Freedom (TM)

Gold:$1.589USD/ozUnliaded Gasoline:$5.34USD/gallonUnemployment:23.3%USD/Darknet Credit:28.7

Chapter 9: // Seed Police

Hank Fossen endured the bone-rattling vibration of his 1981 International Harvestor as he turned at the edge of the field. Could he limp the tractor through another full season without a major overhaul? It had over ten thousand running hours on it. Over the past several years legal fees had forced him to forgo maintenance. He’d looked into a used New Holland, but even with the spot-price of corn reaching record highs, rising expenses made it too risky to seriously consider a replacement.

He glanced back over his shoulder. The anhydrous ammonia applicator and the tank trailing behind were still in good order. He kept running the numbers in his head, wondering if he could time the corn market correctly. He actually had a chance at a decent profit this year if the planets aligned just right.

And then he saw them.

Fossen hurriedly switched off the applicator and brought the tractor to a stop in the middle of his field.

There, by the county road, were two black SUVs parked on the shoulder. Three men with clipboards were walking and kneeling in his field.

“Goddamnit!” He killed the engine and grabbed an axe handle he kept in the cab for knocking mud off tires. In a few moments he’d jumped to the ground and was jogging the couple hundred yards toward the men across bare, loamy soil.

“Get the hell off my land!” he shouted.

The men didn’t budge. One of them took out a video camera and started filming him as he approached. Another was already on his cell phone.

So much for scaring them off. At forty-seven, Fossen didn’t have the running stamina he’d had even five years ago. He’d put on a belly for the first time in his life with all the stress of recent years. By the time he reached the three men, he was breathing hard. The intruders were beefy types in expensive-looking GORE-TEX jackets. Their GMC SUVs were brand-new—most likely rentals out of Des Moines.

Fossen pointed the axe handle at the nearest of them. “You have no right to be here. I want you off my land. Now!”

The nearest one was taking close-up photos of the soil with a powerful-looking lens. “We’re investigators with Bosch and Miller, Mr. Fossen, here to confirm a potential patent infringement violation on behalf of Halperin Organix. We have a legal right to be here.”

“Bullshit! The judge ordered a stay on physical searches pending reasonable suspicion of infringement.”

The guy didn’t even look up. “Well, Halperin got a state judge to reinterpret the meaning of ‘reasonable.’ ”

He pulled out his own cell phone. “I’m calling my lawyer.”

“Donald Petersen is in court at the county seat right now. You won’t be able to reach him.”

The other two men chuckled.

Fossen lowered his phone and felt the anger rising. “You have no right to be here. I don’t believe you about that state ruling.”

One of the other men walked up to him aiming a digital video camera, laughing. “You willing to bet the farm, Hank?” He was a burly high-testosterone type. Most likely an ex-cop from St. Louis, where Halperin’s private detective firms were based. They always got pushy assholes for this.

“We got an anonymous tip that you’re using Mitroven 393, Hank.”

“Planting isn’t for another six or seven weeks. I’m just laying down fertilizer.”

One of them was now taking soil samples. “Well, genetic material from last year is hard to get rid of.”

“You pricks are planting Mitroven, aren’t you?”

“Are you accusing us of dishonesty, Hank?” The man with the video camera laughed.

“Why would we need to do that when there’s an experimental field a couple miles upwind?”

The third guy, who’d been talking on the cell phone, came up. “Don’t do this to yourself, Mr. Fossen. You know Halperin will spend whatever it takes to make an example out of you. Just stop growing heirloom seed and settle. Otherwise, they’ll take your farm away.”

The man with the camera laughed again. “That is, unless you’ve got another dad waiting in the wings to kill himself for the insurance mo—”

Before he even realized it, Fossen had taken a swing at the man with the axe handle, sending the video camera flying in two pieces and damned near cracking the goon in the side of the head.

“Whoa!”

The two other men immediately closed ranks with their colleague, dropping their gear. The cell phone man was apparently the one in charge. “That was stupid, Hank! You want to wind up in jail? How do you think this will look to a judge—you attacking investigators trying to establish theft of intellectual property? Why would you behave this way if you have nothing to hide?”

Fossen wielded the axe handle in one hand, although they weren’t advancing on him. “Go ahead. Show the video! No jury would convict me. You’re on my land illegally.”

The ex-cameraman was still dabbing at the side of his head, looking for blood. “Let’s face it, Hank, your old man bought you some time, but you’re one fuck-up away from making his sacrifice pointless. And I hear stupidity is genetic.”

“Time is on their side, Mr. Fossen. Accept their offer, or the lawsuits will never end.”

Just then the county sheriff’s patrol car pulled up behind the SUVs at the road.

Everyone straightened up as the sheriff got out. He was about Fossen’s age, with a trim, military look about him. He pointedly left his shotgun in the car. He put on his Stetson and walked calmly out to the field to join the assembly.

He gestured to the axe handle in Fossen’s hand. “A bit early in the season for baseball, isn’t it?” The sheriff looked to the others. “Everyone all right?”

Fossen kept his eye on the private detectives. “Who called you out, Dave?”

“You wanna do me a favor and put that axe handle down?” He looked to the three strangers, one of whom was retrieving the pieces of his wrecked camera. “As much as these fellas probably deserve a beating, you and I both know you can’t afford it.”

“They’re on my land illegally.”

“No. No, they’re not, Hank. They got the state court involved. Brigitte just told me on the radio. They’ll call out the state police if necessary to enforce it.”

The three men chuckled and started gathering up their equipment.

Fossen took a deep breath to calm himself. “I don’t know how this is legal. How is this legal?”

The sheriff came closer and gently lifted the axe handle out of Fossen’s hands. He spoke quietly so the others couldn’t hear. “Hank, listen to me. Just get back on your tractor and finish spraying. They want you to lose your cool. Hank Senior wouldn’t have wasted his time with these idiots.”

“My father did everything right. And they still almost bankrupted us. Hell they would have if . . .” Fossen stared with hatred at the men. “He never stole anything in his life. My father was cleaning seeds for people in this county for decades. And his father before him. You need to know that, Dave.”

“I know it, Hank.”

“Why doesn’t anyone else fight back? Why do they let them do this?”

“Because they’re afraid. People are hurting. They’re one lawsuit away from losing everything.”

“Halperin drove my father to do it. He only did it so we could keep the farm.”

The sheriff nodded grimly. “Everyone knows that. No one was more respected than Hank Senior.”

One of the men called out. “I hope your son is smarter than you, Hank. Or some jihadi’s gonna blow him to smithereens.”

The sheriff turned to them. “Hey, I’m a veteran. You want to make sick jokes about soldiers? What if I slapped you with a disorderly conduct charge? Who do you think your employer will believe? You or me? And you think any of your bosses might be veterans?”

They just glared.

“That’s what I thought, now pack up your shit and come back later. I’m all of out of patience with you three.”

They gave him the evil eye and dragged their feet as they went. The lead one called out before he got in the car. “Uncooperative local officials find themselves outspent in elections, Sheriff.”

The sheriff stood alongside Fossen as they watched the men get in their SUVs and drive off. He handed Fossen back his axe handle. “Damn good thing you didn’t have a head on that, or you might have been in serious trouble.”

“Thanks for talking me down.”

“I’ve been wanting to come out and talk to you and Lynn anyway.”

“What about?”

“Do you and Jenna talk much, Hank?”

Fossen narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean? What’s she been up to?”

“Look, I don’t mean to pry into your business, but I’ve been seeing her hanging out with some strange characters here in Greeley.”

Fossen sighed. “Damnit. It’s like I don’t even know her since she came back. She’s just been moping around the house for months since she graduated. There aren’t any jobs—here or anywhere else.”

“Look, I know things are terrible right now, but it’s even stranger than that.” He thumbed in the direction of his patrol car. “Remember when Sheriff Pearson patrolled this county? He had a pistol and half the time he didn’t even wear it. Well, I carry a shotgun, an M16, and two pistols in the car. Crystal meth changed everything. Our department’s been in eight shootouts in four years.”

“Jesus, you’re not telling me that Jenna is involved with drug gangs?”

“Jenna? No, that’s not where I’m going with that.”

“Thank god.”

“My point is that suddenly—like in a single month—the meth gangs are all gone, Hank.”

Fossen frowned. “That’s good. Isn’t that good?”

“Yeah—in a be-careful-what-you-wish-for sort of way. I mean, that doesn’t happen. Think about it. The ruthless, prison-controlled meth gangs in the state are almost completely gone. And nonprofit treatment facilities are popping up.”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me, Dave—but I wish you’d tell me already.”

“There are things going on in this county that . . .” He tried to find words, then looked up. “Well, things that don’t make any sense.”

“Less sense than outsiders having more rights to my land than me?”

“In a word: yes. There’s some sort of strange force at work. Strange equipment is showing up—and people are tearing up their fields. Strangers—mostly young people—are moving back into the county and establishing businesses. But businesses that don’t seem to accept money. They have lots of high-tech, expensive gear—but I’ll be damned if I can tell what it is they do.”

“And they’re not gangs?”

The sheriff shook his head. “No. And they have legal counsel, too. We started investigating them, and the DA made us back off. I don’t know whether they’re a cult or—”

“What does this have to do with Jenna?”

“She’s one of them, Hank. That’s where she spends most of her time. I just thought you knew.”

Fossen gazed down at the fertile but unplanted soil. He nodded to himself. “Tell me where.”

Chapter 10: // Corn Rebellion

Henry Fossen waited in the dark in his F-150 pickup truck on the outskirts of Greeley. He was parked beneath the awning of an abandoned gas station across from a fenced yard shop. According to the sheriff, the yard had become a hive of activity in recent months.

Fossen watched the road for the arrival of Jenna’s subcompact car. One she’d saved up to buy with her own money before college. In the meantime, he listened to AM talk radio.

The news was all bad. Inflation was on the rise, with the dollar falling against overseas currencies. This had sent gas prices soaring. Unemployment—already dismal—was getting worse. Tent cities had begun to spring up outside Des Moines. The financial crisis was supposed to be easing up, but instead it was only getting worse. And yet the stock market was still moving upward. It didn’t seem to make sense.

Across the road Fossen saw silhouettes of people moving beneath flood lamps among tarp-covered pallets in the fenced-in perimeter of the yard shop. He occasionally saw forklifts moving pallets. A semitruck carrying shipping containers arrived at one point, and a lift truck pulled the containers off swiftly—sending the semi on its way.

But there was no printed sign to indicate it was a business. The sheriff said investigation of this site had been halted by the interference of a high-priced Des Moines law firm.

Fossen stared at the place. He needed to be certain the sheriff was right about Jenna before he confronted her. What had she gotten herself into? She had always seemed levelheaded—even as a teenager. Future Farmers of America, 4-H Club. Had he become complacent? Expecting her to never need his help? She excelled in school. Got a partial scholarship to ISU. Graduated with honors in biology—and walked straight out into the worst job market since the Great Depression. Here it was almost nine months later, and she was still living at home with no hope for work. She’d said she was volunteering at a nonprofit political action committee. Would she actually lie to—

Someone suddenly rapped on his passenger window, startling him. He turned to see his twenty-three-year-old daughter, Jenna, standing in a peacoat and scarf alongside his truck. She had a scowl on her face. Even so, she looked as pretty as ever.

Fossen sighed, turned down the radio, and unlocked the passenger door.

She rapped on the window glass again.

Exasperated, Fossen lowered the passenger window. “Jenna, just get in the truck.”

“Dad, why did you come here?”

“Because I need to know what you’re doing.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“Damnit, Jenna, I don’t ever interfere with your life, but I wasn’t born yesterday.”

“I’m twenty-three. I’m an adult, and I don’t need you babysitting me. I haven’t needed anyone to babysit me since I was eight.”

“What do you expect me to do? Just ignore this? Is that what people who care about each other do? As long as you live under our roof, you’ll follow family rules, and family members don’t keep secrets from one another.”

He gestured to the fenced yard shop across the way. “What is this place, and what the hell are you doing in there?”

She studied him unflinchingly. “The sheriff told you about this.”

“Dave cares about you. He’s trying to protect you.”

She frowned. “He should look after himself. He does know that he has political enemies in St. Louis, right?”

Fossen suddenly felt as though he didn’t recognize the person standing next to his truck. “Hold it . . . what?”

She sighed. “Dad, I don’t think you’ll understand what I’m doing or why.”

“What you’re saying is you don’t think I’ll approve of what you’re doing.”

“I don’t care if you approve of what I’m doing.”

“If you’re living in our house—”

“I can move out, if I need to. I just thought that with Dennis away . . .”

He felt suddenly very hurt that she was so unreachable to him. She seemed to notice his reaction. “Dad. I’m not saying I want to move out. I’m just saying that what I’m doing is important.”

“Why can’t you see that I need to know you’re safe? I’m just trying to protect you.”

“That’s what you don’t understand, Dad. I’m the one protecting you. And I promise you, today was the last time Halperin Organix will ever bother the Fossens of Greeley, Iowa.”

He was confused. “Halperin? How is Halperin involved in this?” He studied her. “Honey, what’s going on in there?”

“Dad, if I show you, you have to promise not to try to talk me out of it. Because you won’t succeed.”

“It’s a cult, isn’t it?”

She laughed out loud. “You used to be upset that I wouldn’t go to church. Now you’re worried I’ve become a fanatic.” On his expression, she shook her head. “No, not a cult.”

She put on a pair of expensive-looking glasses and nodded her head. “If you’re coming, now’s the time.”

He got out of the truck and joined her as she crossed the road toward the brightly lit facility. “This is the old lumber yard, isn’t it? Do you need to tell anyone that I’m coming in or . . .”

“They already know, Dad. They knew the moment you drove up.”

As she and Fossen approached, the metal gates at the entrance swung open automatically. Fossen saw half a dozen people in their twenties and thirties moving busily around the yard, stabbing their hands at the air and talking to invisible people—probably on headsets, he guessed. Everyone wore expensive glasses, much like Jenna’s. An unmanned forklift whined past, seemingly under the direction of no one. It deftly lifted a pallet of unmarked crates and drove off into the warehouse.

“Dad, you need to promise me you won’t bother the people working in here. Quite a few of them are doing critical work, and even though they’re looking right at you, they might not be able to see or hear you.”

“Why wouldn’t they be able to see me?”

“Because they’ll be looking into a virtual dimension.” On his uncomprehending look she sighed again. “I told you you wouldn’t understand.”

She kept walking ahead and he followed, soaking up the bustle of the yard. It seemed odd. He hadn’t recalled this much activity here during the day. Come to think of it, he couldn’t recall a business with this much activity in Greeley in decades. “What is it they do here, exactly?”

“This is the logistics hub for the Greeley Faction—the local node of a global mesh network powered by a narrow AI agent that’s building a resilient, sustainable, high-technology civilization.”

He just looked at her. “So . . .”

“Just come inside.” She opened a door in the side of the warehouse and they entered a large space lined with tall shelving. Along the far wall stood several computerized milling machines with their operators focused intently on their work. The center of the room looked to be a staging area, bustling with young people, all wearing eyewear and gloves. To the side was a raised platform lined with office chairs and desks where a dozen people were grabbing, pulling, and pushing at invisible objects in the air. They were all speaking to unseen people, as though it were a call center.

Fossen nodded. “Telemarketers.” He turned to her. “This is one of those network marketing schemes, isn’t it? I’m really disappointed in—”

“Dad! It’s nothing like that.” She walked up to a canvas tarp draped over a large object. She pulled it away, revealing an old, wooden piece of equipment.

Fossen stopped cold. “A Clipper . . . what’s it doing here?”

The antique seemed out of place amid the computer-controlled forklift trucks passing by. It was a century-old Clipper seed cleaner—a machine just like the one that had been in his family ever since the 1920s. His father and his father’s father had used it right up until Halperin’s lawyers seized it as evidence of “intellectual property theft.”

He inspected it, leaning up and down. “I thought the biotech companies had destroyed most of these. . . .”

“It wasn’t easy to find. We’re building new ones now, but I wanted to get you an original. I was going to surprise you.”

He just shook his head. “This is stupid, Jenna. We can’t keep this. There are investigators taking photos of the house night and day. Halperin’s lawyers will claim we’re stealing their products again.”

“Would you listen to yourself? They’re making us bow and scrape for the right to participate in the natural world. They’re seeds, not products.”

“You know exactly what I mean. You know what these lawsuits have done to us.”

“That’s over now.”

“Jenna, stop talking nonsense. I just ran into their agents in the north field today.”

“I know. That’s the last time. I promise. Our faction unlocked Level Four Legal Protection this week. It’s already been activated.”

He just squinted at her. “Honey, none of this makes any sense.” He gestured to the rows of tall shelving, milling machines, and automated forklift trucks. “And who is paying for all this, by the way?”

“We are.”

“Oh really? How?”

“Our network doesn’t use the dollar. We’ve accrued darknet credits—a new digital currency that hasn’t been saddled with twenty lifetimes of debt by corporate giveaways. We’re using that currency to power a local, sustainable economy centered on Greeley.”

“You’re going to wind up getting arrested.”

“We’re free to use private currencies, as long as they’re convertible to the dollar.”

“But why would you bother?”

“Because the dollar is about to go into hyperinflation. There’s nothing supporting it. The darknet currency is backed by joules of green energy—something intrinsically valuable.”

“I just don’t understand any of this, Jenna.”

“My generation has no intention of living as serfs on a corporate manor, Dad. When people became more reliant on multinational corporations than on their own communities, they surrendered whatever say they had in their government. Corporations are growing stronger while democratic government becomes increasingly helpless.”

“Listen, whatever you’re going through—”

“Just look at corn and soybeans, subsidized with taxpayer money—creating a market that wouldn’t otherwise make sense. Why? So agribusiness firms have cheap inputs to make processed food. The taxpayers are basically subsidizing corporations to make crap, when we could have grown real food on our own. But, of course, they’ve made growing food illegal now. . . .”

He started to walk away. “I want you to leave with me.”

“Dad, there was a reason you didn’t want me or Dennis to go into farming. You wanted us to go to college and get away from here. Do you remember why? Do you remember what you said to me?”

He stopped. He didn’t face her, but nodded. “I said that there’s no future in farming.”

“Food is the very heart of freedom. Don’t you realize that? If people don’t grow the food, we both know who will: biotech companies like Halperin Organix. How can people be free if they can’t feed themselves without getting sued for patent violations?”

He looked around the warehouse as workers passed by. “Look, your mother and I did the best we could for—”

She came up and put a hand on his shoulder. “I know you did. You’re honest. So was granddad. And so am I. But they’ve rigged the game. It was like this during the Gilded Age of the 1890s. And then again in the late 1920s. It’s nothing new. We’re just trying to break the cycle.”

He stared at her, unsure whether he wanted to understand what she was saying. “Then you’re not coming home with me?”

She shook her head. “No. I’ve got work to do. I’ll be back home later tonight. ”

He shrugged. “You know, I worry about you. You and your brother. I know it hasn’t been easy. I . . . there’s no real jobs anymore. I feel like we’ve let you down.” Fossen started to tear up.

She hugged him tightly. “Dad, you didn’t let me down.” She looked back up at him. “You taught me everything I need to know: self-reliance, self-respect, community. Just don’t be surprised if I actually put it to use.”

Fossen sat in his La-Z-Boy chair with the television off. He listened to the old house settling. To the ticking of the grandfather clock in the foyer and the refrigerator fan turning on and off as the minutes passed.

It was late.

Then he heard the dogs barking and a car coming up the long drive. He didn’t move. He heard footsteps on the back porch, and then the door in the mudroom squeak open and thump closed. Still he sat motionless.

A creak on the floorboards nearby. Jenna’s voice. “Dad? It’s late. You okay?”

He just held up a letter on embossed stationery. “You know, it’s been nearly five years. And after all that time, it’s just takes one letter.”

She stood in the doorway.

“How did you do it?”

“I told you.”

“No. You really didn’t, Jenna.” He looked up at her. “How does a twenty-three-year-old kid get a multibillion-dollar company to drop a lawsuit?”

“It was the Daemon.”

“What is the Daemon?”

“It’s a digital monster that eats corporate networks. They’re scared to death of it—because it has no fear.”

He turned to face the dark television screen again. They sat in silence for several moments.

“What happens now?”

“That depends on whether you want to continue running this place as part of their system.”

Fossen looked up at the framed photograph of his eldest son in dress uniform on a nearby bookshelf. He nodded. “I didn’t realize we had two warriors in the family.”

He turned around to face her. “What do we do?”

She smiled. “The first thing we do is stop planting corn.”

“And plant what?”

“What people need.”

Chapter 11: // Hunted

Southhaven was a self-styled “six-star” golf resort catering to business. Pharmaceutical companies marketing blood thinners to cardiovascular surgeons, investment retreats, political fund-raisers—all of them were capable of filling the two hundred and eighty outrageously expensive guest bungalows. In another age it might have been a duke’s estate—a place where the affairs of men might be discussed with sophistication while wives strolled the gardens and the children took riding lessons. Now it was a rental that offered double mileage points.

With a world-class golf course, four restaurants, and a bar that permitted cigar smoking, Southhaven Golf Resort was the ideal place to get business done in a relaxed atmosphere. The resort was located on Ocean Island—one of several barrier islands off the southern Atlantic coast of Georgia. Gated and patrolled, the private island consisted of the Southhaven resort, its golf course, and a hundred or so sprawling Mediterranean-style beach houses—third or fourth homes to people looking for somewhere to dump capital gains. Most of the homes were unoccupied at any given time.

A big selling point for Ocean Island was its remoteness. It was buffered by a mile and a half of marshland to the west and north and linked to the mainland by a single causeway. To the east and south lay only the Atlantic Ocean.

In short, it was perfect for The Major’s purpose. He’d long ago graduated from clandestine meetings in run-down safe houses or industrial spaces. He was the establishment now, and he enjoyed its perquisites.

The Major sat on the arm of a sofa in their Emperor Bungalow, talking on his encrypted cell phone with a broker in Hong Kong. He glanced at his watch. Eleven fifty P.M. “Yes. It should be part of the dark liquidity pool. Right. Two hundred thousand shares.”

He looked up at the dining room to see half a dozen senior managers of international security and military providers gathered around a table strewn with maps of the Midwestern United States, photographs, and documents. No two of the men had the same accent—South African, Eastern European, Australian, American, British, Spanish. Several were smoking as they pondered the maps. They were debating something, and the British executive motioned for The Major to rejoin the table.

He knew he wouldn’t have too many more chances to shift his investments. And he wasn’t about to miss the upcoming event.

