by Nate Kenyon
Past tense. Hanscomb’s lips were white as she pressed them together. She was on the edge of collapse. Hawke wanted her to focus, wanted to give her something that built her strength and bound them. “I’ve got a son; I think I told you. Another baby on the way. You have kids?”
“Two,” she said. A bittersweet smile touched her face. “They’re both in college now. Cliché, isn’t it? House in the suburbs, Wall Street yuppie husband, manicures and yoga and afternoon cocktails while the kids were at dance and lacrosse practice. I used to drive a minivan before the Cadillac. That was a gift from my husband, supposed to mark the transition when Jean went off to school.”
“Jean?”
“My youngest. She’s at Smith. Taylor is in his senior year at USC.” She covered her mouth with a hand. Her face was ashen, hollow, as if collapsing upon itself. “You don’t think this has spread beyond New York, do you? They aren’t…” She couldn’t seem to go on.
“I’m sure they’re fine,” he said. He touched her arm, felt her shaking. “Which is why we need to focus on getting ourselves out of the city. They’re going to be worried about you.”
She nodded, bright red spots of color blooming in her cheeks. “Jean’s so nervous, always wanting to know the door’s locked or I’m driving the speed limit. She’ll drive Taylor nuts with this. He…” She paused, swallowed, shaking, and didn’t speak again. Hawke was ashamed. Asking her about her kids had been a mistake. Hanscomb had been little more than an irritating distraction to him since the moment she had crashed the SUV, but she had a life and a family like anyone else. She had kept her mind occupied with her husband’s plight, but that only masked the real terror. This façade she had built around herself was about to come crashing down, and Hawke saw all the pain waiting behind it.
He felt his own panic begin to creep closer to the surface, thinking of Robin’s scream, of the blood spattered across the wall. He fought it back and touched the light worm of scar across the last knuckle of his pinkie. His mother always said he had a knack for staying calm under pressure; when he was eight, he had caught the finger in a car door and it was nearly severed. She liked to tell people how he had simply clutched it to his shirt and said, I need to go to the doctor, as if he were commenting on the weather while blood pumped like a fountain down his shirt. And the night his father died, Hawke had driven to the hospital, where he’d found the man slumped with eyes half-open, mouth slack, having suffered a stroke due to complications of his alcoholism. Hawke had sensed something irreversibly wrong as he sat on the edge of the bed; one pupil was dilated, the other a pinprick of black. Even though the doctors explained that his father was brain-dead and couldn’t hear him, he held the old man’s calloused hand as they shut off the machines, as his chest hitched and sighed, and told him to let go, that it would be over soon. It was the last time he would see his dad before the funeral, and he never shed a tear.
As a child, he had been scared of death. But he didn’t feel that way anymore. He was numb to it for himself; it would come eventually whether he was ready or not. But he was terrified for Thomas. The thought of his boy huddled somewhere, crying for his daddy, punched the air from his chest.
Vasco had maneuvered his legs over the side of the platform, and now he dropped to the tracks with a grunt, the flashlight beam flickering before coming back strong. “We’re wasting time,” he called from below. “Long walk ahead of us.”
* * *
Hawke went over the edge next, and helped Hanscomb and Young down. “Watch the third rail,” he said. “We don’t know for sure if the power’s totally out.”
Vasco played the light along the brightly polished silver rail, raised a few inches above the track bed. “You never hear of a rat getting fried down here,” he said absently, as if he felt the need to say something while his mind was somewhere else. “You know why? Because they’re smart. They go underneath it, or they jump up on it and then jump down. They never make contact while standing on the ground. No way to complete the circuit.”
Nobody answered him. They stood in the hot, suffocating darkness for a moment, gathering their strength. The tunnel was terrifying and damp, the walls seeming to close in on them. There were no emergency lights on down here, and the blackness ate the flashlight beam like a ravenous ghost. Vasco flicked the light up the tunnel. Up where the track curved away, a train sat like a hulking shadow, motionless and dead. The light barely picked it up at all, just a shape and glint before the darkness dissolved everything. Hawke thought he heard something, muffled and unsettling like the moan he’d heard earlier, and he could make out the conductor’s glass window like a milky eye staring at them. But nothing moved; all was still and cold.
