by Nate Kenyon
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Sure.” The tall one looked around the house, as if appreciating the ambiance. “Cute little place. Doesn’t look like your style, though. You been here long?”
“It’s my in-laws’ house. My wife grew up here.” Like they didn’t know.
The tall one nodded again. “More and more young people doing that these days. You’ve been married how long?”
“Five months. We’re starting a family. This is only temporary.” Hawke didn’t know why he’d said that.
“You probably wouldn’t want them to know we were here,” the other agent said, as if they were all friends conspiring to put together a surprise party. “Mind if we take a quick look at your computer? Standard procedure, just crossing the t’s. Faster we do it, faster we can go.”
“Don’t you need a warrant for that sort of thing?”
The tall man studied him for a long moment, the atmosphere between them suddenly going cold. He glanced at his partner. “We can do that,” he said. “If it’s necessary. But it complicates things, you understand. This is a courtesy visit. You cooperate, we’re out of your hair. Otherwise, we might have no choice but to think you’re hiding something.”
Hawke led them to the basement, watched with folded arms as they put on gloves and poked around his desk, checked the trash can, went through drawers and closets. As they went on, they grew more serious, and he got progressively more uncomfortable, as if witnessing his own funeral. He knew they wouldn’t find anything; he’d been careful whenever he had done anything that might have crossed the line, and all his communications with Rick had been through public terminals. Even Hawke’s cell calls were safe; he used Voice over IP, and the pulse was routed through enough servers and switchbacks to make it impossible for the best hacker to trace. But the feeling persisted, and when he thought of Robin coming home and finding this he felt the sweat trickle down the back of his neck.
The smaller agent went into a crouch to poke at the jumble of shoes at the bottom of Hawke’s closet, and his jacket opened up enough to expose the butt of a gun in a holster strapped to the man’s side.
When the tall one began bagging Hawke’s laptop, he stepped in. “Hold on a minute—”
“These things,” the agent said, shaking his head. “I can’t make heads or tails of them. They’re like little alien pods, you know? But we’ve got guys back in the lab who can go over this thoroughly, make sure you’re clean. It’s a supervised environment, better that way for everyone. We’ll return it safe and sound in a couple of days, max.”
“You got a problem with that?” The other agent had come up behind him, the sudden aggression unnerving. “Because an innocent man has nothing to worry about, you know?”
Hawke remembered the glimpse of the gun. “I need it for work.”
“We’ll have it right back to you, good as new. A couple of days.” The tall one finished sliding the laptop into the plastic Baggie. “That’s it, Frank. Let’s go grab some coffee.” He turned to Hawke, stuck out a hand. “Much appreciated, Mr. Hawke. We apologize for the inconvenience. Your name came up a couple of times.…” He shrugged. “You know how it is. Covering our bases.”
He showed them to the door. They thanked him again and the tall one handed him a business card. “Your father,” he said, as if making an offhand remark. “He was a writer, too?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Just curious. His name came up with yours. Runs in the family, I guess. The writing, I mean. A gift for words, that’s a real talent.”
“If you say so.”
“He died kind of young, didn’t he?”
“My father was a drunk. We weren’t very close.”
The agent nodded. “Look, I want you to know, you’re not a suspect in this case,” he said. “But I think you might be able to help us track down the people responsible.”
“I don’t know what you mean. I told you, I’m a journalist for the Times. I know a lot of people. It’s my job.”
The tall one studied him for a long moment, then nodded. “Obstruction of justice carries a stiff penalty, Mr. Hawke. Give us a call if you remember anything.”
They went out to the gigantic SUV that sat at the curb, terribly out of place in the neat but modest suburban street. Most of the neighbors drove Hondas and Ford sedans.
When Hawke closed the door softly and turned back, Robin’s father was standing in the kitchen by the back door. “Something I should know?”
Hawke shook his head. “They got the wrong guy,” he said. “Misunderstanding. Comes with the territory, you know?”
