An Absence of Light

Chapter 62

At the office, Graver kept one eye on the clock as he set about trying to put some order into a day that had begun with an assurance of disorder. It was a bad time for Lara to be out of pocket. The first thing he did was to pull one of the women from the data input clerks to take Lara’s place. She was lost, of course, but at least she could take messages and keep track of the flood of calls.

Next he started checking with his squad supervisors to make sure they were already moving. Organized Crime investigators and analysts were double-checking with informants who might have any remote knowledge of explosives use, as well as reviewing their most active investigations involving competing crime families and organizations, especially those headed by and comprised of Canadian, Asian, and Greek members, as well as the Black and Latin gang organizations that were increasingly becoming an interstate problem. Research and Analysis was already on the computers pulling up names of individuals and groups known to have used explosives or had contacts with those who had used explosives or who were involved in any kind of marine activity or having marine connections. The Anti-Terrorist Squad was running down their possibles in extremist groups of both wings, those having connections with illegal ordnance and explosives, pro-life and pro-choice activists, racist groups, radical religious groups, and persons in the public disorder files.

Graver had a hard time keeping his mind on what he was doing. He knew the odds of any of this hectic activity actually producing a genuine lead was remote. It felt odd to be overseeing a storm of activity that he knew was absolutely futile, to be authorizing the expenditure of manpower and funds on inquiries that could not possibly produce any yield whatsoever.

After his review with his last supervisor, Graver punched an outside line and called his FBI intelligence counterpart in the Federal Building across the bayou to check with their progress. Luckily, the FBI was fielding most of the telephone calls from other intelligence and law enforcement agencies who knew automatically that the FBI would bear the brunt of the investigation. The Bureau’s agents were scattered all over the Gulf Coast shaking down their informants in dissident and terrorist groups whom they considered the most likely candidates to use explosives. So far nothing had turned up, and his assessment of the situation at the South Shore Marina was very much as Olmstead had described it.

Westrate was next. Graver called him and brought him up to date on the morning’s events and the wheels that had been set in motion. He told Westrate that he would keep him informed and that as of yet they still didn’t even know if it was some kind of accident or a bomb. Westrate, ever mindful of his professional image, was getting nervous at being the man in the background of a headline story. Everyone knew that CID ought to have a bead on the possible perpetrators and that sooner or later-most likely sooner-the media would be coming to him with questions in that direction. The story had been on all three network morning news programs, Westrate informed him, and speculation was running high.

For Graver’s part, he was more concerned about the timing of finding human remains at the scene. If Burtell was identified, it was all over. The information about Ginette Burtell owning the boat would hold for a while. Graver had the leverage of being Olmstead’s superior, and he could use that leverage to stall for some time. So, unless Olmstead for some reason jumped procedural rules, Graver’s ad hoc task force was safe for a while longer.

At nine-thirty Graver went to Burtell’s personal file and found Ginette’s record. She was from Seattle, and she had listed her sister as the person she would like to have called in case of an emergency. He got the sister on the telephone, explained who he was, and told her that Dean had been in an accident and there was a good chance he had been killed. He told her that Ginette did not know this yet, nor did she know he was calling, but he thought she might need someone within the next twenty-four hours. She assured him she would catch the next available flight.

Having just about run out of time, Graver was getting ready to walk out of his office on his way to meet Victor Last when his handset rang. He picked it up from the edge of his desk.

“Graver, it’s Paula. We’ve been trying to get to you on your secure line, but it’s been constantly busy. Can you call us back on it? Arnette and I want to speak to you at the same time.”

Graver called Arnette’s number.

“Okay, here’s a quick recap of what we’ve pulled off of Dean’s tape so far,” Paula said. “It looks like Besom and Tisler were selling CID records to Faeber’s DataPrint for six months before Dean ever began to suspect anything was going on. Just about the time he was figuring this out, he was contacted by a guy named Geis. No first name. Geis is CIA.”

“Bullshit,” Graver said instantly. “This is what Dean’s got in those tapes? Is this his answer to the man at the Transco Fountain?”

Paula hesitated, surprised at his flash of anger. “Yeah, but wait a minute. Let me go on here.”

Graver was silent, conscious of strong and confused feelings about Burtell. What in the hell had he done? Had he gone back and rewritten his own record to cover himself? Graver was embarrassed for him. This smacked of self-serving damage control, and to see Burtell trying to sweep his own culpability under the rug by rewriting the record of his own dishonesty was doubly disappointing. Graver could understand why Dean had lied to Ginette, being too ashamed to want her to know what he’d done, but at least he should have given the rest of them the credit for knowing a scam when they saw it.

