The Minotaur (32 page)

He hadn’t heard from the Russians since his talk with that Yuri
fellow, and he had mixed emotions about that. In a way it was
quite pleasant not sweating drop trips or clandestine computer
time or the slim chance of being searched leaving the Pentagon.
Yet every day that went by without a call was another day he had
to waste on his dreary, humdrum job, on this humdrum bus ride,
on this humdrum colorless suburb. Every day he spent here was a
day he wasn’t there, lying in the sun, fucking the beach bunnies,
drinking Cuba Libres and enjoying life.

His fantasy was there, waiting, and he was firmly and hopelessly
planted here. What made the waiting so frustrating was the money
he already had in the bank. That he had committed a variety of
serious crimes to obtain the money troubled him not a whit. He
had never given it a moment’s thought. In fact, he felt exactly like
all the other people who see a large sum of unearned money come
their way—lottery winners, traffic accident victims, legatees, swin-
dlers, personal injury lawyers and so on—the money was his by
divine right. Somehow, some way, the rulers of the universe had
decreed that he deserved the good things and good times that big
money will buy because he wasn’t like all those schmucks who flog
it eight to five. He was different. Special. The money made him
special. The unique and wonderful emissions given off by large
quantities of money made him tingle.

Perhaps because he felt so good about himself, Terry Franklin
took the time this morning, the last morning of his life, to smile at
the bus driver as he boarded and to nod at a woman he recognized
as he went down the aisle.

As the bus threaded its way through rush hour traffic, he
watched the scenery roll by without seeing a thing. He rode lost in
reverie, already enjoying his fantasy.

The morning was spent cleaning and repairing a computer key-
board on which a secretary had spilled coffee. She also had a taste
for doughnuts and potato chips, he noted with a sneer as he
worked with a toothbrush to rid the mechanism of soggy crumbs.
He could just picture her still young but already overweight, al-
ways dieting or talking to her fellow airheads about dieting as she
munches yet another doughnut and swills yet another cup of coffee
loaded with sugar. She must have had at least three lumps in this
stuff she spilled. Lucy’s clone.

He almost decided to tell the chief to trash this keyboard, then
changed his mind. The chief had cut him a lot of slack these past
three weeks: he should try to prove to the chief that he could still
carry his share of the load. He put more WD-40 on the keyboard
and reattacked the sticky mess with the toothbrush.

Terry Franklin’s last meal was a hot dog with mustard, catsup
and relish, a small order of fries and a medium Sprite. He ate it
with another sailor from his section in the main cafeteria. They
discussed the new secretary in the division office—was she really a
blonde, would she or wouldn’t she, was it worth trying to find out,
and so on.

The afternoon went quickly. The chief sent him with one other
man to work on a balky tape drive in the enlisted manpower sec-
tion, and the afternoon flew by. They had found the problem but
had not yet repaired it when quitting time rolled around.

So he carried his tools back to the shop and exchanged guffaws
with his shipmates, then walked to the bus stop outside and found
a place in the usual line.

Had he known what was coming, one wonders what he would
have done differently. No doubt a larger man who knew the end
was nigh might have lived his last day pretty much as he had all his
others, but Terry Franklin was not a big man in any sense of the
word, and he had come to realize that in the last three weeks, since
the fiasco of the bungled drop. He knew he was a coward, a weak-
ling without backbone or character, but, he thought, only he knew,
and so what? Superman lives in Metropolis and Batman lives in
Gotham. The rest of us just try to get along.

Yet, given who he was and what he was, should he have known
he might be approaching the end of his string? The signs were
certainly there if he had thought it through dispassionately, with
some detachment. He didn’t, of course.

He used most of his last hour on earth to stare out the bus
window and think about the feel of the sun on his back and sand
between his bare toes, and to daydream of a hard young female
body under him mingling her sweat with his. She didn’t have a
face, this girl in his dreams, but she had firm brown tits and a flat
stomach and long brown legs with taut thighs.

When he turned the key in the car ignition the radio boomed to
life as the engine caught. “. . . like a bat outta hell, ba-dupe, ba-
dupey . . .”

He rolled the window down and fastened his seat belt and patted
the steering wheel with his hands in time to the music.

