It was working.
After days of trying to think of a solution, Gibson was still no closer to resolving the Ogden situation. So far he had four vague and unsatisfactory options—release Ogden, kill Ogden, kill himself. Or some combination of the above. One morning, after a restless night on the floor, a fifth option occurred to him. He could run, and tip off Ogden’s people once he was off the grid. Not that there was such a place, not anymore. Bin Laden had proven that. If they wanted him badly enough, they would always be able to find him. And Gibson imagined they’d want him pretty bad. It would be a dangerous precedent for Langley to set, allowing someone who’d kidnapped one of their people to remain a free man.
Gibson made a circuit of his tiny apartment and checked to see if the strips of Scotch tape on the windows and front door were all undisturbed. All part of his paranoid morning ritual. Some people made coffee; Gibson made sure the CIA hadn’t broken in while he slept. He really ought to write the adhesive-tape people a thank-you note. They probably hadn’t considered do-it-yourself alarm system among its possible applications.
He peered out through the thin floral curtains that decorated the small window in his front door. Before he got in the shower, he liked to check the street. It helped calm him enough to get ready for work. A black SUV with tinted windows idled at the curb behind his Yukon.
“What are you doing now?” Duke asked.
“There’s somebody out there.”
“Oh, right, that would be the CIA.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Gibson heard the panic in his voice.
“What, are we on the same side now?”
“What do they want?”
“I told you not to go back to the power plant.”
“No, actually, you didn’t,” Gibson said.
“Well, it was implied.”
From this angle, Gibson couldn’t see the plates, but the whole getup felt distinctly government issue. Although it didn’t make any sense, them sitting there out in the open like that. Gibson figured they’d either surveil him or arrest him. Why tip their hand otherwise?
Duke leaned in to take a look for himself. “Flushing game.”
“How’s that?”
“They want you to break cover. They’re trying to spook you.”
“Well, it’s working.”
“Relax, kid, if they had something, they’d have driven a tank through your door already.”
This was a true fact. “So what do I do?”
“I don’t know . . . cowering here seems to be working pretty good so far.”
Gibson felt suddenly vulnerable standing there in his socks and boxers. Ignoring Duke again, he went to find clothes, deciding the best course of action with the men outside was obliviousness. If they had him, they had him, and there wasn’t anything he could do about that. Otherwise, he needed to stick to the plan. He reminded himself how he’d almost freaked out when the cop had followed him. Don’t overreact. Maybe it was nothing but a parent waiting to pick up a carpool kid for school.
“Oh, I’m sure that’s exactly what it is,” Duke said.
Gibson locked his door and walked out to his car. Duke followed after taunting him with paranoid warnings of what would happen next. When the front doors of the black SUV popped opened, Duke chuckled. Two men in suits stepped out to meet him. Gibson scanned the street for their backup, resisting the urge to bolt. Instead, he planted his feet and let them come to him.
The driver, the older of the two, was white with bulldog eyes and a disappointed mouth. Broken blood vessels fanned up his nose like a map of the Amazon. He came around the car and joined his partner, a tall Sikh who wore a black turban that slanted down across his eyebrows and covered his ears. Unlike his partner, he glowed with good health. A lush black beard framed his imperial face, and his mustache came to manicured points. The bulldog held up a hand halfway between a greeting and a caution.
“Mr. Vaughn. A word?”
“I’m on my way to work.” Gibson didn’t know why he wasn’t facedown and handcuffed already, but he would play along.
“How is the dishwashing business?” the bulldog asked.
His younger partner stared off into the middle distance, smiling as if remembering a funny line from the movie he’d watched only last night. It did little to endear him to Gibson.
“What do you want?”
“We’d like you to take a ride with us.”
“Do you have a warrant?”
“We’re not law enforcement, Mr. Vaughn.”
Gibson didn’t know whether to be relieved or not. The partner’s smile broadened into a mirthless grin. He had the whitest teeth that Gibson had ever seen in real life.
