Daemon

by Daniel Suarez

  Marine Captain Terence Lawne waited in a prone position on a shipping blanket laid across the roof of the County’s SWAT van. This gave him a vantage point over the estate fence line and deep into Sobol’s property. Lawne’s right eye pressed against the rubberized viewfinder on the infrared scope of his M82A1A .50-caliber anti-materiel rifle. He panned the property, swiveling the monster gun on its bipod until he located Sobol’s Hummer. He focused the crosshairs on it. The Hummer’s engine had been off for a while, but there was still a good heat signature. “I got it.”

  Major Karl Devon shifted position next to him to get a good look with his FLIR scope. The sheet metal roof of the SWAT van thumped and moved as he did so.

  “Major, watch the movement. This thing’s four hundred and fifty yards downrange.”

  He kept looking. “How’s your angle?”

  Lawne settled in again, getting his breathing under control. “It’s a clear shot.” He pulled on his hearing protection.

  Devon looked down toward the nearby road at the gathered crowd of police, FBI, reporters, and technicians. It was a veritable army standing in the darkness below. The construction lights had been extinguished to facilitate Lawne’s work.

  Devon shouted, “Cover your ears, people!” Devon pulled on his own ear protection and looked back to Lawne. “Fire when ready, Captain.”

  Captain Lawne got the Hummer back in his crosshairs. He focused on his breathing, and felt the calm flow over him. He slowly squeezed the trigger.

  The big gun boomed and kicked back into his shoulder. He brought his eye back up to the infrared scope for damage assessment. Hot liquid streamed out of the bottom of the Hummer’s engine compartment. Heat suddenly spread throughout the engine, and Lawne heard the distant sound of a diesel engine coming to life. The Hummer started to move—albeit slowly.

  “It’s on the move!” He kept his eye to the scope and aimed again. The gun boomed and recoiled. Lawne saw the Hummer jerk to a stop. He had nailed it straight through the engine block. The armor-piercing round struck a mortal blow. Powerful heat was spreading now. Lawne looked up from the viewfinder. He could see orange flames downrange. He pulled off his hearing protectors. “Sorry, Major. It started its engine after the first hit. The Hummer’s on fire.”

  Devon checked his FLIR scope. “Goddamnit, Lawne.”

  He scanned the scene some more. Nothing they could do about it now. Diesel fuel was fairly slow burning, but nobody was going on that property until the Daemon was down for the count. “Forget about it. Let’s take out the emergency generator.”

  Captain Lawne put his eye up to the scope again and swung the long sniper rifle toward the garage, a good hundred yards closer. His eye followed a gravel footpath fifty feet or so to a small stucco outbuilding with an air-conditioning unit set in the wall. The AC unit was red with heat—obviously running. There was also an exterior light just to the right of the nearby door. Lawne switched from infrared to normal view.

  Rustling paper came to Lawne’s ear.

  Major Devon lowered his night vision goggles and examined blueprints with the aid of an infrared flashlight. “Do you see the AC unit in the south wall—just to the left of the door?”

  “I see it.”

  “From this vector, you want to put your rounds…” The major was trying to see his pencil lines. “…about halfway between the door and the AC unit, about a foot below the bottom of the AC unit.” He looked up from the blueprints. “Understood?”

  “Got it.”

  “Fire when ready.”

  They both put their ear protection back on. Lawne squinted and took aim. This would be an easy shot if he knew exactly what he was aiming for. He let loose. BOOM.

  A divot appeared in the stucco, followed by draining brick dust. The electrical power was still on—the exterior light was still on.

  Lawne fired several more times, spreading the shots over an imaginary grid of six-inch squares. The wall rapidly started to crumble. He paused several seconds between each shot to recover from the recoil. His shoulder was starting to ache just as the exterior light flicked off. A muffled cheer and scattered applause went up from hundreds of people in the darkness. Lawne looked up from the viewfinder and could see that all the lights on the Sobol estate had gone out. The only visible light was the Hummer—nearly fully engulfed in flames four football fields away. Lawne pulled off his earphones. He could now hear the excited buzz of the crowd below.

