Vanished

by Joseph Finder

  I pulled out a little Maglite and looked closer and saw just what I expected to see.

  I stepped back out onto the air stairs, the cold rain spritzing my face, and I reached out and felt the slick painted fuselage. I ran my hand over the Argon Express logo, felt something. A ridge. The paint seemed unusually thick.

  Woody was watching me from a few feet away. My fingers located the lower left corner of the two-foot-tall letter A.

  “You don’t paint your logo on?” I asked.

  “Of course it’s painted on. What the hell-?”

  It peeled right up. I tugged some more, and the entire logo-some kind of adhesive vinyl sticker-began to lift off.

  “Check out the data plate,” I said. “It doesn’t match the tail number.”

  “That’s-that’s impossible!”

  “They didn’t just steal the cargo, Woody. They stole the whole plane.”

  2.

  WASHINGTON

  I think I saw her eyelids move.”

  A woman’s voice, distant and echoing, which worked itself into the fevered illogic of a dream.

  Everything deep orange, the color of sunset. Murmured voices; a steady high-pitched beep.

  Her eyelids wouldn’t open. It felt as if her eyelashes had been glued together.

  Against the blood orange sky, stars rushed at her. She was falling headlong through a sky crowded with stars. They dazzled and clotted into odd-shaped white clouds, and then the light became harsh and far too strong and needles of pain jabbed the backs of her eyeballs.

  Her eyelashes came unstuck and fluttered like a bird’s wings.

  More high-pitched electronic beeps. Not regular anymore, but jumbled, a cacophony.

  A man’s voice: “Let’s check an ionized calcium.”

  A clattering of something-dishes? Footsteps receding.

  The man again: “Nurse, did that gas come back?”

  The husky voice of another woman: “Janet, can you page Yurovsky now, please?”

  Lauren said, “You don’t have to shout.”

  “She made a sound. Janet, would you please page Yurovsky now?”

  She tried again to speak, but then gave up the effort, let her eyelids close, the lashes gumming back together. The needles receded. She became aware of another kind of pain, deep and throbbing, at the back of her head. It pulsed in time to her heartbeat, rhythmically sending jagged waves of pain to a little spot just behind her forehead and above her eyes.

  “Ms. Heller,” said the man, “if you can hear me, say something, will you?”

  “What do you want, I’m shouting!” Lauren said at the top of her voice.

  “Now I see it,” one of the female voices said. “Like she’s trying to talk. I don’t know what she said.”

  “I think she said ‘Ow.’ ”

  “The doctor’s on rounds right now,” one of the women said.

  “I don’t care what he’s doing.” The husky-voiced woman. “I don’t care if he’s in the medical supply closet screwing a nurse. If you don’t page him right this second, I will.”

  Lauren smiled, or at least she thought she did.

  SHE FELT a hard pinch on her neck.

  “Hey!” she protested.

  Her eyelids flew open. The light was unbearably bright, just as painful, but everything was gauzy and indistinct, like there was a white scrim over everything. She wondered whether she’d fallen back asleep for several hours.

  A hulking silhouette loomed, came close, then pulled back.

  A male voice: “Well, she’s responding to painful stimuli.”

  Yeah, I’ll show you a painful stimulus, Lauren thought but couldn’t say.

  Actually, two silhouettes, she realized. She couldn’t focus, though. Everything was strangely hazy, like every time you saw Lucille Ball in that dreadful movie version of Mame. Lauren had played the snooty Gloria Upson in the Charlottesville High School production of Auntie Mame, and she’d seen the Rosalind Russell movie countless times, but couldn’t stand the Lucy one.

  “Mrs. Heller, I’m Dr. Yurovsky. Can you hear me?”

  Lauren considered replying, then decided not to bother. Too much effort. The words weren’t coming out the way she wanted.

  “Mrs. Heller, if you can hear me, I’d like you to wiggle your right thumb.”

