The Good Traitor (27 page)

“Go on.”

“We couldn’t get into his computers remotely, but his phone was more vulnerable. I designed a way to ping his phone with a fake cybersecurity alert, which I did once his meeting with the MSS agent had begun. It compelled him to log on.”

“Then what happened?”

“The malware started queuing Gnos.is files to send to us—”

“No. I mean, what happened to Canyon?”

“The agent attempted to take control of the computer. It’s not totally clear to me what happened next, but apparently Canyon did not surrender the machine to the agent. The outcome was that he got shot, though he must have survived long enough to perform some sort of operation that encrypted everything on the network. Canyon died and the MSS got nothing from Gnos.is. It couldn’t have gone worse for anyone.”

She looked down at him. She still had his hands pinned behind him with her body weight, but sh
e’d
let up on his head and back so he could speak freely. “Why are they so desperate to take out Gnos.is? There are news organizations all over the world. They can’t take them all out.”

The Russian parted his lips to speak, then decided to remain silent.

Kera rocked forward, reapplying the pressure that had been so persuasive up to this point.

“Ow. OK. But are you sure you want to know more? The people they’ve killed didn’t know half of what I can tell you.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s on the flash drive,” he said quickly, to prevent her from administering another pulse of discomfort with her palm or knee.

Kera weighed whether they had time for this. What if he was bluffing, hoping to stall her until Ren’s men could find them? On the other hand, h
e’d
admitted his involvement in the death of the ambassador and the others, including the attempt to hack Gnos.is that had resulted in Canyon’s murder. He even claimed to have been inside Unit 61398. Was it possible that he had on this flash drive an explanation for why all of these victims had been targeted by the MSS?

Without freeing him, she pulled the laptop closer. Immediately she saw that the David Cornwell session was running. At some point while the
y’d
been talking, the Wi-Fi connection had been strong enough to get through.

L
ANGLEY

“Where are you? Do you have eyes on them?” Lionel Bright said into his satellite phone. After waiting out a series of tense moments in which the only signs of BLACKFISH had been the two bodies h
e’d
left in his wake, Bright was relieved to hear the man’s voice.

“Negative. I found an apartment full of computers and Red Bull. Someone left in a hurry.”

“What was on the computers?” Bright stepped to a corner of the ops center so he could speak freely in private.

“I didn’t have time to look around.
I’d
just shot two MSS guys; I had to get the fuck out,” BLACKFISH said. Lionel heard the adrenaline in his voice.

“You’re out now?”

“Yeah, I’m out. And not afraid to say I got lucky. The building’s hot. They’ve got an army of plainclothes assholes with firearms searching the site bottom to top. Who’s this subject that everyone’s so interested in?”

Bright exhaled. “We lifted some footage from the building’s security system. Facial recog confirms that a11Egr0, the Russian hacker we like in the ambassador’s assassination, lives in a unit on the top floor. And it looks like Kera Mersal paid him a visit today.” He paused to let this sink in. “You just missed them. They exited together through the east stairwell door. It leads to an alley. You copy?”

“Yeah, I heard you. But I don’t like it. They’re together in one spot? And they did something to tip us off to their location? Doesn’t that seem a little too good to be true?”

“I don’t know what it means, but I think she’s trying to send us a message.”

“A message? Are you sure it’s not a trap?”

Bright grit his teeth. “I’m not sure of anything. For what it’s worth, it doesn’t feel like a trap to me.”

“You’re not the one getting fucking shot at,” BLACKFISH said, and he had a point.

“I know, I know. Listen, we think they may have slipped into that construction site just east of the building. Can you get in there?”

“I can try. But Lionel, I’m not super psyched about risking my life for this woman. You might have reason to trust her, but from where I sit, she’s no great American hero. First she leaked classified files, and now she’s cozy with MSS assets.”

“Believe me, I understand. But with Kera it’s . . . complicated. I know I’m in the minority, but I actually think she went over there looking for some way to redeem herself. Now she seems to be trying to get our attention, and I’m more than a little curious to find out why.”

“All right. But if I have to choose between my own life or hers, I’m coming out of there alive.”

Bright shut his eyes. “Understood. Proceed with caution.”

Five minutes later, Bright was standing nervously in the middle of the ops center, bathed in the glow of live satellite images, when the room’s pass code–protected doors parted. Bright turned at the sound to find Director Tennison walking toward him. This was unexpected. Bright’s first instinct was to look at the clock. Was it already eight in the morning? H
e’d
never seen the director on campus earlier than that. It was only 5:28.

“What’ve we got?” the director grumbled.

“Sir?”

“Is it true? We have eyes on Kera Mersal in Beijing?”

The director now stood before Bright, though his gaze was trained beyond him, up at the satellite and video surveillance images on the ops center’s main tactical display.

