The Minotaur

9

Terry Franklin stood with his back against a pillar and tried to keep his face pointed at Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. The pillar was the second one on the right after you came through the main entrance. The man on the phone had been very precise about that. Second pillar on the right, on the side toward the Inaugural Address.

His eyes kept moving. He was nervous, so nervous. He had vom- ited up his breakfast an hour ago… Not that person, a teenage girl. Not that old fat woman with the cane and the two kids. Maybe that man in the suit over there… he could be FBI. Was he looking this way? Why was he turning? That long-haired guy in jeans…

He had been here ten minutes and had already spotted five men who could be FBI. Maybe they all were. What if they had him staked out, like a goat? Maybe he should just leave, walk away and forget all of this. He had plenty of money. Enough. He had enough. If they weren’t on to him he could live carefully and com- fortably for years with no one the wiser. But what if they knew?

“It’s one of the world’s great speeches, isn’t it?”

He turned and stared. A man, in his fifties with a tan face, stocky, wearing a short jacket, looking at the speech carved in the marble. On his head a brimmed hat. What’s the response? Holy… think! “Yeah. — uh, but I think the Gettysburg Address is better.”

“Stay twenty feet or so behind me.” The man turned and walked for the entrance, not fast, not slow, just walking. After he had gone three paces Terry Franklin could wait no longer and followed.

The man was only ten feet ahead going down the wide, broad steps in front of the Memorial. Franklin forced himself to slow down and lag behind. The distance had increased to fifteen feet by the time they reached the sidewalk, but it narrowed again as Franklin strode along. He stood right behind the man as he waited for a tour bus to roll by.

On the other side of the street the man said, “Walk beside me.” He led Terry along the north side of the Reflecting Pool until he found an empty bench. “Here,” he said.

“Can’t we go somewhere private?” Franklin asked, still on his feet and looking around in all directions.

“This is private. Sit!” The petty officer obeyed. “Look at me. ‘ Stop looking around. You’re as nervous as a schoolboy smoking his first cigarette.”

“Something went wrong. Really wrong. Why in hell did you people have a drop in a black ghetto? Some nigger doper could have torn my head off over there.”

“The drops were selected in Moscow, from a list. That drop was originally chosen for another agent.” The man shrugged, resigned, “Bureaucrats. These things happen.”

“So who got the message? Answer me that! Who saw me there? The cops? The FBI? NIS?” The pitch of his voice started rising. “What am I supposed to do now? Wait until—“

“No one saw you. Some child or derelict probably removed the cigarette pack, or it was blown out of the hole by the wind. If you had been observed they would be tailing you now.”

Franklin couldn’t help himself He turned his head quickly, scanning.

“Sit still! You only call attention to yourself by doing that, and believe me, there is nothing to see. You are clean. I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.”

Franklin stared at his feet. He was so miserable. “I called in sick today.”

“And you rode the subways just as we instructed, and we checked you all the way. No one followed. No one pulled up to Metro stations to see if you got off. No one made phone calls or ran for a car after you passed by. You are clean. You are not being watched.”

“So who are you?”

“You don’t need—” He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “My name is Yuri.” The man extracted a pack of cigarettes from an inside jacket pocket and lit one. Mariboro Gold 100s, Franklin noticed. The fingers that held the cigarette were thick, the nails short. No rings.

“So what do you want me to do?”

“I’m here to evaluate you, to see if you are capable of going on, of continuing to serve.”

Franklin thought about it. Lucy hadn’t spoken to him for four days now. God only knows what that bitch will do. Still, ten thou- sand bucks a disk was damn good money. And if …

“If you wish to continue, you must calm down. You must get a grip on yourself.” Yuri’s voice was low and steady. “Your greatest asset is that no one suspects you, and if you become nervous, irra- tional, irritable, not your usual self, then you call attention to your- self and make yourself suspect. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” He glanced at the man, who was looking at him carefully with inquisitive, knowing eyes. Franklin averted his gaze.

“We’ll give you a rest,” Yuri said. “We’ll wait a few months before we give you another assignment. Will that help?”

Terry Franklin was torn. He wanted the money, quickly, but as he sat here on this bench knowing they could be watching he knew Just how close he was to the end of his emotional rope. For the first time in his life he realized how little real courage he had. But for this kind of money maybe he could screw up enough stuff to keep going, for a while at least. If he had some time. He rubbed his eyes, trying to quell the tic in his left eyelid- “Yes,” he said slowly, “perhaps it would be better to let things cool off, settle down.”

