Roy Merritt had been Loki’s enemy, but unlike The Major, Merritt was a worthy opponent—resourceful, personally courageous, and honest. Loki felt a twinge of anguish at the memory of Merritt dying before his eyes. They called him the Burning Man because he’d survived the death trap Sobol’s house had become—and he did it all on video. Video that had since been seen by just about everyone on the darknet. Merritt had seemed invincible.

But he was a man too idealistic for this world. No wonder his own side shot him in the back.

Loki wondered what it must be like to be so universally loved and admired. He circled around again and looked up into that great, stone face, wrapped in D-Space flames, burning him for all eternity, as though he were damned. It was an odd conceit for the angelic hero to appear tortured by eternal flames. Perhaps he was all the more powerful a symbol because of it.

Loki noticed that there was also a D-Space video display just beneath the carved name on the pedestal. People in the real world wouldn’t be able to see it, of course, but darknet operatives could. It showed only a still photograph of Merritt from what looked to be his FBI Quantico graduation photo. Loki clicked on the image and a procession of photographs and videos began to play to a mournful tune. Loki clicked a MUTE button, preferring instead to view the images without overt psychological manipulation.

What followed was a several-minute presentation that had apparently been gleaned from commercial online photo and video sites. Loki could imagine hundreds of thousands of people scouring the public Web for any information on their fallen hero. It was possible someone even cracked into the Merritt family computer. Whatever the source, a very personal and moving series of images appeared.

Loki turned the sound back on.

There was Merritt whispering kind encouragement to his daughter at the edge of a basketball court, pride still evident in his eyes. Her jersey and the scoreboard behind them showed they were getting creamed. Photos of him with his family. A newspaper photo of Merritt—although injured himself—carrying a wounded woman from a bank surrounded by police.

Loki began to realize the power of myth. It was the power of common belief. Sobol understood it, and yet he chose to become a devil, and here as if part of the natural order, a mythic hero arose in the network—dead but more alive than ever.

While Loki, possibly the most powerful Daemon operative in the world, with each passing day felt smaller and more isolated as the darknet population grew around him.

He suddenly felt truly alone.

Chapter 18: // Underworld

Loki sat astride an idling black Ducati Streetfighter motorcycle. He studied the darkness around him. Stars provided the only light, but the fourth-generation white-phosphor night vision integrated into his helmet gave him a high-contrast black-and-white view of his surroundings. He preferred to remain enveloped in darkness like this when traveling at night. No lights. He had added a control to kill his motorcycle’s brake and dashboard lights, too. As he glanced around, he confirmed what he already knew: he was in the middle of fucking nowhere.

To his left lay the crumbling ruins of a small clapboard house, windows like empty eye sockets. He idled at a T intersection with a road extending left and right along the edge of some woods. The wreckage of several cars had been left there in the tall grass. Oddly, one of them was a Porsche 944, which had died a long way from Germany. This was a desolate place.

Just like him to bring me out here . . .

Eugene, Missouri, couldn’t be considered a town. It was even smaller than Garnia—with no shops or Main Street. The hour was late, and he knew the residents of this tiny hamlet would have heard him roaring in, but he was just an invisible, rumbling presence in the darkness. He wouldn’t have come this far from the interstate if this wasn’t the closest gate to the underworld. And the underworld, he knew, could only be reached in places that had long endured and which would long remain. Finding them in the flatness of this prairie was difficult.

Loki waved a hand and a high-resolution satellite map of his current location appeared in D-Space, seeming to float ten feet in front of him. The imagery showed a dirt track between ruinous structures in the trees ahead. He turned off the map and accelerated toward the tree line. He soon made out the entrance to the brush-choked road and urged the powerful motorcycle through the trees, dodging around old tires and rusted washing machines.

Before long he discovered what he was searching for: a set of steel rails extending to either side through the forest. The Rock Island Line, abandoned back in 1981. The tracks were choked in weeds with wooden ties visible only here and there. Trees crowded the edges of the gravel ballast lane.

Loki turned left and headed down the tracks into the grayscale world that was oily blackness to mere mortals. The tracks continued at a gentle curve through forest, with the land rising up slowly to either side. He bumped along the ties for a quarter of a mile and found what he was looking for—the mouth of the Eugene Tunnel. He stopped and gazed into the black opening. It was pitch-black even to him.

Railroad tunnels. Enthusiasts had meticulously recorded them worldwide—their GPS locations, direction, length, height, and width. The public Web already knew about these underworld places in great detail. And that meant the Daemon knew about them as well. Which made them a logical place for connecting worlds. There was something oddly appropriate in the symbolism of it, and Sobol knew his archetypes well. With Sobol, gates were critical points, where fate was determined. The one Loki was searching for was no exception.

Loki had been studying planar spells ever since he received his odd message. Of course, he was familiar with planar travel from a dozen games where players gate in and out of various dimensions and universes. But now, with the advent of the limitless layers of D-Space projected atop reality, dimensional gates suddenly had relevance to the real world. Artificial intelligences from digital dimensions were starting to appear, and in some cases gaining wireless control over real-world machinery. It was a message from just such a being that had brought Loki to this desolate place—a message from an old opponent.

Loki switched on his motorcycle’s infrared headlights, and his helmet automatically switched to FLIR mode. He could now see down the tunnel to a vanishing point. Sixteen hundred and sixty-seven feet of World War One-era masonry.

But closer at hand he could see a homeless encampment clogging the passage. There were three men with packs and cardboard boxes huddled in the darkness—all of them looking his way, trying to discern who it was that had come to their hiding place, engine rumbling and lights out.

It occurred to Loki that economic times must be getting tough indeed for homeless people to appear this far from cities and towns. He’d begun seeing them everywhere. Whole families. White, Latino, Black, Asian. It looked like the current financial crisis was hitting everyone. Prostitutes were literally everywhere now. These guys, however, looked like locals—white-trash tweakers in their early twenties to late thirties.

If that was the case, then the bike Loki was riding was worth its weight in gold. And standing in the mouth of the tunnel, silhouetted against the night, Loki was probably a good target for folks whose eyes had adjusted to the darkness. Sure enough he saw one of the men—tattooed scalp, piercings, and goatee—lifting what looked to be a pistol. The man slowly pulled back the slide to chamber a round and whispered to the others.

Loki nodded to himself. Bad idea.