The Second Shooter (15 page)

"That's Ellen Rometsch," Gordon said. "She was a Soviet spy, and for two years she had an affair with President Kennedy."

Just after the Gulfstream V touched down at the Fort Smith Regional Airport, the pilot announced that the local time was 10:20 a.m. Max Garcia had just finished resetting his watch for the Central Time Zone when his sat phone rang. He punched the button to answer. "You cut it close."

"It wasn't easy," said the CIA liaison man.

"But that means you got it."

"He gets his mail at a PO box two towns over in Bokoshe. I had to email a fake grand jury subpoena to the postmaster in Bokoshe to get him to give me—"

"What's the physical address?" Garcia interrupted.

"The box is registered to Gordon McCay at 13281 Highway 59, Happy Valley trailer park, lot number thirty-six, Shady Point, Oklahoma."

"Congratulations, you get to keep your job and the ulcers that go with it."

Garcia was about to hang up when the liaison said, "There's something else."

"What?"

What the liaison man told him made Garcia smile.

A few minutes later, the jet taxied to a stop at a secluded spot on the Tarmac beside a waiting Chevrolet Suburban. As the jet's twin turbine engines wound down, Garcia followed Blackstone out of the cabin door and down the stairs.

The Suburban was brand new and black, its windows covered in limo tint. The four buzz-cut hardasses standing outside the vehicle wore tan cargo pants and tactical vests. They sported nylon utility belts with low-slung holsters strapped to their thighs, real twenty-first century gunfighters, Garcia thought. Then he paused at the foot of the stairs and said to Blackstone, "You do understand we are a covert agency, right?"

"I gave them a very short frag order," Blackstone said. "I'd rather have them on time than wearing the right clothes."

"Would it have been too much to expect both?"

"They're here and they're ready to go. We're forty minutes out from the target. Let's get it done."

Garcia nodded. Then he and Blackstone crawled into the third seat of the Suburban while the hardasses piled into the front and middle seats. The driver caught Blackstone's eye in the rearview mirror. "Ready, sir?" When Blackstone nodded the driver goosed the pedal and the Suburban leapt away from the Gulfstream with a jerk, its big engine growling.

Driving this blacked-out behemoth into that trailer park was going to be like riding in on a Mardi Gras float, Garcia thought.

Blackstone glanced at Garcia. "Are we backstopped?"

"I have credentials identifying me as a chief deputy US marshal," Garcia said. "We were attempting to apprehend federal fugitives. They resisted and we were forced to defend ourselves."

"Are you sure that's the play?" Blackstone asked. "Don't you want to question Favreau?"

"I don't want him to ever speak again, not to me, not to you, not to anybody. The quicker we shut him up, the better and the safer we all are."

"And the two FBI agents?"

"Only one of them is an agent," Garcia said. "The other one is an analyst."

"But she's a woman," Blackstone said. "And this is Oklahoma. The local cops might not take too kindly to her death by gunfire."

Garcia turned so he was facing Blackstone. "Is there anything you've heard me say today that indicates to you that I give a shit what the local police think?"

Blackstone shook his head.

"Good. Then follow your orders. Everyone in the trailer resisted. There were no survivors."

"That's assuming they're there."

"They are there right now."

"How do you know that?"

"That call I got," Garcia said. "NSA picked up a radio transmission from the only cab company within fifty miles of Shady Point, Oklahoma. The company dispatcher sent a taxi to pick up three people at the local airport and take them to the Happy Valley trailer park."

"So you were right," Blackstone said. "They went to see Miller's old man."

Garcia nodded.

Blackstone looked at his watch. "Then this whole thing will be over in...forty-five minutes."

"Maybe."

"You don't think the six of us can handle it?"

"Favreau has proven himself very resourceful."

Blackstone pointed to the four ninjas in the seats in front of them. "We have some resources of our own now. And your Frenchman has anchored himself to a hack writer, a rookie FBI agent, and a girl."

"I never count my money until I cash in my chips."

Blackstone shook his head. "Have it your way." He glanced again at his watch. "But in less than an hour, you can book your flight back to Miami and reserve a spot at tonight's bingo game."

Garcia didn't answer. He just stared out through the windshield at the dusty countryside.

