An Absence of Light

“The hell you say.” Strasser nodded, looking at Graver with admiration. “Well, okay, then you know how good he is. Compartmentalized everything. So this ‘rip-off’-nobody knew much about it because he didn’t tell anybody about it. That’s why I moved on Burtell. He was already suspecting Tisler and Besom so I just gave him everything, told him I was CIA-which kept him from bringing you into it, you know, a higher calling-and he almost got to the core of it too. But he was too damn smart for his own good. He figured me out about the same time he figured out what Kalatis was doing.

“Anyway, Panos was my biggest success and my worst mistake all rolled into one. Like all high-yield propositions, he was also high-risk.”

“Then he’s disappeared… along with one hundred million.”

Strasser crossed his stubby arms and looked around at the helicopter. The pilot had kicked on the turbos and the rotors were beginning to whine.

“Well, recovering the money’s a moot point,” he said. “I’ll see if I can’t recover that. That’s a maybe.” He turned and brought his eyes back to Graver. “But Panos… Panos is not a maybe. Panos is a sure thing.”

The rotors on the Bell picked up speed surprisingly quickly and were hammering the night air.

“Sir,” a man shouted above the swelling whine of the jet rotors, “we’re going to have to go.”

Strasser waved a stubby arm without looking around.

“How many people burned up in there?” he asked.

“Two pilots, one copilot, and two businessmen who accompanied their money for the delivery. I don’t even know who they were.”

Strasser nodded, looking at the two burning hangars.

“Could’ve been worse,” he said, and turned and walked away toward the helicopter, the rotors of which were whipping the air now, working up to the familiar whumpwhumpwhump sound before it lifted off.

Strasser climbed into the helicopter and the door closed. He sat with his back to the cockpit, and Graver could see him buckling his seat belt, and then he could see Strasser’s face looking out the window at them as they stood on the tarmac. Then the big Bell’s rotors revved up to a fierce speed, and the craft grew light on its skids and lifted up into the darkness. Graver was looking at its belly as it started drifting sideways, sliding toward the Gulf at the end of the runway, blending with the night, black going into black as the darkness swallowed it.

August

Chapter 82

In late August the breezes that usually grace Italy’s Amalfi coast succumb to the late summer heat and grow weak and listless in the long afternoons. There is a villa there, the color of a fawn, wedged into the rocky coast above the Golfo di Salerno with a view that skirts the island of Capri and looks across the fifteen miles of the Tyrrhenian Sea to Sardinia. It is a jewel of a villa, with a terrace that hangs on the edge of the cliffs and from which the view of the blue, lively western Mediterranean stretches unmarred to the horizon.

Panos Kalatis lay naked on a deck lounge. He lay on his stomach, his arms folded under his head. He was marvelously tanned, his rakish graying hair combed straight back from his forehead. Twenty feet away the pool where he and Jael had been swimming sparkled in the sun that was halfway past meridian in the west.

Jael, also naked, was on her knees, straddling Kalatis. Deeply tanned, her long, wet hair was put up on the back of her head and held loosely in place with a hairpin. She had filled a cupped hand with oil and was rubbing it into his back with her long fingers. The smell of herbal oils heated by the sun against his back filled Kalatis’s nostrils with a fragrance as ancient as the Amalfi coast itself. As Jael massaged him and the sun warmed the muscles in his back, Kalatis felt the double lobes of her buttocks rocking back and touching his own as she moved up and down his spine with her oily hands.

Kalatis grew languid, allowing himself that lightweighted feeling of drifting, a slight sense of arousal at the touch of Jael’s soft inner thighs against his sides.

Watching her own shadow on the tile terrace, Jael paused and reached up and took the thick hairpin out of her long hair. She shook it loose until it hung straight and untangled, almost to the middle of her back.

Taking the thick pin in her left hand, she lightly touched the point of it at a precise spot between the second and third vertebrae of Kalatis’s spine at the base of his skull. She angled the pin upward slightly and then, with the palm of her right hand, she smacked the wide haft of the pin, driving the stainless steel shaft straight into his spinal cord. She sat back on his buttocks until his legs had ceased quivering, and he was still.

Chapter 83

Graver rounded the far end of the pool and started the last half of his final lap. He was up to forty minutes, and by the time his right arm had completed its stroke and his left hand touched the edge of the pool, his heart was banging against the walls of his chest like a diesel-driven piston.