Buried Secrets

by Joseph Finder

  Within it were lots of moving video windows. In some of them were second-tier celebs like Paris Hilton. In others, teenage girls wearing low-cut tank tops and a lot of eye makeup were making provocative poses, and doing suggestive things with their tongues. Some of them had pierced lips.

  “What is this?” Marcus said. “Some kind of pornography site?”

  “Teenage girls and guys sit in front of the camera on their computer and talk to each other,” Dorothy said. “Sometimes more than talk.”

  Dorothy tapped and moused again, entered some text, scrolled down, clicked and clicked some more.

  And then a still photo of Alexa popped up.

  A school portrait, it looked like, from when she was younger. Her blond hair cut into bangs, a white headband, wearing a plaid jumper, probably a school uniform. Very sweet and innocent. Before the trouble started.

  “Oh, my God,” Marcus moaned. “Oh, my God. They put her picture up here where anyone can see it? What—what are they trying to do?”

  Green letters at the top of Alexa’s photo said ENTER CHAT.

  “Chat?” Marcus said. “What’s this—who am I chatting with? What the hell?”

  Dorothy clicked on it, and a log-in window appeared. She entered the user name and password they’d supplied. For a while nothing happened. She sidled over to her laptop, and Marshall and I came closer to the screen to watch.

  Then a big window popped up with another still photo of Alexa.

  Only this looked like it had been taken recently.

  She appeared to be sleeping. Her eyes were closed, with dark smudges of eye makeup that made her look like a raccoon. Her hair was scraggly. She looked terrible.

  Then I realized this wasn’t a still photo at all. It was live video.

  You could see slight motion as she shifted in her sleep. The streaming video had all the production values of a snuff film: the camera too close to her face, the image grainy and the focus tight, and the light strange, green-saturated, as if taken with an infrared camera.

  Indicating that she was in the dark.

  A loud metallic voice: “Alexa, wake up! It’s time to say hello to your father.” A man’s voice. A pronounced accent: Eastern European, maybe.

  Alexa’s eyes came open, her eyes staring wide, her mouth agape.

  Marcus gasped. “That’s her!” he said, probably because he couldn’t think of anything else. Then: “She’s alive. God almighty, she’s alive.”

  Alexa’s eyes were shifting back and forth.

  Unsettled. Panicky.

  Something about her face looked different, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

  She said, “Dad?”

  Marcus stood up, shouted, “Lexie. Baby! I’m here!”

  “She can’t hear you,” Dorothy said.

  “Dad?” Alexa said again.

  The amplified voice said, “You may speak, Alexa.”

  Her words came all in a rush, a high-pitched shriek. “Dad, oh God, please, they’ve got me in this—”

  The sound of her voice abruptly cut out and the accented voice said, “Follow the script exactly, Alexa, or you will never talk to your father, or anyone else, again.”

  Now she was screaming, her eyes bulging, face flushed, head moving side to side, but there was no sound, and after ten more seconds the window went black.

  Marcus said, “No!” and he catapulted himself out of his chair, touching the screen with his stubby fingers. “My baby! My baby!”

  “The link’s gone down,” Dorothy said. The video image had once again become Alexa’s school portrait. The sweet little girl with headband and bangs. “She didn’t cooperate. She was trying to tell us something—maybe her location.”

  Marcus seemed to bob and weave, unsteady on his feet. Terror rilled his forehead.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “Everything about this says professional. They’d never have let her see where they took her.” I glanced over at Dorothy’s laptop, saw a column of white numbers whizzing by on a black background, way too fast to read. “What’d you get?” I asked her. “Can you tell where the signal’s coming from?”

  She shook her head. “Looks like CamFriendz is based in the Philippines, believe it or not. That’s where the video feed originated. So that’s a dead end too. These guys probably have a free account. They could be anywhere in the world.”

  Marcus began to teeter, and I caught him before he sank to the floor. He hadn’t passed out, not quite. I set him down gently in the chair.

  “They killed her,” he said. He stared dully into some middle distance.

  “No,” I said. “That’s not in their interest. They need her for ransom.”

  He moaned, covered his face with his hands.

  Dorothy got up and excused herself and said she wanted to give us some privacy to talk. She took a second laptop from her Gucci bag and went to work in the sitting area off the kitchen to try tracing the IP address.

  “YOU WERE expecting something like this, weren’t you?” I said.

  “Every day, Nick,” he said sadly.

  “After what happened to Alexa at the Chestnut Hill Mall that time.”

  “Right,” he said softly.

  “What do you think they want?”

  He didn’t reply.

  “You’d pay any amount of money to get her back, wouldn’t you?”

  Now he just stared straight ahead, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  I leaned forward in my chair and spoke quietly to him. “Don’t. If they contact you and demand money wired to some offshore account, I know you’d do it in a heartbeat. I know you. But I need you to promise me you won’t. Not until you consult with me and we make sure it’s done the right way. If you want to get your daughter back alive.”

  He kept staring, his eyes focusing on something that wasn’t in the room.

  “Marshall?” I said. “I want your word on this.”

  “Fine.”

  “You never did call the police, did you?” I said.

