The Short Drop (8 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Jenn Charles sat at her desk and went back through her report on Vaughn. It had been one thing to bring him in to consult, but now George was contemplating inserting him into her team for phase two. It was a mistake. She knew it in her gut but couldn’t articulate it beyond that. She needed more to back up her hunch.

Gibson Vaughn, son of Sally and Duke Vaughn. Born and raised in Charlottesville, Virginia. His mother passed when he was three. Ovarian cancer. Hard way to go, she thought. Gibson Vaughn had been raised, if one could call it that, by his workaholic father.

Duke Vaughn had been a legend in Virginia politics. Undergraduate and master’s degrees in political science were both taken at the University of Virginia. A larger-than-life personality, Duke was a born charmer who put friends and foes alike at ease. He lived for the political dogfight and found his life’s calling as Benjamin Lombard’s chief of staff. They made a great pair—Lombard, the stubborn, principled brawler, and Vaughn, the master of the backroom deal. Vaughn was widely credited for guiding a green and largely unknown Benjamin Lombard to the US Senate and for helping him win a second term in a landslide.

From what Jenn could tell, Duke’s devotion to Lombard came at the expense of his son. The demands of the job caused Duke to spend long stretches in DC or on the road with the senator. It was a seven-days-a-week job, which meant that Duke spent most of his weekends with the Lombards.

By all accounts, the Lombards treated Gibson like family; Duke and Gibson each had their own bedroom at both the senator’s home in Great Falls and his beach house at Pamsrest near the North Carolina border. However, Duke had been determined not to uproot his son from school, so during the week Gibson was often left home in Charlottesville. Duke’s sister, Miranda Davis, lived nearby and would look in on Gibson. But she had a family of her own, and as Gibson grew older she didn’t always get over to check on him. So, by the time he was twelve, Gibson Vaughn was effectively living on his own from Monday to Friday.

A lot of children would resent being abandoned that way, but Gibson showed no signs of bitterness or anger. On the contrary, the young Gibson Vaughn quite clearly worshipped his father and had been determined to pull his weight. Gibson kept the household going while his father was away—organized the bills, cleaned the house, did yard work, and saw to minor upkeep. In a lot of ways, Gibson Vaughn raised himself.

On the surface, he had done a good job of it. Good grades. No disciplinary record of any kind. That was if you excluded the time he was pulled over for doing forty-six in a twenty-five. Of course, it was understandable that a thirteen-year-old might not be crystal clear on speed limits. According to unofficial reports, because there was no official report, Duke and the senator had been on a fact-finding tour to the Middle East. Gibson had run out of milk. Rather than call and risk waking his aunt, the boy had done the only reasonable thing and driven himself to the supermarket.

The arresting officer’s report stated that when stopped, the boy had politely asked, “Is there a problem, officer?” Gibson Vaughn had been perched atop
The Collected Writings of Thomas Jefferson
to help him see over the steering wheel. When asked where his parents were, Gibson had pled the Fifth. Afraid of embarrassing his father, he’d refused to speak until the police were able to track down his aunt.

No charges were filed, and the entire incident became a piece of Virginia lore. Partly because the police chose not to pursue charges against a thirteen-year-old, but it didn’t hurt that Duke Vaughn was a close personal friend of the Charlottesville chief of police. It seemed there wasn’t much of anyone in the great commonwealth of Virginia with whom Duke Vaughn hadn’t been a close personal friend.

That anecdote made Jenn smile. She’d been raised by her grandmother and knew what it was like to have to be self-sufficient at a young age. It could make you or it could isolate you, harden you. She would have liked that little boy—resourceful, proud, and a little foolhardy. They’d been a lot alike once, and she could still see traces of that boy now. The problem was she didn’t see enough to reassure her. Duke Vaughn’s suicide had seen to that.

Duke Vaughn had driven home from Washington unexpectedly one Wednesday and hanged himself in his basement. Jenn flipped through the autopsy photographs that she’d culled from the conference room before Vaughn settled in. What kind of selfish prick hangs himself where he’ll be found by his fifteen-year-old son? No note, nothing. It was unforgivable.

