Vanished (32 page)

89.

L
auren 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.

90.

M
y 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.

That was why I spent the night in the woods.

I did a loop around the Paladin compound—ten thousand acres, which meant a perimeter of close to sixteen miles. Too long to circumnavigate on foot. I took the Defender out of concealment and managed to zigzag through the woods, stopping periodically to approach the fence.

Remarkably, the entire property really was fenced in. The apparent excess confirmed what Neil Burris had told me, that Allen Granger was a man with something to worry about. Why else would he spend so much money to put up a fence sixteen miles long? I’d been to top secret government areas before, located in places that weren’t nearly so remote, and none of them was so well protected.

Allen Granger, who hadn’t been seen in public in over a year, was known to be a recluse and intensely private. I realized he was also probably paranoid.

As far as I could see, there weren’t any fiber-optic sensors buried in the ground next to the perimeter fence. That would have been outrageously costly. Unnecessary, too. Instead, the facility was protected by a twelve-foot chain-link fence, six-gauge galvanized steel—extremely difficult to cut through—and topped by coils of razor wire.

But that wasn’t all. There were guards, too. One guard was stationed at the gatehouse at the main entry and was relieved every six hours. Two others made a circuit just inside the fence. Their shift changed every six hours as well, and every half hour they radioed in to a command post.

I knew that because I listened in on their traffic using my handheld Bearcat scanner. That, and a pair of good German binoculars, were all the instruments I needed to learn what I had to about the place. There were an airstrip and several helicopter landing pads, a high-speed driving track and a running track. Rock-climbing walls and drop zones. There was a pound for bomb-sniffing dogs: I could hear the baying of the hounds late into the night. There were barracks for the trainees, a mess hall, administrative offices, and a club where the trainees could go for drinks. It closed down at two in the morning. The lawns were luxuriant and regularly irrigated and mown short like a golf course. There were a few man-made ponds. In fact, the place could have been a country club—if not for the shooting ranges and the ammo-storage bunkers. And the mock village, used for assault exercises, and a fake town with a plaque that said
LITTLE BAGHDAD
, even though it looked nothing like the real Baghdad and we weren’t fighting there any longer. So far as I knew, anyway. And the black Hummers that came and went at regular intervals.

Fairly close to the entrance was an impressive two-story lodge, the sort of faux-rustic home you might see in Aspen.

Granger’s house.

I paid particular attention to the patterns there. Which lights went on in which rooms and when. What time they were switched off. How many guards—two, one inside and one outside—and when their shifts ended. Allen Granger was guarded twenty-four/seven—within the well-protected confines of the compound. Like paranoid old King Herod, ruling from a fortress within the fortress city of Jerusalem, a moat and drawbridge protecting him from those he feared most of all: his own subjects.

Granger lived here alone, I was fairly certain, though I never once saw him emerge. I knew what he looked like from photographs: a clean-cut, handsome young guy, early forties. Sandy brown hair cut short, but not enlisted-man short.

The radio traffic indicated that the boss was in residence. The cook—a tiny Hispanic woman—arrived a few hours before dinnertime and went in through a separate kitchen entrance. There were meetings throughout the day. Vehicles pulled up to the front of the lodge—black Humvees for Paladin officials, and the occasional black Lincoln Town Car bearing politicians, some of whom I recognized—and were always greeted by the outside guard.

I got several hours’ sleep in the woods, in a sleeping bag in a pup tent, with enough food and water to get me through. Once I knew which room Allen Granger slept in and when his bedtime was, I put away my Leitz binoculars and my Bearcat scanner and prepared to make my move.

91.

Y
ou need to tell me,” Lloyd Kozak said softly, gently, “how to reach your husband.”

She couldn’t have replied even if she’d wanted to, not with the duct tape over her mouth. All she could do was shake her head and give him her fiercest glare. She couldn’t move her arms or legs.

She hadn’t expected him to be so strong, to subdue her so easily.

He had taped her into one of the dining-room chairs, her arms bound to her side, and wound silver duct tape around and around her torso. No matter how she twisted her body, she couldn’t move, couldn’t get the chair to move, and he kept talking to her in that soft, gentle voice as he unfolded a cloth parcel, the jingling of metal inside, instruments of some kind.

