The Minotaur (40 page)

Jake Grafton’s voice hardened. “Flying isn’t chess or football or
checkers! Flying isn’t some game I Flying is life distilled down to
the essence—it’s the straight, two hundred-proof stuff. And Rita
knows; she’s a U.S. Naval Aviator. She chose this line of work and
worked like a slave to earn that ride today. She knows.”

“Yes,” Toad admitted. “She knows.”

At 3 A.M. Rita’s mother answered her phone in Connecticut. She
had obviously just awoke. “This is Toad Tarkington, Mrs. Mora-
via.” You know, the guy who married your daughter? “Sorry to
bother you this time of night I tried to call earlier—“

“We were at a party. Is everything okay?” She was wide awake
now and becoming apprehensive.

“Well, not really. That’s sorta why I’m calling. I thought you
should know.”

She went to battle stations while Toad tried to collect his
thoughts.

He interrupted her torrent of words. “What it is—Rita and I
jumped out of an airplane today, Mrs. Moravia- Rita’s over in the
hospital now.”

He could hear her talking to Mr. Moravia. The pitch in her
voice was rising.

“Anyway, Rita’s banged up pretty good and I thought you
should know.”

“How bad is it?”

“She’s in a coma, Mrs. Moravia. She hit the ground before her
parachute had time to open.” Silence. Dead silence. Toad contin-
ued, “Anyway, I’m with her and she’s getting the best medical
treatment there is and I’ll call and let you know when anything
changes.”

Mr. Moravia spoke now. Perhaps his wife had handed him the
phone. “What’s the prognosis, son?”

“She could die, Mr. Moravia. She’s in bad shape.”

“Should we come out there?” He didn’t even know where Toad
was calling from.

“Not now. When she comes out of the coma, that might be a
good idea. But not now. I’ll keep you advised.”

“Are you okay?”

“Fine, sir. No injuries.” Nice that he should ask. Toad thought.

“We’ll pray for her.”

“Yes, Do that. I’m doing some of that myself.”

Harry Franks, the program manager for TRX, stood in the middle
of the hangar issuing orders. A small army of workmen were plac-
ing wreckage in piles as he directed. They had been working since
dawn.

He greeted Jake Grafton without enthusiasm. “Give me five
more minutes and we’ll go upstairs,” he said, then pointed to a pile
for a forklift operator with a piece of what looked like outboard
wingtip.

Jake and the commanders wandered toward the door, trying to
get out of the way. The plane had exploded and burned when it hit,
so the pieces that were left were blackened and charred.

In an office on the second floor, the engineers from the company
that had manufactured the fly-by-wire system, AeroTech, were
completing the setup of their equipment. An AeroTech vice presi-
dent sat on one of the few chairs, sipping coffee and watching the
final installation of the network of wires that powered and con-
nected the test boxes. He didn’t look very vice presidential. He and
the engineers had flown in early this morning and had had only a
few hours’ sleep. He stood up to shake hands with Jake.

After the introductions, they got right to it. The only surviving
processor from the crashed prototype was carefully removed from
its bent, damaged box and its innards exposed. It was physically
examined by the assembled experts with all the curiosity of a group
of med students examining a man with a new disease.

Jake backed off to let the experts have room. He found himself
beside Harry Franks. ‘Tell me again how the fly-by-wire system
works.”

“The aircraft had negative stability,” Franks said, hooking his
thumbs behind his belt and warming to the subject. “Most high-
tech tactical aircraft today have negative stability.” Jake nodded.

Franks continued. “A human cannot fly a negatively stable ma-
chine. It would be like trying to keep a barn door balanced on top
of a flagpole- So computers actually do the flying. In that way we
could build a highly maneuverable aircraft and optimize its low-
observable—stealth—features without worrying that we were com-
promising or negating the ability of the pilot to control it. Now, the
way it works is pretty neat.”

Jake allowed himself a small smile. All engineers think elegant
solutions to technical problems are neat.

‘There are three computers,” Harry Franks continued. “They
each sample the aircraft’s attitude and all the other raw data—like
air density, temperature, airspeed and so on—forty times a second.
Then they see what control input the pilot has made. The pilot’s
control input merely tells the three computers what the pilot wants
the plane to do. The computers then figure out what control
throws are necessary to comply with the pilot’s order, and they
compare their answers. They take a vote. Any two computers can
overrule the third. After the vote, the agreed electrical signal is
seat to the hydraulic actuators, which move the controls. This little
sequence takes place forty times a second. You understand?”

