by Ryan Quinn
“You must be referring to J. D.,” the woman said.
“Is he available?”
“I’m afraid he quit two years ago. We had people calling and asking about him for months after he left. But you’re the first to call in a while. Can we send someone else over to help Mr. Miller?”
“No, no. It’s OK. I wonder, though. You don’t have any contact information for J. D., do you?”
The woman first thought that she did, but after she went to look it up, she came back on the line to say that he had not, in fact, left any contact information. “You might try looking him up. His last name was Jones.”
Kera thanked her and then sat, looking out the window and thinking. The phone conversation with the woman had confirmed that Jones had worked at Lone Star Communications and that he’d used the same name then as he was using now. But that didn’t give her anything new to go by. What she needed was some record of Jones, or whatever his real name was, that had been created before he became interested in wiping away his past—and that he could not have eliminated since.
She turned back to her tablet and searched for high schools in Fredericksburg, Texas. Mercifully, there was only one. She thought about using HawkEye to search the school’s records for a J. D. Jones, but decided against it. It was too risky, and she doubted that that had been his name as far back as high school. She checked the clock and subtracted for the time difference. It was just after two PM in Texas; the school would still be open. She dialed the number and queued up her charm.
“Can you tell me which faculty member oversees the yearbook committee?” she asked the secretary, who proved to be very helpful.
That night—in fact, early the next morning—Kera stood on a sidewalk beneath a street lamp squinting into the shadows. Beyond the curtain of light was only darkness, and nothing of that darkness distinguished itself from the rest. She moved several paces in each direction and looked again, scrutinizing the shadows for details that did not materialize. It was four AM on a Wednesday, two weeks to the day that the mural had appeared.
She retraced her steps to the intersection and turned left on the cross street. There, adjacent to the parking lot, she found a short length of sidewalk, maybe ten yards that fell in the gap between lampposts, from which she could make out the broad, colorless mass of the building. She spun around to scan the structure across the street; it was half car garage, half warehouse. All the windows were dark.
At four thirty she went around the corner to the Village Tavern and spoke to the bartenders winding down from the Tuesday-night shift. They all knew about the mural, and two of them figured they must have walked right beneath it, oblivious, after closing down. A few others had seen it Wednesday afternoon when they came back into work. But nobody had noticed anything suspicious early Wednesday morning.
At five thirty she was back on the street and approached a vendor setting up his cart for breakfast. Kera bought a coffee from the man and asked if he’d been here at the same time two weeks earlier.
“Sure. Made a killing that morning. I ran out of doughnuts and muffins by nine. Never seen anything like it. And then they paint over it same day and no more crowds.”
“When did you first notice the mural?”
“I don’t know. It was just getting light, like now. I went to the corner to buy a paper, and I saw it on the way back. The lights,” he pointed up at the streetlight. “They clicked off and then I notice. The whole building—alive like an explosion!”
“Did you see the painter?”
He gave her a look. “No, no. The whole wall painted. No people.”
“You don’t remember anyone suspicious coming or going that morning?”
He shook his head. “I notice nothing until the lights go off. And then the crowds start coming.”
Sipping her coffee, Kera walked across the street to get a closer look at the lower reaches of the building. The streetlights clicked off, and she made a note of the time—5:49 AM. She wondered what the building’s owner planned to do with this wall. There was enough light now to see what had become of it. The city’s whitewashing job had turned it into an ugly rectangle of uneven white paint framed by dirty bricks. She wondered whether they would repaint it to match the street-facing facade. It was probably only a matter of days before they got an offer they couldn’t refuse from an advertiser looking to cash in on the site’s new allure. She saw the irony in this, thick as the white paint that had started to reflect the first light seeping out of the navy sky. The city would tolerate an ugly white wall, and it would tolerate a wall dressed with brand names worn by airbrushed models. But the mayor himself had mobilized a crew to paint over the artist’s mural.
