The Good Traitor (2 page)

L
ANGLEY
, V
IRGINIA

Lionel Bright, director of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of Collection Strategies and Analysis, paused the video on the operations center’s main tactical display and slipped the small remote control into his pocket. “‘We grieve with all Americans for the loss of our mutual friend, Mr. Ambassador Greg Rodgers,’” he said, translating aloud the final line from the Chinese president’s remarks. This was the fourth time Bright and his team had reviewed film of the press conference since it had been aired three hours earlier by the state-controlled Xinhua News Agency.

He gazed at the dozen men and women around the room through the beat-up glasses that rested on the slope of his angular nose. Bright had begun to notice how common it was these days to be the oldest person in the room. But seniority had plenty of advantages, and few of the side effects bothered him—even his gray-white hair. He had yet to entertain one serious thought about retirement.

In Bright’s other hand, he realized, was a coffee mug painted on one side with the phrase “#1 Dad.” He was not a father and could not remember filling the mug. He looked down into the tepid liquid before abandoning the mug on the nearest desk, which belonged to one of the East Asia analysts, Wilson Yu. Was it possible Yu was a father? Bright had never spoken to him about anything other than satellite images, transcripts from Central Politburo meetings, and cyberthreats that had been traced back within the borders of the People’s Republic. No way Yu had a kid. He was little more than a kid himself, at most two years out of college, and worked sixty-hour weeks.

Bright was in a doubting frame of mind. He was also exhausted. H
e’d
come into work that morning without a care in the world, energized by the improbable success of a second date the night before. After a decade devoid of romance, Bright had found himself on five dates in the past two months. Last night’s had been the only repeat customer. He wasn’t entirely sure where the impetus to socialize had come from in his advanced middle age, but it was doing him some good. H
e’d
begun to exercise regularly and dropped fifteen pounds. H
e’d
never been overweight, not by American standards anyway, but at an inch shorter than average, fifteen pounds went a long way.

“Look at the panel here,” Bright said, nodding at the on-screen image of the members of the Central Politburo’s Standing Committee. A flag-draped background blazed red behind the seven men. Everyone in the ops center knew the faces, names, and biographies of even the lowest ranking among them. “See anything out of place?”

It was rare to get a glimpse of the Politburo Standing Committee, which was composed of China’s most powerful decision makers. But nothing about the formal, highly staged imagery they were analyzing suggested anything more than the condolences being expressed by the president.

“Let’s assume we’re not going to get a good look at whatever’s left of that plane,” Bright said, gazing over the rims of his glasses. He jabbed a finger in the direction of the Chinese politicians on the screen. “And let’s assume these guys aren’t being straight with us. Can we independently rule out foul play? Do we have satellite pictures yet?” he said, turning to the two imagery analysts working an eight-screen array near the center of the room.

While one of the satellite analysts selected key images and punched them up to the big screen, Bright silently reviewed what they knew. The incident had occurred over Chinese airspace and terminated in Chinese waters. No planes or commercial boats in the vicinity had come forward with witnesses. Chinese military vessels had been the first responders, but the
y’d
reached the scene in the dead of night, and bodies had yet to be recovered. The flight data recorder and cockpit recorder remained lost to the sea. Some of the more buoyant pieces of wreckage had been plucked from the water and would be made available to NTSB investigators, who were en route to Shanghai.

That, at least, was China’s version of the story, as relayed through their ambassador in Washington. US agencies working through the night had found only one discrepancy with China’s account. The closest American vessel to the wreckage, a
Virginia
-class submarine, the USS
North Dakota
, had directed its sonar toward the crash coordinates as soon as the American embassy in Beijing had alerted Washington of the incident. The
North Dakota
’s sonar picked up something curious: three Chinese military vessels were already circling the coordinates, well before the time Beijing would eventually claim their search-and-rescue boats had arrived on the scene.

