End of Secrets Page 23

  “What makes you think I want to bring down Hawk?”

  He looked her in the eye. “Because the alternative is to keep working for them.”

  She turned away. On the field immediately in front of them, a pair of corporate softball teams were battling it out. A batter knocked a foul ball that bounced off the backstop. “Why did you come to Hawk?”

  “We’re not talking about that now. Listen to me, Kera. We have to assume ONE is controlling Hawk now. All of it. All of us.”

  “How do I know you’re not working for ONE?” she said. “How do I know everything you’ve just told me isn’t a test that Gabby put you up to?”

  “How do you know anything?” he said.

  She stood up. “I have to go.”

  “Can I ask you something?” he said. Kera turned and waited. “Where do you think they are?”

  “Who?”

  “The missing. The people in hiding, or whatever we’re calling them. I think you’re right about ATLANTIS, Kera. I couldn’t say that in there today. But you’re right. They’re alive, and they’re planning to come back. But why? What are they getting out of this?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. And it was the truth.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Lionel Bright was sitting at his desk, presiding over a weekly intel coordination meeting for the China division, when he noticed the postcard on top of the new mail in his in-box. His eyes kept coming back to it as the meeting droned on around him.

  The purpose of these meetings was to facilitate a line of communication between the cyber guys, who were antisocial, and the case agents, who were secretive to a fault. They needed each other and wouldn’t admit it. So he’d had the idea to force them to sit together in a room for an hour each week and make sure they hadn’t withheld anything crucial from one another, out of negligence or ego. It was important work, despite its tedium. Most weeks Lionel just sat there, interjecting only occasionally and growing bored out of his mind. By the end of the hour, he was usually second-guessing why he’d agreed to waste part of his day on this level of redundancy. Gazing out the window for too long sent a signal that he wasn’t paying attention, so he’d kept his eyes facing forward where he could let his mind wander more covertly.

  That’s when he’d noticed the postcard. It was a picture of the New York City skyline on a glorious day, the crown of the Statue of Liberty sparkling in the sun in the foreground.

  A sinking feeling tugged at his insides.

  If it’s blank . . . , he thought, already knowing that it would be but unable to confirm it until all of the men and women had filed out of his office. When he was finally alone, he stood looking down at Lady Liberty for a second before he lifted the card between thumb and index finger and flipped it over. There was nothing on the back but his address and the postmark. The card had been mailed from Manhattan the previous day.

  Lionel left Langley around five and exited the freeway one ramp earlier than normal so that he could swing by his neighborhood’s small public library. He parked ten minutes before closing time and jogged to the entrance against a light stream of departing foot traffic, mostly parents fetching energetic children from after-school programs and slower-moving elderly patrons who still liked to check out books on tape.

  Ignoring a librarian’s warning about the time, he went directly to one of the public computers and logged into the Yahoo account he had established for this purpose. The in-box was empty, but there was a single message saved to the drafts folder. The subject was WORK FROM HOME! DOUBLE YOUR INCOME! He clicked on it and scrolled quickly through the scam’s tacky, boldface promises and testimonials. At the bottom of the message, below a copyright line, was a block of generic legal disclaimers in a much smaller font. He had to squint at the words to read them, but eventually he found what he was looking for. Inserted into the legal paragraph were six sentences that didn’t belong there:

  HAWK COMPROMISED. FOREIGN TARGETS ABANDONED. WARRANTLESS SURVEILLANCE OF US TARGETS & CORP ESPIONAGE, POSSIBLY ON BEHALF OF MAJOR US CORP. ADVISE NEXT STEPS ASAP.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The quant emerged from his Tribeca condo building at 10:25 AM. She let him walk half a block before she got up from the bus stop bench. He stopped at an intersection to wait for the light. She hung back, watching. She knew there was no HawkEye coverage on his block, but she didn’t want to approach him too close to home. Instead, she waited until he dropped down to the subway platform at Canal. The surveillance cameras on the uptown platform had been out of order for a week, creating a temporary blind spot. It was just the place to talk to Bradley without setting off any scenario alarms that Gabby or Branagh might have programmed HawkEye to recognize.

  She slipped through the turnstile, closed the gap between her and Bradley, and came up on his right side. It must have been some time since the last train; there were more people than usual on the platform.

  “Not returning calls these days?” she said in a voice only he could hear.

  He turned toward her, not understanding at first that she was talking to him. But then recognition flooded his eyes, succeeded quickly by fear. He stepped away from her and looked down the tunnel, desperate for a train. She approached him again.

  “Take a hint, huh? I can’t talk to you,” he said, angling himself away from her. He swiveled his head around as if scanning the platform around them. Then he looked down the tunnel again.

  “There have been developments with ONE. I need to talk to you.” There would be cameras on the train. She had to talk to him before it arrived.

  “Yeah, there have been developments. I get threats now. People follow me. I can’t use my phone; I can’t sleep at night.” He scanned the platform again, and this time she thought his eyes caught on something. She tried to follow his gaze, but there were too many people. Then the rumble of the train rose up, echoing through the station.

