An Absence of Light

She lit the cigarette. The background noises from the computer room drifted into their silence, a telephone ringing, voices, the occasional shrill beep of a computer complaining of a wrong entry. Graver knew Arnette was waiting for him to tell her what he was going to do. She wanted to know, and both of them knew he ought to tell her. Though he had made a career in intelligence, what he was doing now had as much to do with operations as with intelligence. She was more experienced in these kinds of intrigues, and she had seen a hell of a lot more of the havoc caused by men who killed as unthinkingly as they took a piss. She had come from a world where the processes were the same, but the stakes were higher and the rules often didn’t even fit in the picture at all. If he was about to do something that could have lethal results, he’d better understand that.

“Okay,” he said. “Let me tell you what we’ve got.” He told her of Neuman and Paula’s interview with Valerie Heath and the subsequent take of names from her garbage. He told her how they were following up now. He did not mention Victor Last Then he said:

“When I get back to the office, I’m going to have Neuman pick up Heath. He’s been wanting to do that… and that’s your advice too, assuming she’s at the bottom of Kalatis’s organization. We’ll see if we can’t get her to cough up some names. Time’s running out.”

“You know you can’t let her out of your sight once you haul her in,” Arnette said.

Graver could tell by her face that Arnette was eager to see this happen.

“Yeah, I know that,” he said.

“That’s a logistics problem. You can handle that?”

“Yeah.” He didn’t have any idea how, but he knew she would like to have the job, and he didn’t want to give it to her.

She studied him a moment, trying to see what he was thinking, he guessed. Then she said, “Okay, I’m going to run these names through my networks.”

Arnette always wanted more names. Intelligence files were encrusted with layers of aliases, an entire field of study in itself. They were invaluable connectors.

He nodded, and she continued to smoke. She was playing with the cellophane on her pack of cigarettes, and Graver imagined that if he could have been inside her brain the explosion of synapses would have resembled very much the static-like sound of that crinkling plastic. She was working on something.

Graver’s pager vibrated at his waist.

“I’ve got to go,” he said, pushing back his chair. “I guess you don’t have anything on Tisler’s computer.”

Arnette mashed out her half-smoked cigarette. “No, nothing. But I’ve put a couple of other people on it I’m more hopeful now that he was squirreling away a lot of information. It could be a gold mine.”

“And Dean?” Graver stood.

“He’s been at home all day, and he hasn’t made any calls. And now that I know more about what’s going on here, I doubt that he will. He’s way beyond that kind of thing.” She picked up her pack of cigarettes. “But that just increases the probability he’ll take another trip soon, maybe tonight At the very least he’ll have to go out to make telephone calls.” She stood also. “What’s your sense about Ginette? You think she knows? Is she involved?”

“I don’t know. She seems… not to be as rattled as Dean, not as distracted maybe.” He shook his head. “My first reaction is to think that she doesn’t know. But… it’s only a sense, a feeling.”

“Okay, then,” Arnette said. “Let’s both keep plugging away. This can’t go on much longer without something breaking open.”

Arnette came around the end of the table and opened the door to the computer room where the work was still tilting along at full bore, the high-speed, light-speed, almost-silent chip labor of the twenty-first century enabling fewer than a dozen people to move a frighteningly vast amount of data in milliseconds. When Graver allowed himself to dwell on it very long, he almost despaired. It was marvelous what man had learned to do with nothing more than an electrical spark. But somehow, he felt as though man was also only the alchemist’s apprentice. He knew a bit of God’s technology, but he understood considerably less of the divine moral sense that would enable him always to use it wisely. As history had proved all too consistently over the millennia, man’s head was still ahead of his heart.

Chapter 43

When Graver got back to his car, he looked at his pager. The call-back number was Paula’s at the office. He made his way back through the neighborhoods to Holcombe and then headed north on Kirby Drive. By the time he got back to the CID offices it was just after four o’clock. He stopped in front of Lara’s opened office door.

“I’m sorry about lunch,” he said.

She stopped typing on her computer and looked at him. “No problem.” She shook her head. “I ate as much of it as I could.” She grinned. “Did you finally get something?”

“I ate a very bad hamburger on the way. Listen, would you check with me before you leave this afternoon?”

“Sure,” she said, looking at him with dark-eyed curiosity, hoping he would elaborate.