Daemon

by Daniel Suarez

  “That poor son of a bitch.”

  A Vietnam vet, Sebeck thought.

  It was hard to reconcile the human resources photo with the remains that lay before them. The victim’s face was distorted in agony—or at least the involuntary muscle spasms of electrocution. His eyeballs hung out over the cheeks. His hair had mostly burned off his head. His whole face was blistered, but Sebeck already knew who it was: a lead programmer named Chopra Singh—the name on the spoofed Potrero Canyon work order.

  There was no longer any doubt that these were murders. He just had to find the evidence.

  Sebeck had the power company foreman test the door with a voltmeter again just to be sure and then moved aside for nearby firemen, who pushed into the vestibule. The stench of burnt flesh and hair hit them, sending groans and gasps through the team. “Carey, get some video.”

  The photographer moved in, and bright light filled the space. Afterward, the paramedics confirmed the obvious—the victim was deceased. The vestibule was too small for both the body and the investigators, so they scanned the scene from the narrow doorway. Unlike most murder scenes, Sebeck thought, the victim’s body wouldn’t contain much evidence, so he didn’t start there. Instead, he had it covered with a plastic tarp and brought back the power company foreman. “I need to find out what electrified this door, and I need to find out fast.”

  “There’s no danger, Sergeant. The power’s off in the whole building.”

  “I’m not worried about just this building.”

  The foreman paused for a moment to digest that and then nodded gravely.

  Soon Sebeck and the foreman crowded into the open doorway just above the now covered body. It was far from ideal, but Sebeck felt time was of the essence. The doorjamb looked normal, but after unscrewing the strike plate, the foreman got a crowbar into the aluminum frame and pried off the cover with a resounding crack. What it concealed looked strange even to Sebeck.

  A small wire ran up the inside of the door frame from the floor and into the back of the keypad and magstripe reader. But another, much thicker wire ran down from the ceiling and was bolted with copper leads to the frame itself.

  Sebeck looked to the power company foreman. “I don’t remember that on the engineer’s blueprint.”

  The foreman moved in alongside. “That’s 480 cable. You could power an industrial grinder with that.”

  Sebeck pointed up at the ceiling.

  Fiberglass ladders were brought in along with head-mounted lights. Soon they pushed up through the drop ceiling and into the plenum. Their lights revealed fire coating sprayed over the steel beams and metal decking of the floor above. HVAC ducts and bundles of cables traversed the space.

  It was here that they found the black box. At least that’s what it looked like—a black metal housing into which the 480-volt line fed before running back out the far side. A thin, gray cable also led into the black box.

  Sebeck focused his light beam, tracing the various lines from their vanishing points in the darkness. “All right, that’s as far as we go.”

  It took the bomb squad two hours to clear the scene. When they finally gave the all-clear, more ladders were brought in and more ceiling tiles removed until Sebeck, Mantz, Deputy Aaron Larson, and the county’s lead bomb technician, Deputy Bill Greer, were able to convene a precarious meeting with their heads poking through the drop ceiling around the now opened black box.

  Greer was a serene forty-year-old who might as well have been teaching a cooking class as he flipped up his blast helmet visor and pointed to the metal cover in his hand. “Fairly standard project enclosure.” He gestured to the open base, still bolted to the HVAC duct. The 480-volt wire led through a cluster of circuit boards and smaller wires. “This is basically a switch, Sergeant. Whoever set this up could electrify the door frame through this box.”

  Larson pointed to a network port in the side of the black box, then traced his finger to a smaller circuit board attached to it. “Check this out: it’s a Web server on a chip. It’s got a tiny TCP/IP stack. They’re used for controlling devices like doors and lights from an IP network. I checked. They’ve got them all over the building.” Larson slid his hand along a CAT-5 cable extending from the board into the darkness. “This box is linked to their network, and their network is connected to the Internet. It’s conceivable that someone with the right passwords could have activated this switch from anywhere in the world.”