"But the affair with Rometsch wasn't the first time Kennedy got caught sleeping with the enemy," Gordon McCay said as he set an old VHS video cassette tape on the coffee table next to the picture of Ellen Rometsch.

The top of the black cardboard cover bore the title 'John F. Kennedy and the Nazi Spy' in red letters superimposed over a Nazi swastika, while below that, and below a line of small Nazi flags, were side-by-side photographs of a young John Kennedy and a beautiful woman with short dirty-blond hair who was casting a seductive look over her bare shoulder.

"What is that?" Jake asked, curious despite himself.

"Did you ever wonder why the son of the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain spent World War Two commanding a plywood boat?" Gordon asked.

"Not really," Jake said.

"I'm not casting aspersions on his courage," Gordon explained. "When the Japanese destroyer Amagiri slammed into PT 109 and sank it, John Kennedy repeatedly risked his life to save his crew. He was a genuine hero. What I'm talking about is why he was on that PT boat in the first place."

Jake and Stacy looked at each other. Then Jake said, "I have no idea."

"He was there because he got kicked out of Naval Intelligence," Gordon said. "And almost out of the Navy." He tapped the woman's photo on the cover of the video tape. "For dating her."

"Who was she?" Jake asked.

"Her name was Inga Arvad," Gordon said. "A former Danish beauty queen and a minor actress. She moved to the United States in the early 1930s and became a journalist. She was friendly with several prominent Nazis, including Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. In 1936, she attended the Berlin Olympics as a personal guest of Adolph Hitler and later wrote a very flattering article about him. A month before Pearl Harbor, she started dating a young Navy ensign assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence. That young ensign was John Fitzgerald Kennedy."

"She was a spy?" Stacy asked.

"J. Edgar Hoover certainly thought so, which is why he put her under surveillance. Then after Pearl Harbor, the fact that she was dating John Kennedy only seemed to confirm what Hoover already thought about Kennedy's father."

"What do you mean?" Stacy asked.

"How much do you know about Joseph Kennedy Sr.?"

"I heard he made a fortune bootlegging during Prohibition," Stacy said.

"He made several fortunes," Gordon said, "and smuggling scotch and Canadian whisky was certainly the basis for one of them, which is probably why Franklin Roosevelt, who was a big fan of whiskey, appointed Joe Kennedy the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain in 1938. But almost as soon as he got there, Old Joe started pissing off the Brits, particularly Winston Churchill, who thought he was a defeatist and a coward. When the Germans started bombing London, not only did Joe abandon the embassy and move into safer digs out in the English countryside-even though the prime minister, parliament, and the other ambassadors stuck it out in the capital-but he told the Boston Globe that the British didn't stand a chance against the Nazis."

"Why have I never heard this?" Stacy said.

"History is full of things they don't teach you in school," Gordon said. "Especially if it tarnishes the fathers of would-be saints."

"So what happened?" Jake asked, finding himself suddenly interested in the history lesson despite his anger at Gordon McCay.

"The final straw came when the Brits found out Kennedy was trying to arrange a personal meeting with Hitler. And I'm talking about during the Battle of Britain, when the British were fighting for their lives and the Luftwaffe was dropping bombs all over London."

"Why would he want to meet with Hitler?" Stacy said.

"Kennedy claimed that with the British on the brink of defeat, he was trying to prevent a war between the United States and Germany," Gordon said. "Everybody else pretty much believed he admired Hitler and was sympathetic to the Nazis. So the Brits kicked him out. Then four days after Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war on the United States, which at that time looked like it was going to lead to a mostly naval war waged in the North Atlantic. Meanwhile, you have Joe Kennedy's son in Naval Intelligence dating a woman the director of the FBI was convinced was a German spy."

"Damn," Stacy said.

Gordon nodded. "Exactly."

"So what did Hoover do?" Jake asked.

"He sent the FBI surveillance reports on Inga Arvad and John Kennedy to the deputy commander of Naval Intelligence," Gordon said. "After the deputy commander read the reports, he wanted to throw Kennedy out of the Navy. But someone higher up the chain of command realized that tossing out the son of a wealthy former ambassador-no matter how banged up the father's reputation-would look bad in the press, so the Navy brass quietly promoted Ensign John Kennedy to lieutenant junior grade and reassigned him to a PT boat squadron in the Pacific, probably with the secret hope that he wouldn't survive the war."

