Day One: A Novel

by Nate Kenyon

  The fact was, someone had taken down the DOJ servers. If it wasn’t Anonymous, then who had done it?

  Hawke scrolled through the threads quickly, his curiosity piqued. Most of the screen names he didn’t recognize; he’d been out of the game for a while now, and the shadowy hacker underground changed on a dime. Even their physical locations were suspect. Several of the most high-profile members over the last couple of years had turned out to be transients like Commander X using Internet cafés to take down the world’s most powerful and protected networks; one of the most famous had bounced from friends’ couches to abandoned warehouses and become a media star by invading the servers of the Times, Microsoft, and Yahoo! and later, after he was finally unmasked, becoming a security specialist working for a private firm with ties to U.S. government agencies.

  Members of Anonymous could be brilliant. But many of them were also eccentric outliers who shunned society and were hardwired to rebel against authority. Hawke had found that exciting earlier in his life, but not anymore. When you’re starting a family and the cops knock on your door, it changes things, he’d said to Rick, right before the man had gone to jail for his role in leaking classified government documents online. I can’t go down with you.

  A chat window popped up, and Rick, using his familiar alias rodeoclown, was there: Something’s going on. Something big.

  No preamble, no mention of their colorful history or the fact Rick had served eighteen months in a federal prison while Hawke had walked away. That was Rick’s style, when he communicated at all, and Hawke knew better than to push it. Besides, they only had three minutes.

  Operation Global Blackout? he typed.

  No fucking idea. Not involved.

  Who then? Admiral Doe?

  Someone good. Like fucking brilliant. Better than any of us. There was a pause. Tried to track him. Found some footprints in the sand that pointed toward Eclipse IPs, but it left me sinking fast and then fried my board. Like it was the cat and I was the mouse.

  Eclipse. Hawke leaned closer, growing more intrigued. Fried your board? How is that possible?

  Electrical surge.

  Hawke sat back. That didn’t make any sense. Maybe it had been a coincidence. But Rick was always careful; his equipment was certainly shielded.

  He typed: Rumor mill on Doe? Connected to DOJ attack?

  Nobody knows. He’s a ghost.

  Hawke typed: Where are you?

  Nothing for a moment, and then: Never mind. Authorities after everyone. Big pressure on this, I’m in crosshairs.

  Just tell them you’re not involved—they’ll trace everything soon enough and see.

  Not that simple. I’m being set up.

  Hawke shook his head: Why?

  Don’t know. Something’s happening. Find out who Doe is.

  You know I can’t do that.

  Damn well can. You’re the best at this. When you want to be.

  As he was about to type a reply, the screen flickered and went blank. Hawke paused, fingers over the keys, still not entirely sure what he wanted to write. They had another minute before the session would automatically terminate, and this wasn’t the way it would happen anyway. This was like hardware failure.

  He was about to try to crash the system and restart when the screen came back up as if nothing had happened. His chat session with Rick was gone, but everything else was intact.

  Except it wasn’t, not exactly.

  Hawke stared at the message board, trying to make sense of what he saw. At first glance, the board looked the same, the same members posting in the same order, at least as he remembered it. But the contents of the posts were entirely different. Board members had gone from expressing confusion and anger over Operation Global Blackout to taking responsibility for it. A member named crow17 claimed he had been one of many hundreds of thousands who had aimed a low-orbit ion cannon at the DOJ servers last night, taking them down. Another poster talked about being a part of this morning’s call to action through Twitter. Someone else talked about going after the New York Stock Exchange next, then creating an emoticon message that would self-populate through chains of brokerage accounts and wipe out all transactions for the users.

  Hawke remembered seeing both threads when he first logged on, and they were entirely different. And there were more like that. It was as if someone had erased the text of each message and rewritten them, one by one.

  It was one thing to crash a site but quite another to erase and then generate entirely new content on the fly.

  Who could possibly have done something like that?

  In spite of his concerns about getting involved with Rick, Hawke went off sniffing like a bloodhound. He left the corrupted board and logged on to Twitter, scrolling through the hash tags on Anonymous, Admiral Doe, DOJ and Operation Global Blackout. Anonymous had been busy. There were hundreds of tweets in the last few hours by those claiming to be associated with the hacker collective: the DOJ takedown, an attack on the servers of French government, the leaking of private FBI transcripts, service interruptions and messages posted on dozens of police Web sites across the country, a theft of private data from Goldman Sachs accounts, calls to action in protests around the world for various causes like censorship, corruption, injustice and religion, in Austria, Belgium, Britain, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States.…

  The activity was staggering, and through it all Hawke sensed some kind of common thread that he couldn’t quite grasp but scared the hell out of him. The whole point of Anonymous was that it didn’t govern itself, had no permanent set of goals or leaders; it existed simply as a movement for change and a way of pushing back against authority and censorship in any form. It had begun with a small group of mischief-makers and had always kept that playful edge, and it was fluid, constantly evolving, an online, shared consciousness driven by the whims of the group. Hawke had always imagined it as a gigantic flock of geese, moving in unison in a seemingly random pattern.

  This was different. There was purpose here, and it was deadly serious.

