The Minotaur (22 page)

“Just follow me,” Camacho said. “I’ll get you some evidence.”
Even before he finished speaking he was out the door and going
down the stairs to the sidewalk two at a time.

He went across the street toward the Cad at a brisk walk. The
three men were staring.

“Hi.” He reached into his jacket pocket with his left hand and
pulled out his credentials. “FBI—“

One of the men was moving, going sideways and reaching under
his shirt. Camacho rammed his left shoulder into the nearest man
and fell on top of him as he drew his revolver. He heard a shot,
then two more in quick succession. The man who had gone for his
gun fell backward against the car, then slid to the sidewalk as
Camacho jammed his revolver against the teeth of the struggling
man under him.

“Don’tl” The man opened his mouth and Caroacho jammed the
gun in up to the trigger guard. “Freeze, shithead!”

On the other side of the car someone was pleading, “Don’t
shoot, don’t shoot.”

“You even hiccup, I’m gonna blow your brains out.” Camacho
felt the man for a weapon as he stared into his wide eyes. There
was an automatic in his waistband. The agent extracted it and
turned the man so he could look over his shoulder at the house.

Dreyfus was checking the man on the sidewalk and the police
lieutenant was cuffing the third one.

Camacho pulled the barrel of the revolver clear of his man’s lips.
“Is there a back way outta there?”

The lips contorted. Camacho cocked the revolver and placed the
barrel right between his eyes. “Answer me, or so help me
God - . .”

“Yeah. The alley.”

Camacho pulled the man from the sidewalk and shoved him
behind the Cad. “Quick, on your belly, hands behind your back.
Assume the position, fucker, right now.” As the man obeyed, Ca-
macho tossed his cuffs to the lieutenant, then began to run for the
corner.

He rounded the comer at a run just as a car was coming out of
the alley in the middle of the block, its engine howling. He dived
onto his face. An automatic weapon roared as the rear of the car
slewed and smoke poured from the tires. Scrambling behind a
parked car, Camacho managed to fire one shot at the fleeing car,
although he knew that the hollow-point +P .38 slug had no
chance of penetrating the body of the car. Someone leaning out a
rear passenger window hosed another burst in his general direction
as the car ran the stop sign at the next comer. The bullets slapped
the concrete and parked cars. Luis Camacho huddled behind a car
and listened to the engine noise fade away.

When he walked back to the Cadillac, Dreyfus was watching the
cuffed men lying in the street and lighting his pipe while the police
lieutenant used his car radio. Camacho looked at the man who had
been shot. He was dead, with two holes in his chest about four
inches apart. A cocked nine-millimeter Beretta automatic lay on
the street near him.

“Was it you that got this guy?” Camacho asked Dreyfus.

“Yeah. After he took a shot at you.”

“No shit.”

“You are a goddamn hopeless romantic, Luis.”

The lieutenant came over at a trot. His face was livid. “You
fucking idiot! Are you tired of living? You almost got one of us
killed! We’re the good guys, or haven’t you keyhole peepers
heard?”

“I’m sorry. I just didn’t think it through.”

“The FBI, the fearless band of idiots.” The lieutenant said the
words softly, a benediction, a sublime pronouncement of irrefut-
able truth- He looked up and down the street, breathing deeply.
The red tinge in his cheeks subsided slowly. Finally he said,
“Okay, Rambo. How do you want this to read?”

“Hell, just tell it straight. This car came along and parked in
front of a crime scene. I approached them and identified myself
and one of them pulled a weapon.” He shrugged.

The police officer nudged one of the prone men with his foot. “A
real smart bunch of punks. Drive right up and park across the
street from two cars with government plates. You shitheads de-
serve to be in jail. Just in case you haven’t figured it out, you’re
under arrest.”

The wail of an approaching siren caromed from the fronts of the
dilapidated houses.

“See you around. Lieutenant,” Camacho said.

“Leaving? Some congressman fucking his secretary tonight?”

“You city guys can handle this. Mrs. Jackson’s my problem.”

“The old lady can cool off without you, Rambo. I’m gonna go
get a search warrant for this house, and you’re gonna have to sign
an affidavit. A couple of them. You and your sidekick here, J.
Edgar Earp, are gonna be working with me for the next eighteen
hours. Now get your cute little ass over here and start searching
this car. Let’s see what these hot shooters were driving around.”
The lieutenant was right. It did take eighteen hours.

