Chapter Two Thousand One Hundred Seventy.
22nd August 1972
Sacramento, California
At the Presidential Campaign Headquarters for Richard Nixon, no one was quite sure what to make of everything that had happened. Was this good or bad for them? Nixon himself said that he was preparing a statement that he was going to make later than evening, just in time for the National Broadcasters to pick up, of course. He told his staff that now was the time for leadership and that now was the time to strike while the opposition was divided.
One might have gotten whiplash with how fast things had developed over the last few days. At first John Aleshire, the Director of the FBI, was lauded as a hero, he had shot none other than John Dillinger, the man who had topped the FBI’s most wanted list for decades after he claimed that he had been accosted by him in the National Mall. Then a day later, the Washington Post story had dropped and that placed a vastly different spin on the matter. It revealed, complete with photographic evidence, what had really happened. Complete with Aleshire shooting an unarmed man and then planting a weapon on that man. That single action called into question nearly every single case the FBI had ever referred to the US Justice Department during his tenure as Director.
That wasn’t even the meat of the story though.
Dillinger had furnished the Washington Post with verifiable information that proved conclusively that Aleshire had been a deep cover mole for German Military Intelligence for the entirety of his career at the FBI. No one knew how Dillinger could have gotten his hands on that information, or where he had been for the prior decades. He wasn’t in a position to answer any questions. Aleshire shooting him when confronted over the matter had made it so that every bit of that evidence now had far more veracity than if he had just told the Washington Post to take his word for it. The consensus was that Aleshire was completely screwed seven ways.
That this was taking place during the run-up to the 1972 General Election was lost on no one. As President Truman had famously stated when talking about the Office of the President; The Buck stops here. Nelson Rockefeller had had all of this go down on his watch, there was no escaping that. Then to add insult to injury, Spiro Agnew had delivered a particularly tone-deaf acceptance speech when he had accepted the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention. He had gone on at length about those with mixed loyalties lurking among them and had denounced the long reach of the German Monarchy in America due to the refusal to assimilate that they had all witnessed. This was after Nelson Rockefeller, a descendent of German immigrants had spoken to the convention just minutes earlier. Agnew himself, whose father was Greek, should have known better. Besides that, if they had learned anything during the Kraut Scare back in the forties and fifties it was that by alienating a third or more of the country you were providing those very forces you wanted to keep out thousands of potential recruits. Nixon suspected that when they drilled down into the matter, that would very likely be the origins of how the BND got their hooks into Aleshire.
Los Angeles
They had been planning on leaving anyway, but the situation had turned on a dime and it wasn’t the best of circumstances. When Manny and Suse had arrived at the airport, they found that what looked like half the State National Guard had taken up residence. Supposedly, almost every airport in the United States looked like this and according to Ritchie, the border with Mexico was even worse. Manny had spent much of the last week hashing out what could make that movie script halfway workable. The rest of the time he had gone with Suse to various tourist spots. It had been fun. Then something that neither of them had any control over happened. Ritchie had gotten a phone call the previous Saturday calling him in. He had called earlier in the day warning Manny and Suse that it would probably be best if they got on the flight to New York with the connection to Berlin-Brandenburg with as little fuss as possible.
Manny understood that these were the equivalent to the Landwehr back home. Probably not the most formidable Division he might have faced if he had the 2nd Army at his back, but for him alone with Suse it was potentially the worst possible threat. It was all because they were not necessarily professionals. They might be store clerks or barbers most of the time, but they played the role of soldiers occasionally and that was the capacity in which they were here.
For years, there had been talk of putting metal detectors in airports. Part of an effort to keep someone from sneaking something very stupid onto an airplane. That had been argued against by people who feared that they would end up with something like the scene that greeted Manny and Suse when they reached the security checkpoint. It looked like something from a movie depicting Soviet era Russia, complete with heavily armed men and attack dogs.
“ID and boarding pass” The Agent from the Airline said. He had no reason to be polite today and made no effort to be. With a bit of reluctance Manny handed over the relevant documentation and got a dirty look in return. “Your flight will soon be boarding” he said in a tone that suggested that he wanted to say don’t ever come back.
