“Sir,” said Waldron, “as defense counsel well knows, these things do happen. Evidence turns up at the eleventh hour-just as happened with this memorandum for the record.”
“Well, it’s true, Madame Defense Counsel, you can’t exactly complain, given you just pulled the same thing.”
“What we ‘pulled,’ Your Honor, was a rectification of prosecutorial misconduct. We were fortunate to have turned up, through our sources, a document that the prosecution should have given us quite some time ago. Now they’re trying the same trick again. ‘Suddenly’ they ‘happen’ to find a key piece of evidence, and now they’re attempting to introduce it into the court so late that they hope we won’t have a chance to have our experts examine it. If the Defense Intelligence Agency made this recording thirteen years ago, why has it taken so long to see the light?”
“Sir,” Waldron said, “it’s not impossible that this court-martial has provoked persons within the government to comb old files for things they might have otherwise assumed were lost.”
Tom said aloud, indignantly: “I don’t believe they’re trying this!” Then he raised his voice: “You check the tape, Claire! That’s not me!”
“Sergeant,” Farrell said, “you will refrain from talking. Counsel, you are advised that you are to keep your client under control. No further outbursts will be permitted. Now, counsel, I assume you want a continuance.”
“Absolutely, sir. We request one month in order to conduct a full and thorough examination.”
“This is a goddamned frame-up!” Tom shouted, rising.
“Sergeant,” Farrell thundered, “I told you to keep quiet. Now, you were advised that you have a right to attend this court-martial. However, if you’re going to disrupt this court-martial, we will arrange for you to watch the proceedings by closed-circuit television, do you hear me? You will not sit in my courtroom and disrupt it further, you understand?”
“That’s not me!” he shouted. “It’s not true. That’s not my voice!”
“MPs, take this man away!” Farrell bellowed. The brig guards immediately surrounded Tom and wrestled him to the ground as they clamped the handcuffs on him.
“This is a goddamned frame-up!” Tom shouted.
“I want him out of here now!”
The guards yanked at Tom’s elbow and led him away.
“All right,” Farrell said to Claire, when the courtroom was finally quiet. “You’ve got forty-eight hours.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Late at night, Claire and Jackie sat at the kitchen table, drinking and smoking. The tape had already been flown out to one of the world’s foremost forensic voice-and-tape analysts, in Boulder, Colorado. Claire had chosen the expert carefully: the woman had done extensive voice-identification work for the military, and had even done cases with Waldron. She was virtually a Pentagon insider, and her word would be unquestioned.
“Of course he denies it,” Jackie said carefully. “He’s denied everything about this case, Claire. I mean, he denies it’s his gun, right?”
“Yeah, well, it’s probably not his gun!” Claire said, furious. “Or else they switched the barrel!”
“Of course they could have. These guys can do whatever the fuck they want to. But don’t you believe-deep down-that it’s his gun? That he fired it? That maybe Colonel Marks gave the order over the radio, maybe he didn’t, but Tom did it?” She poured more Famous Grouse into both of their glasses.
“No, I don’t.”
Jackie took a long sip of straight scotch, and shuddered. “Claire, if a man can lie to you about his entire life, why can’t he lie to you about the one horrible incident he’s spent his life evading?”
Claire shook her head. The exhaustion had defeated her. Tears flooded her eyes, and one of them splashed on the table. “I need to talk to him.”
The phone rang.
“It’s only midnight,” Jackie said. “A bit early for the breather.”
Claire picked it up, expecting Grimes or Embry.
“Professor Heller?” said a deep female voice. “This is Leonore Eitel, in Boulder.”
“Yes?”
“I hope I’m not calling too late-you asked me to call as soon as I had the first results-”
“That’s fine.” Her heart beat so loud she could barely hear the woman’s voice.
“Well, I’m afraid-I’m afraid it may not be what you want to hear.”
“It’s him, isn’t it?” Claire said thickly.
“I want you to know exactly what tests I’ve run. I used a really quite sophisticated system from Kay Elemetrics, a Computer Speech Lab Model 4300B, to run the oral and spectrographic analysis of the voice, and I matched it against the samples your husband gave me over the phone.”
“It’s him, isn’t it?”
“I looked at things like frequency on the vertical axis, and, in the time domain, the trajectory of formant structure, the consonant-vowel couplings. Pitch, which reflects vocal-fold oscillation and is represented by the vertical striations in the spectrograms-”
“Damn it, is it Tom’s voice?”
“Yes, it is,” the expert said quietly. “I used twenty-two different words, and I got nineteen very good matches based on the number of formant structures.”
“How certain are you?”
“Ninety-nine percent, I’d say. But I’m still not done with my tests, and there’s one more thing I need to check.”
Eight o’clock the next morning. In the long sterile conference room at the brig, the only one where there wasn’t a camera.
“I need the truth now,” she said.
He grimaced. “Come on, Claire-”
“No. Tell me the truth. Did you say that?”
“Of course not. We weren’t out in the field the day after the massacre, we were back at the hooch. And I never carried the radio-that wasn’t my job.” He smiled and sandwiched her right hand between his. “Come on, honey.”
“That’s your voice.”
“They faked it somehow.”
“You can’t fake that, Tom. That’s your voice.”
“Well, I didn’t say all that stuff.”
“And you’re telling me the truth?”
He withdrew his hands. “I’m telling you the truth,” he said softly.
“Promise me.”
His eyes expressed hurt. “My God, you think I did it, don’t you? They’ve turned you around, haven’t they? They’ve gotten to you-my own wife!”
“Come on, Tom!” she shouted. “I don’t know what I think! What about the gun?”
“We’re not still talking about that, are we? You proved how easily they could have-”
“Forget what I did and said in there. Forget my courtroom tricks. It’s just you and me now.”
“You showed how they could have substituted the barrel.”
“Don’t get legalistic on me. Did you kill those people?”
“Claire-”
“Were you ordered to do it? Is that why everyone’s covering up, to protect the general?”
“Claire-”
“If you were ordered to do it-well, that’s not really a defense, but we could argue mitigating factors, and-”
“And you think I massacred eighty-seven people?”
She looked at him, not knowing what to say. “Promise me that’s not you on the tape.”
For a long moment he looked at her, his eyes at once wounded and furious. “I am not a monster, Claire,” he said.
There was a loud knock on the door. She opened it to find Embry standing there, out of breath, holding a sheet of paper.