The Good Traitor Page 10

VASSER: No. That part was not a coincidence.

  BENTON: You’re unmarried?

  VASSER: Yes. Is that a crime too?

  CHU: You admit to being with Mr. Smith at the Park Hyatt as the flight you were initially scheduled to be on crashed into the ocean.

  VASSER: You have a way of making facts sound like accusations.

  BENTON: We just want to get everything straight. You’re saying that not only were you sleeping with someone other than your partner—that’s the word you used for, uh, Ben, isn’t it?—but that this was the man to whom you then disclosed highly classified information.

  VASSER: I was sleeping with someone other than you, which makes that none of your business. I’ve been as clear as I can be about the classified information. I didn’t write those e-mails. I couldn’t have.

  BENTON: Yet here they are.

  Versions of this conversation repeated itself for over five hours. Vasser was then charged with mishandling classified information and flown to a federal prison in Fort Meade, Maryland. The full transcript was published on Gnos.is.

  GEORGETOWN

  Lionel Bright waited anxiously, ensconced in the private booth he’d wrested from the tight control of the maître d’. He’d invested an unusual amount of care in planning a successful evening, enough that rearranging his day to guarantee he’d be on time—something he rarely did for social commitments—had delivered him twenty minutes early. The final thing to do now was to make it look like no planning at all had gone into the date, which his early arrival clearly contradicted. To avoid mulling over his expectations for the evening, he ordered a whiskey. The concentration required to pace his sips over twenty minutes provided the needed distraction from his anxiety.

  She appeared on time and he rose to greet her. Audrey. She was a touch underdressed, but he suspected there was less to read into that than there might have been with other women. He didn’t know her to play games, at least not the subtle sort. Besides, if she turned any heads, it was because of her simple, uncultivated beauty, not for the offense of some common pantsuit that didn’t quite live up to the candlelight and thick tablecloths. She initiated a hug before he could. And then he gestured formally, lamely, toward her side of the booth, feeling awkward without the physical prop of a chair to pull out for her.

  They sat for a minute beneath the dim, low-hanging light fixture as Audrey spread her hands on the plush tablecloth and glanced around the opulent dining room, then down at the neat rows of cursive printed on the menu. She looked up at him with a wry little smile.

  “Christ, Lionel. You’re laying it on pretty thick. Do I come off as someone who’s difficult to impress?”

  “I—” He hesitated. And then, as he’d done several times in her company—and in no one else’s—he said exactly what he was thinking without any premeditation for what might happen next. “I’m terrible at this. This is my first third date.”

  She cocked her head. “Your first third . . . ?” That smile again. “That’s weirdly endearing.”

  “Would you like to go somewhere else?”

  “No. Now I’ve got my eye on the surf and turf.” Her face softened. “You’re doing great.”

  The rest of the meal went splendidly, enough so that he never thought of time passing or even much about the food, which came in three exquisite courses. He never even thought about work, except for once, when his smartphone trembled in his pants pocket. While the waitstaff cleared their picked-over entrées, he stole a discreet glance at the phone. It was a notification of a text message from Henry Liu, his top China analyst. It was not unheard of for Liu to text him after hours. What was unheard of was for Bright to have the attention of an interesting and beautiful woman. He didn’t have time to open and read Liu’s message before the waitstaff retreated and Bright was again alone with Audrey, who he suspected would not hold back her disapproval if she caught him reading texts on his phone during dinner.

  Perhaps another half hour passed before they’d finished coffee and trading bites of a raspberry tart, and Bright excused himself to use the restroom. Would it be too forward, he wondered, to suggest that he could drive them both to his house and then back again in the morning to retrieve her car before work? She—

  He’d not noticed the figure enter the men’s room ten steps ahead of him until Bright himself entered, his fingers already tugging at his zipper. The physical reaction came first: a rising, inflating sensation in his chest that he would not have categorized as healthy. But then his mind caught up and his calm was restored.

