The Good Traitor

by Ryan Quinn

  “The wrong side of this? Jesus, Larry, she’s on the run. What else do you need? Either you take ahold of this thing, or you’re just another asshole bitching about what a shitshow it all is. I need to know now that we’re on the same page. Senator?”

  A commercial jet banked through the airspace above the winding Potomac and then swung toward Reagan National. “Yes,” Wrightmont said finally. “All right.”

  “Then we’ll go ahead, as discussed. Is that your recommendation?”

  “It’s your goddamn plan, Rick. I told you, no matter what, I’m not getting my hands dirty.”

  “I understand, Senator. But your nomination to head the NSA moves to the front of the line if we get out in front of this. If we don’t, you face a reelection campaign. You’re looking at losing a primary to someone who thinks his great-grandparents had pet dinosaurs. Are you willing to leave your career in the hands of the good primary voters of Montana? All I need is assurance from you that you’ll take leadership on the Hill to get our surveillance bill passed.” The vote on the surveillance bill—which, if it passed, would free up hundreds of millions of dollars to be spent on private defense contractors like Altman’s company—would be brought to the Senate floor within weeks. “Once you’ve moved into Fort Meade, we can talk more about our ongoing business together.” Another pause. “Shall we move forward, then?”

  This was repulsive, Wrightmont thought. On the other hand, though, he had encountered few decisions in life that were so crystal clear in their distribution of costs and benefits.

  “Your guy at NSA has access to her files?”

  “He does, and he’s already made me a copy of them. Took him a couple of minutes out of his day. And Larry, wait till you see this shit. This woman—”

  “No, don’t tell me. The less I know, the better. You have a journalist willing to cover it?”

  “Willing? This story’s huge. It will launch his career.”

  Wrightmont turned from the view. Intermission was over; he had to get back to the chamber music. “All right, nail her. I’ll take care of the surveillance bill. And Rick? Don’t fuck this up.”

  NORTHERN VIRGINIA

  A cab from the city rounded the corner, cautious, as if intimidated by the idyllic suburban streets, and then turned into the parking lot of a ten-field recreational soccer and baseball complex. The tall black woman paid in cash, just as she’d promised the driver she would. He’d been more than a little reluctant to take her twenty-five miles out of the city, but she’d shown him the bills and he’d shrugged and programmed the GPS.

  The cab sped away and the woman looked around, orienting herself. The parking lot was only half-full. Behind her, from the direction she’d come, was a quiet residential neighborhood. Leafy green woods surrounded the sports complex in every other direction. Through the trees on one side, she caught glimpses of cyclists and joggers on a path.

  She was relieved to see right away how clear the instructions had been. She began walking, past the baseball fields and out to the farthest soccer field, where a children’s game was in progress. Bursts of affirmation rose in shouts from the sidelines. She stood on the outer edge of the field, a ways off from the nearest cluster of parents, and waited.

  Kera Mersal watched from the protection of the woods more than a hundred meters away. She’d spent several days casing the complex, learning the patterns of the players, parents, referees, and grounds workers who came and went from the fields. And now, ever since she’d received the call from Angela Vasser on a new burner phone she’d purchased and activated for this sole purpose, she’d been circling the wooded perimeter of the complex, searching for any changes in those patterns. She detected none. No strange vans or SUVs with tinted windows. No fluctuation in the pedestrian traffic on the adjacent bike path. No loiterers or bird-watchers or generic maintenance crews.

  She watched Vasser for twenty minutes and carefully reviewed in her mind everything the woman had told her.

  The burner had rung the afternoon following her approach in the hotel ladies’ room—much sooner than Kera had expected. When she answered, Vasser said, “I’ve done a terrible thing,” by which she meant that she’d gone to the FBI and discussed the conversation she’d had with Kera. She was blunt about what she’d told them—that Kera had approached her, claiming the ambassador’s death had been a hit and that Vasser might also be in danger. Vasser apologized to Kera for going to the Feds; the night before it had seemed like the appropriate thing to do.

  But now the situation had changed. Someone had tried to kill her. And Kera was the only one who had warned her about that.

  “How did you know I was in danger?” Vasser had asked after she summarized her conversation with the FBI director. It sounded like an accusation.

  “Listen to me. This is very important. Did you tell them how to contact me?”

  “The note you gave me? No. I didn’t tell anyone about that, not even Ben. It hasn’t left my possession.”

  Kera had to make a decision: to believe Vasser, or to walk away and not risk drawing half of the intelligence community onto her trail. Talking about it over the phone wasn’t helping.

  “Where are you now?” she’d asked. “No, wait, don’t tell me. Are you safe? Are you alone?”

  Vasser indicated that she was.

  “And no one knows you’re calling me from that phone? There are no cameras around you?”

  “No. I got away after the shooting. There’s no one here. No cameras.”

  “What about your own phone?”

  “I threw it away, like you said.”

  “Where?”

  “A block or so from the shooting. I followed all of your directions.”

  “Good.” Kera gave her the address and instructions for what to do when she arrived at the sports complex. She detected reluctance in the silence that came over the line.

