Vanished Read online

  “Told me what?” I said.

  “About the cancer.”

  “The cancer,” I repeated, then I understood. The reason he and Roger had spoken five times. But why hadn’t Roger said anything to me, or at least to Lauren? Why hadn’t my mother called to tell me the news? The old man was dying. Suddenly, I felt hollow.

  I looked down. “Dad, I—my God, I had—”

  He was laughing raucously, his head thrown back. His beard extended down his neck. That hollow place inside me filled slowly with something ice-cold.

  “Why else would you lay down your arms and come visit your poor old Dad?” he said, his words half-choked by laughter. “No, I’m not dying. But there’s gotta be one hell of a reason why you’re here. I figured you must know something they’re not telling me.”

  “No, Dad, I don’t.”

  “You’ve never been here before, have you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Of course you haven’t. The day I reported, Roger drove me. Your mother was quite ill.”

  “She was too depressed to get out of bed.”

  “Yes, that’s right. And you—you had a study to finish at McKinsey, was that it?”

  “I’d enlisted by then.”

  “Ah, yes. The few. The proud. Nick Heller.”

  “It was the army, not the marines. Special Forces.”

  “Special,” he said. He rolled the word around in his mouth like the first sip of a Château Lafite. His lips curled at the edges. “Hooah.”

  The day he entered prison, Dad gave Roger his most prized possession, a gold Patek Philippe watch that Mom had given him when he made his first hundred million. Inscribed on the back was a line from Virgil in Latin: Audentes fortuna juvat. Fortune favors the bold. He’d been bold all right, but Fortune hadn’t gotten the memo.

  “So to what do I owe the honor of your presence?”

  “I want to know what Roger’s been talking to you about.”

  His eyes went blank. “What’s he been talking to me about? What do sons talk about with their fathers?” A slow, mirthless smile. “Been so long, you’ve probably forgotten.”

  One of the inmates down the row was arguing with his visitor, a young black woman who appeared to be the mother of the two little kids running around. Maybe he was the father. I wondered whether the prisoners were allowed conjugal visits.

  “He’s been in touch with you a lot recently.”

  “He calls his dad. He worries about me. He sends me packages. Your mother sends me packages. Everyone else does.” He cocked his head, raised his heavy brows, looked at me through drooping lids. “Maybe it’s a financial hardship?”

  Of course, I knew that Roger hadn’t actually called Dad. Incoming calls weren’t allowed. Dad had to place collect calls to Roger.

  “Roger’s come to visit you, too.” The nav system in his Mercedes confirmed it.

  “They allow visitors between seven thirty and three. They encourage visits, in fact. They say visits can be a positive influence, you know that? They say inmates who receive regular visits adjust much better once they’re released from prison. Which, in my case, is a mere eighteen years from now. When I’ll be, assuming I’m still alive—”

  “Why?”

  “Why does he visit me? Maybe because he’s concerned. Silly, I know. An old man like me locked up with rapists and child molesters and perverts—what’s to worry about?”

  “I mean, why so often?”

  “Often? That’s a relative concept when you’re in here.” He licked his lips. They were chapped, startlingly red against the snow white of his Methuselah beard.

  I tried again, came at it head-on. “When did you last see him?”

  He frowned, folded his arms, leaned back. “I haven’t seen your brother in, well, easily a year.” He looked up and to his right. One of the telltale indicators that he was lying. Another one, some might say, was when he moved his lips. “Roger’s got a family and a serious career. It’s not so convenient—”

  “He was here last week,” I said.

  He slowly shook his head. “I think I’d remember that, Nicholas. There’s not much to do here if you don’t lift weights, and you’ve seen all the Law and Order reruns.”

  “Roger’s name is in the prison visitor-control system three times in the last ten weeks.”

  He hesitated only a split second while he decided whether to brazen it out. His smile spread slowly, eyes gleaming.

  “You know me too well,” he said with a laugh.

  43.

