The Good Traitor (14 page)

C
APITOL
H
ILL

One by one, twenty men and four women checked their smartphones at a bank teller–like window outside of Hart Senate Office Building 219. They proceeded through soundproofed double doors that led to a bland room, which had been swept twenty minutes earlier for eavesdropping devices. Behind the beige walls, steel casing prevented electromagnetic transmissions from escaping, and special panels absorbed and retained sound vibrations generated within the chamber. These walls could not talk.

Hart 219 was a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility—a SCIF—and it was the primary venue for closed hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Like most SCIFs, Hart 219 displayed no architectural flourishes, nothing to detract from the room’s main purpose: to keep secrets.

This was the third time in a week that the members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had assembled for an emergency hearing with an all-too-familiar purpose: to evaluate the damage caused by a new intelligence leak. Overnight, Gnos.is had published a CIA report that cataloged, in devastating detail, the projected cyberespionage and cybersecurity capabilities of US intelligence agencies over the next five years.

The committee members, led by Chairman Larry Wrightmont, the senior Republican from Montana, sat in a horseshoe formation on a platform overlooking a witness table. Today’s witnesses included CIA Director Tennison, bitter over another of his agency’s classified initiatives coming to light before it could yield any measure of success; the NSA director, furious that the new leak might leave key infrastructure and other targets more vulnerable to a major cyberattack; the deputy secretary of state, confused and defensive, if less brazen ever since Angela Vasser—one of their own—had been charged with espionage; and FBI Director Ellis, caught off guard by the occurrence of a new leak while their lead suspect for the first was in custody.

“You’re claiming, Director Ellis, that this woman, Angela Vasser, may also be responsible for this new leak?” Wrightmont asked, addressing the FBI man. “That she’s, what, sending classified reports telepathically to journalists from her prison cell?” Closed hearings were often less scripted and more frank than the grandstanding on display at televised public hearings.

“She could have had the foresight to put the new report in a time-release file. Or she might have given a journalist the password to access it. She also might have a confederate.”

“In which case there could be still more leaks to come?”

“That is our concern, Chairman.”

“This woman was not cleared to Top Secret/SCI,” Wrightmont pressed. “She’s been on the ground in Beijing for two years. How did she get her hands on this intelligence she’s alleged to have leaked?”

“Actually, today’s leak may have provided a clue about that,” Ellis said. “The main focus of the story published today by Gnos.is is the very sensitive IKE program, which you are all familiar with.” IKE was a massive classified program, headed by the Department of Homeland Security, which had been charged with modernizing the nation’s cyberinfrastructure, from water and power grids to fiber-optic Internet cables. IKE was still in its infancy—studies were being done, models were being tested on computers, bids from telecom and software companies were being evaluated. “The report that Gnos.is published includes the names of several private contractors hired to consult on IKE. One of them is Conrad Smith.”

“This is the man Vasser was having an affair with?” Wrightmont asked. H
e’d
grazed the Gnos.is story but hadn’t had time to digest the full leaked report.

“Correct.”

“But hold on. The e-mail exchange between Vasser and Smith discussed TERMITE, not IKE. How did they get access to TERMITE?”

“We’re working on that,” Ellis said.

Chairman Wrightmont shook his head. “What has she said about this?”

“Vasser? She denies it, of course. But the evidence suggests otherwise,” Ellis said.

“The evidence being the e-mails published last week?”

“Yes, those. And now the affair has new significance. You’ve seen the transcripts. Our agents spent hours and hours questioning this woman. She’s hiding something. I’m confident the case we build against her will be quite devastating.”

“OK, OK,” Wrightmont said. He sounded skeptical but wanted to get on with his day. “Before we excuse you, can you make a prediction about the ultimate scope of this intelligence breach? Have we seen the worst of these leaks, or is this only the beginning?” The senator had put this same question to each of the hearing’s witnesses, and, like the others, FBI Director Ellis confessed that he simply didn’t know. Wrightmont was one of the few people in the world who knew the combined budget of the US intelligence community, which was a figure that could only be discussed inside a SCIF like Hart 219. More mind-boggling than that multibillion-dollar figure was that none of these so-called intelligence agencies could provide even an educated guess about the extent of a leak supposedly caused by a junior diplomat.

