Daemon (33 page)

“He’s doing more than that. He’s pursuing the Daemon, and imploring us to do the same. Which leads us once again to the back door in Sobol’s software. Because it was Jon Ross who helped me find it.”

“That’s convenient for him.”

“I thought so, too. That’s why I asked for a face-to-face meeting.”

The NSA chief nodded in apparent recollection.

The FBI analyst looked surprised. “And he agreed?”

“After a fashion.” Philips nodded to the back of the room, and the lights dimmed again.

The screen filled with an animated 3-D environment. It was a narrow, medieval-looking city street, with buildings leaning over it in irregular rows. Few in attendance recognized it because none of them had the time or inclination to play online computer games. A title in plain Arial font briefly appeared superimposed over the image:

Session #489: Elianburg, Duchy of Prendall

Philips narrated. “What you’re looking at is Sobol’s game
The Gate.
This is an online role-playing game—meaning that tens of thousands of users access game maps from central servers. The game covers a large area of virtual space. Jon Ross requested a meeting at this specific location; at the corner of Queensland Boulevard and Hovarth Alley in Elianburg.”

“A meeting in an online game?”

“Yes. But since it’s difficult to arrest an avatar, I decided to go into God Mode.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I cheated; I enlisted the aid of the CyberStorm system administrators to place the intersection under surveillance with virtual cameras.”

“You set up a stake-out in fantasyland?”

A chuckle swept through the room.

Philips nodded. “Something like that. The goal was to monitor every character that entered this intersection up to the appointed meeting time. It’s a busy intersection—in the middle of the market where players purchase equipment—and I wanted the maximum amount of time to trace Ross.”

One of the uniformed military officers spoke up. “Like tracing a phone call?”

“Similar, yes. Each player has a screen name hovering over their character’s head that must be unique for that server cluster. We wrote a script that scanned for suspicious player names on the servers. It autoharvested IP addresses for likely suspects and traced them back to their ISP for follow-up. We also established a manual system where we could select any player name, and the CyberStorm techs would look up that player’s originating IP address.”

“Why bother with IP address? Doesn’t CyberStorm have a record of each player’s billing information?”

“Yes, but it seemed likely that Ross would steal or borrow an account. By using his IP address to locate the Internet Service Provider, and then contacting the ISP for the physical address of the connection, we were more likely to actually find him.” She looked around the room for emphasis. “We scrambled airborne strike teams in several U.S. cities in preparation for this meeting in the hopes that Ross would be hiding in a major metropolitan area.”

The FBI analyst couldn’t resist. “I gather from the fact that Ross is still at large that this plan did not succeed.”

A voice in the darkness: “Can we continue, please?”

Philips nodded.

The screen suddenly came to life. Animated 3-D people moved through the scene. It was eerie how realistically the people moved—although only half of them had glowing names floating over their heads.

“The characters moving around without names are NPCs, non-player characters—they are computer controlled. Only human players have names.”

The perspective of the screen changed. It was a first-person view from Philips’s character as she moved through the crowd.

“We conducted this session from our offices in Crypto. The game permits players with VOIP capability to speak directly to nearby players over a voice channel. Ross requested that we have such a hookup. I am controlling this character in the game, and it is my voice you will hear talking with him. I had a
MUTE
button on my headset, and you will also hear me issuing instructions to my team. Ross did not tell me in advance the name of his character, but he said I would be able to pick him out of the crowd. Which is why we put the auto-trace script in place. But Ross took a page out of Sobol’s playbook.”

The screen view changed as Philips’s character turned this way and that, checking out the shoppers in the market. Then the POV moved toward a Nubian female 3-D character wearing a black leather corset with a plunging neckline. Something resembling a French-cut steel thong wrapped her shapely hips. She was a hentai cover girl. As the frame moved closer, the Nubian woman turned, revealing what was unmistakably a computer-generated version of Philips’s face.

Mild amusement spread through the audience in the meeting room. Philips ignored it.

On-screen the glowing name over the Nubian avatar read:
Cipher.
Philips’s recorded voice came in over the speakers:

Philips: Get me an IP for the screen name “Cipher.” That’s spelled c-i-p-h-e-r.

