Day One: A Novel (15 page)

“You okay?” Price said.

Hawke realized he’d been holding his breath. He nodded. It had all happened so fast, and now the adrenaline rush was making his knees shake. “You think he’s right about Philly?”

“I don’t know,” Price said. “Maybe so. Sarah said she’d heard something about other attacks on the radio.”

“It’s like the Wild West out here,” Vasco said. “Goddamn punks, taking advantage of this to rip people off.” He scanned the street. “The faster we get to the checkpoint, the better.”

*   *   *

Hawke had expected to hear the crowd and emergency vehicles long before they reached the hospital checkpoint. But as they neared 77th Street and Lenox loomed over them, a series of connected buildings taking up most of the block, they found an eerily quiet scene.

Nothing moved. They passed the conference center and emergency entrance where the sliding glass doors under the green awning were shut tight. Farther down, the hospital’s main entrance doors stood open, while a second set of interior doors was closed. A bed of flowers had been trampled, dirt spread across the concrete.

Vasco stopped on the sidewalk, waiting for the others to gather. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “This place should be filled with people.” He walked through the first set of doors to the interior set, which remained shut. He cupped his hands against the glass. “Nobody’s home,” he said. “Some checkpoint.” He rapped a fist against the doors, tried to pull them apart, but they were locked tight.

What about all the patients?
Hawke glanced up at the tall face of the building. There must be hundreds of patients in there, many too sick to move. Where had they all gone?

A sudden noise made them all jump. It was coming from around the other side of the building, a rattling, clanking sound like metal being dragged across concrete.

They looked at one another as the sound stopped as quickly as it had begun. Young started backpedaling away. “Jim,” she said. “He would have come here. He would be looking for that case.” Before anyone could say anything else, she had turned the corner on Park Avenue and disappeared.

*   *   *

Closest to the back of the hospital, Young heard the baby first.

The others had followed Young to the wide expanse of Park and around the building, Vasco cursing under his breath. A few feet in on 76th Street, on the backside of Lenox, Young had stopped short, frozen in place, her head up.

Hawke heard it seconds later: the distinctive wail and hitch, furious and plaintive, of a child in distress.

Just ahead of Young was a double-bay loading dock. The first metal door was closed, but the second one was open, the black entrance yawning wide enough to accommodate at least two trucks. The rattling sound they had heard must have been the door going up.

Vasco came up next to him, breathing too hard, Sarah Hanscomb right behind him. “What the fuck is she doing—”

Hawke tilted his head. “Listen,” he said. They all stood quietly as the haunting cry of the infant drifted through the opening. He thought of Thomas as a baby, imagined him abandoned and alone as strangers passed him by on the street. He thought of the unborn child in his wife’s womb. Young glanced back at them with a look that Hawke couldn’t quite read. It might have been fear, but whether it was for herself or for the child he couldn’t tell. “Jim’s not in there,” he said. “Anne, wait a minute.”

Price walked past the loading dock to another entrance a few feet away and yanked the handle of the door. It was locked. The crying went on and on, constant in its urgency and tone. Young shook her head. She ducked into the darkness without waiting for the rest of them.

Hawke turned to Vasco and Hanscomb. “We can’t leave it there alone,” he said. “I’m going after her.”

Vasco shook his head. “What if it’s
not
alone?”

“You don’t want to go in, then stay outside. It was your idea to come here in the first place.”

“Goddamn it.” Vasco rubbed his face and sighed. “All right, but any sign of trouble, we’re gone, understand?”

*   *   *

Hawke followed Young into the dark loading dock, pausing for a moment to let his eyes adjust. The light from the street illuminated dim shapes; a brand-new ambulance was parked on the left, dark and silent, a series of large trash bins along the right wall, packing skids stacked in the back. A short set of stairs led to a concrete loading ledge and a double metal door that was slightly ajar. Light spilled out around the frame.

The wailing was coming from behind the door.

Young was already halfway up the steps. Hawke followed, his stomach beginning to flutter, warning bells going off even as he reached the top of the ledge and Young pulled the door open, standing framed in antiseptic hospital light.

