The Good Traitor (21 page)

C
ATSKILL
M
OUNTAINS

The clothing options could have been worse. From the resort’s pro shop, Vasser selected a fleece pullover with the Sundown Sanctuary emblem, a tank 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 the
y’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, sh
e’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 h
e’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.

H
ONG
K
ONG
I
NTERNATIONAL
A
IRPORT

Kera awoke at thirty-five thousand feet from the best sleep sh
e’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 sh
e’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 the
y’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 sh
e’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 h
e’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 sh
e’d
run, including a query for the name of a common STD; and even a selective history of contraceptives and other medications sh
e’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 h
e’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 pressure 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.

C
ATSKILL
M
OUNTAINS

Sundown brought with it a decision. Staying in place was no longer tolerable. Vasser felt more and more certain sh
e’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 sh
e’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.

“FBI! FBI!” the intruders were shouting. “Put your hands behind your head.”

Vasser obeyed, and through her exhaustion the only feeling she could summon was relief.

H
ONG
K
ONG
I
NTERNATIONAL
A
IRPORT

Signs in Chinese and English directed all international travelers through baggage claim and into the expansive, high-ceilinged atrium that housed the airport’s busy immigration and customs checkpoint. Passengers burdened with luggage flowed around Kera, who had almost none and who had slowed to study each of the eight customs officials ensconced in their glass boxes, working passport stamps with grave, unchanging expressions.

Instead of falling into one of the lines, Kera stepped aside and entered the ladies’ restroom. She found an empty stall and removed the Sabina Francis passport. She pried at the top of the toilet paper dispenser until the thin metal bent up, exposing a sharp corner. Scraping gently against the surface of the passport’s main page, Kera removed the control digit for the date of birth within the passport’s Machine Readable Zone, or MRZ, the two rows of information along the bottom. Satisfied with the obscured digit, she slipped the book back into her pocket. From her wallet she removed Sabina Francis’s driver’s license, credit card, and business cards. She considered trying to flush them down the toilet but then thought better of it; there was probably a reason signs in public restrooms pleaded with people not to flush trash. She didn’t want to risk a scenario that ended with her rolling up a sleeve. Instead, she bent the license and credit card until they were severely damaged and marked with hard, permanent creases. Then she wrapped each of them in a paper towel and buried them deep in the trash can by the sinks.

That was expensive,
she thought, exiting the restroom.

She walked directly to lane 6. It was slightly longer than the others because, as Kera had observed earlier, the buzz-cut officer in booth 6 took his job very seriously, scrutinizing not just the passports but also the faces of each traveler, as if he actually suspected every man, woman, and child might be an imminent threat to the security of the People’s Republic.

The line inched forward. Kera had easily picked out all of the surveillance cameras, and, forcing herself to buck habit, she refrained from tilting her head or turning away her face. Instead, she kept her eyes up, looking forward.

Several people abandoned the line ahead of her in search of swifter passage elsewhere, leaving her waiting on deck. An elderly couple was now before the officer. Kera watched the interaction, rehearsing in her head the answers to the questions they were asked.

“Hi,” she said when the
y’d
shuffled off, passports stamped, and she found herself face-to-face with the customs official. She slid her passport across the counter.

“Where are you traveling from?”

“New York.”

“Where is your final destination?”

“Kuala Lumpur.”

“So you will not be staying over in China?”

“No.”

“What is the purpose of your travel?”

“Business, mostly. I’m a travel writer.”

During this exchange, Kera had been aware that the officer had attempted to scan her passport twice. Though his expression had not changed, he eventually paused his questioning to give the passport page a cursory once-over. Observing nothing wrong at first glance, he tried the scan again. Again it failed to read. This time he examined the page more closely, paying special attention to the MRZ lines. Kera performed an exaggerated yawn. She watched him out of the corner of her eye so that she saw the exact moment he did a subtle double take and then ran his thumb slowly over the scarred digit. When he looked up at her, she averted her eyes and scratched her head nervously, tilting her wig ever so slightly.

“Is there a problem?” she said.

The man picked up his phone and said something into it that she could not hear. When he looked back at her, all he said was, “One minute, ma’am.”

It took much less than a minute for the officer’s supervisor to arrive. He inspected the document, squinting at the unreadable digit and then looking up at Kera. His tone was friendlier than his colleague’s.

“Did you alter this on purpose?”

“I’m sorry? I don’t understand.”

“See this scratch? It looks very deliberate.”

“No, I didn’t do that,” she said, looking at the passport page as if sh
e’d
never even noticed the digits before.

“The scanner cannot authenticate the passport without that number. Has this been in your possession throughout your flight?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Do you have another form of identification?”

“Other than my passport? No. What more could you need?”

“Not a driver’s license? Nothing?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“I see.” The two men exchanged a few words in Cantonese. And then, “You’ll come with me.”

“Oh. Will this take long? My connecting flight leaves in less than an hour.”

But the man did not answer her. He didn’t give the passport back either.

Here we go,
she thought.