Now Claire stared at him, looked piercingly, fiercely into his eyes.
“This was the middle of the night. June 22. The entire village was sleeping, but we were ordered to awaken the entire village and drag them out of their beds, out of their huts, and search for weapons. I was checking for hidden caches of ammo on the far side of the village when I heard gunfire.”
And now tears streamed down Tom’s cheeks, and his head was bowed, his fists clenched.
“Tom,” Claire said, her stare unwavering.
“And by the time I got there, they were all dead.”
“‘They’?”
“Women and children and old men…”
“How were they killed?”
“Machine guns…” Head still bowed. His face was contorted, ugly, and his eyes were closed, but tears continued to drip down from them onto the rough blanket. “Bodies sprawled, bloodied…”
“Who did it?”
“I… I don’t know. Nobody would talk.”
“How many were killed, Tom?” she asked softly.
“Eighty-seven,” he choked out.
Now Claire closed her eyes. “Oh, Jesus,” she whispered. She rocked back and forth in silence, murmuring, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus.”
Tom, clenched and red-faced like an infant, sobbed silently.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A long silence passed.
At last he spoke again. “The unit was recalled to Fort Bragg for debriefing. The word had gotten out. There had to be sanctions.” He wiped his face with his hand, squeezing his eyes hard with his thumb and forefinger. “The colonel denied he gave the order, and he made his men say the same thing when they were interviewed by CID, the army’s Criminal Investigation Division. They pinned the blame on me. They said I’d lost it. I’d flipped out. I’d killed all these people. Colonel Marks was afraid that, since I wasn’t there and I refused to lie for him, I’d be the weak link who’d tell the truth. So he turned the tables. Had them all blame me. I was naïve. I had no idea what was going on.”
“What do you mean?”
“Marks was spared. I was targeted for prosecution-for first-degree murder. Eighty-seven counts. And the ones who wouldn’t cooperate in the cover-up, one by one, each of them died-committed suicide in their cells, died in car crashes, you name it. And I knew I was next. Because the Pentagon wanted the entire incident covered up. You know the drill-any one of them could have tried to blackmail the Pentagon leadership, because they knew the command was complicit in the massacre.”
“So you escaped.”
“It wasn’t complicated. I slipped a bribe to one of the MPs, the military policemen watching me-asked him to step out and get me a Coke-and I disappeared.”
“Disappeared how?”
“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!”