End of Secrets Read online

  “When was the last time you spoke to him?” she asked.

  “That’s easy. The day he learned I’d given him a D on the assignment.”

  “Just like that? You haven’t heard from him since?”

  He shook his head. “I won’t pretend I have a clear conscience about it. When you’ve been a professor as long as I have, you see a lot of promise go unfulfilled. Rafa Bolívar’s, though; that was a real loss. I know, anyone will say he’s gone on to do just fine for himself without the approval of a passing grade in my course, but that incident has always remained a little unsettling to me.”

  “Do you still have the thesis he wrote?”

  “I’m sure it’s saved in my e-mail archives. But I don’t keep it laying around, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I’ve imposed plenty on your time, Professor Tierney. But if you find a moment to dig it up, I’d be curious to have a look.” She passed him her card, then pulled out her tablet. “Just one more thing, and it’s probably a stretch. Do you recognize this young man? I don’t think he was in any of your classes, but he was a roommate of Bolívar’s at the time.”

  Professor Tierney looked at the photo of Charlie Canyon on Kera’s tablet for long enough that by the time he answered, she had grown hopeful. “Yes. I wouldn’t know his name. But he was one of Bolívar’s friends. I saw them together often. With another boy too.”

  Kera’s phone rang in her bag. The volume was low but audible, and she reached down to silence it. When she did, she noticed the call was coming from an unfamiliar number with a Manhattan prefix. “Another boy?”

  “Yes, outside of class. Whenever I saw Bolívar around campus, he was with these friends. Always the three of them.”

  Kera thanked him again and invited him to e-mail her if he found Bolívar’s thesis or thought of anything else.

  Outside she reached for her phone to call Jones and noticed the previous caller had left a voice mail. The display said that the message was over a minute long. She brought the phone to her ear as she waited to cross the street into Washington Square Park.

  “Kera. Kera. It’s me,” the voice mail began. It was difficult to hear clearly over the traffic, but she could tell it was Parker. “I didn’t want to use my phone, just in case. I got it for you. It’s big. You can use it for a story. Come by the apartment. Can you do that . . . today? It’s important. Right when you get this. I’ll show you everything. They’ll fire me for this, but now I know what they’re doing with the bunker and why it has to be stopped. I’ll have to quit, just like the quant did. But I’m not afraid of them. Not if you can write a story—”

  Kera stood frozen on the curb, straining to listen. When his voice cut out, she pressed the phone harder against her ear. Nothing. The message had terminated far short of a minute. What had he been talking about? She brought the phone down to try to play the message through again, and that’s when she noticed something was wrong.

  Her voice mail in-box was empty.

  Then she ran.

  FORTY-NINE

  Parker had decided to wait to hit rock bottom before he quit drinking. This surely was it. But there was some relief in that—knowing that in a day, or perhaps a week or a month, things would get better again.

  He’d spent the entire night at a terminal in the basement, and then he’d spent the day at his desk, working as diligently as a sleepless night allowed. If anyone noticed anything amiss, they didn’t let on. He just needed to get to five o’clock and get out of the building without drawing any suspicion. Once he handed everything over to Kera, once it was all out in the open, he would be untouchable.

  Heading downtown, he pulled up his jacket collar against the wet chill. Dusk stalked the city several hours ahead of schedule. The light that managed to seep through the clouds was the sort that sucked color from everything. Buildings were indistinguishable. Glass, metal, concrete—all the same shade of ashy gray.

  On the way to the subway, he kept seeing women who he thought for an instant were Kera. Confident, purposeful women navigating the damp city in long jackets, their dark hair tucked under hats or sheltered by umbrellas. The whole city seemed to be filled with women like this. But on second glance, none of them were Kera, none of them even close.

  He told himself not to hope that she might reconsider leaving him.

