At exactly nine o’clock in the morning, Claire Heller Chapman entered the cavernous old Harvard Law School lecture hall and found a small knot of reporters lying in wait for her. There were four or five of them, one a TV cameraman hefting a bulky videocam.

She’d expected this. Ever since the Lambert verdict was announced two days ago, she’d been fielding calls from journalists. Most of them she’d managed to avoid. Now they stood at the front of the old classroom by her lectern, and as she walked right by them, they shouted questions at her.

Claire smiled blandly and could make out only fragments.

“—Lambert? Any comment to make?”

“—pleased with the verdict?”

“—Are you at all concerned about letting a rapist go free?”

A murmur of student voices went up. With the lectern giving her the advantage now of two feet of height, she addressed the reporters. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to leave my classroom.”

“A brief comment, Professor,” said the TV reporter, a pretty blonde in a salmon-colored suit with shoulder pads like a linebacker’s.

“Nothing right now, I’m sorry,” she said. “I have a class to teach.”

Her criminal-law students sat in long arcs that radiated outward from the front of the room like the rings around Saturn. At Harvard Law School, the professor was construed as a deity. This morning the deity was being assaulted.

“But, Professor, a quick—”

“You’re trespassing, folks. Out of here, please. Out.”

Muttering, they began turning around, straggling noisily up the creaky floor of the center aisle toward the exit.

She turned to the class and smiled. Claire Heller, as she was known professionally, was in her mid-thirties: small and slender, brown eyes and dimpled cheeks, with a tangle of coppery hair nuzzling a swan neck. She wore a tweedy but not unstylish chocolate-brown jacket over a cream silk shell.

“All right,” Claire said to the class. “Last time someone asked me, ‘Who’s Regina? And who’s Rex?’” She took a sip of water. There were a few chuckles. A few guffaws. Law-school humor: you laugh to show you get it, you’re smart — not because it’s funny.

“It’s Latin, folks.” Another sip of water. It’s all in the timing.

A gradual crescendo of giggles. “English law. Regina is the queen. Rex is the king.”

Loud, relieved laughter, from the slower ones who finally got it. The best comedy audience in the world.

The back door of the classroom banged shut as the last cameraman left. “All right, Terry v. Ohio. One of the last Warren Court decisions. A real landmark in liberal jurisprudence.” She cast her gaze around the classroom, a Jack Benny poker face. A few students chortled. They knew her politics.

She raised her voice a few decibels. “Terry v. Ohio. That great decision that permitted the police to shake people down for just about any reason whatsoever. Mr. Chief Justice Earl Warren giving one to the cops.” She swiveled her body suddenly. “Ms. Harrington, what if the cops burst into your apartment one evening. Without a search warrant. And they find your stash of crack cocaine. Can you be prosecuted for possession?” A few titters: the humorless, studious Ms. Harrington, a very tall, pale young woman with long ash-blond hair parted in the middle, was not exactly the crack-smoking type.

“No way,” said Ms. Harrington. “If they burst in without a warrant, that evidence can be excluded at trial. Because of the exclusionary rule.”

“And where does that come from?” Claire asked.

“The Fourth Amendment,” Ms. Harrington replied. The purple circles underneath her eyes advertised how little she’d slept her unhappy first year of law school. “It protects us from unreasonable government searches. So any evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment must be excluded from a criminal trial. It’s called ‘fruit of the poisoned tree.’”

“Like your vial of crack,” said Claire.

Ms. Harrington peered gloomily at Claire through raccoon circles of purple and gave a grim half-smile. “Right.”

The students, the smarter ones anyway, were beginning to sense the undertow: the good old liberal wisdom from Claire Heller, old Sixties Liberal, arrested during her student days at Madison, Power to the People, Fuck the Establishment. Time to whipsaw them.

“Okay, now will someone tell me where in the Fourth Amendment it says that evidence illegally obtained must be excluded from trial?” Claire asked.

Silence.

“Ms. Zelinski? Ms. Cartwright? Ms. Williams? Mr. Papoulis?”

She stepped off the rostrum, took an Oprah-like stroll down one of the creaky-floored aisles. “Nowhere, folks. Nowhere.”

From the back of the room came the reedy baritone of Chadwick Lowell III, sandy-blond hair already receding above round British National Health Plan wire-rim glasses, probably from his year as a Rhodes. “I take it you’re no fan of the exclusionary rule.”

“You got it,” Claire said. “We never had such a thing apply to the States until maybe forty years ago — a hundred and seventy years after the Fourth Amendment was adopted.”

“But the exclusionary rule,” Mr. Lowell persisted disdainfully, “didn’t exactly bother you at the Gary Lambert appeal, did it? You got his conviction overturned by getting the search of his trash excluded, right? So I guess you’re not so opposed to it, are you?”

There was a stunned silence. Claire slowly turned to face him. Secretly she was impressed. Mr. Lowell did not flinch. “In the classroom,” she said, “we can talk about principle. In the courtroom, you put aside whatever the hell you believe in and fight with every goddamned scrap of ammunition you’ve got.” She turned to her podium. “Now, let’s get back to Terry v. Ohio.”

Claire and Annie were hustled off to a small, windowless room just off the atrium — a mall security station, by the look of it, and judging by the uniformed rent-a-cops standing guard outside in light-blue shirts with dark-blue shoulder patches. Special Agent Howard Massie of the FBI, the man in the blue blazer, was beefy and crewcut, with small gray eyes and a pockmarked face. The other men were U.S. marshals.

As Annie squirmed in her arms, Claire said, “What the hell is this all about?” The knot of anxiety in her stomach had swollen; the underarms of her blouse were damp with perspiration.

Annie wriggled to the floor and held on to Claire’s skirt. She whined, “Where’s Daddy?”

“Mrs. Chapman,” Agent Massie said, “I think it’s better if we speak alone. Perhaps your daughter can wait outside, in the care of one of these fine gentlemen here.” He leaned forward and gave Annie a brief pat on the head. Annie, in reply, frowned, twitched her head, and shrugged away from him.

“You get your hands off my child,” Claire said. “You are not touching her. She’s staying here with me.”

Massie nodded and managed to regain a semblance of a smile. “Ma’am, you’re obviously upset—”

“Upset?” she gasped. “Ten minutes ago we were having dinner. Suddenly everyone in the world is chasing my husband, firing guns! You want to know upset? You’re looking at a multimillion-dollar civil lawsuit for the unnecessary use of force by two government agencies, reckless pursuit, and reckless endangerment of the lives of innocent bystanders. You and your cowboys just stirred up a shitstorm, Agent.”

“Mrs. Chapman, we have a fully authorized warrant for your husband’s arrest. As to the guns, we weren’t authorized to kill, but we were permitted to wound if necessary, and we didn’t even do that.”

Claire shook her head, laughed, and pulled her cell phone out of her purse. She extended the antenna and began punching numbers. “You might want to have a better story prepared for the Herald and the Globe,” she said. “You obviously have the wrong man, and you just screwed up royally.”

“If we have the wrong man,” Massie replied quietly, “why did he run?”

“Obviously because you guys were in hot pursuit....” She faltered, depressed the END button. “All right, what’s your point?”

“You see,” Massie said, “you don’t want to do that. You don’t want to call the media.”

“Oh, I don’t, do I?”

“Once it’s out of the bottle, you can’t put it back in. You may not want this made public. We’ll have any police report sealed, and we’ll do our best to quash any media coverage. You’d better pray you weren’t recognized.”

“Mommy,” Annie said in a high, frightened voice, “I want to go home.”

“Just a couple of minutes, sweetie,” Claire said, reaching around to give Annie a quick one-armed hug. To Massie, she snapped: “What exactly are you referring to?”

“Your husband, Ronald Kubik, is wanted for murder.”

For a long moment Claire was speechless. “Now I know you have the wrong man,” she said at last. She smiled in relief. “My husband is Tom Chapman.”

“That’s not his real name,” Massie said. He pointed to a cheap-looking white conference table. “Why don’t we sit down?”

Claire took a seat across the table from Massie. Annie at first sat in a chair next to Claire’s, then slid off it onto the floor and began inspecting the underside of the table.

“And even if you do mean my husband, Tom,” Claire said, “who’s he supposed to have murdered?”

“I’m sorry, we’re not authorized to say. Mrs. Chapman, or should I say Professor Heller, believe me, we know who you are. We’re aware of your reputation. We’re being extremely careful here. But what do you know about your husband’s background? What has he told you?”

“I know everything,” she said. “You’ve got the wrong guy.”

Massie nodded and smiled sympathetically. “What you know is his legend, his created biography. Happy childhood in southern California, Claremont College, worked as a broker, moved to Boston, started his own investment firm here. Right?”

She narrowed her eyes, nodded. “‘Legend?’”

“You ever check with Claremont College?” he asked.

She shook her head. “What are you implying?”

“I’m not implying anything. And, frankly, I can’t tell you much at all. But your husband, Ron Kubik, has been a fugitive from justice for thirteen years.”

“That’s the name you guys called him out there,” she said thickly, her heart thudding. “I’ve never heard it before.”

“He hasn’t told you anything about his past?”

“Either this is some colossal mistake, or you guys are framing him. I know how you guys work. Tom is not a murderer.”

“Three days ago you had a burglary at your home in Cambridge,” the FBI man said. “The local police ran all the fingerprints in your house, which is standard procedure these days, put them into AFIS, the computerized Automated Fingerprint Identification System, and your husband’s prints came up flagged. They’ve been on the system for years, waiting for him to commit some crime, or get fingerprinted for some other reason. Bad break for your husband. Lucky for us the Cambridge police were so thorough.”

She shook her head. “My husband wasn’t even home at the time,” she said. “He didn’t give the cops his prints.”

“The police ran all the fingerprints in the house in order to eliminate everyone who wasn’t the suspect. Naturally your husband’s prints turned up,” Massie said. “We came close this time. Unfortunately, a few minutes ago, we lost him somewhere in the parking garage. Your husband has disappeared before, and he’ll try it again. But this time it won’t work. We’ve got him.”

Her mouth went dry. She felt her heartbeat accelerate. “You don’t know who you’re messing with,” she said with a small, hollow laugh.

“He’ll get in touch with you,” Massie said. “He needs you. And when he does, we’ll be watching.”

Claire found the car in the mall parking garage, just where she’d left it, almost expecting to find Tom crouched in the back seat, or at least something there, some sort of sign from him. A note on the dashboard, or slipped under the windshield-wiper blade. But nothing. Their Volvo station wagon was empty.

For a few minutes, she sat still, breathing heavily, trying to regain control. The reality of what had just happened — or, rather, the unreality of it — was just beginning to sink in. While Annie sat in the back seat, licking at an ice-cream cone, her fright apparently having subsided, Claire’s thoughts were in turmoil. What had she just witnessed? If Massie was lying to her, as she assumed, then why had Tom run away? And where had he learned to do such things?

There was a car phone in the Volvo, and as she drove out of the parking garage toward Cambridge, she half expected it to ring, but nothing.

Where had he gone? Was he all right?

Their house was an enormous Georgian, saved from grandeur only by an unruly ramblingness, a series of additions slapped on by a succession of previous owners. It was on Gray Gardens East, in the toniest part of Cambridge. Even a good distance away, as soon as she had turned the corner, Claire could see the stroboscopic flash of blue light, the unaccustomed buzz of late-night activity that she realized was coming from their driveway. She felt her stomach twist and turn over.

The front door was open.

Looking closer, she saw that it had actually been taken off its hinges. Dread roiled her stomach. She parked the car, grabbed Annie, and ran toward the door.

Inside the house, men were everywhere, opening drawers and carting off cardboard boxes of papers. Some wore suits and trench coats; others were in dark-blue FBI windbreakers.

Annie burst into tears and choked out, “Why are these men in here?”

Claire stroked her back as they entered the foyer. “Nothing to worry about, my baby.” Then she yelled out, “All right, who’s in charge here?”

A man in a gray suit and trench coat emerged from the kitchen: tall, with a thatch of brown hair that was obviously colored, a few shades too dark, and a matching brown mustache. He held out a leather ID wallet. “Special Agent Crawford, FBI,” he said.

“Where’s your search warrant?” she demanded.

He glowered at her, then reluctantly reached into the breast pocket of his suit and pulled out a few sheets of paper, which he handed to her.

She looked them over. The first one, the authorization to search their house, seemed to be in order. It not only gave the correct address but described the appearance of the house. It also gave a ridiculously long list of items they were looking for, a laundry list so long, detailed, and comprehensive that it couldn’t possibly leave out a thing. Telephone records, airline tickets, bus or train tickets, any notes concerning times of flights and train departures, out-of-state newspapers, advertisements, any notes pertaining to such that might be found in the trash, in Tom’s files, among his personal possessions... It went on and on.

Claire looked up at Crawford. “Where’s the warrant affidavit?” she asked.

“It’s sealed.”

“Where is it?”

He shrugged. “Probably in the chambers of the federal magistrate. I really don’t know. Anyway, the warrant’s valid.”

He was right, of course. “I want a complete inventory of everything that’s taken,” she said.

“Certainly, ma’am.”

She looked at the second warrant, the arrest warrant, which listed that same strange name, Ronald Kubik. The FBI agent saw what she was examining and said, “It also gives his assumed name, Thomas Chapman, ma’am. Everything’s in order.”

She heard the team spreading throughout the house, heard the scrape of furniture against the wooden floor in Tom’s study immediately above, heard shouts back and forth. The sound of glass breaking. She cringed involuntarily. Everything felt unreal to her, terrifying and quietly menacing and unreal.

“They broke something!” Annie said, looking at her mother aghast.

“I know, honey,” she said.

“Mommy, I want these guys to leave.”

“Me too, baby.”

“Mrs. — uh, Professor Heller,” Agent Crawford said, “if you have any knowledge whatsoever about your husband’s whereabouts and you do not reveal them to us, you can be charged as an accessory after the fact, which in this case would be a felony. And obstructing justice, which is another felony.”

“Try it,” she said. “Go ahead, charge me. Really, I’d welcome that.”

Crawford scowled. “You have a vacation home?”

“We’ve got a house in Truro, on Cape Cod. You’re welcome to send your boys out there — I can’t stop you — but do you seriously think that, if he’s really on the run for some reason, he’d hide out in such an obvious place? Get real.”

“Friends, relatives he might try to approach?”

“What do you think’s going on?” She shook her head.

“You understand, Mrs. Chapman, that we’ll be watching your every move in case he tries to contact you, or you try to contact him.”

“I’m quite aware,” Claire said, “of what sort of shit the government is capable of when they decide to come down on you.”

Crawford nodded, half smiling.

“And you can bet my husband is aware of that, too. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to put my daughter to bed.”

Claire’s sister, Jackie, arrived half an hour after Annie went to bed. She was taller than Claire, skinnier, but not as pretty, with long streaked blond hair. She was two years younger but looked older. Jackie wore black jeans and a black T-shirt under her scruffy denim jacket. Her fingernails were painted, not black, but a sort of eggplant, a Chanel vamp color.

They sat on the glassed-in sun porch. The stuffy, overheated room was like a greenhouse. Its floor-to-ceiling glass walls were steamy; its outside surface was running with condensation.

“They really tore the house up, didn’t they?” Jackie said in her husky, smoker’s voice. She ate sesame chicken with chopsticks out of a white paper carton.

Claire nodded.

“Can’t you sue for that? Destruction of property, or whatever?”

Claire shook her head slowly. “We got bigger problems, kid.”

“What do you think’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted, her voice quavering.

Jackie took a swig of her Diet Pepsi, then fished out a cigarette from the pack of Salems. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Yes.”

Jackie flicked the plastic lighter anyway. The tip of the cigarette flared orange. She sucked in and spoke muzzily through a mouthful of smoke. “They want him for murder? That’s got to be bullshit. Pope Tom?”

“Pope?”

“Good Catholic and Mr. Perfect.”

“Very funny, Jackie. You don’t get it, do you? You’re making jokes.”

“Sorry. Did the arrest warrant say what he did?”

Claire shook her head again. “Sealed.”

“Can they do that?”

“You don’t know the government. You wouldn’t believe the shit they can get away with.”

“What’s with the name? Rubik or whatever.”

“Kubik. Ronald Kubik. I have no idea, Jacks.”

“Can that be right?”

“What do I know anymore? They seem so sure of it.”

“They say they’re sure of it. Who knows what the real story is.”

“Good point. I’ll have one of those. I need one.”

“Uh-oh.”

“You’re a bad influence.” She took a cigarette and the lighter from Jackie. She lighted it, inhaled, and coughed. “It’s been a couple of years.”

“Like riding a bicycle,” Jackie said.

“Ooh, menthol,” Claire said. “Yuck. Almost as bad as clove cigarettes. Tastes like Vicks VapoRub.”

Jackie looked through the steamy glass at the perfectly landscaped backyard. “So where is he?”

Claire shook her head, exhaled a cloud of smoke. The room was hazy with cigarette smoke. “They say they lost him in the parking garage.”

“Doesn’t that tell you he’s guilty of something?”

“Oh, come on!” Claire snapped. “That’s such bullshit. Tom’s not guilty of a goddamned thing.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Do? They’re right, he’ll get in touch with me. Or he’ll come back. And he’ll explain what’s going on.”

“And if he really is guilty of murder?”

“You know him, Jackie,” Claire said, low and intense and angry. “What do you think?”

“You’re right. He’s not a murderer. But he did run. And you gotta wonder why.”

Claire scowled, shook her head as if to dispel the thought. “You know,” she said after a while, “when all those guys were chasing him down, one of them reached him, and I thought it was all over. But suddenly Tom had him down on the ground. Disabled him with his bare hands. Crippled him or knocked him out — maybe killed him, I don’t know.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s as if— Well, I’ve never seen him do anything like that. I had no idea he could do something like that. It was scary. And the way he scaled that wall, the waterfall. It’s like a different Tom took over.”

“I had no idea he knew how to rock-climb.”

“I didn’t either!”

They sat for a minute in silence.

“Think there’ll be something in the papers about this?” Jackie asked.

“I haven’t gotten any calls yet. I don’t think anyone recognized me, except the waiter, who probably didn’t see the incident.”

Jackie exhaled a plume of smoke through her nose, her chin jutting forward. “Tom’ll be back. He’ll explain all this shit.”

Claire nodded.

“He’s a great stepdad. Annie adores him. Daddy’s little girl.”

“Yeah.” She felt a swelling in her chest. She missed him already, and she was frightened for him.

“Annie told me he came into her school for Mom’s Day last week.”

Claire winced. “I was all set to, but I was in New York, meeting with Lambert’s attorneys, and I couldn’t get a flight back in time.”

“Ouch. She must have loved that.”

“I felt horrible.”

“How come he’s able to just take off time in the middle of the day like that to go to her school? I thought he’s one of those obsessive-compulsive Type-A types.”

“He let his chief trader, Jeff, man the trading desk, I guess. I don’t know. Lot of guys wouldn’t do that.”

“At least he doesn’t call her Princess. That would be gross.”

“I get a feeling Annie thinks I’m the stepparent.”

“She was, what, like two when you guys got married? She doesn’t even remember when he wasn’t her daddy.”

“Still,” Claire said sulkily, “I am the birth mother.”

“You guys got any vodka?” Jackie asked.

She woke up, reached for Tom, and remembered.

A bit hungover from the booze, she made breakfast for Annie and herself, a four-egg omelet, nothing else in it or on it, but it came out okay, which was nearly a miracle. Tom was the family’s master chef, and eggs were pretty much the outer limit of her culinary ability. She flipped it onto Annie’s favorite plate, then cut it neatly in two, taking half for herself.

“I don’t want it,” Annie said when Claire set it in front of her. She was still in her pajamas, having refused to get dressed. “I don’t like eggs like this.”

“It’s an omelet, honey,” Claire said.

“I don’t care. I don’t like it. I like it the way Daddy makes it.”

Claire inhaled slowly. “Try it, honey.”

“I don’t want to try it. I don’t want it.”

“We’re going to share it, you and me.” Claire pointed to the omelet half on her own plate. “You see?”

“I hate it. I want it like Daddy makes it.”

Claire sat down in the chair next to Annie’s, stroked her incredibly soft cheek. Annie turned her head away sharply. “Babe, we don’t have any more eggs left, so I can’t make you scrambled eggs like Daddy does.”

“I want Daddy to make it.”

“Oh, sweetie, I told you, Daddy had to go away on business for a while.”

Annie’s face sagged. “What’s ‘a while’?”

“A couple of days, babe. Maybe longer. But it’s very, very important business, and Daddy wouldn’t leave you unless it was very important. You know that.”

“But why did he run away from me?”

So that was it. “He didn’t run away from you, sweetheart. He... well, he had to get away from some bad men.”

“Who?”

A good question. “I don’t know.”

“Why?”

“Why what? Why did he have to get away?”

Annie nodded, watching intently, hanging on her words.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Is he coming back?”

“Of course he is. In just a couple of days.”

“I want him to come back today.”

“So do I, baby. So do I. But he can’t, because he has some very important business meetings.”

Annie’s face was blank. For a moment it appeared as if the storm had passed, as if her concerns had been allayed.

But suddenly Annie thrust out both hands and shoved her plate off the table, onto the tiled floor. The plate shattered with a loud crash, sending shards everywhere. The yellow half-moon of omelet quivered on the floor, festooned with jagged slashes of crockery.

“Annie!” Claire gasped.

Annie stared back with defiance and triumph.

Claire sank slowly to the floor, burying her face in her hands. She could not move. She could no longer cope.

Her eyes pooling with tears, Claire looked up at her daughter. Annie stared in shocked silence.

In a small voice, Annie said, “Mommy?”

“It’s all right, baby.”

“Mommy, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. It’s not that, baby—”

The front door opened. A jingling of keys, then a cough announced Rosa’s arrival.

“Is that Daddy?”

“It’s Rosa. I told you, your daddy’s going to be away for a while.”

“Mrs. Chapman!” exclaimed Rosa, rushing over to Claire and helping her slowly to her feet. “Are you a’right?”

“I’m okay, Rosa, thanks. I’m fine.”

Rosa gave a quick, worried glance at Claire, then kissed Annie on the cheek, which she sat still for. “Querida.”

Claire brushed back her hair, nervously adjusted her blouse. Knew she was a mess. “Rosa,” she said, “I’ve got to be at work. Can you make her breakfast and walk her to school?”

“Of course, Mrs. Chapman. You want French toast, querida?”

“Yes,” Annie said sullenly. She slid her eyes furtively toward her mother, then back to Rosa.

“We’re out of eggs, Rosa. I just used the last this morning. On that.” Claire gestured vaguely toward the mess on the floor.

“Then I want toaster waffles,” Annie said.

Rosa knelt on the floor, gingerly picking up shards of china and putting them into a paper Bread & Circus grocery bag. “Okay,” Rosa said. “We have waffles.”

“Give me a kiss, baby,” Claire said, leaning over to kiss Annie.

Annie sat still, then kissed her mother back.

On the way out of the house, Claire picked up the kitchen phone and listened for the broken dial tone that might indicate a new voice-mail message.

There was none.

“It’s bad,” moaned Connie Gamache, her longtime secretary. “The phone hasn’t stopped ringing in two days. The voice-mail thingo is full, can’t take any more messages. People are getting mean. There’s a lady and several gentlemen here to see you.” She lowered her voice. “I use the term loosely.”

“Morning, Connie,” Claire said, turning to look. The waiting area, two hard couches and a couple of side chairs, normally empty, or maybe occupied by a lone student or two, bustled with reporters. Two of them she recognized: the New York Times Boston bureau chief, and a TV reporter from Channel 4 News that she liked. Claire raised her chin in a silent greeting to the two of them. The last thing she wanted was to talk about the Lambert case to a bunch of indignant journalists.

“I need to hire an assistant,” Connie went on without pause. “All of a sudden you’re Miss Popular.”

“I’ve got a faculty meeting in half an hour or so,” Claire said, unlocking her office door — CLAIRE M. HELLER engraved on a brass plaque, her professional name — and removing her coat at the same time.

