The Good Traitor
Authors: Ryan Quinn
Tags: #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #International Mystery & Crime, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Spies & Politics, #Espionage, #Political, #Thrillers
ALSO BY RYAN QUINN
End of Secrets
The Fall
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 by Ryan Quinn
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503954625
ISBN-10: 1503954625
Cover design by Marc Cohen
For the hackers.
Be gentle.
C
ONTENTS
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UTSIDE
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ONTANA
FBI I
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RANSCRIPT
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S
HANGHAI
Amid the rigged chess game that shuffled fuselages around the tarmac of Pudong International Airport, a sleek Gulfstream G450 taxied from a private terminal and slipped into position behind a line of wide-body commercial jets. Overhead, the last daylight drained from the waiting sky. Inside the glowing porthole window over the G450’s wing sat Greg Rodgers, United States ambassador to China. Graying but still handsome and healthy, Rodgers had eyes that were steady with the patience of a family man, which he was, and lit by the incurable curiosity of an academic, which h
e’d
been before the presidential appointment that had moved him and his wife, Wendy, from New Haven to Beijing. Their two grown sons remained in the States, though they visited often with the diplomat’s daughters-in-law and three grandchildren.
During his ambassadorship, now on the eve of its sixth year, travel for Rodgers rarely involved more than a traffic-choked ride in one of the drab diplomatic vehicles that shuttled the ambassador and his security detail around the capital city. But a recent spate of multination trade talks had forced him to the sky, where h
e’d
been wearing out the airways between Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.
This particular trip was exceptional for its incorporation of the private jet, which belonged to a wealthy Chinese investor named Hu Lan. Rodgers’s first instinct had been to decline Hu’s offer to lend him the Gulfstream for the weekend. Posted to a country where hundreds of millions of citizens lived in abject poverty, Rodgers was not the sort of man who felt comfortable indulging in luxury. But Hu was on the list of Chinese politicians and businessmen with whom Rodgers was encouraged to form ties. This was an actual list—classified and delivered to him weekly in encrypted cables from the State Department in DC. Some of the names on this list had obvious diplomatic value; others didn’t. Rodgers suspected the latter were placed there by the Central Intelligence Agency. Hu Lan was almost certainly one of the CIA additions.
Aside from reluctantly agreeing to borrow the Chinese businessman’s private jet, Rodgers had not given Hu a second thought—until the previous day, when a story had rippled through the international news media that made the trip on Hu’s jet more awkward than it had been already. The story originated on the news website Gnos.is and was quickly confirmed by other reputable news organizations. This Gnos.is-led wave of disruptive news stories was starting to feel like the new norm. Gnos.is’s reportage was thorough and apolitical, and Rodgers had to admit that on many occasions h
e’d
found the site a valuable resource. But Gnos.is—which, instead of relying on the labor of individual journalists, vacuumed up massive amounts of online data and applied algorithms to sort fact from rumor and even to generate the actual text of articles—had a habit of publishing details that caused headaches for diplomats like Rodgers, whose job relied on state secrets remaining secret. While this particular story didn’t cause embarrassment for the US government, it nonetheless promised to complicate Rodgers’s life. The Gnos.is scoop was that Hu Lan’s majority stake in an American telecom company called InspiraCom had been funded by the Ministry of State Security, China’s equivalent to the CIA.
The news story proved Rodgers’s instinct right: Hu’s hospitality would amount to more trouble than it was worth. But that changed nothing. He confirmed that Hu was still on the State Department/CIA list, and then he and his staff climbed aboard the plush little jet and pretended to be grateful for the ride, sipping glasses of wine and avoiding discussing anything they wouldn’t have said aloud in the presence of a Chinese MSS officer.
Owning a business jet was a hot trend among the Chinese elite, who imported them from the United States and Europe by the hundreds annually. With an operating cost of $10,000 per flight, the small luxury aircraft were by all appearances impractical. But the motives behind keeping up appearances are often exactly that. If Hu Lan wanted to spend $10,000 per flight to whisk Rodgers to Shanghai and back as a symbol of China’s ascension in the global economy, who was Rodgers to decline? Diplomacy, h
e’d
discovered, required not only a clear knowledge of one’s principles but also a willingness to go along with almost anything that didn’t violate them outright. Despite his personal discomfort, he had no political principle against riding in a private jet. At least the G450 was American made.
In the fading daylight, Rodgers watched an Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger jetliner, lumber onto the rubber-scarred runway and rumble to speed before lifting, improbably, into the air. Then a Boeing 777 received the all clear from the tower and roared from land to sky.
