End of Secrets Read online

  The Fredericksburg High School yearbooks were in a package outside her front door when she got home that evening. She’d ordered three of them—1996, 1998, and 2000—so that she’d have enough material to work with over the range of years she estimated Jones could have been in high school.

  Taking advantage of the fact that Parker wasn’t home yet, she sat on the couch with the yearbooks and flipped directly to the index pages. There were listings for students named “Jones,” but after looking at the corresponding photos, she eliminated these as possible matches—or even relatives—of the man she knew to be J. D. Jones. With this obvious tactic out of the way, she grabbed the 2000 book and began flipping through each page, looking for a familiar face among the male students.

  She did her first double take when she got to the sophomores. There was a picture of three male students, two of them wearing football jerseys, posing in the aisle of a bus. The luggage racks above them were stuffed full of sports bags. Kera stared at the face of one of the boys wearing a jersey. The dark eyes, the shape of the nose—perhaps it approximated a resemblance, but was it anything more than that? Nearly halfway through the thick volume, she’d already studied hundreds of faces and began to wonder if her eyes were playing tricks, seeing what she wanted them to see. The caption said the student’s name was Sean Carr. She made a note of it on her tablet, but kept searching.

  She finally found him among the juniors. He was not in any of the photographs depicting members of sports teams or other extracurricular groups, but there he was near the end of the pages that featured rows and rows of head shots. She had no doubt that it was Jones. The held-back smile, the dark-brown hair that encroached upon his face; this was the teenage version of the man she knew. Under the picture was the name James Carr.

  She glared at the name, surprised to find that the rush she’d expected to feel at this breakthrough was offset almost entirely by the confirmation that Jones had indeed kept the most basic thing from her: his name. Given their line of work, this was a small, impersonal betrayal. But a betrayal nonetheless.

  So be it, she told herself. Now she had a name. It was time to find out who James Carr was.

  SEVENTEEN

  When Kera returned from a late lunch the next day, Jones was down in the pit, where a hushed debate was in progress between a group of analysts standing over their monitors. They were as she’d seen them on her first day in the Control Room, gazing up at a giant map that filled the big screen. Their faces shifted in unison as a dot on the screen jumped in short pings from one location on the map to the next.

  Kera walked to her workstation as quickly as she could without drawing attention to herself. Once she was logged in, she swiped aside the ATLANTIS case files she’d been working on and pulled up a database that she’d accessed only once during her time at Hawk. On that occasion she’d run a search for her own name, curious to see what information was available about her background. Since the appointment of a director of National Intelligence following the September 11 terror attacks, the US intelligence community had been forced to improve interagency communication and cooperation. One of those improvements had been the creation of this massive, classified database that contained the employment records of people working in each of the seventeen US intelligence agencies. Kera knew from her previous search that her security clearance did not grant her unrestricted access to individual files. But a search here was worth a shot. It was a hell of a lot better than Googling the name “James David Carr.”

  After she entered an additional set of security codes, she opened a new query field and typed in Jones’s real, full name. She glanced up as she tapped the search button to see that Jones was coming up the stairs out of the pit. Her first thought was to abort the search and try again the next time he was away from his workstation. But when would that be? The decision was made for her when she turned back to the screen and saw that the results had already displayed. There was a hit. James David Carr had an employment file with the NSA. She tapped on the link, fighting an urge to look up at Jones, who she could see approaching out of the corner of her eye. She still had a few seconds before the screen she was looking at would be visible to him.

  The file for James David Carr was marked RESTRICTED. The only information that displayed was the dates of his employment. He’d been with the NSA from late 2001 to early 2007. Kera’s eyes tripped up on the word beside the latter date. TERMINATED, it said. Kera committed the information to memory, and then with two swift taps, she was back to studying her ATLANTIS case files.

  “What’s that all about?” she asked Jones, who had arrived at his console but did not sit down. He had paused to study the big screen above the pit.

  “The Gnos.is case,” he said.

  “There’s still a Gnos.is case? I thought we’d shuttered that.”

  “It’s back. The director himself is overseeing it.”

  “Is there new intel? A threat?”

  “Not that I know of. They just want to ID whoever’s behind the site. Those are our orders.”

  “How’s that coming?”

  “It’s not. As we discovered the first time around, whoever is running Gnos.is doesn’t want to be found.” He nodded at the map on the big screen. “They’ve figured out a way to bounce the site’s host server around faster than we can trace it.”

  Jones finally sat down. He had not looked at her screens once. After a few moments, Kera returned to her work, though not without that word—TERMINATED—scrolling through the back of her mind. So Jones had worked at the nation’s electronic spying agency. And then he’d been fired. And then he’d changed his name. And though he hadn’t explicitly lied to her about any of that, he’d certainly left it out of their conversations. But why? Was he embarrassed? Was he just being private? Or was he trying to hide something else?

