Vanished (5 page)

10.

T
he offices of Stoddard Associates looked like the most posh, high-end law firm you’d ever seen: dark mahogany paneling everywhere, antique Persian rugs, burnished fruitwood conference tables. Hushed elegance. Old money. Even a prim middle-aged British receptionist.

The firm’s founder and chairman, Abner J. Stoddard IV—Jay, as everyone called him—sometimes joked that the décor he’d selected, down to the last detail, was nothing more than what he and his CIA buddies used to call “window dressing.” That’s tradecraft jargon.
Every good front needs a plausible cover,
he’d say.

He was only partly joking. After all, Stoddard Associates was a high-powered private intelligence firm. A corporate espionage agency, though Jay Stoddard would never use those words. An august and influential, if shadowy, enterprise. Not some cheesy gumshoe operation with frosted-glass windows and the lingering stench of stale cigar smoke. We occupied twelve thousand square feet of the ninth floor of a sleek office tower at 1900 K Street in Washington, with a curved façade of glass and stainless steel and slate spandrels. K Street, as everyone knew, was the Champs Élysées of Washington lobbyists.

And Jay wasn’t just some ex-spook who did investigations for big companies and the government and very rich people. He was the consummate Washington insider, a guy who knew where all the bodies were buried and was willing to exhume them for the right price. He was a fixer. He knew everyone who counted. He understood how things really worked in this town, as opposed to what they taught you in civics class or what you read in the papers, and he had a strong enough stomach to deal with all the creepy-crawlies you found when you turned over the rock.

Whenever he met with some politician who had qualms about hiring him to do oppo research—digging up dirt on a rival—Stoddard liked to quote Governor Willie Stark from
All the King’s Men
: “Man is born in sin and conceived in corruption and passeth from the stench of the didie to the stink of the shroud. There is always something.”

Jay Stoddard knew that everyone had dirt.

He was a tall, lanky guy in his early sixties, with a proud mane of silver hair he kept a bit too long. He wore handmade English suits and Brooks Brothers shirts with frayed collars, which was his way of announcing that he had taste and family money and appreciated the finer things in life but didn’t really think about any of that stuff. More window dressing, I suspected.

We were wrapping up our Monday morning Risk Committee meeting, which was basically twelve of the firm’s most senior staff members sitting around the big conference table and voting on which cases to take and which to turn down. It was your typical undercaffeinated Monday morning gathering: stifled yawns and low energy, throat-clearing and doodling, and furtive glances at BlackBerrys. Except for Jay, who paced around the room because he couldn’t sit still for more than five minutes.

Most of the cases we’d voted on were pretty boring, standard fare. A big data-storage firm wanted us to find out whether their Indonesian manager was embezzling. The CEO of a huge investment bank wanted us to find out if two of his top executives, a man and a woman, were secretly having an affair. (I wondered why the CEO didn’t want to use his own internal security guy. I also wondered why the CEO cared so much; I had no doubt he was looking for a pretext to fire the two executives for some other reason. The case smelled fishy to me. We voted yes, of course.)

Everyone perked up when Stoddard mentioned a request he’d gotten from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One of their curators was about to go on trial in Ankara for trafficking in looted antiquities—ancient gold coins that the Turkish government said had been stolen from a state museum. I had visions of some Manhattan society dame, with her Burberry scarf and Louis Vuitton bag, huddled in a dank squalid Turkish prison out of
Midnight Express.
We voted to investigate further.

But the case that took up most of our time that morning was a request from one of the biggest oil companies in the world. They were trying to acquire a midsize but highly profitable oil field-service company—a hostile takeover bid. And they wanted us to compile some deep background research on the CEO of the target company.

As usual, the voice of sanity was our forensic data expert, a lovely African-American woman with mocha skin and extremely short hair and big eyes named Dorothy Duval. Dorothy had a smoky voice and a blunt, earthy manner. I’m sure they’d hated her at the National Security Agency, where she had worked for nine years before Stoddard hired her. Stoddard was shrewd enough to realize how smart she was. Or maybe he just found her amusing.

“Look, can we have some real talk here?” Dorothy said. “They want a full-out data haunt. Cell-phone tracking, electronic monitoring, the whole deal. They want the guy’s phone tapped.”

“You’re totally making that up,” said a senior investigator, Marty Masur. “They never said anything of the kind.” Masur was small and bald, arrogant and abrasive. He’d been a Senate investigator until he pissed off one too many senators. Just then he was in the process of pissing off everyone at Stoddard Associates.

