Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  Now, with Clermont-Ferrand burning from end to end and with English warplanes bombing as they pleased; nobody but a fool or a madman, could think that the Front Internationale was in control even here in its alleged capital!

  Agnès had carried on walking.

  All the energy, the last failing warmth of life, was draining from her with every, exhausted step.

  The ground beneath her feet was rising slowly.

  She felt as if she was treading on quicksand; hardly moving forward and everything was happening excruciatingly slowly. Her head was sticky, wet, and it was a long time before she realised it was not just the cold, sleeting snow. Blood had dripped down the left side of her face.

  She had no idea how long she had been stumbling through the trees, climbing ever higher.

  She thought she remembered falling, passing out.

  It had been daylight then, or was I hallucinating…

  Regaining consciousness, heaving herself to her feet; being violently sick but she might have imagined, dreamed that because she was so, desperately tired.

  She blinked up at the sky through the bare, wintery leaves of the forest. It was fully light, the sky leadenly overcast seemingly so low that she could almost reach up and touch the clouds.

  Breathless, she turned and looked back.

  There were too many trees: she could see nothing of the outskirts of the city which she guessed to be seven or eight kilometres distant.

  She knew she could go on no further.

  I have been walking around in circles…

  For how long?

  One day, or two…

  She slumped down onto the ground, her back against the bowl of a tree. She would have wallowed in her misery had it not been for her conscience. Five years ago, she had had a brilliant career, her membership of the Académie des Sciences was assured, one day she might even have become a latter-day Marie Curie, a hero of the Republique for altogether different reasons. She might have been, or rather, possibly become a woman that all young French girls might aspire to be. Not an actress, a society harlot, or the wife of a great man, no, but a leading woman of the Republique in her own, inimitable right.

  All those dreams were dead…

  Now she was a bag of bones freezing to death in a forest in the Auvergne, alone, hunted and ashamed to be alive. She was so cold she had stopped shivering, stopped feeling the pain wracking her emaciated frame.

  As she fell into the arms of sleep, Agnès heard footsteps, and lowered voices approaching along the path she had climbed a few minutes earlier.

  However, she thought no more of it because she was suddenly irresistibly weary.

  Far, far beyond caring.

  Chapter 60

  Wednesday 15th February 1967

  Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC

  For the third morning running Rachel had ordered a cab to pick her up outside the Embassy at 3100 Massachusetts Ave NW, asked the driver to drop her off ‘somewhere at the Foggy Bottom end of Constitution Avenue’, and walked, depending on where the cabby had actually dropped her off, down either 23rd Street or across the park to the Lincoln Memorial.

  Where she waited, and waited…for something to happen.

  Nothing had happened on Monday, or yesterday.

  The weather had been wet, windy and today it was bitterly cold but then, it was Washington in winter.

  Nicko Henderson’s words had been echoing in her head since the weekend.

  ‘This isn’t Malta and you are certainly not trapped in the middle of a siege like you were at Wister Park,’ he had observed when she refused to discuss why she had returned to Washington, and what, exactly, she had planned.

  In fact, the British Ambassador had got royally miffed with her after that.

  ‘I haven’t a clue what you and Dick White got up to in the old days,’ he readily confessed. ‘That was then, this is now and frankly, I don’t need people like you muddying the waters here in DC!’

  He had also told her that if he had known she was going to detach herself from the ‘United Nations Party’ and come back to haunt him, and that the Prime Minister had let it happen, presumably to ‘keep Airey happy’, he might very well have tendered his resignation.

  ‘I might still!’ He had added, heatedly.

  Rachel suspected Nicko was behind the cable she had received on Monday from her husband.

  She had arranged to speak to him via a scrambled transatlantic link yesterday afternoon.

  Dan was flying out to America tomorrow, initially spending at least a week in DC ‘finessing and generally charming fellows on Capitol Hill’ ahead of visiting aerospace facilities in Philadelphia, Houston and New Mexico, on the way to California where he was scheduled to stay at least ten days. It was a work, work, work trip but he ‘craved’ her company.

