End of Secrets (6 page)

FOUR

Kera tapped her ID badge and pushed through the security turnstile in the ground-floor lobby of the steel and mirrored-glass skyscraper where Hawk leased office space under the name of the
Global Report
. Exiting the elevator on the twenty-seventh floor, she waved hello to the receptionist, who sat behind a sleek metal counter imbedded with a wide flat screen displaying the
TGR
logo and a digital news ticker that announced headlines as they went live on
TG
R
’s
site. Two sides of this room were glass, providing views straight into the open-plan newsroom behind the receptionist. On Ker
a’s
first day at Hawk, she had sat in this very waiting room and noted the ironic transparency evoked by the offic
e’s
open design. The appearance was of a busy, high-tech newsroom; what could
n’t
be seen beyond the newsroo
m’s
walls did not exist.

The waiting area was empty at this hour, as it was most hours. But the newsroom itself, which Kera entered through glass doors that slid open after another tap of her ID badge, maintained a staff around the clock. This staff consisted of copyeditors, headline writers, and a few senior editors who processed the unclassified reports fed to them from servers programmed to aggregate content for the
Global Report
. They assembled the reports into news stories and prepped them for publication. In addition to the editorial staff, a lean but highly capable department of web designers and IT personnel kept the news site updating constantly.

There was a cubicle in the newsroom with Kera Mersa
l’s
name on it. The desk had pictures of Parker and her family, the drawers contained binders with notes pertaining to stories filed under her byline, and the phone rang there when someone called the number on her
TGR
business card. Kera had sat at this desk only a few times—when Parker had visited the office, for example, or when she met with anyone who did not possess a high enough security clearance to be inside Haw
k’s
secure quarters. Kera walked past the cubicle now, as she did every morning, and turned down a short hallway that branched off the newsroom and led to a conference room, kitchen, copy room, and bathrooms. At the end of this hall was a solid, nondescript door. Kera waved her ID badge at an unmarked reader built into the wall next to the door frame. Inside she greeted the three security guards by name and unloaded her bag and phone onto the X-ray machin
e’s
conveyor belt. Making small talk with the guards, she steadied her face in front of the retinal scanner that hung at face level in the center of the room. She waited, unblinking, for the approving beep that came a half second later. The display next to the scanner read:

K
ERA
M
ERSAL,
I
NTELLIGENCE
A
NALYST

C
LEARANCE LEVEL:
TS
/
SCI

Beckoned by one of the guards, she passed through the metal detector and collected her things. It was eight thirty. A typical start to the day.

Kera noticed the light on in Gabb
y’s
office, which was several doors down and across the hallway from her own, much more modest work space. It was rare that Gabby beat Kera into the office. Kera set down her bag, turned on her desktop computer, and went across the hall to say good morning. Gabby was
n’t
at her desk. Nothing unusual about that, though. Haw
k’s
deputy director was constantly in meetings, often with Director Branagh, whose office was next door and whose door was always shut. Kera had met the director only once, and on that occasion—her first day at Hawk—the
y’d
hardly exchanged more than a few words in greeting. She got the impression Branagh was an old-school spy, antisocial unless it served whatever mission was at hand, and protective of the inner bubble he created around himself. Gabby operated as his enforcer and, internally, as the face of the higher brass for Hawk employees. As such, she spent a good deal of her day in the Control Room, the windowless chamber at the center of the floor plan where agents monitored data collected by HawkEye, the fir
m’s
proprietary surveillance software, and created reports that were disseminated to clients throughout the intelligence community, including—not infrequently—analysis that made its way into the presiden
t’s
daily briefing.

Kera had never been inside the Control Room. It was a restricted area that required need-to-know clearance for a particular classification of sensitive compartmented information code-named UNIVINT, or universal intelligence, which was the sort of all-source intelligence that was HawkEy
e’s
specialty. UNIVINT referred to a form of supercomputing that combined all available surveillance methods to construct a comprehensive, unifying understanding of a target or an evolving situation.

When it pertained to her work as an analyst, Kera had been granted access to raw reports generated by HawkEye, and sh
e’d
occasionally filed intel requests that were fulfilled by agents in the Control Room, such as obtaining IP addresses or tracking the precise movements of a hacker or suspected terrorist. But she had yet to work a case that required her to set foot in the room herself.

Gabby had e-mailed Kera early that morning to call her to a ten
o’c
lock meeting. Kera could guess what that meant. Gabby wanted an update on the Rowena Pete investigation. What was there to report? She still was
n’t
sure why sh
e’d
been assigned to the investigation, or even what they were supposed to be investigating. It did
n’t
seem clear to anyone that a crime had even been committed. It was even less clear to Kera why any of it was Haw
k’s
concern.

After a detour to the kitchen for her first cup of coffee, Kera retreated to her office to start prepping for the day. She began with the intention to start digesting what little she knew about Rowena Pete, but when she sat down at her desk, there was an e-mail from Travis Bradley, the ex-ONE quant. It was two sentences:
I
CAN GET EVIDENCE.
W
HAT DO YOU NEED FOR A STORY?

Ther
e’s
no story, Bradley
, she thought, closing his e-mail without responding to it and wondering how long it would take before he gave up on her and sought out a real journalist.

