He looked at his watch. “Check in with me. Maybe I’ll have something from my end by the middle of the afternoon.”
Chapter 40
Graver called Lara into his office and for the next how-she helped him work through the stack of paperwork that had been piling up on his desk. It was important that his office didn’t attract attention as a bottleneck to the paper flow. Whatever else happened, he didn’t want it to appear as though Tisler and Besom’s deaths were causing any disruption of routine.
At one thirty-five he realized that Lara had stopped writing and was sitting with her hands folded on a stack of files in her lap, staring at him. He looked up.
“I’ve got to have something to eat,” she said. “Really.”
He looked at nis watch and slumped back in his chair. His head was splitting, and he was starving. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess you’re hungry, huh?”
“Oh, just a little,” she said dryly, brushing the red-nailed fingers of one hand across her cleavage to pick up a wandering hair. “And you’ve got a headache, right?”
He nodded.
“Yeah, you’ve got that look. I’ll bet you didn’t have breakfast, either.”
He nodded again.
“Right,” she said, pushing her chair away from the desk. “What about it? What do you want to eat?”
He grinned at her. “Okay. If you’ll go get it, I’ll buy it What about… Las Hermanas?”
“Perfect,” she said, standing and giving a smart tug at the sides of her skirt to straighten it.
Graver reached back to the coatrack behind him and took his wallet out of his suit coat pocket “I’ll take a couple of beef enchiladas- ranchera-a taco, and a tamale.”
“A tamale?”
“Just one,” he said, dropping the twenty on the stack of folders beside her ballpoint pen.
“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.