Vanished

42.

The Altamont Correctional Facility had originally been built as a hospital for the criminally insane, a hundred and fifty years ago. The Altamont Lunatic Asylum, as it was then called, was a grand Victorian Gothic complex of spires and crenellated towers. Its forbidding red-brick walls were stained dark with soot from a century of internal-combustion engines. Some forty years ago the mental hospital was shut down and converted into a medium-security prison, but it still looked like the sort of place a homicidal maniac escapes from, then terrorizes the nearby summer camp. It also reminded me a little of the high school I’d gone to in Malden.

They’d done some renovation since the days of straitjackets and lobotomies. There was a concrete perimeter wall thirty feet high, topped with coils of razor wire, watchtowers, and banks of high-mast lights. Inside the walls, the old Gothic prison complex was surrounded by a luxuriant green lawn that wouldn’t have been out of place at Pebble Beach.

I’d flown from Washington to Albany, rented a car, and driven a few miles to the outskirts of the town of Guilderland. The nav system was one of those separate portable things that sticks to the dashboard by means of a suction cup. It spoke in an officious, nasal female voice, which might have been tolerable if she hadn’t got me lost for twenty minutes. So I bore her some resentment for making me a little late. Though it wasn’t as if my father was going anywhere.

I filled out a form, showed a driver’s license, went through a metal detector, then an ion scan, for drugs. I had to empty my pockets, leave cell phone and keys in a paper bag with my name on it. The visitor-control system was fairly automated-they took my picture and printed out an adhesive pass with my photo on it and a bar code.

After I passed through a second metal cage, I turned to the guard who was scanning my pass with a barcode reader and said, “Pretty high-tech.”

The guard, a bored-looking, obese black guy with sad eyes and a wide mouth, nodded.

“Big old scary building like this, I was expecting, you know, one of those huge ledgers and a quill, right?”

He broke out laughing. It obviously took very little to amuse him.

“Hey, so I guess that means you keep track of every visitor in your computer.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Anyone can see I visited?”

“Not unless they have access to the computer,” he said.

I nodded. “Okay.”

“You visiting Victor Heller?”

“Right.”

“Who’s that, your brother?”

“Father.”

“Father, huh? Been inside a long time?”

“A while.”

“Guess you got scared straight, right?”

“You could say that.”

THE VISITORS’ room looked like the cafeteria in my high school-the same molded-plastic chairs, the same greenish linoleum floor, the same high ceiling with stained white drop-in panels. The same smell of ammonia mixed with human sweat and desperation. A long, undulating counter snaked through the room, bisecting it: prisoners on one side, visitors on the other. On the visitors’ side, a cheery mural was painted on the wall, primitive art depicting the countryside, probably done by inmates. There were maybe half a dozen visitors. A couple of little kids were running around, oblivious to the setting. Only three prisoners.

Sitting at the far end of the counter was my father.

In the twelve years since I’d last seen him, I’d aged, of course. But he seemed to have aged at the speed of light. Victor Heller, the Dark Prince of Wall Street, was an old man. His shoulders were stooped. He had a big white beard and looked like an Old Testament prophet. His eyebrows were heavy and unruly, like steel-wool pads that had seen too much use. He was wearing a dark green shirt and matching pants, his prison outfit, which looked like a janitor’s uniform.

He looked up as I approached. His eyes were rheumy, and he looked lost. His chronic psoriasis had gotten much worse since I’d last seen him: large flakes of skin were coming off his cheeks and forehead. He reminded me of a molting reptile, a snake shedding its skin, as if the scales were falling away to reveal his corrupt inner core.

But then he smiled when he saw me, and the old familiar glint was in his eyes.

He waited for me to sit down, adjust my chair, the legs scraping against the linoleum. Then he said, “They must have told you.”

“Told me what?” I said.

“About the cancer.”

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

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

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

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

“No, Dad, I don’t.”

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

I shook my head.

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

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

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

“I’d enlisted by then.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

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

“I mean, why so often?”

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

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

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

“He was here last week,” I said.

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

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

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

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

43.

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

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

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

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

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

“What are you saying?”

“Figure it out,” he said.

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

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

See, I’d taken Dad at his word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dad-”

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

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

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

I nodded. “Securities fraud and grand larceny.”

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

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

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

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

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

I shrugged.

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

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

He gave me his raptor’s smile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hospital? Is Lauren all right?”

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

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

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

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

44.

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

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

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

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

“Your input.”

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

“What do you mean? I learned plenty.”

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

“A subcontractor?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So what was he trying to do?”

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

“Hush money,” I said.

He nodded.

“Extortion.”

“You always did have a way with words.”

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

“Ten million dollars.”

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

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

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

“You might have heard of Paladin Worldwide.”

“Ah,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know. I assume not.”

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

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

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

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

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

There could scarcely be a more lethal adversary.

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

He put his hands over his eyes, and a large silver flake sloughed off. “Disappeared? No, Nicholas. It’s far more likely that they… did away with him. That’s how they work.”

“I wonder.” I didn’t bother to explain my reasoning-the fact that Lauren had been knocked unconscious rather than being killed. “I don’t believe in corporate hit squads.”

“Then you’re either naïve or you’re not paying attention. You don’t remember that vice chairman of Enron who was just about to testify before Congress, about to name names in the biggest corporate scandal ever, but before he could get on a plane to Washington, he was found shot to death in his car? ‘Suicide,’ they called it, of course. Then a couple of months later, a consultant for Arthur Andersen whose big client was-you guessed it, Enron-was found shot in the head in a forest in Colorado? And then a banker with the Royal Bank of Scotland who was about to testify against his colleagues in guess what case-that’s right, Enron-was found dead in the woods outside London. Another apparent suicide.”

“This is grassy-knoll, tinfoil-hat stuff, Dad. Black helicopters.”

“A woman named Karen Silkwood works in a nuclear plant in Oklahoma and gets plutonium poisoning and gets in her car to meet a New York Times reporter to spill the beans about unsafe working conditions in the nuclear industry, only her car runs off the road. Suicide?”

“I saw the Meryl Streep movie. Good flick. What’s your point?”

His tone had become fierce. “I have no doubt they killed Roger. Probably meant to kill Lauren, too, not just give her a concussion.”

I decided to let the argument drop. It wasn’t getting me anywhere.

“I need names,” I said. “Who at Paladin he talked to. Who might have threatened him.”

Dad looked at me for a long while as if deciding how much to say. Then: “He tried to contact their founder and CEO, Allen Granger, but Granger refused to talk with him.”

I knew a bit about Allen Granger, the billionaire founder of Paladin Worldwide, but it was limited to what I’d read and heard. A former Navy SEAL from northern Michigan. Rich guy, sort of a recluse. A born-again Christian evangelist, far-right-wing conservative.

“Did he talk to anyone else at Paladin, then?”

Victor nodded. “The head of the Washington office, a man named Carl Koblenz. I think he may be the president of the company-the number two, just under Granger.”

“Carl Koblenz,” I repeated to myself. “Was Koblenz the one who directly threatened Roger?”

“Did I say anything about any direct threats?”

“No, you did not,” I replied.

“You’re planning something,” he said. “I can tell.”

“Maybe.”

“Don’t. At least learn from your brother’s mistakes. I don’t want to lose my only remaining son.”

“I’m touched. But that won’t happen.”

“Surely you know the Thirty-Six Stratagems.”

I shook my head.

“The ancient Chinese art of deception.”

“Oh, right. Sun Tzu. Jay Stoddard’s favorite.”

“Forget Sun Tzu’s Art of War. That’s so commonplace.” He held up a gnarled, age-spotted finger. “Far more interesting than Sun Tzu is Chu-ko Liang. Perhaps the most brilliant military strategist ever. One of his stratagems was to defeat your enemy from within. Infiltrate the enemy’s camp in the guise of cooperation or surrender. Then, once you’ve discovered the source of his weakness, you strike.”

Somehow the setting-the visitors’ room of the Altamont Correctional Facility-made my father’s advice a little less authoritative.

As I walked out of the visitors’ room, I savored a feeling of relief.

Because at that moment I knew that my brother was alive.

45.

Probably meant to kill Lauren, too, not just give her a concussion, Victor had said.

But I hadn’t said anything about a concussion.

All I’d told him was that Lauren had been attacked and had woken up in the hospital. He had another source of information, I was sure. Even though he’d pretended that this was the first he was hearing about it. And given how many times the two of them had spoken in the last month, it was likely that his source was Roger.

If so, that meant that Roger had talked to him after his disappearance.

And thus that Roger was not only still alive but able to receive phone calls. Which meant that he was not a hostage, not a kidnapping victim, not imprisoned somewhere. He was in hiding.

But he was reachable. Since Victor couldn’t receive incoming calls, that meant that he had called Roger.

And that phone number had to be on a list here at the prison. Inmates were allowed to make outgoing collect calls only, to an approved list of up to fifteen telephone numbers.

After I spent a few minutes schmoozing with my new friend, the guard who sat outside the visitors’ room, I confessed to him my concern that my father might be trying to reconnect with some of his old business colleagues. Wasn’t that against prison rules?

He was only too happy to go on the computer and pull up Victor’s approved telephone list. I gave him fifty dollars for his research assistance and thanked him for helping keep my father on the straight and narrow.

As I drove into the Albany International Airport, I called Frank the information broker.

“Didn’t I tell you to be patient?” he said before I could even give him the one number from Victor’s phone list that I didn’t recognize.

“This is about something else, Frank.”

“Yeah, well, I got the information you wanted on that cell number you gave me.”

It took me a second to remember which number he was talking about: the one that Woody, from the cargo company, had given me in Los Angeles. “Great,” I said. “What have you got?”

“It’s a corporate account. Registered to a Carl Koblenz.”

“Paladin Worldwide,” I said.

“You already knew this?”

“I know the name.”

So the president of Paladin Worldwide had hired Woody to steal almost a billion dollars from Traverse Development. That was corporate theft on a truly grand scale.

And then the pieces began to click into place. If my father was telling me the truth-which, of course, wasn’t a given-then Roger had discovered evidence that Paladin Worldwide had been paying kickbacks to the Pentagon. Once they found out what he had, they began to threaten him. He knew they planned to kidnap him, maybe even kill him.

And so he vanished before they had the chance.

But what about that billion dollars? Maybe Paladin, which did a lot of work in Iraq, had learned that Traverse Development-whoever they were-was shipping all this cash back to the U.S., and Paladin had decided to help themselves. A billion dollars was a lot of bribes.

“I sent you your brother’s phone bills,” Frank said, interrupting my reverie. “You ever get them?”

“I did, thanks,” I said. “And I have one more for you.”

46.

Throughout the morning, Lauren found herself checking her e-mail far too often.

She was checking for e-mails from Roger. As foolish as that was.

Give it up, she told herself. There won’t be any more from him.

Stop torturing yourself.

She’d gotten to work late, because she’d had to let in Nick’s friend to overhaul the home-security system. That was okay: Leland was out of the country, so things were slower than usual. Just before lunch, she looked up from her e-mail and saw a man sitting in one of the visitor chairs. She did a double take.

She remembered seeing him come out of Leland’s office. The man was remarkably… well, homely. Ugly, not to put too fine a point on it. His face was deeply pitted with scars, obviously the victim of a terrible case of adolescent acne. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and had thinning brown hair, round shoulders, a pigeon chest.

“Hi?” she said.

“I didn’t want to disturb you,” the man said. He stood up awkwardly, and a leather portfolio slipped out of his hand and hit the floor. He leaned over to retrieve it, and when he came back up his scarred face was flushed. Looking embarrassed, he approached her desk, extended his hand to shake. “Um, I’m Lloyd Kozak. I don’t know if Leland mentioned me-I’m his new financial adviser?”

Lauren looked over at Noreen, who said, “Hello there, Lloyd.”

“Oh, yes-Noreen, right?” He went over to Noreen’s desk and shook her hand, too. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.” He looked over at Lauren, back at Noreen, seeming trapped between the two women. “I just-did Leland leave any computer disks for me?”

Lauren shook her head. “He didn’t say anything-”

“Oh, sure, right here,” Noreen said, and she produced a manila envelope and handed it to the man.

“Thank you,” he said to her, then he went over to Lauren’s desk and said, “I’m sorry to disturb you.”

“No worries,” Lauren said.

The man hurried away.

Lauren waited until he was gone then said to Noreen, “Leland didn’t say anything to me about a financial adviser.”

“I thought I told you about him.”

“Well, yes, you did. But Leland didn’t mention it.”

“Cool your jets,” Noreen said. “Leland told me the guy was going to stop by today and asked me to give him some stuff. It’s no big deal.”

“Well, he didn’t say anything, that’s all.”

“You don’t expect him to explain everything twice, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, all right, then.”

Lauren made a mental note to ask about this financial adviser when Leland got back. She couldn’t help feeling a little hurt, though. Normally, she handled everything for him. He kept no secrets from her. It was silly, she realized, but she felt a little left out. And no doubt Noreen loved it. She was preening over a tiny piece of Leland’s personal life that she, and only she, knew something about.

Lauren really disliked the woman.

In the early afternoon, right after lunch, she checked her e-mail again and found a message from an address she didn’t recognize. Its subject line read: “For Lauren-Personal.”

She clicked on it.

Inside the message box there was no text. Just a dark gray rectangle that she could tell right away was a video player, the sort you see all over the Internet: a frame with video toolbar buttons at its bottom edge. A big pale gray circle right in the middle containing a white triangular play button. It virtually shouted to her, Click me! Click me!

She thought for a moment. The thing looked suspicious. Possibly dangerous.

She checked the sender line and saw that it was blank. Which was strange-she was certain there’d been something there a few seconds ago.

But the sender’s name was gone.

There was only the video-player window. The big white triangular play button taunting her.

After a few seconds, she couldn’t resist any longer. She clicked on the triangle. The gray rectangle came to life: a streaming video image began to move. Black-and-white. Fuzzy and indistinct at first. Shadowy shapes. She couldn’t make anything out.

But then the video became sharper, as if the fog had cleared, and there was something eerily familiar about the scene she was watching. Something she couldn’t put her finger on, but familiar all the same. A white-shrouded figure, shifting slowly, which became a lump beneath rumpled bed sheets. Someone asleep in bed. There was a voyeuristic, quasi-porno quality to the movie she was watching. But what was it? Why was it so familiar? She clicked the full-screen button, and the video took over her entire monitor. The resolution wasn’t great; the contrast was harsh, as if it had been shot at night, using infrared light or something.

The restlessly sleeping figure turned over, and she recognized the long eyelashes, the curly hair. Her head swam, and her heart skittered as the camera zoomed in and held tight on Gabe’s face.

Her son, asleep in bed.

She gasped aloud.

Suddenly the video stopped playing, and the dark gray window shrank back to the size it had been at first, the white triangle at its center. With unsteady fingers, she fumbled for the computer mouse and tried to click the play button again, but the dark gray square was gone. It had vanished, like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.

Leaving not a trace.

As if it had never been there.

47.

Ihad plenty of time before my flight left the airport, so I held on to the rental car awhile longer, left the parking lot, and drove around, just thinking. The roads here were broad and newly paved, with far less congestion than Washington, and in a few miles I passed the Colonie Public Library. On an impulse, I turned in.

In the Internet age, public libraries are immensely undervalued as resources. Sometimes there’s just no substitute for books on shelves and old newspapers, even microfilm copies. Far too many local newspapers just aren’t searchable through Google. Even those that have search engines accessible on the Internet are often poorly indexed. Most of the good stuff you have to find the old-fashioned way.

I found a set of indexes for a Michigan newspaper, the Grand Rapids Press, and began searching year by year for articles on the reclusive founder of Paladin, Allen Granger. Since his family was from northern Michigan, I figured there was a chance I’d find some interesting local coverage, something that might tell me something that I hadn’t read in Time or Newsweek.

While I leafed through volume after volume, my cell phone rang. The periodicals librarian gave me a look, and I shut it off without glancing at the caller ID. I found quite a few articles on Granger, but almost all of them were wire-service dispatches, and none of them was news to me. Lots of pieces on Paladin and various controversies their employees had run into in Iraq. Articles about Allen Granger testifying before Congress. He hadn’t testified before Congress in a year, though. Neither had he done any in-person interviews, as far as I could tell. An interview in which “Mr. Granger spoke to the Associated Press by telephone from Paladin headquarters in southern Georgia.” In the last year, Carl Koblenz, identified as chief executive officer of Paladin Worldwide, based in Falls Church, Virginia, seemed to have taken over the public-spokesman role. Granger hadn’t been seen in public in over a year.

I had to go back quite a few years before I was able to find any local interviews with Allen Granger. Fifteen years, in fact.

I went to the periodicals desk and requested the roll of microfilm from the Grand Rapids Press. Ten minutes later, I was scrolling through the scratchy old microfilm, trying to suppress a wave of motion sickness, and finally located the interview, done by a Grand Rapids reporter, who described Allen Granger as the “handsome scion” of a “waste-management empire” and “former Navy SEAL.” The photo they ran confirmed the handsome part, anyway: He had a clean-cut, blue-eyed, wholesome Midwestern look. Granger told the reporter about how he’d just recently purchased ten thousand acres of pine forest in southern Georgia as a training facility for what he envisioned as “the FedEx of national security,” whatever that meant.

The last line of the interview said, “For Allen Granger, it’s a long way from Traverse City.”

Traverse City, Michigan, was Granger’s hometown.

And Traverse Development? Could that be another one of his firms?

I was thoroughly confused. Why would the president of Paladin Worldwide have hired some guy in a shipping company to steal a billion dollars’ worth of cash from another one of Allen Granger’s companies?

Unless Granger didn’t know what Koblenz was doing.

I couldn’t begin to make sense of this.

Stepping outside into the blindingly bright sunshine, I checked my voice mail.

“Heller,” Dorothy Duval said in a quiet voice. “Call me. We got trouble.”

48.

What’s wrong?” I said.

“I didn’t think Stoddard even knew where my cubicle was. He just walked up to my desk and told me that I’ve been abusing office resources.”

“You getting all your work in on time?”

“You know it doesn’t work like that around here. I’m not on the clock.”

“Exactly. You tell him what you do on your own time is your business.”

“First of all, Nick, I’ve never talked to Stoddard that way, and I’m not going to start now. I’m not like you. I’m disposable.”

“You’re the best, Dorothy, and you know it. None of the other forensic techs get invited to the Monday morning meetings.”

“Yeah, well, as far as Jay Stoddard is concerned, I’m one of about a thousand data-recovery specialists out there, most of whom would jump at the chance to work here.” She lowered her voice. “And he’s probably right.”

“He’s not going to fire you for helping me locate my brother.”

“Oh no? He as much as said so. He said if I do any more database searches on Traverse Development or Roger Heller or anything that’s not a Stoddard project, I better update my résumé.”

“Dorothy,” I said. “You know I’ve got your back.”

“Must be why they always get me from the front,” she said acidly. “You don’t have the power to keep him from firing me, Nick.”

“Don’t be so sure of that.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Right. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Any luck on that list of office-building tenants I faxed you?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry.”

“What are you doing, running every company name to see if they’re subsidiaries of other companies?”

“That would take forever. No, I’m running them against this Traverse Development. But no luck yet.”

“And Roger’s laptop?”

“Looks like it’s mostly personal stuff. E-mails and all that.”

“Can you send it to me?”

“No. But I’ll give you what I got when I see you.”

Call waiting came on, and I saw that it was Garvin. “Dorothy,” I said, “would you mind-?”

“Take the call, Nick.”

“Thanks. You’re the best.”

“I’m glad you appreciate it,” she said. “Because this is the last job I can do for you. See, Nick, I need a paycheck.”

When I clicked over to Garvin’s call, he began abruptly, without even identifying himself: “This is interesting.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“I got back a trace on both of those tags-the Econoline van and that black Humvee?” Like most cops, Garvin called license plates “tags.”

“And?”

“And they both trace back to the same owner.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “Who is it?”

“The registration on file in both cases seems to be a holding company.”

I waited.

“Something called A.G. Holdings.”

“Is there an address?”

“Just a P.O. box.”

“Okay,” I said. “That helps. That helps a lot.”

I hung up, and a minute later I was talking to Dorothy again.

She cut me off: “I told you, Nick, I can’t do any more work for you.”

“I just need you to look at that tenant list I faxed you.”

“Just look at it?”

“Right.”

“I got it right here.”

“Is there a tenant in that building called A.G. Holdings?”

There was a long pause, a rustling of paper. Finally: “Seventh floor,” she said.

“Nice,” I said.

“What?”

“A.G. Holdings is Allen Granger.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m not sure I do either,” I said. “But I intend to find out.”

49.

It seemed like the more I knew, the less I understood.

Paladin Worldwide and Traverse Development and A.G. Holdings-they were all the same company. Or to put it more accurately, they all shared ownership, which wasn’t quite the same thing. One of them owned the other. Maybe it didn’t make any difference which company owned the other. They were all Allen Granger.

Okay, fine. So one of Paladin’s subsidiaries, Traverse Development, secretly shipped a billion dollars’ worth of cash into the United States, only the cash went missing. Why? Because it was stolen by the security director of the shipping company.

Who’d been hired by the same company that shipped it over in the first place.

So in essence, Paladin Worldwide was stealing from itself.

Or, maybe more to the point, Carl Koblenz was stealing from his own company. Maybe that was it. Maybe he was embezzling money on a grand scale.

Maybe Carl Koblenz had tried to steal a billion dollars, and Roger had found out and tried to extort hush money from him to keep it quiet. And Koblenz had decided it would be easier just to abduct, perhaps kill, Roger.

And Roger had somehow managed to escape their clutches.

Okay. But then why would Paladin-under the name of one of its subsidiaries, or holding companies, Traverse Development-hire my firm to track down the missing cash?

The only explanation that made any sense to me was that Stoddard Associates had been hired not by Carl Koblenz but by Allen Granger. In other words, Paladin’s CEO had no idea that his own president had stolen a billion dollars from the company.

And Roger had stepped into the middle of that mess.

And so had I.

As I returned to the airport parking lot, I called a guy I didn’t know, a friend of a friend who worked for Paladin Worldwide. His name was Neil Burris, an ex-Navy SEAL, and he worked out of Paladin’s Falls Church office in their private-security division.

He didn’t sound very friendly on the phone. But after I identified myself as Marty Masur of Stoddard Associates and told him that Stoddard was interested in possibly hiring him, at a salary at least twice what he was making at Paladin, he warmed up.

We arranged to meet for drinks.

50.

With a trembling hand, Lauren picked up the phone to call Nick.

Her heart was racing. Her mouth was dry. She was nauseated, light-headed. The room seemed to be spinning slowly, and she had the physical sensation of falling through space.

How could someone have taken video of Gabe sleeping? Had someone sneaked in during the night? Was there some sort of hidden camera in his room? Could it possibly be?

And who could have done such a thing?

Feeling as if she were about to vomit, she put the phone down. No. It would be a mistake to call Nick. He’d already unearthed things about Roger and about their family life that she wished he hadn’t. How in the world had he discovered Roger’s affair, that terrible, gut-wrenching thing that had so blighted their marriage? She wished Gabe had never asked Nick to help.

Then she opened the St. Gregory’s website-Harvard crimson, elegant font, the school’s coat of arms-and found the main switchboard number on the bottom of the page. She picked up the phone again and called the school.

She recognized the voice of the woman who answered-the receptionist, Mrs. Jordan-and began speaking all in a rush. “Ruth, this is Gabe Heller’s mom, Lauren Heller? I wonder, do you think you could check to see if Gabe’s in school today?”

