End of Secrets

by Ryan Quinn

  “I suggest you stick to reporting and drop the speculation.”

  “I’m hearing that a lot lately. Excuse me a minute, I need to use the ladies’ room.”

  She left him staring down at the shrunken ice cubes in his glass. But she made it only a few steps before he called after her. “Who do you work for?”

  She turned. “The Global Report. We’re a digital news organization that curates an—”

  “Curates an insightful blend of the world’s best original and aggregated news stories,” he said. Then he shrugged. “I’ve heard of it.”

  She nodded. “I’m flattered.”

  She went in search of the ladies’ room and found instead that there was one cramped, unisex restroom fitted with a urinal and two narrow stalls. She let herself into the farthest stall and pulled out her phone to text Jones. The strength-of-signal icon indicated that the phone had no service. That was a first. No device issued to her by Hawk had ever failed to achieve an uninterrupted signal, including while in the subway tunnels, which crawled much deeper beneath the city than this basement. She slid her tablet from her shoulder bag and sat down on the closed lid of the toilet. No cellular or Wi-Fi signal on the tablet either. There wasn’t time to fiddle with the devices. Instead, she took a few minutes to enter her notes about what she’d just witnessed in as much detail as she could remember. She noted the approximate ages of people in the room (early twenties to late thirties), what they were wearing (casual, trendy), the ratio of male to female (close to even), and recorded the names of the people she’d identified (Canyon, Erica, Bolívar, Natalie Smith, Marybelle Pickett). Then she typed Canyon’s name at the top of a new note and, using shorthand, recorded everything she could think of from their conversation.

  She was in the stall six, maybe seven minutes. She stretched her cramped fingers and considered what to do next. It was well after midnight, she’d been out of communication with Jones for more than an hour, and her objective for being here in the first place was at best vague. But she felt sharp and wide-awake. She could feel each moment come into focus and then fly past, as if she were leaving them behind and not the other way around.

  She noticed the wall markings on the stall as she was putting away her tablet. Let’s smoke drugs. Call me 917-214-7512. Janey is a bitch. I let him rape me. Have you figured it out yet? A few heartbeats ticked off while she stared at the last etching. The words, scratched into the paint, curved around the circular knob that worked the lock on the stall door. She reached for her phone and clicked a photo.

  When she emerged from the restroom, Canyon was talking to someone near the bar.

  “Will you introduce me to the artist?” Kera said, interrupting.

  Canyon excused himself and scanned the crowd. His eyes popped a little in his head when he spotted Marybelle Pickett, who was across the room, just visible through a break in the crowd. He said, “Oh, shit.”

  “What?” Kera said.

  The artist was on her toes, whispering something into Rafael Bolívar’s ear. Bolívar was hunched over, listening. But he was staring directly at them. Or, rather, at Canyon.

  “What is it?”

  Canyon didn’t respond, he just returned Bolívar’s stare. Bolívar glanced at one of the paintings on the wall, and then he swung his gaze back, locking it again on Canyon. Suddenly, he was coming toward them, maneuvering his way through the crowd with a dark smile that made Kera’s skin crawl.

  Bolívar stopped in front of them. He nodded to acknowledge Kera’s presence, but only barely. His interest was in Canyon. “Can we talk?” he said, and turned for the exit without waiting for Canyon to respond. Canyon disappeared after him.

  Kera allowed a few seconds to slip away. She might have taken a longer moment to weigh what to do next—interview the artist? Keep an eye on Erica?—but she already knew. She had to follow them. As she struggled to squeeze through the bodies, she caught a glimpse of Bolívar’s beanie just before he and Canyon disappeared through the doorway. She reached the top of the stairs and stopped, her head cocked as she listened. Nothing. Just the din from the party downstairs, underscored by the soft punches of the bass line. Out of the basement, the comparative silence made her alert. With her eyes still adjusting to the darkness, she felt her way around the decommissioned taxis and pushed through the aluminum door.

  The West Side Highway hummed a half block away. The bike was still locked to the fence at the building’s corner. The pale fluorescent light buzzed overhead.

  But the street was empty in either direction.

  She walked a block before she pulled out her phone and checked for a signal. The bars indicated full strength. She rang Jones to say she was safe and sound but couldn’t talk. He was irritated with her. “Did you see my texts? You could have at least checked in to let me know you were OK.” She couldn’t talk, she told him again. The streets were too quiet. Someone might overhear their conversation if she tried to explain everything now. She told him that she’d fill him in tomorrow.

  Parker answered almost immediately when she called him. She said she was on her way home. He didn’t ask from what. The quiet blocks creeped her out, and she stayed on the line—without telling him why—until she’d walked several blocks east and was climbing safely into a cab.

  At home, after saying good night to Parker, she Googled Rafael Bolívar.

  J. D. Jones was furious with Kera. She’d fill him in tomorrow? What she should have done was come in right away, tonight, and explain to him what had happened. Then they could file the case notes together. What she should have done was not go into that building in the first place.