Connie followed her into her office, switched on the overhead light. She was broad-shouldered, large-bottomed, white-haired; decades ago, she’d been beautiful. She looked much older than her fifty years. “You’ve got a lot of reporters who want interviews,” she warned. “Want me to send them all away, or what?”

Claire began unpacking her briefcase into neat piles on the long cherrywood desk. She exhaled a long sigh of frustration. “Ask what’s-her-name from Channel Four — Novak, Nowicki, whatever it is — how long she needs. Ask the Times guy if he can come back later on, maybe this afternoon.”

Connie shook her head in grave disapproval. She was good at handling the media but considered them all leeches to be plucked off the instant they’d affixed themselves. Claire was grateful, actually, for her secretary’s concern, since she was usually right — reporters tended to sensationalize, exaggerate, and fuck you over if they possibly could. And usually they got their stories wrong. In a minute Connie returned. “Now I’ve got them mad. Carol Novak says she just needs five or ten minutes.”

“Okay,” Claire said. Carol Novak, that was her name, had been good to her — smart, reasonably accurate, with less of the animus toward Harvard than the other local reporters tended to exhibit. “Give me a couple of minutes to check my e-mail, then send Carol Novak in.”

“I want to eat while I’m watching Beauty and the Beast,” Annie chanted.

“You’ll eat at the table,” Claire said as sternly as she could. Jackie served Claire and herself salad from an immense rustic Tuscan bowl. Salads were one of her specialties. Jackie was a vegetarian these days, having gone through vegan and macrobiotic phases, all the while smoking heavily.

“No. I want to eat while I’m watching Beauty and the Beast. I want to eat macaroni-and-cheese on the couch while I’m watching Beauty and the Beast.”

At one end of the spacious kitchen was a corner where Annie stashed her vast collection of toys, which included a ragged Elmo, a torn Kermit the Frog puppet, a battle-scarred Mr. Potato Head. There were dozens of others that Annie hadn’t touched or even noticed in months. A large television set faced a tattered, slipcovered sofa stained with a thousand microwaved frozen macaroni-and-cheeses, a thousand sippy-cups of grape juice, a thousand red popsicles (no flavor known to man, just red).

“Come on, kiddo,” Jackie said, “come eat with your mommy and me.”

“No.”

“We’re a family,” Claire said, exasperated. “We eat together. And you’re not having macaroni-and-cheese. Jackie made some delicious chicken.”

Annie ran over to the sofa and defiantly popped the Beauty and the Beast video into the VCR. “I want macaroni-and-cheese,” she said.

“Not on the menu tonight, kiddo,” Jackie said. “Sorry.” To Claire, she said: “You poor thing. What would you do without me?”

“I don’t know,” Claire acknowledged, and said, louder: “Okay, listen, Annie. Come over here.”

Her daughter obediently returned, stood erect in front of Claire as if at an army inspection. She knew she had maneuvered herself onto the shoals of big trouble.

“If you’ll eat the chicken Jackie made, you can watch Beauty and the Beast. On the couch.”

“Okay!” Annie said, running back to the couch. “Excellent!” She pressed the VCR’s play button, and dove onto the couch to enjoy the lengthy previews for other Disney videos and the ad for Disney World.

“That’s laying down the law,” Jackie muttered. “You disciplinarian, you.”

“But just this once!” Claire called out lamely. She dished out roast chicken and mashed potatoes on a plate and brought it over to Annie, with a small fork and a napkin. As she turned back to the kitchen table, she noticed something outside the window, a dark shape visible through the lilac bushes.

A dark-blue government car: a Crown Victoria. Jackie saw Claire staring out the window and said, “Aren’t these goons outside driving you crazy?”

“You have no idea,” Claire said. “One followed me to and from work today.”

“You can’t do anything about it?”

“Well, they’re on public property. They’re respecting the curtilage.”

“The who?”

“Curtilage. The area of privacy around a dwelling. They’re not trespassing. They have the right to be there.”

“What about your freedom of — I don’t know, freedom not to be molested by goons?”

Claire half smiled. “Of course, maybe I could go to court to get a 209-A restraining order against them. Make ’em stay a hundred yards away from me.”

“Yeah,” Jackie said, “I bet that would go over big, trying to get some local judge to order the federal government to back off. I don’t think so.”

“I called Tom’s office,” Claire said. She returned to the table and, stomach tight, tried to regain an appetite for the dinner Jackie had cooked. “Apparently Tom left e-mail messages for his chief trader, Jeff Rosenthal, and his assistant, Vivian, telling them he had to make a sudden, very hush-hush business trip out of the country. Said he’d be gone for a week, maybe longer. They were wondering what’s going on, because everyone at Chapman & Company was questioned at home by FBI agents asking lots of questions about Tom and his whereabouts.”

“That must’ve made ’em suspicious.”

“To say the least. Tom told them in his e-mail that the FBI might be questioning them in connection with a security clearance. I don’t think they were convinced.”

“No,” Jackie said, “I bet not. They’ve got to be wondering, just like we are.”

From the street, the Dunkin’ Donuts in Central Square looked like some high-priced gourmet shop in Concord, the kind that sells forty types of balsamic vinegar and no iceberg lettuce. Its hunter-green façade, with a grid of tiny window panes, had recently been renovated in one of the spasms of gentrification that overcame Central Square every few years. But it would recede, like all the others, leaving the fundamental seediness of the place untouched. Unlovely Central Square, land of a thousand Indian restaurants, home of ninety-nine-cent stores and store-front lawyers and discount jewelry exchanges, would never lose its genuine decrepit proletarian soul.

Ray Devereaux had called her early in the morning and asked her to meet him after she dropped off Annie at school. Claire had an hour to spare before she had to be at Harvard to lecture. She refused to cancel her classes. She was keeping up with all appointments, all classes, all meetings — keeping up appearances, even though she could barely concentrate on anything but Tom. Ray was already sitting at a tiny magenta modular table, his immense girth spilling awkwardly over the narrow rail-back chair attached. An empty baby stroller crowded him. The baby, whose mother sat indifferently nearby with an immense crinkling plastic shopping bag in her lap, toddled around the seating area in a red bunny suit tied at the neck with a pink bow. The mother, a large dark-haired woman, was having a heated conversation in Greek with a silver-haired, large-nosed old man in a black leather jacket. Soft rock blared over the speakers (Rod Stewart rasping “Reason to Believe”), competing with the almost deafening white noise of the exhaust system.

Ray was fastidiously tucking into a chocolate cruller and taking sips from a refillable plastic commuter mug. He was a regular.

“You’ve got company,” he said nonchalantly.

“Hmm?”

“You’ve grown a tail.”

Claire turned back toward the plate-glass front of the shop. A dark-blue Crown Vic was just pulling away from the curb.

“Oh, that,” she said. “Yeah, they’ve been tailing me all over the place. To and from work. They’re just trying to bust my balls.”

“They probably think you got balls, honey.” He chuckled. “But they’re gone now. They can’t double-park here, not in the middle of traffic.”

He took another large bite of the cruller, wiped his hands with the little napkins to remove the sticky stuff. “So I put out some lines to my friends in the Cambridge PD,” he said. “The good news is they got the guy who did the B & E. Your paintings will be harder to find.”

“Ray, you didn’t ask me to come to Central Square just to tell me—”

“Cool your jets, honey.”

He fixed her with a glare until she appeased him: “Go ahead.”

“Anyways, so I call up the National Association of Securities Dealers, the folks who regulate brokers and money managers and what have you, and they faxed me down the résumé Tom has on file with them. I look at it. Born Hawthorne, California, graduated Hawthorne High School. Graduated Claremont Men’s College, 1973. So I call Claremont, the Alumni Association, and I’m trying to get in touch with Tom Chapman, old college buddy, do they know where this guy is, what he’s doing now. You’d be amazed at how much the alumni associations of these colleges keep on file. Real treasure trove.”

“Okay,” she said, keeping her voice neutral. The air was overheated; she took off her coat and her blazer.

“Bad news is, your FBI friends are right. There’s no record of a Thomas Chapman at Claremont Men’s College. Which has since been renamed, by the way.”

An old Chinese woman a few tables over was clipping her fingernails. The dark-haired mother scooped up her baby, now screaming, and put her in the carriage.

“So that set me digging,” Devereaux said. “Find out what’s really going on with your husband. And I found some really interesting stuff on him.”

“Like?”

“Well, so I check with Social Security, see if there’s any irregularities. Strangest thing — everything’s hunky-dory, everything’s copacetic, but there’s no Social Security payments before 1985. Nothing. Well, that’s a little bit strange for a guy who’s, what, forty-six or so? Unless the guy just never worked before he was thirty or whatever, which I guess is possible. And then I check with TRW, the credit people, and everything’s fine, no delinquencies — but he also has no credit history before 1985. Also bizarre.”

Claire felt her stomach tighten. She shifted her feet, which had adhered to a sticky coffee spill on the gray-and-magenta-tiled floor.

Now Steely Dan was playing on the radio. What was it, “Katie Lied”? “Katie Died”? Something like that. A smarmy saxophone solo competed with the insistent bleating of a microwave, then a lushly harmonized chorus: “...Deacon Blue... Deacon Blue...”

“His résumé lists several jobs after college. Good, respectable jobs with companies, brokerages and the like. So I’m asking myself, why is there no record of Social Security payments if the guy was working all that time? So I make some calls, and another strange thing — all the companies he’s ever worked for before he started his own firm have gone under.”

“Maybe he’s a black cat,” Claire murmured.

“I mean, one maybe. But three? Three investment firms and brokerage houses he used to work for that don’t exist anymore. Which means there’s no records available. Nothing to check up on.”

Claire listened in stricken silence. She watched an anxious, short-haired, bespectacled woman with two handbags slung over her shoulder stride in, clutching a Filofax, and order a large coffee, light, two sugars.

“So, what does this mean?” Devereaux said. “Before 1985 — when he was, what, over thirty — he had no credit cards, no AmEx, no Visa, no MasterCard. And I check some more — the IRS has no returns on file for him before then either. So he lists all these jobs with companies that no longer exist, and he paid no Social Security and filed no tax returns.”

“What am I supposed to make of all this?” Claire said. She could not think. She stared. She felt vertiginous.

“Well, I have a buddy works out of L.A., and I asked him to take a little trip down to Hawthorne. Right near LAX—”

“And he didn’t go to Hawthorne High,” Claire interrupted. “You don’t have to tell me this. I’ve figured it out.”

“There’s no record at the high school. None of the teachers, the old-timers, remember him. No one in the Class of ’73 remembers him. He’s not in the yearbook. Plus, going back in the old phone directories, there’s no record his parents ever lived there. No Nelson Chapman ever lived there. Now, I’m not saying the FBI isn’t full of shit. I’m not saying your husband committed any crime. I’m just telling you that Tom Chapman doesn’t exist, Claire. Whoever your husband really is, whatever he really is — he’s not who you think he is.”

In the middle of the night Claire sat up suddenly, drenched in sweat. Her heart racing, she walked around the darkened bedroom, the only illumination coming from a streetlight outside, until she found the drawer where they kept the family photos. The FBI search team had left it more or less alone. They were interested in more revealing, more immediate things — itineraries, travel times, flight numbers, that sort of thing.

There were countless pictures of Annie, album after album of photos from her birth to her last school picture. She had to be one of the most fully documented children in the history of the world. There was an album of pictures of herself, a bunch of baby pictures: Claire with Jackie, Jackie tagging along behind Claire and Claire looking aggrieved. A number of pictures of the family, Claire, Jackie, and their mother, who always seemed to look tired. A lot of pictures of Claire on a vacation in Wyoming with some college friends. Shots of her college graduation (she’d had a miserable outbreak of acne and had gained a lot of weight during spring semester senior year, and so never allowed herself to look at these pictures).

And Tom’s photos?

One baby picture, a small black-and-white with a scalloped border. It might have been any generic baby; it looked nothing like the adult Tom, but baby pictures often bear no resemblance to the adult.

And photos of him as a boy? None.

High school? Nothing.

College, too. Nothing.

There were no pictures of Tom except that one generic baby picture. No high-school yearbook with pages defaced by long goodbye notes in loopy handwriting from girls who had had unrequited crushes on Tom.

What kind of person had no pictures of himself growing up?

Why had she never wondered where all his photographs were?

Later that evening Claire and Jackie sat in the downstairs study, in paired, slightly weathered French leather club chairs. Tom had spent two months searching for the perfect chairs for Claire’s office, because she’d once admired them in a Ralph Lauren ad. Finally he’d located a dealer in New York who imported them from the Paris flea market. They’d gone from a Paris nightclub in the twenties to Cambridge in the late nineties, and they were still magnificently comfortable.

Jackie again wore black jeans and a black T-shirt. Paint spatters freckled her shirt and arms: she was a painter who earned her living as a technical writer. Claire was still wearing her blue suit, a Chanel knockoff but a nice one, because she hadn’t had a minute to change. She was exhausted and her head ached and her neck and shoulders felt stiff. All she wanted to do right now was run a nice hot bath and soak in it for an hour.

The room glowed amber as the sun set.

“Ray Devereaux says Tom used to be some kind of clandestine army operative who got entangled in something,” Jackie said. “Jesus. You think Ray’s information is good?”

“He’s usually reliable. Always has been.”

“So what do you think, he did something for the government, the Pentagon, something undercover, and maybe he got into trouble? And... and he goes AWOL, just takes off, and he goes into hiding and changes his name, and then he moves to Boston and goes into business and hopes he never gets caught? And then, one day, by coincidence, your house is broken into and the cops run his prints, and bingo, the Pentagon’s found him? Is that how it goes?”

“Basically, yeah.” Claire turned to see whether Jackie was being ironic, or simply skeptical, but she wasn’t. She was thinking out loud, as she so often did.

“Hard to get a job with a firm if you have no references for them to check into,” Jackie went on, “so he starts his own business, and that way he doesn’t have people checking too deeply into his background.”

Claire closed her eyes again, nodded.

“So everything you know about Tom is a lie,” Jackie suggested gently.

“Maybe not everything. A lot. An enormous amount.”

Very softly, Jackie said, “But you feel betrayed. It’s, like, custom-made to rip your heart out.”

Tears came to Claire’s eyes, tears of frustration and exhaustion rather than of sadness. “Is it a betrayal if he’s escaping, hiding?”

“He lied to you, Claire. He never told you about it. He’s not who he told you he was. A man who can lie about his life, create a whole fake background, is a man who can lie about anything.”

“He contacted me again, Jacks.”

“How?”

“We don’t know if there are bugs here,” Claire said, pointing at the ceiling, although who knew where listening devices might be planted?

“Well, what are you going to do?” Jackie asked, but then the doorbell rang. They looked at each other. Now who could it be? Claire got up reluctantly and went to the front door.

It was a young guy in his early twenties, with a scuzzy goatee and a brass stud earring in his left ear, wearing bicycle shorts and a leather jacket. “Boston Messengers,” he announced.

Claire looked past him to see two Crown Victorias parked at the curb in front of their house. Passengers in both vehicles were staring at the visitor.

“Are you Claire Chapman?”

Claire nodded, alert.

“Jesus, lady, those guys out there stopped me and asked me a million questions, who am I and what am I doing here — you got something going on in here? You in some sort of trouble? ’Cause I don’t want trouble.”

“What are you doing here?” Claire demanded.

“I got a package for Claire Chapman. I just need to see some kind of ID.”

“Hold on,” Claire said. She closed the door, retrieved her purse from the hall table, and removed her driver’s license from her wallet.

She opened the door again and handed him the license.

The kid inspected it, comparing the picture to her face. He nodded. “I gotta ask for your Harvard faculty card, too.”

“Who’s the package from?”

“I dunno.” He looked at it. “Something Lenahan.”

Claire was immediately flooded with relief, then excitement. “Here,” she said, handing him her faculty ID card.

He looked at it, once again comparing the photos. “Okay,” he said warily. “Sign here.”

She signed, took the package — a flat, rigid cardboard envelope about nine by twelve inches — tipped him, and closed the door.

“Who’s it from?” Jackie asked.

Claire smiled and didn’t answer. Tom knew the phones were tapped, which meant that voice mail and the fax machine weren’t safe. He knew they’d be monitoring the mail. The sudden appearance of a courier might work just once, but without a court order they couldn’t intercept the package.

Inside was a handwritten letter, which brought tears to her eyes — and a plan, which for the first time brought her hope.

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 Yorkers. 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.”

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.

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.

Quantico Marine Base, Quantico, Virginia

Despairing and angry and, above all, confused, Claire sat in the rental car for a long time after leaving the brig. She felt lost and powerless and didn’t know who to turn to for help, and finally she took out her cell phone and called an old friend.

Arthur Iselin, a prominent Washington attorney who was her old boss and a trusted friend, agreed to meet her for an early lunch at the Hay-Adams. Iselin was a partner at one of the biggest and most powerful law firms in Washington. Fresh out of law school, she had clerked for him when he was solicitor general. He was then, and remained, one of the wisest men she knew.

Without asking, the waiter brought him his regular, the farmer’s omelet with piping-hot biscuits, which he slathered with plenty of butter. No health fanatic, he. Nearby sat the White House chief of staff with a Republican senator; Iselin, who knew them both, nodded at them.

“You know, there’s an old saying,” he said. He had widely spaced gray eyes, under which were deep circles, and a large mouth with large lips, the bottom one appearing to be split. “Military justice is to justice as—”

“As military music is to music,” Claire finished. “I know, I know. But I thought they’d gotten a lot better since Vietnam.”

“Since the Calley court-martial, actually. When I was in the army everyone used to tell me the military system is far superior to our civilian one because at least they take it seriously. But I never believed it. Still don’t. I think, if the military wants to lock someone away and throw away the key, they can do it. And I have no doubt they want to lock your husband away.”

“Probably true,” Claire conceded.

“And if you tell me he’s innocent, he’s innocent.”

“Thank you.”

“Of course, that’s easy for me to say. After lunch I go back to my office and my stack of briefs. Your life will never be the same.”

“Right.” She nibbled on a bite of salad. Since the arrest she’d had no appetite.

“The first decision you’ll have to make, and it’s a big one, is whether to make this public. Tom’s story itself is a headline maker. If the Pentagon goes ahead and prosecutes, that makes it front-page stuff.”

“Why wouldn’t I publicize it?”

“Because that’s your ace in the hole. The Pentagon is terrified of public scrutiny these days. Going public is a potent threat. Use it when you have to. For now, I’d keep all this absolutely secret.”

She nodded.

“Tell you something else. If you leak it, even if he’s acquitted, he’ll always be known as a mass murderer. Your family will be destroyed. I wouldn’t do it, given the choice.”

“Makes sense to me.”

“Sounds like you’ve already decided not to get involved as an attorney of record.”

She shrugged.

“I’d reconsider. You’re the last one they want trying this case. To the military, civilian lawyers are wild cards. Get them involved, next thing you know you got what the military calls a CONGRINT, a congressional inquiry. And you most of all — Claire Heller Chapman, big scary Harvard Law School celeb — you’ll scare ’em to death. They’ll piss their pants. You really should do it.” He looked at her, assessed her dour expression, then chomped down blithely on a biscuit. “Failing that, there’s this.” He slid a typed sheet of paper across the table.

“Your list of civilian lawyers who do military law.”

“Correct. You’ll notice it’s not a very long list. Good civilian criminal lawyers who don’t just practice military law but actually specialize in it, there’s maybe a handful of them around the country. You’ll want someone who lives and works in the Virginia area, ideally, so that narrows it down even further. Every one of these was once a JAG officer in one of the service branches of the military. Judge Advocate General Corps.”

“I know what ‘JAG’ is.”

“This is good. You’ll see, the military speaks a different language, and the sooner you learn it the better. Not that many decent civilian military lawyers in the area. Slim pickings.”

She looked the list over with dismay.

“It’s a tough way to earn a living,” Iselin went on. “In the old days when we had a draft, there were rich kids whose daddies were willing to pay the big bucks for a civilian attorney. In the new military, not too many can scrape the money together. If it were me, I’d pick this guy Grimes. In solo practice in Manassas.”

“Why?”

“He’s smart as hell, and he knows the ins and outs of military justice as well as anyone. But most of all he hates the military with a vengeance. You want someone like that, someone with fire in the belly. Because you’ve got a really tough case, and you need a fighter.”

She looked at Grimes’s entry. “He’s a former army JAG and he hates the military? Why?”

“Oh, they forced him into retirement five or six years ago.”

“Over what?”

“I don’t know. Some scandal or something. He’s black, and I think it was racism. Ask him. Thing is, he’s a scrapper and a street fighter, and he’s obsessed with beating them at their own game.”

“But there must be some hotshot partner in a Washington firm who was an army JAG.”

“Sure. There’s a partner in one of the big firms, but you don’t want him.”

“I don’t?”

“Nah. He’s like me — full plate, stretched way too thin, hands everything off to his associate. You want Bernie the Attorney, you want someone who knows the system inside and out and still has lots of time available for this case, because it’s going to be a huge time-consumer. They’ll have him up on murder charges, count on it. Mass murder, whatever the military calls it.” He peered at her over his coffee cup. “Though I thought they were in the mass-murder business.”

“You know anyone who has a house to rent?”

“A house?”

“Preferably furnished. This is going to be a long haul.”

“Boy, it’s a real honor to meet you, ma’am,” the young man said. His name was Captain Terrence Embry, he was twenty-seven years old, and he was the military defense counsel assigned to Tom. (Claire still could not get herself to call her husband Ronald, to think of him as anyone except Tom.)

She smiled, nodded politely, stirred nondairy creamer into her coffee. It was early in the morning and they were meeting for breakfast at the McDonald’s on the base. His invitation: he’d called the Quality Inn the night before, told her he’d just been detailed to the case, and would she like to get together?

“I mean, we studied your book Crime and the Law in my criminal-law class,” he went on. “I’m just sorry about the circumstances and all...” His voice trailed off, and he looked down at his Egg McMuffin. His face reddened.

Terry Embry had reddish hair, cut short in what she was beginning to recognize as an army regulation haircut, large prominent ears, nervous watery blue eyes. He blushed easily. He had long slender fingers and a dry, firm handshake. On his left hand was a large, perfectly shiny gold wedding band, obviously brand-new. On his right hand was a heavy West Point ring, on top of which was mounted a synthetic black star sapphire. He was a West Point graduate, he said, sent by the army to the University of Virginia Law School and then the Judge Advocate General School there, in Charlottesville. He was a smart young man, Claire saw at once, and almost totally inexperienced.

Her appetite still hadn’t returned. She took a sip of her coffee. “Do you mind if I smoke, Captain Embry?” she asked.

Embry’s eyes widened and he looked around anxiously. “No, ma’am, I...”

“Don’t worry, we’re in the smoking section,” she said, as she unwrapped a pack of Camel Lights, pulled one out, and lighted it with a plastic Bic lighter. She despised herself for smoking again — actually buying a pack, and not just bumming from Jackie, was serious — but she couldn’t help it.

She exhaled. There were few things more disgusting than smoking a cigarette at breakfast. “Tell me something, Captain—”

“Terry.”

“Okay, then. Terry. Tell me something. Have you ever tried a case?”

His face reddened. She had her answer. “Well, ma’am, I’ve done a number of plea bargains, mostly for drugs, unauthorized absences, that sort of stuff—”

“But you’ve never actually done a trial.”

“No, ma’am,” he said quietly.

“I see. And have they assigned a prosecutor yet? Or is it still too early for that?”

“Well, it’s really early, but they’ve already detailed someone, which tells me they’re probably planning on a court-martial.”

She smiled grimly. “What a surprise. And who have they assigned?”

“Major Waldron, ma’am. Major Lucas Waldron.” He took a healthy bite of his Egg McMuffin.

“Is he any good, do you know?”

His eyes widened. He accelerated his chewing, then tried to speak through a mouthful of food, but settled for vigorous nodding. Then he said, “Pardon me, ma’am. Major Waldron — yes, ma’am, he’s good. He’s real good. He’s probably the best they’ve got.”

“Is that right?” she said, unsurprised.

