“And beer,” she said.
“Good try. How about an RC?”
She smiled and snatched up the bill. “Be back in twenty minutes.’’
Graver watched her walk out of the office and was still looking at her hips when the telephone rang. She looked back, he waved to her that he would get it, and she was gone. He picked up the telephone.
“This is Graver.”
“This is your secure line, isn’t it?” Arnette asked.
“Yeah, it is.”
“We’ve salvaged a little of the audio from the conversation at the Transco Fountain,” she said. “Not much on it in the way of context. But what has come through, twice, is a name. Marcus, you ever heard of a guy named Panos Kalatis?” She spelled the name.
Graver wrote it down, but he didn’t have to think about it. “No.”
“Okay. Well, I have. I think you’d better come over here, baby. We’ve got to talk.”
Graver felt suddenly warm and queasy.
“I’m on the way,” he said. He stood and grabbed his coat and headed out the door. Lara was already gone. As he slipped on his coat, he pushed through the door beside the receptionist’s booth and told her to tell Lara that he would call in.
Chapter 41
1:45 P.M.
He picked up a hamburger at a stale-smelling little drive-in not far from the police station and ate it on the way to Arnette’s. As he ate, he thought of the enchiladas from Las Hermanas and how furious Lara was going to be when she got back to the office.
Arnette met him at the front door. She was all business.
“This guy’s name comes up twice, Marcus’” she said, taking him through the twilight and out the back door into the shade of the arched arbor that led next door.
“Panos Kalatis. That’s Greek.”
“Yeah, the name’s Greek,” she said, yanking a grape leaf off the vines and starting to shred it as they walked. The cicadas were carrying on a rousing throb in the midday heat “It’s Dean’s voice both times. Early on in their conversation he says something like he doesn’t think Kalatis will do… something… and then later, toward the end, he ends a sentence with ‘Kalatis.’ That’s it They sure as hell knew what they were doing getting inside that fountain. Anyway, that’s not much, just the name. But considering who he is, it’s a huge break.”
They came to the screened back porch of the other house, and Arnette pushed open the screen door without breaking stride and in a few steps they were entering the house and the computer room. The CRTs were busy again, and this time all of them were occupied. But Arnette didn’t pause here at the table where the small blonde was once again at her station. Instead, she took Graver back to her library and closed the door. The library table was bare except for a computer monitor and keyboard at the far end, a glass ashtray and a single manila folder laying in the center. There was a green band code on the raised tab.
“I’m going to leave you here with this,” Arnette said, lifting her chin at the solitary envelope. “After you’ve read it, step outside and have Quinn buzz me. Then we’ll talk.”
“Quinn’s the blonde on the radio.”
“Right.”
Graver nodded and Arnette walked out of the library and closed the door behind her. Graver pulled out a chair and sat down. There was a code number along the left side of the file, a long string of digits and letters. He pulled the file over in front of him and opened it It was a thick, single-spaced dossier on Yosef Raviv.
Raviv was born in 1936 to Jewish parents in Athens, Greece. His father was a locksmith in the Jewish district who in 1943 smuggled his family aboard a ship in Galatas and fled with them to British-partitioned Palestine. They settled in Ashdod on the Mediterranean coast, and the elder Raviv joined the prestate Lehi underground, a radical Jewish group that, along with another underground group known as the Irgunists, conducted terrorism against the British and Arabs in an effort to hasten the creation of a Jewish state. Three months before Jewish independence was announced in 1948, the elder Raviv was killed when a bomb he was assembling accidentally exploded. Yosef was twelve years old.
In 1953 at age seventeen Raviv enrolled in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem where he spent the next six years studying languages. When he left the university in 1959 at the age of twenty-three, he spoke French, English, Italian, and Spanish fluently and had a working knowledge of German, Arabic, and Russian.
After university, Raviv entered the Israeli Army for his mandatory three years service. At the end of that period, in 1962, he was immediately summoned by Tsomet, the Mossad’s recruiting branch, at a time when a new era was beginning for Israel’s foreign intelligence. Meir Amit, the Mossad’s new director, was restructuring the agency and was emphasizing the recruitment of young men who had distinguished themselves in the military or university. He specifically sought men who exhibited “aggressiveness, cunning, initiative, eagerness for engagement with the enemy, and determination.” After three years of instruction, Raviv graduated from the Institute in late 1965 as a Mossad katsa, or case officer.
Raviv was immediately sent to Marseille to replace a case officer whose Arabic language abilities were sorely needed in Israel at this time. All Israeli intelligence agencies, Mossad, Aman, and Shin Bet, strained to prepare for the war with the Arabs that everyone felt was inevitable. Raviv was still in Marseille in June of 1967 when the Six Day War rocked the Middle East.
Under the direction of Meir Amit, the Mossad policy known as the “peripheral concept” gained even greater favor and momentum. This philosophy was based on the belief that Israel needed to form alliances-sometimes secret ones-with the countries bordering the Arab world. In doing this, the Mossad also sought to form stronger ties with their counterpart agencies in the West In the developing nations such as Africa and Latin America, they established diplomatic relations, proposed a variety of aid programs, and then opened embassies where Mossad agents went to work under diplomatic cover, offering their intelligence expertise to the host country’s counterparts and thereby greatly expanding their own knowledge of that country’s security operations. They also set up permanent Israeli military delegations in some countries. In Western Europe, the Mossad expanded its ties with their foreign security counterparts by joining a secret group called “Kilowatt” which was created to combat international terrorism. At every turn and available opportunity, Israel was increasing its knowledge of foreign intelligence and security operations all over the world.
In 1969 Raviv participated in a joint mission with Aman that was eventually to determine the shape of his career. After the Six Day War, the French clamped an embargo on munitions, aircraft, and boats that Israel already had bought and paid for, but which France had not yet delivered. The Israelis were in particular need of five missile boats that were part of the embargo, and they could not wait for the slow wheels of diplomacy to free them. Raviv received orders to travel to Normandy where the missile boats were kept in the shipyard at Cherbourg and to use agents to reconnoiter the weak points of the shipyard security so that the Israelis’ naval operatives could plan a repossession.
On Christmas Eve, Israeli naval officers who had flown into France several weeks earlier and had been briefed by Raviv and his agents, entered the Cherbourg shipyards and sailed the five missile boats through Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean.
After this Raviv was asked not to return to Marseille, but to drop out of sight He was instructed to go to London, get a job, and not contact the Mossad in any way. A year later, in December of 1970, he was contacted and told to go to Paris. There another three months passed before he was joined by a Mossad commander from Tel Aviv who spent a month with him. He had been chosen for a special kind of mission that was to become a trademark of his career.
It was a busy time for the Mossad in France. The 1970s would become the decade of terrorist revolutionary groups, the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, the Japanese Red Army, the Italian Red Brigade, the Basque ETA in Spain, the Action Directe in France, and five different Palestinian organizations. Sooner or later all of them found it necessary to pass through France and stay for various periods of time.
