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.
He jerked his goggles off his head and hung on to the edge of the pool, wheezing for air. Even though he couldn’t have gone another lap the workout felt good. As he rested, the late August sun warmed the top of his wet head and burned its way into the muscles of his shoulders like a heat lamp. He waited for his heart and lungs to regain their equilibrium as he felt his body being moved gently by the water that was slowly settling from the disturbance of his laps.
As he sucked in the heavy afternoon air, he stared across the hot green lawn broken by scattered sago palms and let his thoughts return for the thousandth time to the recent events and their aftermath.
The mandatory suspension imposed for the duration of the investigation should have been a blessing, an opportunity to relax, to recoup his sapped energies, and to think. But it didn’t work out that way. Though the media had been sluggish in connecting all the dots at the beginning, they made up for lost time after the calamity at Bayfield. The investigative reporters in every branch of the media suddenly came alive, and within a week “new leads” were breaking every day and continued to break through the blistering months of July and August.
The withering media assault effectively shut down the Criminal Intelligence Division, and the complexities of what had happened during those five hot days in June promised an extended investigation.
Graver’s report to the special investigating commission had been lengthy and detailed, exceptionally detailed. During the entire period he had been able to account for almost every hour of his time. He had outlined the labyrinth of relationships among the players, pulling no punches for those under his command-or for himself-for not having detected anything amiss despite his having designed a new counterintelligence program two years earlier that had been intended to prevent just such breaches. He had provided names, linkages, information to enable the commission to subpoena entire computer programs from DataPrint and Hormann Plastics and Gulfstream National Bank and Trust, and provided complete copies of Dean Burtell and Bruce Sheck’s computer and microfilm accounts of their involvement. The detail-and amount of detail-had required nearly two weeks of assisted accumulation before the administration could even reach the point that they could suspend him and the commission’s work could begin. Then he walked out of the office and went home.
The only thing that presented a problem was the involvement of Arnette Kepner and her people. Graver had refused to disclose her as a source and, much to his surprise and gratification, so had Casey Neuman and Paula Sale. Though they also had been suspended for the duration of the investigation, their silence was an extraordinary vote of confidence. There would be a way, of course, to resolve the problem. There always was with bureaucracies, especially bureaucracies that relied on secrets to assure their own survival.
That was almost two months ago. He swam twice every day. He drank more wine than he should have, but not too much. He gained weight, but not more than he needed to. His supporters within the Department kept him apprised of the rumors and, when they could, the actual facts. Apparently Westrate had rolled over immediately and had offered up Graver’s career to mollify the fury of the bureaucrats for the shame the Department was suffering under the cloud of scandal. In all likelihood, Graver’s career was gone. The fate of Neuman and Paula was less clear; their futures were still in the balance.
He never heard a word from Arnette. That was expected; that was as it should be. It was a tough business and certain things were understood. By helping him as she had, she had gone way beyond the understood rules of the game. Her silence now was nothing more than self-preservation. She would have expected the same from Graver.
But Graver was a realist and already had accepted the inevitable; he didn’t need to wait for a sitting special commission verdict to know that eventually he would be relieved of his position. He would be lucky if he was allowed part of his pension. He spent most of his time, however, brooding over the events of those few days. The days passed one into the other without distinction as he replayed the mistakes, the disappointments, the bad luck.
All the dying had haunted him.
It would have been easy to blame it on others, on Panos Kalatis and Brod Strasser and their unconscionable commerce in the chemistry of sour dreams, their traffic in a merchandise that commanded unspeakable fortunes. It would have been easy to blame it on the businessmen like Faeber and Hormann and the nameless “clients” whose greed was so vast and dark it blotted out the light of common decency.
But in all honesty, he couldn’t shift the blame so easily. He could have avoided much of the killing if he had kept strictly to his business of gathering intelligence. That’s what he told himself on some days. On other days he told himself something quite different. On those days when he counted the deaths over and over again, it seemed to him that everyone who had died would have died anyway, regardless of what he had done. Their fate had been cast in a game of chance that had been designed and put into play by Kalatis and Strasser, a game that already had run a long course and was just coming to a conclusion as Graver stumbled upon it in its closing hours. Despite what he might think he could have done, it had been out of his control all along. No matter what he could have done Kalatis still would have disappeared with a hundred million dollars. Strasser still would have flown away with twenty-two million in crumbs. Neither man would miss a beat marketing drugs. They simply would move to new venues. They would surround themselves with a different cast of bit players, and in no time at all the river of sour dreams would resume its flow, swollen to its banks with wrecked hopes and the human flotsam of their trade.
As for those two nebulous personalities, little was said in the news reports. Their names appeared only twice and both times only in passing and in the context of rumors. Graver heard that a couple of men from the State
