End of Secrets

by Ryan Quinn

  She needed to prepare for her meeting with Gabby. Normally, the first thing she’d do with a new subject was put in an intel request. But she’d only ever been assigned cases that unfolded on foreign soil and involved non-US citizens. She suspected that it wouldn’t be so easy to pull HawkEye data on Rowena Pete. Not without a FISA warrant, which wasn’t even worth pursuing at this stage in the investigation. She wondered again why Gabby wanted her on this case—and why Hawk was even involved at all. She would get started soon, she told herself. But first, just for a minute, she allowed herself to gaze out the window, to be pulled into the patchwork panorama of billboards and flashing screens and ticker symbols ascending the vertical steel and glass that scraped the sky.

  A three-story portrait of a young pop singer hung across the facade of a building with words announcing: JW. New music from Jalen West. An ad on a smaller scale made a pitch for a documentary film called America. The search for the average American begins May 19, the billboard said. The America ad was dwarfed by another ad for Apocalypse, this one the length of a tractor trailer, which offered one-word excerpts from unnamed critics—“Thrilling!” “Terrifying!” “Blockbuster!”

  Soaring over this commercial thicket was an ad that was visible from every vantage in Times Square. It was a broad white billboard stretching across the facade of a skyscraper, perched high above the pitches for soft drinks, Broadway shows, and television programs:

  ONE

  There are 7,369,090,938 people in the world. Soon they will all be connected.

  The string of giant electronic digits at the center counted faster and further into the billions. Ever since the billboard had appeared months earlier, Kera often caught herself mesmerized by the number, watching it grow relentlessly, one digit at a time, turning over slightly faster than twice every second. The billboard began to unnerve her whenever she stared at it for too long. Is that what people wanted, to be connected?

  Bradley’s words rose up in her mind: the end of secrets. Across Times Square the number hit 7,369,090,967. And then 7,369,090,968. She turned to face her computer before the population clock could update again and began to look into how to handle intel requests for American citizens.

  A few minutes before ten, she took her tablet and phone and approached Gabby’s office. She felt unprepared. Looking into the intel request had been a mostly symbolic gesture meant to signal to her boss that she wasn’t just sitting in her office staring out the window. The only actual development since last night had been Detective Hopper’s benign e-mail.

  “Come in. Shut the door.”

  Kera did as requested, sitting but not quite settling into one of the leather chairs facing the desk. Gabby’s office was neat and sparse. There were no pictures of family, only a few framed photographs of Hawk’s deputy director shaking hands with familiar politicians and Washington bureaucrats—the current and former directors of the CIA, NSA, and FBI, a couple of presidents, the attorney general. Hawk operated completely without paper files and Gabby’s office reflected that. No file cabinets lined the walls, no folders stamped CLASSIFIED cluttered her desk. Just a thin, sleek computer, a tablet, a flat-screen television on the wall, and an STE—or Secure Terminal Equipment—desk phone for encrypted calls.

  “I got a briefing from Hopper an hour ago,” Kera began, opening the detective’s e-mail on her tablet. “NYPD is classifying this as a missing person, possible abduction. They collected prints, hair, and fabric samples from Rowena Pete’s town house. Forensics all came back negative for an intruder. No demand for a ransom—so far. And no other sign of foul play.” Kera looked up from the e-mail she was summarizing aloud. “Except, of course, for the missing woman.”

  Gabby leaned forward and put her elbows on the desk, tenting her hands in front of her mouth. She seemed to be thinking for a moment. Then she smiled. “It’s much stranger than that. Come on. There’s something I want to show you.”

  Kera followed her boss into the hallway. They walked past Director Branagh’s office and then continued on, traveling a quarter of the way around the floor. It wasn’t until Gabby slowed to make the left-hand turn down a short side hallway that Kera understood where they were going. At the unmarked entrance to the Control Room, Gabby stopped and gestured for Kera to step in front of the retinal scanner. Kera flashed Gabby a quizzical glance, but then she did as ordered and stood, unblinking, while the scanner matched her retina with her identity and security clearance. The scan was followed by a soft beep. She jerked her head back and looked at the adjacent screen, confused. It said:

  KERA MERSAL, AGENT

  CLEARANCE LEVEL: TS/SCI-UNIVINT

  PLEASE WAVE ID CARD FOR ENTRY.

  Kera looked at Gabby.

  “Well, try it,” Gabby said.

  Kera waved her badge over the card reader. When she did, she heard a dull click within the heavy door. The screen displayed a new message: AUTHENTICATION CONFIRMED. THANK YOU. HAVE A NICE DAY.

  Kera stood dumbstruck as Gabby submitted her own retinas for scrutiny and waved her badge.

  “Congratulations, Agent Mersal,” she said, holding the door for Kera as they entered. Kera started to say thank you, but it came out as only a whisper. She was already looking past Gabby into the windowless room beyond.

