The Man Who Vanished

PART I

Chapter 1

Walker gently tilted the handle to the right. The turboprop circled above the desert in a wide arc and lined up with the runway. The northern part of the city lay in the distance and, beyond the suburbs, the hillsides of the Sandia Mountains were covered in evergreens. A herd of antelopes were lazily treading along the road to the airport, oblivious to the meager traffic.

Walker eased off the gas. He wasn’t a big fan of autopilot. Knowing that he could turn it on at will reassured him, but he used it only when he needed to doze for a little while or to sit with a passenger in the cabin.

The radio crackled.

DC 142, the runway’s yours.

Thanks, Derek, answered Walker.

One of the advantages of small airports was that everyone knew each other. The landing fees were low and formalities reduced to a minimum. A pilot could park his car and be airborne ten minutes later.

He pushed the handle to descend to fifty feet. The runway was clear. Two mechanics were working on Todd Atkinson’s Learjet. Walker had heard him complain of a problem with the gear. That was yet another argument in favor of his turboprop. The TBM-900 consumed less fuel than a jet, flew at a lower altitude, and required less maintenance. Granted, it peaked at three hundred thirty knots, versus four hundred sixty for Atkinson’s bird, but for the short trips that were the norm for Walker, the difference rarely amounted to more than a few minutes.

Getting his pilot license had transformed Walker’s life. No more exhausting rounds with his sales managers, no more one-night stays in motels with flowery bedspreads, no more stale donuts for breakfast. Now he could visit four or five customers in one day and still be home for dinner.

The plane also made sense financially. It shortened the sales cycle and impressed prospective clients, who thanked Walker for making the effort to come over, simply because he had trumped standard airlines. Just this afternoon, he had landed a major contract from an online retailer in Phoenix, who had justified his decision by the exemplary availability of Wills’s teams.

The plane did more than to help him sign clients; sometimes it helped to keep them. Whenever a customer threatened to drop Wills, Walker would utter his mantra: Don’t leave; I’m on my way! He would then hang up without waiting for a response, hop on the turboprop, and head to Denver or Oklahoma City. The moment he appeared, the discomfited client, mumbling that he had been rash, would feel obligated to take to lunch the very contractor he was about to fire an hour earlier.

Derek had directed the TBM-900 to the shortest runway, aware it needed only seven hundred yards to land. Another advantage over the jets, Walker reflected as he touched down in front of the control tower.

Very clean, said the air traffic controller.

I do what I can. Going home.

All the way to the left–

Watch your step – I know, chimed in Walker.

Usually Derek’s worn-out joke would have annoyed him, but winning this bid right under FedEx’s nose had put him in a jolly mood. He parked the turboprop in the hangar, where Wills rented a spot by the year, and took the wheel of his spacious sedan. In twelve minutes – fifteen if the traffic lights conspired against him – he would walk into his house. He had promised Sarah to fire up the barbecue for dinner. He waved at the gatekeeper and directed his Tesla onto the road to Albuquerque.

Another huge contract, he thought, the third this month. Would it ever end?

The company had been founded in the 1970s by Walker’s father-in-law, Raymond Wills. It provided express delivery services to businesses that wished to reduce their dependence on the notoriously unreliable United States Postal Service. The aptly named Raymond – whose family name was a homonym of wheels – had begun with three small trucks and one mail route. When Walker joined the group in the mid-‘90s, Wills owned one hundred fifty vans that traveled across New Mexico, Arizona, and southern Colorado.

Despite his degrees, Walker had insisted upon starting at the bottom so he could learn the ropes. He delivered the mail in the morning, picked it up in the afternoon, and loaded the trucks at nightfall. From operations, he had moved on to sales, where his flexibility and practical intelligence worked wonders. One gesture or comment was enough for him to grasp a client’s expectations and tailor his speech accordingly. He would coax the penny pinchers by granting them a discount of half a percentage point, pummel the indecisive with statistics, and win over the autocrats by praising their strategy. He also lavished treats on executive secretaries and heads of purchasing. He knew who liked Hershey’s white chocolate and who preferred pistachios, who was on a diet and who couldn’t care less about their cholesterol.

Walker merged onto Route 45, which runs along the Rio Grande. He had mixed feelings about those days, when the only person resisting him was the one he was trying to enrich. He had his finger on the pulse of the market and could sense it was about to explode. He repeatedly urged his father-in-law to open new routes, arguing that an extension to Denver and El Paso alone would generate a thirty percent increase in volume. But Raymond dug in his heels. By nature more cautious than his son-in-law, he was quite pleased with the ten to fifteen percent growth his company had consistently delivered, as well as the generous dividends it that went with it. An exasperated Walker had more than once threatened to quit, forcing Sarah to act as a mediator between her husband and her father.

