The Step Between Read online

  Because of these factors—and because it’s cheaper to manufacture almost anything in faraway places where people work for less than a dollar a day—Jake Graham was able to purchase for a song an abandoned two-story warehouse at the end of a dead-end street. And he also was able to purchase the two and a half acres adjacent to the warehouse for a refrain. Directly behind the building was an endless stretch of land belonging to the U.S. Park Service; endless because the land abuts the Baltimore–Washington Parkway, which is what New York Avenue becomes when it leaves D.C. and enters Maryland.

  GGI, which specialized in the business of security, was as secure an entity as it was possible to be without being secretive or paranoid—the very model of practicing what it preached to its clients. GGI employees, by requirement, entered the building from a side door accessible only from the fenced-in parking lot on the southern end of the building. The GGI employee ID card opened and closed the gated access to the parking lot; the same card permitted entry to and exit from the building. The card was recoded every month. Guests of GGI entered the front door into a very nicely appointed, though not plush, lobby. The surveillance cameras and metal detectors were invisible and therefore nonthreatening to nonhostile clients.

  Jake and Patty had insisted on a level of security they both considered minimal and which Carole Ann, when she joined the company, found excessive, invasive, and borderline threatening. It actually had been Patty who convinced her that the security business and the intelligence business were information driven: the retrieval and use and storage and compilation of information was essentially what Gibson, Graham International was all about. And to the extent that people pay dearly for information, Patty explained, people also will go to any lengths to steal or co-opt or destroy the information held by others. So it was that “the subterraneans” occupied one end of the belowground floor of the building, and the security monitoring station occupied the other end. Both were staffed twenty-four hours a day.

  There were fifteen subterraneans and Patty was their guru; “information specialist” was their official title. When Carole Ann found out what they actually did, she immediately drew up and had Jake sign a document that made her the company’s attorney of record as well as a partner, so that her knowledge of the potentially illegal activities of the subterraneans became a client confidentiality issue. The computers—and those who knew and loved them—occupied two cavernous, steel-encased chambers, and only the computer specialists who worked there, Carole Ann, and Jake had access to those two rooms. For the same security-conscious reasons, only the security specialists, Carole Ann, and Jake could access the monitoring stations at the opposite end of the underground corridor.

  The chief of the information retrieval section was a Bonnie Raitt look-alike, a stylish, sixtyish retiree from the federal government who had forgotten more about computers than any of the young Turks ever would know. That’s because when Patricia Baker, as a very young and newly married Commerce Department secretary, volunteered in 1960 to take a FORTRAN course in a secret location (the Army’s Fort Belvoir in Virginia), nobody but the true visionaries could imagine the importance computers would achieve so quickly; so, aside from the visionaries, only the lowly—clerks, secretaries, and women—were the early beneficiaries of the new knowledge and the new technology. By the time the bureaucrats caught up with the visionaries, former nobodies like Patty Baker had become indispensable; and while her title, her responsibilities, her knowledge—and her importance—grew, her Government Schedule ranking and salary did not. So while she was called, first, a data entry clerk, and then a computer programmer, and finally a computer specialist, Patty Baker earned, until her retirement, the salary of a secretary.

  But back then, few men and fewer women walked away from a guaranteed government pension, so the naturally nicknamed Patty Bake put in her twenty-five years, moonlighting as a software designer before that was a profession, and becoming part of the growing underground of government computer hacks. Then, almost overnight, everything changed. Computers no longer were expensive, mysterious, monolithic, government and academic secrets. The gap between hardware and software was narrowing by the second and, with it, the complex nature of computing itself. Accompanying this sea change was the realization that the federal government no longer was pioneering or controlling any aspect of the runaway computer industry; ergo, there no longer existed an insatiable need for government computer specialists. Especially no-longer-young, female ones.

  Patty Baker happily ended a boring and humiliating retirement at the age of fifty-three to design, create, and manage Jake Graham’s computer operations simply because, as she happily told anybody who’d listen, he said these words to her: “I know I can’t pay you what you’re worth, so how much will you accept to come work for me?” It was the first time anyone had ever paid homage to her knowledge of computer systems and information storage and retrieval methodology.

  They’d met at a physical therapist’s office. Patty’s husband was recovering from a stroke and Jake was recovering from a yearlong paralysis, the result of a bullet to the back that ended his police career. Jake and Eddie Baker were each other’s inspiration and cheering squad, and Patty and Grace Graham united in the wall of support they built for their husbands. By the time the men were able to walk again, the two couples were close friends.

  Carole Ann liked, appreciated, respected, and enjoyed the company of Patty Baker. She also was intimidated by her. With no intent on her part to confuse or obfuscate, Patty spoke computerese, a language Carole Ann neither spoke nor understood. And it’s not that Carole Ann really objected; after all, she frequently was accused of speaking legalese herself. But two meetings with Patty in as many days taxed her. At least Jake had been present at yesterday’s meeting, to interpret Patty’s reports. Today, she was on her own, having been summoned by Patty to review information that she, Carole Ann, had requested.

