Day One: A Novel (11 page)

It made no sense.

A sudden buzz of opportunity lit him up like a live wire.
Use this chance
. He hit the home button, trying to get to the keypad to call Robin. Nothing happened; the phone wouldn’t respond. It seemed to be locked into the texting program but wouldn’t allow him to get to his other contacts or do anything other than respond to Rick’s message.

Hawke cursed and resisted the urge to throw the phone across the room. He typed a response:
Need to get a message to Robin.

He waited, gripping the phone so hard his fingers started to ache. Maybe Rick had no other choice; maybe he’d gotten in far deeper than he expected and needed help and wanted to come clean. But if he and Anonymous were involved with what was happening now, then the shit had truly hit the fan and Hawke would have to admit that he didn’t know Rick anymore and maybe never had. Whatever else the man was, whether the steps he had taken were right or wrong, his heart had always been in the right place, his motivations pure and simple and closely aligned with Hawke’s own.
Use the tools at hand to expose corruption, level the playing field. Tear down the walls that keep people from the truth; empower others to make their own choices.
Rick had always said that they were living in one of the most exciting times in history, and he saw himself as a comic-book hero fighting injustice. Hawke knew it wasn’t that simple, that there were other motivations, purely selfish. There was the challenge of each project they took on—clicking the puzzle pieces together to see if they fit. And the challenge to authority.

But whatever Rick was into now, it wasn’t about empowering people, or making the world a better, fairer, more purely democratic place. This was about anarchy and destruction and pain. Rick had spent over a year in jail, and maybe that had changed him. But Hawke couldn’t imagine reconciling the man he knew with the person who was behind the events today. And besides, even if Anonymous had become a much more malignant and powerful network while Hawke had been away, it was difficult to believe they were capable of the kind of comprehensive and overwhelming attack that was going on now. The entire structure of the group was built upon freedom, anonymity, individuality. It was one thing to bring enough people together for a short period of time to take down a few servers. But how could they gather the resources and power to pull this off?

His phone chirped.
NO MESSAGES. WE ARE MAKING A STATEMENT. TIRED OF WAITING FOR EVERYONE ELSE TO ACT.

Who?

US. THE COLLECTIVE. IT DOES NOT MATTER.

Hawke typed:
What about my family? Are they in danger?

THE WORLD IS IN DANGER.

What are you doing now?

NOT YOUR CONCERN ANYMORE. OPERATION GLOBAL BLACKOUT CANNOT BE STOPPED. IT IS GOING TO GET WORSE. GET TO A CHECKPOINT. YOU WILL BE SAFE THERE. WE WILL NOT TOUCH THEM.

Hawke hesitated, overwhelmed, every nerve in his body singing, wondering what to say, how to handle it.
You don’t want this. This isn’t you.

THINGS CHANGE. PEOPLE CHANGE.

I don’t believe you.

There was no answer for a long moment, and then, without warning, the screen shivered and blinked, and suddenly Hawke was staring at himself through the lens of his camera, his face caught between the shadows and flickering candlelight. There was something threatening about the act, as if he was being observed by a voyeur, the camera’s eye making some kind of point. There was nowhere to hide. His own device had been commandeered and turned against him.

I SEE YOU.

As Hawke watched himself on the screen, hypnotized by the image, someone came at him from the side with a bear hug, low and hard. His phone was wrenched from his grasp. He staggered right, barely kept his feet with a hand on the back of a pew.

He turned to find Weller standing next to him, breathing fast. “You’re going to get us killed,” Weller said. Damaged during the near collision with the SUV, Weller’s glasses sat askew on his nose, giving him an unbalanced, slightly crazed look. He glanced down at the phone, the screen still on, his face filled with an emotion that appeared to be half sadness, half fury, and threw it to the floor, stomping down with a foot as the glass crunched, grinding it into pieces.

Stunned for a moment, and then enraged beyond all understanding, Hawke felt the world go gray as blood thumped behind his eyes. He grappled with the other man with a ferocity he hadn’t known he possessed. Weller’s hands clawed at Hawke’s face as they went to the floor like animals fighting in a back alley. Time seemed to slip away before he began to come back to himself and realized Weller was grunting something at him as they rolled together.

