Daemon (41 page)

“Goddamn you.” She moved for the door.

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

Philips stopped again.

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

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

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

He waved it away. “I know.”

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

“Good night, Dr. Philips.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“POLICE! FREEZE!”

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

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

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

Women started screaming.

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

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

But the first agent he shot was getting up.

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

Click-clack
. He blasted him again.

Click-clack
. Then again.

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

Braaappp!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The agent nodded and pointed to the second boy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The boy robotically nodded his head, visibly trembling.

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

The boy didn’t relax one bit.

“I’m sober now.”

The boy had his face buried in the seat cushion.

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

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

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

The boy stared with his one exposed eye, unflinching.

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

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

The boy curled up tighter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The boy froze.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“
Grammar
school?”

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

“How’d it go in São Paulo?”

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

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

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

“You’ll see in a few minutes.”

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

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

“Daemon Task Force headquarters.”

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

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

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

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

“A knife.”

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

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

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

Merritt sighed and turned to Ross questioningly.

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

“Christ…” Merritt signed with the stylus.

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

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

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

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

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

Merritt eyed the cameras suspiciously.

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

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

“Thanks.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t laugh. The real ones can die.”

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

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

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

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

“Goddamned sharking smacktard, die!”

“Fireball his ass!”

“Cover me!”

“Friggin’ munchkin!”

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

Merritt snapped alert. “What’s this?”

“It’s the R&D lab.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How’d you guys wind up here?”

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

“Forty-nine million. An odd number.”

“Fifty million triggers congressional oversight.”

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

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

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

Merritt pointed at the device. “What now?”

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

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

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

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

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

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