The Minotaur jg-3

by Stephen Coonts

  “He turned off the beltway and is headed north on 1-95 toward Baltimore.”

  “How many cars do you have?”

  “Seven.”

  “Stay loose. He’ll be looking.” A car would be in front of the suspect vehicle and another well behind, but in sight. The addi- tional cars would be at least a mile back. Every four or five minutes the car behind would pass Judy as the lead car accelerated away and got off at the next exit, where it would watch the cavalcade pass and join as the last car. The third car would assume the position immediately behind Judy. If this was done properly, Judy would never notice he was being followed. Had the agents had a helicopter or light plane this morning, none of the cars would have even been in sight of the suspect.

  Camacho drove onto the beltway eastbound and went down two miles to the 1-95 exit, where he merged with a string of cars and trucks headed north. He eased the car up to five miles per hour over the speed limit and stayed in the right-hand lane.

  In the two weeks that Camacho’s men had had Commmander Smoke Judy under surveillance, be had gone driving on only one occasion. That time he had gone to a mall and spent forty-five minutes in an electronics store watching college basketball on tele- vision, eaten two slices of pepperoni pizza and swizzled a medium- sized Sprite, and gawked for five minutes in a store that specialized in racy lingerie. Just another debonair bon vivant out on the town.

  As he passed the Fort Meade exit rain began to fall. Dreyfus called once. The subject was still headed north. Dreyfus had had the lead car take the Route 32 exit in case Judy was on his way to Baltimore-Washington International Airport, but Judy passed it by. After a U-turn the FBI car was back on 1-95 chasing the caval- cade. Camacho hung up the telephone and listened to the wipers. Since this was his personal car, he didn’t have a radio to monitor the surveillance.

  In a few minutes the rain ceased. The clouds still looked threat- ening with patches of blue here and there. The car ahead flung up a spray from the wet road that kept Camacho fiddling with his wiper control and wishing he had taken the intermittent wiper option.

  Following the ribbon of interstate highways, Smoke Judy circled Baltimore and headed north toward York. Just short of the Penn- sylvania line he began to slow in the left lane. Dreyfus was in the car immediately behind and used the radio to call the trailing car, which was three miles back. When Judy swung through an emer- gency vehicle turnaround and accelerated south, the trailing car was already southbound at fifty miles per hour, waiting for Judy to catch up. Dreyfus and the drivers of the other car waited until Judy was completely out of sight before they gunned across the median throwing mud and turf and resumed the pursuit. One of the cars almost got stuck.

  “He thinks he’s being cute,” Dreyfus told Camacho. who took the first exit he came to and crossed over the highway, then sat at the head of the on-ramp to wait.

  “Think he’s spotted you?”

  “I don’t — we’ll see. He’ll go straight home if he has.”

  Smoke Judy didn’t go home. He went to the inner harbor of Baltimore and parked in an outlying lot, then walked unhurriedly past the aquarium and the head of the pier where the three-masted frigate Constellation was berthed and sat in front of the giant in- door food mall, near the water. He sat for almost twenty minutes watching the gulls and people as a gentle wind blew in from the bay.

  Camacho and Dreyfus watched him through one-way glass mounted in the side of a Potomac Power van parked on a yellow line near the frigate pier. From the outside of the van the glass appeared to be a sign unless one inspected it from close range. A man wearing jeans and a tool belt had rigged yellow ropes around the vehicle as soon as it came to a stop to ensure that no one got that close.

  The distance from the van to where Judy sat was a little over a hundred yards. Camacho aimed a small television camera mounted on a pedestal while Dreyfus snapped photos with a 35mm camera with a telephoto lens. Beside them an agent wearing earphones huddled over a cassette recorder- A parabolic microphone on top of the van was slaved to the video camera, but right now the audio was a background murmur, like the background noise of a baseball radio broadcast.

  “He isn’t saying anything,” Camacho muttered to reassure the audio technician.

  “I’ll bet he goes inside,” Dreyfus said.

  “More than likely. Too chilly to sit outside for long.”

