Vanished (24 page)

65.

T
hree against one,
I thought:
Not exactly a fair fight.

Though they weren’t expecting much of a fight. I could see that.

“What’s up, guys?” I said.

The guy with the long grayish hair and the droopy mustache—Taylor, I think—rasped, “Got a quick sec to talk?”

He was the only one of the three still wearing a suit, though he’d taken off his tie. The others had changed into jeans. Taylor looked like a washed-up country-and-western music star doing a late-night TV talk show.

Except for the weapon he was holding. An aluminum-frame Ruger.45 with a black polycarbonate grip, I guessed. Probably a P90. After a couple of years in the field, I’d gotten good at identifying weapons, a skill that could save your life.

But these guys weren’t here to kill me. I took Taylor at his word: They wanted to talk to me. Ask me questions.

The steroid-poisoned WrestleMania reject with the jarhead haircut—Bondarchuk, I remembered—was dangling a handful of yellow nylon flex cuffs. I wasn’t sure why Burris was here, though, unless it was for the personal satisfaction of seeing me restrained and maybe bruised a bit in the process. Otherwise, with his broken wrist, he was mostly a liability.

They advanced toward me slowly, moving into position. Burris swaggered, torquing his yard-wide shoulders back and forth, though I noticed that he kept back a good safe distance. Placing the traffic cones was a thoughtful touch. They wanted to make sure no car came by and got in the way.

“This doesn’t look like a bible-study group,” I said. I stood next to my Land Rover, at the back end, not moving.

“Let’s just do this quick and easy,” Taylor said.

“Always happy to talk,” I said, hands outspread. “Though I thought Carl and I said all there was to say.”

Taylor stopped about ten feet away and raised his weapon slowly, adjusting his grip, and thumbed up the safety to the fire position. Bondarchuk came around to my other side, flex cuffs at the ready. In his giant hand, the yellow nylon straps looked like loose threads.

A couple walked past the traffic cones, did a double take, then rushed to their car.

Neil Burris had a little smirk on his moon face, wreathed by his scrubby goatee—a chin mullet. Now I could see a weapon in his left hand, his only good hand. A black pistol-like object with yellow markings and a muzzle that was too broad to be a gun. A Taser, law-enforcement model. He stood about twenty feet away.

The operating manual that came with the professional-grade Taser told you that twenty-one feet was the maximum effective distance. Theoretically, the compressed nitrogen cartridge in the Taser would fire its two barbed aluminum probes, which were connected by wire filaments to the handheld unit, up to twenty-one feet. The miniature electric harpoons would penetrate clothing then let loose with a paralyzing fifty thousand volts and eighteen watts. Theoretically.

But Burris should have spent more time reading the manual.

Fire the thing at a distance of twenty-one feet, and the probes spread too far apart. If both probes don’t hit your subject, you won’t get an electrical circuit. It won’t work. Seven or eight feet is probably the farthest you want to be.

But Burris was afraid to stand that close to me.

“Hands up and turn around,” Taylor said.

It didn’t take me long to decide that I had no choice. A Ruger and a Taser. Three men on one.

They only wanted to talk.

Then again, some of the most ruthless interrogators at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo had been supplied by Paladin. So maybe it was all in how you defined “talk.”

I shrugged, put my hands up, and turned around, my back to Taylor. Bondarchuk scuffed into an orthogonal position to my left, just far enough away that I couldn’t jump him.

“Hands behind your back, please,” Taylor said.

Burris had shifted position so that he was directly in front of me, and still a good twenty feet away. He raised the Taser in his left hand and pointed it at me and squinted one eye as if he were aiming. That was pure theater. You didn’t need to aim a stun gun that precisely, and if he did fire it, it wouldn’t work, and I was fairly certain he wasn’t planning on using it anyway.

I brought my hands down to my side. Bondarchuk stepped close to loop the flex cuffs around my wrists.

These were pros, and I couldn’t let them establish a tactical advantage, or it was all over.

I felt Taylor clap a hand on my left shoulder. “Hands behind your back,” he shouted, jamming his Ruger against my spine. “Do it
now
!”

At that instant, I stumbled, but not forward.

I fell backwards, right into him, catching him off guard. The momentum sent his gun hand sliding forward, through the gap between my torso and my right arm.

I didn’t have time to think. Lightning-fast, I slipped my hands over his wrist while twisting to my right, his elbow vised tight against my side, and pulled down on his straight arm with a sudden sharp force, hyperextending it.

The elbow is a complicated joint. It’s a hinge made out of three bones that come together with a lot of ligaments and tendons. Most people can flex their elbows nearly one hundred and eight degrees. Force it beyond that, and you’ll wedge the bony tip of the ulna under the end of the humerus, and bad things can happen. The bones can separate, or fracture, or simply snap.

I heard a snap.

Taylor’s scream was almost inhuman. It echoed off the concrete walls as he doubled over in pain and sank to the floor.

His Ruger clattered to the ground.

I couldn’t risk leaning over to retrieve it. Instead, I gave the gun a sideways kick, sending it skittering across the floor and underneath my car.

