An Absence of Light (45 page)

“Should they?”

“I don’t know,” Burtell said. “But I do know they shouldn’t have blackmailed him. They miscalculated.”

“Well, the guy sure had a sweet tooth for black ass, I’ll say that. I saw those damn photographs.”

Burtell flagged this remark. Kalatis’s children ate each other, every one of them a scorpion. Sheck obviously had known about the spying efforts against Tisler, may even have been a part of it. Burtell wondered what kind of paranoia these people lived with. Were they ever free of the suspicion that they themselves might be the next ones to be fed upon? It took only a word from Kalatis to change them from victor to victim. In the long run, that had to weigh heavily on the nerves.

“He shot himself twenty-four hours after they showed him the pictures,” Burtell said pointedly.

Sheck shrugged, smiled a little, and shook his head. The gesture infuriated Burtell, and he took a drink of the beer to help him hold his tongue.

“What did you call me for?” Burtell asked.

Sheck had sat back on the padded cushion of the cabin banquette, his back against a porthole, one leg drawn up so that he was resting one arm on his bent knee, a bare foot on the cushion. He was holding his beer bottle by its neck between the first two fingers of the hand resting on his knee, studying Burtell with a cocked head as though he was trying to see a flaw in Burtell’s character. He seemed to be wanting to say something but not yet altogether sure it was the right thing to do.

“I don’t know what your whole story is, Burtell,” Sheck said. He wasn’t smiling now. He seemed to be working up to some kind of confrontation with the leisurely swagger of a bully.

Burtell’s heart raced and a hot, moist sensation bathed him in an instant He deliberately did not take a drink of beer at this moment Sheck knew to watch for that little trick. Burtell simply looked at him. He did not swallow even though he felt the saliva gathering rapidly at the back of his throat. He did not speak. He wasn’t going to let Sheck draw him out. If Sheck had something on his mind, he was going to have to come out with it Burtell had no intention of making anything easier for Bruce Sheck.

“Are you satisfied with the money you’re getting out of this operation?” Sheck asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“Are you?”

“Why do you ask?”

Sheck grinned, but it was not a completely natural grin. Tension and risk lay behind it, a quivering at the corner of his upper lip that he could not control. The man was showing some stress, which instantly caused Burtell more concern than anything that had happened up to that moment.

Sheck’s grin faded, and he dropped his foot to the deck, placed his forearms on the table, and leaned slightly toward Burtell. The grin disappeared completely, replaced with a grim, downward pull of the sides of his mouth.

“I think something’s about to happen with this operation,” he said. “I think my ass is in danger, and I think yours is too.” He paused to see how Burtell was going to react to such a revelation. “The only reason I’m having this conversation is because I think Kalatis is getting ready for a big change in the way he operates, and I think he’s getting ready to cut me loose. And not just me. He’s getting ready to wipe out a hell of a lot of his past, start a new era.”

Sheck stared at Burtell and Burtell could smell the mixture of beer and Wild Turkey with which Sheck apparently had been fortifying his nerves all night, long before Burtell’s arrival.

“The way this is set up, Burtell, is ingenious,” Sheck began. “It’s a system in which knowledge flows only one way from a thousand origins through a nervous system that grows increasingly less complex as it reaches the top. Less complex, that’s the brilliant part of it If Valerie Heath and all the others like her were cut off, the people who bring her information would not know what to do. The woman who has a first name and an initial, who gives them money for photocopies, would simply never call them again. They wouldn’t know how to get in touch with her. The money would dry up. The whole thing would be over for them. One day they have a contact, one day they don’t It’s over, gone forever.”

Sheck raised one hand and imitated a bubble bursting.

“And then there’s me. If something happened to me then the Valerie Heaths are left without a thought in their stupid little heads. It’s over. They don’t even know enough to ask a question. Who are they gonna ask? One day they have a contact, one day they don’t If nobody calls them again, shit, that part of their life is over. Forever.”