“That’s because they’re too smart to say it outright,” Dorothy replied. “Nobody puts a request like that in writing. They don’t have to.”

“So you’re just point-blank refusing?” Masur shot back. “You wanna keep your hands clean, is that it?”

“Weren’t you the guy who wanted to take on that ‘collection job’ for Hewlett-Packard?” she said, pursing her lips. “Tap the phones of their board members? Wonder whatever happened to the firm they did hire.”

“They were amateurs,” Masur said. “They got caught.”

“There was also that little detail about how it was against the law. Like this job would be. I won’t do it.”

Masur snorted, shook his head. His face flushed, and he looked like he was about to say something really nasty when Stoddard broke in: “Nick, your thoughts?”

I shrugged. “Dorothy’s right. It’s a huge risk. We might end up paying more in legal fees than we can bill on this.”

Masur muttered something, and I turned to him. “Excuse me?”

He shook his head.

“No, I want to hear it, Marty,” I said.

He gave me a wary look. I’d always thought he was intimidated by me. I’m six-foot-two, served in the Special Forces in Iraq, and I’m still in decent shape. Also, there were rumors about my dark skills, things I’d done in Iraq and Bosnia, that swirled around me. None of them were true, but I never bothered to set the record straight. I didn’t really mind having a scary reputation. I think Masur was afraid that if he got on my bad side, I’d get him in an alley one night and slice off one of his ears or something. I liked letting him think that.

“ ‘Being cautious is the greatest risk of all,’ ” he finally said. “Nehru said that.”

I nodded sagely. “If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.”

Masur looked at me quizzically.

“Dan Quayle said that,” I added. Whether he actually did or not, I liked the quote.

Dorothy gave me one of her dazzling smiles.

“All right, ladies and gentlemen,” Stoddard said and cleared his throat. “I will never allow this firm to be put in jeopardy,” he said. “As tempting as the money might be, there’s just no question that we have to do the right thing here. We’re going to pass.”

As the meeting broke up, Stoddard grabbed my elbow. “Come into my office for a sec?”

“Sure.”

We walked down the hall, past the black-framed photographs of Stoddard with politicos and world leaders and celebrities. My favorite was the photo of him and Richard Nixon. Nixon was wearing a light blue suit and was clasping Stoddard’s hand awkwardly. Stoddard was even lankier then, black-haired and movie-star handsome. He had been working in the CIA’s Operations Directorate until the Nixon reelection campaign had hired him to do oppo research. They needed someone to dig up dirt, discreetly. I’d heard that Nixon had hired Stoddard to compile dossiers on certain key Democratic senators in order to discourage them from demanding his resignation. But Stoddard was far too discreet ever to discuss it. Stoddard’s work was legendary, and he cashed in by setting up his own shop right after the election.

Nixon had signed the photograph, in his knifelike script, “With deepest thanks for doing your part to keep the election honest.”

I loved that.

“Great job on that Traverse Development thing,” he said.

I nodded.

“You’re good. Sometimes I forget how good.”

“It was easy.”

“You only make it look easy, Nick. You’ve got
sprezzatura
. You know what that means?”

“I’m on Zithromax,” I said. “Supposed to get rid of it.”

He glanced at me, then chuckled. “
Sprezzatura
’s an Italian word. Means the art of making something difficult look easy.”

“Is that right,” I said.

As we entered his office, I mentioned the name of the big oil company we’d all just been talking about, and I said, “That’s an awful big contract to turn down, Jay. I’m impressed.”

He looked at me. “Come on, man—you think I’m letting that one slip through my fingers? In this economy? The house on Nantucket needs a new roof.” He winked. “Always cover your ass, Nicky. Sit down. We gotta talk.”

11.

V
isitors to Jay Stoddard’s office were always surprised. They expected the standard ego wall of framed photographs of Stoddard with the rich and famous and powerful. But those he’d banished to the hallway. Which was either modest or clever—or just his way of putting his fingerprints all over our offices.

Instead, the walls of his office were lined, floor to ceiling, with books. There were first editions—Victor Hugo and Trollope—but mostly there were big picture books on architecture. Strewn artfully across his glass coffee table were magazines like
Architectural Record
and
Metropolis
and a big orange book called
Richard Meier Architect.