“Yep-I think so. But how does the computer know how much to
move the controls? That’s what the pilot does in a conventional
airplane.”

“Well, obviously, the computer has to be told. So the data that it
uses is placed in a Programmable Read-Only Memory, a PROM-
Since it’s electrical, we call it an E-PROM. There are other types,
like UV-PROMS and—“

Jake halted him with his hand. “So what you guys did when
Rita complained of control sensitivity was to change the
E-PROMs?”

“Yeah. Exactly. They come on chips. The data is just fried into
the little beggars. We called AeroTech and they cooked us some
more and flew ‘em down. That’s all there was to it.”

”But the plane crashed.”

“Yeah,” said Harry Franks defensively, “but we don’t know
yet—“

“Something went very wrong. We know that much,” Jake Graf-
ton said. “The plane went into three inverted spins. Rita was trying
to get it out and succeeded twice.”

“Maybe she—“

“Uh-uh. Nope. She knew exactly what she was doing. She recov-
ered from more inverted spins at Test Pilot School than you’ve
even seen.”

The vice president of AeroTech had a cherubic, round face. The
face looked like it had spent two days in the tropical sun when he
faced Jake an hour later and said. “I don’t know how it happened,
but the data is wrong on this chip.”

“How’s that?”

He gestured futilely. “I mean we’ve run the data three times, and
I don’t know how the heck it happened, but the E-PROM data on
this chip is just flat wrong. Look here.” He nipped open a thick
computer printout “See this line here?” He read off the number,
which was all it was, a number. “Now look here. This is the data
on this chip.” His finger moved to another computer printout, one
Jake had just watched running though the printer. Jake looked. It
was a different number.

“How could this happen? I thought you people checked these
things.”

“We do check the data. After the chip is cooked, we check every
damn number. I don’t know what—I’m at a loss what to tell you.”

‘This is only one box,” Harry Franks said. “There were three of
them. Maybe this is the only one that was defective.”

“Well never know,” Jake Grafton said slowly, surveying the
faces around him and trying to catalogue their reactions. “The
other boxes got smashed and burned. This is the only one left in
one piece.”

“I don’t know what to say,” the AeroTech executive said.

Jake Grafton walked out of the room, looking for a phone.

Luis Camacho listened to Admiral Henry’s voice on the telephone
and doodled on a legal pad. Today he was drawing houses, all with
the proper perspective of course. He had the roofline and baseline
right, he decided.

”Okay, so AeroTech sold you a defective E-PROM chip. Or two
or three of them. Sue the bastards. What do you need the FBI
for?”

“I had the aircraft’s control data base printed out from our
computer. It’s wrong. Now, I don’t know if the AeroTech chip has
this data on it or not, but the stuff in the Pentagon computer is
wrong. So I got on the phone to that National Security Agency
computer doctor who tends our stuff, Kleinberg, Fred Kleinberg.
He played with his top secret programs that I’m not supposed to
know jack about, and tells me the last guy who made a change on
that data base was Harold Strong.”

Camacho extended the lines of the roof, eaves, and base of the
house until they met at the perspective convergence point. Of
course, Albright’s house had more shrubs around it, and with the
fence and all you would never see it looking just like this.

“You still there, Luis?”

“Yeah. I’m still here.”

“I want you and your guys to look into it.”

“You called NIS?” NIS was the Naval Investigative Service.

“Nope- Since you are apparently the only guy inside the beltway
who knows what the fuck is going on, I want you to investigate
this.”

“Investigate what?”

“This computer screw-up, you spook asshole. A four-hundred-
million-dollar prototype airplane that’s supposed to be black as the
ace of spades just made a smoking hole in the ground and the pilot
is at death’s door. The data on the computer chips that fly the
plane is wrong. The last guy who messed with the data is dead,
murdered. Somebody, someplace is bound to have committed a
federal crime. Now get off your fat ass and figure out if the Mino-
taur or some other bastard is screwing with my program! God-
damn, what have I got to do? Call the Director? Go see the Presi-
dent? Maybe I should put an ad in the Post?”

“I’ll be over in a little while.”

