by Nate Kenyon
* * *
Hoboken was just beginning to stir this early in the morning. In the street, the September air was crisp, the sky a flawless steel blue. Hawke smelled the river, heard the calls of geese flying overhead. He started thinking about other ways to make things right with Robin. Maybe another trip to Cuttyhunk Island, near Martha’s Vineyard off the Massachusetts coast. It would be good to get away, have a little quiet time. Hawke used to go to a cottage his aunt owned there when he was a boy, and it had a special meaning for him and his wife: It was where they had gotten married.
Still thinking about how to make the trip work, he put his sunglasses on and chewed an aspirin and then the energy bar, chocolate grit in his teeth as he made his way to the PATH, joining a growing flood of people. It felt good to stretch his legs. He was no gym rat, but he was wiry strong and genetics had been good to him. He kept in shape by walking.
A cabdriver honked at him as he crossed the street, flashing him the finger. Someone cursed next to him and Hawke said, “Excuse me?” before realizing the man had a Bluetooth in his ear and smartphone in hand. The man wore a hand-tailored suit and shoes polished to a sleek shine. He shot Hawke a withering look, as if he were observing the biggest idiot on the planet, and continued his loud conversation.
Once underground, Hawke stuck his sunglasses up on his head and joined the slowly shuffling line to buy a coffee. He and Robin couldn’t afford any extra costs on their stretched-tight budget, but he needed it badly and he had a few minutes before the PATH arrived. Train service had finally been fully restored after Hurricane Sandy, and it was good to see the crowds returning, although he could do without the lines.
When he made it to the front, the waif-thin girl behind the counter didn’t even look at him, her gaze locked on her iPhone screen. Three piercings glittered, one through each eyebrow and a stud through her lip, and her hair was cut short and streaked with red. She was frowning and jumpy, like she’d had too much caffeine or something stronger.
Thomas would have been intrigued by the piercings. He pointed out things that were different, seemed to want to understand them, even if he didn’t say much. This girl wasn’t saying much, either. Something was annoying her about the iPhone; she sighed, poking at the screen in frustration with a tip of pink tongue poking between her lips. In his earlier life, Hawke would have struck up a conversation with her, maybe helped her fix the problem. But he was a married man now, going on thirty, with a young son and another child on the way. He wasn’t running around New York City hacking into big-business networks and chasing stories the way he had been only a few years ago, feeling like a rogue reporter and Internet cowboy. And let’s face it, you got sloppy and made mistakes. Big ones. His hacker skills used to give him an edge in the reporter rat race, allowed him to see stories in ways others did not. But things changed. Maybe he’d lost that edge, the killer instinct all the best journalists needed to get to the truth.
The coffee was scalding hot, and he burned the roof of his mouth on the first sip. He settled into a window seat on the train, watching people situate themselves, many of them on their smartphones or tablets, maneuvering through the aisles with quick glances and shuffling feet. Hawke liked to watch people; he learned a lot. Maybe Thomas was like him that way. The same man was still talking on his Bluetooth, muttering something about derivatives and foreign exchange rates, and he jostled a young woman on his way past hard enough for her to stumble. He moved down the aisle until he was lost in the crowd.
A man across from Hawke had been watching, too. He clutched a rolled-up sign and had a large duffel bag tucked between his feet, and his clothes were nice but faded and slightly wrinkled, as if he’d worn them once or twice already between washings. There was a shadow of stubble across the man’s cheeks, and his jaw muscles twitched.
“What a prick,” Hawke said, motioning toward where Bluetooth had disappeared. He nodded at the duffel. Something about the shape of it, bulky, with angles and points, made him uneasy. “You going to a rally or something?”
The man stared at him, openly hostile. The Occupy Wall Street movement had evolved recently. Now they were focused on high-frequency computer trading and credit swaps, which had bloomed once again with the market recovery. The 1 percent were richer than ever.
