The Gemini Agenda Read online

  That was about as close to a rebuke as Churchill was capable of giving to his only son. Churchill knew that he spoiled Randolph but he couldn’t help it. He so wanted his son to have a different relationship with him than Churchill had with his own father, Lord Randolph, who had been distant and, at times, cruel. He wanted it to be more be more like the one he had with his mentor, Bourke Cockran, the late Irish American statesman and orator who was a close friend to his mother and his Aunt Leonie. Churchill smiled. Indeed, as Leonie told it, Cockran once had been much more to his mother than just a friend after his father had died. He had never asked his mother but secretly he hoped it had been true. He liked Americans. His mother was American.

  Churchill and Cockran had treated one another as equals with due deference given by the younger man to the older man’s wisdom and experience. For if Churchill had striven throughout his life to accomplish great things in order to prove his father wrong in his low opinion of him, the opposite had been true with his mentor Cockran. With him, Churchill was always conscious that he had to prove Cockran right about the glittering future the American had predicted he would have. He liked Americans but he had loved Bourke Cockran.

  Churchill briefly explained to the Prof and Randolph the plans for his holiday in Bavaria—touring Marlborough’s battlefields—with Munich as their base of operations. The Prof promptly accepted Winston’s invitation, but Randolph demurred.

  “I’ll come with you as far as Munich, Papa, but if there’s another election, I must cover it. Hitler may well win. You don’t have to understand German to see the mesmerizing effect he has on crowds. He exhorts them to rise above their petty individual interests and do what is right for their country. His appeal is extraordinary. During the last campaign, Hitler once arrived late for an address in a small rural town. His airplane landed at three in the morning and 40,000 people were still there, in the rain, waiting to hear him speak. Can you imagine that?”

  Churchill chewed on his Havana cigar but said nothing.

  “That’s where the action will be, Papa. I don’t have wars to cover like you did when you were young, but this is as close as it gets. For if Hitler takes power in Germany, war will certainly follow.”

  Again, Churchill did not reply and the three men resumed their walk.

  “I am pleased you will be able to join us,” Churchill said to the Prof before responding to his son, “and I don’t blame you, Randolph, in the slightest for wanting to cover an election in Germany. Were I your age, I would do the same thing.”

  “Why did you have me make those inquiries in Germany, Winston?” the Prof asked for the second time after Randolph had returned to the house to take a telephone call from his editor.

  Churchill kept walking. If the rumors were true—and right now that was all he had—it was all too monstrous to contemplate. They reached the edge of the lake and Churchill turned to his friend. “Randolph is right. There will be war if Hitler comes to power. But there are worse things than war, Prof. Far worse things.”

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you?” Lindemann said but it wasn’t a question.

  Churchill did not answer. After a long silence, they turned and walked back towards the house. “I’ll tell you this much,” Churchill finally said. “People are being kidnapped and killed in America in an alarming fashion. But I don’t know why. And no one in America appears to be paying any attention. A person who has my trust believes there may be a German connection. But that’s all I know. I’ve passed what information I have to my friend, W.R. Hearst, a powerful American publisher. Needless to say, he has vast resources at his disposal. I stayed at his estate in California when I was on holiday there in 1929. I haven’t given him much but someone risked his life to bring the information to me. I hope it will help. I pray to God it will.”

  LATER, alone in his upstairs book-lined study after dinner, a roaring fire at the far end of the room, Churchill stood before a rough-hewn stand-up writing desk and made corrections on page proofs with bold strokes from a red pencil. A weak Johnnie Walker Red and soda was on the shelf above the proofs next to a half-smoked Havana. Was Hearst the right man to have been given the information? For now, yes. Hearst had more than enough money but he also had an incomparable resource in his employ, someone with the tenacity of a terrier in pursuit of prey and the courage of a lioness protecting her cubs. His god-child Mattie McGary, the daughter of his great friend James McGary, who had been the first member of the Liberal Party to befriend the twenty-nine year old Churchill after he crossed the floor of the House of Commons in ’04 and left his father’s Tory party over their new-found opposition to free trade. He shook his head and took a sip of scotch as his thoughts took him back. To the fight for free trade. And to Bourke Cockran, the man who taught him that voluntary exchange was the very cornerstone of liberty. It was in many ways a more simple and happy time. Before all the horrors the 20th century had brought so far and, he greatly feared, was still to bring.

