End of Secrets

by Ryan Quinn

  Later that afternoon Kera came back to Detective Hopper’s e-mail message, which had been neglected in the wake of the mural’s appearance and then the discovery of Charlie Canyon. She now thought it worth following up on. She called the detective on his direct line.

  “Ms. Mersal . . . Ms. Mersal . . .”

  Kera thought it was probably to her advantage that Detective Hopper didn’t immediately remember her. “You e-mailed me this morning. About the Rowena Pete case.”

  “Yes,” he said, first with minor triumph in his voice at remembering the name and then, using a much lower tone when he realized who she actually was, “Oh, yes. I’m sorry this case is turning out to be such a dud. And after starting out with so much potential for sensation. I understand you’re frustrated, but I can assure you again that I have nothing new to report.”

  “I suspected as much. I was just wondering. You wrote in your e-mail that your investigation has turned up no sign of foul play.” She expected the detective to become defensive or to at least toss in a “so far” or some such qualifier that promised future leads. But he said nothing. “How, then, would you classify the bizarre scene that was discovered in her apartment?”

  “A person is free to do whatever she wants in her own home, so long as it doesn’t break a law or harm anyone else. I’ve seen things a lot kinkier than that.”

  “So what happens now? You just stop looking for her?”

  “If she doesn’t want to be found, Ms. Mersal, I’m not going to spend taxpayers’ money dragging out a search. I have real crimes to solve.”

  Kera thanked him halfheartedly for his time and turned her attention to the surveillance photos of Charlie Canyon. In most of them, he was seen at a distance, but she could tell he had dark hair and a handsome, boyish face. He usually wore sunglasses and his blank expression gave away less than his body language, which was calm and confident, an upright posture with shoulders back and chest out slightly as he walked. The electronic dossier, which HawkEye had begun to assemble rapidly, said that Canyon had recently turned thirty.

  A few moments ago, Charlie Canyon had been an anonymous citizen, one of millions who set foot on the city’s streets every day. But a computer linked to a handful of cameras had singled him out because he had a habit of having drinks with people who later went missing. Now he was about to get the full HawkEye treatment. In Kera’s experience with surveillance—which had until this week included only foreign targets—when an individual’s identity was investigated at this level, their lives ended up irrevocably changed.

  TWELVE

  That night, when Parker asked her if she’d heard about the mural in Tribeca, Kera admitted she’d been there and had seen it in person. He looked at her in that pleading, heartbreaking way he did sometimes in moments when his understanding of her work—of her—was exposed as superficial.

  All she said was, “I was in the neighborhood for a work thing.”

  If that answer bothered him, he let it go. He was far more curious about the mural. He wanted to know how big it was and if it looked as real in person as it did in all the web photos. She said it did, realizing now that although she’d been preoccupied at the scene with a search for clues about the artist, the painting had transcended the mob and the cops and the sirens and her bizarre investigation. It had reached her; it was the kind of image that would come flashing across her mind’s eye, at times, for the rest of her life.

  “You should go see it for yourself,” she said.

  “Too late. The city’s painting over it as we speak.”

  This shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Of course they would paint over the mural. From their perspective, it was the work of a vandal who had trespassed and defaced private property, not to mention the disturbance it caused to the intersection below. But something in Kera, something beyond the instinct to preserve evidence, resented the idea that it should be painted over so hastily. “Had you seen any of the previous murals or sculptures?”

  “Not in person,” Parker said, disappointed. He had never mentioned It before, though she figured he must have been aware of the artist before she’d been. She didn’t watch TV, or read popular blogs, or listen to the newest music. She was consumed by work.

  Parker had reclined on the couch with his laptop, the dregs of a gin and tonic mingling with melting ice in a glass on the coffee table. She was on her own computer, perched on a stool at the bar that divided their kitchen from the living room. Like every other night since he’d returned from Dubai, she’d come home after nine, they ate dinner together, and then they sat and talked while browsing online. It had become a routine. A rut, maybe, was another word for it.

  She typed the URL for Gnos.is into the browser’s address bar, angling the screen self-consciously away from Parker so that he couldn’t see it. If he caught her reading Gnos.is, he’d never let her hear the end of it. The coverage of the Tribeca mural was thorough. One art critic, treating the mural as serious art, wrote that it illustrated how the basic human functions were simultaneously harmonious and hypocritical. “The artist exposes how tenuous the true relationship is between our compartmentalized, outward lives and our filthy reality, at all times only inches apart.” Other critics dismissed the mural as a depraved stunt and pleaded for the public to stop giving the artist attention.

  Like Jones’s unsuccessful search on HawkEye, Gnos.is had nothing to report on the artist’s biography. Their coverage focused on the art itself, as well as the public’s growing intrigue. With each new installation, people seemed to embrace the mystery of the unknown artist more deeply. It had become a living urban legend. Kera didn’t care for mysteries, and she didn’t believe in urban legends. She believed every case was solvable. She had to.

