The Falcon and the Snowman (15 page)

Chris had only half-expected Daulton to go through with it.

“It's too late, my friend,” Chris whispered aloud to himself as the white foam of the churning surf rolled toward him from the dark ocean. “We're over the Rubicon.”

The next day Chris drove his Volkswagen as fast as he could to the serenity of the Mojave Desert, its lonely sandscape of sagebrush and Joshua trees at once hostile and inviting to him. The enormity of what he had embarked on weighted him down. With luck, he thought, it would last a few months. He told himself that he had launched himself on a path that was certain to lead to his destruction. The blood pounded at his temples because of the knowledge of what he had unleashed.

Chris parked the Volkswagen where the pavement ceased, and he hiked into the mountains to the first prairie falcon eyrie that he had ever found. He shouted into the desert and sobbed and shook his fist and consigned himself to the only God he knew, to nature around him, to all the cannon fodder that would ever be squandered, to the death of the nation-states and to the rocks under his feet. He wept until he decided that he had no qualms. And then he went home, resolved to let them have it right between the eyes.

15

The evening that Chris was alone in the desert, Daulton sat down in his $40-a-day room in the Hotel El Romano Diana in Mexico City and composed a letter to his brother, David, who was attending college in Idaho. He apologized for leaving without a formal good-bye, but said he had no choice but to flee. “Sometimes,” he said, “freedom is more important than one's country.”

Daulton said he was excited by the prospect of life as an expatriate which loomed ahead of him and that he hadn't faced such an interesting challenge in years. Each man has only so many years to live, he said, and he wasn't going to waste his being hassled. Besides, he went on, there was no way he could ever burn one of his associates in the drug trade—it was against everything he had ever learned in the Brotherhood.

There was a happy eagerness about the letter; Daulton said he was thinking about getting a sailboat and might even take a trip to the Caribbean. He urged his brother to read a book called
Paper Trip
, which told how to procure identification papers, and asked him to investigate whether there was a Federal warrant—as well as a state warrant—out for his arrest. If the Feds were also looking for him, he suggested, it might make a difference in his plans to come back to the States. He did not mention his visit with the Russians, but said:

“Hey, you could really help out if you got into a
good legal situation
because the bucks are going to be flowing in one month.…”

With the wheels now in motion for his new enterprise, Daulton decided to see some of Mexico. He flew to Puerto Vallarta, a resort on the Bay of Banderas west of Guadalajara that had been a somnolent fishing village with a reputation for spectacular sailfishing jealously guarded by sport fishermen until a few
gringo
artists discovered its serenity during the 1950s. A few years later Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor stayed there while he made a film,
The Night of the Iguana
, nearby, and very soon Puerto Vallarta was a fashionable stop for jet setters and would-be jet setters.

Lately, Daulton's stomach had been giving him trouble—he was convinced he had an ulcer—so he decided to relax several days on Los Muertos Beach in Puerto Vallarta and uncoil some of the tension that had been tightening inside him. On the day in mid-April when Daulton had been ordered to appear before Judge Donahue to defend himself on the District Attorney's petition to send him back to jail, he was happily lying on his back under the Mexican sun, drinking a margarita and enjoying the cool salty breezes that swept in from the Pacific.

After he was rested and tan, he made his way back leisurely to Mexico City for a brief meeting with Okana. As prearranged, they met for dinner on April 23 in a Mexico City restaurant, where they exchanged the passwords. Okana was plainly interested now in the offer made by Daulton, and the young American was slightly surprised by the magnitude of his eagerness. He said he had been in touch with his friend and that deliveries of information would begin shortly.

Daulton was a dutiful son, and that night he placed a call to his parents in Palos Verdes to let them know that things were going fine for him. The Lees led a busy social life, and perhaps that was why they had not always been totally informed about Daulton's affairs since his feet-first plunge into the drug underworld.

Despite his problems with the law, Daulton's parents remained as loyal to him as any loving parents would. Their hope was that someday he would grow out of it.

