leave out part of the truth, but that wasn’t a lie. A lie was a booby trap, a land mine that could explode at any time with fatal results. And this lie had been a big one. He sat now staring at the objects on his desk with unseeing eyes as he ex- amined the dimensions of the lie and its possible implications. Stu- pid! A stupid, idiotic lie.
He rubbed his forehead again and found he couldn’t sit still. He paced, back and forth and back and forth, until finally he was standing in front of the Pentagon organization chart. If there were forty files or sixty-three or any number, there would be a small group of people who would have access to all of them, if you constructed just one more hypothesis — that all the files concerned classified projects in research or development. Tyler Henry the ad- miral suspected they did. Albright the spy already knew and had told him so. Camacho the spy catcher must verify or refute that hypothesis soon, or Dreyfus and Henry and Albright and a lot of the others are going to think him incompetent, or worse. He stood staring at one box on the complex chart. Inside the box was printed: “Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition.”
He sat at his desk and unlocked the lower right drawer and removed a file. Inside were photocopies of all sixty-three letters. They were in chronological order. All had been written on plain white copy machine paper in #2 lead pencil, which had been a wise precaution on the part of the person or persons who wrote them. Ink could be analyzed chemically and the sellers of pens could be interviewed, but a #2 lead pencil was a #2 lead pencil. And copy machine paper — the stuff was everywhere, in every office of the nation.
On an average day the Soviet embassy received several dozen casual cards and letters mailed from all over the United States. Most of the messages were short and to the point. Many were crude. “Eat shit, Ivan,” seemed to be popular. The Chernobyl di- saster and the Armenian earthquake had elicited thousands of pieces of mail, much to the chagrin of the postal inspectors and FBI agents assigned to screen it.
Over the last three years these letters in this file had been culled for further scrutiny. All the messages were printed in small block letters, all were long enough to contain an internal code and all of them had been written in English by someone with a fairly decent education. Some were signed and some weren’t. Interestingly, about 80 percent of these letters had been mailed in the Washing- ton metropolitan area. Not a one had been mailed from over a hundred miles away. All had been enclosed in cheap, plain white envelopes available in hundreds of bookstores, convenience stores, supermarkets, etc., all over town.
Camacho looked closely. It was easy to see that the same person had written them all; the penmanship was so careful and neat, the style of the writer so consistent from letter to letter- And every now and then, maybe once in every other letter, the syntax was tortuous, not quite right. It was as if the writer purposefully chose a difficult sentence construction. The conclusion that these letters, or at least some of them, contained an internal code was ines- capable.
The mechanics of the matrix demanded a reasonably long letter if one were going to encrypt a long message, say three dozen char- acters. If it took an average of three words to signal one character, then the message must run to at least nine dozen words, too many for a postcard.
The sheer number of letters was daunting. Some of them were probably dross. knew these letters would arouse suspicion, so he wrote lots of them. And it was impossible to tell which contained a code and which didn’t. He was hiding in plain sight.
Maybe that was the key. Maybe wasn’t just some career civil servant, some clerk. Maybe he was a man in plain sight, out in the open, known to one and all. But why? Why was he committing treason? That’s what the Soviets wanted to know.
Camacho picked up the phone and punched numbers. “Dreyfus, pull the files on all the political people in the Defense Department and put them in the conference room.”
“All of them? Again?”
“All.”
“Yessir,” Dreyfus said without enthusiasm.
Even a blind hog finds an acorn occasionally, Camacho told himself as he cradled the phone. And if there’s an acorn in those files, this time I’m going to find it.
The youngest child, a four-year-old boy, threw a fit as Lucy Frank- lin drove toward Dulles. The nine-year old, Karen, had been devil- ing him all morning, and apparently he decided he had had enough. He wailed at the top of his lungs and punched at his sister. One of his swings connected with her nose. Blood spouted and she screamed too. Lucy pulled off the freeway and put the car in neu- tral.
“Shut up!” she roared. “Both you kids, stop it!” Satisfied with the outcome of the battle, the boy sat back and stared at the blood dripping on ha sister’s dress as she sobbed uncontrollably.
“Look at you two. Fighting again. Now Karen’s hurt. Aren’t you sorry, Kevin?”
He didn’t look a bit sorry, which made Karen cry harder. Lucy got her into the front seat and held a tissue on her nose until the bleeding stopped. She cuddled the child. Karen had vomited twice during the night, so this morning Lucy had kept her home from school.
The traffic roared by. “Say you’re sorry, Kevin.”
“I’m sorry.” His hand came over the seat and touched Karen’s hair. The sobbing gradually eased. Holding a tissue against Karen’s nose with her left hand, Lucy leaned over the seat and cuddled the boy. This week had been tough on them. Terry was so distant, saying little, shouting at the children as they ran through the house and made their usual noise.
He was a volcano about to erupt. His tension and fear were tangible, visible, frightening to the children, terrifying to Lucy. Even as she sat here on the freeway, the unreasoning panic that Terry caused washed over her again. What had he done? What would he do? Would he hurt the children? Would he hurt her?
“Mommy, don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying, sweetheart. I just have something in my eye.”
“I’m okay now,” Karen said, casting an evil glance across the seat back at her brother.
“No more fighting. You two love each other. No more fighting. It makes me sad to see you two trying to irritate each other.”
Now Kevin’s hand touched her hair. “Let’s go get Grandma.”
“Yes. Let’s do.” She started the engine and slipped out into traffic.
At lunch Toad and Rita shared a table-just the two of them. From a table fifty feet away Jake Grafton watched the body language and gestures as he listened to George Wilson and Dalton Harris talk baseball. So Toad Tarkington had fallen in love again! That guy went over that precipice with awe-inspiring regularity. The impact at the bottom was also spectacular.
You really had to tip your hat to the guy. He arrives, takes in the female situation at a glance, then immediately makes a fool of himself over the best-looking woman in sight. Jake allowed himself a grin. The ol’ Horny Toad.
Back in the office after lunch, Jake called Tarkington over to his desk- “I’ve been looking over this memo about the A-6 system. How did it go when you turned off the radar and Doppler?”
“Well, sir, without the Doppler to dampen the velocities, the inertial tends to drift somewhat. But without the radar all you have is the IR and it’s tough. When it isn’t raining or snowing you can run attacks okay once you’ve found the target. The nav system just isn’t right enough to let you find the targets without the radar. The IR doesn’t have enough field of view. With a global positioning system to stabilize the inertial you might have a chance, but not now.”
“It looks to me like you’ve got a handle on the major problems. This evening how about jumping a plane and flying up to Calverton, New York? With Commander Richards. The guys at Grumman are expecting you two. I want you to look over the A-6G system and play with it and let me know what you think. Come back Monday. Tuesday you and I are going to take a little trip out West.”
The lieutenant’s face reflected his dismay.
“That’s not going to put you out or interfere with anything, is it?” Jake tried to appear solicitous.
“Geez, CAG, The whole weekend—“
“You didn’t have anything going, did you? I mean, you haven’t been around here long enough to—“
“Oh no, sir. I just thought I’d do my laundry and all. Maybe take in a movie. Write a letter to my mom.”
Jake couldn’t hold back a smile. “Running out of clean under- wear, huh?”
Toad nodded, trying to maintain a straight face.
“Buy some more- See you Monday, Toad.”
“Yessir. Monday.”
