The Falcon and the Snowman (48 page)

The CIA man liked the idea and did what Chris suggested. The test helped the agency discover that Chris had photographed the teletype messages from the vault for at least two full months; there was a spool of messages—as thick as a roll of toilet paper and twice as wide—for each month. Brown said grimly that the CIA had discovered, among other things, that one message on the spool included details of most American intelligence-collection satellites and their performance capabilities.

Chelius and Dougherty told Chris they thought his willingness to participate in the debriefings would probably help him when the time came for his sentencing. But Chris wasn't counting on a light sentence now. He had made other plans.

Back at Terminal Island, he decided to write a response to Vito Conterno:

I have been turning over what you said in my mind. Thinking back over the last five months and listening to your conversation, you appear the most-together inmate I have come to know so far. I know nothing about you other than what you say. I don't think you would bullshit me. I intend no insult with the following, but you're not just trying to bolster my morale and give me hope by mentioning your lawyer, are you? I mean no insult but you came off the wall rather fast with it. Seriously, the heat would be intense with that type of action concerning a Soviet spy. I hate the Feds as much or more than you do. Your problems with them appear to cover a broad spectrum of activity while I specialized in a narrow scam. No doubt your connections have a varied assortment of skills.

I am a realist. I am going to get more time than I can handle. Furthermore, I have no hope of action on appeal with my case. I would wait until that was resolved, which my lawyers tell me would be finalized within a year and a half before I would seek an alternate solution. I cannot end up like poor Tim. I would rather be dead.

Chris was referring to a wretched prisoner in D Block who had been returned to the block after a liver operation in a nearby public hospital. He had made the mistake of attempting to escape from the hospital, and when he was caught he was returned to the prison, rather than the hospital, to recover from the operation. As Tim twisted in pain on his bunk, moaning, the sutures on his wound popped open and he began to bleed. Prison doctors sewed the wound, but the same thing happened again. Chris listened to Tim's groans at night and watched flies swarm around the wound. Time and again, Tim ripped pus-and-blood-soaked bandages off the wound and threw them out of his cell into the corridor. From his own cell Chris watched a column of ants a half-inch wide feed on the bloody matter adhering to the bandages.

I have no qualms about taking risks. This would just be one more. If you mean what you say, I am interested as hell. Again, please don't take that as an insult. I don't mean it as such. I am just feeling you out.

What you suggest would put my life in hands of people with whom I have no experience. I would have to go forward on trust alone. I would be out on a limb with my cash on the line. But anything would be better than the life the Feds have planned for me. You don't sound like a person who stabs in the back unless crowded first. All I could do is rely on my judgement that you are a honorable man and that those with who you do business are of a like kind.

Once again, to be honest, it does not seem to me that O.C. [Organized Crime] would want to cross CIA. I would have everything to lose, nothing to gain, in a double cross. I once prevented a termination on a courier by the KGB for his duplicity because he was a boyhood friend and I had a big heart. I now regret it. I don't think I would be here now if I had let them go ahead. I totally am aware of the implications you mention. Meaning no insult, I would be acting completely on trust and would be open to rip-off.

Either one of us could be moved at any time and after that we will never see each other again. Believing you are sincere I will rely on your word. You are probably wondering where does this brat get off questioning me. It's just that I was burned bad and here I sit. This is to me a new ball game. I would imagine espionage operates on the same principles.

No way are the Feds going to give me any slack. I am not a socialist and the Soviets no doubt would feel safer with my mouth closed permanently. I am between a rock and a hard place with both systems. My only hope would be to go into deep cover. You mentioned the availability of an initial set of I.D. I am interested as hell. I hope you mean it. I would put all my resources on the line.

Once again, I mean no offense.

In May, five months after his arrest, Chris held a reunion with his parents. His only communication with his family since the arrest had been the letter to his father on the eve of his trial asking his family not to attend and a brief, inconclusive phone conversation with his mother shortly after his arrest. But Chelius had not stopped urging him to see his parents, and they had repeatedly sent messages through the lawyer saying they wanted to see him. Chris, now that the ordeal of the trial was over, consented to see his parents.

