Operation DOUBLEPAYBACK

by Jack Freeman

  Too early the next morning the phone rang in Jack’s apartment. It was the London Station.

  “Oh shit,” breathed Jack, as word came down the crackling line, put down the receiver, picked it up again and dialled Mohsan’s apartment.

  “Hi, Max? Sorry buddy, whenever I call its bad stuff. Listen. I just got a call. Your bookstore was machine gunned last night. Nobody was hurt but a bit of stock damage. Our Brit contractors have patched it up and your dippy assistant is coping surprisingly well. By the way, has he ever been vetted? Officially, the cops have an open mind and no present suspects, except maybe rival radical groups or even anti-beatnik nutters. Conservative politicians and right wing rags have been sounding off about the beatnik menace threatening the morals of what would otherwise be up standing youth. That could have been a factor. There was new graffiti on the sidewalk. It wasn’t very original. It just said “Kilroy woz here” with a picture of the big nosed man peering over a wall. Mean anything to you?”

  “Yeah, probably, means, it’s not anti-beatnik nuts, but that jerk Murphy and his sidekick Kilroy survived the Berlin blast after all, and they’re out there, after me.”

  “That makes sense. Unfortunately, for you. It looks like you’ve now got the IRA as well as RPI and HVA on your case now, buddy. Maybe it’s time to split. Seriously, there are good hide aways in Argentina. Or maybe Columbia. I hear it has nice bits, when they’re not having civil wars.”

  “I’m thinkin’ about it. This life is getting tiresome, you might say. I think we’ll take a few days in the mountains and get some perspective. Most likely we will go back and face it all down. At least I’ve got you guys for backup and we go back a long way. If you haven’t sold me out by now, you probably won’t, I reckon. OK, we will be in touch, probably in London, in a week or so. This is Blue, over and out.”

  Chapter 11 From the past.

  It was early spring, 1962, and Max and Azar had been able to pick up again the beat generation bookshop business after returning from Los Angeles. As Max had expected, a few days hiking and camping wild in the San Gabriel mountain nature reserve had cleared his mind. They had hiked far from well trodden paths and enjoyed a huge range of terrain from lush dells to desert chaparral landscapes and steep rock strewn mountain slopes. The expedition culminated in an ascent of Old Baldy on a perfectly clear day and on the peak, 10,000 feet above the sea, he and Azar agreed to try London again.

  When they returned to London on a wet and windy day, they contacted Jack who was already back at the London Station and he quickly helped Max get tougher bullet resistant glass and steel lined doors fitted to the bookshop. For added security, Max and Azar moved to a two bedroom flat in a mansion block on Marchmont Street , which was few streets away from the shop and as Azar pointed out, even more convenient for The Marlborough Arms. They kept in regular touch with Jack. Things had gone quiet and Max, Jack and Azar were all glad that no further operations were looming. Still, Max didn’t quite believe that the powers of darkness had really decided to forgive and forget.

  Unexpectedly, one morning, while breakfasting on croissants and strong black Arabica coffee, Max took a phone call inviting him to meet a distributor of Latin American magical realist literature in translation at the distributor’s office on the Bayswater Road. A tempting deal was on offer and as Max believed that Latin American magical realism would be the next big thing in the book business, he was happy to go to the meeting.

  Max and Azar set off from Judd Street together and since it was, unusually, a dry and sunny Spring day they decided to walk the whole route and began by zig-zagging through Bloomsbury. As they walked, Max began to speak.

  “Say, I wonder if there is a contemporary version of the Bloomsbury set? We should start one up. We could have a sort of literary salon in the shop. Get big names to come and meet the people once a month or so, poetry readings, debates and all that”

  “Sounds good. You will be a strange successor to Virginia Woolf. I bet she would not have been much of a secret agent. Probably, no use in a firefight. Still, she was a good observer even if her reports were maybe not always crystal clear,” replied Azar.

  They then fell silent and crossed Tottenham Court Road to go along Goodge Street, Mortimer Street and Wigmore Street before dropping south on to Oxford Street which soon led to the Bayswater Road.

