by Ryan Quinn
“She was supposed to be traveling with Rodgers?”
“Yes,” Liu confirmed. “She was the ambassador’s top aide.”
Bright considered this. “And they were in Shanghai for what, precisely?”
“Trade talks about development in Africa.”
“Why didn’t she get on that plane with the rest of the embassy staff?”
Liu flicked his eyes involuntarily at the pages in Bright’s hand, which contained the answers to all of these questions, but then went ahead and summarized what he knew anyway. It seemed prudent not to test Bright’s patience. “The Kenyan and Chinese delegations were staying over for a few extra days, so while Ambassador Rodgers had to return to Beijing, Ms. Vasser stayed back to give us a presence at any informal talks that might have continued through the weekend.”
“And this is the first we’re hearing about her?” Bright looked in disbelief at the faces of the people he’d summoned to his office. They were his three best analysts: Liu; Rob Anderson, a senior analyst who specialized in China’s military strategy; and Judy Huang, a Chinese American woman who was the agency’s top expert on China’s foreign policy. “This Vasser woman had been in high-level meetings with the ambassador throughout his final day alive? She was possibly the last person to talk to him—and we didn’t know her name until today?”
“We asked DOS about that, sir,” Huang said before Liu could attempt an explanation. Liu shifted uncomfortably at the mention of the State Department. “They were less than—well, they indicated that updating us on every detail of the Rodgers tragedy wasn’t very high on their list of priorities. They seem to be upset about the recent headlines describing secret CIA and NSA programs in countries with whom they’re—”
“I know what they’re upset about, and it’s goddamn childish. We’re an intelligence agency. We spy. And our allies know better than to expect a free pass. Find me one country with a GDP bigger than North Dakota’s who isn’t spying on us?” Unburdened of that frustration, Bright looked down at the tablet Liu had handed him along with the transcript of the FBI’s interview with Vasser, which had taken place two days earlier in Beijing. On the tablet’s screen were a headshot and several candids of a young African American woman. Her round, curious eyes stood out against the angular features of her face. “Is this her?”
“Yes, sir,” Liu said, eager to be back in less contentious territory. “We managed to obtain her full file—in spite of our peers at State.”
“Where is she now?”
“Beijing,” Liu said. “She cut short the weekend in Shanghai, obviously, to be with her colleagues and the ambassador’s family, though I gather she wasn’t recalled only for moral support. She apparently has made herself essential to our diplomatic mission in China. In the void left by the ambassador’s death, she’s keeping a lot of heads straight over there.”
Bright tossed the unread transcript onto his desk as if to signal a transition in the conversation. He leaned forward to address the three analysts.
“I called you three here for a reason. I’m assigning you to a new case. It’s classified, code named MIRAGE. For now, I’m keeping the BIGOT list very small,” Bright said, referring to the strictly enforced list of people who would be cleared to know about the operation. Though the term “BIGOT” had British origins dating back to World War II—it was said to have been a secret mission code word derived from “British Invasion of German Occupied Territory”—American intelligence officials had adopted the term and commonly used it when designating a select group of “need-to-know” people for a particularly sensitive operation. “MIRAGE will involve only the people in this room, plus BLACKFISH, who is operational inside the PRC. Our task is to determine as quickly as possible exactly how and why Hu Lan’s plane went down while our ambassador was on board.”
Liu and Anderson looked confused. While they hesitated, trying to read Bright’s mind, Huang voiced the question they all had in mind. “What makes this different from the investigation we’re already advising on for DOS?”
“The difference is that we’re going to assume, until we have solid proof otherwise, that Ambassador Rodgers’s death was not an accident.” Bright logged in to his computer and swiveled the monitor around for the three analysts to see. “These are screen grabs from Feng Xuri’s phone, three days before the ambassador’s death.” He gave them a few moments to read the exchange. “If Beijing had a hand in crashing that plane, as these texts suggest, it will permanently change the United States’ relationship with China. It’s our job to know that before anyone else. Understood?”
