“I’ll go check him,” Nick said, making as if to return. Vaughn put out his hand to stop him—something was crackling through. “Sorry about that,” Don said, sounding as if he’d just run four miles. Vaughn grinned. Although Don had finally been able to run the one and a half miles in nine minutes they were all required to complete, it had taken him about ten tries and three weeks longer than anyone else on the team.
“Acquired?” Vaughn asked the teams, trying to determine if everyone had reached their appointed points.
“Team one in,” came the reply, followed by team two’s affirmative. Vaughn hefted his bag up over another small wall, then began to climb. This exercise required an additional step—Vaughn would be loading all the photos taken onto a laptop at the scene, making some minor calculations, then sending the intelligence over to another computer at the Farm. Although it was easy work that every team member had mastered long ago, Vaughn had never done it on a dark, wet precipice before—and all in the presence of his biggest enemy.
Nick was standing over Vaughn with his arms folded, watching him set up the small dish and laptop that would, had they really been in the field, enable him to bounce information off satellite dishes thousands of miles away and get information back to Langley in seconds. Vaughn still found it impressive that the computer could shoot the images even a few miles. “Want a hand?” Nick asked, smirking.
“I got it,” Vaughn said, watching the laptop come to life with a silent sigh of relief. “Let’s do it.”
Working quickly, Vaughn and Nick attempted to photograph every aspect of the dance hall-sized cave. They would have been crashing into each other but for the smart fabric of their wet suits, which gave off a dull glow about equal to that of a small lantern. The suits were solar, Vaughn knew, and after absorbing only fifteen minutes of direct sunlight, could, powered by body heat, provide the wearer with up to fifteen hours of light if necessary. And if the wearer needed to become invisible suddenly, the uniform could be turned inside out without any loss of power.
Vaughn wanted to get a shot of a cavernlike depression in the corner. Hunkering down, he edged out as far as he dared on the ledge, then began to shoot. There was some kind of assemblage there that he could just barely make out—had it been placed there on purpose to see if the trainees noticed it? Taking a deep breath, he edged out a little farther.
Suddenly, he felt two hands gripping his legs. Nick’s voice came out of the darkness. “You’re going a little too far,” Nick said. Vaughn could almost see the sneer on his face. “You could get hurt doing that kind of thing, you know?”
The smallest push, Vaughn knew, could send him and his camera careening over the edge. And while a recovery team would find him soon enough, he could be badly injured—or worse—before they managed to do so.
Chloe’s voice crackled over the headsets. “Team two’s out,” she said. “Returning to base.”
“Copy that,” Vaughn almost shouted into the headset. Nick’s hands had given him a yank, all right, but back into the chamber. Now Nick had retreated. Had he decided it was too dangerous to try to injure Vaughn? Or had he merely been messing with him—taking him right up to the edge, literally?
“Team one out,” Sam echoed. “Returning to base.”
Vaughn scrambled back up the satellite station. Nick was hunched over the computer, frowning. “We’ve lost the link,” he said, looking up at Vaughn without expression.
This wasn’t the first time Vaughn had suspected Nick of sabotaging missions he had led. But he’d be damned if he was going to let him destroy this one.
“Get out of my way,” Vaughn said, moving behind the laptop. He clicked a few keys. The transmitting bar came up, the signal clear. There was no problem with the link.
Nick was standing over him, laughing. “Psych!” he said, giving his ridiculous hyena.
Vaughn wanted to reach out and shove Pastino over the ledge he’d been sprawled out on minutes ago. He’d gained a measure of self-control since their blowup, though. “Very funny,” he said, keeping his tone even only by using every ounce of strength he had. “Now give me a hand with these images.”
Vaughn and Nick returned to the group about ten minutes later, the transmittal successfully completed. The rest of the team was suited up, and they silently put on their tanks and packs. Maybe I was wrong about this guy, Vaughn thought. Maybe he’s just a got a really stupid sense of humor.