After his father’s death, Gibson Vaughn became a completely different person—hostile, defiant, and antisocial. The impact was clear as day. He withdrew from the computer science classes he was auditing at the University of Virginia. His grades plummeted. Three fights in two months. A suspension for cursing out a teacher. He’d gone to live with his aunt full time, and Jenn’s report had copies of the increasingly despairing letters Miranda Davis wrote to her sister-in-law, detailing her nephew’s deteriorating behavior. How he rarely spoke anymore. Didn’t eat. Wouldn’t leave the house except to go to school. How he spent all day and night in his room on his computer.

It was a matter of public record what he’d done on that computer.

She knocked lightly at her boss’s door. George had always encouraged her to trust her instincts and to speak her mind. It was a trait that had never served her well at the Agency, and it had taken time for her to take him at his word. She didn’t come by trust easily, but George Abe had it. She would walk on broken glass for him.

He’d thrown her a lifeline after her career at the Agency had imploded. Recruited her when she thought she didn’t want a job, tracked her down at home when she ignored his numerous calls and convinced her to come to work for him. To this day, she had no idea how he’d even known who she was. But he’d nursed her back into work shape and given her room to regain her confidence without feeling coddled. A good thing, because she would have quit on the spot. In retrospect, she knew she would never be able to repay that debt.

“Come.”

She opened the door. George was behind his desk, reviewing the financials from the first quarter. The Rolling Stones played in the background. A live version of “Dead Flowers.” She didn’t pay much attention to music and hardly ever knew who was playing, but she knew this song, because George had once spent an hour extolling the virtues of Townes Van Zandt’s acoustic cover during a trip to New York. The Stones were George’s favorite band, and she’d grown accustomed to Jagger’s lecherous caterwauling. An autographed poster of an enormous pair of lips, tongue protruding, hung framed on one wall. It was from one of the band’s US tours and was one of George’s prized possessions. A photograph of George beside Keith Richards hung nearby.

The far wall was a bookshelf neatly divided in two, which, in a way, summed up her boss. George descended from one of the oldest Japanese families in the United States. His ancestors had fled Japan following the Meiji Restoration and arrived in San Francisco in 1871. They had carved out a rich and successful life for themselves, weathered internment, and rebuilt their fortunes in the 1950s. The Abes were proud both of their heritage and their adopted country. It was a family tradition to recognize the two halves in the names of their children.

George Leyasu Abe.

One half of the bookcase was devoted to books on Japanese history. George was particularly fascinated by the culture of the samurai, and dozens of books on the subject took up an entire shelf. His middle name, Leyasu, was taken from the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1600, which was dissolved by the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The other half of the shelf was given over to books on American colonial history. George Washington, his namesake, was especially well represented, as were Madison and Franklin. But, and Jenn knew this for a fact, there wasn’t a single book on Thomas Jefferson. George considered Jefferson disloyal and a traitor. It was a subject he could lecture upon for hours. She didn’t always understand her boss, or agree with his condemnation of Jefferson, but loyalty was one subject about which they were in complete agreement. That was why she couldn’t understand his decision to bring Gibson Vaughn into the next phase of this mission.

George stopped what he was doing and pointed to a chair. Jenn sat, realizing immediately that she didn’t know how to broach the subject. George, as he so often did, read her mind.

“So. Gibson Vaughn.”

She smiled ruefully at her transparence. Poker had never been her game.

“I just don’t get it,” she said. “Mike is the wrong guy, clearly, but it’s not like Gibson Vaughn invented the computer. What really qualifies him for this? So he hacked a senator when he was a kid. Is that really the résumé of someone we want to be working with? I mean, this whole keeping-us-in-suspense thing. He’s a prima donna, and he clearly prefers to do things his own way.”

George smiled. “So you don’t like him.”

“Not really, which is immaterial. I don’t trust him, which isn’t. He’s a risk. And I’m afraid . . .” She trailed off.

George leaned back. “Say what you came to say.”

“I’m afraid this history between you . . . that it’s blinding you. You think he’s going to be grateful for this chance you’re giving him. I know you believe you’re cleaning the slate, and I respect that, but he’s not the type. He’s never going to forgive anyone anything, because it’s all someone else’s fault.”

