by Ryan Quinn
A chime drifted across the lobby. Kera turned back to see the couples shuffle through the elevator’s sliding doors. “Hold, please,” she heard herself say, doubling her steps to catch them. One of the men noticed her and held the door ajar with his forearm. With only a slight hesitation that none of the other passengers noticed, Kera willed herself into the car. Even though Washington’s zoning laws did not permit skyscrapers, the terror of falling even a handful of stories in a metal box came sharply into focus. The doors slid together with a whisper behind her. Kera eyed the panel of buttons. The number 9 was already illuminated. She noted that the hotel had fourteen floors. Her center lurched as they were lifted skyward.
When the chime came again, the doors parted to a spacious lobby filled with black suits and colorful dresses cascading from bare shoulders. Kera planted her pumps, one after the other, on the firm tile floor and stepped forward to a podium where a young woman with a headset matched the name Kera provided with one on the guest list. Kera told the woman that her husband would be coming late. Then she slipped into the near fringes of the crowd where she could keep an eye on new arrivals.
Several minutes passed and she began to worry that she might run out of plausible ways to look occupied standing alone. She took a short loop through the crowd, eyeing the elevators from a distance and growing more anxious each time a pair of doors parted and the handsome neurologist and tall, striking black woman did not emerge.
And then finally they did.
Kera folded herself into the crowd, ordered a club soda and lime from the bar, and stayed out of sight for the remainder of the cocktail hour. When the announcement for dinner came, she had planted herself across the room from Vasser, whose posture beside Welk was as elegant as her silk red dress. The event came off as preposterous to an outsider like Kera, with its hordes of scientists, disproportionately male—and none of them much to look at. Ben Welk, with his dark hair and earnest eyes, was a startling exception to this—even more so in person than in the dozens of photos she’d studied. And Vasser, against all odds, seemed to be enjoying herself. She must have been aware of how everyone in the room eyed her, either with suspicion or simply as amusing ballast to the tedious business of academic research. And yet she carried herself with a warm composure, revealing her bone-white smile in strategic bursts, like muzzle flashes that might cut down her critics. Kera couldn’t help but feel a growing respect, even fondness, for her.
The first opportunity for an approach came at the en masse transition to the ballroom for dinner. Kera had predicted that this would be a logical time for Vasser to use the restroom, given that she’d be occupied in Welk’s spotlight for the remainder of the evening. Kera’s heart quickened in anticipation. But then she saw Vasser eye the sudden line at the ladies’ room and decide to wait. There was a brief moment when Welk and Vasser were separated—enough of an opening that Kera might have pulled Vasser aside before she could enter the ballroom. But she was acutely aware that the moment of making contact was the point of no return. As the moment presented itself, her confidence, as if on a roller coaster, plummeted into a valley, leaving her stomach in the lurch. She watched Vasser work her way into the ballroom and toward her seat near the front. Kera exhaled and then began the project of talking her courage back up. It was better to wait anyway, she told herself. This would go much more smoothly if she could get the diplomat alone.
Kera found her place at the table she’d been assigned to in a far corner of the chandeliered room. There was a salad course, during which Kera was forced into small talk with her tablemates. She made apologies for her tardy husband, who she said was on the editorial board of Nature magazine and had been waiting for the right time to run a feature on what neuroscience might contribute to our understanding of ethics. This explanation had its desired effect; the scientists around her were more comfortable discussing their own work with each other and, beyond a dull instinct for common courtesy, had no use for the spouse of an absent editor who worked for a nonacademic journal. They left her alone.
The windup to the keynote began with a series of remarks made by distinguished researchers and fund-raisers in the field. The moment Kera was waiting for came after the conclusion of a garrulous welcome speech made by a chair of some committee, his cheeks rosy from the cocktail hour. Vasser stood and made her way from the honorees’ table to the back of the room. After a few moments, Kera excused herself and followed her toward the lobby restroom.
