Daemon d-1

by Daniel Suarez

  But his deepest despair came from the knowledge that no one believed that the Daemon existed. From the outset it was clear that both the prosecution and the defense would be arguing not about the Daemon, but about whether Sebeck had been involved in the conspiracy to defraud Sobol’s estate and murder federal officers. The judge refused to hear testimony about the Daemon-largely because there was no evidence it existed. But it had to exist. Sebeck was convinced of it.

  They were appealing his conviction to a higher federal court, but his lawyer didn’t hold out much hope. The government was clearly making an example out of Sebeck. His trial had been fast-tracked in response to public outrage, and failing the introduction of new evidence, there was little chance his guilty verdicts would be overturned on appeal.

  Sebeck tried to remember a time when he was last truly happy. He had to think back all the way to high school, sitting on the roof of his neighbor’s garage with his buddies. That was the night before he found out Laura was pregnant. But was that true? Now the idea of coming home and seeing Chris and Laura laughing at the kitchen table was a treasured memory. The laughter stopped as he arrived, but that wasn’t their fault. It was his fault. He had purposefully distanced himself from them. Without this disaster, would Sebeck ever have realized what he had?

  Sebeck’s mind turned to that voice on the phone at Sobol’s funeral. Experts proved it wasn’t Sobol, but Sebeck realized that was the whole point of it. It had to notbe Sobol, and provably so. Nonetheless, that voice had actually warned him about what was to come.

  I must destroy you.

  He contemplated it emptily. Without hope or purpose.

  But there was something else the voice had said. Sebeck tried hard to remember, buried as it was under months of pretrial testimony, interrogations, and hard evidence. But then it came to him.

  They will require a sacrifice, Sergeant.

  And so they had. Sebeck sat up and stared into nothingness, straining to recall the exact words of the voice.

  Before you die…invoke the Daemon.

  Somewhere there was a surveillance tape that showed Sebeck silently nodding to himself in the stillness of his empty cell. Because he now realized what he had to do.

  Chapter 30:// Offering

  A white van raised a cloud of dust as it approached from a distance, wavering like a phantom in the summer heat. On either side of the dirt road, California grasslands stretched brown and dry, rolling up into the barren hills at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. Every fold and furrow of the land was shadowed in the afternoon sun, like the wrinkles of some timeworn face. The topography was naked and enormously wide. Forty miles of nothing stretched to the horizon, starkly beautiful to anyone with a reliable car.

  The van inched across the gargantuan landscape, progressing toward a ring of asphalt set in the bottom of a forgotten canyon. The van slowed as it reached the track, then turned, revealing the car-carrying trailer it pulled behind it. A black Lincoln Town Car sat on the bed.

  The van stopped, and a moment later the doors swung open, disgorging Kurt Voelker on the passenger side. He wearily stretched. Tingit Khan and Rob McCruder exited the far side of the van and did likewise. They were all in their early twenties, but while Voelker looked dressed for a Christian Fellowship meeting-with khakis and a button-down shirt-Khan and McCruder bore the piercings, tats, and severe hair that once indicated disaffected youth but that now only meant they weren’t interviewing yet.

  Voelker checked his GPS unit. He looked to his two companions. “We’re in the box.”

  “It’s about fucking time.” Khan held up his hand to shade his face. His eyes scanned the terrain. “What is this? A racetrack?”

  “Pretty damned small for a racetrack.”

  Voelker spoke from the far side of the van. “I’m guessing a test track.”

  “It’s not banked or anything.” Khan held up his other hand to block the sun. “What’s it feel like? A hundred degrees out here?”

  McCruder checked his watch. “A hundred and six.”

  “You have a thermometer on your watch?”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  Khan looked through the van windows to Voelker on the other side. “Kurt. Rob has a thermometer on his watch.”

  “So?”

  “Well, at some point, the thing you add to the watch is more significant than the watch. I’d argue he’s wearing a thermometer with a clock on it.”

