Trail of the Twisted Cros (12 page)

When the White Guards finished their task, they left by the back way, skulking down through the alley a few blocks to a waiting
truck. One of them said, “This is the lesson we have learned tonight… we can do what we like in Brixton because we can control
the streets.”

TREALAW, South Wales, 13 September

Afternoon tea at the Colliers Arms is an affair consisting of dumplings, fruit pie, anything left over from the previous night’s
supper, stray cheeses that the household friend Lynfa Perry might fetch around, crackers (as Americans would call them), and
tea as an incidental refreshment.

It is also the time of day when pubs all over the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland are closed. For four
hours, life in Trealaw at the Colliers Arms revolves around the morning and early afternoon gossip, the day’s news events
as reported in the
Daily Mail
from London, and the upcoming “doom hour,” as the twelve minutes of national news is called on the BBC.

Both Monckton and Thatcher were present on this day for tea, as was Lynfa, a diminutive, inordinately attractive young woman
who was rarely seen without the lapel button she wore today: “Good things come in small packages.”

Mavis, as usual, was running the conversation. The subject turned to the matter of the Brixton murders of two blacks the evening
before.

“It’ll be on the doom hour, that’s for sure,” Jack said.

“How witty, my flower,” Mavis answered him. “And will the Queen be in Buckingham Palace this evening, too?”

Jack laughed at her. He and his mates from the bar would be going off for an evening’s entertainment at a nightclub ten miles
up Ynyscynon Road, where they would meet the likes of “Jerky Joan,” “Sweaty Betty,” and assorted other
femme fatales
of the Rhondda Valley. He could care not a whit for Mavis’ catty remarks tonight. She knew very well that he would be going,
that he would be engaging in the mild flirtations that were the custom between the married men of the valley and mostly single
women, a custom no one quite knew why existed.

He looked at Monckton and said, “I married the lady because she looks so sweet when she’s got her nose up. Look at the bird
now. Have you ever in your life seen a sight more adorable than that sweet face?”

Jack cupped Mavis’ chin with his hand. She slapped it away and growled.

Lynfa said, “Let’s none of us watch the telly tonight. Let’s be content to watch Jack and Mavis for the entertainments.” She
looked to Thatcher to see if he would laugh at her joke. He didn’t. For this reason, and others more basic, she was finding
him less and less an attraction. The new lodger, however, was quite another matter. She would watch him whenever she could.
Would he ever pay her some heed?

“Thatcher,” Monckton said, struggling to change the subject. Actually no one laughed at Lynfa’s joke because all it accomplished
was to put Mavis into a snit. “I wonder, Thatcher, if you’ll be watching the BBC report tonight. You know, they’ll have film
of the Brixton incident. You should like that, I should think, beating up blacks and all.”

For the first time in anyone’s memory, Thatcher expressed an opinion.

“You’re bloody right I will. The whole bloody bunch of apes ought to be sent back where they came from. I’m tired of their
stinking up our nation, taking our jobs and all,” he said.

He was overwhelmed at the silence his remarks had engendered. He looked at his fellow residents gazing at him.

“Well,” he finally said, “don’t you all feel the same?”

“I don’t fancy blacks living around me,” Mavis said, ever quick with a responsive opinion, “but I don’t fancy knocking their
heads together for no good reason, either. And these blacks were killed. Killed by some disgusting goons.”

Thatcher went livid, but didn’t say anything. Lynfa quickly moved away from him. He regained his composure and resumed eating.

“I’ll tell you what I think, now,” Jack said. He stood up, moved next to his wife, and put an arm around her shoulder. “I
think me and Mave could breathe much better without you and your stinking bigotry around us.”

Monckton clamped a hand on his arm before Thatcher could angrily get up from the table and leave the premises.

“Just a minute,” he said to Thatcher. “I might have something you could be interested in.”

He took from his pocket the St. John’s Colliery tag number 290, the one he had picked up from East 66th Street in New York,
the garden where the police found the corpse of a mailman.

“I checked the records down at the colliery,” Monckton said, “and it seems this number used to be yours. Any idea where you
lost it?”

Thatcher eyed him suspiciously, then spat out, “Who the bloody blazes are you, mate?”

Monckton ignored the question.

