by Nate Kenyon
Giving the dead woman on the floor a wide berth, Hawke followed Young around the corner to another set of double-hinged doors with rubber seals and windows set in each of them. Young pushed them open, revealing a large, blindingly white-tiled room lit by banks of fluorescent lights. Steel tables and lockers lined the walls, with another set of closed doors on the far side that must lead to the interior of the hospital.
Cold air touched Hawke’s face, along with more of the smell. Something spoiled, along with the scent of vomit. The morgue. There were more bodies in here, which he might have expected, except many of them looked like hospital workers along with several patients in gowns. Hawke counted at least ten of them. They had slumped to the floor where they stood, as if they had collapsed instantaneously, unable to go on. As with the nurse in the hallway, there was no blood, no obvious signs of violence. Their skin was flushed pink, enough to make them look like they’d been in the sun too long.
But his attention was drawn away, because the child was inside this room. Its cries grew louder and more furious, coming from a long, bar-height metal table against the far wall. Hidden under it somewhere. The poor thing was probably cold and starving. There was no sign of its mother.
Hawke approached cautiously for a better look. A row of computer monitors lined the table; he realized the sound was coming from them. Young had stopped dead about ten feet away.
“No,” Hawke said. “You’re kidding.” His voice was too loud; it felt like a violation of some kind of implicit pact. He edged closer, and all the terminals lit up at once, the electronic baby’s wail multiplying and echoing through the silent room, bouncing off the tile and steel and swelling into a cacophony of piercing screams. Code started streaming across the screens, cycling faster and faster. It looked like the same code he had seen before on his phone. Underneath the wails he heard another sound, barely audible: a rattling, low rumble that he couldn’t quite place and was gone before the wailing ceased.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1:39 P.M.
HAWKE HADN’T REALIZED THAT he had backed away until the backs of his thighs touched one of the steel dissecting tables. The terminals were all showing screen savers now, spiraling useless wheels of color from a time when things were normal.
The moment broke. Young had remained frozen in place as the crying went on, but now she moved quickly to the closest monitor as the sound of the double doors flapping closed made Hawke turn; Vasco, Price and Hanscomb, who had remained at the entrance to the room, had ducked back out into the hall.
Hawke thought about following them but joined Young at the line of computers instead, where she was already typing, fingers flying over the keys. “Venus flytrap,” she said. “Lured us right in here. Should have seen it coming. Your wife is pregnant?”
“How the hell…?”
Young nodded. “Educated guess,” she said. “We’re easy marks.”
“You’re pregnant?”
“I was,” Young said, without looking up. “Lost it in week ten. About a month ago. It was better that way. I’m not…” She shrugged. “Mommy material.”
“I … I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He wasn’t exactly interested in being a father.” It came out hard, but her voice broke slightly on the last word. She tapped more keys, crashed the computer, waiting. “These terminals are running an unauthorized program. We have to stop it and reboot to get access to an outside line if we want to find out what’s going on.”
“If you gain root access—”
“It’s not going to be that easy.”
Hawke wondered how she knew that. He studied her in profile, the delicate features and doll-like quality of her frame, hair cropped short around her chin. What he had seen as an absence of emotion was … perhaps a bit more complicated. The shell she wore was more like cracked porcelain than concrete.
“Anne,” he said. “What do you mean, we were lured in? You think this was deliberate?”
The screen had come up blank. She was trying to crash the machine again and regain control, but it wasn’t responding. “I don’t know.”
“Come on,” he said. “You do know something, I can see that. We’re in trouble here. Talk to me.”
“You know how much of our lives can be hacked,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Medical records, bank accounts, text messages and e-mails and phone calls, computer hard drives, blogs. The most personal details. I don’t have to tell you this. Our weak spots are easy to find, right? It’s all available to anyone with the skills to get at them.”
“You think members of Anonymous did this?”
Young shrugged. “I’m not sure. Not yet.”
“Because I’ve got to say, that doesn’t make any sense. What’s so special about you and me, really? Why go to all that trouble for us? You really think Jim was right, that Eclipse is setting us up for something? This is some kind of damage control? That’s conspiracy theory bullshit. It’s not possible, not even for them.”
Even as he said it, something clicked in his head: the calls to action by Admiral Doe on Twitter, the protests being staged all over the city, bringing large groups of people to specific places. He remembered feeling like there had been some sort of pattern in the data he’d seen on the map, but the final answer kept eluding him. Had all of those people been prodded at their most vulnerable points, lured into some kind of spider’s web? Across the entire city of New York?
If so, for what possible reason?
That’s not possible to do on such a massive scale. We’re talking trillions of data points. How could anyone know everything about that many people?
Young wasn’t getting anywhere. “Let me try,” he said, and stepped up to another terminal. “I’ve got some skills of my own.”
