finding him two more officers and another yeoman. He didn’t have desks for them. They had to share.
But things were being accomplished. A Request for Proposal (RFP) on the Athena project was drafted, chopped by everyone up and down the line, committeed and lawyered and redrafted twice and finally approved. Numbered copies went by courier to a half dozen major defense contractors who were believed to have the technical facilities and staff to handle development of a small superconducting computer for aviation use. The office staff had to be informed, and this had been done by the admiral.
Inevitably the number of people who knew about Athena and what it could do was expanding exponentially. Access was still strictly need-to-know, but the system ensured that a great many people had the need, or could claim they did, citing chapter and verse of some regulation or directive no one else had ever read or even seen.
Callie was understanding about the time demands Jake faced. She had spent enough years as a navy wife to know how the service worked. Amy was less so. She and Carrie were still going round and round, and she found Jake a pleasant change. He made rules and he enforced them, and he tucked her into bed every night. She wanted more of his time and he had precious little to give. The weekends became their special time together.
“Why do you spend so much time at work. Jake?”
“It’s my job. I have to.”
‘I’m not going to have a job Hke yours. I’m going to get a job that gives me plenty of time to spend with my little girl.”
“Are you my little girl?”
“No. I’m Amy. I’m not anybody’s little girl. But I’m going to have a little girl of my own someday.”
“Do you ever think much about those somedays? What they’ll be like?”
“Sure. I’ll have lots of money and lots of time and a very nice little girl to buy stuff for and spend time with.”
“How are you going to get lots of money if you don’t spend much time earning it?”
“I’m going to inherit it. From you and Callie.”
“Guess we’d better work hard then.”
One day in early May, Special Agent Lloyd Dreyfus made an ap- pointment to see Luis Camacho’s boss, P. R. Bigelow, without telling Camacho. He had thought about it for a week before he made the appointment with the secretary, and then he had two more days to wait Jumping the chain of command was as grievous a sin in the FBI as it was in the military, yet he had decided to do it anyway and to hell with what Camacho or anyone else thought. As the day and hour approached, however, the enormity of his trans- gression increased with each passing hour. Surely Bigelow would understand. Even if he didn’t, he must realize Dreyfus had a right and duty to voice his concerns.
Dreyfus rehearsed his speech carefully. It wasn’t technically a speech: perhaps a better description would be “short, panicky monologue.” He had to justify himself as soon as he opened his mouth, get Bigelow’s sympathetic attention before he had a chance to start quoting the regulations, before he lost his cool and went ballistic. Was Bigelow a ballistic kind of guy? Dreyfus couldn’t recall Camacho ever saying.
He tried to recall everything he had ever heard about P. R. Bigelow, and that wasn’t much. Strange, when you stopped to think about it Camacho never mentioned his superior officer, never said, “Bigelow wants this,” or “Bigelow is pleased,” or “Bigelow says blah-blah.” Come to think of it, Camacho never talked about anyone. If the Director himself told Luis Camacho to do thus and so, Camacho would just tell Dreyfus, “Do this” or “Do that.” He sometimes said what he hoped to find or achieve, but he never even hinted who had told him to cause something to happen, or why it was to happen. He never expressed a personal opinion. Curious as hell. Camacho was one weird duck, beyond a reasonable doubt.
Sitting in Bigelow’s reception area with the secretary checking him out surreptitiously as she did her nails, Dreyfus went over his list one more time. He wanted everything right on the tip of his tongue. It would be worse than disastrous to think of the clincher on the way to the surgery in the dungeon. Once again he assured himself he was doing the right thing. The right thing. Doing the right thing. He fondled his pipe in his pocket as if it were a set of worry beads.
The ten-button phone on the nail polisher’s desk buzzed to at- tract its owner’s attention. After listening a moment and grunting into the instrument in a pleasant, respectful way, she hung up and said to Dreyfus, “He’ll see you now.” Her painted eyebrows arched knowingly, condescendingly.
P. R. Bigelow was eating a large jelly doughnut at his desk. He mumbled his greeting with his mouth full, a glob of red goo in the comer of his mouth.
Dreyfus took a chair and launched into his prepared remarks. “I’ve asked for this time, sir, to ensure you know what is going on with investigation. The answer is almost nothing. For months now we’ve been spinning our wheels, begging computer time to try and crack X’s letters to the Soviet ambassa- dor, following a few people hither and yon all over Washington, monitoring some phone lines, wasting an army of manpower and bushels of money, and we are going essentially nowhere-I thought you should know that.”
Bigelow wiped the jam from his lips with a napkin, sipped coffee from a white mug labeled “World’s Best Dad” and took another bite of doughnut.
His attitude rattled Dreyfus, who got out his pipe and rubbed the bowl carefully. “Our best lead was a navy enlisted computer technician in the Pentagon, a guy we thought was tapping the computer for some of this stuff. Name of Terry Franklin. Yet Ca- macho never let us pick the guy up. So we sat and watched him do his little thing, and we were diligently following him, right on his tail, in March when his car blew up with him in it.”
Bigelow finished the doughnut and used a moist finger to cap- ture and convey the last few crumbs to his mouth. Then he dabbed his Ups a final time and used two napkins to scrub the powdered sugar and flecks of jelly from his oak desk. He put this trash in the wastebasket and, sighing contentedly, rearranged his bottom in his chair.
“And…?” said P. R. Bigelow.
“A hit man wiped a walk-in witness to a drop with Franklin. Camacho talked to her a couple times, but she got eliminated be- fore we could get her to look at any photos. A professional hit. Two twenty-two caliber slugs in the skull. We’ve got the autopsy and lab reports and we’ve talked to neighbors up and down the street. We’ve got nothing at all. We’re absolutely dry on this one.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes,” said Lloyd Dreyfus with an edge in his voice. He was beginning to lose his temper and didn’t care if it showed a little. “0ne of the staff officers in the navy’s ATA project — a Commander Judy — is trying to peddle classified inside info to interested defense contractors. We got interested in this officer when the project man- ager was murdered over in West Virginia one Friday evening in early February. That murder is unsolved — no one is doing any- thing on it — and Camacho doesn’t appear to be doing any follow- up on Judy’s contacts. He hasn’t even turned the file over to the fraud investigators or NIS. We know some of the people Judy’s talked to and…” Dreyfus threw up his hands in frustration.
“Finished yet?”
“Yes, I think that about covers it”
“So you asked for this appointment on the off chance that Ca- macho has been lying to me about the activities of his office, pur- posely bungling the search for this mole, wasting millions of dol- lars and thousands of man-hours on wild-goose chases.” Dreyfus opened his mouth to interrupt, but Bigelow held up a hand. “I grant that you can probably phrase it more tactfully. You notice I did not suggest that you came up here to tattle and gain some personal advantage. You are a better man than that.” He sighed heavily, almost a belch. “Of course there is another possibility. Perhaps you just wanted to see if I was so stupid as to be satisfied with the progress of the investigation to date.”
“I—” The upraised palm stopped him again.
“I am satisfied. Camacho has kept me fully informed of the activities of his subordinates, of which you are one, by the way. His lines of inquiry have been initiated with my knowledge and, where necessary, my approval. He has discussed his concerns with me and I have informed him of mine. He has followed orders to the letter. I am completely satisfied with his performance. He is one of the most talented senior officers in the bureau.”
The Minotaur
Dreyfus just stared.
“Before you go back to work, do you wish for me to arrange a meeting for you with the Director?” Bigelow
