Vanished (12 page)

30.

P
utting my brother on a terrorist watch list was preposterous. He was an asshole, yes. But a terrorist? All it told me was that he had some very powerful enemies who had the power to abuse the No Fly List. Enemies, I assumed, somewhere within my old haunt, the Pentagon.

But how could Roger have made enemies in the Defense Department? And why?

The more I dug into it, the more I came to believe that something strange and disturbing was going on: something corrupt at a very high level, and my brother was just a casualty. And maybe that was an even more important motivation: my obsessive need to turn over the rock, as Jay Stoddard liked to say. To root out the truth. A shrink would probably tell me that it was a logical, if neurotic, legacy of my peculiar upbringing, of being lied to repeatedly by Victor Heller.

But since I’d never seen a shrink, and I wasn’t particularly self-reflective, I didn’t particularly care where it came from. I didn’t need to understand.

All I knew was that I wasn’t going to stop until I’d unearthed the truth about what had happened to my brother.

DOROTHY DUVAL
had a plaque on her desk that said
JESUS IS COMING—LOOK BUSY
.

I always liked that. That about summed her up. She was actually a fairly devout churchgoer, but she had a bawdy sense of humor about it. She also enjoyed pissing people off. She wasn’t quiet and demure. She was in your face—“all up in your grill,” as she’d put it. It was a trait that was inseparable from her stubbornness. She was brilliant and tireless and methodical, and she never gave up.

I’d seen her in T-shirts that said things like
JESUS IS MY HOMEBOY
and
SATAN SUCKS
and
MY GOD CAN KICK YOUR GOD’S BUTT
. Though not in the office. She always dressed far nicer than a forensic data tech needed to. That day she was wearing a black skirt and a peach blouse and enormous silver hoop earrings.

As a tech, not an investigator, Dorothy didn’t get an office. She got a cubicle in the open area of Stoddard Associates known as the bullpen, along with the other support staff. Her desk was always impeccable. Tacked to the walls of her cubicle were pictures of her parents, her brother, and a gaggle of nieces and nephews. She had no kids of her own, and no significant other—male or female—and I never asked her about her personal life. As blunt-spoken as she was, she kept her private life private, and I always respected that.

She noticed me standing there and cast a wary eye at the laptop under my arm. “That for me?”

I nodded. She took it. “Case number? I don’t see a label on there.”

She was referring to the barcode sticker with a case ID that we put on all pieces of evidence so everything can be tracked easily.

“It’s not a Stoddard case,” I said, and I explained.

It took me a few minutes.

She turned the computer over, popped it open. “This is your brother’s?”

I nodded.

“You tell me what you want, boyfriend.” She looked around. Marty Masur, fellow investigator and petty martinet, strutted by, nodded at us. “Let’s talk in your office,” she said. “Need a little privacy.”

“
YEAH, IT’S
hosed, all right,” Dorothy said a few minutes later, staring at the screen. “Someone tried to scrub it but screwed it up. Got the operating system, too. What do you want off it?”

“Anything and everything you can get.”

“What’s on here that’s so important?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “But I’m guessing there was something there important enough for my brother to try to get rid of it.”

“Why?”

“I just told you.”

“Uh-uh. You told me what you’re looking for. You didn’t tell me
why
you want it.”

“How about you just do it?” I said, sort of testily.

“Honey, it don’t work like that,” she said. I’d noticed that her speech turned “street” when she got annoyed, as if for dramatic effect. She extended a forefinger and tapped the long peach fingernail against the palm of her other hand. “There ain’t some magic unerasing trick or something that’s going to recover permanently deleted data, okay? That’s just science fiction. You watch too many movies.”

“I don’t watch enough, actually. No time.”

“Yeah, well, if someone’s real serious about scrubbing their computer, there’s some hard-core wiping programs out there. That physically overwrite every sector, from zero right to the end of the disc. No way we’re going to find any traces, if they knew what they were doing. I can try some data-carving utilities on this baby, and I might get lucky, but that’s a crap-shoot.”

“Well, see what you can do,” I said. “I don’t understand half of what you said, but I don’t need to.”

