Daniel Suarez - Daemon

NSA: “I’m going to side with him on that. This seems improbable. They’d need serious technical and financial expertise. Not to mention luck.”

FBI: “We’re still searching for the man who claimed to be Jon Ross. He escaped from the Calabasas scene and disappeared without a trace. He might be our skilled operator. Sebeck was most likely the muscle. He was probably just looking for a way out. Had his first kid at sixteen, married the mother at seventeen. A rocky marriage. By all accounts, not a family man. Probably felt trapped.”

NSA: “What about the e-mail video of Sobol?”

FBI: “Preliminary voice and image analysis indicates the MPEG video was faked. Not surprisingly, Sebeck was the one who discovered it. This and the other evidence probably gave Lanthrop and Sebeck time to—”

NSA: “What about the acoustic weapons? And the ultrawideband transmitters?”

FBI: “Clearly someone with tremendous technical know-how was involved. But that didn’t have to be Sobol. Don’t forget: Detective Sebeck was a signatory on eight offshore accounts and an officer in nine offshore holding corporations. Some of these accounts are years old. For godsakes, Detective Sebeck had a safe deposit box in a Los Angeles bank where we found twenty thousand dollars in cash and a forged passport with his picture on it.”

NSA: “That’s quite interesting.” He paused for effect. “I also find it interesting that there were several other Ventura County detectives besides Peter Sebeck who might have been assigned this case. And all of them had not one, but multiple offshore bank accounts. About which they claim ignorance.”

This produced frowns around the table.

CIA: “I don’t understand.”

NSA motioned for a nearby aide to hit the lights. The room dimmed.

NSA: “Look at this map.” He pulled out a remote and a map of the U.S. appeared, via PowerPoint, on a wall screen. “Here, we see cities where these same detectives incurred credit card charges in the last two years.” He clicked. “Now, we overlay credit card charges occurring on those same days for Ms. Lanthrop.”

The map showed the detectives didn’t travel all that widely. But they had an unusual habit of taking trips to cities on the same day that Cheryl Lanthrop was in them.

FBI: “What the hell…?”

NSA: “Same city. Same day. Note that they all took a trip to Grand Cayman at one time or another.”

There was general confusion around the table.

DARPA: “You’re saying that every senior detective in Ventura County was involved?”

NSA: “No. I’m saying that the groundwork was laid to frame every detective—a precaution against a single point of failure in the Daemon. That wasn’t the only precaution….” He clicked the remote. The screen changed to a still image from a security camera showing Lanthrop checking in at a business hotel. She was beautiful even here. “Our Ms. Lanthrop. Memphis. Auburn hair, high cheekbones.” The image changed to another security camera image. “Dallas. Blond hair, soft features, and ample bustline.” Another photograph. “Kansas City. Brunette, tall.”

DARPA: “They’re different women.”

FBI: “So this is the NSA’s attempt to bring the Daemon back into the picture?”

NSA: “It’s not an attempt to do anything. These are the facts. It’s also a fact that Cheryl Lanthrop had no known medical or business experience prior to working at Sobol’s company, nor can we find any trace of her family or anyone who knew her prior to that time.”

CIA: “She’s a doppelganger.”

NSA: “It would appear so.”

FBI: “But that just proves my point; these are sophisticated grifters who scammed Sobol.”

NSA: “Your evidence is largely digital. E-mail, financial transactions, travel records. How do you know that Sebeck’s Lanthrop was anything more than a call girl?”

FBI: “This is ridiculous. Occam’s razor kicks in here. Which is more probable: that a dead man set up a system for framing multiple detectives—simultaneously flushing half his estate down the toilet—or that a group of people abused a position of trust to swindle a dying rich man?”

DIA: “But why was it necessary to have all the detectives involved? If a group of people were swindling Sobol, wouldn’t they want to have cops as far away as possible?”

There was silence.

FBI: “Well, it’s a fact that a cop was involved, and it’s a fact that someone orchestrated the stock swindle.”

DIA: “So, does the Daemon exist or not?”

They looked at each other in the semidarkness.

NSA: “I think we can agree that—as far as the public is concerned—the Daemon must remain a hoax.”

An exasperated sigh came over the phone line. “Look, I’m not interested.”

“Well, then we’ve got something in common.”

She laughed.

Charles Mosely’s voice smiled. “I like your laugh.” Thirty-eight-point-nine percent of the time his deep, rich voice elicited a positive response from females in the twenty-one to thirty-five demographic.

A pause. “Thanks. You have a nice voice.”

“I prefer using it for my art. But with the economy and all, here I am. I do apologize for the intrusion, miss.”

“That’s okay. Sorry I was so short.”

“Not a problem. Peace.”

“What is your art?”

“Pardon?”

“You said you preferred using your voice for your art.”

Mosely chuckled. “I gotta watch that. I’m revealing too much about myself.”

“C’mon. Tell me.”

He hesitated, checking the timer on his computer screen. “Well…you’re gonna laugh at me.”

“No I won’t.”

“I’m an out-of-work stage actor here in New York.”

“Get out! What have you been in?”

Mosely laughed again. “ Othello at the Public, if you can believe it. Just the matinees, though.”

“And now you’re doing this ?”

“Oh, I know—kill me now, right?”

“I’m sorry.” She laughed again. He could almost hear her twirling the phone cord around her finger. “You have such a great voice, Charles.”

“Thank you, miss.”

TeleMaster tracked the activities of individual telemarketers down to the second. Average number of seconds between phone calls, average number of seconds for each call, average number of calls per day, average sales close percentage—all calculated automatically through the VOIP-enabled software package marketed in North America under the brand name TeleMaster , but in Europe and Asia under the impenetrable name Ophaseum.

Sales associates had only a couple of seconds after completing one call before they heard the line ringing for the next. Associates who made their quota early, then slacked off, didn’t fool TeleMaster ; the system monitored you constantly with a moving average. A sudden and precipitous drop-off in productivity was flagged for immediate follow-up by a floor supervisor. Finding a balance between frantically striving for quota and keeping a pace you could maintain throughout a shift was difficult—except for the closers. And Charles was a closer. His deep voice, reassuring tone, and cool confidence gave him a disproportionate closing percentage straight across both male and female demographic segments.

And those who didn’t make quota? Their commission base dropped, and once their commission base dropped, they were earning less for each sale. And once they were earning less for each sale, the work was just as stressful and tedious, but they made less for it. If they failed to perform enough times, then they were out of work and back into the general population.