“If you still think I went out with the boat, I’ve got an alibi for that day. A dentist in Asbury Park fixed my teeth. I have a receipt.”
“I expect you have,” Kabakov said. “How long have you owned the boat?”
“A long time. Eight years.”
“Any previous owners?”
“I had it built.”
“How did you return the deposit?”
“I left it in the same basket in the trunk of my car by a supermarket and put the trunk key under the floor mat. Somebody picked it up.”
The New Jersey coastal chart Kabakov had found in Sapp’s chart bin had the course to the rendezvous marked with a neat black line, departure time and running time checks jotted beside it. The bearings for two radio direction finder fixes were penciled in. Three bearings for each fix.
Kabakov held the chart by the edges, under the lantern where Sapp could see it. “Did you mark this chart?”
“No. I didn’t know it was on the boat or I would have gotten rid of it.”
Kabakov took another chart from the bin, a Florida chart. “Did you plot the course on this one?”
“Yes.”
He compared the two charts. Sapp’s handwriting was different. He had used only two bearings for an RDF fix. Sapp’s times were written in Eastern Standard. Time for the rendezvous with the Leticia, jotted on the New Jersey chart, was 2115. This puzzled Kabakov. He knew the Coast Guard cutter had spotted the speedboat close to the freighter at 1700 Eastern Standard. The boat must have been there for some minutes, loading the plastic, so the rendezvous was about 1615 or 1630. Yet it was marked on the chart for five hours later. Why? The departure time from Toms River and the running time checks were also marked about five hours later than they must have occurred. It didn’t make sense. And then it did make sense—the man Kabakov was seeking had not used Eastern Standard time, he had used Greenwich Mean Time—Zulu time—Pilot time!
“What fliers do you know?” Kabakov demanded. “Professional pilots.”
“I don’t know any professional pilots I can think of,” Sapp said.
“Think hard.”
“Maybe a guy in Jamaica with a commercial license. But he’s been in the jug down there ever since the feds vacuumed his luggage compartment. He’s the only professional pilot I know. I’m sure of it.”
“You know no pilots. You don’t know who hired the boat. You know very little, Mr. Sapp.”
“I don’t. I can’t think of any pilots. Look, you can bust me up. You probably will, but I still won’t know.”
Kabakov considered torturing Sapp. The idea was sickening to him, but he would do it if he thought the results would be worth it. No. Sapp was not a principal in the plot. Threatened with prosecution, fearful that he might be an accessory to a major atrocity involving the explosives, he would try to cooperate. He would try to recall any small detail that would identify the man who hired his boat. Better not to hurt him badly now.
The next step should be an intensive interrogation of Sapp about his activities and associates and a thorough lab analysis of the chart. The FBI was better equipped to do these things. Kabakov had come a long way for very little.
He called Corley from a telephone booth on the pier.
Sapp had not consciously lied to Kabakov, but he was mistaken in saying that he knew no professional pilots. It was an understandable memory lapse—it had been years since he had last seen Michael Lander or thought about the frightening, infuriating day of their first meeting.
Sapp had been on his seasonal migration northward when a floating timber mangled both his propellers off Manasquan, New Jersey, forcing him to stop. Sapp was strong and capable, but he could not change a jammed and twisted prop in open water with a sea running. The boat was drifting slowly toward the beach, dragging her anchor before a relentless onshore wind. He could not call the Coast Guard because they would smell the same stench that gagged him as he went below to get his storm anchor—the smell of $5,500 worth of black market alligator hides bought from a Florida poacher and bound for New York. When Sapp returned to the deck, he saw a boat approaching.
Michael Lander, out with his family in a trim little cruiser, threw Sapp a line and towed him to a protected inlet. Sapp, not wanting to be stuck at a marina with a disabled boat loaded with hot hides, asked Lander to help him. Wearing snorkle masks and flippers, they worked beneath the boat, and their combined strength was enough to pry one of the propellers off its shaft and fit the spare. Sapp could limp home.
“Excuse the smell,” Sapp said uneasily as they sat on the stern, resting. Since Lander had been below in the course of the work, he could not have helped seeing the hides.
“None of my business,” Lander said.
The incident began a casual friendship that ended when Lander returned to Vietnam for his second hitch. Sapp’s friendship with Margaret Lander had continued, however, for some months after that. On the rare occasions when he thought about the Landers, it was the woman Sapp recalled most clearly, not the pilot.
17
ON THE FIRST OF DECEMBER the president informed his chief of staff that he would definitely attend the Super Bowl in New Orleans, whether the Washington Redskins were playing or not.
“Goddamn it,” said Earl Biggs, special agent in charge of the White House Secret Service detail. He said this quietly and alone. He was not surprised—the president had indicated previously that he was likely to go—but Biggs had hoped the trip would be canceled.
I should have known better than to hope, Biggs reflected. The Man’s honeymoon with the nation was over and he had begun to slip a little in the polls, but he would be assured of a standing ovation in the Deep South, with the whole world watching.
Biggs dialed the number of the Secret Service’s Protective Research section. “January twelfth. New Orleans,” he said. “Get on it.”
The Protective Research section has three levels of files. The largest contains every threat that has been made against a president by telephone, mail, or reported utterance in the last forty years. Persons who have made repeated threats or who are considered potentially dangerous are listed in a “live file.”
The live files are reviewed every six months. Changes in address, job status, and international travel are noted. At present, there are 840 names in the live file.
Of these, the 325 considered most serious are also listed in a geographically indexed “trip file.” Before each presidential trip, the persons listed in the area involved are investigated.
With forty-three days of lead time, the clerks in Protective Research and the agents in the field had plenty of time to check out New Orleans.
Lee Harvey Oswald was never listed in the Secret Service trip file. Neither was Michael Lander.
On December 3, three agents from the White House Secret Service detail were dispatched to New Orleans to take charge of security arrangements. Forty days’ lead time and a three-man team have been standard procedure since 1963. On December 7, Jack Renfro, leader of the three-man detail, sent a preliminary report to Earl Biggs at the White House.
Renfro did not like Tulane Stadium. Anytime the president appeared in public, Renfro could feel the exposure crawling on his own skin. The stadium, home of Tulane’s Green Wave, the Sugar Bowl Classic, and the New Orleans Saints, is the largest steel stadium in the world. It is rusty gray and tan and the area beneath the stands is a forest of girders and beams, a nightmare to search. Renfro and the other two Secret Service agents spent two days climbing through the stadium. When Renfro walked out onto the field, every one of the 80,985 seats threatened him. The glassed-in VIP booth high on the west side of the stadium at the end of the press gallery was useless. He knew the president would never consent to use it, even in the case of inclement weather. No one could see the president there. He would use the VIP box, at the front of the west stands on the fifty-yard line. For hours Renfro sat in the box. He placed a member of the New Orleans police department in it for an entire day, while he and the other two agents checked the lines-of-sight from various positions in the stands. He personally inspected the cream of the New Orleans police department‘s Special Events squad—the officers who would be assigned to the stadium.