End of Secrets

by Ryan Quinn

  She got her phone and took a picture of it, rescuing the photo from its precarious physical existence and committing it to digital permanence. Then she grabbed what of her belongings she could carry with her and left Parker’s apartment.

  FORTY-SIX

  Parker did not move for several minutes after Kera’s visit. When he did, it was with the foolish idea of returning to what he’d been doing before she’d arrived. He looked at his computer screen and brought his hands to the keys. But he couldn’t will himself to soldier on any further than that.

  He’d been enjoying something like peace before she appeared. Lately he worked past nine nearly every night. His days filled up quickly with meetings, and he found he enjoyed the quiet evening hours when he could sit at his desk alone with the windows darkening behind him. Almost as bizarre as the incident with Lawson and Information Security was how ever since, Lawson had treated him as if it had never happened. He’d given Parker lead roles in two new projects and hadn’t seemed at all hesitant to invite him to high-level meetings where sensitive information was discussed. Parker wanted to believe that this was because Lawson trusted him, though he couldn’t help but feel that he was being tested.

  But at a quarter to nine, in the nighttime office quiet, such thoughts had seemed more like standard workplace paranoia than anything darker. He’d been reading through the day’s freight of e-mails when the evening lobby attendant rang to tell him that a woman named Kera was there to see him.

  Now work was unpalatable. No, impossible. He needed a drink.

  He walked to the elevators and stood there, feeling numb, while he waited for the soft chime. The numbness, he knew, was his mind’s way of coping. It was denial, an unwillingness to put Kera’s decision in the context of reality. And also a buoy to salvage him from the deepening comprehension of his utter helplessness. It seemed unjust that anyone would be expected to face this without a second chance to make it better again, but there was nothing—nothing—he could do.

  The elevator doors parted. He blinked at the panel of buttons, forgetting for a moment what he was doing. And then everything came into focus and the numbness drifted away. He stared for a long second at the bottommost button. B7.

  Finally, he reached out and pressed it.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Kera woke up in a Midtown hotel room, disoriented for an uncomfortable moment until she remembered how she’d ended up there. Not that those circumstances were very comforting. She’d slept past eight, late for her. Most of the night she had sat at the window, looking out at the city and thinking, planning. The hotel was within walking distance of the office. As she left, she stopped by the front desk and paid cash for an additional two nights. She hadn’t worked out yet where she would stay after that, but for now it was convenient and clean enough.

  The night had delivered another name to the list of the vanished. Lazlo Timms, a novelist/bartender, had left his shift at closing time two nights before and had not been heard from since. According to the police report Kera accessed from her workstation, a handwritten note had been found in Timms’s small Brooklyn apartment. The words were scrawled on the back of a ONE Books contract, which the novelist had not signed. The note said: Have you figured it out yet?

  Kera spent the morning studying up on Timms, who, unlike the other missing, was almost completely unknown. He had no prior novels, no literary reputation. She had heard his name only once before, from Charlie Canyon, who had been reading a bound manuscript of Timms’s novel in the restaurant where they’d last met. Kera stared at the police photo of Timms’s note. It fit neatly—almost too neatly—with the pattern that had been established by the others. There were still two things that every single one of the missing artists had in common: their disappearance amounted to a rejection of ONE, in some form or another, and that phrase had been found written among the belongings they’d left behind.

  Later that afternoon Kera was at her workstation scanning through headlines on Gnos.is when she came across a report about Daryl Walker. Pledges for contributions to his million-dollar exhibition video had reached $750,000. She didn’t know why she desperately wanted the actor not to raise the million dollars, nor why she felt certain that he would. It made her think of something Charlie Canyon had said during her last conversation with him. Kera had asked him whether Daryl Walker would be the next to disappear, and Canyon’s response had been a short, “No. He wouldn’t do that,” and a dismissive laugh. And maybe he was right. There was a difference between Daryl Walker and the other artists who had vanished. A qualitative difference, a seriousness, maybe, about their creative pursuits. Something like what Rafael Bolívar had spoken of in his apartment.

  Kera glanced at the HawkEye maps she had running on three of her monitors. The private America screening and the encounter that had followed in Bolívar’s apartment had occurred the previous Thursday. It was now Tuesday. In the days since she’d seen him, Bolívar had maintained his usual daily routine with prompt predictability. Just that morning, Kera had watched him enter the Alegría headquarters building at nine fifteen and then go out for a scheduled lunch. He’d returned at two, and she had expected him to remain there until the end of the business day. HawkEye, though, told her that he was now somewhere else. She leaned forward in her seat, at first thinking she was looking at the wrong map.

  “Hey, Jones. What do you make of this?”

  Jones glanced up. It was the first they had spoken to each other all day. A few seconds later he came over, and Kera slid her chair to one side so that he could get a better look at the screen. But when she looked up at him to gauge his reaction, he was eyeing her instead.

  “You OK?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, a little too quickly. “I’m fine. Please, look at this.”