Terry Franklin never knew how long he stayed in the bathroom.
The flowers on the wallpaper formed a curious pattern. Each had a
petal that joined to an offset flower, all of them; it was very curious
how they did that. He thought about how the flowers joined and
about nothing at all for a long, long time.

When he came out of the bathroom the house was dark and
silent. He flipped on the kitchen light and drank milk from the
carton in the refrigerator. He was very tired. He climbed the stairs
and lay down on the bed.

The sun was shining in the windows when he awoke. He was still
dressed. He used the toilet, then went downstairs and found some-
thing to eat in the refrigerator. Cold pizza. He ate it cold. It was
left over from a week or more ago when he had taken the whole
family to Pizza Hut. He thought about that for a while, trying to
recall just when it had been, remembering the crowd and the kids
with the cheese strings dangling from their mouths and hands. The
memory was fresh, as if it had happened just a short while ago, yet
it was all wrong. The memory was from the wrong perspective, like
when you remember a scene from your childhood. You remember
it as you saw it as a child, with everything large and the adults tall
and the other children just your size. That’s the way he remem-
bered Pizza Hut.

He sat the empty plate in the sink and ran some water into it,
then went into the living room and lay down on the couch. He was
tired again. He slept most of the day.

12

At four o’clock Saturday after-
noon an exhausted Luis Camacho arrived home with a raging
headache and went straight to bed. When he awoke the house was
quiet and dark and his wife was asleep beside him. He checked the
luminous display on the clock-radio on the bedside stand: 12:47.
Slipping on his robe, he padded downstairs to the kitchen, where
he raided the refrigerator. He got a plate from the dishwasher and
helped himself to some leftover meat loaf and a couple of big
spoonfuls of tuna casserole. He nuked it for a minute in the micro-
wave while he poured a glass of milk.

From the kitchen table he could see Albright’s bedroom window
across the waist-high cedar fence, just twenty feet or so away. The
window was dark. Good ol’ Harlan Albright- Peter Aleksan-
drovich Chistyakov. Yuri.

Matilda Jackson had unlocked her front door and opened it for
her killer, then turned her back on him. So it was someone she
thought she had no reason to fear. A small-caliber automatic with
a good silencer, the point-blank coup de grace, the methodical
search of the house for possible witnesses and the turning off of the
lights and appliances; certainly he was no thief or teenage drug
guard-tumed-gunman. No, Mrs. Jackson had been the victim of a
trained, experienced assassin who convinced her it was safe to ad-
mit him into her house. Perhaps he told her he was with the FBI?
Then he put two bullets into her brain.

Not to protect Pochinkov, who had diplomatic immunity and
coutd not be arrested or prosecuted. The Americans needed no
testimony from Mrs. Jackson or anyone else should they decide to
declare Pochinkov persona non grata. Camacho thought about the
picture of Terry Franklin in his jacket pocket, which he had hoped
Mrs. Jackson might recognize. He had discussed the possibility of
Mrs. Jackson identifying Franklin with Harlan Albright.

And Albright had lost no time. Why take a chance? Why risk
endangering a valuable agent? He probably had not pulled the
trigger himself. Just a quick call from a pay phone and Mrs. Jack-
son was on her way to the graveyard.

The ability to kill people with a telephone call—that’s the ulti-
mate manifestation of power, isn’t it? And those ignorant charla-
tans in the Caribbean are still sticking pins into dolls. If only they
could comprehend how far mankind had progressed with the won-
drous aid of modern technology, developed from the triumphant
findings of rigorous, unbiased science. Two thousand years anno
domini murder is no longer uncertain, affected by mysterious
forces and mystic symbols and the position of the moon and plan-
ets. We civilized moderns just let our fingers do the walking . . .

Camacho rinsed the dirty dish, glass and fork and placed them
in the dishwasher. Somewhere here in the kitchen his wife had
cigarettes hidden. They had both quit smoking six months ago, but
she still liked to savor a cigarette in the afternoon over a cup of
coffee while a soap blared on the television. And she thought he
didn’t know. A cop is supposed to know things, lots of things, and
occasionally he finds he knows too much.