“It’s … not … who you think—”

As abruptly as the fight had begun, it was over. Weller rolled away as Hawke lay on his back, chest heaving, his face wet. “It’s not who you think!” Weller shouted, his voice raw as he regained his feet and collected his glasses from beneath a nearby pew and setting them on his face, where they tilted even farther askew. One lens was cracked now, reflecting the candlelight in two fractured planes, and the lump on Weller’s forehead from hitting it against the curb was purple and swollen like an egg. He looked around at the rest of the group. Everyone had remained frozen in place, staring at him like he’d lost his mind.

Hawke touched his face, his hand coming away red. Weller had clawed him pretty hard, and the blood was mixed with his own tears. He felt something digging into his back and realized it was the remains of his shattered phone.

He got to his feet. “What do you mean, it’s not who I think?”

“It’s not your wife, your friend, your family, on the other end of that text message. Whoever you think it is, it’s not them.”

“How the hell would you know that?”

Weller turned away without answering. Everyone had stopped to watch the spectacle, even the rabbi and those at the front, who had gathered closer together with the others from the pews, forming a tight group around the prayer table. “Anyone else with a phone?” Weller said to the silent room. “Destroy them. Do it now. It doesn’t matter if they’re working or not.”

The look on Weller’s face was so intense and so radiant, Hawke took a step back like it was a communicable disease. Maybe the bump to the head had scrambled Weller up worse than anyone had thought. Or maybe this was more of the paranoia he’d shown in his office earlier.

A glance passed between Weller and Young, and she pulled her own phone from her pocket, placed it on the floor and stamped down, cracking the glass, grinding it under her heel.

Vasco, who had come halfway down the aisle, took his own phone out. “We can deactivate the GPS,” he said. “We might still be able to use them—”

“Do it,” Weller said, his voice holding an edge. “I can’t tell you how dangerous this is. Do it now.”

The two men watched each other for a long moment; then Vasco shrugged and glanced away. He tossed the phone on the floor, crushing it with his foot, making a show out of the process, taking his time.

“You got it, boss,” he said. “Anything you say. It’s dead anyway.”

“There are chips inside,” Weller said to the rabbi’s group. “Your phones can be operated remotely. They can be used to track your location.”

The room was electric. Hawke felt something happening here, words unspoken and hanging like ghosts, things hidden just out of sight. Weller knew something important, and he held people’s attention like a politician at a rally.

“We don’t have phones,” the rabbi called out, after a moment. “None of us.”

Somewhere outside, a faint rumble shook the foundation of the building, like a train passing at a distance. Hawke felt it through his feet.

Weller turned to Sarah Hanscomb, who was shaking her head. “What if my husband, what if he’s trying to call me?” she said, her voice rising up in a mixture of hope and panic. “He might be trying to reach me right now, if I try to turn it on again—”

“It’s nothing but a weapon, a Trojan horse to be used against you. Against us.” Weller took a step toward her, and Hanscomb shrank back, as if fearful of being struck. “They’re after us,” he said. “Don’t you get it?” He looked around at all of them again. “The singularity is here, and it’s not what we all thought it would be. It’s not a new beginning; it’s an ending.”

*   *   *

Hawke had written about it before, in a series of early articles he’d done for the online news blog Timeline that explored concepts rather than offering any real insight. Coined by a science-fiction writer and made popular by futurist visionary Ray Kurzweil, the “singularity” referred to the moment when machines would blend with and then transcend their makers, becoming self-aware and independent. Kurzweil argued that the moment would usher in a new utopia. Others felt it made the future unknowable, a black hole in time after which the world would be impossible to predict. But all of them agreed that the time would come, most likely in the twenty-first century, and that it would change humanity forever.

The singularity.
It was nothing more than an idea that framed something difficult to express, Hawke thought. Weller had lost his mind.

