Vanished

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Lauren Heller’s husband disappeared at a few minutes after ten thirty on a rainy evening.

They were walking to their car after dinner at his favorite Japanese restaurant, on Thirty-third Street in Georgetown. Roger, a serious sushi connoisseur, considered Oji-San the best, most authentic place in all of D.C. Lauren didn’t care one way or another. Raw fish was raw fish, she thought: pretty, but inedible. But Roger-the Mussolini of maki, the Stalin of sashimi-never settled for less than the best. “Hey, I married you, right?” he pointed out on the way over, and how was she supposed to argue with that?

She was just grateful they were finally having a date night. They hadn’t had one in almost three months.

Not that it had been much of a date, actually. He’d seemed awfully preoccupied. Worried about something. Then again, he got that way sometimes, for days at a time. That was just the way he dealt with stress at the office. A very male thing, she’d always thought. Men tended to internalize their problems. Women usually let it out, got emotional, screamed or cried or just got mad, and ended up coping a lot better in the long run. If that wasn’t emotional intelligence, then what was?

But Roger, whom she loved and admired and who was probably the smartest guy she’d ever met, handled stress like a typical man. Plus, he didn’t like to talk about things. That was just his way. That was how he’d been brought up. She remembered once saying to him, “We need to talk,” and he replied, “Those are the scariest four words in the English language.”

Anyway, they had a firm rule: no shop talk. Since they both worked at Gifford Industries-he as a senior finance guy, she as admin to the CEO-that was the only way to keep work from invading their home life.

So at dinner, Roger barely said a word, checked his BlackBerry every few minutes, and scarfed down his nigiri. She’d ordered something recommended by their waiter, which sounded good but turned out to be layers of miso-soaked black cod. The house specialty. Yuck. She left it untouched, picked at her seaweed salad, drank too much sake, got a little tipsy.

They’d cut through Cady’s Alley, a narrow cobblestone walkway lined with old red-brick warehouses converted to high-end German kitchen stores and Italian lighting boutiques. Their footsteps echoed hollowly.

She stopped at the top of the concrete steps that led down to Water Street and said, “Feel like getting some ice cream? Thomas Sweet, maybe?”

The oblique beam of a streetlight caught his white teeth, his strong nose, the pouches that had recently appeared under his eyes. “I thought you’re on South Beach.”

“They have some sugar-free stuff that’s not bad.”

“It’s all the way over on P, isn’t it?”

“There’s a Ben & Jerry’s on M.”

“We probably shouldn’t press our luck with Gabe.”

“He’ll be fine,” she said. Their son was fourteen: old enough to stay home by himself. In truth, staying home alone made him a little nervous though he’d never admit it. The kid was as stubborn as his parents.

Water Street was dark, deserted, kind of creepy at that time of night. A row of cars were parked along a chain-link fence, the scrubby banks of the Potomac just beyond. Roger’s black S-Class Mercedes was wedged between a white panel van and a battered Toyota.

He stood for a moment, rummaged through his pockets, then turned abruptly. “Damn. Left the keys back in the restaurant.”

She grunted, annoyed but not wanting to make a big deal out of it.

“You didn’t bring yours, did you?”

Lauren shook her head. She rarely drove his Mercedes anyway. He was too fussy about his car. “Check your pockets?”

He patted the pockets of his trench coat and his pants and suit jacket as if to prove it. “Yeah. Must’ve left them on the table in the restaurant when I took out my BlackBerry. Sorry about that. Come on.”

“We don’t both have to go back. I’ll wait here.”

A motorcycle blatted by from somewhere below. The white-noise roar of trucks on the Whitehurst Freeway overhead.

“I don’t want you standing out here alone.”

“I’ll be fine. Just hurry, okay?”

He hesitated, took a step toward her, then suddenly kissed her on the lips. “I love you,” he said.

She stared at his back as he hustled across the street. It pleased her to hear that I love you, but she wasn’t used to it, really. Roger Heller was a good husband and father, but not the most demonstrative of men.

A distant shout, then raucous laughter: frat kids, probably Georgetown or GW.

A scuffling sound from the pavement behind her.

She turned to look, felt a sudden gust of air, and a hand was clamped over her mouth.

She tried to scream, but it was stifled beneath the large hand, and she struggled frantically. Roger so close. Maybe a few hundred feet away by then. Close enough to see what was happening to her, if only he’d turn around.

Powerful arms had grabbed her from behind.

She needed to get Roger’s attention, but he obviously couldn’t hear anything at that distance, the scuffling masked by the traffic sounds.

Turn around, damn it! she thought. Good God, please turn around!

“Roger!” she screamed, but it came out a pathetic mewl. She smelled some kind of cheap cologne, mixed with stale cigarette smoke.

She tried to twist her body around, to wrench free, but her arms were trapped, pinioned against the sides of her body, and she felt something cold and hard at her temple, and she heard a click, and then something struck the side of her head, a jagged lightning bolt of pain piercing her eyes.

The foot. Stomp on his foot-some half-remembered martial-arts self-defense class from long ago.

Stomp his instep.

She jammed her left foot down hard, striking nothing, then kicked backwards, hit the Mercedes with a hollow metallic crunch. She tried to pivot, and-

Roger swiveled suddenly, alerted by the sound. He shouted, “Lauren!”

Raced back across the street.

“What the hell are you doing to her?” he screamed. “Why her?”

Something slammed against the back of her head. She tasted blood.

She tried to make sense of what was going on, but she was falling backwards, hurtling through space, and that was the last thing she remembered.

1.

LOS ANGELES

It was a dark and stormy night.

Actually, it wasn’t stormy. But it was dark and rainy and miserable and, for L.A., pretty damned cold. I stood in the drizzle at eleven o’clock at night, under the sickly yellow light from the high-pressure sodium lamps, wearing a fleece and jeans that were soaking wet and good leather shoes that were in the process of getting destroyed.

I’d had the shoes handmade in London for some ridiculous amount of money, and I made a mental note to bill my employer, Stoddard Associates, for the damage, just on general principle.

I hadn’t expected rain. Though, as a putatively high-powered international investigator with a reputation for being able to see around corners, I supposed I could have checked Weather.com.

“That’s the one,” the man standing next to me grunted, pointing at a jet parked a few hundred feet away. He was wearing a long yellow rain slicker with a hood-he hadn’t offered me one back in the office-and his face was concealed by shadows. All I could see was his bristly white mustache.

Elwood Sawyer was the corporate security director of Argon Express Cargo, a competitor of DHL and FedEx, though a lot smaller. He wasn’t happy to see me, but I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t want to be here myself. My boss, Jay Stoddard, had sent me here at the last minute to handle an emergency for a new client I’d never heard of.

An entire planeload of cargo had vanished sometime in the last twenty-four hours. Someone had cleaned out one of their planes at this small regional airport south of L.A. Twenty thousand pounds of boxes and envelopes and packages that had arrived the previous day from Brussels. Gone.

You couldn’t even begin to calculate the loss. Thousands of missing packages meant thousands of enraged customers and lawsuits up the wazoo. A part of the shipment belonged to one customer, Traverse Development Group, which had hired my firm to locate their cargo. They were urgent about it, and they weren’t going to rely on some second-string cargo company to find it for them.

But the last thing Elwood Sawyer wanted was some high-priced corporate investigator from Washington, D.C., standing there in a pair of fancy shoes telling him how he’d screwed up.

The cargo jet he was pointing at stood solitary and dark and rain-slicked, gleaming in the airfield lights. It was glossy white, like all Argon cargo jets, with the company’s name painted across the fuselage in bold orange Helvetica. It was a Boeing 727, immense and magnificent.

An airplane up close is a thing of beauty. Much more awe-inspiring than the view from inside when you’re trapped with the seat of the guy in front of you tilted all the way back, crushing your knees. The jet was one of maybe twenty planes parked in a row on the apron nearby. Some of them, I guessed, were there for the weekend, some for the night, since the control tower closed at ten o’clock. There were chocks under their wheels and traffic cones around each one denoting the circle of safety.

“Let’s take a look inside, Elwood,” I said.

Sawyer turned to look at me. He had bloodshot basset-hound eyes with big saggy pouches beneath them.

“Woody,” he said. He was correcting me, not trying to be friends.

“Okay. Woody.”

“There’s nothing to see. They cleaned it out.” In his right hand he clutched one of those aluminum clipboards in a hinged box, the kind that truck drivers and cops always carry around.

“Mind if I take a look anyway? I’ve never seen the inside of a cargo plane.”

“Mr. Keller-”

“Heller.”

“Mr. Keller, we didn’t hire you, and I don’t have time to play tour guide, so why don’t you go back to interviewing the ground crew while I try to figure out how someone managed to smuggle three truckloads of freight out of this airport without anyone noticing?”

He turned to walk back to the terminal, and I said, “Woody, look. I’m not here to make you look bad. We both want the same thing-to find the missing cargo. I might be able to help. Two heads are better than one, and all that.”

He kept walking. “Uh-huh. Well, that’s real thoughtful, but I’m kinda busy right now.”

“Okay. So… Mind if I use your name?” I said.

He stopped, didn’t turn around. “For what?”

“My client’s going to ask for a name. The guy at Traverse Development can be a vindictive son of a bitch.” Actually, I didn’t even know who at Traverse had hired my firm.

Woody didn’t move.

“You know how these guys work,” I said. “When I tell my client how Argon Express wasn’t interested in any outside assistance, he’s going to ask me for a name. Maybe he’ll admire your independent spirit-that go-it-alone thing. Then again, maybe he’ll just get pissed off so bad that they’ll just stop doing business with you guys. No big deal to them. Then word gets around. Like maybe you guys were covering something up, right? Maybe there’s the threat of a huge lawsuit. Pretty soon, Argon Express goes belly-up. And all because of you.”

Woody still wasn’t moving, but I could see his shoulders start to slump. The back of his yellow slicker was streaked with oil and grime.

“But between you and me, Woody, I gotta admire you for having the guts to tell Traverse Development where to get off. Not too many people have the balls to do that.”

Woody turned around slowly. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone blink so slowly and with such obvious hostility. He headed toward the plane, and I followed close behind.

THERE WAS a hydraulic hum, and the big cargo door came open like the lift gate on a suburban minivan. Woody was standing in the belly of the plane. He gestured me inside with a weary flip of his hand.

He must have switched on an auxiliary power unit because the lights inside the plane were on, a series of naked bulbs in wire cages mounted on the ceiling. The interior was cavernous. You could see the rails where the rows of seats used to be. Just a black floor marked with red lines where the huge cargo containers were supposed to go, only there were no containers here. White windowless walls lined with some kind of papery white material.

I whistled. Totally bare. “The plane was full when it flew in?”

“Mmm-hmm. Twelve igloos.”

“ ‘Igloos’ are the containers, right?”

He walked over to the open cargo door. The rain was thrumming against the plane’s aluminum skin. “Look for yourself.”

A crew was loading another Argon cargo jet right next to us. They worked in that unhurried, efficient manner of a team that had done this a thousand times before. A couple of guys were pushing an immense container, eight or ten feet high and shaped like a child’s drawing of a house, from the back of a truck onto the steel elevator platform of a K-loader. I counted seven guys. Two to push the igloo off the truck, two more to roll it onto the plane, another one to operate the K-loader. Two more guys whose main job seemed to be holding aluminum clipboards and shouting orders. The next jet down, another white Boeing but not one of theirs, was being refueled.

“No way you could get twelve containers off this plane without a crew of at least five,” I said. “Tell me something. This plane got in yesterday, right? What took you so long to unload it?”

He sighed exasperatedly. “International cargo has to be inspected by U.S. Customs before we do anything. It’s the law.”

“That takes an hour or two at most.”

“Yeah, normally. Weekends, Customs doesn’t have the manpower. So they just cleared the crew to get off and go home. Sealed it up. Let it sit there until they had time to do an inspection.”

“So while the plane was sitting here, anyone could have gotten inside. Looks like all the planes just sit here unattended all night. Anyone could climb into one.”

“That’s the way it works in airports around the world, buddy. If you’re cleared to get onto the airfield, they figure you’re supposed to be here. It’s called the ‘honest-man’ system of security.”

I chuckled. “That’s a good one. I gotta use it sometime.”

Woody gave me a look.

I paced along the plane’s interior. There was a surprising amount of rust in the places where there was no liner or white paint. “How old is this thing?” I called out. My voice echoed. It seemed even colder in here than it was outside. The rain was pattering hypnotically on the plane’s exterior.

“Thirty years easy. They stopped making the Boeing seven-twos in 1984, but most of them were made in the sixties and seventies. They’re workhorses, I’m telling you. Long as you do the upkeep, they last forever.”

“You guys buy ’em used or new?”

“Used. Everyone does. FedEx, DHL, UPS-we all buy used planes. It’s a lot cheaper to buy an old passenger plane and have it converted into a cargo freighter.”

“What does one of these cost?”

“Why? You thinking of going into the business?”

“Everyone has a dream.”

He looked at me. It took him a few seconds to get that I was being sarcastic. “You can get one of these babies for three hundred thousand bucks. There’s hundreds of them sitting in airplane boneyards in the desert. Like used-car lots.”

I walked to the front of the plane. Mounted to the doorframe was the data plate, a small stainless-steel square the size of a cigarette pack. Every plane has one. They’re riveted on by the manufacturer, and they’re sort of like birth certificates. This one said THE BOEING COMPANY-COMMERCIAL AIRPLANE DIVISION-RENTON, WASHINGTON, and it listed the year of manufacture (1974) and a bunch of other numbers: the model and the serial number and so on.

I pulled out a little Maglite and looked closer and saw just what I expected to see.

I stepped back out onto the air stairs, the cold rain spritzing my face, and I reached out and felt the slick painted fuselage. I ran my hand over the Argon Express logo, felt something. A ridge. The paint seemed unusually thick.

Woody was watching me from a few feet away. My fingers located the lower left corner of the two-foot-tall letter A.

“You don’t paint your logo on?” I asked.

“Of course it’s painted on. What the hell-?”

It peeled right up. I tugged some more, and the entire logo-some kind of adhesive vinyl sticker-began to lift off.

“Check out the data plate,” I said. “It doesn’t match the tail number.”

“That’s-that’s impossible!”

“They didn’t just steal the cargo, Woody. They stole the whole plane.”

2.

WASHINGTON

I think I saw her eyelids move.”

A woman’s voice, distant and echoing, which worked itself into the fevered illogic of a dream.

Everything deep orange, the color of sunset. Murmured voices; a steady high-pitched beep.

Her eyelids wouldn’t open. It felt as if her eyelashes had been glued together.

Against the blood orange sky, stars rushed at her. She was falling headlong through a sky crowded with stars. They dazzled and clotted into odd-shaped white clouds, and then the light became harsh and far too strong and needles of pain jabbed the backs of her eyeballs.

Her eyelashes came unstuck and fluttered like a bird’s wings.

More high-pitched electronic beeps. Not regular anymore, but jumbled, a cacophony.

A man’s voice: “Let’s check an ionized calcium.”

A clattering of something-dishes? Footsteps receding.

The man again: “Nurse, did that gas come back?”

The husky voice of another woman: “Janet, can you page Yurovsky now, please?”

Lauren said, “You don’t have to shout.”

“She made a sound. Janet, would you please page Yurovsky now?”

She tried again to speak, but then gave up the effort, let her eyelids close, the lashes gumming back together. The needles receded. She became aware of another kind of pain, deep and throbbing, at the back of her head. It pulsed in time to her heartbeat, rhythmically sending jagged waves of pain to a little spot just behind her forehead and above her eyes.

“Ms. Heller,” said the man, “if you can hear me, say something, will you?”

“What do you want, I’m shouting!” Lauren said at the top of her voice.

“Now I see it,” one of the female voices said. “Like she’s trying to talk. I don’t know what she said.”

“I think she said ‘Ow.’ ”

“The doctor’s on rounds right now,” one of the women said.

“I don’t care what he’s doing.” The husky-voiced woman. “I don’t care if he’s in the medical supply closet screwing a nurse. If you don’t page him right this second, I will.”

Lauren smiled, or at least she thought she did.

SHE FELT a hard pinch on her neck.

“Hey!” she protested.

Her eyelids flew open. The light was unbearably bright, just as painful, but everything was gauzy and indistinct, like there was a white scrim over everything. She wondered whether she’d fallen back asleep for several hours.

A hulking silhouette loomed, came close, then pulled back.

A male voice: “Well, she’s responding to painful stimuli.”

Yeah, I’ll show you a painful stimulus, Lauren thought but couldn’t say.

Actually, two silhouettes, she realized. She couldn’t focus, though. Everything was strangely hazy, like every time you saw Lucille Ball in that dreadful movie version of Mame. Lauren had played the snooty Gloria Upson in the Charlottesville High School production of Auntie Mame, and she’d seen the Rosalind Russell movie countless times, but couldn’t stand the Lucy one.

“Mrs. Heller, I’m Dr. Yurovsky. Can you hear me?”

Lauren considered replying, then decided not to bother. Too much effort. The words weren’t coming out the way she wanted.

“Mrs. Heller, if you can hear me, I’d like you to wiggle your right thumb.”

That she definitely didn’t feel like doing. She blinked a few times, which cleared her vision a little.

Finally, she was able to see a man with a tall forehead and long chin, elongated like the man in the moon. Or like a horse. The face came slowly into focus, as if someone were turning a knob. A hooked nose, receding hair. His face was tipped in toward hers. He wore a look of intent concern.

She wiggled her right thumb.

“Mrs. Heller, do you know where you are?”

She tried to swallow, but her tongue was a big woolen sock. No saliva. My breath must reek, she thought.

“I’m guessing it’s a hospital.” Her voice was croaky.

She looked up. A white dropped ceiling with a rust stain on one of the panels, which didn’t inspire confidence. Blue privacy curtains hung from a U-shaped rail. She wasn’t in a private room. Some kind of larger unit, with a lot of beds: an ICU, maybe. A bag of clear liquid sagged on a metal stand, connected by a tube to her arm.

An immense bouquet of white lilies in a glass florist’s vase on the narrow table next to her bed. She craned her neck just enough to see that they were calla lilies, her favorites. A lightning bolt of pain shot through her eyes. She groaned as she smiled.

“From Roger?”

A long pause. Someone whispered something. “From your boss.”

Leland, she thought, smiling inwardly. That’s just like him. She wondered who had ordered the flowers for him.

And how he knew what had happened to her.

She adjusted the thin blanket. “My head hurts,” she said. She felt something lumpy under the blanket, on top of her belly. Pulled it out. A child’s Beanie Baby: a yellow giraffe with orange spots and ugly Day-Glo green feet. It was tattered and soiled. Tears welled in her eyes.

“Your son dropped that off this morning,” a woman said in a soft, sweet voice.

She turned. A nurse. She thought: This morning? That meant it wasn’t morning anymore. She was confused; she’d lost all track of time.

Gabe’s beloved Jaffee-as a toddler, he couldn’t say “Giraffiti,” the name printed on the label. Actually, neither could she. Too cute by half.

“Where is he?”

“Your son is fine, Mrs. Heller.”

“Where is he?”

“I’m sure he’s at home in bed. It’s late.”

“What-time is it?”

“It’s two in the morning.”

She tried to look at the nurse, but turning her head escalated the pain to a level nearly unendurable. How long had she been out? She remembered glancing at her watch just before they got back to the car, seeing 10:28. Almost ten thirty at night on Friday. The attack came not long after that. She tried to do the math. Four hours? Less: three and a half?

Lauren drew breath. “Wait-when did Gabe come by? You said-you said, ‘this morning’-but what time is it-?”

“As I said, just after two in the morning.”

“On Saturday?”

“Sunday. Sunday morning, actually. Or Saturday night, depending on how you look at it.”

Her brain felt like sludge, but she knew the nurse had to be wrong. “Saturday morning, you mean.”

The nurse shook her head, then looked at the horse-faced doctor, who said, “You’ve been unconscious for more than twenty-four hours. Maybe longer. It would help us if you knew approximately what time the attack took place.”

“Twenty-four… hours? Where’s-where’s Roger?”

“Looks like you got a nasty blow to the back of the head,” the doctor said. “From everything we’ve seen, you haven’t sustained any injuries beyond a small spiral fracture at the base of the skull. The CT scan doesn’t show any hematomas or blood clots. You were extremely lucky.”

I guess it depends on your definition of luck. She recalled Roger’s panicked face. The arms grabbing her from behind. His scream: “Why her?”

“Is Roger okay?”

Silence.

“Where’s Roger?”

No reply.

She felt the cold tendrils of fear in her stomach.

“Where is he? Is Roger okay or not?”

“A couple of policemen came by to talk to you,” he said. “But you don’t have to talk to anyone until you feel up to it.”

“The police?” Tears welled in her eyes. “Oh, dear God, what happened to him?”

A long pause.

“Oh, God, no,” Lauren said. “Tell me he’s okay.”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Heller,” the doctor said.

“What? Please, God, tell me he’s alive!”

“I wish I could, Ms. Heller. But we don’t know where your husband is.”

3.

LOS ANGELES

Woody Sawyer ran after me, his boots clanging on the steel air stairs. “What are you saying?” he yelled over the clamor of the K-loader and the roar of a jet engine starting up nearby. “This isn’t our plane?”

I didn’t answer him. I was too busy looking around. A minute or so later I found what I was looking for.

It was the plane I’d seen being refueled earlier. A white Boeing 727 parked on the far side of the Argon jet that was being loaded. It looked identical to the two Argon jets-they could have been triplets-only it had the name VALU CHARTERS on its fuselage.

“Let’s take a look inside,” I said.

“That’s not our plane!”

“Can you get a couple of your guys to roll one of those air stairs over here?”

“You out of your mind? That’s not our plane!”

“Have you ever seen a Valu Charters jet around here before?”

“The hell do I know? These dinky little companies come and go, and they lease space from other companies-”

“I didn’t see any Valu Charters listed on the airport directory, did you?”

Woody shrugged.

“Let’s take a look,” I said.

“Look, I could get in some serious deep trouble for boarding someone else’s plane. That’s illegal, man.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll take the fall.”

He hesitated a long time, shrugged again, then walked back to where the crew was loading. A minute or so later he came back, rolling a set of air stairs up to the Valu Charters plane. He climbed up to the cockpit door with visible reluctance.

Just as I suspected, underneath the Valu Charters logo-which also peeled right off-was the orange Argon Express Cargo logo. Painted on. Remnants of tamper-resistant tape adhered like old confetti to the doorframe of the cargo hatch.

When the door came open, I could see that it was fully loaded with row after row of cargo containers. Each one had a different set of numbers affixed to its sides-really, stick-on letters and numbers of random sizes, sort of like the cutout newsprint letters in a ransom note.

“Do the numbers match your manifest?” I said. I knew they would.

There was a long silence.

“I don’t get it,” Woody finally said. “How’d they switch planes?”

“Easy,” I said. “It was a whole lot easier than off-loading and driving it out of the airport, and it only takes two guys-a pilot and a copilot.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Didn’t you just say you can buy one of these old junkers cheap? All they had to do was paint it white and fly it in here in the middle of the night after the control tower’s closed. Park it nearby and slap on a couple of vinyl decals. Probably took two guys ten minutes, and no one was around to see them because everyone had gone home. But then, they were already on the airfield, so they were supposed to be here. No one probably gave them a second look. Honest-man security, right?”

“My God. Jesus. That’s… brilliant.”

“Well, almost. By the time they flew in last night, the fuel-service guys had gone home, too, I bet.”

“So?”

“So that’s why the plane’s still here. They couldn’t fly it out without filling the tank. Which they just finished doing. I’m guessing they were going to wait to take off until everyone went home.”

“But… who could have done it?”

“I really don’t care who. I wasn’t hired to find out who.”

“But-whoever did it-they must be around here somewhere.”

“No doubt.”

“Look, Mr.-can I call you Nick?”

“Sure.”

“Nick, we both want the same thing. We agree on that.”

“Okay.”

“We’re basically playing on the same team.”

“Right.”

“See, I really don’t think Traverse Development needs to hear the little details, you get me? Just tell them we found the missing cargo. Or you did-I don’t care. No harm, no foul. Some kind of mix-up at the airport. Happens from time to time. They’re going to be mighty relieved, and they’re not going to ask a lot of questions.”

“Works for me.”

“Great. Thanks.”

“But first, would you mind opening this can right here?” I approached one of the big containers. Most of the igloos were stuffed with hundreds of packages for a lot of different customers, but the routing label on this one indicated that it had originated in Bahrain. All of its contents were destined for the Arlington, Virginia, office of Traverse Development. Through a Plexiglas window, I could see tightly packed rows of cardboard boxes, all the same size and shape, all with Traverse Development’s logo printed on them.

“I’m sorry, I can’t do that,” he said.

“You have the keys, Woody.”

“Customs hasn’t even inspected it yet. I could get in some deep kimchi.”

“You could get in some even deeper kimchi if you don’t.”

“That supposed to be a threat?”

“Yeah, basically,” I said. “See, my mind keeps going back to the parking-space thing.”

“Parking space? What about it?”

“Well, so, whenever one of your planes lands and parks for the night or whatever, your crew has to record the number of the space it’s parked in. Standard operating procedure, right?”

He shrugged. “What’s this about?”

“Your Argon jet flies in from Brussels yesterday and parks in space 36, right? That’s in your computer records. Then our bad guys do this big switcheroo with the decals, so what looks like your plane ends up in the wrong space. Number 34, right? Only the problem is, someone already entered 36 in the computer log, couple minutes after it landed. Which isn’t so easy to backdate. And which could be a problem when the guy from Customs comes to check things out, and he’s going to go, ‘Huh, how’d that plane get moved overnight, like by magic?’ So someone wrote the new space, number 34, on the whiteboard in your office. That would be… you. Woody.”

