The Hellfire Club(92)
“You little shits have no idea what you’re doing or who you’re dealing with,” he said, his tone hushed and menacing. “You think it’s cute that Charlie just alerted the Reds about our defoliation program, which we will need to protect allies and our own troops in the coming decades? You think you’re heroes? You’re not heroes. You’re treasonous.”
Charlie reached across the table to Street’s pack of Pall Malls. He shook the box, loosened a cigarette, and lit it with his German lighter. He exhaled into Lance’s face.
“Your chemicals are killing Americans, you insufferable worm,” Charlie said. “Americans. In Utah and Appalachia and Mossville, Louisiana. They’re poor Americans, and colored Americans, so maybe you and Chairman Carlin and your friends at the club don’t care. But I care. Isaiah cares. The guys we fought with in Europe—they care.”
“Spare me the sermon, Eugene Debs,” Lance spat. “If you want to go live in a socialist workers’ paradise, feel free to fly to Moscow right now—you’ll probably get a hero’s welcome.”
“You’re just sore because we figured it out,” Charlie continued. “And it was all right there in front of us.”
He withdrew a piece of paper from his wallet and tossed it in front of Lance: U Chicago, 2,4-D 2,4,5-T cereal grains broadleaf crops. “That was in my desk when I moved in. Or, I should say, in Van Waganan’s desk. And it took me a while to piece it all together, especially since the University of Chicago wouldn’t share the information about Mitchell and Kraus’s study. But as soon as we got hold of the General Kinetics dossier we figured it out. Two, four–D is a fairly common herbicide. It kills weeds around cereal grains. No real mystery there. Until you combine it with two, four, five–T—used to defoliate broadleaf plants—and the rest of what Van Waganan found.”
Lance pointed his finger at Charlie as if it were a sword. “Destroying brush where Communist guerrillas hide will save lives,” he said.
“And is that all the army had discovered in its testing at Fort Detrick? And Eglin Air Force Base?”
Lance once again stood. “We’re done,” he said. “I hope you have a good lawyer. And I hope your wives aren’t home alone.”
He left the table and the tavern with the speed and determination of a demon out of hell. Charlie and Street looked at each other, threw down money for the tab, and rushed to Pennsylvania Station to get to their wives as soon as possible.
At the precise moment Lance was vaguely threatening Margaret, the rain, brutal and unrelenting, was beating down onto the tarp of Margaret’s tent, and she was wondering how long the canvas would be able to withstand the assault. When she’d driven to the tip of the Maryland isthmus, parked, and then crossed the bridge to Susquehannock Island by foot, she’d wondered if the weather would render the trip pointless. But she had no way of reaching Gwinnett, and she didn’t want to disappoint him yet again; almost five months into her pregnancy, this would be her last outing.
Margaret had jogged across the bridge as quickly as she could with her slightly protruding abdomen, which meant she was soaking wet before she reached the halfway point, raincoat notwithstanding. She had guessed that by now Gwinett, Kessler, and Cornelius would have moved to this new island, and she was right. They’d even moved her tent here.
She felt thoroughly alone, unconnected to the researchers in the other three tents who didn’t know yet that she had rejoined them, hundreds of miles away from her husband, with no way to reach him, isolated from the world. She could vanish right now, on this spot, and no one would realize it for hours, if not days. A few months ago she might have reveled in that independence, but now, newly aware of menacing forces, she felt vulnerable. Her internal voice told her not to be so melodramatic, but then she reminded herself that these men in the Hellfire Club had tried to frame Charlie by killing a young woman and were, at the very least, indifferent to the poisoning of Americans in the name of some greater struggle against the Communists. They might even have killed Congressman Van Waganan, for all she knew.
She felt like Elizabeth Proctor in The Crucible, which Charlie had taken her to see shortly after it opened on Broadway. It was as if the whole world had gone mad. People who were normal, even friends, could be revealed as enemies, even evil. What was that line she had so liked from the play? Remember, until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.
She looked at her few belongings in the tent, transported over and tossed inside: a small suitcase, a sleeping bag, a journal, her night-vision binoculars. She was surprised to see the specialty binoculars in her tent, and she picked them up and held them. It felt like years since she’d left the Birder Emporium with them. Before this knowledge of everything Charlie was caught up in; a lifetime ago. Under the hiss of rain hitting the pines and the deeper-pitched sizzle of the spray pounding the ground, a faint murmur of conversation made its way to her ears. One of the voices—Gwinnett’s—was considerably louder than the others. She tried to focus, ignore the other noises, so she could make out what was being said, but to no avail.
Without knowing exactly why she was being secretive, she walked stealthily, heel to toe, toward the sounds coming from Gwinnett’s tent. The soil, a combination of hard-packed sand and dirt, had largely absorbed the water for hours, but saturation was now setting in, and small streams began swirling and trickling throughout the campsite. Twice a sustained gust of wind was strong enough to require Margaret to push her body against it to proceed on her path.