“You’re stronger than she was. You’ve been trained not to be compromised.”
“She was the wife of an American combat officer! His Army was her Army.”
“Then, she wasn’t up to it, was she? Instead of helping her you used her. You filled her full of lethal junk and sent her right back into a fight she couldn’t win. Brown said it best. You bastards!”
“The strategy was optimum!”
“Cut that army bullshit! Who gave you the right?”
“No one! I saw the tactic. I created the strategy. I was the source controll” Ramirez blanched. He had gone too far.
“You?” Alison’s words came back to Peter; he had asked her after the funeral what MacAndrew had thought of Ramirez. A lightweight, hotheaded and too emotional. Not at all reliable. Dad refused to second two field promotions for him.
“There were many such operations. Others were involved, naturally.” Ramirez retreated.
“No, they weren’t! Not with this one!” broke in Chancellor. “It was all yours! What better way to get at the man who pegged you for what you were. A hothead! A liar! Who refused to let them give you a rank you weren’t qualified for! You got revenge through his wife!”
“I got the rank! He couldn’t stop me; that whore couldn’t stop me!”
“Of course not! You immobilized him through her! How did you begin? By sleeping with her?”
“It wasn’t difficult She was a slut!”
“And you had the candy! Oh, you’re a thoroughbred! And when you got your goddamned rank, you didn’t have the stomach for it because you knew how you’d gotten it. You invited reasons how to hide it because you knew you weren’t qualified for it You don’t pretend to be a major so you can talk to the men. You don’t give a damn for anybody! You’re afraid of the rank! You’re a fraud!”
Ramirez sprang up from the chair, his face on fire. Chancellor caught him in the stomach with his foot; the general fell back into the chair.
“You filthy liar!” screamed the soldier.
“Hits a nerve, doesn’t it” It was not a question. Suddenly Peter stopped. Whore? It didn’t make sense. An enormous contradiction was apparent “Wait a minute. You couldn’t have compromised MacAndrew that way. He would have killed you! He never knew his wife was a reverse conduit because you couldn’t tell him! Any of you. He had to be told something else; he had to believe something else. He never knew!”
“He knew his wife was a whore! He knew that!”
A sharp image sprang to Peter’s mind. A strong but broken man cradling a madwoman on the floor of an isolated house. Cradling her lovingly, telling her that everything would be all right It was too great an inconsistency. Regardless of the personal anguish a whoring wife would have been ripped out of MacAndrew’s life.
“I don’t believe you,” said Chancellor.
“He saw for himself! He had to know!”
“He saw something for himself. He was told something. Or maybe it was just hinted at. You people are terrific at indicating something but never coming out and saying it. I don’t think MacAndrew thought his wife was a whore. I don’t think he’d put up with that for a minute!”
“All the symptoms were there! The slut’s mentality.”
Symptoms. Peter stared down at Ramirez. He was getting closer, he could sense it. Symptoms. According to Alison her mother had begun to “slip away” several months before the explosion came. Alison’s father did not know why, so he ascribed it to a progressive deterioration of her faculties, using an accident at a beach to pin the final breakdown on. Used it so often he came to believe it himself.
In the recesses of his mind such a man would continue to love, continue to protect, because his wife was not to blame. No matter what she did. Conflicting forces—parents in the hands of an enemy, a husband fighting that enemy every day—had driven that woman out of her mind.
And all the while trusted friends hinted at promiscuous behavior in order to cover their own actions.
What those colleagues did not understand was that MacAndrew was a far better man than they could imagine. Far better and far more compassionate. Whatever the manifestations of an illness it was the illness that was to be despised, not the actions of the human being afflicted.
And this maggot with his bloody face perspiring in the chair, this “source control” who had held out the lethal candy until he’d slept with the wife of the man he hated, could only repeat the words whore and slut.
Those words were the screen that concealed the truth. “What’s a ‘slut’s mentality,’ General?”
Ramirez’s eyes were wary; he suspected a trap. “She hung around the Ginza,” he said. “In the off-limit bars. She picked up men.”
“Those bars were in the southwest district of the Ginza, weren’t they? I’ve been in Tokyo; those bars were still there in ’67.”
“A number of them, yes.”
“They trafficked in narcotics.”
“It’s possible. More to the point, they sold sex.”
“What did they sell it for, General?”
“What it’s always sold for.”
“Money?”
“Naturally. And kicks.”
“No! Not naturally! MacAndrew’s wife didn’t need money. Or kicks. She was looking for drugs! You strung her out, and she tried to find junk by herself! Without going to the Chinese! That’s what you found out! And by her doing that your whole strategy would blow up in your faces! Just one arrest, one Tokyo bust investigated by an outside agency, and you were finished! Exposed! You had the most to hide, you motherfucker! But others were involved, too. What did you say a few minutes ago? There were many such operations.’ You were all running for cover, trying to protect yourselves!” Again Peter stopped, the realization there. “Which means you had to control what happened—”
“It happened!” screamed Ramirez, interrupting. “We weren’t responsible! She was found down an alley in the Ginza! We didn’t put her there! She was found. She would have died!”
