Nate Kenyon - Day One

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.”