"Maybe. And it sent packets to thousands of IP addresses."

"Packets containing what?"

"Probably commands."

"To thousands of addresses?"

Ross nodded grimly.

"Jesus. Would the Feds know this?"

"Oh yeah. The type of program I stopped at Alcyone is fairly common in computing. It's known as a daemon. It runs in the background waiting for some event to take place. Usually it's something simple like a request to print. In this case it would be news of Sobol's death. Then it activates."

"And triggers the killings."

Ross nodded. "It's possible."

"Just one problem. Sobol couldn't call me on the phone. I got a phone call this morning from someone pretending to be an FBI agent. They told me to check my e-mail-and that's what led me to Sobol. So someone else is coordinating this."

Ross was shaking his head. "It could have been VOIP-voice over Internet protocol."

Sebeck glared at him. "Have I stepped through a fucking time machine? Was I asleep for the last decade or something?"

"VOIP went mainstream in the corporate world years ago. It saves on phone bills by directing voice communications over Internet servers instead of long-distance telephone lines."

"So you're telling me this Daemon program can talk to people over the phone?"

"Playing a prerecorded message over a phone line is easy. The Daemon could manage the sequence and schedule the calls based on what it reads in the news."

"So it's not actually a computer talking? Someone must have recorded the message?"

"Probably. Although there are programs that can convert text streams into pretty convincing synthetic voices. Call any airline reservation desk-you'll be talking to a computer pretty quick. It's used to announce flight schedules, credit card balances, things like that."

They drove on for a few moments in silence.

Sebeck sighed. "Well, at least you got the Alcyone server. That'll put a kink in the killer's plans-whether he's alive or dead."

Ross didn't look comforted. "You really should play one of Sobol's games, Sergeant."

Chapter 9:// Herr Oberstleutnant

Over the Rhine was the only first-person shooter to which Brian Gragg had ever become addicted. He'd played and mastered a score of PC action games. All of them had incredible 3-D graphics, volumetric smoke, realistic physics engines, thirty-two-voice sound, vast levels, and multi-player Internet features. But OTR was different: Its AI was scary smart.

Where enemies in other games poured through doorways, wave after wave, only to be slaughtered, OTR's AI engine deployed Nazi soldiers realistically. In a house-to-house search, groups of three or four would peel off from the main group, kicking in doors. If you shot one or two or even three, the officer in the street would blow his whistle and shout orders. Then you'd better haul ass because dozens of soldiers would surround your cottage. They wouldn't storm the place like mindless automatons. Instead, they'd take cover behind fences, walls, and vehicles, and they'd shout in German for you to come out. When you didn't (and, of course, why would you?) they'd start tossing grenades through the windows or set fire to the house. If you tried to look out a window to see what they were doing, a sniper might cap you.

But what was even more fascinating to Gragg was that they didn't do it the same way each time. There were smart and dumb soldiers, and varying qualities of Nazi officers. If you holed up in a particularly defensible spot, they might call in a Stug to batter the place into rubble-or worse yet, a Flamenwerfer. And if the siege went on for a while, the Gestapo would arrive to take charge of the situation, and that meant only one thing: SS Oberstleutnant Heinrich Boerner, an adversary so wily and twisted, this fictional character had become a cause clbre at the E3 gaming convention. There was a thirty-foot color banner of his face hanging over CyberStorm Entertainment's booth. He was literally the poster boy for evil.

OTR's AI cemented the impression that you were fighting against a rational opponent-and a challenging one. Gragg appreciated the endless hours of distraction this afforded, particularly since his real-life incident with the Filipinos.

Heider's body had been found in a rail yard near Hobby Airport, south of Houston. Heider had been bound, gagged, and beaten to death-left as a warning to the carder community. It was at times like these that Gragg was thankful for his limited social circle.

Few, if any, would be able to connect him to Heider, but just in case he decided to lay low for a few weeks.

He had about fifty or sixty thousand in cash on hand at various banks under various identities. Good thing, because he couldn't trade the identity database he had copied from the Filipino server with any of his Abkhazian contacts. It was just too hot. He felt a wave of humiliation again. Over twenty thousand high-net-worth identities down the drain-a fortune on the open market. How did they know it was him?

Gragg had cracked their database through a Unicode directory traversal that allowed him to install a back door on their Web server. They hadn't properly patched it, and the sample applications were still on the server, so it was a fairly trivial matter to gain Administrator rights. He was pretty certain that a network admin was lying at the bottom of Manila Harbor over that simple mistake.

But how the hell did they trace the hack to him? Gragg ran the exploit through a zombied machine somewhere in Malaysia and a hijacked 803.11g wireless connection in a Houston subdivision. Even if they tracked the file transfer to the destination IP address, how did that lead them back to him? Even if they beat the hell out of the poor suburban sap whose Wi-Fi access point he'd hijacked, that wouldn't tell them anything. Nonetheless, Gragg had spent a couple sleepless nights waiting for his front door to be kicked in while pondering the question. He just couldn't figure it. What had he missed?

Only recently did it occur to Gragg that he might have been the Filipinos' only partner in Houston. By staging the attack from a Houston domain, Gragg had made a pathetically obvious mistake. The carder, Loki, from Houston, Texas, was an obvious suspect.

But as the days slipped by, it became apparent that either the gang was satisfied that Loki was dead or they had no idea of Gragg's real identity. Until he was positive, Gragg spent his waking hours hiding in the rough industrial space that served as his apartment, playing endless hours of OTR.And OTR was quite a challenge, after all.

Gragg usually chose the Nazi side, and his preferred weapon was the sniper rifle, which he'd use to pick off newbies from a hiding place in a bell tower or garret window. He combined this with a liberal amount of verbal abuse, using hot keys to launch the taunts built into the game: I've seen French schoolgirls shoot straighter!

His cable Internet connection usually gave him a ping in the 20-to 50-millisecond range, which was a major advantage against lamers with pings of 150-plus. Their in-game avatars would hesitate as Gragg dropped them. He never tired of piling up the bodies in front of his hiding place.

Deathmatch OTR was a distributed network game-that is, one of the players hosted the game map off of his machine and made the match available for anyone to join over the Internet. There were deathmatch clients available that listed all available matches by geographical region-each machine sending out a message that it was available. The server listings numbered in the thousands.

Since Gragg had been playing OTRoff and on for the last six months-well before the Filipino problem-he was intimately familiar with every game map. He knew that if he tossed a potato masher grenade from the end of the park in the Saint-L map, it would land just behind the vegetable cart on the far end, killing anyone hiding there. He knew a place on the Tunisian map where he could jump up onto shattered rooftops and snipe people with impunity. It took an experienced jumper to make the leap without falling to his death off the balcony.