Warsaw Concerto, page 61
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Dwight Christie’s mind was in overdrive now.
“I didn’t know you were with the Company…”
“I’m not. I never was.”
“Oh, I…”
“You think too much, Mister Christie. That’s probably how you got into bed with Krasnaya Zarya in the first place.”
“I was never,” the man protested, “with those bastards!”
“You were with them all the time,” Rachel retorted coldly. “You just never worked it out until it was too late.” She studied the man briefly, then turned to gaze towards City Hall. “After Wister Park you must have known that Billy the Kid was no legend. That people like him existed, that they were out there. You’d watched me at work. That would have put a lot of things into context for you, wouldn’t it? So, I say again, why didn’t you tell the people at Quantico about Kurt?”
“They asked me questions. I answered.”
“Really? It makes me wonder what other dirty little secrets you have been keeping from us, Mister Christie?”
The man said nothing.
She kept looking at him, unblinking.
Eventually, he broke eye contact.
“You ever heard of Hans Mikkelsen?” He prompted, a little sulkily.
Rachel had joined the man in the windows, gazing out through the misty vista across the plaza in front of City Hall.
“No,” she replied.
“He’s Kurt’s step-father. His name came up when I was investigating three killings in Oregon. That was about ten years ago. We thought we had him cold. Well, circumstantially, nothing you could throw a stick at. Then there were two more killings, just like the first three, except one happened when Hans was in custody, the other while he was under surveillance in another part of the state. I spent a lot of time talking to Hans, he was the sort of guy that made you go cold inside after a while.”
Rachel frowned.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe, somebody ought to find out if Hans did a disappearing act around the time Billy the Kid opened that deposit box in Philadelphia?”
Rachel folded her arms across her breasts, turned to face the man, her lips a hard, thin line.
Dwight Christie was smiling now.
“He never told you about his old man,” he said, practically under his breath. “Like father like son…”
“You think they are working together?”
“Who else would Kurt trust to prepare the ground out here on the West Coast?” The former Special Agent breathed. “He’s come back home to die. You know that, I know that. He’s decided he wants to go out in a blaze of glory; to get his revenge...”
Rachel sighed, stepped away, moving to the wall by the door which she leaned against, viewing the man with dead eyes.
The FBI had belatedly begun to unravel the right-wing, white supremacist, so-called ‘resistance’ network which had thought it was bringing a former CIA hitman back home to assassinate a President. It was early days but the evidence trail led right back to Samuel S. de Witt, the bigoted, immensely wealthy Texan whom, it seemed viewed settling scores with ‘Big Government’ as his number one priority given that he was a dying man…
It sounded too…uncomplicated to be true.
“Was there ever any such thing as ‘the resistance’, Dwight?” Rachel asked quietly.
Christie grunted.
“No, thinking about it there were Red agents like me, and fifty-eight kinds of crazies out there. You could call it ‘the resistance’ if you like, but for the war most of the weirdoes would never have come out of the woods. The whole country went crazy after October 1962. The Battle of Washington could never have happened in a million years before the war. Same as what happened at Wister Park and the other terrorist stuff. Heck, the Church of the End of Days wasn’t born in Moscow or any church you or I would recognise, it was dreamt up in those Hell hole displacement and refugee camps in Wisconsin, and the rebellion only happened because the Federal Government failed to feed, or even pretend to care, about the million people who survived the Chicago bombs.”
He took a breath, realised he was getting angry.
“No,” he went on, “it just suited those bastards in DC to call the people it couldn’t shit on any longer ‘the resistance’ because to call them, us, anything else was an admission of their own guilt!”
Rachel greeted this deadpan-faced.
“Said like a true Marxist,” she remarked, unimpressed. “Now you’ve got it all off your chest; do you feel better?”
“Yes…”
“Why aren’t the FBI all over Hans Mikkelsen?”
“For all I know they are.”
Rachel nodded.
“This room is bugged, by the way.”
“That figures.”
“The shooting down there,” Rachel gestured, “on Market and Polk Street. That’s not like Kurt. That was far too,” she hesitated, “Billy the Kid. A sort of Kilroy was here stunt.”
“The FBI thinks he was staking out the plaza…”
“That’s because they’re…”
“Idiots?”
Rachel shook her head.
“No, because sane people find it almost impossible to get into the heads of psychopaths, Dwight. That’s why I’m here.”
“Okay…”
The woman was not listening to him.
She had moved to the door.
She tapped twice.
“I’m finished in here.”
The door opened and Dwight Christie’s minders entered the room.
“Is that it?” The former Special Agent protested as he was led out.
Rachel ignored him. Instead, she drifted back to the window and gazed anew towards nearby City Hall. The mist seemed to have lifted a little, more sunshine was reaching the open ground in front of the great neo-classical edifice thrown up after the Great Earthquake. A gang of workmen were hoeing and seeding the long-neglected flower beds, others were washing down walkways, applying a lick of white paint to the frontage of City Hall but contrary to the narrative put out by the Secret Service, there had never been any plan to employ the building as a venue during the forthcoming United Nations jamboree.
Rachel sensed a presence at her shoulder.
Texan James B. Adams, the man an ailing Clyde Tolson had left in charge of the West Coast FBI team hunting for Kurt Mikkelsen, sucked his teeth thoughtfully.
