Archive of Our Own

Conversation #004-047 (excerpt)

JEH: My concern, Mr President, relates to this man Delaware. I was informed that he was working…

RMN: Uh-huh, that’s…

JEH: Working for you in some…private capacity. And…

RMN: Well, uh, Edgar, you’ve got to remember…you’ve got to remember that there are some cases where you can’t… [Expletive deleted], you just can’t go through the official channels sometimes, Edgar.

JEH: Mr President, I would like to think that you know you can rely on the Bureau under any…

RMN: Edgar, I know I can count on you. Hell, you know you can count on me too, but you have to understand, with all these [expletive deleted] leaks we’ve had lately, when it comes to certain… And he’s good at what he does. You have to admit that.

JEH: You are aware of Mr Delaware’s record with the Bureau, Mr President? Of the circumstances under which he was obliged to…?

RMN (laughing): Oh hell, Edgar, I know he’s a [expletive deleted][expletive deleted] if that’s what you’re talking about! And I know you don’t, uh…you don’t tolerate that kind of thing in the Bureau.

JEH (clears throat): We…we most certainly do not, Mr President. Certainly not.

Key Biscayne. Shit. I’m still only in Key Biscayne.

The rough lies down flat under the gale from the rotors of the Marine Corps helicopter. Landing aircraft in the middle of the fairway is probably against the club rules, but then again, I guess POTUS does whatever POTUS pleases.

Or not, but there haven’t been many POTUSes quite like this one.

The chopper’s turbine engines wind down with a drawn-out whine; the tips of the blades make sharp whipping sounds as they gradually spin to a halt. The door slides back and I put on my Ray-Bans and climb out of the cool passenger cabin into sticky South Florida heat.

Dick is waiting for me at the ninth hole; I can see the little cluster of golf carts from here, the Pres and his buddies sinking their putts. They’re surrounded by a loose ring of serious-looking guys with sweltering dark suits and radio earpieces. One of them frisks me before I’m allowed into the hallowed presence, relieving me of the .357 I habitually carry in my waistband. You can’t trust anyone nowadays.

A parking garage in glowing electric monochrome. A young guy in an oversized sweater, flanked by slack-gutted cops wearing Stetsons and cowboy boots. A rotund figure moving through the onlookers and flashbulbs with purpose, a pistol in his hand…

Okay, that was weird.

I’m still trying to make sense of the flash, vision, whatever it was, when a pair of hands, one of them gloved, seize my right, pumping it enthusiastically.

“Ah, Mr Delaware,” Dick Nixon growls, favouring me with a flashbulb grin. I can smell the whisky on his breath. “Good to see you again. How’s things?”

“Slow,” I confess as I extricate my hand from the Presidential grip. “Funny, but it turns out a lot of people don’t want to hire a P.I. with a reputation for pulling dirty tricks on behalf of the White House.”

Dick does not like the implications of that. “I thought your work for me was carried out in, uh, strictest confidence?”

“Word gets around,” I tell him. “Word always gets around.” I check out his golf partners for the day. The Winter White House, as they call the Pres’s beachfront getaway down here, has a revolving door for shady businessmen, mobsters, Hollywood glitterati of the GOP persuasion. If it isn’t a delegation of Howard Hughes’s Mormon bodyguards negotiating an off-the-books campaign donation, it’s sweaty-palmed, icy-eyed cold warriors like Hunt and Liddy, planning whose phone they’re going to tap next.

Today, it’s two big guys in loud jackets, more or less interchangeable if one of them put on the other’s horn-rims. I perform a slight double-take as I recognise the one without the glasses as the actor and comedian Jackie Gleason, old Minnesota Fats himself. The other one is Frank Fitzsimmons, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a.k.a. the La Cosa Nostra Savings and Loan Society. He can only be here to pay Dick off again and ensure his predecessor and ex-friend Jimmy Hoffa stays in the big house where he belongs. The Campaign to Re-Elect the President isn’t abbreviated as CREEP for nothing.

Hunt actually tried to recruit me to his little brains trust, before I told him to go fuck himself. These days, I’m strictly freelance.

“Anyway,” I tell Dick, “you rang. What do you want?”

“That’s what I like about you, Mr Delaware,” POTUS confides. “Straight to the point. Too many, uh, flatterers and smoke-blowers around Washington nowadays.”

“‘Twas ever thus,” I remind him.

Dick turns away and sets off in the direction of the tenth tee. I follow, aware of the whole caravan of celebrity guests, caddies, golf carts and Secret Service agents tailing us at a discreet distance. Even wearing shades, the grass seems bright green, the sky bright blue, the sunlight like liquid gold, enough to make my head spin. Is this what that LSD shit the kids are into feels like, I wonder? That might explain whatever the hell that flashback was just now.

I’m still idly wondering who could have spiked me, and how, when the Pres decides we’re far enough ahead of the entourage for him to speak again: “I have another, uh, assignment for you, Mr Delaware.”

“Well, I figured you didn’t invite me down here to play a round. I have a twenty-one handicap.”

“It is a matter of the, uh, greatest sensitivity,” Dick admonishes me, “with grave implications for the national security of the United States.”

“Aren’t they all?” We walk a little way, me waiting for him to elaborate. When he does not, I ask: “With all the stops you’ve pulled out, I’m assuming it involves…out of towners?”

“Something has gone missing from Dreamland,” he informs me without making eye contact.

Dreamland a.k.a. Groom Lake Air Force Base a.k.a. Area 51. Shit.

“An artefact,” says Dick. “Of, uh…exotic origin.”

“I didn’t think you were going to say office supplies.”

“I’m asking you to go out there and, uh, investigate,” Dick continues.

I peer at him sceptically over the top of the Ray-Bans. “Asking?”

“Asking,” he insists. “We’d, uh, cover your usual daily fee, of course. Plus expenses.”

Out of which particular Mob-sourced slush fund, I wonder? Out loud, I say: “When do I leave?” It’s not as if I have anything better to do, and besides I’m a month behind on the rent.

“We’ll, uh, get you on a flight to Vegas this afternoon,” he replies as we reach the tee. “You can connect with the daily, uh, military shuttle in the morning. You’ll have official accreditation, of course.”

I’ll need it. Dreamland is Air Force turf, with various CIA-supervised black projects hosted onsite, quite apart from the alien shit. Nobody there will be putting out a welcome mat for some guy claiming to be a P.I. hired by the President.

The rest of the party have reached us by now. Dick puts his ball down on the tee and selects a fat-headed club from the bulging golf bag on his cart.

“I’ll get moving straight away,” I inform him.

“Good. I’m, uh, counting on you, Mr Delaware, to conclude this matter quickly and above all, uh, quietly.” He gives me the grin again as he swings the club back, above his head. “Now, watch this drive!”

A dark and stormy night on Long Island, appropriately enough. The rain lashes down. The mansion looms blackly against an only marginally paler sky, the only hint of colour the warm orange glow in the window of the old man’s study…

I ring the bell, trying to keep out of the rain as I listen to the shuffle of feet on the other side of the front door. Old Hector is even more wrinkled than he was last time I was here, his shock of hair as white as his skin is dark. When he sees me, he breaks out in a delighted grin:

“Young Mr Canton!”

And then I’m back in Las Vegas, sitting on a rickety stool in the crappy hotel bar.

What the hell was that?

I peer at my drink suspiciously, swirling cheap bourbon and melting ice cubes around the bottom of the glass. Did one of Dick’s black bag guys really slip me something while I was in Florida? And if they did, why? Is this not so much an assignment as one of their goddamn psychedelic brainwashing experiments, all that MK/ULTRA crap?

The bartender continues to ignore me, using the cloth in his hand to smear the spilled liquor and escaped peanuts more evenly across the wooden surface. The TV behind him throws electric-white highlights and huge inky shadows carelessly around the smoky, ill-lit barroom like a never-ending lightning flash.

The other barflies are more interested in their drinks than the scenes of destruction flickering across the small, square screen. Boys in oversized helmets hold Zippos to the thatch of Vietnamese hovels as choppers fill the skies above like angry hornets. One young Marine is giving a confused monologue to the reporter shoving a microphone in his face, something about why this particular village needs to be destroyed in order to save it. Bound and blindfolded prisoners are marched away from their burning houses to whatever fate awaits them.

I’m aware of somebody seating themselves beside me. Of all the empty barstools in this cheap joint, of course they pick that one. I glance away from the war-porn long enough to get the impression of a female face, twenty years too young for me even if I was into partners with internal genitalia; long dark hair, deep and even darker eyes.

I’ve been to Vegas before. I know what it means when a woman deliberately sits down next to a man in a place like this.

“Lady,” I say, “out of all the guys in here, you really could not have made a worse choice.”

On TV, black-bellied B-52s cruise somewhere over the rainbow, way up high, raining endless streams of slim, streamlined bombs onto the jungle below. The treetops boil, misty white shockwaves rippling through them like bursting bubbles. Back home, long-haired protestors are waving placards in Pennsylvania Avenue, and there’s Dick, grinning and bearing it like the shit-eating sonofabitch he is.

“Listen to me…” That’s interesting; she doesn’t sound like a local girl. English? For a second, I’m reminded of the Doctor and his little crew, the last time I had cause to go over the mountains to Dreamland. I take a second look, satisfying myself that I have absolutely, positively, never ever seen her before in my life. Not that that means much when it comes to that sort of business.