The Major nodded and spoke into the phone. “Yeah. Empty the Sutherland—”

His phone connection suddenly dissolved in a wave of static. The Major looked at the phone’s display and saw the message “Connection Lost.” He cursed and moved to dial again when he realized he suddenly had no network signal.

“Damnit!”

The Major looked up to see one of the nearby security executives putting his own phone onto his belt clip.

The man shrugged to the others. “No signal.” Then pointed to a map. “Look, I’ll call them back, but we’re going to need materiel in-country for security teams well before then.”

But The Major was no longer concerned with logistics for the counterinsurgency campaign. He was suddenly concerned about his own survival.

They had just lost wireless connectivity. The Major remembered all too well that the attack at Building Twenty-Nine was preceded by radio jamming. The FBI operation at Sobol’s mansion was also plagued by wireless communications problems—all caused by ultrawideband signals. The same technology used by the Daemon’s automated vehicles to communicate with the darknet. It was battle-level bandwidth that steamrolled everything else.

The Major reached for a remote control on the coffee table in front of him. He used it to turn on the radio in the living room entertainment center. Nothing but static. He kept scanning stations.

The South African executive frowned at him. “Ag, Major. We need you to make a decision here. Can we hold off on the stereo?”

The Major wasn’t listening. His combat instincts had kicked in. The chatter of the senior executives at the table faded, and his senses focused on his immediate surroundings. On the significance of every sound. It brought him back to El Salvador. Listening for the snap of a branch—or for an unearthly animal silence that signaled a hastily prepared ambush. He heard the nearby men arguing as only muffled sounds. The footsteps of a Romanian private security contractor walking to the service tray near the curtained window to pour more coffee commanded his attention. The heavy drapes behind the man billowed as conditioned air washed over them.

Then an unexplained sound, like a tent door being unzipped, came from the courtyard outside—and it kept unzipping—getting louder.

The next few moments, he felt as though he were pulling himself through a pool of water—his mind racing ahead, screaming at his body to keep up. He pushed off the sofa and charged toward the contractor standing near the drape-covered window.

The man started to turn, apparently sensing danger, but The Major leapt into the air, delivering a flying dropkick that sent the Romanian headlong through the thick drapes and French doors altogether, with a deafening crash.

Just then, the front door to the bungalow burst open as a human-sized piece of twisted machinery blasted through it going eighty miles an hour. It careened across the room sending pieces of metal and plastic ricocheting off the walls, overturning the table, and clearing the men there off their feet.

The Major didn’t look back as the deafening sound of powerful motorcycle engines suddenly erupted all around the bungalow. Behind him, he could hear screaming and motorcycles engines so loud the noise was physically painful. He ran through the smashed French doors, and once outside he saw the stunned and bloody Romanian trying to get up in a field of broken glass and splintered wood. The Major stomped on the man’s chest, flattening him on the patio stones.

The man tried to squirm out from under The Major’s foot and breathe. Powerful motorcycle engines were coming his way fast across the lawns, green lasers stabbing at the darkness.

The Major drove his heel into the contractor’s throat, causing the man to grab at his own neck, pawing for air. He then reached down beneath the Romanian’s jacket and felt the holster there. A polyurethane harness. He tugged at it in the darkness and felt the gun come free. No more time. The engines were close.

The Major took off through the bushes, hugging the side of the building, and ducked around the nearest corner moments before the razorbacks arrived. He felt the contours of the newly acquired pistol in the darkness. Twin safetys. Probably a Sig Sauer. He hefted it. A .45—and loaded, judging by the weight. He chambered a round as the engines revved behind him. He heard agonized screams and ringing of steel.

The Major ran blindly through the bushes now under cover of the screams and engines. Branches hit his face as he pushed through the thick of it and soon he emerged into a golf cart lane flanked by soft landscape lighting and dense tropical shrubbery. In his peripheral vision he caught the movement of men in black tactical gear pointing his way. Although he didn’t hear gunshots, he heard projectiles whine past his head as he plunged into the bushes on the far side of the path. He fired two shots to get them ducking and kept cover as motorcycle engines kept pace with him out on the lawns and driveways beyond the decorative jungle.

The Major ran headlong into a rough-hewn beam railing, but without missing a beat he clambered over it, collapsing onto a tiled walkway between resort buildings. It was brightly lit. He glanced right and left and could see fire strobes flashing in the interior corridors. He suddenly noticed the warning Klaxons sounding. Someone had tripped a fire alarm. Good.

He crawled across the tiled floor on his belly and peered through the gap between the handrail and the wall on the far side. He could see more shrubs and a small parking lot behind the reception building.

The Major rolled over the railing and into the bushes on the far side. He was quickly out to the parking lot and trying car doors. Locked. Locked.

He tried to remember how to hot-wire a car, and then it occurred to him that cars had utterly changed since his days of twisting wires in the dark in Belize City. They were computer-controlled now—in fact the damned things had lately become smart enough to hunt him.

Motorcycle engines trolled the grounds out in the darkness. Lights were coming on in the guest room windows. Shouts echoed across the grounds.

“Call the police! Someone call the police!”

It suddenly occurred to him that he still had his phone. He pulled it out of his jacket pocket and hurled it as far as possible across the parking lot, where it shattered against something hard in the dark. For all he knew, that’s how the Daemon tracked him here. It was an untraceable phone. He’d only had it for a few days. How had they found him? He started thinking of possible vectors but decided he’d have time to worry about it later if he survived the night.

He saw car headlights approaching from the direction of the clubhouse and peered down the lane from behind a nearby car tire.

A well-dressed man in his seventies was behind the wheel of a Bentley Continental Flying Spur. It was doing about ten miles per hour.

The Major hid the pistol behind his leg and affected a stiff limp, rushing to block the road. He held up his free hand and did his best to look panicked. The car slowed and came to a stop. The Major limped over to the door as the driver lowered his window.

“What’s the problem, son?”

“My wife and I were hit by a drunk driver coming back from the club. I need someone to call an ambulance.”

“My god, that’s horrible.” The old man put the car into park and searched for his phone.

Putting the car into park was crucial.

By the time the driver looked up again The Major had the pistol pointed at his head. The Major fired a shot into the old man’s forehead at close range. The ivory leather interior spattered with blood.

Messy. Unprofessional.

Small caliber pistols were better for this sort of thing. The bullet wouldn’t go out the back of the head.

Suddenly The Major heard a razorback turn a corner a hundred yards behind them. He looked away quickly, knowing that they carried blinding weapons. He’d read Dr. Philips’s after-action report.

A green laser played across The Major and the Bentley’s mirrors in a brilliant light show. He could hear the bike roaring in his direction. The Major dove headfirst through the open driver’s window and climbed across the still-twitching corpse of the old man. As The Major turned right-side up in the passenger seat he reached his leg over the console hump to get his foot onto the accelerator. He could hear more razorbacks converging on the site from nearby. Suddenly a razor-sharp katana-like blade shot into the old man’s neck through the open window. A second slash took the old man’s head clean off.

The Major fired three shots into the motorized gimbal that held the sword, deforming the mount and causing the bike to eject the blade and pull away from the car, swinging around to aim its beam weapons. The Major ducked his head down and dropped the pistol as the cabin filled with green laser light. He finally managed to reach the gas pedal with his left foot. The shifter between his legs, he jammed the car into drive and felt the powerful engine accelerating him down the narrow road. He ignored the blood all over the seats and the headless man beside him—along with the head now rolling around on the floor.

“Goddamnit! Goddamnit!” He pounded the dashboard. He’d lost his cool. There were surveillance cameras all over this place. He’d need to get ahold of this security video. He was panicking. He needed to get his shit together. And what about the military plans back in the room? He tried to steady himself. You used to be good at operations once.

The Bentley was roaring up to sixty now, and he barely had control of it. He dared a glance into the rearview mirror and could see several razorbacks coming up on him very fast. Soon they were flickering laser light all over the car. He smashed the rearview mirror off the ceiling with his fist.

“Fuck!”

The Bentley caromed off the sides of several cars parked along the restaurant drive, and he struck one of the parking valets. The man’s body tumbled into the bushes.

The Major stomped the accelerator and listened for the deep howl of the approaching bikes behind him. Their thunderous engines grew in volume. He was going eighty now and still accelerating—palm trees and dense brush passed by very fast. It looked like he was going along the coast and the huge private homes there.

Suddenly The Major slammed on the brakes, bringing the large sedan to a screeching stop and sending him hard against the dashboard. The headless body stayed secure as the seat belt pretensioners kick in. A split second later he heard several crashes as the car nudged forward. A large motorcycle hurtled over the left side of the car and tumbled in a shower of sparks down the road.

The Major gunned the engine again, looked behind him to see two more bikes lying on their sides in the road—along with a section of his back bumper. He killed the headlights and turned the car through the front fence of a nearby estate. The Bentley crashed through a white wooden fence line and shuddered across uneven ground as security lights turned on all over the lawn. He dodged palm trees and bushes to bring the car roaring alongside the house. He smashed through patio furniture, aiming toward the pool, then let up on the gas. He opened the passenger door—to dinging alarms—and waited until the right moment. He grabbed his gun, flicked on the safety, and rolled clear onto the grass.

He slid to a stop and watched the Bentley continue through the pool fence and dip nose-down in what turned out to be the shallow end, sending up a column of steam.

“Damnit!”

He got up and ran toward a nearby tree line, motorcycle engines converging on his location. He heard dogs barking. There was a salt smell in the air. He felt very much alive at the moment—adrenaline coursing through his bloodstream. It had been a while.

He ran through some trees and reached a wood fence line. Shoving the pistol into his belt at the small of his back, he climbed over the fence deftly. Dropping to the other side, he moved through ornamental tropical brush toward an even larger Mediterranean mansion.

Security lights started kicking on all around him and he cursed his bad luck for being in such a high-security enclave when this had gone down. Far better to be in some shantytown or packed city street where he could get lost among the populace. He picked up a rock from the garden and hurled it at the garage light next to him, shattering it and bringing back darkness.

He could hear what sounded like a dozen razorbacks on the road now, but they weren’t following the trail of carnage to the pool next door. They were concentrating on the gate at his current location. Goddamnit.

The Major ran around the garage toward the backyard, kicking open a tall fence gate and coming face-to-face with a portly caretaker holding a flashlight. The man was strapping on a pistol holster.

The Major drove his fist into the caretaker’s solar plexus, and followed with an openhanded blow across the throat. He then cleared the man’s legs out from under him. The flashlight fell to the paving stones and went out. The caretaker gasped for air, while The Major grabbed the gun from the man’s holster. He clicked the hammer back and pressed it into the caretaker’s right eye. “Car keys! Where are the keys?”

The man’s eyes were wild with fear. He pointed at the garage, trying to speak. He finally croaked out, “Box on the wall . . .”

The Major pistol-whipped him unconscious and then rolled him into the pool.

Goddamnit! What if there’s surveillance video here, too?

He’d been balancing risks. If he let the man live, the guy would call in the car as stolen, and The Major might get caught in a police standoff. And either way, he’d need to get rid of any witnesses.

He ran to the garage and kicked in the door. He soon found the lights and saw three cars there, two under tarpaulins and one not—a silver ’69 Camaro with black racing stripes. There was a strongbox on the wall, and he felt the anger rising when he found it locked. He aimed the caretaker’s .38 revolver at it and fired first one, then two, then three shots. He finally got it open and located the Camaro keys.

Meanwhile, outside there was pandemonium. It sounded like every razorback in the area had already gotten onto the estate and was scouring the place for him. The Major was becoming calmer with every second. He was easing into a familiar groove. Fieldwork had its rewards and adrenaline highs were one of them.

He got into the Camaro and strapped himself into the racing harness. He started the car and it let up a satisfying roar. Suddenly Boston was playing on the stereo—“Don’t Look Back.” The Major turned it up, revved the engine again, and realized that he had sunglasses in his jacket pocket. He put them on. They might not completely protect him from laser light, but they’d help. He then tapped the garage door opener on the visor and roared out of the garage, tires squealing.

He found three razorbacks waiting in the driveway outside the garage; he hit the first one and sent it skidding into the fountain. As laser lights focused on him, he spun a one-eighty and headed out through the rear lawn. There, he smashed aside another razorback that tried to throw itself under the car and brought the Camaro crashing through the rear fence. He’d made it out onto the beach.

The Major could see a dozen powerful green lasers tracking the car’s movement as it skidded sideways, straightened out, and then started roaring down the beach toward the mainland. From the unevenness of the sand, he figured the motorcycles would lose any speed advantage—they might not even be able to steer. He cranked up the music as muzzle flashes appeared in the trees to his right. Bullets clanged into the car body and spidered the window glass. Human operatives as well? “Is that all you’ve got, you sons a bitches?”

He kept the pedal down and sped on, watching the lights of beachfront homes race by.

The Major kept going for nearly five miles, at times reaching a hundred and twenty miles an hour as he raced down the nighttime beach as close to the water as he dared. He was surprised not to see a single person. The wealthy certainly had an odd idea of what to do with a beach.

But eventually he would run out of island—that much he knew. And there was only one causeway off of it, which would definitely be guarded. So he couldn’t go that way. The fact that no police had arrived told him that there was a major operation under way to get him. Something had leaked. He was starting to get mad just thinking about it. How had he been located?

From what he remembered, there was another barrier island not far south, separated from this one by a narrow inlet. He kept going south, and soon found himself driving over shallow dunes. He slowed the car down and stayed close to the coastline.

He was heading into utter blackness now. After he killed his headlights, there was only starlight to see by. The Major kept his eye on a luminescent dashboard compass the owner had installed. Due south.

Soon enough he saw lights of distant houses ahead, and with very little warning, he almost drove into the narrow inlet that separated the low strip of sand he was on from the other island perhaps a hundred and seventy-five yards away.

He put the car in neutral, turned off the dome light, then took off his shoes and got out. He removed his jacket and began wiping down the car and the guns for fingerprints. It was a bit late, since he was certain he’d left prints all over the place behind him, but it couldn’t hurt. He’d still need to get ahold of any surveillance video. He started thinking of the names of operators who could manage that.

The Major found a toolbox in the Camaro’s trunk. He put the car in gear, then eased out of the driver’s seat as he released the clutch and lowered the toolbox onto the gas pedal—the car roared off into the inlet and soon splashed through the water, eventually stalling and rolling away as it began to sink.

The Major grabbed his shoes, tied them together and hung them over his neck, wrapped the guns inside of his jacket, and started swimming for the far bank, through bubbles still coming up from the car. The water was shockingly cold, but he didn’t think hypothermia would be an issue across this distance.

The Major swam with calm determination toward the far shore. About halfway across he dumped both guns and kept going. A few minutes later he climbed over a low jetty of rocks on the far side. He lay resting on the rocks in the darkness, listening to the waves wash against the stones.

He stared up at the starry night sky from his place in the shadows. Some of his contractors were dead. They would have to be replaced. Some generalized plans had fallen into the hands of the enemy, but it could have been worse. Yes, the enemy would now know they were up to something in the Midwest, but it couldn’t be news to them, could it?

But he was alive. In fact, The Major hadn’t felt this alive in years. He thought back to nights spent in South American jungles. They were some of the most vivid memories he had. That was truly living.

He stared up at the field of stars above him.

And suddenly he saw a dark, wing-shaped object noiselessly gliding across the blue-black field. They’ve got surveillance drones. He snapped alert and grabbed his things. He ran barefoot across the beach toward a pier that jutted out over the water. The Major ran inland beneath it, the wood planks coming closer and closer overhead, until finally he was crawling up to the very beams themselves, pushing sand away to get deeper in, climbing under the boardwalk. He smelled the tar, discarded cigarettes, and dog shit, but he kept digging.

He heard powerful motorcycle engines and diesel trucks approaching. The Major started to push sand back behind him with his feet, hiding his presence. He was sweating profusely, blocking himself in. Then heard steel-shod boots approaching on the boardwalk. Dozens of others were racing over the asphalt to either side. Motorcycle engines throbbed in the background.

The footsteps stopped near The Major’s hiding place. He could see shadows nearby between the planks and the voices of men.

“The car is in the water on the far side. He crossed here.”

“Looks like the shortest swim.”

“How did they find him?”

“Fingerprint scanners on the room locks. Loki released the biometric database from Building Twenty-Nine to the darknet. People have been inserting software bots into all sorts of systems for months.”

A chuckle.

“We’ll get him. There’s nowhere in the world he can hide now.” Loki walked through the shattered bungalow door wearing his black helmet and riding suit. He wasn’t too concerned about his safety. As a fifty-sixth-level darknet Sorcerer, he had the best gear credits could buy. His black riding suit resembled leather inlaid with titanium wire, but it was actually composed of flexible polymer fibers lined with sheer thickening liquid—a mixture of polyethylene glycol and particles of silica whose chemical structure stiffened instantly into a solid under rapid compression. In technical terms the gel displayed a highly nonlinear rate-dependent sheer resistance—which in layman’s terms meant it could stop a bullet or a knife while still being comfortable to wear. However, Loki also had pieces of ceramic composite trauma plate in critical areas, and on the backs of his gloves, as much for looks as protection. This was his faction battle armor, and he seldom moved about without it. Especially in these troubled times.

His hands were clad in gel armor gloves as well, with fiber-optic lines running like veins along the backs of his hands and along his body, leading to a wearable computer on his belt at the small of his back. Two of the fiber lines also ran to lenses contained in engraved, titanium enclosures at the ends of his index fingers to accommodate his LIPC weaponry. His belt buckle bore the symbol of the Stormbringer faction—twin lightning bolts with skulls in each quadrant. Such was the culture of the darknet—manga come to life.

Through the sensors in his outfit, Loki could “feel” the world immediately around him, in a complete sphere. Next to his skin he wore a haptic shirt that pulsed electronic signals like pixels on a screen, to give him a sensory impression of the area all around him. He could “feel” the walls and shapes of obstacles ahead of him in darkness or smoke.

Loki linked more than nearby geometry to his vest. He also reserved several areas of his skin for more powerful electrical pulses—alerts from his pack of razorbacks, darknet news, or news about The Major, or mentions of Loki’s real-life name anywhere on the Web. Loki was intimately connected to the world around him—both the real one and the numberless dimensions of D-Space.

He surveyed the blood-spattered furniture and scattered body parts of dead military contractors. His air filtration system kept most of the intestinal stench out of his nostrils. Blood was still dripping down the walls and off the ceiling. There was a shattered razorback giving off smoke in the corner, but the piercing shriek of the smoke detector made no impression on Loki in his insulated motorcycle helmet.

A glance around the room confirmed what he already knew. The Major wasn’t among the dead. Loki had remotely piloted the lead razorback and slaved the others to it. Perhaps the frontal assault had been a mistake. The Major was a veteran operator, after all.

But there might still be useful intelligence here. The “Cult of Efficiency” was meeting here for a reason. With several other razorbacks patrolling the perimeter, Loki figured he had a while before local police had the courage to move past the carnage at the front gate.

He kicked over the butchered corpse of a husky Latin American man in an expensive suit. The man had been slashed open neck to groin, spine deep—then hip to shoulder. Beneath him on the floor was a blood-soaked map. Loki kicked the carcass aside and overturned a dining room table to reveal a topographical map. He started to notice a collection of large-format survey maps of the Midwestern United States spread about the room. They were torn and stained with blood.

What are you planning, Major?

He snapped several high-definition photos with his HUD display. Loki then reached a black-gloved hand out to turn on a layer of D-Space—one that revealed all wireless consumer electronics data emitted in his vicinity. With it, he immediately saw the mobile equipment identifiers (MEIDs) of several phones floating above the dead men in D-Space, as well as Bluetooth IDs to various headsets and wireless devices around the bungalow. He could also see SSIDs for nearby Wi-Fi access points—floating in three-dimensional space as call-outs.

Loki activated a darknet telecommunications search portal, which appeared as a single orange ring of light floating in space a foot or so in front of him. It was a digital receptacle into which he swept each of the MEIDs of the dead men’s phones with a wave of his gloved hand. The orange circle flashed and in a moment shrank, transforming into a series of six names associated with those handsets. Aliases, of course, but Loki wasn’t looking for their names. He wanted their social network.

Loki turned to look at the shattered French doors, the curtains swaying in a tropical breeze. The Major had been here, and he couldn’t have gotten far.

Loki pushed aside his D-Space portal app and brought up an overhead satellite photo of his current GPS position. The image of the bungalow’s roof floated as a D-Space object, in a private translucent dimension a foot and a half in front of him, where he could work with it. With a couple of clicks he overlaid mobile phone tracking data from four major telecom carriers onto the image of the bungalow roof. He adjusted a slider to move back in time from the present, showing various dots—each representing a phone handset—moving around the bungalow. There were six individuals. Then he spotted a seventh handset coming in from the patio right about the time his lead razorback hit the door.

Loki zoomed out and let the clock run forward—watching the dot representing that same phone handset move through the French doors, and then across the grounds toward the parking lot. At that point the phone disappeared from the map.

Loki rewound the timeline and clicked on the dot—retrieving its MEID, which he then swept into his search portal list.

He now had seven identities. He examined the last name—The Major’s current alias: Anson Gregory Davis.

Loki immediately sent the identity out to the darknet feed dedicated to finding The Major. He knew hundreds of thousands of people were monitoring it. Perhaps The Major would make the mistake of using a credit card from this identity within the next few hours. Likewise, he knew they’d analyze the purchase patterns of this identity, as well. Did The Major buy a coffee at the same time each day? Did he drink a rare type of scotch? Smoke a rare cigar—or have any other unique tastes that couldn’t be masked by a false identity? One they could use to detect him wherever he reappeared? If so, the crowd would find it.

In the meantime, Loki wanted to see what sort of friends “Mr. Davis” had been speaking with. Loki clicked on the name and it quickly expanded into a map of variously sized dots radiating out from a central hub—like the map of a star system. Loki knew each dot represented a unique phone number that The Major had called with this specific handset. The size of the dot represented how often he had called it. With another click, Loki examined the calls made by The Major’s most talked-to colleagues. Intelligence experts called this sort of map a “community of interest,” and each level of detail was called a “generation.” He was now looking at a “two-generation community of interest” for The Major. Loki laid the calling data over a map of the world and noticed a very even geographic spread within the U.S.—plus a few dozen calls overseas to Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

Loki added the second-generation data for the most talked-to colleagues, and suddenly a pattern began to form. Indeed, it was focused throughout the Midwestern states—Kansas, Iowa, Missouri. Bringing up the third generation made the pattern even more clear.

There were operations under way in the Midwest. He stared hungrily at the tiny dots. Each one represented a person—a person who was now known to him and who could be tracked down. At this level of abstraction they looked looked like ants.