  “When did the threats start?”

  He said something, but his voice was drowned out by the screech of brakes.

  “What?” she yelled.

  He looked at her when the train stopped.

  “The threats started after I met with you,” he said. He glanced over her shoulder and she spun around to see what he was looking at. At first she saw nothing out of the ordinary, just people crowding toward the open train doors. But then she caught sight of him. The man was halfway down the platform. Unlike the others, he wasn’t shuffling toward the train. He was holding a telephoto-lens camera to his face. It was pointed right at Kera and Bradley.

  “These are the people following you?” Kera said, turning back. But Bradley had already retreated to the center of the car. She let him go. When she turned around, the man with the camera was gone.

  She was climbing out of the subway station when her phone buzzed with an incoming call from an unsecure line. The ID display said it originated at Alegría North America. She hesitated. It can’t be him, she told herself, prepared to let the call go to voice mail. But after two rings another urge took over. What if it is?

  “Hello,” she said. She was up on the street now and had to cover her other ear in order to hear.

  “Ms. Mersal.” It was his voice.

  “How did you get this number?” she said.

  “I’m resourceful. I didn’t know how else to reach you.”

  “Why would you need to reach me?”

  “I’ll be direct. Small talk feels ridiculous when we both know other people are listening.” That was probably true. It was unlikely that Hawk monitored her calls live, but she didn’t doubt that they were all recorded and stored in case an investigation of her behavior became necessary—which, eventually, it would. She wondered whether Jones would notice the call in Bolívar’s dossier.

  “Go on,” she said. There would be a record of the call either way; she might as well find out what he had to say.

  “Will you see a film with me?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’d like to take you to a movie.”

/>   Kera nearly laughed. “That’s why you’re calling?”

  “It is.”

  Was he talking in code? If he was, she had no way to decipher it. She said, “The other night you insulted me. And now you want me to spend an evening with you?”

  “You’re not saying no?”

  “I’m saying it’s very unusual to receive a call like this. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to tell me that you’re engaged?”

  “I—” Was he testing her to see which she would throw under the bus first, her fiancé or a new opportunity to crack the case? Did he really know about either, or was he bluffing?

  “There will be no press,” he said. “If you are looking to get your picture with me in the tabloids, you’ve missed your chance.”

  “Do I need to state for the record that this will not be a date?”

  “I think you just did. I won’t give any of the details over the phone. I’ll have them sent to you. Keep your Thursday evening open.” And then he hung up.

  She did not try very hard to think of a reason not to go to the movie with him. It was reason enough that he had something to say and that it could not be said over the phone. But that wasn’t the main reason she would go. Her confrontation with Bolívar at the media pioneers event had been bizarre and unpleasant, but that hadn’t stopped her from thinking, almost constantly, about when she might see him again.

  THIRTY-NINE

  The car Rafael Bolívar sent for her wound its way uptown. Kera wore a blood-orange dress and had arranged her hair in an elegant heap at the crown of her head. From the backseat, she enjoyed the evolution of city blocks as they moved across her window. She could not remember the last time she had ridden in a car and just looked at the city, free of distractions from her phone.

  Against Gabby’s warnings that Kera must always have the phone on her person, Kera had left it behind—intentionally—when she’d gone home from work early to get ready. Any phone could be an accurate way of tracking the location of its owner. But a phone issued by Hawk, she suspected, might have even more invasive monitoring capabilities than that. This evening she wanted to be alone. And so the phone was in her work bag by the coffee table in their apartment where, she hoped, it might seem she’d simply forgotten it if it ever became necessary to explain herself.

  Kera did not know the car’s destination, and she did not ask the driver. Not knowing added to her feeling of exhilaration as the vehicle lurched through the city. Some blocks shot past out of focus; others rolled along at a pedestrian’s pace. She sat up with interest when the car pulled over on Fifty-Ninth Street at the entrance to two glass towers that rose up over Columbus Circle at the southwest corner of Central Park. It was his building, where he lived. She recalled reading about his apartment in a tabloid piece, and, of course, she had watched surveillance footage of him coming in and out of these doors daily.

  She was surprised to see Bolívar himself emerge from the building’s entrance to open her car door. The way he moved—fluid and confident—made his custom suit seem less formal somehow, as if he would be just as natural in sandals and shorts as he was in a suit on Fifty-Ninth Street. Through the hours she’d watched him, she’d grown familiar with this comfortable way he had in his own skin, his intrinsic Bolívar-ness. But that description had never been adequate. She realized now what had eluded her about his presence: he did nothing casually; everything was intentional.

  “Good evening, Ms. Mersal,” he said, and guided her inside with a firm hand at the small of her back. She thought about that hand a few moments later when she watched him reach with long, slim fingers to push the button to call an elevator. As she removed her sunglasses, which she had worn to throw off facial-recog software, she could still feel the spot on her lower back where he’d touched her.

