High Crimes (30 page)

“Officially, the secretary of the army’s—the only one senior to the general. Who never much liked Marks. But I’ll bet there were others who persuaded the secretary to convene the court-martial. Rivals of the general’s. We’ll see who they are when we see who succeeds Marks as chief of staff of the army. He had some powerful enemies.”

“So his enemies wanted a court-martial,” Claire said, staring into the middle distance, “in order to bring out, even within limited circles, the fact that General Marks probably gave the order to massacre the entire village, even though he didn’t know—not being there—that they really were innocent. A horrible mistake. And his enemies knew that a court-martial would bring out the fact that he lied to Congress about it, even had his memorandum destroyed. Lied about the massacre for thirteen years. They knew they’d expose his high crimes.” Now she faced Waldron directly. “And yet, at the same time, the court-martial had to be secret, closed to all but military observers…”

“Because, if the word got out that the U.S. military had massacred eighty-seven innocent civilians and covered it up for thirteen years, the worldwide ramifications would be incalculable.”

She nodded. “And now the pieces begin to fall into place.” She handed him a sheet of paper.

“What?” Waldron said, looking it over. “This is a medical record of some sort.… What’s the point?”

“Read it,” she said.

“It’s Hernandez’s—what, it’s about some eye injury or something?”

“You know that scar under his eye? He got it in 1985. At La Colina.”

“Okay,” Waldron said, still baffled. “He had it treated at the infirmary at Fort Bragg—”

“Right after the massacre. There’s a note there from an ophthalmologist and surgeon.”

“‘Burn and laceration to soft tissue inferiolateral to right eye not involving lid margin’…” Waldron read. “Why is this important? He got wounded at La Colina. So?”

“In his sworn statements he says he never fired a gun in the village,” Claire said. “Now read what the army surgeon wrote there. He recorded exactly what Hernandez told him. We’ve contacted the surgeon, and he’s prepared to back that up.”

Waldron read the sheet closely, and looked up after a minute. His eyes were wide with astonishment. “Hernandez was hit just below his right eye by a red-hot ejected shell casing while firing over two hundred rounds with his M-60. His barrel may have overheated, or he swung it a little too wildly.… Jesus fucking Christ. Your husband really
is
innocent.”

Claire nodded.

“My God,” Waldron breathed. He gestured to Hogan to come over at once. “Contact CID,” he called. “They’ve got an arrest to make.” He turned back toward Claire. “I—I don’t really know what to say.”

“Just get the guy who did it,” she said, and headed back toward Tom.

*   *   *

They walked out of the courtroom in a daze. The early-summer sunshine was blinding. They blinked owlishly, Tom and she. Tom was still in his chains, but that was how the military worked. They sat on the steps of the building, near the white van, the guards standing by at a discreet distance. Tom was weeping again.

Grimes approached. “Hey, you guys,” he said softly. “I guess this is where I say goodbye.”

Claire and Tom got to their feet. Claire put her arms around Grimes and pulled him close to her. She hugged him hard, the way a man saved from drowning might hug his rescuer. “I’m going to miss you,” she said softly. “Thank you.”

“Hey,” Grimes said, “I ought to thank
you
. I finally got the fuckers.” He noticed Claire crying, and added: “Don’t get so emotional. You’ll be getting my bill soon. Then you’ll
really
cry.” And he gave one of his unique, trademark cackles.

Once Waldron had returned with the document they needed, the report of results of the trial, she and Tom got into the white van and were taken to the brig. The next hour was a blur of bureaucratic procedures. The release order was prepared. Tom was escorted to his cell to pack his items. He was sent to sick bay to get his medical records, then to the mailroom to fill out a change-of-address card—the mundane things that had to be done!—and then to the control-center supervisor to hand in the checkout sheet. She sat in the confinement-release area and waited. She tried to think clearly, but her mind continued to reel. Then Tom was brought in. His brig uniform was removed, his brig items were taken from him, and his civilian clothes—including a good, freshly pressed suit that Jackie had brought up from Cambridge—were handed to him.

In about an hour, handsome in his charcoal Armani suit and a green tie, Tom was free.

They walked out together hand in hand. She felt the sunshine warm her face. The air was sweet and heavy with the chlorophyll scent of new-mown grass.

“Hey, honey,” he said.

“Hey.” She turned her face upward and kissed him.

His voice was low and sultry. “You saved my life.”

“Aw, it was nothing.” She smiled. “And I’ll tell you something else. Even better than being acquitted. We’ve got proof that Hernandez was the shooter.” She explained.

