“Just for the record I am Gretchen Louisa Brenckmann-Betancourt of the Philadelphia Office of the firm of Betancourt and Sallis. To my left is my husband, Daniel Brenckmann, who has volunteered to be my assistant counsel in this matter. We are both associates of Betancourt and Sallis. It was my understanding that you required an attorney with a ‘high public profile’. Well, my father is a senior figure in the Democratic Party and a Kennedy family insider. I am currently defending the ring leaders of the December uprising. Dan is an assistant counsel to the Warren Commission, and his father is currently the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom. I think we qualify as ‘high profile’, Mr Christie.” Gretchen fixed the man with a thoughtful stare. “However, whether we are prepared to represent you in this matter at customary ‘public defender’ rates has yet to be determined.”
“I thought,” Christie began.
“If we are to represent you, Mr Christie,” Gretchen snapped impatiently, “you must fulfill your side of the bargain. You will give this meeting a full accounting of your subversive activities and crimes since the day you became,” she hesitated, searching for the right word, “disaffected, up until this time. If we are satisfied with the veracity of your account we will represent you. If not, then well, that will be the end of our involvement in your case.”
Dwight Christie looked at the two attorneys.
They were barely half his age; kids really.
“Do you get to speak, Mr Brenckmann?” He asked idly.
The other man grinned.
“This is Gretchen’s case, Mr Christie. I’m just here to watch her back.”
That was what the former FBI man had figured. He flicked his eyes to his left and right.
“What about attorney-client confidentiality?”
“You abrogated that right when you demanded immunity from prosecution,” Gretchen retorted. “If you want us to represent you in this matter you will accept our advice as to your best legal interests.”
“Don’t I get a say in this.”
“No.”
Frank Lovell coughed.
“I understood that we had already moved past… ”
Gretchen gave the older man a withering scowl.
“We are the ones who are endeavoring, at potentially great reputational and career hazard, to assist the FBI and the Department of Justice. You came to us, not the other way around, Frank.”
The man held up his hand in a brief gesture of mock surrender.
While this small arm wrestle had been going on Dan Brenckmann had retrieved a big notebook from a slim attaché case by his chair and was beginning to make notes.
“Your full name, date and place of birth please, Mr Christie?”
“Dwight Harding Christie,” the other man replied. “Born Akron, Ohio. Fourth July nineteen-twenty.”
And so it began.
Education, upbringing, parents, siblings, war service, and Christie’s FBI career; his youthful anger at the war-profiteering of the industrial moguls, the deaths of his brothers on foreign battlefields, the complicity of the federal government and judiciary, the grasping avarice and selective amnesia of Congress and the courts which had eventually driven him into the arms of Soviet recruiters.
“I was a ‘sleeper’ for many years. Most of the fifties, I suppose. My job was to be a good agent, to embed myself in the California Field Office, to make myself the Bureau’s go to guy, Mr Reliable, so that when the revolution needed me most I’d be in the best place to serve it.” There was bitter disillusion in every word he said. “Then the World went mad. I’d never fired my weapon in anger before October 1962. I’d never killed a man until last December. The Reds just wanted people killed. It wasn’t selective. You just turned on whoever you were with at the time because the controllers reckoned we were all ‘blown’. Don’t ask me why? Don’t ask me why the revolution needed to hire the mobsters and killers it signed up. I don’t know why Admiral Braithwaite and his wife were killed. I got a call one day. Jansen, ‘the contractor’ was already in Oakland and I was to make sure ‘nothing got in his way’. The whole rebellion thing was a screw up. If we’d waited a few years the whole country would have eaten itself up anyway, we’d have just been able to walk up the steps of the Capitol Building and proclaim the revolution,” he grunted, his expression sour. “But all that was bull, too. After I got out of Berkeley I tried to make contact with other members of the network. Nobody was at home. They’d all been swept up by Mr Tolson’s boys,” he shook his head, “or they’d run for the hills. It turned out that the only man still standing was the crazy son-of-a-bitch I was hunting down when I got caught.”
Dan Brenckmann looked up from his notes.
“You were arrested in the swamps near a settlement called Sargent in Matagorda County, Texas, Mr Christie.”
The older man nodded.
“We have yet to establish the identity of the prisoner’s accomplice who was shot dead at the scene?” Clyde Tolson growled.
Gretchen met Dwight Christie’s stare with a raised eyebrow.
“Herman Stein,” Christie muttered. “He came over here in 1946. The Soviets were trawling the POW and displaced persons camps in what was left of Germany for scientists and technicians. I always assumed we got a lot of our people into Russia the way they got a lot of agents into the US on the back of Operation Paperclip. That was how Herman got in. Herman worked at the White Sands missile testing range for ten years before he was in a car smash. He retired after that. He ran the Texas-New Mexico ‘group’ but he was never ‘active’.” He glanced sidelong at Clyde Tolson. “These guys keep asking me about Red Dawn, Krasnaya Zarya, or whatever, who were supposed to be involved in the Washington uprising. I never heard of them, any of that. Krasnaya Zarya? Heck, I don’t speak Russian. I’m not some kind of mad dog terrorist.”
Gretchen contemplated this.
“If not that,” she probed, “what are you, Mr Christie?”
“You tell me, lady.”
“You may call me Gretchen, or Mrs Brenckmann. Please don’t ever employ the word ‘lady’ again in my presence in such a pejorative fashion, Mr Christie.”
The rebuke was like a slap in the face.
“Sorry. No disrespect intended,” he apologized before he knew he had even opened his mouth. He hesitated. “Gretchen, if that’s okay?”
The young woman nodded.
Then she rose to her feet and extended her hand across the table. In a moment Dan Brenckmann had followed suit to shake Dwight Christie’s hand.
Gretchen turned to Frank Lovell.
“The managing partner of Betancourt and Sallis, Mr William Sallis, has authorized me to represent Mr Christie and to liaise with the Justice Department and the FBI on an ongoing pro bono basis in the interests of national security. Unless or until my husband’s work with Chief Justice Warren takes precedence over this work he will jointly represent the parties on the same basis going forward.”
The Brenckmanns resumed their chairs.
They looked expectantly to Clyde Tolson.
Chapter 21
When Company ‘A’ had motored into the town a little before noon the Mayor and a crowd of gun-toting citizens had formed an ad hoc welcoming committee. It seemed that practically every veteran who possessed a gun had volunteered to stay behind until the elderly, the infirm, and all the women and children had been safely evacuated to the relative safety of Madison.