Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  Then Alan was trailing after the real players, barely having an opportunity to take in his surroundings.

  Sequoyah Country Club?

  Didn’t Miranda Sullivan’s parents own the place?

  Yes, of course they did…

  Protocol satisfied Alan shrank seamlessly into the background while his principals were wheeled in to meet the Commander-in-Chief. Soon, he and a US Navy four-ringer twice his age were chatting affably about their respective spells in the Mediterranean, and less professionally fulfilling, in DC…

  Margaret Thatcher was a little shocked to find Richard Nixon haggard, round-shouldered, old-looking. He was staring sightlessly out of the windows of the club house, gazing into the distance down the length of the eighteenth hole.

  She did not recognise the man beside him.

  “Why, hello, Gordon,” Tom Harding-Grayson chirped, approaching the stranger like he was a long-lost friend. “What on earth have you been doing with yourself lately?”

  The President seemed to rouse himself.

  “This is Gordon Gray,” he said, introducing the middle-aged man who was torn between grinning at the Prime Minister’s Foreign Secretary, and solemnly greeting the leader of his country’s – despite their many differences – closest global ally. “Kissinger decided that he could no longer give his all to his role in the Administration,” the President said morosely, “and that now would be a good time to return to academic life. Gordon has stepped into his shoes as my National Security Advisor.”

  Margaret Thatcher detected more than a little ongoing existential dissonance.

  With a Herculean effort she contained her curiosity.

  “Several others have not made the trip to California,” the President went on, sombrely. “As you know, George Bush, Senator Bush’s boy, has stepped in as our Ambassador to the United Nations. Oh, and Ron Ziegler has stepped down as White House Press Secretary…”

  The British Prime Minister was momentarily stunned.

  Just before the October War, she had been a shocked bystander – a relatively lowly parliamentary undersecretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance at the time of Harald Macmillan’s famous ‘night of the long knives’, when Supermac had ruthlessly culled a third of his Cabinet one day in July 1962. But that had been a long overdue exercise in cutting out dead wood; right now, she was suddenly suspecting she was sensing the reverberations of some kind of dreadful schism inside the US Administration.

  If British newspapers had published the sort of scurrilous gossip, and leftist-inspired anti-government propaganda the White House had been subjected to in the last few days, she would have damned them to do their worst and carried on as normal. One simply could not be blown from one beam to another by passing storms in the night, or entertain, for a second all this nonsensical conspiracy theory gone mad stuff about a Gestapo state run by the CIA!

  While it was entirely credible that individual officers in that organisation, and in the FBI may have been over-enthusiastic in the performance of their duty – goodness, they had had their troubles with MI5 and MI6 in Britain since the Second War - and one had to recognise that there were always bad eggs in any walk of life, she really had not taken all the hyperbole in the American newspapers that seriously. As for the TV coverage of the alleged scandal, well, she had better things to do than dwell on that sort of thing!

  Moreover, nobody around her had got very excited about it. Admittedly, Tom Harding-Grayson was not one to go overboard about any sort of scandal, and Roy Jenkins had wanted to ‘wait and see’ what developed.

  Pat Harding-Grayson had observed: ‘This is exactly the sort of thing that dreadful man Hoover has got away with ever since the Second War. The American people put up with all that McCarthy malarkey in the 1950s without saying boo to a goose. They’ve just had a civil war, for goodness sake. Of course, their government is going to be paranoid about getting caught out like that another time!’

  There was a tacit agreement within the party that there was at least an even chance that the whole thing would probably turn out to be a storm in a tea cup…

  Except, right now, that was not the message she was getting.

  Fifty-six-year-old Gordon Gray was no stranger to government service, having served under Democrat Harry S. Truman and Republican Dwight Eisenhower. However, his recall two days ago had come as something of a surprise to him.