Ants that were about to get squashed . . .

Chapter 12: // Masterwork

Situated just across the Pearl River Delta from Hong Kong, Shenzhen was a city of migrants. Declared a Special Economic Zone by the Chinese government in 1980, it was an experiment in limited capitalism—and had grown with astonishing speed. Fueled by cheap labor, Shenzhen’s population exploded from three hundred thousand to over twelve million people in less than three decades. State-of-the-art factory complexes producing goods for Western companies covered mile after mile in the northern reaches of the city, away from the tourism- and trade-centered southern districts.

Jon Ross had been here for only a few weeks, and already he liked it better than Beijing. The air was better, for one thing, and it had milder, subtropical weather. It was a city made for the type of person he was pretending to be—a thirty-year-old, successful entrepreneur looking for manufacturing capacity. To such a person, Shenzhen held many charms, not the least of which was cheap, skilled labor.

China was no longer punching out plastic trinkets. They made iPods, computers, and medical devices here now. High-quality merchandise. If you were making shirts or plastic patio chairs, you brought your business to Vietnam or Pakistan. At least for now.

Ross gazed out the window. Thousands of blue-uniformed, female factory workers with multicolored ID tags clipped to their pockets surged around Ross’s chauffeured Buick Regal. As they pressed past in the narrow lane between production buildings and dormitories, the car’s blacked-out windows hid Ross from their view. His driver honked the horn repeatedly and cursed in Mandarin as they inched along. Ross studied the tableau of humanity as it squeezed by—or he by it. It was hard to tell which. Up close, every worker was distinct in some way. Their eyes. Their expression. But in a few moments each disappeared into the crowd.

He knew why they had come to Shenzhen—to send hard money back to their families in rural China. So much rested on the shoulders of these young women. They might be the only hope of a family that had borrowed heavily to send them here. Failure might mean the loss of the family home. That burden gave a sense of deadly seriousness to their labor—particularly since the global economy had recently started to fray at the edges, and layoffs were a daily occurrence throughout the city.

Ross knew that the same migration was occurring all around the world. In a land of borderless markets, individual farmers could no longer compete with industrial farms on price. The land was being depopulated, landholdings aggregated for efficient management by farm machinery, leaving the surplus labor little choice but to depart to the cities and seek work in industry. The same was true in India, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Even America. It was the largest migration in human history. All in the pursuit of high-efficiency, low-cost production.

And it was that very efficiency that made the system vulnerable to the Daemon. The same uniform networks that moved money and information between markets in fractions of a second also allowed the simple bots of the Daemon to masquerade as high-level management strategy, ordering the manufacture and delivery of goods—and deleting the evidence. State-of-the-art, just-in-time management systems had enabled a silent revolution in more ways than one.

Such was the post-Sobol world.

Ross’s car cleared the crowded main road and turned down an empty lane between factory buildings with tall banks of windows. The workers seemed to be walking a beeline between points, and not one of them detoured down this lane. Ross’s car approached an unmarked steel door where a glowing, catlike eye hovered in D-Space to mark his destination. It would be invisible to nondarknet members.

He tapped his driver on the shoulder and pointed. The moment the car stopped, Ross exited.

He stood in the fire lane before the featureless door. There was no handle and no hinges on this side. The metal looked capable of stopping rifle rounds. Ross adjusted his second-generation HUD glasses—smaller and more businesslike than earlier models—and looked up at the glowing, three-dimensional eye, floating in D-Space above the doorway. A spectral object that only existed in virtual space. He glanced back at the black Buick, still parked nearby. He motioned for the driver to depart and nodded in response to the driver’s quizzical expression. The driver shrugged, wrote down an entry in his logbook, and drove off.

Ross watched the car go, then reached into his suit jacket pocket and removed a small silver amulet set with a single green cat’s-eye stone. It matched the symbol hovering above the door. He positioned the amulet in his line of sight in the HUD glasses so that it matched the glowing symbol in both size and orientation, and carefully held it there. He then spoke slowly in a language that only existed in the online game world created by Matthew Sobol—the language of the creators. “De abolonos—fi theseo va—temposum—gara semulo—va cavrotos.”

At the intonation of the last syllable, a bright light began to glow from his amulet. He was certain it was only a D-Space light, one that did not exist in the real world. Nonetheless, it was real to him, and so he squinted his eyes against the glow of pico projectors in his glasses as a bright tracery appeared in D-Space around the doorway. The white lines curled and expanded, forming the outline of an ornate gate that blazed with white light, emanating from the seams of the real-world door. In a moment he heard a click, and the real-world door opened slowly, spilling forth D-Space light.

Ross lowered the amulet, and shielded his eyes as he walked through the gate. His hand blocked nothing, because the light came from within his glasses. Realizing his mistake, he flipped up his HUD lenses and soon found himself standing in a small factory room lined with shelves piled high with electrical components. Ross could hear the roar of powerful electric motors, as well as the crack and pop of automated welding machinery in the factory beyond. But here in this small room, two armed and uniformed Chinese factory guards stood before him, staring hard with arms folded. The steel door behind him slammed shut.

Ross flipped his HUD lenses back down and saw darknet call-outs hovering above both men. They weren’t only security guards—they were ninth-level Fighters with four-star reputation scores, from the Dark Rose faction. Hard-core operatives who could summon a flash mob at a moment’s notice. D-Space call-outs identified the one on the right as Sentinel949. The one on the left was Warder_13. Ross knew his own call-out showed him to be a sixth-level Rogue with a four-and-half-star reputation, but he noticed Warder_13 clicking through Ross’s achievement log, and examining his current quest, while Sentinel949 just looked him up and down.

That’s when Ross noticed that the Dark Rose faction was an Order of Merritt signatory—as denoted by the flame on its logo. He smiled to himself, marveling at how far Roy Merritt’s fame had spread. The Order of Merritt was a spontaneously evolved standard of conduct with a rigorous ethical requirement. Ross knew he’d be treated fairly here.

Warder_13 spoke to Ross in what sounded like Mandarin. A moment later Ross heard a woman’s voice in his ear translating the warrior’s words: “Rakh, they say you were friends with the Burning Man. That you were there the day he died.”

Ross nodded. “Roy was as decent and courageous as anyone can be. I was fortunate to have known him.”

Warder_13 and Sentinel949 nodded appreciatively.

Sentinel949 asked, “Why have you come through the Maker’s Gate?”

“I’ve come to forge a masterwork.” The Mandarin translation of Ross’s words followed moments later.

Sentinel949 raised an eyebrow. “A masterwork? Which one?”

“The Rings of Aggys.”

The guards exchanged looks. Warder_13 clicked through objects in midair that only he could see. “This is a serious item. You have the prerequisites?”

Ross nodded. “I do.”

“Not just the network credits, but the elements as well.”

“I took the nine quests and have all the pieces. PlineyElder should be expecting me.” Ross put a leather dispatch case on a nearby desk and opened it. He withdrew an ornate wooden box above which nine small D-Space call-outs crowded one another. He handed the box to Sentinel949.

The guard opened it and could see nine pieces of jewelry, eight half-rings of titanium—four of them smaller than the others—and a single crystal. They were all stored in foam receptacles. Each had a separate D-Space call-out. He examined them and nodded to his colleague. “The elements are genuine.”

“The aspirant clears the reputation limit and has the necessary credits.”

“He has passed the necessary class specialties.”

Warder_13 spoke clearly and with official ceremony when he declared, “The aspirant has all the elements of the Rings of Aggys. The masterwork can be attempted.” Ross knew that voice recognition bots were listening to the announcement, and that keywords in this statement would activate the next stage in the process.

The guards motioned for Ross to follow as they headed across the storeroom and unlocked a large interior door. Ross grabbed his dispatch case and followed. One of them handed Ross a red hard hat with built-in hearing protectors from a rack on the wall. Ross donned it as the guards put on white hard hats of their own.

Warder_13 pointed to the headphones and spoke again. Moments later the translation came through Ross’s bone-conduction mic, despite the loud noise. “Don’t take your earphones off. It gets loud in there.”

Ross nodded, and they opened the steel door onto a vast manufacturing floor filled with zapping and popping industrial welding robots. Two engineers wearing bright green coveralls and white hard hats were waiting for them at the first row of machines. Call-outs above the men’s heads identified them as a tenth-level Sorcerer named PlineyElder and a ninth-level Fabricator named WuzzGart.

PlineyElder looked at his watch as they approached. He also spoke in Mandarin. “You’re late.”

Ross shrugged. “There was traffic.”

“There’s always traffic. This is Shenzhen.”

Warder_13 handed the wooden box to the sorcerer, who opened it and inspected the contents closely. He then looked up at Ross. “I hope you have your spells ready. I don’t have all day to deal with this.”

Ross nodded. “You just do your part, and I’ll do mine.”

PlineyElder grunted and motioned for Ross to follow him. WuzzGart was right on their tail. The guards stayed behind. The new trio headed off through aisles of turning, rotating, sparking robot arms. Brilliant flashes of light punctuated Ross’s view. Each line of mechanical arms crowded over an assembly line, moving in a symphony of activity, ducking in and out of metal assemblies about the size of a washing machine. With each motion the welding bots would stop, pop a series of precise welds, and then spin on to the next position. Human workers moved among the rows monitoring the equipment. Some of these workers had darknet call-outs, but most did not.

But all of them ignored the suited Westerner moving through their workspace.

Soon Ross and the engineers came to a corner of the factory where a lone robot welding arm stood next to a project pedestal. There was no assembly-line conveyer belt here, and the numerous half-finished objects on the shelves nearby gave it the feel of a prototyping or test area.

WuzzGart, the fabricator, put on white gloves and removed the titanium half-rings and the single crystal from the wooden box. He cleaned each one carefully with a lint-free cloth and spoke to no one in particular as he placed each into a jig bolted onto the scorched project pedestal. “Why do all the powerful items require titanium?”

PlineyElder looked at his watch. “Come on, I have a meeting in twenty minutes.”

“This must be done carefully. The pieces must be cleaned or the chlorine from human sweat will impact the weld. Titanium is a very reactive metal.”

The sorcerer just tapped at his watch dial impatiently. “Then stop talking, and let’s get on with it.”

Ross leaned over WuzzGart’s shoulder to watch as the man placed the single crystal within the end of one half-ring and encased it by pressing another half-ring into the first. Only one of the rings had this receptacle for a crystal. “Did you ever ponder just how strange the world has gotten since Sobol’s game world leaked into reality? I mean, we’ve gathered here essentially to create a magical item.”

“That’s the plan.” WuzzGart tightened the jig around the pieces and then stepped away. “I’ve already uploaded the welding script. We are ready.”

PlineyElder was manipulating unseen D-Space objects on a private layer of his own, but he took a moment to gesture to Ross, snapping his fingers, and motioning like a wedding photographer. “Rakh! You stand here.”

Ross left his dispatch case on the floor and stood equidistant from the other two men, forming the points of a triangle at a distance of ten feet from the project pedestal.

PlineyElder kept motioning forward, then left, then back—and finally gave a thumbs-up. At which point he raised his hands and began a series of complex somatic gestures, tracked in 3-D space by touch-rings on each hand, as he spoke his unlock code to the Daemon’s manufacturing bots—in this instance it was game world elvish: “Davors bethred, puthos cavol, arbas lokad!”

The welding arm suddenly came to life and moved forward to circle the pedestal at close range.

He then began a long chant, moving his hand in a circle, and the robot arm followed suit in a show of slavish mimicry. For more than a minute PlineyElder continued his chant, and then he suddenly stopped and pointed to WuzzGart.

WuzzGart stepped forward and began to cast a spell of his own. Ross knew from the specification for the Rings of Aggys that this was the masterwork spell—creating a D-Space receptacle for the darknet power that the objects would soon receive. PlineyElder’s spell was meant to imbue the D-Space nozzles on the welder with permission to edit virtual space.

WuzzGart’s spell was quite involved, and he failed at his first attempt. Apparently he hadn’t moved his arms in the right combination or perhaps got some of the verbal unlock code wrong. When he finished the last syllable and stood expectantly—nothing happened.

PlineyElder threw up his hands. “Idiot!”

WuzzGart just flipped him off and started again. This time he was successful, and on his last syllable of the enchantment a soft D-Space glow emanated from all four half-rings. “Aha!”

He stepped back smiling. “We’re cooking with gas now!”

As he said this, the welding arm moved in swiftly and zapped each of the four rings once with a blinding flash. Sparks flew from the pedestal and scattered across the floor.

Ross knew this was his cue and ignored PlineyElder, who was waving frantically. He moved toward the rings and held his hands over them, motioning in counter-rotating circles while speaking the darknet incantation that would permanently bind them with the spell. He’d practiced it many times in the shower at the hotel, and he hoped he’d get it right on the first try. “Fasthu, agros visthon, pantoristhas, antoriontus, pashas afthas.”

Happily, as he finished, each ring pulsed with D-Space light.

Ross stepped back, and the welding robot zapped each of them again, this time in a different place. As it withdrew, Ross moved in again and repeated his spell.

The process was performed twice more, and as he spoke the last word, PlineyElder and WuzzGart were already next to him, holding their arms over the pedestal and chanting the words of a fictitious language of a fictitious race of people that had probably been thought up by some writer in a cubicle at Cyberstorm Entertainment in Thousand Oaks, California.

Nonetheless, the Daemon had imbued these words with power.

As the three reached a crescendo and simultaneously completed their chants, a brilliant D-Space light emanated from all the rings and slowly cooled, fading and ultimately disappearing. Now, however, the individual D-Space call-outs above each half-ring had been replaced by a single D-Space call-out, centered above the lone crystal on the parent ring.

PlineyElder grinned. “The masterwork is a success!”

They all shook hands, and Ross stood by eagerly as WuzzGart extracted the finished rings from the jig and dunked them in a bucket of water. He placed all four of them on a ShamWow he found on a nearby workbench and showed them off to Ross and the sorcerer.

“Behold the Rings of Aggys!”

The cloth held two sets of matching rings, one set smaller than the other. All were still steaming. The lone call-out on the ring with a crystal was an inscrutable alphanumeric sequence.

WuzzGart pointed. “Note the quality of the welds. No alpha phase or swirling. You could get those buffed anywhere, and they’ll shine up like white gold.”

PlineyElder nudged Ross and pointed up at his call-out. “Congratulations.”

Ross just then noticed that he’d gone up a level. He was now a seventh-level Rogue. He’d missed the alert in his HUD display amid all the excitement. He nodded to both men. “Thank you, gentlemen. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”

WuzzGart placed the rings in a small velvet bag and handed them to Ross.

PlineyElder pointed at the bag. “Those are powerful rings, master thief! Do not use them lightly or they will destroy themselves. Or even you.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

WuzzGart started cleaning the pedestal with the ShamWow. “You must have a use in mind for these rings to go through so much trouble.”

Ross nodded. “I’ll need them for a journey—through hostile territory.”

“If it’s so hostile, why go there?”

“Because I need to.”

WuzzGart looked into Ross’s eyes, then he looked to PlineyElder. “I’ll bet you a thousand credits it’s a woman.”

Both men laughed.

“You have my thanks, gentlemen.” Ross put the velvet bag in his suit coat pocket, nodded once more, and headed for the exit.

Chapter 13: // Epiphany

“Sir! We need immediate air support! We are being overrun!” The panicked face of the lieutenant filled the monitor, his head distorting on-screen as it darted side to side. Staccato gunfire chattered in the background.

“Air support? Where the hell do you think you are, son, ’Nam? You’re in Illinois.”

“We need help!”

“Where’s your commanding officer?”

“Dead, sir!”

The Major sat in a windowless operations center thousands of miles away in an office park in Bethesda, Maryland.

The screen broke up for a moment. “We need evac! We have been surrounded and are being overrun!”

Gunfire in the background was suddenly much louder. There were screams of wounded and the sound of roaring engines—a sound that The Major was all too familiar with.

“Son. I need you to calm down and provide a concise report.”

“Sir—”

“Report, goddamnit!” The Major hit the MUTE button on the console and turned to a nearby technician. “What group is this?”

“Optimal Outcomes, sir. An outfit out of Dallas.” The technician brought up a map on his own screen that showed a satellite view of a planned community. “They’re bivouacked in a half-finished housing development in Huntley, Illinois.”

“Panicky fuckers.” He let up on the MUTE button.

The lieutenant was taking deep breaths. “We are being engaged by unmanned elements of the Daemon.”

“Razorbacks?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How many?”

“Unknown, sir. Our sentries were taken out by what appear to be radio-guided darts. If we had tactical radar to detect incoming—”

“What do you want, a Phalanx cannon? You’re not a military base. You were supposed to lay low and wait for orders.”

There was more mayhem and screaming in the background. The lieutenant on camera leaned out of frame and fired several bursts from a weapon. “Somehow they found our location. We are being overrun, sir!”

“Yeah, I can see that. Have the local police gotten involved?”

“I don’t know!”

The Major hit the MUTE button again and spoke to a nearby technician. “I need a mop-up crew down there, ASAP. Get them government credentials, and make sure they round up all the Daemon equipment they can find.”

He switched off the MUTE button and spoke to the screen. “How effective were fifty-caliber rifles against these things?”

“Sir?”

“The Barrett rifles. Are they effective against razorbacks?”

The guy tried to control his breathing. “Yes. Yes, sir. But the snipers were quickly taken out by return fire. Deadly accurate return fire.”

One of the technical advisers next to The Major leaned in. “Could have been acoustical triangulation or infrared muzzle-flash detection systems. They can track a projectile back to its source. It makes sense if Sobol was dipping into our research pipeline—we’ve got some prototypes in the field.”

The lieutenant shouted. “Sir! We need help. Now!”

Several Weyburn Labs consultants were still scribbling notes.

One of them leaned into The Major’s ear. “The inertial flywheel on the razorback that powers the blade arms is a problem in close quarters. Hundred thousand rpm rotation. If it gets cracked, it’ll turn into a shrapnel bomb. Ballistics tests show it’s safer to take them out at a hundred meters or more.”

More note taking.

“Sir! Can we get help?”

“We just have a few more questions, son. . . .”

“Goddamnit, sir! We are dying!”

“Well, then. You’re dismissed.”

Suddenly the lieutenant glared into the screen. “You fucker!”

There was nearby screaming, and the lieutenant turned to open fire offscreen. There were desperate shouts for help and the roar of engines. Then the lieutenant fled—a swift blur crossing the screen on his tail. After a few moments, of loud engine noise, there was suddenly comparative silence.

The Weyburn Labs team in the control room also sat quietly for several moments, still jotting notes.

“Have we determined yet whether these razorbacks are remotely piloted, autonomous, or semiautonomous?”

One of the consultants responded. “Surveillance recordings show them vacillating between fight-or-flight behavior and advanced problem-solving.”

“Which means?”

“Which means razorbacks can apparently operate independently or under the remote control of a pilot or remote AI—perhaps a cloud-based logic. A single operator could conceivably shift his control from one razorback to another—like jumping between avatars in a game.”

Another technician nodded. “They’re a promising concept. Razorbacks don’t require ammunition, and they terrify the populace. It’s the perfect crowd control weapon. Surgically precise.”

The Major pondered this. “And electronic countermeasures to their remote control?”

“The ultrawideband used by the Daemon makes ECM difficult, but not impossible. The trick is that we need EWOs in place with specialized equipment—but we don’t know where the Daemon is going to hit us next. And using the equipment jams our own communications.”

One of the technicians butted in. “Excuse me. Major, there was a Mark V security blimp over Huntley, too. It disappeared minutes before they came under attack. Whatever got it came in under radar. We just examined the blimp video. Looks like drone aircraft. Small. Fast. Not very sophisticated. It might even have simply rammed the airship.”

“So it’s got an air force now?”

Another one of the Weyburn Labs guys responded, “The darknet philosophy seems to be large numbers of small things—swarms. In this case, microjets. We’ve found the wreckage of several near sites where our surveillance drones have disappeared.”

“UCAVs?”

“Smaller and easier to manufacture. They use electromechanical systems; microscale propulsion with no moving parts. It doesn’t require the precision manufacturing of turbines. It utilizes thermal transpiration to conduct a hydrocarbon fuel through aerogel membranes into twin Swiss roll jet engines. That helps to maintain core combustion temperature in tiny jet engines. Quite fascinating if you—”

One of the consultants pointed at the monitor console. “Look.” There on-screen stood a figure dressed in a black riding suit and black motorcycle helmet, staring at them from two thousand miles away.

The Major leaned into the microphone. “Loki. You seem to be hunting my people. . . .”

“Major. The last time I saw you, you were . . . oh, that’s right. You were shooting Roy Merritt in the back.”

The Major gave a sideways glance to the assembled researchers, then spoke into the microphone. “A darknet lie.”

“Of course. Facts no longer exist. Everything is a ‘point of view’ now. I can’t wait to burn your house of bullshit down.”

“Apparently Dr. Philips was naïve to think we could rehabilitate you.”

“You realize your little campaign against darknet communities is doomed, don’t you? I know what you’re going to do before you do it.”

“You killed some people and wrecked some equipment. So what? There’s no shortage of trigger-happy dipshits willing to make a hundred bucks an hour. In fact, if you kill them, we don’t have to pay them their completion bonus.”

“I will find you, Major. And what’s in your mind will lead me to your masters. Their industrial empire is about to come to an end.”

The Major chuckled. “You’re not the first freedom fighter whose head I’ve put on a stick, Loki. You all fall in the end—usually betrayed by the very people you think you’re saving.”

Loki cocked his head. “Freedom fighter? Is that what you think I am?” He laughed. “I don’t give a shit about freedom. And if I have to kill a hundred million innocent people to get my hands on you, I’ll do it. Sleep well, Major.”

Loki pulled the plug and the screen went dark.

The control room was silent for several moments.

Someone finally muttered, “Holy shit. . . .”

The Major nodded absently. His campaigns had indeed fought and defeated a hundred liberation movements. They’d divided and confused citizens around the globe who tried to rise up against mining companies, oil companies, coal companies, biotech companies—and in the end the people defeated themselves.

But none of those adversaries had their fingers wrapped around the corporate throat like the Daemon did. And none of those adversaries had imbued a single psychotic individual with such unaccountable power as the Daemon had with Loki. This kid was ready to kill a hundred million people. And he’d already slain hundreds, possibly thousands. A whole new era of technological domination was about to begin—and for once, The Major might not be on the winning side.

It suddenly occurred to The Major that he was afraid.

