Vanished (27 page)

74.

I
was waiting for Lauren to emerge from her bathroom.

In the meantime, Gabe and I talked a bit in his room. I handed his graphic novel back, and he wanted to know what I thought. I told him I thought it was incredible. That I was honored and humbled to be The Cowl.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“The hero. The Cowl. With the fortress of solitude in Adams Morgan.”

“That’s not you,” he said.

“I thought he looked a little like me. No?”

“Huh? No way.”

I sneaked a glance at his face. He looked awkward and extremely defensive. Deeply embarrassed. I had brought out in the open something he didn’t want to admit to out loud. “No,” I said. “Of course not. I mean, I
wish,
right?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, dude.”

“Gabe, who’s Candi Dupont?”

He was too young, or maybe too honest, to have learned how to cover. His eyes flashed with fear. “Just a name,” he said.

“Candi Dupont is Dr. Cash’s girlfriend. Dr. Cash is your dad, Gabe.”

“Oh, man. This is
fiction.
Don’t you understand how fiction works, dude? You take little bits and pieces from your real life, and you weave it into this—”

“Gabe. You read your dad’s e-mails, didn’t you?”

“Screw you!” he shouted hoarsely. He shoved me away with one hand and turned away.

“Gabe.” I put both of my hands on his shoulders and rotated him to face me. “Your dad used the same password on all of his accounts, didn’t he? His Gmail and his iTunes and what ever. And you accessed his e-mail.”

He was crying by then. His face had gone scarlet, his acne like droplets of blood sprinkled over his nose and cheeks.

“That’s how you found out about Candi Dupont, isn’t that right? That’s how you knew your dad had a . . . a relationship.”

“He was cheating on Mom!” he gasped.

“Gabe, it’s okay. I’m not going to yell at you. I really don’t care about that. I just need that password. If there’s any chance of saving your father.”

He looked at me. “Why?”

“Because you’re right: Candi Dupont is just a name. It’s the name that your father called his girlfriend, I’m guessing. A name she used. An alias of some sort. But it’s not her real name. Which is why we haven’t been able to locate her. But if we can find out what her real name is, we might be able to find your dad. Because maybe she knows. Gabe, I know how horrible this is for you—”

“I don’t
know
her real name! How would I know that? All I know is that he was sending all these gross, like totally explicit,
sexual
e-mails to this woman named Candi Dupont, and she was writing back, and she was even more explicit, and he was lying to Mom the whole time, and it just made me want to puke.”

“Of course it did,” I said gently. “Of course. But if you give me his password, we can find out her e-mail address. And that might be enough to find her.”

His head was on his chest, his right elbow shielding his eyes from my gaze, and tears were spilling onto his T-shirt.

“Gabe,” I said. “Come on.”

WHEN LAUREN
came downstairs, I asked her to go with me to Roger’s library so we could talk privately. We sat in the antique French club chairs, which were positioned so that each of us had to shift uncomfortably in order to look at each other.

“How’s Roger?” I said.

Her immediate reaction—a microexpression, I think they’re called—was shock. A split second later she had regained her poise. “You’re asking
me
? How could I possibly know—?”

“Lauren,” I said. “You called him. A few hours ago. On the same disposable cell phone number that my father called him on.”

She blinked quickly. “Nick . . .”

“You’ve been lying to me since the beginning of this whole mess. You’ve known all along where he was.”

“No,” she whispered. “I don’t.”

“Well,” I said, and I cleared my throat, “I wish I could believe that. But you’ve lost all credibility. If you ever had any to begin with. Is this some kind of a scam that you’re helping him pull off?”

“Nick, will you
listen
to me?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’d love to hear your explanation. And while you’re at it, maybe you can tell me how you justify putting Gabe through the hell you’ve put him through.”

“Nick,” she said. “I didn’t know what happened to Roger until last night. I didn’t know anything more than you did. Yes, I admit it—I’ve been concealing a few things from you—but if you’d just hear me out—”

“Last night,” I interrupted. “That was the first time you heard from him?”

“Check my phone records.”

“He called you? E-mailed you?”

“He sent me a text message. With a number to call.” She lifted her purse from the floor, began rummaging through it. “Here, you can check my phone’s text-message in-box if you don’t believe me.”

“So where is he?”

“He said he’s being held somewhere in Georgia.”

Paladin’s training facility and headquarters were in Georgia, I realized. “Yet he was able to call you?”

“Yes.”

“And he was able to receive a call from my father. What kind of imprisonment is that?”

“He didn’t say he was in any kind of prison. Or even that he was a hostage.”

“He said he was ‘being held,’ isn’t that right?”

“Yes, that’s what he said. He kept saying he had to make it fast, that he only had a minute to talk—I had the feeling that wherever he was they didn’t know he had a phone. But listen—the main thing is, he said they were going to release him.”

“ ‘Release’ him.”

