The Falcon and the Snowman (17 page)

Okana seemed to be playing a game with him. When he mentioned Daulton's friend, there was a spark in his eye that seemed to be saying, There isn't
really
a friend, is there?
You
work in the defense plant, don't you? Though the Soviet agent never said he believed that Daulton and his friend were one and the same, Daulton was sure that Okana believed it anyway. Daulton painstakingly copied the list of questions on a sheet of blank paper given him by the Russian, and then the conversation turned to talk of war and peace, and Okana said he was certain that in Daulton's lifetime, the Soviets would rule America.

Okana said they needed a method for Daulton to alert the Soviet delegation at the embassy when he was in Mexico City and wanted to arrange a meeting.

The KGB agent removed a spool of white surgical adhesive tape from a pocket and handed it to Daulton. He said he should use it to make a mark on the first Tuesday of the month to signal his arrival; the marks were to be made in the shape of an “X” on lampposts near certain intersections in Mexico City that would be monitored by the Russians. If the utility poles were marked with the tape, the Russians would expect a meeting the following day.

The X's, he explained, were to be taped exactly one meter above the ground at one of six locations that Okana pointed out on a map of the city. There was a site near the Polyforum at Dakota and Insurgentes, another at Insurgentes and Concepción, another at Dakota and Filadelfia, and so forth. To guide him to the spots, Okana presented him with pictures of each intersection that looked like color postcards which tourists in Mexico City would send home to family and friends.

If the Russians observed a mark at one of the intersections, they would expect Daulton at 6
P.M.
the following evening at a location that would be predetermined and changed from time to time. Neither party was to wait more than fifteen minutes if the other didn't appear. If either party missed a meeting, there would be a backup rendezvous at ten the following morning. He told Daulton
never
to go to the embassy unannounced.

The cipher cards that Daulton sold on May 18 had been given to him by Chris several days earlier, after Daulton had made a quick round-trip flight from Mexico. Chris had wanted to know every detail of what had occurred during the first two meetings.

“I don't believe it,” Chris said. “I didn't think you'd pull it off.”

“They really want the stuff; they're crazy for it,” Daulton said. Daulton said he had received $3,000 for the delivery, and he split it evenly with Chris, although Chris traded in part of his share for some cocaine. Daulton then flew back to Mexico.

18

During his initial briefings, Chris had been told that beneath the bulbous white dome atop M-4 was the High Bay Area, a place where TRW conducted some of the final checkout tests on new satellites and stored them until they were shipped to Cape Canaveral, in Florida, or Vandenberg Air Force Base, up the California coast. These were the two American bases from which spy satellites were launched into space.

As a new employee assigned to Special Projects, he had been taken on a tour of the High Bay Area and had seen several launch-ready satellites and mock-ups of the espionage spacecraft. But he had not been much impressed. They looked like lumpy, shiny boxes perhaps half the size of a railroad boxcar. However, he was told that when they were up in space the satellites looked much different from these bland objects; they had to be packed into tight boxes like this so that they could fit in the narrow nose of a launch booster during their ascent; in space, they opened like an accordion.

Chris wanted to see what a Rhyolite payload looked like when it was unfurled in space, and he had been told he could do so once or twice a year when a standby satellite that was kept in reserve was opened and examined so that engineers could be certain it was ready—no one ever knew when another bird would be needed. Launch frequency depended on how long existing satellites already in space survived the searing heat of the sun's rays, the pounding of micrometeorites and other hazards. One TRW payload already in orbit was supposed to have a life of two years, Chris was told, but it had been working for almost four years, causing jokes around M-4 that the company had made it
too
reliable. After all, the company wanted to sell another one to the CIA.

The High Bay Area was jokingly referred to as “Sherwood's Forest” when the satellite was opened, and Chris learned why. What he had thought was an unimposing box had been opened into a massive creature—a concave dish that measured at least seventy feet across. It was the main antenna of the satellite, and it was backed and supported by a framework grid that reminded Chris of the back of steel bleachers at a high school football field.

