Many, many times during the night he had asked himself if he was signing his death warrant. This morning he was wishing he had brought more than a few biscuits and a couple of bottles of Coke with him. He had never been an outdoors sort of guy; most of his life he had hated the great outdoors and gone to great lengths to avoid it. It was no consolation — his rumbling stomach aside — that if today went badly he was not going to have to worry about where his next meal was coming from.
He was stiff and sore and his right hand felt broken. Hitting somebody with a closed fist was never a good idea and he had had to hit Billy Murdoch a lot of times before he went down. Faint wraiths of mist hung close to the forest floor as full light began to flood through the gaps in the trees and he stumbled onto the shore of the lake.
Not completely lost…
Although that was not to say this was not entirely the wrong lake…
This is dumb!
What sort of a plan was it to aimlessly mooch around in the fucking woods until you walked into your worst nightmare?
He went to the water’s edge, stooped and splashed frigid water on his face. After a moment he submerged his aching hand in the water. An ice pack would have been better but out here in the middle of nowhere he was going to have to wait for winter to get his hand iced.
He had done some bad, and some very stupid things for the cause down the years; but this malarkey just about took the biscuit!
Getting away from Agent Murdoch had been harder than he reckoned in one way, easier in another. It had never occurred to him that Murdoch would actually have been on his own; or rather, the FBI would periodically leave just one minder on duty. Still, even special agents had to go to the John from time to time. He felt bad about letting down Gretchen. Sure, she had just been doing her job but the way she had given it back to that bastard Tolson, well, that was a thing to behold…
Christie was a city boy. He could hardly tell one sound from another in the woods unless it shouted in his ear. In a cityscape he was intuitively streetwise; that was his kind of jungle. Out here in the country he was practically deaf and blind, a real babe in the woods.
“You don’t want to be making any kind of sudden moves, Mister!”
The thickly accented Bronx baritone came from directly behind the former G-man.
Christie left his damaged hand in the water, his fingers feeling around for something solid, a rock or stone. He groaned inwardly when all he succeeded in doing was stirring up the mud.
“Can I stand up?” He asked.
“Real slow. Don’t turn around until I tell you.”
Christie heard a gun cocking, the bolt of a rifle or carbine clicking home.
Okay, there were two of them.
If they were the wrong guys he was dead; and even if they were the right guys he was probably dead too. He straightened very, very slowly making absolutely certain that his hands were in full view all the time.
“Turn around.”
Isaac Cheney, seemingly taller and rangier than he recollected from six months ago stood at the edge of the tree line with a hunting rifle in his hands. The kid’s eyes were vacant, his jaw working as he tried to make sense of finding Christie here.
Christie did not know the other man.
Both his captors were dressed for the woods; wearing heavy boots, and camouflaged Army-style fatigues.
“You know this schmuck, Isaac?” Asked the second man who was holding a Colt forty-five pointed at Christie’s belly.
“Yeah, he’s a friend of Pa’s.”
The man with the Colt raised an eyebrow. He was Christie’s age except he was hard, fit and his crew cut suggested he was ex-military.
“I’m Dwight Christie,” the former G-man explained amiably. “After Galen and Isaac went up to Atlanta in February I got the Cheney women out of Texas City before the FBI raided the family compound.”
This impressed Isaac Cheney a lot more than it did his older companion.
“We ain’t heard nothing from Mikey or the others since… ”
“Mikey didn’t make,” Christie interjected flatly finding it hard to sound as sorry about the death of Galen Cheney’s son as he suspected he needed to be in this company. “The Feds shot him. He held them off while I got the women away.”
The gun in Isaac Cheney’s hands was pointing to the ground. There were tears forming in his eyes, his shoulders were slumped. Michael had always watched over and defended him; the two had been inseparable all their lives until they had fallen out the day before they parted that the last time.
The other man was studying Christie.
“You look beat up, man?”
“I had a little trouble on the way here.”
“Turn around again.”
Christie let the other man pat him down.
“He’s clean. Isaac, you go ahead, I’ll follow behind this guy.”
Once the three men were in the trees the questions began.
“How’d you find us?”
“I didn’t. I was waiting for you to find me.”
“Wise guy, eh! How come it took you so long to show up?”
“Somebody had to keep the women safe from the Feds!”
“That sounds like a real man’s job?”
Dwight Christie halted, turned around.
“Yeah, well, if Galen hadn’t fucked up the Atlanta deal he’d have been around and I wouldn’t have had to take care of his family when I ought to have been working for the resistance!”
Chapter 37
In the last three days it seemed as if practically everybody who was anybody in the Southern Democratic caucus in Congress and the Senate had dutifully trooped up the steps to be greeted, briefly entertained and dispatched back to whence he had come by the Vice President.
The previous night he and Lady Bird had dined with John Connally, the 39th Governor of Texas. Connally and LBJ went back a long way. They had known each other since before the Second War and after the two men returned home from their service — both were Navy men, Connally having been on the fleet carriers Essex and Bennington in some of the most vicious battle of the Pacific War — the future Governor of the Lone Star State had joined Johnson, then a Congressman, in Washington as an aide. It was Connally who had led the Johnson faction at the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles; Connally who had alienated so many of JFK’s supporters by publicly questioned whether ‘their man’ was fit enough to serve a full Presidential term. Back then nobody had really understood how ill Jack Kennedy was or how reliant he was on drugs to keep going, and in any event the Kennedys already had the nomination in their pockets. When LBJ had been offered the Vice Presidential ticket to bring the Southern Democratic wing of the Party onboard, part of the deal had been a cabinet post for his old friend in JFK’s first Administration.
Connally had served as Secretary of the Navy for eleven months in 1961 before he resigned to run in the Texas Gubernatorial race of 1962. The two old friends had talked of many things, not least Claude Betancourt’s machinations and the scheduled meeting today with the one man who might just, if he was very lucky, enable Johnson to wriggle and squirm off the horns of a dilemma which would otherwise fracture the northern and southern cabals of the Party if, by some chance, he was its candidate for President of the United States in November.