Daemon

  Sebeck nodded and motioned for Ross to drive on through.

  They entered the funeral home through the rear door. After a brief discussion, one of the federal agents at the door peeled off to escort them to the chapel.

  As they moved through the rear hallways, the acrid smell of embalming chemicals and cleansers assaulted them. Men and women in suits were everywhere, going through files and computers in side offices and interviewing a man who appeared to be a mortician in a lab coat.

  Soon they passed through a double set of automated doors that let out onto an ornate hallway with marble tile floors. They could hear funerary music playing ahead, and another doorway brought them through a side entrance into a churchlike room with a podium, rows of pews, mountains of flowers, and a raised dais whereupon sat a bronze coffin on a pedestal draped in white satin. The lid of the coffin was partitioned for viewings, and the upper portion was raised—although the body within could not be seen from this vantage point.

  Everyone in the place looked like an FBI agent—including the dozen or so people sitting in the nearly empty pews up front. A crime scene photographer was busy taking photos of the room from every angle—although it wasn’t apparent what crime was being committed just now. Apparently the Feds didn’t want to wait.

  Ross gestured to the coffin. “Behold the devil himself.”

  The FBI agent escorting them excused himself to resume his post, leaving Sebeck and Ross standing in the doorway relatively alone. The sonorous tones of funeral Muzak were punctuated by the occasional squawking of police radios.

  Sebeck glanced around the room. It was remarkably unremarkable. Tapestries depicting generic salvation—lots of light beams coming from on high—hung down between the unexceptional stained glass windows. A stylized statue of Jesus stood at the head of the chapel, set into an alcove. It was eroded in a modern art sort of way to render it theologically inoffensive and appeared to be fashioned out of cheap, imitation-stone resin—stuff that would last until the Second Coming. Its hands were outstretched like an Australian-rules football referee signaling a goal, with robes hanging down.

  The room was modern and provided no sense of history or permanence. The floor sounded hollow under the heels, and on the whole the room reminded him more of a library annex than a chapel. It was sterile and unfeeling, except for the banks of flowers—all white lilies—which through their sheer numbers answered the unasked question: How many white lilies can you cram onto this stage? This many.

  An easel to the left of the coffin held a foam-core poster of Matthew Sobol, in younger and saner days. He looked like an accountant or an insurance broker. His hair was short and dusty brown. He was smiling good-naturedly, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he would kill fifteen people—most of them law officers.

  An eternal flame—which someone had spitefully extinguished or never lit—stood next to the easel on a trestle table. Apparently the authorities had a different eternal flame in mind for Sobol.

  Scattered around the room in groups of two and three were what looked to be FBI agents. Sebeck felt sure they were trying to figure out a way to declare a funeral illegal. Certainly Sebeck felt like putting Sobol’s body through a mulcher.

  Ross tapped his shoulder. “I want to see him.”

  Sebeck nodded, and they both stepped out across the pews. All eyes turned on them. Carpeting absorbed most of the sound of their footfalls, but they still seemed deafening in the stillness of this place. Ross nodded to serious-looking men who watched them pass. The men stared back.

  Sebeck led Ross to the dais steps. They ascended slowly, and as they did, the mortal remains of Matthew Sobol came into view from beyond the rim of the coffin.

  Sebeck came here filled with hate. He despised this diseased freak who had slain Deputy Larson and all the others. He was wholly unprepared for his reaction upon first sight of Sobol’s corpse.

  Sobol was practically a skeleton already. It was shocking how the cancer had wasted him away. His disease was readily apparent from the massive scar tracing along the left side of his bald head. It looked like they had opened his skull to attempt surgical resection. The scar was so long it descended to the orbital socket of Sobol’s left eye—where a black patch indicated that his eye had been removed. No other effort had been made to make Sobol presentable. His cheeks were sunken and pale, his neck lost in the spaciousness of a stiff white shirt collar and a Victorian jacket and tie. His dead hands clutched a golden cross against his chest. Most alarming of all was Sobol’s one remaining eye—oddly open and staring milky blue at the ceiling. It was a window to madness and terror.

