Paramour (30 page)

Marilyn was standing third from the right in a group of women wearing Levi's, shorts, and T-shirts with
Langley Kittens
scrawled across the front. She had a softball in her right hand and her arm was drawn back, ready to throw.

"Marilyn plays on a CIA softball team," Chilcott said.

"Can you think of any reason why she would defect?" Powers said, staring at the photo.

Chilcott shook his head. "I'll never believe she's a traitor."

"May I take this photograph? I'll return it to you."

"I guess."

Powers slipped the photograph into his shirt pocket and walked to the door.

"The last coupla times we spoke I got the impression that she'd been dating. She said he was older than her. Other than that there was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in what she told me, what we talked about."

"What's his name?"

"I never asked."

"Did she mention anything specific about him?" Powers said.

"She didn't go into much detail ... as if she didn't want to talk about him. I assumed it was because he was married, so I didn't press the issue. Oh, yeah. She mentioned something about him having a very important job."

"By the way," Powers, said opening the door. "The Agency. With whom did you speak?"

"Green and Jones. They said they were from Langley."

Downstairs, Powers walked across the street, unlocked the rental car, and climbed in behind the wheel. Leaning back in the seat, he pondered: If Marilyn was so close to her brother, wouldn't she have wanted to speak to him one last time before she defected? He took out the baseball team photograph and turned on the dome light. In the photo, Marilyn's hair was pulled back and she was wearing a baseball hat cocked to one side. She looked different, the way people do in photographs, particularly poor-quality Polaroids. It occurred to him, as some thought buried and suddenly coming into his consciousness, that he would never see her again. And he had the familiar feeling of having forgotten something ... a
name
 
on the tip of one's
tongue
sensation. Hell, maybe he was going crazy. He might as well. Everything else in his life seemed to have turned to shit.

Powers looked up at the house. Chilcott was standing at the window looking down at him. Suddenly uncomfortable, Powers shoved the photograph back in his shirt pocket, started the engine, and drove away, telling himself that the trip to San Francisco had been for nothing.

At the corner, Powers turned onto Mission Street to head back to the hotel. He drove for a mile or so to Market Street in the direction of the bay. At a traffic light he checked the rearview mirror. There was a compact car behind him. Unless he was mistaken, the same car had been behind him on Mission.

Powers cruised through a yellow light. The car sped up, drove through the intersection on the red light, and accelerated past him, its single occupant staring straight ahead. It was a gray Toyota. At the next corner, it turned off-just what an experienced surveillant would do if he found himself too close to his prey. Powers took his foot off the accelerator. As his car slowed, a black van about a quarter block ahead of him pulled into the right lane and slowed down too.

Powers changed lanes, accelerated past the van, and turned right. He moderated his speed and kept his eye on the rearview mirror. A block behind, the Toyota pulled out from a side street and turned in his direction, then turned off again as the van came into view. Powers felt his breath quicken. He was being followed by professionals, he guessed, because of the street paralleling technique.

Powers's mind raced. During a security advance he'd done for President Reagan's visit to the San Francisco convention center a Secret Service tech man had informed him that the area across the street from the center was a communications "dead spot." Radios could neither transmit nor receive because of the unique geography of the location, and special transmitting equipment had to be set up to ensure that the presidential party had reliable communications. Powers made his decision. Turning south, he made his way to the convention center and pulled into an alley next to a brownstone building over whose entrance was a neon sign,
Ted Duffy's Grill
. He climbed out of the car and hurried down the alley. Entering the rear entrance to the tavern, he knew whoever was following him would be unable to communicate with the other cars on the surveillance.

Inside the two customers at the bar, both elderly men wearing Giants baseball hats, were talking with the bartender, a tall man with wavy hair combed straight back. Powers sat down on a bar stool close to the door. The bartender set a cocktail napkin in front of him. "What'll ya have, sport?"

"Scotch and water."

"You got it."

As the bartender mixed the drink, Powers surveyed the bar. The bartender set the drink down, collected money, and returned to the other customers. Powers picked up the drink and moved to a cocktail table next to the window. Because of the bar's darkness, he could look out to the street without fear of being seen by anyone outside.

For the next two hours, as customers came and went, the van and the Toyota alternately cruised past the bar every few minutes, checking, as Powers surmised, to see if his car was still parked in the alley. It would only be a matter of time before whoever was in charge of the surveillance felt it was necessary to verify he was inside and hadn't slipped away unnoticed.

A half hour later, an athletic-looking man wearing a windbreaker entered the front door. He had a well-trimmed mustache and closely cropped hair that gave him a military appearance. At any rate, he didn't look like he belonged in a neighborhood bar. As Powers would have done under the same circumstances, the man was careful not to make eye contact. Without so much as looking in Powers's direction, he walked directly past the bar to the restroom. After an appropriate amount of time, he came out, walked out the door, and moved past the window to Powers's right.

Powers left the table and hurried out the rear door. The man continued on the sidewalk, passing the mouth of the alley. Powers turned right and, breaking into a jog, made his way along a rutted sluiceway at the rear of the businesses. He stopped at a driveway crossing the sidewalk. There was a gray Toyota like the one the man had been driving parked two doors down, toward Market Street. Powers ducked back from the sidewalk and stepped behind an industrial trash receptacle.

