The Good Traitor (15 page)

Vasser’s eyes narrowed. “I hope the investigation answers your questions. I can’t.”

“The investigation? That’s what you’re waiting for?”

“I have to trust that the justice system will sort it out.”

Kera shook her head. “I thought the same thing, and look where it’s gotten me. This goes way beyond the justice system.”

“I’m here, aren’t I? I’m no longer in a cell.”

“That’s true, but you might have been safer on the inside.”

“I need to get back. I think I’ve indulged your intrusion into my evening for long enough.”

“Wait.” Kera held out a slip of paper. “If you change your mind, that’s how you can reach me.” Vasser eyed the note suspiciously, and then, to Kera’s surprise, she took it. “Be careful.”

“‘Be careful’? Are you threatening me? What is that supposed to mean?”

“Stay out of airplanes and elevators.” Now it was Kera who walked away, arranging the wig hastily over her real hair.

“Elevators?”

“My note, Ms. Vasser,” she said, nodding back at the slip of paper. “Read it.” From the restroom she walked directly to the stairwell and descended the nine floors on foot.

Outside, she did not cross to the valet where sh
e’d
left her car. Instead, she walked three blocks to a garage where sh
e’d
parked a different car that sh
e’d
rented under a different name. She was outside of the District before the keynote, “The Moral Brain and the Illusion of Free Will,” concluded to lengthy applause.

L
ANGLEY

Bright ran her phone number. He had told himself that he wasn’t going to do that. Not until things between him and Karen—whom h
e’d
only known as Audrey—got serious.
If
they got serious. He didn’t know yet what he wanted, but he knew better than to sabotage his relationship with this woman before he gave it a real chance. The problem was that ever since the unexpected parting conversation h
e’d
shared with Karen/Audrey at the restaurant, his curiosity had been driving him mad.

Running her cell phone number through the system only confused him further. The number was a match to an Audrey Potter of Arlington, Virginia. In the career field, the system noted that she was a registered lobbyist.

Then what had been the point in telling him her name was Karen and that she wasn’t a lobbyist?

Bright could think of one more resource at his disposal—and it too was one that the average person didn’t have in his arsenal of online-stalking tools. Overriding his guilt, he scrolled through her dating-site profile, singling out clear photos of her face. He selected three and downloaded them onto a flash drive, which he took downstairs with him to the ops center.

“You got a second?” Bright asked one of the familiar technicians. Because so many of the agency’s surveillance targets had multiple identities, they had developed a database—or, more accurately, a network of databases—designed to sort out these webs of aliases and true identities.

“Got anything more than this?” the tech asked after h
e’d
opened the flash drive and found that it contained only three JPEG files.

“No, just the photos.”

The tech shrugged. “Well, that’ll keep it pretty straightforward.” What he meant was that he had only one option: facial-recognition analysis.

The facial-recog search was complete in a matter of seconds. Unsurprisingly, there was a positive match for Audrey Potter. The familiar phone number, address, Social Security number, and career information came up. But there was also a second hit: Karen Lessing. Bright stared at the screen. It was her. Karen Lessing was her name. Her real name. But the database wasn’t much help beyond that. The most recent updated field noted Karen Lessing’s graduation from a UCLA doctoral program in neuroscience—three decades earlier. There was no employer after that, no current address, nothing else.

Bright interpreted this to mean that Karen Lessing had assumed the Audrey Potter cover identity and maintained it for thirty years. That was long enough that the details of her cover had practically eclipsed all record of her real identity.

“Want to save a copy of these?” the tech asked him.

Bright almost said yes. There was a Social Security number attached to the real Karen Lessing. And with that he could have run background checks, credit reports, call logs, etc., even though none of the data would be current. Instead he said, “No, that’s all right. Thank you.”

He didn’t want her old metadata or shopping habits, he realized. But then what
did
he want? This longing, this feeling of helplessness, was unfamiliar to him. There had been hundreds of people he wanted desperately to know more about. But never like this; never someone who was not the target of an intelligence case. H
e’d
wasted an hour prying into the details of her two lives before he realized the proper way to get what he truly wanted was to see her again, to spend time with her, as soon as possible. He reached for his phone.

