An Absence of Light (68 page)

Inside this back-room “office” Graver, Murray, and Last waited. There was a door in the partitioned wall and a sash window covered with a glaze of dirt and two walnut-sized clods of dirt dauber’s nests. The place smelled of undisturbed dust and oil as they stood among stacks of used tires and misshapen cardboard boxes Riled with disassembled parts of old airplanes. Just outside the partitioned office, Remberto hid in the corner formed by the walls of the office and the hangar, wedged between another stack of old tires and an aluminum flat-bottomed boat which was leaning against the front wall of the office. The tin walls of the hangar were still crackling but now it was because the tin was cooling down from the day’s heat.

They had not been in their places more than ten minutes, having hurriedly hidden the two cars in adjacent hangars, when a truck approached along the caliche road that led from the highway three miles away. From the sound of its revving engine, the driver was in a hurry, the sound growing louder until the truck roared up to the closed doors of the hangar and stopped. While the engine idled, a door opened, and someone quickly approached the hangar doors and started fiddling with the latch. Then suddenly the doors slid apart and a man stood between the headlights of a panel truck, its high beams illuminating the glaze of dirt on the office window. Graver and the others pulled back in the shadows.

For a moment Graver thought the man was going to search the hangar, but then he turned, got back into the truck and drove it into the hangar and cut the lights and the engine. Again the man got out of the truck and went back to the hangar doors and pulled them closed, or nearly closed, leaving a space of about a foot between them. He stood in the opening looking out and nervously took out a cigarette and lit it, blowing the smoke out the opening into the darkness.

Then, immediately, there was the distant sound of an airplane. The driver heard it too and threw down his cigarette, shoved the doors a little farther apart and stepped out The sound of the plane grew louder as it approached until it changed tone slightly and suddenly burst low over the hangar and continued out over the Gulf.

The man hurried back inside the hangar, went to an electrical box installed on the wall to the right of the doors, and threw a switch. Through the larger separation of the doors, Graver could make out a string of weak lights spaced far apart along either side of the runway. It appeared to be a makeshift lighting system. The landing strip itself was very obviously only a daytime landing field. The man returned to the door, stepped outside, and looked either way.

Almost immediately the sound of the plane returned, but this time it was coming from the direction of the Gulf. Graver listened to it, imagining the aircraft coming in low over the water and leveling off. He heard it trimming its speed, the tone of the engine deepening, and then it cut way down, and the plane was on the tarmac. Graver saw the lights flick past the crack in the door as the plane wheezed to taxiing speed, revved slightly as it turned, and headed toward the hangar.

As the sound of the taxiing engine approached, the driver of the van began pushing aside the two hangar doors until they were wide open, and the plane taxied up to the opening until its nose was almost inside the hangar. Then the pilot cut the engine, and the prop feathered to a standstill.

The driver slapped open the latches on the back doors of the van, and flung them open. At the same time the door to the airplane, which was situated almost midway in the fuselage and contained the second window back from the cockpit, opened from its middle, the top half hinged at the top swinging up and out of the way while the bottom half folded down to make steps.

Graver watched with one eye peering through the dirty window as a large man wearing a sport coat without a tie and carrying an Uzi equipped with a silencer was the first to disembark.

“Everything okay here?” he asked, standing at the bottom of the steps and looking at the back of the truck where an interior light was throwing a splash of illumination on the concrete floor of the darkened hangar.

“I’m ready to load up,” the driver said from inside the back of the truck, but not exactly responding to the guard’s question.

The guard nodded unenthusiastically, and looked around as the pilot—Wade Pace, Graver reminded himself—came down the steps followed by a man who must have been the copilot, followed by a man in a business suit who was unsteady and unsure about coming down the narrow steps of the plane.

Pace came up to the back of the truck and looked in.

“I’ve got eight boxes,” he said.

“Okay, fine. Bring ’em out, and I’ll stack ’em in the back here.”

Pace looked at the guard who was standing near the door of the plane now. The guard looked back at him.

