An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  He sipped the rum. He pulled a couple of times on the Cohiba. He let the fragrance and the taste of each meld together.

  “I have been working with these people for four years. Never a single problem. They are businessmen, and they know that chaos costs money. Order and efficiency make money. And they know that publicity is for movie stars and fools, not businessmen. Before long—they are deliberate men, almost Oriental in their perspective on time—they will be all there is of the cartels. Anyone who wants the southern spice… will have to buy it from the men of always.”

  “Then it’s agreed,” Kalatis said softly. There were only the two of them on the veranda, and they had finished their last Cuba Libre. Each was leaning his elbows on the wicker table between them, and they were talking softly, casually, almost in a tone of indifference. “Five million.”

  “Cash.”

  “Oh, yes. Of course.” He nodded meditatively. “You have this maturing from…”

  “Everything, T-bills, triple A bonds, CD’s… stock. That’s flexible, the amount from the stocks, I mean.”

  “But you’ll have five million? I’ll need to know the exact amount.”

  “Yes. Five even.”

  “From four or five different banks at least. In several different states. That’s important.”

  “It’s been arranged.”

  “Two days from now.”

  The man nodded, and swallowed. Kalatis knew how he felt. He knew these guys. Men too much in a hurry, too much in love with the way it worked in the eighties to wait for the nineties to pay off. He was making a fortune off the impatience of men like this. Even so, even the real pirates among them got cottonmouth from giving away five million in cash. No collateral, no contracts, no handshakes. But Kalatis had never failed one of them, and that was why they kept coming, this one for the first time.

  “And this is part of a ‘mutual fund,’ “the guest said, wanting Kalatis to reassure him one more time.

  “Oh yes.” Kalatis nodded readily. “This is one package—all Houston investors. Thirty-two million dollars. Your friend who recommended me to you is in for eight million. But you know that There are two others. Yours is the smallest portion. All of the others have invested with me before. You understand I cannot provide their names. Many of our investors know each other because they have recommended one another. But some wish to remain unknown. You are the only newcomer in this particular program.”

  The guest nodded.

  “Good. Okay,” Kalatis said. “Now, for my part: I guarantee you a three hundred percent return. In sixty days you will receive a telephone message telling you where and when to meet my representative in Luxembourg. You will open an account there in your name for fifteen million American dollars. My representative will provide the documentation that will satisfy the bankers about the deposit. They want that now. Things have gotten a little more difficult in that regard, but it is only a matter of paperwork. Formalities.”

  Kalatis’s cold cigar lay in the ashtray between them, and the ice cubes—all that was left of their Cuba Libres—had turned to less than half an inch of warm water in the bottom of each glass.

  “Any questions?”

  “You’ll pick me up again?”

  “One of my people, yes.”

  “At the same place?”

  Kalatis nodded.

  “Okay. I’m satisfied.”

  Kalatis stood. “So am I.”

  The other man stood too, and suddenly one of Kalatis’s guards appeared at the edge of the veranda.

  “He’ll take you back to the States,” Kalatis said “It will be a pleasure doing business with you.”

  “Sir,” the guard said, stepping up and touching the businessman’s arm. The businessman started to shake Kalatis’s hand, but the Greek turned away to light another Cohiba.

  “Good-bye,” Kalatis said through a haze of blue smoke, “and bonne chance.”

  The businessman stood still while he was once again blindfolded. Then he was led down the steps and across the lawn to the seaplane moored at the dock below.

  WEDNESDAY

  Chapter 37

  The Fourth Day

  Anticipating he would have a difficult time getting to sleep, Graver set his alarm late, allowing himself just enough time to shower and shave and drive to Arnette’s. No time for breakfast. Within half an hour of waking, he was walking out the front door of the house. Avoiding the expressways, he negotiated the slower city streets and tried not to acknowledge his growling stomach. He would have given five dollars for a cup of coffee, but did not stop to get one. He already was cutting it close. When he pulled up in front of Arnette’s house he was five minutes late.

  He got out of the car, pushed the door closed softly and walked up to the front gate. The morning sun broke through the high overstory of water oaks and loblolly pines only intermittently, falling here and there on the leaves of the plantains and the palmetto fronds in brassy, molten splashes. Already the birds were clamoring high overhead.

  Mona met Graver at the front door, smiling and barefoot and holding a mug of steaming coffee.

  “Good God, Mona, I love you,” Graver said, gratefully taking the mug from her and following her into the perpetual twilight of Arnette’s living room.

  “I love you too, bah-bee.” Mona laughed. “The Lady is waiting for you next door,” she said, and then hopefully, “Have you had something to eat?”

  “Oh, I’m doing all right,” he lied, wishing he had the time to sit down and indulge himself with one of Mona’s incomparable breakfasts.

  “Okay.” She shrugged philosophically, as if it was Graver’s loss.

