End of Secrets Page 22

  “I’m sorry about the meeting,” Kera said when he approached. She’d been standing at his workstation with a good vantage of the action unfolding in the pit below. “I didn’t mean for—”

  “Sit down.” Jones had said this so calmly that she almost hadn’t heard him. She was standing behind his chair, her body turned toward the big screen above the pit, which was still displaying a map of all the Gnos.is hosting sites the task force had identified.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Don’t look up there. Sit down.”

  Kera sat and tapped the touch-screen keypad. Whenever her workstation was inactive for sixty seconds, it locked into sleep mode. It was an annoying and perfectly sensible security mechanism. The first time she entered her log-in passcode, she got it wrong and had to start over with the print scan. Jones’s tone had thrown her.

  “Can you hear me?” he said. She glanced over at him. “Don’t look, just listen. Do you remember what Gabby said when you told her that ONE was hiring people from the NSA?”

  Kera looked at him and then remembered he’d told her not to, and she steered her eyes back to her screens. Her fingers resumed the detached motions of opening programs as if she were getting back to work.

  “I remember. What’s going on?” Gabby was down in the pit with the Gnos.is team, which meant she was out of earshot as long as they whispered.

  “We can’t talk about it here,” Jones said and fell silent. When Kera finally stole a glance over at him, she saw that he was hunched over his desk writing something on a napkin. A few minutes later, he stood up and strolled over to her workstation. He was holding a coffee cup and, beneath it like a coaster, the napkin. He nodded at the ATLANTIS dossiers Kera had opened on her center monitor.

  “Interesting about that Coast Guard donation,” he said. His voice was casual, as if nothing else had happened.

  “Jones, I would have told you. That phone call I took just before the meeting—that’s when I found out about it. I had to mention it in the meeting. The director wanted to shut us down.”

  “Look, I gotta get back to work,” he said abruptly. Then he wandered off in the direction of the men’s room.

  Kera stared at the coffee cup and napkin resting on the edge of her desk. The cup was one of the disposable paper amenities from the Control Room kitchen. There was a half inch of tepid black coffee in the bottom. She lifted the cup. When she was done reading the instructions, she ripped up the napkin and shoved the crumpled remains into the coffee dregs before tossing it all into her wastebasket.

  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 they’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.

  “He’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 wasn’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 shouldn’t have snuck into the Control Room behind my back to set up a dossier on him. And you shouldn’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. You’re 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 it’s where you’re supposed to be too.”

  “Sitting in front of our screens all day? That’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, we’re 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.”

  She’d imagined that a lot, in fact, and now she wondered again why Bolívar hadn’t gone public with his knowledge of Hawk. She didn’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. Don’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 Lionel’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 she’d be isolated. That is, if she wasn’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 don’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 she’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 didn’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 wasn’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 didn’t want Gabby and Branagh to think that you and I are working too closely together.”

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

  “They’re watching us.”

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

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

  “What?”

  “The thing Gabby was upset over.”

  “Oh, that. I don’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 mod
els. Real invasive, data-mining-type stuff, and then selling off the information to the highest bidder. I’m a foreign cyberthreat analyst, Jones. It wasn’t my area. But I asked her if she wanted me to look into it. I was mostly just kissing ass; I didn’t want the case. Though I guess it wasn’t a total dud. Think of it this way: if a foreign government was spying on American consumers the way ONE is, we’d go after them with everything we’ve 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 ATLANTIS with you, and ONE never came up again.”

  “But you didn’t let it go.”

  “Sure I did. It wasn’t my responsibility, and it’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 hadn’t turned them off because I got swept into ATLANTIS 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. That’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 she’d left out about the meeting with Travis Bradley. She’d told Jones everything. Now it was his turn. “What are you dancing around? You think it’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 it’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, he’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?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “You know the difference. You’re assuming Gabby’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.

  “We’re 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.

  “VINYL.”

  “That’s the Gnos.is case?”

