Warsaw Concerto, page 38
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Clyde Tolson thought he had seen a lot of bad things in his time; this was something else, another order of depravity. There were dozens of wounds on the woman’s naked torso, her arms and legs and as for what the man had done to her eyes…
“Judging from the bleeding and the blood spatter in the bedroom upstairs and down here,” the Medical Examiner offered, unlike many of the local San Antonio PD men completely unimpressed by the presence of the legendary FBI man, “I’d guess all the wounds bar the fatal slash to the throat which simultaneously severed both the left and right carotid arteries, are pre-mortem…”
The disassembled Remington M700 with the bespoke telescopic sight had been discovered in one case, a hundred rounds of .30-06 ammunition, cleaning rags, rods and brushes, a couple of small half-full bottles containing manufacturer’s oil and several empty cartridge cases, in a second nondescript, battered travelling case.
Even with the discovery of the specialist hunting rifle the San Antonio PD would never have flagged this, any of it for FBI attention if the murderer had cut the housekeeper’s, rather than the white woman’s throat.
The killer had given the Mexican woman five hundred dollars and told her to ‘go home for three days.’ Actually, Conchita – she said her surname was Martinez but nobody believed that - she had gone to stay with ‘a friend’ in the city and banked the money, prior to obediently returning to Alamo Heights seven days later.
No questions asked; but then a guy had given her five hundred bucks and, from what she had told the San Antonio PD and Clyde Tolson’s men, apart from using her as his whore most nights during his stay at the house, he had been polite, oddly kind to her.
The guy was average height, maybe five-nine, slightly built, brown hair, thinning, several scars on his chest, a couple on his left arm – Conchita had no idea if the wounds were knife or bullet wounds – and she claimed the man who had stayed at the house never told him anything about himself, his family, or his…work.
He spoke good Spanish, although not with any accent or dialect that Conchita was familiar with.
Maybe, he was from Brazil, or somewhere in ‘the South’.
Nobody in San Antonio would have missed, or given a damn if it had been Conchita’s body bloating and leaking on the floor of the house on Alamo Heights.
Whereas, the woman who had died was San Antonio’s own, Texan aristocracy, the princess daughter of the greatest cattle baron of them all.
Which was probably why Billy the Kid had spent so much time with her; making his point…
The headlines were going to set the whole state, possibly the country alight.
CATTLE MAN’S DAUGHTER SLAIN!
A CITY IN MOURNING!
And that was even before Texans began to discover what had happened to the poor woman in the two days that she had been missing…
Marilyn de Witt’s father was one of, some said, the wealthiest rancher in Texas, a thing which had come about in very recent years because her father, ‘Colonel’ Samuel S. de Witt, was rightly notorious for scenting weakness in his competitors, much like a shark smelling blood in the water thirty miles away. He had been edged out of several lucrative Texan FM radio and TV franchises by the Johnsons – everybody in Texas knew that LBJ had used his time in the Senate to build up his empire back home - but not before he had walked away with a lot of high-value I Owe Yous in his already cash-filled back pockets, and focused thereafter on land grabs as the economy see-sawed, plunged and raced ahead in the volatile post October 1962 chaos. The Lonestar State’s banks had lined up behind de Witt to hoover up abandoned ranges, the great tranches of real estate going begging for a pittance in the brief post-war depression and now, with the coming again of boom times, the de Witt family had cashed in their gambling chips big time.
Marilyn was the heir to the de Witt’s fortune.
Or rather, she had been and according to the local press a brood of previously disinherited aunts, uncles and a posse of cousins was already circling an ailing Big Sam de Witt. It seemed the old man had been battling a cancer for the last two years and was not long for this World.
The de Witt family tragedy seemed complete.