He was an architecture nut. Once, over his fourth glass of single malt at the Alvear Palace Hotel in Buenos Aires, he confessed to me that, as a young man, he’d desperately wanted to go to the Yale School of Architecture. But his father, who’d been in the OSS during World War II, forced him to join the CIA. Jay wasn’t morose about it, though. “Dad was absolutely right,” he said. “I’d have starved to death. I thought all architects were
rich
!”

He shrugged off his suit jacket and hung it on a mahogany valet in the corner. Over his threadbare blue button-down shirt were bright red suspenders—which he called “braces,” because he was an Anglophile—with little pictures of golfers on them.

“You need a cup of coffee,” he announced, pushing the intercom button on his desk phone. “Intravenous, looks like. Hungover, Nick?”

“I’m okay,” I said. “I never drink on plane flights.” It was true. One of the secrets of business travel, I’d learned. That and always fly first class. “No coffee, thanks.”

His assistant’s voice came on: “Yes?”

“Sorry, Heather, cancel that,” he said to the speakerphone as he sat behind his desk. He never drank coffee, himself. He said he didn’t need it, which made it hard to trust him. I don’t need a lot of sleep, but this guy was almost an android. He was incredibly energetic. He played squash, I was told, like a Roman gladiator on speed.

Jay leaned forward and put his elbows on his desk, propping up his head, staring off somewhere behind me. This made him look bored and disengaged.

He often came off as casual and shambling and loose-jointed, but his desk told you everything you needed to know: It was always perfectly clean. Nothing marred the wide polished expanse of mahogany. He was a Type-A personality, an obsessive-compulsive, a clean freak. He was great at banter, never seemed to take anything seriously, sometimes even appeared to be muddleheaded. But he missed nothing. His mind was a steel-jaw trap: Once you got caught in its teeth, you’d have to chew off your own limb to escape.

“So you got in to the office early today?”

I shrugged.

“Looking into Traverse Development, huh?” he said. His blue eyes seemed to have gone gray.

“I like to know as much as possible about my clients,” I said. I’d run Traverse Development through our standard corporate registration databases and found nothing. I’d also run a search on the cell-phone number that Woody gave me back in L.A., the emergency contact number for whoever had hired him. But no luck. It came back as “private.”

Did someone tell Stoddard I’d been searching? Or did my computer search trigger some kind of notification?

“Maybe not the best use of your time.”

“Don’t worry, I did it on my own time.”

He paused. “And?”

“It doesn’t exist,” I said.

“Strange,” Stoddard said. He was toying with me. “The check cleared.”

“No business registration in the city of Arlington. Or Arlington County. Nothing in SearchSystems. The address on that shipment turns out to be bogus—a rented mail drop. A place called EasyOffice, which is one of those business suites you can rent by the hour or by the week. The rent was paid in cash. So obviously it’s a front.”

“Oh, please. Don’t be so suspicious. Companies use fronts for all kinds of legitimate reasons. Like avoiding taxes.”

“You know what was in that container, don’t you?” I said. “What was being shipped out of Bahrain?”

“I didn’t ask.” Jay was too skilled to look evasive.

“But you know anyway,” I said.

He laughed. Sometimes talking with him was like fencing. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“I think you know damned well what was in those boxes.” I said it in a good-humored way, not wanting to come off as confrontational. Confrontational rarely worked with him.

He chewed the inside of his cheek, which was always the giveaway that he was trying to decide whether to tell a lie. The “tell,” as they say in poker. Stoddard was practiced in the art of deception, but my skill at reading people is better. I give full credit for this to my father, who was a liar the way some people are alcoholics. He lived and breathed dishonesty. It was a useful education for a kid.

“If you opened a sealed shipment, Nick, you don’t want to brag about it. You could get the whole firm in trouble. If you’re going to break the law, you do it for the client. Not to work against the client.”

“It was a messy recovery, Jay. A couple of boxes broke open.”

“Why do I doubt that? Point is, whatever you found, that’s outside of the scope of our work. They hired us to do a very specific job. Nothing beyond that. In addition to which, as you well know, anything we come across in the course of an investigation that might be detrimental to a client we always keep confidential. Otherwise, we’d go out of business in a week. I don’t need to tell you this.”

This was one of the things I didn’t love about my job. Often, a client would hire us to investigate some alleged wrongdoing inside the company, and later, after we found it—embezzlement or fraud or bribery or whatever—we’d discover that what the client really wanted was to see if it could be found. Sort of like a game. A scavenger hunt. If we couldn’t find it, neither would the Justice Department. And they always insisted that we bury our findings. Clean up the mess for them and keep our mouths shut. If you didn’t go along with them, they might refuse to pay. And the word would get around that you were, well, maybe a little too fussy. A pain in the ass. Not the kind of firm you could really be comfortable with.

