The Falcon and the Snowman (18 page)

“Speak English,” Okana whispered to Daulton after he had started to say something in his broken Spanish.

After Daulton and Okana climbed into the back seat, however, the driver didn't seem to be particularly interested in listening. He shoved the car into low gear and accelerated it as if he were in a road race. Daulton soon realized that he wasn't driving the limousine like a race car because he wanted to get somewhere in a hurry: he was trying to make sure they weren't being tailed. The black car careened around corners with a squeal of tires, went a block or two, then turned again and repeated the maneuver. They weaved in and out of traffic for twenty minutes, and as they did Okana constantly checked the rear window. Finally, the car began to slow at a park several miles from the center of town.

As the limousine stopped, a European man emerged from the shadow of a tree. Daulton vaguely recognized him and decided he might have seen him on that first day in the embassy. The man got into the back seat with Daulton and Okana and offered his handshake with a smile, saying that he was delighted to meet “Comrade Lee.”

The man was introduced to Daulton as “The Colonel.” He didn't know it at the time, but he was meeting a general. Mikhail Vasilyevich Muzankov was listed on the roster of the Soviet mission as a consular official. But in fact, he was a general in the Red Army and the senior official of the KGB in charge of terrorism in the Western Hemisphere.

Muzankov was about fifty, a tall and beefy man with blue eyes and a craggy complexion that made Daulton think of a seafarer. He had two features that especially etched themselves in Daulton's memory. One was his iron-gray hair. The color of stainless steel, it was lush and cropped like an expensive bristle brush. The other was his front teeth. They were stained yellow and brown by nicotine, and the two most prominent ones were made of steel. When The Colonel smiled, the only thing Daulton could see was a mouthful of glittering metal.

Later that evening, Daulton was introduced to the driver, a dour man named Karpov. In future months Daulton would come to realize that Karpov was not what he appeared to be—an attentive servant—but an officer in the KGB. But he didn't know that yet, and he wondered at the size of the man. In his black uniform, Karpov towered over the woodworker from California by more than a foot, an enormous trunk next to a stump; his eyes reminded Daulton of coal, and his hands were massive paws with thick, puffy fingers.

Okana explained that The Colonel would also be dealing with Daulton from now on, and Daulton wondered if there was a changing-of-the-guard under way; was he being handed off from one case officer to another? Daulton studied the man and was impressed by his air of self-assuredness and the reaction of the other Russians to him. There was a palpable deference to him, and he seemed more polished than the other KGB agents. Years later Daulton would try to remember the first impression that Muzankov made on him and he would pick a simile from the world he knew best: “It was like the difference between a dealer who was used to dealing in ounces compared with one who won't handle anything smaller than kilos. He was up there at the top.”

Karpov dropped the three of them at another park, and they sat shoulder to shoulder on a bench with Daulton in the middle, watching a man selling balloons walk by, his merchandise a geyser of colors above his head.

Daulton handed the Russians the material Chris had given him.

There were more cipher cards and copies of several TWX messages between Pilot, Pedal and Moreno—the code name for the base at Alice Springs.

After inspecting the documents briefly, Steely Teeth gave them to Karpov, who had reappeared after parking the embassy car. Daulton had tried to make conversation with him in English, but the chauffeur shook his head.

With Karpov now in possession of the documents, Steely Teeth suggested that he, Daulton and Okana adjourn to a nearby restaurant for drinks, dinner and a celebration. The Russians were all smiles.

Karpov appeared at the restaurant just as coffee was being served. He said something in Russian to Steely Teeth, who told Daulton they would like to have more time to examine the documents. Would it be possible for him to see them again the next day?

At ten the following morning, Daulton was waiting at a bus stop near the Old City at a spot where he had been told to expect Karpov. The chauffeur was prompt and took Daulton on another high-speed trip through the narrow streets of the Old City, circumnavigating the Zócalo, Mexico City's huge central square, and then plunging into alleys and seemingly getting lost in the byways of the city until the car arrived at the embassy with Daulton flattened on the back seat to avoid being seen.

