“Voice mail. I left three messages. And I e-mailed him.”
“Goddamnit! Did you call his cell phone?”
“Voice mail. Voice mail on his home and car phones, too.”
Chris Hempers, the COO, raised a finger to call attention to himself. “I flew to the trade summit in Montreal with him yesterday.”
“He left town with this going on? Is he back in the office?”
Hempers nodded. “We took one of the Gulfstreams-Ludivic, Ryans, Lindhurst, and I.”
Several voices said simultaneously, “He’s here.”
They smelled blood-a career being cut short-and the possibility of a high-level opening for a friend or relation.
Vanowen was building a head of steam-for which he was justifiably famous. “Well, now I know why he doesn’t want to be here. His folks have screwed up the accounting system, and they hid the problems from me. I hope Lindhurst has a drug problem, because that’s about the only thing that would explain this. Janice, get him on this phone right now.” He pointed to the cutting-edge speakerphone in the center of the tabletop.
“I just tried his line again, Russ. Voice mail.”
“Goddamnit!” Vanowen glanced around. “Board members, please carry on with the agenda. Ryans, you preside. I’m going to retrieve our Mr. Lindhurst, and we’ll get to the bottom of this right now.”
*
Like most companies, Leland Equity Group maintained a data center where no window offices would be lost-in the basement. Thus, Leland’s fifty-story office tower had several temperature-controlled subbasements linked directly into the fiber optic network running beneath the streets of downtown Chicago. From the subbasement the IT department’s tendrils spread to every corner of the building, snaking up all fifty floors through trunk lines that fanned out on each floor to tap every employee individually.
As Vanowen took the separate bank of elevators leading into the basement, he realized how like the Sacculinaparasite the IT department was. And lately it had been growing. Without authorization.
Lindhurst said he’d taken care of this.
Months ago, Lindhurst had moved from his corner office on the forty-ninth floor into the windowless bowels of the building. It was an unprecedented gesture of hands-on management. To Vanowen’s delight, Lindhurst presided over a two-month bloodbath of IT layoffs. Purging the department of “questionable individuals,” cleansing the global organization, and hiring new people who had no doubt where their loyalties should lie. And Leland Equity not only remained, it thrived like never before. The would-be Daemon was stopped-Lindhurst had succeeded, and not a word about their little «difficulty» had made it into the press. The problem was gone.
But now something frightening was happening. The accounting system was wrong. They were a private equity house, for chrissakes. They had to know how to add and subtract numbers.
Vanowen was starting to wonder whether Lindhurst had manufactured this whole threat. Was he that ambitious? Was he that clever?
No way.
Lindhurst certainly had his little fiefdom locked down tight now. Even Vanowen had to order lobby security to enter a code into the keypad in the elevators to get them to move down into the subbasement. The place was like a missile silo. Perhaps Lindhurst was getting too distant from upper management. Perhaps it was time to pull him back into the executive suite. Or to fire him. Vanowen pondered this as the elevator doors opened onto a long, featureless white hallway on level B-2. Uncharacteristically, the hall ran straight ahead, no right or left. Vanowen had never been down here. The corridor stretched for what looked like a hundred feet or more. It had the plastic smell of new construction. Not a sign, a receptionist desk, or anything. He hesitated a moment.
But Vanowen still felt a bit of anger, so he strode out and down the hall, his expensive shoes clacking on the black tile floor.
What the hell kind of place is this?
He tried to recall any descriptions of the IT department by other executives, but came up empty. He kept clicking down the interminable hallway. There were no doors. He squinted ahead, but the hallway somehow seemed to disappear in a dim blackness. Surely he should be able to see the end of it.
He glanced back at the elevator door. It was nearly a hundred feet back. Could they have mistakenly sent him to the storage floor?
He turned front again and peered into the distance. Damnedest thing.
Then something impossible happened. A female voice spoke to him from the air six inches in front of his face. “Why have you come here?”
Vanowen jumped back three feet and nearly fell on his ass. His gasp echoed down the hallway in both directions. He took a moment to catch his breath. He held his chest, still gasping for air. Was he having a coronary?
The voice spoke again, from that spot in midair. “You were commanded to stay out of this place.”
It was like a ghost. But it was a computer voice, wasn’t it? He could just get a hint of artificiality in it. British. Leland had a sophisticated voice response system on their customer service phone lines. Lindhurst had demonstrated it to the board last year. It reduced call center costs by 90 percent-it was cheaper than India. But it didn’t speak in midair.
This was just a trick.
Vanowen was getting his wits back. And his anger. This prank was way out of line. “Lindhurst! Get me Lindhurst, goddamnit!” Vanowen’s voice echoed. “I will not be treated this way!”
“QUIET!“The word was so loud it ripped the fabric of the air around him. It was a physical presence that bowled him over and sent him sprawling backward, where he lay in the hallway, dazed. His ears were ringing. His eyes watering. It was possibly the loudest sound he’d ever experienced.
He felt a trickle running from his right nostril, and he dabbed a hand up-coming back with blood. “Jesus…” He pulled a silk handkerchief from his pocket and held it to his face. His hands were trembling uncontrollably.
