Vanished

by Joseph Finder

“No. No. I’m not talking about those. This is a smart card with a cryptochip-thingy embedded in it. It’s like a whole new generation. Like superduper high-tech. I heard about it. Developed by the NSA. No one else in the private sector has it yet.”

  “So, Neil,” I said, “can you get this for me? As a sample?”

  “I think so. I might be able to. His secretary has the combination to his safe-I think I know where she keeps it.”

  I looked away. I couldn’t have looked less interested. “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m pretty sure I can,” Burris said, handing me back my twenty. “Oh, and hey-beer’s on me. Really.”

  He slapped down a crisp new one-hundred-dollar bill.

  I looked at it, couldn’t help glancing at the serial number on the front. It began with DB. Just like the ones in the shipment I’d recovered outside Los Angeles.

  Burris probably figured I’d be impressed he had hundred-dollar bills to throw around. “Like I told you,” he said. “I get paid in cash.”

  His cell phone rang, and he glanced down at it. “Gotta get it,” he told me. “The boss.” He picked it up, and said, “Yes, Carl.”

  I stood up, gave him an abrupt wave. Pantomimed we’ll talk by making a little phone symbol out of my left hand and holding it to my cheek.

  He gave me a thumbs-up.

  I fought my way through the bar, twisting and turning and squeezing between pods of very different types of patrons: neighborhood customers in HVAC uniforms with name patches sewn on, and Hill rats in charcoal suits from the Men’s Wearhouse, letting off steam after a long day of making photocopies and kissing butt in some minor congressman’s office.

  As I stepped out of the bar and into the refreshing cool air, I noticed a commotion behind me. Neil Burris was bulldozing a path through the crowd, elbowing people aside.

  “Hey,” he said, following me out onto the street. “You’re not Marty Masur.”

  “No?” A couple of motorcycles roared by.

  Burris drew so close to me I could smell his foul breath. “You’re that guy’s brother,” he said. “You’re Nick Heller.”

  60.

  Cars whooshed by. Somewhere nearby a dog was barking. A couple of girls in halter tops were smoking, which they couldn’t do inside the Anchor. A gang of overgrown frat boys were jeering, and one of them was pissing in the alley next to the bar. The restrooms there were so malodorous that no one ever used them more than once.

  Somehow Carl Koblenz had learned that I was meeting with Burris. I had no idea how, but I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised.

  “And I thought we looked nothing alike,” I said.

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “Where is he, Neil?” A shot in the dark. Maybe he knew; maybe he didn’t.

  Burris answered with an obscenity, and suddenly he lunged at me. I saw him move a split second too late. He slammed me against the side of a building, cracking my head hard against the brick. With his right hand, he clamped my throat just below the Adam’s apple and pincered hard. He was strong, even stronger than I expected, and he put his whole overdeveloped body into it. At the same time, he pinioned my left arm with his right shoulder and grabbed my right hand, just above the wrist, and jammed his right knee into the inside of my leg.

  Now I knew for sure he’d really been a Navy SEAL. He was doing everything by the book.

  Which was good, actually.

  His face was so close to mine that I could feel the bristles of his goatee. “Your brother…” he said, breathing hard, “wasn’t as smart as he thought.” His face was red with exertion, and he sounded short of breath. “He thought he could rip us off and get away with it. Not gonna happen.” Flecks of saliva sprayed my eyes.

  Then I relaxed my shoulders and contracted my neck to make it hard for him. I stared back into his adrenaline-crazed eyes. Blinked slowly. Said nothing.

  He expected me to fight back. He didn’t expect me to do nothing, so that’s what I did. Nothing.

  For a few seconds, anyway.

  “Your brother ticked off some very powerful people. He got too greedy. Went too far. So get this straight, Heller. Anything your brother left behind-like files or documents or anything-you’re gonna want to share it with us. You hold back, and there’s going to be collateral damage. I’m talking family members. You decide if it’s worth it. Believe me, you don’t want to make an enemy out of us.”

  He had that triumphant look of someone who knew he’d overpowered his opponent. He was intoxicated with confidence.

