End of Secrets Read online

  The room swelled from half to three-quarters full. She got a glass of champagne and circled the floor slowly, then strolled through the adjacent hallways and anterooms. Canyon must have known all along that he’d be gone by this point and that she would be here alone. The question was, what did he want her to see? She listened closely to the chatter of guests as she weaved back through the ballroom.

  In one circle the topic of conversation was Daryl Walker.

  “Won’t it ruin his acting career if he makes this video?”

  “Are you kidding? Before a week ago, half of us had never heard of him. Now his career will take off.”

  “And if it doesn’t, so what? He’s a millionaire.”

  “There are already hundreds of people promising copycat videos,” said a young man with meticulously crafted hair. “And some are willing to set the bar way lower than a million dollars.” His peers laughed.

  “I think he’s going to do it. He’s already a third of the way there.”

  Flashbulb bursts exploded suddenly behind Kera. She turned in time to see the proud figure of Rafael Bolívar stride into the room and be swallowed immediately by a circle of gawkers, some of them his media-industry peers, others reporters and photographers.

  “Rafa, can you comment on the rumors that Alegría plans to launch a cable network dedicated to reality television?”

  His reply was, “Stay tuned.”

  “Rafa, look this way.”

  He did.

  “Rafa, do you have a comment about Daryl Walker?”

  “He’s a pioneer,” Bolívar said with a smooth smile. This generated a round of laughs and raised glasses.

  He spotted her then. Their eye contact was a small moment, at least as measured in the arbitrary units of time, but in that moment the mind that lay behind those eyes had distinguished her from everyone else in the room.

  “Rafa, are you concerned about the growing number of artists who are disappearing? Just an hour ago it was announced that a painter named Marybelle Pickett has vanished.”

  This was news to Kera, and her reaction was as it had been with Canyon’s disappearance—first surprise, almost disbelief, followed after a moment of thought by the understanding that it had been inevitable.

  “You know what I’ll say about that?” Rafa began. He spoke easily and confidently. “I think the future of our culture has never been brighter. We live in an age where the average person’s contributions online can be far more influential to the culture than the contributions of the greatest painters or writers of previous centuries.”

  The crowd gulped his words thirstily. At least most of them did. Someone thought to point out, “Those paintings, the ones by Marybelle Pickett that had been recovered, they were just auctioned for more than one hundred thousand dollars.”

  “What’s a hundred thousand dollars?” Rafael Bolívar said. “It’s nothing. Painting is irrelevant. It has no more value to pop culture. And pop culture is the only culture that has value anymore.”

  If this was what Canyon wanted her to see, she’d seen enough. Bolívar had not looked again in Kera’s direction. When he began to move about the room, she backed out of the crowd and made a cut for the exit. A man in a suit stopped her before she could get to the elevator. She noted the clear wire that curled behind his ear and disappeared down the back of his jacket.

  “Will you come this way, ma’am? Mr. Bolívar would like a word.”

  The bodyguard led her to a small conference room and then disappeared. Kera walked to the window. The room faced east, but the vista stretched south as far as the Brooklyn Bridge, which looked as delicate as two strings of lights draped across the void of the East River. She turned when she heard the door. Bolívar entered. It was, to her knowledge, the first time he had looked at her openly, without averting his eyes.

  “Would you like to sit?” he said. His voice was different from how it had been with the reporters in the ballroom, only minutes earlier. The contrast caught her off guard.

  “I’ll stand.”

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “I was invited here. By Charlie Canyon.” She let him register what she’d said and decided from his expression that he had not known or expected this. “What happened to him?”

  “He drowned. Isn’t that what the police are suggesting?”

  “Do you believe that?” she asked.

  “I have no reason to form a belief on that matter one way or the other.”

  “You and Canyon were friends?”

  “No. He—” Bolívar hesitated, tacking mentally in a different direction. “Canyon wanted to work for me. I wasn’t hiring people like him.”

  Without thinking, she said, “Why do you say those things? About mindless culture? About web videos?”

  “I’ve made a fortune off those things.”

  “You already had a fortune.”

  “You seem to know a great deal about me.”

  “You’re a public figure.”

  “Ms. Mersal, I don’t want to waste your time, and I don’t intend to waste my own. Let’s cut to the chase. Why are you here?”

  “I told you, Canyon asked me to come here. I didn’t even know that you’d—”

  “Drop the act.” His words interrupted her, but it was the look in his eyes that had stopped her midsentence. “What was Hawk hired to do to me?”

  The room tilted. She put a hand on the back of a nearby chair. “Did Charlie tell you that?” she whispered.

  Bolívar looked confused. “No. I told Charlie about Hawk. In your defense, he seemed to think you weren’t in on it. But the fact that you’re here seems to suggest otherwise.”

  “In on what?”

  “Ms. Mersal, given the amount of money Hawk has at stake here, I don’t believe they sent an incompetent agent into the field. We’re both here now. Can’t we be straight with one another?”

