by Ryan Quinn
Kera shrugged. “Maybe you’re giving them too much credit. The elevator hit on Conrad could have been a desperate blunder. Or just an act of ego. It’s possible that after the first attacks went off so well, the attacker started craving attention, wanting credit that would never come so long as he or she was anonymous.”
“Maybe,” Vasser said. “But wouldn’t that suggest this was just the work of some cyberpunks showing off their nerd skills? I think that’s too simple an explanation. These targets weren’t random. Their connections to InspiraCom suggest that.”
Kera found herself eyeing the fridge while Vasser talked. She couldn’t get Bolívar’s latest text message out of her mind.
“Give me a few minutes,” Kera said, retrieving the satellite phone and powering it back up. She stepped out the side door and went around the back of the cottage, which faced the woods, so she wouldn’t be seen using the banned device in view of any of the resort’s other guests or security guards. Bolívar answered on the second ring.
“Kera. You’re OK.”
“Yeah. Won’t your all-knowing computers alert you when I’m not?” she said, immediately regretting the bite in her tone.
“We have a problem,” he said, brushing aside her cool greeting. “Charlie locked all the Gnos.is data stored at headquarters three hours ago. He hasn’t checked in since.”
“Locked the data?” Kera was aware that Charlie Canyon remained Gnos.is’s only public figure, working out of an office in Manhattan, but it was not totally clear to her what he did there. She also had not forgotten her first interactions with Canyon, which had ended with him disappearing for months as part of a PR stunt to gain attention for Gnos.is. What was he up to now?
“The computers in Charlie’s office receive hostile intrusion attempts almost constantly. Because of that, Jones created a last-resort command that Charlie could use in a crisis—say, a raid or some other security breach. If executed, this command essentially encrypts everything on those machines, permanently—and then destroys the key. It’s catastrophic for the data, Kera. More permanent than burning the place to the ground. Something’s wrong.”
What’s wrong, Kera thought, is that Gnos.is keeps publishing things that turn people into targets. But she refrained from throwing that in Bolívar’s face right now.
“I’ll check it out,” she said.
“Kera—”
“No. Don’t tell me to be careful.”
“You’re angry,” he said.
She nearly hung up on him, but stopped herself. As infrequent as their direct communication was, she knew that cutting out on a bad note would only create a source of regret that would torment her until she could speak to him again. She realized after a few seconds that he’d fallen into an odd silence. A muted ruckus could be heard in the background.
“Rafa?”
“Turn on the news,” he said. His voice was low, the confrontational tone of their previous conversation completely gone.
“What? I can’t. There isn’t any news here. What’s wrong?”
“Charlie’s—” he started. “They’re saying Charlie’s dead.”
Kera’s throat constricted. She covered her mouth with a hand. In a span of several seconds, she experienced a surreal shock that morphed into a very real anger. After determining that Bolívar didn’t have any more information, she got off the phone and went back inside.
“Change of plans. I have to go to New York,” she told Vasser in a voice she hoped masked her shock.
“What about me?”
“You’re staying here.”
“No way. You said we’re in the same boat. We’re doing this together.”
“Together? I have established aliases. I have cash I’ve stashed away, bank accounts I can access, places to hide that only I know about if something goes wrong. I’m assuming you haven’t made similar preparations?” Kera’s loss of temper drove Vasser into silence. “You’re a liability. You can stay here, where you’re as safe as I can help you be. If you don’t like that, you can turn yourself in and try your luck with the FBI. But I wouldn’t count on them being very sympathetic.”
If Vasser had been about to protest, she changed her mind as she watched Kera repack her duffle bag with urgent purpose. Kera retrieved the cheap burner flip phone from the fridge and entered its number into her satellite phone’s contacts. She put the burner back into the fridge before issuing her instructions to Vasser.
“Take that phone out of the fridge every hour on the hour for three minutes. I’ll call you in that window if I need to. At all other times, the phone stays in the fridge. Leave the cabin only if you must, and only in disguise. If you need food, try to order in and charge it to the room. Our reservation is under Abigail Dalton. If anyone asks, that’s me. You can say I went on a drive in the mountains. There’s a small grocery store on the property somewhere,” she said, tapping the resort map. “You can get toiletries or whatever else there. Just try to avoid interacting with the staff. I doubt they’re on the same sabbatical from the Internet and cable news as the guests are.”
“I need clothes.”
“I was getting to that. There’s a gift shop. Charge whatever you need to the room.”
Vasser rolled her eyes.
“I’m dead serious. If you leave this resort, you are more likely to run into someone who has seen your face in the news.” Kera put a short stack of bills into an envelope. “If there’s an emergency, here’s two grand in cash.”
“When will you be back?”
“Don’t know. I’ll call you.”
MANHATTAN
Kera reached the city at dusk. After abandoning the Civic in a church parking lot in Spring Valley, New York, she’d taken Metro-North into Manhattan, where she transferred to a downtown subway. After days in seclusion, the stimulation of the train—its sweaty crush of passengers, its mind-splitting metal clacking in the tunnels, its cameras in every corner—felt claustrophobic and overwhelming. At the same time, she craved information. Her eyes were pulled in the direction of any screen that might provide her with more news.