  I shot my left hand out and jammed it against his right shoulder, which momentarily eased his hold on my throat, while I grabbed his right hand with my left and twisted his wrist clockwise. He let out a roar, scrambled his feet around to try to gain some purchase, but I levered his arm down and around, sending him sprawling to the gravel-strewn pavement.

  I had his right hand in both of mine, the fingers pulled back so far that he only had to move too suddenly and his wrist would snap. He was helpless, and he knew it. But he was too stupid, and too truculent. He tried to swing his legs around, so I kneed him in the face-harder than I intended to, actually. He roared, and I heard something snap, and I knew that I’d broken his nose, perhaps even a cheekbone as well. Blood gushed down the lower part of his face.

  “Was that a threat?” I said. “Because I really hate threats.”

  He bellowed, and I torqued his wrist around some more just to remind him of the price of any further struggle. He let loose with a string of obscenities, but his heart wasn’t in it, I didn’t think. He didn’t seem to have much energy anymore.

  Breathing thickly through the blood in his mouth, he said something about what he planned to do to Lauren.

  “I don’t think so,” I replied. “Not with only one hand.”

  I grasped his right hand by the fingers and pulled them all the way back. His wrist made a muted snick noise when it broke, not the loud snap I expected. He let out a loud, agonized scream. His right hand-his gun hand, I assumed-dangled uselessly, like a marionette off its strings.

  Burris summoned a final burst of strength, tried to rear up, but I kneed him in the chest, heard a few ribs crack. His head snapped backwards, reflexively, slamming into the pavement.

  He went uhhh, looked dazed. All the wind went out of him.

  I stood up, brushed the dirt and debris from my pants, surveyed the damage.

  His eyes were going in and out of focus. He was hovering somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness. His head had collided with the asphalt pretty hard.

  “Hey, Neil,” I said.

  His eyes shifted slightly in my direction. I doubted he could see me very clearly, but I was sure he could hear me.

  He said nothing.

  I leaned over him, jamming my knee into his solar plexus, and said softly, “What do you know about my brother?”

  He blinked, once. He grunted, barely audibly, the faintest indication that he was listening to me, though he couldn’t form words. A small bubble of blood formed at the corner of his lips.

  I knew I wasn’t going to get an answer out of him even if he knew anything.

  I’m not one of those guys who get a perverse plea sure from beating people up. Often it makes me feel guilty. But inflicting pain on Neil Burris, I have to admit, was not entirely unpleasurable.

  My satisfaction faded somewhat a few minutes later, when I crossed the street and found the Defender with a deep white gouge running across the driver’s side door all the way to the rear quarter panel. It looked like someone had keyed it, but with a screwdriver. Maybe some drunken frat kid.

  It was annoying, but I had larger concerns. I took out my phone and dialed the number that Woody the cargo guy had given me in L.A. The number that belonged to Carl Koblenz.

  I got a generic phone-company female voice telling me the number I’d just called, and after the tone I left a message for Carl Koblenz.

  As I was finishing my message, another call was coming in. The caller ID sh
owed “private,” but I picked it up anyway.

  It was Frank Montello. My information broker. “That phone number your father called from prison?” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s a prepaid disposable cell phone. Bought with cash, I bet.”

  Very good, Roger, I thought. I’d expect nothing less. “Does the cell provider have billing records?”

  “What do they need billing records for? It’s prepaid, right? Ten bucks, twenty, fifty-whatever. They don’t need to keep track of the calls.”

  “They do sometimes. All I want to know is where Roger was when he received a collect call from my father.”

  “No go. These cheapo phones don’t have GPS locator chips in them. Most don’t. Anyway, this one didn’t.”

  “What about the location of the cell tower where the phone was when the call came in.”

  “They don’t record that data, not on these disposable phones. I get a feeling your brother’s going to a lot of trouble to conceal his location.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “So how about one more job?”

  61.