Teddy, Marilyn’s older brother had been killed in a rodeo incident, or accident, depending upon which report one read, and another brother, Sam junior, apparently determined to escape his father’s tyranny – the old man had a reputation for meanness and for never, ever forgetting a slight, real or imagined, to his person – had joined the US Army back in the mid-1950s and was listed as missing in action, presumed killed in Korea in October 1965. The matriarch of the family, Delores, had died as long ago as 1948, in childbirth. Rumour had it that ‘good old Sam’ had been inside his then mistress, an MGM starlet, in Las Vegas that night…
‘Big’ Sam’s penchant for philandering was legendary in these parts. Unsurprisingly, it was anticipated that possibly as many as three or four ‘bastards’ would, in due course, come out of the woodwork to claim their piece of the action when the old man finally shuffled off this mortal coil.
Apart from his bankers, nobody was actually going to miss ‘the Colonel’ or it seemed, Marilyn, who had been by all accounts, ‘a complete bitch’.
Clyde Tolson loathed these people.
And now their affairs had become his problem he despised them, if it was humanly possible, even more.
“Oh, well,” the old man grunted, “at least we’ve got the rifle.”
Dwight Christie had been standing apart from the others, always under the suspicious scrutiny of both of his minders. It was only a matter of time before Tolson, or his boss, decided that he was going to be scapegoated for the Agency’s inability to catch up with Billy the Kid. All Hell was going to break loose if the papers ever got hold of that handle!
The former Special Agent coughed.
“No, I don’t think that’s right, sir.”
“What are you talking about?”
“If he had wanted to take the gun with him,” Christie explained, wondering why he was bothering to be tactful. “He would have, sir. Taken it with him, that is, sir. I don’t think he was in any kind of a hurry when he killed Marilyn de Witt. He gave the housekeeper, Conchita, a Helluva a lot of money for a woman like her, to make herself scarce for seventy-two hours.”
Christie had actually listened to what the woman, Conchita, had said. His Californian ear was better attuned to the woman’s Spanish, what the others had taken for mulishness was simply their poor command of the language. Not to mention, impatience and contempt for Hispanics in general.
“He told Conchita that he wanted to be alone with the dead woman. Not unnaturally, she assumed the two of them, Mikkelsen and Marilyn de Witt had a thing going. Conchita is still in shock, you guys ought to know that and if you’d listened to what she was telling you, you wouldn’t still be standing around here with your thumbs up your arses!”
Nobody said anything, or hit him, so Christie went on.
“He didn’t leave the Remington here because he was in a hurry to get out of town. He never intended to take the Remington with him in the first place.”
Immense weariness dulled Clyde Tolson’s rheumy eyes as he studied the former Special Agent’s face with barely disguised disgust.
“From all those empty cartridge boxes Mikkelsen must have fired off hundreds of rounds,” one of Christie’s minders objected, addressing Tolson. “You’d only do that if you were zeroing in and familiarising yourself with a new weapon, sir.”
Dwight Christie rolled his eyes.
For fuck’s sake!
Join up the pieces, guys!
Tolson shook his head.
“Explain it to them, Christie.”
“Two things. One: the reason there are so many empty cartridge cases is that he checked out every single case to make absolutely sure he understood the action of the M700. He wanted to know if the bullet got initiated in exactly the same place when the gun was hot as when it was cold, that sort of stuff. There are actually three different types of cartridge, he was also making a judgement about which one worked best, most repeatably precisely, with the gun.”
He let this sink in.
“Two: there will be an identical M700 waiting for him wherever he’s gone, gentlemen,” the former FBI-man said, resignedly. “Most likely, concealed, certainly positioned, either at a safe house or location near to his target. Or, worst case, at or adjacent to his pre-selected sniping post.”
“Seriously?” One man queried.
“How the fuck is that even possible?” Another retorted.
“These people would have to have a continent-wide organisation to set a thing like this up?” Added the first man.
Dwight Christie judged it politic to say nothing.
These people obviously had a nationwide network!
If the FBI had ever recruited rocket scientists these guys had not been in that class!
Clyde Tolson’s exasperation peaked, mainly because the only other man in the room thinking like a real FBI agent was the most traitorous pile of shit in the Bureau’s history!
