS program to obtain the approximate GPS coordinates of each address. Then I searched this intercepted data set for close matches.”

She smiled slightly at him.

“I found a match.” He tapped a key, and an aerial photograph of a suburban business park filled his screen. A close series of waypoints intersected in the center of the building, then parted. The longer set continued down through the building, concentrating its activity in one area.

“Merritt got me in touch with the building’s architect. They sent me an AutoCAD file of the floor plates. I aligned that blueprint with the GPS grid. Bear in mind: three men were murdered here at the same time period covered by this GPS intercept. I marked the rough location where the bodies were found on this floor plan. Look at this, Nat.”

He brought a detailed floor plan up onto the screen. The GPS waypoints tracked down the hall, then entered a suite labeled 1010 and tracked to the site where each body was found, retraced steps back to two of the bodies, then exited down the hall.

Philips felt a tingle run down her spine. “My God. This is the Daemon’s command system.”

“I think it’s more than that. This type of coordinate tracking system seemed familiar. Look….” Ross swiveled his chair to reach for a nearby workstation, nudging past her. He brought up a different 3-D floor plan in vector lines. “This is a game map for CyberStorm’s Over the Rhine. I’m viewing this level in their map-editing tool, Anvil. Matthew Sobol wrote big parts of this program.” Ross pointed at the screen. “See these dots? Those are sprites—bots, computer-controlled characters that react to players. These tracking lines indicate the coordinates those bots will follow in response to an event elsewhere in the system.”

She leaned in to look closely at the screen. “It’s just like the GPS dots.”

“Exactly. In essence Sobol is using the GPS system to convert the Earth into one big game map. We’re all in his game now.”

Philips stared at the screen, still trying to decide whether this discovery was good or bad news. “It took the most powerful computer on Earth nearly a month to crack the encryption on this block of data, and the encryption changes every few minutes. We can’t jam all the transmissions because the Daemon uses commercial spectrums.” She turned to him. “How do we use this information, Jon?”

“By deducing the existence of certain things. For example, there must be some way for Daemon operatives to interact with this presentation layer. If my theory holds, then the Daemon must have created equipment that permits its operatives to ‘see’ into this extra-dimensional space so they can use it.”

Philips nodded. “That could be why we’ve been unable to track Factions in the real world—because they’re communicating with each other through this virtual space.” She pondered the ramifications of this. “This could be a major breakthrough.”

He shrugged. “We still need to prove the theory.”

“But this is testable. We’ll go through the captured equipment inventory.”

“The devices we’re looking for will most likely have biometric security—fingerprint scanners, things like that. If we can hack our way into one of these objects, we should be able to see into the Daemon’s dimension. And that will be the first step in infiltrating it.”

She stared at him for a few moments. “Excellent work. I’m impressed.”

“I didn’t think it was possible to impress you, Doctor.”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

Ross glanced at the wreckage of the room. “I didn’t mean for you to come back to this. I just heard about Sebeck an hour ago. I guess I snapped.” He started picking up the papers strewn all over the place.

She moved to help him. “It’s my fault. You’ve been cooped up in here for months. I’m trying to get them to loosen the restrictions.”

They grabbed for the same toppled fanfold printout and stopped just short of knocking heads. Their faces were only inches apart, motionless in a sudden, uncomfortable silence.

Their gaze held for several more moments while Philips’s heart raced. She suddenly pulled back and stood up. “I need to check my e-mail.” She grabbed her blazer from the chair back, not bothering to roll down her sleeves as she pulled it on hurriedly. She grabbed her overnight bag.

Ross watched her. “You don’t need to—”

“I’m a federal officer, Jon. You’re a felon under my authority—a foreign national of dubious origin. Identity unknown.” She faced him from across the table. “It’s impossible. My responsibilities make it impossible.”

“If I made you uncomfortable, I apologize. It won’t happen again.”

She took a deep breath, then looked at him with a softer expression. “No…you didn’t make me uncomfortable. But…”

He nodded solemnly. “I understand.” He paused. “I just hope there’s some part of you they don’t own.”

She bristled. “I choose to serve my country.” She turned to leave again. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

She stopped and turned to stare at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re not so difficult to decipher, Doctor.”

“Really? Well, let’s hear it….”

“Okay. Child prodigy—head and shoulders above everyone around you—never quite fit in. Your classmates were always far older than you, and so you never acquired the social skills that develop the strong bonds of friendship. You live an isolated existence defined by your ultra-top-secret work. Work that you will never be able to share with anyone—not even your coworkers.”

This last comment made her fold her arms impatiently.

“Ah, your work—it’s too important to risk intimacy. But isn’t it closer to the truth that you intimidate men? Your intellect scares the hell out of them, doesn’t it? Humor me: what’s the cube root of 393,447?”

“All right, I got your point.”

“Can’t do it?”

“Seventy-three-point-two-seven-six.”

“There we go. How many of your relationships failed because you couldn’t hide your intelligence?”

“That’s enough.”

“You don’t scare me, Nat.”

She stared at him for several moments. “If you only knew what I’ve gone through to protect you. You can’t assume it doesn’t matter to me. I can’t protect you if you don’t trust me. What is your real name? Who are you?”

Ross seriously contemplated this. He stared at the tabletop. He looked truly torn. After nearly a minute he finally stood and started gathering papers again. “Sorry about the mess.”

“Goddamn you.” She moved for the door.

He looked up, watching her leave. “I was twelve when they came for my father.”

Philips stopped again.

“I remember my mother screaming downstairs. I ran out just as they put my father in a car. Our family driver held me back. My dad looked up at me from the backseat. And you know what he did? He winked at me, and he smiled.”

Ross paused for a moment, savoring the memory. “I miss him so much, Nat. He went willingly in exchange for our lives. I try every day to be the man he’d have wanted me to be. The man he would have been proud to call his son.” He looked up at Philips. “If there is anyone on this earth I want to share my name with, it’s you. But I will never trust a government, Nat. They’ll use my identity to get at the people I care about. And I won’t put you in the position of having to choose between your future and me. We both know it will come to that. And I don’t have a future.”

Philips stood motionless for several moments. “Please don’t think I was trying to—”

He waved it away. “I know.”

After a few moments she turned and for the third time headed for the door. “Good night, Mr. Ross.”

“Good night, Dr. Philips.”

Philips didn’t look back until she’d closed the door behind her.

Chapter 41:// The New Social Contract

A bleak dawn radiated over a tract home lost in the grid of a lower-class subdivision. Inside, a Nigerian immigrant stood guard in front of a stark steel door tagged with graffiti and patches of peeling gray paint.

He had the lean, wiry frame of someone raised on significantly less caloric intake than the average American. His skin was almost literally black, and he attentively watched a grainy security monitor focused on the street outside. He was attentive in the way that only a recent immigrant from an impoverished land can be. Grateful to be in Texas, America.

He considered for a moment the money he was earning—what it meant to his extended family back in sub­Saharan Africa. He kept calculating and recalculating how long it would take him to save enough money to also bring his sons to America.

A stubby AK-47 variant with a folding stock hung from a strap on his shoulder, its fore grip wrapped in duct tape. It was his job to identify people seeking entry to the cutting house. He took his job very seriously.

The sounds of people talking and shouting echoed from rooms deeper inside the building. A smattering of tribal languages. The place was bustling with activity. Just another day in the heroin trade. He despised drugs, but economic realities were economic realities.

He noticed the security monitor flicker for a moment. After that, the image skipped vertically. He frowned at it and played with the vertical-hold dial. In a moment the image stabilized, and he nodded in satisfaction.

Then the steel door exploded, sending red­hot metal fragments into his stomach and throwing him down the hall.

A dozen armed men in black full-body armor and ballistic helmets issued through the opening, shouting, “POLICE! FREEZE!”

The initials DEA were stenciled in bold white letters on their breastplates. Shouting filled the back of the house. They were entering back there as well.

“POLICE! FREEZE!”

More shouting. The steel bars were ripped from a picture window by cables linked to trailer hitches. DEA agents jumped through the empty frame, rushing forward shouting, “THIS IS THE POLICE! PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPONS!”

A dozen half-naked men and women scattered, screaming and running to flush bags of heroin stacked on tables in a bedroom.

One of the dealers rolled out into an interior hallway with a pump twelve-gauge shotgun. He turned just in time to see the iridescent faceplate of a body-armored DEA agent blocking his exit. The dealer cut loose, blasting the agent into the narrow closet door at the end of the hallway.

Women started screaming.

The dealer pumped another shell into the chamber. “Ya’ll some badass motherfucker now, huh?”

He leveled the gun and blasted the nearby door frame as another DEA agent leaned out. The wood frame and a chunk of drywall disintegrated.

But the first agent he shot was getting up.

The dealer chambered another round and blasted the man again, sending him back into the closet door.

Click-clack. He blasted him again.

Click-clack. Then again.

He watched in amazement as the agent struggled back to his feet. The dealer raced to find shotgun shells in his pockets. The DEA agent leveled a multibarreled pistol at him.

Braaappp!

The dealer looked down at his white T-shirt. A rapidly expanding bloodstain swept across it. He crumpled to the floor, shotgun over his knees.

The other men in the house threw down their weapons as the agents barked commands at them to get on their knees with their hands over their heads.

Another set of agents moved among them with plastic hand ties, lashing hands behind backs.

But the majority of the DEA agents were still thundering through the house, overturning the drug tables and pushing aside the stacks of money—frantically searching for something. The agents never said a word to each other; instead, they moved as if they were a single entity, searching methodically from behind their mirrored helmet faceplates.

They came up from the basement, in from the garage, down from the attic, and rifled through every closet. They tore open the kitchen cabinets and aimed weapon-mounted tactical lights inside. It was there they discovered two terrified black boys—about seven years old—hiding beneath the sink. They dragged them out screaming.

The search abruptly stopped. Agents gathered around the boys, who clutched each other and stared in fear up at the mirrored faceplates staring back down at them. They were more than mirrored—they had the complex iridescence of mother-of-pearl. Their appearance changed as the men turned.

Still without speaking, the agents pried the boys apart, holding their arms back. One agent knelt down and extended a fingerprint-capture pad toward one boy. He forced open the boy’s hand and pressed the kid’s thumb against the pad—then checked a display reading. A pause, then he repeated the process with the second boy—once again consulting a display.

The agent nodded and pointed to the second boy.

The other agents zipped hand ties on the first boy and tossed him, crying, in with the rest of the prisoners. The second boy they held on to, and the group of agents parted to reveal a tall, broad-shouldered officer, also in black body armor with a mirrored faceplate. He strode forward.

The boy, already scared, now cowered in fear, tears streaming down his face.

The big agent grabbed him under the shoulders, plucking him up off the floor. The boy struggled, but the man’s viselike grip was unshakeable. They walked out the shattered front door of the house and into the street—where a black Chevy Suburban pulled up to meet them. The side door opened, and the big agent pushed the boy inside—following close on his heels. The door thumped shut behind them as the remaining DEA agents poured out of the house, climbing into their black vans.

Inside the Suburban, the boy curled up on the opposite end of the bench seat. The large DEA agent sat on the far end, staring from behind his mirrored helmet at the terrified boy as an agent in the front seat drove, beyond a tinted glass partition.

The big agent brought his hands to his helmet, released twin catches, then twisted, removing it.

Charles Mosely wiped sweat from his face, placed his helmet on the bench seat behind him, and turned again to face the child.

The boy now had a look of utter terror on his face, and he curled up harder against the armrest, covering his head as though he was about to be beaten.

Mosely made a cryptic gesture with his right hand, causing the white DEA letters on his chest plate to slowly fade away. He looked back up at the child. “You remember me, Raymond?”

The boy robotically nodded his head, visibly trembling.

Mosely’s hard face softened. He leaned closer. “It’s all right. I won’t hurt you.”

The boy didn’t relax one bit.

“I’m sober now.”

The boy had his face buried in the seat cushion.

Mosely looked down. Complex emotions knotted his face. “I came up here to say I’m sorry. For all I did—and for all I didn’t do.” He was lost for a moment, but then his resolve returned. “I heard your momma died a couple years back.”

When he looked up, Mosely noticed one of the boy’s eyes peering out from under his arm, watching him.

“I thought about you all the time in prison—about your mom dyin’. You all alone.”

The boy stared with his one exposed eye, unflinching.

Mosely sat back again. “You weren’t easy to find. You ran off from that foster home. Can’t say I blame you. Bad people. I met ’em. But I had real good private detectives searching for you. The best.” He looked Ray straight in his one exposed eye. “I’m sorry.”

Mosely ripped the Velcro straps securing his armored gloves and pulled them off, one by one. He placed the gloves in the back and extended his hand toward his son. “You got a hand for your old man? You want to shake on a new start?”

The boy curled up tighter.

Mosely lowered his hand. “Well, I guess I got it coming, don’t I?” Mosely watched the frightened boy. Resigned to this, Mosely started removing the plates of body armor as the Chevy Suburban climbed the interstate entrance ramp.

An hour later, Ray still hadn’t shown his face. Mosely still sat watching him as the landscape sped past. He realized no amount of talking would erase his son’s earliest memories. To him, Charles Mosely was a ruthless, violent man—a man everyone feared. A man with no concern for the family he abandoned and occasionally terrorized.

A voice came in over the intercom. “We’re here, sir.”

Mosely turned to see a massive wrought iron gate with ivy-strewn walls to either side. A plaque on the nearby wall bore the words “Holmewood Academy” in oxidized bronze letters.

Mosely nudged Ray gently and pointed. “Look at that.”

Despite his fear, Ray’s curiosity got the best of him, and he raised his head to look around warily.

They were moving through the large gates, which had swung open to receive them. Inside, wide athletic fields and Gothic stone buildings lay on either side of the winding drive.

Mosely watched his son’s reaction closely. He could tell the grounds were like nothing Ray had ever seen. The boy’s iron grip on the seat back eased, and he moved toward the window.

Mosely tried to stifle a slight smile, and he turned toward his own window.

Soon, the Suburban arrived at the huge front door of the main building. Mosely got out and looked up. Gothic turrets rose several stories above him. A young Asian woman, a black woman, and a gray-haired white man stood at the front door, apparently waiting for them. They were dressed impeccably in navy blue suits with a coat of arms sewn over the chest pocket.

Mosely leaned into the Suburban and could see Ray already peering out. He smiled and extended his hand. “C’mon, Ray.”

Pausing for a moment, Ray examined Mosely’s hand with trepidation. They both noticed the faded gang tattoos on each knuckle. Ray looked up at his father’s face, and Mosely did his best to look upon him with reassuring eyes.

The boy slowly reached out and took his hand. Mosely eased him down onto the walk and held his hand as they approached the trio of figures standing near the massive wooden doors.

The two women smiled and approached them, kneeling down—all their attention for Ray. “Hi there, Raymond. Is this your father?”

The boy froze.

After a few moments, the young Asian woman smiled and took him by his other hand. “If it’s okay with your dad, I want to introduce you to some friends. Do you like video games, Raymond?”

Ray looked up at his father. Mosely kneeled down beside him. He looked to the women.

They sensed his need and backed away. Mosely looked back at his son. “It’s okay, Ray. This is your school now. It’s your new home.” Mosely straightened his son’s dirty T-shirt. “They’re going to take care of you. They’ll teach you everything you need to know to succeed in life.” Mosely regarded his boy again, and finally hugged him close.

At first Ray struggled, but in a moment his little arms wrapped around Mosely’s thick neck.

Mosely’s eyes welled up with tears. “I did the best I could for you, boy. There’ll be no cages for you. Not for you.” Mosely pulled back and looked in his boy’s face. “Try to remember me.”