  An elevator whisked them skyward and opened to a lobby on the fifty-sixth floor. The room hummed with conversation. Dozens of people stood sipping cocktails and talking in groups. Bolívar led her outside to a bar on a balcony that jutted out from the room. There was not a bad view of the park from any vantage, inside or out. The only interior camera she’d spotted had been in the elevator. She hoped it was a firewalled, closed-circuit feed isolated to the building’s security monitors and not accessible by Jones or anyone else in the Control Room.

  When they’d stepped from the elevator, it had been impossible not to notice Natalie Smith among the crowd. She stood, as ever, like a magnetic pole that pulled on the flow of traffic through the room. Her skin was radiant, her smile warm, her eyes sharp. She had noticed their entrance.

  “You two dated,” Kera said, leaning against the balcony railing and looking inside.

  Bolívar did not need to ask whom she was referring to. “We experimented. I think we both concluded that it was a valuable and enjoyable mistake.” His voice was so free of regret that it caught Kera off guard. Her motive for bringing it up had been jealousy, and that now seemed low in the face of his honest response.

  “The movie we’ll see; it’s hers, isn’t it?” Kera said.

  “Yes. After America was pulled by the studio, I offered to pay to distribute it to every movie theater in the country. She declined. But I finally convinced her to let me host this small screening.”

  “Why did she decline?”

  Bolívar smiled. “You should ask her that yourself.”

  Kera waited and observed the crowd while Bolívar went to the bar. When he rejoined her, she said, “What do you really think about Marybelle Pickett?”

  “What?” he said. “Oh, that.”

  “I saw you at that basement art show for her work. But at the gala the other night, you completely dismissed her.”

  “I was asked a ridiculous question. I gave the answer they wanted.”

  “I find it hard to believe that you’ve gotten to where you are by giving other people what they want. Do you like her paintings?”

  “Very much. I tried to buy them that night at the art show.”

  “Which painting?”

  “All of them.”

  Kera laughed. “How much did you offer, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I was prepared to pay twenty thousand dollars on the spot. But I was told that they weren’t for sale.”

  “Right. Because at that point they were stolen.”

  “I didn’t know that then. I only learned it later that night,” he said. “The artist, those paintings—the whole thing was another one of Charlie’s stunts.”

  “Stunts?”

  Bolívar nodded. “He thought stunts like that were important, to draw wide attention to something deserving. I see things the other way around, that if people can’t recognize value in art, they aren’t deserving of it. It was an ongoing disagreement we had.”

  “It worked,” Kera said.

  “What?”

  “The stunt. The paintings were auctioned for eighty thousand more than you would have paid.”

  “If the stunt proved anything, it’s that the value of paintings has little to do with their price at auction.”

  When they were each holding a drink, Kera led them several steps away from the crowds.

  “I have to ask you something,” she said. She knew he expected her to ask why he’d invited her here. So instead she said, “How did you find out about Hawk?” She did not want to reprise their first conversation, but the chance to learn the answer to this question was one reason she had agreed to come here tonight.

  Bolívar seemed unafraid of the topic. “It was because of the Global Report. When TGR launched two years ago, I assumed it was a competitor, so I started doing my homework. The more I researched, the less TGR seemed to be what it first appeared. Eventually, I figured out that TGR was just a cover for a private security contractor. So I let it go. Or I would have. But then you showed up.”

  “You mean, at the media pioneers event?”

  “No, before that. At the art show in that basement.”

  “You tho
ught I was following you there?” Kera said. “Is that why you left so suddenly?”

  “No. I didn’t know who you were then. I left because I was angry with Charlie. That was the first time I’d seen him in years. And let’s just say his little stunt with the stolen paintings did not amuse me. It wasn’t until we left the art show that I heard about you. Charlie and I were having it out, and he mentioned that a journalist was at the party. He said you worked for TGR. I knew enough about TGR to know that that meant you weren’t a journalist. I guess I assumed that it was me you were interested in.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “I know that now. But I still don’t know why you were following Charlie.”

  “He didn’t tell you?” she asked.

  “No. What did you want with him?”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t say.”

  Bolívar nodded. He watched her take a sip of her drink. “I’m sorry for the way I spoke to you the other night.”

  “You were protecting yourself. But Rafa—” It just came out. It was the first time she’d called him that. “Why do you think Hawk is after you?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “You can’t say or you won’t say?”

  He shrugged. “I think Charlie was right. You’re not in on it. That’s what matters to me.”

  “In on what?”

  He did not answer, and she did not have a chance to prod him because they were interrupted by an announcement that the film was about to begin. He led her into the theater, and they sat side by side. Kera had not anticipated caring much about the movie one way or the other. But at some point in the first few minutes, she became completely engrossed. Natalie Smith was relentlessly self-critical of herself and her career, but also of American culture. She used discomfort as a weapon against complacency—revealing in devastating, often drily humorous interviews the unflattering disconnect between what most Americans proclaim to be American values and how those Americans actually behave. But the takedown was only the setup. The film’s principal achievement was driving home, artfully and without didacticism, the notions that we shouldn’t be so offended to have our flaws revealed, and how it is only through honestly identifying those flaws that it becomes possible to correct them and advance.