  The summer before Roger went off to Harvard, we were hanging out in the body shop of Norman Lang Motors, the used-car dealership owned by a buddy of mine.

  Timmy Lang was watching a guy spray-paint an orange-and-yellow flaming pony on the side of a red Mustang. The paint fumes smelled bad, and we’d always thought that Timmy, not the brightest bulb, had probably breathed too much of them over the years, so Roger and I were standing as far away as we could get. I was going on about how unfair it was, what they’d done to Dad. The way he’d had to go on the lam, become a fugitive somewhere in Switzerland, and all because he’d made some powerful enemies. He was innocent: He’d told us so himself.

  Roger cut me off. “Look, Red Man,” he said, “you really shouldn’t talk about things you don’t understand.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “All I’m saying, Nick, is that sometimes things are . . . complicated, that’s all.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Figure it out,” he said.

  Then I did something I’d never done before: I slugged Roger in the stomach. He doubled over, came back up a minute later, red-faced. But he wasn’t angry. He smiled. “You’re the last true believer, aren’t you, Nick?” he said. “You’ll learn.”

  If a cynic is just a bruised idealist, then Roger wasn’t really a cynic. He was no idealist. He was just more clear-eyed than me.

  See, I’d taken Dad at his word.

  ______

  “ALL PHONE calls here are monitored and recorded,” I said to my father. “So if you want to talk about something sensitive, it’s got to be in person. What did Roger want to talk about?”

  He raised his chin slowly, pursed his lips a few times. “Yes, why in the world would he waste his time coming all the way out here to talk to an old fart like me?”

  “Dad,” I said, refusing to give in to his rancor, “this is important. It’s for Roger’s sake.”

  But he didn’t want to be deterred from his tirade. His voice rose steadily. I could smell the goatish fug of his body odor.

  “There was a time when you worshipped your brother. You thought he peed Perrier. You thought he hung the moon. But I understand why you despise him now. You can’t stand the fact that he stood by me all these years while you did the easy thing and succumbed to all the peer pressure and turned against me.”

  “Are you finished?” I said patiently. The mother with two little kids had stopped arguing with her boyfriend or husband. Her kids had gotten tired of exploring the featureless room and were sitting on the floor with markers and coloring books.

  “Do you know that I still get producers from Fox News and CNN and even 60 Minutes calling the prison and writing me, wanting to interview me? MSNBC wants to feature me on some show called Lock-up. And do you know why I refuse? Because of you. And your mother. And Roger. And my grandson. Because I don’t want to stir things up. I don’t want to embarrass you. I want people to forget. I know what they want. They want a nice juicy video segment, a tight close-up of the billionaire in his prison uniform, brought low, humiliated and filled with regret and expressing remorse for his terrible crimes. They want a morality play. So their viewers can feel a little better about their lives of quiet desperation.”

  “Dad—”

  “Do you know—do you know—that I’m locked up in the same cell-block as murderers and rapists? I’m in here for thirty years, Nicholas. There are child molesters who will be out long before m
e.”

  “You can be released early for good behavior,” I said.

  He smiled bitterly. “If I’m very very good, they’ll put me on a prison bus and let me pick up garbage on the side of the road. Are you aware that there’s a man in here who murdered his own father? Beat him with a baseball bat, then gutted him with a fish knife and put the body in the woods, and this lovely fellow was convicted of manslaughter in the first degree, and he’s serving five years. Five years. While I’m in here for three decades. And do you know why?” A gob of spittle had formed at the corner of his mouth.

  I nodded. “Securities fraud and grand larceny.”

  He waggled a finger. “Wrong. I’m here because of ambition.”

  “I suppose that’s one way of putting it.”

