The Good Traitor (20 page)

M
ANHATTAN

Kera reached the city at dusk. After abandoning the Civic in a church parking lot in Spring Valley, New York, sh
e’d
taken Metro-North into Manhattan, where she transferred to a downtown subway. After days in seclusion, the stimulation of the train—its sweaty crush of passengers, its mind-splitting metal clacking in the tunnels, its cameras in every corner—felt claustrophobic and overwhelming. At the same time, she craved information. Her eyes were pulled in the direction of any screen that might provide her with more news.

Surfacing at Houston and Lafayette, Kera faced a deluge of memories. This had been her neighborhood during her two years in New York City, after being transferred from Langley to work on HAWK. This was where she had shared an apartment with her then fiancé, Parker. Where she had discovered him in the bathtub, his head savaged by a bullet. Under normal circumstances, it would have been difficult to prevent those horrible images from resurfacing. But now—given the news of Charlie Canyon’s murder—it was impossible to suppress them.

She turned downtown into the heart of SoHo, hugging herself against a chill that could not have come from the still-humid fall air. She stopped behind a police line at Spring Street and peered down a block lit up by emergency vehicles. Above them, on the north side of the street, she could see the windows of the loft that Charlie Canyon had maintained as Gnos.is’s small public headquarters.

The coroner’s van, apparently not yet burdened with its fare, was parked cockeyed in the street. A handful of men and women, cops mostly, stood around chatting in the glow of swirling red and blue. Every few minutes, someone decked out in the FBI’s navy-blue jackets with yellow lettering emerged from the building carrying computer equipment—hard drives, monitors, routers, CPUs—all tagged and bagged inside translucent pink antistatic pouches. The
y’d
find fingerprints, Kera thought, but not much else. What they were really after was no longer accessible. Based on what Bolívar had described, Canyon had—in his final moments alive—managed to activate the cryptographer’s version of a suicide bomb within those machines, wrapping every bit of sensitive information in an encryption capsule for which there was no key. Like Canyon himself, the data was now irrevocably gone, no longer reachable by any means known to this world.

Kera watched the scene for longer than she needed to, indulging her anger, permitting it to steer her thoughts. What had she expected to achieve by coming here? Proof that it was real, maybe? She would have to wait, like everyone else, for any useful information about what had happened. Thus far, the police had no leads as to the identity or motive of the suspect.

Her anger showed no signs of subsiding on its own, but eventually she put it at arm’s length in order to focus on something more productive. When she began to think clearly, her first thought was that neither the Feds nor the NSA would have acted in a way that might have caused Canyon to lock that data. Surely the FBI and NSA had been trying mightily for some time to infiltrate the Gnos.is computers in Canyon’s loft—remotely and anonymously—but she didn’t think they were stupid enough to attempt a physical strike against Canyon. The risk was too high that Canyon could destroy what they were looking for—which is exactly what h
e’d
ended up doing.

No, the mortal threat that had forced Canyon to lock all the data must have come from someone else. Who had so much to gain from these murders?

Motivated by a renewed burst of anger, Kera reached for the satellite phone, stepping back from the crowd of people gathered along the police line so her end of the conversation wouldn’t be overheard.

“How high does the body count need to get before you stop publishing?” she said when Bolívar answered.

“Kera. Where are you?”

“Where am I? I’m looking at the fucking van that’s going to haul Charlie’s body to the morgue. That’s where I am. Where are you? Hiding away in a cave? It’s a little hypocritical, don’t you think, for someone who fancies himself a champion of transparency?”

Bolívar had no response.

“Who’s next?” Kera said. He had no right to be silent.

“You can’t possibly think Gnos.is is responsible for these—”

“I thought the common denominator was InspiraCom. But not anymore. Charlie had nothing to do with InspiraCom. Now the only thing all the victims have in common is Gnos.is. You used them as sources, Rafa, and it got them killed. Take down the China story, please, at least until we figure out who’s doing this.”

Because he paused, she thought that maybe he was considering doing just that. But then he said, “Everything in the China story is accurate. It’s verified. If we take it down, how do we answer to that precedent?”

“You answer to it by saying that it will save lives.”

“Will it? And won’t others be lost?”

“Don’t patronize me. This isn’t a philosophical thought experiment.”

“I didn’t commit these murders, Kera, and I didn’t create the world they were committed in. None of us did.”

“Yo
u’d
feel different about that if it were your own life at stake.”

