An Absence of Light (55 page)

“But Kalatis was careful. Besom and Tisler never knew about anything except their own little areas of operation. They never knew about Sheck’s network, for instance, or about his back-door connection to Kalatis. They never had a sense of the size of the organization.

“Dean was reasonably aggressive, though,” she added. “He let Kalatis know that he was ambitious and wanted to be more active, more involved. He presented ideas. Proposed operations that could expand their data collection into other intelligence agencies. Geis was feeding Dean information to help build his credibility with Kalatis, helping him present some enticing projects, hoping Kalatis would come to rely on him and eventually pull Dean deeper into the organization.”

“What Dean didn’t know, however,*’ Arnette put in again, “was that Kalatis wasn’t taking on any new ideas. Whatever Geis suspected Kalatis of doing, whatever his sting was, it was on its last passage. If Dean had come along a year earlier, two years earlier, Kalatis would have found a place for him. But he wasn’t about to bring in any more clever people this late in his game. He was already shutting down. Dean didn’t have a chance.”

“But,” Paula said, “Kalatis did put him in touch with Sheck. That’s how Sheck got into the Probst operation.”

“That’s most of it, the heart of the story,” Arnette said. “Dean includes an encyclopedia of details about these operations, some of which are going to be useful in other ways. He was thoroughly familiar with Sheck’s network of information buyers and adds another perspective to Sheck’s own account of what he was doing.”

“Let’s go back to the sting,” Graver said. “What’s the story on that?”

“It’s intriguing, but not very informative,” Arnette continued. “Sheck, keeping his fingers in the works via his pilot buddies, thinks Kalatis and Strasser are getting ready to offer one last giant buy to their investors. They’ll all be asked to come up with more money than ever before while being promised, of course, equally greater profits. But Sheck predicts Kalatis and Strasser are going to walk away with it—just vanish with the millions.”

“Then he agrees with Geis.”

“Apparently so. He also points out that by the time this happens, Kalatis and Strasser will have dismantled enough of their operation here that they’ll be untraceable. And I’ll have to say, as old intelligence hands they know how to cover a trail. They can probably pull it off.”

“And Dean reported all this to Geis?”

“He did.”

“Okay, then. What about Geis?”

“That’s the big disappointment,” Paula said. “Dean gives details of how he contacts Geis and where they met, how Geis contacts him. All of it is standard operations procedure. We have telephone numbers. We have dead drop locations. We have serial contact outlines. Dean was giving us everything. But, unfortunately, Geis also met Dean at the marina a number of times. We have the contact procedures that they followed when they wanted that to happen. It would have been a perfect opportunity to set the guy up. Would have been, but not now.”

“Geis’s hair must have stood on end when he saw the news of the explosion,” Arnette put in. “None of the contact information Dean gave us is any good now. In fact, I doubt if we’ll ever hear of Mr. Geis again. For all practical purposes, when Kalatis killed Dean, he killed Geis too.”

Graver was silent a moment. He had to admit it did sound good. If he was condemning Burtell he might be condemning the wrong man. Still, he was angry. How could Burtell have so readily assigned his loyalty to Geis, a man he had never met, while at the same time withholding his faith in Graver with whom he had been close for so many years? It didn’t make much sense to Graver, and he could not deny that it hurt more than a little to discover Dean’s distrust. It would almost be easier to believe that Burtell had been dirty than to admit that when so much had been at stake—even, ultimately, his life—Burtell had not trusted Graver enough to overcome his suspicion. If that was, in fact, what it was that had caused Dean to keep his “undercover assignment” to himself.

But in all honesty, Graver couldn’t blame Dean. Hadn’t Graver himself done the same thing? When he first realized that the CID had a leak, and suspicion turned in Burtell’s direction, hadn’t Graver investigated him with a cold disregard for their close personal relationship? Graver had trained him, and both men had been more loyal to their training—and to the system that had taught them—than to each other. Graver always had believed that his quiet, invisible work was his personal contribution to a reasonable society’s struggle to maintain its balance against the innumerable and ever-present tyrannies of social chaos. He didn’t have a missionary zeal about it, but he never doubted he was doing what was right and necessary.