  “He’s looked at his watch twice.”

  Camacho turned the pedestal camera over to the second techni- cian and helped himself to coffee from a thermos. “Appreciate you guys coming out this morning.”

  “Sure.”

  As he sipped his coffee, Camacho glanced at his watch. 11:47. The meet was probably scheduled for twelve o’clock. Albright? If not, then who?

  “Have we got the camera and audio units inside?”

  “Yes, sir. The guys are already in the food court.”

  Camacho took another large swig of coffee, then tapped the man at the camera on the shoulder- He moved aside. The camera had a powerful zoom. Camacho could see the expression on Judy’s face. He looked like a tourist until you studied his face — alert, ready, in absolute control.

  The agent backed off a tad on the zoom and scanned the camera. The crowd was large, lots of families and young couples. With the earpiece in his left ear he picked up snatches of conversation as the camera moved along. Feeling a bit like a voyeur, he aimed the camera at a stream of people coming from the dark interior of the huge, green-glass building into the light. A stringy youth in a black Harley shirt held hands with a vacant-eyed girl with large, unre- strained breasts and a slack jaw. Adenoids? “… that AIDS is bad shit. Had a hell of a time shaking it last time.”

  A tight-faced gray-haired woman spoke to her male companion in a polished whine: “… too far to walk. My feet hurt and it’s been just a terrible, .” Camacho moved on, sampling the faces and polyglot sounds.

  “I’m not hooked, I tell you. I just like the rush. ,” In her mid-thirties, she wore a one-piece designer outfit and a wind-blown coiffure and was speaking to a man in gray slacks and camel- colored cardigan who was chewing on his lower lip. Not wishing to hear more, Luis Camacho swung the camera away.

  “He’s moving,” Dreyfus said. “Toward the door. He’s looking at someone. Do you see him?”

  Camacho searched for the door to the mall and saw only backs. He waited. The light was fading noticeably now as a dark cloud choked off the sunlight. In a few seconds Smoke Judy entered his range of vision from the left and joined the crowd streaming into the interior gloom. Camacho released the camera and rubbed his eyes.

  Dreyfus was on the radio, talking to the watchers inside. “Here he comes,” one of them said, and launched into a running com- mentary on Judy’s direction of travel for the benefit of his com- rades stationed throughout the building.

  “I’m going inside,” Camacho said. Judy had never met him, so that wasn’t a concern. Depending on who it was, Judy’s contact might recognize him, but even so he wanted to see — see now, with his own eyes — the person Smoke Judy did not want to be seen with. He would try to stay out of sight. Just in case.

  A spatter of drops came in at an angle, driven by the strong breeze, as Luis Camacho walked across the head of the quay. A solid curtain of rain over the water moved rapidly this way. The crowd around two jugglers on unicycles dissolved as people began to run. The FBI agent reached the double doors and hurried through just as the deluge struck. A crowd was gathering by the exit, looking out and chattering nervously, but audible above the babble was the drumming of the rain on the glass windows of the building.

  Camacho put the earpiece on his radio in place and rearranged his cap. The radio itself was in an interior jacket pocket- The mi- crophone was pinned inside his lapel: he merely had to key the transmit switch and talk.

  A voice on the radio reported that Judy was upstairs, on the second floor, wandering from booth to booth. That meant the per- son he had come to meet was still unknown, still moving t
hrough the crowd looking for watchers. Camacho stood near the door and looked at faces, an ocean of faces of all ages and colors and sizes. Could one of them be? No chance.

  X was too careful, too circumspect. This wasn’t his kind of risk. He didn’t need men like Smoke Judy for his treason. Or did he?

  “He’s in line at the taco joint”

  Camacho was tempted to move. Not yet! Not yet!

  “There’s a man behind the subject, Caucasian male about fifty- five, five feet nine or so, about a hundred ninety pounds, wearing dark slacks. Hush Puppies and a faded blue windbreaker. No hat. Balding.”

  Camacho shifted his weight and examined the people on the stairs. Families. Youngsters. Five black teenage boys with red ball caps and scarves. No one was looking at him.

