“Affirmative, sir.”
Vanowen raised his eyebrows, surprised that The Major knew his driver’s name.
“Nothing has been left to chance, Mr. Vanowen. You have important work to do for us. See that you achieve your objectives.”
In a moment the Escalade slowed at a rural intersection—two county roads meeting in the middle of nowhere beneath a lamp swirling with moths. The Major turned to Vanowen. “We never met.” He was gone before Vanowen could say a word. The doors locked immediately after him. Vanowen watched a sedan emerge from the shadows to meet The Major. In a moment, Vanowen’s Escalade was moving on, back into the darkness on the other side of the intersection and down the country road, toward a smudge of light on the horizon. Distant suburban sprawl.
Vanowen exhaled in relief. That had gone extraordinarily well. Better than he could have imagined. So the wise men weren’t holding him responsible? The Daemon was widespread. He found it strangely reassuring—especially since the powers that be weren’t even fazed. Matthew Sobol had underestimated them, and they were already taking steps to turn this situation to their advantage. In fact, he was going to have that celebratory scotch, after all.
Vanowen pulled a bottle of thirty-year-old Macallan from the mini-bar and poured three fingers, neat. He lifted the glass and sighed again in satisfaction, appreciating the caramel color against the backdrop of the headlights. Not only was he going to free himself of the Daemon, but he stood to make billions doing it. This was the very essence of capitalism: thriving on chaos. True, there would be a temporary economic meltdown, but like pruning a tree, it would grow back fuller and healthier than before. But thoroughly under their control. He raised his glass and toasted. “Here’s to you, Mr. Sobol.”
Beyond his scotch glass, Vanowen glimpsed a dark shadow growing ahead. Half a second later it came screaming out of the blackness. It was a car with its headlights off. Vanowen’s driver screamed.
A Lincoln Town Car nailed the Escalade dead-center in the front grill at a combined speed of over 150 mph—instantly pancaking the sedan up to its rear passenger seat with a powerful BOOM and flattening the armored Escalade up to its front windshield. This sent the Escalade’s V10 engine plowing into the front seat and blasted the inch-thick windshield out of its mountings, where it tumbled crazily hundreds of yards down the road.
After the initial impact, the wreckage of the Escalade sheared away from the Town Car and went into a wild roll, sending pieces of metal and armored doors flying. What remained of the SUV landed upside down in the opposite lane nearly a hundred yards farther on. Smoke and steam billowed from the wreck.
After a few moments of dead silence, headlights appeared in the distance, back the way the Escalade had come. They grew rapidly brighter, accompanied by the growling of a powerful engine. Soon, a black convertible Mercedes SL Sports Coupe arrived and rolled to a stop near the start of the debris field. Its xenon headlights were aimed at the wreckage of the overturned Escalade, bathing it in white light.
Twin black Lincoln Town Cars, with their headlights off, pulled up behind the Mercedes like guardians. The throbbing engine of the coupe cut off, but the headlights stayed on.
In a few moments the door opened, and the dark form of the driver strode calmly into the light of his own headlights.
Brian Gragg gazed intently at the wreckage.
He was reborn. Gone without a trace were the tattoos and the piercings and the unkempt hair. In their place was a perfectly groomed and successful-looking young man. Dressed as Sobol might dress, all in black with tailored slacks, silk shirt, and sports coat. Except for the black synthex gloves and sports glasses he wore, he looked like any other Austin tech entrepreneur. He was now invisible to authority. A man of substance.
He sniffed the night air. It was thick with moisture and the aroma of field grass. The din of crickets filled his ears. He was never more alive than now. Never more happy. And never before could he see with such clarity. He could feel the world for miles around. Law enforcement GPS units, Faction members, and AutoM8 packs networked in the surrounding countryside—feeding their discoveries to him, like a wizard’s familiars.
Gragg felt the tingling of the Third Eye on his stomach and back. The Third Eye was another of the miracles that Sobol had bestowed upon him. It was a form-fitting conductive shirt worn next to the skin—but it wasn’t a garment. It was a haptic device that helped him use his body’s largest organ—his skin—as another, all-seeing eye. An eye that never blinked, and an eye that could see around him in 360 degrees or halfway around the world, if he wished.
It worked by sending tiny electrical impulses to excite the nerve endings in his skin, much like a computer monitor projected pixels onto a screen. The microscopic electrical impulses represented data—from blips on a radar screen to full-blown visual displays. But what amazed Gragg was how the brain learned to accept input from this new source as if it were just another organ. Just another eye.
He felt the networks around him, but he could do more than just feel them.
Gragg motioned with his gloved hands. Suddenly the headlights of the twin Town Cars flicked on. The cars roared forward and deployed on either side of the road at his command, illuminating the entire crash scene. Gragg halted them with a wave of his hand.
Glittering pieces of metal and plastic littered the roadway. Now he could see the pancaked wreckage of the AutoM8 he’d used in the attack. It was lying backward in a ditch along the road about fifty feet ahead. Smoking like a distillery. Only the rear half remained.
Gragg relaxed his arms and then cracked his knuckles. He strode toward the wreckage of the Escalade.
Both the driver and the front passenger were clearly dead. Someone’s intestines spilled out over the twisted frame and looped along the ground. The smell of butyric acid and bile was mercifully masked by the odor of antifreeze and burning plastic.
Gragg heard whimpering. He moved to the rear passenger compartment and peered through the empty, twisted door frame. Inside, he saw only a jumble of spent airbags, white packing powder, and shattered glass.
Gragg listened intently, following the sound around to the other side of the wreck, where he soon saw the bloody and quivering form of Russell Vanowen lying twisted on his back on the pavement nearby.
Gragg took measured steps to look down on him, careful to avoid the pool of blood forming on one side.
Vanowen’s head and face were covered in blood. His right arm was mangled—splintered bones sticking through his torn sleeve. A long, slow groan came out of his toothless mouth and formless, swollen face. His nose was almost completely flat.
Gragg regarded him icily.
He leaned down and with his gloved hands pulled back Vanowen’s blood-soaked suit jacket.
The wounded man’s chest heaved, and his eyes stared in stark terror as Gragg lifted out the bloody brochure for the Children’s Golf Classic. Gragg shook some of the blood off it and flipped it open. He held it to the light.
It was still legible.
Gragg took out his cell phone and clicked a digital picture of it. Then he folded the brochure and slipped it back into Vanowen’s chest pocket.
Gragg stood and turned to leave.
Vanowen’s groan ascended to a wail as he reached out toward Gragg with his good arm.
Gragg stopped. He paused a moment before turning around, then kneeled down and grabbed Vanowen’s swollen face with his gloved hand, causing the man to scream in agony. “Shhh…I’ll go up a level for this. Maybe I should thank you, Russell.” He searched Vanowen’s bloody eyes for something worthwhile. “But then again, fuck you, you worthless piece of shit.”