“If we needed to talk to Don,” Graver said, “how would we get in touch with him?” As he asked this, he took Bruce Sheck’s contributor ID record out of a manila folder and held his picture up in front of her.
“Damned if I know,” she said. “Just that phone number.” Her eyes went to the photograph. She stared at it Slowly her expression changed. “Well, I’ll be damned.” She started nodding slowly, a smile almost forming on her mouth. “That’s him. That’s ol’ Don C. himself.”
Chapter 48
Graver was walking around the kitchen with his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows pulling sandwich meat and cheese out of the refrigerator, pickles and olives and onions out of the pantry, bread from the bread box, handing a knife to Neuman and indicating to him to start slicing. He was talking to Paula who was sitting at the table taking notes.
“I want you to drain every little detail out of her,” he was saying. “What companies these people were in; what were their exact positions; what kind of data they were providing; what kinds of businesses Don wanted information from; what kinds of information; the names of the firms this computer hacker pulled information from; who was his shift supervisor-the supervisor was probably being paid off since he had to know the hacker wasn’t cleaning offices. Everything you can think of that could help us later when we start piecing this together.”
He took another knife out of the holder on the cabinet and started slicing the onion.
“All in all it wasn’t a bad call,” Graver said. “She did put Sheck in place for us, and there’s a load of detail to be mined from those sources in each of those five companies.”
“Sheck’s going to be harder to get our hands on than Valerie was,” Neuman said, stacking the bread slices on a plate. “It seems to me he’s a pretty savvy operator, an old hand at this sort of thing.”
“I think you’re right” Graver finished the onion and started slicing tomatoes. “He has all the earmarks of a professional. Heath even used the term ‘running’ for Sheck’s handling of his sources. She got that from him. The guy’s got an intelligence background. And that brings us to Kalatis. This guy belongs to Kalatis.”
“With Mossad? He sounds American to me.”
“I don’t think it makes any difference anymore,” Graver said. He was frustrated and angry. “Boundaries are disappearing everywhere. For people like this, loyalties don’t have anything to do with where you’re born or where you live or with family or homeland. Their loyalties don’t operate under flags. They put their lives on the line for international monetary units: the dollar, the deutsche mark, the pound, the yen.”
He put the slices of onions and tomatoes on a large platter with pickles and olives, but left the cold cuts in the brown butcher’s paper the way Lara had brought them from the grocery.
“The problem is,” he said, “we haven’t made a hell of a lot of progress on the big picture here.” He opened a sack of potato chips and a sack of corn chips and then went to the refrigerator again and took out a bottle each of mayonnaise and mustard. “You guys want regular mustard or that other, the spicy kind?”
“Regular,” Neuman said.
“Spicy,” Paula said.
Graver put them both on the cabinet.
“There’s beer and soft drinks in the refrigerator,” he said and started putting together a sandwich while Paula began clearing the table of its collection of notepads and Heath’s assortment of forged identities. When Graver finished the sandwich, he cut it in half diagonally, put it on a plate with both kinds of chips and some olives, and got a beer from the refrigerator. He opened it, put the plate and the beer on a tray with a napkin and walked out of the kitchen.
They were sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed like a couple of schoolgirls, the cards between them.
“Jesus Christ!” Valerie said, walling her eyes from beneath her shock of parched, black hair. “Look at the butler, will ya. You make that yourself?”
“Yeah,” Graver said, putting the tray down on the floor beside Lara.
“Thanks,” Lara said.
“You don’t have a wife?” Heath asked. “You divorced or what?”
“You sure you don’t want something?” he asked her.
“Well… not a sandwich.” She grinned, running her eyes over him.
Graver walked out of the room and looked at his watch. Arnette had called well over an hour ago. Something should have happened by now. As he passed his bedroom he glanced in the open door and stopped. He stepped inside. His bed had been made and Lara’s off-white linen suit was spread out on it. An open suitcase was on the other side of the bed. He walked over and looked in the suitcase. There were slips, a couple of silk blouses. Lingerie. The cups of the bras tucked into each other, the panties folded once. There was the familiar fragrance of fading perfume that lingered in women’s suitcases, even when they were empty. He walked to Dore’s closet and opened the door. There were three dresses hanging there, isolated in the empty space that echoed even in the silence. He closed the door and walked back into the bedroom, pausing once again at the opened suitcase. He stared at the lingerie and resisted an impulse to reach down and touch the lace on the upper parts of the bras, the slippery silk. He turned away and quickly walked out of the room.
Downstairs Paula and Neuman were sitting at the kitchen table eating and talking, a steno pad and ballpoint pen lying beside Neuman’s plate. Graver went to the cabinet and started making a sandwich for himself.
“Okay, let me run this by you,” Neuman said, wiping his mouth with a napkin and picking up the pen as he leaned over his notes. “Sheck is somewhere higher up in the chain for whoever’s buying the information. It’s a pretty good bet Sheck knows Dean, or at least Dean knows him since Sheck’s name is in the Probst file. Kalatis is in the picture only because Dean mentioned his name when he met with the Unknown at the Transco Fountain.”
“That’s right,” Graver said, slicing his sandwich. “And, incidentally, that telephone call earlier was from our surveillance people. Dean’s been on the move for about an hour.”
“Jesus,” Paula said. She threw a look of incredulity at both of them. “Jesus, this is just wild.”
“And there’s Faeber. We connect him with Kalatis through Brod Strasser who bought controlling interest in DataPrint and who was mentioned as a Kalatis associate in the Raviv file.”
“Just for the record,” Graver put in, “I don’t think it was a coincidence that it was at Faeber’s house that my informant overheard the conversation where Tisler and Besom’s names came up.”
Paula nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “And I don’t think it’s too much of a leap in logic to assume that Faeber’s company, or at least someone inside his company, is buying the take from Bruce Sheck’s little data acquisition operation.”
Graver opened a beer for himself, leaned back against the kitchen counter with his legs crossed at the ankles, and began eating his sandwich, looking across the kitchen at them.
“Which speaks also to Sheck’s ‘expertise,’ “Neuman said. He ate a potato chip and drank a couple of sips of his soft drink. He looked at Graver as he wiped his mouth again. “And which makes me wonder about your informant Do you… are you fairly sure…”
“You mean, am I sure he’s not a plant?” He shook his head. “No. His timing-coming out of nowhere just now-is suspicious and his ‘good luck’ at Faeber’s party strains credulity.” Graver shook his head. “No, I’m not comfortable with it at all. But the one thing that doesn’t jibe with his being a plant is his deliberately bringing Faeber’s name into it Why would they volunteer anybody’s name? Especially the name of a key player.”