Labyrinth (3 page)

“You sound pretty sure of that connection.”

Charney swallowed hard. “Lubeck and I went back a long time. He was a pro all the way, by the book. Never strayed from his assignment. We sent him on a goddamn throwaway mission and he came up with something.”

“So what do we do?”

“Send one man to retrace his steps. Maybe we'll get lucky.”

“Son, I don't fancy anything that depends on luck.”

“It's a random factor just like everything else.”

Roy's eyebrows flickered. “So it's a one-man game. What players are available?”

Now it was time. “I want to stay away from the pros altogether. I want to use an amateur.”

“Son, you're talkin' crazy to me.”

“I don't think so. Let's look at some obvious ramifications of San Sebastian. Whatever Lubeck uncovered is big and whoever's behind it is big—organized too. They'd make a pro in no time. They'd know Lubeck put us on to something and cover their tracks.”

“So?”

“So let's assume they're not even sure Lubeck got through to Bogotá or transmitted anything we could make sense of. They would stay in their original pattern, the pattern Lubeck uncovered and a pattern an amateur would fare far better in picking up again.”

Roy regarded Charney with a taut smile and a slight squint in his eyes. “Back where I come from, they say you can always tell when a bull's got somethin' on his mind, even though he don't say much. You got it all figured, don't ya?”

Charney leaned back. “You know about Lubeck's steel pincers?”

“Never would arm wrestle with him… .”

“Ever hear how he lost his hand?”

“Crushed or something, right?”

“The circumstances, I mean.”

“Not that I recall, son.”

“Then let me tell you a story, Cal.” Charney squirmed in his chair, fighting for comfort. The upholstery seemed to be tearing at him. “Twenty years ago, I went to college with Lubeck. Brown University up in Providence, Rhode Island. We met during freshman week. Both of us were football players. There was a kid who tried to make the team as a walk-on but couldn't. He did end up as our friend, though, and for much of the next four years the three of us were best friends.”

“Should I get out my handkerchief for this one, son?”

“His name is Christopher Locke and at present he's an English professor at Georgetown.”

“‘At present'?”

“Flunked his final tenure hearing. This is his last semester.”

“You checked.”

“I checked.”

“I suppose this is all leadin' us somewhere.”

Charney's expression looked pained. “Locke was responsible for Lubeck losing his hand. It was an accident. Happened at the Academy six months into our training; we all joined up together, you see. The Three Musketeers,” Charney added cynically. “Anyway, the details of the accident don't matter now.”

Roy wet his lips. “Then this Locke's not an amateur, after all… .”

“He dropped out of the Academy a week after it happened. The ironic thing was that he was the best in our class. As far as skills went, there were none better. But something was missing even before the … accident. Locke had the stomach; he didn't have the heart.”

“You think that's changed now?”

“One thing hasn't: his guilt. Locke ran away from the Academy into academia and he's been running ever since. Georgetown isn't the first school he's quit or been released from. The accident with Lubeck seemed to set a tone for his entire life, a string of failures and incompletions. I guess he never got over it. Whoever said that time heals all wounds was full of crap. It didn't heal this one.” Charney paused. “We can offer to help him heal it now.”

“By sending him into the field?”

“By sending him after the men who killed Lubeck.”

Roy hedged. “He's still an amateur, son.”

“And the only thing that stopped him from becoming a pro and a damn good one was that he lacked motivation, a clear sense of why. He'll have that now. Flushing out Lubeck's killers will more than provide it. Locke could never face the Luber because those damn steel pincers wouldn't let him. That's not a problem anymore. Lubeck's dead. Finding out who did it will give Locke a chance to finally finish something, maybe the most important thing he never completed and ran away from: his friendship with the Luber … and me. The guilt's been bottled up in him long enough. We can give him a vent for it.”

“How generous of us… .”

“Locke's the human option,” Charney continued. “In this case, infinitely preferable to any other that presents itself given the time frame.”

