End of Secrets

by Ryan Quinn

  “It’s ATLANTIS,” Jones said, interpreting her confusion. “The code name for the case. I’ve already attached our case files to it in the system.”

  “Thanks,” Kera said to him for the second time in ten minutes.

  She opened the ATLANTIS files to see what she had to work with. The better acquainted she became with the system, the more she began to appreciate its intuitiveness. It was an elegant interface that seamlessly integrated information across many files at once. And, unlike at Langley, where everyone had separate computers for classified and unclassified information, HawkEye was one interface. Behind the scenes it sorted out the classified information and kept it firewalled from access to any Internet connection. This might have only been a cosmetic improvement, but it made data much more readable to the human trying to understand it.

  Kera found it both thrilling and a little intimidating to be working alongside the mind who had created this software. She also felt aware of how much catching up she had to do. Jones had programmed HawkEye to build a digital dossier for each of the four people who had vanished. These files were packed with intimate biographical detail—photographs, employment histories, smartphone records, maps that tracked movement, charts that illustrated social networking activity, and even credit card and bank statements. After an hour spent immersed in the lives of the missing, Kera sat back.

  “How long have you been working this case?” she asked Jones through the gaps between their respective banks of monitors.

  “Since this morning,” he said without looking up.

  “You collected all this today?”

  “Not me. HawkEye,” he replied.

  Risking embarrassment, she had to ask, “Where does all this data come from?”

  Jones exhaled in a way that suggested she was a growing nuisance. She took this as confirmation that human interaction was something that required special effort for him. Whether that made him a computer genius or just an asshole was yet to be determined.

  “Come here. Pay attention. I’m only going to explain it once.” His attitude was undercut by the thick band of pride she detected in his voice. Clearly, he took her awe for HawkEye’s capabilities as a personal compliment. “HawkEye relies on a very simple premise: that data exists. The problem HawkEye solves is how to unite data from many sources and apply it in an efficient way. People create floods of data, right? Every time you use a credit card or phone or swipe your ID badge at work. Whenever you log into a social network, save a file, send an e-mail, or stream a film on your computer. Even just walking down the street or into a building—it’s nearly impossible to dodge all the surveillance cameras operated by both law enforcement agencies and private businesses.”

  Kera nodded.

  “As our daily interactions and transactions become more digitized, our behavior becomes increasingly datatized. It’s nearly constant, this generating of data we do. And viewed as a whole, it’s like a trail of digital crumbs we leave behind us wherever we go. The problem, before HawkEye, was that we couldn’t always see all these crumbs at once. There were too many gaps in the trail. Your phone company might know you made a call in Central Park, but it wouldn’t know you went to SoHo and bought shoes an hour later. Only your bank and the shoe retailer would know that. And neither of them would know what you did between the park and the shoe boutique, even though surveillance cameras along the way captured your every movement. HawkEye pulls in data from all of these collection points and links them to the individual. The result is this.”

  He pulled up a map of Manhattan and started a time-lapse sequence. “This is all the activity that HawkEye was able to collect on Rowena Pete the day she vanished.” A yellow dot appeared at the singer’s address. On the side of the screen, a clock displayed the time of day. The dot had appeared around 0720 hours. After a few seconds, it started to move, leaving a faint line behind it. The dot crossed to SoHo, then retreated back to the town house. In the afternoon it snaked over to Washington Square Park. Kera noticed that the trail was not constant; there were a few gaps. In the park, for example, and around the middle of some blocks. The dot returned to Rowena Pete’s building shortly after 1600 hours, and then it disappeared. Kera eyed the time-lapse clock. Another hour swept by. The dot blinked on and off several times between 1700 hours and 1830 hours. At 1844 hours it vanished for good.

  “Those gaps, what happened there?” Kera asked.

  “HawkEye can only track activity that is digitized. If there is no positive facial recognition ID from surveillance footage, no phone or computer use, no credit card transactions—we can’t account for it.”

  “What about after the dot went dark at 1844 hours? The police didn’t arrive until just after 2100 hours. How did she leave without the neighborhood surveillance cams picking her up?”

  “That might require some old-fashioned police work,” Jones said. “She could have left from an underground garage in a vehicle that wasn’t hers. Or she might have been in disguise. If her face was obscured, the facial-recog software is pretty much useless.”

  Kera nodded. “It’s only a two-hour window. I can check the tapes manually. I’m assuming we have access to individual cameras?”

  On-screen, Jones dragged a box around the city blocks immediately surrounding Rowena Pete’s apartment. Then he tapped a button on the side toolbar and a few dozen camera icons appeared on the map. “These are our eyes in the area. Just tap one of the icons to view footage. Like this.” A box popped up with a black-and-white feed showing the entrance to a building. On the sidewalk, in view of the camera, a young woman had paused to finish a phone conversation.

  “This is live now?”

  Jones nodded. “If you want to play back archived footage, just select the time frame on the side here.”

  Kera studied the black-and-white surveillance feed. The woman on the sidewalk stood there, sometimes gesturing, sometimes smiling, but all the time oblivious to the fact that Kera was standing in a dimly lit room across the city watching her.

