The Voice spoke on the headset. "Receive assembly on phrase 'Here it is.'"

Mosely approached a young Asian man standing in the lobby with a handcart piled with five-gallon water cooler jugs. As he walked by, the man extended an odd-looking steel and yellow plastic device to him. It was shaped like a glue gun, with the top section missing-an empty channel with twin grooved steel plates. "Here it is."

Mosely grabbed it with his work-gloved hands and shoved it into a slot on his utility belt designed specifically for it. He heard the water man exit the lobby doors behind him, but he walked purposefully on his appointed vector, passing a nondescript guy in a pullover shirt bearing some company's logo. He nodded congenially as he went past, but the guy didn't acknowledge him in the least. Just some tenant.

"Vector 155,"The Voice said in Mosely's ear.

That was straight down the corridor. Mosely kept moving down the hall, glancing at office doors.

Suite 500.

Ten minutes ago he thought he was going to tap a phone system. But now in possession of the assembly, he recognized it immediately. He had used it before.

It was an electronic pistol.

Manufactured with bright yellow plastic and brushed steel, it resembled a battery-powered hand tool-it even had a tool company logo on the side. But in reality it was a fully automatic, precision-made handgun. It was nearly 100 percent reliable because it had no moving parts. Instead of a firing pin and complex recoil-based reloading mechanism, an electronic pistol was a fire-by-wire device; the caseless bullets were stacked in a straight line in one of four parallel twelve-inch barrels, and a logic chip fired each bullet independently with bolts of electricity from an onboard battery. The gun was reloaded by slapping on new barrels of ammunition. Mosely had already received three rapid-loaders from a courier out in the street. It was a foolproof, untraceable weapon designed for one thing: killing people at close range.

Suite 710.

He steeled himself. There was a grander purpose at work here. He had to keep reminding himself of that. This wasn't the same as what he'd done as a teen. He wasn't doing this for himself. The world was changing. He'd seen it. This was part of the plan. There were no random acts in the plan.

The Voice said, "Stop."

Suite 1010.

Mosely drew the unloaded pistol, then took the welded-steel barrels from the other side of his tool belt. He slid the two together with a click-clack. It was now loaded and looked very much like a garish, toy laser pistol.

The Voice came to his ears. "Device code…4-9-1-5."

Mosely flipped the gun and tapped in the four-digit code at the base of the handle. The device was now armed.

He turned to face the door. Then he reached into his pocket and produced a hard plastic door key given to him by a woman out on the street. All master key systems were vulnerable to mathematical reduction.

The Voice continued in his earpiece. "Confirm instruction: kill the occupants of suite…1-0-1-0."

Mosely closed his eyes. He didn't relish this. He thought he'd left this behind years ago. But the Daemon had found him out. It knew he had killed before. He took a deep breath, then said, "Instruction confirmed."

"Proceed."

Mosely inserted the key, turned it, and pushed the door open. He moved into a cluttered office with shelving piled high with papers and boxes on the far wall. Banks of cheap desktop computers sat atop folding tables. A thirtysomething guy with a sizeable gut turned quickly in his chair to face Mosely. He had a cherry Danish almost up to his mouth.

"You can't just-"

Mosely raised the pistol and sent a quick burst into the man's chest-spattering the computer table and back wall with gore. A couple of the frangible rounds slammed into the wall and dissolved into puffs of powder, barely leaving a dent in the drywall.

Frangible rounds still amazed Mosely. The bullets were made of compressed ceramic powder. They retained their hitting power if they hit soft human tissue, but they disappeared in a cloud of dust if they encountered an unyielding surface-like a wall. They were designed to contain a shoot-out within the room where the shooting was taking place, and they also eliminated the risk of ricochets. This last part was of particular concern when you were spraying seven rounds a second in a room ten feet square.

The bloody fat man slumped and fell onto the floor with a thud that shook the room.

Mosely heard movement in the next office, farther in. The squeaking of a desk chair.

"Mav? What was that?"

Mosely advanced quickly, both hands gripping the pistol. No need to worry about their calling the police. Their phones were out by now, and their cell phones would already be jammed.

He stepped into a larger office area containing two desks and a bank of windows looking out onto the back parking lot. A young man stood behind a desk, hand reaching into the center drawer. A look of disbelief on his face. Mosely ripped out a longer burst this time. With the suppressor it sounded like a muted model airplane engine. The wall, windows, and drop ceiling were now spattered with blood. Smoke wafted away from the gun barrel.

Mosely turned as another man screamed in terror. The man ducked behind his desk, dragging a phone with him.

Shit.

Mosely popped the smoking barrels off and clicked on a new set. He advanced, gun ready, and could hear the man sputtering in terror as he tapped at the dead phone. "No! I'll give you money! Don't!"

Mosely came around the side of the desk and aimed his gun down at the man cowering against the wall.

"No! Please!"

Mosely hesitated. Goddamnit.It could not be left undone. There was no question.

"No!"

Mosely emptied the barrel into him. The man slumped sideways behind the desk, in a pool of blood, his body twitching. Mosely loaded the last barrel and retraced his steps-putting another couple of shots into the heads of the other two men. He spoke into his headset. "Task complete."

There was a pause. Then The Voice said, "Confirmed. Two thousand network credits. Demobilize."

Mosely tapped a sequence of numbers onto a four-key pad on the bottom of the gun and tossed it onto the top of a nearby desk. The weapon started to sizzle and smoke, then the plastic bulk of it began to melt-along with its circuitry.

Mosely took a small semicircular device off his tool belt. The thing resembled a small traveling alarm clock with a rounded bottom. He tapped the same four-key code into the device, then tossed it into the center of the floor, where it rolled around for several moments while Mosely exited the way he came in.

As the device came to rest on its rounded bottom, a pocket laser beamed bright red light onto the stained drop tiles of the ceiling-creating a marquee-like sign in large glowing red letters. The letters spelled out the message the Daemon wanted to send-the message associated with operation 4-9-1-5:

ALL SPAMMERS WILL DIE