The Good Traitor Page 20

  Bright couldn’t blame her for this analysis—he’d thought the same thing all along. But they couldn’t afford to get this wrong any longer. “Maybe. Or maybe that thinking is exactly what’s stalled our investigation. We have a growing body count, almost all of whom are American citizens. I don’t want to hear any more about why the Chinese wouldn’t do this; it’s time to start considering why they would.”

  WASHINGTON, DC

  Reese Frampton pulled an exhilarating all-nighter. At 7:00 AM he was at the small dining table in his one-bedroom apartment hunched over his laptop. Balding at forty-three, he wore glasses, a white undershirt, and charcoal slacks he’d put on twenty-four hours earlier. The table was buried under documents. He’d spent the night reading them furiously, one by one as the predawn hours ticked toward the deadline he’d agreed to. He had two hours left.

  Another surge of adrenaline. Another pot of coffee.

  This was without a doubt a once-in-a-lifetime break, and he was trying not to think about the fact that it had simply fallen into his lap, more or less out of the blue. No matter—he’d had his share of bad luck. What was wrong with seizing the opportunity when his luck took a turn for the better? The story had come to him from a source who needed to remain anonymous because he was a senior NSA contractor at a private defense firm. Frampton had crossed paths with the man at a handful of industry conventions and knew only enough about him to know that he had tremendous access within Fort Meade. In the past, though, all of Frampton’s attempts to court the man as a source had yielded nothing. Each time he’d been blown off.

  And then this, out of nowhere. The source had called him around seven the previous evening and, as instructed, Frampton had gone immediately to retrieve a package from the concierge at the Grand Hyatt near Capitol Hill. Then he hurried home and began reading its contents.

  That’s when he realized the true scope of what he had on his hands. He thought about how his former colleagues at the Washington Times would react, the ones who had offered nothing more than sympathetic pats on the back when he’d been sacked in the annual downsizing season that seemed to coincide with every release of the paper’s earnings reports. Some of them would see it as ironic that he, now a self-employed blogger, would scoop the Washington journalism establishment. But that’s not how Reese Frampton saw it. To him, this was a sign of the changing times. He’d landed on the right side of history.

  After indulging in them briefly, Frampton set aside these thoughts of his former employer. There was no need to be bitter. He had his scoop now, a story that mattered. It would play nationally for weeks, maybe longer.

  Fact-checking the thing overnight had been a heroic ordeal. Three times—at midnight, 1:30 AM, and 4:45 AM—he had called a second source, a man he knew and trusted at the NSA. When the man didn’t answer, Frampton had to get creative with his attempts to independently verify the story told by the documents in front of him. For example, he pored through the private phone records and e-mails to pinpoint nearly a dozen key meetings between the Vasser woman and Conrad Smith, the now-deceased South African contractor. Then he cross-checked those dates with her credit card records and, sure enough, found charges at hotels in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and outside Beijing where the two had spent time together. In addition to Conrad Smith, Frampton used the provided text messages—many of which included unpublishable photographs—to identify the numbers of two additional men whom, it seemed rather obvious, Vasser had met under intimate circumstances. And then of course there were the e-mails between Vasser and Smith that the world had already seen, in which Vasser discussed the classified TERMITE files. The story line practically wrote itself: this woman had taken a real spin on the dip circuit, fucking her way from one Far East city to the next.

  At 7:15 AM, the NSA source awoke to Frampton’s voice-mail messages and called him back, a mixture of concern and annoyance in his voice. “I need a favor,” Frampton said. “No, not a favor. I just need a yes or no.” He had been typing and reading for nine hours straight. Switching suddenly to conversation with another human being strained his ability to be coherent. “I have some documents. I can’t tell you how I got them, but I need to know if they’re authentic.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Frampton had had all night to winnow down what he needed the NSA man to confirm. From the documents approved for publication—many had been marked for use only as background—he’d set aside three that, viewed on their own, wouldn’t hint at the full scope of his story. He’d taken pictures of them with his cell phone, careful to show details like the classification codes and serial numbers at the top of each page. “I’m texting you some images. I want to know if these files look legit.”

