End of Secrets (22 page)

“I do
n’t
understand,” she managed to say.

He smiled. “The look on your face suggests otherwise. I did
n’t
mean to alarm you. But I feel entitled to a few answers. What
I’v
e been trying to figure out is why a shadowy intelligence contractor would send someone like you to spy on someone like me. It seems like a waste of both your time and mine.”

“You do
n’t
know what yo
u’r
e talking about,” she said. It came out as a whisper.

“The answer, of course, is so boring and predictable as to not warrant a discussion: somebody must see a profit in it. Hold on, this is my favorite part.”

“What?” But then she understood. Jalen West. Canyon had closed his eyes, savoring the vocals as they built up to the final chorus. She had to get out of here.

“Wait,” he said when she started to get up. “I thought you wanted to trade information.”

She hesitated, then sat. What more did she have to lose?

“Where is the profit in this for Hawk?” he asked. “Who are they working for?”

“I told you, I do
n’t
know what yo
u’r
e talking about.”

He stared at her for a moment. “Maybe I was wrong about you. I did
n’t
think you were involved. You seeme
d . . .
” he shrugged, “better than that.”

“You do
n’t
know anything about me.”

“I know yo
u’r
e paid to spy on private citizens.”

“Whatever you think about journalists, i
t’s
not like that,” she said. “I investigate. I analyze. And
I’v
e accumulated a great deal of knowledge about cybersecurity. Tha
t’s
my area: computers and networks. But sometimes
I’m
assigned to stories that fall outside of my primary expertise. Tha
t’s
why
I’m
here.
I’m
not used to investigating humans. Especially domestic extremists,” she added, with an edge. “But
I’m
trying to learn.”

“Bullshit. You know as well as I do that it is humans who turn computers into cyberthreats. If you were
n’t
good at analyzing humans, you would
n’t
be very good at your job. Can I ask you a personal question?”

“No.”

“I
t’s
also a professional question. One that is particularly relevant.” With her silence, she gave him permission. “Do you ever examine something not for its potential as a threat, but for its potential to do good?”

“I
t’s
my job to see threats.”

“Even when they are
n’t
there?”

She did
n’t
answer.

“You have gotten one thing right about me,” Canyon said. “I am an extremist. But
I’m
not a threat, nor am I some kind of terrorist. My objective is to enlighten.”

“By making people vanish?”

“By making an argument.”

“I think yo
u’r
e delusional.”

“W
e’l
l see.”

“When?”

“I ca
n’t
tell you that.”

She put a twenty on the table and slid out of the booth. It startled her when he put his hand on the cash and pushed it back across the table.

“My treat,” he said. When he lifted his hand, there was a piece of paper on top of her twenty-dollar bill.

“Wha
t’s
this?” She picked it up.

“I put you on a guest list for a party that I think you should attend. Those are the details.”

“What party?”

But he was
n’t
listening. He was lost in the final measures of the Jalen West song.

She wandered onto the darkest street she could find and leaned against a wall. The tears came then, and she could not stop them. It was a moment of weakness, as inevitable as it was resented. But it was better to ride it out here, to let it destroy her in the privacy of this alley with her head thrown back against a brick wall, than to try to bury it and simply carry on. It took many minutes, maybe half an hour, until her breathing evened and she began to reclaim her mind.

There was a pay phone two blocks away. Sh
e’d
noticed it one morning on her commute soon after she and Parker had moved into the neighborhood. The cameras on that corner were privately owned, trained on storefronts; they did
n’t
capture pedestrian or vehicle traffic. The pay phone there was safe. Unsteadily, she straightened and stepped away from the wall, surprised at how much she had relied on it to keep her from collapsing to the sidewalk. It was very clear to her what she had to do. One foot in front of the other for a little while. That was all. And then pick up the phone. She moved through the streets anonymously. The city was cool and apathetic.

She had not used a pay phone in years.

“Bright speaking.” Lionel answered on the fourth ring. There were voices in the background. He was at a dinner or cocktail party. Her lips parted, but not even a breath slipped out. A beat of silence made the round trip from her end of the line to his and back again. Then another. The background noise grew fainter, and then it was gone completely. H
e’d
moved to a quieter room. She could almost hear his breathing.

