Daemon

by Daniel Suarez

  “Agent Trear, I think this is another trap.”

  Trear rolled his eyes. “No kidding. The whole house is a trap.” He looked to Sebeck. “Detective, please escort Mr. Ross out.”

  Ross persisted. “I just don’t think the house contains critical information. It wouldn’t make sense—from a technological standpoint—for Sobol to store his plans there.”

  “No one’s accusing Sobol of making sense, Mr. Ross.”

  “I think this event was designed to announce the Daemon’s arrival to the world, and to set the stage for something to come. It’s finished here.”

  Trear digested that for a moment. “And what makes you think this?”

  “Because that’s the way Sobol thinks.”

  “How would you know that? You’re not a psychologist.”

  “I’ve played Sobol’s games. A lot. His AI succeeds because it doesn’t anticipate you—it manipulates you.”

  Trear didn’t dismiss it immediately.

  Nearby, Agent Straub glanced at his watch. “The press briefing was scheduled to start four minutes ago, sir.”

  Trear looked to Ross again. “Why should I take you seriously, Mr. Ross? You’re a wandering computer consultant who doesn’t even keep a permanent address—and you play video games. Does that qualify you to deconstruct the motivations of Matthew Sobol?”

  Ross couldn’t think of an immediate response. Put that way, it sounded bad even to him.

  Trear continued. “I appreciate that you want to help. But what you see here is not our entire investigation. Sobol was under psychiatric care for nearly a year before his death. As we speak, I have criminal psychologists conferring with his doctors and reviewing thousands of pages of medical notes—all to build a profile of Sobol’s changing motivations as his illness progressed. His goals. His fears. We’ve used this approach with great success in countless cases—and usually with far less raw data to work with. So I think we know a lot more about Sobol’s motivations than you.”

  He waited for his words to sink in. “This is a serious situation. Six good men died today—leaving behind wives and children. These were people Detective Sebeck, Agent Decker, and I knew. Others were maimed and injured. This isn’t a game. If we guess wrong, many more people could die—and not just here.”

  Sebeck spoke up. “Agent Trear, I’ve seen Jon work. He helped me understand how Sobol killed Pavlos at the canyon scene, and he shut down the Daemon over at Alcyone Insurance when it first appeared. If it wasn’t for him, this situation might be even worse. I think somebody technical should listen to what Jon has to say.”

  Trear nodded appreciatively.

  Agent Straub cleared his throat. “Sir, if we want to make the evening news window, we’ve got to hold a press conference.”

  Trear looked at him. “Straub, this scene is being covered 24/7 by every news channel on the planet. Don’t worry about the news window.” Trear turned away and pulled a pen from his suit jacket. He started scribbling on a memo pad on a nearby conference table. “Look…” He tore the page off and handed it to Sebeck. “Bring Mr. Ross down to CyberStorm’s corporate headquarters and ask for Agent Andrew Corland. He’s head of the FBI Cyber Division. They’re examining the CyberStorm corporate network and interviewing staff.”

  Trear turned to Agent Decker. “We did a background check on Mr. Ross yesterday?”

  Decker nodded. “Preliminary came up clean—except for the address.”

  Ross leaned in. “I explained that.”

  Trear silenced him with an upheld hand. “If you can convince Corland that you know something useful, I’ll be willing to listen to your theories. Failing that, I don’t want to have this conversation again.”

  Sebeck folded and pocketed the slip of paper. “Fair enough. Thanks, Agent Trear. Agent Decker. C’mon, Jon.”

  Ross resisted. “But you do believe this is a diversion?”

  “Have Agent Corland call me, Mr. Ross.” Trear looked to Sebeck. “Sergeant, I know it’s a difficult time, but I need written reports from you as soon as possible. I want your account of the attack, the cell phone call, and I want those findings from the canyon scene.”

  Sebeck nodded. He turned and pulled Ross out the trailer door and into the fading sunlight. Once outside, Sebeck and Ross squeezed past the gathering press corps and headed toward the estate fence line.