Voice mail. The outgoing message, he noted now for the first time, was a standard automated one. It was not recorded in her voice and did not give her name. After the beep he apologized again for having to abandon their last evening together so abruptly. If sh
e’d
forgive him, he wondered whether she would let him cook her dinner the night after next.

The phone rang so suddenly after he disconnected the call that he assumed it was her. The caller ID display brought him reeling back into his workday. It was a secure call coming from the office of the director of the FBI.

“Can you hold, please, for the director?” a male voice said when Bright answered and identified himself.

“Lionel.” The director’s voice came over the line a minute later. “I thought yo
u’d
want to know. I’ve just spoken with Angela Vasser.”

Bright leaned forward, fighting distraction. His mind raced. When you got a call from another agency, most especially from its director, there was always more going on than it seemed. Ever since Angela Vasser’s release—even before her release—Bright had been trying to get a meeting with the diplomat. Vasser had been the last person to talk to the ambassador before he got on that buggy plane. She had to know something useful about what had happened. He wasn’t sure what he expected her to remember that she hadn’t already told the FBI, but maybe sh
e’d
see it differently if she knew they were eyeing the case as an assassination rather than an accident. The trouble was, the BIGOT list for MIRAGE was so pared down that arranging a meet with Vasser required a cover story, and so far every time the
y’d
presented a watered-down story to the bureau, they were told to wait in line. The FBI wasn’t letting anyone piss on their territory in the middle of a very public investigation. Vasser herself wasn’t encouraging visitors, and she rarely left her condo. Hell, Vasser herself wasn’t even a BIGOT—meaning she wasn’t permitted to be read into the case. Bright still hadn’t figured out how he was going to get around that when he did meet her face-to-face.

“Kind of you to think of me, Director, but we’ve been following INR’s lead on all that,” Bright said, referring to the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, their in-house liaison with the intelligence community.

“I know. This is something else,” Director Ellis said. “Vasser had contact last night with Kera Mersal.”

The name came in from such a distant context in Bright’s mind that at first he didn’t register the significance of what the director was saying.

“Vasser told you this? That she spoke with Kera?”

“Apparently. Vasser—who hasn’t been very forthcoming about anything, mind you—just turned up at my office without an appointment to tell me that Kera Mersal approached her in a hotel ladies’ room last night.”

“They met
in person
? She’s sure it was Kera?” Bright could picture Kera sitting on the park bench across the street from his house, holding his newspaper. For an instant Bright wondered whether this call from the FBI director might be a trap. Did they know Kera had approached him too?

“That’s what she said.”

“Can I have a word with Vasser? Don’t let her leave.”

“Too late, she left fifteen minutes ago.”

“Dammit. What about Kera?”

“We’ve got teams at the hotel, airport, and train stations. But she’s got a fifteen-hour head start. I don’t need to tell you that she can disappear in a fraction of that time.”

“What did they speak about?”

“Vasser says that Mersal wanted to know more about what happened in Shanghai. She tried to bait Vasser by claiming the ambassador’s plane crash was a hit. Can you believe that?”

“Jesus Christ.”

Bright thanked the director for letting him know, and the director said h
e’d
send over the hotel’s surveillance tapes, from which they hoped to confirm Kera Mersal’s presence. Bright hung up already convinced that it was her. But what on earth was she up to?

W
ASHINGTON
, DC

Angela Vasser stepped from the sidewalk onto the escalator and let it carry her down into the Archives Metro station. She had expected to feel better than she did right now. Sh
e’d
expected to feel the way you were supposed to feel after doing the right thing. Ben had convinced her, finally, after a blur of sleepless hours, that she must go to the FBI and tell them about Kera Mersal. Maybe she shouldn’t have told Ben that the fugitive intelligence operative had approached her. She could have kept it to herself for a little while, waited to see how things played out.

