by Nate Kenyon
“I doubt that. You were part of one of the most infamous hacks in history, isn’t that right? Stealing top-secret files on undercover moles from the CIA?”
Hawke became very still. A trickle of sweat made its way down his neck, between his shoulder blades. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure, it wasn’t just you. In fact, from what I was able to dig up, you were a fringe player. But the others went to prison for it, while you barely even got a second look. Why is that?” Weller studied him for a long moment. “Look, you were a respected member of the underground not so long ago. Clearly you still know the principal players—”
“Things change,” Hawke said. “This really isn’t about me, Jim. I’m a nobody. Network wants to know about you, about Eclipse and about how they’re going to change the world.”
Weller banged a hand on the desk. “Whatever they have, it’s because of me,” he said, his voice rising. “I want you to know what’s really happening at Eclipse. What they’re doing to me. They’re a fucking Gestapo organization, John, a goddamn militant dictatorship. They have me under surveillance; they’ve tapped my phones, frozen accounts and altered records. All to protect her.”
“Tapped your phones?”
“They know how valuable she is. They don’t want her coming back to me. But they’re going about it all wrong. They just don’t see it. What they’re doing to her is a sin. That place is going to destroy her, slowly but surely.”
Hawke was stunned into silence. It didn’t happen often. Something in their conversation had changed very quickly. Weller’s voice had gone bitter and hard. He sounded like a dangerous fanatic or, what might be worse, a spurned lover. Hawke tried to think of a woman high enough in the Eclipse hierarchy for that to make sense. He’d studied the company’s leadership and current org chart like he’d been preparing for a final exam; there was Connie Williams, head of new-product marketing, but she was almost ten years older than Weller and married. Deb Hunn, in charge of Eclipse’s European operations. Young, attractive. Could be her. But if so, it threw off Hawke’s theory about Weller and Young having a fling. Or maybe it didn’t.
Hawke had the feeling that he was being taught some kind of lesson, and that he’d be required to figure out the answer.
“What are you talking about?” he said finally, carefully. “Because I have to say, you’re sounding a little extreme here, Jim.”
“Far from it. It’s time to follow all the threads, weave them into a complete picture that everyone can understand. You use technology to tell a story. I want you to tell a story now. The biggest one of your life.”
A shout and a crash came from the other room. Weller’s gaze flicked to the door. Hawke stood up and opened it; the copier repairman was standing in the middle of the large room, clutching his right hand and cursing. He was big and broad across the shoulders, and a large tag across the breast of his corporate shirt read: Jason Vasco.
“Goddamn printer,” he said, motioning to the machine by the windows that now lay on its side. Blood dripped onto the freshly vacuumed carpet. “The high-end ones are the worst. This is the third time I’ve been here this week. I thought it was a bad belt giving you trouble, but there’s a corrupt hard drive or something. I swear to God, it was like it bit me.”
Hawke heard more raised voices from the conference room, as if people were arguing over something important. Bradbury was at his desk again, and as Weller emerged from his office the fat man looked up, his entire body seeming to vibrate with excitement. “There’s a lot of noise,” he said. “We’re logging a massive surge of hits coming from all over the place, but the locations keep jumping around or they’re cloaked. So many targets I can’t track them all. We should be all over this.” Bradbury was clearly frustrated. He motioned to the conference room. “But half our staff didn’t show up today, and everyone else is watching the damn news.…”
Weller walked over to Bradbury’s computer. He tapped a few keys. “You’re seeing traffic spikes of what, fifteen hundred percent?”
“Higher.”
Weller was silent for a moment. “More black hats?”
“I don’t know. There would have to be hundreds of thousands all working at once; either that or they’re using bots. But this activity is something I’ve never seen bots do before.”
