End of Secrets

by Ryan Quinn

  He no longer felt the rats scratching at his ankles. They had all taken cover.

  Cowards, he thought.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Kera might never have received the envelope had the receptionist not called out to her as she crossed through the lobby.

  “A delivery?”

  “Came by courier just after I got in. It’s on your desk.”

  She was already late getting into the office, but what were a few more minutes? Instead of clearing directly through to the secure zone within Hawk, Kera went to her desk in the TGR newsroom—the desk she never sat at, the desk that looked like it belonged to a rising young journalist who found time to balance her work and family lives. What first caught her attention were the pictures of her and Parker displayed around the cubicle. She had steered clear of the apartment for the past week and had thus avoided moments like this, which exposed the stark cleavage between the innocent before and the horrific after. Thinking it was safe now to look at photos of him, she picked one up—a shot she’d taken of him in Battery Park, smiling, a ferry pulling away in the background—but all she could see was his body in the bathtub. She set the photograph down, fighting the feeling she so often had had in the days since he’d been killed, of wanting just to lie in bed, unable to face even the most ordinary tasks.

  The sight of the envelope on top of her in-box rescued her from this spiral. It was thick. There was no return information, just an ink stamp from the courier service. Mail addressed to her came regularly, but it was mostly paranoid letters professing news tips from people too suspicious or too old to use e-mail. No one she could think of would mail her anything important, not here, not addressed to the Global Report. She assumed, then, that the envelope likely contained a rant from a more aggressive breed of conspiracy theorist, one with cash to spend on a courier that delivers before nine AM.

  She ripped away the seal. Inside were sheets of paper, perhaps twenty or thirty pages, clamped together with a binder clip. It wasn’t until she pulled them out and had a look at the cover page that she began to understand where the package had come from. She looked around. No one seemed to have noticed her lingering in the newsroom. She put down her bag and sat in the unfamiliar chair. The top page was a printout of a TGR article that she’d become very familiar with: RISING I-BANKERS DECAMP FOR ONE. Her byline beneath the title was what had originally caused Travis Bradley, the ex-Wall Street quant, to contact her. And that had led to the meeting with Bradley that Gabby had sent her to.

  The pages beneath the article were less revealing. She flipped through them quickly, passing over grids of dense data. At first glance page after page looked the same—columns of dates and rows of numbers. And then a folded pamphlet fell out from between the final pages. It was a tourist map of Central Park, the kind purchased at sidewalk kiosks. Because a map was more interesting than pages of endless numbers, and because she didn’t think the map had gotten in there on accident, she unfolded it. She noticed immediately that there was a mark beside a path near the park’s southwest corner, a small X inked in red pen. The ex-Wall Street quant, it seemed, was trying his hand at tradecraft. But what was he trying to tell her?

  She returned her attention to the packet of papers and flipped back to the first page of data. This time she looked more closely and discovered there was a different name, age, address, and phone number on the header of each page. The name on the first page got her attention. She flipped through only three more names before she shoved the packet back into the envelope and hurried for the Control Room.

  After she’d cleared the retinal scanner and entered, she crossed through the familiar glow of digital maps, databases, and surveillance imagery. This morning she noticed that several of the screens above the pit displayed the Gnos.is clock, which ticked backward through 10:28:45 as she approached Jones’s workstation. Director Branagh and Gabby hovered over the VINYL case officer in the pit, each of them attached to a phone and a cup of coffee. A familiar crew of analysts cycled by. But no one seemed very busy. That clock was headed to zero and there was nothing more anyone in this room was going to learn about Gnos.is before it got there.

  “Jones,” she whispered, coming up behind him. She suddenly didn’t know how she should proceed. What she had to say was not something they could discuss with Gabby and Branagh in the room. “I heard from our source. We have—”

  “Kera—” he said, cutting her off. He stood up and glanced down at the pit to make sure Gabby and Branagh weren’t paying any attention to them. “Come with me.”

  He guided her into the small kitchen just off the Control Room floor. There was no one else there. For the moment, they were alone and out of earshot—at least out of range of human ears. “We can’t talk about this in here,” she whispered.

  “If we’re quiet, we can.” He must have read the skepticism on her face. “It’s clean. No bugs.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I looked for them. There are ceiling devices in most offices and conference rooms. And the cameras in the Control Room also pick up audio, though I can’t imagine they pull in anything more than a steady din most of the time. But the bathrooms, kitchens, and hallways are clean.”

  “I think they skipped over all that during my orientation,” she said. “I suppose sweeping rooms for electronic devices is normal behavior for you NSA guys?”

  But Jones was not in the mood for dry humor. In fact, he seemed to be struggling to look her in the eye.

  “Jones?”

  He exhaled. “There was an alert. It came in just a few minutes ago.” A hesitation. “Bolívar’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Right now they’re saying he’s dead, Kera.”

  “What happened? Is there a body?”

  “Kera—”

  “Answer me. Did they find a body?”

  Jones looked away. Finally he shook his head, as if resigned to what was coming. “It’s too early to say. It happened in one of the subway tunnels. They found his jacket, his phone. NYPD is still investigating whether he could have been clipped by a train—or worse.”

