High Crimes

CHAPTER ONE

At exactly nine o’clock in the morning, Claire Heller Chapman entered the cavernous old Harvard Law School lecture hall and found a small knot of reporters lying in wait for her. There were four or five of them, one a TV cameraman hefting a bulky videocam.

She’d expected this. Ever since the Lambert verdict was announced two days ago, she’d been fielding calls from journalists. Most of them she’d managed to avoid. Now they stood at the front of the old classroom by her lectern, and as she walked right by them, they shouted questions at her.

Claire smiled blandly and could make out only fragments.

“-Lambert? Any comment to make?”

“-pleased with the verdict?”

“-Are you at all concerned about letting a rapist go free?”

A murmur of student voices went up. With the lectern giving her the advantage now of two feet of height, she addressed the reporters. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to leave my classroom.”

“A brief comment, Professor,” said the TV reporter, a pretty blonde in a salmon-colored suit with shoulder pads like a linebacker’s.

“Nothing right now, I’m sorry,” she said. “I have a class to teach.”

Her criminal-law students sat in long arcs that radiated outward from the front of the room like the rings around Saturn. At Harvard Law School, the professor was construed as a deity. This morning the deity was being assaulted.

“But, Professor, a quick-”

“You’re trespassing, folks. Out of here, please. Out.”

Muttering, they began turning around, straggling noisily up the creaky floor of the center aisle toward the exit.

She turned to the class and smiled. Claire Heller, as she was known professionally, was in her mid-thirties: small and slender, brown eyes and dimpled cheeks, with a tangle of coppery hair nuzzling a swan neck. She wore a tweedy but not unstylish chocolate-brown jacket over a cream silk shell.

“All right,” Claire said to the class. “Last time someone asked me, ‘Who’s Regina? And who’s Rex?’” She took a sip of water. There were a few chuckles. A few guffaws. Law-school humor: you laugh to show you get it, you’re smart-not because it’s funny.

“It’s Latin, folks.” Another sip of water. It’s all in the timing.

A gradual crescendo of giggles. “English law. Regina is the queen. Rex is the king.”

Loud, relieved laughter, from the slower ones who finally got it. The best comedy audience in the world.

The back door of the classroom banged shut as the last cameraman left. “All right, Terry v. Ohio. One of the last Warren Court decisions. A real landmark in liberal jurisprudence.” She cast her gaze around the classroom, a Jack Benny poker face. A few students chortled. They knew her politics.

She raised her voice a few decibels. “Terry v. Ohio. That great decision that permitted the police to shake people down for just about any reason whatsoever. Mr. Chief Justice Earl Warren giving one to the cops.” She swiveled her body suddenly. “Ms. Harrington, what if the cops burst into your apartment one evening. Without a search warrant. And they find your stash of crack cocaine. Can you be prosecuted for possession?” A few titters: the humorless, studious Ms. Harrington, a very tall, pale young woman with long ash-blond hair parted in the middle, was not exactly the crack-smoking type.

“No way,” said Ms. Harrington. “If they burst in without a warrant, that evidence can be excluded at trial. Because of the exclusionary rule.”

“And where does that come from?” Claire asked.

“The Fourth Amendment,” Ms. Harrington replied. The purple circles underneath her eyes advertised how little she’d slept her unhappy first year of law school. “It protects us from unreasonable government searches. So any evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment must be excluded from a criminal trial. It’s called ‘fruit of the poisoned tree.’”

“Like your vial of crack,” said Claire.

Ms. Harrington peered gloomily at Claire through raccoon circles of purple and gave a grim half-smile. “Right.”

The students, the smarter ones anyway, were beginning to sense the undertow: the good old liberal wisdom from Claire Heller, old Sixties Liberal, arrested during her student days at Madison, Power to the People, Fuck the Establishment. Time to whipsaw them.

“Okay, now will someone tell me where in the Fourth Amendment it says that evidence illegally obtained must be excluded from trial?” Claire asked.

Silence.

“Ms. Zelinski? Ms. Cartwright? Ms. Williams? Mr. Papoulis?”

She stepped off the rostrum, took an Oprah-like stroll down one of the creaky-floored aisles. “Nowhere, folks. Nowhere.”

From the back of the room came the reedy baritone of Chadwick Lowell III, sandy-blond hair already receding above round British National Health Plan wire-rim glasses, probably from his year as a Rhodes. “I take it you’re no fan of the exclusionary rule.”

“You got it,” Claire said. “We never had such a thing apply to the States until maybe forty years ago-a hundred and seventy years after the Fourth Amendment was adopted.”

“But the exclusionary rule,” Mr. Lowell persisted disdainfully, “didn’t exactly bother you at the Gary Lambert appeal, did it? You got his conviction overturned by getting the search of his trash excluded, right? So I guess you’re not so opposed to it, are you?”

There was a stunned silence. Claire slowly turned to face him. Secretly she was impressed. Mr. Lowell did not flinch. “In the classroom,” she said, “we can talk about principle. In the courtroom, you put aside whatever the hell you believe in and fight with every goddamned scrap of ammunition you’ve got.” She turned to her podium. “Now, let’s get back to Terry v. Ohio.”

“Still working on that?”

The waiter was tall and rail-thin, early twenties, insufferable. He looked like a Ralph Lauren model. His blond hair was cropped short; his sideburns were trimmed. His sandpiper legs were clad in black jeans and he wore a black linen T-shirt.

Claire, her husband, Tom, and her six-year-old daughter, Annie, were having dinner that evening at a family-friendly seafood restaurant in an upscale shopping mall in downtown Boston. “Family-friendly” usually meant helium balloons, crayons, and paper placemats. This place was a cut or two above that, and the food was decent.

Claire caught Tom’s eye and smiled. Tom liked to make fun of that old standard waiter’s line. They both did: since when was eating dinner supposed to be work?

“We’re all set,” Tom said pleasantly. Tom Chapman was a youthful mid-forties, trim and handsome in a navy Armani suit. He’d just come from work. His close-cropped hair was graying and receding slightly. His eyes, bracketed by deep-etched crow’s feet, were gray-blue, more gray than blue, and almost twinkled with amusement.

Claire nodded agreement. “All done working,” she said with a straight face.

“I’m all done, too,” said Annie, her glossy brown hair in pigtails, wearing her favorite pale-pink cotton jumper.

“Annie-Banannie,” Tom said, “you didn’t even eat half your burger!”

“Was everything all right?” the waiter asked with concern.

“Very good, thanks,” Tom said.

“But I ate the fries!”

“Can I tempt you with dessert?” asked the waiter. “The marquise au chocolat with pistachio sauce is fabulous. To die for. Or there’s a warm molten chocolate cake that’s really sinful.”

“I want chocolate cake!” said Annie.

Tom looked at Claire. She shook her head. “Nothing for me,” she said.

“Are you sure?” the waiter asked conspiratorially, wickedly. “How ’bout three forks?”

“No, thanks. Maybe just coffee. And no chocolate cake for her unless she finishes her hamburger.”

“I’m going to finish it!” Annie protested, squirming in her seat.

“Very good,” the waiter said. “Two coffees?”

“One,” Claire said when Tom shook his head.

The waiter hesitated, cocking his head toward Claire. “Excuse me, are you Professor Heller?”

Claire nodded. “That’s me.”

The waiter smiled wide, as if he’d been let in on a state secret. “I’ve seen you on TV,” he said as he turned away.

“You don’t exist unless you’ve been on TV, you know,” Tom said when the waiter had left. He squeezed her hand under the lacquered tabletop. “The burdens of fame.”

“Not exactly.”

“In Boston, anyway. How are your colleagues at the Law School going to deal with this?”

“As long as I meet my teaching obligations, they really don’t care who I defend. I could represent Charles Manson; they’d probably whisper I’m a publicity whore, but they’d leave me alone.” She placed a hand on one of his cheeks, then the other hand on his other, and planted a kiss on his mouth. “Thanks,” she said. “Wonderful celebration.”

“My pleasure.”

Light glinted off Tom’s forehead, his deeply furrowed brow. She admired the planes of his face, his high cheekbones, his square chin. Tom wore his hair short, almost military style, in order to de-emphasize the balding, but as a result he looked like an overgrown school kid, fresh-scrubbed and eager to please. His blue-gray eyes, this evening tending toward blue, were translucent and innocent. He caught her looking at him and smiled. “What?”

“Nothing. Just thinking.”

“About?”

She shrugged.

“You seem a little subdued. Feeling funny about getting Lambert off?”

“Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it was the right thing to do, I think. A really important case. Evidence that clearly should have been suppressed, the whole issue of ‘knowing and informed consent,’ unlawful search and seizure, inevitable discovery. Important Fourth Amendment stuff.”

“And yet you got a rapist off,” he said gently. He knew how uneasy she was about having taken on the Lambert case. The famous heir to the Lambert fortune, thirty-year-old Gary Lambert, whose picture you couldn’t help seeing in People magazine, usually in the arms of some supermodel, had been charged by the New York Police Department with the rape of a fifteen-year-old girl.

When Lambert’s fancy trial lawyers asked Claire to handle the appeal, she didn’t hesitate. She knew why she’d been hired: it wasn’t simply because of her growing reputation as an appellate lawyer but rather because she was a professor at Harvard Law School. Her prominence in the legal profession might go a long way toward offsetting Gary Lambert’s fairly squirrelly reputation. Yet she was fascinated by the legal issues involved, the police search of Lambert’s penthouse apartment and his trash, which she knew wouldn’t stand up. She never doubted she’d get his conviction overturned.

Suddenly, as a result of the case, Claire was on the cusp of minor celebrity. She was now a regular on Court TV and on Geraldo Rivera’s legal talk-show. The New York Times had begun to quote her in articles on other trials and legal controversies. She certainly wasn’t recognized walking down the street, but she was on the national media’s radar screen.

“Look,” Tom said, “you always say that the more despicable the person, the more he needs counsel. Right?”

“Yeah,” she said without conviction. “In theory.”

“Well, I think you did a great job, and I’m really proud of you.”

“Maybe you can give my interviews to the Globe,” she said.

“I’m all done now,” Annie said, holding up a crust of bun. “Now I want dessert.” She slipped out of her chair and crawled into Tom’s lap.

He smiled, lifted his stepdaughter up in the air, and gave her a loud smacking kiss on the cheek. “I love you, pumpkin. My Annie-Banannie. It’s coming soon, baby.”

“I forgot to tell you,” Claire said, “that Boston magazine wants to name us one of its Fifty Power Couples, or something like that.”

“Mommy, can I get ice cream with it?” asked Annie.

“Let me guess,” Tom said. “They just called because you got Gary Lambert off.”

“Yes, sweetie, you can,” said Claire. “Actually, they called a few days ago.”

“Gee, I don’t know about that, honey,” Tom said. “We’re not that kind of people.”

She shrugged, smiled with embarrassment. “Says who? Anyway, it’d be good for your business, wouldn’t it? Probably attract a lot of investors to Chapman & Company.”

“I think it’s a little tacky, honey, that’s all. ‘Power Couples’…” He shook his head. “You didn’t say yes already, did you?”

“I didn’t say anything yet.”

“I just wish you wouldn’t.”

“Daddy,” said Annie, one small arm curled around his neck, “when is the man bringing the cake?”

“Soon, babe.”

“Do they have to bake it?”

“Sure seems like it,” Tom said. “It’s certainly taking long enough.”

“Did I tell you the cops think they might have recovered one of the stolen paintings?” Claire said. They’d had a break-in a few days earlier, in which two of their paintings had been stolen-a Corot sketch of a nude woman that was a recent birthday gift to her from Tom, and a William Bailey still life in oil that Tom loved and she hated.

“Seriously? And I was all set to file the insurance claims. Which one’d they find?”

“Don’t know. Of course, it wouldn’t tear me apart if the Bailey’s lost forever.”

“I know,” Tom said. “Too cold and precise and controlled, right? Well, I loved it. Anyway, honey, it’s only stuff, you know? Objects, things. And no one got hurt; that’s the important thing.”

The waiter arrived with a tray. On it were the chocolate cake, a coffee cup, and two flutes of champagne. “Compliments of the house,” the waiter said. “With our congratulations.”

As they left the restaurant, Annie darted ahead into the mall’s food court, shouting, “I wanna go play in the space ship!” The giant plastic space ship was located in Annie’s favorite kiddie store nearby, in front of which stood giant resin statues of cartoon characters.

