Daemon

by Daniel Suarez

  Trear shouted, “Quiet down! Everyone shut up.” He turned back to Garvey. “Play back the video—in slow motion.”

  Garvey nodded, then rewound the video. All the monitors flickered, then a still image came up again: the mansion side hall.

  “Roll it forward slowly.”

  On-screen, frame by frame, the robotic arm grabbed the door handle and pushed down.

  “There.”

  Garvey stopped the image.

  There was an unmistakable gap in the floor toward the bottom of the frame. The floor looked like it was opening up.

  “Okay, advance it slowly.”

  Garvey hit a button.

  The gap expanded. In a quick succession of frames, the door handle pulled from the robot’s grip, and the entire machine slid down a chute that opened beneath it. Its mercury lights illuminated the dark hole, revealing a cinderblock-lined pit—the bottom of which was filled with water. Successive video images showed the water washing up onto its cameras and the robot shorting out. The entire process took about one and a half seconds.

  Sidebar conversations filled the trailer.

  Trear clasped a hand on Garvey’s shoulder. “It’s all right. That’s why we have robots.” Trear looked unruffled, almost serene.

  He turned to the assembled agents. “I think we’ve established that there’s no power in the house.” He pointed to some techs sitting at a frequency-scanning console. “And there’s no radio transmissions emanating from the house, correct?”

  The techs nodded.

  Trear continued. “What we’re looking at here is a simple pit trap. Sobol’s high-tech weaponry is down. He’s gone medieval on us. That’s great news.”

  Garvey turned from the robot command console. “That’s our last robot. We’ll have to send back to L.A. for another one.”

  Trear nodded. “Bring in several. Fly them in if you have to. But we need to get our hands on Sobol’s personal computers as soon as possible.”

  There was silence for a moment in the trailer.

  Garvey hesitated, then asked, “Meaning that we…?”

  “Send in the Hostage Rescue Team. Have them go in as far as the pit. I want the area around the cellar entrance ramped over by the time we get the extra robots here.”

  Wyckoff looked surprised. “Sir, are you certain that’s a good idea?”

  “Certain? No, not certain. But Sobol’s home computers might hold the key to destroying this monster. That’s what we came to do. So let’s do it.”

  Everyone murmured in agreement.

  Someone in back asked, “What about the Hummer, sir?”

  “Pull out the wreckage and ship it down to the L.A. lab. Cover it with a tarpaulin before pulling it out. I don’t want to see any more pictures of the ‘death machine’ on the front page tomorrow.” He clapped his hands once. “Let’s get moving, people. The world’s watching.”

  Special Agent Michael Kirchner sat poring over financial documents with five other agents in an unassuming accountant’s office in Thousand Oaks. The desks were littered with open folders, receipts, tax returns, and ledgers. Another agent was busy imaging computer hard drives. Kirchner, a CPA and a tax attorney, believed that he and his team did more to fight crime than any field office in the bureau. Organized crime couldn’t accomplish much without money.

  They had spent the last eight hours scrutinizing the detailed financial history of Matthew Sobol. It was quite a trail. Sobol was an officer in thirty-seven corporations. He had three sole proprietorships, two partnerships, eleven LLCs—and a slew of international business corporations, holding companies, and offshore trusts. Tons of financial activity over the last two years, with equipment purchases, wire transfers, professional and consulting fees. It was a rat’s nest. The finances of the rich usually were.

  Kirchner reviewed a report of the largest capital expenditures. Technical components from the looks of it. Purchased by one company but shipped to Sobol’s Thousand Oaks address.

  Kirchner looked up at his partner, Lou Galbraith, who was sifting through filing cabinets nearby. “Lou, you lost money in fuel cells a few years back, didn’t you?”

  Galbraith stopped, raised his reading glasses up onto his forehead, and gave Kirchner an impatient look. “I don’t want to talk about it. Why?”

  Kirchner held up the printed report. “Sobol made some big purchases that I thought you might be interested in….” He leafed through the report. “Here, identical hydrogen fuel cell power units purchased by two separate holding corporations, both shipped to his estate. $146,000 a pop.”

