by Ryan Quinn
“Of course. It’s been all over the news.”
“Well, the highly classified details first appeared in a Gnos.is story.”
“You published that leak?” Kera said, not hiding her disapproval.
“It turned up in an offshoot of this China corruption story, actually,” Bolívar said, nodding at the big screen. “Ambassador Rodgers was one of the few people in a position to know about TERMITE.”
“Wait. You think Rodgers gave up TERMITE to Gnos.is?” Kera said. “No way. Rodgers wouldn’t do that.” Kera had never met Greg Rodgers in person, but as an analyst covering China and Iran, she’d come up in the agency studying Rodgers’s interactions with the Chinese during the early years of his ambassadorship. Rodgers blowing open something like TERMITE made no sense. But then again, if Rodgers didn’t leak it, someone else at the agency or high up in one of the embassies had, and that reality wasn’t any easier to stomach. People get turned, Kera thought with a chill. Professionals. People who are trained in duplicity.
Jones shook his head, aligning with her skepticism. “I don’t know. Even if Rodgers was the leak, then what? Instead of recalling him from Beijing and charging him with violating the espionage statutes, the CIA just shot his plane down?”
“I didn’t say that,” Bolívar said.
“Didn’t you?”
Bolívar let that go. “What about the Chinese? They had a motive. The revelations about Hu Lan were embarrassing for them.”
“No,” Kera said. “They have too much to lose by starting an overt conflict with the United States. They wouldn’t risk assassinating an ambassador.”
“Maybe that’s why they tried to make it look like an accident.”
Kera shook her head. “It’s too risky. They’re more disciplined than that.”
“What about the other two sources?” Jones said. “They couldn’t have even been privy to something like TERMITE. Why kill them?”
“That’s what I wanted to hire an independent contractor to look into,” Bolívar said. He didn’t look at Kera.
“Hold on,” Kera said. “You’re talking as if you don’t know what each of these sources contributed to the story. If some of them are leaking data about a trip to the grocery store and others are leaking sensitive classified info, you must know the difference. Who’s responsible for what?”
Jones and Bolívar exchanged a glance. “We don’t know,” Jones said.
“Why not?”
“To protect Gnos.is from human error and bias, we anonymize our sources and what, precisely, they contribute.”
“Then how can you verify a story?”
“Gnos.is verifies everything.”
“Gnos.is is a computer. How would you even know if it made a mistake?”
Jones shook his head, betraying a little frustration with her. “It can’t make a ‘mistake.’ Unlike a human journalist who is prone to overlook something or forget to ask the right question, Gnos.is literally computes it all. Anything it reports as a fact is reported with more certainty than any human journalist ever enjoyed. But we’re getting off topic.”
“No, we’re not. This is relevant. I get that Gnos.is does the legwork, but is there nothing that prevents it from publishing classified information?”
“Gnos.is publishes everything that it can verify as true. It’s not an editorial decision. It’s either a fact or it’s not.”
“Bullshit. Don’t the motives of people who leak information matter?”
“Not if that information is true. You, of all people, should be sympathetic to that.”
Kera was silenced by her own anger. This was the agency’s worst nightmare: an anonymous leaker who either didn’t know or didn’t care that the secrets he or she was leaking could put Americans in the field in danger.
“Look,” she said, “I know how it sounds coming from me, but you have to stop this.”
“Stop what?”
“Publishing these classified leaks,” Kera said.
Bolívar looked at Jones as if to say, I told you so. This enraged Kera even more.
“You have three dead people, one of them an American diplomat, and all you care about is preserving some principle of anonymity? It’s not even a principle. It’s a delusion that some algorithms can make judgment calls better than responsible humans.” Neither Bolívar nor Jones said anything. “The information about the classified TERMITE operation and these three murders came to Gnos.is somehow. It’s right down the hall sitting in those servers, isn’t it? You’re just choosing not to look at it.”
Bolívar had returned to his workstation and sat down while Kera spoke. Jones averted his eyes.
“Well, I’ll look at it,” Kera offered.
“No way,” Bolívar said.
“Don’t you see the irony in this? Which principle are you most loyal to: learning the truth, or helping some leaker remain anonymous? It appears you can’t have both.”
“We have to try” was all Bolívar said. He didn’t look up, as if to indicate that the conversation was over.
“I see,” Kera said softly. But what she saw, now that her anger had matured past a state that blinded her, was that Jones hadn’t brought her here because he had new evidence that could help clear their names. He didn’t even seem concerned about that. While she was ready to accept that their own leak of classified files two months earlier, a decision that had ultimately forced them to go on the run, might have been a mistake, his mind had apparently gone the other way. Not only was he unconcerned about their legal status, he was now helping others to commit the same acts. Had he actually made peace with a life in hiding? Or had the reality of that life not sunk in yet?
Either way, that wasn’t her; she couldn’t do that. And she’d promised herself that of all the people she would no longer betray, she came first on that list.