The food court was lined with upscale fast-food places and furnished with small round tables, wooden benches, and ficus trees in brass planters. The floor was tiled in highly polished marble. The big open space was three levels high and ringed with balconies that rose all the way up to a glass skylight illuminated by floodlights. At the far end of the atrium was an artificial waterfall that cascaded down a jagged granite wall.

“Slow down, Annie-Banannie,” Tom called out, and Annie circled back, grabbed her father’s hand, and tugged at it, at the same moment that two men in suits approached them.

One of them said, “Mr. Kubik, come with us, please. Let’s make this simple.”

Tom turned to the one on the left, puzzled. “Excuse me?”

“Ronald Kubik, federal agents. We have a warrant for your arrest.”

Tom smiled, furrowed his brow. “You’ve got the wrong guy, buddy,” he said, taking Claire’s hand and striding quickly past them.

“Mr. Kubik, come along quietly and no one will get hurt.”

Puzzled, Claire laughed at the absurdity of this. “Sorry, boys.”

“You’re making some kind of a mistake,” Tom said, raising his voice, no longer amused.

The man on the right abruptly grabbed Tom’s arm, and Claire said, “Get your hands off my husband.”

Suddenly Tom swung his briefcase to the right, slamming the man in the stomach, knocking him backward and to the floor, and then, in a flash, he’d sprung forward and was running away, into the food court, at astonishing speed.

Claire shouted after him, “Tom, where’re you going?”

Annie screamed, “Daddy!”

A voice yelled: “Freeze.”

Claire stared in shock as the two men chased after Tom, and then from all around the atrium men began to move abruptly. Why was he running, if this was indeed a case of mistaken identity? On her left, a couple of short-haired men in their late twenties, who’d been sitting having coffee in front of the chocolate-chip-cookie place, jumped to their feet.

Claire shouted, “Tom!” But he was already most of the way across the court, still running.

One of the men, wearing a navy blazer and tie, had just left the line in front of the pizza place and began gesturing to the others. He was older and appeared to be their leader. “Hold it!” he shouted. “Hold fire!”

On her right, another short-haired man, who’d been loitering near Yogurt ’n Salad, whipped around and joined the pursuit. A pair of tourists with cameras around their necks who’d been inspecting the Williams-Sonoma window display suddenly turned and began running toward the far side of the atrium.

“Tom!” Claire screamed. What the hell was happening?

From every direction now men rose from tables, emerged from nearby shops. Tourists and casual loiterers were suddenly moving quickly, smoothly, converging on Tom from every direction.

A loud, metallically amplified voice came over a bullhorn: “Freeze! Federal agents!”

The place was in an uproar. People were crowding at the glass balconies on the upper levels staring down at the scene in disbelief.

Claire stood still, frozen in terror, her mind racing. What was going on? Who were all these men chasing Tom? And why was he running?

“Mommy!” Annie whimpered. “Where’s Daddy going?”

“Cover the emergency exits!” yelled the man in the blue blazer into the commotion.

Claire held her Annie tight, stroking her face. “It’s okay, baby,” she said. It was all she could think to say. What was happening? From all over, people streamed into the middle of the food court. A young boy clung to his father’s leg, crying.

At the far end of the atrium she could see Tom, running even faster, knocking over chairs and benches as he went, suddenly swerve toward the white-tiled wall next to the Japanese take-out kiosk and grab a fire-alarm pull-box. A deafeningly loud bell began to clang. Screams now came from all directions. People were running everywhere, shouting to one another.

“Mommy!” Annie cried in terror. “What’s going on?”

Hugging Annie even more tightly, Claire shouted, “Tom!,” but her voice couldn’t be heard above the incredible din, the clanging fire alarm, the screams from all around. She watched Tom sprint toward the bank of escalators that led up to the movie theater on the floor above.

One of the pursuers, a tall, lanky black man, managed to reach Tom and lunged for him. Claire let out an involuntary scream. Then, suddenly, Tom whirled around and slammed the flat of his hand against the black man’s neck, grabbed the man’s underarm with the other hand, and forced the guy to the floor. The man bellowed in pain and lay flat on the floor, eyes closed, legs twitching, apparently paralyzed.

Claire watched in speechless astonishment, a dull, almost vacant state of horror and disbelief. None of this made sense. All she could think was, Tom doesn’t know how to do any of these things.

As Tom streaked past a stand marked PASTA PRIMO, another man lunged from behind the counter, and Tom tackled him to the ground, then sprang to his feet, weaving away from him. But the man managed to rise and kept coming at Tom, now pointing a gun. Tom grabbed a heavy-looking metal briefcase out of the hands of a horrified onlooker and flung it at his pursuer, knocking the gun out of his hands and sending it clattering to the floor.

Then he wheeled around and bounded toward the fake waterfall coursing down its granite wall at the end of the atrium, just as two other men emerged from an emergency door next to the Italian restaurant just a few feet away.

Tom scrambled up the rocks and boulders in front of the waterfall and in one great leap-Claire could barely believe what she was seeing-he began scaling the jagged stone wall, grabbing on to jutting edges of stone, using them as finger- and toeholds, pulling himself up with his hands, face-climbing up the wall like a skilled rock climber.

“Freeze!” one of the men shouted at him, pulling out a gun and aiming. He fired a shot, which pockmarked the granite very close to Tom’s head.

She screamed, “Tom!” To the others, she yelled: “Stop it! What the hell are you doing?” She could barely believe what Tom, her husband of three years, the man she loved and knew so intimately, was doing. It was as if another man had taken his place, a man she didn’t know, who could do things her Tom would never have dreamed of.

For an instant Tom actually stopped, and Claire wondered whether he really did intend to halt where he was, almost ten feet off the ground, clinging to the artificial rock face.

Another shot hit the glass wall of the balcony just above him, shattering it, and then Tom continued up the rock face with an awesome agility, and Claire stared in rapt amazement as he reached over to the brass guardrail around the balcony, grabbed hold, and deftly swung himself up into the gawking, frenzied crowd of people who’d been waiting to get into the movie theaters or were streaming out of them, and then at once he was gone.

“Goddamn it!” the leader shouted as he reached the escalators. He swept an index finger around at his men. “You two, to the parking garage! You, up this way, into the theater. Move it!” He whirled around and called to another of his men, “Damn it, we lost the fucker!” Then he pointed directly at Claire and Annie, jerking his thumb to one side. “I want them,” he shouted. “Now!”

CHAPTER TWO

Claire and Annie were hustled off to a small, windowless room just off the atrium-a mall security station, by the look of it, and judging by the uniformed rent-a-cops standing guard outside in light-blue shirts with dark-blue shoulder patches. Special Agent Howard Massie of the FBI, the man in the blue blazer, was beefy and crewcut, with small gray eyes and a pockmarked face. The other men were U.S. marshals.

As Annie squirmed in her arms, Claire said, “What the hell is this all about?” The knot of anxiety in her stomach had swollen; the underarms of her blouse were damp with perspiration.

Annie wriggled to the floor and held on to Claire’s skirt. She whined, “Where’s Daddy?”

“Mrs. Chapman,” Agent Massie said, “I think it’s better if we speak alone. Perhaps your daughter can wait outside, in the care of one of these fine gentlemen here.” He leaned forward and gave Annie a brief pat on the head. Annie, in reply, frowned, twitched her head, and shrugged away from him.

“You get your hands off my child,” Claire said. “You are not touching her. She’s staying here with me.”

Massie nodded and managed to regain a semblance of a smile. “Ma’am, you’re obviously upset-”

“Upset?” she gasped. “Ten minutes ago we were having dinner. Suddenly everyone in the world is chasing my husband, firing guns! You want to know upset? You’re looking at a multimillion-dollar civil lawsuit for the unnecessary use of force by two government agencies, reckless pursuit, and reckless endangerment of the lives of innocent bystanders. You and your cowboys just stirred up a shitstorm, Agent.”

“Mrs. Chapman, we have a fully authorized warrant for your husband’s arrest. As to the guns, we weren’t authorized to kill, but we were permitted to wound if necessary, and we didn’t even do that.”

Claire shook her head, laughed, and pulled her cell phone out of her purse. She extended the antenna and began punching numbers. “You might want to have a better story prepared for the Herald and the Globe,” she said. “You obviously have the wrong man, and you just screwed up royally.”

“If we have the wrong man,” Massie replied quietly, “why did he run?”

“Obviously because you guys were in hot pursuit…” She faltered, depressed the END button. “All right, what’s your point?”

“You see,” Massie said, “you don’t want to do that. You don’t want to call the media.”

“Oh, I don’t, do I?”

“Once it’s out of the bottle, you can’t put it back in. You may not want this made public. We’ll have any police report sealed, and we’ll do our best to quash any media coverage. You’d better pray you weren’t recognized.”

“Mommy,” Annie said in a high, frightened voice, “I want to go home.”

“Just a couple of minutes, sweetie,” Claire said, reaching around to give Annie a quick one-armed hug. To Massie, she snapped: “What exactly are you referring to?”

“Your husband, Ronald Kubik, is wanted for murder.”

For a long moment Claire was speechless. “Now I know you have the wrong man,” she said at last. She smiled in relief. “My husband is Tom Chapman.”

“That’s not his real name,” Massie said. He pointed to a cheap-looking white conference table. “Why don’t we sit down?”

Claire took a seat across the table from Massie. Annie at first sat in a chair next to Claire’s, then slid off it onto the floor and began inspecting the underside of the table.

“And even if you do mean my husband, Tom,” Claire said, “who’s he supposed to have murdered?”

“I’m sorry, we’re not authorized to say. Mrs. Chapman, or should I say Professor Heller, believe me, we know who you are. We’re aware of your reputation. We’re being extremely careful here. But what do you know about your husband’s background? What has he told you?”

“I know everything,” she said. “You’ve got the wrong guy.”

Massie nodded and smiled sympathetically. “What you know is his legend, his created biography. Happy childhood in southern California, Claremont College, worked as a broker, moved to Boston, started his own investment firm here. Right?”

She narrowed her eyes, nodded. “‘Legend?’”

“You ever check with Claremont College?” he asked.

She shook her head. “What are you implying?”

“I’m not implying anything. And, frankly, I can’t tell you much at all. But your husband, Ron Kubik, has been a fugitive from justice for thirteen years.”

“That’s the name you guys called him out there,” she said thickly, her heart thudding. “I’ve never heard it before.”

“He hasn’t told you anything about his past?”

“Either this is some colossal mistake, or you guys are framing him. I know how you guys work. Tom is not a murderer.”

“Three days ago you had a burglary at your home in Cambridge,” the FBI man said. “The local police ran all the fingerprints in your house, which is standard procedure these days, put them into AFIS, the computerized Automated Fingerprint Identification System, and your husband’s prints came up flagged. They’ve been on the system for years, waiting for him to commit some crime, or get fingerprinted for some other reason. Bad break for your husband. Lucky for us the Cambridge police were so thorough.”

She shook her head. “My husband wasn’t even home at the time,” she said. “He didn’t give the cops his prints.”

“The police ran all the fingerprints in the house in order to eliminate everyone who wasn’t the suspect. Naturally your husband’s prints turned up,” Massie said. “We came close this time. Unfortunately, a few minutes ago, we lost him somewhere in the parking garage. Your husband has disappeared before, and he’ll try it again. But this time it won’t work. We’ve got him.”

Her mouth went dry. She felt her heartbeat accelerate. “You don’t know who you’re messing with,” she said with a small, hollow laugh.

“He’ll get in touch with you,” Massie said. “He needs you. And when he does, we’ll be watching.”

CHAPTER THREE

Claire found the car in the mall parking garage, just where she’d left it, almost expecting to find Tom crouched in the back seat, or at least something there, some sort of sign from him. A note on the dashboard, or slipped under the windshield-wiper blade. But nothing. Their Volvo station wagon was empty.

For a few minutes, she sat still, breathing heavily, trying to regain control. The reality of what had just happened-or, rather, the unreality of it-was just beginning to sink in. While Annie sat in the back seat, licking at an ice-cream cone, her fright apparently having subsided, Claire’s thoughts were in turmoil. What had she just witnessed? If Massie was lying to her, as she assumed, then why had Tom run away? And where had he learned to do such things?

There was a car phone in the Volvo, and as she drove out of the parking garage toward Cambridge, she half expected it to ring, but nothing.

Where had he gone? Was he all right?

