End of Secrets

by Ryan Quinn

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2014 Ryan Quinn

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477825525

  ISBN-10: 1477825525

  Cover design by theBookDesigners

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014938730

  For the creative. Never stop thinking.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORTY-NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  FIFTY-TWO

  FIFTY-THREE

  FIFTY-FOUR

  FIFTY-FIVE

  FIFTY-SIX

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  FIFTY-NINE

  SIXTY

  SIXTY-ONE

  SIXTY-TWO

  SIXTY-THREE

  SIXTY-FOUR

  SIXTY-FIVE

  SIXTY-SIX

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  SOURCES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  gnosis `nō-sis n. knowledge of spiritual mysteries [from Greek: literally, “knowledge”]

  —New Oxford American Dictionary

  The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.

  —Antonio Gramsci, philosopher

  PROLOGUE

  Washington, DC

  Kera Mersal was pounding pavement by 5:59 AM, one minute ahead of schedule. She liked to beat the heat, of course, which settled thick over the Beltway earlier and earlier this time of summer. But she also liked to catch the District’s wide thoroughfares, blocky marble structures, and out-of-scale monuments in their eerie magnificence as the first sunlight hit them from low, aspiring angles.

  As her legs warmed to the task, her eyes focused, embracing the discomfort she sought from the city’s streets and paths each morning. Though she hadn’t competed since high school, her middle-distance runner’s build was intact, a lean but sturdy five feet eight that in her jogging outfit turned the heads of early morning motorists. She had maple skin and wavy Earl Grey hair pulled back tight in a ponytail. As she ran she listened to a BBC News podcast. She liked to know what the world was being told about what was happening in the world.

  She ran along Embassy Row and into Rock Creek Park, where she could stick to trails all the way to the Potomac. It was usually when she hit the Mall that the buildup of lactic acid in her calves and quads tipped the scales toward discomfort, and she became aware of her pulse pounding in her chest and at her temples. She lifted her head as she rounded the World War II Memorial and then slowed abruptly. She would have completely missed the man sitting on the park bench except that he’d lowered his newspaper and looked directly at her. She stopped in front of him and tugged the earphones from her ears.

  “Morning, Kera.”

  “Lionel. Hi.” Her first thought was that this was some kind of test, and she felt her flushed cheeks warm a few degrees for having not noticed him sooner. He was not in disguise. Half a lifetime earlier, Lionel Bright had known three-dozen ways to alter his appearance on short notice. But for every day of the six years Kera had known him, he had always looked the same: like a middle-aged bureaucrat, with gray-white hair and beat-up glasses resting on his thin, angular nose. He’d once been in fierce shape, though impressive physical stats had never been among his genetic gifts. He was an inch shorter than average and as prone as he’d ever been to gaining weight if he neglected exercise.

  Kera was breathing heavily. Out of instinct, she looked around. There was a black SUV parked on Seventeenth Street. Otherwise, nothing out of the ordinary. “A newspaper. How quaint. You know, the only people who read newspapers on public benches anymore are spies.”

  “Busted,” he said, attempting to fold the paper. The broadsheet resisted stubbornly. He stood, giving up, and stuffed the rumpled sections into a trash can.

  “That your ride?” she said, meaning the SUV but not looking at it.

  “Not usually, no. But there’s someone in there who’d like a word with you. Want to take a drive?”

  “I prefer to run, actually. That’s kind of the point.”

  “I never got that. Come on. This won’t take long, and we can’t do it at the office.”

  They’d been tracking a group of Chinese bankers suspected of plotting a cyberattack on the New York Stock Exchange. There were also the antisecrecy hackers who kept publishing classified documents online. And, of course, there were any of a dozen hot spots being closely monitored in the Middle East. There was always shit flaring up in the Middle East. She made a silent bet that this was about a new intercept from a target there. But what couldn’t be discussed at the office?

  As they approached the SUV, the driver got out and came around to open the rear passenger-side door.

  “Can you turn that off?” Lionel asked, holding out his palm.

  Kera looked at her smartphone, which was still playing the BBC podcast. She powered it down and handed it over to him. Then she climbed into the vehicle. There was a woman seated opposite her in the backseat.

  “Good morning, Kera. I’m Gabrielle di Palma.”

  “I know who you are, ma’am. It’s an honor.”