“Don’t kid yourself. All of our lives are at stake. Yours, mine, Jones’s.” He didn’t say Canyon’s name, but it hung there, implied, in the beat of silence that followed.

“I can take care of myself,” Kera said. “But these other people—the ambassador, Conrad Smith, Vasser—they didn’t choose to risk their lives for your principles.”

“What happened to Vasser?”

“She’s alive, for now. Look, I’m getting off the phone.”

“Kera, wait. Drop this case. Please. We’ll still pay you. Just come back here, or walk away, if yo
u’d
rather, but get out now.”

“I can’t do that, Rafa. You’re not the only one with principles.”

When she hung up, she braced for tears. A few months earlier, turning away from him like this would have been more than she could bear. But things had changed.

Kera made it to the bank just before it closed. Access to safety deposit boxes had already ended for the night, but she persuaded a teller that she knew exactly what she wanted. She wouldn’t need more than a minute alone with her box.

Once he left her in the small privacy room, she removed the remaining items from the box: a passport, driver’s license, and credit card under the name Sabina Francis, along with a dozen business cards identifying Sabina Francis as a travel writer. She locked the empty box and thanked the teller again as she left.

In the taxi, Kera watched the clock. A few minutes before nine, she pulled up the number in her contacts, but she didn’t push the “Call” button right away. A minute passed, then another. The taxi was on the freeway, Manhattan behind them. At 9:01 she placed the call. It rang only once before Vasser answered.

“Kera—”

“No names,” Kera said. She knew her satellite phone calls were heavily encrypted when communicating with the other sat phones that Jones had rigged for them. But the burner sh
e’d
left for Vasser wasn’t capable of encryption. If Vasser were to call someone she knew from that phone, the burner’s number would turn up in the NSA’s servers. Once they knew your number, they knew where you were. But the last person Vasser had tried to call—Conrad—wound up dead, and Kera didn’t think Vasser would make that mistake again. Kera had to assume the burner was still clean and that the risk of their conversation being overheard was acceptably small.

“What’s happening?” Vasser asked.

The isolation is getting to her,
Kera thought. She could hear it in Vasser’s voice. “There’s another victim. A Gnos.is spokesman.”

Vasser hesitated, absorbing this, then abruptly she said, “I need to speak with Ben.”

“No. You can’t do that.”

“They’ll go after him too.”

“I don’t think so,” Kera said, and wasn’t lying. “Ben is fine. The FBI is watching him around the clock.” She lowered her voice to make it unintelligible to the cabdriver. “Listen, do you have any contacts within Chinese intelligence?”

“What? No. I—I wasn’t a spy.”

“I know. But as a diplomat you were certainly an intel target. You must have known that many of the Chinese people you routinely interacted with—politicians, businessmen, and others—were reporting back to the MSS.”

Vasser did not deny this.

“I need a name,” Kera said. “The highest-ranking person in Hong Kong you can think of. Preferably someone you were friendly with. And if you don’t know anyone based in Hong Kong, I’ll make do—”

“No, I do.”

Kera waited. The taxi split off the freeway at the exit for JFK.

“Ren Hanchao,” Vasser said.

The name rang familiar to Kera, an echo of a memory from her casework at the agency three years earlier. It was difficult to confirm these things, but they had suspected that Ren Hanchao was a senior intelligence officer in the Ministry of State Security’s Third Bureau, which covered operations in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. “Ren. Yes, that just might work.”

“What might work?”

Kera ignored the question. She was thinking it was possible that if Ren had performed well as an MSS officer a few years ago, he might now be in a position that reported directly to Feng Xuri, China’s minister of state security.

“Kera, what will happen to him?”

The cab pulled up to the international terminal at JFK, and Kera paid the driver in cash, collecting her duffle from the seat next to her. “You were friendly with Ren?”

“At most, friendly acquaintances. He turned up often, friendly but uninvited, when the ambassador traveled. Will he be harmed?”

Kera took it as a good sign that Vasser was worried about the man’s safety. It meant that Vasser liked him and had perhaps even let him hang around. This was a reflection that Ren had been good at his job. He would be valued within the Ministry of State Security. “Not by me. I’m going to get him a promotion.”

“Is that a PA announcement? Are you at the airport?”

“Listen to me. It’s important now that you don’t know where I am or what I’m going to do. I will check in with you as often as I can. When I do, never say my name and never ask about my location.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Exactly what you’re doing. Stay out of sight.”

