The Minotaur

by Stephen Coonts

  Uh-oh. He kept his voice calm. “Hey, babe. I went out for a beer. Did you all get anything at the mall?”

  “I know where you’ve been. Cindy across the street has told me all about your little expeditions when I’m out for the evening. I know all about you, you son of a bitch.”

  He stared, thunderstruck. This isn’t happening. No, not to me. For the love of— “How?”

  “Who is she? I want to know. Who is she?”

  “Who is who?”

  “Who is the goddamn bitch you’re tomcatting around with, you son of a fucking bitch. Who is she?”

  At last he understood. As the relief washed over him he was suddenly too weak to stand. He sank into a chair. “Lucy, there’s no other wo—”

  “Don’t give me that shit! I know! Cindy told me!” She was a quivering, shouting pillar of hysterical righteousness. “You’re cheating on me.” Tears were flowing now. “Oh God. I tried so hard…”

  “Lucy, calm down. Please, for the love of— The kids will hear. Honest to God, there’s no other woman.” He got to his feet and approached her. “Babe, I love you. There’s nobody—”

  “Don’t you touch me, liar. I’m getting a divorce.” She spun and made for the stairs. “I’m locking the bedroom door. If you try to get in, I’ll call the police. Liar. Cheat. Bastard.”

  He lost it. It had been that kind of evening. “You crazy cunt,” he roared. “You don’t know shit. I went down to the corner for a goddamn beer and when I get home you’re fucking loony crazy. I haven’t cheated on you! I haven’t fucked another woman since that night I knocked you up at the drive-in. You don’t have any goddamn evidence at all, you crazy lunatic.”

  He heard the bedroom door slam and the kids sobbing. He threw himself onto the living-room couch. Some days—it’s absolutely crazy how some days just go bug-fuck nuts. You almost get arrested, smash up the front of the car, your wife demands a divorce because you’re cheating on her when you’re not. What else? What else can fucking happen before midnight?

  The drop was empty. He stretched out on the couch and contemplated that fact. He closed his eyes and tried to relax. He could hear Lucy putting the kids to bed upstairs. Finally the noises stopped.

  He would have to call them. In Miami they had given him an emergency telephone number that he had memorized and a verification code. He would call. He looked around for the evening paper. On top of the TV. He flipped to the sports section. The code was simple; the location and opponent in the next scheduled game of the Bullets, Orioles or Redskins, whichever was in season. They had been insistent; he was never to call except in an emergency and then only from a pay phone. Well, this was sure as hell an emergency. But he wasn’t going back out onto those streets tonight, no way. Even if he could work up the courage, Lucy would use a butcher knife on his crotch when he got back.

  He went into the kitchen and dialed the phone. On the third ring a man’s voice answered with a recitation of the telephone number. The voice was tired, the English perfect. “Six-six-five, oh-one-oh-five.”

  “This is Poor Richard.” He had. picked his code name himself. Easier for him to remember, they said. “It wasn’t there. It wasn’t at the dr—”

  “Verify please.” The voice was hard, exasperated.

  “The Bullets play the Celtics tomorrow night at Capital Centre.”

  “I’ll call you back. Where are you?”

  “Seven-two-nine, seven-four-oh-one.”

  “You’re at home?” The voice was incredulous, outraged.

  “Yeah, I—” He stopped when he realized he was talking to a dead instrument.

  Shit. He would have to call again. He had to find out what the hell was going on. A pay phone. Lucy was going to come sweet-Jesus holy-hell screaming unglued. What a night! He picked up his jacket and eased the front door shut behind him.

  From her seat on the top of the stairs, Lucy heard the door close. She had started to come down earlier but stopped when she heard him enter the kitchen and pick up the phone. She had heard his side of the conversation and she sat now trying to figure it out. “Poor Richard” he had called himself. It wasn’t there. The Bullets play the Celtics? A code of some sort?

