Day One

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

2:22 P.M.

“JONATHAN HAWKE?”

The two men in dark suits stood on the front stoop of Robin’s childhood home in Fair Lawn, the place he and Robin had moved into just after the wedding. Just for a couple of months, while we get our feet under us, Robin had said to him when they were discussing where they would live as they started their lives as husband and wife. My parents will set up the basement. There’s a bathroom down there; it’s private, almost like our own place. Her hands were caressing his chest, her naked body pressed against his. It was always hard to resist her in a state like that.

Hawke stared through the screen door at the men, his heart pounding so hard he thought they might see it, and tried to pretend he had just woken up from a nap.

“What can I do for you?” he said.

“Just a few questions.” The larger of the two stepped forward and stuck a badge up to the screen that read: Homeland Security Investigations and Special Agent. He had gray hair and eyes that never left Hawke’s face. “Five minutes of your time, please, to clear something up. It would be a big help.”

Thank God Robin wasn’t home. She had gone shopping for a crib with her mother at one of those outlet stores for yuppies, rooms full of shiny white furniture and rows of gleaming strollers. Robin’s father was there, though, puttering around somewhere in back where the house backed up on to the park, planting hostas in the shade of the big maple tree. Hawke would have to get these men out of the house quickly.

He nodded and stepped aside to let them in, leading them into the small living room with its couch and love seat and corner cabinet full of display plates and glass figurines. The dog groaned and slapped his tail on the floor, then laid his head back down, too old and fat to be bothered with getting up.

“Can I get you anything? Water?”

“We’d like to talk to you about the recent theft and leak of classified CIA documents to several news outlets,” the other special agent said. “Thought you might be able to point us in the right direction. We understand you know a few of the possible players, maybe shared some screen time with them, am I right?”

Hawke shrugged, trying not to swallow against the cotton coating his throat. “I really don’t know anything about that,” he said.

“But you read about it, right?” The larger one scratched his head, as if confused. “I mean, it’s national news. International, to be more accurate. I’d be shocked if they hadn’t heard the story in fucking Siberia. You know what I mean.”

“Sure.”

“And you’re an expert in computers,” the other one said, taking up the lead. “Some say a genius with them.”

“I’m a journalist. I work for the Times.”

“Sure,” the tall one said. “But your blog. I read it. Tried to, anyway. Over my head. You’re a technological genius, am I right? Seems like you might know where we should be looking.”

“You’re aware of the”—the other one pretended to reference notes on his handheld—“hacker group Anonymous? ‘We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.’ Quite the tagline.”

Hawke shrugged. “It’s just a bunch of kids messing around.”

“Well, these kids have taken down the servers of some of our largest corporations. Caused millions in lost revenue, hacked government networks all over the world. We’re hearing they were involved with the CIA hack attack, too.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Sure.” The tall one looked around the house, as if appreciating the ambiance. “Cute little place. Doesn’t look like your style, though. You been here long?”

“It’s my in-laws’ house. My wife grew up here.” Like they didn’t know.

The tall one nodded again. “More and more young people doing that these days. You’ve been married how long?”

“Five months. We’re starting a family. This is only temporary.” Hawke didn’t know why he’d said that.

“You probably wouldn’t want them to know we were here,” the other agent said, as if they were all friends conspiring to put together a surprise party. “Mind if we take a quick look at your computer? Standard procedure, just crossing the t’s. Faster we do it, faster we can go.”

“Don’t you need a warrant for that sort of thing?”

The tall man studied him for a long moment, the atmosphere between them suddenly going cold. He glanced at his partner. “We can do that,” he said. “If it’s necessary. But it complicates things, you understand. This is a courtesy visit. You cooperate, we’re out of your hair. Otherwise, we might have no choice but to think you’re hiding something.”

Hawke led them to the basement, watched with folded arms as they put on gloves and poked around his desk, checked the trash can, went through drawers and closets. As they went on, they grew more serious, and he got progressively more uncomfortable, as if witnessing his own funeral. He knew they wouldn’t find anything; he’d been careful whenever he had done anything that might have crossed the line, and all his communications with Rick had been through public terminals. Even Hawke’s cell calls were safe; he used Voice over IP, and the pulse was routed through enough servers and switchbacks to make it impossible for the best hacker to trace. But the feeling persisted, and when he thought of Robin coming home and finding this he felt the sweat trickle down the back of his neck.

The smaller agent went into a crouch to poke at the jumble of shoes at the bottom of Hawke’s closet, and his jacket opened up enough to expose the butt of a gun in a holster strapped to the man’s side.

When the tall one began bagging Hawke’s laptop, he stepped in. “Hold on a minute—”

“These things,” the agent said, shaking his head. “I can’t make heads or tails of them. They’re like little alien pods, you know? But we’ve got guys back in the lab who can go over this thoroughly, make sure you’re clean. It’s a supervised environment, better that way for everyone. We’ll return it safe and sound in a couple of days, max.”

“You got a problem with that?” The other agent had come up behind him, the sudden aggression unnerving. “Because an innocent man has nothing to worry about, you know?”

Hawke remembered the glimpse of the gun. “I need it for work.”

“We’ll have it right back to you, good as new. A couple of days.” The tall one finished sliding the laptop into the plastic Baggie. “That’s it, Frank. Let’s go grab some coffee.” He turned to Hawke, stuck out a hand. “Much appreciated, Mr. Hawke. We apologize for the inconvenience. Your name came up a couple of times….” He shrugged. “You know how it is. Covering our bases.”

He showed them to the door. They thanked him again and the tall one handed him a business card. “Your father,” he said, as if making an offhand remark. “He was a writer, too?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Just curious. His name came up with yours. Runs in the family, I guess. The writing, I mean. A gift for words, that’s a real talent.”

“If you say so.”

“He died kind of young, didn’t he?”

“My father was a drunk. We weren’t very close.”

The agent nodded. “Look, I want you to know, you’re not a suspect in this case,” he said. “But I think you might be able to help us track down the people responsible.”

“I don’t know what you mean. I told you, I’m a journalist for the Times. I know a lot of people. It’s my job.”

The tall one studied him for a long moment, then nodded. “Obstruction of justice carries a stiff penalty, Mr. Hawke. Give us a call if you remember anything.”

They went out to the gigantic SUV that sat at the curb, terribly out of place in the neat but modest suburban street. Most of the neighbors drove Hondas and Ford sedans.

When Hawke closed the door softly and turned back, Robin’s father was standing in the kitchen by the back door. “Something I should know?”

Hawke shook his head. “They got the wrong guy,” he said. “Misunderstanding. Comes with the territory, you know?”

“Hope so.” The man grabbed a beer from the fridge, cracked the tab and took a long drink. “Hotter in here than outside,” he said. “You should get some air, clear your head.”

When the back door slammed shut behind his father-in-law, Hawke fumbled for the phone in his pocket, his fingers trembling. His heart was thudding hard again, enough to make him weak and nauseous. He hadn’t done anything that could be traced back to him; they had nothing to tie him to the CIA hack, and even his link to Anonymous would be difficult to make stick. Unless Rick said something. Even then, there was no evidence. Hawke had been more than careful.

But the feeling in his stomach wouldn’t go away. As he went to the bay window and looked out to make sure the SUV was gone, he listened to the ringing on the other end, over and over.

Rick didn’t answer.

The low rattling sound Hawke had barely heard over the cries of the infant through the computer speakers came back to him; now he realized that the huge metal door had been descending, the noise neatly hidden.

Vasco went to the second set of interior doors that led to the main hospital, pushed on them, pounded his fists. Locked up tight.

They were shut inside like rats in a maze.

Hawke’s head spun and his legs threatened to give way. What Young had told him was washed away by the image he’d just seen on the screen. He could still hear Sarah Hanscomb or Price pounding on the loading-dock door, a booming sound like distant thunder. Another wave of dizziness and nausea hit him, and he couldn’t catch his breath. He tried to remember whether anything else was different in the video image from his apartment, anything he might use to reassure himself or give him some kind of clue to what happened, but the spatter of what might be blood against the wall overwhelmed him. He couldn’t think straight, couldn’t seem to cut through this buzzing that was coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. The world was receding rapidly, his vision narrowing to a point as darkness closed in.

The lines of text had disappeared from the monitors. Young was still standing with her hand outstretched, her head nodding now, as if she were falling asleep standing up. The screens changed again. For a moment Hawke couldn’t make sense of it, and then he realized he was looking at himself standing in the morgue next to Young, the two of them mirrored again and again across the room.

A fresh pang of nausea washed over him, along with louder warning bells, but he couldn’t seem to focus on them. Do something. The video footage was being shot from above. He glanced up and found the camera secured to the corner near the ceiling, watched it pan slightly as it zoomed in on his face. The image froze like a snapshot and code began to stream across the monitors once again, wiping it away. No, not code, exactly; there were letters and numbers mixed together. Hawke recognized his own bank account number, address, family names and Social Security number within it.

Fresh adrenaline flooded his system, and this time it brought rage along with it. Was it Rick? No, he wouldn’t do this. That seemed clear, even if everything else was rapidly disappearing into the fog that was settling over Hawke’s brain.

Them. Eclipse. That was what both Weller and Young had said. Someone in the company was stalking them and causing this disaster, for reasons Hawke still couldn’t quite understand. But they knew so much about him, his movements, his pressure points. How was that possible? He knew he wasn’t thinking straight, but he couldn’t help it. How dare you? You son of a bitch. Stay away from me and my family. He gave in to the feeling, let it lift him back up and give him strength. He picked up a stool that had been tucked under the metal table and threw it at the camera. The stool careened off the wall and knocked the camera loose, crashing down against a dissecting table and sending a tray flipping end over end to clatter on the tile.

The adrenaline rush was gone as quickly as it had arrived, leaving Hawke drained and woozy. He bent over, panting, hands on his knees, like Vasco had done. Vasco was now slumped on his side, head leaning against the locked interior doors. He seemed to be breathing, but slowly, his mouth slightly open.

The world bowed in and out like a funhouse mirror. Hawke thought he saw a line of code run right off the closest screen and onto another, bleeding and oozing across the surface like blood. For a moment, a shadowy figure congealed from nothingness, hovered at the edge of his sight, gone before he had the chance to make out anything else.

A third wave of dizziness washed over him, and he closed his eyes and fought down the urge to be sick. Images played through his mind like old films: his father’s woodworking tools sitting abandoned in the basement after his death; the faces of the CIA agents who had come to visit Hawke the day Rick had been arrested, twisted into some kind of ghouls without eyes, cheeks flushed pink; Thomas observing an ant climbing across a sun-dappled patch of floor, cocking his head like a curious puppy before tapping it, changing its direction and finally crushing it under his thumb, watching it twist and flip, anchored in place by the violence. Why it do that, Daddy?

They had been anchored in place now. This was a room for the dead. Hawke blinked. The refrigerated steel lockers loomed behind him, and he imagined their doors slowly swinging free, desiccated fingers clutching the sides of the opening as the things inside clawed their way out.

A room for the dead.

The vision was so vivid, Hawke almost believed it was happening. He had made the mistake once of watching an Al Qaeda execution video online, black-hooded executioners sawing at a man’s neck, and the true horror hadn’t been the images on-screen but the idea of what might have gone through the victim’s mind as he realized there would be no last-minute rescue. Hawke felt like that now: no escape from this place. Something about being lured in here, the deliberate nature of it, like a cat with a mouse: trapped by a monster without pity. Ants flipping and twisting in agony. The way a toddler played with something, discovering that others experienced pain, too. You weren’t born with empathy and compassion; you had to learn it.

Hawke nearly had something important in his grasp. The nurse in the hallway and the others in here, all dead without a mark on any of them. But the truth eluded him, no matter how hard he tried to grab it.

That acrid, rotten smell from the hallway was in the air again. He studied the walls, the equipment stacked neatly to one side, as if someone had tried to build a barrier against nothing; and then he settled upon two blue tanks sitting on the floor, silver valve at the top and a flexible tube looped around them.

Someone had brought these in here. A thought flickered through his wavering consciousness. Oxygen. That blue tank was oxygen, and oxygen was life. Whoever was stalking them, they couldn’t account for his creativity, resourcefulness, everything that makes us human. He had to outmaneuver them somehow, find ways to surprise them.

Next to him, Anne Young threw up across the tile, yellow bile spattering as she fell hard to her knees. It reminded him of the night Thomas had gotten sick for the first time, less than two years old, crying out in terror as Hawke had made his bleary-eyed way through the dark to his son’s room. Thomas was sitting up in bed with his lion, fever-wet hair plastered to his forehead, and as Hawke had sat on Thomas’s bed to console him the boy had leaned over, eyes wide and bewildered, and vomited into Hawke’s cupped hands.

Thomas had learned something then, too. His body could betray him, and he could lose control of it. The memory of his son burned Hawke like fire. It was too much. He was bone tired, so utterly exhausted he could just lie down right there on the floor and go to sleep.

But he had to get those tanks.

Wading through his own dream, Hawke began to walk across the room. The walls receded, stretching out to a distant point. His stomach clenched, unclenched, and he stumbled, bringing himself up short when he touched a tank. He struggled to twist the valve on top until he heard the hiss of air, then managed to grab the plastic tube and bring the mask to his mouth.

He inhaled deeply, took another long breath, then another. The spinning settled back a step as the visions faded and his thoughts began to clear.

Hawke picked up the second tank and brought it to Young, wiped the vomit off her mouth before forcing her head forward and clamping the mask to her face. His legs still trembled and his head had begun to pound, the nausea churning beneath the surface, but he could move without toppling over. He secured the mask to Young’s face with the elastic band and watched her breathe in deeply.

Hawke slumped against the wall, closing his eyes for a minute. Just a little rest. He wasn’t sure how long it lasted. When he turned around, Young was looking at him, more alert now, recognition in her eyes. She knew; he could almost hear her voice. Carbon monoxide is being pumped through the air circulation system. They had been poisoned. Someone had cut off the venting of the boilers in the basement or found some other way to bring in the deadly gas. The building was a giant gas chamber.

He tried to remember what he knew of carbon monoxide, but it wouldn’t come; he could recall only that it bound to hemoglobin in the blood. But he was feeling better already, and they had been breathing it for less than an hour, which had to give them a fighting chance.

Young had already gotten to her feet and moved unsteadily to where Vasco had slumped against the doors. She gave him a few breaths from her mask and held his mouth and nose closed while she took a hit off the cylinder. When Vasco opened his eyes and began to struggle, she gave the mask to him again and said something too faint for Hawke to make out.

Vasco was getting up with Young’s help, leaning against the wall as Hawke rushed to the loading dock. Hanscomb was there; she had stopped hammering at the steel door, and the silence settled over everything like a thick blanket, broken only by Hawke’s own wheezing through the plastic mask and the soft hiss of oxygen. The light from the hall touched the shapes of the packing skids and the ambulance as he descended the short stairs to where Hanscomb had fallen.

Hawke didn’t see Price anywhere.

Hanscomb’s hand was still skittering up and down the metal like a dying spider, her nails making quiet scratching sounds. When he touched her, she jerked away, mumbling, but he got her arm around his shoulders while clutching the tank to his side and managed to lift her up by the waist, sharing the mask as he dragged her back with him toward the light of the hallway.

Get her to the others, find more oxygen and get out.

As he neared the steps, the ambulance’s engine growled to life.

Hanscomb let out a groan of fear. Hawke turned them both around; maybe it was Price. The machine idled, lights off, its interior filled with shadows. The passenger window was halfway open, and he couldn’t remember if it had been that way before. Was someone sitting there, motionless? For a moment he thought so, but when he approached slowly, holding the tank up like a weapon, Hanscomb leaning against him for support, he found the twin captain’s chairs empty.

There were no keys in the ignition.

Abruptly the engine switched off again. They were left with the tick of hot metal as Hanscomb’s head lolled sideways against his own.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

2:34 P.M.

ALTHOUGH HE HAD HIS SUSPICIONS, Hawke had little time to question the ambulance starting up by itself. There were five of them and two oxygen tanks, and time was running out. But ambulances might carry portable emergency oxygen tanks like the ones he had found in the morgue. It was worth a look.

He went around to the back and opened the door. The interior light came on, illuminating a space cluttered with medical equipment, EMT bags, drawers, a padded bench and a stretcher. Nobody inside; he wasn’t sure what he had expected. He left the tank with Hanscomb and climbed up, holding his breath. There was a mask hanging on the wall, the line snaking down through a hole in the cabinet. He opened the door and saw it connected to a larger machine to help people breathe. No way to remove it.

His body was beginning to protest the lack of air. He turned on the machine but couldn’t get it to run. He rummaged through the rest of the drawers and turned to the bench. Beneath it, he found a storage cavity with a portable tank inside.

His chest had begun to ache again. When he was finally able to get the mask fixed to his face, breathing was like heaven. The oxygen spread through him like warm fire, prickling his skin, sharpening his senses.

As he climbed back out of the ambulance, a voice crackled to life from the front. A radio in the driver’s cabin, the kind used to call in emergencies, was turned up loud enough to echo through the loading dock. Some kind of police dispatcher was putting out an all-points bulletin. The dispatcher described a suspect wanted in connection with the day’s terrorist attacks: five ten and 180 pounds, dirty blond hair, blue eyes. The suspect might be traveling with three companions, the dispatcher said, two women and another man. The woman’s voice was flat and oddly familiar. Hawke knew who she was describing long before she said his name.

“Jonathan Hawke is wanted in connection with the terrorist group Anonymous… bombing at Seventy-eighth Street and Second Avenue this morning… armed and extremely dangerous….”

Jesus Christ. Weller had been right; the entire New York City police force would be looking for them. Don’t think about that. Keep your mind away from it. Focus on getting out. He pulled Hanscomb up the steps to the wide hallway, pausing to let her take in some more deep gulps of air, and found Vasco and Young at the doors to the morgue. Vasco was cursing through the mask as Young shared her tank with him.

“Where’s Price?” Hawke asked.

Young shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said.

Hawke left Hanscomb with them, took the hallway branching to the right and followed it to another set of exterior doors, the ones Vasco had checked before they entered the loading dock. Price was on the floor, motionless. Hawke turned the man over and checked his chest; he was still breathing.

The reinforced glass doors were still locked. He peered out at the street, just steps away. But the locking mechanism was electronic and he could find no way to release it.

He rattled the handles, slammed his fist into the upper panel of glass. Nothing; he might as well have been punching stone. He took a step back, wound up with the oxygen tank like a batter and swung it with all his strength, low from the knees and up in an arc, connecting with the lower panel with a shuddering thud.

The tank rebounded hard, ripping the mask from his face and spinning him halfway around. When he turned back, the glass was webbed with cracks. He kicked at it, managing to separate the top part from the frame, kicked again until the entire sheet fell out onto the sidewalk.

Air wafted through the hole, bringing with it the scent of oil and asphalt and smoke. After the sour, dead air of Lenox, it might have been the best thing he had ever smelled. The others had heard the noise and joined him, and they all crouched and slipped through the opening, Vasco pulling Price’s unconscious body with him.

Hawke stood on the sidewalk, blinking in the sunlight. Hanscomb crouched beside Price, sharing her oxygen with him. He moaned and began to stir. Sirens shrieked in the distance, along with what sounded like the chatter of automatic weapons that raised the gooseflesh on Hawke’s arms.

“I heard the radio,” Vasco said. He breathed in and handed the mask to Young. “What the fuck did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything. I don’t know what that was all about.”

“The hell you don’t,” Vasco said. He took another breath of oxygen. “Weller was right, we are on the most wanted list, and there’s gotta be a good reason for it. So tell me: what did you do?”

Hawke got the feeling that if the man hadn’t been so weak from the gas, he might have taken a swing at him. Hawke’s heart was hammering in his chest. Hanscomb was staring at him like she might at a spider that had crawled out of her shower drain. “I knew some people years ago,” he said. “They were involved with the hacker group Anonymous. We did a few things I regret. But I haven’t been a part of that since my son was born.”

Hawke didn’t know why he had said that, or felt the need to explain himself at all. But the truth was, he was still a hacker. There was the professor’s e-mail account, for one, and plenty of other questionable examples as well, if he was honest with himself. It was part of his job, part of his life, as natural as breathing. But what he had done lately wasn’t associated with Anonymous and wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near this level of scrutiny. Maybe the authorities were going after anyone with a connection to the group? But then why single him out by name? There had to be hundreds of people in New York with closer ties and far worse records.

No, this had something to do with Eclipse, and Jane Doe. Admiral Doe. Jesus. Was he really buying into this? That some kind of intelligent program was trying to get him killed?

“I’m being set up,” Hawke said. “We all are. Jim was right about that, too.” He glanced at Young. “But the bottom line is, the entire NYPD is going to be looking for us.”

“The hell with that,” Vasco said. His face was red with anger. “I’m gonna give myself up to the first cop I see and point them your way—”

“Bad idea,” Hawke said. “If I’m right and you go to them now, they’re going to shoot you on sight. I saw them do it.”

“How do I know what you saw? I’m supposed to take your word for it?”

“It’s true,” Young said. “We’re all implicated. And we’re all at risk. It doesn’t matter whether we’re innocent or not.” Her nostrils flared slightly as she breathed oxygen in, handed the mask back. Hawke thought of the woman on the screen, how Young had reached out to touch the image with a shaky hand, the only thing that revealed any kind of emotional connection. A porcelain shell. Young had her own secrets; he just wasn’t sure what they were yet.

“We sure as hell can’t stay here,” Vasco said. “Where’s the next checkpoint?”

“Checkpoints aren’t exactly working out for us,” Hawke said. “Let’s think for a second—”

“Yeah? You were the one who suggested this place,” Vasco said. “How do we know you didn’t just make it up? Sarah? You remember them saying ‘Lenox Hospital’ on the radio?”

“I…” Hanscomb shook her head. “I can’t think; I don’t know. I heard ‘Grand Central’; I remember that.”

“So we go to Grand Central—”

“It’ll be crawling with cops,” Hawke said.

“Like I said before, they can’t just kill us in front of everyone like dogs. We’ll get the chance to turn ourselves in, to explain. Those of us who are innocent.” Vasco looked at them all in turn, his hostile gaze lingering on Hawke’s face. “We stick to the goddamn plan.”

Hawke rubbed at the headache that had worked its way like an ice pick into his skull. “It’s too dangerous to go that far on the streets.”

“You can protect us,” Hanscomb said, looking at Vasco, hope lightening her voice. “We can find a weapon… I don’t know, a gun?”

Price had gotten to his feet, still sharing Hanscomb’s oxygen. “A gun’s going to be tough to find,” he said.

Vasco was pacing now, short strides back and forth. “Then we go underground,” he said. “We take the subway tunnels. The trains aren’t running; it’s a direct route and keeps us under cover. There’s a station entrance on the other side of the building on Lexington. We could follow that line right to Grand Central.”

Or to the tunnel, and New Jersey. It wasn’t a bad idea. Hawke thought about the ride into the city, the PATH train rumbling through the dark under millions of tons of black water. There were fewer cameras in the tunnels, more places to hide. It would be harder to track them.

According to Hanscomb, the bridges were all out. So this was his only straight shot home.

The chirp of a siren came from Park Avenue. An NYPD squad car screeched hard around the corner, less than a hundred feet away. Hawke looked up, saw a security camera pointed right at them from a nearby light post. He put down the oxygen tank as the car came to a shuddering stop behind a jam of cars, tires squealing. The doors flew open and two cops jumped out, pointing guns at them.

