End of Secrets (26 page)

THIRTY-FOUR

Lieutenant Commander William Farris of the US Coast Guard Rescue Command Center returned Ker
a’s
call late in the morning, just before she was about to walk into a meeting with Gabby and Director Branagh—a meeting she was
n’t
entirely confident her career would survive. They had long since run out of promising leads and were now struggling to imagine even the most out-of-the-box possibilities.

Over the past few weeks since the Background Noise Pollution plane crash, Kera had put in dozens of calls to the Coast Guard, NTSB, and FAA, none of which had advanced their understanding of why the plane had gone down or whether they should expect any bodies to be recovered. Now, over the phone, she explained to yet another Coast Guard man that she was a journalist researching a story on the aviation tragedy. He sounded surprised that sh
e’d
obtained his direct number and tried politely to transfer her to a spokesperson, but Kera somehow kept him on the line, assuring him that her questions would only take a moment.

“Am I right that the search-and-rescue effort has been called off?”

“Tha
t’s
correct. I do
n’t
know how to put it tastefully, m
a’a
m, but after a week in those waters, ther
e’s
very little to recover.”

“And no serious injury or loss of life to your crew, I hope?”

“No, m
a’a
m. W
e’r
e used to doing SAR missions in some pretty hairy weather. This was all sunshine and calm seas.”

“Do you know if there were any boats in the area when the plane went down? Are records kept for something like that?”

“As I said before, I do
n’t
have any information that has
n’t
already been released to the press.
I’m
happy to transfer you—”

“I understand. Maybe, if I could, just one more question. Do you think you could estimate for me the cost of the Coast Guar
d’s
search-and-rescue mission?”

“It was eighty-seven thousand dollars.”

Kera nearly laughed. “You just happen to have that figure at hand?”

“Only because yo
u’r
e the second person to call about it, and then just the other day, we—” The man cut himself off.

“
I’m
sorry, I did
n’t
get that,” Kera said. Across her workstation she could see that Jones had shut down his screens. He looked over at her as he rose, indicating that it was time to go. She held up a finger in Jone
s’s
direction. “Just the other day you what?”

“Well, i
t’s
not classified information. A pretty remarkable thing. Two days ago the United States Coast Guard Rescue Command Center received an anonymous cash donation of eighty-seven thousand dollars.”

Kera sat up. “Lieutenant Commander Farris, this is very important. You said you received another call about the expenses? Do you know who that call came from? Do you have a name or a number?”

“
I’m
afraid I do
n’t
, m
a’a
m. Did
n’t
think anything of it at the time. And then,
I’l
l be damned, that pile of cash turned up.”

She thanked him quickly and hung up. Then she ran down the hall to the conference room.

Director Branagh and Gabby did not look up immediately when she entered. Jones had found a way to stall for her by walking them through some data on his tablet. Kera took her seat and listened quietly as they finished. They were talking about Gnos.is.

“We need to discuss
A
TLANTIS
,” the director said, reclaiming the agenda after h
e’d
heard enough from Jones. His tone did not leave room for hope that this would be a pleasant meeting. “
I’m
going to be as blunt as I possibly can. This case came to us as a minor priority, a bullshit little side gig to bolster our reputation and take in a few extra bucks. I expected to have this thing sewn up and forgotten by now. And yet, somehow, we have half a dozen more disappearances linked to this case than when we started—and not a single fucking corpse or a hint of an explanation.”

Kera opened her mouth but was silenced immediately by a look of warning from Gabby and by the director, who raised a scolding finger.

“No. I don’t want any more excuses. Gabby put you two up for this, and you fucked up. The way you’ve managed this case makes you look incompetent, and that reflects poorly on Gabby. And what reflects poorly on Gabby reflects poorly on me. Listen to me very carefully. None of us can afford to look incompetent. Not right now. Not ever. All of our futures here are at stake. Nod if you
understand me.”

Jones nodded. Kera did not. Everyone looked at her.

“If I may, sir. There might be a new development,” she said.

“A development?” Gabby was furious. Kera could feel Jones looking at her.

