Day One

CHAPTER ONE

6:23 A.M.

WHEN HE OPENED HIS EYES, John Hawke was immediately aware of two things: His alarm hadn’t gone off. And there was something in the room with him.

Remnants of the dream still clung like shedding skin; something multi-tentacled and metallic wrapped around his son, slipping across his chest and slithering around his throat. It left Hawke shaky and tight, a knot in his neck and an ache near the base of his skull.

The sound came again, a click and hiss like the warning of an animal crouched in the dark.

The sense of danger faded with the dream, and he sat up, rubbing at his neck. An alien creature had not invaded after all. The radiators in the building were part of a forced hot-water, gravity-fed system, ancient and very noisy. They had come on for the first time last night with the cooler fall temperatures, moving trapped air pockets from one place to another. The maintenance company would have to bleed them, but he knew from experience that a system that old would let the air back in again, one bubble at a time.

The feeling that something was wrong remained with him.

Hawke stood and went to the window, cracking the heavy drapes. Early morning sunlight sliced directly through swirling dust motes, burying itself like shards of glass in his skull. A muttered curse came from the bed as his wife turned over within the tangled sheets, away from him, and he closed the drapes again, making his way through the dark to where she lay. The air felt thick enough to push through as he relived every word they had said to each other the night before, every expression on her face. He’d said things he shouldn’t have. It was part of this unsettled feeling, most likely. Part of a much larger, much more terrifying feeling of emptiness, uncertainty and shame.

A fresh pang of regret washed over him. He’d always been too focused, too fanatical in his passion for uncovering secrets. It had gotten him into trouble ever since he was a boy. He could see a vision of the truth so clearly, it tended to cloud over everything else. But the vision of his own success, the other thing he’d cultivated, had veered off track. And he didn’t know exactly how to fix it.

He smelled the musk and sweat of sleep, reached out to touch his wife and hesitated, hand above her hip. Touching her would lead to a rekindling of emotions, both good and bad. He would have to make a choice between apology and furthering the argument. But he was going to be late. He’d never been one to keep traditional hours, but his most recent project was different, and included rising at 6:00 A.M. like any of the other countless thousands who commuted into New York City every day. He’d been going in faithfully for a week now. It was his chance to make things right again and put his life back on track, and he couldn’t screw it up.

He thought of the slight swell of Robin’s belly under the sheet. Almost three months gone. She had another ultrasound scheduled in a few days to update them on the bleeding. They would find out the sex before long, assuming everything went well. She thought it was a girl. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t picture a face.

It was cold in the room, and he pulled the blanket up over Robin’s shoulders, then stood again and walked through the gloom to the bathroom, passing Thomas’s room where the boy still lay sleeping.

The shower was ice-cold. Hawke gasped through it like a man doing penance, fingers splayed across grout between tiles that had yellowed with age, the stinging spray needling his skin as he cursed the old building and its useless super who was probably still sleeping one off. They had moved into the apartment shortly after Thomas was born. The place reminded Hawke of the ancient, peeling Victorian he’d lived in with his parents until he was fourteen and they’d been forced to move to a smaller place, when his father’s latest book had failed and the man had started drinking more heavily. The Victorian contained some of Hawke’s better memories of childhood, tainted as they were by what followed.

Robin had loved this place at first; she talked about the charm and ambiance and history. But that was before they met Lowry. Their neighbor across the hall was a huge problem. It was like saying, Other than the toxic mold, the place is great. You couldn’t separate the two.

The thought made Hawke’s mood grow even darker. He emerged from the shower pink and shivering. At the sink, his electric razor nicked his chin enough to bleed. By the time he emerged from the bathroom in boxer shorts and T-shirt, wide-awake and buzzing like an angry hornet, he could hear the muted sounds of a nature program from the living room. He took a few deep breaths, caught a glimpse of his son’s head over the top of the couch, reached over and tousled it gently. No good to let the day get to him like this. Thomas glanced up, mouth full of waffle, and returned to the TV program where an African leopard stalked a young antelope through thick stalks of dead grass. In some ways, Thomas seemed younger than his years; in other ways, far older. He didn’t like regular kid shows, insisted on Discovery or National Geographic. He had a stuffed toy lion with a wild mane of fur that he carried everywhere, and it was propped next to Lego big blocks lined up on the coffee table in neat rows, exactly four of the same color to each tower, identically spaced. But he’d rather be playing with his father’s iPad, Hawke thought. Thomas was already a tech guru. He was curious in a detached, slightly clinical way; he seemed to interact better with machines than people.

Robin was in the kitchen in her robe, her dark curls cascading around a pretty face puffy with sleep, a cup of decaf in her hand. She hadn’t made anything for him, a definite sign that she was still angry.

“The coffeemaker’s not working right,” she said. “It’s too bitter.”

The kitchen was nothing more than a narrow aisle, open to the living room and separated by a bar-height counter with stools. “I’ll take a look when I get home,” Hawke said. His bottle and glass from the night before were still sitting out. He slipped past her, took the glass and rinsed it in the sink, then put the empty bottle in the recycling bin and grabbed an energy bar from the cabinet.

“We can’t afford a new one—”

“I know we can’t afford it,” he said. “I said I’ll figure it out.”

Silence hung between them. The overhead lights flickered as if in response. His wife glanced up at them and put her cup on the counter, tightened the belt on her robe and hugged her belly.

“Lowry yelled at Thomas again yesterday in the hallway, when we went to the store,” she said. “He was complaining about something, I don’t know, the TV up too loud, whatever. He’s like one of those little nippy dogs.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“You know how sensitive Thomas is, John. It hurts him, even if he won’t talk about it.”

Hawke nodded. Thomas rarely spoke at all anymore. Robin had started worrying about an autism spectrum disorder. Give him more time, he’ll be fine, Hawke had kept insisting. But Thomas was almost three, and that argument wasn’t working as well now. Hawke hadn’t said anything to Robin, but lately he had started wondering whether his own father had had a touch of whatever genetic mutation would lead to something like this. It made some sense. The code of who you would become was imprinted in your DNA, the building blocks of life. You couldn’t escape it, no matter how hard you tried.

Hawke’s head was pounding. Parts of the dream came back to him, and he remembered metallic tentacles snaking down from the sky.

He gave Robin a kiss on the cheek, but she remained cool, her muscles tense. He let his lips linger just a moment, breathing her in, a scent of coffee and skin lotion and hair conditioner.

“I’m late. Gotta run. We’ll talk later, okay?”

She nodded, and the look on her face softened for a moment. She was giving him an opening, letting him back in, and the entire world seemed to cave in on him. He was no good at this, never had been. I’m sorry, he thought, but didn’t say it.

It was one of the many things he would regret.

