Daniel Suarez - Daemon

Ross came up alongside and studied the winch housing. “If running the winch doesn’t do anything, why bother to send a spoofed e-mail to have someone run it?”

“It is strange. The FBI lab will probably take it apart.” Sebeck pulled out a pad and pen. He started writing down brand, model, and serial numbers for the winch. “Any writing on that side?”

Ross shook his head.

In a moment they were done, and Sebeck put his pad away. “I want to take another look at the murder scene while I’m here. It’ll only be a few minutes.” They returned to the cruiser. Before getting back into the car, Sebeck pulled the remote control from the ziplock bag and pointed it at the gate. He clicked it.

The gate squeaked once, then started swinging open. Another, familiar sound came to Sebeck’s ears, and he cocked his head to listen closely. Ross’s hand slapped across his chest, startling him. He glared at Ross, who was pointing. Sebeck followed his finger.

The winch was running, pulling the steel cable taut.

It took the final clang of the gate stopping to rouse them from their stunned silence. The cable was as taut as a piano wire.

Sebeck looked at Ross.

Ross pointed at the remote. “Whose remote is that?”

Sebeck looked down at it. Then nodded appreciatively. “It belonged to Joseph Pavlos. The victim.”

Ross nodded back. “That’s about right. Otherwise, the cable might be discovered too early, and the murder attempt would fail.”

Sebeck pondered it. “But then why send someone out here to run the winch if the key didn’t do anything? Like you said: why fake the work order?”

They both thought about it for a few moments.

Ross turned to Sebeck again. “What was the first thing you did after finding out the handyman ran the winch?”

“We detained him and requested a search warrant for the property management office.”

“And how much time did you spend waiting for the warrant and searching the office?”

Sebeck grimaced. “Long enough for the second victim to die.”

“So maybe it was a distraction to give him time to kill the second programmer.”

“Then the bigger question is: why was it so important to kill these programmers?”

Ross frowned.

Sebeck watched him closely. “What?”

Ross hesitated. “The Egyptian pharaohs slew the workers who built their pyramids—”

“The programmers knew too much.”

“Maybe. Maybe Sobol had some help to code this thing. He was dying of cancer, after all.”

“But why on earth would they help him? Pavlos rode his dirt bike out here all the time. He’d have to notice this was designed to kill him.”

Ross leaned back against the hood of the car. “I’m guessing they didn’t design this part. Sobol probably did that. They probably coded other parts. Maybe parts we haven’t seen yet.”

They stood there a moment in silence, weighing the significance of this.

Ross was the first to break the silence. “It’s interesting that this Singh guy died trying to get into a server farm.”

“Why’s that interesting?”

“Well, a server farm is basically a big data storage vault. Racks and racks of servers.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So, if I were a programmer trying to get to a secret cache of data—or to physically stop some machine from running—perhaps I’d head for that server farm.”

Sebeck leaned onto the car hood next to Ross.

“Okay, so Singh, who probably works closely with Pavlos, hears about Pavlos’s death and makes a beeline for the server farm. Sobol anticipated this and kills him when he tries to enter. So you think there’s something in the server farm?”

“Probably not anymore. It sounds like Sobol found whatever Singh put there. So what was Singh working on at CyberStorm? Do you know?”

Sebeck strained to remember the name of Singh’s project. “Singh was lead programmer for a game called… Gate ?”

“The Gate?”

“Yeah, The Gate.”

Ross let out a pained groan.

“What now?”

“Do you know the story line for The Gate, Sergeant?”

Sebeck gave Ross a look. Clearly he did not.

“It’s about a cult opening a gate to the Abyss and releasing a demon that lays waste to the world.”

Sebeck just stared at him.

Ross laughed. “I’m talking about Sobol’s game, Sergeant—I don’t believe in demons and devils.”

“Good. You had me worried for a second.”

“The only daemon I’m worried about is the Unix variety. There’s a delicious irony here that I don’t think Sobol would be able to resist. You’d know what I’m talking about if you played his games. Now consider this: The Gate is an MMORPG.”

“What the hell is that?”

“A massively multi-player online role-playing game.”

“And what the hell is that ?”

“It’s a persistent 3-D game world experienced simultaneously by tens of thousands of players over the Internet.”

Sebeck pointed at Ross. “Okay, now that sounds bad.”

“In this case it’s very bad.”

“Well, the Feds powered down the whole server farm last night. There’s not a pocket calculator running over at CyberStorm now. So whatever he planned is…”

Ross didn’t look reassured.

Sebeck persisted, “I mean, hell, whoever did this couldn’t put tens of thousands of steel cables and electrocution traps in people’s houses. Failing that, this is basically just another computer virus.”

Ross jerked his thumb. “I need my laptop.” He walked back and pulled his laptop case from the rear seat. He laid it on the trunk and unzipped the top compartment.

Sebeck walked up to him. “What are you doing now?”

Ross had a credit-card-sized device in his hand. He scanned the area with it. “I’m seeing if there’s a Wi-Fi signal in this area.” He looked to Sebeck. “And there is.” He pointed to the meter on the device, which indicated a strong signal.

Sebeck took the device and examined it while Ross started unpacking his laptop. “Okay, so what’s this prove?”

Ross pointed to the gate down the road. “We need some indication that we’re on the right track.”

“And this does that?”

“Well, for starters it confirms that the gate or the winch could be wirelessly hooked in to the Internet.”

“Like the black box over at CyberStorm.”

“Right. It means a living human being didn’t have to be involved in this. The news reports said Joseph Pavlos went riding down here just about every day. That means his gate remote became a murder weapon only after Sobol died.”

Sebeck nodded. “Meaning the Daemon told the gate to kill Pavlos after it read the news of Sobol’s death.”

“That’s what I’m thinking. Now we’ll see what I can glean from this wireless network.”

Sebeck leaned over Ross’s shoulder as his laptop booted up. “What are you looking for?”

“The usual: whatever I can find.” Ross logged on to his laptop, shielding his logon from Sebeck. Then he launched NetStumbler and waited for it to initialize. “This is a freeware program that helps me see wireless networks.”

“I’m not computer illiterate, Jon. I have a wireless network at home.”

Ross turned the laptop so the wireless card faced the Wi-Fi signal, and he almost pushed his laptop off the trunk lid. He caught it just in time, held on to it, and continued scanning.

In a moment Ross smiled. “Oh yeah. I picked up an AP.” His face suddenly got serious. He looked up at Sebeck.

Sebeck moved over to him. “What?”

“If there’s one thing I know from playing Sobol’s games, it’s this: time works against you. You need to act fast or you’re dead.”