This time her confidence did not waiver. Delaying her entrance until she heard a flush and the closing of a stall door, Kera stepped through a short corridor that opened to a long, eight-stall affair with generous lighting and baskets of cloth towels. Vasser was leaning over a distant sink, looking directly at herself in the mirror as she rinsed her hands. They were alone. Kera wasn’t going to get a better shot than this.
Removing her wig as she walked, Kera moved toward Vasser, shaking out her hair. She stopped a few paces from the diplomat, making herself obvious but leaving an unthreatening gap between them. Vasser looked at her in the mirror, making eye contact, and then tried to look away, as if to telegraph that she wasn’t interested in a conversation. But then her eyes flicked back with a glimmer.
“Do you know who I am?” Kera said. Vasser would have been overseas during Kera’s and Jones’s first few weeks as fugitives—traitors—when images of them had permeated the airways and the front pages of newspapers worldwide. The story had amused Beijing; state-run news outlets had devoted hundreds of hours and column inches to portraying the missing Americans as defectors with anticapitalist motives. Vasser surely would have remembered the coverage.
“What do you want?” Vasser said.
“I rented a room one floor up. Can you get away to talk with me in private?”
“Certainly not.” She reached for a towel and worked it quickly over her hands. “Excuse me.”
Kera had rehearsed contingencies in the event that Vasser would decline her invitation. She appreciated in full now what had come through in the FBI transcripts as a feature of Vasser’s personality: decisive and direct, no bullshit. Vasser wasn’t bluffing; she was about to walk out. Just like that, Kera was forced to deploy her contingency of last resort. “The plane crash was a hit.”
Vasser stopped at the exit and turned. “A hit?”
“An assassination. And I think you—”
“I’ve been accused of a lot of unflattering things,” Vasser interrupted. She looked Kera up and down with new disgust. “But that’s a new one. And from you, of all people—”
“No, you misunderstand me. I think you might have been the target.”
Vasser hesitated, her eyes locked on Kera’s, examining them closely for the first time.
“Both of you. You and the ambassador,” Kera said.
Now only genuine confusion. “Why?”
“Was there anything unusual about your trip to Shanghai?”
“Nothing as unusual as what’s happening right now,” Vasser said, remembering herself.
“If there was a better way to approach you, I would have tried it. Give me twenty minutes. Please.”
“That’s impossible. What do you want?”
“I want to find out who murdered the ambassador—and who intended to murder you too.”
“This is crazy. You know I can’t talk to you.”
“I don’t think you leaked those files. Even if you had access to TERMITE, why expose yourself by mentioning it in an e-mail sent to a man you would see face-to-face a few days later? It doesn’t make sense.” Vasser didn’t respond, but Kera could tell that this had won her some extra time. “You saw Conrad Smith while you were in Shanghai. In the FBI interrogation you were never asked whether you knew why he was in town. Do you?”
“He has nothing to do with this.”
“I’m just asking. The way it looks right now, you were blowing apart a top-secret CIA op around the same time you conveniently missed the flight that killed the ambassador. I kind of li
ke your whole tough-girl act, but it’s missing a few simple answers about how all this might have happened.”
Vasser’s eyes narrowed. “I hope the investigation answers your questions. I can’t.”
“The investigation? That’s what you’re waiting for?”
“I have to trust that the justice system will sort it out.”
Kera shook her head. “I thought the same thing, and look where it’s gotten me. This goes way beyond the justice system.”
“I’m here, aren’t I? I’m no longer in a cell.”
“That’s true, but you might have been safer on the inside.”
“I need to get back. I think I’ve indulged your intrusion into my evening for long enough.”
“Wait.” Kera held out a slip of paper. “If you change your mind, that’s how you can reach me.” Vasser eyed the note suspiciously, and then, to Kera’s surprise, she took it. “Be careful.”
“‘Be careful’? Are you threatening me? What is that supposed to mean?”