“You were right; we were wrong. The schmuck didn’t tell us everything,” the man conceded grudgingly.
Rachel sighed, half-turned and smiled sympathetically.
“Don’t feel so bad about it. Mr Adams. I’m the one who lives in his worst nightmares, not you.”
[The End, or rather…]
Hoc autem non est finis;
fabulam continues quarto decimo
- passuum octo[1]
Author’s End Note
‘Warsaw Concerto’ is Book 13 of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62. I hope you enjoyed it - or if you did not, sorry - but either way, thank you for reading and helping to keep the printed word alive. Remember, civilization depends on people like you.
In the past, well, up until now, Timeline books have come along at a rate of 2 or 3 a year, and fairly evenly spaced out. This year (2019) has been a bit different. For one thing, I dialled back a bit on the intensity at which I was working in the second part of last year and the first few months of this one. For another, I had other projects I needed to work on. Thirdly, I was so ‘busy’ writing, it was threatening to take the fun out of it. My rule of thumb is that when writing starts feeling like ‘work’, stop for a while. So, rather than run myself into the ground, beat myself up about it, et al, I moved Warsaw Concerto back in the schedule. Hence, its August release as opposed to its original April date.
In fact, this is somewhat serendipitous, given that the book is effectively, part one of a two-hander with Eight Miles High, which, releasing on 27th October, works well because readers will not have to wait the normal six months to find out what happens next!
Later this year I will also publish a Timeline 10/27/62 standalone novella The House on Haight Street, the events of which occur during the latter part of the narrative arc of Warsaw Concerto.
NEXT YEAR I plan to go back to April and October releases for Timeline Main Series offerings.
Book 15: Won’t Get Fooled Again is pretty much a standalone piece, will come out in April 2020 (all being well) and Book 16: Armadas, the first book of another two-parter in October 2020.
Thereafter: the plan is to write the series at least up to Book 20, set around the tenth anniversary of the October War in 1972; publishing at the rate of at least 2 books per year as below.
Book 17: Smoke on the Water (2021)
Book 18: Cassandra’s Song (2021)
Book 19: The Changing of the Guard (2022)
Book 20: Independence Day (2022)
Other Books by James Philip
Other Series and Novels
New England Series
Book 1: Empire Day
Book 2: Two Hundred Lost Years
Book 3: Travels Through the Wind
Book 4: Remember Brave Achilles
Coming in 2020
Book 5: George Washington’s Ghost
Book 6: The Imperial Crisis
The River Hall Chronicles
Book 1: Things Can Only Get Better
Book 2: Consenting Adults
Book 3: All Swing Together
Coming in 2020
Book 4: The Honourable Member
The Guy Winter Mysteries
Prologue: Winter’s Pearl
Book 1: Winter’s War
Book 2: Winter’s Revenge
Book 3: Winter’s Exile
Book 4: Winter’s Return
Book 5: Winter’s Spy
Book 6: Winter’s Nemesis
The Bomber War Series
Book 1: Until the Night
Book 2: The Painter
Book 3: The Cloud Walkers
Until the Night Series
Part 1: Main Force Country – September 1943
Part 2: The Road to Berlin – October 1943
Part 3: The Big City – November 1943
Part 4: When Winter Comes – December 1943
Part 5: After Midnight – January 1944
The Harry Waters Series
Book 1: Islands of No Return
Book 2: Heroes
Book 3: Brothers in Arms
The Frankie Ransom Series
Book 1: A Ransom for Two Roses
Book 2: The Plains of Waterloo
Book 3: The Nantucket Sleighride
The Strangers Bureau Series
Book 1: Interlopers
Book 2: Pictures of Lily
James Philip’s Cricket Books
F.S. Jackson
Lord Hawke
Audio Books of the following Titles
are available (or are in production) now
Aftermath
After Midnight
A Ransom for Two Roses
Brothers in Arms
California Dreaming
Empire Day
Heroes
Islands of No Return
Love is Strange
Main Force Country
Operation Anadyr
Red Dawn
The Big City
The Cloud Walkers
The Nantucket Sleighride
The Painter
The Pillars of Hercules
The Plains of Waterloo
The Road to Berlin
Travels Through the Wind
Two Hundred Lost Years
Until the Night
When Winter Comes
Winter’s Exile
Winter’s Pearl
Winter’s Return
Winter’s Revenge
Winter’s Spy
Winter’s War
Cricket Books edited by James Philip
The James D. Coldham Series
[Edited by James Philip]
Books
Northamptonshire Cricket: A History [1741-1958]
Lord Harris
Anthologies
Volume 1: Notes & Articles
Volume 2: Monographs No. 1 to 8
Monographs
No. 1 - William Brockwell
No. 2 - German Cricket
No. 3 - Devon Cricket
No. 4 - R.S. Holmes
No. 5 - Collectors & Collecting
No. 6 - Early Cricket Reporters
No. 7 – Northamptonshire
No. 8 - Cricket & Authors
________
Details of all James Philip’s published books and
forthcoming publications can be found on his website
www.jamesphilip.co.uk
________
Cover artwork concepts by James Philip
Graphic Design by
Beastleigh Web Design
* * *
[1] This is not the end; the story continues in Book Fourteen - Eight Miles High
James Philip, Warsaw Concerto
