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"Yes."

Powers coughed dryly. "She went to her room and I went to mine."

"How were you able to keep an eye on her?"

"There was a bank of windows.... From my room I was able to keep an eye on her door."

"So you watched her room all night to see if she left the hotel?"

"I admit to catching a few winks. I hadn't slept since beginning the surveillance."

"I understand," Sullivan said in a fatherly tone. "When did you notice her missing?"

"In the morning."

"You went to her room?"

"I called her room and there was no answer."

"How do you think she got out of the hotel without you seeing her?" Sullivan said. There was a definite tinge of hostility in his words.

He shouldn't have lied. He just should have told the truth, faced the music. Now he was locked into the story.
"I'm not sure," Powers said mournfully. "I must have nodded off for a few minutes."

Sullivan gave him an icy stare. "It's just you and me in this room, Jack. I have to know everything. This is too important not to know everything."

Powers felt perspiration running down the middle of his back. "I've told you everything."

Sullivan checked his notes. "Tanz Bar. Tanz means dance, doesn't it?"

"Yes."

"Did you dance?"

Powers felt blood rushing to his face. "I don't recall."

"It's me, Jack. There's no one else in this room."

"Come to think of it, we might have danced."

"Did you or didn't you?"

"I didn't see any big deal-"

"You danced with her. Then what?" Sullivan said, staring at him.

"You mean when we left the bar?"

Expressionless and maintaining direct eye contact, Sullivan nodded. Just one nod. "When you left the bar."

Powers wished he could disappear or that he could wake up and have it all be a dream. "Like I said, we returned to the hotel."

Sullivan made a note on the pad. "Go ahead."

"That's about it. We went back to the hotel."

"She's a very attractive woman, isn't she? A ten on the ten scale."

"I guess you could say that."

"It must have been a strange feeling, being over there alone with this beautiful woman. Just you and her."

Powers ran his hands through his hair. There was no use lying anymore. "She spent the night in my room," he said quietly. "I woke up in the morning and she was gone...I'm sorry."

Sullivan's face turned red.

Powers heard his own heart beating.

Sullivan slid the TOP SECRET folder across the table. Powers opened it. In it was a piece of bond paper without letterhead. It read as follows:

TOP SECRET

CONTACT REPORT

Source 2048LKA, during a routine contact, stated substantially as follows:

During the last twenty-four hours an American double agent, a woman, possibly an employee of the CIA named
Kasindorf,
first name
Mary
or
Marilyn,
traveled to Damascus, Syria, via Paris and Ankara where she was met by Syrian Secret Service officials (nfi). Her travel is believed to have been part of an escape plan effected from Kassel, FRG, where she recognized an American surveillance and initiated escape plan. Syrian agents, operating under cover of the Syrian trade mission in Kassel, provided her with a forged Turkish passport (nfi). This information is believed to be reliable and is classified R-1.

END OF MESSAGE

TOP SECRET

Powers felt nauseated: nauseated, chastened, and helpless.

"I guess that answers the question whether Marilyn Kasindorf was a spy," Sullivan said.

"Are you going to tell the President?"

"I'm afraid so," Sullivan said apologetically.

"Will you have to tell him everything ... I mean about her and me?"

"I'm not going to volunteer anything. But if he asks, I'm not going to lie."

"I understand. I'd do the same thing."

Sullivan rubbed his hands together. "Patterson made an issue about following her without telling him. I covered it by saying the President told me to handle it, and he backed off. But he knows something's up. He'll be putting feelers out at the White House to find out what the hell is going on. The problem is he knows what the President thinks of him and how he's out of a job after the election. I'm afraid if he finds out about Marilyn and the President-"

"He'll leak," Powers said, thinking out loud.

"Good chance. Leak to cut some kind of deal with the other campaign, allowing him to stay at CIA during the next administration. But it's a big step for him to make. He's probably the only guy in this town with more political enemies than the President."

Powers shook his head for a moment.

"Jack, I know the train seems out of control for the moment, but we just have to take it one step at a time."

"What happens now?"

"The Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee is always briefed on American defectors within forty-eight hours. You'll be the main witness."

"How do I-?"

"Jack," Sullivan interrupted, "this was a White House security problem and I enlisted your help in handling it. I'll have plenty of plausible reasons for why I chose to handle it this way. And Jack Powers, as far as I'm concerned, acted properly, professionally."

"If Patterson finds out about Marilyn and the President and wants to make his play, the perfect scenario would be to leak to a member of the Oversight Committee. They'd ask me the question under oath-make me the fall guy."