“Stay out of airplanes and elevators.” Now it was Kera who walked away, arranging the wig hastily over her real hair.
“Elevators?”
“My note, Ms. Vasser,” she said, nodding back at the slip of paper. “Read it.” From the restroom she walked directly to the stairwell and descended the nine floors on foot.
Outside, she did not cross to the valet where she’d left her car. Instead, she walked three blocks to a garage where she’d parked a different car that she’d rented under a different name. She was outside of the District before the keynote, “The Moral Brain and the Illusion of Free Will,” concluded to lengthy applause.
LANGLEY
Bright ran her phone number. He had told himself that he wasn’t going to do that. Not until things between him and Karen—whom he’d only known as Audrey—got serious. If they got serious. He didn’t know yet what he wanted, but he knew better than to sabotage his relationship with this woman before he gave it a real chance. The problem was that ever since the unexpected parting conversation he’d shared with Karen/Audrey at the restaurant, his curiosity had been driving him mad.
Running her cell phone number through the system only confused him further. The number was a match to an Audrey Potter of Arlington, Virginia. In the career field, the system noted that she was a registered lobbyist.
Then what had been the point in telling him her name was Karen and that she wasn’t a lobbyist?
Bright could think of one more resource at his disposal—and it too was one that the average person didn’t have in his arsenal of online-stalking tools. Overriding his guilt, he scrolled through her dating-site profile, singling out clear photos of her face. He selected three and downloaded them onto a flash drive, which he took downstairs with him to the ops center.
“You got a second?” Bright asked one of the familiar technicians. Because so many of the agency’s surveillance targets had multiple identities, they had developed a database—or, more accurately, a network of databases—designed to sort out these webs of aliases and true identities.
“Got anything more than this?” the tech asked after he’d opened the flash drive and found that it contained only three JPEG files.
“No, just the photos.”
The tech shrugged. “Well, that’ll keep it pretty straightforward.” What he meant was that he had only one option: facial-recognition analysis.
The facial-recog search was complete in a matter of seconds. Unsurprisingly, there was a positive match for Audrey Potter. The familiar phone number, address, Social Security number, and career information came up. But there was also a second hit: Karen Lessing. Bright stared at the screen. It was her. Karen Lessing was her name. Her real name. But the database wasn’t much help beyond that. The most recent updated field noted Karen Lessing’s graduation from a UCLA doctoral program in neuroscience—three decades earlier. There was no employer after that, no current address, nothing else.
Bright interpreted this to mean that Karen Lessing had assumed the Audrey Potter cover identity and maintained it for thirty years. That was long enough that the details of her cover had practically eclipsed all record of her real identity.
“Want to save a copy of these?” the tech asked him.
Bright almost said yes. There was a Social Security number attached to the real Karen Lessing. And with that he could have run background checks, credit reports, call logs, etc., even though none of the data would be current. Instead he said, “No, that’s all right. Thank you.”
He didn’t want her old metadata or shopping habits, he realized. But then what did he want? This longing, this feeling of helplessness, was unfamiliar to him. There had been hundreds of people he wanted desperately to know more about. But never like this; never someone who was not the target of an intelligence case. He’d wasted an hour prying into the details of her two lives before he realized the proper way to get what he truly wanted was to see her again, to spend time with her, as soon as possible. He reached for his phone.
Voice mail. The outgoing message, he noted now for the first time, was a standard automated one. It was not recorded in her voice and did not give her name. After the beep he apologized again for having to abandon their last evening together so abruptly. If she’d forgive him, he wondered whether she would let him cook her dinner the night after next.
The phone rang so suddenly after he disconnected the call that he assumed it was her. The caller ID display brought him reeling back into his workday. It was a secure call coming from the office of the director of the FBI.
“Can you hold, please, for the director?” a male voice said when Bright answered and identified himself.
“Lionel.” The director’s voice came over the line a minute later. “I thought you’d want to know. I’ve just spoken with Angela Vasser.”