“I’m really not in the market for company,” I insist. She’s oddly dressed for someone in her profession, in what looks a lot like a man’s dinner suit, but it’s quite honestly not the most out-there thing I’ve seen people her age wearing. We live in strange days. “Try that sad sack at the end of the bar. He’s drunk, he’s been flashing his cash, and he was telling me before how his wife just doesn’t understand him.”

“Mr Delaware,” says the woman, “I’m here to help you.”

I hesitate, unnerved by something in those big, bottomless eyes. How does she know my name? In the background, Walter Cronkite is narrating the war in his normal stentorian tones.

Cronkite?

“From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official…”

The woman is gone. I’m back in the rain, and the front door is opening with a gust of warmth and furniture polish.

“Evening, Hector.” I smile, shrugging off my sodden trenchcoat before he can do it for me. I can’t stop him, however, from taking it from my hands and hanging it in the closet under the stairs. “The old man treating you okay?”

Hector, diplomatically, declines to answer that one. “We weren’t expecting you home from college ‘til the end of the semester.” He suddenly grows visibly anxious: “And your room isn’t even ready! I’ll have to tell…”

“Relax,” I advise with a smile. “I’m not staying. I’m just here to talk to the old man. Isn’t he expecting me?”

Hector frowns. “He didn’t say anything, Mr Canton. “He’s been locked away in his study since this afternoon. I’d better announce you.”

“Sure.” I watch him shuffle off along the shadowy, wood-panelled hallway. I follow him unhurriedly past dusty portraits of idealistic revolutionaries in powdered wigs, frock-coated fin de siècle robber barons, and a succession of stern, black-robed judges; the long and involved history of the Delaware dynasty, written in cracked and faded oils. Last in line, next to the oaken study door, hangs the old man’s scowling visage. The most disconcerting thing is how much it reminds me of myself. That’s what I’m going to look like when I’m old, although hopefully not quite so fucking pissed off.

Hector knocks before carefully opening the door. Golden firelight spills into the hall. “Sir, young Mr Canton is here to see you.”

“Send him in.”

“Yes sir.” Hector turns to me as if I have not just heard the exchange with my own ears: “Mr Canton, your father will see you now.”

“Thanks Hector.” I force another smile, then take a deep breath and step over the threshold.

Canton Everett Delaware Jr., Attorney at Law, occupies his usual seat before the great stone fireplace taking up most of one wall of the study. He sits in the wing-backed leather chair like an emperor on his throne, brooding on the crackling flames before him. The firelight falls on him like a bloodstained spotlight, the only bright object in an otherwise darkened room.

Strange shapes loom in the shadows, horned and winged and fanged, covering the other walls; birds and beasts attached to dark wooden plaques with labels of engraved brass. The late Canton Everett Delaware glowers down indignantly from his own portrait on the chimney breast above the fire, his stout torso wrapped in the robes of a Justice of the United States Supreme Court. The trophies are his handiwork, and the long rifle mounted on the wall below the picture is the tool he used to make them.

“Dad,” I say, as insolently as I dare. I hear Hector closing the door behind me with a soft thud, like dirt hitting a coffin lid. “You rang. What do you want?”

“Shut up.” The old man does not raise his eyes from the fireplace. To be fair, it’s the sort of thing he often says to me. He has a cut crystal tumbler clutched in one wrinkled paw, a finger’s width of rich amber liquor swimming inside it.

“I’ve just had a long drive on a pretty shitty night,” I tell him, eyeing the booze enviously. “Least you can do is offer me a dri–”

“I said “shut up!””

I realise something is up, something beyond my father’s usual contempt for me and most other people he meets. One of the shadows behind the armchair moves and I realise there is a third person in the room with us, a beer-gutted, stubble-jawed lowlife in a cheap suit and a tie that looks like he might have puked on it. Below his heavy moustache, half a stogie juts from between nicotine-yellow teeth.

The guy’s name is Phelan; ex-NYPD and dirty with it, by all accounts. Officially, he works as an investigator for the old man’s law firm. In reality, he does anything the old man needs done. All kinds of anything. I don’t think he’s ever killed anyone on my father’s say-so, but it would not surprise me overmuch.

“I ought to have known,” the old man hoarsely croaks, shaking his snowy head from side to side. “I ought to have known when you refused that place at Yale…”

I shrug. “What can I say? I like NYU Law. Better class of people.”

“I pulled strings!” the old man husks, just as outraged as the first few times we had this argument. “I’d have got you into Yale Law School, into Skull and Bones – you’d have been set for life, like…”

“Like Grandpa set you up, you mean? I told you, Dad; it’s my life. I don’t want you planning out my every…”

“Phelan.” My father gives the order with the peremptory self-confidence of a born master addressing a servant. “Show him.”

“Yes sir, Mr Delaware.” Phelan takes out his stogie and carefully lays it in the gilt-edged ashtray on the old man’s desk, then produces a leather briefcase and begins unbuckling it. I start to get a very unpleasant inkling of where this might be going.

“I know why you like NYU,” the old man grates, eyes fixed on the fire. “I know why you like that campus of theirs, right in the middle of goddamn Greenwich Village!” He pronounces the place name like an insult.

Phelan steps into the firelight to hand me a buff cardboard folder. That might almost be an apologetic expression on his puffy, unshaven face.

I open the folder. I scope out the photographs inside. Snapped through a bedroom window, I decide, using a long lens. Two naked male bodies are entwined on the bare mattress, pale skin and dark tangled together, mouths pressed together, faces distorted in the throes of passion. I stare at them, some ridiculous corner of my mind observing that the pics are quite artistic, certainly on a par with anything you could buy from some seedy guy in a leather coat hanging around Times Square. Maybe Phelan has missed his true calling.

“Bad enough,” says the old man. I can barely hear him over the steadily building rushing sound in my ears. “Bad enough that you have to go degrading yourself like that, but…but with a, a Negro? Canton, what the hell is wrong with you?”

“Nothing the love of a good man can’t cure,” I murmur.

The old man’s glass explodes like a grenade as it hits the fireplace’s iron grate, scattering diamond-bright fragments across the Persian rug. The spilled alcohol makes the flames wildly leap and roar. “God damn you!”

“He probably already has.”

“Don’t you realise what could happen if this were made public?” At least the old man is looking me in the eye now, pointing a quivering finger in my direction. “It would be the end of you, boy! Personally, professionally; your life would be over before it began! Do you really want… Do you want people to think you’re some sort of…queer?”

“Well, Dad…” I really am trying not to be sarcastic, I know it won’t help, but he makes it so damn hard. “I think the available evidence would tend to suggest that I am some sort of queer.”

“Do you think this is a joke? What if it hadn’t been Phelan who found out about your sordid little…trysts? What if it had been the police? Or worse yet, the Russians?”

I try my hardest not to laugh at this surreal turn. “The Russians?”

“The International Communist Conspiracy would love to be able to blackmail somebody like you into doing their bidding; the son of a rich, influential man, destined for great things…”

“The International…what?”

“I just thank the Lord your grandfather isn’t here to see this,” the old man piously intones, gazing up at his own father hanging over the fire. “Your mother too. If she were still alive…”

I see red. My attempts at cool evaporate as I fling the photos aside and start violently towards the armchair. “Don’t you dare bring her into this! After all you put her through… You’re not even entitled to speak her name!”

Phelan is alongside me in an instant, fast for a fat man, pulling me up short with one hand on my shoulder and the other twisting my arm up my back in some deft cop’s trick. The pain is excruciating, paralysing. “Hey, cool it, kid,” he says quietly in my ear, again apologetically, as if to protest that just because he does murky things for money it doesn’t necessarily make him a bad guy.

“Listen.” The old man rises ponderously and advances towards me, dispassionately watching me squirm in his goon’s unbreakable grip. “Listen very carefully.”

I try to pull free, succeeding only in making the agony in my shoulder joint blaze more intensely.

“Here’s what you’re going to do,” my father predicts, utterly incorrectly. “You’re going to go back to your precious NYU Law, and stay the hell away from Greenwich Village. You’re going to graduate law school with honours, and then pass the New York bar exam and become an associate at Delaware, Hackensack & Van Damme. Eventually, when I’m ready to retire, you’ll take my place as a full partner. I’ll find some nice society girl for you to marry, and you’ll give me a grandson to carry on the family name. And if you must have your…peccadilloes, you will do so with the utmost care and discretion. Phelan can no doubt provide you with a list of establishments that cater to…people of your ilk in an unobtrusive and confidential manner. Do you understand me, Canton?”

Even through the pain, I manage to curl my lips into a sneer: “In Technicolor, sir.”

The old man nods, the signal for Phelan to release me. The white-hot pain in my shoulder instantly fades to a dull throb. I make a great show of straightening my tie and buttoning my jacket, then turn on my heel and march out of the room, out of the house, out of my father’s life.

I blink.

I’m back in the hotel bar, back in Vegas.

On the TV set, another young soldier faces off against another microphone:

“Do you think you’re fighting for a just cause, here in Vietnam?”

The boy shakes slightly, his pupils like pinpricks, clearly high as a kite on something picked up in some Saigon bazaar. “I…I guess so?” he mumbles in an uncertain Texas drawl.

The call girl, or whatever she is, is watching me from the next barstool with obvious concern. “How long has this been happening to you?”

“I’m okay,” I lie, knocking back the last drain of bourbon and setting the glass down, ice cubes rattling, as I lurch to my feet. I haven’t had that much to drink, surely? “Like I say, try that guy at the end there. He’ll think it’s his lucky night.”

