High Crimes (7 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A full
moon. A warm night. The watchers at their stations in their government-issue sedans lulled by the tedium. It was barely half an hour later. The doorbell rang, and Claire answered it. She wasn’t at all surprised to see the two FBI agents, Howard Massie and John Crawford, standing there in almost identical trench coats. No doubt they’d been summoned by the watchers and had rushed over.

Massie spoke first as they entered. “Where’s the envelope?” he demanded. He was a large man, larger than she’d remembered from the nightmarish scene at the mall and the “conversation” that followed.

“First we talk,” Claire said, leading them into the sitting area just off the foyer, a sofa and a couple of comfortable upholstered chairs on a sisal carpet, around a tufted, tapestry-covered ottoman neatly stacked with old
New Yorker
s. It was a part of the house they rarely used, and it looked that way, sterile, like a display in a furniture store.

Crawford began, menacingly: “If you plan on hiding something from us—”

Massie interrupted, “We need your cooperation, and if your husband has tried to arrange a meeting—”

“How can you prove to me the man you’re looking for, this Ronald Kubik, really is the same man as my husband, Tom Chapman?” Claire said abruptly.

Massie looked at Crawford, who said: “It’s the prints, ma’am. The fingerprints don’t lie. We can show you photographs, but his face is different.”

Claire’s stomach felt as if it had flipped over. “What does that mean, his face is different?”

“There’s only a slight, passing resemblance between the photos we have of your husband and those of Ronald Kubik,” Massie explained. “Photo superimposition demonstrates beyond question that they’re the same person, but you’d never think they were the same person, not after the amount of plastic surgery he’s had. Sergeant Kubik’s an extremely bright man, extremely resourceful. If it weren’t for your burglary, and the thoroughness of the Cambridge police, running all the prints and all, he might never have been caught.”

“
Sergeant?
”

“Yes, ma’am,” Crawford said. “We’re only the contact agency. We’re really working on behalf of the U.S. Army CID. Criminal Investigation Division.” Massie watched her with heavy-lidded interest.

“What the hell is the army investigative service interested in Tom for?”

“I know you’re a professor of law at Harvard,” Massie said, “but I don’t know how much you know about the military. Your husband, Ronald Kubik, is facing a number of charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including Article 85, desertion, and Article 118, murder with premeditation.”

“Who’d he kill? Allegedly?”

“We don’t have that information,” Crawford replied quickly.

Claire looked at Massie, who shook his head, then said: “We know you’ve been contacted by your husband. We need to know his whereabouts. We’d like to examine the package.”

“That’s what I called you to discuss,” Claire said.

“I understand,” said Massie. His eyes were keen.

“You and I want two different things,” she said. “I only want what’s best for him. Now, whatever he’s done, I know it’s not going to be cleared up by running. Sooner or later the Department of Injustice will catch up with him.”

“We thought you’d see the light sooner or later,” Crawford said.

Claire gave him a look of withering contempt, then said: “I don’t want a perp walk. No showy arrests in a public place, no leading away in handcuffs, no guns drawn, no manacles or shackles.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Since he’s arranged to meet me at Logan Airport, the surrender will take place in the parking lot at Logan across the street from the terminal. I’ll make sure either he’s unarmed, or he throws away his weapon, and you’ll be able to confirm it.”

Massie nodded.

“Now, before the surrender, I’ll want time alone with him first—a minimum of one hour.” Massie raised his eyebrows. “In private, so we can talk. Your guys can keep a close watch, so you can make sure he’s not going to run, but I want privacy.”

“That may be a problem,” Crawford said.

“If it is, you can forget taking him in. Or seeing his letter.”

“I think,” Massie said, “we may be able to arrange it.”

“Good. Next, I want assurances from you that you will not freeze his assets.”

“Professor,” Crawford said, “I don’t think that’s—”

“Make it happen, gentlemen. It’s nonnegotiable.”

“We’ll have to talk to Washington.”

“And I don’t want the FBI charging him with violating the False Identity Act. In fact, I’ll want all civilian charges dropped.”

Crawford glanced at Massie in astonishment.

“And I’ll want all of these assurances in writing, signed by an assistant director of the Bureau. No one lower. I want complete accountability. No one’s going to try to wriggle out of this by claiming they didn’t have the proper authority.”

“I think we may be able to arrange this,” Massie said. “But it’s going to take some time.”

“You take too much time, the window of opportunity slams shut on your fingers,” Claire said. “I’ll want signed documents by noon tomorrow. Our rendezvous is early evening.”