“So who are you guys?” Gibson asked.
“My name is Cools,” the bulldog said. “This is Mr. Sidhu.”
“What kind of name is Cools?”
Cools blinked. “Belgian. So what do you say?”
“I say I’m going to be late for work,” Gibson said.
“Take a ride,” the older man said, as if reasoning with an uncooperative child. “We’ll bring you right back after. Dishes will still be dirty.”
“Where are we going?”
“Into the city to see an old friend.”
“Who?” Gibson asked.
“Calista Dauplaise.”
Served him right for wondering how his situation could get any worse. For the first time since the power plant, Duke Vaughn stopped talking. And for the first time since the power plant, Gibson’s head cleared enough for him to think without it hurting.
“Oh, that old friend,” Gibson said.
“What do you say? She just wants to catch up.”
Gibson was pretty sure catching up was the last thing Calista wanted. But she wanted something, and that was reason enough to take a ride into the city. After Atlanta, they’d struck an uneasy truce. A truce that he regretted, even if he knew it had been the pragmatic decision. It had held for two and a half years, until just this minute. Article one—stay out of the other’s way. If Calista was risking the status quo, Gibson needed to know why. She wouldn’t go away, and he’d rather see her coming than waste time looking over his shoulder. He was doing enough of that as it was.
“Do I have a choice?” Gibson asked.
“A choice?” Cools asked. “Sure. You get to choose whether you get in the car under your power or ours.”
“You really want to make a scene out here?”
“There won’t be a scene,” Mr. Sidhu said, speaking for the first time. He held open the back door of the SUV. Gibson saw no option but to play along.
Calista Dauplaise lived in a mansion built by her great-great-great-grandfather, Alexandre Dauplaise, in the aftermath of the War of 1812. His wife, Sophie, had christened the house Colline—Little Hill—upon her arrival from France. Seated at the top of Georgetown, it had been home to one of the oldest families in Washington going on three centuries now. Calista’s ancestors had played a historic role in the nation’s rise as statesmen, generals, and diplomats. A role that had waned in recent years, although Calista was singularly devoted to restoring her family to prominence. If only Duke Vaughn had intuited the ruthlessness of that devotion, how different life might be now. When Duke had threatened her plans, she had dispatched a monster to murder him, staging it as a suicide in the basement of the family home.
Gibson had been fifteen the day he tiptoed down the steps and saw his father’s feet dangling in the air. Calista had sent the monster back for Gibson a decade later when he’d dug too deeply into Bear’s disappearance. A strange little man with eyes at home in the dark and a voice that lacked several essentially human chromosomes. Gibson touched the scar across his throat, remembering the sound of the stool clattering across the floor and the way the rope bit into his neck. He’d be buried alongside his father had Jenn Charles and Dan Hendricks not come to his rescue.
Despite all that, when the time came, Gibson had made peace with Calista Dauplaise to prot
ect Bear’s daughter. It had been a hard deal to stomach, but he’d sided with the living over the dead, chosen to save an innocent girl before avenging his father. He wouldn’t change that decision even if he could, but that didn’t mean he’d ever felt entirely good about it. The guilt was a punishing weight. It fueled the twisted version of Duke that even now sat beside him in the backseat with murder in his eyes. Part of Gibson wished he hadn’t stashed his gun out at the power plant; another part worried what might happen if he had it now.
“What should have happened three years ago,” Duke said.
Gibson slumped back and wondered what could possibly tempt Calista to break the truce and invite him to her home. He was no closer to an answer when they crossed Arlington Memorial Bridge, the Lincoln Memorial rising up to greet them. They looped down onto Ohio Drive, which briefly became I-66 before they exited onto Pennsylvania Avenue at the south end of Georgetown. Crossing Rock Creek, they took a right and disappeared up the hill into the labyrinthine heart of old Georgetown.
Here we go, he thought.
“Here we go,” Duke agreed.
