An Absence of Light

He bent down under the desk on top of which were stacked tens of thousands of dollars of electronic equipment, radio and telephone equipment that had allowed him to communicate secretly with his people for nearly four years, and turned a timer dial on a metal canister about the size of a shoe box. It was actually a cake of enhanced C-4, a solid block of it Wires leading from it led to two other cakes elsewhere in the house. He carefully felt the subtle clicks on the dial and set it on twelve minutes. By the time the dial reached “0” again they would be miles out into the Gulf, and the explosion would be a thing of beauty, viewed from afar.

Chapter 77

There was very little with which Marcus Graver could salve his conscience about what he was doing. No matter what he told himself, he could not shake the anxiety of circumventing the system-he couldn’t say circumventing the rule of law since that so often was obscured even within the system. And even more disconcerting to him was his knowledge that he had allowed himself to take matters this far because of a personal obsession with Panos Kalatis. If he had been professionally dispassionate he would not be taking these risks. A more reasoned plan would have recognized the imbalance of risk and objective. They already had a wealth of information that would enhance the intelligence holdings of several agencies. It would have been more prudent to wait for another time when he, not Kalatis, would define the closing gambit.

But Graver did not wait.

According to Redden, whenever the alternate plan kicked into play, the situation at Bayfield was not entirely known to the pilots. Their instructions were to taxi to hangar No. 2 and unload the money into a truck that would be waiting there. The client and the guard would stay with the money. The pilots could leave. And that was the end of the affair as far as they were concerned.

The hangar, luckily, had a back room, which was the rear end of the hangar partitioned off and having a flat ceiling which formed a loft under the high-pitched roof of the hangar itself.

Inside this back-room “office” Graver, Murray, and Last waited. There was a door in the partitioned wall and a sash window covered with a glaze of dirt and two walnut-sized clods of dirt dauber’s nests. The place smelled of undisturbed dust and oil as they stood among stacks of used tires and misshapen cardboard boxes Riled with disassembled parts of old airplanes. Just outside the partitioned office, Remberto hid in the corner formed by the walls of the office and the hangar, wedged between another stack of old tires and an aluminum flat-bottomed boat which was leaning against the front wall of the office. The tin walls of the hangar were still crackling but now it was because the tin was cooling down from the day’s heat.

They had not been in their places more than ten minutes, having hurriedly hidden the two cars in adjacent hangars, when a truck approached along the caliche road that led from the highway three miles away. From the sound of its revving engine, the driver was in a hurry, the sound growing louder until the truck roared up to the closed doors of the hangar and stopped. While the engine idled, a door opened, and someone quickly approached the hangar doors and started fiddling with the latch. Then suddenly the doors slid apart and a man stood between the headlights of a panel truck, its high beams illuminating the glaze of dirt on the office window. Graver and the others pulled back in the shadows.

For a moment Graver thought the man was going to search the hangar, but then he turned, got back into the truck and drove it into the hangar and cut the lights and the engine. Again the man got out of the truck and went back to the hangar doors and pulled them closed, or nearly closed, leaving a space of about a foot between them. He stood in the opening looking out and nervously took out a cigarette and lit it, blowing the smoke out the opening into the darkness.

Then, immediately, there was the distant sound of an airplane. The driver heard it too and threw down his cigarette, shoved the doors a little farther apart and stepped out The sound of the plane grew louder as it approached until it changed tone slightly and suddenly burst low over the hangar and continued out over the Gulf.

The man hurried back inside the hangar, went to an electrical box installed on the wall to the right of the doors, and threw a switch. Through the larger separation of the doors, Graver could make out a string of weak lights spaced far apart along either side of the runway. It appeared to be a makeshift lighting system. The landing strip itself was very obviously only a daytime landing field. The man returned to the door, stepped outside, and looked either way.