End of Secrets

by Ryan Quinn

  Out her window the ONE billboard overlooking Times Square counted further into the billions. There are 7,369,362,375 people in the world. Soon they will all be connected.

  A thought surfaced that brought her bolt upright in her seat. She paused for a moment to process the legitimacy of the idea, and then she reached for her tablet and pulled up Rowena Pete’s dossier. Using HawkEye, she created a map from the singer’s file the way she’d seen Jones do. The lower half of Manhattan appeared, followed by the yellow dot and then the line tracing the singer’s movements around the city. Next to the time-lapse clock at the top of the screen, the date was listed as May 2, the day Rowena Pete had disappeared. Kera tapped the date display with a finger. This intuitive act was rewarded with the appearance of a pop-up box that displayed a calendar. She exhaled, unaware that she’d been holding her breath.

  She changed the date on the map to May 1. Immediately, the map refreshed and the clock reset. Then it began counting through the hours of May 1. At 0702 hours, a dot appeared at Rowena Pete’s town house. Kera watched the dot traverse the city and eventually return to the town house after a late dinner. The presentation of the full twenty-four-hour day played out over just sixty seconds. After it finished, she tapped the date display again to access the calendar. This time she scrolled back through six, seven, eight months—the calendar didn’t seem to have a limit. Finally, she chose at random the third day of September nearly two years prior.

  Again, the map reset itself and began the twenty-four-hour time lapse. The difference this time was that on that particular September 3, Rowena Pete had been on the West Coast leg of a performance tour. Rather than lower Manhattan, the map that appeared was of Portland, Oregon. The yellow dot illuminated over a hotel at 0817 hours, when the singer had turned on her phone to check her e-mail. Throughout the morning and into the afternoon, the dot made appearances at various points along Interstate Highway 5 between Portland and Seattle. There were many gaps in the line along the highway, some of them stretching for dozens of miles. But that made sense. Surveillance cameras in and between Portland and Seattle two years ago would not have been as pervasive as they were now in Manhattan, where digital eyes were virtually everywhere. It was also likely that the Rowena Pete of two years ago left behind fewer digital crumbs than the contemporary version.

  Kera had an idea. She set off for the Control Room, resisting an urge to break into a jog.

  “I have a question,” she said to Jones, who was looking at artwork again on one of his monitors. She ignored that and didn’t wait for him to acknowledge her presence. “These HawkEye maps can be created for any day or range of days I want, right?”

  “Of course,” Jones said.

  “What about maps for more than one person at a time?”

  “HawkEye can be programmed to do anything you want it to do. What are you getting at?”

  “I want to know if any of our four subjects were ever in the same place at the same time. Can we write a program that would lay maps over each other to see if their paths ever crossed?”

  “We?”

  “You,” she said. “Can you do it or not?”

  Jones seemed to be thinking hard about it for several seconds. Not a good sign. Kera had yet to come across anything, computing-wise, that he wasn’t able to do in a matter of seconds. Finally he said, “Sure, that’d be easy.” She didn’t expect him to admit that her idea was a good one, but she could tell he thought it was because of the way he spun away from her quickly to get started on the project.

  “I’ll have to write some code. And then it’ll take some time for the system to process all the data across four profiles simultaneously. It might take me a few hours.”

  She laughed and told him that a few hours would be fine.

  It took him one hour and forty minutes. And then, “Bingo.”

  She was at her own workstation when his voice broke through the Control Room din. She rushed over to see what he was looking at. His main screen displayed a map of Manhattan and Brooklyn crisscrossed by dozens of blue lines. A group of blinking yellow dots was concentrated on a city block near the West Side Highway.

  “Look at this. All four of our friends were in this neighborhood after eleven PM on the night of June 12 of last year.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I’m not sure.” Jones rolled his cursor over one of the yellow dots, and a window popped up with Rowena Pete’s head shot and the exact time that the computer had identified her. “This surveillance camera captured her near Hudson and Fourteenth Street at 11:38 PM and then again a few blocks north at 2:15 AM.” They watched the two video clips. Rowena Pete was alone and on foot, dressed in a dark skirt and slender, dark jacket. She walked purposefully, but was unrushed. “That means she was somewhere in this neighborhood for nearly three hours. Same with the others.” He rolled over each of the other dots. As he did, windows popped up to identify them. Besides the city’s surveillance cameras, which had captured at least one shot of all of them, two of the subjects had also used their phones while in the neighborhood, though not to call each other.

  “It’s pretty industrial over there, isn’t it?” Kera asked.

  Jones nodded. “There are a few nightclubs nearby, but if they were meeting for drinks, we’d know it. Nightclubs have security cameras. And drinks cost money. There’s a good chance someone would have used a credit card.” He rolled over each of the dots again, studying the time stamps and shaking his head. “It could just be a coincidence. Stranger things have happened in this city.”

  “No,” Kera said. “If we caught all four of them passing through Grand Central Station within a few hours of each other, that would be a coincidence. But not in that part of town, not at that hour.”

  “I also found this.” Jones pulled up a new map, this one covering a small knot of red dots that hovered over a building across the street from Lincoln Center.

  “Tell me that’s a direct hit.”