  The Control Room was a galaxy of screens. Overhead lights had been dimmed to make the environment ideal for viewing digital images. Men and women sat at multiconsole workstations in the semidarkness, pale light from the monitors washing over their faces. Directly ahead, the front wall was dominated by a massive tactical display—a large screen flanked on either side by columns of smaller screens. Above these, a row of digital clocks ticked off the local time in cities around the globe. At the front of the room beneath the main tactical display was a shallow pit where a half-dozen people huddled in discussion around a sprawling command station. Their heads shifted in unison, tilting up at the big screen and then back down at the monitors and touch screens in front of them.

  Gabby led Kera to a pair of semicircle workstations that sat on a plateau overlooking the rest of the room.

  “Wait here,” she said.

  Kera watched Gabby go down to the pit at the front of the room and get the attention of a man who was leaning over an analyst’s workstation and gesturing about something on one of the screens. Gabby exchanged a few words with the man, who glanced up at Kera and nodded. Then he went back to what he’d been doing.

  Kera studied the big screen. It displayed a giant map that spanned from East Asia, across the Americas and Europe, to the Middle East as far as Saudi Arabia. Color-coded dots marked a handful of geographic locations. She couldn’t begin to guess what the map or the dots were meant to illustrate, and she was too far away to overhear the discussion in the pit.

  After a few minutes, Gabby approached with the man she’d been talking to.

  “This is J. D. Jones,” Gabby said. Kera recognized his face. Perhaps they’d shared the elevator once or twice, though they’d never met. His name meant something to her, though. She knew that J. D. Jones was the designer of HawkEye. Kera was thirty-one. Jones couldn’t have been more than two years on either side of that. He had wavy black hair that guarded his face and glasses with thick black rims. He was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans. He might have been handsome, but she didn’t notice that at first. He was mostly just plain, the kind of man who would stand out in a crowd like a blade of grass on a golf course. Jones shook Kera’s hand, but his eye contact was fleeting. By the time Kera introduced herself by name, he was already seated at his workstation in front of a large touch-screen keypad surrounded by an array of screens.

  Jones laid a hand flat on the touch-screen pad and the main screen flashed to life. Beneath the Hawk and HawkEye logos, his picture and full name appeared next to two entry fields. The initials stood for James David, Kera noted. Could that be any blander? She doubted it was his real name. With a quick, fluid blur of finger activity, he entered two passcodes and then tapped the log-in button. W
ithin seconds, the screens around him flashed to life. Controlling them with a combination of efficient swipes and taps, he called up a series of files. Kera immediately recognized images of Rowena Pete on one of the monitors. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of images of the missing singer. They came and went across the screen quickly, one after the next. It took Kera’s eyes a moment to register that these were not just photographs. Most of the images were video files.

  “Any luck?” Gabby asked, eyeing the screens over his shoulder.

  “Luck’s for Vegas. This is actual data,” Jones said. “And we have a lot of it.” He made a few deft strokes on the touch-screen keypad and two rows of photographs materialized on one of the screens. The images resembled something between head shots and mug shots, but more candid than either. Kera scanned them, not recognizing any of the faces until she picked out Rowena Pete’s, which was displayed last. “To answer your question, yes, I found the others.”

  “How many are there?” Gabby said.

  “Leaving out abducted children and runaway teenagers, New York City reported just three missing adults last year. So far this year there have already been eight. Of those cases, six remain open. I think we can remove these two,” Jones said, pointing at a pair of faces. “This guy had a gambling problem his family didn’t know about before he buried them all in debt. And the woman here had been in and out of mental health facilities for a decade before she vanished.” He keyed a few strokes on the keypad and their photos dissolved. “That leaves four that fit our profile.”

  “What do we know about them?”

  Jones clicked through their files quickly. “Craig Shea, a waiter at Otto in the Village. Also a novelist. He’d had two novels published before his thirtieth birthday, which he celebrated by renting a sailboat in Newport, Rhode Island, and hasn’t been heard from since. Next is Cole Emerson, thirty-four. He’s an investigative documentary filmmaker. Disappeared from a boat off the coast of the Horn of Africa while shooting a film about Somali pirates. And as of last night, we can add Rowena Pete, who is the most well-known of the missing. The fourth subject, Caroline Mullen, abandoned her bike on a path leading to the George Washington Bridge. The cops concluded she jumped, but no body’s washed up. The thing with her is, she was a law associate at an estate-planning firm, not an artist, so she doesn’t exactly fit the profile of the others. But on second glance she has more in common with them than not.”

  “Like what?” Gabby said.

  “To start, she was young, just twenty-nine. And single, so she left behind no significant other. But what’s most odd about all of these subjects is the lack of an obvious motive—either for suicide or running away. Usually, adults who go missing are dodging debt or a failed relationship. But not these people. Legally and financially, they had their lives in order.”

  “What about suicide? You never know what goes on in someone’s mind,” Gabby said. “Plenty of people—especially creative people—appear normal to friends and family one day and then kill themselves the next.”

  “No, he’s right,” Kera said, feeling like she should jump in. “Separately these could each easily be explained by suicide. But together? If no bodies have been recovered? Something’s off.” She couldn’t get the odd scene in Rowena Pete’s apartment out of her mind.

  “Have you run the names through the watch list?” Gabby asked.

  “Of course. There’s nothing there.”

  “None?”

  “Not a single match,” Jones said.

