Open Secret

by Fiona Quinn

  “Does your industry use a lot of psychology?” Lisa asked.

  “Absolutely. It’s important to engage the reader and keep them turning the page.”

  “I just read the Taylor Knapp book,” Lisa said.

  That was his cue. Rowan leaned back in his seat in the corner, moving deeper into the shadows and letting Lisa take over.

  “I hate that book,” Avery said vehemently.

  “Your company published it.”

  Avery spun her glass in place and looked toward the door.

  “I thought it was interesting,” Lisa continued. “I was talking to a friend about the themes. They had a completely different take on the book than I did. We had a long discussion about it, and we decided that the author was pretty darned smart and put in little dog whistles for different groups. You wouldn’t hear the whistles unless your ears were tuned to those notes.” Lisa smiled.

  From the way Avery’s body was moving, she must have one leg crossed over the other under the table and be kicking it rhythmically. She said nothing, and Lisa plowed on as if she didn’t see Avery’s tension mounting.

  “Bubbles.” Lisa laughed. “They say social media is making things worse. I read an article recently about people getting into their bubbles and having trouble reaching out to others when their different beliefs make them feel endangered. It really has been a huge issue for the world, leading to crazy unexpected outcomes.” Lisa had taken a step back. She was a professional. She knew what she was doing.

  Rowan hated that she was doing it with Avery.

  But Avery, Rowan was now convinced, was up to her neck in this Taylor Knapp shit stream.

  “Bubbles?” Avery lifted her glass and took a sip. She spun to check on Rowan. She looked back at Lisa. “How so?”

  “Well, take anti-vaxxers for example. There was a group of people who started spreading the rumor—well, the propaganda really, that immunization was dangerous because it gave you AIDS.”

  “Autism,” Avery said.

  “In this case, it was a group that thought it was preferred that African babies died. This group didn’t want the babies in Africa to be immunized. So they told the story that the USA was trying to infect the world with AIDS.”

  Avery laughed.

  Lisa looked at her, dead serious. “I’m not kidding.”

  “And people believed them?”

  “Look it up. Put ‘Polio vaccines and AIDS Link’ into the search engine.”

  Avery pulled out her phone.

  “To this day, it makes giving vaccinations in Africa very difficult. They have a lot of International organizations instead of American organizations doing the meds for just this reason. No one trusts that the US is there helping. They think we’re trying to kill their children.”

  Lisa was quiet as Avery read.

  Once Avery put her phone back down, Lisa said, “Propaganda has long tentacles. It has unknowable outcomes. It can be deadly.” Lisa waited a beat. “You know Taylor Knapp don’t you.”

  Avery stilled.

  “You can’t tell me because you have an NDA, and you’re afraid.”

  Avery said nothing.

  Rowan knew she’d deny it if this were deniable.

  “Has this been difficult for you?” Lisa asked.

  Avery furrowed her brow.

  “Having an NDA. Wanting to talk about the projects at your publishing house…”

  “No one cares about my comma placements in Saving Gloria; A SEALed Fate Romance.” She spun around to look at Rowan.

  Rowan pretended to be texting. He could feel her anxiety. He was watching her body language tells. And now he was sure. Avery was on the team for this book. She didn’t want to be. She had been threatened. He thought of all the ways they could do that. It wasn’t a hard stretch. It didn’t take FBI training.

  Rowan had been on Twitter with writers for a long time and had always been grateful that he had no aspirations for publishing his work. It was a hard industry that was constantly changing. The biggest change was, that with self-publishing, authors were finding that they could get their work in front of readers quickly instead of waiting the year for publication, plus the time trying to find an agent, plus the time for that agent to develop a publishing contract. It could be two years or more from the point where someone typed “The End” to the point where they saw a check from a traditional publisher. That was too long for most. The journey too daunting.

  The publishing industry was devolving. Descending into obscurity. Ancient and quaint.

  If they had threatened Avery’s job, she wouldn’t have many options when it came to finding a new one in the industry. If they told her they’d blackball her, she’d have no chance at all.

