“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 workstatio
n, 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.”
“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.
Chapter 41:// The New Social Contract
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 flick
er 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.