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.