“Hope so.” The man grabbed a beer from the fridge, cracked the tab and took a long drink. “Hotter in here than outside,” he said. “You should get some air, clear your head.”
When the back door slammed shut behind his father-in-law, Hawke fumbled for the phone in his pocket, his fingers trembling. His heart was thudding hard again, enough to make him weak and nauseous. He hadn’t done anything that could be traced back to him; they had nothing to tie him to the CIA hack, and even his link to Anonymous would be difficult to make stick. Unless Rick said something. Even then, there was no evidence. Hawke had been more than careful.
But the feeling in his stomach wouldn’t go away. As he went to the bay window and looked out to make sure the SUV was gone, he listened to the ringing on the other end, over and over.
Rick didn’t answer.
* * *
The low rattling sound Hawke had barely heard over the cries of the infant through the computer speakers came back to him; now he realized that the huge metal door had been descending, the noise neatly hidden.
Vasco went to the second set of interior doors that led to the main hospital, pushed on them, pounded his fists. Locked up tight.
They were shut inside like rats in a maze.
Hawke’s head spun and his legs threatened to give way. What Young had told him was washed away by the image he’d just seen on the screen. He could still hear Sarah Hanscomb or Price pounding on the loading-dock door, a booming sound like distant thunder. Another wave of dizziness and nausea hit him, and he couldn’t catch his breath. He tried to remember whether anything else was different in the video image from his apartment, anything he might use to reassure himself or give him some kind of clue to what happened, but the spatter of what might be blood against the wall overwhelmed him. He couldn’t think straight, couldn’t seem to cut through this buzzing that was coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. The world was receding rapidly, his vision narrowing to a point as darkness closed in.
The lines of text had disappeared from the monitors. Young was still standing with her hand outstretched, her head nodding now, as if she were falling asleep standing up. The screens changed again. For a moment Hawke couldn’t make sense of it, and then he realized he was looking at himself standing in the morgue next to Young, the two of them mirrored again and again across the room.
A fresh pang of nausea washed over him, along with louder warning bells, but he couldn’t seem to focus on them. Do something. The video footage was being shot from above. He glanced up and found the camera secured to the corner near the ceiling, watched it pan slightly as it zoomed in on his face. The image froze like a snapshot and code began to stream across the monitors once again, wiping it away. No, not code, exactly; there were letters and numbers mixed together. Hawke recognized his own bank account number, address, family names and Social Security number within it.
Fresh adrenaline flooded his system, and this time it brought rage along with it. Was it Rick? No, he wouldn’t do this. That seemed clear, even if everything else was rapidly disappearing into the fog that was settling over Hawke’s brain.
Them. Eclipse. That was what both Weller and Young had said. Someone in the company was stalking them and causing this disaster, for reasons Hawke still couldn’t quite understand. But they knew so much about him, his movements, his pressure points. How was that possible?
He knew he wasn’t thinking straight, but he couldn’t help it. How dare you? You son of a bitch. Stay away from me and my family. He gave in to the feeling, let it lift him back up and give him strength. He picked up a stool that had been tucked under the metal table and threw it at the camera. The stool careened off the wall and knocked the camera loose, crashing down against a dissecting table and sending a tray flipping end over end to clatter on the tile.
The adrenaline rush was gone as quickly as it had arrived, leaving Hawke drained and woozy. He bent over, panting, hands on his knees, like Vasco had done. Vasco was now slumped on his side, head leaning against the locked interior doors. He seemed to be breathing, but slowly, his mouth slightly open.
The world bowed in and out like a funhouse mirror. Hawke thought he saw a line of code run right off the closest screen and onto another, bleeding and oozing across the surface like blood. For a moment, a shadowy figure congealed from nothingness, hovered at the edge of his sight, gone before he had the chance to make out anything else.
