As he headed north, Garrison scanned the park to his right in search of pay
phones. They would probably be in pairs, prominently illuminated, on islands of
concrete beside one of the walkways or perhaps near one of the public comfort
stations.
He was beginning to despair, certain that he must have passed at least one group
of telephones, that his old eyes were failing him, but then he saw what he was
looking for. Two pay phones with winglike sound shields. Brightly lighted. They
were about a hundred feet in from the beach, midway between the sand and the
street that flanked the other side of the park.
Turning his back to the churning sea, he slowed to catch his breath and
walked across the grass, under the wind-shaken fronds of a cluster of three
stately royal palms. He was still forty feet from the phones when he saw a car,
traveling at high speed, suddenly break and pull to the curb with a squeal of
tires, parking in a direct line from the phones. Garrison didn’t know who they
were, but he decided not to take any chances. He sidled into the cover provided
by a huge old double-boled date palm that was, fortunately, not one of those
fitted with decorative spotlights. From the notch between the trunks, he had a
view of the phones and of the walkway leading out to the curb where the car had
parked.
Two men got out of the sedan. One sprinted north along the park perimeter,
looking inward, searching for something.
The other man rushed straight into the park along the walkway. When he reached
the lighted area around the phones, his identity was clear—and shocking.
Lemuel Johnson.
Behind the trunks of the Siamese date palms, Garrison drew his arms and legs
closer to his body, sure that the joined bases of the trees provided him with
plenty of cover but trying to make himself smaller nevertheless.
Johnson went to the first phone, lifted the handset—and tried to tear it out of
the coinbox. It had one of those flexible metal cords, and he yanked on it hard,
repeatedly, with little effect. Finally, cursing the instrument’s toughness, he
ripped the handset loose and threw it across the park. Then he destroyed the
second phone.
For a moment, as Johnson turned away from the phones and walked straight toward
Garrison, the attorney thought that he had been seen. But Johnson stopped after
only a few steps and scanned the seaward end of the park and the beach beyond.
His gaze did not appear to rest even momentarily on the date palms behind which
Garrison hid.
“You damn crazy old bastard,” Johnson said, then hurried back toward his car.
Crouched in shadows behind the palms, Garrison grinned because he knew whom the
NSA man was talking about. Suddenly, the attorney did not mind the chill wind
sweeping off the night sea behind him.
Damn crazy old bastard or geriatric James Bond—take your pick. Either way, he
was still a man to be reckoned with.
In the basement switching room of the telephone company, Agents Rick Olbier and
Denny Jones were tending the NSA’s electronic tapping and tracing equipment,
monitoring Garrison Dilworth’s office and home lines. It was dull duty, and they
played cards to make the time pass: two-hand pinochle and five-hundred rummy,
neither of which was a good game, but the very idea of two-hand poker repelled
them.
When a call came through to Dilworth’s home number at fourteen minutes past
eight o’clock, Olbier and Jones reacted with far more excitement than
the situation warranted because they were desperate for action. Olbier dropped
his cards on the floor, and Jones threw his on the table, and they reached for
the two headsets as if this was World War II and they were expecting to overhear
a top-secret conversation between Hitler and Goring.
Their equipment was set to open the line and lock in a tracer pulse if Dilworth
did not answer by the sixth ring. Because he knew the attorney was not at home
and that the phone would not be answered, Olbier overrode the program and opened
the line after the second ring.