Daemon

the gargantuan landscape, progressing toward a ring of asphalt set in the bottom of a forgotten canyon. The van slowed as it reached the track, then turned, revealing the car-carrying trailer it pulled behind it. A black Lincoln Town Car sat on the bed.
    The van stopped, and a moment later the doors swung open, disgorging Kurt Voelker on the passenger side. He wearily stretched. Tingit Khan and Rob McCruder exited the far side of the van and did likewise. They were all in their early twenties, but while Voelker looked dressed for a Christian Fellowship meeting – with khakis and a button-down shirt – Khan and McCruder bore the piercings, tats, and severe hair that once indicated disaffected youth but that now only meant they weren’t interviewing yet.
    Voelker checked his GPS unit. He looked to his two companions. ‘We’re in the box.’
    ‘It’s about fucking time.’ Khan held up his hand to shade his face. His eyes scanned the terrain. ‘What is this? A racetrack?’
    ‘Pretty damned small for a racetrack.’
    Voelker spoke from the far side of the van. ‘I’m guessing a test track.’
    ‘It’s not banked or anything.’ Khan held up his other hand to block the sun. ‘What’s it feel like? A hundred degrees out here?’
    McCruder checked his watch. ‘A hundred and six.’
    ‘You have a
thermometer
on your watch?’
    ‘Yeah. So what?’
    Khan looked through the van windows to Voelker on the other side. ‘Kurt. Rob has a thermometer on his watch.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘Well, at some point, the thing you add to the watch is more significant than the watch. I’d argue he’s wearing a thermometer with a clock on it.’
    McCruder scowled; he was a veteran of Khan’s observations. ‘Fuck off.’
    ‘Why do you need to know the precise temperature where you
are
? It’s not like a weather report; it’s too fucking late – you’re already here.’
    Voelker held up a hand. ‘Khan, get the gear out of the van. I’ll unchain the car.’
    Khan and McCruder started pulling hard-shell Pelican cases from the van. McCruder just shook his head sadly. ‘You’re the one who asked how hot it was.’
    Fifteen minutes later Voelker extended the antenna on a sizeable handheld remote controller. Khan and McCruder sat nearby on the empty hard-shell containers in front of a folding table. The table was strewn with cables, high-gain antennas, and two ruggedized laptops with shades shielding their screens from the sunlight. A half-meter satellite dish pointed skyward on a tripod placed in the grass nearby.
    Voelker looked to McCruder, who was peering at his laptop’s LCD screen. McCruder finally nodded. ‘Anytime, Kurt.’
    Voelker pointed the controller directly at the Lincoln on thetrailer bed. The car looked identical to the endless number of black fleet Town Cars with smoked glass coursing through downtown streets and airports nationwide – replete with a TCP number on its back bumper and a vanity plate reading
LIVRY47
. Voelker pressed a button on the remote. The car’s V8 engine started. He slid a lever to put it in gear and then began backing the car slowly off the trailer ramps.
    ‘I bet he rolls it,’ McCruder snickered.
    ‘You’d better hope he doesn’t.’
    Voelker didn’t even look. ‘Guys, I’m working here. You wanna shut your pie holes for two seconds?’
    In a few moments he had deftly backed the car onto the dirt road; then he shifted it into drive and eased it out onto the asphalt of the small oval racetrack nearby. The circuit was perhaps two hundred feet in diameter. An oddity, really. Nothing you could actually race on. It was crisscrossed with mysterious grooves set at odd angles.
    ‘This good?’ Voelker turned to his companions.
    They shrugged.
    Khan took a lollipop out of his mouth. ‘How the hell are we supposed to know? We’re in the box. Park it where it is.’
    Voelker killed the engine. He collapsed the controller’s antenna. ‘Anything?’
    Both men shook their heads.
    He walked up. ‘I guess we wait.’
    The late afternoon sun was sinking toward the hills. They had been waiting and sweating for a couple of hours in the brutal heat, listening to the wind chimes dangling from the eaves of a nearby utility shed. The chimes sounded all too infrequently.
    Khan mopped his face with the front of his black T-shirt. ‘Goddamn. It is Africa hot.’
    McCruder upended a soda can. Nothing came out. ‘I thought you Indians thrived in this weather, Khan.’
    ‘Fuck you. I grew up