by Ryan Quinn
Bright looked away from the grainy boats and glanced up at the stringcourse of digital clocks circling the room. It was 0830 hours in Beijing, 2030 hours in Washington. The plane had gone down nearly thirteen hours earlier, and he’d been in the windowless ops center since two hours after that, as soon as the State Department had learned of the ambassador’s fate. Eleven straight hours spent among the indicator lights, the glowing maps, the screens and their live feeds. He was not proud of the addictive rush being in this environment provided. Days passed in his sunny office meant that operations were running smoothly and the world was ordered—but those days were often tinged with boredom. What brought him to life were the hours spent in the ops center, which usually meant that a crisis had developed in some critical part of the world. Lives were in jeopardy or had been lost.
Bright shook his head. “So they had boats waiting out there to collect the data recorders. Or they had the plane bugged and were prepared to recover the audio. We’d have done the same thing. Have we confirmed that the plane was owned by Hu?” Bright wanted to bring the conversation back to the Chinese businessman. The crash of Hu Lan’s jet was a peculiar development, coming just forty-eight hours after the news story published by Gnos.is had exposed Hu’s financial ties with the Ministry of State Security. It was no surprise, of course, that Hu had ties to the MSS. But for China to play in the global economy, it was in their interest to keep secret even the possibility of such ties between the Chinese government and its leading business figures. They might not have any qualms about cheating in the global markets, but they had enough tact to not want to get caught. The news story about Hu was a black eye. America’s top diplomat dying in Hu’s airplane was another one. Either this was a pile of coincidences, or there had been an uncharacteristic slipup within China’s intelligence community.
“Yes, sir, the plane was Hu’s. NSA identified the aircraft from activity intercepted from the tower at Pudong. It was a private jet. Tail number registered to Hu’s company.”
“Do our dips usually fly private?” one of the analysts asked. “Why was Rodgers even on board?”
“Because we asked him to be,” Bright said. The room fell into a somber silence. The more he thought about it, the less he liked the timing of all of this—the public revelation of Hu’s links to the MSS and then the downed plane—but he couldn’t draw a straight line between any of the potential causes and effects. “Any chatter from Hu about the crash?”
“Not yet. We’re going back over intercepts from his staff, investment partners, and his wife.”
“That news story about Hu came from Gnos.is,” Bright said. “How’d Gnos.is get the scoop? A whistle-blower inside Hu’s camp?” In addition to generating articles based on facts that emerged from tirelessly mining the Internet, Gnos.is was also a known hub for whistle-blowers and activists who wanted to anonymously submit information that was not already available online. Gnos.is’s top-level domain—the “.is”—meant the site was registered in Iceland, where such activity was protected by liberal free speech laws.
“There’s no evidence of that yet. But it seems more likely than the alternative—that there’s a leak inside the MSS.”
Bright feared a more alarming possibility, one that he had so far kept to himself: that the leak of information to Gnos.is had come from one of the men and women within the CIA’s China division—possibly someone in this room. Bright and his team had discovered months earlier—well before the Gnos.is story—that Hu Lan had received funds from the Ministry of State Security, funneled to him through the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Bright had decided to sit on this bit of intelligence and watch Hu, keeping enough distance to let him attempt to go through with whatever the MSS had in mind for him. But the Gnos.is story had leveled the playing field; Bright’s team no longer had the advantage of knowing more than their rivals thought they knew.
Bright took a call from Charles Kowalsky, the White House chief of staff. The president was preparing a statement, and Kowalsky wanted to know if there were any last-minute updates. Bright assured him there weren’t. Kowalsky hesitated before hanging up.
“The president trusts you, Lionel. What’s your gut say? Is there any chance that this was an assassination? Any reason why we shouldn’t be treating China the same as we were treating them yesterday?”