At that, the women took the boy’s hands and gently led him away. Mosely and his son locked eyes, and for the first time Mosely sensed that his son knew there was love in his father’s eyes. Even though he’d never seen such a thing before.

In a moment he was gone, through the great doors, and Mosely stood again. The gray-haired white man walked up to him, following Mosely’s gaze toward the opening in the doorway. In a second it boomed closed.

“Rest assured, he will be well cared for, Mr. Taylor. And free to decide his future. The Daemon honors its agreements.”

Mosely turned to regard the man. He was a distinguished-looking type, with the air of aristocracy unique to academics. But he did not look down on Mosely—far from it. He appeared to regard Mosely as a man of superior social rank.

Mosely stood. “I am the Daemon’s champion.”

“Then your son will rise to the full level of his abilities.”

Mosely nodded. “That’s all anyone has a right to expect.”

With that, Mosely straightened his uniform, turned on his heels, and headed for the waiting Suburban. What the future held for him, Mosely didn’t know.

Instead, he imagined this field, years from now—filled with throngs of people. Mosely imagined the hopeful faces. His son’s among them.

Chapter 42:// Building Twenty-Nine

Alameda Naval Air Station was a relic of the Cold War—mute testimony to the power of unrestrained government spending. A sprawling military base across the bay from downtown San Francisco, the station squatted on a billion dollars’ worth of real estate. Alameda’s aging collection of military barracks, hangars, docks, administrative buildings, power plants, landing strips, theaters, warehouses, and the occasional R&D oddity rose from a desert of concrete and asphalt covering the northern half of the island. You’d need a jackhammer just to plant geraniums there.

The base was decommissioned in the 1990s, and the city of Oakland had debated for years what to do with the place. A short ferry ride from downtown, it was theoretically a developer’s dream. High-end condominiums, retail, and entertainment plazas crowded dozens of proposal blueprints, moldering in file cabinets while the city wrestled with soil toxicity and asbestos studies—the remnants of decades of military activities that knew no regulation or restriction.

The base sat largely unchanged—except for the odd film production company or construction firm renting out space in hangar buildings. Where once navy jets were retrofitted, now graphic artists with nose rings sat beneath lofty concrete-reinforced ceilings. The runways stretched unused except by model car and airplane enthusiasts. Close by stood the retired aircraft carrier USS Hood and a flotilla of mothballed navy transport vessels. It was as if the sailors and pilots just disappeared one day, leaving everything behind.

Jon Ross gazed out across the tarmac, imagining what this place must have been like forty years ago at the height of the Cold War. When America was the enemy.

He shielded his eyes against the sun and tracked the progress of an unmarked Bell Jet Ranger helicopter coming in low over the distant hangars. It headed toward him—and toward Building Twenty-Nine.

Building Twenty-Nine sat on the far end of a runway apron, on a strip of landfill jutting out into the bay. There wasn’t anything around it for a quarter mile in every direction—just flat concrete, marshland, and open water. The building itself was windowless, long, and narrow. A blockhouse of high-density concrete. It looked like it was built to survive a direct hit by a five-hundred-pound bomb—which it was.

The helicopter descended, lifting up its nose as it crossed a razor-wire fence backed by concrete highway dividers blocking the entrance to the peninsula. Rent-a-cop security guards patrolled the perimeter, which was liberally marked with biohazard signs reading Danger: Radon Contamination.

The chopper continued for a few hundred yards, then set down on a weed-tufted stretch of concrete within a hundred feet of Ross.

Agent Roy Merritt stepped out. He wore an off-the-rack suit, bad tie flapping in the wind. His burn scars were still apparent on his face and neck, even at this distance. He nodded to the pilot as he pulled two cases from the rear seats—one a small ice chest marked with a red medical cross, the other a featureless black, hard-sided case. Merritt walked briskly to the edge of the chopper wash and let a grin crease his usually stern face as he saw Ross. The chopper rose into the air behind him and banked away over the bay, leaving them in comparative silence.

Merritt nodded to Ross. “What’s with the escort?”

“You tell me.” Ross turned to regard the four heavily armed men standing next to him. They wore combat uniforms printed with a new camouflage pattern, one designed to blend in with the background of society: black Kevlar helmets and matching body armor stamped with the friendly, white corporate logo of Korr Security International. Automatic weapons were slung over their shoulders. They stood silently by, as though they didn’t exist.

“Let’s just say I’m closely monitored.” Ross turned back to Merritt and smiled. “It’s good to see you, Roy.” He offered to take the hard-sided black case.

“Thanks.” Merritt passed it to him, and then they shook hands. “I heard that you cut a deal with Washington. They treating you well?”

“We’ve had some procedural disagreements. Apparently amnesty is a synonym for ‘prisoner’ in the government dictionary.”

Merritt frowned. “I know people in Washington. I’ll see what I can do.”

Ross passed the black case to one of the armed guards. “Rush this to Dr. Philips in the lab.”

“Yes, sir.” Another guard grabbed the medical chest from Merritt, who reluctantly released it. Then the two guards rushed off toward the heavy steel doors of Building Twenty-Nine.

Ross and Merritt followed behind at a walking pace, trailed by the remaining two guards.

Ross turned to Merritt. “You in town for a while?”

“Just the day. I was hoping to get back home. It’s been a week or so, and Katy’s team is in the regional quarter-finals tomorrow.”

“Grammar school?”

Merritt laughed and nodded. “Yeah—we take our sports seriously in the Midwest.” He got somber. “Truth is, I just miss the hell out of them. Comes with the job, I guess.”

“How’d it go in São Paulo?”

“Thankfully, the fireworks were over by the time I got there. That guy took out twenty-seven local and federal police before they punched his ticket. The ABIN wasn’t eager to part with the evidence.”

“Building a case is the least of their worries.”

“A lot of diplomatic strings were pulled while I was down there. What’s up?”

“You’ll see in a few minutes.”

As they entered the cavernous doorway, their rear guard hauled steel doors closed behind them with a deafening clang. They were now in an austere, brightly lit concrete anteroom, opening to a hallway lined with bare bulbs and electrical conduits.

Merritt looked around as a guard waved a metal detection wand over him. “What is this place?”

“Daemon Task Force headquarters.”

“You put a top-secret base in the middle of a city?”

“Remote locations don’t mean secrecy anymore. Companies are selling time on private spy satellites. Here we hide in plain sight.”

Merritt nodded and glanced around while the wand beeped and whined. Merritt voluntarily revealed a pistol in a holster beneath his jacket. “I’m FBI.” He produced credentials, which the guards closely examined. They keyed Merritt’s name into a computer to confirm his clearance. They then pressed his thumb against a fingerprint-capture pad, waited for a single beep, then turned to him again.

“Are you carrying any other weapons or electronic devices, Agent Merritt?”

“A knife.”

Another guard passed a tablet PC to him and offered a stylus. “Can you please sign this nondisclosure agreement?”

“I’m already cleared top secret—code word Exorcist.”

“This is an intellectual property agreement, sir. You need to sign to enter.”

Merritt sighed and turned to Ross questioningly.

Ross just shrugged. “Welcome to the Task Force.”

“Christ…” Merritt signed with the stylus.

While he did so, another guard hung a plastic badge around Merritt’s neck. Ross motioned for him to follow down the corridor.

As they walked, Merritt twisted the badge around to examine it. The card was slathered with inscrutable patterns and shiny printed circuits. “You’d think they could afford photo ID badges.”

“It’s not an ID badge. It’s a biometric training marker.” Ross pointed to the ceiling.

Merritt saw a series of small cameras mounted there, running down the length of hallway.

“Your gait is being memorized, Roy. The security system is learning to recognize you from your walk and facial features.”

Merritt eyed the cameras suspiciously.

They soon reached the end of the corridor, where doors of clear ballistic glass blocked the way. Armed sentries stood on both the near and far side—weapons at the ready. One of the guards there removed the training marker from around Merritt’s neck.

“Thank you, Agent Merritt. You are Sec Level Two. Please observe the posted warnings. This is a lethal force zone.”

“Thanks.”

The doors slid open to admit them, and suddenly raucous conversation and clicking keyboards spilled out into the hall.

Ross brought Merritt into a high-ceilinged room about sixty feet square. In a past life it was probably a heavy-equipment room—overhead pulley rails were still in place. Now it was filled with modern, open workspaces, with clusters of five or six computer workstations sharing common desks. The room was crammed with guys in their early to mid-twenties—all wearing headsets and shouting to each other as they played 3-D computer games. Brilliant computer-generated vistas filled twenty-inch flat-panel monitors. It was like a raucous LAN party.

Merritt stared in amazement. “What’s all this?”

“Gaming pit. We’ve got top young minds here from the public and private intelligence sector playing The Gate, Over the Rhine, and half a dozen other online games.”

Merritt surveyed the room. “It’s a bunch of college kids. They’re looking for the Daemon?”

Ross nodded. “Come here.” He brought Merritt up to a broad table covered in piles of large color maps. A nearby large-format color printer was spitting out a new one. “These are level maps we found on the Net. This one’s a custom level for Over the Rhine. That one over there is a castle blueprint from The Gate. Daemon Factions create these as bases of operations and training. The most interesting ones are encrypted—although Natalie’s crypto people can get us in pretty quickly. We’ve found some maps that match the floor plans of real-world structures and huge ones that model real-world city streets. Our teams discover a map and reconnoiter it—by force, if necessary. We try to determine the map’s purpose, and lastly we try to infiltrate Faction ranks.”

Merritt examined the floor plan with an expert tactical eye. “Any luck?”

“Not yet. It’s got us seriously frustrated. We’re always on the lookout for the Daemon’s AI recruiting avatars—Heinrich Boerner in OTR is the main one.” Ross pulled a color screen-capture off a nearby bulletin board. “Here’s a mug shot.”

Merritt looked at the picture. It showed Heinrich Boerner in mid-lecture, a long cigarette filter clenched in one corner of his mouth. Some joker on the Task Force had added the word “Wanted” in large red letters over it. “You’re hunting for a cartoon Nazi.”

“Don’t laugh. The real ones can die.”

Merritt tossed the picture onto the pile. “So who’s starting all these Factions?”

“The disaffected, the dispossessed, the displaced, the disgruntled. Worldwide.”

“That’s a few people.” Merritt soaked up the scene. Watching it, he realized for the first time that the world had really changed—that a line was being drawn in society and which side of the line you stood on would determine your future. He realized more than ever that technological prowess had become a survival skill. “It’s getting bad, isn’t it?”

“That might be about to change, Roy. Thanks to what you’ve brought us. C’mon, they’re waiting for us in the lab.” Ross brought Merritt across the floor, through all the shouting.

“Goddamned sharking smacktard, die!”

“Fireball his ass!”

“Cover me!”

“Friggin’ munchkin!”

Presently they reached a steel blast door flanked by two more armed guards in Korr Security uniforms. A red line painted on the concrete floor formed a semicircle at a fifteen-foot radius around the door. The words Danger—Level 2 Security Zone were stenciled on the floor just beyond the line and on signs along the wall. As they approached, the guards there leveled their HK UMPs.

Merritt snapped alert. “What’s this?”

“It’s the R&D lab.”

The lead guard motioned for the two of them to come forward. “Voice identification, please.”

Ross spoke into a microphone hanging by a long cable from the ceiling. “Ross, Jon Frederick.”

A female computer voice responded, “Voice pattern confirmed.”

There was a loud click, then a flashing red light spun into action, and the massive blast door started to open slowly outward. Merritt was amazed at its thickness—it was easily a foot of solid steel with a beveled edge.

“Hell of a door. Was NORAD having a sale?”

“This place wasn’t designed for us. Back in the sixties this was an indoor cannon testing range for the U.S. Navy.”

“How’d you guys wind up here?”

“Korr Military Solutions owns the building. They have several forty-nine-million-dollar contracts with the Defense Department to operate Daemon Task Force facilities worldwide.”

“Forty-nine million. An odd number.”

“Fifty million triggers congressional oversight.”

The massive door was open now, leading into a brightly lit anteroom guarded by yet another massive blast door. To the right was an interior guardroom manned by several more heavily armed Korr guards.

Ross and Merritt stepped inside. The first blast door boomed shut behind them.

One of the guards gestured to a hole set into the wall nearby. Ross stuck his arm into the hole. A brilliant light glared from within.

Merritt pointed at the device. “What now?”

“Biometric scanner. It scans the pattern of veins in my forearm.”

“If there’s an anal probe ahead, I’m leaving now.”

The second massive door clicked, then started moving inward. “Watch the door, please, sirs.”

They entered a brightly lit, narrow room that was easily a couple hundred feet long. Halfway down the room’s length was a cluster of workbenches and electronics equipment. Steel shelving several rows deep lined the approach to it.

Ross motioned for Merritt to follow. They passed another set of armed guards inside the wide doorway, and then Ross set a brisk pace down the center aisle.

They passed row after row of metal shelving piled high with shattered, twisted, burnt, melted, bullet-ridden, or bloodstained equipment of all types—belts, helmets, circuit boards, odd-looking multibarreled pistols and shotguns, bundles of wiring, parabolic satellite dishes, sensors, and on it went. All of them were tagged with bar codes. It looked like an evidence room.

“Captured Daemon equipment?”

Ross nodded. “You guys bring it in, and this is where the techs reverse-engineer it to find out how to defeat it. But you just brought us our greatest find yet, Roy.”

They finally reached a scientists’ work area and stepped onto a raised dais of nonstatic tile. Several men in lab coats were gathered around something, making adjustments and holding small wrenches. Their bodies completely blocked what they were working on. Dr. Natalie Philips stood, arms crossed, observing the scientists’ work. A burly man in a sports jacket stood next to her. Merritt didn’t recognize him.

The ice chest and black case Merritt had flown in with stood open on the workbenches nearby.

Philips and the man looked up as Ross and Merritt arrived. Philips nodded. “Agent Merritt, I’m glad things went well in Brazil.”

“Anything to help this scavenger hunt of yours, Doctor.” They shook hands.

“Well, it might pay off big today.” Philips gestured to the man. “Agent Merritt, this is our DOD liaison. For security reasons his identity is classified. We simply call him The Major.”

Merritt raised an eyebrow, then extended his hand. “Major.”

The Major shook Merritt’s hand in an iron grip. “You’re something of a celebrity among Daemon operatives, I hear.”

Merritt shrugged. “That’s what they tell me.”

“Good to see you’re fully recovered, Mr. Merritt.”

Merritt reflexively stroked the burn scars on his neck.

Philips pointed to the nearby knot of scientists. “This is our research team on loan from DARPA. Identities also classified.”

“These introductions aren’t very useful.”

One of the scientists looked up from the huddle. He was an older Asian man. “The rig is ready, Dr. Philips.”

Philips nodded toward a nearby stool. “Have a seat, Agent Merritt. I think you’ll find this interesting.”

The scientists scattered, revealing what they had been working on—and what Merritt had brought all this way: a pair of sports sunglasses with yellow-tinted lenses and thick, metallic frames had been bolted into an armature in the center of the lab area. Wires and cables ran from inside the frames over to the lab bench. Set between the posts of the glasses was a clear glass cylinder in which floated a disembodied human eye, like some macabre olive in a jar. The severed nerve endings were alligator-clipped in place to position the eye staring straight forward through the right lens of the sports glasses.

Philips gestured to the rig. “That’s the right eye, Jon?”

Ross nodded. “I double-checked.”

She examined the rig closely. “The sniper’s bullet doesn’t appear to have damaged the blood vessels.” She checked her watch. “Eighteen hours, sixteen minutes since his death. The clock is running. We need to get this test started.”

Merritt was still staring back at the eye. “What sort of test?”

