The Good Traitor

by Ryan Quinn

  Canyon, in fact, had had to delay this trip to the valley because, as the only person publicly affiliated with Gnos.is, he was under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Government law-enforcement and intelligence agencies watched him, hoping to find a trail that would lead them to Bolívar, and thus to Gnos.is, which the government viewed not as a news organization but as a dangerous leaker of classified secrets. Teams at the FBI and NSA were probably going apeshit right now wondering where Canyon had gone and how he’d slipped their watch. When he returned, Canyon thought, their surveillance would only get tighter, perhaps making it impossible for him to visit again.

  When they got around to the far side of the lake, Bolívar steered the truck onto a narrow drive that would have been easy to confuse with any of the other potholed and overgrown paths that sprouted off from the main road. They had to roll up the windows to keep from being slapped by branches. After half a mile, the path opened to a clearing. There was still cover overhead from tall evergreens that let only a few columns of late-afternoon sunlight through their branches. The ground was clear of vegetation but cluttered by small piles of abandoned mining equipment. Moss grew over rusted-out troughs and cables like mold warning of expiration. Bolívar parked next to three other vehicles. Canyon got out of the truck and kicked the dirt and pine needles underfoot, looking up at the trees. He couldn’t see the high ridges through the tree cover.

  The mining tunnel was on the far side of the clearing. At just the place where the land began to slope up steeply, almost like a cliff, there it was—a rectangular black hole in the earth, framed like a picture with thick posts of wood. The opening was no larger than a one-car garage door.

  “It’s a little ways in here,” Bolívar said, and he disappeared into the base of the mountain.

  Canyon caught up with him at a steel door several dozen feet into the tunnel. As he waited for Bolívar to enter a pass code, Canyon glanced back, a little claustrophobically, at the opening they’d come through. It didn’t look so far away, but the temperature had dropped quickly with each step. Canyon turned back to the door when Bolívar pulled it open.

  They came first to a bright, white-painted chamber. It was small, more like a junction of two short hallways than a room. There was a door on each wall.

  “Through there is the lounge and restrooms,” Bolívar said, nodding at the door to the left. It was the only door that did not have a keypad lock on it. “This door on the right leads to the Big Sky turbines,” he said, referring to the mine’s power source, which was made available by Big Sky Energy, an experimental, privately owned company that Bolívar had invested in through a proxy. Big Sky was, in fact, the reason Bolívar had chosen this valley as the spot to anchor Gnos.is. The energy company, whose owner was enthusiastic about Gnos.is’s mission, had been seeking a way to test a hybrid of solar, wind, thermodynamic, and other experimental forms of power that, once perfected, would help communities independently source the energy they required. Big Sky needed a guinea pig and Bolívar needed power—a lot of it, and none that came from the main grid. It had not taken long to reach a secret agreement that made Big Sky Energy a cover for the existence of all activity in the valley, providing Bolívar with his power source while maintaining his anonymity.

  “Beyond the turbine room is a large hall where we’ve installed the servers and generators—Gnos.is’s brain and beating heart,” Bolívar continued. “If necessary, we can keep extending capacity by tunneling deeper into the mountain. But we’re going in here,” he said, walking to the door directly across from the main entrance. He obliged a waiting keypad and retina scanner and, a moment later, was holding the door open for Canyon.

  The chamber inside was surprisingly large. When they entered, a half-dozen men and women looked up from consoles around a long table. The only person Canyon recognized was J. D. Jones, who smiled and came over to greet him. Jones, in his midthirties and presenting a pasty, plain-featured face, had let his hair grow out some, enough that he tucked it behind his ears where the temples of his black-rimmed glasses clung. A veteran of both the NSA and CIA, Jones had been recruited to run Gnos.is’s cybersecurity.

  Bolívar introduced Canyon to the others in the room. As he did, Canyon realized that he knew everyone by name. Like J. D. Jones, they were all well-known coders, hackers, and cybersecurity experts. It had not been difficult to get any of them to quit whatever corporate or government job they’d been doing and join Gnos.is.