For a moment he seemed not to understand. Then his face lit up. “I’ll bet Waldron wants to bury it.”

She shook her head. “He’s already in touch with CID. They’re going to bring Hernandez in for questioning, but I’d say he’s headed for Leavenworth in six months.”

“Or less, if Farrell’s on the bench. I love you.” He leaned over and kissed her again, this time a serious kiss. “We’re going to be a family again.”

She squeezed his hand. “We’ve got some packing to do,” she said. “And some celebrating.”

For the first time, she dared to believe that they might finally have their life back.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

“
Who’s for
more paella?” Tom called out, looking around the crowded dinner table. He brandished a large silver ladle over an immense crockery bowl heaped with lobster, mussels, littleneck clams, chicken, shrimp, and innumerable other kinds of seafood mixed with rice, onions, garlic, and about a dozen other things. He made the finest, most delicately seasoned paella Claire had ever tasted. Of all Tom’s specialties, this was the one he most liked to prepare for guests.

Around their dining table in Cambridge sat Ray Devereaux and his on-again, off-again girlfriend; Tom’s chief trader, the darkly handsome Jeff Rosenthal, and his latest bimbo girlfriend; Claire’s closest friend on the Law School faculty, Abe Margolis, gray-bearded, pudgy, around sixty, and Abe’s wife; and Claire’s good friend Jennifer Evans, very thin, deeply tanned, mid-forties, straight dark hair cut in a highly stylized bob like the silent-film star Louise Brooks. She was unaccompanied, because she was in one of her frequent antimale phases. Next to Claire sat Jackie, who seemed tired, moody, and remote. Annie, in a white sailor dress already stained with saffron-yellow paella drippings, sat on Tom’s lap while he sang to her. She looked little and achingly pretty.

“No more for me,” Ray said. “This is my fourth bowl.”

“I’ll take some,” Jeff said, reaching for the ladle to serve himself.

They were all gathered to celebrate Tom’s return from an extended business trip to the Canary Islands to explore a potentially enormous venture-capital project, a cover story that none of them seemed to question.

“Wanna switch to red?” Claire said to Abe Margolis’s wife, Julia, a large and still very beautiful brunette in her late fifties, who was just finishing a glass of white wine. “Or are you still working on that?” She gave Tom a quick, undetected wink.

“Fill ’er up,” Julia said, extending her glass. “If they mix, what the hell, it’s rosé.” Claire, who’d had a lot to drink, poured unsteadily. “In the glass, if you don’t mind,” Julia Margolis said.

“I’ll have some of that,” Devereaux said. “That Chablis?”

“It’s merlot,” Claire said. “Close enough.”

“Wine is wine to me,” Devereaux said. “Either it has a cork or a screw-top.”

Tom bounced Annie up and down as he continued singing the song he was improvising: “If you’re happy and you know it, pick your nose.…”

“No!” squealed Annie. “That’s not how it goes. It’s clap your hands!”

“If you’re happy and you know it, pick your nose!” Tom sang in a booming, pleasant baritone.

“No!” she shrieked with delight. “You don’t know the words!”

He hoisted her way up in the air. “I love you so much, Annie-Banannie!” he exulted.

“Hey, Tom,” called Jen Evans. “In your absence, you missed the grand opening of yet another new restaurant in the South End.”

“Another one?” groaned Jeff Rosenthal. “Remember when the South End used to be a scuzzy hellhole? Now you can’t walk down Columbus Avenue without tripping over an arugula bush.”

“Arugula doesn’t come in bushes,” his bimbo girlfriend, the stunningly beautiful blonde Candy, objected with great earnestness.

“Oh, really?” Jeff said. A look of embarrassment passed briefly over his face. He was clearly in the terminal stages of infatuation with Candy. “Well, then, it must be a weed or something. Like, Italians are yanking it up from their flower gardens and tossing it in burlap sacks and shipping it off to America, laughing at us the whole time.”

Candy shook her head, eyes wide. “It’s not a weed, Jeff!” she exclaimed. “You can buy it in supermarkets! I’ve seen it!”

Jackie, silent and distant, rolled her eyes.

“This restaurant’s so loud,” Jen went on, “that you practically have to wear earmuffs—you know, those things airport workers have to wear to keep from going deaf when they’re working on the jets? Plus they won’t give you water or bread unless you specifically request it. Like it might drive them into bankruptcy or something.”