“Burtell was contacted by this guy who told him what Besom and Tisler were doing, told him about the Faeber/Kalatis connection. He then gave Dean essentially the same data on Raviv/Kalatis that Arnette has here. He has in his record almost the identical information. So maybe Geis is CIA.”

“Why would you believe that?” Graver interrupted heatedly. “Arnette, are you on the line?”

“Yep.”

“Why would you believe that, Arnette? If you have the information, why couldn’t someone else outside the agency have the information too? Don’t you think you should be a little skeptical about this?”

“Why don’t you let her go on, Marcus?” Arnette said. She was cool, her voice even and steady.

“Shit” He was furious. “Go ahead.” He felt like he was being led around by the nose, and he was getting tired of it. He was impatient and almost too angry to sit still.

“According to Dean,” Paula began again, “Geis tells him that he thinks Kalatis is setting up some kind of enormous sting operation through his drug smuggling business with Brod Strasser. He outlines the same drug operation that we picked up on the tape from Sheck. Same bogus companies, same operational methods. Everything.”

“His detail here is exact, Marcus,” Arnette interjected. “Your point is well taken about other private intelligence companies having what I have, but you know as well as I do-and I’ll write off your slight to frustration-that I’m a little different from ‘most’ private intelligence operations. I don’t know of anyone else… anyone… with my access. That’s why I was so excited to get onto Kalatis.” She hesitated for emphasis. “Nobody but the majors have him, baby. We’ve got to take this Geis seriously.”

Graver said nothing. All along Arnette had insisted the man at the Transco Fountain was “government.” Now Dean’s records were confirming her assertions. He couldn’t blame her for wanting to believe him. Paula went on.

“Geis wanted Dean to work his way inside and help them find out what Kalatis was up to. Geis was pretty damned uncomfortable not knowing what Kalatis was doing besides the drug business. So he gives Dean what he needs to know. Dean ‘discovers’ Besom’s and Tisler’s information-selling operation and demands a piece of it, or he’ll blow it. Soon, with Geis’s background help and guidance, he’s well into the operation.”

“And getting paid off just like they were,” Graver added cynically.

“Apparently so,” Paula said. “He doesn’t hide that It’s all right here. They were making a lot of money. Kalatis was paying generously.”

“And the Seldon investigation?”

“Just what we thought, another cooked operation. Kalatis wanted Seldon out of the way. Dean never really spells out why, just that Seldon was the next target.”

“Is that it? What did Dean find out for Geis?”

“Not a lot. It was months before Dean ever met Kalatis, but when he did it seems that Kalatis found him a little more to his liking than either Besom or Tisler. Before long Dean was handling most of the communication between the CID guys and Kalatis/Faeber. Kalatis came up with the idea of the bogus investigations as a means of eliminating competitors and put Dean in charge of the operation. Probst is the first target. It comes off beautifully. Kalatis is pleased. Friel is next. Then Seldon.

“But Kalatis was careful. Besom and Tisler never knew about anything except their own little areas of operation. They never knew about Sheck’s network, for instance, or about his back-door connection to Kalatis. They never had a sense of the size of the organization.

“Dean was reasonably aggressive, though,” she added. “He let Kalatis know that he was ambitious and wanted to be more active, more involved. He presented ideas. Proposed operations that could expand their data collection into other intelligence agencies. Geis was feeding Dean information to help build his credibility with Kalatis, helping him present some enticing projects, hoping Kalatis would come to rely on him and eventually pull Dean deeper into the organization.”

“What Dean didn’t know, however,*’ Arnette put in again, “was that Kalatis wasn’t taking on any new ideas. Whatever Geis suspected Kalatis of doing, whatever his sting was, it was on its last passage. If Dean had come along a year earlier, two years earlier, Kalatis would have found a place for him. But he wasn’t about to bring in any more clever people this late in his game. He was already shutting down. Dean didn’t have a chance.”

“But,” Paula said, “Kalatis did put him in touch with Sheck. That’s how Sheck got into the Probst operation.”

“That’s most of it, the heart of the story,” Arnette said. “Dean includes an encyclopedia of details about these operations, some of which are going to be useful in other ways. He was thoroughly familiar with Sheck’s network of information buyers and adds another perspective to Sheck’s own account of what he was doing.”

“Let’s go back to the sting,” Graver said. “What’s the story on that?”

“It’s intriguing, but not very informative,” Arnette continued. “Sheck, keeping his fingers in the works via his pilot buddies, thinks Kalatis and Strasser are getting ready to offer one last giant buy to their investors. They’ll all be asked to come up with more money than ever before while being promised, of course, equally greater profits. But Sheck predicts Kalatis and Strasser are going to walk away with it-just vanish with the millions.”

“Then he agrees with Geis.”

“Apparently so. He also points out that by the time this happens, Kalatis and Strasser will have dismantled enough of their operation here that they’ll be untraceable. And I’ll have to say, as old intelligence hands they know how to cover a trail. They can probably pull it off.”

