“How long have you known this?” Charlie asked, irritated. “You said you took the pictures?”
“I don’t know who took them,” Street replied. “I said I took them, but that was a lie. Your dad gave them to me just before I met you at the White Horse Tavern. He had—”
“My dad?”
“Yes,” Street said. “I don’t know where they came from, but thankfully someone was tailing you that night.” He lit another Pall Mall. “I don’t know who took the pictures. For all I know, the Hellfire Club did it so they’d have leverage over Abner Lance and LaMontagne if they needed it. This is a weird and screwy group. And there appears to be a struggle going on within the Hellfire Club. Hoover and McCarthy and Ambassador Kennedy are on one side, the Dulles brothers and some other Ike allies are on the other.”
“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.