Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  By that time Tobias A. Little’s file had already been sitting on a detective’s desk for several hours and, because that detective knew that a uniformed buddy had been half-drowned, that detective had made several phone calls which otherwise, he might not have made.

  According to the Veterans Administration, the Tobias Albert Little on the old guy’s VA card, the only identification he had had on his person at the time of his arrest, had died in Little Rock, Arkansas in July 1957.

  So, more – and progressively more urgent - calls had been made, including one to the VA office in the Mission District, which the Tobias A. Little, whose papers falsely claimed that he had been invalided out of the US Navy on 3rd January 1945, had registered as his forwarding address while he was in California.

  It was quickly established that, notwithstanding he had initially claimed to have no fixed abode, a VA case officer had actually visited ‘Little’ at a flat in a tenement in the Fillmore District, ostensibly to ensure that the old man received all the benefits due to him.

  Around mid-day two beat cops had checked out the address.

  The building’s manager, always glad to help the police because he did not want any trouble with the local precinct – he ran a ‘clean house’ – had let the uniforms into the one room, third-floor apartment.

  Less than an hour later, the box containing what they had found at the old man’s ‘place’, including what was probably his ‘real’ VA Identity Card, was sitting on the duty Inspector’s desk at the station and shortly after that, the FBI had been called in.

  ‘Son of a gun,’ Special Agent James B. Adams had whistled down the line. Collecting his faculties, and still not entirely convinced that he believed his own luck, he had declared: ‘My people will be over to pick him up, we’ll take it from here!’

  Now, the old man was sitting in front of him.

  Hans Mikkelsen was unrecognisable as the man pictured in his stepson’s FBI file. He seemed smaller, half-broken, and old before his time. Some of that would be the cancer but Adams suspected he had let himself go first, and then the illness had taken over. The man had given in, possibly years before the Cuban Missiles War, and allowed the habits of a lifetime to wither, his standards slip. Okay, he had been in holding cells the last couple of nights, but that did not account for, or excuse, the week’s stubble on his face, the lankness of his hair, thinning, tangled and down to his greasy collar at the back. The plaid lumberjack shirt stank of sweat and although his denims may have been a lot cleaner a couple of days ago, there was dirt under his untrimmed nails and his physical frailty, briefly surmounted by whatever alcohol and pills, likely amphetamines, he had taken the other day, was obvious.

  James Adams pulled up a chair opposite the old Marine.

  The room, which had a large mirror on one side was windowless, warm, although in the background the air conditioning whirred. The table between the two men was bolted to the floor, as was the prisoner’s hard, backless bench.

  The old man, he was sixty-three in a week or so, had been leaning forward with his cuffed hands on the table, as if in prayer except the FBI man did not think he was a man who had ever put much stock in the existence of a merciful God.

  Adams reached over and unlocked the cuffs, retrieved them and folded them into the right pocket of his dark sports jacket.

  Hans Mikkelsen rubbed his wrists.

  “Well,” Adams prefaced, “one way or another, I reckon you and I have a lot to talk about, Gunnery Sergeant Mikkelsen.”

  The old man raised a grey eyebrow.

  “You reckon?”

  “Hey,” Adams grinned ruefully, “you’re the old Marine masquerading as a former cook on the USS Franklin who died ten years ago, not me, friend!”

  “If you say so.”

  Adams did not react to being blanked; that was to be expected. Once a Marine, always a Marine. Forget the wreck of a man sitting across the table, there was a real hard-arse in their somewhere.

  “I was in the Army in the forty-five war,” Adams confided, allowing a self-deprecating note to seep into his voice. “Not that anything I did was a patch on your combat service. How many Purple Hearts did they give you? Two for Guadalcanal, another one for Saipan? Is it right you went ashore with the 2nd Marines at Tarawa? On Betio Island?”

  “That’s all just history. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

  Adams shrugged.

  “If you say so, you’re the one who got so badly wounded at Iwo Jima the Corps discharged you when you got back stateside.” He finally opened the folder he had brought with him into the interview room. “But they gave you a Silver Star for that, didn’t they?”