“How do you think they” Tolson snarled angrily, “the resistance, or whatever you want to call them, made us look like idiots for so long? Of course, they still have a nationwide organisation! Not so big as it was but these traitors didn’t go away just because we rounded up some of the ringleaders after the Battle of Washington, or a bunch of crazies got what was coming to them at Wister Park. We just fought a war against people like Mikkelsen in the Midwest. We’ll be conducting war crimes trials against the bastards we caught, for years. What the fuck makes you think we caught all of them?”
Christie shifted uncomfortably.
He had hoped Clyde Tolson was better informed than that!
He needed to stop hoping for things that would never be…
“The people we’re dealing with here had nothing to do with the Kingdom of the End of Days, sir,” he protested, hardly believing that he was the one who was having to tell the Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation any of this. “The deposit box in Philadelphia was set up before the October War. If the organisation behind it still exists then it’s the same one that I was working for, well, in contact with in the late 1950s. Logically, it follows that the pre-war Red infiltration of our institutions has, in some form survived, probably by recruiting or allying itself with pre-existing extremist factions in the US. Maybe, white supremacists, libertarian nutjobs… Who knows? If and when the dust ever settles, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if it turned out that these crazies never guessed Red Dawn was jerking their strings all along. Think about it, after what the country’s been through the last few years there must still be a heck of a lot of angry people out there!”
Tolson ignored Dwight Christie’s muted, angry outburst.
“Somebody, get on to Remington. We need to know who they’ve sold M700s to…”
“I’m sorry, that won’t work, sir,” Christie reminded him because he knew none of the others would have the cajonas to say it out aloud. “There’s no legal requirement for Remington to keep records of that sort. The legislation only requires it to keep records for tax purposes and so that the Department of Defence can audit its procurement protocols.” He continued, sarcastically: “The Office of the Accountant General used to be fussy about that sort of stuff in exactly the way it was never that interested in identifying or prosecuting war profiteers…”
“Cut out the Commie propaganda,” Tolson barked angrily.
Dwight Christie ignored this; it was not as if anybody in the room could do anything to him likely to fuck up his life any worse than it already was.
“You’ve got to stop treating this like a manhunt for a rogue Company contractor,” he said, trying not to get angry. “This isn’t just about Kurt Mikkelsen. Shit, we don’t even know if he’s the only guy we need to worry about. Don’t you get it? Sometime soon the whole fucking FBI will be on the case, literally the whole shebang.”
This was going to get so big that old fart Hoover was going to have to stop harassing the African American Civil Rights Movement! Otherwise the Bureau was going to run out of men!
“A year ago, those maniacs in Wisconsin blindsided the Administration,” Christie continued, not veiling his infuriation, “the Agency and the Company and we still don’t know how many people died as a result! You might not want to ask if it’s all happening again but somebody should!”
“We don’t need another unsubstantiated conspiracy theory…”
“Billy the Kid raped, beat up, tortured half-to-death and then cut the throat of the daughter of the richest man in San Antonio, we already know he killed two people in Baton Rouge whose only crime was to cross his path. The killings aren’t about to stop any time soon, they’re signposts, honeypots to suck in law enforcement. Heck, I’ve never met the guy. I’ve never seen his file, all I know is what I’ve heard. Wherever Mikkelsen goes people die. I hope, I really hope that we aren’t the only people in the Agency on his trail.”
Clyde Tolson viewed him with distaste.
About now the Chief of the San Antonio PD would be talking to the media. It was amazing that the identity of the victim had not yet leaked: the fact that it had been kept secret for the last few hours was going to be received badly.
It did not help that the dead woman’s father was a notoriously litigious son-of-a-bitch. Thus far, his biggest beef against the government was that as an outrageously wealthy man he did not see why he should have to pay taxes like everybody else. Likewise, he regarded his strong-arm, bully-boy business practices as legitimate commercial tools that were no concern of either the State or Federal legislatures or courts.
