Daemon

by Daniel Suarez

  The Voice spoke to him over his earpiece. “Confirm assembly completion.”

  He powered the unit up and waited for a diagnostics check. A green light came on. Ready. He lowered the assembly out of sight. “Assembly complete.”

  A pause. “Stand by…stand by…”

  He looked around the lobby. It was a typical two-story box in a low-end tech park. Security consisted of locked doors with mag-card swipes at the entrances. In other words: no security. Long halls laid with orange indoor-outdoor carpeting crossed each other in a barren atrium in the center of the building.

  He waited patiently in a water company uniform, complete with photo ID badge and water-bottle-laden handcart as The Voice kept repeating, “Stand by…” in his ear every ten seconds.

  Then it paused. “Vector 209. Prepare to tender completed assembly.”

  This was it. The Receiver was coming. He glanced at his GPS and turned to face the security door.

  Charles Mosely walked briskly toward the lobby doors. It was a bright spring day under a wide Texas sky. He could see his reflection in the door glass as he approached. He was dressed in a phone company uniform with tool belt, clipboard, and phone headset. He swiped his security card, and the door opened with a buzz.

  The Voice spoke on the headset. “Receive assembly on phrase ‘Here it is.’”

  Mosely approached a young Asian man standing in the lobby with a handcart piled with five-gallon water cooler jugs. As he walked by, the man extended an odd-looking steel and yellow plastic device to him. It was shaped like a glue gun, with the top section missing—an empty channel with twin grooved steel plates. “Here it is.”

  Mosely grabbed it with his work-gloved hands and shoved it into a slot on his utility belt designed specifically for it. He heard the water man exit the lobby doors behind him, but he walked purposefully on his appointed vector, passing a nondescript guy in a pullover shirt bearing some company’s logo. He nodded congenially as he went past, but the guy didn’t acknowledge him in the least. Just some tenant.

  “Vector 155,” The Voice said in Mosely’s ear.

  That was straight down the corridor. Mosely kept moving down the hall, glancing at office doors.

  Suite 500.

  Ten minutes ago he thought he was going to tap a phone system. But now in possession of the assembly, he recognized it immediately. He had used it before.

  It was an electronic pistol.

  Manufactured with bright yellow plastic and brushed steel, it resembled a battery-powered hand tool—it even had a tool company logo on the side. But in reality it was a fully automatic, precision-made handgun. It was nearly 100 percent reliable because it had no moving parts. Instead of a firing pin and complex recoil-based reloading mechanism, an electronic pistol was a fire-by-wire device; the caseless bullets were stacked in a straight line in one of four parallel twelve-inch barrels, and a logic chip fired each bullet independently with bolts of electricity from an onboard battery. The gun was reloaded by slapping on new barrels of ammunition. Mosely had already received three rapid-loaders from a courier out in the street. It was a foolproof, untraceable weapon designed for one thing: killing people at close range.

  Suite 710.

  He steeled himself. There was a grander purpose at work here. He had to keep reminding himself of that. This wasn’t the same as what he’d done as a teen. He wasn’t doing this for himself. The world was changing. He’d seen it. This was part of the plan. There were no random acts in the plan.

  The Voice said, “Stop.”

  Suite 1010.

  Mosely drew the unloaded pistol, then took the welded-steel barrels from the other side of his tool belt. He slid the two together with a click-clack. It was now loaded and looked very much like a garish, toy laser pistol.

  The Voice came to his ears. “Device code…4-9-1-5.”

  Mosely flipped the gun and tapped in the four-digit code at the base of the handle. The device was now armed.

  He turned to face the door. Then he reached into his pocket and produced a hard plastic door key given to him by a woman out on the street. All master key systems were vulnerable to mathematical reduction.

  The Voice continued in his earpiece. “Confirm instruction: kill the occupants of suite…1-0-1-0.”

  Mosely closed his eyes. He didn’t relish this. He thought he’d left this behind years ago. But the Daemon had found him out. It knew he had killed before. He took a deep breath, then said, “Instruction confirmed.”

