by Ryan Quinn
Through a tunnel, down another escalator, onto the crowded platform. Vasser was wearing dark glasses and kept her head down. She wandered to a spot that was less crowded and looked down at the tracks. If she’d done the right thing, why did she feel this nagging sensation to the contrary? Something about Kera Mersal unsettled Vasser. Something about the way Mersal had approached, about the confidence in her gaze. Vasser didn’t have intimate knowledge of the HAWK case that had ensnared Mersal in her current legal trouble. She’d read about it in the news like everyone else. And, like everyone else, she’d accepted the narrative that had emerged—that Mersal and a colleague named J. D. Jones had betrayed their oath to their country by exposing classified information, and that they were perhaps in the pocket of the People’s Republic of China.
Maybe it was because Vasser now had more sympathy for just how unfair the tide of press coverage could be, but she couldn’t shake an intuition that the woman she’d spoken to the evening before did not fit the mold of a traitor. Why had Mersal risked coming to DC for a few fleeting moments of conversation with Vasser? Just to suggest that Greg’s plane going down had not been an accident? To warn Vasser that her life was in danger? To give her a piece of paper with the names of two other people who had recently died?
Vasser had not told Director Ellis about the note with the names on it and the detailed instructions for making contact with Mersal, should she want to do that. At one point the director asked her whether Mersal had indicated any way she might be contacted. Vasser had said no. Lying had felt wrong in the moment, but now it was the only thing that felt right. She slipped her fingers into her pants pocket and felt relief at the touch of the folded slip of paper. She had not told Ben about the note either. Why that, of all things? Right and wrong felt upside down.
Wind moved through the cavernous Metro tunnel, rustling her hair. Shivering, she stepped back from the edge of the platform. Anonymous commuters swarmed around her, angling for a seat on the train.
She disembarked at Foggy Bottom and took more escalators to the street. From there it would be a hike back into Georgetown, but she was in no rush to return home. No matter where she was, she was a prisoner in waiting—waiting for the investigation to clear her name. Walking the streets at least kept her restlessness at bay.
As she turned up Wisconsin Avenue, her mind was back in Shanghai, searching for an overlooked detail that might provide some clue as to how this baffling chain of events had been set in motion. The Shanghai meetings had been only two weeks before, though it seemed like years. They’d flown down from Beijing on the private jet, which, Vasser remembered vividly, was an accommodation that had made Greg uncomfortable. But Greg had insisted on keeping their travel plans, and Vasser, suspecting this was because he’d been given orders from above, did not belabor her objections. Debating their transportation to Shanghai was not something either of them considered worth their time. In any case, the Hu Lan controversy seemed to be a red herring, even in retrospect. She remembered the fleeting, shameful thrill of the plane’s trivial luxuries—glassware, swivel armchairs, imbedded television screens. But while flying private was atypical, nothing struck her then or now as suspicious.
On arrival they’d gone to the hotel and met immediately with the Kenyan and Chinese delegations. She had made presentations, forged connections with her counterparts. She tried to pace her memory, to scrutinize everything that had happened right up until her parting words with Greg as he and the others left for the airport. She’d checked her phone then, just after Greg had left, and had seen the message from Conrad. He was in Shanghai and had heard that she was too.
Had anything been out of the ordinary?
She’d run through this exercise a dozen times already, of course, both with the FBI and alone in that cell before her release. But everything looked different now. Different ever since Kera Mersal had walked up to her and spoken those words.
Prompted by the traffic signal, Vasser stepped off the curb and into a crosswalk. Her peripheral vision detected fast-approaching harm, confirmed by a quick glance left. Her body took over from there. The car braked and swerved dramatically, nosing itself violently into a van in the adjacent lane. With a pitiful whimper, Vasser threw herself backward, landing in a sprawl on the relative safety of the sidewalk. From that perspective, she began to assess the situation. First herself—no apparent injury there—then her surroundings. Her eyes swung to the far traffic signal. She would have bet her life—in fact, she had—that the light had been red, indicting the reckless driver. But it was green. Had she been so lost in thought that she’d misread the pedestrian signal?
