Vanished

by Joseph Finder

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “You’re thinking this had something to do with his job?”

  “Not necessarily. Just covering all the bases. It could be anything. But I doubt it was a random mugging. If he was attacked”-I deliberately avoided the word “killed”-“there’d probably be some evidence of that. Something would have turned up by now.” A body, I didn’t say.

  “Then what are you suggesting?”

  “We can’t rule out some sort of abduction or kidnapping.”

  “A kidnapping? You’re not serious.” Her voice got high-pitched, scornful, as if to mask her fear. “The cops said the same thing. But who’d kidnap Roger? We’re not rich. That’s crazy.”

  My eyes slid toward the humongous hulking stainless-steel eight-burner Vulcan commercial range that threw off enough BTUs to serve a good-sized restaurant. I knew they’d dumped a quarter of a million bucks at least into redoing their kitchen to Roger’s maniacal specifications. “No doubt,” I said.

  “I mean, sure, we’re well-off, but Roger and I both work for a living.”

  “I know.” Once Victor Heller’s considerable assets were seized, Roger and my mother and I were left without any money. But Roger, at least, inherited Dad’s genius for making it and investing it. Just one of many ways he and I were different.

  Lauren had been Gifford’s admin, a divorcée with a young child, when she met Roger, and she’d made it clear from the outset that she loved her job, loved working for Leland Gifford, and would never give it up. She continued working because she wanted to, not because she had to. Roger made enough to support them, and he invested well.

  “Anyway, if he’s been kidnapped, wouldn’t I have gotten a ransom demand by now?”

  “Not necessarily. Sometimes they wait, just to increase the desperation level. But I agree, that’s not likely.”

  “Then what is likely?”

  “Just a theory, here, but maybe he stuck his nose into something he shouldn’t have. Got into trouble with the wrong sorts of people.”

  “Like who?”

  “Your company’s involved in gigantic, billion-dollar construction projects around the world. Maybe he ran up against some organized-crime syndicate that thought they had some project nailed but lost out to Gifford Industries. Maybe Roger helped elbow them out. Something like that.”

  “You make Gifford Industries sound like some sort of two-bit Mafia-owned New Jersey garbage-hauling company.”

  I thought of a few rejoinders-I’m just wired that way-but I held my tongue.

  “Forget the Mafia,” I said. “The criminal underworld’s gone transnational. The Russians, the East Europeans, the Asians-they’ve all gotten sophisticated. Now they invest. They use legitimate businesses to launder their money. They trade commodities. They’re into oil and precious metal and insurance companies and banks. All over the world. What if Roger came across something about one of these organizations while he was negotiating a deal, something they didn’t want him to know…”

  She looked at me for a few seconds, then her eyes shifted from side to side as if she were reading something off a TelePrompTer. I had a feeling she was thinking that possibility through to its logical conclusion, which wasn’t a happy one.

  “You don’t really believe things like that happen, do you?” She sounded almost scornful.

  “Not really,” I admitted. “Rarely. But the world’s a dirty place. Who knows.”

  “Then what? What do you think happened?”

  “Wish I had something to tell you.” I thought for a moment. “Listen, Lauren. When I asked you if Roger knew the guy, or the people, who grabbed you, you hesitated.”

  “I did?”

  I’d noticed a flash of uncertainty appear in her face; maybe she wasn’t consciously aware of it. “Was there anything in Roger’s face, his expression or whatever, that might have indicated he wasn’t totally surprised by what was going on?”

  She was silent for a few seconds, pensive. “You know, I just remembered something.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s what he said when we were attacked. The last thing I heard him say.”

  “Okay.”

  “He said, ‘Why her?’ ”

  “ ‘Why her,’ ” I repeated. “Which implies, ‘Why not me?’ ”

  “Like he knew them. Like maybe he knew who they were.”

  I thought for a moment. “I think it tells us something more important.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “That maybe he was expecting this to happen. And the question is why.”

  Quietly, a tremor in her voice, she said: “Expecting it? Expecting what?”