Weller straightened. Hawke couldn’t tell if he was satisfied with what he had heard or not. Then he walked quickly in the direction of the conference room without another word, and Hawke followed him, wondering where all this was going. “Black hats” was a term for those who were working on the other side of the law, hackers who were looking to disrupt networks and cause problems. Anonymous was filled with them. White hats were network security experts who usually worked on the other side, and the two were often at odds. But in the real world, the line often blurred, with people switching sides in the course of a single day.
The morning was starting to unravel fast. Hawke felt like a man who had come late to a party and found all the other guests in the middle of something that he couldn’t quite understand. As he followed Weller, he wondered if the man might be about to give them all hell.
Vasco trailed behind them, cursing softly and gripping a paper towel. The others were still gathered under the TV. Hawke expected Weller to order them all back to work, but he said nothing. A major news anchor had broken into the coverage of the protests; the spotlessly coiffed man spoke in a slightly breathless voice, but the others in the room were talking too loudly for Hawke to hear.
“What’s going on now?” he said to Young.
“Everything,” she said, glancing at Weller as if looking for some kind of tacit approval to speak. “Traffic signals malfunctioning, cars running off the road on their own, power surges. People are panicking—”
Young stopped talking abruptly. Hawke caught something passing between Young and Weller that he didn’t understand. Hawke looked back at the TV. A well-dressed gray-haired woman was being interviewed on-screen, clutching her tiny dog in her arms. A stray bit of hair had come loose from the gray helmet and stuck up at the top of her head. “I was at Saks half an hour ago,” the woman said to the local reporter aiming the mike, and in her distress her carefully constructed voice began to betray her Brooklyn roots. “I was on the escalator, and it stopped, and I had my bags with me, and I had to put Peaches down for just a moment, to rebalance, and as soon as I did, as soon as she touched that step, the escalator started again very fast.…” The woman stopped, face wrinkling, chest hitching, as the reporter quietly urged her to continue. “… And thank the good Lord I grabbed her up and the escalator stopped again as soon as I did, but my heel had gotten caught.” She held up the trembling dog and the camera cut to show a shoe with the stiletto heel snapped off before cutting back to the woman’s tear-streaked face. “She could have lost her foot! I swear it was like that escalator tried to eat her.…”
A ripple of uneasy laughter spread through the room, but Vasco wasn’t laughing. “Not funny,” he muttered, staring down at his hand. The paper towel was spotted with red.
“What happened to you, exactly?” Hawke said.
“Thing started up with my hand in its guts. I saw you with the coffee machine, you know. I’m not the only one looking like a fool around here.” Vasco lifted the towel to check his hand, and Hawke caught a glimpse of his index finger, the tip chewed up a bit but the bleeding mostly stopped now. He wrapped it up again. “Thing is, I had it disabled. There’s no way it could just … Never mind.”
Another reporter had started relating other stories of equipment failure, more tablets and cell phones downloading and running what appeared to be complex programming. Hawke thought of the coffee machine, his laptop and the Anonymous board. He thought about what Weller had just said. His head was spinning with possibilities.
“I was monitoring traffic just now, in case anyone cares,” Bradbury said loudly, coming into the room, “and activity has gone through the roof. Denial of Service at
tacks, data theft attempts, serious network breaches reported by our systems at Johnson, Four Tune, about a dozen others. We’re in the security business, right? Maybe we should be actually looking at this, do you think?” He looked around, shook his head. “Anyone else notice weird stuff this morning? Before I came in, my laptop started downloading something automatically, executing some kind of program,” he said. “I wasn’t surfing any porn sites, if that’s what you’re thinking—”
“Please,” a woman named Susan Kessler said, a new hire from what Hawke had learned. “Let’s not make references to porn in the office.” Hawke pegged Kessler’s age at over thirty-five, which would probably make her Weller’s oldest employee. She always wore impeccable business suits and had perfect makeup, but today her suit looked slightly wrinkled and her face, although scrubbed clean, was pale and puffy.
