Daemon

handkerchief from his pocket and held it to his face. His hands were trembling uncontrollably.
    It quickly swelled to panic. He crawled on his hands and knees, then got to his feet and started running back the way he came. He hadn’t actually run in years, but adrenaline carried him the hundred feet back to the elevator. He arrived panting and nearly hysterical.
    But there was no button. The elevator doors were like brushed steel gates. This was impossible. There was no call button. How could there be no button?
    The Voice was right beside his ear, as if he hadn’t moved. He could feel the air vibrating. ‘
Your company belongs to me now. Your divisions will obey their new budgets. If any division heads object, send them to me
.’
    Vanowen’s hands were still trembling. It was Lindhurst. Lindhurst was … or someone was behind this. It was extortion. This was a scare tactic.
    ‘
Of course, you doubt that I am real. You doubt that I am Sobol’s Daemon, and you doubt that my power spans the globe. I will prove to you the extent of my reach.’
There was a pause
. ‘I just caused you millions of dollars in personal losses. Losses across your portfolio and unrelated to this company. You will either learn from this event, or I will seize your personal wealth and eject you from this company. I will be watching you. Do you understand this final warning?
’
    Vanowen stared at the air, still trembling. Waiting for it to end.
    ‘DO YOU UNDERSTAND?’
    ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ He was covering his ears and face with the handkerchief – practically weeping.
    The elevator doors suddenly opened, and Vanowen fell inside. He scrambled on his hands and knees and curled up in the farthest corner.
    The Voice spoke again, but from the hallway, as if it were standing there, seeing him off. ‘
If you fight me, I will only hurt you more
.’
    With that, the elevator doors slammed together with frightful force. The car began to ascend.
    Vanowen sat there shaking, blood running down his face.
    Vanowen spent the remainder of the afternoon in a daze in his corner office, receiving a parade of phone calls from his attorneys and brokers. Millions of dollars had disappeared from his dozens of brokerage and bank accounts. More worrisome were the missing funds in the half-dozen offshore holding companies and the two dozen limited partnerships in which he held assets – some of which were secret even to his wife, much less people at Leland. All told, almost 10 percent of his wealth had disappeared in the blink of an eye. He had just lost eighty million dollars at separate institutions – some of which he held under assumed names.
    As he sat there, still shaking, he suddenly realized the enormity of the monster that had just brushed past him. It was colossally huge. And as powerful as he had always felt, he felt insignificant before it.
    He was now an employee of Daemon Industries LLC.

Chapter 35:// Cruel Calculus
    Reuters.com/business
    Dow Sinks 820 Points on Renewed Cyber Attacks – Network intrusions destroyed data at two publicly traded multinational corporations Wednesday – bringing the total to six cyber attacks in as many days and sending financial markets into free fall. The stocks of Vederos Financial (NYS – VIDO ) and Ambrogy Int’l ( NASDAQ – AMRG ) fell to pennies a share before trading was halted. Federal authorities and international police agencies claim cyber terrorists infiltrated company systems, destroying data and backup tapes. In a worrisome development in the War on Terror, unnamed sources indicated that Islamic terrorists were likely to blame – possibly students educated in Western universities …
    Ops Center 1 was the National Security Agency’s mission control room. Dozens of plasma screens lined its walls, displaying real-time data from around the world in vibrant colors and vector graphics. There were color-coded diagrams of telecom, satellite, and Internet traffic. Other screens displayed current satellite coverage zones and still others showed the status of seabed acoustic sensors, missile launch monitors, the location of radar, radio, seismic, and microwave listening posts. The moderately sized room had a central control board, but individual workstations were arrayed around it in aisles. Each was manned by a specialist case officer: Latin America, the Middle East, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, the Drug Interdiction Task Force, and on and on.
    Uniformed military personnel dominated the