Even in this Godless age the rape and murder of a young housewife and her two infant children still had the capacity to shock and disgust any normal human being. But not, it seemed, Galen Cheney.
“Isaac?” Christie asked. Cheney’s younger surviving son was a moody, silent boy. He was clumsy of movement and relatively slow of thought and never looked one in the eye. Christie had wondered if he was retarded the first time he had met him. “You made Isaac watch the rape of that poor woman?”
Galen Cheney’s eyes narrowed.
“It was God’s will.”
Dwight Christie sucked in a long, deep breath.
“That may be the case,” he observed acidly, folding his arms across his chest. “The problem is that when a young housewife is raped and murdered and her infant children bludgeoned to death it tends to engender a law and order shit storm of epic proportions that we really, really don’t need!”
The older man shrugged and put down the barrel of his disassembled revolver. He said nothing.
“Sooner or later,” Christie continued patiently, “some cop or some G-man somewhere is going to connect, for example, what happened to the Drinkwaters in Colorado Springs with what happened to Marina Oswald in Forth Worth, and when that happens the Secret Service and the FBI will throw everything they’ve got at figuring out why some idiot in Dallas was taking pot shots at an armoured Presidential limousine. And then they’ll start talking to everybody who stepped foot in Dealey Plaza in the month before the shooting. Before we know it some passerby will start talking to them about this tall guy walking around the place with this weird little guy, and hey presto, the Feds have suddenly got a line into what’s left of the resistance in Texas and the South West!”
“They aren’t about to make that connection, son.”
“I’m not one of your fucking sons!”
“Just a figure of speech.”
Christie dropped onto the opposite end of the bench and gave Cheney an exasperated look.
“Look, Galen. There aren’t enough of us left to take risks we don’t have to take. What we think of as ‘the resistance’ is gone, and we’re all that’s left. Us and a few people like us scattered around the country and out of contact with each other. The Federal Government has started relocating to Philadelphia to allow the rebuilding of Washington to begin. The President has reversed all the cuts to the military; straight away all the disaffected veterans who had a beef with the Administration have melted away. The Federal Government has purged State National Guard units and a whole raft of Pentagon staffers.”
Galen Cheney frowned.
“So what are you saying? We should give in?”
“No. Although, that would be the easiest thing to do.” Christie met the older man’s flinty gaze. “No, what I’m talking about is doing something much harder. I’m talking about starting over. Making a new beginning. I’m talking about building our own resistance; building our own networks, raising our own secret militias. The resistance must go on.”
Galen Cheney raised an eyebrow and for an instant there might have been a flicker of ironic amusement in his agate hard grey-blue eyes.
“Only goes to show,” he sighed. “I thought you’d come here to plug me with that forty-five in your belt.”
“I might still,” Christie murmured.
The older man shrugged.
“Maybe,” he agreed as if living or dying was a matter of no significance to him. “Stay awhile and we’ll talk some more about resistance.”
Chapter 53
In a more enlightened age and in a more rational country than most Americans actually lived in, there would have been no need for subterfuge, secrecy and a battalion of lies with which to ensure, if necessary, a corpus of plausible deniability in the event that the coming encounter went wrong.
The handsome thirty-five year old Georgian knew this as he stepped down from the US Air Force Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King, took a moment to compose himself and then moved forward to shake the hand of the President of the United States of America. Despite his recent meetings with the Commander-in-Chief’s younger brother, Bobby, he had travelled to Maryland with mixed feelings and — despite being a generally optimistic man — relatively low expectations. The man standing before him was the man who had already given the World ample notice of the fact that if it came to it he was prepared to smite his enemies with very nearly God-like righteous violence; while he, a humble guest at this Presidential sepulchre in the Catoctin Mountains dedicated to the class — pretty much exclusively comprising the privileged white Ivy League sons of the captains of American commerce and industry — who ruled his country, believed that non-violence was the last best hope for humanity. Moreover, the man now stretching out his hand in apparently sincere friendship was the same man whose arbitrary diktat had, to all intents, forbidden the Southern Civil Rights Movement to march on Washington DC last summer.
On the bright side the fact that the President was a scion of the Catholic Irish aristocracy of the East Coast and he was a Southern Baptist was no impediment to dialogue and co-operation. As a man of God it was a given that he respected and defended another man’s right to believe what he wanted and to worship in whatsoever manner he pleased, Unfortunately, in the big picture of things, this was small comfort. Two months ago there had been an armed insurrection against the government; half of the District of Columbia had been burned to the ground and thousands of people killed and maimed. Already Southern Democrats like George Wallace, the rambunctiously racist Governor of Alabama, was claiming that the ‘rebellion’ was some kind of reaction to the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. In Alabama and elsewhere in the South the Kennedy Administration’s kind words and the President’s scatter gun executive orders seeking to bypass a House of Representatives seemingly indifferent to the plight of people of color, had as yet barely scratched the wicked blight of segregation.
With the exception of a handful of well publicised events like the ‘stand in the schoolhouse door’ incident in which Governor George Wallace had ‘stood’ in front of the door of the Foster Auditorium of the University of Alabama; ostensibly to prevent the desegregation of that institution by the enrolment of two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood and been confronted by Deputy United States Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, Federal Marshalls and a detachment of men from the Alabama State National Guard, the Cuban Missiles War had put the whole question of Civil Rights on the back burner of national politics.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy had had the guts to take on and defeat the Red Menace; thus far it seemed to the man making his first visit to the Presidential retreat, that for all his fine words his President had done virtually nothing to remove the chains of oppression from his people.
“Welcome to Camp David, Dr King,” the President said, smiling sternly.
The two men looked each other in the eye and oddly, it was only then that they both realized how poignant, not to say piquant, and potentially earth-shaking this moment might be. They were different kinds of men from backgrounds which could hardly have been more unalike; the one tormented by the October War and rocked to the core by the recent trauma of Battle of Washington, the other stabbed by doubts as to his worthiness and fitness to lead his people towards some better, half-promised land in which the color of a man’s skin was never again assumed to be the badge of his character or his rightful standing in the land of his birth.