An Absence of Light

“Dean was reasonably aggressive, though,” she added. “He let Kalatis know that he was ambitious and wanted to be more active, more involved. He presented ideas. Proposed operations that could expand their data collection into other intelligence agencies. Geis was feeding Dean information to help build his credibility with Kalatis, helping him present some enticing projects, hoping Kalatis would come to rely on him and eventually pull Dean deeper into the organization.”

“What Dean didn’t know, however,*’ Arnette put in again, “was that Kalatis wasn’t taking on any new ideas. Whatever Geis suspected Kalatis of doing, whatever his sting was, it was on its last passage. If Dean had come along a year earlier, two years earlier, Kalatis would have found a place for him. But he wasn’t about to bring in any more clever people this late in his game. He was already shutting down. Dean didn’t have a chance.”

“But,” Paula said, “Kalatis did put him in touch with Sheck. That’s how Sheck got into the Probst operation.”

“That’s most of it, the heart of the story,” Arnette said. “Dean includes an encyclopedia of details about these operations, some of which are going to be useful in other ways. He was thoroughly familiar with Sheck’s network of information buyers and adds another perspective to Sheck’s own account of what he was doing.”

“Let’s go back to the sting,” Graver said. “What’s the story on that?”

“It’s intriguing, but not very informative,” Arnette continued. “Sheck, keeping his fingers in the works via his pilot buddies, thinks Kalatis and Strasser are getting ready to offer one last giant buy to their investors. They’ll all be asked to come up with more money than ever before while being promised, of course, equally greater profits. But Sheck predicts Kalatis and Strasser are going to walk away with it-just vanish with the millions.”

“Then he agrees with Geis.”

“Apparently so. He also points out that by the time this happens, Kalatis and Strasser will have dismantled enough of their operation here that they’ll be untraceable. And I’ll have to say, as old intelligence hands they know how to cover a trail. They can probably pull it off.”

“And Dean reported all this to Geis?”

“He did.”

“Okay, then. What about Geis?”

“That’s the big disappointment,” Paula said. “Dean gives details of how he contacts Geis and where they met, how Geis contacts him. All of it is standard operations procedure. We have telephone numbers. We have dead drop locations. We have serial contact outlines. Dean was giving us everything. But, unfortunately, Geis also met Dean at the marina a number of times. We have the contact procedures that they followed when they wanted that to happen. It would have been a perfect opportunity to set the guy up. Would have been, but not now.”

“Geis’s hair must have stood on end when he saw the news of the explosion,” Arnette put in. “None of the contact information Dean gave us is any good now. In fact, I doubt if we’ll ever hear of Mr. Geis again. For all practical purposes, when Kalatis killed Dean, he killed Geis too.”

Graver was silent a moment. He had to admit it did sound good. If he was condemning Burtell he might be condemning the wrong man. Still, he was angry. How could Burtell have so readily assigned his loyalty to Geis, a man he had never met, while at the same time withholding his faith in Graver with whom he had been close for so many years? It didn’t make much sense to Graver, and he could not deny that it hurt more than a little to discover Dean’s distrust. It would almost be easier to believe that Burtell had been dirty than to admit that when so much had been at stake-even, ultimately, his life-Burtell had not trusted Graver enough to overcome his suspicion. If that was, in fact, what it was that had caused Dean to keep his “undercover assignment” to himself.

But in all honesty, Graver couldn’t blame Dean. Hadn’t Graver himself done the same thing? When he first realized that the CID had a leak, and suspicion turned in Burtell’s direction, hadn’t Graver investigated him with a cold disregard for their close personal relationship? Graver had trained him, and both men had been more loyal to their training-and to the system that had taught them-than to each other. Graver always had believed that his quiet, invisible work was his personal contribution to a reasonable society’s struggle to maintain its balance against the innumerable and ever-present tyrannies of social chaos. He didn’t have a missionary zeal about it, but he never doubted he was doing what was right and necessary.

Now, he felt as if he had tricked himself. He remembered a quote from Aeschylus which had appeared at the beginning of a chapter on totalitarianism in a book he had used years before in a series of courses he had taken at Georgetown University. “For somehow, this is tyranny’s disease, to trust no friend.”