There was the sound of footsteps on the sidewalk and the man stopped at the edge of the driveway, checked the sluiceway for traffic, and continued on to the Toyota.

Powers stepped from the shadow of the building. Lunging from behind, he threw his right arm around the man's neck and pulled him backward. Using his knee as a lever in the small of the man's back, he broke his balance and pulled him down and backward, arms flailing, toward the alley, back into the shadow of the building. The man grunted and kicked wildly.

"Take it easy, clown, or I'll break your neck," Powers said as the man struggled. Without loosening his right bar-arm grip, Powers frisked him quickly. On the man's left side was a gun in an inside-the-belt holster. Powers yanked the gun out and shoved the barrel to the man's left temple. He stopped flailing.

"Who are you working for?" Powers said.

"I don't know what you are talking about, sir," the man said with a slight accent.

Powers whirled the man around and shoved him against the wall. "Drag out some ID."

"I-I don't have any."

Powers aimed the gun at his face. "Empty your pockets, fucker. Turn 'em inside out."

The man complied. From his right pocket he pulled out a large wad of cash and dropped it to the pavement. He pulled the pocket inside out. The same with the left pocket. Only car keys. He turned, showed Powers his rear pockets. Nothing. Suddenly, Powers felt a chill. There was only one reason for a surveillant to carry no identification: if his mission was to kill. If arrested, he'd have nothing to tie him to a motive for the murder. The cash would facilitate an untraceable escape.

"If I knew for sure you'd been sent to waste me, I'd put a bullet in your brain right here and now, but since I don't, tell whoever you work for I'm gonna find out who they are. And then I'm gonna pull the plug on 'em."

There was a squeal of brakes in the street.

The black van came to a stop. The man broke into a run toward it. Powers moved to chase him, then stopped as the van suddenly reversed and sped directly toward him. Powers had the near-death sensation that some Secret Service agents referred to as the "edge." It was a feeling he'd experienced first in Vietnam when his barracks was mortared the day he arrived in country. The edge manifested itself in the feeling of senses instantaneously becoming acute, the tooth-baring, muscle-tightening, fight-or-flight frozen-in-time response human beings probably first experienced stepping outside the primordial cave and finding a saber-tooth tiger, the same adrenaline rush he'd felt when shots rang out during the assassination attempts on Presidents Ford and Reagan.

He aimed instinctively and fired: one, two, three rounds. The shots echoed between the buildings.

The van, still coming in his direction, sideswiped the wall. Powers was brushed by the bumper and thrown violently backward; the force of the impact caused him to pull the trigger again.

He came to his feet and ran to the end of the sluiceway. Heart pounding, he ran across the street. Hoping to lose anyone else that might be following him, he jogged for blocks, moving in and out of department stores, taking elevators and escalators and back alleys, then doubling back. At Market Street, still not convinced he'd eluded the surveillance, he entered Macy's and broke into a run. At the rear of the store, he ran through a storage area past shocked employees and out the back.

Up the street, he rushed into Clancy's, a spacious, dimly lit restaurant with a cafeteria-style steam table in the center. He hurried past some elderly customers lining up for corned beef and cabbage and found a pay telephone. He picked up the receiver and phoned the San Francisco airport. After reserving a seat on a red-eye to DC under a phony name, he used his telephone credit card to call the White House and asked for the Secret Service command post.

"W-16. Landry."

"I'm in San Francisco. Things are getting nasty."

"What happened?"

"We'd better not talk on the phone. Get Sullivan and meet me at Emerson's at 9 A.M."

Powers racked the phone. Fearing that the surveillants might be staked out on the Summit Hotel, Powers chose to leave the few items of clothing he'd brought with him and return to DC immediately. At San Francisco International Airport, he purchased an inexpensive airlines flight bag to check through to Washington. In a restroom stall he unloaded the remaining two rounds from the revolver and wrapped everything in toilet paper. There was a grayish line on the butt of the revolver where the serial number had been removed-permanently-by what he surmised was acid. And the bullets were hollow-point rounds, the kind used to achieve maximum killing power.

****

TWENTY

The morning was muggy, and during the drive from National Airport to downtown Powers sensed electricity in the air-as if at any moment there might be an uncontrollable cloudburst.

Emerson's, a large coffee shop on M Street, was a place Powers and Landry had frequented when first assigned to the White House Detail. Sitting in one of the thirty or more comfortable leather booths in the always-crowded room was the perfect place to discuss secrets. Powers arrived a few minutes early, carrying the flight bag. Landry and Sullivan were waiting in a booth at the corner.

"What the hell is going on?" Sullivan said sternly as Powers sat down.

Powers recounted tracing the telephone call, interviewing Jim Chilcott, and spotting the surveillance. "At least two one-man cars," Powers said. "I did a double-back and went up against one of 'em. A young guy, a military type with a slight accent. I took his piece away from him."

"He was carrying?" Sullivan said incredulously.