by James Philip
Dwight Christie did not know where this was going; however, it was good not to be locked up in an eight by five windowless cell in the basement of the Bureau’s Oakland Office.
That said, the last week or so they had turned the light off at night which told him that Clyde Tolson had not yet returned from DC. Agents tended to remember they were human beings when the big bosses were not around. They had given him the daily papers to read; heck, that was entertaining lately! It did not surprise him that the President was a crook, that after all, had been his underlying assumption about them all - from FDR through Truman, Ike, JFK and LBJ’s - there was nothing different or out of the ordinary about Nixon, he had been a two-timing SOB back in his days as Eisenhower’s sidekick, the guy was hardly going to change his spots when he got the top job!
“Darlene Lefebre,” he recollected. “Nice kid, a bit mixed up. What happened to her?”
“She married a school teacher and these days they live on an old boat moored up off Sausalito with their kids, latest I heard she’d just had a third baby. Her married name is Sullivan.”
Dwight Christie arched an eyebrow in honest curiosity.
“Yeah,” the other man nodded. “She married Miranda Sullivan’s brother, Gregory.”
“Good for her!”
James Adams had been tempted to ‘park’ Christie. The man had been at Quantico two years before Clyde Tolson sprang him. If, as he suspected, that even the guys at Quantico had failed to clean him out in all that time, maybe, just maybe, the guy really was a genuine closed book.
The trouble was that every now and then, talking to him, Adams got the oddest feeling…
So, now he was trying something new.
Normally, Dwight Christie was cuffed when he was out of his cell. Not today. He had been issued with a new suit, and allowed to wash and shave with warm water for the last week. Not to soften him up; men like him were impervious to tricks of that sort. Simply, as an act of, well, human kindness, man to man because Adams was in a position to do his prisoner good turns, if for no other reason than it made him feel better about himself.
“You’d never have been caught down in Texas if you hadn’t risked taking that girl to a hospital?” He went on, trawling cautiously through his man’s back story.
“She’d been through Hell. She’d have died, it wasn’t any kind of choice,” Christie explained dully.
“And you did your best to defend the women at Wister Park, too?” That was the thing about Christie, he was not evil.
Bad, perhaps but certainly not evil.
He had done good, brave things even when he was on the run. There was no reason to doubt that he actually felt bad about beating up on a fellow agent that time he had escaped from the Bureau in Philadelphia back in sixty-four. The contradictions refused to add up, the real man hiding behind his eyes was always elusive.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t make a very good job of it,” Dwight Christie confessed.
James B. Adams sat back in his chair. Behind him the ninth-floor window opened onto the hazy vista of San Francisco Bay and in the middle distance the great grey liner, the USS United States.
“I don’t get it,” he admitted.
“About what?”
“You. You work for the Reds but you still keep trying to do the right thing,” the FBI man shrugged, “even though it gets you caught, or bust up?”
“Put it down to a character flaw.”
Adams thought about this.
“I was a Democrat member of the Texas House of Representatives back in the day,” he informed the prisoner. “I trained to be an attorney at Baylor University Law School. I played football at Baylor. All that was before I joined the Bureau in July 1951, of course.”
Dwight Christie still had no idea where this was going. However, he was curious and it was not as if he had anywhere else that he needed to be.
“Were you in the Second War?”
The other man nodded.
“Yeah. Not as a GI, although I did the basic training. That was pretty rough!” Adams eyed Christie thoughtfully. “I speak Japanese. Used to, anyway. I was a translator. Mostly behind a desk, but sometimes face-to-face.” He picked up the phone on his desk. “Hi, we could do with coffee in here. Yeah… That would be good, thank you.”
He returned his attention to Dwight Christie, jerking a thumb over his shoulder to the liner moored off Alameda.