  “Proceed.”

  Mosely inserted the key, turned it, and pushed the door open. He moved into a cluttered office with shelving piled high with papers and boxes on the far wall. Banks of cheap desktop computers sat atop folding tables. A thirtysomething guy with a sizeable gut turned quickly in his chair to face Mosely. He had a cherry Danish almost up to his mouth.

  “You can’t just—”

  Mosely raised the pistol and sent a quick burst into the man’s chest—spattering the computer table and back wall with gore. A couple of the frangible rounds slammed into the wall and dissolved into puffs of powder, barely leaving a dent in the drywall.

  Frangible rounds still amazed Mosely. The bullets were made of compressed ceramic powder. They retained their hitting power if they hit soft human tissue, but they disappeared in a cloud of dust if they encountered an unyielding surface—like a wall. They were designed to contain a shoot-out within the room where the shooting was taking place, and they also eliminated the risk of ricochets. This last part was of particular concern when you were spraying seven rounds a second in a room ten feet square.

  The bloody fat man slumped and fell onto the floor with a thud that shook the room.

  Mosely heard movement in the next office, farther in. The squeaking of a desk chair.

  “Mav? What was that?”

  Mosely advanced quickly, both hands gripping the pistol. No need to worry about their calling the police. Their phones were out by now, and their cell phones would already be jammed.

  He stepped into a larger office area containing two desks and a bank of windows looking out onto the back parking lot. A young man stood behind a desk, hand reaching into the center drawer. A look of disbelief on his face. Mosely ripped out a longer burst this time. With the suppressor it sounded like a muted model airplane engine. The wall, windows, and drop ceiling were now spattered with blood. Smoke wafted away from the gun barrel.

  Mosely turned as another man screamed in terror. The man ducked behind his desk, dragging a phone with him.

  Shit.

  Mosely popped the smoking barrels off and clicked on a new set. He advanced, gun ready, and could hear the man sputtering in terror as he tapped at the dead phone. “No! I’ll give you money! Don’t!”

  Mosely came around the side of the desk and aimed his gun down at the man cowering against the wall.

  “No! Please!”

  Mosely hesitated. Goddamnit. It could not be left undone. There was no question.

  “No!”

  Mosely emptied the barrel into him. The man slumped sideways behind the desk, in a pool of blood, his body twitching. Mosely loaded the last barrel and retraced his steps—putting another couple of shots into the heads of the other two men. He spoke into his headset. “Task complete.”

  There was a pause. Then The Voice said, “Confirmed. Two thousand network credits. Demobilize.”

  Mosely tapped a sequence of numbers onto a four-key pad on the bottom of the gun and tossed it onto the top of a nearby desk. The weapon started to sizzle and smoke, then the plastic bulk of it began to melt—along with its circuitry.

  Mosely took a small semicircular device off his tool belt. The thing resembled a small traveling alarm clock with a rounded bottom. He tapped the same four-key code into the device, then tossed it into the center of the floor, where it rolled around for several moments while Mosely exited the way he came in.

  As the device came to rest on its rounded bottom, a pocket laser beamed bright red light onto the
stained drop tiles of the ceiling—creating a marquee-like sign in large glowing red letters. The letters spelled out the message the Daemon wanted to send—the message associated with operation 4-9-1-5:

  ALL SPAMMERS WILL DIE

  Chapter 39:// Closing a Thread

  Reuters.com

  Spammers Massacred, Thousands Dead—A daring and well-coordinated attack launched Monday morning may have claimed the lives of as many as 6,000 prolific spammers in 83 countries. Over two hundred died in Boca Raton, Florida, alone. Authorities are still reeling from the magnitude and sophistication of the strikes. The assailants left behind the same message: “All spammers will die.”

  Since the attacks, ISPs report up to an 80% reduction in the amount of spam clogging Internet servers.

  Sebeck sat in the sterile visitor’s room near Lompoc’s death row. His wife, Laura, sat across the table from him, looking down. To Sebeck’s surprise, there was no bulletproof partition separating them here. His last visitation would be face-to-face. Two prison guards stood watch over them from the nearby door.