  “Yes and no,” he said. He sounded excited, which was a new emotion for him, at least in Kera’s presence. “The building right here near the intersection of Broadway and Columbus is the Empire Hotel. We have confirmation that all four of our subjects were inside the hotel at least once in the months before they vanished. Probably at the rooftop bar, judging from nearly a dozen credit card transactions. The catch is the timing. I can’t put any of them there at the exact same time. Sometimes they show up within an hour or so of each other, but never overlapping.”

  “Huh,” Kera said, thinking about this. “Forget the timing for a minute. You’re saying that this is the one place in the city where all of them visited at some point in the months before they vanished?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s no other place where all four of them happened to pass through on the same day?”

  “Not even a subway platform or a Starbucks,” he said. “Not even Grand Central, for that matter.”

  Kera looked at the map while she thought about this. On the screen the red dots continued to blink.

  “OK. I’ve got my phone with me. Call if you come up with anything else.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “If they all went to that bar, they were there to see someone or something. I’m going to have a look. It’s just about happy hour.”

  She was headed uptown—provided the cab ever made it out of traffic in Times Square—when she pulled out her phone and placed a call to Parker.

  SEVEN

  Parker Cahill walked with his head down. He didn’t feel like acknowledging the city tonight. The city was bleak and immovable. It felt too often like a heavy jacket he couldn’t shrug off. He’d get a panicked, overheated claustrophobia that made him want to dive into the cold silence of a lake, lakes being something he associated with carefree childhood summers. Tonight he was an adult. There was no reason he shouldn’t be content. He’d contributed ideas that were going to be implemented half a world away, and a feeling of achievement put the pesky city at bay.
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  They’d won the Dubai job. He’d received word of it this morning, and the day had rushed by in a blur of company optimism and personal rededication to the mission. His high waned slightly with Kera’s voice mail: something had come up at work and she was calling to say that she couldn’t meet him for dinner. So he joined his colleagues on the Dubai account for happy hour on the company’s dime. When happy hour ended and his colleagues retreated to their families in the suburbs, he found himself still in the mood to celebrate.

  He set out walking. He had no particular destination in mind. He was simply in search of a setting in which he could enjoy this feeling, this sense of freedom to possess a future he desired. This was really big, he told himself, the idea still sinking in. He glimpsed the years stretching out ahead of him. No longer would his days be filled with nine hours at a tedious desk job sandwiched between two ghastly commutes. He was now a businessman, a business traveler, with responsibilities and ideas. Ideas that mattered, ideas that were shaping the world, if only in a small way. Though he’d never possessed such an ambition, he felt tonight as if he’d conquered the city. This city that so many tried to conquer. He thrilled in that irony, that in his own small way, he’d beaten what he hated most about this city: that it was a place where no one rose above it all. Here was Manhattan, that sliver of an island that corralled the toughest and brightest like cattle being led to slaughter. He thought of the city as a murky, polluted ocean that drew in big fish from thousands of small ponds and mutated them into a school of ferocious minnows. Because when you came here, you became obscure and anonymous, you ground out sixty-, seventy-, eighty-hour workweeks just to turn the corner at par, just to have your office light on when the boss left for the day, just to outpace the cost of living. Plop down any Midtown skyscraper into any other city in the country, and it’d become the architectural landmark of the region. But build it side by side with four-dozen competing towers, and none of them stand out. They block each other’s sun and step on each other’s shadows.

  It was the same way with people, and this made him worry about Kera. Already she was succumbing to the undertow of long hours and clawing ambition. She was not one of them, he knew. But she was a survivor. She would do whatever it took to succeed, and he worried that she might not notice if the summitless climb approached a point when it was no longer worth it.

  He walked on, hands thrust in his pockets, head bowed toward the sidewalk. Much of the day had consisted of reviewing contractual documents related to the Dubai project. They were all dated May 3, today’s date, and suddenly the number hit him. May 4, tomorrow, was the day they had planned to be married. Parker didn’t know why he thought of that now—he hadn’t thought about it in months, not since they’d decided to push back the wedding to August—but there it was, the date feeling somehow momentous again. Out of nowhere he faced in his mind’s eye a clear picture of how this weekend might have played out. And then what inevitably followed was the stark contrast between the two Parker-Kera timelines—the original, abandoned timeline versus the real, revised timeline—and he was overcome with anxiety.

  That would only spoil his mood, he thought, performing a mental ducking maneuver in his head. Why was it so hard to let go of everything else and celebrate for a night? He thought of calling Kera, but she had sounded distracted and busy with work, though God knew what was keeping her this late on a Friday. Wasn’t Friday the slowest day in the news cycle? He knew too little about how she actually spent her workdays to even speculate. He called his parents’ home instead. He had an unspoken obligation to his parents to go through the motions of a weekly phone call. Just the one call. No more or less seemed to be necessary.

  His father answered in a low voice. Parker had to plug his non-phone ear with a finger and raise his own voice to communicate over the taxis flowing past on Broadway. He told his father about the Dubai account, explaining how he would travel one week out of every four and that the project would really get going in the fall, and ahead of that, he’d probably spend three straight weeks over there during August. He realized that mentioning this had been a mistake only after it was too late.