The images and the phrases wove swiftly in and out of Chancellor’s mind. Alison’s words came back like the echoes of kettle drums. Her mother had been taken on a Sunday afternoon to Funabashi Beach. The phone started ringing. Was my mother there?… Two Army officers drove out to the house. They were nervous and agitated.…
Was my mother there? Was my mother there?
At night, quite late, I heard screams.… Downstairs … men … walking around rapidly, using hand radios. Then the front door opened, and she was brought inside. On a stretcher.… Her face—it was white. Her eyes were wide, staring blankly … blood rolled down over her chin onto her neck. As the stretcher passed beneath a light, she suddenly lurched up screaming … her body writhing but held in place by the straps.
Christ! thought Peter. Alison’s next words!
I cried out and ran down the stairs, but a … black major … stopped me and picked me up and held me.
A black major!
The black soldier had to be at the bottom of the stairs, near the light! He was what Alison’s mother had seen!
Chancellor remembered other words. A command barked at him by a man in agony twenty-two years later in the late afternoon, still protecting a loved one who’d been driven out of her mind by an event so horrible she could never forget it.
Get by the light; put your face above the shade. It was not to show that his features were Western and not Oriental. It wasn’t that at all! It was to show he was not a black!
Alison’s mother had not been tortured by Chinese agents sending back a message to Army Intelligence. She had been raped! At an off-limits bar in the filthiest district of the Ginza, where she’d come for a connection, she had been dragged down an alley and raped!
“Oh, my God” whispered Peter in revulsion. “That’s what you told him. That’s what you kept hammering at; that’s what you used. She was raped by blacks. She was trying to find a connection in a bar, and she got raped.”
“It was the truth!”
/> “In one of those places it could have been anybody! Anybody! But it wasn’t, so you used it! You blamed the blacks! Oh, Christ!” It was all Chancellor could do to restrain himself. He wanted to kill or maim, so complete was his abhorrence of this man. “You don’t have to spell out the rest It’s goddamned clear! It’s the information missing in MacAndrew’s record. It’s what’s in Hoover’s files! After his wife had been put in the hospital, you made sure he was sent back to Korea. But not to his own outfit! To another! To a black command! And somehow you relayed the battle plans—the actual strategy—back to the Chinese! It was so obvious! An officer’s wife is raped, driven insane, by blacks, so he subjects black troops to murderous gunfire, willing to die with them if he has to, but above all, vengeance! A trap set by men in his own Army! Hundreds of men killed, hundreds missing, so the truth of what you did to his wife and probably dozens like her would never be known! Your experiments hidden! That’s what you held over him: rape and genocide! The first he wouldn’t talk about, the second he didn’t understand. But he saw the connection between them! It must have paralyzed him!”
“Lies!” Ramirez’s head moved back and forth convulsively. “That’s not what happened. You’ve built a terrible lie!”
Peter stood over the brigadier in the last extremity of loathing. “You look like a man who’s heard a lie,” he said sarcastically. “No, General, you’ve just heard the truth. You’ve been running from it for twenty-two years.”
Ramirez’s head moved faster, the denial more emphatic.
“There’s no proof!”
“There are questions. They lead to other questions. That’s how it works. People in high places betray the rest of us who put them there. Bastards!” Chancellor thrust his left hand down and grabbed Ramirez by the shirt, pulling him forward, the gun inches from the general’s eyes. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore. You disgust me! I think I could pull this trigger and kill you, and that scares the hell out of me. So you do exactly what I tell you, or you wont live to do anything else. You go over to the telephone on your desk and you call wherever you had that major taken and you tell them to release him. Now!”
“No!”
In a single, swift movement Peter whipped the barrel of the Colt automatic across Ramirez’s face. The skin broke; a trickle of blood rolled down the soldier’s cheek. Chancellor felt nothing. There was something frightening in that absence of feeling. “Make that call.”
Slowly Ramirez got to his feet, his eyes on the weapon, his hand touching the blood on his face. He picked up the phone and dialed.
“This is General Ramirez. I called for a special detail to be at my residence at eighteen-hundred for an arrest. The prisoner is a Major Brown. Release him.”
Ramirez listened as the voice on the line spoke. Peter pressed the barrel of the automatic into the brigadier’s temple.
“Do as I tell you,” said Ramirez. “Return the major to his vehicle.” He replaced the telephone, his hand still on the instrument. “He’ll be here soon. The MP depot’s ten minutes away.”
“I just told you I didn’t want to talk to you anymore, but I’ve changed my mind. We’re going to wait for Brown, and you’re going to tell me everything you know about Hoover’s files.”
“I know nothing.”
“The hell you don’t You people are into this thing like it was a pocket of quicksand. You’re choking in it. You removed eight months’ worth of material from Mac- Andrew’s service record.”
“That’s all we did.”
“Eight months! And the dates corresponded to the events leading up to Chasǒng. All the incriminating material. Then the massacre where MacAndrew sent waves of black troops into suicidal gunfire. Everything but the truth! You knew where that material ended up!”
“Not at first” The general could barely be heard. “At first it was standard procedure. All compromising information about candidates for the Joint Chiefs is removed and placed in G-Two archives. Someone thought it was dangerous; it was routed to PSA.”
