End of Secrets Read Online Free

worker in broad daylight. It might have been someone high or drunk, claiming a small corner of the city in the night. It might have been anyone. The city was dense and unfathomable.
    Kera moved with the flow of commuters, the words passing overhead, and then she was on the sidewalk.
    She scanned the intersection at Broadway and Houston. The streets and subway tunnels roiled with the citywide migration from office to apartment, career life to family life, from museums to Broadway theaters, cocktails to dinner, from daylight to twilight. Leashed dogs, freed from a da y’s captivity, splashed urine at the base of walls and planters and parking meters. Bareheaded cyclists dodged fares climbing out of open cab doors. Banks went dark and sports bars ran specials. It was rush hour and happy hour.
    It was early for Kera to be off work. Normally, she stayed at Haw k’s Times Square offices until after dark. But today coordinated raids in Sweden, Germany, and Russia had resulted in the arrests of anarchist hackers that her team had been homing in on for months. Gabby had congratulated them and sent everyone home early, reminding them that there would be many late nights to come. Kera had no intention of taking the evening completely off. She had other cases. But she could do that work from home via the secure connection to Haw k’s network while she waited for Parker, who was in the air over the Atlantic and due home in a few hours. She would have dinner waiting for him, she decided. Her fiancé. She had cooked rarely since she moved to the city, and even less since they moved in together. Preparing a meal would mean an inventory of the cupboards and refrigerator, and then a run to at least two of the narrow-aisled groceries in the neighborhood. All of that, just to cover a simple recipe. Maybe she would just order out something nice.
    She paused at the edge of the intersection, anchored against the humanity seeping up from the subway tunnels and receding into the buildings. She liked to absorb the chaos of the city at the end of the day, to measure its unsteady pulse against her own. She had heard that this city was unforgiving, that the people here were cold, or greedy, or lonely by the millions, that life here was gritty and hard. She had ignored these warnings when sh e’d accepted the job. She wanted to see for herself. She had lived here now two years, two years exactly to the day. She was unnoticed and underestimated and underpaid. But she was underway.
    On the sidewalk nearby, a homeless man sat patiently watching his coffee cup fill with change as the stuffy transit system drew breath through the grate beneath him. She did not avert her eyes, though the cit y’s beggars still disturbed her more than D C’s had. Gabby, who was a New Yorker by birth, had assured her that she would get used to the homeless, just as she would get used to the other extremes that in the city were routine, like the absurd monthly apartment lease payments or the trash bags piled to shoulder height along the streets and the rats that darted from beneath them. Kera had no intention of getting used to any of this. Routine dulled the senses. Her training had taught her that people saw only what they wanted to see and what they happened to see. A good agent must see everything else. She was only an analyst now, but she knew that taking the job with Hawk had put her on track to make agent and could eventually lead to a long career as a case officer.
    Her eyes lingered for a moment on the begga r’s cup. Emblazoned on its side, with the logo of a popular coffee chain, was a colorful graphic promoting the release of a forthcoming movie. Apocalypse, it said. May 22. A pair of pretty actors clutched each other, witnessing some unseen horror that was suggested by orange fireballs reflected in their widened pupils. This same advertisement glowed—on a much larger scale—from the side of a five-story building across the street. The electronic billboard