In short, Sam de Witt was an out and out monster who was, to all intents, outside the law in Texas and right now, the FBI had enough on its plate guarding its back in DC, without getting into a no holds barred legal bar room fight down here with a battalion of lawyers in the pay of a bereaved and very angry rich man who practically owned the Democrats in Texas.
Christie appreciated how from Clyde Tolson’s point of view it was much better for the Bureau if the story was that Marilyn de Witt was the random, unfortunate victim of a lone madman than a rogue former CIA contractor.
The reason Tolson had brought his small task force to Alamo Heights was not to put out photos of the suspect, descriptions of his physical appearance, and certainly not to discuss his history of evil, Company-inspired violence. His job was to bury all that stuff. In fact, the sooner he and his people were out of San Antonio the better!
“He’s going to do this again,” Dwight Christie said doggedly. “He wanted our attention and now he’s got it. After this,” he waved at the dry black blood on the floor at their feet, swishing an impotently angry hand at the flies buzzing, “now his own people will be after him too.”
Tolson sniffed disdainfully.
“Maybe, they’ll catch up with him first.”
Dwight Christie rolled his eyes.
The old fart had said it as if he honestly believed that would be the end of their problems.
Chapter 34
Tuesday 10th January 1967
Dover Castle, Kent, England
The first onslaught of the second ‘great storm’ of the winter that the meteorological fraternity had excitedly predicted, might equal or exceed the duration, geographic ‘footprint’ and violence of the hurricane which had struck the English Channel and Southern England with such ruinous effects in December was battering against the ancient ramparts of the old fortress, as General Sir Michael Carver escorted the Prime Minister and her small party deep into the complex buried beneath the White Cliffs.
All Allied shipping in the Channel had been ordered to immediately find the nearest safe harbour over twenty-four hours ago as the first eighty-mile-an-hour gusts began to scour the Isle of Wight. In the next few hours sustained winds of eighty-to-ninety and ‘peak’ gusts of over one-hundred-and-twenty-five miles-an-hour were predicted.
What happened after that was anybody’s guess.
‘After tomorrow we are in uncharted territory, Ma’am,’ Margaret Thatcher had been informed just before she got on the train at Oxford at six o’clock that morning, taking the opportunity to ‘cadge’ – as her husband would say – a lift on one of the four daily services from the capital to the port of Dover carrying men, women and vital humanitarian and war supplies from the booming industrial powerhouse of the unbombed Midlands, and the rapidly recovering North to the war in France.
The short journey by car from the station up to the castle, buffeted practically every inch of the way by a savage squall which, mercifully, had scudded to the east by the time they drove into the armed camp above the port of Dover, had suggested to the Prime Minister that she might – infuriatingly – be detained, trapped here in Kent if her business that afternoon over-ran.
Margaret Thatcher tried very hard to be genuinely sympathetic to General Alain de Boissieu’s obvious mal-de-mare; the poor man looked as white as a sheet, very much as if somebody had just walked over his grave.
The short trip across the Channel from Calais on board HMS Arethusa, one of the recently commissioned Leander class general purpose frigates had probably not been a lot of fun for the poor man. The Leanders were elegant, two thousand five hundred-ton vessels; ‘excellent sea boats’ according to Sir Varyl Begg, the First Sea Lord but in the violently confused waters of the Narrow Seas south of Dover the warship must have been tossed about like a cork in a millrace.
However, the Prime Minister’s sympathy was only skin deep. There was something about de Boissieu, the son-in-law of the late President Charles de Gaulle, that might have been specifically designed to squelch the last maternal, empathetic spark in her heart. It remained an unfathomable mystery to her how her husband got on so well with the bloody man!
Nevertheless, she had insisted that he and his senior lieutenants made the crossing to England for this of all summits. Something had to be done about the situation in France and this, was make or break. Her Cabinet stood staunchly, albeit exasperated, by the events across the English Channel in the last twelve months, behind her and rightly, sensing that half-measures simply were not going to resolve anything, had backed her recommendation to support Sir Michael Carver’s plan – codenamed Operation Mangle – to break, very nearly at any cost, the stalemate in France.