Surfacing at Houston and Lafayette, Kera faced a deluge of memories. This had been her neighborhood during her two years in New York City, after being transferred from Langley to work on HAWK. This was where she had shared an apartment with her then fiancé, Parker. Where she had discovered him in the bathtub, his head savaged by a bullet. Under normal circumstances, it would have been difficult to prevent those horrible images from resurfacing. But now—given the news of Charlie Canyon’s murder—it was impossible to suppress them.
She turned downtown into the heart of SoHo, hugging herself against a chill that could not have come from the still-humid fall air. She stopped behind a police line at Spring Street and peered down a block lit up by emergency vehicles. Above them, on the north side of the street, she could see the windows of the loft that Charlie Canyon had maintained as Gnos.is’s small public headquarters.
The coroner’s van, apparently not yet burdened with its fare, was parked cockeyed in the street. A handful of men and women, cops mostly, stood around chatting in the glow of swirling red and blue. Every few minutes, someone decked out in the FBI’s navy-blue jackets with yellow lettering emerged from the building carrying computer equipment—hard drives, monitors, routers, CPUs—all tagged and bagged inside translucent pink antistatic pouches. They’d find fingerprints, Kera thought, but not much else. What they were really after was no longer accessible. Based on what Bolívar had described, Canyon had—in his final moments alive—managed to activate the cryptographer’s version of a suicide bomb within those machines, wrapping every bit of sensitive information in an encryption capsule for which there was no key. Like Canyon himself, the data was now irrevocably gone, no longer reachable by any means known to this world.
Kera watched the scene for longer than she needed to, indulging her anger, permitting it to steer her thoughts. What had she expected to achieve by coming here? Proof that it was real, maybe? She
would have to wait, like everyone else, for any useful information about what had happened. Thus far, the police had no leads as to the identity or motive of the suspect.
Her anger showed no signs of subsiding on its own, but eventually she put it at arm’s length in order to focus on something more productive. When she began to think clearly, her first thought was that neither the Feds nor the NSA would have acted in a way that might have caused Canyon to lock that data. Surely the FBI and NSA had been trying mightily for some time to infiltrate the Gnos.is computers in Canyon’s loft—remotely and anonymously—but she didn’t think they were stupid enough to attempt a physical strike against Canyon. The risk was too high that Canyon could destroy what they were looking for—which is exactly what he’d ended up doing.
No, the mortal threat that had forced Canyon to lock all the data must have come from someone else. Who had so much to gain from these murders?
Motivated by a renewed burst of anger, Kera reached for the satellite phone, stepping back from the crowd of people gathered along the police line so her end of the conversation wouldn’t be overheard.
“How high does the body count need to get before you stop publishing?” she said when Bolívar answered.
“Kera. Where are you?”
“Where am I? I’m looking at the fucking van that’s going to haul Charlie’s body to the morgue. That’s where I am. Where are you? Hiding away in a cave? It’s a little hypocritical, don’t you think, for someone who fancies himself a champion of transparency?”
Bolívar had no response.
“Who’s next?” Kera said. He had no right to be silent.
“You can’t possibly think Gnos.is is responsible for these—”
“I thought the common denominator was InspiraCom. But not anymore. Charlie had nothing to do with InspiraCom. Now the only thing all the victims have in common is Gnos.is. You used them as sources, Rafa, and it got them killed. Take down the China story, please, at least until we figure out who’s doing this.”
Because he paused, she thought that maybe he was considering doing just that. But then he said, “Everything in the China story is accurate. It’s verified. If we take it down, how do we answer to that precedent?”
“You answer to it by saying that it will save lives.”
“Will it? And won’t others be lost?”
“Don’t patronize me. This isn’t a philosophical thought experiment.”
“I didn’t commit these murders, Kera, and I didn’t create the world they were committed in. None of us did.”
“You’d feel different about that if it were your own life at stake.”
“Don’t kid yourself. All of our lives are at stake. Yours, mine, Jones’s.” He didn’t say Canyon’s name, but it hung there, implied, in the beat of silence that followed.
“I can take care of myself,” Kera said. “But these other people—the ambassador, Conrad Smith, Vasser—they didn’t choose to risk their lives for your principles.”
“What happened to Vasser?”
“She’s alive, for now. Look, I’m getting off the phone.”
“Kera, wait. Drop this case. Please. We’ll still pay you. Just come back here, or walk away, if you’d rather, but get out now.”
“I can’t do that, Rafa. You’re not the only one with principles.”
When she hung up, she braced for tears. A few months earlier, turning away from him like this would have been more than she could bear. But things had changed.
Kera made it to the bank just before it closed. Access to safety deposit boxes had already ended for the night, but she persuaded a teller that she knew exactly what she wanted. She wouldn’t need more than a minute alone with her box.
Once he left her in the small privacy room, she removed the remaining items from the box: a passport, driver’s license, and credit card under the name Sabina Francis, along with a dozen business cards identifying Sabina Francis as a travel writer. She locked the empty box and thanked the teller again as she left.