“What’s that?”
“Psychiatric Systems Analyses. Until recently certain people at the bureau had access. PSA deals with defectors, potential blackmail of high-ranking officers, espionage. Lots of things.”
“Then, you knew it was in Hoover’s files!”
“We found out.”
“How?”
“A man named Longworth. He was a retired FBI agent living in Hawaii. He came back—for only a day, maybe two, I don’t remember—and warned Hoover that he was going to be killed. For his files. Hoover went out of his mind. He combed through them, looking for anything that might lead to the identity of the killers. He came across Chasǒng, and we got a phone call. We swore we were not involved; we offered guarantees, protection, anything. Hoover just wanted us to know what he knew. Then, of course, he was killed.”
Peter dropped the gun. The crash of metal against wood was loud and abrasive, but he did not hear it He heard only the echo of the brigadier’s last words.
Then, of course, he was killed.… Then, of course, he was killed.… Then, of course, he was killed.
Spoken as if the incredible information were neither electrifying nor even shocking, neither appalling nor even, perhaps, out of the ordinary. Instead, as though it were routine, common knowledge—data recorded and accepted and so entered into the books.
But it was not real. Other things were real, but not that. Not the assassination. That was the fantasy, the fiction that had propelled him into the nightmare, but it was the one thing that had never happened!
“What did you say?”
“Nothing you didn’t know,” said Ramirez, staring at the gun on the floor next to his shoes.
“Hoover died of heart failure. The medical examiner called it a cardiovascular disease. That’s how he died! He was an old man!” Chancellor spoke without breathing.
The brigadier looked up into Peter’s eyes. “Are you playing games? There was no autopsy. You know why and so do I.”
“You tell me. Don’t assume I know anything. Why wasn’t there an autopsy?”
“Orders from Sixteen hundred.”
“Who?”
“The White House.”
“Why?”
“They killed him. If they didn’t, they think they did. They think someone there did it. Or had it done. They give oblique orders over there, very ambiguous. You’re either on the team or you’re not; you learn how to read what’s said. He had to be killed. What’s the difference who did it?”
“Because of the files?”
“Partly. But they’re records; they can be burned, destroyed. It was the dispatch units. They’d gone too far.”
“Dispatch units? What are you talking about?”
“For God’s sake, Chancellor! You know what I’m talking about, or you wouldn’t be here! You wouldn’t have done what you did!”
Peter grabbed Ramirez by the cloth of his shirt. “What are dispatch units? What were Hoover’s dispatch units?”
The general’s eyes were fiat. It was as if he did not care any longer. “Assassination teams,” he said. “Men assigned to engineer situations in which specific people were killed. Either by provoking violence resulting in local police or national-guard action, or by hiring psychopaths, known killers or potential killers, to do the work and cutting them down when it was done. It was all once removed, divided secretly inside the bureau. No one knows how far it went. How far it was going. What assassinations could be attributed to Hoover. Or who would be called an enemy next.”
Slowly, staring in disbelief as the throbbing in his temples increased, Chancellor released the brigadier. Blinding white spots converged again in front of his eyes.
Dispatch units! Execution squads!
His own words came back to him. He saw the page and read it in his mind’s eye with terrible pain.
“Did you know about these … execution squads?”
“There’ve been rumors.” “What did you hear?” “Nothing specific. No
proof.… Hoover departmentalizes everything. Everybody. He does it all secretly.… That way everyone stays in line.”
“Gestapor!”
“What did you hear?” “Only that there were final solutions.…” “Final—Oh, my God.” “If we ever needed a last, overwhelming justification, I think we have it. Hoover will be killed two weeks from Monday, the files taken.”
It was all true. It had been true from the beginning. God in heaven, it was never fiction! it was fact!
J. Edgar Hoover had not died the natural death of a sick old man. He had been assassinated.
And with sudden clarity Peter knew who had called for that assassination. It had not been the White House. Instead, it had been a group of men above reproach who made decisions of such impact that they were often the unseen, unelected force that ran the nation.
“You can’t do it! You have everything you need. Bring him to trial! Let him face the judgment of the courts! Of the country!”
“You don’t understand.… There’s not a court in the land, not a judge, not a member of the House or of the Senate, not the President or any of his cabinet, who can bring him to trial. It’s beyond that.”
“No, it isn’t! There are laws!” “There are the files.… People would be reached … by others who have to survive.”… “Then, you’re no better than he is.”
All true.
Inver Brass had demanded the death of J. Edgar Hoover, and the order had been carried out.
It happened so fast Chancellor could only react with a twisting, lurching movement of his body. He felt hands on his chest, then Ramirez’s shoulder against his ribs. He fell, turning sideways to avoid a second blow, but he was too late.
The brigadier had fallen to one knee, his right hand shooting out for the gun on the floor. He grabbed it, twisting it firmly in his grip, his fingers expertly around the handle, his thumb flicking upward instinctively to check the safety. He raised it.
Peter understood that if he had to die at this moment, he had to die trying to avoid that death. He sprang off his feet, hurling himself at the general.