Daemon (40 page)

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

ALL SPAMMERS WILL DIE

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

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

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

She seemed unsure how to respond.

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

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

Sebeck nodded.

“I don’t know what to do, Pete.”

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

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

“Neither can I.”

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

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

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

“So I’m told.”

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

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

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

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

She was crying silently into her hands.

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

She just wept.

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

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

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

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

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

She was crying harder now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Understood. If you’ll excuse me…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Complicated.”

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

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

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

Philips looked down.
Damn.

“Did they really kill him?”

“Yes. They did.”

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

“It couldn’t be helped, Jon.”

“Of course it could be helped”

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

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

“It is exactly the issue.”

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

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

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

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

Ross still stared into space.

“Jon!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philips sighed. “Less than informative.”

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

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

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

“And did you?”

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

She smiled slightly at him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There’s a first time for everything.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t be so sure.”

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

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

“
Really?
Well, let’s hear it….”

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

This last comment made her fold her arms impatiently.

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

“All right, I got your point.”

“Can’t do it?”

“Seventy-three-point-two-seven-six.”

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

“That’s enough.”

“You don’t scare me, Nat.”

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

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