  Born to a wealthy Baltimore family – his father, uncle and his brother had all been, in turn Presidents and Chairmen of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company – he had obtained his law degree at Yale in 1933. He rose to the rank of captain in the US Army during the Second War, served as Secretary of the Army between 1949 and 1950, and later as Director of the Psychological Strategy Board responsible for coordinating ‘psychological operations’. A former President of the University of North Carolina, Eisenhower had appointed him to the Atomic Energy Commission, and then to lead the Office of Defence Mobilisation before making him his US National Security Advisor in 1959.

  His were a safe pair of hands.

  And now, a little over six years later her was back in his old job and he could tell that Tom Harding-Grayson, a lot less spry for all that he was infinitely more dangerous these days, had to be viewing his return as the unmistakable signature of the Administration’s possible disintegration.

  Gordon Gray broke the ice.

  “The President has raised concerns with me about the direction of travel of Anglo-American policy regarding the Security Council…situation?”

  Richard Nixon seemed to stir out of his lethargy.

  “Yes,” he decided grimly.

  Chapter 39

  Friday 10th February 1967

  Commonwealth Hotel, Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington DC

  Professor Caroline Constantis-Zabriski had wasted no time packing her bags, getting a cab and booking into a hotel she had stayed at a couple of times last year. It was early evening by the time she went down to the bar and ordered a Bloody Mary.

  I am getting paranoid in my dotage!

  Nobody was following her.

  However, Rachel had suggested she hang around the bar for twenty minutes; just to see if there was anybody killing time she recognised.

  ‘I know a lot of people in DC!’

  ‘Not the sort of people I’m worried about.’

  She had a second drink, which did nothing to quieten her mind.

  Rachel Piotrowska had wanted to know about Clara Schouten and the killing at the office in Alexandria. It never occurred to Caro to lie, or to dissemble. Everything she was learning about Kurt Mikkelsen, and now the small, piecemeal insights Rachel had inadvertently betrayed were beginning to build profiles. None of which was ever going to make for good bedtime reading. Strangely, although she had never met Billy the Kid; she felt she understood his underlying psychosis better, many times better than she did that of the Angel of Death.

  Rachel’s psyche was multi-layered; it was almost as if there were different personalities, different Rachels, vying for control, each seeking self-expression. It was no mystery to Caro that the woman could sustain – for long periods, possibly indefinitely – a happy, stable marriage. In fact, she suspected that given the right relationship, assuming no adverse, or a bare minimum of negative external stimuli, she might actually be perfectly capable of living a normal life. As to whether that was what she wanted, or sought, that was a different question. The Rachel that she was dealing with was not that pacific, reconciled woman with a brutally dry sense of humour; to the contrary; the one she had met and conversed with, for over an hour in the increasingly humid, foggy bathroom of her CIA apartment in Georgetown, was a coolly driven psychopath.

  ‘You need to not be in DC,’ Rachel had told her.

  It had not been a suggestion, or any kind of advice; it was a statement along the lines of ‘get out while you can!’

  It was a thing that Caro planned to do first thing in the morning.

  Rachel had asked her why
Kurt Mikkelsen had not killed Clara Schouten. They both agreed that he had taken her to the woods off the Georgetown Pike to dump her lifeless, probably mutilated body close to the boundary of the CIA’s Langley complex.

  ‘Kurt was looking at me as if I wasn’t there,’ Clara had told Caro. ‘That was the really weird thing, he didn’t always look at me that way. Even when he was…violating me. I got the feeling the times he took me from behind…he was sort of, ashamed. When he hit me it was cold, very deliberate, so as to not, I don’t know, to damage me? I know that sounds strange. Except that one time he seemed to get angry. I shouldn’t have tried to get away. He really hurt me, that time. Later, I could tell he wasn’t proud of that. Apart from the first time he…violated me, he didn’t try to hurt me. He was rough the next day but not, I don’t know…sadistically?’

  Confusion…

  Caro had always known which buttons to press, and not to press, obviously, with Edwin Mertz; and figured out other criminal psychopaths in essentially similar ways. But none of that seemed applicable with Kurt Mikkelsen, and as for Rachel, well, she too, was a relatively closed book to her. She seemed to have the ability to shut Caro out at will, and none of the normal triggers worked.

