End of Secrets (27 page)

THIRTY-SIX

After work she rode the F train to Broadway-Lafayette, her usual stop. She walked three blocks in the direction of her apartment before she stopped at a spot she knew to be out of view of any surveillance camera accessible by HawkEye. She flagged a cab and told the driver to take her to Eleventh Avenue and West Twenty-Seventh Street. There were no cameras there either. She got out on Eleventh and walked around the corner onto West Twenty-Sixth. She waited for another cab and told the driver to take her uptown and then cross over to Central Park West when they were in the mid-Seventies.

After the
y’d
cruised several blocks north of the Museum of Natural History, which was monitored heavily by surveillance cameras, she asked him to stop. For a block in either direction, the only visible cameras were trained on the entrances of co-op apartment buildings across the street. She stepped out of the cab and took the nearest path into the park.

She found Jones on a bench at the south end of the Great Lawn.

“Did you switch cabs?”

Kera nodded. “What are we doing here?”

“You initiated a HawkEye dossier on Rafael Bolívar,” Jones said. The anger in his voice startled her.

“H
e’s
connected, Jones.”

“How?”

“
I’m
working on that.” She checked the sight lines around them. If anyone other than Jones had been waiting for her, it was
n’t
obvious. “You wanted to come all the way out here to talk about Bolívar?”

“No. This is about you. You got too close to Canyon, and you were lucky he took a swim in the Hudson before he made you. But now Bolívar? You should
n’t
have snuck into the Control Room behind my back to set up a dossier on him. And you should
n’t
have gone to that ridiculous media pioneers event.”

“You have surveillance on me now?”

“Fuck you, Kera. Your privacy is not high on my list of concerns. Yo
u’r
e being reckless.”

“
I’m
being resourceful.
I’m
trying to solve this case. You might have noticed if you spent less time marveling at Gnos.is.”

“I spend my time exactly where
I’m
supposed to be. And i
t’s
where yo
u’r
e supposed to be too.”

“Sitting in front of our screens all day? Tha
t’s
working out well so far. Look,
I’m
sick of watching people disappear and not being able to do anything about it. I had to try something new. What happened in the Control Room today?”

“No. First we settle this. Convince me that tracking Bolívar is worth the risk. Because if he finds out we have surveillance on him, w
e’r
e done. Can you imagine the ratings bait that would be for his TV news and talk shows? If he gets one whiff of us, it will be everywhere.”

Sh
e’d
imagined that a lot, in fact, and now she wondered again why Bolívar had
n’t
gone public with his knowledge of Hawk. She did
n’t
mention that to Jones, though. She just nodded.

“Give me a sign that I can trust you,” he said. “Let me in on where you intend to go with all this.”

Kera thought of Lionel.
Do
n’t
trust anyone. Throughout your entire career, you will trust perhaps two or three people.
J. D. Jones did not qualify as one of those people, not by Lione
l’s
standards nor her own. But her instinct told her that Jones was at least an ally. She believed they were working toward the same end, even if they went about it in different ways. Her instinct also told her that she needed him. Jones was respected at Hawk, and without him sh
e’d
be isolated. That is, if she was
n’t
already. It was not encouraging that Jones thought it necessary to leave the most secure room in Manhattan and rendezvous on a park bench to have a conversation.

She began to talk and found that it felt good to do so. She focused mostly on Charlie Canyon and their bizarre exchanges—from the art show with the “stolen” paintings to confronting him about the missing people at the commercial shoot.

“In person Canyon was, I do
n’t
know—odd. Philosophical at times,” she said. “At first I thought he was just aloof, but he missed nothing. Sometimes I felt like he was three steps ahead of us.” She brought Bolívar into the picture by mentioning how sh
e’d
spotted him at the commercial shoot and had left with the impression that he and Canyon were working together. On what? Well, that was still the open question. “I did
n’t
intend to keep any of this from you. I was waiting, I guess, until
I’d
connected the dots. Because the truth is that I had evidence of nothing. It was
n’t
until that phone call today, right before the meeting, that I felt like I might be getting somewhere. And the timing ended up blindsiding you.
I’m
sorry for that.”

When she was finished, Jones sat in silence for a full minute. Then his eyes swept from one periphery to the other. He was checking for company, she realized, and it gave her comfort to see that he, too, expected them to be alone. Finally he said, “The reason I acted the way I did in the meeting is because I did
n’t
want Gabby and Branagh to think that you and I are working too closely together.”

Kera looked at him, openly confused. “Why?”

“The
y’r
e watching us.”

“Hawk is?” She shrugged. “OK. I guess I assumed as much. But so what? We have
n’t
done anything wrong.”

“What was the ONE case?” he said suddenly.

“What?”

“The thing Gabby was upset over.”

“Oh, that. I do
n’t
know much. Like I told you before, Gabby sent me to meet with a source. The guy had been a quant on the Street, and he said ONE hired him and some other math whizzes to work on complex consumer behavior models. Real invasive, data-mining-type stuff, and then selling off the information to the highest bidder.
I’m
a foreign cyberthreat analyst, Jones. It was
n’t
my area. But I asked her if she wanted me to look into it. I was mostly just kissing ass; I did
n’t
want the case. Though I guess it was
n’t
a total dud. Think of it this way: if a foreign government was spying on American consumers the way ONE is, w
e’d
go after them with everything w
e’v
e got, right?”

“Did she want you to look into it?”

“No. She told me to leave it alone.”

“Then what happened?”

Kera shrugged. “Rowena Pete happened. Gabby assigned me to
A
TLANTIS
with you, and ONE never came up again.”

“But you did
n’t
let it go.”

“Sure I did. It was
n’t
my responsibility, and i
t’s
not my area. What could I do?”