Finally, time began to move forward again. Not more than an instant had elapsed. A surge of vehicles rolled into the intersection suddenly, with engines accelerating from all directions. Then, just as abruptly, the air pealed with the high-pitched cries of pavement stripping rubber from tires. A half-dozen metallic thwacks brought the unluckiest of the vehicles to rest. Horns vented confusion.
Vasser sat up. Her eyes darted. The walk signal was illuminated. So too was the trio of green lights directing cross traffic. The lights perpendicular to them? All green too. Every traffic light around the intersection signaled green, beckoning vehicles toward disaster. Without realizing why, Vasser thought suddenly of the elevators. That morning, after Ben had left for work, she’d Googled the two names on the slip of paper Kera Mersal had given to her. They meant nothing to her. They were both American; the man ran a hedge fund, the woman had been an executive at a technology company. Vasser saw nothing remarkable about them, except for the grim fact that within forty-eight hours they had both perished in freak elevator failures on opposite sides of the planet.
Movement approached in a blur from her left. A motorcycle. In conspicuous contrast to the paralyzed traffic in and around the crippled intersection, the bike sprang forward, roaring through an aisle between cars. Vasser caught sight of the driver, covered from helmet to boot in thick black combat gear and wearing what looked like a computer bag slung across his body. He leaned hard into a sharp turn to cut through the line of cars and hop the bike onto the sidewalk not a dozen feet from her. At first she thought, Police! because the bike had wide carbonate saddle boxes and a thick antenna extending skyward behind the driver. But there were no official markings, no lights or sirens.
A scream from a nearby pedestrian was the only thing that let her believe that what her eyes saw next was a true representation of reality. The man on the bike removed one hand from the handlebars; a moment later it reappeared clutching a handgun. What saved her was an instinct to dive forward, rolling into the street and the narrow space between two idle vehicles, rather than reeling backward defensively on the open sidewalk. The unanticipated motion forced the shooter to redirect both the bike and his aim. She heard the weapon report twice—two pops, implausible to her even as she was rolling away from them. She assumed neither hit its target, though she didn’t completely trust her senses. Her brain was not interested in sensations; it hungered only for as much adrenaline as it could coax from the relevant glands.
Over the screams of bystanders, she heard a loud thud punctuated with a metallic tear and then tinkling glass. The shooter, she realized, must have lost control of his bike while readjusting his aim at her. She could no longer hear the bike’s motor. Resisting an urge to stand up and run, Vasser rolled from the protection of one vehicle’s undercarriage to the next. Was the shooter now on foot? Was he injured? She thought she heard a motor struggling to start. It was difficult to be certain with all the ambient shouting. And then—
Sirens. For the first time since seeing the gun, she believed the odds of surviving the next few moments might swing in her favor. She wriggled left and right, checking her ground-level sight lines. The shooter, stuck with a stalled getaway bike, must have taken off on foot rather than risk capture while trying to finish the job.
Vasser closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and then opened them. She was beneath a taxicab, the
grime and rust of its underbelly an inch from her face. She waited, listening to the sirens grow louder, trying to remember an identifying characteristic that could help the police nail this bastard.
Then she remembered the note in her pocket and she got another idea.
LANGLEY
“That’s her?” Bright asked. He’d expected a disguise, of course, but this was impressive. He wasn’t confident he’d have registered the woman on-screen as Kera if he’d passed her on the street.
