Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

“Or information. Files.”

“Well, I don’t have anything. Believe me, I don’t. They may think I do, but I don’t.”

“Okay,” I said, though I didn’t know what to believe.

“Another question,” Lauren said. “When parents put spyware on their kids’ computers, they sometimes get reports on their e-mail at work or whatever, right? So can’t you tell where this program is sending the reports? By looking at the IP address? Won’t that tell you who’s doing this?”

Dorothy grinned slowly, looked at me. She had a slight gap between her front teeth that I always found cute.

“This girlfriend is extremely clever,” she said. “I see computer ignorance doesn’t run in the family.”

“We’re only related by marriage, not blood,” I pointed out.

“Clearly,” Dorothy said. “The packets are all going out to a botnet in Ukraine – probably one of those Eastern European guys who’s put together this illegal network of thousands of infected Windows XP computers all over the world into a Tier 2 Network.”

“I think I get some of what you’re saying,” I said. “I assume the data going out of the DSL line here isn’t actually ending up on some illegal network in Ukraine, right?”

“Right. It’s just a way to hide where it’s really going. So I suggest we keep all the spyware and the bugs in place, and I keep monitoring the traffic until I figure out its final destination. If I can.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said. “Do whatever it takes. I’m going upstairs.” I took the mug of coffee from the counter. “Merlin’s gonna drink it black whether he likes it that way or not.”

MERLIN STILL hadn’t found anything.

“If there was something here,” he said, “it’s gone now. How do you know that video wasn’t taken a week ago? A month ago, even?”

“I don’t,” I admitted.

While he searched, I sat at Gabe’s desk chair and read his graphic novel. I was astonished at the quality of the drawings. I had never been a big comic-book reader, but for a couple of years, as boys, Roger and I used to exchange old Batman and Superman comics, the occasional Green Lantern and Captain America . And Gabe’s drawings were at least as accomplished as those. He’d done them with an ultrafine-tip black pen, done shadows with cross-hatching. The lettering looked almost professional, too.

But it was the story that blew me away.

He’d titled it The Escape Artist. It was the story of a strong-jawed superhero called The Cowl, who fought evildoers in the nation’s capital, which was a decaying version of Washington, D.C. The Cowl – so named because he wore a black cowl like Batman – was a dead ringer for me. He even had my black hair, although Gabe had given me a Supermanesque whorl on my forehead, a gleaming forelock, which I don’t have. The Cowl had a Dark Past, which seemed to involve a dead wife, and had a dark, brooding temperament. He had a fortress of solitude, which bore more than a passing resemblance to my real-life loft in Adams Morgan. He was able to break out of any prison, escape confinement like Houdini, and he basically beat the crap out of bad guys, most of whom were evil, oversized adolescent boys who dressed like the boys at St. Gregory’s, with blazers and slacks, but also seemed to have come out of the pages of The Lord of the Flies .

His mother didn’t make a single appearance. The archvillain was named Dr. Cash, who looked an awful lot like Roger except that he was hideously deformed, had blue skin, the result of taking colloidal silver. He was the CEO of an evil corporation who had somehow taken over the government in a postapocalyptic coup d’etat and now tyrannized the land from his underground bunker beneath the crumbling ruins of the White House. He was often seen with a busty blonde on his arm, a villainess named Candi Dupont.

Candi Dupont.

Not a name you could easily forget.

Candi Dupont was the woman Roger had been having an affair with, whose abortion he had paid for. An alias, surely: Dorothy had turned up nothing on her in any database. But whatever her real name, obviously Gabe knew about her as well.

Dorothy entered the room, interrupting my reading. “You didn’t turn the kid’s computer back on, did you?”

I closed the notebook.

“No,” Merlin said.

“Because I thought I turned off both computers, and I’m definitely detecting outgoing network traffic. Something’s still transmitting a signal over the Internet.”

“Thanks,” Merlin said mordantly. “That helps a whole lot.”

“That tells us there’s something in the house,” I said. “Something that’s broadcasting, right?”

Merlin shrugged. “So we keep looking.”

“Man, this kid’s Richie Rich,” Dorothy said, ogling all Gabe’s stuff. “Look at all this junk. He’s got video games and iPods and boom boxes and a Game Boy and a Nintendo Wii and a PlayStation 3 and an Xbox 360. And I thought my nephew was spoiled. Did you check all the electronics?”

“Yeah,” Merlin said. “I found a number of semiconductors.”

“Yeah, thanks,” she replied. “All electronic devices have semiconductors. I get your sarcasm. But isn’t that where you actually want to look? In with a lot of other electronic circuits?”

“Yeah,” Merlin said, unwilling to let go of the sarcasm. “That’s just where I’d hide a camera. In a Game Boy that gets moved around everywhere.”

“I don’t know why you’re even bothering to look over there,” Dorothy told him. “The camera angle’s all wrong. Lauren described the shot to me, and that camera’s gonna be just above eye level.” She sliced the air with her hand flat, moving back and forth along a precise horizontal.

I nodded, approached Gabe’s desk, looked at the giant iPod/CD player with the built-in speakers. The one he put his iPod in to use as an alarm every morning. It was covered with a fine film of dust.

A small area on the front console, though, was dust-free.

Right around an LED light that didn’t seem to belong. I grasped the tiny bulb and pulled and out came the long black snake cable that was attached to it.

“Holy crap,” Merlin said.

“Mm-hm,” Dorothy said.

In a few minutes Merlin had carefully disassembled the CD player and placed the components on top of a pile of Gabe’s books. “Hoo boy,” he said excitedly. “This is really cool. I’ve never seen one of these ultraminis before. It’s a Misumi – a Taiwanese company. Hooked up to a wireless video IP encoder that takes the analog signal and transmits it over the Internet.”

“So how come you didn’t find it?” Dorothy said.

“Because they wrapped it in neoprene to hide the heat signature. Very clever. But how’d they know where to put it? They must have checked out the house in advance.”

I thought of the disabled sensors in Roger’s study and said, “For sure.” Then I looked at my watch. “Thank you, guys. I owe you big-time.”

“Just add it to my favor bank account,” Dorothy said.

“You got it.”

“Man, I’m looking forward to cashing in,” she said.

“Substantial penalty for early withdrawal,” I warned her as I walked toward the door. “I’ll catch up with you guys soon.”

“You have a date or something?”

“Nah,” I said. “I’m meeting an old buddy for a drink.”

The Anchor Tavern was a dive bar’s dive bar a few blocks from Capitol Hill. There were dead animals on the wall. Wednesday was dollar-beer night, they had the best burgers in town, and they didn’t serve appletinis.

I sat for ten minutes in a red Naugahyde booth that was sticky and smelled sourly of spilled beer, waiting for a man named Neil Burris, a security officer with Paladin Worldwide.