Vanished by Joseph Finder Page A

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