  She turned left off the elevator and the soles of her Lands’ End boots drug slightly on the carpeted hallway. It had been snowing for the last thirty-six hours—lightly and gently—but enough to coat the streets and create ankle-high drifts on the sidewalks. She was thinking that it would be a good idea to keep a pair of more comfortable shoes in her office closet, when she found herself face-to-face with Patty.

  “You’re always right on time, C.A.,” she said, stepping back, holding the door open. She wore a gray wool jumpsuit and high-heeled boots. Her silver-streaked red hair billowed about her head, and her blue-green eyes glistened with intelligence and humor. She waited for Carole Ann to enter before pulling the door closed again, and making certain that it locked. Then she preceded her down a brief hallway and into the middle of the huge space that was the heart, soul, and brain of Gibson, Graham.

  Carole Ann remembered the time when being in the presence of so many computers would have required the use of earplugs, so loud and persistent would have been the hum of the old mainframe motors and clacking keyboards. But this much she knew of current technology: that just one of the svelte, stylish central processing units in this room contained the information it once required a computer the size of a room to accommodate. Here, she knew, there were two dozen CPUs and her head hurt every time she tried to imagine what they all contained and processed. In addition to the CPUs, each workstation contained the requisite keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and a high-speed laser printer. The workstations were arranged into six separate pods of four each, and she knew that each pod specialized in something different. She just didn’t remember what. Two people were at work in each of the pods; that was the case on every shift, every day.

  Patty’s private office was in the right rear corner of the room, a cubicle with a front panel of bulletproof glass and walls of steel-enforced concrete. Four chairs encircled a round table in one corner of the office. Three computer screens were arrayed along an L-shaped desktop across the left-side and back wall, one screen in the short angle by itself, the other two side by side on the long arm of the L. There
was a chair before each screen. A long, three-shelf bookcase occupied the other wall, on top of which was an impressive array of photographs, proof that Patty Baker enjoyed a full, rich life with human beings.

  With a wave of one arm, she directed Carole Ann into the cubicle as she extended the other arm in the direction of a programmer who was walking toward her. Carole Ann groaned at the size of the file Patty brought into the office with her, and sank down into one of the chairs at the table.

  Patty sat down next to her and dumped the fat file on the table. It was the size of the combined volumes of the D.C. Yellow Pages. “I know how much you don’t like this,” she said with a grin and slid her half-glasses even farther down her nose, “and I promise I won’t tell you what’s on every one of these pages.”

  “I don’t mean to seem ungrateful, Patty, but, quite frankly, sometimes you and your crew intimidate me. Like now. That just seems like too much information.”

  “Anything I can do to help smooth the way for you, C.A., you know I will.” She said “anythang” and “hep,” and Carole Ann was reminded again how many of D.C.’s longer-term residents were true Southerners: Patty was from West Virginia and Jake himself was a North Carolinian.

  She pointed to the file. “Tell me something that I don’t know about Richard Islington.”

  “That’s not his given name.”

  Carole Ann knew that she failed in her effort to keep Patty from seeing the home run she’d just scored. “What do you mean, not his given name? You’re saying it’s an alias?”

  The older woman shook her head and the thick mane of silver-streaked red hair flicked against her shoulders. “He changed it. He started life as Dicky Rae Waters in Scenic View, Ohio, fifty-six years ago. He started using the name Islington when he was eighteen or nineteen, and changed it legally when he was twenty-one.”

  Carole Ann also was shaking her head. “I’ve been reading and hearing about Richard Islington for more than twenty years and I’ve never once heard it mentioned that it wasn’t the man’s true name. How could a person of such prominence—and one who is, according to Jake, so universally disliked—maintain such a crucial secret?”

  “I don’t think it’s supposed to be a secret, C.A. There’s two big Washington Post stories about him that mention his name change, one from September of 1968 and the other from June of 1974.”

  “But what about after that, Patty? There must have been a hundred stories about Richard Islington in the Post since 1974. You’re telling me that not a single one of them reported that the richest man in town isn’t who he says he is?”

  “There are eighty-five mentions of him since 1974, and three more profiles. And no, not another mention of his other name.”

  “What about the Journal, the Times, Crain’s?”

  “Crain’s never mentions the name change, and the other two mention it just once, both times in the late 1960s.”

  “Television? Magazine articles?” Carole Ann felt as if she were grasping, but everything she’d experienced of the media’s fascination with the tidbits of human life—especially the lives of prominent humans—suggested that Richard Islington’s name change would have merited at least a mention in every mention of him.

  Still without opening the file or checking a date, Patty said, “Ed Bradley did a 60 Minutes story on him ten years ago, and it was Islington who brought up the name change. Same thing in a Regardie’s story the next year.”

  “He brought up the name change? Islington himself?”

  She nodded. “And he gave the same reason both times: said he decided when he was fourteen that he didn’t want to be a coal miner or a poor man, so he started reading every book he could get his hands on, to learn what else he could do. He decided when he was eighteen that he wanted to be rich, and he legally changed his name when he was twenty-one because, he said, no rich man he’d ever read about had a poor man’s name. And Dicky Rae Waters, he’d said, was a poor man’s name.”