She turned to him. “We believe these glasses serve as a heads-up display for Daemon operatives, Agent Merritt.” She leaned in and pointed to a spot on the frame of the glasses. “A fiber-optic projector displays an image onto the inside of the glass lenses.” She pointed to a dot elsewhere on the frame. “This is a retinal scanner. The Daemon knows who’s wearing these HUD glasses, and this is a heart pulse monitor—over which we have placed an artificial pulse generator. We intend to fool the Daemon into thinking its operative is still alive and calm. If it hasn’t already invalidated his account, we hope to gain access to the Daemon’s darknet.”

Merritt nodded slowly. “So, that was the big hurry. You’re hoping to steal this guy’s identity.”

Ross stepped up to examine the rig as well. “We’re hoping for more than that.”

The Chinese scientist approached Philips while holding a thick, pouchlike belt made of stretchable black fabric. The belt had an ornate lion’s-head belt buckle. He offered it to her. “This one’s powered by some sort of fuel cell. We have nothing like it in the equipment collection. The Daemon is rapidly increasing the quality of its manufacturing process.”

Merritt pointed at the belt. “What’s it do?”

Philips took it. “It’s a wearable computer. The brains of those eyeglasses. Uses a satellite or radio uplink to the Net and connects to these glasses wirelessly with 192-bit military-grade encryption. The encryption key appears to reseed every few minutes. Hard as hell to crack.”

“What’s with the lion’s-head buckle?”

The Chinese scientist nodded. “Blued titanium with diamond eyes. Very expensive—possibly indicating high rank. Daemon equipment often has stylistic fetishes. These are no doubt intended to imbue them with perceived mystical qualities.”

Philips grimaced. “Another one of Sobol’s psychological hacks.” She closely examined the sports glasses in the rig. “These look way beyond the capabilities of a portable fab lab. Grown-crystal optics…possibly laser-etched circuitry. Can we identify the factory?”

Another scientist weighed in. “Probably South Korean manufacture. Highest quality.”

“How long until we can get this test started, gentlemen?”

The scientists at the lab benches were making last-minute calibrations to hundreds of knobs and dials on rack-mounted monitoring equipment. One of them turned to Philips. “It will be a few minutes yet, Doctor.”

Ross approached her and pointed to the HUD glasses. “You think this runs off the FOM?”

Philips reacted to Merritt’s quizzical expression. “Jon means the Faction Operations Module, Agent Merritt. It’s how the Daemon coordinates the activities of the humans who work for it. That’s how it infiltrated corporate networks, that’s how it identifies new threats, and that’s how it distributes funds and privileges to its members. Basically, it’s the key to its power. The FOM is a distributed mesh network consisting of tens of thousands of nodes. Each node has a unique encryption key at any given moment. If we can clone these glasses, we might have an opening we can exploit to infiltrate the Daemon’s operations. Possibly to shut it down.”

Merritt nodded. “I’m all for that.”

The Major frowned at Philips. “If the Daemon knows we’re penetrating its defenses, it might lash out and start destroying companies.”

“If we’re careful, it will never know, Major.” She reacted to his grim expression. “Look, Daemon operatives coordinate their activities somehow, and so far we’ve been unable to find even a single e-mail or IM message between them. We’re missing something, and both Jon and I believe that that something is sitting right in front of us. Unless we conduct this test, we’ll have no chance at all of stopping the Daemon.”

“What exactly does this test entail, Doctor?”

Philips pointed at the captured glasses. “We plan on powering up these glasses so we can see what a Daemon operative sees while working on the Daemon’s darknet.”

The Major still looked doubtful. He pointed at the wires and cables running from the glasses and back toward the lab benches. “And this?”

The Chinese scientist stepped in. “Sound and video outputs. We’ll record the images projected onto the heads-up display of the glasses for later analysis. We’ll also project the images onto these monitors, here.”

“Nothing’s hooked into our computer network?”

Philips crossed her arms impatiently. “Major, it’s hooked to a DV camera. A camera whose embedded OS has been cleared of serial numbers. Please give us more credit than that. Now, unless the DOD has any objections, I’d like to conduct this test before the Daemon decides that this operative is KIA.”

The Major took one last look around. He nodded grimly. “Okay, Doctor. Proceed.”

Philips turned to the scientists. “Let’s do it, gentlemen.”

They tripped several switches. “Activating computer fuel cell.”

“The glasses have electrical power.”

Numerous television monitors mounted above the workbench filled with information. The scientists looked pleased. “Good. The computer belt has established a secure link to a nearby WiMax transmitter. Let’s get a fix on its location.”

Another scientist called out, “An encrypted link has been established between the glasses and the computer belt.”

“Retinal scanning in progress. Stand by….”

Philips took a deep breath. “Cross your fingers, people.”

They all stared at the glasses, but nothing obvious was happening. They waited.

The lead scientist smiled and turned toward them. “We’re receiving data. I believe we just fooled the Daemon.”

A cheer went up and high fives were exchanged at the lab benches. The Major was impassive, as always.

Philips, Ross, Merritt, and The Major moved to join the scientists crowding around video monitors. The screens displayed images being beamed onto the lenses of the HUD glasses. The Major squinted. “What are we looking at?”

Philips answered. “It’s a graphical user interface of some type—local time, GPS coordinates, power level, shield…Shield, that’s interesting….”

Ross pointed at the screen. “It looks like one of Sobol’s game interfaces. A menu of options. Like a first-person shooter.”

The Major scowled. “But what’s this tell us?”

Ross read through the visible menus. “There’s no obvious way to navigate the UI. How do they work it?”

The lead scientist nodded. “The glasses have a built-in bone-conduction microphone. Could it be voice-activated?”

“We don’t have a voice pattern for this Daemon operative.”

Philips pointed at a small blue square glowing near the right side of the screen. “What’s this?” Barely legible text appeared just above the box, reading: AAW-9393G28. It was connected to the box by a glowing line.

Ross concentrated on the screen. “I’d say it’s a call-out. Looks like there’s an object still active in our captured equipment collection.”

“You mean like the name call-outs hovering over characters in Sobol’s online games?”

“One way to find out…” Ross approached the armature holding the HUD glasses.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to turn these glasses. If that glowing box moves on-screen as I move the glasses, then we know the glasses are showing us a virtual Daemon object that’s bolted to an external coordinate system—most likely the GPS grid.”

Merritt looked from Philips to Ross. “Why would it create virtual objects on the GPS grid?”

Ross called over from the rig as he turned it. “In Sobol’s online games, players and significant objects in the 3-D environment are denoted by virtual call-outs—pop-up menus that hover in space, providing information. I believe Sobol created the same system using the GPS grid.” He turned to Philips. “How’s that?”

The group looked stunned. “Oh my God…”

“What is it?” Ross moved over to the monitor.

The tiny glowing box paled in significance. Hovering eerily in virtual space beyond the real walls of the lab was a towering red call-out box ringed with a dozen mysterious and dangerous-looking symbols—skulls, X’s, and crosses. Beneath that was a line reading 40—Sorcerer. At the top of the call-out was a rolling row of letters, like tumblers cycling endlessly next to the word Stormbringer.

“What the hell is that, Jon?”

Ross studied the video feed. “That’s the call-out of a fortieth-level sorcerer—we’ve been infiltrated.”

The Major leaned in toward the screen. “Where is he?”

“In this building…” Ross moved side to side to get some parallax on the call-out. “He’s in the gaming pit.” Ross turned to The Major. “Call security—NOW!”

The Major shouted to a nearby guard. “Notify Secom that we have a highly dangerous intruder in the gaming pit. Activate silent lockdown.”

The guard reached for his radio, but The Major put his hand over it and pointed to the nearby phone. “Use a landline, you idiot!”

The guard nodded. “Sorry, Major.”

Ross pointed at the screen. “We’ve got half the talent on the task force in that room.”

Philips turned on The Major. “Just how the hell did he get in here, Major?”

“Let’s worry about that once we have the mole in custody. I’ll tell you this much: Britlin is going to have hell to pay.”

“Britlin. Who is Britlin?”

“The company that clears task force candidates.”

Philips looked at him like he was insane. “The government outsourced our background checks?”

“Britlin has worked with the intelligence sector for thirty years, Doctor. This is standard operating procedure.”

“What about the current situation seems standard to you?”

Merritt started loosening his tie. “We need to take him out before he can react. Let me go in there with a can of mace.”

The Major shook his head. “Negative, Agent Merritt. We have people on site.”

“No offense, Major, but I do this for a living.”

“We have thirty ex-SOCOM soldiers—counterinsurgency experts, each with more than a decade of experience. Delta Force, OSNAZ, SFB…”

Merritt stopped preparing himself. “Well, I see you were expecting trouble.”

Ross was still moving back and forth, trying to pinpoint the intruder’s location on a printed floor plan. “He’s one of the gamers along the back wall of the pit. User 23, 24, or 25.”

Philips turned to the scientists. “This intruder must be linked into the Daemon’s darknet. Can you jam his connection?”

The lead scientist looked dour. “We’re not configured to jam signals in the gaming pit, Doctor.”

“Major, we need that mole taken alive if at all possible.”

The Major nodded toward the distant blast doors. “Let’s get to the security control room. We’ll direct the op from there.”

Chapter 43:// Enemy Within

The glass security doors of the gaming pit opened silently, admitting a Korr strike team—half a dozen heavily armed men wearing Kevlar helmets, gas masks, and black body armor. They entered in close formation, single file, guns aimed over each other’s shoulders. The white Korr logo was a just a large stylistic “K,” like a heraldic symbol on their black helmets and breastplates.

Across the room another set of glass doors opened, revealing a second Korr strike team, identical to the first. The team leaders exchanged hand signals, then advanced in unison. They were a steely-eyed, professional bunch, with automatic weapons, Tasers, and beanbag guns at the ready. They moved as one, threading rapidly through the tangle of workstations toward their target. They clearly knew their business.

The strike teams fanned out, aiming toward the far corner of the room. As they moved in, several of them held up printed signs reading Danger: Do not speak. Leave immediately. White-hat gamers looked up one by one, nudging each other. Their game chatter died down, but the guards took up chatter of their own to compensate:

“Team two, cover that left flank.”

“Stop bunching up.”

“Cover that exit!”

“Clear the field of fire.”

The strike teams kept up a steady stream of talk as they formed into a wedge, focused directly on the target: the three gamers in the corner of the room. They could see the gamers’ heads dodging left and right beyond flat-panel monitors, reacting to what was displayed on their computer screens. All three men were completely absorbed in their games.

The forward team leader held up three gloved fingers and pointed directly at the players in the corner. Best to take all three down.

The strike teams were still tugging stunned gamers aside, holding a finger up for silence, then pointing to the exits.

Finally the two strike teams were in position, arrayed around their quarry at a distance of ten or twelve feet. They stared at the heads of three gamers—patches of close-cropped, spiky hair. The ambient chatter had died down now, and the targeted gamers appeared to sense something was up. They glanced around as the last of their neighbors scurried to safety. They were isolated. Silence finally fell upon the room, except for the stereo sound effects of nearby 3-D games.

One of the Korr team leaders touched a microphone switch on his gas mask and shouted in an amplified radio voice. “Users 23, 24, and 25. Remain seated, and put your hands where we can see them. This is not a drill!”

The two gamers on the left immediately raised their hands and looked up in utter shock. When they got a look at the dozen weapons pointed in their direction, they turned a shade paler than they already were.

The young guy on the right remained motionless, still sitting behind his monitor.

“User 25! Put your hands where we can see them! Now!” The team leader motioned for the two users on the left to clear the area. They were happy to oblige, and as they complied, two guards pepper-sprayed them in the face. They collapsed screaming as the guards zipped hand ties onto their wrists. It was done with expert swiftness and precision—like calf roping in a rodeo—and in no time, the guards were back on their feet, weapons ready.

User 25 was now isolated. A couple dozen eyes memorized the top of his head through gun sights. Bright laser dots clustered on his scalp.

The booming radio voice kept up the pressure. “Show your hands! Now!”

User 25 took a deep breath. “This is a mistake.”

“Hands where we can see them or we open fire!”

“A big mistake.”

“I said hands in the air!”

User 25 finally raised his hands. They were wrapped in jet-black gloves with silver caps—like thimbles—on the end of each index finger. Something was set in the palm of each hand, like a large crystal.

Suddenly a white-hot flash several times brighter than the sun pulsed through the room, followed closely by a second flash from User 25’s other hand. It took several moments for the light to flare down.

The strike teams were initially stunned, but then needles of agony burned into their brains. They dropped their weapons as they collapsed onto their knees, grabbing at their eyes and clawing their gas masks off their faces, screaming.

Brian Gragg kicked his chair away and stood up from the gaming workstation. As the blinded strike team members writhed on the floor, crying out, Gragg moved calmly toward the burly team leader who had shouted at him. Gragg aimed a silver-capped index finger at the man—a lens at its very tip. Black fiber optic and electrical cables ran down the back of Gragg’s hand like veins, disappearing beneath his shirt. “The name is Loki, asshole.”

A ruler-straight bolt of electricity cracked like a bullwhip from his fingertip into the man’s body armor, followed by a flickering series of bolts in quick succession—three a second. The team leader’s muscles jerked with each thunderclap. The smell of ozone filled the air.

After the last crack, Gragg lowered his hand, and the team leader dropped to the ground dead, his body smoking and sizzling.

Grimacing from the pain in his eyes, the other team leader glanced around blindly and shouted, “Who’s shooting!”

“That’s not shooting!”

“Hooks!” A pause. “Where’s Hooks!”

“Get to cover and sound off! Sound off!”

Gragg moved toward the fallen men. He pointed and let loose with several seconds of deafening thunderclaps. Men crawled away screaming, only to be immobilized the moment the first bolt hit them.

In a few seconds they were all motionless or convulsing.

The sickening smell of burnt hair came to Gragg’s nostrils.

“What the hell just happened?” Philips stared at a bank of security monitors. The security command center was packed with Korr Security folks pointing at monitors and barking into radios.

The Major snapped his fingers at the control board operator. “Get on the horn to Weyburn Labs. Tell them we might be facing an illicit LIP-C weapon. I need countermeasures and tactics.”

Merritt watched the intruder on the monitor. “What’s an LIP-C weapon?”

“Laser-Induced Plasma Channel. Uses laser light as a virtual wire for electricity.”

“Where did he get it?”

“The Daemon appears to be dipping into our research pipeline.”

Philips turned on him. “Just how many sections of the intelligence apparatus have been compromised, Major?”

“Not now, Doctor. We’ve got men down.”

Ross, Merritt, and Philips stared at the large central monitor. There, the intruder was stepping among the fallen strike team members, sprawled on the floor of the gaming pit.

The Major barked at the board operator. “Seal zones three through six. Let’s contain this asshole.”

Another Korr officer spoke up. “I’ve got an identity on User 25: Michael Radcliffe. Grad student, MIT—”

The Major waved it aside. “That’s bullshit. Radcliffe’s probably dead.”

“Should we pump tear gas through the ventilation ducts, sir?”

“Use your brain. There’s a dozen gas masks in there with him.” The Major checked his watch. “Call in an electronic warfare team and a demolitions team. We need to jam this fucker’s uplink, then kill him.” He turned to nearby Korr officers. “I want commercially marked choppers over our twenty. Scramble the perimeter defense teams. Lethal force authorized. No one enters or leaves this facility until I say otherwise.”

“Understood, Major.”

Philips pushed up to him. “Major, we should try to take this man alive.”

“We’re not capturing anyone, Doctor. This situation is going to end right now, and whatever’s left is all yours.”

Ross pointed at the monitor. “He’s doing something.”

They all looked up.

The intruder was standing, moving his arms as though controlling invisible objects, his mouth moving in a rhythmic chant.

