He was on two-lane blacktop now, a local county road. He watched the mirror. A car turned from 29 onto this road, but it had been traveling north. He didn’t recognize it. Local traffic passed him going the other way.
Fulton was a tiny village—just a few farms, a church and a small post office with a few nearby shops—1.1 miles west of Route 29. Albright angled left onto Lime Kiln Road. This asphalt ribbon was more narrow and twisty as it followed the natural descent of a creek. He was in an area of beautiful homes set in huge meadows well back from the road. Trees lined the fences and horses grazed on the lush grass. The car that had followed him from Route 29 turned left at Reservoir Road and went up a little hill into a sprawling subdivision.
A half mile past Reservoir Road Albright slowed the car. There it was, right beside the road—a stone drinking fountain fed by a pipe from a spring. He eased to a stop and slammed the gear shift lever into park. From the floor of the backseat he selected a 7-Up can, grasping it with a rag. He slid across the seat, opened the passenger door and set the can at the base of the fountain so it was visible from the road. Back into the car, door shut, and rolling again. Twenty seconds.
He glanced left, up a long sloping meadow at a huge house set on top of the hill in a grove of trees. No one in sight.
Three hundred yards farther on he came to a T intersection. This was Brown Bridge Road, another strip of two-lane asphalt with a double yellow line down the center and no berms. He sat at the intersection and looked both ways. No traffic. Nothing in the rearview mirror.
He turned right. The road wound up a wooded draw and came out into rolling, open country. A mile from Lime Kiln Road he came to another stop sign at a T intersection. This was Route 216 again. To the right, east, was Fulton; 1.1 miles to the west was Highland Junction. He knew, because he had spent many a Sunday driving these suburban county roads, learning their twists and turns, looking for likely drop sites. Directly across the road was a Methodist church. Three or four cars in the lot, no people in sight.
He turned right, toward Fulton. He went through the village and out to Route 29, which he crossed and continued on through Skaggsville, across I-95, and into Laurel, where he turned around in the parking lot of a convenience store and began retracing his route as he watched for vehicles he had seen before and scanned the sky for airplanes.
Exactly thirty minutes later, at 2:47 P.M., he again passed Reservoir Road on Lime Kiln. Someone was changing a flat tire on a van fifty yards up the hill on Reservoir. He hadn’t seen that van before. Maybe. It could be the FBI. Or it could be anybody. He continued past and slowed for the stone fountain.
The 7-Up can was still there. No vehicles in sight. No people on the hills that he could see. No choppers or planes overhead. He kept rolling past the fountain and dropped down to the Brown Bridge Road intersection.
He stopped at the stop sign and looked both ways. No traffic. He looked back over his shoulder, thinking about the van with the flat tire, weighing it.
He turned left. The road ran along a creek that was dropping toward the Patuxent River. The little valley was heavily wooded. Houses sat amid the trees off to his left, but the steep bank on his right was a forest.
Two-tenths of a mile from the intersection a gravel road branched off to the right. “Schooley Mill Road,” the sign read. He took it.
The road was narrow, no more than ten feet wide. It ran just along the north side of the creek, parallel to the asphalt road, which was twenty-five feet or so above him at the top of a steep embankment on his left. This was a secluded lovers’ lane, for a few hundred yards invisible from the paved road above. Apparently, when the teenagers weren’t screwing here, the locals used this lane as a trash depository. Green garbage bags, beer and soda-pop cans lay abandoned alongside the gravel.
There was one paved driveway leading north from this road, and it had a mailbox on a wooden post. He passed the box and stopped at the first large tree. He bolted out the passenger door, set the Dr Pepper can at the base of the tree and jumped back in the car.
A tenth of a mile later Schooley Mill Road rejoined Brown Bridge Road. Two-tenths of a mile after he was back on the asphalt he crossed Brown Bridge, a modern low concrete highway bridge across the Patuxent River, which was several hundred yards wide here. Now this highway became Ednor Road. He continued the two miles to New Hampshire Avenue, Maryland Route 650, and turned left. He had to be back at the drop in twenty-five minutes. He checked his watch.
