by Ryan Quinn
“What do you know about Gnos.is?” Ren asked. His voice was free of tension, full of genuine curiosity.
“The news site? I know that it’s a thorn in the side of the US government,” Kera said.
“Gnos.is is a nuisance to many governments.”
Kera nodded and looked down at her lap. “The classified files that were published a few months ago, the ones about HAWK and the CIA. I uploaded them to Gnos.is. It’s what forced me to flee the United States.”
“I am aware. How did that process work?”
“Leaving the country?”
“No. The files. How did you hand them over to Gnos.is?”
Was he kidding? Kera thought. He had a fugitive CIA operative sitting in front of him and he wanted technical details about file uploads?
Kera shrugged. She explained that submitting documents to Gnos.is was simple: anyone could upload files, anonymously, from any device with an Internet connection. If someone happened to live in a country where Gnos.is was blocked by government censors, there was an e-mail address where sources could send files. Either method of exchange, she continued, took place via an “onion router” that shed the source’s identity and encrypted the data, which was bounced around to several different servers, each one adding an additional onion layer of encryption. These layers could only be peeled away by Gnos.is’s decryption key.
“Did you ever speak to anyone at Gnos.is?” Ren asked.
“No, that wasn’t necessary. In fact, my understanding is that Gnos.is prefers to avoid direct contact with sources, to preserve anonymity.”
“But you do know Rafael Bolívar, the man who runs Gnos.is?”
“I did, yes. And then he . . . disappeared.”
“Yes, I know. Do you know where he is?”
Kera shrugged and shook her head.
“What about your former colleague from HAWK, Mr. Jones?”
“We parted ways. I haven’t heard from him since then. You understand, I’ve been avoiding making contact with anyone.”
“Yes, of course.” Ren was silent for a few moments, and Kera couldn’t tell whether he was weighing her sincerity or simply thinking about what to ask her next. It was apparently the latter. “Does the CIA have an affiliation with Gnos.is?”
Kera nearly laughed. “No. The CIA and NSA have tried for years to understand Gnos.is’s operations. But as far as I know, no one knows where Gnos.is’s servers are located. Gnos.is had an office in Manhattan. But two days ago . . .”
“Yes, we are aware of the death of Charlie Canyon.”
There was a knock at the door, and Ren excused himself and stepped out of the room. He returned a minute later.
“If you’ll indulge me, Ms. Mersal, there is someone I would like you to meet.”
She was blindfolded again for the first fifteen minutes of the drive, and then Ren told her she could uncover her eyes. Blinking against the afternoon light, she could see that they were in a town car and had moved into the city. The driver was a plainclothes guard she recognized from the safe house. Ren was beside her in the backseat.
Between a gap in buildings, Kera caught a glimpse of Beijing National Stadium, venue of the awe-inspiring and highly nationalistic opening ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics. Nicknamed the Bird’s Nest for its thatched-metal exterior, Kera thought the building resembled a giant silver saddle in profile. Using the stadium as a landmark, she pictured a map of the city to get her bearings. They were on the north side of Beijing, just outside the Fourth Ring Road, the outermost of the “ring roads” that, like the DC Beltway, encircled the capital.
The car advanced through traffic in painfully short bursts. Kera sensed Ren was growing impatient. Then, without warning, the car pulled to the side of the road, partially blocking the crowded bike lane that flowed along many of Beijing’s streets.
Ren suddenly had an envelope in his hand. He set it on her leg and explained that it contained the address and a key for her new apartment. There was also five thousand yuan inside, “for the cab fare,” he said, not actually with a wink but in that way. Ren looked across the car, out Kera’s window, and nodded at a modern residence tower across the street.
“The man you will meet with is in apartment number 1501. The penthouse suite,” Ren said. “He will give you instructions.”
“Instructions?” Kera raised her eyebrows defiantly to remind him that they’d agreed she wasn’t to be ordered around.
Ren held up his hand as if to allay her concern. “You understand, there are certain procedures we all must endure, to establish our partnership. To build goodwill. If this goes well, it will make things easier for you in China.”
Kera looked out the window, her mind ticking through a checklist of precautions. The building was large enough that there would be fire exits on each side, she guessed. A vehicle ramp descended from the street and disappeared into a subterranean parking garage. On the other side, a narrow alley served as a buffer between the tower and a sprawling construction site. Dozens of men under hard hats swarmed towers of scaffolding, spread concrete, and guided beams lowered from cranes.
“If what goes well?” Kera asked, turning back to him.
“You will see. He will present you with a task, and you will understand its importance,” he said with a note of finality. His gaze shifted from the building back to her. Kera could tell there was something else. She waited. “I have another request, which you must not discuss with the man you will meet. You are to please encourage him to confide in you. I don’t think it will be very difficult. He studied for a few years in America, and he speaks English very well. But he is not trained like you in human intelligence, and”—Ren paused, trying to find an appropriate phrase—“well, he has not seen an American woman in a very long time.”
“What do you want to know about him?”
