Vanished

by Joseph Finder

  To anyone watching, she wasn’t doing anything furtive. She was going into her boss’s office. But she couldn’t help being nervous.

  His BlackBerry wasn’t where he normally left it, on the left side of his desk.

  “Can I get you a sandwich?”

  Noreen was standing in the doorway, hands folded across her ample bosom.

  “That would be great.”

  Go, she thought. Just leave me alone.

  “The usual? Cracked pepper turkey on wheat, mustard and lettuce, no cheese or mayo?”

  “Perfect. Thanks.” She smiled, examined Leland’s desk, intent and focused and very, very busy. She straightened a pile of folders. Looked up, saw Noreen still standing there.

  Noreen smiled back, seemingly about to say something, then turned and left.

  She waited until she heard the glass doors of the executive suite close.

  On the floor next to the desk, on the far side, Leland had left his briefcase. A battered old cordovan leather case handed down from his father.

  She lifted the flap, found his BlackBerry in one of the front pockets.

  Slipped it out.

  Told herself that she was checking on something.

  Her mouth was dry.

  By then, Noreen would have been in the dining room downstairs, waiting on line for sandwiches. Leland was in his budget meeting. She looked at her watch. The meeting would go on for another twenty minutes at least.

  She powered his BlackBerry on. The T-Mobile screen came up, then a message: HANDHELD IS LOCKED.

  Since when did Leland use the password protection on his BlackBerry?

  She clicked UNLOCK.

  ENTER PASSWORD:

  She hesitated. Entered the password he used for his regular office e-mail account. She’d helped him come up with something he’d remember: Don17. For his favorite Dallas Cowboys player, Don Meredith, the famous quarterback from the 1960s, plus his jersey number.

  INCORRECT PASSWORD!

  She clicked ok, and a message came up: ENTER PASSWORD (2/10):

  Meaning the second try of ten. What would happen when she hit ten? She tried again, entered “DandyDon17.”

  INCORRECT PASSWORD!

  What was it? She tried several more variations on Don Meredith, kept getting INCORRECT PASSWORD!

  On the fifth try, it told her to enter the word “blackberry” to keep going. She did, then tried other passwords. His daughter’s name. His wife’s name. His birthday. The year of his birth.

  Before her tenth try, a warning came up. One more incorrect entry and the handheld would be wiped.

  “No line today.”

  Noreen was standing before her. She handed Lauren a sandwich wrapped in brown recycled chlorine-free deli wrap. “That’s Leland’s BlackBerry, isn’t it?”

  Lauren felt a jolt in her stomach. Looked up, a bored expression on her face. “Oh, yeah,” she said with an exasperated sigh. “If he’s going to ask me to install a firmware update one more time…” She let her voice trail off. “Anyway, thanks.”

  “Sure,” Noreen said, a suspicious look in her eyes. “Anytime.”

  68.

  My apartment was dusty and had that closed-up smell, since-between travel and staying at Lauren’s house-I had barely been there in weeks. But it made for a convenient command center. Merlin took the afternoon off-his boss didn’t mind, since the work had been slow-and this time I’d insisted he accept payment. We devised a plan, came up with a shopping list, then split up. It was a little like a scavenger hunt. A handful of disposable cell phones. A laser pointer from an office-supply store. From a hardware store, a couple of chandelier bulbs, a few bags of plaster of paris, some bell wire. From an auto-parts store, aluminum powder, which is used to stop leaks in radiators. From a supermarket, a couple of five-pound bags of granulated sugar and some vegetable oil. Three ski masks from a sporting-goods store. A Super Soaker pressurized water gun from a toy store.

  The rest of the equipment was stuff Merlin had in his garage at home.

  He was easily able to find white smoke grenades at a gun shop. By far the hardest item to find was potassium chlorate. It’s one of those chemicals that the U.S. government tries to control, particularly since 9/11, but Merlin was able to turn up a couple of dusty bags at a garden center, where it was sold as weed killer.