“Well, I have a theory.”

Gabby started to protest, but the director stopped her. “Go ahead,” he said, as Kera had hoped he would. H
e’d
said it himself—the outcome of this case reflected on him. He was as desperate to solve it as anyone. But he would
n’t
pretend to be patient.

“I believe that the circumstances of the disappearances suggest that all ten of the missing people are alive and well.” Kera took a few minutes to outline the brief law career of Caroline Mullen, the twenty-nine-year-old woman who had abandoned her bicycle on the George Washington Bridge and supposedly leapt off. It had been Caroline Mulle
n’s
career track—as an associate attorney, not an artist or writer—that had set her apart from the other missing. And that had led Kera, early in the investigation, to the offices of Milton & Booth to talk to Raymond Booth, the estate attorney who spoke so highly of Caroline Mulle
n’s
skill and passion. Booth had also spoken to Kera about the legal rights of missing persons.

“In most cases of pseudocide,” Kera explained, “the subject is motivated by financial troubles or a failed romantic relationship. They fake their death to collect on a life insurance policy, to avoid a debt, or to flee an abusive spouse. None of our subjects appear to be motivated by such circumstances. In fact, i
t’s
quite the opposite. All were current on their taxes and credit cards at the time of their disappearance. And none of them were married, which means no spouses have been left in the lurch with respect to their legal marital status.”

“
I’l
l stop you right there,” the director said. “Are you suggesting that these people are not only alive, but that the
y’v
e gone missing
by choice
?”

“I am, sir.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said, and seemed to be considering the implications of this. But then he shook his head. “I
t’s
impossible. Putting aside for the moment the question of why they would even want to do this, I do
n’t
see how i
t’s
practical. A person faces hundreds of obligations that cannot simply be abandoned. What about bills, lease agreements, car payments?”

“I checked. Those obligations are real, and in every single one of these cases, arrangements were made in advance to avoid legal default. I thought that that was what Caroline Mullen might be helping them with, but I could
n’t
be sure. Until today.” Kera paused for effect. “An eighty-seven-thousand-dollar payment was made to the US Coast Guard to cover the expense—the
precise
expense, it turns out—of the search-and-rescue mission after that plane crash last week.”

There was a long silence.

“Tha
t’s
true?” the director asked.

Kera nodded. “I believe that the members of Background Noise Pollution created an aviation disaster to fake their deaths, and then paid the US Coast Guard for their troubles, in effect.”

“Why?” Gabby said.

“Because they want to avoid legal trouble.”

“Please. If a cash payment is all it took to clear people of legal trouble, that would happen more often,” the director said.

“I think this case might be unique,” Kera said. “If the only crime here is wasting taxpayer money, well, this solves that. Ther
e’s
no longer any victim.”

The director did not appear convinced of her legal expertise, but his silence indicated that he was at least starting to consider the possibility that she was right about the missing band members. Gabby was
n’t
quite there yet. “Why would someone wh
o’s
dropping off the grid care about legal trouble? That seems like the least of their worries.”

“Because they plan to come back.”

“But why?” Jones said. It was the first time h
e’d
spoken, and for this reason he got everyon
e’s
attention. He was looking at Kera, and not kindly. Sh
e’d
stuck both their necks out with her theory, and she had
n’t
consulted him first. Challenging her now was his way of showing Director Branagh and Gabby that Kera was alone in this hypothesizing. “Yo
u’r
e forgetting the most basic problem with this case: ther
e’s
no motive. Why choose to vanish? What do you imagine these people are trying to accomplish by disappearing—by faking their suicides—if they intend to come back?” He had chosen the word
imagine
deliberately to make her sound like a lunatic. She might have expected him to be annoyed with her, but this cut much deeper.

“I do
n’t
know,” she admitted.

“Say there
was
some motive to vanish—which there does
n’t
appear to be,” Gabby said with an edge in her voice. “How do you explain all the references to suicide? Why fake on
e’s
death so elaborately? Why not just walk away and disappear with no trace?”

