Free Vanished by Joseph Finder

Center and identified myself by my real name and firm and told them that, in the course of an investigation, I’d found a small bundle of cash in a briefcase belonging to a suspected drug trafficker. I gave the woman one of the serial numbers.
    It took her more than five minutes to return to the phone. She had all sorts of questions for me. Where exactly was this drug trafficker based? How much cash? What was the range of serial numbers, and were they sequential?
    I told her the serial numbers on the hundred-dollar bills all began with DB—at least, the ones I had looked at.
    “Well, sir, the first letter, D, means that it’s the 2003 series. And the second letter—B?—that means it was issued by the New York Fed.”
    “Well, that helps,” I said. “But what I want to know is, was this part of any bulk shipment of cash?”
    “I can’t tell you that, sir.” The woman’s voice had gone from bored-but-friendly to officious-and-stern.
    “That’s too bad,” I said. “Because when the Fed won’t help law enforcement recover cash that’s stolen from one of their shipments, that’s serious indeed. Just the sort of thing that my buddy, the chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, would love to sink his claws into. You know how they love scandals like this. How do you spell your last name, again?”
    If there’s one thing a bureaucrat fears more than having to work past five o’clock, it’s having to testify before Congress.
    By the time I hung up, I’d confirmed my suspicions. Sure enough, the cash on that plane was part of the famous nine billion dollars that had gone missing in Baghdad a few years back.
    But I still hadn’t cracked the mystery of who or what Traverse Development was, and that wasn’t going to be easy to do out of this office. Not with Jay Stoddard looking over my shoulder. And not without asking questions about it, as I promised Jay I wouldn’t do.
    I had an old friend named Walter McGeorge, who was an expert in TSCM, which is the industry shorthand for Technical Surveillance Countermeasures. In simple terms, Walter was a bug-sweeper, the best I’d ever met.
    Walter had been a communications sergeant on my Special Forces team. He’d been trained in all the usual stuff—radio equipment and wire communications, burst-code radio nets, and so on. Everything from encrypted satellite transmissions to old-fashioned Morse code. Somewhere along the line, “Walter” had become “Hognose,” because of his passing resemblance to Porky Pig, and then “Merlin,” as he earned the admiration of his teammates. He was recruited to the same Pentagon intel team as me but survived longer. When he finally decided he wanted out, I got him a job doing bug sweeps for a TSCM firm in Mary land. He’d done a number of projects for me since Stoddard Associates didn’t have TSCM specialists on staff: That was a specialized skill these days. All the big investigative firms outsourced those jobs now.
    I reached him on his cell. The connection was crackly, and I asked whether I’d disturbed him on a job.
    “Yeah,” he replied crankily. “A job involving bluefish.”
    Merlin was a serious sport fisherman and kept a small boat in the Harbour Cove Marina on Chesapeake Bay.
    “I need to send someone a package,” I said. Before he had the chance to make a crack about how he wasn’t my secretary, I went on: “I have the address of a drop site, and I want to send them a GPS tracking device. You think you could send out a FedEx package with one of those letter loggers inside?”
    “You looking for historical data?”
    “Historical?”
    “If you’re talking about the GPS Letter Logger, the one that’s like a quarter inch thick and fits in a number-ten business envelope, well, that just records where it’s been after the fact. It’s not real-time. You have to get it back to download the data. And I got a feeling you’re not going to get it back.”
    “I need real-time. I’m figuring