  “Maybe he’d been warned. Maybe it was an attempt to scare him.”

  “For what? That’s-that’s too bizarre, Nick.”

  “You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff that goes on.”

  “Try me.”

  “Someday I’ll tell you the real reason I got booted out of the Pentagon. Things aren’t always the way they appear from the outside. There’s usually more to the story.”

  She shook her head, as if to dismiss the wild speculation. Then she fell silent for ten or fifteen seconds. “You don’t think he’s alive, do you?”

  “I’m sure he’s fine.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  I didn’t believe it either. “Don’t worry,” I said.

  “I’m losing respect for you again.”

  “Whatever happened to him, I’m sure he’s okay. Keep the faith. I’m here for you guys, you know that.”

  “I know. That means a lot. But Nick, I didn’t want to involve you in this. That was Gabe’s idea, not mine.”

  “Involve me?”

  “You know what I mean. Professionally, or whatever. I told Gabe I doubt you can find out anything the cops can’t.”

  “Well,” I said, “truth is, my firm has resources law enforcement doesn’t.”

  “You’re not suggesting I hire Stoddard Associates, are you?”

  “Jay Stoddard wouldn’t take the case. I’d have to do it on my own. Off the books.”

  “That wouldn’t be-I don’t know, complicated?”

  I hesitated, but only for an instant. “No,” I said. “I don’t think it would be complicated.”

  “I mean, given, you know, the way you and Roger…”

  “He’s my brother. And your husband. And Gabe’s dad. That’s not complicated.”

  “So maybe it would be… you know, cleaner… if I hired you directly, paid you off the books. If you’re willing to help out, I mean.”

  “I won’t take money from you.”

  She hesitated. I could see she was struggling. “Roger’s done really well,” she said with a nervous smile. “You were in the army, and then you worked for the government…”

  Yeah, yeah, I thought. I served my country, while my brother served himself. That was what she meant but would never say out loud. The fact was, I did what I did, chose what I did, in order to escape. In other words, for wholly selfish reasons.

  But I’d never say that out loud either.

  “Give me the names of the cops who interviewed you,” I said. “I’ll talk to them. Why don’t we start there?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Not a problem, Lauren. And maybe you could also give me the names of Roger’s close friends. You know, anyone he might have confided in.”

  “Well…” She faltered. “You’ve known Roger a lot longer than me.”

  “He didn’t really have any close friends, did he?”

  “Not really.”

  I wasn’t surprised. He’d always been sort of a loner. Going back to when we were kids, he tended to hang out with my friends. Even though he considered us uncool, since we were a few years younger. And even though he was never really the hanging-out type anyway.

  “Nick, are you sure this is okay?”

  “More than okay,” I said.

  She jumped up and threw her arms around me, and after a
few seconds she began sobbing.

  10.

  The offices of Stoddard Associates looked like the most posh, high-end law firm you’d ever seen: dark mahogany paneling everywhere, antique Persian rugs, burnished fruitwood conference tables. Hushed elegance. Old money. Even a prim middle-aged British receptionist.

  The firm’s founder and chairman, Abner J. Stoddard IV-Jay, as everyone called him-sometimes joked that the décor he’d selected, down to the last detail, was nothing more than what he and his CIA buddies used to call “window dressing.” That’s tradecraft jargon. Every good front needs a plausible cover, he’d say.

  He was only partly joking. After all, Stoddard Associates was a high-powered private intelligence firm. A corporate espionage agency, though Jay Stoddard would never use those words. An august and influential, if shadowy, enterprise. Not some cheesy gumshoe operation with frosted-glass windows and the lingering stench of stale cigar smoke. We occupied twelve thousand square feet of the ninth floor of a sleek office tower at 1900 K Street in Washington, with a curved façade of glass and stainless steel and slate spandrels. K Street, as everyone knew, was the Champs Élysées of Washington lobbyists.

