Vanished Read online

  And not until I’d left Paladin’s office and was riding the elevator down to the parking garage did what Koblenz had told me finally sink in.

  I had to assume, of course, that every word Koblenz had told me, including “and” and “the,” was a lie. That was a given. But I operated on that assumption most of the time anyway: Washington, D.C., is to lying what Hershey, Pennsylvania, is to chocolate.

  Was Paladin Worldwide really owned by Gifford Industries?

  Why not? That wasn’t inconceivable at all. This was the age of corporate consolidation. Big companies buy smaller companies all the time. It’s part of nature, the corporate food chain. The same way microscopic phyto-plankton are eaten by zooplankton, which are in turn eaten by little fish, which get eaten by bigger fish and so on up to the orca killer whale.

  I’d heard rumors that Allen Granger had been looking to sell Paladin. Maybe he realized that things had changed in Washington, that the new administration didn’t want to do so much business with him.

  For instance, one of Paladin’s subsidiaries was an aviation company that did secret “extraordinary rendition” flights for the CIA. Which basically meant that when suspected terrorists were seized by masked men on the street somewhere in Europe and blindfolded and tranquilized and spirited away, it was a Paladin-owned Gulfstream or Boeing 737 that flew the guy off to be tortured in a secret CIA prison in Egypt or Macedonia or Morocco or Libya or another such country that took a more broad-minded view of human rights than the U.S.

  With a new president in office and the secret rendition program cancelled, maybe that wasn’t such a great business to be in anymore.

  Allen Granger was known to be a shrewd businessman. Why wouldn’t he want to cash out at or near the top of the market? Made sense.

  And if Gifford Industries owned Paladin Worldwide, that would explain why Roger had had access to Paladin’s offshore financial records.

  That made sense, too.

  It would certainly explain his meetings with and phone calls to our father, the master thief. Victor had been giving Roger tutorials.

  I told him he was playing a very dangerous game, Victor had said.

  I warned him that the whole idea was reckless.

  So Roger had finally figured out a way to get the money he’d always felt entitled to. Even if it meant leaving behind his wife and son. A wife he was unfaithful to, and her son. Not his.

  He hadn’t stolen money from Paladin, though. He’d tried to blackmail them, which was a very different thing. He’d found out about bribes, kickbacks, whatever, that Paladin made to the Pentagon in order to make sure they got their no-bid contracts—that was my theory, anyway—and had threatened them with exposure. Threatened to report them to some law-enforcement authority, maybe. Unless they paid up.

  Roger was tired of being poor.

  He wasn’t a thief. He was a blackmailer. An extortionist.

  Not that extortion was any better than stealing. I didn’t care one way or the other. But I was certain that Carl Koblenz had handed me a forgery, because he didn’t want me—or anyone—to know that Roger had tried to blackmail them.

  Because to admit that Roger had tried to blackmail them would mean admitting to the sleaze, the illegality, that Roger had threatened to expose. And that Koblenz didn’t want to do.

  I found the Defender where I’d parked it, in a row that branched off the third underground level. As I inserted my key in the lock, I hesitated.

  Call it paranoia. Call it instinct.

  Call it the realization that someone had unwittingly disturbed the pattern of gravel I’d placed on three sides of the car—tiny pyramids of gravel fragments. I wasn’t a fool. I was parking my car in the garage underneath the building where Paladin had an office. Not to assume they’d do something would be naïve.

  Kneeling down, I ran my hand across the undercarriage, feeling for anything that might have been added while I was upstairs meeting with Koblenz. A bomb, say. I peered underneath the car, scanned carefully, and saw nothing.

  Paranoia, I thought.

  Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not really out to get you.

  I opened the car door; then, just to be thorough, I got out and knelt in front of the bumper.

  And found it, magnetically affixed to the back of the license plate. I pulled it off: a miniature GPS tracking device. A box about three inches by one containing a GPS receiver and a cellular modem. That little toy could transmit a vehicle’s location over a cell-phone network.

