Lashback

CONTENTS

Dustjacket Text

Title Page

Family Tree

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Dedication, About the Author, & Copyright

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LASHBACK

Book 5 of the 75-Year Saga

Cold War, Hot Passions

by André Jute

The threads are gathering...

Harvey McQueen, the permanent outsider, the greatest American spy of all time, introduced to President Kennedy at the President's request as the American James Bond, exposed Kim Philby and dug the Berlin Tunnel into the heart of Russia’s darkest secrets. But he almost landed in jail instead for tapping the CIA's own headquarters cable in the company of the intelligence mandarin Joshua Adams and Colonel Hillel Hirsch, the penniless Jewish refugee who became a legend in American intelligence. Their suspension causes the final breach between Harvey and Jennie when she refuses to accompany him to Berlin where he digs the famous Berlin Tunnel.

The change of generations comes even to patriots.

Harvey’s daughter Belinda makes a brilliant career at the State Department and marries Aron Hirsch (Hillel’s son) who is an Israeli anti-terrorist expert but the marriage heaves this way and that under their career stresses. Joshua Adams Jnr and Andrew Drexler are soldiers in dangerous jobs in Vietnam; the same war turns Conrad Drexler into an assassin and starts him on a career which will eventually as the founder of Air America make him the world’s largest transporter of drugs. The Rempton children have other temptations and do not turn out so well, bringing tragedy to their loving parents.

LASHBACK

is Book 5 of Cold War, Hot Passions

Wild but exciting. A grand job with plenty of irony.

New York Times

So bizarre, it’s probably all true.

London Evening News

This is an important book."

Sydney Morning Herald

Keeps up such a pace and such interest that it really satisfies.

Good Housekeeping

A masterly story that has pace, humor, tension and excitement with the bonus of truth.

The Australian

Jute has clearly conducted a great deal of research into everything he describes, investing the novel with an air of prophecy. His moral and ecological concerns are important.

Times Literary Supplement

LASHBACK

Cold War, Hot Passions

Book 5

*

André Jute

*

CoolMain Press

www.coolmainpress.com

Lashback

Your successes are unheralded, your failures are

trumpeted.

John F. Kennedy

Success cannot be advertised, failure cannot be explained.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

1

‘So this is how the rich boys live,’ Harvey said, glaring at the walnut wainscoting. He turned his permanently popped eyes on Joshua. ‘This is your school, isn’t it?’

‘You know perfectly well Princeton is one of my schools, Harvey, so you can drop the police basement technique. I admit everything. Please don’t hit me again.’

‘Ha! I never hit a suspect in my life. You felt my hand on your collar. Float like a butterfly. But I hear you do a fair line in testicle-squeezing.’

‘Oh yes?’ Was it possible that Hillel shared secrets with this ape? And how very much like Harvey to remind him again of his arrest outside the Spanish embassy more than a decade ago. An elephant’s memory is not necessarily a blessing, Joshua thought.

‘From a report by your guns and glory pal, tricky Dickie Drexler, the pinko para. It seems that, from the time he naively thought he could clean up Tammany, he’s the Company’s election expert. They pulled him out of Stockholm and now he’s doing the same thing in Italy that you did in your time there, only on a bigger scale, spending twenty-five million a year. And not doing it under the table like you did but under the direct orders of Mrs Clare Boothe Luce, Ambassador to Rome of these sovereign United States.’

‘I know all that, Harvey. I marked his report for your attention.’ Harvey would have read it anyway; Joshua never met anyone else who worked so hard and so long. Virginia thought Harvey’s marriage was unhappy because of it but Joshua was of the opinion that the marriage was doomed on the day they arrived in Washington, with Jen being too much out of her depth in the circles in which Harvey now moved, lumbering ever upwards. Joshua would never forget Roosevelt’s words. A Harvey McQueen could not only collar an Adams, he could rise by ability and hard work to sit at the same table with him. That was what made America great. Joshua neither resented nor envied Harvey, but he was often vastly irritated by him. Virginia thought that odd, because Harvey possessed the mental refinement and taste of a plains gentleman whereas Joshua’s close friend Joe-Bob Rempton was all veneer lovingly applied by Joshua and David and Hillel over an appallingly crude foundation. The difference, Virginia said, was that Joe-Bob would slyly allow them to change him as long as there was advantage in it for him, whereas Harvey would be forever true to his antecedents and himself. Virginia did not much like Joe-Bob or his ever-agreeable and ultra-capable German wife. But she liked Harvey very much and tried to protect and help Jen whenever possible.

