The Minotaur

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 book 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 studded 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 comat”

“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 wip- ing 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 trou- ble finding the place, then he had to park six blocks away and hike back. The streets were packed with the trendy and the chic. Poo- dles 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 Bames — you remem- ber Sarah, the cheerleader who went to Bryn Mawr? Such a sweet girl! I can’t think of her new 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 ma- chine, 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 phi- losopher.

“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-condi- tioned sanctuary of the lobby in Crystal City.

The elevator took forever to respond to the call button. He waited impatiently. For seven weeks now he had been speculating on the cause of the accident, and Jake Grafton and Helmut Fritsche and Smoke Judy had all refused to enlighten him on the telephone. They had been noncommittal. “We’re investigating.” That was the party line. Toad jabbed the up button again. He wanted some answers.

He gave the secretary the hi sign and marched straight for Grafton’s office- The door was closed, so he knocked, then opened it and stuck his head in. ” ‘Lo, Captain.” Two men he didn’t know were sitting in the guest chairs,

“Be with you in a few minutes, Toad. Good to see you back.”

Tarkington went to his desk and impatiently pawed the stuff in his in basket. Routine read-and-initial crap. He threw his hat on his desk and sat staring at Grafton’s closed door.

The secretary came over to his desk- “How’s Rita?”

“She’s up at Bethesda. I think she’s gonna be okay.”

“It was big news around here that you two were married.” She grinned and leaned forward conspiratorially. “None of us had any idea! It’s so romantic.”

“Yeah,” said Toad Tarkington.

“We’re all just delighted that she’s doing so well. We’ve had her in our thoughts and prayers every day.”

“Thank you,” Toad said, finally pulling his eyes from Grafton’s door and giving the woman a smile. “Know anything about that accident? Why it happened?”

“It’s all very hush-hush,” she confided, her voice low. She glanced around. “I just haven’t seen anything on it, but it was so temblor.”

After he assured her he would convey her good wishes to Rita, she went back to her desk. She was sitting there sorting the mail when Smoke Judy came in. Toad went over to him. “Commander, good to see you.”

“Hey, Tarkington. How’s your wife?”

“Gonna be okay, I think. Commander. Say”—Toad drew the senior officer away from the secretary’s desk—“what can you tell me about the accident investigation? What went wrong?”

“Toad, all that is classified special access, and I don’t know if you have access. All I’ve seen is the confidential section of the report- You’ll have to talk to Captain Grafton.”

“Sorta off the record, it was the E-PROMs, wasn’t it? I figure EMI dicked them up.” EMI was Electromagnetic Interference.

Judy grinned. “Ask Grafton. Give my best to your wife. And congratulations!”

“Thanks.”

Grafton’s door opened and Toad stood. He watched the two men in civilian clothes who came out. Their eyes swept the office as they exited, casually, taking in everything at a glance. Toad forgot about them as soon as they were out of sight. He was walking toward the door when Jake Grafton stuck his head out and mo- tioned to him-

“How’s Rita?”

“Settled in at Bethesda, sir. The reason I wanted to see you”—

Toad carefully closed the door—“is that I want to know why that plane went out of control. What have you guys found out?”

Jake Grafton stood with his back to Toad, facing the window. In a moment he rubbed his nose, then tugged at an earlobe.

“What have you found out, sir?” Toad asked again.

“Huh? Oh. Sorry. The E-PROMs were defective.”

“EMI. I’ll bet.”

“No. The chips were defective. Won’t happen, can’t happen, not a chance in a zillion, but it did.” Grafton shoved both hands into his pockets and turned around slowly. He stared at a comer of his desk. “Defective when installed.”

Something was amiss. “When did you learn this?” Toad said.

“Uh, we knew something was wrong with the chips when we saw the telemetry, but … ah …” He gestured vaguely at the door. “Those guys who were just here…”

“Who were they?”

“Uh…” Suddenly the wrinkles disappeared from Jake Grafton’s brow and he looked straight at Toad’s face, as if seeing him for the first time. “Can’t tell you that,” he said curtly. “Classi- fied.”

“CAG, I’ve got a wife who may be crippled for life. I need to know.”

“You want to know. There’s a hell of a difference. Glad you’re back.”

Toad tried to approach the subject from another angle, only to be rebuffed and shown the door.

Jake Grafton went back to the window and stared without see- ing. Agents Camacho and Dreyfus had been informative, to a point. No doubt it was a rare experience for them, answering the questions instead of asking them. And all those looks and pauses, searching for wordsl A performance! That’s what it had been — a performance. Produced and acted because Vice Admiral Henry demanded it. Well, as little satisfaction as they gave, they were still virgins.