The reunion took place in a small office at the Terminal Island prison, and it was the beginning of a precarious truce.

His mother hugged Chris and almost immediately broke into tears of love and sympathy for her eldest son. His father extended his hand, and Chris did the same.

“How are you, sir?” Chris asked.

“Fine,” he replied.

It was a meeting with about as much overt affection as the father and son ever showed.

They visited for more than an hour, and after a while some of the stiffness thawed. His parents brought Chris up to date on family news, and Chris asked about his dog, Magyar.

During the next few weeks, there would be frequent meetings between Chris and his parents, brothers and sisters. Once his father even brought Magyar to the prison, and Chris visited with him through a chain-link fence. It appeared that the wounds in the relationship between Chris and his family were healing.

Meanwhile, the thoughts of all the members of his family turned to his sentencing, which was scheduled for the middle of June.

48

Chris lay back on his bunk and remembered the first time he had seen Fawkes.

They had met on a December morning in 1973 in the California coastal range near San Luis Obispo. One of her blue feet had been tucked in her belly feathers as she peered out from atop a perch on a high-voltage-transmission-line tower. As he watched, she twisted her head around and looked down the brown mountainside at the sparkling reflection of his binoculars, then lifted off the wire with a defiant snub and rose higher and higher until she was only a black speck in the sky and Chris lost her in a cloud
.

The vision of Fawkes and the blustery morning filled his cell.

After the first sighting, he went back to the Volkswagen to water and feed the pigeons in the back seat. As he leaned against the car to rest, a roadrunner ran, hopped and flew through the broken chaparral, stabbing at mice. And then he waited
.

After a while, Chris decided to return to the mound, his lookout, hoping for another sight of the young prairie falcon. But she was gone; the only birds he spotted with his binoculars were an occasional mourning dove and tight formations of teal flitting between puddles
.

There was a pair of ravens circling in endless spirals to no purpose while coyotes, far in the distance, barked from the foothills. The shadows of twilight were beginning to stab over the jagged edge of the mountainous horizon, and as Chris admiringly watched the panorama of pastels change from rose to orange-streaked gray, he saw the prairie falcon approaching up high, two hundred yards away. Planing her wings flat and taut, she glided down and settled into the dusk with a small tug on the wire. On his mound of rocks, Chris froze, afraid to move his hand or turn his head. When at last the final streaks of twilight had given way to darkness, he cautiously made his way down the hill to the Volkswagen for cold stew out of a can and a can of cold beer. It had to be at first light or not at all
.

He cursed himself for not bringing help, but then he thought again: These are my towers. No one else knew the prairies came here, and no one was going to know
.

Before dawn, he was out of his down bag quietly stamping his feet, awakened by the mental alarm he had set for himself in his final moments of consciousness the night before. His toes ached from the cold
.

Chris went to the car and grabbed one of his pigeons from the cage and wrapped a leather vest, with nylon nooses bristling almost invisibly from it, around the bird. Then he lit up a joint of Thai and waited
.

As dawn broke, Chris wasn't sure if it was the joint or his imagination, but as the morning's first lark announced the arrival of sunrise, he looked up and saw the young prairie moving slightly. She was restless, slipping her head out from under a wing
—
probably, he thought, struggling to regain her wits for the day, just as Chris himself had done a few minutes earlier
.

In the mantle of gray half-light, Chris tensed, bracing himself, as the pigeon struggled in his left fist. The prairie was now growing more restless on her perch, and Chris decided it was time. He started the engine of the Volkswagen and gunned it, startling Fawkes. She swiveled her head in dismay and suddenly bumped off the perch, rising not far from Chris in a tight ring. He had to act quickly. He kissed the pigeon for luck, whispered, “Keep your head down!” and launched it out of the Volkswagen
.