The three members of the new MIRAGE team nodded in unison.
“Let’s get started. Henry, see if we can set up a call with Angela Vasser without causing a meltdown at the State Department. I know the FBI questioned her, but we know things they don’t. She might be the only one still alive who was in a position to recognize that something was amiss before that flight.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bright studied the photographs of the texts that BLACKFISH had received from Feng Xuri’s escort. The plane’s system is not complex. Did that mean what he thought it did?
After the analysts filed out of his room, he took the elevator to the subterranean floor where the ops center was located. Once he’d keyed in his pass code, he went directly to Jason Hernandez, his top cyber guy, whose workstation was in the near corner.
“Hernandez, if you had access, could you get into a Gulfstream’s computer and write a bug that would—”
“There you are.”
Bright stopped short at the sound of his boss’s voice. He hadn’t noticed CIA Director Cal Tennison standing in a group at the front of the room. Now he saw also that the large screens on the wall were tuned to the major news networks.
“What’s all this?” Bright said.
“We found our leaker.”
THE VALLEY
“Who’s reporting this?” Bolívar said. He stood behind Jones in the control room buried in the mountain, watching the bank of monitors. Kera was seated at a workstation across the room.
“The AP was up with it first. But now it’s the top story everywhere.”
Jones put a few of the cable news networks up on the wall screens. Photos of a young African American woman were cut into montages of network anchors reporting vague details alongside hastily summoned experts who’d been cut loose to speculate on those details. Both the anchors and their telegenic guests wore earpieces and wide-eyed stares that occasionally lost focus as they were updated by the producers in their ears.
“Who is she?” Kera asked, breaking the televisions’ spell. Kera had been at the console they’d set up for her, studying police and fire department reports from the two elevator tragedies, but now she was alongside Bolívar.
“Angela Vasser. A special assistant to the ambassador. She was supposed to be on that doomed flight, apparently. Undergrad at Georgetown, PhD from Berkeley. Her dissertation was on China’s influence over developing economies in Africa. She’s—” Jones paused. “She’s only thirty-six. That’s quite a career for someone her age.”
“Any of this on Gnos.is yet?” Bolívar asked.
“No.” Jones shook his head. “Gnos.is isn’t reporting any of it. The woman’s name comes up a few times in reference to other stories about our diplomatic mission in China, but nothing that points to her leaking details of the TERMITE surveillance program.”
“So either the press throughout the entire free world is getting it wrong, or Gnos.is is,” Kera said, with more of an edge than she’d intended. This earned her a pained look from Bolívar. And then he broke eye contact and returned to his workstation.
Kera studied the images of Vasser that the media had raked up out of the past—State Department personnel photos, a driver’s license, a passport. In most of them, Vasser posed with an obedient, stilted smile. There was one candid, though, that drew Kera’s attention. It had been taken at a panel discussion at her alma mater convened to debate s
ome subtlety of globalization. The photo was a reaction shot, Vasser slightly off to the right of the picture, looking at the speaker, who was in profile. Vasser’s eyes looked impatient and adversarial, Kera thought, like she was three steps ahead, just waiting to mount a takedown of the speaker.
“They’re accusing her of what, exactly?”
“She sent e-mails to a non-US citizen that clearly mention the classified TERMITE program—e-mails that every news organization but Gnos.is seems to have received,” Bolívar said from his workstation.
“What do the e-mails say?” Kera looked to the broadcasts on the wall screens, but found only talking heads. E-mails didn’t make for good television, apparently, even if they were precisely the issue at hand. Bolívar opened a link on the AP’s site and put the e-mails on the large center screen. There were a total of five short messages, all part of the same back-and-forth exchange between Angela Vasser and someone named Conrad Smith. She read them in chronological order.
“Who’s Conrad Smith?” she asked when she’d finished.