The pack was on the top shelf in the pantry, behind a box of
instant rice. After a couple of puffs, he poured himself a finger of
bourbon and added water and ice. He sat at the kitchen table and
opened the sliding glass door to the backyard a few inches to ex-
haust the smoke.

Beyond the back fence the houses facing the next street over
were silhouetted against the glare of the streetlights. The shapes
cast weird shadows in his backyard. He smoked two cigarettes
before he finished the whiskey and put both butts in the garbage
under the sink. In the family room he lay down on the couch and
pulled the throw blanket over him.

As he tried to relax the faces and images ran through his mind in
a disjointed, unconnected way: Albright, Franklin, Matilda Jack-
son with her obscene third eye. Admiral Henry, Dreyfus with his
pipe and files, Harold Strong blunt and profane, all the letters with
their penciled block words that said nothing at all and yet whis-
pered of something, something just beyond his understanding . . .
It was a long time before Luis Camacho drifted off to sleep.

He awoke to the smell of coffee and bacon. Breakfast was strained,
as usual. In a crisis of identity last fall, their sixteen-year-old son
had transformed himself into a punk all in the course of one sunny
Saturday at the mall. The boy sat sullenly at the table this morning
with his remaining hair hanging over his forehead and obscuring
his eyes. The shaved place above his left ear, clear up to where his
part used to be back in those old, “normal” days, looked extraordi-
narily white and obscenely naked, his father thought, rather like a
swatch of an old maid’s thigh. Luis Camacho sipped coffee and
studied the tense, quivering lips visible below the cascading hair.

When the boy had left the table and ascended the stairs, Luis
remarked, “What is his problem?”

“He’s sixteen years old,” Sally said crossly. “He’s not popular,
he’s not a good student, he’s not an athlete, and the girls don’t
know he’s alive. The only thing he does have is acne.”

“Sounds like an epitaph.”

“It’s his whole life.”

Camacho was just starting on the Sunday paper when the phone
rang. His wife answered. “It’s for you,” she called.

It was Dreyfus, calling from a car phone. “Luis, it’s Smoke
Judy. He’s out driving this morning. Left his house in Morningside
ten minutes ago- Maybe a meet.”

“Where is he now?”

“Going north on the beltway. We just passed the Capital Centre
arena.”

“You guys got the van in standby?”

“Nope. It’s back at the shop.” The shop was headquarters, the J.
Edgar Hoover Building. “Nobody thought we’d need it today.”

“Get it. I want a record this time. Any idea where he’s going?”

“Not a glimmer.”

“I’ve got to get dressed and shaved. I’ll be in the car in fifteen
minutes. Call me on the car phone then.”

“Sure.”

Sally came into the bathroom while he was shaving. “You’re in
the paper today.” She showed him the story and the photo. “You
didn’t tell me there was a shooting.”

“Friday night. Dreyfus shot a guy.”

“It says here the dead man had already shot at you.”

He eyed her in the mirror, then attacked his upper lip.

“Luis, you could have been killed.”

“Then Gerald could shave his bead as bare as his ass and run
around in a loincloth.”

She closed her eyes and shook her hair. “Weren’t you scared?”

He hugged her. “Yeah. I seem to be spending more and more
time in that condition.”

Camacho was driving south on New Hampshire Avenue past the
old Naval Ordnance Lab, now the navy’s Surface Weapons Center,
when the car phone buzzed. It was only 9:30 on Sunday morning,
but already a good volume of traffic was flowing along the avenue.
It seemed as if all the Silver Spring suburbanites had big plans for
this spring day, which was partly overcast. He wondered if it
would rain as he picked up the phone. “Camacho.”

“He turned off the beltway and is headed north on 1-95 toward
Baltimore.”

“How many cars do you have?”

“Seven.”

“Stay loose. He’ll be looking.” A car would be in front of the
suspect vehicle and another well behind, but in sight. The addi-
tional cars would be at least a mile back. Every four or five minutes
the car behind would pass Judy as the lead car accelerated away
and got off at the next exit, where it would watch the cavalcade
pass and join as the last car. The third car would assume the
position immediately behind Judy. If this was done properly, Judy
would never notice he was being followed. Had the agents had a
helicopter or light plane this morning, none of the cars would have
even been in sight of the suspect.

