The Good Traitor (26 page)

B
EIJING

Kera was beginning to second-guess her instinct to engage the David Cornwell backdoor. Over the last twenty minutes, sh
e’d
watched the Russian download thousands of personnel and other files and save them to a flash drive. She knew they weren’t actually classified, but she also knew that they weren’t infinite. If the Russian bumped up against the limits of the false cache, he would immediately suspect her of tricking him.

“What’s all this?” she asked, trying to distract him and slow him down. She tapped the monitor that was filled with the rotating surveillance feeds.

“That’s the building’s security network,” he said, without looking up.

“Do they know you have access to that?”

He made a
pfft
sound with his lips that left no doubt that he thought her question was ridiculous. And still he kept copying files to the flash drive.

The only time he paused, briefly breaking concentration, was when she moved closer to him so that her arm brushed slowly against his shoulder. He glanced up at her with raised eyebrows, as if to say, “Oh?” And then, with an unappealing little smirk, he returned his eyes to the screen and his fingers resumed their play across the keys.

To keep herself calm, Kera reasoned that if the network’s backdoor was still open, someone in Langley must be responsible for monitoring it. But how long would a response take? She kept eyeing the rotating black-and-white squares on the surveillance monitor. The lobby, the elevators, the hallways—she saw no sign of anything unusual; no one moving in on their location.

When she turned back to the Russian’s active screen, her anxiety flared again. H
e’d
stolen the entire personnel database and was now browsing through lists of IP addresses. The IP addresses were spoofed, of course, and didn’t actually correspond to terminals inside the CIA’s Information Operations Center Analysis Group, but she suspected he could discover that quickly. She didn’t want to be around when he realized h
e’d
been duped.

“You got your personnel files, OK. Now what are you doing?”

“I’m getting some insurance,” he said, not diverting his eyes from his screen. “I’m impressed by your access. I’ve penetrated isolated areas of unclassified networks at Langley before, but nothing like this.”

“Look, I didn’t agree to this. It’s time to shut it down.”

He ignored her. More files streamed into his flash drive.

She weighed the benefits of taking him out. A strike to the throat would disable him before he knew what was happening, allowing her to escape. But where would that leave her? It would spoil whatever trust sh
e’d
earned with the Chinese and dash any hope that she could learn who had killed the ambassador and the others.

Instead she said, “You going somewhere?”

“Huh?”

She nodded at the duffel bag by the couch. “You have this spacious luxury condo, and yet you’re sleeping next to your computers with a go bag packed and ready. Something have you on edge?”

He grimaced slightly at her remark, but it didn’t bait him into a response.

She rested a hand on his shoulder and felt him tense. “You never told me what kind of work you do for our Chinese friends,” she said. He didn’t reply. It was time to go for broke. “Would you like me to guess? Say I wanted to hack the flight-management system of an airplane. Would you be someone I could hire?”

His fingers froze over the keyboard.

“What about elevator software?”

“It wasn’t like that,” he said, his voice thin and high with defiance.

“Are you doing it for the money, for this penthouse apartment? Or is it just a fun challenge?”

“I would think someone like you would be a little more sympathetic to my cause.”

“Your cause?”

He scratched sheepishly at a red blemish on his cheek. “What I’m doing is no different than what you did with the CIA. You were once complicit in their dirty espionage, but eventually you chose your conscience over your career.”

“Bullshit. You don’t know a thing about my motivations. Besides, nothing I did got innocent people killed.”

“I didn’t know who would be on the plane. That wasn’t my choice.” She saw that his hands had gone to the edge of the table. His knuckles pulsed white. “It was their choice, and I’ll make them pay for it.”

“Who?” she said, to keep him talking. Sh
e’d
managed to pull his focus from the computer tasks, but she still had the feeling she was dealing with a short fuse.

“Our hosts. China’s MSS—just like the CIA—they think they are better than everyone because they have power and secrets. They censor the Internet or they use it to spy on their citizens. And they support corporations that do the same. Both China and the United States want the same thing: control. They want it too much. They have no right to control the Internet.”

