Day One

CHAPTER SEVEN

10:43 A.M.

HAWKE LEFT THE 7-ELEVEN with two paper bags, juggling them as he shouldered open the door and mumbled good-bye to the man sweeping the aisles. Robin was still at home, dealing with Thomas’s crying; the fifteen-month-old boy had an earache, the remnants of a bad cold, and he couldn’t sleep. Hawke had picked up some more Children’s Tylenol, along with a carton of milk, bread and canned soup. Needing a break from Thomas’s screams, he thought for a moment about taking a long way home but then thought better of it. The store was only two blocks from their apartment, but Robin would be waiting for him and was probably ready to lose her mind. The boy’s fever had broken when he woke up before dinner, but the pressure in his ears wouldn’t let up.

The night was hot and humid, and Hawke was slick with sweat as he reached the building and fumbled for his keys. He rode the tiny elevator back to their floor, listening to the creaks and groans of the machinery. Their door was standing open a crack. He felt a chill. Had he left it that way? He didn’t think so, but he’d been so edgy and distracted, anything was possible.

Hawke entered the apartment to more of Thomas’s muffled screams, dampened now by a closed bedroom door. Strange; normally Robin would be in there, soothing him with a warm washcloth or another bedtime story. But he focused immediately on something else. A man’s voice came from the kitchen.

Hawke came around the corner with his heart thudding hard, blood pressure rising, and for a moment he stood motionless: Their neighbor Randall Lowry had cornered Hawke’s wife by the sink. Lowry’s hair stuck up in the back of his head, a ragged bird’s nest, and he had a hand in the air, gesturing.

The boy’s crying from the other room ticked up a notch. Lowry caught the movement of Robin’s eyes, and he turned to see Hawke watching them. Whatever Lowry had been saying, he stopped suddenly. His expression changed, and he took a step back.

Thomas’s bedroom door opened; it must not have been latched shut. Hawke glanced over and saw the boy standing in the doorway, red faced, stuffed lion clutched in his arms. His first steps. Thomas hadn’t walked yet. He and Robin had been talking about it that day, considering whether to see the pediatrician. Thomas had been late for almost all his milestones, but his doctor said the boy was fine, simply a cautious child, nothing to worry about. Robin wasn’t so sure.

When Hawke looked back, Lowry was pushing past him, muttering to himself, his head down. “Don’t you come in here again,” Hawke said, but the man was already gone, the sound of his apartment door as it slammed shut echoing off the walls of the hallway and bouncing back to him, amplified into a sound of accusation and regret as he moved toward Robin and watched her turn away, hugging her arms to her chest.

Hawke tried to call Robin back, his fingers trembling and clumsy, and when there was no answer he felt light-headed, disconnected from reality. As the room spun he sat on a nearby desk chair and put his head down for a moment, trying to breathe slow and deep.

There was no time to panic, not now. He’d probably misinterpreted everything and Robin and Thomas were fine. They’re fine.

Except they weren’t, and Hawke knew it. You didn’t make a call like that if everything was okay. Memories popped through his mind like flashbulbs: He saw Robin sitting on their bed, sunlight dappling her bare shoulders, not yet pregnant with Thomas, young and eager and devastatingly beautiful…. Trying to learn how to wrap Thomas in the hospital blanket, make a triangle, wrap and tuck and wrap and then tuck again as the tiny creature squirmed and balled his little fists… Robin sitting on the edge of the bathtub staring up at Hawke, pregnancy test in her hand, and he couldn’t tell if the look of shock on her face was from happiness or terror…. And then when he closed his eyes again, he saw Randall Lowry shouldering open the door of their apartment, greasy hair swinging in his face, his eyes shining with madness and lust, and Hawke heard his wife screaming.

Hawke looked up, coming back into himself with a jolt. People were shouting over one another in the conference room, arguing over what to do. He stuck a finger in his ear to shut out the noise and tried Robin’s phone again, listened to the empty ring. He tried to dial again, and again. The third time, nothing happened at all.

He stared at the phone until spots danced before his eyes, then jabbed at the screen with his finger, cursing the network, and breathed deeply again. You’re not helping them by losing your mind. Think. Half of New York City was probably trying to make a call right now. He would have to find a different way to reach them.

Hawke’s smartphone was jail broken and customized by him, and he was able to bypass the operating system. One of his programs, a video calling and monitoring app, would allow him to use his home wireless network to activate the webcam attached to Robin’s laptop. They’d used it as a nanny cam before, on the rare occasions when they left Thomas with a sitter. In the mornings, Robin usually sat at the counter, had coffee and surfed the Net while Thomas played or watched TV. Maybe she’d left the computer open.

The screen was frozen. Hawke crashed the phone and quickly rebooted, and it seemed to come up clean. He directed the app to the right IP address, and a few moments later a grainy image appeared: his living room as seen through Robin’s laptop camera.

Hawke peered at the tiny screen, his guts churning. He could see the back of the couch; the TV was on and what looked like news reports were playing. No sign of Robin or Thomas, but the lamp that sat on the end table had been knocked over.

Take it easy. It might be nothing. But that single bit of chaos in an otherwise normal room unnerved Hawke. Had Thomas done it? If so, why hadn’t Robin picked it back up again? She was a neat freak, and something like that would have driven her crazy. Hell, even at three years old it would have driven Thomas crazy, too, with his need for order and symmetry, everything in its place and aligned properly. Just last week, he had thrown a tantrum because he hadn’t been able to line up the bins of toys on the shelf in his room to his own satisfaction, and Hawke had teased Robin about it later: Like mother, like son.

Where are they?

Hawke turned up his phone’s volume but couldn’t hear any sound through the laptop’s mike; even the TV seemed to be on mute. He flashed back to his conversation with Robin earlier that morning: Lowry yelled at Thomas again yesterday in the hallway, when we went to the store…. He was complaining about something, I don’t know, the TV up too loud, whatever….

Lowry was responsible for Robin’s panicked phone call. Hawke knew it. He thought about the laundry room, Lowry in Hawke’s apartment with his wife pinned against the sink. He put his ear to the phone, thought he heard a thud and muffled voice, but couldn’t be sure. “Robin!” he shouted into the mike, and shouted again, in case she could hear him, but there was no response.

As he was about to try her cell phone again, his own phone appeared to freeze; he tried to regain control, pushing the home button, tapping at it and cursing, and the phone began cycling through some kind of program, raw code running across the screen. Hawke tried to crash it again, holding the power and home buttons down, but at first the phone didn’t respond. Then the screen went white, blinked and went dead again, and this time it was bricked.

He cursed again and stood up, meaning to go plug it in and get better access through a keyboard to the internals, but a wave of dizziness hit him like a punch to the head. You’re in shock. He heard more voices and looked up as Bradbury came into the room, followed closely by Kessler: “…software is doing its job, I’m telling you it’s tracking activity like you wouldn’t believe—”

And then the voices stopped for a moment. Somehow, Kessler had crossed the space between them and spoke close to Hawke’s ear. “You okay?” she asked as he leaned drunkenly and stumbled. She reached out to him just before a tremendous explosion rocked the building.

CHAPTER EIGHT

10:51 A.M.

THE FLOOR SHUDDERED VIOLENTLY, and Hawke heard a distant whooshing sound, muffled and deep, just before Kessler let him go and ran toward the windows. He wanted to shout at her to get back, but it was too late; the glass exploded inward as the shock wave hit, sending shards hurtling through the air like flashing knives.

A piece caught Kessler in the throat. Hawke saw her whirl and spray blood as he went down, covering his own head, tasting carpet and smoke.

He looked up again through a strange haze as the overhead lights surged and watched Bradbury reach out to catch a desk lamp that was falling. An instinctive reaction, something Hawke probably would have done himself, but Bradbury ended up dancing a jig, his eyes rolling back to the whites, teeth clenched hard together as his huge body went rigid and his skin began to darken before he finally tilted sideways and fell to the floor.

“Oh my God oh my God!” someone was screaming from the other room. Black smoke billowed up from the street, whirling in through the broken windows, and it smelled acrid and oily, stinging Hawke’s eyes. He blinked, saw Bradbury on the floor still clutching the lamp in rigid, blackened fingers with his eyes bulging like boiled eggs and his tongue poking like a purple rag from his lips, and he thought of his apartment and his wife’s frantic voice over the phone. It hit him like a stinging slap: What if this isn’t just New York City? What if it’s happening everywhere?

Hawke stood up, legs trembling, covering his nose and mouth with his sleeve. Nothing else mattered anymore except getting out of the building. The black smoke was thicker around his face, and he couldn’t tell if it was coming from outside or somewhere close. Kessler was jerking violently and clutching her throat, a lot of blood wetting the carpet around her head. He whirled at a noise and watched Weller and a dazed Anne Young emerge from the conference room, stumbling through the dim fog that had descended over them all.

Weller looked around, saw Hawke and led Young to him. “Get her out,” Weller said, coughing into his sleeve. “I’ll be right behind you.”

“What?” Young said. “No—”

“Go! Now!” Weller left them standing there, stumbling through the smoke. Hawke grabbed Young’s arm, ignoring her protests, and dragged her toward the suite doors as the fire alarms started blaring. Vasco followed after they had entered the hall, along with Price, the systems analyst, who had helped Kessler to her feet and was half-carrying, half-dragging her along. Kessler’s eyes had lost focus, her face ghostly white, and blood still pulsed thickly between her fingers as she gripped her own neck with both hands. Vasco got his arm around her waist from the other side to help, and she sagged against him as the two men carried her toward the exit.

Young clutched Hawke’s arm, her nails digging into his skin through his shirt. The alarms were piercingly loud in the hallway, emergency strobe lights flashing. Someone was screaming about the building being on fire, but the sprinklers hadn’t triggered and the smoke thinned as Hawke took the lead past the broken elevator toward the stairs. He started to open the door, then remembered something about fire and heat and oxygen levels and touched the surface lightly, finding it cool.

He hit the bar and shouldered the door open, revealing a flood of other people from the building in the stairwell, rushing toward the lobby. Disjointed and terrifying images from 9/11 flashed through his mind as Hawke stood for a moment, trying to judge whether to wade in. There were at least five floors above them, maybe more, and the people coming down from above were out of control and panicked, taking the steps two and three at a time, stumbling into walls, several of them falling as the others ran past.

But they had no choice, and he entered the fray, trying to clear space for Vasco and Price, who were still carrying a now-unconscious Kessler between them. Young was shoved by a large man in a business suit who barreled down the stairs, and Hawke steadied her, keeping his own balance, hearing others coming from above and gaining fast.

They were three flights down when the lights went out.

The stairwell was plunged into blackness, and screams and shouts echoed up through the dark as bodies fell, bones or heads cracking against concrete as Hawke fumbled his way blindly to the wall, heart thudding fast as the emergency lights kicked on and bathed everything in red. Things speeding up now, he grabbed Young’s hand and led her down, abandoning any effort at restraint, moving as fast as he could go while still keeping his feet, stumbling around the same man in a suit who was lying on the stairs and groaning, trying to get up.

They reached the lobby, busting into open space. Hawke took several deep gasps of air, only now realizing he’d been holding his breath for most of the last two floors. The power was still on down here, the alarms screeching relentlessly. A group of about twenty people was already at the front doors, which seemed to be locked or jammed shut. Someone rattled the handles; a woman pounded on the glass and shouted that the building was going to fall, panic lighting up her voice into a high, keening wail, and Hawke thought of a mother he’d once tried to interview who had just lost her baby to a house fire. The sound of panic and despair was similar here, a repetition of words and actions where human restraint and logic disappeared into something mindless and instinctual.

Hawke looked around, didn’t spot the security guard or the building manager. There was nobody in charge. The entire world had suddenly gone insane. Who had locked the doors, and why? It made no sense.

Vasco and Price came out of the stairwell and put Kessler down on her back. Hawke’s stomach rolled greasily as he watched Kessler’s hands flop lifelessly away from her neck to reveal a deep slash like an ugly, lipless mouth, blood slowly bubbling up and oozing across the tile floor. Price’s shirt was soaked with red. He clapped his own hand down over her neck wound, pressing hard, and started shouting for someone to call 911.

Vasco was pacing, pressing his phone’s screen and cursing. “Check your cell,” he said to Young over the sound of the alarms, and she pulled out her own phone.

“No service,” she said.

“Check it again!” He whirled, questioning, to Hawke, who shook his head. He couldn’t take his eyes off Kessler, the blood spreading out below her body in spite of Price’s frantic efforts to stop it. Hawke thought of the electrocution of Bradbury; how had that much power come through the lamp’s cord? The breakers should have popped.

Vasco was in Hawke’s face, breathing hard and smelling like sweat. “Check your fucking cell,” he said.

“It’s bricked,” Hawke said. “Happened upstairs.”

“Fuck!” Vasco whirled again, suddenly looked around the lobby. “Where’s everybody else?”

“Bradbury’s dead,” Hawke said. “I saw him… he was electrocuted. Weller, I have no idea. He was supposed to be right behind us.”