“Oh, hello, Mrs. Heller. Is there a problem?”

“No, not at all, I left the house early, and you know how late these boys sleep, and…”

Mrs. Jordan chuckled softly. Lauren could hear her typing. She stared at the school’s seal. The Latin motto: Mens Sana in Corpore Sano. What did that mean, “A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body”? She wondered what the Latin was for “More Rich Assholes than You Can Shake a Stick At.”

She couldn’t breathe.

“He’s in today,” she said. “I think he’s in science right now. Did you want to get a message to him?”

Lauren let her breath out slowly. “No, I-” She hesitated. “Actually, yes, Ruth. Can you tell him that I’ll pick him up from school today?”

She looked up the cell-phone number of Kate Vaughan, the mom who was scheduled to drive the car pool in the afternoons this week. She called Kate and told her not to drive Gabe home.

She could leave work early today. Leland wasn’t here, and Noreen would be more than happy to hold down the fort.

She needed to see her son and make sure he was all right.

51.

That headache was back.

The same throbbing in her temples and her forehead, the feeling that her head was a lightbulb that could explode at any moment. That sensation of needles jabbing into the back of her eyeballs.

She could barely concentrate on the road. Since she never left work so early, she had no idea how bad the traffic on the George Washington Parkway was in the mid afternoon. It was only two thirty, not even rush hour, and it was already bumper-to-bumper.

And her head was about to explode.

In her mind she kept replaying that video of Gabe asleep in bed, over and over until she wanted to scream.

St. Gregory’s School was located on a verdant campus off Wisconsin Avenue, near the National Cathedral. It looked like an Ivy League school. It sure cost like an Ivy League school. She drove in past the tennis courts, past the huge new athletic facility, and pulled into a long line of very expensive SUVs. In front of her was a Range Rover. Behind her was a Porsche Cayenne Turbo.

The whole scene felt unfamiliar to her. Yet at the same time sort of nice. Picking your kid up from school-that was something she really missed. Not since Gabe was in first grade had she picked him up from school and taken him home. That was in the early years of working for Leland, and it had been hard to arrange time off, but she’d done it. Seven years ago. Apart from a few days when he was sick, anyway.

There was a time when Lauren knew she could keep Gabe safe. Once she’d been able to pick him up in the palm of one hand. She could still his cries by offering him a bottle or her breast, by patting his back until he gave a tiny burp, by wrapping him up in his blankets as snugly as an egg roll.

But then you send your kid out into the world and anything can happen.

The pickup area was jammed with SUVs pulling in and out, jousting with one another like some high-end monster-truck rally.

The tap of a car horn. A blue Toyota Land Cruiser had pulled up alongside her. The window glided down.

“Lauren?”

Kate Vaughan. A pretty blond woman, very jocky, who wore her hair in a ponytail. A major squash player. Lauren had heard that the Vaughans had had a squash court built in their home. She had three sons, two of them at St. Gregory’s, all three serious squash players, the eldest one nationally ranked. Four boys were in the back two rows, tussling and arguing.

Lauren looked up, waved.

“I got your message about Gabe. You guys going somewhere?”

“No, just-boss is out of town. Did you see Gabe up there?”

“Haven’t seen him, sorry. Are you okay? I heard you were in an accident.”

“Oh, I’m fine, thanks.”

“And, um… Roger? Do they know anything more?”

Lauren shook her head.

“God, Lauren, you must be so worried.” A huge black Cadillac Escalade behind Kate’s Toyota was trying to lumber by and honked loudly.

“I am.”

Kate’s son, Kip, in the front seat, said something to her, and she swatted him away. “Will you chill, kids, okay? God, Lauren. You know, I once heard about something called wandering amnesia? It’s like a… fugue state? It’s triggered by stress-you just all of a sudden forget who you are, and you could be wandering around, and-”

The Escalade blasted its horn.

Kate flipped the bird out the window at the Escalade’s driver. “Sheesh, can you believe this guy? All right, I better move it. Keep me posted, okay? I’m sure it’s totally nothing. But God, it’s so scary, huh?”

“I will. Thanks.”

Hers was one of the last cars to reach the pickup spot. The crowd of boys waiting there, laughing and shoving and shouting to one another, was thinning, and she didn’t see Gabe.

Her forehead was throbbing, and she felt a tightness in her chest.

Maybe he hadn’t gotten the message that she’d be picking him up.

Unlikely. Mrs. Jordan, the school secretary, was a hundred percent reliable. St. Gregory’s was scrupulous about keeping track of its students’ whereabouts at all times. The sons of some very rich and important people-senators and Supreme Court justices and presidents of foreign countries-went here. The parents had to be assured that their kids were safe.

Gabe tended to be pretty spacey, though. He could easily have forgotten she was coming. But then he would have gotten into Kate Vaughan’s car, and she’d have told him to wait for his mom.

The car in front of her pulled away, and she drove up to the curb, and there was no one there.

No Gabe.

She called his cell phone.

It rang four, five, six times, then went to voice mail. Or what ever you called that blast of hideous music that she didn’t have the patience to get through before his recorded voice came on.

Maybe he’d forgotten to carry his cell phone. That was very Gabe. He didn’t use it much, often left it at home or in his locker at school.

She switched off the engine and got out. You weren’t supposed to park here, but she didn’t care. She ran up the concrete path to the Middle School building, heart thudding.

A small pile of backpacks in the foyer, and three boys were sitting on the floor, one of them showing the others something on his iPod.

“Any of you kids seen Gabe Heller?” she asked.

They shrugged. They weren’t in his grade, didn’t know who he was. She kept going, up the big stone staircase to the school secretary’s office.

Mrs. Jordan, a handsome middle-aged black woman, was on the phone, smiled at her, nodded, put the phone on hold.

“Mrs. Heller, why are you-?”

Lauren, trying to sound casual, trying not to sound like the crazed neurotic mom, said, “Have you seen Gabe?”

Mrs. Jordan, who monitored all the students’ absences and late arrivals and early departures from her command post, looked perplexed. “He got picked up half an hour early, like you told me.”

Lauren shook her head. “No, I said to tell him that I was going to pick him up today. I didn’t say anything about coming early.”

“Right, but then you called back to say the police needed to talk to him.”

“The police-?”

“A couple of policemen stopped by just like you said, and I sent them over to his En glish class to get him and-”

The room seemed to revolve.

“I never called-”

Lauren turned around, her legs feeling wobbly, lurching out of the office.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Heller? What you said was-”

But Lauren, running toward her car, heard no more.

52.

When my Delta flight landed at Reagan National, I switched my phone and my BlackBerry back on. I had five voice messages on my cell. Three from Lauren.

Gabe had gone missing.

My first thought, before I returned her call, was that Gabe was probably just acting out. After all, he was upset, under pressure, worried sick about his dad. On top of his problems at school. And… well, just being Gabe.

But when I finally reached her, she told me he’d been picked up by a couple of uniformed D.C. cops, and she’d been unable to reach him on his cell phone. She was terrified. I tried to calm her down, assured her it was very likely Lieutenant Garvin or his guys, and that I’d give him a call.

But then she told me about an anonymous e-mail she’d gotten at the office-a video clip of Gabe asleep in his bed, clearly a surveillance video taken by a concealed camera in his bedroom.

At that point I knew something was very wrong. I reached Garvin on his cell phone and asked him whether he’d sent uniformed officers over to St. Gregory’s School to talk to Gabe for some reason.

He hadn’t. They weren’t from Violent Crimes, or he’d know about it.

I asked him to check the radio runs to see if any police officers had been dispatched to Gabe’s school for some other reason. None had.

I drove to Chevy Chase at top speed.

LAUREN LET me in. Her face was flushed and her makeup was smeared and she’d obviously been crying.

“We’ll find him,” I said.

She shook her head, sniffled, rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. She was still dressed in work clothes, still as gorgeous as ever, but she looked gutted.

“He’s here,” she said.

“He’s been here the whole time?”

She shook her head again. “They brought him home. They picked him up at school and brought him home.”

“Who did?”

“I don’t know. It just sounds totally bizarre. It doesn’t make sense to me… Just, can you talk to him, Nick?”

“What happened?”

“Maybe he’ll talk to you. He won’t talk to me.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’s fine. But we can’t stay here anymore. It’s just not safe.”

“Lauren.”

“I’m taking Gabe, and I’m getting out of here. Go stay with my sister, maybe.”

“Lauren,” I said. “Let me talk to him.”

53.

Icould hear the tinny rasp coming from Gabe’s iPod earbuds even before I opened the door. He was lying on his bed, wearing a black Nightmare Before Christmas T-shirt, reading a paperback. On the cover was some guy in a Roman-gladiator outfit holding a gleaming sword and flying through the air. No doubt one of the sci-fi/fantasy series he devoured along with every comic book ever published.

He didn’t look up.

I sat down on the side of the bed. “Hey,” I said.

He kept reading. Maybe it was a generational thing, but I didn’t understand how he could read at the same time he was listening to music like that. I couldn’t.

Actually, I couldn’t floss my teeth while listening to music like that, but whatever.

“I want to hear what happened,” I said.

He kept looking at the book, but his eyes weren’t scanning the page.

“What happened, Gabe?” I said.

No response.

I reached over and yanked the earbuds out of his ears with one hard tug.

“Hey!” he squawked.

“What’d they do to you?” I said.

He glared at me. “Why? So you can tell Mom? She’s all whacked out over it.”

“She was scared. Can’t blame her. What’d they do?”

“Like, did they arrest me or something?” He gave me that prototypical teenage glower and put his book facedown on the bed. “They wanted to ask me stuff.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, all kinds of stuff.”

“Did they take you somewhere?”

“No. They just talked on the way.”

“On the way?”

“They picked me up at school and brought me home. They knew where I lived and everything. I didn’t even have to give them directions.”

“And what did they ask you?”

“Lots of questions.”

“Like?”

“Like, does Dad have any safe-deposit boxes, and where he keeps the keys, and like that. Does he stash stuff anywhere in the house. Is there like a panic room or some kind of hidden room in the house where he might have kept stuff. Where do we go on vacation, and do Dad and Mom have any places they like to travel to. They wanted names of Dad’s friends and relatives and like that. Anything I could think of.”

“Did they tell you why they wanted to know all this?”

“Of course. They said they’re trying to find him. They said maybe he left files or notes or something. Stuff that might tell them where he went. People who might know where he’d gone.”

“And… you answered all their questions, right?”

“I sure did.”

My stomach sank.

“I told them Dad has a safe-deposit box at Chevy Chase Bank, only I forgot which branch. I told them I was pretty sure Dad was hiding out at our house on Cape Cod.”

“House on Cape Cod,” I repeated.

“Wellfleet.”

“No one told me about this house in Wellfleet,” I said.

“That’s because we don’t have one. He also doesn’t have a safe-deposit box at the Chevy Chase Bank. As far as I know. Come on, dude, what kind of detective are you, anyway?”

54.

Momentarily stunned, I noticed the little smile pulling at the edges of Gabe’s mouth, and I couldn’t help smiling myself. “You lied to them,” I said.

“Misled them,” Gabe said. “Okay, I lied to them.”

“You figured out they weren’t real cops.”

“Thing is, Uncle Nick, they were driving a Crown Vic like all plainclothes cops drive, and they were wearing blue uniforms with shoulder patches that said METROPOLITAN POLICE, so at first they looked totally for real. They even showed me their badges. But you can buy badges and police uniforms and all that stuff on the Internet.”

“So what made you realize they were fake?”

“They didn’t have a police radio installed.”

“Excellent.”

“And they didn’t have those strobe light thingies, the kind the cops take out and put on the roof of their car when they’re chasing speeders.”

“Very nice.”

“And I didn’t smell doughnuts.” He grinned, and I grinned back.

“You did good,” I said.

“Tell that to Mom.”

“I will.” I leaned over to pat him on the shoulder, and I noticed his face had gotten strangely contorted, and there were tears in his eyes. He made a hiccuping sound. He was trying not to cry.

“I was scared out of my mind, Uncle Nick,” he said.

“I know,” I said. I tried to hug him, but it was awkward, the way he was lying back on the bed. Then he leaned forward and gave me a hug.

“Who are they?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know, or you won’t tell me?”

“At this point, I can only guess, and I don’t want to do that.”

He let go, turned around, sat on the edge of the bed, looked back at me. “So what was the point of all that? Were they just trying to scare Mom and me?”

“Maybe.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are… are we safe?”

I hesitated far too long. “I don’t know.”

“Are you going to stay in the house, or are you going back to the fortress of solitude?”

“I told you, Gabe. You can’t get rid of me that easy.”

“Are you going to teach me how to use a gun?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Have a little faith in me,” I said.

He made a derisory snort.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “You don’t trust me?”

He rolled his eyes.

“Listen,” I said. “There was once this legendary French acrobat named Charles Blondin, okay? He was famous in the nineteenth century for doing these impossible daredevil tightrope-walking stunts. He strung a rope across Niagara Falls, a thousand feet long. And this crowd gathered and he walked on the tightrope over the falls, hundreds of feet above the gorge, and the crowd went crazy when he got to the other side, clapping and cheering.”

Gabe gave me a skeptical glance. “Yeah?”

“And then he said to the crowd, ‘Do you believe I can do it again?’ and the crowd cheered, ‘Yes!’ And he did it. And the crowd cheered even louder, and he said, ‘Do you believe I can do it wearing a blindfold?’ And some people in the crowd got scared and shouted, ‘No, don’t do it,’ and others said, ‘Yes! You can do it!’”

“And he fell,” Gabe said.

I shook my head. “He did it, and the crowd cheered even louder, and he said, ‘Do you believe I can do it on stilts this time?’ And the crowd shouted out, “Yes! You can do it!’ And he did it, and the crowd roared and got even wilder. So then he said, ‘Do you believe I can do it pushing a wheelbarrow along the rope?’ And the crowd roared and cheered and said, ‘Yes!’ And Blondin said, ‘You really think I can? You believe it?’ And they shouted, ‘Yes! Yes, you can!’ ”

Despite himself, despite his teenage cynicism, he was actually listening. For a moment he almost seemed to be a child again, listening to a bedtime story. “Is this true?”

“Yes.”

“He actually did it?”

“Yep. He did it. He walked across the tightrope hundreds of feet above the gorge pushing a wheelbarrow, and when he made it to the other side the audience had grown huge and frenzied and totally worked up and they cheered. Really went crazy. So Blondin said, ‘Do you believe I can do it again but this time pushing a man in this wheelbarrow?’ And the crowd roared and said, ‘Yes!’ He said, ‘You really believe I can do it?’ And they all went, ‘Yes, definitely! You can do it! We believe in you! Yes! Absolutely!’ By that time the crowd was completely behind him. They thought he could do anything. So Blondin said, ‘Then who will volunteer to sit in the wheelbarrow?’ And the crowd suddenly went quiet. Totally silent. And he said, ‘What’s the matter? You don’t believe in me anymore?’ And they were silent for a long time before someone from the crowd finally said, ‘Yes, we believe in you. But not that much.’ ”

“Huh. Did anyone ever volunteer to get in the wheelbarrow?”

I shrugged.

“How’d the guy die?”

“In bed. Forty years later. From diabetes.”

“Bummer.”

“Better than falling to his death, don’t you think?”

“Can I use that in my novel?”

“All yours.”

“So what’s your point, Nick? We all die someday, is that it?”

“No. I’m just telling you, sometimes you just gotta have a little faith.” I stood up. “Good night, Gabe.” As I walked out of his bedroom, he said, “Hey, Uncle Nick?”

“Yeah?”

He hurled something at me, and I caught it in midair.

His notebook. His graphic novel.

“Let me know what you think,” he said.

Then it was my turn to tear up.

55.

Lauren was racing wildly around her bedroom, tossing clothes into a couple of suitcases on the bed. Her face was flushed, glistening with perspiration.

“Chill,” I said. “Take a nice, deep breath.”

“No, Nick. I can’t. We can’t stay here.”

“Lauren, sit down, please.”

“Will you at least tell me what happened to him this afternoon?”

“I will if you sit down.”

Slowly, grudgingly, she lowered herself onto the ottoman of the big overstuffed reading chair in the corner. I gave her a quick summary of what had happened to Gabe and how deftly he’d handled it.

“So they were fake cops,” she said. “Impostors.”

I nodded.

“They’re trying to find Roger, aren’t they?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t think getting information was the point of that exercise. That was a threat. Just like that video clip you got today. We’re watching you. You and your son, you’re vulnerable. You’re not safe anywhere.”

The blood seemed to drain from her face. “And this is supposed to calm me down?” she said, her voice rising.

“I’m not here to calm you down.”

She began speaking quickly, almost muttering to herself. “My sister doesn’t have room for us. But we can stay with Mom for a few days while I look for something.”

“What makes you think you’ll be any safer in your mother’s apartment? Or in some Comfort Inn somewhere? You think they can’t track you down? I don’t think there’s any hiding from them.”

“Jesus, Nick!” She got to her feet.

“Did my guy Merlin come by today to put in the new security system?”

“Yeah?”

“I want you to start using it.”

“For what?” she said sharply. “So we can stay locked up inside the house all day with the alarm on like, like, it’s a fortress? You think we’re really safe here? And what happens when Gabe goes to school? You think they’re not going to grab him again? And this time-”

“If anyone wanted to hurt you or Gabe, they’d have done it already. I don’t think that’s what they want.”

“Then what do they want?”

“My guess? Cooperation.”

“Cooperation? On what?”

I answered her question with one of my own: “What are you keeping from me?”

“I’m not keeping anything from you.”

“Lauren. You have something they want.”

“I have no idea what anyone could possibly want from me.”

“Look,” I said. “I saw my father this morning.”

“Victor? In prison?”

“Where else? And he told me that Roger tried to extort a lot of money from a private military company called Paladin Worldwide.”

Eyes wide, she shook her head. “I don’t believe that. Roger? No way.”

“Well, whatever Roger did or didn’t do, I’m sure that’s who these people are. Paladin. And they’re not messing around. You have something they want. Maybe something Roger left for you, whether you’re aware of it or not. And if you don’t give it to them, they’ll take something from you. Something very important to you.”

“Don’t say that. God, Nick, don’t say that.”

“The meaning of the threat was obvious. But it didn’t contain a single explicit demand. So what do you have that they want?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea!”

“Roger said in that e-mail that he’d taken precautions to protect you. That he’d given you the means to hold them off. What else aren’t you telling me?”

She shook her head again, this time more violently. “I don’t know what he meant by that. He never told me anything about any extortion. He never mentioned this… Paladin. You have to believe me. I’m telling you everything I know.”

“You told me everything was fine between you two,” I said.

She paused, frowned, and said, “That was different. That was… personal. I didn’t think it was right to talk about that with you. I’m not withholding anything.”

I was tempted to press her on that point. But instead I said, “Look, I want to do everything I can to protect you guys. So I need you to think really hard about anything Roger might have said to you, maybe something that didn’t mean anything at the time. Or something he gave you.”

“I’m telling you, Nick, I can’t think of anything. You think I’d ever hold out on you, with Gabe’s life at stake?”

“Of course not. Not knowingly. Not consciously. But I need you to think really hard.”

“I will.”

“And give me the chance to find these guys. The only solution is to flush them out and neutralize them.”

“ ‘Neutralize’? Meaning what, exactly?”

“I’ll know when I get there. Have a little confidence in me, please.”

She paused, swallowed hard. “All right,” she said. “But one more threat-one more phone call or e-mail or anything like what happened today, and I’m taking Gabe and driving as far away from here as I can.”

“Deal.”

She reached out her hand, and we shook. Once, up and down, firmly. Then for the first time she noticed Gabe’s notebook in my other hand. “He gave that to you?”

“He just wants my expert opinion.”

“Why you?”

“No idea,” I said.

“I’m his mom, for God’s sake.”

“Maybe that’s why he didn’t want you to see it.”

The doorbell rang, and she looked at me, her eyes wary. “Who could that be?”

“Merlin again. And Dorothy, a colleague of mine at work. They’re here to sweep the house.”

“Sweep it…?”

“For electronic devices. Hidden cameras and microphones, all that sort of thing. And I’m going to have them start in Gabe’s room.”

“Gabe’s room? I don’t want him to know about that video thing, Nick. He’ll freak out.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “At first. But give him a little credit. He can handle it.”

“You have no idea what it’s like to have a kid,” she said.

“Can’t argue with that.”

“It’s like you go from all-powerful to powerless. You-you produce this being that you want to protect with all of your heart and all of your strength, but then you discover that you can’t. You realize that at some point you just can’t protect them anymore.”

“You know what you can do?” I said softly. “If you really want to protect Gabe and yourself?”

“What?”

“Open up. Level with me. Whatever you’re hiding, you need to let me knowwhat it is.”

56.

Walter McGeorge, aka Merlin, was small and compact, like a lot of Special Forces guys. He had a black buzz cut, a porcine nose, and a pencil-thin mustache. He had deep vertical furrows carved into his forehead, which made him look permanently angry.

I helped him carry his equipment upstairs to Gabe’s room: a couple of ridged aluminum cases lined with black polyurethane egg-crate foam and something that looked like a big old video camera out of the early eighties on a tripod.

Gabe gaped as we entered. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but we need to borrow your room for a while.”

“For what?”

“Your mom will explain everything,” I said.

FOR A few moments I watched Merlin moving something that looked like a metal detector or a small minesweeper along the wall. It was wired to a pair of black headphones he was wearing.

“You haven’t found anything yet?”

“Nothing. You sure there’s something here?”

“Positive.”

“This here’s our top-of-the-line spectrum analyzer. Costs a fortune. Sees RF signals in real time. Stuff you normally can’t detect.”

“And it’s not finding anything.”

“Right.”

“Meaning there aren’t any wireless bugs, right?”

“Apparently not. Nothing transmitting right now, anyway. But that thermal-imaging camera over there?”-he pointed at the thing on the tripod-“that’s laboratory-grade instrumentation. I mean, that baby can pick up hot spots in the walls to, like, one-eighteen-thousandth of a degree.”

“And nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“If you do find anything, don’t you expect it’s going to be a GSM bug?”

He nodded. “If it’s really Paladin, yeah. They use government stuff.” The old days, when the guys monitoring an eavesdropping device had to sit in the back of a van on the street close enough to pick up the transmission, were over. Instead the state-of-the-art bugs used the same technology you find in cell phones. They were the guts of cell phones, in fact, minus the keypad and the fancy trappings. You could call in to them from anywhere in the world, and they’d answer silently and switch on their microphones, and you could listen in. From anywhere. They were smaller than a pack of cigarettes, sometimes as small as two inches long, and if you wired them to an existing power line, they’d work forever.

They broadcast using cell-phone signals, but only when they were on. So he used the thermal camera to look for any electronic circuitry. Something about the tiny amounts of heat generated by electricity moving through the diodes.

“No luck with that thing either?”

“Nonlinear junction detector,” he said. “Sends out a high-frequency pulse, then analyzes the harmonics that bounce back. Should find any electronic devices even if they’re off.”

“And?”

“I found plenty.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Clocks, telephones, DVD player-a bunch. Just no bugs. Am I allowed to smoke in here?”

“No.”

“Prisons use these bad boys to find contraband cell phones hidden in the walls or floors.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. But I’m telling you, Heller, there’s nothing.”