  Ross pulled himself free. “I never even wanted to be involved in this mess in the first place.”

  “Jon, you’ve got an unusual skill set. And we need your help. Larson was engaged to be married. He was barely twenty-five. How many more people like him are going to die?”

  “The Feds are wasting their time. They won’t find anything on the CyberStorm network.”

  Sebeck grabbed Ross’s arm again. “Look, I’m getting tired of hearing what we won’t find. Tell me where we can find something.”

  “Sobol had the whole damned Internet to hide his plan. That’s what I would have done.”

  “Don’t even go there.”

  “It’s that type of thinking that’s going to limit us. We must put ourselves in his frame of mind.”

  “Fuck his frame of mind.”

  Ross met Sebeck’s stare for a moment or two, then looked away. “Sorry. I guess that is annoying. If someone could just get me back to my car, I’d like to get some rest.”

  Sebeck’s stare softened. “I forgot the Feds grilled you all last night. I’ll take you back. No detours this time.”

  They turned and faced a barrier of concrete highway dividers ringing Sobol’s estate. CALDOT crews had placed them over the last several hours. Both men looked into the distance. Beyond the estate fence, a quarter mile away, the black Hummer sat motionless in the center of the sweeping lawn amid crisscrossing tire tracks. Its whip antennae stood straight up, like the spines on some deadly insect.

  A few deputy sheriffs were placed here and there along the road, sitting inside rugged-looking Forest Service crew trucks, engines idling. Sebeck guessed they were there to win a demolition derby should the Hummer make a break for it.

  Sebeck turned to Ross. “You really think this is just the beginning, don’t you?”

  Ross scanned the terrain. “I don’t know what I think anymore. Maybe Trear’s right.”

  Sebeck took one last venomous look at the Hummer. “C’mon. Let’s get you back to your car.”

  Chapter 15:// Countermeasures

  Crypto City. That was what they called National Security Agency headquarters. Each day thousands of agency personnel took an unmarked highway exit in Fort Meade, Maryland, into a sprawling business park of mid-rise office buildings surrounded by concentric rings of barbed wire fencing and a yawning desert of parking spaces. The mirrored windows of the buildings were fakes. Behind them sheets of copper and electromagnetic shielding prevented any electrical signals from escaping the premises.

  The agency was a vast communications drift net, catching hundreds of millions of electrical and radio transmissions worldwide every hour and sifting through them with some of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. From its very beginning—back in the days of the fabled Black Chamber after World War II—the agency was responsible for creating the cryptologic ciphers relied upon to safeguard America’s secrets and for cracking the ciphers of foreign powers.

  A culture of secrecy dating back to the Cold War permeated the place. Posters seemingly from a bygone era hung in the common spaces, extolling the virtues of keeping secrets—even from other top-secret researchers. However, with the explosion of technology throughout the nineties, even the NSA was no longer able to keep up with the worldwide flow of digital information, and they were forced to let the rumors of their omniscience hide a brutal reality: no one knew where the next threat was coming from. Nation states were no longer the enemy. The enemy had become a catchall phrase: bad actors.

  In a corner boardroom of the OPS-2B building, a group of agency directors convened an emergency meeting. No introductions were necessary. They ha
d already worked together closely in the War on Terror and the War on Drugs, and they stood ready to combat any other noun that caused trouble. Senior intelligence and research officers from a periodic table of agencies were in attendance: NSA, CIA, DIA, DARPA, and the FBI. The talk was fast and urgent.

  NSA: “So, what is it, a virus? An Internet worm?”

  DARPA: “No, something new. Some sort of distributed scripting engine that responds to real-world events. It’s almost certainly capable of further propagation.”

  NSA: “Can we write a bot to scour the Net and delete it?”

  DARPA: “Not likely.”

  NSA: “Why not?”

  DARPA: “Because it doesn’t appear to have a single profile. Our best guess is that it consists of hundreds or even thousands of individual components spread over compromised workstations linked to the Net. Once a component is used, it’s probably no longer needed.”

  NSA: “Then there’s an end to it? I mean, Sobol’s dead, so it will stop once it runs its course.”

