The Good Traitor (17 page)

Vasser considered this in silence.

“So don’t turn on me,” Kera said. “I want to help you.”

“How do I even begin to trust your motives?”

“Start with the fact that I’m here. If I were working for China, I would be there, where it would be safe for someone who—” Kera stopped herself. Something occurred to her that made her forget for a moment what sh
e’d
been saying to Vasser. It wasn’t until Vasser spoke again that Kera emerged from the distraction.

“Why are you here, really?” Vasser said.

Kera spotted a familiar mix of fear and aggression in Vasser’s eyes. But she also saw an opening.

“It’s important to me to clear my name,” Kera said. “They’ve left me with no choice but to prove to them on my own that I’m a patriot.”

“And you plan to do that how?”

“By figuring out who killed Ambassador Rodgers and why. I don’t need to tell you that the whole framework of our relationship with China is at stake.”

“What do you want with me?”

“You worked closely with the ambassador. You were the last person to talk to him. I know you already went over all of this with the FBI, but that was when they were accusing you of leaking state secrets. Will you go over it again with me—not as a defendant in an interrogation but as a witness to the final hours before the assassination of a US ambassador?”

Vasser’s eyes drifted to the TV and then to the window and the river beyond. “Where do you want me to start?”

“Unless there’s someplace more obvious, start with Shanghai. Think back, look for details that may not have seemed significant before.”

Vasser went through the trip, from the routine preparations to the meetings to the hotel accommodations. Kera stopped her when she mentioned that sh
e’d
stayed the night with Conrad Smith.

“Look, I don’t mean to pry.”

Vasser nearly laughed. “You’re the only one, then.” She shook her head. “Conrad and I are lovers. That’s all there is to that.”

Kera waited for more, but further details weren’t offered. “And your partner? Is that what you call him?”

“Ben. Yes. Ben is completely aware of it, of course. He has his own lovers; I have mine.”

“So it’s . . . an arrangement?”

“It’s honesty and communication. We like each other and we like our relationship. But I travel a lot. It’s our way of getting what we want without putting our relationship on the line.”

Kera nodded. “You explained this to the Feds?”

“I tried. But of course they just obsessed over the sex. They assumed that if they treated it as a dirty secret, it could be used as leverage against me. Well, that’s their baggage, not mine. It’s unhealthy, and it’s bad detective work. The
y’d
be better off focusing their investigation into the TERMITE leak on more relevant leads.”

“Like?”

Vasser shrugged. “There must be a list of everyone who knew about the program. They might have started with those people.”

Kera nodded. “You wouldn’t have been on that list.”

“Exactly.”

“Then why do you think the Feds came after you to begin with?”

“The e-mails, apparently.”

“Which you didn’t write.”

“That’s right.”

“Did the Chinese know you weren’t on the ambassador’s plane when it left Shanghai?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your hosts at these meetings. The Chinese delegation. And the Kenyans. Did they know yo
u’d
skipped out on the flight?”

“Yes, I had dinner with them right after Greg left.”

“But it was last-minute, your decision to stay an extra night?”

“Yes.” She looked down at her hands in her lap. “You mentioned the other night that you thought I might have been the target of that plane crash. Do you really think that? I thought you were crazy then. But now I’ve been shot at. I just can’t figure out
why
.”

“The most obvious reason is TERMITE.”

“I’ve told you, I wasn’t responsible for that leak. I couldn’t have accessed—”

“I know that. And not just because I’m taking your word. I happen to know that the first public descriptions of TERMITE, which appeared in a news story on Gnos.is, did not come from any one human source. They were pieced together by a computer—a lot of computers, actually.” Vasser’s expression went blank with confusion. “That’s how Gnos.is works. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the sensitive nature of the information in that story created the appearance of a leaker, which is why everyone is looking for one.”

“And someone wants to make it look like it was me?”

“Yes. That would explain the e-mails manufactured in your name.” Kera encouraged the silence that followed. It meant Vasser was thinking.

“Those two names you wrote on that piece of paper you gave me. Where did you get them?”

