The Good Traitor Page 23

  Henry Liu peeked cautiously through the exit door a minute later.

  “Lionel,” he said, opening the door and stepping out to join him.

  Bright didn’t say anything at first. He just stood staring out at a parking lot. And then he spoke.

  “We didn’t have anything to do with this Vasser privacy leak, did we? This stuff about the photos and medical history?”

  “No, sir, not that I’m aware of.”

  “Find out who did.”

  HONG KONG

  When Ren Hanchao knocked on Kera’s hotel room door the following morning, he was dressed as a hotel manager in a crisp button-down jacket and pressed gray pants. Kera let him in and closed the door.

  “Have you had adequate time to consider my offer?” Ren asked.

  “I have,” Kera said. “And I’ve decided it’s quite unusual. Why are you offering me help? I was under the impression that China is wary of volunteers. The common wisdom among US intelligence analysts is that the MSS is disinclined to accept the risk. If you want to know a secret, we’ve always kind of admired you for that.”

  “Your talent for analysis no doubt made you a valuable asset to the CIA, Ms. Mersal. Your information is accurate.”

  “Then why are you so eager to trust me?”

  “Believe me, I am no more eager to trust you than you are to betray your country. But you know many things about your CIA’s interest in China. And you need a place to stay. Think of it as a partnership.”

  “I appreciate your offer of hospitality, and I will accept it”—she saw pleasant surprise flicker in his eyes—“on a few conditions. I will meet with whomever you wish me to meet with, though I cannot promise to give them everything they ask for. I will cooperate with your requests for intelligence—up to a point. I’m not willing to discuss subjects that will harm innocent people. In exchange for my knowledge, I will not be detained and no media outlets will learn that I am here. I don’t want to be in Hong Kong; the CIA’s presence here is too great. I will stay in and around Beijing on my own recognizance. Maybe I’ll go and visit the Great Wall. I’ve never been. You will pay for a safe place for me to stay and a weekly stipend of twenty thousand yuan. I imagine that you will have to get approval for this from your minister of state security. If he will not grant me this deal, exactly as I’ve requested, I will disappear. If you try to stop me, you will find that I’ve changed my mind about sharing intelligence.”

  Ren smiled. “You must have had a very comfortable night’s sleep. You have done some big thinking.” The smile faded. “You are asking for a lot.”

  “I know a lot.”

  “Very well. I will try to convince my colleagues that we can build trust with you, Ms. Mersal. You understand, they are skeptical.”

  “I’m sure you and your colleagues have strategies to mitigate those risks. I will oblige them, so long as it doesn’t involve prison time or causing harm to innocent people.”

  Ren nodded. “I will take your proposal to Mr. Feng.”

  “Thank you. I will wait here for up to three hours. I’m sure you’re aware that I’ve made arrangements to continue on to Malaysia this afternoon should our partnership not work out.”

  At her mention of traveling out of the country, he gave her a little smile that made her question whether she was overplaying her confidence. They knew as well as she did that she’d involuntarily traded in her passport for round-the-clock surveillance. On the matter of if and when she ever made it out of the country, she could no longer pretend to have much say.

  An hour later, one of Ren’s bodyguards knocked on Kera’s door. She collected her duffel bag and was led down the hall toward the elevator bank.

  “Don’t take this personally,” Kera said, “but I don’t ride elevators with people below a certain rank.” She opened the stairwell door. “I can meet you downstairs, or you can come with me.”

  The bodyguard glanced back at the elevator, perhaps considering whether she could possibly know something about the elevator that he didn’t and weighing that against the idea of taking thirty-nine flights of stairs. He decided to follow her into the echoing stairwell. They descended quickly, Kera taking two stairs at a time and opening a two-flight gap between herself and the winded bodyguard. As she approached the landing at the lobby, the man called out for her to wait. He caught up to her, sweating from his brow and breathing heavily. Then he continued down another two flights.

  She followed him to the first level of the basement parking garage. When they emerged from the stairwell, an SUV with heavily tinted windows was idling by the elevator bank—not a place it would have parked had they planned to crater an elevator car into the bowels of the building. Kera took that as a good sign.

  Ren was smiling when the bodyguard opened the door for her.

  “Mr. Feng is pleased to honor your requests. Welcome to the People’s Republic of China.”

  LANGLEY

  The MIRAGE team began to hit their stride as they closed in on evidence of how Reese Frampton, the blogger, had obtained Angela Vasser’s private photos, medical records, and other documents. The trail led them to a man named Rick Altman, a wealthy defense contractor who worked closely with the NSA. Using Vasser’s phone number and e-mail address, a friend of Altman’s at the NSA had easily targeted and mined Vasser’s private files. Altman himself had filtered through the payload first, selecting files that contained information that had the greatest potential to damage Vasser’s reputation. These he handed over to Frampton, who was eager to claim the story as his own.

  That was easy enough to determine, but it had done little to reveal the motives behind the smear campaign. So they kept digging, tracing the web of contacts that fanned out from Altman and his NSA insider. This steered them to someone very interesting—Larry Wrightmont, the chairman of the Senate’s intelligence committee. Wrightmont was known to have designs on becoming the next head of the NSA, a post that would put him in a position to funnel lucrative contracts back to Altman.