A black, wrought-iron fence capped with golden spear points rose up on the right. Through the trees that edged the property, he glimpsed the house itself, an imposing, perfectly symmetrical Federal the length of a city block. That one woman called it home was almost enough to make Gibson consider communism.
A pair of uniformed guards stopped the SUV at the new gatehouse. It had been completely rebuilt since the last time he’d been here. Where before it had served a largely ornamental function, the new front gate looked capable of repelling an armored assault. Gibson counted a half dozen security cameras. All it lacked was a moat. Something or someone had put the fear of God into Calista. He didn’t mind that at all.
At the top of the sloping drive, they circled the fountain that dominated the center of the driveway. Curving white quartz steps, thirty feet across at their widest point, led up to a towering front door. They stopped at the bottom, and Sidhu held the door for him again. The butler met them at the door. Gibson remembered him from the day that he’d come for Catherine, Bear’s daughter. The butler remembered him as well.
“Hullo, sir. So good to see you again. Would you care for a beverage? Beer, isn’t it?”
“Good memory, Davis, but a little early for me.”
“If you insist, sir. May I take your coat?”
Davis ushered Gibson and his two chaperones down a high-ceilinged hallway. On one side, glass doors faced out onto the terrace that overlooked the gardens; on the other hung an art collection that would have stopped Toby Kalpar in his tracks—canvases by Winslow Homer, Henry Bacon, John Singer Sargent, among others. They passed through a door and into an antechamber where a fastidious, bespectacled man sat typing briskly at an antique desk. Jazz played soothingly in the background from speakers that Gibson couldn’t see. Without looking up from his keyboard, the man instructed them to sit in an accent that Gibson’s ear could narrow no further than West African. Cools and Sidhu did as they were told. Gibson followed suit.
“Who is he?” Gibson asked.
“Ms. Dauplaise’s secretary,” Sidhu explained.
The secretary glared at them over his glasses. “Quiet, please, gentlemen. There’s no talking.”
“Why don’t you go fuck yourself with that?” Gibson suggested pleasantly.
The secretary froze with a satisfyingly prim, dismayed expression, then stood haughtily, five foot and maybe three hundred pounds. Gibson fixed him with a helpful smile. With a disappointed shake of his head, the secretary disappeared through a door behind his desk.
When he was gone, Sidhu spoke up. “That wasn’t necessary.”
“Felt necessary.”
“Ms. Dauplaise only wants to talk. There’s no call for profanity.”
Gibson gave him a sidelong look. “Are you kidding me? Do you know who you work for? And cursing is where you draw the line? What kind of dipshittery is that?”
Sidhu began to rise, but Cools put a hand on his partner’s shoulder. Reluctantly, Sidhu sat back down.
“Do not curse at me again,” Sidhu said.
Gibson was weighing his options when the secretary returned and pointed to Cools and Sidhu. “She wishes to speak to you.”
Gibson patted Sidhu on the knee. “Good talk.”
His two chaperones followed the secretary into Calista’s office, leaving Gibson alone. He wondered if this could be another of his hallucinations. Simply being back in Calista Dauplaise’s home felt strange enough. But to be treated as a guest and not a prisoner . . . well, that was downright surreal. Gibson realized that Duke hadn’t followed him into the house. Apparently it had taken Calista Dauplaise to drive his father away.
After a few minutes, the office door opened, and the three men returned.
“Ms. Dauplaise will see you now.”
Calista’s office might better have been described as a small library. Towering rosewood bookshelves encircled the room. The high ceiling necessitated a rolling ladder to access the upper shelves. The kind Gibson had only ever seen in black-and-white movies. All the books were leather-bound, and Gibson doubted he’d find one written in the last half century. At the far end of the room, an enormous printer’s table dominated, completely bare apart from two brass desk lamps and a single stack of papers. Behind the desk, the curtains were drawn back on tall bay windows that let in the cool winter sunlight. In one of the window seats, Bear sat with a book open on her lap. The way she’d spent so many afternoons in Pamsrest when they were children. He didn’t like her by the windows, which looked out over the gardens, at the bottom of which was a small family graveyard. Bear looked back at Gibson when he entered and smiled sadly. He shouldn’t have brought her here; he just didn’t know how not to do that.