But if this man was going to a rally on Wall Street, he was on the wrong train. Maybe it was somewhere uptown. Hawke looked around, spotting several others with packs and signs, and suddenly remembered he was wearing a tie and suit jacket, the nicer of the two he owned. “I’m not a broker,” he said. “I’m a journalist.” It sounded stupid and insincere: I’m with you, buddy. He had no idea what this man’s life was like.
The man kept staring, then shook his head in disgust and touched his jaw. Hawke reached up to his own face and felt the speck of tissue still clinging to him from when he’d nicked himself shaving. He picked it off and stared at the small circular brown stain on his palm. Great. One hell of a start to the day. “Thanks,” he said, but the man just pulled the duffel bag closer and looked back toward the spot where Bluetooth had disappeared.
CHAPTER THREE
7:35 A.M.
A WOMAN TOOK THE SEAT next to Hawke, huffing, her meaty thighs spilling over into his space. He sipped his coffee, feeling his body becoming more alert. His mind had already started churning, imagining a Web site that tracked civil unrest by mapping police presence, cross-referenced with politicians’ statements and Twitter alerts, to create a kind of gauge for the level of tension in a particular area. A thermometer that took the temperature of a given confrontation and predicted violence. It could help people avoid a certain area—or search it out, if that was their thing. When he worked for the Times he had blogged during Hurricane Sandy and created a real-time map that tracked the hurricane’s path and predicted which areas of the city were the most vulnerable based on criteria like building clusters, street maps and distance to emergency services, and tied that to live traffic updates and an orderly evacuation plan. Earlier in his career, working as a freelancer for several local news outlets, he’d covered crime and created a site that tracked police activity in New York City by street, culling data from public logs and police scanners to provide near real-time public safety updates. He’d also built a system for a feature on education that analyzed student test scores and cross-referenced that with public funding levels and census data to show the best school districts, as well as racial and socioeconomic bias.
He knew how to do these things. His entire career had been structured to expose a deeper truth in some way, to help people cut through the mass and jumble of information and find the core that was important to them. The truth, coming into focus through the use of technology. The story. It was everything to him. Except now, he’d lost the safety net that the Times had provided him and he was walking the high wire alone, with nothing below him but empty space.
His cell rang. Hawke dug it out of his pocket and saw it was Nathan Brady from Network magazine, one of the largest technology-focused periodicals left in the world. “I’m on the PATH,” Hawke said.
“Good luck to you.” Brady’s voice sounded tinny and hollow, as if he were speaking through a tube. “Is it moving? There’s something happening in the city. Police presence, angry crowd. It’s mucking up our fine Swiss watch of a transit system. You’ll never make it in.”
Hawke glanced around. The car was almost full now. “What do you want, Nathan?”
“I’m drinking at seven thirty A.M. on a Tuesday. What does that say to you?”
“That you’re an alcoholic?”
“I want a status report. I’ve got to go to Editorial in half an hour.”
“I’m meeting with Weller this morning, actually.” Hawke transferred the phone to his other ear, drained his coffee cup and dug out his laptop to look at his notes. “Sitting down with a guy for a demo on stress testing a corporate network, hacker-style, and then it’s Weller again all afternoon.” He was lying through his teeth; for the most part,
Jim Weller had avoided him all week, passing him off to a junior associate for most of the day. Hawke’s notes were thin at best so far. But Brady was going to lose his mind if he knew how little Hawke had on this one, and sooner or later Weller would let him in. After all, why else had he invited Hawke to come?
Jim Weller, founder and CEO of start-up network security firm Conn.ect, Inc., had his own story of failure and possible redemption; a formerly high-flying tech genius, he’d worked on some cutting-edge programming around energy sharing among networked devices at his former company, the tech juggernaut Eclipse, which led to both its stunning IPO and Weller being forced out by a hostile board after he confronted the company about patenting and licensing his intellectual property without the proper authority. Apparently the board didn’t think they needed him anymore. Eclipse seemed to have its fingers in everything from software for networks to new operating systems to national security. They were famously paranoid, with an entire private fleet of enforcers who drove black SUVs and dressed like FBI agents. Their headquarters, a two-hundred-acre complex about thirty miles outside of Los Angeles, was surrounded by razor wire and laser grids. Rumor was, the enforcers were trained to shoot to kill.