  Kera had not seen the Directorate of Intelligence’s deputy director this close before in person. Di Palma had collar-length blond-white hair that shot back from her forehead. Shallow tributaries of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth were visible in the low light coming through the tinted windows. Di Palma was thin—bony even—and an inch or two taller than Kera. She wore a blazer with a silk blouse and skirt; the whole ensemble came together with a commanding elegance that made Kera self-conscious of her own sweaty running clothes. She felt even worse when she remembered that she’d dashed out the door without brushing her teeth.

  “Lionel tells me you’ve come up under him in CSAA,” di Palma said, referring to the agency’s Office of Collection Strategies and Analysis. Kera nodded and glanced quickly at Lionel, who had climbed into the front passenger seat. The driver, Kera noted, re
mained outside. Di Palma switched on a tablet and pushed it across the seat toward her. “I’m going to offer you a job, Kera. But before I do, I need you to agree to keep this conversation between us. Please sign and fingerprint this NDA after you’ve read it carefully.”

  Kera moved her eyes over every word of the agreement, but she was too distracted to absorb more than a quarter of them. Using a finger, she scrawled her signature on the touch screen and then pressed the flat tip of it to the print scanner at the bottom of the display.

  “Thank you,” di Palma said as she tucked away the tablet. “As you know, the new frontier in our field is all-source data mining. The problem we’ve run into at the agency is not our technology. We’ve got that; we’re ahead of the curve, even. As a result, though, we’re absolutely buried under mountains of signals intelligence data that is piling up in servers much faster than we can make any sense of it. It will take a decade to address these problems institutionally. And that makes us vulnerable. Very much not ahead of the curve.”

  Kera tried to appear as if she were listening patiently, but she couldn’t guess why she’d been pulled off the street so that the DI’s deputy director could tell her what she already knew.

  Di Palma paused as if reading Kera’s mind. “I’ll be direct. I’ve been cleared to field an elite team for a black op, code-named Hawk, to operate a more flexible and efficient cyberintelligence platform. I want you on that team.”

  Kera looked to the front seat to gauge Lionel’s reaction. His expression gave her nothing. “I—”

  “Hold on. I haven’t given you the most difficult thing you need to consider before making your decision. The mission of Hawk is to master information. To gather it at its source, to analyze it, and to act upon it at the precise time it is needed. The scope of this work may extend into areas many of our citizens and lawmakers would consider unacceptable. As a result, most of our missions will require us to operate completely off the books. That means we have to get all of the personnel for Hawk out of the agency. The team will be structured like a private contractor.”

  “Is that merely a technicality, or are you asking me to leave the agency?” Kera looked again to Lionel. There was no way he approved of this. She’d only ever heard him curse agency people who defected to the private sector. His eyes urged her to keep listening.

  “Both. It’s a technicality, but it has real consequences. If you’re not comfortable with this, you’re welcome to walk away. If you accept, you will have to resign from the CIA and apply for a job at the Global Report, an online news organization that went live two days ago. You will then relocate to our offices in Midtown Manhattan. Your cover will be as an investigative journalist. Stories will be created and published in your name, but you will have nothing to do with those because you’ll be carrying out a variety of covert cyberintelligence missions under my direction and the direction of Dick Branagh, who’s joining us from NSA.”

  “Ms. di Palma—”

  “Gabby, please.”

  “Gabby . . . ma’am . . . if I may. I didn’t come to Langley and go through years of taxpayer-funded training just so that I could bail for the private sector at the first opportunity.”

  This produced the first tangible reaction out of Lionel, who let a proud smile curl the corners of his mouth.

  “This won’t be bailing, Kera. Quite the contrary. It’s still an agency op, we just have to run things more independently than we’re used to,” Gabby said. “Everyone from the White House down is desperate for an elite unit like this. To develop it inside the agency would take a culture shift and a bureaucratic shuffle that we don’t have time to wait for. Besides, some of the talent we need has already gone private, and they’re too hard to pull back.”

  “When do you need my decision?”

  “By the end of the week. Think about it carefully. And let me be very clear about one thing. Hawk will be secret and autonomous not only so that we can pursue the most advanced cyberintelligence operations ever conducted, but also so that the agency will have plausible deniability if anything goes wrong. Do you understand? If Hawk fails, they will disavow us.”

  Kera heard herself say, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Lionel, will you get my driver back in here?” Gabby said. Then she turned to Kera as Lionel stepped out, scanning her from head to toe as if noticing for the first time what Kera was wearing. “Would you like a ride?”

  “No, ma’am. Thank you.”

  The driver opened Kera’s door, and Lionel must have seen the conflict on her face. He leaned past her and told Gabby to go ahead without him. “I think we’ll take a walk.”