  “I don’t know how else to say that I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Very well. If you refuse to engage with me, perhaps you can at least deliver a message. Tell your client that they’re wasting their money. Whatever they’re after, they can’t have it. I will never let them touch me.”

  “My client?”

  “ONE.”

  Kera shook her head. “There’s been a misunderstanding.”

  “I don’t think so.” Bolívar looked at her. “But I’m beginning to think you’re being played worse than anyone. In your field, I can’t imagine that’s an enviable position to be in.”

  “You don’t know a thing about me or what I do.”

  “Oh? Kera Mersal. Born, like me, outside of this country. Adopted. Shall I skip ahead to the relevant part? You had a promising but brief career at the CIA before you jumped to the private sector, apparently at the first chance you got. Now you’re a hired spy.”

  She started to tremble. To hide it, she gripped tightly the back of the chair where her hand was resting. “You have some gall, suggesting that I’m some sort of a sellout. Have you listened to yourself? Ten minutes ago you were standing out there spewing a bunch of mindless crap to the press about pop culture being the only culture that matters. I don’t know why Charlie thought you were better than that.”

  “The difference between you and me is that in my career I’ve never claimed to be better than that. I don’t have a security clearance and a badge to wave around that tells everyone I’m serving my country. When I want to improve the world, I set out to do it.”

  He was making it easy for her to leave. “While this lecture from you on my patriotism has been quite an unexpected diversion, I do actually have better things to do. Good night, Mr. Bolívar.”

  “Very well. Please pass along my message to your friends back at Hawk. Whatever they want with me, they’re wasting their time. I would personally destroy everything I’ve built rather than allow ONE to get their hands on it.”

  “Hard as it is for you to imagine, none of this has anything to do with you.” Sh
e studied his face for as long as she thought she could get away with it. He was beautiful. She understood him less now than she had after watching his every move for two weeks, but she knew this: he was beautiful and extraordinary. “I’m sorry about your friend,” she said. And then she felt her legs carry her to the door. She did not wait for him to open it for her. She let herself out and devoted all of her concentration to not looking back until the elevator doors closed and she was dropping out of the sky in a cherry wood-appointed aluminum cage that would deliver her to the streets of the city and back to her life.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Parker stood at the edge of the wide plaza at the base of ONE’s Midtown headquarters, sipping a box of orange juice. He had stopped without warning, suddenly unable to join the continuous ant-like march of people who came up out of the subway tunnels and streamed into the building. A curved driveway funneled taxis, black cars, and the occasional limousine to within feet of the tower’s front entrance. Pedestrians veered off the adjacent avenue and lined up at doughnut and coffee carts before crossing the plaza to take up their loyal positions in offices or cubicles on one of the building’s seventy-nine floors. Parker felt particularly resentful of the narrow, landscaped slivers of green that dotted the plaza, audacious in this island metropolis where anything that wasn’t concrete or vertical steel was inherently a waste of space. He looked up at the ONE tower and then quickly looked down, shielding his eyes from the bright morning sun reflecting off its glass facade. It was 8:20 AM on his first day of work at ONE, and he was hungover. He crushed the juice box in his fist and tossed it in a waste can.

  The lobby of the ONE tower was a massive atrium that opened to two separate banks of elevators. The atrium’s exterior walls were made of glass panels that allowed broad views to the plaza and the churning city beyond. The interior walls were lined with screens of varying size that displayed a collage of ONE programing—news programs, reality contests, music videos, feature films, and prime-time sitcoms and dramas. The lobby’s main attraction, however, was the giant employee clock that hung above the security turnstiles. The clock was the first thing Parker saw when he stepped through the revolving doors and found himself inside. It ticked up from 118,094 to 118,095, almost as if acknowledging his arrival. Then it continued on: 118,096 . . . 118,097 . . . 118,098. Above and below the digits, sleek type read: ONE HAS 118,099 EMPLOYEES CONNECTING THE WORLD.

  He was relieved, after he was issued a temporary employee ID card, to board an elevator and leave behind the visual chaos of the lobby. But he remained unsettled. The car’s upward motion stoked his nausea. He felt terrible inside and out. There was no point on the horizon of his future on which to steady his vision, no reason to believe anything would soon become better. Why had he done it? “We can lay together in your room?” No! We cannot! He wanted to fly halfway around the world just so that he could be put in that situation again. No, no, no, he would say. It would be the easiest syllable he’d ever utter. But there was no more flying to Dubai. They’d dumped those clients in the acquisition. Now he was the associate social media consultant to the president of Digital Information and Entertainment at the ONE Corporation. He was glad he didn’t have to see that on a business card. He had declined business cards on the grounds that they were environmentally unfriendly and made him look like a Luddite in the digital landscape of social networks.

  The first thing he did in his new role was sign a ten-page nondisclosure agreement. The people in his department got off on secrecy in a big way. They threw around phrases like “proprietary products” and “sensitive consumer data.” They were, he was assured during a large orientation with other new employees, developing technologies that would revolutionize the consumer’s role in the digital space.

