The Minotaur (41 page)

“If he lasts.”

“Yeah. They all gotta last. Everyone has high expectations, then
for some reason, sometimes the kid sorta fizzles. Know what I
mean?”

Camacho nodded and put Albright’s glass in the sink.

“We had high hopes for you—“

“Why don’t you go home and swelter at your house, Harlan. It’s
two-thirty in the morning and I have to work tomorrow.”

“I don’t. Got the air conditioner guys coming in the morning.
I’ll call in sick. Tomorrow night my place is going to be like Mos-
cow in winter.”

“Terrific.”

Albright heaved himself off the stool and reached for the sliding
glass door. As his hand closed on it, he paused and looked at
Camacho. “Anything new?”

“Yeah. One or two little things, since you mentioned it. The
Soviet ambassador got a letter several weeks ago. For some reason
there was a stain on it, a jelly stain. We analyzed it. Looks like a
French brand of blueberry. Imported. We have a dozen agents on
it.”

“Amazing.” Albright shook his head like a great bear. He
brightened. “That might lead to something, eh?”

“It might. You never know.”

“Amazing. All those letters, over three and a half years! The
Minotaur has never made a mistake, not even one tiny slip. And
now he sends a letter with a jelly stain on it? It’s too good to be
real.”

“You take your breaks where you find them. If it is a break.
We’ll find out if I can keep enough people working on it. Another
development just cropped up.”

“Like what? Peanut butter on the envelope?”

“Nothing to do with X.”

“What?” Albright was no longer amused.

“Crash of the navy’s ATA prototype. Augered in yesterday out
in Nevada.” He glanced at the wall clock. “Day before yesterday,
actually. Seems somebody has been peddling erroneous informa-
tion to a defense contractor. AeroTech. So the smelly stuff has hit
the fan, so to speak.”

“Keep your people on X.” His tone was flat.

“What am I supposed to do now? Salute?”

Albright slid the door open. “I’m not kidding, Luis. We need
some progress.” He stepped through the door and pulled it shut
behind him. Then he disappeared into the darkness.

A minute or so later, Luis Camacho locked the door and pulled
the drapes.

After Jake Grafton and the rest of the staff left for Washington, the
atmosphere at the base at Tonopah took on the ethereal silence of a
graveyard, or so it seemed to Toad Tarkington. He divided his time
between the hangar, where a TRX crew was mocking up the rem-
nants of the airplane he and Rita had abandoned, and the hospital,
where Rita remained in a coma.

Toad drove the two miles back and forth between the two loca-
tions in an air force sedan that one of the commanders had as-
sumed he would return to the motor pool. He would, eventually,
but he was in no hurry. After all, the commander had signed for
the car and hadn’t really ordered him to return it.

The lounge in the VOQ was empty. The other guests apparently
were too busy to hang around the pool table and bet dimes and
swap lies while the TV hummed in the background, as the naval
aviators had. The camaraderie was an essential part of naval avia-
tion. Those who flew the planes gave and demanded this friendship
of each other.

That first evening alone Toad tossed the cue ball down the table
and watched it carom off the rails. He looked at the empty seats
and the blank TV screen and the racks of cue sticks, and trudged
off to his room to call Rita’s parents yet again. He was talking to
them twice a day now.

He was also calling his own folks out in Santa Barbara once a
day, keeping them updated on Rita and talking just to hear their
voices. Likely as not his parents were slightly baffled and secretly
pleased by this attention from the son who usually phoned once a
month and never wrote because he had said everything in the
phone call.

It’s funny, he mused, that now, now. with Rita in such bad
shape, the sound of his mother’s voice was so comforting.
After the second day alone, it finally occurred to him that the
problem was that he had almost nothing to do. He was standing in
the hangar watching, listening, but he had no people to supervise
or reports to write or memos due, so he merely observed with his
mind in neutral. At the hospital he sat beside Rita, who was moved
to a private room, and did a monologue for her or stared at the
wall. And thought. He pondered and thought and mused some
more.

That evening on the way to the hospital he stopped by the ex-
change and bought a spiral notebook. In Rita’s room he began to
write. “Dear Rita,” he began, then sucked on the pen and looked
out the window. He dated the page. “Dear, dear Rita: Someday
you will wake, and when you do, I will give you this letter.”