“Man, I think you’re actually
proud
of being a Luddite.”

“I’m not proud. I just know there are some things I’m good at and some things I’m not.”

“Well, maybe you ought to learn this stuff.”

“I wouldn’t want to put you out of a job.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that.”

“Exactly. Here’s how I look at it. Economists call this the law of comparative advantage. I forget where I read this. Michael Jordan can probably mow his lawn faster than anyone else, but does that mean he should mow it himself?”

“Michael Jordan don’t even play basketball anymore.”

“Tiger Woods, then. Or David Beckham.”

“Are you saying you could be the Tiger Woods or the David Beckham of data recovery if you put your mind to it?”

“I think I better just shut my mouth.”

“I think that’s the first smart thing you said today.”

“Fair enough.”

“Look, Nick, if you’re serious about trying to figure out what your brother was up to, I’m guessing you want a whole deep-dish data-mining job on him. Am I right?”

I smiled, shrugged. “You got me.”

“I know you.”

“Anything you can do,” I said.

“Do I get paid for this?”

“Whatever you want.”

“Let’s just call it a six-figure deposit into my favor bank. To put it in Nick Heller terms.”

I smiled again. “You got it.”

She stood up, folded her arms. “Nick, sweetie, can I say something?”

“Can I ever stop you from saying anything?”

“Not hardly. Nick, don’t do this.”

“Don’t do what?”

“Don’t get involved in this. This whole thing with your brother—it’s too personal. You get too invested, and it just messes you up. You start doing things you shouldn’t do. You lose your professional distance.”

“You ever see me act less than professional?”

She thought for a second. “Plenty of times.”

“But not on the job.”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

“I can handle this.”

“See, I’m not so sure about that. Leave it to the cops. That’s their job. You want to help them, feed them stuff, go ahead. But if you take this on yourself, you’re going to go too far. I tell you this because I love you.”

“And I appreciate it,” I said.

“I’m serious, Nick.”

“Don’t worry about me,” I said.

31.

E
verything’s under control,” Noreen said. “His regular suite at Hotel Le Royal in Luxembourg, a private room reserved at Mosconi for the Benelux senior managers—”

“The Princière.”

“What?”

“When he stays in Luxembourg, he likes the Princière Suite at the Le Royal.”

“I know,” Noreen said, peeved.

“Did you ask the hotel to stock the kitchenette with bottles of San Pellegrino? Or Perrier? Their usual mineral water is too salty.”

“He didn’t say anything about that.”

“He always forgets until he gets there, then he raises holy hell.” Lauren realized what she must have sounded like—the master control freak—and she was embarrassed. Her tone softened. “I’ll call the concierge.”

“Oh, and Leland’s in a meeting with a new financial adviser. For his personal portfolio, not the company’s. Nice guy. But ugly? Hoo boy. Must have fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch.”

“Okay, I’ve been warned,” she said.

“Buffalo Face, I call him. He walks by the bathroom, and all the toilets flush.”

“I need to get back to work,” Lauren said.

Noreen finally went back to her own desk, and Lauren checked her e-mail.

Nothing from Roger.

But why would there be anything? There had been just that one, heartbreaking e-mail, and now that was gone.

Nick wanted her to dig into what Roger had been doing at Gifford, but truthfully, she was afraid to. How could she investigate without setting off all kinds of alarm bells?

She had to be so careful.

The door to Leland’s office came open, and a man in a shapeless gray suit strode rapidly out. She caught only a fleeting glimpse—homely face, horn-rimmed glasses—before he disappeared.

Then Leland came out of his office, and his face lit up.

“I didn’t think you’d really be back so soon!” he boomed in his Texas accent. Gifford’s father had been a railroad worker in west Texas before starting the family business. Now it had revenues of ten billion dollars a year, managed construction projects in forty-seven countries, and was still in the hands of the Gifford family. Gifford Industries had been headquartered in Austin until Leland had made the wrenching decision to relocate to Washington, D.C., because that was where most of the business had gone. Government, not oil fields anymore.