  All four walls of the chamber were lined with large flat-screens displaying pages from both branches of the Gnos.is site: gnos.is/fact, the news branch, and gnos.is/truth, a highly curated arts site. Controversy erupted most often from the /fact side, which was dedicated to collecting, verifying, and publishing facts about the world. Where Gnos.is differed from other sources of journalism was in how it carried out this process. Gnos.is worked by filtering as much Internet traffic as it could access through layers of complex algorithms that assigned a truth value to each claim about the world that it scraped from cyberspace. When a truth value became high enough, a claim was ruled a fact and was then incorporated into all relevant articles on the site. In addition to collecting data and evaluating its truth content, Gnos.is’s powerful software also absorbed the language patterns it detected across the Internet, a capability that was then reverse engineered to spool out the sentences and paragraphs that formed Gnos.is articles. This meant that human beings were not required to actually write the articles or even the headlines. And it also meant that articles were not static documents. New facts could be introduced into articles as soon as they could be verified, automatically updating the text in real time.

  The gnos.is/fact, or news, side of the site was free to users, but only monetarily. Gnos.is did not need money, for it had Bolívar’s fortune. Instead, Gnos.is was paid heftily in the currency it most craved: information. And everyone who had ever touched the Internet had paid them in this way, whether they knew it or not.

  “So this is where it happens,” Canyon said, watching the men and women at work. He thought of the thick file of complaints from the Justice Department. “Do you know how many people would like to get just a few minutes alone in this room with a sledgehammer?”

  For a brief moment, Bolívar was unable to suppress a smile.

  After touring the mine, they rode back to Bolívar’s log house. It was early dusk, and the only sounds as they drove were the branches slapping against the side of the truck. They sat on the porch as the wide sky changed color. Even framed by the valley walls, the sky seemed a limitless expanse, felt as much as seen.

  “Are you coming back?” Canyon asked.

  They were drinking beer from bottles. Inside, some of the others were preparing dinner, reading, playing cards.

  Canyon’s question was followed by such a long silence that he was prepared to just let it go. But then Bolívar answered.

  “Not until Gnos.is has proven itself.”

  “Hasn’t it already?”

  Bolívar shook his head. “We’ve proven to ourselves that Gnos.is works. But Gnos.is still scares a lot of people. We need more time.” He didn’t name the threat contained in the file folder that Canyon had delivered. But that was what he was talking about. The government wanted Gnos.is shut down, and they wanted Bolívar in their custody so they could force him to reveal the website’s sources. “As our public face, I need you to remind them that Gnos.is is interested only in facts. We haven’t broken any laws, and we don’t even know the names of Gnos.is’s sources.”

  Canyon nodded. A little while later, he retrieved his bags from his car and was shown to a guest cabin. The next morning he was gone before sunrise.

  PARIS

  The Hotel Victoire on Rue Michel-Ange in the city’s La Défense district was a full block of tasteful design and trendy lodging, the sort of place that, in a centuries-old city, had benefited from an architect who knew where to apply restraint even if the developer’s budget didn’t require it. The interior features were cutting-edg
e, but practical. Self-tinting windows, environmentally friendly plumbing and lighting, high-speed Internet connectivity—not just for the flat-screens in each room but also for the minibars, closets, air-conditioning, and other utilities. Every variable of the human-designed indoor environment could be digitally adjusted to taste. So what if Victoire had no grand history; it was elegant and expensive. It was the most modern hotel in Paris, and the people who mattered had taken notice.

  At a quarter to nine in the evening, a woman left her ninth-floor room after dressing for dinner. In the hallway she pressed the button to call for an elevator and stood back, smoothing her silk skirt, which had been pressed inside her luggage since New York. The woman was on her way to dinner with a man she saw sometimes when she was in town. The thought of him now made it easier to ignore her jet lag, and she chose instead to savor her anticipation.

