The Good Traitor (25 page)

B
EIJING

Kera got out of the car and did not look back. The air was muggy, drawing perspiration to her face and neck almost immediately. As she crossed the street to the building’s entrance, she picked out two of Ren’s men, one browsing magazines at a sidewalk kiosk, the other loitering near the alley. They were dressed in plain clothes, like Ren’s driver, but their positions were deliberate, out of step with the march of other pedestrians.

The building’s air-conditioned luxury hit Kera as soon as she stepped through the lobby’s revolving glass doors. Two doormen, laughing together by a reception desk, snapped to attention when they saw her. She announced herself as a visitor to number 1501. One of the men gestured toward the elevators after calling up to confirm the resident was at home.

Kera’s breath caught as the elevator accelerated skyward, and she had to remind herself that her fear was irrational. Her Chinese hosts wouldn’t have wasted their time giving her a polygraph test if they intended to drive her across town and drop her down an elevator shaft. But rational knowledge didn’t feel very relevant to her so long as she was trapped in a box hanging by cables from a fifteen-story building. Exhaling as the doors finally parted, she wondered if sh
e’d
ever feel safe in elevators again.

Apartment 1501 was easy to find. There were only two units on the fifteenth floor, separated by the length of a short hallway. At either end of the hall was an exit door that led to a stairwell. As she approached 1501, she could hear loud electronic dance music coming from behind the door. She knocked. Then she rapped harder and in counterpoint to the bass thump from inside.

Until sh
e’d
heard the loud music, sh
e’d
been expecting to meet a middle-aged Chinese man, another of Ren’s type. But the person before her when the door opened was a waifish, pasty Caucasian. And he was young, very young. They stared at each other for a long moment.

“Hello,” he said, stepping back to let her in. He seemed to realize then that the music was too loud. He rushed over to the kitchen’s bar counter and tapped at a tablet screen. The music faded.

From his pocket he removed an object that was about the size of a deck of cards. She recognized it immediately as a radio frequency signal detector. He held it up, seeking permission to sweep her. She held out her arms, crucifixion style, and he approached, nervous, a flare of excitement and terror in his eyes. Without touching her, he waved the scanner through the air around her torso and each limb. Then, satisfied that Ren hadn’t bugged her, he stepped back.

They were standing between the dining area and what Kera assumed was meant to be a living room with sweeping views of the city. Instead, every drape had been pulled across the windows to block out the sunlight. The large dining table had been shoved into the middle of the room. On its surface, six computer monitors formed an inward-facing semicircle in front of a swivel desk chair. A closed laptop lay near four empty cans of Red Bull that were lined up on the table’s edge, as if for target practice. She drew her gaze around the rest of the room. A commercial-grade server tower sat on the far side, where a bookcase might have been. On a stand in the corner was a sparse bonsai plant in a large ceramic pot. A blanket and pillow were bunched on the couch as if the young man slept there often, though the twitchy glaze in his eyes made her think he didn’t sleep much—or at least that he hadn’t slept much lately. She noted the duffel bag on the floor by the couch, unzipped, revealing clothes and toiletries within.

The young man scratched at the matted hair on one side of his head. For a moment he saw the apartment through her eyes and appeared to be debating whether it was too late to straighten the place up a bit. Finally, he gestured to one of the tall kitchen barstools.

“You can sit down,” he said, dropping into his chair and swiveling his back to the computers so he could face her. He spoke with a Russian accent. For a moment he studied her with wide eyes, as if still in disbelief at what he was seeing. “When they told me they were sending someone who could help me access the CIA’s personnel database, I thought they were kidding.” Despite his accent, he had a confident ease with English. He wasn’t a native speaker in the traditional sense, but English was the predominant language of the Internet, which she guessed was his only real home. Ren, she remembered, had said h
e’d
gone to school in the States.

“That’s what they want?” she asked. “Access to Langley?”

“They already know I can access Langley—parts of the network, anyway.” He shrugged, not at all rattled by the implications of the request. “What they really want to know is whether you can.” He looked up at her. “Whether you will.”

Kera understood now. They were testing her, just as Ren said they would. She could guess what they hoped to learn from this test: whether she was actually willing to cooperate with them, and what sort of intelligence she was capable of providing.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“No names.” The young man shook his head. “But I am not one of them.”