  “I—”

  I interrupted him before he could go on. “You need to know something about me,” I said. “I don’t like being lied to by my clients. I took this job because of Alexa, but if I find out you’re lying, or holding anything back, I’ll walk away. Simple as that. Got it?”

  He looked at me for a long time, blinking fast.

  “I’ll give you amnesty for anything you did or said up till now,” I said. “But from here on out, any lie, and I’m off the case. So let’s try again: Did you call the police?”

  He paused. Then, eyes closed, he shook his head. “No.”

  “Okay. This is a start. Why not?”

  “Because I knew they’d just bring in the FBI.”

  “So?”

  “All the FBI cares about is putting me in prison. Making an example of me.”

  “And why’s that? Do they have a case?”

  He hesitated. Then: “Yes.”

  I looked at him. “They do?”

  He just looked back.

  “If you don’t tell me everything now, I’ll walk.”

  “You wouldn’t do that to Alexa.”

  “I haven’t done anything to Alexa.” I stood up. “And I’m sure the FBI will do everything possible to find her.”

  “Nick,” he said. “You can’t do this.”

  “Watch me.”

  I walked toward his office door.

  “Wait!” Marcus called after me. “Nick, listen to me.”

  I turned back.

  “Yes?”

  “Even if they asked for ransom, I couldn’t pay it.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  His face was full of humiliation and anger and deep sadness all at once. A terrible, vulnerable expression.

  “I have nothing,” he said. “Completely wiped out. I’m ruined.”

  PART TWO

  Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.

  —FRIEDRICH NIET
ZSCHE, DAYBREAK

  27.

  “It’s all gone,” Marcus said. He spoke without affect, like he’d been anaesthetized.

  “You have ten billion dollars under management.”

  “Had. It’s all gone.”

  “Ten billion dollars is gone?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s not possible.” Then I had a terrible thought. “My God, you never had it in the first place, did you? Right? It was never real, was it?”

  Marcus stiffened. “I’m no Bernie Madoff,” he said, offended.

  I looked at him, cocked my head. He looked gutted, defeated. “So what happened?”

  He looked down. For the first time I noticed the age spots mottling his face. The network of lines and wrinkles suddenly seemed to have gotten deeper and more pronounced. He looked pale and his eyes were sunken. “About six or seven months ago my CFO noticed something so bizarre he thought we’d accidentally gotten the wrong statements. He saw that all of our stock holdings had been sold. All the proceeds were wired out, along with all the rest of our cash on hand.”

  “Wired where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “By who?”

  “If I knew, I’d have it back.”

  “Well, you have a prime broker, don’t you, that does all your trading?”

  “Sure.”

  “So if they screwed up, they have to unwind it.”

  Slowly he shook his head. “All the trades were authorized, using our codes and passwords. Our broker says they’re not responsible—there’s nothing they can do about it.”

  “Isn’t there one guy there who’s in charge of your account?”

  “Of course. But by the time we discovered what had happened, he’d left the bank. A few days later he was found in Venezuela. Dead. He and his entire family had been killed in a car accident in Caracas.”

  “What brokerage firm do you use?” I was expecting to hear Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley or Credit Suisse, one of the major players, and I was surprised when he answered, “Banco Transnacional de Panamá.”

  “Panama?” I said. “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Half of our funds are offshore, you know. Arabs and the like—those are the ones with the real money.”

  But I was dubious. Panama was the Switzerland of Latin America: the land of bank secrecy, an excellent place to stash money with no questions asked. Even more secretive, actually.

  Panama meant you had something to hide.

  “Suddenly Marcus Capital Management had no capital to manage. We had nothing. Nothing.” A vein throbbed along the ridge of his forehead. I was afraid he might have a coronary right there in front of me.

  “I think I see where this is going. You couldn’t tell your investors they’d lost all their money. Right?”

  “Some of them had hundreds of millions of dollars invested with me. What was I going to tell them, I screwed up? I couldn’t face that. You know I never had a single losing quarter, all those decades? No one’s ever had a record like that. I mean, the sainted Warren Buffett lost almost ten percent a few years back.”

  “So what’d you do, Marshall? Dummy up statements like Bernie Madoff?”

  “No! I needed cash. Lots and lots of it. Massive infusions. And no bank in the world would lend me money.”

  “Ah, gotcha. You took in new money. So you could make it look like you hadn’t lost anything.”

  He nodded, shrugged.

  “That’s still fraud,” I said.

  “That wasn’t my intent!”

  “No, of course not. So who’d you take money from?”

  “You don’t want to know, Nickeleh. Believe me, you don’t want to know. The less you know, the better.”

  “At this point I think you better tell me.”

  “Let’s just say you’re not going to run into any of these guys at the Union League Club, okay? These are bad men, Nicky.” A twitch had started in his left eye.

  “Let me hear some names.”

  “You ever hear of Joost Van Zandt?”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Van Zandt was a Dutch arms dealer whose private militia had supported Liberia’s murderous dictator, Charles Taylor.

  “Desperate, more like,” he said. “How about Agim Grazdani? Or Juan Carlos Santiago Guzman?”