A faint, nearly imperceptible odor wafted over him, slightly acrid and rotten. A hallway loomed beyond, wide and white and empty except for the woman curled in a ball on her side. She was dressed in nurses’ scrubs and looked as if she had decided to lie down and fall asleep. Young knelt by her still form and shook her gently. The woman rolled onto her back, head lolling loosely on her shoulders. Her eyes were open. Young touched the woman’s throat, feeling for a pulse, then stood up and took a step back.

There were no immediate signs of violence, no blood or bruising. The nurse’s skin held a strange, cherry-red flush, mouth slack and crusted with vomit. Hawke stared at her face, blank doll’s eyes reflecting the ceiling lights.

A noise from the steps made him turn. Vasco stood in the doorframe, Price and Hanscomb just behind him. “Is she dead?” Hanscomb said. Hawke didn’t bother to answer. Young looked to where the hallway joined with another in a T. The baby’s cry was coming from the left branch.

Giving the dead woman on the floor a wide berth, Hawke followed Young around the corner to another set of double-hinged doors with rubber seals and windows set in each of them. Young pushed them open, revealing a large, blindingly white-tiled room lit by banks of fluorescent lights. Steel tables and lockers lined the walls, with another set of closed doors on the far side that must lead to the interior of the hospital.

Cold air touched Hawke’s face, along with more of the smell. Something spoiled, along with the scent of vomit.
The morgue.
There were more bodies in here, which he might have expected, except many of them looked like hospital workers along with several patients in gowns. Hawke counted at least ten of them. They had slumped to the floor where they stood, as if they had collapsed instantaneously, unable to go on. As with the nurse in the hallway, there was no blood, no obvious signs of violence. Their skin was flushed pink, enough to make them look like they’d been in the sun too long.

But his attention was drawn away, because the child was inside this room. Its cries grew louder and more furious, coming from a long, bar-height metal table against the far wall. Hidden under it somewhere. The poor thing was probably cold and starving. There was no sign of its mother.

Hawke approached cautiously for a better look. A row of computer monitors lined the table; he realized the sound was coming from them. Young had stopped dead about ten feet away.

“No,” Hawke said. “You’re kidding.” His voice was too loud; it felt like a violation of some kind of implicit pact. He edged closer, and all the terminals lit up at once, the electronic baby’s wail multiplying and echoing through the silent room, bouncing off the tile and steel and swelling into a cacophony of piercing screams. Code started streaming across the screens, cycling faster and faster. It looked like the same code he had seen before on his phone. Underneath the wails he heard another sound, barely audible: a rattling, low rumble that he couldn’t quite place and was gone before the wailing ceased.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

1:39 P.M.

HAWKE HADN’T REALIZED THAT
he had backed away until the backs of his thighs touched one of the steel dissecting tables. The terminals were all showing screen savers now, spiraling useless wheels of color from a time when things were normal.

The moment broke. Young had remained frozen in place as the crying went on, but now she moved quickly to the closest monitor as the sound of the double doors flapping closed made Hawke turn; Vasco, Price and Hanscomb, who had remained at the entrance to the room, had ducked back out into the hall.

Hawke thought about following them but joined Young at the line of computers instead, where she was already typing, fingers flying over the keys. “Venus flytrap,” she said. “Lured us right in here. Should have seen it coming. Your wife is pregnant?”

“How the hell…?”

Young nodded. “Educated guess,” she said. “We’re easy marks.”

“You’re
pregnant
?”

“I was,” Young said, without looking up. “Lost it in week ten. About a month ago. It was better that way. I’m not…” She shrugged. “Mommy material.”

“I … I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. He wasn’t exactly interested in being a father.” It came out hard, but her voice broke slightly on the last word. She tapped more keys, crashed the computer, waiting. “These terminals are running an unauthorized program. We have to stop it and reboot to get access to an outside line if we want to find out what’s going on.”

“If you gain root access—”

“It’s not going to be that easy.”

