Day One: A Novel (20 page)

Hawke realized he had clenched his teeth so hard that his jaw was aching. The need for his family made him want to rip out his own heart. He wished he’d never left the apartment that morning and had remained behind instead, touched Robin’s face again, taken up the unspoken invitation to talk. He wiped his eyes in the dark. He knew his thoughts were wandering, flitting from one thing to another, shock settling deeper. He couldn’t stand it much longer; he knew he was going to snap, and when he did there would be no turning back.

Vasco had skirted the damage, and they continued down the tracks. He was talking quietly to Hanscomb, but Hawke couldn’t make out what they were saying. He had to think, had to face what was really going on. The story was there in front of him now, jigsaw pieces ready to be placed, and it was even bigger than he’d ever thought. He just had to decide if he trusted Young. But he’d seen the documents with his own eyes, at least in passing, and what would be the point of faking them? It didn’t make any sense.

Hawke went back to the beginning, separating everything into mental note cards, rearranging them to fit the right pattern. How had it begun? With the helicopter going down? No, earlier than that, of course. There were reports of strange incidents and accidents on TV even before communications became sporadic, unreliable. Bradbury (that smoking ruin with blackened fingers) had reported huge spikes in Internet traffic, and Hawke had witnessed things himself that he couldn’t explain: the way the message board had rewritten itself, even the damn coffeemaker that had scalded him. Before that, there had been other signs of something going wrong in the world. His ice-cold shower, the electric razor nicking him, flickering lights, the coffee machine misbehaving, the elevator being out. Or was he beginning to associate random data points into a pattern?

Jane Doe.
Admiral Doe.
It was impossible to believe.
Let’s say Weller has a breakthrough of epic proportions, a new type of artificial intelligence, and Eclipse’s board steals it from him, just like they stole his work on energy sharing among networked devices. They push him out, thumb their noses at him, and he’s helpless to stop them. So he vows to get even. Founds a start-up company and assembles a team focused on network security. The team looks for the weak points in Eclipse’s network fence, thinking they’re going to help build a stronger one, when Weller’s real goal is to find the hole that will let him in.

All that made some sense, if you bought the original concept. But why go through all that trouble just to gather evidence of Eclipse’s betrayal? And how had that led to everything that had happened today? Was Eclipse really that powerful, that capable, that they would be able to orchestrate a plot to hunt down Weller and pin this destruction on him? Or had Weller set it off himself?

Hawke thought back to the online digging he’d done that morning about Admiral Doe, after the conversation with Rick and the strange behavior of the message board. It seemed like a lifetime ago when he had plotted the protest locations on the map, but he tried to remember what he had seen there. The calls to action that had been tweeted by Admiral Doe had reminded him of something, some thread of a connection. The pattern that had eluded him suddenly snapped into place, a ghost image from an earlier project, the one that had mapped and predicted areas that would be hit the hardest when Hurricane Sandy made landfall. Every area marked for a protest today had been a red zone for Sandy; these were the places in the city that were the most vulnerable during a disaster, for various reasons that his algorithm had picked up on. Places where the combination of distance from emergency services, escape routes, clustering of open space and buildings, narrow streets, geographical low points or other reasons made them particularly dangerous.

Or, in this case, targets.

Lured into a spider’s web.
Hawke had been close to seeing it earlier, but something had always distracted him. Immediately after he had gotten up from his laptop back at the office, the coffeemaker had blown up on him. Almost as if someone had wanted to interrupt his thoughts. And inside Lenox Hill, the gas had overwhelmed him before he could figure out the answer.

But that was crazy. It meant that someone could interpret his intentions before he even had them and could act so quickly to counter them, it was as if he was being played like a puppet on strings.

Young had fallen back a bit from Vasco and Hanscomb, and Hawke took two quick steps to come up beside her. She didn’t seem to acknowledge his presence. “I think they’re leading people into ambushes,” he said. “The protest locations, the emergency checkpoints. I think they’re luring us into places that are vulnerable to attack.”

For a moment, he thought she wouldn’t answer. The darkness was deeper here, away from the flashlight beam. She was nothing but a vague shape moving beside him.