  The thinly veiled concern in her husband’s voice was with her every waking minute. Sentimentally, she wondered if something so ephemeral and unquantifiable as her feelings, her attachment to Dan could have wrought some kind of change in her. Nonetheless, she comforted herself with the recognition that she had needed to get off Commonwealth One. Had she disembarked in San Francisco she was convinced that the Locksmith would have unleashed the hounds upon her, and everybody would have been horribly embarrassed by the resulting media feeding frenzy. The only thing which really surprised her was that Angleton and his cronies at the Office of Security had not yet ‘outed her’ since she resurfaced in DC.

  That was not to say the nastier end of the Washington rumour-mill – the one that operated at the level of the publishers and editors of the big-circulation papers, the network TV chiefs, the old Kennedy mafia, infiltrated by those insufferable Boston Brahmins, and the real deal-makers on the Hill – was not already agog with the gossip about CIA and British assassins on the loose, and the near celebrity status of the mysterious wife of the famous RAF Air Marshal…

  It would have been unbearable had not Rachel’s world closed in around her; and had she not recognised that she had to get out of her bloodily gilded cage, if she was ever to start to breath freely again.

  Oddly, well, bizarrely, she had only really begun to understand what was going on when she had casually scared the living daylights out of Caroline Constantis.

  That was unforgivable…

  The woman she had imagined that she still was, would not have cared, or even thought about a little thing like that but then she knew now, incontrovertibly, that woman had died at Wister Park…

  Rachel had just not known it until now.

  Maybe, one day in an ideal world, she would lie down on the eminent professor’s couch and let her trawl through the ashes of her psychosis…

  Now there was a weird thought!

  That morning she sat on a bench overlooking the length of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool with the Memorial itself to her left as the cold, moist wind blew off the Potomac, ruffling her hair, and pinching her pale cheeks.

  She was so deep in her thoughts, oblivious to her immediate surroundings that the man walked right up to her without Rachel being aware of his presence.

  He stood over her, suspecting that she was in some kind of trance.

  He sighed loudly, breaking the spell.

  “He’s not going to risk a meeting at a place like this,” James Jesus Angleton remarked irritably as he slumped down on the bench as far as was physically possible, about two feet and a few inches, away from Rachel.

  The man had tried to make absolutely sure – seemingly to no avail – that she had seen him coming from a long way away; there were some people you never, ever surprised.

  “He’s probably watching us,” she retorted, tartly, unable to wholly overcome a listless, lifeless weariness. “Somebody in the Bureau, or the Company, maybe even in your own office, will have told him where I came yesterday and on Monday.”

  “Maybe, maybe,” the man grunted, not knowing what to make of the woman’s lassitude.

  Rachel glanced at the Associate Deputy Directo
r of Operations for Counter Intelligence. The Locksmith was looking old, like he was not sleeping too well these days. He had always been one of those angular men who wore suits as if he was a human coat-hanger.

  “The funny thing is that there probably are moles in the CIA,” she said, as if she was no more than floating a stray idea. “Just not mole’s working for the Russians. That’s the trouble with you ‘patriots’,” she went on, unable to stop herself sneering, “you can’t tell your brand of patriotism from the real thing.”

  James Angleton said nothing.

  He was too busy not getting angry.

  Rachel decided it was oddly piquant that the great American spymaster was terrified she was about to kill him. She was not armed; she had dumped the forty-five she had had when she picked the lock to Caroline Constantis’s apartment before she surrendered herself to the Embassy on Sunday. She did not have a blade, or knuckle-dusters, anything at all to attack Angleton, or anybody else who wished her ill except her handbag. Okay, so if it came to it, she knew how to, and was very proficient, hurting or killing with her bare hands, elbows, knees, feet, et al but somehow, she knew, she just knew, she could not do that. It took a particular mental attitude, adjustment, whatever, to deliberately, in cold-blood hurt or kill another human being and she simply did not have that animus in her soul. Not today. Perhaps, she never would, ever again. Of course, the Associated Deputy Director of Counter Intelligence at Langley, did not know that. Or, from his demeanour, suspect it.

