Vanished

by Joseph Finder

  He shrugged off his suit jacket and hung it on a mahogany valet in the corner. Over his threadbare blue button-down shirt were bright red suspenders-which he called “braces,” because he was an Anglophile-with little pictures of golfers on them.

  “You need a cup of coffee,” he announced, pushing the intercom button on his desk phone. “Intravenous, looks like. Hungover, Nick?”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I never drink on plane flights.” It was true. One of the secrets of business travel, I’d learned. That and always fly first class. “No coffee, thanks.”

  His assistant’s voice came on: “Yes?”

  “Sorry, Heather, cancel that,” he said to the speakerphone as he sat behind his desk. He never drank coffee, himself. He said he didn’t need it, which made it hard to trust him. I don’t need a lot of sleep, but this guy was almost an android. He was incredibly energetic. He played squash, I was told, like a Roman gladiator on speed.

  Jay leaned forward and put his elbows on his desk, propping up his head, staring off somewhere behind me. This made him look bored and disengaged.

  He often came off as casual and shambling and loose-jointed, but his desk told you everything you needed to know: It was always perfectly clean. Nothing marred the wide polished expanse of mahogany. He was a Type-A personality, an obsessive-compulsive, a clean freak. He was great at banter, never seemed to take anything seriously, sometimes even appeared to be muddleheaded. But he missed nothing. His mind was a steel-jaw trap: Once you got caught in its teeth, you’d have to chew off your own limb to escape.

  “So you got in to the office early today?”

  I shrugged.

  “Looking into Traverse Development, huh?” he said. His blue eyes seemed to have gone gray.

  “I like to know as much as possible about my clients,” I said. I’d run Traverse Development through our standard corporate registration databases and found nothing. I’d also run a search on the cell-phone number that Woody gave me back in L.A., the emergency contact number for whoever had hired him. But no luck. It came back as “private.”

  Did someone tell Stoddard I’d been searching? Or did my computer search trigger some kind of notification?

  “Maybe not the best use of your time.”

  “Don’t worry, I did it on my own time.”

  He paused. “And?”

  “It doesn’t exist,” I said.

  “Strange,” Stoddard said. He was toying with me. “The check cleared.”

  “No business registration in the city of Arlington. Or Arlington County. Nothing in SearchSystems. The address on that shipment turns out to be bogus-a rented mail drop. A place called EasyOffice, which is one of those business suites you can rent by the hour or by the week. The rent was paid in cash. So obviously it’s a front.”

  “Oh, please. Don’t be so suspicious. Companies use fronts for all kinds of legitimate reasons. Like avoiding taxes.”

  “You know what was in that container, don’t you?” I said. “What was being shipped out of Bahrain?”

  “I didn’t ask.” Jay was too skilled to look evasive.

  “But you know anyway,” I said.

  He laughed. Sometimes talking with him was like fencing. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  “I think you know damned well what was in those boxes.” I said it in a good-humored way, not wanting to come off as confrontational. Confrontational rarely worked with him.

  He chewed the inside of his cheek, which was always the giveaway that he was trying to decide whether to tell a lie. The “tell,” as they say in poker. Stoddard was practiced in the art of deception, but my skill at reading people is better. I give full credit for this to my father, who was a liar the way some people are alcoholics. He lived and breathed dishonesty. It was a useful education for a kid.

  “If you opened a sealed shipment, Nick, you don’t want to brag about it. You could get the whole firm in trouble. If you’re going to break the law, you do it for the client. Not to work against the client.”

  “It was a messy recovery, Jay. A couple of boxes broke open.”

  “Why do I doubt that? Point is, whatever you found, that’s outside of the scope of our work. They hired us to do a very specific job. Nothing beyond that. In addition to which, as you well know, anything we come across in the course of an investigation that might be detrimental to a client we always keep confidential. Otherwise, we’d go out of business in a week. I don’t need to tell you this.”