  Bright wasn’t sure yet what he would do with this knowledge, but there was at least one strategic option. If he played it straight and turned over the findings to Director Ellis at the FBI, so that the Department of Justice could launch a formal investigation, it might isolate the NSA as the primary culprit of Vasser’s misery. Then maybe she’d consider talking to Bright or the Feds about Kera Mersal.

  Bright and Henry Liu were gaming this out in Bright’s office when his assistant knocked on the door. The ops center had just called. They said it was urgent.

  “I’ll head down there,” Bright said. He was almost to the door when Liu caught up to him.

  “So you want me to reach out to the attorney general’s office?”

  “Yes. About all of it except Wrightmont’s role. Let’s sit on that, see how things play out.”

  “What have we got?” Bright said as he entered the LED glow of the ops center.

  “It’s Vasser’s burner phone, sir,” one of the analysts said. “The one they found in that refrigerator.” He explained that, after a subpoena was issued to the cellular company demanding records associated with the number, the NSA had determined that the sole call Vasser received had originated from a vehicle on the Van Wyck Expressway in Queens.

  “Heading to JFK?” Bright asked.

  “Yep.”

  “And?”

  “There was no Abigail Dalton on any flights out of the tri-state area, but when we searched facial recogs, we got a partial for the name Sabina Francis. This is her at the JFK security checkpoint.”

  Bright studied the monitor. He noticed the way the woman avoided putting her face in direct view of the security cameras. In areas where that was impossible—such as the TSA screening zone, where cameras cased the area from every direction—the woman kept her head tilted awkwardly at a fifteen-degree angle, a tactic that usually stumped the software. “That’s Kera. Where’s she headed?”

  “That’s where it gets weird. We intercepted this footage from the custom
s hall at HKG. She landed there yesterday morning, local time. Her itinerary had her booked through to Kuala Lumpur, same day, tight layover. But as you can see, she disappears here with a customs agent and we lose her. Wherever she went, she never got on the flight to Malaysia.”

  Bright asked the analyst to roll the video again, just the part where Kera approached the customs agent and was then led away. He squinted at the monitor as if that might make it clearer—as if making it clearer would tell him something about what Kera was thinking.

  “Lionel?” Henry Liu said. He’d been standing next to Bright the whole time, taking in this new development like everyone else. “Do you think it’s time we treat the Mersal case as a defection?”

  Bright said nothing. He just squinted at the monitor.

  By that evening Bright had sunk into a foul mood. Kera resurfacing in Hong Kong was big news inside the agency, which had been tracking her in vain since her disappearance. Before Bright could make any determination about how his team should pursue the lead, he was summoned by CIA Director Cal Tennison to the seventh floor. In his corner office, Director Tennison—a tall, graying man with unusually broad shoulders—commended Bright on the fresh lead. But he made it clear that full congratulations were not in order just yet. Bright should be aggressive, Tennison said; he should spare no effort to bring in Kera Mersal. Pressure from the White House was building, and the director was as eager as ever to make an example out of Mersal’s treason.

  Anxious, Bright left the office early. He considered going somewhere to have a drink, but decided instead to walk two miles on the high school track near his house. It helped a little. Not much.

  They were having dinner in Bright’s dining room when Karen, sensing a weight on his mind, finally called him out on it, encouraging him to vent. They had been dating now for over a month, and with relative ease, considering the circumstances. He suddenly felt them plunged into new territory: the first headwinds, the first choppy waters. He considered dismissing her outright, but fearing that that tactic was hopeless, he conceded to her that he was having a minor crisis of conscience. He didn’t know whom to trust and whom to distrust. He had meant this in the context of work, but as soon as he’d said it, he knew the words hung in the air, equally applicable to their relationship. He didn’t correct that notion. Instead, he retreated back into himself, claiming it was something he couldn’t talk about.

  Bright started at the loud clank of her fork against her plate. At first he mistook himself as the source of her anger.

  “They ask too much of us,” Karen said. Her voice wasn’t loud, but it quavered with emotion.

  Bright grew defensive. “It’s not as if I’m the only one who doesn’t share everything about my life.”

  “Is that what’s eating you? Good. Then you know how I feel.”

  He parted his lips to speak again, but she stopped him.

  “Don’t. We can’t let this poison what we’ve managed to create.” Her tone was softer now, almost pleading. She exhaled, as if to preface something difficult. “But we can’t just ignore it either. Clearly, that isn’t working. Look, I know you’ve checked into my background.”

  He couldn’t suppress an instinct to jump in here and what—deny it? Or defend himself? But he didn’t get the chance. She cut him off again.

  “I don’t have proof. Nothing like that. I can just tell. And honestly, that’s fine. I just hope you were able to learn enough to know that I’m not a spy or anything like that.”

  He had not, in fact, learned enough to make him confident about that. But any suspicion he had about her, he realized, was professional, the sort that had been trained into someone who must live his life trusting no one. He didn’t know what to say.