“Yes, sir,” the young analyst said, tempering his excitement as he cued up a chain of clips on adjacent screens. After Kera Mersal and J. D. Jones had first gone missing, a team had been assembled for the sole purpose of tracking them down. Embarrassingly, aside from the morning Kera had approached Bright outside his house, an incident he’d kept to himself, the call this morning from the FBI director about the Vasser-Mersal rendezvous had been their only concrete lead. “She enters the hotel lobby at 1813 hours. Here she is five minutes later up on the ninth floor. She hangs out in view of the elevators there until Vasser and her boyfriend arrive. Then she just sort of wanders for a bit.”
“Tell me you can see them make contact.”
“Not exactly. But it’s close enough. Here. At 1920 hours Vasser gets up to use the ladies. And . . . here. See, Mersal follows her.”
Bright watched the screens, squinting at the female figure striding into the ladies’ room. It was her, all right. He recognized her not so much from her face, which was obscured and heavily made up, but from her tradecraft. Her positions in the room, the way she stood at ninety-degree angles from the surveillance cameras, her detached expression that hid her watchful eyes.
“And then, six minutes later, Mersal emerges and goes straight for the stairwell. This is our last look at her.” The grainy perimeter camera had captured a female figure exiting the stairwell door onto the sidewalk and then walking calmly out of frame.
“What have we got on the alias?”
“Nina Salazar. A credit card in that name paid for the gala tickets, a hotel room, and a rental car, which was abandoned at the valet stand across the street. Beyond those transactions, ‘Nina Salazar’ exists only on paper.”
Bright couldn’t suppress a thin smile. Kera knew exactly the methods they would use to look for her, and she knew exactly how to thwart them. Of course she did—that’s what they’d trained her to do.
Bright returned to his office only to have his assistant confirm that none of the afternoon’s back-to-back meetings had been canceled. He trudged off to the first one, which was interrupted ten minutes later by one of the junior case agents who worked under Henry Liu. The young man was breathless from the dash up the stairs from the ops center.
“Sorry, sir,” he told Bright in the hallway. “You said you wanted to know right away if we picked up anything unusual with Angela Vasser.”
What Bright had actually said was that he wanted Vasser tailed until they’d figured out a way to get a face-to-face meeting with her. Vasser was not only the last person to talk to Ambassador Rodgers but also now the last person they knew of who had spoken to Kera Mersal. Bright had to get to her, even if it meant surprising her in a ladies’ room himself.
He entered the ops center hopeful that he was about to hear one of two things—a viable plan for approaching Vasser, or another sighting of Kera. He realized quickly that neither was likely.
“Lionel, there you are,” Liu said. “I’m not sure what to make of this.”
“What happened?” Bright felt his stomach clench in anticipation of bad news.
“Well, we’re not sure, actually. Look at this.” More surveillance footage. The feed came from a Department of Transportation traffic cam mounted over a busy Georgetown intersection. “OK, so this is Vasser over here,” Liu said, pointing to a tall black woman waiting at the crosswalk. The angle wasn’t great because the camera was aimed at the vehicle traffic, but near the edge of the picture Bright could clearly see Vasser, head down, waiting for the walk signal. “Now, just watch what happens.”
Bright watched with his arms folded over his stomach. He jerked upright in surprise when Vasser stepped off the curb and was nearly clipped by an SUV that had sped into the frame from off camera. He raised his eyebrows at Liu, who nodded for him to keep watching. Vasser, apparently unharmed, was in a reclined position on the sidewalk, resting on her elbows. Bright was distracted just then by a surge of action elsewhere on-screen. Vehicles converged on the intersection all at once; several of them collided. Bright leaned toward the screen, trying to make sense of it. Movement from Vasser’s quadrant returned his attention there, just in time to see her dive forward into the street. A motorcycle entered the picture just as suddenly, and—was that what he thought it was? Two flashes from the weapon, and then the bike swerved but couldn’t avoid making contact—hard—with a parked car.
“Was she hit?”
“We don’t think so. No hospitals are treating gunshot wounds.”
“When did this happen?”
“About forty-five minutes ago.”
“Where is she now?”
Liu shook his head. “The team covering her condo is trying to figure that out. District Police and the FBI are on it too.”