In the center of the room, a pair of green leather chesterfield sofas flanked a crackling fireplace. Calista sat on one with her back to the door, a throw across her lap and her feet tucked up underneath her. On the low marble table between the chesterfields, a pot of tea steeped beside a stack of the day’s newspapers and a black rotary telephone. Across the base, the phone had six square buttons, one red, the others clear for changing lines—straight out of the old spy movies that his dad loved. For a woman trying to drag her family into the new century, Calista lived a decidedly museum-quality life.
She didn’t turn to greet Gibson but waited for him to circle into her line of sight. Calista did not adjust to the world; the world moved to suit her. She gave him an appraising nod, offered him a seat on the opposite sofa, and set to serving the tea. She poured two cups, to which she added milk and a single teaspoon of white sugar, all without asking if Gibson wanted tea, and if he did, how he took it. She pushed one of the cups a quarter inch in Gibson’s direction and lifted the other to her lips and blew across it contemplatively. The normal timeframe to greet a guest had passed, and now they sat in awkward silence, neither inclined to be the first to speak.
It gave Gibson a moment to acclimate to being this close to Calista Dauplaise. Disappointingly, she appeared unchanged from their last encounter more than two years ago. If there were any justice in the world, recent history would have withered her. The naïve sentiment that the truly evil wore their sins on their skin. But like Dorian Gray, Calista Dauplaise must have had help to appear unblemished. One didn’t look ageless at sixty-five without either medical or supernatural assistance. Gibson would have believed either.
Calista sipped her tea.
Gibson waited.
“You’ve lost weight,” she said, breaking the deadlock. “You must tell me your secret.”
As with everything Calista said, there were layers to the seeming compliment. Gibson wondered how much she knew, but, rather than take her bait, he forged ahead.
“We had a deal.”
Calista set down her teacup. “And as far as I’m concerned, that arrangement stands.”
“So what am I doing here?”
“Having
tea.”
“I hate tea,” Gibson said.
“You were far more charming the first time we met.”
“You want charm, maybe snatch people whose fathers you didn’t kill.”
Calista contemplated the wisdom of that.
“What am I doing here?” he asked a second time.
“I require your assistance,” Calista replied.
Gibson put a fist to his lips but couldn’t prevent the hiccup of laughter that escaped him. A full-throated laugh followed. It could have been mistaken for forced or fake, maybe it was, but he needed it to vent some of what he was feeling. It was either laugh or choke her to death. Calista’s face dropped like a stone into a well. Not a woman accustomed to being laughed at, she struggled with how to respond, eventually choosing to conceal her displeasure behind her teacup. When Gibson’s outburst subsided, he stood to go. That was all the catching up he had in him.
She didn’t speak until he had his hand on the doorknob.
“Sit. Down.”
He paused to look back at her; she still sat with her back stubbornly to the door like a parent refusing to acknowledge a child’s tantrum. Gibson had used the same tactic on Ellie a time or two.
“You will want to hear this,” she said.
“What?” Against his better judgment, Gibson took his hand from the doorknob.
“I am not speaking to you while you are standing behind me.”
“Well, then turn your ass around.”
Calista’s back stiffened, but she didn’t turn. He badly wanted to walk out on her, but it would be a meaningless victory, and he did want to know what was important enough for her to risk their cease-fire. He returned to the sofa where she could see him, but remained standing. Gratefully, he saw that Bear had gone from the room. He didn’t want her here for this.
“All right,” Gibson said. “What exactly do you need my help with?”
Calista took a sip of her tea before answering. “I need you to help me free George Abe.”
Cold Harbor (The Gibson Vaughn Series Book 3) Page 14
