“Vaughn did that,” said Abe. “Well, he was involved with the operation. It was an incredibly intricate job. Lot of moving parts. The SEALs might have pulled the trigger, but all four service branches were needed to put bin Laden in harm’s way. CIA. NSA. Vaughn impressed a lot of people, if my source is correct.”

“Vaughn wrote the code?” asked Jenn.

“He contributed to the code, but no, that wasn’t his unique contribution.”

“What was?”

“He got the Pakistanis to install it.”

“He what?”

“That’s what I’m told.”

“Pakistan installed a virus onto their own system?”

“Apparently. He’s just that persuasive, and they are not people who are easily persuaded.”

“You’re telling me the Activity recruited Gibson Vaughn?”

“Right out of basic.”

“Holy hell.”

The Activity or Intelligence Support Activity was the intelligence-gathering branch of the JSOC—the Joint Special Operations Command. The military’s CIA. After the 1980 Operation Eagle Claw ended in disaster in an Iranian desert, the Armed Forces had blamed the CIA for failing to share mission-critical assets and information. The Activity had been birthed so that the military would never again have to rely on the CIA. Jenn knew the lore well; everyone in the CIA did.

The Activity was the competition.

It cherry-picked its personnel from the four military branches, and she could see how a marine like Gibson Vaughn would catch their eye. They put a premium on out-of-the-box thinkers, and sometimes you needed a thief to catch a thief. It threw her portrait of Gibson Vaughn out of focus. She was also reasonably certain that her boss wanted it that way.

“Jesus,” she said. “The guy helped take down bin Laden and now he can’t even get a job at Burger King.”

“Well, as you said, he didn’t invent the computer, and it’s safer to hire someone else than cross the vice president. Scratch that. The next president.”

“So you’re saying I should give him a break?”

“No, I’m not. What I’m saying is that people are rarely as black and white as you sometimes make them out to be. Now, in the field there are times when snap judgments are necessary, and you excel in those situations. It’s why I hired you. Your instincts are very rarely wrong, but we’re not in the field yet, and you have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater where people are concerned.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Don’t be. Something about Vaughn rubs you the wrong way. Makes your trigger finger itch. But I knew him when he was a boy, and I saw his relationship with Suzanne. You had to see it to believe the way he took care of her. She was a very special little girl, and he was a great kid too.”

“But that was a long—” she began, but he put up a hand to stop her.