The Minotaur

by Stephen Coonts

  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 carelessness and a tiny pinch of rotten luck. Voilà! 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.

  “I think the doctor in the mail room is an illegal.”

  “You asked to see his green card?”

  “Nope.”

  “Going to?”

  “Not unless you tell me to.”

  “Let’s go see if Wiggins wants to talk.”

  Dreyfus stoked his pipe again on the stroll down the hall. Wiggins’ secretary glared at them. Dreyfus gave her a sympathetic grin, which she ignored.

  They sat silently and flipped through the magazines on the stand. It was five more minutes before the buzzer sounded and they were waved into the inner sanctum.

  “My client,” said the counselor, “wishes to cooperate. With the understanding, of course, that he can cease answering questions at any time.”

  Wiggins had met Smoke Judy on five different occasions. Judy knew that AeroTech needed contracts and offered to help in return for a small cash payment and some stock. On two occasions he talked about a job after he retired. Wiggins had been noncommittal about the job, but had agreed to the money and the stock. Five thousand dollars cash and a bearer certificate for a thousand shares of AeroTech—currently worth $12.75 each—had bought the company an advance peek at the flight control data for the TRX prototype. The navy was just floating a Request for Proposal (RFP) for the fly-by-wire system. AeroTech bid for the chip business and won the contract.

  All this Wiggins admitted, but he stoutly denied any wrongdoing. “This company, it needs the business. And we underbid every other contractor for those chips. We saved the government a lot of money. We didn’t do anything that other defense contractors don’t routinely do. It’s a cutthroat business.”

  The FBI agents seemed unimpressed.

  “Listen, if I hadn’t agreed to Judy’s offer, he would have peddled that information to my competitors. Then where would I have been? No contract. I have a duty to this company.” Color returned to Homer Wiggins’ cheeks.

  “Of course,” Dreyfus said, “you could have called us when Judy first approached you.”

  “I’ve spent fifteen years building this business. I did it with my bare hands, with no money, with a ton of sweat, taking risks that would scare the wits out of a Vegas gambler. I built it!” Camacho found himself staring at Wiggins’ gold wedding ring and gold class ring. Was that Yale?

  “Now the navy wants me to make E-PROMs cheaper than anyone else. So I do. And this is the gratitude, this is the reward! I am treated like a criminal!” He sprayed saliva across the desk, and for the first time Camacho saw the drive and determination that had built a successful corporation.

  “I am treated like a criminal for doing what everyone else does and for making E-PROM chips cheaper than anyone else can.”

  Camacho looked at his watch: 5:30. Maybe he was still in the office. “Do you want to go to jail tonight?”

  Wiggins gaped. The blood drained from his face, and for a moment Camacho thought he had stopped breathing.

  “No,” he whispered.

  “Now see here—” the lawyer began, but Camacho cut him off with a jab of his hand.

  “Have you talked to Judy this week?”

  “No. No!”

  “I want you to call him for me. I’ll tell you what to say. I’ll listen on an extension. You will say precisely what I tell you and nothing else. Will you do it?”

  “What choice do I have?” Wiggins was recovering. This man’s recuperative powers were excellent. He could handle it.

  “You don’t go to jail this evening. I make my report to the Justice Department and they take it from there. If they indict you, that’s their business. My report will show that you cooperated.”

  “I’ll make the call.”

  “Homer,” said Nash, “maybe—”

  “I’ll make the call. And you go on home, Prescott. Thanks for being here this afternoon. I’ll call you.”

  “Are you sure you—?”

  Wiggins was examining his hands. Martin Prescott Nash rose from his chair and went out the door. It swung shut behind him.

  “Smoke, this is Homer Wiggins.”

  “I told you never to call me—”

  “Something’s come up. The FBI are here, in Detroit. They’re checking out the chips. I’m just letting you know.”

  Smoke Judy was silent for several seconds. “Have they talked to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What—?” His voice fell. “Do they know?”

  “About you? I don’t know. I think—they might. Definitely.”

  “Did you—?”

  “I’ve got to go now, Smoke. I just wanted you to know.” Wiggins held the instrument away from his ear, and at a nod from Camacho, Dreyfus simultaneously depressed the buttons on both telephones, severing the connection.

  When they were alone in the car on the way back to the airport, Camacho said, “I got a little job for you tomorrow, Dreyfus. We’re going to need all our people, and you’ll probably have to borrow a bunch.”

  Dreyfus fished out his pipe and tobacco and merely glanced at his boss.

  “I want to keep track of a man. We’ll need discreet surveillance teams, couple of choppers and the electronics boys.”

  “Anyone I know.”

  “Nope. It’s my next-door neighbor, guy named Harlan Albright.”