“One of whom?”

“Our crafty Chinese hosts,” he said, turning to his keyboard.

His tone was derogatory, which surprised her. “You’ve clearly earned their trust—and then some,” she said, admiring his penthouse full of hacker toys.

“No, not trust. They are too smart for that. But they happen to be in the unenviable position of needing something that I can provide.”

She glanced up at the light fixture on the ceiling, which was dark. “You aren’t worried that they’re watching?”

“No. Though I’m sure they are worried about why they can’t see and hear us. Eventually they’ll figure out they’re not just having technical difficulties. But for now, it’s just us.” He resumed typing on the keyboard.

She stood and moved closer to him, studying his monitors. Three of them were lit. Two displayed lines of neon text on a black background, evidence that h
e’d
been programming. The other lit screen displayed what looked like the building’s closed-circuit surveillance feeds. Black-and-white squares glowed with rotating images of the stairwells, lobby, hallways, elevator banks, and parking garage.

The Russian lit up a fourth monitor and began typing. She was close enough now to see the URL he entered in the address bar of an Internet browser. When the page loaded, Kera felt her chest tighten. She stared at the screen. It was the CIA’s secure remote log-in site.

“That URL is classified,” she whispered. “How did you get it?”

“Please,” he said dismissively. He stood and stepped aside, leaving the chair free for her.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked.

“Of course.” His grin exposed crooked teeth; one had gone yellow.

“Then you know I was terminated from the agency. I can’t just log in anymore.” But she couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. It triggered a pang of nostalgia for a time when entering her username and password on this site was part of her daily routine.

Skepticism darkened his eyes. “I think our hosts expected that you might have other, more creative ways of getting in. But if not . . .” He made a move to sit down again.

“Wait,” Kera said. She reached out and gripped his thin forearm. They were testing her. If they were looking for a sign that she was willing to meet the challenge, she could give them that. The cursor blinked at her from the username field. Her only hesitation was over the risk that it might not work. What would Ren do with her if he decided she was less valuable than h
e’d
expected? And then: What if it
did
work? That might be the riskiest outcome of all.

Kera sat down in the Russian’s chair. Resting her fingers on the keys, she entered “David.Cornwell” into the username field and then paused, probing the ephemeral reaches of her long-term memory in an attempt to retrieve the password. Sh
e’d
memorized hundreds of PINs and passwords, phone numbers, addresses, and authentication phrases—that had been part of her job. This particular username-password combination had been set up a good three years earlier. “David.Cornwell” was a handle that the agency’s Information Operations Center had created to test an experimental counterintelligence tactic—a false backdoor into the network that they could dangle in front of malicious hackers. Kera had participated in simulations for the IOC program, but sh
e’d
never actually had the opportunity to use the false backdoor in the field. It was possible—likely, even—that the David Cornwell backdoor had been closed and the username and password scrapped.

She typed in the numbers and letters as she recalled them and hit the “Enter” key. The agency’s internal landing page appeared immediately.

The young Russian leaned forward. “Who is David Cornwell?”

Kera could not suppress a smile. “Just an old colleague who was careless with his passwords.” Her fingers had started moving again. She navigated into the agency’s searchable personnel database, which is what the young Russian had claimed was their target. But she didn’t stop there. She clicked on the search bar and entered Lionel Bright’s name.

“What are you doing?” the Russian said, wising to her determined keystrokes.

“I’m spying. Did you have something else in mind?”

He eyed her strangely. “Let me see that,” he said, and she got up so he could take over.

L
ANGLEY

A ringing woke Bright. He stirred, confused at first about why Karen wasn’t beside him in the bed, and then about the source of the disruption. Karen hadn’t stayed over, he remembered. He rolled onto his side to reach for his work phone on the nightstand. The clock said it was 3:50
AM
.

“What is it?” Bright said.

“Remember David Cornwell?” It was Henry Liu.

Through the fog of half sleep, it took Bright a moment to clarify why that name was familiar. He swung his legs off the mattress and found the floor. “Are you at the office?”

“On my way there now. It might be nothing. Want me to call you back when I have a better idea?”

The still-asleep part of Bright did want that. But he already knew that wasn’t possible. The full context of those words—“David Cornwell”—became clearer every second. If this was for real, it needed to be monitored in real time.

