The Good Traitor

by Ryan Quinn

  “Marcus Templeton and Anne Platt. They were killed within a day or two of the ambassador. Did their names mean anything to you?”

  “Not until I looked them up. The woman, Anne Platt, had spent her career developing phones and other devices that laid the foundation of the modern telecom industry. And the man, Marcus Templeton, made billions investing in telecom.”

  “How about the ambassador? Did he have any stake in telecom?”

  “Sure.” Vasser shrugged. “No financial stake, of course. That would have been a conflict of interest. But telecom was a big part of our development initiatives with Africa and China. It’s in America’s own interest to have a global cyberinfrastructure that’s compatible, efficient, and that can drive commerce back to the States. That’s what Conrad had been hired—”

  “Conrad Smith?”

  Vasser nodded. “You saw the latest story in Gnos.is? It mentioned that Conrad was working as a consultant on a classified government program called IKE.”

  Kera nodded. “Did he ever discuss that with you?”

  “No. It was classified. It didn’t occur to me that he would even know about IKE.”

  “Wait. So you knew about IKE before the story broke?”

  “Only the broad outlines. It informed our long-term policy positions with China and Africa.”

  “What are the broad outlines?”

  Vasser hesitated.

  “The program is public now. Can’t you discuss it?”

  Another pause for internal deliberation. Perhaps Vasser was rehearsing which parts of the program were classified and which were not. Or perhaps she was weighing whether Kera’s question was actually a trap to test how easily Vasser would give up classified details. Candidness won out.

  “More and more devices,” Vasser began, “well, practically everything we come into contact with each day—from our televisions to our cars to our refrigerators and bedroom thermostats—are becoming linked via the Internet. This is great news for the future of the telecom industry. Investments and profits have already started to explode. But connectivity is expanding much faster than security. Basically, when it comes to online security—both individually and at the level of the Internet’s infrastructure—we’ve maintained a pre-9/11 mentality. Instead of building security software that becomes outdated in the time it takes to install it, we need to engineer all of our new devices and vehicles and appliances with fundamental security built in.”

  “This is what Conrad Smith is advising the US government on for IKE?” Kera asked. She had been plenty aware on her own of America’s dire cybersecurity position, but she had not heard of the IKE program until the CIA documents were leaked.

  “I imagine so. I didn’t know he was involved with IKE until I read his name in Gnos.is. We never speak about work, not in that way. We can’t. Both of us are too involved with sensitive stuff.”

  “Did Conrad say why he was in Shanghai on the night you were there?”

  “Work.” Vasser shrugged awkwardly, sensing that her answer seemed flimsy. “He was there for some meetings. Like I said, we didn’t press each other on details. Why?”

  Kera leaned forward. “By my count, there are only five people who know you’re innocent. You’re one of them. I’m one of them. Two others work with me.” She watched Vasser do the math.

  “And Conrad.”

  Kera nodded.

  “I need to talk to him,” Vasser said suddenly.

  “Have you spoken to him since your release?”

  “No. My calls, my e-mails, they’re all being monitored. I have to assume everyone I contact right now is subject to invasive scrutiny. I wanted to spare Conrad that, though I imagine they’re already all over him. But this is different. I need to warn him.”

  “That’s impossible. You don’t know his role in this.”

  “What do you mean?” Vasser’s eyes narrowed. “What are you suggesting, that he’s in on it?”

  “I’m suggesting that contacting him is not a risk we can take.”

  “We?” Vasser said. “I just met you. I know Conrad. Don’t you have anyone you trust? Do you have any relationships built on that?”

  Kera smiled bitterly and stood. “I’m going to get some rest. Your room is at the end of the hall. I got groceries yesterday; help yourself if you’re hungry. Don’t go out.”