She rose as Leland came over to her desk and hugged her. He was tall and rotund, with arched bushy eyebrows and sagging jowls, a large head and rosy cheeks and a white crew cut. Those who met him for the first time found him physically intimidating, and indeed, in repose, he often wore an imperious expression, made even more threatening by his arched brows.

Then he stopped abruptly. “Boy hidy, I forgot you’re hurt, and here I am crushing the life out of you.”

“Come on, Leland, I’m not made of glass.”

He put both hands on her shoulders and fixed her with a stern expression. “Nothin’ new about Roger?”

She shook her head.

“They don’t even know if he’s alive?”

“Right.”

He closed his eyes. “Why’re you even here?” he said softly.

“Because I need to be here,” she said.

“You understand you can take all the time you need, doncha? Weeks, months—whatever it takes.”

“I need to be here.”

“You know, I don’t understand half the stuff Roger does, but he’s a valued employee. More important, he’s your husband. If you ever need anything from me, you just say so, you hear?”

She nodded. “You have to leave in half an hour,” she said. “Twenty-five minutes, actually.”

She pulled a few magazines from the stack on her desk, handed him a fresh
Business Week
and a
Forbes.
Then she turned back around, opened a drawer, and took out a handful of Metamucil packets and handed them to him, too.

“You think of everything,” he said. “You sweetie.”

32.

L
oud laughter rang out from Jay Stoddard’s office as I approached. I expected to see Jay in animated conversation with one of his old buddies from the Agency. But he was alone, sitting at his desk, leaning back in his chair, watching his computer screen.

He glanced at me, then turned back to the computer. He extended his left arm and beckoned me in with a flip of his hand. “Nicky,” he said. “Just the man I wanted to talk to.”

“Okay.”

Stoddard was wearing one of his more extreme bespoke suits: double-breasted, double-vented, cut from a hairy tweed fabric. On each cuff four buttons that really buttoned, the last one undone. He looked like he’d just come back from a weekend at Balmoral Castle. My father used to wear suits like that. Before he started wearing orange jumpsuits every day.

“Oh, dear me,” he gasped, laughing helplessly. “Oh, sweet Jesus. Have you seen this?”

I entered, leaned across his desk, craned my neck. He was watching a video on the Internet. At first glance it appeared to be porn. Well, it sort of was. An assortment of busty young women in dominatrix costumes were whipping the naked buttocks of a middle-aged man with leather riding crops. One of them was checking his hair for lice. They were shouting at him in bad German. Clearly this was supposed to be a Nazi-themed orgy, though it didn’t look like much fun if you were the guy being whipped.

“Their German accents aren’t very good, are they?” I said.

“Do you know who that guy is?”

“His butt doesn’t look all that familiar, no.”

Stoddard told me the name of a prominent British political figure. “He wants to know how this video got out. He’s trying to get an injunction to take it down from the Internet. Says his privacy rights have been violated.”

I looked closer. “Says there it’s been viewed one million, four hundred thousand—”

“I know, I know. He’s an Oxford man, you know that?”

“I didn’t. Hal—”

“Brophy can wrap this one up in his sleep,” he said. Brophy was one of our more senior investigators. “Waste of time, you ask me, but I won’t turn it down.”

“Maybe Brophy can take on that CEO backgrounder, too.”

He brought his chair upright. “No, Nicky, you’re our big swinging dick. Don’t tell me you have ethical qualms about this one, too?” He raked his fingers through his silver mane.

“No. Not if it can wait. I’m taking a couple of personal days.”

“Oh?”

“Family business.”

He looked at me expectantly.

I just looked back.

He wanted to know, of course, and I wasn’t going to tell him anything I didn’t have to.

He looked down pensively at the immaculate surface of his desk, gave a slight shake of his head. “Your family,” he said. “Your father, then your brother . . . You sure you’re not descended from the House of Atreus?”

“Excuse me?”

“You gotta wonder if it’s some kind of blood curse.”

“What do you know about my brother?” I said.

His phone buzzed, and the voice of Elizabeth, the receptionist, crisply announced a caller who insisted on speaking with him right away.

I got up as he picked up the phone. His long, tapered index finger hovered over the extension button. “It doesn’t look good, does it?” he said, then he punched the button and took the call.