So what did he know? The E-PROMs were defective. The data on the chips was that of preliminary engineering work done several years ago. Somehow… No. Someone in this office or at TRX had given that data to the manufacturer. The agents had skated around that conclusion, but they didn’t challenge it. They couldn’t. “Who?” was the question they had refused to answer. He had run through names to see if he could get a reaction, but no. They had just stared at him.

“Does this have anything to do with Captain Strong’s death?” He had asked them that and they had discussed the possibilities, in the end saying nothing of substance. They should have been politi- cians, not federal agents.

The only fact he now had that he hadn’t had before was that the data on the chips matched preliminary engineering work. For that they had come at Henry’s insistence?

“Why in hell,” Jake muttered, “does everything have to be so damned complicated?”

At 2 P.M. Smoke Judy decided to do it. The desk beside him was empty. Les Richards was at a meeting and would be for another hour, at least. Most of the people in the office were busy on Cap- tain Grafton’s report or were in a meeting somewhere.

He inserted a formatted disk in the a-drive of his terminal and started tapping. The code word for the file he wanted was “kilder- kin.” He didn’t legally have access to this file. The code word that Albright had supplied was a word he had never heard before. Be- fore he typed it, he wiped his hands on his trousers and adjusted the brightness level of the screen.

He had been debating this all week. He had a hundred grand of Albright’s money plus the bucks he already had. He could walk out of here this evening, jump a plane at Dulles tomorrow and by 7 A.M. Monday be so far from Washington these clowns would never find him. Not in fifty years, even if he lived to be ninety-three.

He would be stiffing Albright, of course, but the man was a spy and wasn’t going to squeal very loudly. And what the hey, in the big wide world of espionage, a hundred thousand bucks must be small change.

Or he could copy this file and give it to Albright on Monday night. Roll the dice, pass Go and collect another hundred and fifty. Then he would have a total of almost three hundred thousand green American dollars, in cash. Now, for that kind of money you could live pretty damn good in one of those little beach villages out on the edge of nowhere. Get yourself a firm, warm something to take to bed at night. Live modestly but well, loose and relaxed, as light as it’s possible to get and keep breathing.

If he copied this file he would not be able to ever come back. If he walked without it, the heat would dissipate sooner or later over that E-PROM chip flap and he could slip back into the country.

Do you pay a hundred and fifty grand to keep your options open? Without the money he would eventually go broke and have to come back.

He typed the word. “Kilderkin.” There was the list. Three dozen documents. He looked at the list carefully. Something caught his eye. He studied the column of numbers that listed how many bytes each file was composed of. Boy, these were short files.

Then he understood.

He opened one of the files. The title page came up. He hit the page advance key. The second page was blank. Nothing!

The title page was the whole document! He tried a second docu- ment. Just a title page.

The Athena file was empty!

Smoke Judy stared at the screen, trying to think. Possibility Three leaped into his mind. It hadn’t even occurred to him until this moment. No wonder you never went up the ladder. Smoke. You just don’t think like those snake charmers, those greasy dream merchants who slice off a couple million before they’re thirty and spend the rest of their lives pretending they are somebody. Okay, my slow, dim-witted son, this is your chance to butcher the fat hog. Albright isn’t going to have a computer in that singles bar to check the disk. Give him an empty disk, take his fucking money, and run.

But no. The joke will be on him. Hell get exactly what he paid for. It’s Albright’s tough luck the file is empty, not yours,

Judy punched the keys. The disk whirled and whirred.

The file was quickly copied. No wonder, short as it was. Judy put the disk in a side pocket of his gym bag, exited the program and turned off the terminal. He spent another ten minutes cleaning up his desk, locking the drawers, watching the other people in the office.

At the door he used the grease pencil to annotate the personnel board hanging on the wall. Back at 4:30. “I’m going to work out,” he called to the secretary, snagged his cover from the hat rack and logged out with the security guards. That easy. Sayonara, mothers.

The elevator took a while to arrive. It always did. The navy had a dirt-cheap lease on this space, so the building owner refused to update the elevators. The thought made Smoke Judy smile. This was the very last time he would ever have to put up with all the petty irritations that came with the uniform. He was through. When he took this uniform off tonight, that would be the very last time.