I throw a fistful of dollars onto the counter and stagger out of the bar, into the low-rent hotel lobby. I can feel her eyes on me the whole way.

I catch sight of the phone booths lined along the far wall of the lobby. They’re not blue, and they’re not bigger on the inside than the outside, but they serve a purpose. On a whim, I step into the nearest one, struggling with the receiver for a moment before managing to get through to the operator and place a long-distance call.

“How’s it going, Carl?” I ask, playing it casual.

“Canton?” The voice on the other end of the line is blurry with sleep. “You know it’s one in the morning here, don’t you?”

I glance at the lobby clock guiltily, suddenly remembering I’m in another time zone. “I needed to talk to you.” It’s just the God’s honest truth. “I needed to hear your voice.”

Carl lets out a weary almost-groan. “You been drinking?”

“Don’t ask stupid fucking questions. It’s after dark, isn’t it?” I try softening my voice, sounding false even to myself: “You okay? I didn’t see you in Key Biscayne.”

“I doubt I’ll ever get back on Presidential Protection,” he murmurs, gloomily. I can picture his strong, handsome face; those steady, attentive eyes that miss nothing. “I’m only just back off desk duty. They’ve got me chasing counterfeiters. I’m lucky I’ve still got a job after negligently discharging my sidearm in the Oval Office; what if I’d hit the Commander-in-Chief?”

“Why would you even do that?” I wonder aloud. The bourbon has loosened my tongue.

“Goddamned if I know.” I can hear the angry edge in his voice. “That’s not exactly supportive, by the way.”

“Yeah.” I feel like a heel. I talk faster than I think sometimes; that’s always been my problem. Like when I kept disrespecting Carl in front of POTUS during the whole Doctor escapade. I didn’t mean anything by it; I’m just an incorrigible smartass and a sarcastic sonofabitch to boot, but I know Carl well enough to read the emotions behind his cold professional mask. For all that he would never say it out loud, he felt those putdowns more keenly than most, because whatever way you try to cut it, as a black man in the Secret Service he has worked harder and sacrificed more to get where he is than I will ever know.

It’s a difference between being a visible minority and an invisible one. People like me can keep their heads down and blend in if they want to, even if they shouldn’t have to. For Carl, though, every day is an uphill fight and there’s nowhere he can hide. Just the thought that I have ever done or said anything to make that fight harder…

“Sorry, partner.” I mean it with all my heart; sorry for everything, even if being sorry won’t stop me from sticking my foot in my mouth the next time, or the time after that. “You knew I was a loudmouthed jackass when you first hooked up with me.”

“I guess I did.” I can still hear the pain in his voice, and it hurts me too. “Where are you, anyway? On a case somewhere?”

“If I told you, I’d have to kill you. Dick says so.”

“You could try to kill me,” Carl replies, with a hint of humour. “Might just end up the other way around, though.”

“That’s how you can tell you’ve got a good thing going. When you can casually exchange death threats over the phone like this.”

“You wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Hell no.” I drop my voice again, hopefully sounding more sincere this time. “Stay safe, Carl. I mean it.”

“You too.”

“And…” I dry up. Me. Some words don’t come easy, even after all this time. However comfortable in your own skin you think you are, there’s always that reticence, that self-doubt. The old man saw to that, the bastard. I take a deep breath and force myself to say it: “I love you, Carl. Remember I love you, okay?”

“I know that,” he replies, as if thinking what an idiotic statement of the obvious I’ve just made. “I love you too, man.”

“Even if I don’t deserve it.”

“Go to bed,” he sternly commands. “May not be as late there as it is here, but you sound like you’re about ready to fall down where you’re standing.”

“I’ll call again soon.”

“Good night.”

The receiver clicks in my ear.

An office, late at night, stinking of fresh paint, mixed with the same floor-polish smell as the old man’s house. A secretary behind a clattering typewriter, doing her best to ignore me while I wait. A wooden door with a frosted-glass window. I watch it, dreading its opening. So, naturally, it opens.

There is a man standing in the doorway, tall, solid and unsmiling.

“The Director will see you now.”

Light.

The dim night-time office is replaced by the cabin of a passenger jet, flooded with golden-white desert light. I blink in confusion, looking out of the window at jagged, bone-dry brown mountains and the glaring white salt pan below.

I sit there, trying to make sense of the shockingly vivid memory. No, not a memory at all. I was there, back in DC more than a decade ago. Now I’m here.

What the hell…?

The airplane’s wheels hit runway with a screech of brakes. There are fewer formalities than at a civilian airport; as soon as the 707 taxies to a halt, the stairs are wheeled alongside and we’re disembarking in Dreamland.

The other passengers are for the most part civilian defence contractors; engineers who live in neat little tract houses on the outskirts of Las Vegas. They fly out here every morning on this unmarked, false-numbered aircraft, commuting home the same way every night. It’s less than an hour’s flight from Nellis Air Force Base, northwest over the mountains into the high desert where the atom bombs used to go off like firecrackers in the good old days before the Test Ban Treaty.

The engineers work for Lockheed, Northrop, half a dozen other aerospace corporations who grow fat on the Pentagon’s near-bottomless “black” budget; the funds that pay for the things the man in the street isn’t supposed to know about. These things have obtuse codenames, names like Oxcart, Have Blue, Senior Trend; names intended to provide no clue as to what they are. They are angular black things that fly at the edge of the atmosphere, fast enough for their wings and fuselages to glow red like a re-entering space capsule. Things that can read a newspaper over the shoulder of some guy in Red Square while laughing at the missiles and fighters that miserably fail to reach them that high up. Things that disappear from radar screens like ghosts, if they ever appear there at all. If you didn’t know better, you might think they were UFOs.

They are the real business of the little military outpost clinging to the shoreline of Groom Dry Lakebed, but its remoteness and secrecy make it a convenient place to stash other things that need to stay hidden from, well, just about everybody.

And now one of the other things has gone for a walk.

I cross the oven-hot tarmac, looking at the rows of hangars nestling beneath the bare, looming slopes of Papoose Mountain. They all have closed doors and blacked-out windows and fully-armed USAF Security Police standing guard over the secrets inside. I’m sweating already, gagging on scalding air made almost unbreathable by the reek of melting asphalt and jet fuel fumes and burned rubber. Nevada has a different sort of heat from Florida; it’s a dry heat, a furnace heat, almost unbearable. You can feel it sucking the moisture out of you, cracking your lips and leaving your tongue feeling like a piece of old leather.

With a hangover, it’s even worse. I’m so glad for the Ray-Bans right now.

There’s a welcoming committee; a stern-faced man in neatly-pressed green Air Force fatigues, more armed MPs standing on either side of him.

“Major Taggart,” he introduces himself, without so much as an offered handshake. I’ve already worked this out for myself from the rank insignia on his collar and the nametag stitched above his breast pocket. “And you’re Mr Delaware.”

“If you say so.” I show him the little Junior G-Man badge Dick’s people provided me with. Apparently, it says I work for the National Security Council, which I understand is used to cover a multitude of sins.

“I still don’t understand why this is necessary,” the Major says, barely glancing at the credentials. “The base commander has begun his own investigation into the…incident. We can handle this.”

This is necessary because Dick is a pill-popping paranoia case who doesn’t trust anyone he can’t buy or blackmail. I’m therefore doubly reliable in his eyes. I don’t say this, though. I say: “The Commander-in-Chief thought you could use a fresh pair of eyes.” After last night’s drinking session and the three hours’ sleep I got, my eyes feel anything but fresh. They feel like they’ve been pulled out, boiled, and then shoved back into my head the wrong way around.

Major Taggart shrugs, as if it’s all the same to him, and leads me towards one of the hangars, the two MPs falling into step behind us. “18,” it says on the hangar door in big, white-painted letters. We step through a small postern set into the main door, into an air-conditioner chill that is almost as oppressive in its suddenness as the heat outside.

The interior of the hangar is divided by partitions, making it impossible to see anything apart from the narrow passageway the Major is leading me along. That, I suspect, is the idea. Whatever they keep in here, it isn’t aircraft, however new-fangled.

“The, um…event took place in the S-4 facility,” Taggart explains. “I believe you’re already familiar with it, Mr Delaware.”

“Can’t wait to see the old place again.” It’s where we built an impossible prison of dwarf star alloy to hold an impossible man. Or that was the cover story, anyway.

We pass through security checkpoints. I show my badge again, leave my gun in the Air Force’s safekeeping, get issued with a visitor pass to clip to my lapel. We descend into a sort of underground railroad station where a dinky little electric train awaits to carry us through a long, long tunnel. I feel my ears pop as the air pressure builds. We’re deep beneath Papoose Mountain now, heading west away from Groom Lake, and getting deeper all the time.

At the other end of the tunnel is a sprawling subterranean bunker complex consisting of more corridors and rooms, all gleaming white tiles and concrete, all filled with bright, flat fluorescent light. There are offices and laboratories, guard rooms and armouries, and huge storage spaces filled from floor to ceiling with shelves holding anonymous crates and boxes. It’s the treasure house, the holy of holies, the place the United States keeps secrets that are literally out of this world.

Taggart takes me to a little room lined with tiny television screens, all carefully watched by another soldier in green, sitting at an elaborate console like a music recording studio.

