The Minotaur

by Stephen Coonts

  “All of them? Again?”

  “All.”

  “Yessir,” Dreyfus said without enthusiasm.

  Even a blind hog finds an acorn occasionally, Camacho told himself as he cradled the phone. And if there’s an acorn in those files, this time I’m going to find it.

  The youngest child, a four-year-old boy, threw a fit as Lucy Franklin drove toward Dulles. The nine-year old, Karen, had been deviling him all morning, and apparently he decided he had had enough. He wailed at the top of his lungs and punched at his sister. One of his swings connected with her nose. Blood spouted and she screamed too. Lucy pulled off the freeway and put the car in neutral.

  “Shut up!” she roared. “Both you kids, stop it!”

  Satisfied with the outcome of the battle, the boy sat back and stared at the blood dripping on his sister’s dress as she sobbed uncontrollably.

  “Look at you two. Fighting again. Now Karen’s hurt. Aren’t you sorry, Kevin?”

  He didn’t look a bit sorry, which made Karen cry harder. Lucy got her into the front seat and held a tissue on her nose until the bleeding stopped. She cuddled the child. Karen had vomited twice during the night, so this morning Lucy had kept her home from school.

  The traffic roared by. “Say you’re sorry, Kevin.”

  “I’m sorry.” His hand came over the seat and touched Karen’s hair. The sobbing gradually eased. Holding a tissue against Karen’s nose with her left hand, Lucy leaned over the seat and cuddled the boy. This week had been tough on them. Terry was so distant, saying little, shouting at the children as they ran through the house and made their usual noise.

  He was a volcano about to erupt. His tension and fear were tangible, visible, frightening to the children, terrifying to Lucy. Even as she sat here on the freeway, the unreasoning panic that Terry caused washed over her again. What had he done? What would he do? Would he hurt the children? Would he hurt her?

  “Mommy, don’t cry.”

  “I’m not crying, sweetheart. I just have something in my eye.”

  “I’m okay now,” Karen said, casting an evil glance across the seat back at her brother.

  “No more fighting. You two love each other. No more fighting. It makes me sad to see you two trying to irritate each other.”

  Now Kevin’s hand touched her hair. “Let’s go get Grandma.”

  “Yes. Let’s do.” She started the engine and slipped out into traffic.

  At lunch Toad and Rita shared a table, just the two of them. From a table fifty feet away Jake Grafton watched the body language and gestures as he listened to George Wilson and Dalton Harris talk baseball. So Toad Tarkington had fallen in love again! That guy went over that precipice with awe-inspiring regularity. The impact at the bottom was also spectacular.

  You really had to tip your hat to the guy. He arrives, takes in the female situation at a glance, then immediately makes a fool of himself over the best-looking woman in sight. Jake allowed himself a grin. The ol’ Horny Toad.

  Back in the office after lunch, Jake called Tarkington over to his desk. “I’ve been looking over this memo about the A-6 system. How did it go when you turned off the radar and Doppler?”

  “Well, sir, without the Doppler to dampen the velocities, the inertial tends to drift somewhat. But without the radar all you have is the IR and it’s tough. When it isn’t raining or snowing you can run attacks okay once you’ve found the target. The nav system just isn’t right enough to let you find the targets without the radar. The IR doesn’t have enough field of view. With a global positioning system to stabilize the inertial you might have a chance, but not now.”

  “It looks to me like you’ve got a handle on the major problems. This evening how about jumping a plane and flying up to Calverton, New York? With Commander Richards. The guys at Grumman are expecting you two. I want you to look over the A-6G system and play with it and let me know what you think. Come back Monday. Tuesday you and I are going to take a little trip out West.”

  The lieutenant’s face reflected his dismay.

  “That’s not going to put you out or interfere with anything, is it?” Jake tried to appear solicitous.

  “Geez, CAG. The whole weekend—”

  “You didn’t have anything going, did you? I mean, you haven’t been around here long enough to—”

  “Oh no, sir. I just thought I’d do my laundry and all. Maybe take in a movie. Write a letter to my mom.”