“If you’re happy and you know it,” Tom sang, “then you never better show it—”

“No! No!” Annie screamed, thrilled. “That’s wrong!”

“Boy, how do you like that story about the general who offed himself,” said Abe Margolis. General William Marks’s suicide was the lead news story everywhere. “General what’s-his-name. I’ll bet you we don’t have the real story yet. It’ll turn out he was facing some big sexual-harassment suit or something.”

“Blackmail, maybe,” Jeff Rosenthal suggested.

“God, there’s just
something
about a man in uniform,” vamped the buxom Julia Margolis breathily, then smiled lasciviously. “Those guys can’t keep it in their pants.”

For an instant Claire caught Tom’s eye. Devereaux inspected his half-finished bowl of paella. There was a brief silence around the table.

“Well,” Claire said, getting up, “I could sure use some fizzy water. Any takers?”

Several hands went up. Claire went to the kitchen. Tom set Annie down, and she scampered off. “I’ll help you with the glasses,” he said, following Claire.

Tom put his arms around Claire’s waist as she stood at the refrigerator gathering up cobalt-blue bottles of enormously overpriced Welsh sparkling water. “Hey, hon,” he said.

“Hey.” She raised her face and kissed him.

Then she said, “You know, Abe says he thinks Harvard’s going to keep me on after all. He says Dean Englander told him he fought like hell for me, and he won.”

“Of course Englander’s going to say that. He’s a politician.”

The phone rang. Neither one of them made a move to get it.

But Jackie got up from the dining table and answered the wall phone at the entrance to the kitchen. “Uh, sure,” she said into the receiver. “One second. It’s for you, Claire. It’s Terry Embry.”

“Terry Embry?” she said. Tom shrugged as he took the cobalt-blue seltzer bottles from her.

She picked up the phone. “Terry?”

“Gosh, I’m really sorry to bother you, um, Claire. Sounds like you guys are having a party, I’m really sorry—”

“Don’t worry about it, Terry. What’s up?”

“I got that stuff you asked me to get, the logs and all that, and I was going to FedEx it to you.”

“To my office, okay?” She gave the address. “And thanks.”

“You know Hernandez has gone missing? They want him for questioning, but no one can find him.”

“He’ll turn up,” she said.

She hung up and began gathering water glasses.

CHAPTER FIFTY

There was
a knock at Claire’s office door, then it opened. Connie, her secretary, tilted her head and asked, “Is this a good time to go over some more mail and messages?”

Claire looked up from a law-review article that a student had asked her to read. Distracted, she smiled, nodded.

“We got a real logjam here.” Connie sat next to Claire’s desk, set down a pile of mail. “I figure if we do an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon we’ll get caught up on your mail and phone calls by … oh, early next year sometime.” She shook her head.

Claire noticed the large white cardboard envelope with the Federal Express logo on it in blue and orange. “That FedEx for me?”

“Oh, right. Just came in.” Connie handed it to her.

The sender was Terry Embry. Claire opened the envelope and slid out its contents.

She drew a breath. “Connie,” she said, “maybe now’s not such a good time after all.”

Connie looked at her curiously. “Okay,” she said. “Let me know when.” She left slowly, glancing back before she closed the door.

Claire held up the small square black-and-white photograph and examined it. It was an enlistment photograph of a young soldier with dark eyes and dark curly hair. She read the name: L
ENTINI
, R
OBERT
.

A week or so ago, Ray Devereaux had put in a request with Army Personnel Records to locate the photograph in the archives. Then, at her request, Embry had sent for it.

She knew where she had seen Robert Lentini before, even though Robert Lentini had since lost his head of hair.

Robert Lentini had become a CIA operations officer named Dennis T. Mackie.

Her “deep throat.” He had shed his previous identity like a rattlesnake.

Maybe he had always been Dennis T. Mackie. Maybe he was a CIA officer even before he joined Detachment 27 and became Robert Lentini. These things happened. Stranger things, in fact, happened. The CIA liked to plant its people wherever it could.

Her source.

The man who had “somehow” turned up General Marks’s memorandum and effectively ended the general’s career.

She was beginning to understand. She pulled out a small square of paper, the routing slip that had accompanied the forged tape recording. It was headed C
ENTRAL
I
NTELLIGENCE
A
GENCY
.

The scrawled initials said “DTM.”

DTM was, had to be, Dennis T. Mackie.

Her deep throat.