  “Could the switch be set to activate when a certain person swiped their access card at the security door?”

  “Probably. I just don’t know enough about these cards yet.”

  “How long has the switch been here?”

  Greer looked at the back of the enclosure. “It was covered in dust when we got to it.”

  “So that vestibule door has probably been used thousands of times without incident—then suddenly today it kills someone. We need to find out if Singh has ever been in this data center.”

  Larson jotted serial numbers down from the circuit board. “We can review their access logs. And there are security cameras.”

  Sebeck was shaking his head. It was too complex. They were all just guessing now. He stared at the switch for a moment more. “Gentlemen, I think it’s time to call in the FBI. No offense, Aaron, but we just don’t have the capabilities to deal with this.”

  By early evening, Sebeck stood near the building entrance flanked by Mantz and a uniformed deputy. A frenetic pack of reporters surrounded them, microphones pushed forward into a multicolored mass of foam rubber. Camera lenses glinted in the rear while reporters shouted questions.

  Sebeck motioned for silence until all he heard was the nearby generators on the satellite trucks. “This is what we know right now. At approximately eleven thirty this morning, the body of Joseph Pavlos, an employee of CyberStorm Entertainment, was discovered in a canyon off Potrero Road in Thousand Oaks. At approximately two P.M., a second CyberStorm employee was electrocuted in what we now know to be a deliberate act. We are withholding the identity of the second victim pending notification of next of kin. We also believe Mr. Pavlos’s death was a homicide and have requested assistance from the FBI.”

  Shouted questions erupted again. Sebeck motioned for silence. “It appears these employees were specifically targeted, and we have no reason to believe that the general public is in any danger. I caution CyberStorm employees to be particularly vigilant and to report suspicious objects or packages to the police. I’ll take questions now.”

  The parking lot erupted in shouting.

  Sebeck pointed to an Asian woman. He’d have to admit that he chose her first because she was drop-dead gorgeous.

  “Sergeant, you said you’re bringing in the FBI. That means there’s more to the case than the two murders?”

  “The FBI has the resources and jurisdiction required to properly investigate this case.”

  Another reporter spoke up. “Can you describe precisely how the victims were killed?”

  “We can’t divulge precise methods at this time.”

  “Can you give us a rough idea?”

  Sebeck hesitated. “At least one of the victims appears to have been murdered through the Internet.”

  A buzz went through the press corps. That was their sound bite.

  “That’s all we’re prepared to say right now.”

  Chapter 4:// God of Mischief

  From his vantage point at a coffeehouse, Brian Gragg gazed across the street at the darkened windows of a French provincial mansion. The lush River Oaks section of Houston’s Inner Loop had more than a few of these aging beauties, restored and pressed into service as quaint professional buildings. They sheltered doctors’ offices, architectural firms, law firms—and branch offices of East Coast stockbrokers. It was this last species of suburban tenant that attracted Gragg. They were the weakest link in a valuable chain.

  One of the brokers there had installed a wireless access point in his office but failed to change the default password and SSID.
Better yet, the broker couldn’t be bothered to shut his machine off at night.

  Gragg glanced down at his own laptop and adjusted a small Wi-Fi antenna to point more directly at the office windows. The broker’s computer screen was displayed as a window on Gragg’s laptop. Gragg had compromised the workstation days ago, first obtaining a network IP address from the router, and then gaining access to the broker’s machine through the most basic of NetBIOS assaults. The ports on the workstation were wide open, and over the course of several evening visits to the café, Gragg had escalated his privileges. He now owned their local network. Clearing the router’s log would erase any evidence that he had been there.

  But all that was child’s play compared to how he would use this exploit. In the past year, Gragg had evolved beyond simple credit card scams. He no longer prowled bars passing out portable magstripe readers to waiters and busboys and paying a bounty for each credit card number. Gragg now stole identities. His buddy, Heider, had schooled him on the intricacies of spear-phishing. It opened up a whole new world.