It quickly swelled to panic. He crawled on his hands and knees, then got to his feet and started running back the way he came. He hadn’t actually run in years, but adrenaline carried him the hundred feet back to the elevator. He arrived panting and nearly hysterical.
But there was no button. The elevator doors were like brushed steel gates. This was impossible. There was no call button. How could there be no button?
The Voice was right beside his ear, as if he hadn’t moved. He could feel the air vibrating. “Your company belongs to me now. Your divisions will obey their new budgets. If any division heads object, send them to me.”
Vanowen’s hands were still trembling. It was Lindhurst. Lindhurst was…or someone was behind this. It was extortion. This was a scare tactic.
“Of course, you doubt that I am real. You doubt that I am Sobol’s Daemon, and you doubt that my power spans the globe. I will prove to you the extent of my reach.“There was a pause. “I just caused you millions of dollars in personal losses. Losses across your portfolio and unrelated to this company. You will either learn from this event, or I will seize your personal wealth and eject you from this company. I will be watching you. Do you understand this final warning?”
Vanowen stared at the air, still trembling. Waiting for it to end.
“DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” He was covering his ears and face with the handkerchief-practically weeping.
The elevator doors suddenly opened, and Vanowen fell inside. He scrambled on his hands and knees and curled up in the farthest corner.
The Voice spoke again, but from the hallway, as if it were standing there, seeing him off. “If you fight me, I will only hurt you more.”
With that, the elevator doors slammed together with frightful force. The car began to ascend.
Vanowen sat there shaking, blood running down his face.
*
Vanowen spent the remainder of the afternoon in a daze in his corner office, receiving a parade of phone calls from his attorneys and brokers. Millions of dollars had disappeared
from his dozens of brokerage and bank accounts. More worrisome were the missing funds in the half-dozen offshore holding companies and the two dozen limited partnerships in which he held assets-some of which were secret even to his wife, much less people at Leland. All told, almost 10 percent of his wealth had disappeared in the blink of an eye. He had just lost eighty million dollars at separate institutions-some of which he held under assumed names.
As he sat there, still shaking, he suddenly realized the enormity of the monster that had just brushed past him. It was colossally huge. And as powerful as he had always felt, he felt insignificant before it.
He was now an employee of Daemon Industries LLC.
Chapter 35:// Cruel Calculus
Reuters.com/business
Dow Sinks 820 Points on Renewed Cyber Attacks — Network intrusions destroyed data at two publicly traded multinational corporations Wednesday-bringing the total to six cyber attacks in as many days and sending financial markets into free fall. The stocks of Vederos Financial (NYS-VIDO) and Ambrogy Int’l (NASDAQ — AMRG) fell to pennies a share before trading was halted. Federal authorities and international police agencies claim cyber terrorists infiltrated company systems, destroying data and backup tapes. In a worrisome development in the War on Terror, unnamed sources indicated that Islamic terrorists were likely to blame-possibly students educated in Western universities…
Ops Center 1 was the National Security Agency’s mission control room. Dozens of plasma screens lined its walls, displaying real-time data from around the world in vibrant colors and vector graphics. There were color-coded diagrams of telecom, satellite, and Internet traffic. Other screens displayed current satellite coverage zones and still others showed the status of seabed acoustic sensors, missile launch monitors, the location of radar, radio, seismic, and microwave listening posts. The moderately sized room had a central control board, but individual workstations were arrayed around it in aisles. Each was manned by a specialist case officer: Latin America, the Middle East, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, the Drug Interdiction Task Force, and on and on.
Uniformed military personnel dominated the space. They were relatively young people for the most part, not the seasoned analysts who developed strategy but the younger officers who worked in the world of operations, monitoring the data feeds. They were the nerve endings of the United States.
They were especially keyed up as they watched the large central screen and its digital world map. Hundreds of red dots on that map were scattered throughout North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. And in this business, red dots meant trouble.
Dr. Natalie Philips stood behind the central control board operator. A three-star general and the NSA’s deputy director, Chris Fulbright, stood alongside her. Fulbright had the earnest, soft-spoken manner of a high school guidance counselor, but his mild demeanor masked a steely-eyed pragmatism. Philips knew that mild-mannered people did not rise to Mahogany Row.
She gestured to the digital map filling the screen. “Approximately thirty-eight hundred corporate networks in sixteen countries have been hijacked by an unknown entity-and these are just the ones we know about. We have good reason to believe the entity is Sobol’s Daemon.”
The general stared at the screen. “Sergeant, notify the Joint Chiefs; inform them that we are under attack.”
The board operator looked up. “Already taken care of, sir.”
The general looked to Philips again. “Where are the attacks coming from?”
Philips stared at the world map. “You mean where did they come from, General. The battle is long over.”
“What the hell is she talking about?”
Deputy Director Fulbright interceded. “She means these networks were compromised some time ago. We’re only learning about it just now.”
The general’s nostrils flared. He looked darkly at Philips. “How is it possible no one noticed these networks go down?”
“Because they didn’t go down. They’re still operating normally.”