  By the time I got back to Roger’s house, Lauren and Gabe were asleep. I cleaned up the nasty cuts and scrapes on my face and neck with some peroxide, checked to make sure that the alarm was set properly and the house secure. Then I crashed for a few hours. I had an important meeting to prepare for.

  THE HEADQUARTERS of Paladin Worldwide was in southern Georgia, on ten thousand acres of swampland that also served as a training facility. This was where Allen Granger, Paladin’s chairman, apparently spent most of his time.

  But you couldn’t do business with the U.S. government and not keep a base in or near Washington, D.C. So Paladin had a small office in Falls Church, Virginia, on the seventh floor of the Skyview Executive Center on Leesburg Pike, out of which they ran most of their government operations, their lobbying efforts, and so on.

  This time I parked on the third level of the underground garage. But instead of taking the elevator right up to the seventh floor, I walked up to the street level and took a leisurely stroll around the outside of the building. Checked out the corporate landscaping, the artificial copses of trees out back, the contours of the shallow plot of land on which the building had been sited. Standing on the highest promontory I could find, I took out a pocket monocular spotting scope, located the bank of windows belonging to the offices of A.G. Holdings, which was either Paladin or Paladin’s holding company-but for all intents and purposes, the same thing. After all, it was where Carl Koblenz worked, where he’d told me to come. For about twenty minutes I watched as much of the comings and goings as I could see from that angle.

  It wasn’t like in the movies. I didn’t see much. I was pretty sure I saw Koblenz-I’d seen his picture on Paladin’s website-sitting at his desk, conferring with his assistant and a couple of large men. In any case, I saw enough to get a sense of the flow of office traffic.

  Then I entered the lobby and headed over to the directory sign. Nowhere did the name “Paladin” appear. On the seventh floor was a Japanese intellectual property firm and A.G. Holdings. Paladin’s holding company. Or maybe just another name for Paladin. It made sense. Maybe they didn’t want it publicly known that Paladin’s offices were here. They probably didn’t want protesters or crazed intruders trying to storm the gates.

  “Hey, cookie man!”

  I turned, saw my old friend the security guard, gave him a smile and a wave.

  “Got any more free samples for me?” he said.

  “Next time, I promise. I have an appointment with Paladin. Carl Koblenz.”

  “Oh, yeah? Excellent. Bunch of real big guys work there. Betcha they’ll go crazy for your wife’s cookies.” So: as I thought. A.G. Holdings was Paladin.

  I gave him my name, and he printed out a security pass for me to stick on the front of my shirt.

  I WAS wearing jeans and a slightly grubby polo shirt, partly to remind Koblenz that I wasn’t on official Stoddard Associates business. And to let him know I wasn’t playing by the rules of the suit-and-tie world. Also because it was more comfortable than a suit.

  The elevator rose smoothly and swiftly to the seventh floor. I got out into a small lobby with dark wooden doors at either end. Each door had a brass plaque. One said NAKAMURA & PARTNERS. A law firm, according to the lobby directory sign. The other said A.G. HOLDINGS.

  A small black dome camera, almost undetectable, was mounted high on the wall on Paladin’s side, but not on Nakamura & Partners’ side. That told me Paladin had their own private security system, in addition to whatever the building provided its tenants. I’d have expected nothing less. Mounted to the doorframe was a proximity-key reader, where Paladin’s employees would swipe to enter.

  I pushed the lever handle down and entered a reception area with a long black granite desk.

  The receptionist was a cute young blonde with carefully applied makeup and an expensive haircut.

  “Mr. Heller?” she said.

  “Right.”

  “Please have a seat, and Mr. Koblenz will be right with you.”

  Mounted to the front of the receptionist’s desk was the Paladin logo, a navy blue globe with white continents and white crosshairs superimposed over it. As if to say: We’re taking aim at the world.

  Or maybe: Overcharging governments around the world and killing innocent civilians since 1994.

  The globe reminded me of the one in the Gifford Industries lobby. Maybe all rapacious international firms were required to have a globe in their logo. The coffee table was black and marble and coffin-shaped. There wasn’t much to browse: the Post, the Wall Street Journal, a couple of security magazines. I glanced over the front page of the Journal, but I didn’t have time to read it before the inner door opened and three large guys entered.