  Nothing had prepared Sebeck for this. A seed of pity took root in him. Sobol had endured the tortures of the damned. Surely Sebeck wanted Sobol to burn in Hell—but he’d never considered Sobol had been living in Hell for some time already.

  Ross croaked, “Jesus.”

  A woman spoke from behind them. “What did you expect to find, Mr. Ross?”

  Ross and Sebeck spun around to regard a young black woman sitting in the first pew. She was neither beautiful nor unattractive. She wore an immaculate dark blue pantsuit, but she did not have the telltale earphone of the Feds. A white guy sat in the pew behind her, leaning forward to join her symbolically. He had buzz-cut blond hair and wore a dark plaid sports jacket and a black sweater. He didn’t look uncomfortable in the jacket, but somehow the jacket appeared uncomfortable with him.

  Ross looked to Sebeck and then back to the woman. “Do I know you?”

  “No. But I know you. You’re Jon Frederick Ross, son of Harold and Ivana. Graduated with honors 1999 from the University of Illinois at Urbana with a master’s in computer science. President and CEO of Cyberon Systems, Inc., a one-man Delaware Service Corporation founded in 2003.” She reached into her jacket pocket and produced a badge folder. “Natalie Philips. National Security Agency.”

  “Oh shit.” Ross looked to the nearby Jesus for mercy.

  Sebeck stepped in. “I’m trying to keep Jon’s name out of the news. He’s worried that Sobol will come after him.”

  “Interesting.” She stood up and approached the dais. “Egotistical, but interesting.”

  She was lean and fit—probably about thirty years old. Sebeck couldn’t help but notice her body and cursed his libido.

  She gestured to the coffin. “I’m surprised you’d come here if you thought Sobol was after you. He might have packed the coffin with C-four.”

  Ross stepped away from the casket warily.

  She laughed. “Relax. We T-rayed it and swept the whole chapel for computers and wireless transmitters. Came up empty.” She walked up and stood looking over Sobol’s remains. “Apparently Sobol anticipated his unpopularity and left behind a program to carry out his funeral arrangements.”

  Sebeck frowned. “The Daemon did this?”

  “It ordered the deluxe package from the funeral home’s Web page—but it never had direct control over these objects. Just-in-time inventory; the coffin was built by Bates Corporation yesterday and shipped overnight by truck. We tailed it the whole way. The lilies arrived this morning. This is the mortuary equivalent of a number two combo.”

  Ross extended his hand. “Agent Philips.” She shook it.

  Sebeck extended his hand, too. “Detective—“

  “—Sergeant Peter Sebeck,” she finished for him. “My condolences on the deaths of your colleagues. It must be very hard to see this psycho in the flesh.”

  Sebeck nodded. “What’s left of him.” He looked down at the body. “I didn’t expect him to look so…”

  “Pitiful?”

  “Yeah.”

  Philips viewed Sobol’s remains, too. She gestured to the cross. “They say he found religion in the end.”

  A cold laugh came out of Sebeck. “I thought crosses burned vampires.”

  Ross changed the subject. “What’s the NSA doing up here, Agent Philips? Isn’t the big investigation down in Thousand Oaks?”

  “I’m not a field
agent. I’m a steganalyst.”

  Ross nodded, then answered Sebeck’s quizzical look. “She finds hidden messages. Terrorists and drug traffickers sometimes hide data inside JPEGs and other computer files.”

  “I won’t ask why you know that. My own parents don’t understand what I do.”

  “So, what brings a steganalyst to Sobol’s funeral?”

  “Symbolism. Sobol’s games are packed with symbols—and I’m not convinced all of them are harmless.”

  “What’s that got to do with his funeral?”

  “What’s a funeral but a symbolic ritual? He’s sending a message. Maybe to us, maybe to someone else.”

  “Perhaps. One thing’s for sure, it got us all here.”

  She nodded grimly. “Yes, but it looks like the Feds have scared off anyone else.”

  Ross leaned in close. “You’re trying to identify the Daemon’s components, aren’t you?”

  The buzz-cut guy bristled in the pews. “Dr. Philips, remember your directive.”