Thank you. Commander Judy. Thank you for your twenty-one years of faithful service to the navy and the nation. Thank you for eight cruises, three of them to the Indian Ocean. Thank you for your devotion, which ruined your marriage and cost you your kids. Thank you for accepting a mediocre salary and a family move every two years and the prospect of a pissy little pension. Thank you for groveling before the tyrannical god of the fitness report, your fate dependent upon his every whim. Commander Smoke Judy, you are a great American.

The signal above the elevators dinged. Judy glanced at it The up light illuminated on the elevator at the far left.

The door of that elevator opened. Vice Admiral Tyler Henry stepped out. Automatically the commander straightened.

“Good afternoon. Ad—“

The look on Henry’s face stopped him.

“You!” the admiral roared. He turned to the civilian who had accompanied him on the elevator as he pointed a rigid finger at Judy. “That’s him! That’s the fucking traitori”

Judy turned and banged open the door to the stairs. With his last glimpse over his shoulder he saw the civilian reaching under his Jacket for something on his belt.

He went down the staircase like a rabbit descending a hole, taking them three at a time.

“Stop! NIS!” The shout came from above, a hollow sound, rever- berating in the stairwell.

Your luck’s running true to form. Smoke.

He groped into the gym bag as he ran. The pistol was under the gym clothes.

Seventh floor. Sixth. Noises from above. They were after him. Fourth.

He kept going down.

Second floor. As he rounded the landing Vice Admiral Henry came through the fireproof door on the first floor. He rode the damn elevator!

Smoke shot at the man behind Henry through the door opening and threw his weight against the door, slamming it shut. In this enclosed space the report deafened him. The admiral grabbed for him, so he chopped at his head with the gun barrel.

Tyler Henry went to his knees. Smoke reversed the gun in his hand and hit him in the head with the butt, using all his strength. The admiral collapsed.

With ears ringing, he wiped his forehead, trying to think. If he could get into the parking garages under the building quickly enough, he might have a chance. He could hear running feet above- Galvanized. he leaped over the admiral’s body and charged down- ward.

Level G1. Smoke went out the door and looked wildly around as he ran for the nearest row of cars. No one in sight. He had beaten them down here, but he had mere seconds.

He ran along looking for keys dangling in the ignition, frustra- tion and panic welling in him.

Hang tough, Smoke. You’ve been in tight spots before and you’ve always gotten yourself out in one piece.

He loped down the row, searching desperately.

Ah, there ahead, some guy was unlocking his door. A civilian. Smoke went for him on a dead run.

The man heard Judy coming at the last moment and looked back over his shoulder, just in time to see the gun barrel chopping down.

Smoke picked up the keys from the concrete and tossed his gym bag through the open driver’s door. He pulled the man out of the way and got behind the wheel. As he started the car he could see men pouring out of the elevator and stairwell. They were search- ing, spreading out, hunting for him.

The engine caught. Smoke backed out carefully, snicked the transmission into drive and headed for the exit. Someone was com- ing this way, shouting.

A shot!

He stepped on the gas.

He went around the last pillar with tires squalling and shot up the exit ramp.

The street at the top of the ramp was one-way, from right to left. Smoke looked right. One car coming. He swerved that way and jammed the accelerator down. The driver of that sedan swerved to avoid him, then decided to try to ram. Too latel

Down the street a half block to the intersection, then left through a hole in traffic, almost grazing an oncoming truck, which skidded to avoid him with its horn roaring.

Right again, then left. He ran a red light and swung right onto the bus-only ramp, which led up onto the freeway. Merged with traffic and scanning the rearview mirror, only then did Smoke Judy begin to try to sort out what had happened.

“He’s dead.” The ambulance attendant covered the body of Vice Admiral Tyler Henry with a sheet. “You people give us some room.”

Jake Grafton walked out into the elevator lobby, dazed. A half dozen FBI agents were talking on their hand-held radios and lis- tening to the words coming back. There was still a bloody spot on the floor where one agent had gone down with a bullet in his shoulder. Who would have believed… Smoke Judy?

Toad Tarkington blocked his path.

“Judy. He’s the guy who sold the E-PROM data, wasn’t he?”

Jake nodded.

Toad turned and walked away.

‘Tarkington! Tarkington!”

Jake caught up with the lieutenant in the plaza. “Where do you think you’re going?”

Tarkington didn’t look at him. “For a few lousy bucks that bas- tard damn near killed my wife. She’ll never fully recover. She’ll carry the scars all her life,”

“The FBI’ll get him. They’re the pros at this.”

“They’d better,” Toad muttered. “If I get to the cocksucker before they do, they can quit looking.”

