End of Secrets

by Ryan Quinn

  “I’m out. I left a few minutes ago. They’re tracking you, Kera. Gabby and the director. And they have men on the street.”

  “They killed him. They fucking killed him.” The cab driver looked at her in the rearview mirror.

  Jones was silent for a moment. “Are you all right? Did you make contact first?”

  Kera looked at the backpack on the floor of the cab between her feet. Her fingers were still wrapped tightly around the shoulder strap. For the first time since she’d snatched it from under the bench, she loosened her grip. Her palm was smeared with bright blood. Christ, she thought. She looked at the cabby; he was watching the road. She commanded herself to be calm. Then she unzipped the backpack and looked inside.

  “Kera?”

  “I grabbed his bag. I think the files are here.”

  “Listen to me. We have to get off the phone. When we hang up, turn off your phone and remove the battery. Then throw them both away. Meet me at the place we went to two weeks ago after you approached me on the street. OK?”

  “OK,” Kera said, picturing the little bar they’d walked to from Times Square. After she hung up, she told the driver to drive around the block and let her out. She took another cab halfway downtown and then switched to a cab that brought her back up to Hell’s Kitchen.

  Kera arrived at the bar first and used the ladies’ room in back to wipe blood from the backpack and wash her hands. Then she sat at the dim table nearest to the back exit and kept her eye on the front door. When Jones came in and she saw that he was alone and unharmed, she rose. Jones had his computer bag slung over his shoulder. He hugged her before she could say anything.

  “Are the files in there?” he said, staring at Bradley’s backpack, which Kera still gripped in one hand, afraid to let go.

  She nodded and unzipped the main pocket. Inside was an external hard drive. Jones took it from her and began to unpack his laptop on the table. Kera stepped to the bar and ordered two Cokes from the bartender, who’d started to eye them expectantly. He made a show of being unimpressed with her order, but what could he do? It was early afternoon on a weekday. To keep him out of their hair, she left him a ten-dollar tip for use of the table. When she returned with the sodas, Jones had tethered the external drive to his computer with a USB cable.

  “Let’s have a look,” he said, clicking the icon as it appeared on-screen.

  The drive contained only two folders. The first one they selected displayed seven files. Jones opened them one by one. They were all architectural designs—blueprints and 3-D renderings of a large underground complex.

  “What is it?” Kera asked.

  “It looks like a series of large, insulated rooms—five stories of them. That’s hundreds of thousands of square feet of space. And see these plans for the central air-conditioning system? They’re serious about keeping this place cool. I’d say we’re looking at a massive server farm.”

  Kera could see from the elevation drawing that the complex was buried in a hillside. The coordinates in the legend identified a location in semirural New Jersey, some forty miles west of Manhattan.

  “You think ONE is planning to build this?” Jones asked.

  Kera shook her head. “They already have. At our first meeting, Bradley called it ‘the bunker.’ Parker’s voice mail mentioned it too. What’s in the other folder?” The server farm in the bunker was interesting, but this couldn’t be the full extent of what Travis Bradley had given his life for.

  Jones clicked open the second folder, which contained several dozen database files, all of them enormous. Most of the file names were opaque combinations of letters and numbers. Jones glanced up at her as if to ask where they should start. She shrugged and told him to just open the first file. It was named “Clients.”

  She felt her pulse thump as a grid of numbers spread across the screen. It looked similar to the printed pages of data that Travis Bradley had sent her the morning before, except that these weren’t data files of surveillance targets; they were the names and addresses of all the entities who had purchased such information from ONE. She scanned the grid quickly, noticing that the clients had been given code names.

  “Can you search clients by address?” she asked.

  Jones clicked to the search field and typed in “Beijing.” There were four hits. Kera recognized one of the addresses as the headquarters of the Chinese government’s Ministry of State Security. Next he typed in “Moscow.” There were two hits there. “Islamabad,” “Riyadh,” “Jerusalem,” and “London” all turned up in the addresses of clients as well.

  “Try Langley,” Kera said.

  Jones looked at her. Then he typed in the letters. It was a hit. Kera stared at the list of results. There were at least forty-five orders for information on targets in just the last month. In the column next to the date of the order, each request was marked as “Delivered.”

  “Jesus,” she whispered.

  Jones spent a few more minutes searching for cities in and around northern Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, until he and Kera had determined that US intelligence and law enforcement agencies were using ONE’s information services as readily as anyone else.

  “It’s like privatized espionage,” he said. “With no national loyalty. Is this really worth the money to ONE?”

  “Apparently,” Kera said. “And it probably goes beyond that.” She wished now—now that it was too late—that she’d paid more attention to what Bradley had told her at their first meeting. “Bradley said ONE was striving for total transparency, for the end of secrets. But I think what they really want is to control all the world’s secrets. That would give them more power than any amount of money could buy.”

  They spent fifteen minutes clicking through each file in the two folders. The last file in the second folder was different from the others. Instead of another database, it was a compressed file that contained thousands of internal ONE e-mails discussing the details and ambitions of the secret data-mining program. In the “to” and “from” fields, Kera recognized the names of several of the conglomerate’s key executives.