  And Jay wasn’t just some ex-spook who did investigations for big companies and the government and very rich people. He was the consummate Washington insider, a guy who knew where all the bodies were buried and was willing to exhume them for the right price. He was a fixer. He knew everyone who counted. He understood how things really worked in this town, as opposed to what they taught you in civics class or what you read in the papers, and he had a strong enough stomach to deal with all the creepy-crawlies you found when you turned over the rock.

  Whenever he met with some politician who had qualms about hiring him to do oppo research-digging up dirt on a rival-Stoddard liked to quote Governor Willie Stark from All the King’s Men: “Man is born in sin and conceived in corruption and passeth from the stench of the didie to the stink of the shroud. There is always something.”

  Jay Stoddard knew that everyone had dirt.

  He was a tall, lanky guy in his early sixties, with a proud mane of silver hair he kept a bit too long. He wore handmade English suits and Brooks Brothers shirts with frayed collars, which was his way of announcing that he had taste and family money and appreciated the finer things in life but didn’t really think about any of that stuff. More window dressing, I suspected.

  We were wrapping up our Monday morning Risk Committee meeting, which was basically twelve of the firm’s most senior staff members sitting around the big conference table and voting on which cases to take and which to turn down. It was your typical undercaffeinated Monday morning gathering: stifled yawns and low energy, throat-clearing and doodling, and furtive glances at BlackBerrys. Except for Jay, who paced around the room because he couldn’t sit still for more than five minutes.

  Most of the cases we’d voted on were pretty boring, standard fare. A big data-storage firm wanted us to find out whether their Indonesian manager was embezzling. The CEO of a huge investment bank wanted us to find out if two of his top executives, a man and a woman, were secretly having an affair. (I wondered why the CEO didn’t want to use his own internal security guy. I also wondered why the CEO cared so much; I had no doubt he was looking for a pretext to fire the two executives for some other reason. The case smelled fishy to me. We voted yes, of course.)

  Everyone perked up when Stoddard mentioned a request he’d gotten from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One of their curators was about to go on trial in Ankara for trafficking in looted antiquities-ancient gold coins that the Turkish government said had been stolen from a state museum. I had visions of some Manhattan society dame, with her Burberry scarf and Louis Vuitton bag, huddled in a dank squalid Turkish prison out of Midnight Express. We voted to investigate further.

  But the case that took up most of our time that morning was a request from one of the biggest oil companies in the world. They were trying to acquire a midsize but highly profitable oil field-service company-a hostile takeover bid. And they wanted us to compile some deep background research on the CEO of the target company.

  As usual, the voice of sanity was our forensic data expert, a lovely African-American woman with mocha skin and extremely short hair and big eyes named Dorothy Duval. Dorothy had a smoky voice and a blunt, earthy manner. I’m sure they’d hated her at the National Security Agency, where she had worked for nine years before Stoddard hired her. Stoddard was shrewd enough to realize how smart she was. Or maybe he just found her amusing.

  “Look, can we have some real talk here?” Dorothy said. “They want a full-out data haunt. Cell-phone tracking, electronic monitoring, the whole deal. They want the guy’s phone tapped.”

  “You’re totally making that up,” said a senior investigator, Marty Masur. “They never said anything of the kind.” Masur was small and bald, arrogant and abrasive. He’d been a Senate investigator until he pissed off one too many senators. Just then he was in the process of pissing off everyone at Stoddard Associates.

  “That’s because they’re too smart to say it outright,” Dorothy replied. “Nobody puts a request like that in writing. They don’t have to.”

  “So you’re just point-blank refusing?” Masur shot back. “You wanna keep your hands clean, is that it?”

  “Weren’t you the guy who wanted to take on that ‘collection job’ for Hewlett-Packard?” she said, pursing her lips. “Tap the phones of their board members? Wonder whatever happened to the firm they did hire.”

  “They were amateurs,” Masur said. “They got caught.”

  “There was also that little detail about how it was against the law. Like this job would be. I won’t do it.”

  Masur snorted, shook his head. His face flushed, and he looked like he was about to say something really nasty when Stoddard broke in: “Nick, your thoughts?”

