David Lindsey - An Absence of Light

Picking up the white telephone, he first called a number in La Porte and left a code number. Momentarily his blue telephone rang. The return call was from a man, a Texan, Kalatis had known briefly in Buenos Aires in 1981. In 1985 the man had opened a trucking business in La Porte. In 1990, the man received a telephone call from Kalatis. Since then, Kalatis had not spoken to the man more than four or five times, but when he did the man “rented” one of his trucks to Kalatis for an exorbitant amount of money. Cash.

Kalatis picked up the white telephone again and called Maricio Landrone’s code number. Within moments the blue telephone rang.

“This is Landrone.”

“Maricio, are you at the hangar?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“There’s been a foul-up at the original destination. We are going to use the alternate plan.” Kalatis spoke slowly, almost casually. He had learned a lifetime ago, in the Mossad, that the very first step in controlling your men was in controlling your voice. For most men-and women-fear and panic were infectious. If they detected the virus of fear or uncertainty or futility, it was likely they also would contract the disease. It was the first responsibility of a group leader never to expose your people to the virus, even if you yourself were dying of it.

“The alternate destination remains the same,” Kalatis said, “but the timetable is suspended. I want you to leave right now. The cargo will be ready at its hangar when you get there. Load and leave as soon as you can.”

“Okay,” Maricio said. “I’ve got it.”

Maricio had flown cocaine for Kalatis for two years before he took over one of the money runs a year earlier. He was very good at last-minute changes.

Kalatis picked up the white telephone again and called Eddie Redden. Almost immediately the blue telephone rang and Kalatis gave the same information to his third pilot. When he hung up, he looked at his watch. The first load should be arriving at Bayfield in Wade Pace’s Malibu Mirage in just over twenty minutes. With luck, the last one would breeze in on Eddie Redden’s Pilatus somewhere around twelve-fifteen. Maricio Landrone’s flight would be the questionable one. There was not much difference in the distance Landrone and Redden had to fly. It was possible they could come in on top of each other at Bayfield. Kalatis had no idea how they might handle that And he wasn’t going to worry about it. As of this moment he had done all he could do. From here on, whether or not he got his money was going to depend on other people.

He heard the twin engines on the pontoon plane sitting at the dock revving to a pitch that sounded to him like the sweet whine of escape. He could almost smell the burnt fuel thrown off the heated engines, a smell that reminded him of other nighttime assignments, years of adrenaline-driven timetables and rendezvous where trusting other people to hold up their end of the bargain was the only hope he had of getting out alive.

“Panos.”

Kalatis turned and saw Jael standing in the doorway through the bedroom. She was wearing a man’s white shirt tucked into a pair of jeans, her black hair pulled back into a single thick braid that dropped down the center of her back.

“We must go,” she said. “The pilot say we must go if we want to see.”

“Okay,” Kalatis said. “Have you got everything?”

“Everything, yes,” she said.

“Then go on down to the plane. I’ll be right behind you.”

“Everything” actually translated to very little. They were literally walking out of the door and away from a fully furnished house, closets filled with clothes, televisions, stereos-everything that made up a person’s life. He felt marvelous, like a snake shedding its skin. It was an exhilarating experience, to walk away from everything.

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.

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.