The High Bay Area was an enormous vertical cavern topped by the igloo covering. The satellite glistened eerily in the glow of floodlights and bristled with strange appendages: there were large panels of steel-blue solar cells reaching out from the main structure, reflecting the lights as if they were a constellation of tiny stars, and there were several lesser antennae and other gadgets whose function was a mystery to Chris.

Chris studied the machine, one spy looking at another, and then walked away—thinking again of the similarities between the bizarre machine and the eyes and ears of his falcons.

Chris had long since decided that there was a wide gap between reality and the government-mandated “tight security” regarding the satellites so zealously preached in the security briefings. “Security at TRW is a joke,” he told Daulton. Supposedly, Special Project employees cleared for a particular system were allowed to discuss their project only with other people specifically cleared for the same project. But he discovered that not everyone followed the stricture. One day, for example, an acquaintance told Chris about a secret project at M-4 to build a new satellite that would be used to shoot down other satellites with a superhigh-energy laser beam.

It was a weapon out of science fiction, evoking images of robot surrogates of man battling each other with light beams in the dark and cold vacuum of space tens of thousands of miles from Earth. The project was so secret that the Air Force had set up a special communications vault at TRW to handle traffic for this project exclusively; lie-detector tests had been required of all the Air Force officers assigned to it. Although Chris didn't know it at the time, it was one of the highest-priority satellite programs in the country—nor did he know that Soviet engineers were simultaneously developing the same kind of system.

While looking over traffic from Pilot one day, Chris discovered an item that made him smile: A TRW employee on this project had stolen components for the laser gun and taken them home. It seemed that he was planning to go into business for himself to manufacture the lasers at his own company. He had been caught, the laser components were returned from his garage and he was fired. But Chris laughed out loud at the angry protest from Pilot about TRW's failure to prevent parts for the secret project from being carted out of the plant.

Chris was drinking more now than ever before in his life, and much of his drinking was done in the Black Vault. Drinking was a routine fact of life there, and as the frequency of parties behind its steel door increased, the handful of people allowed inside found ever more ingenious ways to smuggle booze to the TRW inner sanctum. Sometimes they used the courier pouches set aside for carrying Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency documents; sometimes they used the case for a large camera that was used to make pictures for Project security badges. When the CIA hired a new clerk—a stunning if not very bright blonde—she was invited in for a drink on her first day on the job. She hadn't had much experience with alcohol, and after several vodka-and-orange juices she was so drunk that she couldn't walk out of the vault without leaning on Laurie Vicker.

It was not an auspicious beginning, but she managed to hold on to her job, and it was not long before she had moved in with an engineer who worked on one of the black projects. Once, the couple threw a party for Special Projects people that lasted two days and was considered a total success—except for the complaints of neighbors who protested about the sexual couplings that took place on the front lawn of the couple's home.

Drinking and security violations weren't the only goings-on that bemused Chris about the gap between his security briefings and reality. He got to know an employee named Huey who showed porno movies in the plant at lunchtime; another who worked in the High Bay Area and sold bets on baseball games; and another who took bets on the horse races over the secure telephone lines in the TRW War Room.

Meanwhile, Laurie Vicker announced that she was getting married soon. But that didn't stop her from continuing her attempted seduction of Chris, which he continued to resist. Gene Norman had found a sideline job—selling Amway household cleaners and other products out of the Black Vault by telephone and to TRW employees. He encouraged Chris to join him to make some extra money, and between handling secret messages, Chris also sold Amway merchandise.

Chris was also getting to know better the CIA residents at the plant and some of the agency's employees who worked in the West Coast Office. With few exceptions, he was frightened of them. “When they talked about nuclear war,” he would recall years later, “they didn't think in terms of
if
there will be a war, but
when
there will be a war.” Their casualness about a nuclear holocaust horrified him. For the most part, he thought the CIA spooks were cold, self-righteous, right-on Americans.

