by Ryan Quinn
“No names. If I talk to you at all, it has to be on deep background.”
“Mm-hmm.” She sounded bored. It was only half an act. They always wanted to remain anonymous. A startling percentage of the callers were certifiable nut jobs absolutely sure that they had evidence of some newsworthy conspiracy—a secret murder, innocent death-row inmates, political crooks, the government spying on citizens. If they only knew, she thought.
“The ONE story.”
“I’m sorry?” She pried her eyes from her other work and pulled up the Global Report’s website on a new monitor.
“Your story about the ONE Corporation. The one about the Wall Street bankers.”
So that was why Gabby had stuck her with this—it was related to a story that had run under her byline. In the Global Report’s search bar, she entered the keywords he’d just provided along with her name. ONE Wall Street bankers Kera Mersal. The headline popped up: RISING I-BANKERS DECAMP FOR ONE.
“Sure,” she said, skimming the first paragraph. The article reported that, in an unusual move, the ONE Corporation had poached twelve men from Wall Street banks in the last year. She remembered reading it now. Couldn’t have been more than two or three days earlier. There were at least one of these articles per day with her name on them, and although many were much less interesting than this, the banker piece hadn’t particularly stood out. Not with everything that was going on with her actual casework. “What about it?”
“I have information about ONE that people should know.”
“What kind of information?”
“Information that ONE doesn’t want you to have.”
“Why should I trust your information if I don’t know who you are?”
“I was one of the bankers.”
This checked out. The number she’d reached him on belonged to the cell phone of one Travis Bradley, formerly vice president of Project Analysis (whatever that was) at the ONE Corporation, and before that a vice president at Goldman Sachs. Bradley had no criminal record, was in good standing with the IRS, and owed no debt other than a monthly balance on three credit cards. She listened to as much as he was willing to say over the phone, which, in her professional opinion, was more than he should have said into any electronic device. She said she’d get back to him, a promise she had no intention of keeping.
She wrote up a report for Gabby, filed it electronically, and had forgotten all about Travis Bradley by the time she returned her attention to the batch of IP addresses located six thousand miles away.
An hour later she got an e-mail from Gabby. The subject was “Bradley.” The entire message was two sentences: MEET WITH HIM. SEE WHAT HE KNOWS.
Which is how, two days later, Kera found herself in that Upper East Side dive bar doing the first fieldwork she’d done since joining Hawk.
“I quit,” Bradley told her.
“Why?”
There were a handful of people in the bar, none of them within earshot. Bradley had chosen the site—far from his home and far from the stomping grounds of any of his ex-colleagues on Wall Street or at the Midtown headquarters of ONE. Pool balls clacked on a scuffed table in the back. A few patrons chatted up the bartender, their wandering eyes cutting between televised baseball games. There was a jukebox, but no one had bothered to feed it any money at this hour. Instead, a Tom Petty album played low from the speakers.
“I couldn’t do it anymore. I’ve made too much money to claim to have a conscience, but that’s the closest thing to it. Can you turn that off?” They both stared for a moment at her phone on the table between them. After she’d switched off the mic and dropped the phone back into her bag, he spoke quickly. She didn’t have to ask him many questions to keep him talking. The gist of his intelligence was this: ONE had hired the bankers to develop sophisticated algorithms that could mine huge amounts of data and deliver precise predictions about consumer behavior.
“So what?” Kera said. “Don’t all smart companies do that, or at least try to? I search for something online, the search engine uses all of my recent web activity to get me the best results. I buy music or a book, the retailer tells me what other titles I’d like. How is what you’re talking about different from that?”
“Those are very two-dimensional examples. What ONE is actually able to do is more like this: ONE gathers up a record of all the entertainment you consume, and the entertainment your friends consume, and how close you are to each of those friends. Most of that stuff is trivial, of course, and consumers are just giving it away anyway. But ONE also is gathering up data on the jobs you’ve held, and your educational background, and your medical history, and the medical history of your relatives, and your driving record, and most of your financial transactions, and a thousand other factors you’d never even think about.”
“But how could ONE get all of that?”
“You mean, how is the data collected?” He shook his head. “I knew better than to ask that.”
“You think they’re getting it illegally?”
“Would there be a legal way?”
“I hope not. But then why? ONE is a media company. Why do they even want data like that, especially if they have to break laws to get it?”
“They’re not just a media company. Not anymore. Their ultimate objective—the arrogance of it—is staggering. It would have been laughable to me before I got to ONE, especially coming from the Street, where I thought arrogance had been perfected. But I’ve seen these models work, and—”
He hesitated, and she sensed he was holding something back. “And what?”
“With data on this scale, yes, they can tell you what book you might want to read next. But they can also tell an insurance company your likely medical future, including the age and cause of your death. Or they could tell an employer whether you are the best candidate for a job you’ve applied to. Or supply a university’s admissions committee with a report that details not just whether you’re a qualified candidate, but what you’re likely to do with the degree they give you, and how much you’ll be making ten years from now.”
“It’s hard to believe it could be that precisely predictive.”
“Believe it.”
“And this data is for sale?”