  After a few minutes fuming by himself in the Control Room, though, Jones realized that none of that was why he was angry with Kera. In fact, he was angrier with himself. The feeling had snuck up on him suddenly while he waited to get word from her after she’d disappeared into the building and slipped out of contact. The minutes had passed. Then an hour. And all he could do was sit there in front of his screens, worrying. The problem was what he was worrying about. He should have been worrying about whether her cover had been blown, or whether the information she brought out of that building could be trusted, or whether she could still be trusted after pulling such a hasty move. But as each minute went by, he worried only about her.

  Instead of logging out and going home, he sat at his workstation and thought about how dangerous this feeling was. He was too self-aware not to contemplate it, but contemplating it seemed to lend it credibility. And that threatened to spoil the cut-and-dry professionalism he brought to his work.

  He thought briefly of Annie, his ex-wife. It seemed to be the only reference point. He had loved her, whatever that word had meant to him then. But in the three years that spanned from date number one to divorce, he was never sure that he’d truly understood her. He knew for certain that he had never let her understand him. In a marriage emotional delinquency like that signaled a character flaw. That’s how it must have looked to everyone else, anyway. He was just a computer nerd whose paycheck came from installing software that he would have been able to crack in under a minute. When he wasn’t at work, he spent hours at his home computer. That had been where he was most productive. But no one, including his wife, ever cared about that. Not once, as he’d struggled through high school and menial computer jobs, had a teacher or colleague ever suggested that there were important, meaningful careers for someone with his talents.

  At his job now, the ability to isolate himself and avoid close personal connections almost seemed noble. It was a sacrifice he made in order to serve his country. And that had been why he’d taken this job, hadn’t it? To sacrifice and to serve. To do something that would have made his brother proud. The job with Hawk was, for the first time in his life, something that Jones recognized as having real meaning. It had been both a higher calling and a refuge. And it kept his personal life simple.

  Until Kera Mersal had walked into the Control Room.

  Watching her now, Jones
noticed that Kera had called her fiancé immediately after she’d gotten off the phone with him. Jones stayed at his workstation until he saw on HawkEye that Kera was safely home. Then he left, hating himself for wondering whether Kera and Parker’s relationship would prove to be as impossible as his own marriage had been.

  SIXTEEN

  “Where have you been?” Gabby wanted to know the next morning when Kera appeared in the conference room thirty minutes late. Jones, who was slumped in a chair across from her, looked up when Kera entered. As usual, his eyes did all of the talking; he’d been worried about her. Once he saw that she was OK, he looked away in anger.

  “At an auto body shop on the West Side Highway,” Kera said.

  “You drive a car in the city?” Gabby said.

  “No. It was—I was there last night. I wanted to go back and check it out.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t know what to make of it. Today it’s—it’s like it’s just an auto body shop. The basement is full of tires and car parts.”

  Gabby gave her an odd look, and Kera realized that what she’d said wasn’t as strange as her tone implied.

  “Last night everything was different,” Kera said softly. “It was completely transformed.”

  “I see,” Gabby said, though it did not sound like she did. She looked down at the screen of her tablet. “I saw your report here, and I have to say it doesn’t make much sense to me. You were at this auto body shop . . . for an art show?”

  The three of them were seated around one end of the long table. Gabby was at the head seat, between Kera and Jones. A pop-up flat screen at the center of the table displayed its default image, the Global Report’s home page. Kera kept staring at the small type under the masthead.

  THE GLOBAL REPORT

  THE DIGITAL NEWS ORGANIZATION THAT CURATES AN INSIGHTFUL BLEND OF THE WORLD’S BEST ORIGINAL AND AGGREGATED NEWS STORIES.

  “I’m sorry. What?” Kera said.

  “It was an art show? This thing last night?”

  Kera nodded. Gabby clearly had not read her report.

  “What exactly were you doing there?”

  “I was following Charlie Canyon and Erica Foster, a bartender who works at the Empire Hotel.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Gabby said. Jones said nothing. “You followed them in?”

  Kera nodded. “I made a judgment call.”

  “You made the wrong call. Where were you during all this?” she said to Jones.

  “The Control Room.”

  “Where you both should have been. Did you advise her to go into that building?”

  Kera didn’t look at Jones. She didn’t want to see him cover for her—or betray her. “No. I told her to get out of there.”

  Gabby turned back to Kera. “And you didn’t listen, placing yourself in danger and the investigation at risk. I specifically said no tails. Digital surveillance only.”

  “There’s a blind spot,” Kera said.

  “A what?”

  “There are about twelve blocks on the west side where we don’t have video surveillance,” Jones said.

  “A blind spot,” Gabby muttered, as though frustrated that this couldn’t be blamed on Jones and Kera.

  The mention of the blind spot reminded Kera of how she couldn’t get a signal on her smartphone or tablet while she’d been in the basement during the party. This morning, though, when she went back and was given a brief tour by the confused manager, the signal had been strong. She knew this because she’d snapped a few photos and they’d uploaded immediately to HawkEye over the network.

  “There was no way to see what they were doing in there without following them,” Kera said.

  “Who’s ‘they’? Who was at this gathering?” Gabby said to Kera, who was distracted. “Kera?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How big was this party?”