“He’s a South African contractor, an economic consultant who has done projects for a handful of governments—including ours. And China’s.”
Kera read the e-mail chain again. The tone in the exchange was bare, free of the false pleasantries customarily present in cooperative, professional e-mails. References to the classified surveillance program were poorly veiled for someone who ought to have known the consequences of what she was doing. It made the back and forth seem almost transparently conspiratorial, like bad dialogue in a daytime soap.
“How does the AP say they got these?”
“An anonymous source. I’m guessing that’s why Gnos.is isn’t biting. If Gnos.is can’t independently confirm or corroborate the claims made in the e-mails, it won’t publish.”
That restraint, at least, was refreshing, Kera thought, looking away from the e-mails. She stood in silence for a long moment, biting her lip and thinking. Then suddenly, she spoke up. “So this woman, Vasser, works in the American embassy in Beijing, where she somehow acquired knowledge of the CIA’s TERMITE surveillance operation. And then she decided to share this classified intelligence with a foreign contractor. In an e-mail.” She paused before shaking her head. “No fucking way. I think it’s the other way around. There’s a witch-hunt on for a leaker already, and then these e-mails turn up, and now you have pundits on TV absolutely giddy over how suspicious she looks. Hell, the fact that she’s alive is suspicious. After all, she knew just when not to board the ambassador’s plane, right?”
“The media’s only accused her of putting classified information in an e-mail,” Bolívar said, cutting short Kera’s sarcasm-laced summary of the events. “What are you suggesting?”
“Oh, I think the media is accusing her of much more than that. And they seem perfectly gleeful about it. What’s she saying about all this?” Kera wondered aloud. She only needed to glance up at the cable news broadcasts to get her answer. “None of this coverage is even attempting to share her side of the story.” And then suddenly she realized something. “Oh shit.”
“What?” Jones asked.
“Didn’t you say she was mentioned in the China story?”
“Vasser? Yeah, she comes up here and there. But nothing related to the surveillance program. She didn’t leak that.”
“No one did,” Bolívar reminded them. “Gnos.is pieced it together on its own.”
“Right, but she has been a source for Gnos.is stories, right?”
Bolívar shrugged. “I’m sure she is, in the same way anyone in her position would be.”
“In the same way the ambassador was?”
Bolívar and Jones exchanged a glance. “She was supposed to be on that plane,” Bolívar said. He reached for the nearest computer. “Where is Vasser now?”
They split up, searching Gnos.is, the AP, the Guardian, the Post, the Times—anyone who was doing real reporting on Angela Vasser—but came up empty-handed.
“Got her,” Jones said a few minutes later. “She’s on a commercial flight out of Beijing. It took off two hours ago.”
“Where’s it going?”
“SFO. Her itinerary continues on to DC.”
“She’s coming home, then,” Bolívar said, surprised.
“How do you know she’s on that flight?” Kera asked.
“I plead the fifth on my methodology, but the felony-free version is that airlines and transportation security organizations keep databases of flight manifests.”
“And you can access them?”
“The fifth,” Jones repeated, pursing his lips.
Remembering now what it was like working with Jones, Kera held up a hand as if to say she didn’t want to know any more than that. “That means we’re too late.”
“For what?”
“To warn her. She’ll be detained at customs in San Francisco.”
“You want to warn her that being accused of mishandling classified information could get her detained at a US airport?”
“No. I want to warn her not to get on any elevators.”
FBI INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT (EXCERPT)
DETAINEE: ANGELA VASSER
AGENTS PRESENT: BENTON, CHU, WILLIAMSON, LEE, TOMS
START TIME: 1148 HRS PST
END TIME: 1730 HRS PST
LOCATION: SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
ANGELA VASSER: Is Ben OK? Does he know I’m here?
AGENT BENTON: Ben is . . . ?
VASSER: My partner?
BENTON: Partner?
VASSER: Yeah.
BENTON: I see. I’m sure he’s fine. We can have someone contact him if you like.