Gragg concentrated on the plane of D-Space. The entire floor plan of Building Twenty-Nine was replicated there, spread out around him as a life-sized wire-frame model overlaid on the GPS grid. It aligned precisely with the corners of each wall in the real world. This allowed Gragg to see the geometry of adjoining rooms. More importantly, images from the building’s dense network of security cameras were wrapped around the wire-frame model’s geometry, showing a patchwork of live video from those neighboring rooms—giving Gragg an almost X-ray vision through the dense concrete.

Korr personnel sprinted through the hallways, loading weapons and sealing doorways. They were ants in his ant colony. He had seen the strike teams getting ready all the way back in their locker room.

The garrison was in disarray.

Gragg turned to look far beyond the concrete walls of Building Twenty-Nine, to distant, glowing call-outs in D-Space. He selected dozens of virtual objects he’d stored there, then launched his prearranged summoning sequence, making somatic gestures and speaking the unlock code to the VOIP module. “Andos ethran Kohlra Bethru. Lord of a million eyes, Loki summons you….”

Gragg looked through the sealed blast doors leading into the lab. The guards there had been pulled inside, but Gragg looked into the artificial dimension beyond them. He aimed his gloved finger at a virtual object in the lab, an object he had insinuated into the equipment collection some time ago. Gragg closed his fist on the object in D-Space.

Somewhere beyond those thick concrete walls a compressed air tank sprayed powdered aluminum across the lab space—then ignited it with an electrical spark. Suddenly the building shuddered, followed by a dull roar and the muted shrieks of twisting metal. A deafening klaxon sounded the alarm throughout the facility. Blue strobes flickered near the exits.

The Major scanned the security monitors as a dozen red lights blinked on a floor plan map. There. The lab was consumed in flames. The camera image rippled with interference, vertical hold skipping. One of the scientists ran through the picture, burning alive beneath white-hot flames. Sprinklers deployed to little effect.

“Goddamnit…”

“The science team. Get medics to the lab! And the equipment collection—”

“It’s too late….” Ross pointed to the monitor.

On-screen an acetylene tank was spinning in a pinwheel of flame near the lab table, then exploded, shaking the building again. The monitor image went dead.

Philips slumped and covered her eyes. “We just lost some of our best people, not to mention the Daemon equipment collection.”

Merritt grabbed The Major’s shoulder. “Where do you need me?”

“Sit tight, Merritt.” The Major looked back at Philips. “Are you still glad you conducted your little test, Doctor?”

“Without this test we never would have discovered we’d been infiltrated.”

Ross nodded. “That’s why we weren’t able to join Daemon Factions. He was tracking our every move.”

The Major turned to him. “Maybe we shouldn’t have been playing games with the Daemon in the first place.”

The board operator looked up again. “He’s not going anywhere, Major. The gaming pit is locked down.”

Gragg stood before the sealed bulletproof glass doors barring his exit. The camera-lined corridor beyond led to the building entry vestibule.

Gragg turned to face another D-Space object hovering just to the right of the glass doors. It was a surreal blue button, floating impossibly there as seen through his HUD glasses. It was labeled in large glowing letters: OPEN. Gragg tapped the virtual button with his gloved hand. It flashed.

The real-world ballistic glass doors slid open, and he stepped through the opening and entered the anteroom beyond.

Philips threw up her hands. “He’s out of the gaming pit.”

Ross gestured to the monitors. “The security system’s been compromised.”

“Who subcontracted that, I wonder?”

The Major gave her a look. “Stow that shit right now.” He turned to the board operator. “Physically cut the power to the north perimeter doors.”

The board operator rolled back in his chair. He opened an electrical panel on the back wall and started tripping breaker switches.

Philips leaned over the board and clicked from camera to camera. “Where is he?”

“Don’t worry, Doctor. He’s trapped.”

“That’s what you said last time. Show me.”

“We just tripped the breakers. The perimeter doors are frozen in a locked position. He’s not getting through inch-thick steel plating.”

She studied the bank of black-and-white monitors. The large one in the center now showed the intruder standing in a dead-end hallway some distance from the exterior steel doors. He stood above three newly fallen guards, their bodies smoking. The intruder was just staring up at the camera. Unnervingly calm. He was only a kid—early twenties at most.

The Major nodded at the monitor. “I told you we’d stop him.” He turned to a nearby guard. “I want every gun on the tarmac focused on that exit.”

Philips leaned into the microphone sticking up from the control board. She held down the mic switch. “You’re trapped. Give up, and you won’t be hurt.”

The intruder’s tinny voice came in over the speakers. “Dr. Philips, I see you discovered D-Space. Or at least a layer of it.”

A flash of fear swept through her. He knew her real name. How could he possibly know her name? Thoughts of her parents in D.C. thrust front and center in her mind. She turned to The Major. “Call Dr. Fulbright at Fort Meade. Tell him to take my parents into protective custody. Now!”

The Major snapped his fingers at a Korr guard, who grabbed another phone.

She keyed the mic. “You know who I am. So who are you—or are you afraid to tell me your name?”

“Bitch. I’m Loki, the most powerful sorcerer in the world, and I’m about to ruin your whole fucking day.”

Merritt took off his suit jacket and headed for the door. “Keep this nutcase busy, Doctor.”

Ross grabbed Merritt’s arm. “No heroics, Roy.”

“I don’t plan on any.”

The Major blocked his path. “Where are you going?”

Merritt looked calmly at him. “I’m going to see how that prick deals with flash-bang grenades. Unlock the gaming pit, Major.”

The Major appraised Merritt for a moment, then grabbed a radio and headset from a nearby charging station. The man looked as determined as he had in the famous Burning Man images from Sobol’s mansion. He tossed them to Merritt. “Good luck.” The Major watched him exit.

Philips turned back to the monitor and keyed the mic again. “Loki, Sobol is using you. What you’re doing is high treason. If you surrender now, I can help you.”

“You can help me?” He laughed. “I’m not the one who needs help. The society you’re defending is doomed.”

“It’s your society, too, Loki.”

“No. It’s my parents’ society, not mine. What does it offer my generation? A meaningless existence. Living long, boring lives, milked each day by salesmen. Livestock for a permanent ruling class. Well, I have no use for their laws, their maps, their failures. The Daemon has already defeated them.”

“This is your last warning: surrender.”

Loki smiled. “You don’t get it, do you?”

Philips sighed in exasperation and pounded the mic button again. “We physically cut the power to the door in front of you. Your hacks won’t work. Even if you manage to get through the door, we’ve got snipers covering the tarmac. They’ll cut you down from two hundred meters downrange. Just surrender.”

Loki shook his head. “You’re not thinking in enough dimensions, Doctor. Only part of me is in this building.”

Squads of heavily armed Korr Security guards ran to take up positions next to a guard shack ringed with highway barriers and razor wire at the perimeter gate. Behind them a quarter mile of bare tarmac stretched to the nearest hangar, but most of their attention was drawn inward, to Building Twenty-Nine itself. They listened to their encrypted radios and the voice coming through it.

“Shoot on sight. Repeat: Shoot on sight….”

“Copy that, Secom. Out.”

A bay breeze kicked up, sending scraps of paper tumbling over the expanse of concrete and flattening them against the chain-link fencing. Nearer to the building another squad of Korr guards with scoped M4A1s rushed to take up positions in the staff parking lot—the best cover available. They took aim at the sealed steel doors of the building.

The roar of speeding engines suddenly came in on the wind. One guard turned, then urgently grabbed his officer’s shoulder, pointing. “Pas op!”

They both turned to see one, then six, then fifteen, then thirty cars screaming in from several vectors along the runway, racing in through the gaps between distant hangar buildings. The cars swerved with remarkable coordination, all converging on Building Twenty-Nine like a school of piranha.

“Polizei?”

The lieutenant blew a whistle, and everyone turned to face him. He pointed and shouted with an Afrikaans accent. “Incoming! Take cover!”

“Might be car bombs.”

“Belay that!” The cars had already closed half the distance. More were issuing from between the distant hangars. The lieutenant keyed his radio. “Secom, we have several dozen vehicles inbound at high speed. Code 30.”

Nothing but static came back.

“Scheisse.” He turned to his men. “Fire at will!”

Automatic gunfire erupted from a score of positions. The shots cracked flatly in the open air of the runway. Tracer rounds ripped across the tarmac, ricocheting off the concrete and whining into the sky.

“Knock out the lead cars! The lead cars!”

A light antitank rocket blasted from their lines in a pall of smoke and detonated against a mid-sized car at fifty yards, turning it into a tumbling ball of flame. A black domestic sedan swerved around the wreckage and came roaring onward. Half a dozen divots appeared in the black-tinted windshield at head level right in front of the driver’s seat, revealing a high degree of marksmanship. Then hundreds more bullets tore through its front grill. As its engine died another car surged past it, and as that one was riddled with bullets, yet another took its place. Already ten cars were smoking and rolling to a stop—but still more came on.

The shooting died down as half the squad dropped clips and hurriedly reloaded.

“Watch that left flank!”

The lieutenant leaned around the guard shack just in time to see a car’s front grill—which was the last thing he ever saw.

The car crashed into the fence line and concrete highway divider at 110 mph, disappearing into a cloud of concrete dust and debris as it tumbled end over end. It was immediately followed by three other sedans, crashing through the gate. Automatic weapons stitched them full of bullet holes from several directions. Shouting filled the gaps in the gunfire.

But other cars had already blasted through the fence line elsewhere, dragging great serrated lengths of chain-link fencing behind them. These caught guards across the thighs, tearing their flesh and dragging them screaming, even as other guards blasted out windows and peppered car bodies with bullets from M249s with 200-round belts.

Now they could plainly see the cars were unmanned.

“Dit kan nie wees, nie!”

“Fall back! Fall back!”

A car crashed into the edge of the parking lot, while two others careened off each other and slammed into a scattering pack of guards with such force that the guards’ bodies hurtled twenty yards and landed in the bay, followed closely by the cars that hit them. The cars sent up geysers of water as they hit the surface.

In the distance, more AutoM8s kept streaming through the gaps between warehouses.

Merritt raced out into the gaming pit, Berretta drawn. Automatic gunfire crackled like popcorn somewhere outside. “Damnit…“

Merritt slowed as he reached the still-smoking bodies of the strike teams sprawled between the workstations. He knelt to feel the pulse of the nearest one. Nothing.

He scavenged an HK UMP .40-cal submachine gun with a web belt of extra clips and flash-bang grenades, then spoke into his headset microphone. “Merritt to Secom. What the hell’s going on out there? Over.”

The Major talked into a radio headset. “Agent Merritt, we’re under attack. Stand by.”

Inside the security control room, the sound of muffled automatic weapons fire was starting to be eclipsed by roaring engines and crashing. The Major watched the external monitors. One camera showed a head-on view of a driverless, bullet-riddled car nailing the camera pole, the screen filling with snow. “Why didn’t they sound the alarm?” He was having trouble comprehending it. “This isn’t a guerrilla raid—this is a frontal assault.”

Ross examined the screens. “Computer-controlled vehicles. Dozens of them. The Factions call them AutoM8s.”

The Major stared at the large central monitor on the control board—seemingly the only monitor not at present depicting mayhem.

On-screen the intruder was busy moving his arms—manipulating invisible objects. He glanced up at the security camera. His voice came over the speaker. “I’ll let myself out.”

Just then, some ten yards behind the intruder, the steel doors were staved in by a shredded mass of metal. The whole building shook with a dull thud, concrete dust sifting down through seams.

The intruder barely flinched.

The car that had smashed in the steel doors was now entirely blocking the exit. But then another unseen vehicle cut in from the side and ripped the first one out of the hole with a deafening crash.

The opening was now clear.

Merritt heard the first crash and saw sunlight streaming in from beyond the sealed ballistic doors. He loaded the UMP and by the second crash he was rushing toward the glass doors.

Gragg emerged into the sunlight through the shattered opening of the main door.

As he did so, a silver BMW 740 with blacked-out windows rolled up to meet him. Its rear door opened, and he slid inside, pulling the door closed behind him. The BMW screeched off toward the wrecked fence line, followed close on by a pack of domestic sedans.

Merritt emerged from the dark, smoking doorway screaming, “Loki!” He stopped, clutched his UMP’s fore grip, and opened up with three short bursts, expertly tagging the tinted rear windshield with a dozen closely grouped shots. The .40-cal bullets left small divots but not much else. The car was obviously a security model.

“Goddamnit!” Merritt lowered his gun and watched a sizeable pack of unmanned vehicles converge like a single organism, surrounding the BMW to shield it. They accelerated toward the distant fence line, running over several bodies in the process. The pack of cars was heading for the distant hangars at high speed.

Merritt glanced around at the carnage surrounding Building Twenty-Nine. There were bodies, streaks of blood, burning vehicles, and debris littering the tarmac. Columns of black smoke billowed skyward. There wasn’t a guard in sight—or any intact unmanned vehicles for that matter. They had all left with Loki.

Merritt spotted a racing motorcycle parked along the wall in the staff parking lot. He rushed over to it and searched for keys—nothing. He slung his UMP over his back and pulled his Berretta pistol, aiming it at the ignition lock. He turned his head away.

Boom.

Pieces of plastic and metal parts clattered across the pavement. Merritt holstered the Berretta, then mounted the bike. He turned the shattered lock cylinder to Start and kicked the engine to life, revving its powerful engine. He grabbed the helmet hanging from the handlebars and pulled it on. He flipped down the mirrored visor, and a moment later he screeched out after the pack of automated cars receding in the distance. He accelerated madly through the debris field and rocketed out onto the runway in hot pursuit. He could barely make out the silver BMW in the middle of the car pack, but he targeted it with every ounce of horsepower he had at his disposal. The bike engine howled.

After buckling himself in, Gragg looked back toward Building Twenty-Nine.

Directly over the building a bright red glowing sign towered in D-Space sixty stories tall, rotating like a neon sign and visible for miles around to anyone on the Daemon’s darknet. It proclaimed in giant letters with an arrow pointing down: Top-Secret Anti-Daemon Task Force. Gragg laughed, then raised one black-gloved hand. He drew another glowing red box across D-Space to encompass the entire facility. With a click of his pinky he brought up a pop-up menu, then selected Kill Everyone.

Merritt’s motorcycle howled across the decommissioned runway. He leaned into a swerve at a hundred mph to avoid a pothole, but as he came out of it, he noticed a second wave of unmanned vehicles streaming in toward Building Twenty-Nine. Thirty vehicles, including a couple of white Econoline panel vans. A detachment of mid-sized domestic sedans peeled off from the main group and vectored in on Merritt.

“Oh shit…”

The sedans were almost on him—and still accelerating.

Merritt’s youthful passion for fast motorcycles finally paid off. He thrust his body up and over the left side of the gas tank—expertly pulling into the hardest turn he could manage at high speed. Friction coefficients instinctively ran through his head and muscle memory took over.

The first blue sedan screamed past on the right rear flank with a margin so close the wind pounded into Merritt’s thigh.

Merritt leaned right.

Half a second later, two more sedans clipped each other just feet behind him. Hollow crashing sounds—as of rolling vehicles—boomed, then quickly faded behind him.

The fourth one came so close it tore Merritt’s left rear turning light off. This left Merritt wavering and off balance. The motorcycle yawed from side to side for a few moments until he got it back under control. He was now highly aware that he wasn’t wearing riding gear.

He looked up to see Loki’s pack of cars racing through the decommissioned base’s front gate. Merritt shot a glance behind him. Two cars were pursuing and closing fast. He yanked on the throttle, and raw acceleration nearly ripped him off the saddle.

Merritt raced down a lane between hangars and keyed his radio. “Merritt to Secom. In pursuit of Loki. He’s headed…east…in an armored, silver late-model BMW. It’s surrounded by a pack of unmanned vehicles. More are headed your way.”

