Cold Harbor (The Gibson Vaughn Series Book 3)

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  Not bad, he thought.

  Actually, he felt pretty good in general. Since he’d begun prepping in earnest for Damon Ogden, things had improved steadily. Each day a little better. His head had calmed. He rarely saw Duke or Bear. Now that he had a project, he didn’t need them as much. Being outdoors barely affected him anymore. Even interacting with people was getting easier, and it no longer hurt to be touched. Duke had promised that if Gibson followed through with their plan, things would get better. So far, so good. His revenge gave him a sense of purpose that drove him. Its planning, organization, and execution felt important in a way that washing dishes for twelve dollars an hour never could.

  He’d been keeping late hours, so once the movie started, Gibson made himself comfortable and took a nap. He wasn’t there for the movie anyway. It was all part of the plan, and he needed to establish an alibi. Not that he thought anyone was watching. Not now anyway. But afterward, he’d need a verifiable routine. So he made a point of buying something from the concessions line and chatting amicably with the bored staff behind the counter. To make certain they remembered him, he’d twice let his large soda slip out of his hand at the counter. No one ever forgot a serial klutz.

  After the movie, Gibson drove to the outskirts of Damon Ogden’s neighborhood. Ogden lived alone in a house in Vienna, Virginia, just beyond the sprawl of Tysons Corner. A quiet neighborhood dominated by young families. A place where people felt safe, let their guards down. In the Yukon, Gibson changed into the same distinctive running gear and took his nightly jog past Ogden’s house. It gave him the opportunity to scout the neighborhood and plan for contingencies.

  The weatherman called it a polar vortex. Gibson called it camouflage. At night, the thermometer had been dipping into the teens, driving all but the hardiest off the streets. The handful of brave souls that he did meet, Gibson greeted with a friendly wave. No one questioned the neoprene hood that covered everything but his eyes. He wanted to be remembered but not recognized. The best way not to seem out of the ordinary was not to be. When the time came, Gibson would be just a hard-core neighbor out for a run. Plus, he really needed the exercise. It felt good to be able to run more than a block without puking into the bushes.

  His last stop each night was the abandoned power plant. It had been a godsend. Duke had suggested it when they’d first started planning, but they’d had to wait until Gibson’s release to make sure it still stood.

  Duke had been chief of staff to Senator Benjamin Lombard when the plant had closed. It had remained a political hot potato in Northern Virginia for more than twenty years. The original proposal had called for the plant to be demolished to make way for new development, which in real-estate-hungry Northern Virginia would ordinarily have been a no-brainer. However, no one had calculated the expense of removing the asbestos, lead paint, mercury, and other hazardous materials. Standard demolition would have had serious environmental implications for the surrounding residential neighborhoods, which meant time and money. One development company after another backed away from the project. So there the old plant remained, undisturbed in all its dilapidated glory. Neighbors paid it no mind, and it had become an all-but-invisible eyesore.

  It may have been perfect, but he still had a lot to do if he wanted to make his deadline. He worked until after two a.m., as he did every night. It was grueling, but Gibson enjoyed the work. For the first few days, his back had ached like he’d been through a workout, which he supposed he had. Combined with his running, he felt like he was relearning how to use his body. It was a satisfying feeling. Then, exhausted, he stumbled home to his basement room and slept on the floor until it was time to go to work at the diner.

  The next night, after a particularly awful movie involving a white family, demonic possession, and a haunted house, Gibson found a small trailer hitched to the back of his Yukon. The first delivery, right on schedule. Swonger had held up his end. Not wanting to leave his cargo unattended, Gibson skipped his evening run and drove straight to the plant.

  A high chain-link fence overgrown with vines encircled the property, but the gate was wide open. Anything of value had long since been removed. A security service drove the property twice a week looking for indications that local kids were partying there. Security never went inside the plant, though, and as long as Gibson kept a low profile and covered his tracks, they never would.