  Hawke focused his search on New York, and found dozens of tweets referring to gatherings across the city. One in Bowling Green Park, protesting Wall Street greed; another near Downtown Hospital to protest unaffordable health care; a third in Seward Park to protest immigration laws; a fourth and fifth in SoHo and the Theater District to protest censorship; a sixth outside of Rockefeller University to protest lack of affordability in higher education. There were protests on wealth inequality in J. Hood Wright, Inwood Hill, Highbridge and Marcus Garvey parks.

  Each call to action had been tweeted by Admiral Doe.

  Hawke thought of the man with the duffel bag, and the others on the train, all going in different directions. He pulled up a map, plotted the protest locations. He sensed some kind of pattern, but no matter how hard he stared at the screen, it wouldn’t emerge.

  Another cup of coffee might help him focus. He got up, took off his suit jacket and draped it over his chair and began to make his way toward a tiny back room where a pot was usually brewing.

  The first thing Hawke noticed when he opened the door was the heat; it puffed out at him. The room’s lights blinked on automatically. The room was little more than a windowless supply closet, lined with open shelves stacked with reams of paper and office supplies on the right side and a long worktable on the left with a small refrigerator underneath it. Someone had brought a container of donut holes, and powdered sugar and cinnamon dotted the table next to the paper cups and containers of sugar packets and creamer, along with the monstrous coffee machine.

  The room had to be twenty degrees hotter than the office, and the smell of coffee was strong. Probably scalded. It figured; the machine was brand-new, with all the bells and whistles, one of those complicated stations that people with too much money paid through the nose for in order to create barista-style drinks in their pajamas, and
yet it couldn’t even brew a decent cup. Bradbury had acted like a proud father when he’d shown it off on Hawke’s first day in the office. It did pretty much everything from grinding beans and foaming milk to making flavored drinks. It even had an app for remote scheduling, which Bradbury had insisted on demonstrating. The entire outfit practically screamed, Look at me; I’m sophisticated!

  Hawke glanced at the sheet of printed instructions for lattes and cappuccinos lying on the table and sighed. He didn’t need a specialty drink. Luckily, the beast had a separate glass carafe for regular coffee, and someone had used it this morning. There were a couple of cups still left. Even if the remains were burned, it would be better than nothing.

  As Hawke reached for the carafe, he could feel the heat radiating from the gleaming machine and heard a faint hiss of escaping pressure as his fingers touched the handle. Incredibly, the smooth steel was cool to the touch, another marvel of modern engineering. But the smell of the coffee was bitter and hot.

  When he pulled the glass carafe free it exploded in his hand. The sound was like a gunshot in the small room. Scalding coffee sprayed across the table and front of the shiny machine; glass shards bounced off the walls and floor.

  Hawke dropped the remains of the carafe like he’d been bitten and felt warmth across the back of his wrist, warmth that quickly changed to a sharp pain. More warmth spread through his chest. Jesus Christ. He looked down in shock; luckily, most of the coffee and the glass had sprayed away from him, but his shirt was spotted with coffee stains and his wrist was already turning red.

  The machine let out another hiss. Steam rose from somewhere inside it. Hawke yanked the plug from the outlet, then stepped back, eyeing the coffeemaker warily. He grabbed a roll of paper towels from a shelf and blotted the coffee from the table, his shock and fear quickly turning to embarrassment. Even though he hadn’t done anything to cause the mess, he felt guilty. An exploding coffeemaker. It was a silly prank, absolutely fucking slapstick comedy. Let’s get the new guy. He almost wanted to look around for the hidden camera, and he might have laughed it off except for the burn on his wrist that had already begun to throb. Not so funny after all. When he thought about it, he knew it was no prank. Just a malfunctioning piece of equipment, and he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Hawke swept the larger shards of glass up with a nearby dustpan and brush and deposited them in the trash. He was considering the smears of coffee on the wall when the sound of someone clearing his throat made him glance up.

  “Never liked that thing,” Weller said. He was standing in the open doorway, arms crossed, leaning against the jamb. “I guess I wasn’t the only one. When you’re done cleaning up, join me in my office. We need to talk.”

  Hawke considered explaining, but what could he say? I didn’t drop it; I swear—it just blew up in my hand? When Weller stepped away from the open door, Hawke saw the copier repairman standing with his arms crossed, smirking at him.

  The hacker journalist can’t figure out how to work the coffee machine. It would surely become office legend. Thank God nobody else had seen it, or things might have been far worse.

  CHAPTER SIX

  9:47 A.M.

  HAWKE FOLLOWED WELLER INTO HIS OFFICE, where the man closed the door and motioned to the simple rigid wooden chair that faced his uncluttered desk. A black hard-shelled laptop case with a security lock sat against the wall next to a glass-door cabinet crammed with networking gear. The case was large enough for two laptops. There was very little else in the room.

  Weller was lithe, slightly over six feet, and tended to wear dark jeans and Oxford shirts every day. Both the way he dressed and his office reflected his affection for minimalism and order. His round glasses would have seemed delicate and feminine on most men, but they served to soften what would have otherwise been a harshly angular face. He bristled with a coiled energy that kept him in constant motion, and even as he sat behind the desk he bounced slightly in his chair, hands fiddling with a pen, tapping and flicking it against the wood. “You okay?”