Camacho drove onto the beltway eastbound and went down two
miles to the 1-95 exit, where he merged with a string of cars and
trucks headed north. He eased the car up to five miles per hour
over the speed limit and stayed in the right-hand lane.

In the two weeks that Camacho’s men had had Commmander
Smoke Judy under surveillance, be had gone driving on only one
occasion. That time he had gone to a mall and spent forty-five
minutes in an electronics store watching college basketball on tele-
vision, eaten two slices of pepperoni pizza and swizzled a medium-
sized Sprite, and gawked for five minutes in a store that specialized
in racy lingerie. Just another debonair bon vivant out on the town.

As he passed the Fort Meade exit rain began to fall. Dreyfus
called once. The subject was still headed north. Dreyfus had had
the lead car take the Route 32 exit in case Judy was on his way to
Baltimore-Washington International Airport, but Judy passed it
by. After a U-turn the FBI car was back on 1-95 chasing the caval-
cade. Camacho hung up the telephone and listened to the wipers.
Since this was his personal car, he didn’t have a radio to monitor
the surveillance.

In a few minutes the rain ceased. The clouds still looked threat-
ening with patches of blue here and there. The car ahead flung up a
spray from the wet road that kept Camacho fiddling with his wiper
control and wishing he had taken the intermittent wiper option.

Following the ribbon of interstate highways, Smoke Judy circled
Baltimore and headed north toward York. Just short of the Penn-
sylvania line he began to slow in the left lane. Dreyfus was in the
car immediately behind and used the radio to call the trailing car,
which was three miles back. When Judy swung through an emer-
gency vehicle turnaround and accelerated south, the trailing car
was already southbound at fifty miles per hour, waiting for Judy to
catch up. Dreyfus and the drivers of the other car waited until
Judy was completely out of sight before they gunned across the
median throwing mud and turf and resumed the pursuit. One of
the cars almost got stuck.

“He thinks he’s being cute,” Dreyfus told Camacho. who took
the first exit he came to and crossed over the highway, then sat at
the head of the on-ramp to wait.

“Think he’s spotted you?”

“I don’t—we’ll see. He’ll go straight home if he has.”

Smoke Judy didn’t go home. He went to the inner harbor of
Baltimore and parked in an outlying lot, then walked unhurriedly
past the aquarium and the head of the pier where the three-masted
frigate Constellation was berthed and sat in front of the giant in-
door food mall, near the water. He sat for almost twenty minutes
watching the gulls and people as a gentle wind blew in from the
bay.

Camacho and Dreyfus watched him through one-way glass
mounted in the side of a Potomac Power van parked on a yellow
line near the frigate pier. From the outside of the van the glass
appeared to be a sign unless one inspected it from close range. A
man wearing jeans and a tool belt had rigged yellow ropes around
the vehicle as soon as it came to a stop to ensure that no one got
that close.

The distance from the van to where Judy sat was a little over a
hundred yards. Camacho aimed a small television camera mounted
on a pedestal while Dreyfus snapped photos with a 35mm camera
with a telephoto lens. Beside them an agent wearing earphones
huddled over a cassette recorder- A parabolic microphone on top
of the van was slaved to the video camera, but right now the audio
was a background murmur, like the background noise of a baseball
radio broadcast.

“He isn’t saying anything,” Camacho muttered to reassure the
audio technician.

“I’ll bet he goes inside,” Dreyfus said.

“More than likely. Too chilly to sit outside for long.”

“He’s looked at his watch twice.”

Camacho turned the pedestal camera over to the second techni-
cian and helped himself to coffee from a thermos. “Appreciate you
guys coming out this morning.”

“Sure.”

As he sipped his coffee, Camacho glanced at his watch. 11:47.
The meet was probably scheduled for twelve o’clock. Albright? If
not, then who?

“Have we got the camera and audio units inside?”

“Yes, sir. The guys are already in the food court.”

Camacho took another large swig of coffee, then tapped the man
at the camera on the shoulder- He moved aside. The camera had a
powerful zoom. Camacho could see the expression on Judy’s face.
He looked like a tourist until you studied his face—alert, ready, in
absolute control.

