Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

But I didn’t have to defend my father’s honor anymore at our fancy private school. The next day we stayed home from school and helped Mom pack up the house. A moving truck came the day after that.

The government had seized all of Dad’s assets, which meant everything – the Bedford house, the duplex penthouse on Fifth Avenue at East Sixty-fourth Street, the house in Palm Beach that Roger and I hated, the chalet in Aspen, the ranch in Montana. All bank accounts. Every last cent.

We piled into the old Subaru station wagon that Mom liked to tool around Bedford Village in and headed for her mother’s house, north of Boston. After we crossed the Massachusetts border, Mom stopped in Sturbridge to get some lunch, and she went to an ATM to get cash and began crying. Her personal bank account had been seized, too.

We had nothing.

Roger and I were starved, as only teenage boys can be, but we said nothing.

“You okay, Red Man?” Roger said to me.

“I’m okay,” I said.

We didn’t stop until we got to Malden and our grandmother’s cramped, pink-painted suburban split-level ranch house. The house Mom grew up in. No tennis court. No stables.

No Dad, either.

We didn’t see him again for more than ten years.

After five years of working the dark side of Washington, D.C., both in the government and out, I had a pretty good Rolodex. Not like Jay Stoddard’s, but not too shabby. I knew someone in just about every three-letter government agency.

Granted, no one actually uses Rolodex card files anymore. In fact, as a figure of speech, I prefer the concept of the favor bank. You do a favor for someone, help someone out of trouble, put someone in touch with someone else, make a connection… the odds are the person you helped out will pay you back.

They don’t always. Some people are jerks. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns and all that. Plus, deposits into the favor bank aren’t insured by the FDIC. And you don’t always do favors just to earn payback. Sometimes you do the right thing just to do the right thing, which might be called the good-karma network, or the “pay it forward” principle.

But whatever your motive, you always want to maintain a positive balance in your favor bank account. You want liquidity, in case you ever need to make an emergency withdrawal. The longer I work in this murky underworld, the more it resembles Tony Soprano’s office in the back room of the Bada Bing strip club. Not just Washington, but the business world, too: They’re like the Mafia, but without the horse head in the bed. Usually.

Anyway, I knew a guy who worked in a fairly senior capacity at the Transportation Security Administration, the TSA. These are the folks who frisk and wand you and grope you, make you take off your shoes and arbitrarily decide to search through your underwear at airport security gates. Who once seized a toddler’s sippy cup at Reagan National Airport a few years back and detained the kid’s mother for trying to smuggle potentially lethal infant formula on board. And who not long ago made a lady in Texas remove her nipple rings with a rusty pair of pliers (though the less said about nipple rings the better).

About a year ago, Stoddard Associates was brought in by the TSA to conduct an outside investigation into alleged corruption in the agency – a smuggling ring led by someone inside TSA. For some reason the TSA people didn’t want to use the FBI. Something to do with politics and turf, and Jay Stoddard didn’t care why.

They’d fingered an operations security administrator named Bill Puccino. I met him and knew right away he hadn’t done it. We bonded. His Boston accent was as familiar to me, as comforting, as a pair of old sneakers, after the years I spent in Malden at Grandma’s house.

Turned out that his boss had set him up as the fall guy. I cleared Puccino. He was promoted to his boss’s job. His boss was punished by being transferred to a more exalted position in Homeland Security, which gave him a medal for his “integrity” and sent him to Paris as their “attaché.” Cruel and unusual. The ignoble fate of the political appointee.

TSA was part of the Department of Homeland Security, which itself was part of the vast new bureaucracy created after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Washington responded to 9/11 just like a corporation responds to a bad quarter – by doing a reorg. Shuffle around the boxes on the org chart. In short order, the TSA created the No Fly List, a secret list of people who aren’t allowed to board a commercial plane to travel within the U.S. The number of people on that list is also a secret, but it’s around fifty thousand.

As I headed up Constitution Avenue toward K Street, I called Bill Puccino’s work number. He answered with a bark: “Puccino.”

“Pooch,” I said. “Nick Heller.”

“Nico!” he said. “There you are!”

“How goes it?”

“Doin’ good, doin’ good.”

“Still keeping the world safe from nipple rings, I hope.”

He paused, got it, then laughed.

“I need a quick favor,” I said.

“For you, big guy, anything.”

“I need you to dip into a database.”

“Which one?”

“TSDB.”

He was silent for a good five or six seconds. “Sorry, Nico. No can do.”

And he hung up.

I didn’t realize at first that he’d hung up. I thought maybe the call had been dropped – a dead spot, maybe. They’re all over the District.

But about two minutes later my cell phone rang. It was Puccino.

“Sorry about that,” he said. The sound quality was different; it sounded like he was calling from a mobile phone, too. “I can’t talk about that stuff on my work line.”

“They monitor your calls?”

“Come on, man, what do you think? I work for Big Brother. So tell me what you want.”

“How does someone get put on the No Fly List?”

“Threaten to blow up the White House? Take flying lessons but tell them you don’t need to learn how to land the plane?”

Then it was my turn to laugh politely at a lame joke.

“There’s a name on your No Fly List,” I said. “I want to know how it got there.”

He exhaled noisily into his cell phone. “Nick, how important is this to you?”

“Very.”

He exhaled into the phone again. It wasn’t a sigh of exasperation, though. It was tension, indecision. He was wrestling with it.

“I can check to see if someone’s on the No Fly List,” Puccino said. “That’s easy. Lots of people in law enforcement have access to the Secure Flight program. But when you ask how it got there and what the reason is – well, that’s a whole different deal. That means accessing this superduper-double-secret database called TIDE – the Terrorist Identities Data-something or other. That’s the one that contains the derogatories.”

“Derogatories?”

“The bad stuff they did. The reason someone’s a threat. And which agency put ’em there. The originating agency.”

“Can you get into that?”

“Sure. But every time you sign in to TIDE, you leave tracks. There’s all these information security safeguards now. A whole audit trail. So I gotta be careful.”

“Understood. I appreciate your sticking your neck out for me.”

“You have a date of birth or a social security number? You wouldn’t believe the number of Gary Smiths we have. Or John Williamses.”

I told him the name.

He said, “Heller, as in Nick Heller?”

“My brother.”

“You gotta be kidding.”

“I wish.”

“What’d he do?”

“Pissed off the wrong people.”

“ I’ll say.” He hung up again and called me back just as I was about to pull into the parking garage underneath 1900 K Street. I swung into a space on the street next to a fire hydrant, since the cell reception in the garage was funky.