  Jake couldn’t hold back a smile. “Running out of clean underwear, huh?”

  Toad nodded, trying to maintain a straight face.

  “Buy some more. See you Monday, Toad.”

  “Yessir. Monday.”

  At four o’clock Jake received a call from Commander Rob Knight. “Could you come over to my office?”

  “Well, I was getting ready to go home.”

  “On your way?”

  “Sure.”

  Jake locked the files, turned off the lights and snagged his hat on the way out. Smoke Judy was still there. “Lock up, will you, Smoke?”

  “Sure, Captain. Have a good weekend.”

  “You too.”

  Jake walked to the Pentagon. He was getting very familiar with this route. The parking lot was emptying as he crossed it and he had to do some dodging.

  On the fourth-level corridor the pile of used furniture was still gathering dust. Jake turned right on the D-Ring and walked down three doors. He knocked.

  Rear Admiral Costello opened the door. “Ah, Captain, please come in.”

  The room was packed. People were sitting on desks. Everyone had a beer can in his hand. Vice Admiral Henry was there, Costello’s three aides—all captains fresh from carrier commands and waiting for the flag list or new orders—together with the four office regulars and two admirals Jake didn’t know. He accepted a beer and found himself talking to Henry. “Glad you could join us, Captain.”

  “Delighted, sir.”

  It was Happy Hour. These men who had spent their lives in the camaraderie of ready rooms needed two hours at the end of the week to review the week’s frustrations and reduce them to manageable proportions. Soon the subject turned from shop to mutual friends, ships, ports, and planes they had flown.

  Just before six Jake excused himself. He and Callie were going to the beach this evening. Tyler Henry grabbed his hat and started with Jake for the door. As Jake opened it, Henry paused and took a long, smiling look at the bulletin board. He was looking at a photo. It was a black-and-white eight-by-ten of singer Ann-Margret holding a microphone in her hand and singing her heart out, wearing a sleeveless shorty blouse and no pants at all.

  “I was there,” Henry said. “Kitty Hawk, ’67 or ’68. That woman…” He pointed at the picture. “She’s all lady. She’s my favorite entertainer.”

  The photo was autographed and signed. “To the guys of OP-506.” Yes, thought Jake Grafton, remembering those days. No doubt that was a great moment for her, performing before five thousand screaming sailors, but it was an even greater moment for them, a moment they would remember and cherish every day of their lives, each and every man jack of them. Of course, bombing North Vietnam twelve hours a day, some of them didn’t have very many days left. The loss rate then was almost a plane a day. No doubt Ann-Margret had known that.

  “Mine too,” said Jake Grafton, and together with the admiral walked into the corridor where he said goodbye. The admiral went back toward his office as Jake set off alone for the subway.

  At six o’clock, as Jake Grafton was boarding the subway at the Pentagon station, Luis Camacho closed the last of the files piled up on his desk. It was hopeless: 218 files, 218 political appointees in the Department of Defense, including the service secretaries and tinders and assistants. He had selected just eighteen files: the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, his political aides, and the assistants and under secretaries in SECDEF’s office. And SECDEF. All these men had held their positions for at least three years. But it was still hopeless.

 
; If one of these men was the Minotaur, no hint of it came from the FBI background investigations that had been completed for the Senate confirmation process. The common thread was that they were pillars of the establishment, the kind of men generations of mothers prayed their daughters would marry. All eighteen were white, well educated, leaders in their local communities, respected by all those similarly situated. Several had previously held elected or appointed office. Most were family men or divorced family men. Thirteen of them had graduated from an Ivy League school. Tennis was the most popular sport and golf a close second. Several were yachtsmen. Every single one of them could be labeled independently wealthy, most from old family money, a few from small fortunes they had made themselves.

  It was sickening. Wealth, privilege, power, spelled out in these files in black and white. Oh, they had a few little peccadilloes. One man had flunked out of three colleges before he had completed his education in a fourth. Three drunken-driving convictions. One illegitimate child. One man had been known to frequent prostitutes in his younger days, and one had been accused of being a closet homosexual by a disgruntled soon-to-be-ex during a messy divorce. Luis Camacho, career cop, thought it pretty tame stuff.