  Left alone, Angela Vasser’s eyes drifted back to the television. Every fifteen minutes or so, the familiar banner popped up on the lower third of the screen—BREAKING NEWS: VASSER AND SHOOTING SUSPECT BOTH MISSING AFTER ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT—though there were no new “breaking” developments being reported. With the TV on mute, she occasionally heard a creak or rustle from the upstairs master bedroom where Kera Mersal had gone. Vasser got up and switched off the TV.

  The exhaustion hit her then. In the last twenty-four hours, she had confronted the most primal challenge of any species: survival. Now lesser needs presented themselves. A shower. Sleep. Her body suddenly ached for these things. She had no personal belongings with her, and she was wearing the outfit she’d put on the previous morning. In the bathroom, she removed her clothes and washed them in the shower, a chore she lingered over, savoring the warmth and the isolation of the cascading stream. She imagined this would be the appropriate time to break down, to unleash a good sob in the relative safety and privacy of the bathroom. But tears would not come. Her body knew it wasn’t time to let go; this wasn’t over yet.

  Wrapped in a towel, she padded down the hallway to the guest room, pulled toward the queen bed by the promise of imminent sleep. That’s when she saw the cottage’s landline phone under the lamp on the nightstand.

  SAN FRANCISCO

  The flight from Chicago felt short, and not just because Conrad Smith was accustomed to transoceanic travel. What Smith most wanted right now was to be invisible, anonymous, indefinitely thirty thousand feet above it all. Unless you lived in the African bush or the Amazonian rain forest, a plane was about the only place you could credibly claim anymore to be unreachable by phone or e-mail.

  And even that would change soon—thanks in part, ironically, to the formerly secret project on which Smith had been advising the US government. Though travelers would welcome the ability to surf the Internet and send text messages in-flight, Smith suspected that the change in regulations was hardly being made on their behalf. From what he’d witnessed in his work on the IKE project, the catalyst driving the policy shift was the fact that the NSA went into withdrawal every time a passenger got on a plane and was forced to stop using his or her phone. The new in-flight electronic free-for-all would provide the agency with the desired uninterrupted stream of data from citizens—some of whom might be terrorists, the agency and its defenders were always quick to point out.

  Conrad Smith sat in first class, but only because it had become nearly impossible for him to book a ticket in coach with as many miles and rewards points as he’d accumulated. In fact, he’d thought he’d succeeded this time in doing just that, but at the gate the airline had given him an automatic courtesy upgrade. He switched off his phone well before the flight attendant’s announcement to do so and leaned back in his seat, avoiding eye contact with any of his fellow travelers shuffling down the aisle toward their coach seats. The day before, a classified report mentioning his name in connection with the IKE project had been published on Gnos.is. Ever since, he’d fielded panicked calls from the Department of Homeland Security, which was trying to manage the intelligence leak, as well as inquiries from his overseas clients. And of course, there was a new wave of messages from the FBI agents who had been interrogating him for more than a week about the fake e-mails between him and Angela Vasser. When those e-mails had first surfaced, he’d been immediately suspended from work on the IKE contract. Luckily, he’d been in South Africa at the time, or else he would have been detained the way Vasser had been. But Vasser was finally released and the credibility of the e-mails was challenged.

  Just a few weeks earlier, his consulting busines
s had been booming. And then it had all come apart. His involvement with IKE was over. His name was forever linked to news stories of illegal leaks and extramarital affairs. Now, with this trip to San Francisco, he was being forced to plead with his remaining clients not to drop him.

  For a few blissful hours, Smith read a book, occasionally glancing out the window where the American plains gave way to mountains and desert and then, finally, the fog-shrouded, verdant coast. Walking from gate to curb, he resuscitated his phone. It twitched frantically. There were a dozen texts and two voice-mail messages. The texts were mostly from harmless friends who’d read his name in the news again and were calling more or less to marvel at this fact. He looked at the voice-mail display. One message was from his former client at DHS, no doubt with instructions for how to handle news of the leak in that afternoon’s meeting. The other voice mail was from a Virginia number; probably a journalist or, worse, another FBI agent with follow-up questions posed in the form of accusations.