The Major’s voice came in over the radio. “Agent Merritt, terminate this pursuit. Repeat: Terminate pursuit immediately.”

Merritt emerged from between the hangars and saw Loki’s pack racing out into the city streets, smashing other traffic aside. “Negative. This guy’s a danger to the public.”

“Repeat: Terminate this chase!”

“I don’t report to you, Major! Until the bureau orders me otherwise, I’m going after this bastard. Out.”

He accelerated out the abandoned front gates of Alameda Naval Air Station and hit the surface roads with a bounce.

Gragg cinched the racing harness tighter around his body as the powerful BMW AutoM8 roared into the streets of Oakland.

The unmanned steering wheel spun crazily as it went into a power slide around the corner. AutoM8s crowded Gragg’s car on either side, muscling other cars out of their way. His entourage was a pack of a dozen sedans. He saw their random, alphanumeric call-outs hovering in D-Space all around him.

He concentrated further ahead—on the dozens more AutoM8s streaming in toward him from across the city. His strength was growing by the minute, now reaching upwards of a hundred vehicles.

He waved his gloved hands and screeched cars across the mouths of distant intersections, sealing out cross-traffic and opening the way ahead.

Gragg’s own pack invaded a busy intersection against the light—sparking several broadside crashes as his minions forced a path for him. Smashing glass followed screeching rubber. Wrecked cars spun out of control, and pedestrians ran for cover.

Gragg’s BMW raced through the carnage and past a local patrolman ticketing a landscaper’s truck. Gragg’s eyes narrowed, and he brought video from dashboard cameras of a trailing AutoM8 up onto his HUD display. In the video window Gragg could see the local cop sprinting to his squad car, speaking urgently into his hand radio.

With a subtle motion of his hand Gragg clicked on the license plate of the police car, locking the nearest AutoM8 onto it.

The video image disappeared in a cloud of snow on impact, and Gragg chuckled to himself, imagining the consequences.

On the tarmac surrounding Building Twenty-Nine, two white panel vans came to a stop as a dozen more AutoM8s circled around them, on guard. The rear doors to each van opened, and metal mesh ramps dropped onto the pavement with a clang.

A deep, guttural roar rose over the other engines, and down each ramp rolled a riderless, black racing motorcycle with dozens of brushed steel blades running along their tops and sides like cooling fins. Neither bike had handlebars, but instead had forward-mounted hydraulic assemblies of brushed steel, folded tightly. A cowling of black laminate armor enclosed the front. In place of a rider’s saddle was a circular steel dome about a foot in diameter, its surface etched with mystical symbols. Nearly every inch of the bikes was covered in runes and glyphs and razor-sharp blades. They were as much fetish objects as machines.

The motorcycles rolled to a stop and twin hydraulic jacks slammed down onto the pavement like oversized kickstands or half-formed legs. They thrust each bike nearly a foot off the ground, where they stood revving their 1800cc engines deafeningly. Then twin robotic arms with gleaming three-foot sword blades unfolded from the forward hydraulic assemblies, lashing forth on gimbals, arcing smoothly with blinding speed as they ran through diagnostics like insects cleaning their antennae.

At some unseen signal, the bikes retracted their kickstand jacks and hit the pavement, rear wheels smoking. They streaked off toward the hulking silhouette of Building Twenty-Nine in the distance.

Philips and The Major moved swiftly down a corridor, followed by Ross and four heavily armed Korr guards. Personnel raced past them in both directions, carrying computers and boxes of files. The Major was speaking on his L3 phone. “I understand.” A pause. “Yes. We’re working back channels to warn off civilian authorities. I will.” He snapped the phone shut.

They reached the gaming pit and could see black smoke seeping from the seams of the sealed lab blast doors, hinting at the inferno burning within. Korr medics were doing CPR on two strike team members, while other guards were placing bodies in a row on the floor.

Philips slowed for a moment. “My God…”

The Major pulled her past and motioned for Ross to follow. “We’re evacuating this facility. Choppers are on the way. I’m taking the first one to go after Agent Merritt. I want you and Mr. Ross on chopper two.”

“Where is Merritt?”

“He went out after this ‘Loki’ person, but we can track him. His radio has GPS.”

Ross noticed guards pass by, uncoiling detonator wire from a reel. “What’s going on?”

“We’re about to have a serious industrial accident here. Prearranged cover story.”

Philips snapped alert. “This facility still contains critical equipment and data, Major.”

“This facility is in danger of being overrun by the enemy, Doctor.”

Philips thought about this for a moment, then produced her own encrypted phone and started punching numbers. “I haven’t received orders to abandon this facility, and until I do, I’m not going anywhere.”

“In that case…” The Major drew a Glock 9mm pistol from his coat and chambered a round. “I can’t risk you falling into enemy hands. Your knowledge of U.S. ciphers is too great.”

Ross stepped in front of her. “Wait!”

“Do you want to see my orders, Doctor?”

She was speechless, staring at the business end of the pistol.

Ross held his hands up. “She’ll go, Major.”

The Major lowered his gun. “Puts it into perspective, doesn’t it? Now get ready to pull out.”

“What about my people?”

“They’re no longer your people. This task force has been dissolved. I’ve been ordered to send you back to Fort Meade and to remand Mr. Ross to the custody of the FBI.”

“On what charges?”

“Multiple counts of wire fraud and identity theft.”

She stared at The Major. “That’s insane. He just made a breakthrough.”

“This task force has been ineffective at curbing the rapid growth of the Daemon. Your narrow field of expertise is being folded into a larger effort. Mr. Ross’s services are no longer required. If they ever were.”

Ross looked unsurprised. “But I have an amnesty agreement with the Justice Department.”

“The terms of which you failed to meet.”

“We failed because task force functions were compromised by private contractors.”

The Major nodded to the nearby guards, who raised stun guns. “These men will see that you’re delivered safely. Resistance is optional.”

Philips kept shaking her head. “Major, if Merritt captures Loki, we can find out how they compromised our systems.”

“The Daemon won this round, Doctor. I have orders to break off contact with the infiltrator as soon as possible.”

“You can’t just let Loki escape.”

“The number one goal right now is keeping the existence of the Daemon a secret until we mitigate the risks to the global economy. That goal is not compatible with open warfare on our perimeter or by Agent Merritt pursuing a pack of robotic vehicles through downtown Oakland. We’re lucky we don’t already have news choppers swarming overhead.”

“If we can stop this thing now, it will be worth the hit to the economy.”

“I’ll be sure to put that in my report, Comrade Philips.”

The thumping of a chopper was now audible. The Major spoke to a nearby Korr guard. “Hold them here, and rush them to the roof when the second chopper arrives—but not before. Understood?”

The lead guard saluted. “Yes, Major.”

The radio on the guard’s belt crackled to life. “This is Perimeter-9…do you copy?”

The Major motioned for the guard to hand it to him, and he started heading toward the stairwell doors as he keyed the mic. “This is Secom, Perimeter-9. What’s your status?”

Out on the tarmac Perimeter-9 clutched a radio handset and winced in pain. “All units down. Repeat: all perimeter units are down. Request medevac and air support.” He limped painfully behind a wrecked and bullet-riddled AutoM8. His lower leg was stained with blood just below a makeshift tourniquet. The leg was badly mangled.

The Major’s voice came over the radio through a haze of static. “Report on the unmanned vehicles.”

“They left with the intruder. But more of them just arrived. They’re forming for another attack. I’m out of ammo, sir. Badly injured.” He craned his neck back toward a chopper angling in toward the roof of Building Twenty-Nine. “Requesting immediate airlift.”

“Negative. Just stay put, Nine. Help’s on the way.”

Just then Perimeter-9 heard the howl of high-performance engines. He turned to see twin racing motorcycles streaking across the tarmac in his direction. They were moving in close formation at 150 mph or more.

“Hold it. I’ve got two motorcycles inbound….” He stepped behind the fender of the car, putting the car hood between him and the approaching bikes. “They’re moving fast as hell.”

“Where are they headed?”

Suddenly a brilliant green laser light dazzled his eyes. He held up his hands against it, squinting. “Hang on, I’m being painted by something. I can’t see—”

The roaring engines were suddenly on him and he heard a deep thwack. He was completely disoriented for several moments. As his vision cleared, he had a view from the ground—a view of his own headless, one-armed body slumping over the hood of the car ten feet away, then sliding onto the pavement.

Back in the gaming pit, The Major was already gone. His voice came through on a nearby guard’s radio. “Perimeter-9! Do you copy?”

Ross watched eight armed guards piling black bags onto the floor for transport. Two were staring at him with hard eyes—stun guns ready.

“I guess I should have seen this coming.”

Philips squeezed his shoulder. “I won’t let them do this to you, Jon. I have friends in Washington, too.”

Suddenly the howl of racing engines echoed down the corridor behind the nearby ballistic doors. Everyone turned to see shadows streak along the corridor wall, then twin black motorcycles roared into view beyond the closed bulletproof glass doors. They raised robotic blade arms menacingly. The blades on the lead bike were already stained with blood.

Everyone stepped back away from the doors. The Korr guards raised their weapons, clicking off their safeties. Ross pointed toward the far glass doors. “Let’s get to the roof. Now!”

Philips stared at the machines beyond the sealed Lexan glass. The most exotic thing that the Daemon had spawned yet. “Jon, I’ve seen the word ‘Razorback’ listed in decrypted Daemon intercepts. This could—”

A spiraling green light stabbed forth from the face of the lead bike, beaming through the ballistic glass into her eyes. She screamed and slammed her palms against her face, staggering back.

Ross rushed forward and grabbed her. He pulled her behind the guards, who were also dazed by the light. “Don’t look at them! They have blinding weapons!”

Then the ballistic doors slid open with their familiar hiss—and the roar of the advancing Razorbacks filled the cavernous gaming pit. Followed by gunfire and—almost immediately—bloodcurdling screams.

Ross pulled on Philips’s arm. “Run!” The engine roar was deafening now as Ross guided Philips down the adjacent hall toward the open security control room door. There was only a smattering of gunfire now as the roar of the engines zigzagged across the room behind them. Smashing furniture. Ross risked a quick glance back behind them. Blood was spattered all over the walls and floor near the ballistic doors. A Korr guard was running toward him, firing blindly over his shoulder as a Razorback raised twin, bloody blades and screeched after him on the polished concrete, green laser spiraling. Ross turned away as a series of metallic ringing sounds, screams, and sharp thwacks accompanied the roar of engines.

Ross reached the security control room door, half dragging the blinded Philips across the polished floor.

“What’s happening, Jon? What’s happening?”

“Keep moving!” He took another glance behind them as the same Razorback accelerated down the hallway in their direction. Ross looked away just as a laser light played across his face.

He pulled Philips inside the control room, then dropped her on the floor and raced back toward the open control room door. He kicked the hollow steel door closed just as the Razorback screeched to a stop in front of it. He put a shoulder against the door and slammed it shut, locking it.

Almost instantly a series of massive dents deformed the door, accompanied by the thunderous roar of a powerful engine. The pounding continued, deforming the door surface as Ross backed away from it.

He felt Philips clutching for his leg. “Jon, I think I’m blind!”

He glanced toward another door leading out the far side of the control room. He knelt next to her and shouted over the engine noise. “Nat, we can’t stay here!”

She gripped her face, tears streaming down from between her fingers. “My eyes, Jon! They’re burning!”

He grabbed her roughly. “Nat! Nat, listen to me!”

She stopped. The Razorback’s pounding vibrated the floor.

“It could be temporary.” He looked back at the door. “If we don’t leave here now, we’re going to die!”

The sound of deforming metal reinforced his argument.

She took a deep breath and nodded. “Where are we?”

He shouted over the deafening roar of the Razorback. “Security control room!”

She nodded. “We can make it to the back gate!”

He helped her to her feet, and they headed to the door on the far side of the small room.

One of the Razorback’s steel falchions pierced through the door and wrenched free as the engine roared again.

She stopped him. “The perimeter doors. We need to trip the breakers back on.”

“I’ll get it. Just go! Follow the left wall.” He pushed her through the door, then turned. Jagged holes had been torn into the sheet metal of the other door. Part of it was broken away, and he could see one of the Razorback’s gnarled, twisted blade arms through the slits. It paused for a moment, then he heard a ping sound, and the twisted blades spun free like disposable razors, clattering onto the concrete floor in the hallway outside.

Ross rushed to the breaker boxes. He stole a glance at the bank of camera monitors on the control board. One showed the Razorback in the hallway outside, reaching around to its side. A metal click-clack, and the arms rose with fresh, gleaming blades.

“Son of a bitch…” He opened a panel marked Perimeter and tripped all the breakers back on. He raced back to the far door, looking behind just as the Razorback smashed the door in. He turned away as its laser painted him, and it roared across the room. Ross slammed the new door behind them, and the pounding started almost immediately.

A Bell Jet Ranger chopper hovered inches above the cluttered roof of Building Twenty-Nine. The helicopter was electric blue with a bold yellow logo for Golden Gate Heli-Tours. The Major rose from his kneeling position and scurried toward it at a crouch. A crewmember wearing a Korr flak vest pulled him inside. The Major leaned toward the helmeted pilot, who nodded in his direction. The crewman handed The Major a closed-circuit headset, and The Major slipped it on.

The pilot’s voice came over the headphones, “What’s the situation here, Major?”

“I need to get topside. We’ve got a Daemon operative escaping into the city and a federal officer in pursuit. Where’s my kit?”

“Case on the floor, sir.”

The Major pointed at the crewmember and copilot in turn, but spoke to the pilot. “These people, off.”

Both men looked to the pilot, who simply said, “You heard the man. Take the next chopper out.”

They unbuckled themselves and with a hesitant look jumped down onto the roof.

The Major shouted. “Go!”

The pilot yanked on the stick, and the chopper ascended rapidly, making corkscrews of the columns of black smoke.

Chapter 44:// Revelation

Merritt accelerated down an Oakland retail strip. Damaged vehicles littered the way. On the motorcycle, he was able to slip past the bottlenecks of wreckage and whipped past several damaged patrol cars to take the lead in the pursuit. Up ahead he could see Loki’s pack of cars, and he could see the silver BMW itself, protected by its personal guard detail. A minivan suddenly bucked up and tumbled out of the way as a horrendous crash came to Merritt’s ears.

This guy was a psycho.

A city motorcycle cop raced up on Merritt’s right. Merritt shouted over to him and held his badge up on a chain. “FBI!” He used military hand signals to indicate the target.

The motorcycle cop nodded and brought his big bike racing ahead past Merritt.

“Hey!”

Suddenly twin sedans streaked in from side streets, crushing the motorcycle cop between them with a horrific crash.

Merritt averted his head as he powered through the flying debris and smoke. He emerged on the other side to see nothing but flames behind him.

Gragg looked into his HUD glasses to see multiple police cars screeching onto the street several blocks back, rack lights flashing. He crashed another one of his AutoM8s into a civilian’s subcompact, smashing it out of the way and sending it spinning up onto the sidewalk. He left a trail of destruction behind him as the police lights zigzagged between wrecked vehicles, falling behind fast. But more sirens could be heard ahead and to either side of him. They were starting to cordon him off. Choppers were no doubt en route.

He smiled to himself. More AutoM8s were streaming in to aid him. He felt the presence of over a hundred now—some more valuable than others.

Another BMW 740 screeching in from a side street suddenly joined Gragg’s car. This BMW was scarlet red. The pack expanded automatically to encompass it.

Gragg motioned with one black-gloved hand, and the electro-polymer paint of his own BMW shifted from silver to red in a matter of seconds—even as the newly arrived red BMW transformed from red to silver. Gragg’s digital ink license plates flicked from California to Oregon vanity tags that read GECCO. In a flash, his BMW went into a power slide down a side street and left the main pack behind.