  “You know, in my fifteen years in the FBI I have never felt more like a mushroom than I have working for you. You’ve kept me in the dark and shoveled shit at me for eighteen months now. If you got croaked tomorrow, I couldn’t even tell the old man what the hell you were working on. I don’t know.”

  Camacho, behind the wheel, kept his eyes on the
road. “The electronics guys already put listening devices in his house, three days ago when his air conditioning went out. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.”

  Dreyfus got his pipe going strongly and rolled down his window. The car’s air conditioning was going full blast. “Think he’s screwing your wife?”

  “Read the security regulations lately, Dreyfus?”

  “Listen, boss. And listen good. You want good solid work from me but you don’t want me to know anything. Now I am just about one day away from submitting my resignation. I don’t need this shit and I’m not gonna keep taking it! Not for you, not for the old man, not for the Director, not for any of you spook dingdongs. And you can put that in my final evaluation!”

  Camacho braked the car to a stop at a light. He just sat there behind the wheel, watching the light, waiting for it to change. When it did, he glanced left and hesitated. An old junker car was going to run the red. As it hurled by, Dreyfus leaned out his window with his middle finger jabbed prominently aloft.

  Camacho took his foot off the brake and fed gas.

  “Okay,” Luis Camacho said. “You want to know what’s going on. I’ll tell you.” And he did.

  25

  On Saturday the sun rose into a clean, bright sky, a pleasant change from the haze that had been stalled over the Potomac River basin for a week. The morning weatherman credited a cold front that had swept through during the night and blessed the metropolitan Washington area with some much-needed showers.

  Commander Smoke Judy absorbed the weather information while he scraped at his chin. He had acquired the habit of listening to the morning forecasts during his twenty years in naval aviation, and it was hard to break. Yet he wasn’t paying much attention. His mind was on other things.

  After finishing at the sink and dressing, he poured himself a glass of orange juice and opened the sliding glass door to his apartment balcony. The view was excellent, considering he was only six floors up. From out here he could see the gleam of the Potomac and, on the horizon, the jutting spire of the Washington Monument. As usual, the jets were droning into and out of National Airport. Even with that cold front last night today would be hot Already the sun had a bite to it.

  He sat on the little folding chair in the sun and thought once again about Harold Strong and the flight control data and Homer T. Wiggins of AeroTech. Nothing in life ever works out just the way you think it will, he told himself bitterly. They should put that over the door of every public building in Washington.

  Strong had gotten suspicious. Judy had spent one too many evenings in the office, asked one too many questions about that TRX fly-by-wire system. So Strong had doctored the data, rendering it worthless unless one knew exactly how and where it had been changed.

  When Smoke found out, it was too late. He had already given the data to AeroTech, to Homer T. Wiggins. Oh, even defective it was good for what Homer wanted it for, to check the AeroTech manufacturing capability and cost out the manufacturing process. Heck, he could have written Homer a purely fictitious report that would have allowed AeroTech to accomplish the same thing. So it wasn’t like he had stiffed Homer. And both he and Homer knew that the preliminary data would be changed, probably many times, during the course of development. There was no possibility that the erroneous stuff would end up in an airplane that someone was going to try to fly.

  And still, it happened! It happened. All the checks that were supposed to be done, the fail-safe, zero-defects program, all of it went down the crapper in an unbelievable series of coincidences. Now TRX was going to fire a couple of clowns who each thought the other guy had done the checks. So neither did them.

  He tossed off the last gulp of orange juice and wiped his mouth with his fingers. He sat the empty glass on the concrete beside his chair and sat looking at the city.

  Nothing he had ever attempted in his whole life had worked out right. What was it the hippies called it? Karma?

  Funny, killing Harold Strong had been easier than he thought it would be. Probably too easy. No doubt someway, somehow, he had fucked that up too.

  Looking back, it had been a bad decision. Strong probably had nothing but a few baseless suspicions that he couldn’t prove.

  Ah well, what was done was done. You signed for the plane and flew it as best you could and if today was your day to die, you died. That was life.

  He had wanted something besides a pension, and now he had his savings—about $56,000—and the cash from five little deals—$30,000—and some stock he probably couldn’t sell. Plus his pension, a lousy 55 percent of his base pay if he lasted twenty-two years. Yet if he cut and ran, his pension would evaporate like a gob of spit on a hot steel deck. If he didn’t run, well…he would have to give his savings and the cash to a lawyer to try to stay out of prison.

  FBI agents were probably watching him this very minute. Sitting somewhere in one of these apartments or in a vehicle down in the lot, watching him. If Wiggins had been telling the truth…But there was really no reason for him to lie. What did Wiggins have to gain by lying?

