High Crimes

Waldron stared back with his lucid blue-gray eyes. “I hope you don’t seriously think we even need to bug your offices.” He shook his head and gave one of his feral smiles. “You really have no idea, do you?”

29

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.”