“Thirty-one.”
“Yeah. Are you ready to go home?”
“I can’t even speak the language anymore. When I hear it I have to concentrate real hard to get the drift, and then I can’t think of the proper response. I been dreaming in English for over twenty- five years. Want some more coffee?”
“Okay.”
Luis took his cup and went inside. He returned in a moment with Albright’s coffee and a cup for himself. They both sampled the brew, then sat in silence. Birds were squawking vigorously in the tree behind them. Camacho took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. How could he leave? He liked this place and these people.
Albright broke the silence. “You really think Caplinger is the Minotaur?”
Luis considered. “He could be,” he said at last. “It fits. He has the necessary access, he was on the official guest list of that party three years ago when the first letter was stuck in the ambassador’s coat. He’s an egomaniac, likes the power trip. It’s possible.”
“But why?”
Camacho shrugged. “List all the possibilities and look at them. Pick the one you like.”
“I’ve done that. And you know what? I got the sneaking suspi- cion that the real reason wasn’t on my list.”
“Why does a happily married man start buying tricks on a street corner? Why does a man in his fifties steal a few hundred from the petty-cash drawer?”
“That was the shortest reason on the list. Nut case. But I don’t think so.”
“Happens all the time.” Camacho drained his cup, set it out of the way and got back to the painting.
“Royce Alien Caplinger,” Albright said, pronouncing the name slowly. “Sixty-three years old. Estimated net worth, $132 million. Son of a druggist. Grew up in St. Paul. Married twice. Second wife died of a heart attack six years ago. Hasn’t remarried, though he’s screwing his secretary who’s worked for him for fifteen years. He’s been doing that about once a month for ten years. She’s forty-two, never married, modestly attractive, had a hysterectomy eight years ago. Caplinger collects American Indian art, pays too much, some- times gets good stuff, sometimes bad. Buys what he likes and to hell with the experts. Has a copy of every book ever written about MacArthur and the best MacArthur memorabilia collection in ex- istence. Time said he has every piece of old junk Mrs. MacArthur ever threw out. What else? Oh yeah. He has two grown children, two dogs, and drives a fifteen- year-old Jaguar. Owns an estate in Virginia near Middleburg. Gives his entire government salary to charity.”
“Was involved in a panty raid when he was in college and was suspended for a semester,” Camacho said without taking his eyes from his work.
“That too. The rattling bones from his youth.” Albright tossed the dregs of his coffee into the grass and laid the cup on his lap. “So, Dr. Freud, has Caplinger gone over the edge? Is he copulating with Mother Russia?”
Albright rose and, dangling the cup from a finger, ambled through the gate. Thirty minutes later Camacho heard his car start out front and drive away.
Albright drove to a Wat-Mart store near Laurel. After browsing for ten minutes, he used the pay phone in the entryway. No one an- swered at the number he tried. He waited exactly one minute and tried again. The third time someone picked up the phone.
Albright talked for almost a minute. The other party never spoke. Then Albright hung up and went back into the store, where he wandered the aisles and handled merchandise for another half hour.
When he left the store he drove aimlessly for an hour. At Burtonsville he stopped for gas and bought a can of soda pop, a Dr Pepper. He drank the contents as he drove north on Route 29 and used a rag in the car to carefully wipe the fingerprints from the can.
Approaching the outskirts of Columbia, he took the off-ramp for Route 32, made an illegal left turn at the top and a sweeping right down onto Route 29 headed south as he scanned the mirrors. No one followed. No choppers or light planes in sight. At Route 216 he turned right from the through lane at the very last instant, just as the stoplight turned green.
He was on two-lane blacktop now, a local county road. He watched the mirror. A car turned from 29 onto this road, but it had been traveling north. He didn’t recognize it. Local traffic passed him going the other way.
