“What happened to your friend and her baby?” The man asked as the man from the Los Angeles Times was led away.
“The cops had a big fight among themselves and two young guys drove us down to UCLA. I trained to be a nurse at the end of the war. The Pacific War, that is, and I’ve had kids of my own so I knew what to do once the arseholes had uncuffed me.”
The soldier clearly wanted to kick somebody.
“You are seriously telling me that LAPD officers from this station hand-cuffed a heavily pregnant woman?”
“They sure did.” Sabrina involuntarily put a hand to her right cheek which was sore, a little puffy and probably going to bruise badly in the next day or two. “They slapped me about when I complained.”
“What’s going on?”
Captain ‘Reggie’ O’Connell had been a cop all his life, albeit a political one. He was a friend and drinking crony of several movie stars, whose lifestyle he sought to ape. Three times married, often investigated he had never got himself into a corner he could not slide out of. Until now, that was. Even now he honestly believed his friends would assuredly come to his aid because that was what friends were for.
“Ah, Ms Henschal,” the newcomer guffawed. The most corrupt policeman in Los Angeles — no mean achievement given there were a lot of highly skilled and well-connected operators in the same field — was wearing a thousand dollar suit, newly shaved, with gold on his fingers and smiling a sparkling party smile. “We meet again.”
Lieutenant Sanchez grunted.
“This lady is here to make a complaint, Captain O’Connell.”
Sabrina shook her head.
There was no point wasting time writing up a formal complaint against a wise guy like O’Connell; that was just storing up a heap of trouble down the road.
“No?” The soldier queried, his patience fraying.
“I’m here to spring my friend’s boyfriend.”
“Oh, I see.” Lieutenant Sanchez backtracked immediately. “No, I don’t understand.”
Sabrina waved her arms like windmills in a gale.
“These arseholes arrested Sam Brenckmann after The Troubadour burned down!”
“Brenckmann?” The Guardsman echoed. “My Medical Officer treated him earlier…”
“Sam’s hurt?” Sabrina squealed in anguish.
“Calm down, ma’am…”
“I WILL NOT FUCKING CALM DOWN!”
“No, obviously not,” the soldier agreed. “Mr Brenckmann is okay. A few stray buckshot, nothing that won’t heal in a week or two.”
Sabrina was so relieved to hear the news that she very nearly swooned. She leaned against the reception desk and sucked in several huge gulps of air.
“Brenckmann’s being held as an accessory to murder,” Reggie O’Connell announced with an oddly saturnine smile. “His associate killed a man in cold blood with a shot gun at the scene of the fire on Santa Monica Boulevard.”
Chapter 14
The midnight hour was calling.
Although great fires still burned across the shattered city and now and then, gunshots rang distantly in the cold smoky winter air as flecks of snow fell from the unbroken overcast, the worst seemed to be over. However, fate had had one last cruel trick to play on its exhausted, traumatised victims.
The two senior survivors of the desperate British peace mission who had flown into Andrews Air Force Base at the height of the uprising — their American hosts steadfastly refused to call the rebellion what it was, a murderous but thankfully botched coup d’état — sat alone in a dimly lit side room in the unfinished bunker beneath the White House.
For all that they were each, in their own way, hardened, season political operators who had suffered numerous hard knocks in their lives and careers, both men were in shock, reeling.
They were also agreed that they had to act now.
The senior man — politically although junior by several years in age — Iain Norman MacLeod, the Minister of Information in the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration and the Chairman of the dominant party in that coalition, the Conservatives, stared thoughtfully at the phone receiver he had just replaced on its mount. He sighed and looked to his companion, Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson, the newly appointed British Foreign Secretary.
“Jim,” he said, referring to James Callaghan, constitutionally the de facto Acting Prime Minister, who theoretically as of a approximately two minutes ago held the reins of power back in Cheltenham, England, “concurs with us.”
Both men were still in a state of shock.
A little over ninety minutes ago Prime Minister Edward Heath had been shot dead by a White House Secretary — a middle aged woman called Edna Maria Zabriski — who had suddenly pulled a Navy Colt from her handbag and started blasting away at random as the signatories to the newly signed ‘friendship treaty’ between the former North Atlantic Treaty organization — NATO — allies the United States of America and the United Kingdom had toasted each other’s good sense in averting a new war. A war between the World’s last two nuclear powers would have been an unimaginable catastrophe and the mood in the bullet pocked Oval Office had been euphoric, albeit in an understated, exhausted sort of way. Everybody had been sighing such a huge collective sigh of relief that common sense had prevailed that nobody had noticed the gun until the first shot rang out.
What had ensued had been broadcast live on television and radio to the American people.
One bullet had passed through Edward Heath’s right eye, killing him instantly. Another had cut down the President’s brother, the United States Attorney General Robert Kennedy — although the wound to his lower left leg was serious it was in no way life-threatening — and a Secret Service man had received a flesh wound to his right hip. But for the actions of Captain Walter Brenckmann, the US Naval Attaché on the staff of the US Ambassador to the Court of Balmoral, in immediately wrestling the mad woman to the floor the carnage might have been indescribably worse.
And yet, coming after the dreadful events of recent days when Washington had been a bloody battleground and American and the old country had very nearly sleepwalked into an all out shooting war, the death of Edward Heath was an indescribably crushing blow to both men in the clammy, fire-tainted room off the White House Emergency Situation Room buried some thirty feet below the West Lawn.
The politics of power are unforgiving. While as human beings the two men badly needed to grieve, to come to terms with the tragedy; as men with their country’s future in their hands they had no time for any of that. These last few months they had lived in an unimaginably brutal world in which terrible decisions had to be made daily, sometimes hourly where the stakes were usually measured in suffering and death. Presently, there was no time or space for grief or for attempting to come to terms with personal loss.
Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson had stepped into the shoes of his murdered predecessor only days ago after a life spent in the Foreign and Colonial service. He had not known Edward Heath well as a man but had always respected his integrity and judgement in foreign policy matters. The dead Prime Minister’s epitaph would be the launching of the peace mission to Washington that had single-handedly averted a disastrous war with America. However, that was already in the past. The Foreign Secretary’s preoccupation now was to ensure that the good work, the achievement of a meaningful truce and the avoidance of another disastrous war, was not undone in the aftermath of the atrocity that their American hosts had negligently allowed to take place in the Oval Office. One did not need to be any kind of conspiracy theorist to imagine that the dark forces behind the uprising — possibly Red Dawn — might as easily have been behind the assassination of Edward Heath.