“You know, it’s too bad this tag wasn’t something like a hotel key. I don’t know about this place, but in the States, most
especially in New York, you can just drop a lost hotel key in a mail box—a post box, as you would call it here.”

Monckton had dropped the accent. He was now clearly an American.

Thatcher said the obvious: “You’re no coal miner, and you’re not from Manchester.”

“Nope,” Slayton said. “I own up now. I’m an imposter.”

“What’s going on?” Jack asked.

“You’ve two imposters at your table, Jack,” Slayton answered. “And one of us is a murderer and a terrorist, wanted by the
government of the United States for, among other things, threatening the life of the President, murdering a mailman, and attempted
extortion.

“This is not to mention plotting the overthrow of a Federal penitentiary, and, in the Bahamas, a murder rap, no doubt on a
conspiracy charge statute.”

“Jewish swine!” Thatcher screamed.

“The two don’t mix,” Slayton said.

Thatcher pulled a knife from a sheath below his shirt and lashed out at Slayton, opening a gaping wound in his shoulder before
he could escape fatal damage.

Now Thatcher stood over Slayton with the huge, bloodied knife poised for another slashing. Slayton was trapped in a corner.

Thatcher thrust forward, missing Slayton’s face by less than an inch as he swerved out of the path of the gleaming knife.
Again Thatcher lunged. This time, Slayton managed to blunt the progress of the knife with his arm by slamming into Thatcher’s
body with a glancing karate chop. But he couldn’t rely on his martial arts much longer. His blood loss was making him woozy.

Jack, meanwhile, had one by one cleared the dining area, and now only the three men were in the room. Lynfa and Mavis watched
this horrible dance through a frosted glass window set between the dining area and the corridor.

Thatcher was moving in for the kill. His prey was weak and falling.

Slayton slipped down the wall on which he was backed. His eyes closed in a half-sleep, half-dread of the end.

Jack grabbed a towel next to the sink, wrapped it several times around his right forearm, and then advanced on Thatcher. Jack
raised his leg and sent his boot flying into the small of Thatcher’s back, just as Thatcher had raised his knife on Slayton.

The kick sent Thatcher reeling into the wall. He collapsed on top of the heavily wounded Slayton. Then he scrambled for the
knife he had dropped on the floor with the force of Jack’s assault. Jack, too, grabbed for the advantage of the weapon, but
failed.

Thatcher managed to get up, knife in hand, and now began advancing on Jack Warry. Jack, meanwhile, spotted a carving knife
in a dish drainer. He grabbed it.

A wolfish grin came over Thatcher’s face as he moved in, confident now that he would best Warry in a contest of this sort.
What did a publican know about fighting, other than fisticuffs in a barroom?

Thatcher lunged heavily at Warry, with a wide horizontal swipe of the knife at Jack’s midsection. Warry nimbly jutted his
hips back, defended his middle, and countered with a stab to Thatcher’s chest that didn’t penetrate very deeply, but led his
opponent to consider some alternatives.

Now Warry advanced, slashing at Thatcher’s wrists, cutting him once. He took a small cut in the shoulder himself, and deflected
one of Thatcher’s blows with his towel-wrapped forearm.

Thatcher leaped to the table top, which was a mistake.

Warry slashed freely at the man’s legs and ankles, cutting them to ribbons as Thatcher danced and leaped in attempts to defend
himself.

Thatcher then lost his balance, fell backward, and went crashing out the dining area of the kitchen, through the window, and
down one full floor to the garden below. Warry shouted instructions:

“Mavis, attend to Monckton… Lynfa, call the constabulary!”

Expertly, Mavis moved Slayton—Monckton, as he was still known to everyone at the Colliers—from the floor to the table top,
clearing away bits of glass and blood. She found a towel and made him a pillow, then began tearing strips of cloth to make
a tourniquet for his gushing shoulder.

Slayton’s eyes were watery, his speech slurred and incomprehensible. The blood loss was enormous.

“Lynfa,” Mavis screamed, “the doctor, too. He’ll be needing a transfusion. Call an ambulance!”

Jack, meanwhile, was clattering down the back stairs to the garden, hoping to hold Thatcher for the police. But Thatcher was
nowhere to be seen. He had disappeared, bleeding, into the night.

