Faces of the Gone: A Mystery

by Brad Parks

  The Director started talking but I was beyond listening. My brain was trained to seek narratives. And now that the Director’s once-scattered story was falling into place, it was hard to slow the thoughts streaking through my head. All those questions suddenly had found answers.

  Where did 100 percent pure heroin come from? Newark airport. Who was responsible for making seizures at Newark airport? The National Drug Bureau. Who would have unfettered access to the impounded seizures without worrying about chain of custody or being accountable to a higher authority? Field Director Randall N. Meyers.

  Who could have more easily skated under, over, and around the detection of all levels of law enforcement? It wouldn’t be some lab guy. It would be someone deeply embedded in the agency that was . . . what was the speech Monty/Pete had given me? I couldn’t quite summon the language. But it had something to do with being the guys in charge.

  Just look at the way the Director had hopped on the Ludlow Street investigations, claiming jurisdiction before the bodies were even stiff. The overburdened Newark cops were all too happy to give it to him, of course. From that point, the Director could spin the investigation any way he wanted, falsifying evidence, pinning it on someone else, or just forgetting to assign any detectives to the case. Talk about guaranteeing the perfect crime: the guy responsible for bringing the perp to justice was the perp himself.

  And sure, someone in Washington might notice the Newark office hadn’t solved that pesky quadruple homi cide. But what would they care? The Director could please his bosses with other successes. He certainly didn’t lack for motivation: every time his agents made another successful seizure at Newark airport, it was just more supply for his operation.

  The only people who might hold him accountable for the Ludlow Street investigation were the families of the victims— who didn’t have much pull or, in some cases, didn’t even exist—and the press, i.e., me. And when I came inquiring, all the Director had to do was make up a plausible story. In this case, he had made up some ridiculous, impossible-to-confirmor-deny fairy tale about José de Jesús Encarcerón—the equivalent of pinning it on the bogeyman. And he had Monty Pete to parrot it for him to the media.

  Was L. Pete in on it? Of course he was. He was Wanda’s “boss,” the little guy with the suit and the badge that Tynesha sucked off. Or at least that was a reasonable guess. After all, he’d offered to take her to a game at Giants Stadium. He had offered to take me to see the Jets—who, of course, play in Giants Stadium. Nice to know L. Pete held me in the same high esteem as his favorite hooker.

  Suddenly I became aware the Director was standing, rearing to his full six feet five. He was every ounce of three hundred pounds, but his weight was much more solid than I had first surmised. Lift a Honda? Hell, he could lift a Cadillac.

  He was done talking. And he was looking at me like I was supposed to say something.

  “That’s all very interesting,” I said, feeling like the kid in math class who had been caught daydreaming. “What was it that gave it away?”

  “That gave what away?”

  “You know, what you just said,” I said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The thing.”

  “What thing?”

  The Director was staring me down like he was on one of his hunting vacations and I was an antelope at the end of his rifle sight. And—I don’t know why this took me so long to figure out—it suddenly dawned on me that’s exactly what I was. He hadn’t brought me here for a story. And he wasn’t tickling that gun on his shoulder because he liked how it felt.

  He had lured me into his office to kill me. Right here. Right now.

  “Is something the matter?” the Director asked.

  My fight-or- flight response was kicking in, and I could feel those ancient juices that had been saving mankind’s ass for thousands of years surging through me. I’m not sure what prehistoric generations of the Ross family did a hundred millennia ago when faced with a predator on the plains of Africa. But I knew what I was going to do. There was no fighting this guy, who was big, mean, and, oh yeah, armed.

  So I flung myself away from the chair and ran.

  In three long strides, I covered that great tract of carpet and made it to his door. I didn’t know if he was pulling his weapon, if I was about to feel a bullet in the back of my head, or if my sudden move had caught him by surprise. But I wasn’t turning around to check.

  I slammed the door behind me, like that would do some good. I knew L. Pete’s office was to the left so I cut hard to the right, down the hallway in the opposite direction. I heard the Director’s voice from behind the closed door shouting for Monty.

