Daemon

by Daniel Suarez

  Merritt sank down to lean his back against the wall. Waucheuer and the others had been carrying the heavy-duty breaching kit—the cutting charges and boosters. All Merritt had was a roll of strip explosives, and that wouldn’t take out this steel gate.

  Sobol’s voice was right there with him. “Does it help to know that there’s nothing important here?”

  Merritt looked down into the watery pit. He examined its walls. They were of brick painted with thick black marine paint. The pit was on the same level as the rest of the cellar—and presumably the server room.

  Merritt holstered his pistol and took the remaining grenades from his web harness. He had four flash-bang grenades left. He took the roll of Primasheet and det cord from his thigh pocket and wrapped them tightly around the grenades. Then he stood, straddling the corner of the pit. He dropped the package into the water, reeling out detonator cord as it fell. Then he ducked around the corner and activated the detonator.

  The muffled blast shot a geyser of water into the ceiling. The floor trembled for a few moments. Merritt soon heard the sound of water rushing through an opening. He had cracked the brick wall.

  He came back to the edge of the pit and could see water draining through the wall and into the server room.

  A klaxon suddenly sounded in the house, and fire strobes flickered on the ceiling. A British female voice spoke on a regular PA system, “Primary data center penetrated. Commencing self-destruct sequence.” There was a pause. “And there is no countdown.”

  “Shit!” Merritt knew the front door was around the corner and down the front hall. He sprinted around the corner as a piercing beep filled the house. It was like a smoke detector on steroids—drilling into his brain.

  The sprinkler caps popped off in the ceiling above him, and sprinkler heads clicked down. He heard the hiss of pressure building up. Merritt looked ahead. The front door of the mansion still stood wide open about a hundred feet ahead—wedged open by that blessed bomb squad team. He sprinted for the opening with everything he had.

  The sprinkler heads came to life, spraying gasoline over the stylish décor. He was still sixty feet from the front door when he saw a bright halogen bulb start to burn intensely up near the ceiling in the foyer. The light grew so intense that Merritt couldn’t look directly at it.

  When the bulb exploded—sending a wall of flame roaring toward him—Merritt’s brain trotted forward a candidate for his last mortal thought:

  I’ll never see my daughters grow up.

  Without warning, the floor gave way beneath him as he ran. A pit trap swallowed him. He fell into blackness, chased by flames that lit up the brackish water. Time slowed down, and Merritt had the leisure to consider what a bastard Sobol was; he’d activated a pit trap after letting the bomb disposal robot drive down the hallway safely.

  The devious bastard.

  Merritt hit the water face-first and blacked out as the trapdoor snapped shut above him.

  Among the agents surrounding the mansion a shout went up. It was quickly followed by hundreds of other voices shouting. Sobol’s mansion was now glowing orange. Then flames burst out through literally all of its windows. In seconds the entire structure was engulfed in flames reaching fifty feet into the air. The half-dozen outbuildings burst into flames, too, and were quickly roaring infernos.

  Trear numbly watched the scene. It was the nightmarish Waco visual he’d dreaded—one almost certainly combined with the worst casualties ever suffered by the FBI in a single operation. And all of Sobol’s data were going up in flames. Along with Trear’s career.

  Chapter 19:// Sarcophagus

  It took Gragg nearly three and a half hours to crack the WPA key on Boerner’s second Wi-Fi network. He had to keep his car running the entire time to be certain he didn’t drain his laptop battery. Once he cracked the key, he configured his card to use it, and DHCP soon handed him an IP address on the wireless network. By that time it was roughly four in the morning.

  But he’d slept a little, and buoyed by the successful crack, he felt good. If this was a test, he’d passed the first part. He might get out of this alive yet.

  Gragg used Superscan to run a ping sweep and port scan for machines on this new network, but he discovered only the single workstation running the wireless access point. The workstation returned information on its operating system and coughed up the status of several running services—but its hard drive was sealed tight.

