The Good Traitor Read online

  ALSO BY RYAN QUINN

  End of Secrets

  The Fall

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 by Ryan Quinn

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503954625

  ISBN-10: 1503954625

  Cover design by Marc Cohen

  For the hackers.

  Be gentle.

  CONTENTS

  SHANGHAI

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  LOWER MANHATTAN

  THE VALLEY, RURAL MONTANA

  PARIS

  SEATTLE

  LANGLEY

  THE VALLEY

  SEATTLE

  I-93, OUTSIDE MISSOULA, MONTANA

  FAIRFAX COUNTY, VIRGINIA

  MANHATTAN

  I-70 WEST

  LANGLEY

  THE VALLEY

  LANGLEY

  THE VALLEY

  FBI INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT (EXCERPT)

  GEORGETOWN

  LANGLEY

  THE VALLEY

  MANHATTAN

  CAPITOL HILL

  WASHINGTON, DC

  LANGLEY

  WASHINGTON, DC

  LANGLEY

  CAPITOL HILL

  NORTHERN VIRGINIA

  SAN FRANCISCO

  LANGLEY

  ALGONKIAN REGIONAL PARK

  LEESBURG PIKE

  I-81, CENTRAL PENNSYLVANIA

  MANHATTAN

  CATSKILL MOUNTAINS

  MANHATTAN

  LANGLEY

  WASHINGTON, DC

  CATSKILL MOUNTAINS

  HONG KONG INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  CATSKILL MOUNTAINS

  HONG KONG INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

  HONG KONG INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  HONG KONG

  MINISTRY OF STATE SECURITY COMMAND CENTER, HONG KONG

  FORT MEADE

  HONG KONG

  LANGLEY

  BEIJING

  BEIJING

  LANGLEY

  BEIJING

  BEIJING

  LANGLEY

  BEIJING

  LANGLEY

  ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE

  CAPITOL HILL—TWO WEEKS LATER

  THE VALLEY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SOURCES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SHANGHAI

  Amid the rigged chess game that shuffled fuselages around the tarmac of Pudong International Airport, a sleek Gulfstream G450 taxied from a private terminal and slipped into position behind a line of wide-body commercial jets. Overhead, the last daylight drained from the waiting sky. Inside the glowing porthole window over the G450’s wing sat Greg Rodgers, United States ambassador to China. Graying but still handsome and healthy, Rodgers had eyes that were steady with the patience of a family man, which he was, and lit by the incurable curiosity of an academic, which he’d been before the presidential appointment that had moved him and his wife, Wendy, from New Haven to Beijing. Their two grown sons remained in the States, though they visited often with the diplomat’s daughters-in-law and three grandchildren.

  During his ambassadorship, now on the eve of its sixth year, travel for Rodgers rarely involved more than a traffic-choked ride in one of the drab diplomatic vehicles that shuttled the ambassador and his security detail around the capital city. But a recent spate of multination trade talks had forced him to the sky, where he’d been wearing out the airways between Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.

  This particular trip was exceptional for its incorporation of the private jet, which belonged to a wealthy Chinese investor named Hu Lan. Rodgers’s first instinct had been to decline Hu’s offer to lend him the Gulfstream for the weekend. Posted to a country where hundreds of millions of citizens lived in abject poverty, Rodgers was not the sort of man who felt comfortable indulging in luxury. But Hu was on the list of Chinese politicians and businessmen with whom Rodgers was encouraged to form ties. This was an actual list—classified and delivered to him weekly in encrypted cables from the State Department in DC. Some of the names on this list had obvious diplomatic value; others didn’t. Rodgers suspected the latter were placed there by the Central Intelligence Agency. Hu Lan was almost certainly one of the CIA additions.

  Aside from reluctantly agreeing to borrow the Chinese businessman’s private jet, Rodgers had not given Hu a second thought—until the previous day, when a story had rippled through the international news media that made the trip on Hu’s jet more awkward than it had been already. The story originated on the news website Gnos.is and was quickly confirmed by other reputable news organizations. This Gnos.is-led wave of disruptive news stories was starting to feel like the new norm. Gnos.is’s reportage was thorough and apolitical, and Rodgers had to admit that on many occasions he’d found the site a valuable resource. But Gnos.is—which, instead of relying on the labor of individual journalists, vacuumed up massive amounts of online data and applied algorithms to sort fact from rumor and even to generate the actual text of articles—had a habit of publishing details that caused headaches for diplomats like Rodgers, whose job relied on state secrets remaining secret. While this particular story didn’t cause embarrassment for the US government, it nonetheless promised to complicate Rodgers’s life. The Gnos.is scoop was that Hu Lan’s majority stake in an American telecom company called InspiraCom had been funded by the Ministry of State Security, China’s equivalent to the CIA.

  The news story proved Rodgers’s instinct right: Hu’s hospitality would amount to more trouble than it was worth. But that changed nothing. He confirmed that Hu was still on the State Department/CIA list, and then he and his staff climbed aboard the plush little jet and pretended to be grateful for the ride, sipping glasses of wine and avoiding discussing anything they wouldn’t have said aloud in the presence of a Chinese MSS officer.

  Owning a business jet was a hot trend among the Chinese elite, who imported them from the United States and Europe by the hundreds annually. With an operating cost of $10,000 per flight, the small luxury aircraft were by all appearances impractical. But the motives behind keeping up appearances are often exactly that. If Hu Lan wanted to spend $10,000 per flight to whisk Rodgers to Shanghai and back as a symbol of China’s ascension in the global economy, who was Rodgers to decline? Diplomacy, he’d discovered, required not only a clear knowledge of one’s principles but also a willingness to go along with almost anything that didn’t violate them outright. Despite his personal discomfort, he had no political principle against riding in a private jet. At least the G450 was American made.