Now, he felt as if he had tricked himself. He remembered a quote from Aeschylus which had appeared at the beginning of a chapter on totalitarianism in a book he had used years before in a series of courses he had taken at Georgetown University. “For somehow, this is tyranny’s disease, to trust no friend.”

At the time, the quote had lodged in his mind as a reminder of the consequences of the evils he had sworn to engage. It was an acrid and disconcerting irony, then, to find that “tyranny’s disease” was alive and well among the men who had dedicated themselves to opposing tyranny itself. The disease had invaded the physician, despite his skills and good intentions, despite his best efforts.

“This is too neat,” he heard himself say. He swallowed hard to dislodge the lump in his throat “I don’t understand,” he said, trying to sound terse and focused, “why Dean is giving all this up to us. Why, suddenly, at the last minute, is he spilling everything he knows—about Kalatis and Faeber, and especially about Geis? Why wouldn’t he ‘keep the faith’ with the CIA?”

For the first time Arnette had no response.

“All the loose ends are falling into place,” Graver went on, “but it’s all happening a little too late, isn’t it We’ve uncovered a wealth of information in record time, but Geis has evaporated, and we’re not a single step closer to Kalatis.”

“That’s right,” Arnette snapped back. “Look, Marcus, I don’t know how to answer your questions about Dean, but I do know he’s put us onto some very serious operations here. Yes, all the big players are disappearing into the woodwork. That’s what they’re trained to do. That’s their business. If they didn’t sew up loose ends, they wouldn’t
be
in business. But the fact is, Dean’s given us a hell of a lot more than we would have had without him. I’m not going to agonize about his ethics this late in the game. We’re not through here; we still need a lot of answers. I’m not going to blame Dean because he didn’t clear up
everything
for me. As for his role in this, you may never figure it out. Or if you do, you might not like it But does that really make a goddamned bit of difference as to what we do now?”

For a few moments the line was dead, no one spoke. Then Graver said:

“Okay, Arnette. You’re right” He paused again. “But for right now I’ve still got just one objective… and just one more chance at achieving it. Paula, can you glean anything else from the files?”

“Oh, sure,” Paula said. “There are a million details, stuff we can follow up on for months. As far as connections go, this is a bonanza.”

“Arnette,” Graver said, “you have no interest in the operational end here, I know. But if I get a shot at Kalatis can I get some backup from your people? Before you answer, you’d better know this: there’s not a dime in it.”

“I told you, I’m already making money off this, baby,” Arnette said. “You can have my people anytime. I’m way ahead of the game here.”

“Okay,” Graver said. “We may have a long shot I’ll get back to you within a couple of hours.”

By the time Graver got to La Facezia, he was nearly twenty minutes late. He parked a half block away, locked the car, and walked back on the sidewalk under the shade of the catalpa trees, a welcome shelter from the mid-morning sun. The temperature already had climbed into the upper eighties and surely would not stop until it reached the mid nineties.

The tables under the arbor on the sidewalk were popular this morning, and the patio doors were thrown open so that the dining room was open to the shady cool. As Graver suspected, Last was not among the sidewalk coffee drinkers. He went through one of the iron gates, under the arbor, and into the dining room which retained a cavernous coolness, its three sets of French doors allowing a wash of arbor-muted morning brightness into the big room.

As Graver walked through one of the French doors that opened obliquely into the dining room, he paused a moment to let his eyes adjust from the glare of the street There were a few diners, and he could hear a murmur of conversation and the clinking of tableware. One of the waitresses whisked by him with a tray of coffee and croissants on her way to the sidewalk tables. “Please, anywhere you wish,” she said in passing, and following that he heard Last’s relaxed, mellow English.

“Right here, Marcus.”

Graver turned to his right and made out Last’s shadow ghost sitting at one of the more choice tables, next to a window with a thick stone sill. An iron grille covered the window and a lacework of ivy covered the iron, forming a delicate panel of privacy separating them from the tables outside like the screen in a confessional. Graver walked to the table and sat down.

“This is untypical,” Last observed. “So late.”

“I couldn’t help it,” Graver said. “You’ve seen the papers?”

“Oh yes. I gathered as much.”

One of the waitresses came and took Graver’s order for coffee.