Woody began to sputter, indignant. “You don’t know the first thing about how our operations work.”

I tapped on the Plexiglas window of the cargo container. “Why don’t you pop this open, then we’ll talk. I’m really curious what’s in here that would make you and two of your employees risk such a long stretch in prison. Gotta be something totally worth it.”

He stared at me for a few seconds, then whined, “Come on, man, I open this, I could get in trouble.”

“Kind of a little late for that,” I said.

“I can’t open this,” he said, almost pleading. “I really can’t.”

“Okay,” I said, shrugging. “But you got a phone book I could borrow first? See, I want to call around to some of the aircraft boneyards. There aren’t that many of them-what, six or seven airparks in California and Arizona and Nevada? And I’m going to read off the serial number of that old junker over there and find out who sold it. And who they sold it to. Oh, sure, it’ll probably be some dummy company, but that’ll be easy to trace.”

“I thought you don’t care who did it,” Woody said. His sallow face had turned deep red.

“See, that’s my problem. Kind of a personal failing. I get my hooks into something, I can’t stop. Sort of an obsessive-compulsive thing.”

He cleared his throat. “Come on, man.”

I tapped the Plexiglas window of the igloo. “Let’s pop the hood here so I can take a quick look, then you can get back to your Sudoku.” I tried to peer through the window, but the Plexiglas was scratched and fogged, and all I could see were the boxes. I turned around and gave Woody a smile and found myself looking into the barrel of a SIG-Sauer P229, a nine-millimeter semiautomatic.

“Woody,” I said, disappointed, “I thought we were playing on the same team.”

4.

Hands up, Heller,” Woody said, “and turn around.”

I didn’t put my hands up. Or turn around. I waited.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Move it.” There was a tic in his right eye.

“Woody, you’re making things worse.”

“You’re on private property here, and I asked you nicely to leave, okay? So move it. Hands up.”

I brought my hands up slowly, then thrust my left hand up quickly and suddenly and grabbed the barrel of the SIG and torqued it downward while I smashed my right fist into his mouth. He yelped. Like most guys who brandish weapons, he wasn’t prepared to defend himself without one. He tried to wrest his gun from my grip, and at the same time he turned his head away, thereby offering up his ear, which my right fist connected with, and he yelped again. Then I levered the pistol’s barrel upward until his index finger, trapped in the trigger guard, snapped like a dry twig.

Woody screamed and sank to his knees. I pointed his SIG-Sauer at him and said, “Now would you mind unlocking this container, please?”

He struggled to his feet, and I didn’t help him up.

“There’s a seal on it,” he said. “They’re going to know I opened it.”

“I’ll take care of Customs.”

“I’m not talking about Customs.”

“Who are you worried about?”

He shook his head, then shook his right hand, moaned. “You broke my finger.”

“Awful sorry,” I said, not sounding very sorry.

Groaning the whole time, he walked around to the back of the igloo and inserted one of his keys in a padlock, then rolled up a panel.

“You got a box cutter?” I said.

He pulled one out of a holster on his belt and handed it to me. I tucked his gun into the waistband of my pants, sliced open one of the cardboard cartons, and pried the flaps apart.

When I realized what was inside, I smiled. “No wonder my client was a little antsy about it.”

“Good God Almighty,” Woody said.

The box was tightly packed with shrink-wrapped packages of brand-new United States currency.

Hundred-dollar bills: the new ones, of course, with the off-center engraving of Ben Franklin looking constipated. Each oblong bundle-“bricks,” they’re officially called-was stamped in black letters REPORT ANY DISCREPANCIES TO YOUR LOCAL FEDERAL RESERVE OFFICE and had a bar code printed at one end.

These were fresh, unopened packs of money from the U.S. Bureau of Engraving that somehow had ended up in Bahrain, in the hands of some company in Arlington, Virginia, I’d never heard of before that morning.

“I had no idea,” Woody said. “I swear.”

“What’s the volume of this thing?” I thumped the side of the igloo.

“I don’t know, like around five hundred cubic feet, maybe? Just shy of that.”

I thought for a moment. I’m pretty good at math-one of the few remaining legacies of my father, who was not only a math whiz but an immensely rich man before he went to prison.

I unwrapped one brick and counted forty packets of bills. Each packet contained a hundred bills; they always do. That meant that each brick was worth four hundred thousand dollars. One cubic foot, I figured, was a bit less than three million dollars.

Assuming that each box was packed with bricks of hundred-dollar bills, just like this one, the container held almost a billion dollars. Maybe more.

A billion dollars.

I’d never seen a billion dollars up close and personal. I was impressed by how much space it took up, even in hundred-dollar bills.

“A little spending money, Woody?”

He’d stopped nursing his broken index finger. He was gaping. “My God… My God… I had no idea.”

“What did you think was in here?”

“I… I had no idea. Honestly, I didn’t! I’m telling you, I had no idea-they didn’t…”

“No idea at all, Woody?”

He didn’t look up. “They didn’t give me details.”

“But someone knew. A lot of time and money and thought went into this. And the risk of hiring you and a couple other guys in your company.”

“I just did my part.”

“Which was to make sure the switch went through no problem.”

He nodded.

“I’ll bet they gave you an emergency contact number. In case something got screwed up.”

He nodded.

“I want that number, Woody.”

He glanced up at me, then down.

“See, Woody,” I said, “this is where the road forks. You can either cooperate with me and make things better. Or not, and make things even worse. A whole lot worse.”

He said nothing.

My cell phone started ringing. There was no one I needed to talk to. I let it go to voice mail.

“Woody, you sure as hell didn’t pull this off by yourself. No offense. So why don’t you give me a phone number?”

“I thought you didn’t care who did it,” Woody said once again.

“I do now,” I said.

EVERYONE WHO served in the Iraq war knew the stories about the missing American cash. Not long after the U.S. invaded Iraq, the U.S. government secretly flew twelve billion dollars in cash to Baghdad. I know it’s hard to believe, and it sounds like it was made up by one of those wacko left-wing conspiracy-obsessed blogs on the Internet. But it’s a matter of documented fact. Twelve billion dollars in U.S. banknotes was trucked from the Federal Reserve Bank in East Rutherford, New Jersey, to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, where it was put on pallets and loaded on C-130 military transport planes and flown to Baghdad.

The idea, I guess, was that this was the only way to pay our contractors working in Iraq and run the puppet government: in stacks of Benjamins. Baghdad was awash in crisp new American banknotes. Gunnysacks full of cash sat around, unguarded, in Iraqi ministry offices. Bureaucrats and soldiers played football with bricks of hundred-dollar bills.

And here’s the best part: Somehow, nine billion dollars just disappeared. Vanished. Without a trace.

I had an idea where some of it might have gone.

My cell phone started ringing again. Annoyed, I fished it out of my pocket, glanced at the caller ID. It said Lauren Heller-my brother’s wife. In Washington, D.C., it was around one in the morning. She wasn’t calling to chat.

I answered, “Lauren, what’s up?”

“It’s me.”

Not Lauren. The voice of an adolescent boy. Lauren’s fourteen-year-old son, Gabe.

I hadn’t spoken to my obnoxious brother in months, but I liked his wife a lot, and her son-Roger’s stepson-was a great kid. Gabe and I talked on the phone at least once a week, and I did stuff with him as often as I could. He was the son I didn’t have, might not ever have; and I was, I guess, the father he lacked. Having ended up with Roger as his stepfather instead.

“Hey, bud, I’m sorry. I can’t really talk now. I’m with a client.” I glanced at Woody, pulled his SIG-Sauer from my waistband, and wagged it at the guy. Like some overworked customer-service representative, I said apologetically: “I’ll be right with you.”

“Uncle Nick,” Gabe said. “You need to get over here.”

“I’m not in D.C., Gabe. What’s wrong?”

“It’s Mom. She’s in the hospital.”

“What happened? Is she okay?”

“I think she’s in a coma.”

“A coma? How-”

“No one’s telling me anything. She got mugged or something, but-”

“Where’s your dad? Is he out of town on business?”

“I don’t know where he is. No one does. Please, Uncle Nick. Can you get back here now?”

“Gabe,” I said, “I’m in the middle of something, but as soon as I can-”

“Uncle Nick,” he said, “I need you.”

5.

WASHINGTON

She must have fallen asleep again-a fitful, distressed sleep, troubled by dreams that were far too real. Gabe visiting her in the hospital, his curly hair a mess, crying when he saw her. A doctor with a long chin and a high-domed forehead peering into her eyes with a bright light. She awoke, slowly this time, unsure which if any of these things had actually happened.

When she opened her eyes again, she could tell right away she’d been moved. None of that frantic intensive-care cacophony, the jumbled voices and quick footsteps or the dissonant symphony of electronic beeping. One machine beeping quietly, but not much else. Quiet whispers.

The quality of light was different somehow. Daylight, maybe. There had to be a window somewhere nearby. She’d slept through the night. Another night, come to think of it.

Two men in jackets and ties stood at the foot of her bed. One a lot older than the other. Cops, she thought.

For a moment she thought she might still be dreaming. She closed her eyes and went away for a while, but when she opened them again, they were still there, talking quietly to each other. One of them glanced at her, approached.

He was around sixty, with thinning white hair and a scraggly white beard that she guessed had been grown to conceal a weak chin. “Mrs. Heller, I’m Detective Garvin from the D.C. police department.” He was holding a giant Dunkin’ Donuts cup. “And this is Detective Scarpino.”

The guy standing behind him-cute, dark-haired, the innocent face of a boy and the body of a linebacker-looked barely thirty. “How’s it going?” he said, smiling, and she couldn’t help smiling back.

They each took out leather badge holders and flipped them open. She saw only a flash of gold, a glint of silver.

The older one sat slowly, gingerly, on the only chair, as if he had a bad back. “How are you feeling, Mrs. Heller?” His partner went scrounging for another chair from somewhere beyond the blue curtains, the boundaries of her world.

“Where’s my husband?” she said.

Garvin went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “One of the nurses gave us the heads-up that you were okay to talk, but if you don’t feel up to it, we can come back.”

“What time is it?”

“Around nine. In the morning.”

“Are you here about my husband?”

Garvin wore steel aviator rim glasses with thick lenses that grotesquely magnified his bleary pale eyes-gray? blue? Hard to say. “Mrs. Heller, we’d like to ask you some questions about what happened.”

The throbbing behind her eyes was back with a vengeance. “Are you… homicide detectives?” she asked in a choked voice.

He shook his head, gave a prim smile. “We’re from the Violent Crime Branch.”

The words made her stomach flip over. “Detective, where’s my husband?” she said, heart thudding. “Have you found him or not?”

“No, ma’am. Nothing.”

“What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”

“Every hospital in the city and the surrounding area has been called. Medical examiners’ offices, even the central cellblock.”

“Cellblock?”

“We don’t want to rule anything out. A notice went out on WALES-the Washington area law-enforcement network.”

“And…?”

“Nothing, ma’am. I’m sorry. At this point, we’re treating this as a missing-persons case.”

“How do you know he wasn’t-harmed? Or worse?”

“Our crime scene squad didn’t find any cartridge casings or bloodstains or anything else that would indicate bodily harm.”

“ ‘Missing persons’…?”

He hesitated. “Missing Person Critical, actually.”

Scarpino returned with a molded plastic chair and scraped it into place behind his partner’s.

“Why ‘critical’?”

“Suspicion of foul play.”

“But you just said you didn’t find anything.”

“Because of what happened to you.”

“How do you know I wasn’t just mugged or something?”

“Because, ma’am, you were identified by the contents of your purse. Someone saw you lying in the street and called nine-one-one, and because you still had your wallet, we knew who you were and who to call.”

His stare was penetrating, downright unnerving.

“So?”

“Tells us you probably weren’t mugged, right? So maybe you could tell us as much about the incident as you remember.”

She told them everything she could. Garvin asked all the questions; Scarpino, clearly the recessive gene, said nothing, took notes.

“The attacker-was there only one of them?” Garvin asked.

“As far as I know. I mean, some guy grabbed me from behind, and I guess he hit me on the head with something, though I don’t remember that part. And… yes, I think he put a gun to my head.”

“Where?”

“Right here.” She pointed to her temple.

“Before or after you were hit in the head?”

“Before.”

“What makes you so sure it was a gun?”

“I-I don’t know, it was hard and round and it felt like metal and-I mean, I suppose it could have been anything, but-”

“You didn’t see it, though.”

“No, but-actually, come to think of it, I remember hearing a click. Like a revolver being cocked.”

“You know what that sounds like?”

“My dad kept one in the house. I don’t think he ever fired it, but he showed me and my sister how to use it.”

“Did the attacker try to get your clothes off?”

“No. But he might have been scared off when Roger showed up.”

“Let’s back up a little. You and your husband went out to dinner, just the two of you, right?”

“Right.”

“A special occasion?”

Date night, she wanted to say, but instead she replied, “Just dinner.”

“Whose idea was it to go out to dinner?”

“What difference does it make?”

“We’re just trying to get the big picture here.”

“It was Roger’s.”

“Did you go out for dinner often, just the two of you?”

“Not often enough. We used to go out every week, but recently that’s sort of… Well, it’s been months, probably.”

“Did your husband have any enemies that you know of?”

“Enemies? He’s a businessman.”

“Mrs. Heller, are you and your husband wealthy?”

Lauren hesitated. What a question. She didn’t know how to begin to answer that. Wealthy compared to whom? To a police detective? She made a good salary, but it was still a secretary’s salary. Roger made a lot more than she, as a senior vice president, but in the six figures. Not the million-plus that the top corporate officers earned. They lived in a nice house in Chevy Chase. Compared to the house where she and Maura had grown up in Charlottesville-a tiny split-level ranch-it was Versailles.

On the other hand, compared to the kind of money Roger’s family once had, they were paupers.

“We’re well-off,” she finally said. She hesitated. “My husband’s family used to be quite rich, but not anymore.”

Garvin blinked. “Oh?”

“You might have heard of his father, Victor Heller.”

A pause. “Sure.” A blank look clouded his eyes. Not an uncommon reaction, she’d found. Victor Heller was famous, and not in a good way. “You think people might assume the family still has money?”

“How would I know? Anyway, if someone thought he was rich, wouldn’t there be a ransom demand? Wouldn’t they kidnap me instead of him? Or my son?”

“Just exploring every possibility, that’s all. Did you notice any change in your husband’s behavior recently? Did he start to act differently toward you?”

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at.”

“Let me ask you something, and please don’t take this the wrong way: You and your husband-how was your relationship?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Was there any talk of divorce? Do you think he might have been having an affair?”

“You’re really clutching at straws, Detective.”

“Not at all. It’s standard procedure-we never want to leave any stone unturned.”

“Our relationship was-fine.”

“Not great? Just fine?”

“We had our ups and down like any married couple. But no, he wasn’t cheating on me. And we never talked about divorce.”

“Did he ever threaten you, Mrs. Heller?”

“Oh, this is ridiculous.”

“Look, Mrs. Heller, we all want to find out what happened to him, too, but we can’t do that without your help. We really can’t. I know this is a stressful time for you, and I know you’re in a lot of pain, but time is really crucial here. The faster we move, the more likely we are to solve this thing.”

“Isn’t it possible that my husband was attacked, too, and he’s wandering around in a state of amnesia or something? Or maybe he’s been badly hurt. Or… or worse. And meanwhile you two are sitting here spinning out all sorts of wacky scenarios. You’re guessing, that’s all. Guessing.”

“Yeah, well, guessing is a lot of what we do. I get good at guessing. And yeah, maybe we’re clutching at straws. But that’s all we got at this point, Mrs. Heller. All we know is that you were the victim of a random-seeming attack in a part of the city where that doesn’t happen very often. You weren’t mugged, and apparently they didn’t try to rape you. We have no reason to believe your husband was killed. He’s gone, and we don’t know more than that. Without evidence, without a motive, we’re not going to get anywhere, do you understand?”

“You don’t sound very optimistic.”

“I don’t want to give you false hope, is all.”

Someone made a throat-clearing sound, and they all turned around.

Gabe was standing there. His dark ringlets wild and scraggly. He was staring at her, an expression of grave concern in his liquid brown eyes. Black jeans and a black hoodie sweatshirt with a weird cartoon character on the front: Invader Zim, she remembered. He looked even scrawnier than usual.

“Gabe,” she called out.

“Excuse me, Officers,” he said sternly. “My mother needs to rest. You need to leave now.”

The younger cop grinned until he caught the sharp edge of Gabe’s adolescent glower, then the two detectives began to gather their things.

6.

Hey,” she said hoarsely, when the cops had left.

“Hey.”

Tears in his eyes, she saw. In the last year her sweet boy had become a remote and often surly teenager. But once in a while there were flashes of the adoring son he’d once been and would, she hoped, be again. Her love for him swelled in her chest, like a physical object, expanding her ribs, her collarbones.

“Thanks.”

“I’m serious. They shouldn’t be here.”

She noticed the dark circles under his eyes. They appeared whenever he was sick or overtired or just worried. Which was often. More than a few pimples on his cheeks, which hadn’t been there two months ago.

In his right hand he was clutching his beat-up school notebook, spiral-bound, ST. GREGORY’S on the cover. The notebook had nothing to do with school, though. She wasn’t allowed to look at it, which made it all the more tempting, though she never had. All she knew was that it contained some epic-length comic book he’d been working on for a year or more. She’d caught a glimpse once before he snatched it away and was astonished at the quality of the drawings.

“Thanks for lending me Jaffee,” she said. She reached out a hand, held his. He squeezed her hand back. That was about as much affection as he ever showed her anymore. He hated being kissed or hugged, tended to shrink from her caresses as if she had some grotesque infectious disease.

“Your blood pressure is really bad,” he said.

“Why do you say that?”

“That machine keeps beeping.”

“It’s supposed to do that. Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“I look worse than I feel.”

“Lot of flowers,” Gabe said.

“From Lee.”

She meant Leland Gifford, the CEO and son of the founder of Gifford Industries. He’d find someone to cover for her, of course-likely Noreen, who worked in the same executive suite as Lauren but was underemployed as the admin to the CFO and lusted after Lauren’s job. She was a disaster, though: not too bright, not very detail-oriented, not half as competent as she thought she was. Now Lauren had something else to worry about. Leland ran a multibillion-dollar corporation, but he barely knew how to send e-mail.

Half to herself, she added, “Somebody must have told him what happened.”

Gabe shrugged. “I e-mailed him from your computer at home.”

“You e-mailed him?”

“What, I’m not supposed to e-mail your boss?”

“No, it’s-I’m impressed, that’s all. Thank you.” She fumbled with the bed’s controls, raised the head of the bed so she was finally upright. She murmured, mostly to herself, “I’ve got to get myself released from this place. I’ve got to get back there.”

“Mom, you have a serious concussion, and you just woke up from being unconscious for twenty-four hours. Leland Gifford will be fine for a while without you.” Abruptly, he added: “Okay, Mom. Where is he?”

“Who?”

“You know who I mean. Where’s Dad?”

She hesitated for a few seconds while she tried to think. Her brain was operating at half speed. She blinked, silent for a beat too long. What had they told him? She tried never to lie to him. Even if she wanted to, he was too smart to lie to.

The kid scared her sometimes, he was so smart. She wondered where he inherited it. Not from her gene pool, that was for sure. Richard, her first husband and Gabe’s father, was smart enough but no genius. She also wondered from time to time whether being so precocious made him an outcast at his private boys’ school. It couldn’t be easy.

“He went on a business trip,” she finally said. “Sort of an emergency. A last-minute thing.”

Now Gabe’s eyes went flat. “Don’t, Mom. The cops came to the house yesterday looking for him.”

“You-you were alone, Gabe?”

“Of course I was alone. I’m fine. I’m fourteen.”

“Oh, God, Gabe.”

“Chillax, Mom, okay? It’s all good.”

“ ‘Chillax’?”

“I’m just freaked out about Dad, that’s all. They wouldn’t tell me anything, but…”

“But you overheard what they were saying to me.”

He nodded.

She bit her lower lip, shook her head, and after a few seconds, she said, “Look, I don’t know where he is.”

“Did he-did he, like, go somewhere?”

She finally returned his gaze with a look that was equally fierce, yet also sorrowful and compassionate at the same time. “It’s possible he got hurt in the attack-”

“Like he’s lying somewhere bleeding to death?”

She shook her head. “The police assured me that he’s not in any hospitals or…”

“Or morgues,” he added.

“Which is a huge relief, Gabe. That means that he’s-he’s probably fine, just-”

“He’s dead. You know he is.” He swallowed, blinked rapidly, tears flooding his eyes.

“No, Gabe. No, he’s not. Don’t think that way.”

“How do you know he’s not?”

“Gabe, there’d-there’d be…” She couldn’t continue.

“Do you think it’s possible these guys who hurt you grabbed Dad or something? Like, kidnapped him?”

Finally, she replied, defeated, “I don’t know what to think.”

“Maybe Uncle Nick can find him.”

“I know you love Uncle Nick. Me, too. I just don’t think he can find anything the police can’t. He does corporate work, mostly.”

“Well, we’ll see,” Gabe said. “I called him and he told me he’s on his way home now. He promised me he’d find Dad.”

7.

I’m not married, even though I’ve come dangerously close a few times, and I don’t have a family of my own. My “family of origin,” as the shrinks say, had been pretty well shattered by my father’s very public arrest and the squalid events that followed. So my nephew, Gabe, means a lot to me. I’m extremely protective of him.

Strictly speaking, I’d finished my work in L.A. anyway. I’d done the job I’d been sent there to do: I’d located the missing shipment. As I waited at L.A.X. for the first flight to D.C. that had an available seat, I got on my BlackBerry and fired off an e-mail to Jay Stoddard with the details. As much as I wanted to stay on and indulge my own curiosity and dig into what had really happened there, that was a luxury I no longer had. I had no intention of dropping it, of course. I never drop anything. But I had to get back to D.C. and make sure that Gabe and his mother were okay.

Because whatever had happened to his father-my brother-didn’t sound good at all. He’d been missing for two days.

The truth was, Roger and I hadn’t been close since Dad’s trial. Maybe that was a euphemistic way of putting it. I didn’t like the guy, and he didn’t like me either. We barely tolerated each other.

But damn it, he was my brother. And maybe more important, Gabe’s stepfather.

And I couldn’t suppress a feeling of gnawing anxiety, of growing disquiet.

The earliest flights were sold out, so I didn’t get to Washington until the late afternoon. In the cab, I called Lauren’s cell, expecting Gabe, and was surprised when Lauren picked up. The doctors were letting her go home. She told me what had happened, in broad outline, anyway. She sounded a little groggy but otherwise fine.

Which was a huge relief. Some of the tension I’d been feeling over the last several hours, like a low-level nagging headache, began to ebb away.

I stopped by my apartment, a loft in a converted warehouse in the Adams Morgan section of Washington. I’d bought it because there was parking in the building, and it came furnished. The agent talked about “hip modern urban living” and its “industrial aesthetic.” A sign out front said, obnoxiously, “You. Are. Here.” To me it looked like what it was, an old warehouse with raw concrete ceilings and a lot of painted ductwork. It had all the charm of an airplane hangar. Gabe thought it was cool, of course. He referred to it as my Fortress of Solitude.

A few hours later I pulled into the driveway of my brother’s house on Virgilia Road in Chevy Chase, a big old Georgian Revival on a leafy street surrounded by other big old houses. It was made of red brick with black shutters and white trim. It was imposing from the front, and even more imposing inside: six bedrooms and seven and a half baths, five fireplaces, a big pool in the backyard that they never used.

Roger once cracked to me that my entire apartment could probably fit in his media room. I replied that his entire house could probably fit in the conservatory of our childhood home in Bedford. That shut him up. We both knew what it was like to have a lot of money. We never thought about it. But after we lost it, I actually felt relieved, like I was taking off tight shoes.

Whereas Roger became obsessed, like Ahab and his damned white whale, with what we’d lost.

I found Gabe sitting on the front steps. He was wearing a black hoodie sweatshirt and frayed black sneakers and had iPod earbuds in his ears. He was drawing in his mysterious notebook, the one he never let anyone look at. He closed it quickly as I approached.

“Hey,” he said, pausing the music on his iPod, yanking the earbuds out. “Thanks for coming.”

“Hey.” I leaned over to give the kid a hug, and he got up only partway, and we embraced awkwardly. Gabe was small for his age. I could feel his bony shoulders and rib cage. “How’s Mom?”

“I don’t know why they let her out of the hospital so soon. She was in a coma for twenty-four hours.”

I shrugged, turned my palms upward. “Was she badly hurt?”

“Enough to give her a concussion.”

“You think she shouldn’t be home?”

He shrugged, palms up, an unconscious imitation. “I’m not a doctor.”

“Ah. No word from your dad?”

“The police were asking Mom if they had relationship problems. They think maybe Dad ran off.”

“That doesn’t sound like your dad.”

He was watching my face closely. “Or maybe he was kidnapped. Isn’t that possible?”

“Kidnapped? I doubt it. Look, we’ll figure this out. I don’t want you to worry, Gabe.”

“Yeah,” he said dubiously. “Sure.”

I turned toward the door, and he said, “Uncle Nick, will you teach me how to use a gun?”

“It’s late. We’d piss off the neighbors.”

“I mean, like, at the range or the gun club or whatever.”

“I don’t belong to a gun club, and I don’t shoot at a range. In fact, I rarely use a gun. I always prefer to use my hands.”