  Frampton heard the man juggle his phone, then several long moments of silence while he viewed the images on his phone. When his voice returned, he said, “You shouldn’t be texting these. It isn’t secure.”

  “I intend to publish them this morning. It hardly matters if they’re in a text.”

  “Well, I don’t want them connected to me,” the man shot back. Then, more calmly, “Can we be off the record?”

  Frampton shut his eyes. To independently verify the story, he really ought to have a second source on the record. But maybe that wasn’t necessary. Perhaps it was enough, for his own peace of mind, just to get this guy’s off-the-record affirmation. After all, the deal he’d agreed to had been clear: he wasn’t supposed to talk to anyone about this until the story was published. “Sure,” he heard himself say.

  “Where did you get these?”

  “I can’t reveal that.”

  “Are you willing to go to jail over these? Because publishing them could earn you a subpoena.”

  Jail? What was he talking about? His original source had given him thorough instructions, but he’d said nothing about subpoenas. “I just need to know. Are they for real or not?”

  “They’re for real, all right. And whoever gave them to you broke some choice laws. This is very targeted, private data on a US citizen. NSA isn’t supposed to be storing stuff like that, let alone—”

  “And yet they do. Look, I got a deadline. I appreciate you calling me back.”

  “Wait. I’m going to hang up in a second because I don’t want anything to do with this. But my advice to you: I think you should think real hard about this before publishing. This is going to do more harm than good.”

  “You’re in the business of protecting secrets, and I’m in the business of uncovering the truth. I don’t expect us to see eye to eye on this.”

  “Very well. We never spoke, OK?”

  “Huh? Oh, right. I got it. Have a nice day.”

  An hour later the article was finished. Frampton read it from beginning to end, then reread it, tinkering each time with the occasional typo or improving a turn of phrase. Satisfied, he copied the full text and pasted it into his blog’s template. He tapped out the title that his source had insisted upon: DOCUMENTS REVEAL DEVIOUS LIFE OF CLASSIFIED LEAKER. He leaned back and stared at the “Publish” button. It was not a moment of plumbing the depths of his conscience; it was a moment to savor the anticipation.

  Then it was done. He tweeted the link and e-mailed it to his subscribers. He wasn’t sure what to do next. He poured a cup of coffee. But he’d been drinking coffee for twelve hours, one cup after another. It didn’t seem up to the occasion. He found a bottle of twenty-year-old scotch that someone had gifted him, still in its fancy box. He poured two fingers over an ice cube in a tumbler and stood at the window, wondering what would happen next.

  The phone rang for the first time seven minutes after the article went live. It was a rival reporter at the Post who’d been assigned the task of confirming the story. Before that call ended, inquiries began to bombard his in-box and Twitter account. It had begun.

  CATSKILL MOUNTAINS

  The clothing options could have been worse. From the resort’s pro shop, Vasser selected a fleece pullover with the Sundown Sanctuary emblem, a tan
k top, and ladies’ golf shorts. Next door, the decidedly high-end convenience store sold yoga apparel. She put a pair of stretch pants in her basket, along with some cheese, a baguette, orange juice, and bananas.

  The clerk at the checkout register, a middle-aged Filipina woman sporting the resort’s conservative uniform, watched her approach. Turning her eyes down, as if trying to hide them with the bill of Kera’s hat, Vasser slid her basket onto the counter. The woman began to ring up the items, but when Vasser looked up a few seconds later, the clerk was still watching her. Vasser looked down, her heart thudding. Hadn’t Kera said they’d be safe here? That no one would recognize them?

  The woman bagged Vasser’s supplies slowly, securing each item with gentle precision into its place in the brown paper bag. When she finished, they both stood there for a moment, neither of them moving or speaking.