  He called her from the pay phone outside of L@Ho. As her phone rang and rang, he recalled the first time he’d wandered into the bar and how he’d liked the feel of the place immediately. Now he craved it almost as much as he craved sleep, even though it no longer satisfied him to sit and chat and think about the day. His favorite bartender was no longer there. Parker had read in the news that morning that the man had disappeared along with the other missing.

  Hearing her voice on the recording had stung him more than he’d expected, as if she’d been gone for years. His message rambled. He wasn’t sure how much to divulge over the phone.

  He walked the remaining four blocks and climbed the steps to their—his—apartment. It had been nearly thirty-six hours since he’d been home. The keys were in a pocket of the leather courier bag he carried to work every day, a gift from Kera the previous Christmas. He retrieved them and let himself in.

  Two men were sitting on the bar stools at the kitchen counter, and they said they just wanted to talk.

  FIFTY

  Kera threw a twenty over the seat and slid out of the cab as it was still rolling to a stop in front of the apartment building. She took the stairs two at a time and put her ear to the door before knocking. She heard nothing.

  She knocked four times and listened again. Silence.

  Using her own key, she tested the dead bolt, which she and Parker both had a habit of always locking, even when they were home. It was not engaged. The door knob, which locked automatically, clicked loudly when she turned the key. As soon as the door swung on its hinges, she could smell burnt gunpowder in the air. The odor was unmistakable; it reminded her immediately of the firing range at the Farm. She threw herself flat against the hallway wall, a safe distance from the door, at first bracing for gunfire and then, when it didn’t come, crouching to strike low at anyone who emerged from the apartment. Between breaths, she strained to hear any movement that would give away a threat.

  But there was no rustling of clothes, no creak of the floorboards, no voices. Just a terrible silence that hung heavy with the acrid odor.

  Moving cautiously, Kera entered the apartment and leapt for the shelter of the kitchen, which she could see was clear. The living room, just on the other side of the bar counter where she had ducked for cover, was still. She tested a few glances into the open space and then, staying low and against the wall, crept out far enough to see that the living room was also clear. The bedroom was next. Again, she approached it as though it contained a shooter, and again she found herself alone, the only sound her pulse thumping in her ears.

  By the time she reached the bathroom, she knew what she would find.

  She expected it to be bad, and it was far worse. She had an overwhelming urge to run to him and touch him, to shake him and haul him out of the bathtub. He didn’t belong there. This was all wrong. A wave of nausea stopped her. For all her training, she had never seen a corpse in the field. There was nothing but the real thing, she thought, that could prepare anyone for the first time they see what a bullet at close range can do to a skull and the matter it holds. What had not been contained by the walls of the tub had soiled the lower half of the curtain and part of the tile wall. She spun away and then shielded her eyes to avoid looking at herself in the mirror. It seemed indecent to be seen like this, even by herself.

  For several moments Kera concentrated on getting her breath back. This was a crime scene, she realized. She had to pull herself together. She had to think clearly.

  She turned and took a few steps toward the tub, keeping her eyes on the bathroom floor. Then she drew them up carefully. The gun was in his hand, which had fallen across his chest.
She couldn’t bring her eyes up any higher to look at his face, and was glad of that in the moments that followed, when she needed to be very careful and not make any mistakes.

  She called 911 and heard herself tell the operator that her fiancé had shot himself in the head. Her words felt disconnected from herself, a voice faraway and down a tunnel. While she answered the operator’s questions, she retraced her steps through the small rooms, this time looking in closets and behind furniture. Everything was almost exactly the way Parker would have had it. Almost. There was one thing amiss: Parker’s work bag was not in the apartment.

  She kept looking for it until she could hear sirens. Then the operator said it was OK to hang up and she did. She sat down on the side of the couch that was farthest from the bathroom and hugged her legs against her chest. There was nothing more she could do now; it was OK to start letting go. Her sobs came in awful, desolate bursts, seizing her chest until she could hardly breathe.

