by James Philip
Back in July 1964 maniacs had stormed the Embassy and murdered Lord Franks, his wife and practically the whole British diplomatic community in America while, to all appearances, the Philadelphia PD and the US Army, who were supposed to be protecting the Wister Park Compound, had looked on, reluctant to fire live ammunition into a rioting crowd. And then the news of the battles in the Persian Gulf had exploded across America; British and Commonwealth ships had been attacked by the US Navy, in retaliation the RAF had sunk the USS Kitty Hawk, by a few feet and tons, at the time the biggest warship in the world and savagely mauled the great ship’s escorting task force. Thousands of American Navy-men were dead; the two old allies were seemingly on the verge of nuking each other’s cities…and then Peter and Marija had bearded LBJ, then only hours into his brief, crisis-riven Presidency on the steps of the Philadelphia White House, and on nationwide, networked TV, implored Johnson to ‘give peace a chance.’
Most Americans had instantly fallen in love with Peter and Marija, particularly the little sparkling-eyed Maltese princess…
All Nicko had tried to do since his friends had departed was to carry on the good work, despite having been sent a deputy, the former Conservative politician Sir Arthur Soames; a grandee appointed to the Washington mission as a concession to his ill-health, possibly with a view to his gentle rehabilitation ahead of re-joining the political mainstream in a ministerial post in Margaret Thatcher’s government at some stage. Unfortunately, Soames, although a gentleman to the core, clearly thought he ought to be the Ambassador and often, seemed to regard Henderson as a usurper, and for reasons best known to himself, felt that a ‘much harder line’ needed to be taken with ‘the Americans’.
It did not help that Soames represented that contrary – flying in the face of all the evidence – faction within the FCO that honestly believed, God alone knew why – that the ‘Christopher Regime’ had been a disaster.
Sometimes, it occurred to Nicko Henderson that all the wrong people had got blown up on that night back in late October 1962!
The Ambassador settled in a deep chair opposite Rachel and viewed her with thoughtful wariness. Peter, Marija, Alan and Rosa Hannay had befriended Rachel. That went back to their time together on Malta, of course. Although, he did not know the lady very well, mostly by hearsay truth be told, he struggled with the notion that his friends could ever have been so friendly, or at ease, unafraid of the woman sitting in his office. There were fools who claimed this was because they had had no idea who, or what she was; wrongly in his estimation, because Peter and Marija had known exactly what Rachel was and what she was capable of, long before the Wister Park bloodbath. Peter Christopher had turned up at the hospital when the US Marine Corps was guarding Rachel like ‘Christ come to cleanse the Temple,’ according to more than one account…
“I heard that your number two, Sir Arthur, was out of town,” the woman said. “I don’t think he’d approve of me paying a house call.”
“No, possibly not.”
“He’s old school, Nicko. There are still a lot of people like him around, even now. You’d think the last four years had never happened.” She sobered. “Is it true you went with Anthony Eden to visit Hitler’s bunker in 1945?”
Henderson guffawed.
He had known enough spooks, brushed shoulders with countless of their kind down the years; he was not surprised that the woman probably knew a lot more about him than he ever would about her. That was the nature of the game.
Okay, Rachel wanted to shadow box for a while before she got down to business.
It cost him nothing to oblige her.
“Yes. When I came back from Cairo in 1944, Sir Anthony was kind enough to take me on as an assistant private secretary. When the war in Europe was over, Sir Anthony took me on a trip to Berlin. The whole city was in ruins, much as it is again now, I suppose. The Fuhrer Bunker was a dreadful mess, there were still clothes on the floor, the place had been ransacked by the Red Army. I think the ruins of the Chancellery left a deeper lasting impression on me; there were piles of Iron Crosses on the floor,” he paused, met Rachel’s stare unflinchingly, “but then you know what Berlin was like just after the war. For all I know you might have been one of the scarecrows I saw scavenging in the rubble when I was with Eden.”
“After the end of the war?” Rachel considered a moment. “I never needed to scavenge. The Yanks paid well for a skinny girl who didn’t cry.”
Henderson sighed, opened his mouth to speak, shut it again when there was a knock at the door.
Mary Henderson and the Ambassador’s daughter, grimacing shyly brought in a tea tray.
Rachel rose to her feet and hugged the other woman.
“My, you’ve grown up,” she smiled to Alexandra who must have shot up several inches since she had seen her last.
Rachel understood how hard it was for them not to stare at her. It had been so much easier to believe that she was a normal person when Marija and Rosa had been around; people had had plenty of time to fill them in on precisely what manner of evil, they had inadvertently tolerated in their midst in…the old days.
“I don’t bite,” she promised. “Whatever they’ve told you since I left.”
Soon she was alone again with Nicko Henderson.
“You are right to be afraid to inquire what I might ask of you, Nicko,” Rachel remarked, watching the man pour tea into a bone china cup.
He passed her the cup and saucer before dribbling milk from a small silver jug into his own, and splashing tea into it. He raised the cup to his lips, viewed Rachel over the rim.
