Daemon

by Daniel Suarez

  Anderson watched grimly from beyond the bulletproof partition. “Sergeant, there is no Daemon. But I’ll be happy to pass along the message.”

  Sebeck pointed at her. “You and I will meet again.”

  Anderson felt strangely exhilarated. Sebeck was sexy when he was pissed off—and god, did this guy have balls. He was going to die, but he was going down swinging. She motioned to stop rolling camera, then locked eyes with Sebeck. “I’ll convey the message. Have no doubt.”

  She had a direct line, after all.

  And word from the Daemon was that Sebeck must die.

  Chapter 33:// Response

  Yahoo.com/news

  Sebeck’s Macabre Message—In a live interview with Anji Anderson Friday at Lompoc Federal Prison, Peter Sebeck, the ex–Ventura County Sheriff’s detective convicted in last year’s Daemon Hoax, directed a bizarre message to the late Matthew Sobol: “My message is this: I, Peter Sebeck, accept the Daemon.” Legal experts doubt a belated insanity defense will have any effect on Sebeck’s pending federal appeal.

  In a dark storage room in a nondescript export company in the Huang Cun Industrial Zone of Dongguan City, China, a low-end server stood wedged between stacks of toner cartridges and counterfeit software packages. A long-forgotten CAT-5 cable ran from the back of the machine, snaking behind towering boxes containing yet more boxes, and terminated in a Fast-Ethernet jack just to the left of an overloaded electrical outlet—both lost to sight behind cases of Communist Party propaganda pamphlets, printed specifically for use as props in Western theme restaurants. The Ethernet jack ran in turn to the company network, which in turn led to the corporate Web server, which in turn led to the world.

  The computer fan hummed as the machine used RSS to scan the contents of the same four hundred Web sites every minute. And at exactly seventeen minutes past midnight, Greenwich Mean Time, the machine stopped scanning.

  The computer’s hard drive whined to life and started clicking feverishly—sending out packets to hundreds of IP addresses before committing digital suicide by erasing itself.

  Another Daemon event had been triggered.

  Part Three

  Six Months Later

  Chapter 34://Sacculina

  “What the hell is going on with these numbers, people?” Russell Vanowen, Jr., looked up from the P&Ls in his executive financial summary. He frowned down the burled walnut table running the length of his paneled corporate boardroom. The familiar faces of two dozen Leland board members and senior executives stared back. The faces were all the more familiar because he served on their boards, too. “I’ve got seven divisions running over budget, with only IT on target. What the hell is going on here? Why didn’t I receive any guidance on this?”

  Harris Brieknewcz, the CFO, shook his head slowly. “Russ, let me stop you right there. These numbers are wrong.”

  “Wrong? How are they wrong?”

  “Wrong as in not right. Look…” He slid an open binder across the table. Other execs passed it on to Vanowen. “This is what we’re getting from our off-line systems.”

  “What the hell, Harris—you mean spreadsheets? You’re passing me spreadsheets? Why did I spend fifty million dollars on a real-time enterprise accounting system if we can just use spreadsheets?”

  “The accounting system is wrong. Things are being assigned to the wrong cost centers.”

  “Forget cost centers—we’re sixty million dollars over budget this month. It doesn’t matter how you move the shells around. You’ll still have the same number of shells.”

  “Yes, but the numbers aren’t being assigned to the correct cost centers—”

  “Well, then your people are screwing up the entries—”

  “They’re not screwing up the data entry, Russ. We’re not sixty million dollars off the mark this month from keying errors. I had my people start recording these problems because—”

  “Why is this the first I’ve heard about it?”

  Brieknewcz stopped, girded himself, then continued. “You haven’t heard about it because Lindhurst told me they’d fix it. It’s under his purview, not mine. IT runs the accounting system.”

  Milton Hewitt, the executive VP of the brokerage division, leaned forward. “He’s right, Russ. Our cost centers are under budget this period, and we exceeded our revenue targets. But these reports coming out of the accounting system are all screwed up.”

  Several others voiced their agreement.

  Vanowen threw up his hands. “Jesus H. fucking Christ…” He looked around. “Lindhurst! Where’s Lindhurst?”

  Everyone glanced around theatrically. They knew he wasn’t present. Again.

  Vanowen dropped his leather folio onto the table with a bang. “Goddamnit! Janice!”

  The disembodied voice of Vanowen’s secretary carried over from somewhere among the chairs lining the wall. “Yes, Russ.”

  “Is Lindhurst in today? Has he been reminded of this meeting? The monthly board meeting?”

  “I checked his calendar. He should be in. I phoned him this morning.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “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 Sacculina parasite 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 wonde
r 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 di
d 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.