  What is he into? she asked herself, her horror growing. He had looked so stunned when she said she knew. That look was the verification she needed that he was cheating on her. But how did that fit with a code and nonsense sentences? Was he placing bets with a bookie? No, he wasn’t spending money she didn’t know about. Something to do with his job at the Pentagon? Could he be spying, like those Walkers several years ago? No, that wasn’t possible. Or was it? He would do it if he could get away with it, she decided. In their eleven years of marriage she had found him a man who always put himself first.

  What else could it be? My God, what other possibilities were there?

  The sun was still embedded in the gray scud over the ocean on Saturday morning when Jake and Callie walked through the gap in the low dune on their way to the beach. Callie trailed along behind him on the narrow path, her hands tucked into the pockets of her windbreaker.

  He strolled as he always did, his eyes moving restlessly across the sky and the sea and the naked sand and coming to rest often on her. Whenever she was with him she drew his eyes. It had been that way since they first met, one of the little unconscious things he did that told her without words what she meant to him. This morning walking beside him she was acutely aware of his glances.

  “How did your little interview with the soul stripper go yesterday?”

  “He says I have to come to grips with your decision to ram that transport in the Med last fall.”

  Jake stopped and turned to face her. He looked bewildered. “What the hell are you worrying about that for?”

  “For a week I was a widow.”

  He turned away and looked out to sea. It was a moment before he spoke. “You may be again someday.” He faced her. “Women live longer than men these days. I don’t have a crystal ball, Callie. Jesus, we can’t stop living because we’re mortal.” He gestured angrily. “I may get hit by a meteor ten seconds from now. I may get run over by some drunk when I step off the curb at—”

  He stopped because she was walking away from him, along the beach, her arms wrapped around her chest.

  He hurried after her. “Hey—”

  “For a whole week you were dead! You had killed yourself chasing those damned Arabs and I was left here all alone!” He put his hand on her arm and she jerked away, whirling to face him. “You knew how much I loved you and…and…when they called and said you were alive, the memorial service was scheduled for the next morning. I was going to bury you. You were dead!” He enveloped her in his arms and she pressed her face against his shoulder.

  After a while she stopped trembling and he murmured, “Still love me?”

  “Yes.”

  “A little bit or a whole lot?”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  With his arm around her shoulder, he started them walking north again. In a moment he paused and kissed her, then they resumed their journey with their arms locked together.

  Something white. Whatever it was that blocked Toad’s gaze, it was white. He closed his eyes and the pain and nausea washed over him, enveloping him. Ye gods…Something hard and cold against his cheek—he opened his eyes again—and white. Lotta light…He moved. Shit! He was lying in a fucking bathtub.

  He raised himself slowly. His head felt like it was coming off. He was still dressed in his khaki uniform, but it was wrinkled and had vomit on it. He still had his shoes on. Oh God, he felt worse than he had ever felt in his entire twenty-eight years, felt like he had been dead for a week or two. He sat up slowly. His head was being hammered on by an angry King Kong. After a moment he grasped the shower handles and faucet and hauled himself erect. He swayed as the blood pounded in his temples with every beat of his heart. Then he tried to step out of the tub. He tripped and sprawled heavily on the floor, striking his head against the bottom of
the sink cabinet. He lay there, too sick and dazed to move.

  Amid the pain he heard the door open. “Good morning.” A woman’s voice.

  Toad flopped over and squinted against the ceiling light. Rita Moravia!

  What had he done to deserve this? It’s true, life is all misery and pain.

  “I’d appreciate it if you would transport yourself to your own room, Tarkington. Now. I don’t want anybody to get the wrong idea about you and me.”

  He tried to speak. His mouth was dry and tasted of sour vomit. He cleared his throat and licked his lips. “How’d I get here?”

  “Four men carried you in here last night. We thought someone should keep an eye on you during the night. I volunteered.”

  “Aren’t you a sweetie.”

  “I want you out of here, Tarkington.”

  He hoisted himself up and staggered past her. He was going to have to find another bathroom pretty damn quick. He went through the little sitting room and got the door open and was hustling down the hall when he heard her voice behind him. “We’re flying at two this afternoon. Meet you in the lobby at ten till twelve.”