“I was being facetious earlier, dear lady.”
“No,” she disagreed, pursing her lips. “I think you’re sitting in the hottest diplomatic seat in the world because Tom Harding-Grayson, bless his twisted little heart, thinks that you’re the cleverest man he knows. Either that, or you know some of those nasty little secrets from the good old days that he tries so hard to hide. And if you know any of those kinds of secrets, then well, you’re probably one of the shrewdest men left standing these days. So, no, I don’t think you were being facetious, dear man.”
“Oh, that’s a shame,” Henderson sighed, “in that case, you’d better put your cards on the table. Or do I need to drink poison first?”
Rachel smiled sweetly.
“Hemlock,” she suggested.
“On second thoughts, I’ll wait and hear what you have to say. If it’s all the same to you.”
Rachel hesitated, which was ridiculous. She knew what she had to say, how she was going to say it and why she could no longer freelance.
She needed Henderson’s help.
Yet she hesitated.
The reason the Prime Minister had not wanted the Ambassador in the mix in San Francisco was because James Angleton’s people were searching for ways to undermine and discredit him, just as assiduously as they had tried and singularly failed, to damage his predecessor. Except, unlike in the ‘Christopher case’, in Henderson’s case – a man with a twenty-year history in the Diplomatic Service – the CIA had a career ready-made to be falsely embellished, with hearsay and manufactured evidence inserted at strategic points, a narrative ready and waiting to be spun to take the heat off the Administration if the United Nations talks went as badly as people in the State Department anticipated.
Henderson had been President of the Oxford Union in his time at Hertford College; openly socialist in his youth, the member of a Fabian circle that included contemporaries like Sir Roy Jenkins, he had been a personal friend of the pre-war leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell and still was with Anthony Crosland, a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s original Unity Administration of the United Kingdom. Having survived childhood tuberculosis, he had been rejected by the armed forces in the Second War, serving as Assistant Private Secretary to both Sir Anthony Eden, and his successor as Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevan. In a varied and successful career, he had worked in Athens, Vienna and Santiago, Chile, as well as serving a stint in
Washington before the October War, at the time of which he had been Head of the Foreign Office’s Northern Department.
There was nothing remotely suspicious or untoward in Henderson’s diplomatic service; but that would not have stopped the CIA’s Office of Security warping innocent facts, or chance contacts into question marks, or more likely, falsifying and inventing ‘evidence’ to use against him…at need.
“You haven’t asked me why I’m not in California with the Prime Minister’s party?” She asked.
“Somebody tampered with the cockpit controls of Commonwealth One,” Henderson retorted quietly. “That was what I was told, anyway. In any event, it gave you an opportunity to do a flit.”
“Somebody?” Rachel murmured.
The Ambassador shrugged, put down his cup and saucer and swept the rebellious, a little overlong lock of hair off his brow,
“Possibly, a maintenance issue,” he reconsidered. “One tends to be overly suspicious about these things nowadays, especially when they are so conveniently timed. Who else knows you have returned to DC?”
“Only the people who followed me after I met Professor Caroline Constantis-Zabriski in Georgetown. CIA, FBI, I have no idea which. It could have been the Mob, or the Teamsters, for all I know. This country is a lot more messed up than it thinks it is, Nicko. And no, I don’t think I was followed here. They won’t know I’m here, or was here, until tomorrow. As you say, you can’t afford to employ Americans at the weekend.”
“Okay, but I’m still none the wiser, dear lady.”
“Sorry. Just so that you know, this isn’t one of Dick White’s little legacy wheezes. I saw him six months ago, before the cancer had hollowed him out. Just to say goodbye.”
“You’re working for Airey now?”
“Yes and no. This is more a personal sort of thing. I think I may have stumbled over something. Something big. A conspiracy, I suppose. Everything’s got a little mixed up because of The Post’s big scoop about Operation Maelstrom. I could have done without that, it has…”
“Muddied the waters?”
Rachel nodded.
“I think the CIA had, probably still have, people imbedded in what’s left of the so-called resistance. Whatever… They brought back a man I know from the old days – Kurt Mikkelsen - to,” she quirked a grimace, “disrupt the bad guys, which he’s done. Very successfully, actually. Except, not in the way it planned. That woman he murdered down in San Antonio, Marilyn de Witt, the heiress, I reckon she was working for the Company, embedded in the resistance, what was left of it. When her father died – he’s dying of cancer now – she’d have been perfectly placed to starve the Southern Resistance of funding, then people like Angleton would have rolled it up and flaunted the CIA’s success in the FBI’s face. I have no idea if Kurt knew what he was doing; or even if Angleton and his reptiles told him whose side that poor woman was on. Anyway, far from rolling up the resistance down in the South, I suspect the whole network – what’s left of it – will have gone underground now. But that’s somebody else’s problem…”
Nicko Henderson blanched at this.
A possibly innocent, patriotic citizen working for the Central Intelligence Agency had been murdered, literally hung out to dry, left to her fate, by her own Government and Rachel was shrugging it off as if it was some kind of tiresome, incidental detail!