Sheck stopped, picked up the Wild Turkey bottle and took a nip from it. Burtell forced himself to be patient Sheck was being frustratingly repetitious. Burtell reminded himself that he owed a lot to Sheck’s tenacious curiosity. It was Sheck who had discovered Kalatis’s scheme to end all schemes, an elaborate plan to reduce a multiplicity of intrigues to one simple equation and, ultimately, to one man. One wealthy man. Burtell owed him, even to the point of indulging his endless reliving of Kalatis’s betrayal, a betrayal that Sheck could do nothing about.

Wiping his mouth, Sheck resumed speaking, his voice a husky, raspy sound that died in the dead air of the cabin almost as soon as it left his throat.

“The point is, all Kalatis has to do is eliminate four or five people—I don’t know exactly how many, but just a few—and that whole, big, complex system that involves several hundred people is shut down”—he snapped his fingers—”just like that. Gone. And you couldn’t piece it together again for love or money. Very clean. You sure as hell couldn’t trace it to Kalatis.

“This system here in Houston has been running nearly four years now. Kalatis and Faeber have more shit in their computers about key people in this city, in this state, than the goddamn FBI and CIA combined. They know where all the money is. They know where all the scandal is. They know where the future is. They’ve gotten to this point by milking this big nervous system of theirs.”

Though Sheck paused, letting his sometimes slightly unfocused eyes rest lazily on Burtell, Burtell said nothing. Sheck had called the meeting, and the whiskey and beer were lubricating a normally reticent personality. The best thing Burtell could do was to let the chemistry take its course.

“I’ll tell you what I’ve learned. Burtell.” Sheck continued, as though he had made a difficult thought transition through the vapor of alcohol. “I’ve learned that an operation has a certain life span. Kalatis knows this… like God. The son of a bitch sees the beginning and the end, and he controls both of them. But if you’re a guy like me, just a peon in this deal, if you keep your eyes and ears open, learn to read the signs, you start to notice certain little shifts and changes, signals that some kind of shit’s about to happen. You get to where you can predict the rhythm of the seasons, so to speak. Get to know when there’s going to be rain, or frost, or when the sap is rising in the trees.”

Sheck finished his beer and very carefully set the empty bottle to one side of the table, out of his way. He leaned closer to Burtell, resting his forearms on the table, and his raspy voice grew softer still.

“Well, let me tell you, Dean Burtell, the sap is rising. Things are going to heat up. This season has just about run its course.”

He stopped. Outside a lanyard slapped with a hollow ping against an aluminum mast on one of the sailboats, and a dock creaked as the bay waters shifted on the tides in the marina.

“Give me something I can believe, Sheck,” Burtell said after a pause. “I can’t make any judgments about your feelings.”

Sheck kept his eyes on Burtell and nodded slowly.

“I don’t fly for Kalatis as much now as I used to,” he said, easing back from Burtell, “but it’s still pretty damn regular. So I know his two other pilots pretty well. Kalatis, he loves compartmentalization. Believes it’s the vitamin C of intelligence work… keeps away infections, system screwups. So we’re not supposed to talk to each other. But I’ve been with that greasy Greek longer than anybody, and when these guys came on board they discovered that working for him was so goddamned weird they’d sneak around and feel me out about things. This is happening, that’s happening, they’d say. What do I think that means? I’d shoot straight with them. Give them some pointers about working close with the guy because they were right there at ‘headquarters.’ Flying was all they did. I was still in operations, not so close to the Greek on a daily basis. I couldn’t see who was coming and going. But that’s all they could see, who was coming and going, but they didn’t know anything about what was happening in the background, in operations. So between us pilots—there’s a comradery with pilots, people don’t understand that—we can pretty well follow the fortunes of Kalatis’s business. I mean, in a ‘big picture’ sort of way.”

Sheck stopped, paused as he straightened his back, drew his neck in, and belched, not a croaking belch from his gut, but a loud, wind-rushing belch of hops and malt that hissed up through his throat He shook his head like he was clearing it from a hard blow.