  That meant that my friends at Paladin could track my car’s every move on their computers at the office or even on their PDAs or iPhones. The technology in those things was light-years beyond the days of “bumper beepers,” when you slapped a radio transmitter on a straying wife’s car so you could follow her to her rendezvous with the UPS guy at Motel 6.

  I heard a scraping sound, and I looked up.

  Three Day-Glo traffic cones had been placed across the mouth of the lane.

  And coming at me slowly, steadily, were my three friends from upstairs.

  65.

  Three against one, I thought: Not exactly a fair fight.

  Though they weren’t expecting much of a fight. I could see that.

  “What’s up, guys?” I said.

  The guy with the long grayish hair and the droopy mustache—Taylor, I think—rasped, “Got a quick sec to talk?”

  He was the only one of the three still wearing a suit, though he’d taken off his tie. The others had changed into jeans. Taylor looked like a washed-up country-and-western music star doing a late-night TV talk show.

  Except for the weapon he was holding. An aluminum-frame Ruger.45 with a black polycarbonate grip, I guessed. Probably a P90. After a couple of years in the field, I’d gotten good at identifying weapons, a skill that could save your life.

  But these guys weren’t here to kill me. I took Taylor at his word: They wanted to talk to me. Ask me questions.

  The steroid-poisoned WrestleMania reject with the jarhead haircut—Bondarchuk, I remembered—was dangling a handful of yellow nylon flex cuffs. I wasn’t sure why Burris was here, though, unless it was for the personal satisfaction of seeing me restrained and maybe bruised a bit in the process. Otherwise, with his broken wrist, he was mostly a liability.

  They advanced toward me slowly, moving into position. Burris swaggered, torquing his yard-wide shoulders back and forth, though I noticed that he kept back a good safe distance. Placing the traffic cones was a thoughtful touch. They wanted to make sure no car came by and got in the way.

  “This doesn’t look like a bible-study group,” I said. I stood next to my Land Rover, at the back end, not moving.

  “Let’s just do this quick and easy,” Taylor said.

  “Always happy to talk,” I said, hands outspread. “Though I thought Carl and I said all there was to say.”

  Taylor stopped about ten feet away and raised his weapon slowly, adjusting his grip, and thumbed up the safety to the fire position. Bondarchuk came around to my other side, flex cuffs at the ready. In his giant hand, the yellow nylon straps looked like loose threads.

  A couple walked past the traffic cones, did a double take, then rushed to their car.

  Neil Burris had a little smirk on his moon face, wreathed by his scrubby goatee—a chin mullet. Now I could see a weapon in his left hand, his only good hand. A black pistol-like object with yellow markings and a muzzle that was too broad to be a gun. A Taser, law-enforcement model. He stood about twenty feet away.

  The operating manual that came with the professional-grade Taser told you that twenty-one feet was the maximum effective distance. Theoretically, the compressed nitrogen cartridge in the Taser would fire its two barbed aluminum probes, which were connected by wire filaments to the handheld unit, up to twenty-one feet. The miniature electric harpoons would penetrate clothing then let loose with a paralyzing fifty thousand volts and eighteen watts. Theoretically.

  But Burris should hav
e spent more time reading the manual.

  Fire the thing at a distance of twenty-one feet, and the probes spread too far apart. If both probes don’t hit your subject, you won’t get an electrical circuit. It won’t work. Seven or eight feet is probably the farthest you want to be.

  But Burris was afraid to stand that close to me.

  “Hands up and turn around,” Taylor said.

  It didn’t take me long to decide that I had no choice. A Ruger and a Taser. Three men on one.

  They only wanted to talk.

  Then again, some of the most ruthless interrogators at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo had been supplied by Paladin. So maybe it was all in how you defined “talk.”

  I shrugged, put my hands up, and turned around, my back to Taylor. Bondarchuk scuffed into an orthogonal position to my left, just far enough away that I couldn’t jump him.

  “Hands behind your back, please,” Taylor said.

