An Absence of Light (37 page)

“What are you suggesting?” Graver knew Neuman was right about the lack of time. It made their job seem nearly impossible.

Neuman was rolling back the cuffs on his plaid shirt His tie, though still knotted, was tucked into his shirt placket between the first and second buttons to keep it out of his way.

“We could interview Sheck, just as we talked to Heath,” he said. “But odds are she’s going to have talked to him already, and he’ll probably be expecting us. It’ll be a tougher interview no matter what he’s like, unless he’s completely spineless.” He glanced at Paula. “Heath though, she’s vulnerable. I think we can panic her without too much of a problem. We’ve got all this false ID stuff on her. I think we can make her believe we know more than we do, put her in a corner, press her, turn her around. I think it could pay off.”

“But that really commits us, Casey,” Paula hedged. “If we can’t get her to cooperate and she walks away, we’ve given ourselves away.”

“I think we have anyway,” Neuman admitted. “That insurance business isn’t going to hold up.” He looked at his watch. “By now she already knows there’s no such company.”

Graver stared at his notes, turned the cobblestone a few more times. It was a close call. If he thought nothing was going to be forthcoming from the tail and the tap on Burtell, if he thought the password puzzle on Tisler’s computer tape was not going to be broken within the next twenty-four hours, if the audio tape of Burtell’s meeting was not going to yield any information today, then he would be all for Neuman’s plan. But Paula was right too. To try to turn Heath and to fail in the effort would scatter the pigeons without a doubt. The investigation would be out in the open.

“Here’s what I want to do,” Graver said finally. “As incredible as this may seem, I’ve got an informant who save me something last night that may lead right into the middle of this.” Without telling them anything about Last, Graver told them of the conversation Last had over-heard at the party at Colin Faeber’s house.

Paula’s eyes widened in amazement as she turned to Neuman who simply shook his head at yet another weird wist Graver entertained the idea of bringing them into he picture even more, telling them about Last, about Arnette, giving them all the pieces. But something warned him to hold back. As usual he was being cautious, and in doing so he knew he might be hampering their investigation by not having the benefit of their analysis of the en-ire scope of what they were dealing with. Still, he held back.

“Casey, I want you to do a work-up on Faeber,” Graver said. “He may have nothing to do with the conversation these two guys had, I don’t have any idea, but we need to try to find out I’ll keep after my informant. There’s no way for me to corroborate this, obviously, but we can’t be picky at this point.”

Graver rubbed his face with his hands. His neck was getting stiff; he could feel the tendons drawing, growing taut and rigid. He shook his head.

“Jesus, we could use a dozen people on this. Paula, I want you to find out who’s involved in Gulfstream National Bank and Trust Officers, board members, that kind of thing. If it’s owned by a holding company get the corporate charter from the Secretary of State’s office, lave them fax you everything they have. We’ve got to find out if there are any threads coming out of there that we :an pull on.”

He looked at his watch. “Check in with me. Maybe I’ll have something from my end by the middle of the afternoon.”

Graver called Lara into his office and for the next how-she helped him work through the stack of paperwork that had been piling up on his desk. It was important that his office didn’t attract attention as a bottleneck to the paper flow. Whatever else happened, he didn’t want it to appear as though Tisler and Besom’s deaths were causing any disruption of routine.

At one thirty-five he realized that Lara had stopped writing and was sitting with her hands folded on a stack of files in her lap, staring at him. He looked up.

“I’ve got to have something to eat,” she said. “Really.”

He looked at nis watch and slumped back in his chair. His head was splitting, and he was starving. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess you’re hungry, huh?”

“Oh, just a little,” she said dryly, brushing the red-nailed fingers of one hand across her cleavage to pick up a wandering hair. “And you’ve got a headache, right?”

He nodded.

“Yeah, you’ve got that look. I’ll bet you didn’t have breakfast, either.”

He nodded again.

“Right,” she said, pushing her chair away from the desk. “What about it? What do you want to eat?”

He grinned at her. “Okay. If you’ll go get it, I’ll buy it What about… Las Hermanas?”

