The Falcon and the Snowman (16 page)

Lana loved to cook, and she loved babies—human or otherwise. Everything was
her
baby: she had two miniature mutts that could almost fit in the palm of her hand—they were her babies; her car—an old Rambler—and her dozens of house plants were her babies; and when they went fishing and she hooked a big slimy bass and finally got it into the boat, she said, “
Poor baby
.”

Chris was usually addressed as “You stupid,” or something similar. “You stupid,” she'd demand, “why aren't your dishes done?” “You stupid, why don't you do your laundry?” For Chris, domestic responsibilities were only minor considerations. “She threw superlative tantrums,” he recalled later, “and I was always trying to unwrap myself from around her little finger. Sometimes I would take her for granted and there would be hell to pay.”

Chris tried not to become too attached to Lana in those early months. But that didn't fit into the plans for her baby. She had just turned eighteen when they met; but as Chris would say, “The little monkey was twice as together as I was; she was the practical one and I was the dreamer.”

Chris introduced Lana to the wilderness and falconry, and together they explored as much of the West as they could reach on the weekends he could get away from work and she could spare from her studies at junior college. They rode down the Colorado River on a raft, hiked into the backwoods to spot falcons, cooked dinner over campfires in the desert and began blending their lives.

The fact that Lana was a Christian Scientist vaguely troubled Chris's mother, but she noticed that Lana had an electric personality that complemented Chris's introspective moodiness and that she was well liked by Chris's sisters—so well that it seemed she had become another member of the family. After a while, Chris's parents said they could see marriage on the horizon.

A few days after Daulton's second visit with the Russians, Chris signed out for a week's vacation. He filled out a form at TRW noting that he planned to travel outside the country. It was an official formality, required even though he was going only sixty-five miles across the Mexican border, on a camping trip with Lana and a couple with whom they had occasionally double-dated: Hank Lyle, a fellow falconer and friend from high school who now worked as an airline ticket sales agent, and his girlfriend, Sandy Jones, who was a friend of Lana's. Their destination was Estero Beach, a wide expanse of sand that stretched into the Pacific from beneath a brow of rocky cliffs near the Mexican town of Ensenada. As they headed south, Chris remembered the first time he had made a trip with Hank.

It had been a treasure hunt and had even begun with a treasure map:

A few days after their graduation from Rolling Hills High, they had set out for Texas in the Lyle family's station wagon and, behind it, a trailer crammed with empty cartons labeled B
EKINS
V
AN AND
S
TORAGE
C
OMPANY
. Chris had informed his father that he and Hank were going to Colorado to pick up some free furniture promised by a friend.

The truth was that Chris and Hank had left on a peyote expedition. A friend of Hank's who wasn't interested in the information himself had met an old man, a family friend, who had said he knew a place in Texas where wild peyote cactuses grew as thick as wheat on the plains of Kansas and had given him a map showing him the way. Peyote is nature's LSD—a plant that produces buttons containing a natural hallucinogenic drug like lysergic acid. Only Indians who used the drug for religious reasons were permitted legally to grow or harvest it. Although the only drug Chris used at this stage of his life was marijuana, the idea of finding a treasure of peyote that could be sold for a profit excited him; besides, what better way was there to celebrate graduation?

After a two-day drive, the two friends followed the old man's map south through Texas to a desolate patch of desert within sight of the Mexican border river, the Rio Grande. And just as the old man had said, the peyote was there—acres and acres of it, growing wild in the desert!

They harvested the stuff for four days—four days in which the afternoon temperatures climbed to over 100 degrees. Methodically, but not pushing themselves, they cut down the plants, broke off the buttons and filled the Bekins boxes with their treasure; for appearances, they had marked each box with a word or two, such as D
ISHES
, T
OOLS
and L
INENS
. And on one, D
AULTON'S
T
OYS
. One afternoon while Chris was running back to the station wagon with a load, he heard a sound something like a machine gun off to one side of him. He looked down and saw a rattlesnake uncoil and lunge. It missed him, but he felt it bite on the gunnysack of peyote flung over his back, and he then saw it fall away.

