27 My Colonel Cut My Badge In Half And Called Me A Security Breach — He Didn't Know The Audit Showed His Own Office Cloned It

Derek Vaughn was arrested four days later.

He was arrested at a motel outside Barstow, California, by two OSI agents and a deputy U.S. Marshal. He had been there for two days. He had been paying cash. He had been living on sandwiches from a gas station and he had not used his cell phone since the night he left Nellis.

He was arrested because Ray Vance — who had been tracking the shell company account in Dubai for six months — sent a message to the account through a wire transfer of one dollar and fifty cents with a memo line that said: "We know where you are. Come home and talk."

Derek Vaughn came home.

He came home because he had no money left and because his car had broken down and because he was twenty-six years old and he had been living in a motel for two days and he had realized, somewhere along the way, that he was not going to make it to Mexico with the money he had.

He was interviewed for six hours on the day of his arrest.

He told the OSI everything. He told them about the shell company and about the foreign buyer and about the money. He told them about the phone calls and the wire transfers and the plane ticket to Istanbul that had been booked and then canceled. He told them about Vault 4 and about the monitoring device that he had installed on Monday at 16:02, when he had used a second cloned credential to open the door a second time.

He told them about Colonel Keene.

He told them that Colonel Keene had not ordered him to clone the badges. He told them that he had done it on his own. He told them that he had used the programmer because it was the only programmer in the office that was not logged and because he had known, from watching Keene use it a hundred times, that Keene would not notice if it was used. He told them that he had not told Keene what he was doing. He told them that Keene had found out after the fact — on Monday evening, when the access log flagged the duplicate entries on his own audit — and that Keene had called him into his office and had asked him what he had done.

He told them what Keene had said.

"What did Colonel Keene say?" Okafor asked.

Derek Vaughn was quiet for a long moment.

"He said, 'Derek, if this comes out, your mother will lose her job and I will lose my career and you will go to prison for the rest of your life.' And then he said, 'So I am going to handle this. And you are going to do exactly what I tell you to do.'"

"And what did he tell you to do?"

"He told me to delete the phone records. He told me to delete the wire transfer receipts. He told me to clear the programmer log on the desktop. He told me to clean out my apartment of anything that could connect me to the shell company. And then he told me to stay out of sight and to let him handle the technical sergeant."

"Did he tell you how he was going to handle the technical sergeant?"

"He told me he was going to cut her badge in half and call her the breach. And he told me that if I did exactly what he said, the investigation would go after her and not after me. And he told me that if I got scared and ran, he would know, because he would be watching me. And he told me that if I ran, he would not be able to help me."

Okafor looked at Derek Vaughn for a long moment.

"Mr. Vaughn," she said, "I am going to tell you something, and I am going to tell it to you in a way that will make you remember it for the rest of your career. Colonel Keene did not help you. He used you. He used you to cover for the fact that his own office was compromised. And when it turned out that the cover-up was not going to work, he called the OSI at 06:30 in the morning and he told me that you had called him from a motel in Barstow and told him that a strange woman was sitting in a car outside your building. He told me where you were. He told me the night before the warrant was going to be served. He told me because he had already decided that you were going to be the one to take the fall."

Derek Vaughn did not say anything.

He looked at the table.