20.1 Just Another Non-Existent Terminal

Room 464, on the third floor of the south wing of Tropicana in Las Vegas, Tyler Friesen was ushered into a compact room with his luggage. He tipped the bellboy and turned around in the tiny space dumping his Olivetti portable typewriter in a plastic case on the trivial double bed. Tyler made a slight bargain to get this room on the top floor facing E Reno Avenue. This hotel sealed off its south wing because there was construction taking place to build a convention and exhibit space on the south side. The theatre was its new addition coming up on the west side expected to open next year.

Two cheap side tables with white surface boards beside the bed – one with a large telephone and the other could only hold that bed lamp. The bed without a headboard wasn’t all that comfortable. The upholstery on the wall was just paper with a design of large yellow flowers and vines in a rhombus pattern.

Tropicana Hotel and Country Club opened on 4^th April 1957 with 300 rooms. This south wing was annexed in 1962. The casino located at the northwest corner and almost surrounded by three-storey buildings with a half-moon-shaped swimming pool piped with muzak in the garden of this lavish property. A cascading 60 ft fountain stood in front of the entrance by the northwest corner.

His first priority was to slip the brown curtain and step out on the triangular balcony to check if his view blocked from construction work below. Nothing did and he could see miles and miles of desert to his eyeshot, the runways of McCarren International Airport and a range of mountains beyond. In 32° C, 89.6° F for him, of the Las Vegas heat, on the southern end of the Strip, there were no trees and no buildings in the vicinity other than the island of Hacienda Hotel on the right half a mile away. Earlier, he checked from the roadside, driving in his Ford Torino, to see if any obstacle stood in his way to the room he chose. Tyler noticed the ten-storey building of Howard Johnson under construction on the east estate next to the Tropicana. He couldn’t see that building to his view from the balcony facing south. A tall sliding door, a table and two red chairs on the balcony secured by a simple railing of vertical bars.

He stepped inside and began to unpack his gear. He brought photography equipment; a Canon F-1 camera in its case, a 135 mm zoom lens, binoculars and a durable tripod besides his writing material.

He was strongly willed to write that book about those Maxwell moles while working on two other projects in 1972. By now that hysteria about his Siberia experience and talk shows passed by and long forgotten.

He drove southward on Strip Boulevard and took the turn to Diablo Drive and reached the Hacienda Gate to their private terminal on Haven Street. He stopped by the corner and picked his camera to take some pictures. There was no sign of a soul around here. He wasn’t aware that this area was closed for street level traffic.

To begin with, he needed help from John Adams. He called a month ago and revealed a very strange story to John Adams who was now a senior official at his legate office; a deputy. Tyler told him that he suspected Gumper as Maxwell and that a man in a yellow shirt at the Water Gate Inn said so.

“Oh shit!” cried Adams, “Why didn’t you tell me this before? We have clues! We retrieved fragments of the bullets from the demise and picked a hair from the floor at Turner & Sons!”

“Nobody told me that,” Tyler uttered.

“In that case I’ll find about Bradley and you can come to meet me here in Washington with all that stuff you obtained from Salazar in Armenia. I am not going to support you with that book but it’s just quid pro quo.”

A month later he met John Adams who said that Melville Bradley continues to work at the test facility and still a lieutenant after all these years. A government front agency called EG&G (Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier Inc.) recently started ‘Janet Airlines’ with a DC-6 flying to the military bases around carrying two dozen employees every day. That was the reason Tyler Friesen drove across the great state of Arizona to arrive in Nevada first.

All this was going on in his mind as he rolled on Haven Street in the heat of the Sunday sun. He observed a fence on his right and several trucks on the left. A fence that enclosed the security of the airport and particularly the privacy of the parking area of the EG&G. He captured the gate and signboards on his camera and observed the cars in the parking lot though not too many. Tyler rolled on leisurely to climb Hacienda Street, noticed the Howard Johnson’s tower which was the only tall building upright at this site, turned to Giles and accelerated towards Reno Avenue.

Even in this heat, the garden and palms around in the Tropicana courtyard as well as the grass of a golf course lying to the north looked healthy and green.

He stocked the minibar with mad man’s drinks and assembled his equipment on the balcony as the sun took a dive towards the west on the cool side of the day. He sat down with his binoculars and watched the flights come to land and take-off from the runway.

Around 18:45 in the afternoon, in the hazy red sunlight, he saw an aircraft approaching the EG&G hanger tailing the taxiway in a dance. It was the DC-6B with Pratt and Whitney R-2800-CB17 four reciprocating engines and previously operated by Northeast Airlines. He was able to read its tail number, N6583C, when she came to stop on the apron in front of the waiting room. Tyler couldn’t get a sharp picture on his Canon F-1 camera mounted on a tripod with a 135 mm f/2.5 lens and an ASA 100 film.

Anyway, he watched the commuters climb down the aircraft with a blue stripe around its fuselage and two blue stripes on its tail. Their faces were in his view from little over half a mile distance. All wore plainclothes.

He spent two sweltering weeks waiting for that aircraft which only occurred two or three times a day. His accessories were plenteous spread on the bed and floor of the little space that he had to tip the housekeeping too often to keep their mouth shut.

When Tyler was familiar with the late afternoon arrivals, he raced in his car to Haven Street next to figure out which car Bradley was driving. He drove a black 1970 Chevrolet Camaro.