The agent backed off a tad on the zoom and scanned the camera.
The crowd was large, lots of families and young couples. With the
earpiece in his left ear he picked up snatches of conversation as
the camera moved along. Feeling a bit like a voyeur, he aimed the
camera at a stream of people coming from the dark interior of the
huge, green-glass building into the light. A stringy youth in a black
Harley shirt held hands with a vacant-eyed girl with large, unre-
strained breasts and a slack jaw. Adenoids? “. . . that AIDS is
bad shit. Had a hell of a time shaking it last time.”

A tight-faced gray-haired woman spoke to her male companion
in a polished whine: “. . . too far to walk. My feet hurt and it’s
been just a terrible , . .” Camacho moved on, sampling the faces
and polyglot sounds.

“I’m not hooked, I tell you. I just like the rush . . ,” In her
mid-thirties, she wore a one-piece designer outfit and a wind-blown
coiffure and was speaking to a man in gray slacks and camel-
colored cardigan who was chewing on his lower lip. Not wishing to
hear more, Luis Camacho swung the camera away.

“He’s moving,” Dreyfus said. “Toward the door. He’s looking at
someone. Do you see him?”

Camacho searched for the door to the mall and saw only backs.
He waited. The light was fading noticeably now as a dark cloud
choked off the sunlight. In a few seconds Smoke Judy entered his
range of vision from the left and joined the crowd streaming into
the interior gloom. Camacho released the camera and rubbed his
eyes.

Dreyfus was on the radio, talking to the watchers inside. “Here
he comes,” one of them said, and launched into a running com-
mentary on Judy’s direction of travel for the benefit of his com-
rades stationed throughout the building.

“I’m going inside,” Camacho said. Judy had never met him, so
that wasn’t a concern. Depending on who it was, Judy’s contact
might recognize him, but even so he wanted to see—see now, with
his own eyes—the person Smoke Judy did not want to be seen
with. He would try to stay out of sight. Just in case.

A spatter of drops came in at an angle, driven by the strong
breeze, as Luis Camacho walked across the head of the quay. A
solid curtain of rain over the water moved rapidly this way. The
crowd around two jugglers on unicycles dissolved as people began
to run. The FBI agent reached the double doors and hurried
through just as the deluge struck. A crowd was gathering by the
exit, looking out and chattering nervously, but audible above the
babble was the drumming of the rain on the glass windows of the
building.

Camacho put the earpiece on his radio in place and rearranged
his cap. The radio itself was in an interior jacket pocket- The mi-
crophone was pinned inside his lapel: he merely had to key the
transmit switch and talk.

A voice on the radio reported that Judy was upstairs, on the
second floor, wandering from booth to booth. That meant the per-
son he had come to meet was still unknown, still moving through
the crowd looking for watchers. Camacho stood near the door and
looked at faces, an ocean of faces of all ages and colors and sizes.
Could one of them be ? No chance.

X was too careful, too circumspect. This wasn’t his kind of risk. He
didn’t need men like Smoke Judy for his treason. Or did he?

“He’s in line at the taco joint”

Camacho was tempted to move. Not yet! Not yet!

“There’s a man behind the subject, Caucasian male about fifty-
five, five feet nine or so, about a hundred ninety pounds, wearing
dark slacks. Hush Puppies and a faded blue windbreaker. No hat.
Balding.”

Camacho shifted his weight and examined the people on the
stairs. Families. Youngsters. Five black teenage boys with red ball
caps and scarves. No one was looking at him.

“Guy in the windbreaker said something to the subject.”

“Get pictures.” That was Dreyfus in the van.

“Camera’s rolling.” The lawyers at Justice loved these portable
video cameras with automatic focus and light-level adjustment.
Jurors raised in the television age thought prosecutors should have
a movie of every ten-dollar back-alley deal. At last technology had
delivered. The government’s shysters could show each greedy,
grubby, loving little moment in living color on the courtroom
Zenith—and play it over and over again until even the stupidest
juror was firmly convinced—while the defendants writhed and the
defense shysters planned their appeals.

“Subject paying for his grub.”

Camacho swiveled his eyes again, looking at no one in particu-
lar, seeing everyone-