High Crimes

“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.

50

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.