End of Secrets Read online

  “No. Forget it. Go home. Go to the park. Go to a museum. I don’t care. Pretend you enjoy having an afternoon off. That’s an order.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She’d lost all track of time when she heard the key in the lock. She met Parker at the door and embraced him before he could pull off his shoes, lifting herself a few inches to his height by going on tiptoe. His familiar smell was layered with a stale whiff of recycled airplane air. His youthful, all-American handsomeness was textured with an extra day’s scruff. When his cheek brushed hers, she felt a warm, satisfying shiver. It reminded her, in the way that only a touch, smell, or song can surface a memory, of the first months she’d spent with him. The months when she’d first detected the symptoms of love.

  “I brought us something,” he said, unveiling a bottle of wine from a paper bag.

  When she saw the label, she smiled. “You already proposed to me, remember?”

  “I want to hear your answer again. The first time I was too nervous to take it all in.”

  She mussed his sandy-blond hair and then stood back and made a show of contemplating the question posed by the bottle. Finally she said, “Well, all right, yes. I will spend the rest of my life with you if you keep turning up with bottles of wine and that sweet look on your face.” And then she leaned in to kiss him.

  The night Parker had gone shaking to one knee to utter his blur of compliments and confessions and, finally, the proposal, they had been right here in their new living room with an identical bottle of wine—the winery was called Eons; he was prone to gross sentimentality—and a too-expensive dinner they’d ordered for takeout to avoid paying extra for a tip.

  “Oh, shit. Dinner. You’re probably starving,” Kera said, remembering now with a pang of guilt. “I got distracted with work. What are you in the mood for? I’ll order us something.” She made a move to carry the wine to the kitchen, which, like most of the apartment, was only a few feet from the front door.

  “Big news day today, huh?” Parker said, watching her with his gray-blue eyes and a big grin.

  “Hmm?”

  “Your story. This spy business with Iran.”

  “Oh, that,” she said, struggling to remember what she had supposedly written about Iran. Iran and China had become her main fields of expertise, first at the agency and now at Hawk. But she couldn’t remember what latest piece of the international saga had been released by the Pentagon or uncovered by an actual reporter somewhere that would have triggered a story today under her byline in the Global Report. She’d read the brief at the office, and she must have glanced through the copy—she always did—but her mind had been preoccupied after her meeting with the ONE whistle-blower, and she’d failed, apparently, to retain even a few conversational details about the latest Iran headline.

  “It was hardly a scoop. I’m not exactly reporting from the front lines,” she said.

  “At my job it might matter who gets there first. But at yours it only really matters who gets it right,” he said, opening his laptop. “Look, your piece has dozens of shares on Facebook. Almost a hundred tweets.” He looked up at her. “My fiancée’s famous.”

  “Hardly. And don’t say that. Fame ruins careers in my business,” she said, kissing him playfully and pushing him toward the bedroom. “Get out of here. Make yourself at home. I’m going to order Thai.”

  The moment he disappeared into the bedroom, dragging his suitcase, she spun his laptop around and started reading. There was her name under the headline MALWARE CRACKED, SHEDDING LIGHT ON IRAN’S AMBITION. She was doing some real multitasking now, one hand in and out of a drawer with the takeout menu, the other scrolling the web page as she read through blocks of copy.

  “The story’s published now. You still can’t talk about it?” Parker said from the bedroom.

  “Order for delivery,” Kera said into the phone, loud enough for him to hear. The details came back to her as she skimmed through the article. The virus had targeted British, Israeli, and American intelligence assets in the Mideast. As a countermeasure, the CIA had exposed the malware to disinformation, feeding it data that could be traced back to the virus’s creators. It was a classic trapdoor, only in reverse. The trail led to a bundle of servers in Tehran. Busted.

  By the time she’d placed their order and hung up the phone, she’d absorbed enough to carry on a conversation.

  “The cyberattack originated in Iran, but we turned it against them?” Parker asked.

  “Yes, essentially.”

  “And in the process, we discovered that they’re selling nuclear weapons?”

  “Correct. Except we don’t think they actually have the capability to make nuclear weapons. Not yet.”

  “Whoever’s buying them must think they do.”

  “Maybe. It’s more likely the weapons deals are fake. It’s disinformation designed to provoke Israel. They like to provoke, the Iranians.”

  An ambulance or fire truck raced past the end of their block, and the room swelled with noise. Then the siren trailed off, leaving a silence. Kera found that she couldn’t get Travis Bradley out of her mind. Even if she’d at first been annoyed that Gabby had sent her to the meeting with the ex-quant, and even if she was still skeptical about Bradley’s credibility, his allegations were unsettling. Out of curiosity she’d done some research into ONE that afternoon. The company’s stock price, which she’d been studying when Parker arrived home, had closed the day in record territory. Other than hiring the twelve quants, however, she saw no indication that ONE was branching out into anything beyond the entertainment industry. In a decade ONE had patched together a gargantuan media empire by gobbling up every small magazine, newspaper, TV station, record company, and film studio on the map. They were buying competitors and start-ups at a rate of a half dozen a month. It was impossible to walk down the street or turn on the TV without encountering ONE’s influence. They seemed to control every third billboard in the city, every third song that played on the radio, every third movie opening in every megaplex. What was this need to own everything?