Their house was an enormous Georgian, saved from grandeur only by an unruly ramblingness, a series of additions slapped on by a succession of previous owners. It was on Gray Gardens East, in the toniest part of Cambridge. Even a good distance away, as soon as she had turned the corner, Claire could see the stroboscopic flash of blue light, the unaccustomed buzz of late-night activity that she realized was coming from their driveway. She felt her stomach twist and turn over.

The front door was open.

Looking closer, she saw that it had actually been taken off its hinges. Dread roiled her stomach. She parked the car, grabbed Annie, and ran toward the door.

Inside the house, men were everywhere, opening drawers and carting off cardboard boxes of papers. Some wore suits and trench coats; others were in dark-blue FBI windbreakers.

Annie burst into tears and choked out, “Why are these men in here?”

Claire stroked her back as they entered the foyer. “Nothing to worry about, my baby.” Then she yelled out, “All right, who’s in charge here?”

A man in a gray suit and trench coat emerged from the kitchen: tall, with a thatch of brown hair that was obviously colored, a few shades too dark, and a matching brown mustache. He held out a leather ID wallet. “Special Agent Crawford, FBI,” he said.

“Where’s your search warrant?” she demanded.

He glowered at her, then reluctantly reached into the breast pocket of his suit and pulled out a few sheets of paper, which he handed to her.

She looked them over. The first one, the authorization to search their house, seemed to be in order. It not only gave the correct address but described the appearance of the house. It also gave a ridiculously long list of items they were looking for, a laundry list so long, detailed, and comprehensive that it couldn’t possibly leave out a thing. Telephone records, airline tickets, bus or train tickets, any notes concerning times of flights and train departures, out-of-state newspapers, advertisements, any notes pertaining to such that might be found in the trash, in Tom’s files, among his personal possessions… It went on and on.

Claire looked up at Crawford. “Where’s the warrant affidavit?” she asked.

“It’s sealed.”

“Where is it?”

He shrugged. “Probably in the chambers of the federal magistrate. I really don’t know. Anyway, the warrant’s valid.”

He was right, of course. “I want a complete inventory of everything that’s taken,” she said.

“Certainly, ma’am.”

She looked at the second warrant, the arrest warrant, which listed that same strange name, Ronald Kubik. The FBI agent saw what she was examining and said, “It also gives his assumed name, Thomas Chapman, ma’am. Everything’s in order.”

She heard the team spreading throughout the house, heard the scrape of furniture against the wooden floor in Tom’s study immediately above, heard shouts back and forth. The sound of glass breaking. She cringed involuntarily. Everything felt unreal to her, terrifying and quietly menacing and unreal.

“They broke something!” Annie said, looking at her mother aghast.

“I know, honey,” she said.

“Mommy, I want these guys to leave.”

“Me too, baby.”

“Mrs.-uh, Professor Heller,” Agent Crawford said, “if you have any knowledge whatsoever about your husband’s whereabouts and you do not reveal them to us, you can be charged as an accessory after the fact, which in this case would be a felony. And obstructing justice, which is another felony.”

“Try it,” she said. “Go ahead, charge me. Really, I’d welcome that.”

Crawford scowled. “You have a vacation home?”

“We’ve got a house in Truro, on Cape Cod. You’re welcome to send your boys out there-I can’t stop you-but do you seriously think that, if he’s really on the run for some reason, he’d hide out in such an obvious place? Get real.”

“Friends, relatives he might try to approach?”

“What do you think’s going on?” She shook her head.

“You understand, Mrs. Chapman, that we’ll be watching your every move in case he tries to contact you, or you try to contact him.”

“I’m quite aware,” Claire said, “of what sort of shit the government is capable of when they decide to come down on you.”

Crawford nodded, half smiling.

“And you can bet my husband is aware of that, too. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to put my daughter to bed.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Claire’s sister, Jackie, arrived half an hour after Annie went to bed. She was taller than Claire, skinnier, but not as pretty, with long streaked blond hair. She was two years younger but looked older. Jackie wore black jeans and a black T-shirt under her scruffy denim jacket. Her fingernails were painted, not black, but a sort of eggplant, a Chanel vamp color.

They sat on the glassed-in sun porch. The stuffy, overheated room was like a greenhouse. Its floor-to-ceiling glass walls were steamy; its outside surface was running with condensation.

“They really tore the house up, didn’t they?” Jackie said in her husky, smoker’s voice. She ate sesame chicken with chopsticks out of a white paper carton.

Claire nodded.

“Can’t you sue for that? Destruction of property, or whatever?”

Claire shook her head slowly. “We got bigger problems, kid.”

“What do you think’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted, her voice quavering.

Jackie took a swig of her Diet Pepsi, then fished out a cigarette from the pack of Salems. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Yes.”

Jackie flicked the plastic lighter anyway. The tip of the cigarette flared orange. She sucked in and spoke muzzily through a mouthful of smoke. “They want him for murder? That’s got to be bullshit. Pope Tom?”

“Pope?”

“Good Catholic and Mr. Perfect.”

“Very funny, Jackie. You don’t get it, do you? You’re making jokes.”

“Sorry. Did the arrest warrant say what he did?”

Claire shook her head again. “Sealed.”

“Can they do that?”

“You don’t know the government. You wouldn’t believe the shit they can get away with.”

“What’s with the name? Rubik or whatever.”

“Kubik. Ronald Kubik. I have no idea, Jacks.”

“Can that be right?”

“What do I know anymore? They seem so sure of it.”

“They say they’re sure of it. Who knows what the real story is.”

“Good point. I’ll have one of those. I need one.”

“Uh-oh.”

“You’re a bad influence.” She took a cigarette and the lighter from Jackie. She lighted it, inhaled, and coughed. “It’s been a couple of years.”

“Like riding a bicycle,” Jackie said.

“Ooh, menthol,” Claire said. “Yuck. Almost as bad as clove cigarettes. Tastes like Vicks VapoRub.”

Jackie looked through the steamy glass at the perfectly landscaped backyard. “So where is he?”

Claire shook her head, exhaled a cloud of smoke. The room was hazy with cigarette smoke. “They say they lost him in the parking garage.”

“Doesn’t that tell you he’s guilty of something?”

“Oh, come on!” Claire snapped. “That’s such bullshit. Tom’s not guilty of a goddamned thing.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Do? They’re right, he’ll get in touch with me. Or he’ll come back. And he’ll explain what’s going on.”

“And if he really is guilty of murder?”

“You know him, Jackie,” Claire said, low and intense and angry. “What do you think?”

“You’re right. He’s not a murderer. But he did run. And you gotta wonder why.”

Claire scowled, shook her head as if to dispel the thought. “You know,” she said after a while, “when all those guys were chasing him down, one of them reached him, and I thought it was all over. But suddenly Tom had him down on the ground. Disabled him with his bare hands. Crippled him or knocked him out-maybe killed him, I don’t know.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s as if- Well, I’ve never seen him do anything like that. I had no idea he could do something like that. It was scary. And the way he scaled that wall, the waterfall. It’s like a different Tom took over.”

“I had no idea he knew how to rock-climb.”

“I didn’t either!”

They sat for a minute in silence.

“Think there’ll be something in the papers about this?” Jackie asked.

“I haven’t gotten any calls yet. I don’t think anyone recognized me, except the waiter, who probably didn’t see the incident.”

Jackie exhaled a plume of smoke through her nose, her chin jutting forward. “Tom’ll be back. He’ll explain all this shit.”

Claire nodded.

“He’s a great stepdad. Annie adores him. Daddy’s little girl.”

“Yeah.” She felt a swelling in her chest. She missed him already, and she was frightened for him.

“Annie told me he came into her school for Mom’s Day last week.”

Claire winced. “I was all set to, but I was in New York, meeting with Lambert’s attorneys, and I couldn’t get a flight back in time.”

“Ouch. She must have loved that.”

“I felt horrible.”

“How come he’s able to just take off time in the middle of the day like that to go to her school? I thought he’s one of those obsessive-compulsive Type-A types.”

“He let his chief trader, Jeff, man the trading desk, I guess. I don’t know. Lot of guys wouldn’t do that.”

“At least he doesn’t call her Princess. That would be gross.”

“I get a feeling Annie thinks I’m the stepparent.”

“She was, what, like two when you guys got married? She doesn’t even remember when he wasn’t her daddy.”

“Still,” Claire said sulkily, “I am the birth mother.”

“You guys got any vodka?” Jackie asked.

Claire was convinced that happy marriages were only really appreciated by those who’d been married, badly, already. She’d met Jay, her first husband, at Yale Law School, and at the time he’d seemed such a good match. He was good-looking, seemingly easygoing (though in reality wound tighter than a clock spring), tall and blond and slim. He’d paid her the kind of attention no man had really paid her before, and that alone-for an insecure young woman whose father had abandoned the family when she was nine (she’d been in therapy; she recognized the issues)-was almost mesmerizing. Jay was as career-oriented, as hardworking as she was, which she’d mistakenly thought made them compatible. After her clerkships, when she was hired to teach at Harvard Law School, he’d moved to Boston to take a job at a high-powered downtown firm, and also to be with her. They were married. They worked, and talked about work. On the weekends Jay would unwind by getting roaring drunk. He also became abusive. He was, it turned out, a deeply unhappy man.

Though she was about to turn thirty, neither one of them was ready to start a family. Only later did Claire realize that her reluctance was an early-warning signal of a bad marriage. When she’d gotten pregnant by accident, Jay started drinking regularly, on weekdays, then at lunchtime, then pretty much all the time. His work suffered, of course. He didn’t make partner. He was told to begin looking at other firms.

He didn’t want a child, he said. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to be married to her. He admitted he was threatened by this high-powered woman he’d married. By the time Annie was born, Jay had moved in with his parents in Austin, Texas.

Here she was, a young star on the Harvard Law School faculty, a great success by most conventional measures, and her personal life was a train wreck. Without the help of her sister, Jackie, she didn’t know how she’d have made it.

Jackie, and a guy named Tom Chapman, the investment adviser Jay had chosen to manage their small but growing portfolio of stocks. Tom became a friend, a support, a shoulder to cry on. When Annie was six months old, Jay, the daddy she’d never known, was killed in a car accident. Drunk, naturally. And Tom Chapman had been there, at Claire’s house, almost nightly, helping her through it, helping make funeral arrangements, counseling her.

Five months later, Claire and Tom started seeing each other. He’d nursed her back to emotional health, forced her to go out to Red Sox games at Fenway Park and Celtics games at the old Boston Garden. He explained to her the mysteries of basketball, the fast break and the pick-and-roll. When she was morose, he wheedled her with jokes, mostly bad ones, until she laughed at their badness. They’d go for picnics in Lincoln, and once, when they were rained out, he set it up on the carpet of the front room of his South End apartment, with picnic baskets stuffed with sandwiches and macaroni salad and potato chips. Tom was as emotionally attentive as Jay had been unavailable, distant. He was gentle and caring, yet at the same time fun-loving, with a mischievous streak she adored.

And he loved Annie. Was in fact crazy about her. He would spend hours playing with Annie, building castles out of blocks, playing with the big wooden dollhouse he’d made for her. When Claire needed to work, Tom would take Annie to the playground or the pet shop or just walking around Harvard Square. Annie, who didn’t understand what had happened to her real father, was at once drawn to him and instinctively resentful of him, but by the time Claire had fallen in love with Tom, Annie had too. A year and a half later Claire and Tom were married. Finally she’d found a man to build a life with.

All right, so the first husband had been a mistake. There was an old Russian proverb Claire had read once and never forgotten: The first pancake is always a lump.

She brushed her teeth twice with a new baking-soda-and-peroxide toothpaste, but her mouth still tasted like an ashtray. How come it never used to bother her when she smoked a pack a day? Tom hated it when she smoked and had gotten her to quit.

A little woozy from the vodka she and Jackie had drunk, she settled into bed and thought.

Where could he be right now? Where could he have gone?

And why?

She picked up the phone to call Ray Devereaux, the private investigator she often used. The dial tone stuttered, indicating that there were messages on their voice mail.

Nothing unusual about that, but maybe Tom had left a message. It made a certain sense: only the two of them knew the secret code to access their voice mail.

Then again, if the FBI was really monitoring their phones, they’d hear anything she did.

She speed-dialed voice mail.

“Please dial your password,” invited the friendly-efficient female automaton voice.

She punched the digits.

“You have two messages. Main menu: to hear your messages, press one. To send a message-”

She punched one.

