by Ryan Quinn
“Did you say, ‘She is going to Shanghai.’ Not ‘he’?”
“That’s what it says. But you know . . . text messages, autocorrect. The punctuation in these things is a mess. The guy’s got an escort in the room. Maybe he was distracted and typing fast. The point is, they’re discussing tampering with the ambassador’s plane a few days before it crashed.”
“Who is Peng?”
“Don’t know. I’ll send you the screen shots when I can get proper encryption.”
Bright thanked BLACKFISH and hung up, making a mental note to check with the NSA to see what they could do to identify “Peng.” For a few moments, he stood on the loading dock, thinking. Then he returned reluctantly to the PR meeting and sat thinking some more while the flacks rambled on about strategies for winning back the news cycle.
Bright was pulled from his thoughts when several smartphones rattled and chirped suddenly in quick succession, beckoning the attention of their owners.
“What the hell is that?” the head PR spokeswoman said, losing the room to their phones. Bright felt his own phone twitch inside his pocket.
“FBI Director Ellis is starting a news conference,” someone said, summarizing the alert he was reading as the PR spokeswoman switched the screen on the wall behind her over to the news conference. “DOJ’s twenty-four-hour deadline for Gnos.is has passed. The classified content is still live. The Feds are going after Rafael Bolívar.”
“Good luck finding him,” someone else muttered.
Bright was a patriot from head to heart. A prerequisite of that, he believed, was a firm belief in the First Amendment—a belief he couldn’t ever remember questioning before. But then again, he’d never worked so close to such a serious leak of classified files. “Eventually we find everyone,” he whispered, gazing up at Bolívar’s picture on the news broadcast.
THE VALLEY
What kept Bolívar awake through the night, first restless in bed and then under a heavy jacket in a chair on the dock, was not any three-letter agency headquartered in Washington. He’d expected the subpoenas and indictments—expected them sooner than they’d come, even. The real wedge in his mind was something that Kera had said, days earlier, when she’d appeared in the valley for a few surreal hours and then retreated back into oblivion.
Which principle are you most loyal to: learning the truth, or helping some leaker remain anonymous? It appears you can’t have both.
You can’t have both. The words beat like a mantra through his head, hour after hour, until he could no longer picture her face without hearing them. At some point, as he and the dock and the earth beneath the lake all rotated under the stars, Bolívar realized that Kera was right: he had to choose between the truth or the leaker’s anonymity; he couldn’t have both, and it was too dangerous for Gnos.is to have neither. By dawn it was obvious what he would have to do.
In the prelight he left the dock and drove his truck to the mine. Jones was already there, had perhaps been there all night, and he looked up when Bolívar entered.
“You too?” Jones said. Bolívar couldn’t be certain if Jones meant he was restless because of the subpoenas or the deceased sources or just because of Kera. Maybe it was everything.
Bolívar crossed to his workstation on the far side of the room. Without speaking or sitting, he logged in and pulled up the China story and the profiles of each of the three deceased sources. For Jones’s benefit, he displayed them all on the wall screens. Then he stood with his eyes shifting in a calculated way from one screen to the next.
“Suppose our biggest problem is not that one of these three sources provided Gnos.is with classified information, and that they did so with the expectation that their anonymity was guaranteed.”
“OK.” Jones recognized the loaded tenor in Bolívar’s voice and knew it meant he was circling an idea. He waited for Bolívar to come around to it.
“What if there’s something even bigger going on?” Bolívar turned from the screens to face Jones. “You would know if our network had been hacked, right?”
“Sure. The system would have warned us of that.”
“Well, what if it has warned us?”
Jones’s eyebrows drew together in confusion.
“Those alerts about the three sources,” Bolívar continued. “What if that’s the only way the system has to communicate the sort of breach that’s taken place?”
“I’m not following.”
“Your network security is too good to permit a conventional malware attack or some other remote intrusion. But couldn’t a similar effect be achieved by manipulating sources?”
“Manipulating sources? You mean killing them.”
“Yes, in this case. Say you wanted to stop Gnos.is from publishing a potentially damaging story, and you’re unable to do so by hacking the site. The only option left might be cutting off the critical sources of the information before it can even be fed to Gnos.is.”
Jones shook his head. “Three dead people is some pretty high-value collateral damage.”
“Is it? It might sound that way to us. But we don’t yet know who stands to lose and gain from the TERMITE story. What we do know is that Gnos.is has upset people who clearly have a lot at stake—enough that they resorted to killing our sources. We can’t just let that continue. If we’re truly going to protect our sources, I think we have to go inside Gnos.is and see how this China story came together.”
“You want to identify which one of the deceased sources is the leaker?”
Bolívar hesitated, even though he’d spent enough of the night certain of his decision. “I don’t think we have a choice. The actual leaker is only one part of it. If someone is willing to kill to distort a Gnos.is story, I can’t imagine they intend to stop there. They’re not finished yet. Whether we like it or not, we’re playing an intermediary role in these deaths. I think, in this very narrow case, our duty to uncover the truth outweighs any expectation an individual has for anonymity.”