“Well, he’s a bit of a hardass, ma’am, if you don’t mind my saying. He’s the most experienced trial counsel in the JAG Corps. Really aggressive. And he has a perfect win-loss record. No one’s ever been acquitted at a trial he’s prosecuted.”

“I don’t suppose that means he only takes the easy cases, in order to maintain his perfect record, does it?”

“Not that I’ve heard, ma’am. He’s just really good.”

“My husband is being scapegoated.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said politely.

“When you read whatever files they give you, you’ll see that. It’s a conspiracy. Can you deal with that?”

“If it’s true, yes, ma’am, I can.”

“It won’t be good for your career, Terry, going after a cover-up within the military, will it?”

“Ma’am, I don’t know what’s best for my career.”

“Enough with the ‘ma’am,’ okay?”

“Sorry.”

“Terry, you should know I’ll be hiring civilian counsel.”

He examined his Egg McMuffin. “That’s certainly your right, uh, Claire. Would you like me to excuse myself from the case?”

“No.”

“Well, one of us will have to be associate counsel,” he said. When Claire didn’t answer, he said, “I suppose it’ll be me. That’s certainly fine.”

“Tell me something, Terry. Why do you suppose you, a complete rookie, were assigned to this case, against Major Waldron, the best the army has? Any idea, Terry?”

“I have no idea,” he admitted with a candor she found disarming, “but it doesn’t look good for us, does it?”

She gave a soft snort. “You didn’t choose this assignment, did you?”

“That’s not the way it works in the military. You go where they tell you.”

“Wouldn’t you rather be prosecuting it?”

“This case?” He reddened. “Just from the way it looks, this is a slow soft pitch right across the plate, just hanging there, waiting to be hit out of the ballpark.”

“By the prosecution.”

“Just from what I’ve heard, but I haven’t dug into it yet.”

“Did you choose to go into defense, Terry, or did they just put you there?”

“I was assigned. I mean, everyone in JAG school wants to prosecute, not defend, you know? Defending bad guys is not exactly a career-enhancing billet.”

Claire’s eyes flashed. “I want you to know something, Terry,” she said coolly. She exhaled a plume of smoke like some kind of dragon, or perhaps a femme fatale. “My husband is not a bad guy.”

“Well, so, anyway, I think you should look at this.” He withdrew some papers from a folder and, without even looking at them, handed her a stapled sheaf.

“What’s this?” Claire asked.

“The charge sheet. They work fast. Article 85, desertion. Article 90, assaulting or willfully disobeying superior commissioned officer. Article 118, murder in the first degree. Eighty-seven specifications.” He looked up at Claire, shook his head.

For the first time, the seriousness, the finality of it all struck her. They were really going after Tom. He could in fact be executed. The military still had the death penalty.

She had to do it.

“I think I’ve just changed my mind,” she said, steely. “How the hell do I sign up to help represent my husband?”

Twenty minutes from Quantico, along the two-lane Dumfries Road in Manassas, Virginia, Claire pulled the sleek rented Oldsmobile over onto the shoulder and once again inspected the street number. This was the correct number, it had to be. It was precisely the same address that appeared on the short list Arthur Iselin had given her, and neither Arthur nor his secretary made mistakes. And she had talked to the lawyer on the phone and had taken down the street number he told her. So it was impossible that she’d gotten the address wrong.

But this could not be the office.

This was a tiny yellow clapboard house, almost a dollhouse. It was a house, not an office building, and it was a house out of Tobacco Road; all that was missing was a turnip truck and maybe a car chassis up on cinderblocks. This could not be the office of Charles O. Grimes III.

After she’d driven past the house three or four times, she finally pulled into the driveway and got out and rang the doorbell.

After a few long minutes the door opened. A handsome black man in his late forties, with graying hair, a gray-flecked mustache, and large amused eyes, stared at her for a disconcertingly long time. “You get lost, Professor? I saw you pass by here, must have been four times.”

“Thought I might have had the wrong address.”

“Come on in. I’m Charles.” He extended a hand.

“Claire.”

“Let me guess,” he said, guiding her through a tiny cluttered living room dominated by an immense TV, “you’re asking yourself, why does this guy work out of the same little shitbox he lives in, right?” Claire, following him through a doorway into a fake-wood-paneled study, didn’t answer. “Well, you see, Professor, I had a wife who wasn’t too happy when I started boinking my secretary, who was never much of a secretary anyway, and isn’t my secretary anymore. In fact, I don’t even know where she is. So the wife dumps me, holds me up for child support, takes all my money, and now look at me. I used to have a Jag. JAG with a Jag. Now I’ve got a third-hand rustbucket Mercedes.” He sank down into a cheap orange vinyl-cushioned desk chair and interlaced his hands behind his head. “Have a seat. Welcome to Grimes & Associates.”

She lifted a stack of papers off the only other chair and sat down. This was the tackiest office she’d ever seen. The floor was covered in hideous wall-to-wall orange shag carpeting. Piles of papers were everywhere, some in cardboard boxes, some in precarious towers on the floor or heaped on top of the flimsy-looking tan four-drawer filing cabinets. In one corner of the room a portable fan stood on the floor next to a red-and-black shoe polisher. There were a few diplomas on the wall she couldn’t make out. Atop one of the file cabinets was a cluster of bowling trophies. A fake antique wooden sign hung on one wall announcing, in olde lettering, “DULY QUALIFIED HONEST COUNTRY LAWYER at your service — Wills — Deeds filed — Disputes settled — Bondsman — Patents review’d — Consultations from 25¢ — Your lawyer is your friend.” Hanging from the bottom of the sign was another sign, a wooden rectangle: “C. O. GRIMES III, ESQ.”

“Grimes & Associates?” Claire asked. “You have associates?”

“Planning on it. A man can dream, can’t he?” A powerful mothball odor wafted from his seventies-style polyester pullover sweater, a psychedelic riot of brown, orange, and yellow.

“Look,” she said. “Don’t take this the wrong way. You come highly recommended. By, of all people, Arthur Iselin.”

“How is Artie?”

“He’s fine. He says you’re a star of the civilian military-law field. I assume that means you win a lot of cases. You’re successful. Now, in my world, if you’re a big star—”

“—a big swinging dick, you have a corner office in a skyscraper, am I reading you right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, some of the guys in my business do, but mostly they practice other kinds of law, too. Like corporate, or big-deal criminal, or whatever. You can’t get rich on military law. Myself, I supplement my military practice with personal-injury and insurance work. No, I’m not a big Harvard Law School celebrity like you-all. But you wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t talked to some other civilian military lawyers and checked out my record, and if you have, you know I like to win cases. I don’t always, but I try... real hard.”

“Why’d you leave the military?”

Grimes hesitated a split second. “Retired.”

“Why?”

“I was tired of it.”

“Something happen?”

“I got tired of it,” he said, a note of irritation entering his voice. “That’s what happened. You mind if I ask you a couple questions?”

“Go ahead.”

“Arthur called me. I got the background. Sounds like you’re in some kind of deep doodoo. He been charged yet?”

She handed Grimes the charge sheet. He looked it over, raised his brows here and there, hummed. By the second page his humming got louder and went up an octave. “Someone’s been a bad boy,” he said.

“You better be joking.”

“Of course he didn’t do it,” Grimes said, a twinkle in his eye. “I like to tell people all my clients are innocent. They’re always innocent — or else they won’t plead guilty.”

Claire suppressed her annoyance. “Is he a deserter? No question about it. But he’s no mass murderer. They tried to set him up to take the fall for this massacre thirteen years ago, and he was smart enough to escape their clutches. General William Marks — that’s right, the four-star General Marks, the chief of staff of the army — commanded the platoon in 1985, when he was a colonel. The Special Forces detachment that was sent down to El Salvador to take revenge for the killing of some American marines. General Marks himself ordered them to kill eighty-seven civilians for one reason alone: cold-blooded revenge. Tom didn’t take part in it — he wasn’t even there.”

Grimes nodded, watching her steadily.

“General Marks initiated and supervised a cover-up thirteen years ago and tried to nail my husband with responsibility for it. So whoever takes this case is going to flush him out and expose his attempted cover-up. Because I’m going to go after the whole corrupt system. The whole goddamned military system—”

“Oh, no, you’re not,” Grimes interrupted. “No fucking way. Bad mistake. Get that out of your head, sister. You’re going to play by the rules. Play hard, play aggressive, but it’s their game — hell, it’s their fucking stadium. Their fucking ball club. Lady, let me tell you something. Every civilian who’s ever gone into a military general court-martial and tried to attack the foundations of the military has lost his case. No exceptions. The military is a tight, closed fraternity. They take it real serious. Military justice is a deadly-serious business. You’d be surprised how much it’s like the civilian justice system — it was made that way. Modeled on the U.S. criminal-justice system. Lot of the same rights. You want to defend your husband, you go after the charges and prove they haven’t made their case, just like you’d do in a regular courtroom. You think there was a cover-up, go ahead and go after General Marks. Go after General Patton, General Douglas fucking MacArthur, General Dwight fucking Eisenhower if you want. But you don’t attack the system. Now, you know I’m hungry for this case, but I’m not going to lie to you. If you hire me, you’re hiring someone who plays by their rules. I play nasty, but I play their game. I just play it better than them.”

Claire nodded, smiled.

“They hook you up with a detailed defense counsel yet?” Grimes asked.

“Yes. Some kid named Terry Embry, fresh out of law school.”

“Hmph. Never heard of him. He any good?”

“He’s totally green. Smart. Well-meaning, I think. Nice kid. But strictly junior-varsity.”

“We all got to start somewhere. Why should the Pentagon give you their best? How about trial counsel? That’s what the military calls the prosecutor. He assigned yet?”

“Lucas Waldron.”

Grimes leaned back in his chair and laughed. He laughed so loud, so hard, that he had a coughing fit. “Lucas Waldron?” he choked out.

“You’ve heard of him, I take it.”

When he finally stopped coughing, Grimes said, “Oh, I heard of him, all right. He’s a totally ruthless son of a bitch.”

“You ever come up against him?”

“A couple times. Got some light jury sentences off him, but never won a case against him. But what I don’t get is why they’re even putting your husband on trial.”

“What else could they have done? Legally, I mean.”

“Oh, man, they could have done much worse if they wanted to. They could have had three army shrinks declare him crazy and lock him up in some government mental institution, some federal facility, and throw away the key. I really don’t get why they want to go the court-martial route.”

“Probably because of me. Do everything by the book.”

He nodded slowly. “Maybe. Still doesn’t make sense.”

“You’d be second chair, you know. If I hire you.”

“Second to the fetus?”

“Second to me. He’d be third chair. If I even keep him on. I don’t know if I can trust someone from the army.”

“Nah, you want to hold on to the assigned co-counsel. He’s got the power to order military witnesses to appear for an interview; we don’t. Plus, you need him around to cut through all the administrative bullshit. I’m telling you, the army has a reg — a regulation — for everything, including how to wipe your ass.”

“Okay.”

“No offense, Professor — you want to be lead counsel on this, go right ahead, it’s your money, your husband, your case. You’re the boss. But I don’t get the feeling you know too much about court-martials.”

“You just said it follows civilian law pretty closely.”

“You want to be gettin’ your training wheels when your husband is facing the death penalty?”

“I’d expect you to do a lot of backseat driving.”

He shrugged. “Hey, you’re Claire Heller Chapman. You want to do it that way, fine with me. You got clearance?”

“Why?”

“I promise you, they’re going to close this courtroom, shut it tight as a drum. Plus most of the statements and evidence will be classified top secret. That’s how they’re going to play this.”

“I’ll get clearance. You think that’ll be a problem?”

“Shouldn’t be. You’ll have to fill out a bunch of paper. Standard form 86. They’ll do an NAC, that’s a national agency check. Background check by FBI and the Defense Investigative Services. Clear you up to ‘secret.’”

“And if they don’t give me clearance?”

“They have to. Now that you’re counsel. They have to give counsel clearance, otherwise your husband doesn’t have to talk.”

“How fast can I get it?”

“They can grant it overnight if they want. Now, we’re going to need a good investigator.”

“I know a really good one.”

“Army background? CID?”

“Boston PD and FBI.”

“Good enough for me.”

“He’s in Boston, but he’s worth the added expense. Really good investigators are rare.”

“Tell me about it. In this case, they’ll be vital. This case is going to be brutal. So what’s the deal here? Am I hired or not?”

On the way from the airport, Claire stopped first at Arthur Iselin’s law firm, just off Dupont Circle, to pick up the keys. Annie and Jackie waited in the rented Olds. The house was on Thirty-fourth Street, near Massachusetts Avenue, a very short walk to the Naval Observatory. It was a Federal-style town house, cream-painted brick front with black shutters, quite handsome. It belonged to one of the senior partners in Iselin’s firm, who had recently retired and moved to Tuscany for six months. He was asking a lot for the short-term rental, but Claire decided, as she walked up the front steps, that it was worth it.

“Do I get my own room?” Annie asked.

“I’m sure you do,” Claire replied.

“How ’bout me?” Jackie asked.

“Hey, you get your own wing,” Claire said.

As soon as Claire had the door unlocked, Annie bolted ahead into the house. She squealed as she ran, “Mommy, this is so cool!”

Claire took in the spacious and elegant foyer, the beautiful old Persian rugs, the antique furnishings, the linen-white wainscoted walls. “We’re in trouble,” she said to Jackie. “She’s going to destroy this.” The air was musty — the house smelled as if it had been empty for months — yet laced with furniture polish. Someone came in and cleaned once a week or so, she decided.

Jackie set her duffel bag down and looked around, eyeing the graceful staircase that wound around upward from the left of the foyer in a fan of white balusters. “Cool,” she said. “You did good.”

The military policeman stood straight and tall and perfectly dressed in a perfectly creased uniform. He had whitewalls behind his ears. His shoes appeared to be spit-shined to a mirror gleam. He looked like he’d just stepped out of an inspection box. He was “strac,” Grimes marveled. ‘Strac,’ he said, was army lingo for spiffy, impeccably attired, and groomed in the very best, strictest army manner.

He stood guard before a windowless room in the basement of a building at Quantico called Hockmuth Hall, where all classified materials in the Ronald Kubik matter were stored under conditions of the highest security. Outside the room Claire waited with Embry and Grimes.

“This is what we call a SCIF,” Captain Embry told Claire. He pronounced it “skiff.”

“Another new word,” Claire said dryly. “Meaning?”

Embry hesitated.

“Special Compartmental Information Facility,” Grimes said. “Something like that.”

“I think it’s Sensitive Compartmental Information Facility,” Embry said.

“Whatever,” Grimes said.

“I requested a continuance on the 32,” Embry said. “But the investigating officer turned us down.”

“What a surprise,” Grimes said. “Who is he, by the way?”

“Lieutenant Colonel Robert Holt. Nice guy.”

“They’re all nice guys,” Grimes said. “Watch out for nice guys in the military.”

Embry ignored him. “He instructed me that this is a case with national security implications, and any conversations regarding it must be conducted in the SCIF.”

“Whatever that stands for,” Claire said. Grimes caught her eye, which she took to mean Pay no attention to their instructions.

“Next time we talk to your husband,” Grimes said, “I want to do it outside the brig. I don’t trust these guys. Who knows who might be listening in?”

“They’re not allowed to listen in on conversations between attorney and client,” Embry said.

“Oh, I see,” Grimes said. “You want to tell ’em that, or should I?”

Grimes and Embry had just met this morning, and already Grimes was testing Embry’s patience. But Embry was too polite to rise to the bait. In any case, before Embry had the chance to say anything now, the door to the SCIF was opened by a security officer.

It was just a room, linoleum floors with government-issue green metal tables and gray metal chairs. There were, however, a number of large safes, Sargent & Greenleaf brand, officially approved government safes, that opened with combination locks. Inside were separately locked drawers, each with its own combination lock. Each of them was given a drawer where he or she was to lock up any notes taken. No notes were to be removed from the room. They’d brought yellow legal pads — Grimes had told her not to bother bringing a laptop computer — but even their own handwritten notes had to stay there in the locked drawers. All notes on classified files would become part of an official government file, kept under government control.

Claire found this alarming, even a little ominous. They couldn’t take notes out with them? How could they work anywhere outside this awful little room? The official headquarters of the Ronald Kubik defense was the library at her rented Thirty-fourth Street house, where all their files were kept; how could they work there without notes on the classified files? She was given no satisfactory answer. Neither Embry nor Grimes seemed perturbed by this ridiculous precaution.

She was shown a procedure designed to ensure that no one else looked at her notes. Any papers she chose to leave here would be placed inside a manila envelope, sealed with two-and-a-half-inch brown paper tape, the kind you moisten with a little sponge. The security officer would seal it for her, after which she would sign her initials over the tape’s seal line. That went into another manila envelope, which was then sealed with the same tape and then initialed. That envelope was marked SECRET-SENSITIVE PROPRIETARY and then placed into yet another envelope marked PRIVATE FOR_____.

The whole ritual was designed to set the note-taker’s mind at ease, and, indeed, it appeared to be awfully hard for anyone to get to her private notes without being detected, but she put nothing past these people. Anyone who came up with such elaborate and lurid precautions probably had figured out how to penetrate them.

“Jesus,” Grimes exclaimed from his seat at an adjoining table. “Either your husband is really some kind of sick fuck or they got some fine creative minds over at the JAG Corps.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Claire.

Grimes waved a sheaf of papers. “CID statement taken in, what, August of 1984. Sergeant Kubik was stationed at Fort Bragg for training, living off-base in Fayetteville at the time. Neighbor, a civilian, lodges a complaint against him.”

Claire approached, tried to read over Grimes’s shoulder.

“Seems the neighbor’s dog kept pissing on Kubik’s rosebushes, Kubik complained a number of times, and then one morning he grabbed the dog, slit its throat, and hung it by its hind feet from the neighbor’s mailbox. Hoo-boy.”

Claire, speechless, shook her head. “That’s... that’s impossible. That’s not — Tom.”

“Man,” Grimes said. Embry looked over nervously, then returned to whatever he was reading. “Hoo-boy. Avon calling. No welcome wagon for this bad boy.”

“It’s got to be a forgery,” Claire said. “Can’t they make these things up? I mean, look at it, it’s a couple of crappy typed pages.”

“The CID agent’s name who took the complaint is down there. Neighbor’s name, too. Roswell something.”

She shook her head again. “That’s not Tom,” she repeated.

“No, Professor,” came a voice from the entrance to the room. “That’s Ronald Kubik. And I’m Major Waldron.”

Major Lucas Waldron was a tall, lean, brown-haired man in his late thirties whose predominant feature was his aquiline nose. He was neither handsome nor plain — he had a fine, strong brow, and a thin, weak mouth — but he was unmistakably intense. He did not smile as he shook hands. Claire felt her stomach clench, as it did whenever she met a powerful adversary.

“Maybe you’re beginning to understand, Professor, why so many people consider your husband a stain on the army’s reputation,” Waldron said.

Claire looked at him for a moment. “Are you proud of prosecuting this farce?”

Waldron gave a glacial smile. “Given who your husband is — what your husband is — I personally don’t think he’s even worthy of a trial—”

“The charade of a trial, you mean,” Claire interjected. “I’m surprised you were willing to accept this assignment. You might spoil your perfect win-loss record.”

“Let me tell you something, Professor,” Waldron said. “This is not a case the army’s going to lose. When you get a look at the evidence we have here, you’ll understand. I can only assume that you don’t have any idea what kind of monster this man is, what kind of monster you married.”

“You’ve got to be awfully naïve if you believe the stuff they’re handing you,” she said. “If you can’t smell a cover-up.”

“All you have to do is check out the evidence.”

“Believe me, I plan to.”

“Just check it out. You’ll see. And as for my perfect win-loss record, well, part of that’s because I’m lucky. And I’m thorough. But the main reason is, the people I prosecute happen to be guilty.”

“I’m sure you’re good, too,” Claire said. “Anyone can convict a guilty man, but it takes a really good prosecutor to convict the innocent.”

“My father was a POW in Vietnam,” Waldron said. “I’m an army officer and I happen to be proud of it. I plan to spend my whole career in the army. But if I had to destroy my career to get a sicko like your husband convicted, I’d do it. And gladly. Nice to meet you, Professor.”

And he turned and left the room.

“Nice guy, huh?” Grimes said.

“Over here, guys,” Embry called out. “CID’s got seven statements here, from seven members of Kubik’s unit in Salvador, Special Forces Detachment 27. Taken on 27 June 1985. Five days after the 22 June incident, in debriefings back at Fort Bragg. They’re almost identical. And they’re devastating.” Embry looked at Claire anxiously, almost wincing. He licked his lips.

Grimes bolted from his seat. “They’re only calling one eyewitness at the 32 investigation. A Colonel Jimmy Hernandez, now a senior administrative officer based in the Pentagon. Now, he wouldn’t happen to be one of the seven, by any stretch of the imagination, would he?”

Embry flipped through the pile in front of him. “Major James Hernandez, the XO. The executive officer. Yep, he’s here.”

Claire felt her stomach constrict. “Let me see it,” she said.

Embry handed it to her with an involuntary wince.

Her heart thrumming, she at first skimmed it, then began to read through it very slowly. Her mouth was dry. She felt sick.

The top page was a cover sheet from the Criminal Investigation Division of the United States Army. Statement taken at Fort Bragg, 27 June 1985. The time. HERNANDEZ, James Jerome. His Social Security number. His grade. Then several long blocks of text, each initialed by Hernandez at the beginning and the end of each paragraph. Then several pages of questions and answers.

“I, Major James J. HERNANDEZ,” it began,

Claire put down the page she was reading and felt lightheaded. She excused herself and located the women’s room in the corridor outside. The “head.” She staggered to a stall and was sick. Then she washed her face at the sink with a brown block of army-issue soap.

As she waited to be admitted to the brig, she found herself lost in thought.

It is shortly after their wedding, on their honeymoon, in fact. They are checking into the Hotel Hassler in Rome, at the head of the Spanish Steps, on the Piazza Trinità dei Monte. She’d wanted to stay at a more modest pensione nearby, the Scalinata di Spagna, but Tom insisted they treat themselves to some serious luxury. The reservation, however, has been lost. A screwup. The suite he’d reserved is no longer available. The most they can offer, with deepest apologies, is a “junior suite.” Tom flushes, slams his fist down on the counter. “We made a reservation, goddamn it,” he thunders. Everyone in the lobby turns, appalled and fascinated. The reservation clerk is all apologies, flustered, humiliated. He almost dances before them. Tom glowers terribly, but then, just as quickly as he ignited, he cools. He nods. “See what you can do,” he says.

There are other times, she now remembers.

The time when his assistant at Chapman & Company confused the date of a lunch meeting with a big-time potential investor so that Tom missed the appointment. He flew into a rage, became abusive, and fired her, but then relented a few hours later and hired her back.

The time when a neighbor accidentally swerved his Range Rover into their lawn and gouged out a rut. Tom came storming out of the house, face dark with fury, but by the time he reached the neighbor’s car he seemed to have cooled down.

The time when, as he was walking with Annie in Harvard Square, she reached out to pet a dog, and the dog growled and snapped at her, and Tom grabbed the dog by the scruff of the neck until it yelped. The owner protested angrily; Tom set the dog back down, and it slunk away, tail between its legs. “Don’t you worry about anything,” he said to Annie.

There were dozens of such incidents, but what did they mean? A man who didn’t want his perfect honeymoon spoiled. An overly exacting boss. A meticulous homeowner. An overprotective father. In the course of marriage — even a relatively brief one, as theirs had so far been — you witness anger and sadness. You see the best in your spouse, and you see the worst. Tom had a quick temper, but he’d never directed it at her, never at Annie, and he’d always managed to contain it.

And then there was the way he had paralyzed the U.S. Marshals agent who had pursued him at the shopping mall. No doubt it was his Special Forces training. Had he really been unnecessarily brutal? They were trying to imprison him for a crime he insisted he hadn’t committed. He hadn’t killed the man.

Even the ruthless way he’d fought off the marshals at the lakeside cabin in the Berkshires — but was that anything more than self-protection, the survival instinct?