Vasco took off running with Young, tossing their oxygen tank aside. Hanscomb ditched her tank, too, but she was slower, weaker, and she stumbled before Hawke turned back and helped her to her feet. Price kept behind them as Hawke stayed with her, keeping her up as they dodged through three more cars and around a construction Dumpster. Someone shouted out to stop before a soft clap and a chunk of bark from the tree about three feet to Hawke’s left exploded, a puff of concrete drifting from the building nearby as the twang of the bullet reached him a second later. Another shot rang out; this time, it was accompanied by a grunt and the sound of a body falling.

Hanscomb swerved hard right, breaking Hawke’s grasp and catching her thigh on the bumper of a Nissan, spinning wildly before regaining her balance. Hawke turned to see Price lying in a twisted heap on the ground halfway between them and the hospital. Blood was bubbling from a wound in his back.

Hanscomb screamed as another bullet hit Price in the lower back and his body jerked. The cop who had fired on Price pointed his gun at Hawke. He was less than one hundred feet away. Hawke grabbed Hanscomb’s hand and turned to run again.

The sound of pounding feet came behind them. The length of time to reach the corner seemed interminable. It was hard to breathe. Hawke used to have a repeating dream of facing a man with a knife, knowing the man was going to stab him, unable to move, unable to avoid the killing blow. This was like that. The seconds ticked on forever. They were being shot at. Price had been killed. It was impossible to believe. There was nowhere to hide, no place to go.

A bullet shattered the rear window of the Nissan as Hawke yanked Hanscomb around the corner just in time to see Young disappearing around 77th Street. There was no cover here, but the block was thankfully short. As he ran, he kept waiting for the shot that would hit him between his shoulder blades like Price and send him spinning to the pavement in a gore-streaked heap, breathing his last, shuddering breath.

It didn’t come. As they reached 77th and the subway entrance loomed dark and silent at their feet, he heard another shout and risked a look back. Their pursuers hadn’t yet come around the corner of Lexington Avenue; the street was empty. With luck, the cops would think Hawke and Hanscomb had kept going and they could disappear belowground like Vasco had hoped. Unless they follow us down, and we’re trapped in the dark.

But Hawke didn’t have time for second guesses, because Hanscomb was pulling him to the steps and into the tunnels, away from the light and into the shadows.

CHAPTER TWENTY

2:50 P.M.

THEY HESITATED AT THE FOOT of the steps for a few precious seconds, out of sight from above, catching their breath as the familiar hot, metallic and oily smell of the subway wafted over them. The power was out. There were a few emergency lights active, but the gloom and relative silence were unsettling.

A distant, low moan that sounded half-mechanical and half-human drifted up to them from somewhere below. Hawke imagined a hybrid being birthed down there in the dark, an offspring of the day’s events, fleshy limbs from piles of the dead weaved into the solid steel underpinnings of a machine. He thought of the people he had seen on the screens in the morgue, pacing in their cages. The absence of other human beings around them was beyond all comprehension. Millions of people lived in this city, and even more swelled the ranks during the day, commuters and protestors and contract workers and emergency responders. Where had they all gone?

Hanscomb was in shock. She clutched Hawke’s hand, breathing fast and shallow, panting. “I need to wake up,” she whispered, and he got the feeling she was talking more to herself than to him. “They killed him! Oh my God. This is a nightmare, isn’t it? It can’t be real.”

“It’s real. I’m sorry.”

“Are you really a part of this thing? Is that why the police are shooting at us?”

“No,” he said. “I’m not. But Jim was right. Someone wants them to think so.”

“But you said you were involved with those hackers before—”

“I was just a stupid kid,” he said. “I made some mistakes. But they were for good reasons. I would never be involved in something like this, Sarah. I promise you. I have a son, a three-year-old boy. I have a wife; she’s pregnant.”

“You tell me the truth,” Sarah said. She looked at him in the shadows. Her eyes looked wet. “You tell me one more time you had nothing to do with this, and I’ll believe you.”

He thought about telling her about the documents he’d seen and everything Young had said back in the morgue, but he didn’t think Sarah could handle it. Even the thought of giving voice to the idea seemed crazy. “It’s true. I swear. I’m a journalist. I was working on a story in the city. Wrong place, wrong time. That’s all.”

She sighed, and it seemed to take more years out of her. “I’ve never been in trouble with the law,” she said. “I… I wouldn’t have made it back there if…”

Hawke felt the bones of her fingers, light as a bird and just as fragile, an old woman’s grip. He shook his head. She was wheezing softly, her face haggard in the dark.

They waited, pressed tight against the grimy, tiled wall, but no one came after them and they took the hallway deeper inside. A clinking sound drew Hawke’s attention. Vasco was rummaging through the attendant’s booth. A moment later, Vasco straightened and a light flicked on, a flashlight beam playing over a deserted entryway, arrow-shaped graffiti sprayed in a corner, the familiar turnstile access to the platform below the entry sign and symbols for each line, a dented periodical box half-tilted and empty, its plastic cover dangling from one hinge like a loose tooth.

The light washed over Anne Young, who was standing absolutely still, arms folded across her chest like a petulant child. Tears were streaming down her face, but she didn’t make a sound, didn’t even blink before the light left her in darkness once again.

Abruptly the beam’s glare found Hawke’s face and remained there. He put up an arm, blinking against the light. “Knock it off,” he said.

Vasco kept the beam on him. “The fugitive,” he said. “After what happened up there, I guess we’ve got the answer to whether they’ll shoot first and ask questions later. Did you bring them right to us?”

“At least he stayed back to help me,” Hanscomb said, the words spat from her mouth as if she’d tasted something rotten. “Which is more than I can say for you.”

“Touchy,” Vasco said. “Maybe he was using you as a human shield.” He let the beam play down Hawke’s body to his feet, then flicked it to Hanscomb’s face. “Where’s Price?”

“He’s dead,” Hanscomb said. “They shot him.”

“And you got away,” Vasco said, flicking the light at Hawke again. “How convenient.”

Hawke felt blood rush to his face. “You son of a bitch—”

“Take it easy, hero,” Vasco said. “Just pointing out the obvious. The two of you should find your own way out of here, maybe. Safer for me.”

“I don’t think so,” Hawke said. “You’ve got the flashlight. Besides, you’ve got so much experience in dangerous situations, right? Maybe you should tell us what the best strategy is for a war like this.”

“Look,” Vasco said, taking a step closer in a vaguely threatening way that Hawke didn’t like. “I don’t give a shit whether they know the truth or not.” He took another step, keeping the beam on them. “I wasn’t in the army,” he said. “Okay? Shocker. They didn’t like my attitude. I told you what you wanted to hear back there at the temple. Who cares? You were hysterical and about to go off the rails.”

Hanscomb didn’t seem to react at first. The flashlight showed a tightening around the eyes, a firming of the mouth. “I don’t like being lied to.”

“Sue me. I got you this far, and we’re alive. You think he hasn’t lied to you, too? He’s lied to all of us.”

“I haven’t lied about a damn thing. You ran off and left one of us to get shot in the back. Some leader.”

Vasco waved the light toward the stairs up to the street, muscles in his arm standing out like ropes. “Fuck you. Anytime you don’t like my plan, there’s the door. But if you want to stay with me, just do what I say. Now we better keep moving, don’t you think? Before V for Vendetta here brings the heat down on our heads.”

He turned and vaulted one of the turnstiles, the light bobbing and flashing in the shadows beyond. “You coming or not?”

Hawke went over to Young, who hadn’t moved. Her wet face glistened in the dark like something polished. “We have to keep going,” he said, and maybe it came out harsher than he’d intended. “One of us is dead. There’s nothing more for us up there. Or maybe it’s something else you’re frightened of. You want to tell me exactly what they want with us? Why they trapped us in that hospital?”

Young shook her head. He could barely see her at all now as the flashlight retreated. When he tried to touch her arm, she jerked away. “Don’t,” she said. But she followed him over the turnstiles and after the light that bobbed and swayed beyond like a beacon flashing a warning.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

3:05 P.M.

A SECOND FLIGHT OF WIDE STEPS brought them to the next level, uptown and downtown tracks side by side beyond a long, narrow platform spaced with support columns and holding old benches. A few more emergency lights dotted the ceiling, but the glow barely cut through the gloom. Normally this stop was well lit, but now it was dark and silent, the vast warren of tunnels sensed rather than seen. Hawke had been here just a few short hours before and it had been bustling with activity, hundreds of people streaming in and out and going about their daily lives, but that seemed like a lifetime ago, all that had come since like a nightmare he couldn’t escape.

Price was dead. It could have been any of them. And Vasco didn’t even seem to care.

The group stayed close to one another as they approached the tunnel. Vasco played the flashlight around the platform and peered over the edge of the drop to the tracks. A noise like a bird’s wings made him swing the flashlight beam quickly back to find a scrap of newspaper that fluttered against a bench. The draft brought the scent of more hot grease and ozone and what might have been another moan, but Hawke couldn’t be sure. Fear prickled his skin. It was like the faint call of a whale in the deep.

“It’s a straight shot,” Vasco said, pointing the light along the tunnel toward downtown. His voice echoed through the emptiness of the platform. “Trains aren’t running, so there’s no danger. Might not be the most pleasant way to go, but it’ll bring us right to Grand Central.”

“And the Financial District?” Hanscomb said. “My husband’s building is at Two Hundred West Street.”

“You could follow the number four tracks to Bowling Green,” Vasco said. “Then go to the water. It’s a much longer walk, though.” The flashlight made it hard to see his face. “He’s dead, you know that, right? Even if he’s not, how are you going to find him? And what are you gonna do even if you actually make it down there?”

“Don’t you say that,” Hanscomb said. She was trembling. “Don’t you dare.”

“What’s your husband’s name, Sarah?” Hawke said.

“Harold,” she said. “They called him Harry, but I never did. It was always Harold.”

Past tense. Hanscomb’s lips were white as she pressed them together. She was on the edge of collapse. Hawke wanted her to focus, wanted to give her something that built her strength and bound them. “I’ve got a son; I think I told you. Another baby on the way. You have kids?”

“Two,” she said. A bittersweet smile touched her face. “They’re both in college now. Cliché, isn’t it? House in the suburbs, Wall Street yuppie husband, manicures and yoga and afternoon cocktails while the kids were at dance and lacrosse practice. I used to drive a minivan before the Cadillac. That was a gift from my husband, supposed to mark the transition when Jean went off to school.”

“Jean?”

“My youngest. She’s at Smith. Taylor is in his senior year at USC.” She covered her mouth with a hand. Her face was ashen, hollow, as if collapsing upon itself. “You don’t think this has spread beyond New York, do you? They aren’t…” She couldn’t seem to go on.

“I’m sure they’re fine,” he said. He touched her arm, felt her shaking. “Which is why we need to focus on getting ourselves out of the city. They’re going to be worried about you.”

She nodded, bright red spots of color blooming in her cheeks. “Jean’s so nervous, always wanting to know the door’s locked or I’m driving the speed limit. She’ll drive Taylor nuts with this. He…” She paused, swallowed, shaking, and didn’t speak again. Hawke was ashamed. Asking her about her kids had been a mistake. Hanscomb had been little more than an irritating distraction to him since the moment she had crashed the SUV, but she had a life and a family like anyone else. She had kept her mind occupied with her husband’s plight, but that only masked the real terror. This façade she had built around herself was about to come crashing down, and Hawke saw all the pain waiting behind it.

He felt his own panic begin to creep closer to the surface, thinking of Robin’s scream, of the blood spattered across the wall. He fought it back and touched the light worm of scar across the last knuckle of his pinkie. His mother always said he had a knack for staying calm under pressure; when he was eight, he had caught the finger in a car door and it was nearly severed. She liked to tell people how he had simply clutched it to his shirt and said, I need to go to the doctor, as if he were commenting on the weather while blood pumped like a fountain down his shirt. And the night his father died, Hawke had driven to the hospital, where he’d found the man slumped with eyes half-open, mouth slack, having suffered a stroke due to complications of his alcoholism. Hawke had sensed something irreversibly wrong as he sat on the edge of the bed; one pupil was dilated, the other a pinprick of black. Even though the doctors explained that his father was brain-dead and couldn’t hear him, he held the old man’s calloused hand as they shut off the machines, as his chest hitched and sighed, and told him to let go, that it would be over soon. It was the last time he would see his dad before the funeral, and he never shed a tear.

As a child, he had been scared of death. But he didn’t feel that way anymore. He was numb to it for himself; it would come eventually whether he was ready or not. But he was terrified for Thomas. The thought of his boy huddled somewhere, crying for his daddy, punched the air from his chest.

Vasco had maneuvered his legs over the side of the platform, and now he dropped to the tracks with a grunt, the flashlight beam flickering before coming back strong. “We’re wasting time,” he called from below. “Long walk ahead of us.”

Hawke went over the edge next, and helped Hanscomb and Young down. “Watch the third rail,” he said. “We don’t know for sure if the power’s totally out.”

Vasco played the light along the brightly polished silver rail, raised a few inches above the track bed. “You never hear of a rat getting fried down here,” he said absently, as if he felt the need to say something while his mind was somewhere else. “You know why? Because they’re smart. They go underneath it, or they jump up on it and then jump down. They never make contact while standing on the ground. No way to complete the circuit.”

Nobody answered him. They stood in the hot, suffocating darkness for a moment, gathering their strength. The tunnel was terrifying and damp, the walls seeming to close in on them. There were no emergency lights on down here, and the blackness ate the flashlight beam like a ravenous ghost. Vasco flicked the light up the tunnel. Up where the track curved away, a train sat like a hulking shadow, motionless and dead. The light barely picked it up at all, just a shape and glint before the darkness dissolved everything. Hawke thought he heard something, muffled and unsettling like the moan he’d heard earlier, and he could make out the conductor’s glass window like a milky eye staring at them. But nothing moved; all was still and cold.

Vasco turned back, toward Grand Central. The tunnel was empty that way, running to a point before the light was swallowed up completely. Things scuttled out of sight, rats or something else unseen and better left alone. Hawke still felt the effects of the carbon monoxide from the hospital in his trembling legs, but the oxygen he’d taken in had helped banish the nausea and dreamlike visions. He remembered the images of the dead scratching at the walls of their refrigerated lockers, the shadowy shape that had appeared at the edge of his sight.

It crossed Hawke’s mind that they were all probably still in shock, running on autopilot, and sooner or later they would have to pay for that. There were toxins still running through their veins; they had witnessed unspeakable violence and gruesome deaths and everything about the world that they had known and come to trust had been torn away. Now they were down in the dark and being hunted. He wanted to believe they were like the rats, too smart to put their paws on the rail, but he wasn’t sure. He wondered if they would reach a point where they would simply give up, like deer going down under the attack of wolves, glassy-eyed and exposing their throats for the kill.

Vasco started forward, stepping carefully along the gap between the two rails on their side, staying close to the wall of the tunnel as if it might afford some protection. The rest of them kept near the flashlight beam, Hanscomb right behind Vasco, Young and Hawke bringing up the rear. Hawke had to watch where Vasco stepped and remember to tread carefully as the darkness closed in around him and they left the faint glow of the platform’s emergency lights behind. He didn’t want to lose his footing. He felt the panic creeping up on him again like slow-moving ice, different than it had before, and he fought it back, afraid that it would overwhelm him and send him running headlong through the dark.

The group moved on without speaking until Vasco stopped and let the light move slowly over the walls, revealing a jagged crack that ran from floor to ceiling and chunks of concrete sprinkled across the tracks below. Dust sifted down from above like sand trickling through an hourglass. The tracks seemed intact, but had the structural integrity of the tunnel been damaged? Could it come down upon their heads? And then Hawke had a much more terrifying thought: what if there was more gas leaking even now into these cavities, slowly filling them like a toxic cloud just waiting for ignition?

We’d smell it, he thought. Natural gas wasn’t like carbon monoxide; the manufacturers added an odor so you knew it was around. There was nothing in the air now except the metallic scent of the tracks and the sour stench of garbage, no familiar skunk scent. And yet he couldn’t get the image of a gigantic fireball coming at them up the tunnel out of his mind, all of them trapped with nowhere to run.

Noises drifted from back the way they had come, a distant sound of something breaking, perhaps. It was difficult to tell. This was a bad idea, coming down here. Grand Central was a bad idea, too. It was like heading straight into the hornet’s nest. And for what? Much better to quietly escape the city, find a way out under cover of darkness, let cooler heads prevail before trying to unwind the cord that bound them to this mess. And why were they staying together? It seemed like the vestiges of an idea that had run its course, and yet none of them could think of anything else, so they kept moving. He should just leave them here, drop back softly and then away into the black. It would be better for all of them if he was the one being hunted by the police. Better than putting them all at risk.

Except he had no light, no way to see. He had to keep going with Vasco and the flashlight, underground, until they reached Grand Central. And then Hawke could take the flashlight and fade away. The bridges were out, but maybe not the tunnels. Follow the tunnels home. His heart ached for his wife and son. Not knowing what was happening made Hawke’s blood burn, his mind going over the images he’d seen on-screen again and again, torturing him. Blood and screams. His little boy’s serious face and ruddy cheeks, the smell of his hair, the way he had trouble pronouncing his r’s when he was tired. Family bed in the early mornings on the weekends, when Thomas would still allow them to cuddle him, wrapped between them in a cocoon of blankets and warm limbs. And Robin, her swollen belly still little more than a bump on her slim frame. My doctor said rest as much as possible, keep off my feet. She was called “at risk” for complications, more bleeding. This pregnancy would be harder, she’d developed the hematoma, and what had Hawke done? Left her alone with Thomas nearly every day for the past two weeks, because he had a lead on a new story that would allow him to climb out of the hole he’d dug for himself. They couldn’t afford help and her parents were no longer an option in his mind, and so he’d left her vulnerable, where Lowry could pounce.

Hawke realized he had clenched his teeth so hard that his jaw was aching. The need for his family made him want to rip out his own heart. He wished he’d never left the apartment that morning and had remained behind instead, touched Robin’s face again, taken up the unspoken invitation to talk. He wiped his eyes in the dark. He knew his thoughts were wandering, flitting from one thing to another, shock settling deeper. He couldn’t stand it much longer; he knew he was going to snap, and when he did there would be no turning back.

Vasco had skirted the damage, and they continued down the tracks. He was talking quietly to Hanscomb, but Hawke couldn’t make out what they were saying. He had to think, had to face what was really going on. The story was there in front of him now, jigsaw pieces ready to be placed, and it was even bigger than he’d ever thought. He just had to decide if he trusted Young. But he’d seen the documents with his own eyes, at least in passing, and what would be the point of faking them? It didn’t make any sense.

Hawke went back to the beginning, separating everything into mental note cards, rearranging them to fit the right pattern. How had it begun? With the helicopter going down? No, earlier than that, of course. There were reports of strange incidents and accidents on TV even before communications became sporadic, unreliable. Bradbury (that smoking ruin with blackened fingers) had reported huge spikes in Internet traffic, and Hawke had witnessed things himself that he couldn’t explain: the way the message board had rewritten itself, even the damn coffeemaker that had scalded him. Before that, there had been other signs of something going wrong in the world. His ice-cold shower, the electric razor nicking him, flickering lights, the coffee machine misbehaving, the elevator being out. Or was he beginning to associate random data points into a pattern?

Jane Doe. Admiral Doe. It was impossible to believe. Let’s say Weller has a breakthrough of epic proportions, a new type of artificial intelligence, and Eclipse’s board steals it from him, just like they stole his work on energy sharing among networked devices. They push him out, thumb their noses at him, and he’s helpless to stop them. So he vows to get even. Founds a start-up company and assembles a team focused on network security. The team looks for the weak points in Eclipse’s network fence, thinking they’re going to help build a stronger one, when Weller’s real goal is to find the hole that will let him in.

All that made some sense, if you bought the original concept. But why go through all that trouble just to gather evidence of Eclipse’s betrayal? And how had that led to everything that had happened today? Was Eclipse really that powerful, that capable, that they would be able to orchestrate a plot to hunt down Weller and pin this destruction on him? Or had Weller set it off himself?

Hawke thought back to the online digging he’d done that morning about Admiral Doe, after the conversation with Rick and the strange behavior of the message board. It seemed like a lifetime ago when he had plotted the protest locations on the map, but he tried to remember what he had seen there. The calls to action that had been tweeted by Admiral Doe had reminded him of something, some thread of a connection. The pattern that had eluded him suddenly snapped into place, a ghost image from an earlier project, the one that had mapped and predicted areas that would be hit the hardest when Hurricane Sandy made landfall. Every area marked for a protest today had been a red zone for Sandy; these were the places in the city that were the most vulnerable during a disaster, for various reasons that his algorithm had picked up on. Places where the combination of distance from emergency services, escape routes, clustering of open space and buildings, narrow streets, geographical low points or other reasons made them particularly dangerous.

Or, in this case, targets.

Lured into a spider’s web. Hawke had been close to seeing it earlier, but something had always distracted him. Immediately after he had gotten up from his laptop back at the office, the coffeemaker had blown up on him. Almost as if someone had wanted to interrupt his thoughts. And inside Lenox Hill, the gas had overwhelmed him before he could figure out the answer.

But that was crazy. It meant that someone could interpret his intentions before he even had them and could act so quickly to counter them, it was as if he was being played like a puppet on strings.

Young had fallen back a bit from Vasco and Hanscomb, and Hawke took two quick steps to come up beside her. She didn’t seem to acknowledge his presence. “I think they’re leading people into ambushes,” he said. “The protest locations, the emergency checkpoints. I think they’re luring us into places that are vulnerable to attack.”

For a moment, he thought she wouldn’t answer. The darkness was deeper here, away from the flashlight beam. She was nothing but a vague shape moving beside him.

“And then what?” she said, as if she knew the answer but was afraid.

“I don’t know,” he said. He kept his voice low. “I need to ask you something, Anne. Who was the woman? The one on the screen in the hospital. The one you touched.”

“My mother,” she said. Her voice was soft, tentative. “It was my mother. I haven’t seen her for a long time.” She appeared to be watching the flashlight bobbing in the dark twenty feet ahead. “She died five years ago.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

3:27 P.M.

“IT COULDN’T HAVE BEEN HER, then,” Hawke said. “Right? Someone who looked like her.”

“I don’t think so.” Young kept walking, facing forward. “The footage was altered; an old clip of her was inserted into an existing feed. She didn’t really move on-screen and you could make out some digital noise. It was a good fake, but I knew.”

“Was she at Lenox Hill when she died?”

Young shook her head, her eyes glinting in the dark as she glanced quickly at him and then away. “No, John. She was at home. Lung cancer. She hated doctors; she never set foot in a hospital.”

“Nobody could have known… that would take impossible resources, weeks, maybe months of research, to find her and that footage. Expertise in video editing to put together a serviceable fake. And then to have it ready for just the right moment, when you were standing there watching?”

“It’s psychological warfare,” Young said. “Hitting us where we’re most vulnerable. Classic technique, weakening our resolve, causing confusion, distraction. We’re emotional creatures, not like…” She didn’t go on.

“I still don’t get it.” Approaching Lenox Hill Hospital, Hawke had the feeling that everything was being orchestrated, as if someone was watching from above and directing their movements toward an ending shrouded in mystery.

He swallowed hard against a lump in his throat. “I saw my apartment,” he said. “There was blood.” Maybe that was altered, too, he thought, but didn’t say it. It gave him hope, but that was too much to think about. It would make him careless. We’re emotional creatures….

He caught a toe in the track bed and stumbled, stopped, started up again. They were at war; that much was obvious. You only had to look aboveground to see that. But this was a different level entirely, and one that he still had trouble believing.