  Smith located his waiting driver and parlayed a greeting into small talk, relieved for another excuse to delay the requisite electronic correspondence. He could return the phone calls when he got to his hotel room.

  LANGLEY

  “What’s he doing?” Bright asked.

  The analyst shrugged. “Nothing. Same thing he’s been doing all day.” The analyst’s screens showed video feeds from inside the home of Ben Welk and Angela Vasser. Welk was seated at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee, staring out the bay windows. Since Vasser had gone missing, he hadn’t left the house.

  “Put yourself in his shoes. What would you be doing?” Bright said.

  “Same thing, I guess. Waiting by the phone. Checking my e-mail, Facebook.”

  Bright studied the screen. The man’s phone and laptop were within arm’s reach on the kitchen table. “Why isn’t she contacting him?” he wondered aloud.

  Bright and the analysts who worked in the ops center were desensitized to the shame that any decent civilized person would experience while witnessing another’s private life. Bright had long ago lost the urge to look away out of decency. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it was boredom that turned him away; the vast majority of people’s outward lives were that mundane. After a few minutes of watching Ben Welk stare out his dining room window, Bright got restless.

  “Where are we with the other likely points of contact?” he said, addressing the analysts he’d assigned to each target. The responses came in quick succession.

  “No one at the embassy in Beijing has heard from Vasser since she got on the plane home last week.”

  “Her parents say they last heard from her two days ago—before the Georgetown attack. Their phone and e-mail logs confirm that.”

  Ever since the gunman’s attempt on Vasser’s life—and her subsequent disappearance—Bright had ordered round-the-clock monitoring of anyone whom Vasser might conceivably reach out to.

  “And Conrad Smith?”

  “He just landed in San Francisco.”

  Bright suspected that Conrad Smith was as likely as Welk to be contacted. “Do we have phone and e-mail coverage on him?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s a foreign national contracting on IKE; we own his devices.”

  Bright knew that the analyst was using the hacker’s definition of the word “own,” meaning that they had installed malware in Conrad Smith’s phone and computer that allowed them to access it whenever they wished.

  “In addition, the team you requested will be on him within the hour.”

  “Anything in the metadata?” Bright said.

  “This is what I’ve flagged so far. There’s a call from earlier today that I don’t know what to make of,” the analyst said.

  Bright leaned over his shoulder to get a look. Among calls from clients and the FBI was an incoming call that had originated from an entity listed as “Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority.” The duration of the call was sixty-four seconds.

  “That’s too long to be a wrong number. Do we know what they talked about?”

  The analyst shook his head and pointed at the call’s time stamp. “I don’t think they talked. The call came in after he’d powered down his phone for the flight to San Fran.”

  “A voice mail, then?”

  “That’d be my guess.”

  “Can we access it?”

  “Should be able to, yeah.” He paused. “Would you like me to try?” Accessing the actual content of electronic communications on American soil was a step deeper into controversial territory than simply analyzing its metadata. Since the public outcry over domestic surveillance brought on by Edward Snowden, this had become a sensitive enough topic that analysts knew to ask their superiors for permission before proceeding.

  “Will he be able to tell if we access it?” Bright asked.

  “No. Our malware prevents his phone from ever shutting down fully, even when he powers it off. No matter what he’s doing with it now, we can still connect to the baseboard chip without tipping him off.”

  “All right. Go ahead.” Snowden or not, they still had the Patriot Act, which allowed foreign nationals under investigation, like Conrad Smith, to be monitored if someone like Bright thought they should be.

  “Yes, sir.” The analyst clamped large headphones onto his head. “This might take a few minutes.”