  Burris had shifted position so that he was directly in front of me, and still a good twenty feet away. He raised the Taser in his left hand and pointed it at me and squinted one eye as if he were aiming. That was pure theater. You didn’t need to aim a stun gun that precisely, and if he did fire it, it wouldn’t work, and I was fairly certain he wasn’t planning on using it anyway.

  I brought my hands down to my side. Bondarchuk stepped close to loop the flex cuffs around my wrists.

  These were pros, and I couldn’t let them establish a tactical advantage, or it was all over.

  I felt Taylor clap a hand on my left shoulder. “Hands behind your back,” he shouted, jamming his Ruger against my spine. “Do it now!”

  At that instant, I stumbled, but not forward.

  I fell backwards, right into him, catching him off guard. The momentum sent his gun hand sliding forward, through the gap between my torso and my right arm.

  I didn’t have time to think. Lightning-fast, I slipped my hands over his wrist while twisting to my right, his elbow vised tight against my side, and pulled down on his straight arm with a sudden sharp force, hyperextending it.

  The elbow is a complicated joint. It’s a hinge made out of three bones that come together with a lot of ligaments and tendons. Most people can flex their elbows nearly one hundred and eight degrees. Force it beyond that, and you’ll wedge the bony tip of the ulna under the end of the humerus, and bad things can happen. The bones can separate, or fracture, or simply snap.

  I heard a snap.

  Taylor’s scream was almost inhuman. It echoed off the concrete walls as he doubled over in pain and sank to the floor.

  His Ruger clattered to the ground.

  I couldn’t risk leaning over to retrieve it. Instead, I gave the gun a sideways kick, sending it skittering across the floor and underneath my car.

  And then two things happened almost simultaneously.

  Bondarchuk lunged at me and threw a straight punch at my head, his enormous fist coming at me with all of his vast body weight behind it. I raised my left arm to deflect the blow, which threw him off-balance. He leaned forward just as I smashed my elbow into his chin. He grunted, wobbled, righted himself, somehow managed to land a punch on my shoulder.

  Immensely painful, but nothing compared to what Taylor was experiencing. He lay writhing and bellowing like a dying beast, clutching his grotesquely distended joint.

  Then Neil Burris, who’d been striding toward me, raised his Taser and fired.

  66.

  Here’s the thing about close combat in real life: It’s almost always over in a matter of seconds. Not like in the movies, where your hero has the luxury to strategize and maneuver and grapple for minutes on end.

  Fortunately, when your life is in danger, your brain kicks in. Deep inside your brain this little almond-shaped gland called the amygdala sends out the signal to make your body start pumping out dopamine and adrenaline and cortisol. Time seems to slow, your focus sharpens, you suddenly start perceiving way more stimuli than normal. Neurologists call this tachypsychia. Everyone else calls it the fight-or-flight response. Cavemen who didn’t have it got eaten by saber-toothed tigers.

  So I made a quick decision. I could either be incapacitated by a Taser, or I could put myself within the reach of Bondarchuk’s fists.

  No choice.

  I dove at the giant, kneeing him in the stomach as I did so. He toppled to the ground, and I landed on top of him.

  There was a loud pop and then a metallic chink-chink as Burris’s Taser fired its two fishhook probes into the Defender’s steel rear door. He’d missed me by about one second. Then came the rattling, frying-bug-zapper sound of the Taser sending out its electrical current.

  Burris cursed. He couldn’t use the Taser again until he’d replaced the spent cartridge, which wouldn’t be easy with only one working hand.

  Meanwhile, Bondarchuk reared up, taking me up with him like a forklift. But I really didn’t want to give him the chance to swing at me again. I kneed him in the chin, snapping his head upward. He sagged to the floor, finally knocked out.

  “Tase him!” I heard. “Tase him, now!”

  Taylor was on his knees, trying to get up. Behind him, Burris was fumbling with the holster clipped to his belt using the fingers of his wounded hand. Not a handgun. A replacement cartridge for the Taser. Both men were badly hurt, and neither was giving up.

  The profit motive always works.

  I guess I was motivated, at that precise moment, by pure raw anger. Winded and aching, I struggled to my feet, grabbing on to the side-view mirror of the Toyota Camry parked next to my car to hoist myself up.