  “Such arrogance,” Jones said, “to put things like this in an e-mail and believe that they won’t come back to haunt you.” He closed down all the files and pulled up a web browser. The bar’s Wi-Fi password was written on the bottom of a chalkboard that touted the day’s happy-hour specials.

  “What are you doing?”

  “The last two people who had these files were murdered. We’re going to get rid of these before ONE or Hawk finds us.”

  “What—here?”

  “Got a better idea?”

  “What about HawkEye? You said yourself they were using it to track me.”

  “I’ll explain in a moment why we don’t need to worry about that. But first, where are we sending these? We should get started. It’s going to take a while for them to upload.”

  Kera bit her lower lip. “We can’t send them to the agency. You were right last night. They’re too involved. They’d want the whole thing to go away, and I’m afraid they’d succeed at that.”

  Jones lifted his eyebrows as if to say, Well, then?

  “Do it,” she said. “Send them to Gnos.is. But not with our names attached.” She watched Jones work and wondered where she would go next. She had passports, whole identities that she’d created for herself for situations like this—though she’d never really believed they would be necessary.

  “Want a drink?” Jones said, when the upload had started. “We might as well get comfortable. The Wi-Fi here isn’t bad for a bar, but I don’t think they had file uploads of this size in mind when they selected their Internet plan.”

  “I think first you better explain why you’re not more worried about Hawk tracking us down here.”

  “Oh, right. HawkEye,” Jones said, and she thought she saw a shade of sadness cast over his eyes. “It no longer exists.”

  SIXTY-THREE

  In the Control Room, Gabby di Palma and Dick Branagh
were gazing up at the main tactical display, monitoring feeds from surveillance cameras on the south end of Central Park. This was interrupted occasionally by Gabby’s yelling into a phone that broadcast radio signals to Hawk’s team on the street. Kera had left the building earlier than any of them had expected and then, infuriatingly, she’d lost the one man who had been in a position to tail her. Then she’d vanished into the park, where there were no cameras.

  Twenty minutes later, still with no sighting of Kera, the major news networks had begun to report on a shooting in the park. HawkEye picked her up again when she used her phone while in a cab going south on Central Park West. And then suddenly, all the screens in the Control Room flickered and went black.

  “Goddamn it,” Branagh shouted—the only time Gabby or any of the rest of them had ever heard him raise his voice. It startled Gabby as much as the blackout. “Now what?”

  “The system’s down,” an analyst in the pit reported.

  “Yes,” Branagh said drily, control regained. “Now, if you would get it back up, please.”

  There was a period of frantic activity among the analysts and technicians in the pit until finally one of them reported that it wasn’t possible to get HawkEye back online. It hadn’t just crashed; a bug had damaged it catastrophically.

  “Who was she talking to on the phone? Can we at least figure that out?”

  “Jones,” Gabby said suddenly. Branagh looked at her, and then they both turned to look up at Jones’s workstation.

  But Jones was gone.

  An hour passed. In the absence of any input from HawkEye, someone had switched all the big screens over to show the feeds from cable news networks that were covering the Central Park shooting, as well as popular news websites, such as the New York Times and Gnos.is. The shooting victim had been a man named Travis Bradley. Gabby did not need HawkEye to tell her that it was the same Travis Bradley she’d sent Kera to meet with a few weeks earlier. As requested, Gabby had passed Kera’s report of that meeting along to her client at ONE. In her opinion, given the stakes, ONE had been slow to react. Bradley should have been eliminated immediately. But instead, ONE had fixated on finding the missing artists and, of course, on Gnos.is. The only silver lining was the way that those cases had ultimately exposed Kera and Jones as traitors.

  Gabby had no doubt that, HawkEye or not, Jones and Kera would be found—if not today, then tomorrow or the next. They’d been clever, but they should have known better what they were up against. It wasn’t only Hawk and ONE that would prevent them from surviving on the run. If this little incident couldn’t be contained before the CIA caught wind of it, then the agency would join the ranks of irritated parties who couldn’t afford to have them loose either.

  While the computer technicians tried to revive some capability that might assist her men in the field, Gabby had been shifting her eyes systematically from screen to screen, scrutinizing the cable and online news images for anything that looked wrong. It was in this way, several minutes later, that she came upon the neglected screen in the lower corner, which was displaying the Gnos.is home page. By design, apparently, the Gnos.is home page didn’t change often or arbitrarily, which prevented it from overreacting to breaking news. And so the relatively quick movement of a new sphere popping up and growing in size as it rolled forward toward the front of the cloud caught Gabby’s eye. She brought a hand to her mouth, sensing the unfolding disaster even before her mind could assemble a full understanding of what had happened.

  As she moved out from behind the consoles in the pit to get a better look at the Gnos.is headline, the CNN feed on one of the larger screens abruptly switched over from coverage of the shooting to introduce another breaking-news story. The screen filled with a live overhead shot of a hillside in rural New Jersey. Outside an inconspicuous concrete facade, a small, tree-lined employee parking lot lay hidden from the public road. The headline running across the bottom of the screen read:

  BREAKING: SECRET ONE CORP. FACILITY AT CENTER OF INTERNATIONAL ESPIONAGE SCANDAL; FBI WILL LEAD INVESTIGATION

  Gabby was holding her phone in her hand, so she felt the vibrations when it started to ring. It was her secretary. “Keith Grassley at ONE is on the line for you.”