“Who is this?” he asked.

On the street behind her, a large delivery truck whooshed through the intersection. In response to her silence, she could feel Lionel thinking, gathering intelligence, analyzing what the call could mean. Her vision blurred suddenly. She blinked until the moisture hit her cheeks and she could see clearly again. She was careful not to breathe. She was afraid to make a sound. She was afraid that if she did, she would break down.

Rather than admit failure, she hung up.

She was only five blocks from home, but she could
n’t
go there. There was too much to do. At Houston she flagged a cab and gave the driver the address for the office.

After tapping her badge in the lobby and again in the
TGR
waiting room, and then clearing the retinal scanner at the security checkpoint outside the Control Room, she went directly to the on-duty surveillance clerk. He sat at a console behind a counter in a small, adjacent anteroom.

“I need to process a target,” Kera said, exposing her eyes to another scanner. This one would attach her security clearance and case assignment to the intercept request. It worked like a filter, the idea being that not just anyone should be able to look at any private citize
n’s
correspondence. The agent making the request had to be cleared at the classification level of the intercept he or she was requesting to access, and the intercept had to be crucial to an open case. That would
n’t
be a problem. “Name is Canyon, Charlie. Her
e’s
his social and DOB. Case code name:
A
TLANTIS
. I need metadata of the targe
t’s
phone calls.” She hesitated. “Transcripts too. I need his e-mails. I need VoIP packets. Everything.”

HawkEye was useful for location tracking and collecting some transactional data, like credit card purchases, incoming and outgoing phone numbers, search engine queries, and e-mail header details. But it did
n’t
capture the actual content of private correspondence, which is what Kera needed now.

The young man keyed in her command. “Starting when, m
a’a
m?”

“Uh, I do
n’t
know. A month ago.”

He glanced up at her, but then obediently processed the order. There was no need to specify that the request was urgent. Everything was digital and therefore virtually instantaneous. By the time she walked to her office, all the requested files that were classified at or below her security clearance were accessible to her on one of the Hawk servers. After she retreated to the kitchen for a cup of coffee, she sat down at her desk and started to read.

TWENTY-SIX

“
I’l
l introduce you to her,” Parker was telling the bartender at
L@Ho.
“
I’l
l bring her in sometime.” H
e’d
been talking about her again. He did
n’t
know why the urge to talk about Kera was so persistent, especially here. He did
n’t
know why he felt himself nudging closer and closer to saying aloud the thing h
e’d
convinced himself never to mention to anyone. It was buried forever. It had to be.

Except it was getting worse. He was fatiguing. Forever was an impossibly voluminous amount of time, whereas just saying the words would get it over within moments. He could wrap his head around the latter; maybe tha
t’s
why it kept creeping up on him like an itch that needed relief. H
e’d
thought it would go away. Of course h
e’d
thought that; it
had
to go away. H
e’d
learned his lesson, and the best thing was to move on. Dragging it on like this served no one. “She works a lot. Too much, I think. Tha
t’s
how it is at the start of a career, I guess, right?”

The bartender wandered down the bar to attend to a new patron. Parker fiddled with his phone. He checked the half-dozen social networking accounts he oversaw at work and then switched over to have a glance at his own personal profiles. That was how he learned about the new It piece, a sculpture in Central Park. His fingers swiped and tapped, eager to learn more.

The piece of art, as described by a blogger, was discovered in a wooded area near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Once it had been “excavated” from the shrubs, the piece was revealed to be a slab of granite into which had been carved, in bas relief, a mock magazine cover. The magazin
e’s
name was
Renaissance Man Quarterly
, and the cover image was Michelangel
o’s
David, but distorted to mimic an unnaturally thin model with enhanced abdominal muscles, airbrushed pectorals, and facial features that betrayed the symptoms of a little surgical work. Having not defaced any public or private property this time, the piece was merely hauled away by authorities like disowned furniture left on the curb.

“Did you hear about this?” Parker asked the bartender, showing him a picture of the sculpture when he returned.

The bartender chuckled. “Is it It?”

“No one else has taken responsibility,” Parker reported. “Tha
t’s
one of I
t’s
trademarks.”

