Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  The Governor’s wife was not having any of that kind of talk!

  “We don’t know that yet,” she countered gently.

  “I’m sorry,” Aurélie apologised instantly. “I picked up a book visiting the hospital at Bighi, where a Russian friend is recovering from his wounds,” her thoughts became momentarily distracted, “yes, a book…”

  Lady Antoinette waited patiently, intrigued.

  “It was a Times of Malta book containing all the letters and articles that Lady Marija Calleja-Christopher has submitted to the paper since just after the October War.” Aurélie blushed guiltily. “I feel terrible, because I didn’t give it back. I will donate another book to the library at the hospital to replace it…”

  “Lady Marija has a very particular, refreshingly sanguine view of things,” the older woman smiled.

  “You must have met her, of course.”

  “Many times.” Lady Antoinette shook her head. “I swear that woman will be this island’s patron saint before she’s done!” Presently, she picked up the threads of their previous conversation. “What became of your sister, my dear?”

  “I don’t know.” Aurélie hesitated. “Jacqueline was on government work. She was in Algeria when the putsch happened. After that, I think she was at the Academy of Sciences in Paris. Her hero was always Marie Curie. It all went over my head but I remember Mama saying one day, just before she passed away, that Jacqueline was working on our bomb.”

  “Oh, so she was a physicist?”

  “I think so. I never saw her after our mother’s funeral. I think she thought I was a flighty young thing and she didn’t have any time to be ‘mothering’ me. Things turned out okay. I qualified, I got my teaching certificate, I met Pierre.” She shrugged. “We were both very young; we might have worked things out eventually…”

  “How is your friend at Bighi?”

  “Dmitry? The doctors say he won’t be back on his feet for a little while,” Aurélie smiled, glad her host had diplomatically changed the subject. “It is awkward. He was a Russian officer. He was a Red Navy KGB man.”

  The older woman struck a reassuring note.

  “I think my husband’s predecessor, Sir Daniel French, very wisely took the view and established the, er, very sensible precedent, that former Soviet personnel not known to have been involved in committing war crimes against Allied combatants or civilians, should be,” Lady Antoinette smiled, “given the benefit of the doubt, and treated accordingly.”

  “I worry because Dmitry was a…”

  “KGB officer?” The Governor’s wife shrugged sympathetically. “I’m sure the people at MI6 will want to interview your friend. I should imagine that so long as he is frank with them that he will be treated fairly.”

  Aurélie tried and failed to hide her anxiety.

  Lady Antoinette touched her hand.

  “I am sure that your future husband,” she decided, “will have been at pains to clarify Captain Kolokoltsev’s situation with my husband.”

  Aurélie blushed.

  Since the Jean Bart had anchored in the Grand Harbour, she had punctiliously ceased to be Rene’s ‘secretary’, and as deliberately, ceased to be a crew member. Aboard the battleship she had been ‘the Admiral’s woman’ and neither she, nor her beau, wanted her to be that any more.

  Rene had been allocated married quarters at Fort Pembroke, a few miles up the coast and in the last couple of days she had been doing what she could to turn the small apartment – a bedroom, a kitchen, a claustrophobic parlour and a small, marvellously clean and sweet-smelling bathroom – into a home, for as long as they were going to be on the island. Rene, foolish man, insisted on staying on board the Jean Bart, now moored alongside Parlatorio Wharf undergoing emergency repairs, until their wedding night, scheduled for a week hence.

  She just wanted to be his wife; not a member of his crew. That life had ended. Now she ached to look forward to being, if such a thing was possible, just Rene’s wife, and if it happened, the mother of his children.

  “Ah, there you are, ladies!” Lord Hull chortled happily as he led the tall, hook-nosed man who had, against the odds, saved the last ships of the French Mediterranean Fleet and their rag-tag crews, and now found himself – much to his surprise – the Commander-in-Chief of all Free French Naval Forces in the Mediterranean, out onto the veranda.

