Cold Harbor

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  “You killed one?”

  “Lost consciousness before I could kill the other one.” Jenn sounded disappointed.

  “And Langley tried to sweep it all under the rug?”

  “Let’s just say I found out that my loyalty was not reciprocal. I was a true believer—young, naïve. I did not take it at all well. At all. Sounds stupid to say about a job, but it felt like I’d had my heart broken. I felt that I’d been betrayed. Anyway. I holed up in an apartment in Nashville. Just hiding from the world. Not working. Burned through my savings in about eight months. Drinking pretty hard too. Vodka, like my mom. Thought for a while there that I’d wind up at the bottom of the Cumberland River.”

  “So what happened?”

  “George Abe knocked on my door and offered me a job is what happened. I opened the door looking like something that would clog a garbage disposal, and there stood George in his perfectly pressed shirt and his perfectly pressed jeans. I mean, who presses their jeans?”

  “That’s exactly what I thought!” said Gibson. “Did you know him from somewhere?”

  “Never seen him before in my life. I thought he was there to give me the good word of the Lord. Still don’t know how he found me. Said I came highly recommended. But I still don’t know by whom. So after I say no in about a dozen unpleasant ways, he spends three days talking sense to me until I finally give in. Drove back to DC with him. Got my fresh start. George Abe saved my life. That’s why I’m doing it.”

  “That’s a hell of a story,” Gibson said.

  “I know there’s bad blood between you and him, but if we pull this off, I really suggest giving him a chance. He’s good people.”

  “I might just do that.”

  “And on that note, I’m going to bed,” Jenn said.

  “Yeah, long day tomorrow.”

  “They’re all long days from here on out.”

  “Good night,” Gibson said, carrying their empties to the recycling bin.

  “Gibson,” Jenn said, stopping him. “I didn’t mean what I said.”

  “About what?”

  “About not trusting anybody. I trust George Abe with my life.”

  “I know you do.”

  “And you. I trust you. Even if you’re an asshole sometimes.”

  Gibson nodded. “Maybe some more cribbage tomorrow night? Now that I’m actually ahead for once.”

  “In your dreams, Vaughn.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  They never did get back to the game. By morning, Jenn’s smile was nothing but a distant memory, along with the deck of cards and her cribbage board. When she shook him awake a little before dawn, the bags under her eyes spoke of a restless night. As if she’d been berating herself for taking even a few hours for herself. From that moment on, she was all business. They had a lot of work to do and not a lot of time to do it.

  “What?” Gibson asked and tried to roll away. “I’m not going out to Dulles until later when they get busy. Let me sleep.”

  “We’re going for a run,” Jenn said. “You’ve got six minutes.”

  “Sir, yes, sir,” Gibson grumbled. He hadn’t slept much either. He’d resolved to start sleeping in a bed, with no more than a night-light for company. It had been rough, but he was done coddling his demons. He might be a long way from being well, but he would fake it until he made it. That was his current thinking anyway.

  “Five minutes fifty seconds,” Jenn updated him and closed his door.

  Gibson bounced from foot to foot, trying to get loose. Cold enough to see his own breath, the weather made his joints feel as if they’d been soldered in place. Jenn started what seemed for her an easy jog. Gibson labored to keep up. When she picked up the pace a mile out, he realized how far he had to go before regaining his old strength and wind.

  “I thought we should talk before we get any deeper into the planning,” Jenn said.

  “As opposed to last night?”

  “Calista has the house bugged.”

  The only part that surprised Gibson was that he hadn’t anticipated it. “How do you know?”

  “I swept the house the day I arrived. Dan might be the expert, but he taught me a thing or two.”

  “Wait,” Gibson said, thinking back on everything that had been spoken over the past two days. “Why are you only telling me now?”

  “Because I needed you to be convincing. We had to have those conversations, and Calista needed to hear us having them. I knew you would question my working with her, and I wanted her to hear me backing her up.”

  “So what? I was the patsy?”