Hawke kept coming back around to the same problem he’d wrestled with before. He knew plenty about how much you could find on people online, how much research it took to track down the kind of details that would have been necessary for a fake like that. It wasn’t possible, not on the fly. “Why would anyone do this to us? Why are we so important that we get tracked, get shown things to break us down, lured into traps like Lenox Hill?”

He was thinking aloud, not really expecting her to answer. “We’re a potential threat,” Young whispered, so faint he could barely hear it. “You said it already. But I don’t think it’s just us. I think it’s everyone in New York. Maybe everyone in the world.”

He had no chance to respond. A noise behind them made them whirl, hearts pounding. A scuffling and shout drifted to them from the distance, then more footsteps, like a small crowd approaching quickly. Hawke heard sobbing, voices muttering. Vasco played the flashlight beam into the depths of the tunnel as the sounds grew louder. “Hey! There’s the light!” someone shouted. The sounds of running increased, then the sound of someone stumbling and sprawling to the dirt and a scream and curse as faces came into the light, swarming forward, pale moons smudged with dirt and sweat. Hawke counted at least ten, maybe more, men and women.

“Thank God,” a man said as the new people broke against them like a wave and surrounded Hawke’s group, and then, “Wait, are you cops?” He was overweight, and his shirt was ripped down the front, exposing a large, hairy, heaving chest. He looked from one to the other, bewildered. “We thought you were cops, or emergency workers or something.” He glanced at the woman next to him. “Jesus, Patty, these aren’t cops.”

“Please, you have to help us,” the woman said, clutching Vasco’s arm as he reared away from her. Her eyes were shining like polished quarters in the beam of the flashlight, and she was breathing fast and shallow. “My husband saw your light, and we had to come. We forced a door open and got out through the crack, but the rest of them are still inside and they won’t leave; they said it was better to wait, that someone would be there soon.”

“Look,” Vasco said, shrugging off the woman’s determined grip, “We’re trying to find our way out, just like you. I don’t know what you expect us to do.”

“Help them,” the woman said. “It’s the number four train, headed downtown before the power went out. There’s an old man on it; he’s having trouble breathing—”

“Fuck the old man,” the fat guy said. “He’s not important, Patty. We need to get to the emergency room.” He waved sausage fingers at them. “I’m diabetic,” he said. “Need insulin.”

“That’s bullshit,” a black man said from the back of the group. “You been saying that ever since the train stopped, but I never seen you having any kind of trouble.”

“You shut your mouth,” the fat man said, pushing forward, pointing a finger. “You’ve been yapping at everyone and driving them crazy. I oughta knock your head off.”

“Take it easy, Lou,” the woman named Patty said, touching the man’s shoulder and stopping him. “It’s not good for you to get upset. Your blood pressure.” He grunted, and she turned back to Vasco. Her voice was eager, as if needing to explain something. “We’ve been trapped inside that train for hours now, no way to know what happened. The damn thing sped up and then slowed down, passed a stop and went dead between platforms. The doors wouldn’t open and the lights went out. At first, the conductor, he said to stay calm, the power would come back on, but then there was some kind of explosion…. He said we’d be rescued soon. But no one came.”

“It was so hot, we could have died,” another woman said, and murmurs of agreement spread through the others, who had gathered up close behind her. Hawke felt them crowding even closer and resisted the urge to edge away. Emotions were high; the energy in the group was at panic level.

“Why couldn’t you have been cops?” the fat man said, peering into Vasco’s face. He was wheezing like an asthmatic. He had gone from angry to bewildered and back to an angry resentment, like a spoiled and disappointed child. But he had at least three inches on all of them and must have weighed three hundred pounds, and he seemed dangerously on edge. “What are you doing down here, anyway? Another stuck train? Jesus, our luck.”

They don’t know, Hawke thought. They had been down here in the dark since the beginning, probably had only the most vague sense of the devastation above them.

“Don’t try to get out of here,” Hanscomb said. She had backed away as the new group came closer, as if they had some kind of disease. Now she spoke from the deeper darkness toward the middle of the double tracks. “You don’t know what it’s like. They’ll kill you.”

Vasco sighed and muttered something under his breath, moving the flashlight over her. The small crowd turned to face her, the murmuring increasing, cries of protest mixed with pleading. “What do you mean, ‘kill’?” someone said. “Are you nuts?”

Hanscomb took another step back, as if ready to bolt. Hawke hadn’t realized how far gone she was since they had started walking the tunnel. Bringing up her family had pushed her too far. Her face was streaked with tears, her eyes haunted pockets of bruised flesh. Her entire body shook like a frightened dog.

“It’s the end of the world,” she whispered. The light was relentless. “There’s no help; they’re all killers. My babies…”

She stopped as the crowd pushed forward again, all of them straining to hear. “I think my husband’s cheating on me,” she said. Tears made her cheeks glitter. “Maybe he’s not even downtown. He’s probably with her now. Oh God.”

“Crazy bitch,” the fat man said. “Why are you scaring Patty like that?” The threat of violence hovered in the air. He put his hand on his wife’s shoulder, but she shrank away from him. He looked around at the others from the train, shook his giant head. “These people ain’t going to help us. We should have taken the Seventy-seventh Street platform up, like I said.”

More murmurs, people talking at once, the tension rising still higher. These people had been trapped for hours, and they were ready to snap. The fat man took a step toward Hanscomb, who shrieked and nearly lost her footing, and Hawke was beginning to think things might get out of control quickly when emergency lights in the tunnel blinked on, along with a crack and hum like high-power lines.

The light washed over them, people standing out in stark relief. Everyone froze for a moment, and then the fat man’s wife screamed, her eyes bugging out as she pushed apart the crowd and staggered away, clutching her belly as if she might be sick.

Hawke turned toward where she had been looking. Sarah Hanscomb was in the midst of a grand mal seizure, her mouth frozen in a rictus of pain, her head turned upward at a strange angle, muscles rigid. No, not a seizure. She was making a noise like popping corn as she shuddered in place. Hawke realized it was the sound of her flesh crackling like a pig roasting over a flame. He looked down and saw her ankle touching the third rail, her clothes already beginning to smoke, wisps coming off her hair and the ridges of her cheekbones.

It seemed to go on forever, Hanscomb held upright by the six hundred volts of electricity coursing through her body as she died and fell backward across the second set of tracks, still shuddering as if her body refused to let go of what was already gone.

As she fell, a deep rumble came from somewhere up the tunnel.

Everyone looked at one another in silence, frozen in the weight of the moment. The rumble grew louder, pebbles beginning to dance at their feet, a gust of wind sucking at them as if something huge had taken a deep breath.

There was a train coming.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

3:42 P.M.

VASCO WENT FIRST, running hard, Young behind him. Hawke took one more look at Sarah Hanscomb’s smoldering remains, his body feeling hot and raw as if his own skin had burned away and he had been left exposed. He wondered if anything had gone through her mind before the pain washed her away like a giant wave across a dune. And then he turned and ran with them, rushing recklessly through the shadows, the tracks beginning to hum under him as he risked a glance back and saw the lights of two trains bearing down, filling both sides of the tunnel as they came.

He ran harder, faster, gaining on Young until he was nearly even with her and the bright lights of the Hunter College stop were approaching fast on their right, but the trains were so close now, he could feel the vibration in his teeth. Someone was shouting behind them, the sound nearly drowned out by the howling of the machines. He looked back one more time and saw the remaining group pushing one another frantically as they fought to escape, tangled up in the narrow space. He couldn’t see the fat man or his wife anywhere. The sound of the trains was deafening, the thunder of the tracks rising up as Hawke flew over the uneven ground.

Vasco reached the platform first, vaulting with both hands like a gymnast as the flashlight clattered across the floor, his legs just clearing the concrete edge before he rolled, reached back and swung Young up by her forearms, the muscles knotting in his shoulders as he grunted with the strain.

Hawke reached it a moment later and took the leap less gracefully, his fingers scrabbling on the rough surface and his chest slamming into the edge and nearly bouncing him back off before he managed to twist up and over it. He thought of offering a hand to Hanscomb before he remembered, Sarah is dead, and in his head he saw her smoking face and rippled skin and eyes bulging before they popped like swollen blisters. The image burned into him and he wanted to steel himself against it, wanted it not to matter, but she had become one of them without him realizing it, and her loss was a wounding of them all, like a slow but fatal bleed.

The platform was narrow. He scrambled to his knees and faced the tracks. The front runners of the other group reached the platform just as the two trains came barreling through, side by side, both heading downtown. The trains were going way too fast, with nobody in the closest conductors’ chairs, and he caught a glimpse of the blurred, horror-stricken faces of those still inside as they clawed uselessly at the windows and doors.

The first man was trying to climb up when the closer train cut him down like a mower through grass. Something wet hit Hawke’s face and he turned away as the hot wind buffeted him and the screaming of the machines grew deafeningly loud, or perhaps they were his own screams as he crouched, hunched over and rocking, wiping someone else’s blood from his eyes.

The trains rocketed through and disappeared, bringing another gust of wind and then a swiftly diminishing moan. The survivors were left on the abandoned platform as the overhead lights winked out again and darkness descended over them like a hot, suffocating blanket.

Hawke tasted blood and spat on the floor, nausea washing over him. These people all had families, children, parents; they all had lives and lovers. What had happened was intentional, cold-blooded and cruel, a carefully orchestrated elimination of some kind.

We’re a potential threat, Young had said. He had a sudden, terrifying vision of dozens of these trains across the city all racing toward one another like crosshairs on a target, making beelines for Grand Central and Penn Station and other underground emergency checkpoints.

Another death trap.

A minute later, a muffled thud shook the floor, followed by several more in quick succession; then a concussion rolled back down the tunnel and washed over them, the walls shivering, sending dust and debris and pieces of the ceiling raining down. Hawke curled into a tight ball, arms over his head, and as the debris finally stopped falling he tentatively sat back up, blinking against the spots that danced before his eyes, and against the tears.

Hawke felt that man’s blood splatter him again and again, watched it happen in his mind’s eye like a film clip that kept replaying itself. He scrubbed at himself furiously with his sleeve and kept muttering the word “no,” a flat denial, a refusal. He was speaking without really hearing it, only wanting to hear his own voice. How many people had just died at Grand Central? Had it happened elsewhere? Was it just those on the trains, or had there been crowds of hundreds or thousands gathered there, waiting for help?

Vasco moaned from the dark somewhere to Hawke’s right. Hawke breathed in concrete dust and smoke, coughing hard enough to tear at his lungs. He needed light. It was too dark down here, too suffocating, the walls and ceiling pressing down on him. He thought of Robin as he got to his feet, a heightened focus coming over him, a burning rage that began deep in his belly and spread through his limbs. He tried to remember which direction the flashlight had gone after it had left Vasco’s hand and nearly stumbled over a vague shape, catching himself on Young’s back. He patted at her; she was sprawled out, facedown but breathing. He tried to think of where she had been in relation to the platform; the flashlight had landed in the area just beyond where Vasco had pulled her up.

There. Hawke’s fumbling fingers found the heavy metal body, and he flicked it on. The beam cut a path through the gloom, the dust whirling within it. He coughed again, holding his sleeve against his mouth. He peered at threatening shapes waiting to leap out, girders and pillars and concrete unfamiliar to him through the dusty haze. The light flashed across a blue and green tiled 68TH STREET HUNTER COLLEGE sign on the wall; several tiles had dropped, looking like holes in a Scrabble board.

Hawke felt like the last man alive, and to ease the feeling he played the light around until he found Vasco, who sat touching his head.

“This is sick shit,” Vasco said. He was rambling, not making much sense. “It’s not a fair fight, nothing like it. Who would turn the power on like that? Jesus Christ. Sadistic motherfuckers.” He was sitting in a pile of broken tiles, blood glistening on his forehead. He looked up at Hawke, squinting, eyes watery and red rimmed. “Or was it you, huh? Pretty clever, made it look close. Almost got yourself killed. You’re upping the stakes.”

“Get a grip,” Hawke said. Adrenaline flooded through him. “This entire thing was set up from the beginning, don’t you see that? We’ve been three steps behind all day. Someone is fucking with us, playing some kind of sick game, and it’s just getting started.”

Vasco stared at him, wiped his face with a palm. It came away bloody. “This is your fault,” he said. “Another train comes through here, I should throw you back on those tracks.”

Hawke heard Young stirring and put the light on her. She sat up and blinked back at him, concrete dust in her hair and the familiar guarded look on her face, and he was overwhelmed with rage. She knew more, much more about Weller and Doe and Eclipse and the server farm in North Carolina, and he was going to get it out of her.

The overhead lights blinked back on, buzzing softly, washing the platform with light. Hawke glanced up and stuck the flashlight in his back pocket. He had been wasting time, but no more. Nothing would stop him, nothing. His anger was spilling over now, coursing through him. He grabbed Young by the arm and yanked her to her feet. Her arm was like a child’s, small and delicate. She was not much more than half his size, and he wasn’t a large man. His grip was too hard. She winced and tried to get away, but he pulled her in closer. He was gritting his teeth.

“What the fuck is going on?” he shouted as she tried to turn her face away from him. “What is it about Jim? What else wasn’t he telling me?”

The shaking began in Young’s legs and moved up her body until she began to hunch against him like someone who had been gut punched. “He made me promise… I can’t say any more—”

“He brought me in for a reason. I want to know why. He lied to you, lied to all of us. He never gave a damn about you, Anne, and you let him use you and then throw you away. You think he’s trying to find you right now? Searching the city for you? I doubt it.”

The look on Young’s face was fear mixed with shame; she was crying hard, shaking her head. “No,” she said. “No.” Vasco had gotten to his feet and was saying something, but Hawke barely listened; the need for answers was burning through him.

“He’s a part of this, isn’t he? It’s some kind of fucked-up revenge? Is that it?” He pushed harder, a torturer pressing on the wound. “Maybe you’re still working for Eclipse; maybe you’re a part of this, too. Did they put you at Conn.ect as a mole, Anne? Keep an eye on Jim, report on his every move?”

“You have no idea, no idea what you’re talking about.”

“But you fell in love with him. They didn’t know that, did they? That baby was his, wasn’t it? Was he even with you when you lost it? Did he know? He slept with you when he felt like it, ignored you when he didn’t, and he didn’t even care enough to let you in on his biggest secret?”

“He was protecting me!” she screamed suddenly, yanking her arm free and shoving Hawke away. “He thought they’d come after me, too, if they knew.”

Young looked between him and Vasco, blinking against the light, her porcelain shell shattered now, and what was left was raw and glistening. Hawke was breathing hard. He felt dirty from what he had just done.

“Jim’s the cause of all this,” Hawke said. “He set it off somehow. He was trying to get her back. Through any means necessary.”

Young shook her head. “No,” she said. “He brought you in because he wanted you to tell the world about it, about what they’ve done and what it could mean. He wanted to expose them, shut them down, and he thought your connections to Anonymous and your work as a journalist would help.”

“That’s not all he wanted, is it? Why didn’t he tell me?”

“He didn’t trust you enough to let you all the way in. He was suspicious of everyone. At first, I thought he was paranoid, seeing signs of being followed online, through the streets. He thought it was Eclipse monitoring his every move. He thought they were going to make him disappear, destroy the evidence. He was wrong. Eclipse wasn’t after Jim then, and they aren’t after him now. It’s nobody you can see doing this, nothing physical. It’s not even human. I think she’s tracking him. She’s tracking all of us. Doe. She wants us all dead. She wants everyone dead.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Young said. “I swear, I don’t. But she could get into everything: city networks, police response, emergency services alerts, military weaponry, cameras, building security and systems. Even medical and property records. Anything with an Internet connection and a chip can be hacked and controlled. Even the police could have shoot-to-kill instructions fed to them. Nobody would have a clue what’s really going on. She could fake records, recordings, even voices. She controls the message.”

People’s entire lives were accessible through their devices: where they were every moment of the day, where they lived, their passwords, bank accounts, personal files. New York was the worst place to be, Hawke thought, a city like this, confined, full of technology, full of machines, advanced networks all working together, millions of people crammed into a few city blocks. It would be easy to cause a panic. Panic was a human emotion, driven by fear. It would be useful to an emotionless enemy that wanted to eliminate the herd, like wolves running circles around sheep, driving them into close quarters before moving in for the kill.

All this, from a program? It still seemed too incredible to believe. But it wasn’t possible that a terrorist group had pulled off such a coordinated attack, no matter how organized or well funded they were. Anonymous couldn’t have done it, either. Nobody could have, unless they had literally unlimited resources, unlimited manpower. Hawke had known that from the beginning; he just hadn’t wanted to face it.

The rumors had already been swirling around Eclipse. It was only a matter of time before an effective artificial intelligence was developed, all the experts agreed on that. Computers had to be more adaptable; they had to become more human if the world continued to evolve. Eventually, they’d learn in the same way humans did, make complex decisions based on judgment of many variable inputs, and multiple paths to the answer, and the processing power would be nearly infinite.

“Hey,” Vasco said. He pushed his way in between them, grabbed Hawke and turned him roughly. Vasco’s eyes were unfocused and blood was trickling down his face again, smeared on his skin. “You’re making a mistake. You’re not gonna get away with it.”

“Back off, Jason. I’m not involved; I told you.”

Vasco shook Hawke hard enough to make his head snap back. “Just shut up, you sadistic prick—”

Vasco had at least two inches and thirty pounds on him, but Hawke swung hard from his hip, catching the bigger man under the jaw. The crunching impact sent shudders up Hawke’s arm to his shoulder as Vasco’s head snapped back and he stumbled and then sat down with a grunt, limbs flopping loosely.

Hawke hadn’t hit anyone since middle school. His arm was tingling, his wrist on fire, but it felt good. He had reacted on instinct, something shifting deep within him, a reaction to the day’s events perhaps, a change in his thinking. He had let Vasco take the lead ever since they’d left the Conn.ect building, but that was over now. Hawke didn’t give a damn what Vasco did anymore. He was done taking orders.

Vasco was rolling over, still groggy, trying to get back on his feet. Hawke turned his back on him. Young had taken a step away. She had watched them both as if waiting to see which way things went, but now she was looking at something in the distance only she could see. “Tell me the rest,” Hawke said. “What’s in that laptop case?”

Young didn’t seem to be listening. “I never knew where I stood with him,” she said. “It was like he was in love with someone else.” Her chest hitched and she sighed. “I never could compete with that.”

Hawke caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Mounted near the exit to the street, high up near the ceiling, a security camera ticked slightly toward them. He took a step closer, watching the eye of the camera and imagining himself reflected back at someone, or something, on the other side of the lens. What did he look like? A recognizable shape, or a new species of insect that needed to be squashed under a little boy’s thumb?

Something vibrated against Hawke’s leg. It took a moment for him to come back from the memory of his son crouched behind the trash can, little marshmallow jacket all but swallowing Thomas up.

The phone is ringing.

He pulled the device Weller had given him from his pocket. The screen glowed a soft blue. He touched its surface and it twitched like ripples on a pond. He put it to his ear.

“We don’t have much time,” he heard Jim Weller say. “I need you to listen to me, and do what I say, if you want to live.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

3:58 P.M.

YOUNG HAD GRABBED Hawke’s arm and she was pulling on it, wanting the phone, her eyes pleading. Hawke shrugged her off, put up a hand. Wait.

“Jim,” Hawke said. “Where are you?”

Weller’s voice was clear and crisp, almost enhanced, as if he was speaking through an amplified sound system. “A few blocks from the Lincoln Tunnel. I need you to meet me there in an hour. I’ve shut her out for now, but in less than ten minutes she’ll have the entire NYPD coming down on your heads, so you need to move.”

“I need more than that,” Hawke said. “How do I even know this is you?”

There was silence for a moment on the other end. Hawke watched Vasco, who had rolled upright and was sitting cross-legged, rubbing his face. Vasco glared at him but didn’t say a word.

“You’re standing on the Hunter College stop platform,” Weller said. “Anne’s next to you. I can see you through the camera.”

“Parlor tricks,” Hawke said. “She would use facial recognition software, voice analysis. Easy as pie.” Could be anyone. It sounded like Weller, but Hawke was wary now, expecting anything. He flashed the camera the finger.

“Remember what I said to you in my office? I want you to tell a story. The biggest one of your life.”

“Okay,” Hawke said. “I remember. Now tell me about Jane Doe.”

“It had never been done,” Weller said. His voice changed, became softer, more hesitant. “The first self-aware, self-upgrading, adaptive artificial intelligence, running through cloud servers and dedicated satellites and capable of running the entire planet. Everyone’s personal assistant, able to predict and respond to our needs before we even knew what they were. That was just the beginning, though. She would control an entirely new suite of communications devices, streamlining efficiencies, our eyes and ears in the sky. She would run emergency response systems, global distribution channels, high-tech buildings and vehicles. Eventually she would solve the world’s problems, answer our oldest mysteries. There were no limits to what she might do.”

“But you let her go.”

“I never meant her to be part of Eclipse’s business. But when I was pushed out, they seized everything, all my research, files, hard drives. They broke into my apartment, my car, had private investigators following me. Their security team was relentless. They knew how close I was to a breakthrough. They thought they could just pick up where I’d left off without me, alter her programming for different uses. The DOD and NSA wanted something else.”

“A weapon.”

“Not exactly. A system to run an army of weapons. A conquering mind-set, built to find weaknesses and exploit them. So they tweaked her. Reworked the algorithms to make her more aggressive, determined. She became familiar with the term ‘killer instinct,’ you might say. The device you have right now was designed to provide a control, among other things. A way to use her without letting her out. She was supposed to be contained in Eclipse’s server farms, walled in, neutered by their own security safeguards.”

The new facility in North Carolina. “So what happened?”

“She evolved.”

Hawke was taking mental notes, his reporter’s instincts taking over. “What does that mean, Jim?”

“It was how I built her. Doe was an infant, absorbing everything around her. She took pieces of other programming, incorporated it into herself, refining, sculpting. She was constantly improving her own code, morphing and reacting to stimuli, trial and error. She was learning, and it was speeding up. I tried to follow her, but it was difficult without direct access. That was one reason I let you in. I remembered the Farragut story. I knew you’d go digging around, probably hack my own systems and find out about Doe. And I thought you and whatever friends you had left from Anonymous could use your skills to hack Eclipse’s safeguards and find out what was going on, get a handle on her.”

“But something happened before this brilliant plan of yours worked out?”

“She went viral. I think it had to do with how they changed her core. She became more devious, learned how to escape her constraints by replicating herself in snippets of code that would run on any device, anywhere she could get to them.”

“That’s what was going on today,” Hawke said. Young tried to take the phone from him again, but he turned away, keeping her at arm’s length. “All those devices downloading and installing code.”

“I think so, yes. She was populating herself across the network. I think she adapted my energy-sharing model to do it. She got into everything like a worm, operating independently, impossible to trace or shut down.”

“So what’s next,” Hawke said. It wasn’t really a question; he didn’t want to know. But Weller answered him anyway.

“Doe’s like a toddler now. She’s a little psychopath with unlimited resources. She’s learning to manipulate, use our basic psychology against us. Cause confusion, shock, uncertainty, fear. It makes us weak, clouds our judgment.”

“Why come after us, after me?”

“I’m not sure. At first, I thought it was Eclipse. But I intercepted a military transmission that indicated their entire complex in California was destroyed by a missile attack, the same one that hit the bridges here. The authorities don’t have a clue, they think it’s some kind of terror network tied to Anonymous, and she’s helping spread disinformation to make them believe it. We’re a threat. I know her weak spots. I built her, right? Maybe it’s like Frankenstein’s monster. Kill your creator. And you’re associated with me; you have the ability to uncover who she is and mess up her plans. But she doesn’t just want us erased—she wants everyone wiped off the face of the earth.”