“Go ahead,” the guard said, jerking his head toward the steps of the plane.

“We could use a little help,” Pace said.

The guard gave a jerk of his head that said tough luck and checked the silencer on the Uzi as if to make sure it was secure.

Pace hesitated, still looking at the guard, then turned and started to the steps of the plane.

“I want to call Kalatis about this,” the client said, standing awkwardly near the hangar door. He was visibly jittery, one hand on his hip, the other one wiping his face. “This sort of thing’s never happened before. This is a hell of a long way from Mexico.”

“We can’t risk radio contact from here,” the guard said. “Security is Mr. Kalatis’s special expertise. He knows what he’s doing.”

The client clearly knew he was in no position to demand anything. If his money was being stolen right now, there was nothing he could do about it, and he would be lucky not to be shot. If it wasn’t being stolen, if this was a legitimate security maneuver, then he ought to keep his mouth shut and not alienate the people who were trying to protect his money.

Pace swore and climbed into the plane. In a moment he began handing out banker’s boxes to the copilot The client watched them. It apparently didn’t occur to him that he might help, or if it did he had decided that it wasn’t his job either. No one said anything else until Pace handed down the last box to the copilot who lugged it to the back of the van and plopped it down on the carpeted floor at the rear door.

“That’s it.” Pace said, coming down the steps. “We’re outta here.”

“You remember what to do?” the guard asked.

“I think I can manage,” Pace said, pissed at the guard’s surly haughtiness.

“You’ve got the coordinates… fifteen miles out, and then you can do whatever the hell you want.”

“Let’s go,” Pace said to his copilot, and the two of them slowly pushed the plane back away from the hangar doorway into the darkness at the edge of the tarmac.

In the dim light coming from the back of the van, Graver could barely make them out climbing back into the plane and pulling the steps up behind them. In a minute the plane engine kicked alive, and Pace revved it to a whine, held it a minute and then maneuvered his flaps to turn the plane toward the tarmac where it taxied toward the end of the runway. He squared for the takeoff, revved his engine, and then the plane was barreling down the runway and lifting off over the water toward the Gulf the way it had come in.

The guard, the van driver, and the client stood just at the edge of the splash of light and watched the plane’s lights disappear into the stars, and then the guard turned, lifted his Uzi, and shot the other two men.

The two muted bursts were startling, the rapid thupping sounds incongruously matched to their effect, which was to cause blood to spray from the two men’s backs while simultaneously knocking them cleanly off their feet.

Graver felt Murray and Last flinch on either side of him, and as it happened his mind rapidly registered a decision to do nothing: It would do no good to shoot the guard now. They could not prevent the two deaths they had just witnessed. If they could have anticipated that and prevented it then shooting him would have been justified. But now, the guard was more use to them alive. Graver was grateful for Remberto’s training. Another man might have shot the guard instantly.

So they watched as the guard slung the Uzi over his shoulder by its strap, came into the hangar, and cut off the runway lights. Then he went back outside, grabbed the feet of the client, and dragged him out of the light and around the corner of the hangar. After a while he returned and grabbed the feet of the van driver and dragged him away also. When he returned, he stepped to the side of the hangar doors, picked up a garden hose that was coiled there, turned on the hydrant to which the hose was attached, and started washing away the considerable amount of blood from in front of the doorway and into the darkness.

The sixty-five-foot
Sphinx
rocked gently in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. The pontoon plane had gone, and Kalatis and Jael sat on the deck with binoculars, their feet on the railing gazing at a specific coordinate to the northwest. The area they were watching was fifteen miles off the coast and might as well have been fifteen hundred miles off the coast It was the middle of nowhere and didn’t exist at all until someone drew the navigational coordinates on a map to define it. For three hundred and sixty degrees there was nothing but emptiness and darkness and one direction could have been any direction; it was all empty, without boundary or meaning or relationship.

Kalatis checked his watch and then looked again in that one single direction that the navigational maps had told him was the right direction. He lifted his binoculars. The space around them was silent except for the whispered swash of the Gulf Stream nibbling at the hull of the
Sphinx
.

