High Crimes (29 page)

“Sergeant,” Farrell thundered, “I told you to keep quiet. Now, you were advised that you have a right to attend this court-martial. However, if you’re going to disrupt this court-martial, we will arrange for you to watch the proceedings by closed-circuit television, do you hear me? You will not sit in my courtroom and disrupt it further, you understand?”

“
That’s not me!
” he shouted. “It’s not true.
That’s not my voice!
”

“MPs, take this man away!” Farrell bellowed. The brig guards immediately surrounded Tom and wrestled him to the ground as they clamped the handcuffs on him.

“
This is a goddamned frame-up!
” Tom shouted.

“I want him out of here
now
!”

The guards yanked at Tom’s elbow and led him away.

“All right,” Farrell said to Claire, when the courtroom was finally quiet. “You’ve got forty-eight hours.”

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Late at
night, Claire and Jackie sat at the kitchen table, drinking and smoking. The tape had already been flown out to one of the world’s foremost forensic voice-and-tape analysts, in Boulder, Colorado. Claire had chosen the expert carefully: the woman had done extensive voice-identification work for the military, and had even done cases with Waldron. She was virtually a Pentagon insider, and her word would be unquestioned.

“Of course he denies it,” Jackie said carefully. “He’s denied everything about this case, Claire. I mean, he denies it’s his gun, right?”

“Yeah, well, it’s probably not his gun!” Claire said, furious. “Or else they switched the barrel!”

“Of course they could have. These guys can do whatever the fuck they want to. But don’t you believe—deep down—that it’s his gun? That he fired it? That maybe Colonel Marks gave the order over the radio, maybe he didn’t, but
Tom did it
?” She poured more Famous Grouse into both of their glasses.

“No, I don’t.”

Jackie took a long sip of straight scotch, and shuddered. “Claire, if a man can lie to you about his entire
life
, why can’t he lie to you about the one horrible incident he’s spent his life evading?”

Claire shook her head. The exhaustion had defeated her. Tears flooded her eyes, and one of them splashed on the table. “I need to talk to him.”

The phone rang.

“It’s only midnight,” Jackie said. “A bit early for the breather.”

Claire picked it up, expecting Grimes or Embry.

“Professor Heller?” said a deep female voice. “This is Leonore Eitel, in Boulder.”

“Yes?”

“I hope I’m not calling too late—you asked me to call as soon as I had the first results—”

“That’s fine.” Her heart beat so loud she could barely hear the woman’s voice.

“Well, I’m afraid—I’m afraid it may not be what you want to hear.”

“It’s him, isn’t it?” Claire said thickly.

“I want you to know exactly what tests I’ve run. I used a really quite sophisticated system from Kay Elemetrics, a Computer Speech Lab Model 4300B, to run the oral and spectrographic analysis of the voice, and I matched it against the samples your husband gave me over the phone.”

“It’s him, isn’t it?”

“I looked at things like frequency on the vertical axis, and, in the time domain, the trajectory of formant structure, the consonant-vowel couplings. Pitch, which reflects vocal-fold oscillation and is represented by the vertical striations in the spectrograms—”

“
Damn it, is it Tom’s voice?
”

“Yes, it is,” the expert said quietly. “I used twenty-two different words, and I got nineteen very good matches based on the number of formant structures.”

“How certain are you?”

“Ninety-nine percent, I’d say. But I’m still not done with my tests, and there’s one more thing I need to check.”

*   *   *

Eight o’clock the next morning. In the long sterile conference room at the brig, the only one where there wasn’t a camera.

“I need the truth now,” she said.

He grimaced. “Come on, Claire—”

“No. Tell me the truth. Did you say that?”

“Of course not. We weren’t out in the field the day after the massacre, we were back at the hooch. And I never carried the radio—that wasn’t my job.” He smiled and sandwiched her right hand between his. “Come on, honey.”

“That’s your voice.”

“They faked it somehow.”

“You can’t fake that, Tom. That’s your voice.”