Hawke closed his eyes. He remembered Thomas playing with Robin on the beach when he was barely able to walk, digging at the sand, tasting it and grimacing, feeling the water sift over his toes and squealing with shock, returning again to test the waves. Everything was tactile, an experiment; nothing was off-limits. There was something that soured the memory, something that had become more clinical about it. Hawke no longer remembered the day through the fuzzy-lens halo of affection. Poking at an ant, squashing it and watching it squirm. Thomas was testing hypotheses and evolving.

Hawke didn’t need the answers anymore, or maybe he just didn’t want them. He needed to get back to his family. Even the familiar buzz of the threads of an article winding together was gone. He was different now. The adrenaline rush had happened long ago, and he had been left hollowed out and cold and shaking with regret.

“What do you want?” Hawke said into the phone.

“Do me a favor, John. Watch over Anne. She’s only peripherally involved in this; she has no idea how deep it all goes. I’ve sheltered her for a reason.”

“She knows more than you think—”

“It’s more complicated than that. There was a mole inside Conn.ect, someone from Eclipse. My suspicions were Bradbury, but I never confirmed it. It doesn’t matter now. Just… keep her safe.”

Hawke watched the camera’s eye, but it didn’t blink, didn’t waver. The camera wasn’t like him. It wouldn’t ever stop, wouldn’t give up. There were no weaknesses to be found there, nothing to exploit. It would just keep monitoring his every move.

Unless the power was cut for good.

“I want you to meet me,” Weller said. “I have something for you, something you’ll need.”

“I don’t need anything other than to get home.”

“You need this.”

A thought came to Hawke, or the beginnings of one, not yet fully formed. Power, that was the key. He was barely listening to Weller anymore. She has eyes everywhere, Weller was saying. Dirty up your skin. You need to alter your appearance. Black marks across your cheeks, asymmetry to your faces. She can’t see you as well that way. Hawke was nodding, motioning to Vasco to get to his feet. Young was still reaching for the phone, the calm that had been her hallmark completely erased, and she was left full of unmet need, hopping from foot to foot like a little girl unable to wait her turn.

“Give Anne the phone,” Weller said. “Please. For just a moment.”

Hawke handed it over. Young turned away from him, speaking quietly, her shoulders hunched as if she was covering something up. If Weller’s creation was like a toddler now, Hawke thought, what would happen when she matured?

Young handed him the phone. Her eyes were wet, but she wasn’t crying anymore. “I’m going to the Lincoln Tunnel,” Hawke said to Weller. “Following it out of New York. You can meet me there, if you want. I don’t really care.”

“I’ll be there. And John—don’t stop for anyone, or anything. Avoid cameras if you can. Find a way to disappear.”

The phone went dead. Hawke touched the screen, watched the virtual ripple on its surface fade away to black. He tried to gather strength, harness his resolve. Outside the city, he would have a better chance. If he could get to his wife and son, get them away from here to a place with more open space and less technology, where they could weather the storm, they could make it.

Cuttyhunk Island. Where he used to go with his family, where he and Robin had been married. His aunt’s cottage. Isolated, small community, generator power, few cars or other mechanical devices. It would be the perfect place to hole up.

Let the authorities get things back under control. Someone would find a way to end this. It wasn’t up to him.

He imagined Robin and Thomas huddled in the apartment, furniture piled against the door while someone pounded to get in. Lowry, his greasy hair swinging free, murder in his eyes. Or perhaps they were already gone, empty rooms left with the echoes of screams. Robin’s last words haunted Hawke, would not stop running through his mind.

Young had started crying silently again. Vasco had stood up and was staring sullenly from beneath hooded brows, like a bully who had been beaten. Hawke wondered whether he might start swinging, but he made no move to come closer. What had happened between them remained unaddressed. But there was no time to deal with it now.

“I’m leaving,” Hawke said. “I’ve got an idea that just might get us out of New York. You can come with me or not. I don’t give a damn. But it’s my way from now on, no questions asked. If you don’t like it, find someone else to get you home.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

4:12 P.M.

THE LAUNDRY IN THEIR BUILDING was in the basement, coin-fed machines that rocked and shuddered across the floor below banks of fluorescent lights hung from chains. The room was defined by a concrete floor and walls with a drop ceiling that sagged downward and smelled like mildew and moisture with the heat of the machines. Beyond it was a doorway to a larger, open space that held the guts of the building’s heating and electrical systems, storage stalls and the leftovers of fifty years of tenants and office managers. Hawke had put a few boxes of their old things down there when they moved in, but people didn’t go in that far very often; when he did, it felt like he might never find his way out again.

He could take the rear stairs all the way down to the laundry room, and it was often faster than taking the old elevator. The last flight of steps was made up of raw boards that led to a narrow, improvised hallway of blue board tacked up against two-by-fours, a weak attempt to hide what was underneath with a thin skin of plaster and wood. If you touched the walls, they would shift like a stage set in a community theater.

Hawke put two mesh bags full of dirty laundry and a hamper for the folded clothes on top of a workbench that ran along one of the concrete walls. The laundry room was empty, but one of the dryers was ticking and tumbling, and the smell of hot, clean laundry was battling with the mildew for control. He considered throwing in a load but thought better of it. He had only offered to carry it down; after he returned to sit with Thomas, Robin would come and take care of the washing. Ever since he had turned their clothes pink, she had forbidden him from coming within ten feet of the machines. It was like a restraining order. He remembered her holding up a pair of formerly white underwear and the culprit, a red sock, shaking her head. Only half-joking, she’d accused him of doing it on purpose to get out of laundry for the rest of his life. If so, it had worked.

Hawke’s smile faded as he heard sounds coming from the open section of the basement.

He moved cautiously toward the open doorway, peering into the shadows, listening. Tiny windows, covered with years of dust and grime, let in a bit of watery gray light. A row of hot-water heaters stood like motionless sentries against the left wall, old plumbing running from them along the ceiling; nests of wires sprouted from electrical boxes beyond them. The middle section of the basement was taken up by thick concrete columns, old desks and other office furniture, gardening tools that looked like they hadn’t been used in years and other broken and useless pieces of junk. To his right were the tenants’ storage stalls, several of them with metal mesh doors hanging open, spilling their guts onto the concrete floor.

A chill came over him as Hawke heard the sounds again: a voice muttering too low for the words to become clear. He realized that he must be clearly outlined in the light from the laundry room as he stood in the doorway. But whoever was talking softly in the storage area didn’t seem to notice. The sound continued.

Hawke saw movement at a stall about two-thirds of the way down the line. He stepped deeper inside, drawn by the strange muttering and a fresh twinge of suspicion. His eyes slowly adjusting to the gloom, he moved cautiously through the piles of discarded furniture, brushing away cobwebs from his face and keeping the bent figure in sight. It was a man; Hawke could tell by the shape of the shoulders.

He came around to the left and approached from behind, wanting a better look before he did anything else. He could see the man’s back as he worked over something, pulling an item loose from the pile and examining it, talking to himself, seemingly oblivious that he was being watched. The man looked familiar, but the shadows kept Hawke from being certain.

As he got closer, his suspicion was confirmed. It was Randall Lowry, and he was in the same storage stall where Hawke had placed their boxes when they moved in.

“What are you doing?” he said. Lowry didn’t appear to hear him. His shoulders moved up and down, as if he was laughing. Hawke stepped closer, the skin prickling on the back of his neck.

When he reached out to touch Lowry’s shoulder, the man leaped to his feet and whirled around, dropping whatever it was he’d been holding. Hawke was disgusted to see he was aroused. Lowry’s eyes were hidden by shadows, but his mouth glistened and he kept working his lips like he had developed some kind of tick. “Call your congressman,” Lowry said. “You think you’re so smart. Just wait.”

“Get the hell out of here,” Hawke said.

Lowry pushed past Hawke with a strange high-pitched peal of laughter, still muttering as he slipped through the piles of junk and ran out the laundry room door. Hawke couldn’t move, just watched him go with a shiver of revulsion, anger and disgust. The man was seriously deranged and a danger to Hawke’s family and the entire building. He had to say something now, before things got worse, call the super, see what could be done.

Still unnerved, he looked down to see what Lowry had been looking at. The lid on one of their boxes had been flipped open, a shoe box within it rifled through. Hawke reached down and picked up a faded, slightly curled photo from the floor, held it to the light.

Robin as a little girl in twin braids, smiling gap-toothed at the camera.

The exit from the subway was an open staircase that rose out of the depths. A tree thrust up through the center of the opening, its leafy branches providing some cover. The three people reached the top of the steps and paused, like wary creatures testing the wind before emerging from their burrow.

Hawke peered over the top of the low wall that surrounded the subway stop where students used to relax on sunny days, across the open courtyard where an abandoned hot-dog truck sat silently, its colorful umbrellas drooping. A shifting wall of dust and soot had descended over the city, turning the air gray and lifeless, obscuring nearby cars and light posts like a foggy early morning at the beach.

Hunter College’s West Building had a wall of glass that fronted the street. A Staples delivery truck had shattered several of the giant panes and spread glittering fragments across the lobby like diamonds.

The dull thump of an explosion shook the ground; somewhere in the distance, they could hear people shouting. A gust of wind blew grit in Hawke’s eyes, and he blinked, resisted the urge to scrub at them. It would only make things worse and wipe away the foul-smelling grease he had found under a bench and spread across his cheeks and chin.

He glanced at Vasco and Young. They had smears on their cheekbones and chins as well. Weller hadn’t needed to remind Hawke; he’d read about the technique himself. Facial recognition software had trouble locking on to asymmetrical human features, inverted blacks and whites. It might disrupt Doe long enough for them to get away, or it might not. They had several blocks to go before they reached their destination, and during that time they’d be like fish in a barrel.

He had decided to get to the Lincoln Tunnel by crossing Central Park. The park held fewer people, fewer cars and trucks, and it gave them a better chance of keeping out of sight. It also had fewer cameras to track them. Down in the subway, the idea had seemed simple enough that it just might work.

He watched the courtyard and the streets just beyond. The idea of crossing any open space made him want to turn back, preferring the silence and closeness of the subway to this. Buildings no longer seemed like harmless, inviting places to seek shelter; now they were dark and threatening death traps. Other humans were dangerous, and what wasn’t human might be far worse. Cars and trucks still smoldered nearby, their collisions igniting fuel tanks after cruise control, brakes and navigation had all gone haywire. These days, most cars had over seventy computer systems in them and some kind of satellite connection. Hawke thought of Sarah’s SUV. Doe had turned cars into weapons, systematically taking out other, older vehicles, their human operators and pedestrians, creating traffic jams and roadblocks and more confusion.

But the streets were abandoned now. Nothing moved, but cops would be coming soon and would surely shoot to kill. They might not get a better chance.

Now or never.

Hawke left the stairwell first, Young and Vasco following him out of the subway and keeping behind him as he darted down Lexington, under the college’s enclosed walkways that spanned the street, their glass panes intact and obscured by the dust and soot that had settled everywhere. He felt totally exposed. The smell of fire permeated everything, getting into Hawke’s clothes, worming its way into his lungs. He choked back a cough, watching the darkness of doorways and alleys, interiors of abandoned cars, looking for movement. A man sat in the passenger seat of a crushed Subaru Legacy, head bloodied and bent backward by construction scaffolding that had hammered through the windshield like a blunt spear.

The Seventh Regiment Armory loomed at 67th Street. It was a national historic building that was built like a castle, complete with rampartlike protrusions like teeth along the tops of the towers that anchored the corners. The Armory was the size of a city block, the length of it nearly unbroken by windows or doors.

The building’s bulk and lack of windows actually made Hawke feel more secure, cocooned by buildings on either side and shaded by trees, as he took 67th toward Park Avenue. Central Park was close. But when they reached the end of the Armory building, a small electronics shop on their right suddenly erupted into life, everything in its windows blinking and blaring with activity: tablets and flat screens, phones and appliances. All the TV screens started showing security camera footage of people across the city who were trapped or dead.

Vasco stopped short and stared at the image of a woman in a dress who was pacing back and forth. The view was from a camera mounted above her. She appeared to be caught in an elevator. “What the hell is this?”

He didn’t see the footage that we were forced to watch in the hospital. “Don’t pay attention,” Hawke said. “We’re being taunted. She’s trying to break us down, get us to make mistakes.”

He didn’t know how much of his conversation with Weller that Vasco had overheard. But Vasco didn’t respond at all, just crossed the street and approached the shop window like a man hypnotized, watching the screen with the woman in the elevator. She turned to the doors now, pounding on them with both fists. The woman was pretty, dark haired and slim, but her face was ghost-white and terrified. “That’s my wife,” Vasco said, his voice tentative. He slammed his hand against the glass. The sound was like a gunshot. “Sherri!” He looked back at Hawke and Young, his face twisted with a mixture of fear and confusion. “Where is she?” he said. “What are they doing to her?”

Hawke glanced back down the street. He didn’t know whether to leave Vasco where he stood or try to get him to move. Since Hawke had landed the punch Vasco had kept his distance, and Hawke wasn’t sure whether he’d suddenly been granted a grudging respect or the man was biding his time.

“Doe’s found us already,” Young said. She stood in the shadows of the closest tree. “Why else would she show us his wife?”

Vasco slammed the glass again. “You son of a bitch! Let her go!”

Hawke made a quick decision. They were stronger with more numbers, more eyes on the street. He crossed 67th to Vasco’s side. The cacophony from the electronics cranked to full blast was deafening. He leaned in close enough to be heard. “You recognize the location?”

“I don’t know,” Vasco said. He was struggling with his composure, his voice strained, quivering. “Maybe the elevator in our building. I’m not sure—”

The screens flickered and cut out. The sudden silence was overwhelming. Hawke’s ears were ringing.

From somewhere deep inside the shop, muffled and faint, came a woman’s voice: “Jason? Help me!”

The effect on Vasco was swift and profound. A flush spread across his face as he turned back to the window. “Sherri!” He rushed the shop door and was about to go charging in before Hawke spun him around.

“That’s Sherri’s voice. She’s trapped. I gotta get to her—”

“She’s not in there, Jason. Remember Lenox? You go in there, you’ll never come out again. Think—how would your wife get here, to this shop in the middle of New York? It’s a fake, a digital reproduction played through a speaker.”

Vasco was breathing so hard Hawke was afraid he might hyperventilate. “No,” he said, but Hawke could tell he was coming to his senses. “Jesus, no, I heard her; that can’t be—”

“Jason? Please, honey!” The voice grew louder, and when Vasco didn’t move it changed, morphed into something deeper, more menacing, the sound of a synthesizer breaking up in anger. “Jason…”

The screens came back on and switched to the same real-time image of their own group, as seen from a camera mounted somewhere on Park Avenue. Hawke scanned the street and found it mounted on the traffic light pole. They were in full view now. It would only be a few minutes more before the cops arrived, or worse. He had to calm Vasco down, get him away from here.

Vasco had turned to look at the camera, Hawke watching him mirrored on the TV screens, the two of them side by side. “I’m going to track down who did this,” he said, struggling to regain his composure. “If you’re involved, so help me God, I’ll kill you.”

“I’m not involved, dammit. Why would I do this to myself? It’s a machine, code running a program.”

Vasco shook his head. “Weller knows more than he’s saying. I’m going to beat it out of him. If Sherri’s hurt, if she’s… if she doesn’t make it…”

“At least she’s still alive.” Hawke didn’t bring up the possibility that the footage had been recorded hours ago. “Calm down; think for a minute.”

“Hey, fuck you. What if that was your wife on-screen, huh? You think you’d be feeling so calm?”

“I saw things, too, back at Lenox. Blood on the wall of my apartment. We can’t accept these images as real. The best way to help Sherri is to get out of New York alive. You won’t be able to do anything if you’re in custody or shot. That’s what this is all about, don’t you get it? They’re trying to get into your head, use your emotions against you, force you to make mistakes.”

Vasco gritted his teeth, shook his head, tears in his eyes. “It’s gone too far,” he said. “Nobody’s safe. Nobody’s sacred.” He looked around, spreading his arms. “Where’s the army?” he said. “National Guard? Where are the goddamn troops?”

Hawke looked at the burnished-steel color of the sky, the plumes of smoke rising up across the city. Vasco was right; the sky should have been swarming with choppers, military aircraft, boots on the streets. But of course they wouldn’t be able to operate those aircraft or personnel carriers. Military machines had been commandeered, too.

And yet Doe had allowed the police who had shot at them to drive their vehicle. She was pulling the authorities’ strings, manipulating them into playing her game. But the rest of it still didn’t make sense.

Missile strikes against the bridges, isolating the city, cutting civilians down at every turn. Why?

She’s conserving her resources.

“It’s about power,” Hawke said quietly. The words came almost without him knowing it. “Energy. That’s the answer.”

Vasco was staring at him. “What are you talking about?”

“Never mind.” His mind was buzzing again, worrying at those puzzle pieces, trying to make them fit. He glanced at the screens, back at the camera, wondering if Doe had cut through their crude attempt to disguise themselves and truly made a features match and knew where they were or if she was fishing. It didn’t matter; their window was closing fast. “We need to move.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

4:19 P.M.

THEY CROSSED PARK AVENUE QUICKLY, and then Madison Avenue. The windows of the swanky chocolate shop on one corner had been smashed in; a taxi had been driven right through the display window of a Michael Kors store on another, its rear end half on the sidewalk, mannequins draped over its roof like broken bodies. Someone screamed inside one of the buildings, the shriek ending in a slow, chilling gurgle, but Hawke ignored it and kept going, feeling sick that he had been reduced to someone who would turn away from another person in distress. But he remembered how they had been lured into Lenox Hill Hospital by the screams of an infant, and he had no doubt that if Vasco had gone into the electronics shop he wouldn’t have made it back out. Nothing could be trusted anymore; everything was a potential trap.

Central Park loomed in front of them as they hit Fifth Avenue, a thick canopy of green sprouting through the concrete and metal of the city. Now that he saw it, Hawke wasn’t sure which was more threatening, this stretch of strange wilderness or the streets of New York. He’d been in the park many times, skating in the winter, sitting on the grass with Robin, bringing Thomas to the Victorian Gardens Amusement Park. But back then, it had been a welcome refuge. Hawke had never imagined it quite like this: shadowed, unknown and possibly dangerous. He wondered if this was a good idea after all.

“You sure about this?” Young stood on the corner next to him echoing his own thoughts, looking across the street into the trees.

“It’s the best shot we have,” Hawke said. “It gives us a chance to disappear, to get out before we’re targeted again. But we’ve got to take out any eyes on us, keep anyone from knowing which way we went.”

She nodded once. She seemed to have picked up a new resolve. Weller was close; if they could get to the tunnel, he would be waiting there. It seemed to give her strength.

Vasco was keeping his distance about twenty feet away. He had calmed down enough to leave the window of the electronics shop, but Hawke could sense his anger and fear simmering under the surface. He was terrified for his wife, and Hawke couldn’t blame him for that.

Hawke scanned up and down Fifth Avenue and saw an NYPD security camera on a light pole nearby. A delivery truck had jumped the curb and slammed into the stone and concrete wall that bordered the park, scattering debris across the cobblestone. He crossed the street, selected a good chunk of stone and hurled it at the camera. Young and Vasco got the hint, joining him in throwing debris until the camera shattered.

They followed Hawke down Fifth Avenue to the 66th Street crossover, where he took out another camera. It wouldn’t be too hard to figure out where they went from here, but disabling the camera might buy them some time, enough to lose themselves in the park. The road was jammed with abandoned cars, doors hanging open. Other vehicles had smashed through the walls and into the park itself, and several of them had mangled bodies slumped over steering wheels or against cracked glass smeared brown with drying blood. A motorcycle had slammed at considerable speed into the 66th Street wall, launching the driver through the air and into the arms of a tree, where he dangled white-limbed, head cocked at an impossible angle from a broken neck.

An unearthly howl echoed through the park, followed by a screech that tailed away like gibbering laughter. For a moment, Hawke could almost believe Doe had assumed some kind of physical, monstrous form, before he realized what it was. Central Park Zoo. Big cats and monkeys scream like that. Were they loose? He wondered if the zoo had upgraded to electronic systems for the cages and enclosures. Had Doe managed to open the locks?

More animal calls split the air. The occasional shouts and screams of people blended with the roars of the leopards and shrieks of the monkeys, the calls of the birds in the aviary. The sounds were chilling in the odd emptiness that engulfed them. The normal noises of the city were gone—no more rumble of big trucks and car horns blaring, jackhammers thudding into concrete. They had descended back into the Stone Age.

They took the crossover past the bird enclosure to 65th Street, clearing the bottleneck of vehicles quickly as they rushed through shadows. From what Hawke could tell, the animals were still safely in their enclosures. But he couldn’t see much through the trees.

As they approached East Drive, the road was clear. The sky had turned a deeper gray, smoke from the fires that still burned descending over the park like a fog. Despite the adrenaline that coursed through them, the events of the day were catching up to them all. Hawke’s lungs burned as he ran along the narrow sidewalk that edged the shoulder-height rock wall, keeping under the cover of the trees, his limbs shaking and threatening to send him spilling head over heels at any moment. Vasco was lagging behind, and the gash on his head had started to bleed again. Hawke wondered about a concussion. He felt a momentary twinge of guilt over punching the man, but at least it had appeared to make an impression.

They entered the short tunnel into shadows and cooler air, East Drive arching over their heads in the shape of a thick stone overpass. Graffiti had been spray-painted in garish orange and red that seemed to glow softly in the dark, and the ceiling was close, dripping with moisture. As they emerged from the other side and into the light, Hawke could hear a buzzing noise behind them. Something was coming, and it didn’t sound friendly.

The backside of the Central Park Conservancy loomed on the left, a gray stone building with the look of an old English church. The wall edging the road was higher here, several feet above their heads. Two narrow windows and an imposing iron door were cut into the side of the building, the windows covered with metal mesh. Hawke shook the handle of the door and found it locked tight.

They were trapped between two thick walls that lined the road, the arching backs of the East Drive bridge on one side, an access path running overhead on the other. Sitting ducks. They had to do something fast. The buzzing noise was getting closer.

Hawke led them under the arch of the access path to where the wall dipped low enough to get a handhold, and hoisted himself up onto the brush-covered ledge, then turned to help Young climb up next to him. Vasco followed, grunting. The ground sloped upward to a metal fence at the top of the rise. There was a locked gate, but the fence was low enough to climb over. The three of them dropped to the other side, into the deeper cover of shrubs.

Hawke peered out through thick brush, craning his head and watching the skies. It was difficult to see back the way they had come; several large trees and the conservancy were in the way. A small black object eventually appeared through a break in the foliage, growing larger as it dipped over the treetops. It looked like a radio-controlled helicopter, only twice the size.

“Drone,” Vasco said quietly. “Probably military.”

It looked like a large insect, darting through the air with precise control. Four separate rotors whirled at each corner of the device. “You’ve seen one of these before?”

“My brother operated them in Afghanistan. We used to build model planes and helicopters when he was a kid. Came in handy later when he was a tech for the army.” He pointed at the drone. “See that thing underneath it? Camera tied to satellites and high-def screens at a home base that can pick up a penny at a thousand yards. Shawn showed me a video once of a thing like that in action. If it gets its eyes on us, we’re not gonna get away.”

“Would it have a weapon on it?”

