End of Secrets
Authors: Ryan Quinn
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the autho
r’s
imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 Ryan Quinn
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477825525
ISBN-10: 1477825525
Cover design by
the
BookDesigners
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014938730
For the creative. Never stop thinking.
CONTENTS
gnosis
\`n
ō-sis\ n. knowledge of spiritual mysteries [from Greek: literally, “knowledge”]
—New Oxford American Dictionary
The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.
—Antonio Gramsci, philosopher
PROLOGUE
Washington, DC
Kera Mersal was pounding pavement by 5:59
AM
, one minute ahead of schedule. She liked to beat the heat, of course, which settled thick over the Beltway earlier and earlier this time of summer. But she also liked to catch the Distric
t’s
wide thoroughfares, blocky marble structures, and out-of-scale monuments in their eerie magnificence as the first sunlight hit them from low, aspiring angles.
As her legs warmed to the task, her eyes focused, embracing the discomfort she sought from the cit
y’s
streets and paths each morning. Though she had
n’t
competed since high school, her
middle-distance
runne
r’s
build was intact, a lean but sturdy five feet eight that in her jogging outfit turned the heads of early morning motorists. She had maple skin and wavy Earl Grey hair pulled back tight in a ponytail. As she ran she listened to a BBC News podcast. She liked to know what the world was being told about what was happening in the world.
She ran along Embassy Row and into Rock Creek Park, where she could stick to trails all the way to the Potomac. It was usually when she hit the Mall that the buildup of lactic acid in her calves and quads tipped the scales toward discomfort, and she became aware of her pulse pounding in her chest and at her temples. She lifted her head as she rounded the World War II Memorial and then slowed abruptly. She would have completely missed the man sitting on the park bench except that
h
e’d
lowered his newspaper and looked directly at her. She stopped in front of him and tugged the earphones from her ears.
“Morning, Kera.”
“Lionel. Hi.” Her first thought was that this was some kind of test, and she felt her flushed cheeks warm a few degrees for having not noticed him sooner. He was not in disguise. Half a lifetime earlier, Lionel Bright had known three-dozen ways to alter his appearance on short notice. But for every day of the six years Kera had known him, he had always looked the same: like a middle-aged bureaucrat, with gray-white hair and beat-up glasses resting on his thin, angular nose.
H
e’d
once been in fierce shape, though impressive physical stats had never been among his genetic gifts. He was an inch shorter than average and as prone as
h
e’d
ever been to gaining weight if he neglected exercise.
Kera was breathing heavily. Out of instinct, she looked around. There was a black SUV parked on Seventeenth Street. Otherwise, nothing out of the ordinary. “A newspaper. How quaint. You know, the only people who read newspapers on public benches anymore are spies.”
“Busted,” he said, attempting to fold the paper. The broadsheet resisted stubbornly. He stood, giving up, and stuffed the rumpled sections into a trash can.
“That your ride?” she said, meaning the SUV but not looking at it.
“Not usually, no. But
there’s
someone in there
wh
o’d
like a word with you. Want to take a drive?”
“I prefer to run, actually. Tha
t’s
kind of the point.”
“I never got that. Come on. This wo
n’t
take long, and we ca
n’t
do it at the office.”
The
y’d
been tracking a group of Chinese bankers suspected of plotting a cyberattack on the New York Stock Exchange. There were also the antisecrecy hackers who kept publishing classified documents online. And, of course, there were any of a dozen hot spots being closely monitored in the Middle East. There was always shit flaring up in the Middle East. She made a silent bet that this was about a new intercept from a target there. But what could
n’t
be discussed at the office?
As they approached the SUV, the driver got out and came around to open the rear passenger-side door.
“Can you turn that off?” Lionel asked, holding out his palm.
Kera looked at her smartphone, which was still playing the BBC podcast. She powered it down and handed it over to him. Then she climbed into the vehicle. There was a woman seated opposite her in the backseat.
