by Ryan Quinn
“Warn him how?” Kera said coolly. “What did you do? Did you call him?” Even as she said it, she felt that she was overreacting, that it was impossible that this woman who had worked in the American embassy in Beijing would consider using any sort of communications device, not in the situation she was in.
But Vasser nodded. Another choked sob escaped from her hand covering her mouth.
“You called his cell phone? From where? What phone did you use?” Besides the cottage’s in-room landline phones, Kera had two phones—the satellite phone from Bolívar and her last prepaid, unused burner smartphone, both of which she’d stashed in the freezer after adjusting the thermostat to a safe temperature. If Vasser had used either, she’d have to throw it away.
Using a hand wet with tears, Vasser indicated in the direction of her room down the hall. “I’m sorry. I was trying to help. You don’t think my call—oh God, what have I done?”
“Go put your clothes on. Now,” Kera said in a chilly, calm voice that was much more effective than a panicked shout. She could tell that Vasser was still worried about Conrad Smith. But they had other problems now. “We have to go.”
LEESBURG PIKE
On the ride out from Langley, colored lights flashing from the windows of a black SUV with government plates, Bright sat in the passenger seat with his smartphone pressed to an ear. The FBI’s special agent in charge on the Vasser case had given him listen-only access, via an encrypted satellite link, to the communications between the tactical team on-site and the FBI’s command and control center. It was difficult to hear the proceedings over the highway noise. The voices he struggled to make out were calm and measured. Like the armed commandos who stormed unfamiliar buildings for a living, the men and women supporting the raid on the back end were trained to release ice into their veins when the pressure started to build.
Bright gathered from their exchange that an eighteen-man SWAT team had arrived at the address and circled the building with no resistance. As the black SUV sped onto a dirt road leading toward a row of secluded cottages, Bright heard the command given to enter. He strained to hear what followed. There was no loud banging, no gunfire; just a lot of boots clobbering against wood and then the shouts of “Clear!”
Bright hopped out of the SUV as it rolled to a stop at the perimeter of the scene. He flashed his agency ID and caught up with the SAIC on the porch steps. “Rooms are clear.”
“I heard.”
“The phone you traced that call to is in the guest bedroom. This way.”
Bright followed the SAIC inside. The cottage was still crowded with bulky SWAT guys clutching their H&K MP5 submachine guns and looking disappointed that there hadn’t been anyone around to apprehend. The cottage had simple furniture and a dated television. It felt closer to something you might find in the rural wilderness than in a DC suburb. Bright was shown down a short hallway and into a small room with a queen bed, desk, chair, and nightstand, on which sat the phone—a cheap receiver and cradle set connected to the landline. Two technicians with FBI windbreakers were scrutinizing the receiver for fingerprints. Their initial examination came up empty.
After the phone’s existence confirmed that they were in the right place, the phone became the least interesting thing in sight. Bright noted the comforter and sheets pulled back. There was a towel thrown over the back of the chair. From the way it was hanging—he knew better than to touch anything—it looked a little heavy: still damp. To corroborate this, he backtracked to the bathroom and found that the shower floor was wet. In the kitchen he used the unbuttoned cuff of his shirt to open the refrigerator door. Milk, bread, cheese, deli meat—all neatly shelved. The trash can had a single gum wrapper in it.
Everything was a little too neat, Bright thought. The phone wiped of fingerprints, the empty trash can. Nothing he’d seen actually identified Angela Vasser. He wasn’t betting that the forensics team would succeed on that front either.
Had he underestimated Vasser?
Finally, he went upstairs and peeked into the master bedroom. The sheets hadn’t been pulled down, but the surface of the comforter was wrinkled in a way that suggested someone had slept there. Standing over the upstairs bathroom sink, which also was wet, he looked out the window, thinking. So Vasser wasn’t alone; she was getting help. Bright had a good guess from whom, but all the other questions that surfaced in his mind just collected there, unanswered.