Kera had turned for the subway to head to work, her head down, thinking, when she noticed the writing on the lip of the sidewalk. The phrase ran parallel to a crack in the concrete, the last three words rolling over the curb and into the gutter.
Have you figured it out yet?
FOURTEEN
A long, sleek table ran like a spine through the center of the secure conference room. The two interior walls dividing the room from neighboring offices were made of opaque frosted glass. The outfacing walls, which formed one corner of the building’s twenty-seventh floor, were made of pristine sheets of one-way glass that came to a point like the bow of a ship sailing into the heart of Times Square. The view out the conference room windows was almost entirely of enormous, flashing advertisements. Inside, a half-dozen flat screens were mounted on slender posts around the perimeter of the room. In addition, a screen folded up out of the tabletop.
The director and CEO of Hawk sat at the head of the table, his back to the view. Dick Branagh had been a three-star army general with a reputation for operating so discreetly and efficiently that the only time anyone thought of him was each time the latest of his swift promotions was announced. Today, he was jacketless and tieless, his collar open at the neck. His hair was receding and going a little gray and thin, but he was handsome for sixty, despite the fact that he never appeared to be having a good time. At this moment, his expression fell on the displeased side of blank. Kera and Jones had taken up straight-backed positions to the director’s right; Gabby sat across from them and to Branagh’s left.
Behind the director, in the distance across Times Square, the population clock on the ONE billboard read 7,374,169,448.
Then 7,374,169,449.
Then 7,374,169,450.
“We’ve identified a person of interest,” Gabby said. “We believe this man, Charlie Canyon, seen here on street surveillance cameras, met with each of the missing subjects in the months leading up to their disappearances. Our lead agent on the case is Kera Mersal. She can summarize what we’ve learned since we started tracking him last week.”
Kera lifted her shoulders an inch higher and swiped her tablet to life. When Director Branagh looked at her, she nodded, trying to appear more confident than she felt. With all Hawk did in the service of homeland security, it was hard to imagine Branagh’s interest in this case. She certainly had not expected her first meeting with him to be about a handful of artists who had gone missing on American soil. To steady her anxiety, she reminded herself to just focus on what she had prepared. For the past five days, she had lived not her own life but Canyon’s, observing him in real time as he moved about the city. She had examined his routines, his purchases, the company he kept, the moments when he thought he was alone and unwatched.
“The subject is extremely private. He has no presence on any social networking sites, and his name returns no major search-engine results other than his employer’s directory. He keeps to himself and rarely indulges in nightlife. The exceptions to this are semifrequent appearances at the Empire Hotel’s rooftop bar, where we believe he rendezvoused with our missing subjects. Otherwise, Mr. Canyon spends as many as twelve hours a day at the offices of AM + Toppe, a powerful PR agency, where he appears to be something of a prodigy. His job description is a little vague, but the best I can gather,
he consults brand campaigns in the entertainment, tech, and fashion industries.” She set down the tablet. “What we don’t know is why he appears to be the only person to have met with our four subjects. We could speculate—”
“Let’s not,” the director said. Kera was taken aback by the softness of his voice. She’d expected it to have a gruffer quality. She understood now, though, that he was a man who rarely needed to raise his voice. She’d yielded to him immediately. “Go back to the missing people for a second. What are your working theories there?”
Kera and Jones exchanged an uncertain glance. “There are none that we’re comfortable with, sir.”
“But they’re alive?”
“It’s possible, yes. If that’s the case, they’re living entirely off the grid.”
“Are they fanatical?” the director asked. “What were they doing before they vanished?”
“They’re not religious, if that’s what you mean. In fact, I couldn’t find an example of religious expression among any of them. They’re creative types—” Kera started to say, realizing that a meeting with the director was not the place to try to articulate something for the first time. She had, in fact, noticed a similar quality in all of the missing people, the lawyer included—not in their title or day job, but in the dedicated way they pursued the work of their choosing. “They’re passionate, I guess you could say.”
