End of Secrets (13 page)

THIRTEEN

“I have
n’t
found one suspicious call or charge in any of these records.” Kera pushed away from the screens and leaned back in her chair with a cup of coffee. “If we were spying on my fiancé, h
e’d
probably look more suspect than this. How can that be?”

Jones, who had been immersed in his own work, swung his gaze from the screens in front of him and aimed it directly at her, his eyes burning into her. After a moment he relaxed and dropped his gaze. “Canyo
n’s
covering his tracks.”

“No, wait. What was that?”

“What?”

“That look you gave me.”

Jones shook his head. “Nothing. I had something else on my mind. You were saying?”

“Canyon. He uses his cell phone regularly. He uses credit cards and e-mail. But all of i
t’s
clean. Work stuff, mostly—correspondence with clients and photographers and directors. The rest is calls to his mother in Tucson or short text messages when meeting up with a friend or something. Even his Internet searches are clean.”

Jones shrugged. “H
e’s
careful.”

“Careful? I can think of other words for it. Paranoid. Suspicious.”

“Just because h
e’s
conscious of his privacy does
n’t
automatically implicate him in anything criminal. There could be a dozen motivations for that.”

“I guess you would know.”

“When did we start talking about me?” Jones said. He glared at her through the tension that had risen up between them.

“Just now,” Kera said, returning his stare. Surely he must have expected that she would try to look into his background. It would have been negligent of her not to. She never would have brought it up, though, had her research turned up even the most basic information. Her searches into the life of J. D. Jones had been exercises in frustration. The only thing she’d gotten out of him directly was that he’d dropped out of college. She had no way of confirming that, and anyway, she doubted he was a dropout if he’d come from CIA, NSA, or some other government agency, which was another thing she’d been unable to verify. She didn’t even know if James David Jones was his real name. It didn’t sound real. In any case, the name hadn’t gotten her anywhere. The only place she hadn’t tried to search for Jones was on HawkEye. She was too afraid that such searches were recorded and that he’d be able to tell. “Charlie Canyon’s records might be spotless. But yours don’t even exist. What’s that about?”

“Privacy. Job security. Yo
u’r
e not exactly an open book either. It comes with the territory.”

She was surprised to find herself so angry that he’d also been prying into
her
background. Given the effort she’d put into trying to violate his privacy, resenting him for doing the same to her was irrational. The difference, she realized, the true source of her aggravation, was her suspicion that he was probably more successful at prying than she’d been.
What might he have found?
she wondered. Her school and CIA files had been watered down and obfuscated to serve the purposes of whatever cover she had assumed. Her mind went to her adoption file. It contained nothing compromising, but it was jus
t . . .
private. In a way, it was the one thing that was most
her
.

Kera had tracked down the adoption file herself, years ago, while she was at Langley. It contained a name, ignored by her adoptive parents—her adoptive mother, an eccentric anthropology professor at the University of Washington, and adoptive father, an Egyptian immigrant who owned a news and shine shop in downtown Seattle. Kera knew only what her parents told her, and all they knew was that she had been born in a small coastal town in El Salvador. The mirror told her that one of her birth parents had likely been Salvadorian and the other likely had
n’t
. The date of birth in the adoption file was believed to be approximate.

Kera had felt no personal attachment to any of the fil
e’s
data. There was only one artifact in the file that had surprised her and that she found significant. It was a photo of her infant self, cradled by a woman whose face was unseen. Kera had taken the photo and kept it for herself, though she later wondered why. Whatever life or name the woman in that photo had given her was not the life she had gone on to live.

Jones was still looking at her. Perhaps as a concession or an attempt to build trust, he interlocked his fingers in front of him and looked at her pleasantly. “What is it you think you need to know about me?”

“I do
n’t
need to know anything.
I’m
just curious.”

“What are you curious about?”

“Where were you before Hawk?” Kera asked.

“Austin.”

“Austin, Texas?”

“Yes.”

“I meant, who were you working for?”

“Lone Star Communications.”

“That a cover?”

“For what?” he said, his confusion sincere.

“Never mind. You did what for this Lone Star outfit?”

“Installed security software.”

“You were an
installation
man?” She almost laughed.

“I did
n’t
excel at school. I
t’s
amazing what talents get ignored when a person does
n’t
thrive in a typical education setting.”

“You could
n’t
have been ignored completely. How did you wind up here?”

“I was recruited. Same as you,” he said. “Same as all of us.”

“How?”

“They found me online.”

“So you do have a digital footprint?”

“In some circles, sure. I did, anyway.”

Kera waited. When he did
n’t
say anything more, she said, “You from Austin originally?”

“No. Fredericksburg.”

“That in Texas?” He nodded. “So why Austin, then? Other than the blue-collar job.”

“I was married.”

“What happened?”

“You do
n’t
need to know that.”

“Fair,” she said. She had picked up on the gap in his résumé—there must have been five or six years between high school in Fredericksburg and marriage in Austin—and she considered whether she should question him about it now. She decided against it; h
e’d
given her a lot suddenly, and she did
n’t
want to test his patience. “Canyon, then. I
t’s
not as if h
e’s
just wiping his feet on the doormat to keep his online house tidy. This is like wiping away fingerprints every time he touches something. Why does a PR man like Charlie Canyon go through so much trouble to keep such a low profile?”