  “You were the convincer. It played better if you were sincere.”

  Gibson thought back to his confessional and telling Jenn about his eighteen months in solitary. The intimate, painful details that he’d shared. The thought of Calista Dauplaise listening made him sick to his stomach. He pulled up and stood with his hands on his hips, breathing hard.

  “Your little speech about trusting me—quite a performance,” he said. “Do you think Calista made popcorn?”

  Jenn circled back to him, jogging in place. “We need to keep running. I don’t know if they’re watching.”

  “Was everything just a performance?”

  “Yes,” Jenn said. “And no. I meant what I said last night.”

  “And yet . . .”

  “I trust you, Gibson, but I didn’t know if you were up to it. You know you’re not all there. I couldn’t be sure you’d be able to pull it off.”

  “So why tell me now?”

  “Because last night I realized that I needed to put my money where my mouth was. You’ve done everything I’ve asked. You’re taking the same risks I am. And they are significant. You deserve to see the whole board.” Jenn smiled ruefully. “And because, as you’ve pointed out, we’ve been on an operation before where I held out on you. Didn’t work out too well for me.”

  “We should keep moving,” Gibson said, breaking back into a jog. “In case they’re watching.”

  They ran in silence. Jenn had a gift for offending him and then making it sound like the only sensible course of action. It drove him crazy, but once again, he couldn’t argue with her reasoning. Forget admitting it, though; he wasn’t feeling that magnanimous.

  “So what do you think is on the plane?” Gibson asked.

  “You mean Calista’s prize? I wish I had some idea. My guess is that it’s something on the export-control list. Technology, maybe? Eskridge is moving his operations to Africa. He’s going to need a patron. He’ll try and trade his cargo for protection and work.”

  “And we’re going to turn that over to Calista Dauplaise?”

  “Over my dead body,” Jenn said.

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “We don’t have one yet.”

  “We should probably get on that.”

  “As soon as you get back from not getting arrested at Dulles.” Jenn picked up the pace and left Gibson in her dust.

  “Oh, right, that.”

  Gibson did not get arrested at Dulles.

  After his little detour to the power plant and diner, Calista revoked his driving privileges for the duration. So he went to the airport under the watchful eye of Cools and Sidhu. They weren’t the friendliest chauffeurs, but neither had taken another swing at him.

  In the end, it was all rather anticlimactic. Gibson’s falsified credentials in the database held up to the scrutiny of the clerk, who issued him a replacement badge. Next, Gibson tested his new green pass, which theoretically gave him the run of the airport. He was a little nervous at his first checkpoint, but he sailed through without a hitch.

  Cools and Sidhu drove him back to Reston, where Jenn and he spent long hours poring over the map of the airport and planning the next steps of their operation, after which Gibson would make an incursion to test their assumptions. There was a risk to being too visible a presence around the airport, but there was also a risk to being a completely new face on the day of the operation. By showing up in
the days preceding the operation, Gibson could learn his way around, get to know the security staff, and in turn, the staff could get to know Gibson Vaughn, a newly hired mechanic with Tyner Aviation.

  Tyner Aviation was one of four fixed-base operators at Dulles that provided support services for general aviation aircraft. Jenn had chosen Tyner because it was the largest FBO and would give Gibson the best chance of going unnoticed. And also because its offices were on the far side of the airport from the Dulles Air Center, a series of private hangars in the northeast corner of the airport, including the one that Cold Harbor staged its flights out of: Hangar Six.

  His cover as a mechanic at Tyner held up from day one, allowing Gibson to poke around and ask questions without drawing attention to himself. The new mechanic was a genial sort of fellow but not all that quick on the uptake. As a result, he asked a lot of rudimentary questions about the airport. No one held it against him, though, because he was very sweet about it, and they’d all been new once too.