  Lady Antoinette rose to her feet, as did Aurélie.

  “Dinner will be served in a few minutes, Richard,” she reminded her husband.

  Aurélie reached out and Rene Leguay took her hand as the couples went back inside.

  “British forces have taken Toulon and Marseilles,” he said, holding his fiancée’s chair for her as she settled at the big, lavishly set table in the relatively small day room she assumed their hosts reserved for private, small-scale functions like tonight’s dinner. “Everywhere the Front Internationale is in retreat, routed. The Free French in the north are sweeping all before them and the people of the Auvergne had risen up against their gaolers!”

  Aurélie turned her face and looked to the man she loved.

  “Can it be true?”

  “In the streets of Toulon, the people are acclaiming Captain O’Reilly as ‘the Liberator of the South’, my love.” He bent his head and kissed her forehead, oblivious of the presence of the Governor and his wife.

  Lord Hull watched the couple for a moment.

  “There are still pockets of resistance,” he cautioned solemnly, ‘but it may well be that the worst is over and that soon, all of France will be free. My best guess is that President de Boissieu will proclaim the 6th Republic sometime in the next few days.”

  Stewards hovered in the doorway bearing a soup tureen.

  It was all Aurélie could do not to burst into excited, distraught, confused joy and laugh like an idiot as she grinned and smiled, half-guiltily at Rene as he, similarly emotional, met her almond-eyed gaze.

  It was like a dream, a fairy tale.

  The war was almost over…

  Chapter 77

  Sunday 18th February 1967

  Manassas, Virginia

  The Virginia State trooper who had slowly driven up to the lodge in the woods had not been some green behind the ears, rookie. The guy had been paunchy, past middle age, balding beneath his cap and suspicious; because suspicion was just a bad habit with some cops and this guy, Kurt Mikkelsen guessed resignedly, was the kind of man who always told his buddies where to find him if he missed his regular call-in.

  That was bad news.

  If this cop failed to come back to wherever he was based with the state’s car, people were going to come looking for him. Worse, they might even know where to start searching.

  Kurt had killed him anyway.

  He figured the guy probably knew the owners of the cabin; that it was never rented it out to strangers and if he got back to town, he was going to start making calls. Kurt could have brazened it out, high-tailed it the moment the trooper’s car turned the bend but he had had enough of being on the run, always looking over his shoulder.

  Nothing was for sure; nothing was simple.

  He would have liked to have known, for certain, for a fact, if Rachel had been coming after him; just like he would have liked to have understood why he had not ended her when he had her in his sights.

  Now he would never know.

  He had pulled out the forty-five in his back waistband and plugged the cop twice in the face; eventually – he was a big man, two hundred pounds at least – he had wrestled the body into the trunk of his car, parked up in some woods outside Bull Run, hitched and walked back to the cabin, and waited.

  He had a lot of stuff to get straight in his head.

  His Pa had been right; it was all over.

  The Company ought to have known it was playing with fire bringing him back that way; especially, after it tried to cut him loose after he sliced up that redneck bitch in San Antonio.

  Why would they send him to San Antonio to kill old man de Witt?


  The man was dying already and the way he had been briefed, she, the daughter was the one actually spending her daddy’s greenbacks rebuilding the ‘West Texas’ militia. That was the ‘’militia’ which was supposed to ‘step into the shoes’ of all those crazies who had died at Wister Park. He had expected her to like it rough; she was supposed to have been one of that maniac preacher Galen Cheney’s disciples, the hottest bitch in his god-dammed harem for fuck’s sake!

  Or, maybe that was just another one of the Company’s lies?

  At the time it had made a kind of sense.

  Jeez, that woman had said a lot of crazy things to him when he started on her…

  Like he was going to believe she’d been working for the Company all along?

  He had not listened at the time; he had been having too much fun.

  It was only later he could not quite, ever get some of the things she said out of his head. She had said she worked for the Scarecrow…

  How the heck had she even known about Angleton?

