Nate Kenyon - Day One

“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! ”

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?”