An Absence of Light

“Oh, sure he does. He told me. In so many words, anyway.”

“How many other people do you think there are?”

“No idea. He just said this was a big operation. And he had this system down pretty good. Rules. Sometimes when we meet he says something like, well, he’d better get going and run his ‘other’ traps. Gives me the impression I’m not the only one he’s feeding money to and collecting information from.” She thought a moment “To tell you the truth, sometimes I think there might be other people like Don, too. You know, working for this ‘client’”

“Have you ever heard of the name Panos Kalatis?” Graver asked.

She shook her head. “No, I think I’d remember that one.”

“Have you ever heard Don speak of a Greek guy?”

“Greek?” She frowned then shook her head again. “No Greek.”

They talked to Valerie Heath for more than an hour. Twice Lara went downstairs to get her more coffee and once Heath had to stop to go to the bathroom. Though Lara said nothing during all this, Paula, Neuman, and Graver went over and over the information, approaching it from different angles, rephrasing her answers into new questions that put a slightly different perspective on the subject Heath’s responses never wavered, and she responded as candidly as she had thrown off the sheets in front of Neuman and Graver. It seemed that having once decided to give it all up, she did so without reservation. At times it even seemed to Graver that she was oddly relieved to do it. And he noticed, too, that she was responding to the very human emotion of being flattered to be the center of attention.

“If we needed to talk to Don,” Graver said, “how would we get in touch with him?” As he asked this, he took Bruce Sheck’s contributor ID record out of a manila folder and held his picture up in front of her.

“Damned if I know,” she said. “Just that phone number.” Her eyes went to the photograph. She stared at it Slowly her expression changed. “Well, I’ll be damned.” She started nodding slowly, a smile almost forming on her mouth. “That’s him. That’s ol’ Don C. himself.”

Chapter 48

Graver was walking around the kitchen with his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows pulling sandwich meat and cheese out of the refrigerator, pickles and olives and onions out of the pantry, bread from the bread box, handing a knife to Neuman and indicating to him to start slicing. He was talking to Paula who was sitting at the table taking notes.

“I want you to drain every little detail out of her,” he was saying. “What companies these people were in; what were their exact positions; what kind of data they were providing; what kinds of businesses Don wanted information from; what kinds of information; the names of the firms this computer hacker pulled information from; who was his shift supervisor-the supervisor was probably being paid off since he had to know the hacker wasn’t cleaning offices. Everything you can think of that could help us later when we start piecing this together.”

He took another knife out of the holder on the cabinet and started slicing the onion.

“All in all it wasn’t a bad call,” Graver said. “She did put Sheck in place for us, and there’s a load of detail to be mined from those sources in each of those five companies.”

“Sheck’s going to be harder to get our hands on than Valerie was,” Neuman said, stacking the bread slices on a plate. “It seems to me he’s a pretty savvy operator, an old hand at this sort of thing.”

“I think you’re right” Graver finished the onion and started slicing tomatoes. “He has all the earmarks of a professional. Heath even used the term ‘running’ for Sheck’s handling of his sources. She got that from him. The guy’s got an intelligence background. And that brings us to Kalatis. This guy belongs to Kalatis.”

“With Mossad? He sounds American to me.”

“I don’t think it makes any difference anymore,” Graver said. He was frustrated and angry. “Boundaries are disappearing everywhere. For people like this, loyalties don’t have anything to do with where you’re born or where you live or with family or homeland. Their loyalties don’t operate under flags. They put their lives on the line for international monetary units: the dollar, the deutsche mark, the pound, the yen.”

He put the slices of onions and tomatoes on a large platter with pickles and olives, but left the cold cuts in the brown butcher’s paper the way Lara had brought them from the grocery.

“The problem is,” he said, “we haven’t made a hell of a lot of progress on the big picture here.” He opened a sack of potato chips and a sack of corn chips and then went to the refrigerator again and took out a bottle each of mayonnaise and mustard. “You guys want regular mustard or that other, the spicy kind?”

“Regular,” Neuman said.

“Spicy,” Paula said.

Graver put them both on the cabinet.