  He studied the screen for few moments, long enough to orient himself to what he was looking at. “Rafael Bolívar is at the ONE building?” he asked. Kera nodded. “What’s he doing there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jones shrugged. “It could be anything. He could be meeting a friend or just making a courtesy call. What makes you think it’s not a business meeting?”

  “He’s never been there before. The two companies don’t have business together.”

  Jones lifted his eyebrows. “You mean, they don’t have business together yet.”

  “Rafa wouldn’t do that,” she said, staring at the blinking dot on the map. She realized her mistake only after it was too late.

  “Rafa?” Jones said. Kera tried to ignore this, but she couldn’t stop her face from flushing. “Think about it. Alegría is a major player now. Why wouldn’t ONE be interested in them?”

  “I’m telling you, Bolívar would never let that happen.”

  “All right. You know him better than I do,” Jones said, his implication heavy.

  This made Kera self-conscious, and that made her doubt herself. She thought again of the small painting hanging in Bolívar’s apartment near the metal door with the keypad lock on it. Had she been fooling herself thinking she knew who Bolívar was?

  She picked up the phone. If ONE and Alegría were truly contemplating a merger, as Jones was suggesting, there was only one place Bolívar could be in that building. She asked the ONE operator to please connect her to the office of Keith Grassley, CEO of the ONE Corporation.

  “Oh, hi. This is Audrey over in Mr. Bolívar’s office at Alegría,” Kera said, using the name of one of his secretaries.

  “Yes?”

  Kera couldn’t tell if the man sounded guarded or just suspicious. She hadn’t done much research into this Audrey character. For all she knew, the girl had a Southern accent or was British.

  “Mr. Bolívar was running a few minutes late,” Kera said. “I just wanted to warn you in case he hadn’t made it there on time.”

  “Thank you. And no need to worry. I showed him in a few minutes ago,” the man said, though he sounded a little hesitant, like the wary victim of a prank call.

 
; “Oh, wonderful,” Kera said.

  There was a strange pause on the line. When the young man spoke again, it was in a different tone, more personal, almost as if in confidence. “You OK?” he said.

  “Yeah, of course.” Kera had to get off the phone.

  Another pause. “Drinks at seven still, right?” he said.

  “You got it. See you then.” She hung up and exhaled. “I think I just confirmed drinks on behalf of a total stranger.”

  Jones nodded. “So their secretaries are fucking. I’d say there’s a good chance ONE and Alegría are about to be in business.”

  Kera waited at her workstation until she saw Bolívar emerge from ONE’s headquarters and slide into the waiting town car. She expected the car to cut across Midtown and return to Alegría’s headquarters, but instead it turned north and let him off at his apartment building. It was only 4:45 PM, early for him to be home on a weekday. A live surveillance feed provided a view of him exiting his car and walking into the lobby. She watched him closely, aching a little at the familiar spring in his step. He had not contacted her since she had left his apartment five nights earlier.

  When he’d disappeared inside, she switched over from the HawkEye map tracing his movements to the digital dossier on his background. After seeing the contrast between Bolívar’s public persona and the person she’d witnessed in private, she was curious to review his file more closely.

  She spent an hour reading what was available about Bolívar’s childhood in Caracas—his early school records, information on the members of his large family, and articles about his father’s ties to key Venezuelan politicians, connections that no doubt had aided in the spectacular growth of his media empire, securing the family’s wealth.

  It wasn’t until she got to Bolívar’s college years that Kera began to read with interest. At NYU Bolívar had been working toward a double major in computer science and philosophy. That was news to her. She’d assumed he’d studied business, though she hadn’t really thought much about it before. Computer science seemed too technical and specialized to interest someone bent on scaling the corporate ladder as swiftly as Bolívar had; philosophy seemed too abstract and impractical. Kera wondered what it meant that Bolívar’s college studies didn’t fit the man he had become.

  Scrolling through Bolívar’s NYU transcripts, Kera noted the As he’d been awarded for each course. Epistemology 3420 . . . The Future of Computing . . . Value Theory. At the bottom of the list, she stopped, puzzling over the dates of the final courses he’d taken. She scrolled up and down a few times, thinking she must have missed something. But she hadn’t. His academic records stopped midway through his senior year, as if he’d simply walked away from his formal education a semester shy of graduation.

  Searching for an explanation, Kera turned to other records that were contemporaneous to the incomplete portion of the transcript. As usual, HawkEye was a prolific source of information. The dossier included parking tickets, travel documents, credit card statements, academic calendars, and electronic library transactions. She scanned through most of these quickly, performing a swift triage. One area she lingered over was the library data, which was voluminous. Bolívar’s literary interests had ranged from highbrow novels to books on philosophy and economics by authors she’d never heard of. In his senior year, he had added to these a dozen or so titles related to journalism. Nothing, though, that seemed to foreshadow his eventual turn toward pop culture and mass media.