“Okay- So tomorrow you go back to work as usual. Do all the usual things, all the things you normally do. Keep to your routine. Do nothing out of the ordinary. Be pleasant to your colleagues. Can you manage that?”

He considered it, visions of the office and the chief flashing be- fore his eyes, fear welling up.

“Yes?”

“Yes.” He got it out.

“Do you want to talk about anything else?”

He shook his head no.

“You are doing important work. You have made a great contri- bution. Your work is known in Moscow.”

Terry Franklin said nothing. Of course his work was known in Moscow. Just as long as no one here found out about it, everything would be fine. Ensuring that that didn’t happen was the whole problem.

“To show you how valuable your work is, we are raising your pay. To eleven thousand a disk.”

Franklin just nodded. The enormity of the risks he was running to earn that money had finally sunk in the last four days- He no longer thought of it as easy money. He was earning every goddamn dime.

“You may leave now. Walk up Twenty-third Street to the Foggy Bottom Metro station and board there. Goodbye.”

Terry Franklin rose and walked away without a backward glance.

“How long you guys gonna be in town?” the driver of the rental car shuttle bus asked George Wilson as they circled Terminal C at Dallas-Fort Worth to pick up more people.

“Oh, a day or so.”

“Going home then?”

“No. We’ve got a couple more cities to visit.” Inquisitive devil, Jake thought, sitting beside George and watching people board.

“Did you come here from home?” Maybe the driver was work- ing for a tip. Or maybe he was just bored. He got the bus in motion again as the people who had just boarded tried to store their bags in the bin and hold on too.

“Nope. Came from L.A. Been on the road a while.”

“I knew it! You’re a traveling salesman, huh?”

“Yep.”

“I can always tell.”

At TRX Industries the six men were passed from person to person until they reached the program manager. His ample gut hung over a wide leather belt secured with a Budweiser buckle. At least it appeared to be a Budweiser buckle, but it would be impossible to know for sure unless you checked while you were shining his cow- boy boots. His name was Harry Franks.

After the introductions and how-are-yous, he said, “Do you guys want to see it right now, or go to the conference room and watch the video presentation first?” He eyed Jake.

“I’d just as soon see the plane now.”

“For sure. Maybe see the presento during lunch. We worked real hard on it. You fellas follow me.”

As they strolled along he bantered with Wilson and the com- manders, whom he called by name. Just a bunch of good ol’ boys.

The plane was in the hangar. The design seemed to Jake Grafton to be more conventional than Consolidated’s. This plane had a tandem cockpit and twin vertical stabilizers canted in at the top, toward each other, but there the similarity to the other prototype stopped. This bird was tactical navy gray, with engine intakes in the wing roots and no canards. Instead of a plenum chamber and fairings to cool the exhaust, the tailpipes were arranged above a fairing that might shield the worst of the heat signature from a ground observer. There were no afterburners. “The Soviets are doing a lot of work on air-to-air IR sensors for their latest genera- tion MiGs,” Smoke Judy said.

“Yeah, probably stole ours,” somebody grumbled.

Jake walked slowly around the plane, the chief engineer at his elbow. On the left side of the fuselage, just behind the nose radome, was a place from which a twenty-millimeter-cannon barrel peeked out “Vulcan?”

“Yep. Six hundred fifty rounds capacity, five hard points for missiles and bombs faired in underneath. This baby’d carry, shoot or drop anything in the U.S. inventory or anything any NATO country’s got.”

“Range?”

“Combat radius is projected at six hundred nautical miles un- refueled.”

“How stealthy is this thing?”

“Well,” said Harry Franks with his thumbs in his belt, “it’s got a head-on RCS of about a half of a square meter. That reduces its detection range compared with an A-6 Intruder by about forty-five percent. That’s naked, as she sits. Hang bombs and a belly tank and the RCS rises, though it’s still down about sixty percent from an A-6 loaded for bear. Our design concept was to be as stealthy as possible and still come up with a mission-capable attack plane with good range and flying characteristics. This prototype was opti- mized for aircraft-carrier operations. It seemed to us that if you guys couldn’t get it aboard ship and keep it there for a reasonable cost, it didn’t matter how stealthy it was.” He sighed and scratched his head and checked the shine on the toe of his boots, “That logic didn’t impress the air force, of course. Not stealthy enough for them by a long shot”

“What’s this thing gonna cost Uncle Sam?” Jake already knew this answer, but he wanted to hear Franks say it

“Well, tbere’re a ton of variables.” Franks’s hands went into his pockets and he looked Jake straight in the eyes- “Optimum pro- duction rates, as is, fifty-three mil.”

