The Falcon and the Snowman (14 page)

Daulton hung up and decided that he had to leave the United States. He would
not
go to jail. And, he thought, the Russians might provide the key to his survival.

The two friends sat in easy chairs near each other in the room at Daulton's home that his father used as a den.

“Okay, one more time: what do I do when I get there?” Daulton asked.

“Get a telephone book, look up the address, hop in a taxi, pass the place, get off several blocks away, case it; walk in like you own the place and then give the stuff to the first security officer you see and stall until they get someone who can read it. Simple,” Chris said.

“It ain't that simple,” Daulton said.

“You're wasting my time. Good-bye,” Chris replied.

“Okay, okay. Sit down. What about my money?” Daulton said.

“The air fare is in the envelope,” Chris said. “Your flight leaves at eleven. That's four hours from now.”

“No, I mean
my
money.”

“Take it up with them,” Chris said.

“But how do I know?” Daulton said. “It's my ass that's being risked, ya know.”

“Put yourself in their place,” Chris said. After all, he said, Daulton was about to offer the Russians American defense secrets.

“Now, remember, don't give 'em my name, because if you do they won't need you.”

“I've thought about that,” Daulton said. “Want a gin-and-tonic?”

Chris accepted the offer, and Daulton asked his father, who was in a nearby room, to fix them a drink.

As he did, they hunched over a typewriter and Chris tapped out a message:

Enclosed is a computer card from a National Security Agency crypto system. If you want to do business, please advise the courier.

Two days later, the undercover agent who had arrested Daulton called the Lee house to talk over the planned setup of the ex-football player and the mob attorney. Dr. Lee answered the phone, and the detective, who had met the physician at the jail after Daulton's arrest, said he imagined Dr. Lee must be very happy that his son was getting out of drugs.

“I think he really means it,” the sheriff's detective said. “Did he tell you he's going to work for us?”

Dr. Lee hadn't heard this item of news and said so.

“Well, he is,” the detective said. “He'll really be able to do some good.”

“If he is, I don't know how he's going to do it,” Dr. Lee said. “He just left to live in Mexico.”

It took a few moments for the cop to realize that he had been victimized. His first reaction was disbelief; then he asked Dr. Lee if he had a telephone number in Mexico for his son. When the physician said he didn't have one, the narcotics officer politely said good-bye and hung up. But he vowed to himself that this wouldn't be the end of things.

Chris returned to work in the Black Vault, and as he operated the encrypted teletype machine, he sometimes looked up from the keyboard, stared blankly at the wall and wondered what forces he had set in motion.

13

When Chris was twelve, he had taken possession of his own field, forty beautiful acres in Palos Verdes; he never took legal possession of it, but took possession of it in his mind. He shared the field with a wizened old Mexican tenant farmer named Rosco; Rosco looked after the neat rows of beans that grew on one part of the field while Chris assumed the responsibility of looking over the creatures that populated the land.

He knew where they all lived—the diamondback rattlers beneath the yellowed Palos Verdes stone; the pheasant that roosted in the eucalyptus trees; the mallards that rested in the winter and the red-winged blackbirds that fed on polliwogs in the marsh. He knew the quail and the barn owls that nested in the gnarled stump of a tree not far from a wild hive of bees. He saw where shrikes had impaled the mice they caught on cactus needles and even found which burrow a skunk and her four offspring, following in single file, disappeared into each morning. He had gotten to know a red fox with a gimpy front foot, and Chris named it—what else?—Gimpy. One morning he had found the fox dead on Hawthorne Boulevard, and after school that day at St. John Fisher, he had picked up the carcass of Gimpy, pedaled his bike to the glen that he had prowled and left it there in a better resting place.

Chris knew every inch of his forty acres, every wild flower as well as every creature. Even after he had gone on to high school he still came down to the field every now and then to watch the cottontails come out at dusk. As his faith in the institutions in which he had invested his trust waned, his field remained a constant in Chris's life.

