The Minotaur (42 page)

“I think the doctor in the mail room is an illegal.”

“You asked to see his green card?”

“Nope.”

“Going to?”

“Not unless you tell me to.”

“Let’s go see if Wiggins wants to talk.”

Dreyfus stoked his pipe again on the stroll down the hall. Wig-
gins’ secretary glared at them. Dreyfus gave her a sympathetic
grin, which she ignored.

They sat silently and flipped through the magazines on the
stand. It was five more minutes before the buzzer sounded and they
were waved into the inner sanctum.

“My client,” said the counselor, “wishes to cooperate. With the
understanding, of course, that he can cease answering questions at
any time.”

Wiggins had met Smoke Judy on five different occasions. Judy
knew that AeroTech needed contracts and offered to help in return
for a small cash payment and some stock. On two occasions he
talked about a job after he retired. Wiggins had been noncommittal
about the job, but had agreed to the money and the stock. Five
thousand dollars cash and a bearer certificate for a thousand shares
of AeroTech—currently worth $12.75 each—had bought the com-
pany an advance peek at the flight control data for the TRX proto-
type. The navy was just floating a Request for Proposal (RFP) for
the fly-by-wire system. AeroTech bid for the chip business and won
the contract.

All this Wiggins admitted, but he stoutly denied any wrongdo-
ing. “This company, it needs the business. And we underbid every
other contractor for those chips. We saved the government a lot of
money. We didn’t do anything that other defense contractors don’t
routinely do. It’s a cutthroat business.”

The FBI agents seemed unimpressed.

“Listen, if I hadn’t agreed to Judy’s offer, he would have peddled
that information to my competitors. Then where would I have
been? No contract. I have a duty to this company.” Color returned
to Homer Wigging’ cheeks.

“Of course,” Dreyfus said, “you could have called us when Judy
first approached you.”

“I’ve spent fifteen years building this business. I did it with my
bare hands, with no money, with a ton of sweat, taking risks that
would scare the wits out of a Vegas gambler. I built it!” Camacho
found himself staring at Wiggins’ gold wedding ring and gold class
ring. Was that Yale?

“Now the navy wants me to make E-PROMs cheaper than any-
one else. So I do. And this is the gratitude, this is the reward! l am
treated like a criminal!” He sprayed saliva across the desk, and for
the first time Camacho saw the drive and determination that had
built a successful corporation.

“I am treated like a criminal for doing what everyone else does
and for making E-PROM chips cheaper than anyone else can.”

Camacho looked at his watch: 5:30. Maybe he was still in the
office. “Do you want to go to jail tonight?”

Wiggins gaped. The blood drained from his face, and for a mo-
ment Camacho thought he had stopped breathing.

“No,” he whispered.

“Now see here—” the lawyer began, but Camacho cut him off
with a jab of his hand.

“Have you talked to Judy this week?”

“No. No!”

“I want you to call him for me. I’ll tell you what to say- I’ll
listen on an extension. You will say precisely what I tell you and
nothing else. Will you do it?”

“What choice do I have?” Wiggins was recovering. This man’s
recuperative powers were excellent. He could handle it.

“You don’t go to jail this evening. I make my report to the
Justice Department and they take it from there. If they indict you,
that’s their business. My report will show that you cooperated.”

“I’ll make the call.”

“Homer,” said Nash, “maybe—“

“I’ll make the call. And you go on home, Prescott. Thanks for
being here this afternoon. I’ll call you.”

“Are you sure you—?”

Wiggins was examining his hands. Martin Prescott Nash rose
from his chair and went out the door. It swung shut behind him.

“Smoke, this is Homer Wiggins.”

“I told you never to call me—“

“Something’s come up. The FBI are here, in Detroit. They’re
checking out the chips. I’m just letting you know.”

Smoke Judy was silent for several seconds. “Have they talked to
you?”

“Yes.”

“What—?” His voice fell. “Do they know?”

“About you? I don’t know. I think—they might. Definitely.”

“Did you—?”