  “Guy in the windbreaker said something to the subject.”

  “Get pictures.” That was Dreyfus in the van.

  “Camera’s rolling.” The lawyers at Justice loved these portable video cameras with automatic focus and light-level adjustment. Jurors raised in the television age thought prosecutors should have a movie of every ten-dollar back-alley deal. At last technology had delivered. The government’s shysters could show each greedy, grubby, loving little moment in living color on the courtroom Zenith — and play it over and over again until even the stupidest juror was firmly convinced — while the defendants writhed and the defense shysters planned their appeals.

  “Subject paying for his grub.”

  Camacho swiveled his eyes again, looking at no one in particu- lar, seeing everyone-

  “Windbreaker paying, just dropped a coin. Kid retrieving it for him. He’s nervous, looking around… Now he’s following sub- ject… They’re gonna share a table. That’s our man. That’s him!”

  He moved for the stairs, climbing slowly, listening to the run- ning commentary from the observer. Pausing with his eyes just at the level of the second-story floor, Camacho scanned to his left, toward the taco stand. The observer said they were near there at a two-person table. He climbed carefully, watching, peering through moving legs and around bodies. He glimpsed Judy’s face. Another step. He was at the top of the stairs. He moved left, keeping a fat woman between himself and Judy. Against the far wall he saw a man from the power company up on a step ladder, bending over a toolbox on the ladder’s little platform. The video camera was in the toolbox. Judy’s face was panning again, examining the crowd-

  Camacho turned his back. A pretzel stand was right in front of him. He pointed one out to the girl and asked for a soft drink. As she thumbed the dispenser he checked the mirror on the back wall. There was Judy again. And there was the man across from him.

  Luis Camacho studied the face in the mirror. Fleshy, clean- shaven, pale.

  He paid the girl and turned to his right, back toward the stairs, as he sipped the drink through a straw. Descending the stairs he kept his eyes glued on the back of the teenager in front of him in a conscious effort to avoid any possibility of eye contact with a ner- vous Smoke Judy. He threw the pretzel and nearly full cup in a trash hamper by the main door and pushed on through, out into the rain.

  The wind threatened to blow his cap off. He held it with his hand as the wind whipped his trouser legs.

  “So?” said Dreyfus as Camacho wiped the water off his face with a handkerchief when he had gained the shelter of the van.

  Luis Camacho shrugged. “They’ll probably bus their own table. Put their trash in a receptacle. Have one of the guys take the whole bag.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Think it’s X?”

  “What in hell would X have to say to Smoke Judy?”

  “How’re they hanging down in your shop? How’d you like to ski Moscow? Quit fucking my wife. The possibilities-” The radio speaker squawked to life with another report from the food court and Dreyfus closed his eyes to listen.

  Camacho took off the radio he was wearing and handed it to one of the technicians. “See you tomorrow at the office,” he said to Dreyfus during a silent moment, then let himself out of the van and walked through the drizzling rain toward his car.

  Harlan Albright came over to Camacho’s house after supper. He accepted a cup of coffee and the two of them went to the basement. The boy was there, and he got up with a wounded look on his face and took the stairs two at a time. His father watched him go, then settled onto the couch and picked up the television remote control and began flipping channels.

  “I see in the paper that Matilda Jackson is dead.”

  Camacho grunted. Two of the channels had those damned game shows, people answering trivial questions to win flashy, useless consumer goods.

  “Who killed her?”

  “Someone who knew exactly what he was about.” Camacho stared at the sex goddess nipping answer cards on Channel 4.

  “Too bad. Had you had a chance to show her Franklin’s pic- ture?”

  “No.”

  “Well, she was an old woman, had lived a long life. It would have come soon anyhow.”

  Camacho jabbed the remote savagely. The television settled on the educational channel. Some Englishman was talking about cathedrals. “Listen, asshole. I’m not in the mood for that shit to- night. It’s been a long goddamn weekend.”

  “Sorry. I read about that shooting incident in front of Jackson’s house. That must have been touch and go.”