“And how much do we tell this human option of yours?”

“As much as he needs to know.” Charney paused. “That includes nothing about the massacre.”

“So we just drop him blindly in the field and tell him to run.”

“I'll be his contact, his eyes,” Charney said softly. “I'll shadow him everywhere he goes. The relays, the codes, the contacts—he drilled with similar ones before. All in an afternoon's work. When the time comes, Langley's only a phone call away.”

“You've thought this thing out.”

Charney nodded.

Calvin Roy's eyes wandered briefly. “I come from farm country, son, and still I didn't understand why you needed shit to make things grow until I got to Washington. This hasn't been easy for you, has it, Brian?”

Charney just looked at him.

“One of your buddies is dead, son. You could leave it at that. You could turn the whole mess over to Langley.”

“You want me to do that?”

Calvin Roy sighed. “Nah, I suppose I don't. But Lubeck was a pro and what he found out there ate him up alive. And I don't care 'bout Locke shinin' brighter than a baby's backside at the Academy twenty years ago, none of that's gonna get him very far against what Lubeck came up against.”

“It'll get him far enough.”

Roy nodded deliberately. “You got the ball, son. You're the one who's got to live with this in the long run.”

Now, drinking his third Chivas Regal, Charney ran Roy's final words through his mind. He could live with himself, he supposed; he couldn't like himself any less anyway. He was doing what had to be done, what the job demanded of him. Maybe that was the problem; he had been in Washington too long, had let his role consume him until it deadened his conscience. Locke was the best man for this assignment, so he would make the offer too tempting for Locke to refuse. Charney was good at that.

He recalled his earliest impressions of Locke at double-session fall football practice at Brown. No one hit the bags harder, took the tires faster. Locke was a kid driven to make that team. In the end numbers had done him in. Faceless men had posted his name and that was that.

Charney shuddered at the thought he had become one of the faceless men, playing with numbers and making cuts of a different variety. He didn't relish that power but accepted it. It was part of the job and the job was him. He glanced at the phone on the coffee table in the gloomy room. One call and the wheels would be in motion, irrevocable from that point.

Christopher Locke had a wife and three kids. Charney wondered why Calvin Roy hadn't asked about that. Then he realized. Roy didn't want to know. The less said, the better. Charney glanced again at the phone. The choice, the decision, was his. He leaned back and squeezed his eyes closed, fighting back the pain that had started in his temples, only a dull throb now but certain to grow into a pounding ache.

I‘m looking out at—

What had Lubeck seen?

Christopher Locke was the man to find out, Charney told himself as he poured another glass of Chivas.

Chapter 2

“IN THE NEWS
this afternoon—”

Christopher Locke turned the radio off. Traffic was backed up all the way along 16th Street and the LTD's air conditioner was on the blink as usual, leaving him a victim of the sweltering spring air.

Locke hit the horn out of sheer frustration.

The news from the tenure hearing shouldn't have surprised him. He'd seen it coming for months now. The signals were all there. The department chairman didn't like his methods, and popularity with the students didn't count for anything. Of course he was popular, they told him, his courses regularly produced the highest percentage of A's in the entire English department. Locke never cared much for grades. The academic pressure at Georgetown was sufficiently high without his adding to it. He wanted students in his classes to relax, to be able to learn and enjoy without worrying about their grade point average. So he was an easy grader, albeit a consistent one who never passed papers to his graduate assistants for marking.

But that apparently didn't help his cause with the tenure board. His philosophy was the exception, not the rule, and so he was out of a job again. He would certainly have time now to work on his novels. Why kid himself, though? The truth was that all the time in the world couldn't salvage them. He was a failure as a novelist and now, apparently, a failure as a professor as well.

A horn blared to his rear. Locke realized traffic was moving again. He waved an apologetic hand behind him and gave the LTD a little gas. His shirt was sticking to the upholstery now.