“Good morning, Kera.
I’m
Gabrielle di Palma.”
“I know who you are,
ma’am
. I
t’s
an honor.”
Kera had not seen the Directorate of Intelligenc
e’s
deputy director this close before in person. Di Palma had collar-length blond-white hair that shot back from her forehead. Shallow tributaries of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth were visible in the low light coming through the tinted windows. Di Palma was thin—bony even—and an inch or two taller than Kera. She wore a blazer with a silk blouse and skirt; the whole ensemble came together with a commanding elegance that made Kera self-conscious of her own sweaty running clothes. She felt even worse when she remembered that
she’d
dashed out the door without brushing her teeth.
“Lionel tells me yo
u’v
e come up under him in CSAA,” di Palma said, referring to the agenc
y’s
Office of Collection Strategies and Analysis. Kera nodded and glanced quickly at Lionel, who had climbed into the front passenger seat. The driver, Kera noted, remained outside. Di Palma switched on a tablet and pushed it across the seat toward her. “
I’m
going to offer you a job, Kera. But before I do, I need you to agree to keep this conversation between us. Please sign and fingerprint this NDA after yo
u’v
e read it carefully.”
Kera moved her eyes over every word of the agreement, but she was too distracted to absorb more than a quarter of them. Using a finger, she scrawled her signature on the touch screen and then pressed the flat tip of it to the print scanner at the bottom of the display.
“Thank you,” di Palma said as she tucked away the tablet. “As you know, the new frontier in our field is all-source data mining. The problem w
e’v
e run into at the agency is not our technology. W
e’v
e got that; w
e’r
e ahead of the curve, even. As a result, though, w
e’r
e absolutely buried under mountains of signals intelligence data that is piling up in servers much faster than we can make any sense of it. It will take a decade to address these problems institutionally. And that makes us vulnerable. Very much not ahead of the curve.”
Kera tried to appear as if she were listening patiently, but she could
n’t
guess why
sh
e’d
been pulled off the street so that the
D
I’s
deputy director could tell her what she already knew.
Di Palma paused as if reading
Ker
a’s
mind. “
I’l
l be direct.
I’v
e been cleared to field an elite team for a black op, code-named Hawk, to operate a more flexible and efficient cyberintelligence platform. I want you on that team.”
Kera looked to the front seat to gauge Lione
l’s
reaction. His expression gave her nothing. “I—”
“Hold on. I have
n’t
given you the most difficult thing you need to consider before making your decision. The mission of Hawk is to master information. To gather it at its source, to analyze it, and to act upon it at the precise time it is needed. The scope of this work may extend into areas many of our citizens and lawmakers would consider unacceptable. As a result, most of our missions will require us to operate completely off the books. That means we have to get all of the personnel for Hawk out of the agency. The team will be structured like a private contractor.”
“Is that merely a technicality, or are you asking me to leave the agency?” Kera looked again to Lionel. There was no way he approved of this.
Sh
e’d
only ever heard him curse agency people who defected to the private sector. His eyes urged her to keep listening.
“Both. I
t’s
a technicality, but it has real consequences. If yo
u’r
e not comfortable with this, yo
u’r
e welcome to walk away. If you accept, you will have to resign from the CIA and apply for a job at the
Global Report
, an online news organization that went live two days ago. You will then relocate to our offices in Midtown Manhattan. Your cover will be as an investigative journalist. Stories will be created and published in your name, but you will have nothing to do with those because yo
u’l
l be carrying out a variety of covert cyberintelligence missions under my direction and the direction of Dick Branagh,
wh
o’s
joining us from NSA.”
“Ms. di Palma—”
“Gabby, please.”
“Gabb
y . . .
m
a’a
m
. . .
if I may. I did
n’t
come to Langley and go through years of taxpayer-funded training just so that I could bail for the private sector at the first opportunity.”
This produced the first tangible reaction out of Lionel, who let a proud smile curl the corners of his mouth.
