Vanished by Joseph Finder
Authors: Joseph Finder
Tags: Fiction, thriller, Suspense, Thrillers, American Mystery & Suspense Fiction, Suspense fiction, Political, Missing Persons, Fiction - Espionage, Security consultants, International business enterprises, Corporate culture
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in.”
“Well . . .” She faltered. “You’ve known Roger a lot longer than me.”
“He didn’t really have any close friends, did he?”
“Not really.”
I wasn’t surprised. He’d always been sort of a loner. Going back to when we were kids, he tended to hang out with my friends. Even though he considered us uncool, since we were a few years younger. And even though he was never really the hanging-out type anyway.
“Nick, are you sure this is okay?”
“More than okay,” I said.
She jumped up and threw her arms around me, and after a few seconds she began sobbing.
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.
“Well . . .” She faltered. “You’ve known Roger a lot longer than me.”
“He didn’t really have any close friends, did he?”
“Not really.”
I wasn’t surprised. He’d always been sort of a loner. Going back to when we were kids, he tended to hang out with my friends. Even though he considered us uncool, since we were a few years younger. And even though he was never really the hanging-out type anyway.
“Nick, are you sure this is okay?”
“More than okay,” I said.
She jumped up and threw her arms around me, and after a few seconds she began sobbing.
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.
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