Day One

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.