End of Secrets (2 page)

Kera nodded and sat down on a bench. “Leave me here, OK?”

She watched Lionel trek across the lawn and disappear into the blocks beyond Constitution Avenue. She sat for a long time, savoring the views of the White House and the institutional buildings that flanked the Mall. They felt different to her than when
sh
e’d
started her jog—there was something about them that was different from every other morning
sh
e’d
been here. It took her a few moments to understand what it was.

I’m
going to New York,
she thought.

ONE

Manhattan, Two Years Later

The man at the table was her source. She saw that immediately. He had chosen the darkest booth, the one with high wooden seat backs—for privacy maybe, or as respite from the harsh glow of daylight, which is always a little sad to see in a bar. He was watching the door when she came in, and from the shadows his eyes widened slightly.

Neither of them belonged in a place like this before noon on a Wednesday. The location had been his call. It made her wonder now if h
e’d
turned to drinking. He was thirty-three and rich, but the way he slumped in the booth made him look like an awkward college boy—spotty facial hair, a worn hoodie hanging off his slender frame. He was MIT-educated, with a wife of two years, a newborn baby girl, and a condo in Tribeca. She had never met him before this moment, but she knew all that. That and, of course, that he was newly unemployed. They were here to talk about his former employer.

“I should
n’t
be talking to you,” he had said over the phone a few days earlier.

“And yet you called me,” she had replied, her attention divided between the call and a database on the screen in front of her that was sorting through a list of IP addresses in Tehran. The man had apparently called the
Global Repor
t
’s
newsroom the previous day. Nothing unusual about that; the newsroom received calls like his constantly. Few of them were even potentially worth following up on. They all went into the system and, unless a computer flagged the message, it was ignored or deflected by one of the newsroom staff. Her computer had not flagged his call, but that was no surprise either. Her casework was related to foreign threats, and his was some sort of domestic matter.

Someon
e’s
computer had flagged it, though, because this gu
y’s
message had gone up the chain as far as Gabby, and Gabby had turned it over to Kera to see if it checked out.

“How can I help you?” Kera had said when she called him back to follow up.

“I saw your story.”

“
I’v
e written a lot of stories, Mr.—wha
t’s
your name?”

“No names. If I talk to you at all, it has to be on deep background.”

“Mm-hmm.” She sounded bored. It was only half an act. They always wanted to remain anonymous. A startling percentage of the callers were certifiable nut jobs absolutely sure that they had evidence of some newsworthy conspiracy—a secret murder, innocent death-row inmates, political crooks, the government spying on citizens.
If they only knew,
she thought.

“The ONE story.”

“
I’m
sorry?” She pried her eyes from her other work and pulled up the
Global Repor
t
’s
website on a new monitor.

“Your story about the ONE Corporation. The one about the Wall Street bankers.”

So that was why Gabby had stuck her with this—it was related to a story that had run under her byline. In the
Global Repor
t
’s
search bar, she entered the keywords h
e’d
just provided along with her name.
ONE Wall Street bankers Kera Mersal
. The headline popped up:
R
ISING
I
-
B
ANKERS
D
ECAMP FOR
ONE
.

“Sure,” she said, skimming the first paragraph. The article reported that, in an unusual move, the ONE Corporation had poached twelve men from Wall Street banks in the last year. She remembered reading it now. Could
n’t
have been more than two or three days earlier. There were at least one of these articles per day with her name on them, and although many were much less interesting than this, the banker piece had
n’t
particularly stood out. Not with everything that was going on with her actual casework. “What about it?”

“I have information about ONE that people should know.”

“What kind of information?”

“Information that ONE does
n’t
want you to have.”

“Why should I trust your information if I do
n’t
know who you are?”

“I was one of the bankers.”

This checked out. The number sh
e’d
reached him on belonged to the cell phone of one Travis Bradley, formerly vice president of Project Analysis (whatever that was) at the ONE Corporation, and before that a vice president at Goldman Sachs. Bradley had no criminal record, was in good standing with the IRS, and owed no debt other than a monthly balance on three credit cards. She listened to as much as he was willing to say over the phone, which, in her professional opinion, was more than he should have said into any electronic device. She said sh
e’d
get back to him, a promise she had no intention of keeping.

She wrote up a report for Gabby, filed it electronically, and had forgotten all about Travis Bradley by the time she returned her attention to the batch of IP addresses located six thousand miles away.

An hour later she got an e-mail from Gabby. The subject was “Bradley.” The entire message was two sentences:
M
EET WITH HIM.
S
EE WHAT HE KNOWS.

Which is how, two days later, Kera found herself in that Upper East Side dive bar doing the first fieldwork sh
e’d
done since joining Hawk.

“I quit,” Bradley told her.

“Why?”

There were a handful of people in the bar, none of them within earshot. Bradley had chosen the site—far from his home and far from the stomping grounds of any of his ex-colleagues on Wall Street or at the Midtown headquarters of ONE. Pool balls clacked on a scuffed table in the back. A few patrons chatted up the bartender, their wandering eyes cutting between televised baseball games. There was a jukebox, but no one had bothered to feed it any money at this hour. Instead, a Tom Petty album played low from the speakers.

“I could
n’t
do it anymore.
I’v
e made too much money to claim to have a conscience, but tha
t’s
the closest thing to it. Can you turn that off?” They both stared for a moment at her phone on the table between them. After sh
e’d
switched off the mic and dropped the phone back into her bag, he spoke quickly. She did
n’t
have to ask him many questions to keep him talking. The gist of his intelligence was this: ONE had hired the bankers to develop sophisticated algorithms that could mine huge amounts of data and deliver precise predictions about consumer behavior.