  FIFTY-ONE

  One Week Later

  That week was the worst of her life. Not just the frequency with which her mind replayed images of Parker’s body slumped in the bathtub, but also of the funeral, two hours north of the city in Connecticut, and the wild, accusatory looks from his parents, when they looked at her at all. What was the appropriate role for an ex-fiancée in that situation? That week Kera felt, more than at any other point in her life, that she had no friends. Her parents were consoling from afar, but they were also a chore, with their own worrying and their demands that she either fly home or they would fly out to meet her.

  Gabby, impossibly, infuriatingly, had attended the funeral. She stood in the third row of pews with a blank expression, looking once or twice at Kera and staying only long enough afterward to tell her that she couldn’t imagine what Kera was going through and that she should take whatever time off she needed.

  Hawk had paid to put her up in a more comfortable Midtown hotel so that she wouldn’t have to go to the apartment until she was ready. Besides at the funeral, she spoke to virtually no one for a full week. She instructed the hotel’s front desk to give no one her room number and to forward no calls. Occasionally, she collected messages from them or checked for messages on her phone. Her parents called and e-mailed daily. Jones had come by once. Even Lionel had called, breaking protocol to leave a message, which said he was sorry about what had happened and to let him know if she needed anything.

  On the eighth day, she got dressed and ventured as far as the hotel’s café for coffee and oatmeal. The continuity of the city’s awful human machinery, the way it just went on, was ludicrous. She could see it outside from her window table. And from the television on the nearby wall, which broadcast one of the cable news networks. It just went on and on. To what end?

  She had played a key role in Parker’s death. That is what she had dedicated the week to reminding herself. Her role in his death was not the one his or her parents thought she’d played—breaking up with a man more troubled than anyone could have known. She knew her real role. As did Gabby and the people at ONE who had been asking Parker questions about her. Kera was not innocent. If only she’d convinced him not to accept the job at ONE, or if only she’d left him earlier. It was Parker’s ties to her that had got him killed.

  Kera looked up when the news anchor on the television announced that Natalie Smith, the filmmaker, had vanished. That this, of all things, should be the event that compelled Kera to action after a week of seclusion was not something she dwelt on. There wasn’t time for that. She felt suddenly that she had to get to Jones before he gave up on her, if he hadn’t already.

  Yes, it had been Parker’s ties to Kera that had gotten him killed. But she hadn’t killed him.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Gabby greeted Kera with uncharacteristic interest in her well-being, protesting Kera’s return to work as premature. “I saw there was another missing person,” Kera told her. “I need to be back. I’m not doing anyone any good alone in that hotel room.”

  Gabby finally conceded with a cautious smile that made Kera wonder how long either of them would be able to keep up this charade.

  Jones, of course, was at his workstation when she arrived. He gave her a hug and did not ask her any questions. “Let’s finish this,” Kera said, nodding at the ATLANTIS files open on his screen, but meaning everything else they had discussed before Parker’s death. All else that needed to be communicated between them was done with their eyes.

  One of the strangest things about her week away, Kera realized, was how isolated, almost helpless she’d felt without access to HawkEye. She spent the rest of the morning and afternoon reorienting herself in the case. Bolívar, oddly, was at home. He’d been there for almost two full days. It was the first time since Kera had begun tracking him that he’d not gone into the office. Next she reviewed Natalie Smith’s final forty-eight hours and found nothing surprising. The filmmaker had left behind a video of herself stepping off the roof of her eighteen-story apartment building. On the pavement below was the chalk outline of a body that wasn’t there. The words were scratched out in chalk by the ghost corpse’s feet: Have you figured it out yet?

  Late in the afternoon, after the novelty of having her back had begun to wear off for her colleagues and they seemed to be paying her less attention, Kera discreetly used HawkEye to look at something else. Without opening an official dossier, she checked the archived footage from the camera that she knew to be closest to her old apartment. Working forward from the approximate time Parker had last called her, she reviewed the footage until she spotted him. She only needed to play the clip once. There he was, walking down the sidewalk, in no apparent danger. The leather courier bag was slung over his shoulder.