“The plane went down just after dusk, so our sats were blind through all the action. At first light the scene looked like this.” On the first satellite image, the imagery analyst drew a circle around a cluster of oblong dark spots that stood out against the ocean’s deep-green morning hue. “These are the Chinese navy’s standard search-and-rescue vessels, the same sort of thing the
y’d
send out for a crippled fishing boat. But the three boats pinged by the
North Dakota
read a lot more like these.” A new satellite image filled the screen, this one of Shanghai’s bustling port at the mouth of the Yangtze River. The analyst zoomed in on three larger vessels docked along its northern end. “This is daybreak, fifty miles west of the crash site, in a section of the port used by the navy. And here are our three boats. Judging from all this vehicle and personnel traffic around them, it looks like they’ve returned from working overnight.”

Bright looked away from the grainy boats and glanced up at the stringcourse of digital clocks circling the room. It was 0830 hours in Beijing, 2030 hours in Washington. The plane had gone down nearly thirteen hours earlier, and h
e’d
been in the windowless ops center since two hours after that, as soon as the State Department had learned of the ambassador’s fate. Eleven straight hours spent among the indicator lights, the glowing maps, the screens and their live feeds. He was not proud of the addictive rush being in this environment provided. Days passed in his sunny office meant that operations were running smoothly and the world was ordered—but those days were often tinged with boredom. What brought him to life were the hours spent in the ops center, which usually meant that a crisis had developed in some critical part of the world. Lives were in jeopardy or had been lost.

Bright shook his head. “So they had boats waiting out there to collect the data recorders. Or they had the plane bugged and were prepared to recover the audio. W
e’d
have done the same thing. Have we confirmed that the plane was owned by Hu?” Bright wanted to bring the conversation back to the Chinese businessman. The crash of Hu Lan’s jet was a peculiar development, coming just forty-eight hours after the news story published by Gnos.is had exposed Hu’s financial ties with the Ministry of State Security. It was no surprise, of course, that Hu had ties to the MSS. But for China to play in the global economy, it was in their interest to keep secret even the possibility of such ties between the Chinese government and its leading business figures. They might not have any qualms about cheating in the global markets, but they had enough tact to not want to get caught. The news story about Hu was a black eye. America’s top diplomat dying in Hu’s airplane was another one. Either this was a pile of coincidences, or there had been an uncharacteristic slipup within China’s intelligence community.

“Yes, sir, the plane was Hu’s. NSA identified the aircraft from activity intercepted from the tower at Pudong. It was a private jet. Tail number registered to Hu’s company.”

“Do our dips usually fly private?” one of the analysts asked. “Why was Rodgers even on board?”

“Because we asked him to be,” Bright said. The room fell into a somber silence. The more he thought about it, the less he liked the timing of all of this—the public revelation of Hu’s links to the MSS and then the downed plane—but he couldn’t draw a straight line between any of the potential causes and effects. “Any chatter from Hu about the crash?”

“Not yet. We’re going back over intercepts from his staff, investment partners, and his wife.”

“That news story about Hu came from Gnos.is,” Bright said. “Ho
w’d
Gnos.is get the scoop? A whistle-blower inside Hu’s camp?” In addition to generating articles based on facts that emerged from tirelessly mining the Internet, Gnos.is was also a known hub for whistle-blowers and activists who wanted to anonymously submit information that was not already available online. Gnos.is’s top-level domain—the “.is”—meant the site was registered in Iceland, where such activity was protected by liberal free speech laws.

“There’s no evidence of that yet. But it seems more likely than the alternative—that there’s a leak inside the MSS.”

Bright feared a more alarming possibility, one that he had so far kept to himself: that the leak of information to Gnos.is had come from one of the men and women within the CIA’s China division—possibly someone in this room. Bright and his team had discovered months earlier—well before the Gnos.is story—that Hu Lan had received funds from the Ministry of State Security, funneled to him through the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Bright had decided to sit on this bit of intelligence and watch Hu, keeping enough distance to let him attempt to go through with whatever the MSS had in mind for him. But the Gnos.is story had leveled the playing field; Bright’s team no longer had the advantage of knowing more than their rivals thought they knew.