Ren smiled. “The same thing we want to know about you. We want to know if he’s playing both sides.”
BEIJING
Kera got out of the car and did not look back. The air was muggy, drawing perspiration to her face and neck almost immediately. As she crossed the street to the building’s entrance, she picked out two of Ren’s men, one browsing magazines at a sidewalk kiosk, the other loitering near the alley. They were dressed in plain clothes, like Ren’s driver, but their positions were deliberate, out of step with the march of other pedestrians.
The building’s air-conditioned luxury hit Kera as soon as she stepped through the lobby’s revolving glass doors. Two doormen, laughing together by a reception desk, snapped to attention when they saw her. She announced herself as a visitor to number 1501. One of the men gestured toward the elevators after calling up to confirm the resident was at home.
Kera’s breath caught as the elevator accelerated skyward, and she had to remind herself that her fear was irrational. Her Chinese hosts wouldn’t have wasted their time giving her a polygraph test if they intended to drive her across town and drop her down an elevator shaft. But rational knowledge didn’t feel very relevant to her so long as she was trapped in a box hanging by cables from a fifteen-story building. Exhaling as the doors finally parted, she wondered if she’d ever feel safe in elevators again.
Apartment 1501 was easy to find. There were only two units on the fifteenth floor, separated by the length of a short hallway. At either end of the hall was an exit door that led to a stairwell. As she approached 1501, she could hear loud electronic dance music coming from behind the door. She knocked. Then she rapped harder and in counterpoint to the bass thump from inside.
Until she’d heard the loud music, she’d been expecting to meet a middle-aged Chinese man, another of Ren’s type. But the person before her when the door opened was a waifish, pasty Caucasian. And he was young, very young. They stared at each other for a long moment.
“Hello,” he said, stepping back to let her in. He seemed to realize then that the music was too loud. He rushed over to the kitchen’s bar counter and tapped at a tablet screen. The music faded.
They were standing between the dining area and what Kera assumed was meant to be a living room with sweeping views of the city. Instead, every drape had been pulled across the windows to block out the sunlight. The large dining table had been shoved into the middle of the room. On its surface, six computer monitors formed an inward-facing semicircle in front of a swivel desk chair. A closed laptop lay near four empty cans of Red Bull that were lined up on the table’s edge, as if for target practice. She drew her gaze around the rest of the room. A commercial-grade server tower sat on the far side, where a bookcase might have been. On a stand in the corner was a sparse bonsai plant in a large ceramic pot. A blanket and pillow were bunched on the couch as if the young man slept there often, though the twitchy glaze in his eyes made her think he didn’t sleep much—or at least that he hadn’t slept much lately. She noted the duffel bag on the floor by the couch, unzipped, revealing clothes and toiletries within.
The young man scratched at the matted hair on one side of his head. For a moment he saw the apartment through her eyes and appeared to be debating whether it was too late to straighten the place up a bit. Finally, he gestured to one of the tall kitchen barstools.
“You can sit down,” he said, dropping into his chair and swiveling his back to the computers so he could face her. He spoke with a Russian accent. For a moment he studied her with wide eyes, as if still in disbelief at what he was seeing. “When they told me they were sending someone who could help me access the CIA’s personnel database, I thought they were kidding.” Despite his accent, he had a confident ease with English. He wasn’t a native speaker in the traditional sense, but English was the predominant language of the Internet, which she guessed was his only real home. Ren, she remembered, had said he’d gone to school in the States.
“That’s what they want?” she asked. “Access to Langley?”
“They already know I can access Langley—parts of the network, anyway.” He shrugged, not at all rattled by the implications of the request. “What they really want to know is whether you can.” He looked up at her. “Whether you will.”
Kera understood now. They were testing her, just as Ren said they would. She could guess what they hoped to learn from this test: whether she was actually willing to cooperate with them, and what sort of intelligence she was capable of providing.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“No names.” The young man shook his head. “But I am not one of them.”
“One of whom?”
“Our crafty Chinese hosts,” he said, turning to his keyboard.
His tone was derogatory, which surprised her. “You’ve clearly earned their trust—and then some,” she said, admiring his penthouse full of hacker toys.
“No, not trust. They are too smart for that. But they happen to be in the unenviable position of needing something that I can provide.”
She glanced up at the light fixture on the ceiling, which was dark. “You aren’t worried that they’re watching?”
“No. Though I’m sure they are worried about why they can’t see and hear us. Eventually they’ll figure out they’re not just having technical difficulties. But for now, it’s just us.” He resumed typing on the keyboard.
She stood and moved closer to him, studying his monitors. Three of them were lit. Two displayed lines of neon text on a black background, evidence that he’d been programming. The other lit screen displayed what looked like the building’s closed-circuit surveillance feeds. Black-and-white squares glowed with rotating images of the stairwells, lobby, hallways, elevator banks, and parking garage.
The Russian lit up a fourth monitor and began typing. She was close enough now to see the URL he entered in the address bar of an Internet browser. When the page loaded, Kera felt her chest tighten. She stared at the screen. It was the CIA’s secure remote log-in site.
“That URL is classified,” she whispered. “How did you get it?”
“Please,” he said dismissively. He stood and stepped aside, leaving the chair free for her.
“Do you know who I am?” she asked.
“Of course.” His grin exposed crooked teeth; one had gone yellow.
“Then you know I was terminated from the agency. I can’t just log in anymore.” But she couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. It triggered a pang of nostalgia for a time when entering her username and password on this site was part of her daily routine.
Skepticism darkened his eyes. “I think our hosts expected that you might have other, more creative ways of getting in. But if not . . .” He made a move to sit down again.
“Wait,” Kera said. She reached out and gripped his thin forearm. They were testing her. If they were looking for a sign that she was willing to meet the challenge, she could give them that. The cursor blinked at her from the username field. Her only hesitation was over the risk that it might not work. What would Ren do with her if he decided she was less valuable than he’d expected? And then: What if it did work? That might be the riskiest outcome of all.
Kera sat down in the Russian’s chair. Resting her fingers on the keys, she entered “David.Cornwell” into the username field and then paused, probing the ephemeral reaches of her long-term memory in an attempt to retrieve the password. She’d memorized hundreds of PINs and passwords, phone numbers, addresses, and authentication phrases—that had been part of her job. This particular username-password combination had been set up a good three years earlier. “David.Cornwell” was a handle that the agency’s Information Operations Center had created to test an experimental counterintelligence tactic—a false backdoor into the network that they could dangle in front of malicious hackers. Kera had participated in simulations for the IOC program, but she’d never actually had the opportunity to use the false backdoor in the field. It was possible—likely, even—that the David Cornwell backdoor had been closed and the username and password scrapped.
She typed in the numbers and letters as she recalled them and hit the “Enter” key. The agency’s internal landing page appeared immediately.
The young Russian leaned forward. “Who is David Cornwell?”
Kera could not suppress a smile. “Just an old colleague who was careless with his passwords.” Her fingers had started moving again. She navigated into the agency’s searchable personnel database, which is what the young Russian had claimed was their target. But she didn’t stop there. She clicked on the search bar and entered Lionel Bright’s name.
“What are you doing?” the Russian said, wising to her determined keystrokes.
“I’m spying. Did you have something else in mind?”
He eyed her strangely. “Let me see that,” he said, and she got up so he could take over.
LANGLEY
A ringing woke Bright. He stirred, confused at first about why Karen wasn’t beside him in the bed, and then about the source of the disruption. Karen hadn’t stayed over, he remembered. He rolled onto his side to reach for his work phone on the nightstand. The clock said it was 3:50 AM.
“What is it?” Bright said.
“Remember David Cornwell?” It was Henry Liu.
Through the fog of half sleep, it took Bright a moment to clarify why that name was familiar. He swung his legs off the mattress and found the floor. “Are you at the office?”
“On my way there now. It might be nothing. Want me to call you back when I have a better idea?”
The still-asleep part of Bright did want that. But he already knew that wasn’t possible. The full context of those words—“David Cornwell”—became clearer every second. If this
was for real, it needed to be monitored in real time.
“No. I’ll meet you there.”
“Let’s clear the room, please,” Bright said, wide-awake now as he breezed into the ops center. The room was half-full. The overnight shift usually presented the best opportunity for analysts and surveillance techs—who often had lower security clearances—to get routine work done, as opposed to regular business hours when higher-ups came crashing into the room, barking at people to leave every time they got the idea that they needed to watch a live satellite picture of a terrorist. “You, stay.” Bright pointed at one of the satellite techs he’d worked with before. “And you too, Hank. Everyone else get up and walk out.” When they were gone, he asked Liu to start at the beginning.
“The session was initiated at 1547 hours local time. In Beijing, that is.”
Bright’s pulse spiked as the tech put up a live satellite image of China’s capital. He knew the city well from this perspective.
“Our geolocation sats put the access point at this address,” Liu said, nodding at a red circle superimposed over the image. He did not need to explain to Bright that the accuracy of the satellites ran within a few meters. “It’s a fifteen-story residential building. Vertical positioning is less accurate, but most likely the user is on an upper floor.”
Bright nodded, but he’d turned his attention to the adjacent screen, which displayed a freeze-frame image of the CIA’s remote log-in page. “Is this a record of the activity?” he asked.
“Yep. Cued up to the moment the Cornwell session was activated.”
Access to large swaths of the CIA’s nongapped network—that is, the CIA computers that had not been separated from the Internet—via the David Cornwell username and password had been a highly classified experimental counterintelligence effort, rolled out a few years back by the Information Operations Center. It was designed to look like a backdoor to a mix of classified and unclassified sensitive files that would serve as a honeypot to lure hackers. In fact, the actual cache accessible through the backdoor was a mix of publicly available data and completely fabricated misinformation. Meanwhile, any session initiated through the David Cornwell backdoor triggered an alert in Langley, where analysts could pinpoint the location of the session and view the intruder’s activity in real time without them knowing.