“He’s still up there,” Young said. She looked at the door to the stairs. When she started toward it, Hawke grabbed her. Her pupils were dilated, her breathing fast and shallow.

“You can’t go back,” he said.

“He might be trapped,” she said. “We can’t just leave him. You don’t understand; they’re going to—”

“You can’t go back up there,” he said. He took her by both her arms and stared into her pale, shivering face. “You get that? This is real; people are getting killed.”

More people came tumbling out of the stairs and into the lobby, none of them familiar; they barely glanced at Hawke and Young but went straight for the doors, joining the others. The noise level increased as more of them pounded at the glass, rattled the handles. “What the hell is going on out there?!” a man shouted. “Let us out!” And someone else screamed as a screech and rending crash came from somewhere on the street, some kind of accident.

The alarms were relentless, drilling into Hawke’s head. Young pulled herself away and he let her go, noticing something else strange; the security cameras mounted in the corners of the lobby that normally panned slowly back and forth were now moving deliberately, as if someone was controlling them.

He watched one of them swing around in his direction and stop, the camera’s unblinking eye fixed on his location. The effect was both eerie and menacing. There was nobody at the front desk, and he walked toward it, hypnotized by the eye, peering at the monitors behind the counter and watching himself reflected back through the camera.

The big man in the suit who had fallen in the stairwell came up next to him, shouldering him aside and breaking his trance. “Get the fuck out of the way,” the man snarled, panting hard. Hawke caught a glimpse of a purple, knotted welt above the man’s left eye as he picked up the desk chair and lifted it over his head, the chair wheels spinning as he turned and ran toward the lobby entrance.

“Get the fuck out of my way!” he shouted again, and the crowd parted just before the man heaved the chair at the glass doors.

The chair was heavy, solid metal and leather, and it caught the impact-resistant glass pane at its center, leading with one leg like a spear. The glass groaned and gave way with a tremendous, shattering crash, spilling out onto the sidewalk as the chair went tumbling and bouncing into the street.

It was like a dam had broken. The crowd surged forward, knocking away the rest of the glass that still hung from the frame, pushing and shoving one another to get through the opening.

Hawke looked around the lobby, trying to find familiar faces among the people who kept coming from the stairwell. He couldn’t see Weller or Young. Price was crouched over Kessler’s lifeless body, hands still clapped hard against her neck. A woman hit Price’s shoulder as she ran by, nearly knocking him over; he reached down and pulled Kessler to him, cradling her against his chest.

Hawke fought his way against the rushing crowd, pushing through to Price’s side. Price looked up at him, his face white with shock. “Call nine-one-one,” he said. “She’s bleeding. Someone has to help her.”

Kessler’s face was slack, her eyes open and fixed. The wound in her neck had stopped bubbling. “She’s gone,” Hawke said. He could smell smoke. “We need to get out of here.”

Price looked down at Kessler, shook his head. “No,” he said. But he set her gently down and let Hawke help him to his feet. His shirt was soaked in Kessler’s blood.

One arm around Price’s waist, Hawke followed the others out through the broken glass doors, away from the noise of the alarms and into hell.

CHAPTER NINE

11:17 A.M.

OUTSIDE, people were rushing everywhere in a panic, shoving one another to get away. Smoke swirled in the air; abandoned cars sat up on the sidewalk with their doors hanging open while other drivers honked their horns against snarled traffic. A series of wrenching crashes echoed through the street as a taxi tried to race around a jammed intersection and slammed into a shiny silver Mercedes sedan, sending it spinning into a Nissan that had been left by the curb. Screams and shouts mixed with the rending of metal, booms of secondary explosions that came from every direction, the shriek of rubber and the growing rumble of something far larger and more terrifying, like the collapse of entire buildings somewhere out of sight.

Hawke helped Price move away from the Conn.ect building to an empty spot on the curb, where he sat Price down and crouched next to him. The man seemed unable to support his own weight. “You hurt?” Hawke said. Price shook his head no. He was crying silently, looking down at his hands, still sticky with Kessler’s blood.

Hawke stood up and looked around with a fresh sense of shock. A block away, a gigantic, gaping hole had swallowed the intersection of Second Avenue and East 78th Street, smoke and flames shooting up from below, asphalt buckled and melting in all directions. He could feel the heat from where he stood. A city bus, barely visible through the rippling flames, had toppled into the hole, upended and tilted sideways, the ads that adorned its sides blackened with smoke. The Mexican restaurant on the corner with the brown plastic booths and corrugated metal roof was gone, the building that had contained it gaping open and licked by fire. The other side of the street had fared slightly better, but Girardi’s market had been defaced with flames and smoke and the awning on the Vietnamese place next door was burning like a torch.

He flashed back to his nightmare: Thomas, being yanked away from him by slippery-smooth tentacles whipping down from above. The heat of the fires nearby washed over Hawke, bringing tears. More smoke billowed up over the city, pillars of it swirling through the blue sky and winding away like balloon strings. The chaos was absolute; Armageddon had descended in a split second’s time. He hadn’t had time to process this. Everything had gone down so fast, and getting down to the lobby was a blur, fueled by adrenaline and a focus on survival. It was all too big, too overwhelming, completely alien and wrong in a way that made him feel numb. This couldn’t be happening, there was no reason or explanation for it, and yet it was; the mental pressure was building around him, strong as an approaching tornado, sucking air from his lungs, whipping dust and debris into every crack and crevice.

“Gas explosion.” Weller appeared as if from nowhere, nodding toward the hole in the street. He spoke loudly to cut through the din, but he appeared eerily calm within the madness around them. “That’s what took out our windows on the seventh floor. Easy enough to do, if you overload the systems and force a rupture.”

The sound of Weller’s voice brought Hawke back to himself. Weller had Young and Vasco with him, and he was carrying the hard-shelled security case from his office in both arms, hugging it like it was a child. Was that why he had lingered in the office suite? Hawke thought of Young, ready to charge back upstairs to rescue Weller without a second thought. Anger flared, white-hot at Hawke’s core. Suddenly he wanted to get his hands around Weller’s throat, and the urge was so strong he balled his fists to keep from leaping at him.

“What the hell happened to you?”

“Got disoriented up there for a few minutes, with the smoke,” he said, “but I found my way down.”

Gas explosion. He was right about the hole on Second Avenue; Hawke could smell it in the air. But it didn’t explain the other plumes of smoke rising up across New York, or the number of cars run off the street and crumpled into one another. It didn’t explain the traffic lights cycling randomly down 79th Street as he watched, or the way Bradbury had danced a jig across the office floor with the office lamp, hair standing on end.

Something else Weller had said finally registered. “What do you mean, it’s easy enough to do?” Hawke said. “You think this was deliberate?”

“We need to get somewhere safe,” Weller said. “Things have changed.”

“What’s changed? And where is safe? People are dead. Don’t you give a damn about Susan Kessler? She bled out in the lobby. And Price over there needs to be treated for shock. What the hell is going on?”

Weller turned toward Hawke, who realized that the man’s calm was an illusion; his eyes held that same glittering light they’d had earlier in his office, pure energy pouring off him like some kind of gospel preacher at the pulpit as another distant explosion shook the ground. “They’re not just coming after me now. I think she’s involved. This is going to get worse.”

CHAPTER TEN

11:23 A.M.

WHO WAS INVOLVED? Did he mean Kessler? Before Hawke could say a word, Weller took a step into the street, still clutching his laptop case. Young shouted a warning as a brand-new Cadillac Escalade, careening on and off the sidewalk around the choked traffic, suddenly swerved violently to the left through an opening and accelerated toward him, its engine screaming.

The huge machine missed Price by less than three feet. Hawke shoved Weller out of the way and dove to the ground, getting a split-second glimpse of the terrified face of the driver, her hands completely up and off the wheel as the vehicle slid past and slammed into a light post.

The post toppled over, crashing into the face of the office building, bouncing off and sending sparks flying as the SUV hung on the light-post base, engine still growling. Hawke lay still for a moment, stunned, the fresh surge of adrenaline making his stomach lurch.

He tasted grit, spat on the concrete and grimaced. His palms were scraped raw. The pain was like a stinging slap to the face, enough to rouse him again, and he sat up as Young tried to get Weller to a sitting position. The man’s head lolled loosely on his shoulders. He was out cold after cracking his head in the fall. Young spoke into his face, “Come on, Jim, wake up….”

Hawke got to his feet and went to the Cadillac, where Vasco was yanking at the driver’s door. He could hear the woman screaming inside, battering at the window with her fists. “Unlock it,” Vasco said, cupping his hands to the glass. He repeated it slowly, as if to a stubborn child. “Unlock… the… fucking… door!”

“She okay?”

Vasco turned to glance at Hawke, breathing hard, and shook his head as the engine continued to race out of control, nearly drowning him out. “It’s in neutral, but if she hits that shifter it’s gonna go like a bat out of hell…. I can’t get through to her; she’s out of her frigging mind here….”

Hawke looked around for more speeding vehicles. Most drivers seemed to have given up amid the traffic and left their cars where they stood. People were still running away from the fire on 78th.

Another low, deep rumble shook the street, something far away or underground. He found a fist-sized chunk of concrete torn loose from the light post’s fall, hefted it and went to the SUV, shattering the window as the driver cowered away from him. He reached in to unlock the door and the woman tumbled out into the street, sobbing and scrambling on all fours away from the vehicle.

She got to her feet a few yards away and turned back to them, holding a small leopard-print clutch, swaying like a drunk and shivering, her mascara running down her face in two black lines. She wiped snot from her nose with a sleeve. “That… fucking thing… it tried to kill me….”

“Easy,” Hawke said. He took a step toward her with his hand out, but she screamed and shrank back, and he stopped dead, not wanting to spook her further. “It kinda looked like you tried to kill us.”

“I… I didn’t!” she screamed, the words torn from her raw throat. She was probably in her early fifties, but with work done around her eyes and neck, a well-kept woman who was going to pieces. “The wheel jumped right out of my fucking hands; I didn’t even touch the accelerator….” She looked wildly from one man to the other, then at the SUV, slowly backing away.

A thud came from the hole on East 78th, and more smoke rushed skyward. Three people coming up Second Avenue ran in between them, a woman in a full business suit with two men dressed like couriers, darting hard and fast, not even bothering to look at Hawke and the others. The woman from the SUV shrank away like an abused dog as they went by, going into a half crouch, hands up around her head. Other people were screaming, and a man kept shouting over and over again from somewhere inside one of the nearby buildings, his voice ragged.

Hawke reached in through the open door and shut off the engine. He got in and switched the radio on, his heart thudding so loud he could barely hear. An automated message blared through the high-end audio system: “This is the emergency broadcast system…. This is not a test…. Mayor Weber has declared a state of emergency…. Please go immediately to your nearest safety checkpoint….”

Hawke found himself breathing too fast and shallow again, getting light-headed. The radio broadcast was listing the checkpoints now. He listened until the message began to repeat, and pressed the OnStar button, praying that the network wasn’t down.

“OnStar. How may I help you?”

Thank God. “I’d like to report an accident,” he said, words tumbling out. Just slow down.

“Name and location?”

“We need an ambulance at the corner of Seventy-ninth and Second; a woman is bleeding to death!” Hawke couldn’t bring himself to say that Kessler was already dead. Maybe we made a mistake. Maybe they can still save her life. He thought of asking for assistance with a possible B and E and giving the operator his apartment address. But something bothered him about the voice; he couldn’t put his finger on what.

“Vocal patterns suggest extreme stress,” the voice said. “Emotional reaction analysis. Recognition algorithms processing.” There was a long pause, and the voice recited his name and his Social Security number. “Please remain in the vehicle. Help is on the way.”

What? Fresh adrenaline flooded through him. He exited the Cadillac and slammed the door just as the locks clicked down again. He backed away, watching it as if it might jump at him at any moment. It was just a car, right? But the voice, although clearly female, had been too calm, too devoid of emotion even for an emergency services worker.

The operator had been trying to trap him.

As soon as the thought crossed his mind, he shook it off. Ridiculous. He could use the Cadillac to get out of the city, get him home to Robin and Thomas. It made the most sense, and yet he couldn’t bring himself to get back in. He had the feeling he might not make it out of the SUV a second time.

Another rattling boom shook the street and spun Hawke around. A fresh, blossoming flower of fire rose up from the hole in Second Avenue as the city bus toppled into the abyss. It was getting harder to breathe with the smoke. The immediacy of the situation came back to him. There was no time to think, not out here, exposed and vulnerable. They needed shelter and a plan.

He watched a figure disappear into a Jewish temple across the street. The building was a solid square of concrete, short and squat, small windows set deep into its surface, with a set of solid wooden doors that looked strong enough to hold off an army. Young and Vasco had gotten Weller upright between them, and Hawke ran toward Price, his shoulders hunched as fresh debris pattered down like hail, afraid a chunk of asphalt would come hurtling to earth and crush him. “Get up,” Hawke said, grabbing the man by the arm. “We’ve got to get to cover.”