The man who had “somehow” turned up a tape recording of Tom speaking over a field radio down in El Salvador, and had gotten it to the Defense Intelligence Agency; the tape that was not just a fake but provably so—good enough to pass prosecution scrutiny but not so good that a defense expert couldn’t prove it a fake. The piece of manufactured evidence that had jettisoned the trial and sprung Tom.

She felt faint. A splash of stomach acid washed up into her mouth, brackish and corrosive.

As she thought, she ran her fingers back and forth inside the FedEx envelope and realized there was something else in there, a stapled sheaf of papers. She pulled it out.

The photocopies she’d asked Embry to make from the Quantico brig visitors’ log of the last several weeks. The logbook that all visitors had to sign.

It took her only a few seconds to locate Dennis T. Mackie’s signature in the V
ISITOR
’
S
N
AME
column (R
EPRESENTING
: “Self,” he had written); then she found it twice more. Dennis T. Mackie had visited Tom three times in the last two weeks of his confinement.

Perhaps there was an explanation.

She called Jackie and asked her to pick up Annie immediately, take her for the night.

Then she called Ray Devereaux and asked his advice.

And then she drove home as quickly as she could, her heart thudding.

*   *   *

Tom was already there.

The house smelled of garlic, wonderful and inviting.

“Guess we’re not having leftover paella,” Claire tried to joke, setting down her briefcase and removing her jacket.

“Linguine with clam sauce,” he said. He came over, gave her a kiss. “Your favorite. Ready to eat? I’m starved.”

“Let’s eat.” Claire smiled. She had no appetite. Her stomach was a small hard ball.

“Where’s my little doll?” he asked, dishing out pasta and salad.

“She wanted to sleep over at Jackie’s.”

“She’s really gotten attached to Jackie, hasn’t she?” He dug into the pasta. “Sorry. Mind if I start?”

“Go ahead.”

“Aren’t you going to eat?”

She toyed with her napkin. “Tom, we need to talk.”

“Uh-oh,” he said through a mouthful of linguine. He chewed, swallowed. “That’s not an auspicious opening line.” He smiled, took a sip of sparkling water, took another forkful of pasta.

“Who’s Lentini?”

Tom’s chewing slowed a moment, then resumed. After he’d swallowed, he said casually, “Another member of the unit.”

“What’s his real name? Lentini or Mackie?”

Tom took a long sip of his fizzy water. His eyes watched her steadily over the curve of the glass. He set down the glass. “What’s with the cross-ex, Claire? Trial’s over.”

She replied very quietly. “Not to me. Not yet.”

He shook his head slowly.

She said very quietly, almost in a whisper: “Do you love me, Tom?”

“You know I do.”

“Then I need you to tell me the truth now.”

He nodded, and with a sad smile, he said: “Lentini—his true name’s Mackie, but I always knew him as Lentini—well, he’s really a CIA guy. CIA’s secretly been his employer ever since he was assigned to the detachment. So, anyway, he tells me that CIA considers—
considered
—Marks a real enemy, a bureaucratic opponent, and they all wanted to undermine his candidacy for the Joint Chiefs job. But I really think that with Lentini it was personal. He despised Marks as much as I did.”

“Is that why he gave Waldron the forged tape? To set up the prosecution, sabotage their case?”

“Does it make any difference now?” Tom took another forkful of pasta.

The room was utterly quiet.

“I’d like to know. Was it your idea or his?”

He shook his head as he chewed. He swallowed, said, “Claire, I haven’t seen the guy in years. Like thirteen years.”

Claire felt herself go numb.

“I have copies of the brig visitors’ log,” she said. “Right here. He visited you three times.”

He regarded her quizzically; then another expression took over, one of calm realization.

Slowly he set down his knife and fork. He breathed a long, soulful sigh. “Claire,” he said wearily. “Claire, Claire, Claire. This was all a very long time ago.”

She whispered: “You killed those people.”

He looked at her pensively. “I don’t think Marks knew the peasants were unarmed and innocent, but he was so riled up about his buddy Arlen Ross being killed at the Zona Rosa that he wasn’t thinking clearly. Later, when the shit hit the fan back at Fort Bragg and they needed a scapegoat, Marks sure wasn’t going to take the fall, and he wasn’t going to point the finger at his XO. Even though he gave Hernandez the fire order. So I realized it was my word against a major’s, and Marks was on his XO’s side, of course. And I knew I had to disappear. Because they were going to pin it on me. And they did, sure enough. And Hernandez and Marks have been blackmailing each other ever since. Partners in crime, so to speak.”

“But you fired, too, didn’t you?” Claire said. “You helped Hernandez massacre those people.”

