Graver said nothing. All along Arnette had insisted the man at the Transco Fountain was “government.” Now Dean’s records were confirming her assertions. He couldn’t blame her for wanting to believe him. Paula went on.
“Geis wanted Dean to work his way inside and help them find out what Kalatis was up to. Geis was pretty damned uncomfortable not knowing what Kalatis was doing besides the drug business. So he gives Dean what he needs to know. Dean ‘discovers’ Besom’s and Tisler’s information-selling operation and demands a piece of it, or he’ll blow it. Soon, with Geis’s background help and guidance, he’s well into the operation.”
“And getting paid off just like they were,” Graver added cynically.
“Apparently so,” Paula said. “He doesn’t hide that It’s all right here. They were making a lot of money. Kalatis was paying generously.”
“And the Seldon investigation?”
“Just what we thought, another cooked operation. Kalatis wanted Seldon out of the way. Dean never really spells out why, just that Seldon was the next target.”
“Is that it? What did Dean find out for Geis?”
“Not a lot. It was months before Dean ever met Kalatis, but when he did it seems that Kalatis found him a little more to his liking than either Besom or Tisler. Before long Dean was handling most of the communication between the CID guys and Kalatis/Faeber. Kalatis came up with the idea of the bogus investigations as a means of eliminating competitors and put Dean in charge of the operation. Probst is the first target. It comes off beautifully. Kalatis is pleased. Friel is next. Then Seldon.
“But Kalatis was careful. Besom and Tisler never knew about anything except their own little areas of operation. They never knew about Sheck’s network, for instance, or about his back-door connection to Kalatis. They never had a sense of the size of the organization.
“Dean was reasonably aggressive, though,” she added. “He let Kalatis know that he was ambitious and wanted to be more active, more involved. He presented ideas. Proposed operations that could expand their data collection into other intelligence agencies. Geis was feeding Dean information to help build his credibility with Kalatis, helping him present some enticing projects, hoping Kalatis would come to rely on him and eventually pull Dean deeper into the organization.”
“What Dean didn’t know, however,*’ Arnette put in again, “was that Kalatis wasn’t taking on any new ideas. Whatever Geis suspected Kalatis of doing, whatever his sting was, it was on its last passage. If Dean had come along a year earlier, two years earlier, Kalatis would have found a place for him. But he wasn’t about to bring in any more clever people this late in his game. He was already shutting down. Dean didn’t have a chance.”
“But,” Paula said, “Kalatis did put him in touch with Sheck. That’s how Sheck got into the Probst operation.”
“That’s most of it, the heart of the story,” Arnette said. “Dean includes an encyclopedia of details about these operations, some of which are going to be useful in other ways. He was thoroughly familiar with Sheck’s network of information buyers and adds another perspective to Sheck’s own account of what he was doing.”
“Let’s go back to the sting,” Graver said. “What’s the story on that?”
“It’s intriguing, but not very informative,” Arnette continued. “Sheck, keeping his fingers in the works via his pilot buddies, thinks Kalatis and Strasser are getting ready to offer one last giant buy to their investors. They’ll all be asked to come up with more money than ever before while being promised, of course, equally greater profits. But Sheck predicts Kalatis and Strasser are going to walk away with it-just vanish with the millions.”
“Then he agrees with Geis.”
“Apparently so. He also points out that by the time this happens, Kalatis and Strasser will have dismantled enough of their operation here that they’ll be untraceable. And I’ll have to say, as old intelligence hands they know how to cover a trail. They can probably pull it off.”
“And Dean reported all this to Geis?”
“He did.”
“Okay, then. What about Geis?”
“That’s the big disappointment,” Paula said. “Dean gives details of how he contacts Geis and where they met, how Geis contacts him. All of it is standard operations procedure. We have telephone numbers. We have dead drop locations. We have serial contact outlines. Dean was giving us everything. But, unfortunately, Geis also met Dean at the marina a number of times. We have the contact procedures that they followed when they wanted that to happen. It would have been a perfect opportunity to set the guy up. Would have been, but not now.”
