Vanished

by Unknown

  She poured coffee into another stoneware mug. “How does your friend upstairs take his coffee?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “We used to boil the freeze-dried instant crap on a folding Esbit stove. Sometimes we’d just chew the coffee granules right out of the MRE bag. If we were in a hurry. But his tastes might have gotten more refined since Afghanistan. Where’s Gabe?”

  “In the living room, reading.”

  “You told him?”

  She nodded.

  “How’d he take it?”

  “He said he wasn’t surprised.”

  “Nick,” Dorothy said, “can I talk to you for a second?”

  “You found something?”

  “Right.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I want Lauren to hear this.”

  Dorothy looked from me to Lauren, then back at me. “None of my malware-detection kits picked up anything,” she said. “So I ended up having to put a box on the line—a network forensics appliance. I finally captured some encrypted traffic going out.”

  “Encrypted?” I said.

  “Bunch of hash marks. Nothing I can read.”

  “We’re talking spyware?” Lauren said.

  “That’s right,” Dorothy said. “Some pretty sophisticated code. Not a commercial, off-the-shelf product like eBlaster. Government-grade, looks like.”

  “Government-grade?” Lauren said. “Meaning, it’s the government that’s doing this?”

  “Or a government contractor with access to government code.”

  “So every e-mail we get or send out, every website we visit—”

  “Every single keystroke,” Dorothy said. “All my user names and passwords on all my e-mail accounts?”

  “Right.”

  “Paladin’s a government contractor, right?” Lauren asked me.

  “The U.S. government’s their main customer.”

  “But how could they have installed it? Does that mean they were inside the house?”

  “Not necessarily,” Dorothy said. “They could have installed this program remotely. But honey, that video they sent you confirms they’ve been in your house. To plant the camera.”

  Lauren nodded, bit her lip. “Did that other guy find the camera?” She pointed toward the ceiling.

  “Not yet,” I said. “But he will.”

  “I don’t understand how that video clip of Gabe could have dis appeared,” Lauren said. “How could they make it just disappear that way?”

  Dorothy nodded. “I know what that is. That’s something called VaporLock. It’s a kind of private web-based mail system. For recordless electronic communication. Once you open it, the sender’s name disappears, then the message disappears.”

  “Okay,” Lauren said. “What’s the point of this spyware? They think Roger might contact me, so they want to read any e-mail I might get from him? That it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “So doesn’t that tell you they think he’s alive?”

  I was silent for ten seconds or so. “Possibly,” I said.

  “And maybe that they really don’t have him? They don’t know where he is?”

  “I suppose,” I conceded. “But there’s a more likely explanation.”

  “Which is?”

  “That they think you have something. And they want it.”

  “And I keep telling you I have no idea what that could possibly be.”

  “Maybe it’s money,” I suggested. “A lot of it.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Or information. Files.”

  “Well, I don’t have anything. Believe me, I don’t. They may think I do, but I don’t.”

  “Okay,” I said, though I didn’t know what to believe.

  “Another question,” Lauren said. “When parents put spyware on their kids’ computers, they sometimes get reports on their e-mail at work or whatever, right? So can’t you tell where this program is sending the reports? By looking at the IP address? Won’t that tell you who’s doing this?”

  Dorothy grinned slowly, looked at me. She had a slight gap between her front teeth that I always found cute.

  “This girlfriend is extremely clever,” she said. “I see computer ignorance doesn’t run in the family.”

  “We’re only related by marriage, not blood,” I pointed out.

  “Clearly,” Dorothy said. “The packets are all going out to a botnet in Ukraine—probably one of those Eastern European guys who’s put together this illegal network of thousands of infected Windows XP computers all over the world into a Tier 2 Network.”

  “I think I get some of what you’re saying,” I said. “I assume the data going out of the DSL line here isn’t actually ending up on some illegal network in Ukraine, right?”