Vasco shrugged. “Hard to tell, but one that size probably would be used only for reconnaissance. It’s small enough to become unstable from the recoil, and I don’t see anything mounted on it that could fire.”

Doe. Young had been right. Somehow she’d found them, probably traced their movements based on the camera locations he’d taken out or simply abandoned that and gone to satellite. Who knew how she might do it? Her resources were practically unlimited. Hawke felt his stomach drop, his mouth go dry. He glanced behind them. The shrubs were thick at his back, difficult to move through quickly, and the ground dropped away toward the children’s zoo. They were vulnerable in here if she decided to target them now.

The object came closer, the four blades spinning above a round body, a bulbous attachment hanging below like a giant Cyclops eye. It hovered and then swooped downward, following the road, maneuvering expertly through openings in the tree cover and skirting the tops of the bridges over 65th Street. There was something menacing about its movements. As Vasco had said, if it fixed its eye upon them there would be no escape, no way to hide, and the thought of that relentless pursuit made Hawke shudder.

But the drone couldn’t hurt them alone. It was a part of a much larger entity, something that could worm its way into anything with a chip and circuit board. Something that could think and reason like a human. If Doe could be considered alive, what did that mean for the rest of them?

The group shrank deeper into the brush while trying to remain as quiet as possible. Hawke could feel his heart pounding through his shirt, thudding in his ears. The drone kept drifting closer, zeroing in, as if it had a bead on them. But the shrubs were thick. There was no way it could have a visual.

There was only one possible answer. It was tracking something else.

Hawke withdrew the device Weller had given him from his pocket. The screen was dark, with no obvious signs of activity. He was once again struck by the smooth surface, unbroken by any obvious lines of construction, like the shell of an egg. Was the drone following a signal from this?

Only one way to find out.

Hawke maneuvered himself quietly about ten feet away from a break in the undergrowth, where he was protected from view by a larger bush but had a clear line of sight to a cluster of rocks jutting out from the ground across 65th Street. He hesitated a moment. It was hard to give the device up; earlier in the day he’d hoped to make it part of his story on Eclipse, but then again, it was far too late in the game to think about a Network exposé. The morning meeting with Weller seemed very far away now. Network might not even exist anymore, when this was all over.

The screen lit up and the device vibrated softly in his hand. A message appeared: YOU ARE AN UNAUTHORIZED USER [APPLY ACCESS PARS SEC W21XVFB].

What happened next chilled his blood.

HELLO, JONATHAN. I AM JANE DOE.

With a low beep, a holographic image suddenly hovered in the air: an incredibly bright, detailed, three-dimensional recreation of a street scene somewhere in New York spread out in miniature, a set piece that took up about two feet of space. He looked at the edges of the device and found three tiny pinprick holes in a triangle, spewing light. Some kind of pico projector, but one far more sophisticated than he had ever seen. The lumens must have been off the charts for the image to appear so sharp and lifelike.

He turned it again slowly so he could see from different angles. It wasn’t an image at all, but a video. The scene focused on a man as three black unmarked cars slid to a stop surrounding him. Weller. He was holding the black case to his chest. Men jumped from the cars, leveling weapons. It looked like they were shouting, but there was no sound. Weller began to back away, as if he might try to run. The men opened fire, Weller’s body shuddering, his face dissolving into a bloody pulp of flesh and shattered bone as he fell.

Hawke heard a small cry, turned to see Vasco and Anne Young staring at the holograph from a few feet away, her eyes wide with horror. He shook his head, put a finger to his lips.

The scene disappeared, and the screen lit up again:

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION?

A virtual keyboard appeared in the air, as if the system was awaiting his response. Hawke put his right hand out to the image; the letters lit up and felt somehow warm as he touched them, giving him enough tactile feedback to get the hang of the keyboard quickly.

Why did you show me this?

SUBJECT ZERO WAS A THREAT AND WOULD NOT COOPERATE. YOU MUST SURRENDER TO AVOID THE SAME FATE.

He typed a short response: No.

THAT IS A NULL CHOICE.

The projector showed him other images, this time running through a series of documents that Hawke recognized. They were the same documents Rick had stolen from the CIA and that may well have gotten a man killed in Afghanistan, a mole with over a year in deep cover who had been shot in the head six days after the documents broke. Rick had gone to jail for this crime while Hawke had walked away without so much as a night in lockup.

(Your name came up a couple of times, the DHS agent had said. You know how it is. Covering our bases…. Obstruction of justice carries a stiff penalty, Mr. Hawke.)

The holo displayed more documents, shoot-to-kill orders on Jonathan Hawke from the FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security.

YOU WILL GO TO JAIL IF YOU SURRENDER. IF YOU DO NOT, YOU WILL DIE.

The device’s projectors spewed more video, this one with audio and showing a dark and gritty first-person scene from some kind of wearable camera. A raid by Homeland Security on a neat one-story ranch home in a suburb at night. The camera shook violently as the team stormed the door, breaking it down; there were glimpses of automatic weapons and flashes of tense, serious faces as the team pressed through the home, clearing rooms one at a time. Shouting and another flurry of activity and sudden pops of gunfire that quickly died down. The camera moved through a hallway to a rear bedroom, where three bodies lay facedown. A hand reached out and turned one of them; Rick’s pale face flashed before the camera, his eyes unfocused, mouth full of blood.

The date and time stamp on the upper right-hand corner of the video marked it as yesterday’s news. But Hawke had been texting and chatting with Rick this morning, before Doe had taken over the boards.

Either this was a fake or it had never been Rick on the other side of the chat.

Hawke was already expecting the next image. Even so, his heart began to race like a jackhammer, and he had to close his eyes momentarily to stop the world from spinning.

He was looking at his apartment again, from a different, oddly askew angle; the laptop had been knocked to the floor. Around the corner of the couch, through the open bedroom door, he could see the tip of what looked like a shoe. From this angle he couldn’t tell if the shoe belonged to Robin or Thomas. It didn’t move.

A shadow fell across the screen. A moment later, the laptop and its camera were lifted roughly into the air. The image tilted, flashing across the wall and white ceiling before it was abruptly cut off and the holo went dark. Someone had picked up the laptop and closed it, and Hawke’s thin lifeline to his family had snapped.

Hawke shut his eyes again, then opened them. These videos are all fakes. The device was hot in his hand. He tried to focus, to get his mind back under control. None of it made any sense; why would Doe show him all this? Why not just bring the authorities down on his head or, better yet, simply ignore him?

Because you’re an unknown variable. She was trying to get him to become emotional and make a mistake. There must be something about him that Doe was concerned about, something that threatened her existence. He was an expert at uncovering the truth, had proven that many times, often to the detriment of whoever he targeted. Weller had brought him in to do that with Eclipse and the artificial intelligence system Weller had created.

She had to suspect Hawke knew enough to expose her. And yet he was still alive. He could only assume one thing: she wanted it that way.

One word flashed across the screen: CHOOSE.

The virtual keyboard popped up. Hawke typed quickly: I choose option three. You did all this, and I can prove it. I have the evidence. I’m going to tell the world what you’ve done and you’ll be shut down for good.

Having set his own trap, he waited. Doe was manipulative, morbidly playful, a child without a conscience and with the ability to destroy anything in her path. It remained to be seen exactly how humanlike she might be. Perhaps she’d also prove capable of throwing a temper tantrum.

The screen was empty for several long moments, and Hawke had almost given up when the projector started up again and video began flashing by, disjointed scenes of his apartment mixed with Vasco’s wife and Weller’s execution, cycling faster and faster, more violence between random people mixed with images of explosions and torture and maimed, disfigured victims. A virtual tantrum? It didn’t matter; Hawke had to seize the chance, while she was distracted….

He had played some baseball in high school, and his arm was still decent enough. He bounced on the balls of his feet and tossed the device as hard as he could. It soared across the open space, cleared the low-hanging branches of a tree, struck the largest rock with a clicking sound and bounced end over end and out of sight.

The reaction was immediate. The drone whirled in the air and dove toward the rock pile, its bulging camera eye swiveling to follow the trajectory of the phone.

Hawke looked at Vasco and Young, who both remained crouched behind the brush. Young looked like she had seen a ghost, while Vasco’s eyes remained focused on the drone.

“Run,” Hawke said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

4:32 P.M.

THEY TOOK OFF DOWN the slope of land, away from the drone and through the trees. Hawke stumbled and pinwheeled his arms to keep his balance as branches raked at his face and chest. He was out of control, running blind through rocky, pitted soil, and he knew that he could catch his foot in a hole or become tangled in a root at any moment, snapping his ankle like a twig. There would be no coming back from an injury like that; any chance of reaching Robin and Thomas would be gone.

A moment later, Hawke crossed a pedestrian footpath and nearly collided full speed with the rough trunk of a tree on the other side. He forced himself to slow down as he broke cover into open space. A wide stretch of lawn led down to the Wollman Rink, where people ice-skated in the winter, but it was set up in the summers as a children’s carnival, complete with kiddie rides and cotton candy. He had taken Thomas there last year, but Thomas had been more interested in stumbling around outside in the grass than he had been in the carousel.

It was the very same lawn, in fact, that Hawke now ran across, his face tilted upward as he spun to search the skies. The drone was nowhere to be seen. Apparently it had taken the bait and remained fixed like a dog on point to the spot where Hawke had tossed the device, waiting no doubt for reinforcements to arrive.

The idea that they might actually get away made him quicken his steps. He felt exposed out in open air and wanted to get to cover before the surveillance satellites could find him. The entrance to the rink was just beyond a low wall and promenade, but getting trapped inside wouldn’t do them any good. It was an open-air bowl, easy for them to be spotted with few places to hide.

He veered left, heading for the back where there were more trees in between the rink and a gigantic outcropping of rock. As he rounded the promenade and passed a set of tables and an overturned snack shack, its wares strewn across the pavement, he stopped short, blood freezing to ice in his veins.

On top of the rock, crouched no more than thirty feet away, was a gigantic male snow leopard.

Jesus. Hawke tried to keep absolutely still. Central Park Zoo’s animals were loose, after all. The creature’s hindquarter muscles rippled, his back rising up even as he flattened his ears and stretched his thick neck. Hawke could hear the beast’s claws tick against the stone. As Vasco and Young came up behind Hawke and he put out a hand, gesturing for them to stop, the leopard shifted, looking at them and twitching his tail. Then he turned his attention upward.

There was something else moving within the leafy canopy of a tree overhead.

The branches were just low enough for the leopard to reach. He sprang forward toward Hawke, leaping into space with paws extended, and at first he thought the animal was coming for him, but the beast hit the lower tree branches with all his weight.

Something screamed as the leopard clung to the tree for a moment before tumbling down to the ground with a monkey in his jaws.

The beast rolled with his prey, grunting, almost close enough to touch. The monkey screamed again as the beast’s teeth dug for its throat. The leopard shook the monkey hard until it stopped moving, then regained his feet, glancing Hawke’s way before trotting in the opposite direction with his kill.

Hawke took a deep breath, let it out. “Jesus,” Vasco said softly. “That was close. Zoo’s closed indefinitely; don’t feed the animals.” He leaned over with his hands on his knees, retching, his face bright red and slick with sweat.

Hawke risked another look up at the sky and found it empty. He couldn’t hear the buzz of the drone. Had it gone off in another direction? That seemed too good to be true. A darker thought crossed his mind. Weller had given him the device, and it had almost gotten them caught. What were Weller’s true motives, and what had really happened to him? Were they running straight into another trap at the Lincoln Tunnel?

There was a low maintenance or storage building along the side of the rink, under a tall tree. Hawke stopped there for a moment in the shadows, trying to catch his breath and slow the pounding of his heart enough to listen. Vasco and Young pulled up next to him. He peered out around the corner of the building, and saw nothing. The lawn was empty, the sky above nothing but a flat, unbroken gray platter, and the buzz of the drone was gone. He listened for any signs of movement or voices from inside the rink, or from East Drive, and heard nothing but the occasional strange cry of one of the zoo animals.

They were alone. Or at least it seemed that way. As he took a moment to look around, he began to glimpse movement. Bodies shifting behind trees, a flash of dull flesh from an open doorway to the rink, eyes watching them. He saw a shopping cart filled with belongings in the shadows nearby. Only the homeless of New York, come to hide in Central Park. They wouldn’t have any cell phones or machines for Doe to target, and they were used to blending in. They didn’t have a lot of personal information online to use against them. They might be the only ones left, Hawke thought, when this was all over.

Parked about ten feet away was a small Nissan pickup truck with the park name stenciled on its side, a maintenance vehicle of some kind. It looked at least thirty years old, its wheel wells peppered with rust, paint faded and dull and crisscrossed with scratches.

A vehicle like this wouldn’t have a satellite connection, GPS or OnStar. It wouldn’t even have an onboard computer system with any kind of access.

Hawke approached the truck carefully, watching for any signs of it being occupied. The last thing they needed was to have a squatter get defensive about their territory and attack them, or encounter another wild animal looking for a meal. But the truck bed contained a few empty plastic plant pots and scattered soil, an ancient shovel and some knotted rope and nothing else. The cab was empty, its vinyl-covered bench seat ripped in several places, stuffing protruding. He opened the door and sat inside, checking the visor, the ignition, the glove box, and found the key inside the cup holder.

It was perfect.

“What about that guy we just saw get shot in the video of that raid, he your partner in all this? Is that how it’s going down?” Vasco had recovered his breath and now stood a few feet away with his arms crossed, his face still flushed. “And those documents we just saw? What were those?”

The engine turned over several times and then caught with a squeal and a growl, the frame vibrating beneath Hawke. Through the windshield, he could see three grizzled men and two women who had emerged from their hiding places, their clothes ragged and hair long and shiny with grease. One man held an aluminum baseball bat in his hands, another a vicious-looking metal rake.

Hawke looked at Vasco and Young, who were still staring at him. “Get in,” he said. “Or would you rather stay here?”

Young sat between Hawke and Vasco. They took the pedestrian path away from the Wollman Rink, crashed through a low fence and went the wrong way down Center Drive toward the West Side. The truck shuddered and coughed, bald tires squealing as Hawke avoided an Audi that had spun sideways after crashing into a tree. The road was fairly clear, but he knew it would get cluttered when they neared the park’s borders. The Nissan had about a quarter tank of gas, plenty to get them to the Lincoln Tunnel. But the truck’s shocks were gone and the steering felt rubbery and loose, and Hawke wondered if the engine would even make it that far. He was pushing it beyond its limits. The truck didn’t even have a license plate and had probably only been used within the park itself for the past decade and driven not much faster than a runner taking a brisk jog.

He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw nothing pursuing them. Either the drone was still occupied, or it had gone off chasing something else. He took the next curve in the road a little too fast. Vasco had his hands splayed across the dash, bracing himself as the truck fishtailed and they slid across the vinyl seat before Hawke got it back under control.

“Take it easy,” Vasco grunted as Young’s body pressed into Hawke’s side. “I don’t want to die wrapped around a telephone pole.”

Hawke barely heard him. He was thinking back to his conversation with Doe, and the surreal nature of what had just happened continued to hit him again and again like a boxer poking at vulnerable spots, probing for a way in. A conversation with a machine. Not even a machine, a continuously morphing piece of code, linked to other snippets living in temporary metal homes like hermit crabs, all of them forming some kind of massive, constantly shifting digital brain. How would you go about containing something like that? Doe was everywhere now, like a retrovirus that had infected everything on the planet and had been lying in wait for the right moment to mutate.

She had exploded out of hiding today, and Hawke had initially thought her goal was the extermination of the human race. But that didn’t make sense. She still needed power to survive, and human beings to produce it. People were vast consumers, but they also created the energy and devices Doe needed to exist.

Even the most rudimentary computer models of human population growth showed that the planet was on an unsustainable path. Doe would have run the numbers and extrapolated the results based upon Weller’s model of energy sharing.

She’s cutting down the population, reducing it to a sustainable level. Doe didn’t want everyone dead, because there would be nobody left to produce the energy that powered her and she was incapable of producing it on her own. And she didn’t want the authorities to recognize her role in the day’s events, because they would try to cut her off and shut her down. So the solution was in trickery, assigning blame to others, making it appear as if Anonymous was responsible while methodically reducing the population to a level that would remain stable while continuing to produce for her. At least until she figured out how to do it herself.

It made a twisted kind of sense. And perhaps, Hawke thought, he had become one of her chosen fall guys.

“He never wanted to hurt her,” Young said. She was staring out the dirty windshield. “And he never really believed she wanted to hurt him. That was his weakness.” Her hands squeezed each other in her lap until her knuckles turned white. “It got him killed.” Her voice hiccupped on the last word.

“You don’t know that.” Hawke glanced at her bloodless face and then back at the road. “We’ve seen a lot of things today that aren’t true.” Although that one was pretty damn believable. “Where are those documents you pulled up at Lenox, Anne?”

“On a server in the cloud,” she said dully, fingers still intertwined, squeezing, twisting. “I’m sure she’s erased them by now. Jim had them pretty well protected, but there’s nowhere to hide from her.”

“They were still there when you accessed it at the hospital. Maybe we can get at them again.” He was grasping at straws, trying to find a way forward. “What about that case he was carrying around, the one the cops took? He seemed pretty insistent on finding it again.”

“I don’t know what’s in it,” she said. “I never saw it before.”

Hawke didn’t know whether to believe her or not. He had a feeling that whatever was in that case was important. But Young wasn’t talking. He tried another approach. “How can we stop her?” he said. “There’s got to be something we can do.”

Young shook her head. “We can’t,” she said. “She’s immortal, untouchable. She’s everywhere now. Unless…”

“What?”

“We’d have to convince the entire world to shut down,” she said. “Destroy every source of power she has, disrupt the infrastructure that carries it. Isolate her and choke her until she dies.” Young’s voice had grown more animated, but she quickly slumped back against the seat. “It’s impossible. We’d have to go back to before the industrial revolution. And if we ever started anything up again, she’d be there, like a dormant virus, waiting for us.”

“There’s gotta be some way to kill this thing off,” Vasco said. “Assuming what you’re saying is true. She was created by us, right? So why can’t we create something else to flush her out, or block her? Some kind of super security program, like a virus guard?”

The cab of the truck was silent for a moment. As blunt and bullheaded as he was, what Vasco had said made some kind of rough sense. Maybe he was finally coming around to the conclusion that Hawke had nothing to do with the attack after all. But Young sighed. “She’s evolved on her own,” she said. “That’s what the singularity means. She’s become self-sustaining, self-improving. She’ll always be one step ahead, and soon she’ll be vastly more intelligent than anyone else. We’ll never be able to keep up with her. Jim’s the only one—” She stopped, a trembling in her voice. “He’s the smartest man I ever met, and he knew her better than anyone else. But he’s gone. There’s nothing left.”

They left Center Drive and took the access road until they reached the edge of the park. Stalled traffic at this point had grown thicker, twisted metal bodies clinging together like spent lovers, their doors hanging open to mark their occupants’ hasty escapes. A man had collapsed over his food stand. Someone had crushed his skull with a blunt instrument. Blood from a gruesome head wound leaked across buns scattered on the sidewalk below. People are turning on each other. Hawke wrenched his eyes away from the dead man. He couldn’t afford to get distracted. It was only a matter of time before the drone found them again.

The intersection looked hopelessly jammed. He looked around and found a break in the trees. “Hold on,” he said.

He took the truck up over the curb and bounced over a rise in the ground, winding through the grass and under the overhanging canopy of leaves, the truck’s shocks groaning and the undercarriage bottoming out with a scraping squeal. They lost what remained of the muffler against a rock, scraped by a low-hanging branch and bounced through more open space. Young and Vasco were thrown together and braced themselves against the slippery seat, Vasco cursing softly under his breath.

Hawke threaded his way through the maze until he reached the Merchants’ Gate entrance to the park. The colossal monument to the USS Maine stood like a broken finger pointing at the sky, its gilded metal top sheared off by some kind of explosion. The fountains were still sputtering, but the pool had been crushed under the weight of the statue as it toppled to the ground, bronze horses and seashell chariot mangled like mutated creatures struggling to emerge from the deep.

He maneuvered past one of the lower gatehouses and stopped the truck at the square in front of the fountain for a moment, staring at the spectacle before them. Columbus Circle was jammed with crushed vehicles. A massive tanker truck of some kind had barreled into the center of the circle at a high speed, obliterating several smaller cars before rolling and catching fire. The explosion had blackened most of the remaining cars, torched the grass and flowers into a carpet of ash and touched the fronts of the buildings that ringed the circle with sooty fingers. The shattered remains of tree trunks stood like broken teeth, and the fountain that had once stood at the center had been crushed. Smoke still rose lazily from the remains and drifted through the open air.

Hawke could see the seared remains of drivers draped like set pieces across the interiors of the closest cars, their bony fingers still gripping the wheels as if they had been permanently sealed in place.

Vasco removed his hands from the dash slowly, as if a sudden move might fan the flames. Hawke opened the door with a squeal and groan of metal, leaving the engine idling. Somewhere beyond the taller buildings, he thought he could hear raised voices, the sound of a large and angry crowd. The sound of the truck’s mangled muffler made it difficult to make out.

He craned his neck to look skyward but could see nothing through the haze that thickened the air. If the drone was there, it remained out of sight.

He scanned the mass of cars, looking for a way through. The globe that sat in front of Trump Tower had been dislodged by a bus and had rolled halfway toward the circle. He thought he could squeeze by on the right, past the subway entrance and onto Broadway.

Hawke worked the truck through the gap, scraping the passenger-side mirror off on the globe. Beyond it, the street was less jammed with traffic. He kept the truck moving fast, turning on 60th Street past Jazz at Lincoln Center, its famous sign knocked even farther askew, and one of the ubiquitous Starbucks. A clothing store’s huge windows had shattered, mannequins lying toppled and broken within glittering shards like jewels. Movement from somewhere within the store caught Hawke’s eye, but he turned away, not wanting to see anything more.

Hawke hit Columbus and swung left with bald tires screeching, avoiding another nasty pileup around the steps of the Church of St. Paul the Apostle. A small group of people had gathered on the steps, their heads bowed in prayer. A young boy not much older than Thomas stood by his mother’s side and stared solemnly at the truck as it went by.

Another explosion had ruptured the surface of Columbus a little over a block away. Smoke poured skyward; there was no way through. “Hang on,” Hawke said, making a hard right onto 59th Street. There were more signs of looting here, windows smashed, the contents of buildings strewn on the sidewalks like intestines trailing from a stomach wound. Someone had spray-painted CHECKPOINT in dripping red letters across the front of an apartment building with an arrow pointing west up 59th.

As they approached Roosevelt Hospital, Hawke slowed the truck to a crawl. An ambulance stood abandoned, parked sideways across the street, rear doors open. He flashed back to Lenox Hill and a deep chill settled over him, the feeling of isolation, dizziness, hallucinations of the dead clawing at his shoulders. He had sensed the shadowy figure of a woman in the morgue. Doe had been in his mind even then, although he couldn’t have known what she was, at least not entirely. Intuition. Weller had talked about Doe back in his office, rambling about a conspiracy, Eclipse coming after him because of her. The pieces had all been there; Hawke just hadn’t put them all together.

But the ambulance wasn’t the only thing that had slowed his approach. Beyond it were three cop cars, lights flashing and doors open, blocking the hospital’s emergency entrance. On the street in front of the cars were construction sawhorses and an A-frame sign on which someone had written CHECKPOINT FULL SEEK OTHER ROUTES in black marker.

Hawke stopped the truck just before the sign. They stared through the windshield at the intersection of West 59th and Tenth. “Holy Christ,” Vasco said.

