Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

Her blinking became rapid. She moaned.

“Do you know the term ‘enucleation’?”

She closed her eyes again, her moaning louder.

“Enucleation is the surgical removal of the eyeball. Usually it’s done only in drastic circumstances like traumatic injury or a malignant tumor.”

He could see her jaw working up and down, could hear her trying to shout the word “please” over and over.

“You’ll still be able to work as an attorney without your eyes, of course,” he explained. “They have screen-reading software now and scanners. You’ll be able to use Westlaw that way, I believe. But you can forget about handwritten notes, and very few websites are accessible to the visually impaired, unfortunately. The adjustment will be onerous.”

He laid his left hand on her forehead, right above her glasses: an intimate gesture, almost a caress.

“Now, I’m going to remove the tape from your mouth, and if you make any noise – if you shout or scream or call for help – I’m going to perform some very quick surgery. Are we clear?”

She nodded, her eyes closed.

“As soon as the tape comes off, I want you to tell me how you reached Mr. Heller. Clear?”

She nodded.

He held the scalpel about a half inch from her eye. With his left hand, he ripped off the duct tape.

She gasped loudly, gulped air.

Her words came all in a rush, high-pitched and mewling. “He left me a message on my voice mail. He told me to go to his desk, he had a cell phone in one of the drawers, one of those prepaid phones, and he said it was already activated, and he wanted me to take it and go down to the street and call him.”

“Call him where?”

“He gave me a phone number.”

“What was the number he gave you?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, how can I possibly remember? I didn’t memorize the number, how could I know what the number is? I called from work. I didn’t keep a record. He told me not to!”

“Of course you don’t have the phone number memorized. But the number you called will be listed on the phone you used.”

She hesitated, just for a second, but long enough for him to realize that she was inventing a reply. “I put the phone back in Roger’s desk.”

“No, I don’t think you did. I think you brought it home because he told you to do so.”

She shook her head. She was trembling.

“You’re a very loyal colleague,” he said. He’d stopped using her name. He never used their names. “You’re protecting Mr. Heller. That’s commendable. But he’s gone now, and you no longer need to protect him. Right now you face a choice. You will give me that phone, or you’ll undergo some very painful surgery without the benefit of anesthesia.”

“Please, no. ”

“Where is the phone?”

After she told him, he went to the dresser. The throwaway cell phone was in the top drawer, just as she said. He nodded, turned back to her.

Just to be sure, he powered it on, then checked the list of outgoing calls.

It had been used only once.

“Very good,” he said.

“Please,” she said in a whisper, “please, can you leave now? You have what you want, don’t you? I don’t know why you want it or who you are, and I don’t care , but I just want you to leave now, please. I promise you – I give you my word – I won’t talk to the police. I won’t talk to anyone. ”

“I know you won’t,” the Surgeon said, ripping off a fresh length of duct tape from the silvery roll and swiftly placing it over her mouth. “I know you won’t.”

Even after all that time, I still knew very little for certain about what had happened to Roger.

The most I could do was to mull over several different hypotheses. Think them through, turn them over and over and try to calculate which one was the most likely. What I eventually settled on was something like this: my ever-scheming, ever-dissatisfied, megalomaniacal brother had finally discovered a way out of his middle-class purgatory. After his company, Gifford Industries, had secretly acquired Paladin Worldwide, he’d combed through Paladin’s financial records, come across evidence of some mammoth kickback scheme, and made the brazen error of trying to extort millions of dollars from Carl Koblenz, Paladin’s president. But instead of simply buying Roger’s silence, Paladin had come right back at him. Threatened him. Targeted him. Then, one night in Georgetown, grabbed him.

After that, well, my hypothesis got even shakier. Had he managed to escape his abductors? That seemed awfully unlikely. Roger was no super-hero. Was he being held prisoner at the Paladin training facility in Georgia in such a lax, loose way that he was actually able to use a cell phone? That was only marginally more likely.

So maybe he was being used by his captors instead. Maybe they were forcing him to make the calls, to Dad and to Lauren, urging them to cooperate with Paladin, give them what they wanted, so he could win his release.

Maybe.

But what my father had to do with it – what my father could have that Paladin might want – I couldn’t imagine.

So maybe there was yet another explanation entirely, something I hadn’t even begun to fathom.

Nothing would surprise me anymore.

I CALLED Dorothy Duval a little later. I tried her work number first, but was put into her voice mail. Then I tried her cell, and she picked right up. A television was playing in the background, loud, wherever she was.

“Hope I’m not disturbing you,” I said.

“Oh, no. I’ve got nothing going on.” She sounded down.

“You okay?”

“I’ll get by. You wanted to go over today?”

“The thing is, we have to do this in the middle of the workday, which I realize is a problem for you.”

“No,” she said. “No problem at all.” There was a grim, yet singsong, quality to her voice.

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

“Heller, I have all the time in the world. Jay Stoddard just fired me.”

“You? For what?”

“He said I was misusing company resources.”

“Meaning that you’ve been helping me out,” I said.

“He didn’t feel I deserved an explanation. The bad thing is, I’m not going to be able to help you anymore. Because I won’t have any more access to any of Stoddard’s databases.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not right.”

“Maybe not. But it’s what happened.”

“No,” I said again. “This is just not acceptable.”

“Tell me about it. Plus he says he’s gonna blackball me. Make sure I never get a job in this town again.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“No,” she said. “Don’t bother. I can’t go back there. Not after he fired me. Uh-uh.”

“I’ll talk to him,” I said. “In the meantime, do me a favor. I need you to go into my brother’s laptop and look for something.”

“There’s not much there.”

“He has a Hotmail account. You can find out the account’s user ID, right?”

“If it’s there, sure. But the password–”

“That’s the easy part. Victor10506.”

“How do you know that?”

“Long story,” I said. “But 10506 is the zip code for Bedford, New York. Where we used to live when we were kids.”

“You want me to go into your brother’s e-mail. No problem. But what am I looking for?”

“I want you to do a search for all e-mails to and from CatLvr74@yahoo.com,” I said. “There’s going to be a cell-phone number in one of them.”

“And what am I supposed to do if I find one?”

“Well,” I said, “I’ve got an interesting idea.”

I found Jay Stoddard at breakfast in the Senate Dining Room with a senator from Virginia who was the chairman of the Armed Services Committee and was facing a nasty reelection battle.