However, Lyndon Baines Johnson hadn’t got where he’d got to by crying over spilt milk. They were where they were. There was no Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy was for kids. Treating the ‘leaders of the House’ with respectful kid gloves had been a bad miscalculation. He shouldn’t have listened to the President; he should have done this thing his own way.
“Later today I have schedules meetings with Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, and with the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John McCone. Those gentlemen have made me aware that the judgement of several of the ‘representatives’ who voted in last night’s ‘debate’ may have been clouded by personal pecuniary considerations and unduly influenced by, well, let’s just say, the company that some of them have been keeping in recent times. Without wishing to pre-determine the outcome of those meetings, once I have seen Director Hoover’s, and Director McCone’s evidence, it is likely I will have to decided whether or not to pass that evidence to prosecutors, or to other interested parties. Director Hoover has been accumulating evidence for some considerable time about corruption in the body politic. Until this time I was able to persuade the President that allowing the Federal Bureau of Investigation a free hand in investigating fraud, insider trading, false accounting and the granting and accepting of inappropriate political favours by member of the House, would not assist in the Administration’s wider desire for stable government. Likewise, Direct McCone of the Central Intelligence Agency regards, particularly the most recent cases, where sensitive and confidential information about the defence status of both the United States and its ally, the United Kingdom, has found its way into the hands of unauthorised persons in the media within hours of its disclosure to Members of the House, constitutes not a breach of privilege, but repeated acts of treachery. When I next speak to the President I will advise him in the strongest possible terms, that,” he paused, wanting to grind his teeth with exasperation, “notwithstanding my previous objections, it is in the national interest that Directors Hoover and McCone, and the other relevant authorities, fully investigate and prosecute to the last full measure of the law, without fear or favour, each and every malefactor.”
The room exploded with protestations of innocence.
The sad thing was that the protestations were completely genuine in the minds of many of the loudest and most outraged ‘protestors’ because these men had been corrupt for so long, that they honestly believed the backhanders, favours and ‘considerations’ they received were legitimate elements of their monthly pay cheques. They took it for granted that their children would be awarded bursaries to the best schools and colleges, that they’d have the choice of lucrative legal partnerships and boardroom sinecures, that they’d collect honorific titles that enabled them to call themselves ‘Doctor’ of ‘Professor’ or ‘Judge’ or ‘Colonel’ when it suited them, that newspapermen would allow them their illicit extra-marital romantic peccadilloes and unsavoury friendships because that was what business as usual on Capitol Hill was all about.
Slowly, worry and the first glimmer of real concern began to flicker in the eyes of ‘the legislators’. They’d complacently assumed that the Vice-President was one of their own. He’d been Senate Majority Leader for six years before he ran for the Democratic Presidential ticket in 1960. If they were dirty, what did that make him?
Lyndon Baines Johnson eyed the men around him like a big cat identifying the weakness member of the herd; his next kill.
“After all this is over — assuming the World hasn’t blown itself up again — I’ll still be here this time next year. Some of you guys will be behind bars. Think about and it and let me know how you’re going to make it up to me.”
This said the Vice-President turned on his heel and walked out.
Chapter 23
Arkady Pavlovich Rykov wiped the blood off his hands under the cold tap. The mirror in the washroom was cracked so he took great care unhurriedly checking that there was no blood spatter on his clothes. Beating a murderer within an inch of death was one thing, walking about the streets looking like you’d just beaten somebody very nearly to death was another. Besides, he didn’t want to have to explain to Clara what he’d been doing the last twenty-four hours. She was better doing what she was doing; sitting by Rosa Calleja’s bedside; his talents, honed by years working for several of the most monstrous men in history, lay in other directions. He’d never actually enjoyed beating another human being to death although he’d known many men who did, but he’d never lost much sleep over, now and then, having to do exactly that. In the past he hadn’t worried overmuch about the justice of it because there was no scope for that sort of thinking within the Soviet internal security apparat. Nowadays, well, he was supposed to be working for men with a more complex understanding of the human condition and the World in which they lived, men whose minds were more attuned to subtlety and nuance and less terrified of the consequences of failure.
The woman he’d told Denzil Williams’s people to look for had fled to Gozo where, foolishly, her family had tried to hide her. They’d been under the misapprehension the woman was in hiding because of her past involvement with the Women of Malta movement — in which she’d been an occasional, somewhat anonymous activist — and her whole village had turned out to attempt to stop the police taking her away.
The two men, brothers, had known there was no escape.
Two soldiers were dead after setting off another tripwire booby trap at the back of the rundown apartment block in Mosta where the last two men from Samuel Calleja’s compromised Red Dawn cell had gone to ground and barricaded themselves into a miniature Alamo.
Once Arkady Rykov had got over his surprise that the unaccounted for final three terrorists hadn’t been eliminated by the Krasnaya Zarya leadership on the archipelago, the two prisoners Denzil William’s people had taken into custody after the sinking of HMS Torquay, had quickly supplied a list of names, places, and contacts. After that it had been relatively straightforward hunting down the final three.
The Mosta ‘Alamo’ had had to be stormed. Neither brother had survived.
He had reported to Admiral Christopher that of the seven members of the terrorist cell Samuel Calleja had been the oldest, the others were all in their mid to late twenties. The only woman in the group had been married to one of the two cell members killed when HMS Torquay had capsized during the Yankee bombing on the 5th December.
The former KGB-man had always been a little squeamish interrogating women; particularly young, petite, attractive women. However, down in the basement — the old dungeons, he guessed — of Fort Rinella there was nobody to hear the woman’s screams.
Samuel Calleja’s group was responsible for the deaths of over a hundred people, the majority innocent Maltese civilians who’d happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the chaotic aftermath of the October War they’d assassinated British officers, more than once in the presence of their wives or families, randomly gunned down servicemen, targeted leading Maltese civic and political leaders, and left car bombs and other booby traps in busy public buildings and thoroughfares. Before the bombing of the 5th December and the death of two or their three bomb-makers onboard HMS Torquay, the group had been planning a new terror campaign unsanctioned by its Krasnaya Zarya masters on the archipelago.