Daniel Suarez - Daemon

“Word of mouth. I’m good at what I do. You look young to be a sergeant of detectives.”

Sebeck grimaced. “I got an early start.” They came up on the entrance ramp to the 101 freeway, but Sebeck headed across the bridge to the far side of town.

“Sergeant, you just missed the freeway ramp.”

“I need to stop off somewhere first. Listen, can I ask you some computer questions?”

Ross looked uncertain. “What about?”

“That virus at Alcyone. Everybody there was looking to you for help. So, you know a lot about viruses?”

“I already told all this to the FBI. I’ve been cleared, remember?”

Sebeck waved his hand in acknowledgment. “I know, I know. But our in-house guy doesn’t have the chops to deal with much more than teen hackers and drug dealers.”

“Sergeant, the FBI has a cyber crime unit to deal with this. They don’t need my help.”

“It’s not the FBI that’s asking.”

Ross looked to Sebeck. “Ah…I see.” He raised his hands to represent headlines. “Local cop cracks case.”

Sebeck looked darkly at Ross. “I’m just trying to stop a killer.”

“To be frank, Sergeant, you’re going to have a difficult time finding whoever killed those men. This is essentially a computer forensics case, and the FBI is better equipped for that.”

Sebeck took a chance. “What if I told you I know who the killer is?”

Ross tensed visibly.

“No, not you.”

“That’s why the FBI let me go?”

Sebeck nodded. “What if I also told you that the killer was dead at the time of the murders?”

Ross looked puzzled for a moment—but then a look of realization came over his face. “No way.”

“That’s what I need to know. Is it possible?”

“Holy shit, you’re serious.”

“The Feds believe it. But I don’t. I think the real killer is over at CyberStorm and that he’s framing this dead guy for the murders.”

“It’s Matthew Sobol, isn’t it?”

Sebeck cast a surprised look at Ross. “Where the hell did you hear that?”

Ross gestured to his phone. “The news said Sobol died this week from brain cancer. He’s your dead killer, isn’t he, Sergeant?”

Sebeck realized he might be in trouble. “Whatever you learn here doesn’t go to the media, your friends—anyone. If I even think you leaked this, I’ll charge you with interfering with a police investigation. Do you understand?”

“Your secret’s safe with me. But if I were you, I’d be more concerned about Sobol. If that’s who’s behind this, then there’s more going on than just these murders.”

“How come everyone but me has heard of this Sobol guy?”

“I’m a hard-core gamer, Sergeant. Sobol was a legend. He helped build the online gaming industry.”

“Legend or not, how could a dead man have known when to trigger his traps? He’d have to know in advance the exact day he’d be dead.”

“Not necessarily.” Ross held up his phone again. “He could be reading the news.”

“Don’t talk science fiction crap.“

“Sergeant, it’s a trivial matter for a computer program to monitor Web site content. It’s just text. All Sobol would have to do is create a program to scan news sites for specific phrases—like his obituary, or stories about the deaths of certain programmers. A simple key word search.”

Sebeck considered this. “That virus you stopped over at Alcyone Insurance. Could that be the program that was waiting for Sobol’s death?”

“Maybe. And it sent packets to thousands of IP addresses.”

“Packets containing what?”

“Probably commands.”

“To thousands of addresses?”

Ross nodded grimly.

“Jesus. Would the Feds know this?”

“Oh yeah. The type of program I stopped at Alcyone is fairly common in computing. It’s known as a daemon . It runs in the background waiting for some event to take place. Usually it’s something simple like a request to print. In this case it would be news of Sobol’s death. Then it activates.”

“And triggers the killings.”

Ross nodded. “It’s possible.”

“Just one problem. Sobol couldn’t call me on the phone. I got a phone call this morning from someone pretending to be an FBI agent. They told me to check my e-mail—and that’s what led me to Sobol. So someone else is coordinating this.”

Ross was shaking his head. “It could have been VOIP—voice over Internet protocol.”

Sebeck glared at him. “Have I stepped through a fucking time machine? Was I asleep for the last decade or something?”

“VOIP went mainstream in the corporate world years ago. It saves on phone bills by directing voice communications over Internet servers instead of long-distance telephone lines.”

“So you’re telling me this Daemon program can talk to people over the phone?”

“Playing a prerecorded message over a phone line is easy. The Daemon could manage the sequence and schedule the calls based on what it reads in the news.”

“So it’s not actually a computer talking? Someone must have recorded the message?”

“Probably. Although there are programs that can convert text streams into pretty convincing synthetic voices. Call any airline reservation desk—you’ll be talking to a computer pretty quick. It’s used to announce flight schedules, credit card balances, things like that.”

They drove on for a few moments in silence.

Sebeck sighed. “Well, at least you got the Alcyone server. That’ll put a kink in the killer’s plans—whether he’s alive or dead.”

Ross didn’t look comforted. “You really should play one of Sobol’s games, Sergeant.”

Over the Rhine was the only first-person shooter to which Brian Gragg had ever become addicted. He’d played and mastered a score of PC action games. All of them had incredible 3-D graphics, volumetric smoke, realistic physics engines, thirty-two-voice sound, vast levels, and multi-player Internet features. But OTR was different: Its AI was scary smart.

Where enemies in other games poured through doorways, wave after wave, only to be slaughtered, OTR’s AI engine deployed Nazi soldiers realistically. In a house-to-house search, groups of three or four would peel off from the main group, kicking in doors. If you shot one or two or even three, the officer in the street would blow his whistle and shout orders. Then you’d better haul ass because dozens of soldiers would surround your cottage. They wouldn’t storm the place like mindless automatons. Instead, they’d take cover behind fences, walls, and vehicles, and they’d shout in German for you to come out. When you didn’t (and, of course, why would you?) they’d start tossing grenades through the windows or set fire to the house. If you tried to look out a window to see what they were doing, a sniper might cap you.

But what was even more fascinating to Gragg was that they didn’t do it the same way each time. There were smart and dumb soldiers, and varying qualities of Nazi officers. If you holed up in a particularly defensible spot, they might call in a Stug to batter the place into rubble—or worse yet, a Flamenwerfer. And if the siege went on for a while, the Gestapo would arrive to take charge of the situation, and that meant only one thing: SS Oberstleutnant Heinrich Boerner, an adversary so wily and twisted, this fictional character had become a cause célèbre at the E3 gaming convention. There was a thirty-foot color banner of his face hanging over CyberStorm Entertainment’s booth. He was literally the poster boy for evil.

OTR ’s AI cemented the impression that you were fighting against a rational opponent—and a challenging one. Gragg appreciated the endless hours of distraction this afforded, particularly since his real-life incident with the Filipinos.