Kera felt a chill roll through her, not for the idealistic content of his little speech, but for the starkness with which it revealed his naïveté. H
e’d
fallen into the trap of all hackers who become amateur philosophers. H
e’d
glimpsed his own power, power wielded at his fingertips because he had a skill that few had and that so many depended upon, and that had got him thinking. He thought, inevitably, about right and wrong; he got big ideas about evil governments and corporations. And without realizing it, his own narrow perspective had become his only standard for what was right. And with his computers’ ability to spy, to keep him anonymous, and to attack asymmetrically, how could he not be tempted—not just tempted; he felt
justified
—to take hostile action every time the world fell short of his vision of what it could be.

With a clear image in her mind of Ambassador Rodgers and Charlie Canyon and his other victims, she made the decision to grab him by the throat and pry him physically from his weapons. But at that moment one of the surveillance feeds caught her eye.

B
EIJING

Kera squinted at the black-and-white image on the monitor. A man was jogging down the ramp that descended from the street to the building’s parking garage. Even on the small surveillance feed, he was hard to miss—Caucasian, tall, and thickly built, with a bald head and a goatee. Within seconds, he disappeared into the garage.
Did he have a car parked down there, or was he avoiding Ren’s men posted near the lobby entrance?
She scanned the other feeds, hoping to pick him up.

The Russian was watching both Kera and the surveillance monitor with a mixture of confusion and anticipation.

Before Kera could spot the tall Caucasian on another camera, a second figure appeared on the vehicle ramp in pursuit of the first. She recognized this one—he was one of Ren’s men, one of the two sh
e’d
made out on the sidewalk.
Shit,
Kera thought.
Here we go.

“Shut it down. We have to move,” she said to the Russian while still watching the monitor. The surveillance feeds rotated, and the Caucasian could be seen sprinting up the stairwell, taking each flight in three bounds. A moment later, Ren’s man swung around the railing and into view, looking up as he continued his pursuit. “Come on, let’s go.”

But the Russian just sat there, either paralyzed or transfixed by the surveillance monitor. He only flinched when the sound of two muffled pops reached them, ringing with a stairwell echo. They both looked instinctively to the door, registering the sounds as gunfire. After a beat, they leapt to action.

The Russian, now appreciating the threat, yanked the flash drive from his computer and nearly tumbled out of the swivel chair as he pushed it back. Kera took a breath and concentrated on the security-camera images one last time, trying to determine which stairwell the men were in. It was impossible to say. Then the feeds rotated again, giving her two new stairwell views. In one, the Chinese agent wh
o’d
followed the intruder was slumped motionless against the wall on a landing. On a lower floor, Ren’s second man had joined the pursuit, ascending the stairs with his weapon drawn cautiously, as though h
e’d
heard the exchange of fire from above. The Caucasian was out of sight.

When Kera swung around to head for the door, she saw the Russian standing over the bonsai in the corner. He had a laptop under his arm, and he was brushing off a plastic baggie that h
e’d
apparently dug out of the planter’s dirt. She saw him slip whatever had been in the plastic bag into his pants pocket.

“Come on,” Kera said from the door. This time, the Russian listened. When they were in the hallway, Kera moved toward the nearest stairwell exit. She held a finger over her lips, instructing him not to speak.

She opened the door in a swift, fluid motion and stuck her head in. There was no visible danger. She paused, listening. At first she could only hear her own heartbeat, so strong it seemed to echo off the walls. Then footsteps. The echo made it difficult to gauge the distance, but she guessed the sound was coming from three or four floors below—and closing fast. She guided the door shut softly and pushed the Russian toward the exit sign at the opposite end of the hall.

Once sh
e’d
checked for footsteps there, and heard nothing, she told the Russian to run as fast as he could and fell into step on the descent behind him. They were both out of breath when they reached the ground floor.

Kera had intended to descend as far as the parking garage to avoid the lobby doormen, who might have already noticed the carnage under way from the surveillance feeds covering the opposite stairwell. But when she reached ground level, she saw that there was an exterior exit door. She remembered the alleyway that separated the residential tower from the adjacent construction site. This suddenly seemed like a better option than going to the underground parking garage where, if Ren’s men had had a chance to call for backup, she and the Russian might be trapped.

“Follow me,” Kera said. “Keep moving.”