  Gragg was using the broker’s workstation to conduct an e-mail campaign to the firm’s clientele. He had cribbed the phony marketing blather and graphics from the brokerage’s own Web site, but what the e-mail said was irrelevant. Gragg’s goal was that the phish merely view the message. That was all it took.

  Gragg’s e-mail contained a poisoned JPEG of the brokerage logo. JPEGs were compressed image files. When the user viewed the e-mail, the operating system ran a decompression algorithm to render the graphic on-screen; it was this decompression algorithm that executed Gragg’s malicious script and let him slip inside the user’s system—granting him full access. There was a patch available for the decompression flaw, but older, rich folks typically had no clue about security patches.

  Gragg’s script also installed a keylogger, which gave him account and password information for virtually everything the user did from then on, sending it to yet another compromised workstation offshore where Gragg could pick it up at leisure.

  What sort of idiot hung the keys to his business out on the street—and more than that, broadcast a declaration from his router telling the world where the keys were? These people shouldn’t be left home alone, much less put in charge of people’s investments.

  Gragg cleaned up the router’s connection log. More than likely the scam wouldn’t be detected for months, and even then, the company probably wouldn’t tell their clients. They’d just close the barn door long after the Trojan horses were gone.

  So far, Gragg had a cache of nearly two thousand high-net-worth identities to sell on the global market, and the Brazilians and Filipinos were snapping up everything he offered.

  Gragg knew he had a survival advantage in this new world. College was no longer the gateway to success. Apparently, people thought nothing of hanging their personal fortunes on technology they didn’t understand. This would be their undoing.

  Gragg finished his mocha latte and glanced around the coffeehouse. Teens and kids in their early twenties. They had no idea he was raking in more than their corporate executive fathers. He looked like any other punk with long sideburns, a goatee, a winter cap, and a laptop. He was the kid you didn’t notice because you were sick of looking at him.

  Gragg shut down his laptop and pulled a bootable flash drive from one USB port. He took a pair of needle-nose pliers and crushed the tiny drive like a walnut, tossing the pieces into a nearby trash can. The evidence was now destroyed. His laptop hard drive contained nothing but evangelical tracts. In the event of trouble, he would look like Jesus’s number one fan.

  Just then his cell phone played the Twilight Zone theme song. Gragg tapped the wireless headphone in his ear. “Jason. Where you at, man?”

  “Corporate restaurant #121. I’m just about done. What’s your ETA?”

  Gragg glanced at his watch. A Tag Heuer. “About thirty minutes.”

  “Don’t be late. Hey, I logged sixteen more open APs uptown at lunch.”

  “Put ’em on the map.”

  “Already done.”

  “I’m on my way. Meet me out back.”

  Gragg glanced around at people getting into their leased cars to drive back to bank-owned homes. They were cattle. He viewed these oblivious drones with contempt.

  Gragg headed “uptown” to Houston’s West Loop—a cluster of skyscrapers just west of the city center that served as a sort of second skyline for people who felt the first one was too far away. Gragg’s partner, Jason Heider, worked as a bartender in a corporate chain restaurant in the Galleria—close by the indoor ice rink.

  Heider was thirtyish but looked older. Back during the tech boom, he’d been some sort of vice president at a dot-com. Gragg met Heider in an IRC chat room dedicated to advanced cracking topics—authoring buffer overruns, algorithms for brute force password cracking, software vulnerability detection, that sort of thing. Heider knew what he was talking about, and before long they were dividing the work required to eavesdrop on Wi-Fi in airports and coffeehouses, stealing corporate logons where possible. They both shared a keen interest in technology and information—the tools of personal power. Heider had taught Gragg a lot in the last year. But nothing lately.

  Also there was Heider’s recklessness. Heider had recently lost his license from a DUI and almost sunk them both by having his laptop in the car at the time. Gragg was starting to watch him more carefully and disliked leaving him alone on a Saturday night for fear his indiscretions would get them both arrested. Fortunately, Gragg had never confided his real name to Heider.

