Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

I was in Echols County, in southernmost Georgia, on the Florida border. It’s the least populous county in the state: just over four thousand people. Almost all of it is privately owned. A few unincorporated towns and a lot of pine forest. The county seat, Statenville, used to be called Troublesome. No joke.

Twelve years ago the family that owned most of the county sold ten thousand acres to Allen Granger. It had been advertised as “perfect for a hunt club,” but it became the training facility and headquarters of Paladin Worldwide.

An unmarked road came off of Route 129, cut through the dense pine forest: newly built, freshly paved. According to the handheld GPS receiver I’d picked up in Savannah, it led directly to the Paladin facility. Half a mile down the road, the forest ended abruptly, and a clearing began, as far as the eye could see. The road ended in a large asphalt-paved circular drive.

There were a gatehouse and a barrier arm and a road-spike barrier and a large sign that said PALADIN WORLDWIDE TRAINING CENTER with the Paladin logo, that stylized blue globe.

On either side of the gate was a high chain-link fence, topped with coils of razor wire, cutting through the woods. How far into the woods, I had no idea. Various articles and Internet reports about Paladin had mentioned the chain-link fence and the razor wire, but I had no idea how far the fence extended. A chain-link fence enclosing ten thousand acres? That seemed excessive. Hugely expensive.

It was amazing, actually, how much I did know about the Paladin training center, all of it from the public record, mostly the Internet. The most useful information came from Google Earth, which had overhead satellite reconnaissance photos of the place, even precise geographical coordinates.

But nothing can take the place of what you can see in person. “Route reconnaissance,” as they called it in the Special Forces.

So I turned around and headed back down the freshly paved road until I found a gap in the trees, a natural path, and drove into the woods as far as I could. Finally, some true off-road driving, and here the Defender performed like a champ. I stowed the car in a thicket that was far enough from the road that it wouldn’t be spotted by anyone driving past, but just to be safe, I hauled some downed limbs and branches and managed to camouflage it reasonably well.

Before I set off, I switched my cell phone on and found four voice mails, all from Arthur Garvin.

He picked up right away.

“Nick,” he said. “I reached out to the Baltimore Homicide guys. To get your brother’s remains.”

“You know what?” I said softly. “I don’t really care about that. No offense–”

“Listen to me. Did your brother have a hip replacement?”

“A what ?”

“The Maryland ME’s Office found something interesting in the wreckage. A piece of a high-grade stainless-steel alloy called Orthinox. It’s a stem used in a total hip replacement.”

“No,” I said. “He never had a hip replacement.”

“I didn’t think so. Also, Washington Hospital Center reported a body missing from their morgue. A sixty-nine-year-old white male.”

I said nothing for a long time.

“Nick?” he said. “You there?”

“Yeah,” I finally said. “I’m here.”

“Oh, and listen. We got a warrant for the guy in the Marjorie Ogonowski murder,” he said. “Nice work on that. The photo match thing.”

“Not me,” I said. “Friend of mine. Like I said, we have some fancy databases at my high-priced firm.”

“Still,” he said. “Good going, there.”

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Keep an eye on Lauren Heller and her son, please?”

I disconnected the call and set off through the woods to do my reconnaissance.

Lauren picked up the phone in the kitchen.

“Is this Ms. Heller?” A pleasant baritone, halting in its delivery.

“You don’t know me, but my name is Lloyd Kozak, and I’m Leland’s financial adviser?”

She remembered suddenly: that homely man who’d come by one day to get some disks from Noreen. “Yes? What can I do for you?”

“It’s just that – well, I know you’re Leland’s personal assistant, and you probably know him better than anyone, but I really hope I’m not sticking my head someplace where it doesn’t belong.”

“I’m not sure what I can do for you,” she said.

“Something’s not right with Leland,” he said. “I need to talk with you if you have a couple of minutes.”

“What’s this about?”

“I’m in Chevy Chase. I could come by soon, if you’re not busy. I think we need to talk.”

“About what?”

“About Leland,” he said. “I think – I just think something’s wrong with him.”

THE DOORBELL rang around half an hour later.

Lauren went to the front door and looked out the fish-eye and saw a pockmarked face, oversized horn-rimmed glasses. She opened the door.

Lloyd Kozak stood on the other side of the screen door in a sad-looking suit and tie. Parked in the driveway was a Buick that had to be at least ten years old.

“Thank you so much for seeing me,” he said, and she opened the screen door and let him in.

The foyer was dark and chilly. The central air-conditioning was set too high. She led him down the hall toward the kitchen, her default meeting place.

“Leland’s told me so much about you,” he said. “He admires you so much. Trusts you so much. I figured you were the one person I could talk to about him.”

“You’ve got me worried sick,” she said. “What’s the problem?”

“You,” he said, and suddenly he was next to her, and he placed a hand over her mouth.

My first response was anger, of course – great, towering fury toward this most contemptible of men. But as I walked through the woods, my anger subsided enough for me to realize that my brother had learned from a master, after all. Nothing he did should have surprised me.

Like a great illusionist, he was always one step ahead of his spectators. He understood that magic is all about misdirection: that sudden burst from a flash pot that gives us retinal burn so we don’t notice him palming the queen of hearts.

A professional magician once told me that the greatest magic tricks are never, in fact, a single trick at all. They’re always a sequence of tricks, and the true magic lies in how they’re presented. The audience watches a magic act in a state of high suspicion. They’re fully expecting to be fooled, and they watch, gimlet-eyed, convinced they know how the magician’s going to pull it off. But what they never know is that it’s this very suspicion that enables them to be mystified in the end. The magician directs their scrutiny away from what he’s really up to and toward a phony explanation of how it’s being done. They think it’s going to be one sort of trick, but then it becomes something else. And just when they’re sure they’ve got it figured out, it’s over, and they’ve been totally fooled.

I thought about Victor and the way he had misled me so cleverly. Maybe that was the real reason why Roger and he had talked so many times. Roger wanted to make sure Dad knew what to say. How to point me toward Paladin in such a way that I would believe I’d figured it out on my own. Roger wanted me to investigate Paladin. He wanted them to feel the hot breath on their necks.

The question was why.

In the end, I drew strength from my anger.

STILL, YOU never want to let your emotion, your impatience, get in the way of an operation. It’s always the times when you most want to rush to the finish line that you need to slow down, take stock, do it right.