Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

“He said he’d found something he wanted my input on,” Victor said, his words muffled.

“Your input.”

He looked up, sighed. He folded his hands on the counter in front of him. “Yes, Nicholas, it turns out I know a thing or two. Even though you never wanted to learn anything from me.”

“What do you mean? I learned plenty.”

“Your sarcasm doesn’t escape me. Roger told me he’d come across a phony expense from one of his subcontractors – a security firm.”

“A subcontractor?”

“They’d been providing installation security for Gifford Industries – armed guards for their power plants and construction projects and such.”

“What do you mean, a ‘phony expense’?”

“He was convinced this was a bribe, a kickback, to some Pentagon big shot, and he wanted proof. But that was a tall order, even to someone as brilliant as your brother. It’s a little like understanding algebraic combinatorics if you still don’t get long division.”

Ah, the old Victor Heller arrogance. Even talking about his revered and adored son, he had to establish his superiority. “Like a toddler trying to run the Boston Marathon, is that it?”

“Give it a rest, Nicholas. Roger knows this stuff on a fairly deep level. But not like me. I’ve done it.”

I assumed he meant that he’d set up all kinds of shell companies in offshore tax havens. I’d often wondered whether he’d squirreled money away, money the government hadn’t been able to locate and seize. How else could he have lived as a fugitive for all those years?

“So Roger wanted to prove that this security firm was making kickbacks to the Pentagon,” I said skeptically. That fit with what he’d told Lauren and what Marjorie Ogonowski had told me. “Why? So he could report it to the government? Earn a merit badge, maybe? Why does this not sound like Roger?”

My father sighed impatiently, waved a hand around as if trying to swat away a cloud of mosquitoes. “Oh, please,” he said. “Spare me. Roger was tired of being poor.”

“Poor?” I said. “Good God. He was making a six-figure salary.”

He snorted. “A six-figure salary. These days, that’s poverty.”

“What do you earn, working in the prison laundry?” I said. “Ten cents a day?”

He didn’t even bother granting me one of his famous withering glares. “He’d had it with being sidelined. He was fed up with seeing mediocrities being promoted above him while he remained stuck. One of a hundred vice presidents. He could have run Gifford Industries, and he knew it.”

“So what was he trying to do?”

“Quite simply, he wanted to make it clear what he had on them. What he knew. And how much he wanted.”

“Hush money,” I said.

He nodded.

“Extortion.”

“You always did have a way with words.”

Yes. Now that sounded like the Roger I knew. “How much did he want?”

“Ten million dollars.”

“That all?” I said as dryly as I could.

“Actually, that was quite reasonable. Quite the bargain. If you consider the public furor that would have erupted if the kickbacks became public. They’d have lost many times that in government contracts.”

“Government contracts, huh? What’s the company?”

“You might have heard of Paladin Worldwide.”

“Ah,” I said.

Paladin Worldwide was the world’s largest private military contractor. It began as a supplier of armed guards for businesses like Gifford Enterprises and eventually morphed into a full-fledged army for hire. Paladin was infamous, controversial, and generally despised. Paladin soldiers – “contractors,” they were called – were widely regarded as trigger-happy cowboys. But what really ticked off U.S. soldiers was that, while a typical sergeant might make a hundred bucks a day, the Paladin guys were making a thousand.

When I was in the service, in Afghanistan and Bosnia, Paladin mercs fought alongside the U.S. troops. They were all recent vets, and in truth they were as well trained as anyone, but since they were legally classified as “consultants,” they weren’t subject to the laws of the country in which they were fighting – or even U.S. military law. That meant that they could fire at civilians with impunity, and some of them did. They couldn’t be prosecuted. Not one was ever charged with a crime. It was like the Wild West. In Iraq, in fact, there were more private contractors than U.S. Army troops. And Paladin Worldwide was the biggest contractor there.

“He was trying to extort ten million dollars from Paladin? Not the smartest idea. Those guys are armed and dangerous.”

“I warned him that the whole idea was reckless.”

“Did you, Dad? Or did you give him tips on how to do it?”

Another sigh, this one more peeved than impatient. “I told him he was playing a very dangerous game.”

I was silent for a long while, then I said, “Did he ever get the ten million?”

“I don’t know. I assume not.”

I recalled Roger’s e-mail, sent through that InCaseOfDeath website. “This has to be the strangest letter I’ve ever written,” he’d said. “Because if you get it, that means I’m dead.”

And: “Who knows what they’ll do? Will they try to make it look like I committed suicide?”

He talked about “the people who are trying to stop me.”

The people who were trying to stop him – from blackmailing them, from extorting them – were Paladin Worldwide, it was clear. Somehow Roger had learned about a phony expense they’d submitted to Gifford Industries, a kickback they’d tried to bill Gifford for. And Roger being Roger, he moved in for the kill. Demanded ten million dollars in hush money.

From Paladin Worldwide. The world’s largest private army.

There could scarcely be a more lethal adversary.

“So what do you think happened?” I said. “You think Paladin grabbed Roger? Or maybe Roger disappeared in order to escape them?”

He put his hands over his eyes, and a large silver flake sloughed off. “Disappeared? No, Nicholas. It’s far more likely that they… did away with him. That’s how they work.”

“I wonder.” I didn’t bother to explain my reasoning – the fact that Lauren had been knocked unconscious rather than being killed. “I don’t believe in corporate hit squads.”

“Then you’re either naïve or you’re not paying attention. You don’t remember that vice chairman of Enron who was just about to testify before Congress, about to name names in the biggest corporate scandal ever, but before he could get on a plane to Washington, he was found shot to death in his car? ‘Suicide,’ they called it, of course. Then a couple of months later, a consultant for Arthur Andersen whose big client was – you guessed it, Enron – was found shot in the head in a forest in Colorado? And then a banker with the Royal Bank of Scotland who was about to testify against his colleagues in guess what case – that’s right, Enron – was found dead in the woods outside London. Another apparent suicide.”

“This is grassy-knoll, tinfoil-hat stuff, Dad. Black helicopters.”

“A woman named Karen Silkwood works in a nuclear plant in Oklahoma and gets plutonium poisoning and gets in her car to meet a New York Times reporter to spill the beans about unsafe working conditions in the nuclear industry, only her car runs off the road. Suicide?”

“I saw the Meryl Streep movie. Good flick. What’s your point?”

His tone had become fierce. “I have no doubt they killed Roger. Probably meant to kill Lauren, too, not just give her a concussion.”

I decided to let the argument drop. It wasn’t getting me anywhere.

“I need names,” I said. “Who at Paladin he talked to. Who might have threatened him.”