“I just mean this wasn’t a phishing scam, not that I could tell. It was something else. I had to come to work, so I just shut it down, figured I would do a safe reboot and clean up later.” When he blinked, Bradbury’s eyes nearly disappeared into pockets of fat. “When I came in, the building manager said her iPad was acting funny. And she was pissed because the elevator was out and the repairman couldn’t seem to fix it, and the building’s security system was down, too.”
A systems analyst named Price shook his head. “You think this is some kind of massive hack?”
“I don’t know what it is,” Bradbury said. “I just think we should pay attention. Business is business, right, Jim?”
The casual reference might have pissed Weller off, but the man didn’t even look at Bradbury and Hawke wasn’t sure he had heard a single word. He was staring at the TV screen, where a scroll of the latest news had begun. A casual observer might have thought he was lost in thought, but Hawke watched a muscle jump in his jaw and could sense the tension building. Whatever Weller had expected coming in here, it didn’t appear to be going quite the way he’d planned.
“How long has this been going on?” Weller said, to no one in particular. “The unauthorized downloads and device malfunctions.”
“Since early this morning, I guess,” Bradbury said. “Like I said, my laptop—”
“Hold on,” Price said, pointing at the TV. The anchor was back, looking grim.
“Stock market exchanges have collapsed today,” the anchor said, “erasing billions—some have estimated even higher—in assets. According to authorities, as in 2008 and 2010, high-frequency computer trading has at least been partially to blame for the crash, but the automatic circuit-breaker halts meant to pause a tumbling market have failed to kick in. In fact, nobody seems to be able to control or explain the collapse. Hedge-fund managers we have reached have refused to speak on camera, though one of them called this the biggest market implosion in history—and they have no answers for the millions who will be ruined.”
The entire group grew silent as they watched, even Bradbury caught by the drama. Things had taken a darker turn. “On the ground,” the anchor said, “protests on Wall Street have intensified and more police presence has been called in, but resources are stretched thin as they deal with increasingly violent, dangerous and unexplained events across the city.”
The screen showed scenes in quick succession: The cops were on edge, angry, swinging at the crowds that were taunting them and turning over cars. There were other updates in quick succession as the anchor became deadly serious now: A five-alarm fire had broken out somewhere in the Bronx, he said, and there were reports of more fires in Manhattan. Stories of explosions on several bridges into the city began scrolling across the bottom of the screen. Sporadic reports had begun to come in of rolling blackouts in other areas of the country as well.
When the network played a clip of the mayor telling everyone to remain calm, Hawke looked at Weller again. The man still hadn’t budged. Hawke was about to say something when a rumble made the group turn to the windows as something appeared in the sky, an object so out of place, so stunning, it left everyone frozen in shock: a helicopter, its blades chopping at the air, black smoke pouring from its engine, plummeting directly past their windows like a dying bird to earth before it disappeared from sight.
A moment later, a rumble shook the building. Kessler let out a small cry, holding her hands to her face.
“Oh my God,” she breathed softly.
Bradbury went to the window, pressed his hands against it, trying to peer down, shaking his giant head. “Did you see that?” he said, looking back at them all, a group frozen in place, his words spilling out in a panic. “Did you see it? Did they just fucking crash a helicopter in the middle of New York?”
As if in answer, smoke drifted up past the glass. “We’re under fire,” Vasco said. He went to the window, too, looking out, then turned back. “It’s another 9/11.”
“You don’t know that,” Kessler said. “You need to calm down—”
“Don’t fucking tell me to calm down!” Vasco shouted, veins standing out in his neck. “This is big; it’s a coordinated attack. When’s the last time you heard of a helicopter crashing in New York City? Did you see the broadcast? There are explosions all over the place. And the mayor’s telling us to stay calm, too, while things are going to hell—”
The others all began to talk at once, while overhead the TV buzzed loudly and went to snow, then crackled and popped like a bundle of firecrackers going off and began to smoke. Kessler was standing nearly directly underneath it; she cried out and jumped back as sparks cascaded down, nearly running into Weller, who still hadn’t moved, his face lit with what was either a strange, ghostly grimace or a smile.
