The Minotaur

by Stephen Coonts

  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, Dreyfus led the other two down the hall and around the corner to the mail room. “Okay,” he said. “I want computer chips. Start looking.”

  It took an hour. One agent found three chips in a package without 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 computer, stuff that Harold Strong had been the last man to revise. A phone call from Camacho earlier in the afternoon had given Dreyfus 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. Someone 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, Camacho 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 information. 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, Camacho swatted furiously until he regained the safety of his kitchen and got the sliding glass door closed behind him.

  Wide awake now, he flipped 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.

  José Canseco was coming to the plate. The A’s announcer was all atwitter. Camacho searched through the cupboard for something 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 opening.

  “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 here, 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 Camacho 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 José 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 José Canseco.” Camacho flipped the radio off.

  “A good player,” Albright told him.

  “Good kid,” Luis agreed.

  “Gonna be a superstar.”

  “If he lasts.”

  “Yeah. They all gotta last. Everyone has high expectations, then for some reason, sometimes the kid sorta fizzles. Know what I mean?”

  Camacho nodded and put Albright’s glass in the sink.

  “We had high hopes for you—”

  “Why don’t you go home and swelter at your house, Harlan. It’s two-thirty in the morning and I have to work tomorrow.”

  “I don’t. Got the air conditioner guys coming in the morning. I’ll call in sick. Tomorrow night my place is going to be like Moscow in winter.”

  “Terrific.”

  Albright heaved himself off the stool and reached for the sliding glass door. As his hand closed on it, he paused and looked at Camacho. “Anything new?”

  “Yeah. One or two little things, since you mentioned it. The Soviet ambassador got a letter several weeks ago. For some reason there was a stain on it, a jelly stain. We analyzed it. Looks like a French brand of blueberry. Imported. We have a d
ozen agents on it.”

  “Amazing.” Albright shook his head like a great bear. He brightened. “That might lead to something, eh?”

  “It might. You never know.”

  “Amazing. All those letters, over three and a half years! The Minotaur has never made a mistake, not even one tiny slip. And now he sends a letter with a jelly stain on it? It’s too good to be real.”

  “You take your breaks where you find them. If it is a break. We’ll find out if I can keep enough people working on it. Another development just cropped up.”

  “Like what? Peanut butter on the envelope?”

  “Nothing to do with the Minotaur.”

  “What?” Albright was no longer amused.

  “Crash of the navy’s ATA prototype. Augered in yesterday out in Nevada.” He glanced at the wall clock. “Day before yesterday, actually. Seems somebody has been peddling erroneous information to a defense contractor. AeroTech. So the smelly stuff has hit the fan, so to speak.”

  “Keep your people on the Minotaur.” His tone was flat.

  “What am I supposed to do now? Salute?”

  Albright slid the door open. “I’m not kidding, Luis. We need some progress.” He stepped through the door and pulled it shut behind him. Then he disappeared into the darkness.

  A minute or so later, Luis Camacho locked the door and pulled the drapes.

  After Jake Grafton and the rest of the staff left for Washington, the atmosphere at the base at Tonopah took on the ethereal silence of a graveyard, or so it seemed to Toad Tarkington. He divided his time between the hangar, where a TRX crew was mocking up the remnants of the airplane he and Rita had abandoned, and the hospital, where Rita remained in a coma.

  Toad drove the two miles back and forth between the two locations in an air force sedan that one of the commanders had assumed he would return to the motor pool. He would, eventually, but he was in no hurry. After all, the commander had signed for the car and hadn’t really ordered him to return it.

  The lounge in the VOQ was empty. The other guests apparently were too busy to hang around the pool table and bet dimes and swap lies while the TV hummed in the background, as the naval aviators had. The camaraderie was an essential part of naval aviation. Those who flew the planes gave and demanded this friendship of each other.

  That first evening alone Toad tossed the cue ball down the table and watched it carom off the rails. He looked at the empty seats and the blank TV screen and the racks of cue sticks, and trudged off to his room to call Rita’s parents yet again. He was talking to them twice a day now.

  He was also calling his own folks out in Santa Barbara once a day, keeping them updated on Rita and talking just to hear their voices. Likely as not his parents were slightly baffled and secretly pleased by this attention from the son who usually phoned once a month and never wrote because he had said everything in the phone call.

  It’s funny, he mused, that now, now, with Rita in such bad shape, the sound of his mother’s voice was so comforting.

  After the second day alone, it finally occurred to him that the problem was that he had almost nothing to do. He was standing in the hangar watching, listening, but he had no people to supervise or reports to write or memos due, so he merely observed with his mind in neutral. At the hospital he sat beside Rita, who was moved to a private room, and did a monologue for her or stared at the wall. And thought. He pondered and thought and mused some more.

  That evening on the way to the hospital he stopped by the exchange and bought a spiral notebook. In Rita’s room he began to write. “Dear Rita,” he began, then sucked on the pen and looked out the window. He dated the page. Dear, dear Rita: “Someday you will wake, and when you do, I will give you this letter.”

  He wrote, sometimes for several hours at a sitting. He started out writing about Toad Tarkington: growing up in southern California with the beach and surf just down the road, baseball and football in the endless summer, the hard-bodied bimbettes chased and wooed and sometimes conquered. He described how he felt about his first true love, and his second and third and fourth. He devoted page after page to college and grades and all-night parties.

