The Short Drop

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  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 branch
es 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?”

  “No, I’m not. What I’m saying is that people are rarely as black and white as you sometimes make them out to be. Now, in the field there are times when snap judgments are necessary, and you excel in those situations. It’s why I hired you. Your instincts are very rarely wrong, but we’re not in the field yet, and you have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater where people are concerned.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “Don’t be. Something about Vaughn rubs you the wrong way. Makes your trigger finger itch. But I knew him when he was a boy, and I saw his relationship with Suzanne. You had to see it to believe the way he took care of her. She was a very special little girl, and he was a great kid too.”

  “But that was a long—” she began, but he put up a hand to stop her.

  “I don’t believe Gibson Vaughn would knowingly sabotage an effort to find her. I also think that his history with Suzanne Lombard is unique and invaluable. He may see something that no one else could. That alone makes him worth the risk to me. But perhaps you’re right. Perhaps my judgment is clouded by history. That’s why I want you right where you are. If he acts against us, I trust you to see it. And we’ll deal with it if he does. In the meantime, I believe he gives us the best odds of seeing this issue to a positive conclusion. Am I understood?”

  “Yes, sir.” She stood to go.

  “Jenn,” George said. “Gibson Vaughn has endured a great deal in his life and served his country ably. It would be shortsighted to underestimate him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Besides, WR8TH seems disinclined to show himself, so this may all be moot.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And, Jenn. This isn’t the CIA. Please feel free to call me George.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Gibson crossed the field under the Saturday morning sun. It felt good to be outdoors again. On Thursday evening, George Abe had thrown him out of the office and warned him in no uncertain terms not to show his face until Monday. It was hard to step away; it made Gibson feel guilty. But he had another little girl who needed him, and she had a soccer game today.

  He hadn’t seen enough of Ellie the past few weeks. He knew it, and he hated it. But it was a necessary evil. Abe’s money had paid the mortgage on the house where she and her mother lived. Where they all had lived before the divorce.

  In hindsight, he and Nicole probably shouldn’t have bought the house. They bought at the height of the market before the crash. It had been a stretch, financially, but at the time Gibson believed he would have his pick of jobs when he was discharged from the Marines. It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption. He’d watched the private sector snap up guys from his unit as soon as their boots hit US soil. Guys with half his experience or commendations sparked bidding wars among the big defense contractors. So with his résumé, he figured he would have it made.

  What he hadn’t counted on, and what he hadn’t understood, was what being on Benjamin Lombard’s blacklist meant. Really meant. He’d job hunted for months without so much as a callback. At first he’d limited himself to the big fish, the whales of the defense industry that always needed guys with his skill set. When he finally accepted that they weren’t going to hire him, he’d applied for jobs with second-tier companies. The crickets came from far and wide to sing him a sad song.

  He took a job at a chain electronics store selling home computers just to keep some money coming in. He’d become bitter and defensive. It had been a bad time. He’d shut down, only surfacing to lash out at his wife and daughter. To his shame, he’d fought with Nicole about everything. Anything. And God help her if she broached the subject of selling the house. That ignited fights that lasted for days and left him in an angry, pulsating silence. Knowing he was failing. Fearing Nicole had hitched her happiness to the wrong man. Fearing that she knew it too, he read resentment in her every action.

  It went on like that for months, and things were unraveling fast when his former commanding officer alerted him that Potestas, a local biotech company, was looking for an IT director and put in a good word for him. Potestas was small enough to fall beneath even Benjamin Lombard’s attention. Or so he’d assumed until a month ago. The work was entry-level IT: mindless and dull. He flew through the interview process and gratefully accepted a salary offer that he would have scoffed at only a year earlier. But with a wife and daughter and a crippling mortgage, Gibson didn’t dare risk making a counteroffer. Suddenly health insurance and a steady paycheck seemed like a gift from above. Job satisfaction and his dreams of spoiling his wife would just have to wait.

  Ex-wife, he reminded himself. They’d been divorced for almost a year, and still he couldn’t bring himself to say it.

  Ex-wife.

  It wasn’t that he’d meant to go looking for trouble, but he hadn’t put up any resistance when trouble found him. He just let it happen. Through all those deployments in the Corps, cheating on his wife had never once crossed his mind. Ironically, it started after he got the job at Potestas. The job hadn’t magically fixed the cracks that had appeared in their marriage, and he’d been too stubborn and prideful to set to fixing them. Instead, he’d gone to a happy hour with a sales rep named Leigh.

  In retrospect, he saw it for what it was: a temporary refuge. Cowardice, pure and simple. Leigh liked him and was nice to him. She didn’t need anything from him except a drink and a laugh. The man who had slept with Leigh was a mystery to him. Even now, it was hard to reconcile that man with who he thought he was.

  To her infinite credit and his eternal gratitude, Nicole wasn’t cruel or vindictive. Her lawyer was fair, and while their marriage ended, it never extended to his relationship with his daughter. Compared to the stories that he’d heard, he’d gotten very lucky. But then anyone who knew Nicole was lucky.

  The hardest part was watching Nicole go dead to him. She did her grieving behind closed doors. Always had. So there had been no fights. No tears. Just a numb distance. She reached her conclu
sion about the marriage before she even confronted him. Everything else was a formality.

  He begged for another chance, but Nicole wasn’t the forgiving kind. They’d known each other since high school, and he’d never once known Nicole to bend. She gave no second chances when it came to loyalty. You were loyal or you weren’t; it wasn’t something you learned. If he wasn’t a man she could trust, he wasn’t a man she could be married to. Gibson had always loved the confidence she had in her own counsel, but it was another thing entirely being on the wrong side of it.

  And just like that, he was a single, divorced father living in a bland high-rise concrete-slab apartment. Gone were six years of marriage. And in its place he had alimony payments, an hour commute to see his daughter, and a deepening suspicion that he was the dumbest son of a bitch who’d ever lived.

  That was why the house mattered.

  It was a good house—a sturdy, two-story Cape Cod. Far out from DC—quiet and safe. Good schools. One July, on furlough, he’d planted the row of azaleas that ran alongside the driveway. Afterward, he and Nicole sat in deck chairs, drinking beers and planning the garden until the bugs chased them inside. Ellie followed nine months later. That was the happiest Gibson had ever been, and he didn’t regret buying the house, even now. Even if it was killing him trying to hold on to it. The house represented the life that he owed Nicole and Ellie. He’d rather die than see them lose it because of him.

  The soccer game was just getting started as he walked up. The ball bounced toward the sideline, and a pack of girls from both teams chased after it, shrieking happily. He spotted Ellie immediately. She was on the far side of the field, bent over and staring intently at something in the grass. Gibson grinned. It was just possible that his daughter was the least talented soccer player in the history of the world. It wasn’t only her utter lack of coordination and inability to judge the flight of the ball. It was her flagrant utter disregard for the rules of the game. The idea of playing a single position bored her, and she roamed the field with impunity. Without the uniform, it would have been hard to tell which team she was on.