Jones looked confused. “What about the thing with the NSA hires? You brought that up.”

“That was a coincidence. I had alerts set up in the system. Same as I do for any case. I had
n’t
turned them off because I got swept into
A
TLANTIS
and forgot all about the stuff with ONE.”

“So you got an alert that ONE had hired some NSA guys.”

“Yeah. It was just a news report, if I remember.”

“You knew it would shake Gabby, though. Tha
t’s
why you brought it up. Why?”

“I was mad at her for treating me like an idiot, especially in front of the director. I was acting out; I just wanted to show her that I knew more than she thought I did.” Kera tried to think of anything sh
e’d
left out about the meeting with Travis Bradley. Sh
e’d
told Jones everything. Now it was his turn. “What are you dancing around? You think i
t’s
more than that? You think there actually
is
a ONE case?”

Jones had been looking up the Great Lawn. Now he looked at her. “I think i
t’s
much worse than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why do you think Gabby sent you to meet with that source?”

“Apparently, the source had come to us—well, h
e’d
approached the
Global Report
, anyway. He was a whistle-blower looking for a journalist. Gabby told me to find out what he knew.”

“What he knew? Or what he was prepared to talk about?”

“Wha
t’s
the difference?”

“You know the difference. Yo
u’r
e assuming Gabb
y’s
interest in this guy was to find out whether ONE was doing something illegal. What if she really sent you to find out if the quant was in a position to give ONE any trouble?”

“You mean, was he someone who needed to be silenced?”

“Something like that.”

“But why would Gabby—” Kera stopped herself and took a long moment to process this, first rejecting the thought multiple times before expanding her mind enough to accommodate what she thought Jones was saying. Not just Jones. Both Charlie Canyon and Rafael Bolívar had suggested it too.

“W
e’r
e working for ONE, Kera.”

She shook her head.

“Yes,” he said. “
I’m
certain of it.”

“Why do you say that?” She was still shaking her head.

“
V
INYL
.”

“Tha
t’s
the Gnos.is case?”

“Yes. About three months ago, Branagh formed a team to root out whoever is behind Gnos.is. I thought,
‘H
ere we go again
,’
right? Because w
e’d
already been through that. Did
n’t
you say you worked the Gnos.is task force the first time around?”

Kera nodded.

“We got back into it, and at first I forgot about how strange the assignment seemed. After all, Gnos.i
s’s
influence has only grown, and we still know virtually nothing about who runs the site or what their intentions are. Iran, China, Russia—w
e’r
e not sure whether the
y’r
e capable of something like this, but what if they are? It seemed like a natural precaution for the intelligence community to want to keep an eye out. And why not use Hawk? W
e’r
e the best, right? Plus, I have to say, on a personal level, Gnos.is has always kind of needled me. It keeps me up at night, you know? How are they doing this? They do
n’t
take in any revenue, which means they do
n’t
have to file with the IRS. They just exist. But why? What are they getting out of it? Why ca
n’t
we crack it? My point is, I was eager to be back on the case, and because of that it took me some time to notice something was off.”

“Off how?”

“The mission of
V
INYL
does
n’t
make sense. We are
n’t
looking for encrypted codes in Gnos.is news stories; we are
n’t
looking for signs of foreign political influence or espionage or even evidence that Gnos.is is storing user
s’
private data. W
e’r
e not really looking for threats at all. From the beginning this whole op has been laser focused on one aim: finding the people who run Gnos.is. Just ID
’e
m. Tha
t’s
the basis of every order
I’v
e received. I
t’s
crazy. Wh
o’s
interested in intel that myopic?” He was looking at her as if what h
e’d
just said implied something obvious.

“I think you lost me. What are you saying?”

“Our client for
V
INYL
is
n’t
coming from the intelligence community. I
t’s
ONE. ONE ordered the intel on Gnos.is, and I think the
y’r
e contracting everything else w
e’r
e doing at Hawk too.” He let this sink in.

Kera shook her head. “Tha
t’s
impossible. When I got to Hawk, I worked on Iran.
I’v
e worked on China. Most of what
I’v
e done here was on real, hard intelligence targets.”

“I know. But then that stopped, right? Whe
n’s
the last time you looked at a string of code from a Chinese computer virus or a satellite image of an Iranian nuclear plant? Kera, everything w
e’v
e worked on in the past six months, I can connect it all back to ONE.
V
INYL
, the meeting Gabby sent you on with that source, and now even
A
TLANTIS
.”

“It ca
n’t
be.”

“It can. I confirmed it.”

“How?”

“I got curious. I
t’s
a problem I have. My background is
n’t
military, and it is
n’t
government. I mostly do
n’t
give a fuck about rank. I believe in questioning orders. Call me disrespectful, but I did
n’t
have much of an internal dilemma before I decided to use my security clearance and some computer gymnastics to get a peek at where these intel orders were coming from.”

“And you found what?”

“Contracts. A lot of them. From what I could see, Hawk has contracts with ONE worth more than a hundred million dollars.”

“Those could have been planted.” Kera was indignant. “It does
n’t
make sense.”

“Sure it does.
I’m
not CFO, but I suspect a hundred million dollars is double what Hawk was making from government contracts.”

“Tha
t’s
not what I meant. Wha
t’s
ON
E’s
interest in
A
TLANTIS
?”

“You heard the director today. It all comes back to money. To hang on to these contracts, Hawk needs to keep ONE happy. ONE has this little problem creep up—all of a sudden, a handful of their artists start vanishing. They want to know wha
t’s
going on, and they want it to stop. And in the meantime they want to keep it out of the press. So they turn to us to figure out wha
t’s
going on, since w
e’r
e already working on other, bigger cases for them.”