  Finally he decided he had squeezed the sponge pretty dry on his youth, so he turned to the navy. Without his even realizing it, his style changed. Instead of the light, witty, listen-to-this style he had adopted for tales of his youth, he wrote seriously now, with no attempt at humor. Facts, impressions, opinions, ambitions, they came pouring from his pen.

  In four days the TRX crew finished their work and mysteriously vanished. Several days later a group of officers and civilians from Washington arrived unannounced. They poked and prodded the dismembered, blackened carcass and photographed everything, then climbed back into the waiting planes parked on the baking ramp in front of base ops. Toad was left with his solitude and his writing.

  So the days passed, one by one, as Rita slept.

  In Washington, Jake Grafton was also writing, though he went about it in a vastly different manner than Tarkington. He dictated general ideas into a recording machine and gave the tapes to his subordinates, who expanded the ideas into smooth, detailed drafts which Jake then worked on with a pencil. Flight test data and observations were marshaled, correlated and compiled. Graphs were drawn and projections made about performance, maintenance manhours, mean time between failures and, of course, costs. Money dripped from every page. Every officer in the group had an input, and conclusions and recommendations were argued and re-argued around Jake’s desk, with him listening and jotting notes and occasionally indicating he had heard enough on one subject or another. All of it went into a mushrooming document with the words “top secret” smeared all over.

  Vice Admiral Tyler Henry spent some unhappy hours with Luis Camacho. It had been quickly established that the data contained on the E-PROM chip from the crashed prototype was identical to the erroneous data contained in the Pentagon computer file that had last been changed by the deceased Captain Harold Strong. TRX’s latest, correct batch of E-PROM data was also in the computer, but under another file number.

  Three days and a dozen phone calls after he had sent Lloyd Dreyfus to Detroit, Camacho went himself. On Thursday at noon he rode the Metro out to National Airport and was sitting in the president of AeroTech’s office in Detroit at 3:50.

  Homer T. Wiggins had gotten himself a lawyer, a manicured, fiftyish aristocrat in a Brooks Brothers suit and dark maroon tie. His stylish tan and his gray temples and sideburns made him look like something sent over from central casting. “Martin Prescott Nash,” he pronounced with a tiny nod at Camacho, then pointedly ignored the proffered hand. Camacho retracted his spurned appendage and used a handkerchief to wipe it carefully as he sized up Wiggins, who was apparently trying his best to look like a pillar of outraged rectitude.

  “My client is one of the most respected leading citizens of this state,” Nash began in a tone that might come naturally to a feminist activist lecturing a group of convicted rapists. He had it just right—the slight voice quaver, the distinct pronunciation of each word, the subtle trace of outrage. “He is active in over a dozen civic organizations, gives over half a million dollars a year to charity and provides employment to six hundred people, every one of whom pays the taxes that provide salaries for you gentlemen.” He had just the slightest little bit of difficulty pronouncing the word “gentlemen.”

  Nash continued, listing the contributions Homer T. Wiggins had made to the arts, the people of the great state of Michigan and the human race. Camacho settled into his chair and let him go, occasionally glancing at his watch.

  Dreyfus waited until he had Camacho’s eye, then winked broadly. Wiggins saw the gesture and winced.

  Finally, as Nash paused for breath, Camacho asked, “Are you a criminal lawyer?”

  “Well, no,” admitted the pleader. “I specialize in corporate law. My firm has advised Homer for ten years now. We handled his last stock offering, over ten million shares on the American Exchange, and the
subordinated debenture—”

  “He needs a criminal lawyer.”

  Deflated, Nash looked to his left, right at the pasty, perspiring face of leading citizen Homer T. Wiggins, who was staring at Camacho and licking his lips.

  “Read him his rights, Dreyfus.”

  Both agents knew this had been done on one prior occasion, yesterday, and Wiggins had declined to answer questions unless his lawyer was present. Dreyfus removed the Miranda card from his credentials folder and read it yet again, slowly, with feeling. The warning usually had a profound effect on men who had never in their lives thought of themselves as criminals. All the color drained from Wiggins’ face and he began to breathe in short, rapid breaths. It was as if he could hear the pillars crumbling and see the plaster falling from the ceiling of that magnificent edifice of position, responsibility and respect that had housed him so well all these years.

  As Dreyfus put the card away, Wiggins squeaked, “You going to arrest me?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?” said Martin Prescott Nash, who was looking a little pale himself.

  “On whether or not I get some truthful answers to the questions I came here to ask.”

  “Are you offering immunity?”

  “No. I have no such authority. I am here to question Mr. Wiggins as a principal about bribery of a government employee and illegally obtaining classified defense information. Both charges are felonies. If you want to talk to us, Mr. Wiggins, we’ll listen. We may or may not arrest you today. I haven’t decided. Anything you say will be included in our reports and will be conveyed to the Justice Department. The attorneys there may or may not use it as evidence against you. They may take it into account when they are trying to decide if prosecution is warranted, or they may not. They may consider your cooperation when they make a sentencing recommendation after your conviction—if there is one—or again, they may not. I have nothing to offer. You have the right to remain silent, but you’ve heard your rights and your attorney is here with you. Or you can decide to cooperate with the government that you and your six hundred employees support with your tax dollars by telling us the truth. It’s up to you.”