The Minotaur jg-3 Page 43

“Working.”

  “I want to talk to him.”

  “I’ll pass that along.”

  “No. You tell him he’ll talk with me or I’m going to raise holy hell. When somebody kills a vice admiral in a navy building, the lid is gonna get ripped off pretty damned quick. Right now I know a lot more than my boss, and I don’t know much. When I start answering his questions he is not going to be a happy camper. He’s a vice admiral too, by the way. I will answer his questions. He’s another one of those guys who doesn’t take no for an answer. George Ludlow, the Secretary of the Navy, he hasn’t even heard the word since he got out of diapers. And CNO…” Jake snorted.

  “Camacho—“

  “He won’t be able to wave his badge over on the E-Ring and stuff this shit back into the goose… You tell him!”

  As Commander Smoke Judy drove across the George Mason Me- morial Bridge into Washington, he stripped off his white uniform shirt with the black shoulder boards and threw it onto the floor of the backseat. He was still wearing a white T-shirt, but that would attract less attention than the uniform. His cover was gone, lost somewhere back in the stairwell.

  He needed a change of clothes, he needed to get rid of this car and he needed a place to hide.

  He took the Fourteenth Street exit on the east side of the bridge and went north, rolling slowly with the traffic between tour buses and out-of-state cars iaden with tourists. A motel? No — they would be checking motels and hotels and bus stations and…

  He crossed Constitution Avenue and continued north into the business district.

  Three blocks north of New York Avenue he was stopped in traffic inching through a single-lane construction choke point when he saw a drunk stagger into an alley, a derelict, or in the language of the social reformers, a “homeless person.”

  It took five minutes to go halfway around the block and enter the alley from the other end. There was just room to get the car by a delivery truck. The drunk was collapsed beside a metal Dump- ster, his wine bottle beside him. His head lay on a blanket roll. Beside him sat a green trash bag. After checking to make sure there was no one in sight. Smoke stopped the car and stepped out.

  The drunk was semiconscious. Smoke examined the trash bag. It contained an old coat, some filthy shirts.

  “Sorry, buddy. This is the end of the line.” Judy throttled him with both hands. The bum, who looked to be in his sixties, with a two-week growth of beard, kicked some and struggled ineffectu- ally. In less than a minute he was gone.

  Judy stripped the shirt from the dead man and put it on over his T-shirt. The trousers were next. Sheltered between the Duropster and the delivery truck, Smoke took off his white trousers and white shoes and socks and pulled the derelict’s grime-encrusted trousers on. Perhaps this garment had once been gray, but now it was just dark, blotchy. And a little big. All the better. He even took the dead man’s shoes. They were too small, but he put them on any- way.

  Judy loaded the trash bag and blanket roll in the car. He helped himself to the wine bottle too, wedging it between the stuff on the backseat so it wouldn’t fall over and spill.

  He rolled out of the alley and, with the help of a courteous tourist, managed to get back into traffic. He discarded all his white uniform items in a Dumpster near RFK Memorial Stadium, then parked the car in the lot at D.C. General Hospital

  With his blanket roll over one shoulder and the trash bag— which now contained his gym bag — dangling across the other, he shuffled across the parking lot toward the Burke Street Metro stop. He didn’t get far. His feet were killing him. The shoes were impos- sibly small. He sat on a curb with a little hedge behind it and put on his running shoes from his gym bag. The car keys he buried in the soft dirt. He stuffed the drunk’s shoes under the hedge, sprin- kled some wine on himself and smeared it on his face and left the bottle beside the shoes after wiping it of prints. There was an old cap in the trash bag, which he donned.

  He sat there on the curb, considering. A car drove into the lot. A woman and her two teenage youngsters- She glanced at him, then ignored him. The teenagers scowled.

  This just might work, Judy told himself. He shouldered his load and set off again for the Metro stop.

