by James Philip
Lyndon Johnson let this pass unremarked as he motioned for his guest to precede him into the parlor. Lady Bird took this as he cue to smile and step back into the shadows, leaving the players to get on with their game.
“My Secret Service boys say you’re a dangerous woman?”
Rachel shrugged.
“All women are potentially dangerous, Mr Vice President,” she replied languidly arranging herself in the chair the man indicated.
“Were you one of Jack Kennedy’s girls back in the day?”
The woman smiled, shook her head.
“No. He had plenty of other mistresses ‘back in the day’,” she went on, her eyes twinkling with wry amusement but her expression impenetrable. “I was more focused on,” she paused, “other clients and it was advantageous to me to keep the President, and his little brother, at arm’s length. Rather in the fashion of particularly endearing puppies with,” another pause, attended with a glacial smile, “shit on its paws.”
Lyndon Johnson laughed. He did not want to laugh; he simply could not help himself.
“Is it true,” Rachel continued, “that when you were Senate Majority Leader you had better dossiers on all the other senators than J. Edgar Hoover?”
“Damn right I did!”
The woman nodded thoughtfully.
“Nobody will tell me what the Secretary of State and the Attorney General are talking to the Russians about,” she confessed, as if she was making polite conversation just to avoid an awkward silence.
“Maybe that’s because it’s none of your goddamned business.”
Rachel let this pass.
The man had a point, after all.
“Okay,” she decided. “I’m here because in the aftermath of the Hyannis Port debacle your government and mine have stopped talking to each other. Oh, I know Secretary of State Fulbright and Lord Franks still have regular bilateral contacts but that’s not talking. Given what’s going on in the Middle East and the fact that Admiral McDonald, your Chief of Naval Operations has recently been absent from his normal haunts, it is not unreasonable to speculate that he has been, or still is in the process of visiting that troubled region.”
Lyndon Johnson raised an eyebrow.
“Ah, you didn’t know about Admiral McDonald’s secret meeting with the commander of the Kitty Hawk’s squadron at Bombay?” The woman queried. “Oh dear, you really are out of favor, Mr Vice President.”
She was good!
Really good!
“Shouldn’t you be doing spy work?” He inquired archly.
“I’m an intelligence officer. I don’t spy on anybody.”
It was a measure of how messed up the World was that spies were the last diplomats standing.
“So you’d have had nothing to do with the stories out there bad-mouthing the President?” The Texan retorted.
“Dr Feelgood, the President’s lobotomized sister?” Rachel asked rhetorically. “Addison’s disease? The American media have known about all that stuff and much, much worse for years and been too spineless, not to mention complicit in the conspiracy of silence, to tell ‘the people’ about it. That’s changing now. Not before time. Don’t you think the American people have a right to know that the President – and his little brother, now and then – used to treat any woman unwise enough to step into the White House as if they were no better than a common harlots in their own personal harems before the Cuban Missiles War?”
Lyndon Johnson did not react.
“You’ve heard all the stories, I’m sure,” his visitor continued. “I thought the one about JFK fucking Marilyn Monroe in Bobby’s love nest in the loft of the Department of Justice Building was a real hoot. The Secret Service claim to have destroyed the recording of Marilyn Monroe’s call to the First Lady; the one in which she threatened to marry the President and to move into the White House. I’m sure they’ve got a copy locked away somewhere, I would if I was running the Secret Service. Apparently, Jackie said ‘that’s great, you'll assume the responsibilities of First Lady, and I'll move out and you'll have all the problems’. How classy is that?”
“What would you have done in her position, Miss Piotrowska?”
It was the woman’s turn to arch an eyebrow.
“Ms Monroe would probably have encountered an unfortunate accident,” she smiled coldly, “as in fact she did shortly before the war. But I’m sure that it was just a tragic accident,” she smiled saturninely. “One hears the oddest rumors. In any event, I am not here to try your patience with tittle-tattle, Mr Vice President.”
Johnson got to his feet, turned towards the door. He hesitated and swung around as the woman rose. For a moment she wondered if she was going to be subjected to the legendary ‘Johnson Treatment’. Six feet and over three inches tall the Vice President towered over her, his stare boring into her face.
“You British don’t get it,” he grunted. “We don’t owe you a goddam thing. You think you’ve got it bad? We saved your asses the night of the war. It didn’t work out nice and clean and tidy but if we hadn’t hit the fucking Soviets when we did we’d all be dead now!”
Rachel decided she was only getting a diluted version of ‘the treatment’.
Even so it felt a little like she was standing under a waterfall and there were rocks in the water falling on her from above.
Johnson has moved a step closer and his gaze was relentless.
Rachel shut her eyes for moment, re-focused on the man.
“I killed the last man who attempted to bully me, Mr Vice President,” she said softly.
“With a fucking Kalashnikov!” He growled instantly. Suddenly he was no longer looming over Rachel and his expression was wry. “They say that’s a Hell of a gun?”
The woman frowned.
“Yes,” she agreed dully.
Especially if you need to kill everybody in the room!
“What do you want, Ms Piotrowska?” Lyndon Johnson demanded before adding. “Whoever the fuck you are!”