“Extremist is another word for it,” Gabby said. “Passionate people have hobbies. These people have either killed themselves or they’ve abandoned their lives and gone into hiding. That’s something entirely different.”
“We don’t know what they’ve done,” Kera pointed out.
“What do you know?” Director Branagh shot back.
“Well, three of the subjects were connected to the ONE Corporation,” Kera said. She saw Gabby and the director exchange a glance, but she couldn’t interpret it. “Rowena Pete was signed to ONE Music. Cole Emerson, the filmmaker, had his last documentary distributed by a ONE subsidiary. And the novelist, Craig Shea, was published by ONE Books. The lawyer has no connection to ONE, as far as I know.”
“What about Canyon? Is he connected to ONE?”
“Not in any way I know of, sir.”
“You said Canyon met with the subjects before they vanished, but you have not said that he is responsible in some way for their going missing.”
“It would be speculation—” Kera started, but then stopped herself. He wanted proof, and she knew they didn’t have it. “We believe, sir,” Kera said, feigning confidence, “that those meetings are related to the disappearances.”
“And you’ve deduced that from these images?” the director said, gesturing at the flat screen.
Kera felt her face flush. “That’s right.”
“Because all I see is a guy going to get a drink after work.” The director’s graying eyebrows underlined his forehead, that great canvas of expression, expansive now in middle age and wrinkled most deeply in the areas that illustrated displeasure. He leaned forward as if he’d heard enough, and pressed both of his palms flat on the table. “I don’t care about these artists. And I don’t care whether you care about them either. But one thing we should all care about more than anything else is our reputation. We cannot afford to look incompetent because we’re unable to locate not a solo terrorist hiding in a hole in Yemen—which, by the way, we’re pretty good at doing—but four human beings who were essentially our neighbors. What happened to them? The answer cannot possibly be this difficult to figure out.”
Kera withered. Humiliation burned her cheeks. She felt as if she’d been jerked out of orbit and now faced the scalding friction of reentry. She was angry for letting herself walk into this meeting with so little to show for her work. She might have said, “Yes, sir,” or at least nodded, but in any event, the director stood up to leave, and then Gabby followed him out the door.
When they were gone, Jones let out his lungs next to her.
Kera looked out the window. The population clock ticked over to 7,374,171,852. She didn’t know why the numbers made her uneasy; it was just a stupid advertising gimmick. She looked away, thinking. There was something else that made her uneasy too. She had an urge, one she wasn’t proud of, to be back in front of the surveillance monitors in the Control Room. She wanted to know what Charlie Canyon was doing. Being away from him was like leaving the room for too long during a television commercial break; she felt anxiety for some unknown, breaking development she might be missing.
It was 11:18 AM. Canyon typically took lunch well after noon, usually takeout that he brought back to the office. But he often came down to the street about this time late in the morning for a second cup of coffee.
“I don’t think we should assume that Rowena Pete was the last,” Kera said.
“The last?”
“The last person to go missing. What if there are going to be more?”
Jones looked at her. “Why do you sound hopeful?”
“Because it could help us. If we can figure out who’s next, it might lead us to the others.”
Jones leaned back in his chair and rubbed his temples as if this, finally, was the thing about this case that he couldn’t wrap his head around. “It’s one thing to look for missing people. It’s something entirely different to look for missing people who aren’t even missing yet.”
“True. But now we know at least one place these people might go before they disappear.”
He nodded, though not optimistically.
“I know, it’s a needle in a pile of needles, coming at it like this. But we can do it the old-fashioned way.”
First, he gave her a look that said, What are you talking about? Then his face went blank, and she recognized the moment when her idea caught traction.
“I want to talk to him,” she said.
“You want to approach Charlie Canyon with this list of names and ask him where they all went?”
“Not exactly. Look at this.” She picked up her tablet. “Judging from Charlie Canyon’s credit card statements, he goes to that bar most Fridays after work, right? This time, I want to be there. And I want to get close enough to see and hear what the surveillance cameras can’t.” She was on her feet suddenly, her tablet and phone tucked between her hand and her hip. “Just like you said, the computers can’t tell us everything we need to know. I want to get in there close.”