“I’ll show you the security camera footage from the night in question,” the Major offers magnanimously. He presses one of the buttons on the console and I hear the high-pitched twiddling sound of tape winding at speed, before the picture on one of the screens changes.

It’s one of the vast storage rooms, I realise as I watch the jumpy black and white image. The picture flickers and big black lines scroll across it for a few seconds before it returns to normal.

“Some sort of interference?” I wonder aloud.

“Look at that shelf on the left,” the Major advises, pressing another button.

I watch the same few seconds of tape, noting the jump and flicker again, the black lines, then normality. I watch it another couple of times before I notice it.

The shelf on the left, filled from one end to the other with small file boxes. The jump. The flicker. The black lines. And then, one of the boxes on the shelf is gone.

“They managed to blind your camera for five seconds, and in that time somehow managed to get into the room, lift your gewgaw, and then get out again without leaving a trace?” I’m impressed, despite myself, because the room isn’t even the hard part. How did they get in and out of this high-security labyrinth, and the top secret military base surrounding it, and the miles of mountainous desert surrounding that, all without being seen?

It’s impossible. Although, it occurs to me that I do know at least one impossible person.

“Do you know what was in the box?” I ask Taggart.

He looks at me for a second, very much as though he would like to kill me. “I’m not cleared for that.” He returns his attention to the screen, punching that button again, and then another one. The short loop of videotape plays again, but this time he hits a third button just as the black lines appear across the picture. “Look closely,” he advises me. “Tell me what you think you see.”

It’s hard to tell; the black takes up most of the image, and the strips of picture left between are misty and distorted, but there seems to be a blurry shadow right next to the disappearing box. A figure, perhaps? No, not a figure, a realise with a rush of disquiet.

“A woman?”

”I told you, Mr Delaware. I’m only trying to help you.”

The lights go out.

I’m not standing under the fluorescent strips anymore, watching the flickering television screens. I’m in an office, filing cabinets on every side, blinds covering the window. The only illumination comes from the green-shaded lamp on the enormous desk in front of which I’m standing.

The man sitting behind the desk has a manila folder open on the blotter in front of him, his square, manicured hands resting upon the typed pages. I can just make out his face in the gloom beyond the circle of lamplight.

J. Edgar Hoover has a square, wrinkled head to match his hands, and a short, thick neck of exactly the same width. He looks as though he could pull both head and neck into the crisply starched collar of his shirt, like a turtle withdrawing into its shell.

“Mr Delaware,” he says, with all the warmth of a dead penguin, “thank you for coming.”

“Yes, sir,” I say. It seems appropriate.

Standing behind Hoover is Associate Director Clyde Tolson, his righthand man, general dogsbody and closest confidant. He watches me unsmilingly as he announces: “Mr Delaware is the man I told you about, sir.”

“Yes.” Hoover considers the file in front of him. “I’ve just been reviewing your record, Mr Delaware. Your training marks are exemplary, as is your record since joining the Bureau proper. Your supervisor suggests that you could have great things ahead of you.”

I don’t really know what to say to that, but he seems to be expecting an answer. I play it safe: “Thank you, sir.”

I submitted my application to join the FBI the day after I left my father’s house for the last time. At the time, it seemed like the surest way to piss him off. I half expected the old man to use his juice with the Department of Justice to blackball me, but he just cut me out of his will instead. Cousin Mervyn really hit the jackpot.

Still, it turns out I have an aptitude for the work. Smartassery is actually an advantage sometimes, especially when questioning suspects, and I’m not a complete slouch either when it comes to using a pistol or my fists.

“I’m putting together a special unit,” the Director tells me, leaning into the lamplight. It makes him look like something you’d expect to see while riding the Ghost Train. “A counterintelligence project aimed at rooting out dangerous, un-American elements in our public discourse. I’m looking for young, keen men…”

Aren’t we all?

“…who aren’t squeamish when it comes to breaking eggs to make omelettes.”

“Are we talking Communists, sir?” I enquire.

“We most certainly are, Mr Delaware. Are you interested?”

How can I say “no?”

I leave the room, finally daring to breathe when I’m back in the secretary’s vestibule. She does not look up from the typewriter. I take a last glance back into the office, to see Tolson closing the door behind me.

Rumour has it J. Edgar and Clyde live as man and husband. Rumour has it J. Edgar likes to throw parties where he dresses up as a French maid and is the good time had by all. I’m the last person to shame anyone for working out their kinks with other consenting adults, but rumour also has it that the charming legitimate businessman Momo Giancana, bigtime Sinatra fan and godfather of the Chicago Outfit, has acquired snapshots of said parties. Rumour has it this is the real reason the Bureau is a lot more eager to go witch-hunting Reds than it is to get to grips with the Mob.

Too bad, comrades, I think as I consider the prospect of my new job. You should learn to take photos of things other than classified documents.

The next day, I meet my new colleagues in our tiny, dusty office in one of Bureau headquarters’ many sparsely-populated sublevels.

Special Agent Peter Van Dolen is old-money, Ivy League, the kind of guy who can’t see a back in front of him without wanting to stab it. He, I gather, is in charge of our little band of brothers. He is sitting with his feet on his desk when I walk in, wearing a suit sharp enough to cut your fingers on, a cigarette burning between his fingers.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” he drawls, exactly the same way he probably expresses his chagrin to his tennis partners whenever he spots a commoner wandering into the country club.

Special Agent Chester “Chet” Robinson, by contrast, is a sandy-haired, brawny farm boy from Ass End of Nowhere, Missouri. Handsome, if you’re into that kind of thing. I’ve asked around about both these guys. When WW2 started, Chet left the farm, joined the Marines and spent the next three years gut-shooting Japanese soldiers on various Pacific islands so he could prise their gold teeth out. When he mustered out, he put himself through law school on the GI Bill and then joined the Bureau, presumably because you don’t get to kill enough people while practicing law in Hickville, USA.

Van Dolen was like me; he had a father with connections. I spent my war counting cans of spam at an Army Air Forces supply depot in Merrie Old England…and making a few extra bucks by helping some of them find their way onto the local black market. Van Dolen wore a Navy uniform but really spent most of his time in San Diego as some desk admiral’s not-so-loyal gofer.

“You must be Delaware,” Chet says, putting down his half-eaten sandwich. “Like the state.”

“And you must be Chet, like the… Shit, I can’t think of a witty comeback.” I throw myself down at what I assume is my desk. “That’s pretty embarrassing, come to think of it.”

Chet thinks this is the funniest thing he has ever heard. I’m starting to like him already.

“All right, fuckoes,” Van Dolen interjects, like the classily-educated gentleman he is. “Let’s get down to business.” He rises and slings copies of a blurry surveillance photo on both our desks; a dignified-looking older man with swept-back silver hair and a briar pipe. “This is our first target. Cosmo Liebermann, teaches philosophy at Georgetown. As Red as a baboon’s ass. We’re going to stop the treacherous bastard from poisoning the minds of the next generation of American intellectuals.”

It doesn’t take long for us to get hip to what Director Hoover’s “counterintelligence project” really involves. Liebermann, and the rest of the people on our list, got rolled by HUAC, by McCarthy’s Senate committee, in some cases just by the freelance Commie-baiters who sprouted all over the place in those crazy days. These are the lucky few, however, who got away with it. Nothing stuck to them, mainly because they hadn’t in fact done anything, or joined anything, or signed any petitions. Almost like they, weirdly, weren’t actually Reds at all.

Director Hoover doesn’t like that. He wants these people gone, for his own peace of mind as much as anything. Which is why we’re soon cruising around the streets of DC in a dilapidated old telephone company van, breaking eggs to make omelettes.

“That’s our guy,” Van Dolen murmurs, snapping some photographs through the little hole in the side of the van as Chet drives slowly along the leafy thoroughfare. I’m crammed in next to Van Dolen, peering through my own little peephole.

It looks like him. He’s walking down the street toting a briefcase and puffing on his pipe, his scarf trailing flamboyantly behind him. It’s starting to get dark; he’s just left campus after a long day poisoning young minds, and we’ve been waiting for him on his normal route home. Except this time, he decides to cross the street and take a left at the next junction. Most irregular.

“Where’s he going?” Chet asks through the partition as he casually turns onto the connecting street.

“Fucked if I know.” Van Dolen snaps another few frames.

I get a queasy, sinking sensation as I start to suspect where the academic must be heading.

I see Liebermann slow down, furtively glancing behind him and completely failing to notice us. Then he scurries down the steps to what looks like a basement bar on the left, its warmly-lit windows just peeking above the sidewalk.

I was right.

“Did he see us?” Chet wonders. “What if he goes out through the back? We’ll lose him.”

“Thanks for the narration,” Van Dolen replies. “One of us needs to go in there after him. Delaware. You.”

“Why me?”

“Because I told you.” He jerks a thumb in the direction of the back doors. “Go!”

I sigh theatrically, climbing out of the back of the vehicle and taking a moment to straighten my crumpled suit. Then, I saunter towards the bar like somebody who hasn’t just emerged suspiciously from a telephone company van. None of the dwindling number of passers-by on the twilit street pay me the slightest heed.

I descend the steps, noting the sign above the door reads “Gaston’s” now. It used to be The Happy Lobster, and before that it was Louie’s. The proprietors change the name every time the cops raid them. I have to admire their perseverance.

I push the door open and step into a noisy fug of booze fumes, cigarette smoke and crackling sexual tension. I wonder how many squares walk in here thinking it’s a regular type bar, and how long it takes them to notice that it isn't. I wonder how many of them notice, and then decide to stay.

