Vanished

by Joseph Finder

  “So what made you realize they were fake?”

  “They didn’t have a police radio installed.”

  “Excellent.”

  “And they didn’t have those strobe light thingies, the kind the cops take out and put on the roof of their car when they’re chasing speeders.”

  “Very nice.”

  “And I didn’t smell doughnuts.” He grinned, and I grinned back.

  “You did good,” I said.

  “Tell that to Mom.”

  “I will.” I leaned over to pat him on the shoulder, and I noticed his face had gotten strangely contorted, and there were tears in his eyes. He made a hiccuping sound. He was trying not to cry.

  “I was scared out of my mind, Uncle Nick,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. I tried to hug him, but it was awkward, the way he was lying back on the bed. Then he leaned forward and gave me a hug.

  “Who are they?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know, or you won’t tell me?”

  “At this point, I can only guess, and I don’t want to do that.”

  He let go, turned around, sat on the edge of the bed, looked back at me. “So what was the point of all that? Were they just trying to scare Mom and me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are… are we safe?”

  I hesitated far too long. “I don’t know.”

  “Are you going to stay in the house, or are you going back to the fortress of solitude?”

  “I told you, Gabe. You can’t get rid of me that easy.”

  “Are you going to teach me how to use a gun?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Have a little faith in me,” I said.

  He made a derisory snort.

  “What’s the matter?” I said. “You don’t trust me?”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “Listen,” I said. “There was once this legendary French acrobat named Charles Blondin, okay? He was famous in the nineteenth century for doing these impossible daredevil tightrope-walking stunts. He strung a rope across Niagara Falls, a thousand feet long. And this crowd gathered and he walked on the tightrope over the falls, hundreds of feet above the gorge, and the crowd went crazy when he got to the other side, clapping and cheering.”

  Gabe gave me a skeptical glance. “Yeah?”

  “And then he said to the crowd, ‘Do you believe I can do it again?’ and the crowd cheered, ‘Yes!’ And he did it. And the crowd cheered even louder, and he said, ‘Do you believe I can do it wearing a blindfold?’ And some people in the crowd got scared and shouted, ‘No, don’t do it,’ and others said, ‘Yes! You can do it!’”

  “And he fell,” Gabe said.

  I shook my head. “He did it, and the crowd cheered even louder, and he said, ‘Do you believe I can do it on stilts this time?’ And the crowd shouted out, “Yes! You can do it!’ And he did it, and the crowd roared and got even wilder. So then he said, ‘Do you believe I can do it pushing a wheelbarrow along the rope?’ And the crowd roared and cheered and said, ‘Yes!’ And Blondin said, ‘You really think I can? You believe it?’ And they shouted, ‘Yes! Yes, you can!’ ”

  Despite himself, despite his teenage cynicism, he was actually listening. For a moment he almost seemed to be a child again, listening to a bedtime story. “Is this true?”

  “Yes.”

  “He actually did it?”

  “Yep. He did it. He walked across the tightrope hundreds of feet above the gorge pushing a wheelbarrow, and when he made it to the other side the audience had grown huge and frenzied and totally worked up and they cheered. Really went crazy. So Blondin said, ‘Do you believe I can do it again but this time pushing a man in this wheelbarrow?’ And the crowd roared and said, ‘Yes!’ He said, ‘You really believe I can do it?’ And they all went, ‘Yes, definitely! You can do it! We believe in you! Yes! Absolutely!’ By that time the crowd was completely behind him. They thought he could do anything. So Blondin said, ‘Then who will volunteer to sit in the wheelbarrow?’ And the crowd suddenly went quiet. Totally silent. And he said, ‘What’s the matter? You don’t believe in me anymore?’ And they were silent for a long time before someone from the crowd finally said, ‘Yes, we believe in you. But not that much.’ ”

  “Huh. Did anyone ever volunteer to get in the wheelbarrow?”

  I shrugged.

  “How’d the guy die?”

  “In bed. Forty years later. From diabetes.”

  “Bummer.”

  “Better than falling to his death, don’t you think?”

  “Can I use that in my novel?”

  “All yours.”

  “So what’s your point, Nick? We all die someday, is that it?”

  “No. I’m just telling you, sometimes you just gotta have a little faith.” I stood up. “Good night, Gabe.” As I walked out of his bedroom, he said, “Hey, Uncle Nick?”

  “Yeah?”

  He hurled something at me, and I caught it in midair.

  His notebook. His graphic novel.

  “Let me know what you think,” he said.

  Then it was my turn to tear up.

  55.

  Lauren was racing wildly around her bedroom, tossing clothes into a couple of suitcases on the bed. Her face was flushed, glistening with perspiration.

  “Chill,” I said. “Take a nice, deep breath.”

  “No, Nick. I can’t. We can’t stay here.”

  “Lauren, sit down, please.”

  “Will you at least tell me what happened to him this afternoon?”

  “I will if you sit down.”

  Slowly, grudgingly, she lowered herself onto the ottoman of the big overstuffed reading chair in the corner. I gave her a quick summary of what had happened to Gabe and how deftly he’d handled it.

