Daemon (31 page)

Merritt slipped the disc into his coat pocket.

“Don’t show that video to anyone. Not yet. If the Daemon knows you’re on to it, it will kill you.”

“Yeah, I’m shaking like a leaf.”

Ross headed toward the bus stop.

Merritt limped after him. “When do I get to see this irrefutable proof?”

“I’ll contact you.”

They reached the bus stop shelter, slathered with advertising posters. Ross peered down the street to see a bus—any bus—coming down the block. He turned to Merritt again. “I’ll show you everything I know about the Daemon.” He looked seriously into Merritt’s eyes. “I think your republic is in danger, Agent Merritt. I don’t know who else to turn to. Please realize I came to you because I saw that video, and I know you are a courageous man. That’s what your republic needed at its founding. And it’s what it needs now.”

Merritt felt the rush return. Love for his country swelled within him. Was he being naïve? He had always wanted a grand purpose. He avoided eye contact for the shame he felt in having his buttons so easily pushed.

The bus squealed to a stop. The doors opened. Ross turned without a word and merged into the line of commuters. In a few moments he was aboard.

Merritt watched the bus pull away, still wrestling over whether or not to alert the police. He committed the bus number and license plate to memory.

Had he really just let the FBI’s Most Wanted man go? He withdrew the DVD from his jacket pocket and looked at it. It bore the handwritten title
Sobol’s House.

To Merritt, something had never seemed quite right about the Daemon hoax. Something about it just seemed too tidy. In his heart he had always had doubts, but after the deaths of his men it seemed self-serving to question the simple story. High-tech experts had declared the matter resolved.

But months ago in Sobol’s mansion, Merritt had seen and heard things no one had ever satisfactorily explained.

He looked around at the oblivious commuters waiting for their buses. He limped back the way he came. There was physical therapy to do. He would be ready for what was coming, and this time he would not fail his country—whether or not Ross was behind it all.

As Merritt moved away through the crowd, he didn’t notice the six-foot-tall bus stop poster framed behind graffiti-carved Lexan. It boasted a medium close-up of Anji Anderson, all business, arms folded, set against an infinity background. She glowered at passersby from above the logo of her network news show,
News to America.
The tag line read:

“The Most Trusted Name in News…”

C
harles Mosely walked across the sunny corporate plaza and cast a glance back at the Lexus sitting curbside a hundred feet behind him. He wasn’t comfortable leaving his ride behind—but then again, The Voice was able to kill the engine at will, so it probably didn’t matter.

A few corporate drones in business suits lock-stepped across the plaza, briefcases in hand. Mosely realized that he must look like one of them.

A fountain occupied the center of the square. It was a dancing display of computer-controlled water jets, recirculating hundreds of gallons per second. Mosely walked around it, just now noticing how many things must be controlled by computers. It wasn’t intelligence, but then again most things in life didn’t really require intelligence.

Gleaming twenty-story high-rises stood on either side of a four-story medical plaza. He walked straight toward the green-glass medical plaza.

The logo over the glass doors read:

fMRI Partners

This was the name The Voice had given him. The landscaping and architecture were impressive. Somebody had put in little grass-carpeted mounds topped with cherry trees. It was pricey real estate. The whole district was dotted with fancy corporate towers. It was not a place where he had had reason to spend time back when he lived in Houston, and the police in these neighborhoods were always crazy suspicious of brothers. Still, he hadn’t been stopped on the way in. Must’ve been the suit and the white-guy car. For the first time he considered that classism might trump racism.

Mosely approached the glass doors and was about to push when they slid away noiselessly to either side. A blast of refrigerated air washed over him. The hot and humid outside air collided with it, creating a mini squall line at the entrance. He stepped straight through and into a minimalist corporate lobby. The doors hissed closed behind him. His heels clicked as he crossed the tiled lobby floor.

The company logo was repeated in bold letters on the back wall behind the receptionist’s desk. The desk itself was the typical front-office bunker designed to look like a welding accident. The receptionist was a creamy-skinned blonde in her twenties who had either been born gorgeous or been modified to be that way. Didn’t matter to Mosely. She was the prettiest woman he’d seen in years.

She was speaking on a wireless headset and smiled at him, mouthing
I’ll be right with you.
Her red lipstick almost burned images onto his corneas.

He glanced around at the high ceiling, spotlights focused on jutting peninsulas of brushed steel. It was like a car showroom without the cars. No chairs anywhere in sight, either.
Welcome. Now get the fuck out.

In a moment she hung up. One could never really tell with headsets, but she focused her gaze on him and smiled. “Mr. Taylor. You’re expected. Please go right in.”

Twin blond wood doors opened automatically in the wall beyond. They revealed a hallway that shared distant architectural relations with the lobby.

