Paramour (36 page)

In the bathroom, he showered, shaved, and dressed. In the kitchen, he put his arms around her waist and kissed her neck.

"You were talking in your sleep," she said.

"What did I say?"

"You said 'Watch out,' as if you were warning someone."

During breakfast they chatted amiably, avoiding any discussion of what had happened in Kassel, and he found himself becoming relaxed and at ease with her again. Finally, the small talk was over and there was an uncomfortable silence.

"What is this all about?" she asked. "What is this really all about?"

"As I see it, either Marilyn Kasindorf used you to stage her own defection, or the CIA engineered the disappearance as part of ... some bigger plan."

"Why a staged defection?"

"To cover up for something-a smokescreen, perhaps. I'll find out. This is some kind of renegade operation."

"How can you tell?"

"I'm privy to certain things," Powers said.

"I never thought I'd be involved in ... what are you going to do?"

"I want you to come back to Washington with me."

"Jack, I signed a secrecy oath."

"I think someone is trying to destroy the President," Powers said, looking her in the eye. "I need you to help me prove it."

"I had a feeling about this mission," she said, after a while.
"When I met you I could see you weren't up to anything. You were just doing your job."

After breakfast, Powers phoned the Frankfurt airport and reserved two seats on a flight to Washington departing at 2 P.M. Because they had a little time to kill, at Susan's suggestion they left the apartment house and took a short walk. Though Powers was tense and preoccupied, he found comfort in talking and holding hands. On the way back to Susan's place, Powers admitted to himself a feeling he'd never had with any woman in his life before: he never wanted to be without her again.

Arriving at the apartment, Powers sauntered onto the balcony. It was a sunny day, and the air was filled with the sound of traffic rising from the street below. Across the street a hefty middle-aged woman was standing at a streetcar stop. She was wearing a scarf and a faded long-sleeved flower-print dress. In her left hand she was holding a fishnet shopping bag by the handle. She raised a handkerchief to her nose and mouth, then lowered it.

Down a few doors on the east side of the street was a green BMW sedan parked at the curb. A man with slick black hair was sitting behind the wheel. In the opposite direction on the south side of the street was another sedan with a single male occupant.

A streetcar arrived at the stop. Its doors opened and a few passengers climbed off and moved along the sidewalk in various directions. The doors closed; the
Strassenbahn
pulled away and continued down the street.

The woman was still there.

A few minutes later, Susan joined him on the balcony. "You're so quiet."

The woman lifted the handkerchief to her lips. Her mouth moved. Her hand returned to her pocket.

"Go inside and get me a drink, then come back out here and hand it to me," he said, without taking his eyes off the street.

"Is something wrong?"

"I'm not sure."

She gave him a puzzled expression and left the balcony.

The woman lifted the handkerchief to her face, then put it down.

Another streetcar arrived and left and the woman was still standing there.

Susan returned to the balcony with a glass of wine and handed it to Powers. The woman on the street lifted her handkerchief.

Powers put his arm around Susan and turned her to him. "That woman is using a hand-held microphone," he said, smiling in case any of the surveillants were using binoculars. "We're under surveillance." He led her inside and pulled the curtains closed.

****

TWENTY-FOUR

"Who do you think it is?" she said fearfully.

"I don't know, but we're not safe here. Pack a bag."

In the bedroom, as Susan shoved some clothes into a blue Lufthansa suitcase and filled a makeup case, Powers unplugged the lamps on either side of the dressing table and removed the shades. To the harp of one lamp he attached a round Styrofoam wig holder he found in the closet. To the other, he wrapped a bedsheet into a human-head-sized ball. Foraging through drawers in the bedroom and the kitchen, he found some yellow yarn, a feather duster, and some household glue. Using generous amounts of the glue, he pasted the yarn on top of one lamp and feathers from the duster on the other.

"What are you doing?" she said.

"Buying time."

He carried the lamps into the living room and set them on the sofa side by side so that just an inch or two of the camouflage hair showed over the backrest, turned on the television, and adjusted the dimmer switch on the living room lamp to minimum. With the back of the sofa facing the balcony as it was, from outside he hoped the dummies would, in the dimness of the room, look like silhouettes of him and Susan sitting on the sofa watching television.

He led Susan out the door into the hallway.

He moved to the curtain, pulled the cord to fully open, and walked quickly in front of the sofa. Lowering himself down below the level of the backrest where he knew he was out of sight of anyone watching him, he low-crawled out the door.

She touched his arm. "Who are they? Who's watching us?"

"We'll find out in DC." He picked up her suitcase. "Do you have a car?"

"No."

"Is there a rear exit to this building?"

"Only a fire door in the underground garage."

He led her to the elevator.

