by Ryan Quinn
The pass codes entered, Jones performed the requisite commands. Just like that, the three names appeared, along with links to Gnos.is stories that reported on the circumstances of each of their deaths. Bolívar and Jones leaned toward the screen in unison.
“Oh shit,” Jones whispered.
SEATTLE
Kera had just finished lunch and was walking along Alki Beach when she felt the pocket pulse of an incoming e-mail. At first she assumed it was from her parents, then remembered that the e-mail address she’d given them wasn’t linked to the burner phone.
Two days earlier she’d paid cash for three prepaid smartphones—two for $64.98 each at Walmart, and another for $79.95 at Target—along with three months’ worth of prepaid unlimited minutes and data usage. She’d only activated one of the burners, and she intended to use it mostly for mundane convenience: to read the news and listen to podcasts, which she preferred over music. She had not used the phone to make a call or to send a text message or e-mail, and she had given no one the phone’s number. As soon as the phone received a call or a text, thereby linking her number to another number, it would be swept into the NSA’s intricate contact-tracing software; she’d have to toss it and activate one of the backup phones.
There was only one Gmail account linked to the phone—an account she’d set up two months earlier on a public library computer in the West Village in Manhattan. Setting up the e-mail account was one of the precautions she’d taken, systematically, as she’d been trained to do, to prepare for going on the run. She’d purchased wigs and colored contacts, withdrawn cash from accounts monitored by the Central Intelligence Agency—her former employer—and spread the money out over several new accounts. She’d established credit lines and created passports and driver’s licenses for three aliases, documents she’d stashed in a safety deposit box in a Midtown bank. They’d be there when she needed them.
For now, she was traveling under the name Laura Perez, a fourth identity she’d built up while waiting out the past two months in El Salvador. Admittedly, it was a thin alias—not much more than a passport, a driver’s license, and a small wooden cross she wore on a necklace. When quizzed by the customs official at LAX upon her return to the United States, she said that she’d been traveling through Central America as a Catholic missionary and was returning to her diocese to raise more funds for the mission.
Kera studied the e-mail that had just hit the in-box of the previously unused Gmail account she had created for this sole purpose. She stared at the jumble of letters and numbers that made up the sender’s e-mail address, which was meaningless to her. There was no subject, and the body of the message was blank.
She hailed a cab and told the driver to take her to the Seattle Public Library. There, she went up to the fifth floor and found an unoccupied public computer. Using a temporary library card she’d acquired under the name Laura Perez, she logged on and clicked away from the library’s home page. She wasn’t here to check out books.
Working quickly, she established two new e-mail accounts, one with Yahoo, the other Gmail. She named each account by glancing down at the front page of a Seattle Times someone had left behind on the desk and selecting the first words her eyes focused on, then tacking on a few numbers to ensure that the e-mail addresses would be unique. She ended up with [email protected] and [email protected]. For each, she created a different password.
From the “opposition301” account, she composed a new message to the sender of the blank e-mail she’d received. She typed a few lines into the body of her e-mail, pitching a great deal on a safe and effective male-enhancement product. At the bottom of her fake ad, in a tiny font size, she typed the following line, which included the address of the second e-mail account she’d just created:
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM FUTURE E-MAILS PLEASE SEND AN E-MAIL WITH THE WORD UNSUBSCRIBE IN THE SUBJECT LINE TO [email protected].
She hit “Send,” then logged off. An elderly woman with a cane and thick glasses took the seat when she got up.
Kera killed twenty minutes reading newspapers off the periodicals shelves before she returned to the computer stations and sat down at a different terminal. She logged into the “insists119” account. There were two messages in the in-box she’d set up not a half hour earlier. She leaned forward. The first was an automated welcome message from Gmail. The second was from another unfamiliar address. It said:
GET YOUR DODGERS TICKETS. 2 FOR 1 UNTIL AUG 8. CALL 866-DODGERS.
This was followed by detailed directions to Dodger Stadium; links to articles about the baseball team’s most recent games, trades, and injury reports; and a schedule of the season’s remaining home games. Kera ignored all of this, though she was amused by the great lengths the sender had gone through to pad the message with so much extra detail. She focused on two things in the e-mail: the address fields and the first line in the body of the message.
In the “To:” field, three e-mail addresses were listed, including [email protected]. The other two were made up of random numbers and letters. But the addresses themselves didn’t matter; it was the number of addresses that was significant. According to the system they’d agreed to—which was to be used if they needed to contact each other and had not yet established an encrypted OTR (Off-the-Record) chat protocol—she would use the number three to decode the message. First she wrote down on a piece of scrap paper the third of five gibberish e-mail addresses in the “CC:” field. It was [email protected]. Then she combined the third word and third number that appeared in the first line of the e-mail message. This gave her “Dodgers8,” which would be the password for the [email protected] account.
She logged off. There was no one at the computer to the right of where she was sitting, so she moved over to the open station. On the Gmail home page, she entered the new address in the username bar, taking care to get each of the letters and numbers in the correct order. Then she typed Dodgers8 into the password bar. The combination worked, quickening her pulse.
