Vanished (20 page)

56.

W
alter McGeorge, aka Merlin, was small and compact, like a lot of Special Forces guys. He had a black buzz cut, a porcine nose, and a pencil-thin mustache. He had deep vertical furrows carved into his forehead, which made him look permanently angry.

I helped him carry his equipment upstairs to Gabe’s room: a couple of ridged aluminum cases lined with black polyurethane egg-crate foam and something that looked like a big old video camera out of the early eighties on a tripod.

Gabe gaped as we entered. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but we need to borrow your room for a while.”

“For what?”

“Your mom will explain everything,” I said.

FOR A
few moments I watched Merlin moving something that looked like a metal detector or a small minesweeper along the wall. It was wired to a pair of black headphones he was wearing.

“You haven’t found anything yet?”

“Nothing. You sure there’s something here?”

“Positive.”

“This here’s our top-of-the-line spectrum analyzer. Costs a fortune. Sees RF signals in real time. Stuff you normally can’t detect.”

“And it’s not finding anything.”

“Right.”

“Meaning there aren’t any wireless bugs, right?”

“Apparently not. Nothing transmitting right now, anyway. But that thermal-imaging camera over there?”—he pointed at the thing on the tripod—“that’s laboratory-grade instrumentation. I mean, that baby can pick up hot spots in the walls to, like, one-eighteen-thousandth of a degree.”

“And nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“If you do find anything, don’t you expect it’s going to be a GSM bug?”

He nodded. “If it’s really Paladin, yeah. They use government stuff.” The old days, when the guys monitoring an eavesdropping device had to sit in the back of a van on the street close enough to pick up the transmission, were over. Instead the state-of-the-art bugs used the same technology you find in cell phones. They
were
the guts of cell phones, in fact, minus the keypad and the fancy trappings. You could call in to them from anywhere in the world, and they’d answer silently and switch on their microphones, and you could listen in. From anywhere. They were smaller than a pack of cigarettes, sometimes as small as two inches long, and if you wired them to an existing power line, they’d work forever.

They broadcast using cell-phone signals, but only when they were on. So he used the thermal camera to look for any electronic circuitry. Something about the tiny amounts of heat generated by electricity moving through the diodes.

“No luck with that thing either?”

“Nonlinear junction detector,” he said. “Sends out a high-frequency pulse, then analyzes the harmonics that bounce back. Should find any electronic devices even if they’re off.”

“And?”

“I found plenty.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Clocks, telephones, DVD player—a bunch. Just no bugs. Am I allowed to smoke in here?”

“No.”

“Prisons use these bad boys to find contraband cell phones hidden in the walls or floors.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. But I’m telling you, Heller, there’s nothing.”

I tried to help by searching the old-fashioned way—a visual inspection, looking for minute traces in the walls and ceiling. I unscrewed light-switch plates and power-outlet covers and the ceiling light fixture. There were all sorts of ways to conceal cameras these days in things like air purifiers and wall clocks and lamps. There was no end to the possible hiding places.

Merlin and I both worked fast, but half an hour later, he sounded discouraged. “Nothing,” he said.

“Some Merlin you are,” I said.

“Are we done here?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Not until you find it.”

57.

I
could hear Dorothy Duval’s raucous laugh as I entered the kitchen. Lauren was making coffee, and Dorothy was helping, or maybe just female bonding. But I knew that Dorothy had a hidden agenda: She was putting Lauren at ease, cajoling her out of her state of anxiety.

“You’ve been hiding this girl from me,” Dorothy said, sipping from a mug.

“I never mix business and pleasure,” I said.

A throaty, knowing laugh. “Right. Tell me about it. You didn’t tell me she’s from C-Ville. I used to spend every summer there, at my grandma’s house.”

Lauren poured a mug of coffee from a glass carafe, the kind from one of those simple automatic drip coffeemakers, and she handed it to me. I took a sip. “Delicious,” I said. “How come I can’t make coffee this good?”

“Because you’re not using the right machine,” Lauren said.

I noticed the beat-up old Hamilton Beach coffee machine on the counter. “You’ve been hiding that from me. That one I know how to use.”

“Roger never liked having it out on the counter. He didn’t like the way it looked.”

She poured coffee into another stoneware mug. “How does your friend upstairs take his coffee?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “We used to boil the freeze-dried instant crap on a folding Esbit stove. Sometimes we’d just chew the coffee granules right out of the MRE bag. If we were in a hurry. But his tastes might have gotten more refined since Afghanistan. Where’s Gabe?”