  “What, a hit-and-run by a train? And one where the body does the running? Jesus, listen to yourself. You can’t believe that.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe.”

  Kera made a move to leave. She needed more information; she needed to see for herself.

  “Kera.” He was blocking her. “Stay focused. I need you today.”

  “Bolívar is one of them, Jones. He’s part of it, whatever it is.”

  “I believe you. But we have to stick to our plan.”

  She tried to slide past him. “I’ve got to get to his apartment.”

  “No. Kera, look at me. You have to stay here. If you’re not at your workstation today, Gabby will know you’re up to something. We can’t give her any reason to keep a closer eye on us. Not right now.”

  Kera was thinking of the locked room in Rafael Bolívar’s apartment. But Jones was right. Deserting her post right now would be a red flag for Gabby. The fact that she’d even considered it made her wonder if she was more shaken by Parker’s death than she imagined. She couldn’t afford a stupid mistake. Both her own life and Jones’s depended on it. She nodded. “So you knew?”

  “Knew what?”

  “About . . . Bolívar and me.”

  He said nothing. He looked at her for a moment more and then turned to leave.

  “Wait,” she said. She pulled the packet of papers from the envelope and handed it to him.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “It’s data on surveillance targets. But look at the names. Senators, foreign ambassadors, even the secretary of defense. They have phone records, purchases, location data—everything. It’s these people’s lives, broken down into numbers and formulas.”

  “Slow down. Where did you get this?”

  “From Bradley. This is what ONE is doing.”

  He looked up at her. “Why?”

  “Because it�
�s information they can sell. It’s a product. You don’t have to stretch your imagination to figure out what sort of consumer would be interested in this. Look at the last page.”

  Jones flipped to the end of the packet. The note was scrawled in unruly handwriting:

  I have more examples like these. By tomorrow I will have a list put together of everyone they’re selling to. It won’t take them long to discover the breach. I’m leaving the city for a while. If you want a copy of what I’ve managed to gather, meet me at noon tomorrow.

  “Meet him where?” Jones asked.

  Kera held up the map.

  “Are you up for going?”

  She nodded. “This is what we’ve been waiting for. We have the link between Hawk and ONE. Bradley, let’s hope, comes through with the rest.”

  “All right,” Jones said. “Tomorrow it is. I’ll copy the ONE contracts and Gabby’s and Branagh’s e-mail files before I leave tonight, and we’ll have to hope it doesn’t set off any alarms before noon tomorrow. Why don’t we meet later, outside, to go over everything?” She nodded. “McKinley’s scotch bar in the Village? Meet there at nine?”

  “It’s a date.”

  FIFTY-FIVE

  News came in the early afternoon that ONE had acquired Alegría North America. An elaborate press conference had been planned to announce the multibillion-dollar deal, but it was scrapped hastily after Rafael Bolívar was first reported dead—reports that were revised throughout the day until the final consensus was that he, like the others, had gone missing. ONE executives, fearing for the company’s valuation on the NYSE, rushed to assure investors that the deal had been finalized the day before Bolívar’s disappearance and that, though they were hopeful for Bolívar’s safe return, Bolívar’s absence would not present any lasting complications.

  Given Bolívar’s recent behavior, news of the acquisition did not come as a surprise to Kera. But it still didn’t make sense. Selling out to ONE seemed to contradict everything else she knew about Bolívar.

  In any case, the Alegría acquisition seemed destined to be overshadowed. By the end of the day, no one was paying attention to anything other than Gnos.is.

  Theories had developed throughout the day that the clock wouldn’t last to the end, that in the final minutes too many people would be watching, too many browsers would be burdening the servers, and the site would crash under the weight of anticipation. But the site’s infrastructure held.

  At six PM Eastern Standard Time, the city was gripped in its predictable commuter chaos. Trains thundered underground at full capacity, people fought over cabs that inched through gridlock, sidewalks clogged with crisscrossing pedestrians. But the people of New York weren’t so far from a phone or computer or television that, at precisely the top of the hour, they could not spare a few seconds to cast an eye on the nearest screen. And it seemed that any screen capable of connecting to the Internet was tuned to Gnos.is.

  When the final few seconds slipped away, all the digits came to rest at zero. And then, as if after a breath, the Gnos.is home page was restored.

  “It’s back,” Director Branagh said, his head tilted back so that he could look up at the wall screens. “What are we looking at?”

  Everyone at a console went to work. Jones, who had been standing next to Kera near their workstations, sat down in front of his monitors. Kera had no official duty in that moment, so she lingered where she stood, watching the display on the main wall.

  The new Gnos.is home page was a clean, simple design. There were only three words on the entire page. At the top was the word Gnos.is, the letters slanting in their recognizable font. The other two words opposed each other in the middle of the screen. On one side was the word /FACT. On the other, /TRUTH.

  The analyst in control of the big screen selected /FACT, and the page slid to the left, revealing a large cloud made up of bubble-like spheres floating in a clump. The sizes of the spheres varied widely. Each sphere was wrapped in a skin of transparent, rotating graphics that included a headline, photo and video images, and descriptive text highlighting the content of the story within.