“Noon tomorrow?” Crawford said. “That’s—that’s impossible!”

Claire shrugged. “Do your best. Once we come to terms, you can read Tom’s letter. And then you can take him into custody.”

*   *   *

Claire left the house early the next morning wearing a bright royal-blue coat she’d bought once at Filene’s Basement in a fit of fashion dementia. She took Annie to school, walked her into the building and to her classroom, then returned to her Volvo and drove to her office. Two Crown Victorias followed like faithful sheepdogs.

At eleven-forty-five in the morning, a package arrived by courier from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Boston field office. It contained the letter she had requested, signed by an assistant director of the FBI, whose signature was an indecipherable jagged up-and-down EKG.

Half an hour later a messenger came by to pick up a sheet of paper and take it to Massie at the FBI office downtown.

When Connie went off for lunch a little after one, Claire gave her a shopping bag, which contained the bright-blue coat, neatly folded, and asked her to leave it with the waiter at the bustling fern bar/restaurant where Connie invariably ate lunch with her regular luncheon companions, two other Harvard Law administrative assistants.

Claire then taught a class, and canceled several afternoon meetings.

At four-thirty she packed up her briefcase, closed her office, said good night to Connie, and walked to the elevator. If a watcher was lingering in the waiting area on her floor, she didn’t notice. She took the elevator to the basement and wandered through the tunnels beneath the Law School campus for a while until she was certain no one was following her. They knew the tricks of their trade, they knew surveillance and patterns of pursuit, but she knew the entrails of the Law School.

At precisely five o’clock, just as Claire had promised the FBI agents, her Volvo pulled slowly out of the faculty parking garage. As she passed on foot, from a good distance away, Claire could see the dark-haired driver in a royal-blue coat and oversized sunglasses, a pretty fair approximation of Claire, or at least as close as Jackie could pull off, with the assistance of a wig she had hastily purchased downtown. The Volvo took a right into rush-hour traffic on Mass. Ave., followed closely behind by an unmarked Crown Victoria, and then pulled out of sight. Jackie would drive to Logan—a nasty, traffic-choked route at this time of day—and go from terminal to terminal as if confused about which one she was supposed to go to, and they would no doubt follow.

The letter Claire had couriered to Massie—single-spaced, printed on the LaserWriter in Tom’s home office on letter-size twenty-pound Hammermill CopyPlus Bright White paper, taken from a sealed ream and therefore without fingerprints, and unsigned—had instructed her to meet him at the Delta terminal at Logan, where he’d be arriving at five-thirty on the New York shuttle. There would be watchers waiting at the arrival gate, but, because they were suspicious, they would naturally follow her Volvo, to make sure she was going where she said she would.

Then Claire took a leisurely stroll to Oxford Street, behind the Law School, and located Tom’s Lexus at a metered parking space. It had been a few hours since Jackie had parked it there, and the meter had long ago expired, so Claire wasn’t at all surprised to find a Day-Glo–orange parking ticket tucked under the windshield-wiper blade.

*   *   *

Take the FM radio from the bedroom, Tom had instructed in the letter he’d sent her, not the one she’d drafted for the FBI’s eyes. Tune it to a station high on the dial, around 108 megahertz. Make sure the signal comes in loud and clear. Now take it out to the garage, and bring the antenna as close as you can to every surface on the car.

Listen for interference. Listen for a squawking noise. Listen for the abrupt change in the quality of reception.

If you detect the presence of a transmitter somewhere in the car, or you’re not sure, don’t go anywhere.

If the car is clean, go.

But wait for rush-hour traffic. Drive in rush-hour traffic, because they’ll find it hard to follow you when the traffic is dense. Drive at nightfall, when tailing is harder, because lights are visible for a long distance.

Take a circuitous route, he had instructed, which was easier said than done. If you’re being followed, nothing is really circuitous. Before you get on the Massachusetts Turnpike, drive around the city. Make four right turns, one right after another, to flush out any followers, because anyone still behind you has to be following you.

Make plenty of left turns, because left turns are harder to shadow unnoticed. Go through yellow lights whenever possible. Come as close to running reds as you can without getting killed.

They will not follow directly behind if they’re attempting covert surveillance. They will follow one or two cars behind. There may be as many as four vehicles following you. Or there may be none.

Watch the right rear of the car, the blind spot that followers favor.

