Stanley Mosk, the combative Attorney General of California, had departed the scene by the time Houlihan and his staffers who had been eating sandwiches and consuming copious amounts of black coffee watching and listening to the events in DC unfold, spilled irascibly out of the two Mayoral cars which had been escorted through the partially blacked out of the city by two Oakland PD motorcycle outriders.
Houlihan approached the substantial figure of Harvey Fleischer and waved. The two men had known each other for more years than they cared to admit. The other man detached himself from a willowy tearful blond woman whom he had had been comforting. The woman looked vaguely familiar to the Mayor of Oakland.
That would be Miranda, Ben and Margaret Sullivan’s kid. Up close the girl looked every inch her mother’s daughter; Houlihan was of an age to have been old enough to drool over Margaret Sullivan in her criminally brief heyday on the silver screen.
“Jesus, Harvey!” He complained. “What the fuck is going on?”
“You ask me what’s going on, John!” The broader, clumsier man retorted as he shook hands with the Mayor of Oakland.
The two old stagers viewed each other like tired boxers who did not have their heart in the game anymore. Worse, they knew each other far too well to be intimidated, one by the other.
Harvey Fleischer was the friend and legal brains behind Ben and Margaret Sullivan’s ever growing, always prospering real estate and TV and movie-making empire. The Mayor knew that when it came to lawyering Harvey was in a higher, very different league — he invariably drove last year’s Lincoln so people did not think he was such a fat cat — but unlike Houlihan, Harvey Fleischer had never been remotely interested in political life.
San Francisco-born Houlihan was the son of a cop who had been raised in the Mission District. He was a graduate of the University of San Francisco and the Santa Clara University School of Law, who had gone into practice in San Francisco before he moved to Oakland in 1944. His law practice had been small time but he was a civic minded man and by 1959 he had become a city planning commissioner, appointed somewhat ironically as it turned out, to a vacant city council seat by Mayor Clifford D. Rishell in 1959. Ironically, because within a couple of years Houlihan had become the 43rd Mayor of Oakland after ousting Rishell in a positively ‘torrid’ — even by the standards of Oakland city mayoral contests — election by 53,340 to 36,423 votes.
“What’s she doing here?” He inquired, gesturing at Miranda Sullivan.
Harvey Fleischer rolled his eyes.
“She was the Governor’s liaison staffer on this deal,” he grunted. “No, don’t get me started,” he added grumpily. “And before you ask me I don’t know what’s going on and frankly, I don’t give a damn. I just want to get the kid out of here. You’ve got four dead Feds in that house and the ‘witness’ they were supposed to be ‘protecting’ has disappeared. For the record we turned up way after your boys arrived.”
John Houlihan absorbed this as he began to re-appraise the scene around him; ambulances, Oakland Police Department cruisers, flashing lights, people already pressing around and in some places through the thin cordon of cops.
“Feds?” He asked, eyes narrowing.
“This was some kind of FBI safe house,” Harvey Fleischer explained.
Miranda Sullivan joined their circle.
“Mr Mayor,” she nodded to Houlihan. She had recovered a little of her normal composure and was looking around with the same calm, thoughtful eyes as the two men. “We came here tonight to serve a warrant on the FBI to release a Miss Darlene Lefebure into our custody. She had been held at this place and denied due process for several days after witnessing the shooting of Rear Admiral Braithwaite and his wife.”
Houlihan scowled. The Oakland PD had hardly covered itself in glory in its initial investigation of the killings in Sequoyah County; he had breathed a quiet sigh of relief when it had seemed as if the US Navy’s Special Investigation Branch and the California Office of the FBI had, in effect, assumed responsibility for the investigation. He had no illusions that his guys were in any way up to or in any way equal to the challenge of untangling gangland type homicides wrapped up in, apparently, unquantifiable ‘national security issues’.
“What’s the Governor’s beef on this one?” The Mayor of Oakland demanded of the young woman.
“That’s complicated, sir,” Miranda Sullivan admitted guardedly.
Harvey Fleischer stepped into the breach.
“The Navy Liaison Officer out of Alameda approached the Governor’s Office in Sacramento to expedite get access to Miss Lefebure,” he explained, knowing that Houlihan already knew this. “That was at about the same time it came to the attention of the Governor’s Office that FBI agents,” he jerked a thumb across the Bay, “were playing fast and loose with the civil rights of bona fide members of the NAACP, and were unlawfully detaining a visitor to San Francisco who happens to be in the employ of Dr King in Atlanta…”
It was John Houlihan’s turn to roll his eyes.
“The Governor asked me to make Mayor Christopher in San Francisco aware of the situation,” Miranda put in helpfully. “However, there was a complication.”
“You don’t say!” The Mayor of Oakland groaned.
“It became known to us that the man in FBI custody in San Francisco, a Mr Dwayne John, was a former associate to Miss Lefebure.”
“Has this John guy gone missing, too?”
“No, sir.”
Harvey Fleischer realized he needed to get to a phone and ring his wife, Molly. Dwayne John was staying a couple of nights at their Nob Hill house while discussions continued as to how best to keep him out of the hands of the FBI, and to safely transport him back into Dr King’s fold in Georgia.
Given what had happened here in Berkeley he was suddenly uneasy.
He knew he was worrying about nothing.
Being idiotically irrational, in fact.
But every day in every way the World just kept getting crazier…
Chapter 4
General David Monroe Shoup the 22nd Commandant of the United States Marine Corps moved between the sharpshooters he had ordered in position on the roof a little over an hour ago, and peered cautiously over the edge. The sight that greeted the fifty-eight year old veteran was like something out of Dante’s Inferno; and briefly, it shook the battle-scarred veteran of Tarawa to the core.
It was just after midnight and Washington was burning.
Great buildings were on fire all across the city, and sparkling, writhing crimson streaks seared across the winter night as tracers scattered in the darkness. New detonations and muzzle flashes ignited through the smoke wreathing Foggy Bottom, the grounds of the White House and the Capitol Building to the north and the north-east of his vantage point on top of the Pentagon. Several hours after the insurgency announced itself with the huge blooms of perhaps as many as a dozen gas tankers and lorries packed with explosives, each halted and detonated before one or other bastion of American civilization — the Department of Justice Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, or the State Department on C Street North West, or foreign embassies or prestigious hotels, under bridges within the city and on the bridges over the Potomac and the Anacostia Rivers — the fighting and what was becoming widespread rioting was still getting worse.
Every now and then a mortar crashed down onto the Pentagon or into the five acre inner courtyard of the complex. Despite the huge size and proximity of the target mortar bombs regularly landed ‘long’ between the Pentagon and the Potomac.