  Carole Ann leaned back in her chair. Jake had said the man was widely despised, and indeed, she’d heard as much herself; but based on information supplied by Patty so far, Richard Raymond Islington sounded like a man one could envy and perhaps even distrust, if changing one’s name could be considered deceitful. But the brand of intense dislike that breeds hatred? “Is the man a thief, Patty? A corporate raider? Does he intentionally ruin competitors or their businesses?”

  Patty shook her head and pointed to the intimidating file. “He’s a hard man, and maybe not always a hundred percent fair, you know what I mean? But he’s not sneaky. Anybody he beat out or brought down knew he was coming. Either he told ’em right up front, or he made enough noise comin’ through the brush that anybody with ears knew it was an elephant and not a puppy dog.”

  Carole Ann grinned at the imagery. And immediately she could imagine and understand how a Richard Islington generated feelings of extreme dislike bordering on hatred: a beast of that size, even moving slowly, tramples everything in its path. Only a beast of similar stature—a rhino, for example—could afford to stand and hold its ground. “Anything else I need to know?”

  “Umhumm,” Patty said with a sly little smile, the kind that says, “I thought you’d never ask.” “His wife left him when their daughter was just two years old and nobody’s heard a peep out of her since. And the daughter disappeared twenty years to the day after the mother left.”

  Paolo Petrocelli came to work for Jake Graham on the Monday following the Friday that was his last day of work for the FBI, where he’d spent eleven years developing an expertise as a missing persons investigator, specializing in missing children. He’d quit, he told Jake and anybody who asked, because he thought it more efficient and effective to follow his own investigative instincts rather than the FBI’s bureaucratic handbook. He also didn’t like how it felt to find a subject a month or a week or a day or an hour too late. To the FBI, what mattered was that the subject was located and the abductors apprehended. To Paolo, it mattered whether the subject was found alive or dead, tortured or whole.

  Jake Graham didn’t promise Paolo that Paolo would locate a subject any sooner or any more alive working for him than for the FBI, but he did promise that GGI didn’t have a rule book for him to follow. In fact, Paolo Petrocelli would be GGI’s new missing persons unit all by himself until Jake hired someone to work with him, missing persons being a significant profit center for a business like GGI. And furthermore, he could be as unorthodox and unbureaucratic as he liked. Both of which he proved to be during the satisfactory resolution of his first three, very high profile cases. Then came a string of duds—rejected cases—borne in on the wave of his quick and early success: two cases in which the victim had been missing for several years; one in which the parents refused to believe that the body recovered from the rocks and boulders of Great Falls was that of their son; another in which the husband’s tale of his wife’s disappearance rang hollow, especially in light of the fact that he’d made no report to the police. So, Paolo Petrocelli hadn’t been very busy in the last couple of months. Then came Richard Islington.

  Hunched over on the love seat in Carole Ann’s office with his elbows planted on his knees and his face nestled in the palms of his hands, he stared balefully at the pile of papers on the coffee table before him. He listened to everything she said without ever removing his eyes from the file. “What’s the first thing we’re gonna do?” he asked when she finished briefing him.

  “Have a heart-to-heart with Richard Islington,” she replied, thrown off guard by his question and his demeanor. She’d met Petrocelli when he was hired, of course, and had exchanged greetings with him in the hallway and in the employee lounge, but this was her first extensive encounter with him and she marveled that he’d survived as long as he had within a government agency as autocratic as the FBI.

  “I hear you know this Islington guy.”

  She shrugged, now not only thrown off by him but put off as well. “I’ve met him.”

  “And?”
he queried.

  “And what?” she snapped.

  “If you were his daughter, would you disappear without a trace or a word, of your own volition?”

  She studied him for a long moment, which didn’t seem to faze him in the least, intrigued enough by the question to take the time to contemplate an answer, which she wasn’t compelled by intrigue or anything else to give him. Instead she replied dryly, “Our meeting with Islington is at eight tomorrow morning. Unless you get a bad feeling about him or about the case from him, we’ll sign the contract, accept his retainer, and you’ll go find his daughter.”

  Paolo sat up straight and looked directly at her for the first time. “You gonna help me look for her?”

  “Nope.”

  He sat up straighter. “You think I’ll find her.” It was not a question.

  “If she’s still alive.”

  He stood and scooped up the file with one hand, something neither C.A. nor Patty nor Jake could manage. “You got any ideas?”

  She nodded. “It’s a two-fer,” she said, and wondered how long it would take him to understand her meaning.

  “Twenty years is a long time,” he said after barely a beat. Then, “Where would you start?”

  “Scenic View,” she answered, and reminded him to remember everything he’d learned about mothers while he was learning how to locate missing children.

  He raised his hand in a half-salute when he left, and she turned immediately to the contracts before her in various states of completion. One of the objections she’d raised most vociferously when Jake first asked her to join him in business was that she’d been a trial lawyer for too many years; that she didn’t remember torts and contracts. She’d been surprised to discover how much she remembered, and didn’t know whether to credit the expertise of her law school professors or her own prowess as a student.