Did all these things really make him a killer?

The library in the rented house was the real thing, an old-house, old-money library. Linen-white-painted bookshelves that held not just the requisite leather-bound antiquarian volumes in sets of ten and twenty and fifty, but real books as well, recent and not-so-recent hardcover editions, mostly politics and history, no fiction in sight. The sort of books that the owner of the house, right now perhaps drinking un caffè macchiato at a café in Siena, probably actually read. His library was the century-old prototype of Claire and Tom’s modern study back in Cambridge.

Captain Embry, dressed in civilian clothes (brand-new deep-indigo jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, both neatly pressed), sat on a hard chair at a side table, taking notes with a chewed Bic pen on a legal pad. Grimes (once again in his 1970s orange Day-Glo sweater) was sunk deep in a floral-upholstered wing chair, legs splayed.

Claire sat, smoking, at the immense oak library table, surrounded by law books: Military Rules of Evidence Manual, Military Criminal Justice: Practice and Procedure, Manual for Courts-Martial: United States. “So all the prosecution is planning to present at the 32 hearing” — already she spoke like an old hand — “are those seven CID statements and one so-called eyewitness, this Jimmy Hernandez guy, to corroborate? That all?”

“Yeah,” Grimes said. “The government doesn’t have to present everything they got. Just enough. Remember, all they got to do is demonstrate there’s enough probable cause to go on to a court-martial. It would be dumb for them to present more than the bare minimum.”

Embry put in: “The idea is, we’re supposed to try to knock it out.”

“Which ain’t gonna happen,” Grimes said. “No matter how hard we try. So consider the 32 as the government’s tryout, their audition. We get the chance to scope out their case in advance, see what they put on the table. Cross-examine to point out all the weaknesses.”

“What about the other six members of Burning Tree who gave statements?” asked Claire. “Why aren’t they being called as witnesses?”

“One, they don’t have to,” Grimes replied. “Any witnesses who are ‘legally unavailable,’ meaning more than a hundred miles away, don’t have to appear. Two, the government doesn’t need ’em.”

Claire nodded. “Can they surprise us? Pop something on us at the hearing?”

Embry said, “Normally they give you the evidence as soon as they get it.”

“Yeah,” Grimes said, inspecting the ornate detail on the vaulted ceiling, “or they might give it to us a day or two before. But I doubt they’re going to surprise us at the hearing. They want to be able to say they gave us everything in advance.”

“Anyway,” Embry said, “if they do drop something on us, we ask for a continuance, that’s all.”

“Same as a civilian court,” Claire said. “But what about Article 46 of the code? The equal-access clause?”

Grimes lowered his head and turned slowly to regard her. “Someone’s got the UCMJ on her bedside table.”

“We get ‘equal opportunity to obtain witnesses and other evidence’ blah blah blah, right?” Claire said.

“Right,” Grimes said, “but it doesn’t say equal time, does it?”

“Mommy?” came Annie’s voice, high and sweet and tentative. She was wearing blue-jeans overalls and pigtails. She stood at the open door, curiously stealing a glance at the two men.

“Yes, honey?”

“Mommy, Jackie’s making dinner. It’s going to be ready soon.”

“Okay, honey. We’ll be done very soon, too. Now, let us work, babe, okay?”

“Okay.” She looked around shyly. “Hi.”

“Hi,” both men called out.

“Why are you smoking, Mommy?”

“Come on,” Claire said, “out of here. I’ll see you at supper.”

“But I want to play here,” Annie said with a pout.

“Not now, sweetie.”

“Why not?”

“Because Mommy’s working.”

“You’re always working!” Annie said, stalking off.

“Man,” Grimes said, “you got a serious case of that nasty habit. I thought no one in Cambridge is allowed to smoke, some zoning law or something.”

“Yeah, well, I’m going to quit when this is over,” she said. “I was going to invite you guys to stay for dinner, but—”

“Invitation accepted,” Grimes said. “I can smell it from here. Someone around here knows how to cook. I love garlic.”

“Terry?” she said.

“I can’t,” Embry said. He reddened immediately. “I’m sorry, I’ve — I’ve got to meet someone.”

“Cheating on the wife already?” Grimes said.

Embry smiled bashfully, shook his head.

“All right, now,” Claire said, “I want to find out whatever we can on Hernandez. Terry, I want you to start a file on every witness or potential witness, starting with Hernandez and the other six who gave statements against Tom. I want their, what do you call them, fitness reports, service records, the works. Then I want to interview Hernandez.”

“Uh, you better leave the interviewing on this guy to me or Embry here,” Grimes said.

“Why?”

“Because we’re both army guys. I’ve done my time in the service. We know how the shit works.”

“Fine, but I want to be there. I want to see his face.”

“Of course,” Grimes said.

“I also want to find out if this guy’s been offered anything in exchange for testifying. Like immunity. Same for anyone else they might call at the trial itself.”

“We get that in discovery,” Embry said. “The general-discovery request.”

“Well, no we don’t, necessarily,” Grimes said. “You got to put in a specific request. Demand the government state with specificity which witnesses are claiming privilege and why. Tell ’em you want a copy of all grants of immunity given to any witness. Or any promises of leniency. We want a copy of all informants’ agreements, including any records of monetary and property remunerations.”

“All right,” Claire said, lighting a fresh cigarette. “I want the names of all members of this unit, their current names and addresses and phone numbers. I’m going to have Ray Devereaux track them all down.”

“You won’t find ’em all,” Grimes said. “These guys disappear, sometimes.”

“Ray’s good,” she said.

“They’re better.”

“You think we can trust them in the discovery process?” Claire asked. “To give us everything we ask for?”

Embry hesitated. Grimes said, “Can you ever trust your opponent in discovery? In the real world, I mean?”

“Not always,” she admitted. “It’s always a question.”

“There you go,” Grimes said.

“But the Brady rule requires them to give us all exculpatory evidence, anything that might indicate Tom’s innocence,” she said.

Grimes chuckled.

“You don’t trust them,” Claire said.

“It’s why I have a job, baby,” Grimes said. “It’s what keeps the big bucks rolling in.”

“If we don’t get everything the prosecution has,” Claire said, “we got ourselves a mistrial.”

“If we can prove it,” Grimes said.

“Terry,” she went on, “I want you to do a complete search through the Iran-Contra hearings and the United Nations reports on abuses in Central America in the nineteen-eighties. See if there’s any mention of the massacre at La Colina.”

Embry jotted a note.

“All right,” she said, “we’re going to request that all charges be dismissed. We’re going to argue that the government has no jurisdiction, since we were in an area we weren’t supposed to be in. The government, in effect, has unclean hands.”

“But what about the desertion charges?” Embry said. “You’re not going to contest those, are you? I mean, he destroyed his military uniform and his IDs — he obviously had no intent to return.”

“Least of our problems,” she replied. “Our defense is duress.”

“Duress?”

“Desertion is a specific-intent offense. That means his intent counts, right? Well, he feared he’d be killed — whether he would have been killed or not, it’s a valid defense, as long as we can show the defendant had a good-faith belief he’d be killed. Maybe we can get it dropped to ‘unauthorized absence.’”

“It’s not the ‘defendant,’ it’s the ‘accused,’” Grimes said. “It’s not the ‘prosecutor,’ it’s the ‘trial counsel.’ You’ll get the hang of the lingo.”

Claire flashed Grimes a sulfurous look of annoyance. “Thanks. Basically, we’ll prove that the U.S. government is trying to make Tom the fall guy for a gruesome government-sanctioned massacre.”

“Baby, you can argue all you want,” Grimes began, back to inspecting the ceiling.

“You say the 32 hearing is for scoping out the government’s case,” Claire said. “Well, here’s how we’re going to use it. To let them see we know how to play the hard way, that we intend to play the hard way. That if they go ahead with this kangaroo court-martial, we’re going to bring out the shit they never want out. We plan to embarrass the hell out of them. We’re going to graymail them. Bring out operational info, stuff they don’t want out in the daylight.”

“It’s a closed proceeding,” Embry objected. “Both this hearing and the court-martial that may or may not follow. Totally sealed.”

“Closed?” Claire said. “We leak. No such thing as an airtight trial.”

Grimes chuckled dryly.

“Leak?” Embry asked, horrified. “But we signed a nondisclosure agreement. If we leak, they’ll do an investigation, and we’ll all be up on charges—”

“Hey, you wanted the case, right?”

“Well, no, ma’am, as I told you—”

“Claire.”

“Ma’am?”

“Call me Claire. And don’t sweat it. Leaks are almost impossible to prove, as long as you’re careful about where you call from. And if they can’t prove it, it goes nowhere. Anyway, then we’re going to argue against this closed-courtroom bullshit. We’re going to argue Tom’s Sixth Amendment right to a public trial, and the public’s right to a public trial.”

“And they’re going to argue national security,” Grimes said, now sitting up, drawn into the game.

“So we file an extraordinary writ for an open trial. We go to the federal district court.”

“They’ll say, ‘We’re not going to intervene in a military matter,’” Grimes said.

“So we file an extraordinary writ for an open trial with the Army Court of Criminal Appeals. And the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. And then the goddamned Supreme Court. And let them try to argue national security — I’m going to argue that the operation is no longer ongoing, hasn’t been for years. That they’re just trying to protect the reputation of the Pentagon. Where’s the national-security interest? They want to have it both ways — protect the national security, yet prosecute my client.”

Grimes nodded slowly, rhythmically. A smile crept across his face. Embry watched her, panic-stricken.

“And you see if the government really wants to go ahead with this court-martial,” Claire said. “I’ll bet they lose their enthusiasm.”

“Claire,” Grimes said, “do you really want this trial open?”

She considered for a long moment. “I don’t, do I? In a sense, we’re trapped. I don’t want Tom’s name smeared. Once the charges are out in public, that’s it. They’re accepted as true.” She nodded. “You may have a point, Grimes. But I’ll tell you something else. We’re going to call General Marks to testify.”

Grimes brayed a laugh, his ha-ha. “I want some of whatever you’re smoking,” he said.

“Camel Lights,” she said. “I’m goddamned serious. If he refuses, I’ll subpoena him.”

“The lady’s kickin’ butt and takin’ names,” Grimes said.

“Claire, ma’am,” Embry said desperately, “General William Marks is the chief of staff of the army. He’s a four-star general. You can’t make him testify.”

“Who says? Where does it say that? I didn’t read anything like that in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”

“I like it,” Grimes said. “You got balls.”

“Thank you,” Claire said, then added, “That is a compliment, right?”

After dinner Jackie told Claire, “You got a call from a reporter at the Washington Post. Style section, I think. They heard you’ve rented a house in D.C. and want to know why. Like it’s their fucking business.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I said I had no idea. They wanted to know if you’re doing some big-deal case here, or if you’re teaching here, or what.”

“No comment,” Claire said.

“I figured.”

“How about we go get a drink,” Grimes said.

“We’ve got booze here,” Claire said.

“I got a place I want to show you. In Southeast.”

“Can you wait till I tuck my little girl in?”

“I’ll wait in the library. File a motion or something.”

Later, Grimes drove them in his beat-up old silver Mercedes. He circled the block where the bar was three times, but no parking space opened up. Finally he saw a large open space right in front of the bar, but before he got there a Volkswagen Jetta zipped into it. Grimes pulled the Mercedes up alongside the Jetta, beeped the horn, and electrically lowered his window. “Uh, excuse me,” he shouted. “Excuse me.”

“Come on, Grimes,” Claire said. “She got there first.”

“Excuse me,” Grimes shouted again.

The woman driver leaned over, cranked down her passenger-side window, and said warily, “What do you want?”

“Hey, none of my business, but you don’t want to park there. That’s valet parking, and believe me, they tow, night and day.”

“Valet parking?” the woman said, confused. “But there’s no sign!”

“The sign’s down, but that’s not going to stop ’em. Ten minutes after you park there, your car’s going to be towed to some part of the city you ain’t never been to before and you don’t ever wanna go to again.”

“Jeez, thank you!” the woman said. She cranked the window back up and pulled out of the space and into traffic.

“Hey, Grimes,” Claire said, “forgive me. That was mighty nice of you.”

He laughed, ha-ha, as he backed into the space. “Always works,” he said.

She shook her head in disgust but couldn’t suppress a smile. “Valet parking,” she said, disapprovingly. “I like that.”

The bar was a dive, dark and dingy and reeking of spilled beer. The creaky wooden floor was sticky. The music — an old song by Parliament/Funkadelic on the jukebox — blasted. “This is it?” she said.

“Authentic, huh?”

“Funky,” she said without much enthusiasm.

Once a plastic pitcher of sudsy beer from the tap had been placed in front of them, along with two large plastic tumblers and a dish of pretzels, Grimes said, “Now, one thing I have to tell you. In the interests of honesty and full disclosure.”

“Yes?”

“You want me to be second chair, fine. But you want me to stand up and cross-examine a witness while you’re sitting there — one of the best in the biz? I don’t think so.”

She laughed. “My cross-examination skills are rusty. Anyway, what do you know about me?”

He took a long swig of beer. “After you graduated from Yale Law School, you did a pair of clerkships. Two years for Arthur Iselin in the D.C. Circuit Court, Court of Appeals. There you worked on opinions, did speeches. You did an insanity case, some bussing, some ineffective-assistance-of-counsel cases. Then you clerked for one year for Justice Marshall at the Supreme Court, where you read applications for certiorari.”

“Very impressive,” she said. “Did you do some sort of Nexis search for interviews with me?”

He took another swig. “Truth is, I read every article, every interview with you. Even before we met. I think you’re pretty cool.” He smiled, embarrassed, and hastily added, “What was Justice Marshall like? Cool guy?”

“Very,” she said. “Extremely funny. And a really nice guy, definitely the nicest guy on the court. He was the only one there who actually hung out with the clerks. One of his favorite TV shows was People’s Court, you know, that one with Judge Wapner.”

Grimes exploded with laughter. “No way.”

“True story. Now, let me ask you something. Why’d you leave the army?”

He studied his beer, took a sip. “Retired, like I said.”

“Voluntarily.”

“Hell, yeah,” he said, annoyed.

“No offense intended. I thought you were sort of forced out.”

“What did Iselin tell you?”

“Just that there was some sort of, I don’t know, scandal.”

“Oh, yeah? Scandal, is that what he said?”

“Something like that.”

He shook his head, drank again. A long silence passed.

“So, what was it, Grimes?”

“You do your twenty years as a lawyer in the army, it makes sense to take retirement. You run the numbers.”

“You weren’t forced out?”

“You don’t stop, do you?” Grimes looked up at her with a hostility that seemed tinged with desperation.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “But I need to know your background.”

He set his beer down, tented his fingers. “Look. I joined the Army as an enlisted man, went to Vietnam, and lived. Okay? I came back, did night school for years, got my bachelor’s and my law degree, got my commission. I’m a lawyer by the time I’m thirty-one. Army’s always telling you they’re the only real equal-opportunity employer, blacks get treated same as whites, and for a while I begin to believe that. I never get beyond major, but that’s ’cause I started late. Fine.” Grimes hunched forward. “Okay, so there’s this brother down in South Carolina. Fort Jackson. Black guy, PFC — that’s private first class — accused of armed robbery on a white guy at the base. I get the case probably for no other reason than I’m black. I fly down there, talk to the kid. Kid never done anything wrong in his life, okay? I mean, National Honor Society in high school, athlete, never been in trouble, army’s gonna send him to college, which is why he enlisted, ’cause his family’s poor. Okay, so what does the prosecution have? This totally weak ID — the victim couldn’t tell one black from another. Meanwhile, I’ve got this case sewed up. So happens that, at the time the robbery went down, this kid’s at home, two hundred miles away, on a weekend pass. Not only that, but I got every fucking second of his time that weekend accounted for. Seven different alibi witnesses, none of them with criminal records or anything. I had neighbors testifying to his good character. When I say ‘altar boy,’ I’m not bullshitting. But the prosecution brings the kid into the courtroom in manacles, which you’re not supposed to do, and they didn’t even need to do that, ’cause the all-white military jury was in and out in five minutes. They didn’t even have time to do a secret written ballot. Gave him ten years in Leavenworth.” Grimes finally looked up. His eyes, blazing, glistened with tears. His expression was fierce. “They gave this fucking altar boy, who joined the army so he could go to college, ten years in Leavenworth for armed robbery. Well, I knew this couldn’t stand up, but I’m a lawyer, see? I was gonna fight this thing up to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, his whole unit knows he’s innocent, and after the sentencing, they give him fifteen days deferment of confinement so he can go home and say goodbye to his mamma and his brothers and sisters.” Grimes clenched a fist and gently pounded it on the table. “I wish to hell they’d put him in the brig.” He shook his head.

Claire, moved to tears, said, “Why?”

“They put you in the brig, they take away your gun, put you on suicide watch. He never could have done it. This kid killed himself. Blew his brains out with his pistol. And the next day, I put in my letter.”

“Jesus, Grimes.”

Very quietly he said: “So you see, kid, you don’t need to convince me what shit a military jury’s capable of, okay?” There was a long, uncomfortable silence, and then Grimes’s voice became louder, his tone belligerent. “So let me ask you a personal question. Do you really think your husband is innocent? Not that it matters to our case, of course.”

“Of course I do,” she said. “I wouldn’t take this on if I didn’t.”

“Well, you are married to him.”

“Grimes, if I thought he was guilty, I’d hire someone else. I wouldn’t do it myself, not if I thought he was really the sort of monster they’re trying to make him out to be.”

He gazed at her levelly. His eyes were bloodshot. “’Course, you represented Gary Lambert, didn’t you?”

“This is different, Grimes,” she said, exasperated. “He’s my husband.”

“You think this whole thing is a frame-up.”

“Of course it is. Colonel Bill Marks comes back to the States after the massacre that he ordered, and realizes he’d better cover his ass, and so he blames it on the one guy in the unit who refused to lie, to cover up. The one who could destroy his career. Here he is, thirteen years later, chief of staff of the army, soon to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and he figures he got away with it. Well, the fucker’s wrong. He didn’t count on me.”

“What am I, chopped liver?” Grimes said.

“Nah, you’re pâté. Hey,” she exclaimed suddenly, “why not polygraph him? And introduce the results at the 32 hearing? That’ll get the court-martial thrown out faster than anything.”

“No way. Don’t go there. Get that nasty idea out your head. Anyway, polygraphs aren’t admissible.”

“Oh, they’re admissible, all right. You don’t keep up on this?”

“Rule 707 of the Military Rules of Evidence says no. In the annotated cases. Based on a 1989 decision of the Army Court of Criminal Appeals. Flat-out no.”

“Grimes, it didn’t used to be admissible, but now it can be. It’s up to the judge. U.S. v. Scheffer, 1996, decided by the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. If it’s exculpatory and the accused’s counsel can lay foundation for it, it may be admissible.”

“And what if you’re wrong? What if he really is guilty?”

“He’s not.”

“You’re gonna take that chance? Plus, he could be innocent and fail because he’s nervous. Then we’re screwed, because people talk, you know. Word gets around. The jurors at the court-martial hear the water-cooler gossip. Everyone’ll know he failed. These guys, these examiners, are Chatty Cathys.”

“Not if he’s hired by us. That makes him an adviser to defense counsel. Falls under attorney work product, brings him within lawyer-client privilege. I’ll see what Tom thinks, but you know a good examiner?”

He sighed with resignation. “I know one. Does a lot of work for the military. You want another pitcher?”

“I couldn’t. Not a third. You shouldn’t either, if you’re driving.”

Not even four in the morning, and the sky was indigo-black with just a trace of pink on the horizon. Dew was on the grass on the forlorn little hillock in front of the “defense shop,” the low white temporary-looking structure that served as Judge Advocate General defense offices at Quantico. It looked like a dressed-up Quonset hut.

Grimes had arrived first, in jeans, a sweatshirt, a black leather jacket out of Shaft. Claire wore jeans and a green Shetland sweater and a suede jacket. They stood in silence. A pair of guys in identical gray sweats and army T-shirts jogged by, huffing in rhythm. A car pulled up, a dark-gray Honda Civic. Captain Terry Embry’s car. Grimes and Claire looked at each other. They hadn’t seen him since that night at the bar; they hadn’t said anything to him either.

Embry got out and sprinted over. “Sorry,” he said.

“No problem,” Claire said. “No one else’s here yet.”

“Morning,” he said with a nod to Grimes. He was wearing his uniform, neatly pressed as always. His complexion was clear with a ruddy flush. She could smell his mouthwash when he talked. “Claire, ma’am, bad news on the general. His office finally got back to me on our request and said the general won’t be able to testify or even give a deposition. There’s been a change in his schedule. He has to fly to CINCPAC, Camp Smith, Hawaii. So he’s going to be totally out of reach from now through the 32 hearing.”

“Ask for a continuance until he gets back.”

“Yeah,” Grimes said, “but you won’t get it.” He grunted. “Asshole.”

“The good news is, I reached Hernandez for you, and he’s all set for an interview with us.”

“Thanks, Terry,” Claire said.

“But...” Embry faltered. “You remember he works in the Pentagon?”

“Yeah?”

Embry unlocked the front door and switched on the lights.

“Well, he’s the senior administrative officer to General Marks.”

“What?” Claire said.

“Yeah. Turns out Hernandez is, like, the general’s aide de camp. His XO, his executive officer. Handles personal business, scheduling, all that. He’s followed General Marks around everywhere since ’85. Totally loyal.”

“I’m sure he’s gonna tell the truth,” Grimes said sardonically. “He won’t cover for the general, oh no, not Hernandez.”

They followed Embry to a conference room, where he also switched on the lights there. “Want me to stay for this, or no?” Embry asked.

“Best if you don’t,” Claire said.

“Okay, then, if you guys don’t mind, I’d like to get back to my office at Fort Belvoir.”

“That’s fine,” Claire said. “Thanks.”

The courtroom where the hearing was to take place was a windowless underground chamber, newly constructed, beneath the basement level of one of the buildings on the Quantico grounds not far from the FBI Academy. It had been specially built for security-classified meetings, courts-martial, and other proceedings, and was intended for the use of all four branches of military service. Two MPs stood guard before the steel stairway that descended to the steel double doors that locked by means of electronic cipher locks. It was extremely secure.

Shortly before nine in the morning — 0900 hours — Claire and Grimes met in front of the red-brick building. She wore a navy suit, conservative — nothing too stylish or flashy. Grimes, she was pleased to see, was in a suit as well: double-breasted, pinstriped, elegant.

“I don’t want Embry speaking,” she said.

“I don’t either.”

“And I want you to start off with the first witness. I’ll observe.”

“Fine.”

“You look good.”

“Surprised, huh?”

“Yeah. Let’s go.” They entered the building and descended to the basement, then waited for the steel doors to the subbasement to be unlocked. The sleek, modern room was low-ceilinged, about twenty by thirty feet. The floors were gray linoleum over concrete; the walls were poured concrete as well. Otherwise, it looked exactly like every other courtroom in the world, with a raised judge’s bench and witness chair, a jury box (ten seats instead of twelve, but empty, because there would be no jury at this hearing), a long table for defense and one for prosecution. The furniture — the witness and jury chairs, the spectators’ chairs, the tables — was modern and tasteful, blond wood and gray upholstering. An American flag hung from a pole next to the bench, on which was mounted a brass armed-forces seal. On the wall in back of the jury box was a large clock. The quality of sound in here was curiously deadened: the chamber was, of course, soundproofed.

Claire was surprised to see four or five unsmiling spectators already in place, uniformed men wearing security badges on white plastic-beaded chains around their necks. None of them she recognized. Why were they here, and how were they allowed in such a secret proceeding?

“I thought this was a closed hearing,” Claire muttered to Grimes.

“Spectators are allowed if they have top-secret clearance.”

“Who are they?”

Grimes shrugged. “Lot of people in the Pentagon are watching this case closely.”

Claire, who’d done hundreds of trials and observed even more, couldn’t help feeling nervous. Her throat was parched. She looked around for some water. Sure enough, a glass pitcher was already in place on the defense table. She poured some water for herself and Grimes, then set down her briefcase and opened it to remove her carefully indexed file folders. Stuffed inside was a honey-colored, fuzzy Winnie-the-Pooh doll, a little gift, a message from Annie. She smiled, almost laughed out loud with pleasure.