  McCruder scowled; he was a veteran of Khan’s observations. “Fuck off.”

  “Why do you need to know the precise temperature where you are? It’s not like a weather report; it’s too fucking late-you’re already here.”

  Voelker held up a hand. “Khan, get the gear out of the van. I’ll un-chain the car.”

  Khan and McCruder started pulling hard-shell Pelican cases from the van. McCruder just shook his head sadly. “You’re the one who asked how hot it was.”

  *

  Fifteen minutes later Voelker extended the antenna on a sizeable handheld remote controller. Khan and McCruder sat nearby on the empty hard-shell containers in front of a folding table. The table was strewn with cables, high-gain antennas, and two ruggedized laptops with shades shielding their screens from the sunlight. A half-meter satellite dish pointed skyward on a tripod placed in the grass nearby.

  Voelker looked to McCruder, who was peering at his laptop’s LCD screen. McCruder finally nodded. “Anytime, Kurt.”

  Voelker pointed the controller directly at the Lincoln on the trailer bed. The car looked identical to the endless number of black fleet Town Cars with smoked glass coursing through downtown streets and airports nationwide-replete with a TCP number on its back bumper and a vanity plate reading LIVRY47.Voelker pressed a button on the remote. The car’s V8 engine started. He slid a lever to put it in gear and then began backing the car slowly off the trailer ramps.

  “I bet he rolls it,” McCruder snickered.

  “You’d better hope he doesn’t.”

  Voelker didn’t even look. “Guys, I’m working here. You wanna shut your pie holes for two seconds?”

  In a few moments he had deftly backed the car onto the dirt road; then he shifted it into drive and eased it out onto the asphalt of the small oval racetrack nearby. The circuit was perhaps two hundred feet in diameter. An oddity, really. Nothing you could actually race on. It was crisscrossed with mysterious grooves set at odd angles.

  “This good?” Voelker turned to his companions.

  They shrugged.

  Khan took a lollipop out of his mouth. “How the hell are we supposed to know? We’re in the box. Park it where it is.”

  Voelker killed the engine. He collapsed the controller’s antenna. “Anything?”

  Both men shook their heads.

  He walked up. “I guess we wait.”

  *

  The late afternoon sun was sinking toward the hills. They had been waiting and sweating for a couple of hours in the brutal heat, listening to the wind chimes dangling from the eaves of a nearby utility shed. The chimes sounded all too infrequently.

  Khan mopped his face with the front of his black T-shirt. “Goddamn. It is Africa hot.”

  McCruder upended a soda can. Nothing came out. “I thought you Indians thrived in this weather, Khan.”

  “Fuck you. I grew up in Portland, moron.”

  Voelker wiped the salty sweat from his eyes. He blinked from the sting. “Guys, I swear, I’ll take a tire iron to you both if you don’t quit your bitching.”

  They heard a blip-blip sound from the nearby laptop. They snapped to attention.

  Khan leaned over McCruder’s shoulder to look at the LCD screen.

  McCruder looked up to Voelker. “It’s here.”

  All three turned expectantly to the asphalt.

  Suddenly the car engine roared to life. It revved several times. The wheels turned left, then right.

  They all watched transfixed.

  Khan grinned. “It’s alive! Bu-wahahahah!”r />
  Suddenly the car’s engine raced, and it laid down rubber, accelerating madly along the asphalt track.

  “Jesus!” Voelker turned to the other two. “What the hell is it doing?”

  “Don’t know, but look at it go, man.”

  The Lincoln was weaving side to side, then it suddenly slammed on the brakes and screeched to a halt. It peeled out suddenly again and went into a power slide, whipping its tail around. It roared forward again, building up speed on the straightaway, then wrenched its wheels into another slide, and came out facing the other direction-still accelerating into a bootlegger reverse.

  McCruder smiled. “It’s testing the properties of the car.”

  Khan and Voelker leaned in, while still watching the screeching display of stunt driving.