  Laura looked up. “Are they treating you well?”

  Sebeck grimaced. “They’re going to kill me this evening.”

  She seemed unsure how to respond.

  Sebeck just waved it aside. “It’s okay. Normal conversation doesn’t really work in here. Don’t feel bad.”

  She sat thin-lipped and tense for several more moments. “Are you afraid?”

  Sebeck nodded.

  “I don’t know what to do, Pete.”

  “I’m sorry about the pension and the life insurance. I hear they canceled them.”

  “I just can’t believe this is happening.”

  “Neither can I.”

  She looked squarely at him. “Tell me again.”

  He looked at her. “I didn’t kill anyone, Laura. I committed adultery, but I didn’t do those other things. I would never have harmed Aaron or those other people.”

  “They say terrible things about you on TV. It never stops.”

  “So I’m told.”

  “It’s been real tough on Chris at school.”

  They both contemplated this gravely. Then Sebeck motioned to her. “It’s good to see you, Laura.” He smiled weakly. “Given all that I’ve put you through, I wouldn’t blame you for not speaking to me again.”

  “I’ve known you my whole life. I couldn’t let you go without saying goodbye.”

  He felt a little choked up as she began to cry. He cleared his tight throat. “I know we don’t really love each other. Not in a romantic way. Our marriage seemed like the right thing to do with the baby and all.”

  She was crying silently into her hands.

  Sebeck continued. “But I think, if I had just had the chance to fall in love with you before all that, I think I would have. I just never had the chance.”

  She just wept.

  “I love our son, Laura. I want you to know that. And I want Chris to know. I don’t regret having him. I regret how I handled it. And how I blamed everyone else for the decisions I made.”

  She looked up. “You were just a boy, Pete. We were both just kids.”

  “Sometimes I feel like I still am. Like I’m frozen in time.”

  She tried to rein in her tears. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Sebeck sighed. “Sell the house. Make sure Chris gets a college education. And then…go fall in love. You deserve to be happy, Laura.”

  She was crying harder now.

  One of the guards called from the door. “Sebeck. Time’s up.”

  Sebeck reached out a hand toward her. They held hands briefly over the table. “Thank you for being kind to me.”

  The guards pulled him away, and the last Sebeck saw of her, she was staring at him through tears as he was pushed through the doorway and into the echoing death row wing beyond.

  Sebeck lay bound hand and foot by leather buckles and straps. A rubber tube was wrapped tightly around his right arm, bulging the veins. Another brown rubber tube ran from the intravenous line in his arm to the wall, where it disappeared through a small port. Sebeck knew there were several men behind that wall, each preparing lethal doses of sodium thiopental (to knock him out), pancuronium bromide (to stop his breathing), and potassium chloride (to interrupt the electrical signals to his heart). Only one of the IV drips was connected to Sebeck’s tube—so the three executioners would never know who delivered the fatal injection. It was an odd system. One that ignored the fact that people killed each other every day without trying to conceal it. In fact, if he jumped the prison fence, they would gun him down without hesitation.

  Looking down at his own body, Sebeck found it funny that he was in better physical shape now than he’d been in a decade. All he’d had to keep himself from going crazy in solitary confinement was endless reps of push-ups and sit-ups. Beneath the 24/7 buzzing fluorescent lights of his cell. He saw the knotted muscles in his arms and it brought back memories of his youth. Of better days.

  Sebeck lay at a slight incline so that he could face the assembled witnesses sitting behind the nearby windows. He felt oddly calm as he regarded them. A mix of curious and angry faces stared back. Some were taking notes.