  As they neared the address given for the distributor, Azar paused and said,

  “I’ll just stop for a minute and pick up a newspaper. I want to read about the hanging of that bastard Hanratty for the A6 murder.”

  A small time criminal, James Hanratty, had been found guilty in a confusing murder case that had divided people as few such cases do, into those totally convinced he was guilty and those who felt sure there had been a miscarriage of justice. Max had said earlier that he thought the case was full of holes and most likely the real killer was a jealous partner who knew that the murder victim, Michael Gregsten had been having an affair with his colleague Valerie Storie, who was raped, shot and left paralysed by the killer (or maybe there was more than one killer). Max had commented that at least nobody had tried to pin it on the Company which Azar did not find particularly funny. Azar was sure Hanratty had done it and should be hanged just for what he did to Storie never mind the killing of Gregsten. It was a nightmare of a crime with a psycho hijacking a car and toying with the occupants for hours before the violent ending. He had raped Storie on top of Gregsten’s body and this detail made Azar shudder. Then he shot Storie leaving her paralysed. He definitely deserved hanging, preferably very slowly. Azar was disappointed to find that hanging in Britain meant the neck was broken by a carefully calibrated fall, so that death, when it came, was instantaneous. Slow strangulation by hanging would be better for types like Hanratty.

  “Ok ,”said Max, “Get a paper with all the gory details. It’s time Britain got up to date and had gas chambers, firing squads or electric chairs, say. Hanging is a bit old-fashioned, surely. I’ll just walk on and see if I can spot this address and you catch up when you get out of the paper shop. It looks like there’s a bit of a line in the shop, probably the place is full of ghouls like you! Public hanging like they used to do near here, at Marble Arch I think it was, would still be popular, I’m sure.”

  As Max walked on along the Bayswater Road, looking for the distributor’s address, he began to pass two black vans parked by the side of the road. When he had passed the first van, suddenly the kerbside doors of both vans opened and Max found himself boxed in by two heavily muscled masked men with baseball bats, one in front and one behind. The back door of the forward van opened and a third masked man emerged with a small handgun pointing at Max’s head. The new man gestured clearly for Max to get in the forward van through the back door. Max thought, “Shit, a set up. Who is it? RPI? IRA? HVA? or maybe Cubans or …?” Next, came a searing blow to the side of his head and a dim awareness of being pulled and pushed into the van, being turned over, then having his hands cuffed behind his back and his ankles being bound. Within seconds came another blow to the head and as Max lost consciousness, the vans carefully pulled out into the light mid –morning traffic.

  Azar just caught sight of something going on as she emerged from the newsagents and noticed that the rearmost of the two black vans had West German plates. There was no sight of Max on the street. She ran down the Bayswater Road still hoping to see Max and unsure whether the vans were sinister or not. As the vans were pulling out into the traffic she suddenly saw a shoe in the gutter. It was a distinctive newly made Chelsea boot, very like the one that Max had just the week before acquired from a recently established trend setting outfitters on Carnaby Street in Soho. The worst assumption was confirmed when she found that the shoe still had a tag inside in which she had written “Max” in marker pen to avoid any confusion of shoes at the gym which Max had begun to frequent. She realised with a start that Max had been abducted and was captive in one of the disappearing black vans.

  Some fifteen minutes after Az
ar had seen the vans moving off from the kerb, Max regained consciousness and saw that he appeared to be in what could be a large, and poorly lit coal cellar. He was lying on a sooty dusty floor, chained by one arm to a very secure metal post that ran from floor to ceiling. His ribs, head and mouth were sore and tender. Above him were looming the unappealing features of Johnny Garcia.

  “So what can I do for the Dominican Republic Secret Service today,” Max managed to say through bruised lips.

  “Still the funny man, huh? Well I am working for the new Trujillo people, true, much like I did for the old guy, God rest him. But also we’re working with the Cubans and your recent ex-friends in the Revolutionary Party of Iran and a few others with an interest in you. A coalition of anti-Blue forces, if you will. We discovered that we have a lot of interests in common with these new pals. In fact, one of your old RPI colleagues is here with me. Remember Ali? You tried to lock him up in London and damn near killed him in Los Angeles. He has come all this way to re-new acquaintance with you. Isn’t that nice?