“That’s our understanding. We’re still trying to confirm the circumstances.” Another of Bright’s sudden understandings was that someone on his team must have the ear of the director—at least on the issue of Kera Mersal. This was only a minor surprise. The role of CIA director often included making calculations that were political. Ever since Kera’s disappearance, Bright had been aware that the director was eager to make an example of her, to bring her very publicly to justice in order to create a precedent that might deter any future would-be intelligence leakers. So it made sense that h
e’d
recruited an informer among Bright’s team to keep him intimately apprised of the Kera Mersal case. The surprise was how quickly h
e’d
been rustled from bed and rushed to the ops center.

The director had two men with him, senior ops-center techs Bright recognized vaguely. When the director nodded to them, they went directly to two open terminals.

“What are they doing?” Bright asked.

“They’re mobilizing people who are going to get Kera Mersal for us.”

“That isn’t necessary.”

“The hell it isn’t.” The director’s glare, when he swung it in Bright’s direction, was part surprise, part anger. “This is the woman who, maybe you remember, dealt herself a royal flush of espionage charges. Leaking those HAWK files made her a pain in our ass. The company she’s keeping now makes her an imminent threat to national security.”

“I know what this looks like,” Bright said, willing himself to deal coolly with his superior and keep the panic from his voice. “But hear me out. I think she’s got something there and she’s trying to let us know.”

“Forget it. We’ve been waiting for her to make a mistake. Now she has. We’re not missing another chance to bring her in.”

“We won’t miss anything,” Bright said. “I’ve got a man on the ground there who’s trying to do just that.”

“This isn’t an operation for your man, Bright. This has gone way beyond that.”

“Sir, please.”

“Sit this one out, Lionel,” the director snapped. “You’re too attached.”

“No, sir. It’s my duty to give you an honest assessment, even if it’s not the one you want to hear. We need to give Kera a chance to come to us. We need to see what she’s got.”

“You misunderstood me. I’m ordering you out of this facility. We’ve got a job to do here, and you clearly aren’t fit to do it.”

“Sir—”

“Out!”

Bright glared at the director, permitting his eyes to express the insubordination that he knew he wouldn’t be able to get away with voicing aloud. The worst part was that he knew it was hopeless. The director’s mind could not be changed, least of all by him. Bright turned for the door. He was halfway across the room when he heard one of the analysts address the director.

“Sir, they’re back up. The signal’s spotty, but it’s coming from inside that construction site.”

That was the last thing Bright heard before the ops center door locked shut behind him.

B
EIJING

“It’s encrypted,” Kera said, staring at the window that had appeared on-screen when she slid the Russian’s flash drive into the USB port. She angled the screen so he could see it. “What’s the key?”

The Russian attempted to shake his head. “We can’t open that here. It isn’t secure.”

“I don’t care.” Her knee found his spine again.

“Ah! OK, then let me enter the key.”

“You don’t understand, do you? You’re not in a position to negotiate.”

He closed his eyes tight and, out of options, told her the key. It was twelve digits, a mixture of numbers and case-sensitive letters. She pictured the characters in blocks of four to help herself commit them to memory. The flash drive, once she was behind the encrypted security wall, revealed two folders. The first had been named MAYFLOWER, the second BYZANTINE. The latter jumped out at her. The MSS’s Unit 61398 was widely referred to as BYZANTINE CANDOR. She steered the cursor toward it.

“No, the other one first,” he said.

She flashed him a warning glance—a reminder not to waste time—but then did as h
e’d
suggested. Inside the MAYFLOWER folder she found only one document, an Excel spreadsheet file, also named MAYFLOWER. When she opened it, the screen filled with columns and rows of numbers and dense text entries, all in Mandarin. Kera started to read as fast as her passable grasp of Mandarin would allow. The title at the top of the page translated to “OPERATION MAYFLOWER.” She was about to start making sense of the column headers when he stopped her.

“Click the second tab. I’m still in the process of translating it, but you’ll get the idea.”

The spreadsheet listed over twelve hundred entries, nearly eight hundred of which had been translated into English. Alongside each name were columns of data: home and work addresses, employer names, and the names of relatives with addresses in China. Also recorded were IP addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and, most telling, a field called “Date of Recruitment.” Some of the dates stretched back nearly a decade. Scrolling through the entries, she felt a chill as she read the employers associated with each name: General Electric, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Apple, Amazon, Google, AT&T, BP, InspiraCom, and so on.

“What is this?” she said.

“The Chinese have been assembling OPERATION MAY-FLOWER for over a decade. This is a list of the people they have in place, working inside American companies.”

“These people are spies?” She lightened the pressure on his back. “Twelve hundred of them?”

