End of Secrets

by Ryan Quinn

  Parker nodded.

  The next door they went through opened into a small glass-enclosed control room that overlooked a massive chamber full of long rows of what looked like futuristic refrigerators, each with a few blinking lights on its outward-facing panel. A dozen technicians looked up from their consoles in the cramped room. “Everyone, this is Parker. He’s working Information with me. Anything he needs help with is top priority.”

  Parker waved lamely and was greeted by friendly nods from the men and women looking back at him. Lawson guided him to the glass where they had the best view of the chamber.

  “Those are all servers?” Parker asked.

  “Yes. But this is only the local relaying station. These servers encrypt requests sent out to the bunker and then accept and distribute all the data that comes back.”

  “The bunker?”

  “Yes. The bunker is about ten times this size, or so I’m told. It’s where the real computing happens. Only a handful of people have seen it or even know where it is. I’m not one of them.” Lawson walked Parker through the control room, explaining how the technicians monitored cybersecurity, bandwidth, temperatures, electricity usage, and a host of other variables. “As I was saying upstairs,” Lawson said when they were walking back to the elevator. “Your role will be to help develop new social networking platforms that will engage more intimately with consumers’ moment-to-moment lives. This will allow us to collect necessary data and merge it with the bunker’s existing stores.”

  “What do you mean by ‘necessary data’?” The onslaught of ambiguous jargon, the internal security clearances, the revelation that he actually had two jobs here—it all sent Parker’s head spinning.

  “Oh, that’s just the way Keith Grassley, our CEO, refers to all data. It’s all necessary. Transparency won’t fully pay off for everyone until it’s universal,” Lawson continued. Parker couldn’t pinpoint what about Lawson’s smooth advocacy of the company made him uneasy, but the feeling poked at the back of his mind, even as he nodded agreeably at Lawson’s words.

  Lawson stopped at the end of the hallway before exiting through the lobby doors. “Think of it as the Big Bang, but in reverse. The data we are interested in is like all the matter in the universe, which is expanding. We want to know what is contained in all that matter. The bunker, then, when it’s complete, will be like the whole of the universe at the moment just after the Bang. It will contain a complete copy of all the information that has ever existed, even information that was not represented as data until people like you and me found a way to turn it into digital bits that can be meaningfully calculated. As Grassley likes to say, that bunker contains the end of secrets.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Lieutenant Commander William Farris of the US Coast Guard Rescue Command Center returned Kera’s call late in the morning, just before she was about to walk into a meeting with Gabby and Director Branagh—a meeting she wasn’t entirely confident her career would survive. They had long since run out of promising leads and were now struggling to imagine even the most out-of-the-box possibilities.

  Over the past few weeks since the Background Noise Pollution plane crash, Kera had put in dozens of calls to the Coast Guard, NTSB, and FAA, none of which had advanced their understanding of why the plane had gone down or whether they should expect any bodies to be recovered. Now, over the phone, she explained to yet another Coast Guard man that she was a journalist researching a story on the aviation tragedy. He sounded surprised that she’d obtained his direct number and tried politely to transfer her to a spokesperson, but Kera somehow kept him on the line, assuring him that her questions would only take a moment.

  “Am I right that the search-and-rescue effort has been called off?”

  “That’s correct. I don’t know how to put it tastefully, ma’am, but after a week in those waters, there’s very little to recover.”

  “And no serious injury or loss of life to your crew, I hope?”

  “No, ma’am. We’re used to doing SAR missions in some pretty hairy weather. This was all sunshine and calm seas.”

  “Do you know if there were any boats in the area when the plane went down? Are records kept for something like that?”

  “As I said before, I don’t have any information that hasn’t already been released to the press. I’m happy to transfer you—”

  “I understand. Maybe, if I could, just one more question. Do you think you could estimate for me the cost of the Coast Guard’s search-and-rescue mission?”

  “It was eighty-seven thousand dollars.”

  Kera nearly laughed. “You just happen to have that figure at hand?”

  “Only because you’re the second person to call about it, and then just the other day, we—” The man cut himself off.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that,” Kera said. Across her workstation she could see that Jones had shut down his screens. He looked over at her as he rose, indicating that it was time to go. She held up a finger in Jones’s direction. “Just the other day you what?”

  “Well, it’s not classified information. A pretty remarkable thing. Two days ago the United States Coast Guard Rescue Command Center received an anonymous cash donation of eighty-seven thousand dollars.”

  Kera sat up. “Lieutenant Commander Farris, this is very important. You said you received another call about the expenses? Do you know who that call came from? Do you have a name or a number?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t, ma’am. Didn’t think anything of it at the time. And then, I’ll be damned, that pile of cash turned up.”

  She thanked him quickly and hung up. Then she ran down the hall to the conference room.

  Director Branagh and Gabby did not look up immediately when she entered. Jones had found a way to stall for her by walking them through some data on his tablet. Kera took her seat and listened quietly as they finished. They were talking about Gnos.is.