  That she definitely didn’t feel like doing. She blinked a few times, which cleared her vision a little.

  Finally, she was able to see a man with a tall forehead and long chin, elongated like the man in the moon. Or like a horse. The face came slowly into focus, as if someone were turning a knob. A hooked nose, receding hair. His face was tipped in toward hers. He wore a look of intent concern.

  She wiggled her right thumb.

  “Mrs. Heller, do you know where you are?”

  She tried to swallow, but her tongue was a big woolen sock. No saliva. My breath must reek, she thought.

  “I’m guessing it’s a hospital.” Her voice was croaky.

  She looked up. A white dropped ceiling with a rust stain on one of the panels, which didn’t inspire confidence. Blue privacy curtains hung from a U-shaped rail. She wasn’t in a private room. Some kind of larger unit, with a lot of beds: an ICU, maybe. A bag of clear liquid sagged on a metal stand, connected by a tube to her arm.

  An immense bouquet of white lilies in a glass florist’s vase on the narrow table next to her bed. She craned her neck just enough to see that they were calla lilies, her favorites. A lightning bolt of pain shot through her eyes. She groaned as she smiled.

  “From Roger?”

  A long pause. Someone whispered something. “From your boss.”

  Leland, she thought, smiling inwardly. That’s just like him. She wondered who had ordered the flowers for him.

  And how he knew what had happened to her.

  She adjusted the thin blanket. “My head hurts,” she said. She felt something lumpy under the blanket, on top of her belly. Pulled it out. A child’s Beanie Baby: a yellow giraffe with orange spots and ugly Day-Glo green feet. It was tattered and soiled. Tears welled in her eyes.

  “Your son dropped that off this morning,” a woman said in a soft, sweet voice.

  She turned. A nurse. She thought: This morning? That meant it wasn’t morning anymore. She was confused; she’d lost all track of time.

  Gabe’s beloved Jaffee-as a toddler, he couldn’t say “Giraffiti,” the name printed on the label. Actually, neither could she. Too cute by half.

  “Where is he?”

  “Your son is fine, Mrs. Heller.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I’m sure he’s at home in bed. It’s late.”

  “What-time is it?”

  “It’s two in the morning.”

  She tried to look at the nurse, but turning her head escalated the pain to a level nearly unendurable. How long had she been out? She remembered glancing at her watch just before they got back to the car, seeing 10:28. Almost ten thirty at night on Friday. The attack came not long after that. She tried to do the math. Four hours? Less: three and a half?

  Lauren drew breath. “Wait-when did Gabe come by? You said-you said, ‘this morning’-but what time is it-?”

  “As I said, just after two in the morning.”

  “On Saturday?”

  “Sunday. Sunday morning, actually. Or Saturday night, depending on how you look at it.”

  Her brain felt like sludge, but she knew the nurse had to be wrong. “Saturday morning, you mean.”

  The nurse shook her head, then looked at the horse-faced doctor, who said, “You’ve been unconscious for more than twenty-four hours. Maybe longer. It would help us if you knew approximately what time the attack took place.”

  “Twenty-four… hours? Where’s-where’s Roger?”

  “Looks like you got a nasty blow to the back of the head,” the doctor said. “From everything we’ve seen, you haven’t sustained any injuries beyond a small spiral fracture at the base of the skull. The CT scan doesn’t show any hematoma
s or blood clots. You were extremely lucky.”

  I guess it depends on your definition of luck. She recalled Roger’s panicked face. The arms grabbing her from behind. His scream: “Why her?”

  “Is Roger okay?”

  Silence.

  “Where’s Roger?”

  No reply.

  She felt the cold tendrils of fear in her stomach.

  “Where is he? Is Roger okay or not?”

  “A couple of policemen came by to talk to you,” he said. “But you don’t have to talk to anyone until you feel up to it.”

  “The police?” Tears welled in her eyes. “Oh, dear God, what happened to him?”

  A long pause.