I tried to help by searching the old-fashioned way-a visual inspection, looking for minute traces in the walls and ceiling. I unscrewed light-switch plates and power-outlet covers and the ceiling light fixture. There were all sorts of ways to conceal cameras these days in things like air purifiers and wall clocks and lamps. There was no end to the possible hiding places.

Merlin and I both worked fast, but half an hour later, he sounded discouraged. “Nothing,” he said.

“Some Merlin you are,” I said.

“Are we done here?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Not until you find it.”

57.

Icould hear Dorothy Duval’s raucous laugh as I entered the kitchen. Lauren was making coffee, and Dorothy was helping, or maybe just female bonding. But I knew that Dorothy had a hidden agenda: She was putting Lauren at ease, cajoling her out of her state of anxiety.

“You’ve been hiding this girl from me,” Dorothy said, sipping from a mug.

“I never mix business and pleasure,” I said.

A throaty, knowing laugh. “Right. Tell me about it. You didn’t tell me she’s from C-Ville. I used to spend every summer there, at my grandma’s house.”

Lauren poured a mug of coffee from a glass carafe, the kind from one of those simple automatic drip coffeemakers, and she handed it to me. I took a sip. “Delicious,” I said. “How come I can’t make coffee this good?”

“Because you’re not using the right machine,” Lauren said.

I noticed the beat-up old Hamilton Beach coffee machine on the counter. “You’ve been hiding that from me. That one I know how to use.”

“Roger never liked having it out on the counter. He didn’t like the way it looked.”

She poured coffee into another stoneware mug. “How does your friend upstairs take his coffee?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “We used to boil the freeze-dried instant crap on a folding Esbit stove. Sometimes we’d just chew the coffee granules right out of the MRE bag. If we were in a hurry. But his tastes might have gotten more refined since Afghanistan. Where’s Gabe?”

“In the living room, reading.”

“You told him?”

She nodded.

“How’d he take it?”

“He said he wasn’t surprised.”

“Nick,” Dorothy said, “can I talk to you for a second?”

“You found something?”

“Right.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I want Lauren to hear this.”

Dorothy looked from me to Lauren, then back at me. “None of my malware-detection kits picked up anything,” she said. “So I ended up having to put a box on the line-a network forensics appliance. I finally captured some encrypted traffic going out.”

“Encrypted?” I said.

“Bunch of hash marks. Nothing I can read.”

“We’re talking spyware?” Lauren said.

“That’s right,” Dorothy said. “Some pretty sophisticated code. Not a commercial, off-the-shelf product like eBlaster. Government-grade, looks like.”

“Government-grade?” Lauren said. “Meaning, it’s the government that’s doing this?”

“Or a government contractor with access to government code.”

“So every e-mail we get or send out, every website we visit-”

“Every single keystroke,” Dorothy said. “All my user names and passwords on all my e-mail accounts?”

“Right.”

“Paladin’s a government contractor, right?” Lauren asked me.

“The U.S. government’s their main customer.”

“But how could they have installed it? Does that mean they were inside the house?”

“Not necessarily,” Dorothy said. “They could have installed this program remotely. But honey, that video they sent you confirms they’ve been in your house. To plant the camera.”

Lauren nodded, bit her lip. “Did that other guy find the camera?” She pointed toward the ceiling.

“Not yet,” I said. “But he will.”

“I don’t understand how that video clip of Gabe could have dis appeared,” Lauren said. “How could they make it just disappear that way?”

Dorothy nodded. “I know what that is. That’s something called VaporLock. It’s a kind of private web-based mail system. For recordless electronic communication. Once you open it, the sender’s name disappears, then the message disappears.”

“Okay,” Lauren said. “What’s the point of this spyware? They think Roger might contact me, so they want to read any e-mail I might get from him? That it?”

“Maybe.”

“So doesn’t that tell you they think he’s alive?”

I was silent for ten seconds or so. “Possibly,” I said.

“And maybe that they really don’t have him? They don’t know where he is?”

“I suppose,” I conceded. “But there’s a more likely explanation.”

“Which is?”

“That they think you have something. And they want it.”

“And I keep telling you I have no idea what that could possibly be.”

“Maybe it’s money,” I suggested. “A lot of it.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Or information. Files.”

“Well, I don’t have anything. Believe me, I don’t. They may think I do, but I don’t.”

“Okay,” I said, though I didn’t know what to believe.

“Another question,” Lauren said. “When parents put spyware on their kids’ computers, they sometimes get reports on their e-mail at work or whatever, right? So can’t you tell where this program is sending the reports? By looking at the IP address? Won’t that tell you who’s doing this?”

Dorothy grinned slowly, looked at me. She had a slight gap between her front teeth that I always found cute.

“This girlfriend is extremely clever,” she said. “I see computer ignorance doesn’t run in the family.”

“We’re only related by marriage, not blood,” I pointed out.

“Clearly,” Dorothy said. “The packets are all going out to a botnet in Ukraine-probably one of those Eastern European guys who’s put together this illegal network of thousands of infected Windows XP computers all over the world into a Tier 2 Network.”

“I think I get some of what you’re saying,” I said. “I assume the data going out of the DSL line here isn’t actually ending up on some illegal network in Ukraine, right?”

“Right. It’s just a way to hide where it’s really going. So I suggest we keep all the spyware and the bugs in place, and I keep monitoring the traffic until I figure out its final destination. If I can.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said. “Do whatever it takes. I’m going upstairs.” I took the mug of coffee from the counter. “Merlin’s gonna drink it black whether he likes it that way or not.”

MERLIN STILL hadn’t found anything.

“If there was something here,” he said, “it’s gone now. How do you know that video wasn’t taken a week ago? A month ago, even?”

“I don’t,” I admitted.

While he searched, I sat at Gabe’s desk chair and read his graphic novel. I was astonished at the quality of the drawings. I had never been a big comic-book reader, but for a couple of years, as boys, Roger and I used to exchange old Batman and Superman comics, the occasional Green Lantern and Captain America. And Gabe’s drawings were at least as accomplished as those. He’d done them with an ultrafine-tip black pen, done shadows with cross-hatching. The lettering looked almost professional, too.

But it was the story that blew me away.

He’d titled it The Escape Artist. It was the story of a strong-jawed superhero called The Cowl, who fought evildoers in the nation’s capital, which was a decaying version of Washington, D.C. The Cowl-so named because he wore a black cowl like Batman-was a dead ringer for me. He even had my black hair, although Gabe had given me a Supermanesque whorl on my forehead, a gleaming forelock, which I don’t have. The Cowl had a Dark Past, which seemed to involve a dead wife, and had a dark, brooding temperament. He had a fortress of solitude, which bore more than a passing resemblance to my real-life loft in Adams Morgan. He was able to break out of any prison, escape confinement like Houdini, and he basically beat the crap out of bad guys, most of whom were evil, oversized adolescent boys who dressed like the boys at St. Gregory’s, with blazers and slacks, but also seemed to have come out of the pages of The Lord of the Flies.

His mother didn’t make a single appearance. The archvillain was named Dr. Cash, who looked an awful lot like Roger except that he was hideously deformed, had blue skin, the result of taking colloidal silver. He was the CEO of an evil corporation who had somehow taken over the government in a postapocalyptic coup d’etat and now tyrannized the land from his underground bunker beneath the crumbling ruins of the White House. He was often seen with a busty blonde on his arm, a villainess named Candi Dupont.

Candi Dupont.

Not a name you could easily forget.

Candi Dupont was the woman Roger had been having an affair with, whose abortion he had paid for. An alias, surely: Dorothy had turned up nothing on her in any database. But whatever her real name, obviously Gabe knew about her as well.

Dorothy entered the room, interrupting my reading. “You didn’t turn the kid’s computer back on, did you?”

I closed the notebook.

“No,” Merlin said.

“Because I thought I turned off both computers, and I’m definitely detecting outgoing network traffic. Something’s still transmitting a signal over the Internet.”

“Thanks,” Merlin said mordantly. “That helps a whole lot.”

“That tells us there’s something in the house,” I said. “Something that’s broadcasting, right?”

Merlin shrugged. “So we keep looking.”

“Man, this kid’s Richie Rich,” Dorothy said, ogling all Gabe’s stuff. “Look at all this junk. He’s got video games and iPods and boom boxes and a Game Boy and a Nintendo Wii and a PlayStation 3 and an Xbox 360. And I thought my nephew was spoiled. Did you check all the electronics?”

“Yeah,” Merlin said. “I found a number of semiconductors.”

“Yeah, thanks,” she replied. “All electronic devices have semiconductors. I get your sarcasm. But isn’t that where you actually want to look? In with a lot of other electronic circuits?”

“Yeah,” Merlin said, unwilling to let go of the sarcasm. “That’s just where I’d hide a camera. In a Game Boy that gets moved around everywhere.”

“I don’t know why you’re even bothering to look over there,” Dorothy told him. “The camera angle’s all wrong. Lauren described the shot to me, and that camera’s gonna be just above eye level.” She sliced the air with her hand flat, moving back and forth along a precise horizontal.

I nodded, approached Gabe’s desk, looked at the giant iPod/CD player with the built-in speakers. The one he put his iPod in to use as an alarm every morning. It was covered with a fine film of dust.

A small area on the front console, though, was dust-free.

Right around an LED light that didn’t seem to belong. I grasped the tiny bulb and pulled and out came the long black snake cable that was attached to it.

“Holy crap,” Merlin said.

“Mm-hm,” Dorothy said.

In a few minutes Merlin had carefully disassembled the CD player and placed the components on top of a pile of Gabe’s books. “Hoo boy,” he said excitedly. “This is really cool. I’ve never seen one of these ultraminis before. It’s a Misumi-a Taiwanese company. Hooked up to a wireless video IP encoder that takes the analog signal and transmits it over the Internet.”

“So how come you didn’t find it?” Dorothy said.

“Because they wrapped it in neoprene to hide the heat signature. Very clever. But how’d they know where to put it? They must have checked out the house in advance.”

I thought of the disabled sensors in Roger’s study and said, “For sure.” Then I looked at my watch. “Thank you, guys. I owe you big-time.”

“Just add it to my favor bank account,” Dorothy said.

“You got it.”

“Man, I’m looking forward to cashing in,” she said.

“Substantial penalty for early withdrawal,” I warned her as I walked toward the door. “I’ll catch up with you guys soon.”

“You have a date or something?”

“Nah,” I said. “I’m meeting an old buddy for a drink.”

58.

The Anchor Tavern was a dive bar’s dive bar a few blocks from Capitol Hill. There were dead animals on the wall. Wednesday was dollar-beer night, they had the best burgers in town, and they didn’t serve appletinis.

I sat for ten minutes in a red Naugahyde booth that was sticky and smelled sourly of spilled beer, waiting for a man named Neil Burris, a security officer with Paladin Worldwide.

I expected that in the time since I’d called him from the Albany airport, pretending to be Marty Masur, he’d done his due diligence. Which in his case probably meant not much more than asking around to find out what kind of money Stoddard Associates paid, then drooling when he found out.

Just when I was about to leave the bar, a compact, muscle-bound guy with ridiculously broad shoulders and a scruffy goatee approached my booth. He had the look of a tough guy gone soft. He wore a black nylon body-hugging muscle shirt that zipped up at the top. The point was probably to show off his shredded biceps and pecs, but it had the unfortunate side effect of displaying his muffin top.

“Hola,” he said. He didn’t even try to make it sound like Spanish. He reached his hand across the table and gave me a bone-crushing shake. “Neil Burris.”

“Marty Masur,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

“Real sorry I’m late. Couldn’t find parking.”

“It’s bad around here,” I said.

He slid into the booth across from me. Looked at me for a long moment. “Funny,” he said. “You don’t look like your picture.”

“I’ve been working out.”

He stared a little longer, then smiled slowly. His teeth were small and pointed and discolored. The brown was probably from chewing tobacco. “Listen, man,” he said. “This is, like, between us, right? I don’t want-”

“You don’t want anyone at Paladin to know we’re talking. Gotcha. We don’t either.”

“Good.”

I signaled for the waitress. “Koblenz won’t let you go without a fight, what I hear.”

“Well…” Neil said with a shrug and a slow, embarrassed smile.

“I mean, it is Koblenz who’s the real power there, right? Not Allen Granger?”

“Never met Granger, you wanna know the truth. He kinda keeps to himself down there in Georgia. Like a hermit or something. No one ever sees him.”

“Why, do you figure?”

His eyes slid from side to side, and he leaned closer. “What I hear, there’s guys who want to kill him.”

“I don’t get it. He runs the world’s largest private army. He’s got all the guards he needs, right?”

“Doesn’t help if the guys who wanna wax you work for you.”

“What do you mean?”

He nodded. “Oh yeah. For real. Remember a couple years back when there was that big mess over in Baghdad, eight or ten towel heads got shot, right? Civilians? Coupla Paladin guys got some serious heat for that.”

I vaguely remembered. Some Paladin security guards had fired at Iraqi civilians and killed them. “The victims’ families filed a lawsuit in U.S. courts, wasn’t that it?”

“Yeah. Screwed up big-time, man. Pentagon was threatening not to renew our contract, so Granger handed over the guys.”

“Handed over?”

“He coulda fought it if he wanted. But he made some deal with the government. Like, he said these guys are just bad apples, you know? Take ’em and do whatever, and that kinda crap won’t happen again. Well, a lotta Paladin guys just went whacko. We figured they’d always protect us, something bad happens. Like always.” He shook his head. “Way I heard it, some buddies of those guys, working Paladin security down in Georgia, tried to off Granger.”

“Off him? Like, kill him?”

“I don’t know, man. Just what I hear. Screwed up, huh?”

The waitress, a pretty young girl with spiky blond hair and multiple piercings in her earlobes, took our order. Burris introduced himself and attempted to flirt with her, but without success. Maybe it was the name. “Neil” is a perfectly good name, but not for a tough guy. He probably wished his name were Bruno or Butch or at least Jack.

“So here’s the deal, Neil,” I said. “Old Man Stoddard wants to expand. Build the brand. He wants to get into the Paladin business, and he’s looking for someone to spearhead that effort.”

“Spearhead it,” Burris said.

“Set it up for us. Means we need someone who knows the lay of the land.”

“The lay of the land,” Burris repeated. He was looking ner vous. I could almost see the thought balloon floating above his head, as if he were a cartoon character: You got the wrong guy. I’m just muscle. I don’t know that stuff.

But he didn’t want to miss out on a chance like this. So maybe he wasn’t qualified. Let the buyer beware.

I went on, “Business like this, you got one main customer, right? The U.S. government.”

“Right.”

“You gotta know who the players are. How to approach them. Know what I’m saying?”

He nodded. “Absolutely.”

“Gotta know the right palms to grease, you know? The old baksheesh.” I rubbed my fingers together to underscore the point.

“Speaking of which, you know, Paladin pays me in cash.”

“Cash? You serious? All you guys?”

“My guess, they don’t want records all over the place. Cash doesn’t leave a trail.”

“Cash? For real?”

“Not all of us. I don’t know, I think it has to do with, like, the fact that we’re independent contractors, not employees. I always figured it was some kinda scam, some way for them to avoid paying taxes, but I don’t ask too many questions. I like cash.”

“Can’t blame you.”

“That a problem for you?”

“I’m sure anything can be arranged,” I said.

A couple of minutes later, the spiky-haired waitress set two draft beers on the table in front of us. Budweisers. Thin and watery and almost flavorless, just the way I liked them.

We toasted each other, and I said, in a confiding tone, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but Jay Stoddard’s real desperate to get into this business, and soon. That means, if you can show me a sample of the wares, I can probably hold him up for a lot more than I told you on the phone. I mean, we might not be able to pay you in cash. Maybe, maybe not. But we’re talking three-quarters of a mil to start. Plus stock options.”

He was in midswallow, and some of the beer must have gone down the wrong way, because he started coughing, and his face turned red. He held up his palm to let me know he was okay, or maybe to tell me to hold on a minute. When he finally stopped coughing, he said, “I’m at your service, uh, Marty.”

59.

So what kind of sample you guys looking for?” Burris said.

“Names, mostly. Something I can take back to Stoddard so he can feel confident you know who the real players are.” I smiled. “See, you don’t need to do a résumé. All you need is a name or two.”

“I could probably find out,” he said.

“You don’t know?”

Hastily, he said, “I’m kinda like-I like to leave that kinda stuff to others, you know? But I can ask around.”

“Sounds like you’re out of the loop.”

“Nah, nah, it’s not like that. I just focus on other stuff, mostly.” He was making it up and not doing a particularly convincing job of it. He didn’t know.

I sidled out of the booth and made to stand up. I threw down a twenty. “Beer’s on me, Neil. Sorry I wasted your time.”

He reached out, grabbed me by the elbow. “Slow down, there. I can find out anything for you.” He waved me close. “Like, there’s all kinds of dirt.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Seriously. I can ask around,” he said.

“Ask around?” I said. “Come on, man. Anyone can ask around.”

Burris shook his head emphatically. “Not if you want the good stuff. The serious, secret stuff-that’s real protected, like.”

“Protected,” I scoffed.

“For real.” He lowered his voice still more. “Koblenz keeps this, like, smart card in his office safe. He uses it to get onto the secure part of the network, so he can make payments and transfers and so on.”

I was intrigued, but I looked both bored and skeptical. “Yeah, every major corporation gives those out. It’s a key fob-a secure hardware card that generates random one-time passwords you type in. Big deal.”

“No. No. I’m not talking about those. This is a smart card with a cryptochip-thingy embedded in it. It’s like a whole new generation. Like superduper high-tech. I heard about it. Developed by the NSA. No one else in the private sector has it yet.”

“So, Neil,” I said, “can you get this for me? As a sample?”

“I think so. I might be able to. His secretary has the combination to his safe-I think I know where she keeps it.”

I looked away. I couldn’t have looked less interested. “Uh-huh.”

“I’m pretty sure I can,” Burris said, handing me back my twenty. “Oh, and hey-beer’s on me. Really.”

He slapped down a crisp new one-hundred-dollar bill.

I looked at it, couldn’t help glancing at the serial number on the front. It began with DB. Just like the ones in the shipment I’d recovered outside Los Angeles.

Burris probably figured I’d be impressed he had hundred-dollar bills to throw around. “Like I told you,” he said. “I get paid in cash.”

His cell phone rang, and he glanced down at it. “Gotta get it,” he told me. “The boss.” He picked it up, and said, “Yes, Carl.”

I stood up, gave him an abrupt wave. Pantomimed we’ll talk by making a little phone symbol out of my left hand and holding it to my cheek.

He gave me a thumbs-up.

I fought my way through the bar, twisting and turning and squeezing between pods of very different types of patrons: neighborhood customers in HVAC uniforms with name patches sewn on, and Hill rats in charcoal suits from the Men’s Wearhouse, letting off steam after a long day of making photocopies and kissing butt in some minor congressman’s office.

As I stepped out of the bar and into the refreshing cool air, I noticed a commotion behind me. Neil Burris was bulldozing a path through the crowd, elbowing people aside.

“Hey,” he said, following me out onto the street. “You’re not Marty Masur.”

“No?” A couple of motorcycles roared by.

Burris drew so close to me I could smell his foul breath. “You’re that guy’s brother,” he said. “You’re Nick Heller.”

60.

Cars whooshed by. Somewhere nearby a dog was barking. A couple of girls in halter tops were smoking, which they couldn’t do inside the Anchor. A gang of overgrown frat boys were jeering, and one of them was pissing in the alley next to the bar. The restrooms there were so malodorous that no one ever used them more than once.

Somehow Carl Koblenz had learned that I was meeting with Burris. I had no idea how, but I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised.

“And I thought we looked nothing alike,” I said.

“You son of a bitch.”

“Where is he, Neil?” A shot in the dark. Maybe he knew; maybe he didn’t.

Burris answered with an obscenity, and suddenly he lunged at me. I saw him move a split second too late. He slammed me against the side of a building, cracking my head hard against the brick. With his right hand, he clamped my throat just below the Adam’s apple and pincered hard. He was strong, even stronger than I expected, and he put his whole overdeveloped body into it. At the same time, he pinioned my left arm with his right shoulder and grabbed my right hand, just above the wrist, and jammed his right knee into the inside of my leg.

Now I knew for sure he’d really been a Navy SEAL. He was doing everything by the book.

Which was good, actually.

His face was so close to mine that I could feel the bristles of his goatee. “Your brother…” he said, breathing hard, “wasn’t as smart as he thought.” His face was red with exertion, and he sounded short of breath. “He thought he could rip us off and get away with it. Not gonna happen.” Flecks of saliva sprayed my eyes.

Then I relaxed my shoulders and contracted my neck to make it hard for him. I stared back into his adrenaline-crazed eyes. Blinked slowly. Said nothing.

He expected me to fight back. He didn’t expect me to do nothing, so that’s what I did. Nothing.

For a few seconds, anyway.

“Your brother ticked off some very powerful people. He got too greedy. Went too far. So get this straight, Heller. Anything your brother left behind-like files or documents or anything-you’re gonna want to share it with us. You hold back, and there’s going to be collateral damage. I’m talking family members. You decide if it’s worth it. Believe me, you don’t want to make an enemy out of us.”

He had that triumphant look of someone who knew he’d overpowered his opponent. He was intoxicated with confidence.

I shot my left hand out and jammed it against his right shoulder, which momentarily eased his hold on my throat, while I grabbed his right hand with my left and twisted his wrist clockwise. He let out a roar, scrambled his feet around to try to gain some purchase, but I levered his arm down and around, sending him sprawling to the gravel-strewn pavement.

I had his right hand in both of mine, the fingers pulled back so far that he only had to move too suddenly and his wrist would snap. He was helpless, and he knew it. But he was too stupid, and too truculent. He tried to swing his legs around, so I kneed him in the face-harder than I intended to, actually. He roared, and I heard something snap, and I knew that I’d broken his nose, perhaps even a cheekbone as well. Blood gushed down the lower part of his face.

“Was that a threat?” I said. “Because I really hate threats.”

He bellowed, and I torqued his wrist around some more just to remind him of the price of any further struggle. He let loose with a string of obscenities, but his heart wasn’t in it, I didn’t think. He didn’t seem to have much energy anymore.

Breathing thickly through the blood in his mouth, he said something about what he planned to do to Lauren.

“I don’t think so,” I replied. “Not with only one hand.”

I grasped his right hand by the fingers and pulled them all the way back. His wrist made a muted snick noise when it broke, not the loud snap I expected. He let out a loud, agonized scream. His right hand-his gun hand, I assumed-dangled uselessly, like a marionette off its strings.

Burris summoned a final burst of strength, tried to rear up, but I kneed him in the chest, heard a few ribs crack. His head snapped backwards, reflexively, slamming into the pavement.

He went uhhh, looked dazed. All the wind went out of him.

I stood up, brushed the dirt and debris from my pants, surveyed the damage.

His eyes were going in and out of focus. He was hovering somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness. His head had collided with the asphalt pretty hard.

“Hey, Neil,” I said.

His eyes shifted slightly in my direction. I doubted he could see me very clearly, but I was sure he could hear me.

He said nothing.

I leaned over him, jamming my knee into his solar plexus, and said softly, “What do you know about my brother?”

He blinked, once. He grunted, barely audibly, the faintest indication that he was listening to me, though he couldn’t form words. A small bubble of blood formed at the corner of his lips.

I knew I wasn’t going to get an answer out of him even if he knew anything.

I’m not one of those guys who get a perverse plea sure from beating people up. Often it makes me feel guilty. But inflicting pain on Neil Burris, I have to admit, was not entirely unpleasurable.