  “Tax dodge?”

  Kirchner frowned. “We’re not trying to nail him on tax evasion, Lou.” He looked down at the report. “Fuel cell power units? Things like that really work?”

  “I wasn’t an idiot, Mike. Of course they work. Hospitals and big companies use them to generate electrical power from natural gas. You know, where the electrical grid is unreliable or too expensive. It was supposed to be huge. Just before its time, that’s all, and—”

  “These things were shipped to Sobol’s estate.” Kirchner looked even more concerned.

  “What’s wrong, Mike?”

  “Call the SAC at the Sobol estate. I want to make sure he knows about this.”

  Agent Roy “Tripwire” Merritt took a deep breath, gathering in the last of the night air, redolent with moist earth. A sliver of moon hung just above the horizon, silhouetting the tree-dotted hills. He scanned the terrain without night vision gear, taking joy in this simple pleasure. It reminded him of the Basque region of Spain by moonlight—or South Africa’s Transvaal. He’d seen a lot of the world by night, and usually from behind third-generation night vision goggles.

  The predawn air was crisp and cool on Merritt’s face as he stood in the payload area of an army ten-ton truck. Its powerful diesel engine labored in low gear as it climbed through a bulldozered breech in the estate wall. The canvas top had been removed, leaving it open to the night sky.

  Merritt slung an HK MP-5/10 over his shoulder, then looked back toward his FBI Hostage Rescue Team. Six of the best-trained operators in the bureau sat on either side of the cargo bay, swaying in unison as the truck lurched over mounds of dirt and rock. These were his men, and they were intimidating as hell. Clad in black Nomex flight suits, body armor with ceramic trauma plates, Pro-Tec helmets, night vision goggles, and bulletproof face masks, they made Darth Vader look like a Wal-Mart greeter. But of all the missions they had carried out together—from Karachi to the wilds of Montana—Merritt had never had more misgivings than on this one. During the mission briefing he kept thinking that this was a job for the bomb disposal teams or the demining experts. It kept coming back to urgency. Six officers were dead, nine more injured. No one had any answers and time was apparently of the essence. Still…

  Merritt looked down at the metal and wood scaffolding materials lying on the floor space between the benches. Four toolboxes lay there as well. His highly trained rapid response team was going to bridge a pit in a hostile environment. He wondered what sort of fuck-up happened upstairs to make this come about.

  Merritt glanced over at the mansion three hundred yards away. No lights had appeared in it since last evening. Radio communications had been back up for the last hour, ever since the ultrawideband transmissions from the house died.

  Merritt spoke normally, knowing his headset mic would pick it up. “Echo One to TOC. We’re at yellow. Request compromise authority and permission to move to green.”

  “Copy, Echo One. I have your team at yellow. You have compromise authority and permission to move to green.”

  “Copy that, TOC.” Merritt gave his men the thumbs-up signal. They returned it.

  Waucheuer, the breaching specialist, flipped up his face mask and grinned. “Hey, Trip, why do we need guns? Sobol’s already dead.”

  “Cut the chatter, Wack. Dead or not, Sobol managed to kill some good people here. Stay alert.”

  Waucheuer shrugged, then nodded sharply,
causing his face mask to flip back down.

  Merritt stood and looked over the cab of the truck as it advanced slowly across the wide lawn of the estate. They were coming up on the burnt-out hulk of the automated Hummer now.

  The other men stood to lean against the railing as the Hummer came up on the right-hand side. The truck slowed, then stopped about twenty feet from the wreckage. Two county SWAT team members were in the truck cab. The passenger kicked on a side-mounted searchlight, focusing it on the still smoldering remains. The Hummer was definitely nonoperational. The wheels were just blackened hubs, and the interior was gutted.

  “Those marines ever hear of a little thing called evidence?”

  Merritt could practically hear Waucheuer grinning behind his mask. Merritt ignored him. He spoke into his headset. “Echo One to TOC. The Hummer is nonoperational. Proceeding to green. Out.” Merritt pounded the cab roof twice. The truck lurched forward toward the mansion some one hundred yards away.