  He drove around to the back of the plant and backed the Yukon up to a basement entrance to unload the trailer. He checked the packing tape that he’d put over the basement door’s seams. It was undisturbed; no one had been there. The door’s lock had broken long before, and it had been padlocked shut with a length of chain. Gibson had removed the padlock with bolt cutters and replaced it with a similar model.

  Inside, he flipped on the lights. One of his first tasks had been to replace most of the lightbulbs, this after he’d discovered to his delight that the caretakers still paid the plant’s utilities. He went down a flight of stairs and along a narrow, dank service corridor. Ducking under a corroded pipe, he made a left and then a right, moving deeper into the abandoned building. It had taken a whole night’s work to clear all the debris, but it had been worth it. He couldn’t imagine a more private location for a hundred miles. And what he had in mind for Damon Ogden depended on privacy.

  His improvised workbench was just as he’d left it. He took a key from a hook and unlocked the bathroom door. It needed reinforcing. One of a long list of modifications to make to the eight-by-ten bathroom. Swonger’s delivery would see to that. But first things first; he went back topside and spent the rest of the night unloading and organizing his new equipment. He had a lot of work left to do if he wanted to be ready by Friday night.

  Friday’s movie featured a misunderstood teenager drafted into a fight against a dystopian oligarch. The key to winning, as best as Gibson could follow, was embracing her individuality. He liked this one more than most of the movies he’d seen recently, although he didn’t know what it said about him that he related so strongly to a teenage freedom fighter. Exhausted after a long week, he could have used a nap, but no way he was sleeping. Tonight was the night.

  When the world was saved and the credits rolled, Gibson went out to the lobby and bought a ticket for another movie he’d already seen. At the concession counter, he ordered a large soda and made a big show of holding it carefully in both hands. They all shared a good laugh about his clumsiness. Gibson asked them the time and wished them a good weekend. Back in the theater, he found a seat in the back and let the lights dim before slipping out the side exit.

  His Yukon was gone. In its place sat a blue 2001 Yukon with Virginia plates. Once again, Gavin Swonger had come through. Gibson thought about considering the proposition that this might be the rule more than the exception.

  The driver’s door was unlocked, and Gibson found the key under the mat. He took an inventory of the trunk. He counted everything that he’d requested along with the suitcase he’d left in his Yukon for Swonger to transfer between vehicles. Inside the suitcase was an empty backpack that Gibson filled with items from tonight’s delivery. Then he got on the road.

  Rush hour was typical for a Friday night, but once he got on the Dulles Toll Road, things eased up. He parked at one of the hotels surrounding the airport, chosen for its lack of security cameras. He tucked the Yukon away in an inconvenient back corner, wheels far enough into the adjacent spot to discourage anyone who cared about their paint job. He rolled the suitcase—the kind businesspeople crammed into the overhead bins on flights—over to the hotel and caught a cab to a second hotel, this one in Tysons Corner. In the lobby bathroom, he changed into his cold-weather running gear. He took the .45 Lawman from its clear plastic bag and loaded it. It felt so good in his hand that he only grudgingly put it back in the backpack. He left the suitcase in a dumpster behind the hotel and caught a second cab that dropped him five blocks from Damon Ogden’s home. He paid cash and shouldered his backpack as the cab disappeared up the block.


  It was going to be another cold one.

  Kidnapping an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency was a terrible, foolhardy idea. It could only end badly. But the fact that it was a terrible idea gave Gibson certain advantages. No one had ever kidnapped a CIA officer on American soil. That meant he had the element of surprise on his side. Sometimes foolhardy gave you an edge.

  It also helped that security for the intelligence community was reactive rather than proactive. Roughly five million Americans held security clearances, so it simply wasn’t feasible to watch everyone. The first line of defense was the individuals themselves. If Damon Ogden spotted trouble—for example, if a foreign national made an approach or if Ogden lost his ID—it was his responsibility to report it. Once the CIA knew of a problem, it would react quickly, but until then, it idled at the starting line.