Liebermann is at the bar, chatting with the other regulars as he waits for service. I unobtrusively slide in a couple of stools down. Half the guys in here are white collar types, looking equal parts nervous and excited just to be here. I blend right in.

“Why, hello stranger,” Henry, the barkeep, swishes at me.

“Jim Beam on the rocks.”

“I thought you were staying away, now you’re a big G-Man and all.”

“My bosses wouldn’t appreciate me being here, no.” I glance surreptitiously at Liebermann, who is too busy talking to the man on the other side of him to notice. Did he hear that, though? Shit. “But after the day I’ve had, I needed a drink.”

“Your bosses.” Henry places a paper napkin on the bar in front of me and puts my drink in the centre of it with mathematical precision. “From what I hear, your Mr Hoover would love it here.”

“He’s not my Mr Hoover.” Surely to God Liebermann heard that? Henry doesn’t have an indoor voice. “Word is, he’s spoken for.” I sink half the drink in one gulp, and cough. Another gulp, and I slam the empty glass down on the napkin. “Keep ‘em coming.”

A couple of Jim Beams later, I’m starting to feel less worried about getting made by my surveillance target, or indeed about anything else. I groove to the music, watch the dancing couples twisting and jiving together on the little dance floor near the back, generally start to feel okay. Liebermann is chatting up some pretty young dude in a sailor’s uniform. They look like they’re feeling okay too.

“Do you know what?” I ask Henry. “You know what?”

“What?” He lights my cigarette for me. I don’t even smoke. He’s a professional; providing a shoulder for sloppy drunks to cry on is part of his job description.

“One day…one day, Henry, people are gonna be…be free. Free to live their lives, you know? Do whatever the fuck they want with whoever they want to fuck. Free to…to be whoever they want to fuck.”

“I think you may have had enough,” Henry observes.

“One day, Henry.” I wave a boozy finger at him. “Mark my words well.”

“Well, maybe one day,” he answers, “but I think you and I will be old and grey by then. If we’re here at all.”

That brings me down a bit. I order another drink, but I don’t enjoy it.

Finally, Liebermann makes a move. Him and the young sailor reel off towards the door, arm in arm. I take my time settling the bar bill, giving them a chance to get ahead of me, and then casually slide off the stool in pursuit.

“Don’t be a stranger again,” Henry calls after me, grinning toothily. “I like listening to you. You’re funny.”

“Thanks.”

“God’s sake, Delaware, you smell like a distillery,” Van Dolen fumes when I climb back into the van. “Do you have any idea how long you were in there?”

“Up ahead on the left,” I tell Chet. “Liebermann and a guy in a sailor suit.”

“Got ‘em.” Chet sets off; the van rumbles around us as it peels away from the kerb. “Looks like they’re on their way back to the old homestead.”

“Don’t think you’re claiming however many drinks it’s been on expenses, either,” Van Dolen continues.

“Don’t worry,” I answer. “That’s not the kind of joint where you ask for a receipt.”

A few minutes later, we’re parked up across the street from the brownstone where Liebermann resides in a hip bachelor pad. We know this because Chet had a chance to check out the décor this afternoon while the professor was at work. Wearing telephone company overalls and carrying a toolbox, and with his aw-shucks-ma’am farm boy charm, it was a small matter to talk the concierge into letting him in. He left a little something behind, hidden inside the receiver of Liebermann’s bedroom telephone.

All three of us are in the back of the van now, sharing a single pair of headphones as we listen intently to what the little something has to tell us. A reel-to-reel tape machine slowly turns, recording the dirt for posterity.

We’re listening to exactly the kind of long-haired experimental jazz you’d expect someone like Liebermann to listen to when he’s at home, and underlying that…

“What’s that?” Chet doesn’t know whether to grin or spit by the look of him. He has he scandalised, delighted expression of a schoolboy sneaking a look at one of his dad’s skin mags. “What’s that noise?”

“Sucking,” says Van Dolen, with glee. He flicks his cigarette butt at the paper coffee cup in the corner. Hole in one.

I listen too, wondering why I’m the only one here who doesn’t seem to be getting off on this, even though as far as I know I’m the only one here who’s into men. I can hear a tinny voice coming from the headphones, accompanying the other sounds:

“Oh yeah… Oh God yeah… That’s real good. Feels real good.”

A young man’s voice, I think. Got to be the sailor.

“Why doesn’t Liebermann say anything?” Chet wants to know. “If he doesn’t identify himself, we can’t…”

“Because his mother brought him up right.” Van Dolen waits for us to give him quizzical looks before parting with the punchline: “Taught him not to talk with his mouth full.”

There’s a lot more. More sucking, more groaning, more squeaking bedsprings. Eventually, there’s pillow talk, and that’s when Liebermann gives Van Dolen what he wants; he tells the sailor who he is, what he does, showing off the way people show off to their lovers. The guy’s just destroyed himself, I think, my stomach heaving, and he sounds blissfully happy about it.

“Need some air.” I push my way out of the van, head swimming. “Think I’m gonna puke.”

“Not surprising, after all that booze,” Van Dolen says, unsympathetically. “We’ve really struck gold here,” he tells Chet. “Rewind the tape to the part where…”

I open my eyes.

I see the bank of television screens in front of me again, and the one that flickers with the ghostly image of a woman – the woman? – just about visible upon it.

“I want to take a look at where it happened,” I tell Major Taggart.

“Are you okay?” he asks, examining my face suspiciously.

“To tell the truth, I have a raging hangover, but other than that I’m all present and correct.”

Taggart clearly does not believe me, but he doesn’t make an issue of it. If anybody knows about raging hangovers, it’s the United States Air Force. They say breathing through one of those pilot’s oxygen masks for a few minutes is the best way there is of sobering up in a hurry. “This way.”

The major and his MPs escort me along another long corridor, identical to all of the other long corridors down here, with another couple of security checks along the way. There’s a door at the end of it, as massive as a bank vault’s, with a fancy lock that involves the major sticking his pass into a slot and typing a short code on a keypad attached to the doorframe.

“Here we are,” Taggart announces as the door swings open with a little hiss of equalising air pressure. I walk past him into the cavernous space beyond. The tiered shelves stretch away into the distance, packed literally to the rafters with God knows what.

“And this is the place?” I ask as I walk over to the gap in one of the lower left-hand shelves. “This is where the…object was stored before it disappeared?”

“That is correct.” The Major and his men seem to be keeping their distance, maybe because they’re not cleared for this.

I bend down, peering into the gap in the hope of seeing…I don’t know, some sort of clue. All I can actually see is a couple of feet of empty metal shelf. I straighten up, perplexed.

And then I see the dark-haired woman running towards me from the far end of the huge room, her tuxedo flying behind her.

“No, Mr Delaware! Don’t…”

I stare at her. “What–?”

I’m sitting at another bar, in the middle of the afternoon, nursing a bourbon while the rest of the lunchtime crowd Martini it up around me. All of us, including the bartender – even me – are currently ignoring our drinks to gape at the TV set. Newsflash.

A black and white Walter Cronkite fidgets with his reading glasses, trying to maintain his calm anchorman’s demeanour. I can hear him choking up as he speaks:

“From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official…”

The smell of cheap liquor and despair hits me before I consciously realise I’m not standing in the warehouse of impossibilities anymore. I’m not in the S-4 facility deep beneath Papoose Mountain, or anywhere else within Dreamland for that matter.

I’m back in the cheap-ass hotel bar. Viva Las Vegas.

I came back here, I remember, on the evening commuter flight. At least, I must have, right? My memory seems foggy. All I can recall is that woman rushing at me, and then she was gone and every alarm in the place was screaming as the MPs ran around with their rifles, searching for a ghost.

That’s right. I came back to the hotel to look for her, or failing that, to question anybody who might know her. It’s the only lead I’ve got.

“Jim Beam on the rocks?” the bartender remembers as he sees me walk in. He’s a young guy with long hair and a droopy moustache, like the young guys have these days.

“I’m here on a case, actually.” I flash the badge, even though it has no legal weight behind it. I’m hoping he just assumes I’m a cop, or a Fed, or something. “What do you know about that young woman who was sitting next to me last night?” If he remembers what random customers were drinking the night before, he’s sure to remember her.

“That weird chick, huh?”

“Yeah, the weird chick. Is she a regular here? Does she come in looking for business?”

He shakes his head. “No, man. And I know all the working girls ‘round these parts. She wasn’t one of them. Didn’t look the part…or sound it.”

“I noticed. You have any idea who she might be?”

Another shake of the head. “Why, you regretting giving her the brush off?”

I give him a twenty, which I can’t really afford. He gratefully squirrels it away. “Listen, smartass, I’m in Room 210. If she comes in here tonight, you give me a call. I’ll be waiting.”

He gives me a shifty look. “Are you, like, some sort of a pig, man?”

“Oink, oink,” I retort. “There’s another twenty where that one came from if you can keep her talking long enough for me to get down here.”

“Sure, man.”

If I wait for her in the bar, I’ll just start drinking again, and I’ve been doing enough of that lately. I feel sick; the greasy burger I grabbed at the airport on my way back is definitely not in agreement with my booze-scoured stomach. I idly wonder if it could actually be my liver complaining as I step out of the elevator onto the second floor.