  “Henry. Jesus, you scared the hell out of me.”

  “Sorry. I would have just approached the table, but I didn’t recognize the woman. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  Bright looked around. “Clearly you did.”

  “You got my message?”

  The text. Bright remembered now. He hadn’t read it. And now suddenly, with Liu in front of him in a men’s room, he understood how out of character he’d begun to act in Audrey’s presence. Who was he, ignoring work messages for more than an hour? Bright extracted his phone, activated it with a thumbprint, and opened his messages. Liu’s text had contained a single word—“Potomac”—which was their code word to arrange a secure call urgently.

  “Well, now you’ve got me,” Bright said, beginning to understand that this run-in wasn’t going to be as simple as a few words exchanged in front of a bank of urinals.

  “It’s MIRAGE, sir. I think you’ll want to come back to the office.”

  Had it been anyone other than Liu, Bright would have dressed him down for sabotaging the evening. But he could see in Liu’s eyes that this was different.

  Fuck, Bright thought, uncharacteristically frustrated with the work intrusion. Why couldn’t they live in a world where planes sometimes just fell out of the sky?

  “I have to take a leak,” he said finally.

  “I’ll pull the car around.”

  “Something’s come up.” Bright stood over the booth, unable to bring himself to sit and look Audrey in the eye.

  “Now?”

  This one syllable, delivered in this way by a woman, stirred up thirty years of solid rationale against dating. Relationships for someone in his line of work were inhumane, if not impossible.

  “I’m afraid so. I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not a senior fellow at the Spurkland Institute, are you?” she said.

  He’d expected her to try to read something else into his abrupt departure, that she’d think he was changing his mind about their prospects for the evening and beyond and was choosing a cowardly excuse to bow out. He was caught off guard by her striking much closer to the truth.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said. They both knew he sounded ridiculous.

  “Yes, you do. Go ahead. Go on,” she said, catching him glancing at the door.

  He’d been in this situation before with women, and on all previous occasions he’d walked out without thinking twice.

  “You’re right,” he said, surprising them both. “I’m not a senior fellow at the Spurkland Institute. I can’t get into that now, though. I really do have to go—”

  “I’m not a lobbyist.”

  “What?” he said.

  “It’s only fair for me to tell you now, since we’re clearing the air. I’m not a lobbyist for the airline industry.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what you do?”

  “I—I can’t. Honestly. I know that sounds ridiculous.”

  “Which part is ridiculous—that you can’t tell me, or that you want me to believe that you’re being honest now when you weren’t before?”

  “Either. Both.” The phone vibrated against his thigh with its special insistence. What was it about the design of this inanimate object that pulled people from significant face-to-face interactions with one twitch? “I’m sorry, Audrey. I have to go.”

  “It’s Karen, actually.”

/>   “Oh.” So he wasn’t the only one with a hidden life. He suddenly had questions he wanted to ask. But there wasn’t time now. Instead, he smiled, hoping he didn’t look as flummoxed as he felt. “OK. Karen, then. I was having a good time.”

  A transition had come across Audrey’s—Karen’s—face so that when she shrugged, Lionel could see she’d already retreated into herself, into the way she would be a minute from now when he was no longer there to impress her or lie to her. She looked disappointed, not in him, but in herself, and the shrug seemed to be her way of telling herself to buck up. What had she expected? This wasn’t just dating in a city steeped with power and politics; this wasn’t just online dating, or dating in middle age. This was all of the above. The power of those cupid algorithms wasn’t in the algorithm at all; it was in the capacity of humans to delude themselves.

  “I was having a good time too,” she said, to herself or to him, and he turned toward the heavy doors at the front of the restaurant. It wasn’t until the car was on the George Washington Memorial Parkway heading to Langley that Bright realized he hadn’t paid the check.

