Detective Sergeant Peter Sebeck died at 6:12 P.M., Pacific Standard Time.

Chapter 40:// A New Dimension

Natalie Philips entered the windowless Daemon Task Force offices well past midnight. She was expecting the place to be nearly deserted, but instead she saw a knot of techs and heavily armed security personnel gathered near the hallway leading to her office. They were engaged in an urgent, hushed discussion. The Major looked up from the center of the huddle as Philips approached. He nodded to her. "How was your trip, Doctor?"

Philips dropped her overnight bag on the floor nearby. "What's going on?"

The Major thumbed down the hallway. "Your hacker friend is having some sort of episode. He locked himself in conference room B and changed the access codes on us."

Philips sighed wearily and rubbed her eyes. "How long ago?"

"About an hour. I was preparing to resolve the situation."

She eyed a guard with a tear gas gun. "That won't be necessary, Major. I'll go talk to him."

The Major grinned coldly. "You're the boss, Doctor."

He was mocking her now. She chose to ignore it and tried to pass. He stood in her way.

"You realize I must submit a report to Centcom about this incident."

"Understood. If you'll excuse me…"

"Please remind him of the relevant clauses in his amnesty agreement."

"I'll be sure to do that. Now, if I'm not mistaken, these men have guard duties. See that they get back to them." She hefted her bag again, but The Major waited a beat before moving aside and allowing her to pass. She trudged down the hall toward a crack of light under the door of conference room B. Once there, she stared at a red LED display glowing on the door's proximity card reader. It read: FUCK_OFF.She smiled slightly, then flipped open the reader's plastic cover to reveal a small ten-key pad underneath. She concentrated for a moment, then tapped in a thirty-two-digit code. Her back door. The door clicked, and she pushed inside.

"Go away." Ross didn't even turn around. He stood on the far side of a conference room table crowded with desktop and laptop computers. Lines of text cycled rapidly across all the screens. The rest of the room was strewn with crumpled charts, diagrams, and innumerable fanfold reports that spilled across the floor.

Ross was taking aim with a makeshift pencil dart at a large photo mosaic of Matthew Sobol's face tacked to the far wall. The picture was tiled together from paper photocopies. A half dozen pencil darts already protruded from Sobol's face, in addition to hundreds of other tiny holes concentrated mainly between Sobol's eyes.

Philips took in the scene. "I can't say this line of research holds much promise."

Ross inclined his head slightly toward her, recognizing her voice. He hesitated for a moment, dart still poised, then completed his throw. The dart stuck into Sobol's eyebrow. Ross drew another dart into his throwing hand and said nothing.

Philips closed the door behind her and picked her way across the littered floor, stepping between charts torn from the walls. "What's going on, Jon?"

"Nothing." He threw another dart, nailing Sobol in the cheek. "How was Washington?"

"Complicated."

"There's a shocker. Another general trying to pack me off to Diego Garcia?" He hurled a dart with great force, burying it deeply in the wall.

Philips walked over to him and dropped her bag onto the conference table. "You may think you're joking, but you're not far off. Your insistence on personal anonymity hasn't helped me defend you. Neither do stunts like this."

Ross stared at Sobol's dart-pocked face for a moment, then turned to Philips. "Is it true that they just executed Pete Sebeck?"

Philips looked down. Damn.

"Did they really kill him?"

"Yes. They did."

Ross tossed another round of darts. "Goddamnit! That's just great!"

"It couldn't be helped, Jon."

"Of course it could be helped"

"Not without risking retribution by the Daemon. It's already killed tens of thousands. Are you prepared to take responsibility for more?"

"That's not the issue, and you know it."

"It is exactly the issue."

Ross turned and threw his last dart. "Fuck! We should have beaten this goddamn monster by now."

"Look, the only way to make Sebeck's sacrifice meaningful is to destroy the Daemon before the public learns of its existence. The financial markets are tumbling on mere rumors. Once the public knows, the financial markets will crash. Those markets support life as we know it. The livelihoods of hundreds of millions are at stake."

"Well, we're running out of time, Doctor. The blogosphere is already buzzing." Ross slumped against the wall.

"There's no solution but to keep working, Jon." Philips removed her blazer and laid it neatly over a chair back. She started methodically rolling up her sleeves. "While I was away, did we get any clear-text back from those intercepts I ran through Cold Iron?"

Ross still stared into space.

"Jon!"

He looked up at her, then slowly dragged himself to the table. "Yes. Crypto forwarded a file." He dropped into a chair and started clattering away at a keyboard.

She nodded, encouraged, and moved over to him. "Good, let's see it."

He opened a text file. An endless stream of double-precision numbers filled the screen, alphanumeric characters strewn between them. "Here's a segment of the clear-text."

She looked closely at the stream. "GPS coordinates."

He nodded. "Damned near a terabyte of them. What prompted you to pluck this out of the airwaves?"

She was still examining the numbers. "Sheer volume. This is just a few days' worth. It's being broadcast from low-power radio transmitters in eighty countries-tens of thousands of transmitters-and this stream didn't exist before the Daemon. It's becoming a background noise that grows louder every day."

"Yeah, well, this 'noise' is nearly a month old, so it's ancient history."

"Brute- force cracks at this key length take time, Jon-even for us." She gestured to the screen. "But what is it? I mean, why would the Daemon bother to encrypt a log of GPS waypoints? Some sort of logistics tracking system?"

"I had some thoughts on that. Notice that the data isn't all GPS coordinates." He highlighted a section of the file. "There are these long, solid alphanumeric strings recurring in the data set-like unique identifiers." He clattered at the keyboard again. "When I parsed the data, I was able to group all the waypoints for a given ID, and when I plot the waypoints in a GIS mapping program"-he launched another program that displayed a map of southern Texas and the Gulf of Mexico. — "I get this.…"

The map filled with dots. Almost every inch was covered.

Philips sighed. "Less than informative."

He nodded. "At this altitude, perhaps, but when we move in closer, things get clearer…" He zoomed down to an overhead view of the streets in a city; the clean vector lines of named avenues filled the screen with an irregular grid. The data points visibly ran along the lines of the street grid, occasionally veering off the marked roads.

Philips rubbed her face, her exhaustion starting to catch up with her. "Just thousands of data points with no meaningful association."

Ross turned to her. "Not if I could relate this data with something I knew the Daemon did. Then we'd have a better idea what we're looking at." He kept his gaze upon her.