“Want?” She echoed. “I don’t want anything. But you’re wrong. You owe us – the Brits - more than you can imagine and if you make peace with the Soviet Union behind our backs you need to know that bad things will happen.”
A smile formed on the craggy Texan’s lips; then faded.
“I don’t take kindly to threats.”
Rachel shrugged.
“Have it your own way. When you are the President you will want to talk to us.”
The woman turned to go.
“That’s it?” Johnson demanded angrily, losing his temper.
“Yes. What did you expect, Mr Vice President?” Rachel said deadpan. “A quick hand job before I leave?”
Chapter 43
Wednesday 1st July 1964
Wharton Forest, New Jersey
Galen Cheney’s people had recovered Dwight Christie’s stolen Chrysler from its hiding place off the Atsion Road and driven it deep into the woods near the encampment. The camp, which had been populated mainly by women and children when the former G-man arrived, had filled with men, at least a dozen of them, the majority dressed in military-style fatigues and carrying a variety of guns. Several of Galen Cheney’s ‘disciples’ hefted M-16 assault rifles, others pump action shotguns, or long hunting rifles, every man carried a handgun on his hip. With the return of the men folk the clearing in the woods had assumed the feel and the mood of an outlaw hideaway.
As there often was in Galen Cheney’s proximity there was a threat of violence in the air; life around him was always lived on the edge of retribution. Now that the returnees – Christie had no idea where they had been – knew who he was, and more importantly, what he had once been, the majority were viewing him as if they wanted to slit his throat and be done with it.
Cheney had called a meeting so Christie could tell his story to everybody,
Dwight Christie had understood that he was on trial for his life; and that if things went badly there would be nothing clean, quick or painless about the manner of h
is death.
‘The resistance,’ he explained, ‘has planted a large number of naval demolition charges underneath City Hall.’
The first time around Galen Cheney, his son Isaac, and his principle lieutenant, the military looking guy called ‘Dan’ had listened with varying degrees of impassivity, nodding now and then as he had explained, in painstaking detail everything he knew about the Resistance’s scheme to decapitate the Kennedy Administration, Congress and, almost incidentally, eradicate the leadership of the Afro-American Civil Rights movement in a single audacious ‘operation’.
They had been impressed enough to let him talk to the others.
‘This was all made possible because when Congress moved to Philadelphia City Hall was a building site for the first month as new offices were set up and the basements were cleared out. Everything was done in such a hurry that nobody, and I mean nobody, was really in charge. The Secret Service, the FBI, the Philadelphia PD, people from Justice, the Office of the Interior and the survivors from the Pentagon all wanted a piece of the action. It was relatively easy for us to get our people into City Hall. Everything’s wired to blow at a flick of a switch. Our demotion guys reckon the whole shebang will fall down like a house of cards.’
Galen Cheney had chewed on this for a very long time.
The silence grew dangerous.
‘City Hall comes crashing down. Then what?’ He had asked lowly.
The crowd standing, sitting, moving about around Christie had begun muttering. He had tried to ignore the hostility, hate in the eyes studying him as he saw in the canvas camp chair in their midst.
‘Then we seize the TV and radio stations in Philadelphia and broadcast the call to arms to rise up against the Federal Government. We all get to join in the great fight for freedom with our brothers and sisters in the Midwest.’
Cheney nodded, looked to Dan, who seemed to be his deputy.
The other man had shrugged imperceptibly, his scrutiny never moving from Christie’s face.
‘How come we don’t know squat about any of this, brother?’
Christie had ignored him, concentrating on Cheney.
‘It was too risky to make contact with you guys after Atlanta. Besides, I was only brought in on this thing a month ago. Until then we couldn’t be sure if the March on Philadelphia was going to happen. We have to decapitate the Government this time. We have to liquidate the whole leadership. What went wrong in DC last year was that the coup hit too many places at the same time without killing the all people that mattered. If the Pentagon had fallen, or if the White House had been destroyed early on things might have been different. But here in Philadelphia we don’t have to capture or destroy half-a-dozen or twenty targets we just have to hit one! Hard! Hit it on a date and at a time we know that all the people we have to kill all be in one place!’
Galen Cheney had sucked his teeth and fiddled unconsciously with his bolo tie, turning the Navajo medallion in his fingers.
‘We already have plans for fourth of July,’ he had declared and nodded to Dan and Isaac to take Christie away.
That was two days ago.
Since then Christie had been kept under constant guard in a tent set back into the woods. He had had to dig his own latrine away from the camp, and had his food brought to him. There were always two guards, always armed with M-1 carbines or M-16 assault rifles. Cheney had warned him if he attempted to escape he would be shot.
‘Like a dog.’
Somebody was shaking Christie’s shoulder.
It was dark but a lantern was swinging close to his head.
“What the...”
The barrel of a gun jabbed his ribs.
“Nobody can get near City Hall,” Galen Cheney grunted accusingly.
Christie struggled to sit up, pressing his right hand to his ribs.
“That’s because it’s the most secure building in the country right now!” He retorted irritably.