  So, hypothetically, if one of their officers went missing, the CIA wouldn’t have any idea initially. It wouldn’t be until Ogden was reported missing or failed to show up at Langley that the CIA would be alerted. Even then, the CIA would allow a short grace period—Gibson guessed no more than a few hours—before it initiated a search. Step one would be to call everyone on the missing officer’s emergency contact form. If friends and family couldn’t help to locate Damon Ogden, the next step would be to send a supervisor to Ogden’s home. Within four or five hours, the FBI and the local police would have been alerted. Within twelve hours, the full muscle of the American intelligence community would be mobilized to find their missing man.

  Once that happened, it wouldn’t take long for someone at Langley to throw the name Gibson Vaughn into the pot along with any other enemies Damon Ogden may have made. After that, they would begin sifting through Gibson’s life for any indication that he’d abducted Damon Ogden. Gibson would either need to be off the grid by then, in which case the CIA would draw a bull’s-eye on his back that would never be erased, or else right where they expected him to be, squeaky clean, above reproach, just trying to make ends meet at the diner.

  Gibson had opted for the latter. For one thing, he didn’t have the resources to go on the run. Better to hide in plain sight and give them no reason to suspect him. Let them sniff around; if his plan worked, then he’d be nowhere near Ogden when the CIA let the dogs off the leash. But to do that he’d need a head start. Friday night gave him his best shot. Monday was Martin Luther King Day. If he took Ogden on Friday evening, then alarms at the CIA wouldn’t start going off until late Tuesday morning when Ogden failed to report for work. That would give him eighty-four hours to cover his tracks while simultaneously creating a much larger window of time for which investigators would need to account.

  The wild card would be if the Agency tried to reach Ogden over the weekend, or if he had personal plans. From what Gibson had been able to ascertain, Ogden’s social circle was small, only a handful of college friends. However, he dated a woman, a single mother of two, in Reston. Ogden saw her two or three times a week and almost always on the weekend. Gibson would need to create a convincing excuse to keep her from panicking early. He had an idea how he’d handle it, but it would have to happen on the fly after he’d taken Ogden. It was risky, reckless even, but then, no plan was perfect.

  Gibson pulled on his face shield and began an easy jog toward Ogden’s house.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  As night fell, so did the temperature. The wind had a bite to it, driving the wise indoors. It picked up as Gibson turned onto Damon Ogden’s street. Two cars sped by on their way home after a long week, and a woman dragged a shivering dachshund up the sidewalk, but otherwise he saw no one, and no one saw him. Jogging past Ogden’s house, he found nothing out of the ordinary. He ran a few blocks before circling back. There was no hurry. Ogden was a creature of habit and wouldn’t be home before six thirty at the earliest.

  One of the quirks of modern home-security systems was that many didn’t consider the garage part of the house. It meant that the countdown to enter the disarm code didn’t begin until the door from the garage into the house opened. That would be fine except that the signals from most commercial garage door openers weren’t encrypted and were remarkably simple to spoof with the right equipment. Unfortunately for Damon Ogden, both his garage door and his alarm system fell into those categories.

  A week earlier, Gibson had come out with a simple device he’d cobbled together from a child’s electronic toy. It cycled garage-door codes and found Ogden’s in less than two minutes. Gibson had then programmed that code into the generic, replacement garage-door opener in the pocket of his running jacket. With the push of a button, he triggered Ogden’s garage door now, strolled casually up to the house, and ducked inside.

  Gibson shut the garage door and looked around. Despite the single-car garage being packed to the rafters, it didn’t offer many places to hide. Gibson added “neat freak” to Ogden’s list of crimes against humanity. The boxes, meticulously labeled and stacked along one wall, offered no cover. His best bet was the small blind in the corner created by a kayak and two bicycles hanging vertically from a rack.

  Gibson squatted on an overturned metal bucket to wait. When the motion-activated light clicked off, he was ready with a flashlight but let out a small involuntary cry anyway. To pass the time, he rummaged through his backpack, flashlight between his teeth, and rearranged his gear. He pulled on a pair of double-layer latex gloves and a surgical hairnet.

  That took all of three minutes.