When he called home that evening, Daulton said that except for some trouble with his stomach, he was in good health and having the time of his life. He said he was doing a lot of sight-seeing and enjoying himself thoroughly, but Daulton didn't mention his new business venture. His mother chided him about the missed court appointment, but Daulton told her not to worry about it.

The same evening, he wrote a letter to his younger sister, who was attending the University of California at its Santa Cruz campus south of San Francisco. Like his earlier letter to David, it blended optimism and apprehension, hinting cryptically of a Big Deal. “I'm sitting on cash that makes all my years of deals look like peanuts,” he confided, without elaborating. “I should have gone international years ago.”

It was a warm letter which indicated the close relationship between brother and sister. Daulton colorfully recounted some of the details of his trip to Puerto Vallarta and promised someday to give his sister a guided tour; he had been getting so much practice speaking Spanish, he joked, that he was beginning to forget his English! As if to assure his sister that he was not suffering in exile, Daulton said he'd just had a sauna and a massage after returning to Mexico City and the previous week he'd gotten a haircut, shave and manicure.

Daulton disclosed that he was planning a quick trip to the States and at that time he would give her his car—it wasn't any good to him anymore, and it was better to give it to her than sell it at a giveaway price. He warned her not to mention his plans for the trip to anyone, because he didn't know how large a dragnet the cops had out for him. Glumly, Daulton wrote that he'd gotten some bad news from Los Angeles: the D.A. was going to re-try him “on some shit” and wanted to send him back to the prison farm “or worse.” Daulton made clear that under no circumstances would he go back to jail. He advised his sister, “Keep in school, this organized crime shit is expensive when you add up the alka seltzer.”

There was, he added, one big plus about his move to Mexico: “I got that dog off my leg, the one (brown dog) that kept biting me for $300 a week.”

Daulton had a second thought, and on the back of a page of the letter he scrawled, “I haven't felt so good in 10 years.”

The same night, he wrote another letter to David Lee. All was well, he said. The following day, April 24, he was planning to fly up to Mazatlán to further burnish a tan that was already unbelievable. Someday, he said, over a glass of good brandy, he would show David the pictures he'd taken on his Mexican odyssey and fill him in on some of his experiences. He repeated the earlier report to his sister about the massage and sauna and last week's haircut, shave and manicure and said that he had bought a new suit—a tailor-made one—as well as several new shirts and a pair of shoes. If all went well, he said, he would be seeing David fairly soon, probably no later than the middle of June. “Study hard so I can put 20,000 into a legit business with you; I think I'm too hot to open a store.”

On the back of the letter, Daulton wrote a postscript: “I've got a money maker going and it is in no way related to my past foolishness (narco). So don't worry about my trying to smuggle los contrabandos en los Estados Unidos.”

A curiously idyllic period in Daulton's troubled existence had begun. Although the threat of jail still loomed over him, and it was too risky to return to Palos Verdes, he had settled easily into the life of expatriate beach bum. His fear of confinement ebbed away, and he dreamed of the dollars that would be rolling in soon from the new scam. It had taken him three days in Mexico City and a pinch of cocaine to muster the courage to go to the embassy. But when he had gone there he had seen something in the eyes of Okana that made him feel comfortable, even excited.
The rip-off should work
.

16

In rearing nine children, Noreen Boyce had become an expert at diagnosing childhood ailments, nursing cut fingers and looking after an occasional broken bone. She could tell by now, she thought, when a member of her brood was attempting to tell a white lie or was troubled by something in school. She had had less experience, however, with the effects of alcohol and drugs on them.

But one evening she noticed that Chris was acting strangely—his eyes were red and he didn't seem himself—and she wondered if he might have been drinking. Chris didn't come by the house much these days, but that wasn't unusual; in fact, he had visited home so seldom in the last year that his parents had begun to refer to him as “the mystery man.” When Charles Boyce came home from work at night, one of the first things he was likely to ask his wife was “Anything new from ‘the mystery man'?”

This evening as they talked in the kitchen, Chris seemed to be a little more willing to talk about his life than usual, and his mother suspected that it might have had something to do with drugs or liquor. Something was bothering Chris, and she tried to ferret it out.