  I shrugged. “Dorothy’s right. It’s a huge risk. We might end up paying more in legal fees than we can bill on this.”

  Masur muttered something, and I turned to him. “Excuse me?”

  He shook his head.

  “No, I want to hear it, Marty,” I said.

  He gave me a wary look. I’d always thought he was intimidated by me. I’m six-foot-two, served in the Special Forces in Iraq, and I’m still in decent shape. Also, there were rumors about my dark skills, things I’d done in Iraq and Bosnia, that swirled around me. None of them were true, but I never bothered to set the record straight. I didn’t really mind having a scary reputation. I think Masur was afraid that if he got on my bad side, I’d get him in an alley one night and slice off one of his ears or something. I liked letting him think that.

  “ ‘Being cautious is the greatest risk of all,’ ” he finally said. “Nehru said that.”

  I nodded sagely. “If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.”

  Masur looked at me quizzically.

  “Dan Quayle said that,” I added. Whether he actually did or not, I liked the quote.

  Dorothy gave me one of her dazzling smiles.

  “All right, ladies and gentlemen,” Stoddard said and cleared his throat. “I will never allow this firm to be put in jeopardy,” he said. “As tempting as the money might be, there’s just no question that we have to do the right thing here. We’re going to pass.”

  As the meeting broke up, Stoddard grabbed my elbow. “Come into my office for a sec?”

  “Sure.”

  We walked down the hall, past the black-framed photographs of Stoddard with politicos and world leaders and celebrities. My favorite was the photo of him and Richard Nixon. Nixon was wearing a light blue suit and was clasping Stoddard’s hand awkwardly. Stoddard was even lankier then, black-haired and movie-star handsome. He had been working in the CIA’s Operations Directorate until the Nixon reelection campaign had hired him to do oppo research. They needed someone to dig up dirt, discreetly. I’d heard that Nixon had hired Stoddard to compile dossiers on certain key Democratic senators in o
rder to discourage them from demanding his resignation. But Stoddard was far too discreet ever to discuss it. Stoddard’s work was legendary, and he cashed in by setting up his own shop right after the election.

  Nixon had signed the photograph, in his knifelike script, “With deepest thanks for doing your part to keep the election honest.”

  I loved that.

  “Great job on that Traverse Development thing,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “You’re good. Sometimes I forget how good.”

  “It was easy.”

  “You only make it look easy, Nick. You’ve got sprezzatura. You know what that means?”

  “I’m on Zithromax,” I said. “Supposed to get rid of it.”

  He glanced at me, then chuckled. “Sprezzatura’s an Italian word. Means the art of making something difficult look easy.”

  “Is that right,” I said.

  As we entered his office, I mentioned the name of the big oil company we’d all just been talking about, and I said, “That’s an awful big contract to turn down, Jay. I’m impressed.”

  He looked at me. “Come on, man-you think I’m letting that one slip through my fingers? In this economy? The house on Nantucket needs a new roof.” He winked. “Always cover your ass, Nicky. Sit down. We gotta talk.”

  11.

  Visitors to Jay Stoddard’s office were always surprised. They expected the standard ego wall of framed photographs of Stoddard with the rich and famous and powerful. But those he’d banished to the hallway. Which was either modest or clever-or just his way of putting his fingerprints all over our offices.

  Instead, the walls of his office were lined, floor to ceiling, with books. There were first editions-Victor Hugo and Trollope-but mostly there were big picture books on architecture. Strewn artfully across his glass coffee table were magazines like Architectural Record and Metropolis and a big orange book called Richard Meier Architect.

  He was an architecture nut. Once, over his fourth glass of single malt at the Alvear Palace Hotel in Buenos Aires, he confessed to me that, as a young man, he’d desperately wanted to go to the Yale School of Architecture. But his father, who’d been in the OSS during World War II, forced him to join the CIA. Jay wasn’t morose about it, though. “Dad was absolutely right,” he said. “I’d have starved to death. I thought all architects were rich!”