VASSER: I want to talk to him.
BENTON: Later.
VASSER: Am I being charged with a crime?
BENTON: It looks that way, yeah. This is serious. These e-mails—here, I’ll ask you to look at them again—in these e-mails you discuss highly classified information—
VASSER: Which I was never privy to. I couldn’t possibly have authored these e-mails. I wasn’t even aware they existed until you put me in this room.
BENTON: So you deny writing them?
VASSER: Yes. If there’s a way to make that clearer to you, I can’t conceive of it now.
BENTON: But you don’t deny that they were written in your name and were sent from your e-mail address?
VASSER: I’ll have to take an agnostic position on that. The documents you’ve shown me appear to support your theory, but I didn’t write them and I can only speculate about who did.
BENTON: Go ahead, then.
VASSER: I’m sorry?
BENTON: Speculate.
VASSER: You’re serious. OK. I’d start questioning people who had the appropriate security clearance. Which I did not.
AGENT CHU: I think what Agent Benton is asking is whether there is anyone who would have had both the motive and technological prowess to do what you’re suggesting.
VASSER: What I’m suggesting?
BENTON: Well, if you deny sending them yourself, how else do you explain them being sent?
VASSER: I can’t explain it sitting in this room. I just stepped off a fourteen-hour flight to discover that I was the last person on earth to know about these e-mails. And now you’ve confiscated my computer and phone. I take that to mean you’re accepting the burden of explaining it.
CHU: So you can’t think of anyone, then?
VASSER: When I do, I’m sure I’ll let you know.
BENTON: Who is Conrad Smith?
VASSER: He’s a contractor. A consultant. Based out of Cape Town.
BENTON: So you do know him?
VASSER: Yes, I haven’t denied that, have I?
BENTON: And he works for the Chinese government?
VASSER: He works for the Chinese government, and for the governments of Kenya and South Africa, and a number of private foundations. Some of them are American, I might add, since you seem to be suggesting some conspiracy along nationalistic lines. Conrad
is an economist and telecom consultant, not a political operative.
BENTON: It sounds like you’re defending him.
VASSER: I’m correcting your misunderstandings. They are rather numerous.
CHU: Why weren’t you on the plane?
VASSER: I’m sorry?
CHU: With the ambassador.
VASSER: Oh. What does that have to do with this?
BENTON: We’re just doing our jobs, Mrs. Vasser.
VASSER: Miss.
BENTON: Ah, yes, we’ll get to that in a minute. You flew to Shanghai with Ambassador Rodgers, but you weren’t on the return flight, which went down in the Yellow Sea.
VASSER: Look, I went over all of this with your colleagues in Beijing a few days ago.
BENTON: The context has changed since then. We want to clear up a few things. This is one of them. How come you weren’t on that flight?
VASSER: My Chinese and Kenyan counterparts remained in Shanghai over the weekend. I didn’t want to lose any of the progress we’d made. So Greg—Ambassador Rodgers—and I agreed that I should stay and continue to build relationships.
CHU: You told the agents who spoke with you at the embassy this week that you were at the Park Hyatt when you learned that the ambassador’s plane was missing.
VASSER: That’s right. I got a call from the embassy’s chief of security. I remember clearly looking at the clock. It was 11:25 in the evening.
BENTON: Is that the hotel you’d stayed at the previous evening?
VASSER: No.
BENTON: I see. As you can imagine, Mrs.—Ms.—Vasser, we’ve had some agents speak with Conrad Smith since these e-mails between you two surfaced. Conrad Smith is in Hong Kong now, but he mentioned that he was in Shanghai last week. It seems he had a room at the Park Hyatt on the night of the ambassador’s plane tragedy. Is that a coincidence?
VASSER: Which part?
CHU: Were you with Mr. Smith that night?
VASSER: Yes, I was. He happened to be in town on business. Coincidentally.
BENTON: And was it a coincidence that you stayed in his hotel room?