His eyes widened. “To kill people?”

“For database searches, mostly,” I said.

“I’m serious, Uncle Nick. I want to learn how to use a gun.”

“I don’t think teenagers who wear all black should use guns,” I said. “Bad stuff tends to happen. Don’t you watch the news?”

“I’m talking about protecting Mom. And self-defense and like that.”

“Sorry,” I said.

I opened the front door, and he said, “Uncle Nick?”

I turned.

“Thanks, man,” he said. “For being here, I mean.”

8.

I’d always thought that the only smart decision Roger ever made was to marry Lauren. She was strikingly attractive-glossy black hair and milky white skin and caramel brown eyes; lips that pulled down at the sides when she smiled. Lauren was a beautiful and elegant woman.

But most of all, I thought, she was a really good human being. Totally unself-centered. She’d devoted her life to three difficult men: her husband, her son, and her boss, Leland Gifford. That couldn’t have been easy. Just being the administrative assistant to the CEO of a major company was more than a full-time job; it was more like a marriage. No doubt Roger was jealous of her devotion to her boss. And maybe her boss was jealous of her devotion to her husband.

She gave me a big hug as I entered, and I stared in shock for a few seconds. Even though I knew she’d been hurt, seeing the evidence of that attack was unnerving. She had a bandage on her head, and the left side of her face was scraped up, with yellowish bruising around her eyes.

She thanked me for coming, and I asked how she was doing and told her she looked good.

“I just lost respect for you,” she said with a disappointed shake of her head. “I always thought you were a real straight shooter.”

“You’re right. I lied. You look pretty rough. I’m worried about you.”

She laughed. “Thanks for your honesty. But I do feel better than I look.”

She led me through the marble-tiled foyer and into their huge kitchen, which smelled like gingerbread or maybe pumpkin pie. She handed me a mug of coffee: black, the way I like it. The mug had a shield on it and said ST. GREGORY’S, Gabe’s private boys’ school. She sat on a stool at one corner of the big black granite island, and I sat facing her.

“The hospital let you go home already?”

“The doctor thinks I’m okay as long as I take it easy. And I can’t leave Gabe alone in the house.”

“No word about Roger?”

She shook her head slowly.

“Listen,” I said. “The first thing is, I don’t want you to assume the worst.” She needed me to be calm and unworried, and I did a fairly good job of faking it.

Tears came to her eyes. “I don’t even know what the worst is.”

“Tell me what happened,” I said.

9.

I listened, asked a lot of questions, and mostly tried not to feed her worst fears. But the more I listened, the stranger it seemed.

A sudden, unexplained attack as they were walking to their car. No blood on the ground, no signs of struggle: nothing to indicate that my brother had been killed or even wounded. The hospitals and morgues had been checked for bodies, and no one matching his description had turned up.

There had been no word from him in the two days since the attack.

It didn’t look good. In the pit of my stomach, I knew that he wasn’t likely to turn up alive. I didn’t want to tell her that. Yet I also didn’t want to mislead her.

“How many of them were there?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Probably just one. But he had a gun.”

“How do you know?”

“I felt it.”

“How?”

“He held something against my temple that felt like the barrel of a gun. And I heard that little click a revolver makes when you cock the hammer.”

“So it was a revolver, not a semiautomatic.”

“You don’t cock a semiautomatic, Nick.”

I just smiled. I didn’t want to get all firearms-geeky on her. Actually, you do cock a semiautomatic when you rack the slide. But the point she was trying to make was basically right: nothing else sounds quite like the hammer on a revolver being pulled. “Male or female?”

“Male, for sure.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I-well, I guess, the strength-”

“There are some awfully strong women around.”

“Maybe I felt arm hair or something.”

“His arms were bare, then.”

“No… I… it smelled like a guy, if you know what I mean. Cologne. Cheap cologne, mixed with cigarette smoke.”

“Did you get the sense that Roger knew the attacker?”

Her eyes roamed the room. “No, I don’t think…”

“Gabe said the cops were wondering if you and Roger were having marital difficulties.”

She winced. “He said that?”

I nodded. “Basically.”

“What does that mean? Like he tried to have me bumped off?”

“I guess.”

“That’s just stupid. If Roger wanted to leave me, he’d just leave.”

“Did he ever talk about that?”

“Not you, too.”

“Nah. Roger’s not the divorce type, I’d say. He’d rather just grind you down.”

She frowned, but not with her eyes. “I know you two have… issues. I realize he can be annoying sometimes, but-”

“Annoying? White guys who call each other ‘dude’ are annoying. Hot-air hand dryers in public restrooms are annoying. I wouldn’t call Roger annoying.” He’s a jerk, I didn’t say. An asshole. In other circumstances I might have said this aloud. But not that day. And the fact was, she loved the guy, and so did Gabe, so who was I to impose my opinion on them? It was irrelevant.

She looked up suddenly, sniffed the air. “Oh, God, the sweet potato.” She ran over to the toaster oven on the counter near the refrigerator (a Sub-Zero, of course, roughly the size of a Humvee) and came back shortly with her foil-wrapped baked sweet potato and a fork.

“Want some?”

“I’m good.”

“You have any supper?”

“You know me. I eat when I’m hungry.”

In their house, the kitchen was normally Roger’s domain. I have a great respect for male friends of mine who can cook. Just not for kitchen fascists like my brother. He always had to have the right high-end appliance or expensive pan, the right cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil, the right thirty-year-old balsamic vinegar. Once food becomes that important, you’ve got a problem that Umbrian white truffle oil can’t solve.

“In the hospital, they kept feeding me Jell-O and ginger ale, and all I could think about was baked sweet potato for some reason.”

“Is your boss going to survive without you?”

She smiled fondly. “He’s been great. He told me to take as much time as I need. But I want to go back soon.”

“You’re well enough?”

“Like I said, I only look a train wreck. I’m feeling fine. Gabe has school, and I’ll just go stir-crazy sitting around the house.”

“I assume Leland Gifford knows about Roger’s… disappearance.”

“Of course.”

“You’ve talked to him about it?”

“Just briefly. I called him this afternoon.”

“And?”

“He’s offered to do anything he can. The police interviewed him about Roger.”

“Did he have any theories as to what might have happened?”

“Lee’s as baffled as anyone.”

I nodded. “Do you have any idea what Roger’s been working on recently?”

She paused to chew a big mouthful, looking at me with narrowed eyes. “We rarely talked about work. Sort of house rules.”

“So he didn’t mention anything he was especially worried about.”

She shook her head. “Nothing interesting, as far as I know.”

Of course, that pretty much described all of Roger’s work at Gifford Industries. He structured deals, arranged financing. It would take me pots of black coffee to get through a single one of his mornings without lapsing into a boredom-induced coma. I always had the feeling, though, that Roger regarded himself as overqualified-that he’d never been promoted to a level he considered commensurate with his talents. Not that such a level could ever possibly exist in corporate America.

“Hmm,” I said.

“You’re thinking this had something to do with his job?”

“Not necessarily. Just covering all the bases. It could be anything. But I doubt it was a random mugging. If he was attacked”-I deliberately avoided the word “killed”-“there’d probably be some evidence of that. Something would have turned up by now.” A body, I didn’t say.

“Then what are you suggesting?”

“We can’t rule out some sort of abduction or kidnapping.”

“A kidnapping? You’re not serious.” Her voice got high-pitched, scornful, as if to mask her fear. “The cops said the same thing. But who’d kidnap Roger? We’re not rich. That’s crazy.”

My eyes slid toward the humongous hulking stainless-steel eight-burner Vulcan commercial range that threw off enough BTUs to serve a good-sized restaurant. I knew they’d dumped a quarter of a million bucks at least into redoing their kitchen to Roger’s maniacal specifications. “No doubt,” I said.

“I mean, sure, we’re well-off, but Roger and I both work for a living.”

“I know.” Once Victor Heller’s considerable assets were seized, Roger and my mother and I were left without any money. But Roger, at least, inherited Dad’s genius for making it and investing it. Just one of many ways he and I were different.

Lauren had been Gifford’s admin, a divorcée with a young child, when she met Roger, and she’d made it clear from the outset that she loved her job, loved working for Leland Gifford, and would never give it up. She continued working because she wanted to, not because she had to. Roger made enough to support them, and he invested well.

“Anyway, if he’s been kidnapped, wouldn’t I have gotten a ransom demand by now?”

“Not necessarily. Sometimes they wait, just to increase the desperation level. But I agree, that’s not likely.”

“Then what is likely?”

“Just a theory, here, but maybe he stuck his nose into something he shouldn’t have. Got into trouble with the wrong sorts of people.”

“Like who?”

“Your company’s involved in gigantic, billion-dollar construction projects around the world. Maybe he ran up against some organized-crime syndicate that thought they had some project nailed but lost out to Gifford Industries. Maybe Roger helped elbow them out. Something like that.”

“You make Gifford Industries sound like some sort of two-bit Mafia-owned New Jersey garbage-hauling company.”

I thought of a few rejoinders-I’m just wired that way-but I held my tongue.

“Forget the Mafia,” I said. “The criminal underworld’s gone transnational. The Russians, the East Europeans, the Asians-they’ve all gotten sophisticated. Now they invest. They use legitimate businesses to launder their money. They trade commodities. They’re into oil and precious metal and insurance companies and banks. All over the world. What if Roger came across something about one of these organizations while he was negotiating a deal, something they didn’t want him to know…”

She looked at me for a few seconds, then her eyes shifted from side to side as if she were reading something off a TelePrompTer. I had a feeling she was thinking that possibility through to its logical conclusion, which wasn’t a happy one.

“You don’t really believe things like that happen, do you?” She sounded almost scornful.

“Not really,” I admitted. “Rarely. But the world’s a dirty place. Who knows.”

“Then what? What do you think happened?”

“Wish I had something to tell you.” I thought for a moment. “Listen, Lauren. When I asked you if Roger knew the guy, or the people, who grabbed you, you hesitated.”

“I did?”

I’d noticed a flash of uncertainty appear in her face; maybe she wasn’t consciously aware of it. “Was there anything in Roger’s face, his expression or whatever, that might have indicated he wasn’t totally surprised by what was going on?”

She was silent for a few seconds, pensive. “You know, I just remembered something.”

“Okay.”

“It’s what he said when we were attacked. The last thing I heard him say.”

“Okay.”

“He said, ‘Why her?’ ”

“ ‘Why her,’ ” I repeated. “Which implies, ‘Why not me?’ ”

“Like he knew them. Like maybe he knew who they were.”

I thought for a moment. “I think it tells us something more important.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“That maybe he was expecting this to happen. And the question is why.”

Quietly, a tremor in her voice, she said: “Expecting it? Expecting what?”

“Maybe he’d been warned. Maybe it was an attempt to scare him.”

“For what? That’s-that’s too bizarre, Nick.”

“You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff that goes on.”

“Try me.”

“Someday I’ll tell you the real reason I got booted out of the Pentagon. Things aren’t always the way they appear from the outside. There’s usually more to the story.”

She shook her head, as if to dismiss the wild speculation. Then she fell silent for ten or fifteen seconds. “You don’t think he’s alive, do you?”

“I’m sure he’s fine.”

“I don’t believe you.”

I didn’t believe it either. “Don’t worry,” I said.

“I’m losing respect for you again.”

“Whatever happened to him, I’m sure he’s okay. Keep the faith. I’m here for you guys, you know that.”

“I know. That means a lot. But Nick, I didn’t want to involve you in this. That was Gabe’s idea, not mine.”

“Involve me?”

“You know what I mean. Professionally, or whatever. I told Gabe I doubt you can find out anything the cops can’t.”

“Well,” I said, “truth is, my firm has resources law enforcement doesn’t.”

“You’re not suggesting I hire Stoddard Associates, are you?”

“Jay Stoddard wouldn’t take the case. I’d have to do it on my own. Off the books.”

“That wouldn’t be-I don’t know, complicated?”

I hesitated, but only for an instant. “No,” I said. “I don’t think it would be complicated.”

“I mean, given, you know, the way you and Roger…”

“He’s my brother. And your husband. And Gabe’s dad. That’s not complicated.”

“So maybe it would be… you know, cleaner… if I hired you directly, paid you off the books. If you’re willing to help out, I mean.”

“I won’t take money from you.”

She hesitated. I could see she was struggling. “Roger’s done really well,” she said with a nervous smile. “You were in the army, and then you worked for the government…”

Yeah, yeah, I thought. I served my country, while my brother served himself. That was what she meant but would never say out loud. The fact was, I did what I did, chose what I did, in order to escape. In other words, for wholly selfish reasons.

But I’d never say that out loud either.

“Give me the names of the cops who interviewed you,” I said. “I’ll talk to them. Why don’t we start there?”

“Are you sure?”

“Not a problem, Lauren. And maybe you could also give me the names of Roger’s close friends. You know, anyone he might have confided in.”

“Well…” She faltered. “You’ve known Roger a lot longer than me.”

“He didn’t really have any close friends, did he?”

“Not really.”

I wasn’t surprised. He’d always been sort of a loner. Going back to when we were kids, he tended to hang out with my friends. Even though he considered us uncool, since we were a few years younger. And even though he was never really the hanging-out type anyway.

“Nick, are you sure this is okay?”

“More than okay,” I said.

She jumped up and threw her arms around me, and after a few seconds she began sobbing.

10.

The offices of Stoddard Associates looked like the most posh, high-end law firm you’d ever seen: dark mahogany paneling everywhere, antique Persian rugs, burnished fruitwood conference tables. Hushed elegance. Old money. Even a prim middle-aged British receptionist.

The firm’s founder and chairman, Abner J. Stoddard IV-Jay, as everyone called him-sometimes joked that the décor he’d selected, down to the last detail, was nothing more than what he and his CIA buddies used to call “window dressing.” That’s tradecraft jargon. Every good front needs a plausible cover, he’d say.

He was only partly joking. After all, Stoddard Associates was a high-powered private intelligence firm. A corporate espionage agency, though Jay Stoddard would never use those words. An august and influential, if shadowy, enterprise. Not some cheesy gumshoe operation with frosted-glass windows and the lingering stench of stale cigar smoke. We occupied twelve thousand square feet of the ninth floor of a sleek office tower at 1900 K Street in Washington, with a curved façade of glass and stainless steel and slate spandrels. K Street, as everyone knew, was the Champs Élysées of Washington lobbyists.

And Jay wasn’t just some ex-spook who did investigations for big companies and the government and very rich people. He was the consummate Washington insider, a guy who knew where all the bodies were buried and was willing to exhume them for the right price. He was a fixer. He knew everyone who counted. He understood how things really worked in this town, as opposed to what they taught you in civics class or what you read in the papers, and he had a strong enough stomach to deal with all the creepy-crawlies you found when you turned over the rock.

Whenever he met with some politician who had qualms about hiring him to do oppo research-digging up dirt on a rival-Stoddard liked to quote Governor Willie Stark from All the King’s Men: “Man is born in sin and conceived in corruption and passeth from the stench of the didie to the stink of the shroud. There is always something.”

Jay Stoddard knew that everyone had dirt.

He was a tall, lanky guy in his early sixties, with a proud mane of silver hair he kept a bit too long. He wore handmade English suits and Brooks Brothers shirts with frayed collars, which was his way of announcing that he had taste and family money and appreciated the finer things in life but didn’t really think about any of that stuff. More window dressing, I suspected.

We were wrapping up our Monday morning Risk Committee meeting, which was basically twelve of the firm’s most senior staff members sitting around the big conference table and voting on which cases to take and which to turn down. It was your typical undercaffeinated Monday morning gathering: stifled yawns and low energy, throat-clearing and doodling, and furtive glances at BlackBerrys. Except for Jay, who paced around the room because he couldn’t sit still for more than five minutes.

Most of the cases we’d voted on were pretty boring, standard fare. A big data-storage firm wanted us to find out whether their Indonesian manager was embezzling. The CEO of a huge investment bank wanted us to find out if two of his top executives, a man and a woman, were secretly having an affair. (I wondered why the CEO didn’t want to use his own internal security guy. I also wondered why the CEO cared so much; I had no doubt he was looking for a pretext to fire the two executives for some other reason. The case smelled fishy to me. We voted yes, of course.)

Everyone perked up when Stoddard mentioned a request he’d gotten from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One of their curators was about to go on trial in Ankara for trafficking in looted antiquities-ancient gold coins that the Turkish government said had been stolen from a state museum. I had visions of some Manhattan society dame, with her Burberry scarf and Louis Vuitton bag, huddled in a dank squalid Turkish prison out of Midnight Express. We voted to investigate further.

But the case that took up most of our time that morning was a request from one of the biggest oil companies in the world. They were trying to acquire a midsize but highly profitable oil field-service company-a hostile takeover bid. And they wanted us to compile some deep background research on the CEO of the target company.

As usual, the voice of sanity was our forensic data expert, a lovely African-American woman with mocha skin and extremely short hair and big eyes named Dorothy Duval. Dorothy had a smoky voice and a blunt, earthy manner. I’m sure they’d hated her at the National Security Agency, where she had worked for nine years before Stoddard hired her. Stoddard was shrewd enough to realize how smart she was. Or maybe he just found her amusing.

“Look, can we have some real talk here?” Dorothy said. “They want a full-out data haunt. Cell-phone tracking, electronic monitoring, the whole deal. They want the guy’s phone tapped.”

“You’re totally making that up,” said a senior investigator, Marty Masur. “They never said anything of the kind.” Masur was small and bald, arrogant and abrasive. He’d been a Senate investigator until he pissed off one too many senators. Just then he was in the process of pissing off everyone at Stoddard Associates.

“That’s because they’re too smart to say it outright,” Dorothy replied. “Nobody puts a request like that in writing. They don’t have to.”

“So you’re just point-blank refusing?” Masur shot back. “You wanna keep your hands clean, is that it?”

“Weren’t you the guy who wanted to take on that ‘collection job’ for Hewlett-Packard?” she said, pursing her lips. “Tap the phones of their board members? Wonder whatever happened to the firm they did hire.”

“They were amateurs,” Masur said. “They got caught.”

“There was also that little detail about how it was against the law. Like this job would be. I won’t do it.”

Masur snorted, shook his head. His face flushed, and he looked like he was about to say something really nasty when Stoddard broke in: “Nick, your thoughts?”

I shrugged. “Dorothy’s right. It’s a huge risk. We might end up paying more in legal fees than we can bill on this.”

Masur muttered something, and I turned to him. “Excuse me?”

He shook his head.

“No, I want to hear it, Marty,” I said.

He gave me a wary look. I’d always thought he was intimidated by me. I’m six-foot-two, served in the Special Forces in Iraq, and I’m still in decent shape. Also, there were rumors about my dark skills, things I’d done in Iraq and Bosnia, that swirled around me. None of them were true, but I never bothered to set the record straight. I didn’t really mind having a scary reputation. I think Masur was afraid that if he got on my bad side, I’d get him in an alley one night and slice off one of his ears or something. I liked letting him think that.

“ ‘Being cautious is the greatest risk of all,’ ” he finally said. “Nehru said that.”

I nodded sagely. “If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.”

Masur looked at me quizzically.

“Dan Quayle said that,” I added. Whether he actually did or not, I liked the quote.

Dorothy gave me one of her dazzling smiles.

“All right, ladies and gentlemen,” Stoddard said and cleared his throat. “I will never allow this firm to be put in jeopardy,” he said. “As tempting as the money might be, there’s just no question that we have to do the right thing here. We’re going to pass.”

As the meeting broke up, Stoddard grabbed my elbow. “Come into my office for a sec?”

“Sure.”

We walked down the hall, past the black-framed photographs of Stoddard with politicos and world leaders and celebrities. My favorite was the photo of him and Richard Nixon. Nixon was wearing a light blue suit and was clasping Stoddard’s hand awkwardly. Stoddard was even lankier then, black-haired and movie-star handsome. He had been working in the CIA’s Operations Directorate until the Nixon reelection campaign had hired him to do oppo research. They needed someone to dig up dirt, discreetly. I’d heard that Nixon had hired Stoddard to compile dossiers on certain key Democratic senators in order to discourage them from demanding his resignation. But Stoddard was far too discreet ever to discuss it. Stoddard’s work was legendary, and he cashed in by setting up his own shop right after the election.

Nixon had signed the photograph, in his knifelike script, “With deepest thanks for doing your part to keep the election honest.”

I loved that.

“Great job on that Traverse Development thing,” he said.

I nodded.

“You’re good. Sometimes I forget how good.”

“It was easy.”

“You only make it look easy, Nick. You’ve got sprezzatura. You know what that means?”

“I’m on Zithromax,” I said. “Supposed to get rid of it.”

He glanced at me, then chuckled. “Sprezzatura’s an Italian word. Means the art of making something difficult look easy.”

“Is that right,” I said.

As we entered his office, I mentioned the name of the big oil company we’d all just been talking about, and I said, “That’s an awful big contract to turn down, Jay. I’m impressed.”

He looked at me. “Come on, man-you think I’m letting that one slip through my fingers? In this economy? The house on Nantucket needs a new roof.” He winked. “Always cover your ass, Nicky. Sit down. We gotta talk.”

11.

Visitors to Jay Stoddard’s office were always surprised. They expected the standard ego wall of framed photographs of Stoddard with the rich and famous and powerful. But those he’d banished to the hallway. Which was either modest or clever-or just his way of putting his fingerprints all over our offices.

Instead, the walls of his office were lined, floor to ceiling, with books. There were first editions-Victor Hugo and Trollope-but mostly there were big picture books on architecture. Strewn artfully across his glass coffee table were magazines like Architectural Record and Metropolis and a big orange book called Richard Meier Architect.

He was an architecture nut. Once, over his fourth glass of single malt at the Alvear Palace Hotel in Buenos Aires, he confessed to me that, as a young man, he’d desperately wanted to go to the Yale School of Architecture. But his father, who’d been in the OSS during World War II, forced him to join the CIA. Jay wasn’t morose about it, though. “Dad was absolutely right,” he said. “I’d have starved to death. I thought all architects were rich!”

He shrugged off his suit jacket and hung it on a mahogany valet in the corner. Over his threadbare blue button-down shirt were bright red suspenders-which he called “braces,” because he was an Anglophile-with little pictures of golfers on them.

“You need a cup of coffee,” he announced, pushing the intercom button on his desk phone. “Intravenous, looks like. Hungover, Nick?”

“I’m okay,” I said. “I never drink on plane flights.” It was true. One of the secrets of business travel, I’d learned. That and always fly first class. “No coffee, thanks.”

His assistant’s voice came on: “Yes?”

“Sorry, Heather, cancel that,” he said to the speakerphone as he sat behind his desk. He never drank coffee, himself. He said he didn’t need it, which made it hard to trust him. I don’t need a lot of sleep, but this guy was almost an android. He was incredibly energetic. He played squash, I was told, like a Roman gladiator on speed.

Jay leaned forward and put his elbows on his desk, propping up his head, staring off somewhere behind me. This made him look bored and disengaged.

He often came off as casual and shambling and loose-jointed, but his desk told you everything you needed to know: It was always perfectly clean. Nothing marred the wide polished expanse of mahogany. He was a Type-A personality, an obsessive-compulsive, a clean freak. He was great at banter, never seemed to take anything seriously, sometimes even appeared to be muddleheaded. But he missed nothing. His mind was a steel-jaw trap: Once you got caught in its teeth, you’d have to chew off your own limb to escape.

“So you got in to the office early today?”

I shrugged.

“Looking into Traverse Development, huh?” he said. His blue eyes seemed to have gone gray.

“I like to know as much as possible about my clients,” I said. I’d run Traverse Development through our standard corporate registration databases and found nothing. I’d also run a search on the cell-phone number that Woody gave me back in L.A., the emergency contact number for whoever had hired him. But no luck. It came back as “private.”

Did someone tell Stoddard I’d been searching? Or did my computer search trigger some kind of notification?

“Maybe not the best use of your time.”

“Don’t worry, I did it on my own time.”

He paused. “And?”

“It doesn’t exist,” I said.

“Strange,” Stoddard said. He was toying with me. “The check cleared.”

“No business registration in the city of Arlington. Or Arlington County. Nothing in SearchSystems. The address on that shipment turns out to be bogus-a rented mail drop. A place called EasyOffice, which is one of those business suites you can rent by the hour or by the week. The rent was paid in cash. So obviously it’s a front.”

“Oh, please. Don’t be so suspicious. Companies use fronts for all kinds of legitimate reasons. Like avoiding taxes.”

“You know what was in that container, don’t you?” I said. “What was being shipped out of Bahrain?”

“I didn’t ask.” Jay was too skilled to look evasive.

“But you know anyway,” I said.

He laughed. Sometimes talking with him was like fencing. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“I think you know damned well what was in those boxes.” I said it in a good-humored way, not wanting to come off as confrontational. Confrontational rarely worked with him.

He chewed the inside of his cheek, which was always the giveaway that he was trying to decide whether to tell a lie. The “tell,” as they say in poker. Stoddard was practiced in the art of deception, but my skill at reading people is better. I give full credit for this to my father, who was a liar the way some people are alcoholics. He lived and breathed dishonesty. It was a useful education for a kid.

“If you opened a sealed shipment, Nick, you don’t want to brag about it. You could get the whole firm in trouble. If you’re going to break the law, you do it for the client. Not to work against the client.”

“It was a messy recovery, Jay. A couple of boxes broke open.”

“Why do I doubt that? Point is, whatever you found, that’s outside of the scope of our work. They hired us to do a very specific job. Nothing beyond that. In addition to which, as you well know, anything we come across in the course of an investigation that might be detrimental to a client we always keep confidential. Otherwise, we’d go out of business in a week. I don’t need to tell you this.”