“Turn off the lights.” Kera had been standing alone at the deck railing when she heard him open the sliding-glass door. It was after dinner and the house was quiet; everyone else had retreated to their cabins, tucked away in the woods that surrounded the lake. The lights went out and she heard him approach in the darkness. Her eyes adjusted quickly under the clear sky. “I’ve never seen so many stars,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”
Bolívar came up next to her, and for a stretch they stood at the railing looking at the way the stars reflected off the lake. Finally he spoke. “So you’re saying no.”
Kera nodded. “I can’t get involved with this, Rafa.”
“You shouldn’t, anyway.”
“You want to know the most terrifying thing I encountered in my two months in hiding? It’s the knowledge that I’m capable of going on like this for the rest of my life. I know how to evade. I know how to survive. But for what? The thing I’m running from is a fraud.” She stopped herself to look up at him. “Do you think I’m what they say I am?” she said, immediately regretting it.
“No,” he said. “You’re guilty of the same thing Gnos.is is: making information public to hold your government accountable. Do you ever read the stories about yourself on Gnos.is?”
Kera didn’t answer. She took this as a rhetorical question. Of course she had read all those stories.
“Gnos.is never verified any evidence to support the charges the government leveled against you—except, of course, that you ‘mishandled’ classified information. Information that I’d say you appropriately handled by making it public. But there was never any evidence of espionage, certainly not the suggestion that you might have been acting on behalf of China.”
Kera recoiled at the implication that he was trusting her because his computer told him to.
“That isn’t why I know it,” he said, resting his hand on her forearm. He left it at that. After several minutes he said, “Your room is comfortable?”
“Yes, thank you.” They fell again into silence until Kera couldn’t stand it any longer. “Leave me out here alone awhile?”
She held her breath, uncertain how she would react if his face were to move in
to meet hers. She’d imagined that happening—maybe a thousand times. But that had always been in the abstract. Confronted with the reality of it now, she knew that kissing him again would be impossible. She wasn’t ready. When she closed her eyes now, all she could see was her ex-fiancé, Parker, forever preserved in her mind the way she’d discovered him, lying in the bathtub with a gun resting on his chest. It had only been a few months. She wasn’t equipped for peaceful moments under the stars with another man.
She heard the wooden creak of the deck and knew that he was moving for the door.
“Kera,” he said from somewhere behind her.
“Hmm.” She didn’t turn. He’s going to tell me to be careful, she thought.
“Good luck.”
She waited until he slid the glass shut and she was certain she was alone before she exhaled.
FAIRFAX COUNTY, VIRGINIA
Lionel Bright shuffled down the hall from his kitchen, where he’d just started the coffeepot. The sound of his slippers on the hardwood made him pick up his feet. He wasn’t so goddamn old that he shuffled.
Bright opened his front door to a humid morning. It was just after six, still an hour before school buses led the suburban rush-hour parade past his house. For now the neighborhood stirred with joggers and disheveled people walking dogs, plastic baggies at the ready, in the small park across the street.
Wearing only an old Georgetown sweatshirt and the pajama pants he slept in, Bright ventured toward the newspaper at the end of his driveway. As he did, he eyed his neighbors’ front yards and drives and failed to spot another paper in any of them. Bright had subscribed to the Washington Post for over thirty years. Originally, the subscription had been one of many establishing details in his cover, another physical thing bearing the name and address he presented to the world. The subscription was paid for with a credit card associated with the Spurkland Institute, a foreign-policy think tank the agency had long maintained as one of its proprietaries. But Bright, who now consumed all other text on his tablet, had cemented a habit of browsing the broadsheet with his morning coffee. Though he knew better, the newspaper made the world seem so orderly and comprehensible, laid out like that in neat columns that could be rolled up in a rubber band and tossed onto his driveway. With the rise of the Internet, he’d assumed that he was doing the Post a favor by renewing his subscription annually. Now, gazing at his neighbors’ empty driveways, he wondered if maybe he was actually a burden on the newspaper, which had to send a delivery van out to his neighborhood just for him, just so that he could maintain the simple pleasures of a morning stroll to the end of his driveway and back and a few minutes with his coffee and the previous day’s news.
He was bent over with an outstretched arm when he saw the front page and felt his breath catch in his throat.
He picked up the paper and looked around, aware now that he was being watched. For a few moments he stood there in his slippers, looking anew at his surroundings. He saw her, finally, sitting on a bench in the park. She wore sunglasses, and her hair was different—light, almost blond.
He crossed the street to her.
“Your paper,” she said, handing over that morning’s actual Post. She nodded at the Post in his hand, which was dated two months earlier. She knew him well enough to know that he’d once used his newspaper to signal meets and drops, though it had been a while since he’d done that. He preferred not to bring others in his line of work that close to his doorstep. “I know it’s a risk for you to talk to me,” she said. “Nod right now and I’ll walk away and you’ll never see me again.”
He kept his head still.
“They made you help them write it, didn’t they?” she said, removing the sunglasses.
Her amber eyes looked darker, Bright thought, but the rest of her face projected the youth and beauty he remembered. Bright looked down at the outdated paper in his hand. Seeing the headline now felt just as unreal to him as it had two months earlier. EVIDENCE LINKS MISSING AMERICAN CYBERSPIES TO CHINA.
“Kera—”
“It’s OK,” she said. “You didn’t have a choice.”