A third wave of dizziness washed over him, and he closed his eyes and fought down the urge to be sick. Images played through his mind like old films: his father’s woodworking tools sitting abandoned in the basement after his death; the faces of the CIA agents who had come to visit Hawke the day Rick had been arrested, twisted into some kind of ghouls without eyes, cheeks flushed pink; Thomas observing an ant climbing across a sun-dappled patch of floor, cocking his head like a curious puppy before tapping it, changing its direction and finally crushing it under his thumb, watching it twist and flip, anchored in place by the violence. Why it do that, Daddy?
They had been anchored in place now. This was a room for the dead. Hawke blinked. The refrigerated steel lockers loomed behind him, and he imagined their doors slowly swinging free, desiccated fingers clutching the sides of the opening as the things inside clawed their way out.
A room for the dead.
The vision was so vivid, Hawke almost believed it was happening. He had made the mistake once of watching an Al Qaeda execution video online, black-hooded executioners sawing at a man’s neck, and the true horror hadn’t been the images on-screen but the idea of what might have gone through the victim’s mind as he realized there would be no last-minute rescue. Hawke felt like that now: no escape from this place. Something about being lured in here, the deliberate nature of it, like a cat with a mouse: trapped by a monster without pity. Ants flipping and twisting in agony. The way a toddler played with something, discovering that others experienced pain, too. You weren’t born with empathy and compassion; you had to learn it.
Hawke nearly had something important in his grasp. The nurse in the hallway and the others in here, all dead without a mark on any of them. But the truth eluded him, no matter how hard he tried to grab it.
That acrid, rotten smell from the hallway was in the air again. He studied the walls, the equipment stacked neatly to one side, as if someone had tried to build a barrier against nothing; and then he settled upon two blue tanks sitting on the floor, silver valve at the top and a flexible tube looped around them.
Someone had brought these in here. A thought flickered through his wavering consciousness. Oxygen. That blue tank was oxygen, and oxygen was life. Whoever was stalking them, they couldn’t account for his creativity, resourcefulness, everything that makes us human. He had to outmaneuver them somehow, find ways to surprise them.
Next to him, Anne Young threw up across the tile, yellow bile spattering as she fell hard to her knees. It reminded him of the night Thomas had gotten sick for the first time, less than two years old, crying out in terror as Hawke had made his bleary-eyed way through the dark to his son’s room. Thomas was sitting up in bed with his lion, fever-wet hair plastered to his forehead, and as Hawke had sat on Thomas’s bed to console him the boy had leaned over, eyes wide and bewildered, and vomited into Hawke’s cupped hands.
Thomas had learned something then, too. His body could betray him, and he could lose control of it. The memory of his son burned Hawke like fire. It was too much. He was bone tired, so utterly exhausted he could just lie down right there on the floor and go to sleep.
But he had to get those tanks.
Wading through his own dream, Hawke began to walk across the room. The walls receded, stretching out to a distant point. His stomach clenched, unclenched, and he stumbled, bringing himself up short when he touched a tank. He struggled to twist the valve on top until he heard the hiss of air, then managed to grab the plastic tube and bring the mask to his mouth.
He inhaled deeply, took another long breath, then another. The spinning settled back a step as the visions faded and his thoughts began to clear.
Hawke picked up the second tank and brought it to Young, wiped the vomit off her mouth before forcing her head forward and clamping the mask to her face. His legs still trembled and his head had begun to pound, the nausea churning beneath the surface, but he could move without toppling over. He secured the mask to Young’s face with the elastic band and watched her breathe in deeply.
Hawke slumped against the wall, closing his eyes for a minute. Just a little rest. He wasn’t sure how long it lasted. When he turned around, Young was looking at him, more alert now, recognition in her eyes. She knew; he could almost hear her voice. Carbon monoxide is being pumped through the air circulation system. They had been poisoned. Someone had cut off the venting of the boilers in the basement or found some other way to bring in the deadly gas. The building was a giant gas chamber.
He tried to remember what he knew of carbon monoxide, but it wouldn’t come; he could recall only that it bound to hemoglobin in the blood. But he was feeling better already, and they had been breathing it for less than an hour, which had to give them a fighting chance.