“I don’t think—”
“Trust me for a minute.” He unplugged the power from the back, then plugged it in again, did a safe reboot with command prompt, named a batch file and opened it, trying to add new administrative and then root access to gain control of the system. Hawke felt light-headed, a little woozy, as if he’d had a few beers. The screen blurred and he had to blink to bring it back into focus. Strange. Maybe it was the aftermath of an adrenaline surge. Somewhere outside the morgue, he could hear a hollow booming sound.
He looked at Young and picked his next words carefully, probing gently around the edges of the truth like a tongue working at a sore tooth. “You worked for Eclipse, didn’t you? When Jim was there.”
At first, she seemed to ignore him; then she nodded once, short and fast. “I started as an intern in his office and stayed another six months as a junior engineer after he left. He offered me a position at Conn.ect. He was the reason I … Jim’s a brilliant man. I jumped at the chance to work with him again.”
Hawke was revising his earlier opinion of Young as someone who played by the rules. He thought of the phone Weller had given him still nestled in his left pocket. He’d forgotten about it in the aftermath of all that had happened since then. She was his mole, had smuggled this out. Or maybe not. Maybe she was up to something else.
Hawke had been making progress on the computer while she spoke. He didn’t have his regular tools with him, but he had a few tricks up his sleeve and he was good enough to get through. He’d installed an IDS sniffer program to log network activity and monitor intrusions before he shut down the Ethernet, cut it off from the outside, and now he worked through several debuggers. The computer seemed to come up clean.
“What was Eclipse working on, Anne? What do they want with Jim?”
“He swore me to secrecy. I signed confidentiality agreements; I did things that were illegal—”
“The world is burning. I think the time for worrying about who signed what is long gone. Why are they after him? What did he do?”
She hesitated again, then seemed to come to a decision. “It’s more like what they took from him. I’ll show you, if we can get access to outside.”
He reactivated the network jack.
“Done,” he said.
She stared at him. “You’re kidding.”
“Like I said, I have some experience with this.”
“I won’t ask.” Young took over, bringing up a connection to a server. She hacked into a private repository of some kind. Documents popped up on-screen, marked as highly confidential. He leaned closer. Internal memos. Specs and code. Diagrams. A new kind of programming language. Patent documents, filed and pending.
“We stole these back from them,” she said. “The reason he founded Conn.ect was to develop security software that could find holes in the best networks and get access to their servers. We got into some, but couldn’t crack the last of them.”
“Jesus,” Hawke said. “What is this?”
“Evidence,” she said. “Stored on a secure remote server Jim set up. Thank God it’s still up and running. He was building a case to prove what they did with his baby.”
“His baby?”
She sighed. “Most programming still runs off simple ones and zeroes, binary code. Right?”
“Sure.”
“You can build the fastest operating system in the world, but it’s not capable of working the same way a brain can, with multiple paths, multiple choices in reasoning. It’s linear. Moravec and Kurzweil argued that the brain could be copied into software, that it can essentially be reproduced exactly. Some neural networks try to do that. But it’s still a simulation, the appearance of thought and perception, not the reality. Machines can’t learn on their own in the same way we can; they can’t be creative, make leaps of logic and discovery. They can’t feel, can’t imagine anything. They aren’t conscious, at least not in the way we define it.”
Hawke kept staring at the screen. He remembered the rumors he’d heard of Eclipse creating something based on quantum computing, but nobody he’d found had known anything more about it. The files were endless: Testing documents and reports, new hardware built to support it. Budgetary outlays and financial documents. And papers about government grants. Lots of them.
“Jim invented another approach, something that had been attempted for years. Adaptive intelligence based on human cognition. Algorithms that allowed for thought, for choice. It created an infinite number of paths, decision making based on multiple variables and learned behavior. But Eclipse patented everything without his knowledge, stole his intellectual property and pushed him out. The chairman of the board there orchestrated the whole thing. I knew what they were doing. I … I even helped, at first. I didn’t understand. When he found out, it was too late. They were legally protected, and they had muscle. They threatened him. He fought back, and they came after him. But he didn’t stop. This was his vision, his breakthrough, his legacy. And they took her from him.”
“Took her?”
“He called her Jane,” Young said. She looked at him, her eyes shimmering in the light from the screen. “Jane Doe.”
* * *
Hawke’s mind was reeling. A fog had descended over him, shock over everything that had happened drowning out Young’s words. He couldn’t make sense of what she was saying anymore. She was talking to him from the end of a long tunnel. He felt drugged, sluggish, exhausted.
Young made a small choked sound. The database she had been accessing was frozen. The IDS had popped up a window, alerting them to malicious activity before it suddenly disappeared. Something had changed, as if control had been yanked away from her.
“She knows we’re here,” Young said.
At first Hawke thought she’d heard someone in the building, but then he realized she meant the machine was being controlled remotely. Young backed away from the terminals. The screens on all of them blinked, shivered and then began streaming code again, the lines running faster and faster until they flickered and went dark.