  He examined the Russian’s face. “I know you probably dropped a dime on her, so don’t waste the hot air on me. You don’t give a damn about that old woman or anybody else.”

  “Sometime—“

  “Shut up!”

  The Englishman was explaining about flying buttresses. He used a computer model to graphically depict the forces transferred through the stone.

  Albright stood up. “I’ll drop over some night this week when you’re in a better mood.”

  “Ummm.”

  Camacho listened to the footsteps climbing the stairs and the noises of Sally letting him out the front door. He stared at the television without seeing it, lost in thought.

  When Luis Camacho returned to his office from his usual Monday- moming conference with his boss, he was in a foul mood. The boss had made several candid remarks about Camacho’s conduct Friday night.

  “Look at this shit,” he roared, waving a section of the Sunday Washington Post. “the special agent in charge of counterespionage standing on a street comer with two punk dopers, in front of a fucking crack house, for Christ’s sake! What in hell has busting dopers got to do with catching spies?”

  Camacho remarked that he had asked the newspaper photogra- pher not to take his picture.

  “Ha! Apparently you haven’t read the Constitution lately, mis- ter.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “And I’m saying it too. I don’t ever want to see your sweet little puss in the public press again, mister, or you’re going to wind up in Pocatello chasing Nazis through cow shit up to your armpits. Those crackpots are probably the only nut cases around who never read the goddamned paper!” The boss had been irked for months by press coverage of the FBI investigation of the Aryan Nations white supremacy fanatics, and ridiculed it and them every chance he got. Sometimes he made up chances. “If you wanta be famous, get a lobotomy and become a rock star.”

  After he’d calmed down, he wanted a complete oral report on Matilda Jackson and Smoke Judy. That had taken an hour. Then the boss had asked questions for a half hour and discussed tactics and strategy for another thirty minutes. When he signaled the dis- cussion was over, Luis Camacho was tired and needed to go to the rest room,

  Now Camacho slumped in his office chair and shuffled through the paper in his in basket. He was rereading a new administrative procedure for the third time when Dreyfus tapped on his door, then stuck his head in. Pipe smoke swirled into the room. “Wanta watch the tape of Smoke Judy we made yesterday?”

  “Sure.”

  “Got it on the VCR.”

  The tw
o men went to the little conference room next door and Dreyfus pushed buttons. “The plates and glasses they used are at the lab. Should have some good prints.”

  “Terrific.”

  ‘The lab wizards synched up the sound from one of the mikes with the video.” Judy and the beefy man in the windbreaker ap- peared on the television screen. Dreyfus twiddled the color knob and adjusted the volume.

  “… not happy with all the media on procurement problems down there.” The beefy man had a well-spoken baritone voice, but Us nervousness was evident.

  Judy replied, but his back must have been to the parabolic mike that picked up this sound track, because his words were indistinct Dreyfus punched the pause button and said, “We have two other audio tracks and think we got it all, but it’ll take a few hours to come up with a complete transcript.”

  Camacho nodded and the tape rolled on.

  “… big risks. Some people will be going to prison,” Judy’s companion said, “after they’ve been drawn and quartered in a pub- lic trial that will take six months.”

  Judy leaned forward and spoke earnestly. Snatches of his re- marks came through. “… you people … a lifetime building the company… literally millions at stake. You guys really need this because… You’ll make tens of millions in the next twenty years and I’ll get a little stock and a paycheck and a pension… not much…” The rest was too garbled to follow.

  ‘That’s enough,” Camacho said after another five minutes. “Let me see the transcript when it’s finished.”

  Dreyfus stopped the tape and pushed the rewind button. “I think that guy’s gonna buy what Judy’s selling.”

  “When you get that rewound, come on back to my office.”

  In his office Luis Camacho took a sheet of scratch paper and printed one word: “Fallacy.” He handed it to Dreyfus when he came in. “See if this is in any of X’s letters.”

  Dreyfus dropped into a chair and began to fiddle with his pipe. He put the paper in his shirt pocket after a glance. “Where’d you get it?” he asked when he had his pipe going again.