A lot of the CIA men, Chris thought, reminded him of his father.

19

Daulton officially became a fugitive on May 27, 1915, when Judge Donahue, after giving him a second chance to appear in court and explain his refusal to cooperate with probation officers, issued a bench warrant for his arrest. Daulton got the news from his family by telephone in Mazatlán.

He had expected it and wasn't troubled, because as he lay on the sand Daulton could compliment himself on having pulled off his smartest business deal ever: the Russians were now bankrolling his drug business.

Following the May 18 meeting with Okana, he began what was to become a routine trading circuit: the Russians gave him money for documents from the Black Vault, and he invested his share of the proceeds (and eventually, more than his share), in Culiacán or Mazatlán, in marijuana or heroin. If it was done right, Daulton knew, $10,000 from the Russians might be turned into $50,000 or more in Los Angeles.

The capitalistic symmetry of the transactions delighted Daulton, and he was convinced from his first visits with the Russians that they would buy anything as long as the flow of goods from the vault continued. There was one problem with the arrangement, however. He was growing tired of life on the run in Mexico. He was beginning to grow tired of the spicy Mexican food and the unpurified Mexican water that was hard on his stomach; he was tired of the ubiquitous mariachi bands and was homesick for people who spoke English.

Returning to Palos Verdes and the beach towns near the Peninsula was out for now because of the warrant for his arrest. But he decided he would be safe in Santa Cruz, the seaside university town in Northern California where one of his sisters lived.

He arrived in Santa Cruz in early June after a flight via Los Angeles and San Jose under the name of Theodore Philip Lovelance—one of several alter egos Daulton had adopted using counterfeit identification papers arranged for by friends in the narcotics underworld. Two days after moving in with his sister, he applied for a driver's license at the California Department of Motor Vehicles branch office in Santa Cruz under the name of Lovelance. On the line of the application where he was to list his height, Daulton, who had never been taller than five feet two, attested that he was five feet five inches tall. Perhaps it was a mistake made in haste; perhaps he had a document from the real Lovelance noting that as his height; or perhaps it was the fantasy of a man creating an alter ego that in his mind was more appealing than his own. Whatever, the DMV clerk did not notice the discrepancy, and he got the license; it was only later that the lie about his height precipitated a crisis.

Daulton had become Theodore Philip Lovelance by paying $200 to the girlfriend of a young hippie who, like Robin, had died in a fire; for the $200 he got the boyfriend's birth certificate and all the other documents that had certified the existence of Theodore Philip Lovelance. It was a trick he learned while reading
The Paper Trip
. Lovelance was the complete alias; Daulton even wore a high school graduation ring with the dead man's name engraved in it.

After three weeks in Santa Cruz, Daulton flew to Los Angeles and arranged by telephone to meet Chris after dark in an alley in Hermosa Beach. He said he was expected in Mexico City in a few days and wanted something to deliver. Chris promised to give him something, and two nights later they met in the same alley and Chris handed him about twenty sheets of 8½-by-II-inch paper with typing on them. Daulton noted the word “Rhyolite” on one sheet.

On the first Tuesday in July, Daulton arrived in Mexico City and placed several X's on lampposts along Avenida Insurgentes Sur. At six o'clock the following evening he found Okana waiting for him at the Polyforum. Although they instantly recognized each other, Okana wanted to play by the rules (he enjoys it, Daulton thought) and asked, “Do you know the restaurant in San Francisco?”

“No, but I know the restaurant in Los Angeles,” Daulton said.

They walked the same route they had taken during the last meeting. Before long a dark limousine of a make Daulton didn't recognize squeezed out of the six lanes of traffic on Insurgentes and stopped at the curb to pick them up. The driver was a huge man in a black suit who, even from the back seat, reminded Daulton of a large, hairy bear.