  “How did you know about the gunman?” Vasser demanded. “Who was he?”

  “I don’t know who he was or who sent him,” Kera said.

  “Then how did you know I was a target?”

  “I can’t explain that over the phone. There isn’t time.”

  “Then I won’t meet you,” Vasser said. It sounded as though she meant it. Kera leapt at the opportunity to test her.

  “Very well,” Kera said. Almost immediately, she regretted it. After all this trouble, she’d practically opened the door for Vasser to simply walk away—with no plan to reestablish contact. She shut her eyes, listening for the line to be disconnected. But after a pause, Vasser reversed herself and said she was getting in a cab.

  Though better than the alternative, that outcome came with its own set of red flags. Vasser’s willingness to meet her left open the possibility that the Feds had enlisted Vasser to lead them to Kera. Could they have put a plan like that together in less than an afternoon—including the bizarre hit man on the motorcycle? Kera doubted it, but it was still a possibility. She would have felt safer had Vasser seemed genuinely tempted to back out of the meeting.

  Each side scored a goal, and Vasser applauded the kids on both occasions. But Kera knew the diplomat wasn’t really watching the game. Her eyes shifted constantly; she fidgeted with her arms. Kera eventually became confident that an immediate ambush was not in the works, and retracing her steps to the bike path, she circled around to a point where she could come up behind Vasser from the woods.

  Vasser heard her approach and turned, wild-eyed, her nerves still on edge after being shot at. Fear melted to relief when she recognized Kera. They stood side by side for a moment, two alleged traitors watching kids chase after a soccer ball.

  “Were you followed?” Kera asked.

  “No.”

  Kera believed her. Ducking surveillance was a habit picked up by anyone who worked in an overseas embassy. But believing Vasser and trusting her were two different things.

  Kera pulled out a radio frequency signal detector she’d purchased for $300 cash at a Best Buy in Reston near Dulles. The
handheld sweep unit was about the size of an iPhone with a short, walkie-talkie-like antenna. Vasser eyed it with a mix of fear and suspicion.

  “Look at me,” Kera said. “Like we’re just chatting.” She aligned herself so that Vasser’s body shielded Kera’s hands from any of the soccer fans who might have glanced at them across the field. Then she turned the dial on the device and let it fall at Vasser’s feet, as if by accident. She bent over and, working slowly up the diplomat’s legs and then torso, watched the device. The bars on the frequency display did not fluctuate. She put the device away, satisfied that Vasser had nothing on her person that could transmit RF signals.

  “What happened in Georgetown?” Kera asked. She’d read about the incident online, but the details were vague and didn’t add up to a narrative that satisfied her common sense.

  “The lights all turned green.”

  “I know that. Tell me about the shooter.”

  “When the traffic jammed, a man appeared on the motorcycle. He came straight for me.” Her fear consolidated this time into suspicion and she glared at Kera. “You knew it would happen.”

  Kera shook her head. “I didn’t. I told you what I knew—that the ambassador’s plane going down was no accident, and that whoever brought down the plane expected you to be on board.” What she didn’t spell out for Vasser was the pattern that had emerged: a plane, elevators, and now traffic lights.

  “What do you want with me?” Vasser asked.

  The final whistle had been blown on the field and young soccer players were starting to be led by their parents back to the parking lot.

  “Let’s go somewhere more private. I have a safe place where we can talk.”

  Between the sports complex and the sweeping Potomac, which marked the state line between Virginia and Maryland, Algonkian Regional Park—on the Virginia side—provided dozens of acres of woods, a golf course, a picnic pavilion, and a low-grade water park. The road into the park ended at a string of cottages tucked into the woods along the riverbank. Kera had rented one of these for the week under the name Laura Perez, the skeleton identity she’d created to get back into the States. She’d paid in cash after explaining to the reservations employee that spotty travel in Central America, on account of missionary work, had resulted in the temporary suspension of her credit cards.

  Vasser sat down on the couch at Kera’s invitation. Large picture windows dominated the living room, overlooking the Potomac as it rolled by, slow and brown. Kera took the easy chair, which, when she faced Vasser and glanced out the window behind her across the room, provided a view of the narrow road that led to the cabin. The road was still.

  Vasser noticed the small television and asked if they could turn it on. Without her phone, she’d lost all connection to the world. She wanted to know if any new footage had emerged that showed her leaving the scene in Georgetown, or if there was any word on the identity of her attacker. Kera tuned the flat-screen to CNN and sat back for a few minutes to let Vasser watch. She was impatient to question the diplomat, but she could tell Vasser would be distracted until she knew something more about what was going on. After several minutes spent churning through the day’s other news stories and a commercial break, Vasser got what she was waiting for: the network replayed the only images it had of the incident—the DOT surveillance footage—while an anchor explained that the shooter had escaped on foot and had yet to be identified. Kera watched Vasser squint at the corner of the screen. The commotion with the motorcycle was visible, but the vantage wasn’t good enough to provide any useful detail. At a commercial break, Vasser looked away, shaking her head. Kera muted the television.

  “You’re not going to find what you’re looking for on that surveillance clip,” Kera said, nodding at the screen but watching Vasser. “The answer is back in China.”