Everyone began talking at once, Vasco coming farther down the aisle as Hanscomb argued more vehemently, holding her small clutch in both hands and pleading her case as the others converged upon her like some senseless mob. It was like she held her husband in that clutch, Hawke thought, rather than a useless piece of machinery that was never going to reach him. Even if what Weller was saying was wrong and the phone was harmless, there was no signal, no way to get through.

The rabbi came out from behind the table, striding forward in his tallith like a man possessed by a higher calling, his congregation falling in behind him in lockstep. Hawke, nearly at the entrance to the vestibule, faded back, past where Price stood and away from them all, his body shaking now like a junkie coming off a fix. He wanted darkness, quiet, a moment alone. He needed to think.

Get to a checkpoint. You’ll be safe there.

As the arguing escalated, the sound of sirens outside made Hawke go to the temple doors. He opened them and peered out, his head and shoulders exposed.

The street outside was eerily empty, looking more like a war zone than the Upper East Side, except for a police car that had pulled up through the swirling smoke next to the Cadillac SUV. Two cops were advancing upon a man on the sidewalk holding a laptop case.
No, not just any case.

It was the one Weller had carried out from his office. They’d left it somewhere on the street when the crash happened, completely forgetting about it in the rush to safety.

Where the hell had everyone gone?

The acrid smell of burning plastic and rubber wafted into the temple. Something Hawke couldn’t quite explain brought chills to the back of his neck. He peered out into the street, the red and blue lights from the cop car bouncing off the smoke and making it harder to see. The man holding the case was close to Weller’s age and build, dressed casually in sneakers, jeans and polo-style shirt, glasses perched on his nose, his thinning hair cropped close to his skull. The cops came with guns drawn and tight, shuffling steps, muscles tense in shooters’ poses, acting like the man was a wanted criminal. They barked orders at him, but Hawke couldn’t make out the words. The man kept shaking his head emphatically. He held out the case at arm’s length, as if making an offering. It was heavy, and he had trouble keeping it there.

While one cop kept his gun trained at the man’s head, the other grabbed the case and stepped back. He knelt on the broken curb for a long moment, his back to Hawke, apparently examining the security latch, unable to open it. He put a hand to his ear, as if listening to an earpiece, nodded once, then said something to his partner, who glanced at him and then back at the man, who stood frozen in place with his hands raised, the universal expression of surrender.

Hawke hesitated at the doors, itching to move, but the cops’ demeanor gave him pause. There was something about the way they were acting; the tension in the air felt wrong. The man seemed to feel it, too; he was shaking his head again, starting to back away almost imperceptibly, his arms dropping until the cop with his gun trained on him ordered him to halt.

The cop with the case stood up and scanned the empty street around them, then looked at the other, who took a single step forward. As the man put his hands up again and began to speak, both cops shot him through the palms, twin bullets blowing his brains out through the back of his skull to splatter on the concrete behind him like an abstract painting come to life.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

12:35 P.M.

WHEN THOMAS HAD JUST TURNED
TWO YEARS OLD,
Hawke lost him as they left the park three streets over from their apartment. It was a small park, little more than a triangle of green carved out of a block of old brick buildings, their lower floors converted to shops, the upper-section apartments looking out at one another across the grass. They’d been there several times before, but that day was different. It started out innocently enough and ended up dissolving into hell.

Robin was out for coffee with a friend from college, and Hawke bundled Thomas up for the fall weather and took him out to play, more to burn time before Robin returned than because of any desire either of them had for exercise. It wouldn’t have mattered much; there wasn’t enough space to do a lot of running or have a play structure of any kind. Hawke sat on the single bench near the end of the green triangle and watched Thomas totter around on chubby little-boy legs, clutching that lion he’d had since the day he was born. He was fascinated by all the things little boys were fascinated by: a dandelion gone to seed and poking up through rocky soil, a worm coiling in the sun, a crow that landed on the other side of the park and hopped sideways, tilting its head and staring with watchful, beady eyes until Thomas turned in its direction and it lifted away, flapping its wings and cawing.