  “If you must know, Lionel, I work at DARPA,” she said, referring to the Defense Department’s secretive scientific research agency. “I’m a scientist. My work needs to be classified for a variety of reasons. And I have the cover identity to protect myself from becoming a target. But what I’m doing is not devious.” She made a point of meeting his eye here. “Secrets aren’t always evidence of bad deeds.”

  “I know that,” he said. “I’m sorry if I ever implied the opposite.”

  “Is it too late for us?”

  “Is what too late?”

  “Sometimes I think I never understood what I was giving up when I was recruited into this career. They don’t tell you about this part of it. About how there might never be a way out. Lionel?”

  His mind had spun reflexively to all the research tools at his disposal, and whether any might be able to confirm her employment at DARPA. Then, just as quickly, he felt a flush of shame for having a mind that worked like that. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She grew quiet and practical then, clearing the table and rinsing the dishes, while he sat thinking in the dining room, marveling actually, at the fact that he’d gotten close enough to a woman that she moved so comfortably in his house. She appeared in the doorway wearing her jacket.

  “I’m going to sleep at home tonight.”

  He didn’t try to stop her. But he felt an urgency he’d never experienced when she opened the front door.

  “Karen,” he said, stopping her in the threshold. “It’s not too late.”

  He thought he saw her head move, the slightest nod, and he decided it was a sign of hope, if not full agreement. She closed the door behind her.

  BEIJING

  They drove her blindfolded to a safe house somewhere near the airport. The drive had been short, and from inside she could hear the not-too-distant roar of jets departing at regular intervals. First they put her in a windowless room where one of Ren’s colleagues asked her a series of benign questions about her background. Then she was escorted to a smaller windowless room where a thin white-haired man sat at a computer. She understood immediately why they’d brought her here: they were going to flutter her.

  The old man rose when she entered but didn’t greet her. With a stony face, he gestured to his instruments. She slipped cooperatively into the pneumograph vest, which would record her respiratory activity. The old man tightened a blood-pressure cuff around her left bicep, and immediately she could feel her pulse throbbing against its grip. Finally, the tips of her fingers were fixed with electrodes calibrated to detect electrodermal responses.

  Everyone else left the room. When the old man finally spoke, his clear English surprised her. The questions he asked fell into three categories. The first were basic questions—“Were you born in El Salvador?” and “Did you go to university at Dartmouth?”—designed to establish a psychophysiological baseline from which to compare her responses to the two other types of questions.

  The second category consisted of control questions, such as, “Have you lied to your parents?” and, “Did you ever cheat to get ahead?” Kera knew to goose her body’s responses to these by imagining anxiety-inducing thoughts in visceral detail. For example, when asked a control question, she transported her mind to the moment she’d entered the apartment she’d shared with Parker and smelled gun smoke in the air. She relived the awful sinking feeling that came from knowing she was too late. Right on the heels of that, she thought of Rafael Bolívar pushing her naked back against the table of her cabin in the valley. Her heart rate increased, her breath wavered. Not overkill, but just enough.

  Control questions, she knew, were designed to tease out the inevitable anxiety one faces when asked to assign truthfulness to past events and behaviors—situations that anyone is likely to reflect on with uncertainty. This way, when she was asked the crucial third type of questions—what polygraph experts call the “relevant” questions, such as, “Are you an intelligence agent of the US government?” and “Did you establish contact with Ren Hanchao under false pretenses?”—her apparent lack of anxiety surrounding these matters would shine in comparison to the control questions, which had caused her to exhibit a physiological spike.

  That was how you beat the polygraph. If your physiological responses
to the control questions were greater than your responses to the relevant questions, you’d be ruled nondeceptive.

  There was no clock in the room, but Kera guessed that the questions had been coming for at least half an hour. She felt sharp and able to focus on each of the old man’s syllables as they were delivered, helping her maintain a calm command of the signals her brain sent into her nervous system.

  That is until, in the same monotonous drone the old man had used throughout, he said, “Do you know Rafael Bolívar?”

  She flinched with surprise—internally if not outwardly. But it must have been enough. She thought she felt a stutter in her chest, a little spike in her blood pressure. These subtle but revealing signals rippled through her vitals like surface rings caused by a stone dropped into a still lake. She’d expected questions about her time at the agency and whether she maintained ties with anyone at Langley. And she’d been prepared to answer questions about surviving on the run and, for example, whether Kuala Lumpur had really been her intended destination. But she had not anticipated Bolívar’s name coming up.

  “We’ve met,” she managed to say.

  “Yes or no answers, please.”

  “Yes.”

  She coached herself to a quick recovery and braced for more questions about Bolívar. But the old man moved on to other topics, probing her biography. Then he announced that the polygraph test had concluded and he disconnected his instruments.

  She was invited into a bare conference room. Now that she was no longer hooked up to a computer, she could let loose on her internal self-criticism for botching the response to the question about Bolívar. It was a potentially disastrous mistake. If she gave her Chinese hosts even the slightest reason to doubt her motives, it could imperil her chances at gaining more access.

  A few minutes later, Ren Hanchao entered and offered her tea. “Yes, thank you,” Kera said, searching his eyes for any change in the way he regarded her.