When he was sixteen, Chris discovered surveyors quartering the field. His stomach tightened, and he knew what to expect.

Several months later, he crossed the field a last time and paused to inspect a hummingbird's dainty nest in the crotch of a snag hidden in tall grass; in it he saw a hummingbird incubating two tiny eggs. The ground shook and Chris had to step aside, and he watched an earthmover rumble forward with a cloud of gray-white smoke. The maternal courage of the hummingbird held her in her nest until the last moment, and then she fled from the trembling snag in an iridescent blur. Then the tiny nest disappeared beneath the machine.

Chris took his grief home with him and was lectured by his father on the prerogatives of ownership, free enterprise and the construction boom. But he silently rejected all of it and went brooding to his room. Chris decided no one should own that field or any field anywhere: man, he decided, had been given the earth in trust; it was not his chattel. He decided that the concept of private property was a thing of tragedy, an evil to be abolished.

A couple of mornings later, in an American History class, Chris listened to a lecture that reviewed the extermination of Indian tribes in the conquest of the West and the conquest of half of Mexico that left Chicanos as pariahs in what had been their own country. However, the teacher said, America had changed and matured; it was defending free expression around the world and fighting for peace in Vietnam. After class, Chris angrily slammed his text,
Triumph of Democracy
, into his locker.

But he didn't brood for long.

That night, he enlisted two friends on a mission; they bought nine ten-pound bags of sugar, and after dark they began lugging it to his field. Before long they were scratching from poison sumac and taking cactus needles in the shin. When Mike, one of his friends, tripped for the third time in the dark, he said, “Whose idea was this, anyway?”

“Pretend you're in 'Nam,” Chris said.

“At least they don't have cactus in the jungle,” Mike said, picking up his thirty pounds of sugar.

A half hour later they peered over a canyon wall at the construction company's fenced equipment yard and saw the silhouette of a guard.

“Let's get out of here!” Mike said.

Chris and the other friend grabbed him.

“You didn't tell me about a guard,” he said.

“He's asleep,” Chris whispered.

“Then why isn't he lying down?” Mike wanted to know.

“They always sleep sitting up; that's what my father says,” Chris said with authority.

Before Mike had a chance to challenge the logic, his friends were moving through a hole in the fence, and very soon all three of them were assaulting the earthmovers, trucks and trenchers with sugar.

Chris poisoned three bulldozers, emptying his sacks of sugar into their gas tanks, making sure not to spill the sugar and leave evidence.

Fifteen minutes later, the trio met at the fence and climbed down the canyon through the brush and cactus, whooping like Iroquois.

The assault delayed the defiling of Chris's field for two weeks. But in the end the field perished.

Chris visited it years later after he had begun to work at TRW. There were silver Eldorados and bronze Mercedes-Benzes and imported olive trees in place of the eucalyptus and beans; there were clipped hedges and instant lawns grown elsewhere and laid out like carpeting on his field in front of ranch and ersatz-Spanish-style homes. He spotted two matrons wearing sunglasses and tennis outfits carrying their rackets down a circular driveway to a black Porsche and swinging lumpy thighs onto red leather.

Somewhere, he thought, beneath it all was his poor raped field, and he thought of wild blossoms growing between fallen columns in the bleached ruins of Carthage.

14

“Who is your friend?” Vasily Ivanovich Okana asked the American who walked into the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City during the first week of April, 1975, and announced that he had brought information about “spy satellites.”

The KGB agent studied the stranger with a cautious smile. When Okana was apprehensive or unsure of a situation, as he was now, his charcoal eyebrows tended to bob up and down spontaneously like a pair of rafts on a choppy lake. Daulton, trying not to be distracted by the motion of the eyebrows, replied that he could not identify his friend, who had a sensitive job working for the American government. The friend, he said, wanted to defect to the Soviet Union but had a wife and two children and did not want to leave them behind. Elaborating on the brief note Chris had typed, Daulton said they had a proposition for the Soviet Union. His friend was motivated by a belief in the future of socialism, while he was a fugitive from the police on a trumped-up charge. They were prepared to deliver American defense secrets to the U.S.S.R., but expected to be paid well for them.

