The Good Traitor by Ryan Quinn

States, she said that sh e’d been traveling through Central America as a Catholic missionary and was returning to her diocese to raise more funds for the mission.
    Kera studied the e-mail that had just hit the in-box of the previously unused Gmail account she had created for this sole purpose. She stared at the jumble of letters and numbers that made up the sender’s e-mail address, which was meaningless to her. There was no subject, and the body of the message was blank.
    She hailed a cab and told the driver to take her to the Seattle Public Library. There, she went up to the fifth floor and found an unoccupied public computer. Using a temporary library card sh e’d acquired under the name Laura Perez, she logged on and clicked away from the library’s home page. She wasn’t here to check out books.
    Working quickly, she established two new e-mail accounts, one with Yahoo, the other Gmail. She named each account by glancing down at the front page of a Seattle Times someone had left behind on the desk and selecting the first words her eyes focused on, then tacking on a few numbers to ensure that the e-mail addresses would be unique. She ended up with [email protected] and [email protected]. For each, she created a different password.
    From the “opposition301” account, she composed a new message to the sender of the blank e-mail sh e’d received. She typed a few lines into the body of her e-mail, pitching a great deal on a safe and effective male-enhancement product. At the bottom of her fake ad, in a tiny font size, she typed the following line, which included the address of the second e-mail account sh e’d just created:
    T O UNSUBSCRIBE FROM FUTURE E-MAILS PLEASE SEND AN E-MAIL WITH THE WORD UNSUBSCRIBE IN THE SUBJECT LINE TO [email protected] .
    She hit “Send,” then logged off. An elderly woman with a cane and thick glasses took the seat when she got up.
    Kera killed twenty minutes reading newspapers off the periodicals shelves before she returned to the computer stations and sat down at a different terminal. She logged into the “insists119” account. There were two messages in the in-box sh e’d set up not a half hour earlier. She leaned forward. The first was an automated welcome message from Gmail. The second was from another unfamiliar address. It said:
     
    G ET YOUR D ODGERS TICKETS . 2 FOR 1 UNTIL A UG 8. C ALL 866-DODGERS.
     
    This was followed by detailed directions to Dodger Stadium; links to articles about the baseball team’s most recent games, trades, and injury reports; and a schedule of the season’s remaining home games. Kera ignored all of this, though she was amused by the great lengths the sender had gone through to pad the message with so much extra detail. She focused on two things in the e-mail: the address fields and the first line in the body of the message.
    In the “To:” field, three e-mail addresses were listed, including [email protected]. The other two were made up of random numbers and letters. But the addresses themselves didn’t matter; it was the number of addresses that was significant. According to the system the y’d agreed to—which was to be used if they needed to contact each other and had not yet established an encrypted OTR (Off-the-Record) chat protocol—she would use the number three to decode the message. First she wrote down on a piece of scrap paper the third of five gibberish e-mail addresses in the “CC:” field. It was [email protected]. Then she combined the third word and third number that appeared in the first line of the e-mail message. This gave her “Dodgers8,” which would be the password for the [email protected] account.
    She logged off. There was no one at the computer to the right of where she was sitting, so she moved over to the open station. On the Gmail home page, she entered the new address in the username bar, taking care to get each of the letters and numbers in the correct order. Then she typed