“When did you stop selling used cars and go to work for TRX?” Franks chuckled good-naturedly.

“If it were something under fifty, I could probably bring my wife over and let her drive it”

The engineer’s grin disappeared. “I hear you. You’ll get some votes in Congress under fifty that you won’t get over that number. But we already scraped and cut and chopped like hell to get down to fifty-three.”

“Uh-huh. Just a suggestion — we’re a long way from a decision— but were I you, I’d be sweating that number again and trying to shrink it Sweating it real hard.”

Later Jake managed to draw Dalton Harris aside. Harris had spent most of his career in electronic warfare. By definition he was an expert on Soviet radars, their capabilities and their usage. Tell me,” Jake asked, ”what a forty-five percent reduction in the detec- tion range of an A-6 means to the Soviets. Over fifty percent reduc- tion carrying weapons.”

“It means that all the Soviet fire-control radars are obsolete.” He shrugged. “They would have to redesign and replace everything they have. Or — and this is a big or — they would have to double the number of existing radars.”

“At what cost?”

“Replacement would be astronomical. Their whole system in- volves using proven technology that can be manufactured in quan- tity at low cost by low-skilled workers with inexpensive equipment and techniques. They need a lot of everything since the Soviet military is so big. Has to be big because the country is; distances are mind-boggling. So they rarely declare anything obsolete until it’s worn out completely. Yet in a mass obsolescence like this low- observable technology threatens, they have to come up with new cutting-edge designs or fixes for over a dozen types of front-line radars, manufacture huge quantities and get them all in service quickly.” Harris raised his bands and dropped them in a gesture of defeat “I don’t think they can do it. It’ll cost too much. Their best bet is to merely make a lot more of what they have, but that will cost them the farm and the family cow. All of which is why Gorbachev has become a good guy.”

“You think?”

“Look at it this way- The Soviet economy is on its ass. They don’t even have money over there. The ruble is non-convertible. They’ve been spending at least an eighth of their gross national product on defense. The barrel is empty. They hate Star Wars because the research and development costs to match or counter it are prohibitive. Now comes stealth: the B-2, the F-117. Those are threats against land-based targets. If that wasn’t enough bad news, now the U.S. Navy wants a stealth bird to threaten their fleet — the A-12. I’ll bet if we were on the Politburo and heard what coun- tering this low-observable technology was going to cost, we’d think about converting to Christianity.”

“They must be looking hard for a way to do it on the cheap,” Jake suggested.

“Wouldn’t surprise me.” Dalton Harris replied.

“Why not build their own stealth birds?”

“They will someday. Right now they can’t afford it. When they do, though, we’ll have to upgrade all our radars.”

“Hell, we can’t afford it either,” Jake Grafton said. Franks was walking this way. When he was close enough Jake said to him, “Let’s sit down and talk about the flight-test schedule.”

“Oh, Mom,” Lucy Franklin sobbed into the telephone, “I didn’t want to call you, but I’ve got no place else to turn.”

“You did the right thing, lucy. Has he hit you?”

“Oh, no. It’s nothing like that. It’s…” She bit her Up. It was all so bizarre. Her neighbor, Melanie, hadn’t believed her and nei- ther had the minister. Her mother was her last hope. “I think Terry is a spy.”

Silence on the other end of the phone. Finally: “Tell me about it.”

Lucy explained. She went over the events of last Friday night in great detail.

“Well,” her mother said. “Something is going on. He’s probably cheating on you.”

“Mother! Please! This is more serious, I’m scared stiff. I can’t eat. I can’t talk to him. I’m afraid of what he’ll do to the kids. Mother, I’m petrified. I’m at the end of my rope.” She began to sob.

“Do you want me to come out there?”

“Oh, I don’t know. What good would that do?”

“He wouldn’t hurt you while I was there- We could confront him.” More silence. “Let me talk to your father and call you back.”

“Not Daddy!” Lucy wailed. “He won’t understand.”

“I know you and he don’t see eye to eye. He didn’t think Terry was the right man for you.”

“He’s never let me forget it.”

“Do you want to come home? Bring the kids?”

If she went home her father would be there. She was genuinely afraid of her father. He just had never been able to cope with a daughter… “Can you come out here?”

“I’ll call your dad at work, then call you back. Okay?”

“Mom, I really need you to help me through this one.”

