Each day — although there was no night or day in this place, so it might actually be happening several times a day because she had no way of telling the difference — they ordered her to strip naked, searched her, asked her politely to bend over and shone lights on her nether orifices as they examined and fingered the same. It was like living in a proctologist’s consulting room except the people here were less fastidious about warming up their hands first. Once this ritual had been observed her old clothes — a white baggy jump suit sort of thing which felt like it was made out of paper or crinkly cotton — and a pair of cream woolly socks, were taken away and new pairs of each brought in. She was told to get dressed and a few minutes later she would be taken out of the cell and walked half-a-dozen steps down a corridor which would not have been out of place in an episode of Dr Kildare — thinking about that nice man Richard Chamberlain, the hero of the series always gave her a tickle of guilty pleasure — where she was asked to sit in a hard chair on one side of a small table in a room with wall to wall mirrors at her back and to her front. Today two female guards stood sentinel behind her.
Within five minutes that day’s interrogator walked into the room.
“Would you leave us please,” he suggested to the two guards who wordlessly obeyed.
“Good morning, Mrs Zabriski.”
“Good morning to you,” Edna Zabriski responded and every day, until today, that was where the exchange had terminated. While she saw no reason to be gratuitously rude to her captors she saw no reason whatsoever to co-operate with them in any way. Her case was an open and shut one. She had wanted to kill the President for his crimes. She had failed but she had killed a man — the British leader — who was directly responsible for the sharp stab of grief and loss which had driven her to actually fulfil her personal pact with the Devil. And besides, she understood that whatever she said her captors would execute her in the end.
“I have been informed that other than exchanging brief salutations that you have refused to communicate with any of the officers with whom you have spoken while you have been in custody here at Langley.”
Langley?
Virginia?
That was only a few miles from the White House!
Edna Zabriski found herself studying the young officer sitting across the table. He had entered the room carrying a slim Manila folder which he had placed unopened on the table between them.
“I am Lieutenant-Commander Walter Brenckmann junior of the United States Navy,” the young man explained respectfully. “My father was the officer who first tackled you to the floor in the Oval Office. The last shot you fired caused him a concussion and deafness in his left ear for some days.”
The woman intuitively opened her mouth to say something but stopped herself at the very last moment.
“He’s fully recovered now,” Walter Brenckmann assured Edna Zabriski. The CIA had spent the last two days drumming into him how this thing had to be done. The fact of who he was might provide a ‘get in’, a way to break down the woman’s blanket resistance. The President had ruled out using drugs on her — truth serums and all that ‘malarkey’, he had decreed, tend to have bad side effects — and read the Agency the riot act when it came to employing rough stuff. ‘We don’t do that sort of thing to middle-aged women!’ Consequently, alternative strategies had had to be developed on, as it were, the hoof.
It so happened that the former Torpedo Officer and Assistant Ballistic Missile Officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt (SSBN-600), was the first reserve called off the bench.
“No, really,” he added, forcing a tight-lipped smile. “Pa’s a tough old bird. He isn’t the sort of guy to hold a grudge. In any other circumstance he would have been mortified to have had to climb all over you that way. That’s no way to treat a lady. He specifically asked me to ascertain that you weren’t hurt and are being looked after properly?”
Edna Zabriski’s lips moved, forming words that never escaped her mouth.
Timing is everything!
That was what the CIA men had emphasised time and time again.
Don’t get suckered in too early.
‘She must want to speak to you so badly it hurts!’
Walter Brenckmann patted the file on the table.
“Pa’s at home in Cambridge with my Ma now,” he said. “They tell me your husband was in Seattle on the night of the war?”
No reply but then he had not expected one.
It was still too early.
“My kid brother was in Bellingham that night. We all thought he was dead for five months but then he turned up in California.”
Edna Zabriski wanted to talk to the unthreatening, handsome young officer who positively oozed respect and sympathy. They had all been through bad times; nobody was unscathed.
“My kid sister was in Buffalo.” Walter Brenckmann did not need to act despair and loss, it very nearly choked him. “Her name was Tabatha. She was eighteen years old.”
In the last week the Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency had crawled over Edna Zabriski’s life in painstaking forensic detail. Investigators had spoken to anybody who had ever known her, to members of her extended family, every link, contact right down to what TV programs she liked, her musical tastes and her preferred breakfast cereal had been identified and analysed.
Edna Zabriski née Sayers was an ordinary girl from an ordinary blue-collar background. Born in St Louis she had worked as a secretary in her home town before her marriage Franklin Nathaniel ‘Frank’ Zabriski the only son of second generation Pomeranian immigrants. Her husband was an automotive engineer who had joined the Army Air Force in 1940. Frank Zabriski had left the Air Force in 1960 and gone to work as a contractor for Boeing in Seattle where he, like tens of thousands of others, had been consumed in the Seattle firestorm. At the time of his death he had filed divorce papers having by then lived apart from his wife for over two years. He had been planning to remarry — a widow some years his junior whom he had met in Seattle and with whom he was residing as man and wife — at the time of the October War. It seemed that Frank and Edna’s marriage, punctuated by frequent removals from one base to another, had not been a bed of roses. Edna had suffered at least two miscarriages before giving birth to her only son — Nathaniel Tobias Zabriski — in 1938, and suffered severe post-natal depression after that birth. Army Air Force and later Air Force Welfare Departments had taken Nathan into care on several occasions before his tenth birthday; eventually he had been fostered up to the age of fifteen by Edna’s married sister, Ida and her husband. During the 1950s Edna had not accompanied her husband on any of his overseas postings to Germany, Italy, or to Japan and had spent four separate periods in various forms of residential psychiatric care.
The Secret Service file prepared on her when she applied to work at the White House contained references to her mental illness in the 1940s, and listed ‘minor gynaecological issues’ that Edna Zabriski had experienced in recent years but had singularly failed to flag up any recent ‘psychological history’. It had not yet been established if this was a matter of bad filing, omission or prima facie treachery.
Since January that year Edna had been living with her sister Ida and her husband — a middle ranking official in the Office of the United States Attorney General — in Georgetown. Her sister and brother-in-law claimed they had had no inkling of what she had planned; apparently, Edna had found Jesus again after the night of the October War. Their only explanation for subsequent events was that she must have ‘flipped when she heard her son Nathan had been killed by the Brits in the Mediterranean’.