  Ross stepped back. “Who’s he?”

  “Hard to say. I just call him The Major.”

  The Major didn’t respond. He just stared.

  Philips stepped into Ross’s line of sight. “Mr. Ross, you played three hundred forty-seven hours of The Gate in the last year. That makes you the only CyberStorm game expert cleared by the FBI. You’re on my list of people to talk to. As long as you’re here, I’ve got a lot of questions about the MMORPG subculture.”

  “Three hundred forty-seven hours? That’s embarrassing.”

  Sebeck smirked. “You need to get a life, Jon.”

  Philips pressed on. “What’s your level of knowledge concerning the Ego AI and CyberStorm 3-D graphics engines?”

  “You think Sobol’s hidden components of the Daemon in his games?”

  “Think texture maps—“

  “Ahh…there’ll be thousands of them.”

  “There are. That’s not including custom maps created by individual users with the map editor.”

  “But why would Sobol bother? He could just as easily hide scripting files on some forgotten server. There’s no reason to hide anything inside his games.”

  “Sobol’s AI engine and CyberStorm’s graphics codecs power a dozen popular games. You can understand why I’m pursuing this angle. They encompass tens of millions of installs worldwide.”

  “Have you interviewed the CyberStorm programmers?”

  “We polygraphed them all. None knew anything about Sobol’s plan—although plenty of them wrote code for purposes they didn’t understand.”

  “That’s no surprise. It’s project management.”

  “Proximity card reader logs showed that Pavlos and Singh were in and out of Sobol’s office wing all during the last year. Their workstations were physically replaced last month, and their hard-drive images contained nothing unusual.”

  “The lack of incriminating evidence is suspicious?”

  “I’m saying they were working long hours on something together—something that’s missing. And they were game developers. Some of the best in the business.”

  Ross considered this. “So that’s why you think his games contain hidden data?”

  She nodded. “The MMORPG world is a male-dominated subculture. I need a guide.”

  “A guide?”

  “I need to see these games as a skilled player sees them—and I can’t trust some twelve-year-old kid or a CyberStorm employee. I need secrecy.”

  “You don’t want the Daemon to know what you’re doing.”

  “Look, you’re an IT professional. You know how dangerous this situation is. We don’t know what the Daemon’s up to, and we don’t know how big it is.”

  The Major stood up. “Dr. Philips.”

  She turned and stabbed a finger in his direction. “If you’re going to censor my conversations this entire damned trip, Major, then I’m heading back to Maryland. I, of all people, am acutely aware of the national security implications of this discussion, and I am having it because it is necessary. Do you read me?”

  “I have my orders, Doctor.”

  “Well, then we have a situation—because my orders are to stop the Daemon, and apparently your orders are to stop me.”

  The Major stood impassively. She eyed him a bit longer, then turned back to Ross. “I need to derive the Daemon’s topology in order to assess the threat.”

  It took Ross a moment to recover from her sudden outburst toward The Major. “You need its master plan.“

  “Yes. I’m developing a timeline of its creation so that we can correlate it with Sobol’s real-world financial and travel activities. If I can reconstruct the development timeline, I might be able to infer its topology.”

  Sebeck interjected. “Topology?”

  They both looked at him.

  Philips sighed. “The physical or logical layout of a networked system.”

  Philips then looked back at Ross and continued. “But there are bigger worries.” She cast an eye toward The Major, then pulled Ross aside, conferring with him privately. This close, Agent Philips had a slight flowery scent that was surprisingly feminine. Ross saw the sharp intellect in her eyes, the intensity. A slight hot flash spread over his skin as he relished this intimacy.

  Philips was oblivious. “Huge amounts of money flowed from Sobol’s bank accounts immediately after his death. ACH wire transfers totaling tens of millions of dollars went offshore. He also took out large lines of credit in the months before his death. This money, too, went overseas the day he died. The Feds are still tracing it. Picture the combination of a widely distributed, compartmentalized application with high failover tolerance—perhaps thousands of copies of each component, able to reconstitute itself if any x-percentage of its components are destroyed.”