And then two things happened almost simultaneously.

Bondarchuk lunged at me and threw a straight punch at my head, his enormous fist coming at me with all of his vast body weight behind it. I raised my left arm to deflect the blow, which threw him off-balance. He leaned forward just as I smashed my elbow into his chin. He grunted, wobbled, righted himself, somehow managed to land a punch on my shoulder.

Immensely painful, but nothing compared to what Taylor was experiencing. He lay writhing and bellowing like a dying beast, clutching his grotesquely distended joint.

Then Neil Burris, who’d been striding toward me, raised his Taser and fired.

66.

H
ere’s the thing about close combat in real life: It’s almost always over in a matter of seconds. Not like in the movies, where your hero has the luxury to strategize and maneuver and grapple for minutes on end.

Fortunately, when your life is in danger, your brain kicks in. Deep inside your brain this little almond-shaped gland called the amygdala sends out the signal to make your body start pumping out dopamine and adrenaline and cortisol. Time seems to slow, your focus sharpens, you suddenly start perceiving way more stimuli than normal. Neurologists call this
tachypsychia
. Everyone else calls it the fight-or-flight response. Cavemen who didn’t have it got eaten by saber-toothed tigers.

So I made a quick decision. I could either be incapacitated by a Taser, or I could put myself within the reach of Bondarchuk’s fists.

No choice.

I dove at the giant, kneeing him in the stomach as I did so. He toppled to the ground, and I landed on top of him.

There was a loud pop and then a metallic
chink-chink
as Burris’s Taser fired its two fishhook probes into the Defender’s steel rear door. He’d missed me by about one second. Then came the rattling, frying-bug-zapper sound of the Taser sending out its electrical current.

Burris cursed. He couldn’t use the Taser again until he’d replaced the spent cartridge, which wouldn’t be easy with only one working hand.

Meanwhile, Bondarchuk reared up, taking me up with him like a forklift. But I really didn’t want to give him the chance to swing at me again. I kneed him in the chin, snapping his head upward. He sagged to the floor, finally knocked out.

“Tase him!” I heard. “Tase him,
now
!”

Taylor was on his knees, trying to get up. Behind him, Burris was fumbling with the holster clipped to his belt using the fingers of his wounded hand. Not a handgun. A replacement cartridge for the Taser. Both men were badly hurt, and neither was giving up.

The profit motive always works.

I guess I was motivated, at that precise moment, by pure raw anger. Winded and aching, I struggled to my feet, grabbing on to the side-view mirror of the Toyota Camry parked next to my car to hoist myself up.

But with a metallic groan the damned thing wrenched loose and I almost fell backwards. I got back up, kicked Taylor at the back of his head, and he, too, went down.

Burris managed to seat the new cartridge into the Taser.

I grabbed the Camry’s dangling side-view-mirror assembly, twisted it free, then hurled the heavy chrome mirror object at Burris. It clipped him on the forehead with a loud
thud.
He wobbled, the Taser slipped from his hand, and he toppled slowly, like a felled tree.

Leaning back against the Camry’s passenger-side door, I took a few deep breaths. The flex cuffs lay scattered on the floor near Bondarchuk’s feet. I snatched them up. Four nylon temporary restraints: He’d brought enough to bind my hands and my feet, with a few left over for good luck.

In a little over a minute I had all three of them cuffed. I figured they might regain consciousness in a few minutes. Even if they were out longer, why not slow them down as much as possible?

But just as I was pulling the cuffs tight on Burris’s wrists, he came to. He moved his head, groaned, opened his eyes. They were glassy and bloodshot.

“Big mistake,” he said.

“Hey there, Neil. We meet again.”

“Think this is over?” His speech was slurred.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think so.”

He didn’t reply.

The Taser was on the floor between his feet, calling out to me. It was already powered on.

He saw where I was looking, and he said, “Don’t even f—”

“Tell Koblenz that if he wants to ask me anything, he can make an appointment with my secretary.”

“You have any idea what Granger’s going to do to you? You’ll beg for death.”

“I haven’t used one of these in years,” I said.

Burris snorted. “Go ahead. Did the kid tell you he pissed his pants when my buddies gave him a ride home from school? Yep, that’s what I heard. He was probably too embarrassed to tell you that, huh?”

All of a sudden the Taser seemed too impersonal. I aimed my fist carefully at a small area behind his ear, at the base of his skull, a bony outgrowth called the mastoid process. I knew that if I wasn’t careful, I could break my hand.

So I was careful. I hit him hard and fast, and I didn’t break my hand. Burris went right out.

Clipped to his belt was his keycard. It had his photo printed on the front, along with his name and employee number and the Paladin seal.

The others, I knew, would have their cards with them as well. They might be mercenaries and ex–Navy SEALS but they were also corporate employees, and like cube dwellers everywhere, they never went anywhere without their keycards.

I jotted down their full names and dates of birth and employee numbers. I checked their wallets and noted the information on their driver’s licenses and wrote that down, too. Each had a rugged little push-to-talk Nextel cell phone. No car keys. Nothing else of interest.