He was led into a room deep inside the embassy and greeted by Steely Teeth.

Caviar and bottles of vodka were waiting on a table next to a tape recorder. Okana wasn't there, but Karpov sat in a corner quietly watching Daulton. Under interrogation by The Colonel, Daulton told what he knew about the satellite operations. Again, he refused to identify his source. But he did his best to raise the Russians' expectations of what he would deliver in the future.

“I'm sure I can get what you want next month,” Daulton said, and this seemed to please the KGB men.

Steely Teeth said the operation was going well, but that additional information was required pertaining to the TRW satellites. Daulton sensed that someone, outside the circle of Russians he had met, was being consulted each time Karpov or The Colonel left the room and came back with new inquiries. He suspected they might have brought a technical specialist from outside Mexico City.

Steely Teeth said they wanted as much technical data about the satellites as Daulton's friend could obtain, but particularly they wanted details of the infrared sensing instruments employed on TRW satellites. He also asked for copies of instruction manuals for the use of components of the satellites, the tables-of-contents of official publications dealing with the space vehicles, names of the people who worked with his friend, pictures of the place where the friend worked and photographs of the satellites. Still more data were needed, the Soviet agent continued, about the methods of transmission—especially the frequency and band widths—used in the system that employed the ciphers.

Daulton slowly took notes on the questions and said optimistically he thought he could get what was wanted. After a while, Karpov came into the room and handed Daulton an envelope containing scores of $100 bills.

Before Karpov took him back, Steely Teeth advised Daulton he was foolish to bring the documents physically to Mexico City; instead, he should photograph them and return them quickly to where his friend had found them. This would reduce the risk, he said.

They said good-bye and agreed tentatively to another meeting the following month.

Daulton had told his brother, David, that he was embarking on a scam to sell something to the Russians even before his first connection with the Soviets, and he had said that when it was over he would be wealthy.

More than anyone else, Dave knew that Daulton liked to spin tales that cloaked him in importance. He had long observed at close hand the demons that haunted Daulton because of his size and looks, the humiliation that girls bestowed on him and his failure to please his father. Even when Daulton came home boasting that he now knew the Russians would “buy anything,” Dave was skeptical. But as Daulton made more trips to Mexico and returned home with envelopes stuffed with brand-new American currency, Dave began to suspect that there might be some truth to Daulton's crazy claim that he and Chris were pulling off a scam involving the Soviet Union.

Several months after Daulton started his periodic trips to Mexico City, Dave joined a group of Palos Verdes high school students on a tour of Eastern Europe.

The tour proceeded normally until the delegation reached Kiev, the ancient city in the Ukraine. After David unaccountably became ill with a high fever and nausea, he blamed the attack on too much beer and sausage when the group had visited Poland. But a Russian doctor who was summoned to his hotel said he had a serious viral infection and he'd have to be hospitalized while the group continued without him.

At a Kiev hospital, David had a visit from the group's English-speaking guide, Ira Mironenko, who worked for Intourist, the Soviet tourist agency. He had noticed her during the tour and thought once or twice that she was trying to catch his eye. She had seemed to go out of her way to choose a seat next to him in the opera and had purposely rubbed against him as they left. David had been flattered by the attention and interested in the possibilities.

When the girl arrived at his bedside he was even more encouraged. Ira visited him three times, staying several hours each time and asking to know all about America. She seemed particularly interested in Dave's family, and when he said he had a brother she inquired at length about him.

David felt he had made a conquest. They agreed to exchange letters; but after he was back in the United States, he wrote to Ira and she did not reply. He would never know why she had asked so many questions, or whether her interest was in him or in Daulton.