  Agim Grazdani was the head of the Albanian mafia. His portfolio included gunrunning, human trafficking, and counterfeiting. When Italy’s top prosecutor issued a warrant for his arrest a couple of years ago, the prosecutor and his entire family turned up in the meat locker of the justice minister’s favorite restaurant in Rome, their bodies dismembered and frozen.

  Since then Italian prosecutors have been too busy with other cases to go after him.

  Juan Carlos Santiago Guzman, the leader of Colombia’s Norte del Valle cartel, was one of the most violent narcotics traffickers in the world. He’d altered his appearance through repeated plastic surgeries, was believed to be living somewhere in Brazil, and basically made Pablo Escobar look like Mister Rogers.

  “And the damned Russians,” he said. “Stanislav Luzhin and Roman Navrozov and Oleg Uspensky.”

  “My God, Marshall, what the hell was the idea?” I said.

  “I thought I could get the ship righted with all the new cash and I’d be back on my feet. But it wasn’t enough to meet all the margin calls. My whole firm went down the crapper anyway.”

  “The new money with the old.”

  He nodded.

  “Guzman and Van Zandt and Grazdani and the Russians,” I said.

  “Right.”

  “You lost all their money too.”

  He winced.

  “You know, when Bernie Madoff’s investors lost everything the most they could do was cry in front of a judge. These guys aren’t the crying type. So which one of them took your daughter?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I’m going to need a list of all of your investors.”

  “You’re not walking away? Thank you.” Tears sprang to Marcus’s eyes. He gripped my forearms in his bear paws. “Thank you, Nick.”

  “A complete list,” I said. “Every single name. No omissions.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

  “I also want a list of all your employees, past and present. Including household staff, past and present. Personnel files too.”

  There was a knock on the door.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” Dorothy said, “but the live feed’s back up.”

  “The feed?” Marcus said, confused.

  “It’s Alexa,” she said. “The video stream is back online.”

  28.

  We crowded around the monitor. Marcus hunched forward in his chair while Dorothy worked the keyboard.

  “It just started up,” Dorothy said.

  The same still photo of Alexa as a girl. Superimposed over it, in green letters: LIVE and ENTER CHAT. Dorothy moved the mouse and clicked.

  Then Alexa’s face appeared again. That same extreme close-up. Eyes brimming with tears.

  “Dad?” she said. She wasn’t looking straight at the camera but slightly off to the side, as if she didn’t know for sure where the lens was. “Dad?”

  Marcus said, “Lexie? Daddy’s right here.”

  “She still can’t hear you,” Dorothy said.

  “Daddy, they’re not going to let me go unless you give them something, okay?”

  The picture was sort of stuttery and jittery. Not very high quality. Like TV reception used to be in the days before cable.

  “Um … first, they say if you contact the police or anything they’re just going to…”

  She blinked rapidly, tears streaming down her cheeks. She shuddered.

  “I’m so cold and I’m so afraid that I’m too weak and I can’t change,” she said suddenly, almost in a monotone. “I—I twist and turn in the darkest space and … I don’t want to be here anymore, Daddy.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Dorothy said.

  “Shhh!” Marcus said. “Pl
ease!”

  There was a low rumble, and suddenly the image pixelated: It froze, turned into thousands of tiny squares that broke apart, and then the screen went dark.

  “No!” Marcus said. “Not again! Why is this happening?”

  But then the video was back. Alexa was saying, “They want Mercury, Daddy, okay? You have to give them Mercury in the raw. I—I don’t know what that means. They said you will. Please, Daddy, I don’t think I can hold out any longer.”

  And the image went dark once again. We waited a few seconds, but this time it didn’t come back.

  “Is that it?” Marcus said, looking wildly from me to Dorothy and back. “That’s the end of the video?”

  “I’m sure it’s not the last,” I said.

  “IR camera for sure,” Dorothy said. Infrared, she meant. The reason for the video’s monochrome, greenish cast. A video camera like that would have its own built-in infrared light source, invisible to the human eye.

  “They’re holding her in total darkness,” I said.

  Marcus shouted, “My little Lexie! What are they doing to her? Where is she?”

  “They don’t want us to know yet,” I said. “It’s part of the pressure, the … cruelty. The not-knowing.”

  Marcus put a hand over his eyes. His lower lip was trembling, his face was flushed. He was sobbing noiselessly.

  “I really do think she’s lying down,” Dorothy said. “Just based on the appearance of her face.”

  “So what happened to the image at the end?” I said. “What caused it to break up?”

  “Some kind of transmission error, maybe.”

  “I’m not so sure. You notice that low-pitched sound? Sounded like a car or a truck nearby.”

  Dorothy nodded. “A big old truck, maybe. They’re probably near traffic. Probably right off a main road or a highway or something.”

  “Nope,” I said. “Not a main road. Not a busy street. That was the first vehicle we heard. So that tells us she’s near a road but not a busy one.” I turned to Marcus. “What’s Mercury?”

  He lifted his hand from his eyes. They were scrunched and red and flooded with tears. “No idea.”

  “And what was all that about ‘I’m too weak and I can’t change’ and ‘I twist and turn in the darkest space’?”