The admiral slammed the phone in Camacho’s ear. The agent
cradled his instrument and went to the door. “Dreyfus? Come in
here.”

At three o’clock Eastern Daylight Time that afternoon Lloyd
Dreyfus and two other FBI agents boarded a plane at National
Airport for a flight to Detroit, where a man from the local field
office would meet them. They planned to drive straight to Aero-
Tech’s headquarters in the suburbs.

The agents were airborne somewhere over Pennsylvania when
Toad Tarkington arrived at the hospital-at the air force’s Tonopah
facility. He stopped at the nurses’ station. “How is she?”

The nurse on duty had been there yesterday when they brought
Rita in. She was an air force captain. She looked at Toad with
sympathy. “No change. Lieutenant. I’m sorry.”

“The doctor around?”

“He’s eating a late lunch. He’ll be back in a half hour or so.”

“Can I see her?”

“Sure.”

The ICU nurse nodded and Toad pulled a chair over near Rita’s
bed- Her chest was still rising and falling rhythmically, the IVs
were dripping, the green line on the heart monitor was spiking—
she lay exactly as he had seen her yesterday and this morning when
he looked in.

The IV needles were in her left arm, so he picked up her right
hand and massaged it gently. In a moment he wrapped her fingers
around two of his. “Rita, this is Toad. If you can hear me, squeeze
my hand a little.”

The hand stayed limp.

‘Try real hard, Rita.”

Nothing.

“Harder.”

He gave up finally and continued to lightly knead her fingers.

There was a window there by her bed. When he pulled the cur-
tains back he could see the distant blue mountains. Clouds were
building over the peaks. ‘

Life is not fair. Good things happen to bad people and vice
versa, almost as if the goodness or badness of those who bear the
load was not factored into the equations for that great computer in
the sky. Toad stood facing out the window and ruminated upon it
Somehow he had survived this last ejection all in one piece and
Rita hadn’t. It wasn’t because he was a good person, or because of
his pious rectitude or exemplary morals or conspicuous faith. He
was physically okay because he had been lucky, sort of. And Rita
was smashed up because her luck deserted her. Yet perhaps the
ejection had cost him something more valuable than his life.

Your luck won’t last forever, Tarkington. The day will come,
Toad-man, the day will come. Regardless of how you live or the
promises you keep, on that day to come your luck will desert you.
You won’t recognize the morning, you won’t recognize the noon,
but that will be the day. And on that day you’ll lose her forever.

He slumped into the chair. Looking at Rita in her bandages was
hard, looking at the IV racks, respirator, and heart monitor was
harder. He twisted, trying to get comfortable.

Somehow, someway, the E-PROMs in the fly-by-wire computers
were screwed up. He had heard them talking this afternoon. How
could it happen? How could TRX and AeroTech’s checks and
double checks and Quality Assurance programs all go south at
precisely the same time?

Someday hell! She might die today, or tomorrow. Or the day
after. You could lose her any day.

He picked up her hand again and massaged it slowly and gently.
Finally he placed it carefully back on the covers. He leaned over
Rita and kissed the two square inches on her forehead not covered
with a bandage. “Hang tough, Rita. Hang tough.”

24

The corporate offices and manu-
facturing faculties of AeroTech sat in a manicured industrial subdi-
vision of a Detroit suburb in a low, sprawling, windowless building
among a dozen similar buildings carefully arranged amid the lawns
and pruned trees. A gardener was laboring in a flower bed as the
FBI car swung into the parking lot.

Agent Lloyd Dreyfus decided that the goddess of the post-indus-
trial revolution had come, conquered, and already departed this
corner of Michigan. Smokestacks now belonged only to the inter-
city poor and wretched Third World peasants. Not a single one of
the antique structures blighted the skyline in any direction.

After a display of credentials to the wide-eyed receptionist, the
agents were ushered in to see the president of the company, who
had trouble understanding just why the FBI were here at the Aero-
Tech facilities. No, Dreyfus did not have a search warrant. He had
not thought one necessary since AeroTech was a defense contrac-
tor with annual billings in the millions and the agents were here to
investigate, not to search. But he could, of course, get such a war-
rant if the official thought it necessary. Did he? No. Company
employees examined security clearance documents with care and
led the government men to an empty conference room.