  Or the Office of Security?

  Or Operation Maelstrom…

  He had talked to his Pa about it.

  He had just told him to ‘man up’.

  And for a day or two, he had moved on.

  But Rachel ought not to have just sat there, not like that, like she was waiting for him to end her. That was just…not her. It was like all the things he had taken for granted were somehow, changed. Suddenly, the world around him was scary.

  Hunter turned prey…

  Like Marilyn de Witt…

  Nothing she had said made sense; it was as if she was talking to him from the other side of a mirror. Everything was the wrong way around, upside down.

  It had been easier to go on cutting than listen.

  Everybody knew that really rich people – like the de Witts – honestly believed that only poor people should pay taxes. What was so weird about the idea they would try to overthrow the government if they reckoned DC was full of liberal, pinko pricks who ignored what good old boys like old man de Witt had to say?

  Only…nothing felt right anymore.

  Perhaps, it was seeing Pa again after all these years.

  He had had that ‘death look’ about him, had not wanted him, or anybody to see him that way. He had not expected Kurt to come looking for him.

  Thinking about it; nothing had messed with his head as badly as what Pa had had to say to him.

  ‘Dwight Christie screwed the Bureau’s West Coast files on you and me in the old days backwards, forwards, every which way but sooner or later, somebody will get his thumb out of his arse and put stuff back together the way it used to be. Then they’ll come for me and if you’re still around, you too, son.’

  That was it; there was no way out this time.

  Sitting on that pier watching the USS United States glide between the city and Alcatraz on the way to its anchorage off Alameda already seemed like a memory from a past life, surreal.

  ‘I heard you had plenty of chances to plug that SOB back in sixty-three, Pa?’ He had checked, more from idle curiosity than angst.

  ‘Yeah, that was after Cheney and his boy went up to Atlanta to shoot that bastard King. I should have done that job myself, not left it to a couple of crazies,’ he had smiled sardonically, for a moment his ashen face that of the iron-hard Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant. He had coughed a rueful laugh. ‘Maybe, I would have taken the contract if the money had been better!’

  Kurt had worked it all out by then.

  ‘Christie screwed us all, Pa. That’s what guys like him do. His people, their people, people like you and me. I reckon Galen Cheney would have cut him up real slow if he hadn’t had other things on his mind at Wister Park.’

  If the Company, or Hoover’s G-men had pieced it all together, Langley would never have sanctioned bringing him out of retirement. They could have left him hanging, sold him out one day like they really meant it. There had been a price on his head in Brazil, head-hunters on his case. The Company had seen to that; assumed it had him on a nice, short string and that he was going to jump at a chance of rehabilitation.

  That was the trouble with people like James Jesus Angleton.

  Sooner or later they started to believe the shit they told their clients in the White House; and dangerously, the Ivy League and know nothing West Coast frat buddies around the President. They got so arrogant that they convinced themselves operators like the former Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counter Intelligence, were the real thing, that they really had magic ‘intelligence dust’ in their coat pockets capable of, hey presto, making all their problems vanish in a puff of smoke.

  Well, around about now all the President’s men would be discovering that what they had thought was ‘magic dust’ was actually, poison and without ever knowing it they had been breathing it in for years!

  Kurt knew he could have run.

  And gone on running for a long time.

  But he was tired and as the pre-dawn twilight began to brighten into full day, throwing a tangle of deep shadows through the still wintery woods around the cabin, he had been listening to the cops, state troopers, likely Army, or National Guard flatfoots too, and their dogs cautiously closing the ring around the log cabin.

  He had meant to torment James Jesus Angleton longer, make him live with the fear, the mind-rending terror he had inflicted on so many others.

  Rachel had made that impossible.

  Maybe, she had returned to DC to hunt him but on balance, he doubted that; more likely, she was like him, to old, too damaged to go on playing the game. There must have been a moment last Wednesday when she longed for the next bullet, the one that meant the nightmares would finally end.

  But he had failed her.