The general looked confused.
Philips explained. “Someone took them over, and they’re running them as if they own them.”
The general gestured to the screens. “Why wasn’t this detected? Our systems should have sounded the alarm the moment anomalous IP traffic patterns occurred. Isn’t that what the neural logic farm is for?”
Philips was calm. “It wasn’t detected, General, because there were no anomalous traffic patterns to detect. The Daemon is not an Internet worm or a network exploit. It doesn’t hack systems. It hacks society.”
The general looked again to Fulbright.
Fulbright obliged. “Dr. Philips discovered the back door in Sobol’s video games some months ago. One that allowed users to enter secret maps and be exposed to the Daemon’s recruitment efforts.”
The general nodded impatiently. “So the Daemon recruited people to compromise these corporate networks on its behalf?”
“Yes. We believe it coordinated the activities of thousands of people who had no individual knowledge of each other.”
“The Daemon Task Force was supposed to detect and infiltrate these terror cells.”
Philips regarded the general with deliberate patience. “Our monitoring resulted in several dozen arrests, but the Daemon network is massively parallel-no one person or event is critical to its survival. It has no ringleaders and no central point of failure. And no central repository of logic. None of the Daemon’s agents knows anything more than a few seconds in advance, so informants have been useless. It also seems highly adept at detecting monitoring.”
“Forget arrests. What about infiltration?”
“We’ve been working with the interagency Task Force, but progress has been slow. My people are not undercover operatives-they know far too many national secrets to be put at risk of capture-and the operatives who’ve been brought forward from Langley and Quantico are not expert enough in the lingo and culture of computer gaming-or cryptography and IP network architecture for that matter. A third of them are evangelicals with little or no experience in online gaming. Developing their skills will take time. We’re painfully short of suitable recruits.”
The general pounded his hand on a chair back in frustration. “Goddamnit, this thing is running circles around us.” He looked to Philips again. “How does recruiting kids through video games translate into taking over corporate networks?”
Philips was looking at the big screen. “Because it didn’t recruit kids. Have a look at the demographics of video game sales. The biggest market segment is young men aged eighteen to twenty-eight.”
Fulbright nodded. “IT workers.”
“Maybe.” She turned to them both. “It could be any mid-to low-level employee. Not necessarily an IT staffer. Their efforts would be augmented by a massively parallel cyber organism that coordinates the efforts of thousands of other people-and it can pay.”
The general tried to wrap his head around it. “But why would employees want to destroy their own company? It doesn’t make sense.”
“There are always disgruntled or greedy people. The Daemon most likely deals them in.”
The general had murder in his eyes. “These terrorists need to be found and shot.”
“Careful. The Daemon has already destroyed two dozen companies that disobeyed its instructions. Among the currently infected are several multibillion-dollar corporations, representing a cross section of strategic industries-energy, finance, high-tech, biotech, media, manufacturing, food, transportation. The targets were obviously selected to maximize economic and social disruption in the event of their collapse.”
The general was starting to see the big picture. “This is no different from a strategic bombing campaign. This Daemon could gut the global economy. What are our options?”
She sighed. “Before we knew the extent of the infection, we attempted to penetrate a couple of compromised networks. But our intrusion attempts were detected and the target networks-and thus, the c
ompanies themselves-were destroyed by the Daemon in retribution.
“Wiretaps and surveillance of individual employees by the FBI resulted in similar retribution. Apparently, the Daemon does not hesitate to destroy the companies it has taken hostage. Further infiltration attempts have been put on hold until new strategies can be developed.”
“Doctor, I repeat: what are our options?”
Philips paused. “Right now we have only one: inform the public. Tell them what’s happening.”
“That’s crazy talk. The stock market would crash.”
Fulbright pointed them to a side conference room and spoke softly. “Please, let’s continue this discussion behind closed doors. Everyone here may be cleared top-secret, but they all have retirement funds.”
They entered a small conference room, and the deputy director closed the door behind them.
The general glared at Philips. “Doctor, what would informing the public accomplish other than to destroy the 401(k)s of millions of taxpayers?”
“Right now Sobol has you exactly where he wants you. His Daemon can prey upon millions of unsuspecting people because we haven’t warned anyone. At some point the Daemon is going to show itself-and we’ll lose all credibility with the public. Look, announce its existence before you’re forced to, and we’ll have billions of allies to help us destroy it.”
Fulbright shook his head. “It’s not that simple, Doctor. A news headline announcing that the Daemon exists might trigger a Daemon event-possibly the deletion of all data in these compromised networks. It could cause financial Armageddon. It could cripple the world economy and lead to widespread conflict-even thermonuclear war. We can’t risk that possibility.”
Philips didn’t blink. “That’s an extreme conclusion.”
“Extreme conclusions are what I’m paid to come to.”
“Do you ever plan on telling the public?”
“We’ll inform them after we’ve developed a countermeasure.”
“But that might be never.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Sir?”
“Yes, Doctor?”
“If you don’t intend to announce the existence of the Daemon, then I hope you’re planning to intervene on behalf of Peter Sebeck.”
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