“Convenient, that,” the other man growled. “Nobody being able to check your story. Maybe I don’t believe you.”
“Yeah, well what you believe and what’s real ain’t always the same thing, Galen!” Dwight Christie had had just about enough; of the FBI, of ‘the cause’, of living, basically, and it made him fearless. “Why the fuck aren’t you out West fighting the good fight with the rest of the fucking brethren?”
In the quietness the lantern sizzled in the gloom.
“I have God’s work to do here in the East first.” He sighed. “The end of times will come soon enough, brother.”
“God said that to you, did he?”
Galen Cheney nodded somberly, pitying the unbeliever.
“My people have no interest in who governs this forsaken country,” he went on. “Go back to your people and tell them that we will do God’s work in Philadelphia as He sees fit.”
“You won’t get anywhere near the President.”
“God will be with us as he was with the Israelites when he parted the Red Sea for them to escape from captivity in Egypt.”
The man is stark raving mad!
“I can’t tell my people that!”
“Then you don’t need to tell them anything.”
The moment had come; the last throw of the dice.
“If I don’t renew contact by noon tomorrow, they’ll come for you in forest, Galen.”
The other man was stone-faced.
“You’ve got a lot of fighting men here but a lot of women and children, too. I’m sure you’re organized, that you’ve got pickets out in the woods. Booby traps, too. But they’ll just come in here and wipe you out anyway because otherwise you might end up in the wrong place at the wrong time on Saturday. They won’t let that happen.” He tried to sound reasonable. However, it was the middle of the night and he had been expecting a bullet in the back of the neck for two days now. “Give me your word you and your people will stay out of downtown Philly on Saturday or shoot me. It doesn’t make a heap of difference to me. What’s it to be?”
Chapter 44
Wednesday 1st July 1964
Camp David, Catoctin Mountains, Maryland
The President of the United States of America looked old and haggard, his eyes sunken in grey pits. J. William Fulbright, the Secretary of State did not look great either, although his was the fatigue of a man who had been constantly perambulating around the World for most of the last three weeks rather than the exhaustion of a sick man.
Jack Kennedy had the pallor of a man struck down by the latest strain of the influenza – people called it ‘flu’ but nobody believed it was anything other than some post-apocalypse plague – that was beginning to spread out of Boston. The sickness had not reached the greater Philadelphia area or New York but if previous outbreaks were anything to go by it would arrive soon. The ‘flu’ had been seeping down through Cape Cod at the time of the Hyannis Port summit with the British; not that anybody had warned the visitors. Such courtesies had long since ceased to be any part of the US’s relations with its ‘friends’.
Curtis LeMay noted the weakness of the President’s grip as the two men shook hands.
“I’m sorry to find you unwell, sir.”
“It is just a chill. That’s what they say, leastways,” the Commander-in-Chief retorted, quirking the famous smile for a moment, mostly from memory.
A chill in high summer...
Fulbright’s grip was iron-hard as always.
“I’m worried the British don’t seem to be taking our naval presence in the Persian Gulf very seriously,” Jack Kennedy said as the three men took their seats in the ‘meeting’ chalet close to the helicopter landing pad. The Secretary of State and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs were passing through, and this meeting had been arranged at literally the last minute at the President’s request. “I’m also worried that we might be sending out mixed messages.”
LeMay threw a thoughtful look at Fulbright.
Lately, American foreign policy had been about preaching to the converted. In the Mid
dle East that meant to Israel and to the best Iraqi, Egyptian and Iranian exiles money could buy. The same policy was being assiduously pursued in Spain, and more tentatively, with the chaotic rightist and borderline fascistic regimes controlling much of Italy. As for the British; in Malta the US military was still behaving as if it was the old country’s best friend in Christendom, but everywhere else more like an estranged former party to a marriage heading for the rocks.
“We are sending out mixed messages, sir,” LeMay observed bluntly.
“The British must know that we can’t let the situation in the Gulf get out of hand,” the Secretary of State interjected. “They know that given the presence of Soviet-backed insurgencies in Turkey and the Balkans that we cannot allow Syria and Jordan to go the way of Iraq. As for the Arabian Peninsula...”
Curtis LeMay shook his head and vented a disgusted snort.
“Dammit! I’m the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and you haven’t told me what our policy in the Middle East is,” he fulminated. “How the heck do you expect the Brits to know what it is?”
Jack Kennedy roused himself.
“It is our policy to put an end to the war in the Gulf, General.”
“With respect, sir,” the veteran airman pointed out, “that is the objective of our policy. Our policy to actually achieve that objective is a recipe for disaster. It has too many goddam moving parts and one false move by Bringle or any of the ships or aircraft of Carrier Division Seven and we hand the Soviets the Arabian oilfields...”
“Yes, we’ve had this debate before, General LeMay,” the Commander-in-Chief reminded him testily. “If it becomes necessary the British forces in the Middle East will be confronted with overwhelming US air and sea power. In this connection, as previously discussed the 319th Bomb Wing should be placed on alert for operations in Iraq and the Northern Persian Gulf. KC-135 tankers should be pre-positioned so as to facilitate B-52 operations in the regions immediately.”