  There was a soft chime and the elevator doors parted. She selected the lobby as her destination and the doors slid shut. She was alone in the car. By the time it started to move, the woman had become distracted with checking the address of the restaurant on her phone. She didn’t notice at first that the lift was going up, not down. It wasn’t until some twenty seconds later, when she sensed the journey was taking too long, that she looked up.

  Floor fourteen was illuminated on the indicator above the door. Then fifteen. She pushed the lobby button again, though it was already illuminated. The car reached seventeen and still it climbed. She jabbed experimentally at a few of the panel’s other buttons, but the lift responded to nothing. It wanted only to climb. She stood back, resigned to wait for the car to reach the top before descending to street level.

  The elevator finally decelerated and came to rest at the twenty-fourth floor, the top, which hosted the hotel’s penthouse suites. Perhaps the elevator gave priority to guests willing to pay 800 euros a night, the woman thought, a little curious to get a glimpse at her wealthy rival for the lift’s services. But the doors didn’t open. The car hovered silently for a few seconds, and then the woman experienced a very strange sensation. Her stomach turned, and she felt weightless.

  SEATTLE

  Kera Mersal sat on a park bench, pretending to read a paperback. Over the rim of the book, and through dark glasses, she eyed a woman she guessed was her own age playing with a toddler near the public sculpture in McGraw Square. Kera had caught herself noticing things like this more often, though she didn’t see the point. Her life did not allow for children. It might never. This hadn’t given her much pause in her twenties, and now it was too late. Not because of her age—she was only thirty-one—but because of the career path she’d chosen. Under the best circumstances, someone with her résumé would have unique difficulties raising kids. But she’d made choices that put the best circumstances far from reach. Now, seeing the toddler hug his mother’s leg, she reminded herself that it was just human nature to want what you can’t have.

  Kera’s real purpose for sitting on this particular park bench presented itself at 6:10 PM. A man came out of the news-and-shine shop across the street and lowered the rolling gate over the shop’s entrance. Then he set off in the direction of the light-rail station, just as she knew he would. In twenty years, his routine had not changed. Maybe he’d moved a little faster in a younger body, and of course he’d gone to the bus station before the rail system existed. But this was what he did six days a week. Seeing it again both comforted and saddened her.

  When he got on the train at Westlake Station, she boarded the opposite end of the car and watched him from a distance. It was rush hour, but someone had noticed the way he hunched slightly from back pain and had given him a seat. He sat quietly, looking forward.

  At the first stop, the seat facing him opened up. Kera took it. She waited until the train was moving again before she removed her sunglasses and forced eye contact with the man. For a beat there was no reaction, just a silent battle: recognition versus disbelief. She remembered now that she’d dyed her hair much lighter than he’d ever seen, but she hadn’t done anything else to disguise herself, not today. With widened eyes, he tried to speak.

  “Not here,” she said softly. “Get off at Pioneer Square and meet me up on the street.” He seemed paralyzed. “Will you do that?” Finally he nodded. She held his gaze for a moment to reassure him and was unprepared for what she saw in his eyes: anxiety, fear, confusion. She turned away, then stood and walked to the next car.

  She waited for him on the sidewalk in Pioneer Square and then guided him into an alley where a Dumpster hid them from the street. Before saying anything more, she asked to see his cell phone. He produced a flip phone that had to be at least five years old. She removed its battery, ignoring the questions that filled his eyes. Confident that the disabled phone couldn’t be accessed by eavesdroppers, she led him back out to the sidewalk. They strolled a few blocks to City Hall Park, where they sat on a bench.

  “Are you OK?” he asked her. If she had given him a chance to speak on the train, moments after he’d first seen her, his first words probably would have been different, angrier. But he’d had time to let her presence sink in, and this is what he wanted to know.

  “I’m OK.” How else could she respond?

  “You should have called us. Why didn’t you call?”

  “I couldn’t. I’m sorry.”

  “You could have, Kera. You could have.” He was shaking his head. “We have to call your mother.” He looked at the phone and battery in his hands.