She pushed through the door and sprinted straight across the alley, where she slipped between the exposed wall beams of a half-finished structure. She could hear the noise of hammers and saws a few levels above her, but the ground floor where she entered seemed deserted. When the Russian caught up with her inside, she crossed to a doorless threshold and worked her way down a dim hallway, deeper into the construction site. Only about half of the rooms had walls, but from the load-bearing skeleton she guessed that the structure was on its way to becoming a shopping mall.

Nearing a multistory atrium, the sound of male voices grew louder, even as they were muffled by hissing welders’ torches and screeching power saws. Choosing an opening at random, Kera ducked into an unfinished retail space and motioned for the Russian to continue ahead of her through a door that led to an adjacent stockroom. He did so without thinking. As soon as he was through the threshold, she delivered a leg swipe that connected with the outside of his right ankle, which locked behind his planted left foot. His own forward momentum brought him down, hard, sending the computer clattering to the ground a few feet away. In an instant she was on top of him, using one hand and her shin to pin his hands against his tailbone. Her knee drove into his spine. He hollered in shock and pain and wriggled violently for a few seconds. He was strong for someone who didn’t look like h
e’d
spent much time in the gym, but sh
e’d
gained the advantage through surprise. When he stopped struggling, realizing for the moment that it was useless, she reached back with her free hand to begin untying his shoelaces.

He kicked her away. “No!” he hissed, part panic and part anger.

She ground her knee into his spine until she forced a mewling sound from him. “Shut up,” she said, “or I’ll snap it. Don’t be an idiot. You’ll get us both killed.”

She stripped the laces, then suddenly spun atop him and pinned both his arms beneath her knees as she bound his hands behind him with the laces. Without the ability to free an arm for leverage, he could be restrained with just her body weight and a carefully placed knee to his back. He realized this too late, and as she spun back around, he tried again to regain some advantage from her by flailing his shoulders and legs. But once sh
e’d
replaced her knee against his spine, he struggled more quietly and without much enthusiasm, as though simply trying to retain a shred of self-respect. Then he fell still but for his heavy breathing.

Kera looked around. A dozen unused cinder blocks were stacked up just inside the door. Two buckets filled with nails and screws sat against the wall. The small room was one of the few spaces fully enclosed by drywall. She was satisfied that for the moment they were hidden in the shadows.

“Who were those guys?” the Russian managed to ask, grimacing.

“Two of them were Ren’s. I’m not sure about the other,” she lied. If the David Cornwell backdoor had worked the way she understood it would, then the tall Caucasian man had been sent by Lionel. His arrival would have been much more welcome had they not been trapped at the top of a fifteen-story building with MSS agents in pursuit. She eyed the Russian’s laptop lying on the ground nearby. She had to get the David Cornwell session up and running again. It would lock in on their location and give Lionel’s man—if h
e’d
made it out of the building—a second chance to get to them.

She leaned away from the Russian and grabbed the laptop, then rode him out for a moment as he thrashed before realizing that it only made the pain at his spine worse. He gave up on the wasted effort and she opened the computer. This deep inside the construction site, it detected only three open Wi-Fi signals. All of them were weak. She picked one and then abandoned it after it was unable to load a web page. The second one she selected got her online.

“What’s your name?” she asked the Russian as she typed in the classified URL for the CIA’s remote log-in page. Then she entered “David.Cornwell” in the username field, along with the password.

“No names,” the Russian said.

“You know my name.”

He lay silent beneath her at first, but then reconsidered, perhaps seeing an opportunity to establish enough goodwill to get her off his back.

“I go by Allegro,” he said softly.

She rolled her eyes. When she clicked the log-in button to initiate the David.Cornwell session, the screen cleared, as if to load the page, but then it froze on the blank page in a frustrating web limbo. It was difficult to tell whether the operation was laboring under the weak connection or if the Internet link had been dropped altogether.

Leaving that to resolve itself, she slipped a hand into the Russian’s pants pockets until she felt what she was looking for. She pulled out two flash drives—the standard-looking black one that h
e’d
used to copy the dummy CIA files, and a sturdy carbonate one that she figured had been the object in the baggie h
e’d
dug out of the bonsai planter.

She flipped the flash drive with the stolen backdoor files to the concrete and reached for one of the loose cinder blocks nearby.

