Day One

“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 disconnected 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.

Hawke closed his eyes and the dream came at him again, Thomas tottering through the leaves, tears streaming down his face. He dug out his phone and looked up Rick’s number, texted him: DOJ? as the train slipped deeper below the Hudson, and watched the screen. The signal was dropping fast, but the text went through, and Hawke put his phone away and stared out at the tunnels walls and the lights flashing by.

CHAPTER FOUR

8:17 A.M.

HAWKE AND THE MAN with the duffel bag split ways at the Christopher Street stop, where Hawke switched from the PATH to the subway. Everyone was back on their various devices, looking for a signal in the tunnels as they began to move toward the exits. The station was more crowded than usual, a buzz in the air, and there were many others with signs and backpacks making their way along with the regular mix of well-dressed bankers and brokers.

The two sides mixed like oil and water. Hawke thought he caught a glimpse of Bluetooth as the subway doors closed, but he was swallowed up by the jostling crowd. The bastard. He supposed he should have given Bluetooth a break. After all, Hawke knew nothing about the man, not really; he was making assumptions that he was in no place to make. But Hawke’s uncle had been a broker in the early nineties and after convincing Hawke’s father to let him manage his money had lost most of the small nest egg by betting the wrong way on the savings and loan crisis. It was money they couldn’t afford to lose, and Hawke’s father had never recovered, drinking himself into oblivion after they had to sell the house. He would ramble on about the merits of Socialism and the New Party to anyone who would listen while the family bounced from one threadbare apartment to another. Hawke’s father’s last book had been a thinly veiled manifesto on the movement and had been panned by the few critics who bothered to read it, which had pushed him over the edge into full-blown alcoholism and dementia and an eventual stroke.

As a result, although Hawke had the grades to get into Cornell, he’d ended up having to scrape and claw for every penny working in a bar wiping tables while he watched the Ivy League assholes enjoy themselves and graduate into high-paying analyst and money-management positions. Since then, Hawke had found little about Wall Street that he liked.

Of course, those experiences had fed his hunger and his drive, helped cultivate that vision of success that had led to his position at the Times. They had also, perhaps, contributed to his fall from grace. He could never satisfy that hunger. It led him to take risks other men might not.

Hawke changed to the L train at 14th Street and changed again at Union Square, riding the 6 train to the Upper East Side and the Lexington Avenue stop at 77th. There seemed to be protestors everywhere, clogging up the tunnels, and his commute took even longer than usual. What the hell was going on? It was well past 8:30 as he sprinted around the corner on foot.

Conn.ect, Inc., rented space in a brand-new building on East 79th Street. Although the space itself was nice, it was a second-rate location; the larger players in network security kept offices in lower Manhattan. Remaining in the shadows didn’t seem like Weller’s style, but it stood to reason that he might want to keep a low profile after the scandal of his prior job, and security was a growing market.

At least that’s what he’d been saying to Hawke. Opportunity. Weller spoke as if the business was about to explode, but it sounded like a well-rehearsed play, a little too tired to be believable.

Inside the building, the elevator doors yawned like a toothless mouth, yellow caution tape stretched across the black opening. A man in a uniform crouched near a control panel that sprouted a nest of wires, cursing under his breath while a security guard stood behind the reception desk, talking in a low voice with a woman in a suit who kept tapping at an iPad and frowning.

Conn.ect, Inc., was on the seventh floor. Hawke took the stairs.

As he entered the suite, out of breath from the climb, the small reception area was silent. Beyond the empty desk, a little Roomba robot vacuum was marking lines across the carpet. He stepped carefully around the busily humming robot and into Conn.ect’s main room, a wide-open space with rows of workstations lined up before floor-to-ceiling windows. Only two people were visible, one of them at his desk, peering ogle eyed into duplicate glowing screens, the other some kind of office repairman bent over one of the brand-new, ridiculously expensive copy machines that could do everything but make lattes. It had been acting up yesterday like a temperamental thoroughbred. Neither of the men glanced up when Hawke entered. The lack of activity was strange; although the company had no major clients yet, they were busy developing proprietary security software, and every other day this week the office had been humming by this hour, with programmers shouting ideas back and forth, writing on the digital whiteboard and working at their computers and tablets.

Weller always arrived early and was probably holed up in his office, where he often worked alone with the door closed. Hawke suspected he sometimes slept there. He still hoped to get that hour with Weller a bit later in