L
ANGLEY

When news of Charlie Canyon’s murder arrived in the ops center, Bright leaned forward and squinted at the big screen. To those who looked to him for orders, he appeared concentrated, perhaps a shade bewildered. Inside, though, he felt an unsettling stillness. Diversion after diversion, from Angela Vasser to Kera Mersal, to Vasser
and
Mersal, had siphoned their resources away from the real issue—which was whether the Chinese had assassinated Ambassador Rodgers and, if so, why.

And now there was another body. Another likely diversion.

The details from the scene of Canyon’s death, when they finally came from the FBI, served to further justify Bright’s fear that the situation was worse than any of them had imagined. The building’s doorman said an “Asian-looking” man had arrived for a meeting with Canyon. An hour later, the doorman said, h
e’d
watched on his surveillance monitors as the visitor left hastily through a fire exit. After three failed attempts to reach Canyon by phone, the doorman had gone up to the loft to investigate. H
e’d
found the door unlocked and Canyon’s body on the floor behind his desk. H
e’d
been shot twice; apparently there was a lot of blood.

Bright whispered to Henry Liu to assemble the MIRAGE team immediately. When they were all together in a windowless, soundproof conference room, he pulled up the text messages between Feng Xuri and Zhau Linpeng on the conference room’s monitor. Alongside that, he displayed the Gnos.is article linking Hu Lan’s business investments to the Ministry of State Security. “Whatever other leads you’re pursuing, drop them. From now on, we are looking for more evidence of this: that members of China’s intelligence and business communities are behind these murders, beginning with the ambassador’s and stopping, one hopes, with Charlie Canyon’s.”

“With respect, sir, in the absence of clear evidence of that, I don’t buy it,” Judy Huang said. She was Bright’s top expert on Chinese politics and foreign policy. “Beijing has too much to lose by assassinating anyone, especially Americans of this stature. They simply wouldn’t do it.”

Bright couldn’t blame her for this analysis—h
e’d
thought the same thing all along. But they couldn’t afford to get this wrong any longer. “Maybe. Or maybe that thinking is exactly what’s stalled our investigation. We have a growing body count, almost all of whom are American citizens. I don’t want to hear any more about why the Chinese
wouldn’t
do this; it’s time to start considering why they
would
.”

W
ASHINGTON
, DC

Reese Frampton pulled an exhilarating all-nighter. At 7:00
AM
he was at the small dining table in his one-bedroom apartment hunched over his laptop. Balding at forty-three, he wore glasses, a white undershirt, and charcoal slacks h
e’d
put on twenty-four hours earlier. The table was buried under documents. H
e’d
spent the night reading them furiously, one by one as the predawn hours ticked toward the deadline h
e’d
agreed to. He had two hours left.

Another surge of adrenaline. Another pot of coffee.

This was without a doubt a once-in-a-lifetime break, and he was trying not to think about the fact that it had simply fallen into his lap, more or less out of the blue. No matter—h
e’d
had his share of bad luck. What was wrong with seizing the opportunity when his luck took a turn for the better? The story had come to him from a source who needed to remain anonymous because he was a senior NSA contractor at a private defense firm. Frampton had crossed paths with the man at a handful of industry conventions and knew only enough about him to know that he had tremendous access within Fort Meade. In the past, though, all of Frampton’s attempts to court the man as a source had yielded nothing. Each time h
e’d
been blown off.

And then this, out of nowhere. The source had called him around seven the previous evening and, as instructed, Frampton had gone immediately to retrieve a package from the concierge at the Grand Hyatt near Capitol Hill. Then he hurried home and began reading its contents.

That’s when he realized the true scope of what he had on his hands. He thought about how his former colleagues at the
Washington Times
would react, the ones who had offered nothing more than sympathetic pats on the back when h
e’d
been sacked in the annual downsizing season that seemed to coincide with every release of the paper’s earnings reports. Some of them would see it as ironic that he, now a self-employed blogger, would scoop the Washington journalism establishment. But that’s not how Reese Frampton saw it. To him, this was a sign of the changing times. H
e’d
landed on the right side of history.

After indulging in them briefly, Frampton set aside these thoughts of his former employer. There was no need to be bitter. He had his scoop now, a story that mattered. It would play nationally for weeks, maybe longer.