  Certainly a happier time than now. Nevertheless, he was optimistic. If, as he hoped but was not so bold as to suggest, Hearst did assign Mattie to investigate the alarming information he had supplied, that meant the son of his old mentor Cockran would not be far behind. He smiled. It had not been his intent to act as a matchmaker but he had more or less brought the children of his two old friends together several years ago and they seemed to have quite a romance going. It had brought him great pleasure for he was a romantic at heart. Churchill was mildly surprised they were still not engaged. Once he decided it was to be Clemmie—and that hadn’t taken very long—Churchill certainly had wasted no time in proposing and then marrying that stunning young woman a few short months later. Before she changed her mind. Faint hearts never won fair ladies. His godchild was equally attractive and no less a catch. Why hadn’t young Cockran proposed to that girl?

  2.

  Improving the Race

  Fifth Avenue

  New York City

  Monday, 9 May 1932

  BOURKE Cockran, Jr. knew from long experience that accepting a written invitation to meet another man’s stunningly beautiful wife, sent without her husband’s knowledge, would rarely be innocent. Enjoyable? Possibly. Perilous? Almost certainly. Innocent? No. Especially not when it came from the wife of a powerful and dangerous adversary. But that only made it more of a challenge and Cockran had never thought for a moment of declining. A certain protocol had to be followed, however, before accepting.

  The morning sun was streaming in the Florida room of his Fifth Avenue town house and, wordlessly, Cockran handed the scented note across the breakfast table to a tall and ravishing red-haired beauty from Scotland, Mattie McGary. Mattie was William Randolph Hearst’s favorite photojournalist and she was just back from a month-long assignment covering the war between Bolivia and Paraguay. Clad only in a green silk dressing gown, carelessly knotted so that it revealed more than it concealed of her freckled breasts, she looked gorgeous, her tousled locks a crimson version of Amelia Earhart. They had been lovers for nearly three years.

  Mattie took the pale blue sheet of paper, raised it to her nose and lifted her eyebrows.

  “It arrived late yesterday afternoon at my law school office,” Cockran said.

  “Strange you didn’t think to show this to me last night.”

  “My mind was occupied with other things.”

  “Your mind?” Mattie said, arching her eyebrows again. “I distinctly recall something else being occupied last night,” she said and began to read aloud:

  Dear Mr. Cockran:

  Please do me the favor of meeting me tomorrow evening at Carnegie Hall for the reception following Dr. Lothrop Stoddard’s lecture. I was not able to make an appointment with your law firm as they advised me you do not keep regular hours there. I wish to consult you professionally.

  Sincerely,

  Ingrid Waterman

  P.S. Please do not make reference to this note in front of my husband. He would not approve.

  �
�Ingrid Waterman. Isn’t she the wife of.…?”

  “Wesley Waterman, the chairman and president of International Calculating Equipment, I.C.E.,” Cockran replied, enunciating each letter of the acronym forming the company’s name.

  Mattie raised her eyebrows once more. God, he loved her eyes but he knew what she meant. He and Wesley Waterman III had an unpleasant history. “His wife is a blonde knockout with a wicked sense of humor. I told you about her. We met after oral argument in Judy Dill’s appeal.”

  Mattie nodded. “I remember. That poor girl who was sterilized, wasn’t it?”

  “The third sterilization case I lost, yes. I notched number four while you were in Bolivia. Anyway, not only was Ingrid easy on the eyes, but she poked fun at her husband right in front of me. He’s the head of the American Eugenics Society as well as I.C.E., and she joked with me about her husband entering her in the annual American Breeders Association contest for Nordic Females. I forget exactly how she phrased it but the gist was that ABA conventions would be ever so much more interesting if they had public matings between the “best in show” winners in the male and female classifications.