  “Right. It’s just a way to hide where it’s really going. So I suggest we keep all the spyware and the bugs in place, and I keep monitoring the traffic until I figure out its final destination. If I can.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said. “Do whatever it takes. I’m going upstairs.” I took the mug of coffee from the counter. “Merlin’s gonna drink it black whether he likes it that way or not.”

  MERLIN STILL hadn’t found anything.

  “If there was something here,” he said, “it’s gone now. How do you know that video wasn’t taken a week ago? A month ago, even?”

  “I don’t,” I admitted.

  While he searched, I sat at Gabe’s desk chair and read his graphic novel. I was astonished at the quality of the drawings. I had never been a big comic-book reader, but for a couple of years, as boys, Roger and I used to exchange old Batman and Superman comics, the occasional Green Lantern and Captain America. And Gabe’s drawings were at least as accomplished as those. He’d done them with an ultrafine-tip black pen, done shadows with cross-hatching. The lettering looked almost professional, too.

  But it was the story that blew me away.

  He’d titled it The Escape Artist. It was the story of a strong-jawed superhero called The Cowl, who fought evildoers in the nation’s capital, which was a decaying version of Washington, D.C. The Cowl—so named because he wore a black cowl like Batman—was a dead ringer for me. He even had my black hair, although Gabe had given me a Supermanesque whorl on my forehead, a gleaming forelock, which I don’t have. The Cowl had a Dark Past, which seemed to involve a dead wife, and had a dark, brooding temperament. He had a fortress of solitude, which bore more than a passing resemblance to my real-life loft in Adams Morgan. He was able to break out of any prison, escape confinement like Houdini, and he basically beat the crap out of bad guys, most of whom were evil, oversized adolescent boys who dressed like the boys at St. Gregory’s, with blazers and slacks, but also seemed to have come out of the pages of The Lord of the Flies.

  His mother didn’t make a single appearance. The archvillain was named Dr. Cash, who looked an awful lot like Roger except that he was hideously deformed, had blue skin, the result of taking colloidal silver. He was the CEO of an evil corporation who had somehow taken over the government in a postapocalyptic coup d’etat and now tyrannized the land from his underground bunker beneath the crumbling ruins of the White House. He was often seen with a busty blonde on his arm, a villainess named Candi Dupont.

  Candi Dupont.

  Not a name you could easily forget.

  Candi Dupont was the woman Roger had been having an affair with, whose abortion he had paid for. An alias, surely: Dorothy had turned up nothing on her in any database. But whatever her real name, obviously Gabe knew about her as well.

  Dorothy entered the room, interrupting my reading. “You didn’t turn the kid’s computer back on, did you?”

  I closed the notebook.

  “No,” Merlin said.

  “Because I thought I turned off both computers, and I’m definitely detecting outgoing network traffic. Something’s still transmitting a signal over the Internet.”

  “Thanks,” Merlin said mordantly. “That helps a whole lot.”

  “That t
ells us there’s something in the house,” I said. “Something that’s broadcasting, right?”

  Merlin shrugged. “So we keep looking.”

  “Man, this kid’s Richie Rich,” Dorothy said, ogling all Gabe’s stuff. “Look at all this junk. He’s got video games and iPods and boom boxes and a Game Boy and a Nintendo Wii and a PlayStation 3 and an Xbox 360. And I thought my nephew was spoiled. Did you check all the electronics?”

  “Yeah,” Merlin said. “I found a number of semiconductors.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” she replied. “All electronic devices have semiconductors. I get your sarcasm. But isn’t that where you actually want to look? In with a lot of other electronic circuits?”

  “Yeah,” Merlin said, unwilling to let go of the sarcasm. “That’s just where I’d hide a camera. In a Game Boy that gets moved around everywhere.”

  “I don’t know why you’re even bothering to look over there,” Dorothy told him. “The camera angle’s all wrong. Lauren described the shot to me, and that camera’s gonna be just above eye level.” She sliced the air with her hand flat, moving back and forth along a precise horizontal.