Bright leaned forward, fighting distraction. His mind raced. When you got a call from another agency, most especially from its director, there was always more going on than it seemed. Ever since Angela Vasser’s release—even before her release—Bright had been trying to get a meeting with the diplomat. Vasser had been the last person to talk to the ambassador before he got on that buggy plane. She had to know something useful about what had happened. He wasn’t sure what he expected her to remember that she hadn’t already told the FBI, but maybe she’d see it differently if she knew they were eyeing the case as an assassination rather than an accident. The trouble was, the BIGOT list for MIRAGE was so pared down that arranging a meet with Vasser required a cover story, and so far every time they’d presented a watered-down story to the bureau, they were told to wait in line. The FBI wasn’t letting anyone piss on their territory in the middle of a very public investigation. Vasser herself wasn’t encouraging visitors, and she rarely left her condo. Hell, Vasser herself wasn’t even a BIGOT—meaning she wasn’t permitted to be read into the case. Bright still hadn’t figured out how he was going to get around that when he did meet her face-to-face.
“Kind of you to think of me, Director, but we’ve been following INR’s lead on all that,” Bright said, referring to the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, their in-house liaison with the intelligence community.
“I know. This is something else,” Director Ellis said. “Vasser had contact last night with Kera Mersal.”
The name came in from such a distant context in Bright’s mind that at first he didn’t register the significance of what the director was saying.
“Vasser told you this? That she spoke with Kera?”
“Apparently. Vasser—who hasn’t been very forthcoming about anything, mind you—just turned up at my office without an appointment to tell me that Kera Mersal approached her in a hotel ladies’ room last night.”
“They met in person? She’s sure it was Kera?” Bright could picture Kera sitting on the park bench across the street from his house, holding his newspaper. For an instant Bright wondered whether this call from the FBI director might be a trap. Did they kno
w Kera had approached him too?
“That’s what she said.”
“Can I have a word with Vasser? Don’t let her leave.”
“Too late, she left fifteen minutes ago.”
“Dammit. What about Kera?”
“We’ve got teams at the hotel, airport, and train stations. But she’s got a fifteen-hour head start. I don’t need to tell you that she can disappear in a fraction of that time.”
“What did they speak about?”
“Vasser says that Mersal wanted to know more about what happened in Shanghai. She tried to bait Vasser by claiming the ambassador’s plane crash was a hit. Can you believe that?”
“Jesus Christ.”
Bright thanked the director for letting him know, and the director said he’d send over the hotel’s surveillance tapes, from which they hoped to confirm Kera Mersal’s presence. Bright hung up already convinced that it was her. But what on earth was she up to?
WASHINGTON, DC
Angela Vasser stepped from the sidewalk onto the escalator and let it carry her down into the Archives Metro station. She had expected to feel better than she did right now. She’d expected to feel the way you were supposed to feel after doing the right thing. Ben had convinced her, finally, after a blur of sleepless hours, that she must go to the FBI and tell them about Kera Mersal. Maybe she shouldn’t have told Ben that the fugitive intelligence operative had approached her. She could have kept it to herself for a little while, waited to see how things played out.
But no, that wouldn’t have been right. She never kept anything from Ben; this seemed a silly thing to withhold. She’d done the right thing. And Ben had been right to persuade her to go to the Feds. Not doing so was equivalent to aiding a fugitive—a traitor—wasn’t it? And beyond that, what better way was there for Vasser to show that she was being cooperative and patriotic? Certainly her lawyers would have given her the same advice Ben had.
Vasser felt a bitter sting. It stung to discover how easily one’s patriotism could be put up for debate—not just a debate, but a sham trial where the evidence, one’s entire career in the diplomatic service, was negated by howling Beltway lifers who all shared a brain and who seemed to demand that the burden was on her to prove her innocence while simultaneously hinting that no proof could change their opinions.