Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

“Nico, you thinking maybe someone stole your brother’s identity or something? That happens sometimes.”

“What do you have?”

“The nominating agency is DoD. Means that Roger Heller was put on the list by the Defense Department.”

“Does it say why?”

“See, that’s the problem. The field in the database where you normally see the reason – you know, ‘Mustafa says he wants to blow up the White House’ – just has a code. Meaning it’s classified beyond my level.”

“Okay,” I said. “This is a big help. Thanks a lot.”

I was about to disconnect the call, when he said, “Nick, listen. I know I’m just a pencil-neck bureaucrat. But I need to protect my pencil neck. You understand?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. You won’t hear from me again.”

Putting my brother on a terrorist watch list was preposterous. He was an asshole, yes. But a terrorist? All it told me was that he had some very powerful enemies who had the power to abuse the No Fly List. Enemies, I assumed, somewhere within my old haunt, the Pentagon.

But how could Roger have made enemies in the Defense Department? And why?

The more I dug into it, the more I came to believe that something strange and disturbing was going on: something corrupt at a very high level, and my brother was just a casualty. And maybe that was an even more important motivation: my obsessive need to turn over the rock, as Jay Stoddard liked to say. To root out the truth. A shrink would probably tell me that it was a logical, if neurotic, legacy of my peculiar upbringing, of being lied to repeatedly by Victor Heller.

But since I’d never seen a shrink, and I wasn’t particularly self-reflective, I didn’t particularly care where it came from. I didn’t need to understand.

All I knew was that I wasn’t going to stop until I’d unearthed the truth about what had happened to my brother.

DOROTHY DUVAL had a plaque on her desk that said JESUS IS COMING – LOOK BUSY.

I always liked that. That about summed her up. She was actually a fairly devout churchgoer, but she had a bawdy sense of humor about it. She also enjoyed pissing people off. She wasn’t quiet and demure. She was in your face – “all up in your grill,” as she’d put it. It was a trait that was inseparable from her stubbornness. She was brilliant and tireless and methodical, and she never gave up.

I’d seen her in T-shirts that said things like JESUS IS MY HOMEBOY and SATAN SUCKS and MY GOD CAN KICK YOUR GOD’S BUTT. Though not in the office. She always dressed far nicer than a forensic data tech needed to. That day she was wearing a black skirt and a peach blouse and enormous silver hoop earrings.

As a tech, not an investigator, Dorothy didn’t get an office. She got a cubicle in the open area of Stoddard Associates known as the bullpen, along with the other support staff. Her desk was always impeccable. Tacked to the walls of her cubicle were pictures of her parents, her brother, and a gaggle of nieces and nephews. She had no kids of her own, and no significant other – male or female – and I never asked her about her personal life. As blunt-spoken as she was, she kept her private life private, and I always respected that.

She noticed me standing there and cast a wary eye at the laptop under my arm. “That for me?”

I nodded. She took it. “Case number? I don’t see a label on there.”

She was referring to the barcode sticker with a case ID that we put on all pieces of evidence so everything can be tracked easily.

“It’s not a Stoddard case,” I said, and I explained.

It took me a few minutes.

She turned the computer over, popped it open. “This is your brother’s?”

I nodded.

“You tell me what you want, boyfriend.” She looked around. Marty Masur, fellow investigator and petty martinet, strutted by, nodded at us. “Let’s talk in your office,” she said. “Need a little privacy.”

“YEAH, IT’S hosed, all right,” Dorothy said a few minutes later, staring at the screen. “Someone tried to scrub it but screwed it up. Got the operating system, too. What do you want off it?”

“Anything and everything you can get.”

“What’s on here that’s so important?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “But I’m guessing there was something there important enough for my brother to try to get rid of it.”

“Why?”

“I just told you.”

“Uh-uh. You told me what you’re looking for. You didn’t tell me why you want it.”

“How about you just do it?” I said, sort of testily.

“Honey, it don’t work like that,” she said. I’d noticed that her speech turned “street” when she got annoyed, as if for dramatic effect. She extended a forefinger and tapped the long peach fingernail against the palm of her other hand. “There ain’t some magic unerasing trick or something that’s going to recover permanently deleted data, okay? That’s just science fiction. You watch too many movies.”

“I don’t watch enough, actually. No time.”

“Yeah, well, if someone’s real serious about scrubbing their computer, there’s some hard-core wiping programs out there. That physically overwrite every sector, from zero right to the end of the disc. No way we’re going to find any traces, if they knew what they were doing. I can try some data-carving utilities on this baby, and I might get lucky, but that’s a crap-shoot.”

“Well, see what you can do,” I said. “I don’t understand half of what you said, but I don’t need to.”

“Man, I think you’re actually proud of being a Luddite.”

“I’m not proud. I just know there are some things I’m good at and some things I’m not.”

“Well, maybe you ought to learn this stuff.”

“I wouldn’t want to put you out of a job.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that.”

“Exactly. Here’s how I look at it. Economists call this the law of comparative advantage. I forget where I read this. Michael Jordan can probably mow his lawn faster than anyone else, but does that mean he should mow it himself?”

“Michael Jordan don’t even play basketball anymore.”

“Tiger Woods, then. Or David Beckham.”

“Are you saying you could be the Tiger Woods or the David Beckham of data recovery if you put your mind to it?”

“I think I better just shut my mouth.”

“I think that’s the first smart thing you said today.”

“Fair enough.”

“Look, Nick, if you’re serious about trying to figure out what your brother was up to, I’m guessing you want a whole deep-dish data-mining job on him. Am I right?”

I smiled, shrugged. “You got me.”

“I know you.”

“Anything you can do,” I said.

“Do I get paid for this?”

“Whatever you want.”

“Let’s just call it a six-figure deposit into my favor bank. To put it in Nick Heller terms.”

I smiled again. “You got it.”

She stood up, folded her arms. “Nick, sweetie, can I say something?”

“Can I ever stop you from saying anything?”

“Not hardly. Nick, don’t do this.”

“Don’t do what?”

“Don’t get involved in this. This whole thing with your brother – it’s too personal. You get too invested, and it just messes you up. You start doing things you shouldn’t do. You lose your professional distance.”

“You ever see me act less than professional?”

She thought for a second. “Plenty of times.”

“But not on the job.”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

“I can handle this.”

“See, I’m not so sure about that. Leave it to the cops. That’s their job. You want to help them, feed them stuff, go ahead. But if you take this on yourself, you’re going to go too far. I tell you this because I love you.”