  DARPA: “True, but there’s obvious concern over the damage it might cause in the meantime. It’s already killed eight people.”

  NSA: “Can’t we block its communications? Surely the components have to communicate with each other?”

  DARPA: “No. They don’t. We believe the components are triggered not by each other, but by reading news stories. For example, one component just issued this press release”—he passed a printed page—“only after the siege story hit the wire services. The release is digitally signed. Sobol wants us to know it was his. We already tracked down the origin of the press release; it was e-mailed from a poorly secured computer in a St. Louis accounting firm. The program destroyed itself after it ran, but we were able to recover it from a tape backup. It was a simple HTML reader searching hundreds of Web sites for headlines about this estate siege.”

  CIA: “Jesus. So we can’t stop this thing? What’s it up to?”

  DARPA: “Its proximate purpose appears to be self-preservation. Its ultimate purpose is unclear. It acts like a distributed AI agent—which would make sense if Matthew Sobol designed it.”

  CIA: “Artificial intelligence? You’re not serious?”

  DARPA: “Let me be clear: this is not a thinking, talking, sentient machine. This is narrow AI—like a character in a computer game. It’s a collection of specific rules searching for recognizable patterns or events. Very basic. Nonetheless, very potent. It can alter course based on what’s occurring in the real world, but it can’t innovate or deviate from its given parameters. It required an incredible amount of planning. The name the press gave it is apt: it’s basically a daemon. A distributed daemon.”

  CIA: “This is horseshit. There must be living people controlling it—cyber terrorists. I mean, how could Sobol know in advance exactly how we’re going to react?”

  DARPA: “He didn’t have to. He could plan for multiple contingencies and then observe what actually occurs. Thus its monitoring of Internet news.”

  FBI: “Just shut down the Internet.”

  The others gave him a patronizing look.

  FBI: “You guys built the damned thing. Why can’t you turn it off?”

  NSA: “Let’s stick to reasonable suggestions, shall we?”

  FBI: “I don’t mean for a long time—just for a second.”

  DARPA: “The Internet is not a single system. It consists of hundreds of millions of individual computer systems linked with a common protocol. No one controls it entirely. It can’t be ‘shut down.’ And even if you could shut it down, the Daemon would just come back when you turned it back on.”

  The director cut him off.

  NSA: “Look, let’s not hold a remedial class on distributed networks. Let’s get back to the big question: do we defy Sobol’s demand? What can he do if we enter the estate prior to thirty days?”

  CIA: “We must enter the estate—you know that.”

  NSA: “Of course I do. But before I make my report to the Advisory Council, I need to know the potential consequences of defying this thing.”

  Everyone looked to the scientist.

  DARPA: “Based on the deaths yesterday, I’d say there will be more fatalities.”

  CIA: “But nothing on a grander scale? No economic damage? No political ramifications?”

  DARPA: “It’s impossible to say. We’ll only know when we defy it.”

  NSA: “What about jamming the radio signals to the Hummer?”

  DARPA opened a folder and flipped through it while he talked.

  DARPA: “The Hummer isn’t the problem. The problem is the ultrawideband signals emanating from the house.” He distributed handouts.

  NSA: “Ultrawideband? Refresh me on that.”

  DARPA: “Ultrawideband involves extremely short pulses of radio energy—just billionths or trillionths of a second. By their nature ultrashort radio pulses occupy a wide swath of the frequency spectrum, covering several gigahertz in range.”

  NSA: “Bottom-line it for us.”

  DARPA: “Okay. This explains the high amount of radio interference around the estate. Normally, ultrawideband transceivers wouldn’t be made powerful for that very reason, but Sobol’s got a big one in place—and I don’t think he’s worried about violating FCC rules. It’s screwing up our radio communications, and it will be hard as hell to jam.”

  CIA: “This is commercial technology? What good is something like that?”

