Vanished

by Unknown

  He put his hands over his eyes, and a large silver flake sloughed off. “Disappeared? No, Nicholas. It’s far more likely that they . . . did away with him. That’s how they work.”

  “I wonder.” I didn’t bother to explain my reasoning—the fact that Lauren had been knocked unconscious rather than being killed. “I don’t believe in corporate hit squads.”

  “Then you’re either naïve or you’re not paying attention. You don’t remember that vice chairman of Enron who was just about to testify before Congress, about to name names in the biggest corporate scandal ever, but before he could get on a plane to Washington, he was found shot to death in his car? ‘Suicide,’ they called it, of course. Then a couple of months later, a consultant for Arthur Andersen whose big client was—you guessed it, Enron—was found shot in the head in a forest in Colorado? And then a banker with the Royal Bank of Scotland who was about to testify against his colleagues in guess what case—that’s right, Enron—was found dead in the woods outside London. Another apparent suicide.”

  “This is grassy-knoll, tinfoil-hat stuff, Dad. Black helicopters.”

  “A woman named Karen Silkwood works in a nuclear plant in Oklahoma and gets plutonium poisoning and gets in her car to meet a New York Times reporter to spill the beans about unsafe working conditions in the nuclear industry, only her car runs off the road. Suicide?”

  “I saw the Meryl Streep movie. Good flick. What’s your point?”

  His tone had become fierce. “I have no doubt they killed Roger. Probably meant to kill Lauren, too, not just give her a concussion.”

  I decided to let the argument drop. It wasn’t getting me anywhere.

  “I need names,” I said. “Who at Paladin he talked to. Who might have threatened him.”

  Dad looked at me for a long while as if deciding how much to say. Then: “He tried to contact their founder and CEO, Allen Granger, but Granger refused to talk with him.”

  I knew a bit about Allen Granger, the billionaire founder of Paladin Worldwide, but it was limited to what I’d read and heard. A former Navy SEAL from northern Michigan. Rich guy, sort of a recluse. A born-again Christian evangelist, far-right-wing conservative.

  “Did he talk to anyone else at Paladin, then?”

  Victor nodded. “The head of the Washington office, a man named Carl Koblenz. I think he may be the president of the company—the number two, just under Granger.”

  “Carl Koblenz,” I repeated to myself. “Was Koblenz the one who directly threatened Roger?”

  “Did I say anything about any direct threats?”

  “No, you did not,” I replied.

  “You’re planning something,” he said. “I can tell.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Don’t. At least learn from your brother’s mistakes. I don’t want to lose my only remaining son.”

  “I’m touched. But that won’t happen.”

  “Surely you know the Thirty-Six Stratagems.”

  I shook my head.

  “The ancient Chinese art of deception.”

  “Oh, right. Sun Tzu. Jay Stoddard’s favorite.”

  “Forget Sun Tzu’s Art of War. That’s so commonplace.” He held up a gnarled, age-spotted finger. “Far more interesting than Sun Tzu is Chu-ko Liang. Perhaps the most brilliant military strategist ever. One of his stratagems was to defeat your enemy from within. Infiltrate the enemy’s camp in the guise of cooperation or surrender. Then, once you’ve discovered the source of his weakness, you strike.”

  Somehow the setting—the visitors’ room of the Altamont Correctional Facility—made my father’s advice a little less authoritative.

  As I walked out of the visitors’ room, I savored a feeling of relief.

  Because at that moment I knew that my brother was alive.

  45.

  Probably meant to kill Lauren, too, not just give her a concussion, Victor had said.

  But I hadn’t said anything about a concussion.

  All I’d told him was that Lauren had been attacked and had woken up in the hospital. He had another source of information, I was sure. Even though he’d pretended that this was the first he was hearing about it. And given how many times the two of them had spoken in the last month, it was likely that his source was Roger.

  If so, that meant that Roger had talked to him after his disappearance.

  And thus that Roger was not only still alive but able to receive phone calls. Which meant that he was not a hostage, not a kidnapping victim, not imprisoned somewhere. He was in hiding.

  But he was reachable. Since Victor couldn’t receive incoming calls, that meant that he had called Roger.

  And that phone number had to be on a list here at the prison. Inmates were allowed to make outgoing collect calls only, to an approved list of up to fifteen telephone numbers.

  After I spent a few minutes schmoozing with my new friend, the guard who sat outside the visitors’ room, I confessed to him my concern that my father might be trying to reconnect with some of his old business colleagues. Wasn’t that against prison rules?

  He was only too happy to go on the computer and pull up Victor’s approved telephone list. I gave him fifty dollars for his research assistance and thanked him for helping keep my father on the straight and narrow.

  As I drove into the Albany International Airport, I called Frank the information broker.

  “Didn’t I tell you to be patient?” he said before I could even give him the one number from Victor’s phone list that I didn’t recognize.

  “This is about something else, Frank.”

  “Yeah, well, I got the information you wanted on that cell number you gave me.”

  It took me a second to remember which number he was talking about: the one that Woody, from the cargo company, had given me in Los Angeles. “Great,” I said. “What have you got?”

  “It’s a corporate account. Registered to a Carl Koblenz.”

