Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  Yesterday morning he had tracked her in his sights for perhaps, fifteen minutes. Another five and he would make the shot, break down the gun and bag it – that would take twenty-two to twenty-six seconds, he practiced with his eyes shut over a dozen times every day – and walk out onto Constitution Avenue like a curious pedestrian trying to find out what all the fuss was about. By then there would be blues and twos charging down to the Lincoln Memorial from every direction, ambulances and people milling around. Everything for the first fifteen to thirty minutes would be confusion. Nobody would even notice an unshaven, nondescript guy in greasy overalls trudging up 21st Street to catch the bus to Arlington.

  He still did not know why he had not killed her.

  He had planned to kill her and anybody who made contact with her, or just her, if nobody else turned up.

  He had had other plans for Angleton and his family…

  She had come to DC to kill him; there was no other explanation for her return. Knowing that she would never find him unless he wanted to be found she had made it easy for him, and incidentally, inevitably, for anybody else who wanted to catch up with her.

  The trouble was, the more he thought about it the less he understood what had happened at the Lincoln Memorial.

  The second round had been aimed dead centre of Angleton’s torso but that was when he had begun to crumple to the ground. Between squeezing the trigger and impact the man had slumped between a foot and eighteen inches, and the bullet had smashed into the back of his head.

  Rachel had already been sprayed with blood, flesh, spits of lung tissue; now she was showered with fragments of cranial bone and brain matter as the dead man’s lifeless cadaver fell across her and bled out.

  Through the Remington’s sights she had looked like she was the one who was bleeding out, like she had been dragged along an abattoir floor.

  And she was screaming…

  He had cursed, recognising he had wasted several seconds. He broke down the rifle, hitched his bag over his shoulder and with an urgency he knew might attract unwanted attention, made his escape. He had decided to leave his semi where it was parked; hotwire a faster ride in Arlington.

  The morning after, he now knew that had been a mistake.

  The old black Dodge he had stolen from a lot near the great cemetery would have been reported missing by now.

  In retrospect, he ought to have declined the shot; taken Angleton another day. The plan had always been to look into the bastard’s eyes as he twisted the knife in his guts…

  But only when he had buried his wife and kids.

  Never use the same rifle for two hits.

  That was two missteps in a day…

  He had parked the Dodge behind the hunting lodge just to make sure it was invisible from the road, a track leading past the cabin.

  Until he fired that second round, he had been the one in control. He still was, or that was what he told himself. So, why do I feel hunted?

  The car’s radio was crackly, the tuning knob loose.

  “…the Chief of Police,” the announcer declaimed as the volume rose and fell, “told the press that the woman apprehended at the scene of the shooting at the Lincoln Memorial is still in custody. He refused to confirm that she is Lady Rachel French, the wife of senior British Air Force Officer Sir Daniel French. The British Ambassador and his wife arrived at the Cleveland Park Police Station shortly after ten o’clock this morning. Sir Nicholas Henderson spoke briefly to reporters to voice his condolences for the family of James Angleton, the former Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counter Intelligence at the CIA, at this sad time…”

  Kurt switched off the radio and clambered out of the Dodge.

  His feet squelched coldly in the sodden leaf matter and mud as he stamped back to the cabin, his rage boiling, threatening to consume him.

  He was so distracted, roiling inside that he did not hear the car draw up in the road until it crunched gears. He glimpsed the white and blue paint job as the vehicle, a Highway Patrol Ford, reversed, halted, and moved forward again, turning up the soggy mud path to the cabin.

  That was when habit, ingrained responses took over.

  Suddenly, Kurt was glacially calm.

  He was focused on only what he could do.

  Everything else, all the myriad of things that were beyond his control were irrelevant.

  Chapter 65

  Thursday 16th February 1967

  BETASOM Bunker, Inner Basin, Port de Bordeaux

  At around the time they established radio contact with the Headquarters of the 4th Tanks at Blaye, the SBS men had discovered that there were, in fact, two ‘doors’ to the bunker in the roof. On inspection, one of them had probably been jammed shut ‘since the war’ – presumably the Second War – leading to ladders and other hatches which zigzagged, to prevent a bomb or shell following the route of the stairway, down into the heart of the bunker, emerging within a few yards of where the leadership of the Bordeaux ‘Collective of the Front Internationale’ had been captured.

  The gentlemen in question considered themselves as belonging to a completely different organisation to that in the Massif Central or down on the south coast.

  They were ‘more pragmatic’ socialists only ‘loosely aligned’ with their comrades in Clermont-Ferrand and with no direct contact with their ‘Soviet brothers and sisters’ back in the USSR. It was all hogwash, of course, judging by the number of Kalashnikovs and the other items of Red Army kit lying about inside the BETASOM complex.

  Apparently, all the real Krasnaya Zarya fanatics were out ‘in the countryside’, doing whatever ‘they did’. By their own lights the chaps running things in Bordeaux, were just a bunch of well-intentioned patriotic Frenchmen doing their best for their people.

  Most remarkable of all, these were claims made with absolutely straight faces.

  Paddy Ashdown, angrily unimpressed, had had explained to his prisoners that either they told all their ‘people’ in the city to lay down their arms or he would leave them alone in a room with a sack of live grenades.