  And now it was too late to do anything about it.

  For her, or for himself.

  The Remington lay in pieces on the neatly made up bed; Kurt sat cross-legged on the hard board floor, mindful that the men outside would shoot him dead the instant his head rose above either of the dusty sills of the cabin’s two windows.

  His forty-five was in his hand, resting in his lap.

  If they got their hooks into him. they would drug him, keep him alive until he had blabbed everything, every dirty little secret just to make absolutely sure they had everything they needed to incriminate the innocent and to protect the guilty. That, as Rachel used to say, was the way things had always, and would always, be for the CIA, the KGB, the FBI or MI5 or Mi6, or any other ‘serious’ intelligence agency there had ever been in the whole history of the world.

  Rachel had always had better ‘letters’ than him.

  He reckoned that was because she had needed to find out why she went through what she had when she was a kid in Poland in the Second War…

  The hunters were outside the door now…

  He bit down hard on the muzzle of the forty-five.

  And as the first smoke grenade smashed, with a shower of glass, through the nearest window, without a moment’s hesitation, he squeezed the trigger.

  Chapter 78

  Tuesday 21st February 1967

  Pasadena, California

  Alan and Rosa Hannay met their visitors on the path in front of their new, as yet not very homely, bungalow situated within a brisk, twenty-minute walk of the campus of the California Institute of Technology.

  Air Marshal Sir Daniel French stepped from behind the wheel of the US Air Force Chrysler and strolled around to the passenger side door to hold it open for his wife to emerge, somewhat diffidently into the bright coolness of the day. A second Chrysler, grey like the French’s car, had drawn up behind it. Its occupants, both garbed in USAF day uniforms with subtle, blue tabs on their left lapels, had jackets tailored to conceal the bulge of shoulder-holstered pistols.

  Alan and Rosa, accustomed to co-existing with their bodyguards, paused to acknowledge the two Military Policemen with friendly nods and smiles.

  Rosa went up to Rachel and embraced her like
a long-lost, much loved sister. Momentarily, the older woman was wooden, unsure of herself: she relented, she hugged her Maltese friend, albeit with a little more self-awareness.

  Alan, meanwhile, had shaken her husband’s hand.

  Sir Daniel looked even more ‘corporate’ in his ‘civvy threads’ than he did in uniform. The former Lancaster and V-Bomber pilot had, during his time in the Governor’s Palace at Malta, morphed into a very modern, business-like administrator and fixer and inevitably, sometime politician. A trim, dapper man he seemed tired, yet somehow, ‘on leave’, as if a burden had lifted off his shoulders which was odd, given that he and his wife were at the epicentre of the biggest US-UK diplomatic row since the two countries had very nearly, started lobbing thermonuclear bombs at each other’s cities in July 1964.

  Alan retrieved his hand.

  Waiting for his wife to disentangle herself from Rachel, he gallantly stepped forward and planted a peck on her pale cheek before, cautiously, as if she was bruised all over, gently embracing her. To his surprise, she hugged him back.

  The two couples stood looking at each other for a few seconds.

  “It is damned good to see you both,” Alan declared.

  “Come inside,” Rosa commanded. “You must be desperate for a nice cup of tea, or coffee, after your drive down from Palmdale. They say the mountains are beautiful? Alan and I plan to explore a little when we are more settled.”

  The Hannays had discovered that the Air Force house came with a young Hispanic part-time maid and nanny, who was employed to be at their disposal from eight in the morning to four in the afternoon weekdays, and for two hours each side of noon at the weekends.

  The woman, whose name was Ramona, was about Rosa’s age, and at first, shy and nervous, a thing Rosa was working on.

  “This is Ramona,” she said, introducing the other woman to her guests. “This is Sir Daniel French and his wife, Lady Rachel.”

  Ramona was astonished, paralysed with indecision as the great man held out his hand and a moment later, his lady, did likewise. The brief handshaking completed, she fled into the back of the bungalow to the security of the kitchen.