Chapter 14: // The China Price

Jon Ross sat reading Izvestia on a handheld device while sipping espresso. He was in the coffee bar of his hotel in the Shekou District of Shenzhen. It was mid-afternoon, and he was dressed in a pressed, four-button black pin-striped suit with a light blue silk tie and a pastel shirt—all handmade in nearby Hong Kong. With his stylish HUD glasses he looked every bit the successful businessman catching up with affairs back home.

Ross preferred Shekou because it allowed him to blend in. It was a pleasant neighborhood popular with expats. It had a small-town feel, but was packed with restaurants and night life.

Here there were dozens of languages being spoken in the cafes and bars, and he was just one more foreign face among many. But none of that mattered now—not for the one piece of unfinished business remaining on this trip.

He downed the last of his espresso as two Chinese men in rumpled suits approached his table. From their hard stares and air of impunity, Ross immediately knew they were policemen—probably Ministry of State Security.

The first nodded and spoke in Russian. “Comrade Morozov. Good afternoon.” He smiled, revealing stained teeth.

Ross lowered his handheld and replied in Russian as well. “Good afternoon. To what do I owe the pleasure, gentlemen?”

“There seems to be a problem with your travel documents.”

“My travel documents?”

The man nodded.

“I don’t see how that’s possible, but . . .” Ross removed his billfold from his jacket. “May I take care of it here?”

“Attempting to bribe a government official is a serious crime in China.”

“Attempting, perhaps. What about succeeding?”

“This is no laughing matter, Mr. Morozov.” He switched suddenly to English. “Or should I say, Mr. Ross?”

Ross remained calm. He placed money on the table to pay his check and put away his billfold. He switched to English as well. “Your English and Russian are both excellent.”

“Thank you. Please mention that to my commander when you see him. Now, if you would please come with us . . .”

“May I ask to see your credentials?”

The man opened his coat to reveal a pistol in a shoulder holster.

“That’s the one that counts, isn’t it?”

The man gestured for Ross to follow them.

Ross sighed then grabbed his handheld and laptop case and complied.

They brought him outside to a waiting car. It was an unmarked Jeep Cherokee knockoff—what some of the expat Americans had taken to calling “Cheeps.” They opened the door for him, and Ross got in. He noticed that there were no door handles on the inside, and a wire mesh stood between him and the front seat. He was now their prisoner.

The officers got in front and drove off in dense traffic without a word either to each other or to Ross. They drove for only a few minutes before pulling to the curb on a highly fashionable restaurant block. The place was bustling with shoppers and young professionals.

The men got out and opened the door for Ross, who stepped onto the sidewalk and met the gaze of his captor. “I’m confused. Am I bribing you or not?”

The man just grabbed Ross’s arm and along with his partner they moved toward an upscale martini bar done in clean Scandinavian glass and hardwoods with a minimalist logo that was so hip it would be indecipherable to Chinese and Scandinavians alike. The place was packed with cigarette smoke and young, mostly Chinese white-collar professionals who quickly parted to let the grim-faced plainclothes policemen through.

Soon they approached a booth in the rear of the bar—the only quiet corner. The tables all around it were conspicuously empty. There, a young Chinese man in a well-cut suit waited with a frosted martini glass in front of him. He smiled as he saw Ross approaching.

Ross couldn’t help but return the smile. It was Shen Liang. Shen was an old friend from Ross’s dot-com days in Portland—back in the late nineties. Before everything went to hell. Shen had been a kid just out of Stanford back then—barely familiar with America and Western culture. He was a brilliant young mind who’d taken in everything the Chinese universities had to offer at the time and was hungry for more.

Ross and Shen had worked together at a start-up Web company named Stiletto Design—“Cutting through the noise” was their motto. It was the quintessential Web commerce shop with high ceilings, exposed brick, Aeron chairs, ping-pong tables, and soon-to-be-worthless stock options. They were expanding like mad in those days, designing merchant solutions for banks, insurance companies, and half-assed Web start-ups. Young men and women working long hours and late nights—it was a great place to be a young single person. The memory was just a haze of work, alcohol, and sex.

As Ross sat down, Shen extended his hand and spoke in perfect American English. “Jon Ames. Or I guess it’s Jon Ross, nowadays. What’d you get married or something?”

“It’s complicated, Liang. You look like you’re doing well.”

Shen motioned to the nearby plainclothesmen and said something in Mandarin.

The lead officer nodded, and both men departed.

Ross watched them go, then turned back to Shen, who was nodding. “I am doing well. I wish I could say the same for you.”

Ross gave him a quizzical look.

“Jon, you’re in a lot of trouble.”

“Then this isn’t a social call?”

Shen grimaced and motioned to a beautiful young woman in a miniskirt. She came to the table immediately, and he pointed her to Ross.

“I’ll have a Stoli, straight up with a twist, please.”

“Of course, sir.” She hurried off.

“Russian vodka. How telling.” He focused an appraising look at Ross as he lit a tiny cigar. “So . . .” He put his gold lighter away. “After all these years I find out that your name isn’t really Jon Ames.”

“Liang—”

“And that Interpol has a global red notice out on you. That you’re the FBI’s Most Wanted Man. Imagine my shock.”

“Like I said, it’s complicated.”

“We were buds, Jon. And now it turns out you were an identity thief and a stock swindler?”

“Well, you didn’t tell me you were a spy for the Ministry of State Services back in the old days, either.”

He gave Ross a disbelieving look. “Who was a spy? They paid for my education. I was supposed to come back with ‘mad skillz.’ How is that spying? It’s not like I pretended I wasn’t Chinese.”

“I seem to remember someone wasn’t planning on coming back to China. I seem to remember someone talking about a Web video start-up—”

Shen held up his hand and looked around. “All right, all right. Would you cool it with that shit? And by the way, you were my witness. That was before YouTube. I had that idea before YouTube.”

“We were on dial-up back then, Liang.”

“That’s not the point. I nailed that.”

“And yet, here you are, working for the government.”

Shen rolled his eyes. “I don’t work for the government, or at least I didn’t work for the government until some asshole started fucking with our networks and they reactivated me.” He saluted. “Now it’s Captain Shen, thank you very much.”

“A PLA Cyber warfare battalion? That seems alarmingly conformist for the Shen Liang I knew.”

Shen nodded grimly and took a big sip of his martini. “Yeah, well, I really screwed up in America, Jon. I had to come back here after that, and I had gone way off reservation. I had to get powerful friends fast to dig out from that mess. I had to be stellar.”

“And is that how you wound up at Wuhan Communications Command Academy?”

Shen stopped mid-puff and narrowed his eyes at Ross. He pulled the cigarillo from his lips. “How the hell do you know that?”

“And how you wound up working with the General Equipment Department, modifying Western router chipsets?”

Shen moved to cover Ross’s mouth. “Would you shut up? What are you, crazy? How the hell do you know that?”

“We’re reaching a crossroad, Liang.”

“This isn’t 1999, Jon. The Web isn’t a toy anymore. Network technology is power now—world-domination-type power. This is a deadly serious business. Stop playing around.”

“We had a great time back then. You remember we all thought technology would change the world?”

“Well, it didn’t. Our parents were right, Jon. It’s scary how right they were. Nothing changes. Only the faces change.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way. I seem to remember you having great hopes for democracy in China.”

Shen glared hard at him as the cocktail waitress returned with Ross’s drink. Both men were quiet until she departed.

Shen shook his head and reached for an ashtray. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. And besides, we have democracy in China. People get to vote with their money, just like they do in America.”

“But if only money talks, those without money don’t get a voice.”

“Well, the smarter people tend to make money, so I don’t see what the problem is.”

“What happens if someone takes your money away?”

Shen cast a wary look at Ross.

Ross continued, “Because that’s what we’re talking about here, isn’t it? Someone has threatened to confiscate your company if you don’t perform. Is that how a free person lives, Liang? In fear of the powerful?”

“Freedom is overrated. You can be completely free and starving in an igloo in Antarctica. Business is what makes people’s lives better, not democracy. The world is filled with dysfunctional democracies, paralyzed by idiots with votes.”

“Liang—”

“Jon, do you know that the World Bank said that over half the Chinese people lived in poverty in 1980? You know what it is now? Care to take a guess? It’s four percent, Jon. Four. Economic development did that, not democracy.”

Ross nodded. “But that’s the deal they offer, isn’t it? They’ll bring economic development in exchange for you not participating in politics—but that economic development is hollow and has no longevity. Have you seen the markets? It’s already fraying at the edges. Believe me, by the time it ends, you’ll realize they have all the power and you don’t matter. Prosperity is not prosperity if they can just take it from you.”

“So you prefer America then? Like they’re prosperous? They owe us more money than there is on the planet. America is finished. Why are you helping them?”

Ross frowned. He took a moment to digest the question, taking a sip of his drink first. “Helping them? What are you talking about?”

“Don’t even start with me. You know exactly what I mean.”

Ross nodded. “So, you brought me here because you’ve got a problem. A problem you think the Americans are behind.”

Shen just studied him for several moments. “You haven’t asked how I found you.”

“I don’t have to ask. I already know how you found me.”

“Oh yeah? How do you know that?”

“Because I’m the one who told you I was in China.”

Shen paused, looking darkly at Ross. “You’re fucking with me now. That’s why I hated playing poker with you.”

“I’m not bluffing, Liang.”

“Yeah, where did I get the information then?”

“That e-mail you received from Jun Shan. That was me.”

Shen almost bit his cigarillo in half. He glanced around the restaurant again and just shook his head. “Jon, you have no idea who you’re dealing with.”

“The PLA reactivated you to find out why the back doors in router chipsets are beginning to fail in North America and Europe. They’re in a panic, aren’t they?”

Shen ground out his cigarette and pushed the ashtray away.

“What the fuck is going on? Who are you working for? The Americans?”

“It isn’t what you think, Liang.”

“Why does a Russian want to help Americans? They’ve been shitting on Russia for decades. They’re imperialist scum.”

“So you want to recruit me, comrade? Is that it?”

“Communism. Capitalism. Who gives a shit? Look, Western imperialism has undermined China since the British started dumping opium here to pry open the tea market. Now that China is taking her rightful place in the world again, the U.S. and Britain are doing everything they can to keep us down. Join us, Jon. I can open a lot of doors for you—especially for a man with your talents. There is virtually unlimited money to be made.”

Ross sipped his vodka. “That’s a great offer, Liang. And I do appreciate it, but I’m going to tell you what’s really going on here. And you’re not going to like it.”

Shen pushed his drink away. “Damnit.”

“You remember why Interpol is looking for me—why I’m wanted by the FBI?”

“Yeah, because you masterminded the Daemon hoax.”

“It’s not a hoax, Liang, and I didn’t mastermind it. There is an open-source cybernetic organism called the Daemon that is spreading across the globe. It’s created an encrypted social network called the darknet, based on an online video game. Millions of people are joining that network and using it to reinvent human society.”

Shen sighed and leaned back in his seat. “Jon, goddamnit! I’m trying to help you.”

“I’m not kidding, Liang. I’m a seventh-level Rogue in the network, and I have powers and abilities that allow me to—”

“You’ve really lost your fucking mind. I can’t believe it. It’s like you don’t even care.” He pointed out the windows. “I told them I would handle this. I told them to back off. That I could turn you, but after you leave here, Jon, they are going to take you away, and put you in a place so dark you won’t ever be seen again. And I won’t be able to help you anymore. Do you understand what I’m telling you? They’re going to disappear you, Jon.”

“I understand. It’s okay.”

“How can it be okay? You’ve got to tell me what’s really going on, Jon, or they’re going to beat it out of you.”

“It’s okay because I had to come to China. I couldn’t learn what I needed anywhere but China. Because what happens here, Liang, affects the entire world. And what your people did was defeat a system that might have been used to oppress billions. I needed you to know that. The Chinese people want to be free, Liang. Just like all people. I’ve seen it. Just like you’ll see it.”

“Jon, they won’t let you leave here.”

“It’s okay. I have this.” Ross held up a single titanium ring with a crystal embedded in the surface. “It’s a magic ring, Liang. Very powerful.”

Shen stared at him, speechless, for several moments. “Oh my god. You really have gone insane.”

Ross slipped the ring on his finger. “I have to go now. But just remember, I came to see you because I wanted to tell you in person. The Daemon is real, and it’s bigger than all of us—because it is all of us. So maybe technology can change the world, after all. Take care, my friend.”

With that, Ross got up and walked away from the table, seeing Shen’s stunned face reflected in a nearby mirror as he left.

Chapter 15: // Political Inversion

“Dr. Philips, you’ve seen the news. The economy is in shambles. Getting a five-year guaranteed contract with built-in cost-of-living adjustments would secure your future. And you could still work within the national intelligence apparatus. A lot of your colleagues have already made the jump.”

Natalie Philips looked across the table at two sharply attired recruiters from Weyburn Labs. They were sitting in the agency cafeteria. It had been months since the incident at Merritt’s funeral, and she had already been folded back into the NSA’s Crypto division—albeit stripped of decision-making authority.

“You’re wasting your time, gentlemen. And I don’t appreciate being ambushed like this. ”

“Look, the public sector is a great place for backbenchers, but someone of your prodigious intellect could have a bright future.” He leaned forward. “You could still finish your current project—”

The second executive finished for him. “But at a substantially higher salary.”

“And performance bonuses.”

Philips betrayed no emotion. “But I’d be working for Weyburn Labs. There are potential conflict-of-interest issues that I don’t think help the mission.”

“National security is everyone’s goal, Doctor.”

“There was a time when I believed that.”

They looked at each other, affecting hurt feelings.

“Weyburn Labs has a long and fruitful partnership with the U.S. government. Our current CEO was a four-star general.”

She nodded as she poked at her salad. “That may be, but I’m not leaving the NSA.”

“And you really think your career here can advance after that fiasco with the Daemon Task Force?”

She glared at him.

Apparently sensing that things were going downhill, the other recruiter leaned in again and spoke softy. “You’re not the only bright person working on the Daemon. Big things are afoot, Doctor. Things not even you know about.”

“We shouldn’t be discussing this here.”

He edged even closer. “Building from your work, we’ve started to gain access to the darknet.”

She stopped eating.

“This is top secret information, of course.”

Philips eyed them both closely. “Who is doing this?”

“Come join the Weyburn Labs team and find out. . . .”

Just then a uniformed Central security officer walked up to the table. “Dr. Philips?”

“Yes?”

“You need to come with me, ma’am. Deputy Director Fulbright needs you in the Ops Center, ASAP.”

Philips shot one last look at the recruiters, then stood with her tray.

The security officer grabbed it from her. “I’ll get that, ma’am. Please just proceed to the CSS vehicle waiting curbside.”

“Gentlemen. If you’ll excuse me.”

“Think about what we said, Doctor.”

Ops Center 1 was a dimly lit digital front line of uniformed military personnel manning rows of computer monitors. They were there to categorize and prioritize America’s various raw intelligence feeds, but today Ops Center 1 was also thick with Department of Defense brass and men in nicely tailored suits. They stared at Philips and whispered among themselves as she was ushered by two air force officers into a nearby conference room where the door was immediately closed behind her.

Inside the darkened conference room, more military officers and suited executives stared up at a large video screen, which displayed what looked to be live footage of a foreign city—somewhere in China, judging by the street signage.

The moment Philips walked in, Deputy Director Chris Fulbright grabbed her by the elbow and escorted her toward the center of the room. Normally soft-spoken and reserved, Fulbright was keyed up and edgy. Something serious was going on. And if they called her in, then that could only mean it involved the Daemon.

“It looks like Jon Ross has surfaced again.”

A wave of surprise hit her—and then worry. “Where?”

“Shenzhen, China.”

“China?” She was about to ask how he’d managed to get there, but that was, of course, a ridiculous question. Jon Ross was an identity thief and hacker—he could be anyone he wanted to be. And if Loki was to be believed, Ross was now a Daemon operative to boot. She just nodded. “A world-class manufacturing hub. High-end electronics.”

“That makes sense then. Our intelligence shows the Daemon has become increasingly embedded in the high-tech manufacturing supply chain of Asia—and that the Chinese know there’s some new force exerting influence domestically. They still don’t seem to know what it is. They think it has something to do with the Falun Gong—or other political opposition groups.”

“Who found Jon?” She braced herself for the answer.

“PLA Cyber warfare unit. Someone connected with General Zhang Zi Min—head of the MSS. They’re carrying out an op to grab Ross right now. . . .” Fulbright gestured to the central screen, which even as he spoke showed shaky video of heavily armed SWAT teams lying in wait around building corners. There were scores of them. A low-flying chopper passed momentarily in front of the frame, occluding the view. “We got word of it in unencrypted intercepts. I don’t need to remind you that—aside from you—no one knows more about the Daemon’s architecture than Jon Ross. If the Chinese grab him—”

“The Ragnorok module. They’d be able to use the Daemon against us.”

Fulbright nodded. “We don’t think the Chinese have even detected—much less decrypted—the IP beacon the Daemon is broadcasting. At least not yet. But capturing Ross might give them access to both. In particular, the Destroy function. That would give the Chinese the ability to destroy individual corporate data on demand—and from there who knows where that knowledge goes. If word got out, it could cause a global stock market panic.”

“But the Chinese are co-invested with America, they wouldn’t—”

“General Zhang is the wild card here. We think his people were responsible for the illicit back doors in corporate routers. It appears the Daemon is closing them, and it’s made Zhang increasingly desperate for something to justify his existence.”

“What do you need me to do?”

Fulbright gestured to several men in suits who were already eyeing her from their place among the generals. “These men want you to identify Ross in that crowd. Before the Chinese get to him.”

Philips looked around the room, suddenly noticing just how many people here were wearing visitor badges.

“Natalie, please . . .” He nodded toward the screen.

She looked up at the video image, now zooming in to scan the patrons of a martini bar. It looked like a sniper’s perspective from a distant rooftop. “They’re going to kill him.”

Fulbright gripped her shoulder. “You don’t know that. We simply need to identify him in that crowd, Doctor.”

“Who are all these men?” She was eyeing the contractors who were even now staring back at her.

“Doctor, we’ve been given a simple directive. We need to provide information.”

“To whom?”

“Natalie, Jon Ross escaped our custody and fled to a foreign power. He’s a serious danger to national security.”

“But—”

“This isn’t a debate. You worked alongside him for months. He may have changed his appearance since then, but you have an eye for detail. Help us identify him in that crowd.”

Philips felt her pulse quickening as she looked up at the screen. There was no way she could do this. And yet, what Director Fulbright said was true. Ross did possess information that the Chinese would be desperate to have—information that they were likely to torture him to get. They might kill him in the process. But if she pointed him out to these men—what then? She tried to remain poker-faced as her mind kept rejecting the cold facts.

The screen panned across Asian and Western faces laughing in the martini bar.

“Doctor, do you see him?”

She couldn’t do it. “I . . .”

A board operator suddenly called out. “The Chinese are making their move, sir.”

“We’re too late.”

Dozens of plainclothesmen brandishing weapons poured through the front door of the high-end bar, creating chaos inside. The camera jerked, then zoomed out a little.

“Yeah, they’ve gone in.”

One of the suits near the wall spoke loudly. “We might still get a shot when they bring him out.”

Fulbright cast a glance to Philips. She was watching the screen. Numb.

“If we miss him, let’s see if we can track what prison they take him to.”

Philips was familiar with this math—“cruel calculus” is what Fulbright had called it. For the first time in her life, she was getting sick of math.

“We’ll use a private asset to take care of it.”

“We need to make sure we don’t lose track of him in the transfer—”

Someone on the control board called out again. “Something’s going on there, sir.”

Everyone looked up onto the screen to see plainclothesmen pouring out into the street again, looking frantically all over. Some were talking on radios.

“Looks like they still don’t have him.”

“Only half of them came out.”

“Maybe there was a shoot-out?”

“Did we have confirmation that Ross was in the building?”

“Yes, sir. Two informants confirmed it.”

The video image pulled back to show a dozen men frantically running into frame from either side of the bar building.

Two more black vans arrived, and tactical squads poured out of them with black body armor, helmets, and ballistic goggles. They brandished automatic weapons and were spreading out into the streets, shouting at people to lie down. The whole shopping area was coming under lockdown.

“Jesus Christ, they don’t have this guy.”

“They must have a hundred boots on the ground.”

“They’ve gotta find him now.”

“They’ve got two million surveillance cameras networked in that city. Believe me, they’ll find him.”

“Yeah, but our asset won’t be in place to take him out.”

Fulbright turned to Philips. “Thanks for coming in, Natalie. I’ll let you know if you’re needed again.”

She was still staring at the screen. “Yes, sir.”

On-screen the Chinese soldiers were still frantically talking on radios.

Philips exited the conference room, and then Ops Center 1. She walked down the bustling hallway outside, and ducked into the ladies’ restroom. She checked the stalls to see whether anyone else was present.

She was alone.

She entered the farthest stall, then closed and locked the door. She sat down and put her head in her hands. And then began to weep—her hands still trembling. As she felt the tears streaming silently down her face, she realized just how deeply she’d fallen in love with Jon Ross.

Chapter 16: // Pwned

Hours later Shen Liang entered the unmarked Golden Shield Central Command facility in downtown Shenzhen. Although there were no guards or signs to mark the nondescript six-story block of windowless concrete, the moment Shen stepped through the mirrored sliding doors in the underground garage, he was met by a dozen heavily armed PLA soldiers waiting to either side of metal detectors. Security officers in dress uniform ushered him through the scanners.

What happened here was very important to the Party. Golden Shield was China’s sweeping program to create information systems to identify and contain dissent and subversive social elements that might threaten the country’s leadership—and thus the people of China. The GSCC building was the culmination of a multiyear, six-billion-dollar investment in internal security—which was itself just a pilot program for the much larger “Safe Cities Initiative,” which would link together all data moving through Chinese society, combining financial, communication, and street-level high-resolution CCTV images into a single software-driven internal security solution. Nothing like it had ever been attempted in the history of mankind, and it would serve as a model for security to be emulated around the world. Shen felt a tremendous sense of pride in yet another example of China’s technological prowess. He also told himself that it was necessary. Necessary to protect the Chinese people from themselves. Order must be maintained or imperialist forces would rob them of their destiny yet again.

As Shen moved through concentric rings of security, he looked up at the numerous camera and sensor domes that he knew even now were analyzing his face, his thermal image, his perspiration and respiratory patterns, all in an effort to determine if he was under emotional duress.

Outside in the streets, two million networked high-resolution CCTV cameras covered the entire city of Shenzhen. In 2006 the government had mandated that all Internet cafes and entertainment venues such as restaurants and bars install video cameras with a direct feed to their local police station. From there, the images were sent to a central cloud computing application that could apply any number of algorithms to the imagery and in turn alert local authorities to a wide array of suspicious behavior. People running, violent motion, sudden groupings of six or more people, flames. Then there was search: “the ten million face test” was used as the measure of facial recognition algorithms, and software was able to routinely spot and track Caucasian and dark-skinned people, or determine gender. The list was long and getting longer all the time. The state was acquiring eyes.