  White phosphorus grenades!

  Specifically, he demanded that the Revolutionary Guards were to throw their weapons into a heap outside the bunker, an exercise the SBS men could observe from the relative safety of the roof. Thereafter, the disarmed fighters were to corral themselves in plain view at the dock gates to the inner basin of the port. The first trickle of men had begun to surrender within an hour of their leaders beginning to broadcast the call to capitulate.

  From the roof of the bunker white flags, sheets were flying and soon, similar blankets, rags were showing from other buildings in the near and middle distance.

  Pessimistically, Ashdown’s prisoners had been worried about a popular uprising, or wide-scale reprisals.

  ‘That’s not my problem,’ he had retorted.

  Sergey Akhromeyev felt the same way as his new English comrades – no, brothers – in arms about men who used defenceless women and children as human shields.

  It was a tactic he had come up against time and again in the White Brigade’s running battles with the FI. And when the women they had liberated in the bunker had accused the ‘commissars’ now in the strike team’s custody of ‘pleasuring themselves’ with the two youngest girls among their number, he had asked Ashdown to leave him alone in a room with the two ‘perverts’ at whom the finger had been pointed.

  He had been astonished by the younger man’s unequivocal, unbending response.

  ‘No, we are better than these people,’ the Royal Marine had said decisively. Besides, they needed one of the men, the alleged leader of the FI in the city, to carry on broadcasting to ‘his people’.

  Akhromeyev had wanted to press the point.

  Paddy Ashdown had shaken his head.

  “Sorry, Sergey. We’re Royal Marines, we fight Her Majesty’s enemies. We aren’t judge and jury. Those beggars surrendered to us and therefore, we are responsible for their welfare. I know that sounds stupid, but,�
� he shrugged, “like I said: we are better than these people.”

  The people of Bordeaux did not feel the same way about things.

  The reprisals had started around mid-day.

  Fires began to burn in the streets, thankfully only a few, a little later.

  “The rioting doesn’t appear to be too widespread, sir,” Paddy Ashdown reported to Edwin Bramall when, eventually, the very surprised and relieved commanding officer of the 4th Tanks eventually came on the line.

  Bramall’s initial cheerfulness quickly sobered.

  When neither of the Westland Wessex helicopters had returned last night, he had feared the worst. The confirmation of the circumstances of the loss of the aircraft and their crews, and of five of the SBS men, was a sickening punch in the solar plexus; one only made bearable by the extraordinary good news from the BETASOM Bunker.

  “The people in charge in the city don’t seem to have had any control over, or feel for the situation on the ground outside it,” Ashdown went on. “It may be that a lot of the people out there were simply keeping their heads down, waiting for us to arrive; probably, they wish a plague on both our and the FI’s head.”

  “Hopefully,” Bramall suggested, “they won’t take too many pot shots at us when we occupy Bordeaux. I’m going to fill up that old ferry moored at Blaye and get a few more of our ruffians across the river to give you a hand. There must be a few helicopters hanging around, too… Do you have any idea what’s going on in La Bastide, on the other bank from where you are now?”

  “None at all, sir,” Ashdown apologised.

  Bramall signed off by assuring the younger officer that he was going to send him every available man to ‘secure the city’.

  Afterwards, Paddy Ashdown climbed up to the roof to join Sergey Akhromeyev.

  “What do we do with the people in the lower bunker?” The Russian asked as the two men surveyed the smoky cityscape beneath the low, threatening grey overcast.

  According to the captive ‘leadership cadre’ there were as many as twenty men and women sheltering behind the barricaded blast doors of the lowest level of the BETASOM complex. There were just empty store rooms, unused for many years, down there.

  There were spits of rain in the air and a bitter westerly wind plucked at their faces.

  “They can stew where they are for the moment,” Ashdown shrugged. “There aren’t enough of us to guard any more prisoners and still man the communications room.”

  A couple of the women they had rescued had volunteered to cook up a porridge-type gruel for the Royal Marines’ breakfast and kept pressing chicory-sour mugs of ‘coffee’ on their liberators and protectors.

  The Royal Marine sighed.

  “How are your ribs, Sergey?”

  “I’ll live,” the Russian grimaced. It hurt to breathe but that was okay; he was still breathing so Vera would not be that angry when he got home…

  Home.

  Home was England now.

  Paddy Ashdown chuckled ruefully

  “Pity it was so dark last night. I’d have loved to have seen the expression on your face when we pushed you over the edge of the roof last night!”

  Chapter 66

  Thursday 16th February 1967

  Philip Burton Federal Building, San Francisco

  This time it was Special Agent James B. Adams who was in the observation room, and Caroline Constantis and her ever-present guardian, Erin Lambert who sat opposite the prisoner.

  Dwight Christie was in an affable, chatty mood and clearly enjoyed being in the company of two, very intelligent, not to say, attractive women. He was particularly attentive to the younger of his interrogators which was odd, because Adams had assumed, he was smarter than that. Especially, since he had to be aware that it was the older of the two women who was the one who was trying to get inside his head.

