"There's no way of knowing at this point. That's for damn sure. "
Early the next morning, Powers gassed the car at the Secret Service garage and hurried to Scott Circle. The light in Marilyn's apartment was still off. At 6 A.M., he started the engine and sped to the McDonald's hamburger stand on Fourteenth Street. He ran inside and purchased two Egg McMuffin sandwiches and a large Styrofoam cup of coffee. He was parked in his surveillance position again within twelve minutes. He ate slowly, savoring each bite of the hot food and the Styrofoam-scented coffee as if it were French cuisine. The light came on around seven, but Marilyn never appeared.
Finally, in mid-afternoon, a DC taxi pulled up in front of the apartment house. The cabdriver, a lanky black man wearing a baseball hat, climbed out and moved to the trunk.
Marilyn strolled through the front door carrying a large leather suitcase and a shoulder bag. Powers's heart jumped. She was leaving town!
****
NINE
Instinctively, Powers grabbed the microphone from the dashboard hook to contact Sullivan, but then he stopped himself. If he transmitted a message, even in a code only he and Sullivan would understand, everyone monitoring the White House Secret Service radio frequency would know something was up. GS-13 special agents just didn't contact the Deputy Director unless it was important official business.
The driver took the suitcase from Marilyn, unlocked the trunk, and set it inside. Closing the trunk, the driver opened the rear passenger door for Marilyn and she climbed in.
Powers turned the ignition key and started the engine.
The taxi pulled into traffic on Rhode Island Avenue.
Powers accelerated from the curb and followed the taxi as it maneuvered through city streets to the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge and onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway. Moving at about fifty miles an hour along the bank of the Potomac River, Powers passed the signs for Langley and was sure.
She was headed for Dulles International Airport.
A few minutes later, the taxi left the highway at the airport exit, cruised along a wide curving ramp, and pulled to a stop in front of the departure terminal. The driver recovered the suitcase from the trunk. Marilyn stepped out, opened her purse, and paid him. A skycap lifted her luggage onto a metal cart and led her into the terminal.
Powers climbed out of his car and followed her inside.
At the American Airlines desk, Marilyn opened her purse and handed an airlines ticket to a blond female ticket clerk. Marilyn lifted her suitcase onto the counter scale. The clerk tagged it with a yellow baggage tag, stapled the receipt to her ticket, and stuffed the ticket into a ticket folder. She handed the ticket back to Marilyn, then pointed toward the escalators leading up to the boarding gates on the second level. Marilyn headed toward the security checkpoint.
Powers moved closer to the counter and watched Marilyn's suitcase as it proceeded along a baggage conveyor belt behind the counter. The yellow tag on the suitcase read FFT. Frankfurt. She was going to Germany!
Powers joined a line of passengers leading to the American Airlines ticket counter. The line moved quickly and at the counter, he used a government transportation request to purchase a round-trip ticket to Frankfurt. The ticket clerk asked about his baggage. Because it would be suspicious to admit he was traveling without luggage, he told her his girlfriend had already checked it earlier. At the clerk's request, he opened his briefcase and showed his passport.
Finally, she handed him the ticket. "The flight will be boarding in half an hour, sir. Gate Twenty-three."
Powers headed for the security checkpoint and then stopped. He was wearing his gun and thus would be required to identify himself to the security personnel. If he did, by federal aviation procedure they would, in turn, notify the crew of the aircraft. Because he couldn't take the chance some member of the crew (as had happened to him on flights in the past) would identify him in front of the other passengers, he turned and headed outside. He opened the trunk of his car and discreetly slipped his gun, bullet pouch, and handcuffs off his belt and hid them underneath the spare tire. There was no time to park the car in the long-term lot. He tossed the keys in the trunk and closed the lid.