A few minutes later Major Lucas Waldron entered, tall and lanky and dour, accompanied by his associate trial counsel, whose name, she’d been told, was Captain Philip Hogan. They were both uniformed and carrying identical bulky leather briefcases. Waldron saw Claire and Grimes and nodded at them as he and Hogan approached the prosecution’s table.

“The gang’s almost all here,” Grimes said. “Where’s the man?”

“He should be here any second,” Claire said. She saw the steel doors open and, sure enough, Tom entered, flanked by two guards. He wore a sharp, dress-green uniform. She was stunned to see him in it: it fit him perfectly, he seemed a natural in it. His ankle restraints, handcuffs, and chain belt looked like some strange funky jewelry. His shirt was immaculately pressed but was noticeably too large at the neck. He’d lost weight. He looked pale.

He looked around the room anxiously until he saw Claire, then smiled. Claire gave him a wave. He was ushered to the vacant chair between Claire and Grimes.

At three minutes before nine, Embry entered, in his dress-green uniform, and rushed over to them. “Sorry,” he said, as he sat next to Grimes.

“Late night?” Grimes said.

Embry shook his head, smiled pleasantly. “Car trouble.”

“You friendly with the prosecution?” Grimes asked suddenly. Claire winced. She’d asked him not to confront Embry, not yet.

“Not especially. Why?”

“Because, if I learn that you’ve leaked anything to them, and I mean anything, no matter how trivial or stupid, I’ll have you disbarred, and then I’ll have your testicles marinating in a pickle jar in my office, next to my bowling trophies.”

“What’s all this about?” Embry said, hurt.

Grimes looked over, saw the investigating officer enter the courtroom from his chambers. “We can talk about it later. It’s showtime.”

Colonel James Hernandez, the general’s aide de camp, was short but powerfully built, with short curly black hair, a thin mustache, and swarthy skin. Under his right eye was a scar. He had the slightest trace of a Cuban accent. As he spoke, he gripped the railing in front of the witness stand.

“They begged for mercy,” he said. “They said they weren’t rebels.”

“And what did Sergeant Kubik do while he was machine-gunning them down?” Waldron asked.

“What did he do?”

“Did he react in any way?”

“Well, he smiled, sort of.”

“Smiled? As if he were enjoying himself?”

“Objection!” Claire called out. She felt Grimes’s restraining hand on her arm. “This witness can’t possibly testify as to whether Sergeant Kubik was enjoying himself—”

“Uh, Ms. Chapman,” Colonel Holt said, “this isn’t a regular court-martial. This is an Article 32 hearing. That means that none of the rules of evidence apply here. The only thing we go by are the military rules of procedure for Article 32 pretrial investigations.”

“Your Honor—”

“And I’m not Your Honor, much as I’d like to be. You can call me ‘Sir,’ or ‘Mr. Investigating Officer,’ but I’m not Your Honor. Now, are you going to be cross-examining this witness, when the time comes?”

“I am, sir,” said Grimes.

“Well, then, counsel, I don’t see why you’re objecting anyway. Mr. Grimes here should be the one objecting. We have a rule here — one counsel, one witness. No tag teams. Understood?”

“Understood,” said Claire with a half-smile. She whispered to Grimes, “Sorry.”

“I have nothing further,” Waldron said.

Grimes got to his feet. Standing just in front of the defense table, he said: “Colonel Hernandez, when you were contacted in regard to this 32 hearing, were you threatened with charges if you didn’t cooperate?”

“No,” Hernandez said.

“You weren’t coerced in any way?”

“No, I was not.” He gave Grimes a direct, confrontational stare.

“I see,” Grimes said, as if he clearly didn’t believe him. “And when you were interviewed by the CID in 1985, in regard to this incident at La Colina, were you pressured in any way by CID?”

“Back in 1985?”

“Right.”

“No, I was not.”

“No one threatened you with charges if you didn’t cooperate — complicity, involvement in the alleged crimes, conspiracy to commit murder, even murder?”

“No one.”

“No threats whatsoever?”

“None.” He jutted his chin as if to say, So there.

“So this was a completely voluntary statement?”

“Correct.”

“Now, you work for General William Marks, the chief of staff of the army, is that right?”

“Yes. I’m his executive officer.”

“Did he ask you to give a statement?”

“No. I did it on my own.”

“He didn’t coerce you in any way?”

“No, sir.”

“You’re not afraid of harming your career if you say anything critical of the general?”

Hernandez hesitated. “If I had anything critical to say, I’m required to say it. I’m under oath. But he did nothing wrong.”

“Aha. Now, tell me something, Colonel. When you saw Sergeant Kubik discharge his weapon at the civilians, did you personally try to stop him?”

Now Hernandez eyed him suspiciously. Was this a lawyer trick? “No,” he finally said.

“You didn’t?”

“No.”

“Who did try to stop him?”

Hernandez hesitated again. He sat forward in his seat. He looked over at Waldron and company. “I don’t know. I didn’t see anyone try to stop him.”

“Hmm,” Grimes said. He took a few steps closer. He shrugged and said conversationally, “So you didn’t actually see anyone try to stop him?”

“No, I did not.”

“And, Colonel, since General Marks — then Colonel Marks — was back at headquarters at this time, you were in charge, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Colonel Hernandez, how long have you worked for General Marks?”

“Since 1985.”

“That’s quite some time. He must trust you enormously.”

“I hope so, sir.”

“You’d take a bullet for the general.”

“If given the chance, yes, sir, I would.”

“You’d lie for him, too, wouldn’t you?”

“Objection!” Waldron shouted.

“Withdrawn,” Grimes said. “Okay, now, Colonel Hernandez, I’m going to take you step by step through this incident. We’re going to very slowly explore every single detail, just so’s I don’t miss anything, okay?”

Hernandez shrugged.

In mind-numbing detail, for two hundred questions or more, Grimes took the witness through every point he could think of. It was like watching a movie frame by frame. Where was he standing? What did Sergeant Major so-and-so say?

Then, suddenly, Grimes seemed to veer off course. “Colonel Hernandez, did you consider yourself a friend of Ronald Kubik’s?”

Hernandez’s eyes snaked over to Waldron for a moment. He looked sullen. He opened his mouth, then closed it.

“You can tell us the truth,” Grimes prompted, walking away from the witness stand, back toward the defense table.

“No, I did not.”

“You didn’t much like him, did you?”

“I thought he was twisted.”

Grimes stopped and whirled around. “Twisted?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Twisted like sick-twisted?”

“Yeah. Sick.”

“Oh?” Grimes looked curious. “And how was he sick?”

“He was a sadist. He loved to kill.”

“In combat, you mean.”

Hernandez looked confused. “Yeah, when else?”

“You didn’t kill people outside of combat, did you?”

“No. Outside of a designated operation, which wasn’t necessarily combat.”

“I see. So, during a designated operation, he loved to kill.”

“That’s right.”

“Which was his job — your job.”

“Only part of the time—”

“Part of the time it was your job to kill people.”

“Right.”

“And he was good at it. In fact, he loved it.”

“Correct.”

“Would you say Ronald Kubik was a good soldier?”

“What he did was illegal—”

“I’m not asking about what happened on June 22, 1985. I’m asking you, up until that point, up until that night, would you say Ron Kubik was a credit to the Special Forces?”

Hernandez looked trapped and resentful. “Yes.”

“He was really good.”

“Yeah,” Hernandez conceded. “He was so fearless it was scary. He was one of the best guys we had.”

“That’s all I’ve got for this witness,” Grimes said.

“As it’s lunchtime,” Colonel Holt announced, “we will recess for an hour and a half, until fourteen hundred hours.” A rustle, oddly dampened by the soundproofing, arose, along with a flat babble of excited voices. The few spectators got to their feet. Waldron headed for the exit; Hogan, his cocounsel, lagged behind, doing something at the prosecution table. The steel doors opened.

Tom gave Claire a hug and said, “We’re doing great, don’t you think?”

“We’re doing okay,” Claire said. “I think. What do I know?”

At that moment, Hogan brushed by the defense table. When he was next to Tom, he whispered: “You know we’ll get you, you sick fuck, one way or another. In court or out.”

Tom’s eyes widened, but he said nothing. Claire, who had overheard the remark, felt a surge of adrenaline, but then she too said nothing.

Tom held out his wrists for cuffing. The restraints were put back on him and he was led away, back to the brig for a meal in his cell.

Embry came around the table and reached to shake Grimes’s hand in congratulation. Grimes didn’t meet it. He leaned over and spoke to Embry in a low, menacing voice. “What the fuck did you tell them about leaking to the press?”

Embry’s hand dropped slowly to his side. His face darkened almost to purple.

“We saw you, Embry. We saw you having beers with Waldron and company.”

“Yeah? Well, that’s all it was. Beers. I work with these guys, you know. They’re colleagues. I have to live with them, work with them, long after you guys are gone.”

“And that’s why you feel free to divulge confidences to them?” Claire asked.

“Now he’s got you thinking this way? I didn’t tell them a thing, Claire. Not a thing. I never would. It’s unprofessional and it would just get me in trouble. Plus it would make me look like a chump. Anyway, why should I tell them I was party to a conspiracy to violate nondisclosure? That would just get me in a heap of trouble.”

He turned, looking wounded, and walked off.

“You believe him?” Grimes asked.

“I don’t know who to believe anymore,” Claire said. “Let’s get lunch. My car is parked really close. There’s a McDonald’s nearby.”

“I’d go for McDonald’s.”

“Is there a McDonald’s on every army base in the world?”

“Or Burger King.”

On the way to the car, when she was satisfied no one was within earshot, Claire said: “I don’t understand why you didn’t trap him, Grimes. In his statement he says something like, We all tried to stop him. But on the stand he backed down from that. That’s a major contradiction! Why didn’t you bring out that inconsistency?”

“Because that’s not the point of this proceeding,” Grimes said. “We’re looking to lock the witness into his story. Get it on paper. We’re not trying to impeach him here.”

“Explain.”

“Don’t blow your wad at the 32. We’re going to trial, we both know that. So hold our ammo in reserve to blow holes in him at the trial. We treat this hearing like a discovery deposition. Don’t confront the witness with his inconsistencies. Not here. Maybe we’ll point them out at the closing, but I’d rather we didn’t do it even then. Save the big guns for the trial.”

She shook her head at the curiousness of the military system.

“Look,” Grimes explained, “it’s like those different kinds of mousetraps, okay? There’s them sticky-glue traps where the mouse gets stuck to it and keeps wriggling around, alive, and you got to pick it up and throw it away. And then there’s the old-fashioned snap-trap that crushes the little bugger in half a second — breaks his back. A 32 is like a glue trap. You get the witness to poke his little paws in the glue so he’s stuck there, wriggling but alive. You don’t crush the fuckers yet.”

“Yeah, well, I wanted to crush the fucker.”

“Because you’re defending your husband. That’s not the way the system works. That would have been ill-advised.”

She flushed hotly, realizing that he was right. She wasn’t being objective. How could her feelings for Tom not hinder the way she tried this case?

She unlocked the passenger side of the rented car first, and they both got in. The instant she switched on the ignition, they were engulfed by an enormously loud sound, the blare of the car radio, turned up all the way.

“Man, you trying to kill me?” Grimes shouted. “I just sustained permanent hearing loss. I didn’t know you were the musical type.”

She switched it off. “Jesus, what was that?”

“Marilyn Manson, I think. I don’t know. I don’t listen to that shit either, don’t ask me.”

“I didn’t put that on,” she said. “I never listen to the radio.”

“Maybe you brushed it on by accident or something.”

“I would have heard it go on. Believe me, I didn’t put the radio on. Someone else did.”

“A warning,” Grimes said. “Telling you they can get into your car or your home, anytime they want, so watch it.”

“Subtle,” she said.

“Your last witness, trial counsel?” Holt said.

“Mr. Investigating Officer,” Waldron said, “I have some testimony that’s not relevant now, which I’ve prepared in response to what I anticipate the defense will put on.” Grimes looked at Claire, puzzled. “So, rather than keep Chief Warrant Officer Four Stanley Oshman around for another day and a half, I’d like to put him on now.”

“Defense, do you have any objections?” asked Holt.

Claire whispered to Grimes, “You didn’t find out who this guy is?”

“No luck,” Grimes whispered back. “It’s okay, we’ll get to cross him, help us put on our case.” Aloud, he said, “We have no objection.”

“I call as my next witness Chief Warrant Officer Oshman,” Waldron announced, “a polygraph examiner assigned to Fort Bragg.”

The courtroom stirred.

“What the hell is this?” Grimes said aloud. He looked at Claire and then at Embry. “What the hell is this?”

Chief Warrant Officer Stanley Oshman, slight and owlish in thick glasses, with receding blond hair, in his early forties, got up from one of the spectator seats. He had been there all along, observing. He made his way to the witness stand and was sworn in. Waldron moved swiftly through the preliminaries while Claire and Grimes watched in dull horror.

“Chief Warrant Officer Oshman,” Waldron asked, “in addition to your day-to-day responsibilities, what do you do with the Special Forces units you work with at Fort Bragg?”

“I teach them to beat the box,” Oshman said.

“Beat the box? What does that mean?”

“I teach them techniques — tricks, if you will — that enable them to beat a polygraph, in case they’re captured and interrogated behind enemy lines.”

Aloud, but ostensibly to himself, Grimes said, “Wait one goddamned second.”

“So it’s your testimony here today,” Waldron continued, “that certain Special Forces officers, like Ronald Kubik, can beat the polygraph.”

“That’s correct. He certainly can.”

“That, if he’s given a polygraph, he knows how to give the answers he wishes to, whether truthful or not, and yet most polygraph examiners will conclude that no deception is indicated.”

“That’s correct.”

Too loudly, Grimes said, “Jesus fucking Christ. Our guy can just goddamn well go home now.”

Cleaning up the kitchen after dinner, Claire and Jackie talked. Annie was getting ready for bed, brushing her teeth. Claire, exhausted and ruminative, rinsed off the dishes while Jackie loaded the dishwasher.

“Will someone please explain to me what the deal is with Eeyore?” Jackie said. “I mean, give the poor donkey some Prozac, you know?”

Claire nodded, smiled.

“And this Kubik thing. I can’t call him Ron,” Jackie said. “That’s fucked up.”

“I can’t either. I don’t know what to call him, and there’s something kind of symbolic about that. It’s as if he’s a different person, only I don’t know who or what he is. I see him for five minutes before the hearing starts, we talk business. It’s all business. He says I did a good job, or he asks me something procedural. I go to visit him in the brig, and we talk about the case. All business.”

“Isn’t that the way it should be? You’re defending him, you’re his lawyer, his life is on the line.”

“Yes, you’re right. But he’s not there somehow.”

“Anyone would be scared out of their mind. You mind if I ask something — did you get the polygraph results admitted?”

“Yeah, sure. But it was damaged goods. If I were the investigating officer, I’d think he beat the box because he was trained to do it.”

“And what do you think? I hate this dishwasher.”

“About what?”

“About whether he ‘beat the box’ — whether he pulled one over on the examiner?”

“How can I answer that? He could have — I mean, he apparently knows how to. Yet I don’t think he’d have to — he’s innocent.”

“Okay,” Jackie said guardedly.

“It’s maddening. I’ve defended enough cases against the government where the government persecuted someone or scapegoated someone — a whistle-blower, whatever — so I know how they can do these things. How corrupt they can be. I once defended this guy who was fired from the EPA for whistle-blowing, basically, about this toxic-waste site. And it turned out his supervisor had forged and backdated personnel records, evaluations, to make it look like the guy’d had a drinking problem. When in fact he’d been a model employee. So I’ve seen this stuff happen.”

Jackie turned over one of the hand-painted ceramic dinner plates. “These are cool,” she said. “I’m surprised they’re letting us use them. You think they’re supposed to go in the dishwasher?”

“They didn’t say not to.”

“Can I be straight with you?”

“What?”

“Look, two months ago we both basically thought Tom Chapman was just this great guy — macho, good-looking, great at everything. Real guy guy. Good provider, great dad, great husband, right?”

“Yeah? So?”

“So now we know he was hiding from us. He’s got a different name, he has this creepy secret past—”

“Jackie—”

“No, wait. Whatever the truth is about these murderers, he was a member of this top-secret military unit that parachutes into places or whatever, into some foreign country where they’re not supposed to be, carrying false ID, shoots the place up, then pulls out. I mean, you want to talk about symbolic? He parachutes into your life out of nowhere, takes it over, carrying false ID—”

“Very clever.” Claire began scrubbing, with deep concentration, the detritus of Annie’s Alpha-Bits cereal encrusted on a bowl.

“And we don’t really know who he is.”

“Whatever they throw at him, he’s still the man I fell in love with.”

Jackie stopped and turned to look directly at Claire. “But you don’t know who that man is. He’s not the man you thought he was — he’s not the man you loved.”

“Oh, now, what does that mean, really? When you come right down to it? I wasn’t being fatuous or naïve when I said he’s the man I fell in love with. Whoever he is, I got to know him as he was, for what he was. I loved him — love him — for who he is, who I know him to be. Everyone has a past, everyone conceals something. No one’s ever totally open about their past, whether they’re hiding stuff intentionally or not, whether it’s their sexuality or—”

“And there you go, rationalizing it.” Jackie raised her voice. “You don’t know, bottom line, who he is and whether he did what they say he did—”

“I know he didn’t do what they’re charging!”

“You don’t know anything about him, Claire. If he could lie to you about his family, his parents, his childhood, his college, practically his whole fucking life, do you really think he couldn’t lie to you about this?”

Annie was standing at the entrance to the kitchen in her Pooh pajamas, sucking her thumb for the first time in years.

“Annie!” Claire said.

Annie removed her thumb with a liquid pop. She looked sullenly, suspiciously at her mother. “Why are you and Aunt Jackie fighting?”

“We’re not fighting, baby. We’re talking. We’re discussing.”

Accusingly, Annie said: “You sound like you’re fighting.”

“We’re just talking, kiddo,” Jackie said. To Claire she added: “I’m going to smoke a cigarette.”

“Outside, please,” Claire said. “I may well join you after Annie goes to bed.”

“I’ve created a monster,” Jackie said.

“No, you’re not tucking me in,” Annie told her mother. “Jackie is.”

“Oh, but can I? I hardly ever see you anymore — I miss you!”

“No,” Annie said loudly. “I don’t want you to tuck me in. I want Jackie to.”

Jackie turned back. “Kiddo, let your mommy tuck you in.”

Claire added, “Sweetie, your mommy—”

“No! You go work! Jackie will do it! Go away!” She ran out of the kitchen, her feet pounding up the staircase to the second floor.

Claire looked at Jackie, who shrugged.

“Go for it,” Jackie said. “You can’t blame the kid.”

Annie’s temporary bedroom was a guest room whose only personalizing touch was the toys she’d scattered about the floor.

Annie had already climbed into bed, looking at Madeline and the Bad Hat, sucking her thumb furiously. “Go away,” she said when Claire entered.

“Honey,” Claire said softly, approaching the bed and kneeling next to it.

Annie pulled out her thumb. “Go away! Go work!”

“Can I read to you? I’d really love to.”

“Well, I don’t want you to, so you can just go away.”

She replaced her thumb in her mouth, staring balefully at the book.

“Can I talk to you?”

Annie ignored her.

“Please, baby. I want to talk to you.”

Annie’s eyes didn’t leave the book.

“I know you’re upset with me. I haven’t been a good mommy at all, I know that. I’m so sorry.”

Annie’s eyes seemed to soften for an instant; then she lowered her brows, frowned. Still she said nothing. Claire had told her that her daddy was on trial, but how much did she really understand?

“I’ve been so busy trying to get Daddy out. I’m out of the house early, and I come home late, and I’m exhausted, and we haven’t done any of the things we always do. And I want you to know that I love you so much. More than anyone in the world. I do. And when this is all over, we’re just going to play together a lot, and go to the zoo, and get ice cream, and mostly just be together like we used to.”

Annie pulled the blankets up to her chin. Without moving her eyes from the book, she said sullenly, almost demanding: “When’s Daddy coming home?”

“Soon, I think. I hope.”

A pause; then Annie said grudgingly, “Jackie says he’s in jail.”

Claire hesitated. She was loath to lie to her anymore, and right now Annie, ferociously observant like all small children, appeared almost to be daring Claire to tell the truth.

“He is, but it’s a mistake.”

Annie frowned again. “What’s jail like?” She seemed to be demanding the details, as proof of Claire’s credibility.

“Well, they keep him in a room, and they give him his supper there, and they give him books.”

“Isn’t there bars and locks and everything?” Annie asked warily.

“Yes, there are bars.”

“Is he sad?”

“He’s sad he can’t be with you.”

“Can I go see him?”

“No, babe, I’m sorry.”

“Why not?”

Why not, indeed. “They don’t allow kids there,” Claire lied. Probably kids were allowed in the visiting room.

Annie seemed to accept this. “Is he scared?”

“At first he was, but now he’s not. He knows they’re going to let him out soon, and then we’ll be a family again. Let’s read some books.”

“No, I don’t want to,” Annie said. Claire couldn’t tell if Annie was mollified or not. “I’m tired.” She turned over. “’Night, Mommy,” she said.

The house crawled with FBI agents — crime-scene investigators, fingerprint and forensic people. They’d arrived with astonishing speed after Ray Devereaux, one of their own, had put in the call the following morning. He’d done so after he’d finished his own cursory inspection, which turned up a dozen more miniature transmitters, in the library, in Claire’s bedroom, in the kitchen. And more to come, no doubt. In the ceiling of an empty guest-room closet one floor above the library Devereaux had located a large black box, which he said was used to gather the signals, amplify them, and broadcast them for miles to whoever was listening.

A meeting was scheduled for one o’clock that day with the military judge who’d just been detailed to the Ronald Kubik court-martial. As she drove to Quantico, Grimes said, “Well, your complaint certainly sped things along.” He was referring to the complaint she’d filed with the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who took things like unlawful surveillance devices and interference with attorney-client privilege with the gravest concern. “That’s one way to get the military judge named — they wanted to have a judge named to deal with the bugging complaint. Problem is, now we’re fucked.”

“Why?” she said, and glanced at him to see whether he was being ironic.

“We’re fucked because our judge is Warren Farrell, who happens to be a Nazi.”

“How so?” Claire asked.

“He’s what you call a real iron colonel.”

“Huh?”

“That’s what you call a full-bird colonel who’s at his terminal rank, meaning he’s not far from retirement and can’t be threatened. So he can be as outrageous as he wants and piss all over us, which he likes to do to defense lawyers, particularly civilians. He certainly doesn’t give a shit about a reversal down the line.”

“I take it you’ve tried cases before him.”

“Never had the pleasure. Heard a lot, though. He don’t much like dark-green army boys like me.” Grimes paused to take a sip of his take-out coffee. “Great circumstances to be meeting the judge for the first time.”

“What are you talking about? It’s great. Puts them on the defensive, makes us look good by contrast.”

“You don’t know Judge Farrell.”

“What, he’s going to be prejudiced against us because we had the misfortune to have our workspace illegally bugged by the government?”

“It wasn’t necessarily the prosecution,” Grimes said.

“Oh? You got any other candidates?”

“Hell, it could be the Pentagon. Defense Intelligence. Defense Humint Service, or one of those creepy military-intelligence groups they keep locked up in the basement of the Pentagon. Might even be some private organization of old Special Forces alumni who don’t want shit like this coming out. Or want to make sure we lose.”

“Maybe some friends of the general’s,” Claire said. “But FBI’s not going to find fingerprints on anything, are they? The culprits aren’t going to be that sloppy.”

Grimes nodded slowly in distracted agreement. “This kind of shit happens all the time.”

“In the military?”

“Oh, yeah. When I was with the Judge Advocates Corps, prosecuting, I heard all the time about how they’d plant bugs on civilian lawyers. Military doesn’t like civilian lawyers playing in their sandlot, I told you.”