Who knows how the company would have fared, had Raymond Wills not succumbed to a heart attack in 2003. He had collapsed, headfirst into his plate, in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner. When his wife, Edna, screaming, had pulled him back up, he had cranberries stuck to his forehead.

The day after the funeral, the Board of Directors promoted Walker to the rank of president. Sarah, who had put her career on hold to raise their children, went back to work. Together, they implemented the business plan the late Raymond Wills had vetoed. Spectacular results were quickly achieved. As expected, Denver and El Paso had generated a spike in traffic, so Wills opened branches in San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston. FedEx and UPS, which for years had been competing for market share in Texas, took a dim view of the arrival of a third party and ganged up to squeeze the newcomer out of the market. Instead of fighting a losing battle, Walker opted to break the alliance between the two giants by offering each of them a deal: the lucky winner would have the privilege of dispatching the parcels of Wills’s clients outside the company’s five historic states, while Walker committed to deliver his new partner’s excess mail over the same territory. FedEx, which at the time was facing serious staffing problems in the southeast, jumped at the chance to neutralize the competition while improving its own reliability. UPS attempted to derail the agreement but managed only to strengthen Walker’s hand.

Now at the helm of a global network, Wills had doubled its sales force and set up shop in California. By acquiring six second-hand Cessna 208B, they had also joined the highly exclusive club of freight companies equipped with an air fleet. Since then, activity and profit were increasing by about one third every year; the company had more than five thousand employees and owned twenty-six aircraft and fifteen-hundred trucks.

But Walker wasn’t one to rest on his laurels. He was convinced the firm’s best years were yet to come. The express transportation sector was growing two to three times faster than the rest of the economy, propelled by the inexorable rise of e-commerce; profit margins were also climbing, thanks to lower gas prices and technology-induced productivity gains.

Still, there was no shortage of problems, like this commitment Walker had just signed but wasn’t quite sure how to fulfill. He had promised his new client that his packages would be delivered by 9:00 a.m. the next day, knowing full well that, given the current size of Wills’s fleet, a quarter of the mail didn’t reach its final destination before noon. Though Walker had asked his head of operations to find a solution, he wasn’t holding his breath: Jimenez had about as much imagination as a food processor. That meant he’d have to come up with something on his own. He had scribbled down a couple of tentative ideas while riding in the taxi earlier and resolved to review them once the kids were in bed.

He activated the gate opener well before reaching his property, so as not to pause at the entrance. He’d had to summon an electrician to extend the range of the remote control, but he considered the time saved worth the expense. The garage door also opened automatically, thanks to a sensor implanted in the driveway. Sarah maintained that the time spent researching and installing this system exceeded the projected savings for the next ten years, but Walker didn’t care. Should a gadget promise to shave off only a few seconds per day, he was willing to drive all the way to Denver to get it. That was one of his indulgences; there weren’t many others.

He waved at the gardener, who was trimming the rose bushes, and parked his Tesla next to his Sarah’s Prius. The maintenance of the property occupied a small army of Mexicans, as Sarah seemed hell-bent on employing half the county.

Walker found his wife in the kitchen, busy peeling vegetables. He approached her from behind and pulled her to him, kissing her neck. She wiggled out of his embrace playfully and planted a kiss on his cheek.

So, how did the bid go?

We won, he said, grabbing a beer from the fridge.

Sarah looked up from her cucumbers.

You sure sound casual about it. How much did you say that contract is worth?

Three million a year, with a forty percent gross margin.

FedEx?

Out of the race.

And UPS?

They backed out too when the buyer demanded one hundred percent same-day delivery before 9:00 a.m. in California.

And we can do that?

We’ll have to, answered Walker, pulling up a chair.

Sarah wiped her hands and sat before her husband.

Congrats, Walker, that’s wonderful news! And what does this distributor sell?

Sex toys.

You hadn’t mentioned that.

You hadn’t asked. Anyway, it’s a product like any other.

Not really, said Sarah with a smile.

No, you’re right: the handcuffs require a special packing slip and the sale of the King Kong dildo is prohibited in Alabama.

Maybe you could bring home a sample? asked Sarah mischievously.

I assume you’re talking about the handcuffs.

Of course. I’ve got everything else I need right here.

The two of them burst into laughter.

They had crossed paths for the first time at Northwestern University, without ever speaking to each other. Walker was studying engineering, played football, and lived on campus; Sarah was a finance major, captain of the track team, and shared an apartment in Evanston. Incidentally, they were both dating someone else back then.