I-81, CENTRAL PENNSYLVANIA
“Where are we going?”
“Why? Is there someone else you’d like to call and give a heads-up to?” Kera said, regretting her tone as soon as the words came out. Rebuked, Vasser fell silent.
They were in a Honda Civic Kera had rented for the week and parked on a residential street a half mile from the cottage. The parking location had been ideal because none of the park’s three roads fed into the residential neighborhood. Anyone traveling by road from inside the park would have to backtrack out through the park’s main entrance and then skirt a wide arch of suburban obstacles—strip malls, retirement homes, schools, churches, dog parks—to reach the street where Kera had stashed the vehicle. There was, however, a short wooded running trail that cut almost directly from the cottage to the car. Kera had discovered it on one of her jogs to scout the area for choke points and escape paths.
They had left the cottage in a dead sprint. Breaking out of the woods, feet from the car, they had heard the approach of a small fleet of vehicles tearing up the park’s gravel roads. Vasser glanced back after she’d climbed into the passenger seat.
“Don’t look,” Kera warned her calmly and put the car in drive. Vasser obeyed. “If we hit a checkpoint, we belong in this neighborhood. Just heading out for some Starbucks,” Kera said. “Got it?”
But the Feds had not had time to expand their perimeter to include the neighborhoods adjacent to the park before Kera and Vasser slipped away, moving a few miles per hour under the speed limit.
“Did my call make Conrad a target?” Vasser asked when they’d driven a half hour. She seemed more stoic now, as if she was looking to take responsibility.
“We don’t even know if he was on that elevator.”
“He was. I know it,” Vasser said softly.
“Your call didn’t make him a target. Whoever is doing this is plenty capable of killing Conrad without your help. Your call made us a target.”
Kera drove north, keeping to minor highways and two-lane country routes, avoiding toll roads and rest stops, which were well covered by surveillance cameras. When she stopped for gas along a busy stretch of strip malls in a Maryland town, she retrieved a blond wig, sunglasses, and baseball cap from her duffel bag and eyed her reflection in the car window to adjust the disguise. She filled the tank and then used a pay phone to make a reservation at a safe place where they would stay that evening. A block up the road from the gas station, she pulled into a narrow lot and parked in front of a small electronics store sandwiched in between a barbershop and Dunkin’ Donuts. Without explanation, she left Vasser in the car. She came out three minutes later with a cheap, prepaid flip phone and a prepaid card with sixty minutes of calling time on it.
Kera was about to climb back into the car when she noticed something. Across the street was the town’s humble public library.
“Wait here. I’ll be back in five minutes.”
In the library, Kera found the public-access computer—there was only one—near a bulletin board advertising private guitar lessons, a local theater production, and a community arts festival that had already happened. She directed the Internet browser to Gnos.is and clicked to Gnos.is/fact, the news side of the side. It took no digging to find what she was looking for. The news of Conrad Smith’s death was a bigger story than she’d expected. She only had to read the first paragraph to understand why. Unlike the previous two elevator failures, the fatal incident in San Francisco was being reported as a murder, not an accident. And for the first time, Gnos.is had confirmed what other news organizations had begun to
speculate about: the three elevator catastrophes were related.
To print the article, Kera had to give fifty cents to the librarian, who collected the pages for her off the printer.
“I’m sorry,” Kera said, handing the article to Vasser as she slid back into the driver’s seat. She guided the car out of the parking lot.
When Vasser saw his name, she made a muffled sound, part pain and part anger. Kera kept her eyes on the road. A few minutes later, Vasser wiped moisture from her eyes.
“I can’t do this,” she said suddenly. “Take me to the police station.”
“No,” Kera said.
“I won’t involve you. But I have to turn myself in. If I don’t, who else will they kill? Ben? The next person whose name is published by Gnos.is?”