  Gibson returned with the results of his reconnaissance, and then he and Jenn began all over. Both taking turns playing devil’s advocate, looking for holes in their thinking. Tearing it to shreds and stitching it back together again. During their morning runs, they used the same tactic to propose ways to keep Eskridge’s classified materials from falling into Calista’s hands. Then back to the airport went Gibson with fresh questions. Soon, the gaps in their plan narrowed. They did their best to anticipate the ways that things could go sideways on them and write contingencies into their script. Jenn projected an air of confidence that Gibson played into, but they both knew that the airport represented a complex and chaotic target. There were simply too many moving pieces to see everything coming. The risks were high, and the chance of taking George Abe cleanly was low.

  Gibson’s crash course on Titus Stonewall Eskridge Jr. had been sobering. Eskridge was smart, ruthless, and adaptive. A survivor. Going up against a man like Eskridge under ideal circumstances would be risky, and these circumstances were far from ideal. They didn’t know what they’d be walking into in Hangar Six. And if by some miracle Eskridge didn’t kill them, they still had Calista Dauplaise to contend with. Jenn, George, and Gibson represented dangerous loose ends to Calista, just as Eskridge did.

  Jenn compensated by working longer and harder. She lived for exactly this. She probably had precise, printed mission specs for brushing her teeth. She went over everything in meticulous detail while Gibson took notes. Any element that they couldn’t account for went on a master list to be worked out later. She’d drill him until he could recite the mission details backward and forward. If the past was any indication, there would be a quiz later.

  “So why don’t we get Hendricks in on this?” Gibson suggested one afternoon during a marathon planning session. “I know he’d come. Another set of reliable hands would up our odds on this a lot.”

  “Can’t. Cold Harbor has eyes on him. If he suddenly decamped for the East Coast, Eskridge would know we were making a play for his aircraft. Besides, he’s already doing an important job. We know from Calista that Eskridge is surveilling Dan. He and I’ve spent the last month establishing a false narrative that I am in hiding somewhere on the West Coast. Dan has been openly begging me for a meet. So far I’ve resisted, but the day before Dulles, I will agree to a meet in the Castro. Ideally, that will give Eskridge a false sense of security and give us the freedom to operate here.”

  Gibson nodded. “If you’re in San Francisco, you can’t very well be at Dulles.”

  “Something like that,” she said. “Eskridge had eyes on you too. Another reason I had to stay away from you. But Cold Harbor lost track of you when you disappeared. That’s the only reason we thought it safe to reach out.”

  “Well, it’s a shame. We could use Dan here.”

  “That we could,” she said and went back to work.

  With a day to spare, Gibson thought they had things nailed down as well as they could on this timetable. But, true to form, Jenn got one of her bad feelings, and they spent the morning reviewing every phase of the operation. Gibson groaned inwardly but resisted the urge to intentionally forget details. He was almost punchy enough to find it funny but not punchy enough to think Jenn would too. In the end, they agreed on the necessity of Gibson making one more trip out to Dulles.

  When he returned to the house, he found Jenn in the midst of an equipment and weapons check, a ritual that had evolved into her cleaning every weapon and re-handloading every magazine.

  “If it jams on me, I want it to be my fault.”

  “Happy to be off the hook for that one,” he said.

  “How did it go at the airport?”

  “We may have a small problem.”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  The plan called for Jenn to fly into Dulles in a small aircraft rented out of Ohio. After she landed, Gibson would need to pick her up in a Tyner Aviation vehicle. Most of the vehicles inside the airport’s security perimeter were parked with keys in the ignition. However, Tyner personnel kept a watchful eye on them. Tyner also had a parking lot outside security. It wasn’t nearly as carefully monitored, but no keys were left in vehicles there. If he managed to commandeer a vehicle from that parking lot, Gibson would also need to cross through security to get into the airport. Neither option was ideal, and he’d gone back to the airport to determine the lesser of two evils.

  “So I could probably take a vehicle from inside the fence, but after that we’re rolling the dice on how long before someone raises the alarm. Might be two hours, might be ten minutes. There’s just no way to know.”

