Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  “We had reason to believe that ‘Billy’ would return to DC, doing what any operative would do, following the money trail. Sometimes, it is impossible to completely conceal, or eradicate the daisy chain of contacts which link an agent in the field to…Control. In this case, we created a false trail which, as it happened, our man followed back to its source, where, of course, from his perspective, the trail goes dead…”

  “You laid a trap for him, he sprung it and now you’re back to square one?”

  “Possibly.”

  “And in the meantime, the CIA has a rogue assassin on the loose in the nation’s capital?”

  At the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Caro was guided through endless corridors, into a lift and eventually into a waiting room on the third floor. She had no idea which part of the sprawling complex she was in; not that she cared.

  Richard Helms passed her on to a woman in her thirties. Caro was pleased to see that she looked as weary as she felt.

  “Did Director Helms tell you about the sting in Alexandria, Professor?”

  “Yes,” Caro returned, irritated. She glared at the Director of Central Intelligence. “But right now, I’m not sure how much credence to place on anything you people tell me. Not now that I know I’ve been working for a bunch of two-bit crooks!”

  The other woman looked blankly at Richard Helms.

  “Professor Constantis was enjoying a little R and R in Nebraska and North Dakota,” the man explained pleasantly. “We had to haul her all the way back to DC in a hurry, Jeanne,” he went on. “None of us have got a lot of sleep lately.”

  Caro snorted her derision.

  “The dead man,” the other woman, called Jeanne, said cautiously, “was standing in for an agent called Jay Lovestone, who is currently in hiding. “There was a woman standing in for the lady who normally worked at the office. That agent was not present at the time of the killing, and therefore, was unharmed. Although, naturally, she was somewhat alarmed by the whole thing. The lady who normally worked with the intended victim, Clara Schouten, is here at Walter Reed.”

  “Clara Schouten?”

  “Age fifty-two, unmarried. She transferred from the OSS to the Agency 1947, first as a typist and then GS9, currently she is graded as GS12, which means she has access to her department’s most sensitive material…”

  “Her department?” Once one had served at Langley or in the White House one got used to the fact extracting information from a CIA or an FBI staffer was like pulling teeth!

  “The Office for Security, Professor.”

  “Okay, so she was in hiding…”

  “No, she wasn’t in hiding, she was on compassionate leave in Connecticut. Her father is in hospital at present…”

  Caroline knew that the reason the CIA did stupid things was not because it employed inherently stupid people; to the contrary, some of the best minds she had ever encountered had been working in ‘intelligence’. No, the problem was that the CIA worked in silos, nobody ever talked to anybody else, and everybody tended to be focused on their own sphere of interest, their own personal responsibilities, project, or pet obsession. Whoever was running the ‘Alexandria sting’ had been uninterested in the consequences, foreseen and unforeseeable of his operation to anybody else in the Company. Tunnel vision never helped the planning process; invariably it ruled out a rational assessment of the operational risks.

  And Billy the Kid, the man whose real name was supposedly Kurt Mikkelsen, would have known this and would be, at this very minute, exploiting it.

  Caroline looked back to Richard Helms.

  “I still don’t understand what I’m doing here?”

  “Clara Schouten is alive. We don’t know why. Mikkelsen clearly took her to the Georgetown Pike to kill her, specifically, to dump her body right next to Langley. But he let her go.”

  Caroline looked around for a chair.

  She was exhausted.

  The woman called Jeanne pursed her lips in thought.

  “You’ve seen Billy the Kid’s file?” She inquired, clearly under the impression Caro was a lot better informed than she actually was.

  “No,” Caro said, shaking her head. She looked to Richard Helms. “All I’ve seen is what the Director allowed me to read prior to interviewing Rachel Piotrowska-French, I have no idea if I have seen Kurt Mikkelsen’s file…”

  That was when Caro cottoned on.

  “Oh, my God, it’s not just that this poor Clara woman is still alive, which you don’t give a shit about,” she spat with contempt, hurling an accusative look at Helms, “you’ve lost track of Rachel as well, haven’t you?”

