An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  But it was just this lack of understanding of women that made Faeber vulnerable. With Connie he had found a more indulgent patience than had been his luck before. He had never stopped to ask why this was, but he had recognized it, and as a result he had begun to unburden himself to her. She had listened, commiserated, seemed concerned, and interested. In fact, she seemed interested not only in him, but also in the astute ways he handled his business.

  During the last three or four months Connie had learned more about Faeber’s business than just about anyone involved other than his senior officers. But even their knowledge was concentrated in their own areas of expertise and did not extend to the business overall. Connie’s did.

  As a matter of fact, the more he talked about his business with her the more she seemed to care for him. It was almost as though she found his work to be an aphrodisiac. Sometimes it seemed even to him that he droned on endlessly, but Connie was always willing, even eager to listen. She asked questions, which it flattered him to be able to answer.

  And it wasn’t too long before, as a special demonstration of his cleverness, he revealed to her what he called the “real” purpose of the business: the selling of “certain” information to persons undisclosed. He told her of the “intel” section, which employed only half a dozen data input clerks, a single coordinator, and a secretary. The operation of this section was buried in the accounting, and the billing for its services was off the books—and was quadruple the volume of the legitimate billing of the business. All cash.

  He told her of intrigues, of the cells of paid informants scattered in businesses and buildings throughout the city, of low-level employees who were more than eager to tap into their employer’s computers and withdraw vital information. Money was all it took. Cash. Nobody ever had enough of it. It could buy you anything in the world, and for the right amount of it everyone could be persuaded to do something.

  She said she didn’t believe him, about the “intel section.” So one night after a fog of vodka tonics, after she had stripteased him to a pitch of silliness, they left his office in their underwear and, carrying the bottle of gin with them—and her purse, she laughingly insisted she would need it for “after”—wove their way through ghostly pools of isolated fluorescent lights until they came to a door where she watched him punch his code into the security panel above the doorknob. And he took her in. She was amazed. And gratified, so she let him have what he wanted. During this unseemly business, she repeated the security code over and over to herself so she wouldn’t forget it Afterward, he passed out on the scratchy, synthetic fiber carpet, amid the white noise of the humming microprocessors and the smell of heated plastic.

  Quickly she wrote down the security code for the door and then set to work with the micro camera she had brought in her purse along with numerous rolls of film. Nearly an hour and a half later she snapped closed the camera, put it back in her purse, and began the back-breaking work of waking him and helping him back to his office.

  After that night Colin Faeber had no more secrets, though he didn’t know it.

  So now, as he began to explain his fears to her, she had to remember to make him stop from time to time and explain himself, to clarify a point or two here and there. When he finally finished, though still pacing back and forth across his office, Connie, who thought she had known so much, had heard more than she had bargained for. She had known nothing, of course, of the “coincidental” deaths, and now Faeber, having rashly regurgitated everything in an effort to help her appreciate his fears, had caused her to wonder if she really wanted to go any further with this. She already had done things she had never dreamed she would do, or could do, emboldened by the prospect of enormous sums of money that Rayner said they would be able to extort with the information she was getting. But now, if she understood him rightly, Faeber was worried about being killed. This was clearly another kind of game altogether.

  “I just don’t know what to do,” he said.

  “You don’t have any idea of what’s going on here?” she asked.

  “No. Kalatis, I don’t know, that guy could be capable of anything.”

  “I thought you were afraid he’d been… killed.” She couldn’t believe she was having this conversation.

  “I don’t know, maybe, or maybe he’s just… not answering.”

  “Which would mean… ?” She wished to God he would stop pacing. He was a goddamned caricature, a comic book character being “nervous,” taking long strides with little U-turn marks behind his heels.

  “I don’t… know.”

  Connie wanted to scream. He had said “I don’t know” four times in the last three minutes. She looked at him. The man was falling apart. He actually was pale, and perspiring on his upper lip. That was something she particularly disliked, but upon seeing it now it was not dislike she felt. It was fear. His fear was infectious, and she felt its warm hand creeping up her throat and contaminating her own imagination. But even in the midst of her growing anxiety, she had the clear, rational realization that she could use his panic as an opportunity to gain an advantage. Despite her alarm, she resolved to appear calm, to be calm. She resolved to present a composed and rational demeanor. She would become a point of stability that he could cling to. It was an opportunity she could hardly afford to pass up.

  “Look,” she said, not knowing what she would say next, “nobody knows where I live, do they? I mean, any of those people?”

  He stared at her from across the room. He shook his head.

  “Okay, go to my place, then, and stay there. I’ll try to get some idea of what’s going on.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “Give me your contact numbers.”

  He stared at her, but she could see him thinking. What was his alternative? He clearly thought things had fallen apart. But was he misreading the situation? If he was, it would be a mistake to betray such numbers. Kalatis would have him strangled. But if he wasn’t, if his suspicions were right and he was being hung out to dry… or if he was going to be killed… then he had nothing to lose, and might even save his life. But what could she possibly find out… ?