CHAPTER TWO

7:12 A.M.

AS HE PASSED Randall Lowry’s door, Hawke paused for a moment, imagining his neighbor huddled there like a troll, eye against the peephole. Hawke had walked into a restroom of a Walmart once when he was about nine years old, his mother waiting impatiently outside, and had seen a man masturbating furiously against a urinal. Although Hawke had barely been old enough to understand, he remembered the feeling he’d had, a mixture of disgust and shame for having viewed it at all, as if he were somehow culpable. He’d turned and walked out and never told a soul, but he had felt tainted from seeing it, his world altered forever in some fundamental way.

Being in Lowry’s presence was like that, as if whatever sickness the man suffered could be transferred through proximity alone. Hawke clutched his laptop bag close to his side like a protective parent and moved on down the hall. The son of a bitch. Lowry had been complaining about their son’s noise since they moved into this place. Twice now he’d shouted at the boy, and they’d had other run-ins that made Hawke feel like he had to scrub the filth off himself. Thomas was confused by Lowry; Robin was terrified. He was definitely unbalanced, far more than just creepy, and he’d clearly lusted after Robin since they moved in, looking her up and down, standing too close on those rare occasions when they were in the same space. Men often stared at Robin, but not like this. Lowry was like a hyena evaluating whether to dart in and snatch away his prize.

Hawke had never seen the inside of the man’s apartment, but he imagined a dimly lit, musty place with piles of old newspapers and boxes in crooked, leaning towers. When he found out Hawke had once worked at the New York Times, Lowry tried to get him to write a story about government conspiracies. Hawke told him to call his congressman. There was the incident in the laundry room, among others, things Hawke didn’t like to think about for too long. Everything he and Robin had tried to do, including a conversation with the useless super, had achieved nothing, and the tension between the two men had grown into something close to viciousness. It was causing more stress between Hawke and his wife, which was one thing they didn’t need. She’d had trouble getting pregnant the second time, and then she’d been bleeding off and on as the pregnancy had progressed, and her doctor had told her she had a subchorionic hematoma and she had to take it easy.

That prick Lowry was only making things worse. Enough was enough; Hawke would talk to the man again tonight, and if that didn’t work he would have to go to the police.

The thought made Hawke’s stomach churn. His own personal history with the authorities usually made him avoid them like the plague, but this had to be settled, once and for all.

Hoboken was just beginning to stir this early in the morning. In the street, the September air was crisp, the sky a flawless steel blue. Hawke smelled the river, heard the calls of geese flying overhead. He started thinking about other ways to make things right with Robin. Maybe another trip to Cuttyhunk Island, near Martha’s Vineyard off the Massachusetts coast. It would be good to get away, have a little quiet time. Hawke used to go to a cottage his aunt owned there when he was a boy, and it had a special meaning for him and his wife: It was where they had gotten married.

Still thinking about how to make the trip work, he put his sunglasses on and chewed an aspirin and then the energy bar, chocolate grit in his teeth as he made his way to the PATH, joining a growing flood of people. It felt good to stretch his legs. He was no gym rat, but he was wiry strong and genetics had been good to him. He kept in shape by walking.

A cabdriver honked at him as he crossed the street, flashing him the finger. Someone cursed next to him and Hawke said, “Excuse me?” before realizing the man had a Bluetooth in his ear and smartphone in hand. The man wore a hand-tailored suit and shoes polished to a sleek shine. He shot Hawke a withering look, as if he were observing the biggest idiot on the planet, and continued his loud conversation.

Once underground, Hawke stuck his sunglasses up on his head and joined the slowly shuffling line to buy a coffee. He and Robin couldn’t afford any extra costs on their stretched-tight budget, but he needed it badly and he had a few minutes before the PATH arrived. Train service had finally been fully restored after Hurricane Sandy, and it was good to see the crowds returning, although he could do without the lines.

When he made it to the front, the waif-thin girl behind the counter didn’t even look at him, her gaze locked on her iPhone screen. Three piercings glittered, one through each eyebrow and a stud through her lip, and her hair was cut short and streaked with red. She was frowning and jumpy, like she’d had too much caffeine or something stronger.

Thomas would have been intrigued by the piercings. He pointed out things that were different, seemed to want to understand them, even if he didn’t say much. This girl wasn’t saying much, either. Something was annoying her about the iPhone; she sighed, poking at the screen in frustration with a tip of pink tongue poking between her lips. In his earlier life, Hawke would have struck up a conversation with her, maybe helped her fix the problem. But he was a married man now, going on thirty, with a young son and another child on the way. He wasn’t running around New York City hacking into big-business networks and chasing stories the way he had been only a few years ago, feeling like a rogue reporter and Internet cowboy. And let’s face it, you got sloppy and made mistakes. Big ones. His hacker skills used to give him an edge in the reporter rat race, allowed him to see stories in ways others did not. But things changed. Maybe he’d lost that edge, the killer instinct all the best journalists needed to get to the truth.

The coffee was scalding hot, and he burned the roof of his mouth on the first sip. He settled into a window seat on the train, watching people situate themselves, many of them on their smartphones or tablets, maneuvering through the aisles with quick glances and shuffling feet. Hawke liked to watch people; he learned a lot. Maybe Thomas was like him that way. The same man was still talking on his Bluetooth, muttering something about derivatives and foreign exchange rates, and he jostled a young woman on his way past hard enough for her to stumble. He moved down the aisle until he was lost in the crowd.

A man across from Hawke had been watching, too. He clutched a rolled-up sign and had a large duffel bag tucked between his feet, and his clothes were nice but faded and slightly wrinkled, as if he’d worn them once or twice already between washings. There was a shadow of stubble across the man’s cheeks, and his jaw muscles twitched.

“What a prick,” Hawke said, motioning toward where Bluetooth had disappeared. He nodded at the duffel. Something about the shape of it, bulky, with angles and points, made him uneasy. “You going to a rally or something?”

The man stared at him, openly hostile. The Occupy Wall Street movement had evolved recently. Now they were focused on high-frequency computer trading and credit swaps, which had bloomed once again with the market recovery. The 1 percent were richer than ever.

But if this man was going to a rally on Wall Street, he was on the wrong train. Maybe it was somewhere uptown. Hawke looked around, spotting several others with packs and signs, and suddenly remembered he was wearing a tie and suit jacket, the nicer of the two he owned. “I’m not a broker,” he said. “I’m a journalist.” It sounded stupid and insincere: I’m with you, buddy. He had no idea what this man’s life was like.

The man kept staring, then shook his head in disgust and touched his jaw. Hawke reached up to his own face and felt the speck of tissue still clinging to him from when he’d nicked himself shaving. He picked it off and stared at the small circular brown stain on his palm. Great. One hell of a start to the day. “Thanks,” he said, but the man just pulled the duffel bag closer and looked back toward the spot where Bluetooth had disappeared.

