“Oh, I think you are, Tarkington. Not physical reach. I’m talk- ing about moral reach. None of his weapons will get to you.”
“You make me sound retarded- How do you know this guy we’re going to see is?”
“I wrote him three letters. Notes. Then this morning I called him and said I was dropping by to chat.”
“Just friendly as fucking shit.” Toad thought about it Jake waited for him to ask how Jake learned ’s identity, but the lieutenant had other things on his mind. “If it weren’t for this turd, Camacho would have arrested Judy months ago and Rita wouldn’t have got whacked up. Camacho would still be alive.” He reached for the radio and snapped it off. “Goddamnit, Captain, this man is guilty.”
“You don’t know anything, Toad. You don’t know who, you don’t know why. Since Rita did get hurt, since that little mess in Camacho’s basement, I thought you had a right to know. That’s why I called you. So you’re going to find out this afternoon.”
“Do you know?”
“Why, you mean?”
Toad nodded.
Jake thought about it. “I’ve made some guesses. But they’re only that. Guesses are three for a quarter. Facts I don’t have. Camacho, though, he knew.”
“And he’s dead.”
“Yes.” Jake turned the radio back on.
“Are we going to turn him in, call the cops?”
“You ask too many questions.”
In a moment Toad said, “Why do you listen to this crap?” He gestured toward the radio.
“It’s refreshing to hear a man who knows precisely where he stands. Even if I don’t share his perch.”
The leaves of the trees alongside the road had the deep green hues of late summer. Cattle and horses grazing, an occasional fe- male rider on a groomed horse in the manicured meadows, glimpses of huge two- or three-story mansions set back well away from the public road at the end of long drives; this countryside was fat. The contrast between this rich and verdant world of moneyed indolence and the baked, potholed streets of Washington jarred Jake Grafton. He could feel his confidence in his assessment of the situation ebbing away as the car took them farther and farther from the Pentagon and the navy.
Five miles north of Middleburg he began to watch the left side of the road. He found the tree and mailbox he had heard about. The box merely had a number, no name. He turned into the hard- packed gravel drive and drove along it. Huge old trees lined the north side of the road, a row that ended in a small grove around a large brick house almost covered with ivy.
Jake Grafton parked right in front.
“Ring the bell,” he muttered at Toad, who gave several tugs on a pull. The sound of chimes or something was just audible through the door.
Tarkington’s eyes darted around.
The door opened.
“Did you get lost?” Royce Caplinger asked, and stood aside to let the two men enter.
“Little longer drive than I figured, Mr. Secretary.”
Toad gaped.
“Close your mouth, son. People’ll think you’re a politician,” Caplinger muttered and led the way down the hall. They passed through a dining room furnished with massive antique tables and chairs and accented with pewter tankards and plates, and on through a kitchen with brick walls and a huge fireplace with an iron kettle hanging in it. A refrigerator, sink, and conventional stove sat against the far wall, on the other side of a work island.
“Nice place you have here,” Jake Grafton said.
“Rustic as hell. I like it. Makes me feel like Thomas Jefferson,”
“He’s real dead,” Toad said.
“Yeah. Sometimes I feel that way too, out here without the traf- fic and airplane noise and five million people all scurrying…” They were in the study now, a corner room with high windows and ceilings. The walls were covered with books. Newspapers scattered on the carpet, some kind of a red-and-blue Oriental thing.
Caplinger waved his hand toward chairs and sank into a large stuffed chair with visibly cracked leather.
He stared at them. Toad avoided his gaze and looked at the books and the bric-a-brac tucked between them. By Toad’s chair was a pipe stand. In it was a corncob pipe, blackened from many fires.
“I wasn’t sure, but I thought it might be you. Captain,” Caplin- ger said. “Didn’t recognize your voice on the phone this morning.”
Jake Grafton rubbed his face with his hands and crossed his legs.
“We were just driving through the neighborhood, Royce,” Toad said, “and thought we’d drop by and ask why you turned traitor and gave all those secrets to the Russians. Why did you?”
Jake caught Toad’s eye. He moved his head ever-so-slightly from side to side.
Jake addressed Caplinger. “Mr. Secretary, we have a problem. We know you’re X and we have some ideas, probably erroneous, about the events of the last few months. Four or five people have died violently. Mr. Tarkington’s wife, Rita Moravia, is a navy test pilot who was seriously injured, almost killed, because various law enforcement agencies failed to properly investigate and make arrests on information they had had for some time. To make a long story short, we came here to ask if you would like to discuss this matter with us before we go to the authorities and the press. Do you?”
“Are you going to the press?”
“That depends.”
“You notice I didn’t ask about the authorities. That doesn’t worry me, but for reasons — welll”
Caplinger slapped his knees and stood suddenly. Toad started. “Relax, son. I only eat lieutenants at the office. Come on, let’s make some coffee.” He led the way into the kitchen.
He filled a pot with water. The pot went on the stove, after he lit the gas jet with a match. He put a paper filter in a drip pot and ladled three spoonfuls of coffee in. “You two are entitled to an explanation. Not legally, but morally. I’m sorry about your wife, Lieutenant. So was Luis Camacho. We had too much at stake to move prematurely.” He shrugged. “Life is complicated,”
Caplinger pulled a stool from under the counter and perched on it.
“Three years ago, no, four, a KGB colonel defected to the United States. It wasn’t in the papers, so I won’t tell you his name. He thought he was brimming with useful information that we would be delighted to have in return for a ton of money and a new life in the West. The money he got and the new identity he got. But the information wasn’t worth much. He did, however, have one piece of information that he didn’t think much of but we found most interesting.”
Caplinger checked the water on the stove.
“It seems that one day about three years before he defected he paid a visit to the Aquarium, the Moscow headquarters of the GRU, which is Soviet military intelligence. His errand doesn’t re- ally matter. During his two or three hours there he was taken into the office of a general who was not expecting company. On the desk was a sheet of paper with four names. The colonel read the names upside down before the general covered the paper with a handy file.”
The water began to rumble. Caplinger checked the pot as he continued. “Under hypnosis the defector could remember three of the four names. We recognized one of them. V. Y. Tsybov.”
The Minotaur
The coffeepot began to whistle. As he reached for it Caplinger said, “Vladimir Yakovich Tsybov was the real name of Luis Cama- cho.”
He poured the hot water into the drip cone and watched the black fluid run out the bottom. “Luis Camacho was a Soviet mole, a deep illegal sent to this country when he was twenty years old, He was half Russian and half Armenian, and with his olive skin and facial characteristics, he seemed a natural to play the rote of a Mexican- American. He knew just a smattering of Spanish, but what the hey. His forefathers, so said his bio, had been in this country since Texas became a state.
“Tsybov, now Camacho, attended a university in Texas and graduated with honors. He obtained a law degree at night while he worked days. The FBI recruited him.
“It’s funny”—Caplinger shook his head—“that J. Edgar Hoo- ver’s lily-white FBI needed a smart Mexican-