Eight thousand feet overhead in a Cessna 172, Agent Clarence Brown laid his binoculars in his lap and rubbed his eyes as he keyed the mike. “Subject went down that Schooley Mill fuck road and was hidden by the trees for about two minutes. He might have stopped in there. You better check it.”
Sitting in the van with the wheel off on Reservoir Road, Lloyd Dreyfus turned to the man beside him. “That can down at the spring wasn’t the drop. The subject was just testing the water.”
“You sure?”
“Hell no.” But Dreyfus felt it in his gut. He looked at his map. The drops were close together, too close really. Albright should have been more careful. He’s getting careless.
“Think he’s spotted the plane?”
“No,” Dreyfus said. “Browns too high. He flew right over us a couple minutes ago. You can’t hear him at that altitude and you can’t see him unless you know where to look.”
Dreyfus keyed the radio mike. “Stay on him, Clarence. I want to know when he’s coming back.”
“Roger.”
To the man beside him Dreyfus said, “Have the guys get the wheel back on. Get ready to roll fast.” Then he switched frequencies and began moving his agents.
Ten minutes later when Vasily Pochinkov passed the Methodist church on Route 216 and turned onto Brown Bridge Road, he was photographed from a station wagon parked in the church parking lot amid four other cars. He never noticed. His eye was captured by the svelte figure of a woman in shorts walking toward the church door.
He glanced at his wife in the passenger seat as she hunted for a glove on the floor. She had dropped it and was feeling blindly. She was too fat to bend over and look for it.
Why is it, he wondered, not for the first time, that all Russian women have figures like potato sacks while American women keep their figures well past middle age? You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but this potato bag was only thirty-four years old and had had the figure of a ballerina when he married her just twelve years ago. It took a lot of vodka these days to prime himself for an expedition between those padded pillars she called thighs.
“Get ready, Nadya. Get the gloves on.”
The road began to twist and descend as it dropped toward Brown Bridge. Pochinkov slowed to twenty-five miles per hour, watched the odometer and looked for Schooley Mill Road.
There!
He saw the Dr Pepper can when he was fifty yards away. He glanced around as he braked to a stop. The glen was empty. Nadya stepped out, a green garbage bag in hand, and placed it fifteen feet west of the tree. While she was doing that, Pochinkov walked over to the Dr Pepper can, glanced around once and placed a second one beside it
They got back in the car, closed the door and rolled.
The Buick was climbing the hill on the south side of the river when the van shot out of Lime Kiln Road and roared the thousand feet to the entrance to Schooley Mill. The driver braked to a halt and two men wearing gloves jumped out. One opened the green trash bag while the other took flash photos.
Inside the van Lloyd Dreyfus was listening to Agent Brown in the Cessna. “Subject is about a half mile south of Ednor Road, northbound on New Hampshire. I’d say you have no more than six or seven minutes…He just passed the drop car, which was southbound.”
The two men piled back into the van within a minute. The agent at the wheel fed gas when he heard the rear door slam. When he reached the asphalt of Brown Bridge, he made a hard left and headed east, back up the road, toward Lime Kiln.
The lane was empty when Harlan
Albright entered four minutes later. He didn’t even get out of the car. After a glance at the soda cans, he merely braked to a stop beside the trash bag and picked it up. He set it on the floor in front of the empty passenger seat as he pulled the door shut with his left hand and took his foot off the brake.
Glancing in he could see trash: a wadded-up bread wrapper, a couple empty vegetable cans, three squashed soda-pop cans and an old meat wrapper. They had, he knew, been carefully washed so they would not attract dogs. Under the trash was the money, $200,000 in used twenties, one hundred bundles of a hundred twenties each.
It was 5 P.M. when he pulled into his driveway in Silver Spring. The Sunday Post was still lying by the mailbox. He took it into the house with him, turned on the television, and settled back with the newspaper.