  And Avery wouldn’t just be thinking about herself, she’d be weighing her promise to her dying father into that equation. Without a job, how could she keep her mother safe?

  It was a very potent threat.

  It would feel life-threatening.

  Rowan thought about Finley. How easy it would be to fall into that trap of thinking he could be both protector, lover, and information gatherer.

  In this moment, Rowan wanted nothing more than to reach out and hold Avery. But that was the worst thing he could do right now. Lisa needed to be the one who forged this new relationship.

  “Did you sign an NDA with your initial contract?” Lisa asked. Her voice was calm and encouraging.

  “No.” Avery focused back on Lisa. “We were given the NDAs two years ago. We were told to sign them or be fired.”

  “And what do you think precipitated this change?” Lisa asked.

  “The industry is in trouble. Authors are finding that it’s more profitable and easier all around to publish themselves. We’re grasping at survival. I imagine that the NDAs had to be company-wide so no one felt targeted, but I think that management wanted to protect our internal numbers, so that if we founder, we don’t look like a sinking ship. If we look like we’re going down, we couldn’t get prestigious authors. We’d be done if that happened.”

  Lisa offered a hint of a smile. “What else happened about that time?” she asked gently.

  Avery shook her head.

  “I read the Taylor Knapp book that your company published, not for pleasure but as part of my assignment as an FBI special agent.”

  Avery’s shoulders came up to her ears.

  “I have some pointed questions, Avery, and I need you to answer them. I’m speaking to you as a special agent for the FBI.”

  Avery looked back at Rowan, and Rowan struggled to keep his head down, typing at a text, seeming to be unaware.

  “I have an NDA,” Avery whispered.

  Lisa leaned in. “Do you know Taylor Knapp’s birth name?”

  “No, they use a penname,” Avery whispered.

  “They, plural?” Lisa canted her head.

  “No, ‘they’ non-gendered,” Avery said.

  “Have you met this individual?” Lisa was calm and that should help, Rowan thought.

  “Twice. Well, I suppose I have. I met someone who purports to be the author.”

  “And why would you have met with them? This was a general meeting?”

  “No.” She picked up her drink and drained it down.

  “Are you working on the Taylor Knapp project Avery?”

  “Am I in trouble?” She turned. “Rowan stop with that stupid subterfuge. I know you’re listening to this. Is this why you’re talking to me? Is this why we went out? You said you didn’t sleep with people for the FBI. You lied to me about that because I was the one you were sleeping with for the FBI.” Anger seethed out of her pores. Her fury was palpable.

  That time when he was holding Avery in the warm water, and they had discussed their future together had been such an important moment in Rowan’s life. And now it was stained.

  “Avery.” Lisa’s voice was sharp and pulled Avery’s attention away from him. “Avery, look me in the eye. No. Absolutely not. No, Rowan didn’t seduce you to get inform
ation. If he was doing that, I wouldn’t be here. First, that’s not who he is. Second, that’s not what he does. Third, he wants a relationship with you. Fourth, he’s frightened for you. And he wants the FBI to step in and save your ass from the crazy that’s sure to come down the pike and hit you full force.” With each point Lisa was jamming her index finger into the table. “Rowan is your knight in shining armor in this scenario. He’s trying to find a soft landing for you. To that end, he asked that our hard hitters from the task force not step in, and instead, he got me involved. He thought you’d feel safer since you and I know each other, and I hope you can trust me. We hope you can trust me. It’s the only way.”

  Avery had her elbows posted on the table and rested her head in her hands. She was crying hard.

  Rowan swallowed. He hated every single second of this.

  “Hey.” Lisa reached out and touched Avery’s arm. “You’re not in trouble with the FBI. But this is complicated.”

  Avery didn’t stop her sobbing.

  It was almost impossible for Rowan to sit still. He wanted to fix this and make it better..

  “I understand. It’s pretty scary,” Lisa said. “The FBI can help you.”