Hawke’s skin crawled as, one by one, video images began to pop up on the terminals. Some were grainy, surveillance footage stills, while others were higher quality and a few broadcast in high definition and vibrant color. All of the feeds showed people trapped and pacing like animals inside building lobbies, parking garages, elevators or stores. Some of them were screaming soundlessly at the camera, others attacking one another with fists and bottles and whatever else they could find. There were thick crowds of protestors, their banners tossed aside, signs used as bludgeons. They had been turned against one another by terror and confusion. The effect of these feeds, so clinical and unblinking against the distress of the people on-screen, was deeply unsettling.
But it was one particular square of video that made Hawke draw in a hissed breath, the blood running cold in his veins.
The interior of his apartment.
He braced both hands on the table as if he could bring more details to the surface through sheer force of will. It was the same feed from Robin’s webcam he had tapped into earlier, showing their living room from the kitchen, the lamp still overturned, the TV now a dark, dead rectangle. The apartment was filled with shadows, but he could see something against the far wall in the spot where Robin had always wanted to hang their largest framed family photo, a task he had never gotten around to doing.
A spray of dark liquid spattered across the beige paint.
Anne Young had come forward again and was staring at another image about halfway down the line of monitors, this one of an older Asian woman in an ankle-length dress who was standing in a hospital room. The video was jerky, low frame rate, the kind of surveillance video you might see as evidence of a crime. But the woman didn’t really move. Hawke recognized the Lenox Hill logo on a cart behind her; the woman was right here, in this building, probably in a patient room upstairs. Young placed a hand on the screen, gently, almost a caress.
The video on the screens shivered and disappeared, leaving black, empty space, a single cursor blinking in green. Text appeared as if someone was typing, running in all caps across the center of each monitor:
NOWHERE TO HIDE
Hawke watched, his breath catching in his throat, as those words were erased and more appeared, the same line over and over and over again, running down the screen like rain:
I AM ADMIRAL DOE
The double doors to the morgue crashed open again, slamming against the wall. Vasco caught the rebound with his hands and leaned over. “The loading door,” he said, looking up and out of breath, his face ashen. He squeezed his eyes shut, blinked, as if the light was too strong for him to handle. “It closed on us. We’re locked in.”
STAGE THREE
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
2:22 P.M.
“JONATHAN HAWKE?”
The two men in dark suits stood on the front stoop of Robin’s childhood home in Fair Lawn, the place he and Robin had moved into just after the wedding. Just for a couple of months, while we get our feet under us, Robin had said to him when they were discussing where they would live as they started their lives as husband and wife. My parents will set up the basement. There’s a bathroom down there; it’s private, almost like our own place. Her hands were caressing his chest, her naked body pressed against his. It was always hard to resist her in a state like that.
Hawke stared through the screen door at the men, his heart pounding so hard he thought they might see it, and tried to pretend he had just woken up from a nap.
“What can I do for you?” he said.
“Just a few questions.” The larger of the two stepped forward and stuck a badge up to the screen that read: Homeland Security Investigations and Special Agent. He had gray hair and eyes that never left Hawke’s face. “Five minutes of your time, please, to clear something up. It would be a big help.”
Thank God Robin wasn’t home. She had gone shopping for a crib with her mother at one of those outlet stores for yuppies, rooms full of shiny white furniture and rows of gleaming strollers. Robin’s father was there, though, puttering around somewhere in back where the house backed up on to the park, planting hostas in the shade of the big maple tree. Hawke would have to get these men out of the house quickly.
He nodded and stepped aside to let them in, leading them into the small living room with its couch and love seat and corner cabinet full of display plates and glass figurines. The dog groaned and slapped his tail on the floor, then laid his head back down, too old and fat to be bothered with getting up.
“Can I get you anything? Water?”
“We’d like to talk to you about the recent theft and leak of classified CIA documents to several news outlets,” the other special agent said. “Thought you might be able to point us in the right direction. We understand you know a few of the possible players, maybe shared some screen time with them, am I right?”
Hawke shrugged, trying not to swallow against the cotton coating his throat. “I really don’t know anything about that,” he said.
“But you read about it, right?” The larger one scratched his head, as if confused. “I mean, it’s national news. International, to be more accurate. I’d be shocked if they hadn’t heard the story in fucking Siberia. You know what I mean.”
“Sure.”
“And you’re an expert in computers,” the other one said, taking up the lead. “Some say a genius with them.”
“I’m a journalist. I work for the Times.”
“Sure,” the tall one said. “But your blog. I read it. Tried to, anyway. Over my head. You’re a technological genius, am I right? Seems like you might know where we should be looking.”
“You’re aware of the”—the other one pretended to reference notes on his handheld—“hacker group Anonymous? ‘We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.’ Quite the tagline.”
Hawke shrugged. “It’s just a bunch of kids messing around.”
“Well, these kids have taken down the servers of some of our largest corporations. Caused millions in lost revenue, hacked government networks all over the world. We’re hearing they were involved with the CIA hack attack, too.”