Next up was the G450, which looked like landing gear with wings next to these larger craft. The initial thrust pushed Rodgers back in his seat. The jet fought to absorb the contours of the runway as it gathered momentum. And then the ride went suddenly smooth. The Gulfstream climbed steeply into the darkening night, banked away from Earth’s most populous country, and darted over the mouth of the Yangtze River before cutting temporarily away from the coast. When it banked back to settle into its flight path over the Yellow Sea, the western horizon tilted into view, glowing in the far distance, enlarging the sky.
Rodgers glanced at his watch. Before boarding h
e’d
called his wife to let her know that the ninety-minute flight to Beijing would get him home closer to bedtime than dinnertime. Rodgers leaned back in his seat, exhaustion weighing on his eyelids. His workday was far from over. Right now it was eight in the morning in Washington, and the deputy secretary of state was expecting a report on the Shanghai meetings. But that was not the sort of cable Rodgers could compose on Hu’s plane. He would have to wait until he was inside the secure confines of the American embassy.
The G450 could comfortably accommodate eight passengers in addition to the crew, but on this leg it held only Rodgers, an assistant, and two former Navy SEALs—his protectors, though what they were supposed to protect him from Rodgers did not waste time imagining. His relative solitude was an unexpected pleasure. He almost always traveled with his top aide, Angela Vasser, ever since sh
e’d
been sent from DC two years earlier. He enjoyed Angela and had come to rely on her quick, incisive mind. But when they had at the last minute decided she should stay on in Shanghai through the weekend to continue deepening her rapport with her Chinese and African counterparts there, h
e’d
found himself glad at the prospect of some true downtime.
Not that he could allow himself to make use of it. Even as he tried to shut down, Rodgers had begun composing in his mind a cable that outlined the key developments of the negotiations. He was still engrossed in this when, without warning, the plane pitched dramatically upward, hard enough to knock his phone and a small bottle of water from the armrest and send them sliding aft across the cabin floor. In addition to the physical disturbance, he noticed a more subtle change: the hum that had accompanied their forward thrust out of Shanghai had suddenly ceased. This silence, more than the plane’s violent bucking, was acutely unnerving, like the sudden absence of a soundtrack in a movie scene. With almost no outward reaction other than a glance at the closed cockpit door, Rodgers calmly acknowledged the wild sinking sensation between his lower stomach and the base of his spine.
“Whoa, there,” said one of the security men, playing it cool.
Rodgers imagined that they all must be thinking the same thing:
Turbulence.
It’s worse in small aircraft, right?
But it wasn’t necessary to be a pilot or a meteorologist to understand that this wasn’t turbulence.
A second later, there was a noise that was louder than a click but softer than a thud, and the cabin lights went out. Rodgers glanced to the wing but couldn’t make out the light that should have been flashing at its tip. The exterior lights had been cut too. Glancing around, he felt both suddenly skilled at diagnosing problems—
Electrical failure! Engine failure!
—and acutely aware that he had no knowledge of how any of these complications might be overcome.
The second security man stood heroically, perhaps because he was trained to do so, and stumbled toward the cockpit, riding the narrow aisle like a bull. By starlight, Rodgers watched him open the door and half expected to see the silhouettes of both pilots slumped over their instruments. He was not prepared for the alternative: that they had full control of their own faculties but somehow none of the plane’s. A brief, calm, highly professional conversation between the pilots and bodyguard ensued. It was inaudible to Rodgers except for a curt excerpt from one of the pilots that reached him, and which turned over and over in his mind: “She went into a stall.”
Rodgers was afraid to guess where that particular problem fell on the continuum of manageable to catastrophic, but the jet’s odd silence was making everything feel inescapably real. He was in the present. This was happening. They were twenty thousand feet above the Yellow Sea, in an aircraft he had not imagined could be so silent as it sailed through the air.
Of the forces imposed upon objects of mass on Earth, gravity is the most predictable. It does not gust or evaporate or ebb or erode. It cannot be harnessed with a windmill or an airfoil or a solar panel. It cannot be voted upon or negotiated or corrupted by money. Struggle against it, and it doesn’t surge with vengeance or retreat out of mercy. It merely is. It always is.
For a violent thirty seconds, the fuselage yo-yoed and rattled, an ungraceful dance partner rebelling against the pilots’ lead. Soon, the aerodynamic phenomenon of lift was no longer in play and the only relevant force was gravity, which, Rodgers had learned in elementary-school science, accelerates objects in free fall at an exponential rate.
The cabin air grew putrid with vomit. Terror pealed in shouts through the stench. Then gradually the human noises subsided as, one by one, the six souls in their spinning cage in the sky were swallowed mercifully into unconsciousness.
Some seconds later, the ocean’s buoyant surface intervened to arrest the plane’s free fall and disperse debris across the surface of the water, which was darker than the starlit sky.