An Absence of Light

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 Muzak 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.”

“He didn’t know her name?”

“Kalatis never spoke to her. Just motioned to her to do what he wanted. Bring drinks. Take away drinks. Whatever.”

There was another pause as Graver tried to push his brain in the right directions, tried to probe possibilities, the opportunities that would give him the most advantage with the least expenditure of time.

“Look, uh,” Rayner said, speaking for the first time, glancing at Last with a look of impatience, “what is it, exactly, that you can do for us?”

Graver leveled his eyes on her. “What is it you want me to do?”

Rayner stared at him. She clearly was uncertain whether or how she should describe her plan to him. She seemed to be trying to figure out how to get to the subject without getting to the point She said:

“We want to use the information we’ve obtained to convince Faeber and Kalatis that we need some retirement security.”

“We?”

“Me and Connie,” she said, tilting her head at the other woman. “There aren’t any golden parachutes for wives and secretaries. It would be… only fair for us to have some financial assurance.”

“You mean extortion.”

“I mean,” she said, glancing at Last, “that Victor led me to believe that you knew something about these matters and could help us… inform us how to protect ourselves from… legal complications as we go about doing this. That’s what I mean.”

She was a little testy.

“Well, what you seem to be suggesting might be a little hard to do now,” Graver said.

Rayner frowned at him. Last squirmed in his seat.

“What do you mean, ‘now’?” Rayner asked.

“From the way Connie described this morning’s meeting with your husband,” Graver said, “it sounds to me like he thinks his house of cards is collapsing. And he thinks he’s been left behind to be buried in the rubble. It looks like Kalatis and Strasser are closing down the operation. They’re burning their bridges-Tisler, Besom, Burtell, Hormann, Sheck. And if Kalatis doesn’t kill your husband first, he’ll probably spend the rest of his life in jail. As soon as the police put together all these deaths, it won’t take them long to shut down DataPrint and its ‘intel project’ “He paused, his attention still fixed on Rayner. “I’m afraid your idea is just a little late in coming,” he concluded.

“Jesus Christ” Connie sank back against the door.

“That damn stupid pud,” Rayner said, shaking her head, half-pissed at Faeber, half-pitying him. “He might as well have just waded out into the damn Gulf of Mexico, just kept going until he fell off the damn continental shelf. Wasn’t even smart enough to get himself blackmailed.”

Nobody moved or spoke in the cool, perfumed compartment Graver watched Connie. Something had hit her harder than the other two. She was worried, staring out into the midday glare. Rayner’s mind was churning, though, and it didn’t take her long to come up with the obvious. But Last was there ahead of her, and tried to stop her before she opened her mouth.

“That’s it then,” Last said. “We’d better let this man get on with his business.”

“Wait just a damn minute,” Rayner said to Last “There’s a plan B here, and I think he”-she nodded at Graver-”might be able to help us out on it.”

“I don’t think we ought to worry him about any plan B’s right now,” Last said, trying to cut her off. “He agreed to help us if he could, but it’s clear that he can’t He’s not obligated to anything else.”

“Plan B,” Rayner said forcefully, ignoring Last and speaking directly to Graver, “is that we go after the biggest clients in the ‘intel’ file. These are big people, corporate people, who paid cash for personal intelligence on competitors, political enemies, people they wanted to ruin or outbid or outmaneuver or blackmail. There are politicians on that list, CEO’s, bankers. If it became known what they had done it could ruin careers, bring down corporations, ruin marriages, destroy reputations…” She stopped. “But there’s a small ‘window of opportunity’ here. We’ve got to move in a hurry. Once the police get onto this, once they have the ‘intel’ tapes, we won’t be able to touch these people. It’ll all be over.”

She looked at Last triumphantly. “Hell, that could be the ticket right there. We could tell them up front: Look, the police will be onto this thing in ten days. We have access to the computers. In exchange for a little financial consideration, we can erase your name from the files, and when the investigation breaks your name won’t even exist…”

She stopped and looked at Graver, then back at Last who was slumped against his door, staring at her like he could have strangled her.

“What’s the matter?” she said.

Graver turned to Last. “I’ll let you deal with this,” he said. Then he looked at Connie. “You want to tell me where he is? I could probably get some more information from him that might be useful. That would take the responsibility off you. You wouldn’t have it on your conscience… if something happened to him.”

“What?” Rayner was looking around at everyone, confused that everyone was acting as if she hadn’t said anything at all, that she didn’t exist.

“He’s at my place,” Connie said, and she gave him the address.

“Colin?” Rayner snapped her head around to the secretary.

“Does Kalatis know where you live?” Graver asked.

Connie shook her head. “That’s why I sent him there.” She looked sick.

“Don’t go back there,” Graver said to her. “Not today, not tonight” Her eyes widened. “I’ll call you when it’s all right,” he said. “Stay at a hotel tonight, at a friend’s. Go on to work tomorrow as usual, and when it’s okay I’ll leave a message at your office. It won’t be explicit, but you’ll understand.”

She nodded. Graver knew she would do whatever he said. She had crossed the line from out of control to under control.

“Hello? Hello? Am I missing something here?” Rayner sputtered. “Did anyone hear anything I said?” She had turned around now and was crouching on her knees, facing the back seat, her cleavage well presented.

“Bloody hell,” Last said to her. “Give it a rest, love.”

“What!” Rayner was incredulous.

“Don’t get lost,” Graver said to Last. “I’m going to want to reach you.”

Last nodded miserably. Graver opened the door of the BMW and got out. He walked to his car, got in, started the motor, and backed out of the parking slot Punching in Arnette’s number on the handset, he started down the ramp, and looked in his rearview mirror. The midnight blue BMW hadn’t moved. He could only imagine the conversation inside.