Vanished (11 page)

27.

A
ctually, there was plenty about my brother I didn’t know.

Like how his mind worked.

Just because we were brothers didn’t mean that we shared anything but a strange upbringing and fifty percent of our DNA. We couldn’t have been more different.

Still, for a long stretch of our childhood—right up until the day Dad left—we were best friends.

Dad was a remote, unfathomable, larger-than-life character to both of us. He seemed to laugh louder than most people, got more angry, was smarter, more intense, more everything.

We loved going to his office in Manhattan. His firm occupied the entire top floor of the Graystone Building, an art deco ziggurat near Grand Central that had been built to resemble a Babylonian temple. In the lobby was a huge mural by some famous artist of Prometheus stealing fire. The elevator doors were ornate brass. His office always smelled like pipe smoke and old wood and leather and brass cleaner, and it was suffused with the ozone of power. It had a breathtaking view of the city. Silhouetted against the Manhattan skyline, Victor Heller stood mightier than any of the spindly skyscrapers in the distance, a colossus astride the globe.

We were terrified of him. When he got angry, you didn’t want to be within a mile. One day he was looking for something in our bathroom, the one Roger and I shared—who knows what he was looking for, maybe a roll of toilet paper—when he found a half-used pouch of chewing tobacco. It said
RED MAN
on the label.

He stormed into the game room, where we were playing Risk, and he demanded to know which one of us was using chewing tobacco.

We both denied it. I didn’t even know what chewing tobacco was.

Furious, Dad whipped us both with his crocodile-leather belt. I don’t think he really cared about whether we were using tobacco. He just didn’t like having his authority undermined.

Afterward, Roger and I consoled each other. We both knew we’d been unfairly punished, which hurt even more than our backsides. Roger slid down the waistband of his Jockey shorts a few inches and showed me the damage Dad had done. His buttocks were crimson. Mine were, too.

“Hey, Red Man,” he said, and we both burst out laughing.

It turned out that the chewing tobacco had been left under the sink by Sal, one of the caretakers, who’d been fixing a leak. But the incident also left us with a nickname for each other, a secret code: “Red Man.” Never in front of others. Only between us.

“Hey, Red Man,” we’d say to each other on the phone, and it was like a nudge, a wink. It instantly evoked a whole world—of archeological digs on the far reaches of the property that enraged Yoshi, the elderly Japanese gardener; of pranks that made our favorite cook, Mrs. Thomasson, giggle; of getting into trouble and covering for each other.

It made us feel like fellow conspirators. Which was nice. It brought us even closer.

Until we turned against each other.

28.

B
y some strange spin of the genetic roulette wheel, I grew up big and broad-shouldered and muscular, while Roger became stringy and gawky. He needed glasses; I didn’t. He became defiantly bookish while I was the athlete who pretended not to care about school. He was the smart one; I was the strong one. He was a bully magnet, and even though he was older, I became his defender. He didn’t like that.

By the time we entered our teens, it became clear that Roger wanted to be just like Dad. He told everyone he was going to work “in finance.”

One day, when I was thirteen and Roger was almost fifteen, we got home from school to find Mom waiting for us in the gloomy library, sitting in a big leather chair in the circle of light cast by a reading lamp. She said she wanted to talk to us.

She got up, gave us both hugs, and told us that Dad had been arrested at work that morning. Right in front of his employees. They’d handcuffed him and led him out through the trading floor.

“Why?” Roger said.

“The Justice Department wanted to embarrass him.”

“No, I mean, why did they arrest him?”

She explained, but it didn’t all sink in. Something about securities fraud and insider trading. Something about an SEC investigation that had been going on for months. Since I barely understood what Dad did for a living, I had no idea what he’d been arrested for.

We didn’t see Dad until the next day. He was at home when we returned from school, which was strange. Normally, he didn’t get home until after dinner.

He took us into his study and told us that he’d spent the night in jail, locked up at the Metropolitan Correctional Center with a bunch of drug dealers. That morning he’d been taken before a magistrate and arraigned and released on bail.

He told us not to worry. That the charges were trumped up. He’d made some powerful enemies, and they were trying to drag him through the mud. But he had great lawyers, and he’d fight this thing, and we’d all get through it, and we’d all be fine.

“But I want you boys to know one thing,” he said fiercely. “I’m innocent. Never forget it.”

“I don’t understand,” Roger said. “How could they arrest someone who’s innocent?”

Dad leaned back in his chair and laughed raucously. “Oh, good Lord, kiddo, you’ve got a lot to learn about the world.”

THE NEXT
morning, when Roger and I were on our way to school, our car stopped at the end of the long driveway. The driver—yes, we had a driver—cursed aloud, and we looked out the front windshield.