Bright had entertained and rejected this idea a dozen times since he’d been called into the ops center that morning. “There’s no evidence to suggest that, Chuck. No logic either.” Killing diplomats is not something that governments risk, unless they’re trying to escalate a conflict. China wasn’t that reckless. Unlike the United States’ other tricky adversaries, such as the Russians and Iranians, the Chinese had always demonstrated the discipline to not wade in over their heads. No, Bright couldn’t imagine a scenario in which the Chinese government was behind an assassination of Ambassador Rodgers.
“Terrorists?”
“That doesn’t add up either. If a terrorist wanted to send a message to Washington, why make the ambassador’s death look like a tragic accident? They’d want to make it a sensation, and they’d be eager to take credit.”
Bright told the president’s chief of staff that, for the time being, it was best to take the Chinese at their word and try to work back channels to get permission to look harder for those flight data recorders.
LOWER MANHATTAN
Two banks of elevator doors dominated the lobby of a skyscraper on Pine Street, two blocks from the New York Stock Exchange. As lawyers and investment bankers tapped their ID cards at a row of security turnstiles, computers assigned them to an elevator car, grouping them in a way that minimized the number of stops each car had to make as it whisked the passengers efficiently to offices as high as ninety floors up.
At 9:17 AM a screen instructed fourteen people to crowd onto elevator 2B. The passengers rode in silence, their heads turned down at their smartphones or up at a pair of flat-screens that broadcast CNBC. The car made a stop at the forty-eighth floor, depositing seven people. It stopped again on fifty and a woman disembarked. Four men and two women remained on board as the car decelerated and approached the seventy-second floor. The familiar chime rang and the car stopped, but the doors did not slide open, provoking a moment of weary confusion. This was the final leg of the passengers’ morning commute. They’d endured trains and cabs and bagel lines and crowded sidewalks. What else could the city throw at them before nine thirty on a Wednesday morning?
The elevators had been upgraded the previous summer to the automated, hands-free grouping system. This eliminated the need for a panel of buttons inside the elevator, which meant that there was nothing to push in frustration when a door didn’t open or close as expected. The only actionable hardware was a call switch below an emergency intercom speaker. The man closest to these flicked the switch. Nothing. Not even a busy tone or an empty crackle. He flipped it up and down a few times in quick succession, but his irritation was met only with indifference. At some point after he gave up and stepped back to let a fellow passenger have a go, but before anyone else could, the elevator car shifted unexpectedly. For a brief moment, innocent confusion reigned. Had any of the six passengers been able to describe it later, they might have mentioned a strange, disorienting sensation in their gut. And then, suddenly, they were weightless. A handbag bounced off the wall and floated slowly toward the ceiling. A man let go of his BlackBerry, and it hung there in front of his face.
These were tricks of perspective.
“Oh my god,” groaned the first man to realize. His last word was drowned out by the sudden chaos around him.
The early portion of the descent was surprisingly smooth. The elevators had been well maintained and were designed to slip up and down the ninety-story shaft with a whisper. The passengers, all strangers, screamed together. Around the fortieth floor, the walls began to vibrate from the friction and there was an odor of smoldering metal. The ride was short after that. The elevator car ran out of s
haft three stories below the lobby, compacting and fracturing into a shallow crater ripped into the concrete by twisted metal.
THE VALLEY, RURAL MONTANA
Twenty miles beyond the last gas station, on a plain where gorgeous desolation stretched beyond the horizon in every direction, Charlie Canyon broke off the two-lane highway and pointed the rental car’s hood up a narrow gravel road. Soon he passed two small signs nailed to a fence post: PRIVATE PROPERTY and NO TRESPASSING. Then the road began to wind up a wooded ravine, leaving behind the open foothills patrolled by cattle.
This world was a surreal contrast to his life in New York City, which he’d slipped from unnoticed forty-eight hours earlier. The journey had started in his office—a SoHo loft that served as the public-facing headquarters of Gnos.is. After returning from lunch around one, he’d changed into clothes he’d never worn before, including new shoes fresh out of the box, a hat, and noncorrective glasses. He’d packed light—just a backpack with toiletries and two changes of clothes. He did not bring his laptop or tablet; even his phone he left behind on his desk.