Price shook him off but got to his feet, eyes still glassy with shock. “I’m okay,” he said. “I’m fine.”

Hawke considered giving him a helping hand, but Price took a step back and shook his head. Instead he helped carry Weller across the street to the temple, Price and the woman from the Cadillac following them at a short distance as if wary of their intentions but too terrified to let them go.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

11:46 A.M.

THE HUGE WOODEN DOORS SWUNG SHUT, and the small group stood for a moment, the sound of their harsh breathing echoing in the vestibule. The abrupt change was shocking. The power was out, but enough light filtered through a small window to allow them to see.

“Jesus Christ,” Vasco said finally. He leaned back against the doors for a moment with Weller’s arm still across his broad shoulders, closed his eyes in the shadows and tipped his head. “Jesus. Fuck. This is crazy. I gotta call in—” He banged his head against the door, opened his eyes again and stood up straight, looked around at them all, then shook his head. “We need to set him down. I need to think for a minute.”

Hawke’s limbs were trembling, but he managed to help carry Weller away from the doors as they set him down on the floor. The building was built like a bomb shelter with walls that were probably three feet thick, and the noise outside was barely audible. A second set of doors to the interior of the building was closed.

Weller’s head lolled limply against Young’s shoulder. “Wake up,” Hawke said, straightening Weller’s head and lightly slapping his cheek, trying to force him into consciousness. “I want to know what’s going on. What were you trying to tell me?”

Young stopped his hand. “He’s out,” she said. “Look at the bump on his head. He can’t answer. Leave him alone.”

“How could you leave her like that?” Price said. “All of you. Just leave her bleeding to death in that lobby.”

Hawke let out a long, trembling sigh. He could smell the blood on Price’s shirt. Kessler’s blood. Nobody spoke. There was no answer to give. Hawke had to collect his thoughts, try to make some sense of everything. He wanted to go at Weller until the man answered his questions.

“What do we do?” the woman from the SUV whispered, her voice hoarse with panic. She twisted her hands together around her clutch over and over, squeezing, digging at it with her manicured nails. “I need to find my husband.” Her gaze darted back and forth, refusing to settle on anything for more than a few seconds. “I have to get downtown.”

Hawke thought of Robin and Thomas, the woman ratcheting up his own anxiety again. What was happening right now at home? Not knowing made him wild, his imagination racing. But losing his cool wouldn’t do them any good. He had to focus, figure out the right way to get back to them.

“What’s your name?” he said. When the woman didn’t seem to hear him, he took her by the arms, forcing her to stop and look at him. “Your name,” he said again.

“Sarah Hanscomb,” she said, finally fixing her gaze on his face. The waves of panic pouring off her were going to make them all lose their minds. She nearly crumpled and looked away again, her brows coming together, mouth quivering, but she fought it off. “We’re from Englewood Cliffs. My husband works for Germer Benson; he’s at the office right now. I dropped him at the PATH this morning. I didn’t think—when things started happening I turned around; I wanted—I had to get over the bridge before—oh God.” She seemed to realize what she’d done, trapping herself in the city, everything crashing down on her at once. Her hands trembled as she brought them to her face as if trying to hide behind the clutch. The backs of them were veined, wrinkled. She was older than Hawke had first thought. He pulled them down again.

“Which bridge?” he said. “What happened?”

She shook her head, tears squeezing out over bruised lids. “The GW. He was downtown,” she said, pleading, as if she felt the need to explain herself. “I had to get him out. The radio said there were explosions—”

“How did you get to Second Avenue?”

“The Henry Hudson was gone after the bridge—I took Harlem River Drive and got off on Park, then worked my way over and down. You don’t understand; the streets are all jammed up—”

Hawke saw her eyes go wide a split second before he was shoved violently aside. Vasco grabbed Hanscomb and threw her up against the wall. “Tell us what the fuck is going on out there,” he said, cords standing out in his neck. “There were more explosions? What exactly did you see?”

“Take it easy,” Hawke said. The woman shook her head back and forth, trying to avoid Vasco’s face, inches from her own as he leaned into her.

“Please,” she whispered, “I can’t—I don’t know!”

“I want to hear every fucking detail. You better talk, lady, right now.”

“People just… went crazy. Cars and trucks off the road, hitting each other. Most of them were trying to get out, but I was coming in. It was easier that way. The radio talked about a terrorist threat, police hurting protestors, riots and looting, but nobody seemed to know why. I called my husband before the phones went out; he was trapped inside his building with people in the street turning cars over and… and worse. He said the stock market was collapsing, traders were locked out of their systems, including him. The entire market gone, bank and investment accounts drained, funds vanishing, and I was so scared for him, you don’t know. People would kill over this stuff. I just needed to get to him, get him out. After I crossed the bridge, the Henry Hudson exit was just a hole in the ground. I couldn’t cross it. Then I heard a terrible noise, it shook everything, and things fell all around the car and when I looked back I…” She swallowed hard, her throat working like she might be sick, and her voice was little more than a whisper. “The bridge was gone.”

Jesus Christ. How could that be possible? Terrorists had blown up the George Washington? For what reason? Hawke couldn’t imagine what might be happening behind the walls of the building they were hiding in, what kind of scale they were actually facing—and what might be coming next.

This was huge, a story to end all others, and he was one step away from it.

Weller. Weller had let him in for a reason, and the things the man had said this morning made it seem as if he’d known something was coming. Hawke wanted to shake the man until something came loose. His wind was up, he was hungry to chase leads, and he hated himself for thinking about that instead of the reality of their situation. The city was falling apart around them, and his wife and son and unborn child could be in terrible danger. But even as Hawke’s skin crawled with the need to run, to fight, to get home, his instincts made him want to figure out the answers and get at the truth.

The helicopter, the explosions, the madness on the streets. The SUV, and the OnStar voice recognizing him. And Weller’s invitation in his office, like a ticket to the dance. Hawke had the pieces in his hands, and now he wanted to fit them together.

You use technology to tell a story. I want you to tell a story now. The biggest one of your life.

“Gone?” Vasco stared at Hanscomb, shook her once and then released her and slowly stepped back, stunned. “The GW? That can’t be right.”

She nodded, her face crumpling again. “The radio said it was a coordinated attack. All the bridges—some kind of missile strike or other weapons, I don’t know—at the same time…” Something like a whimper escaped her mouth before she bit it back. “They said it was happening all over the place. Wall Street is a war zone. People are trapped and panicking, going at each other like animals. My husband, he’s never even had a fistfight in his life. What is he going to do?”

“All the bridges?” Young said. She had remained sitting next to Weller on the floor. He was still unconscious, head leaning against her shoulder. “Are you sure?”

Sarah Hanscomb nodded. “That’s what they said, before the broadcast stopped. Then it was just a recorded loop, telling people to get to the security checkpoints.” She wiped at her running nose, smearing more makeup. “All those people on the bridge, there were hundreds of cars….”

“You tried to run us over,” Vasco said. Hawke could feel the violence rising up in him, the heat and sweat and crackling energy. “I saw you swerve right into us.”

“I didn’t, the car just jumped, I’m telling you—it went crazy, all my lights going on, tire pressure, engine, oil light, and then… I—I wasn’t even touching the wheel!”

Vasco was on the verge of losing control. He moved back toward Hanscomb, and Hawke stepped in between them before anything else could happen, putting a hand gently on Vasco’s chest, just enough to stop his momentum. The touch released something in the other man and he grabbed Hawke by the collar with both fists, his arms trembling and rigid, his mangled finger bleeding again and wetting Hawke’s shirt.

“What the fuck are you doing, huh?” Vasco said. “Protecting this crazy bitch?”

“Don’t,” Hawke said. “We all just want to get home—”

“My wife is in Jersey,” Vasco said, his eyes shimmering now, and Hawke could see his panic about to spill over, could smell it on his breath and skin. “I went through this before, September eleventh. My brother was in the city; I was home with my mother. It took him six hours to get back. I had to watch her waiting…. I thought he was dead. I can’t do that to my wife, you understand? I can’t.”

“I get it,” Hawke said. His legs nearly buckled as an image of Thomas as a baby flashed through his head, little round face all squeezed up and red, a squalling mass of infant fury. “I have a family there, too. I know how you feel, but we have to stick together here, because one wrong move could get us killed.”

“Talking to this crazy…,” Vasco said. He shook his head. “We should throw her back out there to fend for herself. Hell, I don’t even know you people. No job is worth this. Who the fuck are you to tell me what to do, anyway?”

Hawke glanced at Hanscomb, who made another small, helpless noise. “Look, it doesn’t matter how we all got here,” he said. “What’s important is what we do now. We need to put our heads together.”

Vasco stared at him, looked at Hanscomb. “Security checkpoints,” he said. “You said they were on the radio. Where’s the closest one?”

Hanscomb nodded. “Yes, right, there was… I don’t know; I’m trying to…” She started trembling, tears starting again, glancing back and forth between them.

“Lenox Hill Hospital,” Hawke said. “I heard it on the radio. That’s the closest one to where we are.”

Vasco looked at Hanscomb, who nodded again. “I… think that’s right,” she said. “It’s hard to remember. Everything was so crazy.”

A noise from behind the closed inner doors made them all freeze. Someone was inside.

Before Hawke could say a word, Price turned the handles, swinging the doors wide.

The main sanctuary was deep and filled with flitting shadows, paneled in dark wood and carpeted with a deep red Berber, with rows of simple pews marching in straight lines toward the reader’s platform and curtain that hid the Torah Ark. Low ropes ran along inset portions of the walls, and narrow vertical lines of windows let in a little watery light. Candles flickered from candelabras on both sides of the bimah, where a group of people had gathered.

A man was talking in a low voice; Hawke thought it might be a reading from the Torah. The man wore a tallith draped over his shoulders. None of the people acknowledged their arrival.

Vasco spread his arms out and walked up the aisle. “Hello!” he shouted. “You know what’s going on outside? Wake up, people. We’re all looking down the barrel of a gun! You want to wait around until it goes off?”

The words were explosive in the quiet room. But the small group at the front didn’t seem to react, the man in front of them still droning on as if nobody had spoken. Vasco continued up the aisle, wheeling around and walking backward for a moment, then spinning to face the front again, arms still spread wide: a welcoming, open gesture sharply at odds with the barely contained rage held in his body and quivering voice.

“Hey,” Vasco said. “Are you people deaf? Or just stupid?”

He’s going to lose it, Hawke thought again, and he wondered how it would come, an all-out lumbering assault or a more carefully designed, surgical attack.

A man stepped abruptly in front of Vasco just before he reached the front. The man was short, bespectacled, wearing a kippah, his olive skin partially hidden by a thick black beard. He held a copy of the Torah in his hands. Uh-oh, Hawke thought.

“I’m sorry, this is a house of God,” the man said. “Please be respectful—”

Vasco didn’t even slow down, just shouldered past the man on his way to the bimah. “Who’s in charge?” Vasco said, addressing the man in the tallith. “You? This your temple?”

Hawke moved down the aisle, following the action. He saw the small group part and turn as the man sighed slightly, set down his readings and finally looked at Vasco, like a patient father at an interrupting child. Candlelight flickered across his face. “I have come here to welcome anyone who feels the need to pray,” he said. “The house of worship belongs to no one except God.”

“In case you haven’t noticed,” Vasco said, gesturing toward the front doors, “while you’re all sitting in here staring at the Torah, the world is going to hell, and that includes this place. You might want to consider finding an escape route.”

“God will decide who lives and who dies,” the rabbi said. He was taller than the rest, in his fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair cropped short and a close beard streaked with gray. His voice was calm, but it held a commanding power that filled the large room.

“When Gog Umagog arrives,” the man who had stepped in front of Vasco said, “we must repent and pray and release our fears, give ourselves to God. Redemption will come to those who do.”

“Gog what?” Vasco was smiling now, but his face looked pained, like he was humoring a mental deficient.

“The war to end all wars,” the rabbi said. “Armageddon. The end of days.” Several others murmured in agreement. “The Ba’al Shem Tov teaches us to believe with complete faith, so that we may find joy and peace. Our redemption is at hand along with the coming of the Mashiach, and we shall be received with kindness and mercy.”

As Vasco got closer, the men around the reader’s platform shifted to form a half circle in front of the rabbi. Hawke sensed it was done passively, purely for protection, but it punctuated the divide between the two groups. Us against them.

Vasco stopped suddenly, eyeing them all as if discovering a threat. “Armageddon, huh?” he said. “The Mashiach? I thought Jews didn’t believe in Jesus.”

The murmuring grew louder, several others shaking their heads, but the rabbi didn’t seem to mind. “Our Mashiach is not the Christian Messiah,” he said. “But the coming of a savior, one who will lead the way to heaven for those who believe, is understood by anyone who has heard the power of prayer, who understands redemption.” He looked around at the people gathered before him. “That time has come.”

“Give it a rest,” Vasco said. “We’re dealing with terrorists, and people are dying outside, and they’re going to start dying in here.”