“Well, I didn’t say all that stuff.”

“And you’re telling me the truth?”

He withdrew his hands. “I’m telling you the truth,” he said softly.

“Promise me.”

His eyes expressed hurt. “My God, you think I did it, don’t you? They’ve turned you around, haven’t they? They’ve gotten to you—my own wife!”

“Come on, Tom!” she shouted. “I don’t
know
what I think! What about the gun?”

“We’re not still talking about that, are we? You proved how easily they could have—”

“Forget what I did and said in there. Forget my courtroom tricks. It’s just you and me now.”

“You showed how they could have substituted the barrel.”

“Don’t get legalistic on me. Did you kill those people?”

“Claire—”

“Were you ordered to do it? Is that why everyone’s covering up, to protect the general?”

“Claire—”

“If you were ordered to do it—well, that’s not really a defense, but we could argue mitigating factors, and—”

“And you think I massacred eighty-seven people?”

She looked at him, not knowing what to say. “Promise me that’s not you on the tape.”

For a long moment he looked at her, his eyes at once wounded and furious. “
I am not a monster, Claire
,” he said.

There was a loud knock on the door. She opened it to find Embry standing there, out of breath, holding a sheet of paper.

“What have you got there?” Claire asked.

“You asked about Hernandez’s medical records a couple of days ago,” Embry panted. “I had a buddy of mine check around—they were at the Pentagon dispensary, like I thought. He just faxed this over.”

“You got his shrink records?”

“No,” Embry said. “Better.” He grinned, then broke out into laughter. “Much, much better.”

*   *   *

The forensic tape expert, Leonore Eitel, was a petite and dignified-looking woman, slight to the point of tiny, silver-haired, with oversized round black spectacles. She wore a perfect dove-gray suit.

“If you would please stand in front of the witness chair, raise your right hand, and turn and face me,” Waldron said. The attorneys and the judge were meeting in a separate evidentiary hearing, a 39(a) session. “Do you swear that the evidence you shall give in the case now in hearing shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

“I do.”

Claire then took Leonore Eitel through her credentials, which were extensive and impressive. Then Eitel stated her findings: that the voice on the tape was indeed that of Ronald M. Kubik, a.k.a. Thomas Chapman.

“And what else, Ms. Eitel, can you tell us about this tape recording?” Claire asked.

“Well, to begin with, using a spectrum analyzer, I detected a sixty-cycle hum on the recording.”

“What’s the significance of that?”

“That’s the sound made by line power. That tells us that the voice was recorded on an electrical, plugged-in tape recorder, as opposed to a battery-operated one.”

“But couldn’t that hum have come from the tape recorder used by the Signal Corps, the people who allegedly taped the broadcast off the air?”

“No. If the speaker’s voice had been broadcast over a field radio and then recorded off the air, I wouldn’t have picked up that hum where I did. I can demonstrate precisely what I mean.”

“Thank you, but for now, let’s move on. Could this hum have been caused by copying the original?”

“No. I’ll explain—”

“In a few moments. What else did you observe?”

“The band width was different from what you’d expect to see from a voice broadcast over the air. The range of speech and microphone characteristics was markedly different, in terms of frequency response, from what you’d see in a radio transmission.”

“Is that it?”

“Oh, no. There were things missing that should have been there.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the keying of the microphone on the field radio, the button you push to transmit or receive. That sound was missing.”

“Anything else?”

“There were digital artifacts that shouldn’t have been there in an analog tape. That’s a real red flag. There were inverted V-shape figures in the upper frequencies, unexplained spikes in there, half an inch apart. Acoustic marks that aren’t associated with either speech or an analog tape recorder, but with a computer.”

“A computer?”

“That’s correct.”

“So what are you telling us?”

“That this tape was created on a computer, using editing software to splice together words and phrases. I would speculate that the subject did in fact speak all these words, but in a different order. Perhaps in an interrogation or an interview. My conclusion, and I state it with ninety-nine-percent certainty, is that this tape is a fake. A very, very skillful one—really, a beautiful job—but a fake all the same.”

