Cold Harbor (Gibson Vaughn #3)

“Moving forward. Only reason to do anything.”

When Deja was gone, Gibson gathered up his empties but left the last bottle of RC Cola on the nightstand on the off chance that the judge remembered himself long enough to drink it. He squeezed the judge’s shoulder and promised that he’d be back. At the front desk, Gibson signed out of the logbook. Missing from the parking lot was the blue Yukon, but, two spots up, his silver Yukon had magically returned.

He slid behind the wheel. On the dashboard sat a threadbare Phillies baseball cap. Gibson turned it over in his hands and looked at the faded initials written into the red brim. “SDL”—Suzanne Davis Lombard. Bear’s cap. He’d given it to Swonger for safekeeping before driving Merrick to the airfield that night in West Virginia. Had some part of him known then that he wouldn’t be coming back? He didn’t have much connecting him to his old life, and this old cap was an important reminder of where he’d come from. He tossed it in the backseat. That didn’t mean he deserved to wear it anymore.

“Of course you do,” Bear said. “That hat belongs to you. Put it on.”

Gibson started the Yukon without answering.

“So you feel like taking Ogden ‘moved you forward’?” Bear asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about what Deja Noble said.”

“Were you eavesdropping?”

Bear ignored the question. “You don’t feel better, do you? You’re getting worse again.”

“I’m just being tested.”

“Tested?” Bear said, incredulous. “That’s not how mental illness works.”

“How would you know? You are mental illness.”

“You’re being mean.”

“Everything will be better on Tuesday.”

“Why? Because your dad says so? Where is he anyway? Notice how I’m the only one here these days? He abandoned you. That’s what he does.”

Gibson was instantly angry. “That’s not fair.”

Bear raised her hands, admitting she’d gone too far.

“Aren’t you coming?” he asked.

“I’ll see you at home.”

“Bear, come on. Don’t be like that.”

“You still have the steering wheel,” Bear said. “You’re not spinning yet. There’s still time.”

She left him with that to chew over. Gibson took it slow on the way home, the memory of the spinout causing him to ease off the accelerator. He still arrived home in time for the second half of the Packers game. He’d never had any interest in football, but he rooted for Mrs. Nakamura’s team to be a good guest. He fell asleep during the fourth quarter and woke around ten to the amused expression of his landlady. Hungry but too tired to do anything about it, Gibson excused himself and stumbled downstairs to sleep. He had another double at the diner in the morning. One more day until he knew if the plan had been for nothing.





CHAPTER SIXTEEN


On Tuesday morning, Gibson loaded the industrial dishwasher but kept one eye on the clock. 11:07. By now, Ogden’s absence from work would have been noticed and logged. No panic at first. Even employees of the CIA had car trouble. But in the next hour they would begin making calls. When they couldn’t reach him directly, Ogden’s superiors would work their way down his emergency contact list. Someone would be dispatched to check his home. But it wouldn’t be until Ogden’s girlfriend revealed the texts from Friday night about being called back to the office that the Agency would hit the panic button. That’s when Gibson would find how good the CIA really was.

Gibson had never held an especially high opinion of the CIA. During his time in the Marines, he’d always found Agency people insufferable and undeservedly arrogant. Much of that, he recognized, was sibling rivalry. The CIA wasn’t held in the highest regard by the men and women of the Marine Corps Intelligence Support Activity. The CIA, hatched from the Office of Strategic Services after World War II, had for a time enjoyed being the only show in town. But in the modern era, the United States had an ever-expanding intelligence community with often overlapping responsibilities that required justifying their existence to Congress. It made for a competitive, jealous family. The Activity had been founded precisely because the military viewed the CIA as selfish—a former only child that had never learned to play or share well with others.

None of that meant Gibson underestimated how seriously the CIA would treat the disappearance of one of their own. They had the resources to move heaven and earth to find Ogden. The only question was whether an abandoned power plant in Northern Virginia was in either one of those places.

Gibson threw on his coat and went out back to take his break. The fresh air felt good. He did not. Dreams of his revenge had sustained him during his ordeal, but it was time to admit the truth. He’d done what he and Duke had set out to do; it hadn’t fixed him. If anything, he’d been getting worse all weekend, the symptoms of his madness returning with a vengeance. Like ants swarming over a discarded scrap of meat, the edge of his vision had been overrun and clouded. His thoughts were again becoming murky and indecipherable. The only time he felt decent was when the noise from the dishwasher drowned out his thoughts.

He’d been making excuses since throwing the dead bolts on Ogden’s cell. Stalling. But if he’d beaten Damon Ogden, if he’d won like he kept telling himself he had, then why didn’t it feel like a victory? He expected Bear to say she’d told him so, but, like Duke, she had disappeared. He called her name quietly, hoping she might hear him and come talk it over with him. But that had never been how it had worked; he was on his own. Gibson went back inside and got back to work. He still had a lot of dirty dishes to clean.



No longer concerned with establishing an alibi, Gibson shifted into the next phase of his operation: act natural, do nothing, and don’t go anywhere near Ogden. Gibson performed his one-man show about a normal guy just trying to put his life back together, unsure if he had an audience but assuming he was playing to a packed house. He divested himself of anything that connected back to Ogden—burner phones and laptop were all scrubbed and discarded. He went to work. He went home. He applied for jobs that he’d never get. In the afternoons, he went to the movies—it would look odd if his routine changed immediately after Ogden vanished. Externally, his act looked compelling enough, but internally, doubts continued to fester and multiply. As did the feeling that his tenuous grasp on sanity was slipping once more.

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