CHAPTER THREE

7:35 A.M.

A WOMAN TOOK THE SEAT next to Hawke, huffing, her meaty thighs spilling over into his space. He sipped his coffee, feeling his body becoming more alert. His mind had already started churning, imagining a Web site that tracked civil unrest by mapping police presence, cross-referenced with politicians’ statements and Twitter alerts, to create a kind of gauge for the level of tension in a particular area. A thermometer that took the temperature of a given confrontation and predicted violence. It could help people avoid a certain area—or search it out, if that was their thing. When he worked for the Times he had blogged during Hurricane Sandy and created a real-time map that tracked the hurricane’s path and predicted which areas of the city were the most vulnerable based on criteria like building clusters, street maps and distance to emergency services, and tied that to live traffic updates and an orderly evacuation plan. Earlier in his career, working as a freelancer for several local news outlets, he’d covered crime and created a site that tracked police activity in New York City by street, culling data from public logs and police scanners to provide near real-time public safety updates. He’d also built a system for a feature on education that analyzed student test scores and cross-referenced that with public funding levels and census data to show the best school districts, as well as racial and socioeconomic bias.

He knew how to do these things. His entire career had been structured to expose a deeper truth in some way, to help people cut through the mass and jumble of information and find the core that was important to them. The truth, coming into focus through the use of technology. The story. It was everything to him. Except now, he’d lost the safety net that the Times had provided him and he was walking the high wire alone, with nothing below him but empty space.

His cell rang. Hawke dug it out of his pocket and saw it was Nathan Brady from Network magazine, one of the largest technology-focused periodicals left in the world. “I’m on the PATH,” Hawke said.

“Good luck to you.” Brady’s voice sounded tinny and hollow, as if he were speaking through a tube. “Is it moving? There’s something happening in the city. Police presence, angry crowd. It’s mucking up our fine Swiss watch of a transit system. You’ll never make it in.”

Hawke glanced around. The car was almost full now. “What do you want, Nathan?”

“I’m drinking at seven thirty A.M. on a Tuesday. What does that say to you?”

“That you’re an alcoholic?”

“I want a status report. I’ve got to go to Editorial in half an hour.”

“I’m meeting with Weller this morning, actually.” Hawke transferred the phone to his other ear, drained his coffee cup and dug out his laptop to look at his notes. “Sitting down with a guy for a demo on stress testing a corporate network, hacker-style, and then it’s Weller again all afternoon.” He was lying through his teeth; for the most part, Jim Weller had avoided him all week, passing him off to a junior associate for most of the day. Hawke’s notes were thin at best so far. But Brady was going to lose his mind if he knew how little Hawke had on this one, and sooner or later Weller would let him in. After all, why else had he invited Hawke to come?

Jim Weller, founder and CEO of start-up network security firm Conn.ect, Inc., had his own story of failure and possible redemption; a formerly high-flying tech genius, he’d worked on some cutting-edge programming around energy sharing among networked devices at his former company, the tech juggernaut Eclipse, which led to both its stunning IPO and Weller being forced out by a hostile board after he confronted the company about patenting and licensing his intellectual property without the proper authority. Apparently the board didn’t think they needed him anymore. Eclipse seemed to have its fingers in everything from software for networks to new operating systems to national security. They were famously paranoid, with an entire private fleet of enforcers who drove black SUVs and dressed like FBI agents. Their headquarters, a two-hundred-acre complex about thirty miles outside of Los Angeles, was surrounded by razor wire and laser grids. Rumor was, the enforcers were trained to shoot to kill.

Lately there was another rumor that Weller’s former company had invented something entirely new based on quantum computing, some sort of “holy grail” of the industry—and that it had led to a breakthrough deal with the National Security Agency. It was another project Weller had apparently had a hand in, at least during the early seed stages, but everyone on the project had been sworn to secrecy and nobody would talk.

When Hawke had reached out to Weller, asking to pitch a profile of his new company to Network, Weller had deferred at first and then called him up and invited him in, even going so far as to ask Hawke to shadow him at his office in New York. Hawke had found the man cold, calculating, clearly brilliant but distracted, often unavailable. He couldn’t tell whether Weller was fanatically driven or simply a fanatic. He wondered again why Weller had let him into his inner sanctum, and when the man would actually let his guard down enough to start talking. Hawke had gotten some sketches of Weller’s early life during his first few days at Conn.ect, a few hints of his work at Eclipse, but nothing more. Weller seemed secretive about something, but he wasn’t opening up yet.

Hawke had never let it slip that his real reason for the profile was to find out what Weller’s former company was up to, but Brady knew, of course. In fact, that was the only reason he’d gone to bat for the story in the first place. Brady was an old friend, but that only carried you so far; in journalism, it was fish or cut bait.

“I’m close,” Hawke said. “I’m getting to know the people there, learning more about him. He’s secretive, but I can smell the story and trust me, this is going to be big.”

“Then give me something,” Brady said. “I’m putting a lot on the line for you.” His voice took on a needling tone. “Pitching you was like sticking my neck in a guillotine. You need this one. And you need it soon. After what happened with Farragut, nobody would touch you—”

“An unfortunate choice of words, don’t you think?”

Brady sighed. “You know what I mean. You broke the law, hacked into someone’s e-mail, tampered with police business. It doesn’t matter that you found enough kiddy porn to nail the son of a bitch. It crossed a line people aren’t willing to overlook, at least publicly.”

The man in question was a psychology professor at a New York university, an expert in child disorders who had been accused of improper conduct with students. The judge had thrown the images Hawke had found on the professor’s account out of court. The professor had tried to scrub everything else clean by the time authorities searched his computer, but he had made a mess of it, and they had recovered enough data to try him again. The case was still pending. But for Hawke’s career, the damage had been done. He had nearly gone to jail himself but had covered his tracks well enough for the charges not to stick. That didn’t matter to the Times. News International’s phone-hacking scandal was still in everyone’s minds. In the midst of a media furor, his bosses had fired him, claiming he had crossed the lines of journalistic integrity.

It had sent Hawke spiraling down into a cesspool of anger and shame. He’d wanted to do the right thing, and he had ended up on the wrong side. Since then, he hadn’t been able to buy his way into a pitch. Editors wouldn’t take his phone calls. None of them except for Brady, a friend who had stood by him through the worst of it, and who had bought Hawke’s proposed feature story about a technology that, if he was right, was about to transform the world.