  When the SUV had pulled away, they strolled across the open field that gradually sloped up to the Washington Monument. For several minutes neither of them spoke. Lionel Bright was the director of the Office of Collection Strategies and Analysis. His job title made him Kera’s boss. His conviction in her potential had made him her mentor. He was in his midfifties or thereabouts and claimed—correctly, as far as Kera knew—that no one in this world knew his real birth date. What did it matter? Kera doubted that any of his official biographical information was accurate, including his name.

  “You put me up for this?” Kera said. He nodded. “Why?”

  “Because you’re the best.” She gave him a cut-the-bullshit look. In response, he tipped his angular nose down so that he could meet her eyes over the rims of his glasses. “You are. And also because I need you there.”

  “You need me there because of me? Or because you don’t trust di Palma?”

  “Don’t ask questions you know the answers to.”

  He was right. Of course he didn’t trust Gabby di Palma. Distrust had been a cornerstone of his instruction. Trust only your instincts and your training. Make an exception only when your instincts tell you it’s worth the risk. As for really trusting someone, that may happen only once or twice over an entire career. Kera had asked him once, “Has it happened to you?”

  “What? Trusting someone?” After a moment he’d nodded and said, “Twice.”

  She’d wanted to press him further then, to ask him who, but she didn’t.

  “I need you at Hawk, yes. But I’ll miss you around here,” Lionel said, changing course slightly to keep them out of earshot of a family of tourists. “You can’t think about me, though. You have to choose what’s best for you.”

  “What about what’s best for the country?” she said before she could stop herself. “I meant it when I said I didn’t go through the Farm and spend all these years working under you just to coast into the private sector.” She did mean it. And she hated that needing to prove her patriotism was ingrained in her DNA.

  He shook his head. “This won’t be a pleasant job, Kera. Think about it. They’re going private with this because things are going to get dirty. Nothing you’ll do with them is going to be by the book.”

  “In other words, it’ll be real intelligence work?”

  He chuckled, but his expression was sober. “Yes. And that’s a strong argument for why it’s the most effective way you can serve.”

  “Would you do it?” Kera said, searching his eyes. Aside from her parents, Lionel Bright was the only person she had ever trusted.

  He exhaled deeply. “It’s certainly where the action is headed. You’ll have access to technology the rest of the world won’t see for years. But as far as job security, I don’t know. You heard Gabby. If something goes bad, you’re done. You won’t be able to come back.”

  Kera nodded and sat down on a bench. “Leave me here, OK?”

  She watched Lionel trek across the lawn and disappear into the blocks beyond Constitution Avenue. She sat for a long time, savoring the views of the White House and the institutional buildings that flanked the Mall. They felt different to her than when she’d started her jog—there was something about them that was different from every other morning she’d been here. It took her a few moments to understand what it was.

  I’m going to New York, she thou
ght.

  ONE

  Manhattan, Two Years Later

  The man at the table was her source. She saw that immediately. He had chosen the darkest booth, the one with high wooden seat backs—for privacy maybe, or as respite from the harsh glow of daylight, which is always a little sad to see in a bar. He was watching the door when she came in, and from the shadows his eyes widened slightly.

  Neither of them belonged in a place like this before noon on a Wednesday. The location had been his call. It made her wonder now if he’d turned to drinking. He was thirty-three and rich, but the way he slumped in the booth made him look like an awkward college boy—spotty facial hair, a worn hoodie hanging off his slender frame. He was MIT-educated, with a wife of two years, a newborn baby girl, and a condo in Tribeca. She had never met him before this moment, but she knew all that. That and, of course, that he was newly unemployed. They were here to talk about his former employer.

  “I shouldn’t be talking to you,” he had said over the phone a few days earlier.

  “And yet you called me,” she had replied, her attention divided between the call and a database on the screen in front of her that was sorting through a list of IP addresses in Tehran. The man had apparently called the Global Report’s newsroom the previous day. Nothing unusual about that; the newsroom received calls like his constantly. Few of them were even potentially worth following up on. They all went into the system and, unless a computer flagged the message, it was ignored or deflected by one of the newsroom staff. Her computer had not flagged his call, but that was no surprise either. Her casework was related to foreign threats, and his was some sort of domestic matter.

  Someone’s computer had flagged it, though, because this guy’s message had gone up the chain as far as Gabby, and Gabby had turned it over to Kera to see if it checked out.

  “How can I help you?” Kera had said when she called him back to follow up.

  “I saw your story.”

  “I’ve written a lot of stories, Mr.—what’s your name?”