  “You go to law school, Jones?” she said softly.

  He turned his head toward her and eyed her then as if really looking at her for the first time. “No,” he said, closing out of the live surveillance feed with the tap of a finger. “I dropped out of college as an undergrad.”

  She worked through lunch and deep into the afternoon. There were clocks all over the room, but without daylight, the passage of time was surreal. Hours passed without her acknowledging them. Meanwhile, HawkEye’s power grew more exhilarating to her. Every day Great Lake–sized floods of information were being dumped into the oceans of data that hurtled through the world’s communications networks. And HawkEye was there to collect it all, like a rain catcher the size of the rain forest.

  And yet, four human beings had slipped through the cracks.

  “What if they are dead?” she said aloud at one point, leaning back in her chair to stretch her arms overhead. She’d worked some bizarre cases, but usually the simplest explanation for any human event was the most likely.

  “They’re not dead.” Jones sounded annoyed. “Don’t confuse a reliance on electronic technology with life itself. Just because they ditched their cell phones and hunkered down somewhere where there aren’t surveillance cameras doesn’t mean they no longer exist.”

  The verdict was in; genius or not, Jones was an asshole. Gabby’s testing you, Kera thought. Just get through this case quickly, and she’ll put you on a real assignment.

  At dinnertime she blinked away the screen glare. She’d been studying the life and times of Craig Shea, the waiter/novelist who had been the third of the subjects to disappear. Kera walked over to tell Jones she was stepping out to get food and to see if he wanted any. She hesitated when she came up behind him and peered over his shoulder at the large center monitor. The image on his screen was abstract and colorful, like artwork. After a few seconds he zoomed out. From this new perspective, she could see that he was looking at a mural painted on a billboard. He zoomed in and
out on different sections of the painting and then suddenly tapped his keypad and a new piece of art lit up on an adjacent monitor. At least “art” was the word that came to her, though it hardly seemed adequate. The second image was of a sculpture made from street objects—a mailbox, a fire hydrant, and a bicycle—twisted and mashed together to create the visual effect of violent motion. It appeared from the photo that the sculpture had been erected in the middle of an intersection. Jones zoomed in. Kera leaned forward, squinting. Every square inch of the sculpture had been painted in the same pattern as the billboard mural.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  “Fuck,” Jones said, startled. “Goddamn it. How long have you been standing there?” He swiped his finger, and the images vanished. She watched him, eyebrows raised. “It’s nothing.” With his back to her, he pulled up a HawkEye database and scrolled through the latest query results.

  “I’m going downstairs for some food. Want anything?”

  “Just some peace.”

  She made a move to go, but then stopped. “Did I do something?” she said, a little more confrontationally than she’d intended. She hadn’t eaten all day, and it had put her on edge. Jones didn’t look up; he just kept staring at his screens. “I know we just met, and it’s too soon to expect you to trust me. But a little civility might be a better way to get this partnership off the ground.” She thought his shoulders had recoiled slightly at the mention of a partnership.

  He looked at her finally, but as soon as they made eye contact, he turned back to his screens. “I like to work alone.”

  FIVE

  It was nearly ten when she left the office and got on a southbound F train. At her stop she climbed from the subway platform to the street, feeling with every step the stuffy warmth of the underground give way to a mild spring evening. Under the scaffolding at the top of the stairs, she pulled her phone out of her bag and aimed it overhead at the words she’d discovered the previous day. Have you figured it out yet? When the phrase steadied on-screen, she snapped the picture.

  On her walk home, she detoured several blocks out of her way so that she could pass by Rowena Pete’s town house. The street had been reopened, but there was still a police cruiser parked at the curb and yellow tape slung between the railings of the front steps. Ever since she’d left the night before, she’d half expected to get word that Rowena Pete had returned home and admitted that the whole incident was just a bad prank. But no such word had come.

  “You made a risotto,” Kera said, inspecting the pot on the stove after Parker greeted her at the front door with a kiss. He’d cooked the meal, cleaned up the kitchen, and gotten through half of a bottle of red wine waiting for her. Confronted with this visual evidence of her absenteeism, she felt the familiar touch of guilt, silent like a draft caressing the back of her neck. But there was no point in an apology. Work was work. Parker knew nights like this came with the territory. “You didn’t have to do all this. I told you I’d be late.”

  “I wanted to do it. How was your day?”

  Kera exhaled, tipping her head forward and massaging the back of her neck with one hand. “It was a blur. Gabby put me on this new thing, and I’ve got a lot to do to get up to speed.” She changed out of her work clothes and washed her face while Parker filled their bowls and glasses.

  “The new Natalie Smith movie is coming out in a few weeks,” he called to her from the kitchen.

  “Who’s Natalie Smith?”

  “You know. She’s made a few other documentaries. Faux Ed, the one about higher education. That was her most famous one. Remember?” Kera didn’t recognize any of the words he was giving her as clues. “The new one is based on her travels around the country in search of the average American.”

  Kera now thought she remembered seeing advertisements for the film, though she didn’t know what to make of them. It was an odd subject for a documentary. “Did she find him?” she said, coming out of the bedroom.

