Daemon

hadn’t been time to set up a new identity.Certainly Gragg didn’t want to be seen shopping for a new car just now. Too risky.
    So here he was getting into his
own
car – with a laptop full of
warez
and a 9mm pistol. The pistol wasn’t really a concern – this was Texas, after all – but the laptop made him nervous. He knew the government wasn’t afraid of guns, but it
was
afraid of laptops – and what the government feared, it punished. Connecting his real identity with the hacking world would be disastrous. As far as authorities knew, he was a know-nothing high school dropout with no prior arrests, and he wanted to keep it that way. He brought a degausser with him as well as a DC-to-AC adapter for his car’s cigarette lighter socket. In a pinch, he could use it to demagnetize the drive. At worst the police would suspect he’d stolen the laptop. That was no big deal.
    Gragg had slept a few hours after cracking Boerner’s code. Although he was eager to get on with his self-appointed quest, there might be difficulties ahead – and he wanted to be sharp. Meth wasn’t the answer. Down that road lay madness and the worst sort of police difficulties. It was important to keep the blood pure.
    Standing next to the Ford Tempo in the early night, Gragg glanced around at his light industrial neighborhood. They made screen doors and custom car parts down here. After dark it was generally a ghost town except for the occasional pit bull behind a fence or tractor-trailer backing into a parking lot. Tonight was no exception. Gragg breathed deeply of the night air. It was crisp and refreshing.
    He placed his GPS unit on the seat next to him. The coordinates from the encrypted string were somewhere up near Houston International Airport – North Houston, below Beltway 8 between Tomball Parkway and Interstate 45. If he remembered correctly, this was scrubland crisscrossed at half-mile intervals by surface roads, bayous, and occasional subdivisions.
    Gragg drove for nearly an hour into the cool autumn night.Between knots of office parks and suburban sprawl, the metal halide streetlights gave way to darkness, and the stars shimmered, unobscured overhead. The pleasant fragrance of dead leaves and chimney smoke sometimes overpowered the fungal stench in his car.
    Getting into the general area of the GPS coordinates proved to be the easy part. Normally, if he had to convert GPS coordinates to a map location, Gragg would just key in a destination, but this time, he didn’t want to leave a data trail. So he spent a couple of hours trying to find a road that brought him closer to his target, glancing now and again at the map on his GPS unit. Several rural routes weren’t in the database, so he was left backtracking and zigzagging over back roads, following hunches.
    The countryside alternated between narrow wooded roads, spanking new subdivisions, and gritty industrial or heavy-equipment companies. Around one a.m. Gragg found a surface road that mercifully continued to within a couple decimals of his target. He was heading out into scrubland again when a dilapidated-looking low brick building loomed up on his left, between clumps of trees. It bore the name Nasen Trucking, Ltd., although no trucks were visible in the chain-link-fenced parking lot. A lone streetlight shone down from a telephone pole near the gravel entrance.
    Gragg slowed down as the GPS latitude coordinate clicked to match his target. Longitude was still a decimal off, though. Gragg checked the compass reading. That meant left. He pulled the car over to the entrance of the parking lot, beneath the bright streetlight, and looked around.
    There were a couple of battered mailboxes near the entrance – the larger sort that rural companies and farmers used. Gragg squinted to read the writing on the side. The nearest had ‘Nasen Trucking’ stenciled on it in a sans serif font. The other box had one word on it in black Gothic lettering:
Boerner
.
    Gragg’s throat tightened. He looked to the left, where a gravel road ran past Nasen Trucking, into the woods – intodarkness. He was exposed, sitting in the light like this. He cranked the wheel to the left. The power steering screeched in protest, and Gragg gritted his teeth. If he hadn’t alerted anyone before, he sure as hell had now.
    He accelerated down the gravel road and out of the light. The stones crunched under his tires and dinged off his tire wells. The sound reminded him of his childhood and long prairie