Chris shook his head as if to say he couldn't tell her about the mysterious problem, and then said, “Mom, I'm going to have to do something that may embarrass Dad.”

“Chris,” his mother replied quickly, “Don't do it, please. If it's anything serious, it could kill your father.”

“Mom, I'm sorry. I have no way out.”

His mother pressed him to explain what he meant, but Chris didn't answer, and after a while Mrs. Boyce all but forgot the incident.

The CIA man had a proposition for Chris.

Ray Slack, who supervised the movement of classified information for the agency on the West Coast, said the CIA needed an experienced security specialist to work at a classified facility eighty miles from Las Vegas. Slack said he was impressed by Chris's performance at TRW and suggested he consider working directly for the agency in a career assignment. The CIA was a good place to work, he added, and there might be bigger and better things in the future. Chris said he would consider it.

“I think I'll take it,” he told Gene Norman afterward, adding that it meant a good pay increase.

But several days later he told a surprised Norman he'd thought it over and had decided to reject the offer.

“It's too far from everything,” he said, and the work schedule was rugged—round-the-clock shifts for three or four days before any time off. Besides, he added, “It's too far from any women.”

What Chris did not say was that he thought he was falling in love.

He had seen Alana MacDonald for the first time on a Friday night in November at the pool hall and bar. Sitting with three girlfriends, she was in the shadows just beyond the glare of the lights that bathed the pool tables—a blond five-foot-two teenybopper, Chris decided. Even in the shadows, her tan complexion surrounded by her blond curls seemed perfect, if vaguely defiant. But definitely underage, Chris decided. She was trying to look like a sophisticated twenty-one-year-old but could have passed for fifteen.

“I.D., please,” Chris had said to the four girls.

“You poor thing,” Alana said with a smile that dismissed the young bartender. “Run along and get me … let me see … a Bud will be fine.”

“I.D. or out,” Chris ordered.

“I'm not leaving,” she retorted, then pulled a wallet out of her purse and handed Chris a driver's license that certified she was twenty-three. It belonged to her sister.

“Twenty-three.
Sure
,” Chris said.

“Twenty-four in two months,” she said tartly.

The other girls also had I.D.'s that Chris decided were either forged or borrowed. But as far as he was concerned, it didn't matter; they had established that they met California's minimum drinking age of twenty-one, and he was protected if any state investigators came calling, as they did often enough.

“Make that four Buds, bartender,” the blonde demanded. Smiling, she pulled a cue stick from a rack on the wall to enforce the order. She would be giving orders to Chris for the next two years. Alana stayed late that night at the bar with her friends, and about midnight, Chris asked for her telephone number. They went out the next weekend and almost every weekend after that.

Lana, as he began to call her, was a Christian Scientist. She went to Bible-reading class promptly at ten o'clock every Sunday morning and firmly believed that faith, not doctors, cured illnesses and injuries. For the fallen Catholic, who had grown up under the long shadow of Rome, her faith was sometimes spooky. One day he noticed small warts on her left hand and suggested that she go to a dermatologist to have them removed. She scolded him for heresy, and several days later the warts were gone, prompting Chris to say it was voodoo. Who ever heard of praying for the demise of a wart? he asked himself. When he wanted to get under Lana's skin, Chris fell on the floor and writhed in pain and pleaded for a doctor. But she learned after a while to pointedly ignore his performance, and he stopped.

Lana was a bicycle nut who loved to pedal all the way from Palos Verdes to Santa Monica and back, an excursion of twenty miles or so that left Chris with aching thighs for a week but left Lana making plans for even longer trips. And she was a Stevie Wonder nut who would dance to his records around Chris's house, clapping her hands and snapping her fingers as if she were one big wiggle. Lana was embarrassed by dirty stories, but at the beach she wore a bikini that would fit in a pocket. There wasn't an ounce of fat on her, and she nagged Chris about his mania for junk food and a double chin she perceived to be developing above his thin neck.