Vasco turned back, toward Grand Central. The tunnel was empty that way, running to a point before the light was swallowed up completely. Things scuttled out of sight, rats or something else unseen and better left alone. Hawke still felt the effects of the carbon monoxide from the hospital in his trembling legs, but the oxygen he’d taken in had helped banish the nausea and dreamlike visions. He remembered the images of the dead scratching at the walls of their refrigerated lockers, the shadowy shape that had appeared at the edge of his sight.
It crossed Hawke’s mind that they were all probably still in shock, running on autopilot, and sooner or later they would have to pay for that. There were toxins still running through their veins; they had witnessed unspeakable violence and gruesome deaths and everything about the world that they had known and come to trust had been torn away. Now they were down in the dark and being hunted. He wanted to believe they were like the rats, too smart to put their paws on the rail, but he wasn’t sure. He wondered if they would reach a point where they would simply give up, like deer going down under the attack of wolves, glassy-eyed and exposing their throats for the kill.
Vasco started forward, stepping carefully along the gap between the two rails on their side, staying close to the wall of the tunnel as if it might afford some protection. The rest of them kept near the flashlight beam, Hanscomb right behind Vasco, Young and Hawke bringing up the rear. Hawke had to watch where Vasco stepped and remember to tread carefully as the darkness closed in around him and they left the faint glow of the platform’s emergency lights behind. He didn’t want to lose his footing. He felt the panic creeping up on him again like slow-moving ice, different than it had before, and he fought it back, afraid that it would overwhelm him and send him running headlong through the dark.
The group moved on without speaking until Vasco stopped and let the light move slowly over the walls, revealing a jagged crack that ran from floor to ceiling and chunks of concrete sprinkled across the tracks below. Dust sifted down from above like sand trickling through an hourglass. The tracks seemed intact, but had the structural integrity of the tunnel been damaged? Could it come down upon their heads? And then Hawke had a much more terrifying thought: what if there was more gas leaking even now into these cavities, slowly filling them like a toxic cloud just waiting for ignition?
We’d smell it, he thought. Natural gas wasn’t like carbon monoxide; the manufacturers added an odor so you knew it was around. There was nothing in the air now except the metallic scent of the tracks and the sour stench of garbage, no familiar skunk scent. And yet he couldn’t get the image of a gigantic fireball coming at them up the tunnel out of his mind, all of them trapped with nowhere to run.
Noises drifted from back the way they had come, a distant sound of something breaking, perhaps. It was difficult to tell. This was a bad idea, coming down here. Grand Central was a bad idea, too. It was like heading straight into the hornet’s nest. And for what? Much better to quietly escape the city, find a way out under cover of darkness, let cooler heads prevail before trying to unwind the cord that bound them to this mess. And why were they staying together? It seemed like the vestiges of an idea that had run its course, and yet none of them could think of anything else, so they kept moving. He should just leave them here, drop back softly and then away into
the black. It would be better for all of them if he was the one being hunted by the police. Better than putting them all at risk.
Except he had no light, no way to see. He had to keep going with Vasco and the flashlight, underground, until they reached Grand Central. And then Hawke could take the flashlight and fade away. The bridges were out, but maybe not the tunnels. Follow the tunnels home. His heart ached for his wife and son. Not knowing what was happening made Hawke’s blood burn, his mind going over the images he’d seen on-screen again and again, torturing him. Blood and screams. His little boy’s serious face and ruddy cheeks, the smell of his hair, the way he had trouble pronouncing his r’s when he was tired. Family bed in the early mornings on the weekends, when Thomas would still allow them to cuddle him, wrapped between them in a cocoon of blankets and warm limbs. And Robin, her swollen belly still little more than a bump on her slim frame. My doctor said rest as much as possible, keep off my feet. She was called “at risk” for complications, more bleeding. This pregnancy would be harder, she’d developed the hematoma, and what had Hawke done? Left her alone with Thomas nearly every day for the past two weeks, because he had a lead on a new story that would allow him to climb out of the hole he’d dug for himself. They couldn’t afford help and her parents were no longer an option in his mind, and so he’d left her vulnerable, where Lowry could pounce.
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.”