Kera thought about this. “I do
n’t
know the answer to that. But if I had to guess—”

“
I’d
prefer we keep the guessing to a minimum,” said the director.

“I think the elaborate suicide scenes are a key part of the message the
y’r
e trying to send.”

“The message?” the director asked.

“Yes. Each of these people was passionately committed to what they were doing with their lives, whether it was art, or the law—whatever. They were highly unlikely candidates for suicide, and the way they went about staging their departures was so outlandish, s
o . . .
creative, I think it was their way of sending a message to the people who knew them. Like that phrase tha
t’s
left behind at all of the scenes:
‘H
ave you figured it out yet
?’ ”

“What is that about?” Gabby said. “I hear people saying it to each other. What does it
mean
?”

“I think in the case of these missing people, i
t’s
their way of saying,
‘I
’m OK. But
I’m
gone. You wo
n’t
find me unless I want to be found
.’ ”

“Do you have proof of any of this?” the director asked.

“
I’v
e told you what I know.”

Jones leaned back in his chair. He was not supporting her here.

“So, no,” Gabby said.

Jones was silent. Kera would have liked the opportunity to step aside and apologize to him. She knew he felt blindsided, and she hated the way he was looking at her now.

The chance to confer with him would not come, however, at least not now, because just then Director Branag
h’s
assistant burst through the conference room door unannounced to say that something urgent had happened with
V
INYL
.

Director Branagh, Gabby, and Jones stood immediately. Kera, who did not understand what was happening, looked up at Jones. “
V
INYL
?”

“The Gnos.is case,” he said, and then they all hurried away.

THIRTY-FIVE

At 1150 hours a cryptologist at an eight-screen array in Haw
k’s
Control Room leaned back in his chair and whispered to himself, “Holy shit.” For the past three months, his workstation had been tethered to a supercomputer buried fifteen stories under Manhattan. The computer, a Cray XK7 owned by the NSA, had been working around the clock to try to break Gnos.i
s’s
192-bit encryption key. The cryptologist had estimated that, if they got lucky, this brute-force attack on the sit
e’s
encryption key would take a few years. But luck was
n’t
a strategy of any Hawk operation. So while the computer churned away its calculations at more than seventeen million billion operations per second three hundred feet underground, the cryptologist sat at his workstation and studied what little anyone knew about Gnos.i
s’s
back-end operations, trying to come up with a faster solution that would
n’t
make him appear less useful than a computer.

The audible obscenity was on account of the fact that his job had just become exponentially harder. At midnight early that morning, Gnos.is had switched to a 320-bit encryption key. He was one part impressed—320-bit encryption keys were nearly unheard-of—and one part fucked. It would take a dozen supercomputers like the one he was using twice as long to crack a 320-bit key. They did
n’t
have that kind of computing power, and they did
n’t
have that kind of time.

The cryptologis
t’s
discovery was the first new information the
V
INYL
team had collected on Gnos.is in months, and for that reason it was of analytical interest. The heightened encryption level could mean that Gnos.is was undergoing a major system upgrade or data migration, and that might leave the site vulnerable in other ways. If Hawk was waiting at the right place at the right time, they might pick up on something that would help them identify whoever was behind Gnos.is.

Thirty minutes later an analyst monitoring Gnos.i
s’s
live site came forward to report something odd: a sharp decrease in the sit
e’s
routine maintenance. “Gnos.is basically looks the same on its face, but the
y’v
e halted all back-end maintenance. For the past twelve hours, the sit
e’s
been running on autopilot.”

“Is
n’t
it designed for that?” Gabby asked. Director Branagh stood back, quietly taking everything in.

“Yes, in some respects. But the site is still growing. Glitches pop up almost constantly. Without a team at work to fix bugs, these glitches will start showing on the front end within a few days.”

“Maybe they lost their funding,” someone suggested.

“And then upgraded their encryption? I do
n’t
think so. Jones, wha
t’s
happening with hosting?” the case officer said.

