Vanished Read online

  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.

  After 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 ca
reful.”

  “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.”

  30.

  Putting 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.

  Everything’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.”