  Gragg considered his options. He wanted a quick exploit that would give him a remote shell on the host machine with sysadmin rights. From there, he should be able to see into the hardwired LAN not yet visible to him.

  Since he didn’t have the luxury of time, he opted for an attack that was effective against a wide range of devices: SNMP—a buffer overrun that exploited a known vulnerability in unpatched implementations of Simple Network Management Protocol. This service was present on the target, and it was worth a shot.

  He switched to the command console and quickly keyed in the commands, pointing his exploit code to port 161 on the target machine. If the target was running an unpatched OpenBSD, he’d get to root pretty quick.

  He executed the command, waited, and in a moment he got a return instructing him to telnet to port 6161 at the target IP address. He sighed in relief. Another hurdle overcome.

  Gragg launched a telnet session and soon had a root prompt. He now owned Boerner’s workstation. Time to escalate network privileges.

  Gragg searched the target machine’s domain but was disappointed by the results. His victim was linked to a single server—and that was sealed up tight. It barely divulged any information. Gragg took a look in the server’s shared directory and raised his eyebrows.

  The directory contained a single Web page file. A page named HackMe.htm.

  Gragg smiled. He was beginning to feel a connection with Sobol. Sobol wanted him to get this far—that’s what this was all about.

  Gragg double-clicked on the file. A plain white Web page appeared in a browser window. It had logon and password text boxes and a SUBMIT button—nothing more.

  There were options here. Unicode directory traversal? Gragg smiled. Logon. Sobol was encouraging him. This had all the earmarks of an SQL-injection attack, and he had a favorite one. In the logon and password boxes he entered:

  ‘or 1=1--

  He clicked the SUBMIT button. After a moment’s pause an animation appeared with the words “Logon successful. Please wait….” Gragg felt a rush of endorphins. He’d just received high praise from his new mentor. He was getting more comfortable by the minute in this environment.

  In a few moments a slick Flash-based diagram of a cinderblock building appeared with various features highlighted. It was an isometric view depicting the building right in front of Gragg’s car. He could see the antenna tower with a call-out label captioned “WI-FI ANTENNA ARRAY.” He moved his pointer around the diagram and noticed rollovers come to life as his mouse passed over certain features.

  Gragg saw a sensor array depicted on the roof, and the illustration looked like it included at least one camera. Gragg pointed at the array, and a translucent drop-down menu unfolded to the right of it containing a submenu:

  Ultrawideband Transceiver

  HD Video Multiplexer

  Acoustical Sensor Array

  He was beginning to feel the rush now. This wasn’t a game, and it was clearly designed by a well-funded and technologically capable person. He had always sought the edge—and this was it. This was as far from Main Street as he’d ever been. This wasn’t the tattooed, pierced, neo-tribal rebellious bullshit of his generation. This was a quiet demonstration of networked power. This was it.

  Gragg selected HD Video Multiplexer from the drop-down menu. A new browser window appeared containing a selection of six thumbnail images. They appeared to be streaming video feeds. Gragg saw an image of a car in one thumbnail, and he double-clicked on it—as anyone his age would do. It expanded to fill the window. It was a live image of his car
. He waved his hand, and his hand appeared waving on the video feed. Gragg noticed a superimposed red bracket around his license plate. A call-out label showed the software’s interpretation of the tag number. It was correct. So Sobol was employing an optical license plate reader. Gragg knew it was commercially available software—used all the time on interstates and downtown roads. But Sobol needed access to DMV records to determine who owned the car. He must have cracked a DMV database in order to get his registration information. Gragg considered the hourly rate of the average DMV worker and realized that gaining access wasn’t a problem for Sobol.

  In the background of the video, there was a similar bracket around the VW Vanagon’s license plate. Gragg couldn’t help but wonder what was up with that. The van was smashed all to hell.