Jones, already at a workstation in the pit, had anticipated this question. H
e’d
tried to get a step ahead, but then he had to backtrack to check his work. Not because he thought h
e’d
been sloppy, but because he almost did
n’t
believe what he was seeing.

“W
e’v
e got increases here too, sir. Hostin
g’s
shifted to almost double the previous rates.”

“Put it on the big screen.”

A dozen pairs of eyes looked up at the wall-size display in unison. Gnos.is relied on the encryption key to remain anonymous. But the thing that kept the site live and out of danger from saboteurs or investigators was the way the site bounced quickly from server to server, staying ahead of pursuers. Gnos.is accomplished this by constantly making complete copies of itself, storing them on multiple servers, and switching randomly between them. By the time anyone could pinpoint where the site was being published at any one time, the live site had moved to a different server, usually on a different continent. Even if Gnos.is could be shut down on the right server at the right time, the site would just pop up on another server almost instantaneously.

What Jones put up on the big screen illustrated that Gnos.is had improved the speed of this random scramble of host servers. Before, the live site jumped from server to server at a rate of once every 90 to 120 seconds. Now the dots on the big screen were staying lit for less than a minute.

“The only reason the
y’d
do all this is if the
y’r
e getting ready for something,” the case officer said. “Judging by how serious the
y’r
e taking their encryption,
I’d
say i
t’s
got to be something big.”

Jones waited for his first chance to leave the pit and climb the steps to his own workstation. The Gnos.is discoveries—and what they implied—created a feeling among the task force that the
y’d
learned something new about the site. Jones suspected that that feeling would deflate quickly into helplessness as they began to realize that, in fact, all they had learned was that it would now be more difficult than ever, if not impossible, to actually learn anything about Gnos.is that Gnos.is did
n’t
want them to know.

“
I’m
sorry about the meeting,” Kera said when he approached. Sh
e’d
been standing at his workstation with a good vantage of the action unfolding in the pit below. “I did
n’t
mean for—”

“Sit down.” Jones had said this so calmly that she almost had
n’t
heard him. She was standing behind his chair, her body turned toward the big screen above the pit, which was still displaying a map of all the Gnos.is hosting sites the task force had identified.

“Wha
t’s
going on?”

“Do
n’t
look up there. Sit down.”

Kera sat and tapped the touch-screen keypad. Whenever her workstation was inactive for sixty seconds, it locked into sleep mode. It was an annoying and perfectly sensible security mechanism. The first time she entered her log-in passcode, she got it wrong and had to start over with the print scan. Jone
s’s
tone had thrown her.

“Can you hear me?” he said. She glanced over at him. “Do
n’t
look, just listen. Do you remember what Gabby said when you told her that ONE was hiring people from the NSA?”

Kera looked at him and then remembered h
e’d
told her not to, and she steered her eyes back to her screens. Her fingers resumed the detached motions of opening programs as if she were getting back to work.

“I remember. Wha
t’s
going on?” Gabby was down in the pit with the Gnos.is team, which meant she was out of earshot as long as they whispered.

“We ca
n’t
talk about it here,” Jones said and fell silent. When Kera finally stole a glance over at him, she saw that he was hunched over his desk writing something on a napkin. A few minutes later, he stood up and strolled over to her workstation. He was holding a coffee cup and, beneath it like a coaster, the napkin. He nodded at the
A
TLANTIS
dossiers Kera had opened on her center monitor.

“Interesting about that Coast Guard donation,” he said. His voice was casual, as if nothing else had happened.

“Jones, I would have told you. That phone call I took just before the meeting—tha
t’s
when I found out about it. I had to mention it in the meeting. The director wanted to shut us down.”

“Look, I gotta get back to work,” he said abruptly. Then he wandered off in the direction of the me
n’s
room.

Kera stared at the coffee cup and napkin resting on the edge of her desk. The cup was one of the disposable paper amenities from the Control Room kitchen. There was a half inch of tepid black coffee in the bottom. She lifted the cup. When she was done reading the instructions, she ripped up the napkin and shoved the crumpled remains into the coffee dregs before tossing it all into her wastebasket.