  One of them had his right hand in a splint.

  62.

  Hey there, Neil,” I said. “Gosh, what happened to your hand?” Neil Burris just glared at me. He was wearing a shopping-mall suit, not that there was anything wrong with that except that the tailoring obviously wasn’t included. It was too tight across the shoulders and too short in the arms and made him look like a circus gorilla.

  The two other guys also wore cheap suits, which seemed to be the uniform of the Paladin security staff. One of them had longish hair, flecked with gray, and a droopy mustache. He had the lean muscular build of a Navy SEAL. The other looked like something out of WrestleMania-one of those mean-looking three-hundred-pound Ukrainians. He had a jar-head haircut. I recognized him, too.

  He was the one who’d grabbed the surveillance-video DVD from me in Georgetown and in the process smashed my face against the window of my Defender.

  The long-haired guy, who was older and seemed to be in charge, said, “You’re going to have to surrender your cell phone and BlackBerry.”

  “ ‘Surrender’ them?” I said. That was smart of Koblenz, actually. Both cell phones and BlackBerrys could be used as eavesdropping devices. That told me that he wanted to speak freely, which was a good thing. He didn’t want whatever he said to be recorded or transmitted to anyone else.

  The other two tried to stare me down. The pretty receptionist was examining a copy of People the way a rabbi might study the Talmud.

  “Mr. Koblenz won’t meet with you if you have any RF equipment on your person.”

  I shrugged. “I never surrender,” I said.

  He handed me a gray RF-isolation pouch. I’d used pouches like this in secure facilities, but never outside of the military or intelligence community. I slid the BlackBerry and cell phone inside, closed the Velcro flap, and put the pouch into my leather portfolio.

  “Thank you, sir,” said the long-haired one. He also seemed to be the only one allowed to speak. “This way, please.”

  “This is great,” I said. “I even get my own entourage.”

  The long-haired guy waved his proximity badge at the reader mounted next to the inside door. The door buzzed, and he
pushed it open, and the two other guys fell in, Burris beside me and Andre the Giant behind. Either they were trying to intimidate me or they were concerned I might shoplift.

  We walked down a hall that had the generic look of a midrange hotel.

  “Hey, Neil,” I muttered to Burris. “I’m still waiting for your references.”

  He stared straight ahead. His hand and arm were encased in a hard brace made out of some kind of lightweight resin over foam, with Velcro straps around the whole thing.

  “Hello, Mr. Heller.”

  Carl Koblenz was in his late forties but had a youthful appearance, despite the bags under his eyes. He had a pink scrubbed face and clear green eyes and sandy brown hair clipped short. He wore a natty blue blazer over a striped dress shirt and a regimental tie. Maybe the tie was from Eton, where Koblenz went to school, or maybe it was from Sandhurst, where he did his officer training. I’m not very good on British regimental ties.

  “Carl,” I said. We grasped hands firmly. He grasped my hand at the knuckles, so I couldn’t shake back. A power move. He was probably full of them.

  “Thank you for coming out to Falls Church.” He spoke so quietly I could barely hear him.

  “Thank you for taking time to see me.”

  When he’d returned my phone message, I insisted we meet in Washington, and naturally he refused. He was too important a man to leave his office, his power place. He said, in what I surmised was an Eton drawl, “I’m afraid I’ve got a full calendar of appointments, Mr. Heller. I wish I could get out of the office, but I can’t possibly.”

  Just as I’d expected, and hoped, the same reverse psychology that works so well on a three-year-old worked on him, too. I reluctantly agreed to go to the Paladin office in Falls Church.

  “I think you’ve met Neil, haven’t you?”

  “Old friends,” I said. I reached out to shake Burris’s wounded hand, but he didn’t offer it.

  “Don Taylor and Anatoly Bondarchuk,” he said, indicating the others. “I hope you don’t mind if they join us.” Bondarchuk, I assumed, was Andre the Giant.