  “A medal doesn’t mean squat when all your buddies are dead.”

  “No, I suppose not. Was that why you decided to be Kurt’s wingman?”

  That was a stretch, the sort of leap in the dark the Bureau’s old-timers tended to give young tyros a slap over the knuckles for. However, Adams got the sense that time was running out and doing things by the book had not worked out so well on this case. Leastways, not yet.

  “Kurt was what, about eighteen months old when you married his Ma?”

  The old man shrugged.

  He had never stopped viewing Adams with unblinking, inscrutable, oddly cold eyes. Eyes that were rheumy, more grey than green and…mocking.

  That happened sometimes; some people were just plain bad. Out there on Main Street most folk had no idea what sort of evil the FBI was protecting them from. Right now, James Adams was getting a very bad feeling about the old man sitting opposite him.

  “Kurt told the Army his Pa was drowned in a shipwreck on the Great Lakes in the winter of 1926? In a big storm?” Adams asked, as if he was just checking an inconsequential note on the file in front of him.

  “Yeah.”

  “What ship?”

  “The Nisbet Grammer.”

  “Yeah,” the FBI man sighed. “She was the only big ship that went down that year. But that was in May 1926, on Lake Ontario, she was in collision with another ship.”

  Hans Mikkelsen shrugged.

  “There were no casualties,” James Adams went on. “The Nisbet Grammer’s crew was rescued before the ship went down. So,” James Adams prompted, “so, what really happened to Kurt’s Pa, Hans?”

  The old man was silent, brooding.

  “You were a Chicago boy like him, right?”

  Still nothing.

  “Okay, you joined the Marine Corps in August 1927, right?”

  “I’d just married Martha, the boy’s Ma. It was a good job…”

  “That was after the pair of you, and Kurt, got to Portland, Oregon,” Adams interjected, reasonably, as if he was trying to help, “travelling from Chicago to the West Coast wasn’t that easy in those days?”

  Another contemptuous shrug of the shoulders.

  “Okay, okay, I’ll cut to the chase, Hans,” Adams declared. “I can’t prove it but I think you killed Martha’s husband, Kurt senior. For all I know, the two of you, you and Martha, were in on it together, either way, when her husband was gone you married her, adopted young Kurt, who is probably your natural son, anyway, and moved to Portland – probably before anybody started making the sort of dumb comments people make, like: ‘The kid looks just like you? Ain’t that a thing? - where you joined the Marines. Once you got posted overseas, after a while you got to take Martha and your son away from the old country, hundreds, thousands of miles away from all the awkward questions that, by then, had followed you all the way to Oregon?”

  Adams had heard the news of the shooting in the National Mall on the TV late last night; then, angrily, because he had realised Clyde Tolson and the Director had been playing him for a patsy, made the first of several calls to DC which had gone on into the early hours of the morning, eventually managing to get to speak with the high and mighty Associate Director, Clyde Tolson in person! Tolson had been angry too, threatening also; actually, James Adams did not give a damn! The CIA’s Head of Counter Intell
igence had been assassinated near the Lincoln Memorial standing right next to the Angel of Death and he had had to hear the news on the TV! What in God’s name were those old farts in Washington doing?

  Adams was fully aware he had not done his career prospects in the Bureau any favours last night; old men did not like being informed – no matter how diplomatically – that they needed to get their act together.

  Like I care…

  In contrast, dealing with Professor Caroline Constantis-Zabriski earlier that morning had been like a breath of fresh air. She had been as shocked as him and, frankly, equally astonished to hear the news.

  However, unlike Adam’s superiors in DC she had not needed him to join up the dots for her. To the contrary, she had begun, unprompted, providing him with sharply observed, very precise, targeted insights and new lines of interrogation within minutes of their introduction.

  It seemed the lady went nowhere these days without her constant shadow, a trim, prim very protective Air Force Blue Cap who still contrived to look very military in her blue housewifely two-piece jacket – tailored to conceal the forty-five she toted in a shoulder holster - and pleated skirt.