My satisfaction faded somewhat a few minutes later, when I crossed the street and found the Defender with a deep white gouge running across the driver’s side door all the way to the rear quarter panel. It looked like someone had keyed it, but with a screwdriver. Maybe some drunken frat kid.

It was annoying, but I had larger concerns. I took out my phone and dialed the number that Woody the cargo guy had given me in L.A. The number that belonged to Carl Koblenz.

I got a generic phone-company female voice telling me the number I’d just called, and after the tone I left a message for Carl Koblenz.

As I was finishing my message, another call was coming in. The caller ID showed “private,” but I picked it up anyway.

It was Frank Montello. My information broker. “That phone number your father called from prison?” he said.

“Yeah?”

“It’s a prepaid disposable cell phone. Bought with cash, I bet.”

Very good, Roger, I thought. I’d expect nothing less. “Does the cell provider have billing records?”

“What do they need billing records for? It’s prepaid, right? Ten bucks, twenty, fifty-whatever. They don’t need to keep track of the calls.”

“They do sometimes. All I want to know is where Roger was when he received a collect call from my father.”

“No go. These cheapo phones don’t have GPS locator chips in them. Most don’t. Anyway, this one didn’t.”

“What about the location of the cell tower where the phone was when the call came in.”

“They don’t record that data, not on these disposable phones. I get a feeling your brother’s going to a lot of trouble to conceal his location.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. “So how about one more job?”

61.

By the time I got back to Roger’s house, Lauren and Gabe were asleep. I cleaned up the nasty cuts and scrapes on my face and neck with some peroxide, checked to make sure that the alarm was set properly and the house secure. Then I crashed for a few hours. I had an important meeting to prepare for.

THE HEADQUARTERS of Paladin Worldwide was in southern Georgia, on ten thousand acres of swampland that also served as a training facility. This was where Allen Granger, Paladin’s chairman, apparently spent most of his time.

But you couldn’t do business with the U.S. government and not keep a base in or near Washington, D.C. So Paladin had a small office in Falls Church, Virginia, on the seventh floor of the Skyview Executive Center on Leesburg Pike, out of which they ran most of their government operations, their lobbying efforts, and so on.

This time I parked on the third level of the underground garage. But instead of taking the elevator right up to the seventh floor, I walked up to the street level and took a leisurely stroll around the outside of the building. Checked out the corporate landscaping, the artificial copses of trees out back, the contours of the shallow plot of land on which the building had been sited. Standing on the highest promontory I could find, I took out a pocket monocular spotting scope, located the bank of windows belonging to the offices of A.G. Holdings, which was either Paladin or Paladin’s holding company-but for all intents and purposes, the same thing. After all, it was where Carl Koblenz worked, where he’d told me to come. For about twenty minutes I watched as much of the comings and goings as I could see from that angle.

It wasn’t like in the movies. I didn’t see much. I was pretty sure I saw Koblenz-I’d seen his picture on Paladin’s website-sitting at his desk, conferring with his assistant and a couple of large men. In any case, I saw enough to get a sense of the flow of office traffic.

Then I entered the lobby and headed over to the directory sign. Nowhere did the name “Paladin” appear. On the seventh floor was a Japanese intellectual property firm and A.G. Holdings. Paladin’s holding company. Or maybe just another name for Paladin. It made sense. Maybe they didn’t want it publicly known that Paladin’s offices were here. They probably didn’t want protesters or crazed intruders trying to storm the gates.

“Hey, cookie man!”

I turned, saw my old friend the security guard, gave him a smile and a wave.

“Got any more free samples for me?” he said.

“Next time, I promise. I have an appointment with Paladin. Carl Koblenz.”

“Oh, yeah? Excellent. Bunch of real big guys work there. Betcha they’ll go crazy for your wife’s cookies.” So: as I thought. A.G. Holdings was Paladin.

I gave him my name, and he printed out a security pass for me to stick on the front of my shirt.

I WAS wearing jeans and a slightly grubby polo shirt, partly to remind Koblenz that I wasn’t on official Stoddard Associates business. And to let him know I wasn’t playing by the rules of the suit-and-tie world. Also because it was more comfortable than a suit.

The elevator rose smoothly and swiftly to the seventh floor. I got out into a small lobby with dark wooden doors at either end. Each door had a brass plaque. One said NAKAMURA & PARTNERS. A law firm, according to the lobby directory sign. The other said A.G. HOLDINGS.

A small black dome camera, almost undetectable, was mounted high on the wall on Paladin’s side, but not on Nakamura & Partners’ side. That told me Paladin had their own private security system, in addition to whatever the building provided its tenants. I’d have expected nothing less. Mounted to the doorframe was a proximity-key reader, where Paladin’s employees would swipe to enter.

I pushed the lever handle down and entered a reception area with a long black granite desk.

The receptionist was a cute young blonde with carefully applied makeup and an expensive haircut.

“Mr. Heller?” she said.

“Right.”

“Please have a seat, and Mr. Koblenz will be right with you.”

Mounted to the front of the receptionist’s desk was the Paladin logo, a navy blue globe with white continents and white crosshairs superimposed over it. As if to say: We’re taking aim at the world.

Or maybe: Overcharging governments around the world and killing innocent civilians since 1994.

The globe reminded me of the one in the Gifford Industries lobby. Maybe all rapacious international firms were required to have a globe in their logo. The coffee table was black and marble and coffin-shaped. There wasn’t much to browse: the Post, the Wall Street Journal, a couple of security magazines. I glanced over the front page of the Journal, but I didn’t have time to read it before the inner door opened and three large guys entered.

One of them had his right hand in a splint.

62.

Hey there, Neil,” I said. “Gosh, what happened to your hand?” Neil Burris just glared at me. He was wearing a shopping-mall suit, not that there was anything wrong with that except that the tailoring obviously wasn’t included. It was too tight across the shoulders and too short in the arms and made him look like a circus gorilla.

The two other guys also wore cheap suits, which seemed to be the uniform of the Paladin security staff. One of them had longish hair, flecked with gray, and a droopy mustache. He had the lean muscular build of a Navy SEAL. The other looked like something out of WrestleMania-one of those mean-looking three-hundred-pound Ukrainians. He had a jar-head haircut. I recognized him, too.

He was the one who’d grabbed the surveillance-video DVD from me in Georgetown and in the process smashed my face against the window of my Defender.

The long-haired guy, who was older and seemed to be in charge, said, “You’re going to have to surrender your cell phone and BlackBerry.”

“ ‘Surrender’ them?” I said. That was smart of Koblenz, actually. Both cell phones and BlackBerrys could be used as eavesdropping devices. That told me that he wanted to speak freely, which was a good thing. He didn’t want whatever he said to be recorded or transmitted to anyone else.

The other two tried to stare me down. The pretty receptionist was examining a copy of People the way a rabbi might study the Talmud.

“Mr. Koblenz won’t meet with you if you have any RF equipment on your person.”

I shrugged. “I never surrender,” I said.

He handed me a gray RF-isolation pouch. I’d used pouches like this in secure facilities, but never outside of the military or intelligence community. I slid the BlackBerry and cell phone inside, closed the Velcro flap, and put the pouch into my leather portfolio.

“Thank you, sir,” said the long-haired one. He also seemed to be the only one allowed to speak. “This way, please.”

“This is great,” I said. “I even get my own entourage.”

The long-haired guy waved his proximity badge at the reader mounted next to the inside door. The door buzzed, and he pushed it open, and the two other guys fell in, Burris beside me and Andre the Giant behind. Either they were trying to intimidate me or they were concerned I might shoplift.

We walked down a hall that had the generic look of a midrange hotel.

“Hey, Neil,” I muttered to Burris. “I’m still waiting for your references.”

He stared straight ahead. His hand and arm were encased in a hard brace made out of some kind of lightweight resin over foam, with Velcro straps around the whole thing.

“Hello, Mr. Heller.”

Carl Koblenz was in his late forties but had a youthful appearance, despite the bags under his eyes. He had a pink scrubbed face and clear green eyes and sandy brown hair clipped short. He wore a natty blue blazer over a striped dress shirt and a regimental tie. Maybe the tie was from Eton, where Koblenz went to school, or maybe it was from Sandhurst, where he did his officer training. I’m not very good on British regimental ties.

“Carl,” I said. We grasped hands firmly. He grasped my hand at the knuckles, so I couldn’t shake back. A power move. He was probably full of them.

“Thank you for coming out to Falls Church.” He spoke so quietly I could barely hear him.

“Thank you for taking time to see me.”

When he’d returned my phone message, I insisted we meet in Washington, and naturally he refused. He was too important a man to leave his office, his power place. He said, in what I surmised was an Eton drawl, “I’m afraid I’ve got a full calendar of appointments, Mr. Heller. I wish I could get out of the office, but I can’t possibly.”

Just as I’d expected, and hoped, the same reverse psychology that works so well on a three-year-old worked on him, too. I reluctantly agreed to go to the Paladin office in Falls Church.

“I think you’ve met Neil, haven’t you?”

“Old friends,” I said. I reached out to shake Burris’s wounded hand, but he didn’t offer it.

“Don Taylor and Anatoly Bondarchuk,” he said, indicating the others. “I hope you don’t mind if they join us.” Bondarchuk, I assumed, was Andre the Giant.

Sitting at the desk right outside Koblenz’s office was a small, plain woman with short, mousy brown hair. The fake wood plaque on her desk said ELEANOR APPLEBY.

“You know, I do mind,” I said apologetically. “I was hoping we could have a candid talk.”

“I’d prefer to loop them in.”

“I’m not going to hurt you, Carl,” I said. “I promise.”

“Hurt me?” A twinkle of amusement came into his eyes. “You don’t know much about me, do you?”

I knew more about him by now than he probably wanted. I knew that after Eton and Sandhurst, he joined the Scots Guards, and was then selected to the SAS, the British equivalent of the Special Forces that was widely believed to be even tougher than our own, though of course I doubted that. He was sort of a legend during Desert Storm. He was part of the assault team that tried to sneak into an Iraqi communications facility, found themselves facing three hundred Iraqi soldiers, but planted the explosives anyway and pulled out of there under fire. Not a single SAS man was injured. A lot of rich Arabs in Kensington wanted to hire him to do their security after that, but instead he cashed in, joined an international mercenary firm. He ran guns for the government of Sierra Leone, in violation of the U.N. embargo. Then he got involved in a coup attempt against the president of Equatorial Guinea and was arrested and locked up for six months in Black Beach Prison in Malabo, which made the Alta-mont Correctional Facility look like Canyon Ranch.

“Enough not to mess with you,” I said with a generous smile, and he smiled back. With his hand on my shoulder, he guided me into his office, which was as generic as the rest of the place. It smelled like old cigar smoke.

The three security guards filed in behind me. I stopped short, then turned around. “Thanks, guys,” I said. “You got me here safely. Well done. Now, your boss and I have some personal business to discuss.”

Koblenz shook his head, sighed, and said, “All right, mates, wait outside, please.”

He sat behind his desk, I sat in the chair in front of his desk, and he said, “Well, you’ve certainly got quite the track record.”

“Lies, all lies,” I said modestly.

I noticed his office safe, where-according to Neil Burris-he stored the smart card with the embedded cryptochip that enabled access to the most secure layer of the Paladin computer network. The safe was black, about as tall as his desk, and looked like a three-or four-drawer model. An electronic keypad. Formidable-looking.

Despite the great safecracking scenes we’ve all seen in movies, in reality it’s become extremely difficult to crack a high-security safe. The technology has evolved far too much in the last dozen or so years. But with the right plan, nothing was truly impossible.

“Hunting war criminals in Bosnia, huh? With some triple-top secret army unit-what was it, the ISA, right?”

“Couldn’t be all that secret if you know about it.”

He’d done his homework. The Intelligence Support Activity was a classified military intelligence unit that roamed Bosnia looking for Serbian war criminals. Snatch-and-grab strikes on “high-value targets,” as we called them. I never talked about what I’d done in Bosnia or Iraq during the first Gulf War, not to anyone. So Paladin obviously had some excellent sources deep inside the Pentagon.

“What you did to that Serb guy… Draškovi?” His pronunciation was excellent. He shook his head, smiled. “Well done.” An admiring, conspiratorial chuckle.

I said nothing. Just pulled out a folder of photographs and handed it to him.

One was a close-up of the license plate on the Econoline van in which one of his guys had abducted Roger. The other was a close-up of the same guy’s face. The third was a medium view showing Roger and his abductor next to the van.

“Your employee was careful not to let his license plate be seen by the bank’s surveillance camera,” I said, “but he didn’t think about the gas station having its own security cameras.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve seen the tape.”

Well, that’s a start, I thought.

“Am I supposed to know what this is about?” he asked.

“It’s about fifteen years in prison for abduction,” I said. “For you and for your boss. And millions of dollars in lost government business. If you had him killed, well, I think we’re looking at forty years to life.”

“You might want to be a bit more careful about tossing around legal threats.”

“I have no interest in the legal process.” I folded my arms and gave him a lethal smile. “See, I just want my brother back.”

63.

Koblenz went quiet for a few seconds, seemed to be thinking. He blew out air through pursed lips. “Where do I begin, Heller?”

“Maybe with the container of cash in Los Angeles. You could start there. I’m sure Allen Granger would love to hear about that.”

“So much ground to cover.”

“I’ll bet. Or else we could talk about my brother’s attempts to extort money from you. I’m sure it seemed a lot easier just to get rid of the guy than risk exposure of all the kickbacks you give the Pentagon.”

He shook his head, looked mildly amused. “Ah, well, let’s see.” He held up the picture, then let go. It fluttered and slid across his desktop, finally landing on the floor. “First of all, I have no idea who this fellow is. The other one is obviously your brother.”

“We’re running a search right now,” I bluffed. “The PATRIOT Act makes it much easier these days. That and facial-recognition software.”

“Well, let me knowwhat you find. And if you find the guy, maybe you could ask him why he stole a license plate off of one of our vehicles.”

“You can do better than that, Carl.”

“We don’t own a single Econoline van, Heller.”

“Who doesn’t? Paladin? Or one of your twelve subsidiaries?”

“More than twelve. But no. No Econoline vans. I assure you, Heller, we didn’t abduct your brother. Although I do wish we’d thought of it.”

“I hope you’re not denying that’s your license plate,” I said.

“I can neither confirm nor deny,” Koblenz said with a wry smile. “I can barely remember the license-plate numbers of my own cars. But the prefix on the plate suggests it’s one of ours, so I’m not going to argue. You’ll find it’s registered to either a Hummer or an Escalade, though. As for who switched the plates, well, I have no idea.”

“The D.C. police aren’t going to care what kind of vehicle it belongs on.”

“I doubt that seriously,” Koblenz said. “And as for the cash-well, all I can say is, you have my deepest thanks. You’re every bit as good as Jay Stoddard said you are.”

“A billion dollars in cash,” I said. “That should about cover your off-the-books payroll for a month or two.”

“Guilty as charged. But surely you don’t think we’re the only security firm in Baghdad who had to pay cash bribes to Iraqi officials to get things done. It was like Nigeria over there.” He slid a cigar box across the expanse of desk. “Have you forgotten how it worked, Heller? It was a cash economy. The biggest dispenser of cash bribes was the U.S. government. I’d love to see them try to prosecute. Have a Cuban?”

I shook my head. “No, thanks.”

“Are you sure? Hoyo de Monterrey Double Coronas. Handmade in Cuba by only the most skilled torcedoras. Totalmente a mano.”

“No, thanks.”

“Your father’s favorites. Though I don’t imagine he gets much of a chance to smoke them these days.” He selected one, took a guillotine clipper from his desk, held the cigar at eye level, then decisively circumcised it.

I paused, smiled, thought of at least three possible rejoinders. Then I took one of his cigars and studied it for a few seconds before handing it back to him. “My father, whatever his flaws, would never smoke counterfeit cigars.”

“Counterfeit? I don’t think so, Heller.” He flicked a silver butane lighter and held the end of the cigar near the flame, rotating it slowly before putting it in his mouth and drawing on it slowly like a baby enjoying his first reassuring suck on a pacifier.

I pointed to the green-and-white tax stamp on the left front side of the box. “Put it under a blacklight and you’ll see. You won’t see the micro-printing above REPÚBLICA DE CUBA. That’s not a Cuban Government Warranty Seal.”

Wreathed in smoke, he examined the box suspiciously. “You can’t be serious.” He sounded uncertain.

“Sorry. Shouldn’t have said anything. Didn’t mean to spoil it for you. You’d never have known the difference.”

He stared at me through narrowed, glittering eyes.

I continued, “It took me a while to figure out why you’d hire the security director of Argon Express Cargo to steal your own shipment of cash. Until I realized that you didn’t want U.S. Customs discovering the cash, maybe on a random inspection. So you arranged a bogus theft. To make sure Paladin wasn’t charged with bulk-cash smuggling by some government bureaucrat.”

“I like your theory.”

“Thank you.”

“The only hole in it, of course, is that the U.S. government hired us to round up the cash in Baghdad and ship it back. Everything was aboveboard, or at least as much as it can be with the government.” He smiled.

“Sorry. Your mistake was giving Elwood Sawyer your cell-phone number as an emergency contact.”

“And on that slender reed you’re building a case against me? That someone gave him my cell-phone number? Now I’m wondering whether Jay Stoddard gives you too much credit.”

“No doubt,” I said.

“And as for your brother, well, he simply took on the wrong people.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He probably meant to go after Mother Teresa instead.”

“The hellbat of Calcutta is dead, alas,” Koblenz said with a lopsided grin. “Though I always wanted to have a tablecloth made out of her sari. Do we pay kickbacks to certain influential individuals in the Pentagon? Sure.”

“You admit it.”

“Well, not on the record, no, of course not. I’m not that stupid.”

“How much money did he demand from you for silence?”

“Not a cent, as far as I know.”

“Then why was my brother such a threat to you?”

“Who says he was a threat?”

“ ‘I got a stone in my shoe, Mr. Corleone,’ ” I said, quoting from the third Godfather movie. Another Stoddard favorite, but I liked it, too.

He got the reference. “As I said, we had nothing to do with your brother’s disappearance. Whoever’s on that surveillance tape, it wasn’t us. Do a little legwork, and you’ll see.” He smiled. “And no, we didn’t give your brother a poisoned cannoli either. Why would we?”

“Maybe for the same reason your goons are threatening to kidnap Roger’s son. Or e-mailing videos to his wife. And the spyware and the video cameras you planted in his house? The data went out to some Eastern European botnet and eventually right back to Paladin. Which I’ll admit took us a lot of digging. But every step was documented.” Only half of that was true. Dorothy still hadn’t been able to figure out where the network traffic ended up after it went to that Ukrainian network. But let him think we were more on top of things than we actually were.

He shook his head. “I don’t know anything about any surveillance device or any Eastern European… what ever. But arguendo, as the lawyers say-just for the sake of argument-let’s say my employees have been applying pressure on your brother’s wife. Why would they do that if we’d taken Roger prisoner? Where’s the sense in that?”

“Because he left something behind, and you want it.”

“Now you’re starting to make sense. You’re half-right.”

“Am I?”

“Absolutely. He does have something we want. That’s absolutely true. But I doubt he left it behind. That doesn’t fit with my understanding of your brother’s character. Though maybe that’s presumptuous. You know him far better than we do. Am I wrong to assume that he takes after your father?”

“What’s your point?”

He spun around in his chair and took a brown file folder from a wire rack on the credenza behind him next to a couple of generic office plants. He opened it, took out a sheet of paper, and looked at it for a moment. Then he handed it to me.

It was a fax from a bank in the Caymans called Transatlantic Bank & Trust (Cayman) Limited, located on Mary Street in George Town, Grand Cayman. A copy of a copy of a copy, festooned with smudges and photocopier artifacts. It was a letter from Roger, on Gifford Industries letterhead, to the bank’s manager. A letter of instruction.

Roger was instructing the bank manager to move two hundred and fifty million dollars from one account-a subsidiary of Paladin whose name I recognized-to an account in his own name.

“What does that look like to you?” he said.

“A forgery.”

He shrugged, snorted quietly. “That’s right, Heller. We have teams of forgers at work creating phony documents just for you.” His sarcasm was subtle. “Now do you see? Starting to recognize your brother’s modus operandi? Steal a bunch of money, then, when you realize that you’ve messed with the wrong guys, do the cowardly thing and run? Wonder where he got that from.”

“Screw you.” I no longer felt bad about making up that story about his cigars.

“Oh, believe me, it’s the truth. Maybe to Victor Heller’s sons that’s nothing more than loose change you find under your sofa cushions. But not to me. And certainly not to Allen Granger.”

“Roger worked for Gifford Industries. Not for Paladin. He wouldn’t even have had the legal authority to make a transfer.”

“Sure he did.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” I said.

“Your brother had Leland Gifford’s proxy.”

“What does Gifford have to do with Paladin?”

Koblenz tipped his head to one side. “I’m disappointed you don’t know.”

“Know what?”

“Gifford Industries is our parent company. Gifford owns Paladin. Has done for five months.”

At that point I didn’t know what to say. I just looked at him.

“This is not public information, obviously,” he said. “As a privately held corporation, Gifford isn’t required to tell anyone about the acquisition. But Allen was looking to sell for years. So it’s not just me or Allen Granger who wants this money back. It’s Leland Gifford, too. And the gentlemen out there. They each have a significant cash incentive to find your brother, and more important, to find the money he’s stolen. Call them bounty hunters. The profit motive always works.”

“Screw you,” I said. My vocabulary had become very limited all of a sudden.

“Roger’s wife may require a different type of incentive to cooperate.”

“That’s not going to work anymore.”

“Heller, there are so many ways to induce her to cooperate.”

“I don’t recommend you try any of them.”

“And I’d rather not. But I’ll do whatever it takes.”

I rattled the sheet of paper he’d just handed me. “If this is the only proof you have-”

“I don’t need proof,” Koblenz said calmly. “I’m like you-I have no interest in the legal process. We just want our money back. Whatever it takes. If there’s collateral damage, so be it.”

“That kind of sounds like another threat,” I said.

He shrugged. “It is what it is.”

I stood up, put the piece of paper down on the desk, tapped it with my forefinger. “It’s actually a good forgery. Though it would have been more persuasive if you got the bank’s SWIFT code right.”

The SWIFT code is a series of numbers or letters that banks use to identify themselves for the purpose of transferring funds.

“I see,” Koblenz said. “Since of course you have every SWIFT code memorized.”

“No, not at all,” I said. “I just know that the SWIFT code for Cayman Islands banks always includes the letters KY. Like K-Y Jelly. I’m sure you know what that is. And this one doesn’t have those letters. Close, but no cigar, as they say.”

Koblenz, who didn’t seem to be a guy who was ever at a loss for words, was momentarily silenced. He blinked a few times, and his mouth made fishlike motions.

Then I said, “You’ve been a big help, Carl. You’ve told me exactly what I wanted to know.”

He recovered, gave a tart, skeptical smile, and I went on, “See, I know where my brother is. I just wanted to find out whether you do. And now I’ve learned you don’t. So, thanks for the help.”

And I walked calmly out of his office.

64.

It was, of course, an outrageous bluff, pure and simple, though I soon wished I hadn’t done it.

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

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

Was Paladin Worldwide really owned by Gifford Industries?

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

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

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

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

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

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

That made sense, too.

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

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

I warned him that the whole idea was reckless.

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

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

Roger was tired of being poor.

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

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

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

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

Call it paranoia. Call it instinct.