In the middle of the near panic, Hawke’s cell phone rang.
* * *
Hawke dug his phone out of his pocket, heard static and what sounded like a faint voice. Moving away from the noise of the others as they argued and shouted over one another, he ducked into the other room, his pulse hammering and his breath growing tight in his chest.
The voice was his wife’s, but he could barely make it out. He pressed the phone to his ear, straining to understand the faint words through the static. Something was very wrong. He heard what sounded like a scream and his son’s name, then a whisper, a pleading, barely audible prayer, a thump and another strangled shriek.
“Robin!” he said. “Can you hear me? Robin!”
The buzzing faded slightly, and Robin was there for a moment, breathing fast and shallow, a fleeting few seconds of clarity, her terror huge and feeding his own.
“Hurry,” she said, “John, please. He’s coming through.”
Hawke shouted into the phone, told her to stay there, stay calm, but the static washed over the connection and his wife was gone.
STAGE TWO
CHAPTER SEVEN
10:43 A.M.
HAWKE LEFT THE 7-ELEVEN with two paper bags, juggling them as he shouldered open the door and mumbled good-bye to the man sweeping the aisles. Robin was still at home, dealing with Thomas’s crying; the fifteen-month-old boy had an earache, the remnants of a bad cold, and he couldn’t sleep. Hawke had picked up some more Children’s Tylenol, along with a carton of milk, bread and canned soup. Needing a break from Thomas’s screams, he thought for a moment about taking a long way home but then thought better of it. The store was only two blocks from their apartment, but Robin would be waiting for him and was probably ready to lose her mind. The boy’s fever had broken when he woke up before dinner, but the pressure in his ears wouldn’t let up.
The night was hot and humid, and Hawke was slick with sweat as he reached the building and fumbled for his keys. He rode the tiny elevator back to their floor, listening to the creaks and groans of the machinery. Their door was standing open a crack. He felt a chill. Had he left it that way? He didn’t think so, but he’d been so edgy and distracted, anything was possible.
Hawke entered the apartment to more of Thomas’s muffled screams, dampened now by a closed bedroom door. Strange; normally Robin would be in there, soothing him with
a warm washcloth or another bedtime story. But he focused immediately on something else. A man’s voice came from the kitchen.
Hawke came around the corner with his heart thudding hard, blood pressure rising, and for a moment he stood motionless: Their neighbor Randall Lowry had cornered Hawke’s wife by the sink. Lowry’s hair stuck up in the back of his head, a ragged bird’s nest, and he had a hand in the air, gesturing.
The boy’s crying from the other room ticked up a notch. Lowry caught the movement of Robin’s eyes, and he turned to see Hawke watching them. Whatever Lowry had been saying, he stopped suddenly. His expression changed, and he took a step back.
Thomas’s bedroom door opened; it must not have been latched shut. Hawke glanced over and saw the boy standing in the doorway, red faced, stuffed lion clutched in his arms. His first steps. Thomas hadn’t walked yet. He and Robin had been talking about it that day, considering whether to see the pediatrician. Thomas had been late for almost all his milestones, but his doctor said the boy was fine, simply a cautious child, nothing to worry about. Robin wasn’t so sure.
When Hawke looked back, Lowry was pushing past him, muttering to himself, his head down. “Don’t you come in here again,” Hawke said, but the man was already gone, the sound of his apartment door as it slammed shut echoing off the walls of the hallway and bouncing back to him, amplified into a sound of accusation and regret as he moved toward Robin and watched her turn away, hugging her arms to her chest.
* * *
Hawke tried to call Robin back, his fingers trembling and clumsy, and when there was no answer he felt light-headed, disconnected from reality. As the room spun he sat on a nearby desk chair and put his head down for a moment, trying to breathe slow and deep.
There was no time to panic, not now. He’d probably misinterpreted everything and Robin and Thomas were fine. They’re fine.