The Hellfire Club(99)
In the basement of the Capitol, Strongfellow guided Charlie through a labyrinth of unlit hallways.
“Where are we going?”
“To your wife. If you’re lucky, they’ll let you swap the dossier for her.”
“Why would they let me live?” Charlie asked. He didn’t expect an answer and he didn’t get one.
They passed storage rooms and the occasional maintenance closet, went down one hall, then another. They came across a stairwell leading them down an additional flight, though Charlie hadn’t known until then that there was a floor lower than the basement in the Capitol Building. At the bottom of that stair, Strongfellow guided them to the right, down a long hall so dark all Charlie could see were the two closed oak doors at the end of it. Their footsteps echoed above the dull hum of the generator as they finally arrived at their destination. On one of the wooden doors was written STORAGE.
“Open it and keep your hands up,” Charlie was told, and he obeyed.
The expansive room was filled with statues, fifty or more. In front of one honoring Confederate congressman John Tyler—a former U.S. president who’d backed the wrong horse in the Civil War—stood Margaret, her mouth gagged with a cloth, her hands tied behind her back with a rope, her pregnant belly moving rapidly in time with her breathing. To her left, leaning against a sculpture of Aaron Burr, stood Chairman Carlin, his arms crossed. To her right stood Leopold and the two thugs Charlie had seen out on Susquehannock Island.
“Honey, you okay?” Charlie asked Margaret.
“She’s fine,” Miss Leopold answered for her. “For now.”
“Congressman Marder, you’ve proven to be quite the irritant,” Carlin said. “Phil, did you check to see if he has the General Kinetics dossier with him?”
“Not yet,” said Strongfellow. He approached Charlie from behind, frisked him, and easily located the dossier under his shirt. Strongfellow removed and inspected it, then handed it to Carlin. The chairman looked at the dossier, then raised his eyes to meet Charlie’s.
His voice was low, the menacing tone unmistakable. “Do you have any idea how much damage you could have done to the security of this nation?”
“By exposing pesticide plants that are literally killing your fellow Americans?” Charlie asked.
“Might as well tell him, Mr. Chairman,” someone behind Charlie said. “If he’s not ever going to leave here, maybe he should know just how out of his depth he’s been this whole time.”
Street’s voice.
Charlie looked around and saw his friend lighting a cigarette, his gun in one hand, as casual as a summer breeze.
“There you are, Isaiah,” said Carlin. “I was wondering when you were going to show up.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Thursday, April 22, 1954—
Early Morning
Capitol Hill
“Oh my God,” Charlie said, and he looked to Margaret, whose eyes widened in disbelief.
Carlin and Leopold chuckled. The two thugs stayed silent. Strongfellow looked as if he wished he weren’t there.
Street ambled casually into the room, cigarette in one hand, OSS gun in the other. He stopped next to a statue, looked up, and regarded the likeness of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He smirked and pulled himself up to sit on the statue’s marble pedestal, then ashed his cigarette on General Forrest’s boots.
“You want to know why,” Street said, looking at Charlie.
“He’s not entitled to know anything,” Leopold said.
“I want to know everything,” said Charlie, turning his gaze to Carlin. “And start at the beginning: Did you have Van Waganan killed?”
“You don’t have to tell him, Franklin,” Leopold said.
“Franklin?” said Charlie, noting the unusual use of Carlin’s first name.
“Go ahead and explain it, Mr. Chairman,” Street said. “We never meant for Charlie to get tangled up in any of this. And certainly not Margaret.”
“Of course not,” said Leopold. “I did everything I could to try to steer him in the right direction. But you wouldn’t listen, Congressman.”
“Martin Van Waganan had figured out what you’re doing,” said Charlie. “That’s why he’s dead, isn’t it?”
“Martin Van Waganan is dead because he was even more treasonous than you!” Carlin spat. “Someone at the Pentagon told him about the University of Chicago study by Mitchell and Kraus, how a defoliant could be used as a weapon against the Reds. And then he started looking into all of it. He had all these connections at the Pentagon and in corporate America that he’d picked up on the Truman Commission. Thankfully, our connections quickly told us what was going on and we positioned one of our Hellfire Club nuns right next to him so she could keep us abreast of everything the whole time.”
Leopold nodded, lips pursed.
“That’s correct,” she said. “And just like Congressman Marder, Congressman Van Waganan ignored me and thought he was somehow above it all and that all of those working so hard to save this country from the Red Menace were its enemies.”
“Which reminds me, Charlie,” said Carlin, “you owe Miss Leopold and our security team here a thank you for saving your wife’s life. Louis Gwinnett had orders from his Soviet friends to do whatever he needed to get those files on the General Kinetics plants. I have no doubt he would have killed her.”