  McCruder spoke louder. “It’s confirming the specs. Braking distance, turning radius-all that stuff. It’s making sure we followed instructions.”

  Voelker pointed a finger at McCruder. “It damn well better meet the spec.”

  Without turning, McCruder extended his closed fist, then operated his thumb like a crank to extend his middle finger.

  Suddenly the car stopped its acrobatic display and sat motionless on the pavement. Oily rubber smoke still wafted across the track.

  All three men stared at it. It was half a football field away.

  A Bullwinkle the Moose voice came over the speakers of McCruder’s laptop. “Duhhh, you have mail.”

  McCruder checked.

  While McCruder was busy, Khan looked at his own laptop screen. He grinned at Voelker. “We no longer have a connection to the car, Kurt. It changed the access codes.”

  Voelker didn’t flinch. “It’s part of the spec, Khan.”

  McCruder glanced up at his companions. “Let me confirm this.” After a few frenzied moments of clicking, he smiled and turned to them again. “Fifty-six thousand dollars have been deposited into the corporate account, and we have an order for six more AutoM8s. The Daemon is pleased with our offering.”

  They whooped and high-fived.

  “What will that total?” Khan was beaming.

  Voelker thought for a second. “Three hundred thousand and change.” He looked to McCruder. “Does it say where the cars will be coming from?”

  McCruder shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Corporate leases, probably. Not our problem. Looks like the Haas has downloaded more plans, too.”

  “Excellent.” Voelker smiled at them both. “Congratulations, gentlemen.”

  Suddenly the distant car roared into action again-laying down more rubber. They all turned. It was accelerating toward them.

  “It’s gonna whack us!”

  They ran for the van, but the Town Car raced past their table and out along the dirt road. It accelerated and kept going.

  They gathered their breath and watched it recede into the distance.

  Khan turned to them. “We should follow it. You know, back to its lair.”

  McCruder narrowed his eyes. “What, are you fucking insane?”

  Voelker nodded. “He’s right. We released it into the wild. Those were the instructions. Following it is just a good way to get killed.”

  Khan watched the cloud of dust moving toward the distant hills. “You think we’re the only ones doing this?”

  Voelker watched, too, shielding his eyes against the sun. “If the number of unemployed electrical engineers is any indication, I’d say no.”

  Chapter 31:// Red Queen Hypothesis

  Garrett Lindhurst marched purposefully toward the corner office on the fifty-first floor of Leland Equity Group’s palatial world headquarters. He clenched a rolled magazine in his hand like a baton in a slow-motion relay race and looked visibly worried. Worried about systems.

  As chief information officer, Lindhurst held dominion over the systems that delivered the lifeblood of Leland Equity Group: real-time financial data. That data was delivered instantaneously to every corner of the organization and to every client. Every account and every dollar in every branch office passed through Lindhurst’s networks and data systems. Every e-mail passed through his servers. He had thirty regional VPs as direct reports and oversaw an empire of some five hundred IT employees worldwide.

  And yet, Leland Equity Group was one of those multibillion-dollar companies that existed on the periphery of public awareness. Their unremarkable logo could be found in the skyline of any major city in North America, Europe, or Asia, and even if most people had no idea what the company did, they assumed it must be doing something important.

  The reality was that, with eighty billion dollars in assets under management, the decisions made by Leland MBAs ruled the daily lives of two hundred million Third World people.

  Following a (more or less) Darwinian economic model, Leland identified and quantified promising resource development opportunities in the far corners of the world. They had since formed private equity partnerships with local leaders for strip mining in Papua New Guinea, water privatization in Ecuador, marble quarrying in China, oil drilling in Nigeria, and pipeline construction in Myanmar. Anywhere local public and/or private leaders existed with abundant resources, a surfeit of rivals, and a deficit in capital, Leland could be found. And while these projects were theoretically beneficial, the benefits were best perceived at a distance of several thousand miles.

  Leland’s equity offerings used tedious statistical analysis to mask the fact that their business centered on enslaving foreign people and ravaging their lands. They didn’t do this directly, of course, but they hired the people who hired the people who did.

