The Good Traitor by Ryan Quinn Page A

Dodgers8 into the password bar. The combination worked, quickening her pulse.
    She clicked into the “Drafts” folder and found his message.
     
    I’ VE GOT A PROJECT I’ M WORKING ON . W ANT TO HELP ? C AN YOU MEET ME AT THE S HELL STATION ON H WY 93 JUST NORTH OF M ISSOULA , MT? ASAP— YOU NAME THE TIME .
     
    She deleted his draft message and sat staring at the screen. Her training told her that she should stick to her original plan. Sh e’d returned to the States for one reason, and it did not involve a road trip through Montana. Unless, of course . . .  a project I’m working on. Could that mean what she hoped it meant? There was a good chance they were both after the same thing. If h e’d contacted her because he had something that would help clear their names, why make things more difficult for herself by going it alone?
    She typed: N OON . T OMORROW .
    Instead of sending the message, she hit “Save” to keep it contained within the “Drafts” folder. Then she logged out and returned to browse the periodicals. This time she was too anxious to read anything. She forced herself to flip through a Vanity Fair for five minutes before she found a computer she hadn’t used yet. She logged back into the coded Gmail account. Per their agreed-upon system, if the message had been received and confirmed, the entire draft would be deleted, erasing all record of it and signaling that the meeting was on.
    Kera held her breath. The “Drafts” folder was empty.
    She had to get herself to Missoula.

I-93, O UTSIDE M ISSOULA , M ONTANA
    It was overcast when the two figures climbed out of their respective vehicles and embraced in the windy parking lot. Had anyone been watching, they might have established that the pair were not relatives. Her skin was too dark, his too pale. But it was clearly a reunion, and the way they clasped each other silently, and for a moment longer than was necessary for a greeting, gave it an air of significance. Maybe they were lovers, or old college friends, or, judging by their plain, dark clothes and sunglasses, perhaps they were gathering for the funeral of a mutual friend.
    They were in fact none of these things, but that didn’t matter. No one paid them any attention.
    “How long will I be staying?” Kera asked, climbing into the pickup J. D. Jones had driven. The y’d parked her rental car where it would be inconspicuous overnight.
    “That depends.”
    She took this to mean that he would not be comfortable discussing specifics until they got where they were going.
    “You were out of the country?” he said when they were fifteen miles up a two-lane highway.
    “Yes. El Salvador.” She told him the truth; there was no longer any reason to protect it. Sh e’d returned to the States because she was done running.
    He let out a short laugh. “How was that?”
    “Boring.” With her eyes fixed on the ribbon of blurred pavement that split the wide plains, she experienced the same detached feeling sh e’d had looking out at the ocean from a balcony for the past two months. There had been only two things to occupy her time in El Salvador: watching the Pacific and culling through news reports in search of a sign that there had been a shift in her case, a softening in the vitriol, a lessening of the use of terms like “treason” and “aiding the enemy.”
    “No,” she said. “It was worse than boring. It was torture.”
    “Worse than prison?”
    “I’m not afraid of prison. And I’m not afraid of the people who want us there.” She looked over at him and then nodded at the landscape flying by. “We made it this far, didn’t we?”
    When he smiled he looked free, she thought. This made her feel optimistic about why h e’d summoned her.
    For two hours they sat side by side, tracking north across the continent at seventy miles an hour. Out here, Kera thought, space defined everything. Beauty, time, silence. It was all measured by space. The silences in their conversations