The Good Traitor (11 page)

FBI I
NTERVIEW
T
RANSCRIPT
(E
XCERPT
)

D
ETAINEE
: A
NGELA
V
ASSER

A
GENTS
P
RESENT
: B
ENTON
, C
HU
, W
ILLIAMSON
, L
EE
, T
OMS

S
TART
T
IME
: 1148
HRS
PST

E
ND
T
IME
: 1730
HRS
PST

L
OCATION
: S
AN
F
RANCISCO
I
NTERNATIONAL
A
IRPORT

ANGELA VASSER
: Is Ben OK? Does he know I’m here?

AGENT BENTON
: Ben is . . . ?

VASSER
: My partner?

BENTON
: Partner?

VASSER
: Yeah.

BENTON
: I see. I’m sure he’s fine. We can have someone contact him if you like.

VASSER
: I want to talk to him.

BENTON
: Later.

VASSER
: Am I being charged with a crime?

BENTON
: It looks that way, yeah. This is serious. These e-mails—here, I’ll ask you to look at them again—in these e-mails you discuss highly classified information—

VASSER
: Which I was never privy to. I couldn’t possibly have authored these e-mails. I wasn’t even aware they existed until you put me in this room.

BENTON
: So you deny writing them?

VASSER
: Yes. If there’s a way to make that clearer to you, I can’t conceive of it now.

BENTON
: But you don’t deny that they were written in your name and were sent from your e-mail address?

VASSER
: I’ll have to take an agnostic position on that. The documents you’ve shown me appear to support your theory, but I didn’t write them and I can only speculate about who did.

BENTON
: Go ahead, then.

VASSER
: I’m sorry?

BENTON
: Speculate.

VASSER
: You’re serious. OK.
I’d
start questioning people who had the appropriate security clearance. Which I did not.

AGENT CHU
: I think what Agent Benton is asking is whether there is anyone who would have had both the motive and technological prowess to do what you’re suggesting.

VASSER
: What
I’m
suggesting?

BENTON
: Well, if you deny sending them yourself, how else do you explain them being sent?

VASSER
: I can’t explain it sitting in this room. I just stepped off a fourteen-hour flight to discover that I was the last person on earth to know about these e-mails. And now you’ve confiscated my computer and phone. I take that to mean you’re accepting the burden of explaining it.

CHU
: So you can’t think of anyone, then?

VASSER
: When I do, I’m sure I’ll let you know.

BENTON
: Who is Conrad Smith?

VASSER
: He’s a contractor. A consultant. Based out of Cape Town.

BENTON
: So you do know him?

VASSER
: Yes, I haven’t denied that, have I?

BENTON
: And he works for the Chinese government?

VASSER
: He works for the Chinese government, and for the governments of Kenya and South Africa, and a number of private foundations. Some of them are American, I might add, since you seem to be suggesting some conspiracy along nationalistic lines. Conrad is an economist and telecom consultant, not a political operative.

BENTON
: It sounds like you’re defending him.

VASSER
: I’m correcting your misunderstandings. They are rather numerous.

CHU
: Why weren’t you on the plane?

VASSER
: I’m sorry?

CHU
: With the ambassador.

VASSER
: Oh. What does that have to do with this?

BENTON
: We’re just doing our jobs, Mrs. Vasser.

VASSER
: Miss.

BENTON
: Ah, yes, we’ll get to that in a minute. You flew to Shanghai with Ambassador Rodgers, but you weren’t on the return flight, which went down in the Yellow Sea.

VASSER
: Look, I went over all of this with your colleagues in Beijing a few days ago.

BENTON
: The context has changed since then. We want to clear up a few things. This is one of them. How come you weren’t on that flight?

VASSER
: My Chinese and Kenyan counterparts remained in Shanghai over the weekend. I didn’t want to lose any of the progress w
e’d
made. So Greg—Ambassador Rodgers—and I agreed that I should stay and continue to build relationships.

CHU
: You told the agents who spoke with you at the embassy this week that you were at the Park Hyatt when you learned that the ambassador’s plane was missing.

VASSER
: That’s right. I got a call from the embassy’s chief of security. I remember clearly looking at the clock. It was 11:25 in the evening.