A few years later, the New York investment bank where Walker worked had sent him to make the rounds of medium-sized businesses in Arizona, to promote a revolutionary cash management software. Even though the only revolutionary aspect of the product was the high level of commission it generated for the bank, Walker had been happy to oblige. Originally from Pennsylvania, he had never set foot in the south. Three weeks of traveling all expenses paid was too good to pass up.

Raymond Wills had agreed to meet with the young banker, as he did with every supplier who asked, so he could indulge in his favorite pastime: boasting shamelessly about his company without fear of being contradicted. He was one of those people who are determined to convince you of their good fortune and will keep rehashing their arguments until you surrender. According to him, all the fairies of the universe had gathered around his cradle: he had had the shrewdness to establish his company in Albuquerque, a city blessed with an inexhaustible labor force and perfect weather; he was boxing giants and throwing punches like the best of them; his customer ratings were so high that the firm measuring them had initially suspected a glitch; his employees would take a bullet for him. None of that would have been possible without the support of the two loves of his life, the kind of wife every captain of industry dreams of, and a daughter who could have picked any job, but who had chosen to assist her father in his great endeavor.

That’s when Sarah had walked through the door. Though she recognized Walker, she had no qualms about letting him know what she thought of his software: a scheme to suck customers’ bank accounts dry. The conversation had continued and taken a more casual turn at the city’s best restaurant. By the end of the meal, Raymond had offered Walker a job. Although he couldn’t match Wall Street salaries, he explained that for the price of a coat closet in Manhattan you could live in a palace in Albuquerque. Icing on the cake, the weather was glorious, the girls pretty, and five-star establishments a dime a dozen.

Walker, who hated his job, had quit on the spot. A year later, he married Sarah. To this day, they looked like the perfect couple. At forty-three years old, Walker had propelled Wills’s expansion to the point that it had become New Mexico’s largest employer. He was routinely courted by headhunters who assured him he was cut out to run a national airline. As for Sarah, she was the ideal mix of southern hospitality and northern sophistication. Equally comfortable pedaling on a mountain bike or dancing in an evening gown at a charity gala, she enjoyed talking baseball with the roofer as much as discussing interest rates with her banker. She had relinquished her managerial role in the company when Joey was born, though as the majority shareholder, she still sat at the Board. She kept abreast of the state of business and never failed to send Christmas cards to Wills’s oldest and most loyal customers.

How was your day? asked Walker.

Pretty good. Played tennis at 8:00 with the girls. I had to cut it short, I had promised Joey I’d chaperone his class to the planetarium.

Anything interesting?

Depends who you ask. Ms. Nelson is moving to Houston. Joey’s sad, he was hoping he’d have her again next year.

Ms. Nelson?

His teacher. A blond, a bit on the chubby side. You met her in December.

Of course, said Walker who didn’t have the faintest recollection.

Apart from that, the district is setting up an exchange program with French high schools. Unfortunately, a lot of families can’t afford to pay for the trip. I half-promised Carlos he could count on our support.

Sure, said Walker distractedly.

I also booked our plane tickets for Labor Day.

So when are we going?

The Wednesday before.

I would have preferred Thursday. Back-to-school season is always hectic.

That’s why I didn’t ask. If it were up to you, we’d never leave.

All right, I’ll make it work.

I also had lunch with Robbie.

Robert Bryan was Wills’s in-house legal counsel. He was currently helping Sarah set up a charitable foundation dedicated to her father’s memory. The terms and conditions – legal framework, statutes, etc. – had already been determined, but they still needed to decide on the nature and size of the initial donation.

And? asked Walker, suddenly more interested.

He’s recommending we bring in stocks instead of cash—

To set off capital gains – I told you he would. Did you agree on an amount?

I wanted to talk to you about it first. If we value the company at five hundred million—

Five hundred? That’s lowballing it. With a good broker, we could get seven hundred for it.

Sarah resumed.

Between your shares and mine, we own seventy percent of the stock. I propose we donate fifteen percent of it. That way we keep the majority and guarantee the foundation three million dollars in annual dividends.

A bit more actually. We can send a lot of kids to France with that kind of money.

You’re forgetting the other programs.

I’m just kidding.

Does that mean you agree? asked Sarah with a hint of anxiety in her voice.

Well, they’re your stocks, really.

Don’t be silly. What do you think of the amount?

Fifteen percent? That’s fine with me. We might want to spread the transfer over a few years for tax purposes. Your father would roll over in his grave if you gave one extra dollar to the IRS!

Robbie also recommended we name three trustees.

You…

Bill Watford…

In a previous life, Watford had run IBM’s software division. Now that he was retired, he devoted his time to various charities. The excellent reputation he had acquired among businesses and public officials alike made him an ideal choice for independent trustee.

