An Absence of Light

“Lara’s staying,” Graver explained. “There’s a lot to discuss.”

“Oh,” Paula said again, and Graver could see her brain working all over her face. She was cautious, suspicious, and clearly doubting the wisdom of what it seemed that Graver had apparently decided to do.

Neuman immediately read the situation and came in and sat down on the other side of Lara. From that moment on he accepted her as part of the team without reservation and wanted to be seen as having accepted her. He spoke freely in front of her and looked at her as well as the others when it came time for him to give his report.

Paula was less comfortable as she sat down on Lara’s other side. Paula was always game, but she was not blindly game. She would have questions and inevitably would hold to the independence of her own opinions. She was going to reserve her judgment.

“Okay,” Graver said to Neuman, standing behind his chair, “what have you got?”

Neuman loosened his tie, undid the collar button of his plaid shirt, and took a notebook out of his coat pocket.

“Colin Faeber’s married to his second wife, no children. His first wife and a daughter live in Denver where he sends hefty alimony checks. Second wife is from a wealthy family in New Orleans where he went to college. Owns a new home-built four years ago-in the Tanglewood area. Nine hundred thousand plus mortgage… note at Southern Federal. His personal indebtedness, aside from the house, is about four hundred thou… a couple of cars, another residence on South Padre, some furniture. I went to the Uniform Commercial Code filings. His business, DataPrint, dates back seven years when he started it with an initial investment of two hundred thousand borrowed from a bank. That note was paid off after a couple of years. At first the company was a kind of processing operation. He had some pretty heavy duty hardware, and when a smaller firm needed data merged or sorted in a manner that was too complex for their own hardware, Faeber’s company would do it for them. It seems to have been very successful.

“About three and a half years ago Faeber expanded suddenly and enormously. Bought new, more powerful computers with an enormous influx of capital. A new lien holder appeared on his UCC filings: Concordia International Investments… in Buenos Aires, of all places.”

“Do you have anything on that?” Graver interrupted.

“Wait…” Neuman flipped back several pages. “I did take the time to check World Traders Data Reports, but the information was so sketchy I had to resort to tracking down an annual directory of firms in four Latin American countries, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela… here. CII is owned by a holding company, Strasser Industries, which owns dozens of businesses worldwide.”

“Strasser?” The word leaped out of Graver’s mouth.

“Right.”

“That’s a surname?”

“Right Brod Strasser. He’s the CEO of Strasser Industries.”

Graver kept his eyes on Neuman as he came around from behind his chair and sat down. They all looked at him as he motioned for Neuman to continue.

“Well, there’s not a lot more. But from looking at the UCC filings it seems to me that CII owns more of DataPrint than Faeber does at this point It looks like they just about bought him whole when they financed these huge systems for him.”

“Has his business changed? Does he still do the same kind of work he did before?”

“On the books he does. I haven’t had time to do any of my own legwork, so I don’t know any more than that.”

Graver nodded. “Well, I doubt if he does.”

Paula, increasingly impatient, could not control her fidgeting, and Graver didn’t blame her. It was probably clear to all of them now that he was holding a lot of information that he ought to be sharing with them if the investigation was to move forward with any speed at all.

“Okay,” he said, “let me bring you up to speed from my end.”

For the next hour he told them everything he knew except for identifying Arnette or Victor Last. As he spoke he watched their faces alternate through a series of changes from incredulity to grim by the time he had come to the end of Yosef Raviv’s dossier and Brod Strasser’s name.

Several times during his recitation, he saw Paula cut her eyes at Lara. She was still having a hard time believing Graver was including her in such a sensitive development. She would have been even more surprised if she had known how much more Lara knew about this than she did, as well as the Division’s entire operations.

“So there’s the connection to Kalatis/Raviv,” he said. “Colin Faeber is well connected, and I doubt if Kalatis and Strasser are interested in the kind of business that DataPrint has described in the documents on file.”

Neuman was slowly shaking his head.

“Then these… people… you’ve got tailing Burtell,” Paula said. “They’re… a pretty high-powered operation.”