Paramour (13 page)

Powers, sensing an increase in his own heart rate, noted the observation, and the time, in his log.

Nine minutes later, Miller walked out the front door of the apartment house and headed down the street.

At 11:30
P.M., a sedan pulled up behind Powers's car. The lights were turned off and the door opened. It was Landry. He walked to the passenger side and climbed in.

"What's up?" Landry said.

"Get this: One of the CIA agents I met at Rehoboth showed up here earlier. A guy named Miller."

"No shit."

"He goes in, stays nine minutes, and splits. I would have followed him inside, but I didn't want to chance burning the caper. He knows me."

"He was in there long enough to drop something off ... or pick something up," Landry mused.

"On the other hand, maybe he knocked on her door and she refused to answer."

"Maybe Nassiri decided to tell the CIA about Stryker. Maybe they're conducting an investigation like we are."

"Did you find anything out at the House?" Powers asked.

Landry took out his reading glasses and some note cards. "Marilyn Kasindorf is a CIA employee assigned to the National Security Council as an analyst. The Special Projects unit is a National Security Council study group-high-level foreign strategy stuff. She's never married, has a master's degree in international relations, and plays on the CIA women's softball team. She uses a desk in the Special Projects Office when she comes to the White House but reports to a permanent office somewhere else-but not Langley. Her name is on the Oval Office log. The reason for her visits is always listed as 'briefing.'"

"Any CIA employee allowed to brief the President would be at staff level. Patterson must have picked her for the job himself."

"Patterson's known for dirty tricks."

Powers loosened his necktie. "He wouldn't have the guts to pull a honey trap operation on the President himself."

Landry coughed. "You never know about those Agency eggheads. You're taking rich college kids coming right off their mama's tit and training them to lie and cheat."

"They're not that crazy, Ken."

"They start believing all that James Bond crap. It warps their minds and then they go out and pull some crazy shit."

"No. Somehow all this doesn't fit together."

"Then how do you read it, my man?"

"I don't know. But Ray Stryker committing suicide in the office of the President's main squeeze ... there's something missing."

"Right on. Who stands to gain?"

"There's a lot going on ... the Middle East ... and because of the polls, the man's in trouble heading into the convention. That's the way Watergate happened. People were worried about the election and started doing crazy things. "

"There's no way of knowing at this point. That's for damn sure. "

Early the next morning, Powers gassed the car at the Secret Service garage and hurried to Scott Circle. The light in Marilyn's apartment was still off. At 6 A.M., he started the engine and sped to the McDonald's hamburger stand on Fourteenth Street. He ran inside and purchased two Egg McMuffin sandwiches and a large Styrofoam cup of coffee. He was parked in his surveillance position again within twelve minutes. He ate slowly, savoring each bite of the hot food and the Styrofoam-scented coffee as if it were French cuisine. The light came on around seven, but Marilyn never appeared.

Finally, in mid-afternoon, a DC taxi pulled up in front of the apartment house. The cabdriver, a lanky black man wearing a baseball hat, climbed out and moved to the trunk.

Marilyn strolled through the front door carrying a large leather suitcase and a shoulder bag. Powers's heart jumped. She was leaving town!

****

NINE

Instinctively, Powers grabbed the microphone from the dashboard hook to contact Sullivan, but then he stopped himself. If he transmitted a message, even in a code only he and Sullivan would understand, everyone monitoring the White House Secret Service radio frequency would know something was up. GS-13
special agents just didn't contact the Deputy Director unless it was important official business.

The driver took the suitcase from Marilyn, unlocked the trunk, and set it inside. Closing the trunk, the driver opened the rear passenger door for Marilyn and she climbed in.

Powers turned the ignition key and started the engine.

The taxi pulled into traffic on Rhode Island Avenue.

Powers accelerated from the curb and followed the taxi as it maneuvered through city streets to the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge and onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway. Moving at about fifty miles an hour along the bank of the Potomac River, Powers passed the signs for Langley and was sure.

She was headed for Dulles International Airport.

A few minutes later, the taxi left the highway at the airport exit, cruised along a wide curving ramp, and pulled to a stop in front of the departure terminal. The driver recovered the suitcase from the trunk. Marilyn stepped out, opened her purse, and paid him. A skycap lifted her luggage onto a metal cart and led her into the terminal.

Powers climbed out of his car and followed her inside.

At the American Airlines desk, Marilyn opened her purse and handed an airlines ticket to a blond female ticket clerk. Marilyn lifted her suitcase onto the counter scale. The clerk tagged it with a yellow baggage tag, stapled the receipt to her ticket, and stuffed the ticket into a ticket folder. She handed the ticket back to Marilyn, then pointed toward the escalators leading up to the boarding gates on the second level. Marilyn headed toward the security checkpoint.

Powers moved closer to the counter and watched Marilyn's suitcase as it proceeded along a baggage conveyor belt behind the counter. The yellow tag on the suitcase read FFT. Frankfurt. She was going to Germany!