“Our world has finally reached its end, our hubris, our pursuit of power before God, our worship of progress at any cost.”

“What the hell are you talking about—”

“You haven’t seen what’s happening out there? You haven’t noticed that the things attacking us are all of our own making? They are using our own creations against us.”

“Whatever’s going on has human beings on the other end of it, I can promise you that,” Vasco said. “They want to scare the shit out of us; that’s the goal. We need a plan to get out of the city, find some open space.”

The rabbi studied him for a moment, as if considering whether to squash a bug under his foot. “There is no plan,” he said. “Not one for us to make, anyway.”

“What about the people who are still out there?” Sarah Hanscomb had come up behind Vasco and Hawke. “My husband is a good man,” she said. Hawke thought of Bluetooth and his uncle who had skipped the country after destroying Hawke’s parents’ lives, leaving nothing but ruin in his wake. “He… he might be hurt; he might need help. Don’t you have anyone? Loved ones who are missing?”

She looked around at the people watching her. The rabbi gestured for her to move aside. “Are you hurt?” he said, looking at Price, who had remained near the door. In the shadows, the blood on his shirt looked black.

“I’m okay,” Price said. “The friend who bled out all over me is not.”

A woman who stood at the front, her head covered, her body draped in a modest floor-length dress, spoke up. “Maybe we should talk about this,” she said, her voice soft but clear. “They may have news. There’s no harm in that.”

For the first time, the rabbi seemed off balance. “No harm?” he said, his voice cracking slightly. “Ana, you surprise me. There is great harm in letting in those who come from a dying world, who bring that stain with them. If they enter our sacred space with no fear, if they embrace their faith and accept the Mashiach with kindness, they are welcome. If not…” He waved a hand toward the door. “They must leave us.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Vasco said.

“What about Mother?” the woman said, ignoring him. She was younger than Hawke first thought, as he caught a glimpse of her face. Maybe late teens or early twenties.

“She made her choice,” the rabbi said. His slightly furrowed brow had relaxed again, smooth and clear.

“We don’t know that,” the woman said, edging closer to him. “She wasn’t home. She didn’t know where we’d go—”

“Enough, Ana.” The man looked at her, and the woman stopped speaking abruptly. “These people don’t need to hear about our personal lives. None of that’s important anymore.” He gestured at the open space, toward the outside walls. “It doesn’t matter where we are when the time comes. What matters is our expression of faith and our willingness to accept God’s will.”

“This isn’t your building,” Vasco said. He looked like someone who had just figured out a riddle. “You’re squatters, am I right? Came here and took over, just like that?”

The rabbi sighed again, like he had before, the sound of a patient person dealing with someone unstable, a nuisance he’d rather forget. “This house belongs to no man,” he said. “Now, if you’ll allow us to return to our prayers—”

“We’ve got as much a right to be here as you do,” Vasco said. “Who the fuck are you to say otherwise?”

The rabbi stared daggers, and Hawke saw something behind his calm demeanor, something unbalanced and furious—a man not used to having his authority questioned, and one who might react in unexpected ways.

“Profanity has no place in a house of God,” he said. “Please leave us to our prayers.”

As Vasco shook his head, smiling again in a way that was anything but friendly, Hawke’s cell phone chirped in his pocket. Momentarily stunned, he stepped away and slipped back toward the entrance to the building and into a deeper darkness, passing Young and Weller, who seemed to be coming around. The phone had been bricked back in the Conn.ect office, completely dead. How could it be back on now? Hawke turned his back to the others and dug it out with trembling fingers, hoping for something from Robin, anything that would reassure him she was okay.

The message was from Rick, the words bright and clear on his screen: I LIED. I AM ADMIRAL DOE.

CHAPTER TWELVE

12:10 P.M.

HAWKE STARED AT THE PHONE, his head spinning. How had it booted itself up again and come to life? He was certain it had been bricked. Devices didn’t just reanimate themselves.

Maybe Rick had done it somehow, sent Hawke a worm that worked in this way. But why would Rick text him now, on an unsecured line, to admit to something like this? During their chat session Rick had begged Hawke to help him find out who Doe was and claimed he was being set up.

It made no sense.

A sudden buzz of opportunity lit him up like a live wire. Use this chance. He hit the home button, trying to get to the keypad to call Robin. Nothing happened; the phone wouldn’t respond. It seemed to be locked into the texting program but wouldn’t allow him to get to his other contacts or do anything other than respond to Rick’s message.

Hawke cursed and resisted the urge to throw the phone across the room. He typed a response: Need to get a message to Robin.

He waited, gripping the phone so hard his fingers started to ache. Maybe Rick had no other choice; maybe he’d gotten in far deeper than he expected and needed help and wanted to come clean. But if he and Anonymous were involved with what was happening now, then the shit had truly hit the fan and Hawke would have to admit that he didn’t know Rick anymore and maybe never had. Whatever else the man was, whether the steps he had taken were right or wrong, his heart had always been in the right place, his motivations pure and simple and closely aligned with Hawke’s own. Use the tools at hand to expose corruption, level the playing field. Tear down the walls that keep people from the truth; empower others to make their own choices. Rick had always said that they were living in one of the most exciting times in history, and he saw himself as a comic-book hero fighting injustice. Hawke knew it wasn’t that simple, that there were other motivations, purely selfish. There was the challenge of each project they took on—clicking the puzzle pieces together to see if they fit. And the challenge to authority.

But whatever Rick was into now, it wasn’t about empowering people, or making the world a better, fairer, more purely democratic place. This was about anarchy and destruction and pain. Rick had spent over a year in jail, and maybe that had changed him. But Hawke couldn’t imagine reconciling the man he knew with the person who was behind the events today. And besides, even if Anonymous had become a much more malignant and powerful network while Hawke had been away, it was difficult to believe they were capable of the kind of comprehensive and overwhelming attack that was going on now. The entire structure of the group was built upon freedom, anonymity, individuality. It was one thing to bring enough people together for a short period of time to take down a few servers. But how could they gather the resources and power to pull this off?

His phone chirped. NO MESSAGES. WE ARE MAKING A STATEMENT. TIRED OF WAITING FOR EVERYONE ELSE TO ACT.

Who?

US. THE COLLECTIVE. IT DOES NOT MATTER.

Hawke typed: What about my family? Are they in danger?

THE WORLD IS IN DANGER.

What are you doing now?

NOT YOUR CONCERN ANYMORE. OPERATION GLOBAL BLACKOUT CANNOT BE STOPPED. IT IS GOING TO GET WORSE. GET TO A CHECKPOINT. YOU WILL BE SAFE THERE. WE WILL NOT TOUCH THEM.

Hawke hesitated, overwhelmed, every nerve in his body singing, wondering what to say, how to handle it. You don’t want this. This isn’t you.

THINGS CHANGE. PEOPLE CHANGE.

I don’t believe you.

There was no answer for a long moment, and then, without warning, the screen shivered and blinked, and suddenly Hawke was staring at himself through the lens of his camera, his face caught between the shadows and flickering candlelight. There was something threatening about the act, as if he was being observed by a voyeur, the camera’s eye making some kind of point. There was nowhere to hide. His own device had been commandeered and turned against him.

I SEE YOU.

As Hawke watched himself on the screen, hypnotized by the image, someone came at him from the side with a bear hug, low and hard. His phone was wrenched from his grasp. He staggered right, barely kept his feet with a hand on the back of a pew.

He turned to find Weller standing next to him, breathing fast. “You’re going to get us killed,” Weller said. Damaged during the near collision with the SUV, Weller’s glasses sat askew on his nose, giving him an unbalanced, slightly crazed look. He glanced down at the phone, the screen still on, his face filled with an emotion that appeared to be half sadness, half fury, and threw it to the floor, stomping down with a foot as the glass crunched, grinding it into pieces.

Stunned for a moment, and then enraged beyond all understanding, Hawke felt the world go gray as blood thumped behind his eyes. He grappled with the other man with a ferocity he hadn’t known he possessed. Weller’s hands clawed at Hawke’s face as they went to the floor like animals fighting in a back alley. Time seemed to slip away before he began to come back to himself and realized Weller was grunting something at him as they rolled together.

“It’s… not… who you think—”

As abruptly as the fight had begun, it was over. Weller rolled away as Hawke lay on his back, chest heaving, his face wet. “It’s not who you think!” Weller shouted, his voice raw as he regained his feet and collected his glasses from beneath a nearby pew and setting them on his face, where they tilted even farther askew. One lens was cracked now, reflecting the candlelight in two fractured planes, and the lump on Weller’s forehead from hitting it against the curb was purple and swollen like an egg. He looked around at the rest of the group. Everyone had remained frozen in place, staring at him like he’d lost his mind.

Hawke touched his face, his hand coming away red. Weller had clawed him pretty hard, and the blood was mixed with his own tears. He felt something digging into his back and realized it was the remains of his shattered phone.

He got to his feet. “What do you mean, it’s not who I think?”

“It’s not your wife, your friend, your family, on the other end of that text message. Whoever you think it is, it’s not them.”

“How the hell would you know that?”

Weller turned away without answering. Everyone had stopped to watch the spectacle, even the rabbi and those at the front, who had gathered closer together with the others from the pews, forming a tight group around the prayer table. “Anyone else with a phone?” Weller said to the silent room. “Destroy them. Do it now. It doesn’t matter if they’re working or not.”

The look on Weller’s face was so intense and so radiant, Hawke took a step back like it was a communicable disease. Maybe the bump to the head had scrambled Weller up worse than anyone had thought. Or maybe this was more of the paranoia he’d shown in his office earlier.

A glance passed between Weller and Young, and she pulled her own phone from her pocket, placed it on the floor and stamped down, cracking the glass, grinding it under her heel.

Vasco, who had come halfway down the aisle, took his own phone out. “We can deactivate the GPS,” he said. “We might still be able to use them—”

“Do it,” Weller said, his voice holding an edge. “I can’t tell you how dangerous this is. Do it now.”

The two men watched each other for a long moment; then Vasco shrugged and glanced away. He tossed the phone on the floor, crushing it with his foot, making a show out of the process, taking his time.

“You got it, boss,” he said. “Anything you say. It’s dead anyway.”

“There are chips inside,” Weller said to the rabbi’s group. “Your phones can be operated remotely. They can be used to track your location.”

The room was electric. Hawke felt something happening here, words unspoken and hanging like ghosts, things hidden just out of sight. Weller knew something important, and he held people’s attention like a politician at a rally.

“We don’t have phones,” the rabbi called out, after a moment. “None of us.”

Somewhere outside, a faint rumble shook the foundation of the building, like a train passing at a distance. Hawke felt it through his feet.

Weller turned to Sarah Hanscomb, who was shaking her head. “What if my husband, what if he’s trying to call me?” she said, her voice rising up in a mixture of hope and panic. “He might be trying to reach me right now, if I try to turn it on again—”

“It’s nothing but a weapon, a Trojan horse to be used against you. Against us.” Weller took a step toward her, and Hanscomb shrank back, as if fearful of being struck. “They’re after us,” he said. “Don’t you get it?” He looked around at all of them again. “The singularity is here, and it’s not what we all thought it would be. It’s not a new beginning; it’s an ending.”

Hawke had written about it before, in a series of early articles he’d done for the online news blog Timeline that explored concepts rather than offering any real insight. Coined by a science-fiction writer and made popular by futurist visionary Ray Kurzweil, the “singularity” referred to the moment when machines would blend with and then transcend their makers, becoming self-aware and independent. Kurzweil argued that the moment would usher in a new utopia. Others felt it made the future unknowable, a black hole in time after which the world would be impossible to predict. But all of them agreed that the time would come, most likely in the twenty-first century, and that it would change humanity forever.

The singularity. It was nothing more than an idea that framed something difficult to express, Hawke thought. Weller had lost his mind.

Everyone began talking at once, Vasco coming farther down the aisle as Hanscomb argued more vehemently, holding her small clutch in both hands and pleading her case as the others converged upon her like some senseless mob. It was like she held her husband in that clutch, Hawke thought, rather than a useless piece of machinery that was never going to reach him. Even if what Weller was saying was wrong and the phone was harmless, there was no signal, no way to get through.

The rabbi came out from behind the table, striding forward in his tallith like a man possessed by a higher calling, his congregation falling in behind him in lockstep. Hawke, nearly at the entrance to the vestibule, faded back, past where Price stood and away from them all, his body shaking now like a junkie coming off a fix. He wanted darkness, quiet, a moment alone. He needed to think.

Get to a checkpoint. You’ll be safe there.

As the arguing escalated, the sound of sirens outside made Hawke go to the temple doors. He opened them and peered out, his head and shoulders exposed.

The street outside was eerily empty, looking more like a war zone than the Upper East Side, except for a police car that had pulled up through the swirling smoke next to the Cadillac SUV. Two cops were advancing upon a man on the sidewalk holding a laptop case. No, not just any case.