Pulton was a tiny village — just a few farms, a church and a small post office with a few nearby shops—1.1 miles west of Route 29. Albright angled left onto Lime Kiln Road. This asphalt ribbon was more narrow and twisty as it followed the natural descent of a creek. He was in an area of beautiful homes set in huge meadows well back from the road. Trees lined the fences and horses grazed on the lush grass. The car that had followed him from Route 29 turned left at Reservoir Road and went up a little bill into a sprawling subdivision.
A half mile past Reservoir Road Albright slowed the car. There it was, right beside the road — a stone- drinking fountain fed by a pipe from a spring. He eased to a stop and slammed the gear shift lever into park. From the floor of the backseat he selected a 7-Up can, grasping it with a rag. He slid across the seat, opened the passenger door and set the can at the base of the fountain so it was visible from the road. Back into the car, door shut, and rolling again. Twenty seconds.
He glanced left, up a long sloping meadow at a huge house set on top of the hill in a grove of trees. No one in sight.
Three hundred yards farther on he came to a T intersection- This was Brown Bridge Road, another strip of two-lane asphalt with a double yellow line down the center and no benns. He sat at the intersection and looked both ways. No traffic. Nothing in the rearview mirror.
He turned right. The road wound up a wooded draw and came out into rolling, open country. A mile from Lime Kirn Road he came to another stop sign at a T intersection. This was Route 216 again. To the right, east, was Fulton; 1–1 miles to the west was Highland Junction. He knew, because he had spent many a Sunday driving these suburban county roads, learning their twists and turns, looking for likely drop sites. Directly across the road was a Methodist church. Three or four cars in the lot, no people in sight.
He turned right, toward Fulton. He went through the village and out to Route 29, which he crossed and continued on through SkaggsviUe, across 1-95, and into Laurel, where he turned around in the parking lot of a convenience store and began retracing his route as he watched for vehicles he had seen before and scanned the sky for airplanes.
Exactly thirty minutes later, at 2:47 P.M., he again passed Reser- voir Road on Lime Kiln. Someone was changing a flat tire on a van fifty yards up the hill on Reservoir. He hadn’t seen that van before. Maybe. It could be the FBI. Or it could be anybody. He continued past and slowed for the stone fountain.
The 7-Up can was still there. No vehicles in sight. No people on the hills that he could see. No choppers or planes overhead. He kept rolling past the fountain and dropped down to the Brown Bridge Road intersection.
He stopped at the stop sign and looked both ways. No traffic. He looked back over his shoulder, thinking about the van with the flat tire, weighing it.
He turned left. The road ran along a creek that was dropping toward the Patuxent River. The little valley was heavily wooded. Houses sat amid the trees off to his left, but the steep bank on his right was a forest.
Two-tenths of a mile from the intersection a gravel road branched off to the right. “Schooley Mill Road,” the sign read. He took it.
The road was narrow, no more than ten feet wide. It ran just along the north side of the creek, parallel to the asphalt road, which was twenty-five feet or so above him at the top of a steep embankment on his left. This was a secluded lovers lane, for a few hundred yards invisible from the paved road above. Apparently, when the teenagers weren’t screwing here, the locals used this lane as a trash depository. Green garbage bags, beer and soda-pop cans lay abandoned alongside the gravel.
There was one paved driveway leading north from this road, and it had a mailbox on a wooden post. He passed the box and stopped at the first large tree. He bolted out the passenger door, set the Dr Pepper can at the base of the tree and jumped back in the car.
A tenth of a mile later Schooley Mill Road rejoined Brown Bridge Road. Two-tenths of a mile after he was back on the asphalt he crossed Brown Bridge, a modern low concrete highway bridge across the Patuxent River, which was several hundred yards wide here. Now this highway became Ednor Road. He continued the two miles to New Hampshire Avenue, Maryland Route 650, and turned left. He had to be back at the drop in twenty-five minutes. He checked his watch.
Eight thousand feet overhead in a Cessna 172, Agent Clarence Brown laid his binoculars in his lap and rubbed
