“That I do not know. But judging by the secrecy around it, Colonel Eskridge is swimming in very murky waters once more. I intend to see he drowns in them.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I need you to assist my operative—”
“Operative?” Gibson interrupted sharply. If she thought he would work with the man who had killed his father and tried to hang Gibson, she was out of her damned mind.
She anticipated his concern. “No, it is not him. He has not worked for me since Atlanta. I simply need someone with your skill set to consult on this operation.”
“What exactly is the objective of this operation?”
“I need the plane and its contents taken before it leaves US airspace.” She said it as though it would be no harder than lifting the key to a gas-station restroom. And in eight days, no less.
“Is that all?” Gibson said incredulously.
“My confidence is commensurate to your abilities. Now, I think it best that you meet with my operative, who is waiting and will elaborate.” Calista pressed a call button, and the door opened, her secretary filling it amply.
“Hold on,” Gibson said. “Even if any of this is true, what makes you think I’d work for you again?”
“Self-preservation, Mr. Vaughn.”
“We have a deal.”
“This is a separate deal.”
“How so?”
“Because the CIA is offering a substantial reward for information concerning the whereabouts of their missing man, and I have this.”
Calista opened a manila folder and showed Gibson a photograph of him dragging Damon Ogden toward the power plant.
Whatever else might be true, Gibson admired Calista’s discipline. Most people wouldn’t have known to hold their trump card until the end. She’d allowed him to believe he controlled his fate. Believe that their conversation had been a negotiation rather than what it proved to be—a capitulation.
In a daze, he trailed Cools and Sidhu back down the long hall of Colline. His chaperones bundled him back into the SUV, and twenty minutes later, Gibson still felt like a boxer describing a knockout punch he hadn’t seen coming. He couldn’t even call it a sucker punch. After all, he’d prepped himself to be on his toes with Calista, and she’d still blindsided him with ease. What the hell was he going to do now? Besides exactly what he was told.
“Never fails,” Cools said. “They go in her office all tough and come out like spring lambs.”
“He wasn’t that tough to begin with,” Sidhu said.
Cools’s bulldog eyes considered Gibson in the rearview mirror. “That true, sweetheart? Were you ever tough?”
When Gibson didn’t answer, Sidhu turned around in his seat. “What? Don’t feel like cursing at me now?”
He really didn’t.
“Where are we going?” Gibson asked.
“Reston. You have a meeting,” Cools said.
Right, with Calista’s operative—Gibson remembered now. He’d been a little distracted by Calista blowing up his fantasy that he’d gotten away with taking Ogden. When in fact, he’d signed over the deed to his freedom to the most dangerous person he’d ever met. Even if Gibson delivered his end, chances were that Calista would still feed him to the CIA. She’d said she needed to tidy up her affairs. Gibson certainly qualified as a mess. But he didn’t see any choice but to play along for now. Hopefully something would come to him. How those chickens did love to roost.
Reston, Virginia, was an edge city founded in 1964, but hadn’t boomed until 1984, when the Dulles Toll Road was finished. When Gibson had been a kid, this had still been mostly farmland. Those days were over. Reston Town Center was about thirty minutes west of Washington, near Dulles International Airport. The thirty minutes depended on the roads being absolutely clear, which they almost never were. At rush hour, it could easily take an hour and a half.
Cools turned off into a newish development with underdeveloped trees that made the cookie-cutter houses appear even larger than they already were. There was a sameness to the landscape, and the street signs were still on back order. It made navigation tricky. Twice they stopped at the wrong house. Third time was the charm, and Cools pulled to the curb and threw the SUV confidently into park.
“Ring the bell,” Sidhu advised.
“Aren’t you coming in?”
“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” Cools said with a cold laugh. “We’re not welcome.”
Gibson looked up at the house uncertainly. It felt like a setup.
“Off you go. There’s a good boy.”
Gibson went up the walk to the house. He felt like a virgin who’d been led to the lip of a volcano. The front door sat under a small covered overhang; he rang the doorbell and stepped back into the sunshine. Seconds ticked by. He glanced back at the SUV, where his chaperones still watched. His bad feeling became a dreadful certainty that he was one of Calista’s affairs about to be tidied up. He tensed at the sound of approaching footfalls, preparing to flee.
Then the damnedest thing happened.
Jenn Charles opened the door.
She looked different. They both did, of course, but Jenn looked deliberately different. Her eyes were a different color, and her black hair had been dyed blonde and cut short. Like a wolf in a lean winter, she’d shed pounds, and it showed in her face. She stood there in the doorway, letting him grapple with his surprise. Which he did by saying the dumbest thing that came to mind—simply to have something to say.
“Jenn?”
“Hi, Gibson.”
“Jenn?”
“Surprise.”
That was putting it mildly. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“I know you have,” she said with a weary smile.
“And you’re in Reston?”
“You should come inside,” she suggested. “Where it’s warm.”
It seemed a good idea, so he did.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Jenn led Gibson back to a kitchen that flowed into a great room. Everything was king-size, from the wall-mounted television to the overstuffed couches and plush armchairs. The artwork looked as if it had been stolen from the lobby of an Indianapolis Hilton, and there were enough small pillows strewn about to build a scale replica of Stonehenge. Animal prints had made a comeback while he’d been locked away. The entire house smelled like a commercial for air fresheners—some man-made approximation of a glacial spring. A fire crackled cozily in a broad stone fireplace. This was all wrong. Jenn didn’t belong here, in some subdivision in Reston, Virginia. It felt like stumbling across Amelia Earhart collecting tolls on the New Jersey Turnpike.
“Whose house is this?” Gibson asked.
“Airbnb.”
“Oh, this is so weird.”
“Coffee?” she asked and then turned away without waiting for an answer.
The first thing Gibson had ever noticed about Jenn Charles was her grace. She was calmer with a gun pointed at her than most people were tucked safely in bed. So the tremor in her hand when she poured the coffee caught him by surprise and made him a little sad. A reminder that change ran far deeper than the cosmetic.
“How long have you been here?”
“Couple of days.”
“And before that?”
Jenn thought about it and shrugged. “Somewhere else.”