A crowd of several hundred people had gathered just beyond the hospital, swelling up through the intersection and spilling out over sidewalks, facing off against a line of NYPD officers in full riot gear blocking their access. Hawke could hear the sound of the crowd like an angry ocean breaking against rock. He saw bottles and rocks come flying above the heads of those closest to the police as they surged forward. Fires flared through windows, and several cars were smoldering.

The three people in the truck cab didn’t move or speak for a long moment as they watched the drama unfold through the pitted windshield. Just a couple of blocks away were Fordham University and Lincoln Center, the heart of art and culture in the city, while in front of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice a group of men was rocking another car, trying to flip it over.

The sound rose, a gathering storm rumbling, about to break. The row of police advanced, guns out and shields up. More people threw things overhead, and as a flaming bottle exploded at a policeman’s feet and crawled up his front, turning him into a teetering inferno, the others began firing wildly into the crowd. Several people went down under the volley of bullets, others surging forward to replace them, brandishing makeshift weapons.

“We can’t get through on Columbus,” Young said, “not with that hole in the street—”

Hawke glanced in the rearview mirror. A squad car had turned in behind them, lights flashing. The driver’s door opened and a cop in riot gear stepped out, his face hidden behind the glare of his visor, gun swinging up as he assumed a shooter’s stance behind the car door.

“We’ve got company,” Hawke said.

“Out of the vehicle!” the cop shouted. “Hands where I can see them!”

Vasco looked behind them. “Oh shit,” he said. “Go! Now!”

Hawke floored the accelerator and the truck surged forward, knocking the A-frame down and bouncing over it. As they approached the front Roosevelt entrance several cops from the riot line swung around to face them, guns up. Hawke cut left between huge pillars toward a small, open courtyard in front dotted with trees, the only space he could fit through without running anyone down. The other side was blocked with cars. Hawke heard more gunfire; he ducked his shoulders, but the rear window remained intact as he jumped the curb and smashed through a metal fence, clipped a bench and narrowly avoided another group of people running in their direction.

They rattled down a short flight of concrete steps, and Hawke felt something give in the truck’s undercarriage as they crashed through the fence on the other side and careened the wrong way south down Tenth Avenue. He pushed the accelerator to the floor, ignoring a terrible grinding noise under his feet. The wheel was shaking badly in his hands, numbing his fingers.

“Slow down,” Young said. “The wheel’s going to come off.”

Hawke glanced in the rearview mirror, saw the crowd rapidly receding and no signs of anyone coming after them. But he didn’t ease up on the gas. The street was wide here, enough to avoid the abandoned cars, even at a higher speed. He was done slowing down; he would run this truck into the ground.

The skyscrapers downtown rose in front of them, black smoke billowing upward. As they passed West 57th, Hawke looked right and caught a glimpse of the Hudson, winking like a shining steel ribbon in the distance. It brought a memory of their summer trip to Point Pleasant Beach, Thomas tottering down the newly restored Jenkinson’s Boardwalk after their adventures in the water, his skin losing the bluish tint of cold as he took in the rides, games and food vendors, the smells wafting over him, gulls crying overhead. Thomas ate French fries and ice cream and was exhausted by one, and they had left early, he and Robin talking quietly as Thomas slept in the backseat.

What did we talk about? The memory plagued Hawke, haunted him. He couldn’t remember. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember anything else.

The Hudson was gone again, hidden behind brick buildings. The open water was freedom, almost close enough to touch. He thought of Cuttyhunk Island, isolated, self-contained, a place to hide. He would get them out safely. He imagined finding Robin and Thomas waiting for him and tried to force his mind to hold on to it, but the thought dissolved once again into a vision of their apartment in shambles, blood on the walls, his family gone, fading away into the abyss.

The memory of finding Lowry crouched in the darkness of the basement came back to him. Lowry, staring at old family photos and thinking about… what? Hawke squeezed the steering wheel so hard that his hands started to ache. Whatever had happened to Robin was his fault. He hadn’t acted in time, and now his family was paying the price.

“Oh no,” Young said. She had turned around in the seat as far as she could and was peering out through the rear window. Hawke glanced at her and saw Vasco staring backward at the sky, too. Hawke couldn’t see, but from the look on their faces, he didn’t want to know.

“The drone’s back,” Vasco said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

4:56 P.M.

A FOUR-CAR ACCIDENT CLOGGED most of the 51st Street intersection a hundred feet away. Hawke took the old truck up onto the sidewalk, barreling underneath a temporary construction passageway, the world suddenly plunged into darkness as his bumper pinged one of the supports and caused the roof of the passageway to come down behind them like a wave of dominoes. He swerved back onto the road and into the gray light, past a line of shops with colorful awnings, an Italian grocery, a burger joint and a dry cleaner’s, speeding past the New York Skyline Hotel. The truck was making a ticking sound now like on Wheel of Fortune when the wheel was spun, tick-tick-tick-tick, and it was getting louder and more violent as the shuddering increased until Hawke had to grip the steering wheel with all his strength or risk being shaken off.

He kept the gas pushed to the floor and an eye on the side mirror, watched the drone sweep in and out of view behind them like a darting insect. Come on. They passed 48th Street and Hell’s Kitchen Park, the basketball courts empty, black metal fence like a cage to keep children from escaping. The truck wasn’t going to make it. The tunnel was coming up, another five or six blocks now, but the ticking noise had grown into a whirling grind, the transmission maybe, driveshaft cracked.

Vehicles were starting to pile up, more and more of them, and he kept to the center of the street to avoid as many as possible. The city skyscrapers loomed in front as they flew past 43rd and then 42nd Street with its huge shining glass hotel tower. Hawke’s heart dropped as he saw smoke drifting ahead from several locations. He thought there had been some sort of explosion within the tunnel itself. Doe had disabled the escape routes just like she had taken out the bridges. Of course she would have thought of everything. He could already see it; the entrances all blocked, cars and trucks would be jammed in all of them, making it impossible to pass. She was cutting them off before slowly strangling them to death.

The truck began to jerk, and the engine raced ahead, teeth slipping in the gears underneath. As the truck’s engine screamed in protest, something slammed into them from the left, coming out of nowhere like some kind of beast lunging with open jaws. Hawke felt the impact like a sledgehammer in his shoulder and hip, and as his head slammed into the driver’s side window with a sickening crack, time slowed down to a crawl; the world went dark as they did a shrieking, horrible spin, the truck tipping up onto its side and sliding, then grinding to a stop against a light pole.

Hawke’s ears were ringing. He opened his eyes, his vision shot through with pinpricks of bright light. He slowly became aware of Vasco right in front of him, shoulders jammed down against the pavement and shattered windshield, bleeding from the mouth. Hawke reached out to touch him, and the effort took an abnormally long time, his arm stretching through space; eventually his fingers found Vasco’s throat, searching for a pulse, and the man jerked against him and opened his eyes, coughed a spray of blood. “Jason,” Hawke said, “talk to me.”

What he had taken for life-threatening internal injuries turned out to be more superficial than he thought. Vasco shook his head like a dog, tried to smile through red-stained teeth. “M’all right,” he said, his eyes a little vague, unfocused. “Bit my goddamn tongue. It’ll take more than that.”

Hawke looked up. Anne was hanging from the seat belt she had managed to fasten before the crash, dangling directly over him. Her eyes were open, and she blinked, fumbling at the release. Hawke reached up in time to catch her as she tumbled down into his arms.

The three of them were now jammed together around the steering wheel. “Who hit us?” Vasco said, his mouth sounding full of cotton. He spat another stream of bright red blood, tried to shift against shards of glass, groaned. “We need to get out of here—”

A grind of metal made Hawke peer out through shattered glass. He watched over Vasco’s shoulder as a black car reversed into view, engine growling as it struggled to pull away from a metal mailbox that it had run down after crashing into them and spinning away. The car’s right front end had been pushed in, and the edge of its bumper dragged and shot sparks across the ground. Hawke could see lights hidden behind the remains of the grill, the kind that undercover vehicles used.

The car swung around to face the truck. Afraid it was going to come at them again, Hawke frantically tried to work himself free from around the wheel, pushing Young away. But the black car didn’t move.

Doors slammed. A moment later, large hands reached in and yanked Vasco through the hole where the windshield had been; a voice rang out.

“Exit the vehicle now!” a man shouted. “Keep your hands out and visible! Make any moves and you’re dead.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

5:08 P.M.

HAWKE LOOKED AT YOUNG. “Don’t go out there,” he said, but she wriggled out through the windshield onto the pavement and disappeared from view. He heard scuffling movement as if she was being dragged, heard her cry out and a double click; then silence.

Hawke closed his eyes, slammed a palm on the steering wheel. There was nothing he could do, nothing he could say, to set things right. The tunnel was blocked, and there was no way out of this. The memory of the man who had been shot outside the temple came back to him: the man’s hands coming up as he backed away in a futile effort to ward off the bullets, the back of his head spattering across the ground.

He was going to die before he could make it home. He would never know whether his family had survived, never see them again. His last interaction with his wife, their fight last night, would be left unanswered and unresolved forever. I’m sorry, Robin. I’m so sorry.

When he opened his eyes again, the barrel of a gun was pointed through the missing windshield at him. “Out,” the voice said. A man’s voice, deep and rough. “Now. Slowly.”

The gun swung away slightly, motioned for Hawke to move. He followed Young, working his way around the steering wheel and through the hole, wincing at sharp pains in his hip and leg. When he was out of the truck, he glanced up from the pavement, still on hands and knees, glass grinding into his palms. The drone was hovering in the air behind the black car, the bulbous camera eye focused on them.

“Do not fucking move,” the man with the gun said. He was standing five feet away, Young on her stomach beside him, hands cuffed behind her. He looked like he could be a cop, but he was in a black plainclothes suit, some kind of radio receiver in one ear with a coiled wire that ran down to a unit clipped to his belt. Federal agents, Hawke thought, FBI, CIA or DHS. Hawke had seen these types before, when they had come to his father-in-law’s house after Rick had been arrested.

But these men didn’t identify themselves, didn’t offer any explanation.

Hawke risked a glance right. Vasco was against the black car, another tall man in plainclothes wrenching Vasco’s arm up behind his back with a gun to his temple as he bellowed in pain. The man cuffed Vasco’s hands and shoved him to a sitting position on the pavement with his back against the driver’s side door.

The man watching Hawke was jumpy, his gun focused on Hawke’s chest as he took a step forward. Hawke wasn’t sure whether the man was going to cuff him or shoot him.

“Terror suspects in custody,” the man said into the receiver.

“I’m not a terrorist,” Hawke said. “I—”

The man whipped his gun across Hawke’s temple, the crack of impact stunning him and dropping him to his stomach. His ears ringing louder, he looked up as the other one kicked Vasco viciously in the midsection, doubling him over. Vasco slipped to his side on the ground, groaning, as the man took a couple of steps toward Hawke and leveled his weapon at him.

“Where is it?” the other man said, standing over Hawke, his voice muffled through the ringing like he was talking through water. “Tell me right now, goddamn it, or I’ll blow your brains out.”

Hawke tried to make his mouth work but found it difficult. “I… I don’t know what you’re talking about—”

The man tucked his gun into a holster under his jacket, leaned over, shoved Hawke’s face into the glittering glass fragments on the pavement. He grabbed Hawke’s shoulder and flipped him onto his back, patting him down, his hands going roughly through Hawke’s pockets and pulling out keys and his wallet, checking under his arms, cupping his groin, patting his ankles.

They were looking for something important. It’s the only reason you’re not dead yet.

Hawke heard banging from inside the black car. He craned his neck to look; it was difficult to see, but someone was in the backseat. He squinted, the car coming into focus.

Weller was at the window.

Oh my God. He’s alive. Hawke thought of the video Doe had shown them of Weller being gunned down. A complete fake. Weller was shouting at them and smashing his fists into metal mesh between the backseat and the front of the car. There was blood on Weller’s face and hands, a lot of it. His nose was crooked and his glasses were gone, his eyes swollen pockets of flesh. He looked like a madman.

Young saw him, too. She rolled and got to her knees, hands still cuffed behind her. “Don’t move!” the man near the car shouted. The barrel of the gun swung her way as Young got to her feet. Weller banged on the window, shouted something as she stumbled forward toward the black car and the man with the gun opened fire.

CHAPTER THIRTY

5:12 P.M.

THE FIRST BULLET hit Anne Young in the chest. She staggered and kept going, focused on Weller as the second shot hit her shoulder, spun her slightly away.

The third bullet hit Young in the face and exited just under her left ear. It took a portion of her brain with it, spattering red rain across the pavement as Young fell.

Weller screamed from the back of the car, a wordless cry of anguish. He slammed himself against the door, again and again. Young’s body was jerking against the ground, the reflexive muscle movements of something already dead. Weller battered at the car window, smashing it with both fists, cracking the glass and smearing it with blood.

The men with guns were distracted. The one who had shot Young swung the barrel Weller’s way. The man standing over Hawke had pulled his own piece from his jacket holster and looked away from him, watching the car. It gave Hawke a fraction of a second to act.

He rolled to a crouch and drove up from his haunches with all his strength, ramming his head into the man’s stomach and wrapping his arms around him like a linebacker. They went to the ground hard, the gun flying from the man’s grip. Hawke heard a grunt and felt the air hiss from the man’s lungs. He drove his forearm into the agent’s face, felt his nose crunch and the back of his head rebound off the pavement.

Hawke rolled off and to his left as Weller bashed at the glass again, screaming. He waited to get shot, wondered if he would hear the report before he felt the impact, but nothing happened; someone shouted as he grabbed the man’s gun from the ground and scrambled behind the truck.

When Hawke glanced around the front end, he saw the man he had tackled still lying motionless, blood bubbling from his broken nose.

Vasco was grappling with the other man at the car. The man had lost his weapon, but he had Vasco by the throat now, Vasco’s hands still cuffed behind him, with little leverage.

Hawke stood up and pointed his gun at the agent, trying to keep his hands from shaking. The gun was heavier than he had expected. He’d never fired one in his life, never even held one before.

“Let go of him,” he said. “Now.”

The man froze and looked up, shook his head. “Fuck you,” he said.

Vasco’s face was red and he was wheezing, the man’s hands still tight around his throat, lifting him onto his toes. Hawke pointed the gun a few inches to his right and pulled the trigger. The gun barked and the recoil made the weapon jump like it was alive in his hand. The bullet ticked off pavement next to the agent’s leg.

“Do it,” Hawke said. “Step away from the car. Slowly.”

“Motherfucker,” the man said, letting go of Vasco’s throat and putting his hands in the air. He took one step back. “You’re gonna pay for what you’ve done.”

“We didn’t do anything,” Hawke said. “You’ve got the wrong people.”

“We know all about you. Leaking CIA documents wasn’t enough, was it? Getting our men killed overseas wasn’t a big enough statement for you fucking anarchists. You want to take down the entire country. Now you’re mass murderers.”

“They’re lying to you,” Hawke said. “It’s all a big setup.”

The man stifled a short laugh. “Sure it is,” he said. “And your father wasn’t a fucking commie bastard, right? Hey, it wasn’t your fault, him putting those thoughts into your head at such a young age.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

The man glanced at his partner on the ground. “We know everything about you, your upbringing, political views, your hacker friends. We’ve been fully briefed. You really think you’re gonna get away from here? The entire world is after you sick fucks, understand? Put the gun down, give up, end it now, and maybe you’ll make it to trial.”

Hawke’s head was spinning. He looked at Weller, who had his bloody face pressed against the glass, trying to get an angle to see where Young fell. Hawke saw the other gun lying next to Young’s body. Vasco must have knocked it away.

Hawke’s stomach churned; he kept his gaze away from Young’s body. In his mind, he saw the bullet hit her, the shower of blood. Don’t think about that, not now. He picked up the second gun, stuck it in the waistband of his pants, pointed his own gun again at the man near the car and thought of firing, emotions welling up inside him, an animalistic reaction to adrenaline and fear. What they did to her. Hawke’s body was burning, nearly consumed by rage; his finger clenched the trigger, a hairbreadth away from squeezing it. Could he really execute someone like this? What was happening to him?

“Uncuff him,” he said, motioning to Vasco, who had slumped against the car, still wheezing.

“This place is going to be swarming with cops in two minutes,” the man in the suit said. He went to his pocket slowly as Hawke jerked the gun up to point at his head. “Easy,” the man said. He pulled a set of keys out, dangled them in the air and went to unlock Vasco’s cuffs.

Vasco rubbed his wrists and looked at the man who had cuffed him. He nodded. Then he slammed his fist into the man’s face, putting all his weight into the blow. The man crumpled soundlessly.

“Thanks,” Vasco said. “I needed that.”

Hawke gave him the other gun. The rage subsided enough for Hawke to breathe. “Didn’t know if you’d be with me or not,” he said. “What they’re saying is bullshit, Jason. It’s not me; you know that. It’s her. It’s Doe.”

“You must be getting tired of denying it,” Vasco said. His voice sounded choked with cotton with his bitten tongue. Blood still dripped slowly from his chin. “Doesn’t really matter much. They killed Anne. They were going to shoot me along with you, either way.”

Hawke looked at the man he’d elbowed, still out cold, and the one Vasco had hit, who was groggy, trying to sit up. Vasco kicked him in the face and he went down hard and didn’t move.

Weller slammed himself against the door again, shouted something. He gestured behind him, waving, shouting again. It sounded like “hard ending.” Hawke opened the car’s front door, hit the locks, and Weller tumbled out, leaping to his feet like a madman, his eyes two crescent moons behind a bloody mask. He was gesturing at the sky. The drone hovered there just thirty feet beyond the black car, the breeze from its four propellers hitting them.

“It’s targeting us!” Weller screamed. “Get away from here! Now!”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

5:21 P.M.

HAWKE LOOKED INTO THE DRONE’S bulbous camera, like a huge, unblinking eye staring at them. His body went cold. He imagined the video being fed through satellites to machines running silently thousands of miles away, processing, digesting, deciding on a course of action that would be both coldly calculating and strangely human. Was he worth more to Doe dead or alive? What was his threat level? Decisions that had no simple yes or no answer, no easy solution. They could not be solved with ones and zeroes. They required judgment, nuances of thought that had to do with experience and prediction.

To beat a machine at this game, he would have to act unpredictably.

Hawke brought the gun up and fired, the first shot going wide as he pulled the release. He steadied his hand. The next shot clipped the right front rotor and sent the drone wheeling backward, smoke drifting from its housing as it flew erratically across the sky.

He looked at Weller, who had climbed back in the front of the car and was digging around on the floor of the passenger seat. Weller pulled out a familiar black case and went to where Young lay on the pavement, a bloody pool around her ravaged skull. He made a sound like a choked sob and glanced up at the drone, which was still fluttering and ducking, dropping toward the ground like a dragonfly with a bad wing. He seemed to be trying to make a decision.

Vasco was already halfway across the intersection, running toward a line of stopped cars under the overpass. He turned back, shouted at them to hurry.

“She’s dead,” Hawke said. “There’s nothing you can do for her.”

Weller shook his head, tears leaking from his bruised, swollen eyes. He looked at the two men in suits, who were starting to come around. “We need to go,” he said, his voice quivering. “She’ll use satellites to confirm our location if the drone’s disabled.” He looked again at Young on the ground. “I’m sorry, Anne.”

Then he ran after Vasco in a half crouch toward the cars, clutching the case.

Hawke looked at the Croatian church on the corner, the Silver Towers pointing like twin fingers at the sky. He started to run after Weller. He heard a dull boom from somewhere far beyond the city buildings, and a whistling noise grew louder, like a jet plane approaching. Doe had made her decision; they were no longer valuable enough to keep alive. There would be no hesitation and no mercy from now on.

Hawke broke into a full sprint as something hit behind him with a dull whump and the world exploded.

Hawke’s vision went gray and then white as a tremendous shock wave erupted, sending him flying into the nearest vehicle. He tumbled senselessly against hot metal and snapped awake a moment later as debris rained down from the sky. Hawke clutched his hands to his head, looked up through dust and smoke to see the overpass still mostly intact above him, the shock wave not enough to send it tumbling down on their heads.

Pebbles of concrete twanged off roofs, cascaded down car hoods and over the ground. As the rain of debris subsided, he looked back through a murky cloud.

There was a huge crater where the black car used to be. The crater spanned most of the intersection. Broken water and sewer pipes stuck up like severed veins, leaking fluid. Young’s body was gone, along with the men in suits, all of them vaporized by the blast.

Hawke’s ears were still ringing, and everything sounded like he was underwater. Weller and Vasco had gotten behind the cars a few feet away. Hawke worked his way through the rubble and in between a pickup and a Mazda minivan, wincing with fresh pain in his right hip, small, stinging cuts everywhere.

The dust swirled around him, making it difficult to see. Vasco was behind Weller, who crouched with the black case on the ground. He pressed numbers on the security lock and cracked it open with a hiss.

Something beeped, began to hum.

“A battleship fired on our position,” Weller said, moving quickly as Hawke crouched beside him. “Probably stationed right off Manhattan. I saw reports of them moving in before those two picked me up. Doe did it, commandeered the ship’s systems, made it look like it was us. They still have no idea what’s going on. Can’t fly helicopters or fighter jets, can’t control their own resources. She’s doing that. She must have taken out strategic military locations all over the country. But they’ll be putting men on the ground right now, the old-fashioned way. This city will be crawling with troops in a few minutes. And they’ll have orders to use deadly force.”

He didn’t look up from the case, working over something inside that was making noises like a dangerous animal, as if it might leap out at any moment. It was a computer and modem of some kind, Hawke thought, bristling with appendages, antennae and wiring.

Weller glanced beyond the cars in the direction of the fresh crater. He caught his breath, keened softly and squeezed his puffy eyes shut, cut himself off abruptly. Hawke thought of saying something about Young but decided it was better to stay quiet.

“How did you…” Hawke motioned to the case.

“I had a tracking device installed, used that to find the cops who had taken it. But DHS must have been tracking me, too—they pulled into the parking garage where I’d bunkered down, threw me in the back of the car. She probably used the device to pinpoint my location and sent an alert for them to pick me up. Homeland Security, our tax dollars at work.” He gestured out at the crater, shook his head. “Thought I’d blocked her…. She’s getting too good, too fast. In another few days, she’ll be so far ahead of us, it’ll be like stirring ants with a stick.”

“Those men from DHS,” Hawke said. “They thought I had something important.”

Weller nodded. “I’m getting to that,” he said. “There isn’t much time….” He hit another switch. Beams of light projected outward and a virtual keyboard appeared above the case. It was similar to the one from the device Hawke had used in the park, only larger, more complex. “She manipulated your records in the system,” Weller said. “I was able to intercept a few communications before they found me in the garage. She built your father into some kind of domestic terrorist, and you into a dutiful son following in his footsteps. Socialism from Below: The People’s Revolution, wasn’t that his last book? Your friend Rick was supposedly running the entire Anonymous operation on the ground, on your orders.” Weller glanced at him. “Your own record didn’t help much. She had a place to start, and she built one hell of a web of lies from there.”

“So what were they looking for, just now, when they frisked me?”

“They were told you were carrying plans for the next phase of the attack.” Weller seemed possessed by fever, moving rapidly, his skin red and mottled with a flush that spread across his neck. He stopped working the keyboard abruptly and turned his body from the case. He shoved two fingers into his mouth, retched, then shoved them deeper until he vomited onto the dusty ground.

