End of Secrets Read Free

sorry?” She pried her eyes from her other work and pulled up the Global Repor t ’s website on a new monitor.
    “Your story about the ONE Corporation. The one about the Wall Street bankers.”
    So that was why Gabby had stuck her with this—it was related to a story that had run under her byline. In the Global Repor t ’s search bar, she entered the keywords h e’d just provided along with her name. ONE Wall Street bankers Kera Mersal . The headline popped up: R ISING I - B ANKERS D ECAMP FOR ONE .
    “Sure,” she said, skimming the first paragraph. The article reported that, in an unusual move, the ONE Corporation had poached twelve men from Wall Street banks in the last year. She remembered reading it now. Could n’t have been more than two or three days earlier. There were at least one of these articles per day with her name on them, and although many were much less interesting than this, the banker piece had n’t particularly stood out. Not with everything that was going on with her actual casework. “What about it?”
    “I have information about ONE that people should know.”
    “What kind of information?”
    “Information that ONE does n’t want you to have.”
    “Why should I trust your information if I do n’t know who you are?”
    “I was one of the bankers.”
    This checked out. The number sh e’d reached him on belonged to the cell phone of one Travis Bradley, formerly vice president of Project Analysis (whatever that was) at the ONE Corporation, and before that a vice president at Goldman Sachs. Bradley had no criminal record, was in good standing with the IRS, and owed no debt other than a monthly balance on three credit cards. She listened to as much as he was willing to say over the phone, which, in her professional opinion, was more than he should have said into any electronic device. She said sh e’d get back to him, a promise she had no intention of keeping.
    She wrote up a report for Gabby, filed it electronically, and had forgotten all about Travis Bradley by the time she returned her attention to the batch of IP addresses located six thousand miles away.
    An hour later she got an e-mail from Gabby. The subject was “Bradley.” The entire message was two sentences: M EET WITH HIM. S EE WHAT HE KNOWS.
    Which is how, two days later, Kera found herself in that Upper East Side dive bar doing the first fieldwork sh e’d done since joining Hawk.
    “I quit,” Bradley told her.
    “Why?”
    There were a handful of people in the bar, none of them within earshot. Bradley had chosen the site—far from his home and far from the stomping grounds of any of his ex-colleagues on Wall Street or at the Midtown headquarters of ONE. Pool balls clacked on a scuffed table in the back. A few patrons chatted up the bartender, their wandering eyes cutting between televised baseball games. There was a jukebox, but no one had bothered to feed it any money at this hour. Instead, a Tom Petty album played low from the speakers.
    “I could n’t do it anymore. I’v e made too much money to claim to have a conscience, but tha t’s the closest thing to it. Can you turn that off?” They both stared for a moment at her phone on the table between them. After sh e’d switched off the mic and dropped the phone back into her bag, he spoke quickly. She did n’t have to ask him many questions to keep him talking. The gist of his intelligence was this: ONE had hired the bankers to develop sophisticated algorithms that could mine huge amounts of data and deliver precise predictions about consumer behavior.
    “So what?” Kera said. “Do n’t all smart companies do that, or at least try to? I search for something online, the search engine uses all of my recent web activity to get me the best results. I buy music or a book, the retailer tells me what other titles I’d like. How is what yo u’r e talking about different from that?”
    “Those are very two-dimensional examples. What ONE is actually able to do is