There was a mob in front of the gates—cameras, reporters with bulbous microphones, people swarming the car, screaming at us.

The driver backed up and took us out the back way.

School wasn’t much fun that day. Everyone had heard about the arrest of Victor Heller. A rich-kid school like that, you can believe everyone’s parents were talking about it at the breakfast table, and with undisguised glee. There was a lot of pent-up resentment over our father. A lot of jealousy.

Our friends were sympathetic, but there were plenty of kids who hurled insults.

And that was when I learned to fight.

Anyone who dared say anything nasty about my father had to deal with me. Anyone who said anything to my brother had to face me, too.

We were a family under siege. Both parents were around far too much, except for the times when Dad’s lawyers came to the house and met with him in his study for hours on end. The phone kept ringing, but my parents wouldn’t answer it. They stopped going out.

Mom, who until that moment had always seemed a recessive gene, swung into action, helping the lawyers coordinate a legal defense. Suddenly, she felt useful. She knew nothing about Wall Street or white-collar crime, but she was smart and determined to stand by her husband.

She saw the cuts and scrapes on my face when I came home from school, and she said nothing. She knew. She just bandaged me up and told us we’d all get through it.

When Dad emerged from his strategy sessions with his lawyers, he’d rattle around the house or practice his serve with the tennis pro, and he talked to us a lot, assured us that he was innocent, that all the charges would be overturned, and this nightmare would be over. Soon.

About a week later I was awakened by a car starting up in the middle of the night. I sat up, went over to my window. Saw the distinctive beehive taillights of Dad’s 1955 Porsche Speedster. Went back to sleep.

In the morning, Dad was gone. Never said good-bye. Mom’s eyes were bloodshot, her face puffy, and we could tell she’d been crying. She said only that Dad had had to leave suddenly to take care of some business.

He wasn’t back when we returned from school.

Nor the next day.

It took three days before Mom told us that Dad wasn’t coming back anytime soon. He’d left the country. She didn’t know where he’d gone.

All she knew, she said, was that he was innocent. He hadn’t done anything wrong. But innocence didn’t always mean you could get a fair trial.

The indictment was handed down four days after he fled. Victor Heller had been charged with wire fraud and income-tax evasion and securities fraud, even racketeering. The newspapers began referring to him as the “fugitive financier.”

But I didn’t have to defend my father’s honor anymore at our fancy private school. The next day we stayed home from school and helped Mom pack up the house. A moving truck came the day after that.

The government had seized all of Dad’s assets, which meant everything—the Bedford house, the duplex penthouse on Fifth Avenue at East Sixty-fourth Street, the house in Palm Beach that Roger and I hated, the chalet in Aspen, the ranch in Montana. All bank accounts. Every last cent.

We piled into the old Subaru station wagon that Mom liked to tool around Bedford Village in and headed for her mother’s house, north of Boston. After we crossed the Massachusetts border, Mom stopped in Sturbridge to get some lunch, and she went to an ATM to get cash and began crying. Her personal bank account had been seized, too.

We had nothing.

Roger and I were starved, as only teenage boys can be, but we said nothing.

“You okay, Red Man?” Roger said to me.

“I’m okay,” I said.

We didn’t stop until we got to Malden and our grandmother’s cramped, pink-painted suburban split-level ranch house. The house Mom grew up in. No tennis court. No stables.

No Dad, either.

We didn’t see him again for more than ten years.

29.

A
fter five years of working the dark side of Washington, D.C., both in the government and out, I had a pretty good Rolodex. Not like Jay Stoddard’s, but not too shabby. I knew someone in just about every three-letter government agency.

Granted, no one actually uses Rolodex card files anymore. In fact, as a figure of speech, I prefer the concept of the favor bank. You do a favor for someone, help someone out of trouble, put someone in touch with someone else, make a connection . . . the odds are the person you helped out will pay you back.

They don’t always. Some people are jerks. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns and all that. Plus, deposits into the favor bank aren’t insured by the FDIC. And you don’t always do favors just to earn payback. Sometimes you do the right thing just to do the right thing, which might be called the good-karma network, or the “pay it forward” principle.

But whatever your motive, you always want to maintain a positive balance in your favor bank account. You want liquidity, in case you ever need to make an emergency withdrawal. The longer I work in this murky underworld, the more it resembles Tony Soprano’s office in the back room of the Bada Bing strip club. Not just Washington, but the business world, too: They’re like the Mafia, but without the horse head in the bed. Usually.

Anyway, I knew a guy who worked in a fairly senior capacity at the Transportation Security Administration, the TSA. These are the folks who frisk and wand you and grope you, make you take off your shoes and arbitrarily decide to search through your underwear at airport security gates. Who once seized a toddler’s sippy cup at Reagan National Airport a few years back and detained the kid’s mother for trying to smuggle potentially lethal infant formula on board. And who not long ago made a lady in Texas remove her nipple rings with a rusty pair of pliers (though the less said about nipple rings the better).