“And Dean reported all this to Geis?”

“He did.”

“Okay, then. What about Geis?”

“That’s the big disappointment,” Paula said. “Dean gives details of how he contacts Geis and where they met, how Geis contacts him. All of it is standard operations procedure. We have telephone numbers. We have dead drop locations. We have serial contact outlines. Dean was giving us everything. But, unfortunately, Geis also met Dean at the marina a number of times. We have the contact procedures that they followed when they wanted that to happen. It would have been a perfect opportunity to set the guy up. Would have been, but not now.”

“Geis’s hair must have stood on end when he saw the news of the explosion,” Arnette put in. “None of the contact information Dean gave us is any good now. In fact, I doubt if we’ll ever hear of Mr. Geis again. For all practical purposes, when Kalatis killed Dean, he killed Geis too.”

Graver was silent a moment. He had to admit it did sound good. If he was condemning Burtell he might be condemning the wrong man. Still, he was angry. How could Burtell have so readily assigned his loyalty to Geis, a man he had never met, while at the same time withholding his faith in Graver with whom he had been close for so many years? It didn’t make much sense to Graver, and he could not deny that it hurt more than a little to discover Dean’s distrust. It would almost be easier to believe that Burtell had been dirty than to admit that when so much had been at stake-even, ultimately, his life-Burtell had not trusted Graver enough to overcome his suspicion. If that was, in fact, what it was that had caused Dean to keep his “undercover assignment” to himself.

But in all honesty, Graver couldn’t blame Dean. Hadn’t Graver himself done the same thing? When he first realized that the CID had a leak, and suspicion turned in Burtell’s direction, hadn’t Graver investigated him with a cold disregard for their close personal relationship? Graver had trained him, and both men had been more loyal to their training-and to the system that had taught them-than to each other. Graver always had believed that his quiet, invisible work was his personal contribution to a reasonable society’s struggle to maintain its balance against the innumerable and ever-present tyrannies of social chaos. He didn’t have a missionary zeal about it, but he never doubted he was doing what was right and necessary.

Now, he felt as if he had tricked himself. He remembered a quote from Aeschylus which had appeared at the beginning of a chapter on totalitarianism in a book he had used years before in a series of courses he had taken at Georgetown University. “For somehow, this is tyranny’s disease, to trust no friend.”

At the time, the quote had lodged in his mind as a reminder of the consequences of the evils he had sworn to engage. It was an acrid and disconcerting irony, then, to find that “tyranny’s disease” was alive and well among the men who had dedicated themselves to opposing tyranny itself. The disease had invaded the physician, despite his skills and good intentions, despite his best efforts.

“This is too neat,” he heard himself say. He swallowed hard to dislodge the lump in his throat “I don’t understand,” he said, trying to sound terse and focused, “why Dean is giving all this up to us. Why, suddenly, at the last minute, is he spilling everything he knows-about Kalatis and Faeber, and especially about Geis? Why wouldn’t he ‘keep the faith’ with the CIA?”

For the first time Arnette had no response.

“All the loose ends are falling into place,” Graver went on, “but it’s all happening a little too late, isn’t it We’ve uncovered a wealth of information in record time, but Geis has evaporated, and we’re not a single step closer to Kalatis.”

“That’s right,” Arnette snapped back. “Look, Marcus, I don’t know how to answer your questions about Dean, but I do know he’s put us onto some very serious operations here. Yes, all the big players are disappearing into the woodwork. That’s what they’re trained to do. That’s their business. If they didn’t sew up loose ends, they wouldn’t be in business. But the fact is, Dean’s given us a hell of a lot more than we would have had without him. I’m not going to agonize about his ethics this late in the game. We’re not through here; we still need a lot of answers. I’m not going to blame Dean because he didn’t clear up everything for me. As for his role in this, you may never figure it out. Or if you do, you might not like it But does that really make a goddamned bit of difference as to what we do now?”

For a few moments the line was dead, no one spoke. Then Graver said:

“Okay, Arnette. You’re right” He paused again. “But for right now I’ve still got just one objective… and just one more chance at achieving it. Paula, can you glean anything else from the files?”

“Oh, sure,” Paula said. “There are a million details, stuff we can follow up on for months. As far as connections go, this is a bonanza.”

“Arnette,” Graver said, “you have no interest in the operational end here, I know. But if I get a shot at Kalatis can I get some backup from your people? Before you answer, you’d better know this: there’s not a dime in it.”

“I told you, I’m already making money off this, baby,” Arnette said. “You can have my people anytime. I’m way ahead of the game here.”

“Okay,” Graver said. “We may have a long shot I’ll get back to you within a couple of hours.”