  Chapter 33

  Thursday 9th February 1967

  Grand Harbour, Malta

  Despite all the assurances to the contrary, having half-anticipated being greeted by a detachment of Royal Marines and most likely, being taken into custody Contra Amiral Rene Leguay had been very nearly struck dumb when the Governor of Malta, Field Marshal Lord Hull and the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, Vice Admiral Sir Samuel Gresham had come on board the Jean Bart in all their ceremonial finery, smiling broadly.

  The stormy, grey seas of the previous week had turned to tranquil aquamarine blue as the fleet had finally straggled into Naples Bay, where the seventeen-thousand-ton Royal Fleet Auxiliary tanker Orangeleaf, and her guard ship, the Battle class destroyer HMS Dunkirk, were waiting.

  There had been a festive mood onboard the French ships the last couple of days as – having bade farewell to the Orangeleaf and the Dunkirk, both Gibraltar-bound - their three escorting Fletchers had shepherded them south, past the Aeolian Islands with Stromboli smoking on the western horizon and , eventually through the Straits of Messina, with Vesuvius, brooding threateningly in the fading light to the south west, down past Gozo at the northern extremity of the Maltese Archipelago, before the triumphal early-morning entrance to the Grand Harbour.

  The Clemenceau had passed through the breakwaters first, and been guided to a deep water anchorage in Kalkara Creek beneath the cliffs topped by the Doric columns of the Royal Naval Hospital at Bighi, the smaller ships had preceded the De Grasse and finally the Jean Bart while Dermot O’Reilly’s destroyers quartered the seas off the entrance to the finest natural harbour in the Central Mediterranean, suspicious, protective of their charges until at last they rested at their moorings beneath the ramparts and curtain walls of the mighty citadel of Valletta.

  Rene Leguay, walking stiffly, as hurriedly as he was able to welcome his distinguished visitors aboard the flagship, acutely conscious that the Jean Bart, still showing her recent battle damage, her paintwork knocked about by the heavy seas, and with her crew – no matter that he was proud of every man, woman and child on his ship – an outrageously motley assembly as they peered at the approaching barge from every available vantage point on the battleship’s starboard rails.

  A contingent of men from the Campbeltown had got the main gangway over the side amidships. Keith Moss, the quietly spoken, extremely able navigator and watchkeeper Captain O’Reilly had loaned him – in what seemed like another lifetime back in Villefranche-sur-Mer – had rung down ‘finished with main engines’, and was patiently coaching a pair of cack-handed makeshift French seamen in the small matter of which flags to run up the mast to honour their guests.

  Nothing had so deeply impressed Rene Leguay as the unfussy confident professionalism of the Royal Navy men aboard his ship.

  “I hope somebody told Serge Benois to get his arse in gear?” He demanded with forced gruffness, as he stepped, painfully, off the bottom rung of the angled steps leading down to the quarterdeck of the leviathan.

  “Serge is on his way,” Aurélie Faure hissed. After all they had been through, it was ridiculous that her Admiral was panicking – very clearly, he was panicking - over the visit of a few British dignitaries!

  Both she and Rene Leguay relaxed a little when they spied Dmitry Kolokoltsev sitting – well-wrapped in blankets with a sick bay atten
dant close at hand - near the gangway. Somebody had found the Russian a battered French Navy cap.

  Leguay sighed with immense relief when he heard a bosun’s pipe sounding. That would be their English friends who had organised that!

  A dozen Royal Navy men came smartly to attention as the pipe trilled.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,” Serge Benois, Leguay’s second-in-command muttered breathlessly as he joined the reception party, still tucking in his grubby shirt. “So much for us all being arrested, Mon Amiral,” he observed chuckling ruefully.

  “We may still be arrested, my friend,” Rene Leguay warned him. “The day is still young.”

  “Either that,” Aurélie observed, suddenly less than sanguine, spying the photographers in the boat nearing the gangway, and the horde of other people in the two launches just casting off from the quayside, “or we are soon to be movie stars!”

  “Voila,” Dmitry Kolokoltsev whispered, contemplating rising to his feet, and instantly thinking better of it, “I think we are all about to become Free Frenchmen, and women,” he grimaced at Aurélie.