It’s still early. I’ll grab an hour’s sleep, I think, maybe take a shower, wait for the barman to call me. I’m pretty sure he will, if she appears. He may not like pigs, but he does like twenty-dollar bills. If she doesn’t show herself, then in the morning I’ll…

The door of Room 210 is already unlocked.

I take a step to one side of the door, unbuttoning my jacket to pull the .357 out of my waistband as I press my back to the wall. I reach over, very carefully, and push the door open, listening to its hinges creaking as I take a two-handed grip on the revolver. And then I spin around, crouching low as I rush into the room, gun first.

“Freeze!”

The dark-haired woman looks up at me in mild surprise. She is sitting on the end of the bed, legs crossed elegantly, her tuxedo draped over the bedspread beside her to reveal her somewhat frilly shirtsleeves. She appears to have been reading the Gideon Bible from the nightstand, even though the room is illuminated only by the light spilling in from the corridor. When she sees me, she casually tosses the Good Book over her shoulder; it lands on the pillows behind her. She most definitely does not freeze.

“Hello, Mr Delaware.” She sounds like the Queen of England. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

I keep her covered with the revolver, taking no chances whatsoever. “Lady, if I pull this trigger…”

She frowns, mystified. “And why would you do that? I told you, Mr Delaware. I’m only trying to help you.”

“Help me? Tell me how the hell you got into Area 51 this morning. Even better, tell me how the hell you got out again.”

She smiles, betraying just a hint of self-satisfaction, and…something else. Something I’ve seen before, this indefinable glow about her. I feel my blood run cold as I realise I am very probably the only human being in this room.

“Well, Mr Delaware,” she says, “it’s just a matter of time…”

“I love America. Only lady I ever have loved apart from my dear departed Ma…”

“From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official: President Kennedy died at one p.m. Central Standard Time; two o’clock Eastern Standard Time, some thirty-eight…minutes ago. Vice President Lyndon Johnson has left the hospital…”

“There’s going to be a lot of ass-covering going on in the Bureau over this thing,” says Chet, two days later.

We’re in the office on a Sunday, stinking the place out with the take-out breakfast we got from the hot dog cart across the street. It’s all hands to the pump, and even the boys from the super-spooky counterintelligence project have been called in to help out. Van Dolen has flown to Dallas to lend a helping hand at the field office down there. Chet and I are going through tottering stacks of mug books trying to identify any of the people in the various photographic rolls and cine reels the Bureau confiscated from onlookers in Dealey Plaza.

“Ass-covering?” I ask. “How do you figure that?” I’m looking at a still from the dressmaker’s film of the assassination itself. At the moment Jack’s brains explode, there’s a creepy looking guy standing on the far side of the car in some sort of leather seaman’s jacket. He’s the only person not frozen in an attitude of utter horror, watching the President die. He’s too busy staring coldly and calmly into the camera…

“Well,” says Chet, “the official story is this guy Oswald’s a nut, a loner, just took it into his head to blow the President away because his momma didn’t breastfeed him or something.”

I manage to tear my eyes away from the creepy photo. “It might be true.”

“Might be,” says Chet, sceptically, “but…”

“But?”

Chet pulls his chair across to the other side of my desk and leans forward conspiratorially. “Look Canton, you repeat this to anyone, I’ll kill you, okay? Like, actually murder you.”

I shrug, shoving the remains of my breakfast chilli-dog into the wastebasket. “Deal.”

“Okay.” Chet sounds hesitant, almost reluctant, but is also clearly bursting to tell somebody something he probably shouldn’t. “Well, I may have heard some scuttlebutt that Oswald was…known to the Dallas field office.”

“Known?”

“As in, the Bureau was keeping tabs on him for his Communist sympathies and past history with the Soviets. You know he actually lived in Russia for a couple years, right?”

“So I hear.”

Chet glances nervously at the office door, as if expecting to see someone eavesdropping on us. “Apparently he walked into the field office one day a couple weeks ago and left a threatening note for the agent working his case.”

This is certainly news to me. “Do you know what this note said?”

Chet shrugs. “Some sort of cockamamie threat to blow up the office if they didn’t stop harassing his wife, or so the story went.”

“And were they?” I ask.

Chet frowns. “What?”

“Harassing his wife?”

“I don’t know.” Chet waves his hands airily as he leans back in his chair. “Probably. Guy was a known Commie. Point is, anyway, none of this happened.” He leans forward again, dropping his voice to a mere whisper. “The note, the visit, even the Bureau watching Oswald, none of it happened. First time the FBI even heard of Oswald was when the Dallas cops arrested him Friday afternoon. That’s the official story, and it’s coming right from the top.”

I nod slowly, seeing the implications there and realising why Chet seems so jumpy about it. “Hoover, huh?”

“Goddamn right Hoover.” Chet is nodding too, his expression about as serious as I have ever seen; none of that easy-going farm boy humour now. He looks more than a little scared, in fact. “The Director doesn’t want anyone thinking the Bureau was sitting with its collective thumb up its collective ass ignoring an obvious volatile nut in the city the President was about to visit, said volatile nut then going on to blow off said President’s head. Or worse…”

“Worse?” I ask, playing dumb, although I can see exactly where he is going with this.

Chet’s voice is now a whisper of a whisper, barely audible over the gentle hum of the desk fan. “Suppose somebody found out that note Oswald left at the field office didn’t say anything about blowing anything up. Suppose he told them he was going to shoot the Pres?”

“And what?” I ask. “The Bureau ignored it? Not even some sloppy-ass field office guy down in Dallas is that dumb. Ignore a threat to the President’s life? Even if you did think the guy was a kook and all talk, you’d have to report it up the chain just to cover your own ass, just in the unlikely event that he did do it. Something like that might get as far as…Hoover…himself.”

“Well yeah, right.” Chet is very pale, sweat shimmering on his forehead even with the fan spinning. “So if that’s what the note said he was gonna do, and the Bureau did nothing about it… The only reason we’d do that…”

“Would be because Hoover wanted to let Oswald have his run at Kennedy, see if he could pull it off?” I shake my head, aghast. “Look, I know the kind of guy Hoover is, and I know he’s never been a fan of the Kennedys, but that’s…”

“Look, I’m not saying that’s what happened,” Chet protests. “I mean…it’s just all crazy talk, right?” He gives the most unconvincing laugh I think I have ever heard, trying to pass it all off as jokey speculation. We both know it wasn’t, though.

“Right. Crazy talk.” I let out a sigh, rising from the desk. “I suppose the only way we’ll ever find out what Oswald thought he was doing is when he stands trial.”

“I guess so,” says Chet, glancing at the clock on the wall. “Hey, they’re moving him about now, aren’t they? It’ll be on TV.”

I stretch painfully, looking dispiritedly at the piles of mug books I’ve still got to search through. “I could use a break.”

A few minutes later, we’re drinking coffee in the employee lunch room, watching the Dallas PD take Oswald from their cells to the van that will speed him to the County Jail. I’m a little shocked by how young the accused assassin looks; early twenties, wearing an oversized sweater the cops probably gave him. He has a black eye; they probably gave him that too. He shot a patrolman dead while trying to avoid arrest, and with Dallas being the kind of place it is, and with cops feeling about cop-killers the way they do, he is quite honestly lucky to be alive. The President’s murderer, however, warrants VIP treatment. He is guarded by a phalanx of big, beefy lawmen with beer guts and cowboy hats. There are reporters everywhere. He blinks as flashbulbs pop all around him.

And then a rotund man wearing a suit and fedora, looking like the lowest-rent member of the Rat Pack, pushes through the throng.

“Shit!” Chet shouts, jumping up. All of us watching see the pistol in the rotund man’s hand, even before the cops who are actually there.

There is a pop, a flash. Oswald blinks like it’s just another flashbulb going off. Then more pops. Oswald falls as the cops mob the gunman, dragging him to the floor. Too late.

“Shit,” Chet repeats, sounding stunned. We all are.

“Guess there won’t be a trial now,” I murmur, nauseously. “Guess we’ll never…”

And then I see him, standing behind the fallen assassin, and the assassin’s assassin who is currently getting the shit beaten out of him by half a dozen of Dallas’s finest. He is standing next to a man in police uniform who looks genuinely astonished at what has just happened, but he is smiling.

Van Dolen.

Lending a helping hand…

“Mr Delaware,” says the woman.

I’m sitting on the bed in my shitty Las Vegas hotel room, panting and sweating. Somebody has switched on the lamp, at least. I see my gun gleaming on the nightstand, well out of reach.

“You dropped that.” She settles herself in the easy chair near the foot of the bed. “I put it over there for safekeeping.”

“Who are you?” I ask her.

“That’s not really important.”

“What are you?”

“I think you must have your suspicions.” She smiles again, just as frighteningly as before. “A man of experience like you.”

“The Doctor?” I wonder. My head feels as though it’s about to float straight off my shoulders. My stomach is going to get top marks from the judges for its Olympic gymnastics floor programme. Whatever is the matter with me, it’s getting worse. “Do you…know the Doctor?”

The woman laughs, a high-pitched chiming sound. “Do I know the Doctor? You don’t know the half of it. You might say she and I have history.”

It takes me a moment to catch that: “She?”

She laughs again. “You humans are so funny about that kind of thing.” So, at least I know she’s not one of us. “Mr Delaware, you’ve been the victim of a terrible accident, and I feel partly responsible. I’m here to try and take care of you.”

“You’re not my type,” I tell her.

