End of Secrets Read Free Page B

urged her to stop and look back at him. “What?”
    “The end of secrets,” he repeated.
    She returned to the table. “OK,” she said. “That was portentous. Now what the hell does it mean?”
    He waited a few moments for her to sit, but when she did n’t, he began to talk again. “When the other quants and I started at ONE, the first thing we did was have a private lunch with Keith Grassley, the compan y’s CEO. Well, the first thing after w e’d signed a bunch of nondisclosure agreements to ensure w e’d never repeat anything like what I’m telling you now.” He swallowed, and again his eyes worked the room. When they returned to her, there was something like anger in them, as though she were forcing this from him.
    “At the end of that meal, Grassley stood up and told us why we were there. ‘O NE is no longer just a media company ,’ he said. ‘W e are an information empire .’ I know, I rolled my eyes at first too. But it was n’t hyperbole. He told us that in the future, perhaps the near future, power in the world would lie with those who could amass the most information and have the ability to organize it with a few strokes of a touch screen. ‘P erfect information about the past and the present contains the very instructions to build the future .’ Tha t’s another quote I recall. This information was out there, he said, as it had always been. It just needed to be collected. When ONE accomplished that, he said, it would be the end of secrets.”
    “H e’s a quotable guy.”
    “Yeah, well, when you have a minute, think about that last one,” Bradley snapped. But then, just as quickly, the anger washed out of his eyes, and they flooded with desperation and fear. “Will you write something?”
    She shook her head. “Yo u’r e an anonymous source with no evidence. Give me a call when yo u’r e ready to go on the record and have some proof to back it up. Until then, yo u’r e just a coward with a conscience. And that is n’t news.”
    The way she walked away, backlit by the blinding daylight coming through the windows near the front, she must have looked to him more silhouette than woman.

TWO
     
    The premise of the exercise was simple: notice something new about the neighborhood. An architectural detail, a storefront, a billboard, a pattern in the flow of pedestrian traffic. Lionel had taught Kera the game early in her training. H e’d insisted that it was a crucial exercise, both to help maintain observational fitness and to understand new environments. She found that it was most interesting to play the game in places she thought were most familiar. A startling array of things was always there and never seen. Most days, like today, a perfectly new detail in the landscape revealed itself to her in plain sight and reminded her of the extraordinary vastness of the ordinary world. It was a beautiful thought, but it was also evidence of a weakness, a vulnerability.
    The words caught her eye by chance. Technically, this violated the spirit of the exercise, which called for deliberate observations. Nevertheless, there they were—six words where she had never noticed them before. Sh e’d just disembarked from the downtown N train, and the bottleneck in the stairway drew her gaze upward over the hats and hair and bald heads toward the freedom of the sidewalk. The words were made of small letters—the entire phrase stretched at most four feet—painted on the underside of a scaffold landing that shielded pedestrians from the persistent construction along Houston Street.
     
    H AVE YOU FIGURED IT OUT YET?
     
    She cleared the bottleneck and climbed the stairs with her face tilted up, studying the phrase. The vanda l’s penmanship was plain, unlike the stylized tags graffiti artists threw up on walls and train cars and mailboxes across the city.
    Have you figured it out yet? The words were close together, each one nearly running into the next. It might have been the work of a bored construction