The Short Drop (28 page)

Gunfire rattled over the radio. Titus stood with his hands on his hips, glaring at the radio as if he could see what was happening. Calista, brow furrowed, kept asking, “What’s happening? What’s happening?”

No one answered her.

It was hard for George to piece together. Several Cold Harbor operatives were down. Of that much he was sure. One was screaming incoherently for his life. Bedlam. He smiled grimly to himself. Jenn Charles and Dan Hendricks had not gone gentle into that good night.

“Breach,” a voice said clearly over the confusion.

Two detonations occurred simultaneously. The blood drained from Calista’s face.

“Flash-bangs.” Titus began pacing back and forth, cursing under his breath as the pitched battle moved inside the house.

Cold Harbor was losing.

“There’s someone else here! Shoot him! Shoot him! What the . . .” The voice was swamped by a wet gurgle. Nothing coherent followed.

“Tinsley,” Calista whispered to herself. “Oh, dear God.”

She took out her phone and dialed frantically.

Titus snatched up the radio and demanded a sitrep from someone. “What is your status? Report! Over!”

Titus caught George’s eye and didn’t like what he saw. He drew his sidearm and stalked over, leveling it at George’s face.

“No,” Calista said.

Titus stopped and glared at Calista. “What?”

“We may need him.”

“The plan was—”

“The plan was your team was competent,” Calista interrupted. “Now I need a new plan.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

It was fifty miles before Gibson eased off the accelerator, slowing to seventy miles an hour. He drove with one eye on the road ahead and one eye behind, studying the darkness for any sign that someone had followed them. His ears were still ringing.

The brim of Bear’s Phillies cap was low over his eyes. His head had been the safest place for it in the confusion, but now the cap felt oddly comforting. In the chaos, he’d managed to grab it along with Bear’s book. Billy’s gun rested under Gibson’s right thigh. Gibson still wasn’t clear how he’d gotten clear without getting shot. It had been a good old-fashioned turkey shoot.

He had no idea if Jenn or Hendricks were alive. They’d been separated during the firefight, and for all he knew they were captured or dead. He didn’t like leaving them, but Billy had taken one to the stomach and needed a hospital. Gibson had fireman-carried him out of the house to the car, expecting with each staggering step a bullet that never came.

He pulled the Cherokee off at an exit and found an abandoned gas station that looked as if it had been closed for years. He shut off the engine but left Hendricks’s keys dangling from the ignition. Sitting in the shadow of the station’s awning, he looked back the way they had come and listened to the wet rasp of Billy’s breathing.

In the dim glow of the streetlights, Gibson could see Billy’s face, pale and beaded with sweat. Billy coughed what looked like black tar onto his chin. Gibson wiped it away and saw that Billy’s shirt and pants were soaked through with blood. Billy murmured something inchoate. He had drifted in and out of consciousness since the mad scramble back at the house but hadn’t spoken a lucid word.

He had to get Billy to a hospital, but first he needed to know they hadn’t been followed. The dashboard dinged noisily when he opened his door. Billy’s hand shot out and grabbed him by the wrist.

“You know where you’re going next?” Billy asked.

“Yeah, I have a pretty good idea.”

“I knew you’d figure it out. Will you do something for me?”

“Of course.”

“When you find her, will you tell her about me?”

“Hey. Don’t start on a hero trip now. As soon as it’s safe we’re going to a hospital. You’re alive, and you’re going to stay that way.”

“I’m glad I met you. It was good to tell someone.”

“The privilege was mine, Billy. Now shut up and sit tight. I’m going to be right back.”

“Okay.” Billy smiled through the pain.

Pulling the hat low over his eyes, Gibson walked out to the road. He didn’t see anyone, but that didn’t make him feel safe. How long could he wait, though? Billy needed a surgeon.

He took out his phone. It was a risk; the phone might be how Jenn and Hendricks had tracked him to the lake house, but he saw no alternative. He powered it up—one bar. He moved across the parking lot, hunting for a better signal. He settled for three bars. Hendricks would have simply known, but Gibson needed to search for the nearest hospital. He found one eight miles from here, memorized the route, and made the call he’d been dreading. He didn’t want to scare her unnecessarily, but he couldn’t avoid it now.

“You wouldn’t believe how hot it is here,” he said when she answered.

“Say that again?” Nicole asked.

“You wouldn’t believe how hot it is here.”

“How hot is it?”

“One hundred and ten.”

“What’s the heat advisory?” she asked.

“Find shade.”

She was quiet for a moment, then, “Well, try to stay cool.”

“Tell her I love her.”

Nicole hung up without another word.

It was their old code from when he’d been in the service. It meant there was a legitimate terrorist threat to DC, and she needed to get to safety. Calls home were monitored for key words and phrases, so a lot of guys had a way to warn family.