DANBURY, Connecticut, 16 September

A smirking Johnny Lee Rogers walked down the short corridor, from the seclusion area where he was restricted, to another corridor,
this one private, leading to the warden’s office. Waiting for him there was Hamilton Winship.

“Sit down, scumbag,” Winship said. Somehow, the derisive word lost its power when Hamilton Winship used it.

“Thank you, sir, whoever you are, but I prefer to stand.”

“Right, scumbag.”

Rogers’ perpetually grinning demeanor changed.

“Look, you inferior old crock, you called this meeting. Now, what’s on your mind? Did you come all the way from Washington
to call me names?” he asked.

“So you know I’m from Washington?”

Rogers laughed out loud at him.

“What’s the deal you’re going to offer me, old man?”

Winship sucked in his breath.

“The deal is, young man, that a plane is at the ready to take your filthy carcass out of this country. You want Algeria, you’ve
got it.

“Inside the plane is a million dollars in gold. It’s all there.” Winship waited for him to react. “Well?”

“You caved in quite easily, really. But you had no choice, did you?” Rogers asked.

Winship looked down to his shoes and shook his head.

“No, you win. Now would you just get out?”

“I’m just not sure,” Rogers said. “I’d love to see those other surprises we’ve got lined up all go off. You remember the big
bang at Love-bridge? That was nothing.”

Winship stepped toward the prisoner, raised his hand, and slapped him smartly across the face. Rogers wailed, as if he were
some small forest animal.

“You filthy beast. You feed off hatred and misery. You have no idea what evil was released under the system you revere. You
represent the most abhorrent philosophy in the history of the world, and you stand there and smirk. You are scum.”

Rogers was truly surprised by Winship’s anger. He had an almost penitent expression. Then the double doors to an adjoining
room opened up, and he saw the flash of a television camera’s lights. Immediately, his visage changed, back to the ebullient,
self-satisfied
Führer
, Johnny Lee Rogers.

He was marched into the other room, where the assembled press was waiting. Television lights hit him from every angle. His
smile was never wider. This was his triumph, his release from prison despite his conviction. He could not be denied. He was
above it all.

Standing behind one of the cameras, he saw Ben Slayton, his arm in a sling. Manacled to Slayton’s good left arm was Leo Thatcher,
leader of the British White Guards and mastermind of the plot to release Rogers.

The cameras zoomed in close to catch the draining of every last ounce of confidence in Rogers’ face, the casting of a coward
in a few seconds of mouth and eye movements. Suddenly, the swaggering Rogers was a bundle of tears and nervous twitches. He
looked into each camera lens in turn and cried, “I was a captive of these Nazis… they made me do it all…”

He slumped to the floor and the cameras ground away, recording the writhing, humiliated, horrified Johnny Lee Rogers.

“Smile pretty for your fans,” Slayton told him, bending low to whisper to him. “Everybody wants to see a brave little
Führer
.”

Hamilton Winship appeared at center stage and told the assembled press that they had better sit down to hear what he promised
would be a “whale of a tale” about an assassination plot against Richard Nixon, a Nazi-backed sabotage carried out against
the Lovebridge mine, and an international terrorist conspiracy to thwart criminal justice in the United States.

Winship indeed gave the press a whale of a story.

WASHINGTON, D.C., 17 September

“Thatcher was not the most difficult man to track, even through sheep-grazing country at night,” Slayton said. “He was bleeding
like a stuck pig, after all.”

“I can tell you he was rather difficult to get back here into the States for prosecution,” Winship said. “Bloody difficult.”

The two men sat in Winship’s office, both of them looking out his window to the White House.

“Another wrap, Ben. And a job well done.”

Slayton couldn’t match Winship’s satisfaction.

“There will be another Johnny Lee Rogers sooner or later,” he said. “Maybe not as brash, but just as dangerous.”

“You think so?”

“It’s too appealing a role. Look how long Rogers managed to carry it out. And he could have carried on a lot longer, if he
hadn’t been hung up on the conviction.

“Even so, he could have been sprung. We had to get to the power behind Rogers, the power that was using him for its own purposes,
before we could stop that power from carrying out unacceptable risks to our population.”