This was one of the things I didn’t love about my job. Often, a client would hire us to investigate some alleged wrongdoing inside the company, and later, after we found it-embezzlement or fraud or bribery or whatever-we’d discover that what the client really wanted was to see if it could be found. Sort of like a game. A scavenger hunt. If we couldn’t find it, neither would the Justice Department. And they always insisted that we bury our findings. Clean up the mess for them and keep our mouths shut. If you didn’t go along with them, they might refuse to pay. And the word would get around that you were, well, maybe a little too fussy. A pain in the ass. Not the kind of firm you could really be comfortable with.

This sort of thing happened far more than we or anyone else liked to admit. Which was why you had to be careful about who you signed up to work for. You didn’t want to find yourself complicit in covering up someone else’s crime.

“This has the potential to blow up in our faces,” I said. I lowered my voice. “There was close to a billion dollars there in cash. Sealed in bricks by the U.S. Treasury.”

“So?”

“So there’s this annoying little law. The bulk-cash smuggling law of 2001. If you’re shipping more than ten thousand bucks in cash, you’ve got to fill out paperwork.”

“Oh, please. Not if the government does it.”

“This wasn’t a government flight. This was a private cargo shipment.”

“The government uses private cargo firms all the time these days. You know that.”

“For a billion dollars’ worth of cash? I’m dubious.”

“Bottom line, this isn’t your problem, Nick. Grow up. Don’t be naïve.”

Now he was pulling out the heavy artillery. There was nothing worse, in Stoddard’s mind, than being naïve about how the world really worked. He had no patience for it.

“I’m not taking a moral position, here, Jay. I’m just saying that this is the sort of thing that ends up splashed all over the front page of the Washington Post, and suddenly we’re dragged into it. First as a sidebar. Then we become our own separate front-page story.”

“Only if it’s truly illegal, which we don’t know, and only if someone talks. Barring that, we’re on totally solid ground.”

“You really do have faith in the ultimate goodness of mankind, don’t you?” The only successful way to argue with Jay, I’d learned, was to out-cynical him.

He laughed loud and long. Jay had a good smile but a lot of gold fillings at the back, and they caught the light. “Look, Nicky. The world’s a dirty place. I’m sure your father could tell you a lot more about that than I could. Give him a call. Ask him.”

He arched a single brow, which was something I’d always wished I could do. Stoddard wasn’t trying to be snide, I didn’t think. He probably just intended this as his coup de grâce, his knockout punch.

“I don’t think they allow incoming phone calls at his prison,” I said. “Though I admit I’ve never tried.”

IF YOU took a really close look at some of the biggest, most notorious scandals of the last thirty or so years, you’d find Jay Stoddard lurking somewhere in the shadows. As an investigator or a fixer or an adviser, I mean. Whether it was the Iran-Contra hearings in the Reagan days or a Canadian media mogul on trial for fraud. Or one of a dozen Congressional sex scandals. And a whole lot more situations that might have exploded into ugly public imbroglios if it hadn’t been for Stoddard’s work.

But you’d have to know where to look, because Jay didn’t like to leave traces. And he always preferred to be on the winning side.

One of the very few times he picked the wrong side was when he agreed to work for my father. Victor Heller was arrested and charged with massive accounting and securities fraud and grand larceny, and being the smart and extremely well-connected guy that he was, he hired the finest investigative firm in the world to assist his legal defense. Unfortunately for both Jay and Dad, the facts got in the way. He was sent to prison for thirty years.

In fact, I’m convinced that it was because Jay Stoddard felt guilty about letting my father down that he hired me, the black sheep of the family who’d dropped out of college to enlist in the Special Forces. Who’d joined the army instead of Goldman Sachs. Later, though, Jay began bragging that I was his best hire. “Something in those Heller genes,” he’d say.

“Larceny,” I liked to reply.

He’d shake his head, a mournful look in his eyes. “Your dad’s a brilliant man. It’s just a damned shame…”

Now he said, “Anyway, odds are the whole thing’s perfectly innocent. Let’s just leave it there, okay?”

“If I ran a check on some of the serial numbers, I wonder if it would turn out to be part of the cash that went missing in Baghdad a few years ago.”

“Maybe. But why would you?”

“Curiosity.”

I was starting to piss him off. His tone got increasingly exasperated. “Nick, we’ve all got a lot of work to do around here. Let’s just move on, okay?”

I shrugged. I wasn’t interested in getting into a fight with him. Certainly not a fight I couldn’t win. And maybe he was right. “Forget it, Jake,” I said. “ ‘It’s Chinatown.’ ”

Quoting one of the best lines from one of Jay’s favorite movies seemed to mollify him. He laughed heartily. “All right,” he said, “as far as I’m concerned, this never happened.”

I was being forgiven. As if I’d accidentally insulted his wife. Very few people were as affable as Jay when he wanted to be.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

I wish I’d left it there.

12.

When I got to my office, which was about a quarter the size of his, I saw that my voice-mail light was blinking. All calls came through our main switchboard and were answered by Elizabeth, the British receptionist. Most callers just left a name and number and she e-mailed me the message. Sometimes I missed those old pink “While You Were Out” message slips that used to stack up when I worked at McKinsey & Company. But once in a while, especially if the matter was confidential, or the caller didn’t want to leave a name, she’d put them right into my voice mail.

I played the messages over the speakerphone while I sat in my desk chair and spun it halfway around to stare out the window at K Street. A pretty young girl in an orange shirt came out of the restaurant across the street and knelt in front of the menu easel on the sidewalk. She kept tossing back her long brown hair while writing the day’s specials on the chalkboard in a neat cursive hand.

One of the messages was from an old army buddy about our weekly basketball game. Another was from a woman I’d been seeing on an extremely casual basis.

But nothing from Lieutenant Garvin of the Washington Metropolitan Police. I’d left him two messages. So I tried him again, got his voice mail, left him a third message.

In the meantime, I had a few other phone calls to make.

Jay Stoddard had explicitly told me to stop asking questions about Traverse Development, but that was like waving a red flag at a bull. I’ve never liked following orders, which was one of the reasons I was happy to leave the army, then the government. I’ll admit, though, that this didn’t make me an ideal employee.

In any case, I wasn’t asking questions about Traverse Development, whatever that was. I was asking about the almost one billion dollars in cash that Traverse was shipping, and technically that was a different matter. Hairsplitting, maybe, but whatever works.

The plastic wrapping on the bricks of currency had identified it as being from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in East Rutherford, New Jersey. That was the location of the largest cash vault in the country. They had people there whose entire job was to analyze the movement of cash around the world-which is probably one of those jobs that sounds more interesting than it actually is. I called the international cash operations unit of the East Rutherford Operations Center and identified myself by my real name and firm and told them that, in the course of an investigation, I’d found a small bundle of cash in a briefcase belonging to a suspected drug trafficker. I gave the woman one of the serial numbers.

It took her more than five minutes to return to the phone. She had all sorts of questions for me. Where exactly was this drug trafficker based? How much cash? What was the range of serial numbers, and were they sequential?

I told her the serial numbers on the hundred-dollar bills all began with DB-at least, the ones I had looked at.

“Well, sir, the first letter, D, means that it’s the 2003 series. And the second letter-B?-that means it was issued by the New York Fed.”

“Well, that helps,” I said. “But what I want to know is, was this part of any bulk shipment of cash?”

“I can’t tell you that, sir.” The woman’s voice had gone from bored-but-friendly to officious-and-stern.

“That’s too bad,” I said. “Because when the Fed won’t help law enforcement recover cash that’s stolen from one of their shipments, that’s serious indeed. Just the sort of thing that my buddy, the chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, would love to sink his claws into. You know how they love scandals like this. How do you spell your last name, again?”

If there’s one thing a bureaucrat fears more than having to work past five o’clock, it’s having to testify before Congress.

By the time I hung up, I’d confirmed my suspicions. Sure enough, the cash on that plane was part of the famous nine billion dollars that had gone missing in Baghdad a few years back.

But I still hadn’t cracked the mystery of who or what Traverse Development was, and that wasn’t going to be easy to do out of this office. Not with Jay Stoddard looking over my shoulder. And not without asking questions about it, as I promised Jay I wouldn’t do.

I had an old friend named Walter McGeorge, who was an expert in TSCM, which is the industry shorthand for Technical Surveillance Countermeasures. In simple terms, Walter was a bug-sweeper, the best I’d ever met.

Walter had been a communications sergeant on my Special Forces team. He’d been trained in all the usual stuff-radio equipment and wire communications, burst-code radio nets, and so on. Everything from encrypted satellite transmissions to old-fashioned Morse code. Somewhere along the line, “Walter” had become “Hognose,” because of his passing resemblance to Porky Pig, and then “Merlin,” as he earned the admiration of his teammates. He was recruited to the same Pentagon intel team as me but survived longer. When he finally decided he wanted out, I got him a job doing bug sweeps for a TSCM firm in Mary land. He’d done a number of projects for me since Stoddard Associates didn’t have TSCM specialists on staff: That was a specialized skill these days. All the big investigative firms outsourced those jobs now.

I reached him on his cell. The connection was crackly, and I asked whether I’d disturbed him on a job.

“Yeah,” he replied crankily. “A job involving bluefish.”

Merlin was a serious sport fisherman and kept a small boat in the Harbour Cove Marina on Chesapeake Bay.

“I need to send someone a package,” I said. Before he had the chance to make a crack about how he wasn’t my secretary, I went on: “I have the address of a drop site, and I want to send them a GPS tracking device. You think you could send out a FedEx package with one of those letter loggers inside?”

“You looking for historical data?”

“Historical?”

“If you’re talking about the GPS Letter Logger, the one that’s like a quarter inch thick and fits in a number-ten business envelope, well, that just records where it’s been after the fact. It’s not real-time. You have to get it back to download the data. And I got a feeling you’re not going to get it back.”

“I need real-time. I’m figuring the FedEx package will get delivered to the drop site and probably transferred to some actual office, where it’ll get opened.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Maybe not,” I conceded. “Still, it’s worth a try. Once they open it and see a tracker inside, they’re going to destroy it. But at least I’ll get the real location that way.”

“You think so, huh?”

“I hope so. That’s why I’m calling you.”

“Well, here’s the deal. If you want a GPS logger that can broadcast its location in real time, it’s gonna be a little beefier than that Letter Logger device. It’ll send out real-time position data as SMS text messages. Lithium-ion battery. Should stay powered for ten days.”

“Think you can pop one in the mail later on today?”

“Soon as I get back to the office.”

Another call was coming through. I recognized the number, told Merlin where to send the package, and said, “Thanks, man. Good fishing.”

Then I picked up line 2. “Lieutenant Garvin,” I said. “Thanks for getting back to me.”

“Good to hear from you, Mr. Heller,” the cop said. “Funny coincidence, actually. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about your brother.”

13.

The headquarters of the Violent Crime Branch of the Washington Metropolitan Police was hidden away in the back of some dismal shopping center in southeast D.C., off Pennsylvania Avenue. I headed over there right after work. I was buzzed in and entered a dimly lit corridor that smelled of vomit, the stench not quite masked with some deodorizing spray that was almost as bad. I passed an open conference room that had crime-scene tape stretched across the doorway, probably to keep people from accidentally stepping into the mess on the floor.

Detective-Lieutenant Arthur Garvin met me halfway down the hall. He wasn’t quite what I expected. He had an almost professorial appearance: thick steel-rimmed glasses, scraggly white goatee, red-rimmed nostrils. On the way over, I’d called in to the office and asked Dorothy to do a quick backgrounder on the guy. He was sixty-four, with thirty-two years of service, and had gotten a retirement waiver. The police and the fire department had a mandatory retirement age of sixty, but they made exceptions in special cases. Most cops want to retire as soon as they can, I’ve found. The ones who get retirement waivers are the ones who love what they’re doing.

He wore a light blue shirt with a button-down collar, neatly creased; he had his shirts professionally laundered, and they came back in boxes. Not a polyester kind of guy. Neat and orderly, though a large dark grease stain in the middle of his shirt pocket marred the effect.

He shook my hand. His was damp. “Come on back to my office. Ordinarily, we’d talk in the conference room, but it’s undergoing maintenance.”

“Smells like someone couldn’t hold their Jack Daniel’s,” I said.

He scowled. “Nah, something’s going around the office. Some kinda stomach virus.” He sounded congested, kept sniffling.

He didn’t share an office since he was a lieutenant. His was cramped and windowless, with a bad rug and wood-veneer paneling and a lot of framed certificates and awards. It reminded me of a home office in someone’s finished basement.

Garvin sat behind his desk and took a long swig of coffee from a giant mug. “Coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“So, snake-eater, huh?”

I shrugged. He’d checked me out, too.

“Isn’t that what they call you Green Berets?”

No one I knew in the Special Forces ever used the term “snake-eaters.” We all went through a pretty nasty training program called the Q Course, but you didn’t actually have to cook and eat snake. Maybe in the old days you did. No one ever called us “Green Berets” anymore, either. Not since John Wayne.

“Guess so,” I said.

“You’ve been with Stoddard Associates for about three years.”

“That all? Seems a lot longer.”

“Now, I assume you’re here for personal reasons and not on business.”

“Right,” I said.

He sneezed, pulled out a crumpled handkerchief, blew his nose loudly. He sneaked a surreptitious glance at the contents of his handkerchief before crumpling it back up and stuffing it into his pants. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have come in to work today, and now you’re gonna catch this damned thing.”

“I don’t get sick,” I said.

“Bad luck to say that. Now you’re really gonna get hit bad.”

“I’m not superstitious either,” I said. “Where’s your partner? Scorpino? Scardino?”

“Scarpino. Tony’s on another case. He’s been reassigned.”

I knew what that meant. The case had been deemed low-priority. Only one cop on it now.

“Thanks for taking the time to see me,” I said. Cops are overworked and underpaid, overstressed and undervalued, and I always try to let them know I appreciate them. They also tend to be resentful of people who do roughly the same work they do but get paid a lot more. I can’t blame them.

He sneezed again. “Ah, Jeez,” he said. He took out his handkerchief and went through his ritual all over again, right down to the furtive inspection.

“I’m grateful for everything you’re doing to find my brother. I want to help anyway I can.”

“You and your brother are pretty close, huh?”

He peered at me for a few seconds over the rim of his coffee mug. The thick lenses of his eyeglasses magnified his eyes, made them look weird, like some space alien’s. If I had been guilty of something, I would definitely have been intimidated. He was probably quite effective in interrogations.

I shook my head. “Not in years.”

“Must be hard, living in the same town and all.”

“We travel in different circles.”

“Uh-huh.” He put down his mug, turned his chair to face his computer monitor. “How about you and Mrs. Heller? Don’t get along with her either?”

“We get along great. I like her kid.”

“Her kid? You mean, their kid?”

“Well, Roger’s stepson. But Roger’s been his dad since Gabe was two or three.”

“So you’re in touch with her?”

“From time to time. Gabe and I talk about once a week.”

The thought crossed my mind that he might consider me a suspect. Ex-Special Forces, which meant that I was capable of scary stuff. Unmarried and not currently in a relationship. So naturally I must have conspired with my brother’s wife to kill her husband and set this whole elaborate thing up.

But fortunately he didn’t seem to be going down that path. “She ever talk about their marriage?”

“No. She and I don’t really have that kind of relationship.”

“I assume your brother never talked about that sort of stuff with you either.”

“Right.”

“So there could be serious problems between the two of them that you might not know about.”

“Theoretically, sure. But I’d probably have noticed.”

“Any drug use?”

“Not that I know of.”

He tapped at his keyboard. “Do you know if he was involved with bookies?”

“Bookies? Roger? I don’t think he’s ever seen a horse race. Lieutenant, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

“What tree should I be barking up, Mr. Heller?”

“My brother was involved in some complicated financial arrangements at Gifford Industries. The stakes are pretty high-business partners, competitors, all that. Wouldn’t surprise me if he made some enemies. Bad actors.”

“He have any enemies that you know of?”

“I don’t want to give you carpal tunnel syndrome.”

“That many, huh?”

“Roger has an abrasive manner. I’m sure he pissed people off all the time.”

“Maybe the wrong people.”

“Could be.”

“People he’d want to run away from.”

“It’s possible.” I watched him tap at the keys for a few seconds, then said, “I assume you’ve flagged all his credit-card accounts.”

He typed a while longer, sniffled, then turned to me. “Huh. Hadn’t thought of that.” His sarcasm was bone-dry. I liked that.

I let it pass. “Nothing popped up, I take it. You ran his name through all the standard databases-NCIC and so on?”

“Another excellent suggestion,” he said. “So glad you stopped by. Wouldn’t have thought of that either.” He sneezed, and blew his nose, but this time he didn’t bother with the examination. “Any other tips for me?”

“How about checking those closed-circuit crime cameras you guys have all over the place?”

“Actually, Mr. Heller, we don’t have a single crime camera in Georgetown.”

That was news to me. “No crime in Georgetown, huh?”

“No budget,” Garvin said. “I think this is what they call backseat driving.”

I ignored him. “Then what about traffic cameras? I’ve seen plenty of them around Georgetown.”

“They don’t record anything. They’re monitored, but only for traffic-related incidents.”

“Like running a red light.”

“Like that.”

“Still, there have to be dozens, maybe even hundreds, of private security cameras in that part of Georgetown. Businesses, embassies, probably some apartment buildings, too. Anyone canvass the area?”

He gave me one of his styptic, space-alien glares. “Maybe we can bring in the National Guard to assist us. I don’t think we put in that kind of effort to look for Osama Bin Laden. What makes you think we’ve got that kind of manpower for a missing-persons case?”

“Of course you don’t,” I said in a matter-of-fact tone. “But let’s speak frankly, Lieutenant. This is probably a homicide.”

“Think so?”

“The odds of my brother being alive at this point are negligible. You know it as well as I do.”

“Hmph. Interesting. Well, you’re the expert.” He sneezed twice, did his handkerchief thing. “Being a high-priced investigator with Stoddard and all.”

“Lieutenant Garvin,” I said, “this is your case, not mine. I get that. I just want to help.”

“Yeah? Then maybe you could explain something to me.”

“Okay.”

“Since you’re so sure your brother was abducted by unnamed ‘enemies’ and probably killed. How do you explain the fact that about half an hour after he and his wife were attacked, he went to a Wachovia Bank ATM and made a withdrawal?”

I stared at him.

“Kinda raises the odds of your brother’s being alive, doesn’t it?” he said, and he sneezed again.

14.

You don’t seem surprised.”

“Because it wasn’t him,” I said. In fact, I was pretty much blown away at first, but I’ve got a decent poker face. So Garvin had put a flag on Roger’s bank accounts. “You might want to ask for the ATM videotape,” I said, just to watch his reaction.

Garvin began to sputter with indignation, but then he grinned. “Got me,” he said. “Wachovia’s sending it over as soon as they pull it.”

“Whoever abducted my brother grabbed his card and forced his PIN out of him. He didn’t withdraw the money of his own volition.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Nothing else makes sense. I’m sure my brother has several bank accounts. Which one?”

“His personal checking account. The one he uses most often to get cash.”

“What time was this?”

“Eleven oh-nine P.M. Sixteen minutes after we got the nine-one-one call from someone who saw his wife lying on the ground.”

“Gotta be a holdup, then,” I said. “If someone abducted him for some reason, they’d never jeopardize it for, what-a thousand bucks? The maximum Roger could withdraw at any time?”

“Probably.”

“A holdup that went bad, then.”

“If by ‘went bad,’ you mean they killed him, where’s the body?”

“You tell me.”

“Right,” Garvin said with muted disgust.

“It’s also possible they’re still holding him.”

“Your big kidnapping theory again, that it?”

“Look, Lieutenant, you guys are stretched way too thin. You don’t have half the resources my firm has. It’s not fair, but it’s true.” I ignored his cold stare. “We’ve got access to some very powerful, and very expensive, investigative databases. How about I put some of that firepower to work? Case like this, I figure you can use all the help you can get.”

Garvin took off his glasses and set them down on top of a neatly stacked pile of folders. He closed his eyes and massaged his eyelids with his fingertips, pressing hard. “Believe it or not, Mr. Heller, this ain’t my first rodeo.”

It was never anyone’s first rodeo, was it? “I’m only talking about the investigative tools we have at our disposal.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

“We’ve got asset locator services and corporate databases and law-enforcement databases that you probably think only the National Security Agency has. We’ve got access to international records that the CIA and the NSA wish they had. Don’t tell me you’d turn away a lead if I handed you one.”

“Actually, yes. I would turn it away. I can’t use anything you find, Mr. Heller. It wouldn’t be admissible in court. I can’t establish the chain of custody.”

“Forget about trial. If I can piece together what happened to Roger, you’re not going to ignore what I come up with.”

“I know you want to find your brother,” Garvin said. “I get that. But if you start meddling in my case, you’re going to screw it up. You start talking to a potential target before we have our ducks in a row, you’ll tip our hand before we’re ready. The target’s going to start destroying evidence and building alibis in advance. I can’t have that.”

“It ain’t my first rodeo either.”

“Yeah, well.”

“You’re the pro here, not me,” I said. “I’m not here to bust your butt, and I sure as hell don’t want credit. If an envelope happens to turn up in your mailbox with some interesting information in it, don’t throw it away. That’s all I’m saying.”

“I didn’t ask you do to anything,” Garvin said.

“Absolutely not.”

“And certainly nothing illegal.”

“Never,” I said.

Garvin looked at me for a second or two, then nodded. “Good. Just so long as we’re clear on this. I don’t want you doing a damned thing.”

“Hell no,” I said, and smiled. I handed him a business card. “Here’s my cell number. Let me know if you find anything interesting, okay?”

MY CAR-or maybe I should say truck-was an old, rebuilt Land Rover Defender 90. It was rugged and utilitarian and indestructible and totally reliable. Not at all luxurious. Not a living room on wheels like the Range Rover. It was a tall steel box with hand-cranked windows and a Spartan interior, and it could tow cars and drive through rivers. A true off-road vehicle, even though my off-road driving, since I started working for Stoddard, was mostly limited to gravel driveways in Nantucket.

The Defender was a gift from a grateful Jordanian arms dealer after I made the mistake of admiring it while advising him on protection at his Belgravia estate. He had it reconditioned, repainted the same glossy Coniston green, and shipped over. It was a 1997, but it looked brand new.

I climbed in just as my cell phone started ringing.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Nick.” It was Lauren, and she was whispering. “Can you come over?”

“What is it?”

“I just got an e-mail,” she said. “From Roger.”

15.

Lauren was sitting in front of a computer screen in the small nook off their living room that served as her home office. She was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants, and she was barefoot. She looked up as I entered. She’d been crying, I could see. Her eyes were bloodshot.

She tilted the screen so I could see it. I read a few lines, then stopped.

The e-mail was from Roger.Heller@InCaseOfDeath.net.

“ ‘IN CASE of death’?” I said. “What the hell’s that?”

She looked at me for a long time. “I just looked it up. It’s an e-mail service that sends out e-mails to your loved ones,” she said. “After you die.”

We were both silent for a few seconds.

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” I said.

Lauren spoke haltingly. “It’s sort of morbid, really. But I guess it’s a useful service. You know, if there are things you want to tell your family after your death…” And she bit her lip.

“Okay,” I said. I put a hand on her shoulder.

She swallowed, wiped away her tears with the backs of her hands. “You sign up for these automatic e-mail notifications. For up to five people. The e-mails go out after you’ve died.”

I said gently, “And how do they know you’re dead?”

“I’m not sure, Nick… It looks like they automatically e-mail you as often as you request-weekly, monthly, whatever-and you have up to a week to hit REPLY, and if you don’t…”

But I’d stopped listening. I’d moved closer to the screen and started reading Roger’s letter.

My sweet Lauren,

This has to be the strangest letter I’ve ever written. Because if you get it, that means I’m dead.

I looked up and saw that Lauren was standing.

“I need to make sure Gabe’s doing his homework,” she said.

I nodded, kept reading.

How it’ll happen, I have no idea.

But first things first. I want you to know how deeply I love you. I’m not an easy man to be married to, so you might not always have realized it-and for that, all I can do is ask your forgiveness. I’ve never been good about expressing affection, but I hope at least you know I tried my best.

Who knows what they’ll do? Will they try to make it look like I committed suicide? You’ve known me for 9 years-you know I enjoy my life far too much to be suicidal. Or maybe they’ll set it up so it looks like I drove drunk-even though you know how rarely I drink, and that I never ever drink and drive.

Or maybe they won’t even leave a body-no evidence. I have no idea what they might try. But if you get this, that means they finally succeeded.

I can only hope that you actually receive this e-mail. I’m not sure you will. The people who are trying to stop me have the ability to intercept e-mail. Given what I know them to be capable of, that’s the least of it. So one copy is going to your work e-mail address, and one copy to your personal one, and I hope you get at least one of them. I’m certain they can, and will, read this e-mail.

Whether or not I can save myself, I’ve taken precautions to protect you and Gabe-to give you the means to hold them off. You’ll know what I mean.

But whatever you do, you must never trust anyone.

I thought long and hard about e-mailing Gabe separately, but in the end I decided to leave it to you. You’ll know how to handle it. Tell him whatever you think best. Just make sure to tell him I love him immensely. That if there’s an afterlife, I’ll be cheering him on, and I know he’ll grow up to be a terrific man.

And for all the ways I messed up your life-for all the wreckage I’m leaving behind-please forgive me.

I love you so much.

Roger.

P.S.: Please say good-bye to the librarian.

