At four o’clock Jake received a call from Commander Rob Knight. “Could you come over to my office?”
“Well, I was getting ready to go home.”
“On your way?”
“Sure.”
Jake locked the files, turned off the lights and snagged his hat on the way out. Smoke Judy was still there. “Lock up, will you, Smoke?”
“Sure, Captain. Have a good weekend.”
“You too.”
Jake walked to the Pentagon. He was getting very familiar with this route. The parking lot was emptying as he crossed it and he had to do some dodging.
On the fourth-level corridor the pile of used furniture was still gathering dust. Jake turned right on the D-Ring and walked down three doors. He knocked.
Rear Admiral Costello opened the door. “Ah, Captain, please come in.”
The room was packed. People were sitting on desks. Everyone had a beer can in his hand. Vice Admiral Henry was there, Costel- lo’s three aides — all captains fresh from carrier commands and waiting for the flag list or new orders — together with the four office regulars and two admirals Jake didn’t know. He accepted a beer and found himself talking to Henry. “Glad you could join us, Cap- tain.”
“Delighted, sir.”
It was Happy Hour. These men who had spent their lives in the camaraderie of ready rooms needed two hours at the end of the week to review the week’s frustrations and reduce them to manage- able proportions. Soon the subject turned from shop to mutual friends, ships, ports, and planes they had flown.
Just before six Jake excused himself. He and Callie were going to the beach this evening. Tyler Henry grabbed his hat and started with Jake for the door. As Jake opened it, Henry paused and took a long, smiling look at the bulletin board. He was looking at a photo. It was a black-and-white eight-by-ten of singer Ann-Mar- gret holding a microphone in her hand and singing her heart out, wearing a sleeveless shorty blouse and no pants at all.
“I was there,” Henry said. “Kitty Hawk, ‘67 or ‘68. That woman…” He pointed at the picture. “She’s all lady. She’s my favorite entertainer.”
The photo was autographed and signed. “To the guys of OP- 506.” Yes, thought Jake Grafton, remembering those days. No doubt that was a great moment for her, performing before five thousand screaming sailors, but it was an even greater moment for them, a moment they would remember and cherish every day of their lives, each and every man jack of them. Of course, bombing North Vietnam twelve hours a day, some of them didn’t have very many days left- The loss rate then was almost a plane a day. No doubt Ann-Margret had known that.
“Mine too,” said Jake Grafton, and together with the admiral walked into the corridor where he said goodbye. The admiral went back toward his office as Jake set off alone for the subway.
At six o’clock, as Jake Grafton was boarding the subway at the Pentagon station, Luis Camacho closed the last of the files piled up on his desk. It was hopeless: 218 files, 218 political appointees in the Department of Defense, including the service secretaries and unders and assistants. He had selected just eighteen files: the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, his political aides, and the assistants and under secretaries in SECDEF’s office. And SECDEF. All these men had held their positions for at least three years. But it was still hopeless.
If one of these men was, no hint of it came from the FBI background investigations that had been completed for the Senate confirmation process. The common thread was that they were pillars of the establishment, the kind of men generations of mothers prayed their daughters would marry. All eighteen were white, well educated, leaders in their local communities, respected by all those similarly situated. Several had previously held elected or appointed office. Most were family men or divorced family men. Thirteen of them had graduated from an Ivy League school. Tennis was the most popular sport and golf a close second. Several were yachtsmen. Every single one of them could be labeled independently wealthy, most from old family money, a few from small fortunes they had made themselves.
It was sickening. Wealth, privilege, power, spelled out in these files in black and white. Oh, they had a few little peccadillos. One man had flunked out of three colleges before he had completed his education in a fourth. Three drunken-driving convictions. One ille- gitimate child. One man had been known to frequent prostitutes in his younger days, and one had been accused of being a closet ho- mosexual by a disgruntled soon-to-be-ex during a messy divorce. Luis Camacho, career cop, thought it pretty tame stuff.
For several seconds he sat and stared at the piles of folders spread over the table. No cop, he told himself, ever looked seri- ously at a more unlikely group of suspects. There wasn’t even one man with a family or background that might be vulnerable to in- tense scrutiny. Not here. These men had had every advantage that birth, wealth, and social position could confer. Sadly he shook his head.
If the key to X’s behavior was in his past, it was going to remain buried unless a small army of agents with a lot of time were told to dig deep. The agents Camacho could get. What frustrated Camacho was his suspicion that he was running out of time. What infuriated him was his conviction that no matter how deep they dug, the investigators could come up dry. And without something… some artifact… something tangible, how could he sell a man to Albright as X? Albright would want a man he could understand, with a motivation that could be reduced to writing and passed from the Aquarium to the Kremlin and would explain. The committee should have thought this prob- lem through two years ago.
He went back to his office and found a photo of Terry Franklin in the file. Actually there were four of them. The one he selected was a full-figure shot taken with a hidden camera. Franklin was looking just to the right of the camera, perhaps waiting for a car to pass the parked van the photographer had used. This picture he placed in an inside pocket of his sports coat. He glanced at his watch. If he went to the Pentagon, he could probably still catch Vice Admiral Henry, who rarely left before 7 P.M.
Terry Franklin stopped at a neighborhood bar after he got off the bus from work. On the Friday evening of the longest week of his life, he deserved a few drinks. Waiting for the ax to fall was squeez- ing the juice right out of him. He had been a bumbling fool all week, botching one job after another, having to ask the chief for help with several problems that were so minor he had been embar- rassed. The chief was solicitous, asking if he was having problems at home.
The problem was he couldn’t think about anything else. He could no longer concentrate on his job, his wife, the kids, anything. He had to get his mind off it and he just couldn’t! Sitting here at the bar, he glanced warily at the other customers, then bit his lip. A panic-stricken scream was just beneath the surface. He was los- ing it. It was like one of those nightmares he had as a kid — he was fleeing from a hideous monster and his legs went slower and slower and the monster was reaching out, within inches of catching him— and he woke up screaming with pee soaking his pajamas.
He was going to have to get all this crap stuffed into one sock, going to have to wire himself together so he could get from one end of the day to the other. He had all of tonight, all day Saturday, all day Sunday — three nights and two whole days — before he had to face his demons on Monday.
He ordered another CC on the rocks. Sure, he could do it. No one knew. No one was going to arrest him. No one was going to toss him into prison with a bunch of homo thieves and killers. After all, this is America, land of the gullible, home of the foolish.
He would deliver and collect on another dozen floppies or so. Then he would empty his safe-deposit box and be on his way to a new life. Perhaps Rio. He would lie on the beach all day and fuck beach bunnies at night.
He sipped on his drink and thought about how it would be. The life he had always wanted was right there within his grasp, so close, within inches. But he was going to have to be realistic about the monsters, going to have to keep trotting. No urine-soaked paja- mas. No screaming fits. Amen.
He paid the tab and left two quarters on the bar. Outside he forced himself to pause and examine the headlines on the newspa- per m the vending stand. Same old crap. The world was still turn- ing, things were burning down, trains were still crashing…
He walked the two blocks home with his head up, breathing the spring air. It seemed just yesterday that it was so cold and misera- ble. Spring is here. And I’ve got a fortune in the bank and no one knows but me.
His neighbor was washing his car in the driveway. “Hey, Terry, how’s it going?”
“Pretty good. And you?”
“Just fine. Say, I’ve been meaning to ask you. How’s the spy business?”
Terry Franklin froze.
