Darlene stared at the lawyer.
“Unknowingly,” Harvey Fleischer continued gently, “Miss Sullivan and I arrived in Berkeley some time after this attack still under the impression that you were in the house. We only discovered that the FBI had pre-empted the State of California’s warrant to release you from custody an hour ago. We came straight here to check that you were okay.”
Understandably, Darlene Lefebure was anything but okay.
“Agent Christie was nice to me, he paid my rent,” she sobbed in the moments before the tears began to flow and she started to shake like she was in the grip of a mild epileptic fit.
Chapter 11
At first Gretchen Betancourt thought she was deaf and blind but slowly, slowly the darkness around her resolved into different hues of inky, impenetrable blackness broken by the faintest of almost indistinguishable glows. It was when she realized that the yellowy glow was the cracked face of her wristwatch two inches from her face that she realized she was still alive. Instinctively, she attempted to move. Nothing happened, except suddenly she hurt everywhere. Not aching or stabbing pain but gut-rending, agonising spasms. She lay very still, listening to her own wheezing, shallow, ragged breathing.
‘Not deaf,’ she murmured silently to herself.
Her right eye was closed, she tried to blink it open but nothing happened.
Gretchen’s ears were ringing and every sound was muted as if coming to her underwater or through ears stuffed with cotton wool.
‘I’m alive…’
She passed out; when she again attempted to take stock her ears had stopped ringing. Still unable to move she realized she was being pinned down. Her legs and pelvis were squashed to the floor, and her upper body was twisted a little onto her right side. The air was filled with the stench of smoke and corruption. If she tried to take a deep breath she coughed dust. There was grit in her mouth and she was desperately thirsty.
Panic was horribly close.
Gretchen attempted to wiggle her toes.
Yes!
Her lower legs remained immobile.
Her right arm was beneath her and felt wrong.
When she moved her left arm she moaned in anguish and fright; mainly because she did not know whether it was her arm or the other arm which had moved.
Suddenly, things made sense.
Somebody was lying on top of her.
Which helped in one way and did not help in another because she was too week and hurt in too many places to disentangle herself from the other body. Her feeble effort exhausted her energy and she lay for minutes, maybe much longer, waiting for her body to regain the will to move. Fully conscious, it was like being outside of her body, viewing her situation for afar, as if all the pain and helplessness and humiliation had to be happening to somebody else. It also crossed her thoughts that she might be dying. That would be a pity because I had such great plans…
I was in Under Secretary of State George Ball’s office?
There was a huge bang and everything had fallen in on them; she had been stuck on the floor under something then, too.
How weird was that?
People had picked her up.
At some point I remember running down a corridor and shooting…
Yes, shooting and explosions.
Gretchen’s memories were disordered; some of them were back to front. It was an age before she recollected what she was doing at the Main State Building at 2201 C Street.
I thought it would be clever to say something about Vietnam but that had not worked out so well; the Under Secretary of State had mentioned Australia and been explaining why Australia was so important when…
The world had turned upside down and the office had disintegrated around them. Was the President really going to send GIs he did not have to fight in a war in South East Asia? A war that America did not need to fight against an enemy who was no worse than the murderous despot the Administration had already put into power in Saigon?
I may be dying on the floor in a wrecked government building; why do I care about some place I could not have found on a map until twenty-four hours ago?
No, that is all wrong!
If I was dying surely my life would be flashing in front of my eyes about now?
Wouldn’t it?
I would be thinking about all the things I have not done yet.
Maybe, I would be feeling a little guiltier about…
Dan Brenckmann.
No I would not! Just because we sat on the porch of my father’s old summer house in Wethersfield on the night of the war it does not mean Dan and I are ‘meant to be’. In a couple of years I am ‘meant to be’ marrying Joseph Theodore van Stratten. We hardly know each other but once our families are ‘joined’ we will both have the World at our feet. One day Joe will be running his family bank, racing his yachts and I will be…
What will I be?
The perfect wife.
No, I was not ‘meant to be’ that, either. Sometimes it was as if the whole ‘marriage thing’ was just another one of her father’s party games. I was never really happy about the ‘marriage thing’. It was different years ago when I was still a kid but that was before the war and now, well, I seem to be trapped in a building that might collapse on me at any moment so it really does not make that much difference now…
Gretchen stopped breathing.
Somebody was moving nearby.
I was in a corridor and there was shooting and I was pushed into this small room and I fell over.
And I hit my head…
What if the people moving about outside are the killers who attacked the building?
She stopped herself laughing at how ridiculous that question was.
If I lie here much longer I am going to die anyway!
Gretchen tried to call out.
She opened her mouth but at first no sound emerged.
She tried again and ingested so much dust and grit that she gagged, coughed agonizingly.
“Help me!” She croaked.
Chapter 12
When Martha Drinkwater entered the living room to join her husband and the tall, forbidding stranger she hesitated at the threshold, as if physically inhibited by the frigid menace hanging invisibly in the atmosphere. The man called FBI Special Agent Galen Cheney was sitting in Carl’s armchair viewing the world with flinty blue eyes that were bleaker than the worst winter day in the Mid-West.
The television set was still on, its volume turned low.
Washington burned and the commentators had no idea what was going on in the street next to where they were broadcasting from, let alone across the rest of the great, tormented city.
Her husband had tried to shelter her from the ongoing investigations, inspections and inquests going on at Ent Air Force Base. She had little or no idea what the mythical SAGE project was, or what it did other than — obviously — have some key role in the nation’s defense, or any concept of the nature of the work her husband actually did for Burroughs and the US Air Force. Carl never talked about his work.
‘It is all electronics and gobbledygook,’ he would smile.
She knew he had been a radar man in the Navy during the war and that he had graduated from Caltech with degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics; she had consciously elected not to attempt to join up any of the pieces. Carl had been engaged on secret work for as long as they had known each other and basically, they never discussed anything remotely connected to it. It was safest that way, and simpler by far. She had taught English and geography up to twelfth grade before their marriage, and once the kids had started to come along — she was two-and-a-half months pregnant with their third child — she had become a full time housewife and mother. Carl’s pay had been good, they had lived well if not extravagantly because it was well known that the Burroughs Corporation never paid the top dollar or stumped up the bonuses that all the career IBM people were constantly bragging about.