He’d slanted the bill of his hat low over his face to shield it from any of the building’s surveillance cameras, whose feeds were almost certainly processed by facial-recognition software and available to several law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. Then he’d descended to the ground floor via the stairwell and pushed through a fire exit, where he was immediately swallowed into the heavy sidewalk traffic. He bought a new Metro card—using cash—and took the 6 train up to Grand Central Station, then caught a cab across town to Madison Square Garden. There, he entered Penn Station and paid cash for the 3:40 Amtrak train departing for Chicago. The whole time he remained mindful to keep his face hidden from surveillance cameras.
The train emerged from beneath the Hudson and accelerated west. By late evening, when the FBI agents assigned to tail Charlie Canyon began to wonder why they hadn’t spotted him leaving the office at his usual time, he was two hundred miles away.
The train ride took nineteen hours. In Chicago he rented a car from a disreputable company that would take his cash. Then he set out west on the twenty-two-hour drive to Montana, careful to obscure his face whenever he pulled into a gas station or rolled past a tollbooth.
And then finally he was here.
When the gravel road crested at a pass, Canyon—thirty, handsome with dark hair and eyebrows and a smattering of chin stubble—stopped the car in front of a gate. The two earlier signs discouraging trespassers were reprised here, along with another sign that said BIG SKY ENERGY. He got out and stood in front of the gate. It didn’t look like much, the gate, but if one thought about it, the thick steel bars slung across the road were overkill for managing livestock. In a place where most gates had rusty padlocks, there was instead a sophisticated magnetic latch. There was no call box to announce himself.
Canyon stood for a moment in the dirt, stretching his legs. The view from the pass was extraordinary. After ten years living in the city, this scenery was as novel to him as driving a car. The valley below was walled with ridges slicing into the sky, crescendoing at three points to form rocky peaks. On the valley’s south-facing slopes, tennis-court-sized solar panels checkered the landscape above the tree line. He spotted a lake on the valley floor. It was the hottest part of the day, and the only thing that distinguished the dogleg body of water from the evergreen woods surrounding it, other than the way it sparkled in the sunlight, was a short dock protruding from the near shore. He noted that none of the recently constructed cabins were visible through the tree cover, though he knew they were down there somewhere. Viewed from above, the valley looked nearly untouched, save for the dock and solar panels.
Just when he started to wonder if he’d forgotten a step in the instructions—instructions that had come in a series of encrypted chat messages, which he’d memorized and wiped from his computer—he heard a metallic clank and the gate yawned open. He got back into the car and eased it forward.
The road plunged below the tree line and then descended toward the lake in wide, gradual switchbacks. It was an old mining road, he’d been told. On the valley floor, the road split in three directions. Sticking to the instructions, he took the one that guided him to a simple, spacious, two-story log house that appeared suddenly from out of the forest. There was no answer when he knocked on the door, but it was unlocked. He called out to announce himself. The house was as silent as the hills. He crossed the room to stand at the large picture windows overlooking the lake. And there he saw it. Far out in the center of the lake, at the tip of a wake’s V, a male figure advanced through the water with steady crawl strokes.
Canyon went down to the dock below and joined the man’s dog, who was overcome with excitement from tongue to tail for twenty or thirty seconds before sprawling lazily again upon the warm wood. Canyon sat in a chair that had a towel draped over one of the arms and watched the man crawl through the water toward him.
He didn’t have to wait long. A minute later, Rafael Bolívar hoisted himself out of the lake. Bolívar wore no swim trunks. Unashamed, he turned around as if to admire the distance he’d come. Canyon watched the water come off his body; pulled from it by gravity, lifted from it by the sun. Canyon enjoyed moments like this, feeling his species’ basest yearning. His job was to understand human nature and harness its power on a mass scale. Or, as he liked to tell people with an enigmatic grin, “I work in advertising.”
