Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

“So?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Larceny,” I liked to reply.

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

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

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

“Maybe. But why would you?”

“Curiosity.”

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

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

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

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

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

I wish I’d left it there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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