Altered America (7 page)

             
Sra Bouvier: “Our new nation will be much like Great Britain, only larger. Canada, Louisianne and New England are now provinces under a single government, which will be housed in the independent District of Versailles. As a source of unity, children will be required to learn French in school, but otherwise each province will maintain its own local government, cultural language, and national heritage—just as Ireland, Scotland, and Wales operate under the oversight of England. There will be a single military, however, which is now a force to be reckoned with.”

             
Sr Gomez: “Very interesting. I must say, it was a stroke of brilliance to appoint you as Prime Minister, since the New Englanders have always admired you. They seem almost... relieved.”

             
Sra Bouvier: “The US military wasn’t happy about the changeover, obviously. But once it became clear that New England culture would be preserved and that their livelihoods and freedoms would remain much the same, most people saw the greater benefits of peace and stability. New England has been a troubled nation, and its people can now breathe easier.”

             
Sr Gomez: (laughs) “You’re a delightfully dangerous woman, Sra Bouvier. Should the people of New Spain be looking over their collective shoulder?”

             
Sra Bouvier: “Califórnians seem more interested in making movies and sangria than waging war, so there’s no reason for alarm, my friend. However, I do have a more important reason for my visit than merely saying hello.” (Hands him a large square of folded material).

             
Sr Gomez: “What’s this? For those of you who can’t see me on your radio, Sra Bouvier has just handed me... a flag?”

             
Sra Bouvier: “Yes. Why don’t you describe it to your listeners?”

             
Sr Gomez: “Four white stars on a blue field, inside an oval of four concentric red lines. I don’t understand the symbolism. Four stars? Why not three?”

             
Sra Bouvier: “Canada, Louisianne, and New England are three. New Spain would represent the fourth star, and would complete a true North American Union. If, of course, the people of New Spain will join us.”

             
Sr Gomez: “Madame Prime Minister, personally I would be honored, but I don’t have the authority—” (phone rings, red light flashing) “Excuse me one moment.”

             
Sra Bouvier: “Who is it, Sr Gomez?”

             
Sr Gomez: “
Sí, señor
.”
(hangs up) “Speaking on behalf of Califórnian president, Javier Banderas, the Cabinet of New Spain would be pleased to discuss the details of joining the North American Union. Well played, dear lady. And welcome.”

The Orthogonian

by Sam Kepfield

April 10, 1972

             
The unmarked Boeing 707 made its final approach to Chkalovsky Airfield.  The lights of Moscow lay thirty kilometers to the east, clustered on the horizon.   

             
The enormity of it all suddenly hit, and he lay down the black briefing book that had occupied him since the last stopover at Rhein-Main AFB in Germany. 
I’m here.  I’m in the lion’s den
, he thought.  A quarter century fighting the Reds, and here he was about to land in the heart of their empire in the middle of the night. 

             
“We’ll be landing shortly, sir,” the Air Force steward told him.  “Please fasten your seat belt.”

             
“Thank you.” Richard M. Nixon, Assistant Director for Counterintelligence of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was the sole occupant of the forward passenger compartment.  He closed the briefing book, having absorbed its contents and those of the three on the seat beside him during the flight from Washington.  He rubbed his eyes, and massaged his temples to relieve the dull ache brought on by digesting massive amounts of information in a short period of time.  It was a sensation he was used to.

             
Preparation, after all, was why he’d risen to the spot of Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation by the age of forty-five, and why he’d stayed there for the past fourteen years.  At Duke, he’d never been one of those who managed to wing a test with grace after skylarking for a semester.  Dick Nixon, though, had one thing they didn’t—an iron butt, which enabled him to grind out the hours in the law library, graduating with decent grades, and having his application as an FBI agent approved by Hoover himself just after graduation.  He finished the glass of ginger ale, and put the tray up.  No scotch; a clear head was essential. 

             
There was an almost unnoticeable bump as the landing gear made contact with the runway.  The engines reversed, slowing the jet.  The pilot taxied to a far corner of the tarmac, and the jet halted.  Nixon rose, gathered the briefing books and put them in the large black valise he carried, and walked down the aisle where the steward had the door opened for him.  The Russians already had a stairway pushed to the door.

             
The four FBI agents who had accompanied him were in the coach area of the plane.  Each wore a dark suit, crisp starched white shirt and dark conservative tie, in accordance with the dress code that Hoover had laid down decades ago.  Their hair was cut short, no more than an inch in length, sideburns short, and the shoes were shined to a high polish.  Under each coat, a slight bulge from the government-issued .38 revolver. 

