19.3 Water Gate Inn
By windrose
- 234 reads
John F Kennedy was ringing loud in his ears like Salazar’s bells though he wasn’t conscious about it as he drove slowly up Garret Avenue towards The Old Cottage Road looking for signs. Tyler made an appointment with General Howe to meet at his home in East Dallas during this weekend; 1st of May. Around the corner, he stopped at 5107, under the branches in the translucent sunlight, sparse leaves and yellowed trees with matured trunks.
A single-storey house stood on the lawn with a grey roof and no window but a porthole beside the door. Tyler climbed the steps and rang the bell that buzzed like an alarm.
General Howe opened the door wearing a white crew-neck undershirt, “Good morning! Captain! Good to have you back! You scared the shit out of me!”
Tyler entered, “Good to see you too!”
“Come over here, we sit at the study.” He led him pass the living room to the study with windows open to the backyard. General Howe preferred to sit by his desk. “Tell me, what happened?”
“Border troops seized me at the railway station,” he began, “I was going to go to Georgia. They took me out of Armenia. I lost my Colt, my camera, my typewriter and the money.”
“I am sorry to hear that,” he dug into the drawer and pulled out a chequebook, “I guess you need this. You took a damn long year!” He scribbled his signature on the cheque muttering, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
“I did everything I could for the country.”
“No, it is all about you,” he detached the cheque and tossed to Tyler, “Here!”
“Thanks,” he received it signed for 15000 dollars as his bonus promised on his return. “I think you should read this.”
“What is that?” uttered the General.
“My report, I compiled.”
“No, no,” he withdrew, “I don’t need it anymore, Friesen! Catai Tours have cleared their debt, paid all their outstanding of almost two million dollars. Now, we don’t have an issue with Jair Sivils and the rutile ore business is over.”
“General Howe! There is more to it.”
“What do you mean, more?”
“They are operating an airline in Macedonia and that money was obtained for an initial deposit. Randall Gumper of Arizona Teachers College is a shareholder and a founder member of Macedon Air. There’s scandal going on with these people, including Bradley who was leaking top-secret docs to the Russians.”
“Scandal?”
“Yes sir!”
“Ho-ho-ho!” he laughed, “No, Friesen, there is no scandal. It’s just that you are a cheap storyteller. I haven’t got time to read that…petty-bourgeois…”
“Excuse me!”
“I didn’t say that…it is over, Friesen!”
Tyler murmured, “You killed Howard Turner.”
“You talked,” General Howe reacted, “Commies killed him. Commies!”
“Aren’t you going to investigate?”
“It isn’t my problem.”
“Read this, please!”
“Take it away!”
Tyler got up from the chair, “In that case, I won’t be needing this,” he tore the cheque in half, tossed on the table and left the General’s house.
In the months that followed, Tyler was called for interviews on various television and radio networks and he gossiped about his year-long Siberia experience. Tyler filled the columns of the papers he worked for; New York Post, The Riverdale Press, The Villager and The New York Review of Books. Before the book came out, Tyler gave it a name to call it ‘Merkabah’ which he said was a lifetime experience in Tsaghkadzor in Armenia.
Often, he was referred to as ‘the guy who came in from the cold’.
In June 1966, he returned to Foggy Bottom in the hope to meet that guy in a yellow shirt at Water Gate Inn. The builders or the demolishers bulldozed the restaurant to level to the ground.
He published his seventh novel, ‘Lodestar’, in the summer of 1966, sponsored by the Checkpoint Charlie Foundation and sold over 300,000 copies. In February ’67 he released ‘Merkabah’ that instantly hit the million mark which was unprecedented. Tyler Friesen was busy signing autographs, giving speeches and interviews, writing book reviews and articles in the East Coast.
Soon he faced critics as he kept improvising his stories to keep it going. He never once mentioned General Allan Howe or Randall Gumper or Melville Bradley or the .45 calibre pistol inside his typewriter. He was clever to turn it around and create his own version like the General said – a cheap storyteller. It became a tell-tale of how the KGB grabbed him from a train station in Hrazdan and his logic worked out their involvement in the foundation of Macedon Air, backbreaking like hell at the Lubyanka and Bodan Vanev behind Jaco Ferre’s death. He did not have one piece of evidence and in truth, he solved nothing. It just became a talk show and for the listeners Tyler was a hero. He impressed his audience about his ethereal soul ascending to the skies, “I could have flown to the Moon.” Those stories got even better and people loved it.
One might think Tyler Friesen was a silent man but he was not.
He wrote to Samvel Salazar to get his things back and once he got them; he shared nothing with the FBI or John Adams. He kept them to start his own investigation at a time of his convenience. As his novels started selling, he was profoundly keen to learn about these mysterious people; Lieutenant Melville Bradley, Randall Gumper and Candice Staverton. Perhaps, he could tell a story or create a tale. He wished to do it single-handedly.
Tyler knew that Lieutenant Colonel Peter Rolnik dropped these cases except finding the killer of Howard Turner. Leaking secret documents from the test facilities and misuse of funds of the Pentagon were all CIA related. The FBI disclosed none to the director at the helm of the CIA with increasing tension and rivalry wars between the two intelligence bodies.
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seems plausable but the
seems plausable but the bestseller books seems a bit too far but that may be my prejudice showing.
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