“Okay,” Graver said. “Let’s hear it” He was in no mood for pleasantries, and he wanted Last to know that Last nodded.

“Of all the stuff I’d told you before,” Last said, “I left out something… rather central.”

“Really?” Graver couldn’t resist a note of sarcasm.

“What I didn’t tell you was, I’ve been boffing Mrs. Faeber almost from the beginning.”

Graver looked at him. “Okay.”

“This is a lonely woman, Marcus. I knew it from the moment I met her.” Last paused to sip his own coffee when the girl brought Graver’s. “I saw opportunity there… one way or the other. They had money; I had… artifacts. Surely we could work out something, I thought. But Rayner—Mrs. Faeber—was, is, a sexually aggressive woman and ‘Colin,’ apparently, has the sexual curiosity of a sheet of paper. By the time they left Mexico that first time we met, Rayner and I had… connected, so to speak.” He paused to light a cigarette. “This woman, Graver, I tell you she’s insatiable. I’ve never seen anything like it. Do you know that—?”

“Victor, I don’t want to hear it. You know what I do want to hear.”

Last paused and looked at Graver across the table. Graver’s eyes had adjusted to the low light now, and he saw Last’s handsome face with its glory of wrinkles, battle scars from his encounters with the bottle and from sleepless nights in bordellos, from the anxiety of a life of fleecing and deception, from the punishing pleasures and constant disquiet of silk-sheet adulteries, from never being sure of anything except the assurance that nothing was sure. He was smiling slightly, a smile that was at once boyish and wizened. He looked like a man who, on the brink of finally having to admit to himself that he had pissed away the better part of a lifetime with nothing to show for it, had spotted one more long shot—a good one this time—and was about to put everything he had left into the wager.

“Marcus, I was with Rayner last night She told me an incredible story. I think it has enormous potential.”

“You said you could ‘deliver Faeber’s ass.’”

“Better than that. I think… if we give it some thought… we can put our hands on Kalatis.”

Panos Kalatis leaned against the door of his bedroom and looked out across the veranda through the white heat of the sunlight to the murky waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Wearing only his white pajama trousers, he was barefoot and shirtless, his well-tanned barrel chest thrust out in general defiance. He was smoking his first cigar of the day, and he was worried.

Behind him, Jael lay across their bed, nut brown and naked, stretching her long limbs in the warm, late morning breeze that blew in through the veranda doors from the Gulf. Occasionally the squeal of a seagull broke the silence that was otherwise only interrupted by the wash of the water on the beach below and the rustling of the palm fronds moved by the breeze.

Kalatis was worried because his chief security officer had caused him to be awakened at eleven o’clock, thinking it unwise to allow him to go another hour without knowing of the explosion at the South Shore Marina. Though he had cut off all communication with Sheck and Burtell, his men had tried to renew them since news of the explosion this morning and had had no success. Kalatis had something to think about.

“Panos,” Jael said from behind him, her voice throaty from sleep. “Panos.”

He turned a little and looked over his shoulder. She was an absolute marvel. He knew of nothing more heightening to a sexual experience than sleeping with a woman who knew how to kill you in five different languages. A woman like this one. He could not get enough of this woman; he was capable of watching her for long periods of time in much the same way that an animal trainer might watch a prized cat, just for the pure pleasure of enjoying the incomparable marriage of sinew and movement. Her beauty was so unaffected and powerful that it nullified the dimension of danger she occupied, or rather transformed it, so that the violence of which she was capable was no longer a thing to be feared, but to be appreciated, if not altogether desired.

And he liked the way she said “Panos.”

Nevertheless, he turned his back to her and squinted at the eye-watering brightness of the Gulf. Colin Faeber had been trying to get in touch with him. No doubt he had heard of the explosion too and was in a state of panic. Kalatis decided his best course of action with Faeber was simply never to see or speak to him again. Though Faeber had been one of the few people who had been to Kalatis’s beach house without having been presented with the pretense that he was being taken out of the country, he always had been brought there at night and still was deceived as to its true location. But he knew Kalatis was not in Mexico; he knew Kalatis lived as close as an hour’s flight. No, Kalatis did not want to see Faeber again—ever.