An Absence of Light (20 page)

Eighteen months later he received a telephone call from her saying she was in town, that she had bought a home and why didn’t he come by to see her. When he did, he discovered her three-house compound and learned that she had retired only from the federal government, not from the business. She already had been in Houston six months and had all the work she could manage, solely by word of mouth, free-lancing special operations for practically every agency from whom she used to draw a salary.

The age of the personal computer had brought about a sea change in the private investigation and intelligence business. Now anyone who could afford a modem could enter the voyeuristic world of “databanking” where a subterranean network of information resellers, known as superbureaus, had assembled in a limitless number of categories every fact imaginable about most American citizens. Every time an individual filled out an information form, whether he was registering for a free prize at his local grocery or answering a “confidential” medical record form at his doctor’s office, he was providing data that in all likelihood eventually would be purchased by an information reseller. Bank records, medical records, insurance records, personal data, credit records, everything was fair game in the information reselling business where practically nothing was protected by law. And virtually everyone who collected information—including doctors, bankers, and creditors—would eventually sell it The fact was, in the United States today, the individual had no way of controlling information about himself. For a price, everyone’s privacy was for sale.

This ongoing boom in information had been a boon to the burgeoning private investigation business, so much so that anybody and everybody was doing it Now anybody could do a skip trace, search for a missing person, check the background of a job applicant, check criminal history records, track down an old girlfriend, check out a competitor’s financial status and credit standing, locate anyone’s address, telephone number, bank account, and medical records. The data was so easy to obtain that it was like picking it up off the sidewalk.

A surprising number of these agencies had even turned their investigation businesses into huge corporate entities like Kroll and Associates of New York (with branches all over the world), Investigations Group Inc., of Washington, and Business Risk International based in Nashville, whose annual gross incomes were in the tens of millions. These high profile agencies often specialized in money chasing for corporations and even for foreign governments. They provided credit assessments of corporate acquisition targets, conducted forensic accounting studies, collected environmental research, and investigated computer crimes, all logical criminal extensions of a modern, technological age.

Heraclitus, and a good number of wise and observant men after him, had remarked on the constancy and inevitability of change. It was now axiomatic, and anyone who ignored the importance of evolution did so at their own peril. But as the world entered the closing years of the twentieth century, few of those sages could have imagined the neck-snapping speed at which change would one day occur. Only human nature, with its abundant and ineluctable follies, continued to defy the philosopher’s wisdom.

There was one other way in which all investigative and intelligence work had changed during the past several decades. Now that the Computer Age suddenly had given private investigation the means to be enormously profitable, the budgets of literally hundreds of agencies—and corporations who had their own competitor intelligence divisions—outstripped those of many budget-stressed law enforcement agencies. Because of this, the private sector could offer much larger salaries to experienced officers and agents, and as a result private investigative and intelligence agencies were aswarm with ex-police officers, ex-DEA agents, ex-FBI agents, ex-CIA officers, and personnel from practically every agency in the government’s vast intelligence community.

Some private agencies had become so specialized in certain fields of data collection and analysis that law enforcement agencies at every level—all the way up to the CIA—were utilizing these specialized information resellers and private agencies whenever those entities had an edge on them in any given arena of activity. They didn’t like having to do it, and they didn’t publicize it But they did it.

Now, more than at any other time in world history, “private” information was in danger of becoming only a nominal concept The information business, legal and illegal, governmental and private, commercial and political, personal and public, legitimate and underground, was in an era of explosive growth. And, as in all boom-time businesses, abuse was rampant Unfortunately, the American public didn’t have a clue about what was happening to it.

But there were a few independent—private—intelligence operations like Arnette Kepner’s whose work was nothing akin to the highly visible corporate swashbucklers like Kroll. Her experience was in the world of international intelligence, not merely investigation, and in her profession a high profile was the kiss of death and anonymity was the mark of a right-thinking operation. She did not work for businesses or governments, but for other intelligence agencies, and her computers, which occupied most of the rooms in one of her adjacent houses, were packed fat with rarified data about intelligence networks and thousands of individual agents, officers, and operatives which the traditional private and corporate investigative agencies knew nothing about.

Arnette stared at him through the thin haze created by the smoldering joss stick, her errant gray hair forming a lively aura around her face.

“Okay,” she said. She leaned forward and took a cigarette from an ocher pack of a foreign brand sitting on the coffee table in front of her. She lit it and blew the smoke up into the midday dusk to mingle with the incense. Sitting back, she folded one arm across her waist and rested the wrist of the hand holding the cigarette on her knee. “What do you want?”

“A log of their movements and photographs of everyone they talk to. I want to be briefed daily.”

“This kind of thing can be a long haul, Marcus. Two weeks is nothing.”

Graver nodded. “Yeah, I know. But I don’t have much of a choice here.”

She looked at him seriously. “Okay, let’s see what comes up. What’s his address?”

Graver told her and gave her Ginette’s office address as well. She nodded thoughtfully but didn’t write down anything.

“Tomorrow Dean starts two weeks of vacation,” Graver said. “I think his wife will have to work during the first week, but the second week they’re off together.”

“I’ll put someone out there right now,” she said, “something to hold it until I can get a team together later on in the evening. You have any reason to think he’ll bolt?”

“No. I think it’s too soon for that kind of panic. He’ll try to sweat it out. He knows Westrate—everyone—wants to see this thing put to bed. He’ll wait to see if it is.”

“Okay, well, by tonight I’ll have this together anyway.” She pulled on her cigarette and then studied him, a sober expression on her face. “I know this is eating you alive,” she said. “I’m so sorry it’s happening.”

To his surprise, Graver was suddenly relieved she had just come right out with it He felt like he was wrapped in a straitjacket, and he alternately panicked and despaired at his condition.

