Her hands began to tremble first, then her shoulders. Her entire body shook violently. She too slumped to the floor.
A great sob welled up in the back of her throat. The floodgates had opened, and the sobs had broken loose and were coming in powerful waves.
She saw that she was kneeling in a pool of Tom’s blood, seeping from the wounds in his chest. The fine gray wool of her skirt darkened as the stain spread.
In the distance the wail of sirens grew steadily louder. She caught a sulfurous waft of cordite, then the smell of blood, pungent and metallic, and as she cried she thought of Annie, who’d been no less trusting than she, whose life would never be the same, and yet, at the same moment, for the first time, she felt at peace.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We should all have editors as dedicated as Henry Ferris. Just hours after his twin daughters were born, when most new fathers can’t think straight, he was tirelessly exchanging faxes and FedEx packages from the hospital. I’m grateful for his sound judgment, his taste, and his determination. (If it were up to him, he’d have deleted this paragraph as needless excess in a section already too long.)
With each of my four novels, I’ve been privileged to have such superb and generous sources, above all my friend Jack McGeorge of the Public Safety Group in Woodbridge, Virginia, expert in security, munitions, terrorism, and just about everything else. The longer I know him, the more he seems to know. Once again I’m indebted to other friends who’ve given freely of their expertise, contacts, and advice: Paul McSweeney of Professional Management Specialists; H. Keith Melton, expert in (and world-class collector of) surveillance devices; Peter Crooks of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers; the remarkable Paul Redmond of the CIA; Thomas Powers, for his wise counsel; and Marty Peretz, for his generous and unflagging support from the very beginning of my writing career.
A number of experts in various fields provided valuable assistance: in voice and tape identification, Lonnie Smrkovski; on the military and its security procedures, Mickey Connolly; on the U.S. Marshals, Dick Bigelow; and on government secrecy, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. Carlos Salinas of Amnesty International furnished useful background on American involvement in El Salvador. In the Cambridge Police, I was helped by Kathy Murphy, Alisse Cline of the Identification Unit, and Detectives Lester J. Sullivan and John Lopes of the Criminal Investigation Section; and in the Massachusetts State Police, by Chris Dolan in Crime Scene Services. Tom Williams helped make the polygraph scenes as authentic as possible. At Quantico, Chief Warrant Officer Jim Hart granted me an enlightening tour of the brig. Carl M. Majeskey shared with me his unparalleled ballistics expertise. My brother and medical consultant, Dr. Jonathan Finder, was as usual supremely generous with expert medical advice, as well as with an unfortunately timed computer catastrophe.
Claire would have had an even rougher time of it without my team of Boston attorneys: Ralph D. Gants of Palmer & Dodge; Morris M. Goldings of Mahoney, Hawkes & Goldings; Charles W. Rankin of Rankin & Sultan; Nick Poser; and especially Harry Mezer; and in Washington, Joseph E. diGenova and Victoria Toensing. At Harvard Law School, Alan Dershowitz and particulary Martha Minow were extremely helpful, as was M. Tracey Maclin at the Boston University Law School.
The author Rodney Barker kindly provided entrée to the insular and highly specialized world of military law. Thanks to him I was able to assemble my own Dream Team of civilian attorneys specializing in courts-martial, including William J. Baker, Tom Folk, David Sheldon, and the estimable David L. Beck. Charles W. Gittins helped immensely in devising Claire’s legal strategy, at a time when he was working ’round the clock to defend the Sergeant Major of the Army. And I can’t say enough about the great Mike Powell, a civilian military attorney with the imagination of a novelist, who cheerfully served as my chief legal adviser and military consultant, and became a friend. If ever I were court-martialed, I’d hire him in an instant. The malevolent nature of Tom’s court-martial is purely my own invention and not based on anything I ever saw in real life. None of the military judges I met were at all like my Warren Farrell. (What’s possible, though, is another matter…) Any procedural or legal errors are mine, or maybe Claire’s.
At William Morrow I thank Paul Fedorko, Ann Treistman, and Fritz Metsch. I had a superb copy editor in Terry Zaroff-Evans. My wonderful and supremely able assistant, Kathy Economou, made my writing life a lot easier. My gratitude to my terrific literary agent and all-around consigliere, Molly Friedrich; her assistant, Paul Cirone; and Aaron Priest; and again I appreciate the enthusiasm of my foreign-rights agent, Danny Baror, and Richard Green and Howie Sanders of United Talent Agency. My parents, Morris and Natalie Finder, are outstanding unpaid freelance publicists and supporters. And of course my brother, Henry Finder, peerless editor/consultant, still sets aside time for me even as the demand on his time grows and the outside world gets wise to his talents. My wife, Michele Souda, not only helped give life to Claire but also recognized that in my fiction, men who cook are to be watched closely. She encouraged me from the start and continues to believe, and I’m grateful as always for her loving support.
Joseph Finder
In addition to his fiction, Finder continues to write extensively on espionage and international affairs relations for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Republic. He lives in Boston with his wife and daughter.