  Then he sat in the dark of the garage and waited. With all his experience, he would have thought that he’d be an old hand at loneliness. But he hadn’t had a real conversation since the farm, and the lack of human interaction ate at him. Objectively, he knew it was good that Bear and Duke didn’t come around as often. It meant he was improving. But they’d been his only companionship for eighteen soul-crushing months. Even if they were only figments of his psychosis, they were his friends. And he missed them.

  Gibson flicked off the flashlight and counted slowly to ten. When he turned it back on, he could feel himself shaking. He let a few minutes pass and tried again, this time to eleven. When his heart stopped pounding, he told himself, he would go to twelve.

  The motor for the garage door cranked to life. The sudden noise startled Gibson, who dropped his flashlight. It rolled toward the middle of the garage, beam playing crazily over the walls. Gibson watched all his planning come unraveled with a strange, detached fascination. Then miraculously, the flashlight made a U-turn of its own accord and rolled back to Gibson. He scooped it up gratefully and pressed back against the wall as headlights spilled across the garage. The car eased into its spot, and the engine cut off.

  Gibson held his breath.

  The driver’s side door opened, but Ogden took a moment to balance his briefcase, coffee cup, phone, and keys. Gibson studied him in the dome light. He’d expected a rush of emotion when he saw Damon Ogden again, but in truth he felt only confusion. The man in the car didn’t look anything like the man he remembered. Obviously they’d met under less than ideal circumstances—Ogden had been on the wrong end of a beating that night, and the Wolstenholme Hotel had been a war zone. But even so, Gibson would have sworn that he’d know Ogden anywhere. How couldn’t he? It was the last human face he had seen for eighteen months. The last voice he’d thought he would ever hear. Their lives were bound together inexorably because of that night in West Virginia. So how could Gibson not know him? How could this man be a stranger to him?

  Gibson realized that he had a more pressing concern—his hiding place blocked Ogden’s view from the car, but there would be a brief window, between the car and the house door, when he would be in Ogden’s field of vision. If Ogden looked this way, he’d have no chance of subduing him quietly, if at all. It would be an all-out brawl, and not one Gibson could be sure of winning, even if he’d been anywhere close to fighting shape. Anyway, that wasn’t the plan.

  He drew his gun and thumbed the safety off.

  The plan hinged on Ogde
n not knowing the identity of his abductor. It also required that Ogden go into the house and disable the alarm. Gibson needed access to the house, and the security company’s log had to show Ogden arriving home as usual. Because when investigators looked at the record of Ogden’s cell phone, it would show the phone connecting to a tower in his neighborhood. If Ogden never made it inside the house, then investigators would pinpoint exactly when and where Ogden had disappeared. That would hand them the crime scene, which would shift the odds against Gibson considerably.

  Ogden pushed the car door closed with his hip. Gibson crouched lower, his pulse like a freight train in his ears. One step. Then another. Gibson held his breath—one more step and they’d be staring soulfully into each other’s eyes. Gibson pressed the button on his garage remote. The garage door began to close, seemingly on its own. Ogden froze, looking around for an explanation—the button by the door into the house, the car itself, then accusingly up at the garage door motor on the ceiling. Gibson used the distraction to break cover, the rumble of the garage door covering any noise he made. He dropped prone alongside the car as the garage door shuddered to a close. In the silence that followed, he watched Ogden’s feet under the car turn in a slow, confused circle. Gibson willed him away.

  Go on. Go on. You know how glitchy those motors can be.

  Ogden and his feet finally took the hint. Gibson breathed a sigh of relief as Ogden opened the house door. The shrill, staccato bleat of the alarm cried out until Ogden punched in the code to deactivate it. Gibson rose to a crouch, counted to thirty, and slipped into the house after him.

  Although he’d never been inside Ogden’s home, Gibson knew that the garage connected to a combination laundry room and pantry. He knew because all the houses in Ogden’s development were based on a few standard models. Two like Ogden’s were currently on the market, and the floor plans were posted helpfully on the real estate agent’s website for prospective buyers to admire. Or prospective home invaders to memorize.