Tom’s eyes became moist. “Marks knew he could count on me. Everyone in the unit refused except me and, of course, Hernandez.”

He reached out his hand and placed it over hers. It was warm and damp. She withdrew her hand suddenly, as though she’d been burned. She felt her stomach flip over. Suddenly she felt very tired. “You did it,” she said. “You helped Hernandez kill eighty-seven people.”

“You have to understand things in their proper context, Claire. These villagers, they were laughing at us. Totally uncooperative. I had to be a little coercive with them.”

“Torture them.”

“A few of them. Had to. But I couldn’t just torture some of them and then leave them there to report human-rights violations, understand? You don’t do that. You gotta mop up your own work. I didn’t have any choice.”

She felt very cold. She crossed her arms over her chest, hugged herself. She shivered.

“Marks knew he could count on me,” Tom said again, almost conversationally. “You know, before I went to Vietnam they put me through a whole battery of tests. And … and they concluded that I was—what was the expression?—‘morally impaired.’ Which was their way of saying I was just the kind of guy they needed. For the assassination squads, and later for Detachment 27. I could kill without feeling any guilt or remorse.”

She stared at him. The room seemed to be revolving slowly.

“The government
needed
people like me,” he said. “Always does. People who can do the job others won’t. Then, when they’re done with you, it’s, ‘Oh, we’re shocked,
shocked
at what you’ve done. Here, spend the rest of your life in Leavenworth. Here’s your thanks.’ I do what they tell me, and suddenly I’m a criminal when they don’t need me.”

Claire nodded. “I don’t get it, Tom,” she said. “The ballistics guy—there was evidence of only one shooter. All the bullets came from the same barrel.”

“All the bullets he examined. I told you those weren’t my bullets.”

She needed to make sense of this, even as her head was swimming. “I don’t understand.”

He shrugged. “I cleared the scene. I always liked to do my own mop-up. Always used my own ammo—German .308 rounds, full metal jacket, steel-cased. Easy to pick up with a magnetic wand. Unlike the standard brass shit Hernandez was using that won’t stick to a magnet. I went over the scene pretty carefully, got all the projectiles and cartridge casings. I never like to leave behind my calling card.”

Again she nodded. She swallowed hard. She got up from the table, made her way to the wall phone.

“What are you doing, Claire?” he said. He got up, came close. He smiled. “It’s over, you know. Remember? I’ve been found not guilty.”

She nodded again. “Of course,” she said blandly. She felt queasy. Her stomach boiled like a cauldron. She wanted to vomit. She picked up the receiver, punched out a seven-digit number.

“This is all between you and me, Claire,” he said. A note of harshness entered his voice. “You’re my lawyer. You’re bound by attorney-client privilege.”

She could hear ringing on the line.

“It’s over, Claire. Double jeopardy, remember? I can’t be tried again.”

Ringing. Where was Devereaux?

“Don’t do it, Claire.” He reached over and depressed the plungers on the top of the phone to break the connection.

She replaced the handset carefully. She looked around the kitchen, furnished so beautifully. So homey. How many breakfasts had they had there, she and Tom and Annie? How many times had Tom cooked dinner for his wife and stepdaughter? And all this time it had been a carefully sustained lie. How safe he had made her feel, when in fact she and her daughter had been living with a dangerous, sick man. “You need to turn yourself in, Tom,” she whispered.

“It’s not going to happen that way, Claire.”

She reached again for the phone.

He moved closer, his body between her and the phone.

“I mean it, babe. Don’t do it. Look how much we’ve gone through together. Look how much we’ve
got
together, you and me.”

She withdrew her hand slowly. “You’re sick, Tom,” she said, very quietly.

“We’re a family,” he said. “You and me and Annie. We’re a family.”

Claire nodded, head spinning, and once again picked up the phone.

“I mean it, Claire. Put down that phone. Think of Annie. There’s no reason to do this, Claire. We can be a family again.”

She shook her head, tears blurring her eyes, listening to the phone ring.

With a sudden motion he slammed the phone out of her hand, causing her to lose her balance, knocking her to the floor. He depressed the plunger, reached down to retrieve the handset, and replaced it in the cradle.

“I
need
you, Claire!” he shouted suddenly.

Sprawled on the kitchen floor, she looked up at him, saw his flushed face. She winced. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She reached over to her suit jacket, which hung on the back of one of the kitchen chairs, and retrieved the cell phone. She flipped it open, pulled out the little antenna.