  “So it’s got to be a vehicle from outside the lot.”

  “That would be my vote.”

  “You don’t happen to know how to hot-wire a car?”

  “No,” Gibson said. He’d been giving this issue a lot of thought, and he had a solution. Jenn wasn’t going to like it. Without ever meeting him, she wasn’t going to like it one little bit. “But I know a guy.”

  “You know a guy? Why do I suddenly feel like I’m about to get an STD?”

  Gibson described Gavin Swonger to her.

  “And there it is,” Jenn said in disbelief. “You want to recruit a white-trash, convicted car thief? Are you out of your goddamn mind? There’s no time to vet him. I leave in less than eight hours. Calista’s going to brick.”

  “Then let her brick. Look, I’m all for scouring LinkedIn for a Harvard-educated car thief, but I don’t know how many of those we’re going to find.”

  “Gibson . . .”

  “We’re twenty-four hours out. You have a better idea?”

  “You’ve worked with this guy?”

  “In West Virginia. I’ll vouch for him.”

  Jenn looked as if she’d been given the choice between having her fingers smashed with a hammer or smashed with a rock. “Fine, give your guy a call. I’ll smooth things over with Calista. God help me.”

  Swonger didn’t take any convincing at all. He agreed before Gibson even finished laying out what he needed. Gibson brought up payment, and Swonger shut him down.

  “Dog, how many times I got to tell you? Your paper’s no good here.”

  “Thanks, Swonger.”

  “Not a thing. See you mañana.” Swonger hung up.

  Calista took significantly more persuasion, and Jenn didn’t come back downstairs for an hour. When she finally reappeared, they squared away the house ahead of their departure tomorrow. A cleaning crew would follow after them and scour the house from top to bottom, but they wanted to be sure they hadn’t left anything incriminating behind.

  They cooked dinner together—steaks, grilled brussels sprouts, and pureed cauliflower that, despite Gibson’s skepticism, actually tasted exactly like mashed potatoes. It was intended as a morale booster, but it felt too much like a last meal. They ate in silence, then Gibson did the dishes while Jenn burned their plans in the fireplace.

  Afterward, Gibson found Jenn watching the Super Bowl with the volu
me off. He wasn’t much of a football fan but found it disconcerting that he hadn’t even known the game was on. Another facet of American life from which he felt disconnected. He got the last two beers and dropped onto the couch beside Jenn. They clinked bottle necks to George. Two orphans off to rescue a surrogate father. Gibson couldn’t decide whether it was noble or pathetic.

  “When did you move in with your grandmother?”

  “Eight or nine?” Jenn said. “I’m not actually sure.”

  “It’s weird the way it gets foggy beyond a certain point.”

  “You too?”

  “Only the things I want to remember. The things I don’t care about are what I remember best.”

  Jenn chuckled and raised her beer in agreement.

  “Do you remember your mom?” Gibson asked.

  “Not real well. Some days, I can only remember the bad things, like you said, but I know there was more to her than that. What about you? Do you remember your dad?”

  “I thought I did. Now I think I just make him up as I go along.”

  “That’s the beautiful thing about memories—they’re whatever you don’t need them to be.” She finished her beer, slapped Gibson on the knee, and pried herself up off the couch. “I’m for bed.”

  Gibson slept a few hours but woke up after two, heart hammering in his chest, afraid he’d been screaming again. He was grateful not to see Jenn staring down at him, bleary-eyed. Only Bear kept vigil tonight, watching from a nearby armchair. She brought her book over and held it out for him to read to her.

  “I can’t, Bear,” Gibson said. “I can’t read to you anymore.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not good for me.”

  Bear stood there looking hurt. It unnerved Gibson, who rolled over and put his back to the ghost. He checked his e-mail again to see if maybe Nicole had written him back. He’d been checking it obsessively for the past few days. His box should have arrived by now, and he kept thinking that he might hear from her. He hadn’t. He put the phone aside and lay staring at the back of the couch. Eventually he slept.