Drive at inconsistent speeds. Speed up, then slow down. Drive very slowly, excruciatingly slowly, forcing everyone to pass you. Stop at a rest stop and park in the back. Have dinner. Kill a couple of hours. Take some hard object and smash out your rear right taillight. Then return to the pike.

At least once, make a U-turn on the pike, wherever there’s a turnoff.

Once you’ve passed Exit 9 on the turnpike—out beyond Sturbridge, in the far-western part of the state—begin to drive slowly, in the right lane, with your flashers on.

At first she had marveled at Tom’s expertise at tradecraft, at the techniques of surveillance. It was a side of him she’d never seen.

Then she remembered who they said he’d been, and she knew that at least part of it was true.

*   *   *

At just past ten o’clock at night, when it was too late to call Annie even if she dared, which she didn’t, she was driving along a stretch of the turnpike in the Berkshires near Lee, Massachusetts, where the road was lightly trafficked. She thought about Annie, asleep in bed, with Jackie downstairs, smoking.

The road became hilly out here. It cut through ravines, then out into the open, up a steep grade to the top of a hill. She drove slowly, in the breakdown lane, hazard lights flashing. No one was following her, that she felt sure of. As she began her descent down the steep gradient, she noticed, in her rear-view mirror, a car pull out of a wooded turnoff, lights dark, and accelerate until it was just behind her. The car flashed its high-beams twice.

She pulled off the road into the next turnoff, which was shrouded by a dense copse, and switched off her lights.

Her heart hammered.

She stared straight ahead, not daring to turn her head to look.

The other car pulled up just behind her and coasted to a stop. She heard the car door open, heard footsteps on the pavement.

Now she turned to look out of her rolled-up window and saw Tom, a few days’ growth of beard like charcoal smudge on his face, binoculars hanging from a strap around his neck, smiling down at her, and she smiled back.

Tears flooded her eyes, and she threw her arms around him.

CHAPTER TWELVE

She followed
him in the Lexus along a meandering route, off the turnpike, onto local roads that became country roads, until she had no idea where they were. Tom was driving an old black Jeep Wrangler, though where he’d gotten it he hadn’t explained. They passed through a small town that seemed frozen in the 1950s. She glimpsed an old orange Rexall Drug sign, a Woolworth that had to be fifty years old, an antique round Gulf sign. The town was dark and shuttered. Along an unlit country road past a low modern brick elementary school, through a railroad crossing, and then nothing for a very long time. Then Tom signaled her to stop.

She parked the Lexus and joined him in the Jeep.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

He nodded. “I’ll tell you everything. Soon.” He took an abrupt, unmarked turnoff into a dense forest, the road degenerating in abrupt phases from macadam to hard-packed gravel, on which the wheels crunched for a good five minutes, to rutted earth for even longer, until it dead-ended at a shelf of rock, jutting shale and schist and irregular boulders. He switched off the lights, then the engine, and let the Jeep coast to a stop. Then took a large black Maglite from the floor and motioned for her to get out with him.

By the flashlight’s powerful concentrated beam they entered a cluster of large misshapen firs, starved of sunlight in the dense forestation that crowded the shore of a small lake. He navigated a jagged course along a path that was barely a path, a lightly trodden trace of dirt between the towering trees. Claire followed him, losing her footing several times. She was wearing her dress shoes: no traction. Outside the cone of light that shone from Tom’s flashlight, she could see nothing. All was blackness. There didn’t seem to be a moon in the sky.

“Stay close,” Tom said. “Careful.”

“Why?”

“Stay close,” he repeated.

Finally he stopped at a small, crude wooden house along the bank—a shack, really—with a steeply sloping, asphalt-shingled roof that here and there was missing its shingles. The shack was in rough shape. There was a small window, but a yellowed paper shade pulled all the way down hid the interior. The roof came down low enough that Claire could touch the eave. The shack appeared to have been painted white once, probably decades ago; now the remaining splinters of white paint looked like tiny snowdrifts on the weathered clapboard siding.

“Welcome,” Tom said.

“What is this?” But Claire knew her question was all but unanswerable: what is what, precisely? That it was an all-but-abandoned shack on the shore of a deserted lake in western Massachusetts was obvious. That it was a hiding place Tom had somehow found, a bolt hole, was equally obvious.

She came closer. Tom had not shaven in a few days. There were dark circles under his eyes. The lines on his forehead seemed even more deeply etched. He looked exhausted, bone-tired.