Nicole would take Ellie to her uncle’s hunting lodge in West Virginia. She’d be on the road in less than fifteen minutes and would stay off the grid until she heard from him. He’d never had to use it while he was in the service. He was grateful now that she still respected him enough to trust him and not ask questions. Although if he survived all this, he knew he would have many to answer.

The road was still deserted in both directions, so he made another call. It was a number he hadn’t dialed in over a decade; he couldn’t recite it, but his fingers knew it. He just prayed it was still good.

A young boy answered. Gibson asked for his aunt. The boy set the phone down roughly and ran off, yelling “Mom.”

A woman picked up. She sounded just the same.

“Hello, Miranda.”

“Gibson? Is that you?”

They talked for a few minutes. He told her what he needed. She wasn’t sure if she still had it but promised to look.

“If I have it, there’s only one place it would be,” she said.

They set a time and place to meet. He thanked her and hung up. That had gone better than he could reasonably have hoped. He tried Jenn’s number, but it went straight to voice mail. He contemplated leaving a message, but he couldn’t be sure her phone hadn’t been taken. Instead, he hung up and pulled the SIM card and shattered his phone against the side of the gas station. If it hadn’t been compromised already, it soon would be.

Anyway, there wasn’t anybody left for him to call.

He walked back around to the SUV, calculating how long a drive it was to Charlottesville. He could get away with driving at night, but come dawn the bullet holes in the car would lead to unpleasant questions. The passenger door stood open; Billy was gone. Bloody footprints crossed the parking lot and disappeared at the edge of the broad field that backed the gas station. After ten yards he lost the trail. He called out to Billy in the dark. Not even the wind answered.

Gibson studied the horizon to the north but realized he couldn’t be sure which direction Billy had gone. He searched the field in the dark, yelling Billy’s name to the uncaring night.

He went back to the Cherokee. There comes a point when every man must choose his own way. Billy had made his choice, and Gibson hoped he could live with it.

His was Charlottesville.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

When daylight came, Gibson pulled off at a motel that advertised “Clean Rooms” on a hand-painted sign. He parked in the back, away from the main road, and got a room. He paid cash for two nights, even though he only intended to be there until that evening. He put his clothes in the tub to soak the blood out of them and took a shower, stomping his clothes like an old-fashioned wine press until blood leaked out of them, swirling down the drain. He stood under the scalding water until his skin was pink like a newborn’s.

He slept hard. When the need to urinate woke him, he hung his clothes to dry on the shower bar. When he woke for good, it was late afternoon. It felt like he’d been asleep for a five count, not ten hours. He took another shower to wash the sleep off and put his clothes back on. It was an improvement, but you could still see the bloodstains. He turned his shirt inside out. That helped some. Now he just looked like an idiot.

A mile down the road, he stopped at a discount clothing store in a tumbledown strip mall. He bought a pair of jeans and two shirts. He wore them out of the store and threw his old clothes in the trash. At a hardware store he bought a claw hammer. He drove on until he found a secluded turnoff. He took the hammer to the bullet holes in the side of the SUV. It looked a lot worse when he was done, but they didn’t look like bullet holes.

Charlottesville had changed in the ten years he’d been gone, but at the same time it hadn’t changed a bit. Not in ways that mattered. It was still first and foremost a university town. Distinctly southern and proud of its heritage and traditions, it was also young, vibrant, and easygoing—the best of both worlds, in Gibson’s opinion. He drove into town on Route 29, which became Emmet Street once it crossed Route 250. The university rose up to greet him. New buildings dotted the campus, but it was familiar all the same. Part of him wanted to park and take a walk through Grounds, part of him wanted to take a detour to the White Spot for a Gus Burger, and part of him wanted to turn the car around and get out of there. It wasn’t that he had made a conscious decision never to come back, but somehow he’d always found a reason to be elsewhere.

Distracted by memories, he missed his turn on University Avenue. Rather than make a U-turn, he took Jefferson Park Avenue around, picking up West Main on the far side of Grounds. School was out, and, as in the summers of his childhood, Charlottesville was slumbering, worn out by a long school year and trying to catch up on its sleep before twenty thousand students began returning in a few weeks.

The white brick exterior of the Blue Moon Diner came up on his right faster than he remembered. He pulled into the narrow parking lot that ran alongside the building and sat for a minute in the simmering dark.

He had not seen his aunt since the trial. Miranda had taken him in after his father’s death, and it was fair to say he had not been a grateful child. She had been more than understanding of his tempestuous moods and bad behavior in the way that only a mother who had already raised teenage sons could be. He returned her kindness in the form of an FBI raid on her home.

During the trial, contact with his aunt was reserved and frosty. He couldn’t rightly blame her, but, young and angry, he’d resented her for it anyway.