  AT FIFTEEN minutes after midnight I was back at the office building on Leesburg Pike in Falls Church.

  The ten-story building was mostly dark, but not completely. Lights were on in a few windows here and there, though none on the seventh floor. Paladin Worldwide’s Virginia office was a nine-to-five business.

  I positioned myself at the back of the west wing of the building-the western leg of the inverted V-in the location I’d picked out earlier in the day. From there, behind a row of perfectly spaced trees that had been planted to provide an illusion of woods for the building’s tenants, I knew I wouldn’t be spotted if anyone happened to be looking out the window. Though at that time of night, there wasn’t likely to be anyone.

  The mirrored blue glass skin of the building looked black and opaque in the moonlight. There was a little ambient light from the distant streetlights. The wind howled, gusting a few drops of rain. I looked up. The sky was black and murky and threatening. It appeared that it might really start coming down at any moment.

  Much quieter here at midnight than it had been during the day, when the traffic on the Leesburg Pike was a constant high roar. Instead there was only the occasional blat of a motorcycle, the full-throated growl of a truck.

  I looked at my watch, unzipped the nylon Under Armour duffel, and pulled out a small black sphere, soft and squishy.

  A stress ball, roughly the size of a baseball. Lycra over a semisolid gel. Apparently squeezing this little ball helped office workers relieve the tensions of their workday.

  I lobbed it at a second-floor window. It was dense enough to make a thud as it struck the glass, but not hard enough to break it.

  Then I hurled a second one, and a third, and a fourth. All at the same window.

  A few seconds later, I heard the rapid whooping klaxon, an alarm that was broadcast over a couple of sirens inside and out. The exterior windows were wired to glass-break detectors. That meant they’d detect the specific shock frequencies generated by breaking glass-or simply by the vibration caused by a good hard impact that didn’t actually break the glass.

  I checked my watch again, then strolled over to the Defender, parked on a side street in direct view of the building’s main entrance. I got in and waited.

  The security guard showed up nine minutes later.

  He got out of his company vehicle, a Hyundai Sonata, the logo painted on the side. Middle-aged, a comb-over, gin-blossom face. A blue uniform. Armed only with a walkie-talkie. A retired cop, by the look of him, which meant that he’d do everything by the book.

  He did.

  He switched on a flashlight and walked around the perimeter of the building, shining his light up and down the glass exterior, looking for a broken window, for evidence of any intruders. Most office buildings don’t have glass-break sensors above the third floor, on the theory that no one’s going to break a window and try to enter that high up.

  So he only had to check out the windows on the first two stories, which wouldn’t take long. Once he realized there weren’t any broken windows, he’d relax. He’d know he wasn’t dealing with a burglary or even an accident but a technical glitch of some sort. Something had set off the glass-break sensor, he’d figure. A stray gust of wind. Or a defective window frame. Maybe he’d investigate further inside, but his heart wouldn’t be in it.

  He finished his survey of the building’s exterior in six minutes, which was longer than I expected. He was more thorough than he had to be. Definitely a retired cop. A lot of rent-a-cops who haven’t been in law enforcement will do the bare minimum. This guy was going beyond that. He was doing his job. I liked that.

  Plus, it helped me out considerably. I
f he limited his inspection to a cursory walk around the building, I’d be screwed.

  But he didn’t. He came around to the front of the building again, casting a cone of light in front of him. He took a key from a large ring on his belt and unlocked a door to the left of the revolving doors.

  I watched him disappear into the lobby. He was probably going up to the second floor to investigate further, whether by the stairs or the elevator. But I could tell from his body language that he’d already decided there was no crime in progress.

  He didn’t lock the door behind him.

  I didn’t think he would-it’s the sort of detail most people, even security guards, don’t think about-but if he had locked the door, then I would have gone to Plan B. Which was to wait until he’d left, gone back to the monitoring station, and then lob some more stress balls at the window.

  And he’d come back again, annoyed at being pulled away from his book or his newspaper or his TV show, and he’d investigate again, but this time it would be more perfunctory. He’d be convinced that there was some mechanical glitch in the system. Eventually, after two or three callbacks, he’d leave the door open behind him. They always did.

