At 4:02, the first phone rang. Room 1911. A couple from Manitoba celebrating their copper anniversary, which was number seven. The wife answered from REM sleep and a dream about the national cricket team.
“Uh, mmmm, hullo? . . .”
“Ma’am, this is the front desk . . .”
Seconds later, the wife hopped onto the bed screaming in panic. “Kevin! Wake up! Wake up!”
He opened one eye on the pillow. “What is it?”
“An emergency! We have to get out of here!”
They dashed into the hallway. There was a white box on the wall and a sign: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS.
Glass broke.
In the next room, two former classmates from Syracuse on a girlfriend trip. The phone rang.
“W-what? Hello? Huh? . . .”
“This is the front desk. Please stay calm, but we have a serious emergency. There’s been a highly poisonous chemical contamination to your floor from the air system. We need you to evacuate your room immediately . . .”
“But how did—?”
“Ma’am, there’s no time. We have too many rooms to call. The hazardous-material teams are on the way. In the meantime, we’ll need the total cooperation of our guests. Once you get to the hall, grab a fire extinguisher and spray yourselves down with the foam. That will temporarily neutralize the contaminants’ effects on your skin.”
“What will it do to my skin?”
“You don’t want to know right now, but there’s only a remote chance of amputation. And after you’re covered with foam, take the stairs—not the elevator!—and hurry to street level and exit the hotel onto the sidewalk. Once there, strip off all your clothes as fast as possible. By then, the hazmat teams should be waiting with the hoses to properly complete the decontamination procedure.”
The women dashed into the hall. Ten other people were already there, half covered with foam, the other half flapping their arms in whimpering panic. “Spray me next! Spray me next!”
Other doors flung open. More guests in the hall. A second extinguisher was broken out of its harness. The stampede began. No! Not the elevator! They burst into the stairwell, a race of sudsy people down landing after landing, until they reached the bottom and sprinted out onto the sidewalk.
Clothing flew with abandon into the night air.
Traffic on Collins Avenue was sparse at that hour, but even the most jaded motorist couldn’t help but rubberneck at the sidewalk festivities. A silver BMW coupe rear-ended a Miata.
Finally, all clothes were off. The naked guests experienced a modicum of relief. Then they looked around. Where were the hazmat teams?
No chemical response was on the way, but multiple 9-1-1 calls brought six patrol cars screaming down the fashionable avenue with all lights flashing. The first officer got out in front of two dozen frothy, nude people. He’d seen almost everything working the South Beach beat. But . . .
“What in the hell is going on?”
Simultaneously, the staff from the hotel’s front desk emerged from the lobby. “What in the hell is going on?”
What was going on:
One week earlier, somewhere in cyberspace, a chat room sat empty.
At precisely eleven P.M., members began logging in with code names. More than a hundred people from Palm Beach to Monroe County turned up the volume on their computers’ speakers.
A silent, streaming feed from a telephone line. The quiet was broken by an Internet voice. “Two minutes to go . . .”
All the members opened a separate computer browser to a live webcam they had previously located on A1A.
That’s how they selected their missions. When the group first began operating, it was just audio from the phones. But then someone threw out the idea that webcams were now everywhere. Listening to the action was great, but actually seeing the fruits of their work would put it over the top.
“Thirty seconds . . .”
Anticipation built. Then they heard various pulse tones of a phone number being punched in. It belonged to a national fast-food burger franchise across the street from a beach webcam in South Florida.
Someone answered.
“Hello, this is ____. How can we help you today?”
“I’m District Manager Frank Daniels from the regional office. We’ve received multiple alarms from your location. You have a major gas leak.”
“What?”
“There’s no time. Just listen: We need to vent the entire restaurant before there’s an explosion. See the four giant plate-glass windows on the front of the building that look out toward the road? Break them.”
“Explosion?”
“Shut up and get moving! The gas levels are rising every second!”
“What do I break them out with?”
“Use the chairs! Don’t you remember anything from the safety drills?”
The restaurant employee couldn’t remember anything from the safety drills about breaking windows with chairs, but he didn’t want the district manager to know that. The people in the chat room heard the employee yell away from the phone: “Guys! Grab the chairs . . .”
The group’s eyes went to the webcam feed on their monitors. The first chair crashed through the southernmost floor-to-ceiling pane. Then in quick succession, windows two, three and four. Customers and staff ran screaming out through the broken glass. Police arrived. Gas company trucks. Pandemonium.
All over the Gold Coast, fingers typed rapidly on keyboards.
“Excellent gig.”
“Top-notch.”
“Nice touch with the safety drill.”
“I concur. Puts him on the defensive so he’s not thinking straight and doesn’t question authority.”
And so on, through dozens of additional comment threads critiquing the mission.
Welcome to the modern Merry Pranksters. That was actually their name. They would have been anarchists and Luddites except they couldn’t imagine life without the power grid and social media.
Near midnight, the cyber-posts turned to a new subject. Next mission.
“Webcam thoughts?”
“I found one with a great panning view of a thirty-story hotel on Collins Avenue.”
“Perfect, but we’ll need to change the hotel game plan.”
Everyone knew why.
The hotel gig was otherwise excellent. It had been honed and improved through eight separate successful runs. Post-mission critiques added suggestions to make the prank calls more convincing. “Toss in a part about taking the stairs instead of the elevators. Everyone’s familiar with that, so it’s a legitimizing reference point.”
They continued refining the script until it couldn’t miss:
A hotel room phone rang on one of the upper floors.
“Hello, this is the front desk, and we have an emergency. There is a fire of unknown origin, and our sprinkler system is not responding even with manual override. We need you to evacuate immediately by the stairs. Do not take the elevators! Repeat, do not take the elevators! And on the way out, we need you to break off all the sprinkler heads in the hall with a shoe . . .”
But the hotel gig developed an obvious new problem. Since they were now using webcams, the entertainment value of the chaos in an internal hallway would be unseen. They put their heads together.
“We need to get them out of the hotel and onto the sidewalk in view of the cam.”
“But how?”
“What about chemical or biological contamination?”
“That’ll work.”
“Okay, so people are standing on a sidewalk. What’s funny about that?”
“It’ll be late. They’ll be drowsy in their pajamas.”
“I’m still not feeling it.”
“I got it. We tell them to spray one another with fire extinguishers to prevent chemical burns . . .”
That got the ideas flowing.
“. . . And once they’re on the sidewalk, we tell them to take off all their clothes.”
Perfection.
They came up with the place, time and date, and agreed to meet back online.
They began signing off. Until only a single person was left.