She rolls her eyes. “Listen to me, if I don’t treat your injury, you’re going to become irreparably temporally discombobulated.”

“In English, please?”

“You won’t know whether you’re coming or going.”

I have no idea what that means either, or what this injury is I’m supposed to have suffered, so I ask her: “Did you steal the artefact that’s missing from Area 51?”

““Steal” is a loaded term,” she replies. “It really is far safer where it is now.”

“And where’s that?”

“Nowhere you need worry about, Mr Delaware.”

“What is it?” I ask. “The Air Force couldn’t even tell me that.”

“Probably because they don’t know,” says the woman. “There isn’t a word for what it is in your language. Or indeed any of your languages.”

I carefully screw the end cap onto the sawn-off length of pipe, using only my fingertips. My hands are sweating inside the latex gloves.

I gently push the little glass detonator into the hole drilled in the end cap, leaving the wires trailing free. I pick up the pipe with extreme caution, hearing its filling of nuts and bolts and nails and gunpowder rattle softly as I place it in the bag with the others and pull the zipper closed…

I’m still in the hotel room, lying full stretch on the bed now, gasping for breath as I watch the walls ripple and move around me. The only thing I can see clearly is the woman, standing near the curtained window now, busying herself with some sort of glowing device.

I hear her voice coming from somewhere very far away: “It was my fault. The artefact… I suppose the closest word for what it is, that you’d understand, is “landmine.” “Booby-trap,” maybe? It was left lying around here on Earth, after… Well, you don’t want to know about that. You really don’t.”

“Why…” I force the words out, strangled murmurs that I am not sure she can even hear: “Why…am I…having these…visions?”

“They’re not visions, Mr Delaware. When I removed the object, it left a certain…residue behind it. Nothing that would normally harm a human, because quite frankly as a species you’re not nearly time-sensitive enough. I never imagined that somebody as saturated in artron energy are you are would blunder in there. That was just a silly happenstance, but fortunately the spacetime ripples it caused alerted me to your predicament. Lucky for you, really.”

“Ar…artron…what?”

“Type 40s are so leaky. I assume that’s how you must have been exposed, when you met the Doctor. I’ll be having words with her when next we meet.”

I try to understand what she has just said to me. “Not visions…?”

“Unfortunately not.” She is standing next to the bed now, looking down at me as the thing she is holding seems to burn with strange bluish light. “Your mind, Mr Delaware, has been severed from your personal timeline. You’re currently bouncing back and forth between various significant temporal nodes along that timeline, and if I don’t act now, the effect will be permanent.”

I blink up at her, feeling myself starting to melt and fade away, becoming one with the dancing walls. “What the hell does any of that mean?” Something else occurs to me. “You were…there…when it happened today?” That must have been it, when I was looking at the gap on the shelf and she suddenly appeared, running at me. “How did you…?”

“When I couldn’t persuade you to come quietly last night, I tried intercepting you before the initial event took place.” She sighs, irritated. “It didn’t work, of course. Trying to grandfather paradox things away never does. Now, try to relax, Mr Delaware.” She leans closer. “This is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.”

He takes my hand in his, wrinkled fingers closing around mine. “It hasn’t been such a bad life, has it?”

I work the tool with practiced fingers and the trunk of the car pops open. Slowly, gingerly, I lift the bag and place it next to the spare tyre, hearing the contents clink together. Then I close the lid again.

Half an hour later, I stop at a gas station on the main road into Memphis and place an anonymous telephone call to the Shelby County Sheriff's Office. Then I get the hell out of there.

I meet Van Dolen at a diner near Memphis International Airport. Tennessee in the springtime has a muggy, oppressive humidity to it, the warm air and the dark clouds above both buzzing with the threat of thunder. As I park the hire care and wander across the lot, I can see him sitting with someone inside; a nondescript-looking redneck type with a lumberjack shirt and cold, narrow eyes. Not as cold as Van Dolen’s.

“It’s done,” I say as I sit down at the table uninvited.

“Good,” says Van Dolen.

The sheriff’s deputies should be on their way there right now, ready to catch the leader of the People’s Freedom Front with a trunk full of pipe bombs. Of course, he’ll tell them he doesn’t know how they got there, but he would say that, wouldn’t he? What the hell was he thinking trying to set up a radical socialist party in Tennessee? Should have gone to California. That shit might fly in Hollywood or somewhere.

The redneck type stands up more or less as I sit down. “I should get going, Raoul. Things to do.”

Van Dolen sips his coffee. “Take care out there.”

I wait until the other guy’s gone before commenting on that. “Raoul? Really?”

“I don’t use my real name with informants,” he replies, icily. “Not with scum like that, anyway.”

“You just don’t look like a Raoul to me. A Prescott maybe, or perhaps a Theodore…”

Van Dolen isn’t biting. In fact, he seems kind of tense. I look down at the newspaper on the table in front of him. It’s leading with the speech Martin Luther King gave right here in Memphis last night. There’s a big picture of the man himself on the front page, radiating wisdom and dignity. This being Tennessee, the local press doesn’t quite see him that way. I try not to read the newsprint bile underneath the photograph.

“I can’t believe Hoover never sent us after him,” I comment, although I’m not sorry about that at all. Quite the opposite. “I mean, he’s not, uh, the Director’s type of person, is he?”

“Nor mine,” says Van Dolen.

“I gathered.”

He looks at me, admonishingly. “I’m not a racist, you understand.”

“Of course not,” I agree, letting him see my misgivings nonetheless. Not a racist, my ass. Just like my old man wasn’t. They don’t have a monopoly on that kind of thing in the South. Mind you, when I was young I never thought twice about the way we all treated poor old Hector, so I can hardly wash my own hands of responsibility on that count.

“Dr King has done a lot of good work for the Negroes,” Van Dolen goes on, in such a way as to kind of prove my point. “It was when he started talking about poverty, employment rights, that kind of thing. That’s when he became dangerous. You know who talks about that kind of thing?”

“Let me guess, is the answer…Communists?”

“Damn straight it’s Communists.” He considers me with mild disgust. “I just don’t know what the hell’s wrong with you, Delaware. You used to be a good soldier. These days, all you do is mouth off and ask questions. I’m starting to think you could do with a change of pace. Maybe you’ve grown jaded when it comes to counterintelligence.”

“It’s not like it used to be, is it?” I point out. “I used to believe in all that Red Scare bullshit, but… I don’t know, planting pipe bombs on hippies…”

“Keep your fucking voice down!” Van Dolen hisses. “Jesus Christ, Delaware…”

To tell the truth, I never really liked Van Dolen. He’s not exactly a people person. He’s the kind of son my dad would have loved to have. It was after the JFK thing, though, that I couldn’t even stand sitting with him like this. I don’t know what happened, exactly, or how much he was involved in anything, but just the questions it raised in my mind made me realise exactly what I was involved in for the first time, and exactly who I was working with.

And I knew Van Dolen didn’t do anything without Hoover yanking his chain.

“Come on,” I say, getting to my feet again. “We’ll miss our flight.”

We touch down in DC at seven thirty that evening, and the television news is already frantic with the breaking story. Dr Martin Luther King Jr is dead. He was shot while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, just before he was due to address another meeting. Police are looking for a white man seen fleeing the scene. We see cops with crash helmets and shotguns on the streets as we make our way back to headquarters. There are already riots breaking out in Washington’s mainly black neighbourhoods, reports of similar disturbances beginning in Baltimore, Chicago, Kansas City, a dozen other places too. I honestly don’t blame them.

“Well, look at that,” says Van Dolen as we stand outside an electrical goods store watching half a dozen silent TVs. “We were just talking about him.” And then he walks off, leaving me to stare at the screens alone.

“When did this country turn to shit?” I ask Chet when he walks into the darkened office an hour later. I’ve spent the last half hour in the ops room upstairs, watching frantic telexes pour in from FBI field offices all over the country as the riots get into full swing.

“Whole world’s shit,” he replies, swaying slightly. He’s never been a particularly big drinker, by my standards, so I’m surprised. “When you’re young, you just don’t notice it.”

“What are you drinking to forget?” I ask. I could be stereotyping, but I wouldn’t have expected a lily-white farm boy from Missouri to be that broken up over Dr King’s murder. You just can’t tell sometimes, when it comes to people.

“The world being shit,” he replies, and laughs as if that’s the second funniest thing he’s ever heard. “You ever wish you were still young and stupid, Canton?”

“All the time.”

“When I was young and stupid, I was fighting on Peleliu, Okinawa,” he confides, staring straight through me at something only he can see. “Absolute fucking hell on Earth, let me tell you.”

“I can imagine.”

“No, you can’t.” He laughs again. “I still think back on those days, though, and all I really remember is the fun parts. Me and my buddies, goofing off in between battles. We had us some times together, when we weren’t killing people, or trying not to get killed. Funny that, ain’t it?”

“I guess.”

“Van Dolen,” he murmurs, suddenly changing his tone. “What do you think of that guy?”

I lean back in the chair until its legs creak. “I think he’s an asshole.”

“I think he’s into some real bad shit,” Chet decides.

“I think so too.”

Chet laughs again, Van Dolen forgotten, as he totters back towards the office door. “Come on, Canton. Come for a drink with me.”

“Looks like you’ve already had a drink.”

“Come on, you goddamn booze-hound.”

I don’t need telling twice.

It’s a couple of hours later now, and we’re in my crappy apartment, watching the riots on TV and finishing off my last bottle of bourbon. I’m as drunk as Chet is now, which is to say, very. That doesn’t excuse what comes next, but it might explain it.