The investigation took time. At 9 P.M. the FBI team had estab-
lished that the data contained on the E-PROM chip from the TRX
prototype that crashed in Nevada did not correspond to the data
that AeroTech had used to manufacture its chips. Yes, a call had
been received last week from a TRX engineer in Tonopah, and yes,
he had updated the data base via computer modem. The company
had manufactured new E-PROM chips based on the revised data.
The new chips had been taken to the mail room for overnight
shipment. Yes, the records in the mailroom showed three chips
sent by a bonded commercial overnight courier. •’

So at 9 P.M. Dreyfus sat in the conference room and scratched
his head. He had been making notes all evening on a yellow pad,
and now he went over them again, placing a tick mark by each
item after he considered it carefiilly. One of the agents had gone
out for burgers, and now Dreyfus munched a cold cheeseburger
and sipped a Coke in which all the ice had melted.

He decided he had two problems, and he decided to tackle the
one that he thought would be the simpler first. He asked to see the
company president, who was shown into the conference room and
motioned into a chair beside Dreyfus.

“Sorry we’re taking so long,” Dreyfus said as he wadded up the
cheeseburger wrapper and tossed it at a waste can.

“Quite all right,” the president said cheerfully enough. His name
was Homer T. Wiggins. The company prospectus, which Dreyfus
had thumbed through earlier in the evening at a slow moment, said
he was the largest shareholder of AeroTech and one of its four
founders.

“It appears we have a little problem that necessitates a search.
Now, when we got here this afternoon I told you we were here to
investigate, not search. Now we want to search. We can do so with
your permission, or we can go get a warrant. It’s your choice.”
Dreyfus got out his pipe and tobacco and began the charging rit-
ual.

“Why do you want to search?” Wiggins asked.

Dreyfus shrugged. “I can’t tell you. I should tell you, though,
that I believe I have enough information to persuade a judge to find
probable cause and issue a search warrant.”

“On what grounds? Just what is it you’re investigating?”

Dreyfus took his time lighting his pipe. He puffed experimen-
tally to ensure it was lit and drawing properly. Finally satisfied, he
tucked his lighter into a pocket and took a deep drag on the pipe.
“I can’t tell you.”

Homer T. Wiggins had the look of a very sick man. “Just what is
it you want to search for?”

“Oh! Didn’t I tell you? E-PROM chips.”

Bewilderment replaced the pain on Wiggins’ face. “Go right
ahead. Search to your heart’s content.”

After escorting the president out of the conference room and
posting an agent to guard the paper spread out on the table, Drey-
fus led the other two down the hall and around the corner to the
mail room. “Okay,” he said. “I want computer chips. Start look-
ing.”

It took an hour. One agent found three chips in a package with-
out an address within fifteen minutes, but it was an hour before
Dreyfus decided those were the only chips in the room. Back he
went to see the president with the chips in hand. The president’s
eyes expanded dramatically.

“Okay. Now I want one of your engineers to put these on your
testing machine and let me know what these chips are.”

With a glance at the clock, Wiggins picked up his phone. A half
hour later a rumpled, unhappy engineer with long hair and the
faint odor of bourbon about him appeared in the door. “Sorry,
Tom, but these men want some tests run this evening. Apparently
it can’t wait until tomorrow.” He held out the bag with the chips in
it.

“Go with him, Frank, and explain what we want,” Dreyfus told
one of the agents, then resumed his exploration of an industry
magazine that resided on a side table.

The agent appeared in the door at five minutes before midnight
and motioned to Dreyfus, who joined him in the hall. “Okay,
Dreyfus. Those were the chips that they manufactured last week
with the new data from TRX. The engineer is printing out the data
now, but it’s exactly the same.”

“Good. The guy in the mail room just sent the wrong chips to
Tonopah.”

“But when the chips reached Tonopah, wouldn’t TRX test them
before installation?”

“No doubt they should have, but I suspect someone will admit
that there was a mistake, human error, and somehow or other the
chips that did get installed didn’t get checked.” After all, Dreyfus
knew, mistakes made the world the happy place it is today. What
should have happened and what did happen were usually vastly
different things.

“Then where the hell did the bad chips come from?”