Hawke rubbed his eyes and blinked. This was his ticket back into the game, and he wasn’t going to blow it. “Eclipse bought a new server farm,” he said. “Three hundred thousand square feet in North Carolina, expanding to over a million. Security’s tighter than Fort Knox—armed guards, robot sentries, checkpoints, video monitoring, razor wire, retinal scans. This thing is going to be massive. But the same source told me it’s only the first of many.”

“Cloud centers for streaming media? Online lockers? Temporary supercomputer clusters?”

“Since when did Eclipse get into the rental business? And why start so big? Amazon and Google are cornering the market, but it’s retail. That’s not Eclipse’s thing.”

Brady sighed. “I don’t know, John; maybe they’re making a play to grab market share in a new area. Is that a story? You tell me.”

Hawke didn’t answer. The new IPv6 standard that had launched last year expanded the number of Internet protocol addresses almost infinitely, in preparation for an explosion of networked devices. There were already chips in computers, phones, and tablets, of course, and even most cars and TVs, but experts predicted there would be an average of three networked devices for every person on earth in another two years: your washing machine, refrigerator, coffeemaker. Google was working on eyeglasses with the ability to display maps and directions. Wearable computers would become like clothing; people wouldn’t leave home without them.

The world was starving for more data space, an endless supply of capacity, and these massive server farms were cropping up everywhere, interconnected through a global network and sharing workloads across multiple locations. The government was the biggest customer of all, building facilities to handle all the data it was monitoring in the guise of national security. Hawke imagined it like a gigantic new life-form evolving across the globe, and it was only the beginning. Anyone could see how Eclipse would want to be a part of that.

But Brady was right. It wasn’t enough of a fresh story for Network, and Hawke didn’t think expanding data capacity was Eclipse’s end game, either.

“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 the morning before the network stress test demo. He’d already interviewed several employees about their boss; they described him as a visionary—a demanding, secretive and strange genius who seemed to be wound tighter every day. But Hawke had much more to do.

Right now you should be gathering your notes and working out some kind of story angle. Except he didn’t have enough yet to know what that would be. Hawke dropped his laptop at a small desk against the wall, the place Weller had given him to use during his stay. Where was everyone? Something was going on; raised voices came from the conference room in back.

He found a small cluster of people standing around the flat-screen TV, watching a growing throng of protestors around the Wall Street bull in Bowling Green Park and spilling up the side streets. The Occupy Wall Street protests had nearly shut down the city in the past, but they had remained mostly peaceful. This was different. The crowd was angrier, more violent, chanting and holding up signs demanding a revolution. And it looked like they were about to start one.

“Must be over a thousand of them,” someone muttered. The crowd surged forward and a policeman swung a baton at a young man’s arm. A female reporter, dressed smartly, with thick makeup and expertly done hair, stood behind the throng, nearly shouting into her microphone as the anchor asked her to describe the scene. She looked terrified and about to bolt like a young calf at the smell of the slaughterhouse. The cops seemed badly outnumbered, pushed back as they raised riot shields and tried to hold their ground. Someone else threw a bottle, which shattered across a shield; the cops waded in again.

“Twitter,” Anne Young said, her round glasses reflecting the light as she glanced at Hawke and then back at the screen. “A call to action sent out this morning from someone supposedly tied to the group Anonymous, an ‘Admiral Doe.’ Take over the streets, shut down businesses, fight authority. They want blood. And the police are giving it to them.”

Young was a twenty-four-year-old developer Weller had introduced to Hawke when he’d first arrived. She was Asian, fresh faced and just out of grad school, and she appeared to idolize Weller; she tended to spend time in his office with the door closed. Hawke found her stoic, if a bit naïve, and assumed Weller was sleeping with her.

Hawke thought about what Brady had said on the phone about Anonymous: 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. It was more than that, if what Young said was true. Hawke thought about his old friend Rick again, and a faceless army of black hats brought together by nothing more than a common goal, a revolution born out of the loins of Net culture that would change the world. An ambitious idea, to be sure, and one Hawke had bought into once himself. But that felt like a lifetime ago.

Admiral Doe was clearly an echo of Commander X, a hacker who had burst onto the world stage several years ago after posting online videos and participating in a number of prominent cyberattacks. The self-proclaimed leader of the People’s Liberation Front, a hacker collective aligned with Anonymous, Commander X had been identified as a homeless man from California who was arrested for taking down government Web sites before escaping to Canada.

Whoever Admiral Doe was, he or she had sent out a bulletin to every hacker in the world with this call to action:

We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.

“I can’t understand it,” Young said, her face impassive, unreadable, still watching as another cop swung a baton. “Why would they respond to this? They’re being used to incite the violence. It’s not going to get them anywhere, at least not where they want.”

Of course she doesn’t understand, Hawke thought. All her life, she’d probably been a rule follower, straight edged and rigid. She was bright and motivated but probably raised to do as she was told. A person like that couldn’t ever imagine the alternative.

“You okay?” Young said, watching him now. He nodded, thinking about the fight with his wife, about another set of rules, those around relationships. Happy wife, happy life, Brady had said once. They had drifted outside the tent at Hawke’s wedding reception to catch some air. Brady was drunk and Hawke was, too, and Brady’d probably been joking in the way he tended to, but the phrase had stuck with Hawke through the years. He’d been angry lately about what happened at the Times and taking it out on Robin; he’d come home last night and had a drink, and that turned into several, and after Thomas had gone to bed they had gotten into it about money. Robin’s father had helped them get their lives started, move to Jersey and find a place to live. Hawke would never have been able to do it alone; journalism didn’t pay enough, and life near the city was expensive. Hawke had no family money, no safety net. But they had agreed to have children, and he had begged Robin to trust in him.

Now he had dug them an even deeper hole, and they both knew it. Last night was one of the worst fights they’d ever had. Robin was distraught over the thought of them being unable to make their rent payments. Robin’s father had offered to help again, but Hawke didn’t want to take it. He wanted to provide for his family, something his own father had never been able to do. But a boy who needed special attention, and another baby on the way, made going on their own impossible. Even if the Network story worked out, it would hardly cover more than two months’ bills.

They were going to have to move to a cheaper place, and even then, he thought, it wouldn’t be enough.

“Our local anarchist,” Brady said, introducing him. Brady was dressed as Bill Clinton, Brady’s favorite president. They were at a costume party at Brady’s place, Robin in a red, low-cut dress looking like she belonged at a senator’s fund-raiser and Hawke in his ratty jeans and secondhand button-down and socks with holes in the heels. Hipster cool that was half costume, half his regular weekend outfit. He knew he looked good enough, women liked him and he liked them right back, but this one was another species entirely.

“John’s a writer and part of the hacker underground; it’s all very secretive and exciting. I don’t suppose you’ll like each other much; Robin enjoys the civilized world.”