  “What are you going to do with them?” he asked.

  “You said you couldn’t get an answer from Bur tell or Sheck. You said you thought they were in the explosion at the marina. What if you’re wrong? What if they’re hiding too, or not yet aware that something’s gone wrong?”

  Faeber stood still and tried to moisten his lips with his tongue. It didn’t work. His mouth was like sand.

  “Then I ought to call them myself,” he said.

  “You’re not thinking straight,” she said. “You need to drop out of sight Keep quiet. Wait” She couldn’t believe she was saying these things. It didn’t seem very real, helping an emotionally debilitated Colin Faeber elude an assassin.

  Faeber’s dry tongue came out of his mouth again, just a little, and retreated. He walked over to the coat closet, opened the door and took out his suit coat that was hanging there. Retrieving his wallet from the inside pocket, he took out a small plastic card and handed it to her. “The instructions are on there,” he said. “It’s a series of digits, and you calculate them differently depending on the date and who you’re trying to call. It’s all explained. It’s kind of like one of those perpetual calendars. It says on there.”

  She took the card from him.

  “Just stay at my place,” she said. “Just let me look into this a little.”

  He nodded, but he seemed preoccupied. All the failure that Rayner had predicted would come to him—because of his scheming with Kalatis—had arrived. They were through with him. He had served his purpose, and he wasn’t even sure what it had been. Still holding his coat, he walked out of the office.

  Connie watched him leave. Through the open door of his office, she saw him walk through her office and into the reception room. She heard the receptionist speak to him, but he didn’t answer. She heard the soft ping of the door as he pushed it
open and walked out into the hallway.

  She stepped over to his desk, picked up the telephone, and called Rayner Faeber.

  Chapter 66

  They agreed to meet the two women in the parking garage of the Stouffer Hotel in Greenway Plaza. That was Rayner’s idea. Graver didn’t care where they met and considered himself lucky that she had hit Last’s pager when she had because the two men were just about to leave La Facezia’s and go their separate ways.

  As they approached the top of the ramp on the level where they had agreed to meet, Last spotted their car.

  “There they are,” he said. “The BMW.”

  A large, midnight blue BMW sedan with deeply tinted windows was waiting in one of the parking spaces facing the outside of the garage, its nose up against the low barrier wall so that the occupants had a good view looking out of the shaded shelter to the northwest, toward the Galleria and the Transco Tower. The noon sun was baking the city, sending undulating heat waves out over the treetops and glinting here and there off glass and chrome.

  Graver pulled up to the same wall, but parked several spaces away. As the two of them got out of the car and closed their doors, Last looked at him over the top of the car.

  “Oh yeah. I said your name was Gray.”

  “Gray?”

  “Yeah. G-r-a-y.”

  “Forget that. Don’t use a name at all,” Graver said, and they walked over to the BMW. Last motioned for him to get into the back seat behind the passenger while he walked around behind the car to the driver’s side. Graver waited until Last opened his door first and then followed his lead.

  When they closed their doors, Graver found himself very close to two attractive women who were turned half around in their seats, looking at him intently with professionally cosmeticized faces. The BMW was purring softly, its air conditioner whispering a gentle current of chill air. These were women who did not believe that just because you were conspiring to extort millions of dollars you had to subject yourself to the tortures of sweating through your dress in a Houston parking garage. The air conditioner, therefore, was a necessity. Graver was grateful for it. The heavily padded interior was a cool, quiet world that smelled of secrets, of questionable intent, and of expensive perfume.

  “Rayner,” Last said, indicating the strawberry blonde in front of him. “And Connie,” he said, indicating the woman in front of Graver. “This is the man I was telling you about,” he said to the women.

  They both nodded and said hello. Rayner looked at Graver as though she might have thought he was a professional killer, an assessment which she seemed to find pretty damn interesting. She was probably in her early forties, full-bodied, and wearing a dress that accommodated the white, liquidy cleavage Last had so precisely described. She was indeed a pretty woman, and Graver could see why Last had had no trouble seeing things from her point of view. She wore a collection of diamonds on one hand and an emerald cabochon on the other. She kept wanting to smile, but never quite managed to do it.

  Connie was considerably more professional. In her early thirties, she was stylishly thin with frosted shoulder-length hair. She wore a double-breasted, black and white business suit, and her hazel eyes drilled into Graver as though she fully intended to see the bullshit in him before he even opened his mouth and revealed it himself.

  “You said you had gotten some telephone numbers from Faeber,” Last said, looking at Connie.

  She hesitated, her eyes still on Graver.

  “Wait a minute,” Graver said. “I think I should set a few things straight first, so that we understand our situation more clearly.” He looked back and forth between the two women. “Victor has told me that you might have a certain amount of access to a man named Panos Kalatis through Colin Faeber. I have business with Kalatis. For various reasons I’ve lost contact with him. I don’t know anything about your intended business, and all you know about mine is that I want access to Kalatis—and that’s all you need to know. But given that, I’m here to see if there’s some way we might be able to help each other.”