  “So they were fake cops,” she said. “Impostors.”

  I nodded.

  “They’re trying to find Roger, aren’t they?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t think getting information was the point of that exercise. That was a threat. Just like that video clip you got today. We’re watching you. You and your son, you’re vulnerable. You’re not safe anywhere.”

  The blood seemed to drain from her face. “And this is supposed to calm me down?” she said, her voice rising.

  “I’m not here to calm you down.”

  She began speaking quickly, almost muttering to herself. “My sister doesn’t have room for us. But we can stay with Mom for a few days while I look for something.”

  “What makes you think you’ll be any safer in your mother’s apartment? Or in some Comfort Inn somewhere? You think they can’t track you down? I don’t think there’s any hiding from them.”

  “Jesus, Nick!” She got to her feet.

  “Did my guy Merlin come by today to put in the new security system?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I want you to start using it.”

  “For what?” she said sharply. “So we can stay locked up inside the house all day with the alarm on like, like, it’s a fortress? You think we’re really safe here? And what happens when Gabe goes to school? You think they’re not going to grab him again? And this time-”

  “If anyone wanted to hurt you or Gabe, they’d have done it already. I don’t think that’s what they want.”

  “Then what do they want?”

  “My guess? Cooperation.”

  “Cooperation? On what?”

  I answered her question with one of my own: “What are you keeping from me?”

  “I’m not keeping anything from you.”

  “Lauren. You have something they want.”

  “I have no idea what anyone could possibly want from me.”

  “Look,” I said. “I saw my father this morning.”

  “Victor? In prison?”

  “Where else? And he told me that Roger tried to extort a lot of money
from a private military company called Paladin Worldwide.”

  Eyes wide, she shook her head. “I don’t believe that. Roger? No way.”

  “Well, whatever Roger did or didn’t do, I’m sure that’s who these people are. Paladin. And they’re not messing around. You have something they want. Maybe something Roger left for you, whether you’re aware of it or not. And if you don’t give it to them, they’ll take something from you. Something very important to you.”

  “Don’t say that. God, Nick, don’t say that.”

  “The meaning of the threat was obvious. But it didn’t contain a single explicit demand. So what do you have that they want?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea!”

  “Roger said in that e-mail that he’d taken precautions to protect you. That he’d given you the means to hold them off. What else aren’t you telling me?”

  She shook her head again, this time more violently. “I don’t know what he meant by that. He never told me anything about any extortion. He never mentioned this… Paladin. You have to believe me. I’m telling you everything I know.”

  “You told me everything was fine between you two,” I said.

  She paused, frowned, and said, “That was different. That was… personal. I didn’t think it was right to talk about that with you. I’m not withholding anything.”

  I was tempted to press her on that point. But instead I said, “Look, I want to do everything I can to protect you guys. So I need you to think really hard about anything Roger might have said to you, maybe something that didn’t mean anything at the time. Or something he gave you.”

  “I’m telling you, Nick, I can’t think of anything. You think I’d ever hold out on you, with Gabe’s life at stake?”

  “Of course not. Not knowingly. Not consciously. But I need you to think really hard.”

  “I will.”

  “And give me the chance to find these guys. The only solution is to flush them out and neutralize them.”

  “ ‘Neutralize’? Meaning what, exactly?”

  “I’ll know when I get there. Have a little confidence in me, please.”

  She paused, swallowed hard. “All right,” she said. “But one more threat-one more phone call or e-mail or anything like what happened today, and I’m taking Gabe and driving as far away from here as I can.”

  “Deal.”

  She reached out her hand, and we shook. Once, up and down, firmly. Then for the first time she noticed Gabe’s notebook in my other hand. “He gave that to you?”

  “He just wants my expert opinion.”

  “Why you?”

  “No idea,” I said.

  “I’m his mom, for God’s sake.”

  “Maybe that’s why he didn’t want you to see it.”

  The doorbell rang, and she looked at me, her eyes wary. “Who could that be?”

  “Merlin again. And Dorothy, a colleague of mine at work. They’re here to sweep the house.”

  “Sweep it…?”

  “For electronic devices. Hidden cameras and microphones, all that sort of thing. And I’m going to have them start in Gabe’s room.”

  “Gabe’s room? I don’t want him to know about that video thing, Nick. He’ll freak out.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “At first. But give him a little credit. He can handle it.”

  “You have no idea what it’s like to have a kid,” she said.

  “Can’t argue with that.”

  “It’s like you go from all-powerful to powerless. You-you produce this being that you want to protect with all of your heart and all of your strength, but then you discover that you can’t. You realize that at some point you just can’t protect them anymore.”

  “You know what you can do?” I said softly. “If you really want to protect Gabe and yourself?”

  “What?”

  “Open up. Level with me. Whatever you’re hiding, you need to let me knowwhat it is.”

  56.