  Kera shrugged. “Fifty people, maybe more.”

  “Let me guess. None of our missing subjects were there?”

  Kera shook her head. “No. But there were a few interesting sightings. Rafael Bolívar, the media mogul and tabloid sensation—”

  “Hold on. Rafael Bolívar was there? At this basement party?”

  Kera looked up. That this, of all things, should capture Gabby’s attention was peculiar. She nodded. “He was. So was Natalie Smith.”

  “Who is she?”

  “A filmmaker. That’s an ad right there for her new documentary.” Kera pointed out the window at the giant America billboard across Times Square. She added, almost to herself, “Canyon said the studio is planning to drop the film. I think I left that out of my report.”

  “Wait, you spoke to him?”

  “He spoke to me.”

  “How do you explain your decision to fraternize with a person of interest in a classified case?”

  “I told you. I made a judgment call. It was an opportunity to see what our surveillance network can’t.”

  “Maybe on your second date, he’ll tell you where all the bodies are. You’re bordering dangerously on operational malpractice. Both of you. I want another briefing tomorrow morning. You have twenty-four hours to learn something that impresses me about this case.”

  Gabby pushed back to stand, plucked her tablet from the table, and set off toward the hallway. Her movements were a little too exaggerated, Kera thought, almost as if she were enjoying this.

  “Did you know that ONE hired seven people from the NSA this week?” Kera said to her, still looking out the window. She heard Gabby stop in the threshold. In her periphery, Kera saw Jones lift his eyebrows.

  Since she’d been called to Rowena Pete’s town house, promoted to agent, and then assigned to the ATLANTIS case, Kera had nearly forgotten about ONE and the twelve Wall Street quants they’d hired. But her computer hadn’t. In preparation for the meeting with Travis Bradley, she’d programmed the computer to run an automatic, daily analysis of news stories and other indicators linked to ONE, looking for patterns or new behavior. It was an entirely routine practice. The new alert had hit her in-box overnight. Two NSA data analysts and five cybersecurity experts had jumped ship to ONE. “That whistle-blower you sent me to meet with last month was right. It looks like the ONE case is heating up.”

  “There is no ONE case,” Gabby said, glaring at her. “And until you locate these people, you don’t have the luxury of thinking about anything else—not ONE, not what you want for lunch, not whether you need to go to the ladies’ room, nothing.”

  Kera acknowledged this with a nod, but she didn’t turn to look at Gabby. A few seconds later, she heard the deputy director’s heels clapping down the hallway away from them.

  “Are you all right?” Jones asked.

  “Yeah,” she said softly. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”

  “What was that thing about ONE?”

  “Just something she had me look into before all this. I thought it was nothing. Now I’m not so sure.” Kera exhaled heavily, feeling suddenly exhausted. “What?” For a moment, Jones looked as though he’d been about to say something, but then he glanced at the open door and seemed to think better of it.

  “See you back in the Control Room?” he said.

  Kera nodded. She’d spent most of the last twenty-four hours either in the Control Room or out tailing Charlie Canyon. She hadn’t been in her office since before lunch the previous day. She went there now and stood at her desk, studying the four note cards on the wall, each displaying the name, age, occupation, and alleged fate of the missing people. Meeting Canyon had not helped in the way she thought it might. He was different from what she’d expected. And now the case felt even murkier to her than it had before. She couldn’t tell if she was overthinking it or not using her imagination enough. If she were back at the agency, she’d go to Lionel, and he’d help her talk it through. But here, she was on her own. Gabby was no mentor; the only communication Gabby had with her was to give her deadlines.

  Kera switched on her laptop. The photo she’d take
n in the bathroom stall at the party had synched up with the others. She looked at the photos, four of them now, like echoes of each other across the city: Have you figured it out yet? She tapped the screen and the photos disappeared. They were a distraction. This case was booby-trapped with distractions—the basement party, the artist known as It, maybe even Canyon. She made herself read each note card again, straining to see a pattern she hadn’t noticed before.

  When she was done, she sat at her desk and looked out the window. It was that brief time of day when the midday sun was high and bright enough to diminish the flashy advertisements that walled Times Square. It was only a matter of time, she thought, before advertisers found a way to block out the sun and give their brand-buzzing wattage a round-the-clock advantage. She panned across the commercial thicket and then up to its apex, finding the ONE billboard. The population clock was difficult to read under the sun’s glare, but she could see the digits clearly enough to understand that the number was getting larger and larger. More potential consumers coming into the world every second.

  Lowering her gaze, Kera’s eyes settled on the America billboard and she thought of Canyon’s comment about the film—that the studio would pull it from theaters. It had struck her then as an odd comment for him to make to her, and she hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that he’d been trying to tell her something. Or maybe she was reading too much into nothing, and this was just another distraction. The America billboard was still prominently displayed over Times Square. Clearly, the studio was charging full speed toward the film’s release.

  The studio. Even as she spun toward her computer to check, she knew that the studio distributing America would be owned by ONE. The search engine confirmed this for her a few seconds later. But so what? ONE owned at least a third of all major films. It wasn’t even a coincidence. It meant nothing.