“I’ve got to go now. Smoke. I just wanted you to know.” Wig-
gins held the instrument away from his ear, and at a nod from
Camacho, Dreyfus simultaneously depressed the buttons on both
telephones, severing the connection.

When they were alone in the car on the way back to the airport,
Camacho said, “I got a little job for you tomorrow, Dreyfus. We’re
going to need all our people, and you’ll probably have to borrow a
bunch.”

Dreyfus fished out his pipe and tobacco and merely glanced at
his boss.

“I want to keep track of a man. We’ll need discreet surveillance
teams, couple of choppers and the electronics boys.”

“Anyone I know.”

“Nope. It’s my next-door neighbor, guy named Harlan Al-
bright.”

“You know, in my fifteen years in the FBI I have never felt more
like a mushroom than I have working for you. You’ve kept me in
the dark and shoveled shit at me for eighteen months now. If you
got croaked tomorrow, I couldn’t even tell the old man what the
hell you were working on. I don’t know.”

Camacho, behind the wheel, kept his eyes on the road. “The
electronics guys already put listening devices in his house, three
days ago when his air conditioning went out. It was too good an
opportunity to pass up.”

Dreyfus got his pipe going strongly and rolled down his window.
The car’s air conditioning was going full blast. “Think he’s screw-
ing your wife?”

“Read the security regulations lately, Dreyfus?”

“Listen, boss. And listen good. You want good solid work from
me but you don’t want me to know anything. Now I am just about
one day away from submitting my resignation. I don’t need this
shit and I’m not gonna keep taking it! Not for you, not for the old
man, not for the Director, not for any of you spook dingdongs.
And you can put that in my final evaluation!”

Camacho braked the car to a stop at a light. He just sat there
behind the wheel, watching the light, waiting for it to change.
When it did, he glanced left and hesitated. An old junker car was
going to run the red. As it hurled by, Dreyms leaned out his win-
dow with his middle finger jabbed prominently aloft.
Camacho took his foot off the brake and fed gas.
“Okay,” Luis Camacho said. “You want to know what’s going
on. I’ll tell you.” And he did.

25

On Saturday the sun rose into a
clean, bright sky, a pleasant change from the haze that had been
stalled over the Potomac River basin for a week. The morning
weatherman credited a cold front that had swept through during
the night and blessed the metropolitan Washington area with some
much-needed showers.

Commander Smoke Judy absorbed the weather information
while he scraped at his chin. He had acquired the habit of listening
to the morning forecasts during his twenty years in naval aviation,
and it was hard to break. Yet he wasn’t paying much attention. His
mind was on other things.

After finishing at the sink and dressing, he poured himself a
glass of orange juice and opened the sliding glass door to his apart-
ment balcony. The view was excellent, considering he was only six
floors up. From out here he could see the gleam of the Potomac
and, on the horizon, the jutting spire of the Washington Monu-
ment. As usual, the jets were droning into and out of National
Airport. Even with that cold front last night today would be hot
Already the sun had a bite to it

He sat on the little folding chair in the sun and thought once
again about Harold Strong and the flight control data and Homer
T. Wiggins of AeroTech. Nothing in life ever works out just the
way you think it will, he told himself bitterly. They should put that
over the door of every public building in Washington.

Strong had gotten suspicious. Judy had spent one too many eve-
nings in the office, asked one too many questions about that TRX
fly-by-wire system. So Strong had doctored the data, rendering it
worthless unless one knew exactly how and where it had been
changed.

When Smoke found out, it was too late. He had already given
the data to AeroTech, to Homer T. Wiggins. Oh, even defective it
was good for what Homer wanted it for, to check the AeroTech
manufacturing capability and cost out the manufacturing process.
Heck, he could have written Homer a purely fictitious report that
would have allowed AeroTech to accomplish the same thing. So it
wasn’t like he had stiffed Homer. And both he and Homer knew
that the preliminary data would be changed, probably many times,
during the course of development. There was no possibility that the
erroneous stuff would end up in an airplane that someone was
going to try to fly.

And still, it happened! It happened. All the checks that were
supposed to be done, the fail-safe, zero-defects program, all of it
went down the crapper in an unbelievable series of coincidences.
Now TRX was going to fire a couple of clowns who each thought
the other guy had done the checks. So neither did them.