“Not exactly. Not by choice. Most of them aren’t even aware that the Chinese government is using them. They’re business executives, engineers, scientists. You can see, they happen to have family who still live in mainland China. Naturally, these people want to help to modernize China and improve life for their loved ones. So the government asks them to do a small favor here and there, like plug a certain thumb drive into their computer at work or copy a few files. Those who hesitate are soon reminded that they’re vulnerable. It is not so hard to blackmail people if you have the resources of the MSS. One way or another, they’ve all been recruited and cultivated.”

Kera shook her head as she scrolled through the list. “They’ve convinced or coerced
twelve hundred
people to participate in a spy network this big?” She kept going back to that number. “How are they keeping it secret?”

“It is not a network. These people are not working together—at least they’re not aware that they are. And given the nature of the relatively small favors they’re encouraged to do, it never occurs to them that they are acting on behalf of the MSS. Individually, these people don’t present a danger; they are not motivated to harm the United States. So it has remained a secret. But—” He paused to gauge whether she understood where this was going. When she didn’t react, he continued. “But if Beijing were to coordinate the timing of these coerced ‘favors’ and leverage them toward one malicious end, the cumulative effect could be devastating to America’s infrastructure and economy.”

“The thousand grains of sand,” Kera whispered.

“Huh?” the Russian asked.

“How did you get this file? Can you be sure it isn’t a fake?”

“I’m sure. I stole it—as insurance against what they were doing to me.”

“You stole it how?” She wanted to make sure that the Russian hadn’t been duped into the MSS’s version of the David Cornwell backdoor, which led only to spoofed data.

“Like everyone else, I knew it was more than suspicious when the American ambassador died on a jet owned by Hu Lan. But unlike everyone else, I knew that the Chinese had recently asked me to write a bug for the flight-management system of a specific model of Gulfstream jet—the same model that Hu Lan owned.”

“A bug?”

“Yes. A plane like this relies on its computerized flight-management system to fly. And because of that, it has four redundant systems to prevent an in-flight catastrophe. That’s standard on modern aircraft, and it ought to be sufficient, at least for combatting the odd unlucky software glitch. If the main system malfunctions, the plane easily switches to one of the three backup systems. It’s unlikely that all three backup systems would fail. Unless, of course, you program them to. If you know how the FMS is built, you can design a logic bomb. That is, a—”

“I know what that is.” What he meant was that MSS hackers had written a bug that had been inserted into the jet’s flight-management system. When the trigger was activated—for example, when the plane reached a predetermined altitude—the bug woke up, crashed all the backup flight-management software, and sent a mishmash of commands through the avionics systems before simply cutting all power. The plane would be transformed into an erratic hunk of metal that the pilots would be unable to control manually. “OK. How did that lead you to these OPERATION MAYFLOWER files?”

“I followed a digital trail. The MSS had provided me with files that contained the code and specs for the Gulfstream’s flight-management software. I traced those files back to a man who worked for Gulfstream in the United States. Using a backdoor
I’d
discovered in the Unit 61398 network, I ran a search for both Hu Lan and the Gulfstream employee. Mr. Hu has a large file with Unit 61398 and the rest of the MSS, but MSS’s interest in the Gulfstream employee was much narrower. In fact, they’ve apparently used him only for that one task. There was just one document in which both men were listed, and you’re looking at it.” He pointed to the names of the two men on the spreadsheet.

Kera had been listening closely for the Russian to utter a contradiction that would reveal he was making this all up. But sh
e’d
only spotted one such flaw in his claims. She shook her head. “Beijing has little to gain by crippling America’s economy—and too much to lose.”

“They may not want to actually cripple America’s economy, but they most definitely want the ability to do it. It’s the same reason every nation wants nuclear weapons, even though the consequences of using them would be catastrophic. The MSS simply wants the same thing that’s coveted by your CIA and NSA—more power and control.”

Kera was about to retort that the CIA wasn’t assassinating foreign diplomats and innocent civilians to get it—but she knew better. Sh
e’d
seen firsthand the lengths the agency went to in order to serve its interests.

“But what threat did the ambassador pose? Or any of the others you’ve helped them kill?”

“The threat isn’t any individual. It’s Gnos.is.”

“You mean the articles Gnos.is has published about China?”

“No. Not the articles it
has
published. The ones it might publish next.”

Kera froze, remembering the TERMITE story, the way Gnos.is had pieced together the existence of the secret TERMITE program using information that was scraped from the Internet. The MSS had caught on to that, and they were anxious that Gnos.is might do the same to expose OPERATION MAYFLOWER.

“But why did they go after the ambassador, Angela Vasser, and Conrad Smith? They have nothing to do with Gnos.is.”

“Sure they do. They may not have a direct involvement with Gnos.is or OPERATION MAYFLOWER, but they leak data that makes its way online, just like everyone else. The unlucky problem for them is that, because of their positions, they were the likeliest people to possess key pieces of information—whether they knew it or not—that Gnos.is could analyze and use to potentially discover OPERATION MAYFLOWER. To counter this, the MSS made a cool calculation: if they could remove a few key data points from Gnos.is’s intake, it might prevent, or at least delay, the discovery of their plot.”

