End of Secrets (40 page)

SIXTY-TWO

“Where to?”

Through the cab window, Kera could see people running up the paths in search of safety. Some cradled children, coaxed dogs, or yelled into cell phones. She blinked when two police cruisers swerved around the cab and cut into the park.

“M
a’a
m?”

“Just drive. Toward Midtown.”

She tried to focus. What were her options? Going to the hotel was out of the question, as was returning to the Hawk building.
Focus
, she ordered herself. As the cab cruised away from the chaos of the park and drifted into Midtown, where life appeared to carry on as usual, her phone rang. She pulled it from her pocket. It was Jones.

“Are you all right?”

“Get out of there, Jones. Whatever yo
u’r
e doing right now, just walk away.”

“
I’m
out. I left a few minutes ago. The
y’r
e 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 sh
e’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 the
y’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 ladie
s’
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 Bradle
y’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, wh
o’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.

“Le
t’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. Tha
t’s
hundreds of thousands of square feet of space. And see these plans for the central air-conditioning system? The
y’r
e serious about keeping this place cool.
I’d
say w
e’r
e 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
‘t
he bunker
.’
Parke
r’s
voice mail mentioned it too. Wha
t’s
in the other folder?” The server farm in the bunker was interesting, but this could
n’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 were
n’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 governmen
t’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 ON
E’s
information services as readily as anyone else.

“I
t’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 sh
e’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 worl
d’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 conglomerat
e’s
key executives.

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

“What are you doing?”

“The last two people who had these files were murdered. W
e’r
e 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’l
l explain in a moment why we do
n’t
need to worry about that. But first, where are we sending these? We should get started. I
t’s
going to take a while for them to upload.”

Kera bit her lower lip. “We ca
n’t
send them to the agency. You were right last night. The
y’r
e too involved. The
y’d
want the whole thing to go away, and
I’m
afraid the
y’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 sh
e’d
created for herself for situations like this—though sh
e’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 is
n’t
bad for a bar, but I do
n’t
think they had file uploads of this size in mind when they selected their Internet plan.”

“I think first you better explain why yo
u’r
e 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 Gabb
y’s
yelling into a phone that broadcast radio signals to Haw
k’s
team on the street. Kera had left the building earlier than any of them had expected and then, infuriatingly, sh
e’d
lost the one man who had been in a position to tail her. Then sh
e’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 syste
m’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 was
n’t
possible to get HawkEye back online. It had
n’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 Jone
s’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 sh
e’d
sent Kera to meet with a few weeks earlier. As requested, Gabby had passed Ker
a’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. The
y’d
been clever, but they should have known better what they were up against. It was
n’t
only Hawk and ONE that would prevent them from surviving on the run. If this little incident could
n’t
be contained before the CIA caught wind of it, then the agency would join the ranks of irritated parties who could
n’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 did
n’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 Gabb
y’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:

B
REAKING:
S
ECRET
ONE C
ORP.
F
ACILITY AT
C
ENTER OF
I
NTERNATIONAL
E
SPIONAGE
S
CANDAL;
FBI W
ILL
L
EAD
I
NVESTIGATION

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 h
e’d
not yet noticed the report on CNN. Bracing for the fallout, she nodded toward the screen, and he followed her gaze.

“M
a’a
m?” She could hear her secretar
y’s
voice in her ear. “Mr. Grassley sounded upset, but he would
n’t
say what he was calling about. Should I put him through?”

Across the room, Branagh suddenly exploded. “Wha
t’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 ON
E’s
CEO through. That question was answered a few seconds later when she heard her secretar
y’s
voice again.

“Ms. di Palma, I tried to connect Mr. Grassley, but there was some sort of disturbance at his office.
I’l
l 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 ON
E’s
headquarters.

“Abort,” Branagh said, seeing it too. And then, shouting, “Everybody out. W
e’r
e going black.”

Gabby did
n’t
move. Sh
e’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.