The Good Traitor by Ryan Quinn Page B

stretched on for the length of a plain, the width of a mountain range. At one point the sun came out and he rolled down his window. Wind howled through the cabin.
    “You look well,” she said, just loud enough to be heard. “It’s good to see you.”
    He nodded and smiled, his hair blowing in the wind.

    Jones took Kera directly to the mine. As they descended into the valley, circled a sparkling lake, and parked near a tunnel at the base of a mountain, Kera made mental notes of all her questions. Everything made her curious—the conspicuous electronic gate the y’d passed through on their approach, the cabins sheltered among the trees, the solar panels littering the tundra on the ridges above—but for now she kept her questions to herself. She trusted Jones; the answers would come.
    It wasn’t until they arrived at the heavy security doors inside the mine that she understood suddenly where they were.
    “Is this . . . ,” she said.
    Jones smiled. “It’s not as flashy as our old CIA digs, but it’s more powerful than it looks.” Jones typed in a security code and submitted an unblinking eye for a retina scan. Approved, he pushed open the steel door.
    Had she been given another thirty seconds’ warning, her mind might have better anticipated what lay beyond this threshold. Instead, she entered the room still thinking about her old job at the agency, the many task forces sh e’d been assigned to whose sole purpose was to locate the people and hardware that kept the mysterious Gnos.is website running—and how all of those task forces had failed.
    From these thoughts her mind went suddenly blank. Seated at a six-screen array at the far end of a long table was Rafael Bolívar. He glanced up at her entrance, and she saw in his eyes that he had not been expecting her either.
    When time resumed, Kera managed to glance back at Jones, who was smiling, a little proud of himself for having kept this moment a surprise.
    “Rafa, Kera,” he said. “I believe you two have met.” There were a few other people at workstations around the room. All of them looked up at her entrance, but then went politely back to work.
    Bolívar started across the room to embrace her, and for a brief moment she almost wished he wouldn’t. Her mind had worked hard to put him at a distance; she feared that even a brief moment of physical contact could destroy that. Her body, though, never intended to resist. She felt her arms against his back, her chin pressed to his shoulder, and his precise smell—the one characteristic sh e’d been unable to re-create clearly in her mind on the occasions she gave in to a wayward thought of him.
    “What are you doing here?” Bolívar asked, looking at her with wonderment.
    “She’s going to help us independently verify the China story,” Jones said.
    Bolívar turned sharply. “No. No way.” He pushed away from Kera to face Jones. The tension was heightened by the sudden lack of activity from the other workers around the room. “How do you imagine that would work? She’s about as mobile as you are. Every law-enforcement agent in the country is looking for her.”
    “Evading detection is among her many areas of expertise. I think her presence here demonstrates that.”
    “I don’t care. Find someone else. Anyone but her.”
    “Hey, I can hear you, you know,” Kera said. “I’m right here. What are you talking about?”
    “Three sources who contributed to a story about—”
    “Jones,” Bolívar said, cutting him off and creating a stalemate.
    Kera tossed her jacket over the back of a chair and looked from one man to the other. “You two might have had this conversation before hauling me out to the middle of nowhere. But now I’m here. Please,” she said, more to Bolívar. “It’s OK. Try me.”
    With his silence, Bolívar finally conceded. Around the room, the other workers resumed their tasks.
    “This story has been building gradually over the past few weeks.” Jones nodded at