Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

Gabe gaped as we entered. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but we need to borrow your room for a while.”

“For what?”

“Your mom will explain everything,” I said.

FOR A few moments I watched Merlin moving something that looked like a metal detector or a small minesweeper along the wall. It was wired to a pair of black headphones he was wearing.

“You haven’t found anything yet?”

“Nothing. You sure there’s something here?”

“Positive.”

“This here’s our top-of-the-line spectrum analyzer. Costs a fortune. Sees RF signals in real time. Stuff you normally can’t detect.”

“And it’s not finding anything.”

“Right.”

“Meaning there aren’t any wireless bugs, right?”

“Apparently not. Nothing transmitting right now, anyway. But that thermal-imaging camera over there?” – he pointed at the thing on the tripod – “that’s laboratory-grade instrumentation. I mean, that baby can pick up hot spots in the walls to, like, one-eighteen-thousandth of a degree.”

“And nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“If you do find anything, don’t you expect it’s going to be a GSM bug?”

He nodded. “If it’s really Paladin, yeah. They use government stuff.” The old days, when the guys monitoring an eavesdropping device had to sit in the back of a van on the street close enough to pick up the transmission, were over. Instead the state-of-the-art bugs used the same technology you find in cell phones. They were the guts of cell phones, in fact, minus the keypad and the fancy trappings. You could call in to them from anywhere in the world, and they’d answer silently and switch on their microphones, and you could listen in. From anywhere. They were smaller than a pack of cigarettes, sometimes as small as two inches long, and if you wired them to an existing power line, they’d work forever.

They broadcast using cell-phone signals, but only when they were on. So he used the thermal camera to look for any electronic circuitry. Something about the tiny amounts of heat generated by electricity moving through the diodes.

“No luck with that thing either?”

“Nonlinear junction detector,” he said. “Sends out a high-frequency pulse, then analyzes the harmonics that bounce back. Should find any electronic devices even if they’re off.”

“And?”

“I found plenty.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Clocks, telephones, DVD player – a bunch. Just no bugs. Am I allowed to smoke in here?”

“No.”

“Prisons use these bad boys to find contraband cell phones hidden in the walls or floors.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. But I’m telling you, Heller, there’s nothing.”

I tried to help by searching the old-fashioned way – a visual inspection, looking for minute traces in the walls and ceiling. I unscrewed light-switch plates and power-outlet covers and the ceiling light fixture. There were all sorts of ways to conceal cameras these days in things like air purifiers and wall clocks and lamps. There was no end to the possible hiding places.

Merlin and I both worked fast, but half an hour later, he sounded discouraged. “Nothing,” he said.

“Some Merlin you are,” I said.

“Are we done here?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Not until you find it.”

I could hear Dorothy Duval’s raucous laugh as I entered the kitchen. Lauren was making coffee, and Dorothy was helping, or maybe just female bonding. But I knew that Dorothy had a hidden agenda: She was putting Lauren at ease, cajoling her out of her state of anxiety.

“You’ve been hiding this girl from me,” Dorothy said, sipping from a mug.

“I never mix business and pleasure,” I said.

A throaty, knowing laugh. “Right. Tell me about it. You didn’t tell me she’s from C–Ville. I used to spend every summer there, at my grandma’s house.”

Lauren poured a mug of coffee from a glass carafe, the kind from one of those simple automatic drip coffeemakers, and she handed it to me. I took a sip. “Delicious,” I said. “How come I can’t make coffee this good?”

“Because you’re not using the right machine,” Lauren said.

I noticed the beat-up old Hamilton Beach coffee machine on the counter. “You’ve been hiding that from me. That one I know how to use.”

“Roger never liked having it out on the counter. He didn’t like the way it looked.”

She poured coffee into another stoneware mug. “How does your friend upstairs take his coffee?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “We used to boil the freeze-dried instant crap on a folding Esbit stove. Sometimes we’d just chew the coffee granules right out of the MRE bag. If we were in a hurry. But his tastes might have gotten more refined since Afghanistan. Where’s Gabe?”

“In the living room, reading.”

“You told him?”

She nodded.

“How’d he take it?”

“He said he wasn’t surprised.”

“Nick,” Dorothy said, “can I talk to you for a second?”

“You found something?”

“Right.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I want Lauren to hear this.”

Dorothy looked from me to Lauren, then back at me. “None of my malware-detection kits picked up anything,” she said. “So I ended up having to put a box on the line – a network forensics appliance. I finally captured some encrypted traffic going out.”

“Encrypted?” I said.

“Bunch of hash marks. Nothing I can read.”

“We’re talking spyware?” Lauren said.

“That’s right,” Dorothy said. “Some pretty sophisticated code. Not a commercial, off-the-shelf product like eBlaster. Government-grade, looks like.”

“Government-grade?” Lauren said. “Meaning, it’s the government that’s doing this?”

“Or a government contractor with access to government code.”

“So every e-mail we get or send out, every website we visit–”

“Every single keystroke,” Dorothy said.

“All my user names and passwords on all my e-mail accounts?”

“Right.”

“Paladin’s a government contractor, right?” Lauren asked me.

“The U.S. government’s their main customer.”

“But how could they have installed it? Does that mean they were inside the house?”

“Not necessarily,” Dorothy said. “They could have installed this program remotely. But honey, that video they sent you confirms they’ve been in your house. To plant the camera.”

Lauren nodded, bit her lip. “Did that other guy find the camera?” She pointed toward the ceiling.

“Not yet,” I said. “But he will.”

“I don’t understand how that video clip of Gabe could have disappeared,” Lauren said. “How could they make it just disappear that way?”

Dorothy nodded. “I know what that is. That’s something called VaporLock. It’s a kind of private web-based mail system. For recordless electronic communication. Once you open it, the sender’s name disappears, then the message disappears.”

“Okay,” Lauren said. “What’s the point of this spyware? They think Roger might contact me, so they want to read any e-mail I might get from him? That it?”

“Maybe.”

“So doesn’t that tell you they think he’s alive?”

I was silent for ten seconds or so. “Possibly,” I said.

“And maybe that they really don’t have him? They don’t know where he is?”

“I suppose,” I conceded. “But there’s a more likely explanation.”

“Which is?”

“That they think you have something. And they want it.”

“And I keep telling you I have no idea what that could possibly be.”

“Maybe it’s money,” I suggested. “A lot of it.”

“That’s crazy.”