Merritt was still trying to comprehend what he just saw. A decoy BMW had joined the pack, but then Loki’s BMW transformed right in front of Merritt’s eyes. Merritt leaned hard into the turn and gave chase. Loki’s car was now bright red—but he could still see the pockmarks from his earlier shots in the rear window. He cast a glance behind him to see several squad cars race past the intersection, still in pursuit of the original pack.

Merritt turned back to face Loki, then he tapped his radio button. “Major! Major, this is Merritt. Do you copy?”

The Major looked up from assembling a scoped SCAR-H sniper rifle in the passenger bay of the chopper. Merritt’s voice came over their encrypted radio frequency again, dissolving occasionally into static. “Major, this…Merritt…copy?”

The Major keyed his mic. “Go ahead, Agent Merritt.”

“Listen…police are pursuing a decoy BMW…car has…color, and is heading…” Static filled the channel.

“You’re breaking up.”

“Repeat…color. I’m giving chase.”

“You’re catching interference from the AutoM8s. Fall back, Merritt.”

“…police they’re…” At that the signal trailed off into static.

The Major dropped the handset and spoke into his chopper headset. “We still receiving Merritt’s GPS coordinates?”

The pilot nodded. “10-4, Major. Clear as a bell.”

“Then the Daemon is using GPS, too. Get me over Merritt’s twenty.”

Now out of the chase and heading through wide industrial streets, Gragg monitored a distant AutoM8’s video feed as the pack of cars he just left accelerated onto an elevated portion of the 880 Freeway, smashing cars out of their way. California Highway Patrol units took up the chase on the freeway. Gragg couldn’t help but smile. They were closing in.

He accelerated the distant AutoM8 pack toward the elevated junction with Highway 260—and the retaining wall at the steep curve. “This ought to be interesting….”

He selected the lead AutoM8 in the HUD and urged it on ahead of the others. Then he switched to video feed from a car farther back in the pack. The lead car screamed ahead like a missile, then crashed through the concrete retaining wall at a hundred miles an hour, spraying a vacant lot fifty feet below with pieces of concrete and twisted metal. The remaining pack, including the silver BMW, roared through the new gap in the wall and tumbled end over end through the air, smashing down on top of one another in a fiery wreck. The video feed turned to snow.

Done. Gragg took a deep breath and felt himself coming down off the adrenaline surge. He could imagine the police stopping to look out over a tangled pile of burning wreckage, scratching their heads, as police are wont to do. It would take them days to figure out. The nearest police car’s GPS signal was a mile away.

He did a quick postmortem: the Daemon Task Force had been neutralized. It might mean another level for him.

A motorcycle streaked up alongside his car. The rider reached out with one hand, extending a submachine gun, and fired a short burst at Gragg’s tires.

“What the hell?”

Gragg raised his gloved hands to fire the nova light, but then realized his blacked-out windows would ruin the effect. His armored windows didn’t roll down either. “Son of a bitch.”

Gragg motioned with his gloved hand and swerved the car toward the racing bike, but the bike was far more maneuverable. It ducked around to the right side of the car. Again, automatic gunfire cracked at his tires.

Gragg shook his head. “Solid rubber, asshole.”

He reached out into D-Space and started drawing from the surrounding horde—pulling dozens of remaining AutoM8s toward him. “You want to play? Then let’s play.”

Ross and a Korr lieutenant peered through the recessed postern gate. Dozens of AutoM8s crisscrossed the tarmac, circling Building Twenty-Nine. Ross looked across the barren tarmac leading to the ship channel a hundred yards away. It was the longest hundred yards he’d ever seen.

Philips sat in the corridor with several more Korr guards. A medic wound a bandage around her head to cover her injured eyes, while the others trained weapons on the short corridor behind them.

Philips looked up blindly. “What’s the situation?”

Ross and the lieutenant slammed the door with a clang and turned to face her. A roaring motorcycle engine, gunshots, and screams echoed through the interior halls.

A guard stared down the corridor. “We can’t stay here, sirs.”

“We need to run for it, Nat. Those Razorbacks appear to know the floor plan. They’re methodically clearing rooms.”

The lieutenant piped in, “They’re armored, Doctor. Light weapons don’t stop them. At least not from the front.”

She nodded gravely.

“There’s a ship channel about a hundred yards away. If we can reach that, we should be safe.”

Ross turned to the lieutenant and pointed toward what appeared to be dynamite sticks snugged into his web harness. “What are those?”

The man glanced down. “Magnesium flares. To signal the medevac chopper. The radio was down for—”

“Break ’em out. These AutoM8s probably target with infrared. Flares could distract them.”

The lieutenant pulled out six flares. He handed three to Ross. “Just twist the top off and strike them. Like this…” He pantomimed the action.

“Let’s test this.” Ross struck the flare several times before it ignited. He held it, hissing and popping in the corridor. It burned a brilliant red. “Open the door.”

One guard heaved the heavy steel door open, and Ross hurled the flare as far as he could off to the right. He and several guards watched closely as an AutoM8 swerved to avoid it. Another swung wide around it.

The lieutenant frowned. “So much for the infrared theory.”

Philips looked toward his voice. “What’s happening?”

Ross shook his head. “They’re not attracted to the flares, Nat. They’re avoiding them.”

“Then they are using infrared. They’re looking for human heat signatures. The flares must look like a raging fire.”

Ross and the lieutenant exchanged looks. Ross nodded and knelt next to her. “You’re right. We’re in business, Nat.” He removed his jacket and placed one empty sleeve in her hand, then grabbed the other one. “Don’t let go of this. I’ll guide you. We’ll use the flares to conceal our human heat signature. The tarmac is flat. Just follow me and move as fast as you can.”

“How many AutoM8s are there?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Jon, I…” Her head darted to follow a roaring engine as it passed.

“I know it sucks you can’t see. We’ll get you to a hospital, but we need to do this to have any chance at all. Just run with me. You ready?”

She reluctantly nodded.

Ross turned to the Korr lieutenant. “You and your men ready, Lieutenant?”

A motorcycle engine revved and screams echoed behind them, punctuating his words. “Klausky, distribute these.” He passed the magnesium flares. “We travel in a group. Place these on our perimeter.”

The guards struck flares. Ross lit one for himself. Finally the six of them stood there with five lit flares. Ross pulled in front of the lieutenant with Philips in tow and looked out at the stream of AutoM8s racing past, waiting for a gap. “Okay…now!”

They bolted from the recessed doorway as a group and moved quickly across the tarmac—like deer running across a freeway.

The lieutenant barked, “Close it up!”

The nearest AutoM8s immediately screeched around and vectored toward them.

The lieutenant threw out his arm. “Stop moving! Stop!”

They all stopped, and the AutoM8 turned slightly aside, then roared past sixty feet to their left.

The group stood back-to-back on the tarmac, flares hissing and AutoM8s racing past them.

Ross shook his head. “Bad news, Nat; they’re apparently attracted to lateral movement as well.”

She nodded behind her blindfold. “Fires don’t generally run around. I should have guessed Sobol would have more than one criterion.”

The lieutenant pounded his helmeted forehead with his hand. “Hell of a time to realize that! Just fucking beautiful!” He looked back at the postern gate, already seventy feet behind them.

Ross’s gaze followed a sedan racing past twenty feet away. “Okay. Let’s try this: let’s move slowly toward the water.”

The lieutenant shook his head. “Back toward the postern gate.”

Philips turned to him. “Jon’s right. We can’t head back toward the Razorbacks. These AutoM8s must have a threshold of movement detection. We move slowly.”

The lieutenant gave Ross a venomous look, since he was serving as Philips’s eyes. He then finally nodded. “All right, Doctor.”

They all slid their feet across the tarmac as AutoM8s raced past doing loops around the building. They seemed to be coming closer with each pass, but the group of evacuees managed to traverse another hundred and fifty feet. The water’s edge was tantalizingly close.

A guard tapped Ross on the shoulder. “Hey! Hey, this side! Look out!”

Ross turned to see a Dodge easing to a stop fifty feet away. Facing them. Other AutoM8s still raced past.

Philips turned toward it. “What is it?”

“That Dodge is getting suspicious.”

She nodded. “Jon, you think it’s referencing our location on a grid?”

He considered this. “You mean tracking targets over time instead of—”

“Enough!” The lieutenant pointed. “We’ve got incoming!”

Another sedan vectored toward them while the Dodge seemed to observe. The second car was accelerating fast.

The lieutenant shook his head. “Fuck this! Run for the waterline!”

Ross grabbed his arm. “It could be testing us! Stand still!”

The lieutenant pulled free. He and his men sprinted in a ragged line toward the jetty, opening fire on the cars as they ran.

The moment they did so, the incoming car targeted them, and the nearby Dodge accelerated past Ross and Philips, also giving chase. She cringed as it streaked past just feet to her left.

“Jon, what’s happening?”

He pulled her close. “Wait, Nat!” He saw three more cars racing in—one headed toward him and Philips. Ross hurled the flare in its direction and then tugged on the jacket sleeve. “Run! Now!”

The lieutenant fired at another incoming car as he sprinted toward the waterline, but the first sedan overtook him, tossing his body up over its hood and smashing him into its windshield, then up over the roof. He flipped three times, then landed on the pavement just in time for the Dodge to gore him. His body jammed in its undercarriage and was dragged away. The other men scattered as AutoM8s ran them down. Sporadic gunfire was quickly replaced by the shrieks of injured men crawling toward safety as the cars circled back for the kill.

Philips glanced back reflexively. “What’s happening?”

“Just run!”

He led Philips on a different, longer tack to the shoreline—away from the feeding frenzy of the AutoM8s. He and Philips were nearly at the water. Another car roared up behind them. Ross pulled hard on the jacket sleeve. They had reached the jetty stones.

“Jump!”

He could see her grit her teeth—going on blind faith in him. They arced out into air, splashing into the freezing water as the car hurtled inches over their heads. It landed ten feet beyond them and sent up a splash wall thirty feet high.

Ross and Philips both came up flapping their arms, Philips coughing up water. Ross grabbed her around the neck from behind and swam back toward the jetty stones again as the tail of the bobbing sedan settled back into the water, nearly coming down on her head. It flopped onto the waves, bubbling and hissing around them.

She sensed that something large had just missed her. “Jon!”

“It’s okay! Wait. It’s sinking.”

“Where are the others?”

“They’re gone.”

She panted as they bobbed there for several seconds listening to bubbling water and distant engines on the tarmac above. His arm still around her. Soon there was just hissing.

“Okay, swim. Follow my voice.”

Merritt cradled the UMP on the bike’s broad gas tank and swerved from side to side trying to get around Loki’s BMW. Each time he approached, Loki stabbed on the brakes. Finally the road widened again. The corrugated fences of salvage yards and aging factories now fronted it. Merritt accelerated rapidly, roaring alongside the car.

He searched for some weakness in the armor and noticed that brushed steel knobs appeared at regular intervals on the roof, hood, and trunk. They looked like high-end cell-phone antennas—a dozen of them, evenly spaced.

Merritt braked and swerved as Loki tried to smash him into a line of parked cars. Merritt accelerated around the other side and lifted up the UMP. He glanced at the road, then took careful aim at the car. He fired a short burst. The shots ricocheted off the roof.

Loki swerved toward him again, and instead of dodging away immediately, Merritt let him come in closer. He took more careful aim and fired again—nailing a metal knob.

And barely denting it.

“Son of a bitch.”

Behind Merritt eight sedans screeched in from side streets. He glanced back over his shoulder to see them surging after him. He raised the UMP one-handed and opened up with short, controlled bursts. The front tires of first one, then another blasted out, and they quickly fell behind as the others accelerated. He knocked out the tires on still a third.

The gun was empty. Merritt turned forward and saw ten more unmanned cars come in from side streets up ahead.

No way to reload. Time to concentrate. He tossed the UMP onto the hood of a nearby car, then ripped the throttle and drove howling past Loki.

Merritt dodged a hatchback emerging from a parking lot—which turned out to be a regular car with people in it. An onrushing AutoM8 immediately broadsided it. Half a dozen more AutoM8s streamed in from side streets behind him.

Merritt turned forward again to see the AutoM8s approaching up ahead, surging his way in interlocking slaloms. It was an impenetrable roving barrier. A demonstration of networked swarming behavior that no human drivers could match. Merritt had a couple of seconds at most. A score of AutoM8s were all around him, closing fast—more coming in every second.

He looked back at Loki’s BMW, then swerved and stabbed the brakes—bringing himself just feet off Loki’s front bumper. Still going seventy, he eased back on the throttle and, taking a breath, released his hold on the handlebars, falling backward onto Loki’s front hood as the BMW bumped his bike’s rear tire. The bike veered forward and to the side and was immediately crushed by a wall of oncoming AutoM8s, which raced past only inches to either side of the BMW. Several smashed head-on into pursuing AutoM8s, exploding into a whirlwind of plastic parts, glass, and tumbling metal.

Merritt hit Loki’s hood hard, then slid back into the windshield. He rolled left, jamming his foot down onto a brushed metal knob at the corner of the hood, and clamped onto the wiper well with his hands. He braced his other foot against the knob on the far corner like it was a rock-climbing wall.

He glared into the blacked-out windshield and pointed threateningly. You’re not rid of me yet, asshole.

From the backseat of the BMW, Gragg stared in amazement at his pursuer now straddling the car hood. “You have got to be shitting me….” He didn’t see that coming. He watched the man like a television show through the glass as the guy pulled an automatic pistol from his coat and aimed at the corner of the windshield.

A series of muted cracks sounded. Divots appeared in the glass over a several-inch area. Gragg watched this calculated attempt to penetrate his armor with something bordering on admiration. The corners were typically the weakest spots on a bulletproof windshield. It was a cool-headed call—especially with scenery racing past behind him.

Too bad the glass was three inches of polycarbonate laminate that could stop a rifle bullet. A score of AutoM8s now surrounded Gragg’s BMW in close order like a slavering pack of wolves. Gragg shook his head sadly and shouted at the windshield. “What now, crazy man? You’re on an armored car! What were you thinking?”

Beyond the windshield the rider had reached down to his shoe and now brandished a killing knife as he braced himself with both feet and his other hand.

Gragg laughed. “Look out. He’s got a knife!”

The rider turned, jammed the knife under the bottom edge of a satellite uplink node, and pried upward. The node peeled off with a shriek of bending metal.

The Voice came over the stereo system. “Uplink…one…of…twelve…has failed.”

Gragg felt the rage building. “You son of a bitch! You’re going for a ride now!”

With a wave of his gloved hands, the BMW went into a power slide and the rider was nearly flung off.

The Major’s chopper came in low and fast over the industrial area, banking so that nothing but brick factory buildings were visible in the left windows. The Major clipped a monkey cord onto his harness and gave it two test pulls. He struggled to his feet as the chopper leveled off. The old wound in his knee was already acting up. An image of a mortar shell landing next to him in a patch of Nicaraguan mud flashed in his mind. Ancient history.

“There they are, Major!” The pilot pointed.

Below, the Major could see a red BMW screeching around drunkenly as it raced down the street, alternately braking and accelerating while a man tried to retain his grip on the roof. Twenty more vehicles swirled around the car, moving like a single organism. More vehicles converged on the site from all directions at high speed along cross streets, smashing into the occasional unlucky motorist. People fled for their lives. He shook his head. What a goddamned mess. How had this gotten so out of control? Behind him columns of black smoke rose here and there.

Let’s give the city something else to look at. The Major pulled his L3 cell phone from his jacket and spoke to the pilot as he started dialing. “It’s days like this that I almost miss working for the government.”

The pilot’s voice came over the closed-circuit headset. “Almost.”

