Vanished

by Joseph Finder

  He coughed noisily for a few seconds. “Yeah,” he said, “why don’t I send my personal courier over. On his mounted steed.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”

  LIEUTENANT GARVIN turned his computer monitor, an ancient Dell, around so we could both watch. He offered me coffee, and this time I took it.

  A fuzzy color image was frozen on the screen. I couldn’t make out anything beyond a couple of indistinct silhouettes on a street. The ATM was, I assumed, located outside. Near a gas station. Cars zipped by in the background.

  In the frame around the image were numbers-date code, time sequence, all that sort of thing.

  Garvin futzed with the mouse, clicking and double-clicking first the left button, then the right one. Finally, he got it working, and I could see a couple of smeary blobs making funny abrupt movements toward the camera.

  “I should warn you in advance,” he said. “The resolution’s lousy.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “And that’s not all. I thought it was video they were sending over. It’s not.”

  “What is it?”

  “A couple of still photos.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This ATM had a recording rate of one frame every ten seconds.”

  I groaned. “To save hard-disk space, I bet.”

  “Who the hell knows. I don’t know why they even bother.”

  It’s sort of ironic that so many banks invest so much money in their security systems, installing high-tech digital video recorders in their automatic teller machines that transmit compressed video signals to a central server. All very fancy and high-end-and then, to save space, they set their cameras to record at the slowest possible rate. Ten to fifteen frames per second is slow. But one frame every ten seconds was little more than a stop-action camera.

  Garvin clicked something, and the frame advanced, and I could see a man in a suit leaning forward toward the cash machine’s screen. The face was clear.

  It was Roger.

  There was no doubt about it at all.

  His rimless glasses, his large forehead, the dark brown hair parted at the side. The hair was mussed, and his glasses were slightly crooked. He was wearing a dark suit and white shirt and tie, but one lapel of his suit was sticking up and his tie was askew. He looked like he’d been injured. It was hard to see much of his facial expression, but from what I could tell, he looked frightened.

  Roger had survived the attack.

  For the first time, I knew that for sure. But where he was right now, or even whether he was still alive, I had no idea. The mystery I’d stepped into-or been dragged into-had suddenly gotten a whole lot more baffling.

  And probably a lot more dangerous.

  26.

  That him?” Garvin said.

  “That’s him.”

  “I owe you an apology,” he said.

  “I’ll take it. But for what?”

  “You were right about this being an abduction.”

  “Was I?”

  “Your brother wasn’t acting on his own volition. That’s pretty clear.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Watch. Check this out. I think I know how to do it.” He double-clicked the mouse, shifting the frame to the left. Then he clicked some more, centering in on the figure next to my brother.

  It was a guy in a hooded sweatshirt, back turned to the camera. Lieutenant Garvin touched the screen with his index finger, drawing my attention to what looked an awful lot like a gun.

  “You get the guy’s face?”

  “Nope. The whole transaction lasted a minute ten seconds. Seven frames. And you don’t see the guy’s face on any of them. Not even a partial.”

  “I’d like to see all of them, if you don’t mind.”

  Garvin nodded. I expected at least a sigh of frustration, but his attitude toward me seemed to have softened a bit. I was no longer the annoying brother of the victim, or the intrusive, competing investigator. Now I was almost a colleague helping him solve a problem.

  He clicked the mouse and advanced frame by frame, from the beginning. This time we were viewing just the left half of the image, the part that had earlier been outside the frame. You could see the hooded figure very close to Roger, his back always to the camera. He never raised his weapon. He kept it at his side, pointed at Roger.

  “Did Wachovia security say if there was another camera?” I asked.

  “This is the only one.”

  “Where’s the ATM?”

  “Georgetown. M Street, near the Key Bridge.”

  I nodded. “Couple blocks from where they were attacked. So whoever grabbed him just wanted cash? Sorry-I still find that hard to believe.”

  He shrugged. “They got four thousand nine hundred bucks. His account allowed him to withdraw up to five thousand a day, turns out. That ain’t chump change.”

  “Granted. But I doubt money was the primary motivation.”

  “Five thousand bucks is plenty of motivation.”

  “Sure. But that’s not it.”

  “Got a theory you like better?”

  “Well, it’s not plain-vanilla kidnapping. Not without a ransom demand.”

  “Yet.”

  “It’s been long enough. No. You just called it an abduction, and I think you’re right. That I get.”

  “How come?”

  “Because Roger was expecting an attack of some kind.”

  “You know this how?”

  “What he said to his wife that night. He said, ‘I love you.’ ”

  “So?”

  “That’s not like him.”

  “Not like him to tell his wife he loves her? Real sweetheart, huh?”

  “You don’t want to go there. Point is, he knew he was going to be grabbed. He knew he might not ever see her again. He was saying good-bye.”

  “Maybe.” He sounded dubious.

  “And then, when he saw they’d grabbed Lauren, he said, ‘Why her?’ ”

  “Huh. Like, ‘take me instead.’ ”

  “Right.”

  “Doesn’t mean he knew them, though.”

  “You’re right. It doesn’t.”

  “No blood, no trace evidence, no ransom demands. Your theory still doesn’t get us any closer.”

