Free The Good Traitor by Ryan Quinn

room is comfortable?”
    “Yes, thank you.” They fell again into silence until Kera couldn’t stand it any longer. “Leave me out here alone awhile?”
    She held her breath, uncertain how she would react if his face were to move in to meet hers. Sh e’d imagined that happening—maybe a thousand times. But that had always been in the abstract. Confronted with the reality of it now, she knew that kissing him again would be impossible. She wasn’t ready. When she closed her eyes now, all she could see was her ex-fiancé, Parker, forever preserved in her mind the way sh e’d discovered him, lying in the bathtub with a gun resting on his chest. It had only been a few months. She wasn’t equipped for peaceful moments under the stars with another man.
    She heard the wooden creak of the deck and knew that he was moving for the door.
    “Kera,” he said from somewhere behind her.
    “Hmm.” She didn’t turn. He’s going to tell me to be careful, she thought.
    “Good luck.”
    She waited until he slid the glass shut and she was certain she was alone before she exhaled.

F AIRFAX C OUNTY , V IRGINIA
    Lionel Bright shuffled down the hall from his kitchen, where h e’d just started the coffeepot. The sound of his slippers on the hardwood made him pick up his feet. He wasn’t so goddamn old that he shuffled.
    Bright opened his front door to a humid morning. It was just after six, still an hour before school buses led the suburban rush-hour parade past his house. For now the neighborhood stirred with joggers and disheveled people walking dogs, plastic baggies at the ready, in the small park across the street.
    Wearing only an old Georgetown sweatshirt and the pajama pants he slept in, Bright ventured toward the newspaper at the end of his driveway. As he did, he eyed his neighbors’ front yards and drives and failed to spot another paper in any of them. Bright had subscribed to the Washington Post for over thirty years. Originally, the subscription had been one of many establishing details in his cover, another physical thing bearing the name and address he presented to the world. The subscription was paid for with a credit card associated with the Spurkland Institute, a foreign-policy think tank the agency had long maintained as one of its proprietaries. But Bright, who now consumed all other text on his tablet, had cemented a habit of browsing the broadsheet with his morning coffee. Though he knew better, the newspaper made the world seem so orderly and comprehensible, laid out like that in neat columns that could be rolled up in a rubber band and tossed onto his driveway. With the rise of the Internet, h e’d assumed that he was doing the Post a favor by renewing his subscription annually. Now, gazing at his neighbors’ empty driveways, he wondered if maybe he was actually a burden on the newspaper, which had to send a delivery van out to his neighborhood just for him, just so that he could maintain the simple pleasures of a morning stroll to the end of his driveway and back and a few minutes with his coffee and the previous day’s news.
    He was bent over with an outstretched arm when he saw the front page and felt his breath catch in his throat.
    He picked up the paper and looked around, aware now that he was being watched. For a few moments he stood there in his slippers, looking anew at his surroundings. He saw her, finally, sitting on a bench in the park. She wore sunglasses, and her hair was different—light, almost blond.
    He crossed the street to her.
    “Your paper,” she said, handing over that morning’s actual Post . She nodded at the Post in his hand, which was dated two months earlier. She knew him well enough to know that h e’d once used his newspaper to signal meets and drops, though it had been a while since h e’d done that. He preferred not to bring others in his line of work that close to his doorstep. “I know it’s a risk for you to talk to me,” she said. “Nod right now and I’ll walk