“First message. Received today, at six-fifteen P.M.” Then a woman’s voice: “Hey, Claire, long time no speak. It’s Jen.” Jennifer Evans was one of her oldest and closest friends, but she liked to gab, and Claire had no time for it now. She punched the number one to get rid of the voice, but instead it started the message from the beginning. Frustrated, she sat there listening but not listening to Jen’s long and involved message, until finally Jen wound it up, and then the friendly female automaton gave her the option of replaying or erasing or forwarding a message, and she erased it, and the next one came on.

“Received today, at seven-twenty-seven P.M.” Then a male voice, Tom’s, and her heart jumped.

“Claire… honey…” He was calling from someplace out of doors, the sound of traffic roaring in the background. “I don’t know when you’re going to get this, but I don’t want you to worry about anything. I’m fine. I’m… I had to leave.” A long pause. The throaty snarl of a motorcycle. “I-I don’t know how much to trust the security of this voice mail, darling. I don’t want to say too much, but don’t believe anything you’re being told. I’ll be in touch with you one way or another, very soon. I love you, babe. And I’m so, so sorry. And please give my little dolly a great big hug for me. Tell her Daddy had to go away on business for a little while, and he’s sorry he couldn’t kiss her goodbye, but he’ll see her soon. I love you, honey.”

And the message was over. She played it again, then saved it by pressing two, then hung up.

Alone in their bed, she began to cry.

CHAPTER FIVE

She woke up, reached for Tom, and remembered.

A bit hungover from the booze, she made breakfast for Annie and herself, a four-egg omelet, nothing else in it or on it, but it came out okay, which was nearly a miracle. Tom was the family’s master chef, and eggs were pretty much the outer limit of her culinary ability. She flipped it onto Annie’s favorite plate, then cut it neatly in two, taking half for herself.

“I don’t want it,” Annie said when Claire set it in front of her. She was still in her pajamas, having refused to get dressed. “I don’t like eggs like this.”

“It’s an omelet, honey,” Claire said.

“I don’t care. I don’t like it. I like it the way Daddy makes it.”

Claire inhaled slowly. “Try it, honey.”

“I don’t want to try it. I don’t want it.”

“We’re going to share it, you and me.” Claire pointed to the omelet half on her own plate. “You see?”

“I hate it. I want it like Daddy makes it.”

Claire sat down in the chair next to Annie’s, stroked her incredibly soft cheek. Annie turned her head away sharply. “Babe, we don’t have any more eggs left, so I can’t make you scrambled eggs like Daddy does.”

“I want Daddy to make it.”

“Oh, sweetie, I told you, Daddy had to go away on business for a while.”

Annie’s face sagged. “What’s ‘a while’?”

“A couple of days, babe. Maybe longer. But it’s very, very important business, and Daddy wouldn’t leave you unless it was very important. You know that.”

“But why did he run away from me?”

So that was it. “He didn’t run away from you, sweetheart. He… well, he had to get away from some bad men.”

“Who?”

A good question. “I don’t know.”

“Why?”

“Why what? Why did he have to get away?”

Annie nodded, watching intently, hanging on her words.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Is he coming back?”

“Of course he is. In just a couple of days.”

“I want him to come back today.”

“So do I, baby. So do I. But he can’t, because he has some very important business meetings.”

Annie’s face was blank. For a moment it appeared as if the storm had passed, as if her concerns had been allayed.

But suddenly Annie thrust out both hands and shoved her plate off the table, onto the tiled floor. The plate shattered with a loud crash, sending shards everywhere. The yellow half-moon of omelet quivered on the floor, festooned with jagged slashes of crockery.

“Annie!” Claire gasped.

Annie stared back with defiance and triumph.

Claire sank slowly to the floor, burying her face in her hands. She could not move. She could no longer cope.

Her eyes pooling with tears, Claire looked up at her daughter. Annie stared in shocked silence.

In a small voice, Annie said, “Mommy?”

“It’s all right, baby.”

“Mommy, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. It’s not that, baby-”

The front door opened. A jingling of keys, then a cough announced Rosa’s arrival.

“Is that Daddy?”

“It’s Rosa. I told you, your daddy’s going to be away for a while.”

“Mrs. Chapman!” exclaimed Rosa, rushing over to Claire and helping her slowly to her feet. “Are you a’right?”

“I’m okay, Rosa, thanks. I’m fine.”

Rosa gave a quick, worried glance at Claire, then kissed Annie on the cheek, which she sat still for. “Querida.”

Claire brushed back her hair, nervously adjusted her blouse. Knew she was a mess. “Rosa,” she said, “I’ve got to be at work. Can you make her breakfast and walk her to school?”

“Of course, Mrs. Chapman. You want French toast, querida?”

“Yes,” Annie said sullenly. She slid her eyes furtively toward her mother, then back to Rosa.

“We’re out of eggs, Rosa. I just used the last this morning. On that.” Claire gestured vaguely toward the mess on the floor.

“Then I want toaster waffles,” Annie said.

Rosa knelt on the floor, gingerly picking up shards of china and putting them into a paper Bread & Circus grocery bag. “Okay,” Rosa said. “We have waffles.”

“Give me a kiss, baby,” Claire said, leaning over to kiss Annie.

Annie sat still, then kissed her mother back.

On the way out of the house, Claire picked up the kitchen phone and listened for the broken dial tone that might indicate a new voice-mail message.

There was none.

CHAPTER SIX

“It’s bad,” moaned Connie Gamache, her longtime secretary. “The phone hasn’t stopped ringing in two days. The voice-mail thingo is full, can’t take any more messages. People are getting mean. There’s a lady and several gentlemen here to see you.” She lowered her voice. “I use the term loosely.”

“Morning, Connie,” Claire said, turning to look. The waiting area, two hard couches and a couple of side chairs, normally empty, or maybe occupied by a lone student or two, bustled with reporters. Two of them she recognized: the New York Times Boston bureau chief, and a TV reporter from Channel 4 News that she liked. Claire raised her chin in a silent greeting to the two of them. The last thing she wanted was to talk about the Lambert case to a bunch of indignant journalists.

“I need to hire an assistant,” Connie went on without pause. “All of a sudden you’re Miss Popular.”

“I’ve got a faculty meeting in half an hour or so,” Claire said, unlocking her office door-CLAIRE M. HELLER engraved on a brass plaque, her professional name-and removing her coat at the same time.

Connie followed her into her office, switched on the overhead light. She was broad-shouldered, large-bottomed, white-haired; decades ago, she’d been beautiful. She looked much older than her fifty years. “You’ve got a lot of reporters who want interviews,” she warned. “Want me to send them all away, or what?”

Claire began unpacking her briefcase into neat piles on the long cherrywood desk. She exhaled a long sigh of frustration. “Ask what’s-her-name from Channel Four-Novak, Nowicki, whatever it is-how long she needs. Ask the Times guy if he can come back later on, maybe this afternoon.”

Connie shook her head in grave disapproval. She was good at handling the media but considered them all leeches to be plucked off the instant they’d affixed themselves. Claire was grateful, actually, for her secretary’s concern, since she was usually right-reporters tended to sensationalize, exaggerate, and fuck you over if they possibly could. And usually they got their stories wrong. In a minute Connie returned. “Now I’ve got them mad. Carol Novak says she just needs five or ten minutes.”

“Okay,” Claire said. Carol Novak, that was her name, had been good to her-smart, reasonably accurate, with less of the animus toward Harvard than the other local reporters tended to exhibit. “Give me a couple of minutes to check my e-mail, then send Carol Novak in.”

Carol Novak of Channel 4 entered with a cameraman who quickly set up lights, rearranged a desk lamp, moved a couple of chairs, and positioned himself facing Claire’s desk. Meanwhile, the reporter, a small, pert redhead-very pretty, but overly made up, as TV reporters tend to be on the job-made small talk. Her lips were lined perfectly, Claire noticed, and her eyebrows were plucked into perfect slim arches. She asked about Annie; both of them had six-year-olds. She gossiped a bit about another, far more famous member of the Law School faculty. They shared a joke. Carol dispensed some praise and put her hand on Claire’s, woman friend to woman friend. She didn’t seem to know anything about the incident at the mall. The cameraman asked if Claire could move her chair away from the window and against the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Then, when the cameraman was ready, Carol sat at a chair next to Claire’s, in the same frame, and hunched forward with an expression of deep concern.

“You’ve been criticized a lot recently for taking on the Gary Lambert case,” the reporter said. Her voice had suddenly become deeper yet breathy, ripe with solicitude.

“For winning it, you mean,” Claire said.

Carol Novak smiled, a killer’s smile. “Well, for allowing a convicted rapist to go free on a technicality.”

Claire matched smile for smile. “I don’t think the Fourth Amendment is a ‘technicality.’ The fact is, his civil liberties were violated in the search of his apartment. My job was to defend his rights.”

“Even if it meant a convicted rapist is free to rape again?”

Claire shook her head. “Lambert was convicted, but the trial was flawed. Our successful appeal proved that.”

“Are you saying he didn’t do it?”

“I’m saying the process was flawed. If we allow flawed trials to take place, then we’re all at risk.” How often she’d said this; did she always sound as hollow, as unpersuasive as she felt right now?

Carol Novak sat back in her chair. She stared into Claire’s eyes with a fierceness that was startling. “As a woman, how do you feel about getting a rapist off?”

Claire responded quickly, unwilling to allow a pause that might be mistaken for misgivings. “As I said, that isn’t the issue-”

“Claire,” Carol Novak said with the deeply felt sorrow, the stricken intensity, the appalled concern of a daytime talk-show host interviewing a trailer-park denizen who was sleeping with the child he’d fathered by his own daughter, “do you ever feel, sometimes-right here”-she tapped her chest-“that what you’re doing is wrong?”

“If I ever felt that,” Claire said with great certainty and a dramatic pause, “I wouldn’t do it,” and she gave a smile that said, We’re all done now, a smile with which, she knew, Channel 4 would end the interview.

Ray Devereaux stood in her office doorway. The private investigator was almost as big as the door, a good three hundred and fifty pounds, but he didn’t appear fat. He was, instead, massive. His head seemed small, out of proportion to the immense trunk below, although that may have been an optical illusion, given his height.

Devereaux had a gift for the dramatic gesture. He didn’t enter a room, he made an entrance. Now he had positioned himself at the threshold, arms folded atop his girth, and waited for her cue.

“Thanks for coming, Ray,” Claire said.

“You’re welcome,” he said grimly, as if he had performed for her a great Herculean feat. “Where the hell do you park around here?”

“I park in the faculty garage. But there should have been plenty of spaces on Mass. Ave.”

He scowled. “I had to park at a hydrant. Left my blank ticket book on the dash.” He hadn’t been on the police force for some twelve years already, but he still used all the tricks and appurtenances, the perks of being on the job. His blank book of parking tickets was no doubt more than a decade old by now, but the meter maids would still observe the shibboleth and spare him a fifty-dollar ticket. “Congratulations, by the way.”

“For what?”

“For winning the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes, what the hell you think? For Lambert.”

“Thanks.”

“You realize you’re total an-thee-ma to your fellow women now.” He meant “anathema.” “They’re never going to let you into NOW.”

“I never thought much about joining. Come in, make yourself at home. Have a seat.”

He entered her office tentatively, ill-at-ease. Devereaux never liked meeting with her at her office, her turf. He preferred to meet at his lair, a fake-wood-paneled office suite in South Boston adorned with framed diplomas and certificates, where he was czar. He stopped before one of the visitor chairs and glowered down at it, as if unsure what it was. The chair suddenly looked dainty next to him. He pointed straight down at it and grinned. When he smiled, he was a ten-year-old boy, not a forty-seven-year-old private investigator.

“You got something I won’t break?”

“Take mine.” Claire got up from her high-backed leather desk chair and switched places with Devereaux. He took her seat without objection, now comfortably enthroned behind her desk. A fillip of authority symbolism, she figured, would put him at ease.

“So, you rang,” Devereaux said. He leaned way back in her chair and folded his arms across his belly. The chair creaked ominously.

“I called you, but I didn’t leave a message,” she said, confused.

“Caller ID. Recognized your number on the box. So what’s this about, Lambert again? I thought you were done with that sleazeball.”

“It’s something else, Ray. I need your help.” She told him about last night: the mall, the agents pursuing Tom, his disappearance, the search of their house.

