Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

Roger was instructing the bank manager to move two hundred and fifty million dollars from one account – a subsidiary of Paladin whose name I recognized – to an account in his own name.

“What does that look like to you?” he said.

“A forgery.”

He shrugged, snorted quietly. “That’s right, Heller. We have teams of forgers at work creating phony documents just for you.” His sarcasm was subtle. “Now do you see? Starting to recognize your brother’s modus operandi? Steal a bunch of money, then, when you realize that you’ve messed with the wrong guys, do the cowardly thing and run? Wonder where he got that from.”

“Screw you.” I no longer felt bad about making up that story about his cigars.

“Oh, believe me, it’s the truth. Maybe to Victor Heller’s sons that’s nothing more than loose change you find under your sofa cushions. But not to me. And certainly not to Allen Granger.”

“Roger worked for Gifford Industries. Not for Paladin. He wouldn’t even have had the legal authority to make a transfer.”

“Sure he did.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” I said.

“Your brother had Leland Gifford’s proxy.”

“What does Gifford have to do with Paladin?”

Koblenz tipped his head to one side. “I’m disappointed you don’t know.”

“Know what?”

“Gifford Industries is our parent company. Gifford owns Paladin. Has done for five months.”

At that point I didn’t know what to say. I just looked at him.

“This is not public information, obviously,” he said. “As a privately held corporation, Gifford isn’t required to tell anyone about the acquisition. But Allen was looking to sell for years. So it’s not just me or Allen Granger who wants this money back. It’s Leland Gifford, too. And the gentlemen out there. They each have a significant cash incentive to find your brother, and more important, to find the money he’s stolen. Call them bounty hunters. The profit motive always works.”

“Screw you,” I said. My vocabulary had become very limited all of a sudden.

“Roger’s wife may require a different type of incentive to cooperate.”

“That’s not going to work anymore.”

“Heller, there are so many ways to induce her to cooperate.”

“I don’t recommend you try any of them.”

“And I’d rather not. But I’ll do whatever it takes.”

I rattled the sheet of paper he’d just handed me. “If this is the only proof you have–”

“I don’t need proof,” Koblenz said calmly. “I’m like you – I have no interest in the legal process. We just want our money back. Whatever it takes. If there’s collateral damage, so be it.”

“That kind of sounds like another threat,” I said.

He shrugged. “It is what it is.”

I stood up, put the piece of paper down on the desk, tapped it with my forefinger. “It’s actually a good forgery. Though it would have been more persuasive if you got the bank’s SWIFT code right.”

The SWIFT code is a series of numbers or letters that banks use to identify themselves for the purpose of transferring funds.

“I see,” Koblenz said. “Since of course you have every SWIFT code memorized.”

“No, not at all,” I said. “I just know that the SWIFT code for Cayman Islands banks always includes the letters KY. Like K-Y Jelly. I’m sure you know what that is. And this one doesn’t have those letters. Close, but no cigar, as they say.”

Koblenz, who didn’t seem to be a guy who was ever at a loss for words, was momentarily silenced. He blinked a few times, and his mouth made fishlike motions.

Then I said, “You’ve been a big help, Carl. You’ve told me exactly what I wanted to know.”

He recovered, gave a tart, skeptical smile, and I went on, “See, I know where my brother is. I just wanted to find out whether you do. And now I’ve learned you don’t. So, thanks for the help.”

And I walked calmly out of his office.

It was, of course, an outrageous bluff, pure and simple, though I soon wished I hadn’t done it.

And not until I’d left Paladin’s office and was riding the elevator down to the parking garage did what Koblenz had told me finally sink in.

I had to assume, of course, that every word Koblenz had told me, including “and” and “the,” was a lie. That was a given. But I operated on that assumption most of the time anyway: Washington, D.C., is to lying what Hershey, Pennsylvania, is to chocolate.

Was Paladin Worldwide really owned by Gifford Industries?

Why not? That wasn’t inconceivable at all. This was the age of corporate consolidation. Big companies buy smaller companies all the time. It’s part of nature, the corporate food chain. The same way microscopic phyto-plankton are eaten by zooplankton, which are in turn eaten by little fish, which get eaten by bigger fish and so on up to the orca killer whale.

I’d heard rumors that Allen Granger had been looking to sell Paladin. Maybe he realized that things had changed in Washington, that the new administration didn’t want to do so much business with him.

For instance, one of Paladin’s subsidiaries was an aviation company that did secret “extraordinary rendition” flights for the CIA. Which basically meant that when suspected terrorists were seized by masked men on the street somewhere in Europe and blindfolded and tranquilized and spirited away, it was a Paladin-owned Gulfstream or Boeing 737 that flew the guy off to be tortured in a secret CIA prison in Egypt or Macedonia or Morocco or Libya or another such country that took a more broad-minded view of human rights than the U.S.

With a new president in office and the secret rendition program cancelled, maybe that wasn’t such a great business to be in anymore.

Allen Granger was known to be a shrewd businessman. Why wouldn’t he want to cash out at or near the top of the market? Made sense.

And if Gifford Industries owned Paladin Worldwide, that would explain why Roger had had access to Paladin’s offshore financial records.

That made sense, too.

It would certainly explain his meetings with and phone calls to our father, the master thief. Victor had been giving Roger tutorials.

I told him he was playing a very dangerous game, Victor had said.

I warned him that the whole idea was reckless.

So Roger had finally figured out a way to get the money he’d always felt entitled to. Even if it meant leaving behind his wife and son. A wife he was unfaithful to, and her son. Not his.

He hadn’t stolen money from Paladin, though. He’d tried to blackmail them, which was a very different thing. He’d found out about bribes, kickbacks, whatever, that Paladin made to the Pentagon in order to make sure they got their no-bid contracts – that was my theory, anyway – and had threatened them with exposure. Threatened to report them to some law-enforcement authority, maybe. Unless they paid up.

Roger was tired of being poor.

He wasn’t a thief. He was a blackmailer. An extortionist.

Not that extortion was any better than stealing. I didn’t care one way or the other. But I was certain that Carl Koblenz had handed me a forgery, because he didn’t want me – or anyone – to know that Roger had tried to blackmail them.

Because to admit that Roger had tried to blackmail them would mean admitting to the sleaze, the illegality, that Roger had threatened to expose. And that Koblenz didn’t want to do.

I found the Defender where I’d parked it, in a row that branched off the third underground level. As I inserted my key in the lock, I hesitated.

Call it paranoia. Call it instinct.

Call it the realization that someone had unwittingly disturbed the pattern of gravel I’d placed on three sides of the car – tiny pyramids of gravel fragments. I wasn’t a fool. I was parking my car in the garage underneath the building where Paladin had an office. Not to assume they’d do something would be naïve.