Mosely stared at the opening for a moment, then turned to the receptionist. “Listen, baby, you want to explain just what the hell I’m doing here?”

“Well, for one thing, I don’t like being called ‘baby’ any more than you’d like to be called ‘boy.’”

“That’s just it, though. I feel like I’m a ‘boy’ brought down here to the plantation house.” He leaned close. “You know what goes on up in here. You wanna help me out?”

She regarded him coolly. “Here’s some help: you’re expected through those doors.”

Mosely straightened. “A company girl.” He started for the opening. “That why they pay you the big bucks?”

She watched him warily.

Once he passed the threshold, the doors closed behind him with a
click
, sealing him in. He just smirked. “Mosely, you dumb ass.” He kept walking down a nicely appointed hallway. It stretched a good fifty feet. There were no doors to either side, just tasteful artwork—ink drawings with as few lines as possible. He approached the set of double doors at the far end of the hall, and—as he expected—they opened noiselessly to admit him.

They revealed a colder, empty room with a dark granite floor, harsh lighting, and a lofty ceiling not visible from where he stood. Two men in white orderly coats and comfortable shoes stood in the center of the room. They were muscular, one black, one Asian. Their hair cropped close. No jewelry. They didn’t have an unfriendly look in their eyes, but neither were they extending leis in welcome. They both nodded from twenty feet away. The black guy, the bigger of the two, spoke first. “Mr. Taylor.”

Mosely stood in the doorway. He wasn’t about to leave its relative safety. “I don’t know what you want Taylor for, but I ain’t him.”

“We know you’re not Taylor.”

“Then why you callin’ me Taylor?”

“Because
sack of shit
would be derogatory.”

Mosely digested this first hint of trouble. He glanced around. “Where’s the white guy?”

“What white guy?”

“Oh, don’t give me that shit, brother. There’s always a white guy. Ain’t no brother gonna go through all this trouble just to get some nigga jumpin’ through hoops.”

They stared impassively. The big one spoke again. “If you’re trying to ingratiate yourself with a racial or class-based dialect—save your breath.”

Not good.
Mosely shifted uneasily. He glanced behind him. Somehow another set of blond wood doors had closed ten feet behind him. He hadn’t heard a thing. Didn’t even feel the air move. He immediately got onto the balls of his feet, casting about for danger.

“Mr. Taylor, please step forward.”

“Fuck you! Tell me why I’m here.”

“Would you prefer to be in prison?”

“Right about now, I’d say ‘hell yeah.’”

They both chuckled.

Definitely not good.

“Look, if it’s any consolation, we’ve been through this, too.”

“Yeah? What’s ‘this’ precisely?”

“Just step into the room, please.”

“I want some answers, goddamnit. I’m not moving until I find out just who the fuck is behind this and why they brought me here!” His voice echoed into the room.

“We have no desire to harm you.”

“Then pack your no-neck ass up the way you came and get the cracker-in-chief out here. Now!”

The two men exchanged looks and sighed. Then they marched with purpose toward his position in the doorway.

Mosely pulled off his tie. No good wearing a noose to a brawl. He wrapped the silk fabric around his right fist. In a few moments he was dancing, fists ready in the doorway. “Come on, Knick and Knack! You want a piece a this? Come get some!”

The two men stopped walking. They seemed disarmingly nonchalant. There was a subtle look in the big one’s eye. A gentle nod to a target past Mosely. Oldest trick in the book. But still…

Mosely cast a quick glance behind him. The doors were gone, and now there were half a dozen burly men of several races standing right behind him. One extended a silver stick into Mosely’s side. There was an electric
pop
, and Mosely dropped like a sack of bone meal. He remembered nothing more.

He awoke spread-eagled on a table in the center of a larger room. His suit had been replaced by lighter clothing, and his limbs felt constrained. He tried to turn his head to look, but even his head was clamped tight, with some sort of vise pressed in on his temples.

He reflexively struggled against his bonds. After a few moments thrashing, he concluded they might as well have been welded to the side of the
Queen Mary
. They weren’t going anywhere. He also felt the sting of something in his right arm—like an intravenous needle.

Beyond the valley of not good.

He cleared his throat. “All right. We got off on the wrong foot. I see that now.”

Medical experiments.

He had always been a courageous man—mostly because he didn’t particularly care whether he lived or died—but there was something about the sterile, impersonal cruelty of this place that reached in, grabbed him by the brain stem, and wouldn’t let go. A primordial terror welled up inside him.

“Hey! If you’re gonna torture me, then the least you can do is talk about it first.”

A bizarre sound stopped him cold. It seemed to be emanating from around his head and sounded like a jackhammer as heard through thirty feet of rock. It was hammering impossibly fast. Then slow. Then it actually made chirping noises in stabs. Then all was silent.