  In the fading daylight, Rodgers watched an Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger jetliner, lumber onto the rubber-scarred runway and rumble to speed before lifting, improbably, into the air. Then a Boeing 777 received the all clear from the tower and roared from land to sky.

  Next up was the G450, which looked like landing gear with wings next to these larger craft. The initial thrust pushed Rodgers back in his seat. The jet fought to absorb the contours of the runway as it gathered momentum. And then the ride went suddenly smooth. The Gulfstream climbed steeply into the darkening night, banked away from Earth’s most populous country, and darted over the mouth of the Yangtze Rive
r before cutting temporarily away from the coast. When it banked back to settle into its flight path over the Yellow Sea, the western horizon tilted into view, glowing in the far distance, enlarging the sky.

  Rodgers glanced at his watch. Before boarding he’d called his wife to let her know that the ninety-minute flight to Beijing would get him home closer to bedtime than dinnertime. Rodgers leaned back in his seat, exhaustion weighing on his eyelids. His workday was far from over. Right now it was eight in the morning in Washington, and the deputy secretary of state was expecting a report on the Shanghai meetings. But that was not the sort of cable Rodgers could compose on Hu’s plane. He would have to wait until he was inside the secure confines of the American embassy.

  The G450 could comfortably accommodate eight passengers in addition to the crew, but on this leg it held only Rodgers, an assistant, and two former Navy SEALs—his protectors, though what they were supposed to protect him from Rodgers did not waste time imagining. His relative solitude was an unexpected pleasure. He almost always traveled with his top aide, Angela Vasser, ever since she’d been sent from DC two years earlier. He enjoyed Angela and had come to rely on her quick, incisive mind. But when they had at the last minute decided she should stay on in Shanghai through the weekend to continue deepening her rapport with her Chinese and African counterparts there, he’d found himself glad at the prospect of some true downtime.

  Not that he could allow himself to make use of it. Even as he tried to shut down, Rodgers had begun composing in his mind a cable that outlined the key developments of the negotiations. He was still engrossed in this when, without warning, the plane pitched dramatically upward, hard enough to knock his phone and a small bottle of water from the armrest and send them sliding aft across the cabin floor. In addition to the physical disturbance, he noticed a more subtle change: the hum that had accompanied their forward thrust out of Shanghai had suddenly ceased. This silence, more than the plane’s violent bucking, was acutely unnerving, like the sudden absence of a soundtrack in a movie scene. With almost no outward reaction other than a glance at the closed cockpit door, Rodgers calmly acknowledged the wild sinking sensation between his lower stomach and the base of his spine.

  “Whoa, there,” said one of the security men, playing it cool.

  Rodgers imagined that they all must be thinking the same thing: Turbulence. It’s worse in small aircraft, right? But it wasn’t necessary to be a pilot or a meteorologist to understand that this wasn’t turbulence.

  A second later, there was a noise that was louder than a click but softer than a thud, and the cabin lights went out. Rodgers glanced to the wing but couldn’t make out the light that should have been flashing at its tip. The exterior lights had been cut too. Glancing around, he felt both suddenly skilled at diagnosing problems—Electrical failure! Engine failure!—and acutely aware that he had no knowledge of how any of these complications might be overcome.

  The second security man stood heroically, perhaps because he was trained to do so, and stumbled toward the cockpit, riding the narrow aisle like a bull. By starlight, Rodgers watched him open the door and half expected to see the silhouettes of both pilots slumped over their instruments. He was not prepared for the alternative: that they had full control of their own faculties but somehow none of the plane’s. A brief, calm, highly professional conversation between the pilots and bodyguard ensued. It was inaudible to Rodgers except for a curt excerpt from one of the pilots that reached him, and which turned over and over in his mind: “She went into a stall.”

  Rodgers was afraid to guess where that particular problem fell on the continuum of manageable to catastrophic, but the jet’s odd silence was making everything feel inescapably real. He was in the present. This was happening. They were twenty thousand feet above the Yellow Sea, in an aircraft he had not imagined could be so silent as it sailed through the air.

  Of the forces imposed upon objects of mass on Earth, gravity is the most predictable. It does not gust or evaporate or ebb or erode. It cannot be harnessed with a windmill or an airfoil or a solar panel. It cannot be voted upon or negotiated or corrupted by money. Struggle against it, and it doesn’t surge with vengeance or retreat out of mercy. It merely is. It always is.

  For a violent thirty seconds, the fuselage yo-yoed and rattled, an ungraceful dance partner rebelling against the pilots’ lead. Soon, the aerodynamic phenomenon of lift was no longer in play and the only relevant force was gravity, which, Rodgers had learned in elementary-school science, accelerates objects in free fall at an exponential rate.

  The cabin air grew putrid with vomit. Terror pealed in shouts through the stench. Then gradually the human noises subsided as, one by one, the six souls in their spinning cage in the sky were swallowed mercifully into unconsciousness.

  Some seconds later, the ocean’s buoyant surface intervened to arrest the plane’s free fall and disperse debris across the surface of the water, which was darker than the starlit sky.

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  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. He’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. He’d begun to exercise regularly and dropped fifteen pounds. He’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 independ
ently 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 they’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 they’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.”