“Marcus Templeton and Anne Platt. They were killed within a day or two of the ambassador. Did their names mean anything to you?”

“Not until I looked them up. The woman, Anne Platt, had spent her career developing phones and other devices that laid the foundation of the modern telecom industry. And the man, Marcus Templeton, made billions investing in telecom.”

“How about the ambassador? Did he have any stake in telecom?”

“Sure.” Vasser shrugged. “No financial stake, of course. That would have been a conflict of interest. But telecom was a big part of our development initiatives with Africa and China. It’s in America’s own interest to have a global cyberinfrastructure that’s compatible, efficient, and that can drive commerce back to the States. That’s what Conrad had been hired—”

“Conrad Smith?”

Vasser nodded. “You saw the latest story in Gnos.is? It mentioned that Conrad was working as a consultant on a classified government program called IKE.”

Kera nodded. “Did he ever discuss that with you?”

“No. It was classified. It didn’t occur to me that he would even know about IKE.”

“Wait. So
you
knew about IKE before the story broke?”

“Only the broad outlines. It informed our long-term policy positions with China and Africa.”

“What are the broad outlines?”

Vasser hesitated.

“The program is public now. Can’t you discuss it?”

Another pause for internal deliberation. Perhaps Vasser was rehearsing which parts of the program were classified and which were not. Or perhaps she was weighing whether Kera’s question was actually a trap to test how easily Vasser would give up classified details. Candidness won out.

“More and more devices,” Vasser began, “well, practically everything we come into contact with each day—from our televisions to our cars to our refrigerators and bedroom thermostats—are becoming linked via the Internet. This is great news for the future of the telecom industry. Investments and profits have already started to explode. But connectivity is expanding much faster than security. Basically, when it comes to online security—both individually and at the level of the Internet’s infrastructure—we’ve maintained a pre-9/11 mentality. Instead of building security software that becomes outdated in the time it takes to install it, we need to engineer all of our new devices and vehicles and appliances with fundamental security built in.”

“This is what Conrad Smith is advising the US government on for IKE?” Kera asked. She had been plenty aware on her own of America’s dire cybersecurity position, but she had not heard of the IKE program until the CIA documents were leaked.

“I imagine so. I didn’t know he was involved with IKE until I read his name in Gnos.is. We never speak about work, not in that way. We can’t. Both of us are too involved with sensitive stuff.”

“Did Conrad say why he was in Shanghai on the night you were there?”

“Work.” Vasser shrugged awkwardly, sensing that her answer seemed flimsy. “He was there for some meetings. Like I said, we didn’t press each other on details. Why?”

Kera leaned forward. “By my count, there are only five people who know you’re innocent. You’re one of them. I’m one of them. Two others work with me.” She watched Vasser do the math.

“And Conrad.”

Kera nodded.

“I need to talk to him,” Vasser said suddenly.

“Have you spoken to him since your release?”

“No. My calls, my e-mails, they’re all being monitored. I have to assume everyone I contact right now is subject to invasive scrutiny. I wanted to spare Conrad that, though I imagine they’re already all over him. But this is different. I need to warn him.”

“That’s impossible. You don’t know his role in this.”

“What do you mean?” Vasser’s eyes narrowed. “What are you suggesting, that he’s in on it?”

“I’m suggesting that contacting him is not a risk we can take.”

“We?” Vasser said. “I just met you. I
know
Conrad. Don’t you have anyone you trust? Do you have any relationships built on that?”

Kera smiled bitterly and stood. “I’m going to get some rest. Your room is at the end of the hall. I got groceries yesterday; help yourself if you’re hungry. Don’t go out.”

Left alone, Angela Vasser’s eyes drifted back to the television. Every fifteen minutes or so, the familiar banner popped up on the lower third of the screen—
B
REAKING
N
EWS
: V
ASSER AND
S
HOOTING
S
USPECT
B
OTH
M
ISSING
A
FTER
A
SSASSINATION
A
TTEMPT
—though there were no new “breaking” developments being reported. With the TV on mute, she occasionally heard a creak or rustle from the upstairs master bedroom where Kera Mersal had gone. Vasser got up and switched off the TV.