  “Oh, God, no,” Lauren said. “Tell me he’s okay.”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Heller,” the doctor said.

  “What? Please, God, tell me he’s alive!”

  “I wish I could, Ms. Heller. But we don’t know where your husband is.”

  3.

  LOS ANGELES

  Woody Sawyer ran after me, his boots clanging on the steel air stairs. “What are you saying?” he yelled over the clamor of the K-loader and the roar of a jet engine starting up nearby. “This isn’t our plane?”

  I didn’t answer him. I was too busy looking around. A minute or so later I found what I was looking for.

  It was the plane I’d seen being refueled earlier. A white Boeing 727 parked on the far side of the Argon jet that was being loaded. It looked identical to the two Argon jets-they could have been triplets-only it had the name VALU CHARTERS on its fuselage.

  “Let’s take a look inside,” I said.

  “That’s not our plane!”

  “Can you get a couple of your guys to roll one of those air stairs over here?”

  “You out of your mind? That’s not our plane!”

  “Have you ever seen a Valu Charters jet around here before?”

  “The hell do I know? These dinky little companies come and go, and they lease space from other companies-”

  “I didn’t see any Valu Charters listed on the airport directory, did you?”

  Woody shrugged.

  “Let’s take a look,” I said.

  “Look, I could get in some serious deep trouble for boarding someone else’s plane. That’s illegal, man.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll take the fall.”

  He hesitated a long time, shrugged again, then walked back to where the crew was loading. A minute or so later he came back, rolling a set of air stairs up to the Valu Charters plane. He climbed up to the cockpit door with visible reluctance.

  Just as I suspected, underneath the Valu Charters logo-which also peeled right off-was the orange Argon Express Cargo logo. Painted on. Remnants of tamper-resistant tape adhered like old confetti to the doorframe of the cargo hatch.

  When the door came open, I could see that it was fully loaded with row after row of cargo containers. Each one had a different set of numbers affixed to its sides-really, stick-on letters and numbers of random sizes, sort of like the cutout newsprint letters in a ransom note.

  “Do the numbers match your manifest?” I said. I knew they would.

  There was a long silence.

  “I don’t get it,” Woody finally said. “How’d they switch planes?”

  “Easy,” I said. “It was a whole lot easier than off-loading and driving it out of the airport, and it only takes two guys-a pilot and a copilot.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Didn’t you just say you can buy one of these old junkers cheap? All they had to do was paint it white and fly it in here in the middle of the night after the control tower’s closed. Park it nearby and slap on a couple of vinyl decals. Probably took two guys ten minutes, and no one was around to see them because everyone had gone home. But then, they were already on the airfield, so they were supposed to be here. No one probably gave them a second look. Honest-man security, right?”

  “My God. Jesus. That’s… brilliant.”

  “Well, almost. By the time they flew in last night, the fuel-service guys had gone home, too, I bet.”

  “So?”

  “So that’s why the plane’s still here. They couldn’t fly it out without filling the tank. Which they just finished doing. I’m guessing they were going to wait to take off until everyone went home.”

  “But… who could have done it?”

  “I really don’t care who. I wasn’t hired to find out who.”

  “But-whoever did it-they must be around here somewhere.”

  “No doubt.”

  “Look, Mr.-can I call you Nick?”

  “Sure.”

  “Nick, we both want the same thing. We agree on that.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’re basically playing on the same team.”

  “Right.”

  “See, I really don’t think Traverse Development needs to hear the little details, you get me? Just tell them we found the missing cargo. Or you did-I don’t care. No harm, no foul. Some kind of mix-up at the airport. Happens from time to time. They’re going to be mighty relieved, and they’re not going to ask a lot of questions.”

  “Works for me.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  “But first, would you mind opening this can right here?” I approached one of the big containers. Most of the igloos were stuffed with hundreds of packages for a lot of different customers, but the routing label on this one indicated that it had originated in Bahrain. All of its contents were destined for the Arlington, Virginia, office of Traverse Development. Through a Plexiglas window, I could see tightly packed rows of cardboard boxes, all the same size and shape, all with Traverse Development’s logo printed on them.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t do that,” he said.