“Bullshit, Grimes. Don’t tell me the prosecution used information they picked up from bugs.”

“Oh, they’d launder it first. Always happens. You find an independent source, attribute it to them. You think I’m kidding?”

“No, I don’t. I just don’t want to think you’re right.”

The man whose first name and phone number Tom had scrawled on a scrap of paper in the brig met Claire at a yuppie bar in Georgetown — his choice, although as soon as he arrived he announced that he hated it. Too many antiquarian Italian advertising posters, too many twenty-somethings smoking cigars. But neither one of them made a move to go someplace else.

He was short and trim, athletic-looking, about fifty. He was also entirely bald, shiny-bald, as if he waxed his head, which Claire had heard some men did. Upon closer examination she saw he shaved the hair at the sides of his head, probably daily. He had heavy dark eyebrows and would have looked sinister were it not for his morose demeanor. He made Claire ill at ease.

“I’m Dennis,” he said without offering his hand. She did not expect a Dennis; a Dennis did not have a bullet head.

“Claire,” she said, and didn’t offer hers. For several evenings in a row she’d called the phone number Tom had written down for her, but it was never answered. It was the man’s home phone number, and he had neither an answering machine nor voice mail. It just rang and rang, until last night he’d finally answered.

“Who knows you’re here?” Dennis asked. He wore a decent gray suit and an expensive-looking white shirt with a silvery tie and large gold cuff links.

“Why? Are you going to kill me?”

He wasn’t amused. “You tell any of your cocounsel, any of the military guys?”

“No.” She planned to tell Grimes later, but saw no need to get into that now.

“You don’t have a tape recorder on you, I assume.”

“No, I do not.”

“I’ll take you at your word. I could get into a fair amount of difficulty, so, please, no records of our meetings, don’t tell anyone. You know the drill.”

She nodded. “Do you have a last name, Dennis?”

“Let’s leave it at that for now.”

“How do you know Ronald Kubik?”

“I know him.”

“Vietnam?”

“Rather not get into it.”

“Do you mind if I smoke?”

“I’d rather you didn’t.” He flashed a genial smile, although his eyes did not participate.

“Well,” she said. “I’m glad all that’s cleared up. Where do you work?”

“Langley,” he said, his face a blank.

“Ah, the Agency. I might have guessed. I don’t imagine you want to tell me which division you’re in at the Agency.”

He shrugged and smiled. It just missed being a charming, boyish smile. “Can we get down to business?” His gray suit was wrinkled at the armpits, as if he’d been in it all day. This was not a man who worked in shirtsleeves. She guessed he was a fairly senior-ranking official at the CIA. “I assume you don’t know much about how the military works,” he said.

“I’m learning.”

He smiled again. “Like what you see?”

“I’m not planning on enlisting, if that’s what you mean.”

“Well, when a combat unit comes back to base after field action, it’s standard for the CO, the commanding officer, to file an incident report. In the army it’s called an After Action Report. So tell me something: I’m sure you guys have filed discovery and all that — did you get a copy of the After Action Report that Colonel Marks filed after the La Colina atrocity?”

“No. We’ve gotten boxes and boxes of papers, but that’s not in there.”

“And it won’t be. It doesn’t exist. I was just curious as to whether they faked something up. The point is this: when Detachment 27 returned to their hooch, Colonel Marks — now General Marks — filed what’s called an MFR. That’s a memorandum for the record. To tell his side of the story, his version of what happened. Three or four lines, handwritten. See, Marks is the sort of guy puts ‘take a dump’ on a list, okay? He maps out everything. There’s a saying in the army — MFR equals CYA. You know the expression CYA?”

“Yeah, we even cover our asses at Harvard Law School.”

He didn’t smile. “You want to get that MFR.”

“How?”

“Specify it in your discovery request.”

“You think we’ll get it?”

“Hard to say. Pentagon’s good at ‘misplacing’ things. Congress tried to get the Pentagon’s files on Guatemala, took ’em five years. Pentagon said they’d misplaced them.”

“Right. So we’re not going to get the MFR. What good’s it going to do us, anyhow? It’s just going to give the same old bullshit line about Tom — er, Ron — massacring a bunch of innocent people.”

“Maybe.”

Claire’s scotch-and-soda was just arriving, but Dennis was already slipping his olive trench coat back on.

“You must have a copy somewhere,” Claire said.

He flashed another orthodontically perfect smile. “Well, as a matter of fact, we might. But you wouldn’t believe what a mess our records are in. I could have one of my girls look. I’ll let you know if she turns anything up.”

“And what’s it going to prove?”

“It may or may not prove Marks is a liar. Look, no one’s going to testify against General Marks. But now maybe you won’t need that.”

In his baby-blue prison jumpsuit and manacles, Tom looked peculiarly vulnerable. His chasers, the two beefy brig guards, stood by, warily watching him examine a machine gun. They stood in a large empty room off one of the armories at Quantico.

The weapon, an M-60, was forty-four inches long and was sealed in a long plastic bag and tagged as evidence. Allegedly it was Tom’s gun, the one he’d used while serving with Detachment 27, the one he’d allegedly used to slaughter eighty-seven civilians. To Claire it was just a machine gun; she’d never seen one up close before.

She and Grimes waited in a couple of metal chairs in the armory while he turned it over and scrutinized it.

“Do you know,” Grimes said, “they call Quantico Camp Sleepy Hollow?”

“Why’s that?” Claire said without bothering to feign interest.

“Since it’s so quiet and wooded.”

“And so peaceful,” Claire said mordantly. “I want Embry back.”

“What?”

“You hear me. I want Embry back on the team.”

“What makes you think he’ll come back?”

“Because they’ve probably got him doing drug busts and drunk-driving stuff. He’ll jump at the chance.”

“He quit, don’t forget. We didn’t fire him.”

“We shamed him into quitting. We also wronged him. We accused him of leaking, when now we know they had the office bugged. We need him. We need an insider, you said so yourself. We need someone to interview and develop witnesses, do all the scut work that you and I don’t have time for.”

“Hey, you don’t have to convince me. Talk to him. I sure as hell won’t.” In a louder voice he called out to Tom: “That look familiar?”

“What can I say?” Tom said. “I mean, how do I know it’s mine? Seriously. I mean, it’s an M-60. We used M-60s.”

“Obviously we’ll have our independent examiner look at it, and the bullets and shell casings,” Claire said. “I don’t trust them.”

“I wonder why,” Grimes said. “There’s a serial number on there. Stamped on the receiver. Look familiar?”

“Grimes,” Tom said, “you don’t really think I can remember the gun’s serial number after all these years?”

“Just trying to help. I thought you covert-action boys file down the serial numbers so they never get identified in case they’re found.”

“Old wives’ tale,” Tom said. “We were part of the army — we need serial numbers just like everyone else to keep track of weapons. We were just fancy about it. We used sterile weapons — new guns purchased by the Panamanian or Honduran governments, so there’s no chain of custody.”

“Shouldn’t it be a simple matter to figure out whether this was the gun used to kill all those people?” Claire asked.

“Sure,” Grimes replied. “Run the ballistics, compare the shell casings and the bullets to the barrel of the machine gun, see if you got a match.”

“And if there’s a match?” Claire asked. “How can they prove Tom fired it?”

“If there’s a match,” Tom said wearily, “then it wasn’t my gun.” All of a sudden he sounded defeated.

“But were there records of who got which gun?”

He shrugged, studied the floor. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “Each one of us was issued one machine gun, one rifle, one pistol. We used the same one every time. You had to sign it out.”

“So there’s records,” Claire said.

“Armory records,” Grimes said.

“But we don’t have them.”

“Haven’t come in yet. Maybe they don’t have them either.”

“If it’s exculpatory,” she said, “I bet they ‘lose’ them. Without the armory records, they don’t have a case.”

“It may be my weapon,” Tom said, even more slowly, covering his eyes with a hand, “but if it is... it wasn’t the one that fired the rounds. And if it’s the one that fired the rounds...” He made a sudden hiccuping sound. “Claire?”

She looked at him sharply. It was a sob, which he’d tried to stifle. He was weeping. The suddenness of it frightened her.

He lurched forward toward her. His chasers vaulted forward and grabbed him, threw him down on the floor. There was a loud crack: his skull hitting the floor. The guards seemed to take some satisfaction in it. He howled in pain.

“Jesus,” Grimes said.

“What are you doing?” Claire shouted.

“She’s my wife, for Christ’s sake!” Tom said. “I don’t have the right to touch her?” The guards were silent. “Claire, I want to talk to you! Alone!”

“We can’t allow that, ma’am,” one of them said.

“This is a legal visit,” she said. “We have the right to talk without you present.”

Waldron was waiting not far from Claire, Grimes, and Embry in front of the secure-courtroom door at fifteen minutes before nine in the morning. When Claire arrived, he pounced.

“Ms. Chapman.”

“Major,” she said blandly.

“Are you ready to deal?”

Claire tried to conceal her astonishment. “Hadn’t given it a thought.”

“I wish I could believe that. I’ve been instructed to make you an offer. Personally, I oppose any kind of deal — I think you know that. I’m prepared to go for the death penalty, and I’m highly confident we can get it, in the current climate. But I’ve been asked to make an offer.”

“We’re listening.”

Embry and Grimes gathered around.

“We’re willing to drop to voluntary manslaughter — Article 119.”

“How many specifications?” Grimes demanded.

“One,” Waldron said. Grimes raised his brows. “Not eighty-seven. Same course of conduct.”

“Voluntary manslaughter’s fifteen years,” Embry put in.

“Here’s the crux of the deal,” Waldron said. “We’d insist on total nondisclosure. In writing, of course. If the government of El Salvador gets wind of this, there’ll be a major international incident. Sergeant Kubik will speak of the circumstances to no one, including the terms of this agreement and everything connected with these negotiations. No books, magazine articles, letters to the editor. No publicity whatsoever. No private conversations to anyone about the incident either.”

Embry and Grimes nodded. Claire simply watched Waldron, blank-faced.

“All attorneys and support and investigative personnel would also be required to sign nondisclosure agreements,” Waldron continued. “You also waive appellate review. Kubik gets dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of all pays and allowances.”

“What about time?” Grimes said.

“He serves five years,” Waldron said. “But all confinement in excess of five years will be suspended for fifteen years from the date of trial. His nondisclosure will be part of the good-conduct clause. He violates nondisclosure, we vacate the agreement, and he’s back in Leavenworth.”

Grimes turned to Claire.

Waldron said grimly, “Not bad, huh? Five years for killing eighty-seven people? You’ll never beat a deal like this.”

“Why are you suddenly so interested in making a deal?” Claire asked.

“Because this is a long and arduous and expensive process, and we think it’s best for all concerned to come to a settlement now.”

“When do you want to know?”

“Now.”

“Now? You’re crazy. I’ll have to talk to my husband.”

“He’ll be here in a minute or two. I should warn you, the deal’s off the table once he’s arraigned.”

“We’ve got three weeks before trial,” Claire said. “What’s the rush?”

“Just let me know your decision before arraignment. Which is in about five minutes.”

“All rise,” the bailiff called out.

Judge Farrell, wearing a black robe over his dress greens, entered the courtroom and mounted the bench. He sat in his high-backed leather chair. In his rumbling voice he spoke into the microphone. “Please be seated. This Article 39(a) hearing is called to order.”

Waldron remained standing. “This court-martial is convened by the secretary of the army, by convening order number 16–98,” Waldron said. In military court-martials, the trial counsel also served as the court clerk. “United States versus Sergeant First Class Ronald M. Kubik. The accused is charged with violation of Article 85, desertion, and violation of Article 118, premeditated murder, eighty-seven specifications.” And he continued reading a litany of preliminaries.

In front of the judge’s bench sat the court reporter, the same middle-aged blond-haired woman who’d been at the last court session, at a small table, wearing headphones. The LED lights on the tape deck before her flashed, emerald-green lines jumping and sinking.

“All right, I am Colonel Warren Farrell, U.S. Army,” the judge recited. “I’ve been detailed to this court-martial by the circuit military judge. I’m qualified in accordance with Article 26(a) of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Would any counsel like to voir dire the military judge?” He referred to the seldom-used right to question, even to challenge, the judge’s right to try the case.

Waldron stood. “No, Your Honor.”

Claire stood next. “Yes, Your Honor. We would.”

Grimes slapped his forehead with a large hand. The sound was audible as far as the prosecution table, where Captain Hogan regarded Grimes with a smirk. He’d tried to talk her out of this last night, but Claire was determined.

“All right, Ms. Chapman,” Judge Farrell said in an attempt at bluff good humor.

“Your Honor,” she asked, “do you know why you were assigned to this case?”

Farrell jutted his chin and regarded her with veiled eyes. He took a sip of his coffee. “I assume I was assigned because of my experience with national-security cases.”

Claire considered this for a moment and decided to move on. “Can you please state for the record any conversations you’ve had with any member of the Office of the Judge Advocate General regarding this case.”

Farrell’s eyes flickered almost imperceptibly. But he remained game. “To the best of my recollection, counsel, I had one or two conversations that were purely administrative in nature.”

“I see. And can you please state for the record any conversations you may have had with any member of the personal staffs of the secretary of the army or the chief of staff of the army.” Here was the interesting question, and Claire wondered how honest he would be, whether he’d risk trying to cover his tracks.

But the judge was too clever. He took another sip of his coffee and glanced up at the low ceiling as if trying to recall a dim, distant memory. “Well, counsel, I can only recall one conversation I might have had that related to this case, with a member of the chief of staff’s office a few days ago.”

“Can you state for the record what you recall of that conversation?”

His eyes were dead. “Oh, we talked only generally about scheduling matters and such.”

But why was someone from General Marks’s office talking to the judge about scheduling matters? It made no sense.

“With whom did you talk, sir?”

“With Colonel Hernandez.”

From behind her, she heard Grimes exclaim, “What?”

Straining not to show her astonishment, Claire asked, “Is Colonel Hernandez in your chain of command, Your Honor?”

“No, he’s not.” The judge’s patience was visibly wearing thin.

“And, Your Honor, has Colonel Hernandez ever called you before about the scheduling of a case?”

Now he sounded dismissive. “I don’t believe so, no.”

“He’s never had any other conversations with you regarding any other court-martial scheduling?”

“As I said, I don’t recall any others.”

“Now, Your Honor, could you be more specific about what precisely you talked about with Colonel Hernandez?”

But Judge Farrell had had enough. “Counsel, I’m a busy man,” he said flintily. “My days are scheduled to the minute. I have conversations with dozens of people every day about hundreds of things. Unfortunately, I’m not always able to recollect every word that was exchanged. Now, do you or trial counsel have challenge for cause against the military judge?”

Waldron stood. “We most certainly do not have a challenge, Your Honor.”

“Your Honor, we need a brief recess to talk among counsel about whether we have a challenge,” Claire said.

“This court is in recess for ten minutes,” Judge Farrell said, and pounded his gavel.

Grimes reached out a hand and grabbed Claire’s shoulder as she sat down. “I have one simple question for you. Are you out of your fucking mind, or have you just been smoking too much weed? You’re not seriously going to challenge him for cause, are you? Because we don’t have cause.”

“No,” she admitted. “He’s stonewalling, unfortunately, and there’s nothing there we can use.”

“All right, he talked to Hernandez. Surprise, surprise. So is it just your intention to piss this asshole off?”

“Grimes, I want him to know we’re watching him, and that he’d better be on his best behavior.”

“Is the government prepared to make an opening statement?” Judge Farrell asked.

Waldron stood. “Yes, sir.”

This came after several hours of voir dire of the panel members. The jury. After several challenges for cause on both sides, and two peremptory challenges, it came down to two women and four men who would decide Tom’s fate. The most senior member, a lieutenant colonel, became the president of the jury, equivalent to the foreman. He was a light-skinned black man with steel-rimmed aviator glasses. He sat in the center of the front row of the jury box, the next most senior to his right, the second most senior to his left, and so on. They were an unremarkable group, and they watched the proceedings with rapt attention. Each of them had top-secret clearance, and could be relied upon to maintain absolute secrecy.

Two grease-spattered cardboard pizza boxes sat on the library desk, empty Coke cans resting on top of them. It was late Friday night. Between Waldron’s opening statement that morning, and the meeting with General Marks in the afternoon after court, it had been a long day. It had been barely a week since the Article 32 hearing, yet it felt like months.

Grimes and Embry sprawled in their usual chairs. Ray Devereaux was sweeping the room for bugs, going through the frequencies of an RF frequency-finder, which looked like a radio with a long antenna. Claire paced.

“What if we’d never brought it up with the general?” she said. “What if he’d never boasted he had immunity? When was the prosecution planning on telling us?”

Grimes and Embry said nothing.

“Aren’t they required to notify the defense of any grant of immunity,” she went on, “and serve us a copy of it before the arraignment?”

“Actually,” Grimes said wearily, “it says ‘or within a reasonable time before the witness testifies,’ something like that.”

“Which means whenever the fuck they feel like it.”

“Basically.”

“It’s clean,” Devereaux announced. “You can talk freely.”

“Bugs never stopped her before,” Grimes said.

“I wonder if we should raise this issue with the judge,” Claire said.

Embry shook his head slowly but said nothing.

“Claire,” Grimes said, “let me tell you something. When you decided to voir dire the judge, when you went after him, you pissed him off royally. You questioned his integrity. Now I think it’s time for you to cool it, lay off the guy. Stop pissing him off.”

“I don’t intend to stop pissing him off,” she replied. “Here we are, we have no witnesses to corroborate Tom’s account, and if we ask for a continuance, Farrell will laugh. The sworn statements from the other members of his unit are suspiciously identical—”

“You think they were coached?” Embry asked.

“They have to be.”

“How can we ferret that out?”

“The only way,” she said, “is from the witnesses. To try to get the unit members still living to repudiate the statements they made to CID thirteen years ago. So who do we have?”

Ray Devereaux spoke up. “The two Waldron mentioned as being the ones who saw Tom fire his machine gun are Hernandez and a guy named Henry Abbott. Hernandez you’ve already talked to.”

“He’s the general’s boy,” Grimes said. “He’ll never back down. Though I may be able to trap him, corner him, if I’m lucky. Who’s Abbott?”

“Staff Sergeant Henry Abbott left the army in 1985. Went into the private sector. Defense-contractor work, specifically.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Grimes said.

“He’s in ‘government liaison’ at one of those big scary defense corporations. That means he sells to the Pentagon. So somehow I don’t think he’s going to turn state’s evidence for you. The Pentagon’s got him by the proverbial short hairs.”

“He’s on the prosecution’s witness list,” Embry said. “But we don’t know when he’s being called.”

“He’s in Washington,” Devereaux said, always the master of timing. “At the Madison Hotel.”

“Let’s see him,” Claire said.

“I’ve set up a breakfast for you guys,” Devereaux said. “Tomorrow morning at seven.”

“What?” Claire said. “Thanks for telling us—”

“Seven?” Grimes moaned.

“I just set it up,” Devereaux said. He turned to Grimes. “He’s an early riser.”

“Or he’s just busting our balls,” Grimes said. “Who does that leave us?”

“Two others,” Devereaux said. “Robert Lentini and Mark Fahey. Fahey I finally located. He’s in real estate in Pepper Pike, Ohio. Wherever the hell that is. I talked to him. He might be worth talking to — it’s hard to say. He seems sort of embittered about his army experience. Not exactly gung-ho.”

“Our kind of guy,” Claire said.

“Then there’s Lentini,” Devereaux went on. “The mystery man. All I can turn up is his enlistment photo, which I put in a request for; they ought to dig it up in a few days, but it’s not going to do us any good. After that, nothing. No files on him. No record of where he ended up. I checked the U.S. Army Reserve Personnel Center in St. Louis, which keeps the records of all personnel who’ve left the army. And the U.S. Total Army Command, in Virginia, where they keep the active army files. Zippo. And there’s no record of his death anywhere.”

“That’s impossible,” Claire said. “If he’s alive, he’s either in the army or out of it. Can’t be neither. Make sure there isn’t some dumb glitch, like a wrong middle initial or a spelling error or something.”

Devereaux glared at her. “Do I look like an idiot?”

“Don’t answer that,” Grimes said.

“All right,” Claire said. “Ray, I need whatever you got on Abbott, right now. You guys can stay up if you like, but it’s almost two A.M., and I’ve got to get some sleep if I’m going to be coherent with Abbott tomorrow morning.”

There was the light tap of a car horn, and Claire opened her front door. Grimes’s rusty silver Mercedes was sitting in her driveway. Saturday morning at six-thirty, and Thirty-fourth Street was deserted. The early-morning sunlight was pastel. A bird trilled musically, regular as a metronome. Her head ached and thudded at the temples. The daylight pierced her eyes.

“Rise and shine,” Grimes said, sardonic.

“I read over the Abbott stuff until almost four. I need coffee.”

“We’ll grab some on the way.”

In the lobby of the Madison Hotel they were joined by Ray Devereaux. He handed Claire a small Motorola cellular phone, spoke for a few minutes, and returned to the street.

They met Henry Abbott in the Madison restaurant. He was tanned and prosperous-looking, handsome in a vaguely sinister way. His silver hair was combed straight back from his square forehead. He wore gold wire-rim glasses. He was dressed in a gray suit, white shirt, elegant blue foulard tie.

He looked at his watch, a slim gold Patek Philippe, as they joined him at the small table. “You’ve got twenty minutes,” he said.

Grimes rolled his eyes but said nothing.

“Good morning to you, too,” Claire said, setting down her cell phone on the table in front of her. Caffeine and a fresh application of lipstick had made her feel marginally human. She introduced herself and Grimes.

“I have nothing to say to you,” he said. “No law says I have to talk to military investigators.”

“Then why’d you agree to meet us?” Claire asked.

“Curiosity. I wanted to see what you look like. I’ve read about you.”

“Well, now you know,” she said.

“She normally looks better,” Grimes apologized, “but she’s operating on less than three hours’ sleep.”

“We’ve got a couple of questions for you,” she said.

“Why the fuck should I talk to you? I’ve got a reputation to protect.”

I’ll bet, Claire thought. “Your CID statement is quite specific,” she said. “I’m sure they’ve provided you with a copy to refresh your memory.”

“I didn’t see what Kubik is supposed to have done anyway.”

“That’s not what your sworn statement says,” Grimes put in.

“Yeah, well,” Abbott said, and took a sip of coffee. A waiter came by and poured coffee all around. Claire took a grateful sip. The caffeine had an immediate effect, accelerating her heartbeat, causing prickles of sweat to break out at her temples.

“We know the real story,” she said. “All your statements are exactly the same, all you guys in Detachment 27. Which is too cute by half. As this case goes on, you run the risk of being locked into your statement, the one that was coerced out of you thirteen years ago. You don’t want that.”

“Are you tape-recording this?” Abbott asked.

“No, I’m not,” she said.

He dabbed at his mouth with a white linen napkin. “If, theoretically, I were to change my story, they’d charge me with lying under oath to the CID.”

So that was it. “They can’t,” she said. “You have no criminal liability in the military anymore, now that you’re discharged.”

“Says who?”

“The Supreme Court,” Grimes said. “Decades ago. You want to be the first guy who comes clean. You don’t want to be the last guy holding out, telling the lie.”

“And if I don’t?” He was exploring his options now, looking for wiggle room.

“Simple,” Claire said. “If you perjure yourself, you can be tried in federal district court for perjury. Under 18 U.S.C., you can get five years in prison. And when you get out, say goodbye to all those lucrative government contracts. They dry up right away.”

“Look,” Abbott said, exasperated. “You want a witness, I’m not your guy. I didn’t see him shoot — I was on the other side of that fucking shit-hole village manning the radio.”

“Yet you testified you saw him shoot.”

“Are you really that fucking naïve, or are you just pretending to be?” he snapped.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

“Are we off the record here?”

“If you insist.”