“From here. Right here.” The question was, how did AeroTech
get the erroneous data that was burned into the bad chips? That
data was the stuff Admiral Henry said was in the Pentagon com-
puter, stuff that Harold Strong had been the last man to revise. A
phone call from Camacho earlier in the afternoon had given Drey-
fus that fact. And the bad data had been cooked onto chips at
AeroTech.

“Well, Frank, it looks like it’s going to be a long night. I want
you to go back to the local office and wake up someone in the U.S.
Attorney’s office. Have him get cracking. I want a search-and-
seizure warrant for all AeroTech’s travel, long-distance-telephone
and expense-account records and all the data-base files. Until we
have the warrant, we’ll lock this place up and post a guard. Some-
one around here has a nasty little secret. If we can find the smoking
gun, we’ll know who and when and can save ourselves the trouble
of listening to a lot of lies.”

“You’ll need to come down to the office and write the affidavit.”

“Yeah.” He was going to have to call Camacho at home. No
doubt Luis Camacho could think of a plausible story for the judge.

The phone call came at 2 A.M. and woke Camacho from a sound
sleep. He listened to Dreyfus’ recitation of the events of the evening
as he tried to move noiselessly around the bedroom and put on his
robe and slippers. When Dreyfus had completed his summary, Ca-
macho told him to call back in five minutes. He was down in the
kitchen sipping a glass of milk when the phone rang again.

“Dreyfus again, boss. What do I put on the affidavit?”

“The truth. Suspected illegal sale of classified defense informa-
tion. Don’t name any names.”

“I don’t have any names to name yet.”

“Don’t give me that, you pilgrim!”

“Oh, you don’t want me to use Smoke Judy’s name? Oh! Okay,
John Doe strikes again. Anything else?”

“Bye.”

“Night, Luis.”

The lights were off over at Albright’s house. Camacho checked
from the backyard as he walked out to the swing. It was a hot, still,
muggy night. He didn’t stay on the swing long. The gnats and
mosquitoes were still hunting for rich, red blood. Cursing, Cama-
cho swatted furiously until he regained the safety of his kitchen
and got the sliding glass door closed behind him.

Wide awake now, he nipped on the radio and twiddled the dial.

They were still playing a ball game out on the Coast. Baltimore
versus Oakland. Eleventh inning, three runs apiece-

Jose Canseco was coming to the plate. The A’s announcer was
all atwitter. Camacho searched through the cupboard for some-
thing to eat. Didn’t she have some crackers in here? Cookies? Or
did the teenage food monster eat every crumb?

He heard a rapping and turned. The sliding glass door was open-
ing.

“Hi, Harlan. Come on in.”

“Saw your light. Couldn’t sleep. The air conditioning crapped
out today and that place is too stuffy to sleep in.”

“It’d be better if there was a breeze.”

“What a climate!”

Canseco took the first pitch. Strike one. “Want some milk?”

“Yeah. That’d be good. Got any cookies?”

“I’m looking.” Up there, behind the flour. Half a package of Fig
Newtons. He carried them over to the counter where Albright sat
and took one from the package and bit into it. “Little stale, but
edible.”

The radio audience sighed. Foul tip up toward the press box.
Strike two. Harlan Albright helped himself to a cookie while Ca-
macho poured him a glass of milk.

Another foul tip. The sound of the bat on the ball was plainly
audible.

Both men nibbled a cookie and sipped milk as they listened. The
announcer was hyping the moment for all it was worth. Men on
first and second, one out. Two strikes on Jose Canseco.

Another foul tip.

“Guy ought to quit fouling the ball,” Albright said. “Sometimes
you want them to either hit it or strike out, it doesn’t matter, as
long as the game goes on.”

“Yeah,” Camacho mumbled with his mouth full. He swallowed.
“But the guy keeps swinging to stay alive.”

The Baltimore pitcher swung around and threw to second. Too
late.

“Now the pitcher’s doing it.” Albright helped himself to another
Fig Newton.

Camacho finished his milk and set the glass in the sink.

“Here’s the pitch.” the radio blared. The crack of the bat started
the crowd roaring. “Through the hole. looks like it’s going to the
wall. Man rounding third is trotting home. And that’s it, folks. The
A’s win it in the eleventh inning on an RBI double by Jose Can-
seco.” Camacho nipped the radio off.

“A good player,” Albright told him.

“Good kid,” Luis agreed.

“Gonna be a superstar.”