  Parker was already in bed when she slid between the sheets next to him. A few minutes later, he startled her when he said, “You’re thinking about your story, aren’t you?” She couldn’t tell whether he’d been awake the whole time or if she woke him when she got into bed. She nodded in the darkness, her chin brushing up and down against his shoulder. “Does it make you happy?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You seem so serious. Distracted. I worry that you’re not happy here, doing this.”

  “Of course I’m happy,” she said quickly, stroking his hair. “I’m sorry. You’ve been incredibly patient and sweet, and I’m off in another world. But yes, this is what I want to be doing. I love it.”

  Parker turned toward her. “Really?”

  “OK, most of it. Sometimes it’s frustrating. And sometimes . . .”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I just hope it matters.”

  “Matters how?”

  She exhaled. “I’m sorry, I really can’t talk about it.”

  He didn’t say anything to that. She was just glad he didn’t draw away from her.

  I hope it’s worth it, was what she was thinking. I hope that we at least do more good than harm.

  She thought about Jones’s map and the layers and layers of data that had led them to the surveillance images of Charlie Canyon. At that very moment, computers were searching for and saving information about this man, a man who would wake in a matter of hours in a world that seemed to him the same—only something would have changed. His every move would now be watched.

  Some time passed, and Kera fell back into a half-sleep world in which she was pursuing leads that darted for cover into dangerous alleys. She did not know how much time had gone by when a thought punctured her sleepless trance.

  “Parker?” she whispered. “Are you happy?”

  But Parker was asleep.

  THIRTEEN

  “I haven’t found one suspicious call or charge in any of these records.” Kera pushed away from the screens and leaned back in her chair with a cup of coffee. “If we were spying on my fiancé, he’d probably look more suspect than this. How can that be?”

  Jones, who had been immersed in his own work, swung his gaze from the screens in front
of him and aimed it directly at her, his eyes burning into her. After a moment he relaxed and dropped his gaze. “Canyon’s covering his tracks.”

  “No, wait. What was that?”

  “What?”

  “That look you gave me.”

  Jones shook his head. “Nothing. I had something else on my mind. You were saying?”

  “Canyon. He uses his cell phone regularly. He uses credit cards and e-mail. But all of it’s clean. Work stuff, mostly—correspondence with clients and photographers and directors. The rest is calls to his mother in Tucson or short text messages when meeting up with a friend or something. Even his Internet searches are clean.”

  Jones shrugged. “He’s careful.”

  “Careful? I can think of other words for it. Paranoid. Suspicious.”

  “Just because he’s conscious of his privacy doesn’t automatically implicate him in anything criminal. There could be a dozen motivations for that.”

  “I guess you would know.”

  “When did we start talking about me?” Jones said. He glared at her through the tension that had risen up between them.

  “Just now,” Kera said, returning his stare. Surely he must have expected that she would try to look into his background. It would have been negligent of her not to. She never would have brought it up, though, had her research turned up even the most basic information. Her searches into the life of J. D. Jones had been exercises in frustration. The only thing she’d gotten out of him directly was that he’d dropped out of college. She had no way of confirming that, and anyway, she doubted he was a dropout if he’d come from CIA, NSA, or some other government agency, which was another thing she’d been unable to verify. She didn’t even know if James David Jones was his real name. It didn’t sound real. In any case, the name hadn’t gotten her anywhere. The only place she hadn’t tried to search for Jones was on HawkEye. She was too afraid that such searches were recorded and that he’d be able to tell. “Charlie Canyon’s records might be spotless. But yours don’t even exist. What’s that about?”

  “Privacy. Job security. You’re not exactly an open book either. It comes with the territory.”

  She was surprised to find herself so angry that he’d also been prying into her background. Given the effort she’d put into trying to violate his privacy, resenting him for doing the same to her was irrational. The difference, she realized, the true source of her aggravation, was her suspicion that he was probably more successful at prying than she’d been. What might he have found? she wondered. Her school and CIA files had been watered down and obfuscated to serve the purposes of whatever cover she had assumed. Her mind went to her adoption file. It contained nothing compromising, but it was just . . . private. In a way, it was the one thing that was most her.

  Kera had tracked down the adoption file herself, years ago, while she was at Langley. It contained a name, ignored by her adoptive parents—her adoptive mother, an eccentric anthropology professor at the University of Washington, and adoptive father, an Egyptian immigrant who owned a news and shine shop in downtown Seattle. Kera knew only what her parents told her, and all they knew was that she had been born in a small coastal town in El Salvador. The mirror told her that one of her birth parents had likely been Salvadorian and the other likely hadn’t. The date of birth in the adoption file was believed to be approximate.

  Kera had felt no personal attachment to any of the file’s data. There was only one artifact in the file that had surprised her and that she found significant. It was a photo of her infant self, cradled by a woman whose face was unseen. Kera had taken the photo and kept it for herself, though she later wondered why. Whatever life or name the woman in that photo had given her was not the life she had gone on to live.

  Jones was still looking at her. Perhaps as a concession or an attempt to build trust, he interlocked his fingers in front of him and looked at her pleasantly. “What is it you think you need to know about me?”