She grunted—angry, defiant.

The sound of a key in the lock of the front door, and she thought,
Oh please, not Gabe, not now, not with this madman here.

Kozak—or whoever he was, whatever his name was—turned. “Maybe Gabriel will know how to reach his father,” he said.

She tried to scream, to warn Gabe, but nothing came out.

He had something in his hand, something shiny that glinted, caught the light from overhead. Something that looked like a blade. A razor? No. A . . . scalpel?

Fear wriggled deep inside her, a living organism, cold and scaly and serpentlike.

She felt the cool sharp edge of the scalpel as he placed it against the delicate skin just beneath her left eye. She closed her eyes, tried to scream again.

She couldn’t move, couldn’t shout, couldn’t warn Gabe to stay away.

Where was he?

Maybe he’d gone right up to his room.

But he must have noticed the strange car in the driveway. Or the light on in the kitchen, which would tell him that someone was home. Or the fact that the alarm tone hadn’t sounded, which would tell him that it had already been disarmed by someone, and wouldn’t he wonder why?

She heard a series of high electronic tones, faint but distinct.

Had to be Gabe, punching in the alarm code. Spacey as he always was. He was disarming the alarm even though it was already off.

Which told her that he hadn’t even noticed anything wrong. Hadn’t noticed the strange car in the driveway, or if he had, he hadn’t wondered about it.

Please don’t come in here,
she thought. He’d be overpowered in a second by this lunatic.

Unless . . .

Unless he walked into the kitchen and saw his mother bound to a chair with a strange man there, and he turned and ran, out of the house, ran to get help. That he could do. Get help.

She didn’t even know what she wanted him to do.

But it made no difference anyway. She didn’t control her son’s actions. She could no longer keep him safe and wrap him up in his baby blanket like an egg roll. She could no longer pick him up in the palm of her hand.

She heard him go upstairs. Up to his bedroom.

Maybe that was for the best.

“Lauren,” the man murmured. She felt the prick of the blade against her eyelid, cold and hot at the same time, then warm and wet and terribly painful. “If I have to remove your eyes, I will.”

For a moment she didn’t think she could possibly have heard him right.

She squeezed her eyes tight, but it didn’t stop the pain because he just pressed the blade in harder and slid it slowly to one side and she screamed but the sound that came out was a keening, small and frightened.

“You’ll never look at your son’s face again,” he said.

“Back off,” someone said, and for an instant she didn’t recognize Gabe’s voice. It sounded deeper, as if his voice had suddenly changed.

The voice of a man.

But Gabe’s voice. That she knew for sure.

She opened her eyes and the scalpel was no longer there, and Lloyd Kozak had turned around to see what she now saw, too.

Gabe, standing in the doorway, holding the Taser. Pointed at Kozak.

The weapon was shaking in his hand.

92.

A
t that point it was mostly a matter of timing.

I needed at least a fifteen-minute window to enter the compound. When the radio traffic indicated that the perimeter guards were at the far end of their circuit, and my Leitz binoculars confirmed they weren’t in sight, I unfolded the lightweight, portable aluminum ladder next to a section of the fence by the rifle-shooting range. The backstop was easily twenty feet high, which provided good cover. Placing a big square of carpet on top of the razor wire coils, I climbed up, straddled the top of the fence, and hoisted the ladder up after me. Then I set it on the ground on the other side and climbed down.

Easy.

I’d already determined my route, based on which parts of the compound seemed to be deserted at night and which weren’t. There was no way to be sure I wouldn’t be seen by someone who happened to be wandering the grounds at two thirty in the morning, or maybe just standing around smoking, but it was the best route I could devise, with the lowest probability of being spotted. Nothing was certain, of course. But nothing in life is certain.

Carrying the folding ladder and my duffel bag, I looped around the driving track, where there was no one. Then past the airstrip. Adjacent to that was a helipad, well marked with a big white
H
painted on the concrete and recessed landing lights, though the lights were off. No helicopter was expected that night.

A landscaped path wandered by the trainees’ mess hall, which was dark, then a smaller building that apparently served as the dining hall for VIPs and Paladin executives, which was also dark. If the Paladin compound were a military base, which it resembled, that would have been the officers’ club.