  Presently, Captain Erin Lambert was with Caroline Constantis in the adjoining room watching the interview. The two women were obviously very close, if not mother-daughter then sisterly, genuine friends.

  ‘Erin was with me last year,” the older woman had smiled, glancing fondly to her bodyguard, making absolutely sure that Adams did not jump to any conclusions that her companion was ‘just her Air Force minder’. More, in fact, that she was her confidante and in her own right, a highly competent investigator. “One way and another we went through a lot together.”

  James Adams was a man who had got used to being, and if truth be known, a little complacent about being the smartest guy in the room; however, he intuitively accepted that when he was in Caroline Constantis’s company, he was…not.

  Hans Mikkelsen was studying the FBI man with half-lidded, dead eyes.

  “It’s started, right?” He asked, his voice rasping lowly.

  Adams nodded.

  The old man pursed his lips, sniffed, folded his arms across his hollow chest and fell silent.

  The FBI man waited.

  And waited.

  Several minutes passed in silence.

  Then there was a knock at the door, which opened.

  Hans Mikkelsen’s eyes flickered with interest as Erin Lambert entered, positioned a hard-backed chair next to James Adams, and stepped aside as an attractive, older, grey-haired woman came into the room and without a word, settled opposite him.

  The old man viewed the younger woman thoughtfully as she moved to stand by the door, her back against it; her stare never wavered from his face.

  “This is Professor Constantis,” Adams announced, introducing the woman who had sat down beside him. “You may remember her from her TV appearances during the war in the Midwest last year.”

  “Never had much time for TV.”

  “Me neither, Mister Mikkelsen,” Caro admitted. “The camera does not do one any favours as one gets older,” she went on, “although my husband adamantly, and gallantly refutes this. But he’s biased, of course.”

  “I’m done here,” the old man retorted wearily.

  “Is that so?” Caro sat back. “Semper Fidelis,” she whispered. “Always faithful, whatever became of that, Gunnery Sergeant Mikkelsen?”

  The old man snorted, shook his head.

  “I spent the last couple of years of the forty-five-war trying to put back together the Army Air Force’s lost boys,” Caro explained. “The most destructive thing for most of my boys was the guilt they felt for having survived when all their buddies were gone, not the traumas that they themselves had lived through. After the war I went back to ‘normal’ life again; for many years I worked for the FBI developing psychological profiling protocols based on actual case histories and interviews, with most famously, among others, Edwin Mertz.” She smiled thinly. “And people like you.”

  The old man was resolutely mute.

  “Then, after the October War I got a call from Curtis LeMay. Old Iron Pants had found out that I’d worked with some of his boys back in 1944 and 1945. So, he asked me to do the same sort of work, very secretly, with some of the boys, mostly grown men this time around, who came back from that night over the Soviet Union with…issues. Funnily enough, that was how I met my second husband. The current one. His Ma tried to murder the President, JFK; then Nathan, my husband, got sold a hospital pass by the Pentagon but he didn’t turn into a sad, sick fuck-up like you, or Kurt. He stayed loyal to his oath; he still serves.”

  Caro did not flinch from the pitiless darkness in the old man’s eyes. He had warned James Adams not to expect much from this interview; or from her attempt to prick something other than undiluted hate out of Hans Mikkelsen’s twisted psyche.

  “Like father like son,” she mused. “Wasn’t that the way it was. Right now, the Navy Judge Advocate’s Department, is conducting an urgent document search for cases involving unsolved killings or unexplained disappearances at your duty stations in the 1930s up to the outbreak of war in 1941. And,” she added, “the FBI is doing the same sort of exercise for all the places you’ve lived since 1945. Unfortunately, this search will take several weeks, possibly longer to complete. You may not even live to be charged with the half of the crimes you have committed, Hans. However, I think that what we’ll discover is that you, and Kurt, began your careers a long time ago. Tell me I’m wrong?”

  Caroline nodded to the FBI man.