  Major Devon called down to a Computer Systems Corporation SIGINT team sent out from DOD, working from the back of a nearby van. “Rigninski! Is the house still emitting ultrawideband?”

  An engineer conferred with a technician wearing headphones. He looked up at Devon—even though he couldn’t clearly see him in the darkness. “Yes. It’s still transmitting. Must be running on battery backup.”

  Devon looked toward a nearby FBI van, where an array of parabolic microphones was focused on various parts of the Sobol estate. “Agent Gruder, did we take out the generator?”

  Gruder held up a finger as she listened in on a pair of headphones. After a good ten seconds she gave the thumbs-up sign. “It’s dead, Major. Good job.”

  A somewhat forced cheer went up in the crowd closest to them. It was a small victory.

  Major Devon smiled in the darkness. Now it was just a matter of waiting out the battery power backup in the computer room. That gave the Daemon just twelve hours to live.

  Chapter 16:// The Key

  Gragg hadn’t slept in three days, and he was beginning to hallucinate. At least he hoped he was hallucinating. Maybe he was dreaming. Oberstleutnant Boerner stood over him in the predawn darkness, smoking a cigarette in that faggy long filter holder of his. He morphed into a Colonel Klink–like character, and Gragg finally shook himself back to reality.

  Gragg needed sleep, but once his mind was set on a problem, it always ran until physical exhaustion brought it crashing down. He was nearly at that point now.

  Sleep. Blessed sleep. Dreamless sleep. No Boerners to trouble him—that 3-D texturized bastard. But there couldn’t be sleep until he solved the problem. The problem of the key.

  Gragg looked around. He was lying on his couch beneath a scratchy wool blanket that carried the humid stink of a Houston cellar. The couch was a great big thing he’d picked up at a garage sale. It also carried the stench of too many humid days. The cushions, long since missing, had been replaced by a cot mattress that more or less fit in place. The sofa was his bed, dining room table, and La-Z-Boy chair rolled into one, and it stood like an island in the center of the industrial space that served as his apartment. There was nothing near the sofa for twenty feet in every direction. This was intentional. He had to get away from computer screens sometimes.

  The key. What the fuck was the key? It was driving Gragg insane. He had screen-captured the encrypted text on that one Monte Cassino wall, and he hadn’t seen any other writing that might be the key. Could it have been in another room? What was he missing?

  Fuck!

  What kind of sadistic shithead created a map with an impossible puzzle? More irritating was that Gragg couldn’t reload the map to get more information. Not only was the Houston Monte Cassino server nowhere to be found, no other Monte Cassino maps appeared anywhere. The map was gone, as though the creator pulled the map from the entire Web.

  How had they gotten Oberstleutnant Boerner to say those things? Was it some sort of Easter egg created by CyberStorm? Gragg had already checked the chat boards, but his search turned up nothing—no mention of the encrypted message or of Boerner’s little speech, or of the disappearance of the Monte Cassino map. Was he the only one experiencing this? He hadn’t asked a soul, though. This was Gragg’s secret.

  Gragg had begun to suspect that the Monte Cassino map made a registry entry on his machine that prevented the map from appearing in the game listings again. To test his hypothesis, he cleared out hard-drive space on another PC and installed Over the Rhine on it in the hope that the clean machine wou
ld give him access to the Monte Cassino map, but it still didn’t appear in the Internet listings.

  Had the game somehow restricted his IP address? Or his router’s MAC address? Goddamnit, he was grasping at straws now.

  Think!

  The problem: he had an encrypted string but no key—and no idea what encryption algorithm was used to create the string. Boerner had looked straight at him—or at least his avatar—and said, “…use your key, and ve vill meet again.” If Gragg found the key and decrypted the string, where did he enter the decrypted value? Would entering it somewhere make the Monte Cassino map reappear?

  Gragg got up and wrapped the scratchy, smelly blanket around him. He shuffled across the room toward his workbench. Four desktops and two laptops were still powered up there. One was running a dictionary file against the encrypted string using a series of standard decryption algorithms. He stared at the lines spinning past in the debug window and laughed.