“Perfect,” she said, standing and giving a smart tug at the sides of her skirt to straighten it.

Graver reached back to the coatrack behind him and took his wallet out of his suit coat pocket “I’ll take a couple of beef enchiladas—
ranchera—a
taco, and a tamale.”

“A
tamale?”

“Just one,” he said, dropping the twenty on the stack of folders beside her ballpoint pen.

“And beer,” she said.

“Good try. How about an RC?”

She smiled and snatched up the bill. “Be back in twenty minutes.’’

Graver watched her walk out of the office and was still looking at her hips when the telephone rang. She looked back, he waved to her that he would get it, and she was gone. He picked up the telephone.

“This is Graver.”

“This is your secure line, isn’t it?” Arnette asked.

“Yeah, it is.”

“We’ve salvaged a little of the audio from the conversation at the Transco Fountain,” she said. “Not much on it in the way of context. But what has come through, twice, is a name. Marcus, you ever heard of a guy named Panos Kalatis?” She spelled the name.

Graver wrote it down, but he didn’t have to think about it. “No.”

“Okay. Well, I have. I think you’d better come over here, baby. We’ve got to talk.”

Graver felt suddenly warm and queasy.

“I’m on the way,” he said. He stood and grabbed his coat and headed out the door. Lara was already gone. As he slipped on his coat, he pushed through the door beside the receptionist’s booth and told her to tell Lara that he would call in.

1:45 P.M
.

He picked up a hamburger at a stale-smelling little drive-in not far from the police station and ate it on the way to Arnette’s. As he ate, he thought of the enchiladas from Las Hermanas and how furious Lara was going to be when she got back to the office.

Arnette met him at the front door. She was all business.

“This guy’s name comes up twice, Marcus’” she said, taking him through the twilight and out the back door into the shade of the arched arbor that led next door.

“Panos Kalatis. That’s Greek.”

“Yeah, the name’s Greek,” she said, yanking a grape leaf off the vines and starting to shred it as they walked. The cicadas were carrying on a rousing throb in the midday heat “It’s Dean’s voice both times. Early on in their conversation he says something like he doesn’t think Kalatis will do… something… and then later, toward the end, he ends a sentence with ‘Kalatis.’ That’s it They sure as hell knew what they were doing getting inside that fountain. Anyway, that’s not much, just the name. But considering who he is, it’s a huge break.”

They came to the screened back porch of the other house, and Arnette pushed open the screen door without breaking stride and in a few steps they were entering the house and the computer room. The CRTs were busy again, and this time all of them were occupied. But Arnette didn’t pause here at the table where the small blonde was once again at her station. Instead, she took Graver back to her library and closed the door. The library table was bare except for a computer monitor and keyboard at the far end, a glass ashtray and a single manila folder laying in the center. There was a green band code on the raised tab.

“I’m going to leave you here with this,” Arnette said, lifting her chin at the solitary envelope. “After you’ve read it, step outside and have Quinn buzz me. Then we’ll talk.”

“Quinn’s the blonde on the radio.”

“Right.”

Graver nodded and Arnette walked out of the library and closed the door behind her. Graver pulled out a chair and sat down. There was a code number along the left side of the file, a long string of digits and letters. He pulled the file over in front of him and opened it It was a thick, single-spaced dossier on Yosef Raviv.

Raviv was born in 1936 to Jewish parents in Athens, Greece. His father was a locksmith in the Jewish district who in 1943 smuggled his family aboard a ship in Galatas and fled with them to British-partitioned Palestine. They settled in Ashdod on the Mediterranean coast, and the elder Raviv joined the prestate Lehi underground, a radical Jewish group that, along with another underground group known as the Irgunists, conducted terrorism against the British and Arabs in an effort to hasten the creation of a Jewish state. Three months before Jewish independence was announced in 1948, the elder Raviv was killed when a bomb he was assembling accidentally exploded. Yosef was twelve years old.

In 1953 at age seventeen Raviv enrolled in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem where he spent the next six years studying languages. When he left the university in 1959 at the age of twenty-three, he spoke French, English, Italian, and Spanish fluently and had a working knowledge of German, Arabic, and Russian.