“Turn yourself in for what? Leaving the District while you’re under investigation? That’s the only thing you’ve done wrong—except associating with me, and that might be the only thing keeping you alive. Turning yourself in won’t protect you or anyone else from whoever’s trying to kill you. To stop them, we have to figure out who they are and why they’re doing this.”
Vasser fell into a troubling silence, but at least she wasn’t begging to be in police custody anymore.
“I didn’t have time to read the article,” Kera said. “What else does it say?”
“It says the link between the victims is InspiraCom,” Vasser replied without consulting the pages in her lap. She was looking out the window.
“InspiraCom? How?” Kera looked over when Vasser didn’t answer. The look on the diplomat’s face had changed. She was no longer fighting tears. Her eyes were narrowed in concentration.
“It might be possible,” she said finally, more to herself.
“What? Tell me.”
Vasser scanned through the Gnos.is story again, summarizing it for Kera. A year earlier, the booming American telecom company InspiraCom had purchased a Silicon Valley smartphone and tablet manufacturer whose president of development was Anne Platt, the woman killed in the Paris elevator. Platt became involved in InspiraCom’s efforts to get a smartphone to market, although she clashed frequently with her new bosses over the phone’s security standards. Platt wanted to prioritize security while InspiraCom’s management was more focused on growing the company’s market share. Meanwhile, Marcus Templeton, the hedge-fund manager who perished in the Wall Street elevator, had become bullish about InspiraCom and was thought to have been angling for a majority stake. He was never able to achieve that, though. The man who beat him to it was Hu Lan, whose private jet had been loaned to Ambassador Rodgers and was never returned.
Kera felt like she was seeing through a window that had just been wiped clean of fog. What if Hu’s investment in InspiraCom was more than just a wealthy businessman’s bid to expand his holdings? What if it was an early stroke in an orchestrated plan by the MSS to gain control of a vulnerable segment of America’s infrastructure—its telecom network? “What about Conrad? What’s his role?”
“IKE. Just like that leaked CIA document said, Conrad was advising the US government on its major cyberinfrastructure modernization project. InspiraCom was bidding for the job, and Conrad had apparently voiced opposition to their bid. He thought InspiraCom was rushing their designs to market too quickly, and he didn’t think security was at the center of their design philosophy. They relied too much on security software to fix flaws after the fact. That’s too late when you’re up against hackers capable of zero-day attacks.” Vasser stopped. She looked at Kera. “So that’s it? InspiraCom is just eliminating its critics to win a telecom bidding war?”
There was a lot of evidence to support that theory, Kera thought. Except for one thing. “No, it can’t be that simple. Why kill the ambassador, then? Why try to kill you?”
Vasser shrugged. “Because of my ties to Conrad?”
“But you didn’t have any professional ties to Conrad or his work, right?”
“Right, but those e-mails that were planted in the press—those made it look like I did.”
“But that doesn’t explain why the ambassador would be a target.”
Kera spotted the police cruiser coming from the opposite direction too late to tell Vasser to duck and hide herself. If the cops were on the alert for a white woman and a black woman traveling together, it would look less suspicious if they were casually chatting in a car, not ducking at the sight of cops.
“Don’t look at them,” Kera said. She checked her speed: fifty-one in a fifty-five zone. “Forget InspiraCom for a minute. Start over for me. What was your role in our diplomatic mission in China?”
“What?” Vasser asked, distracted as the police car flew by.
Kera checked the rearview. No brake lights.
“Why were you in China to begin with? Your parents, Ben—your life was in Washington. Surely you could have landed a job doing research or teaching in DC.”
“I hate academia.”
Kera nearly laughed. “For a woman who hates academia, you sure submitted yourself to a lot of it.”
“I had to. It helped that my parents had connections through the World Bank. But I’m still black and I’m still a woman. I needed more degrees than the other candidates. I played their game because it was preferable to sitting on the sidelines. But I don’t like all the rules.”
“So why China? What were you doing in the ambassador’s office?”
