“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.
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.
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:
“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
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
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 attacks, 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
“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