A familiar face hove into view over him. The big guy. “Mr. Taylor.”

“Give a brother a break, man. Just tell me what’s goin’ on. Warmonk sold me for medical experiments, didn’t they?”

The big man shook his head. “Just wait.”

“Goddamnit, I don’t want to wait! Tell me what the fuck is going on!” He struggled again, primarily to emphasize his seriousness, not from any belief that he had a chance in hell of breaking free.

The big guy was checking something around Mosely’s head. “You’re about to find out. That too tight?”

“Yes!”

“Then it’s perfect.” He looked right in Mosely’s eyes. “You were right about one thing, my friend. There is a white guy. At least he used to be white. He’s probably sort of grayish by now.” He laughed heartily and lowered a combination goggles/headset onto Mosely’s face—blinding him.

“What the…You motherfucker!”

The big man’s booming laugh receded.

Mosely tried, batlike, to divine the shape of the room and his position in it from the echoes of that laugh. But the headphones made it impossible. Everything was muffled now, and he was blinded by the goggles, which were as opaque as a blindfold.

The strange, muted jackhammer noises recommenced. Suddenly two large television screens appeared before his eyes. Combined, they filled his field of vision and gave the effect of twenty-foot-wide theater screens viewed from ten feet away. They were crystal clear. The left one showed an image of the human brain—all done in the colors of the rainbow. It was a Bob Marley brain, with hues advancing and receding across the temporal lobes to some unheard Rasta beat.

The right screen flickered for a moment and, true to the big guy’s word, a white guy appeared in medium close-up on-screen. The jackhammer noises continued throughout, and the brain color map changed.

Mosely remembered this white guy’s face from somewhere.

The man nodded and spoke—his voice came in over the headphones. “You recognize me. That’s good.”

Mosely shouted, “Who are you?”

The colors chased each other over Bob Marley’s brain and settled in reddish hues toward the front.

The white dude was unrattled. “Before you start asking more complex questions, let me show you who I
was
….”

Suddenly his image was replaced by actual television news footage of reporters talking, headlines, and rotating graphics

“Matthew Sobol built a deadly trap for federal officers serving a search warrant on his Southern California estate….”

The video images chased each other over the screen. It was all coming back to Mosely. They had watched the news in amazement in the prison rec room more than half a year ago. They were sort of disappointed when it turned out to be a hoax.

The video clips continued as they finally settled on the photograph of Matthew Sobol—a close-up image with his name right beside it. The reporter was talking….

“The Daemon hoax was apparently intended to frame Matthew Sobol—who last week died of brain cancer.”

The photograph was suddenly replaced by the live image of Matthew Sobol in perfect digital clarity.

The white guy.

“News of my death has not been exaggerated.”

“Holy shit…”

The brain color map shifted, bluish waves lapping and rising all around.

“Now you truly understand. The Daemon was not a hoax.”

“Why am I here?”

“Yes. Please keep your questions simple. I’m not much of a conversationalist anymore. But I anticipated your question.” There was an almost imperceptible jump in Sobol’s image. Then he continued. “Why are you here? You’re here so I can determine whether your motivations are compatible with mine.” Sobol gestured as if he were physically present. “The equipment around you is a powerful functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. It is scanning the neural activity of your brain in real time. Neurons work like logic gates on a computer chip, firing electrical signals in specific sequences to accomplish certain tasks or to conceive certain generalized concepts.” Sobol paused. “It is a controversial fact that technology has discovered a way to see not only truth or falsehood in a person, but their very thought processes in action. Even before they can act upon those thoughts. Dissembling or deliberate deceit is orchestrated by the frontal lobes….”

The frontal lobes were highlighted on the left-hand screen—over the image of what was presumably Mosely’s brain. Other areas were highlighted in turn as Sobol continued, “Fear, aggression, empathy, and recognition all have their unique signatures in the human brain. Mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, also have their telltale patterns. So you see, you can hide nothing from me. I am about to know you better than anyone has ever known you. Perhaps even better than you know yourself.”

Mosely was starting to tremble again. He saw the colors change in the brain diagram on the left-hand screen. He instinctively knew it was fear. He was seeing his own fear develop on-screen in real time. Feeding on itself.

“You are afraid.”

It took all Mosely’s restraint to keep from screaming in terror. He held it in, tightly closing his eyes. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Why
not
you? Society threw you away. Even
you
had given up on yourself. But I see the promise in you.” A pause. “I brought you here because you were found to be above average in most ways. You are highly intelligent, and your personality profile shows you to be self-reliant and resourceful. These are traits I need in my soldiers.” Another pause. “I don’t care about your level of education—that can be remedied—or your background, which doesn’t matter. Nor do I care about the things you’ve done. I only care about the things you’re
going
to do. My followers will wield incredible power. I am going to see whether my faith in you is justified.”