Displaying uncharacteristic interest, the bartender took Parke
r’s
phone and scrolled through the entire blog report.

“The other trademarks are there too.”

“Like what?” Parker said, surprised. The bartender rarely engaged him in conversation. He usually just listened.

“The way it required discovery. The
‘e
xcavation
.’
And the way the sculpture was trucked away so quickly by city officials, as if in a panic. I
t’s
art is always destroyed within hours of completion.”

Parker took a long pull from his gin and tonic. H
e’d
had a few already and could feel the dreamy buzz in his skull.

“You know what they say about It?” said the bartender.

“What?”

“That h
e’s
the freest person alive.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“He has no obligations. Not to family. Not to society. He exists as he wishes.
If
he wishes. I envy that, in a way.” After a pause, he added, “But I ca
n’t
decide if i
t’s
courageous or cowardly.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

The video opened on the casket. After a few seconds the camera panned slowly to the left, and there was the choir, about twenty strong, singing “Till We Meet Again” in purple robes. There were a few rows of parishioners, visible from behind, between the camera and the choir. These men and women were subdued, their heads bowed in respect or heartbreak. Ninety-seven seconds in the first chorus ended, and a young man stepped forward to sing the second verse. The image jerked and zoomed tighter before it steadied on the soloist. At the sound of his first notes, the total grief in the room became palpable. The first few bars were overwhelming in their pain and beauty. Even viewed on the YouTube video uploaded from a smartphone camera, the pain and beauty were utterly overwhelming.

Sorrow gripped her by the throat. Chilled goose pimples rose in waves along her arms. Kera was on the couch with her laptop and her earphones, a forgotten glass of wine on the coffee table beside her. Parker had long since nodded off and then come to just long enough to shuffle away to bed, mumbling incoherently. This was the first time sh
e’d
seen the video, which put her far out of step with most of America. The video had more than 180 million views. It was the first time sh
e’d
seen one of these viral videos and thought,
I get it. It is worth spending a few minutes of my short time on Earth watching this.
The soloist was unnamed in the video. He was just a young man, a boy, really, who stepped forward for a solo and unleashed a voice so full of innocent hurt and courage and beauty that the first record label would call within hours of the vide
o’s
posting.

That was five years earlier. Now Jalen West, the thin Detroit boy whose pop music career began at his best frien
d’s
funeral, was on top of the world.

Kera had
n’t
slept more than three hours in the last forty. Exhaustion dulled her judgment and played with her emotions like puppet strings.
Bedtime
, she told herself.
Tha
t’s
an order.
The night before sh
e’d
remained in her office until shortly after four
AM
, poring over the intercepts of Charlie Canyo
n’s
private correspondence. She discovered exactly what sh
e’d
hoped to find: nothing. Not one mention of Hawk to anyone. Not even a mention of the
Global Report
. However Canyon had learned of Hawk, he either was
n’t
very interested in it or he was being very careful not to discuss it with anyone. Both of those scenarios favored her. Though nothing excused her of her duty to report that her cover had been compromised, with each minute that passed without her world crashing down around her, she became more tempted to wait just a little while longer. Just until she could complete the case. Then she would come forward and acknowledge that someone on the outside had blown her cover.

As though it was against her brai
n’s
nature to shut itself down, her mind created a sudden memory of the slip of paper Canyon had passed her at the restaurant. It was zipped into the pocket of her shoulder bag, within ar
m’s
reach of the couch. She reread it. The note provided a Midtown address along with the day and time: Tues.,
8:00
PM
.
That was six days from now. Below these practical details were the words
D
O
N’T
MISS THIS.

In an act more of due diligence than hope, she Googled the address, date, and time. The event, to her surprise, was promoted widely. It was a fund-raiser gala called the Annual Celebration of Media Industry Pioneers.

Do
n’t
miss this.
Her detestation of Charlie Canyon had blossomed healthily. She despised him not just because he refused to admit his connection to the missing people, nor because he had compromised her undercover identity and thus her career; the thing that drove her most infuriatingly toward insanity was his ability to tell her just enough. Just enough to beckon her a little further into his world.