  This was ridiculous. It could take a thousand years with all the permutations of a thirty-two-character string.

  He thought about it for a moment. He could harness a few dozen zombie computers and distribute the task among them. He shook his head. He’d have to design the program to distribute the load—and it would still take too long to run. What, a hundred years? And what if the result wasn’t a proper word? How could he programmatically detect a successful decryption? He didn’t even know the encoding algorithm.

  He cast off the scratchy blanket and sat down before a keyboard. He’d searched the chat boards, but he hadn’t done the obvious thing and Google-proxied the problem. He launched a Web browser and prepared to type the URL in manually. Perhaps there was a Web page dedicated to this.

  Gragg froze just after his home page loaded. It was a popular news portal, and there off to the right were the news stories of the moment. The top headline screamed at him:

  Dead Computer Genius Kills Eight

  Gragg clicked the link, and the extensive news coverage of the siege at Sobol’s estate unfolded before him. Gragg voraciously read every word and followed every link. An hour later and he was wide-awake again with one ‘factoid’ echoing in his mind: “…Matthew Sobol, game designer and AI architect for Over the Rhine.”

  This Sobol guy had been a genius. Beyond a genius. Gragg was rarely impressed by other people’s hacks—but this Sobol was the king. Engineering a daemon that took vengeance on the world once you were safely dead and beyond all punishment. Gragg’s mind ran through the possibilities. They were endless.

  How much money had Sobol spent on this? The planning! And the Daemon was still on the loose. The Feds didn’t know how to stop it. You could hear it in the closed-lip pronouncements of the government spokespeople.

  Goose bumps swept over Gragg’s skin. It felt like a new world had opened up to him. Was the Monte Cassino map just a coincidence? It had appeared in the last few days—only after Sobol’s death.

  He couldn’t say that for sure, though. He’d been otherwise engaged prior to the mess with the Filipinos.

  It couldn’t be a coincidence, though, could it?

  Gragg knew, now more than ever, that he had to decipher the encrypted text. He felt he could never be sane again unless he knew more about the Monte Cassino map and about Sobol’s Daemon. He might have the inside track on something incredible—a new frontier in a world filled with familiar hacks, police surveillance, and drab suburban vistas. How long had it been since he’d felt a sense of wonder in his jaded soul? He was feeling that now. Was Monte Cassino Sobol’s work?

  Gragg did a Web search for Monte Cassino and came up with a slew of hits—all relating to World War II. Instead, he reran the search, adding Over the Rhine as criteria. He still got about seven hundred hits, all of them historical because the Italian campaign, ultimately, was aimed toward Germany.

  Gragg looked up from his laptop and stared at a desktop computer’s debug window scrolling the results of his program’s decryption attempts. Output appeared every millisecond or so and varied between gibberish and the words “Bad Data.” He sighed, realizing that encryption could even be something like a proprietary Triple DES, where the designer re-encrypted the message multiple times. Hadn’t the Russians done something like that with their Venona project? Gragg felt quicksand rising up to swallow his efforts. Would he go to his grave never knowing the answer to this riddle?

  He knew a little more now, though. Didn’t he? Well, assuming that Matthew Sobol had designed the Monte Cassino map, he did. He halted the decryption program and brought up the immediate window. Gragg typed the stub of his decryption function:

  ?DecryptIt(

  He had to supply the only argument for the function—the key to use for the encryption. His function was hard-coded to use the encrypted string he got from the Monte Cassino map along with any key he entered here as an argument for the function. It would then cycle through a dozen common decryption algorithms—DES, Triple DES, RSA—feeding the key as the variable. Gragg thought hard. What would Sobol use as a key? Gragg typed: ?DecryptIt(“MatthewSobol”)

  And hit ENTER. The output was twelve lines of gibberish or “Bad Data” once again—one line for each algorithm attempted by the function. He tried scores of variations on Sobol’s name, and then variations on CyberStorm Entertainment, then variations of Over the Rhine. He started entering the names of some of the games Sobol had created—or at least ones Gragg could remember. Then the names of notable game characters, like Boerner.

  The output was all gibberish.

