Of course, there was the possibility that Sheck, or even Burtell, had enemies Kalatis knew nothing about The explosion did not necessarily have to do with him or with their relationship to him. There was no way of knowing who Sheck might have angered and for what reasons. It could be that this had nothing to do with Kalatis at all.
But Kalatis had not remained alive all these years by keeping faith with “possibilities” and “could be’s.” He had remained alive because at the slightest hint of the inconsistent or the inexplicable, he vanished. He did not wait for explanations. They would come eventually, but when they did Kalatis would be somewhere safe to hear them out. A man without a sixth sense was a dead man.
Thus his thoughts turned to Graver. Kalatis was well aware of Graver’s friendship with Dean Burtell, but he had seen big money come between friendships before-it was almost the rule-and he had fully intended to cause such a breach-to his benefit-when he had offered Burtell the five-hundred-thousand-dollar retirement fund. That had been Tuesday night. Now it was Thursday morning, and he had heard not a word from Burtell. He had been willing to bet that the intervening silence was good news. Burtell, it seemed to him, was no less venal than all the other people whose loyalties he paid for every day of the week. He believed he had made a sound investment.
But with Burtell’s death, all bets were off. He knew Graver well enough to know what to expect. If Graver didn’t already know Kalatis was involved with one of his men, he would know soon enough. It was time to stop calculating and start moving.
Standing in the doorway thinking of these things, he flinched only a little when the two bare arms reached around his chest, and he felt Jael’s breasts against the middle of his back, felt her pelvis tuck into his buttocks.
“What are your thought?” she asked in her accented and ungrammatical English.
Kalatis did not respond immediately. He was always polite to her, even kind, even indulgent, but he was never tender. He really did think of her as a cat. You kept it well fed and well groomed. You could scratch it and rub it, give it small pleasures, but you must never become its friend. You must never display a regard that hinted you would make any sacrifice, however small or insignificant, on its behalf. It was not a relationship that accommodated friendship.
So he ignored her because he did not want to be bothered at that moment He smoked and shrugged her off irritably. She backed away, and in the silence behind him he heard the soft crunching of the mattress as she returned to the bed and the cool Egyptian cotton sheets. He had to think, not of her, but of himself. He had to make sure he was doing the right thing, dispensing with the right people, setting into motion the right timing.
In reviewing his plans there was nothing he regretted. Well, perhaps walking away from the house in Bogota. And leaving forever the dusky loins of Colombia’s remarkable women. That he truly would regret But as for the rest of it, he gave nothing else a second thought He had done it often enough for it to be almost familiar. In fact, all those Spartan vanishments over the years-those times when he had built a full life and then one day, because of a telephone call or a three-word note slipped under his door or a notice in the personals column of the newspaper, he closed the door behind him and walked away into another life leaving the alarm clock still set for the next morning-all of those Spartan disappearances when he left a life with only the clothes on his back to accompany him were like dress rehearsals for this final one in which he was taking as much of the world with him as he could possibly manage. His new life would be his last life. He did not intend to disappear ever again, nor did he intend to start all over with nothing, as he had every time before. This final time he would have millions, scattered over the globe in a dozen caches protected by codes and ciphers and shielded accounts. The plan was elaborate, extensive, with dozens of people needed to bring it to its conclusion, but in the end, after a lengthy unfolding, there would be only himself, walking through a doorway alone, to a new life. For the last time.
Chapter 65
Colin Faeber put down the telephone in his office and was immediately aware of a clammy dampness around his mouth. He knew that a condensation of perspiration was forming on his upper lip. The woman had said that Gilbert Hormann had died of a heart attack in the suite adjacent to his office sometime during the night His personal secretary had found his body herself, when she came into the office that morning. She was sorry, she said, but she couldn’t talk anymore. There was so much confusion there now. They had just taken away the body. Everyone was very upset It was tragic, so tragic.
Faeber sat immobile in his chair and counted them off: Tisler, suicide. Besom, heart attack. Burtell, probably in the explosion. He couldn’t find Sheck. Possibly in the explosion with Burtell, since that was their primary meeting location. Hormann, heart attack.
And now he could not raise Kalatis on their code line. Had something happened to him as well? What the hell was happening? He put his hands on the edge of the desk in front of him as if he were steadying himself against the gunnel of a boat, as if he were fighting the nausea of too many hours at sea. Was there something going on here that he should see, something obvious that in retrospect he would see all too clearly and wonder why he hadn’t detected it in the first place? His stomach tumbled at the thought of it But since he couldn’t “see” it, what should he do? Should he take the extreme step of contacting Strasser? He had been told never to do that Strasser was “out of the picture” except financially. He was completely removed, and it was clearly his intention to remain that way. The idea was only fleeting, for if Faeber was intimidated by Kalatis, he was petrified by Brod Strasser whom he had met on only four occasions during the three and a half years since he had bought controlling interest in DataPrint.
He looked around his office which was modern in style as befitted his profession, chrome and glass and copolymer furniture, decorated in primary colors with touches here and there of Italian moderne furnishings, the coffee server, the cocktail pitchers in the liquor cabinets. He stood up from his desk. He didn’t know why. He wasn’t going anywhere. He didn’t know what to do. But he couldn’t sit still, either. There was no contingency plan for this kind of thing, everyone dying, nobody to contact What the hell was going on? Was this thing coming to an end? Was he in danger? Christ! What would make him think he wasn’t? Why wouldn’t he be?
He started toward the door of his office, hesitated, turned back and stood at the window behind his desk. From the western edge of downtown he looked westward, over a sweep of the green canopies of trees toward the satellite commercial centers whose office towers punched up out of the carpet of thick woods like futuristic cities on a jungle-covered planet. Though he had stood at these windows and daydreamed over this view countless times, just now it seemed alien, as though he had awakened in an unfamiliar world. He felt only an unmistakable anxiety.
Turning away from the window again he walked to the door and opened it.
“Connie,” he said. That was all he had to say. She was typing at her computer screen and stopped immediately, though without hurrying, and in one or two moments she was in his office. “Close the door,” he said.
She looked at him as he turned around midway to his desk.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
Colin Faeber, like many businessmen the world over, had fallen, if not in love, then at least into serious glandular obsession with his secretary. Connie, like secretaries the world over, had allowed him to indulge his obsession. It was an easy thing to do. Convenient. Though the sex was usually mundane to forgettable, the perks were often superb. But Faeber’s record with wives and other women was a poor one. His understanding of women in general was obtuse. It was something he never bothered to analyze, and therefore he never acquired more than an adolescent’s comprehension about the opposite sex. It was, for the most part, simply a libidinal conversance, and even that was only rudimentary.