  The truck searchlight swung toward the house. A three-foot-high terrace wall surrounded the mansion at a distance of about two hundred feet. The terrace leveled out the hilltop for the lawns around the pool and patio. The wall prevented the truck from driving all the way to the house, but Merritt agreed with the SAC that driving along the front entrance or rear service road was a bad idea; it was a chokepoint and could be booby-trapped.

  Instead, the truck turned in front of the wall, then backed up; the ridiculous beep-beep of the backup warning filled the tense silence.

  It looked like it was going to work out. The tailgate now stood about two feet off the ground as the truck backed up to the terrace wall. It would be easy to unload the scaffolding and tools. But first, they needed to scout ahead. Merritt shouted to the driver, “Cut the engine and the lights.”

  Relative silence suddenly prevailed. The sound of crickets returned after a few moments. The only lights visible were the work lamps of the besieging FBI at the estate fence line—about three hundred yards away. Merritt swung down his night vision goggles and powered them up. His men did the same.

  Merritt spoke into his bone mic. “Leave the scaffolding. Let’s make sure we have a clear path to the objective.” Merritt gave a hand signal, and his men fell in line behind him.

  The plan was to circle around to the front of the house and enter through the open front door. They were on the east side of the house right now. So they were looking at a 150-yard infil over manicured lawns and gardens. Aerial radar had revealed no hidden pits or other apparent traps on the estate grounds to a depth of ten meters, but the approach to the mansion wasn’t what concerned Merritt. He was worried about entering the house itself—especially considering what happened to the last people to do so. Merritt stepped off the truck tailgate and started moving through the night. He felt and heard his men moving close behind him.

  This wasn’t a hostage crisis. A flash-bang grenade wasn’t going to stun anyone here. Overwhelming firepower wouldn’t intimidate the opponent. This was a new situation.

  Merritt turned and put a hand up to halt his men. “Wait here. I’m going to scout ahead. If you lose contact with me, pull back to the estate perimeter. Understood?”

  They exchanged concerned looks. This went against everything they’d trained for. They were a team. Even Waucheuer had no wisecracks.

  “That’s an order. Assume a defensive posture and wait here.” Merritt turned and moved cautiously toward the house.

  Hundreds of yards away at the FBI Command and Control trailer, the SAC, Steven Trear, stood gazing through a FLIR scope at the distant figures of the HRT unit. He could see one moving ahead of the others—moving toward the side of Sobol’s mansion. Trear muttered to himself, “What’s he doing?”

  One of the agents from the Command Trailer emerged and called to Trear. “Sir, a Special Agent Kirchner on the line for you. Something about Sobol’s purchase records.”

  Trear didn’t look up from the night vision scope. “Kirchner’s heading the audit team?”

  “I believe so, sir.”

  “Tell him I’ll call him back.”

  “He says it’s important—“

  Another Command Center agent pushed his head out through the doorway. “Sir! I’m picking up noise from the parabolic mics. Noise from inside the house.”

  Everyone stopped and looked at the guy with something resembling terror. Trear started walking toward him. “What kind of noise?”

  “It sounds like a pump motor, sir.”

  “Get those men out of there!”

  About sixty feet ahead of his men, Merritt heard the click and stopped cold. His men did likewise. They’d all heard it, too, and they instinctively spun to face every direction—training their weapons. Against what, they didn’t know.

  Suddenly Merritt’s radio crackled. Someone shouted in an urgent voice over the channel, “Echo One, abort immediately! Repeat, abort immediately!”

  Before he could react, Merritt heard a disquieting hiss start to emanate from the ground. Just as suddenly the air around him sprang to life, and he and his men nearly jumped out of their skins.

  Retractable lawn sprinklers popped up and started spraying the lush terrace lawn with cold water. His team burst out laughing as they stood getting soaked by the lawn sprinklers.

  Waucheuer shielded his night vision goggles and shouted the distance to Merritt. “Shit, Trip, I just aged ten years!”

  Even Merritt smiled behind his mask this time. “You heard ’em. Pull out!”

  Then something changed. Suddenly Merritt was aware of an overpowering odor. His eyes narrowed behind his goggles. The sprinklers were no longer spraying water.