And your mother, I guess…

Sarah’s face clouded over. Walker had touched on a sore point.

You know she couldn’t. She’s lost her ability to focus and she’s not good with numbers anymore.

Not that she ever was, thought Walker.

Then who? he asked.

I was assuming you.

Me? But I’m already swamped with work!

You could find the time. It would take no more than one day a month.

That’s huge!

You could offload some of your stuff onto Jimenez.

He’s struggling to manage his own as it is.

If you won’t do it for me, do it for Raymond. For my Mom. For Wills.

If charitable foundations were good for business, every company would have one, replied Walker sarcastically.

And you and I could work side by side. You’re always complaining that we don’t spend enough time together.

That’s not how I want to spend my time with you.

Walker, I’m begging you.

I’ll think about it.

Sarah rose and kissed her husband tenderly on the forehead.

Dinner’s ready, she said.

I’ll call the kids.

They drifted in one at a time.

Jess, their second child, was sixteen. She’d been going through a goth phase ever since she discovered The Cure. Sarah was valiantly trying to limit the damage to scarecrow outfits and a Robert Smith haircut. Jess was cruising in school. She had spent the previous summer digging wells in Nicaragua and had returned fluent in Spanish and brimming with indignation at the cruelty of unfair trade practices.

Andy, the eldest, was eighteen. He and his father shared an uncanny resemblance and a passion for cinema. He was an exceptionally reasonable boy: he didn’t drink, worked hard at school, aimed to attend his parents’ alma mater, and had been dating the same girl for two years – all abnormalities that Sarah found most worrisome.

Joey, the youngest, was the family mascot. Though Andy and Jess made fun of his defective grammar and ineptness at basketball, they indulged his every whim. Joey enjoyed the carefree life of an elementary school student; middle school, his mother somberly predicted, would be a whole new ballgame.

They all took a seat in their designated chairs. Sarah related her lunch with Robbie and asked her children what they thought should be the foundation’s top priorities. Joey opened the debate.

Sending food to Africa.

His beloved Ms. Nelson had shown her class a movie about the Darfur famine. The native children’s swollen bellies and blank stares had made a profound impression on Joey.

No need to go that far to find people dying of hunger, said his sister dismissively.

Jess is right, chimed in Sarah. In the winter, the food shelter downtown is overcrowded.

If we want to help the Africans, we should start by sending them vaccines against malaria, said Andy.

And against the sleeping disease, added Joey. The one you get from flies.

Trypanosomiasis, said Walker. I don’t think there’s a vaccine for that one yet.

So initially, you’d rather send resources abroad, said Sarah, attempting to refocus the conversation.

Not necessarily, answered Andy. We could also set up scholarships for kids who can’t pay for college.

Because people abroad don’t have the right to go to school? said Jess with a sneer.

Of course they do, but universities are usually free over there, while here, a bachelor’s degree from a good college can add up to at least one hundred thousand dollars.

Hmm, it’s actually closer to twice that much, corrected Walker.

You can feed an entire African village for a year with that amount, said Sarah.

Andy shrugged.

You asked for my opinion, Mom, I’m giving it to you. My friends are going to have to work during college, when I’ll be going to the movies. I don’t think that’s fair.

Ha, ha! So now we know what you plan to do instead of studying, said Jess ironically.

Hey, how about telling us some of your own ideas instead of badmouthing everyone else’s? interrupted Sarah.

Me? I’m not disagreeing. We should vaccinate, provide food, build shelters…

And little houses for puppies, added Joey.

That’s all well and good, said Sarah, but the Foundation won’t have an unlimited budget.

How much? asked Jess.

It will own fifteen percent of Wills’s capital. That should allow it to donate a few millions a year.

Only fifteen percent? said Jess. Why not one hundred?

Walker, who had remained on the sidelines during most of the conversation, deemed it necessary to intervene.

First, because we don’t have control over the entire capital. Second, because your mother and I aren’t ready to hand it over. And finally, because a company needs shareholders, whether you like it or not.

Still, said Jess, we could tighten our belts a little.

I’ll remember that when we discuss your allowance next year, retorted Sarah.

It was time to close the debate. Walker proposed a game of foosball. Joey and Sarah teamed up to crush him.

Chapter 2

Walker hated his life.

Time eluded him. Between his family and the company, he didn’t have a minute to himself.

It hadn’t always been that way. During his early years at Wills, he had known the euphoria of engineering expansion. He hired young people, kept the customers satisfied and his suppliers busy; in short, he was creating wealth when Wall Street bankers merely shuffled cash around. He felt