  I nodded, approached Gabe’s desk, looked at the giant iPod/CD player with the built-in speakers. The one he put his iPod in to use as an alarm every morning. It was covered with a fine film of dust.

  A small area on the front console, though, was dust-free.

  Right around an LED light that didn’t seem to belong. I grasped the tiny bulb and pulled and out came the long black snake cable that was attached to it.

  “Holy crap,” Merlin said.

  “Mm-hm,” Dorothy said.

  In a few minutes Merlin had carefully disassembled the CD player and placed the components on top of a pile of Gabe’s books. “Hoo boy,” he said excitedly. “This is really cool. I’ve never seen one of these ultraminis before. It’s a Misumi—a Taiwanese company. Hooked up to a wireless video IP encoder that takes the analog signal and transmits it over the Internet.”

  “So how come you didn’t find it?” Dorothy said.

  “Because they wrapped it in neoprene to hide the heat signature. Very clever. But how’d they know where to put it? They must have checked out the house in advance.”

  I thought of the disabled sensors in Roger’s study and said, “For sure.” Then I looked at my watch. “Thank you, guys. I owe you big-time.”

  “Just add it to my favor bank account,” Dorothy said.

  “You got it.”

  “Man, I’m looking forward to cashing in,” she said.

  “Substantial penalty for early withdrawal,” I warned her as I walked toward the door. “I’ll catch up with you guys soon.”

  “You have a date or something?”

  “Nah,” I said. “I’m meeting an old buddy for a drink.”

  58.

  The Anchor Tavern was a dive bar’s dive bar a few blocks from Capitol Hill. There were dead animals on the wall. Wednesday was dollar-beer night, they had the best burgers in town, and they didn’t serve appletinis.

  I sat for ten minutes in a red Naugahyde booth that was sticky and smelled sourly of spilled beer, waiting for a man named Neil Burris, a security officer with Paladin Worldwide.

  I expected that in the time since I’d called him from the Albany airport, pretending to be Marty Masur, he’d done his due diligence. Which in his case probably meant not much more than asking around to find out what kind of money Stoddard Associates paid, then drooling when he found out.

  Just when I was about to leave the bar, a compact, muscle-bound guy with ridiculously broad shoulders and a scruffy goatee approached my booth. He had the look of a tough guy gone soft. He wore a black nylon body-hugging muscle shirt that zipped up at the top. The point was probably to show off his shredded biceps and pecs, but it had the unfortunate side effect of displaying his muffin top.

  “Hola,” he said. He didn’t even try to make it sound like Spanish. He reached his hand across the table and gave me a bone-crushing shake. “Neil Burris.”

  “Marty Masur,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Real sorry I’m late. Couldn’t find parking.”

  “It’s bad around here,” I said.

  He slid into the booth across from me. Looked at me for a long moment. “Funny,” he said. “You don’t look like your picture.”

  “I’ve been working out.”

  He stared a little longer, then smiled slowly. His teeth were small and pointed and discolored. The brown was probably from chewing tobacco. “Listen, man,” he said. “This is, like, between us, right? I don’t want—”

  “You don’t want anyone at Paladin to know we’re talking. Gotcha. We don’t either.”

  “Good.”

  I signaled for the waitress. “Koblenz won’t let you go without a fight, what I hear.”

  “Well . . .” Neil said with a shrug and a slow, embarrassed smile.

  “I mean, it is Koblenz who’s the real power there, right? Not Allen Granger?”

  “Never met Granger, you wanna know the truth. He kinda keeps to himself down there in Georgia. Like a hermit or something. No one ever sees him.”

  “Why, do you figure?”

  His eyes slid from side to side, and he leaned closer. “What I hear, there’s guys who want to kill him.”

  “I don’t get it. He runs the world’s largest private army. He’s got all the guards he needs, right?”

  “Doesn’t help if the guys who wanna wax you work for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He nodded. “Oh yeah. For real. Remember a couple years back when there was that big mess over in Baghdad, eight or ten towel heads got shot, right? Civilians? Coupla Paladin guys got some serious heat for that.”

