Phillip Margolin - Lost Lake

“Mrs. Vergano, those records never existed except in my daughter’s imagination. I assume she gave you those names, but I have no idea where she got them.”

Ami stared intently at the General, who braced himself for more cross-examination. After a moment, however, she shook her head.

“No further questions, Your Honor.”

The General looked surprised. He cast a quick glance at Kirkpatrick, who shrugged.

“Do you have any more witnesses, Mr. Kirkpatrick?” Judge Velasco asked.

“I may have one more. Can we recess so I can speak with him?”

“How long will you need?”

“Twenty minutes, half an hour.”

“Very well. We’ll adjourn for half an hour.”

As Wingate and Kirkpatrick walked up the aisle toward the courtroom doors, two Secret Service men and the General’s bodyguard formed a protective circle around him. More members of the General’s security force waited outside the courtroom. Kirkpatrick pushed through the doors, and the television lights flashed on as the reporters began firing questions at the candidate.

“The General will hold a press conference in an hour at his hotel,” Bryce McDermott said loudly enough to be heard over the din. “He won’t take any questions until then.”

“Let’s get you upstairs and away from this mob,” Brendan said.

They double-timed it up the marble staircase to the district attorney’s office, and Kirkpatrick led the General back to the conference room.

“Before you leave, there’s someone who wants to meet with you,” Brendan told Wingate.

“We don’t have much time,” McDermott said. “The General has to be in Pittsburgh tomorrow, and we still have the press conference.”

“I’m afraid this is important,” Brendan insisted as he opened the conference room door.

“Good afternoon, General,” said Ted Schoonover, President Jennings’s chief troubleshooter. He was seated at the conference table with Victor Hobson. “You know the assistant director, don’t you?”

McDermott pointed at Schoonover. “What’s he doing here?” he asked Brendan angrily.

“Mr. Kirkpatrick has no idea why I’m here, Bryce,” Schoonover said. “And the reason for our meeting is something I can discuss only with General Wingate. So, everyone but General Wingate and Director Hobson will have to step outside.”

“No fucking way,” McDermott answered. “General, we don’t have time for a chat with Jennings’s hatchet man.”

“You don’t have a choice, Mr. McDermott,” Hobson said. “This meeting is part of a criminal investigation and I’m exercising my authority as a federal agent to clear this room. You, the General’s bodyguard, and the Secret Service will have to wait outside.”

McDermott started to protest, but Wingate held up his hand.

“Wait outside, Bryce.”

“But…”

“I’ll be fine.”

As soon as the door closed behind Kirkpatrick, McDermott, and the General’s bodyguards, Wingate took a seat across from Schoonover and the assistant FBI director.

“We have a problem, General. Or, rather, you do,” Schoonover said.

“What problem?” Wingate asked.

“I’m afraid that some of your testimony under oath wasn’t true and I thought that you’d like to clear it up before the press finds out.”

“I’m not following you,” General Wingate said.

“You testified that you had no contact with Carl Rice between the time he was in high school and the time he invaded your mansion.”

“That’s correct.”

“During her cross-examination, Mrs. Vergano read you a list of names of men who were supposedly in the secret unit you ran out of the AIDC. You said you’d never heard of them.”

“That’s right.”

Schoonover took a sheaf of papers out of an attache case and pushed them across the table.

“Then how do you explain these?” he asked.

The General shuffled through the papers for a moment. They were covered with numbers and letters and appeared to be some kind of code.

“What are they?” he asked.

“Do you want to explain, Victor?” Schoonover said.

“Sure. Your daughter took the personnel records of the men in your secret unit from your safe.”

Wingate smiled. “There were never any records, Mr. Hobson. They are…”

“Yes, yes,” Hobson interrupted, “figments of the imaginations of two very disturbed people, as you testified, and I’m sure the originals don’t exist anymore. You’d have been a fool to keep them after Carl Rice killed Eric Glass to get them, and you are definitely not a fool. But neither is your daughter. Vanessa wrote down the names of the men before she gave the documents to the congressman, and that enabled me to track down the documents Ted just gave you.”

“These don’t look like personnel records,” the General said.

“They’re not. I did serve a search warrant at the army records center in St. Louis, Missouri, for the personnel records, and they found records for all the men on Vanessa’s list. They were similar to Carl’s official records. The men were all listed as having few if any combat missions, and most of those were early in their careers. They were also shown as having stateside duty for most of their time in the service. None of them had a rank over sergeant.

“But the personnel records weren’t the main thing I was looking for. Carl always claimed that he was a captain. A captain’s pay is significantly higher than a sergeant’s. Vanessa told me to look for the pay records, too. Strangely, none of the pay records for these men existed in St. Louis. The clerk I spoke with told me that a fire of mysterious origin destroyed a lot of their records in 1973.”

Hobson paused and stared at the General, but Wingate did not react. Hobson smiled.

“A lot more microfilm was destroyed in the mid-nineties when the information was upgraded to digital media,” he continued. “I thought that I’d reached the end of the line when the clerk remembered that the Defense Finance and Accounting Service in Indianapolis kept copies of the original pay records on microfilm.”

Hobson shook his head. “I had a hell of a time finding them. The microfilm was in old moldy boxes filled with thousand-foot rolls. My men and I thought we’d go blind, but we finally got the pay records for all ten men.”

“I can’t make heads or tails of these numbers and letters,” Wingate said.

“But you do recognize the names at the top. They’re the same names that Mrs. Vergano read to you, the names you testified under oath rang no bells.”

Hobson placed a document on the table. “This is Carl Rice’s pay record for his time in the army from 1970 until 1985. You should have a copy in that stack.”

Wingate found his copy and stared at it.

“I couldn’t make any sense of this either,” Hobson said, “but I got a subject-matter expert at the DFAS to interpret the code. What’s important is the pay rate for each man. Carl was paid as a captain right after he claimed to have started working for you. And he received hazardous-duty pay, which he would not have received for teaching at the language school. But most important, someone had to authorize the promotion of these men so they could receive the pay increase. On the page for each of these men is a code that authorizes their promotion to captain so they could be paid as captains. The papers promoting these men were with their pay records.”

Hobson pushed them across the table.

“They were all signed by you, General,” Schoonover said.

Wingate looked at the documents but did not touch them.

“Victor, would you step outside?” Schoonover asked.

Hobson got up without a word. As he circled the table, his eyes never left Wingate. The General was pale. He seemed disoriented, like a man awakening from a deep, troubled sleep.