Powers hurried back inside and spotted a bank of pay telephones. He dropped change and dialed the direct number to Sullivan's office. The phone rang ten times. He tapped the hook to obtain another dial tone and dialed Sullivan's home number. After two rings, Sullivan's answering machine recording came on the line. After the tone, Powers cleared his throat. "I tailed her to Dulles Airport. She checked a suitcase and boarded Flight One-oh-three to Frankfurt, West Germany. I'm booked on the flight with her. My G-car is parked in front of the terminal with my issue equipment in the trunk. "
He racked the phone. At the security checkpoint, he walked through the metal detector to an escalator leading to the boarding gate area.
At the top of the landing he moved through the crowd looking for Marilyn. She was in the gift shop, browsing. Finally, she carried a magazine to the cash register and paid. To camouflage himself as she made her way out of the shop, Powers joined some callers at a row of pay telephones and picked up a receiver. She moved past him without looking in his direction and headed for the American Airlines boarding area.
As she passed a group of blue-uniformed female flight attendants, one of them, an attractive redhead, turned and, excusing herself from the others, followed Marilyn, finally catching up with her near the boarding area. Powers moved closer. The flight attendant tapped Marilyn on the shoulder and said something. Marilyn seemed less than friendly, in fact somewhat anxious, as the woman spoke. From the redhead's body language, it seemed like nothing more than small talk, the way an acquaintance might spot someone in a public place and simply say hello. They held a brief conversation and Marilyn touched her wristwatch as if to say she was in a hurry. The flight attendant said a few more words, then turned and left. She caught up with her colleagues as they were stepping on the down escalator.
Marilyn took a seat in the boarding area and thumbed the pages of her magazine. Powers wondered why she'd brushed off the flight attendant, but he didn't consider the contact sinister. He knew spies never passed messages face to face but were trained to use clandestine communication such as dead drops and accommodation addresses. Hell, maybe the woman was someone Marilyn simply didn't care for.
Sitting a few rows away from her, he took out his note pad and jotted down the time of the contact and the remark Chance meeting, Appears to be insignificant. About forty minutes later, the agent announced the boarding call for the flight. He allowed Marilyn to board first. Finally, he stepped through a wide doorway onto a crowded people-mover bus.
Marilyn was sitting in a seat between a young uniformed soldier with a shaved head and an elderly black man wearing an African dashiki.
Later, over the Atlantic at thirty-one thousand feet, Powers imagined himself, as in a motion picture, strolling up the aisle, sitting in the empty seat next to Marilyn, and striking up a clever conversation. After a while she would leave her seat to go to the rest room and he would reach into her purse and find a secret code book.
Leaving that train of thought for a while, he pondered his own situation. He'd been assigned to the White House Detail long enough to know secret presidential chores had a way of blowing up in one's face. He was following a White House employee into a foreign country where, as a federal agent, he had no real jurisdiction. He took a deep breath and let it out. Below, the clouds were inky black.
A flight attendant, a mature woman wearing a uniform slightly too small for her puffy body, served him a plastic tray containing a Salisbury steak covered with yellowish gravy, some noodles, and a salad with watery airplane dressing. Though just the thought of airplane food usually made him gag, this time his hunger overcame him and he wolfed down the meal, even finishing the dry roll, stale carrot cake, and lukewarm coffee.
His mind swirling with doubt, he tried to sleep during the flight but couldn't so much
as close his eyes. Finally, daylight broke through the darkness and the land mass of Europe became visible. For a while the plane descended slowly; then, finally, a male flight attendant moved up the aisle and used a microphone to announce the landing.
Fearing he would be caught in the crush of disembarking passengers, Powers was out of his seat and heading down the aisle for the door the very moment the aircraft came to a stop. He hurried down the jetway into Frankfurt's large modern airport. Its air held the familiar lingering odor peculiar to European passenger terminals, a smell Powers remembered clearly from the thousands of hours he'd spent waiting for flights: a stale mixture of Gaulois smoke, rest-room disinfectant, and harried human beings. From the jetway, he ran to a Geldwechsel window near the baggage area and changed five hundred dollars into deutsche marks.
In the baggage area, he checked the American Airlines display board to determine the baggage carousel assigned to the flight, then positioned himself near it to wait for Marilyn.