When I finished reading, I sat there for a minute and stared at the screen in a kind of fugue state.

Then I heard Lauren’s voice, and I turned around. “He wants you,” she said.

It took me a few seconds to realize she meant Gabe.

16.

Gabe’s room stank of sweat and old laundry. I’d been in monkey houses at zoos that smelled nicer. Dirty clothes were heaped everywhere: on the floor, on his desk, on top of the CD player with the big speakers. Lauren had long ago given up cleaning up after him, and their housekeeper, who came three times a week, refused to enter his room. I could barely make my way to his bed. The only clear spot seemed to be on his desk in front of his computer.

The walls were painted bright orange, his choice, and an odd assortment of posters hung on the wall. A poster for the movie The Dark Knight with Heath Ledger wearing creepy eyeliner and lipstick; the only word was “Ha,” dripping blood. A movie poster for Watchmen: a guy getting thrown out of a tall building, shards of glass in his wake, a yellow smiley button floating in midair with a splotch of red blood on it. And the words JUSTICE IS COMING TO ALL OF US. NO MATTER WHAT WE DO. His desk was piled high with comic books and a big softcover of the comic-book artist Will Eisner.

Gabe lay in bed reading a paperback called Joker by Brian Azzarello. The front cover was a grotesque closeup of the Joker’s feral grin, with jagged yellow teeth and smeared lipstick. Gabe was wearing headphones hooked up to an iPod Touch. Music blasted in his ears so loud that I could hear it, tinny and distorted and really awful.

My thoughts were still careening, still trying to make sense of Roger’s strange and cryptic e-mail. If you get this, that means they finally succeeded, he’d written. So he was expecting to be killed. I’ve taken precautions to protect you and Gabe, he’d said. The means to hold them off. What could that be? Would Lauren know? And what was that bizarre postscript-Please say good-bye to the librarian-supposed to mean? A code, surely, but what?

I sat on the side of Gabe’s bed, and he pulled the headphones off and hit the PAUSE button on his iPod.

“Whatcha listening to?” I asked.

“Slipknot.”

“Well, obviously. Which cut?”

“ ‘Wait and Bleed,’ ” he said. “But you knew that.”

He didn’t smile, but there seemed to be a twinkle in his eye. He enjoyed the game. He knew I didn’t get the emo-screamo stuff he’d started listening to recently, and never wanted to.

“You call that music?” I said. Just like old farts have been saying to teenage kids for generations. I imagine Mozart’s dad said something like that, too.

“What do you listen to?” Gabe said. “No, wait, let me guess. Coldplay, right?”

Busted. But I just gave him a steely stare.

“And what else-Styx? ABBA?”

“All right, you win,” I said. “How’s the comic book?”

“It’s a graphic novel,” he bristled.

“Same thing, right?”

“Not even close.”

“When do I get to see it?”

He blushed, shrugged.

“Not for public consumption, huh?”

He shrugged again.

“I’d love to read it sometime.”

“Okay. Maybe. I’ll see.”

“Anyway. You wanted to talk to me?”

He wriggled himself around until he was sitting up. I noticed he was wearing a black T-shirt with Homer Simpson looking into the barrel of a nail gun. It said CAUTION: MAN AT WORK. He also had a stuffed animal in the bed with him, a ratty-looking giraffe Beanie Baby he’d named Jaffee.

Gabe was a strange kid, no doubt about it. He was fourteen, almost fifteen, and had only just entered adolescence. He was a remarkable artist, entirely self-taught, and he spent most of his time-when he wasn’t reading comic books-doing panel drawings with an ultrafine black pen. He was scary-smart, brilliant at math and science, and he affected a world-weary cynicism. But every once in a while a crack would appear in his brittle shell, and you’d catch a fleeting glimpse of the little boy. He didn’t seem to have any close friends. They called him a dork and a nerd at school, he told me once, and I felt bad about what he must be going through. Adolescence was hard enough for a normal kid.

He wasn’t easy to spend time with, which was why I made a point of spending as much time with him as I could. I’d take him to the Air and Space Museum or the Museum of Natural History or the National Zoo, or just for a walk. When he was younger, I taught him how to throw a baseball, and for one disastrous season I coached his Little League team (at the end of which he decided he wasn’t cut out to be an athlete). We tried fishing once, but we both found it boring. Recently, I’d been taking him to comic-book stores a lot, and once, a year or so ago, he made me take him to a comic-book convention at a Quality Inn somewhere in Virginia, for which I truly deserved a purple heart.

“That e-mail was about Dad, wasn’t it?”

I looked at him for a few seconds while I decided how to reply.

“You don’t have to tell me,” he said. “I figured it out.”

“Were you spying on your mom?”

“Of course not. I don’t have to.”

“You don’t read her e-mail, do you?”

“No way.”

“Okay. Good.”

“Uncle Nick. He left us, didn’t he? He ran off with someone.”

“Why in the world would you say that?”

“I can tell. I know things. What did his e-mail say?”

“That’s between you and your mom. But no, he didn’t run off. Nothing like that.”

“Don’t lie to me, Uncle Nick.”

“I won’t. And I’m not.”

“Are you going to take off, too?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Like Dad.” He said it with a kind of scalding hostility, but that was only to mask the fear, the vulnerability.

“You wish,” I said. “But sorry. You can’t get rid of me that easy.”

He smiled despite himself.

From downstairs I heard Lauren calling, “Nick?”

“All right,” I said, standing up. “Good night. Don’t worry. We’ll get to the bottom of this. We’ll find your dad.”

“Nick?” Lauren said again, her voice distant and muffled.

Gabe hit the PAUSE button on his iPod and put his headphones back on.

I closed his bedroom door behind me.

“Nick?” Lauren’s voice echoed in the stairwell. Something in her tone made me quicken my pace. “Can you come here?”

17.

Lauren was standing in front of her computer, hunched over. “Take a look,” she said, swiveling the screen toward me.

I looked, saw nothing unusual. “Yeah?”

“Look again.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“Right.” She began scrolling through her e-mail in-box. “It’s gone.”

I leaned over, watched her move her cursor up and down the list of messages she’d received that day. Roger’s e-mail did seem to have disappeared.

“You think you might have accidentally deleted it?”

“No. I’m positive. His e-mail is gone. I don’t understand this.” Her voice rose, approaching hysterical. “It was right here.”

“He sent a copy to your work address,” I said. “Can you sign on to your work e-mail from here?”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

Her fingers flew over the keyboard. Then: “Jesus.”

“It’s not there either,” I said.

She shook her head.

“Did you print out a copy?”

“Of course not.”

“Or save it on your computer?”

“Why would I? Nick-” She turned around. “I’m not imagining this, right? You saw it.”

“Maybe there’s a way to get it back. We have someone at Stoddard Associates who’s a whiz at data recovery.”

“It’s like someone reached into my e-mail and just deleted it.” She opened a browser on her computer and went to InCaseOfDeath.Net. It was the cyberequivalent of a funeral home-floral bouquets in the borders. Photos of somber people coming up, then fading in flash animation-elderly folks, young parents, and kids-and quotes about death and grieving scrolling across the window. “Never leave anything unsaid!” a banner shouted. “The things you mean to say, the things you haven’t said.”

There was a MEMBER LOGIN box, and below that a line: “Forget password?”

We both saw it at the same time. “He must have had an account,” I said. Even before he could finish, she was typing in Roger’s work e-mail address, then she clicked SEND PASSWORD.

A line came up in red:

INCORRECT EMAIL ADDRESS WAS ENTERED.

“Try his home e-mail,” I said. She typed it in.

INCORRECT EMAIL ADDRESS WAS ENTERED.

“He must have used some e-mail account I don’t know about,” Lauren said. “Damn. But what could we find out anyway, come to think of it?”

“Who knows,” I said. “When he opened the account. What address he used. Maybe nothing. Maybe we’re just grasping at straws.”

She walked into the living room and sat on one of the giant cushy black leather sofas. I followed her in and sat on another couch facing her. Some entertainment news show was on their huge flat-screen Sony. The sound was off. Paris Hilton or one of those interchangeable Hollywood celebrities dodging the paparazzi.

“So Roger was right,” I said. “He said ‘they’ can intercept e-mail. Whoever ‘they’ are. He called them ‘the people who are trying to stop me.’ ”

“But who’s he talking about?”

“I was hoping you might have some idea.”

She shook her head. “He never said anything about…”

“About people threatening to kill him?”

“It sounds paranoid. Crazy. But his e-mail sounded totally rational, don’t you think?”

“You think he wrote it himself?”

She looked at me, furrowed her brow, gave a skeptical smile. “I hadn’t thought about that. But it sure sounded like him. I’d say it was definitely Roger.”

“I agree. Though it sounds more… emotional than I would have expected.”

“Nick, you have no idea.” She sounded annoyed. “I don’t think you ever saw that side of him. The affectionate side.”

“He kept it pretty well hidden.”

“Maybe he was just different with me.”

“No doubt.”

She was quiet a moment. “That was the last thing he said to me, you know.”

“What was?”

“ ‘I love you.’ ”

“Interesting.”

“Why interesting?”

I shook my head, and we didn’t say anything for a while, and then she asked, “But why didn’t he come right out and say what he’d found or who he was afraid of?”

“To protect you, I’d guess. Maybe he figured you’d be safer if you didn’t know anything. Since he thought his e-mails were going to be read.”

“Then what was the point of his sending any e-mail at all?” she said. “I mean, to go to the trouble of signing up with this morbid ‘in case of death’ website so he could have an e-mail sent to me that told me almost nothing-why?”

“But I think it tells you a lot. In ways that other people won’t understand. Like this line he added about a librarian. What do you think he’s referring to?”

“I have no idea. I can’t think of the last time he even went to a library.”

“He didn’t say ‘library,’ he said ‘librarian,’ ” I pointed out.

“Right,” she said. “Librarian.”

“Is ‘librarian’ a code for something?”

“Not that I can think of.”

“Or the word ‘library’?”

“I really have no idea.”

“Well, it’s a signal of some sort,” I said.

“What about the police? Did you talk to them?”

I nodded.

“Do they have any leads?”

I thought for a moment. “So far just one,” I said, and I told her about the withdrawal from Roger’s bank account after the attack.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “If they stole his ATM card, wouldn’t they need his PIN code to withdraw money?”

I nodded again.

“So it’s possible they forced it out of him? At gunpoint or something? Which means maybe they have him alive?” There was such hope in her face that I felt bad.

“Yes, it’s possible,” I said. The other obvious possibility, which I didn’t want to suggest to Lauren, was that once they got the money from him, they no longer needed him alive. She was too fragile. She might have lost her husband, the stepfather to her child. I didn’t want to make things even worse for her.

“Where does Roger keep his laptop?”

“His study.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s late. I’ve got to be at the office early tomorrow morning.”

“You sure you’re up to it?”

“Yeah, I think so. Leland needs me back there. No matter what he says.”

“You know,” I said, “you may be able to help out.”

“How?”

“Find out what Roger was doing before-before this happened. What he was working on.”

“Ask around, you mean.”

“Be discreet about it. It may help explain things.”

“Or it may not.”

“Agreed. But at this point, we need to sweep up everything. Then we see what we have. Okay?”

“I have to be careful. Being the CEO’s admin and all that.”

“Of course.”

“I’ll do what I can, Nick.”

“Good. You don’t mind me poking around in Roger’s study for a bit, do you?”

“Of course not. Actually… would you like to spend the night in one of the guest rooms?”

“No need. Thanks anyway.”

“No, I mean… would you mind spending the night here? I’m just feeling really spooked. That terrifying e-mail from Roger, then the way it vanished? That just scared the hell out of me, Nick. I’m scared about whatever’s going on with Roger, and I’m scared for Gabe, and… Jesus, Nick, I’m too scared to even think clearly about anything anymore. Would you, please?”

“Of course. Though I’ll have to get out of here early so I can stop at my place and change.”

“I’ll probably be gone by the time you leave. I get to work early.”

“What about Gabe?”

“He gets picked up by his car pool. Don’t worry about him, he’ll be fine. He’s used to being alone here in the morning.”

“Roger always left early, too?”

She nodded. “Sometimes we drive in together, unless he wants to get in to work before me.”

I noticed that I’d referred to Roger in the past tense-as if he was dead-and she didn’t catch it.

“Poor Gabe,” I said. “Latch-key child.”

“Yeah, right,” she said, getting up and giving me a quick peck on the cheek. She picked up a couple of remote controls, and switched off the TV and the cable box.

On her way out of the living room, she stopped. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I think you know me well enough to know that I’m not, you know, a scaredy-cat. I don’t panic, you know that. But after the last couple of days, when I think of Gabe, and I think-”

“You don’t have to explain.”

“I’m scared out of my mind. Okay? I’m just flat-out terrified.”

She turned around quickly, as if she was embarrassed she’d been so open, and she walked toward the door.

“Lauren,” I called out.

She stopped, turned her head.

“I’m not going to let anything happen to you guys,” I said.

Lauren whirled around, half walked, half ran toward me, and threw her arms around me. “Thank you,” she whispered.

Then just as quickly she let go. “I’ll get your room ready.”

18.

I never thought I’d see a home office more grandiose than my father’s. Until I saw my brother’s.

Dad’s library made a certain pompous kind of sense, since it was located in a thirty-room mansion built in 1919 on a ninety-acre estate in Bedford, New York. That’s horse country, of course, where women do their shopping in jodhpurs or jeans with holes at the knees and men walk around in flip-flops and everyone gets Lyme disease.

Roger, though, had carved his library out of a far more modest, suburban house. He’d knocked out a couple of rooms on the second floor to create a two-story stage set, complete with a catwalk, and lined with leather-bound books he’d never even opened, probably sold by the yard. Here, my brother got to feel as important, as baronial, as I was sure he didn’t at work, where he no doubt just pissed people off.

I found his laptop right where it belonged, on his ornately carved mahogany desk. It was next to an open copy of a book called Field Guide to Birds of Eastern and Central North America. Roger was a “birder”: a bird-watcher.

That was a hobby I didn’t get, like most aspects of my older brother. I have no hobbies, but I basically understand why a guy might want to restore vintage muscle cars or brew his own beer or collect sports memorabilia. I know accountants who wield nothing more dangerous than a sharpened number two pencil at work but have workshops in their basements with table saws that could slice off your thumb in half a second. I know mild-mannered pediatric pulmonologists who race remote-control monster trucks or rock out on their Fender Stratocasters by themselves when they get home at night.

But getting up at three in the morning to get pooped on by a Black-capped Gnatcatcher? I wasn’t sure I understood the excitement.

I powered up the laptop, and while I waited, I did a quick walk around his office. He had several framed pictures of Mom and Dad together, one at home and one in a banquette at a nightclub. A photo of Dad in his office on the top floor of the Graystone Building in New York, wearing a three-piece suit, the Manhattan skyline behind him.

Built-in cherrywood file cabinets were neatly labeled-bills, taxes, investments, and so on. I pulled open a couple of drawers and saw that he kept paper copies of his phone bills, which made things easier for me.

I checked out the French doors that opened to the backyard, tried them, and was satisfied that they were securely locked. I knelt, noticed the rudimentary security system in place-the magnetic contacts wired into an alarm system, so if someone tried to force the doors open, the alarm would sound.

Something about it looked wrong, though.

But before I could give it a second look, I heard a high-pitched tone coming from Roger’s computer.

It didn’t look good. The screen was deep blue and covered with incomprehensible text-white letters and numbers, garbage that made no sense to me except for one line that I understood quite well:

A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer

It was what computer geeks called the Blue Screen of Death.

Roger’s computer was dead. It had either crashed or-more likely-it had been wiped.

I had a theory how that might have happened-how someone might have gotten into his study to do it-and I went back to the French doors and knelt again.

Sure enough. One of the magnetic contacts on the doorframe looked like it had been hastily screwed into place. As if someone had unscrewed the contact switch, pulled out the connected wire, then jumpered the switch before screwing it back in-sloppily. In other words, someone had disabled the magnetic contact so the alarm wouldn’t go off when the French doors were opened.

Meaning that someone had probably already done a covert entry.

Someone had slipped into Roger and Lauren’s house. To search, perhaps. Or for some other reason.

And maybe was planning to do it again.

19.

I spent the next forty-five minutes circling the perimeter of the house, looking for evidence of any other intrusions, using a little LED pen-light I found in the kitchen that someone had gotten at a trade show. The usual stuff: disturbances in soil patterns, broken shrubbery, jimmied locks, wood shavings, and the like. But I didn’t find anything else. No surprise there: Whoever had broken into the house through Roger’s study didn’t need any other way in. What did surprise me was how primitive the security system was. That would have to change.

I didn’t see any point in telling Lauren about the break-in. Not yet, anyway. There was no need to frighten her more.

So I went upstairs to get some sleep.

The guest room was midway between the master bedroom and Gabe’s room. It was furnished in classic WASP-grandmother style-oval braided rug, little bedside tables with tiny reading lamps. Hand-colored antique wood engravings of birds on the wall, in little gold frames. An old-fashioned white bedspread made out of that tufted, nubby fabric called chenille. I think.

On top of the toilet in the guest bathroom was a wicker basket that held a little travel-size tube of Colgate toothpaste, a shrink-wrapped travel-size toothbrush, little bottles of shampoo and conditioner, small hand soaps from Crabtree & Evelyn. I brushed my teeth, undressed, and hung my clothes up on the mahogany valet.

I got into the bed, naked. Found myself staring at some of the weirder-looking birds on the wall-the Ruffed Bustard, the Sacred ibis, the Balearic crane-and wondering if they were extinct, or found only in Madagascar or some Amazonian jungle.

I couldn’t sleep. Maybe it was the unaccustomed sounds of a strange house. Maybe it was the fifteen-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, or whatever they were, which I wasn’t used to. Too slippery.

More likely, though, it was because I was on alert for any noises that might indicate someone was trying to break in.

I found myself thinking about my brother. About our childhood bedrooms, which we insisted on being right next to each other’s. When, given the size of our house, we could easily have been separated by half a mile.

For most of our childhood, we were best friends. We shared almost everything. We were brought close by the weird isolation imposed upon us by my father’s money. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say, by the way my father chose to live, since I’ve known rich people who are vigilant about giving their kids a normal life. They send their kids to public schools, they conceal their wealth as best they can, they drive ordinary cars and live in ordinary houses.

But not Victor Heller. He was a brilliant wheeler-dealer who rose from a working-class background to rule Wall Street, and he wanted everyone to know it. Hence the estate in Bedford, with the horses and stables and clay tennis courts and the collection of antique roadsters. For years he commuted to and from work in his own Sikorsky helicopter, which landed on a pad in our backyard, until the town authorities took him to court to make him stop.

Mom was the prettiest girl in his small-town high school, with looks that rivaled Grace Kelly’s, and her early photos confirmed it. Victor Heller won her over by the sheer brute force of his charisma, by his indomitable will, his outsize ambition.

To the world, she seemed to be the perfect society wife, though she was anything but. She was too smart to play the role he’d assigned her-arm candy and cheerful volunteer for the charities he supported. Her chief pleasure in life was being a mother, yet Victor made sure she wasn’t around much to enjoy it. He insisted she go to all the dinner parties and balls and weekends in Verbier or Mallorca or Lake Como, though she never seemed to take pleasure in any of it.

As a result, Roger and I spent more time with our nannies and gardener and caretaker and household staff than we did with our parents. This didn’t make for a great childhood, but it did at least bring us together. Roger and I were born less than two years apart-eighteen months, a closeness in age that could have made us intensely rivalrous. Instead, we were more like fraternal twins. We did everything together.

Our personalities couldn’t have been more different, though. I was the rebel, the troublemaker, and the athlete. Roger was the intellectual, far more bookish, basically a solitary type. Yet he was also a troublemaker in his own quiet way. One of our housekeepers called him Eddie Haskell. We’d never seen that old TV show Leave It to Beaver, but years later when I saw a couple of reruns on late-night TV, I realized that our housekeeper really hadn’t liked Roger. Eddie Haskell was an unctuous, conniving brown-noser. He was the two-faced character who’d politely compliment Mrs. Cleaver on her lovely dress while instigating some evil prank that would inevitably get her son, the Beaver, in trouble.

Roger wasn’t as bad as Eddie Haskell, though, and I wasn’t the Beaver.

Still, Roger did enjoy tormenting me with magic tricks. He spent a lot of time at a magicians’ supply house in the city called Tannen’s Magic, and he was as good at sleight of hand as I was at throwing a pass. There was one trick he liked to do that I never figured out. It involved sticking his thumb through a hole that he’d cut into two blue cards stuck together, then sliding a red card between the blue cards like a guillotine, apparently slicing through his thumb. I’d beg and plead, but he’d never tell me how he did it.

My brother was a skilled amateur magician, but his greatest talent was always keeping secrets.

20.

I was lying in bed, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, when there came a soft knock at the door.

I said, “Yeah?”

“Nick?”

Lauren’s voice, hushed and tentative.

“Come on in.”

“You sure it’s okay?”

“Sure.” I sat up, pulled the covers up over my lap. The door opened slowly, squeaking on its hinges, and she looked in.

She noticed my bare chest, and said, “Oh, my God, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Don’t worry, I won’t get out of bed.”

She entered. Now she was wearing just the oversized T-shirt, but it was long and roomy enough that it wasn’t immodest. Her hair was tousled. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Me neither.”

She sat in the reading chair next to the bed. “How’s the bed?” she said, concerned.

“It’s great. What happened to your head ban dage?”

“I don’t need it. The cut’s not bad, and it’s healing. It only looks bad.”

Her eyes dropped to my chest, for just an instant, then she quickly looked away. “I meant to leave you a set of Roger’s pajamas.”

“I usually don’t sleep in pajamas. Anyway, they probably wouldn’t fit.”

“True.” She was quiet for a few seconds. “You think Gabe’s doing all right?”

“Hard to tell,” I said. “He’s a teenager.”

“What’d he want to talk to you about?”

I shook my head. “I never rat out my nephew.”

“Gabe scares me sometimes. He sees too much.”

“You should hear what he listens to.”

“He’s always on the computer with his headphones on, listening to that horrible music.”

“Too bad he’s outgrown those video games he used to play all the time-Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4, those games where you just try to see how many people you can kill. Healthy stuff like that.”

She shook her head, gave a pensive smile. “And then there’s his notebook. That comic book he’s always working on. Which I’m not allowed to look at.”

“Graphic novel.”

She nodded. “Did he show it to you?”

“No. Not yet.”

“You know how much he admires you.”

“I don’t know why.”

“He thinks you’re cool.”

“No. He knows I’m not cool.”

“Well, he thinks you’re terrific.”

“Sure, why not? I drop by once a month or whatever, and I don’t nag him to do his homework.”

“No, it’s-it’s like you’re the kind of dad he’s always wanted to have. He once said…” She looked embarrassed, seemed to have changed her mind, decided not to say whatever she was about to say. “Don’t get me wrong-Roger is as good a stepfather to Gabe as he can be. He always treated Gabe like his own. But it can’t have been easy for him, marrying a divorced woman with a little kid. And he’s not naturally the most-you know, the warmest…”

Her voice faded, and I said, “Well, our own father might not have been the best role model. My parents’ marriage didn’t exactly inspire imitation.”

“Is that why you haven’t gotten married?”

I shrugged.

She said, “Haven’t found the right woman yet?”

“I’ve found plenty of the right women.”

“So…?”

“Marriage is great-for some people. I just don’t think it’s in my skill set.”

She seemed to be thinking hard about something. She bit her lip. Stared at her hands for a while.

“Lauren,” I said, “why does Gabe think Roger ran off with some woman?”

“What? He does? Oh God, is that what he told you?”

I nodded.

“That’s heartbreaking.”

“What makes him think so?”

“Because he has a rich fantasy life. The comic books are only the tip of the iceberg.”

I smiled, but she wasn’t joking. “I need to ask you something very personal.”

“You mean, was Roger having an affair?”

“It’s really none of my business,” I said. “Unless it has some bearing on what happened to him.”

“I understand, and no, he wasn’t.”

“You’re sure.”

“Am I a hundred percent sure he never cheated on me? Who can ever be a hundred percent sure of anything? But I sure don’t think so, and I think I’d have found out.”

“Not necessarily. He was always really good at keeping secrets.”

“I think women always know. On some level, conscious or subconscious, they just know.”

“And you’ve plumbed the depths of your subconscious.”

“Look, Nick, I know.”

I nodded. “Got it.”

But I was convinced she wasn’t telling me everything.

21.

A car alarm woke me at around four thirty, and I decided to get up for the day and begin combing through my brother’s files for any interesting leads. I padded downstairs to the kitchen, found the lights, then spent a few moments puzzling over the coffeemaker. I’m good at mechanical things, but since I didn’t go to M.I.T. and wasn’t trained as a nuclear physicist, that one was beyond me. Eventually, I found a switch that lit up a row of green LED lights. Coffee beans started grinding. A minute or so later, coffee started trickling out of a steel tube-espresso, by the look of it. I had no idea where they hid the coffee mugs, but I found a clean one in the dishwasher. Missed the first shot of espresso but figured out how to extract more.

Soon I was sitting in Roger’s study with a large mug of espresso. Somewhere, water was running through a pipe: a toilet flushing. Lauren, I guessed. Probably a much lighter sleeper than Gabe. Particularly after her husband’s disappearance.

I was half hoping that his laptop would have healed itself overnight, but no. It still had the Blue Screen of Death, covered with those hieroglyphics.