  He left her in the kitchen and continued out the side door to the grape arbor and over to the next house, entering through the screened patio.

  The big room was empty except for a hard-looking woman with a mat of roan hair sitting at the big library table beside the radio. She was wearing the same headset the blond girl had worn the night before and was taking notes from one of the fat ring binders with which the table was still piled.

  She looked up at him. “Graver?”

  He nodded.

  She pushed a button and returned to her writing, occasionally, like the blonde, reaching out to fine-tune the dials without looking at them.

  Graver looked around. The computers were all quiet, each of them in a hectic limbo with different patterned screen savers, swimming and jigging and rippling in brilliantly colored silence. He stepped over to the doorway that he knew led to an adjacent room that housed Arnette’s library. Looking in, he saw that she had significantly expanded her inventory with a larger section of publications that originated within the federal government’s twenty-seven oversight intelligence services and their plethora of subordinate branches that comprised the United States intelligence community. Graver knew that most of these documents were classified. Apparently Arnette had lost none of her connections within the service. The country maps section also had been expanded, especially in those areas of the globe where the U.S. had its greatest vested interests.

  “Good morning,” Arnette said, coming into the main room from yet another doorway carrying a mug of coffee and a large packet which she took to the library table. The woman with the headset began clearing aside the ring binders. “Get some sleep?”

  “Some,” Graver said, coming back to the table.

  Arnette pulled the photographs out of the large envelope and slapped them on the table.

  “The photographer stayed up late last night,” she said. “Let’s see if it was worth it.”

  They both sat down and started turning through the photographs. There were forty-eight of them.

  “The stippled effect on some of them is actually the spray coming from the fountain,” Arnette said, picking up a photographers loop and putting it on a photograph that was lying flat on the table. She put her eye right on the loop. “They must’ve been soaked by the time they finished talking.”

  Graver went through the f
our dozen photographs rather quickly, setting aside the ones in which the unknown man did not appear. The ones in which he did appear Graver then examined again more closely using the loop. The photographer had done a good job of getting the unknown man’s face from several different angles as well as straight on. He appeared to be, as Arnette had said, in his late fifties. Shorter than Burtell, he was also heavier, though not obese. He was wearing a suit without a necktie, his shirt collar undone. His hair was thinning, but he kept it neatly parted and combed. Even though the photographs were in color, it was difficult to determine anything about his complexion or hair color because the lights of the fountain reflecting off the water and the beige granite gave an overall distorted cast to the photographs. He had a slightly bulbous nose and, in one photograph, a noticeable mole on the right side of his chin. He would have had trouble shaving around it.

  Sometimes the man talked to Burtell while looking away, and the expression on his face did not change in any of the pictures. Once the photographer caught him looking back and up at the high curtain of water that almost surrounded them, and it was easy to see that his baldness was generalized over the top of his head.

  “What do you think?” Arnette said after a while.

  Graver shook his head. “Just a guy.”

  “He’d disappear in a room with half a dozen people,” Arnette said. “He looks like a ‘government’ guy.”

  “I can’t imagine that,” Graver said, still looking at the photographs.

  Arnette didn’t say anything. She sipped her coffee, looked at a photograph.

  “They didn’t see him arrive?” Graver looked at her.

  “No. He just came across the grass and was there. Left the same way. In fact, we tried to catch him leaving, but we just flat missed it We would have had a better chance if we’d gotten out of the cars, but we decided against risking it.”

  Graver looked at the man in the picture with a degree of frustration that he found difficult to hide. This was nothing. What could he do with it? Where did it get him? No matter how much he looked at this man’s face, it wasn’t going to tell him any more than he could apprehend in the first few minutes. It was like having a fingerprint before the existence of the national fingerprint index. There was nothing to compare it with. There was no national index of faces.

  “There’s one thing,” Arnette said. “We think we see some countersurveillance there.”

  Graver looked at her.

  “Yeah, no kidding,” she said. She turned sideways and reached for the photographs Graver had set aside. She riffled through them, quickly arranging them in some specific order, and then held them up one by one so that she and Graver could look at them together. “The reason there are so many prints of the crowd is to check for this kind of thing.” She picked up a pencil from the table to use as a pointer. “These shots were taken while Dean was strolling around the sunken lawn area. He made one full circle, eating sunflower seeds.”

  “Sunflower seeds?”

  “Yep. See this couple here? They’re walking together as Dean arrives.”

  At the mention of the word “couple,” Graver felt his face flush as he leaned closer in to the photograph, braeing himself against the recognition of the man and woman from La Facezia. He focused on the woman whose face lay under the tip of Arnette’s pencil. He stared at her. He did not recognize her. He focused on the man to her left. The face was not familiar.

  “Dean starts walking along the grassy mall from the west end of the fountain,” Arnette continued. “They meet him at this moment, but they’re looking away at something. They pass by, Dean keeps going toward the north end of the lawn. The couple stops at the west side of the fountain to watch some kids throwing a Frisbee down on the sunken lawn. This gives them a view of the entire lawn area with Dean circling.”