But no, that wouldn’t have been right. She never kept anything from Ben; this seemed a silly thing to withhold. Sh
e’d
done the right thing. And Ben had been right to persuade her to go to the Feds. Not doing so was equivalent to aiding a fugitive—a traitor—wasn’t it? And beyond that, what better way was there for Vasser to show that she was being cooperative and patriotic? Certainly her lawyers would have given her the same advice Ben had.

Vasser felt a bitter sting. It stung to discover how easily one’s patriotism could be put up for debate—not just a debate, but a sham trial where the evidence, one’s entire career in the diplomatic service, was negated by howling Beltway lifers who all shared a brain and who seemed to demand that the burden was on her to prove her innocence while simultaneously hinting that no proof could change their opinions.

Through a tunnel, down another escalator, onto the crowded platform. Vasser was wearing dark glasses and kept her head down. She wandered to a spot that was less crowded and looked down at the tracks. If sh
e’d
done the right thing, why did she feel this nagging sensation to the contrary? Something about Kera Mersal unsettled Vasser. Something about the way Mersal had approached, about the confidence in her gaze. Vasser didn’t have intimate knowledge of the HAWK case that had ensnared Mersal in her current legal trouble. Sh
e’d
read about it in the news like everyone else. And, like everyone else, sh
e’d
accepted the narrative that had emerged—that Mersal and a colleague named J. D. Jones had betrayed their oath to their country by exposing classified information, and that they were perhaps in the pocket of the People’s Republic of China.

Maybe it was because Vasser now had more sympathy for just how unfair the tide of press coverage could be, but she couldn’t shake an intuition that the woman sh
e’d
spoken to the evening before did not fit the mold of a traitor. Why had Mersal risked coming to DC for a few fleeting moments of conversation with Vasser? Just to suggest that Greg’s plane going down had not been an accident? To warn Vasser that her life was in danger? To give her a piece of paper with the names of two other people who had recently died?

Vasser had not told Director Ellis about the note with the names on it and the detailed instructions for making contact with Mersal, should she want to do that. At one point the director asked her whether Mersal had indicated any way she might be contacted. Vasser had said no. Lying had felt wrong in the moment, but now it was the only thing that felt right. She slipped her fingers into her pants pocket and felt relief at the touch of the folded slip of paper. She had not told Ben about the note either. Why that, of all things? Right and wrong felt upside down.

Wind moved through the cavernous Metro tunnel, rustling her hair. Shivering, she stepped back from the edge of the platform. Anonymous commuters swarmed around her, angling for a seat on the train.

She disembarked at Foggy Bottom and took more escalators to the street. From there it would be a hike back into Georgetown, but she was in no rush to return home. No matter where she was, she was a prisoner in waiting—waiting for the investigation to clear her name. Walking the streets at least kept her restlessness at bay.

As she turned up Wisconsin Avenue, her mind was back in Shanghai, searching for an overlooked detail that might provide some clue as to how this baffling chain of events had been set in motion. The Shanghai meetings had been only two weeks before, though it seemed like years. The
y’d
flown down from Beijing on the private jet, which, Vasser remembered vividly, was an accommodation that had made Greg uncomfortable. But Greg had insisted on keeping their travel plans, and Vasser, suspecting this was because h
e’d
been given orders from above, did not belabor her objections. Debating their transportation to Shanghai was not something either of them considered worth their time. In any case, the Hu Lan controversy seemed to be a red herring, even in retrospect. She remembered the fleeting, shameful thrill of the plane’s trivial luxuries—glassware, swivel armchairs, imbedded television screens. But while flying private was atypical, nothing struck her then or now as suspicious.

On arrival the
y’d
gone to the hotel and met immediately with the Kenyan and Chinese delegations. She had made presentations, forged connections with her counterparts. She tried to pace her memory, to scrutinize everything that had happened right up until her parting words with Greg as he and the others left for the airport. Sh
e’d
checked her phone then, just after Greg had left, and had seen the message from Conrad. He was in Shanghai and had heard that she was too.

Had anything been out of the ordinary?