  To push that distraction aside, she forced herself to return to her work. Each day, one of her routine tasks was to check the overnight news bulletins that the computer had flagged for her. An algorithm used patterns from her recent computer activity to prioritize the alerts. This was how she’d learned about ONE’s hiring of NSA technicians. Today there were about two-dozen hits—a pretty average day. Usually, she read through them first thing in the morning, but the day had gotten away from her. She tapped the link to the first alert, which mentioned Rowena Pete. It turned out to be nothing new, just a follow-up news report about mourning fans growing restless for information. She returned to the list, scanning it without optimism.

  Her eyes stopped on a headline that mentioned Rafael Bolívar. She tapped the link. The article amounted to little more than a gossip column about “Rafa’s” $8 million apartment overlooking Central Park. It described Bolívar as “the extraordinarily successful businessman (and the city’s most eligible bachelor) who has guided the Alegría media empire out of obscurity and established one of the fastest-growing television networks on the air.” Beside the column was a picture of Bolívar coming out of a SoHo restaurant with a young Russian model on his arm. He was wearing dark glasses. Kera couldn’t see his eyes.

  She skimmed over the other bulletins, her brain quickly categorizing them as either irrelevant or old news. Then she got to one that made her say aloud, “No.”

  Jones glanced up at her.

  She clicked the link, and her eyes tore through the copy, struggling to process whether she’d interpreted the headline correctly. Was it possible? The article was accompanied by several images of colorful paintings.

  “That little shit.”

  “What?” Jones said.

  “The paintings at that basement party. They were stolen.” She picked up the phone. “Manhattan, please. AM + Toppe.”

  “You’re calling him,” Jones said, knowing there was nothing he could do about it.

  “Charlie Canyon, please.”

  “May I ask who’s calling?” said the secretary who answered.

  “It’s—” Kera hesitated. She hadn’t given Canyon her name at the party
. “I’m a journalist. We spoke the other night about an artist who I believe is one of Mr. Canyon’s clients.”

  She thought the woman paused, as if confused, but then hold music came over the line. The next voice Kera heard, thirty seconds later, was Canyon’s.

  “You work slow, Ms. Mersal.”

  Kera bit her lower lip. She hadn’t been sure how well Canyon would remember her. She didn’t think it was a good sign that he not only knew it was her on the phone, but had figured out her name.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  “Two ad pitches, prepping a commercial shoot. Some days I feel like I’m just making a living. Others I make a killing.”

  “Cut the bullshit. You know what I’m talking about. Would you like me to read it to you? ‘Art thieves strike Chelsea gallery. Eight oil-on-canvas paintings by the painter Marybelle Pickett have disappeared from the Waterford Gallery, including a ten-by-ten-foot piece known as “Vibrant Night” done in black and white.’ ” Kera remembered seeing the painting at the basement party.

  “I think that one is my favorite,” Canyon said.

  “The paintings were stolen. They went missing after hours last Thursday. Thursday, Charlie. Your party was Friday.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Canyon said, which infuriated her.

  “You stole them. Why?”

  “I didn’t. I helped the artist remove them from a gallery that was doing nothing to get them any attention.”

  “That isn’t the way the gallery sees it. Or the police. We’re talking about ten thousand dollars’ worth of art.”

  “Ten thousand? Is that all they say it is? It’s going to be worth ten times that when this is over.”

  “When what is over?”

  “Why did you call me and not the police?” Canyon said.

  “How do you know I haven’t?”

  “The bluffing routine is unbecoming. Why don’t we level with each other?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Kera Mersal. Born June 1984, exact day unknown. Adopted, raised in Seattle. Graduated Dartmouth 2007, moved to DC, allegedly to work at ComPlex Technologies, which, it turns out, is an empty office in Alexandria. Ms. Mersal then leaves abruptly to become a journalist at the Global Report, which has as venerable a reputation in journalism as you do. Which is to say that TGR did not even exist until two weeks before you were hired. Does that sound right?”

  “That’s right. We’re a start-up, and we’re doing pretty well for ourselves.” Kera glanced at Jones through the gaps between their workstations. If he was paying any attention to her conversation, he wasn’t letting on.

  “Pretty well? You have the smallest newsroom I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Lean. That’s how we like to think of it.”

  “And not a single scoop in two years that’s made national news. Only twenty thousand hits a day. No paid subscribers and ad revenue that couldn’t outfit a Little League team. I’m sure your investors are thrilled.”

  “We’ll be fine.”

  “I wonder, though, about those investors. What are they getting out of it? It looks almost as if the mission of the Global Report is to keep as low a profile as possible.”

  She had to get off the phone. She was on the secure line at her workstation, and her conversations almost certainly were recorded and stored by Hawk’s internal security. That had never concerned her before. But if Gabby—or Jones, for that matter—thought her cover had been blown by someone on the outside, she could be expelled. Disavowed.

  “I’m sure your talents at redirecting a story make you good at your job,” she said. “But I’m pretty good at mine too. I called to get your comment on the stolen paintings, and I’m not falling for your spin routine.”

  “Get your pen ready,” Canyon said. “This is my comment: ‘Ms. Pickett is a talented and important young artist. As you can imagine, she’s quite distressed about the theft of her paintings. We hope they will be recovered and returned to the gallery in short time and in perfect condition.’ ”

  “You’re kidding. That quote will look laughable in an article that reports extensively on how you showed the paintings at a private, star-studded event the day after they were stolen.”