  “Who?”

  “The average American.”

  “Who says it’s a man?”

  “Most men seem pretty average to me. I was playing the odds.”

  He laughed and pulled her to him, kissing her neck. “Gambling. God, I love your feisty side. Will you go with me?”

  “What?”

  “To see the movie.”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  “I know it doesn’t look like much. But it’s a Natalie Smith film. I promise it will be interesting.”

  “I’ll go. I’ll go.”

  He paused. “Babe, we’re supposed to be planning a wedding, and we hardly even see each other.”

  “I know.” She wanted to add that they’d merely hit a busy stretch this last week or two, with her work and his travel to Dubai, but she wasn’t sure that long workdays like this weren’t going to be the norm for a while.

  “I thought it would be fun. Like a real date, with dinner and everything.” Sweet Parker. It was because of him that their relationship survived. They wandered off into their separate worlds for most of every day, and then he brought them back together.

  “Yes. Of course,” she said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I’d love to.”

  After dinner she tried to watch TV with her legs in Parker’s lap and his laptop resting on her shins. But she couldn’t quiet her mind. She remembered that she needed to follow up with Detective Hopper. She hadn’t heard from him since his e-mail that morning. There must be some evidence, some lead the police were pursuing. A woman can’t just vanish from the middle of a city.

  “Did you see this?” Parker asked, tilting his laptop in her direction.

  “Please,” she said. “I’ll bleed from my eyes if I look at another computer screen.”

  “It’s not Gnos.is, I promise. It’s the Times.” She waved it away because she could guess what it was about. “Here, I’ll just read it to you. ‘AFTER SUICIDE RUMORS, NYPD SAYS ROWENA PETE IS MISSING.’ ”

  Kera let him read the article aloud. For now, the angle of the story that gripped the media’s imagination focused on the staged scene in Rowena Pete’s town house, rather than on the fact that there was no body. No stomach digesting the pills, no wrist draining blood into the bathwater, no neck swinging from a rope in the closet. Kera’s mind wandered as Parker read on. Of the four missing people, only one name besides Rowena Pete’s had been familiar to her. It was that of Cole Emerson, the investigative documentary filmmaker who had gained moderate notoriety with a film about income inequality a few years back. As she’d learned today, he’d been shooting a new film about Somali pirates when he disappeared from a boat off the coast of the Horn of Africa and was presumed drowned. That word—presumed. She’d never thought much about it, but now it suddenly seemed ridiculous. Could a life simply be presumed one thing or another? It seemed like something that ought to be more knowable than that.

  ATLANTIS was getting to her. And, Kera realized, she welcomed the feeling of being consumed by it. The important cases for her had always started this way: with a confusing blackness and an intense curiosity that drew her in.

  “I don’t understand the confusion,” Parker said, coming to the end of the article. “Did she kill herself or not? How can that be so hard to figure out?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and she wasn’t lying. “What does Gnos.is say?” This she had meant as a joke. But Parker was already reading the latest Gnos.is coverage.

  “They say Rowena Pete went underground.”

  SIX

  Kera looked up at the four note cards on the wall of her office. One for each of the missing. The cards were a minor rebuke to Hawk’s paper-free policy, but Kera had decided they were necessary. HawkEye, helpful as it was, generated flat-out too much information. The digital ATLANTIS files expanded faster than she could digest them, and her mental picture of the case was losing focus. Thus, after a morning spent blinking at her monitors in the Control Room, delving deeper into the dossiers that HawkEye had stitched to
gether, she felt a need to be in a space where she could do some clear thinking. Computers might not need sunlight, but brains do. She told Jones to text her if he found anything and went back to her office for the first time since she’d been put on the ATLANTIS case.

  There she sat at her desk and copied down on the note cards only the most basic information from each dossier: the subject’s name, age, occupation, and a brief note describing how that person had disappeared. Then she’d taped the cards to the glass wall opposite her desk, arranging them in chronological order by date of disappearance.

  She half leaned, half sat on the edge of the desk, staring up at the cards. Although few scenes were as dramatic as the one in Rowena Pete’s town house, the cards did tell her something immediately: it was impossible to confirm that any of the four missing people were dead. This left three possible scenarios. One, the least likely, was that all four had died, and none of their bodies had been recovered. Two, some of them were dead, and some of them were alive. Or three, that all of them were alive.

  Coincidences are illusions, Lionel had taught her. Four inconclusive suicides and no bodies—that was a hell of a coincidence. Too much of one. But just believing that brought her no closer to pinning down where these people had gone or why.

  It’s in here somewhere, she told herself. You just have to see it.

  On her tablet she pulled up the picture she’d taken under the scaffolding on Houston Street. Next to that she displayed a photo of the mirror in Rowena Pete’s bathroom, snapped by one of the crime scene investigators. She studied the phrase that appeared in both photos. Have you figured it out yet? She’d heard the phrase before and had noticed, with some bafflement, the way it had started to make its way into the lexicon. Lately she’d heard people utter it more and more frequently. She thought it meant Get with the program! or Don’t you know? But it was more than that. There was something about it that she couldn’t put her finger on.