Nate Kenyon - Day One

Vasco trailed behind them, cursing softly and gripping a paper towel. The others were still gathered under the TV. Hawke expected Weller to order them all back to work, but he said nothing. A major news anchor had broken into the coverage of the protests; the spotlessly coiffed man spoke in a slightly breathless voice, but the others in the room were talking too loudly for Hawke to hear.

“What’s going on now?” he said to Young.

“Everything,” she said, glancing at Weller as if looking for some kind of tacit approval to speak. “Traffic signals malfunctioning, cars running off the road on their own, power surges. People are panicking—”

Young stopped talking abruptly. Hawke caught something passing between Young and Weller that he didn’t understand. Hawke looked back at the TV. A well-dressed gray-haired woman was being interviewed on-screen, clutching her tiny dog in her arms. A stray bit of hair had come loose from the gray helmet and stuck up at the top of her head. “I was at Saks half an hour ago,” the woman said to the local reporter aiming the mike, and in her distress her carefully constructed voice began to betray her Brooklyn roots. “I was on the escalator, and it stopped, and I had my bags with me, and I had to put Peaches down for just a moment, to rebalance, and as soon as I did, as soon as she touched that step, the escalator started again very fast….” The woman stopped, face wrinkling, chest hitching, as the reporter quietly urged her to continue. “… And thank the good Lord I grabbed her up and the escalator stopped again as soon as I did, but my heel had gotten caught.” She held up the trembling dog and the camera cut to show a shoe with the stiletto heel snapped off before cutting back to the woman’s tear-streaked face. “She could have lost her foot! I swear it was like that escalator tried to eat her….”

A ripple of uneasy laughter spread through the room, but Vasco wasn’t laughing. “Not funny,” he muttered, staring down at his hand. The paper towel was spotted with red.

“What happened to you, exactly?” Hawke said.

“Thing started up with my hand in its guts. I saw you with the coffee machine, you know. I’m not the only one looking like a fool around here.” Vasco lifted the towel to check his hand, and Hawke caught a glimpse of his index finger, the tip chewed up a bit but the bleeding mostly stopped now. He wrapped it up again. “Thing is, I had it disabled. There’s no way it could just… Never mind.”

Another reporter had started relating other stories of equipment failure, more tablets and cell phones downloading and running what appeared to be complex programming. Hawke thought of the coffee machine, his laptop and the Anonymous board. He thought about what Weller had just said. His head was spinning with possibilities.

“I was monitoring traffic just now, in case anyone cares,” Bradbury said loudly, coming into the room, “and activity has gone through the roof. Denial of Service attacks, data theft attempts, serious network breaches reported by our systems at Johnson, Four Tune, about a dozen others. We’re in the security business, right? Maybe we should be actually looking at this, do you think?” He looked around, shook his head. “Anyone else notice weird stuff this morning? Before I came in, my laptop started downloading something automatically, executing some kind of program,” he said. “I wasn’t surfing any porn sites, if that’s what you’re thinking—”

“Please,” a woman named Susan Kessler said, a new hire from what Hawke had learned. “Let’s not make references to porn in the office.” Hawke pegged Kessler’s age at over thirty-five, which would probably make her Weller’s oldest employee. She always wore impeccable business suits and had perfect makeup, but today her suit looked slightly wrinkled and her face, although scrubbed clean, was pale and puffy.

“I just mean this wasn’t a phishing scam, not that I could tell. It was something else. I had to come to work, so I just shut it down, figured I would do a safe reboot and clean up later.” When he blinked, Bradbury’s eyes nearly disappeared into pockets of fat. “When I came in, the building manager said her iPad was acting funny. And she was pissed because the elevator was out and the repairman couldn’t seem to fix it, and the building’s security system was down, too.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh my God,” she breathed softly.

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