“You want to go tonight?” he said, but before he’d finished she was already in the hallway. “Wait. Kera?”
She didn’t stop, only looked back over her shoulder to say, “I don’t know about you, but by the time we meet with Branagh next, I intend to have something to tell him.”
He watched her walk away until she’d made the turn at the end of the hallway and was out of sight.
FIFTEEN
Across the street from the entrance to the Empire Hotel, a small park sprung up between the colliding six-lane slabs of Broadway and Columbus like a blade of grass that had slithered through a crack in the sidewalk. Kera sat on a park bench and watched limousines and taxis glide up to the curb in front of the hotel. Across Columbus, the fountain in Lincoln Center Plaza danced, backlit by the giant chandeliers of the opera house.
She felt completely in the dark without HawkEye. Every fifteen minutes Jones sent her a text to say that Charlie Canyon was still at work. An hour passed. She stood up and walked the short perimeter of the park and then sat back down. Another half hour passed. When her phone buzzed to life, she sat up, alert.
“He just left the office,” Jones said. “He’s on foot, headed north on Broadway. That should give you about seven minutes.”
Two minutes later Kera stepped off the elevator and onto the top floor of the Empire Hotel. By now it was after ten, and the crowd leaning into the bar was two deep. There were three bartenders. One of them was Erica. “Chardonnay?” Erica asked, remembering. Kera took the glass of wine and sat on a bench of low cushions that wrapped around a cocktail table. From there she had a vi
ew of both the door and the bar.
Charlie Canyon entered alone. He was shorter than she’d imagined, but he had a commanding presence, in subtler ways, to make up for it. He wore a black shirt, dark jeans, and a black leather jacket. When he crossed the room he moved confidently, his shoulders square, his eyes steady. Kera looked down. She texted Jones to say she had established visual contact.
Canyon made his way to the far end of the bar. As he did, Kera shifted her gaze back to Erica in time to see the moment when she spotted him. Dispatching the customer at hand, Erica approached Canyon with a smile and made him a drink he had not ordered. After a short exchange, she returned to her other thirsty, paying customers. Charlie Canyon did not appear to be self-conscious about standing alone in a bar on a Friday night, and this gave Kera hope that he was waiting for someone. She kept an eye on him and on the door, all the while pretending to be busy on her phone, which she hoped would lessen the chance that she’d be approached by some tipsy banker or lawyer. She loaded the Gnos.is home page and scrolled through the top stories. The Tribeca mural was still trending, although now vivid images of the mural were displayed side by side with photos of the whitewashed wall.
At ten thirty a new bartender relieved Erica, who disappeared for fifteen minutes. When she reemerged, her maroon shirt and bartender’s vest had been traded in for a skirt and knee-high boots. She joined Canyon in the corner at the end of the bar. Kera watched them closely. They spoke; Erica laughed a few times. Canyon checked his watch. Their alliance appeared friendly but unromantic. They did not interact with anyone around them, nor did they seem to be waiting for anyone else. Kera thought about trying to move in closer to hear what they were saying, weighing that opportunity against the risk that Erica might notice her loitering nearby.
She never got the chance. As soon as she’d made up her mind to move in, Charlie Canyon looked directly at her. The eye contact lasted only an instant, far shorter than many of the random, curious glances that pass between men and women at a bar like this on a Friday night. But Kera, who felt the fine hairs lift between her shoulder blades and on her neck, was certain it had been deliberate. Erica was standing with her back to Kera in such a way that Canyon’s face was visible just over her right shoulder. Erica had said something to him, then Canyon’s eyes shifted suddenly, met Kera’s, and then swept away. A few moments later, the two of them made a move for the door, Canyon guiding Erica through the crowd with a firm hand on her lower back. Neither of them glanced once in Kera’s direction.