  Seriously though, none of us like US imperialism. We didn’t used to think that way and maybe most still don’t. But the powers that be there are Trujillo-istas like me and we can’t get over the assassination of El Jefe, Trujillo senior. They especially don’t like your involvement as a CIA guy in the assassination, after all the years of cooperation with the US and that’s the thanks we get.

  Blue, you are going to tell us about all the traitors you dealt with in Cuba, in the Dominican Republic and in the ranks of the RPI. You probably think you won’t tell us anything, that your counter interrogation training will really work, but we have an interesting truth drug here that has worked well in recent experiments. We got hold of a KGB manufactured drug, SP-17, that the Russians swear by, but we found a bit unreliable. Through our new Cuban friends and working with them we added in some drugs native to our hemisphere, mescaline and psilocybin. Believe it or not, we have done proper controlled double blind experiments, carried out in our prisons, by experts in the methodology of drug trials. OK, the subjects weren’t exactly volunteers as you might say, and didn’t actually give informed consent, but the results were good, believe me. I think we poor third worlders have beaten your CIA, with its multi-million dollar MK-ULTRA programme, to a truly functioning truth drug. One drawback is that it needs about 24 hours to take effect, and during that period you will be out of it, dead to the world. When you come round, spilling all the beans will strike you as an irresistibly good idea.”

  “Well, I’m always ready to try a new chemical, as you have probably heard. Your volunteers probably did not have bodies with the same experience of multiple drug use as mine has. I can tell you that you’ll need to give me a giant dose. So, you know about MK-ULTRA? That’s so secret, hardly anyone even in the Company has heard about it. It is a totally compartmented programme. As far as I know, we’ve had quite a few fatalities among the subjects but yes, I have to admit it hasn’t produced much. If I do get out of this, your mole is in serious trouble.

  Anyway, you say Ali is here. That’s interesting! How the hell did that happen? Last I heard he was in supposedly ultra secure CIA custody after nearly bleeding out at the Los Angeles shoot out.”

  “Well, maybe no harm telling you, as your days are numbered. You have your moles and assets in rival groups and so do we. Ali was being held under the control of a certain CIA officer, Phil Agee, and Phil, well, he has turned. Unusually for a Yankee, his motivation is ideology, not money. He worked for the Company in South America for years, fingering progressives for right wing death squads until he finally saw the light, saw that he was protecting the capitalists and imperialists from the people’s uprising. So, now he’s an asset of the world revolutionary movement. He told us about MK-ULTRA among other things and he arranged for Ali to have an escape opportunity from the CIA holding pens in Long Beach, which he duly took. Agee also helped him get documents and snuck him out of the States as a harmless Indian business man, Tariq Patel. Using bureaucratic obfuscation, at which he had become a master, Agee kept the whole escape saga completely quiet, so even your contact, Johnson didn’t know about the escape. On the DC books Ali was still in Long Beach long after he had left the continental United States; while on the Long Beach books, he had been moved to a black site in ‘Nam. So everybody thought he was somewhere else. Clever, huh? Ali then came down to a secret summit meeting of us, the Trujillo-istas, with the Cubans and the RPI in Trujillo City. That’s when we got together as a new style revolutionary Internationale, and funnily enough, one of the first items on the agenda was dealing with you, as you have really, really, pissed us all off.”

  As Garcia finished speaking, Ali came in and wagged a finger at Max and said, “It’s payback time. You should have killed me when you had the chance. Because, you are gonna be real sorry you didn’t.”

  “You are right there old buddy I should have made sure you were a gonner when you were bleeding out, down in the trash, in that alley in Los Angeles,” replied Max.

  “Yeah, I won’t forget you kicking me hard in the ribs as I lay near death. Well, it’s time for your medicine. This is one drug, you may not like, my junky amigo.”

  A large Latin American woman in a closely fitting white nurse’s uniform came in with a tray of vials and syringes, followed by a tall man with slicked back blue-black hair in a white coat with a stethoscope.