  “It would. But you won’t publish that. It would ruin your chance to get the story you really want.”

  He was taunting her, and it made her face flush. She could feel it like sunburn on her cheeks and forehead. She cupped her free hand against the side of her face so that Jones wouldn’t notice.

  “You’re arrogant, Charlie. And that’s just the start of your problems. Thank you for your time.”

  She hung up and took a deep breath. Then she thought, What am I doing?

  EIGHTEEN

  A day later and no break in the case. A day closer to their next meeting with Branagh. To ward off her feelings of helplessness, Kera paid another visit to the auto body shop, whose owner still insisted he’d never heard of Charlie Canyon and that no art show had taken place in the basement of his garage.

  Heading back uptown, Kera paused in front of a newsstand on her slow trudge down the subway platform. She didn’t touch any of the periodicals, just stared at them, her eyes going blurry at the rows of headlines. From the gossip mags to the newspapers, they all professed to know something about the world, as if the world were something that could be known in such declarative truths.

  The day had shaken her more than she wanted to acknowledge. To settle her nerves, she kept telling herself that this was a test. The rapid promotion, the ATLANTIS case. Gabby was testing her—testing her commitment, her resourcefulness, her instincts. The solution was to solve the case. Complete the mission: find the missing people, alive or dead, and figure out what happened to them. That was what she was expected to do. After this initiation she’d be reassigned to more important cases, cases that fell within her expertise and within Hawk’s charter as it had originally been laid out to her.

  There was also the matter of Jones and how she should interpret the fact that he’d withheld his NSA history from her. Of course, she hadn’t volunteered much about where she’d come from either, but with Jones, the red flags seemed to be accumulating. Her caution had only deepened after other searches for “James David Carr” on the Internet and in the obvious public databases turned up no consistent record of him.

  Stumped on where else to look, she’d turned her attention to Jones’s brother, Sean, who had been the first familiar face she’d come across in the yearbooks. Her research efforts there proved much more fruitful. Sean Carr had been an accomplished high school football player and track champion, but he’d turned down scholarship offers and had instead enlisted in the army. After multiple deployments to Afghanistan, he was discharged and wound up back in Kabul working for a West Virginia–based private security contractor. The records stopped abruptly after that, and those that did exist all listed Sean Carr as deceased. She’d come across a sole reference to a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but otherwise, she found no detail about the circumstances of the incident that had ended his life. The date of death, she noted without assigning any specific significance to the thought, had come just three weeks before Jones had been terminated from the NSA.

  A burst of warm air preceded the screeching arrival of a train on the opposite track and blew her hair across her face. The cars made their exchange of passengers and accelerated noisily into the dark uptown tunnel. Kera understood that this was how the city stayed alive. Just like in It’s Tribeca mural. Train after train, watt after flickering watt, flush after flush, twenty-four hours a day. Not so much a triumphant pursuit of anything worth pursuing as a relentless grind.

  When Kera returned to the Hawk building, it was a gloomy late afternoon. From her office window, the flickering commerce of Times Square seemed forced and depressing, like an amusement park trying to beckon tourists on a rainy day. She’d come here with a cup of coffee, delaying the inevitability of another long evening in the Control Room double-checking old leads that went cold no
matter which trail she followed them down.

  Outside, across Times Square, workers erected flights of scaffolding over the sidewalk. She watched them drag metal pipes up through the structure and lock them into place, the whole operation telescoping up the side of the building eight feet at a time. She envied the skeletal simplicity of their work, the way each piece fit into its proper place, reinforcing the others. If only her investigation could come together with some of that orderly logic.

  As always, the population clock on the ONE billboard dominated her view, its number increasing at twice the pace of a heartbeat, reminding her that she was one of 7,375,077,224 humans on the planet. The word “ONE,” swooping across the company’s futuristic logo, beamed proudly over the clutter of competing brands. Kera struggled to articulate what irritated her about the clock. Maybe it was the device’s inorganic precision. It was impossible that the world’s net population rose so consistently. Twins, even triplets, were born. Busloads of people died at once. These things made a simple, steady count impossible. The ad misstated the neatness of the world, and in that way, it was no different than any other ad.

  She lowered her gaze. The assembly of the scaffolding was complete, and the construction workers were now elevated like Jack on his beanstalk into the commercial stratosphere. She inhaled sharply when she realized what they were doing. The platform had risen to even with the top of the America billboard, and now the workers crawled like spiders across its broad face. She knew what was about to happen, and still she winced when she saw the first corner of the ad sag away like old wallpaper. The announced release date, visible below Natalie Smith’s name, was still five days away. Kera turned to her computer and ran a search. Sure enough, dozens of news headlines announced that the studio, a subsidiary of ONE, had bowed to pressure from right-wing religious groups and had decided to pull the film from the market.

  As she watched the workers roll away the decommissioned ad, she fumed silently, cursing Charlie Canyon. Finally, she got up and went to the Control Room to find out where he was spending his evening.