  Judy had gone to work yesterday, though he had been sorely tempted to call in sick. That little conversation Thursday evening with Wiggins, just before he walked out of the office, that had shaken him. He had locked up his papers, bid everyone a pleasant good evening and walked out sweating.

  That evening he had convinced himself there really wasn’t any hurry. It might be six months or a year before they got around to arresting him, if they ever did, and he could get out on bail. And where could he run? What with?

  He pushed himself up, out of the chair, and went inside. He drew the curtains. Rummaging through the bottom drawer of his dresser, he found the .38 he always wore in his flight gear. He flipped out the cylinder. Empty. Did he have any cartridges? He sat on the bed and tried to remember. There should be six in the left, radio pocket of his survival vest, which was piled in a corner of the closet. He had put them there when he emptied the pistol after his last flight in that F-14 at Tonopah.

  He found the brass cartridges and dropped them into the cylinder holes.

  The pistol was old, with the bluing completely gone in places. Nowadays they issued the kids nine-millimeters, but he had always liked the old .38. Amazingly enough, this was the one they issued him twenty years ago when he checked into his first fleet squadron.

  The money was in a gym bag on the other side of the closet floor. He spread it on the bed and examined the miserable pile. Fifteen bundles of a hundred twenties each. Three weeks’ take for a twelve year-old crack salesman. For this he had wagered his pension and risked years in prison?

  He went into the kitchen and poured himself the last of the bourbon, added some ice and water and went back out onto the balcony.

  “Here’s to you, Smoke Judy, you stupid, unlucky bastard.”

  He sipped the liquor and watched the shadows shorten as the sun rose higher into the sky. Already it was hot. It was going to be a scorcher.

  Twenty miles north of where Smoke Judy sat, Luis Camacho was trying to get his lawn mower started. He diddled with the choke and jerked the starter rope repeatedly. The plug fired a few times, then gave up. He decided he had flooded it. He could take out the plug and pull it through a few times, but no.

  He sat in the shade on the concrete of his driveway, with his back against the wall, and waited for the recalcitrant device to purify itself. He was trying to work up the energy to stand and again assault the machine when Harlan Albright came out of his house, saw him, and crossed the grass toward him.

  “Hey,” Albright said.

  “Hey yourself. Know anything about lawn mowers?”

  “Cars are my bag. I pay a kid to cut mine.”

  “Why didn’t you hire my kid?”

  “You must be kidding! He doesn’t even cut your grass.”

  “He needs a better offer than I can make.” Camacho stood, flexed his arms a few times experimentally, then grasped the rope. Choke off. He yanked. The engine spluttered.

/>   Albright bent and adjusted the needle valve. “Now try it.”

  It started on the next jerk of the lanyard. Albright played with the needle valve until the engine ran smoothly.

  When Luis finished the front and back yards and put the machine back in the garage, Albright had a beer waiting. Ten o’clock. “What the heck, it’s Saturday.”

  They sat on Albright’s front steps, in the shade of the big maple.

  “What’s new in the glamorous, dazzling world of counterespionage?”

  “Our people visiting the gourmet food stores had a nibble. A store over in Reston. Not much of anything, but it was all we got. One of the clerks got to talking about how many famous people buy their stuff at that store. She had a name, but she couldn’t remember if he had ever bought any jam. She said he or his secretary come in there once a month or so.”

  “Who?”

  “It isn’t evidence. The clerk was a dingbat. The agent said she looked like she had terminal anorexia. Didn’t look like she weighed ninety pounds. Obviously been eating her own stuff.”

  “Who?”

  “Royce Caplinger.”

  Albright’s eyebrows rose once, then fell back into place. “She sure?”

  “I told you, she was bragging. She also said she had three senators, five congressmen, two ex-congressmen, a dozen flag officers from all services, and three high-class hookers that buy stuff from her on a regular basis.”

  “Hookers, huh? What’s the name of the store?”

  “The Gourmet Market.”

  “You going to follow up?”

  “Yeah. Sure. I’ve got a SWAT team sitting on the place twenty-four hours a day. A cockroach couldn’t get in or out without us knowing it. If Caplinger ever shows up again and buys French blueberry jam, we’ll bust him on the spot.” He drained the beer can and stood. “Still, it’s a lead. Someplace to look.”

  “How’s the ATA crash investigation going?”

  “So-so. The usual. Dazzle. Glamour.”

  “Why are you in that investigation anyway?”

  “The admiral in charge is scared to death of the Minotaur. And he knows I’m the best; he won’t talk to anybody else. No shit.” He tossed the empty can at Albright. “I gotta go. Taking Sally to the mall. Thanks for the beer.”