Unfortunately, the filing-cabinet drawers I was most interested in-the ones that held Roger’s bank statements and financial records, according to their labels-were locked. They were your standard Chicago pin tumbler locks, the spring-loaded kind that pop out when they’re unlocked. Not all that complicated. A child could pick it-well, a child with unusual manual dexterity and a decent lock-pick set.

So I started with the unlocked drawers and found a long row of folders bulging with credit-card statements. All neatly placed in order by credit card (platinum American Express, various MasterCards and Visa cards) and, within each folder, by date.

I had nothing specific in mind. Mostly I was looking for patterns: recurring charges, unusual charges. Travel, restaurants, or whatever. Anything that might tell me something about my brother that I didn’t know.

Pretty quickly I learned more about Roger than I wanted to know.

Such as the fact that he colored his hair-an itemized Rite-Aid bill that listed Just For Men hair dye along with various purchases like Preparation-H hemorrhoidal suppositories and other things I wish I hadn’t seen. Nothing wrong with a man coloring his hair, of course. But Roger had always bragged that it was his regular cardiovascular activity that kept him looking so youthful.

Nope. Just For Men, Medium-Dark Brown.

And the occasional Botox treatment, I discovered. At Advanced Skin Specialists of Silver Spring. Fifteen hundred bucks a pop.

Apparently my brother was a bit more vain than he let on.

Then I found a couple of recurring charges to Verizon on one of his MasterCard statements. One was for residential landline telephone service, and it listed the phone numbers. Three other charges were to Verizon Wireless, for three different cell-phone accounts.

So I looked for his phone bills and found them pretty quickly in another drawer. Apparently he had two landlines at home. One barely got any use. That was probably the one they used to send faxes on, back in the day when people sent faxes. The other line, their primary home number, listed calls to a whole array of numbers I didn’t recognize. Most frequent were calls to Virginia Beach, where Lauren’s sister, Maura, lived. Second most frequent were calls to Charlottesville, Virginia, where Lauren’s mother lived.

Then, the cell phones. Roger’s main mobile phone account was one of those primo, unlimited-minutes calling plans. He obviously used it for work-there were a lot of calls every day to Alexandria, probably to Gifford Industries corporate headquarters. The occasional call home, a few to Lauren’s mobile number. A second cell-phone account was Lauren’s, with Gabe added on to hers as part of a “family plan.”

But I couldn’t find the billing records for the third cell-phone account, no matter how much I searched. So I made a mental note to ask Lauren about it, then I looked around for the key to the locked drawers containing Roger’s financial statements. Nothing in all the usual places where people hide their keys. So I found a small screwdriver and a paper clip in one of Roger’s desk drawers and set to work picking the lock.

I heard a throat being cleared, and I looked up.

Lauren was standing in the doorway, arms folded, watching me. She wore a beautifully tailored navy suit over a white silk blouse, and she looked amazing. Even with the fading scrapes and bruises.

“You’re up early,” I said.

“Leland’s flying to Luxembourg.”

“Okay.”

“But he always starts early anyway. That car alarm wake you up?”

“Yep.”

“Sorry about that.”

She crossed the room to Roger’s desk and opened the top drawer. “I don’t mean to take the fun out of it,” she said, pulling out a small manila envelope and handing it to me, “but it might be easier just to use the key.”

“Hiding in plain sight,” I said. “I think Edgar Allan Poe wrote something about that.”

“Can I ask you what you’re looking for?”

“Any large withdrawals. Checks. Transfers into or out of any of his accounts.”

“What would that tell you?”

I shrugged. “If he got money from anyone unusual. Or paid any out. Particularly any large amounts. A money trail always helps.”

She nodded. “Well, I don’t know when you have to leave for work, but Gabe gets picked up for school around seven forty-five. Can you make sure he eats some breakfast? I don’t think he eats breakfast. He really should.”

“Sorry. That’s above my pay grade.”

“Well, whatever you can do.”

“No promises. Lauren, did Roger use this computer often?”

“Every day. Why?”

“When was the last time you saw him use it?”

She squinted, tilted her head first to one side, then to the other. “The last morning he was here. Why do you ask?”

“It’s fried. Totally gone.”

“That’s weird.”

“If you don’t mind, I’m going to take it to work with me to see if any of the data can be recovered. And one more thing. Do you usually set the alarm during the day?”

“Sometimes. Why?”

“From now on, I want you to keep it on anytime you’re not here. And when you and Gabe are asleep, I want you to use the night settings. In fact, I want to get someone in here to upgrade the system. Put in something a little more sophisticated.”

“You really think that’s necessary?”

“I just want you to take precautions.”

“You really think a home-security system is going to keep anyone out who wants to get in here?”

“Of course not. But I want to make it as incon ve nient for them as possible.”

She smiled, but I could see the strain in her face, the tightening of the muscles in her jaw, the lines around her eyes. The yellowing bruises.

As she turned to leave, I said, “Oh, one more thing. I haven’t been able to find all of Roger’s cell-phone records.”

“They should all be there. You mean, you’re missing some of the statements or something?”

“I can’t find any billing records for one of the numbers,” I said, and I read it off to her.

“That’s not Roger’s cell phone.”

“It’s a Verizon Wireless account.”

“That’s not a number I’ve ever heard before,” she said. “Are you sure that’s his?”

“It’s his.”

“Sorry, Nick,” she said. “I can’t help you with that. That’s a mystery to me. Roger always paid all the bills, not me.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“But he’d never keep something like that from me. He’d never keep a secret cell-phone number. That’s not Roger.”

She shook her head emphatically and walked out of the room, and I thought: Maybe you don’t really know Roger.

22.

On the way in to work, Lauren listened to her office voice mail in the Lexus, hands-free.

Most of the messages were from Leland. Whenever he thought of something he wanted her to do, he’d leave her a voice mail.

It had taken him years to get the hang of e-mail-he used to dictate e-mails for her to type, but finally he’d evolved his own two-finger hunt-and-peck method and liked to do it himself. He’d taken to the BlackBerry right away, even though he complained that his fingers were too thick for the Lilliputian keys.

But when he was traveling or just on the road, it was a lot easier for him to leave her voice mail. The first couple of messages were apologetic: “I don’t want to overwhelm you on your first day back,” one of them began; and then, “Also-but if you’re not feeling up to it, don’t worry about it, I’ll ask Noreen.”

Noreen Purvis, the CFO’s admin, worked in the executive suite, too, in the same open bullpen, within shouting distance. She was a disaster, even though Leland was too polite to say as much. She was older than Lauren and had worked at Gifford Industries far longer. She made no secret of the fact that she’d expected Leland to pick her as his admin when Cynthia, Leland’s longtime secretary, had retired more than ten years earlier.

Leland didn’t like Noreen, though. He considered her disorganized and even slovenly, and he was annoyed by her smoking, even though Noreen never smoked indoors. Plus, he didn’t want to grab someone else’s admin. Instead, he hired Lauren.

Noreen, of course, had no idea how Leland really felt about her. She’d wanted the job that Lauren got and never failed to let Lauren know, in all sorts of passive-aggressive ways, that she was far more qualified to be the administrative assistant to the CEO.

The Parkway was choked with traffic, as it always was at this time of the morning, but she didn’t mind.

She needed time to think.

She was determined to arrive at work ready to focus on Leland, not distracted by all the trauma in her personal life. She wanted to give Leland her all for the few hours he was in the office.

Long ago she’d realized that she was, in many ways, like a wife to him, but without the sex. (Then again, she thought ruefully, it wasn’t as if she and Roger had had much of a sex life in the last couple of years either.) In certain respects she knew Leland better than his own wife. But unlike so many marriages where you grow to detest your partner (like her own starter marriage), her relationship with Leland Gifford kept getting better. Her affection and respect for the man had only deepened. She’d come to know all his flaws, and she loved the man despite them all. Maybe even because of them all.

She couldn’t allow herself to think about Roger just then, about where he might be at that very second. Thinking about what might have become of him gave her a terrible, gnawing anxiety.

No. She had to put those thoughts out of her mind, at least for a few hours. She had to arrive at the office with a clear head.

She drove into the Gifford Industries office park and eased the Lexus into a space close to the building. She didn’t have a reserved spot: Those were just for the executive team. But it was early enough that there were still plenty of spaces, and she didn’t have to park half a mile away.

The soft morning light glinted off the gray-green glass skin of the Gifford building. It was a strange, futuristic-looking tower, a twenty-four-story parallelogram. She couldn’t decide if it was ugly or beautiful. It was a “green” building-ecofriendly, energy-efficient. Built of concrete made from slag. Floor-to-ceiling insulating high-performance glass windows. On the roof, a rainwater harvesting system and a one-megawatt solar array.

As she walked toward the main entrance, someone called out to her. It was a senior vice president, Tom Shattuck: tall, broad-shouldered, blond.

“Lauren, I’m so sorry to hear about your husband,” he said with the somber concern of an undertaker.

She wondered how the word had gotten around so fast and whether everyone assumed Roger was dead.

“Thanks,” she said.

“If there’s anything I can do, you know I’m here for you.”

He was always extremely cordial to her, but she knew all about him from his admin. He was a tyrant to the woman who worked for him all day. The admins all talked, of course. Didn’t their bosses realize that?

She smiled, nodded, and kept walking. She waved her badge at the proximity sensor, stepped into the revolving door, and entered the cavernous atrium. Right in the center, surrounded by tropical foliage, was a huge bronze globe, the continents sculpted in sharp relief. On the front of the globe, set at a jaunty angle, was the Gifford Industries logo, which couldn’t have been more hokey: retro squared-off streamlined script that must have looked futuristic when it was designed in the 1930s.

A couple more people waved at her, flashed sympathetic looks, and she ducked into the express elevator to the twenty-fourth floor. She slid her security card into the slot, and the elevator rose.

The lights in the executive suite were already on, which surprised her. She was normally the first one in. She passed her prox badge against the sensor until it beeped, then pushed open the glass doors. When she rounded the corner, she saw someone sitting at her desk.

Noreen Purvis.

23.

Gabe’s room was as dark as a cave.

He was asleep under the covers, a barely discernible lump. His crappy music was semiblasting from the speakers on a big black clock/radio/CD player on his desk, his iPod docked into the top of it.

The music was the audio equivalent of needles being stuck in my eyeballs. I flipped on all the lights. He groaned.

“Let’s go,” I said. “You should have been up twenty minutes ago.”

He pulled the blanket over his head, and I said, “You can run, but you can’t hide.”

He made a surly sound and burrowed in deeper.

“You can’t get rid of me that easy. Move it, or you’ll experience firsthand how I flushed those al-Qaeda terrorists out of their caves at Tora Bora.”

His head slowly emerged from the covers like a turtle from its shell. “That’s such crap,” he said. “You guys never even found Osama bin Laden.”

“Hey, don’t blame me.”

He mumbled something vaguely caustic, and I said, “Anyone ever tell you you’re a smart-ass? Turn off the music.”

He did. “What are you doing here?”

“Making sure you get to school. Move it.”

“I’m staying home. I don’t feel good.” He pulled the covers back over his face.

“You sleep with that stuff on all night?”

“No, it’s my… alarm.” His voice was muffled.

“No wonder you overslept. The music’s too lulling. Don’t you have anything more strident? Celine Dion, maybe?”

He grunted, unamused. As much as I liked Gabe, he was a difficult kid. Fortunately, he was someone else’s problem, not mine. The thought of having a kid, or kids, gave me the heebie-jeebies, but raising a teenager truly seemed like a horror show. I didn’t understand how people did it, though evidently people did. My mother, for one. (Dear old Dad, smart guy that he was, took off when I was thirteen. He missed out on most of the fun.)

“Come on, kid,” I said. “Get up.”

“You can’t make me.”

“Oh yeah? You didn’t know I have police auxiliary authority? I can have you arrested right now for truancy.” It sounded almost plausible.

Gabe slowly pulled down the covers just enough to peek out at me. He uttered a pretty hard-core curse word.

“I can also have you arrested for obscenity.”

“Is that what Grandpa’s in prison for?” he said.

“You’re quick.”

“I’m staying home today.”

“What’s the problem, Gabe?”

He mumbled something I didn’t understand, and I moved in closer, yanked the covers down. “I didn’t hear you so good,” I said.

He put a hand over his eyes to shield them from the light, and croaked, “It’s like all over school anyway.”

“What is?”

“About Dad.”

“What’s all over?”

He sat up, hung his legs over the side of the bed, and stood. Reaching over to his desk, he ran a finger across the touchpad of his MacBook, and the screen came to life.

It was his Facebook page. His picture in a box at the top and a bunch of other little boxes and things. I said, “What am I looking at?”

He tapped the screen. I looked at where he was pointing, an area of the page called “The Wall,” which had a column of little pictures of what I assumed were junior-high-school kids, mostly face pictures but some weird posed shots. Some of the guys had baseball caps on backwards. Next to each picture was a name and some comment, like “What was English homework??” and “quiz on verbs 2morrow?!” Apparently this was how Gabe and his friends communicated.

On one line was a blue question mark instead of a picture. And the comment:

“hey Gay Gabe, you loser, your dad ditched you, can’t blame him, why don’t you just kill yourself?”

I looked at Gabe, saw the tears in his eyes. “Who wrote this?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

“There’s a name here. Can’t you just click on it?”

“It’s fake. Someone made a fake Facebook page.”

“You think it’s someone from school?”

“Gotta be.”

“Is this what they call cyberbullying?”

“I don’t know.”

“Back in the day, someone called you names, you’d wait for him after school and beat the crap out of him.”

“Oh, please,” he said. “You went to some fancy private day school in Westchester County. Like, in a limo with a chauffeur.”

“Granted,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean we didn’t have fistfights.”

I came close to telling him how often I beat up kids who made fun of his father, after Victor’s arrest. But I didn’t think he’d want to hear that his uncle Nick had been his father’s defender. Especially since Roger was my older brother.

“ ‘Why don’t you just kill yourself,’ ” he said, bitterly. “Maybe I will.”

“That’ll show them,” I said, then realized that sarcasm was probably a bad idea at this point. “Come on, Gabe. You can’t pay attention to jerks like this. You know what I always say-never let an asshole rent space in your head.”

He sat back down on the side of the bed, resting his head in his hands.

“Move.”

Gabe started getting dressed-jeans so tight he had to squeeze into them, his black hoodie, black Chuck Taylors. He grabbed an already open can of Red Bull and took a long swig.

I looked at my watch. “Ten minutes before your car pool gets here. Your mother wants you to have breakfast.”

He toasted me with his Red Bull. “What do you think this is?”

I shrugged. The last thing I wanted to be was this kid’s authority figure.

“Gabe, why do you think kids at school say that kind of stuff about your dad?”

“Because they’re assholes?”

“No question. But what makes them say crazy stuff like that, do you think?”

A sullen look came over him. “How do I know?”

“No idea where the kids at school might get that idea?”

“Maybe it’s true.”

Softly, carefully, I said, “You said that before. What makes you think so?”

He looked supremely uncomfortable. “I told you, I just see stuff. I notice stuff.”

“Did he tell you something?”

“No,” he said scornfully. “Of course not.”

“So what did you see? What did you notice?”

“Nothing. It’s just… I don’t know, like, a feeling.”

“A fear, maybe?”

“Maybe.”

“That’s understandable.”

“I have to go to school.”

“Now look who’s concerned with the time all of a sudden,” I said.

While I waited with him for the car pool, I asked, “Gabe, do you use your dad’s laptop?”

“Why would I? I have my own.”

“Any idea why it might have crashed?”

“Crashed?”

“Blue Screen of Death.”

“Oh. He asked me how to do a disk wipe. He said he was planning to get a new one. Maybe he screwed it up. Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“He was trying to wipe it clean? Delete its contents?” So much for my theory about someone breaking in to tamper with Roger’s computer. Still, the alarm contacts on the French doors to Roger’s study had been quickly and sloppily disabled; that much I knew. Meaning that someone had made a covert entry for some reason. To snoop around, maybe. Or maybe for another purpose I hadn’t yet figured out.

“I guess.”

“Why?”

“Who knows. Why were you looking at my dad’s computer, anyway?”

“Because I thought there might be a clue there as to what happened to him.”

“Why would he leave a clue on his laptop?”

“He wouldn’t,” I said, but before I could explain, a big blue Toyota Land Cruiser pulled into the driveway.

“See you,” Gabe said.

“Remember what I told you about assholes.”

“Yeah. Never let them rent space in your head. Wish it was that easy.”

He slung his backpack over his shoulder and went out to the car.

And I couldn’t shake the feeling that he, like his mom, was keeping something from me.

24.

Look at you!” Noreen Purvis scolded, getting right to her feet. “You should be home in bed!”

“I’m okay,” Lauren said. “Really.”

“Oh, honey, I mean it. I can take care of things here for as long as it takes you to recover properly.”

“And I appreciate it. But I’m fine.”

Noreen was a big, horsy woman with ash-blond hair that she wore in a short, no-nonsense style-sort of Princess Diana circa 1990. On Princess Di it had looked good.

She was wearing her fake Chanel scarf and a brown pantsuit and a pair of black Tory Burch pumps with the huge gold Tory Burch medallions on the toes. They were probably fakes, too. She reeked of tea rose perfume and cigarette smoke.

“Why is the door closed?” Lauren said, glancing at Leland’s office, which was next to her desk.

Noreen shrugged. “He’s been in there since I got here, maybe twenty minutes ago.”

“Who’s he talking to?”

She shrugged again, began clearing her things off Lauren’s desk. “Well, I should fill you in on the arrangements for Leland’s trip, I guess.”

“I’ll be right back,” Lauren said. “Need to use the girls’ room.”

SHE LOCKED herself in a stall, lowered the toilet seat, sat down, and began to cry.

It was as if a dam had burst. Damned Noreen sitting at her desk, talking about Leland in that proprietary way.

And Roger. She was frightened. She didn’t know what to think. Not knowing about Roger.

My God. Not knowing: That was the worst thing.

She pulled out a length of toilet paper to blot the tears. After about five minutes, she was all cried out. She left the stall and went to the sink and reapplied her makeup. Then she washed her hands in cold water-the taps came on automatically for a few seconds when you waved your hands under them, but not long enough for the water to turn warm. The paper-towel dispenser shot out an annoying small rectangle of perforated brown paper.

Everything was irritating her now. Everything upset her.

She’d been back barely half an hour and already she needed a vacation.

25.

As soon as Gabe got in the car, I called my old army buddy Merlin, the TSCM expert, and asked him for another favor.

I asked him to stop by Lauren’s house later and help me put in a decent home-security system. Granted, asking Merlin to do a security system was a little like asking Bill Gates for tech support on Microsoft Word. Sort of overkill. But Merlin was gracious about it and said sure.

Just as I was backing out of Lauren’s driveway, my cell phone rang. I glanced at the caller ID and said, “Lieutenant.”

“You might want to stop by.”

Arthur Garvin’s voice was hoarse and adenoidal. He sounded even worse than the day before.

“You got the tape?”

“I did.”

“And?”

“I’ll be here until around eleven.”

“I’ve got a meeting in the office,” I said. “Do you think you could courier a copy over to me?”

He coughed noisily for a few seconds. “Yeah,” he said, “why don’t I send my personal courier over. On his mounted steed.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”

LIEUTENANT GARVIN turned his computer monitor, an ancient Dell, around so we could both watch. He offered me coffee, and this time I took it.

A fuzzy color image was frozen on the screen. I couldn’t make out anything beyond a couple of indistinct silhouettes on a street. The ATM was, I assumed, located outside. Near a gas station. Cars zipped by in the background.

In the frame around the image were numbers-date code, time sequence, all that sort of thing.

Garvin futzed with the mouse, clicking and double-clicking first the left button, then the right one. Finally, he got it working, and I could see a couple of smeary blobs making funny abrupt movements toward the camera.

“I should warn you in advance,” he said. “The resolution’s lousy.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“And that’s not all. I thought it was video they were sending over. It’s not.”

“What is it?”

“A couple of still photos.”

“What do you mean?”

“This ATM had a recording rate of one frame every ten seconds.”

I groaned. “To save hard-disk space, I bet.”

“Who the hell knows. I don’t know why they even bother.”

It’s sort of ironic that so many banks invest so much money in their security systems, installing high-tech digital video recorders in their automatic teller machines that transmit compressed video signals to a central server. All very fancy and high-end-and then, to save space, they set their cameras to record at the slowest possible rate. Ten to fifteen frames per second is slow. But one frame every ten seconds was little more than a stop-action camera.

Garvin clicked something, and the frame advanced, and I could see a man in a suit leaning forward toward the cash machine’s screen. The face was clear.

It was Roger.

There was no doubt about it at all.

His rimless glasses, his large forehead, the dark brown hair parted at the side. The hair was mussed, and his glasses were slightly crooked. He was wearing a dark suit and white shirt and tie, but one lapel of his suit was sticking up and his tie was askew. He looked like he’d been injured. It was hard to see much of his facial expression, but from what I could tell, he looked frightened.

Roger had survived the attack.

For the first time, I knew that for sure. But where he was right now, or even whether he was still alive, I had no idea. The mystery I’d stepped into-or been dragged into-had suddenly gotten a whole lot more baffling.

And probably a lot more dangerous.

26.

That him?” Garvin said.

“That’s him.”

“I owe you an apology,” he said.

“I’ll take it. But for what?”

“You were right about this being an abduction.”

“Was I?”

“Your brother wasn’t acting on his own volition. That’s pretty clear.”

“Based on what?”

“Watch. Check this out. I think I know how to do it.” He double-clicked the mouse, shifting the frame to the left. Then he clicked some more, centering in on the figure next to my brother.

It was a guy in a hooded sweatshirt, back turned to the camera. Lieutenant Garvin touched the screen with his index finger, drawing my attention to what looked an awful lot like a gun.

“You get the guy’s face?”

“Nope. The whole transaction lasted a minute ten seconds. Seven frames. And you don’t see the guy’s face on any of them. Not even a partial.”

“I’d like to see all of them, if you don’t mind.”

Garvin nodded. I expected at least a sigh of frustration, but his attitude toward me seemed to have softened a bit. I was no longer the annoying brother of the victim, or the intrusive, competing investigator. Now I was almost a colleague helping him solve a problem.

He clicked the mouse and advanced frame by frame, from the beginning. This time we were viewing just the left half of the image, the part that had earlier been outside the frame. You could see the hooded figure very close to Roger, his back always to the camera. He never raised his weapon. He kept it at his side, pointed at Roger.

“Did Wachovia security say if there was another camera?” I asked.

“This is the only one.”

“Where’s the ATM?”

“Georgetown. M Street, near the Key Bridge.”

I nodded. “Couple blocks from where they were attacked. So whoever grabbed him just wanted cash? Sorry-I still find that hard to believe.”

He shrugged. “They got four thousand nine hundred bucks. His account allowed him to withdraw up to five thousand a day, turns out. That ain’t chump change.”

“Granted. But I doubt money was the primary motivation.”

“Five thousand bucks is plenty of motivation.”

“Sure. But that’s not it.”

“Got a theory you like better?”

“Well, it’s not plain-vanilla kidnapping. Not without a ransom demand.”

“Yet.”

“It’s been long enough. No. You just called it an abduction, and I think you’re right. That I get.”

“How come?”

“Because Roger was expecting an attack of some kind.”

“You know this how?”

“What he said to his wife that night. He said, ‘I love you.’ ”

“So?”

“That’s not like him.”

“Not like him to tell his wife he loves her? Real sweetheart, huh?”

“You don’t want to go there. Point is, he knew he was going to be grabbed. He knew he might not ever see her again. He was saying good-bye.”

“Maybe.” He sounded dubious.

“And then, when he saw they’d grabbed Lauren, he said, ‘Why her?’ ”

“Huh. Like, ‘take me instead.’ ”

“Right.”

“Doesn’t mean he knew them, though.”

“You’re right. It doesn’t.”

“No blood, no trace evidence, no ransom demands. Your theory still doesn’t get us any closer.”

I paused for a moment. One of my abiding principles is never to tell anyone anything he doesn’t need to know. Loose lips and all that. But Garvin and I were, in a sense, partners by then. The only thing that counted was finding my brother, and the more Garvin knew, the more helpful he could be.

So I told him about what looked like an attempted break-in at Roger’s house. And about the InCaseOfDeath.net e-mail.

“He was being threatened,” I said. “Which is why he arranged that e-mail. Because he was afraid they’d try to make it look like he killed himself.”

Garvin sneezed while I was talking, blew his nose loudly. I was beginning to wonder whether it wasn’t just a cold but maybe Ebola virus.

“Can I see a copy of this e-mail?” he said.

“It’s gone,” I said, and I explained.

“Well, there’s got to be a copy somewhere.”

I shook my head.

“Gotta be some high-priced computer geeks in your high-priced firm who can bring it back.”

“I can ask.”

“You say he was ‘threatened.’ Over what?”

I shook my head. “Don’t know. Maybe to force something out of him.”

“Like what?”

“My guess? He had some information someone wanted. Or he wasn’t supposed to have. Something business-related. Like a big project he was financing.”

“That’s pretty vague.”

“Like I said, it’s just a guess. I don’t actually know. But he tried to delete everything on his laptop at home.”

“To get rid of evidence?”

“Or to protect his family.”

“How so?”

“Cover his trail. Let’s say he’d been collecting information on his laptop, and he didn’t want these guys to know he had it.”

“You got the laptop?”

“Yeah,” I said vaguely. I had other plans for it. “I think so. I’ll look around.”

“Okay. So now I think I get it.”

“Get what?”

He began tidying things on his desk, moving folders into piles. “I asked our Homeland Security division to check on all flights out of the country. Told them to flag your brother’s passport. That was when I was thinking fugitive, not abduction.”