  “I don’t need to know anything. I’m just curious.”

  “What are you curious about?”

  “Where were you before Hawk?” Kera asked.

  “Austin.”

  “Austin, Texas?”

  “Yes.”

  “I meant, who were you working for?”

  “Lone Star Communications.”

  “That a cover?”

  “For what?” he said, his confusion sincere.

  “Never mind. You did what for this Lone Star outfit?”

  “Installed security software.”

  “You were an installation man?” She almost laughed.

  “I didn’t excel at school. It’s amazing what talents get ignored when a person doesn’t thrive in a typical education setting.”

  “You couldn’t have been ignored completely. How did you wind up here?”

  “I was recruited. Same as you,” he said. “Same as all of us.”

  “How?”

  “They found me online.”

  “So you do have a digital footprint?”

  “In some circles, sure. I did, anyway.”

  Kera waited. When he didn’t say anything more, she said, “You from Austin originally?”

  “No. Fredericksburg.”

  “That in Texas?” He nodded. “So why Austin, then? Other than the blue-collar job.”

  “I was married.”

  “What happened?”

  “You don’t need to know that.”

  “Fair,” she said. She had picked up on the gap in his résumé—there must have been five or six years between high school in Fredericksburg and marriage in Austin—and she considered whether she should question him about it now. She decided against it; he’d given her a lot suddenly, and she didn’t want to test his patience. “Canyon, then. It’s not as if he’s just wiping his feet on the doormat to keep his online house tidy. This is like wiping away fingerprints every time he touches something. Why does a PR man like Charlie Canyon go through so much trouble to keep such a low profile?”

  “Maybe you’re asking the wrong question. Why don’t the rest of you?”

  Kera thought immediately of ONE. If Travis Bradley was right, there were math whizzes sitting at terminals across town scooping up these digital footprints and mapping them out into digital DNA that ONE intended to mine for profits.

  Sure, Jones had a point about being protective of privacy. But it didn’t necessarily explain what Charlie Canyon was up to.

  “Didn’t you build HawkEye around the idea that people are putting more and more of their personal data online?” she asked.

  “Yes, and they are. But HawkEye doesn’t get to know people. It just knows where they are. Getting to actually know Canyon is a job for a human. Like you.”

  While Kera thought about this, her eyes drifted to one of her screens, where a photo of the recent Tribeca mural was displayed.

  “I want to find It,” she said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “The artist.”

  Jones smiled. “If we learn only one thing from this case, it will be the immense value of gender pronouns to the English language.”

  “Exactly. Have you tried to run a Google search for ‘It’? We’re relying too much on computers. We need a witness. There’s got to be one out there. Probably several. I mean, we’re in the middle of a city. Have you ever been out on the streets, I don’t care what time of night, and not seen other people? I want to talk to someone who saw that mural go up.” What she really wanted was some insight into the artist’s motive. Motive is what usually busted her through dead ends in a case. What was It getting out of this? Attention? Fame? Money? It was hard to cash in on any of those anonymously.

  “If someone had seen something, we’d have heard about it,” Jones said. “It’s been days. No one’s posted a picture of the artist. No one’s tweeted about seeing the artist. No one’s come forward to the police.”

  “Forget the cops. We’re not talking about a homicide here. Maybe the menacing painter strikes again, maybe
not. Who cares? It’s a waste of their time.”

  “And it’s not a waste of ours?” Jones said, turning back to his screens.

  “You’re the one who brought It into this case to begin with.”

  “That was before I heard of Charlie Canyon. The artist is a sideshow. Maybe he—she, It, whatever—is connected to the case. Maybe not. But Canyon is our best lead.”

  Without admitting aloud that Jones was right, Kera lit up her screens to see if she’d missed anything important in the life of Charlie Canyon.

  Late that afternoon Kera left the Control Room and walked the hall to her office. Using the web browser on her tablet, she visited the website of Lone Star Communications in Austin, Texas. It was a small cybersecurity firm that had been founded in 1999 by a Silicon Valley refugee who’d returned to the Lone Star State after the dot-com bubble burst. Lone Star’s website proudly listed two-dozen local businesses that had been clients for more than ten years.

  Kera reached for her phone and dialed the number she found on their CONTACT US page.

  “Hi there.” She laid on the charm thick, but knew better than to attempt a Texan accent. “I’m calling from the law firm of Miller and Weston over on West Sixth Street,” she said, referencing the name and address of one of the more innocuous of Lone Star’s loyal clients. “I’m a new clerk here for Mr. Miller, and I’m hoping you can help me. We had our firewall upgraded a few years ago by one of your installation men, and Mr. Miller had a few follow-up questions.”

  “I can help you with that. Do you think you’ve experienced a breach?”

  “Oh, no, everything is working wonderfully. The guy you sent out here was just a really big help to Mr. Miller, and he wanted me to give you a call and see if he could chat with the man about a few tips he’d mentioned. I know it’s been two years, so I understand if—”