An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  “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.

  Chapter 51

  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.

  “Yeah, okay,” he said, and then he had to clear his throat “I’ll get there as soon as I can.” He put down the receiver. “God… damn…”

  Paula and Neuman exchanged glances.

  “That was… the surveillance. They followed Dean out to Clear Lake, to the marina at South Shore Harbor. He went down to the boats. The team got a room in the hotel there… the audio specialist photographer… The audio operator finally located him in the cabin of one of the sailboats in the marina. He was talking to Bruce Sheck.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Neuman said.

  Graver could feel Paula’s eyes fixed on him. She knew instinctively this was not the shock to which Graver was reacting.

  Graver looked at his watch. “A little less than fifteen minutes ago… the boat blew up.”

  Silence.

  “The surveillance team said… it was a hell of an explosion. Blew up, maybe, half a dozen other boats… set fire to that many more. They said… they’d be surprised if there’s enough left to make an ID on either one of them.”

  Both Paula and Neuman were dumbfounded and said nothing. Graver almost could feel their racing pulses, the constriction in their chests. The room was thick with the paralyzing concussion of shock. Graver thought of Ginette Burtell. She would stay up all night waiting for Dean to come home, and by morning she would be in a state of panic. The odds were good that she would call Graver. Or maybe Dean had told her something that would turn her first efforts elsewhere. Dean had not, after all, ever returned Graver’s call. Maybe she knew more than Graver suspected. There was no way to know, but he could at least make the assumption that she would not have expected this.

  “This is sickening,” Paula said shakily. “This is out of control… way out of control.”

  “What about the surveillance team?” Neuman asked. They were talking softly, almost whispering. “Did they get anything on tape, any of their conversation?”

  Graver nodded. He didn’t want to talk to them. He wanted to be somewhere else.

  “Apparently so,” he managed to say. “I didn’t… I don’t know what. Just that there was something to listen to. My contact was still on the line to the surveillance team in the hotel room. They were frantically packing their stuff, trying to get out of there.” He shook his head. “Jesus… Christ.”

  “How did they know it was Sheck?” Neuman asked.

  “Dean used his name.”

  “Oh, this is horrible.” Paula was sitting on the sofa with her feet on the floor, her legs together, her arms together, hands clasped and resting atop her thighs as she leaned forward. She looked up at Graver. “We didn’t have any idea that Sheck had a boat, did we? A plane. A car. But not a boat.”

  Graver shook his head.

  “Maybe it was Dean’s,” Neuman said.

  “We never checked on that, I guess,” Paula said. She looked up at Graver. “What are you going to do about Ginette?”

  “Nothing,” he said. It was possibly the hardest single word he had ever had to say.

  Paula frowned at him. It was almost a flinch, a reproach.

  “We don’t know anything.” Graver insisted. “We have to remember that. Dean’s death will come to us—if it comes to us—from forensics. It’ll be up to Ginette to report him missing. We’ll deal with it then.” He shook his head. “We’re just damned lucky the surveillance team caught them in time, and that Dean wasn’t as good at this business as they were. We’re lucky we’ve got the recording.”

  Paula stared at Graver in dismay. “How twisted can this get?”

  It was a rhetorical question, but Graver had been asking himself the same thing. He stood stiffly, deferring a little to his tired back, and put his hands in his pockets. He walked toward the entrance hall doorway and looked at the soft sheen of muted light on the burnished hardwood floor. It was impossible to stop thinking about the explosion, the actual chemistry of it… the impact, the heat, the instant tornadic destruction of it. He had seen explosions on film before, assassinations. The target never reacts at all because the firestorm happens faster than human reflexes are capable of responding. For a millisecond the target can be seen simply sitting immobile in the conflagration, burning alive like the Buddhist monks who set themselves afire in the sixties to protest the Vietnam War. An upright human torch, knowing in that instant they were aflame in hell but being too stunned to react. Then the impact of the explosion, and in the next instant they vanished in a shuddering mist. The rest of it was a mystery, whatever it was like to die.

  Graver was too numb even to sob, though he felt it in his throat, a soft, choking lump of grief and anger and dismay. He was light-headed, but he stood very still drawing deep breaths, struggling for control, resolving not to give in… to anything. Not a damned bloody thing.

  He turned around.

  “Okay,” he said, taking his hands out of his pockets and wiping his face with both hands. He waited a moment “Here’s what we’ve got to do.” He swallowed. “This will in no way affect the CID, not for a few days, not… until the Bomb Squad’s forensic team has had a chance to do their work. And maybe not even then.” He walked a few steps into the living room. “First, Ginette will report him missing. When that happens, the CID will be brought back into it. I don’t think even Jack Westrate will be able to scoff away the disappearance of another CID officer.” He crossed his arms, took a few
more steps, his head down, thinking. “All hell will break loose. If the newspapers were going to run something on Tisler and Besom, it will be bumped off the front page by this explosion. There’s no way to anticipate if the reporters on the other stories will make any connections here. Again, they won’t know who was on the boat It’ll probably take them a day even to determine which slip was the center of the explosion. So… we’ve got a little time.”

  He looked at his watch. He felt the flesh of his face sagging with exhaustion. It seemed to require every gland in his body to produce enough juice to keep him standing.

  “As far as I’m concerned… there’s only one rear son for any of this now… to focus everything… on Panos Kalatis.”

  Graver actually was having to make an effort to control a nearly hysterical frustration at being so completely at a disadvantage. He could hardly contain his grief for Burtell’s death or his rage at Kalatis’s silent, anonymous audacity. He was forcing himself, at considerable expense to his nervous system, to be controlled and methodical and logical.

  “Paula,” he went on, “I want you to debrief Valerie Heath just as we discussed. Tonight, as soon as we get through here. Before you do, tell her what happened. Tell her Sheck was just killed by a bomb with another CID agent… no, just another man. When you’re through, blindfold her again—I sure as hell don’t want her to know where she’s been—and you and Lara take her car and another one and drive her somewhere—a parking garage—and release her. Give her her keys and tell her to get the hell out of the state. Then both of you come back here and wait.”

  He walked a few paces into the room and addressed Neuman.

  “Sheck lives in Nassau Bay?” he asked.

  Neuman nodded. “Yeah, just across the lake from South Shore Harbor.”

  “You need to get over there, Casey, and pick the place apart Take a garbage sack and fill it up with anything remotely informative.” He hesitated. “There’s going to be a lot of action over there. Spectators standing around in their back yards watching the excitement across the water. That’s good for you. But be careful. Kalatis’s people are going to want to make sure he didn’t leave anything behind. They may have already been there. Or they may get there ahead of you and still be there. If not, they might walk in on you. Just watch your ass. Okay? But take the place apart. Unscrew air-conditioning grates, wall plugs. Shit like that And call in every half hour… on the secure handsets. And wear latex gloves.”