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

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

Paranoia, I thought.

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

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

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

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

I heard a scraping sound, and I looked up.

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

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

65.

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

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

“What’s up, guys?” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Burris should have spent more time reading the manual.

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

But Burris was afraid to stand that close to me.

“Hands up and turn around,” Taylor said.

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

They only wanted to talk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At that instant, I stumbled, but not forward.

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

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

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

I heard a snap.

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

His Ruger clattered to the ground.

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

And then two things happened almost simultaneously.

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

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

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

66.

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

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

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

No choice.

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

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

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

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

“Tase him!” I heard. “Tase him, now!”

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

The profit motive always works.

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

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

Burris managed to seat the new cartridge into the Taser.

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

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

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

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

“Big mistake,” he said.

“Hey there, Neil. We meet again.”

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

“Yeah,” I said. “I think so.”

He didn’t reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, Taylor and his colleagues had bigger concerns than a nonfunctioning keycard.

I got in my car and headed out of the garage, and as I drove, I made a phone call.

67.

Leland Gifford, who could barely use a computer, had become a BlackBerry addict. He no longer went anywhere without it.

That was not quite true. He never left the building without it. When he was in the building, he usually left it in his office.

At the moment he was in a budget meeting with the CFO and the EVPs, down the hall in the Executive Conference Room. His BlackBerry was in its usual place in his office.

Normally, Lauren went into Leland’s office only to put notes and files on his desk. He didn’t like her in his office too much, which was understandable. He wanted some zone of privacy.

Noreen was typing something at her desk. Lauren glanced at her quickly, then stood and walked quickly to Leland’s office.

Her heart was pounding.

She knew that she was about to betray a man she loved deeply. But she also knew she had no choice. If she wanted to save her family-to save Roger’s life, to protect Gabe-she had to do this.

In life you sometimes have to make terrible choices, and she’d finally made hers. Her true family over her work family.

To anyone watching, she wasn’t doing anything furtive. She was going into her boss’s office. But she couldn’t help being nervous.

His BlackBerry wasn’t where he normally left it, on the left side of his desk.

“Can I get you a sandwich?”

Noreen was standing in the doorway, hands folded across her ample bosom.

“That would be great.”

Go, she thought. Just leave me alone.

“The usual? Cracked pepper turkey on wheat, mustard and lettuce, no cheese or mayo?”

“Perfect. Thanks.” She smiled, examined Leland’s desk, intent and focused and very, very busy. She straightened a pile of folders. Looked up, saw Noreen still standing there.

Noreen smiled back, seemingly about to say something, then turned and left.

She waited until she heard the glass doors of the executive suite close.

On the floor next to the desk, on the far side, Leland had left his briefcase. A battered old cordovan leather case handed down from his father.

She lifted the flap, found his BlackBerry in one of the front pockets.

Slipped it out.

Told herself that she was checking on something.

Her mouth was dry.

By then, Noreen would have been in the dining room downstairs, waiting on line for sandwiches. Leland was in his budget meeting. She looked at her watch. The meeting would go on for another twenty minutes at least.

She powered his BlackBerry on. The T-Mobile screen came up, then a message: HANDHELD IS LOCKED.

Since when did Leland use the password protection on his BlackBerry?

She clicked UNLOCK.

ENTER PASSWORD:

She hesitated. Entered the password he used for his regular office e-mail account. She’d helped him come up with something he’d remember: Don17. For his favorite Dallas Cowboys player, Don Meredith, the famous quarterback from the 1960s, plus his jersey number.

INCORRECT PASSWORD!

She clicked ok, and a message came up: ENTER PASSWORD (2/10):

Meaning the second try of ten. What would happen when she hit ten? She tried again, entered “DandyDon17.”

INCORRECT PASSWORD!

What was it? She tried several more variations on Don Meredith, kept getting INCORRECT PASSWORD!

On the fifth try, it told her to enter the word “blackberry” to keep going. She did, then tried other passwords. His daughter’s name. His wife’s name. His birthday. The year of his birth.

Before her tenth try, a warning came up. One more incorrect entry and the handheld would be wiped.

“No line today.”

Noreen was standing before her. She handed Lauren a sandwich wrapped in brown recycled chlorine-free deli wrap. “That’s Leland’s BlackBerry, isn’t it?”

Lauren felt a jolt in her stomach. Looked up, a bored expression on her face. “Oh, yeah,” she said with an exasperated sigh. “If he’s going to ask me to install a firmware update one more time…” She let her voice trail off. “Anyway, thanks.”

“Sure,” Noreen said, a suspicious look in her eyes. “Anytime.”

68.

My apartment was dusty and had that closed-up smell, since-between travel and staying at Lauren’s house-I had barely been there in weeks. But it made for a convenient command center. Merlin took the afternoon off-his boss didn’t mind, since the work had been slow-and this time I’d insisted he accept payment. We devised a plan, came up with a shopping list, then split up. It was a little like a scavenger hunt. A handful of disposable cell phones. A laser pointer from an office-supply store. From a hardware store, a couple of chandelier bulbs, a few bags of plaster of paris, some bell wire. From an auto-parts store, aluminum powder, which is used to stop leaks in radiators. From a supermarket, a couple of five-pound bags of granulated sugar and some vegetable oil. Three ski masks from a sporting-goods store. A Super Soaker pressurized water gun from a toy store.

The rest of the equipment was stuff Merlin had in his garage at home.

He was easily able to find white smoke grenades at a gun shop. By far the hardest item to find was potassium chlorate. It’s one of those chemicals that the U.S. government tries to control, particularly since 9/11, but Merlin was able to turn up a couple of dusty bags at a garden center, where it was sold as weed killer.

AT FIFTEEN minutes after midnight I was back at the office building on Leesburg Pike in Falls Church.

The ten-story building was mostly dark, but not completely. Lights were on in a few windows here and there, though none on the seventh floor. Paladin Worldwide’s Virginia office was a nine-to-five business.

I positioned myself at the back of the west wing of the building-the western leg of the inverted V-in the location I’d picked out earlier in the day. From there, behind a row of perfectly spaced trees that had been planted to provide an illusion of woods for the building’s tenants, I knew I wouldn’t be spotted if anyone happened to be looking out the window. Though at that time of night, there wasn’t likely to be anyone.

The mirrored blue glass skin of the building looked black and opaque in the moonlight. There was a little ambient light from the distant streetlights. The wind howled, gusting a few drops of rain. I looked up. The sky was black and murky and threatening. It appeared that it might really start coming down at any moment.

Much quieter here at midnight than it had been during the day, when the traffic on the Leesburg Pike was a constant high roar. Instead there was only the occasional blat of a motorcycle, the full-throated growl of a truck.

I looked at my watch, unzipped the nylon Under Armour duffel, and pulled out a small black sphere, soft and squishy.

A stress ball, roughly the size of a baseball. Lycra over a semisolid gel. Apparently squeezing this little ball helped office workers relieve the tensions of their workday.

I lobbed it at a second-floor window. It was dense enough to make a thud as it struck the glass, but not hard enough to break it.

Then I hurled a second one, and a third, and a fourth. All at the same window.

A few seconds later, I heard the rapid whooping klaxon, an alarm that was broadcast over a couple of sirens inside and out. The exterior windows were wired to glass-break detectors. That meant they’d detect the specific shock frequencies generated by breaking glass-or simply by the vibration caused by a good hard impact that didn’t actually break the glass.

I checked my watch again, then strolled over to the Defender, parked on a side street in direct view of the building’s main entrance. I got in and waited.

The security guard showed up nine minutes later.

He got out of his company vehicle, a Hyundai Sonata, the logo painted on the side. Middle-aged, a comb-over, gin-blossom face. A blue uniform. Armed only with a walkie-talkie. A retired cop, by the look of him, which meant that he’d do everything by the book.

He did.

He switched on a flashlight and walked around the perimeter of the building, shining his light up and down the glass exterior, looking for a broken window, for evidence of any intruders. Most office buildings don’t have glass-break sensors above the third floor, on the theory that no one’s going to break a window and try to enter that high up.

So he only had to check out the windows on the first two stories, which wouldn’t take long. Once he realized there weren’t any broken windows, he’d relax. He’d know he wasn’t dealing with a burglary or even an accident but a technical glitch of some sort. Something had set off the glass-break sensor, he’d figure. A stray gust of wind. Or a defective window frame. Maybe he’d investigate further inside, but his heart wouldn’t be in it.

He finished his survey of the building’s exterior in six minutes, which was longer than I expected. He was more thorough than he had to be. Definitely a retired cop. A lot of rent-a-cops who haven’t been in law enforcement will do the bare minimum. This guy was going beyond that. He was doing his job. I liked that.

Plus, it helped me out considerably. If he limited his inspection to a cursory walk around the building, I’d be screwed.

But he didn’t. He came around to the front of the building again, casting a cone of light in front of him. He took a key from a large ring on his belt and unlocked a door to the left of the revolving doors.

I watched him disappear into the lobby. He was probably going up to the second floor to investigate further, whether by the stairs or the elevator. But I could tell from his body language that he’d already decided there was no crime in progress.

He didn’t lock the door behind him.

I didn’t think he would-it’s the sort of detail most people, even security guards, don’t think about-but if he had locked the door, then I would have gone to Plan B. Which was to wait until he’d left, gone back to the monitoring station, and then lob some more stress balls at the window.

And he’d come back again, annoyed at being pulled away from his book or his newspaper or his TV show, and he’d investigate again, but this time it would be more perfunctory. He’d be convinced that there was some mechanical glitch in the system. Eventually, after two or three callbacks, he’d leave the door open behind him. They always did.

But he’d just saved me a half hour or more.

I moved the Defender to the back of the building, then got out and crossed the narrow strip of lawn that I figured wasn’t covered by the CCTV cameras mounted on this side of the building. There are always blind spots.

I reached the southwest corner of the building, then risked a quick appearance on a security monitor-I had no choice-by sidling close to the building and slipping in through the unlocked door.

Of course, if it had been daytime, the Paladin keycard I’d filched from Don Taylor-swapped, really-would have gotten me in to both the building and the Paladin office suite on the seventh floor. But then the Paladin office suite wouldn’t have been unoccupied. And that wouldn’t have worked at all.

So I had another plan, one that required the help of my friends and a shopping list of supplies and some carefully coordinated execution.

And the one thing that you can’t buy or plan on or wheedle. The one thing you can never count on.

Luck.

69.

Fortunately, I only had to hide in the utility closet off the lobby for fourteen minutes. The space was small and close, the smell of rancid wet mops and strong cleaning fluids overpowering. I heard the elevator doors ping, then open. The squawk of the guard’s walkie-talkie.

The click of his heels against the marble tile as he walked to the exit.

I waited another ten minutes. I wasn’t able to hear his car start up, not at this distance. But by the time I emerged, his car was gone.

He’d found nothing. He would blame it on errant technology, the bane of our existence. He’d done his job, and he’d served my purpose, and he wouldn’t be back.

Then I hit a preprogrammed number on my cell.

Three minutes later I unlocked the side door for Dorothy and Merlin.

“It’s the A-Team,” I said.

“I guess that makes me Mr. T,” Dorothy said.

“Wasn’t that show a little before your time, Dorothy?” I said.

“Honey, I watched it in reruns, come on.”

“Never seen it,” Merlin said, sounding cranky. He was carrying a couple of green clothlike recyclable shopping bags from Whole Foods, which held the improvised devices we’d assembled.

I placed one of them outside the lobby men’s room, where it couldn’t be seen through the glass doors at the front of the building. Then I led them through the lobby to the fire stairs at the back. The door was unlocked.

Each floor was accessible from inside the stairwells, of course-it’s a fire-safety law-so I was able to make a quick stop on the second floor to drop off the second device. When I returned to the stairwell, I noticed that Merlin was looking even more sullen, and I decided to say something.

“You’re having second thoughts.”

He nodded.

“It’s too late.” I gave him a steely stare, and he returned it.

Then I half smiled, and said, “Look, Merlin. There are no guarantees. We have a solid plan of action and a fallback, and at a certain point we just have to rely on luck.”

“Never believed in luck,” he said. The stairwell was dark and empty, and his words echoed hollowly.

“I think luck is essential. You can never count on it, I agree. But we don’t have much choice. Bail if you want to. I’ll understand.”

We stood there in silence for almost a minute. Dorothy looked from Merlin to me and waited.

Finally, he said, “I just want to be clear about something. This isn’t for you, or your brother, or whatever kind of revenge thing you’ve got going on. This is because I hate everything that Paladin stands for.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Just to be clear,” he said. He turned and started climbing the stairs, and Dorothy and I followed.

She flashed me a furtive smile. “How many floors?”

“We’re going to seven,” I said.

“Why the hell couldn’t we take the elevator?”

She was just complaining for the sake of complaining. She knew that the stairs were at the end of the lobby farthest from the Paladin surveillance camera, which was trained on the elevators.

Neither Merlin nor I said anything as we climbed.

“I’m not doing the elliptical trainer for a week,” she muttered, breathing hard.

Then Merlin said, “The problem is, we’re all relying on your observations from one quick walk-through. You didn’t have a chance to get in there and really look around. We really don’t know what their full security setup is like.”

He was right: All we knew was what I’d seen. No keypad access at the door to Paladin’s offices. That was so the cleaning people could get in at night. Don Taylor’s keycard would get us right in, I expected.

That was assuming, naturally, that Carl Koblenz hadn’t gone into some state of DEFCON 1 alert after discovering that three of his professionals had been dispatched by a guy whose field skills he’d probably expected were pretty damned rusty. I hoped, and assumed, that he’d thought it through and decided that my response had been mere, understandable, self-preservation: I didn’t want to be taken in and questioned by three bad guys. Who could blame me?

He wouldn’t think to check his guys’ keycards to see whether they’d been tampered with. He wasn’t going to deactivate any of them. That I was sure of. He’d never expect me to come back in the middle of the night.

At least, I didn’t think so, and one way or the other, we were about to find out soon.

In terms of surveillance, there appeared to be a single CCTV camera in the lobby outside their main office door, fixed and not pan-tilt-zoom. Another camera inside, in the receptionist’s area. No other visible surveillance cameras. It was possible that they were monitored live somewhere, but that wasn’t likely. That would be overkill for an office that mostly handled administrative stuff. I’ve done jobs at corporation headquarters that had more than two hundred security cameras and maybe three monitors. Live monitoring at night, for a small office like this, was almost unheard of.

We stood at the door to the seventh floor. I pushed the crash bar, opening the door an inch or so. Enough to confirm that it wasn’t locked from inside.

“I’m not going to argue with you,” I said. “It’s a crapshoot. You’re just going to have to rely on me.”

Merlin sighed, long and loud.

Dorothy made a sarcastic mmm-hmmm sound. “Then we’re all screwed,” she said.

70.

Merlin was the first through the door. He wore a black ski mask, which made him look like a small-town bank robber. He quickly found the surveillance camera, mounted on the wall outside the Paladin office, then carefully aimed a laser pointer at its lens. The tiny laser beam would dazzle the camera’s sensor, temporarily blinding it so that it would see only a white blur.

He held it steady, aimed at the lens, while walking slowly toward Paladin’s mahogany front doors. Dorothy and I followed. I pulled out the Super Soaker water gun from my duffel bag, pumped it twenty times or so to build up pressure, then pointed it at the camera lens. A thin stream of fluid jetted out: a mix of vegetable oil and water. This coated the lens with a cloudy film of grease, which would fuzz out the image for as long as the grease film remained. Even if someone were monitoring the feed live, unlikely though that was, they’d blame the camera. Merlin lowered the laser pointer and kept on going.

I passed the Paladin keycard over the reader and heard a click. The door was unlocked. Merlin readied the laser pointer in his right hand and switched on his LED flashlight in the other. Then I pulled the door open a few inches.

“Where the hell-?” he said.

“Ten o’clock,” I said.

“How high?”

I closed my eyes, called the memory of Paladin’s lobby to mind. “Roughly eight feet.”

“ ‘Roughly’ doesn’t help.”

“You’re wearing a mask.”

He shrugged, stepped into the dark office. He planted his feet and directed a beam of light into the reception area. Then he raised the laser pointer and waited a few seconds. “Okay.”

We entered behind him, and I squirted that camera with the Super Soaker as well.

Merlin washed the walls with the LED beam, his eyes scanning the room quickly. “Motion detectors?”

“No,” I said.

“You’re sure.”

“No.”

“Great,” Dorothy said.

“Not likely,” I said. “Building cleaners probably come in here at night.”

“Not likely,” Merlin echoed. “Probably.” He lowered the flashlight beam to the floor.

“Life’s a risk,” I said.

“Especially around you,” Dorothy said. “Are we cool here? I’m going to get to work.”

I nodded, handed her an LED flashlight, and shined mine along the floor to the next room, illuminating a path to the windows. The Paladin offices seemed a lot smaller in the dark. Starting at the leftmost window, I tugged the venetian blinds closed. Then I directed Dorothy to the desk where Koblenz’s admin, Eleanor Appleby, normally sat.

Meanwhile, Merlin busied himself with his equipment, looking for stray micro waves that might indicate a microwave-based motion detector, and an RF detector to search for hidden cameras.

“Clear?” I said.

“So far.”

Dorothy made a pssst sound, and I came over, shining my flashlight. She was sitting at Eleanor Appleby’s computer, looking frustrated. “They do take precautions here,” she said. “It’s logged out.”

“Did you check the usual place?” Merlin asked.

“You mean, the Post-it pad in the middle drawer? Yeah, I checked it, but there’s nothing there. What’s wrong with these people?”

“Can you crack the password?” I asked her.

“If you don’t mind me sitting here until morning, I might be able to. I’ll need a pot of coffee, though.”

“Maybe not such a good idea,” I said.

“That means I can’t install any spyware. But maybe that’s just as well. Place like this, they probably have antivirus software that’d pick it up.”

“Now what?”

“I’m stumped.”

This was a disappointment. If we wanted to capture any of Eleanor Appleby’s passwords, we needed to put some kind of eavesdropping device on her computer.

“How about a piece of hardware?” Merlin said. He’d brought a couple of different keyloggers-plastic devices that looked like one of those barrel connectors you might-or might not-notice in the rat’s nest of cables behind your computer.

“Uh-uh,” Dorothy said. She pointed at the back of the admin’s computer. “They’re making life hard for us. Check it out.”

I trained my flashlight at the back of the computer, saw only smooth wood. “What am I looking at?”

“All the computer cables are routed through the desk so no one can tamper with them.”

“That rules out the hardware keylogger, too,” I said.

“No,” said Merlin. “It just means Plan C. The keyboard module.”

That was another little electronic component he’d brought along, which you installed inside the keyboard. Even harder to detect than the barrel connector, but time-consuming to put in. He put his messenger bag on Eleanor Appleby’s desk.

“Dorothy, can you put it in?” I asked.

“I can figure it out, yeah,” she said. “Though Walter might be faster at it.”

“Faster and better,” Merlin said, “but I’ve got another job to do.”

“Then you’ll just have to settle,” Dorothy snapped. She reached into his messenger bag and took out a crimping tool, a screwdriver, and a tube of Superglue. She flipped the keyboard over, began loosening the miniature screws.

“You realize,” Merlin said, “that this means you’re going to have to get back in here and retrieve this thing in a day or two, right?”

“We are,” I said.

He grunted. “Then you really better hope nothing goes south tonight.”

I nodded. “Let’s get lucky.”

I approached Koblenz’s office door, turned the knob slowly, pushed it open. Merlin followed right behind, carrying a second messenger bag full of equipment.

I looked back at Merlin. “You didn’t detect any motion detectors in here, right?”

“Not microwave-based,” he said. “Passive infrared I’m not going to pick up.”

“You think he might have passive infrared?”

Merlin shined the light quickly around the office, saw the immaculate desk, the perfectly squared piles on the credenza behind it. “Nah. He’s too orderly.”

Unless the cleaning people had been given instructions not to clean his office, Koblenz wouldn’t have a motion detector of any kind inside his office. I agreed with Merlin: Koblenz seemed the fastidious type, the sort of guy who’d want his office carpet vacuumed every night, the wastebaskets emptied. And, although it was possible, I doubted his admin cleaned his office for him.

Merlin sighed. “That’s a TL-30X6.”

“I thought it was a Diebold.”

“That’s the rating. The most secure safe they make. And an electronic lock. Oh, man.”

“Like I told you.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Right?”

“You said electronic lock. I didn’t know it was a TL-30X6.”

“I don’t like your tone, Merlin. You sound very pessimistic. Maybe even defeatist.”

“Heller, listen to me. I brought my StrongArm safe cracker diamond-core drill bits, okay? But drilling through one of these, that’s a five-hour job at least. That mother’s made from inch-and-a-half-thick steel and cobalt-carbide matrix hardplate, okay?”

“If you say so.”

“Then they’ve got sheets of tempered glass mounted inside, rigged to break when a drill hits it. Triggers a relocking mechanism that even the right combination won’t open.”

“Merlin,” I said. “I get you. I think we’re going to have to change your name to Eeyore. Now, why don’t we try the keypad? I’d prefer nondestructive means.”

He gave me a look, telling me that was his plan anyway.

The safe had an electronic keypad on the front: nine numbers, on black keys, inset in a round black dial with a red LED light at the top. Instead of turning a dial, you punched in the combination.

He knelt before the safe, took out a small jar and brush, and began dusting the keypad with white fingerprint powder. When he shined the flashlight beam at it, I could see distinct fingerprints on only four of the keys: 3, 5, 9, and ENTER.

“That’s a start,” I said. “That limits us to three numbers.”

“It’s a six-digit combination of 3, 5, and 9,” Merlin said. “How many possible permutations does that make? Like a million?”

“Less than that, Eeyore.”

“Not a lot less. Anyway, we get four tries before we go into penalty mode.”

“And then?”

“Then a five-minute lockout before we can try again.”

“So let’s hope we guess right. What about the manufacturer’s tryout combo?”

“It’s 1-2-3-4-5-6.”

“That’s not it, then. You’re just going to have to try randomly.”

As far as I knew, there were no six-digit numbers that Koblenz had any obvious connection to-his house number had four digits, the number of the office building had five, the suite number had three.

“Right. Great.” He hissed in a breath. “All right, here goes.” He punched in one sequence.

And nothing happened.

“Try again,” I said.

He punched in another sequence.

Nothing.

And a third time. Nothing.

Merlin gritted his teeth and entered another sequence.

Then something happened. But not what we wanted. The red LED light flashed. On, then off, with a ten-second delay between flashes.

“Crap,” he said. “Now we have to wait five minutes.”

“No. Try spiking the solenoid.”

He shrugged, gave me a dyspeptic scowl, and twisted the keypad off the safe door. It’s meant to be easily removed, so you can change the battery. He pushed on a couple of clips, releasing a plastic cover, then pulled out the black rubber membrane. This exposed a circuit board and a row of eight tiny metal posts.

Then he took a nine-volt battery from his bag and clipped on a pair of leads. One end he held against the leftmost post. When he touched the other lead to the top right post, there was a crackling sound and the smell of electronic components burning.

And nothing else. It didn’t unlock.

“That’s it,” he said. “We’re screwed now.”

“Try the drill.”

“I thought you wanted nondestructive.”

“I want the card,” I said. “At this point I want it any way we can get it.”

“If you told me in the first place, I could have brought in a thermic lance.”

“What, from the Ocean’s Eleven prop room?”

“No, man, it’s for real. Cuts through concrete and rebar steel and everything. But it’s huge, and you need an oxygen tank.”