“And?”

“Turns out your brother’s on the No Fly List.”

“No Fly List?”

“Yep. You know, that new TSDB watch list.”

“TSDB?” I said, but I remembered the new acronym just before he said it.

“Terrorist Screening Database.”

“My brother wasn’t a terrorist,” I said.

“Neither are most of the people on the list,” he said.

I grunted. Like most people who’ve come into contact with the sharp end of the U.S. government since September 11, 2001, I’d seen more than my share of abuses of law enforcement. Things like the USA PATRIOT Act were used to justify all kinds of invasions of privacy.

“You know what bycatch is?” Garvin said.

I shook my head.

“It’s like when commercial fisheries go trawling for tuna, and they end up catching other stuff in their nets, like sea turtles and dolphins. The bycatch.”

“Dirty fishing,” I said. “Isn’t that what it’s called?”

“Right.”

“But that implies catching something you don’t intend to catch,” I pointed out. “You don’t put someone’s name on the No Fly List by accident.”

“Okay,” Garvin conceded. “So maybe it’s no accident. Maybe you’re right. Maybe your brother made some enemies. Maybe whatever he was doing, he got into some kinda stuff he shouldn’t have. National security stuff, maybe.”

“He does finance at a construction company.”

“Gifford Industries is a construction company? Like Home Depot is the corner hardware store. Maybe there’s something about him you’re not telling me.”

“I’ve told you everything I know.”

“Then maybe there’s something about him you don’t know,” Garvin said.

27.

Actually, 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.

By 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.

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 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.”

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.”

“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.

Loud 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.

33.

Stoddard’s parting remark felt like a kick to the solar plexus.

“It doesn’t look good”? Meaning what?

That the chances of finding Roger weren’t good, I assumed he meant. But how would he know that? And more to the point, who’d told him about Roger’s disappearance?

Jay Stoddard seemed to know something I didn’t. Sure, he was more plugged in than anybody, knew people and things and all the scuttlebutt before anyone else.

But for some reason he wanted me to know that he knew.

I hesitated in the corridor outside his office for a moment, considered storming back in there and grabbing the phone out of his hand and slamming him against the wall and asking him what the hell he knew. But I came to my senses pretty quickly. There were other, better ways to find out.

ONE OF them was a guy in suburban Maryland who’d been in the FBI a long time ago. Frank Montello was sort of a sketchy character, but a useful one to know. He called himself an information broker. Frank used to be the one you’d call when you wanted to get an unlisted phone number and didn’t have the time, or the right, to get a court order. That was back in the day when there was only one phone company. Since then he’d amassed contacts deep inside all the major wireless carriers, too, including T-Mobile, AT &T, and Verizon. I never asked how he got his information; I didn’t want to know.

I’d called Frank as soon as I got back from L.A. and asked him to find out who owned the cell-phone number Woody had given me at the airport. He quoted me an outrageous price and told me it might take a day or two.

So I called Frank again.

“Patience, my friend,” he said in his deep, gravelly voice. “My girl was out of the office yesterday.”

“I’m not calling about that,” I said. “I’ve got another job.”

“Let’s hear it.”

I gave him Roger’s cell-phone number, the one whose billing records I couldn’t find in his study, and asked him to e-mail me the phone bills as soon as he could. I figured that if my brother went to the trouble of hiding his cell-phone bills, there must be something useful in them. Or at least something he wanted to hide.

The price Frank quoted was even higher.

“Don’t I get a volume discount?” I asked, and Frank laughed heartily, meaning no.

I went out to get a cup of coffee, and when I returned, Dorothy Duval was sitting at my desk, leaning back in the chair, her feet up. Peach stiletto pumps with high heels and a cutout at the toe.

“How do I get an office like this?” she said.

“Kiss a lot of ass.”

“Then I guess I’m lucky I got a cubicle,” she muttered. “You know, it’s amazing what you can find out about people these days. I can’t decide if it’s cool or terrifying. Maybe it’s both.”

“You unerased the laptop?”

“Babe, that’ll take hours. A lot of hours. Meanwhile, I did some basic data-mining.”

“Tell me.”

“How about your brother’s medical prescriptions?”

“You serious?”

“As a heart attack.”

“How’d you get those?” I said, impressed.

She laughed. “Oh, it’s evil. All the big pharmacy chains sell their prescription records to a couple of companies-electronic prescribing networks, they’re called. Supposed to be for patient safety, but you know what it’s really about.” She rubbed her fingers together in the universal sign of moolah. “Man, everything’s online now.”

“Real protected, huh?”

“Oh, yeah. So, how much you wanna know about your brother?”

“What are we talking about?”

“Well, Viagra, for one.”

“He took Viagra, huh?”

She crossed her ankles. Her toenails were painted with peach polish.

“That may be more than I want to know about Roger and Lauren’s sex life.”

“Might not involve Lauren,” she said.

I folded my arms. “How do you figure that?”

She lowered her feet to the floor, then leaned forward.

“Because seven months ago your brother paid for an abortion.”

I stared at her for a few seconds. “I assume it wasn’t Lauren.”

She shook her head.

“How do you…?” The words died in my mouth. I was in shock.

I didn’t think anything about my brother could surprise me. But that knocked the wind right out of me. More than anything, it made me sad. I thought of Lauren and her admiration for him-her love of him, which I’d never understood. And I thought of Gabe and his suspicions that his father was being unfaithful, and I wondered whether kids just saw things more clearly. As an only child, Gabe probably observed his parents with X-ray vision.

She gave a pensive sigh and spoke quietly. “You know medical records aren’t really private.”

“But abortions… Don’t people sometimes use cash to keep it private?”

“Apparently there were complications. That’s how I found the records-the woman was admitted from a family planning center in Brookline, Mass., to Mass General Hospital in Boston, and your brother’s name was recorded as the accompanying adult.”

“Who’s the woman?”

“It’s a funny name. Candi something?” She looked at her notes. “Candi Dupont. That’s Candy with an ‘i’ at the end.”

“Did you find out anything about her?”

“Not yet.”

“You think that’s a real name?”

“Sounds like a stripper name to me.”

“Can you keep digging on it, see what turns up? The usual databases-Accurint, AutoTrack, LexisNexis-see what you turn up on her whereabouts and her employment background and all that.”

“Come on, Nick, what do you think?”

“I appreciate it.”

“Do you think his wife knows?”

“I doubt it.”

“They’re always the last to know, aren’t they? You going to tell her?”

I hesitated, then shook my head. “I don’t see the point. It doesn’t have anything to do with whatever happened to him.”

“You sure?”

“Her life has already been turned upside down. She might have lost her husband. No need to make things even more painful for her.”

“So should I not have told you about this?”

“Of course you should have,” I said, surprised she’d even suggest it. “I need to know everything about my brother. Even the things I’d rather not know.”

“Nick,” she said, “you can’t know everything about anyone. No matter how good an investigator you are, no matter how many databases you have access to, no matter how deep you dig. You just can never know another person completely.”

“You’re too smart to be working in a place like this,” I said.

34.

For a couple of years during college I was a summer associate at McKinsey, the big management-consulting firm. I shouldn’t have even gotten the job. Those were normally reserved for MBA and JD candidates, not for undergrads. But the partner who hired me probably figured that Victor Heller, the fugitive financier, the storied Dark Prince of Wall Street, might throw some big business her way. Which never happened, of course.

I was put on a team assigned to a troubled athletic-shoe manufacturer, which meant I had to interview everyone I could possibly interview, then, at the end of the summer, do a presentation for senior management. My boss seemed to be a lot more interested in what she called the “gatekeepers” and the “decision makers” at the company than in how lousy their sneakers were. I even had to do a Decision Matrix with all the key players’ names color-coded-green meant they wanted to buy more of our consulting services. Red meant they were violently opposed. When I went over my presentation with my boss, she kept leaning on me to trash this one division chief, highlight all the problems in his division.

I tried to argue with my boss about this. After all, the division chief was perfectly fine. Finally, one of my fellow associates, a lovely dark-haired woman who was studying at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth-and who I was going out with that summer-explained to me what was going on.

Turned out this particular manager was a “red name.” He was an obstructionist. He thought consultants like us were a monumental waste of time. My boss wanted him defanged.

So I did what I was told. I did my PowerPoint, dredging up every mistake he’d ever made, every wrong decision.

Shortly afterward, the guy got fired.

Problem solved.

That was when I decided that consulting wasn’t for me. But acting and talking like a consultant-well, that turned out to be a skill set that had come in handy on more than one occasion.

I called Lauren and arranged for a visitor’s pass to be left for me at the concierge desk in the lobby of Gifford Industries. I was a management consultant with Bain & Company, or so the paperwork said.

That was enough to get me upstairs and wandering around unsupervised.

I DIDN’T arrive at the swanky Gifford Industries headquarters building until the early afternoon. I’d hoped to get out of the office much earlier, but work kept intruding. I couldn’t just drop the cases I’d been working; I had to pass along the files to others at Stoddard, brief them on my progress and the outstanding issues. I had to make phone calls to clients I’d been working with to let them know that I’d be taking a few days off for family reasons, which I didn’t explain, and assure them they’d be in good hands; and I had to write and reply to a bunch of e-mails. E-mail: the curse of modern office life. I don’t remember what we did before it.

I was still reeling from what Dorothy had learned about Roger. The fact that he’d been having an affair and had taken his lover to an abortion clinic. The fact that my brother had been unfaithful to his wife, a woman he was beyond lucky to have found. He wasn’t exactly Brad Pitt or George Clooney. I felt the way I often did when I read some Hollywood gossip item about how some supermodel’s husband was caught cheating on her: What do you want, guy? You’re married to one of the most desirable women in the world. What else can you possibly want?

As a single male, I admit I understood the impulse. My brother and I used to tell a joke when we were kids that went something like this: Hey, did you hear Playboy just came out with a magazine just for married men? Yep. Every month the centerfold’s the exact same woman. But being attracted and acting on it were two very different things.

I think that on some deeply buried, subconscious level I was hoping that by investigating my brother’s disappearance I’d discover a side of him that I’d never seen, which would make me finally appreciate him.

I didn’t expect to find out things that would make me dislike him even more.

Roger worked in the special-projects group of the corporate development division of Gifford Industries. There were three attorneys and just one administrative assistant for all of them. You could tell just by looking at their offices that the special-projects group was sort of a ghetto in the company. It didn’t seem to be very special at all. It was hidden in a distant corner of the Legal Department, on the fourth floor, in a warren of identical offices with nothing on the walls except the sort of mind-numbing signs you see in every corporate office in the world-stern notices about floating holidays and how if you don’t give sufficient notice you lose them, something about the blood drive, about keeping the kitchenette clean (“We are not your mothers!” it said). My tie suddenly felt too tight around my neck.

The admin for the special-projects group was named Kim Harding. She was shy and bookish, in her early fifties, with hyperthyroidic eyes behind oversized tinted glasses. She had short curly brown hair and small prim lips painted with dark red lipstick. She looked like a scared rabbit.

“Hello, Kim,” I said. “I’m John Murray, from Security Compliance.” I handed her a business card. That was one of the covers that Stoddard provided its investigators, and it always worked. It identified Security Compliance Partners as a management-consulting firm specializing in security audits of Fortune 500 corporations. It gave the Stoddard Associates address and a phone number there that Elizabeth, the receptionist, would answer the right way.

Every corporation that did business with the Pentagon, as Gifford Industries did, had to suffer regular visits from outside security auditors, who prowled the halls of the company, meeting with people and checking the facilities and the networks, making sure they were in compliance with all the ridiculous, paranoid security measures the government required of any contractor who did classified work. So Kim Harding was conditioned to be cooperative.

She glanced at it and said, “Yes, John, how can I help you?”

“Well, you know, Mr. Gifford has retained our firm to look into certain anomalies concerning someone you work with, a Mr. Roger Heller?”

She looked stricken, compressed her lips, and looked up at me. For a moment I thought she might ask if we were related. Roger and I didn’t resemble each other much anymore, but women tend to be far more observant than men, and someone like Kim, who’d worked for him every day, might be particularly keen.

Instead, she said, “I’m so worried about Roger. Do we know anything more-?”

“I’m not really allowed to go into any of that, Kim, but I’d very much appreciate your help.”

She blinked a few times. “Yes?”

“Well, let’s start with something easy. Do you keep records of telephone calls Roger made or received?”

Kim drew herself up. Her nostrils flared as she inhaled. “The answer’s not going to change no matter how many times you people ask me.”

“Someone’s asked you about this already?”

“Just this morning. Mr. Gifford’s office. Why do I get the feeling the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing?”

“Who in Mr. Gifford’s office?”

She gave me a piercing look. There was a smudge of lipstick on her teeth.

“Noreen Purvis. The woman who’s been filling in for Lauren Heller.”

“I see.”

“I’ll tell you what I told her.” She held up a pad of pink “While You Were Out” message slips. The kind I knew well. “I write messages on these things and I hand them to the attorneys or put them on their desks, and no, I never keep carbon copies either. You want phone records, talk to the girls in Accounting.”

“Well, that’s a start,” I said. “And I’m sorry for the duplication of effort. Can you show me to Roger’s office, please? I’m going to need to take a look at his computer.”

“You people really don’t talk to each other, do you?”

“Noreen did that, too?”

“No. She asked about it, and I told her that his computer’s gone. It was removed by Corporate Security, on direct orders from Mr. Gifford.”

A plain woman with thick wire-frame glasses, wearing a gray business suit, passed by, and Kim held up a pink message slip. The woman took it and said, “Thanks, Kim.” She glanced at the slip, wadded it up, and dropped it in a metal trash basket next to Kim Harding’s desk.

Then she peered at me. “You’re asking about Roger?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“What’s this about?”

I handed her my business card and told her about Security Compliance. She shook my hand, firm, like a man.

“You look familiar,” she said.

“I hear that a lot,” I said.

“You want to know something about Roger, you talk to Marjorie,” said Kim Harding, turning back to her keyboard. “Marjorie knows everything about Roger.”

The woman named Marjorie smiled and blushed. “I do not,” she said. “You make it sound like we were having an affair.”

“Did I say that?” Kim said to me. “Did I say that?”

“No, you didn’t,” I said.

“No, I did not,” Kim said with a slow shake of her head. “But Roger always tells me, if he’s not here, and I need to know anything about a deal he’s working on, go right to Marjorie.”

Marjorie shrugged and said, “Oh, that’s an exaggeration,” but she was still blushing and smiling with unmistakable pleasure.

“Come on, sweetie,” Kim said to her. “Roger always says, if Marjorie doesn’t know it, she can always find it out. Why do you think he calls you the librarian?”

35.

Why are you so interested in what Roger was working on?”

“Just doing my job,” I said. Marjorie Ogonowski worked at a cubicle, so we sat in Roger’s office.

It wasn’t what I expected at all. I’d figured his office at Gifford Industries would have at least some of the pompous décor of his home library. A decent copy of a George Stubbs painting of horses. Maybe even an antique John J. Audubon print of the Brown-headed Nuthatch. But it was a tiny and dismal cubbyhole with no distinguishing features. His desk chair wasn’t an Aeron or anything stylish and emblematic; it looked like overstock from some low-end office-furniture supply house.

There was no computer on his desk.

“But why?” she said. “Does this have anything to do with his disappearance?”

“Do you know anything about it?”

“I asked you.”

I didn’t feel like getting into that kind of standoff, so I said, “That’s the operating theory. What can you tell us, Marge?”

“Marjorie. If you’re working for Leland Gifford, you know exactly what he was working on.”

I paused for a moment. She had a point. “Mr. Heller indicated in an e-mail to his wife that if anything happened to him, you’d know why.”

“He did?”

I nodded.

“Can I see that e-mail?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“What did he say about-about something happening to him?”

“He must have said something to you along the same lines.”

“You’re not going to tell me what he said?”

“That’s the problem. He didn’t say. Nothing beyond that. What do you think he was referring to?”

She was a plain, mannish woman, with short light-brown hair, straight bangs high on her forehead. No lipstick or makeup of any kind. Even her gray suit was man-tailored. She was immensely smart, no-nonsense, precise in her language and mannerisms.

She blinked owlishly. “He didn’t tell me everything. Despite what Kim said.”

“He must have told you enough to make you worried about his well-being.” That was sheer speculation on my part, of course. She obviously took pride in her special relationship to Roger, which I doubted was sexual-she was defiantly asexual. He might have confided in her, because she was so ferociously competent.

“He told me very little about it.”

“About what?”

“About what he’d found.”

I waited, and when she didn’t go on, I said, “What did he find?”

“Mr. Murray, do you have any idea what Roger did here?”

“John,” I said. “No, not really.”

“We mostly worked on M &A stuff with biz-dev deal teams, checking the books, going over the P &L on current and expected, working on rev-rec issues.”

It had been a while since I’d heard that kind of biz-buzz English-as-a-foreign-language. Not since my McKinsey days, in fact. It took me a few seconds to do a mental translation, and I said, “You guys buy companies.”

“In simple terms, yes. I’m just an associate counsel, so I assist Roger. And I have to say, Roger Heller was the smartest person I’ve ever met. He was a pure structured-finance genius. And he’s never gotten the credit he deserves around here. People far less qualified are always getting promoted over his head. He should be general counsel or CFO. At least he should have become managing director of the global M &A practice. But it was like he was frozen in amber.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Maybe because he’s too smart. He intimidates people.”

“Is that so?”

She nodded, then pushed at the nosepiece of her glasses. “He always says what he thinks. It’s like there’s no filter. I guess I’d say that most people don’t get along with him. They see him as sort of humorless. But Roger and I-we get along great. He expects the best out of everyone he works with, and I give him my best. He expects nothing less than perfection, and I-”

“You gave it to him.”

“I usually don’t make mistakes. He knows he can always turn to me.” She smiled. “I document everything. He used to call me ‘the reference librarian,’ and then just ‘the librarian,’ for short. We always got along great.”

“He trusted you.’

“I think he did.”

“So what did he tell you?”

She’d begun to feel more comfortable with me, I could tell. “He said he’d found something in the books of one of the companies. During the due diligence. Something he said was ‘troubling.’ ”

“What was that?”

“He didn’t say, really. But he said he wished he hadn’t. He said he was afraid for his life. He was terrified.”

“I don’t quite follow. Why would discovering something ‘troubling’ make him afraid for his life?”

“Well, he-he left out a step, obviously. As I said, he didn’t tell me everything. But he sort of indicated that he’d called them on it. He’d let them know what he’d found.”

“Called who on it?”

“The company. The one that was doing-whatever.”

“Doing what?”

“Corruption of some sort, I guess.”

“But why’d he contact them?”

She shook her head. “Obviously, he was upset. But that’s just the way he is, you know? He always has to cross every t and dot every i. I think that’s why we get along so well.”

I was sorely tempted to say something, but I all but bit my tongue restraining myself.

She went on, “You know, his father is this famous-you know who the fugitive financier is, Victor Heller? Is, was-I’m not sure. He’s either in prison or he died in prison. But I got a really strong sense that Roger was reacting to his father’s criminality. I mean, that’s just my take on it-he never liked to talk about his father. Once we were in a car on the way to Dulles, and I kind of summoned the courage to ask him about Victor Heller. I guess I thought we’d worked together long enough that we could talk about that kind of thing? And he said his father was a brilliant and misunderstood man, and he should never have gone to jail. Something in his tone told me not to pursue it, so I just changed the subject. And later I realized that I wasn’t really sure what he meant, you know? What did that mean, his father should never have gone to jail? Did that mean that his father shouldn’t have broken the law? Or that his father shouldn’t have gone to jail for whatever he did? I never got that, really. But I couldn’t ask.”

“Hmph,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“And another time he said to me-well, it was sort of an aside, sort of a joke-he was talking about some kind of tricky variable-interest entities he noticed on a company’s balance sheet, and he said, ‘You know, in a good market, this is called financial engineering. In a bad market, it’s called fraud.’ I never knew what to make of that. What he meant, exactly.”

I was sort of lost myself. I said, “Meaning, you couldn’t tell if he approved or disapproved?”

She was quiet for a long time. “I’m not even sure what I mean myself.”

“But he reacted in a very moral way to what he found in that company’s books-what company did you say that was?”

“I didn’t say.”

“What company was it?”

Now she was quiet for even longer. “That I can’t say.”

“It’s extremely important,” I said.

“I understand. But some of the acquisitions we make I’m just not allowed to talk about.”

“So it was a company that Gifford Industries acquired recently.”

“I can’t say.”

“That doesn’t really help us.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But I have to follow rules around here.”

Sometimes silence is the most powerful weapon in an investigator’s arsenal, so I looked at her for a long time without saying anything.

But the weapon doesn’t always hit its target. She looked back, then looked down, then back up. Then she said softly, “All I can tell you is, Roger was terrified.”

“I see.”

“You know,” she said, “you really do look familiar.”

36.

By the time I reached Georgetown, it was already mid afternoon. I backed into a space on Water Street, along a chain-link fence. A few blocks farther down, Water Street turned into K Street. The banks of the Potomac at that point were not exactly the stuff of postcards. No cherry blossoms here; no gleaming Jefferson Memorial. Instead, there were great mounds of dirt and construction trailers and Porta Potties. The city had been working for years to build a waterfront park in place of the industrial blight, the abandoned factories and the rail yards. They’d turned the old incinerator into a Ritz-Carlton. Maybe someday there’d be a park here. But it was a scraggly, weed-choked, trash-littered mess, in the shadows of the Whitehurst Freeway. Truly an urban failure story.

My cell phone emitted four high beeps, alerting me to a text message.

It was a location report from the GPS tracker that Merlin had sent via FedEx to EasyOffice, Traverse Development’s mail drop in Arlington, Virginia. The GPS device had just been delivered to the mail drop. The text message linked me to a Google Earth map, where I could see a flashing red dot indicating where the tracker was.

That told me nothing. I already had that address.

I walked up the footbridge to Cady’s Alley, crossed over to the restaurant where Lauren and Roger had had their last dinner. A Japanese restaurant on Thirty-third Street called Oji-San.

Then I retraced their route from the restaurant, down Cady’s Alley. Back down the footbridge. Across Water Street to their car.

There I stood for a few minutes, thinking. A black Humvee drove by. We’d used up-armored M1114 Humvees in Iraq as our tactical vehicles, equipped with fire-suppression systems and frag protection and mounts on the roof hatch for machine guns and grenade launchers. The air-conditioning wasn’t bad either. But I never understood the point of driving one of them around the city, even a civilian model. What did they expect, rocket-propelled grenades in Georgetown?

Lauren had said it was raining the night of the attack. Parking was probably in short supply. The restaurant didn’t offer valet parking, but there was a garage nearby. So why did Roger park all the way down the hill on Water Street?

He wasn’t a tightwad. You couldn’t grow up in our house in Bedford and learn to be a coupon-clipper. At the most, you could grow up to be someone who doesn’t much care about money-having seen what it can and can’t do. But my brother, unlike me, shared Victor Heller’s unhealthy fixation on wealth. He liked to show off. He had to have the fanciest car, the most opulent kitchen. This was not a guy who’d happily park his S-Class Mercedes in the squalor of Water Street, in the underbelly of the freeway, amid the vagrants and broken bottles, a long walk away on a rainy night.

I didn’t get it.

And I thought about what Lauren remembered Roger saying the night of the attack: “Why her?”

Not, Why? Not, Leave her alone.

But, Why her?

As in, “Why are you coming after her, when it’s me you want.”

Or something like that.

I checked my watch, and while I continued to puzzle over my brother’s last remarks, I walked along Water Street in the direction of the Key Bridge. I liked that bridge. I liked the rhythm of its five high concrete arches, the open spandrel design. I even liked the irony that, in order to build the bridge named after Francis Scott Key, the guy who wrote the “Star Spangled Banner,” they had to tear down Francis Scott Key’s house. Or maybe it was to build that eyesore, the Whitehurst Freeway.

It took me six minutes to walk to the ATM where Roger had made his withdrawal. It was one of those twenty-four-hour walk-up cash machines, built into a brick wall next to a gas station. Outdoors and exposed. A young woman was using it, a large woman dressed entirely in black with platinum hair sticking up in the front like a rooster’s comb. Tufts of her hair were dyed orange and blue. Either she was doing that whole punk thing, or she was on her way to a costume party. She turned around and glared at me. I was too close. I was making her nervous.

So I backed off a few feet and surveyed the area while I waited. This was a no-name gas station that was open twenty-four hours and advertised fresh pastries and the coldest drinks in town. It sold cigarettes and rolling papers and lottery tickets. The pumps were self-serve.

A black Humvee passed by. The same one that had driven by on Water Street? I wondered whether I was being watched. I noted the license plate.

I assumed that Roger had been trundled into a vehicle at the scene of the attack, then driven over to the ATM. Why, I had no idea. But from here I could see the entrance to the Key Bridge, which took you across the Potomac to Virginia and the Parkway, the Beltway, any number of highways. Not a bad place to stop on your way out of town.

The large woman was taking her damned time at the cash machine. I approached, my shoes scraping against a scree pile of that white granular stuff used to absorb gasoline spills. She turned, glared at me, extracted her card and her cash, and hurried away.

The brick wall was covered in graffiti. I was pretty sure this was one side of the old Georgetown Car Barn, a nineteenth-century building where they used to store the trolley cars. Probably it was now offices or condos.

At the top of the ATM console was the lens of a CCTV camera-the one that had recorded Roger approaching, some guy with a gun at his side. Moving right up to the ATM, I turned around and watched an old Honda drive into the lot and pull up next to a pump. Assuming that Roger and his captor or captors had driven here from Water Street, I figured they must have come up M Street. Water Street was a dead end.

