The Stranger

Chapter 45

HE KNOWS

Chris Taylor read the message and wondered yet again how and where this had all gone wrong. The Price job had been for hire. That might have been the mistake, though in most ways, the jobs for hire-and there had been only a handful-were the safest. The payments came from an emotionless third party, a top-level investigation firm. In a sense, it was more on the up-and-up, because there wasn’t-and yes, Chris wasn’t afraid to use the word-blackmail involved.

The normal protocol was simple: You know a terrible secret about a certain person via the web. That person has two options. He or she can pay to have the secret kept or he can choose not to pay and have the secret revealed. Chris felt satisfied either way. The end result was either a profit (the person paid the blackmail) or cathartic (the person came clean). In a sense, they needed people to choose both. They needed the money to keep the operation going. They needed the truth to come out because that was what it was all about, what made their enterprise just and good.

A secret revealed is a secret destroyed.

Perhaps, Chris thought, that was the problem with the for-hire cases. Eduardo had pushed for those. They would, Eduardo claimed, work only with a select group of upscale security companies. There would be safety, ease, and always a profit. The way it worked was also deceptively simple: The firm would put out a name. Eduardo would check through their data banks to see if there was a hit-in this case, there was one for Corinne Price via Fake-A-Pregnancy.com. Then a figure would be paid and the secret revealed.

But that meant, of course, that Corinne Price never got the chance to choose. Yes, the secret was revealed in the end. He had told Adam Price the truth. But he had done so strictly for cash. The secret keeper had not been given the option of redemption.

That wasn’t right.

Chris used the all-encompassing term secret, but really, they weren’t just secrets. They were lies and cheats and worse. Corinne Price had lied to her husband when she faked her pregnancy. Kimberly Dann had lied to her hardworking parents about how she was earning cash for college. Kenny Molino had cheated with steroids. Michaela’s fiancé, Marcus, had done worse when he set up both his roommate and eventual wife with that revenge tape.

Secrets, Chris believed, were cancers. Secrets festered. Secrets ate away at your innards, leaving behind nothing but a flimsy husk. Chris had seen up close the damage secrets could do. When Chris was sixteen years old, his beloved father, the man who had taught him how to ride a bike and walked him to school and coached his Little League team, had unearthed a terrible, long-festering secret.

He wasn’t Chris’s biological father.

A few weeks before their marriage, Chris’s mother had one last fling with an ex-boyfriend and gotten pregnant. His mother had always suspected the truth, but it wasn’t until Chris was hospitalized after a car accident and his father, his beloved father, had tried to donate blood that the truth finally came out.

“My whole life,” Dad had told him, “has been one big lie.”

Chris’s father had tried to do the “right thing” then. He had reminded himself that a father is not merely a sperm donor. A father is there for his child, provides for his child, loves and cares and raises him. But in the end, the lie had just festered too long.

Chris hadn’t seen the man in three years. That was what secrets did to people, to families, to lives.

After Chris finished college, he’d landed a job at an Internet start-up called Downing Place. He liked it there. He thought he’d found a home. But for all the company’s fancy talk, it was really just a facilitator of the worst kind of secrets. Chris ended up working for one particular site called Fake-A-Pregnancy.com. The company lied, even to itself, pretending that people bought the silicone bellies as “gag” gifts or costume parties or other “novelty funsy” rationales. But they all knew the truth. Someone might, in theory, go to a party dressed as someone pregnant. But fake sonograms? Fake pregnancy tests? Who were they fooling?

It was wrong.

Chris realized right away that it would make no sense to expose the company. That was simply too big a task and, as bizarre as it seemed, Fake-A-Pregnancy had competitors. All of these sites did. And if you went after one, the others would just grow stronger. So Chris remembered a lesson that, ironically, his “father” had taught him as a young child: You do what you can. You save the world one person at a time.

He found a few like-minded people in similar businesses, all with the same access to secrets that he had. Some were much more interested in the moneymaking side of the venture. Others understood that what they were doing was right and just, and while Chris didn’t want to make it into some kind of religious crusade, there was an aspect of his new operation that felt like a moral quest.

In the end, the core group had been five-Eduardo, Gabrielle, Merton, Ingrid, and Chris. Eduardo had wanted to do everything online. Make the threat online. Reveal the secret via an untraceable e-mail. Keep it completely anonymous. But Chris didn’t agree. What they were doing, like it or not, was devastating people. You were changing lives in a flash. You could dress it up all you wanted, but the person was one thing before his visit, and something entirely different after. You needed to do that face-to-face. You needed to do that with compassion and with a human touch. The secret protectors were faceless websites, machines, robots.

They would be different.

Chris read Adam Price’s business card and Gabrielle’s short message again: HE KNOWS

In a sense, the shoe had been put on the other foot. Chris now had a secret, didn’t he? But no, his was different. His secret was not for the sake of deception but protection-or was that just what he told himself? Was he, like so many of the people he encountered, simply rationalizing the secret?

Chris had known that what they were doing was dangerous, that they were making enemies, that some would not understand the good and want to retaliate or continue to live in their “secrets” bubble.

Now Ingrid was dead. Murdered.

HE KNOWS

And so the response was obvious: He had to be stopped.