Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

Lauren drew breath. “Wait – when did Gabe come by? You said – you said, ‘this morning’ – but what time is it–?”

“As I said, just after two in the morning.”

“On Saturday?”

“Sunday. Sunday morning , actually. Or Saturday night, depending on how you look at it.”

Her brain felt like sludge, but she knew the nurse had to be wrong. “Saturday morning, you mean.”

The nurse shook her head, then looked at the horse-faced doctor, who said, “You’ve been unconscious for more than twenty-four hours. Maybe longer. It would help us if you knew approximately what time the attack took place.”

“Twenty-four… hours? Where’s – where’s Roger?”

“Looks like you got a nasty blow to the back of the head,” the doctor said. “From everything we’ve seen, you haven’t sustained any injuries beyond a small spiral fracture at the base of the skull. The CT scan doesn’t show any hematomas or blood clots. You were extremely lucky.”

I guess it depends on your definition of luck. She recalled Roger’s panicked face. The arms grabbing her from behind. His scream: “Why her?”

“Is Roger okay?”

Silence.

“Where’s Roger?”

No reply.

She felt the cold tendrils of fear in her stomach.

“ Where is he? Is Roger okay or not?”

“A couple of policemen came by to talk to you,” he said. “But you don’t have to talk to anyone until you feel up to it.”

“The police?” Tears welled in her eyes. “Oh, dear God, what happened to him?”

A long pause.

“Oh, God, no,” Lauren said. “Tell me he’s okay.”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Heller,” the doctor said.

“What? Please, God, tell me he’s alive!”

“I wish I could, Ms. Heller. But we don’t know where your husband is.”

LOS ANGELES

Woody Sawyer ran after me, his boots clanging on the steel air stairs. “What are you saying?” he yelled over the clamor of the K-loader and the roar of a jet engine starting up nearby. “This isn’t our plane?”

I didn’t answer him. I was too busy looking around. A minute or so later I found what I was looking for.

It was the plane I’d seen being refueled earlier. A white Boeing 727 parked on the far side of the Argon jet that was being loaded. It looked identical to the two Argon jets – they could have been triplets – only it had the name VALU CHARTERS on its fuselage.

“Let’s take a look inside,” I said.

“That’s not our plane!”

“Can you get a couple of your guys to roll one of those air stairs over here?”

“You out of your mind? That’s not our plane!”

“Have you ever seen a Valu Charters jet around here before?”

“The hell do I know? These dinky little companies come and go, and they lease space from other companies–”

“I didn’t see any Valu Charters listed on the airport directory, did you?”

Woody shrugged.

“Let’s take a look,” I said.

“Look, I could get in some serious deep trouble for boarding someone else’s plane. That’s illegal, man.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll take the fall.”

He hesitated a long time, shrugged again, then walked back to where the crew was loading. A minute or so later he came back, rolling a set of air stairs up to the Valu Charters plane. He climbed up to the cockpit door with visible reluctance.

Just as I suspected, underneath the Valu Charters logo – which also peeled right off – was the orange Argon Express Cargo logo. Painted on. Remnants of tamper-resistant tape adhered like old confetti to the doorframe of the cargo hatch.

When the door came open, I could see that it was fully loaded with row after row of cargo containers. Each one had a different set of numbers affixed to its sides – really, stick-on letters and numbers of random sizes, sort of like the cutout newsprint letters in a ransom note.

“Do the numbers match your manifest?” I said. I knew they would.

There was a long silence.

“I don’t get it,” Woody finally said. “How’d they switch planes?”

“Easy,” I said. “It was a whole lot easier than off-loading and driving it out of the airport, and it only takes two guys – a pilot and a copilot.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Didn’t you just say you can buy one of these old junkers cheap? All they had to do was paint it white and fly it in here in the middle of the night after the control tower’s closed. Park it nearby and slap on a couple of vinyl decals. Probably took two guys ten minutes, and no one was around to see them because everyone had gone home. But then, they were already on the airfield, so they were supposed to be here. No one probably gave them a second look. Honest-man security, right?”

“My God. Jesus. That’s… brilliant.”

“Well, almost. By the time they flew in last night, the fuel-service guys had gone home, too, I bet.”

“So?”

“So that’s why the plane’s still here. They couldn’t fly it out without filling the tank. Which they just finished doing. I’m guessing they were going to wait to take off until everyone went home.”

“But… who could have done it?”

“I really don’t care who. I wasn’t hired to find out who.”

“But – whoever did it – they must be around here somewhere.”

“No doubt.”

“Look, Mr.– can I call you Nick?”

“Sure.”

“Nick, we both want the same thing. We agree on that.”

“Okay.”

“We’re basically playing on the same team.”

“Right.”

“See, I really don’t think Traverse Development needs to hear the little details, you get me? Just tell them we found the missing cargo. Or you did – I don’t care. No harm, no foul. Some kind of mix-up at the airport. Happens from time to time. They’re going to be mighty relieved, and they’re not going to ask a lot of questions.”

“Works for me.”

“Great. Thanks.”

“But first, would you mind opening this can right here?” I approached one of the big containers. Most of the igloos were stuffed with hundreds of packages for a lot of different customers, but the routing label on this one indicated that it had originated in Bahrain. All of its contents were destined for the Arlington, Virginia, office of Traverse Development. Through a Plexiglas window, I could see tightly packed rows of cardboard boxes, all the same size and shape, all with Traverse Development’s logo printed on them.

“I’m sorry, I can’t do that,” he said.

“You have the keys, Woody.”

“Customs hasn’t even inspected it yet. I could get in some deep kimchi.”

“You could get in some even deeper kimchi if you don’t.”

“That supposed to be a threat?”

“Yeah, basically,” I said. “See, my mind keeps going back to the parking-space thing.”

“Parking space? What about it?”

“Well, so, whenever one of your planes lands and parks for the night or whatever, your crew has to record the number of the space it’s parked in. Standard operating procedure, right?”

He shrugged. “What’s this about?”

“Your Argon jet flies in from Brussels yesterday and parks in space 36, right? That’s in your computer records. Then our bad guys do this big switcheroo with the decals, so what looks like your plane ends up in the wrong space. Number 34, right? Only the problem is, someone already entered 36 in the computer log, couple minutes after it landed. Which isn’t so easy to backdate. And which could be a problem when the guy from Customs comes to check things out, and he’s going to go, ‘Huh, how’d that plane get moved overnight, like by magic?’ So someone wrote the new space, number 34, on the whiteboard in your office. That would be… you. Woody.”