  The fifteenth floor of the National Drug Bureau’s Newark Field Office was one big rectangle, designed completely without imagination. On the exterior side of the hallway, there were offices. On the interior side, there was a mix of offices and what appeared to be secretaries’ stations filled with cubicles.

  Maybe there were hiding places, but damn if I could slow down to find a decent one. I raced past the elevators, knowing they weren’t going to do me any good: I didn’t have time to wait for a car to arrive and, in any event, I didn’t have the swipe card to operate one.

  The stairs were my only shot. But where were the stairs? I looked around for an exit sign.

  “Go that way,” I heard the Director shout at Monty. “Guard the stairs.”

  So much for that.

  I disappeared around the next corner just as the Director had rounded the first one. That gave me about a hundred-foot lead on him but I didn’t dare round another corner. Eventually, I was going to run into Monty coming from the other direction. No time. I had no time.

  I started grabbing at door handles, hoping to find an open office, but none of the doors budged. Goddamn paranoid flatfoot pensioners, locking their offices when they went home at night. Didn’t they ever think about the possibility that a desperate newspaper reporter might need to slip under their desks to escape their homicidal boss?

  I was on my seventh door when, finally, I found the one that had been left slightly ajar. I slipped in and closed it as softly as I could. I had bought myself time, but how much?

  The office was sparse: a desk with a chair, a filing cabinet, a potted plant, and absolutely no place to hide. I reached into my pocket for my cell phone but, of course, it wasn’t there. So I tiptoed to the desk phone and picked up. Hello, 911? I’m trapped in a federal office building where I’m about to be killed by a high- ranking government official. Hello?

  But, no, I couldn’t get that far. I couldn’t even get a normal dial tone— just this monotone buzz. I looked at the phone in frustration. The screen said: “Enter passkey.”

  Of course. Uncle Sam wasn’t going to stand for anyone making free phone calls. The phone wasn’t going to save me.

  I looked at the window, but I was fifteen stories up. There was no surviving that kind of fall. So I studied the phone again. Maybe it might save me. If I got lucky. I punched in 813. My birthday. What the hell. But the line stayed monotone.

  “You have to admit, Carter, my business plan is brilliant, isn’t it?” the Director called out. “I mean, have you ever heard of a better brand name for heroin than ‘The Stuff.’ It’s elegant, don’t you think? It’s going to become the first national heroin brand, you know. It will be like Kleenex, perfectly synonymous with the product it represents.”

  I kept my ear to the phone and soon the line changed to a fast busy signal, like it had grown tired of waiting for me to push additional buttons. Okay, so maybe it was a four-digit passcode. I tried 8137. Pause. Pause. Fast busy signal.

  “You know I’m making more money than I know what to do with?” the Director said, still panting slightly from his sprint. “I’m not sure I could print money as fast as I’m making it. It’s all I can do just to get it laundered and shipped offshore.”

  I keyed in 81378. Pause. Pause. Fast busy signal. Then 081378. This time it went immediately to a fast busy s
ignal. So it was a six-digit code. But even assuming there were a couple hundred employees with passcodes, that made my odds at guessing less than 1 in 1,000.

  “You should come join my operation, Carter,” the Director went on. “You’ve been the only one smart enough to catch on to what’s happening here. No one else has even come close. Not the FBI. Not those supposed geniuses at the CIA. Not the ATF. The most powerful government in the world and I fooled the whole damn thing. But not you. I could use a man like you. Why don’t you come out so we can talk about it? I can make you rich, you know.”

  I rolled my eyes. If I was smarter than the CIA, what the hell made him think I was dumb enough to step outside the office door and greatly hasten my own demise?

  The Director’s voice was getting louder—and closer.

  “You can’t hide forever,” he bellowed. “There’s not another employee due on this floor until Monday at eight A.M. I’ve got all the time I need to find you. Come on out and we’ll talk this through.”