At the hearing’s conclusion, the senators collected their smartphones and returned to the outside world to find their secretaries’ phone lines jammed with calls from angry constituents—a harsh reminder that the world had carried on without them for the last few hours. Another, particularly stinging reminder of that was the breaking news that Senator Wrightmont discovered when he was reunited with his phone. A judge had ruled that, given the new leak, the evidence in support of detaining Angela Vasser was now insufficient. She would be released, though not permitted to leave the District of Columbia, pending the outcome of the FBI’s investigation.

“Should I cancel your lunch?” Senator Wrightmont’s secretary asked.

Wrightmont’s first instinct was to say yes; the hearing had already busted the day’s schedule. Lately, every trip he made into that vacuum chamber left him less certain that what the intelligence boys were telling him made sense. At the beginning of the week, h
e’d
been assured that the first leak, while irritating, had been contained with the arrest of Angela Vasser. But now he got the sense that this scandal was far from over. It would be wise to play the long game.

“No. Let’s not overreact. We’ll carry on as usual.”

Senator Larry Wrightmont browsed no fewer than five of the major news sites daily, though he never admitted this to anyone. Outwardly he carried himself as though he was above the horse race, impervious to the Beltway’s chattering class, which manufactured, reported on, and talked about “news” in a wonderfully amusing—and profitable—closed system. For three terms the senator’s above-the-fray act had worked. As a reward, he was the horse his constituents bet on, and the Beltway press corps seemed an agreeable coconspirator, rarely calling to attention the fact that in a race of ruthless horses, the indifferent one never wins—certainly not three times in a row.

This careful image crafting was an example of one of Washington’s open secrets, and trafficking in such secrets was a skill at which the senator excelled. In his freshman years in the Senate, his abilities on this front had blossomed in ways that surprised even him. Now, like any instinct, it was difficult for him not to take his political talents for granted. Washington was a game; secrets were the play money. Each secret gained or lost value like a stock depending on its moment-to-moment relevance. If one hoped to succeed at this game, reading the news was necessary due diligence.

Wrightmont’s habit was to read on his tablet, which he scrolled through constantly in the car. It had been years since h
e’d
actually sat idle and watched the capital’s streets roll by. This afternoon—it was just past noon—he told his driver the name of a familiar restaurant and began to read as the car picked its way up Massachusetts Avenue. The
Post
, the
Times
, the
Journal
,
Politico
—they all reported essentially what h
e’d
spent all morning being told by the intelligence directors: that an anonymous leaker, leaving no clue as to his or her rank, location, or motive, had acquired and released in full a collection of detailed briefs about cyberespionage and cybersecurity programs in both operational and planning stages. The competing page-one story in all cases announced the abrupt release of Angela Vasser, who had as of yet made no statement to the press, a fact that only encouraged pundits to debate the plausibility of her innocence.

The car was stopped at a light when a sudden, sharp rapping on Wrightmont’s window brought his head up with a snap. Before he could register the source of the sound, he confronted something even more alarming—a black handgun within the car, at eye level, a foot from his face. It took him a moment to comprehend that the hand gripping the gun belonged to his driver and that the weapon was pointed at a figure standing in the street outside his window. Wrightmont had known, intellectually, that his driver carried a firearm, but seeing it for the first time shook him more than h
e’d
have anticipated it might. Keeping his eyes on the weapon, he managed a dismissive gesture at the beggar, forgetting that the window was heavily tinted. The figure did not move. Finally, Wrightmont got a real look at the man and saw what the driver had seen all along—that this was no beggar. The man was in his late fifties, five years younger than Wrightmont, but tours of duty in his youth had long ago collected debts beneath his eyes, around the corners of his mouth, and in rings on his thick neck. He wore a long jacket over a sharp suit.