I was about to tell him to try the drill anyway, despite the long odds, when, out of the murky darkness of Koblenz’s inner sanctum, a tiny red light winked at me from high on the wall near the ceiling.

“You see that flashing light?” I said.

“Yeah,” Merlin said impatiently. “Told you, that’s the penalty mode light. Means we gotta wait five minutes.”

“No. Up there.” I pointed.

He looked up.

Saw the blinking red light.

“Damn it, Heller.”

“What?”

“PIR. Passive infrared.”

A motion detector.

“We gotta get out of here,” he said, his voice rising.

“What’s going on?” Dorothy called from the desk right outside.

“We just set off an alarm,” I said.

71.

His guys are probably already on their way,” Merlin said.

“Oh, good Lord,” Dorothy said.

“Move it,” Merlin said. “Let’s go. Won’t take them more than ten minutes to show up, I bet. Damn it to hell!”

“No,” I said. “We’re not leaving here with nothing. Dorothy, how much more time do you need?”

“I don’t know-three, four minutes. But I can’t rush it.”

“Don’t rush,” I said. “Get that thing in there and clean things up so they can’t tell we’ve been here.”

I swung the flashlight beam around Koblenz’s office, saw the built-in ventilation system beneath his windows. Raced over to it and flipped open the control panel.

“What the hell are you doing?” Merlin said. Perspiration had broken out on his forehead. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Calm down,” I said. “This is why we have the backup procedure.” The air-conditioning had gone off for the evening, as an energy-saving measure, but I switched it back on and turned the fan on full blast. Then I adjusted the louvers on the front of the unit so that air was blowing up at an angle, rattling the papers on top of the file cabinets and the credenza. On top of the credenza were a large rubber plant and a smaller jade plant. I tipped over the jade plant. The plastic pot went in one direction, the plant and its clump of earth went another. Then I took a pile of papers from the credenza and scattered some of them to the floor.

“What the hell?” Merlin said.

“Establishing a plausible explanation,” I said. In reality, the gust of air probably wouldn’t be strong enough to tip over the jade plant, but Koblenz would probably accept it. Especially since nothing would appear to have been stolen. He’d focus on the real anomaly, which was why his AC had gone on in the middle of the night. But he’d dismiss that as a malfunction in the building’s ventilation system. People always blame technology.

I pulled out the four disposable cell phones, found the one that I’d labeled in Sharpie marker with a big number “1.”

“All right,” I said. “Here goes.” I hit the preset number on the first cell phone.

I couldn’t see the result right away. I didn’t need to. The incendiary devices we’d jury-rigged were rudimentary, but the effect would be dramatic. Not that we wanted to burn the building down; not at all. We just wanted to make it look that way.

Inside each Whole Foods bag was a simple contraption: a cell phone wired to a relay, a nine-volt battery, the filament from a chandelier bulb. Phone rings, bulb filament gets hot, sets off a mixture of sugar and potassium chlorate inside a smoke grenade. That in turn sets off the plaster-of-paris and aluminum-powder mix, which we’d poured into a flowerpot and let harden. That mixture would get incredibly hot. It would actually burn underwater.

Basic explosives training; nothing fancy. But within thirty seconds, the entire lobby would be filled with smoke, billowing from a blazing hot fire. Hot but contained. And extremely dramatic. The smoke would pour out of the building.

Even before I made it to the window and saw the clouds of grayish white smoke in the moonlight, the building’s smoke alarm started clanging.

Dorothy announced, “All set.” She adjusted the keyboard on Eleanor Appleby’s desk, restoring it to where it had been before she tinkered with it, then she stood up.

“The fire trucks should be here in five minutes,” I said. “We’d just better hope none of our Paladin friends is closer than that.”

“I thought you said it would take the Paladin guys ten minutes,” Dorothy said.

“That was an estimate.”

“You didn’t know? You were guessing?”

“An educated guess.”

“Heller, why didn’t you tell me that?”

I didn’t reply. The answer was simple: It was a gap in the plan I was hoping to just finesse. I was hoping for good luck. But if I’d told them that, I’d have been doing this alone.

For the first time, I was nervous.

Our escape plan rested entirely on the likelihood that the firefighters would get here before the Paladin guys. Once the fire department arrived, they’d secure the scene and allow no one to enter. But if Paladin got here first, they might well decide to race upstairs, smoke or no smoke. It was entirely possible that they’d connect the two things-the motion sensor in Koblenz’s office going off and an apparent fire raging in the lobby-and conclude that their office had been the target of vandals. Then they’d be all the more motivated to rush up here.

I could hear the sirens, louder and closer, heard the shouts and the braking of the trucks and the clatter of the equipment as the firemen jumped out, and I heaved a sigh of relief.

“They’re here,” she said.

I pressed the second preprogrammed number, detonating the second incendiary device, which I’d placed in the lobby of the second floor.

“I’m not deaf,” I said.

The loud squealing of tires.

“No, Heller, I mean Paladin. Two black Humvees. That’s Paladin.”

“I’m out of here!” Merlin shouted.

“Walter,” Dorothy said. “Man up.”

THE LAST thing I saw before we raced out of the Paladin office and down the stairs was a shouting match between some intimidating-looking Paladin employees, a couple of Falls Church policemen, and a few firemen.

Not a contest the Paladin security people were going to win. The police and the fire department would never let them enter what appeared to be a burning building.

We raced out through the loading-dock entrance at the ground level. No one was waiting for us there. Both smoke devices were at the front of the building, so that was where the firefighters were gathered.

“Merlin,” I said as we parted, Dorothy running ahead toward the Defender. “Thank you.”

He turned toward me, gave me a dark look, and didn’t say a word.

72.

Dorothy and I didn’t talk for a long while. Maybe it was the adrenaline crash, that low-level anxiety and mild depression that often sets in after a time of great stress. You see that a lot after a battle.

Finally, she said, “Now what?”

“There’s always another way.”

“Well, I sure can’t think of one.”

“I can,” I said, and I explained.

“Oh man,” she said. “That’s either incredibly bold or incredibly stupid.”

“I like to think positive.”

“You know, if Koblenz really has one of those RaptorCards, that’s just incredible.”

“Is that what it’s called?”

“I’ve only heard rumors about this. Remember a couple years back how it came out about the U.S. government tapping into the whole SWIFT banking consortium? So they could monitor suspicious movements of money?”

“For terrorist surveillance, sure.”

“Right. But then it turned out the government could spy on every single funds transfer, every single financial transaction-everything. No more bank secrecy. Big Brother was watching, right?”

I didn’t want to argue with her, but I’d always believed that there was a whole lot less secrecy in banking than most people thought. Rich folks assume that when they stash money offshore, it’s going to remain a deep, dark secret. But bankers are human beings. Even offshore bankers. All you have to do is pay off the right one, or make the right friend, and you can find out all sorts of things.

Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for people in my line of work, of course.

And then there was a report that was leaked on the Internet not so long ago about how Cisco Systems was secretly building a backdoor into all its routers to enable the government to eavesdrop on all network traffic, including e-mails and phone calls.

“So a RaptorCard allows you to move money around without the government watching.”

“Right. By embedding private-key cryptography in an appliance that looks like a credit card. The strongest encryption ever devised. The closest thing to a true random number generator. Authentication’s built right in. You can use it anywhere.”

“Numbered accounts are just so twentieth-century, huh?”

“Right. So my question for you, Nick, is what do you plan to do with it?”

I thought for a long moment. The answer was complicated, and in truth, I hadn’t yet figured it out. Not entirely, anyway.

But I didn’t get a chance to answer before my cell phone rang.

“Got something for you,” Frank Montello said. “Something really interesting. That cell phone you asked me to track?”

I hesitated, then remembered. “Yeah?”

“She just called the same throwaway cell phone number your father called.”

“Roger’s cell phone,” I said, and I began to feel queasy. “You’re not serious.”

“Yeah,” Frank said. “Just about an hour ago, Lauren Heller called her husband.”

73.

Marjorie Ogonowski parted the curtains and looked out her living-room window.

A dark blue Buick Century sedan pulled up to the curb. She took note of the white license plate with the dark blue lettering that said U.S. GOVERNMENT. The license-plate number started with a J, denoting the Justice Department. Marjorie, whose cousin was married to an FBI employee, knew a fair amount about the FBI.

After the FBI man had called her to arrange an interview concerning a matter at work, she’d been sorely tempted to call her cousin and see what she could find out. But he had instructed her not to speak to anyone. She hadn’t stopped worrying since the man called. She wondered if it had anything to do with her boss, Roger Heller. She was pretty sure it did. Especially after that man John Murray from Security Compliance had come to talk to her at the office about Roger and why he’d gone missing.

Well, at least the FBI man was right on time. Seven o’clock p.m., just as he promised. She liked that. Marjorie was always on time, always precise. She was orderly in all things. She was nothing if not detail-oriented. This was one of the qualities that made her such a good lawyer, she was convinced. That, and her brains, and her willingness to work long hours without complaining. Right out of Georgetown Law she’d landed a job as an associate counsel in the corporate development division at Gifford Industries, working on mergers and acquisitions, and she was convinced that she was on the fast track to general counsel.

Her salary wasn’t great, but that would change in short order. In the meantime, it had allowed her to buy this tiny ranch house in Linthicum, Mary land. The real-estate salesman had called it “an investor’s dream,” which meant that it needed a lot of work. She had done most of it herself, stripping the yellowed wallpaper, painting, even installing a new laminate hardwood floor in her kitchen by herself over a long weekend.

This was the advantage of not having a social life. You got a lot of work done around the house.

The FBI agent rang the doorbell, and she tried not to answer it too quickly. She didn’t want him to know how nervous she was. Nor that this was the high point of her week, although it was.

In the other room her cockatiel, Caesar, whistled loudly.

She opened the aluminum screen door and shook his hand. Something about his unhandsome face made him seem trustworthy.

“Were my directions okay?” she said.

“Perfect,” he said. “The Parkway wasn’t bad at all. Took me exactly thirty-seven minutes.”

She liked his precision.

She let him in and offered him tea or a soft drink, but he declined. He showed her his FBI badge and credentials, which she inspected carefully, though she’d only seen things like that on TV. The gold badge with the eagle and the embossed letters, in a black leather wallet. The laminated credentials with his photo and signature were clipped to the breast pocket of his cheap suit. He handed her a business card.

They sat facing each other at an angle in the two easy chairs, which she had slipcovered herself with remnant fabric from a shop in Laurel. Her Apple MacBook laptop was open on the narrow desk. She glanced at it. She could see the screen from where she sat and wondered whether he could, too.

His name was Special Agent Corelli, and he had a slight stammer that sounded like a residue from childhood. He was not slick or arrogant, as she was afraid an FBI agent might be, and she liked that, too.

From his black nylon briefcase he took out a note pad.

“Ms. Ogonowski, how well do you know Roger Heller?” he said.

So it was about Roger after all. “Marjorie, please.”

“Marjorie,” he said with an abashed smile.

“Did something happen to him?”

“I’m afraid I can’t talk about an active investigation. I’m sorry.”

An active investigation! “Well, Mr. Heller is my boss-I mean, I just know him that way, of course.” She found herself looking at the business card, turning it over, evading his eyes.

“Of course.”

“He’s my direct supervisor, and it’s been superbusy lately-”

“He’s been out of town a lot, hasn’t he? Out of the office?”

“He travels a lot for business, yes.”

“And for other reasons.”

She hesitated. She drummed her fingers on the end table next to her chair, then reflexively, compulsively, began realigning the objects on the table, lining up the tiny Apple remote alongside the TV and cable and DVD remotes, making them all nice and parallel and evenly spaced. “I’m sorry, what’s the question?”

“You recently tried to reach him when he was out of town. Not on company business.”

How could the FBI possibly know about this? She’d promised never to tell anyone. Could that Security Compliance consultant, John Murray, have found out and told him? “I don’t remember.”

“I think you do,” the FBI man said quietly.

Something in him had suddenly switched off. No longer was he the trustworthy and sincere-seeming federal agent. Now there was a coldness in the man that frightened her even more than the question.

Caesar started whistling again.

“I’m sorry about the bird,” she said. “I need to change the cage liner, so he’s getting a little cranky.”

“Not a problem,” the FBI man said.

She slid her hand across the end table again, shifting, then straightening the remotes back into parallel lines.

“Would you mind if I called the Bureau,” she said abruptly. “Is that all right? Just to-I don’t know…”

He lifted his chin, turned up his hands, smiled. “Go right ahead. We always encourage that. The number’s right there on the card.”

She stood up, went over to the wall phone in the hall outside the kitchen, within view of the FBI man. “My cousin’s husband works there,” she said. “I’m going to call him, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course,” he said. “I don’t mind at all. Whatever puts your mind at ease.”

Taped to the wall was a long list of phone numbers that included her cousin Beverly and Beverly’s husband, Stuart. She found Stuart’s office number and dialed it.

The number on Agent Corelli’s card had a different exchange, she noticed, though she wasn’t sure that meant anything. Maybe main FBI had a different area code from the Washington Field Office. Then something else about the card attracted her notice, too.

“Did they redo the business cards recently?” she asked, looking at Corelli’s card closely. “The seal on my cousin Stuart’s business card-”

A hand shot out and depressed the plunger on the wall phone, breaking the connection. She hadn’t even heard him approach.

She tried to scream, but a hand was clapped over her mouth. “I need you to tell me everything,” the man said softly, so quietly that she could barely hear his words over Caesar’s shrill whistle.

74.

Iwas waiting for Lauren to emerge from her bathroom.

In the meantime, Gabe and I talked a bit in his room. I handed his graphic novel back, and he wanted to know what I thought. I told him I thought it was incredible. That I was honored and humbled to be The Cowl.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“The hero. The Cowl. With the fortress of solitude in Adams Morgan.”

“That’s not you,” he said.

“I thought he looked a little like me. No?”

“Huh? No way.”

I sneaked a glance at his face. He looked awkward and extremely defensive. Deeply embarrassed. I had brought out in the open something he didn’t want to admit to out loud. “No,” I said. “Of course not. I mean, I wish, right?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, dude.”

“Gabe, who’s Candi Dupont?”

He was too young, or maybe too honest, to have learned how to cover. His eyes flashed with fear. “Just a name,” he said.

“Candi Dupont is Dr. Cash’s girlfriend. Dr. Cash is your dad, Gabe.”

“Oh, man. This is fiction. Don’t you understand how fiction works, dude? You take little bits and pieces from your real life, and you weave it into this-”

“Gabe. You read your dad’s e-mails, didn’t you?”

“Screw you!” he shouted hoarsely. He shoved me away with one hand and turned away.

“Gabe.” I put both of my hands on his shoulders and rotated him to face me. “Your dad used the same password on all of his accounts, didn’t he? His Gmail and his iTunes and what ever. And you accessed his e-mail.”

He was crying by then. His face had gone scarlet, his acne like droplets of blood sprinkled over his nose and cheeks.

“That’s how you found out about Candi Dupont, isn’t that right? That’s how you knew your dad had a… a relationship.”

“He was cheating on Mom!” he gasped.

“Gabe, it’s okay. I’m not going to yell at you. I really don’t care about that. I just need that password. If there’s any chance of saving your father.”

He looked at me. “Why?”

“Because you’re right: Candi Dupont is just a name. It’s the name that your father called his girlfriend, I’m guessing. A name she used. An alias of some sort. But it’s not her real name. Which is why we haven’t been able to locate her. But if we can find out what her real name is, we might be able to find your dad. Because maybe she knows. Gabe, I know how horrible this is for you-”

“I don’t know her real name! How would I know that? All I know is that he was sending all these gross, like totally explicit, sexual e-mails to this woman named Candi Dupont, and she was writing back, and she was even more explicit, and he was lying to Mom the whole time, and it just made me want to puke.”

“Of course it did,” I said gently. “Of course. But if you give me his password, we can find out her e-mail address. And that might be enough to find her.”

His head was on his chest, his right elbow shielding his eyes from my gaze, and tears were spilling onto his T-shirt.

“Gabe,” I said. “Come on.”

WHEN LAUREN came downstairs, I asked her to go with me to Roger’s library so we could talk privately. We sat in the antique French club chairs, which were positioned so that each of us had to shift uncomfortably in order to look at each other.

“How’s Roger?” I said.

Her immediate reaction-a microexpression, I think they’re called-was shock. A split second later she had regained her poise. “You’re asking me? How could I possibly know-?”

“Lauren,” I said. “You called him. A few hours ago. On the same disposable cell phone number that my father called him on.”

She blinked quickly. “Nick…”

“You’ve been lying to me since the beginning of this whole mess. You’ve known all along where he was.”

“No,” she whispered. “I don’t.”

“Well,” I said, and I cleared my throat, “I wish I could believe that. But you’ve lost all credibility. If you ever had any to begin with. Is this some kind of a scam that you’re helping him pull off?”

“Nick, will you listen to me?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’d love to hear your explanation. And while you’re at it, maybe you can tell me how you justify putting Gabe through the hell you’ve put him through.”

“Nick,” she said. “I didn’t know what happened to Roger until last night. I didn’t know anything more than you did. Yes, I admit it-I’ve been concealing a few things from you-but if you’d just hear me out-”

“Last night,” I interrupted. “That was the first time you heard from him?”

“Check my phone records.”

“He called you? E-mailed you?”

“He sent me a text message. With a number to call.” She lifted her purse from the floor, began rummaging through it. “Here, you can check my phone’s text-message in-box if you don’t believe me.”

“So where is he?”

“He said he’s being held somewhere in Georgia.”

Paladin’s training facility and headquarters were in Georgia, I realized. “Yet he was able to call you?”

“Yes.”

“And he was able to receive a call from my father. What kind of imprisonment is that?”

“He didn’t say he was in any kind of prison. Or even that he was a hostage.”

“He said he was ‘being held,’ isn’t that right?”

“Yes, that’s what he said. He kept saying he had to make it fast, that he only had a minute to talk-I had the feeling that wherever he was they didn’t know he had a phone. But listen-the main thing is, he said they were going to release him.”

“ ‘Release’ him.”

“That they were going to let him go free, finally. They were going to make a deal.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t say. I didn’t ask-there wasn’t time, and I didn’t know how freely he could talk.”

“What kind of a deal?”

“I don’t know, Nick. He just said that I should be careful, I shouldn’t do anything or make any phone calls or screw things up in any way, and they were going to let him go free. I mean, we talked for maybe a minute before he hung up.”

“You must be relieved to hear from him.”

“Of course I’m relieved. This has been a nightmare.”

“You’re getting your husband back,” I said.

For a long time she was quiet. “The truth is that our marriage has been over for a while now.”

I felt something cold begin to coil in the pit of my stomach. “I see.” That didn’t surprise me. But it did surprise me to hear her say it.

“I mean, ever since I found out about that affair he had-I haven’t been able to forgive him. We haven’t had a romantic life. He’s still a great dad to Gabe, though, and-”

I stood up. “You know what, Lauren? I don’t really care anymore.”

75.

The Surgeon unfolded his black canvas surgical instrument kit and removed his favorite scalpel, a Miltex MeisterHand #3. He carefully inserted a blade made of the finest carbon steel.

Marjorie Ogonowski was crying, the sound muffled by the duct tape over her mouth. Her hands and feet were bound to the bedposts by means of duct tape, too.

He’d left her glasses on so that she could see him clearly.

She’d stopped struggling a few minutes ago, but when she saw him put on the latex gloves, her writhing grew frenzied, her screams agonized. Seeing the scalpel escalated her terror considerably. But that was to be expected. One of the maxims of what was often euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” was that the fear of pain was always far more effective than the pain itself.

Of course, he wasn’t actually a surgeon-he’d been expelled from medical school after an unpleasantness he didn’t like to think about-but he’d gotten the nickname at Bagram, in Af ghan i stan. The CIA had needed to hire outside contractors to conduct interrogations in their secret prisons, in order to insulate the Agency politically. He’d so impressed his employers that they later sent him to Abu Ghraib. But when that whole mess became public, he’d been hung out to dry. There wasn’t much call for his talents in the private sector. He was fortunate to have been hired by one of the few buyers out there, Paladin Worldwide.

Torture-to call it by its true name-was a greatly misunderstood art. It had become po liti cally correct in recent years, during the backlash to the war in Iraq, to claim that torture didn’t work. But if torture didn’t work, why had mankind been using it for thousands of years? Why had all those members of the French Re sis tance given up the names of their comrades, even their own family members, under Nazi torture? Torture was only in effective if it wasn’t done right. This wasn’t just a matter of creative techniques. You needed people skills. You had to know how to read people and how to establish your authority.

He spoke softly, calmly, as he always did. To raise your voice was to lose control. “Let’s try this again. Mr. Heller was out of town, and you needed to reach him urgently, isn’t that right? I believe you were working on a big acquisition. A power plant in São Paolo. Yes? Nod if I’m correct.”

Her eyes were wide, and tears spilled down her face. She gave an exaggerated nod, up down, up down.

“Something had come up suddenly. You needed to reach him right away. But he was out of the office on a personal day. Correct?”

She nodded.

“There was a big mergers-and-acquisitions committee meeting first thing the next morning, and the slide deck had already been prepared, but you found something in the due-diligence process that you were afraid might derail the acquisition. A showstopper, you thought. Am I right?”

She nodded slowly. He could tell that she was puzzled as to how he knew this. Let alone who he was.

There is nothing we fear so much as the unknown, and the Surgeon was not going to enlighten her.

“But you had no way to reach him. You needed to reach him immediately, but he didn’t have his cell phone with him. You couldn’t e-mail him on his BlackBerry, because he didn’t have that with him either. Am I right?”

She hesitated a few seconds before nodding.

“Strange, isn’t it? A hardworking man like Mr. Heller didn’t have his cell phone or his BlackBerry with him while he was traveling at such a very busy time, when he needed to be reachable at all times?”

Her eyes slid to one side. Her deception flashed like a neon sign.

“Yet somehow you reached him. You talked to him. How so?”

She looked away.

“I’m going to remove the tape from your mouth,” he said. “But first I want you to see this scalpel up close. I want you to feel how sharp it is.”

Her eyes widened, filled with tears. She began to shake her head-as if to say, No, please don’t-but then she stopped. She didn’t want him to misinterpret the gesture as an unwillingness to cooperate.

He came in close, the scalpel in his right hand, and he moved it very close to her right eyeball.

She closed her eyes, shook her head violently.

“No sudden moves, please,” he said. “You’ll hurt yourself badly.”

Her eyes remained scrunched closed.

“Open your eyes, please, or you’ll be hurt much worse.”

He waited a few seconds until her eyes came open. She squinted, blinked.

“The skin of the eyelid is less than one millimeter thick. This scalpel will slice through it quite easily. And then the sclera, beneath. The aqueous fluid will leak right out. The damage to your eye will not be reparable.”

Her blinking became rapid. She moaned.

“Do you know the term ‘enucleation’?”

She closed her eyes again, her moaning louder.

“Enucleation is the surgical removal of the eyeball. Usually it’s done only in drastic circumstances like traumatic injury or a malignant tumor.”

He could see her jaw working up and down, could hear her trying to shout the word “please” over and over.

“You’ll still be able to work as an attorney without your eyes, of course,” he explained. “They have screen-reading software now and scanners. You’ll be able to use Westlaw that way, I believe. But you can forget about handwritten notes, and very few websites are accessible to the visually impaired, unfortunately. The adjustment will be onerous.”