The Major laughed. The line picked up. “Project Hazmat.” The Major turned to look back through the atmospheric haze at Building Twenty-Nine in the distance. “Demolition.” A pause. “6-N-G-7-3-H-Z-6.” Another pause. “On my mark. T-minus ten…nine…”

“We’re almost there, Nat.” Ross glanced back at Building Twenty-Nine, three hundred yards behind them now. It was burning somewhere inside, and the flaming wreckage of AutoM8s around it partially obscured it with smoke.

Philips spat out salt water. “I think I’m really blind.”

“I don’t think so.”

“What if that was a ZM-87 Laser Blinder? My retinas would be gone.”

“Doesn’t make sense. Why permanently blind a target you’re about to hack to pieces? It’s probably meant to stun victims. I’d—”

Suddenly a wave of pressure blasted across their backs. A visible shockwave rippled through the atmosphere and pressed down around them—followed close on by a resounding BOOM that they felt more than heard.

They both went facedown in the water as the depths beneath them glowed orange and filled with the sound of splashing boulders and thousands of rock fragments. As they came up sucking for air, rocks and small boulders were landing all around them. Their ears were ringing.

Ross covered her with his body as the rocks continued to rain down. He turned to see a towering mushroom cloud roiling up from the jagged tops of Building Twenty-Nine’s walls. The structure was a pool of flame with refrigerator-sized blocks of reinforced concrete still tumbling end over end across the runway. Burning debris trailing streamers of smoke sailed down from a thousand feet overhead. Metal sheets spun crazily as they fell. “Jesus Christ!”

“What happened?”

“The building. It’s gone!”

From his perch on the BMW’s roof, Merritt glanced back at a black mushroom cloud rising behind him above the factory buildings. “Son of a bitch…” Later.

Suddenly Loki accelerated the car, pulling Merritt down onto the trunk, where he stopped himself from rolling off by pushing his foot against the metal knob on the right rear corner. He grabbed on to the lip of the trunk lid.

Where the hell are the police?

He jammed the knife blade under another metal knob and tore it up from the sheet metal. The knob dangled by exposed wires until Merritt sawed through them.

The Voice intoned again, “Uplink…four…of…twelve…has failed.”

Gragg had eight uplinks left. With triple redundancy he knew he needed at least four to adequately control the car and his army of AutoM8s. He turned around in his seat to see the man mere inches away from his face now—still clinging on. Gragg pounded the window. “That’s it!”

The man’s motorcycle helmet clunked against the glass, awkward in its bulk as he tried to keep his center of gravity down. In between erratic car movements, the rider quickly pulled the helmet off, tossing it over his shoulder. It was immediately crushed by trailing AutoM8s. The man then pressed his head down against the trunk lid.

Gragg could now see the rider’s face. “Roy Merritt…holy shit.” Gragg smiled in spite of himself. The famous Roy Merritt—known to every Daemon operative in the world. The man who tackled Sobol’s home defense system and survived—the entire ordeal captured on Sobol’s security cameras. The one and only Roy Merritt was hanging on to Gragg’s car. Gragg was being pursued—and pursued damned well—by the Burning Man himself. He should have known. The son of a bitch had a knife, and he was doing more damage than a squad of corporate military. Gragg couldn’t deny some level of admiration. Merritt had probed Gragg’s defenses, found a hole—one that would be filled in the future—and improvised an exploit. What hacker couldn’t admire the man’s cojones? His instincts?

Gragg waved his hand, sending the BMW and its entire escort pack to a screeching halt. Merritt was thrown against the rear window. As the BMW lurched to a stop, Merritt stopped himself from rolling off the end of the trunk.

Gragg flipped his voice to the car’s PA system and pounded his finger into the blacked-out glass in front of Merritt’s face. “You’re a fucking crazy man, Roy! You think I can’t kill you the moment I get out of this car?”

Merritt shook his head. “You’re under arrest!”

Gragg pounded the car seat, laughing. “That’s my boy! Shit, I’ll make you a deal: give me your autograph, and I won’t kill you.”

Suddenly Merritt’s stomach exploded, splattering blood across the rear window. Merritt’s face went slack and his eyes rolled up as his grip on the car released.

Stunned, Gragg watched Merritt roll off the end of the trunk and onto the pavement. Gragg waved his hand and brought the BMW farther down the road, so he could see Merritt, lying in the middle of the street. Another wave of his gloved hands and Gragg cleared a ring of AutoM8s all around him.

Gragg looked up.

A blue helicopter with a yellow logo hovered low behind them, about a hundred feet off the ground. Gragg looked down at Merritt, who was moving now, pulling himself along the center line of the road and leaving a trail of blood. Rage began to build in Gragg. He looked up again at the helicopter, death in his eyes. A man wearing a black hood and holding a sniper rifle kneeled in the open doorway. He looked straight back at Gragg. No Daemon call-out hovered above him.

The Major muttered under his breath. “What the hell are you waiting for, asshole?”

He fired a shot at Loki’s rear window, pounding a divot just next to the kid’s head. But Loki barely flinched. He was looking fixedly down at Merritt, crawling across the pavement. There was a fifteen-foot blood trail now. Merritt was fumbling through his jacket, quivering. Looking for something.

The Major sighed. “Goddamnit…”

He saw two Mexican workers open a salvage yard gate to peer out at all the commotion in the street. The Major gritted his teeth and turned the rifle in their direction. He squeezed off several rounds.

Spouts of blood erupted from the chest of the first worker. The man pitched back into the stunned hands of his companion—who The Major nailed straight between the eyes. They both fell from view.

Then The Major turned the crosshairs back onto Merritt. Merritt was lying on his back, panting doggedly, blood shining on his stomach, while he held two small pieces of paper before his eyes. The papers fluttered in the wind.

Why wasn’t Gragg finishing him? Why wasn’t this over yet?

The pilot’s voice came in over the headset. “We need to go, Major.”

The Major made his decision.

As Gragg stared, suddenly the top of Merritt’s head exploded. Merritt’s body slumped, twitching on the pavement.

“You motherfucker!” Gragg pounded his fists against the glass, staring at the sniper. “You motherfucker!”

Two more divots appeared in the window as sniper bullets slammed into it. Then the chopper banked away and took off low and fast above the factory buildings, heading out over the bay. It was soon lost to sight.

Gragg looked back down at the body in the street. Two small photographs wafted away from Merritt’s dead fingers in the wind.

Ross pulled Philips up onto the quay on the far side of the ship channel. They both crawled to level ground, and after panting for a few moments, Ross looked up.

They were on the edge of a pipe storage yard. He eased Philips up so her back rested against a smooth concrete pylon. She looked dazed.

He turned to face the ruins of Building Twenty-Nine burning beneath a thunderhead of roiling black smoke across the water. A dozen more columns of smoke rose elsewhere in the distance. He could hear sirens wailing all over the city. It was a war zone.

Fireboats approached from the bay.

He knelt down next to Philips and brushed her wet hair away from her face. “Help is coming, Nat.” He felt her trembling. “Are you okay?”

Her lips quivered slightly but she nodded. Her face contorted as she tried to contain tears. “How many do you think we lost?”

He took a deep breath. “Possibly everyone.”

She put a hand to her mouth and started crying.

“It’s not your fault, Natalie.” He put a hand on her arm reassuringly.

“I was in charge!”

“No. You weren’t. We just thought you were.”

She stopped and turned her blindfolded eyes toward him.

“They were never going to let us stop the Daemon, Natalie.”

“You’re talking crazy! The government created the Task Force. We were betrayed by private industry.”

“Private industry is your government. I thought you knew that.”

“How can you say that to me?”

“Because it’s true. Sobol knew it. The Daemon isn’t attacking us, Nat. This is a struggle between two artificial organisms. The Daemon is just a new species of corporation.”

They sat for a moment listening to the distant sirens.

“The old social order is dissolving, Nat. It happens every few centuries.” He looked out across the burning city, then turned back to her. “I won’t let Loki be our future.”

She was trembling, whether from being wet or scared he couldn’t tell.

He brushed his hand along her cheek and eased toward her blindfolded face. His face was only an inch away from hers. She could sense him there.

“I want you to know, every day my first and last thought is of you.”

He removed his hand from her cheek. She blindly glanced around, listening, feeling forward with her hands. “Jon.” A pause filled with the sound of sirens and approaching tug engines. She no longer felt his presence. “Jon!”

The only reply was an echoing, amplified voice from the water. “Are you injured?” A fireboat’s engines throbbed in reverse.

Philips wept on the jetty as the roar of powerful engines drowned out the world.

Chapter 45:// Respawning

He floated in the darkness of his mind for what seemed decades. Thoughts came to him only as raw concepts—black despair, vertiginous fear. As he began to coalesce from the emptiness, he slowly pieced together scraps of his personality, regaining some measure of self. His mind no longer floated on a sea of nothingness. It was enmeshed in a carnal vessel again. That vessel was named Peter Sebeck.

He wasn’t sure at what point he noticed someone talking—perhaps they had been there all along—but they kept up a persistent chatter while his mind came into focus in the darkness. At first Sebeck couldn’t distinguish individual words, but as he concentrated they became more distinct.

“…Christ figure is a recurring motif in many cultures; death and rebirth; symbolic turning of the seasons, all that crap. Wyle E. Coyote was a fucking Christ figure, man, and Acme Company was Rome, baby.” A pause. “You can find it in Hindu legend, Sumerian mythology. Shit, you find it in modern folklore, like Rip van Winkle.

“Although Rip van Winkle didn’t die. He slept. But that’s the damned point: death as sleep. Sleep as death. Isn’t our life a cycle of death and rebirth? Sleep and awakening? The promise of eternal life is a threat unless you get to start over. The mythmakers knew that. They weren’t dummies, man.”

The clattering of metal tools.

“They were the ones who invented rhyme and meter—the programming language for human memory in preliterary civilizations. It was a cultural checksum—a mnemonic device. You couldn’t fuck with the code or the rhymes didn’t work; and if the rhymes didn’t work, people noticed. And so the knowledge of a people was passed down intact. It was a shamanic code. If you fucked with the code, then society lost its collective mind. Smell me?”

A pause.

“Hey, I think our boy’s coming around.”

Sebeck opened his eyes and slowly focused on a pasty-faced twenty-something kid sporting a tangled mane of black hair. A few days’ beard shadowed the kid’s neck and climbed higher than usual up his cheeks. This was a hairy guy.

Sebeck blinked at the overhead lights. He coughed and tried to sit up. A rock-hard surface greeted his elbows when he tried to push up. He immediately abandoned the attempt as his head began to swim.

The hairy kid leaned in close. “Hey, bro, sit back for a few. You’re still trying to metabolize the meds.”

Sebeck noticed the kid was wearing a lab coat. He tried to remember where he was. His brain was mashed potatoes.

Sebeck’s voice croaked. “Where is this?”

“Phoenix Mortuary Services. I call it PMS.”

Sebeck tried again to sit up, and he pushed aside the kid’s hands when he tried to help. “Who—” He stopped short; his throat was sore as hell. He put a hand to his larynx. No exterior damage.

Sebeck leaned to one side and looked around. His eyes tried to focus to a greater distance. He was in a long room with several medical examination tables. Oak cabinetry lined the walls. A strong chemical odor assaulted his nose. He’d smelled this before. Formaldehyde.

Sebeck snapped alert; the body of an old man lay naked on a nearby metal table. The old man was definitely dead because his body had the pallor and flattened appearance that comes when blood pressure and breath leave the human frame.

“Where am I?”

“Like I said, my man: funeral home. That’s where they send dead people. It’s the law. And you, my friend, are legally dead. Got the paperwork to prove it.”

Sebeck looked around for a few moments more, then brought his gaze back to the kid. “Who are you?”

The kid wiped his hand on his lab coat, then extended it. “Laney Price. Body prep. I take out the pacemakers and shit like that. That stuff’ll blow up if it goes in the furnace.”

Sebeck ignored Price’s hand and tried to shake his head clear. He glanced down, then swung his legs over the edge of the table and sat up.

Price rushed to hold him steady, but Sebeck pushed him back. He glanced down at his own body. He was wearing casual slacks and a pullover shirt. Next to him on the table lay his crumpled prison khakis. He picked them up, balling them up in his fists. That’s right. He remembered now. He had just been executed for murdering federal officers. He was the most hated man in America.

He dropped the khakis and sat motionless, staring at his own hands. A wave of emotion overcame him, and he started to breathe in fits.

He was alive.

Price clapped a hand around his shoulder. “Hey, Sergeant, you’re not dead, man. Relax.”

Sebeck threw off Price’s arm and grabbed him by the throat. “What the fuck is going on!”

Price extricated himself as Sebeck nearly swooned from the effort. “You tell me. You brought me here.”

Sebeck was still trying to clear his head. God, his throat hurt. “What are you talking about?”

“Look…” Price stomped off and tore a newspaper clipping from its place on a nearby bulletin board. He came back to the examining table and pointed at the clipping—a file picture of Sebeck below the headline Sebeck’s Macabre Message.

“Message received, compadre.”

Sebeck grabbed the article. It was months old. His head started to clear as the adrenaline kicked in. It worked. The Daemon had saved him.

But why?

Before he could ask another question, Price tossed him a plastic water bottle. “Electrolytes. Better drink up.”

Sebeck realized just how thirsty he was. He cracked open the water and drank deeply. His throat throbbed.

Price continued. “Ol’ One-eye’s been asking for ya. He’s all up in my grill, an I’m like, yo, back off, Methuselah. That sprite is a screen saver from hell, I swear it, man. He’s a fourth-dimensional stain.”

Sebeck finished the bottle. “You want to say that again in English?”

“For being in charge, you seem woefully uninformed.”

“What do you mean, ‘in charge’?”

Price threw up his hands. “See, you gotta talk to One-eye. Hang on a sec.” Price headed over to a locked cabinet, pulled out a choked key ring, and started cycling through the keys. He talked while he searched. “You know, it’s an honor to finally meet you. You drew a lot of ink. Most of it said you were evil incarnate, but we all know that’s horseshit. That Anji Anderson chick is out to get you, but evil or not, that bitch is fuckin’ hot. I’d do her. Evil Daemon bitch. Laney likes the bad girls….”

Sebeck was looking around the room again. “You were talking to someone earlier. Something about myths and rhyme.”

Price paused. “You heard that?”

“Is someone else here?” Sebeck glanced around cautiously.

Price just snickered to himself. “Yeah, bad habit from working with dead people.” He stuck a key in the lock. “They’re good listeners, though. Haven’t heard a complaint yet.”

He rummaged around in the cabinet and came out with a sealed plastic box. Price walked back to the examining table, struggling to open the seal. “Damned things. It’s the Asians that do this.” He fished around among the scalpels on his worktable, near the body of the old man. “You know, the average Chinese factory worker must think Americans are insane. Picture this: you work at a plant that makes Halloween stuff—you know, like, rubber severed heads. And you’re all like: Americans decorate their homes with severed heads? These fuckers are savages, man.”

Sebeck slowly leaned forward and tried to stand. He still felt woozy.

“I wouldn’t do that yet if I were you.”

“You’re not me.” Sebeck managed to stand, still holding the table to steady himself. “So, you say I created this place?” He glanced around. “By sending that message to the Daemon?”

Price got the box open. “All will become clear, young grasshopper, when you talk to One-eye. Then maybe he’ll get off my ass.” Price pulled an intricate and expensive-looking pair of sports sunglasses from the box. It was sealed in yet another plastic bag. “Why do they do this shit?” He started biting into the plastic and twisting.

“One-eye?”

Price gave him a look. “Do you have several one-eyed undead freaks stalking you, Sergeant? Should I be more specific?”

Sobol.