  Kera quickly closed out of the camera’s viewer window and brought up her ATLANTIS notes. The first thing that caught her attention was Bolívar’s meeting with the CEO of ONE, more than a week earlier. It bothered her now, as it had when she’d first learned of it. The man she’d studied for weeks was a man of habit and routine. But ever since that meeting with ONE, his behavior seemed to have changed. She squinted at the HawkEye screen. The dot representing Bolívar’s most recent activity hovered over his apartment. It was the middle of a weekday, and he was still at home.

  Moving through her notes, Kera was reminded that the last thing she’d done was meet with Bolívar’s college professor. Picking up where she’d left off, she started to sift through both Bolívar’s and Charlie Canyon’s NYU records to see if there was any mention of a third roommate or friend, as the professor had suggested existed. For the first time in a week, she became lost in thoughts that didn’t end with Parker’s head ripped open in a bathtub. She worked nonstop until a few seconds after six PM, when a murmur rising from the analysts in the pit pulled her out of her work.

  Kera looked immediately to Jones, who was at his workstation. When she saw the bewilderment on his face, she stood up and walked around their desks to look at his screen.

  “What’s happening?” she said.

  “I don’t know. It looks like Gnos.is is down.”

  He refreshed the site’s home page and got the same screen. He tried retyping the URL. Again, he was directed to the same bizarre page. In the place of the familiar Gnos.is home page were six black digits separated by two colons at the center of the screen. It took Kera a few seconds to understand that it was a digital timer counting backward.

  In a moment of confusion, a technician in the pit keyed a combination of commands that pushed the Gnos.is home page onto every screen on the Control Room’s main tactical display. The sight of all those ticking digits plunged the room into an eerie silence. Gnos.is—one of the most popular sites on the Internet—was gone. The page that replaced it contained no hyperlinks. Just the clock, counting backward from twenty-four hours. There was no explanation for the countdown, nor what would follow when the digits reached 00:00:00.

  The VINYL team, Jones included, huddled over the bank of consoles in the pit for a half hour unt
il they’d determined that there was nothing else unusual about the site. All of its content had simply been replaced with this clock. Eventually, Director Branagh made an appearance, spent a minute glaring at the digits as they ticked toward the unknown, and then told the VINYL case officer to keep an eye on it.

  FIFTY-THREE

  The man in the black leather jacket waited at the very end of the platform for the train. When it came, tearing past him with a piercing screech, he stood back and watched people crowd the ledge as if it were worth risking an accidental shove onto the tracks for a shot at being the first to squeeze through the doorway. After the train accelerated out of the station, there was a short period during which the platform was empty. It would begin to fill again in moments, but for a few seconds, it was deserted. The man did not look directly at the security camera at the end of the platform, but he could feel it watching him as he jumped down to the tracks. He walked into the downtown tunnel and wondered, though it seemed beside the point, whether he was breaking any law.

  He squinted, straining for the first glimpse of light thrown toward him from the headlamp of the next train. His eyes played small tricks on him, but the tunnel remained dark. The number 6 trains could always be counted upon to be few and far between.

  Deeper in the tunnel were rats. He heard them first and then felt them at his ankles and shins. The ball clattered in the spray can as he shook it. Then the paint hissed against the wall. He formed each letter carefully and doubled back over each line until the letters were thick and bold. The rats began to retreat, and he glanced down the tracks. The tunnel became illuminated around the near bend, growing brighter with a low rumble. He pushed harder against the head of the spray can. He had to finish. The rail he stood on vibrated through his soles. Air began to flow uptown, lifting his hair, blowing cool particles of paint across his bare knuckles. At first it was only a draft, carrying a lifting sensation that made him feel like a dolphin riding the bow wave of a boat. But then the currents grew stiff and wild, the stale air desperate to escape the path of the train. When he looked again, the headlight curved into sight. He had one letter yet to finish.