  “You would know, I suppose,” Vasser said, her gaze suddenly piercing and accusatory.

  Kera shook her head. “You and I are in the same boat—”

  “Bullshit. You exposed classified files and fled. I don’t have any idea how I got here. Don’t try to tell me our situations are the same.”

  Kera clenched her jaw until the pain became a distraction. Clearly, appealing to Vasser’s reason by offering help wasn’t going to work. She had to take a harder line. “How we got here doesn’t really matter. The fact is, our government considers both of us traitors. So does the press. If you’re in denial, you can hold out for the official charges to be filed, but it’s obvious they’re eager to try you for treason, aiding the enemy, mishandling classified documents—should I go on?”

  “There isn’t proof of any of that. I’ll be cleared.”

  “There are e-mails. There are missed flights. There are affairs with private contractors who have worked for China.” Vasser tried to jump in with a protest, but Kera held up a hand to cut her off. “I’m just telling you what they’ll say. I know you didn’t write those e-mails. And I know that if you didn’t have your country’s best interests in mind, you wouldn’t have gone straight to the Feds after hearing from me.”

  Vasser considered this in silence.

  “So don’t turn on me,” Kera said. “I want to help you.”

  “How do I even begin to trust your motives?”

  “Start with the fact that I’m here. If I were working for China, I would be there, where it would be safe for someone who—” Kera stopped herself. Something occurred to her that made her forget for a moment what she’d been saying to Vasser. It wasn’t until Vasser spoke again that Kera emerged from the distraction.

  “Why are you here, really?” Vasser said.

  Kera spotted a familiar mix of fear and aggression in Vasser’s eyes. But she also saw an opening.

  “It’s important to me to clear my name,” Kera said. “They’ve left me with no choice but to prove to them on my own that I’m a patriot.”

  “And you plan to do that how?”

  “By figuring out who killed Ambassador Rodgers and why. I don’t need to tell you that the whole framework of our relationship with China is at stake.”

  “What do you want with me?”

  “You worked closely with the ambassador. You were the last person to talk to him. I know you already went over all of this with the FBI, but that was when they were accusing you of leaking state secrets. Will you go over it again with me—not as a defendant in an interrogation but as a witness to the final hours before the assassination of a US ambassador?”

  Vasser’s eyes drifted to the TV and then to the window and the river beyond. “Where do you want me to start?”

  “Unless there’s someplace more obvious, start with Shanghai. Think back, look for details that may not have seemed significant before.”

  Vasser went through the trip, from the routine preparations to the meetings to the hotel accommodations. Kera stopped her when she mentioned that she’d stayed the night with Conrad Smith.

  “Look, I don’t mean to pry.”

  Vasser nearly laughed. “You’re the only one, then.” She shook her head. “Conrad and I are lovers. That’s all there is to that.”

  Kera waited for more, but further details weren’t offered. “And your partner? Is that what you call him?”

  “Ben. Yes. Ben is completely aware of it, of course. He has his own lovers; I have mine.”

  “So it’s . . . an arrangement?”

  “It’s honesty and communication. We like each other and we like our relationship. But I travel a lot. It’s our way of getting what we want without putting our relationship on the line.”

  Kera nodded. “You explained this to the Feds?”

  “I tried. But of course they just obsessed over the sex. They assumed that if they treated it as a dirty secret, it could be used as leverage against me. Well, that’s their baggage, not mine. It’s unhealthy, and it’s bad detective work. They’d be better off focusing their investigation into the TERMITE leak on more relevant leads.”

  “Like?”

  Vasser shrugge
d. “There must be a list of everyone who knew about the program. They might have started with those people.”

  Kera nodded. “You wouldn’t have been on that list.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then why do you think the Feds came after you to begin with?”

  “The e-mails, apparently.”

  “Which you didn’t write.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did the Chinese know you weren’t on the ambassador’s plane when it left Shanghai?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your hosts at these meetings. The Chinese delegation. And the Kenyans. Did they know you’d skipped out on the flight?”

  “Yes, I had dinner with them right after Greg left.”

  “But it was last-minute, your decision to stay an extra night?”

  “Yes.” She looked down at her hands in her lap. “You mentioned the other night that you thought I might have been the target of that plane crash. Do you really think that? I thought you were crazy then. But now I’ve been shot at. I just can’t figure out why.”

  “The most obvious reason is TERMITE.”

  “I’ve told you, I wasn’t responsible for that leak. I couldn’t have accessed—”

  “I know that. And not just because I’m taking your word. I happen to know that the first public descriptions of TERMITE, which appeared in a news story on Gnos.is, did not come from any one human source. They were pieced together by a computer—a lot of computers, actually.” Vasser’s expression went blank with confusion. “That’s how Gnos.is works. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the sensitive nature of the information in that story created the appearance of a leaker, which is why everyone is looking for one.”

  “And someone wants to make it look like it was me?”

  “Yes. That would explain the e-mails manufactured in your name.” Kera encouraged the silence that followed. It meant Vasser was thinking.

  “Those two names you wrote on that piece of paper you gave me. Where did you get them?”