He laid his left hand on her forehead, right above her glasses: an intimate gesture, almost a caress.

“Now, I’m going to remove the tape from your mouth, and if you make any noise-if you shout or scream or call for help-I’m going to perform some very quick surgery. Are we clear?”

She nodded, her eyes closed.

“As soon as the tape comes off, I want you to tell me how you reached Mr. Heller. Clear?”

She nodded.

He held the scalpel about a half inch from her eye. With his left hand, he ripped off the duct tape.

She gasped loudly, gulped air.

Her words came all in a rush, high-pitched and mewling. “He left me a message on my voice mail. He told me to go to his desk, he had a cell phone in one of the drawers, one of those prepaid phones, and he said it was already activated, and he wanted me to take it and go down to the street and call him.”

“Call him where?”

“He gave me a phone number.”

“What was the number he gave you?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, how can I possibly remember? I didn’t memorize the number, how could I know what the number is? I called from work. I didn’t keep a record. He told me not to!”

“Of course you don’t have the phone number memorized. But the number you called will be listed on the phone you used.”

She hesitated, just for a second, but long enough for him to realize that she was inventing a reply. “I put the phone back in Roger’s desk.”

“No, I don’t think you did. I think you brought it home because he told you to do so.”

She shook her head. She was trembling.

“You’re a very loyal colleague,” he said. He’d stopped using her name. He never used their names. “You’re protecting Mr. Heller. That’s commendable. But he’s gone now, and you no longer need to protect him. Right now you face a choice. You will give me that phone, or you’ll undergo some very painful surgery without the benefit of anesthesia.”

“Please, no.”

“Where is the phone?”

After she told him, he went to the dresser. The throwaway cell phone was in the top drawer, just as she said. He nodded, turned back to her.

Just to be sure, he powered it on, then checked the list of outgoing calls.

It had been used only once.

“Very good,” he said.

“Please,” she said in a whisper, “please, can you leave now? You have what you want, don’t you? I don’t know why you want it or who you are, and I don’t care, but I just want you to leave now, please. I promise you-I give you my word-I won’t talk to the police. I won’t talk to anyone.”

“I know you won’t,” the Surgeon said, ripping off a fresh length of duct tape from the silvery roll and swiftly placing it over her mouth. “I know you won’t.”

76.

Even after all that time, I still knew very little for certain about what had happened to Roger.

The most I could do was to mull over several different hypotheses. Think them through, turn them over and over and try to calculate which one was the most likely. What I eventually settled on was something like this: my ever-scheming, ever-dissatisfied, megalomaniacal brother had finally discovered a way out of his middle-class purgatory. After his company, Gifford Industries, had secretly acquired Paladin Worldwide, he’d combed through Paladin’s financial records, come across evidence of some mammoth kickback scheme, and made the brazen error of trying to extort millions of dollars from Carl Koblenz, Paladin’s president. But instead of simply buying Roger’s silence, Paladin had come right back at him. Threatened him. Targeted him. Then, one night in Georgetown, grabbed him.

After that, well, my hypothesis got even shakier. Had he managed to escape his abductors? That seemed awfully unlikely. Roger was no super-hero. Was he being held prisoner at the Paladin training facility in Georgia in such a lax, loose way that he was actually able to use a cell phone? That was only marginally more likely.

So maybe he was being used by his captors instead. Maybe they were forcing him to make the calls, to Dad and to Lauren, urging them to cooperate with Paladin, give them what they wanted, so he could win his release.

Maybe.

But what my father had to do with it-what my father could have that Paladin might want-I couldn’t imagine.

So maybe there was yet another explanation entirely, something I hadn’t even begun to fathom.

Nothing would surprise me anymore.

I CALLED Dorothy Duval a little later. I tried her work number first, but was put into her voice mail. Then I tried her cell, and she picked right up. A television was playing in the background, loud, wherever she was.

“Hope I’m not disturbing you,” I said.

“Oh, no. I’ve got nothing going on.” She sounded down.

“You okay?”

“I’ll get by. You wanted to go over today?”

“The thing is, we have to do this in the middle of the workday, which I realize is a problem for you.”

“No,” she said. “No problem at all.” There was a grim, yet singsong, quality to her voice.

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

“Heller, I have all the time in the world. Jay Stoddard just fired me.”

“You? For what?”

“He said I was misusing company resources.”

“Meaning that you’ve been helping me out,” I said.

“He didn’t feel I deserved an explanation. The bad thing is, I’m not going to be able to help you anymore. Because I won’t have any more access to any of Stoddard’s databases.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not right.”

“Maybe not. But it’s what happened.”

“No,” I said again. “This is just not acceptable.”

“Tell me about it. Plus he says he’s gonna blackball me. Make sure I never get a job in this town again.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“No,” she said. “Don’t bother. I can’t go back there. Not after he fired me. Uh-uh.”

“I’ll talk to him,” I said. “In the meantime, do me a favor. I need you to go into my brother’s laptop and look for something.”

“There’s not much there.”

“He has a Hotmail account. You can find out the account’s user ID, right?”

“If it’s there, sure. But the password-”

“That’s the easy part. Victor10506.”

“How do you know that?”

“Long story,” I said. “But 10506 is the zip code for Bedford, New York. Where we used to live when we were kids.”

“You want me to go into your brother’s e-mail. No problem. But what am I looking for?”

“I want you to do a search for all e-mails to and from CatLvr74@ yahoo.com,” I said. “There’s going to be a cell-phone number in one of them.”

“And what am I supposed to do if I find one?”

“Well,” I said, “I’ve got an interesting idea.”

77.

I found Jay Stoddard at breakfast in the Senate Dining Room with a senator from Virginia who was the chairman of the Armed Services Committee and was facing a nasty reelection battle.

I stormed into the elegant room-yellow walls, patterned red carpet, white tablecloths, the hush of power-wearing jeans and a T-shirt and hiking boots. Stoddard was in one of his finest handmade suits: dove gray, double-breasted, with a crisp pale blue shirt and red tie. Before him were a cup of coffee and a bowl of cornflakes. His second breakfast, I guessed. He’d always told me never to go to a business breakfast without eating first.

The maître d’ had followed me in, protesting, “Sir! I’m sorry, but jeans aren’t permitted. Sir, I’m afraid you’re going to have to put on a tie.”

The commotion attracted a lot of attention. A lot of stares. Stoddard glanced around curiously, then did a double take.

“Heller? What the hell are you-?”

“We have a little unfinished business,” I said.

He exchanged a look with the senator-indulge me for a second-and said, “I think this can wait till I’m back in the office.”

“You didn’t seriously believe you could get rid of Dorothy Duval so easily, did you?” I stood before his table, arms folded.

Stoddard rose. “Excuse me, John,” he said to the senator. “Personnel matter.” He came around the table, very close to me, and said through gritted teeth, “Heller, get the hell out of here. You’re making a scene. If you want to talk about this, make a goddamned appointment.”

“Right now works for me,” I said.

“Damn you, Heller,” he said, and crossed the dining room. I followed him out to the corridor. He stood a few feet away and poked my chest with his index finger. “Don’t you ever do that again,” he said, his voice a low, ominous rumble.

“You want to explain to me why you assigned me to that stolen-cargo case in Los Angeles?”

“I assigned you because I thought you’d do the job.”

“Yeah,” I said. “No one else in the firm was qualified, huh? So is that the reason you didn’t want me looking too hard at who Traverse Development really is? So I wouldn’t put it together that Traverse is just a Paladin holding company? Meaning that the real client was Leland Gifford?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Heller.”

“And maybe Leland Gifford figured that I’d have some inside knowledge because of my brother?”

“Why would your brother know anything about this? You’re not exactly making sense.”

“Or did you think you’d be able to control me if I found out what was in that container?” I was, I admit, speculating wildly. I just knew it was no accident that I was put on the job.

“Control you? When have I ever been able to control you? I’ve seen the surveillance video of you and Dorothy and some other guy breaking into the Paladin offices.”

“So you’re singling Dorothy out?”

“I haven’t had a chance to talk to you.”

“So you were planning to fire me, too, that it?”

“I cannot have you doing that sort of thing.”

I took a small metal object from my back pocket and showed it to him. A USB flash drive that held three gigabytes of files and e-mails. “Yeah,” I said. “It would be wrong. Like the illegal wiretap you had us do on the Ogilvie case.”

“Oh, please,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’re growing a conscience all of a sudden.”

“Your breakfast companion might be interested in hearing about the work you did for his colleague, Senator McBride.”

He knew just what I was talking about: a senator who’d hired Stoddard to expunge a domestic-abuse charge before it became public. And then a couple of years later, the senator’s opponent hired Stoddard to do a little background research on Senator McBride, and what do you think Stoddard turned up? Lucky for Stoddard that Senator McBride didn’t demand his money back.

“So what’s this supposed to be, your job insurance?”

I shook my head slowly. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

“You’re quitting, huh?”

“Before you fire me.”

“You think anyone’s ever going to hire you in this town?”

“Nope.”

“You got money in a piggy bank somewhere, Heller? Money your dad buried under a rock for you in the Alps?”

I just looked at him. Let him think it. “Know what this really is, Jay?” I wiggled the flash drive in my fingers. “It’s your retirement package. This effectively puts you out of business.”

“What do you want?”

“Dorothy doesn’t want to work for you. But you’re going to do everything in your power to get her an even better job, somewhere else. You’re going to give her a sterling recommendation, and you’re going to get on the phone and use that famous Stoddard charm and pull every string you have. I’m talking a really great job. And if you don’t…”

I wiggled the flash drive again. Its brushed-metal case glinted in the light from the chandelier overhead.

He stared at me, mouth jutting open. Dumbfounded.

“Don’t disappoint me, Jay,” I said.

Then I turned to leave.

“Heller,” he called after me. “I don’t know what you have up your sleeve, but I suggest you not bother. Like Sun Tzu said: ‘All battles are won or lost before they’re fought.’ ”

“He never said it,” I pointed out. “That’s from the movie Wall Street.”

“Doesn’t make it wrong.”

“Well,” I said. “I guess we’ll see.”

78.

My cell phone kept ringing while I was accosting Jay Stoddard in the Senate Dining Room and outside of it. When I was finally able to check my voice mails, I found six. Two from Dorothy, confirming that she’d been able to rent all the equipment and uniforms I’d asked for. One was from Lauren. One was from an old friend named Pat Keegan, who now taught explosives at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and sounded very happy to hear from me. One was from an irate client who hadn’t been told that I was on leave from Stoddard Associates. He would not be happy to hear that I most assuredly was not coming back.

And one was from Lieutenant Arthur Garvin. He’d just gotten a heads-up from Anne Arundel County police about an apparent homicide that might have been connected to one of the cases Garvin was working. He wanted me to meet him at the crime scene in Linthicum, Maryland. At that time of the morning, it was more than an hour’s drive. There was no way I could do it. I had far too much going on that day.

I called Garvin to extend my apologies.

But when he told me that the victim had worked at Gifford Industries, I raced to my car.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD was cordoned off. A uniformed patrol officer from the Anne Arundel County Police Department was stopping all traffic. His cruiser was parked perpendicular to the street, its light bar flashing red and blue, the strobes pulsing a glaring white.

Garvin met me at the barricade and escorted me through, and together we walked the hundred feet. The neighborhood reminded me of my grandmother’s: modest houses set close together, big cars, manicured lawns. The victim’s house was tiny, the smallest on the block. The street on either side was choked with police vehicles; the driveway was crawling with uniformed officers and crime-scene techs. A patrolman was standing at the door to the bungalow, taking the crime-scene log. Radios were crackling. Neighbors were huddled together at a safe distance, talking. Probably neighbors who’d never spoken before.

“Here’s the deal,” Garvin said. “I don’t know the lead on this case, but he’s an old-timer like me, and he was willing to admit you to the scene on the condition that you don’t move or touch anything. Unfortunately, it’s daytime, so we’ve got everyone and their brother showing up here-all twelve guys from the Homicide unit, the unit commander, the duty official, the ME’s Office, you name it. I told the detective that you’re a buddy of mine, and I trust you.”

“I appreciate it,” I said.

“And I told him that you knew the victim.”

“Barely,” I said.

“I told him you could be a time-line witness. Guy’s not stupid, he wants any help he can get. So just don’t stir up trouble, and we’ll be fine.”

I was issued Tyvek coveralls and shoe covers and a polypropylene hair-net. I had to put on a double set of latex gloves before entering the house.

In the small front room were a couple of easy chairs and a desk with an open MacBook on it: a small white laptop computer. Someone was dusting the window for prints, someone was taking pictures, and someone else was doing a diagram.

The lead detective on the case was a big bluff man nearing retirement named Lenehan. Without even introducing himself, he gave me a litany of orders, everything I couldn’t touch or move or look at, and as he ushered Garvin and me through the crowd in the front room, he said, “So you met with the victim just a couple of days before her death.”

“Three days ago,” I said.

“Did she indicate any concerns, like anyone stalking her, any enemies, anything like that?”

“No,” I said.

“One of her neighbors says he saw a government vehicle parked in the street in front of her house last night. Did she say anything about talking to the FBI, maybe related to her work?”

“Not at all.”

“I want to warn you, this might be upsetting.”

“I’ve been to crime scenes,” I said.

“Yeah, well,” the cop said, and his voice trailed off.

“Defensive wounds on the palms,” Garvin said.

Marjorie Ogonowski had clearly died struggling. Both of her hands were rigid claws. Duct tape over her mouth. Her glasses broken on the floor, a number marker next to them.

When I saw what had been done to the woman’s eyes, after the first wave of nausea had crested and subsided, I felt a surge of fury.

“The tape on her mouth,” I said. “You can see where it was taken off, then put back on.”

Garvin leaned close, lifted his glasses to his forehead, nodded.

“Whoever did it had to remove the tape so she could talk,” I said. “But put it back on when he got what he wanted.”

“Or didn’t,” Garvin pointed out.

“Who found the body?” I asked.

“She didn’t show up for work, and apparently she never missed a day without calling. When her secretary couldn’t reach her on the phone, she called a neighbor and asked them to check in on her, see if everything was okay.”

“The secretary knew who the neighbors were?”

“Nah. She said she searched for phone numbers by address online.”

“The neighbor had a key?”

“Not the one who the secretary called. That was the guy who lives across the street-the one who noticed the car. He called the neighbor who lives next door, and that woman had a key. Unlocked the front door and walked in and found her here. Didn’t take long. It’s not a big house.”

“Mind if I take another look at the front room?” I said.

79.

I stood amid the bustle, looking from the open front door to the little desk with the laptop on it to the two easy chairs. “Was there a desk chair?” I asked.

“Nothing’s been moved,” Lenehan said.

“She didn’t work at that desk,” I said. “There’s no chair. She used the laptop at the desk in her bedroom.”

“Your point?” Lenehan said.

I approached the two chairs, saw the end table next to one of them, several remote controls neatly lined up. “No sign of forced entry, right?”

“She opened the door for him,” Lenehan said.

“She was expecting him,” I said. I pointed at a small white remote control, much smaller than the ones for the cable box and the TV. “That’s for her MacBook.”

“Maybe she watched movies or TV shows on it,” Garvin suggested.

“No,” I said. “Too far away. Twelve-inch screen. Plus, I don’t think she was the type to watch TV or movies. She worked all the time. The computer’s on, isn’t it?”

“Looks like it’s off,” Lenehan said.

“No, it’s just gone to sleep,” I said. “Okay with you if I touch the touchpad.”

“For what?”

“Take the computer out of sleep mode. See what’s on it.”

“I don’t think Crime Scene’s going to want you to do that,” Lenehan said. “Prints, DNA, all that. But hold on a second.” He grabbed someone, had a quick conversation. He turned back to me after half a minute. “Okay, go ahead. They’ve got to fume it for prints under the hood anyway.”

I ran a gloved finger across the MacBook’s touchpad, and a screensaver appeared-an image of a planet, which looked like Mars. I clicked the touchpad’s button, and the screensaver went away. A large box appeared on the screen: a photograph of me.

It was moving as I moved, as my face moved in closer to the camera lens on the lid of the laptop. Recording my image in real time. You clicked a button, and it froze the picture.

Beneath the big box was a row of smaller snapshots. They were all pictures of the room we were in. All showed a man and a woman sitting in the chairs.

Marjorie Ogonowski and a man in a suit and tie with hunched shoulders and a fleshy, pockmarked face.

Lenehan and Garvin approached. “What’s that?” Lenehan said.

“Photo Booth,” I said. “It’s a Macintosh photo application.” I clicked on the touchpad button to enlarge the large photo still more, zoom in on the figures in the chairs.

“She took the pictures while they were sitting there talking,” I said.

I document everything, she’d said.

“How?” said Garvin.

“Using the computer’s remote control.” I pointed. “On the table next to where she was sitting.”

“That’s our guy,” Lenehan said, but it sounded more like a question than a statement.

“That’s our guy,” I said.

“He let her take his picture?”

“He didn’t notice. The computer’s sound was turned off, so he didn’t hear that simulated camera-shutter noise it usually makes.”

“She took his picture without him knowing?” said Lenehan.

“Right,” I said. “Which indicates she didn’t trust him. She wasn’t sure he was who he said he was.”

“He didn’t leave prints anywhere,” Lenehan said. “He was probably wearing gloves. No wonder she was suspicious.”

“I’m sure he didn’t arrive at her door wearing gloves,” I said. “He was just careful about what he touched, and he made sure to wipe down afterward. He’s a pro. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to e-mail myself his picture.”

“What for?” Lenehan said.

“We’ve got a workstation at my office with FaceExaminer on it.”

The Maryland homicide cop didn’t know what I was talking about, but that wasn’t surprising; they weren’t likely to have access to technology like that. “It does face recognition by running a mug shot against a database of known images. Same technology the Las Vegas casinos use to catch card counters.”

“What does that mean, ‘known images’? Where’s this database from?”

“We’ll have to get cooperation from the government,” I said. “So we can tap into their facial databases of all security ID photos. State, Defense, Homeland Security, the intelligence community.” I turned to Garvin. “It’ll go a lot quicker if you make the call.”

“To who?”

“I have a theory,” I said. “I think our guy used to be a government employee.”

80.

Dorothy answered her cell phone abruptly: “Heller, if you keep calling me, I’m not going to be ready in time.”

“I need you to go back in to the office and do something,” I said.

“I don’t think you heard me when I told you I got fired.”

“You’ve got to go back in there and pack up your stuff, right?”

“You don’t get it, do you? Stoddard had me escorted out. I had to pack up my cubicle right then and there. I’m out of there for good.”

“Actually, I just had a talk with Stoddard.”

“He fire you, too?”

“I quit before he could. But our talk was about you.”

“What’d he want to know?”

“Nothing. The talk was my idea. I told him to get you another job.”

“And he laughed in your face.”

“He tried, sure. But he’ll do it.”

“Yeah, right. A job hanging off the back of a garbage truck, maybe.”

“I think he’s going to fall all over himself to help you.”

The silence on the line was so long that I thought the call had been dropped. Then Dorothy said, “What the hell did you do, Nick?”

“You don’t want to know.”

Another long silence. Then, very softly, something I hardly ever heard her say: “Thanks.”

“No problem. So what about it? But would you be willing to go back to the office? To run a photo through FaceExaminer?” I explained quickly about the photo of Marjorie Ogonowski’s murderer, which she’d captured on her laptop computer.

“No,” she said. “But who says I have to?”

“Care to explain?”

“I’ve got a backdoor into all the Stoddard databases. Hardly ever use them. Didn’t want to. But I sure will, if you want.”

“Can you do it now?”

“Not this morning. I’ve got to head over to Ryder right now and get the truck.”

“Change of plans,” I said. “I’ll send you a picture on your cell phone, and you run it through, and I’ll get the truck. Then I’ll pick you up, and we’ll head over to Paladin together.”

“You think we have time?”

“We have to,” I said.

A LITTLE over two hours later, I pulled the rented Ryder truck up to the curb on K Street, where Dorothy was waiting for me.

“You were right,” she said as she got in. “I got a match on the photo. The guy works for Paladin Worldwide.”

“As I suspected.”

“And get this. You know he was one of the interrogators at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib?”

“Sounds like a one-man party,” I said, and I handed her my cell phone. “Do me a favor and hit the speed-dial entry for Arthur Garvin.”

“That’s the detective in the Washington police?”

“Right. He’s going to want to interview Carl Koblenz. So Garvin can help his buddies in Anne Arundel County Homicide clear a case. But tell him to wait until we’re finished.”

81.

Leland was in a finance committee meeting on the sixth floor, where he’d be for at least another hour, maybe even two. Noreen was taking a long lunch: a doctor’s appointment.

Lauren entered Leland’s office and closed the door behind her.

Took a deep breath.

She found his battered old briefcase and located his BlackBerry in one of the front pockets. Slipped it out of its leather case, which she’d ordered for him, and pressed the power button. Why was the ON button red, she’d always wondered, and not green? Red was supposed to mean off, not on. When the screen lit up, she moved the track wheel until it highlighted his personal e-mail account, then she pressed down on the button.

Scrolled down until she found the e-mail from the Cayman Islands. Its subject line read, “Private.”

She clicked on the track wheel to open the message, then clicked again to reply.

And then she composed a message.

When she was finished, she hit SEND, then she stood still for a moment, breathing in and out, trying to remember whether Leland had left the thing on or off. If she left it on when he’d had it turned off, he’d know.

She heard a throat being cleared, and she looked up.

Noreen’s arms were folded on her bosom. “What are you doing?”

Lauren’s heart began jackhammering. “I’m doing my job,” she said. “What business is it of yours?”

Noreen took a few steps into the office. “You’re using his BlackBerry,” she said quietly. “Does he know what you’re doing?”

Lauren realized she was holding Leland’s BlackBerry up in the air as if it were an exhibit in a courtroom, and she was the prosecutor. She set it down on the desk. “I’m his administrative assistant,” she said. “I know you wish it was you, but it’s not. Now, don’t you have anything better to do?”

But Noreen wasn’t budging. “I think you’re reading his e-mails,” she said.

Lauren widened her eyes dramatically. “You caught me,” she said. “I confess. I’ve been reading his e-mails.” Then her voice became harsh and louder. “I read all his e-mail, Noreen. I also answer all of it. That’s my job. How about you-don’t you have a job to do?”

Noreen shook her head, a smug look on her face. “I mean his private e-mail. You don’t have access to his private e-mail accounts except when you use his BlackBerry.”

“Are you done?”

“No,” Noreen said. “A couple of days ago Leland asked me if I’d moved his BlackBerry. He said he remembered putting it in the left-hand front pocket of his briefcase, but it was in the right-hand pocket, and he was sure someone had moved it. So I said maybe you did. And you know what he said?”

Noreen paused, and Lauren said nothing. Her heart was thudding so loudly she wondered whether Noreen could hear it.

“He said, ‘Lauren doesn’t use my BlackBerry.’ He said, ‘I keep it password-protected.’ He said, ‘No one uses it but me.’ ”

“Why don’t you just turn around and get back to your desk,” Lauren said. Her mouth had gone dry.

“You see, he doesn’t know what you’re doing. And I wonder what he’s going to say when I tell him.”

Lauren came around from behind Leland’s desk and walked up to Noreen until she was right in her face. She could see the lines on her upper lip, the cracks in her lipstick. “Would you say the Katharine Gibbs School trained you well, Noreen?”