  This was one of the things I didn’t love about my job. Often, a client would hire us to investigate some alleged wrongdoing inside the company, and later, after we found it-embezzlement or fraud or bribery or whatever-we’d discover that what the client really wanted was to see if it could be found. Sort of like a game. A scavenger hunt. If we couldn’t find it, neither would the Justice Department. And they always insisted that we bury our findings. Clean up the mess for them and keep our mouths shut. If you didn’t go along with them, they might refuse to pay. And the word would get around that you were, well, maybe a little too fussy. A pain in the ass. Not the kind of firm you could really be comfortable with.

  This sort of thing happened far more than we or anyone else liked to admit. Which was why you had to be careful about who you signed up to work for. You didn’t want to find yourself complicit in covering up someone else’s crime.

  “This has the potential to blow up in our faces,” I said. I lowered my voice. “There was close to a billion dollars there in cash. Sealed in bricks by the U.S. Treasury.”

  “So?”

  “So there’s this annoying little law. The bulk-cash smuggling law of 2001. If you’re shipping more than ten thousand bucks in cash, you’ve got to fill out paperwork.”

  “Oh, please. Not if the government does it.”

  “This wasn’t a government flight. This was a private cargo shipment.”

  “The government uses private cargo firms all the time these days. You know that.”

  “For a billion dollars’ worth of cash? I’m dubious.”

  “Bottom line, this isn’t your problem, Nick. Grow up. Don’t be naïve.”

  Now he was pulling out the heavy artillery. There was nothing worse, in Stoddard’s mind, than being naïve about how the world really worked. He had no patience for it.

  “I’m not taking a moral position, here, Jay. I’m just saying that this is the sort of thing that ends up splashed all over the front page of the Washington Post, and suddenly we’re dragged into it. First as a sidebar. Then we become our own separate front-page story.”

  “Only if it’s truly illegal, which we don’t know, and only if someone talks. Barring that, we’re on totally solid ground.”

  “You really do have faith in the ultimate goodness of mankind, don’t you?” The only successful way to argue with Jay, I’d learned, was to out-cynical him.

  He laughed loud and long. Jay had a good smile but a lot of gold fillings at the back, and they caught the light. “Look, Nicky. The world’s a dirty place. I’m sure your father could tell you a lot more about that than I could. Give him a call. Ask him.”

  He arched a single brow, which was something I’d always wished I could do. Stoddard wasn’t trying to be snide, I didn’t think. He probably just intended this as his coup de grâce, his knockout punch.

  “I don’t think they allow incoming phone calls at his prison,” I said. “Though I admit I’ve never tried.”

  IF YOU took a really close look at some of the biggest, most notorious scandals of the last thirty or so years, you’d find Jay Stoddard lurking somewhere in the shadows. As an investigator or a fixer or an adviser, I mean. Whether it was the Iran-Contra hearings in the Reagan days or a Canadian media mogul on trial for fraud. Or one of a dozen Congressional sex scandals. And a whole lot more situations that might have exploded into ugly public imbroglios if it hadn’t been for Stoddard’s work.

  But you’d have to know where to look, because Jay didn’t like to leave traces. And he alway
s preferred to be on the winning side.

  One of the very few times he picked the wrong side was when he agreed to work for my father. Victor Heller was arrested and charged with massive accounting and securities fraud and grand larceny, and being the smart and extremely well-connected guy that he was, he hired the finest investigative firm in the world to assist his legal defense. Unfortunately for both Jay and Dad, the facts got in the way. He was sent to prison for thirty years.

  In fact, I’m convinced that it was because Jay Stoddard felt guilty about letting my father down that he hired me, the black sheep of the family who’d dropped out of college to enlist in the Special Forces. Who’d joined the army instead of Goldman Sachs. Later, though, Jay began bragging that I was his best hire. “Something in those Heller genes,” he’d say.

  “Larceny,” I liked to reply.