“She left the scene?” Bright looked back to the spot on the screen where Vasser had disappeared underneath a vehicle. Between that spot and the edge of the frame were two disorganized rows of cars. Had she crawled out of sight and then fled? “She didn’t go home?”
“Apparently not, sir.”
“Back it up. I want to watch it again.” The analyst working the touch-screen keypad obliged and Bright studied the scene, this time anticipating the motorcycle. He watched Vasser dive out of sight just before the bike slammed into the stopped vehicle. “Hold on. What’s he doing right there? The shooter?”
“Trashing his equipment, apparently, before he takes off on foot.”
“What equipment?”
“It might be too early to say, but the Feds called in a cyber team. They won’t know more until they get the bike into the lab, but the agent I talked to said the thing was rigged like a cell tower on two wheels.”
Bright went still inside and out. He was staring at the frozen image of the perpetrator, who was bringing the butt of his handgun down hard against the contents of the open saddle box. Bright noted the large antenna mounted behind the bike’s seat and the computer bag slung across the perp’s chest.
“The traffic signals,” Bright whispered. He hadn’t noticed the first time around because he’d been distracted by the shooting—and also because the surveillance video was in black and white. But even without color it was clear that the bottom light on each of the signals was illuminated.
“That’s right,” Liu said. “They all turned green right before Vasser was attacked. We’re already in contact with DOT. Their grid was hacked.”
CAPITOL HILL
Mid-adagio movement of Haydn’s Concerto no. 2 in D Major, op. 101, Senator Larry Wrightmont received a text message. He checked it discreetly.
MEET ME ON THE ROOF.
At intermission, the senator excused himself from his wife and the couple they had come with and, grumbling, made his way to the Kennedy Center’s roof terrace. Rick Altman was leaning on the railing, gazing out at the dark Potomac.
“This sneaking up on me has to stop,” Wrightmont said to the defense contractor.
“Would you rather we discuss it on the phone? Or maybe I could just swing by your office or house?” When the senator didn’t reply, Altman dropped the sarcasm. “What are you hearing?”
“You know damn well I can’t talk about what I’m hearing.”
The truth was that what he was hearing was insane. The FBI had prepared a classified report for the members of the Select Committee on Intelligence that contained exactly everything that was being reported on CNN. It characterized the Georgetown incident involving Angela Vasser as chaotic and troublesome. The shooter’s identity and motive were
both unknown. The FBI’s cyberlab confirmed that servers at the Department of Transportation had been accessed by an outside party, who had orchestrated the traffic-signal chaos that preceded the shooting. The FBI had not, however, been able to recover any identifying data from the shooter’s damaged and abandoned equipment. If the shooter was foreign, he’d disguised it well. He was clearly a professional. But what sort? That question had sparked a hot debate. Most agents working the case believed that the DOT hack pointed to the work of a professional cyberterrorist and not, as other agents argued, a professional hit man, given the two errant close-range shots.
The classified report prepared for Senator Wrightmont’s committee claimed that Angela Vasser had survived the attack, though she had apparently vanished. The NSA had used GPS tracking on her phone to guide the FBI to a Georgetown street corner, where they dug the abandoned device out of a trash can. This fact had inspired a mountain of loose speculation from investigators who, under pressure to provide answers to people like Senator Wrightmont, began to shovel paranoid bullshit into the void created by the lack of an intelligible narrative built on real evidence.
“You know what I think?” Altman said, challenging the senator with unblinking eyes. “I think the only thing you know that the rest of us don’t is just how far the FBI is from having a clue about what’s going on. This case is pandemonium. It’s fraught with incompetence. And”—he paused to let the senator hang on his words—“it’s overdue for some leadership. Are we on the same page, Senator?”
Wrightmont shook his head. He didn’t like Altman’s attitude. “I was clear about my reservations. I won’t risk getting on the wrong side of this.”