20

The first thing men noticed about Carole Benedict was her figure. She had blond hair the color of straw and blue eyes, but her hair and face were usually overlooked during the first glance. For as long as she could remember, whether she was rushing to class through the corridors at Rolling Hills High or stretched out on a blanket on the sand at Redondo Beach, Carole had seen men and boys, out of the corner of her eye, studying the lines and motion of her breasts. (Some of the football players who pursued her in high school calculated that she taped out at thirty-eight inches before the end of her junior year.)

By the time Daulton met her in 1973, there was already the hint of tarnish on the looks of a girl whose shape, straw-colored hair and beauty were of the stuff which the myth of the California Girl (the girls of California were
all
supposed to look like that) relied on for perpetuation.

Carole was the daughter of a lawyer who lived in the most exclusive part of the status-conscious Peninsula, the rural enclave of Rolling Hills. It was the kind of place that real estate ads referred to as “horse country.” It was isolated from the rest of The Hill by fences and guards at gates who made sure that only residents and their authorized guests entered the three-square-mile community-within-a-community of wooded high ground and $400,000-and-up homes. To live in Rolling Hills was to live “behind the gates.” In a world where some people chose their Mercedes-Benzes or Jaguars as much to communicate to neighbors their continuing upward economic climb in life as they did for transportation, living “behind the gates” represented the Peninsula's supreme validation of having risen very high indeed.

Carole Benedict had everything material that she wanted. But for years, her family had been ruptured by bitter combat between her mother and father. It was a turbulent union that would eventually dissolve in divorce, and Carole gravitated from her troubled home to Barclay Granger.

If Carole epitomized Madison Avenue's fantasy of the California Girl, Granger's tanned, rugged beachcomber looks were a perfect complement. Barclay never looked better than when he was on a surfboard, his long brown hair streaming in the wind like the trailing scarf of an aviator, his knees slightly bent and arms outstretched, gliding beneath the curl of a six-footer while the gremmies—the girls who followed the surfers—watched in awe from shore.

As a high school student he haunted the beaches up and down the California coast, pursuing the best waves and dreaming of someday riding the biggest waves of all at Sunset Beach in Hawaii. Girls were never a problem for Barclay; they hovered around him like kids surrounding an ice cream vendor on a hot day at the beach. His life was nonstop surfing, sex, drinking and drugs. And even though some of his friends died of overdoses, Barclay merely regarded this as “part of the territory.”

When his friends at Palos Verdes High scattered after graduation to enter college or go to war, to begin careers or marry, Barclay clung to his waves. His father—a business executive who was divorced from his mother—like Daulton's father tried to interest his son in college. Barclay tried a semester at Harbor College but didn't survive even its relaxed academic standards. The only thing he wanted to do was surf. For a while, he found a compromise between work and play—a job at a shop that shaped long planks of lightweight foam plastic into surfboards; but he didn't like the
work
part of this compromise.

Carole's parents didn't approve of Barclay, who was more than three years older than she was. But they were distracted by the final throes of the dissolution of their marriage, and Carole was edged into a side room of their lives. A few weeks before her seventeenth birthday, Carole moved in with Granger, who tried to support both of them on the sporadic earnings he made shaping surfboards. But that didn't bring in enough money, so Carole got a part-time job selling women's clothing in a dress shop.

Like Daulton, Barclay resisted the discipline of a regular job. And as with Daulton, the easy money of drug dealing seemed exactly what he was looking for.

He managed to find a reliable supply before Daulton did, and for a while Daulton had acted as a subcontractor to him, selling marijuana, for which he got a cut of the profit. Later, Daulton found his own source and they teamed as partners; they diversified into cocaine and, eventually, heroin until some weeks they were grossing more than $3,000. Their timing was lucky: just when many customers on The Hill had become bored with pot, they had found a source of coke, and then heroin. Coke was a more expensive high than pot—$20 or more a pop compared with $2—but they found plenty of buyers who could afford it.

Daulton saw a lot of Carole and Barclay during the spring and summer of 1975. During his quick trips from Mexico or from Santa Cruz for a deal, he often stayed at their apartment, making his deals over the telephone, keeping the windows shaded and the doors locked.