  Hawke nodded, touched the brown spatters on his shirt. His wrist throbbed. “Just a little wounded pride.”

  Weller put the pen down, then seemed to dismiss the incident entirely. When Hawke pulled out his digital recorder, Weller shook his head. “No record of this,” he said. “Not yet.”

  Hawke put it away. An object slightly larger than a pack of gum sat on a corner of the desk. Weller picked it up. “The most advanced in government hardware,” he said. “Highly secure communications device, developed by Eclipse as part of their deal with the NSA. It has its own advanced operating system, powered by an all-new adaptive intelligence in the cloud. Nearly impossible to lock on to, uses its own satellites and encrypted five ways to Sunday. Big power comes in small packages.” He handed the phone to Hawke. “I thought you’d appreciate this. Communication is everything in your line of work.”

  Still smarting from the encounter with the coffee machine, this was the last thing Hawke had expected. He turned the object in his hands. It appeared seamless, with an edgeless, glossy screen and nothing else. There was no immediate way to tell how it might operate. He resisted the urge to play with it; now was not the time. He had to get Weller talking. “Does it make calls?” he said.

  Weller smiled. “Borrow it for a while,” he said. “I have another. Might come in handy.”

  The code of ethics for journalists was clear on accepting any kind of gift. Then again, Hawke had never cared much for rules. This tiny phone was part of the story. It would make a great sideline to the main piece; the Network lab could dissect it, piece by piece, break it down for the audience, show them its guts ahead of release. That alone was nearly big enough to satisfy Brady.

  Hawke tried to keep his building excitement from showing, shoved the tiny device in his left pocket and kept his other phone in his right. “I didn’t think Eclipse would be inclined to share with you these days.”

  “I liberated it,” Weller said. “It’s not in commercial development yet.”

  “I’ll keep that part out of the profile.”

  Weller’s smile faded. “They stole something from me; I stole something back. It’s not quite quid pro quo, but it’s a start.”

  “You’re talking about the energy-sharing project?”

  “Something much more important than that. Energy sharing was just the evolution of an old idea. Use the processing power of the cloud to spread out the work. When a device is running low, it borrows another networked device’s chip to crunch data and serve it back.” He stuck the pen in the middle drawer, so the desk’s surface was completely clean, then folded his hands in front of him. “Now let’s get down to business,” he said. “You want to know about my former employer. What happened when I left, and what they’re doing now.”

  Of course Weller knew that the Network angle wasn’t a simple profile or a feature about his new business, but neither of them had ever been this blunt about it. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Jonathan C. Hawke, born to a schoolteacher and a writer and political activist in eastern Massachusetts. Test scores show a boy who would excel at making the connections between things most people miss, a creative mind that would regularly reject those in authority who didn’t question the status quo. An outside-the-box thinker. Predictable behavior problems coupled with flashes of genius, an early tendency toward computer programming and storytelling that would lead to your associations with both the hacker subculture and journalism, but things didn’t start to go downhill until your father’s drinking led to his early death and you dropped out of college and got involved with Anonymous—”

  “So you’ve investigated me,” Hawke interrupted. “Am I supposed to be impressed?”

  “I had to know who you were,” Weller said. “Your strengths and weaknesses, your convictions. Some people like you start companies. I’m one of those. Others go underground, become part of the fringe, end up in jail or disappear.”

  “And t
he rest of us?”

  “A few cross back and forth. Hacker journalism is a respectable way to make a living doing what you love.”

  “This isn’t about me, though. It’s about you.”

  Weller’s eyes were glittering behind the glasses, and Hawke couldn’t tell if he was feverish or furious or both. “I let you in here for a reason. Your abilities have everything to do with this. Your work at the Times was brilliant, regardless of how they treated you. I think we can take this far beyond Network in ways that are going to become obvious to you very soon.”

  Hawke crossed his legs, attempted to look at ease although he had started to sweat. Normally he loved when he began to see pieces of the story hanging there like low fruit on the vine, the combinations still forming themselves in his mind, leading to the alpha moment when things really came together. But it wasn’t good when the person you were supposed to interview gained the upper hand. It was all about control over the story and the delivery; without that, the entire thing dissolved into a muddled, incomprehensible mess.

  “Tell me more,” Hawke said. “Let’s talk about the profile. Maybe you could start with why you chose network security as your next big move.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, John, not anymore,” Weller said. “You know that’s not the real story here.” His eyes were so bright and sharp Hawke wondered if he might be on something. He leaned forward and placed both palms on the desk. “Your investigative skills and instincts are first-rate, as I suspected. What did you discover about your old friends out there on your laptop?”

  Hawke cleared his throat as Weller waited. “You’re monitoring the network,” he said finally.

  “Of course I am, but that’s not the point. They’ve been busy. We may need their help soon, but this is causing quite a mess. I’d like you to ask them to stop.” Weller leaned back, crossed his arms over his chest. “Can you do that?”

  Hawke considered how to answer, finally decided to just go with the truth. “They say they’re not responsible. And they wouldn’t listen to me anyway.”