He tossed off the last gulp of orange juice and wiped his mouth
with his fingers. He sat the empty glass on the concrete beside his
chair and sat looking at the city.

Nothing he had ever attempted in his whole life had worked out
right. What was it the hippies called it? Karma?

Funny, killing Harold Strong had been easier than he thought it
would be. Probably too easy- No doubt someway, somehow, he
had fucked that up too.

Looking back, it had been a bad decision. Strong probably had
nothing but a few baseless suspicions that he couldn’t prove-

Ah well, what was done was done. You signed for the plane and
flew it as best you could and if today was your day to die, you died.
That was life.

He had wanted something besides a pension, and now he had his
savings—about $56,000—and the cash from five little deals—
$30,000—and some stock he probably couldn’t sell. Plus his pen-
sion, a lousy 55 percent of his base pay if he lasted twenty-two
years. Yet if he cut and ran, his pension would evaporate tike a gob
of spit on a hot steel deck. If he didn’t run, well … he would
have to give his savings and the cash to a lawyer to try to stay out
of prison.

FBI agents were probably watching him this very minute. Sitting
somewhere in one of these apartments or in a vehicle down in the
lot, watching him. If Wiggins had been telling the truth . . . But
there was really no reason for him to he. What did Wiggins have to
gain by lying?

Judy had gone to work yesterday, though he had been sorely
tempted to call in sick. That little conversation Thursday evening
with Wiggins, just before he walked out of the office, that had
shaken him. He had locked up his papers, bid everyone a pleasant
good evening and walked out sweating.

That evening he had convinced himself there really wasn’t any
hurry. It might be six months or a year before they got around to
arresting him, if they ever did, and he could get out on bail. And
where could he run? What with?

He pushed himself up, out of the chair, and went inside. He
drew the curtains. Rummaging through the bottom drawer of his
dresser, he found the .38 he always wore in his flight gear. He
flipped out the cylinder. Empty. Did he have any cartridges? He
sat on the bed and tried to remember. There should be six in the
left, radio pocket of his survival vest, which was piled in a corner
of the closet. He had put them there when he emptied the pistol
after his last flight in that F-14 at Tonopah.

He found the brass cartridges and dropped them into the cylin-
der holes.

The pistol was old, with the bluing completely gone in places.
Nowadays they issued the kids nine-millimeters, but he had always
liked the old -38. Amazingly enough, this was the one they issued
him twenty years ago when he checked into his first fleet squadron.

The money was in a gym bag on the other side of the closet floor.
He spread it on the bed and examined the miserable pile. Fifteen
bundles of a hundred twenties each. Three weeks’ take for a twelve
year-old crack salesman. For this he had wagered his pension and
risked years in prison?

He went into the kitchen and poured himself the last of the
bourbon, added some ice and water and went back out onto the
balcony.

“Here’s to you. Smoke Judy, you stupid, unlucky bastard.”

He sipped the liquor and watched the shadows shorten as the
sun rose higher into the sky. Already it was hot. It was going to be
a scorcher.

Twenty miles north of where Smoke Judy sat, Luis Camacho was
trying to get his lawn mower started. He diddled with the choke
and jerked the starter rope repeatedly. The plug fired a few times,
then gave up. He decided he had flooded it. He could take out the
plug and pull it through a few times, but no.

He sat in the shade on the concrete of his driveway, with his
back against the wall, and waited for the recalcitrant device to
purify itself. He was trying to work up the energy to stand and
again assault the machine when Harlan Albright came out of his
house, saw him, and crossed the grass toward him.

“Hey,” Albright said.

“Hey yourself. Know anything about lawn mowers?”

“Cars are my bag. I pay a kid to cut mine.”

“Why didn’t you hire my kid?”

“You must be kidding! He doesn’t even cut your grass.”

“He needs a better offer than I can make.” Camacho stood,
flexed his arms a few times experimentally, then grasped the rope-
Choke off”. He yanked. The engine spluttered.

Albright bent and adjusted the needle valve. “Now try it.”