  Harlan Albright was in the car dealer’s snack area, feeding quar- ters into the coffee machine, when FBI agents arrived at 4:30 to arrest him. He extracted the paper cup from the little door in the front of the machine and sipped it experimentally as he glanced idly through the picture windows at the service desk- Three men in business suits, one of them black, short haircuts, their coats hang- ing open. One of them had a word with Joe Talley, the other service rep, while the other two scanned the area.

  As he looked at them, Albright knew. They weren’t here about a car. When Talley pointed in this direction, Albright moved.

  On the back wall of the snack area was a door marked “Employ- ees Only.” It was locked. Albright used his key and went through into the parts storeroom. The door automatically locked behind him.

  He walked between the shelves and passed the man at the counter with a greeting. Out in the corridor he walked ten feet, then turned left and went through an unmarked door into the service bay.

  Halfway down the bay, one of the mechanics was lowering a car on the hoist, “You about finished with that LTD, Jimmy?”

  “All done, Mr. Albright. Was gonna take it out of here.”

  “I’ll do that. The owner is out at the service desk now. She’s impatient, as usual.”

  “Starter wire was loose,” the mechanic said. “That was the whole problem. Keys are in it But what about the paperwork?”

  “Go ahead and walk it over to the office.”

  “Sure.” As Albright started the car, the mechanic raised the garage door and kicked the lifting blocks out of the way of the tires.

  Albright backed out carefully and drove down the alley toward the area where customers’ cars were parked.

  Yep, another guy in a business suit hustling this way, and an- other going around the building toward the front entrance. Al- bright turned left and drove by the agent walking toward the main showroom. That agent looked at him with surprise. As Albright paused at the street, he glanced in the rearview mirror. The agent was talking on a hand-held radio and looking this way.

  Albright fed gas and slipped the car into traffic.

  They would be right behind him. He jammed the accelerator down and shot across the next intersection just as the light turned red.

  He went straight for three more blocks, then turned right for a block, then right again.

  He entered the dealership lot from the back and coasted the car toward the service parking area, watching carefully for agents. His trip around town had taken five minutes. Yes, they all seemed to be gone.

  He parked the car and walked back inside.

  Joe Talley saw him coming. “Hey, Harlan, some guys were here looking for you.”

  ” ‘S’at right?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t say, but they were cops. Had those little radios and charged outta here like their tails were on fire. Just a couple minutes ago. Say, what’ve you done anyway? Robbed a bank?”

  “Nah.” Albright quickly sorted through the rack of keys of cars that were awaiting service. “Forgot to put a quarter in the meter.” This one, a new Taurus. In for its first oil change.

  “Sons of bitches came after me two years ago,” Talley said. “My ex swore out a warrant.”

  “I sent her the fucking check last week,” Albright growled. He walked back toward the parking area. “They come back, you tell ‘em I went out to feed the meter,” he called. “See you after a while.”

  “Yeah, sure, Harlan.” Talley laughed.

  “Do my time card too, will ya, Joe?”

  “You’re covered.” Talley went back to annotating a service form.

  Albright never returned to the dealership, of course. Less than two hours later he abandoned the Taurus in a parking garage in downtown Washington and walked four blocks to a KGB sa
fe house.

  “Just like that, cool as ice, he went back and traded cars?”

  “Yessir.” Dreyfus tried to keep his eyes on Camacho’s face. It was difficult.

  ‘Two guys in two hours go through our fingers! What is this,

  Keystone Kops?” Camacho sighed heavily. ‘Well, what are we doing to round up these public enemies?”

  “Warrants for them both. Murder One for Judy and Accessory Before the Fact for Albright. Stakeouts. Briefings for the D.C., federal, airport and suburban police — every pistol-packer within fifty miles of the Washington Monument. Photos on the eleven o’clock news and in tomorrow’s papers. The cover story is drugs.”

  The Minotaur

  “We really needed Albright, Lloyd.”

  “I know, sir.” Dreyfus was stunned. Luis Camacho had never before called him by his first name in the five years they had known each other.

  Camacho sat rubbing his forehead with the first two fingers of his left hand.