Hawke wondered how she knew that. He studied her in profile, the delicate features and doll-like quality of her frame, hair cropped short around her chin. What he had seen as an absence of emotion was … perhaps a bit more complicated. The shell she wore was more like cracked porcelain than concrete.

“Anne,” he said. “What do you mean, we were lured in? You think this was deliberate?”

The screen had come up blank. She was trying to crash the machine again and regain control, but it wasn’t responding. “I don’t know.”

“Come on,” he said. “You
do
know something, I can see that. We’re in trouble here. Talk to me.”

“You know how much of our lives can be hacked,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Medical records, bank accounts, text messages and e-mails and phone calls, computer hard drives, blogs. The most personal details. I don’t have to tell you this. Our weak spots are easy to find, right? It’s all available to anyone with the skills to get at them.”

“You think members of Anonymous did this?”

Young shrugged. “I’m not sure. Not yet.”

“Because I’ve got to say, that doesn’t make any sense. What’s so special about you and me, really? Why go to all that trouble for us? You really think Jim was right, that Eclipse is setting us up for something? This is some kind of damage control? That’s conspiracy theory bullshit. It’s not possible, not even for them.”

Even as he said it, something clicked in his head: the calls to action by Admiral Doe on Twitter, the protests being staged all over the city, bringing large groups of people to specific places. He remembered feeling like there had been some sort of pattern in the data he’d seen on the map
,
but the final answer kept eluding him. Had
all
of those people been prodded at their most vulnerable points, lured into some kind of spider’s web? Across the entire city of New York?

If so, for what possible reason?

That’s not possible to do on such a massive scale. We’re talking trillions of data points. How could anyone know everything about that many people?

Young wasn’t getting anywhere. “Let me try,” he said, and stepped up to another terminal. “I’ve got some skills of my own.”

“I don’t think—”

“Trust me for a minute.” He unplugged the power from the back, then plugged it in again, did a safe reboot with command prompt, named a batch file and opened it, trying to add new administrative and then root access to gain control of the system. Hawke felt light-headed, a little woozy, as if he’d had a few beers. The screen blurred and he had to blink to bring it back into focus.
Strange.
Maybe it was the aftermath of an adrenaline surge. Somewhere outside the morgue, he could hear a hollow booming sound.

He looked at Young and picked his next words carefully, probing gently around the edges of the truth like a tongue working at a sore tooth. “You worked for Eclipse, didn’t you? When Jim was there.”

At first, she seemed to ignore him; then she nodded once, short and fast. “I started as an intern in his office and stayed another six months as a junior engineer after he left. He offered me a position at Conn.ect. He was the reason I … Jim’s a brilliant man. I jumped at the chance to work with him again.”

Hawke was revising his earlier opinion of Young as someone who played by the rules. He thought of the phone Weller had given him still nestled in his left pocket. He’d forgotten about it in the aftermath of all that had happened since then. She was his mole, had smuggled this out. Or maybe not. Maybe she was up to something else.

Hawke had been making progress on the computer while she spoke. He didn’t have his regular tools with him, but he had a few tricks up his sleeve and he was good enough to get through. He’d installed an IDS sniffer program to log network activity and monitor intrusions before he shut down the Ethernet, cut it off from the outside, and now he worked through several debuggers. The computer seemed to come up clean.

“What was Eclipse working on, Anne? What do they want with Jim?”

“He swore me to secrecy. I signed confidentiality agreements; I did things that were illegal—”

“The world is burning. I think the time for worrying about who signed what is long gone. Why are they after him? What did he do?”

She hesitated again, then seemed to come to a decision. “It’s more like what they took from him. I’ll show you, if we can get access to outside.”

He reactivated the network jack. “Done,” he said.

She stared at him. “You’re kidding.”

“Like I said, I have some experience with this.”

“I won’t ask.” Young took over, bringing up a connection to a server. She hacked into a private repository of some kind. Documents popped up on-screen, marked as highly confidential. He leaned closer. Internal memos. Specs and code. Diagrams. A new kind of programming language. Patent documents, filed and pending.