Lately there was another rumor that Weller’s former company had invented something entirely new based on quantum computing, some sort of “holy grail” of the industry—and that it had led to a breakthrough deal with the National Security Agency. It was another project Weller had apparently had a hand in, at least during the early seed stages, but everyone on the project had been sworn to secrecy and nobody would talk.
When Hawke had reached out to Weller, asking to pitch a profile of his new company to Network, Weller had deferred at first and then called him up and invited him in, even going so far as to ask Hawke to shadow him at his office in New York. Hawke had found the man cold, calculating, clearly brilliant but distracted, often unavailable. He couldn’t tell whether Weller was fanatically driven or simply a fanatic. He wondered again why Weller had let him into his inner sanctum, and when the man would actually let his guard down enough to start talking. Hawke had gotten some sketches of Weller’s early life during his first few days at Conn.ect, a few hints of his work at Eclipse, but nothing more. Weller seemed secretive about something, but he wasn’t opening up yet.
Hawke had never let it slip that his real reason for the profile was to find out what Weller’s former company was up to, but Brady knew, of course. In fact, that was the only reason he’d gone to bat for the story in the first place. Brady was an old friend, but that only carried you so far; in journalism, it was fish or cut bait.
“I’m close,” Hawke said. “I’m getting to know the people there, learning more about him. He’s secretive, but I can smell the story and trust me, this is going to be big.”
“Then give me something,” Brady said. “I’m putting a lot on the line for you.” His voice took on a needling tone. “Pitching you was like sticking my neck in a guillotine. You need this one. And you need it soon. After what happened with Farragut, nobody would touch you—”
“An unfortunate choice of words, don’t you think?”
Brady sighed. “You know what I mean. You broke the law, hacked into someone’s e-mail, tampered with police business. It doesn’t matter that you found enough kiddy porn to nail the son of a bitch. It crossed a line people aren’t willing to overlook, at least publicly.”
The man in question was a psychology professor at a New York university, an expert in child disorders who had been accused of improper conduct with students. The judge had thrown the images Hawke had found on the professor’s account out of court. The professor had tried to scrub everything else clean by the time authorities searched his computer, but he had made a mess of it, and they had recovered enough data to try him again. The case was still pending. But for Hawke’s career, the damage had been done. He had nearly gone to jail himself but had covered his tracks well enough for the charges not to stick. That didn’t matter to the Times. News International’s phone-hacking scandal was still in everyone’s minds. In the midst of a media furor, his bosses had fired him, claiming he had crossed the lines of journalistic integrity.
It had sent Hawke spiraling down into a cesspool of anger and shame. He’d wanted to do the right thing, and he had ended up on the wrong side. Since then, he hadn’t been able to buy his way into a pitch. Editors wouldn’t take his phone calls. None of them except for Brady, a friend who had stood by him through the worst of it, and who had bought Hawke’s proposed feature story about a technology that, if he was right, was about to transform the world.
Hawke rubbed his eyes and blinked. This was his ticket back into the game, and he wasn’t going to blow it. “Eclipse bought a new server farm,” he said. “Three hundred thousand square feet in North Carolina, expanding to over a million. Security’s tighter than Fort Knox—armed guards, robot sentries, checkpoints, video monitoring, razor wire, retinal scans. This thing is going to be massive. But the same source told me it’s only the first of many.”
“Cloud centers for streaming media? Online lockers? Temporary supercomputer clusters?”
“Since when did Eclipse get into the rental business? And why start so big? Amazon and Google are cornering the market, but it’s retail. That’s not Eclipse’s thing.”