26
Toad Tarkington awoke at four-thirty Monday and went to the bathroom. He got back into bed, but he wasn’t sleepy. Still dark outside. Wide awake and irritated because he couldn’t sleep, he went to the window and peered out. Some clouds with stars visible between them. Not too many stars, though. Funny, but early in the morning, just before dawn, the stars seem to fade, almost as if the weaker ones grow tired of shining and are sent home early.
He prowled the little room, restless. He pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt and was sitting in the easy chair when the light began to spread on the eastern horizon.
The telephone rang.
“Tarkington.”
“Lieutenant, this is the shift supervisor at the hospital. Your wife is awake and she asked for you.”
“I’ll be right over. You tell her!” He dropped the instrument onto the hook and grabbed for his shoes.
The sedan refused to start. He jabbed at the accelerator and held the key over. The engine ground and ground and didn’t fire. Too late he realized he had probably flooded it.
Heck. It was only three-quarters of a mile or so over there. He slammed the door behind him and began to trot. Awake! Asking for him! He picked up the pace.
The sun was about ready to come over the earth’s rim. The clouds above were blue, turning pink. Above them was blue sky.
The last three blocks he sprinted, down the street and across the windswept dirt that would someday be a lawn and across the empty parking lot with its tumbleweeds and right through the front door.
The nurse at the desk was grinning as he charged by. He skidded around the corner and lunged down the hall for the ICU.
A doctor was there beside her bed, talking to her as a nurse took her pulse. The doctor stepped back as Toad skidded to a halt inside the door and walked forward, into Rita’s line of sight.
She tried to grin.
“Hey, babe.” He bent over and kissed her.
“Yeah, Mrs. Moravia, she’s out of the coma. And she recognizes me! She’s asleep right now, real tired, but she’s out of the coma!”
“Oh, thank God!”
“I really think she’s gonna be okay, Mrs. Moravia. It’s like a miracle. She doesn’t remember anything about the flight or the ejection, but she remembers me and being in Nevada and the other flights, and she kept asking how long she’s been in the hospital. The doctor and the nurses are excited! I’m excited!” That was an understatement of major proportions. He was so worked up he felt like he could fly by merely flapping his arms.
After promising to call again after his next visit with Rita, Toad called his parents. He called his sister to give her the news. He called Harriet, Rita’s best friend. Due to the time difference on the East Coast, Harriet was at work. And he called Jake Grafton.
Captain Grafton was also at the office and he could hear the activity in the background, but Toad could almost see Grafton leaning back in his chair and propping his feet on his middle desk drawer as if he had all the time in the world. The captain kept him on the phone almost twenty minutes, making him tell of Rita’s every word and gesture, listening as long as Toad wanted to talk. Finally Toad realized the captain must have something else to do, and said a reluctant goodbye.
“You tell her I said to get well quick.”
“I will, sir.”
“And tell her Amy asks about her every day. Amy and Callie have been pulling real hard for her.”
“I’ll tell her.”
“Keep the faith, shipmate,” Jake Grafton said, and was gone.
“Yeah,” said Toad Tarkington, hanging up the receiver and wiping his eyes. The tears wouldn’t stop. So he laughed and cried at the very same time.
Monday evening after work Commander Smoke Judy went home, changed clothes, then drove to a bar in Georgetown. He had trouble finding the place, then he had to park six blocks away and hike back. The streets were packed with the trendy and the chic. Poodles anointed lampposts and fire hydrants as their ladies gazed away with a studied casualness.
Judy had to stand by the door until a stool opened at the bar. He perched there and studied the beer list. The bartender paused across the polished mahogany bar and said, “On draft we have Guinness, Watney’s, Steinlager—”
“Gimme a Bud. In a bottle.”
He saw Harlan Albright come in about fifteen minutes later and grab an empty stool on the far end. Albright was carrying a gym bag.
Nice touch that, Judy decided. Half the people in the place, men and women, had a gym bag with them or were wearing exercise clothes. Not sweaty tank tops and grungy shorts, mind you, but stuff that looked like it came from Saks and routinely visited a dry-cleaning plant.
