Joseph Finder: Vanished

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Woody, you’re making things worse.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll take care of Customs.”

“I’m not talking about Customs.”

“Who are you worried about?”

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

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

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

“You got a box cutter?” I said.

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

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

“Good God Almighty,” Woody said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A billion dollars.

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

“A little spending money, Woody?”

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

“What did you think was in here?”

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

“No idea at all, Woody?”

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

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

“I just did my part.”

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

He nodded.

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

He nodded.

“I want that number, Woody.”

He glanced up at me, then down.

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

He said nothing.

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

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

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

“I do now,” I said.

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

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

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