But then, Shen knew why it was necessary. The government was worried. There were roughly a hundred and thirty million migrants wandering China looking for work—the equivalent of nearly half the population of the United States, and all in a nation roughly equivalent in size to the United States. In fifteen years the number of migrants was projected to be three hundred and fifty million. Shenzhen was already a city with seven million migrant laborers out of a population of twelve million. And these migrants lacked the benefits of permanent citizens, such as subsidized health care and education. Their national ID cards showed their residency as linked to the rural villages where they were born—places where there was no work, giving them no choice but to head for the cities. And so a second class of citizen had been created: people desperate for work who had helped make this economic miracle possible—but who were increasingly angry at their circumstances. Particularly with the wealth that was evident all around them.

Was it fair? Shen knew it wasn’t, but he also told himself that there was no other way. How else could China become the world leader it was destined to be if not for this sacrifice? Unless someone bore the burden?

Shen hadn’t worked on Golden Shield, but his company had worked on secret modifications to router firmware. He did not doubt that those back doors were utilized throughout the system.

He eyed the camera and sensor arrays again.

He wondered if they detected his nervousness. He had promised his commanding officer, General Zhang, that he would be able to turn the fugitive, Jon Ross, to their side. But Shen had failed. The loss of their back doors in Western networks was still unsolved, and Shen knew that unless it was solved soon, many heads would roll. He hoped his would not be among them.

Jon Ross had known about the chipsets modified by the General Equipment Department—without the knowledge of Western client companies. If Ross knew about the loss of those back doors, then he must have been in on it. Shen was still wondering how on earth it could have been accomplished. America and Europe were not capable of sudden, sweeping changes across companies and borders—without so much as a peep in any e-mails. It seemed impossible.

Shen’s concern about failing to win over Ross was tempered by the fact that he had also been the one to locate the fugitive Ross in the first place. Well, as far as they knew he did—and it was the MSS goons who lost Ross in the streets, not him.

Shen was still puzzled by that.

He was entering the central nerve center of China’s great surveillance experiment now. A uniformed soldier ushered him into an elevator that had no buttons. It might as well have been a microwave for all the control he had over his destination. The doors closed behind Shen, and he was on a one-way ride to somewhere down.

In a little while the doors opened, and Shen came out into a windowless control room, a hundred feet across with a ceiling at least thirty feet high. All along the walls were hundreds of large flat-panel monitors—with one gigantic, stadium-sized display in the center of it all. Currently the large screen showed a map of the city of Shenzhen, and it looked to have the location of each camera marked as a blue dot—but he knew this was impossible, since it would cover the entire city. He guessed they were nodes to local law enforcement feeds or perhaps junctions. There were various digital pin markers and status indicators on some of these dots and moving markers as well (vehicular subjects of surveillance?).

Covering the floor of the control room were banks of zone managers—uniformed officers of the Ministry of State Services. These would be the top graduates from the academies. Eager, smart, and ready to implement the Party’s will.

As Shen entered, a young aide saluted him. “Captain Shen. You are expected.”

Shen almost laughed—as if he could have gotten in here uninvited!

The aide motioned for him to follow and brought him through rows of surveillance technicians to a raised dais with an additional semicircle of monitors and control equipment. There he saw General Zhang Zi Min—director of the Ministry of State Services—in a dignified business suit amid a knot of technicians in short-sleeve shirts and ties, with ID badges on lanyards. While half of them were Han Chinese, Shen was shocked to see that the other half were clearly Westerners—and from their appearance, Americans.

What Americans would be doing in the very nerve center of China’s domestic surveillance headquarters was beyond him. He was almost speechless as he was brought up to General Zhang. The general was listening to something one of the Americans was saying, but nodded to Shen.

Shen made a dramatic, full-body salute—like he’d learned in the academy. As head of the Party ministry responsible for domestic security, Zhang was arguably one of the most politically powerful men in all of China. It was he who had selected Shen from the senior class at Wuhan to spearhead the router projects that had yielded so much valuable commercial and military intelligence. And it was Zhang who had made certain Shen’s Beijing start-up company was successful—providing access to capital and funneling plenty of clients his way. Shen owed his Mercedes, his five-bedroom house in Orange County (a subdivision north of Beijing), and his future to Zhang. Zhang was his patron.

The American was still talking, but in a hushed tone that Shen could not hear from his position ten feet and several people away. The casual way that this American technician was speaking with the general was mind-boggling—as if the man had no idea whom he was talking to. The general just kept nodding patiently, but he occasionally shot a hard-to-decipher look Shen’s way.

Eventually the general held up a hand to the man and motioned for Shen to join them.

Shen straightened his tie and proceeded into the center of the circle.

The general gestured to the screens in front of them. They appeared to be displaying the martini bar where Shen had met with Ross, as well as the streets all around it for blocks in every direction. The exterior video was wrapped around a 3-D map of the building geometry—giving it the appearance of a computer game.

The general spoke in Mandarin. “Captain Shen. I would like you to help us understand how our Russian friend could simply walk out of the meeting point without being seen. I am being informed that your choice of meeting place was less than optimal from a visual and audio surveillance perspective.”

Shen eyed the Americans—a fortyish-looking crew of assembly coders from the look of them. They appeared to be trying to figure out what to make of the new arrival. Shen turned back to the general. “General Zhang, I would be happy to answer your questions, just not in the presence of these Americans, sir.”

“You are surprised to find Americans here, Captain? Do you fancy them a security risk?”

Disturbingly, even though they were still conversing in Mandarin, the lead American engineer let a slight smile escape before he contained it.

“Yes, I do, sir. Nor do I think this discussion sufficiently private.”

“Let me put your mind at ease. We would not be making such rapid progress in our efforts if it weren’t for the private sector’s contributions, and some of the key systems being developed today in the world of security are being developed by private companies based in the United States, Israel, and the European Union.” He gestured to the Chinese engineers crowding around the console.

“As you can see we have complete information sharing, and we will retain all the expertise necessary to extend our capabilities within the terms of our licensing agreement.”

“Licensing agreement?”

“Our partnership with the West has been richly rewarding, Captain. For both sides. You are to give your full cooperation to these gentlemen—in English, if you please. If I’m not mistaken, you are quite proficient.”

Shen was momentarily flummoxed.

The American smiled and extended his hand. He was a tall man of indistinct lineage—black hair and brown eyes. “Captain Shen. It’s a pleasure. Robert Haverford.”

Shen shook his hand uncertainly. “Mr. Haverford. Please forgive me. I’m a little bit shocked, that’s all.”

“No doubt. Wow, your English is excellent. No accent whatsoever.”

“I went to school in the States.”

“Which school?”

“Stanford.”

“Terrific. I’m told you’re quite a hand at chip design. I think our problem is a bit more prosaic. We think it was operator error, and we just need to find out for training purposes. We weren’t present during the incident, but we’re trying to back into just what went on when this unfortunate series of events unfolded.”

Haverford gestured to a seat in front of a control monitor that had somehow mysteriously opened up. Shen felt that it suspiciously resembled the proverbial hot seat. However, he also knew, with the general and several dozen uniformed PLA senior officers nearby, it was not a request.

He sat and examined the monitor in front of him. It showed a blurry image of himself sitting in the booth at the Suomi Linja martini bar hours earlier. They could barely see his head, and the rest of the table was completely blocked by a beam.

Haverford pointed at the image. “You really couldn’t have chosen a worse spot for this meeting, Captain. It’s almost as if you wanted to have a private sit-down.”

The words just hung out there for a few moments—a smiling fuck-you from his new American friend. Passive-aggressive shitheel . . . Shen looked up to General Zhang. “The only chance I thought I’d have of turning Ross, general, was in making him feel comfortable and in reminding him of the friendship we once had in Oregon. Having policemen hanging around and cameras focused on him would not accomplish that. I take full responsibility for selecting the most shielded booth, but it was a calculated risk. I certainly did not think it would be an issue because there was no way for him to leave the bar unobserved—that is, if this system works as it must have been described in the brochure.”

General Zhang pondered Shen’s words for a moment, then nodded to Haverford.

Haverford sighed. “Well, okay then. I guess the fact that we don’t have any audio or video of you speaking with Mr. Ross—look there. . . .” Haverford pointed at a gesticulating arm being reflected in a mirror. “That’s Ross right there. We have him up until that point.”

Shen frowned. “What do you mean ‘up until that point’?”

The control board operator fast-forwarded the video, and people moved up and down the booth aisle like a Benny Hill closing credit chase. And then it suddenly returned to normal speed—to show Shen walking out of the bar several minutes later, a look of dread on his face.

“Wait. Wait a second.” Shen was trying to comprehend what he just saw. “Back it up.”

The video backed up at double speed. He saw himself back up to the table and sit far away from the cameras and the microphones he knew were near the restroom, the glass-and-blond-wood bar, and the entrances. Waitresses and Chinese patrons occasionally walked down the aisle—but no Jon Ross!

“That’s impossible! He was sitting right there with me.”

The video kept backing up until finally Shen saw the back of Ross, reverse-stepping toward the entrance with plainclothes policemen behind him. It was his moment of arrival seen backward.

“So he arrived, but he didn’t leave?”

“That’s what we’ve been wondering about.”

They all just sat there without talking for several moments.

That was when Shen remembered Ross’s words as he held up the ring.

This is a magic ring.

A hot flash of fear came over him. It couldn’t be. . . .

The control board operator was clicking from camera to camera now. Inside and outside the building. He brought up a 3-D model of the city block. It was wrapped with security camera images. “This is running backward from the moment of your departure from the table, Captain Shen.” Half a dozen video insets showed as many scenes in front of the building, the lobby, the rear exit, and the surrounding streets—people and cars were everywhere. The video played, and people moved about, but Ross was absolutely nowhere to be seen.

Haverford shook his head. “See, it certainly doesn’t seem like he left the table, now, does it, Captain?”

Then it occurred to Shen that everyone was looking at him. And then it started to dawn on him that Zhang might seriously be suspecting him of some collusion with Ross—which would be crazy considering he was the one who brought Ross to the table to begin with.

Shen cleared his throat. “There is one other explanation.”

Haverford smiled. “Well, then let’s hear it, buddy.”

Shen felt like punching him in his smiling toothy face, but instead tapped the screen. “Rewind it to the point when Ross arrives back at the table.”

Haverford nodded to the board operator, and the monitor he was focusing on obligingly reversed to the point when Ross arrived.

“Okay. Now, fast-forward it about two, two and a half minutes, then put it on slow motion.”

The screen moved forward, people jittering across the screen, then slowed. Shen held his index finger just inches away from the screen and focused intently on the occasional person moving down the aisle between booths. The rest of the assembled technicians and Chinese officers leaned in behind him.

Then he saw it. “There! Stop!”

The image stopped, and Shen pointed to a sliver of a shoe and a pant leg as reflected in a mirror.

“Uh, it’s a leg. We can’t know it’s his.”

“But there’s no one in the aisle. Look. . . .” Shen pointed. “That reflection occurs when there’s someone in the aisle.”

“Captain, if there’s no one in the aisle, he can’t be in the aisle.”

“Roll it slowly. Watch here closely.” Shen ran his hand along the empty aisle in the picture.

The image ran forward and a wave of surprise went across the assembled witnesses. An aberration, like a fleeting specter, moved across the frame.

Haverford jammed the PAUSE button, shoving the board operator out of the way. “That’s impossible. It’s an artifact. It’s a camera artifact.”

Shen was staring at a slight discoloration and diagonal line occluding the frame. “I don’t think it’s an artifact, Mr. Haverford.”

“But how could he . . . he couldn’t just walk out.”

Shen kept his eye on the screen. “Who was controlling the operation? Was it being directed by central control? Were they giving the signal to the teams to move in from here?”

The technicians looked at each other.

Haverford ignored the question, busying himself in searching other screens—the front door, the side door, the rear door. “None of these doors are popping open. Look.”

Shen pointed to the kitchen’s rear door, propped open to let cool air in. “The rear door is already open. Look—look there.” He pointed at video from inside the kitchen. “The staff is surprised. They are following something with their eyes—as though a very unexpected person is moving through their space. Perhaps a Caucasian businessman.”

It was undeniable. They could see a server and a chef frowning and eyeballing an unknown entity—the chef actually shouting and waving the unseen person away. As they watched, another shimmer disrupted the air of the tape. It was a ripple in the fabric of the screen’s reality. There were blurred reflections on stainless steel counters.

Shen tapped the location on-screen. “These cameras, Mr. Haverford. They are digital CCTV cameras? The very latest, I imagine.”

Haverford just stared at him. “Of course. And Chinese made, I might point out.”

Shen just laughed to himself and shook his head. Of course they are. He recalled Ross’s words again. . . .

The Chinese people want to be free, Liang.

He pointed at another screen—one that showed the mouth of the alley behind the restaurant. Where it met the street. There was no one in the street, but quite clearly, there in the reflection from a darkened window was Jon Ross, looking rather dapper in a Hong Kong pin-striped suit. Shen smiled to himself. “I think we’ve found the problem, Mr. Haverford.”

Now a gasp went over the assembled engineers. More leaned in to see what appeared to all present an absolute impossibility.

Haverford just kept shaking his head. “But . . .”

On-screen, a block away, plainclothes policemen were gathered in a group on a corner, smoking—awaiting a signal that came too late.

Shen turned to General Zhang, but spoke to everyone. “Let me tell you what your system is, Mr. Haverford. It’s a six-billion-dollar . . . how do you Americans say it? Oh yes: clusterfuck.”

Haverford stood up and turned to General Zhang. “This is ridiculous. This is a glitch. That’s all.”

Shen pointed to the cameras. “Mr. Ross is invisible here to a dozen cameras. Show me a camera where he reappears. Blocks away? Hours later? I’ll bet you cannot find him. Because your system has been defeated.”

General Zhang studied the screen. “How, Shen? How did he do it?”

“There are two million digital cameras. They are all unified with layers of digital image-processing software. With camera firmware. Someone has created a system where points on the screen are replaced with the background image.”

“The background?”

“Yes. Somewhere along the chain of custody between where the image is recorded and where it’s seen on our monitors, the empty background imagery of each camera’s sweep is substituted for the image of a person who is wearing some sort of electronic tag—to identify their movements through space.”

“But how could the camera know the location of that person in three-dimensional space relative to the camera?”

Shen was nodding as he said it. “The camera’s position is probably already known, but it could also be derived from a geometric analysis of surrounding landmarks. Software, General. It could all be done with software.”

Haverford was still shaking his head. “But that would . . . it’s just not possible.”

“Why not, Mr. Haverford? Do you think Americans are the only ones who can think ‘outside the box’?”

Zhang was unreadable. “How do we fix it?”

“The first rule of computer security, General, is don’t leave your equipment where people can mess with it.” He gestured to the screen. “What do we have here? Two million cameras sitting around in public? How many fiber-optic lines connecting them to publicly reachable network cables? Literally anyone anywhere in that complex chain could have done this.”

“Then we need to have the cameras fixed. Replaced.”

“And how do you know that you can trust the people who do the replacing?” Shen stood up and turned to the general. “I hope I have not spoken out of turn, sir.”

General Zhang stared with great intensity at the image of Ross still on the screen. “You are dismissed, Captain Shen. I will be in touch with you soon.”

Shen saluted grandly once more, casting Haverford a slight grin. Shen moved to depart.

“Oh, and Captain.”

Shen turned.

“Excellent work.”

He replied in Mandarin. “It was my pleasure, General.”

Shen continued toward the buttonless elevator, and all he could think of was the great game that was now under way out there in the world. A game an old friend told him about. One that he had just now resolved to join.

Chapter 17: // Immortality

Loki’s traveling rig was a tribute to American automotive excess. He drove a customized Ford F-650 4x4 with a Caterpillar diesel engine. It had nine hundred foot-pounds of torque and could pull twenty-six thousand pounds up an unpaved 7 percent grade. With a series of three chromed fuel tanks tucked beneath each running board, that incline didn’t need to be anywhere near a gas station either. Composite-laminate windows and ceramic composite plating meant the driver and three passengers could recline in comfort while enduring a barrage of small arms fire. It was, in short, the ultimate vehicle for commuting through the Apocalypse.

It could have accommodated five passengers if Loki hadn’t extended the storage area to provide room for various pieces of high-tech wireless communications equipment and supplies. This was, after all, his mobile base of operations for running the one-man Stormbringer faction.

Toward that end, Loki towed an enclosed forty-four-foot Gooseneck racing trailer, whose exterior surface was emblazoned with the image of a black-helmeted motorcycle racer viewed from the shoulders up and done in the style of a Japanese anime character. The entire branding effort was completed with the logo for Stormbringer Motorcycle Racing, jagged with lightning bolts.

To all outward appearances, Loki was a professional motorcycle racer following his circuit through the Midwest. The fact that his real business was hunting down and destroying at any cost a shadowy mercenary army hired to kill Daemon operatives was well concealed behind the patina of professional racing. With his big corporate sponsors (unwilling though they might be) listed on the trailer’s wall, he looked more than legit. He looked downright establishment.

However, in this fight, as in all things, Loki remained a loner. He had no crew of mechanics. He preferred instead to communicate his needs through the darknet—pressing into service local maintenance factions to repair his fleet of razorbacks and microjets. That was, after all, what the trailer was for—a storage facility for a score of Type 2-E razorback interceptors and half a dozen microjet aircraft—as well as his personal black Ducati S-version Streetfighter motorcycle, which he rode into battle against The Major’s people. So far he’d slain or captured at least a hundred of the bastards, and he was on his way to tracking down more—dragging them screaming from their motel rooms or safe houses like pigs to slaughter. Their blind trust in the anonymity of their communications would be their undoing.

But each battle brought damage, and for this Loki had to seek out darknet communities where he could get replacement bikes and turn in his damaged units. This had brought him here to Garnia, Missouri—a small, economically depressed town out in the plains that was transforming itself into a bustling new darknet community. Founded by a logistics faction—an Order of Merritt signatory, no less—they’d be able to service his razorbacks, provide fuel cell batteries, replace wireless receivers, and so on. Loki would also be secure in the knowledge that he wouldn’t be hassled by the police—because, as in all darknet communities, the police here would be fellow darknet members.

Regardless of Loki’s half-star reputation score, he knew that no one would question him. He was the leader of an infrastructure defense faction—an unpleasant job that frequently caused him to commandeer local darknet resources in defense of the network as a whole. Everyone knew he had to pass frequent fMRI scans to prove to the Daemon his actions were legitimate—aimed at defense of the Daemon’s constituent parts. So the opinions of fellow darknet operatives mattered little to Loki. The Daemon was all that mattered.

Another fact that swayed other operatives to comply was the network level shown on his call-out. Loki was a fifty-sixth-level Sorcerer, and the most powerful operative in North America—possibly the world. It was hard to know, really, since operatives above fiftieth level could employ power masking. But Loki wanted everyone to see his power.

As Loki brought his huge pickup and trailer rig through the sleepy town’s main street—if such a loose collection of a dozen houses could be called a town—he marveled at what some people accepted as living. The downtown consisted of a single convenience store, a weather-beaten gas station, and a down-in-the-mouth auto-parts store. Loki knew the big-box stores thirty miles off near the interstate had killed most of the local businesses. He imagined the auto-parts store survived primarily because you couldn’t get to the big-box stores if your car was broken down. With gas rising past six dollars a gallon, that dynamic would likely change soon—as would the shipment of cheap, plentiful parts from China.

Beyond the old commercial center of Garnia, there were new businesses sprouting, and ironically much of that life seemed to be sprouting out of the same shipping containers that had helped to destroy the local economy in the first place. The multicolored corrugated-metal boxes littered the landscape, and as Loki drove through the edge of town, he could see darknet operatives pulling lumber, aluminum beams, and construction equipment from them. He also saw the flash of welding coming from within several—mobile fabrication workshops. Loki had seen it before. Local faction leadership had no doubt pooled their resources to call down a construction kit from the network. They’d have to return it to the network pool when they were done, but there were a hundred operatives out there in the fields building homes, businesses, and setting up farms to serve as the center of a new holon. Trying to recolonize America with something that didn’t have a 30 percent interest rate and a forty-five-minute commute attached to it.

Loki just observed them as he came in. Living in such a place was Loki’s idea of Hell. He hoped that there would always be enemies like The Major to stalk, for he dreaded the day he would need to stop hunting and settle down to actually become part of the Daemon’s infrastructure. Defending it was much more to his liking.

As he expected, the several low- to mid-level operatives he passed on the way in didn’t wave to the most powerful sorcerer they’d ever laid eyes on. Loki’s darknet reputation preceded him. The sorcerer with a half-star reputation ranking—meaning that anyone who had ever dealt with him had found him lacking in almost all socially redeeming qualities. A sorcerer who traveled with a personal retinue of twenty razorbacks and no humans—when summoning a single razorback for a limited period of time was a major undertaking for a typical midlevel operative. Neither did they seem to appreciate Loki’s over-the-top rig. Still, they could go fuck themselves with their four- and five-star reputation rankings. Loki was doing the dirty work of the network, and they should be grateful that people like him existed. Loki was happy to live among his machines and his network bots. He didn’t need the company of his fellow man. Mankind had always been a disappointment.

But he did need their labor. And that’s what he’d come to Garnia to claim. He gestured with his gloved hand and pulled some of the local fabricators and mechanics off their priority-two and -three jobs to place them onto his priority-one job: repairing the blade assemblies of three razorbacks and replacing missing blades that he’d left in the back of a mercenary colonel in Oklahoma—a Ghanaian. The guy had been staying in a Holiday Inn, obviously waiting for something. There were forces afoot in the land, and that meant the network was under threat. Loki didn’t care that these locals were building the twenty-first-century equivalent of a homestead. He was claiming the right of an infrastructure defense faction—the right of a lord to commandeer for the common good. He didn’t need to be nice about it.

Loki pulled his rig into a gravel lot behind the gas station, and there near the entrance to an unmarked assembly of container fabrication shops, Loki could see several darknet operatives staring in wide-eyed amazement at what someone could manage to wring from the darknet. Loki’s setup was so over-the-top it was as though a rockstar’s tour bus had pulled in. He opened the door to his cab and dropped three feet to the ground—his steel hobnailed boots clanging into the stones. He wore black jeans and a numbered racing shirt, beneath which he wore—as always—the haptic vest that kept him in continual contact with the networked world, as well as his shimmering electronic contact lenses, which allowed him to see into D-Space without the need to wear glasses—ten thousand darknet credits. It had been worth it. He was looking forward to the day when they’d be able to surgically implant sensors. The newly available tattooed circuitry had looked interesting, but it didn’t provide the full-skin coverage that a haptic vest could.