“Okay,” he said, ready to go on. “For over two years now, two and a half years, Kalatis has had an export operation in Colombia called Hermes Exports—totally separate operationwise from what I’ve been doing… another compartment altogether—shipping flowers and coffee into the U.S. Colombia’s the second biggest flower importer to the U.S. after Holland. And coffee, you know about coffee. But it’s the flower business that’s the heart of the Hermes story. It’s a first-class operation, and the flower importers here love their products because they’re all packed in a Styrofoam-like insulation. The shipments arrive in pristine condition. This insulation is made in a Strasser-owned chemical plant in Bogotá. The chemicals for the plant are shipped to Colombia from another Strasser-owned company called Hormann Plastics here in Houston. Now, to manufacture plastics in any volume—and Hormann’s operation is huge—you gotta have access to big quantities of sulfuric acid and acetic anhydride. Both are used to make cellulose acetate, stuff you got to have if you’re gonna make plastics and foam insulation.

“But”—Sheck raised a muscular forearm and held up his index finger—”as you well know… sulfuric acid is also used in processing cocaine… and acetic anhydride is used in processing heroin.”

He grinned and shook his head admiringly. Even as upset as he was, even as fearful of his own life as he claimed to be, he had to appreciate the genius of what he was about to describe.

“Not only are Kalatis and his buddy Strasser shipping themselves the chemicals to process cocaine and heroin—and these chemicals are on the DEA’s and Customs’ hot list, so they gotta be paying off some pretty big boys because the feds watch that shit with a microscope. Not only are they doing that, but they have—or their chemists have—developed a shit-sure method of ‘reconstituting’ cocaine. Those damn flowers are packed in form-pressed cocaine ‘insulation’ which has been douched in some kind of hydrofluorocarbon or some such shit to cover the smell so the drug dogs can’t pick it up. They’ve been shipping flowers packed in cocaine for nearly three years and no damn Customs hound has ever blinked. Not once. No, shit no.”

Sheck suppressed another belch, and a sour expression crossed his face. “That ballsy Greek has used this very successful system, which has produced a hell of a cash flow, to entice Houston and Texas investors to their even bigger—their global—drug business. They make their pitch to legitimate businessmen who are so shit-faced greedy they can’t stand seeing their money get less than a pirate’s ransom in interest. These men have been giving their money—their cash—to Kalatis who has promptly turned around and tripled it for them. It’s like a come-along thing, a Ponzi scheme… they win every time… they start trusting him… they start putting in bigger and bigger amounts. The money’s so big now that they’re able to buy commodity volumes of cocaine and heroin… all over the world. They’re moving merchant ship loads of stuff… out of Afghanistan, out of the Golden Triangle, out of Peru… everywhere.”

The combination of whiskey and beer was taking its toll on Sheck, but even in his increasing stupor he had just filled in a gap in Burtell’s puzzle. Burtell knew the huge sums of money had built to the point that Kalatis had thought it was time to effect his final plan, the grand finale, but he just wasn’t sure that the cash flow was all coming from information buyers. Now he knew it wasn’t, and though he had suspected drugs all along, he had never been able to prove it or to draw it out of Sheck until now. Sheck had given him the beginning and the end—and now the middle, the part that was the driving force behind Kalatis’s one-man stratagem for achieving financial Nirvana.

Sheck started to reach for the Wild Turkey again. But his hand had just gotten on the neck of the bottle when he froze. He cut his eyes at Burtell. He sniffed a little. Then he sniffed again, deeply, loudly. His face blanched.

“What is that shit… ?”

Remberto and Murray both were looking through their powerful binoculars into the lighted cabin windows when the explosion turned the air into a liquid mist of fire that incinerated the oxygen and everything else within a one-hundred-foot globe, the epicenter of which was the boat they had been watching.

Everyone in the hotel room yelled reflexively. Remberto and Murray recovered instantly, alternately lowering and raising their binoculars, unable to see all they wanted to see with or without them.

Boyd’s tripod camera began ratcheting frames as he quickly pulled out another kind of camera and went to work.

Cheryl flung off her headphones and stared out of the darkened hotel room at the billowing plume of orange light illuminating the silence and the astonishment on her face.

She still could hear him sniffing. What is that shit… she heard him say.

Graver sat at his desk holding the telephone in stunned silence as Arnette explained what had happened. Paula and Neuman watched him from the sofa and one of the armchairs. They had cleaned up in the kitchen and had moved to the living room where they were continuing their discussion of what course they should follow next When the telephone rang Graver had expected it to be Arnette, but he hadn’t expected to hear what she had to say.