  I could hear him opening doors one by one. Obviously, he had some kind of master key and was going office to office looking for me.

  “Don’t even think of escaping,” he called out. “We’ve got holding cells on every floor. The place is designed so you can’t escape. We’ve hired experts to expose flaws in our security system by escaping, and even they couldn’t do it.”

  I was sure I couldn’t, either. But I could do a little better job concealing myself. As softly as I could, being mindful that even the slightest squeak could be deadly, I stood up on the desk and slid open one of the ceiling panels. That was always how they did it in the movies, right? Climb up in the ceiling, replace the panel, and you were as good as invisible.

  Except, of course, when you were on the top floor and it was just a drop ceiling with nothing above it but a concrete wall. I couldn’t even climb around in the space between the real ceiling and the drop ceiling—there was nothing that would come close to supporting my weight.

  So, in short, I had no communications, no place to hide, and absolutely no way out.

  Sorry, Mrs. Ross. Your boy is flat-out hosed.

  There was going to be a showdown, and it was going to come soon. I looked around the room for some kind of weapon, pulling on desk and cabinet drawers to see if there was something sharp inside. A letter opener? A fountain pen? Something?

  But even the fed who had been sloppy enough to leave his door slightly ajar had been careful enough to lock everything else tight. So I grabbed the only thing in the room that looked like it could do a little damage: the plant. The pot was made out of terra-cotta, which wasn’t exactly known as the world’s hardest substance. But maybe if I swung fast enough and connected with something soft and vital, the Director would be the first human being to experience Death by Ficus. Then I could take my chances with Monty.

  I hid by the side of the door, hoping the Director might lead with a particularly vulnerable part of his head. I listened as the sound of the Director trying locks inched ever closer. He was perhaps three or four rooms away and closing in fast.

  I

  don’t know how long I stood there, ficus in hand, waiting for the end. I was keeping myself so still, so quiet, so alert for any tiny noise that when I finally did hear a sound—a series of loud and thunderous ones—I nearly dropped my plant.

  It was a door slamming open and dozens of men rushing onto the floor. There was shouting and struggling and grunting. There were loud orders being barked in rapid succession. Then there was just one voice, and it was asking for me.

  “Mr. Ross? This is the Tactical Response Team. Mr. Ross, can you hear me?”

  I almost emerged from my hiding spot, but stopped myself. Did I really know who the good guys were? Was this just a ploy by the Director to flush me out? Did he have a Tactical Response Team—or guys who could pretend to be a Tactical Response Team—at his disposal?

  “Mr. Ross? Mr. Ross? Can you hear me?”

  Staying put. I was staying put. And staying quiet.

  “I don’t know if he’s up here. Maybe he’s hiding somewhere.”

  Then I heard a radio squawk and a sweet, squelchy response poured out of it.

  “Tell him if he doesn’t come out, he’s not getting any nooky to night,” Tina Thompson said.

  “I surrender,” I yelled. “Tell her I surrender.”

  I walked out of the office to find the hallway filled with men in riot gear. Director Randall Meyers was lying facedown on the floor, his hands and legs bound, his mouth shut. Monty was also bound, but he was whimpering softly.

  “Are you okay, Mr. Ross?” one of the riot cops asked me.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Sound as a pound.”

  “Is there any reason you’re carrying that tree, sir?” he asked.

  I still had a death grip on the ficus.

  “This tree and I have been through a lot,” I said. “I think I’d like to keep it.”

  The guy nodded. “Fine by me, sir. You have some friends downstairs who would like to see you.”

  I rode down the elevator with six heavily armed men, enjoying the knowledge that none of them wanted to shoot me. When I stepped out in the lobby, I was able to put my tree down just in time before Tina and Tommy pounced on me.

  “You’re an idiot,” Tina murmured as she nestled her face in my neck. The three of us stood there for a long minute, clutching each other. I released them when I saw a tall man with a thick head of white hair reaching out to shake my hand.