“That they were going to let him go free, finally. They were going to make a deal.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t say. I didn’t ask—there wasn’t time, and I didn’t know how freely he could talk.”

“What kind of a deal?”

“I don’t
know,
Nick. He just said that I should be careful, I shouldn’t do anything or make any phone calls or screw things up in any way, and they were going to let him go free. I mean, we talked for maybe a minute before he hung up.”

“You must be relieved to hear from him.”

“Of course I’m relieved. This has been a nightmare.”

“You’re getting your husband back,” I said.

For a long time she was quiet. “The truth is that our marriage has been over for a while now.”

I felt something cold begin to coil in the pit of my stomach. “I see.” That didn’t surprise me. But it did surprise me to hear her say it.

“I mean, ever since I found out about that affair he had—I haven’t been able to forgive him. We haven’t had a romantic life. He’s still a great dad to Gabe, though, and—”

I stood up. “You know what, Lauren? I don’t really care anymore.”

75.

T
he Surgeon unfolded his black canvas surgical instrument kit and removed his favorite scalpel, a Miltex MeisterHand #3. He carefully inserted a blade made of the finest carbon steel.

Marjorie Ogonowski was crying, the sound muffled by the duct tape over her mouth. Her hands and feet were bound to the bedposts by means of duct tape, too.

He’d left her glasses on so that she could see him clearly.

She’d stopped struggling a few minutes ago, but when she saw him put on the latex gloves, her writhing grew frenzied, her screams agonized. Seeing the scalpel escalated her terror considerably. But that was to be expected. One of the maxims of what was often euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” was that the fear of pain was always far more effective than the pain itself.

Of course, he wasn’t actually a surgeon—he’d been expelled from medical school after an unpleasantness he didn’t like to think about—but he’d gotten the nickname at Bagram, in Af ghan i stan. The CIA had needed to hire outside contractors to conduct interrogations in their secret prisons, in order to insulate the Agency politically. He’d so impressed his employers that they later sent him to Abu Ghraib. But when that whole mess became public, he’d been hung out to dry. There wasn’t much call for his talents in the private sector. He was fortunate to have been hired by one of the few buyers out there, Paladin Worldwide.

Torture—to call it by its true name—was a greatly misunderstood art. It had become po liti cally correct in recent years, during the backlash to the war in Iraq, to claim that torture didn’t work. But if torture didn’t work, why had mankind been using it for thousands of years? Why had all those members of the French Re sis tance given up the names of their comrades, even their own family members, under Nazi torture? Torture was only in effective if it wasn’t done right. This wasn’t just a matter of creative techniques. You needed people skills. You had to know how to read people and how to establish your authority.

He spoke softly, calmly, as he always did. To raise your voice was to lose control. “Let’s try this again. Mr. Heller was out of town, and you needed to reach him urgently, isn’t that right? I believe you were working on a big acquisition. A power plant in São Paolo. Yes? Nod if I’m correct.”

Her eyes were wide, and tears spilled down her face. She gave an exaggerated nod, up down, up down.

“Something had come up suddenly. You needed to reach him right away. But he was out of the office on a personal day. Correct?”

She nodded.

“There was a big mergers-and-acquisitions committee meeting first thing the next morning, and the slide deck had already been prepared, but you found something in the due-diligence process that you were afraid might derail the acquisition. A showstopper, you thought. Am I right?”

She nodded slowly. He could tell that she was puzzled as to how he knew this. Let alone who he was.

There is nothing we fear so much as the unknown, and the Surgeon was not going to enlighten her.

“But you had no way to reach him. You needed to reach him immediately, but he didn’t have his cell phone with him. You couldn’t e-mail him on his BlackBerry, because he didn’t have that with him either. Am I right?”

She hesitated a few seconds before nodding.

“Strange, isn’t it? A hardworking man like Mr. Heller didn’t have his cell phone or his BlackBerry with him while he was traveling at such a very busy time, when he needed to be reachable at all times?”

Her eyes slid to one side. Her deception flashed like a neon sign.

“Yet somehow you reached him. You talked to him. How so?”

She looked away.

“I’m going to remove the tape from your mouth,” he said. “But first I want you to see this scalpel up close. I want you to feel how sharp it is.”

Her eyes widened, filled with tears. She began to shake her head—as if to say, No, please don’t—but then she stopped. She didn’t want him to misinterpret the gesture as an unwillingness to cooperate.

He came in close, the scalpel in his right hand, and he moved it very close to her right eyeball.

She closed her eyes, shook her head violently.

“No sudden moves, please,” he said. “You’ll hurt yourself badly.”

Her eyes remained scrunched closed.

“Open your eyes, please, or you’ll be hurt much worse.”

He waited a few seconds until her eyes came open. She squinted, blinked.

“The skin of the eyelid is less than one millimeter thick. This scalpel will slice through it quite easily. And then the sclera, beneath. The aqueous fluid will leak right out. The damage to your eye will not be reparable.”

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.”