This sort of thing happened far more than we or anyone else liked to admit. Which was why you had to be careful about who you signed up to work for. You didn’t want to find yourself complicit in covering up someone else’s crime.

“This has the potential to blow up in our faces,” I said. I lowered my voice. “There was close to a billion dollars there in cash. Sealed in bricks by the U.S. Treasury.”

“So?”

“So there’s this annoying little law. The bulk-cash smuggling law of 2001. If you’re shipping more than ten thousand bucks in cash, you’ve got to fill out paperwork.”

“Oh, please. Not if the government does it.”

“This wasn’t a government flight. This was a private cargo shipment.”

“The government uses private cargo firms all the time these days. You know that.”

“For a billion dollars’ worth of cash? I’m dubious.”

“Bottom line, this isn’t your problem, Nick. Grow up. Don’t be naïve.”

Now he was pulling out the heavy artillery. There was nothing worse, in Stoddard’s mind, than being naïve about how the world really worked. He had no patience for it.

“I’m not taking a moral position, here, Jay. I’m just saying that this is the sort of thing that ends up splashed all over the front page of the
Washington Post,
and suddenly we’re dragged into it. First as a sidebar. Then we become our own separate front-page story.”

“Only if it’s truly illegal, which we don’t know, and only if someone talks. Barring that, we’re on totally solid ground.”

“You really do have faith in the ultimate goodness of mankind, don’t you?” The only successful way to argue with Jay, I’d learned, was to out-cynical him.

He laughed loud and long. Jay had a good smile but a lot of gold fillings at the back, and they caught the light. “Look, Nicky. The world’s a dirty place. I’m sure your father could tell you a lot more about that than I could. Give him a call. Ask him.”

He arched a single brow, which was something I’d always wished I could do. Stoddard wasn’t trying to be snide, I didn’t think. He probably just intended this as his coup de grâce, his knockout punch.

“I don’t think they allow incoming phone calls at his prison,” I said. “Though I admit I’ve never tried.”

IF YOU
took a really close look at some of the biggest, most notorious scandals of the last thirty or so years, you’d find Jay Stoddard lurking somewhere in the shadows. As an investigator or a fixer or an adviser, I mean. Whether it was the Iran-Contra hearings in the Reagan days or a Canadian media mogul on trial for fraud. Or one of a dozen Congressional sex scandals. And a whole lot more situations that might have exploded into ugly public imbroglios if it hadn’t been for Stoddard’s work.

But you’d have to know where to look, because Jay didn’t like to leave traces. And he always preferred to be on the winning side.

One of the very few times he picked the wrong side was when he agreed to work for my father. Victor Heller was arrested and charged with massive accounting and securities fraud and grand larceny, and being the smart and extremely well-connected guy that he was, he hired the finest investigative firm in the world to assist his legal defense. Unfortunately for both Jay and Dad, the facts got in the way. He was sent to prison for thirty years.

In fact, I’m convinced that it was because Jay Stoddard felt guilty about letting my father down that he hired me, the black sheep of the family who’d dropped out of college to enlist in the Special Forces. Who’d joined the army instead of Goldman Sachs. Later, though, Jay began bragging that I was his best hire. “Something in those Heller genes,” he’d say.

“Larceny,” I liked to reply.

He’d shake his head, a mournful look in his eyes. “Your dad’s a brilliant man. It’s just a damned shame . . .”

Now he said, “Anyway, odds are the whole thing’s perfectly innocent. Let’s just leave it there, okay?”

“If I ran a check on some of the serial numbers, I wonder if it would turn out to be part of the cash that went missing in Baghdad a few years ago.”

“Maybe. But why would you?”

“Curiosity.”

I was starting to piss him off. His tone got increasingly exasperated. “Nick, we’ve all got a lot of work to do around here. Let’s just move on, okay?”

I shrugged. I wasn’t interested in getting into a fight with him. Certainly not a fight I couldn’t win. And maybe he was right. “Forget it, Jake,” I said. “ ‘It’s Chinatown.’ ”

Quoting one of the best lines from one of Jay’s favorite movies seemed to mollify him. He laughed heartily. “All right,” he said, “as far as I’m concerned, this never happened.”

I was being forgiven. As if I’d accidentally insulted his wife. Very few people were as affable as Jay when he wanted to be.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

I wish I’d left it there.