“Did Van Dolen kill JFK?” Chet asks me, in all seriousness.

“He killed Oswald,” I opine. “Got that guy Ruby to kill him. Same difference.”

“Why?” Chet wonders, puzzled.

“To cover for the Bureau, for Hoover, ‘cause we dropped the ball on Oswald.” I drain my glass. “That’s my theory, anyway. Could be wrong.”

“Huh.” He stares blearily at the TV. “Huh.” He looks around at the apartment, taking in the bachelor squalor in which I live. It’s nothing like Professor Liebermann’s stylish pad in Georgetown. “How come you never got married, had kids, Canton?” he asks, very sincerely. “Smart, sharp-dressed guys like you; women love you. I mean, you’re what, forty now?”

I look at him puzzling earnestly as he tries to figure it out. “Why do you think I never got married and had kids, Chet?”

He shrugs, and then smiles at me goofily. He’s adorable. So, naturally, I lean over and kiss him.

I come to on the floor a second later, feeling like I just got hit on the head with a sledgehammer. This, when you consider the size of Chet’s fists, is actually more or less what happened to me.

“What the hell?” he’s screaming, over and over again as he stands over me. “What the fuck did you just do?”

I manage to get halfway to a sitting position. There’s broken glass under me. I can feel blood on my face. “Chet,” I murmur.

“You’re disgusting!” he’s yelling. “Men like you, you’re…you’re not normal!”

“Chet…”

He slams the door thunderously as he leaves, nearly taking it off its hinges. I sit there, bruised and bleeding, crying like a baby. I don’t think I’ve cried in thirty years. I more than make up for it that night.

I walk into headquarters the next morning, nursing a titanic headache and two black eyes, drawing plenty of strange looks from the security guards and typists as I make my way through the building. I’m waiting for the elevator to our sublevel when I notice the new wanted posters on the noticeboard opposite me.

James Earl Ray; wanted for questioning in connection to the murder of Martin Luther King; matches the description of the man seen fleeing the scene. It’s an old mugshot; he’s younger, and has an ugly prison haircut, but it’s the same guy.

It’s the guy who called Van Dolen “Raoul.”

I’m still staring, stunned, when the man himself steps out of the elevator.

“What happened to you, Delaware?” he asks.

“You son of a bitch,” I growl.

Van Dolen seems genuinely confused by this. “What?”

“I know what you did,” I tell him. “And there I was wondering why Hoover never sent us after King. You piece of…”

Van Dolen’s face cracks into the most…evil grin I think I have ever seen. “What’s the matter, Delaware? Squeamish? After some of the things you’ve been saying and doing around town lately, you’d better pray Hoover doesn’t send us after you.” He points his index finger at me, raising and then dropping his thumb like the hammer of a pistol as he winks and mouths: “Bang.”

So, of course, I punch his fucking lights out.

I’m sitting in the office about an hour later, alone, applying iodine to my smashed knuckles. They actually hurt worse than my face. Van Dolen looks something similar to me now, which is a source of satisfaction, but not as much as the amount of blood that got on his fancy suit. Dry cleaning won’t do anything to that, I think happily as I hear the door open.

It’s Associate Director Tolson, come down from on high, and not looking very happy about it. I gape at him stupidly.

“The Director wants to see you,” he announces.

“Mr Delaware,” says Hoover, stonily, as I’m marched into his office. Tolson shuts the door sharply behind me and then takes his place at his husband’s side. “Look at the…condition in which you reported for duty this morning. I’m quite frankly shocked.”

“You should see the other guy, sir.”

Hoover does not look like he even understands the concept of jokes. He just gazes at me with an expression of utter loathing. “I have received a very serious complaint, Mr Delaware, from one of your fellow agents, concerning your personal conduct. Associate Director Tolson, who as you know oversees all personnel matters, will conduct a full investigation, but I can tell you now that if even part of these allegations turns out to be true, then it will mean the end of your career in this Bureau. I will see to that personally.”

“Where is he?” I ask, taking a step forward. Tolson looks like he’s about to reach for his gun. “Where’s Van Dolen? If he wants to accuse me of anything, he can at least do it to my face. And while we’re at it, I’ve got a few accusations I’d like to make against him. You know why we took that trip to Memphis, don’t you, Director? You know it wasn’t just to frame a few hippies, right?”

“Mr Delaware,” Hoover says, very slowly and precisely, giving me a gorgon stare. “Mr Van Dolen has made no complaint against you. Mr Van Dolen is currently receiving medical treatment after…the accident he had this morning.” I frown, trying to work out exactly what this means, what kind of angle is being played. “No,” Hoover continues, “the complaint I refer to was filed by your colleague Mr Robinson.”

Chet?

“We take a very serious view of these matters,” Hoover is saying, somewhere in the distance. “The moral character of our agents is the very foundation of our Bureau, in accordance with our motto: “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.””

“Mr Delaware,” says Tolson, stepping forward and reaching out a hand. “Your badge and your service weapon, please. You are of course suspended pending the outcome of the disciplinary investigation.”

I already know what the outcome is going to be. I’m proud that I manage to get out of the building before I start laughing and crying at the same time, manic belly laughs combined with wracking sobs until I can scarcely breathe. When I finally pull myself together, I decide another drink couldn’t hurt.

The place is called “Henry’s” for now; he bought out the previous owners after one police raid too many.

“What the hell happened to you?” he asks as I sit down at the bar. The place is practically empty at this hour apart from a couple of really dedicated drinkers.

“It’s a long story,” I tell him, and it’s true. I think about Chet. I shouldn’t have lunged for him like that; that isn’t ever right, and drink is no excuse. I wonder if I’ll ever see him again.

“Jim Beam on the rocks?”

I look at the clock. “Do you have coffee?” I wonder.

Henry is astonished. “There must be something wrong with you.”

“That’s what people keep telling me.”

The door bangs open, and I see a youngish African-American man enter the barroom. He has that nervous look about him; first time in here, clearly. He comes and sits three stools down from me.

“What’ll it be?” asks Henry.

“Uh, I just came in to check the place out,” the guy mumbles. “Someone told me…”

“The coffee’s good,” I suggest, even though I have no idea.

“Coffee,” says the guy.

“I’m Canton Everett Delaware III,” I say, extending a hand. “I’m almost certainly unemployed. What’s your name?”

He hesitates, then seizes and shakes my hand. He has a grip like a vice. “Uh, I’m Carl.”

I open my eyes.

I’m sitting on the hotel bed, my head pounding, but at least the walls are still and solid again. That’s something.

“All done, Mr Delaware,” says the woman, rolling down her shirtsleeves and shrugging her tuxedo back on. There is no sign of the glowing device she was holding before, whatever it might have been.

“No more visions?” I ask, hopefully.

“I told you, they weren’t visions, but no. You should be anchoring again very soon, although…”

I don’t like the sound of that. “Although what?”

“Well, it’s hard to tell exactly where, or rather when, your mind will come to rest.”

I think about that for a second. “So, this could be another vision, right now?”

She gives me a withering look. “They’re not visions.”

“Yes, but…”

Another eyeroll: “Yes, it could be. And now, I really must be off.” She pronounces it “orf,” like a real English lady.

“What do I tell…my employer about the missing artefact?” I call after her as she makes for the door.

“Tell them they’re much better off without it,” she replies. “Trust me; I know what I’m talking about.” She pauses in the doorway, glancing at me over her shoulder. “Mr Delaware, it’s probably none of my business, but have you ever considered getting into a better line of work?”

I shrug helplessly. “What can I say? I love America. Only lady I ever have loved apart from my dear departed Ma. Even if she does keep cheating on me with pieces of shit like Dick Nixon. But that isn’t going to make me stop loving her.”

“Still, if you’re interested in doing something more fulfilling with your time, you should try giving the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce a call. Tell them Fred sent you.”

And with that, she’s gone.

I sit on the bed a while longer, wondering what the hell just happened to me.

I wake up.

I’m lying in my own bed, in my own house, a little timber bungalow on the shores of Chesapeake Bay. I can see sailboats from my bedroom window.

I raise my head, bones creaking, blinking my eyes as I try to remember what I was just dreaming about. The past, I decide, catching sight of my white hair and shrivelled face reflected in the windowpane. When you get to my age, the past is pretty much all you’ve got.

Only pretty much, though.

The bed squeaks next to me as Carl turns over. His hair is as white as mine now when he lets it grow out, but he keeps it shaved most of the time. He’s always been vain about his bald spot.

“You awake?” I ask as I swing my old legs over the side of the bed and feel around for my slippers.

“I am now. You were talking in your sleep.”

“I was having the strangest dreams.” I look at the wall of pictures opposite the window. Nothing of me when I was at school or college, or with the FBI. Those aren’t the memories I want to keep. There are pictures of Carl and me, fifty years’ worth. Pictures of me with the UNIT guys and girls, back in Merrie Old England and a few other places too. Pictures of me with the Doctor…all of him. And her.

“Dreams about what?” Carl asks.

“About the past,” I tell him. “About some of the things I did that I’m not very proud of.”

“Well, that was all before you met me,” he points out. “And since then…” He takes my hand in his, wrinkled fingers closing around mine. “It hasn’t been such a bad life, has it?”

I sit and look at the pictures, holding his hand, and smile.

“No,” I say. “It wasn’t so bad in the end.”

END