  “I have always been a free Frenchwoman,” she murmured.

  “But now you don’t have to pretend any more, mon amour,” Rene Leguay declared very nearly under his breath, doing his best to adopt a vaguely military bearing as he anticipated the appearance of the heads of the highest-ranking member of the British boarding party to appear above the level of the deck.

  A handful of seconds later and he was swapping salutes and shaking hands.

  Lord Hull, the Governor General spoke excellent, albeit schoolboy, French.

  Soon, the quarterdeck teemed with photographers and became a minefield of trailing TV and radio cables. Things got a little confused for a while. Everybody wanted to shake the Governor’s and the British Admiral’s hands.

  “Might I suggest we continue below, Admiral Leguay?” Sir Samuel Gresham called.

  A large table had been manhandled into Rene Leguay’s stateroom because he had been convinced that there was going to be some kind of formal surrender ceremony. Soon, Leguay, Aurélie, Serge Benois, Keith Moss – the latter looking sheepish and a little awed to be in the company of the C-in-C Mediterranean Fleet – to him God’s direct representative on planet earth – Lord Hull’s aide-de-camp and Sam Gresham’s flag lieutenant, were alone in the sudden quietness.

  “We ought to sort out the ground rules, I suppose?” Lord Hull suggested affably. “But perhaps, if we all sit down, things will be a little more relaxed, what?”

  “We have English tea, a peace offering from Captain O’Reilly, My Lord,” Aurélie Faure said, her courage evaporating.

  “That would be marvellous, dear lady,” the Governor of Malta smiled.

  Aurélie waved at the door and heard movement in the passageway. One of HMS Campbeltown’s Royal Marines and a young woman brought in trays.

  “We only have powdered milk,” Aurélie apologised, shame-faced, remembering how the English took their tea.

  Samuel Gresham, the C-in-C Mediterranean Fleet, chuckled with such low-pitched enthusiasm, that it was a surprise to the others that nothing seemed to vibrate in sympathy.

  “This, I think, sir,” he prefaced for the Governor’s benefit, “is the young lady who convinced Dermot O’Reilly and Henry Leach not to just sink these fine ships we have just welcomed into port today!”

  Lord Hull beamed paternally at the diminutive figure still standing, a little embarrassed by all the eyes focused on her, between Rene Leguay and Serge Benois.

  “I was indisposed at the time,” Leguay said, by way of explanation.

  Everybody sat, contemplating their ‘tea’ with mutual suspicion.

  Still, it was the thought that counted.

  “Let us not beat about the bush, Admiral Leguay,” Lord Hull announced, taking charge of the meeting. “My Government has decided that it will treat you – everybody on your ships – as Free French allies, and that your ships will remain under French command, albeit for the moment reliant on the resources of the Mediterranean Fleet and the Admiralty Dockyards of Malta for their re-supply and mechanical repair and upkeep. I know that many women and children, and numerous male civilians sought sanctuary on your ships. All persons who wish to come ashore may do so without let or hindrance, there to continue their lives as they wish with the proviso that they undertake not to aide our enemies, namely the Front Internationale or any factions loyal to them, or to promote the interests of the Soviet Union in the Mediterranean theatre of operations. Is that acceptable to you Contra Amiral Leguay?”

  Aurélie nodded unconsciously.

  Rene Leguay grinned, glanced to her.

  “That is settled, then,” he sighed. He stood up and stiffly, extended his right hand towards Lord Hull.

  The two men shook on the contract.

  “Good. Sir Samuel’s people will want to crawl all over your ships, and I imagine it will be a while before we sort out which ship needs whatever, and before we can free up dockyard time and resources to attend to all your squadron’s needs. In the meantime, any of your people who wish to go ashore may so do, with immediate effect although I suggest not everybody lands at once!”

  Courtesy of the Royal Navy crate upon crate of Maltese-brewed beer was sent on board the Jean Bart and the Clemenceau that evening, just to seal the deal.