She was among the first few passengers to arrive from the aircraft. She had applied fresh makeup and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. A few long strands had slipped out of her barrette and were hanging below her ear. Standing there, close to her but invisible among the sea of people now edging closer to the carousel, he had the inexplicable urge to reach out and brush the loose strands back as one might with a female friend.
Feeling the effects of sleep loss since beginning the surveillance, Powers ran his hands over his face and took a couple of deep breaths. He wished he'd been able to sleep on the plane.
Luggage began to spill from a conveyor belt. Marilyn watched carefully, then stepped forward and retrieved her suitcase.
Outside the terminal, she went to an information booth and said something to the uniformed man inside. He pointed down the sidewalk. Marilyn picked up her suitcase and walked directly to a passenger bus parked curbside to the right of the terminal door. Setting her suitcase down in a row next to some other luggage being loaded by two baggage handlers, she joined a small line of passengers filing onto the bus.
Powers waited until a few people had queued behind her, and then he too joined the line.
On the bus, Marilyn paid the driver, a balding, heavy-set German with a purplish nose, and took a seat in one of the middle rows on the right.
Because Powers had no idea of his destination and thus the cost of the trip, he held out all the bills he'd obtained from the moneychanger to the driver.
"Wir fahren nur zum Kassel, nicht Griechenland," the driver said condescendingly. He picked a couple of bills and handed Powers some change.
Rather than chance moving down the aisle and coming face to face with Marilyn, Powers sat in an empty seat directly behind the driver.
The driver closed the door and steered onto the autobahn, a modern, four-lanes-in-each-direction highway. Powers sat back in his seat as the bus, traveling north at what he guessed was more than seventy miles an hour, whipped past sterile rest stops and rolling green hills dotted with farmhouses. After little more than an hour or so, as they passed some signs for Bad Hersfeld, Marilyn left her seat and moved down the aisle to the driver.
"In Kassel," she said, "wie weit fon der hauptstadt is das hotel Zum Goldenen Hirsch?"
"Nicht weit. Vielleicht funf kilometer."
"Danke," she said and returned to her seat.
The bus passed a line of U.S. Army tanks entering the main gate of an American army post protected by a high chain-link fence. The sign read: CAMP WILLIAM O. DARBY, 4TH ARMORED CAVALRY DIVISION, SIXTH ARMY. A few minutes later, the green landscape on the left side of the road changed to the outline of a city.
The bus slowed down, turned off the autobahn, and proceeded along a narrow road toward town. Kassel, a city hewn by the past, was a jumble of brownish tenements, apartment buildings, modern storefronts, wood-paneled taverns, and cobblestoned alleys. Like many German cities, a cathedral spire marked the center of town.
The bus pulled up at the train station, and the driver made an announcement via the intercom. Powers made his way off the bus among other disembarking passengers and waited near a line of taxis in front of the station.
Marilyn waited until her suitcase was off-loaded from the outside luggage compartment, then picked it up and moved to a taxi. The driver, who was standing on the sidewalk, took the suitcase from her and placed it on the front passenger seat. Marilyn climbed in the back.
Powers hurried to the taxi parked behind. The back seat was filled with passengers. The last taxi in the line had no driver.
Marilyn's taxi pulled away from the curb and turned a corner.
Another taxi pulled up and Powers rushed to it. The driver was a young man with a crew cut and granny glasses. "Is there a hotel Golden Hirsch?" Powers said.
"Hotel Zum Goldenen Hirsch?"
"That's it, buddy," Powers said, climbing in.
The Zum Goldenen Hirsch was located outside the center of town at the edge of a large public park. In the middle of the park was a modem building that looked like a museum or perhaps an exhibition hall or convention center.
Powers paid the driver and hurried inside the hotel.
Marilyn was at the reception desk.
