“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.
“When I first met you, I was lonely and depressed and making a decent living managing other people’s money. I had to run my own show, my own business, because anyone who checked out my employment history too carefully would have found everyone I’d ever worked for had gone out of business. Who wants to hire a black cat?” He smiled sadly. “By then it was already six years or so since I’d disappeared, become Tom Chapman, and I was still looking around me whenever I walked down the street. I was still convinced they were going to track me down, because they’re good, Claire. They’re really good. They’re ruthless and they’re killers and they’re really, really good.”
“Who are ‘they’?”
“I worked for a supersecret clandestine unit of the Pentagon. A black OPSEC support group. A detachment of the Special Forces.”
“Translation, please.”
“An operational-security group-a group of twelve highly skilled, highly trained Special Forces who served as covert operatives the Pentagon could send out wherever they wanted to assist secret, often illegal, covert operations anywhere in the world where the Pentagon or the CIA or the State Department didn’t want anyone to know they were messing around.”
Tom was sitting on the edge of the cot. Next to him, Claire sat cross-legged. “Tom, you’ve got to slow down.”
But Tom seemed not to want to slow down. He kept talking, in an oddly intense monotone. “Officially the group didn’t exist. It wasn’t on any flow charts or directories. No record of its existence anywhere public. But we were extremely well funded out of the Pentagon’s black budget, their massive slush fund. We were officially named Detachment 27, but we sometimes called ourselves Burning Tree. Headed by a real zealot, a corrupt guy, Colonel Bill Marks. William O. Marks.”
“Name sounds familiar, I think.” She was overwhelmed. Her head spun.
Tom snorted in disgust. “He’s now the general in charge of the army. A member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 1984, when the Reagan administration was fighting a covert war in Central America-”
“Tom, you’ve got to rewind. Start at the beginning. This is too abrupt, too bizarre to make sense to me. Tell me what’s true, what’s not. You did or you didn’t go to college, work for a series of brokerages…? Is that all fiction?”
He nodded. “The story I told you about Claremont College-there was some truth in that. Only I was born and raised in a suburb north of Chicago. But it’s true about my parents divorcing, about my dad refusing to pay for college. And this was 1969, remember. If you weren’t married or in school or had some disability, you were drafted and sent over to Vietnam. So I was drafted. But for some reason I got plucked out for the Special Forces, and after my Vietnam tour was done they brought me down to Fort Bragg, and I was inducted into Burning Tree. I was good at it, and-I’m ashamed to admit it now-I believed in it. There was a real bond there, a shared zealotry. We all believed we were doing the dirty work that America needed done but its weak-kneed government was afraid to do openly.”
She looked at him curiously, and he smiled. “Or so I believed at the time. By the nineteen-eighties, the CIA and the Defense Department were up to their knees in it in Central America. The CIA was printing up training manuals teaching its agents down there how to use torture.”
She nodded; the CIA training manuals had become common knowledge.
“The Reagan administration was insane about routing the Communists down there. But Congress hadn’t declared war, so officially we weren’t supposed to be involved in combat there. Just ‘advising.’ So our unit was sent, wearing sanitized fatigues-so in case we ever got caught we couldn’t be identified-to help train the Nicaraguan guerrillas in Honduras and help out the government in El Salvador. Reagan’s State Department took the really clever, legalistic position that they didn’t have to notify Congress that the CIA and the Pentagon had secret units down there because the War Powers Act didn’t cover antiterrorist units. Which was us.
“So one day-June 19, 1985-in this nice part of San Salvador called the Pink Zone, the Zona Rosa, a bunch of American marines, off-duty and out of uniform, were eating dinner at this row of sidewalk restaurants. Suddenly a pickup truck pulled up and a bunch of guys jumped out with semi-automatic weapons and opened fire. These urban commandos-leftist, antigovernment guerrillas-managed to kill four marines and two American businessmen and seven Salvadorans in their ambush before they went speeding off. A real bloody massacre. Unbelievable.
“And the Reagan White House went apeshit. We had an agreement that the leftist guerrillas in Salvador wouldn’t target Americans, and now this. There was a ceremony at Andrews Air Force Base, where the bodies of the four marines were flown back. Reagan was furious. He vowed that we’d move any mountain and ford any river-you remember how he talked, that phony poetry-to find these jackals and bring them to justice.”
Claire nodded, eyes closed.
“Only what he didn’t say was that the orders had been passed down already. Get the fuckers. Get the guys who did this. ‘Total closure,’ they said-which everyone knew meant kill everyone remotely involved. So Burning Tree went out to find the murderers. We had an intelligence lead that the commandos, a splinter group of the leftist organization called FMLN, were based in this village outside San Salvador. A tiny village, I mean grass huts and stuff like that, Claire. The lead was wrong. There weren’t any commandos there. There were civilians, there were old men and women and children and babies, and it was obvious right away that this was no hideout for urban commandos, but, you see, we were out for blood.”