Noreen backed up a step. Her mouth came open just a fraction of an inch, then closed again. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“When you first got hired here, umpteen years ago, you lied on your application, and you lied in your interview. You told them you’d graduated from Katharine Gibbs. But you never went there, did you? You didn’t even graduate from high school.”

“Where are you getting this?” Her perfume, Lauren noticed, smelled a lot like Deep Woods Off bug spray.

“And when your boss found out the truth and asked HR about it, you begged and pleaded with him not to fire you, and he felt bad for you, and he decided he was willing to overlook your lie because you’d been so loyal to him, am I right? And he agreed to keep it quiet. Just a note in your personnel file confirming that the matter had been resolved. No one would ever know about it.”

“How-where are you-?”

Lauren had never seen Noreen at a loss like this, and she had to say she was enjoying it. “I see everything, Noreen,” she said. “I see all kinds of files. So let’s be clear, you and me. Next time you feel like threatening me, ask yourself whether it’s worth your job.”

Noreen turned and hurried out of Leland’s office.

82.

The burnished-mahogany door to the Paladin office suite opened, and the receptionist stood there, looking at us with a puzzled expression.

For an instant I thought she might have remembered me from the day before. But I was barely visible, standing behind the hydraulic pallet truck on which a huge cardboard box rested.

Dorothy took the lead. She stepped up to the receptionist, holding her metal clipboard. She was wearing gray twill pants and a light blue shirt with a patch above her left breast pocket that said HVAC OF RESTON. My uniform was identical, except that I was wearing a dark blue trucker cap that also said HVAC OF RESTON on the front. The uniforms, the pallet truck, and the huge empty Trane carton had all been borrowed from the heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning company owned by Dorothy’s second cousin.

“Can I help you?” the pretty blond receptionist said.

“You’ve got a defective fan-coil unit in one of your offices,” Dorothy said. “Building management wants it replaced pronto.”

“Fan-coil…?”

“Mind if we move this unit in and get to work? I’m going to need an authorized signature.” She held out the clipboard and pointed to a blank signature box.

I began pushing the dolly through the double doors.

“But where is this supposed to go?”

“Your boss’s office? What’s his name, Koblenz or something? Anyway, management wants this done now, while Mr. Koblenz is out of the office, so we don’t disrupt him any more than we have to.”

“I don’t understand,” the receptionist said. “Who did you say authorized this?”

“Lady, we don’t got time for this,” Dorothy said. “The blower on the fan-coil unit is bad, and it has to be replaced immediately or it’s a fire hazard, are you understanding me? And from what I hear, this building already had some kinda problem with fire last night, so if you want to be the one who refuses to let us fix this unit…”

“No, no,” the receptionist said. “Come on in.”

I kept my head down behind the Trane carton and hoped no one recognized me. Koblenz wasn’t there, I knew. He was, at that moment, on his way over to an emergency meeting with Leland Gifford, at Gifford’s home in Great Falls, Virginia.

Though Leland Gifford’s wife would no doubt be surprised when Carl Koblenz rang their doorbell. Leland was at his company’s headquarters, at an afternoon meeting of his executive team.

Dorothy-using the name Noreen Purvis-had scheduled the urgent meeting with Koblenz’s admin, Eleanor Appleby, who was accompanying her boss, as usual.

Dorothy guided me through the corridor to Koblenz’s office.

When we got inside, I began pounding on the cooling unit with a hammer, making a great racket, and Dorothy considerately shut the office door. I’m sure the others in the Paladin office appreciated it. They’d gladly stay out of our way.

Then I immediately set to work, taking the empty carton off the hand truck, lowering the hydraulic bed, and sliding its steel lift plate underneath the front of the safe. While I pumped the hydraulic handle, raising the bed, and the safe, a few feet, Dorothy neatly broke down the empty Trane carton and slipped it over the safe. It was quite a bit larger than the safe, but no one would notice.

Then we moved the hand truck out of the Paladin office suite and onto the freight elevator to the basement before anyone happened to notice what was missing from Carl Koblenz’s office.

A little less than two hours later, the rented Ryder truck pulled in to the Ordnance Center at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Maryland, the U.S. Army’s oldest testing and evaluation facility for weapons and explosives. A couple of eager soldiers, students at the Ordnance Center & Schools, hopped onto the back of the truck and helped unload the safe.

They were all very much looking forward to learning how to use controlled explosives to open a high-security safe without damaging its contents. It was a rare educational opportunity.

A professional “safe engineer,” as they’re called, would surely have refused to do the job. He’d have made me fill out all sorts of forms and maybe even asked the local police to witness the opening of the safe. The situation-a large high-security safe brought to him on the back of a rented truck-would have rung every warning bell. But my old friend, Staff Sergeant Patrick Keegan, one of the instructors, was grateful to me for offering up my old safe so they could practice on it.

We all stood back a few hundred feet while Keegan finished wiring the blasting cap to the small morsel of C-4 explosive that he’d molded to a corner of the safe’s rear panel.

He joined the rest of us and pressed the detonator, setting off a loud explosion with the sharp concussive sound of a rifle shot. The back of the safe flew into the air and landed maybe twenty feet away from us.

But the RaptorCard inside was unharmed.

“I WANTED to grab that keyboard,” Dorothy said as we drove the truck away about an hour and a half later.

“Off Eleanor Appleby’s desk? The one with the keylogger in it?”

“Yeah. So we still have to get back in there.”

“That probably wouldn’t have been a good idea. They might have wondered why a couple of HVAC repair people stole a keyboard.”

“Yeah. So let me ask you something.”

“Yeah?”

“How the hell did you come up with the idea of stealing the whole damned safe?”

“Not sure,” I said. “Maybe it was that cargo job I did in L.A.”

My cell phone suddenly emitted four beeps, alerting me to a text message.

I pulled over to the side of the road and flipped the phone open.

NEW TXT MESSAGE

From: Anon@AnonTxt.com

You have something of ours We have something of yours Let’s trade

83.

My heart began to pound.

Paladin, of course.

From a blocked e-mail address. I hit REPLY. I struggled with the keypad, with how to enter letters. Teenage girls text on their pink Razrs like court reporters on speed-OMG! BRB! LOL! ROTFLOL!

It took me a while. Finally, I was able to enter: “What do you have?”

“What’s going on, Heller?” said Dorothy.

I held the phone, waited.

Then, a minute later, four beeps. A photo appeared on the phone’s display.

My brother.

Taken at an odd angle, in low light. He looked haggard, seemed to have aged five years. But it was definitely Roger.

A picture that could have been taken at any time. Hardly proof of life.

Dorothy said, “My God.”

I entered: “Proof?”

The answer came back a minute later:

No time

Not good enough, I thought. This smelled like a setup. I thought for a few moments, then entered: “What R’s nickname for me?”

If, as I suspected, this was Koblenz’s trap, that would trip him up. He-or whoever was holding my brother hostage-would have to ask Roger. And if Roger wasn’t cooperating, he would either refuse to reply or give a wrong answer.

The four beeps came less than a minute later, and then the words:

RED MAN

“Jesus,” I said aloud. “It’s him.”

“How do you know, Heller? Talk to me.”

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Drive the truck.”

Dorothy took over behind the wheel, and I thought, staring at the phone. What if Roger had used the phrase in some e-mail to me years ago? Had he? I certainly didn’t remember, and it wasn’t as if he’d e-mailed me much at all in the last few years. A couple of times, maybe. But if he had, and they’d captured his e-mails to me and analyzed them…

It wasn’t impossible that they’d discovered Roger’s nickname for me that way. So this wasn’t really proof. Though maybe there was no definitive proof.

I tapped out: “What on back of Dad’s gift to R?”

That they couldn’t know without asking him. No way. He never put anything like that in an e-mail to me. We never talked about the Patek Philippe watch, Mom’s gift to Dad, which he’d handed over to Roger when he entered prison.

The text-message alert took much longer this time. I imagined Roger telling his captors, spelling out the Latin words repeatedly. His frustration at the ignorance of the men who’d taken him prisoner. Men who didn’t know Latin the way Roger did.

If, of course, they truly had Roger.

But then came the four beeps.

AUDNTES FORTUNA JUVT

A couple of typos. Missing a few letters, like the Latin inscription on the pediment of an old building. Typed out rapidly. But close enough. Fortune favors the bold.

I entered: “Where?”

The answer came back quickly:

Union Station Center Cafe 6:00 pm Alone

I looked at my watch. It was 4:30. That left me barely enough time to return to Washington and make the arrangements I needed to make.

I texted back: “OK”

84.

In normal circumstances, I’d always found Union Station to be one of the most beautiful places in Washington, and one of the most impressive train stations in the world. It was meant to evoke the Arch of Constantine in Rome. The barrel-vaulted ceiling in the main waiting room was almost a hundred feet high, with gold leaf all over the place. Not that long ago-twenty, twenty-five years ago-the station had been boarded up. Mold grew on the ceiling, toad-stools in the bathrooms. Now it gleamed, freshly painted and re-gold-leafed.

Just then, though, it seemed a teeming, chaotic place. Dangerous. The Paladin people had deliberately set our rendezvous for rush hour, when hordes of commuters flowed through the main hall, in and out of shops, up and down the escalators, to and from the train platforms and the metro station.

They wanted to watch me without being seen themselves. Though I wasn’t likely to recognize any of them anyway. The ones who’d already gone after me were probably collecting disability and spending a lot of time in chiropractors’ offices.

I’d found a space on the second level of the parking structure adjacent to the terminal. As had become my habit recently, I’d done a quick check for any concealed GPS tracking devices on the undercarriage of my car. There were none.

I took the escalators down, then went through the sliding glass doors to the mezzanine level. There I stood at the balcony and looked down over the main hall. It was impossible to identify anyone who might be watching me. There were far too many people here, moving in irregular patterns or just standing around and browsing. I descended the winding staircase to the main level and crossed the west hall, past a sports-memorabilia shop.

In my peripheral vision I noticed a man in his sixties wearing an old Baltimore Orioles baseball cap pulled down low over his head and a pair of black-framed glasses. Lt. Arthur Garvin of the Washington Metropolitan Police Violent Crime Branch was inspecting a Washington Redskins coffee mug.

He glanced vaguely in my direction, didn’t acknowledge me, and I kept going.

By the time I returned to the main pavilion and was circling the Center Cafe, my phone vibrated. I glanced at the number, answered it.

“Yeah?”

“Nothing?” Garvin said.

“Okay,” I said. “Twenty-two minutes. There’s a couple of stores within direct sight line of the Center Cafe.”

Koblenz, I assumed, was counting on my eagerness to see my brother making me sloppy. I hated to disappoint him. But this whole thing felt more and more like a setup.

I was now convinced that they really did have Roger. Between the photo they’d sent to my cell phone and the two pieces of information, one of which no one but Roger could possibly have known, there was little doubt.

But that didn’t mean that they actually planned to turn him over. As much as Koblenz wanted his RaptorCard back, he wasn’t going to give up leverage like that. At least not so easily.

Instead, they were probably planning on grabbing me, too. He’d use men I didn’t recognize. They’d get me somewhere and stick a needle in me and, finally, they’d be rid of the last threat of exposure.

That was, I assumed, their plan, anyway.

But plans are made to go wrong.

Garvin had his department-issue Glock. I had the Ruger.45 I’d liberated from Taylor, the Paladin guy. It was perfectly good, and if there were any legal complications later, I preferred to have the firearms trace lead back to Paladin rather than to me. The Ruger was tucked into an ankle holster, under a loose-fitting pair of jeans.

Still, it was just the two of us, and Garvin was not exactly in shape. He was a desk jockey. Nor could he call in any of his friends on the force, assuming he still had any. On the off chance that Koblenz’s swap was actually on the level, we didn’t want an unusual police presence in Union Station scaring his men off.

At five minutes before six, I stood in front of the information booth next to the Center Cafe, pretending to study the arrivals-and-departures board. The crowd surged, making it difficult to identify any obvious Paladin types nearby-ex-SEALS or ex-Special Forces guys wearing surveillance earpieces with the distinctive coiled audio tube running down the backs of their necks. Or holding mobile phones to their ears. Or wearing Bluetooth headsets.

There were a number of beefy guys talking into cell phones. Any of them could be Paladin. Or stockbrokers, for that matter.

But none of them seemed to be looking in my direction. Or if they were, they were being subtle.

Garvin was standing at the end of a bar. He looked like he was caught up in an argument with another patron.

At exactly six o’clock, my phone beeped four times, and I checked the text message.

Alone?

I texted back: “Yes.”

I waited. A row of gray statues high above gazed down, solemn Roman legionnaires.

Then another message:

Enter code on reverse of card

I understood at once. They wanted to confirm that I really had the RaptorCard with me, that I wasn’t trying to pull off a swindle. I took out the card and noted the eight-digit serial number on the back, which I assumed was a unique code. Then I entered it on the phone keypad.

And waited.

Then came the four beeps, and a message:

OK Buy ticket Camden Line to Laurel

Tickets to the commuter trains were sold just outside the doors at the back of the main hall. I walked through a set of glass doors and got in the long line that wound around stanchions to a ticket counter. No marble grandeur here; it could have been a Trailways bus station in Poughkeepsie.

About a minute later my phone beeped again.

No time Use machine

They were watching.

But where were they?

I looked around, saw dozens of people milling around, waiting for trains, standing in line. None of them familiar, none of them obviously a Paladin type. Garvin was in range, talking to a shoeshine guy, laughing. As if he had all the time in the world. But he was watching.

Maybe I’d underestimated him.

On either side of the counter was a bank of electronic ticketing machines. The lines there were much shorter. I chose a machine to the right of the counter. Only one person ahead of me; I had to wait just a few seconds. I inserted my credit card and selected the Laurel, Maryland, stop on the northbound MARC train.

I looked around again, trying to catch someone suddenly looking away, averting his eyes. Someone with a cell phone, punching away at the keys-texting, not talking on it.

But saw no one.

I considered calling Garvin’s cell to let him know where I was going but decided that was too risky. They were watching. Maybe they’d hear his phone ring, see him answer it at the same time that I was placing a call. I didn’t want to endanger him that way. Let him figure out what I was doing.

I’d offered Garvin the use of a tiny Bluetooth microearbud from Merlin’s stash. It was government-grade, used by the Secret Service, not available commercially. You slip it into your ear canal, and it’s just about invisible. But Garvin was old-school, and he wasn’t comfortable sticking something that tiny into his ear. He was afraid it would get stuck.

I wished at that point that Garvin had taken me up on the offer.

The ticket popped out. I grabbed it, found the track number on the departures board. Through the automatic doors at Gate A and outside to the platform. The air was cool and crisp and acrid from uncombusted diesel fuel and smoke. The Camden train was idling, its doors open. Already crowded with passengers. Some of them had put briefcases on the vacant seats next to them. I found a seat in a row of two on the right side, next to an elderly lady. The compartment was just about full to capacity. Passengers started having to take their bags off the empty seats, letting people sit next to them.

Garvin, who’d been following me at a discreet distance, walked past my compartment, decided to board the next car down. A smart move: He didn’t want to be recognized.

An announcement came over the train’s P.A. system warning that the doors were about to close. The train was about to depart.

My phone beeped, and I flipped it open.

Get off train now Do not take this train

I sighed in annoyance: I didn’t like being toyed with. But I jumped out of the train just as the doors began to close with a pneumatic hiss. Garvin, in the next compartment, saw what I was doing a few seconds later and pushed at the doors, tried to force them open. The train picked up speed and several seconds later was gone. Along with Garvin.

My phone was beeping again. The message said:

Penn Line train

Across the platform.

I entered: “To where?”

I was getting good at texting. By then I could have given a teenage girl a run for her money.

The answer came at once:

Just get on

85.

The Penn Line train was about to depart, a minute or so after the Camden Line. I raced across the platform and found a seat, and my phone vibrated. A call, not a text message.

“Dammit,” Garvin said, “what was that all about?”

“I think that was their way to make sure I’m alone,” I said as quietly as I could.

“Where are they sending you now?”

“I don’t know. This train heads into Baltimore. Terminates in Perryville.”

“Call me back when they tell you which station you’re getting off at,” he said. “I’ll grab a cab or something.”

“I’ll call you when I get off,” I said. “I have a feeling the games aren’t over yet.”

The conductor came by with a handheld punch and asked for my ticket. I didn’t know how far I was going, so I bought a ticket for the end of the line, Perryville.

And for a long while the phone stayed quiet. No text messages; no calls from Garvin.

The train was old and decrepit, the seats worn and permanently soiled. The man next to me kept ripping out articles from the Washington Post. I wondered whether he was senile. Very few passengers were talking on cell phones. It was quiet, the silence of people who were depleted after a long day. A few snoozed.

We passed the used-car dealerships in Seabrook, then the landscape became rural. Twenty-two minutes out, we reached Bowie State. Five minutes later, Odenton.

And still no text message with instructions. I’d begun to wonder whether I was being led on a pointless errand, a mind game. The next stop was BWI Marshall Airport. Most of the other passengers got out there, probably to board buses to the airport.

Five minutes later the train stopped at Halethorpe. The suburban outskirts of Baltimore. Tract housing. Residential. A cemetery on the west side.

So maybe they wanted to meet in Baltimore. In seventeen minutes the train would arrive at Baltimore’s Penn Station. But still no text message. I wasn’t going to call Garvin; not yet. Not until I was certain of the destination.

Just three passengers remained in my car. The old man next to me, obsessively ripping out swaths of newsprint. He looked like the kind of guy who lives in a studio apartment surrounded by towering stacks of dusty yellowed newspapers until one of them topples and he’s crushed to death. A young guy, too small and nerdy and fragile-looking to be Paladin. A middle-aged black woman, likely a government worker.

Five minutes later my phone came to life, signaling a text message.

Exit here W Baltimore

An announcement came over the loudspeaker: “Next stop, West Baltimore. Doors open on the last car only. Passengers wishing to depart here should move to the last car.”

I got up, walked into the next car and the one after that, and as I did, I hit redial to call Garvin.

“West Baltimore station,” I said.

“Jesus Christ. I’m at Annapolis Junction. I’ll grab a cab if I can find one.”

The train came to a stop, the doors opened, and I got out along with the middle-aged black woman from my car and a young, black-haired guy in a hooded sweatshirt wearing a backpack.

It was a grim-looking area. Down below, to the left, was an old, abandoned red-brick factory, soot-stained, all of its windows broken. Narrow row houses along a steep hillside, many of them boarded up. The train platform was elevated, traffic running underneath. The black-haired guy clomped down the stairs ahead of me.

A text message popped up:

W Mulberry St to Wheeler Ave

So they were going to lead me block by block.

Twilight had begun to settle. Not many people on the streets. I paid close attention to everyone passing by, vigilant to the possibility of an ambush.

Fifteen or twenty minutes later, my phone beeped again.

R on Winchester St North on N Bentalou St

By then I’d walked about a mile. The streets got more desolate, more deserted. More abandoned buildings. It had that sort of bombed-out, urban-wasteland-of-the-future look you see in some of the old sci-fi movies like Blade Runner and Escape from New York.

Four more beeps:

Cross st

On the other side of the street was an old brick building as long as a city block. One of the many crumbling remains of Charm City’s long-vanished industrial era. Faint remnants of painted letters on the brick indicated it had once been a meat-processing plant. It was surrounded by a rusted chain-link fence, bent and ruined and caved in here and there.

Another text-message alert:

Go to E side of easternmost bldg and wait by old loading dock

I could see that it wasn’t just one building but an entire factory complex. Three identical block-long buildings parallel to one another, maybe a hundred feet apart, along the west side of the railroad tracks. Each building was four stories high. Broken windows boarded up. Occasional grimy smokestacks. The sort of place that, in a nicer part of a city, would have been converted into condos for yuppies five or ten years ago and named The Meat Factory or something.

I easily stepped over a caved-in section of the chain-link fence.

The no-man’s-land inside was littered with old tires and trash and broken bottles. The wind swirled plastic-bag tumbleweed. The buildings were covered with graffiti and plastered with DO NOT ENTER and CONDEMNED notices. It took me a good five minutes just to reach the end of the first building. Then over to the third building, where I found an old loading dock, boarded up like all the windows. Each building was at least a thousand feet long. Far longer than an average city block. More like the length of an east-west block in New York City.

And there I waited.

Looked around at the now-dark, desolate landscape, the wind whistling, the distant sound of car horns.

I understood why they’d chosen the location, or at least I had a pretty good idea. From a distance, anyone watching through binoculars could see I’d come alone. I was on foot and had no backup-they’d made sure of that-and the site was so deserted that they could enter and exit and know they weren’t being followed.

I also realized how vulnerable I was, standing here. One man alone, a pistol holstered to my ankle. No one covering me. The Paladin guys could be waiting inside the abandoned building, aiming sniper rifles through the gaps in the boards.

They could take me out in seconds.

But the truth was, they could have taken me out at any number of points if they’d wanted to. Killing me wasn’t going to solve their problems. They could have done that easily, long ago. Instead, they probably wanted to force information out of me, which would require taking me alive, as a hostage.

The way they must have taken Roger. Or maybe they planned something like what had been done to Marjorie Ogonowski.

But what could they want from me if they had Roger already?

Or else they really meant what they said, and they simply wanted the RaptorCard back. It was, in my hands, truly a threat. It would enable me to access their computer files.

So maybe they actually did want to trade Roger for that little piece of hardware. Maybe this truly was a swap. The way East and West used to exchange imprisoned spies on the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin.

Maybe. Or maybe not.

At that point, though, I had no more leverage. Not if I wanted to see my brother again.

I waited a little longer. Reached down and pulled the Ruger from its holster. Thumbed the safety up to the ready position.

My phone rang: a call, not a text message. Garvin.

“Where are you?” I said.

“No goddamned cabs around here. I had to call for one. I’m waiting. Where are you?”

I told him.

“Get out of there,” he said. “Don’t do anything until I get there.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t control the timing here.”

“You can if you want to. Just leave.”

“No. Get over here as soon as you can.”

“Heller, you idiot.”

“Just get here when you can,” I said, and I ended the call.

Then I heard the squeal of tires, and two vehicles careened around each end of the building, the timing synchronized. Two black Humvees barreling toward me.

I stood still.

Looked to either side.

The two Humvees pulled up about thirty to forty feet in front of me, nose-to-nose, two feet apart, their brakes screeching. Dark-tinted windows: I couldn’t see inside. Mud on the license plates.

I waited. The Ruger in my right hand, at my side. The driver’s side door of the Hummer on my right opened, and a guy got out. Tall, bullet-headed, his head shaven down to the skin. Odd-shaped head, too. He looked like a human-sized penis.

In his hand was not a gun but something small and oblong that looked vaguely familiar but I couldn’t immediately identify.

“Don’t move,” the guy said.

“I’m not,” I said.

He held up the device. A garage-door opener, I realized, but I knew what it was for.

“Drop the weapon.”

“Convince me.”

“This is a detonator,” the penis-shaped man said. “Do anything sudden, and your brother dies.”

“Just like that, huh?”

“Drop the gun.”

“Drop it? Rather not scratch the finish.”

“Drop it now.”

“Why?”

“You want to find out?”

I didn’t. I lowered the Ruger, safety still off, still fire-ready, and set it gingerly on the hard-packed earth.

He signaled with his free hand, and the back door on the other vehicle opened. I heard it open, didn’t see it. Heard voices. Commands uttered in a low voice. A figure came around the far side of the car, walked between the two vehicles, stopped to the right of the bullet-headed guy.

A figure in baggy, shapeless clothes. Dun-colored overalls that were too big for him, under an old trench coat.

Roger.