“I must look awful,” Caroline blurted.
The man shook his head.
“You look like a million dollars to me,” he retorted. “You always do… ”
“Nathan, I’m… ”
Again the man shook his head.
“Twenty million dollars!”
Caroline was silenced by his quiet vehemence.
“Look, I’m this mass-murdering war criminal,” Nathan said, ruefully running a hand through his sweat-slicked short hair, “with this crazy woman mother who tried to murder the President. But for you I’d have blown my brains out by now. I think I love you… ”
“Nathan, I… ”
“Everything’s crazy, right?” The man rejoined, leaning towards her. “The Russians are fighting the Brits, there’s bad stuff going in the Midwest. Heck, California and the whole South West could secede from the Union any day. Then what happens? Another Civil War but with nukes this time! It’s like Miranda Sullivan said last night. How dumb is it to die wondering? How crazy is it to worry about what anybody else thinks about anything? Maybe I don’t love you. Maybe I do. I think I do. I’ve never been in love before and the way I feel about you is so weird I don’t know what else it could be. But I do know I care about you a lot and I want to be with you. I do know that every time we get naked I get so hard it hurts. And I do know you like me.”
And there it was; the clinching argument.
“Baby,” Caroline muttered, bewildered and frightened, “I don’t just like you. The reason I came back here is because there’s nowhere else in the World I’d rather be right now.”
Chapter 33
There were four of them waiting for Gretchen as she left the foyer of her new Walnut Street apartment. Men in dark suits, white shirts and black ties, and they were not about to take no for an answer. They surrounded her before she could raise an arm to hail a cab.
Special Agent Noble allowed her to examine his card.
‘We’re sorry if we alarmed you Mrs Brenckmann,’ the man had apologized but only perfunctorily. He was in his fifties, still lean and possibly mean beneath the fixed half-smile he had stuck onto his lined face. ‘A situation has arisen and Director Tolson needs to speak to you immediately.’
Gretchen had been invited to get into the back of the first of two black Lincolns idling at the roadside just down from the entrance to her apartment.
‘I have appointments!’ She had objected.
‘I have my orders, Ma’am.’
Gretchen had huffed and puffed — secretly a little relieved that Dan had left for Chief Justice Earl Warren’s office at the Department of Justice on South Broad Street literally at the crack of dawn. Ironically, the preparatory work for the Commission on the Causes and Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War had suddenly shifted up another gear now that both Houses had realized that it was increasingly unlikely that there would be any sittings — exploratory or otherwise of ‘the Commission’ — until sometime after the November elections. Gretchen strongly suspected that if her husband had been with her when the FBI men swooped there would have been a scene.
‘I will be complaining about this to the Attorney General,’ she promised her abductors as the Lincoln cruised down the road. Thereafter she had said absolutely nothing until she was escorted into the second floor conference room of the Philadelphia Field Office of the FBI.
Clyde Tolson was grim-faced and agitated.
Gretchen, who had made a point of keeping up with her kidnappers as they marched her through the building, winced and reached for the back of a chair to support herself the moment she stopped moving forward.
Tolson’s expression changed.
“Are you… ”
“I am perfectly all right!” Gretchen snapped irritably, making an effort to straighten to her full height while she was busily fixing the veteran FBI-man with a look of undiluted feline contempt. “How dare you arrest me on the street like a common criminal and bring me to,” her right arm proscribed a dismissive waving away gesture, ‘this place!”
Tolson opened his mouth to speak.
“I have appointments scheduled this morning and this afternoon I am due to travel to Maryland to confer with several clients,” Gretchen continued, her tone very much that of a woman gratuitously wronged who had only just begun to protest. “How dare you!”
The Assistant Director of the FBI held up his hands.
“Bring Murdoch in,” he muttered to his men. “We have a situation, Mrs Brenckmann… ”
“Where’s Frank Lovell?” Gretchen demanded. She had made it clear that she had no intention of being at J. Edgar Hoover’s disposal in her dealings with the Department of Justice. Justice’s ‘point man’ on this thing was the Attorney General’s fixer, with whom she had established acceptable ‘ground rules’. This morning the FBI had ridden roughshod over those arrangements.
“Mr Lovell is in New York. He is unable to get to Philadelphia before this afternoon, Mrs Brenckmann,” Tolson explained testily.
Agent William ‘Billy’ Murdoch was a tall, broad man, a bruiser who had obviously come off much the worst in a recent brawl. His left arm was in a sling, his wrist heavily plastered. His face was mottled and swollen — particularly on the left side where his brow seemed to be only held together by a maze of stitching — and he was noticeably unsteady on his feet.
“Christie attacked Agent Murdoch and escaped,” Clyde Tolson grated through clenched teeth, seizing the moment as Gretchen momentarily fell silent trying to work out what was going on.
Gretchen wasted no time going back onto the offensive.
“My client was not under arrest, Mr Director,” she retorted primly.
“He was supposed to be co-operating with Bureau operatives!”
Such was implied but not specifically stated in the immunity granted to Dwight Christie. He had actually agreed to make a full disclosure of his past activities and crimes, and to fully co-operate with FBI debriefings to facilitate the arrest of the perpetrators of the Bedford Pine Park atrocity. The FBI had interpreted this as a license to keep Christie under house arrest.
“I’m Mr Christie’s lawyer, not his keeper,” she reminded the FBI men around her. For the first time she began to take cognizance of the room into which she had been escorted. Dark blinds on the windows, just the one big table with several odd-looking, overlarge telephone handsets on it, each with two or three finger-thick cables running back to a circular opening in the middle of the table, thence into a metallic column that disappeared into the floor. There were lumpy microphones in front of each of the nine chairs positioned around the table. “What is this place?”
“A conference room, Ma’am,” explained Agent Noble. “The telephone sets on the table broadcast incoming calls and the microphones enable the caller to hear what is said in the room.”
There was talk of installing similar equipment in the downtown offices of Betancourt and Sallis. Corporate clients liked the idea, private clients less; no decision had been taken as yet.
Gretchen was suddenly frowning.
“When did you mislay my client?”
“Yesterday around noon,” Agent Murdoch slurred through puffy lips.
Tolson made a loud sighing noise.
“Last night Christie put a call through to the Field Office demanding that senior Philadelphia agents be in this room to receive his call at ten o’clock this morning. He threatened that if you were not in the room that he would break contact and that we’d never hear from him again.”
Gretchen checked her wristwatch, a small, sparkly thing her father had given her on her twenty-fifth birthday.