Nate Kenyon - Day One

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

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

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

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

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

1:39 P.M.

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

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

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

“How the hell…?”

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

“You’re pregnant ?”

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

“I… I’m sorry.”

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

“If you gain root access—”

“It’s not going to be that easy.”

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

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

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

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

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

“You think members of Anonymous did this?”

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

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

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

If so, for what possible reason?

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

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

“I don’t think—”

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

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

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

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

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