Daemon

out of your mind and concentrate on saving the lives and property of millions more Americans.’
    Philips stared at him for a moment. ‘But surely we—’
    ‘There is no “but,” Doctor. Please focus on your work.’
    She was about to speak again when the general leaned in.
    ‘Any word from Jon Ross?’
    Philips was still distracted but collected herself. ‘Not recently.’
    The general nodded. ‘
There’s
a hacker we need in custody ASAP. All these hackers should be rounded up and shot.’
    She eyed the general. ‘
I’m
a hacker, General, and if it weren’t for people like Jon Ross, we’d be in far worse shape than we are now.’
    Fulbright kept his eyes on her. ‘Find him. We need him on the Joint Task Force. Tell him we’ll offer amnesty and U.S. citizenship, if you think it will matter. Just get him here. In the meantime, I need you and your people focused and working to find a way to stop this thing. Is that clear?’
    She did not respond with enthusiasm. ‘Yes, sir.’
    Fulbright didn’t relent. ‘Are we clear on this?’
    ‘Sir, I—’
    ‘You are a perceptive woman, Natalie. You, of all people, should be able to do the math on this. If we risk the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people to save the life of a single man, we’ll be guilty of a heinous crime. Do you see the truth of this?’
    She nodded after a moment.
    ‘Now perhaps you can gain some appreciation for the cruel calculus I’m forced to use every day.’ He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Your heart is in the right place. There’s nothing wrong with that. But keep a sense of perspective. Ask yourself how many children you’d be willing to sacrifice so that Detective Sebeck can live.’
    Philips realized he was right.
    The general cleared his throat. ‘I need to report back to the Pentagon.’
    Philips turned to the deputy director. He nodded. She called after the general. ‘There’s more, sir.’
    ‘Let’s hear it.’
    ‘I detected something unusual emanating from the networksof Daemon-infected companies. It’s a pulse – an IP beacon of sorts. The tech industry calls these “heartbeats.” This one consists of a lengthy burst of packets issuing from TCP port 135 at a predictable interval and bit length. Once we noticed the beacon was present at infected companies, we started looking for it elsewhere on the Internet. We found it echoing all over. That’s how we estimate that thirty-eight hundred corporations have been compromised. Some of those companies might not even know they’re infected yet.’
    The general was nonplussed. ‘What’s the purpose of this “IP beacon”?’
    ‘That was the question. We first thought it might be a signal to indicate a company was a Daemon host. But then the signal wouldn’t need to be so long – and each burst is a pretty long stream of data. It’s always identical for a single company, but never the same between two different companies. And all companies project it in a sequence – like a chain. A pulse from Company A is sent to Company B, then from Company B to Company C, and so on until we start back at Company A again. Stranger still, when our infiltration attempt caused one company to be destroyed, another beacon appeared at a new company to take its place, and it exactly matched the beacon that was lost.’
    She paused. ‘That’s when I first suspected this was a multipart message.’
    ‘The companies are communicating with each other?’
    ‘No. They’re communicating to us.’
    The general weighed what that meant. He regarded Philips with something akin to dread. ‘What are they saying?’
    ‘The message was encoded with a 128-bit block cipher. It took us weeks to decrypt – and that was on
Cold Iron
. The good news is that, besides the Japanese and maybe the Chinese, it will take other nations years to decrypt, so we’re convinced that Sobol intended it for us. When we assembled the constituent pieces from all the beacons at all the companies,we discovered a single, very large GNU compressed file. When we extracted the package contents, we found two things: an API and an MPEG video file.’
    ‘What’s an API?’
    ‘It’s an application programming interface – rules for controlling a process. It’s basically a guide for communicating with – and possibly controlling – the Daemon.’
    ‘Good lord! Why would Sobol give us that?’
    ‘I think it’s a trap, sir.’
    ‘What sort of control is it saying it will give