  He’d shake his head, a mournful look in his eyes. “Your dad’s a brilliant man. It’s just a damned shame…”

  Now he said, “Anyway, odds are the whole thing’s perfectly innocent. Let’s just leave it there, okay?”

  “If I ran a check on some of the serial numbers, I wonder if it would turn out to be part of the cash that went missing in Baghdad a few years ago.”

  “Maybe. But why would you?”

  “Curiosity.”

  I was starting to piss him off. His tone got increasingly exasperated. “Nick, we’ve all got a lot of work to do around here. Let’s just move on, okay?”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t interested in getting into a fight with him. Certainly not a fight I couldn’t win. And maybe he was right. “Forget it, Jake,” I said. “ ‘It’s Chinatown.’ ”

  Quoting one of the best lines from one of Jay’s favorite movies seemed to mollify him. He laughed heartily. “All right,” he said, “as far as I’m concerned, this never happened.”

  I was being forgiven. As if I’d accidentally insulted his wife. Very few people were as affable as Jay when he wanted to be.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  I wish I’d left it there.

  12.

  When I got to my office, which was about a quarter the size of his, I saw that my voice-mail light was blinking. All calls came through our main switchboard and were answered by Elizabeth, the British receptionist. Most callers just left a name and number and she e-mailed me the message. Sometimes I missed those old pink “While You Were Out” message slips that used to stack up when I worked at McKinsey & Company. But once in a while, especially if the matter was confidential, or the caller didn’t want to leave a name, she’d put them right into my voice mail.

  I played the messages over the speakerphone while I sat in my desk chair and spun it halfway around to stare out the window at K Street. A pretty young girl in an orange shirt came out of the restaurant across the street and knelt in front of the menu easel on the sidewalk. She kept tossing back her long brown hair while writing the day’s specials on the chalkboard in a neat cursive hand.

  One of the messages was from an old army buddy about our weekly basketball game. Another was from a woman I’d been seeing on an extremely casual basis.

  But nothing from Lieutenant Garvin of the Washington Metropolitan Police. I’d left him two messages. So I tried him again, got his voice mail, left him a third message.

  In the meantime, I had a few other phone calls to make.

  Jay Stoddard had explicitly told me to stop asking questions about Traverse Development, but that was like waving a red flag at a bull. I’ve never liked following orders, which was one of the reasons I was happy to leave the army, then the government. I’ll admit, though, that this didn’t make me an ideal employee.

  In any case, I wasn’t asking questions about Traverse Development, whatever that was. I was asking about the almost one billion dollars in cash that Traverse was shipping, and technically that was a different matter. Hairsplitting, maybe, but whatever works.

  The plastic wrapping on the bricks of currency had identified it as being from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in East Rutherford, New Jersey. That was the location of the largest cash vault in the country. They had people there whose entire job was to analyze the movement of cash around the world-which is probably one of those jobs that sounds more interesting than it actually is. I called the international cash operations unit of the East Rutherford Operations Center and identified myself by my real name and firm and told them that, in the course of an investigation, I’d found a small bundle of cash in a briefcase belonging to a suspected drug trafficker. I gave the woman one of the serial numbers.

  It took her more than five minutes to return to the phone. She had all sorts of questions for me. Where exactly was this drug trafficker based? How much cash? What was the range of serial numbers, and were they sequential?

  I told her the serial numbers on the hundred-dollar bills all began with DB-at least, the ones I had looked at.

  “Well, sir, the first letter, D, means that it’s the 2003 series. And the second letter-B?-that means it was issued by the New York Fed.”

  “Well, that helps,” I said. “But what I want to know is, was this part of any bulk shipment of cash?”

  “I can’t tell you that, sir.” The woman’s voice had gone from bored-but-friendly to officious-and-stern.