  “I already spoke to Mom. I just came from the university.” Her father’s eyes got big. “She’s angry,” Kera said. Her father nodded. “I understand that. Look, Dad, all of those things they say I’ve done—” she started, and then stopped herself. She could see doubt in his eyes, sown by all the stories that had been stirred up about her in the media. Her phone records, text messages, e-mails, even her private photos—all of it carefully cherry-picked for release to the media to build the narrative the agency wanted to create. She had no clue how they’d even gotten their hands on most of it. They hadn’t done so legally, anyway. But what could she do? Defending herself meant falling into their trap. They were provoking her, trying to draw her out of hiding.

  Even if her next words hadn’t been stopped by a sudden lump in her throat, she knew there was no way to explain this to her father. “It’s not the way they say it is,” she whispered finally. “I can’t prove that to you now. But I will. Someday this will be over and I’ll show you.”

  Mercifully, the media had been gentle with her parents. Her adoptive parents. The only parents Kera had ever known. Her adoptive mother was a white UW anthropology professor from the Midwest; her adoptive father had run his news-and-shine shop since he immigrated to the US from Egypt when the couple married. Kera herself had been born to a Salvadorian woman; everything about her biological father was unknown. After Kera vanished two months earlier, some professionally distasteful pundits, mostly from conservative radio, had taken the predictable swipes at the mixed-race, Seattle-living, professor-immigrant couple. But for the most part, the media had written her parents out of the drama. Kera was relieved for that, even if she suspected it had to do with the fact that they were not her “real” parents. Could the sins of an adopted Central American child who grows up to be a treasonous spy really be blamed on the loving couple who took her in and gave her a chance at a good life?

  Kera had done her best to ignore all of that. What did it matter anyway? The media had been spun and misled so thoroughly that they had no hope of getting the story right. She was just thankful that her parents had been spared the dirty misinformation campaign intended to level suspicion and judgment on her.

  She had to look away when she saw the wet shine in his eyes. That’s when she knew she had to go. She pulled a folded slip of paper from her pocket. “Here. If you need to reach me, use this e-mail address. But don’t use your computer at home. They’re watching that.”

  “Who’s watching that?”

  “I’m sorr
y, Dad. Good-bye for now.”

  “Who’s watching us?” he called after her. “Kera, what have you done?”

  LANGLEY

  She looked different from her online pictures. Not worse, like the others had; but still, the disconnect had thrown him. Live and in three dimensions, she looked like a distant, older cousin of the woman Bright’s imagination had constructed from her dating-profile photos. Now that Bright had spent a few hours in her company, he could see, retroactively, the honest resemblances contained in those photographs. The lines at the corners of her mouth when she smiled. The look in her eyes when she laughed, which was so tied to the sound and movement of her laugh that its identifying contours could not possibly be conveyed in a picture viewed by a stranger.

  In the span of their first meal, the dating-profile version of herself had been replaced with the live woman in front of him, and to his surprise, Bright found his curiosity deepening in her presence. She commanded a down-to-earth appeal that he rounded up to beauty. And her eyes cast the hint of a wild drive he couldn’t imagine she had a use for in her career as an airline-industry lobbyist. She was the kind of woman Bright could picture equally comfortable watching an opera or drinking pints in a sports bar. On their first date they’d barely glossed over the topic of their jobs. When she asked, he had told her only that he worked at a foreign-policy think tank, his usual cover story.

  After he got out of this meeting, Bright decided, he would call her—Audrey—and suggest they have dinner again later in the week.

  A mention of the late Ambassador Rodgers by a woman down the conference table nudged Bright back into the present. But the name had only been dropped in the service of making some tangential point, and the woman continued on about chatter the Central America division had intercepted and interpreted as a terror group’s ambition to strike the Panama Canal. Bright listened, hoping he wouldn’t be called upon to acknowledge that he knew nothing more about the ambassador’s death. The meeting he was in was a daily high-level teleconference session between CIA Director Cal Tennison and the director of national intelligence, who delivered the daily security briefing each morning to the president. Bright rarely attended such sessions, but he’d been asked to sit in today in case the DNI brought up the situation in China, which so far he hadn’t.