I took Taylor’s phone, on the theory that the most senior guy would probably have the most access to higher-ups, meaning that he’d have the most useful phone numbers programmed into his phone.

I retrieved the gun from under the Defender. Always useful.

But it was the keycards that most interested me. They would get me into the building. Maybe into Paladin’s office suite as well.

Taking a keycard, however, was out of the question. Once Koblenz realized I’d taken it, that card would be deactivated, frozen. And I wasn’t yet ready to use it. Not quite yet. I needed time to prepare.

I examined Taylor’s card, and confirmed that it was the same exact type that Stoddard used, a PVC proximity card. Convenient, but not a huge surprise. The vast majority of corporations around the world issued key-cards just like the ones Paladin used.

It was the size of a credit card, with printing on one side. Actually, it was a sandwich: a layer of PVC, then a layer containing an antenna coil and an integrated electronic chip, then another layer of PVC, with an adhesive backing designed to go through the company’s on-site printer.

Most companies recycle keycards—they just reprogram them and peel off the label and stick on a new one. It wasn’t hard to peel the top layer off Taylor’s keycard, once I wedged a fingernail in there. I was able to swap his picture for mine in a matter of minutes. That way, they wouldn’t realize I’d taken one of their proximity cards. Taylor’s wouldn’t work, but that wouldn’t worry them too much. Maybe it had gotten damaged in the struggle.

Anyway, Taylor and his colleagues had bigger concerns than a nonfunctioning keycard.

I got in my car and headed out of the garage, and as I drove, I made a phone call.

67.

L
eland Gifford, who could barely use a computer, had become a BlackBerry addict. He no longer went anywhere without it.

That was not quite true. He never left the building without it. When he was in the building, he usually left it in his office.

At the moment he was in a budget meeting with the CFO and the EVPs, down the hall in the Executive Conference Room. His BlackBerry was in its usual place in his office.

Normally, Lauren went into Leland’s office only to put notes and files on his desk. He didn’t like her in his office too much, which was understandable. He wanted some zone of privacy.

Noreen was typing something at her desk. Lauren glanced at her quickly, then stood and walked quickly to Leland’s office.

Her heart was pounding.

She knew that she was about to betray a man she loved deeply. But she also knew she had no choice. If she wanted to save her family—to save Roger’s life, to protect Gabe—she had to do this.

In life you sometimes have to make terrible choices, and she’d finally made hers. Her true family over her work family.

To anyone watching, she wasn’t doing anything furtive. She was going into her boss’s office. But she couldn’t help being nervous.

His BlackBerry wasn’t where he normally left it, on the left side of his desk.

“Can I get you a sandwich?”

Noreen was standing in the doorway, hands folded across her ample bosom.

“That would be great.”

Go,
she thought.
Just leave me alone.

“The usual? Cracked pepper turkey on wheat, mustard and lettuce, no cheese or mayo?”

“Perfect. Thanks.” She smiled, examined Leland’s desk, intent and focused and very, very busy. She straightened a pile of folders. Looked up, saw Noreen still standing there.

Noreen smiled back, seemingly about to say something, then turned and left.

She waited until she heard the glass doors of the executive suite close.

On the floor next to the desk, on the far side, Leland had left his briefcase. A battered old cordovan leather case handed down from his father.

She lifted the flap, found his BlackBerry in one of the front pockets.

Slipped it out.

Told herself that she was
checking on something.

Her mouth was dry.

By then, Noreen would have been in the dining room downstairs, waiting on line for sandwiches. Leland was in his budget meeting. She looked at her watch. The meeting would go on for another twenty minutes at least.

She powered his BlackBerry on. The T-Mobile screen came up, then a message:
HANDHELD IS LOCKED.

Since when did Leland use the password protection on his BlackBerry?

She clicked
UNLOCK
.

ENTER PASSWORD:

She hesitated. Entered the password he used for his regular office e-mail account. She’d helped him come up with something he’d remember: Don17. For his favorite Dallas Cowboys player, Don Meredith, the famous quarterback from the 1960s, plus his jersey number.

INCORRECT PASSWORD!

She clicked ok, and a message came up:
ENTER PASSWORD
(2/10):

Meaning the second try of ten. What would happen when she hit ten? She tried again, entered “DandyDon17.”

INCORRECT PASSWORD!

What was it? She tried several more variations on Don Meredith, kept getting
INCORRECT PASSWORD!

On the fifth try, it told her to enter the word “blackberry” to keep going. She did, then tried other passwords. His daughter’s name. His wife’s name. His birthday. The year of his birth.

Before her tenth try, a warning came up. One more incorrect entry and the handheld would be wiped.

“No line today.”

Noreen was standing before her. She handed Lauren a sandwich wrapped in brown recycled chlorine-free deli wrap. “That’s Leland’s BlackBerry, isn’t it?”

Lauren felt a jolt in her stomach. Looked up, a bored expression on her face. “Oh, yeah,” she said with an exasperated sigh. “If he’s going to ask me to install a firmware update one more time . . .” She let her voice trail off. “Anyway, thanks.”

“Sure,” Noreen said, a suspicious look in her eyes. “Anytime.”