NSA Tech: Got it, Doctor. Looking up ISP…

The screen perspective moved right up to
Cipher
, and stopped. The scantily clad warrior princess faced the screen. A male voice came in over the speakers:

Ross: Good evening, Doctor.

Philips: Mr. Ross. Apparently you can’t resist identity theft. How did you upload my likeness to this game?

Ross: I didn’t upload anything. Players can edit the geometry of their avatars. I sculpted this one to resemble you.

Philips: I didn’t realize you studied my appearance so closely.

Ross: How could I forget you? Besides, I knew you’d try to identify my account in advance of this meeting, but your automated forensics tools don’t know what you look like, Doctor. Your physical appearance is a graphical encryption that the human mind is uniquely qualified to decode.

Philips: That doesn’t make it any less unsettling to have a conversation with myself as a transsexual lingerie model.

Ross: I find it just as uncomfortable being seen with you.

Philips: How’s that?

Ross: Well, you’ve got the default skin of a generic warrior, and nobody keeps the default skin. You are the fantasy world equivalent of a Fed. I recognized you a mile away.

Philips: Jon, why did you call me here?

Ross: To prove to you that I’m innocent.

Philips: And how do you intend to do that?

Ross: By showing you one of the back doors in this game.

Philips: We’ve been through every line of the source code, Jon. There are no back doors.

Ross: None here, true.

Ross’s female warrior gestured dramatically, as if performing a spell. In a moment a magical portal appeared in the street. A wandering player character tried to walk into it but bounced off. After a few tries, he got bored and walked off.

Philips: What’s this?

Ross: A Type II gate. It will only permit those I choose to enter, and I just typed your character’s name in. What does “FANX” mean, anyway?

Philips: I’ll let you puzzle it out.

Ross: Please step through the portal.

NSA Tech: Doctor, we’ve got a physical address, but it’s in Helsingborg, Sweden.

Philips: [MUTE ON] Notify local authorities and Interpol. [MUTE OFF] Where’s this lead to?

Ross: What does it matter? Look, I hope efforts to trace my physical location are not distracting you. I’m running several layers of proxies, Dr. Philips. By the time you track them all down, this will be long over. Just pay attention, please. This is important.

Philips: Jon, I’m not—

Ross: It’s okay, Doctor. That’s your job. Just step through the gate, please.

The perspective of the screen changed as Philips moved her character through the gate. It was a swirling vortex of blue lines, and then suddenly the view changed to a darkened masonry tunnel filled to a depth of a couple feet with black water. The area was lit by the swirling lights of the nearby magical portal. Rats scurried away along ledges, and the water’s surface rippled with the dazzling lights.

Someone in the dark muttered. “Nice algorithm…”

The NSA chief craned his neck. “Shhh!”

On-screen, Ross’s hentai warrior princess waded out into the water and stood in front of Philips’s character.

Philips: What is this place?

Ross: It’s a sewer beneath the Temple District. Not accessible without a magical portal.

Philips: What did you want to show me, Jon?

Ross: Look straight ahead. What do you see? You may need to move side to side to notice it.

The view on-screen changed as Philips focused straight ahead. There in the semidarkness of the slime-covered wall was the outline of an oxidized bronze door—nearly the same color as the surrounding stones.

Philips: A door.

Ross: Not just any door. A back door.

Philips: It’s a literal door?

Ross: You were expecting a code snippet? Maybe something that accepted anonymous connections at a certain port address or carried out actions on the user’s computer with their rights? But you didn’t find that. You didn’t find it because you shouldn’t have been looking for a back door leading IN. You should have been looking for a back door leading OUT.

Philips: But how would that permit Sobol to control a user’s machine?

Ross: It isn’t their machine he’s trying to control.

Philips: You’re saying he was trying to control the user?

Ross: Why don’t you step through the portal and find out?

Philips: Wait a minute. We still should have found this in the code.

Ross: Why? Were you looking for a graphic of a door that when used as an object in the game environment loads a game map? Do you know how many times that innocuous function call appears in the source code? The code itself is benign—it’s the map it loads that isn’t. Because the map in question is not on the CyberStorm servers, and I’ll bet you didn’t look farther than the IP addresses of the map links.

