An Absence of Light (56 page)

The explosion in the harbor had disturbed a very tightly scheduled series of events and possibly had ruined the rest of Kalatis’s program. Possibly. Now he had to decide whether he thought he could salvage all of it, or whether he thought he should cut his losses. That would mean passing up nearly forty million dollars, and that kind of money was worth considerable risk.

But, there
was
considerable risk. Not the least of which was continuing his plan without knowing who was responsible for the explosion. Was this an accident? Burtell and Sheck were almost surely killed in that fire, since it was their habit to meet on Burtell’s boat If they were, what kind of a coincidence was that? None, he was sure. Kalatis had planned and escaped too many intrigues to believe in coincidence. Coincidence was a thing that occurred so rarely that he considered it almost an apocryphal concept. Like the unicorn, it was an idea of fools and romantics. As an explanation for anything as concrete as an explosion, it was a delusion.

He had so little time left—he was beginning his last day of collections—that it was hardly worth the effort of putting into operation any kind of serious investigation. His best course of action was to try and speed up the collection process which was, as always, to take place late at night and in the early morning hours. Now he had his people getting in touch with the three remaining clients, trying to arrange their appointments for earlier in the evening or, even better, late in the afternoon. This change would be catching his clients by surprise, and they would surely have procedural adjustments to bring about before they could comply with his request All of this was to be negotiated during the next three or four hours. By daylight the next morning, Panos Kalatis would have disappeared off the face of the earth.

Of course, there was the possibility that Sheck, or even Burtell, had enemies Kalatis knew nothing about The explosion did not necessarily have to do with him or with their relationship to him. There was no way of knowing who Sheck might have angered and for what reasons. It could be that this had nothing to do with Kalatis at all.

But Kalatis had not remained alive all these years by keeping faith with “possibilities” and “could be’s.” He had remained alive because at the slightest hint of the inconsistent or the inexplicable, he vanished. He did not wait for explanations. They would come eventually, but when they did Kalatis would be somewhere safe to hear them out. A man without a sixth sense was a dead man.

Thus his thoughts turned to Graver. Kalatis was well aware of Graver’s friendship with Dean Burtell, but he had seen big money come between friendships before—it was almost the rule—and he had fully intended to cause such a breach—to his benefit—when he had offered Burtell the five-hundred-thousand-dollar retirement fund. That had been Tuesday night. Now it was Thursday morning, and he had heard not a word from Burtell. He had been willing to bet that the intervening silence was good news. Burtell, it seemed to him, was no less venal than all the other people whose loyalties he paid for every day of the week. He believed he had made a sound investment.

But with Burtell’s death, all bets were off. He knew Graver well enough to know what to expect. If Graver didn’t already know Kalatis was involved with one of his men, he would know soon enough. It was time to stop calculating and start moving.

Standing in the doorway thinking of these things, he flinched only a little when the two bare arms reached around his chest, and he felt Jael’s breasts against the middle of his back, felt her pelvis tuck into his buttocks.

“What are your thought?” she asked in her accented and ungrammatical English.

Kalatis did not respond immediately. He was always polite to her, even kind, even indulgent, but he was never tender. He really did think of her as a cat. You kept it well fed and well groomed. You could scratch it and rub it, give it small pleasures, but you must never become its friend. You must never display a regard that hinted you would make any sacrifice, however small or insignificant, on its behalf. It was not a relationship that accommodated friendship.

So he ignored her because he did not want to be bothered at that moment He smoked and shrugged her off irritably. She backed away, and in the silence behind him he heard the soft crunching of the mattress as she returned to the bed and the cool Egyptian cotton sheets. He had to think, not of her, but of himself. He had to make sure he was doing the right thing, dispensing with the right people, setting into motion the right timing.