“It’s OK, Jordan,” the senator said to the driver. The gun finally vanished. Wrightmont rolled down his window. “Hi, Rick.” He tried to remember the last time h
e’d
seen Rick Altman. There had been a black-tie event six months earlier, at which the
y’d
spoken briefly. He couldn’t remember about what. The
y’d
shared a couple of lunches over the past few years, and the senator had let Altman express his opinions on one bill or another. Altman was in defense, the private sector. The profit sector.

“Mind if I get in?” Altman said.

Wrightmont felt his driver tense again. The light changed and the car behind them honked. The driver was responsible for the senator’s physical safety. But what about his political well-being? Within a fraction of a second, the instinct that gave function to Wrightmont’s political organs weighed the risk of being caught with a defense contractor in an illicit conversation against the potential to gain an information advantage over his political adversaries. Calmly, he asked the driver to unlock the doors as he slid over to make room for Altman.

“What’s this about?” Wrightmont asked when Altman had settled in beside him and shut the door.

“Her,” said Altman. He thrust one thick finger at the tablet, which Wrightmont had forgotten since the firearm had made its appearance. The tablet was still illuminated, resting on the senator’s lap. The photo on the screen was of Angela Vasser.

W
ASHINGTON
, DC

Using cash provided to her by Bolívar for expenses, Kera bought an Acela ticket from Penn Station to DC.

She had intended for New York to be a forty-eight-hour working layover on her way to Paris, where she planned to examine the elevator software of that city’s most modern hotel. She hadn’t made plans beyond that. Perhaps a trip to South Africa would be advantageous if Conrad Smith, the contractor whose name had turned up in the FBI transcripts as well as in the latest leak of classified files, began to figure into her investigation.

The trip to Washington had been an urgent, last-minute addition to her itinerary. Before leaving New York, sh
e’d
gone to the Midtown bank where, months earlier, sh
e’d
rented a safety deposit box. From the box, she retrieved documents that supported two of the three aliases Kera had established after it became clear that HAWK was going to implode and she better prepare for the worst. She chose the first alias, Nina Salazar, figuring that sh
e’d
need a valid credit card while in DC. She retrieved the driver’s license, passport, and credit card of the second alias, Abigail Dalton, as a safety net in case something went wrong. The documents for the third alias remained locked in the bank; she would need them when she was ready for international travel.

Kera had deliberated with herself whether dipping into the aliases was a good idea. Her resources were finite. But once the opportunity presented itself and lodged in her head, she knew she had to give it a try.

At first she did not tell Bolívar or Jones that her plans had changed. She didn’t need their input and didn’t want them to worry. But while reading Gnos.is on the train, she stumbled upon a new story related to Angela Vasser’s arrest and release. At first it appeared to be only a tangential thread. But then she read more, and before long it consumed her.

By the time the train glided to rest at Union Station, she had messaged Jones with a request. It took him twenty minutes—the time it took her to check into a hotel—to pack a zip drive full of background material on Vasser’s partner Ben Welk and her apparent lover Conrad Smith and encrypt it in a message back to her. If Jones was curious about her motive for the request, he didn’t say so, and she didn’t ask him how h
e’d
acquired all the files. It was almost like old times, Kera thought, remembering the months the
y’d
shared working together on HAWK.

Seated at the small hotel-room table in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood where sh
e’d
lived when she worked at Langley, she plowed through the files from Jones. After three hours of searching, she identified her opening.

At dusk two evenings later, a car driven by Ben Welk came out of the subterranean parking garage of a residential building near the Georgetown University Medical Center. Angela Vasser was in the passenger seat. Though Kera had had no one to wager against, she would have bet that Vasser would be with Welk tonight. Sh
e’d
prepared for either eventuality—that Vasser would accompany her partner to the keynote gala of a conference on neurology and ethics, at which Welk was being honored for research h
e’d
recently published, or that Vasser would stay home and continue to avoid the media and other inquisitors. The latter option presented a more difficult approach for Kera; surely the agency and the bureau had redundant teams watching the condo, which would make knocking on the embattled diplomat’s door risky. But after reading the transcripts from Vasser’s FBI interrogation at SFO, Kera was beginning to understand that Angela Vasser was not the kind of woman who liked to be confined to house arrest, not by members of the press or the Justice Department or anyone else.

