An Absence of Light (71 page)

It was only at that moment that Graver realized that both hangars had been on fire since the initial explosion, and their cars were burning inside the second one.

Graver and Remberto and Murray stood on the tarmac and watched Strasser’s men unload the Pilatus and the van and stack the boxes of cash into the sleek body of the Bell 206L. Strasser walked over to Graver when it was all done.

“That’s twenty-two million,” Strasser said. “You know how much went up?
Eighteen
million. The biggest load was in the smallest plane.” He snorted. “I don’t know how Panos figured that.”

“How do I know my people are all right?” Graver asked.

“They’re all right,” Strasser said. He lifted the telephone he was carrying and punched a button again. He listened a moment. “It’s me. Give me fifteen minutes and then walk away from them. When you leave, tell them to call this number.”

He punched a couple of numbers on the handset, tried to dial out, listened, punched another button and handed the telephone to Graver.

“Here,” he said. “Your people will call you in fifteen minutes. But you can’t call out on that now. I just turned it into a receiver.” He looked at the still-burning hangar. “I imagine somebody’s on the way out here now anyway,” he said. He studied Graver. “This has been a hell of a deal for you, huh?”

“Yeah,” Graver said.

“What did you do, go around the bureaucracy?”

“What do you mean?”

“This whole thing started for you five days ago when Arthur Tisler turned up dead. Now you’re standing here talking to me. To tell you the truth, this surprises me very much. I’m not a pretentious man, Graver. I don’t see much use in crowing about anything, but I do know how I run things. I do know I’m good at what I do. Under normal circumstances you couldn’t have gotten this close to me in five years, let alone five days.”

“Well,” Graver said, wiping his forehead on the arm of his shirt which was now gritty with soot and dirt and sweat, “these haven’t been normal circumstances.”

“No, that’s true,” Strasser conceded, “that’s true. But still, bureaucracies don’t move as fast as you’ve moved these last five days.” He looked at Remberto and Murray. “And I don’t think these two guys are cops.”

“Tell me something,” Graver said, “have I still got somebody dirty in the police department?”

“Hell, you know, I don’t even know.” Strasser shrugged casually. “All that was Panos’s business. I never had anything to do with any of this except for buying out Faeber and Hormann through front companies. My people arranged that. I basically backed Kalatis’s ventures. All the details were his. I’m just here because, you know, when you’ve got people like Panos for business partners, you’ve got to have somebody watching them all the time. Some of my people inside his works, people he didn’t know were my people, told me they thought he was working on some kind of rip-off. Panos is about as good as they get. You know anything about him?”

“Yeah, I know he’s Yosef Raviv. I know his background with the Mossad, all that.”

“The hell you say.” Strasser nodded, looking at Graver with admiration. “Well, okay, then you know how good he is. Compartmentalized everything. So this ‘rip-off’—nobody knew much about it because he didn’t tell anybody about it. That’s why I moved on Burtell. He was already suspecting Tisler and Besom so I just gave him everything, told him I was CIA—which kept him from bringing you into it, you know, a higher calling—and he almost got to the core of it too. But he was too damn smart for his own good. He figured me out about the same time he figured out what Kalatis was doing.

“Anyway, Panos was my biggest success and my worst mistake all rolled into one. Like all high-yield propositions, he was also high-risk.”

“Then he’s disappeared… along with one hundred million.”

Strasser crossed his stubby arms and looked around at the helicopter. The pilot had kicked on the turbos and the rotors were beginning to whine.

“Well, recovering the money’s a moot point,” he said. “I’ll see if I can’t recover that. That’s a maybe.” He turned and brought his eyes back to Graver. “But Panos… Panos is not a maybe. Panos is a sure thing.”

The rotors on the Bell picked up speed surprisingly quickly and were hammering the night air.

“Sir,” a man shouted above the swelling whine of the jet rotors, “we’re going to have to go.”

Strasser waved a stubby arm without looking around.

“How many people burned up in there?” he asked.