  Arnette’s pencil touched the faces on another photograph. Graver leaned in again, studying the man and woman from another angle. He simply does not recognize the faces. He is relieved, but puzzled. If he had been given the chance to bet that they would be the same couple from La Facezia, he would have done it.

  “See, they’re standing there facing the Frisbee players, but the woman is actually looking away toward Dean,” Arnette went on. “Now she’s looking back along the west side of the lawn. Here she’s looking on the east side. Guy she’s with is looking toward the fountain now. Dean circles the north end. Couple splits up. She walks to the north end; he stays at the fountain, and they mill around, watching the place from both vantage points. Here, the woman pretends to be watching some kids down in the sunken lawn. Now, Dean comes along the east side of the lawn, and when he gets to the fountain the Unknown joins him, and they step up to the fountain. Man at the fountain hangs around inside with them. He looks at the water falling. He looks at the arches, probably through them at the grassy mall beyond. Woman joins him after having come up the east side.”

  Arnette picked up several other photographs she had set aside. “Now, here, my photographer really goes close up.” She put the point of the pencil on the man’s left ear. “See this? I think this is an earpiece. There’s disagreement here about this, but I think that’s what it is. The couple stay a while in the spray of the fountain looking out through the arches, out to the sides. After a while they split up again and head to opposite sides of the grassy mall where they stay, just looking around as before, until Dean and the Unknown finish talking and split up.”

  Arnette put down the last picture and the pencil, took a sip of coffee and looked at Graver.

  “In these photographs the couple do not appear to speak to each other even once. They don’t lounge around on the grass, sit on the benches, go up to the waterfall, up close and look up and laugh about it—people always go up to the water and look up and laugh for some reason. The perspective gives you a weird feeling. But what’s most important is that they do not look at what’s in front of them. Ever. They’re always looking somewhere else.”

  Graver was motionless, studying the pictures.

  “We’re seeing this all the time, now,” she said, sitting back, cradling her coffee cup. “Everybody’s a spy. The dope traffickers, the computer chip bandits, the stolen car rings, you name it Business associates; business competitors. And middle-class America? Everybody’s bugging everybody. Everybody’s tapping into everybody else’s modem, and eavesdropping on their portable telephone conversations. It’s the technology. Radio Shack has turned America on to a new game… keeping up with the Bonds, the James Bonds.” She smiled. “When the stakes get past who’s cheating on whom, countersurveillance is a given. We automatically look for it.”

  Graver didn’t say anything for a second.

  “Do you think they picked you up?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “What about the audio?”

  “They worked on it late last night, but when they quit just after two o’clock, they hadn’t recovered anything.”

  “Do you mean ‘not much’ or ‘anything’?”

  “I mean zip. Nothing.”

  “And Tisler’s tapes?”

  “Nothing. I told you those could be hard to crack. Again it’s the technology. It’s a two-way street The computer chip has made it easier for us to maneuver through the mazes of cryptography, but at the same time it’s made it easier for the other side to design ever more complex ciphers too. It’s a constant struggle of one-upmanship. Sometimes they’re ahead of us; sometimes we’re ahead of them. It’s a toss-up.”

  Graver sipped the last of his coffee. It was too cold to drink. He looked at the pictures scattered in front of him. He looked at Burtell, standing in profile facing the unknown man under one of the Roman arches with the waterfall shimmering behind him.

  “He looks pretty calm, doesn’t he,” he said.

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact I thought so too. They said last night he seemed completely relaxed. Do you think he knew about Besom when these were taken?”

  “I hope not,” Graver said.
“I really hope not.”

  Arnette sipped her coffee too, waiting for him.

  “Westrate was beside himself last night,” Graver said, idly matching up the corners of several photographs. “He’s thinking conspiracy; he’s thinking corruption, but he doesn’t want to be the first one to say it I’m guessing that’s the way they’re all going to react, the administration. The emperor’s new clothes will be greatly admired.”

  “What do you expect? Hell, take advantage of it While they flap around in confusion, push ahead. It’s got to be done, and by the time they get around to realizing that you’ll be way out front It’s going to put you ahead in more ways than one.”

  Graver pushed away the photographs. “I don’t see much here,” he said. “Am I missing something?”

  “No, I don’t see much either. But the countersurveillance makes me think Dean’s dealing with people who are bigger than local racket operators.”

  “Why?”

  Arnette shook her head apologetically. “I’m sorry, Marcus, it’s just a guess at this point The appearance of the older man. Where he chose to meet The way the countersurveillance went about its business. This is very slick stuff.” She set aside her coffee and started gathering up the photographs. “Look, we’ve been on this less than eighteen hours. There’s a lot to work with. Give us some breathing room.”