by Jake Tapper
“And what exactly is your role in it, Isaiah?” Charlie asked. “And why are you just now telling me about these pictures?” He was trying to control the anger in his voice, without success.
Street raised both hands in mild protest. “Listen, I didn’t know they even existed until this morning. Neither did your dad. I was going to tell you at the White Horse Tavern, but Lance showed up before I had a chance. Your dad called me first thing this morning and told me he’d managed to secure photographs that would be exculpatory. He said he was having them delivered to him this morning and I needed to come to his house to get them. He knew I was already coming up at your request. I met him, got the pics, then came to you. Ever since you told me about your predicament, your dad and I have been trying to figure out how to save you. Thank God his connection worked out.”
Charlie looked down at the floor. Street took another drag from his cigarette.
Charlie was silent, squinting at Street as he worked to piece things together. Outside, the rain beat down on another set of train tracks, beyond which leaned the shacks of the slums of Newark, New Jersey.
“So you’re like—a spy for my father?”
“No, no,” Street protested. “You and I are friends. That’s real, Charlie. But your father and I are…affiliated. And we talk. About things that have nothing to do with you.”
“Affiliated how?” Charlie asked.
But Street only shrugged. “That’s not for me to say right now.”
Charlie stared at him, then he stared out the window again. The train sped by a parallel roadside where signs, white on red and lit by individual lamps, had been hammered onto telephone poles: DON’T TAKE / A CURVE / AT 60 PER / WE HATE TO LOSE / A CUSTOMER / BURMA-SHAVE. The sky was a ceiling of black and gray clouds. Thick sheets of rain looked like ink stains in the distant horizon. A bolt of lightning flashed and then crackled several miles away, making the cloud behind it glow a bright yellow, as if it were a pinball-machine TILT.
“We’re all on the same side here, Charlie,” Street finally said. “Your father should be the one to tell you anything more. He’ll be furious at me if he finds out that I told you even this much.”
“You haven’t told me anything!” Charlie exclaimed angrily.
Street shook his head. “I’m sorry, I just cannot say anything more right now. Just know there are good people looking out for you.”
At this point Charlie wasn’t sure if there was anyone he could trust other than Margaret. Even his father had been withholding information.
The train continued on its southern path to Baltimore, with Washington at the end of the line.
The cloak of night had fallen on Susquehannock Island; the only light emanated from a flickering lamp inside Gwinnett’s tent and the two dim flashlights Cornelius and Kessler held at their hips. But through her night-vision binoculars, Margaret could see just enough: Cornelius stood on the bridge to the mainland; Kessler stayed in the wooded area between the bridge and the camp.
She was grateful she had the binoculars, though all they accomplished right now was to highlight the extent of her predicament. Short of swimming off the island—which in this storm was too great a risk—she was trapped, unless she could get them to move. Which would require a diversion. But what?
Determined not to give in to her fear, she tried to remain focused. Her only option was to get off the island before the storm subsided and the sun rose. She began moving west, to her left, crouching low to the ground, trying to be as quiet as possible, though her sloshing in the bog was drowned out, even to her own ears, by the roil and thunder of the storm.
She stood slowly, taking cover behind an elm, and used the binoculars to follow the green glow of Gwinnett’s body heat as he walked from the tent to the bridge. The other two men had turned off their flashlights, but she could still make them out in the distance. She considered running to her tent, where she knew she had a knife in her supply kit. Could she make it there and out without them seeing her? It seemed too great a chance.
She sensed something to her right. It started as a feeling, then she heard a sound. She turned the binoculars away from the men and saw a giant glowing green mass speeding toward the researchers. It was barreling through the rising waters that had formed in a field of salt-marsh cordgrass; it took Margaret a second to make out the individual parts of the immense shape.
The ponies.
It was impossible to get a precise count but there were maybe a hundred of them, all galloping from the wooded part of Susquehannock Island toward the men standing near the bridge. The stampede had started for no discernible reason beyond a storm that had been raging for half the day.
Gwinnett shouted something Margaret couldn’t make out in the tempest, and through the binoculars she saw the other two green shapes turn to see the ponies running toward them, and then the men began to run in three different directions.
With the stampeding ponies several yards to her right, Margaret—her agility and speed compromised by the pregnancy—jogged alongside them, running through the brush and onto the northern shore as the ponies continued their charge. The storm, while steady and intense, hadn’t noticeably increased in the past few minutes; panic was the only explanation she could imagine. She jogged behind a scrub pine tree, then looked around for any sign of a human as the last of the herd—foals, mainly, accompanied by their mothers—galloped past her.
Margaret realized that the distraction of the stampede might be her only chance to escape the island. She was about to sprint toward the bridge, when she saw Gwinnett emerge from behind a shrub thicket maybe ten feet away; she didn’t need her night-vision binoculars to see him. He was close enough that she could see him scowling at her, with a look of menace she’d never seen before. She stopped in her tracks and unconsciously reached under her shirt to pat her abdomen, to reassure herself that the baby was okay and also to calm herself. Her swollen belly felt perfectly fine, but the shock of her ordeal caused her to shake. A wave of nausea hit her and as she gasped, she was stunned by a bright strobe of light and, one second later, a loud crack.