Brady sighed. “I don’t know, John; maybe they’re making a play to grab market share in a new area. Is that a story? You tell me.”
Hawke didn’t answer. The new IPv6 standard that had launched last year expanded the number of Internet protocol addresses almost infinitely, in preparation for an explosion of networked devices. There were already chips in computers, phones, and tablets, of course, and even most cars and TVs, but experts predicted there would be an average of three networked devices for every person on earth in another two years: your washing machine, refrigerator, coffeemaker. Google was working on eyeglasses with the ability to display maps and directions. Wearable computers would become like clothing; people wouldn’t leave home without them.
The world was starving for more data space, an endless supply of capacity, and these massive server farms were cropping up everywhere, interconnected through a global network and sharing workloads across multiple locations. The government was the biggest customer of all, building facilities to handle all the data it was monitoring in the guise of national security. Hawke imagined it like a gigantic new life-form evolving across the globe, and it was only the beginning. Anyone could see how Eclipse would want to be a part of that.
But Brady was right. It wasn’t enough of a fresh story for Network, and Hawke didn’t think expanding data capacity was Eclipse’s end game, either.
“Give me a little more time,” he said. “There’s a lot more to this; I just can’t talk about it yet. I’ll have a draft for you in a week, and we can talk about building something more interactive to support the main story.”
“You’ve got three days. I’ll hold off the hyenas until then.” Brady’s voice grew softer, conspiratorial. “Or here’s a thought. Why don’t you check out the hack attacks that took down the Justice Department’s Web site last night? ‘Anonymous’ strikes again. I hear they have a hand in the mess you’ve gotten yourself tangled up in this morning, tweeting about spontaneous rallies and calls to action, gumming up the public transit system.”
Hawke closed his eyes. “Was Rick involved?”
“No idea. Look, you know these people. You’re in the trenches, am I right? Or at least you were. If this Eclipse business doesn’t play out, go after that one. Could be the story of our time. The future of mass protests, cyberterrorism at its finest, the men behind the masks. A crisis of democracy. ‘We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.’ That’s pure gold.”
“I left that part of my life behind when I had Thomas. Rick would never take my call.”
“Don’t be so sure. How is Thomas, by the way? And Robin?”
Hawke thought of his son’s long silences and increasingly disconne
cted mannerisms, and Robin’s belly, just swollen enough for him to notice. Yesterday she’d found blood spotting her underwear again, enough to worry her, even though the doctor had said before it wasn’t a miscarriage but the hematoma.
“They’re … fine.” The train gave a jerk and a squeal. “We’re moving, Nathan. Looks like I’ll make it into the city after all.”
“Good.” Brady paused, sighed again, forced some levity into his voice. “Listen, old man, maybe you need a little break to clear your head. Let’s go out on the boat this weekend; we can do a little deep-sea fishing, talk some more about the draft and where you’re taking the interactive features of this idea of yours. Talk about what’s next.”
“Sure. I’m going to lose you in the tunnel. I’ll check in again tonight.”
Hawke stuck his phone in his pocket, closed his laptop and put it away. The lack of a connection to a networked device left him feeling unsettled. Sparks flashed as the train gathered speed through the tunnel. Hawke couldn’t help wondering what might happen if the thousands of pounds of concrete and steel collapsed on him. He imagined the massive buildings of the Manhattan skyline rising up like the peaks of a man-made mountain range. He loved this city, loved the size and scope, the noise, the energy. But people were altering the landscape, changing the natural world into something alien. It was more than physical; it was electric, invisible; it was connectivity and fiber optics and cyberspace. And he had played a part in it; he had embraced it with open arms. Are we evolving, Hawke wondered, or mutating? Was there any difference?
Crumbling tunnels, crushing stone. You’re imagining the death of your own career. The life he had pictured for himself, the rock-star hacker journalist changing the world, was swiftly fading. His family was what he had left, and he felt like he was losing them, too.