  Caro could see that there was a deep psycho-sexual component to Mikkelsen’s behaviour, and conceivably, something causal, or at least, contributory buried deep in his war experiences. But he had been past childhood by then; not a brutalised teenage girl cut adrift in a nightmare like Rachel…

  “You should have told me you were booking out of the Company house, Ma’am.”

  Caro almost jumped out of her skin.

  She had been so buried in her thoughts that the world around her had gone silent, with all extraneous stimuli tuned out.

  “Erin?” She blurted over-loudly.

  Captain Erin Lambert, of the elite US Air Force Military Police ‘blue caps’, was out of uniform, slim and elegant in her off the peg dress beneath her open Camel-hair coat, wearing sensible shoes beneath legs concealed by thick blue tights against the winter cold.

  The younger woman smiled.

  They hugged.

  Belatedly, Caro realised she had missed something really important.

  “Did you follow me here from the apartment?”

  The military policewoman shook her head.

  “No. I got a report you’d moved out, and the number of the cab. I called up the company, they put a radio page to the driver and he rang in where he’d dropped you.”

  “Why you?” Caro asked pointedly.

  “Because you’d have told anybody else who turned up tonight to go to Hell, Colonel,” Erin Lambert shrugged. “I’m on assignment to the Internal Security Division at the Pentagon. I get to liaise a lot with CIA, FBI, and other offices you won’t ever get to hear about. As of a couple of hours ago, I’m on your case. And,” she pursed her lips philosophically, “my boss outranks you; so, even if you tell me to go to Hell, it ain’t going to happen.”

  Caro was thinking straight for the first time in twenty-four hours.

  Her friend was hefting a stylish black handbag just big enough – like Rachel’s - to accommodate a purse, the normal womanly compacts and cotton wool buds, and an automatic pistol.

  “ISD at the Pentagon?” Caro checked.

  Erin Lambert nodded.

  “Have you ever been involved in any of the,” the older woman caught herself, “bad stuff that’s been in the papers the last couple of days?”

  “No, Ma’am. That’s not what my office does. We look for real spies and chase down real security issues at Department of Defence bases. Everybody in the military signs up to being under the microscope; that’s how we all stay safe at night.” She half-smiled. “Well, mostly. And no, we don’t co-operate with any of that Operation Maelstrom…shit.”

  “What about now?”

  The younger woman had settled on a bar stool next to Caro.

  She signalled the barman.

  “Any chance of a coffee in this joint?”

  “Sure thing, lady.”

  Erin Lambert returned her full attention to her friend. The two women had grown very close last year when she was her bodyguard.

  “While you wear the uniform, the Air Force owns you, Ma’am…”

  “Cut that out, Erin!”

  “I’m on duty, Caro.”

  The older woman raised a hand to order a third Bloody Mary.

  “Sorry, she doesn’t need that,” Erin told the barman.

  “Erin!”

  “I’ve been ordered to not let you out of my sight until I’ve delivered you to your allocated married quarters at Offutt Air Force Base.”

  Caro stared at her in bewilderment.

  “I have your orders in my handbag. They were cut this afternoon. You are hereby attached – until further notice - to Strategic Air Command’s Operational Research Group as Officer Commanding the Office of Psychological Factors.”

  “You just made that up!”

  “Sorry. But yes, somebody else may have just made it up, not me. If I have to, I’ll cuff you, Caro. We fly out of Andrews Field at fourteen hundred hours local tomorrow.”

  Chapter 40

  Friday 10th February 1967

  4936 Thirtieth Place NW, Forest Hills Washington DC

  There was only the one man who could disturb J. Edgar Hoover’s evening, especially at a few minutes before midnight after the Director had already retired to bed. Over the last quarter-of-a-century there had been, in theory, one or two others for whom he would have deigned to rise – President Eisenhower, or FDR, perhaps although not Truman, and certainly not that young upstart JFK – but now there was only one man permitted to call him at any time of day, and it was not the President, Richard Milhous Nixon, it was Clyde Anderson Tolson.