Slowly Ray leaned forward until both of his feet were on the ground. “You’re shittin’ me,” he said.

She shook her head.

He pursed his lips, jutted them out like a blowfish. He closed his eyes. A long, dramatic pause. He was said to be excellent at interrogations. “I know a guy,” he said at last. “Knew him from my FBI days. Probably looking to get out. Maybe I’ll offer him a job with me.”

“You’re going to hire someone?”

“I said offer.”

“Well, be discreet. Fly below the radar, you know? Don’t let them know why you’re interested.”

Devereaux scowled. “Now you’re going to tell me how to do my job? I don’t tell you about torts-or whatever the hell it is you teach.”

“Point taken. Sorry. But could this whole thing be a mistake, a misunderstanding?”

Devereaux stared at the ceiling for a long moment, for maximum dramatic effect. “It’s unlikely,” he said. “Count on the fact they’ve got your phones bugged. And a trap-and-trace on Tom’s office, your home-”

“My office here, too?”

“Why not, sure.”

“I want you to sweep my phones.”

Devereaux gave a sardonic smile. “‘Sweep’ your phones? If they’re doing this outta the central office, which I’m sure they are, I’m not going to find anything. I’ll sweep if you want, but don’t expect anything. Anyway, even if I did find something, I can’t remove it if it’s legal.”

“Does that mean, if he calls me to check in, they can trace the call and find out where he is?”

“I’m sure that’s what they want. But it’s gotten a lot harder these days. You just buy one of those prepaid phone cards, and in effect the service is making the call for you, so it’s impossible to trace.”

“He left me a voice-mail message.”

“Where? Here or at home?”

“Home.”

“They can access that, no problem. Don’t need any secret code. If they’ve got a warrant, NYNEX is going to let them listen to any voice-mail messages left there.”

“So they heard the message Tom left?”

“Count on it. But he probably counted on that, too.”

“And they’re probably going to get all phone records, at home and at Tom’s office, right? So they can see who he might have tried to reach.”

“You got it.”

“But only long-distance, right?”

“Wrong. The phone company keeps a log of every single local phone call that’s made-phone number dialed, duration of call, all that. That’s how they do billing for people who don’t have unlimited calling plans.” Claire nodded. “But they don’t preserve the records beyond one billing cycle, which means roughly a month.”

“So is there any way Tom can contact me without them knowing?”

Devereaux was silent for a moment. He cupped a hand over his mouth. “Probably.”

“How?”

“I’d have to think on that. ’Course, Tom’s probably already thought about that. Also, we have to assume that they’ve bugged this office, too.”

“You gotta find out what’s going on, Ray.”

“I’ll see what I can dig up.” He grasped the arms of the chair and fixed her with a stagy glare. “Will that be all, Professor?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“I want to eat while I’m watching Beauty and the Beast,” Annie chanted.

“You’ll eat at the table,” Claire said as sternly as she could. Jackie served Claire and herself salad from an immense rustic Tuscan bowl. Salads were one of her specialties. Jackie was a vegetarian these days, having gone through vegan and macrobiotic phases, all the while smoking heavily.

“No. I want to eat while I’m watching Beauty and the Beast. I want to eat macaroni-and-cheese on the couch while I’m watching Beauty and the Beast.”

At one end of the spacious kitchen was a corner where Annie stashed her vast collection of toys, which included a ragged Elmo, a torn Kermit the Frog puppet, a battle-scarred Mr. Potato Head. There were dozens of others that Annie hadn’t touched or even noticed in months. A large television set faced a tattered, slipcovered sofa stained with a thousand microwaved frozen macaroni-and-cheeses, a thousand sippy-cups of grape juice, a thousand red popsicles (no flavor known to man, just red).

“Come on, kiddo,” Jackie said, “come eat with your mommy and me.”

“No.”

“We’re a family,” Claire said, exasperated. “We eat together. And you’re not having macaroni-and-cheese. Jackie made some delicious chicken.”

Annie ran over to the sofa and defiantly popped the Beauty and the Beast video into the VCR. “I want macaroni-and-cheese,” she said.

“Not on the menu tonight, kiddo,” Jackie said. “Sorry.” To Claire, she said: “You poor thing. What would you do without me?”

“I don’t know,” Claire acknowledged, and said, louder: “Okay, listen, Annie. Come over here.”

Her daughter obediently returned, stood erect in front of Claire as if at an army inspection. She knew she had maneuvered herself onto the shoals of big trouble.

“If you’ll eat the chicken Jackie made, you can watch Beauty and the Beast. On the couch.”

“Okay!” Annie said, running back to the couch. “Excellent!” She pressed the VCR’s play button, and dove onto the couch to enjoy the lengthy previews for other Disney videos and the ad for Disney World.

“That’s laying down the law,” Jackie muttered. “You disciplinarian, you.”

“But just this once!” Claire called out lamely. She dished out roast chicken and mashed potatoes on a plate and brought it over to Annie, with a small fork and a napkin. As she turned back to the kitchen table, she noticed something outside the window, a dark shape visible through the lilac bushes.

A dark-blue government car: a Crown Victoria. Jackie saw Claire staring out the window and said, “Aren’t these goons outside driving you crazy?”

“You have no idea,” Claire said. “One followed me to and from work today.”

“You can’t do anything about it?”

“Well, they’re on public property. They’re respecting the curtilage.”

“The who?”

“Curtilage. The area of privacy around a dwelling. They’re not trespassing. They have the right to be there.”

“What about your freedom of-I don’t know, freedom not to be molested by goons?”

Claire half smiled. “Of course, maybe I could go to court to get a 209-A restraining order against them. Make ’em stay a hundred yards away from me.”

“Yeah,” Jackie said, “I bet that would go over big, trying to get some local judge to order the federal government to back off. I don’t think so.”

“I called Tom’s office,” Claire said. She returned to the table and, stomach tight, tried to regain an appetite for the dinner Jackie had cooked. “Apparently Tom left e-mail messages for his chief trader, Jeff Rosenthal, and his assistant, Vivian, telling them he had to make a sudden, very hush-hush business trip out of the country. Said he’d be gone for a week, maybe longer. They were wondering what’s going on, because everyone at Chapman & Company was questioned at home by FBI agents asking lots of questions about Tom and his whereabouts.”

“That must’ve made ’em suspicious.”

“To say the least. Tom told them in his e-mail that the FBI might be questioning them in connection with a security clearance. I don’t think they were convinced.”

“No,” Jackie said, “I bet not. They’ve got to be wondering, just like we are.”

Annie went to bed without any trouble, and Claire and Jackie sat in the enclosed sun porch, both smoking. Jackie sipped at a tumbler of Famous Grouse; Claire, in an oversized Gap T-shirt and sweatpants, drank seltzer.

“Well, Annie seems to be holding up okay with Daddy gone,” Jackie said, exhaling a lungful of smoke through her nostrils.

“She’s had her difficult moments,” Claire said.

“You’re not surprised she’s difficult sometimes, are you? Don’t forget, you did read Rosemary’s Baby while you were pregnant. What if she’s really the spawn of Satan?”

Claire smiled pallidly.

“You holding up okay?” Jackie asked.

Claire nodded. “I don’t know what to think. I asked Ray Devereaux to look into it, see what he came up with.”

“They’re telling you he used to have a different name, a different identity-you think they might be telling you the truth?”

“You know him, Jackie,” Claire said. “You know he’s not a murderer.” Claire put her cigarette down in the ashtray.

“I don’t know him,” Jackie replied. “Obviously you don’t know him either.”

“Oh, come on!” Claire cried. “You have good character judgment-so do I. Look how much time we’ve both spent with Tom in the last three years. How can you say you don’t know him?”

“Or is it Ron?”

“Fuck you.”

“Look, we know he can get pretty angry. He’s got a temper. We’ve all seen it. You remember when we were driving down to the Cape and this car cut in front of us, cut us off, and Tom just about lost it?”

“He didn’t lose it.”

“Oh, come on, his face got red, he cursed the guy out, took off after him. It was terrifying! You were yelling at him to calm down, and finally he did, but… Remember?”

“Yeah,” Claire said wearily. “So what? He’s got a temper. Does that make him a murderer? Okay, he lied to me about his past-but does that make him a murderer either?”

“Jesus, Claire, how much do you really know about him? I mean, you’ve never met his family, right?”

“Not true. I met his father, Nelson, at the wedding and once after that, when we visited him at his condo on Jupiter Island, Florida. But, look, I think I met Jay’s parents only once.”

“And you’ve hardly met any friends of his.”

“Friends? Guys in their forties rarely have more than a couple of friends, haven’t you ever noticed that? Men aren’t like women. They get married and get buried in their jobs and sort of fall off the face of the earth. Every guy considers every other guy a potential rival. Men his age have colleagues, they have contacts. Maybe they have guys they play sports with or watch basketball or football with. I mean, Tom has plenty of casual friends-everyone likes him. But no old friends, as far as I can tell. Then again, Jay didn’t have any old friends either.”

“Claire, you never met any boyhood friends of his, any college friends. Or anyone who knew him before he moved to Boston. Am I wrong?”

Claire sighed. She traced her index finger down the sweat on the outside of her glass tumbler. “Once in a while he’d get phone calls from an old college friend. Once I remember him getting a phone call from a friend of his in California. No, he didn’t seem to be in touch with any old friends, not on any regular basis. But, Jackie, you don’t seem to be listening to me. There was nothing out of the ordinary about that. Why in the world would I assume he was lying to me?”

“So where is he, do you think? Where do you think he’s gone?”

Claire shook her head. “I have no idea.”

A long silence passed between them.

“Do you remember what Dad looked like?” Claire asked suddenly. “I don’t.”

“Yeah, well, I do. I wish I could forget. He was an asshole.”

“Remember how he smelled-his aftershave?”

“I remember he reeked like a French whore.”

“I loved the way he smelled. Old Spice. Whenever I smell it, it takes me right back.”

“Right back to your happy childhood and our loving dad,” Jackie muttered. “I hope Tom doesn’t wear Old Spice.”

“Dad was a troubled guy.”

“He was a selfish loser. You know what smell I associate with him?” Jackie said. “Seriously. The smell of gasoline when a car’s starting up. You know, partially combusted gas? I remember standing outside the house on the gravel driveway saying goodbye to him, watching him drive off, smelling that smell. I loved that smell. I mean, it’s a bittersweet smell to me, ’cause I never knew if he’d be coming back. I never knew if he was going away for good.”

Claire nodded. They sat in silence again. Jackie snubbed out another cigarette, finished her scotch. “Can you hand me that bottle?” She poured out the rest of the Famous Grouse.

“He’s my husband, and I love him,” Claire said very quietly. “He’s a great father and a great husband and I love him.”

“Hey, I kinda like the lug myself. Is this the end of the scotch?”

CHAPTER EIGHT

From the street, the Dunkin’ Donuts in Central Square looked like some high-priced gourmet shop in Concord, the kind that sells forty types of balsamic vinegar and no iceberg lettuce. Its hunter-green façade, with a grid of tiny window panes, had recently been renovated in one of the spasms of gentrification that overcame Central Square every few years. But it would recede, like all the others, leaving the fundamental seediness of the place untouched. Unlovely Central Square, land of a thousand Indian restaurants, home of ninety-nine-cent stores and store-front lawyers and discount jewelry exchanges, would never lose its genuine decrepit proletarian soul.

Ray Devereaux had called her early in the morning and asked her to meet him after she dropped off Annie at school. Claire had an hour to spare before she had to be at Harvard to lecture. She refused to cancel her classes. She was keeping up with all appointments, all classes, all meetings-keeping up appearances, even though she could barely concentrate on anything but Tom. Ray was already sitting at a tiny magenta modular table, his immense girth spilling awkwardly over the narrow rail-back chair attached. An empty baby stroller crowded him. The baby, whose mother sat indifferently nearby with an immense crinkling plastic shopping bag in her lap, toddled around the seating area in a red bunny suit tied at the neck with a pink bow. The mother, a large dark-haired woman, was having a heated conversation in Greek with a silver-haired, large-nosed old man in a black leather jacket. Soft rock blared over the speakers (Rod Stewart rasping “Reason to Believe”), competing with the almost deafening white noise of the exhaust system.

Ray was fastidiously tucking into a chocolate cruller and taking sips from a refillable plastic commuter mug. He was a regular.

“You’ve got company,” he said nonchalantly.

“Hmm?”

“You’ve grown a tail.”

