Martin Smith - Stallion Gate

"Sergeant, I find amusing something so puny as a boxing match on a night like this, but I suspect the general would call it a dereliction of duty."

Augustino saw the car as well as Joe. Augustino knew the cars from the Hill as well as Joe, and this was Teller's car. There seemed to be only one person inside. Her white hands held the steering wheel.

"You'd have to arrest half the MPs on the site. You're not going to do that."

"True, I do have other matters in mind."

Amazing he could recognize her even by her hands. In the dark, he could see her gray eyes look around the courtyard and stare at the jeep.

"Since these aren't my sticks," Joe said and nodded to the wands, "and since you aren't going to do anything about the fight, I better start looking for those Apaches."

"Good hunting, Sergeant."

Joe started the jeep's engine. He'd leave the courtyard and wait on the highway for her to catch up.

"Just one question," Augustino said, "and then you can go. One question, fair enough?"

"Ask."

"Have you ever seen Harry Gold and Oppenheimer together?"

"You're back on that kick?"

"You know Harry Gold, also known as Heinrich Golodnitsky?"

"Yes."

"And you've never seen him with our Dr Oppenheimer?"

"No."

Something dropped on the wands. Augustino produced a flashlight and shone it on a photograph of Oppy and Joe and Harry Gold. The three of them were standing on the corner outside La Fonda.

"I think I've earned another question, Sergeant. Have you ever seen Harry Gold with Dr Anna Weiss?"

Joe sat back and wondered where a photographer was that day in Santa Fe. The captain dropped a second picture. It was of Joe and Harry Gold and Anna Weiss on the same corner. She wore the silver hairpin she'd bought on the portal . "The tour bus," Joe said. "The dudes with the cameras."

"Yes. We had a pair of buses following him. Considering the fact they couldn't stay near him all the time, we were lucky." A third picture slipped to the seat. In this one, Joe and Gold were alone and Joe's hand was on the newspaper under Gold's arm. "You see, a Soviet courier doesn't just coincidentally bump into Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the Director of a secret US Army project, or Anna Weiss, a member of the project. That's why you said 'No' to me. That's why you lied to me."

"I was talking to Gold. Dr Weiss joined us to talk to me."

"That's all you have to say. You witnessed a meeting between Anna Weiss and a Soviet courier. You did the right thing in telling me."

Joe cut the engine. The rain had a steadier hiss now, a long-drawn, patient sound on the tarmac. Even at a distance and in the dark, he could see two heads rise from hiding in the back of the Plymouth.

"You missed Fuchs," he told Augustino. "Gold met Fuchs at a bridge a few blocks from the plaza. They switched newspapers. I was trying to get the newspaper from Gold, to see what Fuchs gave him."

"I'm not interested in Fuchs."

"He's the man Gold came to see. I saw them meet."

"I'm not interested in Fuchs."

"When you saw Gold on the portal , he was carrying a copy of the Santa Fe newspaper. At the bridge -"

"I'm not interested in Fuchs."

How often does a man see an example of love? A chance taken for him? Even if the danger was so much greater than she knew.

"Leave Dr Weiss alone," he said to Augustino. "That's up to you. It's her or Oppenheimer. You choose."

"I need some time."

As she waited, the windshield fogged before her face. Beads of rain idly coalesced and ran.

Go, Joe thought. Thank you, now go.

Augustino said, "Tonight. You know all the tests on the Hill for the last two days point to an ignominious failure here. We are on the eve of an historic debacle, Sergeant. Billions of dollars wasted. A chance to end the war lost. That's why Julius Oppenheimer is coming apart now, because he knows the bomb won't work. He knows the first question General Groves is going to ask is, who's to blame? Oppenheimer is a master of escaping blame. His wife is a communist, his brother is a communist, his friends and students are communists, but he says he's not a communist and here he is running our most important project. I didn't make up Harry Gold, Sergeant. Harry Gold came here with a message. If Trinity fails, it won't be a failure of American science; it will be the result of Soviet orders. When it fails, as it will tonight, I will do my part. My men are in Santa Fe, waiting to arrest Gold. I will arrest his co-conspirator. That's been my mission all along."

Run, Joe pleaded in his mind. Go!

"No one is going to believe any charge against Anna Weiss."

"No one will defend her. A refugee from a Nazi mental home? A scandal? The wives on the Hill will rise as one to burn her at the stake and Kitty Oppenheimer will throw the first torch. Sergeant, I have some small experience in security, and I can promise you that in the atmosphere following the failure, everyone will be relieved that someone was blamed."

"On what proof?"

"Gold, Weiss, you. Courier, contact, witness. The evidence does point to this sordid triangle."

Finally the Plymouth slipped forward, lights still out, a shadow reluctantly turning in the cafe driveway, the sound of its motion covered by the rain. Joe watched the car's tail-lights, a red blur fading. After ten seconds, an Army sedan with its lights out rolled from behind a motel cabin across the courtyard and followed. It was half a mile to the highway. For the first time, Augustino paid attention to Anna, now that she was gone.

"We assume she is taking those two fugitive medicine men to the border. I've told the officers not to arrest her without my direct order, but you certainly have incriminated her. And you will incriminate her more. You will incriminate her as only a lover can. How did she escape from Germany? While here, did she ever work to impede the development of the bomb, or prevent its application, or influence others to do so?"

"What do you want?"

"Gold, Oppenheimer, you. That would be perfect." Joe took a deep breath. "Let me see the picture again." Augustino picked up the top photographs and played the flashlight on the picture of Oppy standing with Gold and Joe in front of the hotel in Santa Fe. In glossy black and white, Oppy was angry, Gold wistful. With Joe cropped, the two men might have been holding an animated conversation. "It seemed like a chance meeting," Joe said. "I need more than a chance meeting." On to the picture Augustino dropped a white business card that said in raised letters, "Harry Gold". "I want this card in Oppenheimer's pocket - trouser pocket, jacket pocket, it doesn't matter. See, I have proof enough for myself. What I need for others is some minute piece of evidence, some concrete fulcrum of incrimination."

"When you knocked out Gold at the Casa Mariana, you weren't just searching him. You were taking out the card."

"Yes. When I took you out of the stockade, I told you you had a mission. That morning of the hunt when I let you live so you could bring Oppenheimer and General Groves down here, it was so you could carry out that same mission. To deliver that card. Or a card like it. Or evidence like it."

"What about the information you were always asking about?"

"Sergeant, you're much too truculent to be a reliable informer. You do the important things well, though. Oppenheimer and Dr Weiss. So, what is your choice?"

The rain came harder, more at an angle. He thought he could feel her turn south to Mexico.

The card was cheap pasteboard. Frayed at the corners. It fitted neatly into Joe's palm, slipped easily into his pocket. He started the engine again.

"Back to the tower?" he asked Augustino.

"To our patriotic duty."

29

At 10 pm an anti-sabotage light was hung on the first landing of the tower for spotlights six miles away to train on. The weak beams that penetrated the rain lit an open jeep in which Eberly sat, drenched, a submachine-gun across his knees. Jaworski and Foote, in soaked clothes and dripping hats, had opened the door to the standing crate called the "privy" at the tower base. Oppy watched them, a damp, dead cigarette in his mouth, his porkpie hat wet through. The door of an Army sedan opened as Joe and Augustine drove up in the jeep.