  “Drugs in the Pentagon is going to get a lot of press,” Dreyfus volunteered. “Already Ted Koppel wants the Director for Night- line. Some nitwit on the Hill is promising a congressional investiga- tion. Everybody on the west side of the Potomac is probably going to have to pee in a bottle on Monday morning.”

  If Camacho heard, he gave no sign. After a moment he said softly, “We’ll never get him unless he comes to us.”

  27

  A Saturday in August is a terrible time to be in Washington. The heat and humidity make any trip outdoors an endurance trek. The summer haze diffuses the sun- light, but doesn’t soften it. Perspiration oozes from every square inch of hide and clothes become sodden rags.

  By eleven o’clock Saturday morning. Smoke Judy felt as if he had lived on the street for six months. He had managed only two hours’ sleep the night before, most of it in fifteen-minute spurts. The alley he now called home housed three other derelicts, all of whom were comatose drunk by 9 P.M. They had no trouble at all sleeping.

  At 7 A.M., or (hereabouts — Judy had stowed his watch in his gym bag — his companions stirred themselves and collected their traps. He followed them as they staggered the five blocks to a mission. Two of them vomited along the way. The little neon sign over the door proclaimed: “Jesus Saves.”

  Breakfast was scrambled eggs, toast and black coffee. Judy care- fully observed the men and four women, maybe five — he wasn’t sure about one — who ate listlessly or not at all. The alcoholics in the final stages of their disease drank coffee but didn’t touch the food. Almost everyone smoked cigarettes. A man across from him offered him an unfiltered Pall Mall, which Smoke Judy accepted. He hadn’t smoked a cigarette since he was twenty-four, but when in Rome…

  “I see you been to the barber college,” his benefactor said as he blew out his match.

  — Yeah.”

  “Go there myself from time to time.”

  Judy concentrated on smoking the cigarette until the man beside him lost interest in conversation. Behind the screen of rising smoke he studied the people around him. He was apparently the only one who showed any interest in his companions. Most of them sat with vacant eyes, or stared at their plates, or the wall, or the smoke rising from their cigarettes.

  By eight o’clock he was back on the street. The humidity was bad and the heat was building. Already the concrete sidewalks had become griddles. His companions wandered off in twos and threes, looking for shady spots to snooze, spots near areas of heavy pedes- trian traffic that later in the day could be mined by panhandling for enough money to purchase the daily bottle.

  Deciding the street was too dangerous for a man with only a day’s growth of beard, Judy ambled back toward the alley where he had spent the night. He concentrated on the derelict’s shuffle, the head-down, stoop-shouldered, eyes-averted gait that character- ized so many of the defeated wanderers-

  His eye caught a headline in a newspaper rack. The photo — that was him! He walked along, wondering. Up ahead was a trash bin with a paper sticking out. He snagged it and took it back to the alley

  Drugs. Cocaine trafficking. The photo of him in uniform was that service-record shot he had submitted last year. The picture of Harlan Albright was a candid street shot, almost as if he had been unaware of the camera. Still, it was a good likeness. With his back to the Dumpster, sitting on the asphalt, Smoke Judy read the sto- ries carefully. Vice Admiral Henry was dead, according to the Post, killed by a drug dealer resisting arrest. Well, was the Post ever wrong?

  When he finished the story he threw the paper in the Dumpster.

  Now he lay in the heat, his head on his blanket roll, watching an old dog search for edible garbage. A slight breeze wafted down the alley, but it wasn’t much. The place was a sauna. After the dog left, the only creatures vigorously stirring were the flies.

  Jesus, who would have believed things could go so wrong so fast? The feds must have been monitoring access to that file, and the instant he opened it, jumped in the car to drive over and arrest him. From commander in the U.S. Navy to hunted fugitive killer all in one fifteen-minute period — that had to be a new record for the fastest fall in the history of the navy.

  As he thought about it, Smoke Judy did not agonize over the split-second decisions he had made or torture himself with what- ifs. He had spent his adult life in a discipline composed of split- second decisions, and he had long ago learned to live with them. You made the best choice you could on the information you had and never wasted time later regretting the choice. He didn’t now.