  “I was the one who told Dick that Philby was a double agent,” she said, idly. “He didn’t believe me either. Not at first. I should have just put a bullet in his neck anyway. It would have saved us all a lot of trouble later. Don’t you think?”

  If she had been unsure how ripping the scab off an old, unsightly, unhealed wound still hurt, the CIA man wasted no time confirming as much.

  “You hardly knew Kim,” the man objected, bloodlessly as if the fight had drained out of him.

  “Neither did you, it seems.”

  “He deceived us all. Each and every one of his friends.”

  Angleton leaned forward, half-stretching and planted his gloved hands on his knees, staring into the bleak, wintery distance of the cityscape beyond the park.

  “Aren’t you afraid Mikkelsen will bring you down with him?”

  “No,” Rachel shrugged. “I quit this game back in Malta. I just didn’t know it at the time.”

  “People like you…”

  Angleton’s voice trailed off; he shook his head.

  “Heck, maybe people like you do quit. What do I know?”

  “I came back because I wanted to see him one last time,” Rachel confessed. “Don’t ask me why, I just wanted to see him one more time. To look him in the eye and say, I don’t know, I was sorry.”

  James Angleton shook his head.

  “What’s this? Honour among assassins?”

  “Something like that. Back in the day, I warned him I’d been sent to kill him. It would have been better if I’d killed him, or he’d ended me.” She changed the subject. “I met Dwight Christie again in San Francisco. Was he ever one of your guys?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Nothing…”

  “It’s something, or you wouldn’t have asked?”

  Rachel sighed.

  “They say that after the White House and the Smithsonian, this is the place every visitor to DC should visit,” she said, musing aloud. “Well, what’s left of the Smithsonian. They say all the things looted from it during the uprising of December 1963 are flooding the antiquities black markets of the world. Perhaps, the Battle of Washington wasn’t about overthrowing the government; it was just a great big heist after all? What do you think?”

  “Most coups are criminal conspiracies: land grabs or worse.”

  “You should know, you’ve supervised a few in your time.”

  “What the fuck is going on, Rachel?”

  She ignored the question, gazing instead at the marble white Doric-style temple at the western end of the National Mall housing the nineteen-foot-high statue of the sixteenth President of the Union.

  Rachel had discovered as a child that nothing was ever quite what it seemed to be. For example, here in the land of the free, at the very heart of the Empire of Liberty, Congress had so cherished the remembrance of the victor of the Civil War of the nineteenth century that it had rejected the first six attempts to fund a monument to the great emancipator of the Southern slave nation; even the reflecting Pool had been an afterthought, not seriously contemplated until after Chief Justice William H. Taft had dedicated the ‘temple’ in May 1922 in a ceremony in which he then, ‘presented’ it to President Warren G. Harding.

  Lincoln’s only surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln, then seventy-eight years old, had been a witness, possibly standing not a million miles from where she and the Locksmith reminisced about…old times.

  Rachel wondered where the President’s son, who had died only two years before she was born, had actually stood that day; had she unknowingly walked in his footsteps the last three days?

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” she confessed.

  The architect who had designed the Lincoln memorial and the Reflecting Pool, Henry Bacon had campaigned for over two decades to erect a proper memorial to the man who had saved the Union; fighting apathy, parsimony and at times, callow indifference in a country that then, as now, prided itself on being the bastion of democracy. Like Lincoln’s son, he too only just lived to see his vision come to fruition.

  I never used to get distracted like this…

  “Do you know that the man who designed the Lincoln memorial also designed the Confederate Memorial in Wilmington?” She posed, rhetorically.