On the fifth day, when Hank had gone back with a load to the station wagon, Chris looked up and saw a cloud of dust rising on the horizon against a low backdrop of cactus, and the cloud seemed to be moving toward him. He squinted and soon realized that it was a U.S. Border Patrol jeep. Somebody had seen him and probably figured that he was a Mexican illegal alien who had swum the Rio Grande. That somebody was in a hurry to catch him.

The only clothes Chris had on were boots and Levi's—no shirt, no underwear. In that heat, that was all he had wanted. When he saw the speeding jeep and looked down at the peyote cactuses all around him, Chris began running. Hank was nowhere to be seen. Chris sprinted as fast as he could in the direction of a rolling formation of ravines more than a mile away. The ravines, he knew, would slow the jeep.

He reached the first gully just one hundred yards ahead of the jeep, which was trailing behind it a rooster tail of dust, and kept on running. He thought he was safe. But somehow, the jeep found a way into the ravine and was closing the gap fast. It was close enough for Chris to see two men in the jeep, and to decide he must do something fast or get caught. At the top of the next ravine he threw himself to one side, into the trough of the wide rut, hoping they would pass him by. He lunged into the air and unfortunately flopped onto a cactus. Bleeding, he lay on the ground and poked his head to one side of the needles and saw the jeep approach and speed past him; if the Border Patrol agents had looked down, they would have seen a bloodied, grinning fugitive.

After a couple of minutes, the Border Patrolmen realized they had passed their quarry and turned back. But by then it was too late. Chris had run in the opposite direction down the trough of a gulley out of the sight of his pursuers. The last thing Chris heard was a shouted voice somewhere in the distance: “He must be over there!”

Chris and Hank had agreed beforehand that if their idyll in the peyote field was interrupted by any lawmen, it would be each man for himself. Figuring that Hank had seen the Border Patrolmen and was headed for home in a hurry, Chris, without a shirt or money, began his way back to The Hill. He would later say that the six days in which he found his way home had been one of the richest periods of his life. In a way, it was a rite of coming of age. He eventually found his way out of the field and located a highway and hitched a ride with a truck driver. He was a Cajun from Louisiana with such a thick accent Chris couldn't determine what he was saying most of the time. But he took Chris to the border town of Laredo and was sufficiently taken with him to give him one of his own shirts. In Laredo a gray-haired Mexican driving a huge, gasping old truck that could barely reach a top speed of thirty miles an hour picked him up, gave him a few dollars and took him to San Antonio. And in San Antonio Chris got a ride with a tourist who took him all the way back to Southern California, where, to his surprise, he beat Lyle home. His companion had figured that Chris had gotten lost in the desert and had hunted for him for five days before giving him up for dead, a victim of the desert sun. He had phoned home with a report of Chris's disappearance, and his parents had told the Boyces.

Chris's parents had filed a missing-person report with the police, but had also concluded that he was dead. When he walked in the door of his home in Palos Verdes, however, he did not receive the kind of reception one might expect from someone who was returning from the dead. His father somehow knew
everything
. Chris never figured out how he had done it, but his father, who had done some investigating after the report from Lyle, knew all about the map, the peyote and the secret mission to find it. Charles Boyce was more furious than Chris had ever seen him before, and he gave Chris an order: he was going to join the Marines.

Chris, in no position to argue, accepted the order in silence. But after a few days, his father's ire had cooled, and Chris told his mother that he didn't want to be a Marine. She interceded, as he had expected, with his father, and his parents agreed that perhaps it would be better if he went to college that fall. But they assured him he would be on probation.

Chris never again saw all that peyote they had picked. Lyle had dumped it somewhere beside a road in Texas.

Now, in Mexico, Lyle and Chris laughed and reminisced about the trip as they sat around their campfire on the beach with Lana and Sandy Jones. They swam and fished and cooked their catch over the open fire; they slept in tents; and Chris forgot about the events he had set in motion.