She was halfway through the cup of coffee when an e-mail came in from Detective Hopper. It was terse. The prints on all the evidence were a match to Rowena Pete. The town house had been examined top to bottom, and there was no sign of forced entry. There also was still no body. The NYPD was classifying Rowena Pete as a missing person. The detectiv
e’s
tone seemed to imply that the singer had simply run away, an interpretation that made it seem like she did
n’t
want to be found, as opposed to the alternative—that the detective was too incompetent to find her. This irritated Kera. The runaway theory did
n’t
make sense. Run away to where? And why? And, OK, say for a moment Rowena Pete
had
run away; why go through the trouble of staging multiple, symbolic suicides? Why leave behind her phone and wallet? Kera felt torn. A missing persons case seemed insignificant compared to the global threats of cyberwar and terrorism that she was accustomed to monitoring. But she could
n’t
suppress her curiosity. “Where did you go, Rowena?” she whispered aloud to herself, letting her eyes drift over the scissoring intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue below her window.

She needed to prepare for her meeting with Gabby. Normally, the first thing sh
e’d
do with a new subject was put in an intel request. But sh
e’d
only ever been assigned cases that unfolded on foreign soil and involved non-US citizens. She suspected that it would
n’t
be so easy to pull HawkEye data on Rowena Pete. Not without a FISA warrant, which was
n’t
even worth pursuing at this stage in the investigation. She wondered again why Gabby wanted her on this case—and why Hawk was even involved at all. She would get started soon, she told herself. But first, just for a minute, she allowed herself to gaze out the window, to be pulled into the patchwork panorama of billboards and flashing screens and ticker symbols ascending the vertical steel and glass that scraped the sky.

A three-story portrait of a young pop singer hung across the facade of a building with words announcing:
JW. New music from Jalen West
. An ad on a smaller scale made a pitch for a documentary film called
America
.
The search for the average American begins May 19
, the billboard said. The
America
ad was dwarfed by another ad for
Apocalypse
, this one the length of a tractor trailer, which offered one-word excerpts from unnamed critics—“Thrilling!” “Terrifying!” “Blockbuster!”

Soaring over this commercial thicket was an ad that was visible from every vantage in Times Square. It was a broad white billboard stretching across the facade of a skyscraper, perched high above the pitches for soft drinks, Broadway shows, and television programs:

ONE

There are 7,369,090,938
people in the world.
Soon they will all be connected.

The string of giant electronic digits at the center counted faster and further into the billions. Ever since the billboard had appeared months earlier, Kera often caught herself mesmerized by the number, watching it grow relentlessly, one digit at a time, turning over slightly faster than twice every second. The billboard began to unnerve her whenever she stared at it for too long. Is that what people wanted, to be connected?

Bradle
y’s
words rose up in her mind:
the end of secrets.
Across Times Square the number hit 7,369,090,967. And then 7,369,090,968. She turned to face her computer before the population clock could update again and began to look into how to handle intel requests for American citizens.

A few minutes before ten, she took her tablet and phone and approached Gabb
y’s
office. She felt unprepared. Looking into the intel request had been a mostly symbolic gesture meant to signal to her boss that she was
n’t
just sitting in her office staring out the window. The only actual development since last night had been Detective Hoppe
r’s
benign e-mail.

“Come in. Shut the door.”

Kera did as requested, sitting but not quite settling into one of the leather chairs facing the desk. Gabb
y’s
office was neat and sparse. There were no pictures of family, only a few framed photographs of Haw
k’s
deputy director shaking hands with familiar politicians and Washington bureaucrats—the current and former directors of the CIA, NSA, and FBI, a couple of presidents, the attorney general. Hawk operated completely without paper files and Gabb
y’s
office reflected that. No file cabinets lined the walls, no folders stamped
C
LASSIFIED
cluttered her desk. Just a thin, sleek computer, a tablet, a flat-screen television on the wall, and an STE—or Secure Terminal Equipment—desk phone for encrypted calls.

“I got a briefing from Hopper an hour ago,” Kera began, opening the detectiv
e’s
e-mail on her tablet. “NYPD is classifying this as a missing person, possible abduction. They collected prints, hair, and fabric samples from Rowena Pet
e’s
town house. Forensics all came back negative for an intruder. No demand for a ransom—so far. And no other sign of foul play.” Kera looked up from the e-mail she was summarizing aloud. “Except, of course, for the missing woman.”

Gabby leaned forward and put her elbows on the desk, tenting her hands in front of her mouth. She seemed to be thinking for a moment. Then she smiled. “I
t’s
much stranger than that. Come on. Ther
e’s
something I want to show you.”

Kera followed her boss into the hallway. They walked past Director Branag
h’s
office and then continued on, traveling a quarter of the way around the floor. It was
n’t
until Gabby slowed to make the left-hand turn down a short side hallway that Kera understood where they were going. At the unmarked entrance to the Control Room, Gabby stopped and gestured for Kera to step in front of the retinal scanner. Kera flashed Gabby a quizzical glance, but then she did as ordered and stood, unblinking, while the scanner matched her retina with her identity and security clearance. The scan was followed by a soft beep. She jerked her head back and looked at the adjacent screen, confused. It said:

K
ERA
M
ERSAL,
A
GENT

C
LEARANCE LEVEL:
TS
/
SCI
-
UNIVINT

P
LEASE WAVE
ID
CARD FOR ENTRY.

Kera looked at Gabby.

“Well, try it,” Gabby said.

Kera waved her badge over the card reader. When she did, she heard a dull click within the heavy door. The screen displayed a new message:
A
UTHENTICATION CONFIRMED.
T
HANK YOU.
H
AVE A NICE DAY.

Kera stood dumbstruck as Gabby submitted her own retinas for scrutiny and waved her badge.

“Congratulations, Agent Mersal,” she said, holding the door for Kera as they entered. Kera started to say thank you, but it came out as only a whisper. She was already looking past Gabby into the windowless room beyond.