It was the one Weller had carried out from his office. They’d left it somewhere on the street when the crash happened, completely forgetting about it in the rush to safety.

Where the hell had everyone gone?

The acrid smell of burning plastic and rubber wafted into the temple. Something Hawke couldn’t quite explain brought chills to the back of his neck. He peered out into the street, the red and blue lights from the cop car bouncing off the smoke and making it harder to see. The man holding the case was close to Weller’s age and build, dressed casually in sneakers, jeans and polo-style shirt, glasses perched on his nose, his thinning hair cropped close to his skull. The cops came with guns drawn and tight, shuffling steps, muscles tense in shooters’ poses, acting like the man was a wanted criminal. They barked orders at him, but Hawke couldn’t make out the words. The man kept shaking his head emphatically. He held out the case at arm’s length, as if making an offering. It was heavy, and he had trouble keeping it there.

While one cop kept his gun trained at the man’s head, the other grabbed the case and stepped back. He knelt on the broken curb for a long moment, his back to Hawke, apparently examining the security latch, unable to open it. He put a hand to his ear, as if listening to an earpiece, nodded once, then said something to his partner, who glanced at him and then back at the man, who stood frozen in place with his hands raised, the universal expression of surrender.

Hawke hesitated at the doors, itching to move, but the cops’ demeanor gave him pause. There was something about the way they were acting; the tension in the air felt wrong. The man seemed to feel it, too; he was shaking his head again, starting to back away almost imperceptibly, his arms dropping until the cop with his gun trained on him ordered him to halt.

The cop with the case stood up and scanned the empty street around them, then looked at the other, who took a single step forward. As the man put his hands up again and began to speak, both cops shot him through the palms, twin bullets blowing his brains out through the back of his skull to splatter on the concrete behind him like an abstract painting come to life.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

12:35 P.M.

WHEN THOMAS HAD JUST TURNED TWO YEARS OLD, Hawke lost him as they left the park three streets over from their apartment. It was a small park, little more than a triangle of green carved out of a block of old brick buildings, their lower floors converted to shops, the upper-section apartments looking out at one another across the grass. They’d been there several times before, but that day was different. It started out innocently enough and ended up dissolving into hell.

Robin was out for coffee with a friend from college, and Hawke bundled Thomas up for the fall weather and took him out to play, more to burn time before Robin returned than because of any desire either of them had for exercise. It wouldn’t have mattered much; there wasn’t enough space to do a lot of running or have a play structure of any kind. Hawke sat on the single bench near the end of the green triangle and watched Thomas totter around on chubby little-boy legs, clutching that lion he’d had since the day he was born. He was fascinated by all the things little boys were fascinated by: a dandelion gone to seed and poking up through rocky soil, a worm coiling in the sun, a crow that landed on the other side of the park and hopped sideways, tilting its head and staring with watchful, beady eyes until Thomas turned in its direction and it lifted away, flapping its wings and cawing.

He looked at Hawke, questioning. “That’s a bird,” Hawke said. “A big black bird.”

Thomas pointed in the direction of the crow, now a speck in the bright sky. “Bud,” he said, his face serious. “Big back bud.” Hawke nodded, keeping his own face carefully neutral, his heart swelling; although bright, Thomas didn’t speak much, and he was already beginning to display a need for order and symmetry and perfection. He rarely took a chance on anything he couldn’t say perfectly. But he was studying things, learning, trying to understand and communicate. This was one of those moments Hawke knew he would remember, another small thread of the web that bound them together. He had been single, and then almost without warning he was married; childless, and then he had a child. Hawke had begun to define himself as Thomas’s dad, rather than John Hawke, and he was surprised by how little that bothered him.

He wanted to give Thomas the stability he never had, the sense that his father would be there for him, no matter what. Most parents think of themselves as their children’s protectors; they think they are far more important in a child’s life than the other way around. Hawke wondered if that was the case or if he would come to realize, too late, that he could no longer live without his son.

They stayed for less than twenty minutes. When they left, Thomas wanted to walk in front of the stroller and Hawke let him, following closely down the sidewalk to make sure he didn’t suddenly change direction and stumble into the street. When Hawke’s cell phone chirped, he dug it out of his pocket to glance at the screen: a text from Robin saying she was on her way home. When he looked up again, not ten seconds later, Thomas was gone.

Hawke whirled, looking back at the park, expecting to see him at any moment. But the boy was gone. Hawke’s heart paused and swelled in his chest, blocking his throat like a balloon, the silence drawing out until his pulse began to pound like a jackhammer and adrenaline flooded his veins. He whirled again, scanning the street, the row of buildings to his left, the empty stroller, panic lighting him up, making him wild as he called out Thomas’s name, softly and then louder, his voice cracking at its height.

A man came out of a bagel shop across the street from the park. “Have you seen a little boy?” Hawke shouted at him, and the man looked at him, startled, then shook his head and put his hands up, palms open.

Hawke raced forward past a city trash barrel, the next cross street too far away for Thomas to have reached it, but he pounded full speed to the curb, panting as he looked right and left, seeing cars winking in the sunlight but no little boy, the sidewalks empty.

When Hawke turned back toward the stroller, he saw Thomas crouched down behind the trash barrel in his puffy blue coat with his lion, his little face squeezed up into a private smile, eyes shut, as if by closing his eyes and being still he became invisible. Hide-and-seek, Thomas’s new favorite game at home—he was playing it now and blissfully unaware of Hawke’s impending heart attack.

His chest violently unclenched; he heaved in a gulp of air and pounded toward his son, his emotions now pouring out in a single grunt of blind rage as he grabbed Thomas’s arm and pulled the boy up toward his face. Whatever Thomas saw there made him go slack with shock and then crumple into tears, and Hawke’s words died on his lips as he hugged Thomas to his chest and rocked him, cooing his apology into the shoulder of the boy’s coat until his sobs began to subside.

Hawke found himself struggling to catch his breath.

The doors had swung shut on their own, blocking out the image of the dead man. Hawke reeled backward, bumping into Anne Young, who had come up behind him. He was shaking like a leaf in high wind, but she was absolutely still. She put a hand on his shoulder, light as a bird, and kept it there. He glanced back but couldn’t tell from her face whether she’d seen anything at all, her gaze remaining on the closed doors as if she could look right through them.

Hawke leaned left and convulsed, a stream of vomit splattering onto the rug: the remains of coffee and the energy bar he’d eaten that morning.

Young kept her hand on Hawke’s shoulder. Everything seemed to press down upon his head, suffocating him. He wiped his mouth and swallowed hard, keeping the sickness down this time as he tried to make some kind of sense of what had just happened. But it was wrong in every way. His mind played over the scene again and again: the man’s face registering what was going down a split second before the cops fired, the way his hands came up to ward off the bullet, twin red holes blossoming in them as if by some dark magic, the back of his skull exploding in a mass of red spatter, his body falling backward to slap lifelessly against the sidewalk. It was an execution, an outrage, the murder of a defenseless person who had probably done nothing wrong. A man in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But why? Two cops shooting someone in cold blood made no sense, no matter what else was happening out there.

The feeling of dread had come full force with the sight of blood. It was like Hawke’s dream, tentacles pulling Thomas away from him. The need to get home to his wife and son clawed at Hawke’s chest. What if they were in trouble right now, facing the same kind of violence he had just witnessed?

“Wait,” Young said, but Hawke pushed past her without bothering to ask what she wanted. He stalked back up the aisle of the worship room to where Weller stood with the rabbi and his group, Vasco and Hanscomb right behind him.

“Your laptop,” Hawke said to Weller, inserting himself in between the man and the others. “What’s on it?”

Weller had been in midsentence, continuing the argument about cell phones that had apparently escalated between the rabbi’s people and the rest of them. He stopped, mouth still open, studying Hawke’s face. Then he looked around the room, his gaze finally settling on Young, who had followed Hawke back from the vestibule. “Where’s the case?” Weller said, his voice rising. She shook her head, mute, and Hawke stepped in again to get him focused, the movement bringing Weller’s gaze back around.

“What the hell is going on?” Hawke said. “You seem to know something. Why did a man carrying your laptop just get executed?”

“Hold it,” Vasco said. “What did you just say?”

Hawke kept his eyes trained on Weller’s face. “Two cops,” he said. “They just shot someone outside who was carrying Jim’s laptop case. Maybe he was trying to steal it; I don’t know. But it seemed like a pretty harsh punishment to me. Excessive force, don’t you think?”

“Are you serious?” Hanscomb shook her head, backing away until her legs hit a pew behind her, as if trying to escape. Her voice was shrill and loud, and she sounded like she thought it might be some kind of bad joke. “Oh my God.”

“That makes no sense,” Vasco said. “Why would cops be shooting people in the street?”

“I don’t know,” Hawke said. He gestured at Weller. “Ask him.” Hawke kept seeing the blood, the man’s skull exploding in red chunks of bone and brains, the way the body fell straight back and nothing cushioned its fall, as if that mattered anymore.

A long, uncomfortable silence descended over the temple. Even the rabbi and his people remained still, watching, waiting. Weller glanced back at Young and then away, a look coming over his face as if he’d just figured out the world’s biggest riddle. “They think it’s a threat,” he said, almost too softly to be heard. “Things are out of control, just like I told them, and it’s a loose end. And we’re a scapegoat.”

“For who?”

“Eclipse. They’re tracking us.”

“You’ve got to be kidding—”

“You can’t imagine the power,” he said. “The sheer size and scope, the capability. It’s breathtaking, in its own way.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Jim?” Hawke said.

“Don’t you get it yet? They’re going to find a way to make us disappear.” Weller smiled, but his eyes were distant. “We’re all wanted terrorists,” he said. “Every one of us from Conn.ect. Starting right now, every law enforcement officer in the city is looking for us.”

“For what?”

“Crimes against humanity,” he said. “The downfall of modern civilization.” He spread his arms in the direction of the doors. “According to every cop in New York, we’re responsible for what’s happening outside. We’re on every list in every database in the world, and I’m quite sure excessive force is not only going to be justified, but encouraged.”

“You’ve lost your fucking mind,” Vasco said. His voice had grown dark. “They can’t do that. This is crazy.”

“Has Google mapped the inside of this building?” Weller said to the rabbi, dismissing Vasco’s outburst.

“Google? I don’t know what you mean—”

“Does it show up on Street View? Is that how you found it?”

“Google Maps,” the young woman explained, the one the rabbi had called Ana. “He’s talking about the maps on the Internet. They’ve started to do interiors, not just roads. You can walk around inside buildings, on your computer.”

The rabbi closed his mouth, opened it again, a fish out of water. Weller didn’t wait for a response. He wheeled around and walked to where the remains of Hawke’s cell still lay in the aisle and crouched, studying them for a moment before turning again and looking over their heads at the ceiling. “It’s unusual,” he said as if to himself, staring at the walls, “the lines of the windows….” He stood up. “Consumer GPS chips are accurate to within a few feet, but inside a building like this the error could be more. They thought we were outside, but they’ll be looking to confirm location.”

“Jim,” Young said. Her face was like a white moon in the shadows.

Weller walked over to Hawke and both stood there nose to nose, Weller’s glasses winking in the faint light. “I hope you got something important out of that conversation,” he said. “It won’t take long before they verify the ID, but they’re already mapping images from your cell. It’s going to bring them right to our door.”

“Who?” Hawke said. “Who are they?”

“Eclipse’s secret service,” Weller said. “The police, the FBI. Whoever else they convince to come after us.”

“I’ll ask you again. What the hell is this all about, Jim?”

“Only one way to find out,” Weller said. He spun on his heel and marched through the vestibule, opened the door of the temple and walked out, the door slamming shut behind him.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

12:45 P.M.

IT WAS AS IF WELLER’S WORDS HAD FROZEN them in shock, his actions so bizarre that they couldn’t react. Hawke didn’t move, waiting to see in which direction things would go. The room grew quiet again, and then Young tried to go after Weller, but Vasco grabbed her and everyone exploded into action at once. The rabbi waved his arms as if to usher them right out of the building, shouting something about terrorists, the rest of his flock surging forward behind him. Vasco began to protest, his face red, veins standing out in his temples, as the rabbi came up to him with arms still out like a rancher herding cattle. Hanscomb shrank away from it all, creeping backward along a pew toward the wall.

“Out!” the rabbi shouted. “All of you! Leave us in peace.” The others shouted with him, their faces flushed with anger. Only the young woman, Ana, tried to calm him, her protests lost in the cacophony of voices crashing over the worship room.

They gathered for a moment in the vestibule, Hanscomb coming last with her own hands up. Two of the people behind the rabbi had picked up heavy candelabras and were brandishing them like clubs.

“Don’t hurt me,” she said. “I’m not with them, I’m just trying to get my husband and go home.” When she reached the vestibule, she looked back, saw Hawke, Vasco, Price and Young and blanched, as if she were being thrown into a jail cell with a pack of murderers.

“Get out,” the rabbi said, one more time, and then he took hold of the second set of interior doors that separated the vestibule from the worship room and slammed them shut, closing off the group and leaving them in relative silence.