  For several seconds he sat and stared at the piles of folders spread over the table. No cop, he told himself, ever looked seriously at a more unlikely group of suspects. There wasn’t even one man with a family or background that might be vulnerable to intense scrutiny. Not here. These men had had every advantage that birth, wealth, and social position could confer. Sadly he shook his head.

  If the key to the Minotaur’s behavior was in his past, it was going to remain buried unless a small army of agents with a lot of time were told to dig deep. The agents Camacho could get. What frustrated Camacho was his suspicion that he was running out of time. What infuriated him was his conviction that no matter how deep they dug, the investigators could come up dry. And without something…some artifact…something tangible, how could he sell a man to Albright as the Minotaur? Albright would want a man he could understand, with a motivation that could be reduced to writing and passed from the Aquarium to the Kremlin and would explain. The committee should have thought this problem through two years ago.

  He went back to his office and found a photo of Terry Franklin in the file. Actually there were four of them. The one he selected was a full-figure shot taken with a hidden camera. Franklin was looking just to the right of the camera, perhaps waiting for a car to pass the parked van the photographer had used. This picture he placed in an inside pocket of his sports coat. He glanced at his watch. If he went to the Pentagon, he could probably still catch Vice Admiral Henry, who rarely left before 7 P.M.

  Terry Franklin stopped at a neighborhood bar after he got off the bus from work. On the Friday evening of the longest week of his life, he deserved a few drinks. Waiting for the ax to fall was squeezing the juice right out of him. He had been a bumbling fool all week, botching one job after another, having to ask the chief for help with several problems that were so minor he had been embarrassed. The chief was solicitous, asking if he was having problems at home.

  The problem was he couldn’t think about anything else. He could no longer concentrate on his job, his wife, the kids, anything. He had to get his mind off it and he just couldn’t! Sitting here at the bar, he glanced warily at the other customers, then bit his lip. A panic-stricken scream was just beneath the surface. He was losing it. It was like one of those nightmares he had as a kid—he was fleeing from a hideous monster and his legs went slower and slower and the monster was reaching out, within inches of catching him—and he woke up screaming with pee soaking his pajamas.

  He was going to have to get all this crap stuffed into one sock, going to have to wire himself together so he could get from one end of the day to the other. He had all of tonight, all day Saturday, all day Sunday—three nights and two whole days—before he had to face his demons on Monday.

  He ordered another CC on the rocks. Sure, he could do it. No one knew. No one was going to arrest him. No one was going to toss him into prison with a bunch of homo thieves and killers. After all, this is America, land of the gullible, home of the foolish.

  He would deliver and collect on another dozen floppies or so. Then he would empty his safe-deposit box and be on his way to a new life. Perhaps Rio. He would lie on the beach all day and fuck beach bunnies at night.

  He sipped on his drink and thought about how it would be. The life he had always wanted was right there within his grasp, so close, within inches. But he was going to have to be realistic about the monsters, going to have to keep trotting. No urine-soaked pajamas. No screaming fits. Amen.

  He paid the tab and left two quarters on the bar. Outside he forced himself to pause and examine the headlines on the newspaper in the vending stand. Same old crap. The world was still turning, things were burning down, trains were still crashing…

  He walked the two blocks home with his head up, breathing the spring air. It seemed just yesterday that it was so cold and miserable. Spring is here. And I’ve got a fortune in the bank and no one knows but me.

  His neighbor was washing his car in the driveway. “Hey, Terry, how’s it going?”

  “Pretty good. And you?”

  “Just fine. Say, I’ve been meaning to ask you. How’s the spy business?”

  Terry Franklin froze.

  The asshole tossed his sponge into a bucket and wiped his hands on his jeans. He grinned as he reached for his cigarettes. “Lucy has been telling Melanie that you’re a spy. I laughed myself sick. So…”

  Terry didn’t hear any more. He lurched for the front door.