She thought lightning had struck. But the lightning bolts that had struck the sea and the island over the previous few hours had been clear bolts zigzagging from the sky with deliberate speed. This was just a circle of light that flashed from the bridge, and it was followed by Gwinnett falling limply back into the thicket.
Then she saw: someone was on the bridge with a gun.
Margaret squinted as the beam from a powerful flashlight blinded her.
“Don’t move!” a voice commanded.
A woman’s voice.
The streets outside Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Station were being pounded with torrential rains, and taxicabs were scarce. When Charlie finally found one, the grizzled hack wouldn’t consider any sum to make the drive all the way out to the bridge to Susquehannock Island. “Never,” he said, chomping on his cigar. “And you ain’t gonna find no one willing to do it in this weather. Not no one.” The prediction proved correct, and soon enough Charlie was at the local Hertz auto-rental office, where he was offered a black 1951 Studebaker Commander.
The last time I was in a Studebaker was that night in Rock Creek, Charlie thought. And then he corrected himself, since he now knew he hadn’t been in the car that night at all.
When he was here a month ago, the journey via taxi had taken an interminable three and a half hours. Driving himself, he could theoretically drive faster and more recklessly, but with accidents and flooding from the storm, it took him five hours—an insufferably frustrating trek that reminded Charlie of a recurring nightmare he’d had in high school in which no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t reach an object that he desperately needed to.
As he neared the bait shop, he saw in the distance not only his car, which Margaret had driven there, but three others parked on the shoulder between the store and the footbridge. One car had its lights on and was still running. Charlie turned off his lights and pulled over t
o the side of the road.
At first Margaret didn’t recognize the woman. Her head was shrouded in the hood of a dark poncho; she looked like a sinister nun. But then the woman lowered her lamp and came closer, and Margaret realized who had just shot Gwinnett.
“Make sure he’s dead,” Catherine Leopold said.
Stunned, Margaret obeyed, hustling to the thicket where Gwinnett had fallen. She reached into the brambles and pulled him up by the back of the neck. His head was heavy and lifeless. No breath, no movement, no pulse. She gently released him back into the bush.
What on earth is happening? she thought. Why is Miss Leopold holding a gun?
“He’s dead,” Margaret said, still reeling from the intensity of the night, all ending with the shock of seeing Leopold. She was of course relieved that Gwinnett was no longer chasing her down, but why did Leopold shoot him, and who was she with?
Leopold turned to two other figures standing behind her, men that Margaret hadn’t focused on until now. “Go find the others,” she told them, and they hustled past Margaret onto the island.
From under her poncho, Leopold produced a cigarette, but she struggled to light it in the rain. She finally ducked completely into the poncho like a turtle and then reemerged with it lit.
Margaret braced herself to ask. “Why—”
“He was a threat to you, your Dr. Louis Gwinnett,” Leopold interrupted, exhaling her cigarette smoke. “He wanted the dossier, of course. Where is the dossier, Margaret?” No more “Mrs. Marder”; such formalities were no longer called for, apparently.
Margaret had so many questions.
“At the house,” she replied. “The dossier is at our house. We made a photocopy; Charlie has the original.”
Leopold nodded.
It all seemed impossible, this scene: Catherine Leopold holding a gun while they stood there soaking wet, minutes after the ponies stampeded. Gwinnett, who just hours ago had gone from seductive to menacing, dead in a bush just feet away. Margaret tried to make sense of it but couldn’t. She tried to appeal to Catherine, figuring it was her only chance.
“Thank you for saving me, Catherine,” she said. The rain poured down on her face as if she were standing beneath a fire hose. “He and his…goons were chasing me all over the island.”
“Gwinnett was a Communist agent,” Leopold said. “Did you know he was a Communist?”
“Yes. No. I mean, I suspected he had those sympathies from comments he’d made here and there. But frankly, it’s not all that unusual in academia. I never thought he took any action. But then a few hours ago I overheard someone on a radio telling him to get the dossier and to get me, so I ran and hid.”
Leopold took a deep drag of her cigarette.
“We’ve been following him for the past month, since we picked up shortwave radio chatter about you,” she said. “You must have heard some of that as well.”
“‘We’?” Margaret asked. “‘We’ve’ been following him for the past month?”
“Hoover,” she said. “I should be more precise. The FBI. Hours ago they picked him up talking to a Soviet agent; he was told to get the file at any cost. The Feds put out an APB for him, and of course Chairman Carlin and the others were also alerted. Through the club. I knew his whereabouts because we’ve also been monitoring you. And your house.”
“Can we get out of the rain?” Margaret asked. She shivered.
“In a minute. We need to wait for them to finish the job.”
They stood there in the darkness, rain beating on them relentlessly. Leopold flicked her cigarette into the brush. “You put yourself, your husband, and your country at great risk today.” She stared at Margaret with her enormous blue eyes, which right now conveyed fury. “I don’t mean to sound harsh, but you are a very foolish woman.”