“Well, that was fun,” Vasco said. “Like visiting the in-laws.”

Vasco still had Young by the arm. She shrugged free, staring at him in a way Hawke couldn’t quite decipher. She stood rubbing her wrist as if scrubbing away something foul.

Price was pacing back and forth, muttering something softly to himself. Hanscomb pressed herself against the interior doors like a cornered animal, watching them. “What?” Vasco said to her. “You think we’re all killers now? Is that it? Jesus.” He shook his head, the grin-grimace back on his face again, the same one he’d had inside the worship room. I’m humoring a moron, but I’m about to lose my patience.

“Everybody just needs to calm down for a minute,” Hawke said. “We need to work together—”

“Is what he said true?” Hanscomb asked.

“Of course not,” Vasco said. “Look, we’re caught in the middle of this thing just like everyone else. I don’t know what’s going on any more than you do. But I do know we need to be very careful before we open this door.”

“Might as well have killed Susan,” Price said suddenly. He’d stopped pacing and was staring at Young. “The great Jim Weller just left her to bleed out in my arms. You all did. And nobody’s said a word about her since.”

“What do you want us to say?” Vasco said. “She was dying. There was nothing anyone could have done to change it.”

“I watched the life go out of her eyes,” Price said. “I couldn’t help her.” He turned his head from side to side, as if searching for something that would absolve him of guilt. “You have any idea how that feels?”

“Maybe I do,” Vasco said. “But that doesn’t matter. Right now we’ve got to focus on keeping our own asses alive.”

“We have to go after Jim,” Young said. “He’s alone out there; he needs us.”

“I’ll go with you,” Price said. He had turned away from Vasco as if he couldn’t stand the sight of him for another second. “I wouldn’t mind asking him a few questions myself. And I need to get the hell out of here.”

Vasco shrugged and put up his hands. “Go ahead,” he said. “But before you do, just think this through for a minute. Where are you going? You step one foot outside these doors, you could get beaten, shot, blown up. A bus could come around the corner and turn you into a frog on the freeway. People are rioting, they’re terrified and nobody knows what’s happening. It’s like the Wild West out there, and we don’t know who’s on our side.”

“You don’t think the police actually want to kill us?” Hanscomb said. She looked at Hawke. “Did you really see them shoot someone?”

“He was standing there, holding the laptop case,” Hawke said. “They took it from him. He put his hands up, and they shot him in the head.”

Hanscomb shook her head. “Oh God—”

“He ain’t going to help you, lady,” Vasco said. “God has left the building.”

“I don’t know any of you,” Hanscomb said. “You could be anyone. What am I supposed to do, just trust you?”

“You don’t have a choice,” Vasco said. “If we leave here, and any of us have a prayer of making it out of New York, we’ve got to stick together, like he said.” Vasco motioned at Hawke. “Watch each other’s backs.”

“Who are you to tell us what we need to do?” Hanscomb had folded her arms across her chest as if trying to protect herself.

“I served two tours in Afghanistan,” Vasco said. “Okay? That good enough for you? I know what I’m doing. This is like a military exercise. We have an objective; we have rules. Everyone’s got a job to do. You do it, you stay alive.”

“Okay.” Hanscomb nodded, more tears coming, as if she had released control and was relieved someone was taking over. Military family, Hawke thought. Maybe a dad in the army. She was used to this. She sniffled, wiped her face. “So now what?”

“The first thing is to stay calm. We plan a course of action, and we stick to the plan. Each of us is responsible for the others in the group. Leave nobody behind.”

“So where do we go?” Price shook his head. “What’s the plan, exactly?”

“I need to get to Hoboken, to my family,” Hawke said. Hanscomb might have been ready to hand over the reins to Jason Vasco; he was not. “I don’t care about anything else.”

“My wife is in Jersey, too,” Vasco said. “I’m with you. But it’s some kind of war out there, and we don’t even know who the enemy is. You might not make it out of the city alone. We need to know more, and we need help. So we get everyone to a checkpoint alive and safe. Lenox Hill Hospital is a couple of blocks away.”

“What about the police?” Hanscomb said. “What if they… get violent?”

“I don’t know why they shot that guy,” Vasco said. “But cops don’t just kill people for no reason. Look, maybe he really was a criminal. Maybe he had a gun.”

“He didn’t,” Hawke said. “He was unarmed—”

Vasco shrugged. “Okay. Maybe there was something else you didn’t see. I don’t know.”

“And if they do think we’re a part of this, for whatever reason?” Hanscomb said.

“We get the chance to explain the mistake.” Vasco shook his head. “Look at us, for Chrissake. Nobody’s going to believe that this group had anything to do with any terrorist attack. It’s ridiculous.” He pointed at Young. “We go out together. You, watch left. Sarah, you watch our right flank. Anyone sees anything at all, threatening or not, speak up. That’s your job; you focus on it. I’ll take point, and you two”—he pointed at Hawke and Price—“take up the rear. If we find Weller and he agrees, we bring him along, but no arguing, no debating. We stay together, stick to the buildings, shadows, whatever cover we can find. You do what I say. Okay?”

Hawke took a deep breath. He wasn’t sure yet what Weller had been talking about, although he had some ideas, and none of them were pleasant. The alternative was that Weller had completely lost his mind. But at this point, it didn’t matter. Weller was gone, they needed a plan and this was as good as any.

Get to a safe place; find help; get out of the city to your family. It’s almost over.

But he was wrong.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

12:57 P.M.

BY THE TIME THEY PUSHED open the temple doors, easing cautiously through the opening, Jim Weller was nowhere to be seen.

Vasco stepped out first. He motioned to the others to follow, and they fanned out as instructed, Young on the left, Sarah Hanscomb on the right. Hawke let the doors close softly behind Price, and they took up the rear.

The street remained strangely empty. Hawke heard someone shouting somewhere out of sight and another’s ragged, high-pitched scream. Smoke wafted over them, bitter and black. The hole in Second Avenue was still burning, and fire was almost certainly licking up the sides of the buildings by now. It wouldn’t take long before the entire block was ablaze. A siren played in the distance, but there was no sign of emergency responders, no trucks ready to put out the fire before it spread.

The smoke made it tough to see much, but Hawke thought he saw someone ducking out of sight to the east, up 79th Street. Could have been anyone. There was no way to know, and it was a big city. They couldn’t go chasing after ghosts.

Hanscomb’s Cadillac sat crookedly on the sidewalk across the intersection, still hung up on the stump of the light pole. Other cars were scattered across 79th Street, stalled and left alone with doors still hanging open like mechanical corpses lying battered and broken where they’d crashed. Many of them looked like they had been intentionally run headfirst into buildings or each other, as if half the world suddenly went mad and decided to play demolition derby.

Hawke couldn’t reconcile what he now saw with the New York he knew and loved, a city full of energy, teeming with life. The scene was surreal, dreamlike, unfathomable. This city was dangerous and unpredictable; anything could happen.

The cop car was gone. But the body of the man who had been shot across the street still lay crumpled where he had fallen. A dark pool of blood had gathered around his head, a brutal sign of the violence that had occurred just minutes earlier. Hawke saw the others looking at the dead man as the reality sank in with the rest of them. Hanscomb was even paler than before, and she was trembling. Price’s face was a grimly set mask, the blood still covering his shirt making him look like a war victim. Vasco just stared, as if trying to accept what they were seeing.

Young moved forward slowly. “Where’s the briefcase?” she said. “Did they take it? Where’s Jim?”

“Wait,” Vasco said. “Stay close—”

Young ignored the warning, calling out Weller’s name as she reached the middle of the street, turning in circles and calling out again before Vasco got to her.

“Jim’s not here,” Vasco said, his voice low and strained. “I think it would be better not to bring attention to us, don’t you?”

“He’s putting himself in danger. You have to let me—”

“I’d rather not join him,” Vasco said. “We follow the plan. We follow the plan.”

Young blinked, the mask she seemed to carry dropping over her again. Her face remained inscrutable; whatever emotions she carried were buried deep inside. Or maybe she didn’t have any at all, Hawke thought. It wasn’t a comforting idea, but he had never been able to read her, even before everything had gone to hell. The only time he’d seen her look rattled was in the lobby of the building when she realized Weller was missing, and even then she’d barely broken a sweat. It was part of the reason Hawke would describe her as plain; her features were pretty but without animation, a porcelain doll sitting on a shelf. In most crowds, she would fade into the background, almost as if she weren’t there at all.

“He couldn’t have gotten very far,” Hanscomb said.

Another scream split the momentary calm. There was no way to tell if it was male or female. The sound echoed through the lonely corners of buildings and streets, then cut off at its height, as if the person was suddenly, violently silenced.

“Where did everybody go?” Price said.

“Checkpoints,” Vasco said. “That’s gotta be where people are headed. The explosion probably spooked them, and they’re trying to get out of this area to a safe place. Just like us.”

Nobody said anything. The explanation was weak, Hawke thought. The fire should have been surrounded by firefighters and police, emergency vehicles dealing with the injured. Instead there was nothing. It was as if eight million people had suddenly vanished into thin air. A chill crept up Hawke’s spine and made him shiver as he imagined Robin standing in the hallway facing the front door, shoulders square, with Thomas behind her. She would be brave for her son; Hawke knew that. But she had never had to face real adversity, had always been blessed with fine, caring parents, good schools, popularity. She’d never had to fight, to claw her way up from the bottom. You never knew how people would react when the world suddenly changed, when there was no warning.

He remembered finding her in the kitchen with Lowry. Hawke had rationalized it then; Robin had begged him to leave it alone, and besides, the man was just a little off, he had told himself, he didn’t mean any harm, they could handle this on their own. All the things you think when you’re avoiding confrontation. He was overreacting; what would he say if he called the cops? This guy was trespassing? He’s weird and we felt violated? So he did nothing at first. But then it had gotten worse, and he had had to admit that he didn’t know himself as well as he had thought. He’d avoided going to the police for his own selfish reasons, his personal history with the authorities clouding his judgment. When he had finally tried to act, it was too little, too late.

If something has happened to them, this is your fault. You could have done more to stop it earlier, could have called a lawyer, could have found another place and moved out. His imagination ran wild, punishing him over and over. In his mind, the door shuddered, then burst open, Lowry coming at them like the bogeyman, nothing but a shadow moving across the walls.

Vasco was in Hawke’s face. “You gonna keep it together? Because we need to move.”

Hawke wiped his eyes, blinking against the sting. Behind him, Anne Young was looking out across the desecrated streets as if expecting an apparition to appear at any moment.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Let’s go.”

They took 79th toward the park. The street here was dotted with trees, giving them a sense of cover. But it was a false sense, Hawke knew, because those branches wouldn’t stop something falling from the sky, wouldn’t block the flames sweeping through the block, wouldn’t deflect a bullet.

An alarm blared from a bank building nearby, and the sound of shattering glass came from somewhere. A dead man lay crushed under the wheels of an SUV, his head a jellied mess. Another lay sprawled across the hood of a car that had jumped the curb and smashed into a jewelry store entrance, his legs crushed and his right arm nearly separated from his body. Hawke turned his face away, his belly churning. Vasco moved fast, keeping them on the sidewalk, close to the shelter of the buildings, checking as they approached open doorways. Bringing up the rear, Hawke kept his eyes everywhere, watching the shadows and their flank, making sure they weren’t taken by surprise by anything that might be a threat.

The problem was, it was impossible to know what that threat might be. Even now, none of them had any real idea what had happened, or how far the contagion had spread. It seemed clear that some kind of terrorist attack had occurred, but how had they pulled it off? Were they still out there, still active? How long would it continue?

Don’t think about this, not right now….

Because what he was imagining was too terrifying, too overwhelming, to possibly be real. Hawke remembered the text messages he’d received: THE WORLD IS IN DANGER…. OPERATION GLOBAL BLACKOUT CANNOT BE STOPPED. IT IS GOING TO GET WORSE. He thought of the message board rewriting itself. How could Rick and Anonymous have done something like this? It just didn’t seem possible. And yet the evidence was mounting, and even Rick himself had admitted that he was the infamous Admiral Doe.

It’s not who you think, Weller had said.

If not Rick, then who? Could Eclipse really have orchestrated something like this, and if so, why? And what did it have to do with Weller’s laptop case?

Hawke’s thoughts were interrupted as they came to a four-car pileup. A brand-new delivery truck had rammed broadside into a Toyota minivan and pushed it into two parked cars, driving the twisted mass of metal halfway up on the sidewalk. There was blood smeared on the trunk of a tree. Hanscomb gave a small sound like a shuddering sigh and pointed at a pair of legs that stuck out from underneath the truck. A man’s legs in dark jeans.

Vasco held a fist in the air like a SWAT leader telling his team to hold. The Toyota’s passenger sliding door was open, more blood on the sidewalk beneath it. A voice was droning on from somewhere inside one of the vehicles.