“So what?” Kera said. “Do
n’t
all smart companies do that, or at least try to? I search for something online, the search engine uses all of my recent web activity to get me the best results. I buy music or a book, the retailer tells me what other titles
I’d
like. How is what yo
u’r
e talking about different from that?”

“Those are very two-dimensional examples. What ONE is actually able to do is more like this: ONE gathers up a record of all the entertainment you consume, and the entertainment your friends consume, and how close you are to each of those friends. Most of that stuff is trivial, of course, and consumers are just giving it away anyway. But ONE also is gathering up data on the jobs yo
u’v
e held, and your educational background, and your medical history, and the medical history of your relatives, and your driving record, and most of your financial transactions, and a thousand other factors yo
u’d
never even think about.”

“But how could ONE get all of that?”

“You mean, how is the data collected?” He shook his head. “I knew better than to ask that.”

“You think the
y’r
e getting it illegally?”

“Would there be a legal way?”

“I hope not. But then
why
? ONE is a media company. Why do they even want data like that, especially if they have to break laws to get it?”

“The
y’r
e not just a media company. Not anymore. Their ultimate objective—the arrogance of it—is staggering. It would have been laughable to me before I got to ONE, especially coming from the Street, where I thought arrogance had been perfected. But
I’v
e seen these models work, and—”

He hesitated, and she sensed he was holding something back. “And what?”

“With data on this scale, yes, they can tell you what book you might want to read next. But they can also tell an insurance company your likely medical future, including the age and cause of your death. Or they could tell an employer whether you are the best candidate for a job yo
u’v
e applied to. Or supply a universit
y’s
admissions committee with a report that details not just whether yo
u’r
e a qualified candidate, but what yo
u’r
e likely to do with the degree they give you, and how much yo
u’l
l be making ten years from now.”

“I
t’s
hard to believe it could be that precisely predictive.”

“Believe it.”

“And this data is for sale?”

He nodded. She saw his eyes scan to the door. “That part is secret. Well, everythin
g’s
secret. They have a whole new facility full of servers—they call it
‘t
he bunke
r’—
that no one is allowed to see, just churning out these calculations. But the
y’r
e most secretive about the fact that the
y’r
e selling the information.”

“Selling it to who? Insurance companies, employers?”

“Yes. And other clients.”

“Like who?”

This time he shook his head. “Use your imagination.”

“No,” she said. “I hope yo
u’l
l forgive my skepticism, but extraordinary claims like this require extraordinary evidence. And yo
u’r
e hardly making sense. Yo
u’v
e got to give me something more concrete.”

He shifted awkwardly in his seat. Again, his gaze darted around the room before it returned to a point on the table between them. “I think I better not say anything more.”

“Have you been threatened? Why not go to the cops first?”

He shook his head as though frustrated with her. “This is a little outside their jurisdiction.”

“The FBI, then?” she asked, reaching.

His eyes caught hers and then he looked down. “That is
n’t
an option.”

“OK. Then wh
y’d
you call me?”

“I told you. The article you wrote. I thought maybe yo
u’d
turned up something about ONE on your own that I could help confirm. But if
I’m
the only source, the
y’l
l know it was me.”

“Who will know? ONE?”

“Yes. An
d . . .
their clients.”

She gave him a few beats, a final chance to elaborate, but he did
n’t
jump at the opportunity. “Well,” she said, standing to leave. “When yo
u’r
e prepared to say anything more specific, you know how to reach me.” Gabby had been vague about what Kera should hope to learn from this meeting, and Kera had exhausted her patience for fishing around in the dark. She made it only a few steps across the room when he said something more. It was the way h
e’d
said it, like a confession made on an impulse, that urged her to stop and look back at him. “What?”

“The end of secrets,” he repeated.

She returned to the table. “OK,” she said. “That was portentous. Now what the hell does it mean?”

He waited a few moments for her to sit, but when she did
n’t,
he began to talk again. “When the other quants and I started at ONE, the first thing we did was have a private lunch with Keith Grassley, the compan
y’s
CEO. Well, the first thing after w
e’d
signed a bunch of nondisclosure agreements to ensure w
e’d
never repeat anything like what
I’m
telling you now.” He swallowed, and again his eyes worked the room. When they returned to her, there was something like anger in them, as though she were forcing this from him.

“At the end of that meal, Grassley stood up and told us why we were there.
‘O
NE is no longer just a media company
,’
he said.
‘W
e are an information empire
.’
I know, I rolled my eyes at first too. But it was
n’t
hyperbole. He told us that in the future, perhaps the near future, power in the world would lie with those who could amass the most information and have the ability to organize it with a few strokes of a touch screen.
‘P
erfect information about the past and the present contains the very instructions to build the future
.’
Tha
t’s
another quote I recall. This information was out there, he said, as it had always been. It just needed to be collected. When ONE accomplished that, he said, it would be the end of secrets.”

“H
e’s
a quotable guy.”

“Yeah, well, when you have a minute, think about that last one,” Bradley snapped. But then, just as quickly, the anger washed out of his eyes, and they flooded with desperation and fear. “Will you write something?”

She shook her head. “Yo
u’r
e an anonymous source with no evidence. Give me a call when yo
u’r
e ready to go on the record and have some proof to back it up. Until then, yo
u’r
e just a coward with a conscience. And that is
n’t
news.”

The way she walked away, backlit by the blinding daylight coming through the windows near the front, she must have looked to him more silhouette than woman.