The Good Traitor Read online

  “That wasn’t us, Kera. Not the pictures and the private files.”

  “Bullshit. That was never about pictures, not really. Why can’t anyone see that? She’s innocent, Lionel. She always was. An American diplomat, and she was treated like a traitor.” She looked right at him. “I know how that feels.”

  “Kera—”

  She held up a hand to stop him. “Do you have a computer? Let’s get this over with.” She felt the snap in her voice and regretted it. It was the fatigue, closing in around her.

  Bright produced a laptop from a shoulder bag lying on the table. He pushed it toward her, inviting her to sit. She did, after taking the small flash drive from her pocket. She slipped it into the USB port. When prompted for the encryption key, she entered it without hesitation and turned the computer back to Lionel, who started scrutinizing the contents of the files immediately.

  Kera sat back. For the first time, she felt real relief—relief for learning the cause of so many deaths, for getting out of China, for recovering the flash drive and delivering it to Lionel. Especially for that. It felt surreal being here with him. The dramatic events of the last few months had taught her that Lionel Bright was not the man she’d believed he was when she’d worked under him at the agency. But didn’t that mean she knew him better now, just like she knew herself better too? In a weird way, having cause to question their trust in each other had brought them closer.

  She watched Bright for a few minutes as the expression on his face changed from curious to astonished. The files were legit, all right.

  “What is Vasser saying?” Kera asked.

  “About you?” he said without looking up. He was engrossed in what he was seeing on-screen. “Nothing. She’s driving everyone crazy.”

  Kera smiled. “She did everything right.”

  Then she fell silent for several minutes and let Bright absorb the details of OPERATION MAYFLOWER and the stolen Unit 61398 files.

  “Do you think a war can be avoided?” she asked him. “Or is it already too late?”

  “That depends. Does Beijing know these files were stolen?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then I like our chances. If we do it right, we might be able to unwind this thing before they even know it’s blown. As long as no one panics, we can all wake up tomorrow morning.”

  “And me?”

  He pointed at the computer screen. “Do you realize what you’ve done here? Not just getting us details of this operation in time for us to diffuse it. But this other stuff on Unit 61398. It’s like a decade’s worth of work, dropped right in our lap.”

  “You’ll be a character witness at my sentencing hearing, then?” It wasn’t a joke exactly, just sarcasm.

  His eyes grew serious. “All the things that were done to Vasser after she was falsely accused—they’ll be done to you too. And worse, probably. I can’t bear to see that.”

  “It’s not up to you, I guess.”

  “I’m being serious. Do you have somewhere you can go?”

  “To go?” she said, finding his eyes. She didn’t fully understand what he meant until she saw the steadiness in his gaze. “I . . . I don’t know.” And then, after a moment of catching up, she said, “Who knows I made it out of Beijing?”

  “No one. Just BLACKFISH. I told him that his internal report of the incident in Beijing should suggest that you’d been killed in the gunfight that got a11Egr0. Of course, if you prefer, you can turn yourself in. I’d be honored to be a character witness at your hearing. But I hope I never have to.”

  Kera stepped back, studying his eyes for a hint that she’d misunderstood him. But he was serious. He was telling her that he’d left her a way out. It felt dangerous to want something as badly as she wanted to believe him. “Remember what you used to tell me?” she said. “‘Never forget that there’s a difference between your undercover life and your real life. And your real life matters more.’” He nodded. “I don’t have a real life anymore.”

  “Well, now you have a chance. You deserve that much.”

  She nodded. And suddenly, now that she’d glimpsed the potential for a new life, a life that wouldn’t be defined by the four close walls of a prison cell, she couldn’t look back. Her mind had already begun to formulate a plan.

  Bright held up the flash drive. “I need to get this back to Langley right now. Is there somewhere I can find you, if I need to?”

  Kera shook her head. The beginning of a smile formed at the corners of her mouth. “No. You won’t be able to find me. But when you want to be in touch, leave a five-star review on Amazon, using your initials, for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. When I see it, I’ll find you.”

  He chuckled. “That was a smart move, getting our attention with the David Cornwell backdoor.”

  “It only looks smart now because it worked. Thanks for recognizing it for what it was,” she said.

  “We used to be a good team. I hadn’t forgotten that.”

  “See you around, then?”

  He nodded. She gave a little wave, and then she turned and he watched her cross the hangar floor. She never looked back.

  CAPITOL HILL—TWO WEEKS LATER

  Before this moment, Angela Vasser had never set foot inside room 219 of the Hart Senate Office Building. She’d been in other Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities before, of course. The embassy in Beijing had no fewer than three. But no SCIF—outside of the White House’s situation room and those at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley—had hosted as many discussions about the United States’ most closely held intelligence secrets as Hart 219. Upon entering through a vault-like door, she was immediately struck by the simplicity of the room—all beige-paneled walls and utilitarian furniture. The room didn’t pretend to be anything other than what it was: a soundproof box full of men and women with very high security clearances.