  But he’d just saved me a half hour or more.

  I moved the Defender to the back of the building, then got out and crossed the narrow strip of lawn that I figured wasn’t covered by the CCTV cameras mounted on this side of the building. There are always blind spots.

  I reached the southwest corner of the building, then risked a quick appearance on a security monitor-I had no choice-by sidling close to the building and slipping in through the unlocked door.

  Of course, if it had been daytime, the Paladin keycard I’d filched from Don Taylor-swapped, really-would have gotten me in to both the building and the Paladin office suite on the seventh floor. But then the Paladin office suite wouldn’t have been unoccupied. And that wouldn’t have worked at all.

  So I had another plan, one that required the help of my friends and a shopping list of supplies and some carefully coordinated execution.

  And the one thing that you can’t buy or plan on or wheedle. The one thing you can never count on.

  Luck.

  69.

  Fortunately, I only had to hide in the utility closet off the lobby for fourteen minutes. The space was small and close, the smell of rancid wet mops and strong cleaning fluids overpowering. I heard the elevator doors ping, then open. The squawk of the guard’s walkie-talkie.

  The click of his heels against the marble tile as he walked to the exit.

  I waited another ten minutes. I wasn’t able to hear his car start up, not at this distance. But by the time I emerged, his car was gone.

  He’d found nothing. He would blame it on errant technology, the bane of our existence. He’d done his job, and he’d served my purpose, and he wouldn’t be back.

  Then I hit a preprogrammed number on my cell.

  Three minutes later I unlocked the side door for Dorothy and Merlin.

  “It’s the A-Team,” I said.

  “I guess that makes me Mr. T,” Dorothy said.

  “Wasn’t that show a little before your time, Dorothy?” I said.

  “Honey, I watched it in reruns, come on.”

  “Never seen it,” Merlin said, sounding cranky. He was carrying a couple of green clothlike recyclable shopping bags from Whole Foods, which held the improvised devices we’d assembled.

  I placed one of them outside the lobby men’s room, where it couldn’t be seen through the glass doors at the front of the building. Then I led them through the lobby to the fire stairs at the back. The door was unlocked.

  Each floor was accessible from inside the stairwells, of course-it’s a fire-safety law-so I was able to make a quick stop on the second floor to drop off the second device. When I returned to the stairwell, I noticed that Merlin was looking even more sullen, and I decided to say something.

  “You’re having second thoughts.”

  He nodded.

  “It’s too late.” I gave him a steely stare, and he returned it.

  Then I half smiled, and said, “Look, Merlin. There are no guarantees. We have a solid plan of action and a fallback, and at a certain point we just have to rely on luck.”

  “Never believed in luck,” he said. The stairwell was dark and empty, and his words echoed hollowly.

  “I think luck is essential. You can never count on it, I agree. But we don’t have much choice. Bail if you want to. I’ll understand.”

  We stood there in silence for almost a minute. Dorothy looked from Merlin to me and waited.

  Finally, he said, “I just want to be clear about something. This isn’t for you, or your brother, or whatever kind of revenge thing you’ve got going on. This is because I hate everything that Paladin stands for.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Just to be clear,” he said. He turned and started climbing the stairs, and Dorothy and I followed.

  She flashed me a furtive smile. “How many floors?”

  “We’re going to seven,” I said.

  “Why the hell couldn’t we take the elevator?”

  She was just complaining for the sake of complaining. She knew that the stairs were at the end of the lobby farthest from the Paladin surveillance camera, which was trained on the elevators.

  Neither Merlin nor I said anything as we climbed.

  “I’m not doing the elliptical trainer for a week,” she muttered, breathing hard.

  Then Merlin said, “The problem is, we’re all relying on your observations from one quick walk-through. You didn’t have a chance to get in there and really look around. We really don’t know what their full security setup is like.”

