The Good Traitor (3 page)

T
HE
V
ALLEY
, R
URAL
M
ONTANA

Twenty miles beyond the last gas station, on a plain where gorgeous desolation stretched beyond the horizon in every direction, Charlie Canyon broke off the two-lane highway and pointed the rental car’s hood up a narrow gravel road. Soon he passed two small signs nailed to a fence post:
P
RIVATE
P
ROPERTY
and
N
O
T
RESPASSING
. Then the road began to wind up a wooded ravine, leaving behind the open foothills patrolled by cattle.

This world was a surreal contrast to his life in New York City, which h
e’d
slipped from unnoticed forty-eight hours earlier. The journey had started in his office—a SoHo loft that served as the public-facing headquarters of Gnos.is. After returning from lunch around one, h
e’d
changed into clothes h
e’d
never worn before, including new shoes fresh out of the box, a hat, and noncorrective glasses. H
e’d
packed light—just a backpack with toiletries and two changes of clothes. He did not bring his laptop or tablet; even his phone he left behind on his desk.

H
e’d
slanted the bill of his hat low over his face to shield it from any of the building’s surveillance cameras, whose feeds were almost certainly processed by facial-recognition software and available to several law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. Then h
e’d
descended to the ground floor via the stairwell and pushed through a fire exit, where he was immediately swallowed into the heavy sidewalk traffic. He bought a new Metro card—using cash—and took the 6 train up to Grand Central Station, then caught a cab across town to Madison Square Garden. There, he entered Penn Station and paid cash for the 3:40 Amtrak train departing for Chicago. The whole time he remained mindful to keep his face hidden from surveillance cameras.

The train emerged from beneath the Hudson and accelerated west. By late evening, when the FBI agents assigned to tail Charlie Canyon began to wonder why they hadn’t spotted him leaving the office at his usual time, he was two hundred miles away.

The train ride took nineteen hours. In Chicago he rented a car from a disreputable company that would take his cash. Then he set out west on the twenty-two-hour drive to Montana, careful to obscure his face whenever he pulled into a gas station or rolled past a tollbooth.

And then finally he was here.

When the gravel road crested at a pass, Canyon—thirty, handsome with dark hair and eyebrows and a smattering of chin stubble—stopped the car in front of a gate. The two earlier signs discouraging trespassers were reprised here, along with another sign that said
B
IG
S
KY
E
NERGY
. He got out and stood in front of the gate. It didn’t look like much, the gate, but if one thought about it, the thick steel bars slung across the road were overkill for managing livestock. In a place where most gates had rusty padlocks, there was instead a sophisticated magnetic latch. There was no call box to announce himself.

Canyon stood for a moment in the dirt, stretching his legs. The view from the pass was extraordinary. After ten years living in the city, this scenery was as novel to him as driving a car. The valley below was walled with ridges slicing into the sky, crescendoing at three points to form rocky peaks. On the valley’s south-facing slopes, tennis-court-sized solar panels checkered the landscape above the tree line. He spotted a lake on the valley floor. It was the hottest part of the day, and the only thing that distinguished the dogleg body of water from the evergreen woods surrounding it, other than the way it sparkled in the sunlight, was a short dock protruding from the near shore. He noted that none of the recently constructed cabins were visible through the tree cover, though he knew they were down there somewhere. Viewed from above, the valley looked nearly untouched, save for the dock and solar panels.

Just when he started to wonder if h
e’d
forgotten a step in the instructions—instructions that had come in a series of encrypted chat messages, which h
e’d
memorized and wiped from his computer—he heard a metallic clank and the gate yawned open. He got back into the car and eased it forward.

The road plunged below the tree line and then descended toward the lake in wide, gradual switchbacks. It was an old mining road, h
e’d
been told. On the valley floor, the road split in three directions. Sticking to the instructions, he took the one that guided him to a simple, spacious, two-story log house that appeared suddenly from out of the forest. There was no answer when he knocked on the door, but it was unlocked. He called out to announce himself. The house was as silent as the hills. He crossed the room to stand at the large picture windows overlooking the lake. And there he saw it. Far out in the center of the lake, at the tip of a wake’s V, a male figure advanced through the water with steady crawl strokes.

Canyon went down to the dock below and joined the man’s dog, who was overcome with excitement from tongue to tail for twenty or thirty seconds before sprawling lazily again upon the warm wood. Canyon sat in a chair that had a towel draped over one of the arms and watched the man crawl through the water toward him.

He didn’t have to wait long. A minute later, Rafael Bolívar hoisted himself out of the lake. Bolívar wore no swim trunks. Unashamed, he turned around as if to admire the distance h
e’d
come. Canyon watched the water come off his body; pulled from it by gravity, lifted from it by the sun. Canyon enjoyed moments like this, feeling his species’ basest yearning. His job was to understand human nature and harness its power on a mass scale. Or, as he liked to tell people with an enigmatic grin, “I work in advertising.”

That was true, in a way, though it was only one small piece of the role Canyon played at Gnos.is as the website’s only public face—its spokesman and advocate. Gnos.is, in fact, did no conventional advertising or marketing. It didn’t need to. The site’s performance was enough to capture users’ imaginations.