  Jake sat on the crest of the low dune and watched the glider moving north, away from him above the dune. He had its nose pointed obliquely forty-five degrees out to sea, but the velocity of the incoming wind was such that the plane stayed more or less over the dune. He was holding her low, only eight or ten feet up, to take advantage of the upward vector of the breeze as it crossed the low sand hill.

  “Better turn her back this way,” advised the eleven-year-old aviation expert from up the street.

  Jake banked the plane. “Keep the nose up,” David urged, his voice rising. Jake fed in back stick. Too late. The right wingtip kissed the sand and she cartwheeled. David was up and running instantly.

  The boy was examining the wreckage when Jake reached him. The rubber bands that held the wings to the fuselage had popped off, which undoubtedly minimized the damage. “A hole in the wing Monokote and a busted spar in the right horizontal stabilizer,” the youngster advised cheerfully. “Not bad. Yippy-skippy! You gotta remember to feed in a little back stick on the turns.”

  “Yeah. Let’s take it over to my house and fix it.”

  “What kind of planes do you fly in the navy?” David asked as they walked down the beach with the pieces of the glider in their arms.

  “A-6s mostly. Last year I flew the F-14 some.”

  “Wow, those fighters! Did you see Top Gun?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “My dad bought that movie for me. I must have watched it a couple dozen times. When I grow up I’m gonna fly fighters.” He paused, apparently considering the implications of this bold statement. “What’s it really like?” he asked, not quite so confident.

  Jake was still trying to explain when they rounded the corner and he saw the strange car in the driveway. When he saw the blue Department of Defense bumper sticker with the three stars on it, he knew. Vice Admiral Henry. He led the boy inside.

  The admiral was wearing jeans and a heavy jacket today. He and another man in a coat sat at the dining room table with Callie drinking coffee. David marched over to her and held the wing so she could see it. “He let the nose fall in a turn and crashed. We can fix it, though.”

  “Good morning, Admiral.”

  “Jake, I’d like you to meet Luis Camacho.”

  “Hi.” Jake leaned across the table and shook hands. Camacho was in his early fifties with no tan, a man who spent his life indoors. Even though he wore a jacket his spare tire was evident, but his handshake was firm and quick. He didn’t smile. Jake got the impression that he was not a man who smiled often.

  “Nice place you have here,” Camacho said.

  “We like it,” Callie said. “Would you all like a quiet place to talk?”

  The admiral stood. “I thought we could take a walk along the beach. Be a shame to drive all the way over here from Washington and not walk on the beach.”

  The three men left David working on the glider at the kitchen table. He was telling Callie about servos and receivers when they went out the door.

  “Nice day,” Admiral Henry muttered as they walked toward the beach trail at the end of the street.

  “They’re all nice here,” Jake said. “Raw and rainy at times, but nice.”

  “Luis is from the FBI.”

  “Got credentials?” Camacho produced them from a pocket and passed them to Jake, who looked the ID card and badge over carefully and returned them without comment.

  Henry stopped at the end of the little path that led through the waist-high dune and looked right and left, up and down the beach. He turned right, south, and walked with his hands in his pockets toward the area with the fewest people. He didn’t even glance toward the ocean. Out on the horizon a large containership was making its way north, perhaps to round Cape Henlopen and go up the Delaware.

  “Yesterday you wanted to know what really happened in West Virginia after Harold Strong was killed.”

  “Yessir.”

  “I told you the truth, but I left a few things out. Camacho here was with me that morning. We met with Trooper Keadle and the local prosecutor, guy named Don Cookman. They weren’t happy campers. They knew murder when they saw it and cooperation smacked of cover-up. So Luis got on the phone to Washington and the director of the FBI drove up along with the forensic team. We got cooperation with a capital C from then on.”

  “Go on,” Jake prompted when the admiral fell silent.

  The admiral turned to face him. “You’re asking too damn much, Jake.”

  “I’m not asking for anything other than what I need to know to do my job.”

  “Like shit.”