  So this was the death chamber? This was what it felt like to be put to death. His hunch about Sobol had been wrong. The funeral message hadn’t brought forth any rescuer from beyond the grave. It hadn’t even seemed a remote possibility while he lived in the heart of suburbia that he would one day be put to death by the federal government. Yet here he was. He almost laughed. It was so ludicrous he half expected Rod Serling to saunter in and deliver a double-entendre-laden summation of his life. Pete Sebeck, a man whose demons got the better of him…

  Was there ever really a Daemon after all? Even if there was, Sebeck had been defeated by it. His relatively brief life had been a complete waste. The only good thing he’d accomplished was his son—ironic since the pregnancy had always seemed like the worst thing that ever happened to him.

  He considered that most of the people here really believed that he conspired to murder federal officers. He hardly blamed them for what they were doing. He would have looked on in righteous anger, too.

  Just then Sebeck noticed Anji Anderson in the gallery. A flash of anger coursed through him. That was just the last straw—to see that smug, pert face with the slight curl of a smile on the edges of her mouth. Like an evil pixie. Sebeck’s most malevolent stare bored into her. At first she kept the smug look, but soon the trace of a smile faded, and then she finally looked away.

  After conferring for a moment with the doctor, the warden leaned down and asked if Sebeck had any last words. He’d been thinking about his last words for several months. For too long, actually. It wasn’t like he was going to win over anyone. He had decided to take the stoic, unflinching approach.

  He looked to the mirrored glass of the window concealing the victims’ families. “I didn’t kill your loved ones. I didn’t kill anyone. But if I were in your position, I’d think I was guilty, too. Hopefully, the truth will come out someday, if only so that my son knows his father isn’t a murderer.” He paused. “That’s it, let’s get this over with.”

  Almost immediately he felt a warm sensation in his arm. It spread like a wave of numbness over his entire body. It occurred to him that this was the speed of his circulatory system. He also noticed a label on the fluorescent light fixture above him. It read, “30W BALLAST PARABOLIC REFLECTOR.” It was a strange message to depart this life with. So he turned to face the doctor standing nearby, an angular man with cold blue eyes who stared icily back at Sebeck. Even Sebeck couldn’t meet his fierce gaze, so he fixated on the logo on the lapel of the doctor’s lab coat. It read: “Singer/Kellog Medical Services, Inc.”

  Sebeck found his eyes getting heavy, and his breathing became labored. He turned back toward the overhead light. As the last of his vision faded, he struggled to maintain a focus on the light. Sebeck realized he had forgotten to appreciate his last sight of thi
s world. It was too late, and he fought for one last glimpse. But everything was blackness. And then it was nothingness, and he fell into a well of emptiness so deep and broad that it was as though the entire universe had ceased to exist.

  Detective Sergeant Peter Sebeck died at 6:12 P.M., Pacific Standard Time.

  Chapter 40:// A New Dimension

  Newswire.com

  Sebeck Executed (Lompoc, CA)—Ex–police detective Peter Sebeck was put to death by lethal injection at the Lompoc Federal Prison at 6:12 P.M. Monday. Convicted early last year for his part in the Daemon hoax, Sebeck’s trial and appeals had been fast-tracked through the federal justice system. Federal prosecutor Wilson Stanos commented, “This judgment sends a clear message to the enemies of freedom.”

  Natalie Philips entered the windowless Daemon Task Force offices well past midnight. She was expecting the place to be nearly deserted, but instead she saw a knot of techs and heavily armed security personnel gathered near the hallway leading to her office. They were engaged in an urgent, hushed discussion. The Major looked up from the center of the huddle as Philips approached. He nodded to her. “How was your trip, Doctor?”

  Philips dropped her overnight bag on the floor nearby. “What’s going on?”

  The Major thumbed down the hallway. “Your hacker friend is having some sort of episode. He locked himself in conference room B and changed the access codes on us.”

  Philips sighed wearily and rubbed her eyes. “How long ago?”

  “About an hour. I was preparing to resolve the situation.”

  She eyed a guard with a tear gas gun. “That won’t be necessary, Major. I’ll go talk to him.”

  The Major grinned coldly. “You’re the boss, Doctor.”

  He was mocking her now. She chose to ignore it and tried to pass. He stood in her way.

  “You realize I must submit a report to Centcom about this incident.”