They said their goodbyes and hung up. Lucy drank more coffee and chewed her fingernails. Mom would be such a help- Terry wouldn’t do anything with her here. Oh, please, Daddy, let her come.

“Looks like gibberish, of course. What it is is two computer access code words and a file name.” The man from the lab laid an eight- by-ten color photo of the inside of the cigarette pack on Camacho’s desk. “No prints on the pack except for Mrs. Jackson’s.”

Camacho studied the print The words and numbers were:

“And the photos?”

“They didn’t come out so good. She used a miserable camera with a fixed focus.” The lab man handed Camacho the stack. He looked at each one and laid them across the desk. He stood and beat over to study them, moving slowly.

“This one.” He selected a photo of a man in a trilby hat wearing a fall-length coat. Only the bottom half of his face was visible, and it was fuzzy. Yet obviously a white man. The other men in the pictures were Mack. “Blow up the face and see what you can do with computer enhancement.”

The lab man checked the back of the photo for the number of the negative. He excused himself and left. Camacho sat in his chair and stared at the face. Thick cheeks, rounded chin, the suggestion of a fleshy nose. He had seen that face before. He picked up the phone: “Dreyfus, bring in the mug book of Soviet embassy person- nel.”

It took twenty minutes, but Camacho and Dreyfus finally agreed. The man in Mrs. Jackson’s photo was Vasily Pochinkov, assistant agricultural officer at the Soviet embassy.

“These black dudes.” Camacho tapped the stack. “Take these over to the D.C. police and go through the mug books. They’ll be in there.”

“Your father agreed that under the circumstances I should come.”

“Thank you, Mother. Thank you,” Lucy said.

“You should thank your father too. He was going to use this money for a down payment on a new car.”

“Yes,” Lucy said, trying to hold back the tears.

“He loves you too, Lucy. He always wanted what was best for you.”

“I know. Mom.”

“I’ll be there day after tomorrow at one o’clock. Dulles.” She gave Lucy the flight number. “Can you meet me?”

“The kids and I’ll be there. Thanks so much. Mom. I really need you.”

“I know, baby. I know- Just don’t tell Terry I’m coming.”

From his window seat Jake stared at the mountains and forests through the gaps in the cloud cover as the Boeing 727 descended into the twilight. The mountain ridges ran off to the northeast between valleys now dark and murky, enlivened only by the twin- kling jewels of towns and villages.

Over the Shenandoah Valley the 727 pilot broke his descent. Jake felt the gentle adjustment in nose attitude and the power addition. Now the left wing rose and the pilot eased to a new heading, still in a descent. This long glide back to earth was the best part, Jake decided, the best part of the flight after hours in the stratosphere. He closed his eyes and became one with the plane as the pilot leveled the wings and made another power adjustment. He could feel the controls, the stick and throttles in his hands, the—

“Is your seat belt fastened, sir?”

“0h yes.” Jake moved the newspaper on his lap so the steward- ess could visually check. She smiled automatically and moved on.

Your return from the sky should be gentle and slow so that all the bittersweet flavor can be savored. The airspeed and altitude that held you so high above the earth should be surrendered gradu- ally, not— Argghl What’s the use? Why long for things that can- not be again? Stop it, Grafton! Stop wishing and longing and tast- ing the things of the past.

Power back, almost to idle. He heard the high-pitched whine of the flap motor and checked the wing. The pilot was milking them out as he turned yet again, no doubt following instructions from Air Traffic Control. The earth was only three or four thousand feet below and headlights of cars and trucks were visible. Farmhouses, towns, highways, dark woodlots, all slipped past beneath as the pilot in the cockpit of the airliner milked the flaps out further and eased left in a long sweeping turn that would probably line him up for the approach into Dulles. Jake waited. He was rewarded with a thunk and hum as the gear doors opened and the main mounts were lowered into the slipstream.

You miss it too much, he told himself. Too much.

Callie was waiting when Jake stepped out of the shuttle bus onto the concourse. He saw her and grinned, and walked right into the fat lady ahead of him. She had stopped dead and bent over to scoop two children into her arms. The children piped their wel- come to their grandmother as the line-of people behind came to a jerky halt. Callie watched with a wide grin on her face.

“Hi, Mom,” Jake said as he put his arm over her shoulder.

The grin got even wider and her eyes sparkled. “Hi, Dad.”

“We’re not really going to do that, are we? Call each other Mom and Dad?”

“Maybe. Every now and then.”

“Miss me?”

“A teeny tiny little bit. I’m getting used to having you around.”