“Is it Jim?” Young said. Price went around the side of the truck and crouched, then came up shaking his head. Hawke started toward the Toyota, drawn by the voice, but stopped when he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. An NYPD security camera mounted high on a pole across the street was monitoring their progress. As Vasco moved back toward the sidewalk, Hawke watched it slowly pan to follow, keeping an unblinking, impassive eye upon them. Just like the cameras in the lobby of the Conn.ect building.

Hawke realized that the voice coming from the minivan was the same emergency broadcast he’d heard in the SUV. Hanscomb and Young moved closer to listen, but Hawke hung back. Vasco came around to his side, and Hawke motioned to him. “We’re being watched,” he said quietly.

“By who?”

“I don’t know. It’s a police security channel, though.” He pointed at the camera. He’d never realized how many cameras there were in the world these days; they were everywhere.

“Gives me the creeps,” Vasco said. “You think this has anything to do with that guy getting shot?”

“I don’t know,” Hawke said. “But I wouldn’t trust the cops to be particularly friendly.”

“Christ.” Vasco rubbed his face. “Just don’t say anything to the women—or Price, for that matter. He’s wound tight enough as it is.”

“None of this makes any sense,” Hawke said, keeping his voice low. “Where’s the emergency response? What about putting out that fire?”

“Maybe they’re busy somewhere else.”

“So that means it’s even worse in the rest of the city? And what about a bigger response from the military? You were in the army. Shouldn’t the streets be crawling with National Guard by now?”

Vasco shrugged. “My brother served two tours,” he said. “I was too much of a fuckup for them to take me.”

“But what you said back inside—”

“Hey, it worked, didn’t it? I just wanted to calm her down, and I didn’t see you stepping up to the plate. Look, I’ve seen enough movies to know something about military strategy. My brother used to say leadership was less about what choice you made and more about just making one. We need someone to make decisions and keep everyone else in line.”

The sound of an approaching engine distracted them. They all ducked behind the Toyota. Hawke looked out around the bumper. A squad car was moving slowly west on 79th Street in their direction, nearing the intersection where the shooting had taken place, working its way through stalled vehicles.

A voice crackled over a loudspeaker, echoing through the streets: “A state of emergency has been declared. Go to your nearest checkpoint immediately and report any suspicious activity. These locations are being broadcast on the emergency broadcast system.”

The wreck they hid behind created a natural barrier, shielding them from view. But if the person behind the camera had radioed their position, there was nothing they could do.

The car crept closer and rumbled by, no more than ten feet from where they crouched. “Don’t move,” Vasco whispered. “We don’t know if they’re friendly.”

Hanscomb was trembling. “But they’re the police—”

Vasco glanced up at the camera, then motioned at Hawke. “You heard what he said. The cops shot an unarmed man. You want to take that chance?”

As the car passed, Hawke risked another peek around the other side of the van, getting only a glimpse of the driver, who wore a traditional NYPD eight-point cap pulled low over his forehead. He couldn’t tell if these were the same two cops who had shot the man in the street. Bullet holes peppered the car’s right front fender. A bloody handprint marked the rear passenger window, smearing the glass on the inside. There was someone in the backseat, but the glass was too dirty to make out anything other than a vague shape.

Maybe these same cops had shot that man. Maybe they were rogue cops who had cracked under whatever was happening in New York. Or maybe not. Hawke glanced at Hanscomb, who was trembling more violently, her teeth chattering together like she was in a deep freeze. Something seemed to break, and as she went to stand up Young grabbed her arm, pulling her back down. They waited until the car had turned the corner and disappeared from sight. Young finally let go of Hanscomb’s arm. She was sobbing, clutching her knees to her chest.

“We can’t treat the police like the enemy,” she said. “Even if they think we’re some kind of terrorists.” She looked up at Vasco, mascara smeared across her face. “Like you said, they must have had a reason for shooting that man.”

“Did you see the blood?” Vasco said. “The handprint? Someone else got hurt, and hurt bad. Maybe those cops did that, too. Maybe they’re just crazy, or maybe they do want us dead. But there will be a lot of people at Lenox, a lot more cops and emergency responders. They won’t be able to just gun us down like animals there.”

Hanscomb shook her head. “We’re going to die out here anyway. And we just let them go.”

The radio kept droning on from the Toyota:… Mayor Weber has declared a state of emergency…. Please go immediately to your nearest safety checkpoint….

Hawke glanced at Vasco. His hands were braced on the Toyota’s twisted fender. The finger that had been mangled had stopped bleeding, but the tip was an ugly red mess of meat. The hands splayed against the car looked too delicate for the man’s thick frame, too smooth and soft for a repairman. Hawke’s father had been the opposite: a thin man with big, calloused hands and stubby, gnarled fingers created from a lifetime of tinkering in garages and basements.

The smoke was getting thicker, swirling around them. Somewhere in the distance, a popping sound rang out, several in succession.

“Gunshots,” Price said. “Jesus. What now?”

“We can’t stay here,” Vasco said. “We’re sitting ducks out on the street. There’s no cover. We gotta keep moving.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

1:24 P.M.

WHEN HAWKE GOT HOME, his mother wasn’t there. He parked on the street. Their apartment his senior year was a three-family with their unit on the ground floor, in a neighborhood tough enough for bars on the windows. The owner let Hawke’s father use the basement and his tools in exchange for repairing broken sinks and toilets, rewiring light switches and plastering holes in walls, and he gave the family a break on the rent.

Back when they owned their own place and Hawke’s mother would try to hire a plumber or electrician, it would often escalate into an argument about the division of the working class and the elite, the specialization of America. Why should they hire someone to do it, his father would say, when he was perfectly capable of handling it himself? When he wasn’t writing or drinking too much to see straight, his creative streak urged him to fix or to build things. He would tell Hawke about tree houses and go-carts he’d put together when he was young. Now he built furniture. Or at least he had, until his last book had come out a month earlier and sunk without a ripple and he had hit the bottle harder than ever.

Hawke caught a whiff of smoke in the air. The weather was warm. Many people would be firing up their grills on their tiny patches of lawns or on rear porches. He entered the house, called out for his father and got no answer. Hawke opened the basement door, found the shop dark and empty. When he was a younger boy, he used to sneak down to his father’s woodworking shop and play with the tools, pretending to saw and hammer and glue spare pieces together while ignoring the glinting lines of empty liquor bottles that took up more and more space on the workbench. He used to believe back then that his father could fix anything, build whatever he set his sights on. But he never really seemed to want Hawke there when he was around, and after a while Hawke stopped going down there. As he grew older he realized those were times when his old man had needed to be alone, to drink and try to sort through or avoid whatever disorder was growing inside him. No matter how hard he tried to create order from chaos, he was helpless to do so for his own mind.

Hawke called out again and got no answer. He followed the smell of smoke through the sagging galley kitchen to the back door. His father was outside in the dirt square that stood for their backyard, his back to the house. He was feeding a bonfire that was growing bigger by the moment. Flames licked the air hungrily as he reached down, picked something up and threw it in.

When the back door slammed, the man didn’t even turn around. Hawke came down the short steps to see a box of books sitting at his father’s feet. About twenty of them were already burning, along with chunks of what looked like broken furniture. A can of lighter fluid had been tossed to one side.

“Poison dart frogs,” his father said. “From the family Dendrobatidae, common to Central and South America. One of the most poisonous animals in history. But they’re tiny things, look pretty enough, like you might want to pet them. And did you know that only a few types can kill you? The others are harmless, more or less.”

He took a swig from a bottle of vodka and threw another book into the flames, watching as the pages fluttered through the air like a bird’s wings. “This book was supposed to be a warning to the world,” he said. “But it’s going to kill me, Johnny. It’s the last piece of the puzzle. I’m done.”

Hawke didn’t know what his father was talking about. He glanced at Hawke, bleary-eyed and unable to focus. “You’re going to burn the house down,” Hawke said. He looked at the cover of the book as it curled and blackened in the flames: Socialism from Below: The People’s Revolution.

“It’s coming,” his father said, his words slurring into each other. “Reform from the masses, overthrowing this fucking capitalist system that’s keeping us hostage. Nobody gives a damn what I say, but you wait and see. It might look pretty and harmless on the surface, but we’re going to build and build and build until we create our own end.”

You keep saying it, Hawke thought, as if that’ll make it come true. “We seem to be hanging in there.”

“You and your machines,” his father said. “Locking yourself up in your room all night, staring into the screen. You think that’s a real connection? It’s no substitute for humanity.” He reached down, tossed another book onto the flames. “Look at them,” he said. “Even when they burn, they don’t fight back.”

Hawke’s thoughts ran in different directions. He couldn’t tell whether the images of his father that filled his mind were accurate or not. But he remembered the heat of the fire, the flames shooting higher as his father had kept throwing in more copies of his books. The fire department had finally shown up to put out the blaze before it caught the house or garage and took up the rest of the block, and he spent the night in jail, sleeping one off.

It had been less than six months before his death.

Hawke watched for the police car as the group kept going across 79th Street, but it didn’t reappear. Vasco remained about twenty feet ahead.

“You think this is a good idea, letting him take the lead like this?” Price said. He had been backpedaling next to Hawke, looking behind them for any kind of threat, and now he turned and edged closer, keeping his voice little more than a whisper as he nodded at Vasco’s back. “I never even saw the guy before today. He’s an office machine repairman, for Chrissake.”

“I don’t know,” Hawke said. “You don’t know much about me, either.” But he’d been thinking the same thing. Vasco had lied about serving in the military. What else might he lie about?

“I know you better than this guy,” Price said. “Besides, you didn’t start ordering us around like you were running the troops through a drill. Just seems like he’s wound a little tight, that’s all.”

“We all are,” Hawke said. “Not much of a surprise, considering what we’ve been through.”

Smoke wafted from the shattered windows of a bakery up ahead; some kind of explosion inside had scattered debris across the sidewalk. A young woman in a sleeveless white summer dress looked like she had taken the brunt of the blast. She lay sprawled among the shattered glass, blood pooled around her motionless body. Vasco crouched and touched her neck, feeling for a pulse, then looked up at them and shook his head.

The rest of them gave the dead woman a wide berth.

Outside the Yorkville Library, a colorful banner imprinted with the profile of a lion and the library’s logo hung from a pole above the door. The lower rope securing it to an iron railing had come loose, and the banner flapped in the breeze, then snapped like a gunshot. Hanscomb let out a short shriek and covered her head, nearly breaking into a wild run. “Stay with us,” Vasco barked at her. “Don’t panic, or you’ll get yourself killed.”

Hawke had the feeling he and the others were being manipulated like puppets, but he didn’t want to think about why. Not yet. That massive jumble of information he’d received was like a shark coming to the surface, the truth circling around this particular group of lies, and he felt like it might just capsize him if he came too close to it. And there was no time to work through it. His senses were heightened, his vision narrowing and sharpening every detail immediately before them.

They turned down Lexington Avenue, passing another bank on the corner. Across the street was a florist’s shop with alarms blaring; Price touched Hawke’s shoulder and pointed to two men in baggy sweatshirts and jeans ducking out from the shattered glass of the front door carrying fistfuls of cash. One of them had a gun.

“Don’t make eye contact,” Hawke said, but it was too late. One of them had spotted the group and nudged his friend, and the two of them sauntered across the street.

“What the fuck you looking at?” the one holding the gun said to Price. He was short, stocky, with the broad shoulders and thick neck of a bodybuilder. A brightly colored tattoo ran around his forearm. The other one, taller and thinner, had the sickly, hollow, twitchy look of a heroin addict. He edged around to flank Price and Hawke but said nothing.

“We don’t want any trouble,” Price said. His voice broke slightly. “We didn’t see anything, okay?”

The gunman grinned. “It’s a fire sale,” he said. “Everything one hundred percent off.” He looked at Hawke. “You see anything, amigo?”

Hawke shrugged, trying to keep his fear from showing. “You want to risk your life for a few bucks, go for it,” he said. “Me, I’d rather get out of the city alive.”

The man’s eyes narrowed, and he took a step closer. “You think you know what the fuck is going down around here, huh? You think this shit matters? My brother’s in Philly, talked to him before the phone went dead. Same thing’s happening there. So where you gonna go at the end of the world?”

A chill ran through Hawke’s body. He had held out hope that the attack had been mainly focused on New York, but if this was true…

“Hey!” Vasco shouted. The others had realized what was going on and circled back, but they stopped short when the man raised the gun. “Whoa,” Vasco said, taking a quick step back. “Take it easy.”

The man pointed the gun at Hawke’s face. “No po po around here,” he said. “Nothing to stop me.” The barrel loomed as he cocked the hammer. “Pow,” he said. Then he glanced at his friend and started backing away, gun still trained on Hawke. “Good luck staying alive,” he said. The two of them turned and ran down 79th, back the way Hawke’s group had come.

“You okay?” Price said.

Hawke realized he’d been holding his breath. He nodded. It had all happened so fast, and now the adrenaline rush was making his knees shake. “You think he’s right about Philly?”