The car in front of him turned right after four blocks, and the
one behind turned left a block later. Terry Franklin paid no atten-
tion. He drove out onto an old boulevard now lined with small
strip businesses and proceeded about a mile before he swung the
car onto a side street. He liked to drive through these quiet residen-
tial streets because they had so little traffic and he thought he made
better time, though he had never clocked it.

At the first stop sign he came to, a little girl was crossing the
street pushing a miniature baby carriage containing her doll. That
she had chosen to cross the street at just this time and place proba-
bly gave Terry Franklin another minute of life.

One minute was just about the time it took for him to wait until
the little girl was clear, depress the accelerator and cruise down to
the next cross street. He glanced both ways, no traffic, and took his
foot off the brake to roll on through. “. . . like a bat outta
hell …”

That’s when the bomb underneath the vehicle, directly under the
driver’s seat, exploded.

Terry Franklin felt a concussive impact as his knees came up to
smash into his chin, but that was the only sensation that he was
conscious of in the thousandth of a second he had left to live. The
floor of the car came apart and the seat springs and fabric and
padding were all forced explosively upward. His skull popped like
a ripe melon when this rising, accelerating column on which he sat
smashed into the roof of the car and bowed it upward. The win-
dows exploded outward as the fireball continued to expand, show-
ering the area with glass. Fragments of springs and plastic and
fabric were forced deep into Terry Franklin’s now lifeless corpse,
which began to sear from the intense heat

The car, still in gear and torn almost in two, moved like a
wounded crab diagonally across the intersection and lightly im-
pacted a parked vehicle. Then the engine quit from fuel starvation.
The severed fuel line dumped its liquid into the molten mess in the
center of the vehicle and the smoldering wreckage became an in-
femo. In ten seconds the fire was so hot the fuel tank exploded.

Coming around the corner four blocks away, FBI agent Clar-
ence Brown saw the rising fireball from the exploding gas tank. He
grabbed the dash-mounted mike. “Holy shit, his car blew up. It
blew up! The subject’s car blew upt”

The voice on the telephone had a hollow, metallic sound, like it
was coming through a long pipe. “Little development I thought
you would want to know about, Luis. Probably nothing important-
Terry Franklin just went out with a bang. His car blew up.”

“Anybody else hurt, Dreyfus?”

“Not another soul. We had an agent following him, keeping tabs
per your instructions, and he saw the gas tank go poof. The lab
guys are on the way. The agent at the scene. Brown, says it looks
like a bomb.”

“What time, exactly?”
“Sixteen fifty-seven.”

Camacho looked at his watch. Seventeen minutes ago- “Get a
search warrant for his house.”
“Already doing the affidavit”

“Send a man over to the house to watch it. And you’d better
alert somebody out in California that they’ll have to do a next-of-
kin notification when we get a positive ID from the medical exam-
iner.”

“The ID’S gonna take a while. The corpse is still in the car,
roasted like a Christinas turkey.”

“Have the people in California quietly check to see that his wifes’

in-laws are physically there.”

“You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?”

“I just follow orders, asshole,” Camacho snarled. “Why don’t
you do the same?” He slammed the phone onto its cradle.

Two minutes later it rang again. “Yes.”

“Dreyfus again. Already we’re getting calls from TV stations.
There’s a chopper overhead now. It’s real visual with the smoke
column and all. Evening news for sure, distraught housewives and
sobbing kids, the whole bit. What’s the official hot screaming
poop?”

“We’re investigating, cooperating with the local police. Off the
record, hint at drugs.”

“Roger hint.”

“Is local law on the scene?”

“Yeah. Couple cruisers and a big red fire truck.”

“Don’t let ‘em touch anything.”

“Roger Wilco, over and out”

Luis Camacho pulled into his driveway at five minutes after mid-
night and checked the jury-rigged bulb in the hole in the door
panel. Still off. Amen.

The night air retained some of the heat from the day. The FBI
agent stood in his shirt sleeves beside his car and breathed the
deep, rich scent of the earth.

The neighborhood was quiet. He could hear crickets.