  “You have the keys, Woody.”

  “Customs hasn’t even inspected it yet. I could get in some deep kimchi.”

  “You could get in some even deeper kimchi if you don’t.”

  “That supposed to be a threat?”

  “Yeah, basically,” I said. “See, my mind keeps going back to the parking-space thing.”

  “Parking space? What about it?”

  “Well, so, whenever one of your planes lands and parks for the night or whatever, your crew has to record the number of the space it’s parked in. Standard operating procedure, right?”

  He shrugged. “What’s this about?”

  “Your Argon jet flies in from Brussels yesterday and parks in space 36, right? That’s in your computer records. Then our bad guys do this big switcheroo with the decals, so what looks like your plane ends up in the wrong space. Number 34, right? Only the problem is, someone already entered 36 in the computer log, couple minutes after it landed. Which isn’t so easy to backdate. And which could be a problem when the guy from Customs comes to check things out, and he’s going to go, ‘Huh, how’d that plane get moved overnight, like by magic?’ So someone wrote the new space, number 34, on the whiteboard in your office. That would be… you. Woody.”

  Woody began to sputter, indignant. “You don’t know the first thing about how our operations work.”

  I tapped on the Plexiglas window of the cargo container. “Why don’t you pop this open, then we’ll talk. I’m really curious what’s in here that would make you and two of your employees risk such a long stretch in prison. Gotta be something totally worth it.”

  He stared at me for a few seconds, then whined, “Come on, man, I open this, I could get in trouble.”

  “Kind of a little late for that,” I said.

  “I can’t open this,” he said, almost pleading. “I really can’t.”

  “Okay,” I said, shrugging. “But you got a phone book I could borrow first? See, I want to call around to some of the aircraft boneyards. There aren’t that many of them-what, six or seven airparks in California and Arizona and Nevada? And I’m going to read off the serial number of that old junker over there and find out who sold it. And who they sold it to. Oh,
sure, it’ll probably be some dummy company, but that’ll be easy to trace.”

  “I thought you don’t care who did it,” Woody said. His sallow face had turned deep red.

  “See, that’s my problem. Kind of a personal failing. I get my hooks into something, I can’t stop. Sort of an obsessive-compulsive thing.”

  He cleared his throat. “Come on, man.”

  I tapped the Plexiglas window of the igloo. “Let’s pop the hood here so I can take a quick look, then you can get back to your Sudoku.” I tried to peer through the window, but the Plexiglas was scratched and fogged, and all I could see were the boxes. I turned around and gave Woody a smile and found myself looking into the barrel of a SIG-Sauer P229, a nine-millimeter semiautomatic.

  “Woody,” I said, disappointed, “I thought we were playing on the same team.”

  4.

  Hands up, Heller,” Woody said, “and turn around.”

  I didn’t put my hands up. Or turn around. I waited.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “Move it.” There was a tic in his right eye.

  “Woody, you’re making things worse.”

  “You’re on private property here, and I asked you nicely to leave, okay? So move it. Hands up.”

  I brought my hands up slowly, then thrust my left hand up quickly and suddenly and grabbed the barrel of the SIG and torqued it downward while I smashed my right fist into his mouth. He yelped. Like most guys who brandish weapons, he wasn’t prepared to defend himself without one. He tried to wrest his gun from my grip, and at the same time he turned his head away, thereby offering up his ear, which my right fist connected with, and he yelped again. Then I levered the pistol’s barrel upward until his index finger, trapped in the trigger guard, snapped like a dry twig.

  Woody screamed and sank to his knees. I pointed his SIG-Sauer at him and said, “Now would you mind unlocking this container, please?”

  He struggled to his feet, and I didn’t help him up.