Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

Success. Maybe. But at least I knew that someone had picked up the FedEx package and moved it from the mail drop to an office building in Falls Church, and that was something. Or it might turn out to be nothing. I wouldn’t know until I drove out there and took a look. I pocketed the BlackBerry and cell phone and fished out my car key, the DVD in my left hand.

The Defender is as nonautomatic a vehicle as you can get: even the windows crank by hand. No remote starter; no keyless entry. You open it with a good old-fashioned key just like they did a century ago. I inserted the key in the lock and turned it–

And heard the scrape against the pavement an instant too late.

I turned slowly, but suddenly the car window came at me, smashing into my nose and mouth.

While, at the same time, the DVD was wrenched out of my left hand.

Reeling in pain, I spun, hands out, unsteady on my feet. Miraculously, the window glass hadn’t broken, but it felt like maybe my nose had.

Enraged, I took off after my assailant, who was already quite a distance away. A black Humvee came hurtling down the street and slowed for a second. Its passenger-side door came open, and the guy took a running leap into the vehicle.

Once I caught a glimpse of its license plate, I knew it was the same Humvee that had passed me twice before. I’m not the fastest runner, but fueled by adrenaline and considerable anger, I was able to get close enough to the Humvee to thump an angry fist against its left rear quarter panel before it disappeared down the street.

My attacker had been unusually tall, with a steroid-poisoned wrestler’s build and what looked at a distance to be a high-and-tight jarhead recon haircut-shaven everywhere except the crown of his head, like a short Mohawk. He looked like an overweight Travis Bickle.

I felt along the bridge of my nose. It wasn’t broken. No broken teeth either, though my upper lip was bleeding. I felt and tasted the blood.

I took out my cell phone and hit redial, and when Garvin answered I said, “I have one more license plate for you.”

The Dean & Deluca’s on M Street in Georgetown sold excellent fresh-baked chocolate-chip cookies. I bought a dozen and asked the bakery clerk to pack them for me in a plain white deli box. I placed the box of cookies on the car seat next to me and got onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The entire interior of the car at once filled with the sweet buttery smell of freshly baked cookies.

About half an hour later I turned off Leesburg Pike into a semicircular drive in front of a modern ten-story office building built in the shape of a broad V, with a blue glass skin that mirrored the sky so perfectly it seemed at times to disappear.

The name on the front of the building was Skyview Executive Center. It appeared to be a multitenant office building. Like a lot of commercial buildings in Tysons Corner and Falls Church, there was an underground parking garage. Instead, I parked in the Doubletree Hotel down the block and walked over with my box of cookies.

I hadn’t gotten any text messages from the GPS tracker in a while, so as I walked I took out my phone and opened the last message I’d received, then clicked on the map. The red dot was gone. That told me that the device had stopped transmitting. Which presumably meant that it had been discovered, then disabled.

I entered the lobby and spent a few minutes inspecting the building directory, one of those big black wall signs with white letters, rear-illuminated. A long list of tenants. Mostly small to midsize firms: healthcare consultants, investment managers, accountants, a lot of lawyers. A couple of government-agency satellite offices. A number of companies with cryptic-sounding names like Aegis Partners and Orion Strategy, which were either lobbyists or defense contractors.

But no Traverse Development. Nothing that sounded even remotely familiar. It didn’t surprise me that this mysterious company wasn’t listed on the building’s directory. But one of the companies in the building had to be connected to them, in some way.

The security guard, seated behind a curved granite counter in the middle of the lobby, saw me staring at the directory board and called out, “Can I help you, sir?” He was in his late fifties, with deep-set eyes and a prominent forehead, a shiny bald head and protruding ears.

“You have a list of the tenants in this building you might be able to give me?”

“No, sir, I’m afraid I can’t. Management company won’t let me hand that out.”

“Rules is rules, huh? Thing is, the wife’s trying to start a chocolate-chip cookie business?” I held up the white bakery box. “I’m helping her with the marketing. Because she won’t let me near the kitchen.”

I smiled, and he smiled back, and I went on, “We want to give out free boxes of cookies to all the companies here, sort of a promotional thing?” I came closer and handed him the box. “Here, these are for you. Try a couple and tell me if you don’t think my wife’s got it nailed.”

He hesitated.

“Go on, try one. If you can stop at one.”

He opened the flaps on the box and pulled out a cookie and took a large bite. “Mmm,” he said. “Soft and chewy and crispy all at the same time. She use dark chocolate chips?”

“Only the best quality chocolate.”

He took another bite. “Man, these are good. ”

“Thank you.”

He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a stapled set of papers and gave it to me. “Just don’t tell anyone where you got this, okay?” He winked.

I winked back. “Not a word.”

He peered at me, touched his nose and lip and said, “You get into a fight with the wife?”

For a moment I didn’t know what he was talking about, then I remembered that my bruised nose and split lip probably looked pretty bad by then. “Yeah,” I said. “I told her I thought she should use shortening instead of butter. Learned my lesson. I’m sticking to the marketing.”

INSTEAD OF driving back to the office, I stopped at a FedEx/Kinko’s copy shop and faxed Dorothy the tenant list. Not to some fax machine in the halls of Stoddard Associates, where anyone could see it; instead, I faxed it to her E-Fax account, so she’d get it online. While I was there, I rented time on a computer, checked my e-mail, and found an e-mail from Frank Montello, my information broker.

Whenever he wrote e-mails, he used all capital letters as if he were sending a telegram by Western Union.

ATTACHED YOUR BRO’S PHONE BILLS. BIG FILE. STILL WORKING ON THAT OTHER CELL # BUT SHOULD HAVE SOMETHING BY TOMORROW. INVOICE ATTACHED, TOO, PAYABLE WITHIN 10 DAYS AS PER USUAL.

So he still hadn’t located the owner of the emergency contact number that Woody Sawyer had been given, back at the airport outside of L.A. But he had been able to unearth the billing statements for one of Roger’s cell phones, the one whose bills I couldn’t find in his study. The detailed phone records ran for dozens of pages. It wouldn’t have been much fun to read them on my BlackBerry. I printed them all out and skimmed the list while sitting in my car.

Mostly meaningless columns of phone numbers. But then something leaped out at me.

Five calls, all collect, all from a number in Altamont, New York.

“Billed on behalf of Global TelLink,” it said, and gave a phone number with a 518 area code.

The Altamont Correctional Facility, it said.

From Victor Heller, of course.

I hadn’t talked to my father in several years. Whereas Roger had spoken to him five times in the last month.

My brother always got along with our father well-far better than I did. I’d always thought that was because the two of them were so much alike.

But five phone calls in the last month?