“Geis’s hair must have stood on end when he saw the news of the explosion,” Arnette put in. “None of the contact information Dean gave us is any good now. In fact, I doubt if we’ll ever hear of Mr. Geis again. For all practical purposes, when Kalatis killed Dean, he killed Geis too.”
Graver was silent a moment. He had to admit it did sound good. If he was condemning Burtell he might be condemning the wrong man. Still, he was angry. How could Burtell have so readily assigned his loyalty to Geis, a man he had never met, while at the same time withholding his faith in Graver with whom he had been close for so many years? It didn’t make much sense to Graver, and he could not deny that it hurt more than a little to discover Dean’s distrust. It would almost be easier to believe that Burtell had been dirty than to admit that when so much had been at stake-even, ultimately, his life-Burtell had not trusted Graver enough to overcome his suspicion. If that was, in fact, what it was that had caused Dean to keep his “undercover assignment” to himself.
But in all honesty, Graver couldn’t blame Dean. Hadn’t Graver himself done the same thing? When he first realized that the CID had a leak, and suspicion turned in Burtell’s direction, hadn’t Graver investigated him with a cold disregard for their close personal relationship? Graver had trained him, and both men had been more loyal to their training-and to the system that had taught them-than to each other. Graver always had believed that his quiet, invisible work was his personal contribution to a reasonable society’s struggle to maintain its balance against the innumerable and ever-present tyrannies of social chaos. He didn’t have a missionary zeal about it, but he never doubted he was doing what was right and necessary.
Now, he felt as if he had tricked himself. He remembered a quote from Aeschylus which had appeared at the beginning of a chapter on totalitarianism in a book he had used years before in a series of courses he had taken at Georgetown University. “For somehow, this is tyranny’s disease, to trust no friend.”
At the time, the quote had lodged in his mind as a reminder of the consequences of the evils he had sworn to engage. It was an acrid and disconcerting irony, then, to find that “tyranny’s disease” was alive and well among the men who had dedicated themselves to opposing tyranny itself. The disease had invaded the physician, despite his skills and good intentions, despite his best efforts.
“This is too neat,” he heard himself say. He swallowed hard to dislodge the lump in his throat “I don’t understand,” he said, trying to sound terse and focused, “why Dean is giving all this up to us. Why, suddenly, at the last minute, is he spilling everything he knows-about Kalatis and Faeber, and especially about Geis? Why wouldn’t he ‘keep the faith’ with the CIA?”
For the first time Arnette had no response.
“All the loose ends are falling into place,” Graver went on, “but it’s all happening a little too late, isn’t it We’ve uncovered a wealth of information in record time, but Geis has evaporated, and we’re not a single step closer to Kalatis.”
“That’s right,” Arnette snapped back. “Look, Marcus, I don’t know how to answer your questions about Dean, but I do know he’s put us onto some very serious operations here. Yes, all the big players are disappearing into the woodwork. That’s what they’re trained to do. That’s their business. If they didn’t sew up loose ends, they wouldn’t be in business. But the fact is, Dean’s given us a hell of a lot more than we would have had without him. I’m not going to agonize about his ethics this late in the game. We’re not through here; we still need a lot of answers. I’m not going to blame Dean because he didn’t clear up everything for me. As for his role in this, you may never figure it out. Or if you do, you might not like it But does that really make a goddamned bit of difference as to what we do now?”
For a few moments the line was dead, no one spoke. Then Graver said:
“Okay, Arnette. You’re right” He paused again. “But for right now I’ve still got just one objective… and just one more chance at achieving it. Paula, can you glean anything else from the files?”
“Oh, sure,” Paula said. “There are a million details, stuff we can follow up on for months. As far as connections go, this is a bonanza.”
“Arnette,” Graver said, “you have no interest in the operational end here, I know. But if I get a shot at Kalatis