She clicked into the “Drafts” folder and found his message.
I’VE GOT A PROJECT I’M WORKING ON. WANT TO HELP? CAN YOU MEET ME AT THE SHELL STATION ON HWY 93 JUST NORTH OF MISSOULA, MT? ASAP—YOU NAME THE TIME.
She deleted his draft message and sat staring at the screen. Her training told her that she should stick to her original plan. She’d returned to the States for one reason, and it did not involve a road trip through Montana. Unless, of course . . . a project I’m working on. Could that mean what she hoped it meant? There was a good chance they were both after the same thing. If he’d contacted her because he had something that would help clear their names, why make things more difficult for herself by going it alone?
She typed: NOON. TOMORROW.
Instead of sending the message, she hit “Save” to keep it contained within the “Drafts” folder. Then she logged out and returned to browse the periodicals. This time she was too anxious to read anything. She forced herself to flip through a Vanity Fair for five minutes before she found a computer she hadn’t used yet. She logged back into the coded Gmail account. Per their agreed-upon system, if the message had been received and confirmed, the entire draft would be deleted, erasing all record of it and signaling that the meeting was on.
Kera held her breath. The “Drafts” folder was empty.
She had to get herself to Missoula.
I-93, OUTSIDE MISSOULA, MONTANA
It was overcast when the two figures climbed out of their respective vehicles and embraced in the windy parking lot. Had anyone been watching, they might have established that the pair were not relatives. Her skin was too dark, his too pale. But it was clearly a reunion, and the way they clasped each other silently, and for a moment longer than was necessary for a greeting, gave it an air of significance. Maybe they were lovers, or old college friends, or, judging by their plain, dark clothes and sunglasses, perhaps they were gathering for the funeral of a mutual friend.
They were in fact none of these th
ings, but that didn’t matter. No one paid them any attention.
“How long will I be staying?” Kera asked, climbing into the pickup J. D. Jones had driven. They’d parked her rental car where it would be inconspicuous overnight.
“That depends.”
She took this to mean that he would not be comfortable discussing specifics until they got where they were going.
“You were out of the country?” he said when they were fifteen miles up a two-lane highway.
“Yes. El Salvador.” She told him the truth; there was no longer any reason to protect it. She’d returned to the States because she was done running.
He let out a short laugh. “How was that?”
“Boring.” With her eyes fixed on the ribbon of blurred pavement that split the wide plains, she experienced the same detached feeling she’d had looking out at the ocean from a balcony for the past two months. There had been only two things to occupy her time in El Salvador: watching the Pacific and culling through news reports in search of a sign that there had been a shift in her case, a softening in the vitriol, a lessening of the use of terms like “treason” and “aiding the enemy.”
“No,” she said. “It was worse than boring. It was torture.”
“Worse than prison?”
“I’m not afraid of prison. And I’m not afraid of the people who want us there.” She looked over at him and then nodded at the landscape flying by. “We made it this far, didn’t we?”
When he smiled he looked free, she thought. This made her feel optimistic about why he’d summoned her.
For two hours they sat side by side, tracking north across the continent at seventy miles an hour. Out here, Kera thought, space defined everything. Beauty, time, silence. It was all measured by space. The silences in their conversations stretched on for the length of a plain, the width of a mountain range. At one point the sun came out and he rolled down his window. Wind howled through the cabin.
“You look well,” she said, just loud enough to be heard. “It’s good to see you.”
He nodded and smiled, his hair blowing in the wind.
Jones took Kera directly to the mine. As they descended into the valley, circled a sparkling lake, and parked near a tunnel at the base of a mountain, Kera made mental notes of all her questions. Everything made her curious—the conspicuous electronic gate they’d passed through on their approach, the cabins sheltered among the trees, the solar panels littering the tundra on the ridges above—but for now she kept her questions to herself. She trusted Jones; the answers would come.
It wasn’t until they arrived at the heavy security doors inside the mine that she understood suddenly where they were.
“Is this . . . ,” she said.
Jones smiled. “It’s not as flashy as our old CIA digs, but it’s more powerful than it looks.” Jones typed in a security code and submitted an unblinking eye for a retina scan. Approved, he pushed open the steel door.
Had she been given another thirty seconds’ warning, her mind might have better anticipated what lay beyond this threshold. Instead, she entered the room still thinking about her old job at the agency, the many task forces she’d been assigned to whose sole purpose was to locate the people and hardware that kept the mysterious Gnos.is website running—and how all of those task forces had failed.
From these thoughts her mind went suddenly blank. Seated at a six-screen array at the far end of a long table was Rafael Bolívar. He glanced up at her entrance, and she saw in his eyes that he had not been expecting her either.
When time resumed, Kera managed to glance back at Jones, who was smiling, a little proud of himself for having kept this moment a surprise.
“Rafa, Kera,” he said. “I believe you two have met.” There were a few other people at workstations around the room. All of them looked up at her entrance, but then went politely back to work.