  “No. You can’t.” Avery moved her drink off the cocktail napkin, then used the napkin to swipe at her eyes. “I have a contract. An NDA. I have a future, which sounds unpatriotic to put first. But I have to put it first. I read the newspaper. I see what happens to whistleblowers and informants. Their lives are destroyed. It’s not just my life on the line here.”

  Lisa nodded. “We can help protect you.”

  “No. You can’t.” She shook her head at Lisa. “With all the things I’ve been learning about social media and manipulation in the last week, I’m even more terrified than ever. If my name goes on someone’s Get-Avery-List, I will never find peace. I will be trolled and botted, and God knows what else.” She flung her hand in the air. “Doxxed. I’m not sure if what very limited information I have would be helpful in any way, shape, or form.”

  “Right now, the biggest help would be figuring out who this person is who is calling themselves Taylor Knapp.”

  “I don’t know their legal name.”

  “But you know how we could find them?” Lisa lifted her brow. “You have an email? A phone number? An address? Because I have a plan.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Rowan

  Friday Night

  New York City

  “Avery how good are you at lying?” Lisa asked.

  “I suck at it, to be honest. I get so anxious. I turn bright red. Please don’t ask me to lie.”

  Lisa looked up at the ceiling, thinking, then focused back on Avery. “Okay, let me ask it this way—Avery, I hear that you tell wonderful stories. Are you a good story teller? Have you ever acted?”

  “I can tell stories. I’ve never tried acting.”

  Lisa nodded, storing that away, then seemed to change tack. “I wrote a story once, and you sent me editing notes. Well, I’ve sent you lots of stories, and you’ve sent me lots of editing notes over the years. I just looked over the notes you sent me on my new short story. You were right about all of that. It was as plain as day the holes I left, once you pointed them out to me. So thank you.”

  Avery nodded.

  “But I’m thinking of a specific story. It was the story about the woman in prison, do you remember that?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t.”

  “It was a pretty long time ago. I remember it vividly because it made a lot of sense to me. You told me to walk through the scene with my body, bend over the way my character did, and when I tried it out on my own, I would see it was impossible. The reader, you said, might not know why they didn’t buy into a scene, but the scene wouldn’t make sense to their brains. I followed your advice, I walked through the scene, and I learned a lot.”

  Avery shrugged and shook her head. She didn’t see the relevance. Lisa was trying to slow spin this, and Avery’s mind moved too fast for the long drag out. Rowan didn’t know how to signal Lisa, he had to sit there and hope she had a plan.

  “Pretend this is part of a novel. Pretend you’re walking through the scene to see how things play out. You’re not lying, you’re watching characters in an unravelling plot. This is a thriller. The timeline for this is really short. We need to push the pedal down and try to get ahead of this before the new video game drops. As soon as the video game is released, the good guys lose a lot of control.”

  “Are you trying to stop the release?” Avery asked.

  “I can’t comment on our goals.” Lisa was matter of fact.

  Avery breathed in, sighed out. “I don’t know what to do.” She looked back at Rowan. “What should I do?” she whispered.

  Rowan couldn’t answer her. There was no right way to answer her. She needed to trust Lisa, and she needed to make up her mind on her own. This was her life, and Avery seemed to understand, things could unroll very quickly and very badly.

  Again, Avery nodded, acknowledging his silence as his answer. “I need to go to the ladies’ room and blow my nose.” She got up and left.

  “We could put a tail on her and see where she goes,” Lisa said.

  Rowan drummed his thumb on the table. “You heard her using the ‘they’ form of pronoun. But the way she used it didn’t sound like someone from the LGBTQ community using the non-specific gender pronoun. It sounded like she was using it to hide Taylor’s identity. We, on the other hand, used the masculine pronoun. That leads me to believe Taylor Knapp is a woman.”

  “You could be right, which means, if a team tailed Avery, they wouldn’t even know what gender subject we’re looking for. They’re an adult human and breathing, and that’s all we’ve got.”

  They sat in silence until Avery came back and found her seat, looking composed and very business-like.

  Rowan would say she’d gone off to get her head on straight. Could be a good thing. Might just as well be a bad one. It depended entirely on how Lisa played this.

