The Hellfire Club(96)
“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.