  The twenty-four members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were present, arranged according to seniority in a horseshoe formation on a platform from which they peered down at the speaker. Not one of them made a sound as Vasser took her seat. Whatever else was on their minds, whatever else their busy schedules had in store for them that day—they seemed to forget it when she entered. The tension in the room climaxed as Vasser took a sip of water from the glass on the table before her and then set it down.

  “Good morning, Ms. Vasser,” said Larry Wrightmont, the intelligence committee’s chairman. “Thank you for being here today. I know you have not found many champions on Capitol Hill, but I’d like to be the first here to commend you, in an unqualified, nonpartisan manner, for your continued service to this country. As I’m sure you’re about to highlight, our diplomatic relationship with China has never been so delicate. We’re relieved to have you back in Beijing.”

  “Thank you, Chairman,” Vasser said, adjusting the microphone in front of her. She felt the room exhale, as if there was universal relief that this exchange would remain civil. The previous weeks had provided good reason to doubt that.

  Following the discovery of China’s espionage plot, along with evidence that exonerated Vasser from any wrongdoing, the secretary of state had lobbied the president to nominate Vasser to replace the late Ambassador Rodgers. He made a strong case that her presence at the embassy in Beijing was invaluable. But while many of the adults in Congress had voiced support for the Vasser nomination, they were immediately drowned out by waves of vitriol from their political opponents. The past revelations of Vasser’s sex life, her associations with Kera Mersal—it was all too much for the politicians to defend to their constituents. Vasser herself had ended the controversy by asking the president to withdraw her from consideration.

  “What do you want to do?” the president had asked her during a fifteen-minute meeting in the Oval Office after a classified ceremony at which she had been honored by the State Department and the CIA.

  “I’d like to go back to China. But I don’t want to go through a confirmation hearing, and I don’t w
ant a position that’s merely ceremonial. The new ambassador, whomever you choose, will need me on the ground there, doing real work to repair this damage. And I’m told the CIA has an interest in having me there too.”

  With a new ambassador yet to be nominated, Vasser was the only person qualified to brief the Senate’s intelligence committee on the diplomatic challenges the United States faced in China. Besides the CIA and FBI, only the men and women gathered in Hart 219 knew the full scope of the tensions with China, including the discovery and careful dismantling of OPERATION MAYFLOWER.

  “I understand you’ve been briefed by the FBI on the foiled Chinese espionage plot,” Senator Wrightmont said, tacking straight to business.

  “Yes, I just came from there,” Vasser said, locking eyes with Wrightmont. “And by foiled you mean foiled except for the assassinations of Ambassador Rodgers, Conrad Smith, Charlie—”

  “Yes, of course, Ms. Vasser. No one is forgetting that,” Wrightmont said. His voice was clipped, resentful of her approach. “But surely you appreciate the incomprehensible damage that was avoided because our intelligence community discovered OPERATION MAYFLOWER before it could be used against us.”

  “Let’s not sugarcoat the intelligence community’s role here, Mr. Chairman. An ex-CIA operative, Kera Mersal—working on her own—led us to that intelligence, and she gave her life in the process.” Vasser studied the senators; she didn’t owe them anything.

  Since her nomination, Vasser had been briefed three times by the FBI and twice by the CIA. Each time, she pleaded to know more about what Kera Mersal had been doing in China and why she hadn’t come back. She was told that Kera had been killed during a mission to apprehend her and bring her into US custody for questioning. This was more than what the general public knew, but the information was still vague. When she pressed for details, she was told the case was classified. She had begun to doubt whether anyone actually knew what had happened to Kera after all. Surely it must have been on the minds of the senators before her. If it couldn’t be discussed by them in this room, it meant the senators had nothing to discuss.

  The briefings she received had been much more enlightening about everything else that had happened. The missing link, which neither Vasser nor Kera had been aware of at the time they were on the run together, was OPERATION MAYFLOWER. When a powerful faction of spooks inside the MSS began to sense that their secret operation was slipping from their control just as it was becoming big enough to do real damage, they panicked. In a desperate attempt to keep evidence of the plot from surfacing, they tried to eliminate the potential sources of such evidence. These included people such as Ambassador Rodgers, Conrad Smith, and even Vasser herself, among others, who were unaware of the operation but happened to have close associations with assets involved with OPERATION MAYFLOWER.

  The young man who’d been contracted to carry out the assassinations, a Russian hacker called a11Egr0, who ultimately turned against his Chinese handlers, was himself killed on the same day as Kera. Whatever had happened in the final hours of their lives, Kera had somehow stolen classified Chinese intelligence files from the hacker and passed them on to the CIA. Those files led the FBI to systematically question nearly twelve hundred people who lived in the United States and remained in contact with operatives of China’s Ministry of State Security. A few dozen of those people had been arrested, and dozens more had been deported, but the vast majority had pleaded complete ignorance of the plot and were happy to cooperate with the FBI. Details they turned over led intelligence officials to identify the network of MSS handlers responsible for orchestrating the plot.

  A senator three seats over from Wrightmont jumped in with a question intended to get the conversation back on track. “Are you back in communication with your Chinese counterparts?”