  I paused for a moment. One of my abiding principles is never to tell anyone anything he doesn’t need to know. Loose lips and all that. But Garvin and I were, in a sense, partners by then. The only thing that counted was finding my brother, and the more Garvin knew, the more helpful he could be.

  So I told him about what looked like an attempted break-in at Roger’s house. And about the InCaseOfDeath.net e-mail.

  “He was being threatened,” I said. “Which is why he arranged that e-mail. Because he was afraid they’d try to make it look like he killed himself.”

  Garvin sneezed while I was talking, blew his nose loudly. I was beginning to wonder whether it wasn’t just a cold but maybe Ebola virus.

  “Can I see a copy of this e-mail?” he said.

  “It’s gone,” I said, and I explained.

  “Well, there’s got to be a copy somewhere.”

  I shook my head.

  “Gotta be some high-priced computer geeks in your high-priced firm who can bring it back.”

  “I can ask.”

  “You say he was ‘threatened.’ Over what?”

  I shook my head. “Don’t know. Maybe to force something out of him.”

  “Like what?”

  “My guess? He had some information someone wanted. Or he wasn’t supposed to have. Something business-related. Like a big project he was financing.”

  “That’s pretty vague.”

  “Like I said, it’s just a guess. I don’t actually know. But he tried to delete everything on his laptop at home.”

  “To get rid of evidence?”

  “Or to protect his family.”

  “How so?”

  “Cover his trail. Let’s say he’d been collecting
information on his laptop, and he didn’t want these guys to know he had it.”

  “You got the laptop?”

  “Yeah,” I said vaguely. I had other plans for it. “I think so. I’ll look around.”

  “Okay. So now I think I get it.”

  “Get what?”

  He began tidying things on his desk, moving folders into piles. “I asked our Homeland Security division to check on all flights out of the country. Told them to flag your brother’s passport. That was when I was thinking fugitive, not abduction.”

  “And?”

  “Turns out your brother’s on the No Fly List.”

  “No Fly List?”

  “Yep. You know, that new TSDB watch list.”

  “TSDB?” I said, but I remembered the new acronym just before he said it.

  “Terrorist Screening Database.”

  “My brother wasn’t a terrorist,” I said.

  “Neither are most of the people on the list,” he said.

  I grunted. Like most people who’ve come into contact with the sharp end of the U.S. government since September 11, 2001, I’d seen more than my share of abuses of law enforcement. Things like the USA PATRIOT Act were used to justify all kinds of invasions of privacy.

  “You know what bycatch is?” Garvin said.

  I shook my head.

  “It’s like when commercial fisheries go trawling for tuna, and they end up catching other stuff in their nets, like sea turtles and dolphins. The bycatch.”

  “Dirty fishing,” I said. “Isn’t that what it’s called?”

  “Right.”

  “But that implies catching something you don’t intend to catch,” I pointed out. “You don’t put someone’s name on the No Fly List by accident.”

  “Okay,” Garvin conceded. “So maybe it’s no accident. Maybe you’re right. Maybe your brother made some enemies. Maybe whatever he was doing, he got into some kinda stuff he shouldn’t have. National security stuff, maybe.”

  “He does finance at a construction company.”

  “Gifford Industries is a construction company? Like Home Depot is the corner hardware store. Maybe there’s something about him you’re not telling me.”

  “I’ve told you everything I know.”

  “Then maybe there’s something about him you don’t know,” Garvin said.

  27.

  Actually, there was plenty about my brother I didn’t know.

  Like how his mind worked.

  Just because we were brothers didn’t mean that we shared anything but a strange upbringing and fifty percent of our DNA. We couldn’t have been more different.

  Still, for a long stretch of our childhood-right up until the day Dad left-we were best friends.

  Dad was a remote, unfathomable, larger-than-life character to both of us. He seemed to laugh louder than most people, got more angry, was smarter, more intense, more everything.

  We loved going to his office in Manhattan. His firm occupied the entire top floor of the Graystone Building, an art deco ziggurat near Grand Central that had been built to resemble a Babylonian temple. In the lobby was a huge mural by some famous artist of Prometheus stealing fire. The elevator doors were ornate brass. His office always smelled like pipe smoke and old wood and leather and brass cleaner, and it was suffused with the ozone of power. It had a breathtaking view of the city. Silhouetted against the Manhattan skyline, Victor Heller stood mightier than any of the spindly skyscrapers in the distance, a colossus astride the globe.

  We were terrified of him. When he got angry, you didn’t want to be within a mile. One day he was looking for something in our bathroom, the one Roger and I shared-who knows what he was looking for, maybe a roll of toilet paper-when he found a half-used pouch of chewing tobacco. It said RED MAN on the label.

  He stormed into the game room, where we were playing Risk, and he demanded to know which one of us was using chewing tobacco.

  We both denied it. I didn’t even know what chewing tobacco was.

  Furious, Dad whipped us both with his crocodile-leather belt. I don’t think he really cared about whether we were using tobacco. He just didn’t like having his authority undermined.