Jones made a few more attempts at playing devil’s advocate, stressing that they were talking about crossing a point of no return. But he eventually had to admit that the only alternative to what Bolívar was suggesting was to just sit back and wait to see what happened. And that, they were in agreement, was not an option.
Finally Jones shrugged. “All right, then. Let’s have a peek under the hood.”
While Jones turned to his screens, Bolívar used his phone to send out a message to everyone scheduled to arrive for work in the mine that day. His message instructed them to stay home. He wanted to minimize the number of people exposed to the information they were about to examine. With that done, he sat down in a chair next to Jones. In the bluish LED glow, they entered the necessary pass codes to access data that, though it sat in servers behind locked doors just down the hall, they had never intended to view.
Before they could begin to orient themselves to the breadth of the task in front of them, they were startled by an electronic warning tone. Out of instinct they both looked up at the small ceiling speakers, from which the tone pulsed with urgency. A few seconds later Bolívar felt his phone vibrate in his pocket and he reached for it. Jones swiveled to an adjacent screen to call up the valley’s security interface.
Bolívar felt a sinking stillness in his chest. “It’s a perimeter breach,” he said, reading the alert from his phone, which did not provide any more detail than that.
“I’ve got it here. It’s a vehicle.”
“On the road to the pass?”
“Yes.” Jones looked up at Bolívar, and he could see that they were both thinking the same thing: This is it. It’s all over.
An unofficial agreement had arisen between them to not discuss the government’s charges against Gnos.is. Separately they had each read the indictments and subpoenas, which had been published on Gnos.is and elsewhere: Bolívar had been ordered to appear before the US District Court in Manhattan, and Gnos.is was ordered to remove all stories that contained “dangerous” classified informat
ion as well as to reveal to the attorney general and the FBI the names of the leakers who had provided them with that information.
Bolívar and Jones had not needed to discuss whether they would comply with any of those demands. They both knew they would not. And now, in this moment, Bolívar was relieved to discover that he did not regret that decision, even as the consequences were closing in around them.
“Have they reached the first camera yet?” he asked Jones.
“No.”
“Put it up on the big screen.”
A few seconds later, an image of the tranquil country road flickered onto the main screen. It looked almost like a photograph except for the leaves that could be seen swaying gently in the breeze. The two stared at the screen in silence.
Finally, it appeared. A gray sedan charged into the picture ahead of a billowing tail of dust.
“Jesus. They’re coming in fast,” Bolívar said.
“The plates aren’t in our system.” An edge of panic had crept into Jones’s voice. “Should we evacuate and lock up?”
Bolívar made a face, part anger, part anguished defeat. For a moment, they both thought he was going to say yes. “Have any other perimeter sensors been tripped?”
Jones checked his screens, swiping through a series of surveillance images and motion-sensor readings. He shook his head. “Nothing.” He flipped the image on the big screen over to a new feed. This one provided a view of the gate where the road crested the pass. It was the only other camera they had out on the road.
The men waited again in silence until the gray car sped into view. They leaned forward as the vehicle slowed and then stopped for the gate.
For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then the driver’s door swung open and a figure stepped out.
Bolívar opened the gate remotely and was waiting outside the tunnel to the mine when the car swept into the clearing. He watched her get out and walk toward him on a narrow path worn through the moss.
“I changed my mind. I want in,” Kera said, answering the question written all over his face. “The ambassador, and your other sources. Let’s find out what happened to them.”
“Kera. Please, don’t do this.”
“I’ve made up my mind.”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“That’s irrelevant,” she said, and walked by him into the tunnel.
“Go through it again,” Bolívar said. “We missed something.”
Jones and Kera exchanged a weary glance. Five hours before, the three of them had sat down at separate screens to review every bit of data that had come to Gnos.is from each of the deceased sources. That had taken only minutes. Marcus Templeton, the hedge-fund manager killed in the Lower Manhattan elevator fail, had guarded his private and business lives closely, permitting only a digital trickle to escape. From him, Gnos.is had referenced a series of investments Templeton made in publicly traded companies, trades that Gnos.is had used, alongside similar orders from thousands of other investors in the public record, to confirm an increasing bullishness toward the telecommunications industry. China was a major global player in telecom, which is how Templeton’s investments had been relevant, albeit tangentially, to the China story. Nothing about Templeton’s trades or how they became available to Gnos.is suggested that he’d ever had access to any classified information about TERMITE or anything else. He wasn’t the leaker.
Anne Platt, the technology consultant who had been the sole victim in the Paris elevator, had been only slightly more prolific as a source. Gnos.is’s mining of her digitized activity had yielded dated quotations from interviews she’d given to tech-industry publications. Her name also turned up on the programs of a few international conferences, in Dubai, in Shanghai, in Paris. Like Templeton, Platt had volunteered nothing to Gnos.is’s servers directly. She wasn’t the leaker either.
