“See you Tuesday.”
Gibson stood on the concourse, watching them until they were out of sight. Hammond Birk. After all these years. What might he want? It wasn’t for old times’ sake, that was for certain. Gibson’s sunny mood was nowhere to be seen. He went to see if Ellie had picked out a cap, suddenly uneasy with the symbolism. Maybe she’d like a jersey instead.
CHAPTER THREE
The offices of Veritas Preemployment and Polygraph Services were located on the third floor of a nondescript office building in Ashburn, Virginia. Veritas was one of more than thirty private firms that contracted with the Office of Personnel Management to conduct federal security clearances. Secrecy was a growth industry in Northern Virginia.
Gibson arrived early and checked in with the receptionist—a drab, polite woman who asked for his driver’s license and directed him to have a seat in the drab, polite waiting room. Abstract swirls of muted corporate art decorated the walls. It felt like a doctor’s office, and no one looked particularly happy to be there. He sat beside an anxious man mainlining coffee. For the stranger’s sake, it had better be his normal intake—an uncharacteristic dose of caffeine could confuse the machine, which might necessitate a retest. And you didn’t want that—a full-scope polygraph took eight hours to complete.
No, thank you, and no, thank you very much. Gibson had taken multiple polys in the military, so he knew the drill all too well. Once would be more than enough. To be safe, Gibson went back through his paperwork, confirming that it was all in order—it ran to sixty-three pages plus attachments and covered his entire life. Most of it anyway.
Nowhere did his paperwork mention the name Suzanne Lombard, his role in the death of her father, Vice President Benjamin Lombard, or the promises that he’d made to Suzanne’s mother, Grace Lombard. After Lombard’s death in Atlanta, Grace and he had agreed that it would be safer if they severed contact except in an emergency. No one could know the real story behind Atlanta. So his paperwork glossed over the true nature of his consulting work for Abe Consulting Group, stating only that he’d helped identify network vulnerabilities. Technically true, and hopefully it gave the examiner no reason to ask specific questions.
His paperwork listed Jenn Charles as his supervisor at Abe Consulting. That was also technically true, although she would probably have a more colorful description for their working relationship. Not that anyone could fact-check it, since Abe Consulting had ceased to exist overnight, and the owner and founder, George Abe, had been missing since August. Jenn Charles had gone looking for him after Atlanta, and Gibson hadn’t heard from her since. He regretted letting her go alone. Letting her . . . as if he could have stopped her. Still, he should have tried harder to talk her out of it. It had just been a strange time in the immediate aftermath of Atlanta, and Gibson, Jenn, and Hendricks had fled each other on journeys of their own.
Dan Hendricks had returned to California, where he was lying low and teaching tactical driving. Gibson checked in with him every two weeks, but Hendricks didn’t know any more than he did. Assuming Jenn and George were still alive, they were both well off the grid. Gibson was good at finding things that people preferred remain hidden, and he hadn’t turned up so much as a whisper. The fact was, Jenn was ex-CIA. If she didn’t want to be found, she wasn’t going to be found. He kept looking, all the same. It ate at him. Not only the guilt. He also found himself missing her. That was unexpected. They probably wouldn’t be friends if they’d met under any other circumstances—they might not be friends now—but they’d been through something together, and it would be good to see her.
Absently, Gibson ran his fingers through his beard, touching the raised scar on his neck that ran from ear to ear. A souvenir from his investigation into Suzanne Lombard’s disappearance. It was an ugly mark. One he never wanted Ellie to see. What would he say to her about it? He’d grown the beard as camouflage, but his fingers sought it out when he was distracted or lost in thought, running back and forth along the knotted length. He caught himself doing it and jerked his hand away.
The unmarked door at the back of the reception area opened; a woman stepped into the room and read his name off a clipboard. She gave his hand a businesslike shake and introduced herself as Amanda Gabir. He handed over his paperwork, and she rechecked his driver’s license before ushering him down a corridor and into a polygraph suite. She talked him through the procedure as she wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around his biceps, put a pneumograph around his chest to measure breathing, and slipped galvanometers over his fingers to record electrical activity. He had to hand it to her, she made it sound as if she were fitting him for a suit, but it was impossible to feel like anything but a lab animal.
“Are you relaxed?” she asked.
“Is this part of the test?”
She smiled clinically at his joke and patted his arm, which didn’t help to put him at ease. He felt solidarity with the fetal pigs of the world, pinned helplessly to high-school dissection trays. Do your worst, he thought, and shifted around, seeking a less painful position in the straight-backed metal chair where he’d be spending the better part of the day. All for a job he knew nothing about. But that was how top-secret SCI worked.
SCI, or sensitive compartmented information, was a control system that “compartmented” employees, who would never have access to an entire project. An employee might be assigned to develop a particular subsystem while having no idea of the full scope of the larger endeavor. In theory, it made espionage much more difficult. It also meant that Gibson had interviewed for the job blind and wouldn’t find out the exact nature of the work until his clearance was approved. Only then would he be officially read in. It hadn’t mattered. Five minutes into the interview, he would have run through traffic for the job based simply on the hypotheticals they’d posed him. The guy who’d recruited him for the job, Nick Finelli, warned him it would be this way.
“Take the interview,” Nick had advised. “Trust me, you’ll want it.”