Philips: [a sigh of disgust] You mean he’s using a redirect.

Ross: It will look local in the map database, but when you try to load it, it redirects to an external IP address—which logs the user off the current game and establishes a new connection on an alien server. In short: this portal leads to a darknet.

Philips: A darknet. An encrypted virtual network.

Ross: Correct. Except that this is a graphical darknet.

Philips: How do you know all this?

Ross: Like I said—step through the portal. However, I will leave you now. Your colleagues are quite skilled and have probably located my zombie in Sweden, maybe even my zombie in Germany—and I really must be going. Please remember that I am innocent, Natalie—if I may call you Natalie. I’d really like to tell you the whole story over dinner sometime.

Philips: I don’t date felons, Jon—especially cross-dressing felons.

Ross: Till we meet again, Doctor…

At that, Ross’s avatar disappeared—as did his magical gate—leaving her in relative darkness. There was just the faint glow emanating from the door.

NSA Tech: He’s off-line, Doctor.

Philips: We’re still recording?

NSA Tech: Affirmative.

On-screen, Philips approached the door and activated it. It creaked open, the noise echoing down the sewer tunnel. Animated cobwebs stretched. A dialog box appeared reading “Loading Map…”

NSA Tech: Connection severed to CyberStorm server. We’re establishing a connection to an IP address assigned to a domain in…South Korea.

Philips: Are the packets really routing there?

NSA Tech: Stand by.

Philips: Get us a fix as soon as possible.

In a few moments the map was loaded. Philips’s character moved out into a medieval hall, with a gallery on either side above and pennants hanging down bearing heraldic symbols. Set into the wall straight ahead was a statue of a man, disquietingly similar to Sobol, in flowing robes, hands outstretched. Virtual water glimmered like a fountain as it rolled down each cheek from his eyes. Mineral stains marked the path. A perpetual fountain of tears.

A black-robed figure stood before the statue like a sentinel blocking her way. Its face was lost in shadow.

NSA Tech: It’s fingering us, Doctor. I didn’t spoof our IP address.

Philips: It’s okay, Chris, I didn’t ask you to.

The hooded figure snapped alert suddenly, then raised a finger and pointed at her.

Guardian: You don’t belong here!

Lightning arced from that finger in her general direction, and the Blue Screen of Death filled their view.

Then everything went black.

NSA Tech: We are down! Down, down, down!

P
ete Sebeck stared at a dimple in the concrete of his cell wall. It was the only imperfection in an unrelenting sameness. It was his secret—a place upon which to center his mind as the world turned unseen around him.

It might have been night outside, but it was never dark in here. There was nothing even to mark the passage of time, and if there was, they would erase it. He was watched constantly. A fluorescent fixture buzzed light down on him from overhead. Surveillance cameras in mirrored enclosures on two ceiling corners recorded his every movement. A microphone his every utterance. He was alone, but never alone. As a high-profile prisoner, no expense had been spared to monitor him 24/7—guarding against the possibility that he might harm himself before the government could mete out justice.

As Sebeck lay staring at the wall, his memories were still raw nerves. Each turn of his mind made him wince.

Worth losing everything for.
That’s what he used to tell himself about Cheryl Lanthrop. She was beautiful, but there was more to it than that. It was what that reflected about him. That he was worthy of attracting such a successful, confident person. Why did he think she would want him? What part of him nursed such fantasies? That was the sad truth of it. He was ripe for programming. He was ready to suspend disbelief to live that life. He hadn’t wanted to know the truth—not about her and definitely not about himself.

They said Lanthrop was dead now. If she had only confided in him. Perhaps he would have done the right thing. To his shame, he wasn’t certain.

The trial had been a fast-moving media circus. He was shocked at how incriminating the evidence against him was. In hindsight he felt it should have been obvious that he was being set up—Lanthrop urging him to secrecy. And then there were the things he had no knowledge of that crucified him. The files on his computer. Lists and corporate documents, all digitally shredded—but incompletely. A passport under the fictitious name Michael Corvus. The travels of that fictitious name, establishing offshore bank accounts and corporations. The credit card purchases and corporate officerships. The offshore payments and records of phone calls to Pavlos and Singh. The e-mail accounts detailing a convenient, media-friendly conspiracy.

