Daemon

do.’
    Ross passed the black case to one of the armed guards. ‘Rush this to Dr Philips in the lab.’
    ‘Yes, sir.’ Another guard grabbed the medical chest from Merritt, who reluctantly released it. Then the two guards rushed off toward the heavy steel doors of Building Twenty-Nine.
    Ross and Merritt followed behind at a walking pace, trailed by the remaining two guards.
    Ross turned to Merritt. ‘You in town for a while?’
    ‘Just the day. I was hoping to get back home. It’s been a week or so, and Katy’s team is in the regional quarter-finals tomorrow.’
    ‘
Grammar
school?’
    Merritt laughed and nodded. ‘Yeah – we take our sports seriously in the Midwest.’ He got somber. ‘Truth is, I just miss the hell out of them. Comes with the job, I guess.’
    ‘How’d it go in São Paulo?’
    ‘Thankfully, the fireworks were over by the time I got there. That guy took out twenty-seven local and federal police beforethey punched his ticket. The ABIN wasn’t eager to part with the evidence.’
    ‘Building a case is the least of their worries.’
    ‘A lot of diplomatic strings were pulled while I was down there. What’s up?’
    ‘You’ll see in a few minutes.’
    As they entered the cavernous doorway, their rear guard hauled steel doors closed behind them with a deafening clang. They were now in an austere, brightly lit concrete anteroom, opening to a hallway lined with bare bulbs and electrical conduits.
    Merritt looked around as a guard waved a metal detection wand over him. ‘What is this place?’
    ‘Daemon Task Force headquarters.’
    ‘You put a top-secret base in the middle of a city?’
    ‘Remote locations don’t mean secrecy anymore. Companies are selling time on private spy satellites. Here we hide in plain sight.’
    Merritt nodded and glanced around while the wand beeped and whined. Merritt voluntarily revealed a pistol in a holster beneath his jacket. ‘I’m FBI.’ He produced credentials, which the guards closely examined. They keyed Merritt’s name into a computer to confirm his clearance. They then pressed his thumb against a fingerprint-capture pad, waited for a single beep, then turned to him again.
    ‘Are you carrying any other weapons or electronic devices, Agent Merritt?’
    ‘A knife.’
    Another guard passed a tablet PC to him and offered a stylus. ‘Can you please sign this nondisclosure agreement?’
    ‘I’m already cleared top secret – code word Exorcist.’
    ‘This is an intellectual property agreement, sir. You need to sign to enter.’
    Merritt sighed and turned to Ross questioningly.
    Ross just shrugged. ‘Welcome to the Task Force.’
    ‘Christ …’ Merritt signed with the stylus.
    While he did so, another guard hung a plastic badge around Merritt’s neck. Ross motioned for him to follow down the corridor.
    As they walked, Merritt twisted the badge around to examine it. The card was slathered with inscrutable patterns and shiny printed circuits. ‘You’d think they could afford photo ID badges.’
    ‘It’s not an ID badge. It’s a biometric training marker.’ Ross pointed to the ceiling.
    Merritt saw a series of small cameras mounted there, running down the length of hallway.
    ‘Your gait is being memorized, Roy. The security system is learning to recognize you from your walk and facial features.’
    Merritt eyed the cameras suspiciously.
    They soon reached the end of the corridor, where doors of clear ballistic glass blocked the way. Armed sentries stood on both the near and far side – weapons at the ready. One of the guards there removed the training marker from around Merritt’s neck.
    ‘Thank you, Agent Merritt. You are Sec Level Two. Please observe the posted warnings. This is a lethal force zone.’
    ‘Thanks.’
    The doors slid open to admit them, and suddenly raucous conversation and clicking keyboards spilled out into the hall.
    Ross brought Merritt into a high-ceilinged room about sixty feet square. In a past life it was probably a heavy-equipment room – overhead pulley rails were still in place. Now it was filled with modern, open workspaces, with clusters of five or six computer workstations sharing common desks. The room was crammed with guys in their early to mid-twenties – all wearing headsets and shouting to each other as they played 3-D computer games. Brilliant computer-generated vistas filled twenty-inch flat-panel monitors. It was like a raucous LAN party.
    Merritt stared in amazement. ‘What’s all