  After the orientation meeting, Parker found his way to his new office, only to be told by a temp secretary—he would get to hire a permanent replacement soon—that Mr. Lawson, his boss, wanted to see him in his office.

  An LED screen built into the closed door of Lawson’s office, about eye height, read STEVEN LAWSON, PRESIDENT OF DIGITAL INFORMATION AND ENTERTAINMENT. When Lawson’s secretary ushered Parker inside, he expected to find Lawson as he’d always found him in his limited experience to date: a pale, overfed man who delivered everything he said with an arrogant scowl, as if his audience was wasting his time. Alone with the man in his office, though, there was no sign of this trademark scowl. Lawson made eye contact and spoke in a friendly tone. Parker realized that this man saw people as being either inside or outside his sphere of influence, and Parker was now an insider.

  “How are you liking it here so far?” Lawson said, half sitting on the edge of his vast oak desk and leaning toward Parker as if he had something to confide.

  “It’s great,” Parker said. “It’s only been a few hours. It’s a little overwhelming, I guess.”

  “Forget whatever other shit you’ve been told. That’s not what any of us is really here for.”

  Parker wasn’t sure whether he was meant to react to this or not. He couldn’t think of a suitable thing to say and began to sweat. Then the fear of becoming nauseated in this man’s office made him sweat even more. But Lawson didn’t appear to want to test him; he was merely setting up his next point.

  “All of our key employees here at ONE have two jobs: the first is to carry out your duties related to your established media specialty. This is how we excel in the present and keep the shareholders off our backs. In your case, you’ll be overseeing the social campaign for the release of Apocalypse, our first big film release of the summer.”

  Parker nodded cooperatively. He’d been told about this in one of the many interviews ONE had conducted after the acquisition to determine whom they wanted to keep. Eager to impress, Parker had already come up with a few ideas for the campaign to present to the team. But Lawson didn’t seem to want to talk about that.

  “The second job,” Lawson continued. “Now, that is the fun part. It’s what sets ONE apart from every other company on earth. It’s our commitment to the future. As president of Digital Information, I am responsible for maximizing ONE’s access to information. And you are going to be a key player in that strategy.” Lawson, apparently concerned that Parker did not appreciate the gravity of what he was being told, leaned farther forward and continued as though trying to close a sale. “Some ONE employees work years to reach this level of responsibility, Parker. But you work in a field—you’re an expert in a field—that is crucial to ONE’s future.

  “Social media is where the consumer becomes a partner with us in creating value from information. Most consumers already have an intuitive sense that the future is a place where everything—everyone—will be valued digitally. Our task is to show them that embracing that future is beneficial for everyone. The obvious place to start is in the social landscape. That’s where you and I are going to make history here. You up for that?”

  “Yeah,” Parker said, feeling for the first time that working for ONE might be a better opportunity than he’d first thought. “Yeah,” he repeated, more enthusiastically.

  “Good. Then let’s get you credentialed with Information Security, and I’ll introduce you to the bunker. Why don’t you take a few minutes to settle into your office. Meet me down in the B7 lobby in, say, ten minutes?”

  “B7. You mean, ‘B’ as in basement?”

  “Yep. Ten minutes.”

  The basement has a lobby? Parker thought.

  Parker took the elevator to B7, which was located beneath P1–P6, and found the promised lobby, where he waited on a leather couch. Lawson joined him a minute later and led Parker through two separate doors that required a tap of the ID card Lawson wore on a lanyard around his neck.

  They walked down an empty concrete hallway. “We’ll get you set up with your credential in here,” Lawson said, tapping his card to enter yet another locked door, this one with a narrow horizontal screen that said INFORMATION SECURITY.

  Two humorless men issued Parker his o
wn ID card, which displayed a regrettable head shot under his name, department, and the words LEVEL 4 ACCESS. “I got you access at a level higher than you need, strictly speaking. It should minimize the red tape,” Lawson said, scowling at the IS men, who had clearly been on the losing end of that battle. “Your background check kicked off a little debate around here. You sailed through, of course. But the issue of your fiancée was something none of us had encountered before.”

  “My fiancée? Kera? What about her?”

  “Nothing to worry about at all. Just the opposite. In the end I convinced everyone that, if anything, your association with her was a strength. You’re already accustomed to navigating the usual insecurities that professional secrecy can sometimes create for couples.”

  “I’m not sure I understand. What does any of this have to do with her?”

  The IS men looked concerned, but Lawson found a way to turn it into another victory. “See. Exactly. It has nothing to do with her. And she’ll understand that. Just like you understand that there are things about her work that she can’t tell you.”

  Baffled, but afraid to challenge Lawson further in front of the IS men, Parker followed his boss back into the hallway.

  “What I’m about to show you is the very core of our information mission. Its existence is kind of ‘need to know,’ you know? But ONE is desperate to carve out a more dominant market share in the social space. So you need to know. You also need to know that this is the most confidential thing you will work on at ONE. You don’t discuss it in the presence of anyone who isn’t credentialed at Level Three or higher. You already signed the NDAs about this. I’m just reminding you.”