He wrote, sometimes for several hours at a sitting. He started
out writing about Toad Tarkington: growing up in southern Cali-
fornia with the beach and surf just down the road, baseball and
football in the endless summer, the hard-bodied bimbettes chased
and wooed and sometimes conquered. He described how he felt
about his first true love, and his second and third and fourth. He
devoted page after page to college and grades and all-night parties.

Finally he decided he had squeezed the sponge pretty dry on his
youth, so he turned to the navy. Without his even realizing it, his
style changed. Instead of the light, witty, listen-to-this style he had
adopted for tales of his youth, he wrote seriously now, with no
attempt at humor. Facts, impressions, opinions, ambitions, they
came pouring from his pen.

In four days the TRX crew finished their work and mysteriously
vanished. Several days later a group of officers and civilians from
Washington arrived unannounced. They poked and prodded the
dismembered, blackened carcass and photographed everything,
then climbed back into the waiting planes parked on the baking
ramp in front of base ops. Toad was left with his solitude and his
writing.

So the days passed, one by one, as Rita slept.

In Washington, Jake Grafton was also writing, though he went
about it in a vastly different manner than Tarkington. He dictated
general ideas into a recording machine and gave the tapes to his
subordinates, who expanded the ideas into smooth, detailed drafts
which Jake then worked on with a pencil. Flight test data and
observations were marshaled, correlated and compiled. Graphs
were drawn and projections made about performance, maintenance
manhours, mean time between failures and, of course, costs.
Money dripped from every page. Every officer in the group had an
input, and conclusions and recommendations were argued and re-
argued around Jake’s desk, with him listening and jotting notes
and occasionally indicating he had heard enough on one subject or
another. All of it went into a mushrooming document with the
words “top secret” smeared all over.

Vice Admiral Tyler Henry spent some unhappy hours with Luis
Camacho. It had been quickly established that the data contained
on the E-PROM chip from the crashed prototype was identical to
the erroneous data contained in the Pentagon computer file that
had last been changed by the deceased Captain Harold Strong.
TRX’s latest, correct batch of E-PROM data was also in the com-
puter, but under another file number.

Three days and a dozen phone calls after be had sent Lloyd
Dreyfas to Detroit, Camacho went himself. On Thursday at noon
he rode the Metro out to National Airport and was sitting in the
president of AeroTech’s office in Detroit at 3:50.

Homer T. Wiggins had gotten himself a lawyer, a manicured,
fiftyish aristocrat in a Brooks Brothers suit and dark maroon tie.
His stylish tan and his gray temples and sideburns made him look
like something sent over from central casting. “Martin Prescott
Nash,” he pronounced with a tiny nod at Camacho, then pointedly
ignored the proffered hand. Camacho retracted his spurned ap-
pendage and used a handkerchief to wipe it carefully as he sized up
Wiggins, who was apparently trying his best to look like a pillar of
outraged rectitude.

“My client is one of the most respected leading citizens of this
state,” Nash began in a tone that might come naturally to a femi-
nist activist lecturing a group of convicted rapists. He had it just
right—the slight voice quaver, the distinct pronunciation of each
word, the subtle trace of outrage. “He is active in over a dozen
civic organizations, gives over half a million dollars a year to char-
ity and provides employment to six hundred people, every one of
whom pays the taxes that provide salaries for you gentlemen.” He
had just the slightest little bit of difficulty pronouncing the word
“gentlemen.”

Nash continued, listing the contributions Homer T. Wiggins had
made to the arts, the people of the great state of Michigan and the
human race. Camacho settled into his chair and let him go, occa-
sionally glancing at his watch.

Dreyfus waited until he had Camacho’s eye, then winked
broadly. Wiggins saw the gesture and winced.

Finally, as Nash paused for breath, Camacho asked, “Are you a
criminal lawyer?”

“Well, no,” admitted the pleader. “I specialize in corporate law.
My firm has advised Homer for ten years now. We handled his last
stock offering, over ten million shares on the American Exchange,
and the subordinated debenture—“

“He needs a criminal lawyer.”