  She put on music and rinsed two dusty wineglasses while she watched Parker struggle to ease the cork from the bottle with a tool she knew had been designed to make the task much simpler than it appeared to be for him. While they sipped wine and waited for dinner, Parker told her about Dubai. He had traveled there for something called a global social networking conference.

  “The place is unreal. The whole time I was thinking about how much you’d love it. I’ll take you with me sometime. If we pick up this business, I’ll have to travel there once a month.” Parker worked at a peppy start-up firm that specialized in digital marketing and that was owned by a distant friend of a family friend. “Remember that thing I was telling you about with the shoe designer app? We’re pitching a soccer brand for a campaign that will lead up to an international tournament they’re hosting . . .”

  Kera did remember him telling her about the shoe app. And no matter how much she tried to prevent it, her reaction now was as it had been the first time he’d brought it up: her eyes glazed over and her mind drifted back to her own work. She wondered whether the hacker arrests overseas had been made public yet. With any luck, data on hard drives had been recovered in the raids that would lead her team to additional hackers in the network.

  “I’m boring you,” Parker said.

  “No, babe,” she said, though they both knew she’d been caught with her mind wandering. She slid a hand up the back of his shirt and spread her fingers across his lower back. “I’m glad it went well.”

  Another siren crescendoed on the street, momentarily drowning out the Internet radio.

  “Can you believe all that?” Parker said.

  “What?”

  “She lived a few blocks from here.”

  “She who?”

  “You didn’t hear?”

  “I’ve been doing work stuff.”

  “And you call yourself a newswoman,” he joked.

  “What happene
d?”

  “Rowena Pete.”

  It took Kera a moment to place the name. The singer. Yes, that was right. Kera liked the music of Rowena Pete. “Dead?”

  Parker nodded. “I read about it on my phone. And then it turns out she lived so close. They shut down a whole block, and the cab had to go around. It’s a complete circus.”

  Kera poured them more wine and sat on the couch next to him. He was on his computer now.

  “Gnos.is?” she said disparagingly.

  “They’re the fastest. Look,” he said, opening the Global Report in a new window for comparison. He was right. TGR hadn’t yet published any reports on the death of Rowena Pete. Neither had the New York Times or any other serious news organization. She rolled her eyes as Parker, his point made, clicked back to Gnos.is. “They think pills.”

  “Who thinks pills? How would anyone know something like that already? There used to be a time when people preferred a medical examiner to make that call.”

  “And a medical examiner will have his say. But people have always wanted information as fast as possible, even if that information is imperfect at first. The only thing that’s changed is that now they can have it almost immediately. Look at the way Gnos.is works. Maybe a cop leaked something, or a resident working at the coroner’s office. Whatever the source, a new fact makes its way online and Gnos.is verifies it to the degree it can in that moment. It’s doing the work of a dozen reporters in a fraction of the time.”

  “It’s not journalism.”

  “Sure it is. Journalism’s changing. You’re as aware of that as anyone.”

  What she wouldn’t let Parker know was just how much Gnos.is baffled her. The site had appeared three years earlier and, after a slow start as a hard-news site, it increased its offerings in entertainment news and started to gain real traction. While that trajectory wasn’t unlike any number of other Internet start-ups, one thing set Gnos.is apart: the owners of the site were anonymous. No one knew who they were or where they operated—or why. At first, the site’s top-level domain—“.is”—was thought to be a clue, an indication that the site was hosted in Iceland. But the CIA’s cyberspies had determined that the site was in fact hosted by a complex network of servers around the world, bouncing from one to another randomly to prevent hackers or government agencies from sabotaging the site or identifying its owners.

  Gnos.is created no revenue. It simply used high-powered computing to assemble and publish news. The anonymity was irregular enough in a world where successful high-tech entrepreneurs typically flaunted their egos along with their sudden wealth. But what was first believed to be a gimmick on the part of the site’s unknown owners quickly became something more ominous. No one could crack Gnos.is. Even chat rooms frequented by the hacker community began to buzz about the mysterious site. And still, no one came forward with any credible insight about who was behind Gnos.is, nor how they kept the site’s operations secret.

  The obsession over Gnos.is in the intelligence community took the form of panic. Many analysts concluded that the site was a front for a foreign, state-sponsored intelligence-gathering program. Gnos.is didn’t exist to make a profit, so their intentions must be hostile. Or so the argument went. Some of that paranoia found its way to Hawk, and Kera had briefly been assigned to a Gnos.is task force. Like everyone else, though, the Hawk hackers failed to locate the site’s owners or to decode the algorithms that made Gnos.is work. But they also failed to come up with any evidence that Gnos.is was sponsored by a foreign state or that it was collecting the data of users and storing it for illegal or otherwise suspicious purposes. Eventually, funding for the task force was pulled and, embarrassed, everyone turned their attentions elsewhere. To Kera’s knowledge, it remained the only case that Hawk had failed to deliver on.

