High Crimes (8 page)

Tom, clenched and red-faced like an infant, sobbed silently.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A long
silence passed.

At last he spoke again. “The unit was recalled to Fort Bragg for debriefing. The word had gotten out. There had to be sanctions.” He wiped his face with his hand, squeezing his eyes hard with his thumb and forefinger. “The colonel denied he gave the order, and he made his men say the same thing when they were interviewed by CID, the army’s Criminal Investigation Division. They pinned the blame on me. They said I’d lost it. I’d flipped out. I’d killed all these people. Colonel Marks was afraid that, since I wasn’t there and I refused to lie for him, I’d be the weak link who’d tell the truth. So he turned the tables. Had them all blame me. I was naïve. I had no idea what was going on.”

“What do you mean?”

“Marks was spared. I was targeted for prosecution—for first-degree murder. Eighty-seven counts. And the ones who wouldn’t cooperate in the cover-up, one by one, each of them died—committed suicide in their cells, died in car crashes, you name it. And I knew I was next. Because the Pentagon wanted the entire incident covered up. You know the drill—any one of them could have tried to blackmail the Pentagon leadership, because they knew the command was complicit in the massacre.”

“So you escaped.”

“It wasn’t complicated. I slipped a bribe to one of the MPs, the military policemen watching me—asked him to step out and get me a Coke—and I disappeared.”

“Disappeared how?”

“God, Claire, we’d been
trained
in this stuff. Some of the same tricks they use in the Federal Witness Security Program. I took a bus to Montana, got a Social Security card, which is ridiculously easy to do once you get access to birth and death records—which are public. And from there you get all the other identity cards, and you start a credit record. I did my own witness-protection program. Made myself disappear and then reappear as a whole new person. But believe me, I was terrified the whole time. I worked at shitty jobs, washing dishes, short-order cook, auto mechanic, you name it. And I had plastic surgery done. The shape of my nose and chin altered, implants put in my cheeks. They can’t give you a whole new face, but they can change the old one so much that you’re virtually unrecognizable. And slowly and carefully I began to put together a false résumé. Fake medical records are the simplest—you just hand them to whoever your doctor is, no one questions anything. School and college records are the toughest—the U.S. government usually gets an administrator to plant fake school records, for the good of the country and all that, but I didn’t have the resources to do that. Still, my new identity had to be really solid, because I heard after a while that there was a price on my head of two million dollars.”

“Offered by whom—the Pentagon?”

“No, not like that. At least not officially. By the other members of Burning Tree, the surviving ones.”

“Including Colonel Bill Marks?”

“Now General Marks,” he said with a nod. “A four-star general. I’m the only one out there who knows about the massacre. If word ever gets out—”

“If it does, then what? That was, what, thirteen years ago.”

“—that the current chief of staff of the army, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led a massacre of eighty-seven Salvadoran civilians, men, women, and children, and then covered it up?”

She nodded.

“That’s why my fingerprints were on the national crime database. So that, if I ever turned up anywhere, arrested for anything, even just fingerprinted for anything, they’d have me. The local police didn’t know what they were doing when they ran my prints, but once they did, that was it. The Pentagon was alerted, and they sent the FBI and the U.S. Marshals. If I’d known they’d lifted my prints, I’d have fled to protect you and Annie. The Pentagon wants me locked up forever, I’m sure, and a lot of other people want me dead.”

“So who was Nelson Chapman?”

“A friend. Really, the father of an old army buddy. I saved his son’s life once. He was willing to help me out. He was also willing to lend me some money to start up my investment firm. I doubled his seed money in four months.”

“How long do you think you can hide out here?”

“Don’t know. Not long, before I attract suspicion.”

“I wasn’t followed here, as far as I can tell.”

“You did a great job evading them. Almost like a pro.”

“I followed your instructions, that’s all. What about the e-mail message you sent me—can they trace that?”

“No way. I sent it through an anonymous remailer in Finland. I have an e-mail account, one of those small independent service providers, which I pay for with money orders. I linked into it through a laptop I bought around here, secondhand, and a public phone and an acoustic coupler. The courier trick would only work once, I knew.…”

His voice faded away, and Claire turned slightly and put her hands on his knees and once again stared into his eyes. “Tom, you’ve lied to me for six years or more. I really don’t know what to believe anymore.”

“Why the hell do you think I lied to you, Claire?” he said, eyes flashing. “What do you expect, that I could have told you the truth? ‘Oh, by the way, Claire, I’m not really Tom Chapman from California, I’m Ron Kubik from Illinois, and, oh yes, I also haven’t really been a money manager all these years, I was actually a covert operative, and now I’m on the run. And, oh yes, another thing, I’ve had plastic surgery, so this face you’re looking at isn’t really the face I was born with.’ Is
that
what you honestly expected me to say? And
you
of course would say, ‘I see, that’s interesting, and what time’s dinner?’”

“Not at the beginning, maybe, but sometime after we got married, maybe you could have opened up to me, been honest.”

“And maybe I would have!” he almost shouted. “Maybe I would have. How do I know? We’d been married three years, baby. In the scheme of things, that’s not a long time! Probably I would have told you, when the time was right. But I looked at you and your little daughter—my daughter—and thought, The most important thing I can do in the world right now is to make their world safe. Is to protect them. Because I knew that, if I told you, you’d immediately be put into danger. You’d know, and once you know, you’re vulnerable. Things happen, people talk, word gets out. And I wasn’t going to do that to you. My job was to protect you!”

