“How on earth are we going to feed the people?”
Rosson viewed the graying politician with coolly exasperated eyes.
“Feeding the people is not my problem, sir. I’m fighting a war here not running a grocery store.” He knew he ought to shut up at that point. However, something drove him to make one last attempt to explain the new reality to the older man. Several of his staffers were already calling the state capitol ‘the Alamo’; the bigger picture was that Madison — sitting at a key junction of the Interstate’s from the south east and the east — was the Bastogne of Wisconsin. He beckoned the Governor of Wisconsin to move closer to the map table. He pointed at Madison. “My job is to buy time for Command to scrape up and deploy blocking forces between here and Minneapolis. The Navy may be able to transport forces to Duluth to reinforce the existing company-strength National Guard garrison, and if it comes to it provide fire support. None of that is going to happen if we don’t hold Madison, sir.”
“But the people… ”
“The people aren’t going anywhere, sir,” Rosson said sadly, almost gently.
Chapter 15
As befitted the Philadelphia chambers of Betancourt and Sallis, Attorneys at Law, of Boston, Massachusetts, the newly acquired Broad Street offices were appropriately grand, positively palatial. However, other than to find Dan — if her husband was in his junior associate’s second floor broom closet — to drag him out to lunch, or just to see him, Gretchen Betancourt rarely showed her face in Broad Street.
Whereas Dan, for all that he was the most junior associate at the firm was engaged on Federal work that could only reflect well on the partnership; her current ‘brief’ was altogether less publicly creditworthy. In fact, for the sake of propriety, Gretchen had temporarily ceased to be an associate at the firm.
Normally, when she visited the Broad Street office she went in search of her husband but today Dan was at City Hall, the seat of the House of Representatives acting as Chief Justice Earl Warren’s secretary in a meeting with the Majority and Minority Leaders of the Senate.
Today, she had made a beeline directly up to the senior partners’ rooms on the third floor.
Fifty-nine year old William Henry Sallis II was a large well fed distinguished man with courtly manners. He had been with the firm thirty-seven years, the last twenty-eight of them as Gretchen’s father’s trusted right hand man. He was ‘Uncle Bill’ to all the Betancourt siblings. His cousin, Eleanor Louisa, was Gretchen’s mother and had been her father’s second wife.
Gretchen’s mother and father had only been married half-a-dozen years, and as a girl she had treated her step-mother, her father’s third and — presumably, given his advancing age — final wife, Gloria, as her real mother. She and Gloria had got on all right until Gretchen was about fourteen, thereafter things had gone sour. Probably this was because Gretchen was Eleanor’s, her birth mother’s — spitting image, and two strong-willed women under the same roof was always a recipe for trouble. Gretchen had been sent away to boarding schools, including one at Cheltenham in the old country for a year — which she had hated — and spent her holidays in New England with her father and brothers while Gloria amused herself in Acapulco, or the French Riviera.
She had never blamed her step-mother’s neglect on Uncle Bill.
She had always been immensely fond of Uncle Bill.
“Uncle!” She smiled, foregoing the business handshakes and solemn nods of acknowledgement in favor of a ‘niece-like’ hug and a pecking kiss, greeting her Uncle as she would regardless of the presence of the United States Deputy Attorney General in her firm’s Senior Partner’s Conference Room.
The last time Gretchen had had anything to do with Nick Katzenbach was the previous fall when she had been working as an assistant counsel in the protocol office of the Justice Department. He had used her to deflect press attention from the White House in the days immediately before the Battle of Washington; provoking FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to leak false allegations that she was having an affair with him to the press. The hue and cry had not been very nice, forcing her to seek a position in another department. To cut a long story short it was Nick Katzenbach’s fault that she was in the office of Under Secretary of State George Ball at the time the rebels blew it up!
She shook hands with the Deputy Attorney General.
“It is good to see you so recovered, Mrs Brenckmann,” the man said. Then he thought about it, and opened his mouth to correct himself.
“I sign myself Gretchen Brenckmann,” she said, tartly, “but all my documentation bears the name Brenckmann-Betancourt. Either appellation is fine by me, Mr Katzenbach.”
“Nick,” Bill Sallis interjected smoothly as the trio settled in comfortable chairs, “has a little problem that he hopes our firm can finesse for him.”
Katzenbach chuckled and shook his head.
“It’s more Director Hoover’s problem than mine actually, Bill.”
“Yes, quite so, Nick.”
Gretchen frowned even though she knew it to be less than professional.
Bill Sallis ran a hand over his balding pate.
“Perhaps, if you would explain the, er, situation, to Gretchen, Nick?”
There was a knock at the door and Sallis’s middle-aged graying secretary Hilda, entered with a coffee tray. Hilda was famous for keeping detailed notes on how each of her boss’s visitors liked his or her coffee. Bill Sallis half rose to his feet and smiled briefly at the newcomer. Everybody in the firm thought something had to have been going on between the two of them for years but both were such scions of discretion that even if something had been, or still was ‘going on’ between them, nobody held out any hope of finding out what, any time soon.
“I’m here on behalf of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the Deputy Attorney General prefaced, hardly believing he was about to say what he planned to say next. “Specifically, at the request of Director Hoover who finds himself in a, shall we say, delicate position over a matter of what might possibly be great national importance.”
Gretchen tried very hard to keep a straight face.
It was not easy.
The idea of a senior member of the Administration doing J. Edgar Hoover any kind of favor would have had her rolling around on the floor in agonizing stitches of laughter in practically any other circumstance.
“You will be aware that the President has, in addition to the Bureau’s other responsibilities, instructed Director Hoover to prioritize the ongoing investigation into the plot to depose the government by force in December of last year,” Nick Katzenbach grimaced apologetically, knowing that Gretchen was the last person in America he needed to tell about that, “and the hunting down of the men responsible for the Bedford Pine Park atrocity.”
Gretchen nodded, genuinely curious.
“I am not here in connection with the first of the President’s ‘priorities’,” the Deputy Attorney General said quickly. “That would be inappropriate and lead to a conflict of interests since you are defending several of the alleged ring leaders of that uprising. The thing is,” he explained, “Director Hoover believes he knows who was responsible for the Bedford Pine Park shootings but has been unable to locate, or to capture those individuals. In extremis, therefore, the FBI is seeking to enlist a former criminal associate of the men responsible who may be able to lure, or entrap the killers and thereby enable the government to bring them to justice. But there is a problem. The man concerned, a former FBI Special Agent, is refusing to co-operate unless he receives cast iron guarantees of life-long immunity from prosecution for his many, and I should say, heinous crimes.”