“Data points? We’re talking about innocent people,” Kera said.

“Innocent people die in war,” the Russian said, a little too nonchalantly, as if he knew anything about the real consequences of war.

But that’s what this was, wasn’t it? A war. A war that had escalated
in secret to a point so dangerous that killing an ambassador—an offense that by any other standard might have
started
a conventional war—was viewed by China as a justifiable, if desperate, attempt to prevent an even worse conflict. That told her one impor-tant and horrifying thing: China was as afraid of the consequences of OPERATION MAYFLOWER as the US ought to be.

“What’s in the second folder?” she asked him, clicking open the file labeled BYZANTINE. He said nothing, as if he wanted to watch her discover it on her own. The folder contained hundreds of documents. She chose one at random. When the file opened, she found strings of numbers that she immediately recognized as IP addresses. She didn’t dare let herself hope it was what it appeared to be. “Are these—?”

“More files I stole.”

“These are from Unit 61398’s internal network?”

He nodded, unable to disguise his pride for this achievement, even as a woman was pinning him to the pavement.

Kera clicked through a few more documents. In addition to scores of IP addresses, the files contained personal data on Unit 61398 employees, including their e-mail addresses and pass codes. Kera could hardly breathe. At the CIA, sh
e’d
worked on a handful of task forces that had tried to breach Unit 61398, known in US intelligence circles as BYZANTINE CANDOR. None of those attempts had succeeded. The US intelligence community was dangerously in the dark when it came to the capabilities of Chinese cyberespionage. What she was looking at on the screen represented a quantum leap in that knowledge.

“How did you get this?”

He made the familiar
pfft
sound. “Unit 61398 is a complicated organization. They are not impenetrable. They have weaknesses, just like airplanes do, and elevators, and even your CIA. After they lied to me and framed me for a crime I never intended to commit, I needed something to level the playing field with them.” His mouth was a crooked grin. “So I went after the secrets they thought the
y’d
guarded most carefully.”

“Do they know you have this?”

“Not yet. But it’s time.” He looked up at her with a grin that exposed a discolored row of neglected teeth. “I’ve been preparing this for a reason. This will be Gnos.is’s biggest scoop yet.”

She shook her head. “None of this can be made public.”

“But it has to. That’s why I stole it. You of all people should understand that.”

She disconnected the computer from its weak Wi-Fi source, suddenly afraid to have opened these files on a computer that had access to the Internet, potentially within Gnos.is’s reach. If there was one thing that could not happen, it was for him to release these files to Gnos.is. Given the precarious state of diplomacy between China and the United States in the wake of the ambassador’s death, a news story exposing OPERATION MAYFLOWER would almost surely force China’s hand. The United States would retaliate. Within hours, the world’s largest superpowers would be crippled by their own vicious cycle of attacks and counterattacks.

She removed the flash drive and tucked it into her pocket. The Russian squirmed beneath her.

“I have backup copies,” he protested. “If you take those, I’ll just release them myself.”

“You’re too inexperienced for this work. Get up.” She untied his hands and then lifted herself from him, grabbing the computer. He sat up, rubbing his wrists and arching his back. Finally, slowly, he stood.

“Let’s go,” she said, gesturing for him to walk ahead of her out of the small room, back the way the
y’d
come.

“What are we doing?” He looked down at the shoelaces as if debating whether he needed them.

“I’m going to get us out of here.”

He lingered for a moment, his eyes frantic and distrusting. She thought he looked suddenly paler than before.

“Let’s go,” she repeated.

He took a few steps ahead of her and crossed through the door into the half-finished retail space. He wasn’t halfway across the room when he bolted.

She wasn’t surprised, exactly, but the suddenness of his move caught her off guard, giving him enough of a gap to escape her grip when she lunged for him. He sprinted toward the wide opening at the store’s entrance and cut sharply right, grabbing the wall with his inside hand to swing himself around the corner. Two pops burst from out of sight as soon as he disappeared, followed by a hard thump. Her own momentum carried her through the doorway, and, reeling defensively, she dropped the laptop, which clattered end over end into the corridor. When she came to rest, she was staring at the hot end of a Sig Sauer P229, trained chest high at her from about ten yards away.

The man holding the firearm was without question the same man sh
e’d
seen on the building’s surveillance feeds. His features were much more visible now. He was sturdy and bald-headed with a ginger goatee, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt. Definitely American.

Slowly, Kera raised her hands. A surreal silence filled the air in the wake of the gunfire.

“We’re on the same team,” she said.

“Oh yeah? What team is that?”

“Lionel’s team.” The American hesitated. Sh
e’d
gotten his attention.