“Well, I do insist. This is off the record. Don’t tell me you don’t know how the system works. The system works in favor of guys like Colonel Marks — excuse me, General fucking Marks. The system wants somebody to blame it on. Right after we got back to Fort Bragg, Marks called each of us in, before our interviews with CID, and says, ‘I’m preparing my statement and I want to make sure I have my facts straight. What is your recollection of what happened?’ And I say, you know, ‘I don’t recall one way or the other, sir.’ I was a good soldier. I knew what to say. But he wanted more than that. He says, ‘Didn’t you see Kubik suddenly raise his weapon and begin to shoot?’ I say, ‘No, sir, I didn’t.’ I mean, this was night, and I was like two hundred yards away. I saw someone fire. How the hell do I know who it was? He says, ‘Are you sure you didn’t see Kubik suddenly go crazy and start firing? Be sure about this, Sergeant. This’ll make or break your career. Kubik has violent tendencies. If you search your memory, I’m sure you’ll recall Kubik suddenly taking out his weapon and firing.’ Well, I wasn’t born yesterday, and I say, ‘Yes, sir, of course, that was it. That’s what he did, sir, you’re absolutely correct, sir.’ And that’s all it takes.”

Claire nodded as if he were simply confirming something she already knew.

“And let me tell you, I’ll deny all this on the stand. I’ve got to deal with the Pentagon every day. They buy billions of dollars of equipment from my company. And they don’t like snitches and turncoats. I got a meeting.” He stood up. “Was all that true, in the Post?”

“I didn’t see the Post yet this morning,” Grimes said. “What are you talking about?”

“You,” Abbott said to Claire. “You really do that? You probably don’t want to talk about it, do you?”

“Shit,” she said. “The Post found out why I’m in Washington, didn’t they?”

He looked puzzled. “You read it, didn’t you?” He popped open his metal briefcase, reached in, and pulled out a neatly folded copy of the Washington Post, which he dropped on the table in front of her.

She saw her photograph, small and below the fold, and the headline — A HARVARD PROFESSOR’S TAINTED PAST — and she felt the blood rush to her head.

Claire smoked.

Annie danced around the kitchen table, chanting: “What? What? What?”

Jackie told her, “Give us some privacy, babe.”

Claire stubbed out her cigarette. She pulled another from the pack, offered it to Jackie, was surprised when Jackie shook her head.

Annie grabbed on to Claire’s skirt. “What are you reading? Tell me. Tell me.”

Claire was too numb to talk.

Annie needed the reassurance of Mommy’s attention. Mommy, however, was a thousand miles away, and almost two decades.

Mommy was twenty-three now. A One-L at Yale Law School. Probably one of the smartest students in her class, but she didn’t actually feel like it. Most of the time she felt like crying, and very often she did. Most of the spring semester she’d been flying back and forth between Pittsburgh and LaGuardia. Renting cars at the Pittsburgh airport and driving to Franklin. Taking buses from LaGuardia to New Haven. Sitting by her mother’s hospital bed and watching her succumb to liver cancer.

There were a dozen excuses. She was barely in New Haven that semester, the second term of her first year. She was distracted. She should have taken a leave but didn’t. She was frightened. Even for a full-time student, law school was a challenge, and she barely saw the inside of the law library.

She’d meant to use the obscure law-review article only for inspiration. She had no interest, really, in civil procedures. The draft she handed in she’d meant to rework extensively, but she had a plane to catch. She’d just gotten the phone call from the attending telling her that her mother had just died. Anyone else would have taken a leave of absence, but she wanted to maintain a semblance of normalcy.

It was a bad break, really. A lousy coincidence.

Her professor was quite familiar with the obscure law-review article she’d all but rewritten under her name. The law-review article had been written by a former student of his, who’d proudly sent a signed reprint of it to his old professor.

A bad break.

He called her into his office and confronted her. Not for a moment did she try to deny it or make excuses. He was an acerbic and bitter man, not inclined to grant clemency.

Plagiarism, pure and simple. The dean was more understanding than the professor. She’d been under stress. Her mother was dying. She should have requested a leave. At least she should have requested an extension. She’d been irresponsible, not criminal.

The charge was buried. She was given the chance to resubmit the paper. Only the understanding dean, and the aggrieved professor (whose later nomination to the Supreme Court was acrimoniously rejected), would ever know.

In the background the phone rang repeatedly, but no one rose from the kitchen table to answer it. Claire reread the article for the hundredth time. Substantially it was accurate. Here and there a detail was off, but it was a good job of reporting. The Post reporter could even say, truthfully, that repeated calls to Ms. Chapman’s home were not returned.

The headline burned her insides like a red-hot poker.

Annie clung to the hem of her skirt as if afraid her mother would leave her.

“What happens to you now?” Jackie said.

“I don’t know,” she said thickly. “I may lose my position at the Law School. I’m pretty sure that’s what happens.”

“But you have tenure.”

“Tenure doesn’t cover this sort of thing.”

“There were mitigating circumstances.”

“I could make the argument. Harvard might even listen. But more likely they’ll quietly ask me to leave the faculty. I know how they work.”

“The general warned you,” Jackie said ruefully. “‘You have a career to be concerned about,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to ruin it.’”

“Yeah,” Claire agreed. “He warned me. But a threat like that wasn’t going to stop me.”

Finally Claire and Jackie began to take turns answering the phone. At least two dozen reporters, wire-service, newspaper, radio, and television, called to follow up on the Post story. To all of them she either refused to comment or declined to come to the phone. A few friends from Cambridge called, wonderfully full of understanding; loyal friends. Abe Margolis, her Law School colleague, called, and though he wasn’t exactly the touchy-feely type, he too expressed his anger at the intrusion by the Post into a part of her personal life that was no one’s business, and he talked strategy. He said he’d talk to the dean of the Law School. He thought this thing could be beat.

Claire was less sanguine.

In the middle of the night, the phone rang again. Claire awoke with a hammering heart and pounding temples.

She let it ring. The answering machine would get it.

After five rings, the machine switched on, played her outgoing message, beeped. There was silence, then a click. She reached over, fumbled with the phone, and finally managed to turn off the ringer.

Her heartbeat slowing, she finally fell back asleep.

It didn’t ring again for three hours.

At five-fifty-six Monday morning, she awoke, glanced at the digital alarm clock, and knew she should get up and start preparing for court. Then she realized that the phone had been ringing, somewhere distant, somewhere in another room in the house. She remembered she’d turned off the ringer. She lay there in bed, her heart thumping again, and waited for the machine to get it.

This time a male voice came on over the answering machine. It was a youngish-sounding voice, crisp and authoritative. “Claire Heller,” he said.

She waited.

“Pick up the phone, it’s important.”

She reached over and picked it up. “Yes?”

“I have information for you,” the voice said.

“What kind of information?” She sat up slowly.

“For your trial.”

“Who’s this?”

“Information on Marks.”

“Who is this?”

Silence. Had he hung up?

“Lentini. You recognize the name?”

“Yes.”

“I need complete secrecy, and let me tell you right now, I won’t testify. I’m not testifying against him.”

“Can we meet?”

“Not at your house.”

“Where?”

“And with you only. Not with either of the other attorneys. Not your private eye either. I see anyone else, I take off.”

“How do you know I’m working with two attorneys?”

“I know people.”

“Is that how you got my number?”

“I can only meet at night. I have a job, and it’s not easy for me to get out of town.”

“I’ll meet you wherever it’s convenient for you.”

“Not near me. I won’t take that chance. Write this down.”

He gave her precise directions.

“Just you alone,” he said.

“The government calls Frank La Pierre,” Waldron announced.

The prosecution was beginning its case with the Criminal Investigation Division agent who was in charge of the case against Ronald Kubik. Frank La Pierre was escorted by the bailiff into the courtroom. He walked with a slow shuffle, as if he’d been injured long ago. He wore a cheap-looking dark suit that flapped open; he’d clearly been unable to button it over his potbelly. He had owlish horn-rimmed glasses, a pinched nose, and a small downturned mouth. His receding hairline came down in a widow’s peak.

Waldron stood with his hands clasped behind his back. “Mr. La Pierre, is it correct that you are a special agent for the CID?”

“That is correct,” La Pierre boomed in a sonorous, assured baritone.

“You are in fact the CID agent in charge of this investigation, is that correct?” As if there might be another reason he was here.

“That is correct.”

“Now, Mr. La Pierre, how long have you been a CID agent?”

“Eight years.”

“And what office are you attached to?”

“CID headquarters at Fort Belvoir.”

“Do you have a specialty as a CID agent?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And what is that specialty?”

“Personal crimes, particularly homicide.”

“I see. Mr. La Pierre, how many murder cases would you say you’ve worked in your career?”

“I don’t know, maybe forty.”

“Forty? Well, that’s quite a few.” He took La Pierre through his credentials and his involvement in the Kubik case. It was all matter-of-fact, often quite dry, but thorough.

After lunch, Claire stood to cross-examine the witness. She looked momentarily lost. “Mr. La Pierre, you say eighty-seven civilians were killed at La Colina, El Salvador, on 22 June 1985, is that right?”

“That’s correct.” La Pierre’s certitude was almost defiant.

“Well, can you identify, please, for the investigating officer, the individuals who are dead?”

La Pierre hesitated. “Identify how?”

“Well, how many, say, were male?” Claire gave a sudden little open-palmed shrug, as if the thought had just occurred to her.

He paused again, furtively glanced at Waldron, then looked down. “I don’t know that.”

“How many were female?”

With annoyance: “There’s no way of knowing—”

“Well, what were the ages of the eighty-seven victims?”

“Look, this was thirteen years—”

“Answer the question, please. What were the ages of the victims?”

Firmly: “I don’t know.”

“Well, where are they buried?”

“I’m sure I can get that for you—”

“Who buried them?”

“Your Honor,” Waldron burst in angrily, “counsel is engaging in a completely specious line of questioning, completely improper, inadmissible—”

“Sustained,” Judge Farrell replied blandly. “Let’s move this along, counsel.”

“Thank you. Mr. La Pierre, do you have any photographs of the dead bodies?”

“No,” he said testily.

“No? What about death certificates? Surely you have those?”

“No.”

“No? Autopsy reports, no doubt. You must have those.”

“No, but—”

“Mr. La Pierre, can you tell me the name of one individual that my client is accused of killing?”

La Pierre stared at her venomously. “No, I cannot.”

“Not even one?”

“No.”

“If you can’t tell me one, I know you can’t tell me two. Let alone twenty-two. Yet you’re accusing Sergeant Kubik of murdering eighty-seven people, is that your testimony here today, sir?”

But Frank La Pierre had had his fill of badgering. He came back at her with high moral indignation: “Ronald Kubik murdered eighty-seven innocent people in—”

“Yet you can’t testify that you’ve seen even a single one of the bodies of the eighty-seven people that my client is alleged to have killed. You can’t, can you?”

“But—”

“And you haven’t seen an autopsy report for a single person that my client is alleged to have killed?”

“No, I have not,” he said, this time almost proudly.

“And you haven’t seen a death certificate for a single person that my client is alleged to have killed?”

“No, I have not.”

“In point of fact, sir, you don’t have a single document, except for the” — she paused for emphasis, lifted her eyebrows — “‘sworn’ statements that the government has introduced, to prove that eighty-seven people were killed at La Colina on 22 June 1985. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Or who these eighty-seven people were.”

“Yes.”

“So we’re to take this on your word?”

“Based on seven identical sworn statements,” La Pierre managed to get in.

“Oh, I see. The seven” — she held up two fingers on each hand and flicked them in the universal quotation-mark sign — “‘sworn’ statements. Which are, as you correctly point out, identical. Yet you have no autopsy reports. You have no death certificates. In fact, you have no hard evidence whatsoever, do you?”

A long pause. “Besides the statements, no.”

“Now, Mr. La Pierre, we’ve had an opportunity to examine the service records of each of the members of Detachment 27 who made a statement to you. And, you know, it’s funny, but we didn’t discover any entry in those service records that would indicate temporary duty in El Salvador. Did we miss something?”

Now they were back on his turf. “No. Often top-secret missions aren’t recorded in service records.”

“So we didn’t miss anything.”

“I believe not.”

“Good. There was no mention in any of those service records of the incursion into El Salvador in June 1985, right?”

“I believe that’s correct.”

“Mr. La Pierre, did you see my discovery request?”

“No, trial counsel didn’t show it to me.”

“Well, Mr. La Pierre, the defense made a discovery request for the order assigning these individuals to El Salvador. And the strange thing was, we never got any. And I’m thinking, you know, bureaucracies and everything, the way things fall between the cracks... Did you happen to see any order assigning the members of Detachment 27 to El Salvador in June 1985?”

“No, I did not.”

“No record of any order?”

“That’s correct.”

“None at all.”

Warily, he said, “Uh, that’s right.”

“That’s a relief,” Claire said, “because I didn’t either.” Scattered laughter in the courtroom. “It’s good to hear I’m not the only one who hasn’t had an easy time dealing with the Pentagon’s paper-shufflers. And presumably you went to the supervisory headquarters for this particular Special Forces detachment.”

“I believe we did, yes.”

“Yet you got no records of any order assigning them to El Salvador?”

“Right.”

She turned suddenly to the witness as if another thought had just occurred to her. “Did you attempt to locate in archived records copies of the temporary duty orders that every single military unit has to get before they’re sent anywhere?”

“Uh, no.”

“You didn’t? What about travel claims? Did you attempt to locate in archived records the travel claims for Detachment 27’s alleged incursion into El Salvador in June 1985?”

“Well, no, but—”

“You know, Mr. La Pierre, I’m not a member of the military—”

“I wouldn’t have guessed,” he said flatly.

Hearty laughter broke out among the spectators. Claire laughed along, sharing the joke at her own expense. “And, well, you know, I really don’t know much about your world here, but it’s my understanding — and correct me if I’m wrong — that any time any U.S. soldier goes anywhere where there’s travel involved, there’s got to be a travel claim submitted. Am I right?”

“I believe so,” La Pierre said, seemingly bored.

“You believe so. Hmm. Yet you didn’t find any travel claim for this alleged operation in El Salvador in June 1985.”

“Well, no, but—”

“So there’s really no corroboration these individuals went anywhere.”

La Pierre worked his open mouth a few times, and at last began, “I—”

“Presumably you’ve made some efforts,” Claire interrupted, “to corroborate whether or not this operation ever actually occurred.”

With narrowed eyes, La Pierre shot back, “You’re not denying this operation took place, are you?”

“Let me ask the questions, Mr. La Pierre. You’ve made some efforts to determine whether or not this operation actually occurred, haven’t you?”

“It’s obvious it occurred—”

“It’s obvious? To whom? To you and Major Waldron over there? Or to me and Mr. Grimes and Ronald Kubik over here? Who is it obvious to?”

“The operation occurred,” La Pierre hissed.

“But you have no records of any orders to corroborate that, do you?” She didn’t wait for his reply. “Now, Mr. La Pierre, it’s my understanding — and again, correct me if I’m wrong — that before the U.S. government, including the military, engages in a covert operation, there must be a presidential finding authorizing that covert operation. A classified order signed personally by the President of the United States. Is that right?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“A presidential finding authorizing covert action is called an NSDD — a National Security Decision Directive — is that right?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Which may be classified, right?”

“It can be.”

“Sometimes an NSDD can have a classified and an unclassified version, correct?”

“I think so.”

“And this operation was a covert operation, isn’t that true?”

“Yes, it was.”

“So there must exist an NSDD, presumably a classified one, authorizing Detachment 27’s mission to El Salvador in June 1985. Right?”

He attempted to sidestep the jaw trap. “I wouldn’t know.”

“But you just said that every covert action must be authorized by an NSDD. And this was a covert action, you said yourself. So there must be an NSDD, right?”

“I suppose so.”

“Yet you didn’t obtain the presidential finding authorizing the June 1985 covert operation and signed by the President of the United States?”

“No, I did not.”

“Well, gosh, Mr. La Pierre, as the chief investigator in this case, don’t you think it’s important to know whether this operation was authorized by the president?”

“In my job,” he said ringingly, “I don’t get into foreign affairs. I do personal crimes, including homicides.”

“You don’t get into foreign affairs,” she repeated.

“No, I do not.”

“Mr. La Pierre, if a full-bird colonel in the Special Forces, who’s now the chief of staff of the army, ran an operation in El Salvador in June 1985 that was illegal — because it wasn’t authorized by a presidential finding — don’t you think you’d want to advise him of his rights?”

Frank La Pierre looked over at the judge. “I don’t know how to answer that,” he said.

“Just answer the question,” Farrell said with annoyance. “Did you read General Marks his rights?”

“No, I most certainly did not.”

“Why not?” Claire asked.

“I had no reason to believe this was an illegal operation.”

“Because you don’t ‘get into’ foreign affairs. Well, sir, don’t you think that, as the lead investigator in a mass-murder case that allegedly took place in a foreign country during a covert operation, you might want to educate yourself about foreign policy and the rules governing covert action?”

“I don’t see why I need to.”

“Really?” Claire said, amazed. “So it’s not important to educate yourself as to whether a U.S. operation violated the laws of the United States in its inception?”

“That’s not my job.”

“So let me get all this straight. You can’t identify a single person who was killed. In fact, you don’t know who was killed, or, indeed, if anyone was killed. So much for element one of the charge — that is, that a ‘certain named or described person is dead.’ We don’t know.

“And, secondly, we don’t even know whether or not this operation took place. And if it did take place, we don’t even know if the operation was authorized. So, heck, we don’t even know whether any of these alleged killings — of which we have no proof — were unlawful. Because we don’t know what was lawful in this case. We have no idea what the President of the United States ordered — assuming this mission even happened at all! So much for element two of the charge — that is, was the killing unlawful.” She shook her head in disgust. “I have nothing further, Your Honor.”

This time the call came at close to 4:00 A.M. She answered, said, “Keep it up. We’ll trace you,” then hung up.

Before she left the house that morning, Devereaux called. “The FBI’s close,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“On those mysterious phone calls. They’ve narrowed it down to one of several public payphones within the Pentagon.”

“The Pentagon?”

“Yeah,” Devereaux replied. “Whoever’s trying to scare you doesn’t want to make them from his Pentagon office, I’ll bet. That time of night, you can only get into the Pentagon if you’re an employee or have a pass.”

“That narrows it down to twenty-five thousand people,” she said tartly.

The three attorneys sat at a table in a coffee shop in Manassas.

“Well, that sucks,” Grimes said, tucking into an outsized wedge of sour-cream coffee cake. The owners of the shop knew him and obviously liked him. “Panel members, they’re going to eat up Hernandez’s motive for holding back — helping out a buddy, esprit de corps, protecting the army’s good name. Shit, only thing he left out was God.”

Claire sipped a black coffee and looked balefully at the NO SMOKING sign posted on the wall directly above their table. “But it’s a lie,” she said. Embry nodded and took a sip of coffee.

“You think the guy just dreamed up that stuff to spice up his story? Sort of like icing on the cake? Or Waldron told him to suddenly ‘remember’ it?”

Embry put in: “Waldron must have had something to do with it. Hernandez had all the right reasons — it’s not like he tried to claim he’d forgotten.”

“Maybe so,” Grimes said, “but the panel won’t think that.”

“So they’re one up on us,” she said. “You think I should have re-crossed?”

Embry shook his head, puzzled. Grimes spoke first. “Maybe,” he said at length. “I don’t know what I would have done.”

She nodded. “Fair enough. It was a tough call. A criminal trial is a psychodrama — and a crapshoot.”

The owner, or owner’s wife, appeared with a pot of coffee. She was an ample-bosomed, middle-aged black woman who smelled of sweat and Opium. She laid her free hand on Grimes’s shoulders. “Refill, sugar?”

He held out his mug. “Thanks, babe.”

“Anyone else?” she asked. Embry and Claire shook their heads no. “How’s my coffee cake, honey?” she asked Grimes.

“Tastes just like my mamma used to make, before she got arrested.”

The woman stopped short for an instant, baffled. Grimes laughed, ha-ha! “But it’s not as sweet as you,” he said.

“Not like you’d know,” she said mock sternly, and moved on.

“At least we’ve got Mark Fahey,” Embry said.

“One witness to their ten,” Claire said mordantly. “Has he been served with a subpoena yet?”

Embry nodded. “Prosecution’s been notified. Fahey will be here in three days, ready to testify.”

“Wonder what kind of rat hole the government puts him up at,” Grimes said, and shoveled another immense forkload of coffee cake into his mouth.

“What’s up with the transcription?” Claire asked.

“I’ve hired five different transcriptionists,” Embry replied. “This is going to cost big-time.”

“I need to read over Abbott. He done yet?” she asked.

“Close. Maybe by tonight; I’ll call. These women are working ’round the clock. That’s why it’s so expensive.”

Grimes looked up. Crumbs had colonized the lines around his mouth. “You still getting spooky phone calls?”

Claire nodded. “Yeah, but if I let the answering machine get them, he hangs up. Funny, he doesn’t seem to want to leave us a voice sample. Ray says the FBI’s got nothing on the trap-and-trace: the caller moves around to different exchanges; he’s only on for a few seconds.”

“He’ll stop,” Grimes said. “He’s made his point — trying to unnerve you — but it didn’t work.”

“You guys mind if I leave you here?” Embry asked. “I’ve got a boatload of ballistics stuff to go over, and I’m working on an idea.”

“Share,” Claire said.

“When I’ve checked it out,” Embry said, standing up.

After Embry had left, Claire told Grimes about the call from Lentini.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said. “So he turns up after all. Man, this guy must be in deep fucking cover.”

“For good reason, I’d guess.”

“I want to go with you. We know nothing about him, and I don’t like mysteries.”

“I can take care of myself.”

Grimes seemed to consider this for a moment. “Can I ask you something?”

She looked at him.

“Was that all cooked up — that Post stuff?”

“No,” she admitted.

He nodded slowly. He was silent for a moment. “Shit, Claire,” he said at last, “we all make mistakes.”

“Mistakes?” she said with a bitter laugh.

“We all got skeletons in our closet. Stuff we wish we’d never done.”

She didn’t say anything, embarrassed to be talking about this with Grimes, but he gamely forged ahead. “General Marks said pursuing this case could be hazardous to your career. Guess he meant it, huh?”

“Guess so.”

“You think he, or one of his people, sent out people to dig stuff up?”

“My guess is it came up in the FBI background check. One of my professors at Yale.” She gave his name. Grimes, recognizing the name, nodded. “All it takes is someone in CID who’s friendly to the general.”

“Like just about anyone with ambitions,” Grimes said. “Suck up to the boss. You want to bring this up to the judge, get an investigation going?”

“For what? So he can say no, or, worse, he can order an investigation that goes nowhere? There won’t be any fingerprints on this.”

“I’m moving in,” Devereaux said. “You got more rooms in here than the goddamn Hilton, and the roach motel’s starting to wear on me. And you need protection.”

Claire lay on a couch in one of the sitting rooms, both Jackie and Grimes hovering nearby with grave concern. It was close to one in the morning. She was considerably banged up, particularly along her side and her left hip, where she had landed on several small rocks. There were quite a few scrapes as well, including a long, ugly one along her neck and left cheek, by the ear. She also had a ferocious, thudding headache. She’d spent over an hour being questioned by Maryland state police, from which nothing, she knew, would ever come.

“I don’t need protection, Ray,” she said weakly.

“Naw, you don’t need protection,” he said sardonically. “Not you. Someone disables your braking system, intending for you to wipe out on a jeep that’s conveniently left in your path, with two probably half-empty gas tanks on the back, and get blown up, but, naw, everything’s fine.”

“If you care about me—” Jackie said. “No, forget about me. If you care about Annie, you’ll take him up on his offer.”

Claire shrugged, unwilling to argue with such logic.

“So you never lost consciousness at all?” Devereaux asked.

“Nope.”

“No vomiting, change in vision, none of that?”

“Nope.”

“Your pupils look the same size, far as I can tell. So you don’t have a concussion, but you really should get over to the ER and have ’em do a CAT scan.”

“Suddenly you’re a doctor, too?” Claire said.

“You’re not disoriented.”

“No more than usual,” she replied.

“All right, now, Jackie,” Devereaux said, “I want you to wake her up in a couple hours, make sure she can wake up.”