             
The four men surrounded the only other passenger, the whole objective of this trip.  He was a short man with a pudgy build, thinning hair, wire-rim spectacles, and the sort of face that would never attract a second glance in a crowd.  He wore a cheap dark suit and striped tie, and handcuffs.  The face was a mask of forced calm covering mortal fear.

             
“I hope you can live with this,” Daniel Henderson said.

             
“My conscience is perfectly clear,” Nixon said, motioning the agents to take him down the stairs to his fate. 

             
Until two weeks ago, Daniel Henderson had been the Deputy National Security Adviser to President Nelson A. Rockefeller.  Henderson had worked his way up over twenty years through the ranks of the Navy.  While serving a tour at the Pentagon in the early ‘60s, he caught the eye of Dr. Henry Kissinger, then a professor at Harvard and a member of the Defense Studies Program.  When Rockefeller won the Presidency in 1964, Kissinger went to Washington as National Security Adviser, taking Henderson with him. 

             
For eight years, Henderson had been privy to every critical decision of the Rockefeller Administration—the escalation and the de-escalations in Vietnam and Cambodia, the ouster of regimes in the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, and Indonesia.  He had sat in on meetings regarding arms control negotiations, begun by Kennedy after the Cuban affair but currently languishing in Helsinki. 

             
Two weeks ago, Henderson had been caught by a team of FBI agents in a dead-drop in a wooded area near Mclean, Virginia.  Agents retrieved classified documents detailing shipments of American arms to Israel, particularly anti-aircraft weapons to counter the Soviet-made MiG-23s supplied to Sadat.  The NSA and Defense Intelligence Agency warned that the sales were the run-up to a possible military strike by Egypt, either alone or in concert with Syria and Jordan.

             
A higher-than-normal series of arrests had taken place in Moscow and Leningrad over the previous year, alerting both the CIA and the FBI that there was a serious leak in the American intelligence apparatus.  Polygraphs proved ineffective.  Nixon, though, had reasoned that in this day and age, no one sold out to the Communists because of idealism.  Money was their goal.  The FBI began tracking the spending habits of thirty-six possible candidates, and narrowed it to four.  Henderson had been one of the four.

             
Henderson was taken into custody immediately.  Nixon blocked the CIA from taking over, calling it a bribery investigation.  Absolute discretion was required, since the news that a highly-placed intelligence aide to the President would be a bombshell bigger than the defection of Burgess, McLean and Philby from Great Britain to Russia in the ‘50s.  Nixon had earned a reputation for being tight-lipped during his tenure,   detesting leaks so much that he had his own “plumbers” to fix them.  

             
During his interrogation, Henderson revealed that he had given away the names of three American spies to the KGB.  Two were confirmed shot.  The third was still being interrogated.  The next day, a message had been hand-delivered by courier, from the Soviet Embassy, with an extraordinary offer and invitation.

             
Nixon stood at the top of the gangway as Henderson was led down the metal steps to a waiting black van, which was surrounded by grim-looking KGB men in dark suits.  One of them spoke into a field radio before Whitaker was guided inside, and the doors slammed on him. 

With a deep breath of the still-chilly air, Nixon descended to the tarmac, finally setting foot on Soviet soil. 

              He was greeted by an older man in a dark trench coat.  He extended his hand.  “Welcome to Moscow,
Gospodin
Nixon.  I trust your trip was not too strenuous,” the man said in accented English.

             
“I had a layover in Germany. Mr. Fedorov, I presume?” Nixon said smoothly.  Fedorov’s fluency in English, acquired while on a fellowship at Columbia in the ‘30s was in the briefing books.

             
“
Da
,” the man said.  Georgy Maximovich Fedorov was the Deputy Director of the
Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnostiy,
better known by its feared initials—KGB.  He had been born a few years before the Revolution, had worked his way up through Party ranks, while climbing the promotion ladder at the KGB, serving with distinction during World War II and afterwards.

             
“Jernigan is being moved from Lefortovo Prison.  He will arrive here shortly.  Forgive the delay.  It was unavoidable.”

             
Howard Jernigan was a low-level staffer at the American Embassy who was in reality a CIA officer, running agents inside the Ministry of Defense, and one who was a staff member in the Central Committee.  He had provided invaluable information for three years, but his usefulness was at an end.  His agents had likely already been dealt with in the traditional Soviet manner.