  Bright wandered across the room, eyeing his own phone with suspicion as he turned it over in his hand. This was the world they were operating in. An agency cybersecurity tech had once walked him through the inescapable vulnerabilities and the procedures for how to counter them. The malware they were currently using to monitor Conrad Smith’s smartphone, for example, and which any foreign agency would love to get into a phone like Bright’s, could be overridden by plugging in the phone and holding down the power and home buttons in a particular sequence—a sequence that Bright could no longer precisely recall. That was supposed to render the device benign, incapable of transmitting data to an eavesdropper. But there were a dozen other procedures for a dozen other vulnerabilities introduced by the mere possession of these phones, none of which were intuitive to Bright. So he kept things simple. When he needed to ensure he wasn’t being tracked, he left the phone at home; when he wanted a conversation kept private, he made sure the phone was in a place where the conversation couldn’t reach it.

  While the tech worked on pulling data from Conrad Smith’s phone, Bright found Henry Liu at the workstation he’d commandeered for MIRAGE. Liu had an update from the NTSB team in Shanghai. “They just wrapped their guided tour of the projected crash site.”

  “And?”

  “They saw a lot of water. No physical evidence.”

  “What about the submersible?”

  “It’s standing by, but still hasn’t been cleared to get in there. Beijing is stalling. Should we put more pressure on State?”

  Bright had stopped listening. “Where’s this?” he said suddenly, walking toward the front of the room. Three screens on the big wall were tuned to live feeds from the major cable news networks. All three were showing the same thing: a swarm of emergency vehicles, lights ablaze, in front of a building on a busy city street. The answer to Bright’s question was soon revealed in the headline running across the bottom of one network’s coverage: SAN FRANCISCO ELEVATOR TRAGEDY IS THIRD THIS MONTH; FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED.

  Bright swung around. “Where did you say Conrad Smith is right now?” he called up to the analyst who was monitoring the surveillance on Angela Vasser’s contacts.

  The analyst was already standing. He ignored Bright’s question and instead held out an outstretched arm, offering up his headphones. “I found the voice mail. I think you’ll want to listen to this.”

  ALGONKIAN REGIONAL PARK

  Kera came out of a spoiled dream, groaning at the cheap digital watch on the nightstand. It was beeping again. Had it already been an hour? Outside it was still daylight. Running a hand through her hair, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat for a few
seconds, listening, scanning the view from the bedroom window. The house was silent; the surrounding woods were still but for the slow roll of the muddy Potomac, visible through the woods where the tree cover thinned.

  She performed a similar scan from the window in the master bathroom, which looked out at the opposite side of the cottage. Then she went downstairs and repeated the sweep, moving systematically from one window to the next. Nothing amiss. She hesitated at the closed door of the guest bedroom. The silence suggested Vasser was asleep. Kera weighed the risk of diverting from her own routine against allowing Vasser another hour of sleep. She thought she heard a rustle from Vasser’s room as she retreated down the hallway, but Kera had made up her mind to let her rest—only this once. Vasser wasn’t trained to handle sleep deprivation the way Kera had been.

  The last stop on Kera’s hourly rotation was the television, which was her only safe source of information about the outside world. Phones and computers would have been more efficient, no doubt, but they were a two-way link to the world—a path that could lead anyone who knew what to look for right to the cottage’s doorstep.

  The news from the TV was not good: there had been another elevator failure.

  Kera rushed to turn up the volume on the muted TV, desperate for details that she knew would not yet be available. What was known was that a hotel elevator in San Francisco had plummeted two dozen stories. It was thought that as many as three people were in the car; rescue crews were still trying to unpack the wreckage.

  Kera heard a gasp behind her and turned to find Angela Vasser wrapped in a towel. One hand covered her mouth; her eyes filled quickly with a fear that put Kera on edge.

  “Conrad,” Vasser managed to whisper. And then a sob, choked back too late, dislodged from her throat, surprising them both. Her breath looked caught in her chest. “I—I tried to warn him.”

  Kera forgot about the TV and the elevator. She crossed to Vasser, gripped the diplomat’s shoulders, and looked her in the eye.