Robin held his gaze and kept his hand in hers a moment longer than what might be necessary, her skin hot against his own.

“Anarchists frighten me,” she said, after they broke off from Brady and got drinks from the kitchen. “But then again, so do heights. And yet they make me tremble with excitement.” She glanced sideways at Hawke, and then down, a look he would later come to know very well. He caught a whiff of something light and summery as she leaned in, smiling: jasmine and cedar. “Will you make me tremble, Mr. Hawke?”

Hawke couldn’t tell if she was serious or not. It was Marilyn Monroe–style parody, but Robin played it well. She wore her curls up under a short blond wig and had a slender neck, a few fine, dark hairs escaping from where they’d been pinned.

My God, what a woman. He was out of his league and tongue-tied. “Nathan’s pulling your leg. We don’t want to end all government. We’re just interested in freedom of expression, and the power of the masses to bring the right kind of change. It’s about justice.”

“That a pretty noble idea, but not a very realistic one, is it?”

“Let the trembling commence.”

“I just mean it isn’t particularly feasible. It assumes the masses can agree on anything.”

“True democracy assumes that the majority can reach a consensus. We just try to create a space where that can happen. Technology gives us a vehicle to do that, in a way that’s never been possible before.”

“But how are you going to do that? Give everyone in America a voice?”

“We’re all free to join the movement, protest against the decisions we don’t like, make our opinions known—”

“But you can’t force people to do it. And let’s face it, most of them won’t. Most Americans will continue about their lives, working day shifts and going home to dinner with their families. So you’re faced with the same situation we’ve faced since the beginning of the civilized world—you’re part of a small group claiming to represent the opinions of everyone else.”

“It’s not like that,” Hawke said. He was beginning to get flushed, and she was so goddamn beautiful he couldn’t think straight. “We don’t represent anyone but ourselves, and that’s the whole point. Look, the imbalance of power is greater now than at any other time in our history. A handful of people hold the country’s wealth, while the rest work their fingers to the bone just to survive—”

“Have you ever heard of feudalism?” Robin said. She sipped her drink, watching his face, her long, delicate fingers wrapped around the glass.

“I’m talking about modern times here,” he said, his flush getting deeper. “Listen, what are you anyway, a historian?”

“Actually, yes. Working on my dissertation.” She smiled again, and her face was warm and open and kind; there was nothing confrontational in it, and he realized she’d been playing with him after all.

“You’re pretty serious, aren’t you?” she said. “I like a serious man. Someone who believes in their convictions, who has a vision of what they want. It’s sexy as hell. Let’s go have babies together and conquer the world.”

Goddamn it, Nathan. Hawke had to smile. Brady had known exactly what he was doing, introducing them. “Why don’t we start by getting out of here,” Hawke said, and Robin agreed. They slipped out before dinner even started without telling anyone, and he never spent a second regretting it.

In fact, it was the best decision he ever made.

CHAPTER FIVE

8:59 A.M.

THE TV IN THE CONFERENCE ROOM FLICKERED and went to snow for a moment, and the lights dimmed. Like in my apartment earlier this morning, Hawke thought, memories of his wife drifting away and leaving him with a momentary ache. A faint smell wafted over the room, chemical and hot, and a buzzing filled the air and then faded as the fluorescents came back up.

“Did you see that?” a programmer named Bradbury, who had just entered the room asked. He was large enough to have rolls of fat around the back of his neck. He was looking up at the lights, as if the answer could be found there. But nothing else happened, and after a moment the broadcast came back on.

As Hawke slipped back to the desk where he’d set up his computer, still thinking of Robin, his cell vibrated. He dug it out to see a message response from Rick: No.

That was it, just the one word on Hawke’s screen. Rick had never been the type to go on and on about anything. But as angry as Rick was (“hurt” or “betrayed” might be more accurate), Hawke was surprised he’d responded at all, and that meant something.

The man was worried.

Hawke texted back: Log on in five. He sat down and opened his laptop. So, as far as Rick was concerned, Anonymous hadn’t been responsible for the attack on the Justice Department’s servers. Rick was deeper in the underground network than anyone, Hawke knew. But it was an amorphous entity, members and targets shifting constantly with no formal leadership structure, and although Hawke still trusted Rick with his life regardless of all that had happened between them, and although he knew Rick would be honest with him, that didn’t mean he was right.

The standard decoy message board was still online, cluttered with news items and press releases that chronicled the group’s latest targets and triumphs. It even had a log-in and special members area where people posted about ion cannons and argued about the merits of taking down Facebook. But that was all bullshit, a smoke screen, and the people posting there were wannabes and fringe elements. You had to dig past them to get to the core; there were layers of Anonymous so deep and so secret, even some of the veterans didn’t know they existed. It had to be this way, with federal investigators all over them.

Hawke quickly found the right thread with what appeared to be the ravings of a lunatic against big government. He got out his phone and launched a custom app that applied a filter to the phone’s camera, allowing him to see the public key encryption hidden in simple text against the white background underneath. He hadn’t visited the board in months, but the process was still the same, and he hoped the private key he had was still the right one.

Sure enough, the private key worked just fine. He copied the hidden URL, as well as a user name and password. The boards changed constantly, and user names and passwords were generated on the fly; they were good for one use only. Chat sessions within the network, if initiated, could only run for three minutes before the URL changed and new log-in credentials were required.

The latest private board was filled with threads that were already pages long, going on about something called Operation Global Blackout. It was supposed to be an organized attack over the next several days by Anonymous members on networks across the world to protest the latest copyright bill working its way through Congress. But here people seemed mostly confused, all of them claiming to have nothing to do with the attacks, including the one on the DOJ last night.

The fact was, someone had taken down the DOJ servers. If it wasn’t Anonymous, then who had done it?

Hawke scrolled through the threads quickly, his curiosity piqued. Most of the screen names he didn’t recognize; he’d been out of the game for a while now, and the shadowy hacker underground changed on a dime. Even their physical locations were suspect. Several of the most high-profile members over the last couple of years had turned out to be transients like Commander X using Internet cafés to take down the world’s most powerful and protected networks; one of the most famous had bounced from friends’ couches to abandoned warehouses and become a media star by invading the servers of the Times, Microsoft, and Yahoo! and later, after he was finally unmasked, becoming a security specialist working for a private firm with ties to U.S. government agencies.

Members of Anonymous could be brilliant. But many of them were also eccentric outliers who shunned society and were hardwired to rebel against authority. Hawke had found that exciting earlier in his life, but not anymore. When you’re starting a family and the cops knock on your door, it changes things, he’d said to Rick, right before the man had gone to jail for his role in leaking classified government documents online. I can’t go down with you.

A chat window popped up, and Rick, using his familiar alias rodeoclown, was there: Something’s going on. Something big.

