Katzenbach nodded, took a mental breath, ordered his thoughts. He was a solid, high browed figure with the presence of a man who was used to commanding respect and to the casual exercise of authority.
“Miss Betancourt’s chaperone is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How do you feel about being Miss Betancourt’s special assistant, Mr Brenckmann?”
“Er, well…”
“You don’t have to make a decision now. Come back in the car with Miss Betancourt and me and let me know what you think later this morning.”
“Dan has his own practice in Boston, sir,” Gretchen protested half-heartedly.
Nicholas Katzenbach smiled.
“Ask not what your country can do for you, Miss Betancourt. Ask what you can do for your country.”
Ten minutes later the United States Deputy Attorney General, Gretchen and Dan Brenckmann, and a duty staffer from the Department of Justice were facing each other in the back of one of the armoured Presidential limousines kept at Andrews Air Force Base for transporting VIPs from Andrews Field to destinations in and around Washington DC. Gretchen and Dan sat with their backs to the driver, Gretchen opposite Nicholas Katzenbach, Dan Brenckmann across from the yawning DOJ man.
“Director Hoover has Special Agents tapping the Attorney General’s phones and documenting his meetings with Dr King and other leading members of the Civil Rights movement, sir,” Gretchen reported, dispensing with an exploratory preamble. “The FBI is also illegally tailing and, for want of a better word, ‘persecuting’ associates of the leaders of the African-American groups with whom the Attorney General is meeting or is otherwise in communication with. For example, a man called Dwayne John is currently in custody in San Francisco awaiting interrogation by a team of FBI men whose job appears to be to travel around the country trying to dig up evidence to implicate Dr King and others in ‘un-American activities’. It was my understanding that we had moved on from those days, sir?”
The United States Deputy Attorney General raised a weary eyebrow.
“Director Hoover never moves on, Miss Betancourt.”
“The FBI only showed me the files because they want to be able to turn around at some later date and claim that you and the Attorney General knew what was going on all the time, sir.”
Katzenbach nodded.
“That would be Director Hoover’s SOP,” he agreed mildly.
Gretchen frowned.
“Standard operating procedure,” Dan Brenckmann murmured helpfully.
She threw a vexed look at him.
“Sorry, with two Navy men in the family there’s a lot of Navy talk around the dinner table…”
Nicholas Katzenbach tried hard not to grin too broadly.
“What else do you need to tell me?” He asked.
“The first two files were to do with the Bureau’s activities against persons involved in the Civil Rights movement,” Gretchen explained primly. “The third was a summary file preparatory to a court submission to compel the Air Force to hand over confidential files on several civilian contractors who had had ‘contact’ with the Head of Security at Ent Air Force Base at Colorado Springs. Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Gunther was found dead in his car seven days ago. Ignoring the fact that Colonel Gunther had no history of depression, and that he was happily married with young sons; Special Investigation Branch at the Pentagon have classified the death as an open and shut suicide. The report mentions ‘pressure of work’ as a possible motive for suicide but there is no supporting evidence for this. However, Colonel Gunther’s superiors had warned him on two separate occasions to stop ‘harassing civilian contractors’. A civilian analyst called Maxwell Herman Calman, and another Burroughs Corporation man, a Solomon Kaufmann both filed harassment complaints against Gunther.”
“Ent Air Force Base is the Headquarters of NORAD,” Katzenbach mused, his brow slightly furrowed. “Was the local PD or pathologist’s report on the death in the file?”
“No, I requested sight of it, sir. It seems that it was one of the documents embargoed at the Pentagon.”
“What exactly is the Bureau’s beef with the Air Force?”
“There is a note that there have been several other suspicious deaths of Air Force officers in recent weeks, sir. Somebody in the Judge Advocate’s Office flagged the deaths, none of which occurred within the boundaries of any military base, training area, aircraft or vessel, and asked why the relevant military authorities did not appear to be co-operating fully with local police and justice officials. I don’t know how the FBI initially got involved. Presumably, somebody tipped somebody off at the DOJ.”
Katzenbach was too tired to get drawn into a quasi territorial-judicial spat with the FBI, the Air Force and for all he knew, several sulking and uncooperative city and county police departments. The first thing a man learned in a job like his was that there was never enough time, and that there were never enough people who knew their arse from their elbows to do everything properly. One had to prioritise, to decide what really mattered and to never, ever take one’s eye off that ball.
“I think we’ll let the FBI worry about their ‘suspicious suicides’ for now, Miss Betancourt.” This issue kicked into the long grass he returned to the earlier irregularities the young woman had brought to his attention. “I will raise the matter of Director Hoover’s flouting of the civil liberties of American citizens with him later today. Thank you for your briefing.”
He noted Gretchen’s ill-concealed disappointment.
“Do you do shorthand?” He asked, idly.
“No,” she retorted. Secretaries did shorthand, not ambitious young attorneys. “No, sir,” she added hurriedly in what she hoped was a less dismissive and more respectful fashion.
Nicholas Katzenbach shook his head, smiled mostly to himself.
“Can you act as if you do shorthand, Miss Betancourt?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Good. You will attend the interview with Director Hoover in the capacity of my junior associate.”
Chapter 13
Major General Colin Dempsey arrived as dawn was breaking over the scene of total devastation which had once been the peaceful, thriving fishing and logging community of Bellingham. He had ordered the bodies of the insurgents to be burned and now great pyres roared and guttered in the wind and the stench of gasoline fumes fouled the clean air falling down to the sea off the mountains. Outside the town survey teams were searching for the mass graves containing the bodies of untold thousands of Bellingham’s pre-war population.
Dempsey had not been in Germany in 1945; he had missed witnessing Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and the half-a-hundred other nightmare concentration and death camps of the Nazis. Likewise, by the time he had got to Japan in late 1945 all the Allied prisoners had been repatriated and the Japanese were left scrabbling about in the ashes of their broken civilization, pathetic survivors reduced to figures evoking sympathy and pity rather than contempt. He had heard about the things that had happened in Russia under Josef Stalin’s barbaric tyranny. However, nothing had really prepared him for what he had found in Bellingham. What he had found on American soil! Or the monstrous scale of the atrocities committed by Americans against fellow Americans! It turned his stomach just to think about it.
The men and boys had been beaten, starved and worked to death. When their usefulness was at an end they had been clubbed into oblivion with baseball bats or rifle butts, the lucky ones had been granted the mercy of a bullet through the head. The women and children had suffered unimaginable torments. To be a young girl or woman in Bellingham had been to live in purgatory, to suffer degradations so obscene as to be very nearly unthinkable in the modern World. He doubted if any Vandal or Mongol horde of antiquity had ever subjected a single population to such an extended orgy of unrestrained sexual violence. If Bellingham was an example of what happened when society disintegrated then he had vowed to die before he let it happen again anywhere else.