Missing Man
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wamu885Prologue
November 13, 2010, Gulf Breeze, Florida
Rain splattered against the windshield of her silver-gray BMW as
Sonya Dobbs pulled up to a security gate blocking the street. It wasn’t
much of a gate, at least by Florida standards, just a long, rolling fence
stretching across a road. She punched a code into the gate’s keypad.
After two unsuccessful tries, she used her cell phone to call her boss,
David McGee, who opened the gate from inside his house. It slid back
and Sonya drove through, a laptop resting on the passenger seat.
Sonya’s Saturday night had started very differently. She had
planned to spend it sorting through photographs. Sonya worked as
Dave’s paralegal at a large law firm called Beggs & Lane located in
Pensacola, a city at the western end of Florida’s Panhandle, the nar-
row, two-hundred-mile-long coastal strip tucked between the Gulf of
Mexico and the states of Alabama and Georgia. Sonya wanted to
carve out a second career as a photographer, and she had been on a
chase boat the previous day in Pensacola Bay, snapping pictures of a
new oceangoing tugboat, christened Freedom, as it went through test
maneuvers. The photos showed the big black and gray tug slicing
4 Missing Man
through the foamy water under a blue sky fi lled with white, puff y
clouds. A maker of some of the boat’s parts had ordered pictures, and
Sonya was happily spending her Saturday evening playing with dif-
ferent ways to crop the images.
Then the phone rang, and she heard a familiar voice on the other
end of the line. Over the past three years, she had spoken to Ira Silver-
man hundreds of times, if she had to guess. Most days, the retired
television newsman phoned Dave at least once. Their conversations
were always about a mutual friend, Robert Levinson, a former agent
with the Federal Bureau of Investigation turned private investigator.
Sonya had never met him, though she felt as if she had.
Bob disappeared in 2007 while on a trip to Iran. Dave and Ira,
who had both known Bob for years, were trying to help his desperate
family fi nd him. Months after the investigator went missing, Dave
convinced Bob’s wife, Christine, to ship his work fi les to Beggs &
Lane. Sonya had read through them and organized the reports. She
was a natural snoop, at ease with computers. Before long, she had
tracked down Bob’s email accounts and figured out the passwords.
As she walked through the record of his life, she learned a secret that
Dave, Ira, and Chris already knew: the explanation that U.S. govern-
ment officials were giving out publicly to explain Bob’s reason for
visiting Iran wasn’t true, at least not the part that really mattered.
Since the investigator’s disappearance, there had been reported
sightings of him in Tehran’s Evin Prison, the notorious jail where
political dissidents are tortured or killed. Some tipsters had come for-
ward to claim that the Revolutionary Guards, the elite military force
aligned with Iran’s Islamic religious leaders, were holding him at a
secret detention center. His family had made public pleas for infor-
mation about him, and the FBI had assigned agents to the search. But
the hunt for the missing man had gone nowhere.
Ira’s call was about an email he had gotten earlier that Saturday
containing a message that read like a ransom note. He had received
similar emails before and had passed them on to the FBI. But this one
wasn’t like the others. This email had a fi le attached to it. Ira told
Prologue 5
Sonya he couldn’t figure out how to open the attachment and was
forwarding it to her to see if she could. The email read:
This is a serious message
Until this time we have prepared a good situation for Bob and
he is in good health. we announce for the last ultimatum that his
life is based on and related to you
You should pay 3000000$ (in cash) and release our friends: Salem
Mohamad Ahmad Ghasem, Ahmad Ali Alarzagh, Ebrahim Ali
Ahmad.
We are waiting for your positive answer without any precondi-
tions. We would announce our way to receive the money.
Sonya clicked on the email’s attachment, but nothing happened.
She didn’t recognize the file’s extension, the three-letter code that tells
a computer which program is needed to open a fi le. She suspected
the extension—.flv— signified it was a video fi le, and she hunted
around on the Internet for information about a recommended player.
Finding one, she downloaded the software and clicked again on the
attachment. This time, the fi le launched and a man’s gaunt face ap-
peared, seemingly staring out at her. He had closely shorn gray hair,
a moustache, and sunken cheeks covered by stubble. He started
speaking in a deep, raspy voice. Strange music played in the back-
ground, rhythmic instruments accompanied by a singer’s droning
call. After a few seconds, the camera pulled back and Sonya could see
that the man was sitting in front of a gray stone wall in what ap-
peared to be a stark prison cell. The polo shirt he wore looked thread-
bare and hung on his frame as though it was several sizes too big for
him. Part of the shirt’s right sleeve was gone. There was nothing im-
mediately threatening about the video. Masked jihadists weren’t
standing over the man brandishing guns or swords, and there wasn’t
a black political banner hanging behind him. Still, the video was dis-
quieting. The man’s arms didn’t move as he spoke, suggesting that his
hands, which couldn’t be seen in the video, might be lying manacled
6 Missing Man
in his lap. He struggled to stay calm and to keep his words measured.
Occasionally, his voice came close to breaking and he would briefly
close his eyes, pause, or gesture by turning his head. He said:
For my beau— my beautiful, my loving, my loyal wife, Christine . . .
and my children . . . and my grandson . . . and also for the United States
government . . . I have been held here for three and a half years . . . I am not
in very good health . . . I am running . . . very quickly out of diabetes
medicine . . . I have been treated . . . well . . . but I need the help of the
United States government to answer the requests of the group that has held
me for three and a half years . . . And please help me . . . get home . . .
Thirty-three years of ser vice to the United States deserves something . . .
Please help me.
Dave McGee opened his front door and ushered Sonya out of the
rain. They went into the kitchen, where the lawyer’s wife, Joyce, was
waiting. Sonya put her laptop on the table, opened it, and launched
the video. Dave wasn’t positive that Bob was the man on the tape.
The last time he had seen the former FBI agent, he resembled a big,
overweight teddy bear with a mop of hair. The man on the tape was
so thin that the skin on his throat sagged. Dave realized that the only
way to know for sure was to call Christine. Sonya dialed her number,
and when Chris answered, she put her cell phone next to the com-
puter and clicked on the video. A few moments passed.
“That’s Bob’s voice,” Chris said. “That’s Bob.”