car pulls off the road and bounces uncomfortably along the rutted track into a tree-shrouded twilight. He turns round to the father and the boy and tells them it’s probably a good point for them to take a toilet break, as they won’t be stopping for some time. Even then, odd and unlikely as that is, they nod, trusting him unquestioningly because he wears a suit and has shown them an ID card with the American eagle embossed in tin across it.
He suggests the father goes first, and nods to Blaine to go with him. The men both leave the car and stumble through knee-high ferns into the woods to seek their own private spots. Only, Blaine isn’t going for a toilet break. He watches them until both men vanish, then smiles reassuringly at the boy.
‘Are we going to see the President?’ the boy asks.
‘He’s a busy man right now. Even though we’ve finished up in Europe, our boys’re still fighting the Japs. There’s a lot still to do.’
‘Yeah,’ says the boy thoughtfully. ‘How do you think that German ended up over here?’
‘I don’t really know. That’s why we’re taking you and your father back to our headquarters so we can puzzle this thing out together. You did the right thing telling the authorities.’
The boy smiles, proud that he’s done his bit.
He knows this is going to be hard.
He thanks God he can delegate the messy business to Blaine. It’s one thing to remotely give the go-ahead for some innocent to be discreetly removed, quite another to have to pull the trigger oneself.
Through the trees, he can see movement. It’s Blaine returning alone. The boy’s father is dead. Now it’s the kid’s turn.
The boy turns to follow his gaze. ‘Where’s my dad?’
He wonders whether there’s any point keeping up the pretence now. The lad may struggle, or try to run if he works out what’s about to happen, but he won’t outrun a bullet.
The boy looks back at him. ‘What’s happened to my dad?’
‘I’m sorry, boy, but we’ve got to do this.’ He gestures to Blaine to grab the lad and pull him out of the car, and finish off this unpleasant job. But Blaine remains fixed to the spot, shaking his head.
The boy is beginning to panic. ‘What have you done with my daddy?’ he begins to whimper.
‘Blaine, get the boy!’ he orders the man.
Blaine shakes his head again. ‘I can’t do it. Not a kid.’
‘What? Just fucking well do it!’
The boy, now sobbing, turns to Blaine, standing outside the car. ‘Please don’t hurt me!’
Blaine, the ‘hard’ man, is crumbling — not so hard after all it seems. ‘I can’t do it, sir. There must be another way.’
‘You know we have to do them both, now get on with it!’
The man grimaces and pulls his silenced handgun out. He raises it uncertainly, lining the gun up on the boy in the car.
‘I’m really sorry, kid,’ he mumbles. ‘You have to get out of the car now.’
The boy opens the rear door and steps outside, his eyes fearfully locked on the pistol. He whispers ‘please’, his hands involuntarily clasped together like he’s praying.
‘Do it, Blaine!’
The man fires a wavering shot that hits the boy in the arm. The boy’s startled face looks down at the growing crimson stain on his sleeve. He looks up from the wound and without a word of warning turns on his heels and runs from the car, up the dirt lane towards the main coast road.
The boy has to be stopped… but the useless fool Blaine is not giving chase. He’s staring after the boy, his gun arm isn’t raised to finish the boy off. It’s hanging uselessly by his side.
He climbs out of the car and grabs Blaine’s gun and turns round to take aim. But the boy has stumbled, and lies on the ground shaking, trembling, sobbing. His momentary bid to escape spent.
The dozen or so strides he takes towards the boy cowering on the floor have been replayed time and time again in his mind. The final shot he has managed, over time, to blank out.
He shuddered, the boy had definitely been the worst of them.
There had been seventeen in total. Seventeen civilians whose deaths he’d had to arrange in the months after the end of the war. And then after that, after the civilian liabilities had all been disposed of, there had been another job for him and the Department — ensuring that those men who had attended Truman’s crisis conference had remained silent on the matter, for the rest of their lives.
Being the youngest man who had attended during those two days at the White House had most definitely been a factor in Truman’s decision to entrust him with keeping the whole incident under wraps; he would outlive them all.
For the last sixty years, he alone had overseen the task entrusted to the Department — collating data on those men, powerful men who lived very political and complicated lives; watching closely those who looked wobbly, those whom he had a hunch might just talk.
And, oh yes… there had been a few.
Several of the most senior men who had been with Truman on those two days had come dangerously close to looking like they might spill it all as they entered the autumn years of their lives. Of course, that was when they became most worrying: old men, facing their inevitable mortality and wondering if now, after so many years, it might just be safe enough to tell a favourite grandchild or nephew an incredible story from way back.
He smiled with satisfaction as he recalled the discreet and not so veiled warnings he had made to some very powerful and influential men from time to time throughout his long vigil. Men who had recoiled with shock that they should be under surveillance so many decades after the event.
Men who should have known better.
Wallace smiled with pride. Truman had turned to him on that final day, as men great and powerful filed dutifully and silently out of the conference room. Truman had quietly asked him to stay, and no one else.
President Truman took off his glasses and rubbed his tired and red-rimmed eyes. The last forty-eight hours had clearly taken a lot out of him. ‘I’m the new boy, here, Wallace. I don’t know who to trust, who are the sharks. All I know is that amongst all these supposedly wise men, it was your advice that seemed to make the most sense. It was your counsel I took in the end, not theirs.’
‘Thank you, Mr President,’ replied Wallace.
‘I’m going to need someone I can trust, someone with a lot of smarts, someone who can work quickly, think on his feet like you did today, to make sure this whole sorry episode stays buried. Think you’re up to it?’
‘Me, sir?’
‘Yes, lad, you.’
‘I’ve not been in intelligence long, sir… just a few months — ’
‘Then perhaps you’re untainted. You’re not habitually used to procedures, ways of doing things that might slow you down… red tape that might prevent you from acting quickly, if it was required. Do you understand me?’
‘I’m not sure I do, sir.’
‘This must never, ever become known to the public. And I’d like you to take charge of that. I’ll make sure you have everything you need — money, men, materials, your own little secret agency… just make sure this thing never surfaces. Whatever it takes… you understand me? Whatever it takes. Whatever you need to do, I don’t care what it is, and I won’t want to know either, you make sure this remains a secret.’
Truman’s eyes remained on Wallace, studying his reaction, looking for uncertainty in the young man’s response. If there was doubt or any indecision in his response, he supposed the young man would not be suitable… and he too would be a potential liability to deal with.
‘Whatever it takes, sir?’
Truman nodded. ‘Well? Do you think you’re up to it?’
In the darkness, outside the motel rooms, in response to that question asked over sixty years earlier, Wallace nodded with satisfaction. He had been up to it.
His eyes picked out the headlights of the van as it exited the interstate off the slip road, disappeared momentarily behind some trees and then, seconds later, cruised quietly past the diner and on to the parking lot in front of the motel rooms. The headlights winked off and the van rolled silently forward, the engine switched off, using the last of the vehicle’s momentum. It came to a rest a few yards from where Wallace waited in the