Claire turned back toward the plate-glass front of the shop. A dark-blue Crown Vic was just pulling away from the curb.

“Oh, that,” she said. “Yeah, they’ve been tailing me all over the place. To and from work. They’re just trying to bust my balls.”

“They probably think you got balls, honey.” He chuckled. “But they’re gone now. They can’t double-park here, not in the middle of traffic.”

He took another large bite of the cruller, wiped his hands with the little napkins to remove the sticky stuff. “So I put out some lines to my friends in the Cambridge PD,” he said. “The good news is they got the guy who did the B & E. Your paintings will be harder to find.”

“Ray, you didn’t ask me to come to Central Square just to tell me-”

“Cool your jets, honey.”

He fixed her with a glare until she appeased him: “Go ahead.”

“Anyways, so I call up the National Association of Securities Dealers, the folks who regulate brokers and money managers and what have you, and they faxed me down the résumé Tom has on file with them. I look at it. Born Hawthorne, California, graduated Hawthorne High School. Graduated Claremont Men’s College, 1973. So I call Claremont, the Alumni Association, and I’m trying to get in touch with Tom Chapman, old college buddy, do they know where this guy is, what he’s doing now. You’d be amazed at how much the alumni associations of these colleges keep on file. Real treasure trove.”

“Okay,” she said, keeping her voice neutral. The air was overheated; she took off her coat and her blazer.

“Bad news is, your FBI friends are right. There’s no record of a Thomas Chapman at Claremont Men’s College. Which has since been renamed, by the way.”

An old Chinese woman a few tables over was clipping her fingernails. The dark-haired mother scooped up her baby, now screaming, and put her in the carriage.

“So that set me digging,” Devereaux said. “Find out what’s really going on with your husband. And I found some really interesting stuff on him.”

“Like?”

“Well, so I check with Social Security, see if there’s any irregularities. Strangest thing-everything’s hunky-dory, everything’s copacetic, but there’s no Social Security payments before 1985. Nothing. Well, that’s a little bit strange for a guy who’s, what, forty-six or so? Unless the guy just never worked before he was thirty or whatever, which I guess is possible. And then I check with TRW, the credit people, and everything’s fine, no delinquencies-but he also has no credit history before 1985. Also bizarre.”

Claire felt her stomach tighten. She shifted her feet, which had adhered to a sticky coffee spill on the gray-and-magenta-tiled floor.

Now Steely Dan was playing on the radio. What was it, “Katie Lied”? “Katie Died”? Something like that. A smarmy saxophone solo competed with the insistent bleating of a microwave, then a lushly harmonized chorus: “… Deacon Blue… Deacon Blue…”

“His résumé lists several jobs after college. Good, respectable jobs with companies, brokerages and the like. So I’m asking myself, why is there no record of Social Security payments if the guy was working all that time? So I make some calls, and another strange thing-all the companies he’s ever worked for before he started his own firm have gone under.”

“Maybe he’s a black cat,” Claire murmured.

“I mean, one maybe. But three? Three investment firms and brokerage houses he used to work for that don’t exist anymore. Which means there’s no records available. Nothing to check up on.”

Claire listened in stricken silence. She watched an anxious, short-haired, bespectacled woman with two handbags slung over her shoulder stride in, clutching a Filofax, and order a large coffee, light, two sugars.

“So, what does this mean?” Devereaux said. “Before 1985-when he was, what, over thirty-he had no credit cards, no AmEx, no Visa, no MasterCard. And I check some more-the IRS has no returns on file for him before then either. So he lists all these jobs with companies that no longer exist, and he paid no Social Security and filed no tax returns.”

“What am I supposed to make of all this?” Claire said. She could not think. She stared. She felt vertiginous.

“Well, I have a buddy works out of L.A., and I asked him to take a little trip down to Hawthorne. Right near LAX-”

“And he didn’t go to Hawthorne High,” Claire interrupted. “You don’t have to tell me this. I’ve figured it out.”

“There’s no record at the high school. None of the teachers, the old-timers, remember him. No one in the Class of ’73 remembers him. He’s not in the yearbook. Plus, going back in the old phone directories, there’s no record his parents ever lived there. No Nelson Chapman ever lived there. Now, I’m not saying the FBI isn’t full of shit. I’m not saying your husband committed any crime. I’m just telling you that Tom Chapman doesn’t exist, Claire. Whoever your husband really is, whatever he really is-he’s not who you think he is.”

After class, Claire returned to her office, met with a few frantic students-the semester was almost over, and final exams were imminent-then checked her e-mail.

Unfortunately, the dean had only recently discovered e-mail and had started using it to send every notice, in addition to any stray thought that crossed his mind. He’d left several pointless memos. There were a couple of press queries-attempts to get to her through the back door-but she knew how to deal with them: complete and utter silence. No answer. And a long-winded, chatty message from a friend in Paris.

And a message whose return address she didn’t recognize, in Finland. It was addressed to Professor Chapman, which was strange, because almost everyone knew her as Professor Heller. She read it, then read it again, and her heart began to thud.

Dear Professor Chapman,

I am interested in having you represent me in a matter of great urgency and utmost personal concern. Although circumstances prevent me from meeting with you in person, I will be in touch directly soon. Telephone, including voice mail, insufficiently private. Please do not believe the incorrect impressions about my case that you may have been given. When we meet I will explain all.

Fondest regards to you and your offspring.

R. LENEHAN

R. Lenehan, she knew at once, referred to their favorite small restaurant in Boston’s South End, a place called Rose Lenehan’s, where they’d had their first date.

She clicked the reply icon and quickly typed out:

Very eager for meeting soonest.

CHAPTER NINE

In the middle of the night Claire sat up suddenly, drenched in sweat. Her heart racing, she walked around the darkened bedroom, the only illumination coming from a streetlight outside, until she found the drawer where they kept the family photos. The FBI search team had left it more or less alone. They were interested in more revealing, more immediate things-itineraries, travel times, flight numbers, that sort of thing.

There were countless pictures of Annie, album after album of photos from her birth to her last school picture. She had to be one of the most fully documented children in the history of the world. There was an album of pictures of herself, a bunch of baby pictures: Claire with Jackie, Jackie tagging along behind Claire and Claire looking aggrieved. A number of pictures of the family, Claire, Jackie, and their mother, who always seemed to look tired. A lot of pictures of Claire on a vacation in Wyoming with some college friends. Shots of her college graduation (she’d had a miserable outbreak of acne and had gained a lot of weight during spring semester senior year, and so never allowed herself to look at these pictures).

And Tom’s photos?

One baby picture, a small black-and-white with a scalloped border. It might have been any generic baby; it looked nothing like the adult Tom, but baby pictures often bear no resemblance to the adult.

And photos of him as a boy? None.

High school? Nothing.

College, too. Nothing.

There were no pictures of Tom except that one generic baby picture. No high-school yearbook with pages defaced by long goodbye notes in loopy handwriting from girls who had had unrequited crushes on Tom.

What kind of person had no pictures of himself growing up?

Why had she never wondered where all his photographs were?

Returning from class late that morning, trailing two insistent students who’d attached themselves to her like limpets, Claire gracefully asked them to return later in the day. She had a meeting, she told them. They were nervous about finals; she’d be happy to spend time with them later on.

Connie was at her desk doing correspondence. She looked up, started to say something.

Claire smiled, gave a nice-to-see-you-but-I’m-too-rushed-to-stop-and-talk-just-now wave, went into her office, and shut the door behind her.

Ray Devereaux was sitting in her chair.

“The shit has hit the fan,” he said. He was dressed in a gray suit, surprisingly well cut, a white shirt, a pale turquoise tie.

“Tell me about it.”

She sat down in one of the visitor chairs, dropped her briefcase to the floor. “Your sources are good?”

“Not especially. I’ve been calling around, but everyone’s awful tight-lipped. This isn’t a rinky-dink operation. This is big stuff.”

“How big are we talking?”

Devereaux leaned back in the chair, which creaked alarmingly. She half expected him to topple over backward. “They’ve accelerated the surveillance. They know he left a voice-mail message for you at home, and they’re approved to get your office voice mail at Harvard. They have no idea where he is, but they’re waiting for him to contact you. They have people outside his office downtown. A couple of guys outside this building. Everywhere you drive, they’ll follow you, in case you might be driving to meet him somewhere.”

“Like that song by the Police, right?” Claire smiled grimly. “‘Every Step You Take.’”

Devereaux looked blank. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

They went for a stroll through the Law School quadrangle. She noticed the two plainclothesmen following at a not-so-discreet distance.

“Nice day, huh?” Devereaux said. “Real late-spring day.”

“Ray-”

“Not yet, honey. I’ve always thought those long-range directional microphones they got are overrated, particularly on a crowded street. But I don’t want to take a chance. I mean, we could walk along Mass. Ave. and drive them crazy trying to pick out our voices from a hundred other babblers, but why chance it? Let’s take a ride in my car. I just picked it up this morning, and I know I wasn’t followed, so it’s not likely they put a bug in it. Yet.”

Devereaux’s car was a new Lincoln. One of his clients ran an auto-leasing agency and let him lease cars for free, as compensation. She sank back in the comfortable, well-cushioned leather seat while he drove around aimlessly.

“You mentioned his father,” Devereaux said. “Nelson Chapman. You said he lives in Florida.”

“You talked to him?”

Devereaux shook his head slowly. “No such person.”

“I’ve met him. We visited him at his condo on Jupiter Island.”

“You’ve met a man who called himself Nelson Chapman. The condo you said you visited is owned by someone who’s never heard of any Nelson Chapman. Neighbors there, even longtime neighbors, have never heard of him. You don’t believe me, call if you want.”

“Are you saying Tom arranged for someone to play the role of his father?”

“That’s what it looks like. It’s real compartmented, this operation.” He steered with one index finger. “Real tough to get anything. My contacts don’t know shit, and those that know anything are shut up tight. But this much I learned: they’re saying Tom used to be a covert operative for the Pentagon.”

“Oh, come on!” she scoffed.

“Why is that so hard to believe?”

“He’s a money guy.”

“Now. But I’m told that he was in the military and disappeared, went AWOL, like more than a decade ago, that he’s escaping something really nasty, real serious. Some bad kind of shit.”

“What are you telling me?”

“They’re saying he’s wanted for murder.”

“So they tell me.”

“That he was some kind of clandestine operative for the U.S. government who committed some horrible crime and then went on the lam.”

She shook her head, chewed on a fingernail. An old law-school habit she thought she’d stopped. “That’s not possible.”

“You’re married to him,” Devereaux said equably. “You’d know.” He turned to look at her, then turned back to the road.

Claire smiled, a strange, bitter smile. “How well do you ever know the person you married?”

“Hey, don’t ask me. I didn’t know when I married Margaret that she was a bitch, but that’s what she turned out to be. Is it possible that Tom could have worked for the government, for some clandestine branch of the military? Sure. Fact is, he made up a history, a biography. The college thing was just the tip of the iceberg. He’s covering something up, escaping something. That much I’d say for sure.”

“But couldn’t there be a-benign explanation?”

“Like he ran up a lot of parking tickets in Dubuque? Doubtful.”

Claire did not smile.

“But I’ll tell you the truth,” Devereaux said somberly. “I always thought Tom was a little too smooth for his own good, but he’s your husband, so I gotta side with him. When the government starts gathering its forces to go after one guy, you gotta believe they’re trying to hide something, too.”

That evening, as she was trying to convince Annie that it was bedtime, the phone rang.

She recognized the voice right away: Julia Margolis, the wife of her closest friend on the Harvard faculty, Abe Margolis, who taught constitutional law. “Claire?” she said in her big contralto. “Where are you? You’re an hour and a half late-is everything all right?”

“An hour-oh my God. You invited us for dinner tonight. Oh, shit, Julia. I’m so sorry, I totally forgot about it.”

“Are you sure you’re all right? That’s not like you at all.” Julia Margolis was a large and still very beautiful brunette in her late fifties, a great cook and an even greater hostess.

“I’ve been insanely busy,” Claire said, then revised that: “Tom had to go out of town on business suddenly, and I feel like everything’s falling down around me.”

“Well, I’ve had the swordfish marinating for something like two days, and I really hate to waste it. Why don’t you come over now?”

“I’m sorry, Julia. I really am. Rosa’s gone home, and I don’t have a sitter, and I’m just frantic. Please forgive me.”