Legal bills had eaten through his father’s estate, and his last correspondence with his aunt had been when the house was sold. It had taken time to find a buyer, and he was nearing graduation at Parris Island when the envelope came—plain, white, and with a check inside. There was no note, and he’d seen no cause to reply. Eventually, he’d used the money as a down payment on the house Nicole and Ellie lived in now.

He didn’t know what to expect from the meeting and realized that he only had a child’s memory of his aunt. He didn’t know what kind of a person she was. She was just Aunt Miranda, who’d looked after him and made sure he didn’t starve while Duke was out of town. Whatever else may have happened, he told himself, she had done more than most would have. He’d lost a father, but she’d lost a brother. Still, he didn’t have the first idea what Duke Gibson had meant to his sister. If he was being honest, he had stayed away from Charlottesville out of the stubborn desire to avoid this very meeting.

The Blue Moon Diner wasn’t the same. He shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was. It had been ten years, more, and management had changed yet again. He felt a sadness for the place that surprised him.

A young white woman with tattoos down both arms touched his arm and told him to sit anywhere. He chose a booth in the front corner so he could watch the front door for Miranda.

Gibson thought the new owners had done a nice job of maintaining the feel of the place, but his father surely would have expressed disdain for most of the changes.

Duke Vaughn was progressive on a lot of fronts, but on some matters, like his diners, he was fussily old school. Take the records overflowing the windowsills, or the beer and liquor for sale. Neither belonged in the Duke Vaughn school of American diners. The chalkboard schedule of nightly singers would have surely drawn a groan. “Diners don’t have singers!” he could hear his father pronouncing. And the menu, which had items like the Mountain Trout Club and the Tandoori Chicken Sandwich, would almost certainly have earned Duke Vaughn’s scorn.

The club sounded pretty good. He handed the menu back to the waitress.

His thoughts turned to Billy and to Hendricks and Jenn. Were any of them alive? George Abe. Kirby Tate. Terrance Musgrove. So many lives bound together in the Gordian knot of one missing girl. But for Gibson, it came down to his father. He was under no illusion that he was safe, but it was a question he needed to answer before deciding his next move. As horrible as the truth might be, Gibson knew that the doubt would drive him insane. What had driven his father to suicide? Gibson could feel the opaque fingers of his suspicion tightening their grip.

He just prayed that his aunt had kept it.

Miranda Davis came in through the front door. Gibson stood to greet her, unsure how. His aunt solved that riddle and drew her nephew into her strong arms. He sank into her embrace, and both their eyes were wet when they parted.

The years had treated Miranda fairly. She had aged, of course, but lost none of her vitality. Her tall, thin frame, strong from years of competitive running, including six marathons, looked nearly the same. Only her hair appeared noticeably different.

“I like your hair,” he said.

“Oh, I got sick of the gray. Bill thinks I look pretty as a redhead.”

Bill was her husband of thirty-some years. Gibson had only ever heard him speak on two subjects: UVA sports and his lovely, lovely wife. Otherwise, he left the talking to Miranda.

“He’s right. You look great.”

Miranda waved the compliment away. “Well, I don’t know about all that, but thank you. And, my goodness, Gibson. Look at you. A man. Lord, it’s been so long.” She became quiet. “Which is my fault, I know.”

“No,” he said with a vehemence that surprised him. “I was a shit.”

“You were a child,” she corrected. “I was the grown-up. I should have acted like one.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She covered his hand with hers. “I’m so glad you called.”

“Me too.”

“Lord but we can be a stubborn lot. Are you in town long? Bill would love to see you.”

He said that he was leaving tonight. Miranda looked disappointed, and he promised that when he had time he’d like to come for a visit.

“I have a daughter.” He told Miranda about Ellie, and about Nicole. Miranda asked questions, and he filled her in on his life as best he could, trying to keep the narrative upbeat. He was surprised at how much good stuff there was to tell, and at how good it felt to have someone who wanted to hear it.

“I hope to meet her someday,” she said.

He promised that he would bring her to Charlottesville soon. That brought a fresh round of tears and self-recriminations. She smiled through her tears.

“Bill says I cry if the wind changes direction. I suppose that’s true. Oh! I have what you asked for. I almost forgot why I was here. Such a space cadet. I found it.”

She reached into her bag and lifted out a small marble bust of James Madison. She put it on the table between them. His father had bought it at a yard sale as an undergraduate at UVA. Duke called it his first “important purchase,” and it had held a place of honor on his desk until the day he died.

They talked a few more minutes, Miranda all smiles, even as he walked her outside and they embraced once more.

“You look just like him, you know? Especially the eyes.” In the air, her fingers traced the features of his face. “Just like him.”