  “I’m sorry about this,” Hoover’s deputy apologised, getting to his feet as his best friend, mentor and long-time boss, entered with a face-wide scowl on his jowls and the tails of his dragon-motif silk dressing gown flapping in his wake. “If this could have waited for the morning…”

  “That’s okay, Clyde,” the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation growled. Anybody else he would have bawled out for five to ten minutes before he listened to a word they had to say; but that was not the kind of relationship he had had with Clyde Tolson for the last couple of decades. They had covered each other’s backs like brothers, blood brothers, everything they had achieved they had achieved together and although Hoover had always been the guy absolutely in charge, his partner’s recent illness had illustrated that – as he had feared – without him he was vulnerable, incomplete and his control over the great sprawling empire of the Bureau was in some way, critically undermined. “That’s okay, I know it has to be important. Whatever it is?”

  “Adams called me from San Francisco. He tried to get straight through to you…”

  Hoover’s scowl had morphed into a frown, now he scowled anew.

  “Did he?” He murmured menacingly.

  “But that’s not the thing, Chief.”

  “Okay,” what is?”

  “A few days ago, at his request I sent him several digests, and selected interview transcripts prepared by the people who had been processing that scumbag Christie at Quantico…”

  Hoover, who had slumped into an easy chair began to rise to his feet, spontaneously enraged by the mere mention of that…bastard’s name.

  Clyde Tolson, who had settled in a chair opposite his friend in the house’s old-fashioned, rather crowded and floridly furnished parlour began to rise also, except he had raised a hand to warn Hoover to try not to get too upset, over this, preliminary piece of information, at least.

  Nobody other than Hoover spent as much time at 4936 Thirtieth Place NW, as Clyde Tolson. His friend had moved into the house back in 1940, following the death of his mother. Therein lay another ghost in the Director’s past which Tolson, had adroitly managed and largely, successfully conspired to conceal down the years.

  Lately, th
e greying, still handsome Associate Director of the FBI, found himself thinking overlong about things buried deep in the past; as if wondering how many of their – his and Edgar’s - secrets would one day come to haunt them. Hopefully, it would not be until they were both dead and gone.

  John Edgar Hoover was supposedly one of three siblings, the son of parents of German-Swiss ancestry, born on New Year’s Day 1895. Although listed on the 1900 Census, as living at the family’s former address at 413 C Street SE, Hoover’s birth – of which there was to this day no official original or contemporaneous record…anywhere – had not been registered until a certificate was filed, in the wake of his mother’s death in 1938.

  It had always astonished Clyde Tolson that this ‘anomaly’, which would have been of enormous interest in any Bureau investigation, where identity was invariably crucial to ongoing inquiries, had never really been the subject of close public scrutiny. Hoover and his mother had always been very close. Although Tolson had not met the father until several years after his death, he had got the impression that Edgar and the old man had been, in some way, mutually estranged. In any event, after his passing in 1921, Edgar, then aged twenty-six, had moved back in with his mother in the house where he had been born and continued living there, even after he became the famous gang-busting Director of the FBI.

  In 1939, Hoover, by then a big man in DC, had had the house at 4936 Thirtieth Place NW, specially designed and built for him at a cost of $12,000 only after his mother’s death. It had been his hideaway ever since, where he lived in mostly blissful anonymity – or as anonymously as any man who was driven to and from his place of work in a gleaming limo – usually one similar to that in use by the changeable incumbent of the White House – every day. Out here in Forest Hills, Tolson knew that Hoover could relax, that to his neighbours and their children, he was anything but the ogre so many DC insiders assumed him to be. Heck, the Chief gave old folks rides to the local bus stops, and sometimes he stopped to talk to kids on the street…