  Walter McGeorge, aka Merlin, was small and compact, like a lot of Special Forces guys. He had a black buzz cut, a porcine nose, and a pencil-thin mustache. He had deep vertical furrows carved into his forehead, which made him look permanently angry.

  I helped him carry his equipment upstairs to Gabe’s room: a couple of ridged aluminum cases lined with black polyurethane egg-crate foam and something that looked like a big old video camera out of the early eighties on a tripod.

  Gabe gaped as we entered. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but we need to borrow your room for a while.”

  “For what?”

  “Your mom will explain everything,” I said.

  FOR A few moments I watched Merlin moving something that looked like a metal detector or a small minesweeper along the wall. It was wired to a pair of black headphones he was wearing.

  “You haven’t found anything yet?”

  “Nothing. You sure there’s something here?”

  “Positive.”

  “This here’s our top-of-the-line spectrum analyzer. Costs a fortune. Sees RF signals in real time. Stuff you normally can’t detect.”

  “And it’s not finding anything.”

  “Right.”

  “Meaning there aren’t any wireless bugs, right?”

  “Apparently not. Nothing transmitting right now, anyway. But that thermal-imaging camera over there?”-he pointed at the thing on the tripod-“that’s laboratory-grade instrumentation. I mean, that baby can pick up hot spots in the walls to, like, one-eighteen-thousandth of a degree.”

  “And nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “If you do find anything, don’t you expect it’s going to be a GSM bug?”

  He nodded. “If it’s really Paladin, yeah. They use government stuff.” The old days, when the guys monitoring an eavesdropping device had to sit in the back of a van on the street close enough to pick up the transmission, were over. Instead the state-of-the-art bugs used the same technology you find in cell phones. They were the guts of cell phones, in fact, minus the keypad and the fancy trappings. You could call in to them from anywhere in the world, and they’d answer silently and switch on their microphones, and you could listen in. From anywhere. They were smaller than a pack of cigarettes, sometimes as small as two inches long, and if you wired them to an existing power line, they’d work forever.

  They broadcast using cell-phone signals, but only when they were on. So he used the thermal camera to look for any electronic circuitry. Something about the tiny amounts of heat generated by electricity moving through the diodes.

  “No luck with that thing either?”

  “Nonlinear junction detector,” he said. “Sends out a high-frequency pulse, then analyzes the harmonics that bounce back. Should find any electronic devices even if they’re off.”

  “And?”

  “I found plenty.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Clocks, telephones, DVD player-a bunch. Just no bugs. Am I allowed to smoke in here?”

  “No.”

  “Prisons use these bad boys to find contraband cell phones hidden in the walls or floors.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. But I’m telling you, Heller, there’s nothing.”

  I tried to help by searching the old-fashioned way-a visual inspection, looking for minute traces in the walls and ceiling. I unscrewed light-switch plates and power-outlet covers and the ceiling light fixture. There were all sorts of ways to conceal cameras these days in things like air purifiers and wall clocks and lamps. There was no end to the possible hiding places.

  Merlin and I both worked fast, but half an hour later, he sounded discouraged. “Nothing,” he said.

  “Some Merlin you are,” I said.

  “Are we done here?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Not until you find it.”

  57.

  Icould hear Dorothy Duval’s raucous laugh as I entered the kitchen. Lauren was making coffee, and Dorothy was helping, or maybe just female bonding. But I knew that Dorothy ha
d a hidden agenda: She was putting Lauren at ease, cajoling her out of her state of anxiety.

  “You’ve been hiding this girl from me,” Dorothy said, sipping from a mug.

  “I never mix business and pleasure,” I said.

  A throaty, knowing laugh. “Right. Tell me about it. You didn’t tell me she’s from C-Ville. I used to spend every summer there, at my grandma’s house.”

  Lauren poured a mug of coffee from a glass carafe, the kind from one of those simple automatic drip coffeemakers, and she handed it to me. I took a sip. “Delicious,” I said. “How come I can’t make coffee this good?”

  “Because you’re not using the right machine,” Lauren said.

  I noticed the beat-up old Hamilton Beach coffee machine on the counter. “You’ve been hiding that from me. That one I know how to use.”

  “Roger never liked having it out on the counter. He didn’t like the way it looked.”

  She poured coffee into another stoneware mug. “How does your friend upstairs take his coffee?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “We used to boil the freeze-dried instant crap on a folding Esbit stove. Sometimes we’d just chew the coffee granules right out of the MRE bag. If we were in a hurry. But his tastes might have gotten more refined since Afghanistan. Where’s Gabe?”

  “In the living room, reading.”

  “You told him?”

  She nodded.

  “How’d he take it?”

  “He said he wasn’t surprised.”

  “Nick,” Dorothy said, “can I talk to you for a second?”

  “You found something?”

  “Right.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I want Lauren to hear this.”

  Dorothy looked from me to Lauren, then back at me. “None of my malware-detection kits picked up anything,” she said. “So I ended up having to put a box on the line-a network forensics appliance. I finally captured some encrypted traffic going out.”

  “Encrypted?” I said.

  “Bunch of hash marks. Nothing I can read.”