“Don’t bother,” Claire said. “I’ve got my nightly harassing phone call to wake me up.”

“You think it really was Lentini behind this, or just someone using his name for the set-up?” Grimes asked.

“Who cares?” Claire said.

“Nah,” Devereaux said. “The call you got — arranging your little meeting in Maryland — I got a local phone-company source tells me it came from a payphone inside the Pentagon. I doubt it really came from Lentini — if he’s lying low, hiding, he won’t be calling from inside the belly of the beast.”

“We gotta file a notice with the Quantico cops, the MPs,” Grimes said.

“To what end?” Claire asked. “Until we can figure out who did this to me, and prove it, we’ve got nothing.”

“You know something,” Devereaux said, looming over her, “you really piss me off royally. What the hell you think you were doing, arranging a meeting like that, asking me to wire you, and not telling me where you were going? I woulda gone with you.”

“He insisted I go alone,” Claire said feebly.

“They always do,” Devereaux scowled. “You gotta stop being so casual about your safety. I got news for you.” He turned around to the others. “For all of youse. You know your realtor from Pepper Pike?”

“Our witness? What’s-his-name, Fahey?” Grimes said. “Don’t tell me...”

“Yeah. He was killed in a car accident this morning.”

Claire bolted upright. Her head almost exploded with a searing pain. “Oh my God.”

“Whoever wanted him out of the way are the same folks who wanted you out of the way,” Devereaux said. “Similar modus vivendi.”

“Operandi,” Grimes said.

“Right. It seems to be the modus operandi of Kubik v. the United States.”

She was able to cover her scraped cheek fairly well with a concealer, but a large, garish, purple-yellow bruise had emerged around her left eye that even the most industrial-strength cover-up she had wouldn’t hide unless she troweled it on.

Tom noticed it immediately as he was brought to the defense table. “What the hell happened to you?” he said, gaping.

“I slipped and fell,” she said. “Living in a strange house, you know. Happens.”

He looked unpersuaded.

The fact was that they were losing the case. Despite Claire’s powerful cross-examinations of both Hernandez and La Pierre, the two witnesses had still done the job the prosecution had called them to do. The jury no doubt believed not only that Tom had machine-gunned eighty-seven mothers, children, and old men, but that he had visited upon them acts of sadism that could only have been devised by a disturbed mind.

By the afternoon session of the third day of testimony, Henry Abbott, the next eyewitness, was ready for cross-examination. Claire looked around the courtroom, located Ray Devereaux sitting in a spectator seat with his hands folded over his great belly, and smiled. He was wearing one of what he called his courtroom suits, in case he had to take the stand, and looked ill at ease.

She got slowly to her feet and approached the witness stand. Henry Abbott, dressed in a navy-blue suit and crisp white shirt with a silver-striped tie, looked relaxed and confident. He gazed at her with dead eyes. He exuded neither hatred nor contempt. He looked blankly through her, as if she were some invisible bag lady on the street.

“Mr. Abbott,” she said, “I’m Claire Chapman. I’m the lead defense counsel.”

He blinked and gave the barest nod.

“Mr. Abbott, did you see the accused shoot those eighty-seven people?”

“Yes, I did.”

Claire turned her head slightly so that she was out of the line of sight of the jury, then gave Abbott a brief smile. “So you saw the victims react to the impact of the bullets?”

“Yes.”

“Can you describe their reaction?”

“Their reaction? Some of them screamed and cried, some of them fell to the ground and tried to cover their heads. The mothers shielded their children with their bodies.”

Very good. He was well prepared. “And you saw their reaction to the bullets’ impact?”

“Yes.”

“Which was—?”

“Some of them flew backward. They twitched, fell, crumpled in bizarre positions.”

“And you believe the accused was the only one who could have fired those bullets?”

“He was the only one that did.”

“But can you state positively that the bullets that struck those victims came from the accused’s firearm?”

“As I say, he was the only one firing.”

“But did you see the bullets exiting his machine gun?”

“I couldn’t see the bullets in flight, if that’s what you mean. I’m not Superman.”

A few chuckles came from the jury box. Abbott was unshakable. He had been thoroughly briefed.

“Mr. Abbott, how many rounds are in an M-60’s ammunition belt?”

“One hundred.”

“If you’re machine-gunning eighty-seven people, one hundred rounds isn’t enough, is it?”

“No, it’s not.”

“So you must have seen him reload.”

But Abbott was too well prepared. “He had two belts linked together,” he said evenly. “He didn’t have to reload.” A brief twinkle of triumph seemed to enter his eyes.

“Mr. Abbott, did your unit have muzzle devices called distorters available for your M-60 machine guns?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why did we have them?”

“Correct.”

“To mask the location of the shooter,” he said, one eyebrow cocked in a deft expression of contempt. “Sometimes it was very important that we not be located.”

“And can you tell me whether Sergeant Kubik had a distorter or a sound-suppressor on his weapon?”

Abbott hesitated. This detail they hadn’t furnished him.

“I believe not.”

“You believe not?” Claire echoed. “Well, isn’t the sound of an M-60 machine gun extremely loud?”

“Yes,” he conceded grudgingly.

“So there’s nothing subtle about it, is there? It would be just about impossible not to know whether an M-60 had a sound-suppressor on it, isn’t that right?”

He shrugged, wary of the trap he suspected she was laying for him. “Perhaps.”

“So, then, is it your testimony that Sergeant Kubik did not use a sound-suppressor or distorter when he fired the rounds that killed the eighty-seven civilians?”

“Right.”

Had he guessed? If so, he was lucky. Abbott was too sharp, or too well briefed, to be shaken from his prefabricated story. She decided it was time to pounce.

“Mr. Abbott, how much business does your company do with the Department of Defense?”

“I don’t really know.”

“Surely you have a fairly good idea.”

“A couple billion, certainly.”

“A couple of billion dollars,” she marveled. “So a good relationship with the Pentagon, and the army in particular, must be important to you and your company.”

He shrugged. “The customer’s always right, I like to say.”

“I’ll bet. And are you currently involved in any contract negotiations with the Pentagon?”

“Yes.”

“For what?”

“That’s a classified matter.”

“We’re in a classified courtroom, Mr. Abbott. Everyone here is cleared, including the jurors and the spectators. You can speak freely.”

“We’re conducting negotiations with the army for the purchase of a new generation of attack helicopters.”

“That must mean quite a lot of potential income for your firm.”

“Yes, it does.”

“And you’re one of the point men in those negotiations, correct?”

“Yes.”

“So that must make you inclined to be cooperative with the army.”

“Is that a question?”

“The customer’s always right, as you like to say.”

He shrugged.

“Mr. Abbott, do you remember the interview we had at the Madison Hotel four days ago?”

“Yes.”

“We met for breakfast, did we not?”

“We did.”

“Did I meet you along with my cocounsel, Mr. Grimes?”

“Yes, you did.”

“How long was the interview?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Does twenty-six minutes sound about right?”

“It may be. I don’t know.”

“Mr. Abbott, at our interview with you at the Madison Hotel, did you tell us you were coached by Colonel Marks, and told what to say in your CID interview?”

Now his eyes were dead again, the flat eyes of a snake. “No.”

“You don’t remember saying that?”

He leaned forward. “I never said it.”

“You never said you were coached before your CID interview?”

“No, I didn’t, and no, I wasn’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Are you positive?”

“Objection, Your Honor,” Waldron shouted. “Asked and answered.”

“Overruled,” Farrell said, and took a sip of Pepsi as though he were watching a particularly exciting game on TV.

“I remind you you’re under oath, Mr. Abbott. You never told me that your commanding officer told you what to say to the CID?”

“I never said that, and he never did.”

“Are you aware, Mr. Abbott, that I can move to the witness stand and testify about what you told me?”

“Then it would be your word against mine,” he said blandly. “And you’re not exactly an unbiased witness, are you?”

Claire noticed several jurors watching this exchange with great interest. The foreman, or president of the court, the bespectacled black man, was busily taking notes. “If I told you that’s exactly what I remember, would I be lying?” she said.

“Yes, you would.”

“If I told you that’s exactly what my cocounsel remembers, would he be lying?”

“He most certainly would.”

“If I told you we were tape-recording that interview, would we be lying?” she asked casually and turned toward the defense table. The courtroom stirred. She saw Tom’s eyes gleaming. He was doing all he could not to smile.

Grimes handed her a small stack of papers. She saw Abbott stiffen and clench both hands at his sides. He glared at her fiercely.

“Your Honor,” she said, “may I approach the witness?”

“You may.”

She strolled over to the prosecution table and dropped a stapled sheaf of paper, then placed one on the judge’s bench. Then she handed one to Abbott.

“Mr. Abbott,” she said, “that’s a verbatim transcript of your interview with us, certified by my colleague, Mr. Grimes, and my investigator, Mr. Devereaux, transcribed from a tape recording made by Mr. Devereaux.” She didn’t yet bother to explain that Devereaux had provided her with a transmitter in a dummy cellular phone and had taped the conversation in his car parked in front of the Madison. “Please turn to page thirty-four, Mr. Abbott, and begin reading where it’s marked, seven lines down, beginning with, ‘He says, “Didn’t you see Kubik suddenly raise his weapon and begin to shoot?” I say, “No, sir, I didn’t.”’ And ending with ‘they don’t like snitches and turncoats.’”

Abbott’s face was dark with fury. Under his breath, he said, “Cunt.”

“Excuse me? What did you say?”

Abbott stared ferociously. A vein at his right temple throbbed.

“Did you just refer to me by a four-letter vulgarism, Mr. Abbott?”

Suddenly Abbott threw the transcript to the floor of the witness box. “Goddamn you, that was off the record!”

“It was off the record back then,” Claire said quietly. “But you led yourself into the perjury you just committed, not us, and we can’t allow that to happen.”

“Your Honor!” Waldron shot to his feet.

“That’s it!” Judge Farrell exploded, hammering his gavel. “The members are excused.”

“Did you really agree that conversation was off the record?” rasped Farrell.

“Yes, Your Honor, I did,” Claire replied. “I tricked him. I had my investigator make a tape recording to ensure that we got accurate testimony at the trial.”

“Does your investigator secretly tape-record all your witness interviews?”

“I’d rather not say. But it’s legal, sir.”

“Why’d you tape him?”

“I mean no disrespect to you or to this court, but I had my doubts about his veracity. This witness should not be permitted to come in here and tell barefaced lies to you, me, and the jury.”

Waldron, who’d been pacing during this exchange, stopped suddenly and said, “Your Honor, this is a clear-cut violation of reciprocal discovery. We’ve got a discovery request for all statements by government witnesses in the hands of the defense. How come we never got this transcript?” He was smooth.

“It was nondisclosable,” Claire said. “This is obviously not a statement of the witness. The witness hasn’t read and signed the statement and sworn to the truth of it. We didn’t put the guy under oath.”

“But, Your Honor—”

“Well, I gotta go along with defense counsel on this one,” Farrell said, draining his can of Pepsi and setting it down on the podium with a hollow thock. “It’s no violation of discovery.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” Claire said.

“But I’m going to grant prosecution a delay of one hour. I don’t like this surprise stuff. I want the witness to have the chance to read through this transcript. I’m not interested in soliciting perjury in this case just to help you out, Ms. Chapman. Or you, Mr. Waldron. Really. Mr. Waldron, you put your poor excuse for a witness in a room, and I’m going to let the members take a break.”

“But, Your Honor,” Claire said, “this is right in the middle of my cross-examination. Can you instruct the government not to talk to the witness?”

“No, I will not.”

Claire sputtered, “But, sir—”

“Now we’re finished here,” Farrell said.

Claire and Tom met in the small private conference room within the secure courtroom complex. She showed him the photocopy of General Marks’s memorandum for the record that Dennis had given her. He read it, betraying no expression, and looked up. “Nice,” he said, and smiled.

“‘Nice’?” Claire said, aghast. “Is that all you can say? ‘Nice’? This little piece of paper may have just won the case for us here!”

Tom cocked his head and said curiously, “You think so?”

“Well, who the hell knows what will happen in this kangaroo court. But now we’ve got proof that Marks gave Hernandez the order to have those people killed. This is hugely important.” She looked at him for a moment. “Do you think it’s possible Hernandez was one of the shooters?”

Tom shrugged. “I told you, I didn’t see anything. I heard gunfire, and by the time I got there all I saw was the bodies.”

“But did you see Hernandez holding his machine gun as if he’d just fired it, anything like that? You’re not withholding anything from me, are you?”

“Claire,” Tom said, raising his voice, “are you listening to me? I said I didn’t see anything. Okay? You want me to repeat it? I didn’t see anything.”

She stared at him, taken aback by this sudden flash of anger. What in the world was he so mad about?

“I hear you,” she replied tersely, and got up to enter the courtroom.

The weekend, at last. Some much-needed time off. She tried to sleep late but couldn’t. She awoke before seven and realized the phone hadn’t rung in the middle of the night. Progress. Or maybe they took weekends off. She ran a very hot bath in the big old white porcelain tub in the master-suite bathroom, whose floor was tiled in tiny black-and-white octagons as in a grand hotel of old, and took a long soak. She was tempted to bring some work into the tub with her, maybe a transcript, but then forced herself not to. She needed a break. She needed to let her fevered brain rest a bit. She needed perspective on the case. So she closed her eyes and soaked away the bruises and the aches. She thought about Tom, wanted to visit him at the brig, but knew that Annie needed her even more right now.

Then she got into jeans, a sweatshirt, and sneakers, and took Annie out to breakfast in Georgetown, just the two of them. They left without notifying Devereaux, who was probably still sleeping.

“When can we go home?” Annie asked. She was making designs on her pancakes with the squeeze bottle of syrup.

“You mean Boston?”

“Yeah. I want to see my friends. I want to see Katie.”

“Soon, honey.”

“What’s ‘soon’?”

“A couple of weeks. Maybe sooner.”

“With Daddy?”

She didn’t know what to say now. No, she wanted to say. Not with Daddy. Daddy’s kangaroo court will probably find him guilty and sentence him to life in Leavenworth, where you’ll be able to visit him once in a while. It will tear your life apart. And that’s if Mommy’s able to get the sentence reduced from death. All the while, Mommy will be fighting uphill battles, writing and filing briefs like one of these half-crazed prison legal scholars, taking the case to the Army Court of Criminal Appeals, and higher and higher, all the way up to the Supreme Court. While the family’s resources dwindled away, because Harvard would have fired her, which she was sure would happen any day now. Probably at some point, once they were out of the military system, the verdict would be overturned; it surely couldn’t stand up, the government’s case was a joke. But Daddy would certainly not survive prison, because too many people wanted him dead.

“Of course with Daddy,” she said, and tousled Annie’s miraculously soft, glossy brown hair. “Now, when you’re done with your pancakes, we’ll go to the zoo, okay?”

Annie shrugged as if the idea didn’t appeal to her.

“You don’t like the zoo?” Claire said.

Annie shook her head.

“You’re still upset with me.”

“No, Mommy. I’m angry with you.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t, Mommy. You always say you know, but you don’t.” Her eyes shone. “You said you were going to be home more, but you’re still always gone.”

“You wanted me to play with you last night, but I had to work with Mr. Grimes and Mr. Embry and Uncle Ray. I know.”

“How come you’re always working?”

“Because Daddy’s on trial,” she said. “They want to lock him up in the jail for a long, long time, and it’s up to me and my friends to make sure they don’t do that.”

“But why does it take so long?”

A tough one. “Because the people who want to put him away are bad guys, and sometimes they lie.”

“Why?”

Claire thought about that one for a long time. Finally she said, honestly, “I don’t really know.”

“They’re putting the general on the stand today?” Devereaux asked. Claire sat in the front seat of Devereaux’s rented car, a Lincoln Town Car even larger and more luxurious than the one he drove back in Boston. Corinthian leather was everywhere.

“Apparently.” Distracted, she sipped from a takeout cup of coffee.

“So he’s going to sit there in his general’s costume with the four stars and the fruit salad on the front and say Sergeant Ronald Kubik did it? And that’s going to sway the jury because he’s a four-star general? Even though he wasn’t even on the scene?”

“That’s Waldron’s theory, and it’s not a bad one.”

“And you’re going to do what?” He pulled into the back gate of Quantico and waved at the sentry, who by now recognized them.

“I’m going to look for the soft spots,” she said, “and plunge in the knife.”

Devereaux looked at her for a moment and turned back to the road. He gave a crooked smile. “Why do I get a feeling you’re gonna plunge in the knife even if there isn’t a soft spot? You get a call this morning, around two-thirty?”

She nodded. “The FBI boys got something?”

“Nope. Me. See, there’s only two entrances to the Pentagon that’re open twenty-four hours a day. There’s the Mall entrance, and there’s the River entrance. I gambled, and staked out the Mall entrance. At around twenty after two in the morning — ten minutes before you received a call — guess who’s striding into the Pentagon, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?”

“I can’t guess,” she said.

“The good soldier. Colonel James Hernandez. He’s your caller. And probably behind that car ‘accident’ in Maryland. Nice guy, huh?”

“Your Honor,” Waldron demanded, “I’d like to have the defense counsel state for the record, as an officer of the court, how long she’s had this memorandum, and where she got it.”

“No, Your Honor,” Claire said before Farrell had a chance to respond. “I don’t have to do that, and I’m not going to. The prosecution isn’t entitled to a preview of my cross-examination. For God’s sake, we put this exact MFR in our discovery request — we named it specifically! — and the government, in effect, made a written denial that it even existed! I got this after their written denial; this document is a photocopy from the CIA operational files, fully marked with a complete chain of custody, and that’s all I’m going to say.”

“The CIA!” Waldron stammered, looking at Claire. Why was he so astonished? she wondered.

Farrell was clearly taken aback by the whole business, by how quickly the tables had turned, by the spectacle of an entire courtroom watching a four-star general lie under oath. Everything the judge said on the record was going to be scrutinized minutely. He had to tiptoe, and he knew it. He popped open a Pepsi and swigged long and hard.

“Mr. Trial Counsel,” Farrell said, “it’s your witness, and it was your job to find that document, so I’m not inclined to help you out here.”

In the meantime, Jerome Fine, the general’s counsel, had moved a chair right next to the general’s on the witness stand, and the two of them were conferring in whispers.

“General,” Claire said, approaching him, “is that your attorney there?”

Marks seemed vaguely amused. “Yes, it is.”

“And what’s his name?”

“Jerome R. Fine. He’s the army general counsel.”

“Hmm. Interesting, General, that you have your attorney sitting right next to you. Do you feel you have something to hide?”

He smiled and said with a low chuckle, “Not at all.”

“Now, General, prior to your testifying here today, did you review the testimony you gave before Congress when you were confirmed as chief of staff of the army?”

Marks hesitated but a moment. “Yes.”

“Your attorney advised you to do that, didn’t he?”

“Ms. Chapman,” the general said hotly, “I don’t have to tell you anything that my attorney and I discussed.”

“Ah, but I’m afraid you do.” She glanced at Jerome Fine, who looked uneasy. “You see, General, we can call Mr. Fine to the stand right after you — nothing you two have talked about is privileged, since he works for the United States of America. Not for you.”

The general looked at his lawyer, who gave a tiny nod.

“So perhaps you can answer my question, General. Did your attorney advise you to review your congressional testimony?”

A pause. The lawyer nodded again. “Yes, he did.”

“Now, General Marks, did you tell your attorney that the memorandum for the record you wrote immediately after the incident at La Colina had been destroyed, as far as you knew, and that you didn’t remember its contents?”

Marks turned again to Judge Farrell. “Do I have to answer that, Your Honor?”

“Yes, you do,” Farrell replied.

“Yes, I did tell him that,” Marks replied, “but that was my recollection—”

“Thank you,” Claire interrupted. “General, did you ever tell your wife about the alleged massacre at La Colina?”

“My wife?” Incredulous, he turned back to the judge. “Your Honor, I don’t have to answer questions about my personal life, do I?”

“Yes, General, you do,” the judge said evenly.

Raising his voice a few decibels, Marks said tartly, “My wife and I never discuss this sort of thing.”

“Oh? And what sort of thing is that?”

“Covert actions—”

“And was the incident at La Colina a ‘covert action’?”

“Don’t twist my words,” Marks snapped. “That massacre was the most godawful tragic thing that ever happened during my—”

“And you mean to tell us you didn’t tell your wife about this most godawful tragic thing?”

He hesitated.

“Or did you lie to her, too?”

“I have never lied about La Colina!” Marks thundered.

“Oh, no? You lied to Congress, didn’t you? Isn’t it a fact that when you were asked about this incident by the Senate during your confirmation, you gave a version entirely contradicted by the MFR you wrote? You lied to Congress, did you not?”

“I do not have to take this!” Marks shouted. “I have dedicated over thirty years of my life to serving the Constitution of the United States and the people of this country—”

“General,” said his attorney, grabbing his arm.

“But you lied to Congress, General, did you not?” Claire persisted.

“I do not have to take that from someone like you!” Marks shouted, half rising from his seat. His face was crimson. “You’re out of line!”

“General, please!” his attorney said, tugging at Marks’s arm to pull him back into his seat.

“What does that mean, someone like me?” Claire asked with a faint smile. “A defense attorney doing her job? Protecting a client falsely accused of murders he did not commit? That you might have had a hand in as an accomplice—?”

“Objection!” shouted Waldron.

“This is an obscenity!” thundered Marks.

“Move on,” Judge Farrell said.

“General,” Claire said in a ringing voice, “you lied to Congress, did you not?”

There was a moment of silence.

The general’s lawyer cupped a hand in front of his mouth and whispered something to his client. General Marks, his composure regained, looked up and said blithely, “Upon advice of counsel, I decline to comment.”

“Wait a second,” Claire said. “Are you taking the Fifth?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Well, what — what are you taking the Fifth about?”

“About my testimony,” Marks replied evenly. “My lawyer has just advised me that I may have committed false swearing.” He turned toward Judge Farrell. “Your Honor, I haven’t seen that document in thirteen years. I testified here as to what I remembered of that document. And, frankly, I was ambushed.”

“Your Honor,” Claire said, “I move to strike the direct testimony of this witness, since we’re being denied the Sixth Amendment right to cross-examination.”

Farrell squinted at the general, then shook his head in disbelief. “Your motion is granted. The witness’s direct testimony is stricken.”

“Thank you, Your Honor. At this time, defense moves for a mistrial on the grounds that this witness’s testimony can’t be taken back. You can’t unring that bell.”

“Denied,” Farrell snapped with a red-faced scowl.

“In that case, Your Honor, we ask that you instruct the members that the chief of staff of the army is no longer a witness before this court, and the members may not consider any testimony he has given. I also ask that Your Honor inform the members that you, the military judge, believe that the chief of staff may have perjured himself, and that the members should put his testimony out of their minds, and that the military judge has advised the chief of his rights against self-incrimination under Article 31 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and the chief of staff has decided he will give no further testimony here before this court-martial.”

“All right,” Farrell said. He knew he had little choice. “You got it. I will so instruct the members. And, General, you’re excused, with our deepest apologies.”

Claire stared in disbelief as the general got to his feet, shrugged his uniform back into place, and strode off, attorney in tow.

“Uh, Your Honor,” Waldron said, “while we’re in this 39(a) session, I’d like to introduce our next exhibit, Prosecution Exhibit 4, for identification, which is a tape recording of the accused speaking on a tactical field radio on 22 June 1985, referring to the events he’s on trial for, as well as a verbatim transcript of that conversation.”

Claire looked at Grimes, then Embry, then Tom. All of them looked as astonished as she did.

“Your Honor, I don’t believe this!” she said.

“And the worm turns,” Farrell said. “What is this, Surprise Evidence Day? Give the Judge an Ulcer Day? Trial counsel, you got the tape right here?”

“Yes, we do, sir,” Waldron said. He handed the black cassette to the judge, along with a small tape player.

“Well, let’s hear it,” Farrell said.

Grimes said aloud, “The hits just keep on coming.”

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.”

“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.

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: LENTINI, ROBERT.

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 CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY.

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 VISITOR’S NAME column (REPRESENTING: “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.