  But then Christie had been locked away with little or no feminine contact for the last two-and-a-half years, and even though the man was at best a scumbag traitor, he was only human. Adams guessed that Caroline Constantis had primed her younger friend to make eyes at the stocky, prematurely going to seed, former FBI man.

  “I had a very interesting little chat with Rachel before I came out west,” Caro prefaced, smiling.

  “Rachel?”

  “The Angel of Death, yes.”

  From his vantage point in the next room James Adams had to stop himself venting a chortle. She was good. I must work with Professor Constantis again. A man could learn a heck of a lot just sitting next to her, listening awhile. Less than five minutes in and she was already hitting all the buttons Dwight Christie did not want her to press!

  “And,” Caro went on, matter of factly, “the FBI has kindly given me access to your personal file.” She met Christie’s gaze, smiling wanly. “The whole file, not the expurgated, abridged version. My, my… I must say, it reads like a novel, Mister Christie.” She sighed, her expression turning gently disappointed. “But not, unfortunately, in a good way.”

  James Adams had suggested to Caro that there was ‘an unusually significant proportion of uncorroborated material’ in the files which had been under Dwight Christie’s control, in the two California offices at which he had been based for much of the latter 1950s all the way through to December 1963.

  ‘Hearsay?’ She had queried, just to be clear what they were talking about, and to confirm her own suspicions.

  ‘No, more like the illicit padding of existing cases and possibly, the deliberate fabrication of other files the majority of which never reached a conclusion but which, when they read them, would have given his superiors the impression, he was a heck of a lot more active than he really was…’

  Adams had not wanted to be specific.

  However, Caro got the impression that Christie had exaggerated his role in successful cases, gratuitously erased his presence from others, and ‘invented’ and extensively documented, including with fictitious witness statements, non-existent investigations.

  Investigations which were no more or less than figments of his fertile imagination.

  What was the mantra that applied?

  If one repeats a lie enough times one forgets what is false, and what is real?

  Inevitably, this raised a plethora of questions about the value of the testimony he had supplied to the Bureau’s interrogators at Quantico, and cast into varying degrees of doubt much of what until then had previously been taken as gospel about the man’s FBI career.

  “Dwight?” Caro inquired, leaning towards the former Special Agent, as if they were speaking confidentially. “If that is really your name?”

  The man blinked, opened his mouth to speak and thought better of it.

  “We know there is, or at least, was a real Dwight David Christie, date of birth 3rd June 1923,” Caro explained. “He had two brothers who were killed in the Second War, one in the Pacific War, and another in Europe. Meanwhile, he, ‘Dwight’, served, with anonymous distinction in the US Army Office of Defence Procurement in the North West, mainly in Washington State and at the Pentagon, in DC, until he was discharged in early 1946. What we do not know,” she qualified, “is if it was actually that Dwight David Christie who later went on to college and subsequently joined the FBI.”

  The man blinked at Caro, whose smiled faded.

  “So, I have to ask. Are you Dwight David Christie?”

  “Who else would I be?”

  “We don’t know. That’s the problem. As you would understand, from your time with the FBI, identification is key to the whole investigative process. I don’t know if you are who you claim to be. From what I can gather, Agent Adams has opened an investigation to establish exactly that,” she smiled, tight-lipped, “one way or the other.”

  Caro knew little about the minutiae of the cases the man who called himself Dwight Christie had investigated, solved or failed to resolve in his decade-and-a-half with the FBI, she had focused on the story he had told, and largely sold to the FBI when he graduated to the Bureau ‘Ten
Most Wanted’ list in early 1964 when it was suspected he was complicit in the pre-meditated, cold-blooded murder of at least two of his closest colleagues.

  “Of course, if you are not the real Dwight David Christie, then the question arises as to what happened to the real one; and your culpability in his disappearance?”

  “Seriously?” The man groaned, throwing up his arms a little too melodramatically in a parody of exasperation.

  The only thing Caro could not understand was how and why Christie’s ‘history’ had been tacitly accepted, more or less, in toto, until now.

  Surely, somebody must have been paying attention in the FBI’s Office of Personnel Management between 1946 and 1963?

  She and James Adams had discussed how ‘Christie’ – if it turned out he was a fraud - could have flown under everybody’s radar for so long.

  ‘Two possible reasons, I think,” James Adams had offered. ‘Firstly, the Bureau has had other things on its mind the last few years and the top brass, Hoover and the people around him in Washington now view Christie as a huge embarrassment that frankly, they wish would just go away. Secondly, a great deal of what we know – or think we know – about the alleged Communist infiltration of the Bureau, and the Reds’ links with what is generically referred to as the American Resistance, a catch-all name for home-grown insurgent or terroristic groups, turns out to be based on information supplied by Christie, or by persons who have worked with him down the years. If I’m right about this guy, it’s going to turn out that either he wrote those reports and notes, signing them with somebody else’s name; or he ‘sold’ a crock of shit, if you’ll forgive my language, to other, honest agents and they submitted cockamamie reports in good faith.’

  Caro had not been convinced.

  ‘But surely, after over two years of intensive expert interrogation all these things would have been thoroughly explored and where possible, corroborated?’ She had objected.