From a distance came a bang and then the echo of a gunshot. Then another one, seemingly from the other side of the island. Margaret was terrified; her mouth was dry and her limbs felt heavy. Worried about her baby, Margaret touched her abdomen underneath her shirt again. “I don’t understand,” said Margaret, trying to keep the conversation friendly, trying not to sound alarmed. “All three of them were Communist agents? I thought Kessler and Cornelius were just grad students.”
Leopold shrugged. “The Bureau has been monitoring Gwinnett since the late 1940s; he’d been recruited years before, likely by Hiss. He’d been recruiting and had also been tasked with pursuing, er, friendships with susceptible young women in proximity to power. Your father-in-law was the long-game target, we assume, but then Charlie was appointed to Congress and your star rose even higher.” She gestured with her left arm, indicating the landscape. “This entire research project was funded by Mother Russia so Gwinnett could get close to you while Charlie was in Congress.”
“But why? Charlie’s just a freshman.”
“The Reds have tentacles throughout the government. Everywhere. And Charlie’s been the focus of a lot of groups. Clubs and associations. The Commies, the Hellfire Club, other competing interests. Folks want to be close to the son of Winston Marder. And when Charlie tried to stop the funding to Goodstone, he showed a certain egoism, a selfishness, early on that Chairman Carlin and others in the club knew needed to be stopped.”
“Can’t have too many folks trying to do the right thing, I suppose,” Margaret said.
“You and your idiot husband wouldn’t know the right thing if it bit you squarely on the nose,” Leopold said. “You think you’re keeping us safe? From what? The engine of our economic boom? From the makers of weapons that will protect us and prevent Communism from spreading here? I know your kind. You sneer at Joe McCarthy while he ferrets out the traitors in our midst. You turn your nose up at the workers who slave away at General Kinetics plants, but you enjoy their products and the safety they afford you and your unborn baby.”
Margaret felt her heart skip a beat. Is this really Catherine Leopold? A trained killer? She wondered if Leopold’s smiling, efficient, aging-beauty-queen persona had ever been legitimate. Margaret tried to appeal to her vanity by treating her like an expert.
“Why would the Reds even want the dossier?” Margaret asked. “Why would Gwinnett be chasing me down like that? I don’t understand.”
“We don’t know if they intended to leak the information to their lackeys in the press or, more likely, whether they were planning some sort of combination of espionage and sabotage, learning as much as they can about the chemical plants and destroying them when need be. The Soviets’ ability to recruit spies has been depressingly efficient.”
“I want you to know I appreciate your trying to help Charlie, trying to steer him away from this madness,” Margaret said, hoping her ploy to appeal to her captor wasn’t too obvious.
“I did for him what I tried to do for Van Waganan. I gave him advice on how to succeed on Capitol Hill and do right by the American people. Neither one took my advice, with predictable results.”
The two men she’d sent off hustled back from their tasks. “Should we go?” one of them asked Miss Leopold.
“Indeed. Put Margaret here in the backseat. Tie her hands and have her sit between the two of you. I’ll drive.”
At the sound of the first gunshot, Charlie had instinctively crouched into soldier position as if he were back in France. Except, he immediately realized, he was without a weapon.
He ran to the left, to the bank, as far as he could to escape from the beam of the one idling car’s taillights, and then slowly walked toward the bridge. He saw shapes on the island, barely illuminated by the car’s headlights, dissipating in the downpour. There were three figures, two larger men and one smaller shape. The two bigger shadows suddenly ran in opposite directions out onto the island, one to the left and the other to the right. Charlie took his chance and scurried under the bridge.
The footbridge from the mainland to Susquehannock Island spanned roughly five hundred feet, short enough to swim at a normal time but too far now, given the swift current. Charlie
held up the flame of his lighter to inspect the underside of the bridge; a stabilizing beam ran its length, with perpendicular bars roughly every ten feet. He could probably have made it across when he was at peak army fitness, a decade ago, but attempting to complete such a challenge today seemed mad.
And yet, what choice did he have?
Charlie put the lighter back in his pocket, then took off his overcoat and suit jacket and dropped them on the muddy bank under the bridge. He rolled up his sleeves and jumped up to the first perpendicular bar, which he was relieved to find was relatively dry. His grip was firm and felt steadier than he’d anticipated. Good. He swung himself back and forth like a trapeze artist until his body was parallel with the ocean and he could hook one leg around the long beam that undergirded all five hundred feet of the bridge. With his back to the ocean, he began to shimmy across.
About halfway along, he could faintly make out two women’s voices, one of them Margaret’s, though their tones were too low for him to discern what they were saying. As he continued, he heard a gunshot, and he froze, suspended above the churning waters. He started moving at an increased pace and soon heard another blast of gunfire. After what seemed like an eternity, he heard his wife speak again. As he approached the island, one set of heavy footsteps clomped on the footbridge above him, then a second set, then more. He heard Margaret’s voice as she crossed the bridge above his head.
When Charlie arrived on Susquehannock Island, he jumped to the ground, poked his head out, and saw four people walking briskly in the other direction, returning to the mainland. In the light of the car, the outlines of the men revealed their guns. As did the woman’s. She spoke, and Charlie recognized Leopold’s voice. Her gun was resting at the small of Margaret’s back.
