High Crimes (9 page)

“Now what?” she said.

“I’ll take care of it. Their standard operating procedure now is to negotiate. We let them talk.”

“
You’ve got ten seconds,
” said the voice, loud and slow and deliberate. “
Come out peacefully and no one gets hurt. You have no choice. We have you surrounded. You have six seconds.
”

“Jesus, Tom, what are we doing?”

“They’re not going to fire on us, babe.”

“
Three seconds. Come out
now
or we commence firing.
”

“Tom!”

“They’re bluffing.”

And suddenly there was a series of muffled shots, a
phump-phump-phump.
Terrified, Claire scrambled off the floor, crouched, peered out one of the open windows, and saw that several objects had been fired at them—

“Grenades,” Tom said quietly.

“Oh my God!” she screamed.

Each grenade, she saw, was emitting a thin cloud of white smoke.

“Gas,” Tom said. “Not explosives. Incapacitant gas. Shit.”

And suddenly Claire felt drowsy, uncontrollably, deeply tired, and then everything went black.

PART TWO

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Quantico Marine Base, Quantico, Virginia

The gate
, made of steel bars painted institutional gray, slid open slowly, electronically. A marine guard stood at attention. The floors were pale-green linoleum atop concrete; the corridor echoed as she walked. The gate slid shut behind her, filling her with dread. A red sign on the wall said B-W
ING
. The cinderblock walls in this section of the Quantico brig, Special Quarters One, were painted white. In this wing, violent rapists and murderers were incarcerated. Security cameras were everywhere. Her escort, the duty brig commander, led her to a door marked C
ELL
B
LOCK
B and held it open. It was eight-thirty in the morning.

Another guard snapped to attention. She was taken to a windowed visitors’ room just off the cell block, shown to a blue chair at a wooden conference table. She sat and waited in the cold.

A few minutes later a rattling and clanking of chains announced his arrival.

Flanked by two large guards, Tom stood before her naked, except for gray military-issue undershorts. He was in handcuffs, leg irons, and a connecting waist chain. His head had been shaved. He was shivering.

Tears sprang to her eyes.

He said, “Thanks for coming.”

She began to weep.

She got to her feet. “What the hell is this?” she shouted at one of the guards, who looked at her impassively. “Where are his clothes?”

“Suicide watch, ma’am,” one of the guards said.

“I want clothes on him right now!”

“That request has to go through the duty commander, ma’am,” the other guard said.

“You go talk to him now. This man has rights,” Claire said.

*   *   *

They brought Tom back, dressed in a light-blue prison jumpsuit. He was still in restraints, which forced him to take small, mincing, jangling steps toward her. Still weeping, she embraced him. His hands still cuffed, he could not hug her back.

“I want the cuffs off,” she said.

“Only one hand can come out of the cuffs, ma’am,” a guard said. “Duty commander’s order.”

Tom sat at the conference table across from Claire. A guard stood watch just outside. A security camera was mounted in one corner of the room, where the wall met the ceiling. Guards watched them through one glass wall.

They sat for a moment in silence. He wore a tan ID badge with a tiny smudged black-and-white photo, his name—Ronald M. Kubik—his Social Security number, and the date of the confinement, which was today. A black strip on it said D
ETAINED
. A red strip said M
AX
, for maximum-security confinement.

“This is all my fault,” Claire said.

“What is?”

“This.” She waved her hand around. “All this. You know—the car.”

“You’d never have found the transmitter. I blame myself. I shouldn’t have let you drive it anywhere near the lake.”

“They don’t fuck around,” Claire said.

He nodded.

“You’re in the army now,” she said.

He nodded again. He reached his free hand across the table and held hers.

“No joke,” she said. “You’ve been joined to a headquarters-and-service company, on paper anyway. After thirteen years they’ve got you back on active-duty status. The good news is, you start drawing pay again.” She flashed a fake smile.

“How’s my little girl?” he asked.

“She’s okay. She misses you. I kissed her goodbye this morning. Jackie took her to school. It’s her last day. End of the school year.”

“Early in the morning for Jackie, isn’t it?” He gave a rueful smile.

“She’s a trouper. I got the first flight out of Logan. I’m basically running on fumes.”

“Are you going back to Boston today?”

“Probably not.”

“Where are you staying?”

“For now, some Quality Inn right outside the Quantico gates.”

“What am I charged with?”

It occurred to her for the first time that Tom had been kept entirely in the dark. They’d flown him directly to the marine base at Quantico on one of the U.S. Marshals Service DC-9s—“Con Air,” they called their fleet of planes—and trundled him into a holding cell, stripped him, confiscated all his possessions, printed him, photographed him, gave him a regulation haircut. Thrown him into Cell 3, Cell Block B, wearing nothing but army-issue shorts. Told him nothing. All the U.S. Marshals had told her was that they had been subjected to a sophisticated new incapacitating agent, a formula that had been developed after the FBI’s fiascos at Waco and Ruby Ridge. The grenades burned a formula that contained a built-in antidote, so that as soon as the two of them were knocked out, a chemical immediately started waking them up. Within an hour both of them were awake, though groggy and nauseated.

They’d threatened her with all kinds of charges: they were furious at her evasion and at first refused to allow her to see Tom. In the end, though, the FBI men had backed down. Legally, they couldn’t do anything to her. She had a right to meet with her husband; it was as simple as that. The next day she flew to Washington National Airport, rented a car, and drove to Quantico, Virginia.

“I don’t know,” Claire said. “Officially you haven’t been charged. They don’t have to do that yet. Some system they got here.”

“They made me sign a confinement order.”

She scowled. “Don’t sign anything.”

“It was just to acknowledge that I’d read it.”

“What did it say?”

“Just the ‘nature of the offense.’”

“Which is?”

“Desertion. Nothing else. Article 85 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I guess they drew up those charges years ago, after I disappeared.”

She nodded. “And more to come. Did they read you your rights?”

“Yep.”

“Damn. Now we need to find you an attorney.”

“What about you?”

“Me? What the hell do I know about military justice?”

“They’ll assign me a military attorney automatically. He’ll know all the military stuff.”

She shook her head slowly. “We have to find you an outside attorney who really knows what he’s doing. In addition to whoever they assign to you.”

“How?”

“I’ll find someone. Don’t worry about it.”

“Claire, don’t you realize what’s going on here? Don’t you know what they’re planning to do to me? They’re going to put on a court-martial. A fucking kangaroo court. They’ll probably do it in secrecy. They’ll find me guilty, and then they’ll lock me away in Leavenworth, or maybe some special Pentagon facility no one’s ever heard of, for the rest of my life. Which won’t be long, because soon they’ll ‘discover’ me dead in my cell, presumably a suicide.”

There was a knock on the door.

“Have you seen my cell, Claire? You can see it from here—look.”

The guard entered. “Time,” he said.

“We’re not finished yet,” Claire said.

“Sorry,” the guard said. “Commander’s orders.”

Tom pointed with his free hand. Through the open door she could see his cell, just a green mattress on a metal shelf and a steel toilet-sink unit.

“Claire,” Tom said, “I need you.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

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.”

*   *   *

When she returned to her room at the Quality Inn, across from the Quantico gates, she was surprised to find her bed unmade. When she called down to Housekeeping to ask about it, she was told that a D
O
N
OT
D
ISTURB
sign had been hung from her doorknob for most of the afternoon. She knew she hadn’t put the sign up. This prompted her to check her suitcase; sure enough, the zipper was aligned differently from the way she had left it.

She sank onto the unmade bed and, more depressed than frightened, began to make telephone calls.