  But with a metallic groan the damned thing wrenched loose and I almost fell backwards. I got back up, kicked Taylor at the back of his head, and he, too, went down.

  Burris managed to seat the new cartridge into the Taser.

  I grabbed the Camry’s dangling side-view-mirror assembly, twisted it free, then hurled the heavy chrome mirror object at Burris. It clipped him on the forehead with a loud thud. He wobbled, the Taser slipped from his hand, and he toppled slowly, like a felled tree.

  Leaning back against the Camry’s passenger-side door, I took a few deep breaths. The flex cuffs lay scattered on the floor near Bondarchuk’s feet. I snatched them up. Four nylon temporary restraints: He’d brought enough to bind my hands and my feet, with a few left over for good luck.

  In a little over a minute I had all three of them cuffed. I figured they might regain consciousness in a few minutes. Even if they were out longer, why not slow them down as much as possible?

  But just as I was pulling the cuffs tight on Burris’s wrists, he came to. He moved his head, groaned, opened his eyes. They were glassy and bloodshot.

  “Big mistake,” he said.

  “Hey there, Neil. We meet again.”

  “Think this is over?” His speech was slurred.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think so.”

  He didn’t reply.

  The Taser was on the floor between his feet, calling out to me. It was already powered on.

  He saw where I was looking, and he said, “Don’t even f—”

  “Tell Koblenz that if he wants to ask me anything, he can make an appointment with my secretary.”

  “You have any idea what Granger’s going to do to you? You’ll beg for death.”

  “I haven’t used one of these in years,” I said.

  Burris snorted. “Go ahead. Did the kid tell you he pissed his pants when my buddies gave him a ride home from school? Yep, that’s what I heard. He was probably too embarrassed to tell you that, huh?”

  All of a sudden the Taser seemed too impersonal. I aimed my fist carefully at a small area behind his ear, at the base of his skull, a bony outgrowth called the mastoid process. I knew that if I wasn’t careful, I could break my hand.

  So I was careful. I hit him hard and fast, and I didn’t break my hand. Burris went right out.

  Clipped to his belt was his keycard. It had his photo printed on the front, along with his name and employe
e number and the Paladin seal.

  The others, I knew, would have their cards with them as well. They might be mercenaries and ex–Navy SEALS but they were also corporate employees, and like cube dwellers everywhere, they never went anywhere without their keycards.

  I jotted down their full names and dates of birth and employee numbers. I checked their wallets and noted the information on their driver’s licenses and wrote that down, too. Each had a rugged little push-to-talk Nextel cell phone. No car keys. Nothing else of interest.

  I took Taylor’s phone, on the theory that the most senior guy would probably have the most access to higher-ups, meaning that he’d have the most useful phone numbers programmed into his phone.

  I retrieved the gun from under the Defender. Always useful.

  But it was the keycards that most interested me. They would get me into the building. Maybe into Paladin’s office suite as well.

  Taking a keycard, however, was out of the question. Once Koblenz realized I’d taken it, that card would be deactivated, frozen. And I wasn’t yet ready to use it. Not quite yet. I needed time to prepare.

  I examined Taylor’s card, and confirmed that it was the same exact type that Stoddard used, a PVC proximity card. Convenient, but not a huge surprise. The vast majority of corporations around the world issued key-cards just like the ones Paladin used.

  It was the size of a credit card, with printing on one side. Actually, it was a sandwich: a layer of PVC, then a layer containing an antenna coil and an integrated electronic chip, then another layer of PVC, with an adhesive backing designed to go through the company’s on-site printer.

  Most companies recycle keycards—they just reprogram them and peel off the label and stick on a new one. It wasn’t hard to peel the top layer off Taylor’s keycard, once I wedged a fingernail in there. I was able to swap his picture for mine in a matter of minutes. That way, they wouldn’t realize I’d taken one of their proximity cards. Taylor’s wouldn’t work, but that wouldn’t worry them too much. Maybe it had gotten damaged in the struggle.