  Angleton, never a man overly sensitive to such social cues, got to his feet and standing over the woman, and vented a little of his pent-up exasperation.

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  Rachel looked up at him, a twinge of pity twitching at her lips.

  And then, as she knew it would; it happened.

  The first bullet must have exploded as it passed through the spymaster’s chest cavity. It fragmented, exiting in a blossom of gore, spattering Rachel.

  James Jesus Angleton stood there for a moment, dying, a look of stupefaction in his eyes, his arms, already disarticulated from his ruptured nervous system twitching.

  He swayed.

  The second round took off most of his head as he fell.

  As the spymaster’s lifeless corpse collapsed onto Rachel she screamed.

  And screamed.

  And went on screaming for nearly a minute after the first uniformed Washington PD officer arrived, pushing through the small crowd of shocked, mute witnesses.

  Chapter 61

  Wednesday 15th February 1967

  BETASOM Bunker, Inner Basin, Port de Bordeaux

  Operation Blondie threatened to unravel shortly after the two helicopters lifted off. As they skimmed across the dark waters of the Gironde, racing along the left bank of the flooded river, up ahead the sky sparkled with tracers and the flash of explosions.

  The Eagle’s Sea Vixens and Buccaneers were doing their stuff; the problem was that the two Westland Wessex’s were late!

  This meant that by the time the two helicopters clattered across the flooded Garonne and turned over Blanquefort, settling upon their approach to the target, the bombing raid was over and the defenders, angry and ready, were standing to their guns.

  “Go or no-go?” The pilot of the lead aircraft asked tersely over the open intercom circuit.

  Paddy Ashdown did not think about this overlong.

  “Go! Confirm Go!”

  The flares over the port area had gone out by then; and the remnants of the white phosphorus markers strewn across the roof of the bunker and dozens of surrounding buildings spat and fizzled like guttering blue-white candles as the Wessex’s suddenly flared, lost forward momentum and plummeted towards hard landings.


  “Oh, fuck!” The pilot muttered. Then he shouted: “The fucking roof’s not flat!”

  “Hover, we’ll jump out!” Paddy Ashdown retorted, as if leaping out of an aircraft in the middle of the night onto a concrete roof that was ‘not flat’ was but a minor inconvenience.

  In the event the wheels bumped something solid and Sergey Akhromeyev found himself propelled out of the door by the man behind him, landing in a heap on the man who had preceded him into the darkness.

  Paddy Ashdown yanked him to his feet.

  “ALL IN ONE PIECE?” He bellowed in the Russian’s face.

  “Da,” Akhromeyev grunted, dazed, disorientated, unconvinced. He was struggling for breath and his ribs hurt.

  “Oh, shit!” The man he had fallen on muttered, rising to his feet.

  They all turned…

  The second Wessex was on fire, tracer ripping into it as it struggled to reach the BETASOM Bunker.

  It fell – as if in dreadful slow motion - into the eastern end of the unyielding monolith of the BETASOM complex.

  Tracer fell into it, it lurched sidelong.

  In a moment it disintegrated into a maelstrom of flailing rotors, rending metal and a terrible, dazzling bloom of exploding aviation fuel.

  The first Wessex was attempting to lift off.

  The blast wave tipped it sideways for moment, the aircraft staggered, banked away, dipped below the roof line and then miraculously, flew on, perilously low over the cold, unfeeling neutral waters of the inner basin with small arms fire kicking up geysers in her wake.

  The five men on the roof knew the Wessex was not going to make it.

  Yet they still watched until the instant the helicopter nosed into the water and her main rotors ploughed the blackness into frenzied spume in the chaos of the crash. The machine settled, for a moment, upright. Not that there was any hope for her three-man crew as a single searchlight wobbled across the basin, captured the downed aircraft and automatic gunfire began to fall into the mist of spray around her.

  Paddy Ashdown was the first to react.