  Mattie laughed, almost choking on a sip of tea. “She said that! In front of her husband? I like her already.”

  “It sounds like she needs a lawyer. Should I go? What do you think? You’d have to fly yourself to Long Island tonight for your meeting with Hearst.”

  Mattie spooned some marmalade onto a piece of toast and held it up in the air. “I’ve seen photographs of her on the society pages. She is very blonde and very beautiful but I suppose it’s okay. I’m a big girl. I can fly myself. On one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you don’t show her your birthmark.”

  Cockran laughed. “I promise. I’ve learned my lesson.”

  Mattie smiled. “Good. Me too.”

  COCKRAN stepped out of the taxi in front of Carnegie Hall and looked up at the darkening clouds. What had started out as a beautiful spring day was turning into something else entirely. He tipped the cabbie and saw a flash of lightning. To the east, he saw the high, dark clouds which foreshadowed the storm to follow. He was worried. He had read the weather reports and had been concerned about his flying Mattie out to Long Island himself but now, with the storm definitely approaching, he hoped Mattie wouldn’t attempt to fly on her own.

  Mattie was a good pilot but “risk-taking”, not “cautious”, more aptly described her approach to life. He put the thought out of his mind. It was something he couldn’t control and he no longer criticized her for it. It previously had been the subject of many arguments between them because he once believed his criticism could curb her recklessness. But the unintended consequences of doing that had persuaded him otherwise. He had learned his lesson the hard way. She was who she was and risk was part of the package.

  The humor-tinged exchange between them at the breakfast table was a healthy sign that the hurt each had caused the other a year ago over this very subject was continuing to heal. While apart from him after one of their arguments over her risk-taking, Mattie had come to believe that Cockran had thrown her over and was having an affair with a new and beautiful blonde client. He hadn’t but it had been a damn close run thing. In the process, his client had gotten a really good glimpse of the birthmark on Cockran’s ass while she had been tending a bullet wound he had incurred in defending her from a ruthless business competitor—Wesley Waterman to be precise. All very innocent—really—but enough to make a saint suspicious.

  Mattie was no saint and, for reasons he never understood, his client had told her about seeing his birthmark and used that to imply she and Cockran were lovers. A heartbroken Mattie thought their argument over risk-taking was responsible and that he had found someone else. Shortly thereafter, a vulnerable Mattie had an affair with a man accompanying her on what became a dangerous assignment. Cockran didn’t know that last part exactly. Her affair, that is.

  Once she learned Cockran hadn’t been sleeping with his client, Mattie tried to confess what she had done but he put her off. He had met the guy who was tall, fair-haired and one tough bastard. He and Cockran had even joined forces later to rescue Mattie from several tight situations. Under other circumstances, he might even have liked the guy. But if it were true about him and Mattie, he didn’t want to hear it. He loved her and simply wanted it all to stay in the past while they moved forward. That was when he had decided her taking risks was one of those things he couldn’t control. But his previous plans to propose marriage were temporarily on hold for a variety of reason.

  For one thing, she didn’t really know him that well if she thought he was the kind of guy who would have an affair with another woman without first telling Mattie that it was over between them. For another, he thought she still had tender feelings for the man who had so swiftly swept her off her feet and into his bed. He needed to come to grips with both because he didn’t want her accepting a marriage proposal out of guilt over the affair or her misreading of his character. And he sure as hell didn’t want to talk about it. Guys didn’t do that even if girls did.

  Cockran looked again at the ominous sky. He had taught Mattie to fly himself last summer in Italy and she would be flying the safest aircraft known to man, a Pitcairn autogiro, Cockran’s personal plane, the Celtic Princess. Mattie was a good pilot and good pilots knew better than to fly in bad weather like this.