  “Lucy!” He slammed the door behind him and charged for the kitchen. “Lucy,” he bellowed, “you stupid—”

  Lucy was sitting with her mother drinking coffee at the counter. Both women stared, openmouthed.

  “What—what does Jared mean—about Melanie? What did you tell Melanie?” He thought he was doing pretty well under the circumstances, staying calm and keeping the legs going. But it came out as a roar.

  “Now listen here, Terry—” Lucy’s mom began.

  “Lucy, I need to talk to you.” He grabbed her arm and half lifted her from the stool. “Now, Lucy.”

  “Let go of her, Terry!”

  “Mom Southworth, please! I need to talk to—”

  “No!” The old lady had a voice like a drill instructor.

  “Lucy, what did you tell that moron Melanie?”

  “I told her that—”

  “Get your hands off her, Terry. I know all about you. You stupid, greedy—” The older woman was fat, with two chins. Just now Terry Franklin thought her the ugliest woman he had ever laid eyes on.

  “Shut up, you nosy old bitch! What the hell are you doing here anyway? Lucy, I want to talk to you.” He grabbed her arm and dragged her from the stool toward the downstairs half-bath. He pulled her inside and slammed the door. “What in the name of God have you been saying to Melanie?”

  Lucy was scared witless. “Noth—”

  “Did you tell her I was a spy?”

  Terry didn’t need an answer; it was written all over her face. The mother-in-law was pounding on the door and shouting. Something about calling the police.

  “You—you—” he whimpered as his legs turned to wood and the monster’s fetid breath engulfed him.

  Lucy opened the door and slid out as he sagged down onto the floor and covered his face with his hands. His whole life was shattered, smashed to bits by that silly, simple twat!

  It was 8:30 P.M. when Luis Camacho parked in front of Mrs. Jackson’s house and locked his car. It was a delightful spring evening, still a nip in the air, but almost no wind. The foliage was budding. Summer was coming and the earth was ready.

  As he walked down the street Camacho glanced at the crack house. Someone was peering though a curtain on the second floor, he saw it move. No one on the sidewalk. Mrs. Jackson’s gate was ajar, but not a light showed through the curtains
.

  He mounted the stoop and rapped on the door. As he waited he glanced around. Street still empty. Such a beautiful evening. He knocked some more. Perhaps she had gone to the store, or to a neighbor’s?

  Suddenly he knew. He tried the knob. It turned. He pushed the door open several inches and called into the darkness, “Mrs. Jackson? Mrs. Jackson, are you here?” He gingerly pushed the door open wider and reached under his jacket for the butt of the .357 magnum on his right hip.

  All the lights were off. Camacho closed the door behind him and stood in the darkness listening with the revolver in his hand.

  Nothing. Not a sound. Not a squeak, not a creak, nothing.

  He waited, flexing his fingers on the butt of the gun. All he could hear was the thud of his own heart.

  Slowly, carefully, he groped for the light switch on the wall.

  She was lying near the kitchen door with her right leg twisted under her, staring fixedly at the ceiling. In the center of her forehead was a small red circle. No blood. She had died instantly.

  With the revolver ready he went from room to room, turning on lights and glancing into closets. Everything was neat, clean, tidy. Satisfied that the killer was gone, he came back to the living room and stood looking at Mrs. Jackson. He stooped and touched her cheek. She had been dead for hours. Around the bullet hole in her forehead was a black substance. A powder burn.

  The phone was in the kitchen. Her purse sat beside it, the catch still latched. Camacho wrapped his handkerchief loosely around the telephone receiver before he picked it up. He dialed with a pen from his shirt pocket. As he waited for the duty officer to answer, he idly noticed that the fire under the coffeepot had been turned off. A professional hit. With any luck the body would not have been discovered for days and the time of death would have been problematic.

  “This is Special Agent Camacho.” He gave them the address. “I’ve discovered a corpse. Better send the forensic team and the D.C. police liaison officer. And call Dreyfus at home and ask him to come over.”