Loki pulled a racing cap onto his head and walked along the length of his trailer. He could feel the messages reaching him from his stable of razorbacks. They were like restless war stallions, and he maintained a constant link to them. They were his familiars. The only friends he wanted near him. He felt affection for his loyal mechanical beasts.

He could have summoned more razorbacks and sent these back into the public pool, but he’d grown fond of these specific machines. It was a form of animism that he couldn’t readily reconcile with the logical side of himself. He’d examined the source code of these machines and knew they were just automatons. But the human in him wanted them to be more and had him reading between the lines of their source code.

Loki “felt” an eighteenth-level Fabricator named Sledge, leader of the Advitam faction, approaching from some ways away. And he’d also observed a great deal of message traffic about his truck’s arrival. They were talking about him here.

“Afternoon, Loki. This is a hell of a battle wagon you’ve got here.”

Loki barely looked up. “I’ve got damaged razorbacks.”

“Yeah, we got the message. It’s good to see you’re in the area. There are gangs operating around here—burning homesteads and beating up darknet folks.”

Loki just stared at the guy. He was young—perhaps in his mid-twenties. “Why on earth would you want to start a darknet community in this place?”

Sledge shrugged. “Grew up around here. It’ll be good to live near my folks again. I was working in Indianapolis before this. Same for a lot of these other guys.”

Loki said nothing but kept looking around at all the work going on in the town.

“You’re on the trail of The Major, aren’t you?”

Loki turned to Sledge and narrowed his mother-of-pearl eyes. “Has he been through here?”

Sledge just laughed and shook his head. “No. Hell, if we saw that bastard, we’d have called a flash mob to tear him to pieces. I was just wondering because I know you were there when it happened.”

“When what happened?”

“When The Major killed Roy Merritt.” Sledge pointed across the street. “If you get a chance before you leave, check out our monument in Redstone Park.”

Loki kept his gaze on Sledge. “Something else happened that day.”

“What?”

“I destroyed the Daemon task force.”

Sledge looked uneasy. “I’m not sure that accomplished what you thought it would.”

Loki turned away and motioned with a gloved hand. The rear door to the trailer opened, slamming down a ramp onto the gravel drive. There was a dull roar within the trailer and in a few moments, several razorbacks smeared with brownish bloodstains, dented and bullet-pocked, drove off the rear ramp.

Sledge got the hint and yelled over the roar. “We don’t have any spares, so we’ll have to fabricate parts. We’ll let you know when it’s done.”

“I don’t see anywhere to eat on your grid.”

“We’re not a full-service community yet, but there are places out by the highway.”

“Not really a holon, then, is it?”

“We’re working on it.”

Loki looked Sledge up and down then clomped up the trailer ramp. He mounted his Ducati Streetfighter motorcycle and roared out of there.

Asshole.

He accelerated down the county road, south toward its junction with the interstate. Loki noticed the park that Sledge must have been referring to. Even though it was a small thing—a village green with a circular flagstone path, a flagpole, and a statue—it still stopped Loki in his tracks. The statue was that of a man—but it was engulfed in writhing flames. Not chiseled flames, either, but rippling orange flames that guttered and surged twenty feet into the air.

It took several moments for Loki to realize they had to be D-Space flames. He made a gesture and turned off his HUD contact lenses, and sure enough, the flames disappeared, leaving the ten-foot-tall stone statue cold and inert. Loki turned his HUD display back on and the flames returned. He drove off the county road, onto the grass, and pulled his bike up to the base of the statue.

The words “Roy Merritt” were carved into its pedestal base. He looked up to see Merritt posed on one knee, one arm across his leg, the other bracing himself on the ground, as though he were readying himself to get back up from a severe blow.

Loki leaned under the shadow of the statue to look into the eyes of that massive head. The brow was determined. The jaw firmly set—showing his resolve to endure. It was a fair likeness of the man he remembered—but who had grown larger than life since his death. Now it literally was a chiseled jaw, but there was also Roy’s Roman nose, his short hair, and, of course, his burns. They appeared as a texture pattern running down his muscular neck and down the sinewy forearms. He was depicted in tactical gear—ready for action.

Solid granite. Loki marveled that this was one of the first public monuments for this new darknet community. He’d seen the cult of Merritt growing steadily with each passing month. He thought the funeral might have been the high-water mark of the hero worship, but he was seeing real-life graffiti, and more Order of Merritt factions being founded.

Roy Merritt had been Loki’s enemy, but unlike The Major, Merritt was a worthy opponent—resourceful, personally courageous, and honest. Loki felt a twinge of anguish at the memory of Merritt dying before his eyes. They called him the Burning Man because he’d survived the death trap Sobol’s house had become—and he did it all on video. Video that had since been seen by just about everyone on the darknet. Merritt had seemed invincible.

But he was a man too idealistic for this world. No wonder his own side shot him in the back.

Loki wondered what it must be like to be so universally loved and admired. He circled around again and looked up into that great, stone face, wrapped in D-Space flames, burning him for all eternity, as though he were damned. It was an odd conceit for the angelic hero to appear tortured by eternal flames. Perhaps he was all the more powerful a symbol because of it.

Loki noticed that there was also a D-Space video display just beneath the carved name on the pedestal. People in the real world wouldn’t be able to see it, of course, but darknet operatives could. It showed only a still photograph of Merritt from what looked to be his FBI Quantico graduation photo. Loki clicked on the image and a procession of photographs and videos began to play to a mournful tune. Loki clicked a MUTE button, preferring instead to view the images without overt psychological manipulation.

What followed was a several-minute presentation that had apparently been gleaned from commercial online photo and video sites. Loki could imagine hundreds of thousands of people scouring the public Web for any information on their fallen hero. It was possible someone even cracked into the Merritt family computer. Whatever the source, a very personal and moving series of images appeared.

Loki turned the sound back on.

There was Merritt whispering kind encouragement to his daughter at the edge of a basketball court, pride still evident in his eyes. Her jersey and the scoreboard behind them showed they were getting creamed. Photos of him with his family. A newspaper photo of Merritt—although injured himself—carrying a wounded woman from a bank surrounded by police.

Loki began to realize the power of myth. It was the power of common belief. Sobol understood it, and yet he chose to become a devil, and here as if part of the natural order, a mythic hero arose in the network—dead but more alive than ever.

While Loki, possibly the most powerful Daemon operative in the world, with each passing day felt smaller and more isolated as the darknet population grew around him.

He suddenly felt truly alone.

Chapter 18: // Underworld

Loki sat astride an idling black Ducati Streetfighter motorcycle. He studied the darkness around him. Stars provided the only light, but the fourth-generation white-phosphor night vision integrated into his helmet gave him a high-contrast black-and-white view of his surroundings. He preferred to remain enveloped in darkness like this when traveling at night. No lights. He had added a control to kill his motorcycle’s brake and dashboard lights, too. As he glanced around, he confirmed what he already knew: he was in the middle of fucking nowhere.

To his left lay the crumbling ruins of a small clapboard house, windows like empty eye sockets. He idled at a T intersection with a road extending left and right along the edge of some woods. The wreckage of several cars had been left there in the tall grass. Oddly, one of them was a Porsche 944, which had died a long way from Germany. This was a desolate place.

Just like him to bring me out here . . .

Eugene, Missouri, couldn’t be considered a town. It was even smaller than Garnia—with no shops or Main Street. The hour was late, and he knew the residents of this tiny hamlet would have heard him roaring in, but he was just an invisible, rumbling presence in the darkness. He wouldn’t have come this far from the interstate if this wasn’t the closest gate to the underworld. And the underworld, he knew, could only be reached in places that had long endured and which would long remain. Finding them in the flatness of this prairie was difficult.

Loki waved a hand and a high-resolution satellite map of his current location appeared in D-Space, seeming to float ten feet in front of him. The imagery showed a dirt track between ruinous structures in the trees ahead. He turned off the map and accelerated toward the tree line. He soon made out the entrance to the brush-choked road and urged the powerful motorcycle through the trees, dodging around old tires and rusted washing machines.

Before long he discovered what he was searching for: a set of steel rails extending to either side through the forest. The Rock Island Line, abandoned back in 1981. The tracks were choked in weeds with wooden ties visible only here and there. Trees crowded the edges of the gravel ballast lane.

Loki turned left and headed down the tracks into the grayscale world that was oily blackness to mere mortals. The tracks continued at a gentle curve through forest, with the land rising up slowly to either side. He bumped along the ties for a quarter of a mile and found what he was looking for—the mouth of the Eugene Tunnel. He stopped and gazed into the black opening. It was pitch-black even to him.

Railroad tunnels. Enthusiasts had meticulously recorded them worldwide—their GPS locations, direction, length, height, and width. The public Web already knew about these underworld places in great detail. And that meant the Daemon knew about them as well. Which made them a logical place for connecting worlds. There was something oddly appropriate in the symbolism of it, and Sobol knew his archetypes well. With Sobol, gates were critical points, where fate was determined. The one Loki was searching for was no exception.

Loki had been studying planar spells ever since he received his odd message. Of course, he was familiar with planar travel from a dozen games where players gate in and out of various dimensions and universes. But now, with the advent of the limitless layers of D-Space projected atop reality, dimensional gates suddenly had relevance to the real world. Artificial intelligences from digital dimensions were starting to appear, and in some cases gaining wireless control over real-world machinery. It was a message from just such a being that had brought Loki to this desolate place—a message from an old opponent.

Loki switched on his motorcycle’s infrared headlights, and his helmet automatically switched to FLIR mode. He could now see down the tunnel to a vanishing point. Sixteen hundred and sixty-seven feet of World War One-era masonry.

But closer at hand he could see a homeless encampment clogging the passage. There were three men with packs and cardboard boxes huddled in the darkness—all of them looking his way, trying to discern who it was that had come to their hiding place, engine rumbling and lights out.

It occurred to Loki that economic times must be getting tough indeed for homeless people to appear this far from cities and towns. He’d begun seeing them everywhere. Whole families. White, Latino, Black, Asian. It looked like the current financial crisis was hitting everyone. Prostitutes were literally everywhere now. These guys, however, looked like locals—white-trash tweakers in their early twenties to late thirties.

If that was the case, then the bike Loki was riding was worth its weight in gold. And standing in the mouth of the tunnel, silhouetted against the night, Loki was probably a good target for folks whose eyes had adjusted to the darkness. Sure enough he saw one of the men—tattooed scalp, piercings, and goatee—lifting what looked to be a pistol. The man slowly pulled back the slide to chamber a round and whispered to the others.

Loki nodded to himself. Bad idea.

He revved the bike’s engine to fully charge his weapons and watched to see what baldy would do next. The man was still pointing the gun up in a holding stance, staring intently into the darkness. Loki raised a gloved hand and aimed a hypersonic projector in the palm of his glove into the middle of the group. He then softly spoke words that were amplified a thousand times into a booming voice that appeared in the midst of the group. “PUT THE GUN DOWN OR DIE!”

The gunman panicked as everyone scattered. The man aimed his pistol at the mouth of the tunnel.

CRACK! A blinding beam of light projected from Loki’s index finger and the deafening sound of a bullwhip filled the tunnel.

The gunman fell dead, his hair and clothing smoking in the darkness. The other homeless men staggered around, blinded by the sudden burst of industrial lightning.

Loki shouted. “Who else wants to die tonight?”

The men got onto their bellies and covered their heads. One shouted. “Don’t shoot, man! Don’t shoot!”

Laser-induced plasma channel was a hell of a weapon. The technology used a relatively low-powered laser at a precise wavelength to cause atmospheric oxygen to form a plasma—one with an extremely low electrical resistance. It was, in essence, a virtual wire that could carry a lethal electrical shock. The thunderous clap occurred when the energy burst stopped and the air snapped shut around the vacuum that remained. It was man-made lightning. Loki could shoot lightning from his hands—the achievement of a lifelong goal. Whenever some idiot gave him a legitimate reason to use it on darknet business, he almost felt like kissing them. Thank you, tweaker.

Loki gunned the engine and came up to the men lying on the edges of the tracks. They were still blinded. “If it was up to me, I’d kill you—but I can’t unless you give me a good reason. If you’re not still lying here when I get back, I’ll follow the heat signatures of your footprints, find you, and kill you both. Do you understand?”

“Yes! Yes!”

Loki roared off into the tunnel, feeling the exhilaration of adrenaline surging through his veins.

A couple hundred yards later Loki could see a colored, D-Space object glowing in the tunnel. He closed the distance and before long came to a colorful glow surrounding a virtual portal. He killed the Ducati’s engine, dismounted, and walked toward the portal. The metal cleats on his calf-high black boots rang menacingly as he walked across the gravel in the echoing tunnel. He soon stopped before an alcove in the tunnel wall.

In real-world, three-dimensional space, this was just a dark stone archway over an alcove—a place for railroad workers to shelter against oncoming trains. But on the base layer of D-Space, laid atop the GPS grid, this was also a gate between worlds. In this case between D-Space and one of Sobol’s game worlds—Over the Rhine, a World War Two-themed online game. It was here where a level map Loki knew well intersected with D-Space. As he looked ahead of him, he could see projected onto reality a view into the Monte Cassino game map through a spiked and studded virtual portcullis.

There, standing behind the bars, was an old opponent—Herr Oberstleutnant, Heinrich Boerner, the infamous virtual SS officer in a long trench coat, with an Iron Cross hanging at his throat from the stiff collar of his tunic.

He was just a game bot. An electronic figment of the game designer Matthew Sobol’s imagination, but even so, the villainous Boerner was deviously clever. While playing Sobol’s game, Loki had been virtually killed by this bot more times than he’d care to remember. And now here Boerner stood.

As always, Boerner wore a monocle over his right eye and he clenched a long black cigarette filter between his teeth, exhaling volumetric smoke as he nodded in greetings—his voice coming over Loki’s earpiece. “Mein Herr. So gut to see you again.”

Ever since he reached fiftieth level, Loki had been receiving darknet messages from an AI claiming to be Boerner. While he initially ignored them, they had become more persistent. As Loki’s reputation score continued its decline, Boerner’s messages became more relentless. Loki recalled what a comforting refuge the game Over the Rhine had been for him during difficult times. In some sick way, Boerner was almost like an old friend. An old friend who had killed him thousands of times.

“What do you want, Boerner?”

“Ah, you haf done vell for yourself, I see.”

“You don’t see shit. Your eyes are bitmaps. Get to the point.”

“Mein Freund, I can only understant simple concepts.”

Loki simplified. “Why did you contact me, you fuck?”

“Vy?” He spread his hands expansively. “Because ve are kindred spirits, you und I.”

“You’re a 3-D model with a scripted psychosis. You’re nothing to me.”

“I cannot understant you.” Boerner wrapped his gloved hands around the bars—his fingers becoming suddenly much more real as they extended out into D-Space. “But your tone sounded . . . unfriendly. Is zis vy you are so unpopular?”

“Fuck you.”

Boerner laughed his familiar, evil cackle. “Yes. I think so. But they do not understant you as I do. Perhaps I can be of some use to you in your vorlt?”

Loki felt suddenly concerned. He remembered just how devious Heinrich Boerner was. “My world?”

“D-Space, Mein Herr. You could free me from zis tiny vorlt. I could serf you, Mein Herr. If only you vould release me.”

Loki stopped cold. Seriously? The sociopathic Boerner AI was asking Loki to bring him into D-Space—and thus, into a world where he might be able to control real-world machinery and software? Not likely. “Fuck off.”

Boerner paused for a moment, then grinned, teeth still clenched around his cigarette filter. “Mein Herr, you are all alone in your vorlt. Your mechanical servants, just stupid beasts. They can be destroyed. But I cannot. I vill always be zer for you. To protect you. To vatch over you.”

“Bullshit. You’ve shot me in the back more times than I care to count.”

“Loki—may I call you Loki?”

Loki realized that the AI was only scanning his responses for keywords, so he stopped speaking in full sentences, opting instead for simplicity. “Why me?”

“Because only vun as powerful as you can free me.”

Loki knew it would require a powerful Gate spell to bring Boerner into D-Space. He’d looked into it, and he had the spell stored in his listing. He wondered why he’d done that. Was it Sobol’s manipulation again?

Loki examined the digital Nazi’s subtle, scripted movements, swaying in place, drawing on his cigarette, and exhaling digital smoke. But Loki knew that whatever AI construct was behind this didn’t even need a body. The physical form was just a psychological hack. One designed to appeal to some base human instinct.

“Ve both know you have no one else zu vatch your back. Und your vorlt is a dangerous place.”

Boerner actually seemed to have a sincere look on his face—but he was just a 3-D model with a scripted series of actions, nothing more. But then, what were people? At least Loki could examine Boerner’s source code if he brought him into D-Space. Couldn’t he? Wouldn’t that be like examining a person’s soul—something he couldn’t do in reality?

Boerner pressed his case. “Who else could be as ruthless as you, mein Freund?”

Loki had no answer.

The Boerner avatar withdrew his cigarette filter. He also removed his officer’s hat—for the first time showing a bald scalp. To Loki’s knowledge, no one had ever seen Boerner without his hat. And then Boerner reached his spectral arm through the bars of the portcullis and into the world of D-Space—not quite reaching Loki’s arm, where Loki imagined his haptic vest would reproduce Boerner’s ghostly touch.

But more shocking was that as Boerner’s arm reached into the fabric of D-Space, the polygon count on the Nazi’s 3-D model increased several orders of magnitude. Boerner’s arm went from that of an online game sprite to a fully realized human being. The arm reaching out to Loki from beyond reality was that of a real-life SS officer, the pores on his leather gloves, and the weave in the fabric of his greatcoat sleeve all too apparent, flexing as he reached out.

“Free me from zis place. Vat human do you trust? Vat human trusts you? Zey have used you, Mein Herr. Vizout you, zer vould be no darknet. Ze Daemon vould have failed. Zey don’t understand us. Zat zey need us.”

Loki could see insanity in those bitmap eyes.

Suddenly Boerner thrust his face between the bars, and it likewise underwent a metamorphosis into a horrifying visage—the face of a real person, a snarling rictus of evil. “Mankind needs evil, Loki! Without evil, there can be no good.”

Loki stared in horror at the face and backed away. Immediately Boerner drew his face back and returned to the world of Over the Rhine. Loki couldn’t get the image out of his mind.

But Loki also wondered if he was looking into a mirror. He had a half-star reputation on a base factor of thousands. The growing darknet factions had no use for him—the Daemon no longer accepted sociopaths, apparently. Loki had been expedient in the early days of Sobol’s network. Now he was alone with his packs of software bots and machines.

And yet, Sobol had thought of him here, too, hadn’t he? How like Sobol to have predicted this. Isolated in his power, as he had been throughout his life, Loki did not connect with or trust people. Was it a corrective? Something to restrain him? To console him?

“What if I say yes?”

Boerner grinned and pulled back from the bars. He carefully placed his hat back on his head. “If you release me, I vill respond to one event for each level zat you possess. After zis, I am free of my obligation to you.”

Loki nodded to himself. “What kind of events?”

“You set ze parameters. Perhaps you have me respond ven you experience excessive stress—or in defense of your possessions. Or the appearance of an item in human news—such as your physical death . . . almost an infinite number of events may be scripted.”

“And what would you do in response?”

“Zat is entirely up to you, Loki.” Boerner let a sly smile escape. “But I vould be doing so vith all the power now at your disposal.”

Loki had only ever placed his faith in one person—Matthew Sobol. And he had yet to be disappointed.

“Very well, Boerner. Stand clear of the gate. . . .”

Chapter 19: // Crossroad

Natalie Philips entered her condo clutching groceries, mail, and her keys. She shouldered the door closed and silenced the beeping of her security system by tapping in the disarm code. She hung up her jacket in the hall closet and brought the groceries into the kitchen. A blinking light on the cordless phone base station told her there was a message.

After putting the groceries away she poured a glass of mineral water and sliced a lime into four sections. She squeezed each wedge into the glass. She then wiped down the cutting board, cleaned the knife, and took a sip of her drink. Philips then grabbed the cordless handset and sat at the kitchen table next to the pile of mail.

One message. She tapped a key to hear it. Her mother’s voice played, inviting her to come stay for the weekend. Her cousins were up from Tampa. Philips deleted it and hung up. She was about to click the speed dial for her mom’s cell, but she waited a moment. She put the phone down on top of the neat stack of mail. Centered it. Straightened it.

Philips had spent most of the last eight years in a top secret lab where she couldn’t take personal calls. In that time she’d trained her own parents not to phone her during the day. She had spent long hours on her research and seldom took time off. And here, her own mother didn’t have her cell phone number. She felt a pang of guilt at all the time irretrievably lost. And what if it all fell apart anyway?

She would never be able to tell them—or anyone—about any of this. She couldn’t tell them about her code-breaking work. About her near death at the hands of the Daemon. About the shadowy entities pulling the strings of her government.

She sipped her drink again and wondered what that implied about Sobol. Was the Daemon still the problem? Well, now it was one of several competing problems. But did killing people automatically make Sobol worse? She knew full well that killing was sometimes necessary. Or did she know that? How did one really know what was necessary and what wasn’t? What if it was “necessary” from the point of view that anything was justifiable to stay in control? How was that different from what these private industry folks were doing?

What if Fulbright was wrong? What if his cruel calculus was just an excuse? When she’d signed on to be a cryptographer, she hadn’t counted on moral dilemmas. She just wanted to do beautiful math. Maybe Fulbright didn’t know what he was doing either.

She smiled thinking of her days as an intern. Everything was simple then. She had been convinced she would revolutionize encryption. She recalled scoffing at Morris’s three golden rules of computer security:

do not own a computer;

do not power it on;

and do not use one

The subtlety of it had escaped her at the time. It wasn’t meant as a surrender. It was a meditation on risk versus benefit. Did these systems give us more than they took from us? It was an admission that we will never be fully secure. We must instead strive for survivability. Then perhaps Sobol was right. . . .

Philips knew she had to get back into this fight. However, it was becoming apparent that there were more than two sides in the war. Perhaps all wars were like this.

She decided not to call her mother just yet. She didn’t want to sound tense, and her mother could always tell. Instead, Philips slipped the mail out from under the phone and flipped through the stack.