  Humanity had always trafficked in oppression. Before the corporate marketing department got ahold of it, it was called conquest. Now it was regional development.Vikings and Mongols were big on revenue targets, too-but Leland had dispensed with all the tedious invading, and had taken a page out of the Roman playbook by hiring the locals to enslave each other as franchisees.

  To view Leland fund managers as immoral was a gross simplification of the world. And what was there to replace capitalism, anyway? Communism? Theocracy? Most of the Third World had already suffered nearly terminal bouts of idealism. It was the Communists, after all, who had littered the world with cheap AK-47s in order to «liberate» the masses. But the only lasting effect was that every wall between Cairo and the Philippines had at least one bullet hole in it. But nothing changed. Nothing changed because these alternate belief systems flew in the face of human nature. Of even common sense. Anyone who has ever tried to share pizza with roommates knows that Communism cannot everwork. If Lenin and Marx had just shared an apartment, perhaps a hundred million lives might have been spared and put to productive use making sneakers and office furniture.

  Leland bankers told clients that they didn’t design the world-they were just trying to live in it. And incidentally, the wonders of the developed world rose from the ashes of conflict and competition, so they were helping people in the long run. For godsakes, just look at Japan.

  And while the debate mumbled on, asterisked by legal disclaimers, Leland booked another highly profitable year.

  But profitability was not what was bothering Garrett Lindhurst as he approached the CEO’s office suite.

  Among Leland’s C-level executives, only Lindhurst was without decades-old family ties to the organization-but then again, the rapid expansion of computer systems in the corporate world in recent years had outpaced the ability of old-money families to produce senior technology talent. While Lindhurst hadn’t written any actual code since working with Fortran and Pascal back in his Princeton days, he had learned over the years how much systems should cost and what they needed to do.

  In essence, computer systems needed to do only one of two things: make money or save money. Everything else was just details. Scut work. These tasks Lindhurst delegated to the executive senior veeps, who, in turn, delegated them to someone else…and so on. It was only during times of complete disaster that Lindhurst involved himself with the actual com
puter systems themselves.

  Today was such a time.

  Lindhurst pointed at the CEO’s temple-like office doors as he passed the executive secretary’s desk. “He in?”

  “He’s leaving for Moscow in an hour.”

  She barely registered Lindhurst’s presence. A stone-faced woman in her fifties, she was many years in the CEO’s service and effectively had more authority than any two senior vice presidents put together.

  But Lindhurst had more authority than ten. He pushed his way through the towering double doors.

  “Garrett!” she called after him.

  He ignored her and proceeded into the CEO’s cavernous office at a quick pace.

  The tanned, pampered face of Russell Vanowen, Jr., CEO and chairman of Leland Equity Group, looked up from reading a letter. He scowled. “Damnit, Garrett, make an appointment.”

  Garrett heard the doors close behind him, and he took a deep breath. “This can’t wait.”

  “Then just pick up the phone, for chrissakes.”

  “We need a face-to-face.”

  Vanowen regarded him like a statue would a pigeon. Vanowen had that obsessively groomed look of the fabulously rich-as though his head were the grounds of Augusta National and a hundred grounds-keepers swarmed over it each morning. The ring of white hair sweeping around the back of his head was perfectly manicured like a green. The pores of his skin were flawless. His suit was masterfully tailored to make his husky form look manly and authoritative.

  Yet, for all his obvious fastidiousness, Vanowen did not look soft. He was stocky, intimidating, with a presence that projected itself without having to speak; his eyes scanned a room like twin.50-caliber machine guns. And he had an almost mystical authority in this office, with its bank of tall windows overlooking downtown Chicago and Lake Michigan beyond. This was a fabled seat of power, overlooking the length and breadth of the land.

  Lindhurst proceeded toward Vanowen’s massive teak wood desk, still thirty feet away. “We have a major problem, Russ.”