He revised his thinking minutes later, though. As he brought up the rear of the line in the underwater chamber, he suddenly smacked headfirst into Nick’s flippers and found himself jammed up against the ceiling of the chamber, his mouthpiece pushed dangerously away.
This is going too far, he thought, scrambling madly to get his mouthpiece back before his lungs began to feel it and he panicked. This is endangering the welfare of the team!
In any operation, the last person—the team leader—was always responsible for those in front. Vaughn knew that, whatever was happening, Akiko, Sam, Melvin, Chloe, and Don should continue to swim to safety, then send a person back in, if necessary. But now he was left to subdue Nick in the confines of this tunnel, and he wasn’t sure how much oxygen he had left.
However, as Vaughn replaced his mouthpiece and pushed forward to assess the situation, he realized that the first five team members hadn’t swum to safety at all. Don was still hanging back, and it looked like he was wrestling with Nick.
Vaughn swam forward and grabbed Nick by the shoulders. As he tried to pull him away from Don, Nick strong-armed him back, sending him floating up toward the cement ceiling again. In the darkness of the tunnel, it was hard to see what was going on. But he thought that he saw Nick rip Don’s mouthpiece off, then place it in his own mouth and begin to breath from it.
What’s he doing? Vaughn thought, frantically trying to swim back toward the two lashing bodies through the muck they’d kicked up with their wrestling. Has he totally lost his mind?
But as he finally reached them, the situation abruptly came to a halt. Nick replaced Don’s mouth-piece, broke formation, and kicked off in the direction of the departed team.
Vaughn reached Don and held him up in the water. Through the mask, Vaughn could see that Don’s eyes held fear and panic. He wasn’t breathing into his mouthpiece, and he looked on the verge of passing out.
Securing Don’s head firmly under his arm, Vaughn began to kick off after Nick. It was only a few strokes towards the entrance from the tunnel, then a few kicks to the surface of the water, but Vaughn knew he had to get Don out fast. People didn’t breathe properly when they went into shock, and they could drown in just an inch of water.
Kicking powerfully, Vaughn dragged Don past the rest of the group and broke through the surface into the open air. The boat was only a few yards away, and he hauled Don onto the keel, ripping his mask off and checking for vitals. He was about to begin CPR when Don started spurting out mouthfuls of water, coughing and gagging and screaming all at once.
“He . . . he tried to kill me,” he choked, pointing Nick, who was just swimming up to the boat. Don’s face was turning from blue to white in the late-afternoon sunlight. The rest of the team boarded the craft, removed their masks, and stood dripping onto the deck in the cold wind.
“That’s it,” the instructor said, flipping the motor on and turning the boat around like a racing demon. “All of you, report to Harlow’s office at oh six hundred.”
Vaughn felt as if he’d been debriefing for at least the past twenty-four hours, although it had only been two at most. Facing him were Betty Harlow and their ballistics instructor, Major Gannett.
“And then CT Pastino held your legs and shoved you forward?” Betty was asking for the twentieth time. Vaughn sighed.
“He didn’t shove me forward,” he repeated. “He just said that what I was doing was dangerous.” The two questioners exchanged glances.
“But this isn’t the first time he’s done something like that,” Vaughn said. “I’ve seen him be rough p
hysically rough with Chloe, and he’s always talking to—”
“Be confident that we will be talking to all of you about you interactions with CT Pastino,” Betty interrupted. “Please only refer to those circumstances in which you were directly involved.”
Vaughn began again. “Well, there was the fight we had a few weeks ago,” he began.
“And explain again why you did not report this incident before?” Betty asked.
Vaughn drew in his breath. “I thought . . . ,” he said. “I thought we could work it out between ourselves.”
Betty shook her head and made a notation on her pad. Gannett’s face was becoming increasingly red.
“Sir, you do understand that this lapse may very well have endangered one of the lives of your fellow CTs?” Gannett blasted. The major had gone through a few variations of this explosion approximately every half hour since the debriefing had begun.