“I don’t know,” Price said. “Maybe so. Sarah said she’d heard something about other attacks on the radio.”

“It’s like the Wild West out here,” Vasco said. “Goddamn punks, taking advantage of this to rip people off.” He scanned the street. “The faster we get to the checkpoint, the better.”

Hawke had expected to hear the crowd and emergency vehicles long before they reached the hospital checkpoint. But as they neared 77th Street and Lenox loomed over them, a series of connected buildings taking up most of the block, they found an eerily quiet scene.

Nothing moved. They passed the conference center and emergency entrance where the sliding glass doors under the green awning were shut tight. Farther down, the hospital’s main entrance doors stood open, while a second set of interior doors was closed. A bed of flowers had been trampled, dirt spread across the concrete.

Vasco stopped on the sidewalk, waiting for the others to gather. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “This place should be filled with people.” He walked through the first set of doors to the interior set, which remained shut. He cupped his hands against the glass. “Nobody’s home,” he said. “Some checkpoint.” He rapped a fist against the doors, tried to pull them apart, but they were locked tight.

What about all the patients? Hawke glanced up at the tall face of the building. There must be hundreds of patients in there, many too sick to move. Where had they all gone?

A sudden noise made them all jump. It was coming from around the other side of the building, a rattling, clanking sound like metal being dragged across concrete.

They looked at one another as the sound stopped as quickly as it had begun. Young started backpedaling away. “Jim,” she said. “He would have come here. He would be looking for that case.” Before anyone could say anything else, she had turned the corner on Park Avenue and disappeared.

Closest to the back of the hospital, Young heard the baby first.

The others had followed Young to the wide expanse of Park and around the building, Vasco cursing under his breath. A few feet in on 76th Street, on the backside of Lenox, Young had stopped short, frozen in place, her head up.

Hawke heard it seconds later: the distinctive wail and hitch, furious and plaintive, of a child in distress.

Just ahead of Young was a double-bay loading dock. The first metal door was closed, but the second one was open, the black entrance yawning wide enough to accommodate at least two trucks. The rattling sound they had heard must have been the door going up.

Vasco came up next to him, breathing too hard, Sarah Hanscomb right behind him. “What the fuck is she doing—”

Hawke tilted his head. “Listen,” he said. They all stood quietly as the haunting cry of the infant drifted through the opening. He thought of Thomas as a baby, imagined him abandoned and alone as strangers passed him by on the street. He thought of the unborn child in his wife’s womb. Young glanced back at them with a look that Hawke couldn’t quite read. It might have been fear, but whether it was for herself or for the child he couldn’t tell. “Jim’s not in there,” he said. “Anne, wait a minute.”

Price walked past the loading dock to another entrance a few feet away and yanked the handle of the door. It was locked. The crying went on and on, constant in its urgency and tone. Young shook her head. She ducked into the darkness without waiting for the rest of them.

Hawke turned to Vasco and Hanscomb. “We can’t leave it there alone,” he said. “I’m going after her.”

Vasco shook his head. “What if it’s not alone?”

“You don’t want to go in, then stay outside. It was your idea to come here in the first place.”

“Goddamn it.” Vasco rubbed his face and sighed. “All right, but any sign of trouble, we’re gone, understand?”

Hawke followed Young into the dark loading dock, pausing for a moment to let his eyes adjust. The light from the street illuminated dim shapes; a brand-new ambulance was parked on the left, dark and silent, a series of large trash bins along the right wall, packing skids stacked in the back. A short set of stairs led to a concrete loading ledge and a double metal door that was slightly ajar. Light spilled out around the frame.

The wailing was coming from behind the door.

Young was already halfway up the steps. Hawke followed, his stomach beginning to flutter, warning bells going off even as he reached the top of the ledge and Young pulled the door open, standing framed in antiseptic hospital light.

A faint, nearly imperceptible odor wafted over him, slightly acrid and rotten. A hallway loomed beyond, wide and white and empty except for the woman curled in a ball on her side. She was dressed in nurses’ scrubs and looked as if she had decided to lie down and fall asleep. Young knelt by her still form and shook her gently. The woman rolled onto her back, head lolling loosely on her shoulders. Her eyes were open. Young touched the woman’s throat, feeling for a pulse, then stood up and took a step back.

There were no immediate signs of violence, no blood or bruising. The nurse’s skin held a strange, cherry-red flush, mouth slack and crusted with vomit. Hawke stared at her face, blank doll’s eyes reflecting the ceiling lights.

A noise from the steps made him turn. Vasco stood in the doorframe, Price and Hanscomb just behind him. “Is she dead?” Hanscomb said. Hawke didn’t bother to answer. Young looked to where the hallway joined with another in a T. The baby’s cry was coming from the left branch.

Giving the dead woman on the floor a wide berth, Hawke followed Young around the corner to another set of double-hinged doors with rubber seals and windows set in each of them. Young pushed them open, revealing a large, blindingly white-tiled room lit by banks of fluorescent lights. Steel tables and lockers lined the walls, with another set of closed doors on the far side that must lead to the interior of the hospital.

Cold air touched Hawke’s face, along with more of the smell. Something spoiled, along with the scent of vomit. The morgue. There were more bodies in here, which he might have expected, except many of them looked like hospital workers along with several patients in gowns. Hawke counted at least ten of them. They had slumped to the floor where they stood, as if they had collapsed instantaneously, unable to go on. As with the nurse in the hallway, there was no blood, no obvious signs of violence. Their skin was flushed pink, enough to make them look like they’d been in the sun too long.

But his attention was drawn away, because the child was inside this room. Its cries grew louder and more furious, coming from a long, bar-height metal table against the far wall. Hidden under it somewhere. The poor thing was probably cold and starving. There was no sign of its mother.

Hawke approached cautiously for a better look. A row of computer monitors lined the table; he realized the sound was coming from them. Young had stopped dead about ten feet away.

“No,” Hawke said. “You’re kidding.” His voice was too loud; it felt like a violation of some kind of implicit pact. He edged closer, and all the terminals lit up at once, the electronic baby’s wail multiplying and echoing through the silent room, bouncing off the tile and steel and swelling into a cacophony of piercing screams. Code started streaming across the screens, cycling faster and faster. It looked like the same code he had seen before on his phone. Underneath the wails he heard another sound, barely audible: a rattling, low rumble that he couldn’t quite place and was gone before the wailing ceased.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

1:39 P.M.

HAWKE HADN’T REALIZED THAT he had backed away until the backs of his thighs touched one of the steel dissecting tables. The terminals were all showing screen savers now, spiraling useless wheels of color from a time when things were normal.

The moment broke. Young had remained frozen in place as the crying went on, but now she moved quickly to the closest monitor as the sound of the double doors flapping closed made Hawke turn; Vasco, Price and Hanscomb, who had remained at the entrance to the room, had ducked back out into the hall.

Hawke thought about following them but joined Young at the line of computers instead, where she was already typing, fingers flying over the keys. “Venus flytrap,” she said. “Lured us right in here. Should have seen it coming. Your wife is pregnant?”

“How the hell…?”

Young nodded. “Educated guess,” she said. “We’re easy marks.”

“You’re pregnant?”

“I was,” Young said, without looking up. “Lost it in week ten. About a month ago. It was better that way. I’m not…” She shrugged. “Mommy material.”

“I… I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. He wasn’t exactly interested in being a father.” It came out hard, but her voice broke slightly on the last word. She tapped more keys, crashed the computer, waiting. “These terminals are running an unauthorized program. We have to stop it and reboot to get access to an outside line if we want to find out what’s going on.”

“If you gain root access—”

“It’s not going to be that easy.”

Hawke wondered how she knew that. He studied her in profile, the delicate features and doll-like quality of her frame, hair cropped short around her chin. What he had seen as an absence of emotion was… perhaps a bit more complicated. The shell she wore was more like cracked porcelain than concrete.

“Anne,” he said. “What do you mean, we were lured in? You think this was deliberate?”

The screen had come up blank. She was trying to crash the machine again and regain control, but it wasn’t responding. “I don’t know.”

“Come on,” he said. “You do know something, I can see that. We’re in trouble here. Talk to me.”

“You know how much of our lives can be hacked,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Medical records, bank accounts, text messages and e-mails and phone calls, computer hard drives, blogs. The most personal details. I don’t have to tell you this. Our weak spots are easy to find, right? It’s all available to anyone with the skills to get at them.”

“You think members of Anonymous did this?”

Young shrugged. “I’m not sure. Not yet.”

“Because I’ve got to say, that doesn’t make any sense. What’s so special about you and me, really? Why go to all that trouble for us? You really think Jim was right, that Eclipse is setting us up for something? This is some kind of damage control? That’s conspiracy theory bullshit. It’s not possible, not even for them.”

Even as he said it, something clicked in his head: the calls to action by Admiral Doe on Twitter, the protests being staged all over the city, bringing large groups of people to specific places. He remembered feeling like there had been some sort of pattern in the data he’d seen on the map, but the final answer kept eluding him. Had all of those people been prodded at their most vulnerable points, lured into some kind of spider’s web? Across the entire city of New York?

If so, for what possible reason?

That’s not possible to do on such a massive scale. We’re talking trillions of data points. How could anyone know everything about that many people?

Young wasn’t getting anywhere. “Let me try,” he said, and stepped up to another terminal. “I’ve got some skills of my own.”

“I don’t think—”

“Trust me for a minute.” He unplugged the power from the back, then plugged it in again, did a safe reboot with command prompt, named a batch file and opened it, trying to add new administrative and then root access to gain control of the system. Hawke felt light-headed, a little woozy, as if he’d had a few beers. The screen blurred and he had to blink to bring it back into focus. Strange. Maybe it was the aftermath of an adrenaline surge. Somewhere outside the morgue, he could hear a hollow booming sound.

He looked at Young and picked his next words carefully, probing gently around the edges of the truth like a tongue working at a sore tooth. “You worked for Eclipse, didn’t you? When Jim was there.”

At first, she seemed to ignore him; then she nodded once, short and fast. “I started as an intern in his office and stayed another six months as a junior engineer after he left. He offered me a position at Conn.ect. He was the reason I… Jim’s a brilliant man. I jumped at the chance to work with him again.”

Hawke was revising his earlier opinion of Young as someone who played by the rules. He thought of the phone Weller had given him still nestled in his left pocket. He’d forgotten about it in the aftermath of all that had happened since then. She was his mole, had smuggled this out. Or maybe not. Maybe she was up to something else.

Hawke had been making progress on the computer while she spoke. He didn’t have his regular tools with him, but he had a few tricks up his sleeve and he was good enough to get through. He’d installed an IDS sniffer program to log network activity and monitor intrusions before he shut down the Ethernet, cut it off from the outside, and now he worked through several debuggers. The computer seemed to come up clean.

“What was Eclipse working on, Anne? What do they want with Jim?”

“He swore me to secrecy. I signed confidentiality agreements; I did things that were illegal—”

“The world is burning. I think the time for worrying about who signed what is long gone. Why are they after him? What did he do?”

She hesitated again, then seemed to come to a decision. “It’s more like what they took from him. I’ll show you, if we can get access to outside.”

He reactivated the network jack. “Done,” he said.

She stared at him. “You’re kidding.”

“Like I said, I have some experience with this.”

“I won’t ask.” Young took over, bringing up a connection to a server. She hacked into a private repository of some kind. Documents popped up on-screen, marked as highly confidential. He leaned closer. Internal memos. Specs and code. Diagrams. A new kind of programming language. Patent documents, filed and pending.

“We stole these back from them,” she said. “The reason he founded Conn.ect was to develop security software that could find holes in the best networks and get access to their servers. We got into some, but couldn’t crack the last of them.”

“Jesus,” Hawke said. “What is this?”

“Evidence,” she said. “Stored on a secure remote server Jim set up. Thank God it’s still up and running. He was building a case to prove what they did with his baby.”

“His baby?”

She sighed. “Most programming still runs off simple ones and zeroes, binary code. Right?”

“Sure.”

“You can build the fastest operating system in the world, but it’s not capable of working the same way a brain can, with multiple paths, multiple choices in reasoning. It’s linear. Moravec and Kurzweil argued that the brain could be copied into software, that it can essentially be reproduced exactly. Some neural networks try to do that. But it’s still a simulation, the appearance of thought and perception, not the reality. Machines can’t learn on their own in the same way we can; they can’t be creative, make leaps of logic and discovery. They can’t feel, can’t imagine anything. They aren’t conscious, at least not in the way we define it.”

Hawke kept staring at the screen. He remembered the rumors he’d heard of Eclipse creating something based on quantum computing, but nobody he’d found had known anything more about it. The files were endless: Testing documents and reports, new hardware built to support it. Budgetary outlays and financial documents. And papers about government grants. Lots of them.

“Jim invented another approach, something that had been attempted for years. Adaptive intelligence based on human cognition. Algorithms that allowed for thought, for choice. It created an infinite number of paths, decision making based on multiple variables and learned behavior. But Eclipse patented everything without his 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:

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:

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.”