Day One: A Novel (3 page)

“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.

The world was starving for more data space, an endless supply of capacity, and these massive server farms were cropping up everywhere, interconnected through a global network and sharing workloads across multiple locations. The government was the biggest customer of all, building facilities to handle all the data it was monitoring in the guise of national security. Hawke imagined it like a gigantic new life-form evolving across the globe, and it was only the beginning. Anyone could see how Eclipse would want to be a part of that.

But Brady was right. It wasn’t enough of a fresh story for
Network
, and Hawke didn’t think expanding data capacity was Eclipse’s end game, either.

“Give me a little more time,” he said. “There’s a lot more to this; I just can’t talk about it yet. I’ll have a draft for you in a week, and we can talk about building something more interactive to support the main story.”

“You’ve got three days. I’ll hold off the hyenas until then.” Brady’s voice grew softer, conspiratorial. “Or here’s a thought. Why don’t you check out the hack attacks that took down the Justice Department’s Web site last night? ‘Anonymous’ strikes again. I hear they have a hand in the mess you’ve gotten yourself tangled up in this morning, tweeting about spontaneous rallies and calls to action, gumming up the public transit system.”

Hawke closed his eyes. “Was Rick involved?”

“No idea. Look, you know these people. You’re in the trenches, am I right? Or at least you were. If this Eclipse business doesn’t play out, go after that one. Could be the story of our time. The future of mass protests, cyberterrorism at its finest, the men behind the masks. A crisis of democracy. ‘We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.’ That’s pure gold.”

“I left that part of my life behind when I had Thomas. Rick would never take my call.”

“Don’t be so sure. How is Thomas, by the way? And Robin?”

Hawke thought of his son’s long silences and increasingly disconnected mannerisms, and Robin’s belly, just swollen enough for him to notice. Yesterday she’d found blood spotting her underwear again, enough to worry her, even though the doctor had said before it wasn’t a miscarriage but the hematoma.

“They’re … fine.” The train gave a jerk and a squeal. “We’re moving, Nathan. Looks like I’ll make it into the city after all.”

“Good.” Brady paused, sighed again, forced some levity into his voice. “Listen, old man, maybe you need a little break to clear your head. Let’s go out on the boat this weekend; we can do a little deep-sea fishing, talk some more about the draft and where you’re taking the interactive features of this idea of yours. Talk about what’s next.”

“Sure. I’m going to lose you in the tunnel. I’ll check in again tonight.”

Hawke stuck his phone in his pocket, closed his laptop and put it away. The lack of a connection to a networked device left him feeling unsettled. Sparks flashed as the train gathered speed through the tunnel. Hawke couldn’t help wondering what might happen if the thousands of pounds of concrete and steel collapsed on him. He imagined the massive buildings of the Manhattan skyline rising up like the peaks of a man-made mountain range. He loved this city, loved the size and scope, the noise, the energy. But people were altering the landscape, changing the natural world into something alien. It was more than physical; it was electric, invisible; it was connectivity and fiber optics and cyberspace. And he had played a part in it; he had embraced it with open arms.
Are we evolving
, Hawke wondered,
or mutating?
Was there any difference?

Crumbling tunnels, crushing stone.
You’re imagining the death of your own career.
The life he had pictured for himself, the rock-star hacker journalist changing the world, was swiftly fading. His family was what he had left, and he felt like he was losing them, too.

Hawke closed his eyes and the dream came at him again, Thomas tottering through the leaves, tears streaming down his face. He dug out his phone and looked up Rick’s number, texted him:
DOJ?
as the train slipped deeper below the Hudson, and watched the screen. The signal was dropping fast, but the text went through, and Hawke put his phone away and stared out at the tunnels walls and the lights flashing by.

CHAPTER FOUR

8:17 A.M.

HAWKE AND THE MAN
with the duffel bag split ways at the Christopher Street stop, where Hawke switched from the PATH to the subway. Everyone was back on their various devices, looking for a signal in the tunnels as they began to move toward the exits. The station was more crowded than usual, a buzz in the air, and there were many others with signs and backpacks making their way along with the regular mix of well-dressed bankers and brokers.

The two sides mixed like oil and water. Hawke thought he caught a glimpse of Bluetooth as the subway doors closed, but he was swallowed up by the jostling crowd.
The bastard.
He supposed he should have given Bluetooth a break. After all, Hawke knew nothing about the man, not really; he was making assumptions that he was in no place to make. But Hawke’s uncle had been a broker in the early nineties and after convincing Hawke’s father to let him manage his money had lost most of the small nest egg by betting the wrong way on the savings and loan crisis. It was money they couldn’t afford to lose, and Hawke’s father had never recovered, drinking himself into oblivion after they had to sell the house. He would ramble on about the merits of Socialism and the New Party to anyone who would listen while the family bounced from one threadbare apartment to another. Hawke’s father’s last book had been a thinly veiled manifesto on the movement and had been panned by the few critics who bothered to read it, which had pushed him over the edge into full-blown alcoholism and dementia and an eventual stroke.

As a result, although Hawke had the grades to get into Cornell, he’d ended up having to scrape and claw for every penny working in a bar wiping tables while he watched the Ivy League assholes enjoy themselves and graduate into high-paying analyst and money-management positions. Since then, Hawke had found little about Wall Street that he liked.

Of course, those experiences had fed his hunger and his drive, helped cultivate that vision of success that had led to his position at the
Times.
They had also, perhaps, contributed to his fall from grace. He could never satisfy that hunger. It led him to take risks other men might not.

Hawke changed to the L train at 14th Street and changed again at Union Square, riding the 6 train to the Upper East Side and the Lexington Avenue stop at 77th. There seemed to be protestors everywhere, clogging up the tunnels, and his commute took even longer than usual. What the hell was going on? It was well past 8:30 as he sprinted around the corner on foot.

Conn.ect, Inc., rented space in a brand-new building on East 79th Street. Although the space itself was nice, it was a second-rate location; the larger players in network security kept offices in lower Manhattan. Remaining in the shadows didn’t seem like Weller’s style, but it stood to reason that he might want to keep a low profile after the scandal of his prior job, and security was a growing market.