In anticipation, Kera had used the Nina Salazar credit card to purchase tickets to the gala—two, as Salazar would need a husband for the evening, at least on paper—an outfit for the black-tie affair, and a hotel room just one floor above the relevant ballroom. A good cover wasn’t cheap. At $1,000 a plate, this one was getting absurd. As a result, a disconcerting feeling had begun to taint all of her preparations: doubt. Was this diversion a mistake? The decision to come to DC seemed more and more like one she would have vetoed had she thought it through more carefully. But now she was here. The money was spent. The Nina Salazar alias was activated. Walking away would only guarantee that all of it had been a waste.

She entered the hotel a few minutes before the Welk-Vasser couple, dressed in an elegant but conservative navy-blue dress that sh
e’d
chosen because it was plain and would not stand out. Kera pulled up short at the sign in the lobby directing gala attendees to a ninth-floor ballroom. A few smartly dressed couples had gathered at a bank of elevator doors, waiting. She looked back. Still no sign of Vasser or Welk. When Kera had entered the lobby, the couple’s car had been fifth in line for the hotel’s valet. Kera had beaten the crowd by leaving her rental car with the valet at an Italian restaurant across the street.

A chime drifted across the lobby. Kera turned back to see the couples shuffle through the elevator’s sliding doors. “Hold, please,” she heard herself say, doubling her steps to catch them. One of the men noticed her and held the door ajar with his forearm. With only a slight hesitation that none of the other passengers noticed, Kera willed herself into the car. Even though Washington’s zoning laws did not permit skyscrapers, the terror of falling even a handful of stories in a metal box came sharply into focus. The doors slid together with a whisper behind her. Kera eyed the panel of buttons. The number 9 was already illuminated. She noted that the hotel had fourteen floors. Her center lurched as they were lifted skyward.

When the chime came again, the doors parted to a spacious lobby filled with black suits and colorful dresses cascading from bare shoulders. Kera planted her pumps, one after the other, on the firm tile floor and stepped forward to a podium where a young woman with a headset matched the name Kera provided with one on the guest list. Kera told the woman that her husband would be coming late. Then she slipped into the near fringes of the crowd where she could keep an eye on new arrivals.

Several minutes passed and she began to worry that she might run out of plausible ways to look occupied standing alone. She took a short loop through the crowd, eyeing the elevators from a distance and growing more anxious each time a pair of doors parted and the handsome neurologist and tall, striking black woman did not emerge.

And then finally they did.

Kera folded herself into the crowd, ordered a club soda and lime from the bar, and stayed out of sight for the remainder of the cocktail hour. When the announcement for dinner came, she had planted herself across the room from Vasser, whose posture beside Welk was as elegant as her silk red dress. The event came off as preposterous to an outsider like Kera, with its hordes of scientists, disproportionately male—and none of them much to look at. Ben Welk, with his dark hair and earnest eyes, was a startling exception to this—even more so in person than in the dozens of photos sh
e’d
studied. And Vasser, against all odds, seemed to be enjoying herself. She must have been aware of how everyone in the room eyed her, either with suspicion or simply as amusing ballast to the tedious business of academic research. And yet she carried herself with a warm composure, revealing her bone-white smile in strategic bursts, like muzzle flashes that might cut down her critics. Kera couldn’t help but feel a growing respect, even fondness, for her.

The first opportunity for an approach came at the en masse transition to the ballroom for dinner. Kera had predicted that this would be a logical time for Vasser to use the restroom, given that sh
e’d
be occupied in Welk’s spotlight for the remainder of the evening. Kera’s heart quickened in anticipation. But then she saw Vasser eye the sudden line at the ladies’ room and decide to wait. There was a brief moment when Welk and Vasser were separated—enough of an opening that Kera might have pulled Vasser aside before she could enter the ballroom. But she was acutely aware that the moment of making contact was the point of no return. As the moment presented itself, her confidence, as if on a roller coaster, plummeted into a valley, leaving her stomach in the lurch. She watched Vasser work her way into the ballroom and toward her seat near the front. Kera exhaled and then began the project of talking her courage back up. It was better to wait anyway, she told herself. This would go much more smoothly if she could get the diplomat alone.