“Maybe yo
u’r
e asking the wrong question. Why do
n’t
the rest of you?”

Kera thought immediately of ONE. If Travis Bradley was right, there were math whizzes sitting at terminals across town scooping up these digital footprints and mapping them out into digital DNA that ONE intended to mine for profits.

Sure, Jones had a point about being protective of privacy. But it did
n’t
necessarily explain what Charlie Canyon was up to.

“Did
n’t
you build HawkEye around the idea that people are putting more and more of their personal data online?” she asked.

“Yes, and they are. But HawkEye does
n’t
get to know people. It just knows where they are. Getting to actually know Canyon is a job for a human. Like you.”

While Kera thought about this, her eyes drifted to one of her screens, where a photo of the recent Tribeca mural was displayed.

“I want to find It,” she said suddenly.

“What?”

“The artist.”

Jones smiled. “If we learn only one thing from this case, it will be the immense value of gender pronouns to the English language.”

“Exactly. Have you tried to run a Google search for ‘It’? W
e’r
e relying too much on computers. We need a witness. Ther
e’s
got to be one out there. Probably several. I mean, w
e’r
e in the middle of a city. Have you ever been out on the streets, I do
n’t
care what time of night, and not seen other people? I want to talk to someone who saw that mural go up.” What she really wanted was some insight into the artis
t’s
motive. Motive is what usually busted her through dead ends in a case. What was It getting out of this? Attention? Fame? Money? It was hard to cash in on any of those anonymously.

“If someone had seen something, we’d have heard about it,” Jones said. “It’s been days. No one’s posted a picture of the artist. No one’s tweeted about seeing the artist. No one’s come forward to the police.”

“Forget the cops. W
e’r
e not talking about a homicide here. Maybe the menacing painter strikes again, maybe not. Who cares? I
t’s
a waste of their time.”

“And i
t’s
not a waste of ours?” Jones said, turning back to his screens.

“Yo
u’r
e the one who brought It into this case to begin with.”

“That was before I heard of Charlie Canyon. The artist is a sideshow. Maybe he—she, It, whatever—is connected to the case. Maybe not. But Canyon is our best lead.”

Without admitting aloud that Jones was right, Kera lit up her screens to see if sh
e’d
missed anything important in the life of Charlie Canyon.

Late that afternoon Kera left the Control Room and walked the hall to her office. Using the web browser on her tablet, she visited the website of Lone Star Communications in Austin, Texas. It was a small cybersecurity firm that had been founded in 1999 by a Silicon Valley refugee wh
o’d
returned to the Lone Star State after the dot-com bubble burst. Lone Sta
r’s
website proudly listed two-dozen local businesses that had been clients for more than ten years.

Kera reached for her phone and dialed the number she found on their
C
ONTACT
U
S
page.

“Hi there.” She laid on the charm thick, but knew better than to attempt a Texan accent. “I’m calling from the law firm of Miller and Weston over on West Sixth Street,” she said, referencing the name and address of one of the more innocuous of Lone Star’s loyal clients. “I’m a new clerk here for Mr. Miller, and I’m hoping you can help me. We had our firewall upgraded a few years ago by one of your installation men, and Mr. Miller had a few follow-up questions.”

“I can help you with that. Do you think you’ve experienced a breach?”

“Oh, no, everything is working wonderfully. The guy you sent out here was just a really big help to Mr. Miller, and he wanted me to give you a call and see if he could chat with the man about a few tips h
e’d
mentioned. I know i
t’s
been two years, so I understand if—”

“You must be referring to J. D.,” the woman said.

“Is he available?”

“
I’m
afraid he quit two years ago. We had people calling and asking about him for months after he left. But yo
u’r
e the first to call in a while. Can we send someone else over to help Mr. Miller?”

“No, no. I
t’s
OK. I wonder, though. You do
n’t
have any contact information for J. D., do you?”

The woman first thought that she did, but after she went to look it up, she came back on the line to say that he had not, in fact, left any contact information. “You might try looking him up. His last name was Jones.”

Kera thanked her and then sat, looking out the window and thinking. The phone conversation with the woman had confirmed that Jones had worked at Lone Star Communications and that h
e’d
used the same name then as he was using now. But that did
n’t
give her anything new to go by. What she needed was some record of Jones, or whatever his real name was, that had been created before he became interested in wiping away his past—and that he could not have eliminated since.

She turned back to her tablet and searched for high schools in Fredericksburg, Texas. Mercifully, there was only one. She thought about using HawkEye to search the school’s records for a J. D. Jones, but decided against it. It was too risky, and she doubted that that had been his name as far back as high school. She checked the clock and subtracted for the time difference. It was just after two
PM
in Texas; the school would still be open. She dialed the number and queued up her charm.

“Can you tell me which faculty member oversees the yearbook committee?” she asked the secretary, who proved to be very helpful.