“I understand now,” Vaughn repeated. “Believe me, I regret my actions and I understand what I did wrong.” Betty shook her head again, then looked at Gannett. She made some inscrutable signal, and Gannett nodded slowly.
“We’ll get back to you with our decision,” Gannett said. Vaughn stood up and left the room. There was nothing else he could do.
He only hoped this dismissal wasn’t a final one.
7
VAUGHN MOVED HIS CURSOR over the last paragraph of the report he’d just completed, checking for omissions and errors one last time. “Akiko, did Historical send over those papers I requested?” he shouted over the cubicle. Akiko’s face, now framed by long hair and demure pearl earrings, popped up over the four-foot plastic wall.
“What do I look like, your secretary?” she asked, then disappeared again.
“I wish,” Vaughn muttered.
“I heard that!” Akiko shouted, rustling her papers ominously.
Vaughn laughed, but bitterly. Since their graduation from the Farm, he and Akiko were perhaps only marginally more likely to be given a secretary than the guys who picked up Langley’s garbage at the end of day.
Instead of bringing the team closer together, the last months of their training at the Farm had only increased each member’s feelings of disillusionment. By the time training was complete, Vaughn knew that even though on the outside their team functioned as an efficient, streamlined entity, on the inside each member was only counting the days until he or she could graduate and get away.
For some of the members, the desire to escape was strictly family related. Both Akiko and Melvin were married, and although the CIA didn’t make spouses hide the fact that they were in the CIA anymore, the training period put a strain on even the strongest marriages. Chloe’s biggest strain was not being able to visit her elderly grandfather, whose health had been steadily worsening in the past couple of months. Sam, whose girlfriend thought he had entered a graduate program in the Virginia area, was eager to move in with her and propose so that he could fill her in on the new direction his life was taking. And Don talked all the time about the nieces and nephews he’d missed visiting during his time at the Farm.
Vaughn had learned all this at their regular Sunday dinners at the canteen, but he hadn’t told his teammates what was going on in his own life. While he and Nora had shared a few more e-mails since her initial contact, Vaughn had struggled over what he could and couldn’t say under his cover, and the distance he’d felt at their graduation over a year ago seemed to have deepened into a large abyss. Mostly, though, what kept his mouth shut around his colleagues was his shame over the blowback from what he thought of as the Pastino Affair.
After the entire team had suffered through numerous hours of debriefing, Betty and Major Gannett had returned to them with a decision: They would continue their training without Nick Pastino, and the report of the incident and those leading up to it would be recorded as black marks on their records. “The key to teamwork is good communication,” Gannett blasted at them in the room where they had assembled to wait for the decision. “And in that area, you all get an F minus.”
Akiko was the only one with the courage to ask the question they all wanted answered. “What’s going to happen to CT Pastino?” she asked, keeping her voice steady under the hundred-watt glare of Major Gannett and the stone-faced mien of Betty. “Will he be continuing his training with another team?”
Betty didn’t even bat an eye. “That information is on a strictly need-to-know basis for now,” she said, looking around the room. “Are there any other questions?” she asked.
There weren’t.
Although Gannett and Betty seemed to assign some responsibility for the blowup to every team member, Vaughn knew it was mostly his fault. He had erupted with rage at Nick, possibly driving him to his actions that day in the Vault. His teammates had tried to protect him when they’d decided not to take the matter public and he had urged them to keep it quiet. And he’d been leading the team on the day Nick had gone haywire, and thus would have been responsible if Don or anyone had died.
“There’s probably more to this than meets the eye,” Akiko had said to him as they returned to the dorms, giving him a comforting slap on the back. “Don’t take it all on yourself.”
But I have to take it on myself, Vaughn had silently argued. It’s my fault, and it’s my responsibility.
And after the team had finished their last operations at the Farm and been given their marching orders, it seemed clear that someone very high up agreed with Vaughn. While Chloe was sent to Paris, Melvin to St. Petersburg, Sam to London, and Don to Azerbaijan, Vaughn was to remain at Langley, working not under the deputy director of operations, as he’d trained for, but as a liaison for that department to the directorate of intelligence, the department that handled all the complex analytical work for the CIA.