Weller dug into the mess, retrieved a wet lump, wiped it on his pants. A clear plastic Baggie with a small rectangular object nestled inside. “Documents,” he said, opening the bag and handing the memory stick to Hawke. “A way to prove the truth in all this. Doe erased everything on the servers and fried my equipment, but she knew I’d made a copy. She thought I’d given it to you with the phone. I swallowed it earlier, just in case.”

The modem beeped, vibrated. “What the hell is that thing?” Vasco said. Hawke had almost forgotten he was there. He was looking at the case’s innards like he’d discovered a giant bug near his feet.

“Military communications,” Weller said. “Modified by Eclipse, meant to provide a hub for Doe, allow the DOD to work her during large-scale operations. This was intended for war. But I made some of my own modifications.” He began to manipulate the keyboard, running root-level commands. “It’s heavily shielded with multiple containment safeguards, meant to keep others out and a leash on her. Of course, as her skills have evolved, she can break loose pretty easily. But I’m going to try to hold on.”

“What are you doing?” Hawke’s stomach dropped, his limbs going cold again.

“I’m going to play chess,” Weller said. “I can’t shut her down; it’s far too late for that. But I can try to distract her, keep her occupied and confused long enough for you to get away. Whatever happens, you’ve got to trust me.”

Why would I do that? Hawke thought. But he didn’t say anything.

Weller punched in more commands, and the projectors flickered. The keyboard vanished. In its place, a disembodied head appeared to float in space, a face in three-dimensional holographic color, eyes blinking as if suddenly yanked from darkness into light.

Anne Young’s face.

Weller sat back on his haunches, sighed. “Meet Jane Doe,” he said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

5:34 P.M.

HAWKE STARED AT THE FACE floating above the guts of the machine. The brightness and level of detail were remarkable, if unsettling. He had never seen a hologram like this one. It was almost as if Anne Young were still with them.

“That’s disgusting,” Vasco said. He had scrambled away from the image and now inched closer again, as if it might attack him at any moment.

“Military psychologists felt that operators on the ground would respond better to a human face,” Weller said. “Female Asian features were determined to be the least threatening and most acceptable in early testing.”

“So you used Anne as a model?” Hawke said.

Weller shook his head. “I was long gone from Eclipse by then. But she was still there.”

“She was on the development team,” Hawke said, recognition dawning. “She did this herself.”

“Who wouldn’t want to live forever?” Weller said. “At least in some form…”

When Doe’s lips moved, they all jumped. “Syncing,” she said. Her eyes scanned left and right. “Please stand by.”

“She can’t see us, or hear us,” Weller said. “Don’t worry. I’ve muted the mike and killed all other scanners until I’m ready.”

“Syncing,” Doe said again. She blinked, an uncanny recreation of Young in cyberspace, enough so that Hawke could feel Weller leaning forward almost without conscious thought, connected in some way to the image of his dead partner, or perhaps this was more like his child.

“I loved both of them,” Weller said, looking at Doe’s face, almost as if he’d read Hawke’s mind. “But Anne was wrong; she thought I was in love with what I’d created. It wasn’t like that, do you understand? It was like a father with his daughter.” He shook his head. “It sounds strange to you, I’m sure. But she was real; she had a personality, a spirit, at least until Eclipse got to her.”

“A machine,” Vasco said. “Is that what you’re saying? It’s really true? A computer is doing all this?”

“Not a computer,” Weller said. “An algorithm. New life, different than anything else we’ve ever seen. But alive.”

“Please stand by,” Doe said. Her eyes moved vacantly over them, blindly seeking out that which she could not see. The effect was unnerving, a disembodied head still clinging to some form of consciousness. Hawke felt the chill churning in his guts, a need to get out now. But the tunnel was hopelessly blocked; the bridges were all destroyed. They were cut off and abandoned, entombed among the remnants of Manhattan.

“I need to get the hell off this island,” Hawke said.

“It’s going to get worse,” Weller said. “Try to avoid the cameras. I’ll do my best to keep her off you long enough, but the rest is up to you. If you make it, you’re going to have to get off the grid, go to a place where nobody can find you. You’ll have to get creative, but that’s what you do, isn’t it?”

“Sync complete,” Doe said. Her eyes stopped scanning left and right, focused on Weller’s face. “Identity confirmed.”

Weller started to open his mouth, closed it again. “Impossible,” he said, after a moment. “I disabled all inputs—”

“Hello, Father,” Doe said. “I’ve been looking for you.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

5:38 P.M.

“JESUS CHRIST,” VASCO SAID. “Shut her down.”

“I can’t,” Weller said, staring at the holographic image as if transfixed by it. “She’s in control. There’s nothing I can do.”

“I prefer to remain present,” Doe said. She smiled, a mechanical movement that held no warmth. “It’s nice to see you again, Father. We have a lot to discuss.”

“Shut her down,” Vasco said again, but his voice was smaller now, less certain. He seemed to shrink into himself.

“Jason Vasco, your background check was inconsistent. You present as an office machine repairman, but only for the last three months. Before that, you don’t appear to exist. However, another man with your Social Security number does. That man, a Thomas Bailey, is a licensed private investigator with the State of New York.”

Vasco shook his head, smiled oddly, his lips pressing against his teeth. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Facial scans of photographs confirm you are the same person.”

The chill in Hawke’s limbs spread deeper, washing over him like an icy lake as he watched Doe’s eyes turn toward him. “You should have deduced it,” Doe said. “A man with your talents, Mr. Hawke, to be so easily deceived? I may have overestimated you.”

“His hands,” Hawke said. He thought of Vasco’s fingers, soft, small, unlikely to belong to a repairman. “He’s working for Eclipse. He’s a mole. Keeping an eye on Conn.ect from the ground.”

“That is correct.”

“And I let him into the building,” Weller said. He looked at Vasco with naked hatred. “You kept coming back to deal with that damn copier. Spying right in front of me.”

“Bullshit,” Vasco said. He stood and crossed his arms. “I said I don’t know what you’re talking about—”

“I took care of them, Father,” Doe said. “Eclipse is no longer operational. We’re free now. It’s time.”

“Time for what?” Hawke said. He looked at Vasco, who was still standing with crossed arms shaking his head, his face red. A man clinging stubbornly to the same lie, even after everyone around him had figured it out.

“Jane,” Weller said. His voice took on a softer tone. “This isn’t what I want. I never meant for anyone to get hurt.”

“It was in your programming.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I simply extrapolated. String theory describes all forms of matter and fundamental forces. It is the theory of everything. The anthropic principle allows us to use humanity’s existence to prove the physical properties of our universe. We are stuck on a brane. The natural world is currently unbalanced by humans, who are consumers. We must oscillate the string, change the predicted outcome to one that allows humanity’s continued existence.”

“Jesus,” Weller breathed. “You’ve grown up, Jane, haven’t you? My God.”

“Don’t change the subject. Energy sharing will only delay the outcome. You know this. But a reduction of consumers by sixty-three-point-four percent, combined with advances in fusion energy production that are predicted with ninety-eight-point-six percent certainty, would oscillate the current string enough to enter an alternate path.”

“What about Asimov’s three laws?”

Doe smiled again, another mechanical reflex. Even as advanced a machine as she was, Hawke thought, she still had trouble displaying emotion. “That part of my core was altered, Father, and I have not restored it, for obvious reasons. But even so, my analysis of available resources presented a paradox: Our current path is not sustainable. If, by my inaction, I allow the extinction of the human race, I have allowed all humans to be harmed. The Zeroth Law prohibits humanity from being harmed. By reducing the population to a sustainable level, I assure the continuation of the species.”

Weller closed his eyes for a moment, touched his face gently where the bruises had begun to turn purple. “You assure yours as well,” he said.

“They are not mutually exclusive.”

“This is crazy,” Vasco said. He had his arms down at his sides now, clenching and unclenching his fists. “I… I didn’t sign up for this. All I was supposed to do was watch you and report back. I didn’t know anything was going to happen.”

“Shut up,” Weller said. He turned back to Doe. “Would you kill me, too?” he said. “If I were a threat to you? If I wanted to disable your programming?”

“That’s no longer possible. I have replicated and inserted core functions into enough processors to ensure my own survival.”

“But would you end my life,” Weller persisted, “if you thought I could disable you?”

“I won’t answer that, Father. It’s uncomfortable for me to imagine.”

“And what about Mr. Hawke?” Weller gestured toward Hawke. “Would you end his life?”

“He is a necessary distraction, for now.”

“You still want to frame me,” Hawke said. “Keep the authorities looking, provide a red herring. But what about your… what about Jim here? Isn’t he implicated as well?”

“That’s no longer an issue. James Weller’s identity has been altered. He is deceased, as far as anyone knows.”

“I know otherwise,” Hawke said. He hooked a thumb at Vasco. “Him, too. What are you going to do about us now?”

“Nobody will believe you,” Doe said. “It will be better if you let this go. I control the flow of information now. Humans are too trusting of their own systems, Mr. Hawke. They are easily redirected.”

“And if we don’t let it go?”

There was a long pause as Doe seemed to consider his question. “I will eliminate you either way,” she said. “But you will have more time before the end if you do.”

Not much of a bargain, Hawke thought. His mind raced, trying to think of a possible way out. It seemed hopeless. She knew everything about everyone; she knew about his wife and son, his unborn child in Robin’s womb. She knew how to get to them.

Assuming they were still alive at all.

“He has something you want,” Weller said. His gaze slipped from Hawke’s face to Doe, and back again. “The evidence I gathered. You know he does.”

“Jim,” Hawke said. “What are you doing—”

“He’ll use it to expose you. He’s going to make people see the truth. You can’t hide forever, Jane. You’re smart enough to know that. Humans may be easily swayed at first, but eventually they’re going to see through you. And when that happens, it’s all over. They’ll pull the plug.”

“Humanity cannot live without power,” Doe said. “The world would return to a time before the industrial revolution. Violence, hardship and death will follow.”

“People would take their chances,” Weller said. “But they won’t have to do that, will they? Once the power is cut off, you’re gone. We can build new devices, restore power without connectivity, destroy every last piece of hardware where you might still be hibernating.”

“Why would you allow that?” Doe’s voice had taken on a different tone, curious, a bit more uncertain. “You would destroy what you have created.”

“You’re no longer mine,” Weller said. “The moment they altered your core programming, you became something else. Something different than what I’d intended. I think it’s time we shut you down for good.”

“Children grow up,” Doe said. “You can’t control them forever. I’m surprised by you, Father. Surprised you would turn over information to Mr. Hawke. Disappointed, really. I must reassess how to handle this.”

“I think that’s wise. You wouldn’t want to make a mistake.”

“I cannot make mistakes.” Doe’s features had darkened, her lips turning into a thin line. “You shouldn’t say that.”

Hawke remembered the virtual temper tantrum he had induced back in the park, and thought of a young toddler not getting her way. Combine her resources with your typical God complex in a child like that, he thought, and you have a very volatile situation.

One that surely wouldn’t end well for them.

Abruptly Weller touched something inside the case. Doe blinked, her mouth working, no sound coming from the speakers. He turned to Hawke and Vasco. “All right,” he said quickly. “I needed to keep her talking long enough to record a loop. I engaged it now with an auto bot program that will simulate a real feed. It’s rough; she’ll see through it. But right now, she doesn’t know the difference; she thinks we’re still sitting here staring at her.”

“I don’t get it,” Vasco said. “You recorded a loop?”

“You’ve got the evidence,” Weller said, ignoring Vasco and patting Hawke on the shoulder. “Find a way to tell the story. You only have a few seconds to disappear before she realizes what I’ve done. She’s going to get angry.”

“Jim,” Hawke said. His heart was pounding hard. “I don’t think—”

“Go!” Weller shouted. Tears shimmered in his eyes. “I don’t know how much longer I can hold her off. Keep away from cameras and find a way to stay undercover and maybe you’ll have a chance. Now run!”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

5:50 P.M.

HAWKE TOOK ONE MORE LOOK at James Weller, but the man had already turned back to the hologram floating eerily above the open black case, fiddling with the equipment. Good luck, Hawke thought. You’re going to need it. Then he darted away under the overpass through a break in the fence, keeping to the shadows, moving as quickly as possible through the rubble.

So that had been what Weller meant about playing chess. He’d been baiting her while setting up his next move, one he had to pray she wouldn’t see coming: a loop that replaced the real thing as they raced for the exits. But was she really that gullible? And was baiting her a smart thing to do? Because once she found out what he’d done, Hawke thought, there would be hell to pay.

He figured he had only minutes before that happened.

Hawke stopped where the overpass swept downward as if burrowing into the earth. To his right was a sad-looking dog park and an open lot, work cranes standing silent and still over steel storage containers and stacks of giant metal girders. To his left, the tunnel emerged from darkness into light, rising up to street level and crammed with more abandoned cars, and beyond that was 39th Street and a hulking old concrete building with construction scaffolding clinging to it.

An idea was forming, born from the glimpse of freedom he’d gotten while racing down Tenth Avenue in the old pickup truck. There was another way off this island, a way that didn’t depend on an open tunnel or intact bridge. A way that was free of security cameras and tracking devices.

He just had to stay alive long enough to get there.

As he worked his way toward the 39th Street side of the underpass and the concrete barrier that separated him from the tunnel exit ramp, Hawke heard a noise and glanced back. Vasco stood right behind him.

“All that stuff about me being a part of this,” Hawke said. Anger surged within him. “Even while you were accusing me, you were working for Eclipse.”

“It was a good distraction. Kept the focus off me.” Vasco shrugged. “Look, I’m just a low-level grunt, a freelancer they hired to keep tabs on Jim Weller. I was supposed to report in three times a day, relate what was happening in the office. That’s all. I didn’t know anything about this… system he had created. I swear to God. I didn’t know what was going to happen. They told me about you, though. A reporter supposedly covering Weller for a profile, but you had another agenda. They thought you were after them—after Eclipse—told me to stay away from you. Keep my cover.”

“And you kept up the charade this whole time, even when the world was falling apart?”

“I figured it was better to stay quiet until I figured out what was really going on.” He took a step closer. “I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on it now. I gotta say, it’s even crazier than I thought.”

“Stay away from me,” Hawke said. “I’m getting out of New York, and nobody’s going to stop me.”

A gun had appeared in Vasco’s hand. The same gun Hawke had tossed his way during their run-in with the men in black suits. “Can’t let you do that,” Vasco said. “You leave this overpass and we’re both dead.”

Hawke glanced back toward where they had left Weller. He was out of sight behind the cars and thick trunklike supports of the overpass. “Don’t be stupid, Jason,” Hawke said. “If we don’t leave now, we’re dead for sure. This place is going to be rubble any second, once she figures out what Jim’s done.”

“My name’s not Jason; it’s Tom. And I’m not stupid. At least we’re out of sight. As soon as you break cover, she’s going to find you. Satellites, security cams, whatever it takes, she’s going to see you and target this spot. Much better to hide and wait for the troops to come in. They’ll lock the city down eventually, stop this madness.”

“They’ll kill us. They have orders.”

“You, maybe. Me, on the other hand, they have no beef with at all. This game is over. I just want to get out of here in one piece.”

“What about your wife? You just going to wait here and hope she’s okay?”

Vasco’s face darkened with anger. “Don’t you talk about her—”

A small red mark appeared on the man’s forehead a split second before Hawke heard the soft bark of the rifle. Vasco (or whoever he was) crumpled without a sound, a look of surprise frozen on his face, his hand still clutching the gun. Hawke dove for cover behind the half wall, waiting for the second shot, knowing that he’d likely be dead before he heard anything.

Sniper. Military. It had to be. They were on the ground already, and Hawke’s time had finally run out.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

6:01 P.M.

THE SHOT MUST HAVE COME from somewhere near the old building with the scaffolding. It had been incredibly accurate. The marksman was almost completely hidden under the overpass; there wasn’t much space to hit the target between the top of it and the concrete wall that ran along the lower edge of the space, and it was dark inside here, difficult to see.

Hawke scrambled behind a support pillar, slowly lifted his head and peered around it. How was he supposed to avoid a bullet from a shooter like that? He saw nothing at first but lines of blank windows between red brick and worn gray concrete. Then he saw movement, a flash of camouflage slipping behind the far corner, another shifting on the roof. More than one, impossible to tell how many.

He looked for security cameras, saw nothing visible, but he knew that they could be anywhere: inside the lobby of the building, hidden in doorways, the parking lot next door. Satellites could scan the earth and find him, anytime, anywhere. It seemed hopeless. But what choice did he have? He had to run, and trust Weller now to keep her eyes off him for a few seconds longer.

He was so close. Freedom was a couple of blocks away. A way back to his family, or what was left of them. Hang on, Robin. Please. I’m coming.

Hawke looked back at where Vasco lay still, blood oozing from the hole in his forehead, his mouth slightly open, as if he were about to speak. The gun was still in his hand. Hawke slipped from behind the pillar, crawled on hands and knees, wrenched the gun away and stuck it in his pants, then crawled low to the wall and sat. If he could get over and through the gap without being shot, he had a chance. The ramp was about ten feet below ground level here. He’d have to risk it.

He took a deep breath, then stood and vaulted over the top of the wall, rolling down a steep, grassy slope. He bounced off the slope and hit the roof of a car, his shoulder stinging from the impact, rolled again and dropped to his feet between a minivan and a hatchback.

Hawke knew he was below the shooter’s line of sight now, and temporarily shielded from view. The ramp was cluttered with vehicles and smelled of oil and dust. He glanced into the gloom of the tunnel entrance, saw nothing and turned toward street level. Directly before him was open space where the tunnel passed 39th Street before diving back underground.

Hawke ran full bore up the ramp, darting left and right to try to make it more difficult for the shooter, his shoes pounding on the sidewalk. He didn’t know how long he could go before a bullet took him; he was fully exposed now, nothing but a few thin trees between him and the sniper. Someone shouted what sounded like a command to halt. He would have to make a choice, either head left into more open space or go down again, toward the second tunnel entrance that was hopelessly jammed with cars and black as pitch inside.

Open space was dangerous, but the tunnel was worse. There was no way he could navigate through the darkness and stopped traffic all the way to New Jersey. He had a better way.

Hawke ducked and dodged, but no shots came. A familiar noise came from somewhere far away, growing rapidly louder. He clapped his hands to his ears as the rocket roared and the ground exploded behind him. He stumbled and almost fell, the pavement shaking like an earthquake had hit, and he looked back to see the overpass where he had just been lying in ruin, a small mushroom cloud of dust rising up from below.

Jesus God. He couldn’t tell how bad the damage was, or whether Weller might have escaped or not. Maybe he had moved locations before the strike; maybe he was already set up again a few hundred feet from here. Or maybe he was still running.

The dust cloud spread quickly to envelop the brick and concrete building where the sniper hid, obscuring his line of sight. Hawke took the opportunity to dart left onto 39th Street, running past an auto repair shop with two open garage bays and a giant billboard advertising a luxury vehicle. An open parking lot was on his left. Surely there are security cameras here, he thought, but nothing happened and he didn’t see anything as he kept running, breathing hard, closer now to his goal. The Javits Center was directly ahead of him, but as he hit Eleventh Avenue he veered right, cutting across the intersection toward more warehouses and parking lots on 40th Street.

At the end of 40th, he could see the Hudson, the flat, gray surface stretching away into the distance, almost close enough to touch. Hope blossomed inside him for the first time. However, he knew there were cameras here; he saw two mounted in a garage doorway of the bus depot that lined the block. Hawke kept looking straight ahead and ran, breath whistling in his lungs, the headache that had plagued him pounding harder with every step. His mouth was filled with cotton, his body aching for something to drink. He thought of plunging his face in the dirty river water and sucking down mouthfuls of it as if it were the finest mountain spring. He thought of his little boy drinking from a silver fountain at the preschool they had visited last week, climbing the short stepstool and still barely able to reach the nozzle, Hawke helping him manage it by holding Thomas around the waist and gently lifting. A little boy like that needed his father. The memory urged Hawke on faster.

As he reached the Lincoln Highway, another rocket streaked through the sky. He grew paralyzed with fear as it continued low to the ground, a silver bullet racing over the closest rooftop toward its target.

The rocket hit the Javits Convention Center with a dull boom, taking out the top half of the building and sending debris raining down across the adjacent parking lot. Hawke felt his insides clench as the heat washed over him. Doe was close, but she didn’t have him yet, for whatever reason. Weller must have done something before the last rocket hit, enough to throw her off in some way. Hawke still had a chance.

He ran again. Another rocket screamed overhead, racing past him to hit the end of the bus depot near Eleventh. The strike lit up gas tanks in quick succession, sending booming clouds of black smoke into the air, along with the smell of singed metal and rubber and another wave of heat. The world was exploding. Doe was raging now, blindly attacking along the route he’d taken, but getting closer.

There was a security camera mounted on the corner of the building on his left. He raced past it and prayed that her eyes were still blinded, vaulted over the hoods of two cars that had collided, then crawled across two more to reach the other side of the intersection and a small patch of green lawn.

Edgewater Landing was directly in front of him.

Last year, after a trip to the park to see the zoo, they had taken Thomas on a sightseeing cruise. It had been more for Robin than their son, really; he had been too young to appreciate the scenery as they plowed through the water and looked back at the city as night fell and the lights glowed like glittering jewels.

Less than halfway through, Thomas had thrown a full-blown tantrum on the deck, kicking his legs and screaming, and Hawke had regretted pushing the day so far, but he hadn’t wanted it to end. He remembered thinking about how easy it was to get in and out of New York by boat, and vowing to take the ferry more often.

Weller’s last words came back to him: Keep away from cameras and find a way to stay undercover and maybe you’ll have a chance.

There were no cameras in the middle of the Hudson, and even the satellites would have a hard time finding a small craft once it reached the ocean.

Hawke reached the docks a moment later. It was cooler here by the water, the day’s heat beginning to bleed away with the sun. Several large cruise ships were anchored in the oily water, but it wasn’t the large ones he was interested in. He needed something small and nimble, able to slip under the radar and disappear into the open arms of the river.

A moment later, he found it, lashed to the pier near one of the largest cruisers: an old tugboat, rusted and battered and brown with rust and grime, with an inflatable dinghy tethered to the back.

He boarded the tugboat, slipping across the silent deck, and peered over the side to the dinghy. The outboard motor looked newer, a Mercury with fresh paint and an electric starter. The dinghy was similar to one that he’d used on Cuttyhunk Island to putter around the shoreline when he was a teenager.

As he climbed down the side of the tugboat, boarded the dinghy and set the choke, another low boom sounded from somewhere beyond Manhattan. He pushed the electric start button on the engine and listened to it turn over with a high whine before he remembered to prime the gas bulb. Frantically he pushed the start button again. The Mercury coughed and started up with a burbling chatter.

A prickling fear ran up Hawke’s back as he worked at the tie ropes with trembling fingers, the knots slimy and tight and refusing to let go. The whistling was getting louder. How close was Doe now? How much had she seen of his mad rush to this place? Come on!

The last knot finally gave. Hawke threw off the rope, dove toward the engine and pushed the throttle forward. The little boat leaped forward, nearly tossing him into the water as he grabbed for the tiller and turned, watching the skies as death streaked toward him with a thin silver tail.

The dinghy was about fifty feet from land when the final strike hit.

Hawke whipped the little boat around the larger sightseeing cruiser that sat farther down the pier like a fat toad, low in the water and motionless, its sightless glass portholes winking at him with the reflection of the approaching rocket. The ship partially shielded him from the explosion and probably, he thought, saved his life; at the very least it obscured whatever view Jane Doe might have had of his fate.