“Two pilots, one copilot, and two businessmen who accompanied their money for the delivery. I don’t even know who they were.”

Strasser nodded, looking at the two burning hangars.

“Could’ve been worse,” he said, and turned and walked away toward the helicopter, the rotors of which were whipping the air now, working up to the familiar whumpwhumpwhump sound before it lifted off.

Strasser climbed into the helicopter and the door closed. He sat with his back to the cockpit, and Graver could see him buckling his seat belt, and then he could see Strasser’s face looking out the window at them as they stood on the tarmac. Then the big Bell’s rotors revved up to a fierce speed, and the craft grew light on its skids and lifted up into the darkness. Graver was looking at its belly as it started drifting sideways, sliding toward the Gulf at the end of the runway, blending with the night, black going into black as the darkness swallowed it.

In late August the breezes that usually grace Italy’s Amalfi coast succumb to the late summer heat and grow weak and listless in the long afternoons. There is a villa there, the color of a fawn, wedged into the rocky coast above the Golfo di Salerno with a view that skirts the island of Capri and looks across the fifteen miles of the Tyrrhenian Sea to Sardinia. It is a jewel of a villa, with a terrace that hangs on the edge of the cliffs and from which the view of the blue, lively western Mediterranean stretches unmarred to the horizon.

Panos Kalatis lay naked on a deck lounge. He lay on his stomach, his arms folded under his head. He was marvelously tanned, his rakish graying hair combed straight back from his forehead. Twenty feet away the pool where he and Jael had been swimming sparkled in the sun that was halfway past meridian in the west.

Jael, also naked, was on her knees, straddling Kalatis. Deeply tanned, her long, wet hair was put up on the back of her head and held loosely in place with a hairpin. She had filled a cupped hand with oil and was rubbing it into his back with her long fingers. The smell of herbal oils heated by the sun against his back filled Kalatis’s nostrils with a fragrance as ancient as the Amalfi coast itself. As Jael massaged him and the sun warmed the muscles in his back, Kalatis felt the double lobes of her buttocks rocking back and touching his own as she moved up and down his spine with her oily hands.

Kalatis grew languid, allowing himself that lightweighted feeling of drifting, a slight sense of arousal at the touch of Jael’s soft inner thighs against his sides.

Watching her own shadow on the tile terrace, Jael paused and reached up and took the thick hairpin out of her long hair. She shook it loose until it hung straight and untangled, almost to the middle of her back.

Taking the thick pin in her left hand, she lightly touched the point of it at a precise spot between the second and third vertebrae of Kalatis’s spine at the base of his skull. She angled the pin upward slightly and then, with the palm of her right hand, she smacked the wide haft of the pin, driving the stainless steel shaft straight into his spinal cord. She sat back on his buttocks until his legs had ceased quivering, and he was still.

Graver rounded the far end of the pool and started the last half of his final lap. He was up to forty minutes, and by the time his right arm had completed its stroke and his left hand touched the edge of the pool, his heart was banging against the walls of his chest like a diesel-driven piston.

He jerked his goggles off his head and hung on to the edge of the pool, wheezing for air. Even though he couldn’t have gone another lap the workout felt good. As he rested, the late August sun warmed the top of his wet head and burned its way into the muscles of his shoulders like a heat lamp. He waited for his heart and lungs to regain their equilibrium as he felt his body being moved gently by the water that was slowly settling from the disturbance of his laps.

As he sucked in the heavy afternoon air, he stared across the hot green lawn broken by scattered sago palms and let his thoughts return for the thousandth time to the recent events and their aftermath.

The mandatory suspension imposed for the duration of the investigation should have been a blessing, an opportunity to relax, to recoup his sapped energies, and to think. But it didn’t work out that way. Though the media had been sluggish in connecting all the dots at the beginning, they made up for lost time after the calamity at Bayfield. The investigative reporters in every branch of the media suddenly came alive, and within a week “new leads” were breaking every day and continued to break through the blistering months of July and August.