  “Please, Mister? A penny, if you can spare it?” The voice of a boy reached Cockran through the depths of his thoughts. He turned and saw a small boy in threadbare clothes, clearly unwashed, standing outside the entrance to Carnegie Hall and begging passersby. Ever since the Depression deepened, he had been disturbed at how many beggars were children these days — their parents off looking in vain for work that did not exist. Cockran often wondered how his father would have responded to the Depression, wishing his great oratorical presence were still alive to protest the Republicans’ high tariffs, higher taxes and greater government spending which they promised would return prosperity. It hadn’t and things were getting worse. “Governments create nothing” his father once had said and his father’s protégé Winston Churchill had said it even better: “A government can no more tax itself into prosperity than a man standing in a bucket can lift himself by the handles.”

  He opened his wallet for a ten dollar bill to place in the boy’s outstretched palm. “Oh, thank you, Mister! Thank you, God bless you!” the boy shouted. Cockran gave him a smile. It would only help for so long, Cockran thought, as he walked up the steps to the entrance to Carnegie Hall, but his father had taught him to be generous with those less fortunate.

  Cockran opened the brass door, walked inside and examined the glass-enclosed placard announcing the evening’s entertainment:

  LECTURE TONIGHT

  “Our Moral Obligation to Future Generations”

  By Dr. Lothrop Stoddard

  Author of: The Passing Of The Great Race;

  The Rising Tide Of Color Against White World-Supremacy; and

  The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man

  Cockran shook his head. How could you shove so much crap inside one Harvard Ph.D.?

  Cockran was late, a not uncommon occurrence, but it was usually unplanned. Tonight was different. He knew what Stoddard would be saying. He didn’t need to hear it again. He had heard it all before at the Army War College where Stoddard had been a regular lecturer to the Officer Corps of the U.S. Army and MID agents like Cockran. All three of Stoddard’s books listed on the lobby poster were required reading at the war college. What kind of government would employ Stoddard as an educator for its young military officers? Democrat or Republican, it apparently didn’t matter. Predictably, Stoddard had started during the reign of that Southern racist Woodrow Wilson but he was still there today with Herbert Hoover in the White House.

  Stoddard was one of the leading advocates of “eugenics,” the science of human heredity which contained both positiv
e and negative components. Cockran’s father had said to him on more than one occasion that, in a society where there was democratic tolerance and freedom under the law, many kinds of evil would crop up. But give them a little time and they would usually breed their own cure. It wasn’t that the science of eugenics was evil per se. Science, properly understood, was neutral. It could be used for good or ill. But when science—or some scientists—began to serve politics, bad things could happen. Eugenics was a case in point.

  Cockran, like his father, fiercely believed in individual liberty. Hence, he was more tolerant of “positive” eugenics whose core consisted of encouraging upper class Protestants to breed more of their own kind so as to keep Irish, Italians, Jews and other undesirables out of their superior gene pool. Having grown up as an Irish Catholic on Long Island’s Gold Coast, Cockran came to appreciate that most Protestants didn’t want their offspring sleeping with Catholics, let alone marrying them. Cockran thought it had more to do with bigotry than science but small-minded bigots only marrying their own kind might well breed its own cure.

  The problem was that its twin—“negative” eugenics—was definitely not breeding its own cure. States were passing laws left and right mandating sterilization of mental defectives — already over 40,000 women in twenty six states had been permanently deprived of their ability to reproduce by wise and well-meaning governments. He couldn’t help recalling the phrase “three generations of imbeciles are enough” from the judicial pen of the octogenarian Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes which had opened the constitutional floodgates for forced sterilization based on a cooked-up record which the senile bastard had not bothered to analyze.

  After that unfortunate Supreme Court decision, Cockran had taken on the lost cause of four women condemned to forced sterilization because they were “mentally defective.” Cockran had done this because he could see where it would all end. Weeding out the weak was only the first step. State-sanctioned euthanasia would be next. Scientific treatises were already advocating just that. Could the courts be far behind? With judges like Holmes, who knew?