  When he finished that brief statement, both women were looking at him with wide-eyed absorption. They were silent.

  “I told him about the telephone numbers,” Last said.

  “Do you know about the deaths?” Connie asked abruptly. Her eyes had never moved from Graver.

  “Which ones?”

  He thought she winced.

  “A guy named Tisler.” She waited, but Graver didn’t react. “A guy named Burtell.” She waited. Graver didn’t say anything. “And Besom and Sheck and Gilbert Hormann.”

  On this last one her voice cracked, and it was Graver’s turn to wince. Jesus Christ.

  “Yes,” he said. “I know about them. How do you know about them?”

  “Colin told me about them this morning,” she said shakily. “I didn’t know anything about any of that.” She cut her eyes at Last and Rayner. “Nobody told me anything about any of that.”

  “Where is Faeber?”

  “I thought you were only interested in Kalatis?” she said.

  “I thought the idea was that we’d do what we could to help each other,” Graver responded. “Faeber could help me get to Kalatis.”

  “Not anymore,” Connie said. For the next few minutes she explained what had happened that morning, leaving out the part about sending Faeber to her condo.

  Graver watched Rayner and from the look on her face she was hearing this for the first time too. Connie had played her cards very close to the vest. Several times during her explanation Rayner and Last exchanged glances. Graver kept his eyes on Connie. She was nervous, almost testy.

  “When Faeber called those numbers,” Graver said, after she had finished, “what was the procedure?”

  “He called the number and left a message. They would call him back.”

  “Then it’s almost certain we can’t trace the numbers,” he said. “I’d guess they’re using a digital clearing box. It’ll be in a rented apartment somewhere. Since there are different numbers for different dates, there are probably several locations, several boxes. The return calls will also go through the clearing boxes, scrambling the signals so that a trace will stop at the box. All we’ll find at the end of the trace is an unfurnished apartment with a little black box sitting on the floor. They’ve probably got several apartments so if one is tracked down they’ll be able to clear calls out of the others.” He stopped. “Who do the numbers put him in contact with?”

  She looked down at the card which she had been holding in her lap behind the seat and read the names. “Panos. Dean. Rick. Bruce. Ray. Eddie.”

  “Rick and Eddie? Do you know anything about them?”

  She shook her head. “I just know they’re pilots.”

  “You know they’re pilots?”

  “Yeah. They’re a couple of the guys who pick up Colin and take him to Kalatis’s place. He told me.”

  “Okay. Wait a minute.” Graver got out of the BMW and walked to his car. He sat down in the front seat, picked up his handset, and called Arnette. Then he went back to the BMW carrying the handset with him.

  “What was that?” Connie said as soon as he closed the door. She seemed to be the only one talking.

  “You said Faeber would be flown to Kalatis’s?” Graver asked, ignoring her question.

  “That’s what Colin says. Kalatis flies him there when he wants to talk to him.”

  “Do you recall Faeber ever saying how long the flight was?”

  She glanced at Rayner as if to see if there were any objections to her going on with this. She got no reaction. She looked back at Graver.

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do,” she said. “One time he was telling me about how they always make sure he can’t see where they’re going, even though he doesn’t know anything about flying, and the flight’s always at night If he was in one of the smaller planes they’d put him facing backward into the cabin so he couldn’t see, and then they’d put headphones on him and make him listen to Mu
zak or something so he couldn’t hear the pilot giving his navigating coordinates to the towers. He said the flights were about an hour.”

  “Did he ever say what kind of plane he flew in?”

  “No, he doesn’t know planes.” She hesitated, thought a second. “But he did say they always landed on water, so I guess it was one of those pontoon planes. They taxied up to a pier and then walked up to the house.”

  “What kind of a house?”

  “He said it was… just this big white house. Palms in front. A porch… a, uh, veranda he called it.”

  “And Kalatis was there?”

  “Yeah, on the veranda. Colin said he’d never even been on the inside.”

  “Was anyone else there?”

  “He said there would be men waiting at the pier to tie up the plane. The pilots would stand around and talk to these guys while Colin went up to the house.”

  “You said, “up to the house.’ Was it hilly? A rocky cliff?”

  “No, actually, I don’t think so. He described it like… you know, up from the beach to the house.”

  “That’s all? No one else there?”

  “Well, yeah. There was someone else. Colin said that about half the time this woman would be there. He said she was maybe in her late twenties, a foreign woman, he thought maybe Middle Eastern. He said that on several occasions she would be in the house… naked or with very little on… and as they sat on the veranda he could clearly see her through the windows. He said he thought Kalatis liked that, for Colin to be able to see her naked through the window behind Kalatis’s back. Sometimes she brought them drinks out on the veranda.”