Canyon tossed the towel to Bolívar, who had bent to scratch the dog.

“How was the drive?” Bolívar asked, covering himself and stepping into sandals.

“Fine, considering you live on the dark side of the moon.”

Canyon was sitting at the dining room table when Bolívar, showered and dressed in khaki shorts and a white T-shirt, joined him. Bolívar was thirty-three, and h
e’d
looked his age in the city, Canyon thought, if not abstractly a little older in his fitted suits and a solemn business stare that guarded not just his thoughts but a headful of proprietary secrets—secrets that, eventually, had driven him to this valley.

Before h
e’d
disappeared from the outside world, Rafael Bolívar had inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from his father, who had founded Venezuela’s largest media company. Bolívar had turned those millions into billions by expanding his father’s media empire into North America. He had been celebrated in the media industry as a cunning yet principled businessman and in the tabloids as an eligible bachelor. But Bolívar’s success in the world of sensationalized news and reality shows had been a front, a ruthless tactic to raise money on the backs of cultural institutions he saw as depraved. Secretly, he had been reinvesting that money to fund what he hoped would replace them: Gnos.is.

It had been a little more than two months since Canyon had seen him in person. He thought Bolívar looked much younger out here than he had in the city.

Canyon slid a beige file folder across the table. Bolívar lifted its cover to glance at the first page, then he let it fall closed.

“This is the real reason you’re here?”

Canyon nodded.

“What are they?”

“They are the findings of an investigation into Gnos.is by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee’s chairman, as you know, is Senator Wrightmont of Montana, who would probably not be amused if he knew that you were currently a constituent. I gather they think you’re hiding in Iceland.” Canyon picked up the file and flipped through it. “The senator has amassed a collection of letters from the attorney general’s office along with these invitations from the FBI, CIA, State Department, DHS, and the embassies of most US allies. It’s all here.”

“Invitations?”

“That’s what they’re calling them. For now.”

“What do they want?”

“They want Gnos.is’s sources.”

“For which stories?”

Canyon shrugged. “Dozens of them. There’s a list of Gnos.is articles that they say exposed classified information.” Canyon leaned back, folding his arms over his abdomen. “They did not, however, cite any concrete examples of harm caused by the publication of that information. Most of the stories seem pretty minor to me, just like before. There’s one, though, that seems to have especially struck a nerve.”

“Which one?”

“It ran last week. That report about the Chinese businessman who invested in an American telecom company with money from China’s intelligence agency.” Canyon shrugged. “Is that breaking news? I wouldn’t have thought so.”

Bolívar lifted his eyebrows, but he made no move to review the contents of the file.

“Any warrants or subpoenas?”

Canyon looked hurt. “If a subpoena comes, it won’t be served by me.”

Bolívar left the file on the table and walked to the window. “They’ll come,” he said. And then, after a long silence, “Come on, I’ll show you the mine.”

Bolívar drove them in a pickup truck. He was silent during the short ride, his arm resting on the edge of the open window, his hair waving in the breeze, his olive skin noticeably darker from a few months in the sun. Canyon looked out at the woods, noting the occasional narrow driveway they came upon and passed. At the end of each drive was a small cabin sheltered among the trees. Bolívar’s staff in the valley totaled approximately two dozen men and women who had jumped at the invitation to work for Gnos.is, even though it meant—at least for now—living in hiding and engaging only in activities that didn’t risk giving away their location. They lived this way out of necessity, to protect Gnos.is, which, like any good news organization, had enemies who were much more powerful than its friends.

Canyon, in fact, had had to delay this trip to the valley because, as the only person publicly affiliated with Gnos.is, he was under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Government law-enforcement and intelligence agencies watched him, hoping to find a trail that would lead them to Bolívar, and thus to Gnos.is, which the government viewed not as a news organization but as a dangerous leaker of classified secrets. Teams at the FBI and NSA were probably going apeshit right now wondering where Canyon had gone and how h
e’d
slipped their watch. When he returned, Canyon thought, their surveillance would only get tighter, perhaps making it impossible for him to visit again.

When they got around to the far side of the lake, Bolívar steered the truck onto a narrow drive that would have been easy to confuse with any of the other potholed and overgrown paths that sprouted off from the main road. They had to roll up the windows to keep from being slapped by branches. After half a mile, the path opened to a clearing. There was still cover overhead from tall evergreens that let only a few columns of late-afternoon sunlight through their branches. The ground was clear of vegetation but cluttered by small piles of abandoned mining equipment. Moss grew over rusted-out troughs and cables like mold warning of expiration. Bolívar parked next to three other vehicles. Canyon got out of the truck and kicked the dirt and pine needles underfoot, looking up at the trees. He couldn’t see the high ridges through the tree cover.

The mining tunnel was on the far side of the clearing. At just the place where the land began to slope up steeply, almost like a cliff, there it was—a rectangular black hole in the earth, framed like a picture with thick posts of wood. The opening was no larger than a one-car garage door.