The pigeon recognized its peril from the spiraling falcon immediately. It began to struggle frantically for altitude, flapping its wings and moving diagonally away from Chris. Fawkes forgot the chug of the Volkswagen. She turned and dived rapidly for her breakfast. It was a beautiful stoop. Fawkes seemed to hit the pigeon with only a glancing blow
—
but that was all it took: in that instinctive pass, the falcon's blue foot had become ensnared in a noose. Chris yelped in triumph
.

The falcon beat her wings furiously to gain level flight. Just as furiously the terrified pigeon beat
its
wings to escape in another direction. Finally they fell to the ground in tandem, four wings flapping against each other in helpless desperation. Chris sprinted the quarter-mile to the screeching birds, hoping every second that Fawkes wouldn't extricate herself from the thin thread and escape. He approached the flailing birds from behind and quickly popped a hood over the passage, sending her into darkened tranquillity. Then he stripped the pigeon of its vest and let it fly free
.

Vito wrote a reply to Chris: Everything could be handled. His associates in Chicago should have no trouble springing him. “My friends will look out for everything,” he said. “You get plastic surgery on your face and nobody will ever see Chris Boyce again.” Chris burned his note and flushed the ashes down the toilet.

He then wrote a second letter to the aging Mafioso. As always, he seemed to show deference to his elders:

I don't mean to pry or get personal; what would be the broad, general mechanics of an exit? In transit? In what way would my movement to Ill. be handled? This would appear to be most crucial. What type of summons could bring a spy there without arousing Fed suspicion? Would the crew know my true identity?

What would be the total bill? Exit, facelift, I.D., passport, credit cards, the works?

How much time between exit and completion of facelift?

Would not my meeting of your attorney previous to an exit lead to an investigation of a connection between the two? Are you worried about CIA heat? I know nothing about O.C., drug dealing, etc. I respect a man who holds the agency in contempt. In all probability counter intelligence would think the KGB is responsible.

Would you ever broaden your horizons? Would all relationship between us cease at the completion of an exit?

Two weeks after she plummeted to earth with the pigeon, Fawkes was back in the air. For three months, Chris and the falcon hunted, man and animal in the marvelous partnership that always had such a hypnotic effect on Chris
.

He would never forget the last time:

Chris removed the hood near a pond of cinnamon teal, and Fawkes, as usual, exploded from his fist to gain altitude, eager for the kill. Poised for his own assignment in the partnership
—
flushing the teal
—
Chris waited for Fawkes to relax and level off. But to his surprise, Fawkes didn't stop. She climbed higher and higher, oblivious of the teal, confusing Chris. To his horror, Chris soon understood why: a large orange-footed wild hawk
—
a haggard
—
had spotted Fawkes poaching on his territory, and he was preparing to expel her. Chris saw the big old hawk rising to gain the advantage; then both of them were rising in parallel corkscrews. Chris rushed forward on the ground to be closer, but he knew he was only a helpless spectator in the impending combat
.

Fawkes and the haggard, in a spectacular double corkscrew that could only have been choreographed by nature, fought stroke for stroke to achieve the dominant altitude from which one would soon launch its opening attack. Chris leaned on a post and did the only thing he could do: watch his falcon battle for her survival. They pushed hundreds of feet into the air, and after a while, Chris could no longer tell one bird from the other. When they were only barely visible from the ground, Chris saw that one bird had opened the attack. The dark speck was above its antagonist and let loose with a diving stoop. Chris strained to see which of the birds had the advantage
.

It was the old hawk
.

Fawkes was fleeing for her life. Chris never saw her again
.

God, how he missed his birds, his outdoors, Chris thought. Except for Vito and a few other prisoners in D Block, Chris didn't have contact with anybody except his lawyers and the CIA spook named Jerry Brown who still called him downtown periodically to go over more documents. Chelius and Dougherty visited often and tried to keep his spirits high until the sentencing. They said they would try to have him sentenced under a Federal statute that gave judges the flexibility to show youthful offenders—those under twenty-five—more leniency than older defendants. First, they said, there might be a short sentence for a psychological evaluation, possibly at the Federal Bureau of Prisons' Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego. There were a few rays of hope, they said encouragingly.