Nate Kenyon - Day One

He knew how to do these things. His entire career had been structured to expose a deeper truth in some way, to help people cut through the mass and jumble of information and find the core that was important to them. The truth, coming into focus through the use of technology. The story. It was everything to him. Except now, he’d lost the safety net that the Times had provided him and he was walking the high wire alone, with nothing below him but empty space.

His cell rang. Hawke dug it out of his pocket and saw it was Nathan Brady from Network magazine, one of the largest technology-focused periodicals left in the world. “I’m on the PATH,” Hawke said.

“Good luck to you.” Brady’s voice sounded tinny and hollow, as if he were speaking through a tube. “Is it moving? There’s something happening in the city. Police presence, angry crowd. It’s mucking up our fine Swiss watch of a transit system. You’ll never make it in.”

Hawke glanced around. The car was almost full now. “What do you want, Nathan?”

“I’m drinking at seven thirty A.M. on a Tuesday. What does that say to you?”

“That you’re an alcoholic?”

“I want a status report. I’ve got to go to Editorial in half an hour.”

“I’m meeting with Weller this morning, actually.” Hawke transferred the phone to his other ear, drained his coffee cup and dug out his laptop to look at his notes. “Sitting down with a guy for a demo on stress testing a corporate network, hacker-style, and then it’s Weller again all afternoon.” He was lying through his teeth; for the most part, Jim Weller had avoided him all week, passing him off to a junior associate for most of the day. Hawke’s notes were thin at best so far. But Brady was going to lose his mind if he knew how little Hawke had on this one, and sooner or later Weller would let him in. After all, why else had he invited Hawke to come?

Jim Weller, founder and CEO of start-up network security firm Conn.ect, Inc., had his own story of failure and possible redemption; a formerly high-flying tech genius, he’d worked on some cutting-edge programming around energy sharing among networked devices at his former company, the tech juggernaut Eclipse, which led to both its stunning IPO and Weller being forced out by a hostile board after he confronted the company about patenting and licensing his intellectual property without the proper authority. Apparently the board didn’t think they needed him anymore. Eclipse seemed to have its fingers in everything from software for networks to new operating systems to national security. They were famously paranoid, with an entire private fleet of enforcers who drove black SUVs and dressed like FBI agents. Their headquarters, a two-hundred-acre complex about thirty miles outside of Los Angeles, was surrounded by razor wire and laser grids. Rumor was, the enforcers were trained to shoot to kill.

Lately there was another rumor that Weller’s former company had invented something entirely new based on quantum computing, some sort of “holy grail” of the industry—and that it had led to a breakthrough deal with the National Security Agency. It was another project Weller had apparently had a hand in, at least during the early seed stages, but everyone on the project had been sworn to secrecy and nobody would talk.

When Hawke had reached out to Weller, asking to pitch a profile of his new company to Network, Weller had deferred at first and then called him up and invited him in, even going so far as to ask Hawke to shadow him at his office in New York. Hawke had found the man cold, calculating, clearly brilliant but distracted, often unavailable. He couldn’t tell whether Weller was fanatically driven or simply a fanatic. He wondered again why Weller had let him into his inner sanctum, and when the man would actually let his guard down enough to start talking. Hawke had gotten some sketches of Weller’s early life during his first few days at Conn.ect, a few hints of his work at Eclipse, but nothing more. Weller seemed secretive about something, but he wasn’t opening up yet.

Hawke had never let it slip that his real reason for the profile was to find out what Weller’s former company was up to, but Brady knew, of course. In fact, that was the only reason he’d gone to bat for the story in the first place. Brady was an old friend, but that only carried you so far; in journalism, it was fish or cut bait.

“I’m close,” Hawke said. “I’m getting to know the people there, learning more about him. He’s secretive, but I can smell the story and trust me, this is going to be big.”

“Then give me something, ” Brady said. “I’m putting a lot on the line for you.” His voice took on a needling tone. “Pitching you was like sticking my neck in a guillotine. You need this one. And you need it soon. After what happened with Farragut, nobody would touch you—”

“An unfortunate choice of words, don’t you think?”

Brady sighed. “You know what I mean. You broke the law, hacked into someone’s e-mail, tampered with police business. It doesn’t matter that you found enough kiddy porn to nail the son of a bitch. It crossed a line people aren’t willing to overlook, at least publicly.”

The man in question was a psychology professor at a New York university, an expert in child disorders who had been accused of improper conduct with students. The judge had thrown the images Hawke had found on the professor’s account out of court. The professor had tried to scrub everything else clean by the time authorities searched his computer, but he had made a mess of it, and they had recovered enough data to try him again. The case was still pending. But for Hawke’s career, the damage had been done. He had nearly gone to jail himself but had covered his tracks well enough for the charges not to stick. That didn’t matter to the Times. News International’s phone-hacking scandal was still in everyone’s minds. In the midst of a media furor, his bosses had fired him, claiming he had crossed the lines of journalistic integrity.

It had sent Hawke spiraling down into a cesspool of anger and shame. He’d wanted to do the right thing, and he had ended up on the wrong side. Since then, he hadn’t been able to buy his way into a pitch. Editors wouldn’t take his phone calls. None of them except for Brady, a friend who had stood by him through the worst of it, and who had bought Hawke’s proposed feature story about a technology that, if he was right, was about to transform the world.

Hawke rubbed his eyes and blinked. This was his ticket back into the game, and he wasn’t going to blow it. “Eclipse bought a new server farm,” he said. “Three hundred thousand square feet in North Carolina, expanding to over a million. Security’s tighter than Fort Knox—armed guards, robot sentries, checkpoints, video monitoring, razor wire, retinal scans. This thing is going to be massive. But the same source told me it’s only the first of many.”

“Cloud centers for streaming media? Online lockers? Temporary supercomputer clusters?”

“Since when did Eclipse get into the rental business? And why start so big? Amazon and Google are cornering the market, but it’s retail. That’s not Eclipse’s thing.”

Brady sighed. “I don’t know, John; maybe they’re making a play to grab market share in a new area. Is that a story? You tell me.”

Hawke didn’t answer. The new IPv6 standard that had launched last year expanded the number of Internet protocol addresses almost infinitely, in preparation for an explosion of networked devices. There were already chips in computers, phones, and tablets, of course, and even most cars and TVs, but experts predicted there would be an average of three networked devices for every person on earth in another two years: your washing machine, refrigerator, coffeemaker. Google was working on eyeglasses with the ability to display maps and directions. Wearable computers would become like clothing; people wouldn’t leave home without them.