  In a voice as calm as she could summon, Vasser gave the woman her cabin number and the name under which Kera had registered. She signed the bill with an illegible scribble. To mask her anxiety, she offered a smile that she knew too late must have appeared forced.

  The air and sunlight outside helped to steady her pulse. She reasoned now that there were dozens of reasons the cashier might have been staring at her—and it seemed equally likely that Vasser’s own imagination had exaggerated the entire encounter. Still, she took a route through a small garden, avoiding the paths with high foot traffic. Looking back once, while crossing the small footbridge over the creek, she saw one of the resort’s security guards about fifty yards back. He was not rushing toward her in pursuit, but he definitely had been looking in her direction. Her mind reverted quickly to worst-case scenarios. Had something terrible happened to Kera that put their story front and center in the news cycle? If something had happened, she’d be the last to know. She walked faster and didn’t look back again until she was on the porch of the cabin. The security guard was still in sight, though he’d fallen back farther to allow distance to open between them.

  She pulled the blinds over the windows and peered out from between the slats. The guard had vanished. But Vasser could no longer talk herself out of the anxiety she felt. She was trapped, claustrophobic. Her fellow resortgoers may have sworn off news from the outside world during their time here, but surely the resort’s staff came and went from the premises daily. This felt suddenly like a dangerous disadvantage. For twenty minutes, she went from window to window, alternating glances between the cabin’s quiet surroundings and the clock on the stove.

  At one minute to four, she removed the little flip phone from the refrigerator. She turned it on and set it on the counter. She watched the device, willing it to vibrate with a call from Kera.

  But the minutes passed and no call came.

  HONG KONG INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  Kera awoke at thirty-five thousand feet from the best sleep she’d had in weeks. She should fly more often, she thought, checking the alignment of her wig in the dark window’s reflection. Airports were risky, but once you were within the contained environment of an airplane, your fate was sealed for at least the duration of the flight. Might as well get some rest.

  The route map on the seat-back screen told her that they were still three hours from Hong Kong. That meant she had slept nearly twelve of the scheduled sixteen hours. Cathay Pacific’s JFK-to-HKG haul was one of the world’s longest nonstop flights. She felt a growl of hunger and wondered whether her body thought it was time for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Tapping the screen’s navigation menu, she replaced the map with the satellite television feed. It was already tuned to CNN, the channel she’d watched briefly on the ascent out of New York, before the call of sleep promised higher returns than the repetitive non-news being trumpeted with exaggerated headlines and recycled footage.

  She sat through a report on receding polar ice caps and then an interview with a congresswoman who had just announced her retirement. At a commercial break, she got up to stretch her legs and use the restroom. Back in her seat, she had to wait until just after the top of the hour before the news cycle spun around to her story. When it did, Kera could tell quickly from the rotating headlines on the bottom of the screen that there had been a development. An anchor was replaying an interview with a man named Reese Frampton. They were talking about Angela Vasser. Kera was reaching for her headphones when, without warning, the network cut away from the image of the puffy, balding Frampton in a DC studio to display a series of photographs taken by a smartphone. In each of the photos, Angela Vasser was unclothed before a hotel mirror. CNN had blurred the predictable areas, probably out of deference to the FCC, Kera guessed, since the decision to show the photos at all exempted the network from accusations that they’d handled the story with any decency. The Internet would be far less discerning. Kera shuddered to think of how the uncensored photos could have already spread.

  Instinctively, she reached for her pocket before remembering that she’d thrown away the satellite phone at JFK, along with everything else that she didn’t want the TSA to get too curious about: an extra wig, her colored contacts, driver’s licenses for both Laura Perez and Abigail Dalton. The only thing she had on her now was the duffle filled with clothes and toiletries and the passport and other documents that identified her as Sabina Francis.

  Kera shut her eyes and felt sick at the thought of Vasser holed up at that resort, possibly one of the last people on the Internet-connected planet to learn that her private photos had been stolen and released.

