“Uh, no.”
“You didn’t? What about travel claims? Did you attempt to locate in archived records the travel claims for Detachment 27’s alleged incursion into El Salvador in June 1985?”
“Well, no, but-”
“You know, Mr. La Pierre, I’m not a member of the military-”
“I wouldn’t have guessed,” he said flatly.
Hearty laughter broke out among the spectators. Claire laughed along, sharing the joke at her own expense. “And, well, you know, I really don’t know much about your world here, but it’s my understanding-and correct me if I’m wrong-that any time any U.S. soldier goes anywhere where there’s travel involved, there’s got to be a travel claim submitted. Am I right?”
“I believe so,” La Pierre said, seemingly bored.
“You believe so. Hmm. Yet you didn’t find any travel claim for this alleged operation in El Salvador in June 1985.”
“Well, no, but-”
“So there’s really no corroboration these individuals went anywhere.”
La Pierre worked his open mouth a few times, and at last began, “I-”
“Presumably you’ve made some efforts,” Claire interrupted, “to corroborate whether or not this operation ever actually occurred.”
With narrowed eyes, La Pierre shot back, “You’re not denying this operation took place, are you?”
“Let me ask the questions, Mr. La Pierre. You’ve made some efforts to determine whether or not this operation actually occurred, haven’t you?”
“It’s obvious it occurred-”
“It’s obvious? To whom? To you and Major Waldron over there? Or to me and Mr. Grimes and Ronald Kubik over here? Who is it obvious to?”
“The operation occurred,” La Pierre hissed.
“But you have no records of any orders to corroborate that, do you?” She didn’t wait for his reply. “Now, Mr. La Pierre, it’s my understanding-and again, correct me if I’m wrong-that before the U.S. government, including the military, engages in a covert operation, there must be a presidential finding authorizing that covert operation. A classified order signed personally by the President of the United States. Is that right?”
“I believe so, yes.”
“A presidential finding authorizing covert action is called an NSDD-a National Security Decision Directive-is that right?”
“Uh, yes.”
“Which may be classified, right?”
“It can be.”
“Sometimes an NSDD can have a classified and an unclassified version, correct?”
“I think so.”
“And this operation was a covert operation, isn’t that true?”
“Yes, it was.”
“So there must exist an NSDD, presumably a classified one, authorizing Detachment 27’s mission to El Salvador in June 1985. Right?”
He attempted to sidestep the jaw trap. “I wouldn’t know.”
“But you just said that every covert action must be authorized by an NSDD. And this was a covert action, you said yourself. So there must be an NSDD, right?”
“I suppose so.”
“Yet you didn’t obtain the presidential finding authorizing the June 1985 covert operation and signed by the President of the United States?”
“No, I did not.”
“Well, gosh, Mr. La Pierre, as the chief investigator in this case, don’t you think it’s important to know whether this operation was authorized by the president?”
“In my job,” he said ringingly, “I don’t get into foreign affairs. I do personal crimes, including homicides.”
“You don’t get into foreign affairs,” she repeated.
“No, I do not.”
“Mr. La Pierre, if a full-bird colonel in the Special Forces, who’s now the chief of staff of the army, ran an operation in El Salvador in June 1985 that was illegal-because it wasn’t authorized by a presidential finding-don’t you think you’d want to advise him of his rights?”
Frank La Pierre looked over at the judge. “I don’t know how to answer that,” he said.
“Just answer the question,” Farrell said with annoyance. “Did you read General Marks his rights?”
“No, I most certainly did not.”
“Why not?” Claire asked.
“I had no reason to believe this was an illegal operation.”
“Because you don’t ‘get into’ foreign affairs. Well, sir, don’t you think that, as the lead investigator in a mass-murder case that allegedly took place in a foreign country during a covert operation, you might want to educate yourself about foreign policy and the rules governing covert action?”
“I don’t see why I need to.”
“Really?” Claire said, amazed. “So it’s not important to educate yourself as to whether a U.S. operation violated the laws of the United States in its inception?”
“That’s not my job.”
“So let me get all this straight. You can’t identify a single person who was killed. In fact, you don’t know who was killed, or, indeed, if anyone was killed. So much for element one of the charge-that is, that a ‘certain named or described person is dead.’ We don’t know.
“And, secondly, we don’t even know whether or not this operation took place. And if it did take place, we don’t even know if the operation was authorized. So, heck, we don’t even know whether any of these alleged killings-of which we have no proof-were unlawful. Because we don’t know what was lawful in this case. We have no idea what the President of the United States ordered-assuming this mission even happened at all! So much for element two of the charge-that is, was the killing unlawful.” She shook her head in disgust. “I have nothing further, Your Honor.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
This time the call came at close to 4:00 A.M. She answered, said, “Keep it up. We’ll trace you,” then hung up.
Before she left the house that morning, Devereaux called. “The FBI’s close,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“On those mysterious phone calls. They’ve narrowed it down to one of several public payphones within the Pentagon.”
“The Pentagon?”
“Yeah,” Devereaux replied. “Whoever’s trying to scare you doesn’t want to make them from his Pentagon office, I’ll bet. That time of night, you can only get into the Pentagon if you’re an employee or have a pass.”
“That narrows it down to twenty-five thousand people,” she said tartly.
The first day of testimony had been, all told, a good one for the defense. Claire’s cross had been devastating. Waldron’s attempt to rehabilitate the CID man in his redirect was perfunctory and not particularly effective.
But by the end of the second morning of testimony, things took a sudden bad turn for the defense.
Colonel James J. Hernandez was testifying for the government, and for the most part he was repeating the same charges he’d made before. Waldron had put him on in order to establish what the law calls the corpus delicti, the material evidence that a crime has been committed, the body of a murdered person. They had no photographs of bodies, no autopsies, so they would have to present eyewitness testimony that there were in fact bodies-which Hernandez did ably and without a hitch.
Until shortly before lunchtime, when Waldron guided Hernandez to the moment when the unit, in the dead of night, entered the town. Hernandez had approached alongside Ronald Kubik, he testified.
“And what did you proceed to do?” Waldron asked in a seemingly offhand way.
“We went around from hut to hut, rousting people out of there, waking them up, checking for weapons or any signs of the guerrillas.”
“Did you find any weapons or any guerrillas?”
“No, we did not, sir.”
“Did you use your weapons while you were forcing them out of their huts?”
“Only to point at them. Bayonets or rifles or carbines or machine guns, whatever we had on us.”