He encircled her with his arms, and moved to kiss her, but she turned away.

“What was I supposed to do?” he said.

“I don’t know what to say.”

He slipped one hand into her blouse and cupped her left breast, and she shook her head.

“Honey,” he said plaintively, withdrawing his hand.

She was torn by emotions, wholly confused. She could barely resist him, yet at the same time she desperately wanted to resist him. Finally, she closed her eyes and kissed him, and then he gently began kissing the nape of her neck, the swell at the top of her breasts, her nipples, the underside of her breasts.

*   *   *

She said, “I’m starved. I didn’t eat dinner.”

Naked, the two of them were entwined on the narrow cot.

He looked at his watch. “It’s three in the morning. Care for an early breakfast?”

“I’d love it.”

Another plane roared by overhead.

She said, “Three guesses why this lake is deserted.”

“After a while you don’t even notice the planes,” he said. He stood up, walked over to the stove. “We’ve got eggs and toast.”

“Brioche?”

“Sorry. Wonder Bread.” He knelt down, lit the wood stove, watched until it had caught fire. “Gotta catch sometime,” he said. “Ah, here it goes.” He smiled in satisfaction. “And that takes care of
that.
”

“It’s cold here,” she said. She got up from the cot and put on one of his plaid flannel shirts.

“Good idea,” he said, and slipped into his jeans and a T-shirt. He returned to the stove, put four slices of bread on the toasting rack and a chunk of butter into the hot frying pan, and cracked several eggs over it. The eggs crackled and sizzled and filled the shack with the most wonderful smells.

“Where do you bathe around here?”

“Guess.”

“That freezing lake?”

He nodded. Then, suddenly, he turned his head. “Claire.”

“What?”

“Do you hear something?”

“Don’t tell me you have animals out here, too.”

“Shh. Listen.”

“What are you doing?” she whispered as he walked to the door and began slowly to open it. “Tom?”

“Shh.” He looked out the door, looked around in all directions. He shook his head. “I thought I heard something.”

He slipped on a battered pair of Reeboks she’d never seen before and stepped outside. She followed him.

He stopped and looked up at the sky. Now Claire could just make out a noise from above that didn’t sound like an ordinary plane: a drone, high-pitched and insistent, that grew louder. As it did, another sound distinguished itself: the
thwack-thwack
of helicopter blades. Tom kept looking up.

“There must have been a transmitter in the Lexus,” he said.

“But I did the check you told me to do!”

He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have let you drive here. Even stopping the Lexus a few miles away. Those transmitters have gotten more sophisticated since my time in the military—you couldn’t have found it. Those planes we heard must have been small single-engine fixed-wing—”

Suddenly, from somewhere on the ground, came a series of sharp explosions that sounded like firecrackers going off.

“Oh, God, Tom, what is it?”

“My booby traps. Get back inside!”

“What?”

The
thwack-thwack
of helicopter blades grew louder as the helicopter approached and then hovered directly overhead, and suddenly a blindingly bright light came from the sky. She looked up. Bright lights shone down from the helicopter, illuminating the whole area. She blinked, her eyes trying to adjust to the sudden brightness.

“Go!” he shouted, and she turned swiftly and ran back to the shack, with Tom right behind.

He shut the door, grabbed her. “Get down on the floor.”

“Tom—?”

“Now!”

She dropped and flattened herself on the rough wooden floor.

“I strung up booby-trap devices all around. Trip wires nailed to the trees. They never expected it. My primitive burglar-alarm system.”

Before she could say anything, a loud, amplified voice from out of the sky boomed: “
Federal agents! Come out and drop all weapons!
”

“Tom, what are we going to do?” she cried, her voice muffled by the floorboards.

He didn’t reply. He was searching for something.

“Tom?”

“They’re not going to rush us, not with you in here,” he said. “Also, they don’t know what I’ve got in here. Now, they’ve got us surrounded, but they’re not going to move any closer.”

“What are we going to do?” she said desperately.

“Let me do it, Claire.”

She turned to watch him looking out the window through the viewfinder of the brown oblong box she’d seen earlier. He seemed to be pointing it up at the sky.

“Tom, what are you doing?”

“It’s a laser range-finder from a tank,” he said. “Old Special Forces trick.”

“Where the hell did you get that?” She turned her head so she could see out one of the windows.

The amplified voice boomed: “
We are the U.S. Marshals Service. We have a warrant for your arrest. Come out peacefully and no one will be hurt.
”

“Army surplus in Albany,” Tom said. “Thousand bucks. Use the laser to temporarily blind the pilot, zap him in the eyes. Old trick. We have no choice. That’s their surveillance post in the sky. Take care of that first.”

“
Come out with your hands up.
”

He pressed a button on the box, said, “Got him.”

She looked out at the helicopter, heard the racket suddenly get louder. The helicopter seemed to be tipping, banking to one side. Then, just as suddenly, it flew off, taking with it the bright lights.

The shack returned to darkness, the noise diminished almost to silence.

“Got the pilot with the laser. Pilot couldn’t see, probably freaked out. Copilot probably took over. They’re not idiots; they’re not coming back. That leaves our friends out there, but they’re going to be a little freaked out themselves.

“Looks like they’re fifty yards away,” he said.

Now another voice came from out in front of the shack, also amplified, flat and mechanical sounding: “
We’ve got you surrounded. Come out with your hands up.
”

“Stay down there, Claire.”

She turned her head to look up. He was standing in the shadows, peering out the open window.