Sh
e’d
run through this exercise a dozen times already, of course, both with the FBI and alone in that cell before her release. But everything looked different now. Different ever since Kera Mersal had walked up to her and spoken those words.

Prompted by the traffic signal, Vasser stepped off the curb and into a crosswalk. Her peripheral vision detected fast-approaching harm, confirmed by a quick glance left. Her body took over from there. The car braked and swerved dramatically, nosing itself violently into a van in the adjacent lane. With a pitiful whimper, Vasser threw herself backward, landing in a sprawl on the relative safety of the sidewalk. From that perspective, she began to assess the situation. First herself—no apparent injury there—then her surroundings. Her eyes swung to the far traffic signal. She would have bet her life—in fact, she had—that the light had been red, indicting the reckless driver. But it was green. Had she been so lost in thought that sh
e’d
misread the pedestrian signal?

Finally, time began to move forward again. Not more than an instant had elapsed. A surge of vehicles rolled into the intersection suddenly, with engines accelerating from all directions. Then, just as abruptly, the air pealed with the high-pitched cries of pavement stripping rubber from tires. A half-dozen metallic thwacks brought the unluckiest of the vehicles to rest. Horns vented confusion.

Vasser sat up. Her eyes darted. The walk signal was illuminated. So too was the trio of green lights directing cross traffic. The lights perpendicular to them? All green too. Every traffic light around the intersection signaled green, beckoning vehicles toward disaster. Without realizing why, Vasser thought suddenly of the elevators. That morning, after Ben had left for work, sh
e’d
Googled the two names on the slip of paper Kera Mersal had given to her. They meant nothing to her. They were both American; the man ran a hedge fund, the woman had been an executive at a technology company. Vasser saw nothing remarkable about them, except for the grim fact that within forty-eight hours they had both perished in freak elevator failures on opposite sides of the planet.

Movement approached in a blur from her left. A motorcycle. In conspicuous contrast to the paralyzed traffic in and around the crippled intersection, the bike sprang forward, roaring through an aisle between cars. Vasser caught sight of the driver, covered from helmet to boot in thick black combat gear and wearing what looked like a computer bag slung across his body. He leaned hard into a sharp turn to cut through the line of cars and hop the bike onto the sidewalk not a dozen feet from her. At first she thought,
Police!
because the bike had wide carbonate saddle boxes and a thick antenna extending skyward behind the driver. But there were no official markings, no lights or sirens.

A scream from a nearby pedestrian was the only thing that let her believe that what her eyes saw next was a true representation of reality. The man on the bike removed one hand from the handlebars; a moment later it reappeared clutching a handgun. What saved her was an instinct to dive forward, rolling into the street and the narrow space between two idle vehicles, rather than reeling backward defensively on the open sidewalk. The unanticipated motion forced the shooter to redirect both the bike and his aim. She heard the weapon report twice—two pops, implausible to her even as she was rolling away from them. She assumed neither hit its target, though she didn’t completely trust her senses. Her brain was not interested in sensations; it hungered only for as much adrenaline as it could coax from the relevant glands.

Over the screams of bystanders, she heard a loud thud punctuated with a metallic tear and then tinkling glass. The shooter, she realized, must have lost control of his bike while readjusting his aim at her. She could no longer hear the bike’s motor. Resisting an urge to stand up and run, Vasser rolled from the protection of one vehicle’s undercarriage to the next. Was the shooter now on foot? Was he injured? She thought she heard a motor struggling to start. It was difficult to be certain with all the ambient shouting. And then—

Sirens. For the first time since seeing the gun, she believed the odds of surviving the next few moments might swing in her favor. She wriggled left and right, checking her ground-level sight lines. The shooter, stuck with a stalled getaway bike, must have taken off on foot rather than risk capture while trying to finish the job.

Vasser closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and then opened them. She was beneath a taxicab, the grime and rust of its underbelly an inch from her face. She waited, listening to the sirens grow louder, trying to remember an identifying characteristic that could help the police nail this bastard.

Then she remembered the note in her pocket and she got another idea.