In the end, he thought, everything came down to security. You worked your whole life to reach a stage where worry was nonexistent, where the rudiments of happiness were available and, with a minimum of unpleasant effort, attainable. What would happen to that security now? Without the Georgetown salary and benefits, how would his family survive? Much of his savings would have to go toward the kids' educations, and there was still the mortgage on their home in Silver Spring to consider. The bills came in piles Chris just barely managed to lower with the help of the check his wife had started bringing home from her real estate job. It was life on a shoestring and now even that was about to be severed.

And how was he to tell his family of his dismissal? His wife Beth, he guessed, would calmly remind him of all the times in the past she had urged him to go into business. He had always shrugged her off, saying he preferred the academic life. Practical as she was, she could never really understand his refusal even to consider leaving college for a “real” job. His oldest children, a seventeen-year-old boy and fifteen-year-old girl he knew less and less everyday, would brush the news off casually, becoming concerned only after considering how the dismissal might affect them. Only his youngest son would show Locke the love and support he so sorely needed. Just past twelve, Greg was the pride of his life. Chris wanted to freeze the boy just as he was, keep him forever from middle adolescence when hugs disappear and soft smiles are replaced by impatient frowns.

Locke would like to have been a better father, just as he would like to have been a better writer, professor, and husband. It was easy to see how people could live their lives for their children: It blotted out their own failures and missed opportunities. But Locke wasn't going to fool himself. His oldest children were strangers and he couldn't expect to hold on to the youngest forever.

Those thoughts had tied a knot of anxiety in his stomach by the time he pulled into the driveway of his Silver Spring home. He lingered briefly before moving from the car. His heart was thumping crazily against his chest.

“Hi, Daddy!” Whitney greeted him with an affectionate hug as he stepped through the door, leaving the phone dangling by the front hall stairway.

“Hi, beautiful.”

She seemed not to hear him. “You're not gonna believe what happened to me today! I was asked to the prom, the
junior prom
! Do you believe it? And the guy is absolutely gorgeous, definitely tops in the whole junior class. I can't believe he asked me. Of course, I knew he liked me 'cause Marcia knows someone who sits near him in study period and she overheard him mention my name… .”

Locke looked closely at his only daughter as she moved back toward the phone, still jabbering away. She was wearing faded jeans and had tied her flowing blond hair atop her head in a bun. There was a naturalness about her beauty. It wasn't hard to figure out why boys drooled over her. But she was only a freshman. Could she handle it? Locke wanted so much to discuss that issue with her but knew he'd botch things if he tried.

Whitney held the phone against her shoulder. “I'll have to get a new gown for the prom, you know,” she said softer, as tentatively as she could manage.

“What about the one I bought you for the Christmas dance?”

“That old thing? Daddy, be serious, you can't wear the same dress to two formals. Nobody does.”

“Maybe they just trade off so nobody notices.”

Whitney frowned, impatient to get back to her phone call. “Be serious, Daddy.” She whispered something into the receiver, then looked back up at Locke as he sorted through the mail. “Can I eat at Debbie's tonight?” she asked.

“What does your mother say?”

“This is Monday, Daddy. Mom works.”

How could I not know that?
Locke asked himself.

“Okay.” He shrugged.

“Thanks, Daddy!” Then, without missing a breath, Whitney was back in her conversation.

Still shuffling through the mail, flinching at each bill, Chris moved into the kitchen, realizing suddenly how thirsty he was. He found Bobby sitting in one chair with his feet up on another sipping Coke and scanning the latest rock magazine.

“What do you say, Pop?”

Locke sighed on his way to the fridge. He had never gotten used to Bobby calling him “Pop.” Somehow the word seemed demeaning. He grabbed a Diet Coke and joined his oldest son at the table.

“How was school?”

“Okay, I guess,” Bobby replied with his eyes still on the magazine. “Usual shit.”

“Give any more thought to that talk we had?”