Tarkington walked away and Jake stood and watched him go. What the hell, he needs some time off anyway- He’ll never find Judy. The FBI will scoop him up in a day or two. And maybe the time off will do Toad some good.

Back inside he ran into an agent he recognized, Lloyd Dreyfus. “What the hell happened, Dreyfus?”

“Well, Captain, it seems that the National Security Agency was monitoring the terminals, and when Judy got into the Athena file, they called Vice Admiral Henry right after they called us. Henry beat us here by about a minute.”

Jake started to speak and Dreyfus held up a hand. “I know, I know. They shouldn’t have done that. And now some poor schnook will probably lose his job. But Tyler Henry was Tyler Henry. Very few people ever managed to say no to him and make it stick.”

“That’s true,” Jake acknowledged. “Who was the civilian up- stairs with Henry?”

“Guy from the Naval Investigative Service. We got all this from him.”

“Where’s Luis Camacho?”

“Working.”

“I want to talk to him.”

“I’ll pass that along.”

“No. You tell him he’ll talk with me or I’m going to raise holy hell. When somebody kills a vice admiral in a navy building, the lid is gonna get ripped off pretty damned quick. Right now I know a lot more than my boss, and I don’t know much. When I start answering his questions he is not going to be a happy camper. He’s a vice admiral too, by the way. I will answer his questions. He’s another one of those guys who doesn’t take no for an answer. George Ludlow, the Secretary of the Navy, he hasn’t even heard the word since he got out of diapers. And CNO…” Jake snorted.

“Camacho—“

“He won’t be able to wave his badge over on the E-Ring and stuff this shit back into the goose… You tell him!”

As Commander Smoke Judy drove across the George Mason Me- morial Bridge into Washington, he stripped off his white uniform shirt with the black shoulder boards and threw it onto the floor of the backseat. He was still wearing a white T-shirt, but that would attract less attention than the uniform. His cover was gone, lost somewhere back in the stairwell.

He needed a change of clothes, he needed to get rid of this car and he needed a place to hide.

He took the Fourteenth Street exit on the east side of the bridge and went north, rolling slowly with the traffic between tour buses and out-of-state cars iaden with tourists. A motel? No — they would be checking motels and hotels and bus stations and…

He crossed Constitution Avenue and continued north into the business district.

Three blocks north of New York Avenue he was stopped in traffic inching through a single-lane construction choke point when he saw a drunk stagger into an alley, a derelict, or in the language of the social reformers, a “homeless person.”

It took five minutes to go halfway around the block and enter the alley from the other end. There was just room to get the car by a delivery truck. The drunk was collapsed beside a metal Dump- ster, his wine bottle beside him. His head lay on a blanket roll. Beside him sat a green trash bag. After checking to make sure there was no one in sight. Smoke stopped the car and stepped out.

The drunk was semiconscious. Smoke examined the trash bag. It contained an old coat, some filthy shirts.

“Sorry, buddy. This is the end of the line.” Judy throttled him with both hands. The bum, who looked to be in his sixties, with a two-week growth of beard, kicked some and struggled ineffectu- ally. In less than a minute he was gone.

Judy stripped the shirt from the dead man and put it on over his T-shirt. The trousers were next. Sheltered between the Duropster and the delivery truck, Smoke took off his white trousers and white shoes and socks and pulled the derelict’s grime-encrusted trousers on. Perhaps this garment had once been gray, but now it was just dark, blotchy. And a little big. All the better. He even took the dead man’s shoes. They were too small, but he put them on any- way.

Judy loaded the trash bag and blanket roll in the car. He helped himself to the wine bottle too, wedging it between the stuff on the backseat so it wouldn’t fall over and spill.

He rolled out of the alley and, with the help of a courteous tourist, managed to get back into traffic. He discarded all his white uniform items in a Dumpster near RFK Memorial Stadium, then parked the car in the lot at D.C. General Hospital

With his blanket roll over one shoulder and the trash bag— which now contained his gym bag — dangling across the other, he shuffled across the parking lot toward the Burke Street Metro stop. He didn’t get far. His feet were killing him. The shoes were impos- sibly small. He sat on a curb with a little hedge behind it and put on his running shoes from his gym bag. The car keys he buried in the soft dirt. He stuffed the drunk’s shoes under the hedge, sprin- kled some wine on himself and smeared it on his face and left the bottle beside the shoes after wiping it of prints. There was an old cap in the trash bag, which he donned.

He sat there on the curb, considering. A car drove into the lot. A woman and her two teenage youngsters- She glanced at him, then ignored him. The teenagers scowled.