“Of course, dear. But when things settle down, will you call me? We’d love to see you two.”

CHAPTER TEN

Later that evening Claire and Jackie sat in the downstairs study, in paired, slightly weathered French leather club chairs. Tom had spent two months searching for the perfect chairs for Claire’s office, because she’d once admired them in a Ralph Lauren ad. Finally he’d located a dealer in New York who imported them from the Paris flea market. They’d gone from a Paris nightclub in the twenties to Cambridge in the late nineties, and they were still magnificently comfortable.

Jackie again wore black jeans and a black T-shirt. Paint spatters freckled her shirt and arms: she was a painter who earned her living as a technical writer. Claire was still wearing her blue suit, a Chanel knockoff but a nice one, because she hadn’t had a minute to change. She was exhausted and her head ached and her neck and shoulders felt stiff. All she wanted to do right now was run a nice hot bath and soak in it for an hour.

The room glowed amber as the sun set.

“Ray Devereaux says Tom used to be some kind of clandestine army operative who got entangled in something,” Jackie said. “Jesus. You think Ray’s information is good?”

“He’s usually reliable. Always has been.”

“So what do you think, he did something for the government, the Pentagon, something undercover, and maybe he got into trouble? And… and he goes AWOL, just takes off, and he goes into hiding and changes his name, and then he moves to Boston and goes into business and hopes he never gets caught? And then, one day, by coincidence, your house is broken into and the cops run his prints, and bingo, the Pentagon’s found him? Is that how it goes?”

“Basically, yeah.” Claire turned to see whether Jackie was being ironic, or simply skeptical, but she wasn’t. She was thinking out loud, as she so often did.

“Hard to get a job with a firm if you have no references for them to check into,” Jackie went on, “so he starts his own business, and that way he doesn’t have people checking too deeply into his background.”

Claire closed her eyes again, nodded.

“So everything you know about Tom is a lie,” Jackie suggested gently.

“Maybe not everything. A lot. An enormous amount.”

Very softly, Jackie said, “But you feel betrayed. It’s, like, custom-made to rip your heart out.”

Tears came to Claire’s eyes, tears of frustration and exhaustion rather than of sadness. “Is it a betrayal if he’s escaping, hiding?”

“He lied to you, Claire. He never told you about it. He’s not who he told you he was. A man who can lie about his life, create a whole fake background, is a man who can lie about anything.”

“He contacted me again, Jacks.”

“How?”

“We don’t know if there are bugs here,” Claire said, pointing at the ceiling, although who knew where listening devices might be planted?

“Well, what are you going to do?” Jackie asked, but then the doorbell rang. They looked at each other. Now who could it be? Claire got up reluctantly and went to the front door.

It was a young guy in his early twenties, with a scuzzy goatee and a brass stud earring in his left ear, wearing bicycle shorts and a leather jacket. “Boston Messengers,” he announced.

Claire looked past him to see two Crown Victorias parked at the curb in front of their house. Passengers in both vehicles were staring at the visitor.

“Are you Claire Chapman?”

Claire nodded, alert.

“Jesus, lady, those guys out there stopped me and asked me a million questions, who am I and what am I doing here-you got something going on in here? You in some sort of trouble? ’Cause I don’t want trouble.”

“What are you doing here?” Claire demanded.

“I got a package for Claire Chapman. I just need to see some kind of ID.”

“Hold on,” Claire said. She closed the door, retrieved her purse from the hall table, and removed her driver’s license from her wallet.

She opened the door again and handed him the license.

The kid inspected it, comparing the picture to her face. He nodded. “I gotta ask for your Harvard faculty card, too.”

“Who’s the package from?”

“I dunno.” He looked at it. “Something Lenahan.”

Claire was immediately flooded with relief, then excitement. “Here,” she said, handing him her faculty ID card.

He looked at it, once again comparing the photos. “Okay,” he said warily. “Sign here.”

She signed, took the package-a flat, rigid cardboard envelope about nine by twelve inches-tipped him, and closed the door.

“Who’s it from?” Jackie asked.

Claire smiled and didn’t answer. Tom knew the phones were tapped, which meant that voice mail and the fax machine weren’t safe. He knew they’d be monitoring the mail. The sudden appearance of a courier might work just once, but without a court order they couldn’t intercept the package.

Inside was a handwritten letter, which brought tears to her eyes-and a plan, which for the first time brought her hope.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A full moon. A warm night. The watchers at their stations in their government-issue sedans lulled by the tedium. It was barely half an hour later. The doorbell rang, and Claire answered it. She wasn’t at all surprised to see the two FBI agents, Howard Massie and John Crawford, standing there in almost identical trench coats. No doubt they’d been summoned by the watchers and had rushed over.

Massie spoke first as they entered. “Where’s the envelope?” he demanded. He was a large man, larger than she’d remembered from the nightmarish scene at the mall and the “conversation” that followed.

“First we talk,” Claire said, leading them into the sitting area just off the foyer, a sofa and a couple of comfortable upholstered chairs on a sisal carpet, around a tufted, tapestry-covered ottoman neatly stacked with old New Yorkers. It was a part of the house they rarely used, and it looked that way, sterile, like a display in a furniture store.

Crawford began, menacingly: “If you plan on hiding something from us-”

Massie interrupted, “We need your cooperation, and if your husband has tried to arrange a meeting-”

“How can you prove to me the man you’re looking for, this Ronald Kubik, really is the same man as my husband, Tom Chapman?” Claire said abruptly.

Massie looked at Crawford, who said: “It’s the prints, ma’am. The fingerprints don’t lie. We can show you photographs, but his face is different.”

Claire’s stomach felt as if it had flipped over. “What does that mean, his face is different?”

“There’s only a slight, passing resemblance between the photos we have of your husband and those of Ronald Kubik,” Massie explained. “Photo superimposition demonstrates beyond question that they’re the same person, but you’d never think they were the same person, not after the amount of plastic surgery he’s had. Sergeant Kubik’s an extremely bright man, extremely resourceful. If it weren’t for your burglary, and the thoroughness of the Cambridge police, running all the prints and all, he might never have been caught.”

“Sergeant?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Crawford said. “We’re only the contact agency. We’re really working on behalf of the U.S. Army CID. Criminal Investigation Division.” Massie watched her with heavy-lidded interest.

“What the hell is the army investigative service interested in Tom for?”

“I know you’re a professor of law at Harvard,” Massie said, “but I don’t know how much you know about the military. Your husband, Ronald Kubik, is facing a number of charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including Article 85, desertion, and Article 118, murder with premeditation.”

“Who’d he kill? Allegedly?”

“We don’t have that information,” Crawford replied quickly.

Claire looked at Massie, who shook his head, then said: “We know you’ve been contacted by your husband. We need to know his whereabouts. We’d like to examine the package.”

“That’s what I called you to discuss,” Claire said.

“I understand,” said Massie. His eyes were keen.

“You and I want two different things,” she said. “I only want what’s best for him. Now, whatever he’s done, I know it’s not going to be cleared up by running. Sooner or later the Department of Injustice will catch up with him.”

“We thought you’d see the light sooner or later,” Crawford said.

Claire gave him a look of withering contempt, then said: “I don’t want a perp walk. No showy arrests in a public place, no leading away in handcuffs, no guns drawn, no manacles or shackles.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Since he’s arranged to meet me at Logan Airport, the surrender will take place in the parking lot at Logan across the street from the terminal. I’ll make sure either he’s unarmed, or he throws away his weapon, and you’ll be able to confirm it.”

Massie nodded.

“Now, before the surrender, I’ll want time alone with him first-a minimum of one hour.” Massie raised his eyebrows. “In private, so we can talk. Your guys can keep a close watch, so you can make sure he’s not going to run, but I want privacy.”

“That may be a problem,” Crawford said.

“If it is, you can forget taking him in. Or seeing his letter.”

“I think,” Massie said, “we may be able to arrange it.”

“Good. Next, I want assurances from you that you will not freeze his assets.”

“Professor,” Crawford said, “I don’t think that’s-”

“Make it happen, gentlemen. It’s nonnegotiable.”

“We’ll have to talk to Washington.”

“And I don’t want the FBI charging him with violating the False Identity Act. In fact, I’ll want all civilian charges dropped.”

Crawford glanced at Massie in astonishment.

“And I’ll want all of these assurances in writing, signed by an assistant director of the Bureau. No one lower. I want complete accountability. No one’s going to try to wriggle out of this by claiming they didn’t have the proper authority.”

“I think we may be able to arrange this,” Massie said. “But it’s going to take some time.”

“You take too much time, the window of opportunity slams shut on your fingers,” Claire said. “I’ll want signed documents by noon tomorrow. Our rendezvous is early evening.”

“Noon tomorrow?” Crawford said. “That’s-that’s impossible!”

Claire shrugged. “Do your best. Once we come to terms, you can read Tom’s letter. And then you can take him into custody.”

Claire left the house early the next morning wearing a bright royal-blue coat she’d bought once at Filene’s Basement in a fit of fashion dementia. She took Annie to school, walked her into the building and to her classroom, then returned to her Volvo and drove to her office. Two Crown Victorias followed like faithful sheepdogs.

At eleven-forty-five in the morning, a package arrived by courier from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Boston field office. It contained the letter she had requested, signed by an assistant director of the FBI, whose signature was an indecipherable jagged up-and-down EKG.

Half an hour later a messenger came by to pick up a sheet of paper and take it to Massie at the FBI office downtown.

When Connie went off for lunch a little after one, Claire gave her a shopping bag, which contained the bright-blue coat, neatly folded, and asked her to leave it with the waiter at the bustling fern bar/restaurant where Connie invariably ate lunch with her regular luncheon companions, two other Harvard Law administrative assistants.

Claire then taught a class, and canceled several afternoon meetings.

At four-thirty she packed up her briefcase, closed her office, said good night to Connie, and walked to the elevator. If a watcher was lingering in the waiting area on her floor, she didn’t notice. She took the elevator to the basement and wandered through the tunnels beneath the Law School campus for a while until she was certain no one was following her. They knew the tricks of their trade, they knew surveillance and patterns of pursuit, but she knew the entrails of the Law School.

At precisely five o’clock, just as Claire had promised the FBI agents, her Volvo pulled slowly out of the faculty parking garage. As she passed on foot, from a good distance away, Claire could see the dark-haired driver in a royal-blue coat and oversized sunglasses, a pretty fair approximation of Claire, or at least as close as Jackie could pull off, with the assistance of a wig she had hastily purchased downtown. The Volvo took a right into rush-hour traffic on Mass. Ave., followed closely behind by an unmarked Crown Victoria, and then pulled out of sight. Jackie would drive to Logan-a nasty, traffic-choked route at this time of day-and go from terminal to terminal as if confused about which one she was supposed to go to, and they would no doubt follow.

The letter Claire had couriered to Massie-single-spaced, printed on the LaserWriter in Tom’s home office on letter-size twenty-pound Hammermill CopyPlus Bright White paper, taken from a sealed ream and therefore without fingerprints, and unsigned-had instructed her to meet him at the Delta terminal at Logan, where he’d be arriving at five-thirty on the New York shuttle. There would be watchers waiting at the arrival gate, but, because they were suspicious, they would naturally follow her Volvo, to make sure she was going where she said she would.

Then Claire took a leisurely stroll to Oxford Street, behind the Law School, and located Tom’s Lexus at a metered parking space. It had been a few hours since Jackie had parked it there, and the meter had long ago expired, so Claire wasn’t at all surprised to find a Day-Glo-orange parking ticket tucked under the windshield-wiper blade.

Take the FM radio from the bedroom, Tom had instructed in the letter he’d sent her, not the one she’d drafted for the FBI’s eyes. Tune it to a station high on the dial, around 108 megahertz. Make sure the signal comes in loud and clear. Now take it out to the garage, and bring the antenna as close as you can to every surface on the car.

Listen for interference. Listen for a squawking noise. Listen for the abrupt change in the quality of reception.

If you detect the presence of a transmitter somewhere in the car, or you’re not sure, don’t go anywhere.

If the car is clean, go.

But wait for rush-hour traffic. Drive in rush-hour traffic, because they’ll find it hard to follow you when the traffic is dense. Drive at nightfall, when tailing is harder, because lights are visible for a long distance.

Take a circuitous route, he had instructed, which was easier said than done. If you’re being followed, nothing is really circuitous. Before you get on the Massachusetts Turnpike, drive around the city. Make four right turns, one right after another, to flush out any followers, because anyone still behind you has to be following you.