“In the living room, reading.”

“You told him?”

She nodded.

“How’d he take it?”

“He said he wasn’t surprised.”

“Nick,” Dorothy said, “can I talk to you for a second?”

“You found something?”

“Right.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I want Lauren to hear this.”

Dorothy looked from me to Lauren, then back at me. “None of my malware-detection kits picked up anything,” she said. “So I ended up having to put a box on the line—a network forensics appliance. I finally captured some encrypted traffic going out.”

“Encrypted?” I said.

“Bunch of hash marks. Nothing I can read.”

“We’re talking spyware?” Lauren said.

“That’s right,” Dorothy said. “Some pretty sophisticated code. Not a commercial, off-the-shelf product like eBlaster. Government-grade, looks like.”

“Government-grade?” Lauren said. “Meaning, it’s the government that’s doing this?”

“Or a government contractor with access to government code.”

“So every e-mail we get or send out, every website we visit—”

“Every single keystroke,” Dorothy said. “All my user names and passwords on all my e-mail accounts?”

“Right.”

“Paladin’s a government contractor, right?” Lauren asked me.

“The U.S. government’s their main customer.”

“But how could they have installed it? Does that mean they were inside the house?”

“Not necessarily,” Dorothy said. “They could have installed this program remotely. But honey, that video they sent you confirms they’ve been in your house. To plant the camera.”

Lauren nodded, bit her lip. “Did that other guy find the camera?” She pointed toward the ceiling.

“Not yet,” I said. “But he will.”

“I don’t understand how that video clip of Gabe could have dis appeared,” Lauren said. “How could they make it just disappear that way?”

Dorothy nodded. “I know what that is. That’s something called VaporLock. It’s a kind of private web-based mail system. For recordless electronic communication. Once you open it, the sender’s name disappears, then the message disappears.”

“Okay,” Lauren said. “What’s the point of this spyware? They think Roger might contact me, so they want to read any e-mail I might get from him? That it?”

“Maybe.”

“So doesn’t that tell you they think he’s alive?”

I was silent for ten seconds or so. “Possibly,” I said.

“And maybe that they really
don’t
have him? They don’t know where he is?”

“I suppose,” I conceded. “But there’s a more likely explanation.”

“Which is?”

“That they think you have something. And they want it.”

“And I keep telling you I have no idea what that could possibly be.”

“Maybe it’s money,” I suggested. “A lot of it.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Or information. Files.”

“Well, I don’t have anything. Believe me, I don’t. They may think I do, but I don’t.”

“Okay,” I said, though I didn’t know what to believe.

“Another question,” Lauren said. “When parents put spyware on their kids’ computers, they sometimes get reports on their e-mail at work or whatever, right? So can’t you tell where this program is sending the reports? By looking at the IP address? Won’t that tell you who’s doing this?”

Dorothy grinned slowly, looked at me. She had a slight gap between her front teeth that I always found cute.

“This girlfriend is extremely clever,” she said. “I see computer ignorance doesn’t run in the family.”

“We’re only related by marriage, not blood,” I pointed out.

“Clearly,” Dorothy said. “The packets are all going out to a botnet in Ukraine—probably one of those Eastern European guys who’s put together this illegal network of thousands of infected Windows XP computers all over the world into a Tier 2 Network.”

“I think I get some of what you’re saying,” I said. “I assume the data going out of the DSL line here isn’t actually ending up on some illegal network in Ukraine, right?”

“Right. It’s just a way to hide where it’s really going. So I suggest we keep all the spyware and the bugs in place, and I keep monitoring the traffic until I figure out its final destination. If I can.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said. “Do whatever it takes. I’m going upstairs.” I took the mug of coffee from the counter. “Merlin’s gonna drink it black whether he likes it that way or not.”

MERLIN STILL
hadn’t found anything.

“If there was something here,” he said, “it’s gone now. How do you know that video wasn’t taken a week ago? A month ago, even?”

“I don’t,” I admitted.

While he searched, I sat at Gabe’s desk chair and read his graphic novel. I was astonished at the quality of the drawings. I had never been a big comic-book reader, but for a couple of years, as boys, Roger and I used to exchange old Batman and Superman comics, the occasional
Green Lantern
and
Captain America
. And Gabe’s drawings were at least as accomplished as those. He’d done them with an ultrafine-tip black pen, done shadows with cross-hatching. The lettering looked almost professional, too.

But it was the story that blew me away.