In reviewing his plans there was nothing he regretted. Well, perhaps walking away from the house in Bogotá. And leaving forever the dusky loins of Colombia’s remarkable women. That he truly would regret But as for the rest of it, he gave nothing else a second thought He had done it often enough for it to be almost familiar. In fact, all those Spartan vanishments over the years—those times when he had built a full life and then one day, because of a telephone call or a three-word note slipped under his door or a notice in the personals column of the newspaper, he closed the door behind him and walked away into another life leaving the alarm clock still set for the next morning—all of those Spartan disappearances when he left a life with only the clothes on his back to accompany him were like dress rehearsals for this final one in which he was taking as much of the world with him as he could possibly manage. His new life would be his last life. He did not intend to disappear ever again, nor did he intend to start all over with nothing, as he had every time before. This final time he would have millions, scattered over the globe in a dozen caches protected by codes and ciphers and shielded accounts. The plan was elaborate, extensive, with dozens of people needed to bring it to its conclusion, but in the end, after a lengthy unfolding, there would be only himself, walking through a doorway alone, to a new life. For the last time.

Colin Faeber put down the telephone in his office and was immediately aware of a clammy dampness around his mouth. He knew that a condensation of perspiration was forming on his upper lip. The woman had said that Gilbert Hormann had died of a heart attack in the suite adjacent to his office sometime during the night His personal secretary had found his body herself, when she came into the office that morning. She was sorry, she said, but she couldn’t talk anymore. There was so much confusion there now. They had just taken away the body. Everyone was very upset It was tragic, so tragic.

Faeber sat immobile in his chair and counted them off: Tisler, suicide. Besom, heart attack. Burtell, probably in the explosion. He couldn’t find Sheck. Possibly in the explosion with Burtell, since that was their primary meeting location. Hormann, heart attack.

And now he could not raise Kalatis on their code line. Had something happened to him as well? What the hell was happening? He put his hands on the edge of the desk in front of him as if he were steadying himself against the gunnel of a boat, as if he were fighting the nausea of too many hours at sea. Was there something going on here that he should see, something obvious that in retrospect he would see all too clearly and wonder why he hadn’t detected it in the first place? His stomach tumbled at the thought of it But since he couldn’t “see” it, what should he do? Should he take the extreme step of contacting Strasser? He had been told never to do that Strasser was “out of the picture” except financially. He was completely removed, and it was clearly his intention to remain that way. The idea was only fleeting, for if Faeber was intimidated by Kalatis, he was petrified by Brod Strasser whom he had met on only four occasions during the three and a half years since he had bought controlling interest in DataPrint.

He looked around his office which was modern in style as befitted his profession, chrome and glass and copolymer furniture, decorated in primary colors with touches here and there of Italian
moderne
furnishings, the coffee server, the cocktail pitchers in the liquor cabinets. He stood up from his desk. He didn’t know why. He wasn’t going anywhere. He didn’t know what to do. But he couldn’t sit still, either. There was no contingency plan for this kind of thing, everyone dying, nobody to contact What the hell was going on? Was this thing coming to an end? Was he in danger? Christ! What would make him think he
wasn’t?
Why
wouldn’t
he be?

He started toward the door of his office, hesitated, turned back and stood at the window behind his desk. From the western edge of downtown he looked westward, over a sweep of the green canopies of trees toward the satellite commercial centers whose office towers punched up out of the carpet of thick woods like futuristic cities on a jungle-covered planet. Though he had stood at these windows and daydreamed over this view countless times, just now it seemed alien, as though he had awakened in an unfamiliar world. He felt only an unmistakable anxiety.

Turning away from the window again he walked to the door and opened it.

“Connie,” he said. That was all he had to say. She was typing at her computer screen and stopped immediately, though without hurrying, and in one or two moments she was in his office. “Close the door,” he said.

She looked at him as he turned around midway to his desk.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

Colin Faeber, like many businessmen the world over, had fallen, if not in love, then at least into serious glandular obsession with his secretary. Connie, like secretaries the world over, had allowed him to indulge his obsession. It was an easy thing to do. Convenient. Though the sex was usually mundane to forgettable, the perks were often superb. But Faeber’s record with wives and other women was a poor one. His understanding of women in general was obtuse. It was something he never bothered to analyze, and therefore he never acquired more than an adolescent’s comprehension about the opposite sex. It was, for the most part, simply a libidinal conversance, and even that was only rudimentary.

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.