  “Yes. About three months ago, Branagh formed a team to root out whoever is behind Gnos.is. I thought, ‘Here we go again,’ right? Because we’d already been through that. Didn’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.is’s influence has only grown, and we still know virtually nothing about who runs the site or what their intentions are. Iran, China, Russia—we’re not sure whether they’re 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? We’re 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 don’t take in any revenue, which means they don’t have to file with the IRS. They just exist. But why? What are they getting out of it? Why can’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 VINYL doesn’t make sense. We aren’t looking for encrypted codes in Gnos.is news stories; we aren’t looking for signs of foreign political influence or espionage or even evidence that Gnos.is is storing users’ private data. We’re 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 ’em. That’s the basis of every order I’ve received. It’s crazy. Who’s interested in intel that myopic?” He was looking at her as if what he’d just said implied something obvious.

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

  “Our client for VINYL isn’t coming from the intelligence community. It’s ONE. ONE ordered the intel on Gnos.is, and I think they’re contracting everything else we’re doing at Hawk too.” He let this sink in.

  Kera shook her head. “That’s impossible. When I got to Hawk, I worked on Iran. I’ve worked on China. Most of what I’ve done here was on real, hard intelligence targets.”

  “I know. But then that stopped, right? When’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 we’ve worked on in the past six months, I can connect it all back to ONE. VINYL, the meeting Gabby sent you on with that source, and now even ATLANTIS.”

  “It can’t be.”

  “It can. I confirmed it.”

  “How?”

  “I got curious. It’s a problem I have. My background isn’t military, and it isn’t government. I mostly don’t give a fuck about rank. I believe in questioning orders. Call me disrespectful, but I didn’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 doesn’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.”

  “That’s not what I meant. What’s ONE’s interest in ATLANTIS?”

  “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 what’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 what’s going on, since we’re already working on other, bigger cases for them.”

  Kera couldn’t quite spot a hole in his argument, but she wasn’t sure she was convinced. “And what about Gnos.is?” she said. “Why would ONE be so interested in finding the owners of Gnos.is?”

  Jones looked at her as if this should have been obvious. “So they can make them an offer.”

  The brashness of it, the simplicity—she didn’t have to think about it for long before she saw that his theory was plausible. Gnos.is was a formidable presence in the online media space. Acquiring them would eliminate an unpredictable and powerful adversary. And that wasn’t even Gnos.is’s greatest potential value to ONE. From her own work on the first Gnos.is case, Kera was very aware of the site’s elegance and efficiency. The coders and designers behind Gnos.is—whoever and wherever they were—were the best in the world. They would be valuable to ONE. Perhaps even valuable enough to hire the best intelligence contractor ever assembled to find them.

  The prospect that Jones was right about all of this finally hit her. But there was one problem with Jones�
�s theory. “We weren’t for sale,” she said softly.

  “Everyone in this business is for sale. Hawk might have originated at CIA in partnership with NSA, but it was structured as a private contractor.”

  “That was supposed to be part of our cover.”

  “Welcome to the intelligence business.”

  His condescension infuriated her. “I swore an oath. Christ, Jones, I didn’t come here to be a corporate spy.”

  “Your oath meant something at Langley, and I believe it still means something to you. But we didn’t swear anything to Hawk. We signed contracts to analyze computer intelligence. At the end of the day, ONE was willing to pay more for that service than our government.”

  Kera looked up the Great Lawn. It was a warm evening. A half-dozen softball games were in progress. People lay on blankets reading. Shirtless men threw a Frisbee. She saw little of this, though. Her vision was turned inward. “You discovered this today?” she asked.

  “No, weeks ago.”

  “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “I had nothing to gain by telling you.” She felt sure the chill in his voice was intentional. He was making it clear that they were in a business where the only way to survive was to watch your own back. Which raised her next question.

  “Why are you telling me now?”

  “Because I need your help bringing them down.”

  “What are you talking about, bring them down?”

  “Expose them and destroy them. They are using us, Kera. They’ve stolen some of the intelligence community’s best resources, including people like you and me. And for what? To spy on other Americans for their own profit? I’m not comfortable letting them get away with that, and I’m certainly not comfortable being a part of it. I’m telling you now because they don’t yet know what I know about them. But they will. They’re watching everything we do. We have to bring them down before they catch on to what we’re doing.”