“This wo
n’t
be bailing, Kera. Quite the contrary. I
t’s
still an agency op, we just have to run things more independently than w
e’r
e used to,” Gabby said. “Everyone from the White House down is desperate for an elite unit like this. To develop it inside the agency would take a culture shift and a bureaucratic shuffle that we do
n’t
have time to wait for. Besides, some of the talent we need has already gone private, and the
y’r
e too hard to pull back.”
“When do you need my decision?”
“By the end of the week. Think about it carefully. And let me be very clear about one thing. Hawk will be secret and autonomous not only so that we can pursue the most advanced cyberintelligence operations ever conducted, but also so that the agency will have plausible deniability if anything goes wrong. Do you understand? If Hawk fails, they will disavow us.”
Kera heard herself say, “Yes,
m
a’a
m.
”
“Lionel, will you get my driver back in here?” Gabby said. Then she turned to Kera as Lionel stepped out, scanning her from head to toe as if noticing for the first time what Kera was wearing. “Would you like a ride?”
“No,
m
a’a
m
. Thank you.”
The driver opened
Ker
a’s
door, and Lionel must have seen the conflict on her face. He leaned past her and told Gabby to go ahead without him. “I think w
e’l
l take a walk.”
When the SUV had pulled away, they strolled across the open field that gradually sloped up to the Washington Monument. For several minutes neither of them spoke. Lionel Bright was the director of the Office of Collection Strategies and Analysis. His job title made him
Ker
a’s
boss. His conviction in her potential had made him her mentor. He was in his midfifties or thereabouts and claimed—correctly, as far as Kera knew—that no one in this world knew his real birth date. What did it matter? Kera doubted that
any
of his official biographical information was accurate, including his name.
“You put me up for this?” Kera said. He nodded. “Why?”
“Because yo
u’r
e the best.” She gave him a cut-the-bullshit look. In response, he tipped his angular nose down so that he could meet her eyes over the rims of his glasses. “You are. And also because I need you there.”
“You need me there because of me? Or because you do
n’t
trust di Palma?”
“Do
n’t
ask questions you know the answers to.”
He was right. Of course he did
n’t
trust Gabby di Palma. Distrust had been a cornerstone of his instruction.
Trust only your instincts and your training. Make an exception only when your instincts tell you i
t’s
worth the risk. As for really trusting someone, that may happen only once or twice over an entire career.
Kera had asked him once,
“Has it happened to you?”
“What? Trusting someone?” After a moment
h
e’d
nodded and said, “Twice.”
Sh
e’d
wanted to press him further then, to ask him who, but she did
n’t
.
“I need you at Hawk, yes. But
I’l
l miss you around here,” Lionel said, changing course slightly to keep them out of earshot of a family of tourists. “You ca
n’t
think about me, though. You have to choose wha
t’s
best for you.”
“What about wha
t’s
best for the country?” she said before she could stop herself. “I meant it when I said I did
n’t
go through the Farm and spend all these years working under you just to coast into the private sector.” She did mean it. And she hated that needing to prove her patriotism was ingrained in her DNA.
He shook his head. “This wo
n’t
be a pleasant job, Kera. Think about it. The
y’r
e going private with this because things are going to get dirty. Nothing yo
u’l
l do with them is going to be by the book.”
“In other words, i
t’l
l be real intelligence work?”
He chuckled, but his expression was sober. “Yes. And tha
t’s
a strong argument for why i
t’s
the most effective way you can serve.”
“Would you do it?” Kera said, searching his eyes. Aside from her parents, Lionel Bright was the only person she had ever trusted.
He exhaled deeply. “
I
t’s
certainly where the action is headed. Yo
u’l
l have access to technology the rest of the world wo
n’t
see for years. But as far as job security, I do
n’t
know. You heard Gabby. If something goes bad, yo
u’r
e done. You wo
n’t
be able to come back.”