All the lights were off in Harlan Albright’s house. Only a gleam
of the hall light was visible through the window of his own door.
Camacho picked up the package on his front seat and locked his
car, then used his key on the front door. He shot the bolt behind
him.

There was a note by the phone. Albright had called.

Camacho poured himself a bourbon and added three ice cubes
from the tray in the freezer. He opened the kitchen door and stood
there sipping his drink and looking at the shadows in the backyard.
The dog whined and wagged its tail.

Taking his time, Camacho strolled the length of the yard and
seated himself in the tire swing hanging from the old oak. He
absently petted the dog and made comforting noises as he sipped
the Uquor and let the alcohol take effect

It would be interesting to see how many of those servos were still
in Albright’s mad bomber kit. And the batteries and fuses.

You sure had to take your hat off to Peter Aleksandrovich, a-kA
good ol’ Harlan, Terry Franklin’s sudden end had been a nice tidy
job. No loose ends. No secondary casualties that might fester into
an eventual murder indictment that would make a spy swap impos-
sible, should the worst happen and he get arrested by the FBI.
Terry Franklin had been very neatly and permanently silenced.
Scratch one asset-turned-debit. Clean up that balance sheet. Wipe
off the red ink, and, mild! we have a profitable enterprise, as any-
one can plainly see.

Good ol’ Harlan’s house was as dark as a tomb. The big maples
in front shielded it from the streetlights and the oaks and beeches
here in back performed a similar service with that little alley light
So the house was just a looming black shape.

Camacho thought about the stairs up to the bedroom, pictured
himself once again slipping up there, careful as a mouse, looking
for booby traps, prying open the trapdoor to the attic—he shivered
as he thought about it. Good ol’ Harlan would probably rig some
more unpleasant surprises, like plastique that goes boom when the
someone coming into a room steps in the wrong place, or forgets to
turn the light on and off three times in three seconds. Good ol’
Harlan would be just the man for a little rig like that

Wonder if Harlan’s found the blank film in the camera? Had
Camacho been careful enough with the operation? Had he tripped
a camera he didn’t find? If so, that bulb in the door would come on
very soon.

His fatigue hit him all at once. It was all he could do to walk
back to the house, lock the door, and ascend the stairs. He stripped
off his clothes and fell into bed.

“I don’t want to ever get married,” Rita said.

“Me neither,” Toad Tarkmgton agreed fervently. “Half the mar-
riages fail, kids in single-parent households, everybody broke—
who needs it?” It was a pretty Saturday morning and they were on
their way to a restaurant for breakfast, with Toad at the wheel.

“People should be free to have a relationship without being
bound,” she said.

“When two people break up they shouldn’t have to hire lawyers
to fight over the dog.”

“Marriage is an obsolete institution.”

“It’s doomed,” Toad pronounced, sounding a good bit like Sam-
uel Dodgers denouncing sin, which was probably unintentional.
But to prove he wasn’t a bigot he added, “Of course, my parents
are happily married. Thirty-five years this July. It’s a lot tougher
nowadays, though. My sister was only married three years, one kid
—the divorce was real messy. My dad had to help her with the
legal fees.”

“Did she get custody?” Rita asked.

Toad told her about it. Both of them shook their heads sadly.
Truly, modern marriage was a misery.

‘Two people who love each other don’t need all that,” Rita
sniffed. “I want a man who loves me and wants to be with me, not
because he has to, but because he wants to.”

“It’s the has-to part that turns me off,” Toad explained. “You
know, I think it’s terrific that you and I think so much alike.”

“Well, we’re very similar. We both have middle-class back-
grounds, good educations, we’re naval officers, we fly. You’re only
a year older than I am. It’s no wonder.”

“I guess.”

Toad wheeled her Mazda into the restaurant parking lot and
found a space. He opened the door for Rita and she smiled her
thanks, a gorgeous little grin that he returned. She rested her fin-
gers lightly on his arm as they walked across the macadam. He
held the door for her and she preceded him through. He had never
felt better in his life—so alive, so into all of it. They loved each
other without strings. And the best part, he told himself, was that
they could be so forthright, so frank with each other. Wouldn’t the
world be a better place if everyone’s relationships were so open and
honest?