  Ross was nodding as she talked. God, this woman was razor sharp. He found his normal resistance to all thoughts not his own falling away.

  She continued, “Now combine an application like that—a widely distributed entity that never dies—with tens of millions of dollars and the ability to purchase goods and services. It’s answerable to no one and has no fear of punishment.”

  “My God. It’s a corporation.”

  “Bingo.”

  Sebeck’s cell phone twittered. He welcomed the intrusion. He was just holding hats in this conversation. “Excuse me.” Sebeck turned and walked away as he pulled his phone out. He glanced at the number on the LCD panel. The caller was unknown. He answered it. “Sebeck.”

  A familiar, rasping voice came to his ear. “Forgive my appearance, Sergeant.”

  Sebeck sucked in a breath and gazed at Sobol’s corpse lying in state six feet away. He glanced at the FBI and NSA agents standing around the chapel. Ross and Agent Philips were still locked in an animated technobabble conversation nearby.

  Sebeck moved right up to the coffin and stared down at Sobol’s corpse. “Is hell a toll call for you, Sobol?”

  Sebeck stood waiting. There was a moment’s delay.

  The voice returned, weak and wavering. “Detective Sebeck. It’s too late.” The sound of labored breathing and wheezing came over the line. “There is no stopping my Daemon now.”

  Sebeck looked again toward Philips and Ross, but Sobol was already talking.

  “I’m sorry, but I must destroy you. They will require a sacrifice, Sergeant.” Sobol wheezed. “It’s necessary. Maybe before it’s over, you’ll understand. I don’t know if I’m right. I don’t know anymore.”

  Sebeck looked down at Sobol’s tortured remains. The insane eye matched the voice of madness.

  Sobol’s voice hissed urgently. “Before you die…invoke the Daemon. Do it in the months before your death. Say this…exactly this: ‘I, Peter Sebeck, accept the Daemon.’” Sobol gasped for air. “Either way…you must die.”

  The line went dead.

  Sebeck folded his phone and stared hard at Sobol’s corpse for a few moments. Then he spoke loudly. “Agent Philips.”

  Phili
ps and Ross stopped talking.

  Sebeck turned to face them. “That call I just received. It was Sobol.”

  Ross and Philips exchanged looks. He had their attention now.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I was listening carefully.”

  “What did he say?” Philips motioned to The Major, who came sprinting up. He took the dais steps in a leap. They all converged on Sebeck’s location at the coffin.

  “He sounded just like that.” Sebeck pointed at the corpse. “He was wheezing and semi-coherent. He kept telling me that I was going to die. That it was necessary that I die.”

  “What else did he say? Try to remember it, word-for-word.”

  Sebeck thought on it. “He said I needed to ‘invoke’ the Daemon. That I needed to ‘accept’ it. He said I had to speak directly to it in the months before my death. But that either way I was going to die.”

  Philips looked grim.

  Sebeck pondered the situation. “You think it’s more mind games?”

  She turned to The Major. “Find out if those wiretaps on Detective Sebeck’s phone and computer lines have gone through. If they haven’t, fast-track them.”

  The Major nodded and immediately bolted down the center aisle and out the front doors with a bang.

  Sebeck watched the man leave, then turned to Philips. “You think Sobol will call again?”

  “Maybe. He’s most likely manipulating you.”

  “He definitely wants me to do something.”

  Philips stared. “Don’t. In fact, we’ll prevent the press from communicating with you or any members of your family.”

  Ross raised his eyebrows at that. “That’s to prevent him from inadvertently triggering a new Daemon event?”

  “Precisely. There’s no doubt it’s reading the news. So you’d be advised to stay out of the headlines.”

  “You’re quarantining me?”

  “Only for a little while. At least until we can reliably monitor Sobol’s communications. You’ll be very useful in that regard, Sergeant.”

  Two suited agents double-timed it up the dais steps. One whispered in Philips’s ear. Her face displayed momentary shock before she regained her composure. She glanced at Sebeck and Ross. “I have to go, gentlemen. Sobol is up to something.” She and the agents scurried down the steps of the dais. Several other darkly suited men converged on her from far-flung corners of the chapel.