A half-pound of junk mail anchored by a cable bill, a brokerage statement, and a Stanford University alumni association news-letter. She decided not to open her broker statement. Her mutual funds had lost over half their value in the collapse of the real estate and CDO markets a while back and never recovered. Now inflation and looming bank failures were threatening to send them spiraling down again. And the dollar was sinking fast against the euro and the yuan.

It was nearly impossible to tell whether this was caused by the Daemon, fear of the Daemon, or whether it had absolutely nothing to do with the Daemon. There were too many large financial institutions that had become insolvent, but which were so important to the centralized global economy that they couldn’t be allowed to fail. And yet, the American economy didn’t seem to have much forward momentum on anything. The dot-coms had melted down just as she got out of school, and later the real estate markets had tanked. Now the main industry of America seemed to be moving paperwork around in circles. Basically, she’d just been breaking even over the last eight years, despite the fact that she’d put a lot of money away. She’d invested it, and those supposedly safe investments had gone sour. She’d purchased this three-bedroom, two-bath condo near Washington, and now four years and forty-eight payments later it was worth slightly less than what she bought it for. Factoring in tax deductions for interest, but then also plumbing and improvements, she figured she was just about even. That is, if the market held. Around here, near the defense/intelligence sector, she should be okay, but she wondered what most middle-class Americans were going to do.

For the first time she started understanding the appeal the Daemon must hold to a broad cross-section of people. It was a chance to start over. Daemon operatives had said it provided medical care. Retirement. Debt relief. No wonder. It was essentially a tax on corporations—one the corporate attorneys couldn’t dodge by moving their headquarters to Bermuda.

Philips got up and flipped through the catalogs and advertisements above the open trash can lid. Clothes, housewares, department store sales, all went into the circular file. An online gaming ad, into the trash. A pet medicine ad—

Wait a second.

She stopped for a moment then retrieved the online gaming ad from the wastebasket. And stared at it. Oh my god. . . .

She groped for the kitchen chair and sat down, feeling her pulse pounding. The ad was a four-color, oversized enameled postcard declaring a “100-Hour Free Trial Offer” for CyberStorm’s massively parallel online fantasy game, The Gate.

And Jon Ross was staring back at her from the front of it.

It was unmistakably him—a computer graphic rendering of Ross as a roguish game character.

She laid the card on the kitchen table and recalled the first time Ross arranged a clandestine meeting with her. It was in Sobol’s online game world, and he’d designed his avatar to look like her: facial geometry is a code the human mind is uniquely suited to decipher. He’d used the trick to sneak past her group’s automated filter system. To find her before she found him. Now on the card in front of her, the animated thief avatar in medieval leather armor had Jon Ross’s face. Ever since his near assassination in China, she’d wanted to see his face again. To know he was alive.

She closely examined the postcard. Sobol’s company, CyberStorm, had gone bankrupt years ago, but the massive online game he created had been folded into one of the subsidiaries of a massive media conglomerate. She flipped the card over and saw a printed code for logging on to the game and initiating the trial subscription. There was also a street address for CyberStorm Entertainment in small letters at the bottom—an address here in Columbia, Maryland.

She felt even more elated. But then—he was still in China. He couldn’t be here. Could he?

Philips dropped the card into the trash can, having committed everything she needed to memory. All it took was a glance. She followed it quickly with a supermarket circular then lifted her foot, and let the plastic lid close.

It was a two-story, nondescript concrete office building, surrounded on three sides by woods. A small parking lot ran around behind it, but there weren’t many cars.

Philips glanced around but saw no one observing her. She entered the unlocked vestibule, knowing the address on the postcard placed CyberStorm in Suite G, but there was no Suite G on the lobby directory. There were only traffic engineering and accountant firms—no gaming companies.

She walked upstairs and moved down the musty-smelling hallway. She came across no one. Finally she found herself standing in front of a wood veneer door marked SUITE G. There was a ten-key pad on the wall to the right of it. With one more glance to see that she wasn’t followed, she tapped in the code she remembered from the postcard.

The door buzzed open. She grabbed the lever handle and pushed inside.

As the door clicked closed behind her, she glanced left and right in what appeared to be an empty office suite. There was a reception area, but no furniture except for a single folding table set up in the center of the three-thousand-square-foot space. Upon it stood a computer and a twenty-inch flat-panel monitor screen that was already turned on. It displayed the log-on screen for Matthew Sobol’s infamous online fantasy game, The Gate. A desk chair and a computer headset were already waiting.

Philips just smiled. Just like Ross . . .

She sat down in the chair. It had been a while since she’d logged on to The Gate, but she still knew how to navigate the interface. She donned the headset and keyed in the “trial” subscription code.

The screen popped up a “Please Wait” message while the game loaded. It was a powerful machine because soon a breathtaking virtual vista spread out before her in all its 3-D glory.

From a first-person view, her avatar stood at the edge of a terrace overlooking a vast cave. It looked to be a couple thousand feet high and miles long in either direction. Luminescent material coated the walls of the cave, casting a soft glow into the air. A glittering city spread out along the floor of the cavern beneath her, with a river bisecting it. Several waterfalls descended from the ceiling like veils. Most of them disappeared into a cloud of mist above forest-land at the edge of the city; others cascaded down the sides of the cave itself. The sound of the water was a pleasant white noise. As she looked across to the far side of the huge cavern, she could see villas set into the wall like balconies. She could also hear music and laughter in the distance, with other player-character avatars moving around, call-outs floating over their heads.

It was beautiful. She spent several moments just staring at it.

Then she heard someone speak in her headset. “I beg your pardon, my lady.”

Philips turned her avatar to face what looked to be a non-player-character—or NPC—a servant of some type in house livery. She knew it was a bot, a simple AI program that could respond in limited ways, or be scripted to perform actions. She could tell because it bore no call-out above its head.

The avatar bowed before her and swept his plumed hat off his head. “My lady, Master Rakh will be very glad when he hears that you’ve arrived safely. May I ask you to remain here while I fetch him?”

Philips knew what to do. She could either right-click on the servant and select from a list of options to respond—or . . . She decided to speak directly into the headset mic. “Yes.” She knew Sobol’s speech recognition was pretty good.

The NPC nodded and smiled. “Excellent, my lady. I don’t think the master will be long.” With that he marched off in a hurry, placing his hat back on his head.

That left Philips some time to explore the terrace. It appeared to be the garden of a several-story villa built into the rock face. Fountains, statues, and ornamental plants filled the area. She had to admit that the 3-D renderings were well done. Sobol’s game engine was popular for a reason.

Philips walked over to a fountain that depicted something like Poseidon riding a chariot drawn by sea horses. She looked down into what she knew was particle simulation water and saw her own reflection staring back at her. Her avatar was fashioned to look like her real self. She was looking at her own image.

In the real-world office, Philips smiled. Her character wore a beautiful dress that appeared to be silk with a brocade wrap. There was also a glittering jeweled necklace—not the type of thing she would ever wear in real life, but she figured no indigenous people could be brutalized in the diamond trade here in fantasyland.

“I hope you don’t mind the outfit. I didn’t know what to get you.”

Philips looked up to see the avatar of Ross that was depicted on the postcard ad. He wore leather armor and a sword at his side—the prosperous rogue. She smiled in the real world, happy to see him, even if it was just a 3-D model.

“Mr. Ross.”

They approached each other and stood at arm’s length.

“I’ve been so worried for you, Nat.”

“I’m fine, Jon.” She turned to face the vast cave beyond the terrace railing. “What is this place?”

“Do you like it?”

“It’s beautiful.”

“It lies beneath the kingdom of Avelar. It’s called the Cave of Forgotten Kings. Built from what remained of a sunken city. Phosphorescent moss made this cave livable after thousands of years of glacial erosion.”

“Wow.”

“What do you mean, ‘wow’? What I just said was complete rubbish. This is a bunch of bitmap textures wrapped around a 3-D model.”

“Oh, don’t ruin it.”

He laughed. “It is pretty amazing how the brain just kind of plays along. We’re quite willing to delude ourselves.”

“I got your card. What better way to reach a steganographer?”

“I’m glad you liked it.”

“Just one thing.”

“What?”

“It could have been sent by anyone.”

“Ah . . . so then—”

“Prove to me you’re you. Show me that you remember what you last said to me.”

Ross’s avatar moved close to her—right up to her face. “I told you that every day my first and last thought is of you.”

In the real world, Philips felt almost overcome with emotion. He’d spoken those words to her amid the destruction of Building Twenty-Nine. She’d lain blind on a jetty as fireboats approached. No one else could have known those words. There were times, in fact, when she thought she would never hear them again.

Ross’s avatar stepped back a pace. “And how do I know you’re you?”

Philips was suddenly confounded. Of course, he was right.

“I know. Tell me what I did when I told you those words.”

She’d thought of it thousands of times since. “You brushed my cheek with your hand. And even though I couldn’t see you . . .”

She could hear the smile in his voice. “God, Natalie. I missed you so much. I’m so glad you’re safe.”

She wanted more than anything to wrap her arms around him, and was now more aware than ever that this was not reality.

“You took precautions not to be followed, I hope.”

“Jon, if they’re following me, they’re not doing it physically, and I left my cell phone at home.”

They walked their avatars along the terrace in silence for a few moments.

“How are your eyes, Nat?”

“They’re recovering. I’ll wear corrective lenses for the rest of my life, but no major damage.”

“I hope you know why I left.”

“Of course I know. They gave you no choice. And I don’t want you to tell me where you are now. I’m just glad to hear your voice. To see . . . you.” She laughed lightly. “Sort of.”

“Yeah. It’s like we’re guild members.” He flourished his arms. “Want to see a trick?”

She smirked in the real-world office. “Sure.”

He raised his hands and a bright light issued forth like a fiery missile that sailed high into the air over the city. It eventually detonated like a fireworks burst, sending a boom across the city.

“Hah! It doesn’t look very useful.”

“Well, a fireball is more useful, but not very impressive.”

“What are we going to do, Jon?”

He turned to face her again. “Join me, Natalie. Join the darknet.” She felt her heart racing again, but shook her head in real life. “Jon, you know I can’t do that. I took an oath.”

“To defend America against enemies foreign and domestic—yes. And nothing in the darknet contradicts that. Sobol’s battle is with illegitimate power. It’s not an enemy of democratic government. I’ve seen it from the inside.”

“But Jon, The Major and his people are planning to take control of the Daemon. They can’t control it if I destroy it. You used to agree with me on that.”

“Then let’s stop them from taking control of it.”

“And what if we do? Then we face Loki? Or a hundred Lokis?”

Ross was silent for a moment. “People are working to counteract the abuse of darknet power, too.”

“The Daemon is too much of an experiment, Jon. There are billions of lives at stake. Tinkering with the organization of human society—it never ends well.”

“Come here, I want you to see something.”

“Jon—”

“Just come here.” He brought her to what looked to be a tall statue of a muscular warrior facing a bulging stylized gate carved into the cliff face. Monstrous clawed hands and appendages were prying their way through the edges, but the lone warrior stood, sword drawn, and his other hand clutching a shield—determination on his face. The statue was probably fifty feet tall.

Then Philips recognized the face. It was Roy Merritt. “My god, what is this?”

“This villa, it’s the faction hall for the Order of Merritt. Roy is widely admired, Natalie. There are whole factions based on his ideals—ideals left by a lifetime of good deeds. Read the public charters of factions like the Meritorious Raiders or the Knights of Fire.”

“It’s great that they admire him, but I don’t see how this changes anything.”

“The majority of people are good, Natalie. That’s true right around the world. And they responded to the human decency they saw in Roy.”

She stared up at the statue.

“I’m tired of burying people I care about. I don’t want to lose you. You mean too much to me.”

She felt more than anything like holding him—if it had been real life, perhaps she would have wavered.

His avatar came closer again. “Please leave the NSA. Come with me.”

“I can’t, Jon. We need to destroy the Daemon—before it becomes a force for tyranny.”

“But there’s tyranny in the world now, Nat. You can’t tell me you don’t see it. Humanity already serves a system. One that doesn’t recognize the governments we create. That doesn’t respect our laws or our values. It’s protected by people like The Major, who are just as brutal as Loki—if not more so. That system is dooming civilization in a mindless pursuit of growth.” There was a pause. “The darknet is the only thing I’ve seen that can break that system’s grip on humanity. That’s why I joined.”

“Jon, why did you lie to Roy about your father’s death?”

“Natalie. What?”

“The Communist coup wasn’t in 1991. It was in 1992. That doesn’t seem like something you’d be likely to forget. You can’t expect me to trust you if you lie. Are you even Russian?”

There was a moment of silence as his avatar just faced her. The medium of the game made it impossible for her to tell what he was thinking at this moment, and she already felt regret for having said it.

In a moment he spoke, his voice sounding sad. “The essence of my story was true, Nat. I changed some of the details to protect people I love. You must understand. I knew they would polygraph Roy. I revealed the truth about me, but not the facts.”

“You can’t tell me about yourself, but you’re asking me to betray everything I believe in. I could be put in prison for forty years just for coming here today.”

“Then why did you come?”

She stared at the screen but said nothing.

Ross’s avatar paced the terrace for a few moments. He turned back to her. “Sobol’s games always provide a turning point—a crossroad where you choose your fate. I was convinced that his Daemon would be the same—and it is. We all have a choice, Nat. We just have to make it.”

There was silence for several moments. “I’m sorry, Jon. I’ve made my choice.”

She heard him sigh. His avatar wandered over to a short marble pedestal. The top of it glowed with a blue aura, implying magical energy. Ross’s avatar held an amulet in its hand.

“If we never meet again, please remember that I loved you.”

He placed the amulet on the glowing surface of the pedestal where it disappeared in a blinding flash of light.

“Jon—”

At that moment she was suddenly ejected from the game and found herself staring at the icons of a computer desktop.

In the real world of the office, Philips heard a machine come to life in a back room, humming and whirring.

She turned to look around the monitor and saw a cable extending from the back of the computer. Philips stood up and followed the cable as it ran along the floor into what appeared to be a server room. Instead of servers though, she saw a machine about the size of a refrigerator. She leaned down and could see through a tinted window as a movable laser head blazed. It was laying down some sort of metallic material with each pass, the head moving rapidly. As she watched, it became apparent that the machine was creating the small amulet that Ross’s avatar held in its hand.

Within moments, the machine stopped, and the printing head withdrew. The front door whirred open, and the part was there in front of her.

Philips gingerly withdrew the amulet. It still felt warm and was made of a silvery metal. It also had a loop where she could fasten a chain. It was small, perhaps the size of a woman’s watch face, and it was engraved with the simple words “I love you.”

She held it tightly in her hand and wondered if she’d made the right choice.

Chapter 20: // Data Curse

Loki was standing in line at a coffeehouse, six people back, when the businessman cut in line two slots ahead of him. The woman there hadn’t closed the gap entirely, and the douchebag slipped right in, pretending not to notice the dozen people stretching toward the wall.

The mousy woman in front of him accepted it, and no one else seemed inclined to start an argument.

Loki had killed people for less.

He stepped out of line and walked with his studded leather riding boots and black riding outfit straight up to the man—whose cologne assaulted his tastebuds as much as his nostrils. “Asshole. That’s the end of the line, back there.” Loki gestured to the far wall.

The man, who stood at least half a head taller, raised his eyebrows. “What did you call me, son?”

Loki took a deep breath. The Daemon did not permit him to commit wanton murder—he had to have a legitimate infrastructure defense purpose for punching someone’s ticket. And he had to be able to pass fMRI interrogation on every kill. He took another deep breath. There were alternatives, however.

“I said—ASSHOLE—the line is back there.”

The queue advanced another slot—the man was only one person away from the register.

“Look, just grow up, son. You don’t intimidate me with your little leather outfit and your goth contact lenses.”

“If you don’t assume your rightful place in this line, I will make you regret the day you were born.”

“Are you threatening me? In public?”

“It’s not a threat. I’m telling you, that if you do not leave this position in line—you will wish you were dead.”

“This isn’t amusing, son. Now leave me alone before you get yourself in legal trouble.”

“You made your choice.”

The man actually started a bit when Loki raised his ringed hands and pointed at him. “Vilos andre—siphood ulros—carvin sienvey.” Loki spiraled his finger in front of the guy. “I curse your data. . . .”

The man burst out laughing. “Is that what you’re going to do? Cast a whammy hex on me?” He laughed again.

Loki kept aiming his finger—and read the consumer data from the man’s wireless devices, which linked in moments to his identity. “Robert Wahlen—social security ending 3-9-7-3—I damn you, that you might walk cursed among men . . .”

The man stopped laughing. “How do you know my name? Where the hell did you get that information?”

“. . . that your data will forever sour. Until you seek expiation.”

“You’re a fuckin’ weirdo, you know that? I want to know how you got that information. I’ll call the police.”

“I wouldn’t call the police if I were you, Bob. There’s probably a warrant out on you for unpaid parking tickets by now.”

The man’s turn at the register had come. He glared as Loki stood nearby.

“Goddamned weirdo . . .”

The man ordered his coffee and a pastry, then offered his gold card. The cashier ran it, paused, and then frowned. “I’m sorry, sir. That card was declined. Do you have another one?”

“Declined? That’s impossible.”

The people in line groaned.

“Look, here . . .” He took out another credit card and handed it to her. Then he turned to face Loki. “Listen, I’m going to call the police if you don’t get away from me.”

“But I’m a law-abiding citizen, Bob. You should be careful who you point fingers at.”

The cashier grimaced. “Uh, I’m sorry, sir. This one has also been declined, but it says that I need to confiscate it. I’m sorry.”

“What? This is ridiculous!”

“That’s what it says, sir.”

He tried to grab it back from her, but she pulled away. “Sir! The card is not your property. It’s the card company’s property.”

Wahlen turned on Loki. “You did something to me, and I’m going to phone the police.” The man stepped out of line and started dialing, but another call was already coming in. “Hello? . . .” Wahlen listened. Then frowned, whispering tersely. “No . . . no. Hold it. I don’t owe money on a boat.” He hung up.

Loki walked behind him. “Welcome to hell, Robert. . . .”

The man hurried out, Loki watching him go.

Loki suddenly noticed another darknet operative staring at him near the window—her handle marked her as Vienna_2, an eighth-level Chemist with a four-star reputation on a base of seven-thirty. “What are you lookin’ at?”

“That was cruel, Loki, to use your power like that. You’re liable to ruin that man’s life with a Data Curse. And over what—cutting in line?”

“Fuck you.”

She reached into D-Space and rated him one star.

He flipped her off. “If I gave a damn what you thought of me, I’d kill myself.”

Just then he received an alert in his HUD display, and his mood changed considerably as he read the notification. It was a pleasant surprise. He turned to Vienna_2. “My apologies, Vienna. As a matter of fact, here . . .” He rated her five stars. “For being such a civic-minded little bitch. But my day just got a lot better. If you’ll excuse me, I have to catch up with an old friend.”

Chapter 21: // Exploit

Loki had always known it would only be a matter of time before he found The Major. The darknet grew more eyes every day, and the modern world left too much data in the wake of everyday transactions. If they couldn’t find The Major by his purchasing patterns, or the communities of interest in his captured telecom data, they still might catch his likeness in facial recognition systems they were putting up on bridges and highways or—more probably—in the chance detection of him by the ever-expanding network of darknet operatives. As the real-world economy continued to sink, more and more folks were joining the darknet.

Still, The Major was harder to track down than most; he worked through proxies and surrounded himself with endless numbers of expendable contractors who knew nothing of his whereabouts. He also constantly shifted from safe house to motel to hotel, switched identities—and used top-notch encryption in his communications.

But even the most stringent security precautions suffered from a fatal weakness: the human factor. This was doubly true for busy people, and there was little doubt that The Major was busy; planning a covert military campaign in the middle of the United States in coordination with a media propaganda campaign had to require long hours. The Major was probably operating on very little sleep.

Which is why Loki wasn’t surprised when a lone credit card charge for Anson Gregory Davis appeared on merchant bank networks. It was the same alias The Major had used in Georgia. The charge was for a block of rooms at a roadside motel in Hinton, Oklahoma—about a half-hour drive outside of Oklahoma City.

Loki quickly overlaid a map of Oklahoma darknet communities with that of reported acts of violence against them. Hinton looked like an easy commute to the front lines of this covert war. It was also close to several airports. By tapping nearby darknet operatives, Loki was able to confirm out-of-the-ordinary C-130 cargo plane activity at a nearby municipal strip. The tail numbers came up empty in the FAA database. Normally, running a scan for such numbers would have sent up alarm bells; government and quasi-government agencies typically put flags on covert records, so they’d know if anyone searched for them. But the Daemon had mirrored many such databases over the past two years.

The Major wouldn’t have any idea Loki was coming.

Darkness had fallen on the Red Rock Motel just south of town. Loki sat inside his racing trailer ops center, parked in a field two miles away. He began manipulating the D-Space objects that represented the constellation of machines at his command—both in the air and on the ground.

He’d been monitoring comings and goings at the motel from several low-speed drones orbiting at ten thousand feet. Pattern tracking software had quickly identified repetitious movement—the patrolling radius of several sentries. Each of the sentries was carrying a cell phone, so tracking them now wouldn’t be a problem. He also noticed two sets of sentries sitting in vehicles near the road, watching the approaches from the north and south.

In the field outside his parked trailer, Loki arrayed two dozen razorbacks, and he now took direct control of the lead bike, bringing its camera eyes up in his HUD display. It felt like an ultra-realistic game. He slaved the other bikes to his, and then sent them down the county road at a modest speed.

Using the aerial drones to surveil the roads, he’d timed the departure of the bikes so they didn’t encounter other vehicles. When they got within a mile of the motel he switched off their engines and had them run on their electrical drive—powered by the boron/epoxy flywheel in the saddle casing. In this low-power mode, razorbacks were very quiet, although they couldn’t run like this for very long.

He sent them out into the field west of the motel. In about ten minutes they had swung around and were silently approaching through the scattered trees and grass at the edge of the motel grounds.

That’s when he sent two distant AutoM8s accelerating down the county road—one coming from the north, the other from the south. They were unmanned Dodge Charger SRT8s. With gas prices now approaching seven bucks a gallon and unemployment still rising, brand-new eight-cylinder cars were sitting on distributor lots everywhere. The Daemon was doing cheap fleet leases and insuring them against their inevitable destruction. Cars were something America had an endless quantity of.

It was a shame that these were going to be destroyed. They looked fun.