Here the path forked, the left fork leading to the barracks where the trainees bunked. A few lights were still on there. Some of the trainees kept late hours, and I couldn’t risk being seen. I took the right fork, which meandered past a man-made pond, bordered by ornamental grasses and flowers. Definitely more country club than army base.

Up ahead loomed Granger’s lodge. I stopped behind a cluster of trees where the path bent so I could observe unseen. The house was surrounded by thick, waist-high hedges: too low for privacy. Probably to delineate a border, a sort of moat. A line beyond which you dared not cross. In front of the house was a white-gravel parking area. When you walked over it, your footsteps would crunch audibly. The only vehicle parked here was a black Hummer.

I went closer, then crouched down behind the Hummer and watched the house for a few minutes. The only light on was in the front room, probably where the interior guard was stationed during Granger’s sleeping hours. I plugged an earphone into the Bearcat scanner and listened for transmissions. There weren’t any.

A guard was making a long, slow, counterclockwise circuit around the lodge. He was smoking a cigarette, toting a machine gun, and looking bored.

I didn’t envy the guard his job, protecting a paranoid shut-in during the small hours of the night. He couldn’t read, couldn’t listen to music, and had no one to share the tedium with.

Then again, some of his colleagues were working in various death zones around the world, so maybe he had the better gig. Boredom was generally better than death or mutilation.

But boredom makes you less alert. You’re likely to tune out, get distracted, let your mind wander. You expend all your mental energy trying to stay awake and get through your shift.

I hoped that was the case here.

Somehow I had to approach the house undetected. I also needed at least three minutes. Ideally, five. That wasn’t likely to happen, not with a guard constantly circling the property.

I removed a cell phone from my pocket, switched it on, and slid it behind the Hummer’s rear tire. When the guard had rounded the southeast corner of the lodge, I made my move, taking long quiet strides, from time to time ducking beneath the hedges when I thought I might have moved into the guard’s peripheral vision. Then, when he’d circled around the back of the lodge and disappeared around the northwest corner, I stepped over the hedge, hoisted the ladder and duffel bag after me, and ran to the kitchen entrance.

I looked at my watch.

I had around sixty seconds before the guard circled around again and spotted me. Maybe a bit less. I took out a second cell phone and dialed the first one.

A few seconds later, I could hear the phone ringing. Even at this distance, the sharp trill pierced the stillness.

Before setting down the ladder, I hooked up the earpiece of the radio scanner again and heard: “Alpha Three to Alpha Two.”

“This is Alpha Two.”

“You hear that? Sounds like a . . .
phone,
huh?”

“I don’t hear nothin’.”

“It’s out here somewhere. Out in front. I’m gonna go check it out.”

The disturbance was irresistible, of course. Just as I hoped it might be.

After five rings, I disconnected the call.

At both the front and the back of the lodge were entrance porches with wood-shingled shed roofs, lower than the roof of the main building. That made it easy to climb to the second story. I set up the ladder against the peeled-log exterior wall and started to climb, and I heard in my earpiece:

“Alpha Two to Alpha Three.”

“Alpha Three here.”

“What’d you find?”

“Nothing.”

“You think someone dropped a phone, maybe?”

“I don’t know. I’m coming back in.”

“Back in” probably meant back on his circuit. Which meant he’d be here in forty-five seconds.

As I clambered onto the roof of the porch, I hit redial, and I heard the faint ringing from the other side of the lodge.

“Ahh, dammit, there it is again,” I heard in my earpiece.

“I hear it now. You check the porch?”

“Nah, it’s farther out there.”

I chose a second-floor window that had remained dark at night. It seemed the safest point of entry.

“Alpha Three, I still hear it.”

“Yeah, me, too. I’m lookin’.”

That bought me another minute at least.

I switched off the cell phone to stop the ringing. I wanted him to look but not find it. From my duffel bag I pulled out a glass cutter and suction device, set them down on the flat of the roof outside the window.

But I saw no alarm contacts and the window slid right up.

The screen was unlocked, too, and I managed to slide that open.

Then I pulled the ladder up after me, folded it, and set it on the floor of the darkened room.

And then I entered the house in search of Allen Granger.