  “Oh, not my own ambition. Believe me. I’m here because some very greedy and grasping young turks in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan wanted a scalp. They wanted to advance their grubby little careers. They wanted to land a plum job at some white-shoe law firm. Or run for mayor. Or governor. It’s all about ambition, Nicholas. Theirs versus mine. I was merely a stepping-stone on their path to greater glory. There’s no more Mafia, so now they go after the rich guys. ‘White-collar crime,’ they call it. Isn’t that what you do for a living now? Some sort of gumshoe? A private dick? You don’t think that’s beneath you, Nicholas? A little déclassé?”

  I let my eyes roam the visiting room slowly, pointedly. “It’s hard to measure up to your accomplishments,” I said. “You set the bar awfully high.” I smiled. “Also, Stoddard Associates wasn’t too déclassé when you wanted them to save your ass.”

  “When you need a plumber, you call a plumber. Doesn’t mean you become one.”

  I shrugged.

  “And yet you dare to pass judgment on me,” he said.

  “Not at all. I don’t need to pass judgment on you. I already know what I think of you.”

  He gave me his raptor’s smile.

  “Anyway, I wasn’t asking about you,” I said. “Fascinating as you are. I need to know what Roger came here to talk about.”

  He licked his lips very precisely, with just the tip of his tongue. “Your brother and I spoke in confidence. I won’t betray that confidence. You can ask him yourself.”

  “I wish I could. But he’s gone. And I’m thinking it had something to do with whatever you two talked about.”

  “That’s between father and son.” He said it with a cruel twist, as if he and I had a different, less privileged relationship.

  “Okay,” I said. I pushed back the chair and got up. The guard looked up from his small wooden table at the door. “Nice to see you, Dad. A pleasure as always.”

  “Sit down,” he said. “Don’t be silly. Your brother can tell you whatever he chooses to tell you.”

  “Not likely. He and Lauren were attacked in Georgetown a couple of days ago, and when she woke up in the hospital—”

  “Hospital? Is Lauren all right?”

  I nodded, backed away from the counter a few steps.

  My father stared at me levelly. Blinked a few times. “And Roger?”

  “No one’s been able to find him since then. No one’s heard anything from him.”

  A look of panic darted across his eyes, and he suddenly gave a loud, guttural cry. “No! Dear God, no! God damn it, I told him not to do it.”

  44.

  My father ran a hand over his forehead, his eyes, flecking off some snowflakes of dead skin. “What does this mean, no one’s been able to find him? They haven’t found a—?”

  “No body, Dad. Maybe he’s alive. Maybe he’s just fine. Then again . . .” I returned to the plastic chair and sat down. “So tell me what you and Roger talked about.”

  He cradled his scaly forehead in his hands. His large blunt fingers massaged the skin deeply, and I had to look away. Psoriasis often flares up at times of severe emotional stress. I imagined that being in prison might be stressful. Funny how the condition made him more repellent, more reptilian, rather than more sympathetic or vulnerable.

  “He said he’d found something he wanted my input on,” Victor said, his words muffled.

  “Your input.”

  He looked up, sighed. He folded his hands on the counter in front of him. “Yes, Nicholas, it turns out I know a thing or two. Even though you never wanted to learn anything from me.”

  “What do you mean? I learned plenty.”

  “Your sarcasm doesn’t escape me. Roger told me he’d come across a phony expense from one of his subcontractors—a security firm.”

  “A subcontractor?”

  “They’d been providing installation security for Gifford Industries—armed guards for their power plants and construction projects and such.”

  “What do you mean, a ‘phony expense’?”

  “He was convinced this was a bribe, a kickback, to some Pentagon big shot, and he wanted proof. But that was a tall order, even to someone as brilliant as your brother. It’s a little like understanding algebraic combinatorics if you still don’t get long division.”

  Ah, the old Victor Heller arrogance. Even talking about his revered and adored son, he had to establish his superiority. “Like a toddler trying to run the Boston Marathon, is that it?”

  “Give it a rest, Nicholas. Roger knows this stuff on a fairly deep level. But not like me. I’ve done it.”