Harvey was still talking about Mrs Luce. ‘Now there’s one of the few women I could admire. Brains. Guts to match. She doesn’t give up, even when the commies try to poison her with arsenic in the paint on the walls of her bedroom.’

‘That was probably a mistake at the paint factory.’

‘Until we discover otherwise, I have instructed Rome to treat it as hostile action.’

‘Safe, but probably unnecessary.’

‘I insist, Joshua.’

‘All right. You insist. It’s done now, anyway.’ Joshua was damned if he would ask Harvey where the testicle squeezing came in. It certainly wasn’t in Richard’s report. Richard and his whole team were keeping a low profile, letting their dollars speak for them, dishing out money to any and all democratic parties for rent and organizational expenses but, reading the expense sheets, above all for wall posters, the key element in any Italian election. It was a propaganda war, without any Company involvement in the rough stuff that inevitably accompanies Italian elections.

‘Baffled, are you?’

‘No, Harvey, just waiting for you to tell me. I didn’t miss anything in that file, did I?’

‘Uh-huh. Race horses.’

Joshua experienced a sinking feeling. ‘Richard doesn’t say anything about horses. Not in any of his reports.’

‘No, but events keep occurring at race tracks or near them. And guess who’s big on horses? The one who now styles himself Lewis Mont d’Or.’ Harvey nodded his heavy head several times. ‘The same, now organizing the rough stuff for the industrial right wing. None other than your ball-buddy Luigi Corsa, the one you made a gift of a new Swiss face. He’s the biggest horse breeder in Italy, a pillar of la dolce vita. Luigi Mountain of Gold. Loverly.’

Joshua sighed. ‘How many files deep was that?’

‘Eight or nine. But it was there.’

‘Thanks, Harvey. I’ll send Luigi a message that his activities are counterproductive and we want him to stop.’

‘Tell him that if he doesn’t, you will come grab his balls again and Hillel will carve him a new face that will be much prettier than the one he left in Switzerland. I already signaled Richard that you will fix that little nuisance.’ Harvey changed the subject. ‘They promoted your man Granitti a full general and put him in charge of military intelligence.’

‘He dropped me a note to the house.’ Joshua was not surprised that Harvey knew before the official notification arrived on their desks via the military. Harvey, who had never left Washington, commanded enviable private sources everywhere, starting with the FBI and State in Washington and reaching through them into the furthest corners of the world.

‘It must be gratifying to own your own little country like Italy, lock, stock, police and army—several years after you left.’

‘Very.’

‘I don’t suppose I’ll ever get to try it.’

‘It was a wartime phenomenon, Harvey. We are returning to normality.’

It was not being born Joshua Adams, Harvey thought, but said nothing. Joshua was not to blame, nor his parents. My own grandchildren will move through the world with the same assurance, gathering pieces of it for themselves. I will have made it possible for them to hold high meetings of State in the Nassau Gun Club on Princeton campus. Once more Harvey studied the rich patina of the years on the paneling in the waiting room. Behind the double doors the CIA’s Board of National Estimates met in the Governors’ Room to decide what they would tell the President lay in the future of the country and the world.

2

The distinguished and sometimes dignified men who came from the inner chamber left in twos and threes. Several of them greeted Joshua and one called, ‘Good luck, Harvey.’

‘He knows something I hope we find out soon,’ Harvey said under his breath. ‘He’s never called me anything else but Hey, you.