Interference.
Judy grinned. “Ask Grafton. Give my best to your wife. And congratulations!”
“Thanks.”
Grafton’s door opened and Toad stood. He watched the two men in civilian clothes who came out. Their eyes swept the office as they exited, casually, taking in everything at a glance. Toad forgot about them as soon as they were out of sight. He was walking toward the door when Jake Grafton stuck his head out and mo- tioned to him-
“How’s Rita?”
“Settled in at Bethesda, sir. The reason I wanted to see you”—
Toad carefully closed the door—“is that I want to know why that plane went out of control. What have you guys found out?”
Jake Grafton stood with his back to Toad, facing the window. In a moment he rubbed his nose, then tugged at an earlobe.
“What have you found out, sir?” Toad asked again.
“Huh? Oh. Sorry. The E-PROMs were defective.”
“EMI. I’ll bet.”
“No. The chips were defective. Won’t happen, can’t happen, not a chance in a zillion, but it did.” Grafton shoved both hands into his pockets and turned around slowly. He stared at a comer of his desk. “Defective when installed.”
Something was amiss. “When did you learn this?” Toad said.
“Uh, we knew something was wrong with the chips when we saw the telemetry, but … ah …” He gestured vaguely at the door. “Those guys who were just here…”
“Who were they?”
“Uh…” Suddenly the wrinkles disappeared from Jake Grafton’s brow and he looked straight at Toad’s face, as if seeing him for the first time. “Can’t tell you that,” he said curtly. “Classi- fied.”
“CAG, I’ve got a wife who may be crippled for life. I need to know.”
“You want to know. There’s a hell of a difference. Glad you’re back.”
Toad tried to approach the subject from another angle, only to be rebuffed and shown the door.
Jake Grafton went back to the window and stared without see- ing. Agents Camacho and Dreyfus had been informative, to a point. No doubt it was a rare experience for them, answering the questions instead of asking them. And all those looks and pauses, searching for wordsl A performance! That’s what it had been — a performance. Produced and acted because Vice Admiral Henry demanded it. Well, as little satisfaction as they gave, they were still virgins.
So what did he know? The E-PROMs were defective. The data on the chips was that of preliminary engineering work done several years ago. Somehow… No. Someone in this office or at TRX had given that data to the manufacturer. The agents had skated around that conclusion, but they didn’t challenge it. They couldn’t. “Who?” was the question they had refused to answer. He had run through names to see if he could get a reaction, but no. They had just stared at him.
“Does this have anything to do with Captain Strong’s death?” He had asked them that and they had discussed the possibilities, in the end saying nothing of substance. They should have been politi- cians, not federal agents.
The only fact he now had that he hadn’t had before was that the data on the chips matched preliminary engineering work. For that they had come at Henry’s insistence?
“Why in hell,” Jake muttered, “does everything have to be so damned complicated?”
At 2 P.M. Smoke Judy decided to do it. The desk beside him was empty. Les Richards was at a meeting and would be for another hour, at least. Most of the people in the office were busy on Cap- tain Grafton’s report or were in a meeting somewhere.
He inserted a formatted disk in the a-drive of his terminal and started tapping. The code word for the file he wanted was “kilder- kin.” He didn’t legally have access to this file. The code word that Albright had supplied was a word he had never heard before. Be- fore he typed it, he wiped his hands on his trousers and adjusted the brightness level of the screen.
He had been debating this all week. He had a hundred grand of Albright’s money plus the bucks he already had. He could walk out of here this evening, jump a plane at Dulles tomorrow and by 7 A.M. Monday be so far from Washington these clowns would never find him. Not in fifty years, even if he lived to be ninety-three.
He would be stiffing Albright, of course, but the man was a spy and wasn’t going to squeal very loudly. And what the hey, in the big wide world of espionage, a hundred thousand bucks must be small change.
Or he could copy this file and give it to Albright on Monday night. Roll the dice, pass Go and collect another hundred and fifty. Then he would have a total of almost three hundred thousand green American dollars, in cash. Now, for that kind of money you could live pretty damn good in one of those little beach villages out on the edge of nowhere. Get yourself a firm, warm something to take to bed at night. Live modestly but well, loose and relaxed, as light as it’s possible to get and keep breathing.
If he copied this file he would not be able to ever come back. If he walked without it, the heat would dissipate sooner or later over that E-PROM chip flap and he could slip back into the country.
Do you pay a hundred and fifty grand to keep your options open? Without the money he would eventually go broke and have to come back.
He typed the word. “Kilderkin.” There was the list. Three dozen documents. He looked at the list carefully. Something caught his eye. He studied the column of numbers that listed how many bytes each file was composed of. Boy, these were short files.
Then he understood.
He opened one of the files. The title page came up. He hit the page advance key. The second page was blank. Nothing!
The title page was the whole document! He tried a second docu- ment. Just a title page.
The Athena file was empty!
Smoke Judy stared at the screen, trying to think. Possibility Three leaped into his mind. It hadn’t even occurred to him until this moment. No wonder you never went up the ladder. Smoke. You just don’t think like those snake charmers, those greasy dream merchants who slice off a couple million before they’re thirty and spend the rest of their lives pretending they are somebody. Okay, my slow, dim-witted son, this is your chance to butcher the fat hog. Albright isn’t going to have a computer in that singles bar to check the disk. Give him an empty disk, take his fucking money, and run.
But no. The joke will be on him. Hell get exactly what he paid for. It’s Albright’s tough luck the file is empty, not yours,
Judy punched the keys. The disk whirled and whirred.
The file was quickly copied. No wonder, short as it was. Judy put the disk in a side pocket of his gym bag, exited the program and turned off the terminal. He spent another ten minutes cleaning up his desk, locking the drawers, watching the other people in the office.
At the door he used the grease pencil to annotate the personnel board hanging on the wall. Back at 4:30. “I’m going to work out,” he called to the secretary, snagged his cover from the hat rack and logged out with the security guards. That easy. Sayonara, mothers.
The elevator took a while to arrive. It always did. The navy had a dirt-cheap lease on this space, so the building owner refused to update the elevators. The thought made Smoke Judy smile. This was the very last time he would ever have to put up with all the petty irritations that came with the uniform. He was through. When he took this uniform off tonight, that would be the very last time.
Thank you. Commander Judy. Thank you for your twenty-one years of faithful service to the navy and the nation. Thank you for eight cruises, three of them to the Indian Ocean. Thank you for your devotion, which ruined your marriage and cost you your kids. Thank you for accepting a mediocre salary and a family move every two years and the prospect of a pissy little pension. Thank you for groveling before the tyrannical god of the fitness report, your fate dependent upon his every whim. Commander Smoke Judy, you are a great American.
The signal above the elevators dinged. Judy glanced at it The up light illuminated on the elevator at the far left.
