Daniel Suarez - Daemon

He looked back at his computer screen:

29.3935-95.3933

These were numbers Gragg knew well. In fact, they were numbers that any Texas geo-caching enthusiast knew well. They were GPS coordinates of a location somewhere in southern Texas. He had been playing the Monte Cassino map on the Houston Monte Cassino server, so this made sense. Gragg picked up his GPS receiver and checked its battery.

…ve vill meet again…

Indeed. Gragg opened the drawer of his heavy 1960s-era desk and drew out a Glock 9mm pistol in a nylon belt holster. He pondered it gravely, realizing just how quickly things were getting out of control. This could be a trap. This could be something he couldn’t even imagine. He clipped the holster to the small of his back.

Either way, he wasn’t going to live a long life in the trackless wastes of suburbia—and that was something.

The only car Gragg had at the moment was the first one he’d ever owned—a piece-of-shit blue 1989 Ford Tempo whose paint had long ago bleached into Grateful Dead tie-dye patterns. The rear window leaked, and the resulting mildew stench in the car made his sofa smell like a field of heather by comparison.

He kept the Tempo because a guy his age was suspicious without a car. Gragg lived most of his life under stolen identities—such was the life of a carder—but he still had a real name and social security number to maintain. Thus, the Tempo. On paper Gragg was a loser, supposedly working part-time at a computer parts store in Montrose. He officially earned little but didn’t apply for welfare or food stamps. He was just a slacker—an unambitious young punk who spent most of his hours in the alt.binaries.nospam.facials newsgroup. His ISP could vouch for that. The official Brian Gragg was a totally uninteresting person.

Gragg always registered his good cars under assumed identities, and unlike his bulk identity thefts, Gragg was more selective about the identities he “wore.” No one too successful or too poor. He found his victims by trading with other carders for the social security numbers, names, and addresses of middle-class folks. Folks who weren’t worth much on the open market except as a mask. Once he picked a name, it was easy to use online skip-tracing services to find the last half-dozen places where the victim worked, where they’d lived, their credit reports, income tax information, relatives, and neighbors. It was all readily available. Gragg had a policy of selecting only Fortune 1000 or government employees for his victims—real solid folks. His Honda Si had been registered under the name of an Oregonian man who worked for TRW. The irony always made Gragg smile. Of course, he made certain to pay his victim’s illicit bills on time—at least as long as he kept the identity.

But the fiasco with the Filipinos left him without a decent ride, and there hadn’t been time to set up a new identity. Certainly Gragg didn’t want to be seen shopping for a new car just now. Too risky.

So here he was getting into his own car—with a laptop full of warez and a 9mm pistol. The pistol wasn’t really a concern—this was Texas, after all—but the laptop made him nervous. He knew the government wasn’t afraid of guns, but it was afraid of laptops—and what the government feared, it punished. Connecting his real identity with the hacking world would be disastrous. As far as authorities knew, he was a know-nothing high school dropout with no prior arrests, and he wanted to keep it that way. He brought a degausser with him as well as a DC-to-AC adapter for his car’s cigarette lighter socket. In a pinch, he could use it to demagnetize the drive. At worst the police would suspect he’d stolen the laptop. That was no big deal.

Gragg had slept a few hours after cracking Boerner’s code. Although he was eager to get on with his self-appointed quest, there might be difficulties ahead—and he wanted to be sharp. Meth wasn’t the answer. Down that road lay madness and the worst sort of police difficulties. It was important to keep the blood pure.

Standing next to the Ford Tempo in the early night, Gragg glanced around at his light industrial neighborhood. They made screen doors and custom car parts down here. After dark it was generally a ghost town except for the occasional pit bull behind a fence or tractor-trailer backing into a parking lot. Tonight was no exception. Gragg breathed deeply of the night air. It was crisp and refreshing.

He placed his GPS unit on the seat next to him. The coordinates from the encrypted string were somewhere up near Houston International Airport—North Houston, below Beltway 8 between Tomball Parkway and Interstate 45. If he remembered correctly, this was scrubland crisscrossed at half-mile intervals by surface roads, bayous, and occasional subdivisions.

Gragg drove for nearly an hour into the cool autumn night. Between knots of office parks and suburban sprawl, the metal halide streetlights gave way to darkness, and the stars shimmered, unobscured overhead. The pleasant fragrance of dead leaves and chimney smoke sometimes overpowered the fungal stench in his car.

Getting into the general area of the GPS coordinates proved to be the easy part. Normally, if he had to convert GPS coordinates to a map location, Gragg would just key in a destination, but this time, he didn’t want to leave a data trail. So he spent a couple of hours trying to find a road that brought him closer to his target, glancing now and again at the map on his GPS unit. Several rural routes weren’t in the database, so he was left backtracking and zigzagging over back roads, following hunches.

The countryside alternated between narrow wooded roads, spanking new subdivisions, and gritty industrial or heavy-equipment companies. Around one A.M. Gragg found a surface road that mercifully continued to within a couple decimals of his target. He was heading out into scrubland again when a dilapidated-looking low brick building loomed up on his left, between clumps of trees. It bore the name Nasen Trucking, Ltd., although no trucks were visible in the chain-link-fenced parking lot. A lone streetlight shone down from a telephone pole near the gravel entrance.

Gragg slowed down as the GPS latitude coordinate clicked to match his target. Longitude was still a decimal off, though. Gragg checked the compass reading. That meant left. He pulled the car over to the entrance of the parking lot, beneath the bright streetlight, and looked around.

There were a couple of battered mailboxes near the entrance—the larger sort that rural companies and farmers used. Gragg squinted to read the writing on the side. The nearest had “Nasen Trucking” stenciled on it in a sans serif font. The other box had one word on it in black Gothic lettering: Boerner.

Gragg’s throat tightened. He looked to the left, where a gravel road ran past Nasen Trucking, into the woods—into darkness. He was exposed, sitting in the light like this. He cranked the wheel to the left. The power steering screeched in protest, and Gragg gritted his teeth. If he hadn’t alerted anyone before, he sure as hell had now.

He accelerated down the gravel road and out of the light. The stones crunched under his tires and dinged off his tire wells. The sound reminded him of his childhood and long prairie driveways. Once out of the cone of the streetlight, he slowed to five mph and scanned the darkness for…he didn’t know what. Bare birch trees lined the road on the left, while a ditch and a riot of thornbushes ran along the right. Gragg turned off his headlights and put the car in park. He took his foot off the brake to prevent the brake lights from giving away his location to anyone driving along the main road.

Gragg fumbled around in the darkness and found his rucksack. He unzipped it and pulled out night vision goggles. Untangling the headband, he then pulled them over his head and powered them up. He scanned the terrain ahead in the green glow of the viewfinder.