BENTON
: Is that the hotel yo
u’d
stayed at the previous evening?

VASSER
: No.

BENTON
: I see. As you can imagine, Mrs.—
Ms.
—Vasser, we’ve had some agents speak with Conrad Smith since these e-mails between you two surfaced. Conrad Smith is in Hong Kong now, but he mentioned that he was in Shanghai last week. It seems he had a room at the Park Hyatt on the night of the ambassador’s plane tragedy. Is that a coincidence?

VASSER
: Which part?

CHU
: Were you with Mr. Smith that night?

VASSER
: Yes, I was. He happened to be in town on business. Coincidentally.

BENTON
: And was it a coincidence that you stayed in his hotel room?

VASSER
: No. That part was not a coincidence.

BENTON
: You’re unmarried?

VASSER
: Yes. Is that a crime too?

CHU
: You admit to being with Mr. Smith at the Park Hyatt as the flight you were initially scheduled to be on crashed into the ocean.

VASSER
: You have a way of making facts sound like accusations.

BENTON
: We just want to get everything straight. You’re saying that not only were you sleeping with someone other than your partner—that’s the word you used for, uh, Ben, isn’t it?—but that this was the man to whom you then disclosed highly classified information.

VASSER
: I was sleeping with someone other than you, which makes that none of your business. I’ve been as clear as I can be about the classified information. I didn’t write those e-mails. I couldn’t have.

BENTON
: Yet here they are.

Versions of this conversation repeated itself for over five hours. Vasser was then charged with mishandling classified information and flown to a federal prison in Fort Meade, Maryland. The full transcript was published on Gnos.is.

G
EORGETOWN

Lionel Bright waited anxiously, ensconced in the private booth h
e’d
wrested from the tight control of the maître d’. H
e’d
invested an unusual amount of care in planning a successful evening, enough that rearranging his day to guarantee h
e’d
be on time—something he rarely did for social commitments—had delivered him twenty minutes early. The final thing to do now was to make it look like no planning at all had gone into the date, which his early arrival clearly contradicted. To avoid mulling over his expectations for the evening, he ordered a whiskey. The concentration required to pace his sips over twenty minutes provided the needed distraction from his anxiety.

She appeared on time and he rose to greet her. Audrey. She was a touch underdressed, but he suspected there was less to read into that than there might have been with other women. He didn’t know her to play games, at least not the subtle sort. Besides, if she turned any heads, it was because of her simple, uncultivated beauty, not for the offense of some common pantsuit that didn’t quite live up to the candlelight and thick tablecloths. She initiated a hug before he could. And then he gestured formally, lamely, toward her side of the booth, feeling awkward without the physical prop of a chair to pull out for her.

They sat for a minute beneath the dim, low-hanging light fixture as Audrey spread her hands on the plush tablecloth and glanced around the opulent dining room, then down at the neat rows of cursive printed on the menu. She looked up at him with a wry little smile.

“Christ, Lionel. You’re laying it on pretty thick. Do I come off as someone who’s difficult to impress?”

“I—” He hesitated. And then, as h
e’d
done several times in her company—and in no one else’s—he said exactly what he was thinking without any premeditation for what might happen next. “I’m terrible at this. This is my first third date.”

She cocked her head. “Your first third . . . ?” That smile again. “That’s weirdly endearing.”

“Would you like to go somewhere else?”

“No. Now I’ve got my eye on the surf and turf.” Her face softened. “You’re doing great.”

The rest of the meal went splendidly, enough so that he never thought of time passing or even much about the food, which came in three exquisite courses. He never even thought about work, except for once, when his smartphone trembled in his pants pocket. While the waitstaff cleared their picked-over entrées, he stole a discreet glance at the phone. It was a notification of a text message from Henry Liu, his top China analyst. It was not unheard of for Liu to text him after hours. What was unheard of was for Bright to have the attention of an interesting and beautiful woman. He didn’t have time to open and read Liu’s message before the waitstaff retreated and Bright was again alone with Audrey, who he suspected would not hold back her disapproval if she caught him reading texts on his phone during dinner.