He smiled, a lopsided, bashful smile. “I’m a crazy poet from New York who needs a little solitude for a few weeks. Place belongs to the fellow who owns the Gulf station in town. Used to belong to his father, who passed away twenty years ago, but his family won’t go near it. I scoped the place out a few years ago in case I ever needed a quickie escape hatch. When I called him a few days ago, he was more than happy to take fifty bucks a week for it.”

“A few years ago? You’ve been expecting this day?”

“Yes and no. Part of me thought this would never happen, but another part of me’s always been ready for it.”

“And what did you think was going to happen to Annie and me if this happened?”

“Claire, if I’d had any idea this was really going to happen, I would have taken off right away. Believe me.” He opened the heavy door, which screeched on its hinges. There was no lock. “Enter.”

Inside, the wide pine floorboards were rough and worn and looked dangerously splintery. There was a wood-burning stove, on top of which was a box of Ohio Blue Tip strike-anywhere kitchen matches. The air smelled smoky, pleasantly, like wood fire. He appeared to have made a home. A small cot stood against one wall, made up with an ancient-looking dark-green woolen blanket. On a tiny, rickety wooden table were piled foodstuffs: a carton of eggs, a half-gone loaf of bread, a few cans of tuna fish. Next to them was a small pile of things, mechanical-looking objects she didn’t recognize. She picked up one of them, a light-brown oblong box the size of a pair of binoculars with a viewfinder at one end.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“A toy. One of the things I picked up at an army-surplus store.”

“What is it?”

“Protection. Insurance.”

She didn’t pursue it.

The sound of a small plane high above broke the silence.

“Remind me not to buy property on this lake,” Claire said.

“There’s some private airport nearby. I think we’re on its flight path. So…” He put his arms around her and gave her an embrace so powerful it almost hurt. Once again she was reminded of the great strength in those lithe limbs.

He murmured, “Thanks for coming,” and kissed her full on the mouth.

She pulled away. “Who are you, Tom?” she asked quietly, venomously. “Or is it Ron? Which is it?”

“I haven’t been Ron in so long…” he said. “I was never happy when I was Ron. With you I’ve always been Tom. Call me Tom.”

“So, Tom.” Disgust now seeped into her voice. “Who are you, really? Because I really have no idea how much of you is left after all the lies are removed. Is it true, what they’re saying?”

“Is what true? I don’t know what they’re telling you.”

She raised her voice. “You don’t know … What they’re telling me,
Tom
, is more than you ever told me.”

“Claire—”

“So why don’t you finally tell me the fucking truth.”

“I was protecting you, Claire.”

She gave a bitter laugh that sounded like a hoarse bark. “Oh, that’s a good one. You lied from the first goddamned second we met, and you were protecting
me
. Of course, why didn’t I see that? What a gentleman you are, what a chivalrous guy. What a protector. Thank you for protecting me, me and my daughter, with three years of lies—no, what,
five
years of lies. Thank you!”

“Claire, babe,” Tom said, reaching for her again with his arms, and as his arms began to encircle her shoulders, she swiftly kneed him, neatly and to great effect, in the groin.

*   *   *

“When I first met you, I was lonely and depressed and making a decent living managing other people’s money. I had to run my own show, my own business, because anyone who checked out my employment history too carefully would have found everyone I’d ever worked for had gone out of business. Who wants to hire a black cat?” He smiled sadly. “By then it was already six years or so since I’d disappeared, become Tom Chapman, and I was still looking around me whenever I walked down the street. I was still convinced they were going to track me down, because they’re good, Claire. They’re really good. They’re ruthless and they’re killers and they’re really, really good.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“I worked for a supersecret clandestine unit of the Pentagon. A black OPSEC support group. A detachment of the Special Forces.”

“Translation, please.”

“An operational-security group—a group of twelve highly skilled, highly trained Special Forces who served as covert operatives the Pentagon could send out wherever they wanted to assist secret, often illegal, covert operations anywhere in the world where the Pentagon or the CIA or the State Department didn’t want anyone to know they were messing around.”

Tom was sitting on the edge of the cot. Next to him, Claire sat cross-legged. “Tom, you’ve got to slow down.”

But Tom seemed not to want to slow down. He kept talking, in an oddly intense monotone. “Officially the group didn’t exist. It wasn’t on any flow charts or directories. No record of its existence anywhere public. But we were extremely well funded out of the Pentagon’s black budget, their massive slush fund. We were officially named Detachment 27, but we sometimes called ourselves Burning Tree. Headed by a real zealot, a corrupt guy, Colonel Bill Marks. William O. Marks.”