When the man beside Judy left to visit a woman who had just slipped into a booth, Albright came over and sat on the vacant stool.
“Ever been here before?”
“Nope. Gonna come back, though. This is a real meat market. And on a Monday evening too!”
“Next Monday. A week from today, same time, right here.” Albright signaled the bartender, laid a five on the wood and left.
Smoke nursed his second beer. The mirror behind the bar gave him an excellent view of the Lycra thighs and hungry eyes of the female patrons, most of whom seemed to be drinking white wine or Perrier with a twist.
Smoke Judy, fighter pilot, took a last swallow and counted his change. He left a dollar tip. With a final glance around, he hoisted the gym bag and walked out, right past some sweet little piece in spandex on her way in.
Tuesday evening Rita grinned as Toad entered her room. She had been moved from the ICU and was in a semiprivate room, but the other bed was empty. The respirator and heart monitor had not accompanied her.
Toad closed the door behind him and kissed her. “How you feeling?”
“Like I got hit by a truck.” Her voice was soft, almost a whisper.
“I’ve been talking to the doctor. They’re going to medevac you to Bethesda on Thursday if you keep improving. Being as how I’m next of kin, I get to ride along.”
“Good,” she said, and continued to grin with her eyes on him.
“So,” he said, returning her smile. “So.”
“I’ve read a little bit.” Her grin broadened.
“I thought you couldn’t focus very well yet.”
“I can’t. Read a little here, a little there. The Adventures of Tarkington. You’re a pretty good writer.”
“You’re a poor critic.”
“I’m glad I married you.”
“I’m damn glad you did.”
The air force medevac plane, a C-141, landed at Andrews AFB. Rita traveled the rest of the way to Bethesda in an ambulance. That evening, when she awoke from her nap, Toad was waiting with her parents, whom he had driven straight to the hospital from National Airport.
Mrs. Moravia was teary but determined to maintain a stiff upper lip. Five minutes after she arrived she launched into a speech that she had apparently been rehearsing for weeks:
“It’s time, Rita. It’s time. You’ve got a fine husband and it’s time you stopped this flying business. Why, Sarah Barnes—you remember Sarah, the cheerleader who went to Bryn Mawr? Such a sweet girl! I can’t think of her n
ew married name…Sarah just had her second baby, a perfectly darling little boy. Her husband’s a med student who’s going into pediatrics. And Nancy Stroh, who married that new dentist from Newport—you knew about that, a perfectly gorgeous wedding in May—her mother told me just last week that Nancy’s practically pregnant. And Kimberly Hyer…”
Mr. Moravia slipped out into the hallway and Toad followed.
“She looks very tired.”
“She’s had a long day,” Toad said.
“Is she going to recover completely?”
“No way to tell. The physical therapy will start in a few weeks and we’ll know more then. Right now she’s pretty desperate to get out of that lower-body cast. The itching and all is driving her nuts. That’s a good sign, I think.”
Ten minutes later, as they finished coffees from a vending machine, Toad suggested, “Maybe we’d better go get your wife and say good night to Rita. She wears down pretty quickly and she’ll need some sleep.”
“We can visit some more in the morning,” the older man agreed.
Walking back toward the room, Toad said, “Rita turned out a little different than her mom.”
“Different generations.” Mr. Moravia shrugged. He was a philosopher.
“They want different things,” Toad said, probing gently.
“Every generation does.”
“Rita’ll keep flying if the doctors let her.”
“I believe you. Madeline’s just blowing off steam. Rita knows that. Where are we going to eat tonight?”
The next morning, a Friday, Toad accompanied the Moravias to the hospital, then had Mr. Moravia drop him at a Metro station. They were going to the National Gallery. Toad went to the office.
Even the subways were stifling in the August heat. Toad’s white uniform shirt threatened to melt before he reached the air-conditioned sanctuary of the lobby in Crystal City.
The Minotaur Page 41