Young had already gotten to her feet and moved unsteadily to where Vasco had slumped against the doors. She gave him a few breaths from her mask and held his mouth and nose closed while she took a hit off the cylinder. When Vasco opened his eyes and began to struggle, she gave the mask to him again and said something too faint for Hawke to make out.
Vasco was getting up with Young’s help, leaning against the wall as Hawke rushed to the loading dock. Hanscomb was there; she had stopped hammering at the steel door, and the silence settled over everything like a thick blanket, broken only by Hawke’s own wheezing through the plastic mask and the soft hiss of oxygen. The light from the hall touched the shapes of the packing skids and the ambulance as he descended the short stairs to where Hanscomb had fallen.
Hawke didn’t see Price anywhere.
Hanscomb’s hand was still skittering up and down the metal like a dying spider, her nails making quiet scratching sounds. When he touched her, she jerked away, mumbling, but he got her arm around his shoulders while clutching the tank to his side and managed to lift her up by the waist, sharing the mask as he dragged her back with him toward the light of the hallway.
Get her to the others, find more oxygen and get out.
As he neared the steps, the ambulance’s engine growled to life.
Hanscomb let out a groan of fear. Hawke turned them both around; maybe it was Price. The machine idled, lights off, its interior filled with shadows. The passenger window was halfway open, and he couldn’t remember if it had been that way before. Was someone sitting there, motionless? For a moment he thought so, but when he approached slowly, holding the tank up like a weapon, Hanscomb leaning against him for support, he found the twin captain’s chairs empty.
There were no keys in the ignition.
Abruptly the engine switched off again. They were left with the tick of hot metal as Hanscomb’s head lolled sideways against his own.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
2:34 P.M.
ALTHOUGH HE HAD HIS SUSPICIONS, Hawke had little time to question the ambulance starting up by itself. There were five of them and two oxygen tanks, and time was running out. But ambulances might carry portable emergency oxygen tanks like the ones he had found in the morgu
e. It was worth a look.
He went around to the back and opened the door. The interior light came on, illuminating a space cluttered with medical equipment, EMT bags, drawers, a padded bench and a stretcher. Nobody inside; he wasn’t sure what he had expected. He left the tank with Hanscomb and climbed up, holding his breath. There was a mask hanging on the wall, the line snaking down through a hole in the cabinet. He opened the door and saw it connected to a larger machine to help people breathe. No way to remove it.
His body was beginning to protest the lack of air. He turned on the machine but couldn’t get it to run. He rummaged through the rest of the drawers and turned to the bench. Beneath it, he found a storage cavity with a portable tank inside.
His chest had begun to ache again. When he was finally able to get the mask fixed to his face, breathing was like heaven. The oxygen spread through him like warm fire, prickling his skin, sharpening his senses.
As he climbed back out of the ambulance, a voice crackled to life from the front. A radio in the driver’s cabin, the kind used to call in emergencies, was turned up loud enough to echo through the loading dock. Some kind of police dispatcher was putting out an all-points bulletin. The dispatcher described a suspect wanted in connection with the day’s terrorist attacks: five ten and 180 pounds, dirty blond hair, blue eyes. The suspect might be traveling with three companions, the dispatcher said, two women and another man. The woman’s voice was flat and oddly familiar. Hawke knew who she was describing long before she said his name.
“Jonathan Hawke is wanted in connection with the terrorist group Anonymous … bombing at Seventy-eighth Street and Second Avenue this morning … armed and extremely dangerous.…”
Jesus Christ. Weller had been right; the entire New York City police force would be looking for them. Don’t think about that. Keep your mind away from it. Focus on getting out. He pulled Hanscomb up the steps to the wide hallway, pausing to let her take in some more deep gulps of air, and found Vasco and Young at the doors to the morgue. Vasco was cursing through the mask as Young shared her tank with him.