Daniel Suarez - Freedom (TM)

Philips sighed in exasperation—but then stopped cold. On the wall next to her a message was spelled out in brilliant red laser light:

Your room is bugged.

The butter knife she was planning on using as a screwdriver dropped from her hand with a clang. The glowing message changed to read:

Open the service door and do not speak.

She turned around.

There at the rear service door stood a man dressed in a black Nomex flight suit, body armor, and utility vest. A balaclava covered his head and advanced-looking night vision goggles covered his eyes. In his gloved hands he held a laser pointing device aimed at Philips’s dining room wall.

She recovered from the shock and walked to the service door. After a moment’s hesitation she opened it.

The intruder ducked past her and closed the door, holding a gloved finger to his lips.

He pulled a wandlike device from his utility harness and started scanning the walls, light fixtures, and furniture with it.

As she watched, Philips listened to the news playing in the background, continuing its litany of financial and social woes. Philips turned up the volume.

Anji Anderson was on screen as part of a panel with other pundits. She spoke authoritatively for someone who had a few short years ago been a lifestyles reporter. “People can’t simply blame others for their plight. They need to lift themselves up by their bootstraps, but it appears that some people don’t want to do that. They want to take from others in pursuit of what they call” —air quotes—“ ‘ fairness.’ ”

The stranger meanwhile was teasing a small bugging device out of her dining room lamp with tweezers. He held it up for Philips to see, then placed it in one of several chambers in a small metal box.

He continued scanning for bugs as Philips followed him.

It took nearly twenty minutes, but by the time he was done, he had located eight bugs in all—from the bar to the bathroom to the bedroom. The stranger then sat down on a changing bench at the foot of the bed and removed his hood and goggles. Jon Ross sighed in relief and smiled at her. “There we go.”

“Jon! My god . . .” She rushed to hold his face in her hands. There was that slight crinkle at the corner of his eyes when he smiled that she missed so much. Before she had time to think about it, she was kissing him passionately. After a moment she pulled back to look at him.

He gazed back, and then pulled her close, kissing her harder, longer, and with a strength that almost squeezed the breath from her.

He eventually relaxed his hold. “I thought I’d lost you.”

“How on earth did you find me?”

He tugged on the silver chain around her neck, coming up with the amulet he’d created for her.

She scowled. “You gave me a tracking device? How romantic . . .”

“It’s more an amulet of protection.”

“Protection from what?”

“From Loki—and people like him. I didn’t want his machines harming you.”

She studied the amulet and then turned back to him. Philips pointed to the metal box on the nearby table. “You’re sure they can’t hear us?”

Ross nodded. “Bug Vault. It produces generic sounds of human habitation—footsteps, television, stuff like that. It’ll make them think their bugs are still in place.”

“How the hell did you get past ranch security? This place is surrounded by the best surveillance system money can buy.”

“Yeah, they’re using the latest technology—a Beholder Unified Surveillance System designed by Haverford Systems. State of the art.”

She looked puzzled.

“Let’s just say it has some flaws built in, compliments of the Chinese people.”

She sat down next to him. “I was worried I’d never see you again.” Philips looked at him gravely. “But why would you take such a stupid risk to come here?”

“I came to get you, Nat.”

“What made you think I needed rescuing? This is where I need to be. They’re about to launch Operation Exorcist, and unless I can stop them, they’ll take control of the Daemon.”

He contemplated her words. “The Weyburn Labs people have expanded on the work you and I did at Building Twenty-Nine. They’re starting to crack their way into the Daemon’s darknet. I don’t know how they did it, but they’ve started spoofing people and creating darknet objects. They used it to capture Pete Sebeck, and he’s here on the ranch now.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“From Pete Sebeck.”

“Peter Sebeck is alive ?”

“Yeah, look, it’s a long story, but Sobol rescued Sebeck from his execution and sent him on a quest to justify humanity’s freedom. The Major just kidnapped Sebeck and brought him here. There’s about to be a serious showdown, Nat, and I need to get you out of here.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Loki Stormbringer is headed this way with an army of machines. There are two dozen darknet factions on his heels. Once Loki’s army is gathered, this whole place will be a war zone.”

“ The Loki?” She sat on the arm of a nearby sofa and shook her head. “I can’t leave, Jon.”

“Why not? This isn’t your—”

“Look, you have no idea how happy I am to see you, and I can’t tell you how much it touches me that you risked your life to rescue me. But I can’t go. The plutocrats are planning to execute some sort of cyber warfare attack. Physically storming this ranch won’t stop it. I need to figure out what they’re really up to and stop them. Luckily, I have some clues.” She brought him over to a huge stack of documents on a nearby desk. “They’ve given me tech documentation on Operation Exorcist—but something about it doesn’t make sense.”

“Operation Exorcist?”

“Yes. Remember the Destroy function of the Daemon—the command that destroys all data in a Daemon-infected corporation? Well, they’ve come up with a blocker.”

“How the hell did—?”

“They figured out that if they use a formatstring hack they could inject executable code through the tax ID function parameter. It puts the Destroy function into an infinite loop so that it doesn’t return a value.”

“Meaning the Destroy command won’t be issued . . . making the Daemon harmless to them.”

She nodded.

“Can they really inject it into all the Daemon-infected networks?”

“The Ragnorok module is a Web API. They can invoke the function from anywhere.”

“Jesus . . .”

“They could do it with a script . They’re using the Daemon’s own high availability against it.”

Ross gestured to the piles of technical documents marked “Top Secret.” “But you said something’s not adding up.”

“Yes. I’ve spent the last forty-eight hours examining all this, and it just looks too rosy.”

“A ruse?”

She nodded. “Jon, they’re planning on launching their Daemon-blocker attack from thousands of machines, and then they’re going to send in police and paramilitary strike teams to seize tens of thousands of data centers around the world—all at once. It would easily be the largest covert operation launched in the history of mankind—by several orders of magnitude—and I don’t see how an international operation this size could be kept secret.”

“You mean from the Daemon?”

“I mean from anyone.”

She picked up a sheaf of documents. “So how am I supposed to believe this? It’s not credible.”

“So Operation Exorcist is a lie.”

“Or we don’t know what the real Operation Exorcist is. They’ve basically put me under house arrest here to read through propaganda—so when things go to hell, I can attest to some congressional subcommittee how diligently Weyburn Labs and Korr were working toward defeating the Daemon.”