Former Special Agent Dwight Christie had wondered, now and then, what it would be like being a prisoner. When first he betrayed the Agency, his country and the majority of the people he had ever called ‘friends’ he had expected to be quickly uncovered, captured, condemned and probably hung, gassed or electrocuted — depending upon which state he was arraigned in — or shot in some last gasp desperate OK Corral-type shoot out… every day. However, when it had not happened after the first year he had started to relax. In fact as the years had rolled by he had become a little blasé about the prospect.
No fool like an old fool.
The handcuffs chaffed; the connecting chain of his manacles was strung through a rugged steel loop buried in the table before him. Even had he been able to get to his feet his ankles were shackled. The chains made sense; he was after all, a very dangerous man.
“Tadeusz Drzewiecki. Aged twenty-nine years.”
Tolson had not called the goons in the corridor back into the interrogation cell yet. On balance that was likely a good sign. They would have stayed around if today was the day he got to be beaten to a pulp. Problematically, the day was still young but the thing about being a prisoner was that you learned — faster than most people imagine — to live minute by minute because your life belonged to somebody else. The hardest thing to get used to was not having to make any plans, or take any decisions. After a while it tended to leave a huge empty void in a man’s mind.
“I shot Richter,” Dwight Christie confessed. “I could pretend I did it because he raped a seventeen year old girl in the car lot behind the Santa Fe Field Office one night, but,” he shrugged as demonstrably as his manacled hands allowed, “I’d have capped the jerk when I found out about that if I was half the man I like to think I am. Before you ask, I killed Jansen, too. He was the guy who carried out the hit on Admiral Braithwaite and his wife in Oakland. Jansen was the one who capped Drzewiecki and Miller.”
Tolson scowled.
“Who ordered the assassination of Admiral and Mrs Braithwaite?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.” Two lies.
“How did you meet Jansen?”
Christie said nothing.
“Okay,” Tolson grunted. “Why kill everybody at the safe house in Berkeley?”
“How far would I have got if I’d just disappeared?”
The older man sucked in an asthmatic breath.
“It took you what,” Christie inquired, “two months to figure out I wasn’t one of the bodies in Berkeley? I knew the Bureau would work it out sooner or later. Later was better at the time. Besides, Jansen had it coming to him. Guys like me hate contracting work out to the mob as much as you and the Director, Mr Tolson.”
“Guys like you?”
“Guys like you and me who protect and serve the swindlers who profit from this country’s wars.”
Clyde Tolson was looking at him as if he was mad.
Heck, maybe I am mad!
I must have been crazy risking getting caught playing the good fucking Samaritan once too often…
“The women and children at the address where you were arrested,” Tolson inquired, “claim that you were their guardian angel?”
Christie snorted a short laugh.
“I put distance between them and Galen Cheney and brought them food and medicine when I could, if that’s what you mean?”
Tolson had been thumbing through a sheaf of notes.
He paused, read several lines.
“There were two older women. A lady in her forties and another in her twenties, and several girls… ” He looked up. “All of whom had been violated. Including the youngest, who claims her age to be only twelve years?”
“Sarah Jane was raped by Galen Cheney’s son Isaac the night before the pair of them took off north,” Christie said. There was no point holding back things the bastards already knew. “Before you ask; for what it’s worth I didn’t know they planned to assassinate Dr King. I’ve got no problem being a communist, if that’s what you want to call me but I’ve got no quarrel with blacks who want a fair deal. I thought that was what the Civil War was about… ”
Tolson’s pale face was wearing a troubled, vaguely confused expression.
“You must have known Cheney’s planned to assassinate the Reverend King?”
Christie shook his head.
“No. I didn’t know he planned to take a pot shot at the Presidential cavalcade in Dallas either.” He shook his head again. “Or any of the other shit he got up to before I met up with him again back in December. The rebellion in DC was as big a surprise to me as it was to you and the Director, by the way.” That was lie, of course. “I guessed the Braithwaite killing was something to do with that, but that’s just twenty-twenty hindsight. Maybe the Admiral found out what was in the wind and somebody wanted him silenced?”
Tolson was quiet for some seconds.
“Everybody says you’re a sharp operator, Christie.” It was no kind of question so the younger man did not reply.
Instead, he asked a question of his own.
“It was one of the girls who tipped you off, wasn’t it?”
Nothing else made sense. The women were terrified of Galen Cheney and his idiot surviving son. Retarded or not Isaac had to have been the man who fired the shots responsible for the Bedford Pine Park tragedy in Atlanta in February. The kid had a gift with a long rifle, the eyesight of a hawk and the untroubled conscience of a child who simply does not realize that taking down another human being of ranges of up to a mile is wrong.
Isaac had damaged Sarah Jane that night before he went away. Inseminated her, and subsequently beaten her so badly she had passed blood for two days. A fortnight ago the kid had miscarried and the bleeding had gone on and on…
She would have died if he had not driven her and Selma, the oldest of the surviving Cheney women to the nearest hospital over thirty miles north from the bayou hideaway where, until then, the women had been safe from the Cheney’s.
Sarah Jane had been delirious.
She would not have been able to help herself…
“I am informed that the child is recovering,” Tolson explained, obviously finding the whole discussion about the hospitalization of a twelve year old victim of unspeakable sexual abuse intensely distasteful, “as well as can be expected in the circumstances.”
Dwight Christie was beginning to realize he was no longer being interrogated; possibly, because his captors suspected that he had little or no useful intelligence to betray. He had had no contact with his former minders since before the Battle of Washington; and so far as he knew he had only a single unburned contact left in the whole of North America. He had trawled the south western states checking dead letter drops, slipping the standard key words — code words — into conversations in places where he had met comrades in the past. He had watched old safe houses, trailed the friends and relations of old associates. All to no avail; the network was gone, anybody still ‘sleeping’ was comatose and everybody else was dead or in the hands of the Bureau.
Yes, something was definitely sticking in Associate Director Tolson’s throat.
No witnesses in the cell.
No visible sign of any bugging or recording equipment.
No double-sided mirrors.
Perhaps, Tolson needed whatever he wanted to say to him to be private with a capital ‘P’.
Christie waited. He had all the time in the world; he was going nowhere but Clyde Tolson was a busy man. He would get to the punch line sooner or later.