The courtroom exploded. Farrell pounded his gavel. “Order!” he bellowed. “I want order! Trial counsel?”

Waldron’s eyes flashed with anger and shame. Both his hands flew up, palms out. “Your Honor,” he said, “we had no idea this tape was a forgery, we submitted it in good faith, and we hereby withdraw it—”

“You had a duty,” Farrell thundered, “to ascertain if it was real before throwing it into this court.”

“Sir, no one is as surprised as we are,” Waldron protested. “We had no reason to believe—”

“Sit down, trial counsel! I am appalled. I warned you there’d be no prosecutorial misconduct, and here you’ve had a general officer lie to this court, then he takes the Fifth like some drug dealer. Now you introduce this tape, and you didn’t even
ask
for the time to have it tested! You leave me no choice. Ms. Chapman, do you have a motion for a finding of not guilty on these charges?”

Claire stared at the judge, momentarily speechless. She got slowly to her feet. “Uh—yes, Your Honor, yes, I do.”

“Your request is granted,” Farrell said. “I find Sergeant First Class Ronald Kubik not guilty of all charges and specifications.” He gave a loud wallop of the gavel. “Trial counsel is instructed to prepare the results of the trial, after which the accused is to be returned to the brig for processing out of confinement. This court is adjourned.” And with another slam of the gavel, he rose.

*   *   *

Time slowed virtually to a standstill.

All around her was turmoil, yet everything seemed slow, quiet, muffled. The light seemed to have been refracted through a clouded lens. Her suit was soaked through with sweat. She moved slowly, as if underwater. She hugged Tom, then Grimes, then Devereaux. She smiled, laughed, then wept. Devereaux almost crushed her in his immense embrace, then shook Tom’s hand, too. Tom was also weeping. Embarrassed, he tried to shield his tear-strewn face from the gaze of others with a splayed hand. As she hugged Tom again, she saw Waldron storm past, then stop, then circle back to her. He stood and waited while Tom patted her on the back and said, “You saved my life, Claire. You saved my life.” She felt strange: relieved, of course, and mortally exhausted; but more—mildly depressed, and oddly tense.

“Counselor,” Waldron said sharply. He held out his hand, but his countenance was unsmiling. “Congratulations.”

She extricated herself from Tom’s embrace, held out her hand. “Thank you,” she said. She feigned geniality. “You did an impressive job. Apart from all the discovery stuff, which I’d like to believe wasn’t your fault.”

“It wasn’t. Can I call you Claire?”

She shrugged.

“You were a fearsome adversary, Claire, and one I hope I never have to face again.”

“Believe me,” she said, “I hope I never have to face
you
again, either. Let’s talk in private for a minute, okay?”

Waldron hesitated, puzzled. “Sure.”

They found a quiet corner of the courtroom where they could talk undisturbed.

“I hope you don’t believe I was behind that forged tape,” Waldron said.

She avoided his eyes. “Let me put it this way,” she said. “I don’t think it was necessarily your idea to put bugs in my rented house, but you didn’t exactly shy away from using whatever information you were given, right?” Waldron’s face was a mask, neutral and inexpressive. His eyes narrowed. “I just think there are a lot of people behind you who wanted to see you succeed. Such as General Marks.” She gave him a saccharine smile.

Anger flashed in his hawklike face. “The tape was given to me,” he said. “Believe me, I would never have used it if I had the slightest inkling it was fake. And by the way: he killed himself, did you hear?”

“Who?”

“General Marks. About two hours ago. Bullet through his head with his service revolver. Dressed in his Class A’s. In his office at the Pentagon.”

She felt the blood drain from her face. “
What
?”

“He knew his career was destroyed, and he’d be facing criminal charges,” Waldron said. “He didn’t want to go down that way.”

“I’m sorry he’s not around to see the acquittal,” Claire said.

“It wasn’t his decision to court-martial your husband.”

“Then whose decision was it?”