The silhouette of the huge grey ship with her two massive, distinctive round smoke stacks suggested power and forward motion even when she was riding on her chains in harbour. The giant funnels were only partly for show, down in her bowels the liner had four Westinghouse double-reaction turbines powered by eight Babcock and Wilcox boilers, generating upwards of two-hundred-and-forty thousand shaft horsepower. The excess smoke and heat from a machinery set like that had to go somewhere!
“They say the Russians are coming to the party. Maybe the new guys in charge with thump the table like Khrushchev did a few years back? What goes around, comes around, right?”
Dwight Christie knew all that was way beyond Adams’s pay grade, therefore it had to be smoke and mirrors, look at this hand while I smack you in the chops with the other one. Except, something told him that his interrogator was not that dumb. He tested the theory.
“The last time I was in the loop,” he grunted, staring past Adams’s shoulder across the bay at the USS United States, “and still getting to read the personnel circulars headquarters sent out, you were in Washington State, Seattle, right?”
“I was out of town when the bombs hit. After that I was posted to Minneapolis.”
“What about your family?”
James Adam’s face darkened.
“They weren’t so lucky.”
“That’s bad. Sorry, none of my business…”
“I’ve since re-married. We have a son, James junior. He was born in Fresno shortly after I was transferred down here.”
“Minneapolis must have been tough?”
Adams half-smiled.
“Carrie-Ann and me, we reckoned we had a duty to see things through. We were out of town on New Year’s Eve when the bomb went off in St Paul, staying with an old football buddy of mine from Baylor. Crazy really, he has this summer place – had, anyways, it got burned down by raiders, or deserters, same thing, in the war – outside of St Cloud. I guess we were eighty, ninety miles away from the bomb in St Paul. Jeez, it lit up the night for a split second like somebody just turned on the noonday summer sun at midnight. Our place in Minneapolis was undamaged, weird that, all the houses nearby had busted windows...”
“You family still in Fresno?”
“No, we’re renting this place at Berkeley nowadays,” Adams replied. “Carrie-Ann’s hoping to get a teaching job at the college. Night school, something like that. She’s an English major, and speaks Dutch and German like a native.” He paused, grinned. “What else do you want to ask me?”
Christie blinked, momentarily his confusion must have touched his eyes.
“People have been asking you questions for the last two years,” Adams said. “That must have got old a while back now?”
The former Special Agent said nothing.
“You and me,” Adams went on, amiably, “are the same – okay not in all things or in all ways – but we’re both always trying to figure out what really goes on beneath the surface. Why things happen the way they do. Tell me I’m wrong?”
Dwight Christie shrugged.
“The killings out West have stopped, haven’t they?” he asked.
Adams nodded.
“What do you think that means?” Christie pressed.
“I don’t know.”
“But the number with the rifle bothers you, doesn’t it?”
Adams hesitated: “Yes,” he conceded.
Kurt Mikkelsen had not spent several days in San Antonio – probably out in the desert, or one of the valleys up country - experimenting with, and intimately familiarising himself with the Remington Ar
ms Model 700, US Army designation M24 .30-06 hunting – slash – sniper rifle just for the Hell of it. And yet, leaving that gun in the house where he had raped, tortured and eventually murdered the daughter, and heiress of one of the richest men in Texas, had made no sense at all unless he already had another identical weapon waiting for him somewhere else…
“Me, too,” Christie concurred sympathetically. “He might well have killed several people since he left San Antonio, of course? I assume the Bureau is checking all unattributed killings in the state?”
Adams nodded.
“Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and California. We’re also monitoring missing persons reports. We’ve drawn a blank, so far. It takes a long time for all the reports to get back to HQ, and then they need to be sent out to Field Offices.” He grimaced, shook his head. “The same way they always used to be back in the good old days…”
“The Pony Express,” Dwight Christie sneered; although not at Adams and the other man knew as much.
The bureaucracy of the FBI still operated at pre-Second War speeds, eschewing any of the new – baffling to the Director – modes of electronic communication. Telegrams still flew hither and thither; mostly everything proceeded at the pace of the Mail unless somebody had the gumption to pick up a phone and risk the ire of his boss by incurring the cost of a long-distance telephone call. To be fair, things were changing – probably because the Hoover-Tolson axis was losing its grip – although not fast enough.