“Economic development in China, Africa, and India will have tremendous consequences for the United States. Our way of life is linked inextricably to our economy. And our economy is linked to the rest of the world’s. So to say that our future way of life depends on the prosperity, equity, and accessibility of the global economy is an understatement. My academic focus was China and, to a lesser extent, Africa. But actually facilitating an emerging economy is not about imposing academic theories. It’s about solving problems. And not by paying people off. Corruption is one of the biggest problems plaguing emerging economies. To deal with this, American foreign policy generally assumes two approaches: military dominance and bribery. These might be effective and acceptable strategies in certain circumstances, like in a short-term humanitarian crisis, but not in fostering new, stable economies. The few examples where we’ve been most successful—politically and economically—we’ve exported innovations that cheaply improve the quality of life for local people in a fair way. Put another way: if we’re not improving the lives of citizens in countries we engage with on a scale that is proportional to what we’re getting out of it, it doesn’t work.”
“Was this the topic of your conference in Shanghai?”
“Yes, more or less.”
“Did it go well, or were there problems?”
“There are always problems. China and Africa are steeped in corruption. Hu Lan’s use of Chinese government money—or, more accurately, the Chinese government’s use of Hu Lan as a cover—to gain a controlling stake in an American corporation is an example of that. But American-style capitalism isn’t innocent. Corporations see foreign investment as a zero-sum game—and Washington is run by corporations. Every contract a US corporation wins in Africa is one that China didn’t win. And vice versa. And since that’s the only way we care to measure success, we have everyone bribing and killing and spying their way into markets that need whole armies of security contractors and surveillance experts and cyberspies to prop them up. Meanwhile, the people of China and Africa are forgotten. You can call me a China sympathizer, but anyone who thinks the global economy can work without them succeeding is naïve. We don’t just need their oil or cheap labor or loans, we need their people to have economic stability and dignity. Not because we’re charitable, but because it’s in our best interests. And anyway, no offense, but you can learn a lot more about an ally or an adversary by working on the ground to build economies with their people than you can by tapping the phones of a whole continent.”
“Have you ever thought of running for office?” Kera said.
“You�
��re joking, right?” Vasser laughed. “A godless and childless black woman in an open relationship with a white man. I’m completely unelectable. And that was before I was accused of treason.”
Kera smiled. “That’d make for a hell of a campaign slogan. But at least it’s honest, which is more than any actual politician can claim.”
“Can I ask you something?” Vasser said.
“Try me.”
“What really happened with HAWK?”
“Oh . . . that.” Kera realized that she’d not had the opportunity to give her side of the story to anyone but Lionel—and he hadn’t exactly solicited it from her with empathetic intentions. Jones and Bolívar knew the truth, but that was only because they’d been a part of it. And like Kera, that was why they remained in hiding.
Kera gave Vasser a summary, beginning with her recruitment to HAWK, the cyberespionage black op where she’d met J. D. Jones. After Kera and Jones were nearly killed for what they came to learn about HAWK’s illegal domestic surveillance practices, they’d opted to expose HAWK rather than turn over the evidence to the CIA, where they feared it would be obfuscated.
“So you did take the classified files from HAWK. And you passed them on to Gnos.is.”
“We did, yes. We did it not only because HAWK was targeting and spying on American citizens, but because they’d partnered with a corporation that was selling American citizens’ private data to anyone willing to buy it—including foreign intelligence agencies.”
“What about your ties to China?” Vasser said.
Kera looked over at her. “What did you hear about that?”
“I was in Beijing at the time. Chinese state media celebrated the scandal. Most people in our embassy assumed that you and Jones had, at the very least, fled to China and sought defection. The CIA’s Beijing station chief had instructed everyone working at the embassy to alert him immediately if any of us were contacted by you.”
Kera bit her lip. It was one thing to have the media ranting and raving about treason based on a false narrative peddled by the CIA, who were desperate to cover their own asses. But it was something else to hear that a knowledgeable, respectable diplomat from one of America’s most important embassies had bought this story line.