  “Hello, Carter,” he said. “Irving Wallace.”

  I grasped his hand and pumped, still bewildered.

  “You? So . . . how . . . what . . . I don’t know where to start,” I said.

  “How about: How did we find you?” Tina suggested.

  “Yes. Right. How did you find me?”

  “I followed you,” Tina said, delighted by her own cleverness. “I’ve been following you all day long. I was sitting five booths behind you at the I-HOP and you didn’t even notice. You’d make a crummy spy.”

  “Okay, but how did you know I was in trouble up there?”

  “That’s where Tommy and I come in,” Irving said. “You’re lucky that he’s a crummy spy, too.”

  “Aww, come on,” Tommy complained. “I wasn’t that bad.”

  “I saw him sitting on my street, not looking at anything but my house,” Irving said. “I figured he was casing my place to rob it and I wanted to have a little chat with him.”

  Tommy jumped in.

  “I was starting to hightail it out of there, but as Irving got closer he took his hat off,” Tommy said. “Suddenly I could tell he wasn’t the man from the sketch. Way too much hair. Not nearly enough neck. And he obviously didn’t weigh three hundred pounds.”

  Sure enough, Irving Wallace looked to be two hundred, tops, with a runner’s build.

  “So I slowed down and talked to him. After I proved to him I wasn’t a crook, and he proved to me he wasn’t a crook, we started talking like normal law-abiding people,” Tommy said. “I told him what I knew. He told me what he knew. And it kind of fell in place.”

  “I had been suspicious for months,” Irving said. “Remember how I told you every sample of heroin comes with its own unique fingerprint? I started noticing that we were getting street samples that looked identical to what the National Drug Bureau had been seizing at the airport.”

  “And a light went on in your head,” I said.

  “No, not at first,” Wallace said. “I thought it was some strange coincidence or had some kind of benign explanation. But it kept happening. So I started paying careful attention, asking questions, keeping records, that sort of thing. The clincher was actually those samples of ‘The Stuff’ you gave me. I knew I had seen that signature on a shipment that had been seized by the NDB three months ago.

  “Anyway,” Wallace continued. “I had a guy do some snooping for me and I found out that particu lar stash was supposed to be in the Newark Field Office’s confiscation vau
lt. There’s only one person in an NDB field office with free access to the vault: the field director. My snoop called me on Saturday morning to confirm it all. That’s when I started calling you.”

  “A nd here I thought you were only inviting me to your house for brunch so you could kill me,” I said.

  The elevator opened and we moved aside to make way for a phalanx of riot police escorting a manacled Randall Meyers, still stoic, out the door. Monty/Pete, still sniveling, was right behind him, also in handcuffs. The lobby filled with the sound of the cops’ rubber- soled shoes squeaking on the highly polished marble floor.

  “God, I’m glad we nailed him,” Irving said. “To think of how that man violated the trust in . . . don’t get me started. Anyway, where were we?”

  “I was accusing you of wanting to kill me,” I said helpfully.

  “Oh, right,” Irving said. “The real reason we needed to talk in person was so I could show you how exact the match was on those heroin samples. I ended up showing it to Tommy instead.”

  “I tried to call you and tell you what was going on,” Tommy said as they exited. “But your cell phone just kept ringing through to voice mail.”

  “It had been confiscated,” I said.

  “Oh. Well, then I called Tina,” Tommy said. “I told her ‘the Director’ from the memo was the field director of the National Drug Bureau’s Newark Office and she was like, ‘Oh, my God, Carter is there right now.’ ”

  “Actually, I think I said something slightly stronger than that,” Tina interjected, snaking her arm around my waist and holding it there.

  “That’s when Irving called his people and made things happen,” Tommy finished.

  “Yeah, who are those people, anyway?” I asked.

  “No comment,” Wallace said, smiling. “I just hope the U.S. Attorney is going to be able to put a case together.”

  “I don’t know if it would be considered admissible, but you think a taped confession would help?” I said, drawing the recorder out of my pocket.