High Crimes

“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.