“No. I’ll meet you there.”

“Let’s clear the room, please,” Bright said, wide-awake now as he breezed into the ops center. The room was half-full. The overnight shift usually presented the best opportunity for analysts and surveillance techs—who often had lower security clearances—to get routine work done, as opposed to regular business hours when higher-ups came crashing into the room, barking at people to leave every time they got the idea that they needed to watch a live satellite picture of a terrorist. “You, stay.” Bright pointed at one of the satellite techs h
e’d
worked with before. “And you too, Hank. Everyone else get up and walk out.” When they were gone, he asked Liu to start at the beginning.

“The session was initiated at 1547 hours local time. In Beijing, that is.”

Bright’s pulse spiked as the tech put up a live satellite image of China’s capital. He knew the city well from this perspective.

“Our geolocation sats put the access point at this address,” Liu said, nodding at a red circle superimposed over the image. He did not need to explain to Bright that the accuracy of the satellites ran within a few meters. “It’s a fifteen-story residential building. Vertical positioning is less accurate, but most likely the user is on an upper floor.”

Bright nodded, but h
e’d
turned his attention to the adjacent screen, which displayed a freeze-frame image of the CIA’s remote log-in page. “Is this a record of the activity?” he asked.

“Yep. Cued up to the moment the Cornwell session was activated.”

Access to large swaths of the CIA’s nongapped network—that is, the CIA computers that had not been separated from the Internet—via the David Cornwell username and password had been a highly classified experimental counterintelligence effort, rolled out a few years back by the Information Operations Center. It was designed to look like a backdoor to a mix of classified and unclassified sensitive files that would serve as a honeypot to lure hackers. In fact, the actual cache accessible through the backdoor was a mix of publicly available data and completely fabricated misinformation. Meanwhile, any session initiated through the David Cornwell backdoor triggered an alert in Langley, where analysts could pinpoint the location of the session and view the intruder’s activity in real time without them knowing.

The time stamp at the beginning of the playback said 15:47:13. From the digital clocks that were spaced along the upper portion of the walls, Bright noted that local time in Beijing was now 16:14.

“Is the session still active?”

“Yes.”

“What are they after?”

“Hard to say, exactly. So far they’ve run a dozen queries targeting the personnel files of Chinese Americans employed by the agency. They’ve already downloaded scores of records—all fake, of course. There is no way they can get actual employee records this way. But there was something strange . . .” Liu pointed to the paused screen, indicating to the tech that he could start the playback. “Watch this. This is what happened immediately after the session was initiated.”

Bright watched. Within a dozen seconds, his own name was searched for. It returned no results in the spoofed database, and after a few seconds, the intruder moved on to other queries.

“Any idea what that’s about?” Liu asked.

“It’s her,” Bright said softly.

“Sir?”

“It’s Kera.”

“Kera Mersal knows about David Cornwell?”

Bright nodded. “She helped us test it.”

Liu looked up at the screens again. “What is she up to?”

“I don’t know. But she’s trying to get our attention.”

“Sir, the coordinates are holding. The user is in that building,” the technician said, looking up at Bright as if anticipating an order for what to do next.

“Keep an eye on her,” Bright said quickly. He turned to Liu. “Get me Beijing.”

Within three minutes, Bright was on the phone with the station chief, who insisted he hadn’t authorized any of his people to engage the David Cornwell backdoor. This only strengthened Bright’s conviction that it was Kera.

“Could someone else be acting without the knowledge of the Beijing station chief?” Liu asked, still not buying into Bright’s hunch. Liu had been read into the David Cornwell file, but he didn’t know its history the way Bright did. When Bright didn’t reply, Liu turned to the technician. “Show me who else we have in Beijing.” Looking over the man’s shoulder, he scanned the short list. “BLACKFISH. He returned from Shanghai a few days ago.”

Lionel shook his head. H
e’d
already thought of that. “BLACKFISH doesn’t know about Cornwell.” And then he had another thought. “But maybe he can help us out. See if we can get him on the phone.”

When they had BLACKFISH on the line and determined he was within a short cab ride from the address, Bright gave him the green light to move in on the coordinates for a closer look.

“I’m on my way. What am I looking for?” BLACKFISH asked.

“Someone on a computer,” Bright said. He paused. “A woman on a computer.”