The woman was viewing him thoughtfully.
“Don’t be so shocked, Nico,” she soothed. “Nixon’s the sort of man who appoints an operator like Richard Helms to run Langley. The White House was fine about Angleton feeding it dirt about its political opponents back around the time of the California Primary in the summer of 1964. It was before your time in America but if somebody hadn’t leaked all those nasty rumours about that crooked bond issue when Nelson Rockefeller was Governor of New York… Remember, the one John Mitchell wrote the false prospectus for? Maybe Nixon wouldn’t have polled well enough to even remain in contention? Who do you think told his campaign that the Reverend King was involved with a white woman? Angleton, Helms, all the others, Hoover too, I should imagine, were all pining for the good old days under Ike again by then. So, it’s not as if we are dealing with people who give a damn if an asset, here or there, has to be burned for the greater good of the Company, or the Bureau, or,” Rachel shrugged, “the Presidency. Marilyn de Witt was just collateral damage to these people. It’ll be budget setting time again soon: why would they roll up the Southern Resistance when its continued existence justifies year-on-year increases on CIA and FBI funding estimates? Set against that greater good, what’s the rape, torture and murder of a woman half-a-continent away?”
Henderson took a deep breath.
“Do you know any of this for a fact, Rachel?”
“Now that Dick White is gone, nobody knows the real ‘facts’ about the things I have done for,” Rachel quirked a wry smile, “my adopted country.”
The British Ambassador vented a sigh.
“The trouble is,” Rachel went on, “that Kurt’s gone rogue. I think he’s figured out he’s being used. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility, that he’s gone after the people he’s decided are the real ‘enemies within’.”
Nicko Henderson was parsing what he had been told.
He was still waiting to hear what any of this had to do with him.
Or his country.
“How did you get back to DC from Nebraska?” He asked, genuinely curious.
“Airey handed me the roll of greenbacks he keeps for emergencies. He’s an old softie at heart. I don’t think wanted me ‘bushwhacking’ innocent passers-by to survive.”
“Why wasn’t I warned you were coming here?”
“The Embassy? That wasn’t part of the plan. Kurt Mikkelsen isn’t the only one who has gone rogue, Nicko. But now I’ve spoken to Professor Constantis – you don’t need to know why that may turn out to have been very important, by the way – I’ve come to the conclusion that hiding is going to be counter-productive.”
“Why?”
“Because I intend to help you to do the Administration, the CIA, the FBI and whoever else is involved in this filthy business a huge favour. One day, people in this town will remember that, even if they’ll never say it in public. Not ever.”
Henderson was getting impatient.
“Don’t look so disapproving, Nicko,” Rachel comforted him. “In a wilderness of mirrors; what will the spider do? Suspend its operations, or will the weevil delay?”
This simply added to the Ambassador’s bewilderment.
Now the bloody woman was quoting T.S. Eliot at him!
“The problem is that I haven’t a snowflake’s chance in Hell of tracking down the man, Kurt Mikkelsen, I am hunting. Not before he’s killed again and again, leastways.”
This, Henderson concluded was not a conversation the woman would have conducted with Peter Christopher!
But then Nicko had never pretended he was that gallant, understandably honourably naïve knight errant hero; he was, despite all appearances to the contrary, a seasoned and very hard-nosed diplomat, who had had more than a passing acquaintance with the secret world in the last two decades.
“So, what’s the plan?”
“The man I plan to kill,” Rachel said unemotionally, “or be killed by, is known to the CIA as Billy the Kid. He is the most dangerous man I have ever met. We were once, briefly, partners. Shortly, he will know that I am in this city. And then I will become the hunted, not the hunter.”
“I repeat, what’s the plan, Rachel?”
“Simple, I make it very easy for him to find me.”
“That’s no plan at all!”
Rachel gave Henderson a disappointed look.
Men, why did one always have to draw them a diagram!
Chapter 46
Sunday 12th February 1967
Headquarters, 4th Royal Tanks Battle Group, Blaye
All things considered, twenty-five-year-old Royal Marines Lieutenant Jeremy John Durham ‘Paddy’
Ashdown, had had a very busy time of it since the world went stark staring, raving mad that night in late October 1962. He had been in Singapore at the time, where he had learned to speak Malay, he would claim in the mess because one day he was told – possibly apocryphally – that there was a single word in that language for ‘let’s take off our clothes and tell dirty stories!’ Subsequently, he had discovered he had an unsuspected natural flair for learning languages. In Borneo he had mastered Dayak, in the Mediterranean he flirted with Maltese, a baffling Semitic tongue descended from Siculo-Arabic and corrupted over the centuries by Sicilian and English, and since he had been in France, taken to colloquial French with the alacrity that a ‘real’ Royal Marine takes to canoeing!
His corps’ special forces had been members of the Special Boat Section when he joined it, these days it was a fully-fledged Squadron. This however, was probably the least significant of the countless changes he had witnessed in his still relatively short military career; but then they lived in strange and more than somewhat troubled times, and he was at heart, a very sensible, very professional soldier.