Powers joined a line of passengers leading to the American Airlines ticket counter. The line moved quickly and at the counter, he used a government transportation request to purchase a round-trip ticket to Frankfurt. The ticket clerk asked about his baggage. Because it would be suspicious to admit he was traveling without luggage, he told her his girlfriend had already checked it earlier. At the clerk's request, he opened his briefcase and showed his passport.

Finally, she handed him the ticket. "The flight will be boarding in half an hour, sir. Gate Twenty-three."

Powers headed for the security checkpoint and then stopped. He was wearing his gun and thus would be required to identify himself to the security personnel. If he did, by federal aviation procedure they would, in turn, notify the crew of the aircraft. Because he couldn't take the chance some member of the crew (as had happened to him on flights in the past) would identify him in front of the other passengers, he turned and headed outside. He opened the trunk of his car and discreetly slipped his gun, bullet pouch, and handcuffs off his belt and hid them underneath the spare tire. There was no time to park the car in the long-term lot. He tossed the keys in the trunk and closed the lid.

Powers hurried back inside and spotted a bank of pay telephones. He dropped change and dialed the direct number to Sullivan's office. The phone rang ten times. He tapped the hook to obtain another dial tone and dialed Sullivan's home number. After two rings, Sullivan's answering machine recording came on the line. After the tone, Powers cleared his throat. "I tailed her to Dulles Airport. She checked a suitcase and boarded Flight One-oh-three to Frankfurt, West Germany. I'm booked on the flight with her. My G-car is parked in front of the terminal with my issue equipment in the trunk. "

He racked the phone. At the security checkpoint, he walked through the metal detector to an escalator leading to the boarding gate area.

At the top of the landing he moved through the crowd looking for Marilyn. She was in the gift shop, browsing. Finally, she carried a magazine to the cash register and paid. To camouflage himself as she made her way out of the shop, Powers joined some callers at a row of pay telephones and picked up a receiver. She moved past him without looking in his direction and headed for the American Airlines boarding area.

As she passed a group of blue-uniformed female flight attendants, one of them, an attractive redhead, turned and, excusing herself from the others, followed Marilyn, finally catching up with her near the boarding area. Powers moved closer. The flight attendant tapped Marilyn on the shoulder and said something. Marilyn seemed less than friendly, in fact somewhat anxious, as the woman spoke. From the redhead's body language, it seemed like nothing more than small talk, the way an acquaintance might spot someone in a public place and simply say hello. They held a brief conversation and Marilyn touched her wristwatch as if to say she was in a hurry. The flight attendant said a few more words, then turned and left. She caught up with her colleagues as they were stepping on the down escalator.

Marilyn took a seat in the boarding area and thumbed the pages of her magazine. Powers wondered why she'd brushed off the flight attendant, but he didn't consider the contact sinister. He knew spies never passed messages face to face but were trained to use clandestine communication such as dead drops and accommodation addresses. Hell, maybe the woman was someone Marilyn simply didn't care for.

Sitting a few rows away from her, he took out his note pad and jotted down the time of the contact and the remark
Chance meeting, Appears to be insignificant.
About forty minutes later, the agent announced the boarding call for the flight. He allowed Marilyn to board first. Finally, he stepped through a wide doorway onto a crowded people-mover bus.

Marilyn was sitting in a seat between a young uniformed soldier with a shaved head and an elderly black man wearing an African dashiki.

Later, over the Atlantic at thirty-one thousand feet, Powers imagined himself, as in a motion picture, strolling up the aisle, sitting in the empty seat next to Marilyn, and striking up a clever conversation. After a while she would leave her seat to go to the rest room and he would reach into her purse and find a secret code book.

Leaving that train of thought for a while, he pondered his own situation. He'd been assigned to the White House Detail long enough to know secret presidential chores had a way of blowing up in one's face. He was following a White House employee into a foreign country where, as a federal agent, he had no real jurisdiction. He took a deep breath and let it out. Below, the clouds were inky black.

A flight attendant, a mature woman wearing a uniform slightly too small for her puffy body, served him a plastic tray containing a Salisbury steak covered with yellowish gravy, some noodles, and a salad with watery airplane dressing. Though just the thought of airplane food usually made him gag, this time his hunger overcame him and he wolfed down the meal, even finishing the dry roll, stale carrot cake, and lukewarm coffee.

His mind swirling with doubt, he tried to sleep during the flight but couldn't so much as close his eyes. Finally, daylight broke through the darkness and the land mass of Europe became visible. For a while the plane descended slowly; then, finally, a male flight attendant moved up the aisle and used a microphone to announce the landing.

Fearing he would be caught in the crush of disembarking passengers, Powers was out of his seat and heading down the aisle for the door the very moment the aircraft came to a stop. He hurried down the jetway into Frankfurt's large modern airport. Its air held the familiar lingering odor peculiar to European passenger terminals, a smell Powers remembered clearly from the thousands of hours he'd spent waiting for flights: a stale mixture of Gaulois smoke, rest-room disinfectant, and harried human beings. From the jetway, he ran to a
Geldwechsel
window near the baggage area and changed five hundred dollars into deutsche marks.

In the baggage area, he checked the American Airlines display board to determine the baggage carousel assigned to the flight, then positioned himself near it to wait for Marilyn.