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!
Chapter 29:// Memory
Pete 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.
Chapter 30:// Offering
A white van raised a cloud of dust as it approached from a distance, wavering like a phantom in the summer heat. On either side of the dirt road, California grasslands stretched brown and dry, rolling up into the barren hills at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. Every fold and furrow of the land was shadowed in the afternoon sun, like the wrinkles of some timeworn face. The topography was naked and enormously wide. Forty miles of nothing stretched to the horizon, starkly beautiful to anyone with a reliable car.
The van inched across the gargantuan landscape, progressing toward a ring of asphalt set in the bottom of a forgotten canyon. The van slowed as it reached the track, then turned,
revealing the car-carrying trailer it pulled behind it. A black Lincoln Town Car sat on the bed.
The van stopped, and a moment later the doors swung open, disgorging Kurt Voelker on the passenger side. He wearily stretched. Tingit Khan and Rob McCruder exited the far side of the van and did likewise. They were all in their early twenties, but while Voelker looked dressed for a Christian Fellowship meeting—with khakis and a button-down shirt—Khan and McCruder bore the piercings, tats, and severe hair that once indicated disaffected youth but that now only meant they weren’t interviewing yet.
Voelker checked his GPS unit. He looked to his two companions. “We’re in the box.”
“It’s about fucking time.” Khan held up his hand to shade his face. His eyes scanned the terrain. “What is this? A racetrack?”
“Pretty damned small for a racetrack.”
Voelker spoke from the far side of the van. “I’m guessing a test track.”
“It’s not banked or anything.” Khan held up his other hand to block the sun. “What’s it feel like? A hundred degrees out here?”
McCruder checked his watch. “A hundred and six.”
“You have a thermometer on your watch?”
“Yeah. So what?”
Khan looked through the van windows to Voelker on the other side. “Kurt. Rob has a thermometer on his watch.”
“So?”
“Well, at some point, the thing you add to the watch is more significant than the watch. I’d argue he’s wearing a thermometer with a clock on it.”
McCruder scowled; he was a veteran of Khan’s observations. “Fuck off.”
“Why do you need to know the precise temperature where you are? It’s not like a weather report; it’s too fucking late—you’re already here.”
Voelker held up a hand. “Khan, get the gear out of the van. I’ll un-chain the car.”
Khan and McCruder started pulling hard-shell Pelican cases from the van. McCruder just shook his head sadly. “You’re the one who asked how hot it was.”
Fifteen minutes later Voelker extended the antenna on a sizeable handheld remote controller. Khan and McCruder sat nearby on the empty hard-shell containers in front of a folding table. The table was strewn with cables, high-gain antennas, and two ruggedized laptops with shades shielding their screens from the sunlight. A half-meter satellite dish pointed skyward on a tripod placed in the grass nearby.
Voelker looked to McCruder, who was peering at his laptop’s LCD screen. McCruder finally nodded. “Anytime, Kurt.”
Voelker pointed the controller directly at the Lincoln on the trailer bed. The car looked identical to the endless number of black fleet Town Cars with smoked glass coursing through downtown streets and airports nationwide—replete with a TCP number on its back bumper and a vanity plate reading LIVRY47. Voelker pressed a button on the remote. The car’s V8 engine started. He slid a lever to put it in gear and then began backing the car slowly off the trailer ramps.
“I bet he rolls it,” McCruder snickered.
“You’d better hope he doesn’t.”
Voelker didn’t even look. “Guys, I’m working here. You wanna shut your pie holes for two seconds?”
In a few moments he had deftly backed the car onto the dirt road; then he shifted it into drive and eased it out onto the asphalt of the small oval racetrack nearby. The circuit was perhaps two hundred feet in diameter. An oddity, really. Nothing you could actually race on. It was crisscrossed with mysterious grooves set at odd angles.
“This good?” Voelker turned to his companions.
They shrugged.
Khan took a lollipop out of his mouth. “How the hell are we supposed to know? We’re in the box. Park it where it is.”
Voelker killed the engine. He collapsed the controller’s antenna. “Anything?”
Both men shook their heads.
He walked up. “I guess we wait.”
The late afternoon sun was sinking toward the hills. They had been waiting and sweating for a couple of hours in the brutal heat, listening to the wind chimes dangling from the eaves of a nearby utility shed. The chimes sounded all too infrequently.
Khan mopped his face with the front of his black T-shirt. “Goddamn. It is Africa hot.”
McCruder upended a soda can. Nothing came out. “I thought you Indians thrived in this weather, Khan.”
“Fuck you. I grew up in Portland, moron.”
Voelker wiped the salty sweat from his eyes. He blinked from the sting. “Guys, I swear, I’ll take a tire iron to you both if you don’t quit your bitching.”
They heard a blip-blip sound from the nearby laptop. They snapped to attention.