Powers crossed the lobby and sat down on a sofa as she signed in. A bellman picked up her suitcase and started across the lobby. She stopped him and gave him a tip. As he headed toward the elevator with her luggage, Marilyn walked to a car rental desk near the front and exchanged a few words with a young bespectacled female clerk wearing a dark suit. Marilyn said something in German. The clerk replied in English. Marilyn showed some identification and filled out a form. Finally, the clerk came from behind the counter and led Marilyn out the front door of the hotel.
Powers moved to a tall window providing a view of the front of the hotel and its parking lot. Outside, Marilyn followed the clerk to a line of cars parked near a tennis court. The clerk used a key to open the driver's door of a brown economy-model Mercedes Benz and pointed out some items in the interior. Marilyn nodded. The clerk locked the car again and handed the keys to Marilyn. Marilyn dropped the keys in her purse, and they walked back inside, chatting amiably.
Powers took out a pen and noted the license number of the car on a matchbook.
Back in the hotel, Marilyn crossed the lobby to the elevator, waited until it arrived, and then stepped on. The doors closed.
At the registration desk, Powers rented a room, listing his occupation in the required box of the registration card as an accountant for the firm Sullivan and Company. He surrendered his passport to the clerk and told an inquiring bellman his luggage had been lost. He sauntered to the car rental desk and went through the same general procedure to rent a car as Marilyn had. In fact, the car he was assigned was an economy-model Mercedes Benz just like the one Marilyn had rented.
Next, he used a house phone, dialed the hotel operator, and learned Marilyn was in Room 202. He took the elevator to the second floor and checked the location of her room. Then, after inspecting the stairway exits and hallways, he returned to the lobby. There he examined the physical layout of the hotel and determined one could get from the guest rooms to the lobby by either the lobby elevator or one of two stairwells leading from the floors. Thus he would be able to monitor Marilyn's movements by sitting in the lobby.
If Marilyn decided to leave the hotel, however, he would be at a disadvantage because he was alone and had no one to help him on the surveillance. If she walked through the lobby and headed for her rental car, it would be impossible to be discreet in rushing out of the hotel to jump in his own car before she drove away. But if he sat outside in his rental car prepared to follow her, he'd be unable to monitor her movements inside the hotel and might be sitting outside as she met with foreign agents. After some thought, he concluded that, as sensitive as the investigation was, if he was to monitor her activities he'd need at least one other person to help him cover both the interior and the exterior of the hotel at the same time.
In his room, using direct dial, he phoned both Sullivan's office and his home number to request help, but both were busy. Frustrated, he racked the phone.
In the lobby, he took a seat on a sofa in the corner and took a few deep breaths. It was 1 P.M. by the ornate clock on the wall above the elevator.
During the next seven hours, other than for a quick trip down the corridor to the hotel's clothing store to purchase a change of clothes and some underwear he figured he would need, Powers didn't leave the lobby. Sitting with the clothing for a while, he finally tipped a bellman to take it to his room.
As the afternoon passed, he did nothing but move from sofa to sofa and exercise his legs by pacing about and, every hour or so, try to reach Sullivan by phone.
At 10 P.M., Powers made a pretext call to the hotel kitchen and learned Marilyn had taken dinner in her room.
****
TEN
During the flight to California on Air Force One, young White House staff members pestered Landry with questions about the LA presidential visit, using him to double-check possible glitches in the schedule. "Ken, do you know the arrival time at the museum? Ken, can you give me the number of cars in the motorcade at the City Hall stop?"
Landry, having learned many years ago that showing hostility was never a sound course in organizational culture and, in fact, could be career poison for a black man, calmly complied. Each time he would take out his copy of the Secret Service Advance plan and provide the correct information. Sometimes he wished he had never worked so hard to get promoted. If he had remained just a working agent, he'd be off duty and could be sleeping during the trip or lounging in the Secret Service cabin shooting the bull with the guys. On the other hand, he had to admit relishing being not only the only Secret Service agent but the only black seated with the rich white boys in the power cabin. His dead father, a bricklayer who'd spent his life as the only "colored man" (his father's term) employed by the Colantonio Masonry Company in Baltimore, Maryland, would have been proud.
Paramour Page 9