He nodded. She saw his eyes scan to the door. “That part is secret. Well, everything’s secret. They have a whole new facility full of servers—they call it ‘the bunker’—that no one is allowed to see, just churning out these calculations. But they’re most secretive about the fact that they’re selling the information.”
“Selling it to who? Insurance companies, employers?”
“Yes. And other clients.”
“Like who?”
This time he shook his head. “Use your imagination.”
“No,” she said. “I hope you’ll forgive my skepticism, but extraordinary claims like this require extraordinary evidence. And you’re hardly making sense. You’ve got to give me something more concrete.”
He shifted awkwardly in his seat. Again, his gaze darted around the room before it returned to a point on the table between them. “I think I better not say anything more.”
“Have you been threatened? Why not go to the cops first?”
He shook his head as though frustrated with her. “This is a little outside their jurisdiction.”
“The FBI, then?” she asked, reaching.
His eyes caught hers and then he looked down. “That isn’t an option.”
“OK. Then why’d you call me?”
“I told you. The article you wrote. I thought maybe you’d turned up something about ONE on your own that I could help confirm. But if I’m the only source, they’ll know it was me.”
“Who will know? ONE?”
“Yes. And . . . their clients.”
She gave him a few beats, a final chance to elaborate, but he didn’t jump at the opportunity. “Well,” she said, standing to leave. “When you’re prepared to say anything more specific, you know how to reach me.” Gabby had been vague
about what Kera should hope to learn from this meeting, and Kera had exhausted her patience for fishing around in the dark. She made it only a few steps across the room when he said something more. It was the way he’d said it, like a confession made on an impulse, that urged her to stop and look back at him. “What?”
“The end of secrets,” he repeated.
She returned to the table. “OK,” she said. “That was portentous. Now what the hell does it mean?”
He waited a few moments for her to sit, but when she didn’t, he began to talk again. “When the other quants and I started at ONE, the first thing we did was have a private lunch with Keith Grassley, the company’s CEO. Well, the first thing after we’d signed a bunch of nondisclosure agreements to ensure we’d never repeat anything like what I’m telling you now.” He swallowed, and again his eyes worked the room. When they returned to her, there was something like anger in them, as though she were forcing this from him.
“At the end of that meal, Grassley stood up and told us why we were there. ‘ONE is no longer just a media company,’ he said. ‘We are an information empire.’ I know, I rolled my eyes at first too. But it wasn’t hyperbole. He told us that in the future, perhaps the near future, power in the world would lie with those who could amass the most information and have the ability to organize it with a few strokes of a touch screen. ‘Perfect information about the past and the present contains the very instructions to build the future.’ That’s another quote I recall. This information was out there, he said, as it had always been. It just needed to be collected. When ONE accomplished that, he said, it would be the end of secrets.”
“He’s a quotable guy.”
“Yeah, well, when you have a minute, think about that last one,” Bradley snapped. But then, just as quickly, the anger washed out of his eyes, and they flooded with desperation and fear. “Will you write something?”
She shook her head. “You’re an anonymous source with no evidence. Give me a call when you’re ready to go on the record and have some proof to back it up. Until then, you’re just a coward with a conscience. And that isn’t news.”
The way she walked away, backlit by the blinding daylight coming through the windows near the front, she must have looked to him more silhouette than woman.
TWO
The premise of the exercise was simple: notice something new about the neighborhood. An architectural detail, a storefront, a billboard, a pattern in the flow of pedestrian traffic. Lionel had taught Kera the game early in her training. He’d insisted that it was a crucial exercise, both to help maintain observational fitness and to understand new environments. She found that it was most interesting to play the game in places she thought were most familiar. A startling array of things was always there and never seen. Most days, like today, a perfectly new detail in the landscape revealed itself to her in plain sight and reminded her of the extraordinary vastness of the ordinary world. It was a beautiful thought, but it was also evidence of a weakness, a vulnerability.
The words caught her eye by chance. Technically, this violated the spirit of the exercise, which called for deliberate observations. Nevertheless, there they were—six words where she had never noticed them before. She’d just disembarked from the downtown N train, and the bottleneck in the stairway drew her gaze upward over the hats and hair and bald heads toward the freedom of the sidewalk. The words were made of small letters—the entire phrase stretched at most four feet—painted on the underside of a scaffold landing that shielded pedestrians from the persistent construction along Houston Street.
HAVE YOU FIGURED IT OUT YET?
She cleared the bottleneck and climbed the stairs with her face tilted up, studying the phrase. The vandal’s penmanship was plain, unlike the stylized tags graffiti artists threw up on walls and train cars and mailboxes across the city.
Have you figured it out yet? The words were close together, each one nearly running into the next. It might have been the work of a bored construction worker in broad daylight. It might have been someone high or drunk, claiming a small corner of the city in the night. It might have been anyone. The city was dense and unfathomable.
Kera moved with the flow of commuters, the words passing overhead, and then she was on the sidewalk.