  “Would you let yourself be led along by the nose if you were me? Jesus Christ, Admiral, my predecessor was murdered! I got a wife over there”—he pointed back toward his house—“who would like to have me alive for—”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Why was Strong killed? What did you tell those people in West Virginia? Why the silence on a murder? Who and what are you investigating?” He looked at Camacho. “Who the hell are you?”

  Camacho spoke first. “I’m special agent in charge of the Washington-area FBI group that handles counterespionage. That’s why the locals in West Virginia cooperated. That’s why Trooper Keadle called me when you left his office Thursday. That’s why he called me when Commander Judy showed up that afternoon to search Harold Strong’s cabin.” He turned and started down the beach, still talking. Admiral Henry and Jake Grafton trailed along. “Why was Strong killed? If we knew that we would be almost there. It wasn’t personal or domestic. No way. It was a hit, a contract. He got taken out by someone who knew precisely what they were doing, a cool customer. So the hypothesis that seems most likely is that he knew something he shouldn’t. That leads us to his job—the ATA program.”

  “That sea story about a Minotaur—that was true?”

  “Yeah, that’s the code name. But we don’t know if it’s one guy or several,” the agent said, with a glance at Tyler Henry, who picked that moment to look out to sea.

  “I thought,” Jake said, “that these spy things usually get broken when you get somebody to talk.”

  “That’s the history. It’d be nice if we knew who to put the screws to to clean up this little mess. But we don’t. So right now we’re busy doing it the hard way.” He led the two naval officers along the beach as he talked and answered questions. When Jake remembered to glance out to sea, the containership was no longer in sight.

  “Let’s transfer Smoke Judy,” Jake suggested to the admiral.

  Henry just stared at him.

  “Dunedin said if I got goosey, I could get rid of him.”

  “I’d rather you left him in place,” Camacho said. “I’ve already made that request to Admiral Henry and now I’ll make it to you.”

  “Going to be real tough to pretend I don’t know anything.”

  “You don’t k
now anything,” Henry growled. He jerked his thumb at Camacho. “If he talked to you for a week, you still wouldn’t know anything. I sure as hell don’t.”

  An hour later, as they came single file through the dune trail, Henry said, “Now you know as much as I do, which is precious little. On Monday you tell that chief in officer personnel to tear up your retirement papers.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Don’t ever pull that stunt on me again, Grafton.”

  “Or…?”

  “Don’t you abandon ship and leave me and Dunedin up to our necks alone in this sack of shit.”

  After the two men had departed in the admiral’s car, Jake went back into the house. Callie was sitting on the couch reading a book. “David got your plane fixed, but his mother called and he went home for lunch. He said he would come back later and help you fly it”

  Jake nodded and poured a cup of coffee.

  “Want to tell me about it?”

  “Huh?”

  “Jake…” Her voice had that time-to-come-clean, no-more-nonsense tone. That tone in her voice always got his attention, perhaps because his mother had used it so effectively some years ago.

  “Admiral Henry’s my boss’s boss. Camacho’s a civilian. They drove over here to talk about a problem at the office. A classified problem. That’s all I can say. You want coffee?”

  She nodded yes. When he handed it to her she said, “So you are working on the ATA program?”

  “Callie, for Christ’s sake. I told you I was. I don’t lie to you.”

  She sipped her coffee for a bit. “David likes you,” she said.

  It made him nervous when she shifted subjects like that. “He’s a great kid,” he said noncommittally. “Honest, Callie. I tell you the truth. If something’s classified and I can’t talk about it, I just say so. You know that! You know me!”

  She nodded her agreement and picked up the book. He waited a moment, slightly baffled, then wandered outside with his coffee cup in his hand. Women! Any man who thinks he’s got them figured out should be declared incompetent and incarcerated to protect himself.

  The cursors were running all over the scope when it occurred to Toad to check the velocities in the inertial. They were all gone to hell. “Hold this heading,” he growled at Rita as he consulted his kneeboard cards. He pushed the buttons to take the inertial out of the system, then typed in a wind he thought would work.