  “A senior Central Intelligence Agency officer was assassinated in Washington yesterday,” he informed Hans Mikkelsen.

  “Angleton, right?” The old man checked, hoarsely.

  James Adams nodded acknowledgement.

  “Figures…”

  “Who else is Kurt going for?” Adams demanded, suddenly a little breathless.

  Hans Mikkelsen looked to him deadpan for a moment and then, very slowly, he began, hurtfully, to laugh.

  Chapter 64

  Thursday 16th February 1967

  Manassas, Virginia

  Kurt had held her face in the cross hairs of the Remington’s telescopic sights for perhaps, as long as fifteen or twenty seconds before the first bodies began to flit across, and soon, completely obscure his line of fire.

  James Jesus Angleton ought, by rights, to have crumpled to the ground like a broken rag doll after that first round tore out his chest. Yet the man had remained standing, swaying stubbornly like a tree cut through at its base, ready to topple for an interminable, impossible time.

  Kurt had identified the mass of scaffolding on the roof of the old Federal Reserve Building on Constitution Avenue as a possible firing position on Tuesday afternoon; guessing that if Rachel had repeated the previous day’s movements she would return at least once more, on Wednesday to the Lincoln Memorial.

  ‘Same as Monday,’ the man at the other end of the line had reported when he rang the DC number from the call box in the nearby town. ‘Like she’s waiting for somebody. Same bench. Stayed there half-an-hour, like before…’

  Kurt had hung up.

  The same voice, a guy with a Bronx hard-arse twang had answered both days. Years ago, it would sometimes be a woman with a sing-song voice. Clara Schouten had confessed that she remembered that duty one week when he was down in Caracas, Venezuela. Usually, he had got to speak to a guy, somebody hard-bitten like the man on the desk this week.

  The Company did not care about the cops Rachel had taken down back in sixty-one; that was just inter-agency bickering. No, those idiots at Langley just wanted her dead, gone because she knew too much. If he did not do it; somebody else would. The weirdest thing was that he had been okay with that right up to the point…he was not.

  So, he had ended the Locksmith…instead.

  He had not known Angleton planned to meet Rachel; or even why he would take a risk like that. That was why he had waited
; just to see if she was going to put a bullet in the evil bastard’s brain. However, when it had become clear that she was out of the game, he had not hesitated.

  Waiting just long enough to see the Locksmith’s skull disintegrate in a spray of blood and bone; unaccountably, he had hesitated, stared through the sights…

  All the buildings along Constitution Avenue had been burned out or fought over, wrecked, ruined, or looted during the fighting in December 1963; and several, like the Federal Reserve Building, on which restoration had only begun in the fall, were chaotic construction sites which, for one reason or another, had been left fallow, briefly forgotten when the Corps of Engineers – who were still in charge of the great reconstruction project to rebuild the capital – had moved resources to pacify one or other vested interest on the Hill, or simply, run out of men. Whatever, the old Federal Reserve Building had been deserted and last night he had parked up over a mile away, carried the disassembled Remington in a shapeless canvas bag like a workman wearily trudging home, broken into the site, set-up and grabbed several hours sleep knowing that the dawn would surely awaken him.

  He had not known for a certainty that she would repeat the routine she had followed, with minor alterations, on Monday and Tuesday, nor did he have any way of knowing if the FBI, or the CIA, or any other Federal agency would again follow her to the Memorial, on Wednesday morning. However, when an operator like Rachel telegraphed her movements it was always for a reason; so, it was odds-on she would return to the bench overlooking the Reflecting Pool at least once more.

  And that the other watchers would suspect as much.

  Thus, if they were going to contact her; it was likely – if not probable – that they would do it that morning.

  Ifs, buts, maybes, imponderables without number were the currency of an assassin’s life. Like a big cat hunting prey on the African plains, many hunts failed. The mark never showed up, or something unforeseen happened. Fog, haze, a change of schedule, bodyguards on duty who actually knew what they were doing. No plan was rock solid, sometimes there was a kill-no kill split second.