“Sir, please—”
“Philips, you yourself said that the Daemon has operatives in thousands of organizations. It could also have operatives in the penal system or law enforcement. So we must take the safe course. Sebeck is a casualty of this war, Doctor. You must put him out of your mind and concentrate on saving the lives and property of millions more Americans.”
Philips stared at him for a moment. “But surely we—”
“There is no ‘but,’ Doctor. Please focus on your work.”
She was about to speak again when the general leaned in.
“Any word from Jon Ross?”
Philips was still distracted but collected herself. “Not recently.”
The general nodded. “There’s a hacker we need in custody ASAP. All these hackers should be rounded up and shot.”
She eyed the general. “I’m a hacker, General, and if it weren’t for people like Jon Ross, we’d be in far worse shape than we are now.”
Fulbright kept his eyes on her. “Find him. We need him on the Joint Task Force. Tell him we’ll offer amnesty and U.S. citizenship, if you think it will matter. Just get him here. In the meantime, I need you and your people focused and working to find a way to stop this thing. Is that clear?”
She did not respond with enthusiasm. “Yes, sir.”
Fulbright didn’t relent. “Are we clear on this?”
“Sir, I—”
“You are a perceptive woman, Natalie. You, of all people, should be able to do the math on this. If we risk the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people to save the life of a single man, we’ll be guilty of a heinous crime. Do you see the truth of this?”
She nodded after a moment.
“Now perhaps you can gain some appreciation for the cruel calculus I’m forced to use every day.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “Your heart is in the right place. There’s nothing wrong with that. But keep a sense of perspective. Ask yourself how many children you’d be willing to sacrifice so that Detective Sebeck can live.”
Philips realized he was right.
The general cleared his throat. “I need to report back to the Pentagon.”
Philips turned to the deputy director. He nodded. She called after the general. “There’s more, sir.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“I detected something unusual emanating from the networks of Daemon-infected companies. It’s a pulse—an IP beacon of sorts. The tech industry calls these ‘heartbeats.’ This one consists of a lengthy burst of packets issuing from TCP port 135 at a predictable interval and bit length. Once we noticed the beacon was present at infected companies, we started looking for it elsewhere on the Internet. We found it echoing all over. That’s how we estimate that thirty-eight hundred corporations have been compromised. Some of those companies might not even know they’re infected yet.”
The general was nonplussed. “What’s the purpose of this ‘IP beacon’?”
“That was the question. We first thought it might be a signal to indicate a company was a Daemon host. But then the signal wouldn’t need to be so long—and each burst is a pretty long stream of data. It’s always identical for a single company, but never the same between two different companies. And all companies project it in a sequence—like a chain. A pulse from Company A is sent to Company B, then from Company B to Company C, and so on until we start back at Company A again. Stranger still, when our infiltration attempt caused one company to be destroyed, another beacon appeared at a new company to take its place, and it exactly matched the beacon that was lost.”
She paused. “That’s when I first suspected this was a multipart message.”
“The companies are communicating with each other?”
“No. They’re communicating to us.”
The general weighed what that meant. He regarded Philips with something akin to dread. “What are they saying?”
“The message was encoded with a 128-bit block cipher. It took us weeks to decrypt—and that was on Cold Iron. The good news is that, besides the Japanese and maybe the Chinese, it will take other nations years to decrypt, so we’re convinced that Sobol intended it for us. When we assembled the constituent pieces from all the beacons at all the companies, we discovered a single, very large GNU compressed file. When we extracted the package contents, we found two things: an API and an MPEG video file.”
“What’s an API?”
“It’s an application programming interface—rules for controlling a process. It’s basically a guide for communicating with—and possibly controlling—the Daemon.”
“Good lord! Why would Sobol give us that?”
“I think it’s a trap, sir.”
“What sort of control is it saying it will give us?”
“We’ve only begun our analysis, but the most significant function we’ve discovered is in the Daemon’s Ragnorok class library. It’s a function named Destroy. It accepts a country code and a tax ID as arguments. We believe that invoking it destroys all the data in the target company.”
The general thought about this. “My God…why would he give that to us?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“You said there was a video. What did the video contain?”
Philips took a deep breath. “Something you need to carry up the chain of command.”
In the boardroom of building OPS-2B, the group of agency directors sat arrayed around a broad mahogany conference table. The tension was thick as ominous looks passed from one director to the next. Their host opened the emergency meeting.
NSA: “Gentlemen, you are all aware of the gravity of the current situation. I’ve brought in representatives from both Computer Systems Corporation and its subsidiary, EndoCorp, to provide additional technical expertise in this matter. These are the same folks who built the FBI’s new case management system. They are cleared UMBRA, so we may speak freely. Some of you have already worked together at NBP-1.”
Both representatives gave dour nods. They were in their forties and looked more conservative than the window mannequins in the FBI gift shop.
NSA: “What you’re about to see is a matter of the utmost secrecy. Were this information to be made public, there is every likelihood that the world economy would falter.” He let it sink in. “A-Group has decrypted a video message from Matthew Sobol.”
An animated buzz spread through the room. He waited until it died down.
NSA: “We’re going to screen that video. Watch it carefully, and we’ll discuss it afterward. Lights, please.”
The lights dimmed, and a plasma screen set into the wall glowed to life. In a moment Matthew Sobol appeared in high-definition color. The image was so clear it seemed as if a window had opened in the side of the somber boardroom. Sobol stood outdoors, in the sun on high ground overlooking the ocean. He was dressed in khakis and a pressed linen shirt. He looked normal, healthy, the breeze tossing his hair.
Sobol betrayed no emotion. He stared into the camera for several moments before speaking. “They built a twenty-trillion-dollar house of cards. Then they told you to guard it. And they call me insane.”
Sobol started to walk along the cliff’s edge. The camera followed him, Steadicam-like, in medium close-up. “Technology. It is the physical manifestation of the human will. It began with simple tools. Then came the wheel, and on it goes to this very day. Civilizations rise and fall based on technological innovation. Bronze falls to iron. Iron falls to steel. Steel falls to gunpowder. Gunpowder falls to circuitry.” Sobol looked toward the camera again. “For those among you who don’t understand what’s happening, let me explain: the Great Diffusion has begun—an era when the nation state dissolves. Technology will cause this. As countries compete for markets in the global economy, diffusion of high technology will accelerate. It will result in a diffusion of power. And diffusion of power will make countries an ineffective organizing principle. At first, marginal governments will fail. Larger states will not be equipped to intercede effectively. These lawless regions will become breeding grounds for international crime and terrorism. Threats to centralized authority will multiply. Centralized power will be defenseless against these distributed threats. You have already experienced the leading edge of this wave.”