  Afterward, Roger and I consoled each other. We both knew we’d been unfairly punished, which hurt even more than our backsides. Roger slid down the waistband of his Jockey shorts a few inches and showed me the damage Dad had done. His buttocks were crimson. Mine were, too.

  “Hey, Red Man,” he said, and we both burst out laughing.

  It turned out that the chewing tobacco had been left under the sink by Sal, one of the caretakers, who’d been fixing a leak. But the incident also left us with a nickname for each other, a secret code: “Red Man.” Never in front of others. Only between us.

  “Hey, Red Man,” we’d say to each other on the phone, and it was like a nudge, a wink. It instantly evoked a whole world-of archeological digs on the far reaches of the property that enraged Yoshi, the elderly Japanese gardener; of pranks that made our favorite cook, Mrs. Thomasson, giggle; of getting into trouble and covering for each other.

  It made us feel like fellow conspirators. Which was nice. It brought us even closer.

  Until we turned against each other.

  28.

  By some strange spin of the genetic roulette wheel, I grew up big and broad-shouldered and muscular, while Roger became stringy and gawky. He needed glasses; I didn’t. He became defiantly bookish while I was the athlete who pretended not to care about school. He was the smart one; I was the strong one. He was a bully magnet, and even though he was older, I became his defender. He didn’t like that.

  By the time we entered our teens, it became clear that Roger wanted to be just like Dad. He told everyone he was going to work “in finance.”

  One day, when I was thirteen and Roger was almost fifteen, we got home from school to find Mom waiting for us in the gloomy library, sitting in a big leather chair in the circle of light cast by a reading lamp. She said she wanted to talk to us.

  She got up, gave us both hugs, and told us that Dad had been arrested at work that morning. Right in front of his employees. They’d handcuffed him and led him out through the trading floor.

  “Why?” Roger said.

  “The Justice Department wanted to embarrass him.”

  “No, I mean, why did they arrest him?”

  She explained, but it didn’t all sink in. Something about securities fraud and insider trading. Something about an SEC investigation that had been going on for months. Since I barely understood what Dad did for a living, I had no idea what he’d been arrested for.

  We didn’t see Dad until the next day. He was at home when we returned from school, which was strange. Normally, he didn’t get home until after dinner.

  He took us into his study and told us that he’d spent the night in jail, locked up at the Metropolitan Correctional Center with a bunch of drug dealers. That morning he’d been taken before a magistrate and arraigned and released on bail.

  He told us not to worry. That the charges were trumped up. He’d made some powerful enemies, and they were trying to drag him through the mud. But he had great lawyers, and he’d fight this thing, and we’d all get through it, and we’d all be fine.

  “But I want you boys to know one thing,” he said fiercely. “I’m innocent. Never forget it.”

  “I don’t understand,” Roger said. “How could they arrest someone who’s innocent?”

  Dad leaned back in his chair and laughed raucously. “Oh, good Lord, kiddo, you’ve got a lot to learn about the world.”

  THE NEXT morning, when Roger and I were on our way to school, our car stopped at the end of the long driveway. The driver-yes, we had a driver-cursed aloud, and we looked out the front windshield.

  There was a mob in front of the gates-cameras, reporters with bulbous microphones, people swarming the car, screaming at us.

  The driver backed up and took us out the back way.

  School wasn’t much fun that day.
Everyone had heard about the arrest of Victor Heller. A rich-kid school like that, you can believe everyone’s parents were talking about it at the breakfast table, and with undisguised glee. There was a lot of pent-up resentment over our father. A lot of jealousy.

  Our friends were sympathetic, but there were plenty of kids who hurled insults.

  And that was when I learned to fight.

  Anyone who dared say anything nasty about my father had to deal with me. Anyone who said anything to my brother had to face me, too.

  We were a family under siege. Both parents were around far too much, except for the times when Dad’s lawyers came to the house and met with him in his study for hours on end. The phone kept ringing, but my parents wouldn’t answer it. They stopped going out.

  Mom, who until that moment had always seemed a recessive gene, swung into action, helping the lawyers coordinate a legal defense. Suddenly, she felt useful. She knew nothing about Wall Street or white-collar crime, but she was smart and determined to stand by her husband.

  She saw the cuts and scrapes on my face when I came home from school, and she said nothing. She knew. She just bandaged me up and told us we’d all get through it.

  When Dad emerged from his strategy sessions with his lawyers, he’d rattle around the house or practice his serve with the tennis pro, and he talked to us a lot, assured us that he was innocent, that all the charges would be overturned, and this nightmare would be over. Soon.

  About a week later I was awakened by a car starting up in the middle of the night. I sat up, went over to my window. Saw the distinctive beehive taillights of Dad’s 1955 Porsche Speedster. Went back to sleep.

  In the morning, Dad was gone. Never said good-bye. Mom’s eyes were bloodshot, her face puffy, and we could tell she’d been crying. She said only that Dad had had to leave suddenly to take care of some business.

  He wasn’t back when we returned from school.

  Nor the next day.

  It took three days before Mom told us that Dad wasn’t coming back anytime soon. He’d left the country. She didn’t know where he’d gone.

  All she knew, she said, was that he was innocent. He hadn’t done anything wrong. But innocence didn’t always mean you could get a fair trial.