  “It’s news, sir,” an analyst said. “Like before, but . . .” he trailed off, unable to articulate yet what about the site was so different. Kera scanned the most prominent headlines: FAMINE FEARED WITHIN A DECADE, CLIMATE CHANGE ACCELERATING, PROGRESS SEEN ON AIDS VACCINE.

  After a few more minutes, a different analyst spoke up. “Sir, it looks like they’ve altered their sorting algorithms.”

  “Their what?” Gabby said.

  “The way each news story is prioritized. Before, on the previous incarnation of Gnos.is, headlines were more or less ranked based on how many people clicked on them. That’s how most news sites work.”

  Kera had been studying the spheres as she listened, and suddenly she understood what the analyst was about to say before he said it.

  “Now, though, the stories are prioritized according to their real global impact. See the larger bubbles there? They are news stories that affect a greater number of people than the smaller bubbles. Well, that’s an oversimplification. It has to do with more than just the number of people affected. It’s a little early to say, but it looks like the algorithm is factoring in several other variables too. Things like financial impact, health implications, and historical significance. Basically, it’s calling out the stories that have the most tangible impact on the population’s quality of life.”

  What was not factored in, Kera noted, was each news story’s entertainment value. That, more than anything, differentiated it from other news sites.

  “What about the bar on top?” the director asked. Above the cloud of spheres was a small bar with the word GLOBAL in it. “Does that change?”

  The analyst tapped the bar, and it expanded to offer two other options: NATIONAL AND LOCAL. He selected them one at a time. Each time he tapped a new region, the cloud vanished and then reappeared with a different set of spheres. Similar to the GLOBAL cloud, the size of each sphere was proportionate to the story’s respective impact on the lives of people in that region. As such, while famine, violence caused by religious conflict, and climate change stood out in the GLOBAL cloud, things like subway and sewer failures, tax and zoning laws, and severe weather patterns dominated the local cloud. Neither featured any headline about a politician’s extramarital affair, a roller coaster disaster at a distant county fair, or an actor’s exhibitionist video.

  Kera felt the gentle pulse of her smartphone as it received an incoming e-mail. She slipped it out of her pocket and looked at the screen. The e-mail had been sent to her TGR account. It was from Professor Carl Tierney.

  SUBJECT: THESIS

  HE’S A DECADE PAST THE DEADLINE, BUT I THINK HE’S JUST COMPLETED MY ASSIGNMENT. PLEASE SEE ATTACHED.

  Kera reread the message three times. What was he talking about?

  She put her phone back in her pocket and looked down at the activity in the pit. That’s when she saw it.

  “What is that?” she said aloud, pointing to one of the analyst’s screens below her as she descended the stairs into the pit. A few people looked in her direction, including Gabby, whose first reaction was a territorial glance, as if to warn Kera against butting into a case that wasn’t hers. But what she saw in Kera’s eyes stopped her. “That!” Kera said. “What’s that?” She was directly behind the analyst now, hovering over his shoulders.

  “This is the /TRUTH side of the site,” he said.

  In the background across the top of his screen were the words HAVE YOU FIGURED IT OUT YET? The letters were red on a black background, stylized like graffiti. Below them a video played of a singer, a young woman, performing alone on a stage. At first Kera had only noticed the familiar phrase, but now she studied the singer.

  “Put that up on the big screen. Do we have audio?” Kera said.

  The analyst had never met Kera before, but since Gabby wasn’t objecting to Kera’s demands, he did as he was told. The audio came over the speakers as the
image appeared on the wall display. Kera froze at the sound of the first notes. She had never heard the song before, but she recognized the voice immediately.

  “Is that—?” Gabby said.

  “Rowena Pete,” Kera whispered. Then she looked down at the analyst. “This is coming from the new Gnos.is?”

  “Yes. This is basically what the /TRUTH side of the site contains. Here, look.” He swiped the video away, and it seemed to fold itself into a sphere and recede back into a cloud, just like the spheres did on the /FACT side. In this cloud, though, all of the spheres were wrapped in images of performing musicians, artwork, and text from books. “It’s just a bunch of entertainment and art stuff, see?” the analyst started to explain.

  But Kera was walking away from him. She moved toward the big screen, gazing up at the spheres. They were all there—all of the missing subjects from the ATLANTIS case: Rowena Pete and Background Noise Pollution, the musicians; Cole Emerson and Natalie Smith, the filmmakers; Craig Shea and Lazlo Timms, the novelists; and Caroline Mullen, the estate attorney.

  And there was a new one. The largest sphere of all featured the art of It.

  Gabby turned from the screen and looked at Kera. “Alive and well, indeed,” she said. “It looks like your theory came pretty close.”

  Kera nodded, acknowledging the compliment, but she was thinking the same thing as Director Branagh, who voiced the question aloud.

  “Where are they?” None of the analysts had an answer for that. “They’re on here, publishing all this content—but where did they go? Why?”