There was no expression on the Russian's face when Daulton had finished his short sales pitch.

Without seeming to demand it, Okana asked Daulton if he had any personal identification. Daulton pulled out his wallet and offered his driver's license. The agent made a note of his name and address and then handed the license back to him, making a complimentary remark about Southern California.

“Would you like vodka?” he asked. Daulton said he would enjoy it, and Okana left the office where he was conducting the interview and came back a few seconds later. Within a few minutes a male servant brought in two large bottles of vodka and a bowl of iced caviar.

The Russian said that he had once served in the United States and had polished his English there; Daulton noticed that the bobbing of his eyebrows had subsided somewhat, but there was still an apprehensive look behind his gray eyes. Daulton explained that what he had brought was only samples of the kind of information that his friend could make available to the Soviet Union. He stressed that his friend was personally involved in the operation of spy satellites and had unlimited access to secrets that he was sure the Russians would want to buy.

Leaving Daulton with a drink in his hand, Okana excused himself, taking the computer programming cards and a twelve-inch length of paper tape used in the KG-13 and KW-7 crypto machines that Chris had given to Daulton.

When he returned twenty minutes later, Okana carried a piece of notepaper in one hand and, referring to it, began to probe Daulton about reconnaissance satellites. From his conversations with Chris, Daulton knew enough to convince the Russian that he had more than a casual knowledge of such satellites and a secret CIA post somewhere near Los Angeles.

Okana poured another glass of vodka for his guest and invited him to sample more caviar. Then he left the room for another conference somewhere else in the embassy. This time when he returned, he handed Daulton an envelope containing $250 in American currency—enough, he said, to finance a return trip from Los Angeles to Mexico.

Okana was warm now and smiling continuously, although the nervous bobbing of his eyebrows reappeared from time to time to distract Daulton. Okana said that he and his associates were very much interested in the proposition made by Daulton and his friend, and they looked forward to a mutually profitable enterprise. And then he gave Daulton instructions to meet him at a Mexico City restaurant on his next trip and told him they would use passwords at future meetings. Daulton would be asked:

“Do you know the restaurant in San Francisco?”

And Daulton was to reply:

“No, but I know the restaurant in Los Angeles.”

Okana said they would also use code names to reduce the possibility of detection. Daulton, he said, was to be known as “Luis,” and he would be called “John.”

The meeting was over, and Daulton shook hands with the KGB man.

“
Adios
, John,” Daulton said.

“
Adios
, Luis,” Okana said.

And with that, a curious commerce between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and two young men from a wealthy suburb in California had begun.

According to their plan, Chris was standing near a telephone booth that night in Hermosa Beach, another one of the beach communities north of The Hill. At nine o'clock the phone in the booth rang, and he went inside and closed the door.

“Hello,” he answered.

“Hello, Mr. Philippe?” inquired a telephone operator with a Latin accent.

“Yes,” Chris said.

“One moment please, Mr. Philippe. Your party is on the line, Señor Gómez.”

He heard Daulton's voice:

“
Gracias. Buenas noches
, Señor Philippe.”

“Good evening, Señor Gómez,” Chris replied. “How's Señora Gómez?”

“Fuck if I know. You were right. My uncle says ‘Hi.'”

“Simple?” Chris asked.

“Like hell.”

“Simple,” Chris said with I-told-you-so self-assuredness.

“You're crazy,” Daulton said, trying to deflate the self-assuredness. “Now do me one favor. Don't get fired, and stay off those damned cliffs until I get back there. Man, this is going to blow your—”

Chris hung up the phone and walked down to the edge of the ocean, breathing the salt air. He looked back at the night lights of Hermosa, the alleys and the shadows, and he turned to the luminescent Pacific surf in search of guidance. But its indifferent pounding mocked him. What are these? he asked himself. Misgivings?