No preamble, no mention of their colorful history or the fact Rick had served eighteen months in a federal prison while Hawke had walked away. That was Rick’s style, when he communicated at all, and Hawke knew better than to push it. Besides, they only had three minutes.

Operation Global Blackout? he typed.

No fucking idea. Not involved.

Who then? Admiral Doe?

Someone good. Like fucking brilliant. Better than any of us. There was a pause. Tried to track him. Found some footprints in the sand that pointed toward Eclipse IPs, but it left me sinking fast and then fried my board. Like it was the cat and I was the mouse.

Eclipse. Hawke leaned closer, growing more intrigued. Fried your board? How is that possible?

Electrical surge.

Hawke sat back. That didn’t make any sense. Maybe it had been a coincidence. But Rick was always careful; his equipment was certainly shielded.

He typed: Rumor mill on Doe? Connected to DOJ attack?

Nobody knows. He’s a ghost.

Hawke typed: Where are you?

Nothing for a moment, and then: Never mind. Authorities after everyone. Big pressure on this, I’m in crosshairs.

Just tell them you’re not involved—they’ll trace everything soon enough and see.

Not that simple. I’m being set up.

Hawke shook his head: Why?

Don’t know. Something’s happening. Find out who Doe is.

You know I can’t do that.

Damn well can. You’re the best at this. When you want to be.

As he was about to type a reply, the screen flickered and went blank. Hawke paused, fingers over the keys, still not entirely sure what he wanted to write. They had another minute before the session would automatically terminate, and this wasn’t the way it would happen anyway. This was like hardware failure.

He was about to try to crash the system and restart when the screen came back up as if nothing had happened. His chat session with Rick was gone, but everything else was intact.

Except it wasn’t, not exactly.

Hawke stared at the message board, trying to make sense of what he saw. At first glance, the board looked the same, the same members posting in the same order, at least as he remembered it. But the contents of the posts were entirely different. Board members had gone from expressing confusion and anger over Operation Global Blackout to taking responsibility for it. A member named crow17 claimed he had been one of many hundreds of thousands who had aimed a low-orbit ion cannon at the DOJ servers last night, taking them down. Another poster talked about being a part of this morning’s call to action through Twitter. Someone else talked about going after the New York Stock Exchange next, then creating an emoticon message that would self-populate through chains of brokerage accounts and wipe out all transactions for the users.

Hawke remembered seeing both threads when he first logged on, and they were entirely different. And there were more like that. It was as if someone had erased the text of each message and rewritten them, one by one.

It was one thing to crash a site but quite another to erase and then generate entirely new content on the fly.

Who could possibly have done something like that?

In spite of his concerns about getting involved with Rick, Hawke went off sniffing like a bloodhound. He left the corrupted board and logged on to Twitter, scrolling through the hash tags on Anonymous, Admiral Doe, DOJ and Operation Global Blackout. Anonymous had been busy. There were hundreds of tweets in the last few hours by those claiming to be associated with the hacker collective: the DOJ takedown, an attack on the servers of French government, the leaking of private FBI transcripts, service interruptions and messages posted on dozens of police Web sites across the country, a theft of private data from Goldman Sachs accounts, calls to action in protests around the world for various causes like censorship, corruption, injustice and religion, in Austria, Belgium, Britain, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States….

The activity was staggering, and through it all Hawke sensed some kind of common thread that he couldn’t quite grasp but scared the hell out of him. The whole point of Anonymous was that it didn’t govern itself, had no permanent set of goals or leaders; it existed simply as a movement for change and a way of pushing back against authority and censorship in any form. It had begun with a small group of mischief-makers and had always kept that playful edge, and it was fluid, constantly evolving, an online, shared consciousness driven by the whims of the group. Hawke had always imagined it as a gigantic flock of geese, moving in unison in a seemingly random pattern.

This was different. There was purpose here, and it was deadly serious.

Hawke focused his search on New York, and found dozens of tweets referring to gatherings across the city. One in Bowling Green Park, protesting Wall Street greed; another near Downtown Hospital to protest unaffordable health care; a third in Seward Park to protest immigration laws; a fourth and fifth in SoHo and the Theater District to protest censorship; a sixth outside of Rockefeller University to protest lack of affordability in higher education. There were protests on wealth inequality in J. Hood Wright, Inwood Hill, Highbridge and Marcus Garvey parks.

Each call to action had been tweeted by Admiral Doe.

Hawke thought of the man with the duffel bag, and the others on the train, all going in different directions. He pulled up a map, plotted the protest locations. He sensed some kind of pattern, but no matter how hard he stared at the screen, it wouldn’t emerge.

Another cup of coffee might help him focus. He got up, took off his suit jacket and draped it over his chair and began to make his way toward a tiny back room where a pot was usually brewing.

The first thing Hawke noticed when he opened the door was the heat; it puffed out at him. The room’s lights blinked on automatically. The room was little more than a windowless supply closet, lined with open shelves stacked with reams of paper and office supplies on the right side and a long worktable on the left with a small refrigerator underneath it. Someone had brought a container of donut holes, and powdered sugar and cinnamon dotted the table next to the paper cups and containers of sugar packets and creamer, along with the monstrous coffee machine.

The room had to be twenty degrees hotter than the office, and the smell of coffee was strong. Probably scalded. It figured; the machine was brand-new, with all the bells and whistles, one of those complicated stations that people with too much money paid through the nose for in order to create barista-style drinks in their pajamas, and yet it couldn’t even brew a decent cup. Bradbury had acted like a proud father when he’d shown it off on Hawke’s first day in the office. It did pretty much everything from grinding beans and foaming milk to making flavored drinks. It even had an app for remote scheduling, which Bradbury had insisted on demonstrating. The entire outfit practically screamed, Look at me; I’m sophisticated!

Hawke glanced at the sheet of printed instructions for lattes and cappuccinos lying on the table and sighed. He didn’t need a specialty drink. Luckily, the beast had a separate glass carafe for regular coffee, and someone had used it this morning. There were a couple of cups still left. Even if the remains were burned, it would be better than nothing.

As Hawke reached for the carafe, he could feel the heat radiating from the gleaming machine and heard a faint hiss of escaping pressure as his fingers touched the handle. Incredibly, the smooth steel was cool to the touch, another marvel of modern engineering. But the smell of the coffee was bitter and hot.

When he pulled the glass carafe free it exploded in his hand. The sound was like a gunshot in the small room. Scalding coffee sprayed across the table and front of the shiny machine; glass shards bounced off the walls and floor.