"I'm not trying to minimize, but we have a lot going for us. The President has friends on the committee. If they are properly primed and if Patterson doesn't throw his spear, you should be able to slide through without a lot of hostile questions."

"One of them could drop the zinger, ask me point-blank about the President and Marilyn."

"The way you answer could change the course of American history," Sullivan said hoarsely. He coughed. "The Chairman is Senator Eastland. He and the President were roommates at Yale. If Eastland can be convinced to limit the questioning, we're home free."

"And if he doesn't, or if Patterson starts pulling strings, the President gets impeached." Powers put his head in his hands. "She knew she couldn't get out of the hotel without me watching her, so she conned me-reeled me in like a fish," he cried.

"It's not going to be easy to get out of this mess," Sullivan said. "It may call for some sacrifices."

Powers sat up. "I'm a Secret Service agent and I'll do what needs to be done," he said, feeling as embarrassed as he ever had in his life.

Sullivan walked to the safe and replaced the folder. He shoved the heavy drawer closed and spun the combination dial. "Unfortunately, the hardest part is yet to come," he said somberly.

"The President."

"That's right, Jack. He has questions."

"Does he suspect something?"

"When I briefed him and Morgan on the defection, he kept asking for specifics: how she got away from the hotel without you seeing her. I went through a song-and-dance about how difficult it was for you-following her alone and all-but he wasn't satisfied."

"You mean I have to brief him in person?"

Sullivan nodded.

"Can't you answer his questions for me?" Powers pleaded.

"The President is a former prosecutor. He likes to hear things from the horse's mouth," Sullivan said.

"What if he gets specific?"

"Then you'll have to ... handle it."

"I mean what if he gets specific?"

"You'll have to do what you have to do, Jack."

"I can't lie to the President. Jesus H. Christ."

"Then tell him the truth."

"If I tell him the truth about Marilyn, my career is ended." Frustrated, Powers let out his breath. "Shit," he said angrily. "Shit."

"Or I could tell him for you. It would be easier if it comes from me."

"Either way I get fired."

"Don't forget. The President is twisting in the wind
with
you. She was
his
girlfriend. I'm going to do everything in my power to sweep this thing under the rug and keep you from getting hurt. You just have to trust me until we see which way the wind is blowing."

Powers felt reassured. Sullivan was a master at power games, a politician in his own right. He would take his advice.

"I'll phone you after I talk with the man. In the meantime, don't report back for duty. If anyone asks, you're extending your vacation to take care of some personal errands."

****

FIFTEEN

Outside Secret Service headquarters, Sullivan offered Powers a ride. Powers declined, preferring to walk and give himself time to get his thoughts together.

Sullivan climbed in his car, started the engine, and pulled away from the curb.

Standing there with a warm, humid breeze at his back, Powers suddenly felt as alone as he ever had in his entire life: alone and burdened with a sense of guilt and foreboding. Absorbed in this state of depression, he began walking slowly, aimlessly, in the general direction of the White House. Though fretting over his personal situation, he found himself thinking about Marilyn-and, again and again, reliving the time he'd spent with her.

In Lafayette Park, a diminutive patch of lawn and trees across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, he sat down on a bench and stared blankly at the tourists as they moved along the sidewalk and through the park. Though he wasn't counting, he spotted three women during the next hour or so he thought looked like Marilyn.

Finally, Powers stood up from the bench and headed down Pennsylvania Avenue. At the Georgetown Arms Apartments, he knocked on the manager's door. From inside came the sound of a TV commercial jingle. Mrs. Hammerstrom let him in. Her hair was wrapped in a dye-spotted towel. She was barefoot and wearing a tattered pink housecoat. He greeted her and asked for his mail and the key to a vacant apartment.

Without saying anything, she plodded to a Formica-topped dinette table in the middle of her living room. Keeping her eyes on the television so she wouldn't miss any of the show, she dug into a cardboard box and took out a four-inch stack of letters fastened with a rubber band. Then, from a small board on top of the television, she lifted a set of keys. She handed the items to Powers, and he thanked her.

"I still have your application and your deposit from the last time," she said, hypnotized by a couple kissing on the television screen. "You're in four-twelve. It's the only vacancy."

He took the elevator to the cluttered basement. He found a Safeway grocery cart in the corner near the furnace and loaded his footlockers in it. And, figuring the apartment would need cleaning, like the others he'd rented at the Georgetown Arms over the years, he set the apartment house's upright vacuum on the bottom rack of the cart. Then he rolled the cart to apartment 412.