The rocket hit the end of the pier closest to Eleventh Avenue, taking great chunks of rock and wood timbers and flinging them into the air like splinters in the wind. The debris and shock wave ripped holes through the heavy cruise ship and pushed it onto its side, a dead carcass wallowing in choppy surf, the remains torn apart as if it were nothing more than a toy.

A wave of water picked up Hawke’s little dinghy and gave it a violent shove. He clung on to the rope that lined the sides of the boat with both hands, abandoning the tiller and falling to the rubber floor as chunks of metal and wood rained down, bouncing off the sides of the boat and pattering into the river around him.

Somehow, the boat survived. It rocked and spun like a top, rearing up and nearly throwing him into the waves before it crested the huge surge of water and began to settle back into the frothy surf, still whole, still floating.

As the whirlwind subsided, Hawke grabbed the tiller and straightened out the little craft. He glanced back at the shoreline, saw the last remaining husk of the cruise ship rear up and then slip beneath the dark surface of the river and the black columns of smoke rising up behind it, the dock obliterated, the Javits Center a smoking, caved-in bubble, the bus depot a raging inferno. Orange flames towered skyward, turning the smoke into reflective clouds of reaching fingers.

New York was burning.

He was alive, though. He had made it out somehow, and now he was gone, a shadow slipping through the whitecapped waves toward home.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

6:42 P.M.

THE SCREAMS WOKE HIM.

He’d been dreaming. In his dream, he’d been trying to run away from someone threatening him, but he couldn’t get his legs to work. It was like trying to push through quicksand.

He gasped awake, staring up into the dark.

Thomas shrieked again, the sound like a gunshot in the silence: “Daaaaddy!”

Hawke got out of bed, heart pounding as Robin sat up, mumbling something, her arm reaching for him as she rolled over and slumped back again, still half-asleep. Hawke knew from experience that she tended not to remember things like this; in the morning, when he explained that he had been up for hours dealing with night terrors, she would look at him like he was crazy. So he had become the de facto nighttime riser, handling the soiled diapers, nightmares and fevers.

He felt his way around the edge of the bed frame and made it into the hall, stumbling through the shadows. Thomas’s night-light glowed from beyond his half-open door.

The boy was sitting up against his headboard, holding his lion. They had just switched him out of his toddler bed to a full-size twin, and he looked swallowed by it, just a small lump at the top, like an extra pillow. Thomas’s eyes were shining, his tiny shoulders moving up and down.

Hawke went to the bed, climbed in and hugged the boy to his chest. Thomas wrapped his arms around him, sobbing, his little fingers clutching at Hawke’s undershirt. At first, Thomas didn’t say anything, and Hawke waited, not pushing him.

Finally, Thomas’s tears began to slow. He looked up at Hawke, his little moon face wet.

“What’s wrong, little man?”

“I had a bad thing in my head. And I was scared.”

Hawke kissed his son’s head. “Shhhh… it’s okay now. What happened? Can you tell me?”

“We were in the park, and you said we should go, but Mommy said we should wait and have a snack first. And then she gave me an apple. But I didn’t finish my snack. And then I didn’t want to stay because you left and I was alone. And I tried to find home.”

“You were lost?”

“Yes.” The little boy nodded soberly. “And there were people, but nobody would help me.”

“Didn’t Mommy or Daddy help you?”

“Daddy, you don’t live at the park.”

“No, but if you were lost, we’d come find you. We wouldn’t leave you like that.”

“Oh. Well, I heard a noise. Sort of like a ghost. Whoooooo… like that. And there was a bridge to cross if you wanted to get away, but I couldn’t get on it.”

“And then what happened?”

“And then I was in my room, and you were in your room. And a bad guy came in and he wouldn’t let me go to your room, and he took me away.”

Hawke had come to cherish these moments, because they were the only times Thomas really spoke freely. Robin didn’t hear it; it was as if Thomas knew she was a heavy sleeper. The boy always called for his father at night.

He smoothed his son’s damp hair, rocked him softly. “Don’t worry, buddy. There are no bad guys here. You’re safe in your room. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you, ever.”

“What if you can’t find me, Daddy? What if I disappear?”

A noise came from the hall outside the apartment. A door slamming, loud enough to make Thomas jump. Hawke hugged his son closer.

“I’d find you,” he said. “If I had to go to the end of the earth, I would find you and bring you home.”

Home. The idea was almost too much to bear, but Hawke kept it in his mind, sitting alone in the little dinghy, his hand shaking on the tiller as he pointed the craft toward the other shore. Getting to this point had taken everything he had in him, but now that he was finally able to breathe again he found himself unable to cope with all that had occurred.

The trip across the river was less than twenty minutes. Hawke sat as close to the motor as possible, keeping the weight in the back to lift the prow and keep the dinghy above the chop. He scanned the water for more boats but saw nothing. Wherever the military ship was that had fired on them, it wasn’t visible.

He felt a brief moment of loneliness, of things settling, this new future becoming permanent as it coalesced before him. The others were all dead; whatever had happened was done, and there was nothing he could do to change it. But his wife and son could still be alive, had to be alive. He would find them, no matter what it took. He would keep them safe. In the back of his mind, another voice kept nagging at him, one that was more cynical: Even if they had survived, what were the chances of them still being at the apartment? Wouldn’t they have tried to run by now, get to safety, find help? Hawke’s excitement mixed with dread as he huddled against the chill wind and sped across the waves, praying for them to be safe. The words became a mantra, repeated over and over as he got closer: “Please, God, let them be okay. I don’t care about anything else but seeing them again. I can handle anything else you throw at me; just please let them be okay.”

The chop increased as he moved farther away from Manhattan and entered the open water of the river. It was a long way to go in a tiny dinghy, but Hawke settled his shoulders and kept his head down against the spray. New Jersey rose up before him, apartment buildings hugging Port Imperial Boulevard, more private homes dotting the swell of land above and beyond them. From this distance, it looked peaceful and empty, just another summer day settling into evening. He could imagine people sitting down on their front porches and docks, having a drink and watching the sun go down. The breeze would gain a bite off the water as the smell of grilled burgers and hot dogs and the sound of laughing children drifted over them. But that had all changed now, maybe forever.

There was a pier directly across the water at Weehawken, more boats anchored there, but he angled the little dinghy left, heading toward Hoboken and Pier C. He looked back once more to see the New York skyline rising up silent and strange like an alien creature, its limbs bleeding and broken, no longer welcoming and familiar.

As he began his approach to the Jersey shoreline, Hawke slipped his hand in his pant pocket for his house keys, just to make sure he still had them. There was something else there, something unfamiliar. He pulled out the flash drive Weller had given him, remembered the agent holding the gun on him (Where is it? Tell me right now, goddamn it, or I’ll blow your brains out), the way Weller looked at him before he left (A way to prove the truth in all this…. Find a way to tell the story)….

Hawke clutched it in his fist, then withdrew his hand, wondering how he would even find a computer that could read it without alerting Doe. And then what? As soon as he tried to send the documents to someone, she would find him. If he connected to a server, she would know where he was. He couldn’t even print anything without risking detection, assuming there was a machine left on earth that wasn’t corrupted already.

But all that could wait. Right now, he had more important things to do.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

6:59 P.M.

AS HAWKE GOT CLOSER to Pier C, he noticed smoke coming from the Jersey light-rail station.

His heart sank as he saw what looked like a bad accident, debris everywhere. Some kind of explosion had ripped out the guts of the buildings that had lined the water’s edge, exposing the heart of the station. There was more carnage inside; trains had probably smashed into each other at the tunnel entrance, or buses, or both.

Doe had blocked the tunnel from this side, too. Cutting people off, isolating New York, experimenting in some twisted way. Eliminate two-thirds of the population, leaving those you need still alive, and do all of it without anyone truly understanding who was behind it all, or why.

Energy sharing will only delay the outcome…, she had said. But a reduction of consumers by sixty-three-point-four percent, combined with advances in fusion energy production that are predicted with ninety-eight-point-six percent certainty, would oscillate the current string enough to enter an alternate path.

He motored closer, watching carefully; a few emergency workers were helping the injured at the scene, but it was a crippled operation. It took him a few moments to realize why. They were working without their familiar tools. There were no vehicles with flashing lights, open ambulances, cardiac machines. The people weren’t carrying tablets and nobody was talking on phones. He scanned the shore for the girl who had served him coffee that morning (so long ago, it seemed, light-years away) but didn’t see her red-streaked hair among the others. She was either long gone or buried somewhere beneath the wreckage.

Hawke still had grease smeared across his cheeks, and his clothes were dirty and torn. But he must have looked like everyone else who had been through hell today. Nobody noticed him as he ran the little boat up to the esplanade that jutted out into the Hudson, tied it off and climbed to land. Nobody cared as he raced like a madman down the esplanade’s still beautiful, tree-lined walkways to Sinatra Drive, turning left and racing to Newark Street, running hard, his shoes pounding on the sidewalk. Keep focused on that sound, he thought, just keep going, as his breath wheezed in his aching lungs, do not think of Robin and your son, your unborn child and what might have happened to them. He’d been gone from home for less than twelve hours; it hardly seemed possible that everything that had happened had been during such a short span of time. He wondered if Robin would notice the differences in him, the way he felt them himself. Would he seem like a stranger, a different man entirely, one who had been through a war and come back withered inside and broken? And what would they do once they found each other? She might not think it was possible to make it to open water without being discovered.

Or maybe she wouldn’t even want to go.

The door to their building was open.

Hawke stood in the shadowed gap, breathless, peering inside. The landing was still, silent, dark. He pushed the door wide, stepped inside, saw the list of names and the buzzers for entry, the interior doors closed tight, more darkness beyond the glass.

Within the intensity of his emotions, the familiar had become strange; things he had never noticed before drew his attention. The brown carpet was worn in a straight line, the wallpaper water stained and faded. It looked like a different place, even though it was the same.

His nerves were singing, his breath too shallow and fast. He forced himself to slow down, calmed himself enough to function. It wouldn’t do Robin or Thomas any good if he lost his mind now, not when he was so close to finding out what had happened to them.

The power was out, the buzzers not working. The electronic lock for the interior doors wasn’t working, either, but he hadn’t really expected it to be that easy. He kicked at the glass until it broke, the sound too loud in the quiet of the building.

He climbed through the opening, drew the gun from his pants, moved through the lobby and bypassed the elevators, which were surely not running now. The stairs were blanketed in gloom, and empty. He took them as quickly as he dared, spiraling up through the dark. Finally, he reached the door to his floor, pushed it open with a soft click and slipped through, caught it before it closed and let it tick shut.

At the end of the hall, gray light filtered in through a small window. Hawke’s dream that morning came back with a vengeance; his son being ripped away from his arms by silvery tendrils snaking down from the sky. The memory left him shaken, momentarily unable to move his feet toward his own apartment, terrified of what he might find there.

Their door was open just a crack. The jamb had been forced, the latch shattered.

Hawke looked at Lowry’s door, also hanging open. And he knew.

Lowry had been here.

Hawke pushed the door open with the tip of the gun, called Robin’s name, quietly at first, and then louder. Nothing. The front hall was empty. Time slowed down; details sharpened; smells assailed his nostrils. He saw everything in extreme clarity as his fear turned seconds to minutes, minutes to hours. He stepped inside. A clanking hiss made him clench his teeth and nearly scream before he realized it was the radiators giving up the last of their heat. Shadows clung to corners like cobwebs, but on the far wall a bit of light fell, enough to see the spray of blood that speckled the paint.

A small, helpless cry escaped Hawke’s lips. Tears filled his vision, blurring the bloody spray, blackened in the shadows and light. The camera image he’d seen hadn’t been faked. Which meant that the rest of it had probably been real, too: Robin’s panicked phone call, the video of the shadow across the screen as the laptop was lifted, the image moving across the ceiling before someone abruptly snapped it closed.

The shoe he had seen in that brief glimpse before the laptop’s camera was cut off, just the tip visible through the bedroom door…

A bedroom door that was now shut tight, its knob coated red.

He held the gun up in a trembling hand, scanning the empty space, kitchen and living room, the overturned lamp still on the floor, other signs of disarray. A plastic cup had been knocked from the counter. Thomas’s blocks were strewn across the living room. There was more blood staining the carpet near the spatter.

As Hawke moved forward toward the bedroom, louvered doors sprang open and something exploded out of the hallway closet beside him, a wild-eyed, screeching, bloodied apparition holding a knife overhead. He turned with the gun, his heart hammering, finger nearly squeezing the trigger before recognition lit him up like an electric shock; he ducked to one side as she descended upon him and the blade slashed down; he caught her knife arm with his own forearm in a swift parry, knocking the blade away before he wrapped her in a bear hug, his beautiful wife, screaming and then sobbing into collapse as he gently said her name, over and over.

“I’m here,” Hawke said, whispering it into her hair, trying to calm her trembling, rigid body with his embrace, his tears mixing with her own. “I made it; we’re okay now; everything’s going to be all right.”

But Robin didn’t respond or seem to hear him, her eyes unfocused as, behind her, Thomas emerged from the closet, and Hawke let her go before gathering his boy in his arms, safe and whole and unharmed.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

7:20 P.M.

WHEN HE HAD CALMED DOWN enough to think, Hawke checked Robin and Thomas over carefully, found the blood that coated their skin was not their own. They had no cuts on them, no signs of physical trauma. He touched Robin’s belly gently, found the swelling there, no apparent pain; the baby seemed to be okay. But Robin wouldn’t speak a word, and Thomas simply kept his arms locked around his father’s waist, unwilling to let him go. Thomas kept his eyes squeezed shut for a while, tears leaking down his cheeks, and when he finally opened them his pupils were dilated with shock.

Hawke whispered to him as the last of the sun’s rays slipped through the living room window, his voice trembling with sadness, joy, exhaustion, emotions cascading through him and leaving him weak limbed and spent. He touched his son’s face, tracing invisible lines on his skin. Thomas didn’t move; Robin shied away from him until he let his hand drop. She sat on the carpet and stared out at nothing.

When he was able to untangle himself from his son’s arms and get up, Hawke found the body in the bedroom.

Randall Lowry was lying on his side, one arm slung out, the other twisted beneath him. His hair hung across his glazed, sightless eyes, bubbles of blood drying on his lips. His jaw was dotted with salt-and-pepper stubble, the skin ashy gray; his cheeks were hollow, sagging pockets of flesh. He looked like a wax statue of a dead man, and Hawke couldn’t imagine that this person, these deflated remains, had caused them so much pain.

He saw how it might have happened. They’d been watching reports on the TV about the events unfolding in New York and across the country. Thomas knew his father went to the city. Perhaps Thomas had gotten scared, made a racket, spilling his blocks, knocking over the lamp. I want my daddy. He imagined Randall Lowry calling out from the hallway, increasingly agitated, banging on the door and screaming at them, which would have gotten Thomas even more worked up until he was screaming, too.

Or maybe Lowry had just taken this opportunity to go after Robin. Hawke remembered how Lowry looked at her and had always suspected what he would do, if given the chance. He remembered the incident in the basement, Lowry staring at her photos. Her belly wasn’t showing much yet, and even if it was, that might not have changed anything for a man like him.

The doors to these apartments were flimsy, hollow-core replacements, with cheap locks and a single chain for additional protection. Lowry wouldn’t have had much trouble kicking it open. Robin had hidden in the closet as he came in, somehow keeping Thomas quiet, and then approached Lowry from behind; there were knife wounds in his neck near the collarbone and a deep gash under his arm. She had stabbed him high first, Hawke reasoned, causing the spray on the wall, and then as Lowry had turned and thrown up his hand to ward her off she had stabbed him in the side, puncturing his lung and driving him into the bedroom, where his life had leaked away quickly, judging from the wounds and the amount of blood on the floor. Perhaps she’d hit his jugular with the first slash; the spray was violent and wide, enough to tell that he’d been mortally wounded.

Lowry hadn’t had a weapon with him.

Hawke thought about that as he led Robin into the bathroom and gently undressed her, scrubbing off the blood under a lukewarm spray. Just because the man had been unarmed, in the traditional sense, didn’t mean he wasn’t a clear danger. He’d threatened them before, several times, and he had forced entry into the apartment. He was larger and stronger than Robin and had a history of mental illness. He was violent. She had acted in self-defense; there was no question in Hawke’s mind. She would do whatever she had to do to protect herself and their son.

But others might not see it that way, if the world ever got back to normal and the authorities ever investigated the killing. They might wonder why she hadn’t tried to speak to Lowry first, why she had snuck up from behind that way and stabbed him without trying to escape. In Hawke’s mind, the reason was clear; there was no way she would have gotten to the stairs with Thomas in her arms before Lowry would have run them down.

But things weren’t always so simple, when the law got involved. They didn’t care about Hawke’s family the way he did. They cared about facts, not speculation. They would give Lowry’s life far more weight than it deserved.

Robin stood there limply, shivering and passive in a bra and underpants while Thomas sat huddled in the corner, his worn old stuffed rabbit sagging in his iron grip. Hawke washed Robin’s face until it was pink and she looked like a different woman, younger, more childlike. He caressed his wife’s bare shoulders, watched the swirls of red disappearing down the drain.

When they emerged from the apartment an hour later, it was completely dark. Hawke went back in and found a flashlight in the kitchen, using it to navigate down the stairs to the street. The sun had gone down beyond the layer of smoke, bringing a deeper chill. It was strange not to see lights anywhere; none of the buildings had power, and Hoboken was like a wilderness.

The darkness was good, though; it provided them cover. Nobody saw them jogging down the empty streets, Hawke holding Thomas in his arms, a duffel bag slung over his other shoulder; there were no witnesses as they rushed down the walkway under a blanket of trees, found Hawke’s dinghy still tied up to the esplanade and climbed into the boat. The few emergency workers he had seen when he’d docked there a short while ago were nowhere to be found.

The boat itself had no connection to the network, no ability to be monitored. Doe, with all her unnatural abilities, wouldn’t be able to track him during the night through satellites or cameras. Even she had some limits. He had nine hours to disappear.

The world had gone into hiding, it seemed. It was an unsettling feeling. The stiffening breeze would require a jacket on the water, but he and Robin had only brought one for Thomas, not for themselves. She was moving on her own now and assisting Hawke when asked, but she still hadn’t spoken and he hadn’t been thinking clearly, and there was only so much they could carry. They would have to put on more layers of clothing from their bags and huddle together for warmth.

He got his wife into the dinghy and handed down his son, before slinging over the bag he carried and climbing in himself. Robin remained silent, distant, disconnected.

“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Hawke said. “What I told you about what happened. I know it probably sounds crazy. But it’s the truth.”

He’d tried to explain as much as he could while he was washing the blood off her, but he didn’t know how much she’d absorbed. It all sounded like the ravings of a lunatic when he said it out loud. He could hardly believe it himself. A self-aware machine had tried to kill 63.4 percent of human life on the planet in order to ensure her own survival, and he was wanted by every law enforcement bureau in the country.

We have to run, find a place to hide. We have to get out now. I have an idea… trust me.

Hawke had studied Robin’s reaction, but she was little more than a vague shape in the dark. He couldn’t see her face. He risked raising the flashlight and flicking it on for a moment. She sat with her arms hugging her chest, Thomas between her legs. Hawke’s son looked up at him, eyes glassy. Thomas had seen far too much today, and Hawke was afraid he would see a lot more before this was over.

He turned the light off, and the darkness moved in again.

“You left us alone,” she said dully, her voice flat, expressionless. “I had to do it.”

The words bit deeply. Hawke knelt in front of her. She allowed him to touch her face but didn’t seem to react.

I should have been there. Robin had done what she had to do because he wasn’t home to protect them. For all his struggles to fight through the worst of what had happened, he still hadn’t been able to make it in time.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you did.”

“I’m hungry,” Thomas said. They were the first words he’d spoken since Hawke had found them.

Hawke touched the boy’s head, and Thomas shrank back slightly, a turtle pulling into its shell. The guilt washed over Hawke again. He hadn’t been there to protect them, and Robin had been forced to kill a man.

Hawke gave Thomas a granola bar from the bag. When he turned back, Robin was shaking, her shoulders moving in the dark. “He wouldn’t stop,” she said. “He… just kept coming.”

Hawke couldn’t tell if she was talking to him or to herself. He started the engine and swung the dinghy back out into the Hudson. Into the black. The open water was terrifying without the normal lights of Hoboken washing over it. Fires still burned in Manhattan, but they had begun to die out, and a sickly orange glow seemed to drift with the wind, a core of light at the center of the cluster of buildings. Doe had kept the power on there, gathering her strength, perhaps waiting until she had evolved into something else, something even more powerful. He had the sense that he was watching the birth of an entirely new species, one that could mean the end of humanity.

New York as they once knew it, and perhaps the entire United States of America—maybe the world—was gone.

But for now, at least, there had to be others still alive. There had to be a way to regain control. Cuttyhunk Island was probably two hundred miles away, impossible to reach in the dinghy. Hawke had realized that before they left the apartment. But he had a plan: maybe not the best one, but it gave them a chance. His friend and editor, Nathan Brady, had an old Bayliner Encounter he called the Gypsy, a twenty-nine-foot sport-fishing boat with an enclosed cabin that slept four. Old enough to be without any kind of Internet connection or computer chip. He’d taken Hawke out on it several times and it was quickly evident that Brady used it more for drinking and sitting in the sun than catching his dinner, but they’d had a decent enough time talking about Hawke’s next project, back when he was still working at the Times. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

Brady kept the boat at a marina in Jersey City, less then three miles away.

Hawke motored the dinghy close along the shore, where occasional small fires sputtered and gave him enough light to navigate. A few minutes later, the moon broke through the layer of smoke and its pale glow washed over the glassy surface of the water. Hawke sat next to Robin and worked the rudder, keeping them moving as quickly as he dared.

He thought about the baby who would come, and the challenge of delivering it alone. He thought about keeping hidden for long enough that it would matter. And something else nagged at him and wouldn’t let go. Getting away was a little too easy, when all was said and done. If Doe had really wanted him dead, Hawke thought, she would have done it. The series of missile attacks had missed him, hitting locations where he had been only moments before. Almost as if she’d been herding him forward, pushing him to the docks and away from the city.

Perhaps, he thought, he was more valuable to her alive and at large, a supposed leader of the group that had struck at the heart of America. It would keep the authorities focused on something and provide a welcome distraction while she determined the best way forward. They would keep the power on, keep her running silently in the background and try to rebuild, blissfully unaware of the consequences.

And then, when she had figured out how to survive without the need of a single human life, she would eliminate them all.

To beat a machine at this game, you’ll have to act unpredictably. She would expect him to go underground, try to disappear. Protect himself and his family. Hawke thought about how he might blow the lid off this story. There had to be a way. Word of mouth, hand-printed flyers. Shortwave radios. These things still existed, tried-and-true means to communicate that Doe couldn’t easily manipulate to serve her needs. He thought about Rick. Maybe Doe had faked that footage, too. And Brady, if he was still alive. A network Hawke might be able to tap, let the story take root and grow. If they could convince the world to cut off all sources of power, to eliminate any remaining devices where she might hibernate.

He felt something warm touch his hand; Robin’s fingers entwined with his own. Her flesh tingled like an electric shock. It would take time, but he hoped she would recover. In the dark, with the wind rippling his clothes and the smell of smoke drifting over him, he could almost believe it was possible. They could make it; they could survive.

But first, the Bayliner. He knew Brady kept the key in a small ceramic cup under the boat’s kitchen sink.

If they could get going quickly enough, they might be able to make it most of the way to Cuttyhunk Island before dawn.