Daemon

home for all I care. I’ve got a gig tonight, and I don’t need a canine unit giving the cops probable cause.’
    ‘Christ, would you relax?’
    ‘I don’t relax. I stay focused. Friends don’t let friends do drugs – especially when those friends can turn state’s evidence.’
    ‘All right, man. Enough. I get the fucking idea.’ Heider turned the dome light switch off, then opened the car door and tossed a small ziplock bag onto the asphalt.
    Gragg started the car and pulled away. ‘Your brain is your only valuable tool, Jase. If you keep trashing it, you’ll be worthless to me.’
    ‘Oh, fuck off. If I had a stroke and sniffed glue, I’d wind up with your IQ. I mean, you spend all day watching hentai and playing video games. How smart can you be?’
    Video games
was an oversimplification; Gragg played massively multi-player online games, or MMOGs, and as he stared coolly at his partner, it occurred to him that the games’ complex societies contained far more social stimulation than anything that existed in Heider’s world. All the more reason for what was to come.
    Gragg turned up the stereo to an Oakenfold mix and drowned out Heider’s voice.
    He drove out to the Katy Freeway and headed west, exiting onto State Highway 6 North about ten miles out of Houston. Highway 6 was a bleak four-lane stretch of concrete running through marshy ground and wide prairie fields bordered by walls of trees – remnants of an agrarian past. Now the only growth was in strip malls, subdivisions, and office parks, sprouting like bunches of grapes off the vine of highway and separated by long stretches of nothing useful.
    Gragg glowered at the road. He hadn’t said a word in ten minutes.
    Heider just watched him. ‘What’s with you tonight?’
    ‘The fucking Filipinos. They posted a message telling me to meet them.’
    ‘What for?’
    ‘To pick up a new encryption key.’
    ‘In person?’
    ‘They’re trying to keep the Feds off their tail.’
    ‘Fuck that. Sell the data to the Brazilians, man.’
    ‘The Filipinos owe me for five hundred identities already. If I don’t pick up the code, I don’t get paid.’
    ‘What a pain in the ass. Last time we do business with them.’
    Gragg flipped open his cell phone and started keying a text message while driving. He spoke to Heider without looking at him. ‘We’ve got less than forty minutes to showtime. The Filipinos can wait.’
    In a deserted cul-de-sac of an under-construction subdivision, half a dozen cars sat in the darkness. Knots of teenagers drank and smoked on their car hoods, laughing, arguing, or staring at the distant glow of the freeway. The pounding bass beat of rap music thudded into the cold night air from several car stereos all tuned to the same satellite radio channel. It reverberated in their chests as they threw rocks, shattering the newly installed windows of half-built homes. One kid zipped from car to car on a motorized scooter.
    They were a racially mixed group, mostly white, but with Asian, black, and Hispanic kids here and there. Their cars displayed their social class; a Mustang GT convertible with eighteen-inch chrome rims; late-model SUVs with vanity plates; Mom’s BMW. Economic class, not race, was the glue that bound them.
    A cell phone somewhere began a faint MIDI of
Eine kleine Nacht-musik
, and every girl in the group groped for her phone. The alpha girl – a thin, sexy blonde with low-cut denims and a midriff top despite the cold – clucked her tongue at theothers. ‘Y’all stole my ring.’ She read the text message. ‘Austin! Guys, turn down the music!’
    Stereos were quickly muted.
    Alpha girl used her best cheerleader voice to project the coordinates: ‘29.98075, and ′95.687274. Everybody got that?’ She repeated the coordinates while several others keyed them into GPS receivers.
    An athletically built African American kid and his buddies stared at the console of his Lexus SUV. He keyed in the coordinates, and a graphical map appeared on the GPS’s LCD. ‘Tennet Field. It’s closed down. My dad used to have his plane there. Let’s roll!’
    A dozen kids paused to text-message the coordinates to still other friends. The smart mob was forming and would be en route in minutes.
    Gragg strode the tarmac in the pale moonlight, heading toward the dark silhouette of Hangar Two.
    The radio crackled in his head. He wore a bone-conduction headset. It was capable of projecting sound directly into his skull, regardless