At the apartment house rear exit, they followed an alley for the entire length of the block. They entered the rear of another apartment house, hurried through a storage and heating room, a dingy lobby, and onto a cobblestoned street lined with small shops. Walking briskly along back alleys and through parking lots, Susan led him to the Frankfurt train station.

Inside the terminal, Powers checked the train schedule. It was fifteen minutes before the next train to the airport. He purchased two tickets, and they sat down on a bench near the door to catch their breath.

Susan pointed. "Look," she said, indicating the entrance.

The woman wearing the scarf who'd been standing across from the apartment was now standing inside the door looking about for them while cleverly obscuring herself among a bustling crowd of passengers. An obvious professional, he guessed she worked for an intelligence rather than a law enforcement agency.

"Damn," he said.

"What are we going to do?" Susan said.

The woman, having spotted them, sat down dispassionately on a bench.

A train pulled into the station. The sign on the side read WÜRZBURG/BAYREUTH/BAD NEUSTADT.

The train announcer said something in German, in French, and then in broken English. "The fast train to Würzburg is departing from track nine. All aboard, please."

"I don't see anyone else. If she's part of a surveillance team, they probably haven't caught up to her yet," Powers said. He picked up the luggage. "Follow me."

"Our train isn't here yet," she said, following him toward the Würzburg train.

He helped her onto the train. They entered the first empty compartment and set the luggage down.

The woman with the scarf hurried toward the train and joined the crowd funneling into the aft car door. The moment she stepped inside, Powers grabbed Susan's hand and stepped out of the car.

"Take a taxi to the airport and meet me at the American Airlines ticket counter," he said. "Go."

She backed away a couple of steps and hurried into the crowd.

Peeking through the window in the interior door, Powers could see the broad-shouldered woman moving up and down the aisle searching. She spotted the suitcases in the compartment and, shoving her way past passengers, moved frantically down the aisle in his direction.

The ten-second warning buzzer sounded. Powers stepped off the train. The train's hydraulic brakes hissed and the train began to move.

The woman burst from the interior door to disembark.

Using a straight-arm, Powers shoved her back inside. The doors closed, and he jumped back. The train pulled away. Powers ran past train platforms and out the door. For a few minutes, he waited nervously in a taxi line.

At Frankfurt International Airport, Susan was waiting for him at the airport ticket counter. Before they boarded the aircraft, Powers phoned Herb Kugler and asked him to meet them on arrival.

During the flight from Frankfurt to Dulles Airport the aircraft was only half full. They talked nonstop through the airplane movie: a comedy about a rich Wall Street broker who drinks a magic potion and becomes a southern plantation slave.

"I've lived in Germany for the last ten years," she said. "I majored in art at the Anton Feder Institute. It's a big art school here. Being a flight attendant was perfect for me. I'd fly for a few days and have a week to paint."

Powers found himself telling her about his childhood in Monterey, California-how during the summers he worked on his father's fishing boat. In high school, he'd been a member of both the cross-country and the gymnastics teams and had little interest in scholarly endeavors. In 1970,
rather than flee to Canada or hide from the Vietnam draft by joining the National Guard as a lot of his pals on the gymnastics team had done, he'd quit his criminology classes at Pacific Grove Community College and enlisted in the army. After a combat tour in Vietnam as an infantryman, he completed a bachelor's degree in Law Enforcement at San Francisco State College.

"The classes were boring," he said. "Studying police administrative procedures and law of evidence. Because there is no way you can actually teach someone to be a law enforcement officer, all the classes repeated themselves. It was like studying for four years on how to be a mail carrier."

"I can see you in college in those days," she said sarcastically.

"I didn't care much for the hippies," he said. "Who was I to fight the Age of Aquarius?"

Powers woke up as the aircraft touched down at Dulles Airport. In the early dark, a pall of rain-filled clouds hugged the countryside.

Powers and Susan had their passports stamped and passed the Customs control point. Herb Kugler was waiting in the baggage area. Powers introduced him to Susan.

"You can talk freely," Powers said to the reticent Kugler.

"I was able to raise a serial number on the gun. The trace shows it was purchased from a sporting goods store in San Francisco about a year ago by someone named Daniel McVey. I ran his driver's license number and it comes back to a mail drop, an accommodation address. McVey has no criminal or credit history. He doesn't exist."

"Sounds like whoever purchased the gun was using a phony license."

"That's the way I see it."

"CIA?"

"The serial numbers of all their guns usually trace to gun stores in Indiana for some reason. If anyone checks, the trail dies then and there. But for what it's worth, I remember a political assassination that occurred in the Caribbean a few years ago. A gun was recovered and, unless I'm mistaken, it had been purchased in a similar way in San Francisco. It was traced to a Syrian military attaché assigned to the San Francisco consulate."