Day One: A Novel by Nate Kenyon Page A

come loose from the gray helmet and stuck up at the top of her head. “I was at Saks half an hour ago,” the woman said to the local reporter aiming the mike, and in her distress her carefully constructed voice began to betray her Brooklyn roots. “I was on the escalator, and it stopped, and I had my bags with me, and I had to put Peaches down for just a moment, to rebalance, and as soon as I did, as soon as she touched that step, the escalator started again very fast.…” The woman stopped, face wrinkling, chest hitching, as the reporter quietly urged her to continue. “… And thank the good Lord I grabbed her up and the escalator stopped again as soon as I did, but my heel had gotten caught.” She held up the trembling dog and the camera cut to show a shoe with the stiletto heel snapped off before cutting back to the woman’s tear-streaked face. “She could have lost her foot! I swear it was like that escalator tried to eat her.…”
    A ripple of uneasy laughter spread through the room, but Vasco wasn’t laughing. “Not funny,” he muttered, staring down at his hand. The paper towel was spotted with red.
    “What happened to you, exactly?” Hawke said.
    “Thing started up with my hand in its guts. I saw you with the coffee machine, you know. I’m not the only one looking like a fool around here.” Vasco lifted the towel to check his hand, and Hawke caught a glimpse of his index finger, the tip chewed up a bit but the bleeding mostly stopped now. He wrapped it up again. “Thing is, I had it disabled. There’s no way it could just … Never mind.”
    Another reporter had started relating other stories of equipment failure, more tablets and cell phones downloading and running what appeared to be complex programming. Hawke thought of the coffee machine, his laptop and the Anonymous board. He thought about what Weller had just said. His head was spinning with possibilities.
    “I was monitoring traffic just now, in case anyone cares,” Bradbury said loudly, coming into the room, “and activity has gone through the roof. Denial of Service attacks, data theft attempts, serious network breaches reported by our systems at Johnson, Four Tune, about a dozen others. We’re in the security business, right? Maybe we should be actually looking at this, do you think?” He looked around, shook his head. “Anyone else notice weird stuff this morning? Before I came in, my laptop started downloading something automatically, executing some kind of program,” he said. “I wasn’t surfing any porn sites, if that’s what you’re thinking—”
    “Please,” a woman named Susan Kessler said, a new hire from what Hawke had learned. “Let’s not make references to porn in the office.” Hawke pegged Kessler’s age at over thirty-five, which would probably make her Weller’s oldest employee. She always wore impeccable business suits and had perfect makeup, but today her suit looked slightly wrinkled and her face, although scrubbed clean, was pale and puffy.
    “I just mean this wasn’t a phishing scam, not that I could tell. It was something else. I had to come to work, so I just shut it down, figured I would do a safe reboot and clean up later.” When he blinked, Bradbury’s eyes nearly disappeared into pockets of fat. “When I came in, the building manager said her iPad was acting funny. And she was pissed because the elevator was out and the repairman couldn’t seem to fix it, and the building’s security system was down, too.”
    A systems analyst named Price shook his head. “You think this is some kind of massive hack?”
    “I don’t know what it is,” Bradbury said. “I just think we should pay attention. Business is business, right, Jim?”
    The casual reference might have pissed Weller off, but the man didn’t even look at Bradbury and Hawke wasn’t sure he had heard a single word. He was staring at the TV screen, where a scroll of the latest news had begun. A casual observer might have thought