Daniel Suarez: Daemon

After running a few tests with a voltmeter, the engineer and power company foreman determined that the door frames were not electrified. They instructed the data center employees to open the second exit and let the police and firemen in. They then evacuated the techs. The crime scene was now free of civilians.

Sebeck was surprised at how warm and stuffy the room had become. The AC hadn’t been off all that long. He glanced around at the dozens of rack-mounted computers clicking away. That was a lot of BTUs. That’s probably why they had an entry vestibule—to keep the cold air in. He turned to the engineer. “What are these machines for, anyway?”

“People playing games with each other over the Internet. My grandson plays.”

Sebeck had heard of this sort of thing. He had no idea it involved so much hardware. It looked expensive.

They moved to the inner security door. The victim lay just beyond the glass, and they got their first good look at him. As a patrolman, Sebeck had seen the carnage of a hundred car wrecks, but the network director lost it and excused himself. As Sebeck suspected, the engineer wasn’t much affected.

“That poor son of a bitch.”

A Vietnam vet , Sebeck thought.

It was hard to reconcile the human resources photo with the remains that lay before them. The victim’s face was distorted in agony—or at least the involuntary muscle spasms of electrocution. His eyeballs hung out over the cheeks. His hair had mostly burned off his head. His whole face was blistered, but Sebeck already knew who it was: a lead programmer named Chopra Singh—the name on the spoofed Potrero Canyon work order.

There was no longer any doubt that these were murders. He just had to find the evidence.

Sebeck had the power company foreman test the door with a voltmeter again just to be sure and then moved aside for nearby firemen, who pushed into the vestibule. The stench of burnt flesh and hair hit them, sending groans and gasps through the team. “Carey, get some video.”

The photographer moved in, and bright light filled the space. Afterward, the paramedics confirmed the obvious—the victim was deceased. The vestibule was too small for both the body and the investigators, so they scanned the scene from the narrow doorway. Unlike most murder scenes, Sebeck thought, the victim’s body wouldn’t contain much evidence, so he didn’t start there. Instead, he had it covered with a plastic tarp and brought back the power company foreman. “I need to find out what electrified this door, and I need to find out fast.”

“There’s no danger, Sergeant. The power’s off in the whole building.”

“I’m not worried about just this building.”

The foreman paused for a moment to digest that and then nodded gravely.

Soon Sebeck and the foreman crowded into the open doorway just above the now covered body. It was far from ideal, but Sebeck felt time was of the essence. The doorjamb looked normal, but after unscrewing the strike plate, the foreman got a crowbar into the aluminum frame and pried off the cover with a resounding crack. What it concealed looked strange even to Sebeck.

A small wire ran up the inside of the door frame from the floor and into the back of the keypad and magstripe reader. But another, much thicker wire ran down from the ceiling and was bolted with copper leads to the frame itself.

Sebeck looked to the power company foreman. “I don’t remember that on the engineer’s blueprint.”

The foreman moved in alongside. “That’s 480 cable. You could power an industrial grinder with that.”

Sebeck pointed up at the ceiling.

Fiberglass ladders were brought in along with head-mounted lights. Soon they pushed up through the drop ceiling and into the plenum. Their lights revealed fire coating sprayed over the steel beams and metal decking of the floor above. HVAC ducts and bundles of cables traversed the space.

It was here that they found the black box. At least that’s what it looked like—a black metal housing into which the 480-volt line fed before running back out the far side. A thin, gray cable also led into the black box.

Sebeck focused his light beam, tracing the various lines from their vanishing points in the darkness. “All right, that’s as far as we go.”

It took the bomb squad two hours to clear the scene. When they finally gave the all-clear, more ladders were brought in and more ceiling tiles removed until Sebeck, Mantz, Deputy Aaron Larson, and the county’s lead bomb technician, Deputy Bill Greer, were able to convene a precarious meeting with their heads poking through the drop ceiling around the now opened black box.

Greer was a serene forty-year-old who might as well have been teaching a cooking class as he flipped up his blast helmet visor and pointed to the metal cover in his hand. “Fairly standard project enclosure.” He gestured to the open base, still bolted to the HVAC duct. The 480-volt wire led through a cluster of circuit boards and smaller wires. “This is basically a switch, Sergeant. Whoever set this up could electrify the door frame through this box.”

Larson pointed to a network port in the side of the black box, then traced his finger to a smaller circuit board attached to it. “Check this out: it’s a Web server on a chip. It’s got a tiny TCP/IP stack. They’re used for controlling devices like doors and lights from an IP network. I checked. They’ve got them all over the building.” Larson slid his hand along a CAT-5 cable extending from the board into the darkness. “This box is linked to their network, and their network is connected to the Internet. It’s conceivable that someone with the right passwords could have activated this switch from anywhere in the world.”

“Could the switch be set to activate when a certain person swiped their access card at the security door?”

“Probably. I just don’t know enough about these cards yet.”

“How long has the switch been here?”

Greer looked at the back of the enclosure. “It was covered in dust when we got to it.”

“So that vestibule door has probably been used thousands of times without incident—then suddenly today it kills someone. We need to find out if Singh has ever been in this data center.”

Larson jotted serial numbers down from the circuit board. “We can review their access logs. And there are security cameras.”

Sebeck was shaking his head. It was too complex. They were all just guessing now. He stared at the switch for a moment more. “Gentlemen, I think it’s time to call in the FBI. No offense, Aaron, but we just don’t have the capabilities to deal with this.”

By early evening, Sebeck stood near the building entrance flanked by Mantz and a uniformed deputy. A frenetic pack of reporters surrounded them, microphones pushed forward into a multicolored mass of foam rubber. Camera lenses glinted in the rear while reporters shouted questions.

Sebeck motioned for silence until all he heard was the nearby generators on the satellite trucks. “This is what we know right now. At approximately eleven thirty this morning, the body of Joseph Pavlos, an employee of CyberStorm Entertainment, was discovered in a canyon off Potrero Road in Thousand Oaks. At approximately two P.M., a second CyberStorm employee was electrocuted in what we now know to be a deliberate act. We are withholding the identity of the second victim pending notification of next of kin. We also believe Mr. Pavlos’s death was a homicide and have requested assistance from the FBI.”

Shouted questions erupted again. Sebeck motioned for silence. “It appears these employees were specifically targeted, and we have no reason to believe that the general public is in any danger. I caution CyberStorm employees to be particularly vigilant and to report suspicious objects or packages to the police. I’ll take questions now.”