“Wait!” the Russian protested.

But she didn’t hesitate. It took only a few seconds to pulverize the plastic storage device to an unrecoverable pile of shards and dust.

“What’s on this other one?” she said, examining the flash drive h
e’d
kept hidden in the planter. When he didn’t reply, she set it aside to free up a hand. She pressed her palm into his cheekbone and repeated the question.

The Russian tried to shake his head, but that was more painful than holding it still, so he just gritted his teeth defiantly. She could open the drive on the laptop and have a look for herself, but first, while she had him in this position, she wanted some information. She leaned toward his ear and spoke coolly.

“Why did they hire you to bring down Ambassador Rodgers’s plane?” On the last word, she increased the pressure on the point where her knee dug into his back between his narrow shoulder blades. His one visible eye popped a little, and he made a futile effort to speak. She let up on the pressure, just enough so that he could talk.

“Get off me. I can’t breathe.” He wriggled beneath her.

“What about the people in those elevators? You murdered them too, didn’t you? Why?” She sent a new surge of pressure through her knee where it ground into his spine.

“OK, stop! Please. I did it,” he mumbled. She eased up on his skull. “But it’s not like you think. I didn’t know that innocent people would die. It wasn’t until after the plane and the first two elevators that I figured it out. After that I started working against them.”

“Working against whom?”

“Have you heard of Unit 61398?”

“Of course. They’re the elite cyberspies of the MSS. They target computer networks, though, not people.”

The Russian shook his head. “They follow orders like everyone else. This time their expertise was called upon to take out human targets.”

“Orders from the MSS?”

“Yes. All the way at the top.”

“Bullshit.” Kera shook her head. Even if he was privy to the knowledge he was claiming—which she doubted—what he was saying didn’t make sense. Assassinating an American ambassador invited some hefty consequences. There was no way Beijing would take a risk like that. “If you stopped working with them after the first round of attacks, what happened to Conrad Smith? He was killed in an elevator two weeks after the others.”

“They were going to kill him anyway. He was on their list. They were planning to shoot him. But by using the elevator, I—”

“Established a trend,” Kera whispered, understanding. “It made it obvious that the string of elevators falling out of the sky wasn’t a coincidence—or an accident.”

“Yes.”

“But didn’t that anger your MSS handlers?”

“Of course. But I knew they wouldn’t do anything to me. Not yet.”

“Why?”

“They don’t realize just how much I’ve figured out about their plans. I know, for example, that they need me alive and they need my fingerprints all over these assassinations. That’s the real reason they granted me asylum in China. If a lone Russian hacker with anti-American motivations can be blamed for these attacks, then there will be no retaliation from the United States. And China won’t be responsible for starting a major conflict between the world’s two largest superpowers.”

She thought about this for a few moments before she found a hole in his story. “What about Charlie Canyon? He was killed after Conrad Smith. Did you have anything to do with that?”

His voice was softer this time when he replied. “That one I couldn’t stop.”

She rocked forward, digging the sharpest part of her knee into his back. The Russian moaned.

“Please! I tried, I promise. The MSS are desperate to take out Gnos.is. I didn’t want to help them with that, but I had to at least appear to be going along with their attempts. The problem was that Gnos.is couldn’t be fully infiltrated remotely. We needed to get someone physically in front of one of their machines to log in and keep a session going long enough to exfil all the files. The MSS has an agent in New York who got a meeting with Canyon by posing as a tech-industry lobbyist. When Canyon visited the cover website we built for the lobbyist, malware was transferred to his computer. This malware sat dormant until Canyon’s meeting with the agent. Once the agent was in the room and could prevent Canyon from logging off, I woke up the malware.”

“You did that remotely?”

“Yes. From the Unit 61398 facility in Shanghai.”

“You’ve been
inside
Unit 61398?”

“Yes.” The Russian’s eyes flicked briefly to the flash drive that Kera had set down next to the laptop.

Kera suddenly had a hundred new questions for him. But first she had to know what happened to Canyon. “How did this agent get Canyon to log in? Did he just put the gun to his head?”

“No. We were afraid Canyon wouldn’t log in if he felt threatened, or that maybe he could use a decoy account or something. We had to be sure he logged in for real.”