In the taxi, Kera watched the clock. A few minutes before nine, she pulled up the number in her contacts, but she didn’t push the “Call” button right away. A minute passed, then another. The taxi was on the freeway, Manhattan behind them. At 9:01 she placed the call. It rang only once before Vasser answered.
“Kera—”
“No names,” Kera said. She knew her satellite phone calls were heavily encrypted when communicating with the other sat phones that Jones had rigged for them. But the burner she’d left for Vasser wasn’t capable of encryption. If Vasser were to call someone she knew from that phone, the burner’s number would turn up in the NSA’s servers. Once they knew your number, they knew where you were. But the last person Vasser had tried to call—Conrad—wound up dead, and Kera didn’t think Vasser would make that mistake again. Kera had to assume the burner was still clean and that the risk of their conversation being overheard was acceptably small.
“What’s happening?” Vasser asked.
The isolation is getting to her, Kera thought. She could hear it in Vasser’s voice. “There’s another victim. A Gnos.is spokesman.”
Vasser hesitated, absorbing this, then abruptly she said, “I need to speak with Ben.”
“No. You can’t do that.”
“They’ll go after him too.”
“I don’t think so,” Kera said, and wasn’t lying. “Ben is fine. The FBI is watching him around the clock.” She lowered her voice to make it unintelligible to the cabdriver. “Listen, do you have any contacts within Chinese intelligence?”
“What? No. I—I wasn’t a spy.”
“I know. But as a diplomat you were certainly an intel target. You must have known that many of the Chinese people you routinely interacted with—politicians, businessmen, and others—were reporting back to the MSS.”
Vasser did not deny this.
“I need a name,” Kera said. “The highest-ranking person in Hong Kong you can think of. Preferably someone you were friendly with. And if you don’t know anyone based in Hong Kong, I’ll make do—”
“No, I do.”
Kera waited. The taxi split off the freeway at the exit for JFK.
“Ren Hanchao,” Vasser said.
The name rang familiar to Kera, an echo of a memory from her casework at the agency three years earlier. It was difficult to confirm these things, but they had suspected that Ren Hanchao was a senior intelligence officer in the Ministry of State Security’s Third Bureau, which covered operations in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. “Ren. Yes, that just might work.”
“What might work?”
Kera ignored the question. She was thinking it was possible that if Ren had performed well as an MSS officer a few years ago, he might now be in a position that reported directly to Feng Xuri, China’s minister of state security.
“Kera, what will happen to him?”
The cab pulled up to the international terminal at JFK, and Kera paid the driver in cash, collecting her duffle from the seat next to her. “You were friendly with Ren?”
“At most, friendly acquaintances. He turned up often, friendly but uninvited, when the ambassador traveled. Will he be harmed?”
Kera took it as a good sign that Vasser was worried about the man’s safety. It meant that Vasser liked him and had perhaps even let him hang around. This was a reflection that Ren had been good at his job. He would be valued within the Ministry of State Security. “Not by me. I’m going to get him a promotion.”
“Is that a PA announcement? Are you at the airport?”
“Listen to me. It’s important now that you don’t know where I am or what I’m going to do. I will check in with you as often as I can. When I do, never say my name and never ask about my location.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Exactly what you’re doing. Stay out of sight.”
LANGLEY
When news of Charlie Canyon’s murder arrived in the ops center, Bright leaned forward and squinted at the big sc
reen. To those who looked to him for orders, he appeared concentrated, perhaps a shade bewildered. Inside, though, he felt an unsettling stillness. Diversion after diversion, from Angela Vasser to Kera Mersal, to Vasser and Mersal, had siphoned their resources away from the real issue—which was whether the Chinese had assassinated Ambassador Rodgers and, if so, why.
And now there was another body. Another likely diversion.
The details from the scene of Canyon’s death, when they finally came from the FBI, served to further justify Bright’s fear that the situation was worse than any of them had imagined. The building’s doorman said an “Asian-looking” man had arrived for a meeting with Canyon. An hour later, the doorman said, he’d watched on his surveillance monitors as the visitor left hastily through a fire exit. After three failed attempts to reach Canyon by phone, the doorman had gone up to the loft to investigate. He’d found the door unlocked and Canyon’s body on the floor behind his desk. He’d been shot twice; apparently there was a lot of blood.
Bright whispered to Henry Liu to assemble the MIRAGE team immediately. When they were all together in a windowless, soundproof conference room, he pulled up the text messages between Feng Xuri and Zhau Linpeng on the conference room’s monitor. Alongside that, he displayed the Gnos.is article linking Hu Lan’s business investments to the Ministry of State Security. “Whatever other leads you’re pursuing, drop them. From now on, we are looking for more evidence of this: that members of China’s intelligence and business communities are behind these murders, beginning with the ambassador’s and stopping, one hopes, with Charlie Canyon’s.”
“With respect, sir, in the absence of clear evidence of that, I don’t buy it,” Judy Huang said. She was Bright’s top expert on Chinese politics and foreign policy. “Beijing has too much to lose by assassinating anyone, especially Americans of this stature. They simply wouldn’t do it.”