  “The terror watch list?” Kera asked, confused. “I thought we were talking about artists. Why would they be on the watch list?”

  “We don’t know what they are. We have to start with what we know and check everything. What we know is that they were young and passionate.”

  “That doesn’t make them terrorists.”

  “It makes them idealists, which makes them prone to extremism,” Gabby said, not without disdain. “Has Branagh seen this?”

  “Not yet.”

  “All right, I’m headed to a meeting with him now. I’ll fill him in. In the meantime, Jones, get a code name assigned for this case. Kera, this will be your priority, starting immediately. Here’s your new workstation.” Gabby unlocked a drawer under the desk and retrieved several items from it. “This is your secure phone and tablet. Both automatically sort incoming and outgoing calls and data as either classified or unclassified. You won’t be able to access anything classified when you’re outside of Hawk’s walls. Jones has already transferred all of your current data over. Your phone number will remain the same, and you’re to keep the phone on you at all times. Is that understood?” Gabby paused as if considering whether she’d covered everything. “I’ll need you to give me your old phone and tablet.”

  Kera hesitated, not realizing at first that Gabby meant now. But after a moment she acquiesced, handing over the old devices and reaching for the new, which to her looked identical.

  Next Gabby pulled a thin strip of glass out of a small case and held it out to Kera. It was about the size of a Band-Aid and completely transparent. “Here are your access codes for HawkEye. The memory will wipe clean at 1200 hours. OK? You two need to learn everything there is to know about these people. Their routines, their work, their friends—everything. And, most importantly, what the hell happened to them.”

  Gabby pivoted to leave, and Jones turned back to his monitors as if Kera wasn’t standing there.

  “Gabby?” Kera said, hurrying to catch up. “I—I’m a little confused. I’m grateful for the promotion—thank you—but this is a missing persons case. I’ve been tracking major cyberthreats coming out of China and the Mideast. Aren’t I a little overqualified for this?” Gabby stopped her right there with a look of reproach. Kera tried to backpedal. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not questioning you—”

  “That sounds like exactly what you’re doing.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. I’m just—”

  “Do you remember what you said when we were in Rowena Pete’s bathroom last night? You said, ‘She’s trying to send a message.’ ”

  Kera nodded slowly.

  “You think you’re overqualified? Prove it. Figure out what message she’s trying to send.”

  “What about my other cases?”

  “We’ll find someone else to cover your caseload. This is your only priority. Is that clear, Agent Mersal?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Kera said, but Gabby was already walking away.

  Kera’s new workstation was adjacent to J. D. Jones’s. Their dueling banks of monitors angled toward each other at ninety degrees so that Kera and Jones also had clear views to the big screen at the front of the room. Kera sat in the swivel chair at the center of her work space and laid a hand flat on the touch-screen keypad the way she’d seen Jones do. The center monitor came to life immediately, displaying her photo, name, rank, and a prompt for the two passcodes. For a moment she savored this. Agent Mersal. She liked the sound of that. There was a bitter irony, though, in being promoted in a job that didn’t exist. Later, when Parker asked her about her day, she would say it was fine or busy or just all right. She wouldn’t be able to tell him that she’d made agent. Celebrating or in any way acknowledging the promotion to someone outside Hawk would amount to a felony offense that would, among other inglorious consequences, jeopardize her security clearance.

  She looked at the piece of glass that Gabby had given her and turned it over in her palm. It looked like a microscope slide. She held it up to the monitor, hoping the backlight would reveal the passcodes. Nothing. Her cheeks and forehead flushed. It had been a long time since she’d experienced any form of helpless panic in front of a computer. Maybe it was supposed to plug in like a USB drive, she thought, feeling like an idiot for not thinking of that first. She put the side of her head to the desk, her hair falling onto the keypad as she scanned the side and back of the touch-screen apparatus for a slot that looked like a promising fit.

  “What are you d
oing?”

  Kera sat up, startled. Jones was looking at her over the rims of his glasses as though she were an idiot.

  “I was . . .” She held up the glass slide. “I’ve never seen one of these before.”

  Annoyed, he held out his hand. She got up, walked around the end of the desk that separated their stations, and handed him the glass slide. “It’s like this.” Using both hands, he pressed each end of the glass between a thumb and forefinger. Then he gave it back to her. She held it the way she’d watched him do. Instantly, two strings of blue digits appeared within the glass. She released a finger and the digits disappeared just as quickly. Simple as that.

  “Thanks,” she said. Jones ignored her; he was already back to work.

  She returned to her seat and studied the passcodes. Because the slide required simultaneous fingerprint readings from both her thumb and forefinger on both hands, she couldn’t type while the digits were visible. She had to memorize the codes before she could do anything else.

  Once she was in the system, she faced a new obstacle. The interface had been customized for Hawk and was entirely unfamiliar to her. Having made up her mind not to ask Jones for help again, she waded into a trial-and-error tutorial on her own. She got only as far as the list of files that she could access from the server before she realized this wasn’t going to work. Every case appeared to have been assigned a code name at random, probably by a secure computer program. This was no doubt meant to add a layer of security to the classified information. It was effective; none of the words in front of her made any sense.