  He was right: All we knew was what I’d seen. No keypad access at the door to Paladin’s offices. That was so the cleaning people could get in at night. Don Taylor’s keycard would get us right in, I expected.

  That was assuming, naturally, that Carl Koblenz hadn’t gone into some state of DEFCON 1 alert after discovering that three of his professionals had been dispatched by a guy whose field skills he’d probably expected were pretty damned rusty. I hoped, and assumed, that he’d thought it through and decided that my response had been mere, understandable, self-preservation: I didn’t want to be taken in and questioned by three bad guys. Who could blame me?

  He wouldn’t think to check his guys’ keycards to see whether they’d been tampered with. He wasn’t going to deactivate any of them. That I was sure of. He’d never expect me to come back in the middle of the night.

  At least, I didn’t think so, and one way or the other, we were about to find out soon.

  In terms of surveillance, there appeared to be a single CCTV camera in the lobby outside their main office door, fixed and not pan-tilt-zoom. Another camera inside, in the receptionist’s area. No other visible surveillance cameras. It was possible that they were monitored live somewhere, but that wasn’t likely. That would be overkill for an office that mostly handled administrative stuff. I’ve done jobs at corporation headquarters that had more than two hundred security cameras and maybe three monitors. Live monitoring at night, for a small office like this, was almost unheard of.

  We stood at the door to the seventh floor. I pushed the crash bar, opening the door an inch or so. Enough to confirm that it wasn’t locked from inside.

  “I’m not going to argue with you,” I said. “It’s a crapshoot. You’re just going to have to rely on me.”

  Merlin sighed, long and loud.

  Dorothy made a sarcastic mmm-hmmm sound. “Then we’re all screwed,” she said.

  70.

  Merlin was the first through the door. He wore a black ski mask, which made him look like a small-town bank robber. He quickly found the surveillance camera, mounted on the wall outside the Paladin office, then carefully aimed a laser pointer at its lens. The tiny laser beam would dazzle the camera’s sensor, temporarily blinding it so that it would see only a white blur.

  He hel
d it steady, aimed at the lens, while walking slowly toward Paladin’s mahogany front doors. Dorothy and I followed. I pulled out the Super Soaker water gun from my duffel bag, pumped it twenty times or so to build up pressure, then pointed it at the camera lens. A thin stream of fluid jetted out: a mix of vegetable oil and water. This coated the lens with a cloudy film of grease, which would fuzz out the image for as long as the grease film remained. Even if someone were monitoring the feed live, unlikely though that was, they’d blame the camera. Merlin lowered the laser pointer and kept on going.

  I passed the Paladin keycard over the reader and heard a click. The door was unlocked. Merlin readied the laser pointer in his right hand and switched on his LED flashlight in the other. Then I pulled the door open a few inches.

  “Where the hell-?” he said.

  “Ten o’clock,” I said.

  “How high?”

  I closed my eyes, called the memory of Paladin’s lobby to mind. “Roughly eight feet.”

  “ ‘Roughly’ doesn’t help.”

  “You’re wearing a mask.”

  He shrugged, stepped into the dark office. He planted his feet and directed a beam of light into the reception area. Then he raised the laser pointer and waited a few seconds. “Okay.”

  We entered behind him, and I squirted that camera with the Super Soaker as well.

  Merlin washed the walls with the LED beam, his eyes scanning the room quickly. “Motion detectors?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You’re sure.”

  “No.”

  “Great,” Dorothy said.

  “Not likely,” I said. “Building cleaners probably come in here at night.”

  “Not likely,” Merlin echoed. “Probably.” He lowered the flashlight beam to the floor.

  “Life’s a risk,” I said.

  “Especially around you,” Dorothy said. “Are we cool here? I’m going to get to work.”

  I nodded, handed her an LED flashlight, and shined mine along the floor to the next room, illuminating a path to the windows. The Paladin offices seemed a lot smaller in the dark. Starting at the leftmost window, I tugged the venetian blinds closed. Then I directed Dorothy to the desk where Koblenz’s admin, Eleanor Appleby, normally sat.