End of Secrets (41 page)

SIXTY-FOUR

Kera wore a hat and glasses and was careful to turn away from the cameras in the airports. Even without HawkEye in operation, the cameras were still there, and they still saw nearly everything. Hawk, sh
e’d
read on Gnos.is and elsewhere, had been dismantled. Gabby, Branagh, and dozens of ONE executives had been arrested. But the agency would be looking for her, and they were
n’t
interested in a hero; they needed scapegoats. She could see the signs of their work already—in the evolving speculation from media pundits about the motives and credibility of the “anonymous” leaker, which had begun to sour. Common sense dictated that she should stay out of airports and lie low, and that she should not attempt to leave the country. Which was why she was doing just the opposite.

She had another reason too.

In Houston she considered calling her parent
s’
home phone to leave a voice mail and then decided against it. They might be waiting by the phone, even though they would have been at work at this hour on a typical day. Instead, she wrote them an e-mail. She explained, rather lamely, that her work situation had grown complicated, a gross understatement given what her parents would be reading in the news. She added that she needed some time alone for reflection after everything that had happened. This was probably not an adequate explanation to give to a parent, but it was all she had. She knew they would forgive her, whether she deserved it or not.

It had been just before she boarded the flight out of the States that she happened to look up at a television to see a report that ON
E’s
stock price was in free fall. The company was threatening lawsuits, a strategy that seemed increasingly laughable as its top executives, one by one, were indicted for white-collar felonies.

SIXTY-FIVE

Garita Palmera, El Salvador

Once she was on the ground and through customs in San Salvador, Kera hired a driver to take her into Garita Palmera. There sh
e
rented a bike. For most of the afternoon, she pedaled slowly on dirt roads, constantly triangulating the only landmarks she had to go by: the beachhead, a cluster of distant buildings, the ocean farther in the background. It was late afternoon when she finally came upon a small dwelling that seemed to fit all the criteria. She dismounted and leaned the bike against a water pump. A young girl, maybe seven, was playing in the dirt and looked up at her. Two unkempt dogs sniffed for food by a blackened fire ring. Kera mounted the steps to the porch. There was no proper door, just a simple curtain and a bug screen, through which she could see a woman washing dishes. She knocked on the frame and the woman came to investigate.

She removed her sunglasses. The woman looked a few years younger than Kera, but easily old enough to have mothered the child in the front yard. She had skin darker than Ker
a’s
, and hair blacker. Kera judged quickly that she and the woman did not share any relatives. She determined soon after that they also did not share a common language.

Kera removed the photograph from her pocket. It was the original print; the digital copy had been abandoned along with her phone. While the woman studied the photo, Kera glanced past her, into the main room. From the photo, Kera recognized the large window in the far wall and the wooden pole in the center of the room, supporting the low ceiling. But the furniture and other decorations had been replaced. The family who had been here then had long ago moved on.

The woman handed the photo back, confused. Kera pointed to the infant in the photo and then to herself. She repeated this motion several times. When understanding came into the woma
n’s
eyes, they grew wide and round and then a little damp. The woman became excited and offered Kera a cup of something hot to drink and a chair to sit in. Kera politely declined both. She only needed a minute. She put the picture back in her pocket, and there it was in real life—the view that had become familiar to her from years of studying a creased and faded four-by-six print.

Her affiliation with the present slipped momentarily. Time scoped, refocusing like a giant lens. Over the past few years, and especially with the
A
TLANTIS
case, her identity had morphed to the point that it was no longer definable, even to her. Who was she? Perhaps this had started much earlier than her career in the intelligence community. Who was the infant girl in the photo? This was what she knew: she was a disavowed clandestine agent of the US government. She was an American, born elsewhere, a daughter of someone els
e’s
making, an ex-fiancée to an earnest and loving man who had been killed because of his links to her.

She drifted back into the present one layer of awareness at a time, hearing first the distant waves and the call of seagulls, and then a motorbike on the road, and finally, the window curtain in front of her, flapping in a breeze.

Who was the infant girl in the photo?

It had taken a thirty-year journey before she had arrived here to really ask herself that question. She would start over now. And this time she would do a better job of keeping track of the answer.

A few days later, Kera took a trip to the city and picked up a copy of the
New York Times
, which she had been monitoring online in short snatches of time she stole on the hote
l’s
tired, shared computer. Exchanging cash for the paper in a small kiosk on a dusty commercial street, she thought that her father would be proud that they still lived in a world where news was printed on broadsheets and distributed to faraway news shops not unlike his own. He would be less proud of the story on page one that began in a narrow column beneath the fold. F
ORMER
I
NTELLIGENCE
A
SSETS
I
NVESTIGATED FOR
T
REASON
, it said. And then her name, right there in the lead paragraph. Though sh
e’d
already read it online, it seemed more consequential in print.

Kera Mersal, a former CIA analyst, and James Carr, a former employee of the NSA (who goes by the name J. D. Jones), are wanted for questioning as federal authorities struggle to learn more about the widening ONE scandal that has rocked both Wall Street and the global intelligence community.

Investigators say they now believe Mersal and Carr were behind the massive leak of classified documents published to the website
Gnos.is
by an anonymous source last week. A
CIA official with knowledge of the investigation said that the leaked documents, which at first appeared to implicate the agency in the scandal, were in fact fabricated and planted by Mersal and Carr on behalf of Russian and Chinese intelligence organizations in an attempt to shift the balance of power in global espionage circles. Such charges, if brought, would amount to treason under US law and would ratchet up tensions between Washington and Beijing and Moscow.