  “I thought you were getting married in August,” his father said.

  “We are. We are.” His parents expected the wedding to be a huge production, but Kera had made him promise that it wouldn’t be. They had even put off plans for a honeymoon until winter, when work for both of them would slow down. “Can we not talk about that tonight?” He would be the bigger man, he decided, and rushed to wrap up the wasted conversation amicably.

  He walked sidewalks blackened by shuttered storefronts, sidewalks yellowed by dim streetlights, and sidewalks whitened by glaring billboards. He realized he’d reached Houston Street, and the sidewalk took him around the corner to a bar called L@Ho. Immediately he liked the low ceiling, the long bar, the inviting stools. It wasn’t too crowded; he hated crowded bars. Televisions lit the room with colorful flashes from a basketball game in Cleveland, baseball games in the Bronx and Milwaukee, and a soccer match from a crowded Barcelona stadium.

  He settled onto a stool. The bartender looked up, lifting his pen from the napkin he was drawing on. Parker ordered and told him to keep the tab open. “Great place,” he said, tasting the first crisp swallow of his gin and tonic. The bartender nodded, and Parker interpreted it as an invitation to talk. “I live a few blocks away. Don’t know why it took me so long to come in.” He didn’t feel lonely; he was just talkative. It seemed right that a guy could wander in off the street and find a place to sit and think and talk things over with a stranger. “I was supposed to meet my fiancée for dinner, but she has to work.”

  Parker had begun to wonder whether they should have been married immediately, the very weekend he’d proposed, as had been Kera’s instinct. She’d suggested that they drive to a beautiful place upstate, get married, make love in a bed and breakfast, and take the scenic way back in time for work Monday morning. “What are we waiting for?” she asked, as if it wasn’t obvious. They were lying on the couch in their new apartment in the city, their noses inches apart, and all he could see was her marbled black and amber eyes. Oh, God, if getting married was as simple as that.

  The soccer game on the corner TV reminded him of the Dubai project. Every player on the field was outfitted by the shoe company his firm was partnering with to create a global social campaign designed to determine communities most in need of shoes. During each day of the upcoming Dubai tournament, a cargo plane would take off from somewhere in the world, and fan posts on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook would be collated in real time to steer the branded aircraft to what was deemed the worthiest drop point. It had been his idea. Gimmicky, yes, but it’d both put shoes on feet in desperate need of them and remind oblivious sports consumers the world over that something other than the World Cup standings required their attention. The firm had let him pitch it, and the client had loved it immediately. He should feel more celebratory, he thought, though having no one to celebrate with made the work victory seem illicit. He could feel it in his lawyer-father’s cool indifference, and in his reporter-fiancée’s distracted voice mail. Good for you, Parker Cahill. You get to travel the world, but the rest of us have shit to take care of right here. Mind leaving us the fuck alone?

  He chatted with the bartender about the city’s best neighborhood bars and sports and the shit economy and why things were the way they were even though they didn’t have to be, not really. Parker found himself doing too much of the talking. When he wasn’t pulling a draft or mixing a drink, the bartender listened contentedly while he doodled on his napkin. At eleven he assured Parker that he wasn’t kicking him out, he just had to close the tab because his shift was over. “Really, stick around. You want another on me?”

  A fresh glass atop a napkin, another crisp bite of booze and carbonation at the back of his throat. Left alone with his drink, Parker faced sudden gloom. He felt exhausted, too tired to shoot the breeze with the new guy across the bar. He hadn’t eat
en. His stomach had soured to its contents—an empty slime of unabsorbed gin and syrupy sugar. He would pick up two slices of pizza on the way home, he thought, feeling sad that the evening was coming to an end like this. He gulped at his drink, in a hurry now to get out of this place, but at the same time happy to have discovered it.

  His glass left a ring of condensation on the napkin and he noticed something dark bleeding through. He peeled the napkin off the counter and held it up. The other side was covered in blue ink: stick figures, geometric designs, a crowded assortment of meaningless squiggles and symbols. He remembered the bartender scratching away at a napkin while he talked. The ink had run together as it bled through the wet fibers, and Parker had to turn the napkin 180 degrees to make out the short phrase that snaked along a white space between the figures. It was something he’d heard people say lately. It was just a saying, he thought, though something about it made him uncomfortable. Tonight it made him think, not pleasantly, of the wedding and Kera and Dubai and his father: Have you figured it out yet?

  EIGHT

  The bar at the Empire Hotel was on the roof with a view up and down the seam of Broadway. To the west, the sun set over the Metropolitan Opera House and, farther in the distance, the New Jersey horizon. At five thirty, the bar was only beginning to show signs of a busy Friday night: suits wound down with scotches and loosened ties, underdressed tourists rested their legs and crooked necks, and couples began dates that would eventually move across the street to the opera or ballet.

  Kera circled once through the bar’s seating areas, first indoor and then outdoor, looking more like a businesswoman searching for a friend than someone reconnoitering the place. Figuring that any bartender established enough to work the lucrative Friday-night shift was as likely as anyone to know the regulars, Kera returned to the main bar inside.