Everyone believed that Sebeck was responsible for the deaths of all those people—and of Aaron Larson. He recalled the several times Larson sought guidance from him. Sebeck had refused the role of mentor. Being a father figure to anyone was the last thing he wanted.

Sebeck could hardly blame the public for hating him. The evidence was wide and deep. The clincher was that Sebeck did, indeed, have an affair with Cheryl Lanthrop. What they did together seemed merely kinky and strange at the time—but when combined with the mountain of evidence against him, it revealed a person quite different from the public face of Detective Sergeant Peter Sebeck, decorated officer and dedicated family man. So different that he had begun to question it himself.

His wife, Laura, surprised him, though. He thought she would be glad to be rid of him.

Strange. After all this time, he couldn’t recall whether she goaded him into marriage or whether he had volunteered as a means of doing the right thing by her. It never even occurred to him at the time that she might not want to marry him. The pregnancy had been something that happened to him—at least in his own mind. Perhaps she had married him because she also thought that was the right thing to do.

After his arrest, when everyone abandoned him, she was there for him. The press pilloried her as a guileless moron, but she knew him. Tears welled in Sebeck’s eyes remembering it. She knew he could not have done these things, even when he doubted it himself. She had kept him sane, or near enough to sane.

They were just two people who got lost somewhere early in life.

Chris, their son, had come to see Sebeck only once and stared at the floor almost the entire time. When he did look up, there was a glare of utter malevolence through the glass that stung Sebeck worse than anything the federal prosecutor could say. It still stung.

Sebeck curled up on his cot around a pain so deep that he longed for it all to end. There was no clearing this up—even if proof of his innocence were found. His name had been too thoroughly dragged through the mud. Some taint would always remain. Some doubt would always exist in the minds of those around him. Death would be welcome, if it weren’t for the fact that almost everyone he cared about considered him evil. That his passing would be seen as justice. He was thankful his parents hadn’t lived to see this day.

But his deepest despair came from the knowledge that no one believed that the Daemon existed. From the outset it was clear that both the prosecution and the defense would be arguing not about the Daemon, but about whether Sebeck had been involved in the conspiracy to defraud Sobol’s estate and murder federal officers. The judge refused to hear testimony about the Daemon—largely because there was no evidence it existed. But it had to exist. Sebeck was convinced of it.

They were appealing his conviction to a higher federal court, but his lawyer didn’t hold out much hope. The government was clearly making an example out of Sebeck. His trial had been fast-tracked in response to public outrage, and failing the introduction of new evidence, there was little chance his guilty verdicts would be overturned on appeal.

Sebeck tried to remember a time when he was last truly happy. He had to think back all the way to high school, sitting on the roof of his neighbor’s garage with his buddies. That was the night before he found out Laura was pregnant. But was that true? Now the idea of coming home and seeing Chris and Laura laughing at the kitchen table was a treasured memory. The laughter stopped as he arrived, but that wasn’t their fault. It was his fault. He had purposefully distanced himself from them. Without this disaster, would Sebeck ever have realized what he had?

Sebeck’s mind turned to that voice on the phone at Sobol’s funeral. Experts proved it wasn’t Sobol, but Sebeck realized that was the whole point of it. It had to
not
be Sobol, and provably so. Nonetheless, that voice had actually warned him about what was to come.

I must destroy you.

He contemplated it emptily. Without hope or purpose.

But there was something else the voice had said. Sebeck tried hard to remember, buried as it was under months of pretrial testimony, interrogations, and hard evidence. But then it came to him.

They will require a sacrifice, Sergeant
.

And so they had. Sebeck sat up and stared into nothingness, straining to recall the exact words of the voice.

Before you die…invoke the Daemon.

Somewhere there was a surveillance tape that showed Sebeck silently nodding to himself in the stillness of his empty cell. Because he now realized what he had to do.