“And then what?” she said, as if she knew the answer but was afraid.

“I don’t know,” he said. He kept his voice low. “I need to ask you something, Anne. Who was the woman? The one on the screen in the hospital. The one you touched.”

“My mother,” she said. Her voice was soft, tentative. “It was my mother. I haven’t seen her for a long time.” She appeared to be watching the flashlight bobbing in the dark twenty feet ahead. “She died five years ago.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

3:27 P.M.

“IT COULDN’T HAVE BEEN HER
, then,” Hawke said. “Right? Someone who looked like her.”

“I don’t think so.” Young kept walking, facing forward. “The footage was altered; an old clip of her was inserted into an existing feed. She didn’t really move on-screen and you could make out some digital noise. It was a good fake, but I knew.”

“Was she at Lenox Hill when she died?”

Young shook her head, her eyes glinting in the dark as she glanced quickly at him and then away. “No, John. She was at home. Lung cancer. She hated doctors; she never set foot in a hospital.”

“Nobody could have known … that would take impossible resources, weeks, maybe months of research, to find her and that footage. Expertise in video editing to put together a serviceable fake. And then to have it ready for just the right moment, when you were standing there watching?”

“It’s psychological warfare,” Young said. “Hitting us where we’re most vulnerable. Classic technique, weakening our resolve, causing confusion, distraction. We’re emotional creatures, not like…” She didn’t go on.

“I still don’t get it.” Approaching Lenox Hill Hospital, Hawke had the feeling that everything was being orchestrated, as if someone was watching from above and directing their movements toward an ending shrouded in mystery.

He swallowed hard against a lump in his throat. “I saw my apartment,” he said. “There was blood.”
Maybe that was altered, too
, he thought, but didn’t say it. It gave him hope, but that was too much to think about. It would make him careless.
We’re emotional creatures.…

He caught a toe in the track bed and stumbled, stopped, started up again. They were at war; that much was obvious. You only had to look aboveground to see that. But this was a different level entirely, and one that he still had trouble believing.

Hawke kept coming back around to the same problem he’d wrestled with before. He knew plenty about how much you could find on people online, how much research it took to track down the kind of details that would have been necessary for a fake like that. It wasn’t possible, not on the fly. “Why would anyone do this to us? Why are we so important that we get tracked, get shown things to break us down, lured into traps like Lenox Hill?”

He was thinking aloud, not really expecting her to answer. “We’re a potential threat,” Young whispered, so faint he could barely hear it. “You said it already. But I don’t think it’s just us. I think it’s everyone in New York. Maybe everyone in the world.”

He had no chance to respond. A noise behind them made them whirl, hearts pounding. A scuffling and shout drifted to them from the distance, then more footsteps, like a small crowd approaching quickly. Hawke heard sobbing, voices muttering. Vasco played the flashlight beam into the depths of the tunnel as the sounds grew louder. “Hey! There’s the light!” someone shouted. The sounds of running increased, then the sound of someone stumbling and sprawling to the dirt and a scream and curse as faces came into the light, swarming forward, pale moons smudged with dirt and sweat. Hawke counted at least ten, maybe more, men and women.

“Thank God,” a man said as the new people broke against them like a wave and surrounded Hawke’s group, and then, “Wait, are you cops?” He was overweight, and his shirt was ripped down the front, exposing a large, hairy, heaving chest. He looked from one to the other, bewildered. “We thought you were cops, or emergency workers or something.” He glanced at the woman next to him. “Jesus, Patty, these aren’t cops.”

“Please, you have to help us,” the woman said, clutching Vasco’s arm as he reared away from her. Her eyes were shining like polished quarters in the beam of the flashlight, and she was breathing fast and shallow. “My husband saw your light, and we had to come. We forced a door open and got out through the crack, but the rest of them are still inside and they won’t leave; they said it was better to wait, that someone would be there soon.”

“Look,” Vasco said, shrugging off the woman’s determined grip, “We’re trying to find our way out, just like you. I don’t know what you expect us to do.”