He shook his head. “It’ll soak in, I’m sure,” he said. “But right now it doesn’t seem very real… I just don’t understand it… why in the hell he’s in this situation. It’s absolutely… senseless.”

Arnette nodded. “It’s going to take a lot of guts to do this, baby. It’ll be hard on you. It’s going to tear you apart You’ve got to know that.”

He didn’t respond immediately. “I just want to know why he’s doing it,” he said.

“And you think you’ll ‘understand’ it then? You don’t really believe it’ll be that simple, do you?”

Graver shrugged. He didn’t even know if what he had just said was that simple. If he had thought about it for ten minutes he might have said something else. If he had this same conversation half an hour from now, he wasn’t sure it would be anything like it was now. Maybe if there was one thing he did know it was that nothing that had happened to him in the last year was “that simple,” least of all what was happening to him now.

“You know,” Arnette said, a kind of smile softening her face, “I’ve been in this business so long… Most of the people in this work, when you get to know them well enough, have an element of the unchaste about them, at some level or other. Even the bureaucrats who don’t actually get their hands dirty in the real blood and earth of the business.” She narrowed her eyes in thought “It has something to do with secrets, it seems, with
dealing
in secrets. You know, it’s like trafficking in the power of the Holy Ghost It’s not something a person ought to do. But a person has proclivities… in that direction, I mean toward ‘uncleanliness,’ as the old Hebrews used to say. A person has proclivities, so he gravitates to a business that has the appearance of respectability, but which allows him all manner of vicarious indulgences… in the name of something higher, something cleaner. Very common men and women get into this work. It’s almost a stereotype of the profession. The ordinary, workaday fellow, the ‘invisible’ plodder who years later, well into his retirement, is revealed to have been a longtime ‘famous spy.’ “She stopped. “But if you really dissect him, psychologically I mean, this banal old man, he is anything but benign. His perversity is only more cleverly dissembled. He’s uncanny, disguising his moral petulance as a virtue.”

She smoked a moment more and Graver waited, knowing all of this was prologue, watching her, suddenly and strangely aware of the extreme nature of this profession and how quickly logical steps could take you, one at a time, to such outrageous places.

“Except you, Marcus,” she continued. “I’ve known you a good while now, longer than many. But I’ve never sensed any perversity in you at all. And I can tell you, dear, I look for it. Oh, I look for it in everyone I have anything to do with.”

Her smile was very faint now, almost not there at all. Outside, the world seemed to be populated only by birds.

“It could be,” he said, “that you’ve never met anyone who was so adept at guile.”

It was a remark both cynical and self-condemning, one that Graver himself almost had come to believe. It was the kind of extreme thinking one came to when one began searching inside one’s self for the reasons for other people’s actions. Maybe it didn’t make sense, but for some people it was instinctive, and it took an equally extreme act of will not to believe that the search was justified.

Arnette studied him, the smoke coiling from the cigarette beside her gypsy face, so exotic in saffron, in the twilight.

“Well, it could be,” she drawled thoughtfully, her voice barely audible. Then stronger, her tone changing: “Anyway, this looks like a rough one, baby. I hope you’re ready for it.”

On the way back to the office Graver stopped at a small steak house that catered to businessmen, a place that had sat very still and very quiet while the last two decades had passed it by. It was a sunless retreat with heavy wood furnishings that smelled of liquor and cigarettes and cigars, and whose waitresses dressed in little Heidi uniforms with white ruffled scoop necks and push-up bras. The steaks sizzled in their own grease; there were only three kinds of salad dressings, none of them low cal; and the only kind of sweetener on the table was sugar. Everything was unhealthy and delicious.

He ate alone at a corner table and reviewed his conversation with Arnette. He remembered the look on her face when he told her he wanted her to put Dean and Ginette Burtell under surveillance. For just a flicker of an instant she had looked as if she doubted
his
loyalties, rather than Burtell’s. What in the hell was he doing putting a tail on Burtell? That’s the way it was with everyone, Dean Burtell was beyond reproach, his integrity was a given, so solid you just didn’t bother to give it any thought. He was the kind of guy you would want standing beside you if one day the world suddenly turned nasty on you and all the rules changed and everything seemed stacked against you through no fault of your own. You’d want Dean there because you knew there would be no recriminations, an abundance of understanding, and an assurance that he would see you through to the end. Graver knew that was the way people felt about him. That was the way he felt about him too.

Graver’s chopped steak arrived swimming in its own juices and with a side of fries that were long, thin, limp, and golden brown. As he ate, he tried to force his thoughts out in front of events. He really didn’t have a lot of time to mull over his options. He knew that And he also knew he didn’t have much room to maneuver in a conventional sense. By the time he polished off the last bite of steak he had made some major decisions. There were certain points of reference he had to establish. There had to be one or two things he could rely on unequivocally.

It was nearly one-thirty when he got back to the office. He stopped at Lara’s door and stuck his head in.

“Have you got a minute?”

“Sure,” she said. Grabbing a steno pad and pencil, she followed him into his office. He closed the door behind them, and she went over and stood in front of his desk. He noticed she had freshened up after lunch, brushed through her hair, put on fresh lipstick, tucked and pulled at her suit until it looked as crisp and fresh as it had when she came in that morning.

“Sit down,” he said, and he walked around her and sat in one of the other chairs opposite her in front of his desk. She held her steno pad and pencil in her scarlet-nailed Fingers, resting on her lap. Her expression was anticipatory, though not anxious. She already had sensed this was not going to be a routine conversation.

“Lara, I need your help with something that’s… out of the ordinary,” Graver said.

Her expression did not change, but a slight vertical shadow, the beginning of a puzzled frown, appeared between her dark eyebrows.