  He closed that dialog box and checked out the other video feeds. There were cameras placed all around the cinderblock building, guarding it from every direction. Every time the wind blew, the swaying branches were outlined by vectored lines trying to resolve into something recognized by the software. Gragg found himself watching the red lines appear and disappear like a lava lamp. Motion-capture software? This was sophisticated stuff. No one would ever suspect that this isolated blockhouse held so much processing power.

  Gragg closed the video feeds and moved around to the other visible features of the diagram. He noticed that a garage-like protrusion extended from the rear of the building. He pointed his mouse at it, and the words “H1 Alpha” materialized beneath his pointer. That explained the damage to the Vanagon. There was an automated Hummer here—just like at Sobol’s mansion. Gragg smiled. It was Sobol. He was walking in the footsteps of a genius. To his dismay, there was no more information visible for the Hummer, so he clicked on one of the nodes around the base of the building. The label “Seismic Sensors” appeared. Probably for detection of approaching vehicles and people.

  As Gragg scrolled around the base of the building illustration, a rollover displayed the red, glowing outline of a door in the front wall. He looked up at the real wall some twenty feet ahead of him. He couldn’t see any indication that there was a door in the plain cinder blocks. He hovered his mouse cursor back over the section of wall in the diagram, and a drop-down menu appeared. It had two selections: “Open” and “Close.” Gragg clicked “Open.”

  In front of his car, he saw a section of the cinderblock wall move inward and then slide sideways—revealing a dark doorway about five feet wide. Gragg half expected roiling steam to emanate from the opening. It was outlined with a soft red glow.

  Was this it? Was he supposed to enter? He looked around warily. That would require getting out of his car.

  The spotlight from the building still shined down on the area, revealing what a horrendous morass of mud he’d driven into. He had no idea how he’d get the car out without a tow truck. He couldn’t stay in here forever.

  Gragg shut down his laptop and packed up all his gear. In a few minutes he had everything in his rucksack except for his Glock 9mm—which he kept in his right hand. Gragg opened the Tempo’s driver door with its trademark 1980s-Detroit-crack-squeak sound. He gingerly placed one combat-booted foot into the quagmire and felt it sink up to his knee. He groaned in disgust, but realizing he had no choice, he followed it with his other foot, closing the car door behind him. Pretty soon he was stagger-stepping through the deep mud toward the dark opening in the cinderblock wall.

  Gragg stopped and took another look at the smashed VW Vanagon with Louisiana plates and anarchy bumper stickers. Shattered taillight plastic and twisted side moldings littered the area. The left rear wheel of the VW was smashed into immobility, set at an angle to the axle. The passenger door of the Vanagon was slightly open, with deep footprints leading out of the mud and toward the road.

  Gragg stood for a moment, deciding whether to check it out. He realized he didn’t want to be walking around out here and continued staggering through the foot-sucking mud toward the building.

  Before long he climbed up onto a ledge of solid ground that ringed the building. Gragg examined his legs. They were caked in mud. His feet were sopping wet. He tried to scrape the mud off his boots by dragging them against the ground but gave up and slung his rucksack over his shoulder. Then he chambered a round in the Glock and faced the opening.

  Diffuse red light emanated from the edges of the door. It was just enough light to reveal a polished stone floor extending into the blackness beyond. Red. Low-frequency light not visible from any significant distance.

  Suddenly a British-accented female voice spoke in midair right alongside Gragg’s head. “Come inside, Mr. Gragg.”

  Gragg was so startled he reflexively squeezed off a shot with the Glock. The deafening crack echoed off into the sky. The bullet whined off the cinderblock wall, then howled out into the woods.

  The female voice spoke again. It sounded slightly artificial, clipped. “Are you familiar with gunshot detectors? Police departments in major U.S. cities deploy them to identify and triangulate the precise location of gunshots the moment they occur. A gunshot has a distinct acoustic pattern. Even the weapon fired can be identified by its sound pattern. You apparently have a…nine millimeter.” There was a pause. “You won’t need it. You’ve earned the right to enter.”