He’d titled it
The Escape Artist.
It was the story of a strong-jawed superhero called The Cowl, who fought evildoers in the nation’s capital, which was a decaying version of Washington, D.C. The Cowl—so named because he wore a black cowl like Batman—was a dead ringer for me. He even had my black hair, although Gabe had given me a Supermanesque whorl on my forehead, a gleaming forelock, which I don’t have. The Cowl had a Dark Past, which seemed to involve a dead wife, and had a dark, brooding temperament. He had a fortress of solitude, which bore more than a passing resemblance to my real-life loft in Adams Morgan. He was able to break out of any prison, escape confinement like Houdini, and he basically beat the crap out of bad guys, most of whom were evil, oversized adolescent boys who dressed like the boys at St. Gregory’s, with blazers and slacks, but also seemed to have come out of the pages of
The Lord of the Flies
.

His mother didn’t make a single appearance. The archvillain was named Dr. Cash, who looked an awful lot like Roger except that he was hideously deformed, had blue skin, the result of taking colloidal silver. He was the CEO of an evil corporation who had somehow taken over the government in a postapocalyptic coup d’etat and now tyrannized the land from his underground bunker beneath the crumbling ruins of the White House. He was often seen with a busty blonde on his arm, a villainess named Candi Dupont.

Candi Dupont.

Not a name you could easily forget.

Candi Dupont was the woman Roger had been having an affair with, whose abortion he had paid for. An alias, surely: Dorothy had turned up nothing on her in any database. But whatever her real name, obviously Gabe knew about her as well.

Dorothy entered the room, interrupting my reading. “You didn’t turn the kid’s computer back on, did you?”

I closed the notebook.

“No,” Merlin said.

“Because I thought I turned off both computers, and I’m definitely detecting outgoing network traffic. Something’s still transmitting a signal over the Internet.”

“Thanks,” Merlin said mordantly. “That helps a whole lot.”

“That tells us there’s something in the house,” I said. “Something that’s broadcasting, right?”

Merlin shrugged. “So we keep looking.”

“Man, this kid’s Richie Rich,” Dorothy said, ogling all Gabe’s stuff. “Look at all this junk. He’s got video games and iPods and boom boxes and a Game Boy and a Nintendo Wii and a PlayStation 3 and an Xbox 360. And I thought
my
nephew was spoiled. Did you check all the electronics?”

“Yeah,” Merlin said. “I found a number of semiconductors.”

“Yeah, thanks,” she replied. “All electronic devices have semiconductors. I get your sarcasm. But isn’t that where you actually
want
to look? In with a lot of other electronic circuits?”

“Yeah,” Merlin said, unwilling to let go of the sarcasm. “That’s just where I’d hide a camera. In a Game Boy that gets moved around everywhere.”

“I don’t know why you’re even bothering to look over there,” Dorothy told him. “The camera angle’s all wrong. Lauren described the shot to me, and that camera’s gonna be just above eye level.” She sliced the air with her hand flat, moving back and forth along a precise horizontal.

I nodded, approached Gabe’s desk, looked at the giant iPod/CD player with the built-in speakers. The one he put his iPod in to use as an alarm every morning. It was covered with a fine film of dust.

A small area on the front console, though, was dust-free.

Right around an LED light that didn’t seem to belong. I grasped the tiny bulb and pulled and out came the long black snake cable that was attached to it.

“Holy crap,” Merlin said.

“Mm-hm,” Dorothy said.

In a few minutes Merlin had carefully disassembled the CD player and placed the components on top of a pile of Gabe’s books. “Hoo boy,” he said excitedly. “This is really cool. I’ve never seen one of these ultraminis before. It’s a Misumi—a Taiwanese company. Hooked up to a wireless video IP encoder that takes the analog signal and transmits it over the Internet.”

“So how come
you
didn’t find it?” Dorothy said.

“Because they wrapped it in neoprene to hide the heat signature. Very clever. But how’d they know where to put it? They must have checked out the house in advance.”

I thought of the disabled sensors in Roger’s study and said, “For sure.” Then I looked at my watch. “Thank you, guys. I owe you big-time.”

“Just add it to my favor bank account,” Dorothy said.

“You got it.”

“Man, I’m looking forward to cashing in,” she said.

“Substantial penalty for early withdrawal,” I warned her as I walked toward the door. “I’ll catch up with you guys soon.”

“You have a date or something?”

“Nah,” I said. “I’m meeting an old buddy for a drink.”