             
“No apologies necessary,” Nixon said.  One couldn’t very well conduct a spy swap and welcome the second-ranking man in the American FBI at any of the three Moscow airports that handled civilian traffic, Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo and Vnukovo; too much danger of being spotted.  If word of this leaked, the consequences would be severe, especially in an election year.

             
“Your car is waiting,” Fedorov said, motioning Nixon to a black Chaika limousine parked in front of the van. A KGB guard opened the door.  Nixon looked at Simmons, the senior agent in charge with a lantern jaw and graying crewcut.

             
“Rules are that you should ride with us,” Simmons said.  A second black van had been brought for the FBI’s use. 

             
“I think we can dispense with protocol this once,” Nixon said.  The Soviets were many things, but not so stupid as to detain or murder the head of America’s counterespionage program in the heart of Moscow.  A certain amount of trust was involved here.  Nixon slid in the back seat first, with Fedorov following.

             
“This is a most historic occasion,” Fedorov said as the car began moving.  “It’s a shame that the world will never know of it.”

             
“I prefer it that way,” Nixon said.  “Obscurity provides freedom.”  He’d always worked behind the scenes, in the shadows, ever since being assigned to counterespionage back during the war.  As a younger man, he’d flirted with the idea of politics, even winning the position of student body president at Whittier College.  Although he’d delivered on his sole campaign promise—allowing dancing on campus—he had found the high exposure disagreeable.  He was awkward, ill-at-ease in large crowds, denied at birth the natural grace of the athletes who made up Whittier’s only social club, the Franklins.  Nixon had formed his own society, the Orthogonians, or “Square Shooters,” who posed for their school photos in open-necked shirts, not tuxedos.  Since then, he’d found a way around the Franklins who glided through life with nary a care, the Hisses and Kennedys who snorted at the Dick Nixons and the other Square Shooters of the world.

             
“True,” Fedorov said.  “But for how much longer?  We hear rumors about your superior’s health.  And his immediate successor has been incapacitated by a stroke for years.”

             
“I saw Director Hoover just before I left,” Nixon said.  “He was in good health.” 
Too good
, he added ruefully to himself.  Hoover was 77, had run the Bureau since Coolidge was President, and would be carried out of his office in a box.  No President dared cross him.  Truman and Kennedy had both considered firing him, but Hoover had too many inconvenient secrets tucked away.  Those secrets sometimes found their way out, as secrets will, and aided in sinking Kennedy’s re-election bid in 1964.

             
Rockefeller had mused about firing Hoover just after his re-election in ’68, but backed off.  Rocky, like Kennedy, had secrets of his own, and left the unhappy task to his successor.  Whoever won in November, be it Humphrey, Jackson, Kennedy, Romney, or Scranton, would avoid the confrontation.  Only Wallace seemed to have the balls to fire Hoover, but the country wasn’t ready for a hard-line segregationist in the White House.  Until then, Nixon’s iron butt would serve him in waiting for the inevitable.

             
“There are others who would probably be better placed to become Director,” Nixon demurred.

             
“You are too modest, Mr. Nixon.  I know something of power struggles in large institutions,” Fedorov said wryly.  “I was on the Central Committee when the Army faction tried to oust Khrushchev in ’58, and again when they succeeded in ’64. Nothing ever goes as planned.  The battle goes to he who shows daring and guile.”

             
“Very true,” Nixon said noncommittally.  He was uneasy sharing so many inside details of the Bureau with a Politburo candidate member.  But he knew that Fedorov was correct.  Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s longtime aide, was still Associate Director, but in name only after his stroke in ’64, and was in no shape to run the Bureau.  None of the assistant directors had been at the Bureau longer than Nixon, and none had worked harder and delivered more successes.  He could handle his only rival, Mark Felt.

             
“It does depend on how the election goes,” Fedorov said.  “President Rockefeller may be inclined to appoint you, but what of those who would succeed him?”  The question was more than rhetorical, Nixon knew.  William Scranton, the incumbent Vice-President running to succeed Rockefeller, would no doubt appoint him in Hoover’s stead.  Nixon had been careful to cultivate that relationship. 

             
The Democrats were a different story, having had the Bureau in their sights since the early ‘60s, and their suspicions had only been confirmed by the COINTELPRO documents stolen two years ago.  The editorial boards of the New York
Times
and the Washington
Post
had been outraged by the Bureau’s targeting civil rights leaders like King and Evers, even though Truman and Kennedy had been the big offenders and Rockefeller had cancelled the whole thing in ’67 over Hoover’s objections.