Fact-checking the thing overnight had been a heroic ordeal. Three times—at midnight,
1:30
AM
, and 4:45
AM
—he had called a second source, a man he knew and trusted at the NSA. When the man didn’t answer, Frampton had to get creative with his attempts to independently verify the story told by the documents in front of him. For example, he pored through the private phone records and e-mails to pinpoint nearly a dozen key meetings between the Vasser woman and Conrad Smith, the now-deceased South African contractor. Then he cross-checked those dates with her credit card records and, sure enough, found charges at hotels in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and outside Beijing where the two had spent time together. In addition to Conrad Smith, Frampton used the provided text messages—many of which included unpublishable photographs—to identify the numbers of two additional men whom, it seemed rather obvious, Vasser had met under intimate circumstances. And then of course there were the e-mails between Vasser and Smith that the world had already seen, in which Vasser discussed the classified TERMITE files. The story line practically wrote itself: this woman had taken a real spin on the dip circuit, fucking her way from one Far East city to the next.

At 7:15
AM
, the NSA source awoke to Frampton’s voice-mail messages and called him back, a mixture of concern and annoyance in his voice. “I need a favor,” Frampton said. “No, not a favor. I just need a yes or no.” He had been typing and reading for nine hours straight. Switching suddenly to conversation with another human being strained his ability to be coherent. “I have some documents. I can’t tell you how I got them, but I need to know if they’re authentic.”

“What are you talking about?”

Frampton had had all night to winnow down what he needed the NSA man to confirm. From the documents approved for publication—many had been marked for use only as background—h
e’d
set aside three that, viewed on their own, wouldn’t hint at the full scope of his story. H
e’d
taken pictures of them with his cell phone, careful to show details like the classification codes and serial numbers at the top of each page. “I’m texting you some images. I want to know if these files look legit.”

Frampton heard the man juggle his phone, then several long moments of silence while he viewed the images on his phone. When his voice returned, he said, “You shouldn’t be texting these. It isn’t secure.”

“I intend to publish them this morning. It hardly matters if they’re in a text.”

“Well, I don’t want them connected to me,” the man shot back. Then, more calmly, “Can we be off the record?”

Frampton shut his eyes. To independently verify the story, he really ought to have a second source on the record. But maybe that wasn’t necessary. Perhaps it was enough, for his own peace of mind, just to get this guy’s off-the-record affirmation. After all, the deal h
e’d
agreed to had been clear: he wasn’t supposed to talk to anyone about this until the story was published. “Sure,” he heard himself say.

“Where did you get these?”

“I can’t reveal that.”

“Are you willing to go to jail over these? Because publishing them could earn you a subpoena.”

Jail?
What was he talking about? His original source had given him thorough instructions, but h
e’d
said nothing about subpoenas. “I just need to know. Are they for real or not?”

“They’re for real, all right. And whoever gave them to you broke some choice laws. This is very targeted, private data on a US citizen. NSA isn’t supposed to be storing stuff like that, let alone—”

“And yet they do. Look, I got a deadline. I appreciate you calling me back.”

“Wait. I’m going to hang up in a second because I don’t want anything to do with this. But my advice to you: I think you should think real hard about this before publishing. This is going to do more harm than good.”

“You’re in the business of protecting secrets, and I’m in the business of uncovering the truth. I don’t expect us to see eye to eye on this.”

“Very well. We never spoke, OK?”

“Huh? Oh, right. I got it. Have a nice day.”

An hour later the article was finished. Frampton read it from beginning to end, then reread it, tinkering each time with the occasional typo or improving a turn of phrase. Satisfied, he copied the full text and pasted it into his blog’s template. He tapped out the title that his source had insisted upon:
D
OCUMENTS
R
EVEAL
D
EVIOUS
L
IFE OF
C
LASSIFIED
L
EAKER
. He leaned back and stared at the “Publish” button. It was not a moment of plumbing the depths of his conscience; it was a moment to savor the anticipation.

Then it was done. He tweeted the link and e-mailed it to his subscribers. He wasn’t sure what to do next. He poured a cup of coffee. But h
e’d
been drinking coffee for twelve hours, one cup after another. It didn’t seem up to the occasion. He found a bottle of twenty-year-old scotch that someone had gifted him, still in its fancy box. He poured two fingers over an ice cube in a tumbler and stood at the window, wondering what would happen next.

The phone rang for the first time seven minutes after the article went live. It was a rival reporter at the
Post
wh
o’d
been assigned the task of confirming the story. Before that call ended, inquiries began to bombard his in-box and Twitter account. It had begun.