An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  “Strasser. Strasser.” It was Victor Last, coming up behind Graver from the hangar where he was supposed to be holding the pilots and the two remaining clients. At the sound of his voice calling Strasser’s name, Graver felt as if he were enveloped in an insulting cold breath. He knew instantly. Betrayal was everywhere a popular sin.

  “Two thirds of the money is still in the planes,” Last wheezed, jogging up beside them, glancing once awkwardly at Graver.

  Strasser smiled benignly, the first time his face had shown any expression at all.

  “Well, Vic, let’s just get it all out then,” he said. He looked at Graver. “I guess this is a surprise,” he said, tilting his head at Last.

  “Yes, this is a surprise.” Graver turned to Last “How long have you been working for him, Victor? From the beginning?”

  Last didn’t know exactly how to behave, at least he had enough scruples remaining in his soul to be ashamed. He mumbled something lame about it being “just business.”

  “We wouldn’t have known where you were tonight if it hadn’t been for Vic,” Strasser explained. “He’s been carrying a couple of special frequency beepers. He kept one turned on all the time so we knew where you were. Then, when he was sure where the money was going to be, he turned on the second one. We just homed in.”

  Strasser then turned and waved at the plane again and another man jumped out Strasser turned back to Last “Where’s the other plane?”

  “Around behind the hangar. They pushed it around there.” Last was ingratiatingly eager to help. He didn’t look at Graver again. Like a lamprey, he was firmly attached to Strasser’s soft, hosting underbelly. Last was going to make enough from his usefulness in this affair to pull off his own bourgeois retirement.

  “Take these guys around there,” Strasser said to Last, as the second man jogged up to join the man with the radio.

  Graver turned and waved for Remberto and Murray to come over to him. He looked at Strasser.

  “I’ve got to tell them what’s happening here.”

  Strasser nodded, understanding.

  When Remberto and Murray approached it was clear they recognized “Geis” too.

  “This is Brod Strasser,” Graver said. Remberto and Murray shifted their eyes from Graver to Strasser who just stood there with his hands in his pockets as though he was waiting for an elevator to arrive. “Kalatis was ‘stealing’ this money from him. He’s apparently already squirreled away over one hundred million. There’s forty million over there,” he said, nodding his head toward the hangar. “Strasser’s people have Neuman, Ledet, my assistant from my office, and Ginette Burtell. He wants the money.”

  “Ho-ly shit,” Murray swore.

  Remberto looked at Strasser as if he had seen it all before. This was the drug business.

  “Mr. Strasser,” one of Last’s helpers yelled, “it’s going to be easier to push the plane over there. It’s a small Mooney. We could use the spot from the chopper.”

  Strasser turned and walked back to the helicopter and told the pilot to turn on the spotlight.

  “Did you talk to Neuman?” Remberto asked quickly as Strasser stepped away.

  “Yeah, I did. And to my assistant She was keeping Ginette Burtell at my house.”

  “Then Strasser’s people are actually holding them?” Murray said.

  Graver nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

  As Strasser started back toward them they all turned and looked at the path of the spotlight shooting down between the two hangars and saw the three men turn the Mooney and then begin pushing it toward them between the two buildings.

  “I see some bodies over there,” Strasser observed incidentally. “The guards?”

  “Yeah,” Graver said. “One of them killed—”

  The explosion was a double impact: the bomb and then the Mooney’s fuel tank, both combining into a mini-mushroom that lifted up between the two hangars, incinerating the plane, Strasser’s two men, and Last in a fluorescing orange flash. The blast also blew the thirteen million dollars high into the night sky so that when the mushroom burned itself out in midair in a matter of one or two seconds, the only fire in the sky was another cloud, a floating, drifting, fluttering cloud of burning money, individual bills flittering crookedly like falling leaves, leaves afire, an autumn of burning millions.

  Everyone gaped in stupefaction at the incinerating fortune that hung in a slow descent like a star-burst of fireworks.

  And then Strasser screamed:

  “God Almighty! God damn his soul to bloody hell! The son of a bitch…”

  Everyone had the same thought at the same instant: Kalatis’s guards had probably left bombs on all the planes. All of the pilots had been doomed the moment they unloaded their planes and flew away. Kalatis had come close to making a clean sweep.

  “The Pilatus,” Strasser croaked. When the Pilatus blew, it would take the van with it Forty million up in flames.

  Remberto and Murray and Graver ran for Redden’s plane, lifting its tail and dragging it away from the door of the hangar. Since Last and Strasser’s men had just begun to push the Mooney it was still near the rear of the hangar when it blew and the fiery concussion blasted the rear wall of the hangar all the way into the office. Redden, Landrone, Landrone’s copilot, and the two clients could not have survived the blast.

  Remberto was scrambling inside the van before anyone else could get to it. Throwing it into reverse, he roared out of the hangar and kept going all the way out to the helicopter which was already starting its rotors again. As Murray and Graver were running away from the Pilatus two more men bailed out of Strasser’s helicopter and started running toward the Pilatus while Strasser shouted instructions to them. They ran past Graver and Murray who spun around in disbelief and watched in horror as the two men climbed into the still-open cockpit as Strasser had ordered them to do. Strasser himself watched without any visible emotion as the two men confronted almost certain death on his behalf. He might have been standing at a gaming table where life and death played no part in the wager. But he wasn’t. And it did.

  The prop on the Pilatus kicked on and almost simultaneously one of the men clambered out of the cockpit door with a briefcase with which he disappeared into the dark as the Pilatus revved and pulled away from the burning hangar, taxiing out onto the tarmac near the helicopter and the van.

  In a moment the man came running out of the dark without the briefcase, running as hard as he could, and was well onto the tarmac when the bomb went off. Another red mushroom lighted the airstrip, and though they could feel the heat from its explosion, it was well away from the hangars and did no damage, the fireball dissipating quickly as the darkness rushed back into the space from which it had been driven.

  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.

  Chapter 81

  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.

  August

  Chapter 82

  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.

  Chapter 83

  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 happ
ened 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.