  He looked to his men and shouted, “Gasoline!”

  Before they could turn and run, a high-precision motor whirred in the distant cupola tower. A deep choom sound issued from it, and the last thing Merritt saw through his goggles was a blinding green flare arcing over the distance between him and the tower.

  The rolling fireball lit up the sky for a mile around. Its dull roar echoed off the side of the trailer, and the orange light illuminated three hundred horrified faces. Trear still held the radio in his hand. He stood paralyzed as shrieks of agony came over the radio channel. All around him men raced into action—or anarchy, it was hard to tell.

  “Get the fire trucks over there!”

  “Ambulance! Bring up an ambulance!”

  “We’ve got agents down!”

  The fireball climbed to the sky, and in its stark light Trear could see the lawn sprinklers surrounding it still running. They were spraying water—to contain the fire in the precise spot where the HRT unit had infiltrated. Trear felt like he was watching something on TV. It had the surreal feeling of the impossible. People were grabbing him, shouting at him. He couldn’t take his eyes off the raging fire and the wildly thrashing dark forms dancing in the flames like damned souls—then falling. The ten-ton truck was burning like a Texas A&M bonfire.

  Someone shouted in his ear about radio transmissions, and Trear absently looked down at the radio in his hand. Only static hissed out of it now. That’s when it happened.

  Suddenly all the lights went on in Sobol’s mansion, glowing with a frightful intensity. Then lights kicked back on all across the estate. An audible groan ran through the ranks of the besieging agents.

  Trear snapped out of it and shoved the now useless radio into another agent’s hands. “Get to cover! Everybody get to cover!”

  The pain (because it must have been pain) was white noise that Merritt had no time for. On the imaginary control board in his mind, every light was flashing red. He ran as only men on fire can run, yanking his Nomex balaclava up to cover his mouth. The whole world had turned into the surface of the sun. He resisted the panic-stricken need to breathe the superheated air. To breathe was to die.

  But then it turned dark again—the bright glow beyond his clenched eyelids had gone away. Had the night vision goggles failed? Probably. But he’d have to open his eyes to find out,
and he wasn’t ready for that. But the heat was gone—and now there was only cold. His entire body tingled. It was almost pleasant. Experience told him that, in combat, tingling sensations meant you had just been seriously injured.

  Merritt staggered on blindly. Finally he stopped and tore off his night vision goggles and opened his eyes. Instantly he was blinded by cold water spraying into his face. It felt wonderful. He smelled a combination of gasoline, burnt flesh, melted plastic, and hot metal. He turned in place dizzily—feeling shock creep up on him. He stood in a manicured section of lawn right next to a rising mushroom of orange flame fifty feet tall. The cold water spraying over him made it tolerable to be this close. His men were in those flames somewhere.

  He reached for his bone mic, melted against his cheek. “Waucheuer! Reese! Littleton! Report! Kirkson! Engels! Report!” The microphone pulled off in his hands. His earphones were dead under his Kevlar helmet.

  His men were gone. All gone.

  Merritt was numb. He spun in place to orient himself and saw the mansion blazing white light a hundred feet farther on. He held his arm up and saw that the stock of his MP-5 had melted onto the back of his sleeve. His nylon web belt containing ammunition clips had melted into his jumpsuit and Kevlar body armor. He wasn’t sure whether he was badly injured, but his temper was beginning to flare. He decided to go with it.

  Merritt grabbed the gun’s barrel with his left hand and wrenched the twisted mass free from his arm. The Nomex appeared to have protected him from the worst of it, but he felt the confused buzzing in his nerve endings that was the neurological equivalent of “Please Stand By For Pain….”

  Merritt started running, not toward the perimeter wall and safety, but toward the mansion. He raced for the fenced-in pool area and a set of white French doors with polished brass handles—its windows blazing light. His eyes never left it as he leapt over stone benches and herb gardens.

  Around him, in the sprinkler wash, he smelled gasoline again, and he heard the whoosh of flames racing to overtake him, but he outran it and stayed in the cool clear water that served as a buffer against the flames reaching the house.