Daniel Suarez - Daemon

They revealed a colder, empty room with a dark granite floor, harsh lighting, and a lofty ceiling not visible from where he stood. Two men in white orderly coats and comfortable shoes stood in the center of the room. They were muscular, one black, one Asian. Their hair cropped close. No jewelry. They didn’t have an unfriendly look in their eyes, but neither were they extending leis in welcome. They both nodded from twenty feet away. The black guy, the bigger of the two, spoke first. “Mr. Taylor.”

Mosely stood in the doorway. He wasn’t about to leave its relative safety. “I don’t know what you want Taylor for, but I ain’t him.”

“We know you’re not Taylor.”

“Then why you callin’ me Taylor?”

“Because sack of shit would be derogatory.”

Mosely digested this first hint of trouble. He glanced around. “Where’s the white guy?”

“What white guy?”

“Oh, don’t give me that shit, brother. There’s always a white guy. Ain’t no brother gonna go through all this trouble just to get some nigga jumpin’ through hoops.”

They stared impassively. The big one spoke again. “If you’re trying to ingratiate yourself with a racial or class-based dialect—save your breath.”

Not good. Mosely shifted uneasily. He glanced behind him. Somehow another set of blond wood doors had closed ten feet behind him. He hadn’t heard a thing. Didn’t even feel the air move. He immediately got onto the balls of his feet, casting about for danger.

“Mr. Taylor, please step forward.”

“Fuck you! Tell me why I’m here.”

“Would you prefer to be in prison?”

“Right about now, I’d say ‘hell yeah.’”

They both chuckled.

Definitely not good.

“Look, if it’s any consolation, we’ve been through this, too.”

“Yeah? What’s ‘this’ precisely?”

“Just step into the room, please.”

“I want some answers, goddamnit. I’m not moving until I find out just who the fuck is behind this and why they brought me here!” His voice echoed into the room.

“We have no desire to harm you.”

“Then pack your no-neck ass up the way you came and get the cracker-in-chief out here. Now!”

The two men exchanged looks and sighed. Then they marched with purpose toward his position in the doorway.

Mosely pulled off his tie. No good wearing a noose to a brawl. He wrapped the silk fabric around his right fist. In a few moments he was dancing, fists ready in the doorway. “Come on, Knick and Knack! You want a piece a this? Come get some!”

The two men stopped walking. They seemed disarmingly nonchalant. There was a subtle look in the big one’s eye. A gentle nod to a target past Mosely. Oldest trick in the book. But still…

Mosely cast a quick glance behind him. The doors were gone, and now there were half a dozen burly men of several races standing right behind him. One extended a silver stick into Mosely’s side. There was an electric pop , and Mosely dropped like a sack of bone meal. He remembered nothing more.

He awoke spread-eagled on a table in the center of a larger room. His suit had been replaced by lighter clothing, and his limbs felt constrained. He tried to turn his head to look, but even his head was clamped tight, with some sort of vise pressed in on his temples.

He reflexively struggled against his bonds. After a few moments thrashing, he concluded they might as well have been welded to the side of the Queen Mary . They weren’t going anywhere. He also felt the sting of something in his right arm—like an intravenous needle.

Beyond the valley of not good.

He cleared his throat. “All right. We got off on the wrong foot. I see that now.”

Medical experiments.

He had always been a courageous man—mostly because he didn’t particularly care whether he lived or died—but there was something about the sterile, impersonal cruelty of this place that reached in, grabbed him by the brain stem, and wouldn’t let go. A primordial terror welled up inside him.

“Hey! If you’re gonna torture me, then the least you can do is talk about it first.”

A bizarre sound stopped him cold. It seemed to be emanating from around his head and sounded like a jackhammer as heard through thirty feet of rock. It was hammering impossibly fast. Then slow. Then it actually made chirping noises in stabs. Then all was silent.

A familiar face hove into view over him. The big guy. “Mr. Taylor.”

“Give a brother a break, man. Just tell me what’s goin’ on. Warmonk sold me for medical experiments, didn’t they?”

The big man shook his head. “Just wait.”

“Goddamnit, I don’t want to wait! Tell me what the fuck is going on!” He struggled again, primarily to emphasize his seriousness, not from any belief that he had a chance in hell of breaking free.

The big guy was checking something around Mosely’s head. “You’re about to find out. That too tight?”

“Yes!”

“Then it’s perfect.” He looked right in Mosely’s eyes. “You were right about one thing, my friend. There is a white guy. At least he used to be white. He’s probably sort of grayish by now.” He laughed heartily and lowered a combination goggles/headset onto Mosely’s face—blinding him.

“What the…You motherfucker!”

The big man’s booming laugh receded.

Mosely tried, batlike, to divine the shape of the room and his position in it from the echoes of that laugh. But the headphones made it impossible. Everything was muffled now, and he was blinded by the goggles, which were as opaque as a blindfold.

The strange, muted jackhammer noises recommenced. Suddenly two large television screens appeared before his eyes. Combined, they filled his field of vision and gave the effect of twenty-foot-wide theater screens viewed from ten feet away. They were crystal clear. The left one showed an image of the human brain—all done in the colors of the rainbow. It was a Bob Marley brain, with hues advancing and receding across the temporal lobes to some unheard Rasta beat.

The right screen flickered for a moment and, true to the big guy’s word, a white guy appeared in medium close-up on-screen. The jackhammer noises continued throughout, and the brain color map changed.

Mosely remembered this white guy’s face from somewhere.

The man nodded and spoke—his voice came in over the headphones. “You recognize me. That’s good.”

Mosely shouted, “Who are you?”

The colors chased each other over Bob Marley’s brain and settled in reddish hues toward the front.

The white dude was unrattled. “Before you start asking more complex questions, let me show you who I was ….”

Suddenly his image was replaced by actual television news footage of reporters talking, headlines, and rotating graphics

“Matthew Sobol built a deadly trap for federal officers serving a search warrant on his Southern California estate….”

The video images chased each other over the screen. It was all coming back to Mosely. They had watched the news in amazement in the prison rec room more than half a year ago. They were sort of disappointed when it turned out to be a hoax.

The video clips continued as they finally settled on the photograph of Matthew Sobol—a close-up image with his name right beside it. The reporter was talking….

“The Daemon hoax was apparently intended to frame Matthew Sobol—who last week died of brain cancer.”

The photograph was suddenly replaced by the live image of Matthew Sobol in perfect digital clarity.

The white guy.

“News of my death has not been exaggerated.”

“Holy shit…”

The brain color map shifted, bluish waves lapping and rising all around.