  “We need to discuss ATLANTIS,” the director said, reclaiming the agenda after he’d heard enough from Jones. His tone did not leave room for hope that this would be a pleasant meeting. “I’m going to be as blunt as I possibly can. This case came to us as a minor priority, a bullshit little side gig to bolster our reputation and take in a few extra bucks. I expected to have this thing sewn up and forgotten by now. And yet, somehow, we have half a dozen more disappearances linked to this case than when we started—and not a single fucking corpse or a hint of an explanation.”

  Kera opened her mouth but was silenced immediately by a look of warning from Gabby and by the director, who raised a scolding finger.

  “No. I don’t want any more excuses. Gabby put you two up for this, and you fucked up. The way you’ve managed this case makes you look incompetent, and that reflects poorly on Gabby. And what reflects poorly on Gabby reflects poorly on me. Listen to me very carefully. None of us can afford to look incompetent. Not right now. Not ever. All of our futures here are at stake. Nod if you understand me.”

  Jones nodded. Kera did not. Everyone looked at her.

  “If I may, sir. There might be a new development,” she said.

  “A development?” Gabby was furious. Kera could feel Jones looking at her.

  “Well, I have a theory.”

  Gabby started to protest, but the director stopped her. “Go ahead,” he said, as Kera had hoped he would. He’d said it himself—the outcome of this case reflected on him. He was as desperate to solve it as anyone. But he wouldn’t pretend to be patient.

  “I believe that the circumstances of the disappearances suggest that all ten of the missing people are alive and well.” Kera took a few minutes to outline the brief law career of Caroline Mullen, the twenty-nine-year-old woman who had abandoned her bicycle on the George Washington Bridge and supposedly leapt off. It had been Caroline Mullen’s career track—as an associate attorney, not an artist or writer—that had set her apart from the other missing. And that had led Kera, early in the investigation, to the offices of Milton & Booth to talk to Raymond B
ooth, the estate attorney who spoke so highly of Caroline Mullen’s skill and passion. Booth had also spoken to Kera about the legal rights of missing persons.

  “In most cases of pseudocide,” Kera explained, “the subject is motivated by financial troubles or a failed romantic relationship. They fake their death to collect on a life insurance policy, to avoid a debt, or to flee an abusive spouse. None of our subjects appear to be motivated by such circumstances. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. All were current on their taxes and credit cards at the time of their disappearance. And none of them were married, which means no spouses have been left in the lurch with respect to their legal marital status.”

  “I’ll stop you right there,” the director said. “Are you suggesting that these people are not only alive, but that they’ve gone missing by choice?”

  “I am, sir.”

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, and seemed to be considering the implications of this. But then he shook his head. “It’s impossible. Putting aside for the moment the question of why they would even want to do this, I don’t see how it’s practical. A person faces hundreds of obligations that cannot simply be abandoned. What about bills, lease agreements, car payments?”

  “I checked. Those obligations are real, and in every single one of these cases, arrangements were made in advance to avoid legal default. I thought that that was what Caroline Mullen might be helping them with, but I couldn’t be sure. Until today.” Kera paused for effect. “An eighty-seven-thousand-dollar payment was made to the US Coast Guard to cover the expense—the precise expense, it turns out—of the search-and-rescue mission after that plane crash last week.”

  There was a long silence.

  “That’s true?” the director asked.

  Kera nodded. “I believe that the members of Background Noise Pollution created an aviation disaster to fake their deaths, and then paid the US Coast Guard for their troubles, in effect.”

  “Why?” Gabby said.

  “Because they want to avoid legal trouble.”

  “Please. If a cash payment is all it took to clear people of legal trouble, that would happen more often,” the director said.

  “I think this case might be unique,” Kera said. “If the only crime here is wasting taxpayer money, well, this solves that. There’s no longer any victim.”

  The director did not appear convinced of her legal expertise, but his silence indicated that he was at least starting to consider the possibility that she was right about the missing band members. Gabby wasn’t quite there yet. “Why would someone who’s dropping off the grid care about legal trouble? That seems like the least of their worries.”

  “Because they plan to come back.”

  “But why?” Jones said. It was the first time he’d spoken, and for this reason he got everyone’s attention. He was looking at Kera, and not kindly. She’d stuck both their necks out with her theory, and she hadn’t consulted him first. Challenging her now was his way of showing Director Branagh and Gabby that Kera was alone in this hypothesizing. “You’re forgetting the most basic problem with this case: there’s no motive. Why choose to vanish? What do you imagine these people are trying to accomplish by disappearing—by faking their suicides—if they intend to come back?” He had chosen the word imagine deliberately to make her sound like a lunatic. She might have expected him to be annoyed with her, but this cut much deeper.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  “Say there was some motive to vanish—which there doesn’t appear to be,” Gabby said with an edge in her voice. “How do you explain all the references to suicide? Why fake one’s death so elaborately? Why not just walk away and disappear with no trace?”

  Kera thought about this. “I don’t know the answer to that. But if I had to guess—”

  “I’d prefer we keep the guessing to a minimum,” said the director.

  “I think the elaborate suicide scenes are a key part of the message they’re trying to send.”

  “The message?” the director asked.

