Joseph Finder - Vanished

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

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”

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.