They never did get back to the game. By morning, Jenn’s smile was nothing but a distant memory, along with the deck of cards and her cribbage board. When she shook him awake a little before dawn, the bags under her eyes spoke of a restless night. As if she’d been berating herself for taking even a few hours for herself. From that moment on, she was all business. They had a lot of work to do and not a lot of time to do it.
“What?” Gibson asked and tried to roll away. “I’m not going out to Dulles until later when they get busy. Let me sleep.”
“We’re going for a run,” Jenn said. “You’ve got six minutes.”
“Sir, yes, sir,” Gibson grumbled. He hadn’t slept much either. He’d resolved to start sleeping in a bed, with no more than a night-light for company. It had been rough, but he was done coddling his demons. He might be a long way from being well, but he would fake it until he made it. That was his current thinking anyway.
“Five minutes fifty seconds,” Jenn updated him and closed his door.
Gibson bounced from foot to foot, trying to get loose. Cold enough to see his own breath, the weather made his joints feel as if they’d been soldered in place. Jenn started what seemed for her an easy jog. Gibson labored to keep up. When she picked up the pace a mile out, he realized how far he had to go before regaining his old strength and wind.
“I thought we should talk before we get any deeper into the planning,” Jenn said.
“As opposed to last night?”
“Calista has the house bugged.”
The only part that surprised Gibson was that he hadn’t anticipated it. “How do you know?”
“I swept the house the day I arrived. Dan might be the expert, but he taught me a thing or two.”
“Wait,” Gibson said, thinking back on everything that had been spoken over the past two days. “Why are you only telling me now?”
“Because I needed you to be convincing. We had to have those conversations, and Calista needed to hear us having them. I knew you would question my working with her, and I wanted her to hear me backing her up.”
“So what? I was the patsy?”
“You were the convincer. It played better if you were sincere.”
Gibson thought back to his confessional and telling Jenn about his eighteen months in solitary. The intimate, painful details that he’d shared. The thought of Calista Dauplaise listening made him sick to his stomach. He pulled up and stood with his hands on his hips, breathing hard.
“Your little speech about trusting me—quite a performance,” he said. “Do you think Calista made popcorn?”
Jenn circled back to him, jogging in place. “We need to keep running. I don’t know if they’re watching.”
“Was everything just a performance?”
“Yes,” Jenn said. “And no. I meant what I said last night.”
“And yet . . .”
“I trust you, Gibson, but I didn’t know if you were up to it. You know you’re not all there. I couldn’t be sure you’d be able to pull it off.”
“So why tell me now?”
“Because last night I realized that I needed to put my money where my mouth was. You’ve done everything I’ve asked. You’re taking the same risks I am. And they are significant. You deserve to see the whole board.” Jenn smiled ruefully. “And because, as you’ve pointed out, we’ve been on an operation before where I held out on you. Didn’t work out too well for me.”
“We should keep moving,” Gibson said, breaking back into a jog. “In case they’re watching.”
They ran in silence. Jenn had a gift for offending him and then making it sound like the only sensible course of action. It drove him crazy, but once again, he couldn’t argue with her reasoning. Forget admitting it, though; he wasn’t feeling that magnanimous.
“So what do you think is on the plane?” Gibson asked.
“You mean Calista’s prize? I wish I had some idea. My guess is that it’s something on the export-control list. Technology, maybe? Eskridge is moving his operations to Africa. He’s going to need a patron. He’ll try and trade his cargo for protection and work.”
“And we’re going to turn that over to Calista Dauplaise?”
“Over my dead body,” Jenn said.
“So what’s the plan?”
“We don’t have one yet.”
“We should probably get on that.”
“As soon as you get back from not getting arrested at Dulles.” Jenn picked up the pace and left Gibson in her dust.
“Oh, right, that.”
Gibson did not get arrested at Dulles.
After his little detour to the power plant and diner, Calista revoked his driving privileges for the duration. So he went to the airport under the watchful eye of Cools and Sidhu. They weren’t the friendliest chauffeurs, but neither had taken another swing at him.
In the end, it was all rather anticlimactic. Gibson’s falsified credentials in the database held up to the scrutiny of the clerk, who issued him a replacement badge. Next, Gibson tested his new green pass, which theoretically gave him the run of the airport. He was a little nervous at his first checkpoint, but he sailed through without a hitch.
Cools and Sidhu drove him back to Reston, where Jenn and he spent long hours poring over the map of the airport and planning the next steps of their operation, after which Gibson would make an incursion to test their assumptions. There was a risk to being too visible a presence around the airport, but there was also a risk to being a completely new face on the day of the operation. By showing up in the days preceding the operation, Gibson could learn his way around, get to know the security staff, and in turn, the staff could get to know Gibson Vaughn, a newly hired mechanic with Tyner Aviation.
Tyner Aviation was one of four fixed-base operators at Dulles that provided support services for general aviation aircraft. Jenn had chosen Tyner because it was the largest FBO and would give Gibson the best chance of going unnoticed. And also because its offices were on the far side of the airport from the Dulles Air Center, a series of private hangars in the northeast corner of the airport, including the one that Cold Harbor staged its flights out of: Hangar Six.