“You got CIA liaison on this one?” Dwight Christie asked, out of curiosity.
“Yeah, sort of. No way to tell if it’s worth anything.”
“That figures. But they still let you talk to Rachel Piotrowska?”
A rhetorical question…
James Adams hesitated, decided he needed to gamble because he had to know if he had a card in the game or if, as he feared, he was already holding a busted flush.
“Yeah, the Angel of Death…”
“What did you say?” Dwight Christie almost lurched to his feet, as if stung by a hornet.
“The Angel of Death,” James Adams remarked. “That’s what the CIA’s Office of Security calls the lady. Why? Is it important?”
Adams wondered how much of the other man’s sudden agitation was real; some of it, for sure.
“What happened to her? Where is she now?” Christie demanded.
“I don’t know. Nobody knows. She was called to DC but afterwards they think she got off the plane bringing the British delegation from DC to the United Nations summit on the USS United States at Grand Forks. It had technical problems had had to divert to Nebraska …”
“Did they actually find anything wrong with the aircraft?”
Adams frowned. “I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Dwight Christie comforted him. “It doesn’t matter.”
The FBI man tried not to reveal his excitement.
Somehow, some way, he had punched Christie’s button; that magical sweet, or soft spot – depending upon how you saw these things – more by accident than design. The man could retreat into his shell any moment if he made a bad move.
Adams said nothing, that was safest.
“I don’t think Kurt Mikkelsen’s gone rogue, I think somebody brought him in from the cold to ‘tidy house’,” Dwight Christie declared, a little breathlessly. “They just didn’t reckon on the Operation Maelstrom story breaking, especially at the same time as the United Nations thing was happening. By now, Mikkelsen will have figured out that his mission is busted. He’s not worried about us, the Agency or the Bureau, his mission is busted and he thinks he has been betrayed. You, or me, if we were in his place would do a fade, do a disappearing act. Not him. Not Billy the Kid; he’s in hunter-killer mode.”
“Is he working with the Piotrowska woman?” James Adams asked, if only because it seemed like the obvious question to ask.
“No, no, think about it, Mister Adams. Think about it!”
“I am,” the other man rasped. Then, he realised he had been asking all the wrong questions. It hit him between the eyes and briefly, he was a little dazed.
The enemy within…
And before he could open his mouth Christie was walking him through his own thoughts and fears.
“He butchered that woman in Texas to metaphorically gut the Resistance, well, what’s left of it in the South. There will be other targets in California, most likely but to Kurt Mikkelsen the enemy within isn’t out in the boondocks, its back in DC, at Langley and wherever that old faggot Hoover hangs out these days.”
The trouble was that every time James Adams thought he understood he discovered that he did not. He shut his eyes, tried to order the sum of his thoughts.
“Okay,” he sighed. “Okay,” trying to walk, not run through the field of ideas jostling like ripe stalks of wheat in the field as he marched forward, “Mikkelsen had to have had an accomplice on the West Coast. Maybe, even in the Bay Area, or down Los Angeles way; whatever, nobody knew where the United Nations event was going to be held until the last few weeks and we have to assume this thing was planned months ago. Would there be another ‘partner’ waiting for him in DC?”
“I doubt it,” Dwight Christie shrugged. “The whole thing with the gun is bizarre…unless the gun was never his idea…”
Adams hesitated, hating what he was thinking.
“Where does the Angel of Death fit in?”
Dwight Christie chuckled unfunnily.
“You need to be looking at files you’re not authorised to see, my friend.”
The idea horrified James Adams: “Why would I do that?”
“You played college football at Baylor. So, you know you don’t want to get blind-sided by a three-hundred-pound line-backer.”
“Very funny!”