  I vaguely remembered. Some Paladin security guards had fired at Iraqi civilians and killed them. “The victims’ families filed a lawsuit in U.S. courts, wasn’t that it?”

  “Yeah. Screwed up big-time, man. Pentagon was threatening not to renew our contract, so Granger handed over the guys.”

  “Handed over?”

  “He coulda fought it if he wanted. But he made some deal with the government. Like, he said these guys are just bad apples, you know? Take ’em and do whatever, and that kinda crap won’t happen again. Well, a lotta Paladin guys just went whacko. We figured they’d always protect us, something bad happens. Like always.” He shook his head. “Way I heard it, some buddies of those guys, working Paladin security down in Georgia, tried to off Granger.”

  “Off him? Like, kill him?”

  “I don’t know, man. Just what I hear. Screwed up, huh?”

  The waitress, a pretty young girl with spiky blond hair and multiple piercings in her earlobes, took our order. Burris introduced himself and attempted to flirt with her, but without success. Maybe it was the name. “Neil” is a perfectly good name, but not for a tough guy. He probably wished his name were Bruno or Butch or at least Jack.

  “So here’s the deal, Neil,” I said. “Old Man Stoddard wants to expand. Build the brand. He wants to get into the Paladin business, and he’s looking for someone to spearhead that effort.”

  “Spearhead it,” Burris said.

  “Set it up for us. Means we need someone who knows the lay of the land.”

  “The lay of the land,” Burris repeated. He was looking ner vous. I could almost see the thought balloon floating above his head, as if he were a cartoon character: You got the wrong guy. I’m just muscle. I don’t know that stuff.

  But he didn’t want to miss out on a chance like this. So maybe he wasn’t qualified. Let the buyer beware.

  I went on, “Business like this, you got one main customer, right? The U.S. government.”

  “Right.”

  “You gotta know who the players are. How to approach them. Know what I’m saying?”

  He nodded. “Absolutely.”

  “Gotta know the right palms to grease, you know? The old baksheesh.” I rubbed my fingers together to underscore the point.<
br />
  “Speaking of which, you know, Paladin pays me in cash.”

  “Cash? You serious? All you guys?”

  “My guess, they don’t want records all over the place. Cash doesn’t leave a trail.”

  “Cash? For real?”

  “Not all of us. I don’t know, I think it has to do with, like, the fact that we’re independent contractors, not employees. I always figured it was some kinda scam, some way for them to avoid paying taxes, but I don’t ask too many questions. I like cash.”

  “Can’t blame you.”

  “That a problem for you?”

  “I’m sure anything can be arranged,” I said.

  A couple of minutes later, the spiky-haired waitress set two draft beers on the table in front of us. Budweisers. Thin and watery and almost flavorless, just the way I liked them.

  We toasted each other, and I said, in a confiding tone, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but Jay Stoddard’s real desperate to get into this business, and soon. That means, if you can show me a sample of the wares, I can probably hold him up for a lot more than I told you on the phone. I mean, we might not be able to pay you in cash. Maybe, maybe not. But we’re talking three-quarters of a mil to start. Plus stock options.”

  He was in midswallow, and some of the beer must have gone down the wrong way, because he started coughing, and his face turned red. He held up his palm to let me know he was okay, or maybe to tell me to hold on a minute. When he finally stopped coughing, he said, “I’m at your service, uh, Marty.”

  59.

  So what kind of sample you guys looking for?” Burris said.

  “Names, mostly. Something I can take back to Stoddard so he can feel confident you know who the real players are.” I smiled. “See, you don’t need to do a résumé. All you need is a name or two.”

  “I could probably find out,” he said.

  “You don’t know?”

  Hastily, he said, “I’m kinda like—I like to leave that kinda stuff to others, you know? But I can ask around.”

  “Sounds like you’re out of the loop.”

  “Nah, nah, it’s not like that. I just focus on other stuff, mostly.” He was making it up and not doing a particularly convincing job of it. He didn’t know.