She scanned the intersection at Broadway and Houston. The streets and subway tunnels roiled with the citywide migration from office to apartment, career life to family life, from museums to Broadway theaters, cocktails to dinner, from daylight to twilight. Leashed dogs, freed from a day’s captivity, splashed urine at the base of walls and planters and parking meters. Bareheaded cyclists dodged fares climbing out of open cab doors. Banks went dark and sports bars ran specials. It was rush hour and happy hour.
It was early for Kera to be off work. Normally, she stayed at Hawk’s Times Square offices until after dark. But today coordinated raids in Sweden, Germany, and Russia had resulted in the arrests of anarchist hackers that her team had been homing in on for months. Gabby had congratulated them and sent everyone home early, reminding them that there would be many late nights to come. Kera had no intention of taking the evening completely off. She had other cases. But she could do that work from home via the secure connection to Hawk’s network while she waited for Parker, who was in the air over the Atlantic and due home in a few hours. She would have dinner waiting for him, she decided. Her fiancé. She had cooked rarely since she moved to the city, and even less since they moved in together. Preparing a meal would mean an inventory of the cupboards and refrigerator, and then a run to at least two of the narrow-aisled groceries in the neighborhood. All of that, just to cover a simple recipe. Maybe she would just order out something nice.
She paused at the edge of the intersection, anchored against the humanity seeping up from the subway tunnels and receding into the buildings. She liked to absorb the chaos of the city at the end of the day, to measure its unsteady pulse against her own. She had heard that this city was unforgiving, that the people here were cold, or greedy, or lonely by the millions, that life here was gritty and hard. She had ignored these warnings when she’d accepted the job. She wanted to see for herself. She had lived here now two years, two years exactly to the day. She was unnoticed and underestimated and underpaid. But she was underway.
On the sidewalk nearby, a homeless man sat patiently watching his coffee cup fill with change as the stuffy transit system drew breath through the grate beneath him. She did not avert her eyes, though the city’s beggars still disturbed her more than DC’s had. Gabby, who was a New Yorker by birth, had assured her that she would get used to the homeless, just as she would get used to the other extremes that in the city were routine, like the absurd monthly apartment lease payments or the trash bags piled to shoulder height along the streets and the rats that darted from beneath them. Kera had no intention of getting used to any of this. Routine dulled the senses. Her training had taught her that people saw only what they wanted to see and what they happened to see. A good agent must see everything else. She was only an analyst now, but she knew that taking the job with Hawk had put her on track to make agent and could eventually lead to a long career as a case officer.
Her eyes lingered for a moment on the beggar’s cup. Emblazoned on its side, with the logo of a popular coffee chain, was a colorful graphic promoting the release of a forthcoming movie. Apocalypse, it said. May 22. A pair of pretty actors clutched each other, witnessing some unseen horror that was suggested by orange fireballs reflected in their widened pupils. This same advertisement glowed—on a much larger scale—from the side of a five-story building across the street. The electronic billboard lurked over the intersection, dominating the canopy of the neighborhood’s tangled commercial jungle. A few seconds later, the board served up a new ad, this one featuring a naked model, artistically obscured in shadow, pitching a men’s fragrance (with dubious effect, given the palette of smells—garbage, bus exhaust, urine, the overcooked meats sizzling on vendors’ carts—all competing for attention at s
treet level). And then the giant LED screen flashed back to the Hollywood production, invading sight lines in every direction.
She skirted the bum’s outstretched legs and crossed Broadway toward Lafayette. She knew all she needed to know about Apocalypse. First, that the film was crap and she had no intention of viewing it. And second, that she didn’t matter; the movie was predestined for box-office glory with or without her approval. But mostly, she was aware that the studio that had produced the film was owned by the ONE Corporation, the world’s largest media conglomerate.
After the meeting that morning with Travis Bradley, Kera had gone directly to Gabby’s office. Although Kera now considered Hawk’s deputy director approachable, she was as aware as she’d been at their first meeting—in the back of that SUV on the National Mall—that this was a shrewd, impatient woman who was difficult to please. Kera knew nothing about Gabby’s personal life but assumed it was impossible she was married.
“You look flushed,” Gabby said when Kera was escorted in by her boss’s militant gatekeeper of an assistant. “What’ve you got?”
One thing Kera had learned through a half-dozen embarrassing reprimands over the preceding two years was that the deputy director loathed having her time wasted. Kera spoke without sitting down.
“ONE Corp. hired a dozen investment bankers from prestigious Wall Street banks over the last ten months. All men, of course. Quants—the math guys on the Street who turn market data into money.”
“And Bradley was one of them?”
“Yes, that’s confirmed.”
“What does he want?”
“He’s doing the whistle-blower dance. The charges are a little foggy, but he claims ONE is running some sort of Total Information Awareness data-mining project and selling off the consumer data.”
“Selling it to who?”
“He wouldn’t give any specifics.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I don’t know. ONE isn’t an investment bank. Hiring a dozen of the best quants in the world does strike me as odd.” But that wasn’t the main thing about the meeting with Bradley that had stayed with Kera. “His fear was real. Whatever he thinks he knows, he’s not comfortable talking about it. Then again, he said he wouldn’t go to the Feds, so maybe he knows his story isn’t credible. Want me to look into it?” she said, hoping Gabby would say no.