Perhaps another half hour passed before the
y’d
finished coffee and trading bites of a raspberry tart, and Bright excused himself to use the restroom. Would it be too forward, he wondered, to suggest that he could drive them both to his house and then back again in the morning to retrieve her car before work? She—

H
e’d
not noticed the figure enter the men’s room ten steps ahead of him until Bright himself entered, his fingers already tugging at his zipper. The physical reaction came first: a rising, inflating sensation in his chest that he would not have categorized as healthy. But then his mind caught up and his calm was restored.

“Henry. Jesus, you scared the hell out of me.”

“Sorry. I would have just approached the table, but I didn’t recognize the woman. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

Bright looked around. “Clearly you did.”

“You got my message?”

The text. Bright remembered now. He hadn’t read it. And now suddenly, with Liu in front of him in a men’s room, he understood how out of character h
e’d
begun to act in Audrey’s presence. Who was he, ignoring work messages for more than an hour? Bright extracted his phone, activated it with a thumbprint, and opened his messages. Liu’s text had contained a single word—“Potomac”—which was their code word to arrange a secure call urgently.

“Well, now you’ve got me,” Bright said, beginning to understand that this run-in wasn’t going to be as simple as a few words exchanged in front of a bank of urinals.

“It’s MIRAGE, sir. I think you’ll want to come back to the office.”

Had it been anyone other than Liu, Bright would have dressed him down for sabotaging the evening. But he could see in Liu’s eyes that this was different.

Fuck,
Bright thought, uncharacteristically frustrated with the work intrusion. Why couldn’t they live in a world where planes sometimes just fell out of the sky?

“I have to take a leak,” he said finally.

“I’ll pull the car around.”

“Something’s come up.” Bright stood over the booth, unable to bring himself to sit and look Audrey in the eye.

“Now?”

This one syllable, delivered in this way by a woman, stirred up thirty years of solid rationale against dating. Relationships for someone in his line of work were inhumane, if not impossible.

“I’m afraid so. I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry.”

“You’re not a senior fellow at the Spurkland Institute, are you?” she said.

H
e’d
expected her to try to read something else into his abrupt departure, that sh
e’d
think he was changing his mind about their prospects for the evening and beyond and was choosing a cowardly excuse to bow out. He was caught off guard by her striking much closer to the truth.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said. They both knew he sounded ridiculous.

“Yes, you do. Go ahead. Go on,” she said, catching him glancing at the door.

H
e’d
been in this situation before with women, and on all previous occasions h
e’d
walked out without thinking twice.

“You’re right,” he said, surprising them both. “I’m not a senior fellow at the Spurkland Institute. I can’t get into that now, though. I really do have to go—”

“I’m not a lobbyist.”

“What?” he said.

“It’s only fair for me to tell you now, since we’re clearing the air. I’m not a lobbyist for the airline industry.”

“Who do you work for?”

“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what you do?”

“I—I can’t. Honestly. I know that sounds ridiculous.”

“Which part is ridiculous—that you can’t tell me, or that you want me to believe that you’re being honest now when you weren’t before?”

“Either. Both.” The phone vibrated against his thigh with its special insistence. What was it about the design of this inanimate object that pulled people from significant face-to-face interactions with one twitch? “I’m sorry, Audrey. I have to go.”

“It’s Karen, actually.”

“Oh.” So he wasn’t the only one with a hidden life. He suddenly had questions he wanted to ask. But there wasn’t time now. Instead, he smiled, hoping he didn’t look as flummoxed as he felt. “OK. Karen, then. I was having a good time.”

A transition had come across Audrey’s—Karen’s—face so that when she shrugged, Lionel could see sh
e’d
already retreated into herself, into the way she would be a minute from now when he was no longer there to impress her or lie to her. She looked disappointed, not in him, but in herself, and the shrug seemed to be her way of telling herself to buck up. What had she expected? This wasn’t just dating in a city steeped with power and politics; this wasn’t just online dating, or dating in middle age. This was all of the above. The power of those cupid algorithms wasn’t in the algorithm at all; it was in the capacity of humans to delude themselves.

“I was having a good time too,” she said, to herself or to him, and he turned toward the heavy doors at the front of the restaurant. It wasn’t until the car was on the George Washington Memorial Parkway heading to Langley that Bright realized he hadn’t paid the check.