  Gragg reached the mall parking lot and circled around the bland tiers of stucco. He parked near the west entrance and waited. Heider eventually straggled out to the parking lot with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. It was a cold autumn night, and Heider’s breath smoked whether he was exhaling smoke or not. He wore a surplus M-65 jacket that had seen better days. The guy looked particularly pathetic as he trudged toward Gragg’s car. Gragg thought it would be a mercy to run him down. Heider was a shadow of himself—as he often admitted. He took a last puff of his cigarette, tossed it, and got into the car.

  “Hey, Chico. Where’s the rave?”

  Gragg gave him a once-over. “You carrying?”

  “No, man. Well, just some crank.”

  “Jase, dump that shit out now, or you can walk the fuck home for all I care. I’ve got a gig tonight, and I don’t need a canine unit giving the cops probable cause.”

  “Christ, would you relax?”

  “I don’t relax. I stay focused. Friends don’t let friends do drugs—especially when those friends can turn state’s evidence.”

  “All right, man. Enough. I get the fucking idea.” Heider turned the dome light switch off, then opened the car door and tossed a small ziplock bag onto the asphalt.

  Gragg started the car and pulled away. “Your brain is your only valuable tool, Jase. If you keep trashing it, you’ll be worthless to me.”

  “Oh, fuck off. If I had a stroke and sniffed glue, I’d wind up with your IQ. I mean, you spend all day watching hentai and playing video games. How smart can you be?”

  Video games was an oversimplification; Gragg played massively multi-player online games, or MMOGs, and as he stared coolly at his partner, it occurred to him that the games’ complex societies contained far more social stimulation than anything that existed in Heider’s world. All the more reason for what was to come.

  Gragg turned up the stereo to an Oakenfold mix and drowned out Heider’s voice.

  He drove out to the Katy Freeway and headed west, exiting onto State Highway 6 North about ten miles out of Houston. Highway 6 was a bleak four-lane stretch of concrete running through marshy ground and wide prairie fields bordered by walls of trees—remnants of an agrarian past. Now the only growth was in strip malls, subdivisions, and office parks, sprouting like bunches of grapes off the vine of highway and separated by long stretches of nothing useful.

  Gragg glowered at the road. He hadn
’t said a word in ten minutes.

  Heider just watched him. “What’s with you tonight?”

  “The fucking Filipinos. They posted a message telling me to meet them.”

  “What for?”

  “To pick up a new encryption key.”

  “In person?”

  “They’re trying to keep the Feds off their tail.”

  “Fuck that. Sell the data to the Brazilians, man.”

  “The Filipinos owe me for five hundred identities already. If I don’t pick up the code, I don’t get paid.”

  “What a pain in the ass. Last time we do business with them.”

  Gragg flipped open his cell phone and started keying a text message while driving. He spoke to Heider without looking at him. “We’ve got less than forty minutes to showtime. The Filipinos can wait.”

  In a deserted cul-de-sac of an under-construction subdivision, half a dozen cars sat in the darkness. Knots of teenagers drank and smoked on their car hoods, laughing, arguing, or staring at the distant glow of the freeway. The pounding bass beat of rap music thudded into the cold night air from several car stereos all tuned to the same satellite radio channel. It reverberated in their chests as they threw rocks, shattering the newly installed windows of half-built homes. One kid zipped from car to car on a motorized scooter.

  They were a racially mixed group, mostly white, but with Asian, black, and Hispanic kids here and there. Their cars displayed their social class; a Mustang GT convertible with eighteen-inch chrome rims; late-model SUVs with vanity plates; Mom’s BMW. Economic class, not race, was the glue that bound them.

  A cell phone somewhere began a faint MIDI of Eine kleine Nachtmusik, and every girl in the group groped for her phone. The alpha girl—a thin, sexy blonde with low-cut denims and a midriff top despite the cold—clucked her tongue at the others. “Y’all stole my ring.” She read the text message. “Austin! Guys, turn down the music!”