  “I like the nurse outfit. This operation is a classy one,” said Max.

  “Shut up, for God’s sake. No more with the wise cracks. Let’s get on with the show. Nurse, attend to the patient,” said Garcia, looking exasperated.

  Garcia addressed the man in the white coat, “Dr Finlay, make sure this creep doesn’t die on us.”

  “Very good, Mr Garcia. Don’t worry. I had plenty experience of this sort of thing with Cameron back at the Montreal lab,” replied Finlay with a soft Edinburgh accent.

  Max braced himself and tried to focus on Finlay’s face which looked somehow familiar. Then he remembered, yes, he had seen Finlay at a briefing on the MK-ULTRA truth drug programme in DC. He was the link with Professor Donald Cameron’s psychiatric research laboratory at McGill University. Cameron was an unwitting asset, accepting grants from medical research charity fronts set up by the Company to test products of the Company’s labs on a large scale. Cameron was highly respected as President of the World Psychiatric Association and a leader in the field of extreme treatments of mental disorder; radical lobotomies, coma therapy, massive electro-convulsive shocks and drug doses that neared fatal levels, coupled with twenty four hour subliminal auditory messages. He was persuaded and persuasive that extreme conditions merited extreme treatments and that such treatments would re-configure sick brains. The Company hoped he might prove the effectiveness of the truth drugs being developed in its secret laboratories and also perhaps come up with ways of reversing the effects of the brainwashing treatments perfected by the Chinese communists.

  Suddenly, Max heard what sounded like a train rumbling somewhere far below the filthy cellar floor. Then he felt a sharp puncturing in his unsecured upper left arm as a large syringe needle was forcefully pushed in by the burly nurse. Immediately, a very relaxed feeling overcame him.

  Max began to see the room swimming and the objects in it started to dissolve into one another in front of him. Garcia, Ali, Finlay and the nurse were distorting , stretching and shrinking, as the walls bulged back and forth. Colours were extraordinarily bright and tiny details of surfaces became absorbing. The sooty floor had become a fascinating world of intricate and wonderful patterns.

  “I’m liking this, don’t know what it is, but it sure cleans the doors of perception…but how the hell did I get into this goddam cellar?” thought Max just before he lost all awareness of outside reality. At this point the hippocampus and amygdala regions of his brain began greedily absorbing unusually high quantities of blood glucose and the neurons relating to memory retrievals and reconstructions began firing in abnormal patterns whic
h re-generated, with hallucinatory clarity, his experiences operating in what the Company called the Western Hemisphere Directorate, from back in 1958. These covert activities had led ultimately and inexorably to his being tied up, drugged and delirious on a dirty cellar floor in London’s Mayfair district.

  Chapter 12 Cuba ‘58

  “The General, El Presidente, will see you now Senor Blue.”

  Max Blue looked up from the Miami Herald International Edition for that day, Monday, October 6th, 1958, which led with a story about a new jet powered passenger air service by de Havilland Comet planes across the Atlantic Ocean. Max smiled broadly at the tight skirted aide to General Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar as she beckoned him to follow her. The solid mahogany door was opened by a guard in tropical dress uniform and Max saw a heavy dark skinned man who was sweating heavily despite the powerful air conditioning, behind a marble topped desk. On the wall was a large scale map of Cuba dotted with red and blue headed pins. The red pins looked to be winning.

  The dark skinned man stood up and said, “Welcome to Cuba, Senor Blue. Please take a seat and Rosalita, bring our best rum and some ice for our guest and me.”

  Max replied, “Thank you, General. I hope we can be of some assistance. A cold rum with plenty ice would be most welcome.”

  The men took seats facing each other across a low glass table which was quickly supplied with glasses, ice and a large crystal decanter of 7 year old Havana Club rum. Behind Batista was a picture window with a good view of Havana’s Old Quarter baking in the autumn heat.

  Batista began to speak, “As you know, the rebels are doing better than we would like. We are sure they are being supplied by the Russians and the Russians look to add us to their Empire if they possibly can. We need help from our American friends to stop this and I am hoping you bring good news on that.”