Price now pulled the glasses out of the bag. They were stylish, with yellow-tinted lenses and hip frames, but the posts were unusually thick. Price also pulled a thick beltlike device from the box. He glanced at Sebeck and started adjusting a strap. “Just take me a sec. You’re a what, size thirty-eight?”

“Thirty-four.”

“Damn. I’ve gotta lose about forty pounds myself. But then again, you were on the”—air quotes here—“Lompoc prison diet.”

Sebeck just pointed at the glasses.

“Oh, HUD—heads-up display. It’s an interface to the Daemon network. Check this shit out.”

“The Daemon network?”

“Can’t see the TOP without the HUD.”

“Stop with the acronyms.”

“I’ve got acronyms for my acronyms.” He held up the belt and clicked a battery into place. “Ready. Here, put this on.” He handed it to Sebeck.

Sebeck took it warily. It was like a thick money belt and was made of black, stretchable nylonlike material with a sleek titanium buckle.

Price was fiddling with the glasses. “The belt’s a combination satellite phone, GPS, and wearable computer. Methane-oxide fuel cell battery’ll last for about three days. Works in conjunction with the glasses. Be careful with it. It’s ruggedized and water-resistant, but don’t go driving nails with it. The glasses alone cost about fifty thousand dollars.”

Sebeck was taken aback. “What, are you joking? Who paid for them?”

“Daemon’s got cash, bro. Hell, you ain’t seen nothing.”

“Why’s it giving them to me? I want to destroy the Daemon.”

“Because it wants to have a word with you.”

Sebeck considered this for a few moments. Then he fastened the belt around his waist. It fit well and felt like a lifting belt.

Price slid the HUD glasses onto Sebeck’s face.

Sebeck wrapped the band around his head. “Nice fit.”

“Should be a perfect fit. They scanned your head.”

“They? Who’s they?”

Price shrugged. “Fabricators. Micro-manufacturers. Hell, who knows? The Daemon shipped it to me.”

Sebeck noticed the lens flicker momentarily, then return to normal.

“It’s got a retinal scanner and a heart pulse sensor. If you’re a member of the network and still alive, it knows who you are and what your rights are. It senses the moment you take them off. Put ’em on, you just logged on. Take ’em off, you just logged off.”

Price walked briskly over to a cluttered desk nearby. “Wait a sec.” He grabbed another pair of glasses sitting there and put them on.

They looked at each other.

Suddenly, Sebeck’s lenses blinked, then information appeared at the top and bottom of the “screen.” He focused on Price and was surprised to see a name call-out box hovering over Price—just like in the game The Gate. Price’s screen name was apparently ChunkyMonkey.

“You gotta be shitting me….”

“No, man. Check this out.” He pointed at Sebeck’s glasses. “See the green bar-stack next to my name? That’s my network power relative to you. That number seven—that’s my skill level.”

Price appeared to have seven bars.

“Network power?”

“It’s a point system. I see no bars—that means you’re a wuss compared to me. How many bars do you see?”

“Seven.”

“That means I’m nominally seven times as powerful as you. It has to do with the Shamanic Interface, but we’ll cover that later. Right now, we gotta see One-eye before he goes into a loop. He must know you’re awake by now, since you just logged on.”

Sebeck was having difficulty absorbing the reality of it all.

Price approached him. “Here…” He adjusted one side of the glasses, lowering a short piece of metal. “Sound boom. Gives you audio by vibrating the bones in your head. Works as a microphone the same way.” Price motioned for Sebeck to hurry. “You good to walk, or should I get a wheelchair?”

“I can walk.”

Price came up alongside and helped to steady him. “This way.”

Price brought them toward an alcove into which was set a pair of imposing oak doors about nine feet tall. Sebeck still felt dizzy and the glasses weren’t helping. Inexplicable information kept flashing and winking at him. “God, it’s like walking with sports scores flashing before my eyes.”

“Never mind that. You can customize it later. If you want to see without the glasses, flip the lenses up—they’re on a hinge. Don’t take the glasses off, or you’ll log off the system—and it’ll take a few seconds to get logged back on. You’ll get used to it.”

They reached the door. Price motioned for Sebeck to stay put, then he grabbed the door handles. He glanced back. “Sergeant, welcome to the Daemon’s darknet.” He opened the doors.

They swung inward, revealing a plushly appointed but rather stodgy office with stuffed leather chairs and thick carven furniture. It looked like the office of an eighteenth-century natural philosopher. Bookcases and curio cabinets filled with insect and rock specimens lined the windowless walls. There was dust everywhere.

But what riveted Sebeck’s gaze was the translucent apparition of Matthew Sobol sitting behind the big mahogany desk, hands folded, as if waiting patiently. It was post-surgery Sobol, with his open eye socket, hollow cheeks, and bald head—a shriveled wreckage of a man ravaged by chemotherapy and cancer. He was wearing the same suit he wore at his funeral.

His spectre nodded in somber greeting. “Detective Sebeck. I’ve been waiting for you.” He motioned for Sebeck to come forward. “Please, have a seat.”

Sebeck looked to Price.

Price nodded in commiseration. “I know. It’s freaky, but don’t worry. You’re not Hamlet. This is a Temporal Offset Projection, Sergeant—it’s an interactive 3-D avatar projected over the GPS grid. It’s only visible and audible in your HUD glasses.”

Sebeck studied the spectre. He flipped up his glass lenses. Sobol disappeared. He flipped them back down again and Sobol’s spectre returned. “It’s a private dimension.”

“Actually, it’s a dynamic array capable of encapsulating a variable number of dimensional elements.”

Sebeck looked at him blankly.

Price patted him on the back. “You’re right. It’s a private dimension.” He made a scooting motion. “Better sit down. He’ll know if you don’t do it.” Sebeck stepped forward and sat in one of the stuffed leather chairs. He wiped a thin layer of dust from the armrests and shifted to keep the computer belt from pressing into his back.

Sebeck could actually see Sobol more clearly now, since he was closer. Sobol’s phantasm was gaunt, and the gaping eye socket looked horrific. He really did resemble a restless spirit wandering the Earth.

Sobol looked toward Price. “Leave us.”

“Damn.” Price looked to Sebeck. “You’re on your own, my man. I gotta leave.”

Sebeck gestured to the apparition of Sobol. “What the hell do I say to this thing?”

“I was hoping you’d know.” Price rushed out, closing the double doors behind him.

Sobol’s spectre gazed at the doors. A loud click sounded as they locked.

After a few moments, Sobol turned again to Sebeck. He smiled slightly. “I’m glad it was you, Sergeant. You were my favorite. So damaged by your choices. You never understood games. Maybe that’s why the world was such a mystery to you.”

Sebeck stared. “Why don’t you just die already?”

Sobol paused. “Mammals of every species indulge in play. Games are Nature’s way of preparing us to face difficult realities. Are you finally ready to face reality, Sergeant?”

“Kiss my ass.”

Sobol’s spectre pointed at his own forehead. “It’s so clear here. Even if you can’t see it.” He lowered his arm. “Civilization is about to fail.”

Sebeck felt a wave of anxiety wash over him. Kee-hrist.

“The modern world is a highly efficient, precision machine. But that’s its flaw—one wrench in the works and it all grinds to a halt. So what does our generation get? A culture of lies to hide weakness. Decreasing freedom. All to conceal one simple fact: the assumptions upon which our civilization is based are no longer valid. If you doubt me, ask yourself: why was I able to accomplish this?”

Sebeck shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“But what if we corrected civilization’s weakness—as painful as that correction might be?”

Sobol changed expression, looking more relaxed. “But you’re probably confused. Why did I frame you? It’s simple: you were bait—bait that they took. The weak hide their weakness. By now, the plutocrats have put their money in safer havens, and I have closely watched this transfer. Now they are more vulnerable than ever.” Sobol grinned humorlessly. “You were my Trojan horse, Sergeant.”

Sebeck’s fingernails nearly tore through the chair leather. “Fuck you! You destroyed my life!”

Sobol’s spectre flickered almost imperceptibly. “An analysis of your voice patterns is revealing. Prosody tells me that you are agitated. Save your anger, Detective. It will make no difference to the outcome.”

Sebeck ground his teeth.

“Who will mourn for you, Sergeant? No one. You and I share that. We have sacrificed for the greater good. In gratitude I cared for your family in your absence—when no one else would. Your family has no idea that I am their benefactor.”

Sebeck leaned forward, another rage building. “What have you done?”

Sobol continued. “They will continue to have good fortune—but only as long as I can count on you, Detective.”

“You son of a bitch!” Sebeck swept a curio case off of Sobol’s desk, sending it crashing into the wall behind him. Glass shards flew everywhere. “Don’t involve my family!”

Sobol’s spectre flickered again. “There is that pattern again. You’re upset. I defer to your judgment in this matter. Answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’: should the Daemon withdraw support from your family?”

Sebeck stopped short. He took a breath and realized he had no idea how to respond. If—

“Respond ‘yes’ or ‘no’—or I will make a random choice for you.”

“Damn you!”

“Answer NOW. Do you want the Daemon to withdraw financial support from your family?”

Sebeck shook his head and closed his eyes. “No.”

“Thank you. The Daemon will continue to provide for them. Now, please sit down.”

“I hope you’re burning in hell.” Sebeck sat.

“We both know you don’t believe in hell.”

Sebeck sat stunned at the spectre’s response.

“Yes, I’ve done quite a bit of research on you, Sergeant. But don’t confuse me with someone who gives a damn about you. You will live or die, and I don’t care which. The only thing I care about is the Daemon’s goal. There’s a greater good in this than you can understand—perhaps than you’ll ever understand. Since you were clever enough to save yourself, you may be of some use to me still. If the Daemon triumphs, tens of millions will die. If it fails, billions will die, and we will fall back to a seventeenth-century agrarian economy. Those are the stakes, Sergeant.”

Sebeck was practically climbing out of his skin. He whispered under his breath, “Goddamn you…”

“You want to destroy the Daemon—but you offer nothing in its place. How can you expect to handle the future if you can’t even handle the present? I’ll tell you what the Daemon is: the Daemon is a remorseless system for building a distributed civilization. A civilization that perpetually regenerates. One with no central authority. Your only option is what form that civilization takes. And that depends on the actions of people like you.”

Sobol stood and started pacing behind the desk. For the first time Sebeck noticed that the desk chair was also a phantasm—there was no real chair behind the desk.

“There are those who resist necessary change. Even now they think only of protecting their investments. I am at war with them. A war that you’ll never see on the evening news. And to my mind, the outcome of this war will decide whether civilization flourishes—or collapses into a thousand-year dark age. Perhaps even with the eclipse of the human race as the dominant species on this planet.”

Sobol ran his hand along the scar on his skull. “My enemies will show themselves soon, Sergeant. As much as you despise me, they are your true enemy. I am merely an inevitable consequence of human progress. An unfeeling, unthinking thing.”

Sebeck sat in stunned silence for several moments.

Sobol’s spectre sat on the edge of the desk near Sebeck. “I suspect that democracy is not viable in a technologically advanced society. Free people wield too much ability to destroy. But I will give you the chance to determine the truth of this. If you fail to prove the viability of democracy in man’s future, then humans will serve society—not the other way around. Either way, a change is coming. I see it. As plainly as I see you sitting there.”

Sebeck realized Sobol had indeed envisioned this moment—for here Sebeck sat.

“Do you accept the task of finding justification for the freedom of humanity, Sergeant? Yes or no?”

Sebeck sat staring at the floor. He missed his family. He was tired of being alone. Of feeling the hatred of the world seeping through the walls of every room he was in. Why was this happening to him? Why did it have to be him?

“Do you accept this task, Sergeant? Yes or no?”

Son of a bitch.

“I will ask one more time: will you—”

“Yes.”

Sobol’s spectre flickered briefly, then nodded. “Good, Sergeant. I’m glad you could overcome your hatred of me.”

Sobol stood and walked toward the wall. His steps creaked on the floor to complete the illusion. He turned toward Sebeck. “Walk with me.”

With a wave of the spectre’s hand, a section of the wall opened in reality, revealing a narrow back hallway. Wainscoting and rich wallpaper lined the walls.

Sebeck rose reluctantly, glancing back at the sealed double doors he’d entered through, then looked again at Sobol’s phantom padding down the hall.

Sobol turned back again to look over his shoulder. “Please, Sergeant.”

Sebeck gritted his teeth and followed on Sobol’s heels as the apparition opened another door at the end of the hallway. Brilliant sunlight and a mild, fresh breeze filled the hall. The sound of rustling leaves came in on the wind.

Sebeck stopped. It had been many months since he’d been outside. His nostrils flared, taking in the fragrance. Balmy air whirled around him.

Sobol’s spectre beckoned him.

Sebeck strode down a short series of steps and into the sunlight. He hurried to catch up with Sobol, who was already moving across a green stretch of lawn beneath the shade of an ancient California oak. They were in a low-walled yard at the back of a great Victorian mansion.

Sebeck turned on his heels, drinking in the sun and the scenery. The Lompoc Valley lay around him. Rolling grassy hills dotted with oaks, blue mountains loomed on the horizon. Split-rail fences undulated over the contours of the land. The wind waved through the grass. The beauty of it almost brought Sebeck to tears.

He was alive.

Sobol stood next to the great oak, looking down at the ground.

Sebeck moved to catch up, and as he reached the tree he could see a small headstone there, set in the grass near the low wall. Sebeck read the simple inscription.

Matthew Sobol—1969

The inscription was centered—leaving no room for a date of death.

Sobol’s spectre gazed out over the valley below. “I loved this place.” He turned to Sebeck. “Are you familiar with the Fates, Sergeant? Greek legend said that they spun the threads of men’s lives and cut them at a length of their choosing. Like the Fates, I severed the thread of your life….”

Sobol faced toward the horizon and extended his hand. Suddenly a glowing blue line appeared in D-Space, extending from Sobol’s palm and tracing almost instantly down the nearby road and through the hills, to be lost beyond the horizon.

“Here is your new thread. Only you can see it, and it leads to a future only you can find.”

At that, Sobol’s ghostly image turned and started descending slowly into the ground of his grave, as if walking down ethereal steps. He moved methodically, slowly—like a monk in procession. Just before Sobol’s head disappeared beneath the soil, he stopped and looked up, directly into Sebeck’s eyes. “The guardian of this node will teach you all you need to know. When you leave this place, Sergeant, remember that they killed Peter Sebeck once. Do not doubt that they will kill him again if he reappears. Alive you’re a grave risk to their world—such is your fate.”

With one last glance, Sobol stepped down into his grave and disappeared beneath the grass.

Sebeck stared for several minutes at the spot where his nemesis had disappeared. His thoughts were turbulent—not yet forming into anything definite. Why didn’t he feel rage? Depression? He finally looked up, and the thread was still there, undulating over the land, projected from where Sebeck stood. He flipped up the HUD glass lenses, and the glowing thread disappeared. He flipped them down, and the line returned.

Sebeck heard the crunch of gravel, and he turned to see a black Lincoln Town Car easing to a stop just beyond the back wall gate.

Laney Price got out and moved to open the rear car door. He motioned dramatically for Sebeck to get inside.

With one last glance at Sobol’s grave, Sebeck approached the car, pushing open the wrought iron gate.

Price nodded, still holding open the rear door. “I’m supposed to help you, Sergeant. Sobol said you’d know where to go.”

Sebeck gazed back along the road behind them—away from the blue thread. He thought of his previous life. Of those he’d left behind. Of the sheriff’s department, Laura, and his son, Chris. Of everyone and everything he’d ever known. Peter Sebeck was dead.

He turned to face the blue line again, tracing a glowing filament down the road and toward a distant horizon.

“I’ll drive.”

THE END