After university, Raviv entered the Israeli Army for his mandatory three years service. At the end of that period, in 1962, he was immediately summoned by Tsomet, the Mossad’s recruiting branch, at a time when a new era was beginning for Israel’s foreign intelligence. Meir Amit, the Mossad’s new director, was restructuring the agency and was emphasizing the recruitment of young men who had distinguished themselves in the military or university. He specifically sought men who exhibited “aggressiveness, cunning, initiative, eagerness for engagement with the enemy, and determination.” After three years of instruction, Raviv graduated from the Institute in late 1965 as a Mossad
katsa
, or case officer.

Raviv was immediately sent to Marseille to replace a case officer whose Arabic language abilities were sorely needed in Israel at this time. All Israeli intelligence agencies, Mossad, Aman, and Shin Bet, strained to prepare for the war with the Arabs that everyone felt was inevitable. Raviv was still in Marseille in June of 1967 when the Six Day War rocked the Middle East.

Under the direction of Meir Amit, the Mossad policy known as the “peripheral concept” gained even greater favor and momentum. This philosophy was based on the belief that Israel needed to form alliances—sometimes secret ones—with the countries bordering the Arab world. In doing this, the Mossad also sought to form stronger ties with their counterpart agencies in the West In the developing nations such as Africa and Latin America, they established diplomatic relations, proposed a variety of aid programs, and then opened embassies where Mossad agents went to work under diplomatic cover, offering their intelligence expertise to the host country’s counterparts and thereby greatly expanding their own knowledge of that country’s security operations. They also set up permanent Israeli military delegations in some countries. In Western Europe, the Mossad expanded its ties with their foreign security counterparts by joining a secret group called “Kilowatt” which was created to combat international terrorism. At every turn and available opportunity, Israel was increasing its knowledge of foreign intelligence and security operations all over the world.

In 1969 Raviv participated in a joint mission with Aman that was eventually to determine the shape of his career. After the Six Day War, the French clamped an embargo on munitions, aircraft, and boats that Israel already had bought and paid for, but which France had not yet delivered. The Israelis were in particular need of five missile boats that were part of the embargo, and they could not wait for the slow wheels of diplomacy to free them. Raviv received orders to travel to Normandy where the missile boats were kept in the shipyard at Cherbourg and to use agents to reconnoiter the weak points of the shipyard security so that the Israelis’ naval operatives could plan a repossession.

On Christmas Eve, Israeli naval officers who had flown into France several weeks earlier and had been briefed by Raviv and his agents, entered the Cherbourg shipyards and sailed the five missile boats through Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean.

After this Raviv was asked not to return to Marseille, but to drop out of sight He was instructed to go to London, get a job, and not contact the Mossad in any way. A year later, in December of 1970, he was contacted and told to go to Paris. There another three months passed before he was joined by a Mossad commander from Tel Aviv who spent a month with him. He had been chosen for a special kind of mission that was to become a trademark of his career.

It was a busy time for the Mossad in France. The 1970s would become the decade of terrorist revolutionary groups, the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, the Japanese Red Army, the Italian Red Brigade, the Basque ETA in Spain, the Action Directe in France, and five different Palestinian organizations. Sooner or later all of them found it necessary to pass through France and stay for various periods of time.

Raviv’s languages expertise and his preference for working alone were considered indispensable under these circumstances. He had been made a “single,” a rare
katsa
even by the standards of the innovative Mossad. He ran no agents and operated entirely alone, his existence unknown to other Mossad operatives anywhere. Even though the Mossad had three
kidon
units—small operational cells within the Metsada department that conducted assassinations and kidnappings everywhere in the world—there was a special need at this time for “veiled” hits, assassinations that appeared to be natural deaths. The targets were three men and a woman in the diplomatic corps of four different embassies who had significant clandestine connections to terrorist organizations. A traditional assassination—even if the Israelis were never linked to the deaths—would cause an uproar and create blowback that could only damage Israeli interests.