  “Paladin Worldwide,” I said.

  “You already knew this?”

  “I know the name.”

  So the president of Paladin Worldwide had hired Woody to steal almost a billion dollars from Traverse Development. That was corporate theft on a truly grand scale.

  And then the pieces began to click into place. If my father was telling me the truth—which, of course, wasn’t a given—then Roger had discovered evidence that Paladin Worldwide had been paying kickbacks to the Pentagon. Once they found out what he had, they began to threaten him. He knew they planned to kidnap him, maybe even kill him.

  And so he vanished before they had the chance.

  But what about that billion dollars? Maybe Paladin, which did a lot of work in Iraq, had learned that Traverse Development—whoever they were—was shipping all this cash back to the U.S., and Paladin had decided to help themselves. A billion dollars was a lot of bribes.

  “I sent you your brother’s phone bills,” Frank said, interrupting my reverie. “You ever get them?”

  “I did, thanks,” I said. “And I have one more for you.”

  46.

  Throughout the morning, Lauren found herself checking her e-mail far too often.

  She was checking for e-mails from Roger. As foolish as that was.

  Give it up, she told herself. There won’t be any more from him.

  Stop torturing yourself.

  She’d gotten to work late, because she’d had to let in Nick’s friend to overhaul the home-security system. That was okay: Leland was out of the country, so things were slower than usual. Just before lunch, she looked up from her e-mail and saw a man sitting in one of the visitor chairs. She did a double take.

  She remembered seeing him come out of Leland’s office. The man was remarkably . . . well, homely. Ugly, not to put too fine a point on it. His face was deeply pitted with scars, obviously the victim of a terrible case of adolescent acne. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and had thinning brown hair, round shoulders, a pigeon chest.

  “Hi?” she said.

  “I
didn’t want to disturb you,” the man said. He stood up awkwardly, and a leather portfolio slipped out of his hand and hit the floor. He leaned over to retrieve it, and when he came back up his scarred face was flushed. Looking embarrassed, he approached her desk, extended his hand to shake. “Um, I’m Lloyd Kozak. I don’t know if Leland mentioned me—I’m his new financial adviser?”

  Lauren looked over at Noreen, who said, “Hello there, Lloyd.”

  “Oh, yes—Noreen, right?” He went over to Noreen’s desk and shook her hand, too. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.” He looked over at Lauren, back at Noreen, seeming trapped between the two women. “I just—did Leland leave any computer disks for me?”

  Lauren shook her head. “He didn’t say anything—”

  “Oh, sure, right here,” Noreen said, and she produced a manila envelope and handed it to the man.

  “Thank you,” he said to her, then he went over to Lauren’s desk and said, “I’m sorry to disturb you.”

  “No worries,” Lauren said.

  The man hurried away.

  Lauren waited until he was gone then said to Noreen, “Leland didn’t say anything to me about a financial adviser.”

  “I thought I told you about him.”

  “Well, yes, you did. But Leland didn’t mention it.”

  “Cool your jets,” Noreen said. “Leland told me the guy was going to stop by today and asked me to give him some stuff. It’s no big deal.”

  “Well, he didn’t say anything, that’s all.”

  “You don’t expect him to explain everything twice, do you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, all right, then.”

  Lauren made a mental note to ask about this financial adviser when Leland got back. She couldn’t help feeling a little hurt, though. Normally, she handled everything for him. He kept no secrets from her. It was silly, she realized, but she felt a little left out. And no doubt Noreen loved it. She was preening over a tiny piece of Leland’s personal life that she, and only she, knew something about.

  Lauren really disliked the woman.

  In the early afternoon, right after lunch, she checked her e-mail again and found a message from an address she didn’t recognize. Its subject line read: “For Lauren—Personal.”

  She clicked on it.

  Inside the message box there was no text. Just a dark gray rectangle that she could tell right away was a video player, the sort you see all over the Internet: a frame with video toolbar buttons at its bottom edge. A big pale gray circle right in the middle containing a white triangular play button. It virtually shouted to her, Click me! Click me!

  She thought for a moment. The thing looked suspicious. Possibly dangerous.

  She checked the sender line and saw that it was blank. Which was strange—she was certain there’d been something there a few seconds ago.

  But the sender’s name was gone.

  There was only the video-player window. The big white triangular play button taunting her.

  After a few seconds, she couldn’t resist any longer. She clicked on the triangle. The gray rectangle came to life: a streaming video image began to move. Black-and-white. Fuzzy and indistinct at first. Shadowy shapes. She couldn’t make anything out.

  But then the video became sharper, as if the fog had cleared, and there was something eerily familiar about the scene she was watching. Something she couldn’t put her finger on, but familiar all the same. A white-shrouded figure, shifting slowly, which became a lump beneath rumpled bed sheets. Someone asleep in bed. There was a voyeuristic, quasi-porno quality to the movie she was watching. But what was it? Why was it so familiar? She clicked the full-screen button, and the video took over her entire monitor. The resolution wasn’t great; the contrast was harsh, as if it had been shot at night, using infrared light or something.