Deflated, Nash looked to his left, right at the pasty, perspiring
face of leading citizen Homer T. Wiggins, who was staring at Ca-
macho and licking his lips.

“Read him his rights. Dreyfus.”

Both agents knew this had been done on one prior occasion,
yesterday, and Wiggins had declined to answer questions unless his
lawyer was present. Dreyfus removed the Miranda card from his
credentials folder and read it yet again, slowly, with feeling. The
warning usually had a profound effect on men who had never in
their lives thought of themselves as criminals. All the color drained
from Wiggins’ face and he began to breathe in short, rapid breaths.
It was as if he could hear the pillars crumbling and see the plaster
falling from the ceiling of that magnificent edifice of position, re-
sponsibility and respect that had housed him so well all these
years.

As Dreyfus put the card away, Wiggins squeaked, “You going to
arrest me?”

“That depends.”

“On what?” said Martin Prescott Nash, who was looking a little
pale himself.

“On whether or not I get some truthful answers to the questions
I came here to ask.”

“Are you offering immunity?”

“No. I have no such authority. I am here to question Mr. Wig-
gins as a principal about bribery of a government employee and
illegally obtaining classified defense information. Both charges are
felonies. If you want to talk to us, Mr. Wiggins, we’ll listen. We
may or may not arrest you today. I haven’t decided. Anything you
say will be included in our reports and will be conveyed to the
Justice Department. The attorneys there may or may not use it as
evidence against you. They may take it into account when they are
trying to decide if prosecution is warranted, or they may not. They
may consider your cooperation when they make a sentencing rec-
ommendation after your conviction—if there is one—or again,
they may not. I have nothing to offer. You have the right to remain
silent, but you’ve heard your rights and your attorney is here with
you. Or you can decide to cooperate with the government that you
and your six hundred employees support with your tax dollars by
telling us the truth. It’s up to you.”

Nash wanted to talk to his client in private. The agents went out
into the hall and walked toward the cafeteria.

“Have you really got it?” Camacho asked Dreyfus.

“Chapter and verse. He turned in expense-account reports for
every trip to Washington, including credit-card receipts for dinners
with the name Thomas H. Judy on the back as a business guest in
his own handwriting. Apparently he didn’t want any more trouble
with those IRS troglodytes about his expense account.”

“Can you tie him personally to the data?”

“Yep. An engineer here got the computer printout about seven
months ago—Wiggins himself handed it to him. Told him to make
up some experimental chips to see if they could validate the
method and their computer stuff, and to develop a cost projection.
All of which he did. Other people swear to that. I’ve got a sworn
statement in writing from this engineer burning Wiggins and a
cassette recording of him telling it to me originally. And the NSA
computer records show Judy as one of the officers who had routine
access to the E-PROM data. We’ve got Homer T. cold as a frozen
steak.”

“Is this the right time?” Camacho muttered, thinking aloud.

“Well, shit!” Dreyfus hissed. “I don’t know! I just dig this stuff
up. You—“

Camacho silenced him with a glance. Dreyfus lit his pipe and
walked along with smoke billowing.

“So why the big screw-up with the chips?” Camacho asked when
they reached the cafeteria, which housed three microwaves and a
wall full of vending machines.

“Oh, AeroTech got in four or five different data dumps from
TRX and even one from the Pentagon, all in the last three months.
The first three chips just sat there on the engineer’s desk. No one is
sure how or when they went to the mail room. No one knows how
they got mixed up with an outgoing shipment. The mail-room guy
is from Haiti, with a heavy accent. He denies everything. Rumor
has it he used to be a medical doctor in his former life.” Dreyfus
shrugged. “Looks like human error, that plus the usual careless-
ness and a tiny pinch of rotten luck. Voila! Anything that can go
wrong, will. Isn’t that the fourth or fifth law of thermodynamics or
Murphy or the Georgia state legislature?”

“Something like that.” Camacho removed a plastic cup full of
decaffeinated coffee from the vending machine and sat on a plastic
chair at a plastic table beneath a fluorescent light with a faulty
igniter—the light hummed and flickered.