  “Yes. Each of these people was passionately committed to what they were doing with their lives, whether it was art, or the law—whatever. They were highly unlikely candidates for suicide, and the way they went about staging their departures was so outlandish, so . . . creative, I think it was their way of sending a message to the people who knew them. Like that phrase that’s left behind at all of the scenes: ‘Have you figured it out yet?’ ”

  “What is that about?” Gabby said. “I hear people saying it to each other. What does it mean?”

  “I think in the case of these missing people, it’s their way of saying, ‘I’m OK. But I’m gone. You won’t find me unless I want to be found.’ ”

  “Do you have proof of any of this?” the director asked.

  “I’ve told you what I know.”

  Jones leaned back in his chair. He was not supporting her here.

  “So, no,” Gabby said.

  Jones was silent. Kera would have liked the opportunity to step aside and apologize to him. She knew he felt blindsided, and she hated the way he was looking at her now.

  The chance to confer with him would not come, however, at least not now, because just then Director Branagh’s assistant burst through the conference room door unannounced to say that something urgent had happened with VINYL.

  Director Branagh, Gabby, and Jones stood immediately. Kera, who did not understand what was happening, looked up at Jones. “VINYL?”

  “The Gnos.is case,” he said, and then they all hurried away.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  At 1150 hours a cryptologist at an eight-screen array in Hawk’s Control Room leaned back in his chair and whispered to himself, “Holy shit.” For the past three months, his workstation had been tethered to a supercomputer buried fifteen stories under Manhattan. The computer, a Cray XK7 owned by the NSA, had been working around the clock to try to break Gnos.is’s 192-bit encryption key. The cryptologist had estimated that, if they got lucky, this brute-force attack on the site’s encryption key would take a few years. But luck wasn’t a strategy of any Hawk operation. So while the computer churned away its calculations at more than seventeen million billion operations per second three hundred feet underground, the cryptologist sat at his workstation and studied what little anyone knew about Gnos.is’s back-end operations, trying to come up with a faster solution that wouldn’t make him appear less useful than a computer.

  The audible obscenity was on account of the fact that his job had just become exponentially harder. At midnight early that morning, Gnos.is had switched to a 320-bit encryption key. He was one part impressed—320-bit encryption keys were nearly unheard-of—and one part fucked. It would take a dozen supercomputers like the one he was using twice as long to crack a 320-bit key. They didn’t have that kind of computing power, and they didn’t have that kind of time.

  The cryptologist’s discovery was the first new information the VINYL team had collected on Gnos.is in months, and for that reason it was of analytical interest. The heightened encryption level could mean that Gnos.is was undergoing a major system upgrade or data migration, and that might leave the site vulnerable in other ways. If Hawk was waiting at the right place at the right time, they might pick up on something that would help them identify whoever was behind Gnos.is.

  Thirty minutes later an analyst monitoring Gnos.is’s live site came forward to report something odd: a sharp decrease in the site’s routine maintenance. “Gnos.is basically looks the same on its face, but they’ve halted all back-end maintenance. For the past twelve hours, the site’s been running on autopilot.”

  “Isn’t it designed for that?” Gabby asked. Director Branagh stood back, quietly taking everything in.

  “Yes, in some respects. But the site is still growing. Glitches pop up almost constantly. Without a team at work to fix bugs, these glitches will start showing on the front end within a few days.”

  “Maybe they lost their funding,” someone suggested.

>   “And then upgraded their encryption? I don’t think so. Jones, what’s happening with hosting?” the case officer said.

  Jones, already at a workstation in the pit, had anticipated this question. He’d tried to get a step ahead, but then he had to backtrack to check his work. Not because he thought he’d been sloppy, but because he almost didn’t believe what he was seeing.

  “We’ve got increases here too, sir. Hosting’s shifted to almost double the previous rates.”

  “Put it on the big screen.”

  A dozen pairs of eyes looked up at the wall-size display in unison. Gnos.is relied on the encryption key to remain anonymous. But the thing that kept the site live and out of danger from saboteurs or investigators was the way the site bounced quickly from server to server, staying ahead of pursuers. Gnos.is accomplished this by constantly making complete copies of itself, storing them on multiple servers, and switching randomly between them. By the time anyone could pinpoint where the site was being published at any one time, the live site had moved to a different server, usually on a different continent. Even if Gnos.is could be shut down on the right server at the right time, the site would just pop up on another server almost instantaneously.

  What Jones put up on the big screen illustrated that Gnos.is had improved the speed of this random scramble of host servers. Before, the live site jumped from server to server at a rate of once every 90 to 120 seconds. Now the dots on the big screen were staying lit for less than a minute.

  “The only reason they’d do all this is if they’re getting ready for something,” the case officer said. “Judging by how serious they’re taking their encryption, I’d say it’s got to be something big.”

  Jones waited for his first chance to leave the pit and climb the steps to his own workstation. The Gnos.is discoveries—and what they implied—created a feeling among the task force that they’d learned something new about the site. Jones suspected that that feeling would deflate quickly into helplessness as they began to realize that, in fact, all they had learned was that it would now be more difficult than ever, if not impossible, to actually learn anything about Gnos.is that Gnos.is didn’t want them to know.