“Name sounds familiar, I think.” She was overwhelmed. Her head spun.

Tom snorted in disgust. “He’s now the general in charge of the army. A member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 1984, when the Reagan administration was fighting a covert war in Central America—”

“Tom, you’ve got to rewind. Start at the beginning. This is too abrupt, too bizarre to make sense to me. Tell me what’s true, what’s not. You did or you didn’t go to college, work for a series of brokerages…? Is that all fiction?”

He nodded. “The story I told you about Claremont College—there was some truth in that. Only I was born and raised in a suburb north of Chicago. But it’s true about my parents divorcing, about my dad refusing to pay for college. And this was 1969, remember. If you weren’t married or in school or had some disability, you were drafted and sent over to Vietnam. So I was drafted. But for some reason I got plucked out for the Special Forces, and after my Vietnam tour was done they brought me down to Fort Bragg, and I was inducted into Burning Tree. I was good at it, and—I’m ashamed to admit it now—I believed in it. There was a real bond there, a shared zealotry. We all believed we were doing the dirty work that America needed done but its weak-kneed government was afraid to do openly.”

She looked at him curiously, and he smiled. “Or so I believed at the time. By the nineteen-eighties, the CIA and the Defense Department were up to their knees in it in Central America. The CIA was printing up training manuals teaching its agents down there how to use torture.”

She nodded; the CIA training manuals had become common knowledge.

“The Reagan administration was insane about routing the Communists down there. But Congress hadn’t declared war, so officially we weren’t supposed to be involved in combat there. Just ‘advising.’ So our unit was sent, wearing sanitized fatigues—so in case we ever got caught we couldn’t be identified—to help train the Nicaraguan guerrillas in Honduras and help out the government in El Salvador. Reagan’s State Department took the really clever, legalistic position that they didn’t have to notify Congress that the CIA and the Pentagon had secret units down there because the War Powers Act didn’t cover antiterrorist units. Which was us.

“So one day—June 19, 1985—in this nice part of San Salvador called the Pink Zone, the Zona Rosa, a bunch of American marines, off-duty and out of uniform, were eating dinner at this row of sidewalk restaurants. Suddenly a pickup truck pulled up and a bunch of guys jumped out with semi-automatic weapons and opened fire. These urban commandos—leftist, antigovernment guerrillas—managed to kill four marines and two American businessmen and seven Salvadorans in their ambush before they went speeding off. A real bloody massacre. Unbelievable.

“And the Reagan White House went apeshit. We had an agreement that the leftist guerrillas in Salvador wouldn’t target Americans, and now this. There was a ceremony at Andrews Air Force Base, where the bodies of the four marines were flown back. Reagan was furious. He vowed that we’d move any mountain and ford any river—you remember how he talked, that phony poetry—to find these jackals and bring them to justice.”

Claire nodded, eyes closed.

“Only what he didn’t say was that the orders had been passed down already. Get the fuckers. Get the guys who did this. ‘Total closure,’ they said—which everyone knew meant kill everyone remotely involved. So Burning Tree went out to find the murderers. We had an intelligence lead that the commandos, a splinter group of the leftist organization called FMLN, were based in this village outside San Salvador. A tiny village, I mean grass huts and stuff like that, Claire. The lead was wrong. There weren’t any commandos there. There were civilians, there were old men and women and children and babies, and it was obvious right away that this was no hideout for urban commandos, but, you see, we were out for blood.”

Now Claire stared at him, looked piercingly, fiercely into his eyes.

“This was the middle of the night. June 22. The entire village was sleeping, but we were ordered to awaken the entire village and drag them out of their beds, out of their huts, and search for weapons. I was checking for hidden caches of ammo on the far side of the village when I heard gunfire.”

And now tears streamed down Tom’s cheeks, and his head was bowed, his fists clenched.

“Tom,” Claire said, her stare unwavering.

“And by the time I got there, they were all dead.”

“‘They’?”

“Women and children and old men…”

“How were they killed?”

“Machine guns…” Head still bowed. His face was contorted, ugly, and his eyes were closed, but tears continued to drip down from them onto the rough blanket. “Bodies sprawled, bloodied…”

“Who did it?”

“I … I don’t know. Nobody would talk.”

“How many were killed, Tom?” she asked softly.

“Eighty-seven,” he choked out.

Now Claire closed her eyes. “Oh, Jesus,” she whispered. She rocked back and forth in silence, murmuring, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus.”