Daemon

as steganographic information in the .wav format? Gragg guessed there must be hundreds of numerically named .wav files in the OTR game directory. Then he thought once again about Boerner’s words:
‘… use your key, and ve vill meet again …’
    A mischievous smile crept across his face. It fit Boerner’s style; the invisible punctuation that only the human brain could provide:
    ‘… use “your key,” and ve vill meet again …’
    Gragg took a deep breath and entered ‘your key’ as the argument for his decryption function. He tapped the ENTER key.
    Twelve output strings – all but one gibberish. All but the seventh one:
RSA Decryption Result: 29.3935 ′95.3933
    He leapt up and howled in joy, dancing around his apartment like the sleep-deprived lunatic he was. But then a cocktail of other emotions flowed in: relief, caution, even fear. Did he dare to think this might be Sobol speaking to him? Guiding him from beyond the grave? What was Gragg setting in motion?
    Gragg grabbed a remote and powered up the forty-two-inch plasma TV on the other side of the room. As he suspected, the twenty-four-hour news channels had set up live feeds from Sobol’s estate. Their cameras panned the besieging forces with night vision scopes – like a report from some foreign war. Hundreds of local and federal police surrounded the place. Heavy equipment was everywhere. A video segment of a military marksman walking toward a van with a massive sniper rifle played repeatedly in inset. The government was deadly serious about Sobol’s little game. Gragg got suddenly serious, too.
    He looked back at his computer screen:
    29.3935 ′95.3933
    These were numbers Gragg knew well. In fact, they were numbers that any Texas geo-caching enthusiast knew well. They were GPS coordinates of a location somewhere in southern Texas. He had been playing the Monte Cassino map on the Houston Monte Cassino server, so this made sense. Gragg picked up his GPS receiver and checked its battery.
… ve vill meet again …
    Indeed. Gragg opened the drawer of his heavy 1960s-era desk and drew out a Glock 9mm pistol in a nylon belt holster. He pondered it gravely, realizing just how quickly things were getting out of control. This could be a trap. This could be something he couldn’t even imagine. He clipped the holster to the small of his back.
    Either way, he wasn’t going to live a long life in the trackless wastes of suburbia – and that was something.
    *
    The only car Gragg had at the moment was the first one he’d ever owned – a piece-of-shit blue 1989 Ford Tempo whose paint had long ago bleached into Grateful Dead tie-dye patterns. The rear window leaked, and the resulting mildew stench in the car made his sofa smell like a field of heather by comparison.
    He kept the Tempo because a guy his age was suspicious without a car. Gragg lived most of his life under stolen identities – such was the life of a carder – but he still had a real name and social security number to maintain. Thus, the Tempo. On paper Gragg was a loser, supposedly working parttime at a computer parts store in Montrose. He officially earned little but didn’t apply for welfare or food stamps. He was just a slacker – an unambitious young punk who spent most of his hours in the
alt.binaries.nospam.facials
newsgroup. His ISP could vouch for that. The official Brian Gragg was a totally uninteresting person.
    Gragg always registered his good cars under assumed identities, and unlike his bulk identity thefts, Gragg was more selective about the identities he ‘wore.’ No one too successful or too poor. He found his victims by trading with other carders for the social security numbers, names, and addresses of middle-class folks. Folks who weren’t worth much on the open market except as a mask. Once he picked a name, it was easy to use online skip-tracing services to find the last half-dozen places where the victim worked, where they’d lived, their credit reports, income tax information, relatives, and neighbors. It was all readily available. Gragg had a policy of selecting only Fortune 1000 or government employees for his victims – real solid folks. His Honda Si had been registered under the name of an Oregonian man who worked for TRW. The irony always made Gragg smile. Of course, he made certain to pay his victim’s illicit bills on time – at least as long as he kept the identity.
    But the fiasco with the Filipinos left him without a decent ride, and there