  Still, as he looked back, he couldn’t really pinpoint any specific decision that he could say had been the perfect choice to make when he made it. So here he was, lying in an alley ten blocks northeast of the White House. Hell must be like this, dirty and hot, all the sinners baking slowly, desperate for a beer. God, a cold beer would taste so good!

  The money. After that phone call from Homer T- Wiggins, he had felt it unsafe to leave the money in his apartment when he wasn’t there, so he had put it in a duffel bag in the trunk of his car. His passport was in the bag too. The car was undoubtedly in the police impound lot by this time and the money and passport were in the evidence safe. He had been tempted yesterday to try to get it, but that temptation he had easily resisted. Smoke Judy, fighter pilot, knew all about what happened to guys who went back to a heavily defended target for one more run.

  Man, the bumper sticker is right — shit happens. And it happens fast. The real crazy thing is it all happened to him. The great sewer in the sky dumped it all on him, Fuck! He said it aloud; “Fuck.”

  “Fuck!” He shouted it, liking the sound of his voice booming the obscenity at the alley walls. The word seemed to gain weight and substance as it echoed toward the street. He filled his lungs with air and roared, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!”

  “Hey, you down there.” He looked up. Some guy was leaning out a window. “You stop that damn shouting or I’ll call a cop to run you out of there. You hear?”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “Goddamn fucking drunk psychos,” the man said as he closed the window, probably to keep in the cool, conditioned air.

  Okay, Judy told himself, going through the whole thing one more time. He was in the smelly stuff to his eyes. Okay. How was he going to get the hell out of this mess?

  Well, this alley was as good a place as any to spend the weekend.

  If he tried to check into a motel or hotel, or tried to buy clothes or steal a car, he might be recognized. The cops wouldn’t be looking for him in an alley, at least not for a few days. No doubt they were watching the airports, train station and bus depot. And looking for that car he drove away from Crystal City.

  So sitting here in this shithole for a few days looked like a pretty good idea. Of course, selling the E-PROM data to Homer T. Wig- gins had looked good too, as did killing Harold Strong, copying the Athena file …

  Ah me.

  Well, he still had a card. One chance. $150,000. Boy, did he ever need that money now
. Monday evening, Harlan Albright, that meat market in Georgetown. One way or the other, Albright was parting with the cash, he told himself grimly. There were still five live cartridges left in the pistol.

  Jake Grafton sent his family to the beach Friday evening. Saturday he was back at the office-finishing his report on the testing of the prototypes. He had already circulated a draft to his superiors and now he was incorporating their comments.

  The senior secretary had volunteered to work on Saturday, and she was making the changes on the computer when the telephone rang. “Jake, this is Admiral Dunedin. I have a couple FBI agents here with me. Could you come up to my office?”

  “Yessir. Be right there.”

  The agents turned out to be Camacho and Dreyfus. They shook his hand politely. Jake sat in a chair against the wall, facing the side of the admiral’s desk.

  “Captain,” the admiral said to get the ball rolling, “these gentle- men said you had some concerns that you wished to discuss.”

  Jake snorted and rearranged his fanny on the chair. “I suspect my concerns are minor and worlds away from the FBI’s, but they’re real enough. I’ve read the morning papers. Apparently the ATA program is some kind of cover for drug dealers who are supplying all the addicts in the Pentagon, and one of them went bug-fuck crazy yesterday and beat an admiral to death.”

  “Now, Captain—” Camacho began-

  “Let me finish. Presumably this boondoggle operation is run by some airhead who is unable to recognize the nefarious character of his subordinates, who have been engaged in subverting the national defense establishment from within. Moral rot and all that. And who is the airhead who commands this collection of criminals in uniform? Why, it’s the navy’s very own Jake Grafton, who next week is going to be testifying before various committees of Con- gress about the necessity to fund a new all-weather, carrier-based, stealth attack plane. No doubt this Captain Bligh will be ques- tioned closely by concerned congressmen about his inability to see beyond the end of his nose. So my question is this — just what the hell do you gentlemen suggest I tell the congressmen?”