Daniel Suarez - Daemon

He scanned the scene some more. Nothing they could do about it now. Diesel fuel was fairly slow burning, but nobody was going on that property until the Daemon was down for the count. “Forget about it. Let’s take out the emergency generator.”

Captain Lawne put his eye up to the scope again and swung the long sniper rifle toward the garage, a good hundred yards closer. His eye followed a gravel footpath fifty feet or so to a small stucco outbuilding with an air-conditioning unit set in the wall. The AC unit was red with heat—obviously running. There was also an exterior light just to the right of the nearby door. Lawne switched from infrared to normal view.

Rustling paper came to Lawne’s ear.

Major Devon lowered his night vision goggles and examined blueprints with the aid of an infrared flashlight. “Do you see the AC unit in the south wall—just to the left of the door?”

“I see it.”

“From this vector, you want to put your rounds…” The major was trying to see his pencil lines. “…about halfway between the door and the AC unit, about a foot below the bottom of the AC unit.” He looked up from the blueprints. “Understood?”

“Got it.”

“Fire when ready.”

They both put their ear protection back on. Lawne squinted and took aim. This would be an easy shot if he knew exactly what he was aiming for. He let loose. BOOM .

A divot appeared in the stucco, followed by draining brick dust. The electrical power was still on—the exterior light was still on.

Lawne fired several more times, spreading the shots over an imaginary grid of six-inch squares. The wall rapidly started to crumble. He paused several seconds between each shot to recover from the recoil. His shoulder was starting to ache just as the exterior light flicked off. A muffled cheer and scattered applause went up from hundreds of people in the darkness. Lawne looked up from the viewfinder and could see that all the lights on the Sobol estate had gone out. The only visible light was the Hummer—nearly fully engulfed in flames four football fields away. Lawne pulled off his earphones. He could now hear the excited buzz of the crowd below.

Major Devon called down to a Computer Systems Corporation SIGINT team sent out from DOD, working from the back of a nearby van. “Rigninski! Is the house still emitting ultrawideband?”

An engineer conferred with a technician wearing headphones. He looked up at Devon—even though he couldn’t clearly see him in the darkness. “Yes. It’s still transmitting. Must be running on battery backup.”

Devon looked toward a nearby FBI van, where an array of parabolic microphones was focused on various parts of the Sobol estate. “Agent Gruder, did we take out the generator?”

Gruder held up a finger as she listened in on a pair of headphones. After a good ten seconds she gave the thumbs-up sign. “It’s dead, Major. Good job.”

A somewhat forced cheer went up in the crowd closest to them. It was a small victory.

Major Devon smiled in the darkness. Now it was just a matter of waiting out the battery power backup in the computer room. That gave the Daemon just twelve hours to live.

Gragg hadn’t slept in three days, and he was beginning to hallucinate. At least he hoped he was hallucinating. Maybe he was dreaming. Oberstleutnant Boerner stood over him in the predawn darkness, smoking a cigarette in that faggy long filter holder of his. He morphed into a Colonel Klink–like character, and Gragg finally shook himself back to reality.

Gragg needed sleep, but once his mind was set on a problem, it always ran until physical exhaustion brought it crashing down. He was nearly at that point now.

Sleep. Blessed sleep. Dreamless sleep. No Boerners to trouble him—that 3-D texturized bastard. But there couldn’t be sleep until he solved the problem. The problem of the key.

Gragg looked around. He was lying on his couch beneath a scratchy wool blanket that carried the humid stink of a Houston cellar. The couch was a great big thing he’d picked up at a garage sale. It also carried the stench of too many humid days. The cushions, long since missing, had been replaced by a cot mattress that more or less fit in place. The sofa was his bed, dining room table, and La-Z-Boy chair rolled into one, and it stood like an island in the center of the industrial space that served as his apartment. There was nothing near the sofa for twenty feet in every direction. This was intentional. He had to get away from computer screens sometimes.

The key. What the fuck was the key? It was driving Gragg insane. He had screen-captured the encrypted text on that one Monte Cassino wall, and he hadn’t seen any other writing that might be the key. Could it have been in another room? What was he missing?

Fuck!

What kind of sadistic shithead created a map with an impossible puzzle? More irritating was that Gragg couldn’t reload the map to get more information. Not only was the Houston Monte Cassino server nowhere to be found, no other Monte Cassino maps appeared anywhere. The map was gone, as though the creator pulled the map from the entire Web.

How had they gotten Oberstleutnant Boerner to say those things? Was it some sort of Easter egg created by CyberStorm? Gragg had already checked the chat boards, but his search turned up nothing—no mention of the encrypted message or of Boerner’s little speech, or of the disappearance of the Monte Cassino map. Was he the only one experiencing this? He hadn’t asked a soul, though. This was Gragg’s secret.

Gragg had begun to suspect that the Monte Cassino map made a registry entry on his machine that prevented the map from appearing in the game listings again. To test his hypothesis, he cleared out hard-drive space on another PC and installed Over the Rhine on it in the hope that the clean machine would give him access to the Monte Cassino map, but it still didn’t appear in the Internet listings.

Had the game somehow restricted his IP address? Or his router’s MAC address? Goddamnit, he was grasping at straws now.

Think!

The problem: he had an encrypted string but no key—and no idea what encryption algorithm was used to create the string. Boerner had looked straight at him—or at least his avatar—and said, “…use your key, and ve vill meet again.” If Gragg found the key and decrypted the string, where did he enter the decrypted value? Would entering it somewhere make the Monte Cassino map reappear?

Gragg got up and wrapped the scratchy, smelly blanket around him. He shuffled across the room toward his workbench. Four desktops and two laptops were still powered up there. One was running a dictionary file against the encrypted string using a series of standard decryption algorithms. He stared at the lines spinning past in the debug window and laughed.

This was ridiculous. It could take a thousand years with all the permutations of a thirty-two-character string.

He thought about it for a moment. He could harness a few dozen zombie computers and distribute the task among them. He shook his head. He’d have to design the program to distribute the load—and it would still take too long to run. What, a hundred years? And what if the result wasn’t a proper word? How could he programmatically detect a successful decryption? He didn’t even know the encoding algorithm.

He cast off the scratchy blanket and sat down before a keyboard. He’d searched the chat boards, but he hadn’t done the obvious thing and Google-proxied the problem. He launched a Web browser and prepared to type the URL in manually. Perhaps there was a Web page dedicated to this.

Gragg froze just after his home page loaded. It was a popular news portal, and there off to the right were the news stories of the moment. The top headline screamed at him: