The Good Traitor

by Ryan Quinn

  The time stamp at the beginning of the playback said 15:47:13. From the digital clocks that were spaced along the upper portion of the walls, Bright noted that local time in Beijing was now 16:14.

  “Is the session still active?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are they after?”

  “Hard to say, exactly. So far they’ve run a dozen queries targeting the personnel files of Chinese Americans employed by the agency. They’ve already downloaded scores of records—all fake, of course. There is no way they can get actual employee records this way. But there was something strange . . .” Liu pointed to the paused screen, indicating to the tech that he could start the playback. “Watch this. This is what happened immediately after the session was initiated.”

  Bright watched. Within a dozen seconds, his own name was searched for. It returned no results in the spoofed database, and after a few seconds, the intruder moved on to other queries.

  “Any idea what that’s about?” Liu asked.

  “It’s her,” Bright said softly.

  “Sir?”

  “It’s Kera.”

  “Kera Mersal knows about David Cornwell?”

  Bright nodded. “She helped us test it.”

  Liu looked up at the screens again. “What is she up to?”

  “I don’t know. But she’s trying to get our attention.”

  “Sir, the coordinates are holding. The user is in that building,” the technician said, looking up at Bright as if anticipating an order for what to do next.

  “Keep an eye on her,” Bright said quickly. He turned to Liu. “Get me Beijing.”

  Within three minutes, Bright was on the phone with the station chief, who insisted he hadn’t authorized any of his people to engage the David Cornwell backdoor. This only strengthened Bright’s conviction that it was Kera.

  “Could someone else be acting without the knowledge of the Beijing station chief?” Liu asked, still not buying into Bright’s hunch. Liu had been read into the David Cornwell file, but he didn’t know its history the way Bright did. When Bright didn’t reply, Liu turned to the technician. “Show me who else we have in Beijing.” Looking over the man’s shoulder, he scanned the short list. “BLACKFISH. He returned from Shanghai a few days ago.”

  Lionel shook his head. He’d already thought of that. “BLACKFISH doesn’t know about Cornwell.” And then he had another thought. “But maybe he can help us out. See if we can get him on the phone.”

  When they had BLACKFISH on the line and determined he was within a short cab ride from the address, Bright gave him the green light to move in on the coordinates for a closer look.

  “I’m on my way. What am I looking for?” BLACKFISH asked.

  “Someone on a computer,” Bright said. He paused. “A woman on a computer.”

  BEIJING

  Kera was beginning to second-guess her instinct to engage the David Cornwell backdoor. Over the last twenty minutes, she’d watched the Russian download thousands of personnel and other files and save them to a flash drive. She knew they weren’t actually classified, but she also knew that they weren’t infinite. If the Russian bumped up against the limits of the false cache, he would immediately suspect her of tricking him.

  “What’s all this?” she asked, trying to distract him and slow him down. She tapped the monitor that was filled with the rotating surveillance feeds.

  “That’s the building’s security network,” he said, without looking up.

  “Do they know you have access to that?”

  He made a pfft sound with his lips that left no doubt that he thought her question was ridiculous. And still he kept copying files to the flash drive.

  The only time he paused, briefly breaking concentration, was when she moved closer to him so that her arm brushed slowly against his shoulder. He glanced up at her with raised eyebrows, as if to say, “Oh?” And then, with an unappealing little smirk, he returned his eyes to the screen and his fingers resumed their play across the keys.

  To keep herself calm, Kera reasoned that if the network’s backdoor was still open, someone in Langley must be responsible for monitoring it. But how long would a response take? She kept eyeing the rotating black-and-white squares on the surveillance monitor. The lobby, the elevators, the hallways—she saw no sign of anything unusual; no one moving in on their location.

  When she turned back to the Russian’s active screen, her anxiety flared again. He’d stolen the entire personnel database and was now browsing through lists of IP addresses. The IP addresses were spoofed, of course, and didn’t actually correspond to terminals inside the CIA’s Information Operations Center Analysis Group, but she suspected he could discover that quickly. She didn’t want to be around when he realized he’d been duped.

  “You got your personnel files, OK. Now what are you doing?”

  “I’m getting some insurance,” he said, not diverting his eyes from his screen. “I’m impressed by your access. I’ve penetrated isolated areas of unclassified networks at Langley before, but nothing like this.”

  “Look, I didn’t agree to this. It’s time to shut it down.”

  He ignored her. More files streamed into his flash drive.

  She weighed the benefits of taking him out. A strike to the throat would disable him before he knew what was happening, allowing her to escape. But where would that leave her? It would spoil whatever trust she’d earned with the Chinese and dash any hope that she could learn who had killed the ambassador and the others.

  Instead she said, “You going somewhere?”

  “Huh?”

  She nodded at the duffel bag by the couch. “You have this spacious luxury condo, and yet you’re sleeping next to your computers with a go bag packed and ready. Something have you on edge?”

  He grimaced slightly at her remark, but it didn’t bait him into a response.

  She rested a hand on his shoulder and felt him tense. “You never told me what kind of work you do for our Chinese friends,” she said. He didn’t reply. It was time to go for broke. “Would you like me to guess? Say I wanted to hack the flight-management system of an airplane. Would you be someone I could hire?”

  His fingers froze over the keyboard.

  “What about elevator software?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” he said, his voice thin and high with defiance.

  “Are you doing it for the money, for this penthouse apartment? Or is it just a fun challenge?”

  “I would think someone like you would be a little more sympathetic to my cause.”

  “Your cause?”

  He scratched sheepishly at a red blemish on his cheek. “What I’m doing is no different than what you did with the CIA. You were once complicit in their dirty espionage, but eventually you chose your conscience over your career.”

  “Bullshit. You don’t know a thing about my motivations. Besides, nothing I did got innocent people killed.”

  “I didn’t know who would be on the plane. That wasn’t my choice.” She saw that his hands had gone to the edge of the table. His knuckles pulsed white. “It was their choice, and I’ll make them pay for it.”

  “Who?” she said, to keep him talking. She’d managed to pull his focus from the computer tasks, but she still had the feeling she was dealing with a short fuse.

  “Our hosts. China’s MSS—just like the CIA—they think they are better than everyone because they have power and secrets. They censor the Internet or they use it to spy on their citizens. And they support corporations that do the same. Both China and the United States want the same thing: control. They want it too much. They have no right to control the Internet.”

  Kera felt a chill roll through her, not for the idealistic content of his little speech, but for the starkness with which it revealed his naïveté. He’d fallen into the trap of all hackers who become amateur philosophers. He’d glimpsed his own power, power wielded at his fingertips because he had a skill that few had and that so many depended upon, and that had got him
thinking. He thought, inevitably, about right and wrong; he got big ideas about evil governments and corporations. And without realizing it, his own narrow perspective had become his only standard for what was right. And with his computers’ ability to spy, to keep him anonymous, and to attack asymmetrically, how could he not be tempted—not just tempted; he felt justified—to take hostile action every time the world fell short of his vision of what it could be.

  With a clear image in her mind of Ambassador Rodgers and Charlie Canyon and his other victims, she made the decision to grab him by the throat and pry him physically from his weapons. But at that moment one of the surveillance feeds caught her eye.

  BEIJING

  Kera squinted at the black-and-white image on the monitor. A man was jogging down the ramp that descended from the street to the building’s parking garage. Even on the small surveillance feed, he was hard to miss—Caucasian, tall, and thickly built, with a bald head and a goatee. Within seconds, he disappeared into the garage. Did he have a car parked down there, or was he avoiding Ren’s men posted near the lobby entrance? She scanned the other feeds, hoping to pick him up.

  The Russian was watching both Kera and the surveillance monitor with a mixture of confusion and anticipation.

  Before Kera could spot the tall Caucasian on another camera, a second figure appeared on the vehicle ramp in pursuit of the first. She recognized this one—he was one of Ren’s men, one of the two she’d made out on the sidewalk. Shit, Kera thought. Here we go.

  “Shut it down. We have to move,” she said to the Russian while still watching the monitor. The surveillance feeds rotated, and the Caucasian could be seen sprinting up the stairwell, taking each flight in three bounds. A moment later, Ren’s man swung around the railing and into view, looking up as he continued his pursuit. “Come on, let’s go.”

  But the Russian just sat there, either paralyzed or transfixed by the surveillance monitor. He only flinched when the sound of two muffled pops reached them, ringing with a stairwell echo. They both looked instinctively to the door, registering the sounds as gunfire. After a beat, they leapt to action.

  The Russian, now appreciating the threat, yanked the flash drive from his computer and nearly tumbled out of the swivel chair as he pushed it back. Kera took a breath and concentrated on the security-camera images one last time, trying to determine which stairwell the men were in. It was impossible to say. Then the feeds rotated again, giving her two new stairwell views. In one, the Chinese agent who’d followed the intruder was slumped motionless against the wall on a landing. On a lower floor, Ren’s second man had joined the pursuit, ascending the stairs with his weapon drawn cautiously, as though he’d heard the exchange of fire from above. The Caucasian was out of sight.

  When Kera swung around to head for the door, she saw the Russian standing over the bonsai in the corner. He had a laptop under his arm, and he was brushing off a plastic baggie that he’d apparently dug out of the planter’s dirt. She saw him slip whatever had been in the plastic bag into his pants pocket.

  “Come on,” Kera said from the door. This time, the Russian listened. When they were in the hallway, Kera moved toward the nearest stairwell exit. She held a finger over her lips, instructing him not to speak.

  She opened the door in a swift, fluid motion and stuck her head in. There was no visible danger. She paused, listening. At first she could only hear her own heartbeat, so strong it seemed to echo off the walls. Then footsteps. The echo made it difficult to gauge the distance, but she guessed the sound was coming from three or four floors below—and closing fast. She guided the door shut softly and pushed the Russian toward the exit sign at the opposite end of the hall.

  Once she’d checked for footsteps there, and heard nothing, she told the Russian to run as fast as he could and fell into step on the descent behind him. They were both out of breath when they reached the ground floor.

  Kera had intended to descend as far as the parking garage to avoid the lobby doormen, who might have already noticed the carnage under way from the surveillance feeds covering the opposite stairwell. But when she reached ground level, she saw that there was an exterior exit door. She remembered the alleyway that separated the residential tower from the adjacent construction site. This suddenly seemed like a better option than going to the underground parking garage where, if Ren’s men had had a chance to call for backup, she and the Russian might be trapped.

  “Follow me,” Kera said. “Keep moving.”

  She pushed through the door and sprinted straight across the alley, where she slipped between the exposed wall beams of a half-finished structure. She could hear the noise of hammers and saws a few levels above her, but the ground floor where she entered seemed deserted. When the Russian caught up with her inside, she crossed to a doorless threshold and worked her way down a dim hallway, deeper into the construction site. Only about half of the rooms had walls, but from the load-bearing skeleton she guessed that the structure was on its way to becoming a shopping mall.

  Nearing a multistory atrium, the sound of male voices grew louder, even as they were muffled by hissing welders’ torches and screeching power saws. Choosing an opening at random, Kera ducked into an unfinished retail space and motioned for the Russian to continue ahead of her through a door that led to an adjacent stockroom. He did so without thinking. As soon as he was through the threshold, she delivered a leg swipe that connected with the outside of his right ankle, which locked behind his planted left foot. His own forward momentum brought him down, hard, sending the computer clattering to the ground a few feet away. In an instant she was on top of him, using one hand and her shin to pin his hands against his tailbone. Her knee drove into his spine. He hollered in shock and pain and wriggled violently for a few seconds. He was strong for someone who didn’t look like he’d spent much time in the gym, but she’d gained the advantage through surprise. When he stopped struggling, realizing for the moment that it was useless, she reached back with her free hand to begin untying his shoelaces.

  He kicked her away. “No!” he hissed, part panic and part anger.

  She ground her knee into his spine until she forced a mewling sound from him. “Shut up,” she said, “or I’ll snap it. Don’t be an idiot. You’ll get us both killed.”

  She stripped the laces, then suddenly spun atop him and pinned both his arms beneath her knees as she bound his hands behind him with the laces. Without the ability to free an arm for leverage, he could be restrained with just her body weight and a carefully placed knee to his back. He realized this too late, and as she spun back around, he tried again to regain some advantage from her by flailing his shoulders and legs. But once she’d replaced her knee against his spine, he struggled more quietly and without much enthusiasm, as though simply trying to retain a shred of self-respect. Then he fell still but for his heavy breathing.

  Kera looked around. A dozen unused cinder blocks were stacked up just inside the door. Two buckets filled with nails and screws sat against the wall. The small room was one of the few spaces fully enclosed by drywall. She was satisfied that for the moment they were hidden in the shadows.

  “Who were those guys?” the Russian managed to ask, grimacing.

  “Two of them were Ren’s. I’m not sure about the other,” she lied. If the David Cornwell backdoor had worked the way she understood it would, then the tall Caucasian man had been sent by Lionel. His arrival would have been much more welcome had they not been trapped at the top of a fifteen-story building with MSS agents in pursuit. She eyed the Russian’s laptop lying on the ground nearby. She had to get the David Cornwell session up and running again. It would lock in on their location and give Lionel’s man—if he’d made it out of the building—a second chance to get to them.

  She leaned away from the Russian and grabbed the laptop, then rode him out for a moment as he thrashed before realizing that it only made the pain at his spine worse. He gave up on the wasted effort and she opened the computer. This deep inside the construction s
ite, it detected only three open Wi-Fi signals. All of them were weak. She picked one and then abandoned it after it was unable to load a web page. The second one she selected got her online.

  “What’s your name?” she asked the Russian as she typed in the classified URL for the CIA’s remote log-in page. Then she entered “David.Cornwell” in the username field, along with the password.

  “No names,” the Russian said.

  “You know my name.”

  He lay silent beneath her at first, but then reconsidered, perhaps seeing an opportunity to establish enough goodwill to get her off his back.

  “I go by Allegro,” he said softly.

  She rolled her eyes. When she clicked the log-in button to initiate the David.Cornwell session, the screen cleared, as if to load the page, but then it froze on the blank page in a frustrating web limbo. It was difficult to tell whether the operation was laboring under the weak connection or if the Internet link had been dropped altogether.

  Leaving that to resolve itself, she slipped a hand into the Russian’s pants pockets until she felt what she was looking for. She pulled out two flash drives—the standard-looking black one that he’d used to copy the dummy CIA files, and a sturdy carbonate one that she figured had been the object in the baggie he’d dug out of the bonsai planter.

  She flipped the flash drive with the stolen backdoor files to the concrete and reached for one of the loose cinder blocks nearby.

  “Wait!” the Russian protested.

  But she didn’t hesitate. It took only a few seconds to pulverize the plastic storage device to an unrecoverable pile of shards and dust.