Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

The other two tried to stare me down. The pretty receptionist was examining a copy of People the way a rabbi might study the Talmud.

“Mr. Koblenz won’t meet with you if you have any RF equipment on your person.”

I shrugged. “I never surrender,” I said.

He handed me a gray RF-isolation pouch. I’d used pouches like this in secure facilities, but never outside of the military or intelligence community. I slid the BlackBerry and cell phone inside, closed the Velcro flap, and put the pouch into my leather portfolio.

“Thank you, sir,” said the long-haired one. He also seemed to be the only one allowed to speak. “This way, please.”

“This is great,” I said. “I even get my own entourage.”

The long-haired guy waved his proximity badge at the reader mounted next to the inside door. The door buzzed, and he pushed it open, and the two other guys fell in, Burris beside me and Andre the Giant behind. Either they were trying to intimidate me or they were concerned I might shoplift.

We walked down a hall that had the generic look of a midrange hotel.

“Hey, Neil,” I muttered to Burris. “I’m still waiting for your references.”

He stared straight ahead. His hand and arm were encased in a hard brace made out of some kind of lightweight resin over foam, with Velcro straps around the whole thing.

“Hello, Mr. Heller.”

Carl Koblenz was in his late forties but had a youthful appearance, despite the bags under his eyes. He had a pink scrubbed face and clear green eyes and sandy brown hair clipped short. He wore a natty blue blazer over a striped dress shirt and a regimental tie. Maybe the tie was from Eton, where Koblenz went to school, or maybe it was from Sandhurst, where he did his officer training. I’m not very good on British regimental ties.

“Carl,” I said. We grasped hands firmly. He grasped my hand at the knuckles, so I couldn’t shake back. A power move. He was probably full of them.

“Thank you for coming out to Falls Church.” He spoke so quietly I could barely hear him.

“Thank you for taking time to see me.”

When he’d returned my phone message, I insisted we meet in Washington, and naturally he refused. He was too important a man to leave his office, his power place. He said, in what I surmised was an Eton drawl, “I’m afraid I’ve got a full calendar of appointments, Mr. Heller. I wish I could get out of the office, but I can’t possibly.”

Just as I’d expected, and hoped, the same reverse psychology that works so well on a three-year-old worked on him, too. I reluctantly agreed to go to the Paladin office in Falls Church.

“I think you’ve met Neil, haven’t you?”

“Old friends,” I said. I reached out to shake Burris’s wounded hand, but he didn’t offer it.

“Don Taylor and Anatoly Bondarchuk,” he said, indicating the others. “I hope you don’t mind if they join us.” Bondarchuk, I assumed, was Andre the Giant.

Sitting at the desk right outside Koblenz’s office was a small, plain woman with short, mousy brown hair. The fake wood plaque on her desk said ELEANOR APPLEBY.

“You know, I do mind,” I said apologetically. “I was hoping we could have a candid talk.”

“I’d prefer to loop them in.”

“I’m not going to hurt you, Carl,” I said. “I promise.”

“Hurt me?” A twinkle of amusement came into his eyes. “You don’t know much about me, do you?”

I knew more about him by now than he probably wanted. I knew that after Eton and Sandhurst, he joined the Scots Guards, and was then selected to the SAS, the British equivalent of the Special Forces that was widely believed to be even tougher than our own, though of course I doubted that. He was sort of a legend during Desert Storm. He was part of the assault team that tried to sneak into an Iraqi communications facility, found themselves facing three hundred Iraqi soldiers, but planted the explosives anyway and pulled out of there under fire. Not a single SAS man was injured. A lot of rich Arabs in Kensington wanted to hire him to do their security after that, but instead he cashed in, joined an international mercenary firm. He ran guns for the government of Sierra Leone, in violation of the U.N. embargo. Then he got involved in a coup attempt against the president of Equatorial Guinea and was arrested and locked up for six months in Black Beach Prison in Malabo, which made the Altamont Correctional Facility look like Canyon Ranch.

“Enough not to mess with you,” I said with a generous smile, and he smiled back. With his hand on my shoulder, he guided me into his office, which was as generic as the rest of the place. It smelled like old cigar smoke.

The three security guards filed in behind me. I stopped short, then turned around. “Thanks, guys,” I said. “You got me here safely. Well done. Now, your boss and I have some personal business to discuss.”

Koblenz shook his head, sighed, and said, “All right, mates, wait outside, please.”

He sat behind his desk, I sat in the chair in front of his desk, and he said, “Well, you’ve certainly got quite the track record.”

“Lies, all lies,” I said modestly.

I noticed his office safe, where – according to Neil Burris – he stored the smart card with the embedded cryptochip that enabled access to the most secure layer of the Paladin computer network. The safe was black, about as tall as his desk, and looked like a three- or four-drawer model. An electronic keypad. Formidable-looking.

Despite the great safecracking scenes we’ve all seen in movies, in reality it’s become extremely difficult to crack a high-security safe. The technology has evolved far too much in the last dozen or so years. But with the right plan, nothing was truly impossible.

“Hunting war criminals in Bosnia, huh? With some triple-top secret army unit – what was it, the ISA, right?”

“Couldn’t be all that secret if you know about it.”

He’d done his homework. The Intelligence Support Activity was a classified military intelligence unit that roamed Bosnia looking for Serbian war criminals. Snatch-and-grab strikes on “high-value targets,” as we called them. I never talked about what I’d done in Bosnia or Iraq during the first Gulf War, not to anyone. So Paladin obviously had some excellent sources deep inside the Pentagon.

“What you did to that Serb guy… Draškovič?” His pronunciation was excellent. He shook his head, smiled. “Well done.” An admiring, conspiratorial chuckle.

I said nothing. Just pulled out a folder of photographs and handed it to him.

One was a close-up of the license plate on the Econoline van in which one of his guys had abducted Roger. The other was a close-up of the same guy’s face. The third was a medium view showing Roger and his abductor next to the van.

“Your employee was careful not to let his license plate be seen by the bank’s surveillance camera,” I said, “but he didn’t think about the gas station having its own security cameras.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve seen the tape.”

Well, that’s a start, I thought.

“Am I supposed to know what this is about?” he asked.

“It’s about fifteen years in prison for abduction,” I said. “For you and for your boss. And millions of dollars in lost government business. If you had him killed, well, I think we’re looking at forty years to life.”

“You might want to be a bit more careful about tossing around legal threats.”

“I have no interest in the legal process.” I folded my arms and gave him a lethal smile. “See, I just want my brother back.”

Koblenz went quiet for a few seconds, seemed to be thinking. He blew out air through pursed lips. “Where do I begin, Heller?”