I can’t believe this, Vaughn had thought, reading the printout carefully again to be sure he hadn’t made a mistake. I’ve been demoted to an analyst!
While Vaughn knew that the directorate of intelligence was vital to the work of the CIA, the intensive training he’d just received wasn’t necessary to become an analyst in that department. Analysts were basically a higher-paid breed of academic, studying the international communities and leaders Vaughn had written papers on in college in order to provide crucial information to the directorate of operations.
I’m not even an analyst, he realized, scanning the document again. I’m a liaison to an analyst!
Vaughn had been suddenly filled with white-hot hatred for Betty Harlow. If it’s the last thing I do, he had thought, picturing her long gray hair, her stony face, and her cane with irritation, I’m going to show that woman that I’m good enough to be an operations officer at the CIA.
“Hey, Vaughn, have you ever heard of being a liaison for the DI?” Akiko had asked, using the general shorthand for the directorate of intelligence as she approached, waving her marching orders in her right hand.
“No,” he had answered, his mouth filling with bile. He could understand demoting him, but Akiko as well? She hadn’t done anything but be his closest ally on the team. Clearly, in the CIA, your friends could drag you down as well as your enemies. “But I have a feeling we’re about to learn all about it.”
Both Vaughn and Akiko tried to take a philosophical view towards their positions, which involved writing and sifting through hundreds of counterintelligence reports and raw intel and which Betty Harlow seemed to have created out of thin air just for them. “I was dreading telling my husband we had to move to Kuwait City anyway,” Akiko joked.
“Yeah—maybe Harlow knew we’d miss Washington nightlife,” Vaughn threw back.
In reality, there was little time for nightlife or for their families. Both Vaughn and Akiko had the same Weeble-like streak: When you punched them, they wobbled, but they wouldn’t fall down. It wasn’t, at this point, out of love for the job. Pride and competitive instinct kept them both working overtime, even though Betty, back on detail at Langley, seemed to pay little attention to their work.
“Thanks,” she’d say brusquely whenever Vaughn or Akiko provided her with a report or a document she’d requested. Liaison, as it turned out, also meant working as a private secretary for Betty.
“You’ve got to stop working so hard,” Akiko told Vaughn near midnight one night, when she was finally calling it quits just as he got his usual second wind.
He looked up, trying to see if she was being sarcastic. He knew that to keep her job on track during this difficult period, Akiko was sacrificing valuable time with her family. But what was working late to him? He was only going home to a one-bedroom apartment filled with unpacked boxes and a fridge crammed with leftover pizza and Chinese. He couldn’t even look forward to the occasional message from his mother—he hadn’t yet had a chance to hook up the phone, and he forgot to pay his cell phone bill so frequently he kept having to start with a new service and change the number.
“You’re the one who’s working too hard,” he said, his fingers momentarily ceasing their manic tapping at the keyboard. “You’ve got a husband and kids—don’t they miss you? I don’t mind taking on some of the extra work here if you want time to see them.”
Akiko smiled. “David understands,” she said. “And so do Blanche and Eugene. But I don’t think this is going to last much longer, anyway.”
Vaughn pushed back from his desk, suddenly filled with concern. “You’re not leaving me, are you?” he said. “Because without you, I swear, I’d be running through these halls in a clown suit ooga-ooging in about a week.”
Akiko laughed. “With some of your suits, you’re basically doing that anyway, Vaughn,” she joked. “But seriously, I didn’t mean I was talking about leaving the CIA. I meant just what I said: I don’t think that this is going to last much longer.”
Now Vaughn was definitely all ears. Had Akiko heard that something about their current situation was about to change? What was going on upstairs? “You think we’re going to get canned?” he asked, hoping that whatever tip she’d gotten was just malicious gossip.
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