We always have a choice, he thought. Like right now. He shouldn’t be talking to her unless he planned to bring her in—and it was too early to say what he would do about that. She’d been smart to catch him like this, phoneless, practically in his underwear.
“For what it’s worth, I never thought you’d turned,” he said, sitting down next to her on the bench. “If you’d wanted to betray your country, you wouldn’t have transferred to HAWK in the first place. You would have stayed inside the agency where you might have done more damage.”
“Thanks for that vote of confidence.”
“This isn’t about confidence, Kera.”
When she looked at him now, her eyes were pleading. “What did the agency’s investigation really determine?”
“That you and J. D. Jones leaked the HAWK files.”
“Of course we did. That isn’t the part that needed investigating.”
Bright paused. And then he told her the truth. “There wasn’t an investigation. There wasn’t time.”
“No?” she scoffed. “But apparently there was time for a disgusting smear campaign.”
“The mess you left us with had to be cleaned up. That was the direction they took. I didn’t endorse it.”
“Oh, how courageous of you. This was their idea of cleaning up a mess? Throwing two of your best under the bus and managing to escalate tensions with China in the process?” She nodded at the headline on the old paper. The treason accusations were the most serious, legally, but far from the most salacious. Private details had been released, selectively, to suggest a narrative that starred Kera and Jones as duplicitous philanderers and mentally unstable outcasts. Rather than confront its own domestic-surveillance scandal, the agency had manufactured a new scandal that they thought would play better in the media. They’d been right.
“Like you said, Kera, I didn’t have a choice. The HAWK operation was classified. You didn’t have the authority to make public what you witnessed there.”
“The authority? None of us had the authority for the kind of surveillance HAWK was doing. Not on American soil, Lionel. Don’t talk to me about who’s got authority.” Kera paused as a spandex-clad woman clutching a yoga mat walked by. “I warned you personally about what was happening within HAWK, Lionel. When nothing was done about it, Jones and I had to act.”
Bright remembered well the last encounter he’d had with Kera. Sitting in a back booth at a Manhattan diner, she’d outlined the disaster unfolding within the classified black op known as HAWK. The problem, from the CIA’s standpoint, was that in order to evade congressional oversight, the HAWK operation had been moved off the agency’s books. Officially, it didn’t exist. To admit that the operation had gone rogue was to admit that it had existed in the first place, which the agency refused to do—and which Kera and Jones had decided to do on their own, by releasing evidence to the press in the form of classified files.
“You should have come to us with all the HAWK files first,” Lionel said. “Let us vet them.”
Kera almost laughed. “We were spying on Americans, Lionel. Do you understand? We broke laws. You, me—all of us. And the agency got burned—HAWK played us all, and it was too late to pull them back. What do you imagine the agency was going to do with evidence of that? Release it? They’re at least smart enough not to fess up to their own incompetence.”
“Something might have been worked out.”
“I hope so.” She looked at him. “That’s why I’m here.”
At first he didn’t understand. And then he did and looked pained. “Kera.” He had to be honest. “That’s impossible. They think you’re a traitor.”
Two more women cruised by in shorts and tank tops, talking loudly.
“You’re in a position to convince them I’m not,” Kera said when the women had passed.
She can’t be serious, Bright thought. “The director—hell,
even the president—is intent on making an example out of you. This administration has already prosecuted more leakers than any before it.” He shook his head. “The best thing you can do, Kera, is turn yourself in. The government wants a headline, but they don’t want a trial, not one where they’d have to make public a bunch of classified documents in order to make their case against you. You can graymail them into a generous plea deal.” Graymail was a strategy defense attorneys used to secure lesser charges for their clients by threatening to expose classified material at trial. What Bright meant was that the more serious charges against Kera—conspiring with China, for example—would be difficult to prove anyway, and they’d be impossible to prove without the government acknowledging the depths of the intelligence community’s corruption and negligence in the HAWK case. She’d probably face something more benign, like “mishandling classified information.”
“Forget it. If I come forward, it will be so that I can have the opportunity to serve my country again. Not,” she said, patting the two-month-old Post, “to refute some story the agency cooked up about me working for China. I need some assurance that I have a future.”
“I can tell you right now you don’t have a future at Langley. Look at this.” He held up the old newspaper so that she could see her picture on the front page. “It doesn’t matter how this happened or whose fault it was. This is out there now. You’ve been compromised. I’m sorry, Kera.”
A man walking a boxer came within earshot and they fell silent again. The man lingered, bending to collect his dog’s waste. Bright recognized the man. He lived half a block down from him. If the man registered anything untoward about Bright sitting in the park in his PJs, talking to a woman half his age, he didn’t express it. They exchanged good-mornings as the man passed, and then Bright and Kera were alone again.
“Please think about it, Lionel. That’s all I’m asking. You trained me to focus on the mission, to always remember that it’s our job to protect—”
“My job, Kera. Not yours anymore.”
“Exactly, because while real cyberterrorists in China, Iran, Russia, and elsewhere are planning attacks against the United States, the CIA is wasting its time trying to cover up every ugly truth that might embarrass them.” With that, she stood and covered her eyes again with the sunglasses.