  Gragg just stared at the flat-panel monitor. He might as well curl up and die now because some bastard had placed this virus in his head, and he would never be free of it. If he ever got his hands on the Monte Cassino map designer, he was going to wring that fuck’s scrawny neck. Gragg pounded his head on the desk—not hard enough to hurt himself, but hard enough to inform his brain of the danger.

  Clues. He needed to examine what would be important to someone—say, Sobol—who wanted to keep a secret away from the Feds, but who also wanted Generation Y to find it. Those Feds would no doubt be using sniffers, crackers, and decompilers in order to find encrypted strings in Sobol’s work. If not now, then soon. But they couldn’t decrypt it if they didn’t find it. Where to hide data from automated forensics tools?

  Gragg had an epiphany: there was no encrypted string in the Monte Cassino map. Gragg had perceived the encrypted text, but it wasn’t really computer text; it was a graphical image—and one done in a Teutonic stone-carved font, no less. The encrypted string, “m0wFG3PRCo JVTs7JcgBwsOXb3U7yPxBB,” was an arrangement of pixels that only a human eye—or a really good optical character-recognition scanner—could interpret. Programmatically scanning the contents of this map wouldn’t uncover any encrypted text—only a human being viewing the map in the context in which it was meant to be seen could see its significance. But even within the game the significance of the coded string wasn’t truly revealed until…

  Gragg smiled. Herr Oberstleutnant Boerner pointed out its significance. The combination of the picture file and Boerner’s verbal statement, “…use your key, and ve vill meet again….”—these were the components of the encryption, the data and the key to unlocking it. The more he contemplated it, the more sense it made. The data and the key appeared in proximity to each other only within the context of the game, and then only if the player was dedicated and capable enough to reach the inner sanctum of that difficult map. That probably ruled out anyone over thirty years of age. Certainly it ruled out anyone in a position of responsibility.

  Excitement coursed through Gragg’s body. He had forgotten all about his exhaustion. He was hopeful again. Either that or he was headed toward madness.

  If the audio file contained the key, then where was it? Was it hidden somewhere as steganographic information in the .wav format? Gragg guessed there must be hundreds of numerically named .wav files in the OTR game directory. Then he thought once again about Boerner’s words: “…use your key, and ve vill me
et again….”

  A mischievous smile crept across his face. It fit Boerner’s style; the invisible punctuation that only the human brain could provide:

  “…use ‘your key,’ and ve vill meet again….”

  Gragg took a deep breath and entered “your key” as the argument for his decryption function. He tapped the ENTER key.

  Twelve output strings—all but one gibberish. All but the seventh one: RSA Decryption Result: 29.3935 -95.3933

  He leapt up and howled in joy, dancing around his apartment like the sleep-deprived lunatic he was. But then a cocktail of other emotions flowed in: relief, caution, even fear. Did he dare to think this might be Sobol speaking to him? Guiding him from beyond the grave? What was Gragg setting in motion?

  Gragg grabbed a remote and powered up the forty-two-inch plasma TV on the other side of the room. As he suspected, the twenty-four-hour news channels had set up live feeds from Sobol’s estate. Their cameras panned the besieging forces with night vision scopes—like a report from some foreign war. Hundreds of local and federal police surrounded the place. Heavy equipment was everywhere. A video segment of a military marksman walking toward a van with a massive sniper rifle played repeatedly in inset. The government was deadly serious about Sobol’s little game. Gragg got suddenly serious, too.

  He looked back at his computer screen:

  29.3935 -95.3933

  These were numbers Gragg knew well. In fact, they were numbers that any Texas geo-caching enthusiast knew well. They were GPS coordinates of a location somewhere in southern Texas. He had been playing the Monte Cassino map on the Houston Monte Cassino server, so this made sense. Gragg picked up his GPS receiver and checked its battery.

  …ve vill meet again…

  Indeed. Gragg opened the drawer of his heavy 1960s-era desk and drew out a Glock 9mm pistol in a nylon belt holster. He pondered it gravely, realizing just how quickly things were getting out of control. This could be a trap. This could be something he couldn’t even imagine. He clipped the holster to the small of his back.