  “I am. The willingness of both sides to continue diplomatic relations has, I believe, saved us from entering a much larger conflict.”

  “What is your interpretation of China’s response to all this? What are they admitting to? And how much do they know about the intelligence that we—or, Ms. Mersal was able to recover?”

  “There remains plenty of uncertainty about who in the Chinese government knew what—at least with respect to the MSS’s lethal attempts to keep OPERATION MAYFLOWER secret. But in just the last few days, the Chinese government has arrested several MSS officials who had been linked to the assassinations or who assisted the Russian hacker. Such a crackdown on spies within their own intelligence service is an unprecedented step for Beijing. I interpret it as a conciliatory and profound gesture of their desire to restore workable levels of trust with the United States.”

  “Excuse me,” one senator said when Vasser finished her statement. “Are you not recommending any sanctions or military action against China?”

  “At this time, no.”

  “Are you not concerned that doing nothing makes the United States look weak?”

  “With respect, Senator, we are not doing nothing. We are doing what is in America’s best interest. Our strength comes from recognizing that our priority is to work with other world powers to build a healthy global economy and encourage more transparency. How we act now will determine whether the global technology race benefits humanity or precipitates its destruction. We demonstrate that strength by engaging in frank diplomacy with Beijing, not by continuing a tit-for-tat confrontation that, in any event, will not bring back Ambassador Rodgers.”

  The hearing was adjourned at the conclusion of Vasser’s testimony. Several senators approached her to thank her personally for her service and to offer condolences for the loss of Ambassador Rodgers. A few others had remained in the room, huddled in their own private conversations. And a few had left in a hurry to make their next appointments. Once outside the soundproof vault, Vasser waited for her turn to collect her phone from the security guard. When she had that in hand, she pushed through the outer door and into the hallway.

  She froze. Standing in the center of the hall with an attentive eye on the door were five men in blue FBI windbreakers. She felt a tightening in her chest, a mix of alarm and anger.

  “It’s OK, babe,” a voice said from her left. It was Ben. He’d planned to meet her and take her to lunch. It was the last meal they’d have together before she left for Beijing. Sensing her distress, he added, “They’re here for someone else.”

  Had she grown so accustomed to being pursued by law enforcement that just the sight of a few Feds made her heart race? Vasser looked back over her shoulder, but the door to Hart 219 had already closed behind her. “Who are they here for?”

  Ben didn’t know the answer to that. He’d been waiting for her, he said, when the Feds approached one of the security guards. They said they needed to see one of the senators who was inside. They weren’t happy to be told to wait, but the guard assured them that they didn’t have a security clearance high enough to enter the room while a closed hearing was in progress. If it was any consolation, there was only one way out of the room, and no communication could get in. Their senator wasn’t a flight risk.

  A few moments later, the question was answered. The outer door opened and Senator Larry Wrightmont emerged, powering up his newly reclaimed phone. He took two steps before he looked up and stopped in his tracks.

  “Senator Wrightmont?” the lead agent said, moving with his colleagues toward the senator. “You are under the arrest for abuse of power. Specifically, conspiracy to steal and distribute private, classified information about a private US citizen.”

  “What is this about?” Senator Wrightmont said, his instinct to fight kicking in. “Hold on. You can’t do this. Not here.” He brushed away the agent’s first attempt to cuff him, but when the four other agents took a step closer, he seemed to concede that he was not going to win a physical altercation. As he was being cuffed, his eyes darted around the hallway. When they found Vasser’s, they hesitated. And then they looked quickly back to the agents. “This is a big mistake, gentlemen. I want to speak to my l
awyer before you take me anywhere—”

  “It was you?” Ben said. His voice boomed. “You were behind all this?” He took a few steps toward the senator before Vasser could put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. She looked him in the eye.

  “It’s OK. It’s over now,” she said. And for the first time since all this had begun, she really believed that it was.

  THE VALLEY

  Kera crested the pass and put the rental car in park just in front of the gate. She got out and stood for a minute, looking up at the peaks and down at the lake while a breeze blew hair across her face. After a minute she heard a click, and the gate swung slowly open. She was smiling as she climbed back behind the wheel.

  It was Jones who greeted her with a hug when she found him in the driveway outside Bolívar’s cabin. His pickup was parked nearby, its engine clicking as it cooled. He must have hauled ass to get here from the mine.

  “We thought you’d—” Jones stuttered. “Gnos.is was never able to confirm it, but everyone else was reporting that you’d been killed. In China? We didn’t know what to think.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I couldn’t risk being in touch.”

  “What happened?”

  Kera didn’t know how to answer that. She shrugged. “Most of the pieces are all out there in the world now. Don’t you have a little toy that can put them all together?”

  “Who knows you’re alive?”

  “Lionel. And one of his guys in Beijing, plus the small flight crew who transported me back. And now you.”

  “Lionel let you go?”

  “It was his idea. I brought him something very valuable.” Jones looked at her, wanting more. But she just shook her head. “That part is something Gnos.is is not going to get its hands on.”