Back at the table, his food was waiting for him. He pushed the plate away untouched and held the statue in his hands, feeling its weight. Turning it over, he searched for the indentation in the pedestal. His thumb found it and released the panel concealing the cubbyhole in the pedestal. Originally intended for notes and the like, it was just big enough to hide a thumb drive. Still, he was a little surprised when it fell into his palm.

Duke Vaughn had kept a diary since he was an undergraduate at UVA. Always a believer in his own destiny, he claimed it would be instrumental when it came time to write his memoirs. Although Duke spoke of it often, no one had ever read a word, and so Duke Vaughn’s “diary” had become something of a family legend.

Gibson had seen his father back up his computer and hide the thumb drive in the statue a million times. After his arrest, the FBI had seized his father’s PC, which had contained enough incriminating evidence to destroy Duke’s reputation. The computer had never been returned, and, more than likely, the thumb drive was the last remaining copy of Duke Vaughn’s writing.

He plugged it into his laptop.

A single folder appeared on his screen labeled “PRIVATE.” Subtle. A window appeared, prompting him for a password. When he’d first become interested in computers and encryption, his first project had been his father. The first password he’d ever hacked. His first criminal act. Second if you counted the time he’d been pulled over for speeding when he was a kid. Gibson entered the password and the window disappeared.

In the folder were more than thirty files, each named for the year in which it had been written. The earliest dated back to the late seventies. In total, they covered Duke Vaughn’s life from university, through his rise in politics, up to his “suicide,” running to well more than two million words. Some entries were incredibly short: “October 7, 1987—I hate canvassing for voters. I hate it,” read one from a campaign trail. Others were much more serious and went on for pages. The writing became insightful and articulate. Encounters with party bigwigs, legislation Duke had been involved with, philosophical musings on politics.

Gibson opened a program that would search all the documents simultaneously for keywords. He typed in “baseball” and waited while the machine combed through his father’s journals. It came back with close to two thousand matches. Gibson frowned and added “Suzanne” and “Gibson” to his search. The program did its work again and dinged to announce it had finished. A single match this time.

On the surface it was perfectly innocuous—an outing to a baseball game cut short by a difficult child. Gibson read slowly, hearing his father’s voice in the words, listening for anything out of the ordinary. But it sounded merely like a man concerned for his friend’s daughter. Gibson came to the part when Bear really flipped out. It matched his recollection until a part came that he didn’t remember:

I’d arranged a face-to-face with Martinez. Social. Low pressure. A chance for Ben to clear the air with the Whip after we broke ranks on the unemployment bill. It was the right call, but it’s cost us. Midterms were eighteen months out, but we needed to pave over the cracks now.

Hard to do the way Suzanne was behaving. Decision time. Ben wanted to postpone, but I’d worn holes in the knees of a good suit getting the meeting. It was happening. So it was agreed that I’d take Suzanne back to Virginia. George would stay with Gibson and Ben. Felt badly leaving Gibson behind, but the Whip had a son about his age. Made sense, and from what I was told, Gibson knocked it out of the park. Kid’s got a future.

Suzanne was a wreck until I got her out of the park. I kept my distance or she’d start to freak again. It was a scene. Offered to buy her a cap, and that seemed to calm her down some. Found a merchandise stand on the walk back to the car. She didn’t want an Orioles cap. No Orioles. No, no, of course not. It was an O’s game for Christ’s sake. What else are they going to have? She started to cry again. The guy dug around in the boxes and found two Phillies caps. Wasn’t sure why he had it. Bought them both—thought we could bond over it. Cap was too big for her, but it was a snapback so I cinched it all the way and it just about stayed on her head. That made her happy, and thank God she passed out in the backseat on the way home.

O’s lost.

Gibson remembered that cap now. The second cap had been left in the backseat on the drive home. He’d asked Duke about it but gotten no real answer, and his father had thrown it in the trash when they got back to Charlottesville. He’d never connected it to Bear before now.

And it felt wrong. It was all so wrong. He’d found nothing definitive, but there was enough to feed his festering doubt. Gibson took the Phillies cap off and looked at it again. Billy was right. It was a message, and he had a sickening feeling it had been intended for him. Billy said she’d kept thinking up ways to make contact with him in jail.

What were you trying to tell me?

Gibson put the cap into his bag rather than back on his head. The Blue Moon was filling up. In one corner, the evening’s entertainment tuned a guitar. Gibson needed to get somewhere quiet where he could comb through the rest of the diary. There had to be more.

He packed up, paid the bill, and went out the side door to the parking lot. It was a risk, but he needed to reach out to Jenn. Of course, his phone was lying shattered in a gas station parking lot in Pennsylvania. Older motels often still had pay phones. He needed a place where he could hole up for the night and kill two birds.