The line was silent for a moment—but then his own voice came back to him, talking fast, as Hollis always did on business calls. . . .
“Even if the U.S. markets crash, we’ll make money. Movement is all we need—positive or negative makes no difference. . . .”
It was definitely Hollis’s voice. Someone had tapped his phone calls. Another clip immediately followed. . . .
“What a company does is irrelevant. What a company makes is irrelevant. The market is a math problem we solve through value extraction.”
Someone somewhere had intercepted his words. But why?
Looking at the remorseless killing machine outside, he somehow couldn’t picture it being spawned by human rights activists. Whoever was behind it was decidedly more dangerous.
His laughing voice came to him again over the speaker. “We made it legal. Our people wrote the congressional bill.”
On the security monitor a different type of bike entered the wardrobe room. This machine wasn’t covered in blades, but in piping and pressure tanks. As it came in, the other bike moved aside. The new arrival slammed down hydraulic jacks to plant it firmly just outside the panic room door. Then, instead of twin blade arms, it extended a single robotic nozzle arm, with hoses trailing back along its length to half a dozen pressure tanks. A spark flashed, and then a white-hot flame suddenly stabbed out from the nozzle—instantly turning the wood paneling in front of the panic room door into a solid wall of flame.
Hollis stared at the machine on-screen, paralyzed in fear. He knew what it was. He’d owned stock in steel mills in the nineties. It was a plasma torch. Someone had mounted it on this terror machine, and it now stood before his safe room door, blasting aside the wooden millwork surrounding his bunker as though it were nothing more than ash. Already the scores of fine suits and leather shoes and carpeting in the wardrobe room were engulfed in flames as the twenty-five-thousand-degree cutting head on the machine penetrated the steel door like a knife through modeling clay.
The sprinkler system leapt into action, spraying water over the outside room, but the fire’s intensity vaporized it. The surveillance camera showed the remorseless machines standing their ground, one cutting, the other waiting, but soon, even the camera started to fail—and melt. The screen turned grainy and then went black.
Behind him, Hollis was suddenly deafened by a burst of pressure and a cracking sound as a white-hot jet of plasma burst through the steel doorway and began tracing a molten line along the length of the door. The sofa and wet bar beyond it burst into flames, and the glass cover of the flat-screen television shattered—the whole thing folding over itself like a big wax candle. Blue-hot sparks of molten steel scattered like marbles across the concrete floor. The safe room sprinklers popped and started raining over everything to no effect.
Hollis’s recorded voice still spoke to him over the speakerphone as he sat in a catatonic state, while the sprinklers soaked him with freezing water.
“Pure math frees us to create unlimited profit.”
Already the torch had finished cutting through the vault-like door. In a moment a huge section of steel fell forward with a crash that shook the concrete floor. The door’s edges still glowed red. Hollis turned to watch with the detachment of someone on morphine.
As he began to feel the heat of the flames outside and inside, even through all the water raining down on him, the killing machine entered his safe room and unfolded both sword blades with swift precision. The bike was stained with cooked blood and charred flesh. Steam rose from its metal frame.
Hollis put the pistol against his head as the killing machine moved toward him. It raised its blades in the same way he’d seen it do with Metzer.
There was no escape. Hollis pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. The safety was on.
Hollis’s own words were the last thing he heard as he fumbled for the gun’s safety switch. . . .
“The beauty of it is: they can’t afford to let us fail. . . .”
Chapter 2: // Operation Exorcist
High-profile Assassinations Stun Financial Community—Attacks that left scores of financial executives dead worldwide have rattled the reclusive billionaires’ club. Security services in the U.S., Great Britain, Japan, and China have withheld details of sixty-one nearly simultaneous killings that appear to be part of a coordinated campaign reminiscent of last year’s spammer massacre.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks. However, the murders highlight growing resentment over outsized executive compensation in the midst of skyrocketing unemployment.
The surveillance video showed a man screaming as a robotic motorcycle wielding twin swords chopped him to pieces.
A voice spoke in the darkness. “Who was he?”
“Anthony Hollis—ran a highly successful hedge fund.”
“Has his name been in the news?”
“Yes. Lots of detractors in the business press. Four hundred and six negative mentions in the past year alone.” A pause. “You think the Daemon botnet is behind this?”
“Play it back. Slowly.”
The video replayed in slow motion, frame by frame. A blade-covered motorcycle advanced on the cornered man. The image stopped then zoomed in. Though motion blurred, the screen was frozen in midstroke, a sword leveled at the man’s neck while spiraling lasers in the bike’s headlight assembly illuminated his terrified face.
“Unmanned vehicle. Like some sort of ground level Predator drone. Daemon operatives call them ‘razorbacks.’ The same type Dr. Philips described in her report on the attack at Building Twenty-Nine.”
“So the Daemon is conducting class warfare now?”
“I don’t think so. These people were all engaged in a specific type of financial activity.”
“Sobol did say his Daemon would ‘eliminate parasites in the system.’ Could it have viewed Hollis and the others as parasites?”
A third voice joined the discussion. “With all due respect, these killings are just a distraction from the real problem.”
“Perhaps, but they reveal something important about the Daemon’s purpose. Bring up the lights, please.”
Suddenly the room illuminated, revealing the heads of America’s intelligence services sitting around a circular boardroom table in Building OPS-2B of National Security Agency headquarters. Plaques stood in front of everyone present—NSA, CIA, FBI, DARPA, DIA—as well as several visitors from the private intelligence and security sectors; suited executives from Computer Systems Corporation (CSC), its subsidiaries—EndoCorp and Korr Military Solutions—and a principal from the lobbying firm Byers, Carroll, and Marquist (BCM).
Their host scanned the room.
NSA: “The late Matthew Sobol created his Daemon as a news-reading computer virus. It activated two years ago at the appearance of Sobol’s obituary in online news, and has since spread throughout the world, siphoning capital from corporate hosts to sustain a network of human operatives who distribute and protect it. It has already used these operatives to destroy the data and backup tapes of companies that try to remove it. The question is: how do we kill the Daemon without precipitating a ‘digital doomsday’?”
DIA: “That’s the dilemma. If we act, the Daemon will react and destroy the corporate networks it’s infected.”