  LANGLEY

  From what Liu had explained in the car, Bright expected to walk into an assemblage of the appropriate people from the China division, who were indeed present in surprising numbers given the hour. But the three figures Bright had not anticipated—though of course he should have; their kind seemed drawn into everything lately—were the pale cyberspecialists sitting along a bank of consoles near the front of the ops center. Just five years earlier, these men had been indistinguishable to Bright, with their matching shiny, indoor complexions and incidental-seeming bodies, soft for their age around the torsos. But as he’d come to depend on them, they’d become easier to identify.

  The cyber men worked unfazed through Bright’s entrance. They sat hunched over keypads beneath six-screen arrays, so detached from the hubbub around them that Bright wondered if they were actually working as furiously as they seemed to be, or if they simply lacked the social acumen to engage the other human beings in the room. Bright had long marveled at how, even in the highest-level meetings, the cyber guys never seemed to be able to share in a productive interaction with their colleagues without a few gigaflops of computing power as a go-between.

  This combination of disciplines—China and cyberespionage—rendered the presence of the youthful brunette planted at the center of the room inevitable. With her thick-rimmed glasses and one wavy, almond-colored lock descending along a delicate cheekbone, Amy Bristol stood over the main terminal, coaching a technician on what to display on the big screens at the front of the room. She looked up when Bright entered and, straightening slightly, nodded hello, which Bright acknowledged with a moment’s eye contact but did not reciprocate. Bristol had come to the agency as a young doctoral candidate brushing up a thesis on Chinese foreign policy, and in two years she’d leapfrogged into a senior analyst position by virtue of her superior comprehension of computer networks. In Bright’s time coming up through the agency, you had to luck into some life-threatening fieldwork to get promotions that swift. Now you just had to know how the Internet worked, which everyone under thirty-five seemed to.

  A quorum attained, the room settled and Henry Liu signaled for Bristol to begin.

  At the click of a small handheld remote, the wall screen filled with the now-familiar text exchange that BLACKFISH had acquired from the smartphone of China’s minister of state security. “The man on the other side of this intercept, called Peng here by the state security minister, is in fact Zhau Linpeng, a high-ranking officer in BYZANTINE CANDOR,” Bristol said. BYZANTINE CANDOR was the name US intelligence agencies had given to Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army, a secret bureau of China’s top cyberwarriors, also known as Advanced Persistent Threat 1. Bright had first incorporated into his job description the tracking of advanced persistent threats, or APTs—highly capable groups intent on targeting sensitive intelligence via cyberespionage—when BYZANTINE CANDOR was discovered back in 2002. Since then, he’d worked with the NSA and private security contractors to uncover a handful of attacks that had targeted the networks of US businesses, media organizations, and the military. Nearly all of those attacks had been designed and executed by Unit 61398 from their headquarters in an unassuming twelve-story building on Shanghai’s outskirts.

  A click of Bristol’s remote brought Zhau Linpeng’s photograph onto an adjacent screen. “Zhau’s been having off-campus communications with a Russian national named Anton Kozlov, who goes by Allegro.” Another photograph appeared, this one of a slim, blond-haired young man with sickly white skin. The image was accompanied by a profile that, though incomplete, provided Kozlov’s birth date, which was half a decade earlier than Bright would have guessed from looking at him.

  “What did you say he goes by?” Bright asked. He started spelling out the alias printed alongside the photo. “A—one—one—E—”

  “A11Egr0,” she said, again pronouncing the word as Allegro. “It’s leet, an alternative alphabet that substitutes numbers and other symbols for letters. It’s a hacker thing, one of the ways they set themselves apart.” Set themselves apart from clueless people like you, her tone seemed to suggest. “The spelling of a11Egr0 has many variations, but this is the one Kozlov is best known by.”

  “I see. Go on.”

  “Kozlov studied programming at MIT for three years, but he was expelled for using school computers to hack corporate targets. As you can imagine, that made him virtually unemployable—at least by noncriminal entities—and he was eventually deported after his student visa expired. We think that’s when he became a11Egr0. It’s certainly when he started getting popular in the international hacker community. This business with Zhau is the first time a11Egr0 popped up on our radar, but apparently NSA has been tracking him for years.”