Make plenty of left turns, because left turns are harder to shadow unnoticed. Go through yellow lights whenever possible. Come as close to running reds as you can without getting killed.

They will not follow directly behind if they’re attempting covert surveillance. They will follow one or two cars behind. There may be as many as four vehicles following you. Or there may be none.

Watch the right rear of the car, the blind spot that followers favor.

Drive at inconsistent speeds. Speed up, then slow down. Drive very slowly, excruciatingly slowly, forcing everyone to pass you. Stop at a rest stop and park in the back. Have dinner. Kill a couple of hours. Take some hard object and smash out your rear right taillight. Then return to the pike.

At least once, make a U-turn on the pike, wherever there’s a turnoff.

Once you’ve passed Exit 9 on the turnpike-out beyond Sturbridge, in the far-western part of the state-begin to drive slowly, in the right lane, with your flashers on.

At first she had marveled at Tom’s expertise at tradecraft, at the techniques of surveillance. It was a side of him she’d never seen.

Then she remembered who they said he’d been, and she knew that at least part of it was true.

At just past ten o’clock at night, when it was too late to call Annie even if she dared, which she didn’t, she was driving along a stretch of the turnpike in the Berkshires near Lee, Massachusetts, where the road was lightly trafficked. She thought about Annie, asleep in bed, with Jackie downstairs, smoking.

The road became hilly out here. It cut through ravines, then out into the open, up a steep grade to the top of a hill. She drove slowly, in the breakdown lane, hazard lights flashing. No one was following her, that she felt sure of. As she began her descent down the steep gradient, she noticed, in her rear-view mirror, a car pull out of a wooded turnoff, lights dark, and accelerate until it was just behind her. The car flashed its high-beams twice.

She pulled off the road into the next turnoff, which was shrouded by a dense copse, and switched off her lights.

Her heart hammered.

She stared straight ahead, not daring to turn her head to look.

The other car pulled up just behind her and coasted to a stop. She heard the car door open, heard footsteps on the pavement.

Now she turned to look out of her rolled-up window and saw Tom, a few days’ growth of beard like charcoal smudge on his face, binoculars hanging from a strap around his neck, smiling down at her, and she smiled back.

Tears flooded her eyes, and she threw her arms around him.

CHAPTER TWELVE

She followed him in the Lexus along a meandering route, off the turnpike, onto local roads that became country roads, until she had no idea where they were. Tom was driving an old black Jeep Wrangler, though where he’d gotten it he hadn’t explained. They passed through a small town that seemed frozen in the 1950s. She glimpsed an old orange Rexall Drug sign, a Woolworth that had to be fifty years old, an antique round Gulf sign. The town was dark and shuttered. Along an unlit country road past a low modern brick elementary school, through a railroad crossing, and then nothing for a very long time. Then Tom signaled her to stop.

She parked the Lexus and joined him in the Jeep.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

He nodded. “I’ll tell you everything. Soon.” He took an abrupt, unmarked turnoff into a dense forest, the road degenerating in abrupt phases from macadam to hard-packed gravel, on which the wheels crunched for a good five minutes, to rutted earth for even longer, until it dead-ended at a shelf of rock, jutting shale and schist and irregular boulders. He switched off the lights, then the engine, and let the Jeep coast to a stop. Then took a large black Maglite from the floor and motioned for her to get out with him.

By the flashlight’s powerful concentrated beam they entered a cluster of large misshapen firs, starved of sunlight in the dense forestation that crowded the shore of a small lake. He navigated a jagged course along a path that was barely a path, a lightly trodden trace of dirt between the towering trees. Claire followed him, losing her footing several times. She was wearing her dress shoes: no traction. Outside the cone of light that shone from Tom’s flashlight, she could see nothing. All was blackness. There didn’t seem to be a moon in the sky.

“Stay close,” Tom said. “Careful.”

“Why?”

“Stay close,” he repeated.

Finally he stopped at a small, crude wooden house along the bank-a shack, really-with a steeply sloping, asphalt-shingled roof that here and there was missing its shingles. The shack was in rough shape. There was a small window, but a yellowed paper shade pulled all the way down hid the interior. The roof came down low enough that Claire could touch the eave. The shack appeared to have been painted white once, probably decades ago; now the remaining splinters of white paint looked like tiny snowdrifts on the weathered clapboard siding.

“Welcome,” Tom said.

“What is this?” But Claire knew her question was all but unanswerable: what is what, precisely? That it was an all-but-abandoned shack on the shore of a deserted lake in western Massachusetts was obvious. That it was a hiding place Tom had somehow found, a bolt hole, was equally obvious.

She came closer. Tom had not shaven in a few days. There were dark circles under his eyes. The lines on his forehead seemed even more deeply etched. He looked exhausted, bone-tired.

He smiled, a lopsided, bashful smile. “I’m a crazy poet from New York who needs a little solitude for a few weeks. Place belongs to the fellow who owns the Gulf station in town. Used to belong to his father, who passed away twenty years ago, but his family won’t go near it. I scoped the place out a few years ago in case I ever needed a quickie escape hatch. When I called him a few days ago, he was more than happy to take fifty bucks a week for it.”

“A few years ago? You’ve been expecting this day?”

“Yes and no. Part of me thought this would never happen, but another part of me’s always been ready for it.”

“And what did you think was going to happen to Annie and me if this happened?”

“Claire, if I’d had any idea this was really going to happen, I would have taken off right away. Believe me.” He opened the heavy door, which screeched on its hinges. There was no lock. “Enter.”

Inside, the wide pine floorboards were rough and worn and looked dangerously splintery. There was a wood-burning stove, on top of which was a box of Ohio Blue Tip strike-anywhere kitchen matches. The air smelled smoky, pleasantly, like wood fire. He appeared to have made a home. A small cot stood against one wall, made up with an ancient-looking dark-green woolen blanket. On a tiny, rickety wooden table were piled foodstuffs: a carton of eggs, a half-gone loaf of bread, a few cans of tuna fish. Next to them was a small pile of things, mechanical-looking objects she didn’t recognize. She picked up one of them, a light-brown oblong box the size of a pair of binoculars with a viewfinder at one end.

“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.”

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!”

He encircled her with his arms, and moved to kiss her, but she turned away.

“What was I supposed to do?” he said.

“I don’t know what to say.”

He slipped one hand into her blouse and cupped her left breast, and she shook her head.

“Honey,” he said plaintively, withdrawing his hand.

She was torn by emotions, wholly confused. She could barely resist him, yet at the same time she desperately wanted to resist him. Finally, she closed her eyes and kissed him, and then he gently began kissing the nape of her neck, the swell at the top of her breasts, her nipples, the underside of her breasts.

She said, “I’m starved. I didn’t eat dinner.”

Naked, the two of them were entwined on the narrow cot.

He looked at his watch. “It’s three in the morning. Care for an early breakfast?”

“I’d love it.”

Another plane roared by overhead.

She said, “Three guesses why this lake is deserted.”

“After a while you don’t even notice the planes,” he said. He stood up, walked over to the stove. “We’ve got eggs and toast.”

“Brioche?”

“Sorry. Wonder Bread.” He knelt down, lit the wood stove, watched until it had caught fire. “Gotta catch sometime,” he said. “Ah, here it goes.” He smiled in satisfaction. “And that takes care of that.”

“It’s cold here,” she said. She got up from the cot and put on one of his plaid flannel shirts.

“Good idea,” he said, and slipped into his jeans and a T-shirt. He returned to the stove, put four slices of bread on the toasting rack and a chunk of butter into the hot frying pan, and cracked several eggs over it. The eggs crackled and sizzled and filled the shack with the most wonderful smells.

“Where do you bathe around here?”

“Guess.”

“That freezing lake?”

He nodded. Then, suddenly, he turned his head. “Claire.”

“What?”

“Do you hear something?”

“Don’t tell me you have animals out here, too.”

“Shh. Listen.”

“What are you doing?” she whispered as he walked to the door and began slowly to open it. “Tom?”

“Shh.” He looked out the door, looked around in all directions. He shook his head. “I thought I heard something.”

He slipped on a battered pair of Reeboks she’d never seen before and stepped outside. She followed him.

He stopped and looked up at the sky. Now Claire could just make out a noise from above that didn’t sound like an ordinary plane: a drone, high-pitched and insistent, that grew louder. As it did, another sound distinguished itself: the thwack-thwack of helicopter blades. Tom kept looking up.

“There must have been a transmitter in the Lexus,” he said.

“But I did the check you told me to do!”

He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have let you drive here. Even stopping the Lexus a few miles away. Those transmitters have gotten more sophisticated since my time in the military-you couldn’t have found it. Those planes we heard must have been small single-engine fixed-wing-”

Suddenly, from somewhere on the ground, came a series of sharp explosions that sounded like firecrackers going off.

“Oh, God, Tom, what is it?”

“My booby traps. Get back inside!”

“What?”

The thwack-thwack of helicopter blades grew louder as the helicopter approached and then hovered directly overhead, and suddenly a blindingly bright light came from the sky. She looked up. Bright lights shone down from the helicopter, illuminating the whole area. She blinked, her eyes trying to adjust to the sudden brightness.

“Go!” he shouted, and she turned swiftly and ran back to the shack, with Tom right behind.

He shut the door, grabbed her. “Get down on the floor.”

“Tom-?”

“Now!”

She dropped and flattened herself on the rough wooden floor.

“I strung up booby-trap devices all around. Trip wires nailed to the trees. They never expected it. My primitive burglar-alarm system.”

Before she could say anything, a loud, amplified voice from out of the sky boomed: “Federal agents! Come out and drop all weapons!”

“Tom, what are we going to do?” she cried, her voice muffled by the floorboards.

He didn’t reply. He was searching for something.

“Tom?”

“They’re not going to rush us, not with you in here,” he said. “Also, they don’t know what I’ve got in here. Now, they’ve got us surrounded, but they’re not going to move any closer.”

“What are we going to do?” she said desperately.

“Let me do it, Claire.”

She turned to watch him looking out the window through the viewfinder of the brown oblong box she’d seen earlier. He seemed to be pointing it up at the sky.

“Tom, what are you doing?”

“It’s a laser range-finder from a tank,” he said. “Old Special Forces trick.”

“Where the hell did you get that?” She turned her head so she could see out one of the windows.

The amplified voice boomed: “We are the U.S. Marshals Service. We have a warrant for your arrest. Come out peacefully and no one will be hurt.”

“Army surplus in Albany,” Tom said. “Thousand bucks. Use the laser to temporarily blind the pilot, zap him in the eyes. Old trick. We have no choice. That’s their surveillance post in the sky. Take care of that first.”

“Come out with your hands up.”

He pressed a button on the box, said, “Got him.”

She looked out at the helicopter, heard the racket suddenly get louder. The helicopter seemed to be tipping, banking to one side. Then, just as suddenly, it flew off, taking with it the bright lights.

The shack returned to darkness, the noise diminished almost to silence.

“Got the pilot with the laser. Pilot couldn’t see, probably freaked out. Copilot probably took over. They’re not idiots; they’re not coming back. That leaves our friends out there, but they’re going to be a little freaked out themselves.

“Looks like they’re fifty yards away,” he said.

Now another voice came from out in front of the shack, also amplified, flat and mechanical sounding: “We’ve got you surrounded. Come out with your hands up.”

“Stay down there, Claire.”

She turned her head to look up. He was standing in the shadows, peering out the open window.

“Now what?” she said.

“I’ll take care of it. Their standard operating procedure now is to negotiate. We let them talk.”

“You’ve got ten seconds,” said the voice, loud and slow and deliberate. “Come out peacefully and no one gets hurt. You have no choice. We have you surrounded. You have six seconds.”

“Jesus, Tom, what are we doing?”

“They’re not going to fire on us, babe.”

“Three seconds. Come out now or we commence firing.”

“Tom!”

“They’re bluffing.”

And suddenly there was a series of muffled shots, a phump-phump-phump. Terrified, Claire scrambled off the floor, crouched, peered out one of the open windows, and saw that several objects had been fired at them-

“Grenades,” Tom said quietly.

“Oh my God!” she screamed.

Each grenade, she saw, was emitting a thin cloud of white smoke.

“Gas,” Tom said. “Not explosives. Incapacitant gas. Shit.”

And suddenly Claire felt drowsy, uncontrollably, deeply tired, and then everything went black.