About a year ago, Stoddard Associates was brought in by the TSA to conduct an outside investigation into alleged corruption in the agency—a smuggling ring led by someone inside TSA. For some reason the TSA people didn’t want to use the FBI. Something to do with politics and turf, and Jay Stoddard didn’t care why.

They’d fingered an operations security administrator named Bill Puccino. I met him and knew right away he hadn’t done it. We bonded. His Boston accent was as familiar to me, as comforting, as a pair of old sneakers, after the years I spent in Malden at Grandma’s house.

Turned out that his boss had set him up as the fall guy. I cleared Puccino. He was promoted to his boss’s job. His boss was punished by being transferred to a more exalted position in Homeland Security, which gave him a medal for his “integrity” and sent him to Paris as their “attaché.” Cruel and unusual. The ignoble fate of the political appointee.

TSA was part of the Department of Homeland Security, which itself was part of the vast new bureaucracy created after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Washington responded to 9/11 just like a corporation responds to a bad quarter—by doing a reorg. Shuffle around the boxes on the org chart. In short order, the TSA created the No Fly List, a secret list of people who aren’t allowed to board a commercial plane to travel within the U.S. The number of people on that list is also a secret, but it’s around fifty thousand.

As I headed up Constitution Avenue toward K Street, I called Bill Puccino’s work number. He answered with a bark: “Puccino.”

“Pooch,” I said. “Nick Heller.”

“Nico!” he said. “There you are!”

“How goes it?”

“Doin’ good, doin’ good.”

“Still keeping the world safe from nipple rings, I hope.”

He paused, got it, then laughed.

“I need a quick favor,” I said.

“For you, big guy, anything.”

“I need you to dip into a database.”

“Which one?”

“TSDB.”

He was silent for a good five or six seconds. “Sorry, Nico. No can do.”

And he hung up.

I didn’t realize at first that he’d hung up. I thought maybe the call had been dropped—a dead spot, maybe. They’re all over the District.

But about two minutes later my cell phone rang. It was Puccino.

“Sorry about that,” he said. The sound quality was different; it sounded like he was calling from a mobile phone, too. “I can’t talk about that stuff on my work line.”

“They monitor your calls?”

“Come on, man, what do you think? I work for Big Brother. So tell me what you want.”

“How does someone get put on the No Fly List?”

“Threaten to blow up the White House? Take flying lessons but tell them you don’t need to learn how to land the plane?”

Then it was my turn to laugh politely at a lame joke.

“There’s a name on your No Fly List,” I said. “I want to know how it got there.”

He exhaled noisily into his cell phone. “Nick, how important is this to you?”

“Very.”

He exhaled into the phone again. It wasn’t a sigh of exasperation, though. It was tension, indecision. He was wrestling with it.

“I can check to see if someone’s on the No Fly List,” Puccino said. “That’s easy. Lots of people in law enforcement have access to the Secure Flight program. But when you ask how it got there and what the reason is—well, that’s a whole different deal. That means accessing this superduper-double-secret database called TIDE—the Terrorist Identities Data-something or other. That’s the one that contains the derogatories.”

“Derogatories?”

“The bad stuff they did. The reason someone’s a threat. And which agency put ’em there. The originating agency.”

“Can you get into that?”

“Sure. But every time you sign in to TIDE, you leave tracks. There’s all these information security safeguards now. A whole audit trail. So I gotta be careful.”

“Understood. I appreciate your sticking your neck out for me.”

“You have a date of birth or a social security number? You wouldn’t believe the number of Gary Smiths we have. Or John Williamses.”

I told him the name.

He said, “Heller, as in Nick Heller?”

“My brother.”

“You gotta be kidding.”

“I wish.”

“What’d he do?”

“Pissed off the wrong people.”

“
I’ll
say.” He hung up again and called me back just as I was about to pull into the parking garage underneath 1900 K Street. I swung into a space on the street next to a fire hydrant, since the cell reception in the garage was funky.

“Nico, you thinking maybe someone stole your brother’s identity or something? That happens sometimes.”

“What do you have?”

“The nominating agency is DoD. Means that Roger Heller was put on the list by the Defense Department.”

“Does it say why?”

“See, that’s the problem. The field in the database where you normally see the reason—you know, ‘Mustafa says he wants to blow up the White House’—just has a code. Meaning it’s classified beyond my level.”

“Okay,” I said. “This is a big help. Thanks a lot.”

I was about to disconnect the call, when he said, “Nick, listen. I know I’m just a pencil-neck bureaucrat. But I need to protect my pencil neck. You understand?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. You won’t hear from me again.”