  I assumed he meant that he’d set up all kinds of shell companies in offshore tax havens. I’d often wondered whether he’d squirreled money away, money the government hadn’t been able to locate and seize. How else could he have lived as a fugitive for all those years?

  “So Roger wanted to prove that this security firm was making kickbacks to the Pentagon,” I said skeptically. That fit with what he’d told Lauren and what Marjorie Ogonowski had told me. “Why? So he could report it to the government? Earn a merit badge, maybe? Why does this not sound like Roger?”

  My father sighed impatiently, waved a hand around as if trying to swat away a cloud of mosquitoes. “Oh, please,” he said. “Spare me. Roger was tired of being poor.”

  “Poor?” I said. “Good God. He was making a six-figure salary.”

  He snorted. “A six-figure salary. These days, that’s poverty.”

  “What do you earn, working in the prison laundry?” I said. “Ten cents a day?”

  He didn’t even bother granting me one of his famous withering glares. “He’d had it with being sidelined. He was fed up with seeing mediocrities being promoted above him while he remained stuck. One of a hundred vice presidents. He could have run Gifford Industries, and he knew it.”

  “So what was he trying to do?”

  “Quite simply, he wanted to make it clear what he had on them. What he knew. And how much he wanted.”

  “Hush money,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Extortion.”

  “You always did have a way with words.”

  Yes. Now that sounded like the Roger I knew. “How much did he want?”

  “Ten million dollars.”

  “That all?” I said as dryly as I could.

  “Actually, that was quite reasonable. Quite the bargain. If you consider the public furor that would have erupted if the kickbacks became public. They’d have lost many times that in government contracts.”

  “Government contracts, huh? What’s the company?”

  “You might have heard of Paladin Worldwide.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  Paladin Worldwide was the world’s largest private military contractor. It began as a supplier of armed guards for businesses like Gifford Enterprises and eventually morphed into a full-fledged army for hire. Paladin was infamous, controversial, and generally despised. Paladin soldiers—“contractors,” they were called—were widely regarded as trigger-happy cowboys. But what really ticked off U.S. soldiers was that, while a typical sergeant might make a hundred bucks a day, the Paladin guys were making a thousand.

  When I was in the servi
ce, in Afghanistan and Bosnia, Paladin mercs fought alongside the U.S. troops. They were all recent vets, and in truth they were as well trained as anyone, but since they were legally classified as “consultants,” they weren’t subject to the laws of the country in which they were fighting—or even U.S. military law. That meant that they could fire at civilians with impunity, and some of them did. They couldn’t be prosecuted. Not one was ever charged with a crime. It was like the Wild West. In Iraq, in fact, there were more private contractors than U.S. Army troops. And Paladin Worldwide was the biggest contractor there.

  “He was trying to extort ten million dollars from Paladin? Not the smartest idea. Those guys are armed and dangerous.”

  “I warned him that the whole idea was reckless.”

  “Did you, Dad? Or did you give him tips on how to do it?”

  Another sigh, this one more peeved than impatient. “I told him he was playing a very dangerous game.”

  I was silent for a long while, then I said, “Did he ever get the ten million?”

  “I don’t know. I assume not.”

  I recalled Roger’s e-mail, sent through that InCaseOfDeath website. “This has to be the strangest letter I’ve ever written,” he’d said. “Because if you get it, that means I’m dead.”

  And: “Who knows what they’ll do? Will they try to make it look like I committed suicide?”

  He talked about “the people who are trying to stop me.”

  The people who were trying to stop him—from blackmailing them, from extorting them—were Paladin Worldwide, it was clear. Somehow Roger had learned about a phony expense they’d submitted to Gifford Industries, a kickback they’d tried to bill Gifford for. And Roger being Roger, he moved in for the kill. Demanded ten million dollars in hush money.

  From Paladin Worldwide. The world’s largest private army.

  There could scarcely be a more lethal adversary.

  “So what do you think happened?” I said. “You think Paladin grabbed Roger? Or maybe Roger disappeared in order to escape them?”