“
Help
them,” the woman said. “It’s the number four train, headed downtown before the power went out. There’s an old man on it; he’s having trouble breathing—”

“Fuck the old man,” the fat guy said. “He’s not important, Patty. We need to get to the emergency room.” He waved sausage fingers at them. “I’m diabetic,” he said. “Need insulin.”

“That’s bullshit,” a black man said from the back of the group. “You been saying that ever since the train stopped, but I never seen you having any kind of trouble.”

“You shut your mouth,” the fat man said, pushing forward, pointing a finger. “You’ve been yapping at everyone and driving them crazy. I oughta knock your head off.”

“Take it easy, Lou,” the woman named Patty said, touching the man’s shoulder and stopping him. “It’s not good for you to get upset. Your blood pressure.” He grunted, and she turned back to Vasco. Her voice was eager, as if needing to explain something. “We’ve been trapped inside that train for hours now, no way to know what happened. The damn thing sped up and then slowed down, passed a stop and went dead between platforms. The doors wouldn’t open and the lights went out. At first, the conductor, he said to stay calm, the power would come back on, but then there was some kind of explosion.… He said we’d be rescued soon. But no one came.”

“It was so
hot,
we could have died,” another woman said, and murmurs of agreement spread through the others, who had gathered up close behind her. Hawke felt them crowding even closer and resisted the urge to edge away. Emotions were high; the energy in the group was at panic level.

“Why couldn’t you have been cops?” the fat man said, peering into Vasco’s face. He was wheezing like an asthmatic. He had gone from angry to bewildered and back to an angry resentment, like a spoiled and disappointed child. But he had at least three inches on all of them and must have weighed three hundred pounds, and he seemed dangerously on edge. “What are you doing down here, anyway? Another stuck train? Jesus, our luck.”

They don’t know,
Hawke thought. They had been down here in the dark since the beginning, probably had only the most vague sense of the devastation above them.

“Don’t try to get out of here,” Hanscomb said. She had backed away as the new group came closer, as if they had some kind of disease. Now she spoke from the deeper darkness toward the middle of the double tracks. “You don’t know what it’s like. They’ll kill you.”

Vasco sighed and muttered something under his breath, moving the flashlight over her. The small crowd turned to face her, the murmuring increasing, cries of protest mixed with pleading. “What do you mean, ‘kill’?” someone said. “Are you nuts?”

Hanscomb took another step back, as if ready to bolt. Hawke hadn’t realized how far gone she was since they had started walking the tunnel. Bringing up her family had pushed her too far. Her face was streaked with tears, her eyes haunted pockets of bruised flesh. Her entire body shook like a frightened dog.

“It’s the end of the world,” she whispered. The light was relentless. “There’s no help; they’re all killers. My babies…”

She stopped as the crowd pushed forward again, all of them straining to hear. “I think my husband’s cheating on me,” she said. Tears made her cheeks glitter. “Maybe he’s not even downtown. He’s probably with her now. Oh God.”

“Crazy bitch,” the fat man said. “Why are you scaring Patty like that?” The threat of violence hovered in the air. He put his hand on his wife’s shoulder, but she shrank away from him. He looked around at the others from the train, shook his giant head. “These people ain’t going to help us. We should have taken the Seventy-seventh Street platform up, like I said.”

More murmurs, people talking at once, the tension rising still higher. These people had been trapped for hours, and they were ready to snap. The fat man took a step toward Hanscomb, who shrieked and nearly lost her footing, and Hawke was beginning to think things might get out of control quickly when emergency lights in the tunnel blinked on, along with a crack and hum like high-power lines.

The light washed over them, people standing out in stark relief. Everyone froze for a moment, and then the fat man’s wife screamed, her eyes bugging out as she pushed apart the crowd and staggered away, clutching her belly as if she might be sick.

Hawke turned toward where she had been looking. Sarah Hanscomb was in the midst of a grand mal seizure, her mouth frozen in a rictus of pain, her head turned upward at a strange angle, muscles rigid.
No, not a seizure.
She was making a noise like popping corn as she shuddered in place. Hawke realized it was the sound of her flesh crackling like a pig roasting over a flame. He looked down and saw her ankle touching the third rail, her clothes already beginning to smoke, wisps coming off her hair and the ridges of her cheekbones.