Kera found her place at the table sh
e’d
been assigned to in a far corner of the chandeliered room. There was a salad course, during which Kera was forced into small talk with her tablemates. She made apologies for her tardy husband, who she said was on the editorial board of
Nature
magazine and had been waiting for the right time to run a feature on what neuroscience might contribute to our understanding of ethics. This explanation had its desired effect; the scientists around her were more comfortable discussing their own work with each other and, beyond a dull instinct for common courtesy, had no use for the spouse of an absent editor who worked for a nonacademic journal. They left her alone.

The windup to the keynote began with a series of remarks made by distinguished researchers and fund-raisers in the field. The moment Kera was waiting for came after the conclusion of a garrulous welcome speech made by a chair of some committee, his cheeks rosy from the cocktail hour. Vasser stood and made her way from the honorees’ table to the back of the room. After a few moments, Kera excused herself and followed her toward the lobby restroom.

This time her confidence did not waiver. Delaying her entrance until she heard a flush and the closing of a stall door, Kera stepped through a short corridor that opened to a long, eight-stall affair with generous lighting and baskets of cloth towels. Vasser was leaning over a distant sink, looking directly at herself in the mirror as she rinsed her hands. They were alone. Kera wasn’t going to get a better shot than this.

Removing her wig as she walked, Kera moved toward Vasser, shaking out her hair. She stopped a few paces from the diplomat, making herself obvious but leaving an unthreatening gap between them. Vasser looked at her in the mirror, making eye contact, and then tried to look away, as if to telegraph that she wasn’t interested in a conversation. But then her eyes flicked back with a glimmer.

“Do you know who I am?” Kera said. Vasser would have been overseas during Kera’s and Jones’s first few weeks as fugitives—traitors—when images of them had permeated the airways and the front pages of newspapers worldwide. The story had amused Beijing; state-run news outlets had devoted hundreds of hours and column inches to portraying the missing Americans as defectors with anticapitalist motives. Vasser surely would have remembered the coverage.

“What do you want?” Vasser said.

“I rented a room one floor up. Can you get away to talk with me in private?”

“Certainly not.” She reached for a towel and worked it quickly over her hands. “Excuse me.”

Kera had rehearsed contingencies in the event that Vasser would decline her invitation. She appreciated in full now what had come through in the FBI transcripts as a feature of Vasser’s personality: decisive and direct, no bullshit. Vasser wasn’t bluffing; she was about to walk out. Just like that, Kera was forced to deploy her contingency of last resort. “The plane crash was a hit.”

Vasser stopped at the exit and turned. “A hit?”

“An assassination. And I think you—”

“I’ve been accused of a lot of unflattering things,” Vasser interrupted. She looked Kera up and down with new disgust. “But that’s a new one. And from you, of all people—”

“No, you misunderstand me. I think you might have been the target.”

Vasser hesitated, her eyes locked on Kera’s, examining them closely for the first time.

“Both of you. You and the ambassador,” Kera said.

Now only genuine confusion. “Why?”

“Was there anything unusual about your trip to Shanghai?”

“Nothing as unusual as what’s happening right now,” Vasser said, remembering herself.

“If there was a better way to approach you, I would have tried it. Give me twenty minutes. Please.”

“That’s impossible. What do you want?”

“I want to find out who murdered the ambassador—and who intended to murder you too.”

“This is crazy. You know I can’t talk to you.”

“I don’t think you leaked those files. Even if you had access to TERMITE, why expose yourself by mentioning it in an e-mail sent to a man you would see face-to-face a few days later? It doesn’t make sense.” Vasser didn’t respond, but Kera could tell that this had won her some extra time. “You saw Conrad Smith while you were in Shanghai. In the FBI interrogation you were never asked whether you knew why he was in town. Do you?”

“He has nothing to do with this.”

“I’m just asking. The way it looks right now, you were blowing apart a top-secret CIA op around the same time you conveniently missed the flight that killed the ambassador. I kind of like your whole tough-girl act, but it’s missing a few simple answers about how all this might have happened.”