  The restlessly sleeping figure turned over, and she recognized the long eyelashes, the curly hair. Her head swam, and her heart skittered as the camera zoomed in and held tight on Gabe’s face.

  Her son, asleep in bed.

  She gasped aloud.

  Suddenly the video stopped playing, and the dark gray window shrank back to the size it had been at first, the white triangle at its center. With unsteady fingers, she fumbled for the computer mouse and tried to click the play button again, but the dark gray square was gone. It had vanished, like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.

  Leaving not a trace.

  As if it had never been there.

  47.

  Ihad plenty of time before my flight left the airport, so I held on to the rental car awhile longer, left the parking lot, and drove around, just thinking. The roads here were broad and newly paved, with far less congestion than Washington, and in a few miles I passed the Colonie Public Library. On an impulse, I turned in.

  In the Internet age, public libraries are immensely undervalued as resources. Sometimes there’s just no substitute for books on shelves and old newspapers, even microfilm copies. Far too many local newspapers just aren’t searchable through Google. Even those that have search engines accessible on the Internet are often poorly indexed. Most of the good stuff you have to find the old-fashioned way.

  I found a set of indexes for a Michigan newspaper, the Grand Rapids Press, and began searching year by year for articles on the reclusive founder of Paladin, Allen Granger. Since his family was from northern Michigan, I figured there was a chance I’d find some interesting local coverage, something that might tell me something that I hadn’t read in Time or Newsweek.

  While I leafed through volume after volume, my cell phone rang. The periodicals librarian gave me a look, and I shut it off without glancing at the caller ID. I found quite a few articles on Granger, but almost all of them were wire-service dispatches, and none of them was news to me. Lots of pieces on Paladin and various controversies their employees had run into in Iraq. Articles about Allen Granger testifying before Congress. He hadn’t testified before Congress in a year, though. Neither had he done any in-person interviews, as far as I could tell. An interview in which “Mr. Granger spoke to the Associated Press by telephone from Paladin headquarters in southern Georgia.” In the last year, Carl Koblenz, identified as chief executive officer of Paladin Worldwide, based in Falls Church, Virginia, seemed to have taken over the public-spokesman role. Granger hadn’t been seen in public in over a year.

  I had to go back quite a few years before I was able to find any local interviews with Allen Granger. Fifteen years, in fact.

  I went to the periodicals desk and requested the roll of microfilm from the Grand Rapids Press. Ten minutes later, I was scrolling through the scratchy old microfilm, trying to suppress a wave of motion sickness, and finally located the interview, done by a Grand Rapids reporter, who described Allen Granger as the “handsome scion” of a “waste-management empire” and “former Navy SEAL.” The photo they ran confirmed the handsome part, anyway: He had a clean-cut, blue-eyed, wholesome Midwestern look. Granger told the reporter about how he’d just recently purchased ten thousand acres of pine forest in southern Georgia as a training facility for what he envisioned as “the FedEx of national security,” whatever that meant.

  The last line of the interview said, “For Allen Granger, it’s a long way from Traverse City.”

  Traverse City, Michigan, was Granger’s hometown.

  And Traverse Development? Could that be another one of his firms?

  I was thoroughly confused. Why would the president of Paladin Worldwide have hired some guy in a shipping company to steal a billion dollars’ worth of cash from another one of Allen Granger’s companies?

  Unless Granger didn’t know what Koblenz was doing.

  I couldn’t begin to make sense of this.

  Stepping outside into the blindingly bright sunshine, I checked my voice mail.

  “Heller,” Dorothy Duval said in a quiet voice. “Call me. We got trouble.”

  48.

  What’s wrong?” I said.

 
“I didn’t think Stoddard even knew where my cubicle was. He just walked up to my desk and told me that I’ve been abusing office resources.”

  “You getting all your work in on time?”

  “You know it doesn’t work like that around here. I’m not on the clock.”

  “Exactly. You tell him what you do on your own time is your business.”

  “First of all, Nick, I’ve never talked to Stoddard that way, and I’m not going to start now. I’m not like you. I’m disposable.”

  “You’re the best, Dorothy, and you know it. None of the other forensic techs get invited to the Monday morning meetings.”

  “Yeah, well, as far as Jay Stoddard is concerned, I’m one of about a thousand data-recovery specialists out there, most of whom would jump at the chance to work here.” She lowered her voice. “And he’s probably right.”

  “He’s not going to fire you for helping me locate my brother.”

  “Oh no? He as much as said so. He said if I do any more database searches on Traverse Development or Roger Heller or anything that’s not a Stoddard project, I better update my résumé.”

  “Dorothy,” I said. “You know I’ve got your back.”

  “Must be why they always get me from the front,” she said acidly. “You don’t have the power to keep him from firing me, Nick.”

  “Don’t be so sure of that.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “Right. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Any luck on that list of office-building tenants I faxed you?”

  “Nothing. I’m sorry.”

  “What are you doing, running every company name to see if they’re subsidiaries of other companies?”

  “That would take forever. No, I’m running them against this Traverse Development. But no luck yet.”

  “And Roger’s laptop?”

  “Looks like it’s mostly personal stuff. E-mails and all that.”

  “Can you send it to me?”