Daemon

them had incredible 3-D graphics, volumetric smoke, realistic physics engines, thirty-two-voice sound, vast levels, and multi-player Internet features. But
OTR
was different: Its AI was scary smart.
    Where enemies in other games poured through doorways, wave after wave, only to be slaughtered,
OTR
’s AI engine deployed Nazi soldiers realistically. In a house-to-house search, groups of three or four would peel off from the main group, kicking in doors. If you shot one or two or even three, the officer in the street would blow his whistle and shout orders. Then you’d better haul ass because dozens of soldiers would surround your cottage. They wouldn’t storm the place like mindless automatons. Instead, they’d take cover behind fences, walls, and vehicles, and they’d shout in German for you to come out. When you didn’t (and, of course, why would you?) they’d start tossing grenades through the windows or set fire to the house. If you tried to look out a window to see what they were doing, a sniper might cap you.
    But what was even more fascinating to Gragg was that they didn’t do it the same way each time. There were smart and dumb soldiers, and varying qualities of Nazi officers. If you holed up in a particularly defensible spot, they might call in a Stug to batter the place into rubble – or worse yet, a Flammenwerfer. And if the siege went on for a while, the Gestapo would arrive to take charge of the situation, and that meant only one thing: SS Oberstleutnant Heinrich Boerner, an adversary so wily and twisted, this fictional character hadbecome a cause célèbre at the E3 gaming convention. There was a thirty-foot color banner of his face hanging over CyberStorm Entertainment’s booth. He was literally the poster boy for evil.
    OTR
’s AI cemented the impression that you were fighting against a rational opponent – and a challenging one. Gragg appreciated the endless hours of distraction this afforded, particularly since his real-life incident with the Filipinos.
    Heider’s body had been found in a rail yard near Hobby Airport, south of Houston. Heider had been bound, gagged, and beaten to death – left as a warning to the carder community. It was at times like these that Gragg was thankful for his limited social circle.
    Few, if any, would be able to connect him to Heider, but just in case he decided to lay low for a few weeks.
    He had about fifty or sixty thousand in cash on hand at various banks under various identities. Good thing, because he couldn’t trade the identity database he had copied from the Filipino server with any of his Abkhazian contacts. It was just too hot. He felt a wave of humiliation again. Over twenty thousand high-net-worth identities down the drain – a fortune on the open market. How did they know it was him?
    Gragg had cracked their database through a Unicode directory traversal that allowed him to install a back door on their Web server. They hadn’t properly patched it, and the sample applications were still on the server, so it was a fairly trivial matter to gain Administrator rights. He was pretty certain that a network admin was lying at the bottom of Manila Harbor over that simple mistake.
    But how the hell did they trace the hack to him? Gragg ran the exploit through a zombied machine somewhere in Malaysia and a hijacked 803.11g wireless connection in a Houston subdivision. Even if they tracked the file transfer to the destination IP address, how did that lead them back to him? Even if they beat the hell out of the poor suburban sap whose Wi-Fi accesspoint he’d hijacked, that wouldn’t tell them anything. Nonetheless, Gragg had spent a couple of sleepless nights waiting for his front door to be kicked in while pondering the question. He just couldn’t figure it. What had he missed?
    Only recently did it occur to Gragg that he might have been the Filipinos’ only partner in Houston. By staging the attack from a Houston domain, Gragg had made a pathetically obvious mistake. The carder, Loki, from Houston, Texas, was an obvious suspect.
    But as the days slipped by, it became apparent that either the gang was satisfied that Loki was dead or they had no idea of Gragg’s real identity. Until he was positive, Gragg spent his waking hours hiding in the rough industrial space that served as his apartment, playing endless hours of
OTR
. And
OTR
was quite a challenge, after all.
    Gragg usually chose the Nazi side, and his preferred weapon was the sniper rifle,