Bolívar started across the room to embrace her, and for a brief moment she almost wished he wouldn’t. Her mind had worked hard to put him at a distance; she feared that even a brief moment of physical contact could destroy that. Her body, though, never intended to resist. She felt her arms against his back, her chin pressed to his shoulder, and his precise smell—the one characteristic she’d been unable to re-create clearly in her mind on the occasions she gave in to a wayward thought of him.
“What are you doing here?” Bolívar asked, looking at her with wonderment.
“She’s going to help us independently verify the China story,” Jones said.
Bolívar turned sharply. “No. No way.” He pushed away from Kera to face Jones. The tension was heightened by the sudden lack of activity from the other workers around the room. “How do you imagine that would work? She’s about as mobile as you are. Every law-enforcement agent in the country is looking for her.”
“Evading detection is among her many areas of expertise. I think her presence here demonstrates that.”
“I don’t care. Find someone else. Anyone but her.”
“Hey, I can hear you, you know,” Kera said. “I’m right here. What are you talking about?”
“Three sources who contributed to a story about—”
“Jones,” Bolívar said, cutting him off and creating a stalemate.
Kera tossed her jacket over the back of a chair and looked from one man to the other. “You two might have had this conversation before hauling me out to the middle of nowhere. But now I’m here. Please,” she said, more to Bolívar. “It’s OK. Try me.”
With his silence, Bolívar finally conceded. Around the room, the other workers resumed their tasks.
“This story has been building gradually over the past few weeks.” Jones nodded at one of the large flat-screens on the wall, where a page from Gnos.is was displayed. Kera read the headline and a few paragraphs. It was all familiar to her; Gnos.is was the first news site she read each morning. The story was about corruption in China’s government.
“Not exactly breaking news, is it?”
“Some of it was, apparently. We’ll get to that. But generally, no, corruption in China is well documented. The difference is that Gnos.is’s account is painstakingly comprehensive—and highly unflattering to a whole bunch of members of the Communist Party.” He paused, a small hesitation before getting to the main point. “Two days ago our integrity software detected a problem. Three sources who contributed to this story died of unnatural causes within seventy-two hours of each other.”
“Unnatural? That makes it sound like you’ve ruled out the chance that their deaths were a coincidence.”
Jones and Bolívar exchanged a glance.
“What?” Kera said.
“All right, show her,” Bolívar said.
Jones went to a console, talking as he tapped out commands on a touch-screen keypad. “We don’t like to know the identities of our sources, but given the circumstances, we didn’t have a choice. Here they are. Marcus Templeton, a forty-seven-year-old hedge-fund manager. He’d hit a sweet spot recently investing in the telecommunications industry. Net worth cracked a billion last year.” Jones tapped his screen, and Templeton’s image was replaced with a woman’s. “The second is a tech exec, Anne Platt, early forties. She was way up the chain in product development at Apple until she was poached by a private Silicon Valley consulting firm two years ago.” Jones looked at Kera. “These two both died in elevator accidents—he in Manhattan, she in Paris.”
“Elevator accidents?” Kera said.
“Yeah, if you can imagine that.”
“I’d rather not. But I’m starting to see why you don’t think the deaths were coincidental. Did the third one get on a bad elevator too?”
Jones hesitated. “The third was Greg Rodgers, our ambassador to China.”
Kera’s eyes narrowed. “The plane crash.”
“Yes.”
“That was a hit?”
Jones shrugged. “Unless it was a coincidence.”
Kera’s mind rapidly shuffled scenarios. “You say he
was a source?”
“All three of them were.”
“Meaning what? They were all leaking information to Gnos.is?”
“Yes, but not necessarily in the way you mean it.”
Kera waited for them to explain.
“There are some people who directly upload information to Gnos.is with the intention that it be used in a story,” Jones elaborated. “But they make up only a tiny fraction of the total data that Gnos.is relies upon.”
“Right,” Kera said. “And the rest comes from . . .” She was generally familiar with how Gnos.is functioned, but did not understand its inner workings the way Bolívar and Jones did.
Jones held out his arms to indicate the atmosphere around them. “The Internet. When we say ‘source,’ we’re including anyone whose everyday digital activity is scraped from the Internet by Gnos.is and used to corroborate background data for a story,” Jones said. Kera let him continue. She was listening for a vulnerability in the system. “Most events—from natural disasters to wars to an individual’s trip to the grocery store—are digitized in one way or another. And most of that data is linked to the Internet. So, for all intents and purposes, we’re all leaking information to Gnos.is, whether we know it or not. Gnos.is analyzes all that information and calculates the probability that each data point is false or factual. Then it discards the false data and describes all the facts in relation to each other.”
“If everyone’s leaking data online, why were these three killed?” Kera said. “What made them targets?”
“TERMITE,” Bolívar said suddenly, participating for the first time. “You’ve heard about this operation the CIA was running out of our embassies overseas? The one where we’re eavesdropping on journalists to spy on foreign leaders.”