From here, they could have driven right onto the Key Bridge. But they could have also taken the Whitehurst Freeway. As I turned my head, I noticed something on top of the convenience store: another security camera.

A weatherproof bullet camera, as it’s called, attached to the steel arm of a mounting bracket. It was aimed at the cash machine.

37.

The gas-station attendant stood at a cash register in a booth behind thick bulletproof Plexiglas. He was changing the paper tape in the cash register. He was a small, squat, dark-skinned man in his fifties. Indian or Pakistani, maybe, with jet-black hair and steel-framed aviator glasses and a serious scowl. He wore a tie. I concluded he wasn’t merely the attendant but probably the owner. A black name badge pinned to his white shirt said MR. YOUNIS.

Mr. Younis. This was a man who demanded respect.

“Excuse me, Mr. Younis,” I said.

He glared at me, suspicious. “Yes?”

“I wonder if you could help me.” I kept my tone matter-of-fact. “A couple of days ago I was mugged over there by the ATM. Couple of thugs took my cash, my wallet, everything.”

He shook his head, turned away, went back to changing the register tape. “I know nothing about this.”

Right, I thought. He’s afraid he’ll somehow get ensnared in a crime that had nothing to do with him, just because it took place on his property. Was the ATM in fact on his property? The ATM belonged to Wachovia Bank. The brick wall was the side of the old car-barn building and probably belonged to Georgetown University, which was the big landlord around here. So why did he have his own surveillance camera pointed in that direction?

The graffiti, I guessed. Kids with cans of spray paint, defacing the wall he looked at every day. Probably made his already high blood pressure shoot up to dangerous levels.

“The cops won’t do a damned thing,” I said. “They can’t be bothered.”

He grunted, fiddled with the register-tape roll, pushed it into its slot.

“Know what they said?” I went on. “They said forget it. They couldn’t care less. There’s a damned crime wave in this city, and the police just sit there on their fat asses.”

He shook his head, and his scowl deepened. He closed the cash-register-tape compartment and looked up. “It’s a disgrace,” he agreed.

A man who installed such an elaborate security system was not someone who had a great deal of faith in law enforcement. He was also a guy with a lot of pent-up resentment.

He was putty in my hands.

“These thugs just run wild around here,” I said. “Do whatever the hell they want. They know they’ll get away with it. Like all that graffiti on the wall over there.”

Some little sprocket of anger clicked into place in the guy’s head. He looked up at me. “These vandals-they call themselves ‘taggers,’ and they call this vandalism ‘art.’ And the police, they tell me if they have no documentation, they can do nothing. So I put in cameras.”

“It didn’t stop them, huh?”

“No! Nothing! One of the police even told me this is freedom of expression, this ‘tagging’!” He folded his arms.

“Easy for them to say. They don’t have to live with it.”

“It is an outrage!”

“But it looks like a terrific surveillance system you’ve put in. High-res, infrared-”

“-Yet it does me no good! None! Thousands of dollars, and these taggers are still doing their ‘art’!”

“Gosh, wouldn’t it be great if your system got some video of my mugging, couple of days ago? Hell, might even be the same guys who keep writing on your wall. Let’s see the cops try to wriggle out of that, huh?”

He looked at me, his eyes narrowing.

“Do you know how to operate a digital recorder?” he asked. “I have to stay behind the counter.”

MR. YOUNIS KEPT his security equipment in a locked supply closet next to a shelf of beer. On a wire shelf was a low-end digital recorder, eight-channel, a black oblong box. The video images were stored on a computer hard drive. On top of the DVR was a cheap fourteen-inch color monitor. He showed me how to search by date and time, and he returned to his Plexiglas booth to wait on a couple of college kids who wanted to buy a pack of Marlboros and a case of Budweiser.

The supply closet was shallow, so I stood half-in, half-out. It took me five minutes to locate the night I wanted. I pushed PLAY. The recorder was set to take one picture every two seconds until it detected motion, at which point it kicked the recording speed up to a full thirty frames per second. Cars entered the frame and turned and backed up. People walked up to the ATM, alone or in couples, a few groups of three, their movements jerky, then suddenly smooth. I fast-scanned until I reached 11:00 P.M.

At 11:06, a white panel van entered the frame, nosed in against the brick wall a few yards to the left of the cash machine. A bulky guy in a hooded gray sweatshirt got out of the driver’s side, slammed the door, then walked around the back of the van to the passenger’s side. It was hard to tell for sure, but it looked like he had a gun in his left hand. When the guy turned slightly, I was able to catch a glimpse of his profile: beefy face, mustache. Late thirties or early forties. With his right hand, he unlocked the front passenger door. He pocketed the keys, switched the gun to his right hand, then pulled the door open.

And Roger stepped out.

The hooded guy raised his gun a little, waved it back and forth. Roger nodded. He looked panicked. His tie was out of place, his suit rumpled.

The guy in the hooded sweatshirt grabbed Roger with his left hand, and the two of them looped around the back of the van. They stood there for a few seconds.

“Dude.”

I looked up. A kid with tattoos and a silver barbell through his nasal septum was standing there.

“Zig-Zags,” he said.

“What about it?” He also had huge silver plugs, easily half an inch in diameter, through his earlobes. I wondered what this kid would look like at age seventy with big droopy holes in his ears and nose.

“Like, where the hell are the rolling papers?”

“Yeah,” I said with a glare, “like I know.”

He hurried away.

I turned back to the monitor. The beefy guy in the hooded sweatshirt said something to Roger, then turned around, and I got a full-on look at his face.

No one I recognized, but he was a type-Neanderthal forehead, deep eye sockets, simian features. He could have been any one of a dozen guys I trained with in Special Forces and who washed out before the end. One of those blank-faced muscle-bound cretins who think they’re tougher and smarter than they really are and usually end up working as mall cops.

I paused the video and zoomed in until I had a good screen capture of his face, then I cut and pasted the image. Not bad for a computer illiterate. When I returned to the normal view, I moved the cursor over until the rear of the van was in the center of the screen. A Ford Econoline E-350 Super Duty van, fairly new. The kind you see everywhere.

I zoomed in closer and got another screen capture.

The abductor had been careful to hide his face from the ATM camera. But not being all that bright, he hadn’t counted on another surveillance camera grabbing a very clear picture of his face.

Or the license plate of the van he was driving.

38.

Isuppose I could have asked someone at Stoddard Associates to run the plates for me, but I knew that Virginia’s motor-vehicle records weren’t online-some ridiculous state law-and I didn’t want to call in any favors at work that I didn’t have to. Not with Stoddard keeping an eye on what I was doing.

But Arthur Garvin was only too happy to run a trace: This was a serious break on a case that had been confounding him. As I walked back to my car, I read off the number and told him that as soon as I got back to the office, I’d e-mail him some of the video-frame captures of the thug who’d grabbed Roger. He warned me it might take him a day or two, but he promised he’d get the information for me.

My cell phone gave off four beeps, and, as I stood next to the Defender, I checked the text message. Another location report from the GPS tracker in the FedEx envelope.

By then it was in Falls Church, Virginia. About six or seven miles from the drop site in Arlington. An address on Leesburg Pike.

That meant that the package had been moved. Someone had picked it up and was delivering it somewhere else.

I found myself juggling the cell phone and the BlackBerry, which I never liked using as a cell phone, and the DVD copy of Mr. Younis’s surveillance tape, in an old cracked CD jewel case he had lying around. I arrayed them before me on the hood of the Defender, my mobile office.

When I clicked on Google Earth and zoomed in on the flashing red dot on my BlackBerry screen, I could see it was some big V-shaped office building.

Success. Maybe. But at least I knew that someone had picked up the FedEx package and moved it from the mail drop to an office building in Falls Church, and that was something. Or it might turn out to be nothing. I wouldn’t know until I drove out there and took a look. I pocketed the BlackBerry and cell phone and fished out my car key, the DVD in my left hand.

The Defender is as nonautomatic a vehicle as you can get: even the windows crank by hand. No remote starter; no keyless entry. You open it with a good old-fashioned key just like they did a century ago. I inserted the key in the lock and turned it-

And heard the scrape against the pavement an instant too late.

I turned slowly, but suddenly the car window came at me, smashing into my nose and mouth.

While, at the same time, the DVD was wrenched out of my left hand.

Reeling in pain, I spun, hands out, unsteady on my feet. Miraculously, the window glass hadn’t broken, but it felt like maybe my nose had.

Enraged, I took off after my assailant, who was already quite a distance away. A black Humvee came hurtling down the street and slowed for a second. Its passenger-side door came open, and the guy took a running leap into the vehicle.

Once I caught a glimpse of its license plate, I knew it was the same Humvee that had passed me twice before. I’m not the fastest runner, but fueled by adrenaline and considerable anger, I was able to get close enough to the Humvee to thump an angry fist against its left rear quarter panel before it disappeared down the street.

My attacker had been unusually tall, with a steroid-poisoned wrestler’s build and what looked at a distance to be a high-and-tight jarhead recon haircut-shaven everywhere except the crown of his head, like a short Mohawk. He looked like an overweight Travis Bickle.

I felt along the bridge of my nose. It wasn’t broken. No broken teeth either, though my upper lip was bleeding. I felt and tasted the blood.

I took out my cell phone and hit redial, and when Garvin answered I said, “I have one more license plate for you.”

39.

The Dean & Deluca’s on M Street in Georgetown sold excellent fresh-baked chocolate-chip cookies. I bought a dozen and asked the bakery clerk to pack them for me in a plain white deli box. I placed the box of cookies on the car seat next to me and got onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The entire interior of the car at once filled with the sweet buttery smell of freshly baked cookies.

About half an hour later I turned off Leesburg Pike into a semicircular drive in front of a modern ten-story office building built in the shape of a broad V, with a blue glass skin that mirrored the sky so perfectly it seemed at times to disappear.

The name on the front of the building was Skyview Executive Center. It appeared to be a multitenant office building. Like a lot of commercial buildings in Tysons Corner and Falls Church, there was an underground parking garage. Instead, I parked in the Doubletree Hotel down the block and walked over with my box of cookies.

I hadn’t gotten any text messages from the GPS tracker in a while, so as I walked I took out my phone and opened the last message I’d received, then clicked on the map. The red dot was gone. That told me that the device had stopped transmitting. Which presumably meant that it had been discovered, then disabled.

I entered the lobby and spent a few minutes inspecting the building directory, one of those big black wall signs with white letters, rear-illuminated. A long list of tenants. Mostly small to midsize firms: healthcare consultants, investment managers, accountants, a lot of lawyers. A couple of government-agency satellite offices. A number of companies with cryptic-sounding names like Aegis Partners and Orion Strategy, which were either lobbyists or defense contractors.

But no Traverse Development. Nothing that sounded even remotely familiar. It didn’t surprise me that this mysterious company wasn’t listed on the building’s directory. But one of the companies in the building had to be connected to them, in some way.

The security guard, seated behind a curved granite counter in the middle of the lobby, saw me staring at the directory board and called out, “Can I help you, sir?” He was in his late fifties, with deep-set eyes and a prominent forehead, a shiny bald head and protruding ears.

“You have a list of the tenants in this building you might be able to give me?”

“No, sir, I’m afraid I can’t. Management company won’t let me hand that out.”

“Rules is rules, huh? Thing is, the wife’s trying to start a chocolate-chip cookie business?” I held up the white bakery box. “I’m helping her with the marketing. Because she won’t let me near the kitchen.”

I smiled, and he smiled back, and I went on, “We want to give out free boxes of cookies to all the companies here, sort of a promotional thing?” I came closer and handed him the box. “Here, these are for you. Try a couple and tell me if you don’t think my wife’s got it nailed.”

He hesitated.

“Go on, try one. If you can stop at one.”

He opened the flaps on the box and pulled out a cookie and took a large bite. “Mmm,” he said. “Soft and chewy and crispy all at the same time. She use dark chocolate chips?”

“Only the best quality chocolate.”

He took another bite. “Man, these are good.”

“Thank you.”

He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a stapled set of papers and gave it to me. “Just don’t tell anyone where you got this, okay?” He winked.

I winked back. “Not a word.”

He peered at me, touched his nose and lip and said, “You get into a fight with the wife?”

For a moment I didn’t know what he was talking about, then I remembered that my bruised nose and split lip probably looked pretty bad by then. “Yeah,” I said. “I told her I thought she should use shortening instead of butter. Learned my lesson. I’m sticking to the marketing.”

INSTEAD OF driving back to the office, I stopped at a FedEx/Kinko’s copy shop and faxed Dorothy the tenant list. Not to some fax machine in the halls of Stoddard Associates, where anyone could see it; instead, I faxed it to her E-Fax account, so she’d get it online. While I was there, I rented time on a computer, checked my e-mail, and found an e-mail from Frank Montello, my information broker.

Whenever he wrote e-mails, he used all capital letters as if he were sending a telegram by Western Union.

ATTACHED YOUR BRO’S PHONE BILLS. BIG FILE. STILL WORKING ON

THAT OTHER CELL # BUT SHOULD HAVE SOMETHING BY TOMORROW.

INVOICE ATTACHED, TOO, PAYABLE WITHIN 10 DAYS AS PER USUAL.

So he still hadn’t located the owner of the emergency contact number that Woody Sawyer had been given, back at the airport outside of L.A. But he had been able to unearth the billing statements for one of Roger’s cell phones, the one whose bills I couldn’t find in his study. The detailed phone records ran for dozens of pages. It wouldn’t have been much fun to read them on my BlackBerry. I printed them all out and skimmed the list while sitting in my car.

Mostly meaningless columns of phone numbers. But then something leaped out at me.

Five calls, all collect, all from a number in Altamont, New York.

“Billed on behalf of Global TelLink,” it said, and gave a phone number with a 518 area code.

The Altamont Correctional Facility, it said.

From Victor Heller, of course.

I hadn’t talked to my father in several years. Whereas Roger had spoken to him five times in the last month.

My brother always got along with our father well-far better than I did. I’d always thought that was because the two of them were so much alike.

But five phone calls in the last month?

More carefully, I went through the previous year’s phone bills and found just one other collect call from my father-eleven months ago. Six collect calls in a year from Dad, five of them in the last four weeks. Just before Roger’s disappearance.

No coincidence.

40.

When I returned to Lauren’s house-after a quick stop at Mr. Younis’s gas station in Georgetown to make another DVD copy of the surveillance video that had been snatched from me-both Lauren and Gabe were home. Her Lexus was in the driveway, and the light in Gabe’s room was on. I unlocked the front door. The security system’s warning tone didn’t sound. They’d disarmed it.

That was not what I wanted. I’d made it clear to Lauren that whenever they were home, they should use the night setting, which would give off a tone whenever someone entered. So I went to find her and explain to her how to use the system.

She wasn’t in the kitchen. Nor was she in the TV room or at the computer in the hutch that served as her home office. I became aware of raised voices coming from upstairs, and I walked toward the staircase, climbed the steps.

Mother and son were arguing. I stopped halfway up the landing, heard Gabe shout, his voice cracking: “-But you don’t know that. You don’t know that!”

Lauren shouted back, “You listen to me! He’ll turn up. They’ll find him. I promise you!”

“After all this time? He’s dead, don’t you get it? Why do you keep pretending?”

“He’s not dead, Gabriel! You have to think positive. You have to believe. Your father is not dead!”

It was too painful to listen to, and anyway, I was eavesdropping on a private moment. I headed back down the stairs.

I WATCHED TV listlessly for a few minutes, changing the channels, not finding anything I wanted to stay on. I heard a door slam, followed by heavy footsteps, then Lauren entered the room.

“That kid, I swear-”

She stopped short when she saw my face. “Jesus, Nick, what happened?”

I shrugged.

“Who did that to you?”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” I said, and smiled.

“Yeah, I get the reference. How’d that happen?”

“Lauren, I overheard you talking to Gabe.”

She sat at the end of the same couch I was sitting on. “You call that ‘talking’? More like screaming. He just knows how to push every single one of my buttons.”

“Why are you telling him to keep the faith? What’s the point of assuring him that Roger’s alive?”

“Why?” Her eyes flashed. “Can you imagine what it’s like to have your father disappear suddenly, not knowing whether he’s…” She faltered, seeing my expression, realizing.

I nodded. “Yeah, I can imagine.”

“Why did I never see the parallel?”

“What makes you think there’s a parallel? My father took off in the middle of the night. My mother told us he was on the run. We knew that he was out there somewhere, hiding from the authorities.”

She said softly, “Maybe Roger is, too. Something like that-I want to believe that’s what happened.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, and I described the surveillance video I’d just seen: the apparent abduction, the Econoline van, the gun.

She looked stricken, then closed her eyes for five or ten seconds. “Can I see it? Do you have a copy?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Someone grabbed it from me. That’s how I got this.” I pointed to my bruised nose and split lip. “So I just went back and made another one.”

I PLAYED the DVD for her on her computer, and she responded the way I expected she would: shock, disbelief, then immense relief. And then puzzlement: What did it mean? Roger hadn’t been killed in the attack, but he had been abducted. But by whom, and why?

“This means he’s alive,” she said.

“Maybe,” I said carefully. “It certainly means he survived the attack. That much we know for sure. As for whether…”

“He’s alive,” she said. “These people have him.”

“Could be.”

She pointed to my face. “Who did that to you?”

“Probably the same people who abducted him.”

“Who?”

“You’ll be the first to know when I find out,” I said.

She nodded, compressed her lips. “Nick, you were able to get into Gifford Industries today, right?”

“I was, yes. And I met with the librarian.”

“The librarian-?”

“Roger’s e-mail, remember-he said something about saying good-bye to a librarian. ‘The librarian’ turns out to be Roger’s nickname for a lawyer colleague of his named-”

“-Marjorie something. Right! I’d totally forgotten. So what did she say?”

I told her about how protective of Roger she’d been, her unwillingness to provide details beyond the fact that Roger had discovered something “troubling” in the books of a company they were acquiring.

“Well, it shouldn’t be so hard to figure out which company she’s talking about. We’ve only acquired one in the last three or four months, a power company in Brazil.”

“She wouldn’t say whether it was a company Gifford acquired or was considering acquiring.”

“Is she covering something up?”

“That wasn’t my sense.” I paused. Thought for a second. “I walked around Georgetown a bit. Retraced the route you and Roger took the night you were attacked. So let me ask you something.”

“Sure.”

“Roger parked his car on Water Street. Quite a ways down the hill from the restaurant. I don’t get that.”

“What don’t you get? Oji-San doesn’t have valet parking.”

“But there are parking garages a lot closer than where he parked. And it was a rainy night-not the kind of night you’d want to stroll around Georgetown.”

“I… I suppose I never thought about it.”

“It didn’t strike you as somehow strange?”

“No, not really. What are you getting at?”

“I don’t have a theory. It’s just that it doesn’t make sense.”

“Sense? I mean, Roger’s parked there before. It’s free, it’s easy to get in and out of. I don’t see what the big deal is.”

“Okay.”

“What, you think he deliberately parked there for some sinister reason?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Then what are you saying?”

I spoke carefully. “I just wonder how well you know him. How much you know about him.”

“How well I know Roger? What are you talking about? If you’re hinting at something, why don’t you just come out and say it?”

I hesitated, blew out a lungful of air. “Did you know Roger was having an affair?” I asked gingerly.

“Stop it.”

“Did you know?”

“Just cut it out.”

“You had no idea?”

“That’s just not true. Now you’re listening to Gabe’s crazy ideas?”

“I’m not asking if it’s true. I’m asking if you knew about it.”

She shook her head. “Stop it.”

I got up, closed both living-room doors. “What do you know about Candi Dupont?” I asked.

Lauren blinked a few times. “Candy…?”

“Candi Dupont is a woman. Candi with an i. A woman that Roger was having an affair with.”

She flushed, looked as if she’d just been slapped. Closed her eyes again.

“Seven months ago-” I began.

“I don’t want to hear it,” she interrupted. “If he started seeing her again, I don’t want to know about it.”

“So you did know.”

“What does this have to do with what happened to him?”

“It’s an important lead. She might know where he is.”

“Or not.”

“Or not,” I agreed.

“Nick, we went through a-a difficult time in our marriage a few years ago.”

She looked at me, but I just nodded silently.

“Sort of a crisis, I guess you’d call it. He’d met some woman on a business trip to Boston. We’d had some big fight before he left, and I guess he was angry at me, and he said he was in the bar at the Four Seasons, and in a moment of weakness…”

“Candi Dupont.”

“I never knew her name. He wouldn’t tell me. But this was three or four years ago, Nick. He begged me to forgive him, and he promised it was over. He swore.”

“Obviously it wasn’t. Seven months ago Roger paid for a woman named Candi Dupont to have an abortion at a clinic in Boston.”

“Oh, God.”

“We haven’t turned up anything on any ‘Candi Dupont’ in the standard databases, which tells me that ‘Candi Dupont’ might be some sort of alias. But whatever her name is, maybe it’s the same woman Roger told you about. Which would mean the affair didn’t end three or four years ago.”

She grabbed a hardcover book from the coffee table and hurled it across the room. It hit the wall, rattled a picture frame, and fell to the floor. I couldn’t help noticing that the book was called Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames by Thich Nhat Hanh. “Enough!” she cried. “I don’t want to hear about it! If he didn’t stop seeing that… slut… I don’t want to know about it! Don’t you get that?”

“I do,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

She got up and retrieved the book, put it back on the coffee table, and sat back down on the couch, but much closer to me. For a minute or so she was silent, and I didn’t say anything either, then she said, “Nick.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve been lying to you.”

41.

Okay,” I said gently. I kept my tone light, casual, nonconfrontational. I wanted her to feel safe about finally opening up to me. “Tell me.”

“Roger did mention something.”

“About what?”

“Just that he’d found something he wasn’t supposed to know about. Some kind of corruption, it sounded like.”

“Which is precisely what Marjorie Ogonowski told me. Did he say whether it involved Gifford Industries?”

“I don’t know. He said it involved a lot of money, but other than that, he was completely vague about it. The more I pressed him on it, the more he withdrew. He could get that way. He’d retreat into himself.”

“He didn’t give you any specifics? Nothing at all?”

“Nothing. But-well, he was afraid that something might happen to him. That he’d gotten threats.”

“That’s pretty vague, too.”

“He admitted it sounded paranoid. Like he was some conspiracy theorist. I asked him if he wanted me to talk to Leland-to see if Leland could do something, help in some way. But he told me never to say anything to Leland about it. He made me promise.”

“And did you keep that promise?”

“Of course.”

“And he never said who was threatening him?”

She shook her head again. “He never said, and I gave up asking. He said he wanted to protect Gabe and me, and the less I knew, the better.”

“So that e-mail he sent-that InCaseOfDeath thing-that didn’t really shock you, did it, what he was telling you?”

A beat. Then, ruefully: “No.”

“So why did you keep this from me?”

“Ohh, Nick.” She sighed, then hugged herself, shivering as if she were cold. “Because what if he-I don’t know, surrendered.”

“Surrendered? To whom?”

“I mean, what if he gave himself up? I mean, they’d threatened him, threatened his family, and he knew he couldn’t unring the bell, you know? He couldn’t pretend not to know whatever it was he found out. So maybe he made a deal with them. These guys, whoever they are, they attacked me and he saw that and he said, in effect, ‘Hey, why her? I’m the one you want. Take me.’ To spare me and Gabe. Do you follow? Am I making any sense?”

“I think so,” I said. “But what do you think happened to him?”

Very quietly, she said, “He might have sacrificed himself.”

She lowered her head almost to her chest, then put her hands on each temple. From the way her head was moving, I knew she was crying. After a moment, she looked up, tears streaming down her face. “You see? Do you understand why I’m so scared?”

“Yes. I do.” I reached over and held her in a tight embrace, felt her damp heat. “But I’m not going to let anything happen to you or Gabe.”

“What if that’s beyond your control, Nick?”

“It’s not,” I said, and I was instantly ashamed because that was a transparent lie. Plenty of things were beyond my control.

“And you know, just listening to you talk about what happened that night, the night I was attacked-well, maybe you’re right. Maybe there was something strange about it. And then there was that e-mail from him, and now there’s this video, and it all seems to add up to something very different from what I thought it was.”

I held her for a long while.

“Lauren,” I said, “did he ever tell you why he talked to Victor so often?”

“He called your dad? When?”

“Victor called him, to be precise. Collect calls. Five times in the last month.”

“He never said anything about that to me. Are you sure about this? I thought he hadn’t talked to Victor in almost a year.”

I SAT there for a few minutes in front of the TV set after Lauren went to bed-Kyra Sedgwick in a rerun of The Closer, saying to a bunch of sullen male cops, in a treacly Southern accent, “Why thank you very much, gentlemen”-and then I thought of something.

I went to the entry hall by the front door. The spare key to Roger’s car-really, a keyless entry fob-was in a green ceramic Japanese bowl on the hall table. His S-Class AMG Mercedes was parked in the garage, black and gleaming. Inside, it smelled like new leather. I started it up, pressed the navigation system button on the LCD touch screen, hit DESTINATION MEMORY, then LAST DESTINATIONS.

A beautiful car, that Mercedes. A six-liter V-12 engine with 604 horsepower and incredible torque. Invoice price probably around a hundred eighty thousand dollars. And the crappiest navigation system in the world.

But it told me what I needed to know.

Roger had not just talked to Dad on the phone a bunch of times in the last month. He’d also visited him in prison. He’d driven to upstate New York, and at least once he’d used the Mercedes’s navigation system to get him there.

The question was why.

The one person who might know what had happened to Roger was the last person I wanted to see.