Suddenly there was a bright flash directly in line with Kalatis’s gaze.

“Christ!” he said. “There it is. Close. Shit, closer than I was expecting. I didn’t even hear the plane.”

He took down his binoculars and watched the fireball the size of an orange against the star-speckled darkness.

“How much far away is that?” Jael asked, lifting her binoculars to see it more clearly.

“I don’t know,” Kalatis said, raising his binoculars again. “A mile. Maybe a mile.”

The fireball died out quickly, leaving its afterimage in the stars.

“That’s Pace,” Kalatis said. “The first thirteen million is in the van.”

The guard came back into the hangar and stood at the rear of the van. He was out of Graver’s line of sight for a few moments, but whatever he was doing didn’t last long, and he soon closed both doors and slammed down the latch. But he did not close the hangar doors. Rather, he stood outside the opening, just about where he had shot the two men a few moments earlier, and worked with his Uzi. It sounded like he was fieldstripping the gun, a fact which gave Graver pause. As soon as the next plane landed Graver would be confronted with two armed men. Now was the perfect moment to cut that risk in half. But if he did, there would be no way of knowing whether or not this man had a role—a signal, some kind of all-clear communication—to play in the landing of the next shipment And Graver wanted that next shipment right there in the van in front of him, just like the first one. So he waited.

The heat inside the back room of the hangar was exacerbated by the dead weight of the motionless air. There was no circulation, and everything Graver touched stuck to him. Like Remberto, he had shed his coat and rolled his sleeves to his elbows, and every time he put his arm down on the edge of the barrel or on a box or a board, a layer of dust stuck to the sweat on his forearm. Perspiration rolled down his ribs, staining his shirt in long, dark smears. In the faint light he looked at Murray who had pulled off his white T-shirt because of its visibility. His thick chest and arms made him look like a gladiator as he held his reliable old .45 in his right hand, his arms slightly out from his sides.

Graver then looked at Last who wiped his forehead on the arm of his expensive linen jacket and rolled his eyes. Last had done well. Graver had had secret reservations about giving him a gun and a role of responsibility, but by doing so without expressing doubts to Murray and Remberto, he was tacitly vouching for his trustworthiness in a squeeze. He had no idea, of course, if Last was indeed trustworthy in a squeeze, but Graver already had his neck out as far as it would go, and he needed another body—and another gun—on his side of this equation.

The guard reassembled his Uzi and then lit a cigarette which he left dangling in his lips while he stepped over to the side of the hangar, unzipped his pants, and urinated into the dried grass at the edge of the tarmac.

Just as Graver was beginning to wonder if something had gone wrong, the drone of Maricio Landrone’s Mooney became audible in the distance. Hearing it, the guard finished his business, zipped his trousers and walked farther out onto the tarmac and looked up at the sky. As Pace had done, Landrone buzzed the hangar and headed out into the Gulf. The guard quick-walked back into the hangar, went to the electrical box inside the door, flipped on the runway lights, and then returned to the skirt of the tarmac to watch the landing.

While the guard was concentrating on the sight and increasing sound of the incoming aircraft, Graver nodded at Murray who slipped out of the door of the back room and signaled to Remberto. The two men went to opposite sides of the hangar, Remberto on the left side of the van as viewed from the office and Murray on the right Each hid behind a piece of equipment that they already had picked out and which would provide only momentary cover, Remberto behind a four-cylinder caddy for an acetylene welding rig, and Murray behind a generator for an arc welder. If anyone decided to take a look around, even a cursory one, everything would happen fast. If all went as planned, it would anyway.

Graver’s eyes were straining to see in the dull light of the hangar. From the moment Murray stepped out of the office door everything was out of Graver’s hands. Arnette’s men were perfectly willing to be led by Graver as to operational strategy, but when it came to tactical decisions they were on their own. They had had a long talk and an agreement about that. Graver was responsible for the decisions that set everything into motion, but the action itself was a second-by-second unfolding over which he had no control.