That was true, in a way, though it was only one small piece of the role Canyon played at Gnos.is as the website’s only public face—its spokesman and advocate. Gnos.is, in fact, did no conventional advertising or marketing. It didn’t need to. The site’s performance was enough to capture users’ imaginations.
Canyon tossed the towel to Bolívar, who had bent to scratch the dog.
“How was the drive?” Bolívar asked, covering himself and stepping into sandals.
“Fine, considering you live on the dark side of the moon.”
Canyon was sitting at the dining room table when Bolívar, showered and dressed in khaki shorts and a white T-shirt, joined him. Bolívar was thirty-three, and he’d looked his age in the city, Canyon thought, if not abstractly a little older in his fitted suits and a solemn business stare that guarded not just his thoughts but a headful of proprietary secrets—secrets that, eventually, had driven him to this valley.
Before he’d disappeared from the outside world, Rafael Bolívar had inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from his father, who had founded Venezuela’s largest media company. Bolívar had turned those millions into billions by expanding his father’s media empire into North America. He had been celebrated in the media industry as a cunning yet principled businessman and in the tabloids as an eligible bachelor. But Bolívar’s success in the world of sensationalized news and reality shows had been a front, a ruthless tactic to raise money on the backs of cultural institutions he saw as depraved. Secretly, he had been reinvesting that money to fund what he hoped would replace them: Gnos.is.
It had been a little more than two months since Canyon had seen him in person. He thought Bolívar looked much younger out here than he had in the city.
Canyon slid a beige file folder across the table. Bolívar lifted its cover to glance at the first page, then he let it fall closed.
“This is the real reason you’re here?”
Canyon nodded.
“What are they?”
“They are the findings of an investigation into Gnos.is by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee’s chairman, as you know, is Senator Wrightmont of Montana, who would probably not be amused if he knew that you were currently a constituent. I gather they think you’re hiding in Iceland.” Canyon picked up the file and flipped through it. “The senator has amassed a collection of letters from the attorney general’s office along with these invitations from the FBI, CIA, State Department, DHS, and the embassies of most US allies. It’s all here.”
“Invitations?”
“What do they want?”
“They want Gnos.is’s sources.”
“For which stories?”
Canyon shrugged. “Dozens of them. There’s a list of Gnos.is articles that they say exposed classified information.” Canyon leaned back, folding his arms over his abdomen. “They did not, however, cite any concrete examples of harm caused by the publication of that information. Most of the stories seem pretty minor to me, just like before. There’s one, though, that seems to have especially struck a nerve.”
“Which one?”
“It ran last week. That report about the Chinese businessman who invested in an American telecom company with money from China’s intelligence agency.” Canyon shrugged. “Is that breaking news? I wouldn’t have thought so.”
Bolívar lifted his eyebrows, but he made no move to review the contents of the file.
“Any warrants or subpoenas?”
Canyon looked hurt. “If a subpoena comes, it won’t be served by me.”
Bolívar left the file on the table and walked to the window. “They’ll come,” he said. And then, after a long silence, “Come on, I’ll show you the mine.”
Bolívar drove them in a pickup truck. He was silent during the short ride, his arm resting on the edge of the open window, his hair waving in the breeze, his olive skin noticeably darker from a few months in the sun. Canyon looked out at the woods, noting the occasional narrow driveway they came upon and passed. At the end of each drive was a small cabin sheltered among the trees. Bolívar’s staff in the valley totaled approximately two dozen men and women who had jumped at the invitation to work for Gnos.is, even though it meant—at least for now—living in hiding and engaging only in activities that didn’t risk giving away their location. They lived this way out of necessity, to protect Gnos.is, which, like any good news organization, had enemies who were much more powerful than its friends.