  “See, more sources are contributing. Gnos.is is saying it’s a suicide.”

  “You mean, some idiot on the street is tweeting that,” she said.

  The buzzer rang. For twenty minutes Kera and Parker sat across from each other sharing pad thai and curry out of plastic containers. Afterward, Parker opened another bottle of wine, and they sat on the couch with dueling laptops. Kera browsed a few news sites, looking for early reports of the hacker raids. When she came up empty, she closed her laptop and leaned her head on Parker’s shoulder. He was reading Gnos.is’s coverage of the Rowena Pete story. Other news sites had begun to report rumors of the singer’s death, but few claimed to be able to confirm anything. Local television stations and even CNN had perched correspondents in front of the singer’s apartment building, but none of them were going live with new details. The New York Times had posted only a brief, bare-bones mention of the tragedy on its website, a sort of preobituary that had come from the AP. Meanwhile, Parker gloated, Gnos.is had pages and pages of information, including dozens of photos and videos uploaded from smartphone users on the street.

  “Pills were found in the apartment, but a cause of death has not been determined,” he read from the text in its current form. The paragraphs updated themselves, sometimes more than once a minute, as new reports were uploaded and confirmed. Parker frowned. “Hang on. Several sources also report that a knife has been found on the scene. There is at least one report claiming that the singer hung herself in a closet.”

  “See, no one knows anything, so they just publish everything,” Kera said, standing to clean up from dinner. “What’s to keep me from submitting my own made-up version of the story? These quote-unquote reports could be coming from some bored idiot at work on the West Coast—or in Tokyo, for that matter.”

  “The reports are filtered against each other and against established facts,” Parker said. Kera listened, assuming a layperson’s understanding of the site. “False reports are discarded, and the users who submit them are flagged. I’m not saying it’s a perfect system. But it’s still a useful tool.”

  “Useful for what? The latest celebrity gossip. What Gnos.is provides is hardly news.”

  Parker shrugged. “It’s what people want. It’s entertainment.”

  “I’ve never understood what’s entertaining about what most people call entertainment.”

  It was not the first time they’d had this conversation. Parker came down on the side of technology’s inevitability and its uncanny knack for improving, on balance, the lives it inevitably disrupted. He usually seemed more enthusiastic about the conversation than Kera, who secretly liked to see his passion stoked. She envied him this outlet, to be able to discuss openly what he did at work.

  Parker got up to pour another glass of wine. Minutes passed without any update. The image he’d left on-screen was a photo of Rowena Pete taken at a show earlier that year.

  “What was she, twenty-eight?” Kera said, studying the photo. “A few years younger than us. I always wanted to see her perform live.” She entered “Rowena Pete” into the Internet radio player and sat for a moment, her glass of wine in hand, listening in the way you do only when it’s too late to not take something for granted. There was a raw quality that Kera liked about Rowena’s music that was missing from most other music she listened to. Something honest and present. The year before, she’d almost bought them tickets to see Rowena Pete at the Bowery Ballroom. She remembered now why she hadn’t. During her first months in the city, she’d been tempted from all sides by concerts and museums and Broadway shows. So much happened in this city every day of the week, and the chance to see a Rowena Pete show had felt, like everything else, as if it would always be there.

  Kera’s phone chirped to life on the counter. She looked at the time. It was after ten.

  “Shit. It’s Gabby.”

  Parker looked up at her for a moment with raised eyebrows, but then returned his attention to his computer.

  “Are you at home?” Gabby said over a background din of voices and vehicle engines, the occasional bleat of a car horn.

  “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “Can you join me at a fresh scene at Fourth and Bowery? Branagh himse
lf sent me out here, and I want you looped in,” she said, referring to Dick Branagh, Hawk’s reclusive director and the only person higher up the chain than Gabby.

  “A scene?” It was unusual for Hawk personnel to be present at a physical crime scene. Hawk agents lived almost exclusively in the digital world, and for good reason. It was a vantage from which they could access any crime scene report they needed without the nuisance of having to get a human being on-site under false pretenses. Human intelligence was viewed by Director Branagh as not only fallible, but the greatest source of vulnerability to the operation. Anytime they worked in the field, they risked blowing their cover. It was a risk that was judged, more times than not, to be unacceptable.

  What struck Kera as even more unusual than that, though, was Gabby’s location. Fourth and Bowery was only blocks from their apartment. She stepped into the bedroom with her phone. Through the open door she could see the screen on Parker’s laptop, still open to Gnos.is.

  “That was my reaction too. Until I saw it for myself,” Gabby said. “I need you to get over here, Kera. I want you to take this case.”

  “A case? This thing with the singer? How is that a case for us?”

  “I’ll show you when you get here. Use the back entrance. The front is a total shit show. Cameras everywhere. Oh, and Kera?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t take any shit from these cops. We’re here with permission from the mayor’s office, and nobody’s happy about it.”

  Kera exhaled, rousing her body from the sleepy buzz of wine. “All right, I’m just a few blocks away. I can be there in ten minutes.”

  She hung up and retrieved her shoes and jacket from the closet.