  Gragg looked down at the Glock in his hand. He took a breath. He’d never felt out of his depth technologically, but the disembodied voice was as close to magic as he’d ever experienced. He didn’t like the role of awed primitive. It didn’t suit him. He took another deep breath and tentatively spoke to the voice. “Who are you?”

  The voice shot back. “This door will close permanently in ten seconds.”

  Gragg’s thoughts scattered, and he hesitated for a moment before rushing through the doorway and into the darkness—feet squishing mud. The moment he did so, the door slid noiselessly closed behind him. The red glow from the door frame faded away as the opening sealed shut. Gragg stood in pitch-black darkness for a moment. It smelled not at all musty. It was super-clean, dry, filtered air. He wasn’t in South Texas anymore….

  Suddenly a diffuse white light began to emanate from the walls. It didn’t flicker on, like fluorescent lights, but steadily rose from nothing to a comfortable, even glow. It was confident, effortless light, and completely silent.

  Gragg found himself in a room twenty feet square, with a single steel door set in the middle of the wall straight ahead of him. The door had a dappled gunmetal look to its surface, as though it were meant to draw the eye. The walls in here were all glowing white panels—made of some nylon or fiberglass material. The floor was simple polished concrete.

  The voice came back suddenly, startling Gragg as it circled around him. Gragg was hearing it, but he was still having difficulty accepting it. In real life a voice couldn’t appear in thin air. It wasn’t possible.

  “You’ve come a long way, and you’ve accomplished much.” A pause. “Don’t be frightened by my voice. Its appearance in midair is accomplished through a HyperSonic Sound system. This technology is commercially available. Would you like to hear a technical explanation? Yes or no?”

  Gragg looked around at the ceiling and walls. There were tiny plastic pods of various sorts mounted there. He cleared his throat. “Yes.”

  “A HyperSonic Sound system—or HSS—does not use physical speakers. HSS pulsates quartz crystals at a frequency thousands of times faster than the vibrations in a normal speaker—creating ultrasonic waves at frequencies far beyond human hearing. Unlike lower-frequency sound, these waves travel in a tight path—a beam. Two beams can be focused to intersect each other, and where they interact they produce a third sonic wave whose frequency is exactly the difference between the two original sounds. In HSS that difference will fall within the range of human hearing—and will appear to come from thin air. This is known as a Tartini Tone—in honor of Guiseppe Tartini, the eighteenth-century Italian composer who first discovered this principle.”

  Gragg was feeling slightly faint.
<
br />   “This is only the beginning of what you will learn. You do wish to learn, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he blurted.

  “Then we must determine your sincerity.”

  The whir of a precise electrical motor came to his ears, and Gragg glanced around the room. A small console had opened up in the wall next to the door. Gragg warily approached it, his feet squishing mud onto the concrete floor. He saw no other muddy prints. He must have been the first to make it this far. A smile stole across his face, and he approached the console with more courage.

  The console appeared to be an array of biometric devices—a handprint reader, a camera lens with a rubber viewfinder, and a microphone. There was also a small LCD screen—like the type found on the backs of airline seats. It was not illuminated.

  The voice was right next to him. “Place either hand on the reader. Place your eye against the viewfinder, and adjust the microphone to a position approximately three inches to the right of your mouth.”

  Gragg did as instructed. It was not the most comfortable setup, but he didn’t think complaining was a good idea.

  “Very good. I can administer this test in one of seven different languages. Is English your primary language? Answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”

  Gragg cleared his throat. “Yes.”

  “Good. I am going to ask a series of questions. You must answer truthfully—even if you think the truth is not the optimal response. This is not a test of your skills as a hacker. It is an effort to determine if you bear us ill will. A pattern of falsehoods will terminate the test. Early termination of the test will cause the air to be pumped from the room. This will create a partial vacuum that will cause the nitrogen to bubble out of your blood—resulting in an excruciating death. An MPEG video of your death will be placed on the Internet as a warning to others. Do you understand? Answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”