End of Secrets (3 page)

TWO

The premise of the exercise was simple: notice something new about the neighborhood. An architectural detail, a storefront, a billboard, a pattern in the flow of pedestrian traffic. Lionel had taught Kera the game early in her training. H
e’d
insisted that it was a crucial exercise, both to help maintain observational fitness and to understand new environments. She found that it was most interesting to play the game in places she thought were most familiar. A startling array of things was always there and never seen. Most days, like today, a perfectly new detail in the landscape revealed itself to her in plain sight and reminded her of the extraordinary vastness of the ordinary world. It was a beautiful thought, but it was also evidence of a weakness, a vulnerability.

The words caught her eye by chance. Technically, this violated the spirit of the exercise, which called for deliberate observations. Nevertheless, there they were—six words where she had never noticed them before. Sh
e’d
just disembarked from the downtown N train, and the bottleneck in the stairway drew her gaze upward over the hats and hair and bald heads toward the freedom of the sidewalk. The words were made of small letters—the entire phrase stretched at most four feet—painted on the underside of a scaffold landing that shielded pedestrians from the persistent construction along Houston Street.

H
AVE YOU FIGURED IT OUT YET?

She cleared the bottleneck and climbed the stairs with her face tilted up, studying the phrase. The vanda
l’s
penmanship was plain, unlike the stylized tags graffiti artists threw up on walls and train cars and mailboxes across the city.

Have you figured it out yet?
The words were close together, each one nearly running into the next. It might have been the work of a bored construction worker in broad daylight. It might have been someone high or drunk, claiming a small corner of the city in the night. It might have been anyone. The city was dense and unfathomable.

Kera moved with the flow of commuters, the words passing overhead, and then she was on the sidewalk.

She scanned the intersection at Broadway and Houston. The streets and subway tunnels roiled with the citywide migration from office to apartment, career life to family life, from museums to Broadway theaters, cocktails to dinner, from daylight to twilight. Leashed dogs, freed from a da
y’s
captivity, splashed urine at the base of walls and planters and parking meters. Bareheaded cyclists dodged fares climbing out of open cab doors. Banks went dark and sports bars ran specials. It was rush hour and happy hour.

It was early for Kera to be off work. Normally, she stayed at Haw
k’s
Times Square offices until after dark. But today coordinated raids in Sweden, Germany, and Russia had resulted in the arrests of anarchist hackers that her team had been homing in on for months. Gabby had congratulated them and sent everyone home early, reminding them that there would be many late nights to come. Kera had no intention of taking the evening completely off. She had other cases. But she could do that work from home via the secure connection to Haw
k’s
network while she waited for Parker, who was in the air over the Atlantic and due home in a few hours. She would have dinner waiting for him, she decided. Her fiancé. She had cooked rarely since she moved to the city, and even less since they moved in together. Preparing a meal would mean an inventory of the cupboards and refrigerator, and then a run to at least two of the narrow-aisled groceries in the neighborhood. All of that, just to cover a simple recipe. Maybe she would just order out something nice.

She paused at the edge of the intersection, anchored against the humanity seeping up from the subway tunnels and receding into the buildings. She liked to absorb the chaos of the city at the end of the day, to measure its unsteady pulse against her own. She had heard that this city was unforgiving, that the people here were cold, or greedy, or lonely by the millions, that life here was gritty and hard. She had ignored these warnings when sh
e’d
accepted the job. She wanted to see for herself. She had lived here now two years, two years exactly to the day. She was unnoticed and underestimated and underpaid. But she was underway.

On the sidewalk nearby, a homeless man sat patiently watching his coffee cup fill with change as the stuffy transit system drew breath through the grate beneath him. She did not avert her eyes, though the cit
y’s
beggars still disturbed her more than D
C’s
had. Gabby, who was a New Yorker by birth, had assured her that she would get used to the homeless, just as she would get used to the other extremes that in the city were routine, like the absurd monthly apartment lease payments or the trash bags piled to shoulder height along the streets and the rats that darted from beneath them. Kera had no intention of getting used to any of this. Routine dulled the senses. Her training had taught her that people saw only what they wanted to see and what they happened to see. A good agent must see everything else. She was only an analyst now, but she knew that taking the job with Hawk had put her on track to make agent and could eventually lead to a long career as a case officer.

Her eyes lingered for a moment on the begga
r’s
cup. Emblazoned on its side, with the logo of a popular coffee chain, was a colorful graphic promoting the release of a forthcoming movie.
Apocalypse,
it said.
May 22.
A pair of pretty actors clutched each other, witnessing some unseen horror that was suggested by orange fireballs reflected in their widened pupils. This same advertisement glowed—on a much larger scale—from the side of a five-story building across the street. The electronic billboard lurked over the intersection, dominating the canopy of the neighborhoo
d’s
tangled commercial jungle. A few seconds later, the board served up a new ad, this one featuring a naked model, artistically obscured in shadow, pitching a me
n’s
fragrance (with dubious effect, given the palette of
smells—garbage
, bus exhaust, urine, the overcooked meats sizzling on vendor
s’
carts—all competing for attention at street level). And then the giant LED screen flashed back to the Hollywood production, invading sight lines in every direction.