This just might work, Judy told himself. He shouldered his load and set off again for the Metro stop.

Harlan Albright was in the car dealer’s snack area, feeding quar- ters into the coffee machine, when FBI agents arrived at 4:30 to arrest him. He extracted the paper cup from the little door in the front of the machine and sipped it experimentally as he glanced idly through the picture windows at the service desk- Three men in business suits, one of them black, short haircuts, their coats hang- ing open. One of them had a word with Joe Talley, the other service rep, while the other two scanned the area.

As he looked at them, Albright knew. They weren’t here about a car. When Talley pointed in this direction, Albright moved.

On the back wall of the snack area was a door marked “Employ- ees Only.” It was locked. Albright used his key and went through into the parts storeroom. The door automatically locked behind him.

He walked between the shelves and passed the man at the counter with a greeting. Out in the corridor he walked ten feet, then turned left and went through an unmarked door into the service bay.

Halfway down the bay, one of the mechanics was lowering a car on the hoist, “You about finished with that LTD, Jimmy?”

“All done, Mr. Albright. Was gonna take it out of here.”

“I’ll do that. The owner is out at the service desk now. She’s impatient, as usual.”

“Starter wire was loose,” the mechanic said. “That was the whole problem. Keys are in it But what about the paperwork?”

“Go ahead and walk it over to the office.”

“Sure.” As Albright started the car, the mechanic raised the garage door and kicked the lifting blocks out of the way of the tires.

Albright backed out carefully and drove down the alley toward the area where customers’ cars were parked.

Yep, another guy in a business suit hustling this way, and an- other going around the building toward the front entrance. Al- bright turned left and drove by the agent walking toward the main showroom. That agent looked at him with surprise. As Albright paused at the street, he glanced in the rearview mirror. The agent was talking on a hand-held radio and looking this way.

Albright fed gas and slipped the car into traffic.

They would be right behind him. He jammed the accelerator down and shot across the next intersection just as the light turned red.

He went straight for three more blocks, then turned right for a block, then right again.

He entered the dealership lot from the back and coasted the car toward the service parking area, watching carefully for agents. His trip around town had taken five minutes. Yes, they all seemed to be gone.

He parked the car and walked back inside.

Joe Talley saw him coming. “Hey, Harlan, some guys were here looking for you.”

” ‘S’at right?”

“Yeah. Didn’t say, but they were cops. Had those little radios and charged outta here like their tails were on fire. Just a couple minutes ago. Say, what’ve you done anyway? Robbed a bank?”

“Nah.” Albright quickly sorted through the rack of keys of cars that were awaiting service. “Forgot to put a quarter in the meter.” This one, a new Taurus. In for its first oil change.

“Sons of bitches came after me two years ago,” Talley said. “My ex swore out a warrant.”

“I sent her the fucking check last week,” Albright growled. He walked back toward the parking area. “They come back, you tell ‘em I went out to feed the meter,” he called. “See you after a while.”

“Yeah, sure, Harlan.” Talley laughed.

“Do my time card too, will ya, Joe?”

“You’re covered.” Talley went back to annotating a service form.

Albright never returned to the dealership, of course. Less than two hours later he abandoned the Taurus in a parking garage in downtown Washington and walked four blocks to a KGB safe house.

“Just like that, cool as ice, he went back and traded cars?”

“Yessir.” Dreyfus tried to keep his eyes on Camacho’s face. It was difficult.

‘Two guys in two hours go through our fingers! What is this,

Keystone Kops?” Camacho sighed heavily. ‘Well, what are we doing to round up these public enemies?”

“Warrants for them both. Murder One for Judy and Accessory Before the Fact for Albright. Stakeouts. Briefings for the D.C., federal, airport and suburban police — every pistol-packer within fifty miles of the Washington Monument. Photos on the eleven o’clock news and in tomorrow’s papers. The cover story is drugs.”

The Minotaur

“We really needed Albright, Lloyd.”

“I know, sir.” Dreyfus was stunned. Luis Camacho had never before called him by his first name in the five years they had known each other.

Camacho sat rubbing his forehead with the first two fingers of his left hand.

“Drugs in the Pentagon is going to get a lot of press,” Dreyfus volunteered. “Already Ted Koppel wants the Director for Night- line. Some nitwit on the Hill is promising a congressional investiga- tion. Everybody on the west side of the Potomac is probably going to have to pee in a bottle on Monday morning.”

If Camacho heard, he gave no sign. After a moment he said softly, “We’ll never get him unless he comes to us.”