  A few minutes later, she came across a change-of-address request Bolívar had filed with the Post Office. She scrolled through it, looking to understand the chronology of where he’d lived when. For his first two years of college, he’d resided in a brownstone in the Village, and then he’d moved to—her breath caught when she saw the SoHo address. It was familiar. Switching to a new screen, she pulled up Charlie Canyon’s dossier to confirm it, though her memory was clear. The address was for a large flat in SoHo and, a week earlier when she’d done a similar review of Canyon’s dossier, the apartment had stuck out in her mind because it didn’t seem like the sort of thing Canyon would have been able to afford. Bolívar, however, could have afforded something twice as lavish.

  She leaned back in her chair, thinking. She’d been aware that Bolívar and Canyon had attended NYU at the same time and that they were at the very least acquaintances, but neither of them had mentioned living together. Bolívar had, in fact, brushed aside the implication that they were friends. For a few moments, she wondered whether their being roommates a decade earlier was significant, and then, even though she couldn’t think of a particular reason why it was, she scolded herself for not drawing this link between them sooner.

  How had she not seen it? Grew up in Caracas . . . studied at NYU . . . moved up the ranks at Alegría. She realized that before today, she had only familiarized herself with a broad sketch of Bolívar’s biography, and her mind had lazily filled in details that, while far from unlikely, happened to be wrong. People dropped out of college all the time, didn’t they? Maybe, but not people pursuing double majors, not people who go on to climb the corporate ladder in the most calculated of ways.

  She returned to Bolívar’s transcripts, and this time she studied the names of the professors who had taught each course. She wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just a name or a course that inspired a feeling stronger than the others. What she found was much more straightforward than that. There was one professor who had taught Bolívar in four different courses over his three-and-half years at the school. Carl Tierney, professor of Computer Technologies and Society. She checked the school’s current directory and found that he was still listed as a professor.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Professor Tierney welcomed Kera into his office the following afternoon. The room was small, but it had a large window overlooking Washington Square Park. Peculiarly for a man who carried the banner for the digital future, the cramped office was overrun by physical books and paper files. The inescapable burden of academic bureaucracy, she supposed. She thanked him for seeing her and sat in a chair wedged against the wall, where she had to keep her legs tucked under the seat to avoid brushing against his feet beneath the desk.

  “I looked you up, Ms. Mersal,” Professor Tierney said. “I confess, I wasn’t familiar with the Global Report. It seems they have you covering quite a wide range of subjects.”

  “A sign of the times, Professor. The news is not what it once was.”

  “That’s very true. But you know, in my courses I encourage students never to bemoan the changing times. There’s always good reason that the past has gone away, and in any event, no amount of hand-wringing will bring it back. Better to approach any criticism of the present with the future in mind. I think that’s saying something from an old guy like me.” As if catching himself being professorial in front of a young woman who had not enrolled in his class, he frowned. “But I understand you are, in fact, here to discuss the past.”

  “That’s right. As I noted in my e-mail, I’m preparing a piece on Rafael Bolívar, and I’ve run into a dead end. It appears that Mr. Bolívar’s academic records are incomplete. They simply end a semester shy of graduation. Maybe it’s nothing, but I noticed that he’d taken several of your courses. I was hoping you might know what happened?”

  Professor Tierney looked at her from across his desk, perhaps weighing whether it was ethical to get into a conversation about a former student’s records. “I’m afraid I do, Ms. Mersal. Mr. Bolívar dropped out.”

  “Voluntarily?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I gave him a D on his final assignment in my Digital Innovation course.”

  “He dropped out of college because of a bad grade?” Kera was now familiar with all of Bolívar’s transcripts. He’d received straight As in everything else. Dropping out over one anomaly seemed extreme.

  “Obviously, it must have been more complicated for him than that. I’m not sure I understand it myself.
I won’t lie; it’s bothered me over the years.”

  “What was the assignment?”

  “The assignment, which I still assign to classes each semester, was to design an Internet-based innovation, such as a website or an application, and write a thesis to defend its originality and societal importance. He presented his theory on paper quite passionately, but he was unable to complete a functional prototype. You see, he made the engineer’s crucial flaw—he overreached. The thing he was striving for was impossible. Frankly, I was charitable in giving him the D instead of an all-out failing mark.”

  “Were you surprised when he dropped out?”

  “At first, yes. But I shouldn’t have been. You see, Rafael Bolívar was not motivated by a need to adhere to social conventions, like getting good grades or earning a diploma. Not because he didn’t care. In fact, I suspect he cared too much. I think he probably thought that if he didn’t drop out, it would be a sign to himself, if no one else, that he didn’t believe deeply enough in his theory.”

  “You keep saying ‘was’ and ‘didn’t.’ Are you referring to him in the past tense intentionally?”

  “Ah, yes. Well, there was the man who wrote that thesis and put everything on the line to defend it. And then there’s the man who got rich selling reality shows and infotainment programs through his television networks. These cannot possibly be the same man.”

  There it was, she thought. The same contradiction she herself had noticed in Bolívar—his public persona versus the man she had witnessed in private.