She skirted the bu
m’s
outstretched legs and crossed Broadway toward Lafayette. She knew all she needed to know about
Apocalypse
. First, that the film was crap and she had no intention of viewing it. And second, that she did
n’t
matter; the movie was predestined for box-office glory with or without her approval. But mostly, she was aware that the studio that had produced the film was owned by the ONE Corporation, the worl
d’s
largest media conglomerate.

After the meeting that morning with Travis Bradley, Kera had gone directly to Gabb
y’s
office. Although Kera now considered Haw
k’s
deputy director approachable, she was as aware as sh
e’d
been at their first meeting—in the back of that SUV on the National Mall—that this was a shrewd, impatient woman who was difficult to please. Kera knew nothing about Gabb
y’s
personal life but assumed it was impossible she was married.

“You look flushed,” Gabby said when Kera was escorted in by her bos
s’s
militant gatekeeper of an assistant. “Wha
t’v
e you got?”

One thing Kera had learned through a half-dozen embarrassing reprimands over the preceding two years was that the deputy director loathed having her time wasted. Kera spoke without sitting down.

“ONE Corp. hired a dozen investment bankers from prestigious Wall Street banks over the last ten months. All men, of course. Quants—the math guys on the Street who turn market data into money.”

“And Bradley was one of them?”

“Yes, tha
t’s
confirmed.”

“What does he want?”

“H
e’s
doing the whistle-blower dance. The charges are a little foggy, but he claims ONE is running some sort of Total Information Awareness data-mining project and selling off the consumer data.”

“Selling it to who?”

“He would
n’t
give any specifics.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I do
n’t
know. ONE is
n’t
an investment bank. Hiring a dozen of the best quants in the world does strike me as odd.” But that was
n’t
the main thing about the meeting with Bradley that had stayed with Kera. “His fear was real. Whatever he thinks he knows, h
e’s
not comfortable talking about it. Then again, he said he would
n’t
go to the Feds, so maybe he knows his story is
n’t
credible. Want me to look into it?” she said, hoping Gabby would say no.

“No. Forget it. Go home. Go to the park. Go to a museum. I do
n’t
care. Pretend you enjoy having an afternoon off. Tha
t’s
an order.”

“Yes, m
a’a
m.”

Sh
e’d
lost all track of time when she heard the key in the lock. She met Parker at the door and embraced him before he could pull off his shoes, lifting herself a few inches to his height by going on tiptoe. His familiar smell was layered with a stale whiff of recycled airplane air. His youthful, all-American handsomeness was textured with an extra da
y’s
scruff. When his cheek brushed hers, she felt a warm, satisfying shiver. It reminded her, in the way that only a touch, smell, or song can surface a memory, of the first months sh
e’d
spent with him. The months when sh
e’d
first detected the symptoms of love.

“I brought us something,” he said, unveiling a bottle of wine from a paper bag.

When she saw the label, she smiled. “You already proposed to me, remember?”

“I want to hear your answer again. The first time I was too nervous to take it all in.”

She mussed his sandy-blond hair and then stood back and made a show of contemplating the question posed by the bottle. Finally she said, “Well, all right, yes. I will spend the rest of my life with you if you keep turning up with bottles of wine and that sweet look on your face.” And then she leaned in to kiss him.

The night Parker had gone shaking to one knee to utter his blur of compliments and confessions and, finally, the proposal, they had been right here in their new living room with an identical bottle of wine—the winery was called Eons; he was prone to gross
sentimentality—and
a too-expensive dinner the
y’d
ordered for takeout to avoid paying extra for a tip.

“Oh, shit. Dinner. Yo
u’r
e probably starving,” Kera said, remembering now with a pang of guilt. “I got distracted with work. What are you in the mood for?
I’l
l order us something.” She made a move to carry the wine to the kitchen, which, like most of the apartment, was only a few feet from the front door.

“Big news day today, huh?” Parker said, watching her with his gray-blue eyes and a big grin.

“Hmm?”

“Your story. This spy business with Iran.”

“Oh, that,” she said, struggling to remember what she had supposedly written about Iran. Iran and China had become her main fields of expertise, first at the agency and now at Hawk. But she could
n’t
remember what latest piece of the international saga had been released by the Pentagon or uncovered by an actual reporter somewhere that would have triggered a story today under her byline in the
Global Report
. Sh
e’d
read the brief at the office, and she must have glanced through the copy—she always did—but her mind had been preoccupied after her meeting with the ONE whistle-blower, and sh
e’d
failed, apparently, to retain even a few conversational details about the latest Iran headline.

“It was hardly a scoop.
I’m
not exactly reporting from the front lines,” she said.

“At my job it might matter who gets there first. But at yours it only really matters who gets it right,” he said, opening his laptop. “Look, your piece has dozens of shares on Facebook. Almost a hundred tweets.” He looked up at her. “My fiancé
e’s
famous.”

“Hardly. And do
n’t
say that. Fame ruins careers in my business,” she said, kissing him playfully and pushing him toward the bedroom. “Get out of here. Make yourself at home.
I’m
going to order Thai.”

The moment he disappeared into the bedroom, dragging his suitcase, she spun his laptop around and started reading. There was her name under the headline
M
ALWARE
C
RACKED,
S
HEDDING
L
IGHT ON
I
RA
N’S
A
MBITION
. She was doing some real multitasking now, one hand in and out of a drawer with the takeout menu, the other scrolling the web page as she read through blocks of copy.