  It wasn’t just photos, as it turned out. This Frampton character was apparently the journalist who broke the story—if he could be called a journalist and if this could be called a news story. He was explaining to the anchor how he’d acquired access to a trove of Vasser’s personal files from a source whose identity he would not reveal, and he seemed to have no reservations in defending his decision to publish most of the material on his blog. Kera’s hand went to her mouth. The files this man had made public included photographs and videos Vasser had exchanged with Ben Welk and several other men; text messages; credit card transactions that revealed her travel habits; e-mails in which she said undiplomatic things about friends and colleagues; lists of Google searches she’d run, including a query for the name of a common STD; and even a selective history of contraceptives and other medications she’d been prescribed. It was all newsworthy, Frampton argued, because Vasser had made herself a public figure by leaking national security secrets.

  “No citizen who makes public classified information should have a reasonable expectation of privacy,” Frampton was saying in a way that sounded rote, as though he’d uttered the same clunky phrase to a dozen other media outlets in the last few hours. “These records, this evidence of Ms. Vasser’s reckless associations, paint a pretty disturbing picture of a woman we trusted to represent the United States to the world. Look, there’s an inevitable tension between privacy and national security. I get that. But that’s not the real issue here anymore. This evidence came to light; we can’t reverse that. The only thing we can do—we must do—is take all of this information into account when we assess Ms. Vasser’s guilt or innocence on these very serious charges.”

  Kera felt her anger come back into focus, this time backed up by a passion fueled by twelve hours of restful sleep. This was not news. It was a meticulously designed smear campaign, assembled illegally and handed off to a self-proclaimed journalist Kera had never heard of. The government’s message was clear: Go ahead and hide. We don’t even need to prosecute you to ruin your life.

  But where had this come from? Not the CIA; they preferred to keep things quiet. Securing approval for a tactic this depraved seemed like a long shot at the FBI, where too many risk-averse bureaucrats would have had to sign off. There was only one entity on earth that could acquire this amount of this type of information on a target. But what did the NSA have against Vasser? It didn’t add up. The smear felt like a new, and much more political, dimension to the case. Fucking Washington, Kera thought. No doubt press
ure was building for someone to stop both the classified leaks and the rising body count. And since no one was succeeding there, they were all desperate to keep shifting the focus, redirecting the blame.

  The Boeing 777-300ER touched down on Chinese soil at dawn. When she disembarked, it was 5:57 AM, local time, which was thirteen hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time. Kera pictured Angela Vasser removing the phone from the refrigerator, eager for news. Kera could purchase a calling card and call her from a pay phone. But what would she say to her? What good would it do?

  Kera walked right past the pay phones and proceeded to customs.

  CATSKILL MOUNTAINS

  Sundown brought with it a decision. Staying in place was no longer tolerable. Vasser felt more and more certain she’d been recognized and followed by the resort’s staff. She had no contact with the outside world. And Kera hadn’t called in over twenty-four hours. What if Kera had been followed too? Or arrested? Or worse? Vasser would have no way of knowing. It was time to move. She would leave as soon as darkness set in.

  A few minutes after the top of the hour, Vasser set the phone back in the fridge and packed her old clothes, which she’d changed out of after purchasing the resort wear. She checked that the doors were locked and turned out all the lights except for one in the living room. Then she reset the timer on the stove for fifty-five minutes, giving Kera one last chance to call, and she lay on the couch to rest. The sun was already down, but daylight would wane gradually to dusk for another hour or so.

  Despite the adrenaline cycling through her, she must have dozed off while working out in her head where she would go once she left the resort on foot. The next sound she heard was a heart-stopping crash that jolted her from sleep. The front and back doors to the cottage were breached simultaneously, their locks ripped from splintering frames. In the time it took her to sit upright, eight men dressed in black tactical gear with automatic weapons drawn entered the room and circled the couch. It was over before Vasser could even scream.