  After dark, Aurélie found her Admiral alone on the bridge wing gazing at the lights on the ramparts of Valletta. Earlier, she had seen Dmitry Kolokoltsev safely onto one of the lighters taking the battleship’s sick and wounded across the water to the landing dock below the cliffs, where, one by one, stretchers were loaded into the lift carrying them to the hospital on the cliff top overlooking the harbour.

  “I think Dmitry was upset to miss the party,” she confided to the man as she joined him.

  She took his hand and he turned.

  Practically a head taller he looked down into her face.

  Rene Leguay was momentarily lost for words.

  He stood on the deck of a great ship, which he commanded, safe in a harbour among friends; and feeling like he was eighteen all over again. It was as if the last four years had been a bad dream, leavened only by the accident of crossing paths with the woman whose brown eyes seemed to heal all his woes.

  “I must make one thing absolutely clear, Mademoiselle Faure,” he said with every last ounce of mock severity he could gather, trying not to grin like an idiot.

  “And what would that be, Mon Cher?” She asked, the lights around the Grand Harbour twinkling in her eyes.

  “I have no intention of sleeping with you until we are man and wife,” he said. He had never been one to sweet talk the ladies, he was no gallant preux chevalier. So, since being true to his own conscience had worked quite well recently, it seemed sensible to carry on in the same vein.

  “Oh,” she smiled. On tip toes, she kissed his chin and when he lowered his face, his mouth. She patted his chest above his heart. “Your wounds are still not healed. I would not like to be the death of you, mon cher.”

  “It is agreed?”

  “Yes,” she said, tears welling in her brown eyes as she buried her face in his chest. “But please…let us not wait too long.”

  Chapter 34

  Thursday 9th February 1967

  Philip Burton Federal Building, San Francisco

  When Associate Director of the FBI Clyde Tolson had flown back to Washington three weeks ago, supposedly to ‘brief’ his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, he had handed the Billy the Kid investigation over to forty-year-old James B. Adams, the recently appointed Assistant Special Agent in charge of San Francisco.

  In mid-January, Adams had been under the impression that Tolson would probably be back, possibly within a week or so. However, not only had the number two man at the Bureau not returned, a couple of long-distance telephone terse conversations apart, Adams had been left almost completely to his own devices. Almost completely because in the FBI there was always somebody looking over you
r shoulder and attempting to beg, borrow or just plain steal, a part of a big case because, not to put too fine a point on it, that was how a man – there were not a lot of women in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI other than in the typing pool – got ahead, got noticed, and made a name for himself.

  James Adams was, by now, so familiar with former Special Agent Dwight David Christie’s personnel ‘jacket’, he had developed a sneaking, never to be spoken, grim admiration for the way the man sitting in front of him had ‘played the game’ during his, in retrospect, more than middlingly brilliant career in the Bureau. Christie had made sure he was close to the people who mattered, that he got his share – and more - of the kudos when things went well, and he had an uncanny knack of not having, or adroitly removing, his fingerprints on anything that did not.

  Go well, that was.

  Christie had earned a reputation for good, solid investigative work, for sticking to the book and making damned sure nobody wrote it up when he went ‘off-piste’ and did his own thing. People who worked with him regarded him as a natural detective, a loner who had mastered the art of team work, and, more importantly demonstrated positively savant gifts when it came to navigating the Bureau’s Byzantine red tape. Out on the West Coast, far enough away from the stultifying stasis of J. Edgar Hoover’s aging dead hand in DC, practically every man who had ever worked with, or for, Dwight Christie had said he was a ‘regular guy’, a ‘great boss’ and a ‘real friend’, who ‘always squared away the paperwork!’ In the FBI there could be few greater accolades than this last compliment.

  Right up to the moment he hired a Mafia hit man to murder his closest buddies in the San Francisco Office, the guy had been a model G-man…

  “I don’t get it, Christie,” Adams admitted, swivelling in his chair to face the other man. The two of them were of an age, by rights ought to have had a lot in common and they were – in terms of their FBI careers – patently, both very good at their jobs. “The last thing you did before you went bad – openly bad, that is – was to make sure that the young woman you were holding at the safe house on Telegraph Avenue, was safe at her place in Oakland?”