“He’s performed well up until now.”

“Yes, he has. But taking him out into the field is a whole other thing. I’m worried that if we get close to WR8TH that he’ll burn us. Even if that means burning himself.”

“The proverbial scorpion on the turtle’s back.”

“He’s undependable,” she said. “Respectfully, sir.”

“Is that all?”

“I don’t like him poking around in our computers.”

“Anything else? His haircut perhaps?” George stood and fetched a bottle of mineral water from a built-in refrigerator. He sat beside Jenn and gazed off into space. He often took his time composing his thoughts and never spoke before he was ready. She knew better than to interrupt him now that she’d said her piece. It used to make her nervous, but she’d come to admire her employer’s introspective nature.

“You may be right,” he said at last.

The answer surprised her, but she remained silent.

“About all of it. You may be right. I have my doubts too.”

“Is he really worth the risk, then?”

“How much do you know about what Vaughn did in the Marines?”

“I know he was a penetration tester. A glorified hacker.”

“Not exactly.”

“That’s what it says in his file,” she said and realized as she did that there was more to it. “But that was a cover, wasn’t it?”

“It was, yes.”

“What did he really do?”

“Well, let me ask you this. How do you fly two Blackhawk helicopters into a sovereign nation, brazenly violating their airspace, and set them down in the heart of one of their biggest cities without drawing attention?”

“You’re talking about bin Laden. Pakistan.”

“Theoretically,” Abe said. “Supposing I am. Ask yourself how we managed it. Ask yourself why they didn’t know we were there until they saw it on the news.”

“The choppers were specially outfitted. Some kind of stealth technology.”

“Partially true, but only partially. You can baffle a helicopter, to a degree, so that it runs quiet if not silent, but what about radar? You can’t make a Blackhawk completely invisible to radar and certainly not to Pakistani air defense. The Pentagon canceled the program to build a stealth helicopter in ’04. And stealth is not a design feature you can easily retrofit.”

“So how?”

“Radar is a machine. Software translates electrical impulses so that users can see what radar sees. So rather than spending billions on stealth helicopters, wouldn’t it be simpler to take control of the software? Insert code right into their system so that the software only showed them what you wanted them to see. Voila, Blackhawks that are there but not there. If you follow me.”

“We did that?”

“Vaughn did that,” said Abe. “Well, he was involved with the operation. It was an incredibly intricate job. Lot of moving parts. The SEALs might have pulled the trigger, but all four service branches were needed to put bin Laden in harm’s way. CIA. NSA. Vaughn impressed a lot of people, if my source is correct.”

“Vaughn wrote the code?” asked Jenn.

“He contributed to the code, but no, that wasn’t his unique contribution.”

“What was?”

“He got the Pakistanis to install it.”

“He what?”

“That’s what I’m told.”

“Pakistan installed a virus onto their own system?”

“Apparently. He’s just that persuasive, and they are not people who are easily persuaded.”

“You’re telling me the Activity recruited Gibson Vaughn?”

“Right out of basic.”

“Holy hell.”

The Activity or Intelligence Support Activity was the intelligence-gathering branch of the JSOC—the Joint Special Operations Command. The military’s CIA. After the 1980 Operation Eagle Claw ended in disaster in an Iranian desert, the Armed Forces had blamed the CIA for failing to share mission-critical assets and information. The Activity had been birthed so that the military would never again have to rely on the CIA. Jenn knew the lore well; everyone in the CIA did.

The Activity was the competition.

It cherry-picked its personnel from the four military branches, and she could see how a marine like Gibson Vaughn would catch their eye. They put a premium on out-of-the-box thinkers, and sometimes you needed a thief to catch a thief. It threw her portrait of Gibson Vaughn out of focus. She was also reasonably certain that her boss wanted it that way.

“Jesus,” she said. “The guy helped take down bin Laden and now he can’t even get a job at Burger King.”

“Well, as you said, he didn’t invent the computer, and it’s safer to hire someone else than cross the vice president. Scratch that. The next president.”

“So you’re saying I should give him a break?”