“The thing about Kalatis,” she continued, “is that because he’s a loner, there are fewer layers of small-timers between him and the dirty work. He’s close. Just around the corner.” She paused, and her voice assumed a note of calculation. “My advice: get your hands on one of the small-timers. Take them into a room and don’t come out until you have the person above them. Get your hands on that person and do the same thing with them. Two, three ‘interviews’ like that and you’ll be close enough to smell him.”
Graver sipped the coffee and nodded, watching her. Jesus.
“What about Dean’s contact at the fountain? What in the hell do you think he’s doing?”
“Marcus, I told you I thought this guy looked like government, didn’t I?” Arnette said, tapping an ash off her cigarette into the ashtray. “Well, we’re checking into that I’m trying to get wire photos of… relevant… CIA and FBI people.” She was being uncharacteristically evasive. “Luckily, this part of the business is relatively small. I should get something pretty quick.”
“This part?”
“The government doesn’t know how to handle people like Kalatis. There’s a lot of intelligence community overlapping. He’s a former foreign intelligence officer-that’s CIA. He’s probably working drugs-that’s DEA. Whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it Stateside-that’s FBI. So who gets him? CIA? DEA? FBI? Usually, everybody feels free to pursue their separate courses of inquiry.” She mashed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “And you know how well they cooperate with each other.”
“Then you think Dean is working for a government agency?”
“Well, not exactly.” Arnette lowered her eyes cautiously, and her thin fingers dropped to the ocher pack of cigarettes. She moved it a little, repositioned it, stood it on its side, stood it on its bottom. “The question is, does Dean know who he’s dealing with? What they’ve been doing, Marcus, is pretty far out It’s dirty. Being co-opted by the bad guys is pretty… sleazy. I don’t know who’s fooling whom here. I just think the guy’s got government written all over him… Dean has business with him… and they’re talking about Panos Kalatis.” She shrugged.
“Anyway,” she went on, “with Kalatis getting into the picture, this becomes business to me, too. It turns out Dean’s reference to Kalatis is the first action the intelligence networks have had on this guy in almost a year. This is a fantastic opportunity for me, for my business. I want to get all I can on him. Now that we’ve both got a stake in him, you won’t have to bear the whole financial burden. And the guy at the fountain. I want to know who the hell he is, too. There are some things I can do that you won’t have to pay for, and I’ll simply pass along what I can.”
Graver nodded.
She leveled her eyes on him. “And I’ll expect you to do the same,” she added.
Graver nodded again. “Sure, of course,” he said. “I appreciate it.” He straightened up in his chair, put his elbows on the table and held his head in his hands for a second and then dropped them.
“We could be making a big mistake here,” he said, looking at Arnette. “Why should we believe that the information behind lister’s bogus investigations has to be originating with Kalatis? What if they’re coming from the people at the fountain? What if the unknown is providing the information, not Kalatis?”
“We’re thinking Kalatis made the hits.”
“Based on this, yes,” Graver said, tapping the dossier. “But what if we’re wrong about that? Dean mentions Kalatis, but we don’t know in what context If we hadn’t heard his name, if we didn’t know he existed, wouldn’t we be assuming the guy at the fountain was behind all this? We’d almost have to be. This dossier may have thrown us off track.”
“Or put us on track,” Arnette countered, slipping another cigarette out of her pack. “We could have been making the wrong assumption. But, okay, let’s say we weren’t Dean is still talking to the guy at the fountain about Kalatis. Is he asking about Kalatis or reporting about him? Either way”-she waved the unlighted cigarette balanced between her thin fingers-”Kalatis is involved-somehow. Either way I can guarantee you’re going to be dealing with him.”
She lit the cigarette. The background noises from the computer room drifted into their silence, a telephone ringing, voices, the occasional shrill beep of a computer complaining of a wrong entry. Graver knew Arnette was waiting for him to tell her what he was going to do. She wanted to know, and both of them knew he ought to tell her. Though he had made a career in intelligence, what he was doing now had as much to do with operations as with intelligence. She was more experienced in these kinds of intrigues, and she had seen a hell of a lot more of the havoc caused by men who killed as unthinkingly as they took a piss. She had come from a world where the processes were the same, but the stakes were higher and the rules often didn’t even fit in the picture at all. If he was about to do something that could have lethal results, he’d better understand that.
“Okay,” he said. “Let me tell you what we’ve got.” He told her of Neuman and Paula’s interview with Valerie Heath and the subsequent take of names from her garbage. He told her how they were following up now. He did not mention Victor Last Then he said:
“When I get back to the office, I’m going to have Neuman pick up Heath. He’s been wanting to do that… and that’s your advice too, assuming she’s at the bottom of Kalatis’s organization. We’ll see if we can’t get her to cough up some names. Time’s running out.”
“You know you can’t let her out of your sight once you haul her in,” Arnette said.
Graver could tell by her face that Arnette was eager to see this happen.
“Yeah, I know that,” he said.
“That’s a logistics problem. You can handle that?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t have any idea how, but he knew she would like to have the job, and he didn’t want to give it to her.
She studied him a moment, trying to see what he was thinking, he guessed. Then she said, “Okay, I’m going to run these names through my networks.”
Arnette always wanted more names. Intelligence files were encrusted with layers of aliases, an entire field of study in itself. They were invaluable connectors.
He nodded, and she continued to smoke. She was playing with the cellophane on her pack of cigarettes, and Graver imagined that if he could have been inside her brain the explosion of synapses would have resembled very much the static-like sound of that crinkling plastic. She was working on something.
Graver’s pager vibrated at his waist.
“I’ve got to go,” he said, pushing back his chair. “I guess you don’t have anything on Tisler’s computer.”
Arnette mashed out her half-smoked cigarette. “No, nothing. But I’ve put a couple of other people on it I’m more hopeful now that he was squirreling away a lot of information. It could be a gold mine.”
“And Dean?” Graver stood.
“He’s been at home all day, and he hasn’t made any calls. And now that I know more about what’s going on here, I doubt that he will. He’s way beyond that kind of thing.” She picked up her pack of cigarettes. “But that just increases the probability he’ll take another trip soon, maybe tonight At the very least he’ll have to go out to make telephone calls.” She stood also. “What’s your sense about Ginette? You think she knows? Is she involved?”
“I don’t know. She seems… not to be as rattled as Dean, not as distracted maybe.” He shook his head. “My first reaction is to think that she doesn’t know. But… it’s only a sense, a feeling.”
“Okay, then,” Arnette said. “Let’s both keep plugging away. This can’t go on much longer without something breaking open.”