"Did the FBI arrest Inga Arvad?" Stacy asked.

"No," Gordon said. "Because there was no hard evidence that she was a spy."

"What happened to her?"

"Right after the war she married a cowboy actor named Tim McCoy. They lived on a ranch and had two sons. She died in 1973."

Jake touched the photograph of Ellen Rometsch, the beautiful woman with the beehive hair and the choker at her throat. "What does all this have to do with her?"

"Just setting the stage," Gordon said, "and showing you how information can be manipulated."

"So you're saying Rometsch wasn't a spy either," Stacy said.

"No, I'm not saying that at all," Gordon said. "Ellen Rometsch was definitely a spy. She was from East Germany and crossed the border in 1955, before the wall went up. She married a sergeant in the West German Air Force and came with him to Washington when he was assigned to the West German Embassy. Then she got a job as a hostess at the Quorum Club, where she just happened to meet the president of the United States, John Kennedy."

"What's the Quorum Club?" Stacy asked.

"Officially, it was a private men's club at the Carroll Arms Hotel, conveniently located next door to the Senate Office Building," Gordon said. "In reality, it was a high-end brothel run by a sleaze merchant named Bobby Baker and frequented by politicians, lobbyists, bagmen, and the occasional gangster."

"She worked for the KGB," Favreau said.

Both Jake and Stacy looked to Gordon for an explanation.

"Technically, she worked for the Stasi," Gordon said, "the East German secret police, but since the Stasi was the KGB's German subcontractor, it is accurate to say that Ellen Rometsch worked for the KGB."

Stacy stared at the photograph of Ellen Rometsch. "And you said she had a two-year affair with President Kennedy?"

"Yes," Gordon said. "And J. Edgar Hoover knew all about it. Not only did he bug the hotel room they used, he installed a camera."

"In the room?" Stacy asked.

"In the room," Gordon said.

"Eww," Stacy said, scrunching up her face. "You mean there's video of President Kennedy and this chick...doing it?"

"They used film back then, but yes."

Stacy shook her head in disgust.

"I was never a fan of J. Edgar Hoover," Gordon said, "But in all fairness to the man, Rometsch was a Soviet agent and she was sleeping with the president of the United States. And don't forget, Hoover hated the Kennedys, going all the way back to Joe Senior, and he considered it a personal insult when John Kennedy appointed his brother Bobby as attorney general."

"So Hoover probably loved this," Jake said.

"For someone who was always looking for leverage on the Kennedys," Gordon said, "this was the Holy Grail."

Stacy looked at Favreau. "So when you said President Kennedy had been compromised...this is what you meant?"

He nodded. "I was shown the surveillance films and a dossier on Ellen Rometsch."

"Who showed them to you?"

"A man from the CIA."

Stacy turned back to Gordon. "But you said the FBI conducted the surveillance."

"Hoover hated the CIA, but he hated the Kennedys more," Gordon said. "Twenty years before, he sent the surveillance reports of John Kennedy and Inga Arvad to the Navy, so it's not hard to imagine that he sent copies of the surveillance films of Kennedy and Rometsch to the CIA."

"No. No. No." Stacy shook her head. "Don't even go there. Don't try to tell me that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were behind killing the president."

"The FBI didn't kill Kennedy," Gordon said. "It was the CIA."

"That's ridiculous," Jake said.

"No, it's not," said Favreau. "The man who showed me the films and the dossier said the KGB had its own photographs from the hotel room, taken by a remote-controlled camera hidden in Rometsch's purse. The KGB rezident, the equivalent of a CIA station chief, who worked under diplomatic cover at the Soviet Embassy, arranged a private meeting with Kennedy at the White House. The rezident showed Kennedy the photographs, which were already inside an envelope addressed to The Washington Post. According to the man from the CIA, the Russians were going to force Kennedy to commit the entire US military to defending South Vietnam while the Soviet Union took over the rest of Europe, the Caribbean, and South America."

"And you believed that?" Jake asked, surprised, if the story was even true, at the Frenchman's naiveté.