Instead of switching off in response to Adam’s flash of irritation, Christie seemed re-energised.
“Look, think about it. The Company has its Angel of Death; why wouldn’t the Bureau have another, one it identified before the October War but allowed to remain active at Los Alamos and in the experimental reactor program at Hanford, just in case it needed to pull a Soviet A-bomb spy out of the hat, to take the heat off J. Edgar and his boys if anybody discovered they were part of the problem, not the solution…”
“Yeah, well,” Adams complained sourly, thinking the interview was effectively, over, “you can cut the Commie spiel…”
Dwight Christie was viewing him with a mixture of sympathy and…triumph. As if he had just won a private bet, or was in the middle of an absorbing game of Chess, declared: ‘CHECK’ out of the blue.
“Her name was,” he said, smiling smugly, “and probably still is, unless she’s gone to the electric chair yet; Karen Mathilde Czerniawska, the daughter of a Hungarian physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project with Oppenheimer.”
James Adams stared at the former FBI man like he was threatening him with a meat cleaver.
For his part, Christie was smiling now like a cat that had just swallowed a mouse.
“Files. I read files. I remember everything. Sometimes, I make connections that you real special agents don’t, and never will because you don’t think ‘crooked’ enough.”
Adams could live with that, he let the other man go on, uninterrupted.
Christie fell silent when a woman brought in a tray bearing two cups of coffee and a bowl of sugar cubes. She scurried out and the former Special Agent dropped two of the cubes into his cup, as if there was nothing at all odd about his surroundings, or his situation.
“You see,” he continued, perhaps suspecting that James Adams’s silence had a lot to do with his not wanting to risk breaking what he, presumably, thought was some kind of ‘spell’. “Some jerk back in DC mistakenly added her name to a file list sent out to State Field Offices. That doesn’t mean a mess of beans, obviously. Not of itself, but once you know a file designator and identify who owns, or originated it,” Christie explained casually, “getting hold of it, or persuading
somebody to have sight of it, and gossip about it at a bar is a lot easier than you’d imagine. Like I said, I’m lucky, I don’t forget stuff. Show me a file and something in my head goes ‘click’ and it’s all there, stored away for future reference. Photographic memory, although only ever in black and white, nobody’s ever figured that out.”
James Adams was reeling.
Karen Mathilde Czerniawska was among the twelve lead defendants at the forthcoming War Crimes Tribunal in Minneapolis, charged with crimes against humanity and genocide. Herself horribly scarred in the Sammamish strike which had wiped out Adams’s own family, it was suspected that she had personally armed the Las Vegas, Manhattan and the Philadelphia nukes on New Year’s Eve 1965, and actively facilitated the arming of all the other bombs, the ghastly harbingers of the War in the Midwest.
And now Dwight Christie, who had been in a maximum-security jail under round-the-clock surveillance since the autumn of 1964, was telling James Adams things he could not possibly know…
“She’s J. Edgar’s trophy war criminal. She belongs to him. Even though it was Army Intelligence who tracked her down, she’s the FBI’s shield against the accusation it was asleep on at the wheel on 31st December 1965. And,” Dwight Christie grinned, spreading his arms wide, “we both know that even though the FBI is up to its neck in its own version of Operation Maelstrom – which is why there are never anywhere near enough agents actually investigating crime – it never talked to the Company about people like Czerniawska. I don’t know it for a fact but the reason, I’d speculate, that the War Crimes trials haven’t started yet, even though the Administration will have lit a fire under the Department of Justice’s arse – if only to distract attention from its own problems – is that getting the CIA and the FBI’s files ‘together’ to build coherent prosecution cases against people like the Czerniawska woman, is like trying to get blood out of a stone. Rachel Piotrowska was in DC for several months in 1961; she made two contacts – maybe three but that third report was ambiguous – with Czerniawska. A ‘brush contact’, probably to pass some kind of message or to receive intelligence from her, and they met at a house in Georgetown one afternoon…”