An Absence of Light (70 page)

“Geis,” Graver said.

The man stopped also. He looked at Graver with an unconcerned but serious face.

“Very good,” he said. “That’s commendable.”

The photographs from the fountain flipped through Graver’s memory. The man at the fountain. Geis. As Arnette had pointed out, this Geis in front of him was unremarkable in appearance. The slightly rounded nose was indeed familiar. The man exuded… nothing. He was so common in appearance as to have been all but invisible had he been encountered on the street or in a mall or sitting in the car next to you in traffic. He was uninteresting in every way.

“What are you doing here?” Graver asked.

“Vested interests, Graver. Vested interests.” He nodded at his own words. He said it wearily, as though he had had a long day but wasn’t going to complain about it “What, uh… Is all the money here?”

Graver hesitated, he didn’t know why. More than likely Geis knew damn well where the money was.

“It’s all here,” Graver said.

“What about Panos Kalatis?”

“I don’t know anything about Kalatis.”

Geis sighed and nodded. “Did you know his house blew up about an hour ago?”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Big-time. Blew to shit.”

Geis nodded at his own description of the severity of the explosion and then leaned sideways a little to look around Graver at the entrance of the hangar. His cheap, loose-fitting suit emphasized his rounded shoulders and dumpy stature. Graver noticed that the sleeves of his coat were a little too long, coming down onto his hands.

“You have people back in there with guns, I guess,” Geis observed blandly. He might have been asking Graver if he had a ride home.

Graver said nothing.

“Well, look,” Geis said, straightening up and putting his pudgy hands into the pockets of his baggy trousers, “I’m, uh, I’m going to have to take the money.”

“Where?”

“Well, with me.”

“I don’t think so,” Graver said.

Pause.

“Is it all in the hangar there, in the van?”

Graver said nothing.

“I don’t think it’s all in the van,” Geis said, almost to himself. “You haven’t had time to unload the Pilatus yet.”

Pause.

Graver turned partway to the hangar and called back over his shoulder. “Use the handset and call Westrate,” he said. “Get a tac squad out here. Tell them who’s here.”

“Don’t do that,” Geis said quickly, but without urgency. “I mean, we’ll be out of here before anybody can get here, but if we leave without the money it will be very, very bad. Just have them hold off on that call. I’ll show you what I mean.”

There was something about Geis’s sang-froid in the presence of so much death that made Graver take his words seriously. He raised his hand and turned and looked toward the hangar.

“Hold it,” he yelled. He turned to Geis. “If you’re CIA you’d better produce some proof. I’m not letting you take that money without some very convincing authorization.” He hesitated a couple of counts. “I mean it.”

Geis waved at the helicopter without turning around. “I’ll show you,” he repeated.

The door to the helicopter opened again and a man stepped out carrying a telephone and jogged over to them. He gave the telephone to Geis and then stepped back a few steps and waited. Geis pushed a button on the black instrument, listened a moment, and then said, “Put him on.” Then he handed the phone to Graver.

Graver took it and put it to his ear. “Hello,” he said.

“Captain, this is Neuman.”

“Casey? Where are you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What do you mean? What’s going on?”

“Well, they’re holding us somewhere.”

“You and Ledet?”

“Yeah.” Pause. “And Lara and Ginette Burtell.”

Graver almost dropped the telephone. His muscles went limp, as if he had been swimming for hours, as if there was nothing left in him or in them, no strength at all, just quivering muscle.

“I want to speak to Lara,” Graver said.

“I’ll see…”

Pause.

“Hello?” Lara sounded scared. That was immediately apparent It took only two syllables.

“Lara, are you okay?” Graver asked, fixing his eyes on Geis.

“Yes. Yes, we’re okay. They broke into the house…” She started crying, stopped, recovered her voice. “I’m sorry… God…”

They broke into the house? Graver’s throat tightened. Neuman was back on the line.

“We’re all right,” Neuman assured him.

“No one’s hurt… ?”

“No, no, everything’s fine, nothing like that.”

“Okay,” Graver said. “Don’t worry. It’ll be all right. We’re working it out. Understand?”

“Yeah. Captain… ‘Geis’ is Strasser…” The line went dead.

Strasser.

The dumpy man reached out for the telephone, took it from Graver, and handed it back to the man who had brought it to them from the helicopter.

“You’re Brod Strasser?” Graver felt like a fool. He had seen no further into this nightmare than if he had been a kid. The surprise was debilitating. Not only that, he knew that Strasser would kill everyone he was holding if he thought he had to.

“There’s just a lot going on here that you don’t understand, Graver,” Strasser said.

“I have no doubt of that.” Graver was almost ashamed of his stupidity. He had risked everyone’s life. Somewhere along the way he had allowed himself to get sucked into a maelstrom of self-deception. Standing here, facing this powerful, disheveled little man. Graver suddenly realized how terribly wrong he had gone. Now this banal, dangerous creature was threatening four more deaths. Graver was appalled at what he had done.

“Do you know what Kalatis was doing?” Strasser asked. His voice brought Graver back to the moment.

“I assumed the two of you were robbing one more grave.”

“Well, there you have it That’s precisely why we’re standing here.
We
weren’t doing anything. Panos was taking all of this for himself. I’ve most certainly seen the last of Panos Kalatis. There’s a total of forty million dollars here. A little over. This was the last ‘collection’ of a series of collections that Panos has been making behind my back. He’s already gotten away with over”—Strasser paused and leaned forward toward Graver for emphasis, the hands of his short arms still jammed into his pockets—”one hundred million… in this deal.
Our’
money, as it were.”

Strasser straightened up. “But he would have had one hundred and
forty
million if I hadn’t stopped the hemorrhage. I’ve got men running my interests all over the world, Graver. Sometimes they manage to steal from me for a long time before I catch them. Panos was better at it than most Silly bastard.”

“Was he burning his bridges? Is that why everyone died?”

“Well, not everyone. Tisler, Besom, yes, of course. Faeber, Gilbert Hormann, yes. But Burtell was working for me, and he was catching on that… he was being used.”

“That you weren’t CIA.”

Strasser gave a quick shrug.

“What about Sheck?”

“Oh, Sheck just happened… you know, to be in the wrong place, wrong time. That happens to people like Sheck. If it hadn’t been there last night, it would have been somewhere else another night.”

“Jesus Christ.” Graver couldn’t believe his ears.

“Kalatis,” Strasser said, shaking his head. “Things began to unravel. It’s too bad. There’s this concept, a bourgeois concept you find even in the most un-bour-geois-like people—Kalatis for example—this bourgeois concept, that a person oughtn’t to have to work all his life. That’s just a bizarre concept when you think about it. I mean, where does that
come
from? That’s what got Kalatis into trouble. He wanted this bundle to ‘retire.’ He just wanted to kick back and screw young girls the rest of his life.”

“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.