  “That’s too bad,” I said. “Because when the Fed won’t help law enforcement recover cash that’s stolen from one of their shipments, that’s serious indeed. Just the sort of thing that my buddy, the chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, would love to sink his claws into. You know how they love scandals like this. How do you spell your last name, again?”

  If there’s one thing a bureaucrat fears more than having to work past five o’clock, it’s having to testify before Congress.

  By the time I hung up, I’d confirmed my suspicions. Sure enough, the cash on that plane was part of the famous nine billion dollars that had gone missing in Baghdad a few years back.

  But I still hadn’t cracked the mystery of who or what Traverse Development was, and that wasn’t going to be easy to do out of this office. Not with Jay Stoddard looking over my shoulder. And not without asking questions about it, as I promised Jay I wouldn’t do.

  I had an old friend named Walter McGeorge, who was an expert in TSCM, which is the industry shorthand for Technical Surveillance Countermeasures. In simple terms, Walter was a bug-sweeper, the best I’d ever met.

  Walter had been a communications sergeant on my Special Forces team. He’d been trained in all the usual stuff-radio equipment and wire communications, burst-code radio nets, and so on. Everything from encrypted satellite transmissions to old-fashioned Morse code. Somewhere along the line, “Walter” had become “Hognose,” because of his passing resemblance to Porky Pig, and then “Merlin,” as he earned the admiration of his teammates. He was recruited to the same Pentagon intel team as me but survived longer. When he finally decided he wanted out, I got him a job doing bug sweeps for a TSCM firm in Mary land. He’d done a number of projects for me since Stoddard Associates didn’t have TSCM specialists on staff: That was a specialized skill these days. All the big investigative firms outsourced those jobs now.

  I reached him on his cell. The connection was crackly, and I asked whether I’d disturbed him on a job.

  “Yeah,” he replied crankily. “A job involving bluefish.”

  Merlin was a serious sport fisherman and kept a small boat in the Harbour Cove Marina on Chesapeake Bay.

  “I need to send someone a package,” I said. Before he had the chance to make a crack about how he wasn’t my secretary, I went on: “I have the address of a drop site, and I want to send them a GPS tracking device. You think you could send out a FedEx package with one of those letter loggers inside?”

  “You looking for historical data?”

  “Historical?”

  “If you’re talking about the GPS Letter Logger, the one that’s like a quarter inch thick and fits in a number-ten business envelope, wel
l, that just records where it’s been after the fact. It’s not real-time. You have to get it back to download the data. And I got a feeling you’re not going to get it back.”

  “I need real-time. I’m figuring the FedEx package will get delivered to the drop site and probably transferred to some actual office, where it’ll get opened.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Maybe not,” I conceded. “Still, it’s worth a try. Once they open it and see a tracker inside, they’re going to destroy it. But at least I’ll get the real location that way.”

  “You think so, huh?”

  “I hope so. That’s why I’m calling you.”

  “Well, here’s the deal. If you want a GPS logger that can broadcast its location in real time, it’s gonna be a little beefier than that Letter Logger device. It’ll send out real-time position data as SMS text messages. Lithium-ion battery. Should stay powered for ten days.”

  “Think you can pop one in the mail later on today?”

  “Soon as I get back to the office.”

  Another call was coming through. I recognized the number, told Merlin where to send the package, and said, “Thanks, man. Good fishing.”

  Then I picked up line 2. “Lieutenant Garvin,” I said. “Thanks for getting back to me.”

  “Good to hear from you, Mr. Heller,” the cop said. “Funny coincidence, actually. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about your brother.”

  13.

  The headquarters of the Violent Crime Branch of the Washington Metropolitan Police was hidden away in the back of some dismal shopping center in southeast D.C., off Pennsylvania Avenue. I headed over there right after work. I was buzzed in and entered a dimly lit corridor that smelled of vomit, the stench not quite masked with some deodorizing spray that was almost as bad. I passed an open conference room that had crime-scene tape stretched across the doorway, probably to keep people from accidentally stepping into the mess on the floor.