Ambassador Rodgers, predictably, had the biggest digital footprint of the three. Official itineraries, quotes excerpted from speeches, press releases, and the like represented dozens of points where the ambassador’s diplomatic activity had corroborated foundational facts within the China story. But it was immediately notable that he too had never directly submitted any information to Gnos.is—let alone classified secrets. All of his contributions to the China story had been delivered via passive digital donations, seemingly innocuous facts vacuumed up by Gnos.is from the public record.
“So the leaker wasn’t one of these three at all?” Kera said, looking from Bolívar to Jones to make sure her imperfect understanding of how Gnos.is worked had not led her to the wrong conclusion. It hadn’t.
“Apparently,” Jones said.
“Well, someone had to have leaked the classified information about TERMITE, right? Isn’t there a record of everything that’s uploaded to Gnos.is directly?”
Jones shook his head. “Not a reader-friendly one, no. Remember, identifying individual sources is something we go out of our way to avoid.” He paused and seemed to be considering something. “But the data exists, which means it can be searched. Hold on.” He swiped a new screen to life.
Bolívar and Kera sat back, waiting. Seconds accumulated into minutes. Then suddenly Bolívar stood up.
“What?” Kera said.
Bolívar fidgeted over Jones’s shoulder. “How much longer?”
“A minute, maybe two. I need to make sure the search is narrow enough to be useful, but wide enough to catch what we’re looking for. It’s a large story; the source material comes from millions of data points.”
Bolívar nodded and walked away looking restless. Kera, who had been watching Jones’s monitors intently, now watched Bolívar pace along the row of large screens on the main wall, taken aback by the whir of activity behind his eyes.
“All right, here we go,” Jones said, drawing her attention back.
“What are we looking at?” she asked. The screen filled with a large three-dimensional network of points connected by lines.
“This is the full piece on Chinese corruption, fragmented so that claims made in the story can be traced back to their source material.”
“There are so many.”
Jones clicked on a few points that represented intersections within the network. “This stuff’s all benign,” he said, scrolling through a few of the documents: official minutes from government meetings, court transcripts, itineraries. Nothing classified. “Let me try isolating just the paragraphs of the story that first mentioned the classified surveillance program.”
It took Jones a quick series of swipes and taps to execute the new query.
“Huh,” he said, squinting at the error message flashing on-screen. Kera glared at it in confusion too. Bolívar wasn’t looking at the screen. He was still pacing.
“What does that mean?” Kera asked.
“No matches.”
Bolívar stopped pacing.
Jones checked his work and retried the query. When the computer gave him the same result, he leaned back in his seat, defeated. “This system wasn’t designed for queries like this. I must have introduced a glitch when I tried to rig the search function.”
“There’s no glitch,” Bolívar said. He was standing halfway across the room, backlit by a large screen. “And there’s no leaker. There never was one.”
Kera and Jones looked at him, not following.
“Think about it. The CIA drew up this TERMITE operation, named it, planned it, and classified it as TOP SECRET—all activities that took place offline behind closed doors. But as soon as they began rolling out the operation in the real world, it started to leave traces of itself. How could it not? Hundreds of real people were acting and reacting; information was being exchanged. Just because Langley insists the operation is classified doesn’t make traces of the operation invisible. Now, maybe no human being is in a position to notice those traces and piece them all together. But Gnos.is is.”
A comprehending grin crept onto Jones’s face. “And what Gnos.is put together was evidence that the CIA and NSA were spy
ing on foreign journalists who had access to key politicians. In other words, Gnos.is noticed TERMITE’s shadow.”
Kera shook her head. “But details about TERMITE were published that could only have come from inside Langley. Like the name of the operation itself.”
“That’s true now. But remember, the original Gnos.is story didn’t have any of those details. All it had was a broad outline of the operation, which it mentioned in an obscure paragraph within the larger piece. The name ‘TERMITE’ only surfaced after the Washington Post, following up on the Gnos.is story, got a source on deep background to confirm the program. But the Post never would have even asked the right questions if Gnos.is hadn’t spotted patterns that hinted at the existence of the program in the first place.”
“So you’re saying no one at all came forward to tip off Gnos.is about the TERMITE program? It just figured it out on its own?”
“That’s right,” Jones said with uncharacteristic excitement. “There was never a leaker on the TERMITE story, and it didn’t take a leaker to connect the dots between Hu Lan and the MSS either. Gnos.is put it all together, just like it does with any other part of any story. In this case it just happened to come up with a pretty good scoop.”
Kera wasn’t sure whether she found the implications of that alarming or fascinating. But there was a problem with what Bolívar and Jones were saying. “Hold on. If Ambassador Rodgers, Marcus Templeton, and Anne Platt never uploaded secret files, what made them a threat to whoever killed them?”
“I don’t know,” Bolívar admitted, looking up at the China story displayed on the main screen. “On that, Gnos.is has been silent so far.”
LANGLEY
Lionel Bright looked up from the transcript he’d been handed after reading only a few lines.
“Who is Angela Vasser?” he asked, turning to Henry Liu, the lead analyst assigned to the investigation into Ambassador Rodgers’s death.
“The luckiest American diplomat in China. She wasn’t on the ambassador’s plane. Decided to stay in Shanghai through the weekend, apparently at the last minute.”