Hawke dropped the remains of the carafe like he’d been bitten and felt warmth across the back of his wrist, warmth that quickly changed to a sharp pain. More warmth spread through his chest. Jesus Christ. He looked down in shock; luckily, most of the coffee and the glass had sprayed away from him, but his shirt was spotted with coffee stains and his wrist was already turning red.

The machine let out another hiss. Steam rose from somewhere inside it. Hawke yanked the plug from the outlet, then stepped back, eyeing the coffeemaker warily. He grabbed a roll of paper towels from a shelf and blotted the coffee from the table, his shock and fear quickly turning to embarrassment. Even though he hadn’t done anything to cause the mess, he felt guilty. An exploding coffeemaker. It was a silly prank, absolutely fucking slapstick comedy. Let’s get the new guy. He almost wanted to look around for the hidden camera, and he might have laughed it off except for the burn on his wrist that had already begun to throb. Not so funny after all. When he thought about it, he knew it was no prank. Just a malfunctioning piece of equipment, and he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Hawke swept the larger shards of glass up with a nearby dustpan and brush and deposited them in the trash. He was considering the smears of coffee on the wall when the sound of someone clearing his throat made him glance up.

“Never liked that thing,” Weller said. He was standing in the open doorway, arms crossed, leaning against the jamb. “I guess I wasn’t the only one. When you’re done cleaning up, join me in my office. We need to talk.”

Hawke considered explaining, but what could he say? I didn’t drop it; I swear—it just blew up in my hand? When Weller stepped away from the open door, Hawke saw the copier repairman standing with his arms crossed, smirking at him.

The hacker journalist can’t figure out how to work the coffee machine. It would surely become office legend. Thank God nobody else had seen it, or things might have been far worse.

CHAPTER SIX

9:47 A.M.

HAWKE FOLLOWED WELLER INTO HIS OFFICE, where the man closed the door and motioned to the simple rigid wooden chair that faced his uncluttered desk. A black hard-shelled laptop case with a security lock sat against the wall next to a glass-door cabinet crammed with networking gear. The case was large enough for two laptops. There was very little else in the room.

Weller was lithe, slightly over six feet, and tended to wear dark jeans and Oxford shirts every day. Both the way he dressed and his office reflected his affection for minimalism and order. His round glasses would have seemed delicate and feminine on most men, but they served to soften what would have otherwise been a harshly angular face. He bristled with a coiled energy that kept him in constant motion, and even as he sat behind the desk he bounced slightly in his chair, hands fiddling with a pen, tapping and flicking it against the wood. “You okay?”

Hawke nodded, touched the brown spatters on his shirt. His wrist throbbed. “Just a little wounded pride.”

Weller put the pen down, then seemed to dismiss the incident entirely. When Hawke pulled out his digital recorder, Weller shook his head. “No record of this,” he said. “Not yet.”

Hawke put it away. An object slightly larger than a pack of gum sat on a corner of the desk. Weller picked it up. “The most advanced in government hardware,” he said. “Highly secure communications device, developed by Eclipse as part of their deal with the NSA. It has its own advanced operating system, powered by an all-new adaptive intelligence in the cloud. Nearly impossible to lock on to, uses its own satellites and encrypted five ways to Sunday. Big power comes in small packages.” He handed the phone to Hawke. “I thought you’d appreciate this. Communication is everything in your line of work.”

Still smarting from the encounter with the coffee machine, this was the last thing Hawke had expected. He turned the object in his hands. It appeared seamless, with an edgeless, glossy screen and nothing else. There was no immediate way to tell how it might operate. He resisted the urge to play with it; now was not the time. He had to get Weller talking. “Does it make calls?” he said.

Weller smiled. “Borrow it for a while,” he said. “I have another. Might come in handy.”

The code of ethics for journalists was clear on accepting any kind of gift. Then again, Hawke had never cared much for rules. This tiny phone was part of the story. It would make a great sideline to the main piece; the Network lab could dissect it, piece by piece, break it down for the audience, show them its guts ahead of release. That alone was nearly big enough to satisfy Brady.

Hawke tried to keep his building excitement from showing, shoved the tiny device in his left pocket and kept his other phone in his right. “I didn’t think Eclipse would be inclined to share with you these days.”

“I liberated it,” Weller said. “It’s not in commercial development yet.”

“I’ll keep that part out of the profile.”

Weller’s smile faded. “They stole something from me; I stole something back. It’s not quite quid pro quo, but it’s a start.”

“You’re talking about the energy-sharing project?”

“Something much more important than that. Energy sharing was just the evolution of an old idea. Use the processing power of the cloud to spread out the work. When a device is running low, it borrows another networked device’s chip to crunch data and serve it back.” He stuck the pen in the middle drawer, so the desk’s surface was completely clean, then folded his hands in front of him. “Now let’s get down to business,” he said. “You want to know about my former employer. What happened when I left, and what they’re doing now.”

Of course Weller knew that the Network angle wasn’t a simple profile or a feature about his new business, but neither of them had ever been this blunt about it. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“Jonathan C. Hawke, born to a schoolteacher and a writer and political activist in eastern Massachusetts. Test scores show a boy who would excel at making the connections between things most people miss, a creative mind that would regularly reject those in authority who didn’t question the status quo. An outside-the-box thinker. Predictable behavior problems coupled with flashes of genius, an early tendency toward computer programming and storytelling that would lead to your associations with both the hacker subculture and journalism, but things didn’t start to go downhill until your father’s drinking led to his early death and you dropped out of college and got involved with Anonymous—”

“So you’ve investigated me,” Hawke interrupted. “Am I supposed to be impressed?”

“I had to know who you were,” Weller said. “Your strengths and weaknesses, your convictions. Some people like you start companies. I’m one of those. Others go underground, become part of the fringe, end up in jail or disappear.”

“And the rest of us?”

“A few cross back and forth. Hacker journalism is a respectable way to make a living doing what you love.”

“This isn’t about me, though. It’s about you.”

Weller’s eyes were glittering behind the glasses, and Hawke couldn’t tell if he was feverish or furious or both. “I let you in here for a reason. Your abilities have everything to do with this. Your work at the Times was brilliant, regardless of how they treated you. I think we can take this far beyond Network in ways that are going to become obvious to you very soon.”

Hawke crossed his legs, attempted to look at ease although he had started to sweat. Normally he loved when he began to see pieces of the story hanging there like low fruit on the vine, the combinations still forming themselves in his mind, leading to the alpha moment when things really came together. But it wasn’t good when the person you were supposed to interview gained the upper hand. It was all about control over the story and the delivery; without that, the entire thing dissolved into a muddled, incomprehensible mess.

“Tell me more,” Hawke said. “Let’s talk about the profile. Maybe you could start with why you chose network security as your next big move.”