  DARPA, warming up to his topic: “It can be used as a super-accurate local GPS system—and I mean accurate down to a centimeter scale. Because of the wide swath of frequencies in use, some portion of the signal’s going to get through even brick walls and radio jamming. With a computer map of the property and a transponder mounted in the Hummer, it would be possible to know exactly where the vehicle was at all times. He could relay infrared or other targeting information to the Hummer from a central computer, and he could protect the central computer from direct attack.”

  CIA: “You’re sure he’s using this ultrawideband?”

  DARPA: “We’ve got CSC techs on the scene gathering COMINT and SIGINT.”

  FBI: “Was it ultrawideband that took out the bomb disposal team?”

  DARPA: “No.” He passed out more folders. “Fortunately the disposal team survived, and one of our researchers was able to interview Agent Guerner at County USC. His account leads our scientists to conclude that Sobol used some form of acoustical weaponry.”

  CIA: “Jesus Christ, why didn’t we recruit this guy?”

  NSA: “We tried to.”

  FBI: “Acoustical weaponry?”

  DARPA: “Yes. Extremely low-frequency sound waves have been researched for use as nonlethal weapons. They’re intended for quelling riots.”

  NSA, reading report: “Some nonlethal weapon. The capillaries in their eyes burst.”

  DARPA: “The low-frequency sound vibrates the victim’s intestines, creating a feeling of deep unease and panic, difficulty breathing—and in stronger applications damaging delicate blood vessels. This matches Guerner’s account and his injuries. Bear in mind, much of this technology isn’t classified. With a good amount of money, a technical expert like Sobol could theoretically reproduce it—especially if he didn’t intend to profit from it.”

  The attendees were duly sobered.

  NSA: “How do we keep the Daemon from knowing we’ve entered the estate?”

  FBI: “Can’t we simply impose a news blackout? To stop it from reading the news?”

  DIA: “Domestically? All hell would break loose.”

  FBI: “Not a total news blackout—just redaction of news about the Daemon. A gag order. Use our ties to the Web search companies. Or just decree it in the name of national security.”

  CIA: “Why not take out a full-page ad asking the public to panic?”

  DARPA: “Look, you’re ignoring the fact that at least one component of the Daemon is in Sobol’s house. It doesn’t need to read the headlines to find out we’re breaking in.”
>
  Everyone grew quiet again.

  DIA: “They’ve cut power to the house, right?”

  It was FBI’s turn to roll his eyes.

  DARPA: “It probably has backup power systems.”

  FBI, examining his own report: “Ground-penetrating radar shows nothing unusual on the estate grounds. No secret power lines or tunnels. The L.A. Division got ahold of the networking company that installed Sobol’s server room. He’s got about twelve hours of backup battery power. The city permit office plans also show a backup diesel generator with three-hundred-gallon fuel capacity.”

  CIA: “How long could that last?”

  NSA: “The political pressure will be intense. I’m guessing we can’t wait even a couple of days.”

  FBI: “It’s being taken care of, gentlemen.”

  DARPA: “Frankly, we’re more concerned about the Daemon components on the Internet than the components in the house.”

  CIA: “Can’t you focus Carnivore on this thing?”

  NSA: “That quickly turns into a discussion of USSID-18. We all know what a shitstorm that kicked up.”

  CIA: “That’s ridiculous. This isn’t a domestic surveillance issue. Sobol’s dead. He’s no longer a U.S. citizen.”

  DIA: “I’ll bet the ACLU would have an opinion on that.”

  FBI: “Just purchase consumer data from the private sector. It’s easier.”

  DARPA: “Once again, gentlemen, reality intrudes. Our standard surveillance methods won’t work. The Daemon issues press releases or reads the news. One is highly public; the other is a passive activity. There are no recurrent IP addresses or search words in e-mails to monitor. Carnivore won’t help you. Neither will purchasing patterns.”

  The room grew quiet again.

  NSA: “Then we’re agreed that we need to defy the Daemon’s demand as soon as power can be brought down on the estate?”

  They all nodded.

  NSA: “Good. We’ll know more once we capture Sobol’s server room.” He looked to FBI. “Make that happen, and we’ll see what this thing has up its sleeve.”