The withering media assault effectively shut down the Criminal Intelligence Division, and the complexities of what had happened during those five hot days in June promised an extended investigation.

Graver’s report to the special investigating commission had been lengthy and detailed, exceptionally detailed. During the entire period he had been able to account for almost every hour of his time. He had outlined the labyrinth of relationships among the players, pulling no punches for those under his command—or for himself—for not having detected anything amiss despite his having designed a new counterintelligence program two years earlier that had been intended to prevent just such breaches. He had provided names, linkages, information to enable the commission to subpoena entire computer programs from DataPrint and Hormann Plastics and Gulfstream National Bank and Trust, and provided complete copies of Dean Burtell and Bruce Sheck’s computer and microfilm accounts of their involvement. The detail—and amount of detail—had required nearly two weeks of assisted accumulation before the administration could even reach the point that they could suspend him and the commission’s work could begin. Then he walked out of the office and went home.

The only thing that presented a problem was the involvement of Arnette Kepner and her people. Graver had refused to disclose her as a source and, much to his surprise and gratification, so had Casey Neuman and Paula Sale. Though they also had been suspended for the duration of the investigation, their silence was an extraordinary vote of confidence. There would be a way, of course, to resolve the problem. There always was with bureaucracies, especially bureaucracies that relied on secrets to assure their own survival.

That was almost two months ago. He swam twice every day. He drank more wine than he should have, but not too much. He gained weight, but not more than he needed to. His supporters within the Department kept him apprised of the rumors and, when they could, the actual facts. Apparently Westrate had rolled over immediately and had offered up Graver’s career to mollify the fury of the bureaucrats for the shame the Department was suffering under the cloud of scandal. In all likelihood, Graver’s career was gone. The fate of Neuman and Paula was less clear; their futures were still in the balance.

He never heard a word from Arnette. That was expected; that was as it should be. It was a tough business and certain things were understood. By helping him as she had, she had gone way beyond the understood rules of the game. Her silence now was nothing more than self-preservation. She would have expected the same from Graver.

But Graver was a realist and already had accepted the inevitable; he didn’t need to wait for a sitting special commission verdict to know that eventually he would be relieved of his position. He would be lucky if he was allowed part of his pension. He spent most of his time, however, brooding over the events of those few days. The days passed one into the other without distinction as he replayed the mistakes, the disappointments, the bad luck.

All the dying had haunted him.

It would have been easy to blame it on others, on Panos Kalatis and Brod Strasser and their unconscionable commerce in the chemistry of sour dreams, their traffic in a merchandise that commanded unspeakable fortunes. It would have been easy to blame it on the businessmen like Faeber and Hormann and the nameless “clients” whose greed was so vast and dark it blotted out the light of common decency.

But in all honesty, he couldn’t shift the blame so easily. He could have avoided much of the killing if he had kept strictly to his business of gathering intelligence. That’s what he told himself on some days. On other days he told himself something quite different. On those days when he counted the deaths over and over again, it seemed to him that everyone who had died would have died anyway, regardless of what he had done. Their fate had been cast in a game of chance that had been designed and put into play by Kalatis and Strasser, a game that already had run a long course and was just coming to a conclusion as Graver stumbled upon it in its closing hours. Despite what he might think he could have done, it had been out of his control all along. No matter what he could have done Kalatis still would have disappeared with a hundred million dollars. Strasser still would have flown away with twenty-two million in crumbs. Neither man would miss a beat marketing drugs. They simply would move to new venues. They would surround themselves with a different cast of bit players, and in no time at all the river of sour dreams would resume its flow, swollen to its banks with wrecked hopes and the human flotsam of their trade.

As for those two nebulous personalities, little was said in the news reports. Their names appeared only twice and both times only in passing and in the context of rumors. Graver heard that a couple of men from the State Department had been in town for a few days, and after that Kalatis and Strasser were pushed out of the picture altogether by stories of Art Tisler having been selling CID intelligence for sex. Kinky sex and crooked cops were a jazzier story and pushed simple greed completely out of the headlines.