Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

It was annoying, but I had larger concerns. I took out my phone and dialed the number that Woody the cargo guy had given me in L.A. The number that belonged to Carl Koblenz.

I got a generic phone-company female voice telling me the number I’d just called, and after the tone I left a message for Carl Koblenz.

As I was finishing my message, another call was coming in. The caller ID showed “private,” but I picked it up anyway.

It was Frank Montello. My information broker. “That phone number your father called from prison?” he said.

“Yeah?”

“It’s a prepaid disposable cell phone. Bought with cash, I bet.”

Very good, Roger, I thought. I’d expect nothing less. “Does the cell provider have billing records?”

“What do they need billing records for? It’s prepaid, right? Ten bucks, twenty, fifty – whatever. They don’t need to keep track of the calls.”

“They do sometimes. All I want to know is where Roger was when he received a collect call from my father.”

“No go. These cheapo phones don’t have GPS locator chips in them. Most don’t. Anyway, this one didn’t.”

“What about the location of the cell tower where the phone was when the call came in.”

“They don’t record that data, not on these disposable phones. I get a feeling your brother’s going to a lot of trouble to conceal his location.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. “So how about one more job?”

By the time I got back to Roger’s house, Lauren and Gabe were asleep. I cleaned up the nasty cuts and scrapes on my face and neck with some peroxide, checked to make sure that the alarm was set properly and the house secure. Then I crashed for a few hours. I had an important meeting to prepare for.

THE HEADQUARTERS of Paladin Worldwide was in southern Georgia, on ten thousand acres of swampland that also served as a training facility. This was where Allen Granger, Paladin’s chairman, apparently spent most of his time.

But you couldn’t do business with the U.S. government and not keep a base in or near Washington, D.C. So Paladin had a small office in Falls Church, Virginia, on the seventh floor of the Skyview Executive Center on Leesburg Pike, out of which they ran most of their government operations, their lobbying efforts, and so on.

This time I parked on the third level of the underground garage. But instead of taking the elevator right up to the seventh floor, I walked up to the street level and took a leisurely stroll around the outside of the building. Checked out the corporate landscaping, the artificial copses of trees out back, the contours of the shallow plot of land on which the building had been sited. Standing on the highest promontory I could find, I took out a pocket monocular spotting scope, located the bank of windows belonging to the offices of A.G. Holdings, which was either Paladin or Paladin’s holding company – but for all intents and purposes, the same thing. After all, it was where Carl Koblenz worked, where he’d told me to come. For about twenty minutes I watched as much of the comings and goings as I could see from that angle.

It wasn’t like in the movies. I didn’t see much. I was pretty sure I saw Koblenz – I’d seen his picture on Paladin’s website – sitting at his desk, conferring with his assistant and a couple of large men. In any case, I saw enough to get a sense of the flow of office traffic.

Then I entered the lobby and headed over to the directory sign. Nowhere did the name “Paladin” appear. On the seventh floor was a Japanese intellectual property firm and A.G. Holdings. Paladin’s holding company. Or maybe just another name for Paladin. It made sense. Maybe they didn’t want it publicly known that Paladin’s offices were here. They probably didn’t want protesters or crazed intruders trying to storm the gates.

“Hey, cookie man!”

I turned, saw my old friend the security guard, gave him a smile and a wave.

“Got any more free samples for me?” he said.

“Next time, I promise. I have an appointment with Paladin. Carl Koblenz.”

“Oh, yeah? Excellent. Bunch of real big guys work there. Betcha they’ll go crazy for your wife’s cookies.” So: as I thought. A.G. Holdings was Paladin.

I gave him my name, and he printed out a security pass for me to stick on the front of my shirt.

I WAS wearing jeans and a slightly grubby polo shirt, partly to remind Koblenz that I wasn’t on official Stoddard Associates business. And to let him know I wasn’t playing by the rules of the suit-and-tie world. Also because it was more comfortable than a suit.

The elevator rose smoothly and swiftly to the seventh floor. I got out into a small lobby with dark wooden doors at either end. Each door had a brass plaque. One said NAKAMURA & PARTNERS. A law firm, according to the lobby directory sign. The other said A.G. HOLDINGS.

A small black dome camera, almost undetectable, was mounted high on the wall on Paladin’s side, but not on Nakamura & Partners’ side. That told me Paladin had their own private security system, in addition to whatever the building provided its tenants. I’d have expected nothing less. Mounted to the doorframe was a proximity-key reader, where Paladin’s employees would swipe to enter.

I pushed the lever handle down and entered a reception area with a long black granite desk.

The receptionist was a cute young blonde with carefully applied makeup and an expensive haircut.

“Mr. Heller?” she said.

“Right.”

“Please have a seat, and Mr. Koblenz will be right with you.”

Mounted to the front of the receptionist’s desk was the Paladin logo, a navy blue globe with white continents and white crosshairs superimposed over it. As if to say: We’re taking aim at the world.

Or maybe: Overcharging governments around the world and killing innocent civilians since 1994.

The globe reminded me of the one in the Gifford Industries lobby. Maybe all rapacious international firms were required to have a globe in their logo. The coffee table was black and marble and coffin-shaped. There wasn’t much to browse: the Post, the Wall Street Journal, a couple of security magazines. I glanced over the front page of the Journal, but I didn’t have time to read it before the inner door opened and three large guys entered.

One of them had his right hand in a splint.

“Hey there, Neil,” I said. “Gosh, what happened to your hand?” Neil Burris just glared at me. He was wearing a shopping-mall suit, not that there was anything wrong with that except that the tailoring obviously wasn’t included. It was too tight across the shoulders and too short in the arms and made him look like a circus gorilla.

The two other guys also wore cheap suits, which seemed to be the uniform of the Paladin security staff. One of them had longish hair, flecked with gray, and a droopy mustache. He had the lean muscular build of a Navy SEAL. The other looked like something out of WrestleMania – one of those mean-looking three-hundred-pound Ukrainians. He had a jar-head haircut. I recognized him, too.

He was the one who’d grabbed the surveillance-video DVD from me in Georgetown and in the process smashed my face against the window of my Defender.

The long-haired guy, who was older and seemed to be in charge, said, “You’re going to have to surrender your cell phone and BlackBerry.”

“ ‘Surrender’ them?” I said. That was smart of Koblenz, actually. Both cell phones and BlackBerrys could be used as eavesdropping devices. That told me that he wanted to speak freely, which was a good thing. He didn’t want whatever he said to be recorded or transmitted to anyone else.