Khan leaned over McCruder’s shoulder to look at the LCD screen.
McCruder looked up to Voelker. “It’s here.”
All three turned expectantly to the asphalt.
Suddenly the car engine roared to life. It revved several times. The wheels turned left, then right.
They all watched transfixed.
Khan grinned. “It’s alive! Bu-wahahahah!”
Suddenly the car’s engine raced, and it laid down rubber, accelerating madly along the asphalt track.
“Jesus!” Voelker turned to the other two. “What the hell is it doing?”
“Don’t know, but look at it go, man.”
The Lincoln was weaving side to side, then it suddenly slammed on the brakes and screeched to a halt. It peeled out suddenly again and went into a power slide, whipping its tail around. It roared forward again, building up speed on the straightaway, then wrenched its wheels into another slide, and came out facing the other direction—still accelerating into a bootlegger reverse.
McCruder smiled. “It’s testing the properties of the car.”
Khan and Voelker leaned in, while still watching the screeching display of stunt driving.
McCruder spoke louder. “It’s confirming the specs. Braking distance, turning radius—all that stuff. It’s making sure we followed instructions.”
Voelker pointed a finger at McCruder. “It damn well better meet the spec.”
Without turning, McCruder extended his closed fist, then operated his thumb like a crank to extend his middle finger.
Suddenly the car stopped its acrobatic display and sat motionless on the pavement. Oily rubber smoke still wafted across the track.
All three men stared at it. It was half a football field away.
A Bullwinkle the Moose voice came over the speakers of McCruder’s laptop. “Duhhh, you have mail.”
McCruder checked.
While McCruder was busy, Khan looked at his own laptop screen. He grinned at Voelker. “We no longer have a connection to the car, Kurt. It changed the access codes.”
Voelker didn’t flinch. “It’s part of the spec, Khan.”
McCruder glanced up at his companions. “Let me confirm this.” After a few frenzied moments of clicking, he smiled and turned to them again. “Fifty-six thousand dollars have been deposited into the corporate account, and we have an order for six more AutoM8s. The Daemon is pleased with our offering.”
They whooped and high-fived.
“What will that total?” Khan was beaming.
Voelker thought for a second. “Three hundred thousand and change.” He looked to McCruder. “Does it say where the cars will be coming from?”
McCruder shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Corporate leases, probably. Not our problem. Looks like the Haas has downloaded more plans, too.”
“Excellent.” Voelker smiled at them both. “Congratulations, gentlemen.”
Suddenly the distant car roared into action again—laying down more rubber. They all turned. It was accelerating toward them.
“It’s gonna whack us!”
They ran for the van, but the Town Car raced past their table and out along the dirt road. It accelerated and kept going.
They gathered their breath and watched it recede into the distance.
Khan turned to them. “We should follow it. You
know, back to its lair.”
McCruder narrowed his eyes. “What, are you fucking insane?”
Voelker nodded. “He’s right. We released it into the wild. Those were the instructions. Following it is just a good way to get killed.”
Khan watched the cloud of dust moving toward the distant hills. “You think we’re the only ones doing this?”
Voelker watched, too, shielding his eyes against the sun. “If the number of unemployed electrical engineers is any indication, I’d say no.”
Chapter 31:// Red Queen Hypothesis
Garrett Lindhurst marched purposefully toward the corner office on the fifty-first floor of Leland Equity Group’s palatial world headquarters. He clenched a rolled magazine in his hand like a baton in a slow-motion relay race and looked visibly worried. Worried about systems.
As chief information officer, Lindhurst held dominion over the systems that delivered the lifeblood of Leland Equity Group: real-time financial data. That data was delivered instantaneously to every corner of the organization and to every client. Every account and every dollar in every branch office passed through Lindhurst’s networks and data systems. Every e-mail passed through his servers. He had thirty regional VPs as direct reports and oversaw an empire of some five hundred IT employees worldwide.
And yet, Leland Equity Group was one of those multibillion-dollar companies that existed on the periphery of public awareness. Their unremarkable logo could be found in the skyline of any major city in North America, Europe, or Asia, and even if most people had no idea what the company did, they assumed it must be doing something important.
The reality was that, with eighty billion dollars in assets under management, the decisions made by Leland MBAs ruled the daily lives of two hundred million Third World people.
Following a (more or less) Darwinian economic model, Leland identified and quantified promising resource development opportunities in the far corners of the world. They had since formed private equity partnerships with local leaders for strip mining in Papua New Guinea, water privatization in Ecuador, marble quarrying in China, oil drilling in Nigeria, and pipeline construction in Myanmar. Anywhere local public and/or private leaders existed with abundant resources, a surfeit of rivals, and a deficit in capital, Leland could be found. And while these projects were theoretically beneficial, the benefits were best perceived at a distance of several thousand miles.