Chapter 7 - The Contractor's File
Derek Vaughn's file arrived at the OSI office at 09:00 on Thursday morning.
It was a small file. It was a small file because Derek Vaughn had been a contractor for only eight months, and because the company that employed him — Meridian Security Solutions — had been the low bidder on a contract that had been awarded by a competitive process that Priya, when she saw the paperwork, did not entirely believe.
Derek Vaughn was twenty-six years old. He had been in the Army for four years, from 2018 to 2022. He had been an intelligence analyst. He had been honorably discharged at the rank of specialist. He had no disciplinary record. He had no criminal record. He had a bachelor's degree in cybersecurity from a small state school in Virginia, awarded in 2023, and he had been hired by Meridian Security Solutions in August of that year.
He had been assigned to Nellis in February. He had been working in the security director's office since then. He had, according to his performance reviews, been "outstanding."
He had also, according to a note in his file that Okafor read twice, been personally recommended for the position by Colonel Adam Keene.
The recommendation was dated December. It said, in Keene's handwriting: "Derek Vaughn is the son of a very old friend. I have known him since he was a child. He is a fine young man and a fine analyst. I recommend him without reservation."
Okafor set the file down.
"Ray," she said to the phone on her desk. "I need you to find out everything you can about a man named Thomas Vaughn. He was in the Army in the nineties. He was in intelligence. He was a very old friend of Adam Keene."
"I am on it," Ray Vance said.
He called back four hours later.
"Michelle," he said, "I have a problem."
"What kind of problem?"
"Thomas Vaughn was a chief warrant officer in the Army. He served with Adam Keene in Germany in 1997 and in Bosnia in 1998. He retired in 2005. He died in 2019. And his son, Derek Vaughn, was raised by his mother. And his mother — I want you to sit down for this — is a woman named Claire Vaughn. And Claire Vaughn has been a contractor at the Defense Intelligence Agency for eleven years."
Okafor sat down.
"Ray," she said, "are you telling me that the contractor who cloned the badge is the son of a retired intelligence warrant officer who was a very old friend of the colonel, and the nephew of a Defense Intelligence Agency contractor, and that the colonel personally recommended him for the position?"
"I am telling you that. And I am telling you something else. I ran Derek Vaughn's name through a database we do not talk about. And I found something."
"What did you find?"
"In October — three weeks before the cloned badge — Derek Vaughn made a series of phone calls to a number in Istanbul. The number belongs to a shell company. The shell company is registered in Cyprus. The shell company has received three wire transfers in the last six months, all of them from an account in Dubai, all of them in amounts between forty and ninety thousand dollars."
Okafor's blood went cold.
"Ray," she said, "are you telling me that Derek Vaughn has been taking money from a foreign entity?"
"I am telling you that the pattern is consistent with it. I am telling you that the amounts are consistent with it. I am telling you that the timing is consistent with it. I am not telling you that I can prove it yet. But I am telling you that I can prove it, and that I am going to prove it, and that when I prove it, the Air Force is going to have to answer a very uncomfortable question."
"What question?"
"How a twenty-six-year-old contractor with a Defense Intelligence Agency mother and a colonel who personally recommended him for the position ended up taking money from a foreign entity and using a programmer in the colonel's own office to clone the credentials of a technical sergeant and a master sergeant and install a monitoring device in the base's classified network — and the colonel, when he found out, decided that the best way to handle it was to cut the technical sergeant's badge in half in front of sixty people and call her the breach."
Okafor was quiet for a moment.
May you like
"Ray," she said, "I need you to get me a warrant for Derek Vaughn's apartment."
"You have it," Ray said. "I signed it myself."