When the vacation was over and the two couples were driving back home, Chris told Hank of a dream. He said that he wanted to drive his Volkswagen to Road's End in the Yukon Territory in Canada—the end of civilization—and then push ahead into the wilderness toward the North Pole. Chris had already modified the VW to handle the terrain. Indeed, it was a strange-looking machine: it was painted bright yellow; the hood had been removed and replaced with a squat, blunt-nosed front end with two bug-eye headlights; the factory fenders had been removed and replaced with tiny glass-fiber brows; and there were plump, oversized tires, special lights and heavy-duty springs all designed for off-road use.

When he finally reached the north country, Chris told Hank, he would spend months studying the Arctic falcon—a giant species as regal as the peregrine—before it became extinct.

Beyond that, Chris said he was still undecided about what he wanted to do with his life; probably he would return to college, go to law school and maybe join the FBI like his father.

17

On May 18, 1975, Daulton arrived in Mexico City for his third meeting with the Russians.

At the previous meeting, Okana had instructed Daulton to rendezvous with him on the eighteenth at 6
P.M.
near the Polyforum on Avenida Insurgentes Sur. Daulton knew the location well. It was one of Mexico City's major artistic landmarks. The Polyforum had been executed by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros as “an atheistic temple—not to adore God but to adore man.” A fusion of blazing color and sculpture, it was a vast amphitheater of art with a three-dimensional mural that depicted Siqueiros' concept of “The March of Humanity,” and a rotating turntable on which hundreds of people at once could view the circular work of art.

Shoppers, store clerks, tourists from the hinterlands and well-dressed businessmen left little room on the sidewalk for the short man from California as he approached the structure. But Daulton managed to thread his way through the early-evening crowds and find a fence to lean against which Siqueiros himself had designed. He studied the crowds for Okana but saw only a collage of Mexicans in a hurry. Suddenly, amid the brown faces, a familiar black suit caught his eye, and Daulton looked up from the pumping hips and shoulders and saw the athletic figure of Okana striding toward him.

The Russian greeted his new spy warmly and they exchanged the passwords. They shook hands and blended quickly into the throngs of shoppers and tourists that seemed omnipresent in Mexico City, regardless of the season. The short American wearing brown slacks and a light-brown jacket and the Russian in his dark suit continued their walk along Insurgentes. They looked around them, studying the crowds as they walked. Okana again brought up his interest in knowing the identity of his friend, and, for a reason that Daulton never fathomed, he asked casually if his friend was black. Daulton repeated that he could say only that his friend held an important position with an American firm that produced spy satellites. But he wasn't black, he assured him. His friend, he repeated, believed in socialism and wanted to help the Soviet Union; this was only the beginning; many more secrets would be forthcoming, he promised tantalizingly.

Daulton slipped him ten KW-7 cipher cards, and Okana looked pleased. After they had walked a few more blocks, Okana pointed out a restaurant they had just passed and said he would meet Daulton there at eight o'clock that night. Quickly, Okana flagged down a taxi and was gone with the cards that Daulton had delivered.

Promptly at eight, Okana arrived at the Villa Nova Restaurant and found Daulton waiting for him. Okana requested a table against a far wall and seated himself so that he could watch the entrance. There was something about Okana's nervousness—maybe it was the bobbing eyebrows again—that Daulton found humorous; it reminded him of himself as he kept an eye out for narcs.

Apparently, the Russians had examined the cipher cards since their earlier meeting.

Okana said that he and his associates were pleased with the delivery; a few moments after they sat down, he gave Daulton an envelope. Daulton felt it, but couldn't resist looking inside; there was a deck of $100 bills, but he couldn't tell how many.

“To peace,” Okana said, and they both raised their glasses.

Okana stressed that his country had great admiration for Daulton's friend who was doing such a service for the cause of peace.

After they ordered dinner, Okana removed a piece of paper from the inside pocket of his suit coat and began to read a list of questions in English that he said he would like Daulton's friend to answer. The questions were pointed and specific: Exactly what kind of facility does the friend work in? Who are his superiors? What kind of encryption machines are employed, the model and serial numbers? On what radio frequencies and band width are the messages broadcast? Exactly what satellites are manufactured at the plant where the friend works? What are their functions and orbital parameters? The list went on.…