“Don’t bullshit me, John, not anymore,” Weller said. “You know that’s not the real story here.” His eyes were so bright and sharp Hawke wondered if he might be on something. He leaned forward and placed both palms on the desk. “Your investigative skills and instincts are first-rate, as I suspected. What did you discover about your old friends out there on your laptop?”

Hawke cleared his throat as Weller waited. “You’re monitoring the network,” he said finally.

“Of course I am, but that’s not the point. They’ve been busy. We may need their help soon, but this is causing quite a mess. I’d like you to ask them to stop.” Weller leaned back, crossed his arms over his chest. “Can you do that?”

Hawke considered how to answer, finally decided to just go with the truth. “They say they’re not responsible. And they wouldn’t listen to me anyway.”

“I doubt that. You were part of one of the most infamous hacks in history, isn’t that right? Stealing top-secret files on undercover moles from the CIA?”

Hawke became very still. A trickle of sweat made its way down his neck, between his shoulder blades. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure, it wasn’t just you. In fact, from what I was able to dig up, you were a fringe player. But the others went to prison for it, while you barely even got a second look. Why is that?” Weller studied him for a long moment. “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. Network wants to know about you, about Eclipse and about how they’re going to change the world.”

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. Could be her. But if so, it threw off Hawke’s theory about Weller and Young having a fling. Or maybe it didn’t.

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: Jason Vasco.

“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 bit me.”

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 touched that step, the escalator started again very fast….” The woman stopped, face wrinkling, chest hitching, as the reporter quietly urged her to continue. “… And thank the good Lord I grabbed her up and the escalator stopped again as soon as I did, but my heel had gotten caught.” She held up the trembling dog and the camera cut to show a shoe with the stiletto heel snapped off before cutting back to the woman’s tear-streaked face. “She could have lost her foot! I swear it was like that escalator tried to eat her….”

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 looking at this, do you think?” He looked around, shook his head. “Anyone else notice weird stuff this morning? Before I came in, my laptop started downloading something automatically, executing some kind of program,” he said. “I wasn’t surfing any porn sites, if that’s what you’re thinking—”

“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 she was pissed because the elevator was out and the repairman couldn’t seem to fix it, and the building’s security system was down, too.”

A systems analyst named Price shook his head. “You think this is some kind of massive hack?”

“I don’t know what it is,” Bradbury said. “I just think we should pay attention. Business is business, right, Jim?”

The casual reference might have pissed Weller off, but the man didn’t even look at Bradbury and Hawke wasn’t sure he had heard a single word. He was staring at the TV screen, where a scroll of the latest news had begun. A casual observer might have thought he was lost in thought, but Hawke watched a muscle jump in his jaw and could sense the tension building. Whatever Weller had expected coming in here, it didn’t appear to be going quite the way he’d planned.

“How long has this been going on?” Weller said, to no one in particular. “The unauthorized downloads and device malfunctions.”

“Since early this morning, I guess,” Bradbury said. “Like I said, my laptop—”

“Hold on,” Price said, pointing at the TV. The anchor was back, looking grim.

“Stock market exchanges have collapsed today,” the anchor said, “erasing billions—some have estimated even higher—in assets. According to authorities, as in 2008 and 2010, high-frequency computer trading has at least been partially to blame for the crash, but the automatic circuit-breaker halts meant to pause a tumbling market have failed to kick in. In fact, nobody seems to be able to control or explain the collapse. Hedge-fund managers we have reached have refused to speak on camera, though one of them called this the biggest market implosion in history—and they have no answers for the millions who will be ruined.”

The entire group grew silent as they watched, even Bradbury caught by the drama. Things had taken a darker turn. “On the ground,” the anchor said, “protests on Wall Street have intensified and more police presence has been called in, but resources are stretched thin as they deal with increasingly violent, dangerous and unexplained events across the city.”

The screen showed scenes in quick succession: The cops were on edge, angry, swinging at the crowds that were taunting them and turning over cars. There were other updates in quick succession as the anchor became deadly serious now: A five-alarm fire had broken out somewhere in the Bronx, he said, and there were reports of more fires in Manhattan. Stories of explosions on several bridges into the city began scrolling across the bottom of the screen. Sporadic reports had begun to come in of rolling blackouts in other areas of the country as well.

When the network played a clip of the mayor telling everyone to remain calm, Hawke looked at Weller again. The man still hadn’t budged. Hawke was about to say something when a rumble made the group turn to the windows as something appeared in the sky, an object so out of place, so stunning, it left everyone frozen in shock: a helicopter, its blades chopping at the air, black smoke pouring from its engine, plummeting directly past their windows like a dying bird to earth before it disappeared from sight.

A moment later, a rumble shook the building. Kessler let out a small cry, holding her hands to her face.

“Oh my God,” she breathed softly.

Bradbury went to the window, pressed his hands against it, trying to peer down, shaking his giant head. “Did you see that?” he said, looking back at them all, a group frozen in place, his words spilling out in a panic. “Did you see it? Did they just fucking crash a helicopter in the middle of New York?”

As if in answer, smoke drifted up past the glass. “We’re under fire,” Vasco said. He went to the window, too, looking out, then turned back. “It’s another 9/11.”

“You don’t know that,” Kessler said. “You need to calm down—”

“Don’t fucking tell me to calm down!” Vasco shouted, veins standing out in his neck. “This is big; it’s a coordinated attack. When’s the last time you heard of a helicopter crashing in New York City? Did you see the broadcast? There are explosions all over the place. And the mayor’s telling us to stay calm, too, while things are going to hell—”

The others all began to talk at once, while overhead the TV buzzed loudly and went to snow, then crackled and popped like a bundle of firecrackers going off and began to smoke. Kessler was standing nearly directly underneath it; she cried out and jumped back as sparks cascaded down, nearly running into Weller, who still hadn’t moved, his face lit with what was either a strange, ghostly grimace or a smile.

In the middle of the near panic, Hawke’s cell phone rang.

Hawke dug his phone out of his pocket, heard static and what sounded like a faint voice. Moving away from the noise of the others as they argued and shouted over one another, he ducked into the other room, his pulse hammering and his breath growing tight in his chest.

The voice was his wife’s, but he could barely make it out. He pressed the phone to his ear, straining to understand the faint words through the static. Something was very wrong. He heard what sounded like a scream and his son’s name, then a whisper, a pleading, barely audible prayer, a thump and another strangled shriek.

“Robin!” he said. “Can you hear me? Robin!”

The buzzing faded slightly, and Robin was there for a moment, breathing fast and shallow, a fleeting few seconds of clarity, her terror huge and feeding his own.

“Hurry,” she said, “John, please. He’s coming through.”

Hawke shouted into the phone, told her to stay there, stay calm, but the static washed over the connection and his wife was gone.