Bright took a call from Charles Kowalsky, the White House chief of staff. The president was preparing a statement, and Kowalsky wanted to know if there were any last-minute updates. Bright assured him there weren’t. Kowalsky hesitated before hanging up.

“The president trusts you, Lionel. What’s your gut say? Is there any chance that this was an assassination? Any reason why we shouldn’t be treating China the same as we were treating them yesterday?”

Bright had entertained and rejected this idea a dozen times since h
e’d
been called into the ops center that morning. “There’s no evidence to suggest that, Chuck. No logic either.” Killing diplomats is not something that governments risk, unless they’re trying to escalate a conflict. China wasn’t that reckless. Unlike the United States’ other tricky adversaries, such as the Russians and Iranians, the Chinese had always demonstrated the discipline to not wade in over their heads. No, Bright couldn’t imagine a scenario in which the Chinese government was behind an assassination of Ambassador Rodgers.

“Terrorists?”

“That doesn’t add up either. If a terrorist wanted to send a message to Washington, why make the ambassador’s death look like a tragic accident? The
y’d
want to make it a sensation, and the
y’d
be eager to take credit.”

Bright told the president’s chief of staff that, for the time being, it was best to take the Chinese at their word and try to work back channels to get permission to look harder for those flight data recorders.

L
OWER
M
ANHATTAN

Two banks of elevator doors dominated the lobby of a skyscraper on Pine Street, two blocks from the New York Stock Exchange. As lawyers and investment bankers tapped their ID cards at a row of security turnstiles, computers assigned them to an elevator car, grouping them in a way that minimized the number of stops each car had to make as it whisked the passengers efficiently to offices as high as ninety floors up.

At 9:17
AM
a screen instructed fourteen people to crowd onto elevator 2B. The passengers rode in silence, their heads turned down at their smartphones or up at a pair of flat-screens that broadcast CNBC. The car made a stop at the forty-eighth floor, depositing seven people. It stopped again on fifty and a woman disembarked. Four men and two women remained on board as the car decelerated and approached the seventy-second floor. The familiar chime rang and the car stopped, but the doors did not slide open, provoking a moment of weary confusion. This was the final leg of the passengers’ morning commute. The
y’d
endured trains and cabs and bagel lines and crowded sidewalks. What else could the city throw at them before nine thirty on a Wednesday morning?

The elevators had been upgraded the previous summer to the automated, hands-free grouping system. This eliminated the need for a panel of buttons inside the elevator, which meant that there was nothing to push in frustration when a door didn’t open or close as expected. The only actionable hardware was a call switch below an emergency intercom speaker. The man closest to these flicked the switch. Nothing. Not even a busy tone or an empty crackle. He flipped it up and down a few times in quick succession, but his irritation was met only with indifference. At some point after he gave up and stepped back to let a fellow passenger have a go, but before anyone else could, the elevator car shifted unexpectedly. For a brief moment, innocent confusion reigned. Had any of the six passengers been able to describe it later, they might have mentioned a strange, disorienting sensation in their gut. And then, suddenly, they were weightless. A handbag bounced off the wall and floated slowly toward the ceiling. A man let go of his BlackBerry, and it hung there in front of his face.

These were tricks of perspective.

“Oh my god,” groaned the first man to realize. His last word was drowned out by the sudden chaos around him.

The early portion of the descent was surprisingly smooth. The elevators had been well maintained and were designed to slip up and down the ninety-story shaft with a whisper. The passengers, all strangers, screamed together. Around the fortieth floor, the walls began to vibrate from the friction and there was an odor of smoldering metal. The ride was short after that. The elevator car ran out of shaft three stories below the lobby, compacting and fracturing into a shallow crater ripped into the concrete by twisted metal.