  Gabby looked over at Branagh and caught his eye. He looked merely anxious, as he had since his momentary loss of control after HawkEye had crashed. She could see that he’d not yet noticed the report on CNN. Bracing for the fallout, she nodded toward the screen, and he followed her gaze.

  “Ma’am?” She could hear her secretary’s voice in her ear. “Mr. Grassley sounded upset, but he wouldn’t say what he was calling about. Should I put him through?”

  Across the room, Branagh suddenly exploded. “What’s going on? Can anyone tell me what the fuck is happening?” Above him, two other networks flipped over to cover the new story. Like CNN, they already had their own helicopters arriving in the airspace over the bunker.

  Gabby had the phone pressed to her ear, but she did not know if her secretary was still there or if the young woman had gone ahead and put ONE’s CEO through. That question was answered a few seconds later when she heard her secretary’s voice again.

  “Ms. di Palma, I tried to connect Mr. Grassley, but there was some sort of disturbance at his office. I’ll see if I can get him back.”

  Gabby felt the phone slip from her fingers. One of the networks broke into their coverage of the raid on the ONE bunker to show scenes of tactical teams surrounding a Manhattan skyscraper. She recognized the building as ONE’s headquarters.

  “Abort,” Branagh said, seeing it too. And then, shouting, “Everybody out. We’re going black.”

  Gabby didn’t move. She’d seen the Gnos.is headline, which mentioned Hawk by name, and knew, with a wave of nausea, where the story had come from and that it was too late. As she steadied herself against the nearest desk, she watched over the heads of her fleeing colleagues as the first of the SWAT men, weapons drawn, filled the hallway outside the Control Room.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  Kera wore a hat and glasses and was careful to turn away from the cameras in the airports. Even without HawkEye in operation, the cameras were still there, and they still saw nearly everything. Hawk, she’d read on Gnos.is and elsewhere, had been dismantled. Gabby, Branagh, and dozens of ONE executives had been arrested. But the agency would be looking for her, and they weren’t interested in a hero; they needed scapegoats. She could see the signs of their work already—in the evolving speculation from media pundits about the motives and credibility of the “anonymous” leaker, which had begun to sour. Common sense dictated that she should stay out of airports and lie low, and that she should not attempt to leave the country. Which was why she was doing just the opposite.

  She had another reason too.

  In Houston she considered calling her parents’ home phone to leave a voice mail and then decided against it. They might be waiting by the phone, even though they would have been at work at this hour on a typical day. Instead, she wrote them an e-mail. She explained, rather lamely, that her work situation had grown complicated, a gross understatement given what her parents would be reading in the news. She added that she needed some time alone for reflection after everything that had happened. This was probably not an adequate explanation to give to a parent, but it was all she had. She knew they would forgive her, whether she deserved it or not.

  It had been just before she boarded the flight out of the States that she happened to look up at a television to see a report that ONE’s stock price was in free fall. The company was threatening lawsuits, a strategy that seemed increasingly laughable as its top executives, one by one, were indicted for white-collar felonies.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Garita Palmera, El Salvador

  Once she was on the ground and through customs in San Salvador, Kera hired a driver to take her into Garita Palmera. There she rented a bike. For most of the afternoon, she pedaled slowly on dirt roads, constantly triangulating the only landmarks s
he had to go by: the beachhead, a cluster of distant buildings, the ocean farther in the background. It was late afternoon when she finally came upon a small dwelling that seemed to fit all the criteria. She dismounted and leaned the bike against a water pump. A young girl, maybe seven, was playing in the dirt and looked up at her. Two unkempt dogs sniffed for food by a blackened fire ring. Kera mounted the steps to the porch. There was no proper door, just a simple curtain and a bug screen, through which she could see a woman washing dishes. She knocked on the frame and the woman came to investigate.

  She removed her sunglasses. The woman looked a few years younger than Kera, but easily old enough to have mothered the child in the front yard. She had skin darker than Kera’s, and hair blacker. Kera judged quickly that she and the woman did not share any relatives. She determined soon after that they also did not share a common language.

  Kera removed the photograph from her pocket. It was the original print; the digital copy had been abandoned along with her phone. While the woman studied the photo, Kera glanced past her, into the main room. From the photo, Kera recognized the large window in the far wall and the wooden pole in the center of the room, supporting the low ceiling. But the furniture and other decorations had been replaced. The family who had been here then had long ago moved on.

  The woman handed the photo back, confused. Kera pointed to the infant in the photo and then to herself. She repeated this motion several times. When understanding came into the woman’s eyes, they grew wide and round and then a little damp. The woman became excited and offered Kera a cup of something hot to drink and a chair to sit in. Kera politely declined both. She only needed a minute. She put the picture back in her pocket, and there it was in real life—the view that had become familiar to her from years of studying a creased and faded four-by-six print.