  “For years?” Bright said, digesting the data on the big screen. “He’s twenty-five.”

  “These hackers are like gymnasts, they peak young. And, as with gymnasts, both Russia and China mine their populations systematically for elite talent.”

  “Whereas the US apparently deports them,” Bright noted before moving on. “So what’s a11Egr0 doing in China?”

  “We think he was granted asylum there two years ago. At least one of our sources in Moscow says a11Egr0 made enemies with the SVR”—the Russian intelligence agency that replaced the KGB—“after he penetrated some of their most sensitive computer networks. When he fled, he didn’t even try to come back to the States. China took him in. And now—well, this text exchange is interesting. It clearly suggests that the Chinese planned to have someone access Ambassador Rodgers’s plane in Shanghai. And Zhau’s communications with a11Egr0 suggest that a11Egr0 himself was the person they had in mind for that. The thing is, I don’t know if I fully buy a11Egr0 working directly for the Chinese, despite his contact with them. It goes against everything we know about hackers like him—”

  “Hold it. I warned you,” Liu said, cutting off Bristol. He turned to the room. “I warned you all. Each of you is here for a very specific reason, and that is to share with us your particular expertise. You are not to speculate on the wider nature of this case. This is a briefing, not a brainstorm.”

  “I agree,” Bright said. He and Liu were the only people in the room on the BIGOT list for MIRAGE—that is, they were the only ones cleared to even know about the secret investigation into China’s involvement in the ambassador’s death. To keep their inquiry from becoming widely known, a meeting like this was necessary—a way to siphon, in essence, the knowledge of analysts and other experts without reading them into the case. “But I do have a question about what Ms. Bristol just said.” He turned to her. “If a11Egr0 did in fact have contact with Unit 61398, is there any reason to believe he isn’t working for the Chinese?”

  “Sure. That’s where this gets interesting,” Bristol said. She gestured at the young man’s picture on the screen. “Hackers generally see it as their duty to keep the
Internet free from the control of governments and corporations, and a11Egr0 has always projected himself as the gold standard of those principles. He’s built his reputation on it. We know he’s hacked targets in the US and Russia, and the NSA says they discovered his shadow on a handful of cybercrimes in Europe and Asia—DDoS attacks, corporate espionage, identity theft, that sort of thing. His trademark seems to be zero-day attacks that—”

  “Hold on. Zero-day?” It was a term Bright had heard thrown around, and he was annoyed with himself now for not knowing precisely what it referred to.

  Aggravatingly, Bristol seemed to enjoy the opportunity to conduct another tutorial. “He chooses targets that have never been hit before and designs viruses and worms that are novel and thus undetectable until after the fact, usually when it’s too late.”

  Bright could feel the discourse sinking into a technovacuum. He wanted to make sense of this on the macro level first. “So a11Egr0 gets in over his head playing pranks on the SVR and, with his life in danger, finds a sudden friend in China. Which is problematic, at least for his hacker reputation. But he’s not too idealistic to recognize that turning a few tricks for China is better than the gulag. Is that the theory?” Bright looked around the room. Most of the heads were nodding in agreement.

  “That explains a11Egr0’s motivation,” Bristol said. “But not the Chinese’s unusual behavior. A guy like Zhau Linpeng doesn’t usually turn up chattering away about business via text.”

  “Zhau is who again?” Bright asked.

  “Zhau is ‘Peng’ on those text messages. He’s high up the chain at Unit 61398.”

  “Right,” Bright said, remembering. “And the NSA had him making contact with a11Egr0.”

  “No, actually,” Bristol said. “The NSA didn’t intercept the intelligence about the meeting between a11Egr0 and Zhau. That particular intel was the agency’s own handiwork. It apparently came from one of your men in the field.”

  BLACKFISH? Bright thought. He glanced up at the string of digital clocks on the wall. It was just after 10:00 AM in Beijing.