“It it was my decision I’d have you taken outside and shot,” the older man stated unhappily. “However, Director Hoover has empowered me to put a,” he choked on this for a moment, “proposition to you.”
Dwight Christie’s ears pricked up in surprise. From Tolson’s self-evident discomfort the proposition in question clearly did not concern the color of the bullets with which he was to be dispatched.
“The number one priority of the Bureau at this time is to bring the murderers of Bedford Pine Park to justice.”
“The number one priority?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Christie murmured, still not really knowing where this bizarre turn of events was heading.
“If you materially assist the Bureau in the apprehension of Galen Cheney, his son Isaac and any other associates engaged in his murderous activities presently or in the past,” Tolson went on, his tone increasingly terse and breathless with unmitigated disgust, “you will be granted immunity from prosecution for any of the heinous crimes you have committed against the United States up to and including this time.”
Jesus wept…
I honestly did not see that coming!
Dwight Christie’s brain clicked back into gear.
“Okay,” he muttered. Then, finding his voice he asked: “Do I get that in writing from the US Attorney General’s Office?”
“That’s hardly… ”
“I want it in writing signed by the Attorney General or his Deputy, and I want that letter notarized by and locked away in the safe of the sort of lawyer even you and Director Hoover will think twice before rousting.”
“You are in no position to make conditions, Christie.”
But they both knew that was not true.
“Look, Mr Tolson,” the man in chains reasoned wearily. “Here’s the thing. I’m not about to deny anything you think I’ve done. I don’t care what you think of me or about any of that. For what it’s worth I’m not even a communist; leastways, not in my own head. I may have been working for the Soviets for most of the last twenty years, I don’t know. I don’t speak Russian; and I never wanted to live in the Soviet Union. I just got angry with the way things are, were, in this country. I saw all those fat cats getting fatter while our boys — well, my brothers in particular, actually — were getting killed on the beaches of all those shitty little islands in the Pacific and over there in Europe. Hell, I never understood why that was our fight anyway. So, here I am in,” actually he had no idea where he was, “in wherever this is with my hands and feet in chains waiting for somebody to cap me. I’m okay with that. I’ve done bad things, crazy mixed up bad things now that I think about it but it all made a kind of sense at the time.”
“You’re in Albuquerque,” Tolson said hoarsely.
“Oh, right. Albuquerque. Whatever, with the greatest respect, unless you want to make this ‘proposition’ of yours official as in signed, sealed and delivered if it’s all the same with you I’ll carry on sitting here on my arse waiting for the bullet, Mr Tolson.”
Chapter 3
Fifty-one year old Professor Caroline Konstantis had been in the process of ‘retiring’ from the United States Air Force Reserve at the time of the Cuban Missiles War. She had finally been appointed a fellow of the School of Medicine at the University of Chicago in 1961 and her military ‘duties’ — mostly the requirement to serve sixty to ninety days per annum on ‘standby’ or actually on active service — was likely, going forward, to become an onerous distraction as her medical career blossomed.
In medicine as in any other profession just being a woman was a big disadvantage in itself, and looking ahead not being around to fight her department’s battles at the School of Medicine two to three months most years, even assuming there was no new major war in the next ten years, was going to be a real career issue going forward. She had ambitions to be the School’s first female Dean of Psychiatry and that was not going to happen if she was stabbed in the back every time she performed her ‘reserve duties’ in DC or Hawaii or Guam or Stuttgart. Thus, if things had gone to plan by the fall of 1963 she ought to have been a free woman again.
But then in late October 1962 the missiles had started flying, the bombs dropping and everything had gone the Hell; and now she had another career. Or rather, two careers, a public and a secret role. For public consumption she appeared in all Veterans Administration documentation as Lieutenant Colonel, Psychiatric Services attached to the Philadelphia Naval Hospital. Sometimes she even made an appearance at her office in Philly; but not often. In real life she reported directly to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Curtis LeMay and other than when she was face to face with her immediate colleagues she never talked about her work.
‘I’ve got a Helluva a lot of damaged boys in my Air Force,’ the legendary former commander of Strategic Air Command had told her with the bluntness for which he was famed. Not for nothing was Curtis LeMay, the man who had led the 3rd Air Division of the Eighth Air Force to Regensburg in 1943, and orchestrated the fire-bombing of the Japanese Cities in 1945, known by his men as ‘Old Iron Pants’, ‘the Big Cigar’ and ‘Bombs Away LeMay’ but that was only one side of the man whose missiles and bombers had won World War III in a single night. ‘That’s not a thing I can make a big thing about right now,” he had gone on grimly, ‘but I’m not about to brush any of this shit under the carpet like those assholes in DC want!’
Caroline Konstantis had been flown from Illinois to meet LeMay at Barksdale Air Force Base, near Shreveport in Louisiana the week before Christmas 1962, and never returned to Chicago. She had survived the night of the war because she was staying overnight with friends in Joliet, forty miles south west of city, well beyond the blast radius of either of the big bombs which had wrecked the north of the Windy City. LeMay’s people had only tracked her down because she had registered her reserve status with the Illinois Emergency Disaster Management Office in Joliet.
The National Guard had closed all the roads into Chicago in the weeks after the cataclysm; and she had reported for duty at the local hospital.
The whole World had been traumatized in those days.
As if under the surface it was any less traumatized now…
Caroline Konstantis turned off University Avenue and parked her car, a 1960 Plymouth from the US Air Force car pool in Oakland, on Hearst Street. It was one of those beautiful, balmy, bright California mornings that made everybody from out of state wonder what on earth they were doing living somewhere else. Lately, there were a host of other reasons why right thinking Americans would want to live in California; not least because the state was beginning to seem to many Americans like an island of sanity in an ever madder World. A lot of the places she travelled to — her job meant she spent every third day in the air or on the road — there were National Guardsman on street corners, the roads were littered with the detritus of riots, people treated out of towners and the military like enemies, and politics had become well… positively feral. The country had turned in upon itself; and to be accused of being un-American was a thing that could get a man — or a woman — beaten up in the street in most states.
She switched off the motor, pushed up her Ray-Bans and adjusted the mirror. Her hair seemed streaked with straw as much as grey; spending so much time in the sun agreed with her. The grey-blue in her eyes seemed brighter than she had noticed years ago, and the crows’ feet at the corners of her eyes were no more pronounced than before the war. There had been a time when she would have imagined that her new life — her post-cataclysm life — might have worn her down; instead it had freed her from a narrow middle-aged professional rut which had become her prison. Her ex-husband, a history professor ten years her senior, had been in Niagara with his latest floozy the night of the war. Sometimes she wondered if they had been coupling at the moment they were vaporized by the Buffalo bomb. Her son, Simon, was a junior houseman at Shore Memorial in Atlantic City. Simon had been his father’s son and he had not spoken to her since the divorce, five years ago.