The exhaustion hit her then. In the last twenty-four hours, she had confronted the most primal challenge of any species: survival. Now lesser needs presented themselves. A shower. Sleep. Her body suddenly ached for these things. She had no personal belongings with her, and she was wearing the outfit sh
e’d
put on the previous morning. In the bathroom, she removed her clothes and washed them in the shower, a chore she lingered over, savoring the warmth and the isolation of the cascading stream. She imagined this would be the appropriate time to break down, to unleash a good sob in the relative safety and privacy of the bathroom. But tears would not come. Her body knew it wasn’t time to let go; this wasn’t over yet.

Wrapped in a towel, she padded down the hallway to the guest room, pulled toward the queen bed by the promise of imminent sleep. That’s when she saw the cottage’s landline phone under the lamp on the nightstand.

S
AN
F
RANCISCO

The flight from Chicago felt short, and not just because Conrad Smith was accustomed to transoceanic travel. What Smith most wanted right now was to be invisible, anonymous, indefinitely thirty thousand feet above it all. Unless you lived in the African bush or the Amazonian rain forest, a plane was about the only place you could credibly claim anymore to be unreachable by phone or e-mail.

And even that would change soon—thanks in part, ironically, to the formerly secret project on which Smith had been advising the US government. Though travelers would welcome the ability to surf the Internet and send text messages in-flight, Smith suspected that the change in regulations was hardly being made on their behalf. From what h
e’d
witnessed in his work on the IKE project, the catalyst driving the policy shift was the fact that the NSA went into withdrawal every time a passenger got on a plane and was forced to stop using his or her phone. The new in-flight electronic free-for-all would provide the agency with the desired uninterrupted stream of data from citizens—some of whom might be terrorists, the agency and its defenders were always quick to point out.

Conrad Smith sat in first class, but only because it had become nearly impossible for him to book a ticket in coach with as many miles and rewards points as h
e’d
accumulated. In fact, h
e’d
thought h
e’d
succeeded this time in doing just that, but at the gate the airline had given him an automatic courtesy upgrade. He switched off his phone well before the flight attendant’s announcement to do so and leaned back in his seat, avoiding eye contact with any of his fellow travelers shuffling down the aisle toward their coach seats. The day before, a classified report mentioning his name in connection with the IKE project had been published on Gnos.is. Ever since, h
e’d
fielded panicked calls from the Department of Homeland Security, which was trying to manage the intelligence leak, as well as inquiries from his overseas clients. And of course, there was a new wave of messages from the FBI agents who had been interrogating him for more than a week about the fake e-mails between him and Angela Vasser. When those e-mails had first surfaced, h
e’d
been immediately suspended from work on the IKE contract. Luckily, h
e’d
been in South Africa at the time, or else he would have been detained the way Vasser had been. But Vasser was finally released and the credibility of the e-mails was challenged.

Just a few weeks earlier, his consulting business had been booming. And then it had all come apart. His involvement with IKE was over. His name was forever linked to news stories of illegal leaks and extramarital affairs. Now, with this trip to San Francisco, he was being forced to plead with his remaining clients not to drop him.

For a few blissful hours, Smith read a book, occasionally glancing out the window where the American plains gave way to mountains and desert and then, finally, the fog-shrouded, verdant coast. Walking from gate to curb, he resuscitated his phone. It twitched frantically. There were a dozen texts and two voice-mail messages. The texts were mostly from harmless friends wh
o’d
read his name in the news again and were calling more or less to marvel at this fact. He looked at the voice-mail display. One message was from his former client at DHS, no doubt with instructions for how to handle news of the leak in that afternoon’s meeting. The other voice mail was from a Virginia number; probably a journalist or, worse, another FBI agent with follow-up questions posed in the form of accusations.

Smith located his waiting driver and parlayed a greeting into small talk, relieved for another excuse to delay the requisite electronic correspondence. He could return the phone calls when he got to his hotel room.