The CIA maintains that their involvement with ONE was a carefully planned strategy to infiltrate the corporation and learn about their illegal practices of collecting and selling detailed information on US citizens to foreign agencies. The CIA operation, the agency claims, was badly damaged by Mersal’s and Car
r’s
actions. Mersal and Carr are reportedly at large.

Meanwhile, experts predict that the crippled media giant, ONE, which was first at the center of the scandal, is spiraling toward bankruptcy.

Kera sat on the balcony of her hotel room overlooking the beach. She read the article again and again, folding the irrelevant half of the paper back on itself to prevent interference from the breeze that occasionally blew a ribbon of hair across her face. This was another reason sh
e’d
come to the tiny Central American country: to wait and see what she was facing. Now she knew. It was part of the game, she thought. It was the agenc
y’s
way of trying to get her and Jones to resurface on their own and defend themselves.

She sat in silence, thinking, as the sun cooled and dropped toward the line of the Pacific. Finally, she spread out the newspaper on the small balcony table.

Then she got out a pen.

SIXTY-SIX

Langley, Virginia

Lionel Bright was having one of the worst weeks in his career. Six days earlier, his boss, the director of the CIA, had learned on CNN that the agenc
y’s
most highly classified black operation, Hawk, had gone under. On the list of career low points, having an operation get botched this spectacularly was second only to having an agent killed in action. And that was without it being the lead story coming out of every media outlet in the world.

In subsequent meetings throughout the week, Bright had sat and listened to his team and the FBI investigators as they tried to piece together what had happened—and what they were going to do to clean up the mess. The Feds had not permitted him to talk yet with Gabby, who was being held in a federal prison in downtown Manhattan. But Brigh
t’s
team had sent word to her through her lawyers that the agency had a crisis management plan that would work if she played along. Bright wished to God they did
n’t
need her so badly to save their own asses; h
e’d
have been content to see her serve real prison time. If anyone deserved to be thrown under the bus, it was Gabby, not Kera.

H
e’d
been furious when he read Gabb
y’s
statement, which the agency had written for her and in which she claimed that Kera and Jones had sabotaged the well-intentioned Hawk operation on behalf of Russian and Chinese interests. On its face, given the detailed evidence that had been leaked, that story seemed preposterous to Bright, though it had become less and less so each day the media gave it legs and as long as Kera remained silent.

Since sh
e’d
left her duties at Langley for the Hawk assignment in New York, Kera and Bright had communicated only twice—once when h
e’d
approached her in New York after her postcard and e-mail warning, and then when h
e’d
left her an unreturned phone message days after her fianc
é’s
death. He had not heard from her since their discussion in the diner.

Until now. Just this afternoon h
e’d
received a sealed manila envelope that had come by courier. There was no return address. Thinking little of it, he cut into one end with his letter opener and pulled out the contents. When he saw that it was a newspaper, he forgot everything else.

He sat down to study the broadsheet closely. It was a Tuesday
New York Times
from the previous week, the edition that had prominently displayed the story about Kera and Jones facing possible charges of treason. At first there was nothing else notable about the newspaper. But after he turned carefully through a few pages, he saw it. He checked a few more pages to confirm the pattern.

He reached for a pen. On every page of the newspaper, he found two ink dots—one in the vertical margin and one in the horizontal margin. Imagining that the dots were points on two perpendicular axes, he followed them until they bisected on a word somewhere within the copy. Advancing in order from page A1 to page A6, he located the word marked on each page and wrote it down on the back of the envelope. When he was finished, he walked to the window of his office and stood there awhile with a complex smile on his face, part pride, part sadness, and part fear. H
e’d
burn the newspaper and the note in a minute. But for now, for just a little while longer, he wanted them to exist.

Her decoded message said:
Have you figured it out yet?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The process of writing a novel requires a suspiciously disciplined person to sit for hours alone, daily, for a year or more, trying to put into words a bunch of stuff h
e’s
cooked up in his head. Turning that document into a coherent, enjoyable, publishable book requires the patience, wisdom, and generosity of dozens of people who go well out of their way to offer support and expertise. The following people were crucial in pushing me to make this novel far better than I could have done alone.

Chris is my daily source of support, encouragement, and happiness. And I do mean daily. He goes above and beyond the call of duty in accommodating my writing schedule, and his presence keeps me sane and productive. He also happens to be the love of my life, and on that front I ca
n’t
imagine being any more fortunate.

I lucked into the most supportive family any human being—and especially a writer—could hope for. Mom and Dad, thank you for your endless support and for sharing in the ups and downs of seeing this through. Kelly and Gretchen, thanks not only for your kind words of encouragement, but also for being so eager to read an early draft and give incredibly useful feedback.

It is not putting too sentimental a spin on it to say that my friends are like my second family. Their support is sincere, their good humor is life-giving, and their talents at their own creative and professional pursuits are inspiring. The
y’l
l likely all be household names before I will. Jon Bergman, Eric Brassard, Phil Buiser, Zac Hug, Max Miller, and Marc Valera were particularly helpful in coaching this book along and helping me get it across the finish line.

I’m
extraordinarily grateful for Anh Schluep and the rest of the Thomas & Mercer team at Amazon Publishing, as well as Terry Goodman and Jessica Poore, for their passion, professionalism, and for taking a chance on me. Rebecca Brinson copyedited this thing with an impossibly sharp eye; the English language and I are in debt to her for that. And finally, I want to acknowledge David Downing, my brilliant editor, whose wisdom and patience helped me transform the final drafts of this book. Readers will never know the full significance of Davi
d’s
guidance—which, I think, is the point. But i
t’s
a shame that the best editors are inherently underappreciated by readers. Take my word for it, dear reader, David has done you all a great favor in the immense value he added to this book.