  “I’m not here to scare you. I’m not here to twist your arm. I’m here because we need Taylor Knapp’s help. That’s why we need to get in touch.”

  Avery reached over to Rowan’s scotch, took a sip, and coughed hard.

  “In the aftermath of the 9-11 Terror Attacks,” Lisa said, once Avery was breathing again, “the CIA came to understand that their thinking might be homogenous. They needed a way to anticipate attacks that they couldn’t see coming. We’ve been looking through our intelligence agency lenses, sometimes those lenses can make us myopic, sometimes they can be blinders. If a threat hasn’t occurred to you, how could you possibly be prepared to thwart it?” she asked. “The Intel Community was blindsided by the airplanes being hijacked.”

  Rowan moved his chair close to Avery’s, and she shifted around, pressing up against him until he wrapped his arm around her. She snuggled in, resting her head back against his shoulder, listening.

  “Now that this problem was exposed,” Lisa continued, “the CIA decided to form a group of people who could and would challenge the intelligence agencies. They hired out-of-the-box thinkers. People willing, and even delighted, to freak out the higher ups by shining a light on ideas that might piss off the senior officials.”

  “Okay, I’m hearing this as a romance editor and that makes perfect sense to me. This is the frame I’ve put that in—one of the genres that I edit is military romance. One of the tropes is that the men in these novels are the best of the best. Super-human, if you will. The problem for my authors is how to make them unique and show their individual personalities. In this set of people, they are homogenized by their professions, and their personality differences become more nuanced and less obvious.”

  Avery shot a “sorry!” glance toward Rowan, knowing that he had been one of these elite soldiers.

  “You mean beyond being the best-trained killing machines on the face of the planet, and being the most egotistical, that special operators actually have personal
ities?” Lisa asked. “I mean, is there really anything else to know? I say, just let me read about how big their muscles are and how they’re willing to swim through fire to save the heroine, and I’m good. Personalities are overrated.” She winked at Rowan.

  Lisa had a girlfriend and less than zero interest in men and their muscles.

  “Okay look, I know you’re teasing me,” Avery said. “But I’m talking about editing and writing here. I’m talking about this as an observer and not someone who lives the life of a special operator.” She squeezed Rowan’s thigh. “And I’m using this as a metaphor to show that I can understand how the CIA got into their pickle. People who chose that career have specific personality traits. We know this because there are tests. They have to be of a high intellectual calibre. They have to be of a certain physical capability. They have to be honest. They have to be law abiding, and so forth. Now, go back to the author writing elite soldiers. The characters enter into the military world, where their egos are stripped down and built back up. The characters train to think as a single unit. Each may have their strengths and weaknesses, but in action, those nuances don’t show up as vividly as say heroes with different backgrounds. The nice guy who wanders into a cupcake shop in a sweet romance, for example. I’m not saying the military heroes are cookie-cutter characters, I’m just saying that the authors who are writing about operations and missions and what have you, work very hard to portray differences in personalities of their characters while their characters are in stressful situations where they’ve been trained to act in a very specific way. And those actions, reactions, and thought processes are standardised for the sake of success.”

  She held out her hands stretching her fingers wide. “Now, I’m imagining the CIA. People who get to the level that would be calling the shots, would have been trained to think and institutionalized to behave in a monochromatic way. It would be far better,” she stopped and lifted her brows for emphasis as she looked up at Rowan, “to bring in creative thinkers. For example, you could give me any scenario and without batting an eyelash, I could tell you fifteen plausible ways that this could all go to hell in a handbasket. Why? Because the stories that put characters in life or death situations are the stories that trigger the brain to pay attention, and brains hearing danger stories get that dopamine reward we were talking about earlier. If I get a manuscript in, I’m looking for places where the author got lazy and let the story be too bright and happy. Too predictable. Bright happy predictable books are put on bedside tables. We need bad things to happen in the books so the reader’s mind is enthusiastically learning. Those bad things have to be interesting so readers are hungry to turn the pages. How do you make a story interesting? By finding new and unique ways to twist the plot. And to make the possible outcomes dangerous.”