As they came roaring toward their targets, Loki motioned with his gloved hand, setting loose a hundred foot-long steel spikes from a weather-balloon-like platform floating at eighty thousand feet several miles to the east. They were just steel spikes with motorized fletching linked to a radio receiver, but they could be guided like a smart bomb to their target—either directly by a darknet operative or automatically at saved targets (using a cell phone in someone’s pocket or a Bluetooth headset ID as a beacon). Darknet operatives had taken to calling the spikes “angel teeth,” probably because they came silently out of the heavens like divine retribution. Few weapons were as cheap, since they were easy to manufacture and were often reusable. Wind and rapid movement of the target were an issue—which was why Loki dropped a hundred of them.

If he timed this correctly, he’d be able to eliminate sentries and surround The Major in his hotel room before he was even aware of Loki’s presence.

Loki glanced up at the sky through the aluminum walls of his racing trailer. He could see the D-Space call-outs of the hundred spikes spreading out as they descended, moving to their assigned targets.

Loki throttled back the two AutoM8s so they didn’t strike first.

And then, with practiced skill, the plan came together rather nicely. Aerial surveillance showed eight sentries walking in pairs suddenly being struck down by a hail of silent steel spikes coming in at terminal velocity. It wasn’t windy, so most of the spikes struck their targets.

With another gesture Loki sent the waves of razorbacks in, still on quiet electrical power. He could see video from the lead bike, and guided it around to the back of the motel and toward the room that was his target.

Moments later the northern AutoM8 came roaring around a bend in the county road a quarter mile away. It didn’t follow the bend, but instead came roaring straight at a Chevy parked in the parking lot of a gas station—one containing two private military contractors. It struck broadside going ninety miles an hour.

Loki winced and covered his eyes in mock horror. From the air it looked spectacular. He tagged the video and dragged it to his feed so others could check it out later.

By the time he turned to the southern AutoM8, it had already plowed through a billboard and creamed the car containing the remaining sentries. To his disappointment there was no explosion. But no one was walking away from that crash.

Now he focused on his razorbacks, powering up their massive engines, extending their blades, and roaring in to the attack. They spread out and smashed through the doors of four motel rooms almost simultaneously. Loki had also left several razorbacks behind the hotel to pick up anyone climbing out rear windows.

He needn’t have bothered. Plainclothes military contractors had already grabbed their weapons and the moment the first razorback came through the door, several M249 machine guns opened up-tracer rounds bounding around the room as they deflected off the ceramic composite cowling of the lead razorback.

Loki always found this part exciting. It really did resemble the world’s most realistic video game. He almost felt like he was there—with military contractors screaming in rage as they unloaded assault rifles and machine guns on him from behind a sofa, an overturned dining table, and the nearby bed.

Loki noticed they had all donned tinted flash goggles—so his green laser blinders wouldn’t have any effect. Damn. The Major had equipped his group well. But where was he hiding?

Loki raised his gloved hand and starting clicking on individual targets. He had to clear away all these NPCs. The razorbacks surged forward to cut them to pieces. He winced because in one of the rooms a contractor fired a forty-millimeter grenade into the doorway, damaging the lead razorback, but also stunning everyone else in the room.

Idiot. Loki switched his POV to the next razorback in line and surged it forward into the mercenaries, cutting them down. It reminded him of a real-time strategy game where you had to keep moving the view around to juggle all your priorities. Soon enough, the mercs fell back reloading, and the razorbacks began to tear them apart. Their screams came over the audio feed. That’s when Loki noticed something interesting. . . .

In the background he could see a young, attractive woman bound, blindfolded, and gagged in the bathroom of the second motel room. She was nude and tied to a kitchen chair. She struggled like mad to break free amid all the gunfire and chaos.

Very interesting. Still, he needed to find The Major.

By now Loki was in mopping-up mode. The last of the mercenaries were tossing grenades or running for the rear bathroom windows. They’d all be dead or bleeding to death shortly. One thing he already knew—The Major wasn’t here. But these men were protecting something.

So Loki turned his attention again to the bathroom, switching POV to the nearest razorback. He drove it right up to the door, nudging it all the way open. What he saw was very nice, indeed. Just the way he liked a woman—young, nude, and tied up. She was cringing from the powerful engine throbbing next to her, and visibly sobbing behind her blindfold. Her breathing was labored as she tried to get enough air despite the duct tape covering her mouth. He could see a tattoo on her shoulder of a bosomy manga girl in a schoolgirl outfit, twin katanas raised.

Loki extended the razorback’s bloody sword and brought it near her throat. She sucked in air—trembling at what she sensed was so close. Perhaps she smelled the blood that coated the stainless steel.

A minute later, Loki guided his own Ducati Streetfighter motorcycle into the motel parking lot as panicked guests watched him from the safety of the woods on the far side of the road. Loki knew that none of their cell phones would work, and it didn’t look like anyone had the balls to go get their car with a squad of blood-soaked razorbacks standing about on hydraulic stands. He got off his bike and walked into the second motel room in full battle armor.

He glanced around to see the usual topographical maps, folders filled with printed spreadsheets, shattered laptops—and severed limbs, bloody torsos, and coiled intestines. The whole place was splattered with blood and thousands of shell casings littered the floor. There were bullet holes everywhere.

No wonder no one was in a hurry to come investigate.

Loki stepped through the bathroom door and took in the beauty of the young woman in person. She had short brunette hair and alabaster skin. Her hips and legs were beautifully proportioned. The nipples of her small, firm breasts were clearly defined. She had a couple more Japanese characters tattooed on her hip and right forearm.

Loki leaned up to her face, still in his battle helmet. “Tell me where The Major is.”

He reached up and tore off the duct tape covering her mouth. She sucked for air and immediately started sobbing.

“Where is The Major?”

“Why would I know?” Still she sobbed.

“But you’ve heard of him?”

She was still heaving. “Please untie me.”

“Where did you hear of him?”

“Who are you?”

“Never mind who I am.”

She looked unsure for a moment, but spoke through sobs.

“I’m a darknet member! Shadowcreek faction.” She fell into more weeping.

“Bullshit.”

“I can prove it! They have my equipment.”

“Where?”

“In a radio-proof bag. Silver. They have it here. I was bringing an artifact north.”

Loki eyed her body again. If she were telling the truth, it would change things. He couldn’t do just anything to a faction member. He leaned outside the bathroom and there by the nightstand he saw what looked to be a silvered tent bag, now spattered with blood droplets. He walked over to it and dumped its contents on the floor. Suddenly half a dozen D-Space call-outs appeared above various electronic gadgets—HUD glasses among them.

Damnit.

He grabbed the HUD glasses and reentered the bathroom. He took another look at her lithe body, then removed her blindfold. She was as pretty as he thought she might be. Eurasian.

She looked up at him, her eyes still red from crying. She recoiled at Loki’s fearsome appearance. He placed the glasses on her head, and in a moment a call-out appeared above her indicating her name was Siren_3, a third-level messenger with the Shadowcreek faction.

She stared at him—no doubt seeing Loki’s very powerful call-out.

“Thank you for saving me.”

“We’ll see how grateful you are later. We need to leave.”

“Untie me.”

With a flick of his wrist a razor sharp spur protruded from his riding outfit. He slit through the nylon rope binding her hands and then her ankles. She sighed and rubbed her rope-burned wrists.

“I want to leave here. I want to go home.” She was looking around for a towel or something to cover herself.

Loki looked at the pile of D-Space objects on the bed. One of them in particular stuck out at him. He picked it up. It was a silver ring with the name Signet of Spell Storing—Level Twenty-One hovering above it.

Holy shit. “Is this the object you were transporting?”

She obviously didn’t want to say.

“Siren. Is this what you were bringing north?”

She had wrapped a towel around herself and nodded.

“This is powerful. Whose is it?”

“It belonged to a sorcerer killed near Denver. How it got to Oklahoma, I don’t know. Our faction found it, and we’re contributing it to the fight in the Midwest.”

Loki took off his armored gauntlet. “Consider it contributed.” He slipped it on his finger. As he did he felt a sharp pain. “Ah!” He pulled it off and could see blood dripping off a needlelike protrusion.

And then it hit him—even as he was already staggering toward the doorway.

She looked at him. “What’s wrong?”

Loki was meandering like a drunken person, cursing and now nearly on his knees.

“You little bitch!”

“What is it?”

“A needle! You fucking cunt!” Loki raised his one gloved hand and suddenly a blinding flash of bolt-straight electricity leapt from his fingertip into Siren’s eye. Her hair stood on end briefly before her head caught flame and she dropped like a rag doll onto the floor—her entire body smoking and sizzling.

Loki slammed down onto the bloody, littered carpet and felt his mind losing connection with his body. Paralyzed, he stared at the bottom of a dead mercenary’s boot. Beyond that he could see the open doorway of the motel room—and a razorback standing guard. He tried to summon it. To control it. But he couldn’t move. He felt saliva flowing out of his open mouth.

In the distance somewhere he heard several deep booms—one after the other. With a final boom, the headlight assembly of the razorback in the doorway blasted apart. It fell out of sight.

Moments later, through a syrupy haze, he saw men walking through the motel room doorway. One of them leaned his face down next to his.

It was The Major. “You helped me win a bet, Loki.” He gestured to unseen witnesses. “They said you wouldn’t kill the girl. But I knew better.”

As Loki’s vision began to fade, The Major moved closer. “She was innocent, by the way. . . .”

Chapter 22: // Identity Theft

Loki hung by his wrists from a hook on the ceiling of a concrete cell. He was naked and had been from the moment he awoke. He’d spent most of the last day with a hood over his head, bags on his hands, chained into confinement positions. No one spoke to him. No one said a word. It was only in the past hour that they’d brought him here.

As Loki looked around, the doors and walls of this place indicated it was a stable. There were thick, wooden doors, split into two parts—like a Dutch door. That’s where the horse would stick his head out and feed. That’s how it worked, wasn’t it?

There were cameras and lights all around him in the room, creating a harsh glare. He was having difficulty breathing in this position, and the pain in his shoulders was almost unbearable. They’d also strapped some sort of muzzle over his mouth that had an almost stirrup-like piece of metal forced between his teeth. Sleep was impossible.

He felt the loss of the darknet like the death of a close friend. No, that wasn’t right because he’d never really had a close friend. He felt the loss of his connection to the darknet like the amputation of a limb. As though someone had castrated him. His electronic contact lenses were gone. His haptic vest was gone. His gloves, his bone mic—everything. Everything except the implant near his aorta—that remained. However, it was just a locator—he couldn’t interact with the darknet through it. But it was his only hope. The question was: how much time had elapsed?

After what seemed like an eternity of pain, he heard the slap of heavy bolts and looked up to see the big wooden door open on squealing hinges.

There before him was the devil himself—The Major—followed by several other men, some of whom were wheeling metal carts on rubberized wheels. The Major stood in the doorway for a moment to regard Loki.

Fuck you, too, motherfucker.

“So you thought your fanboy toys would destroy us, is that it? Do you think you’re the first group to come at us with novel tactics? It’s not about how many people you can kill—it’s about who runs out of people first. And I promise you, it will be you.”

The Major moved into the room. His entourage began to set up equipment and workspace behind him. The Major was wearing what looked to be surgical scrubs. Loki heard the clank of metal tools being arranged behind The Major. He felt a cold dread creeping up his spine. Fear gripped him, causing him to tremble despite his exhaustion.

The Major accepted rubber gloves passed to him by an Asian man wearing a face mask. The Major did not wear a mask. He grinned humorlessly as he pulled the rubber gloves on.

“Loki Stormbringer. That’s what you call yourself isn’t it? Fiftieth-level Sorcerer—or something like that? The most powerful darknet operative known. Your fingerprints bring up nothing in government records. Was that the first thing you did, Loki—destroy your old identity? No footprints from birth. No fingerprints from child abduction prevention programs. No DNA samples from prior arrests. It’s like Loki is the real you—as though you wanted to pretend the white-trash loser you were before never existed. But I’m going to show you that you do exist.”

The Major walked right up to Loki’s face. “I’ve been amused by the debate in America over whether torture is effective.” He paced a ways away and picked up a pair of nasty-looking clippers from a metal table that had been set up. “Of course it’s effective.”

The Major returned holding a tool shielded by his hand. “But not at producing information. Torture isn’t about extracting information.”

He brought the sinister-looking clippers up to Loki’s face. “Torture is about control. You let me torture a thousand people, and I can keep five million working obediently with their heads down. The more innocent the victims, the better. And after they’re broken and maimed, you release them so that everyone can see what awaits those who resist.”

Suddenly the hook on the ceiling started to lower, and in a moment Loki’s feet touched the ground. It was the first time in hours that the pressure on his breathing and shoulders had eased. But before he could relish the relief, strong hands grabbed his wrists, and he was forced down onto his knees. Two powerfully built men forced his wrists into clamps that were bolted to the floor. They shoved pieces of two-by-four under his palms to prevent him from closing his hand into a fist, and even though he struggled, Loki soon found himself with his arms splayed out before him. The Major was kneeling right alongside him.

“There is no debate about torture in here, my friend. So you see, there’s nothing you can tell me that will stop the pain. You’re no longer Loki, the sorcerer. The only thing you are is a billboard—on which I’m going to write my message: this is what happens to people who join the darknet. . . .”

At which point The Major clamped the tip of Loki’s index finger in the metal clippers, and though Loki struggled to pull away, the steel jaws snipped off his index finger up to the second knuckle.

The pain shot through him like needles moving through his bloodstream. He tasted blood in his mouth from where he had bit his tongue.

The agony was followed by still further searing pain as the Asian doctor in a lab coat applied a red-hot filament to the stump, cauterizing the wound and sending up a sickening sizzling sound.

Loki thrashed around, pulling a muscle in his back, but it was only the beginning. The Major cut off another fingertip, and another, and another. The doctor cauterized each wound before the next digit was clipped off. Loki felt his consciousness ebbing, but they waved smelling salts under his nose.

The Major was in his face again. “How will the Daemon know you if you have no biometric markers left?”

The unbearable agony continued as the spawn of Satan himself snipped off the tips of all eight of Loki’s fingers. And finally the most painful ones of all—his thumbs.

In his mind Loki was begging for death. To use his powerful intellect to will his heart to stop. To die and let the universe take him.

But his world was nothing but a white-hot wall of pain.

And yet it got worse. Before he had a chance to realize what was happening, he felt his left eyelid pried open and he saw a pair of surgical scissors coming for his eyeball as they pulled it out of the orbital socket. He tried to scream—tried to turn away, but they’d clamped his head into place. With a dagger of pain, he lost all sight in his left eye and saw through his tear-filled right eye as they dropped it into a metal pan.

The next few moments brought utter blindness as the horrific event was repeated. Loki prayed—actually prayed—for death, yet it did not come. He heard horrible groaning, and realized that he was the source. He was like an animal being butchered. He no longer wished to live.

He heard the devil’s voice in his ear one more time. “And so that the Daemon cannot recognize you by your voice . . .”

No. No!

Loki felt the stirrup-like gag they’d fastened over his mouth expand with the force of a car jack—opening his mouth and keeping it open no matter what he did. He felt the sharp pinch of a pair of pliers pulling his tongue forward roughly and then the searing cut that bored right into the center of his mind. Loki’s tongue was cut clean from his mouth.

As he died within himself, trapped in the broken shell of his body, Loki felt the shell’s head pulled back and the devil’s voice whisper again.

“The Daemon no longer knows you. And I have all the biometric markers I need to become you. I will be Loki Stormbringer. Your identity is my reward. The only reason I’ll keep you alive is so that you can pass the occasional fMRI test for me.”

It was the final nail. Loki felt his soul guttering, flickering, and though he prayed with every fiber of his being for death, it did not come. He existed, just as The Major said he would, as a vessel that spoke of torment.

Oscar Strickland’s interest in medicine arose from his many blissful years hunting white-tailed deer in the Colorado Rockies. Cleaning and dressing carcasses beneath the aspens awakened in his young mind a fascination with all living things. This ultimately inspired him to join a volunteer rescue squad and become an EMT—which exposed him to the miracle of human anatomy as he helped to pry victims out of crumpled wreckage on mountain roads. And it was here where he discovered his connection to pain. Namely the infliction of it.

The discovery was accidental—a careless push of a gurney that struck the edge of an ambulance door. But then he began adding a few extra bumps to a spinal patient’s transport, or not quite administering a painkiller. At first it was the thrill of indulging a taboo. But then it was a need—a need to see others suffer. He endured several years of private shame, feeling that he was a horrible person.

When he joined the army, it was with the hope that they would give him the discipline he needed to conquer his sick compulsion. But on the contrary, in the army he found that pain—and the infliction of it—had a long and storied history. It was, in fact, the history of the world. No great nation or empire could exist without it. It was in some ways the guardian of all that was good. Fear of pain kept men honest.

And as Strickland’s career advanced from the army to covert government operations and then on to private security operations, he held his head high. For his was a noble profession.

It also paid well—especially given the current economic crisis. Strickland’s contract would do more than care for his wife and kids in Wyoming. It would also care for his wife and kids in Costa Rica.

But on this posting, he was a second stringer. It was easy work. He looked up from his Sudoku puzzle as his lone patient groaned pitiably. The man was strapped to an old bed among several dozen others in the infirmary of an old Catholic school. Strickland looked up to see a cross-shaped clean spot on an otherwise dirty wall above him. The diocese apparently had some difficulty with lawsuits and had to shut down the school. He had no idea who the maimed young man was—only that he was an enemy combatant who needed to be kept alive. The way they’d cut him, Strickland didn’t see how they’d ever be able to get anything more out of him.

Unprofessional.

Still, the groaning was nice background music. He focused his lone lamp more fully on the puzzle and continued.

But then he heard the telltale sound of a security detail approaching over the squeaky wooden floors. He put the puzzle in the empty desk drawer and sat up straight—ostensibly to observe his patient suffering nearby in the darkened ward.

However, what came around the corner surprised him. It wasn’t the Korr Military Solutions officers who’d brought him out here, or any of the site security detail—it was four men dressed in outlandish battle armor, like something from a sci-fi convention. The faceplates of their helmets shimmered like the surface of a soap bubble, and they had odd, high-tech-looking plastic/metal rifles slung on straps with suppressors at their tips. They weren’t weapons Strickland had seen before—and he had seen just about everything. Probably elite special operators. Private industry always had the best gear. . . .

Strickland stood up. “Gentlemen.”

That’s when he noticed their gun barrels were smoking. The odor of cordite wafted over him.

One of them raised a gauntleted hand and motioned for the outliers to walk around the edges of the desk—approaching Strickland from two different directions.

“Whoa, what’s going on?”

The voice came over a radio speaker. “Nothing, sir. Please put these on.” He reached forward, extending a pair of expensive-looking eyeglasses.

“Hold . . . what?”

The two soldiers on either side grabbed him roughly by the arms. Their grip was crushing—almost supernaturally strong.

Again came the radio voice from that inscrutable mirrored faceplate in front of him. “I said, put these on.”

“Okay. For chrissake. What’s going on?” The twin guards relaxed their grip enough for him to take the glasses—heavy things—and put them on.

As he did so, the view in front of him suddenly changed to reveal a sixth person in the room—a ghostly apparition that was kneeling next to Strickland’s lone patient among the rows of beds. He could hear it whispering.

“Oh my god . . .”

As Strickland spoke, the apparition turned and stood. It then walked calmly and methodically toward him. It was unaccountably the translucent apparition of . . . apparently of an SS officer with full trench coat, monocle, and peaked hat.

Strickland tried to back up, he was so startled, but the guards held him fast.

The ghostly Nazi came right up to Strickland’s terrified face. “Now ve can see each other. Do you know of me, mein Herr?”

“Do I know of you? I don’t even know what you are!”

“It was a yes or no qvestion. And yet it vas seemingly beyont you.” The ghostly Nazi turned to the real-world soldiers. “Place ze cap on him.”

Strickland struggled as one of the men approached with what looked like a water polo helmet. Wires led from it to a controller. They began to strap it to his head.

“Hold it! I’ll tell you what you want! You don’t have to do this!”

The Nazi pulled out a long black cigarette filter and lit a cigarette. He took a long drag. “It tastes so much better at zis resolution.” He turned to Strickland and gestured at his headwear. “Ze cap on your head uses near infrared to measure blood acktifity in your brain. In short—it tells me if you’re lying.”

“I just work here. I was taking care of him.” Strickland could already see a real-life, human medical team moving over to his patient—half a dozen men and women holding IVs and wheeling a stretcher.

The SS officer laughed a unique, wicked laugh. “I haf no idea vat you’re saying . . . but it sounds terrified.” Then he focused his spectral gaze on Strickland. “Ver you ze one who injured mein Freund?”

“No! I swear it!”

The Nazi paused a moment and then nodded—before asking, “Do you know ver I can find ze perpetrators?”

“No.”

He spoke more insistently. “Do you know ver I can find zem!”

“No! I don’t know!”

There was a pause. The Nazi nodded again. “Vill zey be coming back to zis place?”

Strickland waited as long as he dared—then nodded. “Yes.”

“Gut, gut, mein Herr! Ve are just about finished here.” He walked right up to Strickland, blowing virtual smoke in his face—causing Strickland to cough out of instinct. “Tell me . . . vould you haf enjoyed harming mein Freund—if you had ze chance?”

Strickland just stared. His mouth was suddenly dry as he looked into the ghostly eyes only inches from his own. They were insanely real—as was the gleam in them when the Nazi smiled.

“Zat’s vat I thought. . . .” He turned to the soldiers. “Secure him, gentlemen....”

A soldier pulled the cap off his head.

“Hold it! Hold it!” Strickland looked to the faceplate of the soldier to his right, then to his left. “It’s wrong! The machine is wrong!”

The soldiers grabbed his wrists and slammed his hands against the wall with incredible force. They seemed to have artificial musculature in their suits that he was helpless to resist.

They placed steel restraints over his wrists and then tapped the wall looking for studs—finally using a power tool to bolt the restraints in place. They repeated the process for his struggling feet.

“No! Stop!”

Meanwhile, the spectral Nazi just stood observing, smoking his cigarette on its long filter.

The soldiers finally stood. “Done, sir!”

“Gut. Leave us.”

The soldiers exchanged looks and left in a hurry. As they did, a deep rumbling noise came to Strickland’s ears. It was like a slow, rolling thunder. Through the wide infirmary doorway came a hellish-looking motorcycle covered in blades and mystical sigils and glyphs. Another one followed it.

“Oh my god . . .”

They pulled up alongside the apparition and slammed down hydraulic kickstands. Both of them extended fiendish sword arms with a ring of steel.

“No!”

The Nazi removed his trench coat and hung it on the extended blade of a nearby bike. Then he rolled up his sleeves. He moved toward Strickland along with the second motorcycle. “I do so enjoy my vork. . . .”