Justice Hunter (23 page)
F
or all the idealistic drivel spewing from the mouths of first-year law students across the country these days, large firm existence had the remarkable ability to chill even the most quixotic sentiment. Survival meant conformity, exhibiting masterful diplomacy skills, and billing an ungodly and humanly impossible number of hours. And Whitman was no different from the others. Like Kruger and a handful of blue-chip law firms dominating the Philadelphia skyline, Whitman prided itself on luring the region’s best and brightest and making them regret their decision to attend law school in the first place. These modern-day bastions of communism had mastered the art of excising those areas of the human brain associated with creative thought and leadership without their ever even knowing it.
Perhaps describing these places as communistic is a bit extreme, for it might suggest that the attorneys lead an ascetic existence, at least on some level. That couldn’t be further from the truth, however. Some of the lawyers—like doctors and other highly skilled professionals—struggled with inferiority complexes. They worked too hard and were paid exceptionally well. Yet the figures certainly weren’t staggering by any means. Once the excitement of passing the bar exam or the boards and securing one’s dream job subsided, it was all a bit anticlimactic. By anyone’s standards, though, Whitman lawyers were well compensated, tending to avoid the drabber colors on the spectrum, perhaps as a way of furthering their own denial that somehow they weren’t just expendable cogs in a highly inefficient machine. Drab personalities, on the other hand, were inescapable. After all, that was the whole point of garishly bold power ties, seemingly a requirement among the firm’s top brass.
And on this particular Tuesday, news of Russo’s murder had little if any consequence. It was business as usual, or rather unusual, depending upon one’s vantage point. The Whitman eye, cloaked by classic Wayfarer shades, barely blinked despite the grisly discovery made in Russo’s chambers in the early hours that same morning: a severe but nonfatal gash across the neck and a single gunshot to the back of the head that had penetrated the brain directly above the cerebellum and lodged itself inside the temporal lobe. The lifeless body had been discovered face down on a bloodstained Oriental rug. There were no indications of a struggle, and it was apparent that Russo had been caught entirely off-guard.
If grieving for one’s own loved ones was a luxury for these folks, getting bogged down with trivialities like pausing to acknowledge the untimely death of one of the city’s most prominent jurists was entirely out of the question. Unless, of course, mourning became a firm-wide mandate. Yet that remained to be seen. Even the initial outpouring of support for Andy, one of their very own, had been short-lived. Hunter couldn’t help but consider the possibility that some of the other associates were secretly praying for a rapid decline in Andy’s health, excited by the prospect that a serious partnership contender might be out of the running.
Frankly, Hunter, very much in stealth mode, was relieved at the thought that there was still a place he could remain relatively anonymous. He considered the irony on his way up to his office after spending more than an hour analyzing his conversation with Detective Risotto and strategizing. He passed through the minimalist, post-modern corridors of this deconstructionist shrine to the billable hour, observing a handful of newer, anal-retentive associates who marched like soldiers to their next billable event. One of the newly minted partners surfaced, stiff and smug, meandering through the air-conditioned halls in the latest and greatest Brooks Brothers’ ensemble, self-importantly basking in his newfound glory as he casually made his way to the power meeting awaiting his divine presence.
Hunter stood over his desk, reduced to one giant inbox, holding a fax marked urgent from his opposing counsel in the Mediacast case. Neglected for nearly a week, the small office was starting to look more like an eccentric scientist’s laboratory than the office of a senior associate with partnership aspirations. Hunter quickly logged in to his LexisNexis account, just to see if there were any reported cases Mancini had been involved in. In addition to a handful of cases that had wound their way up to the state’s highest court, Hunter was surprised to come across one where Mancini himself was a party. It was a divorce, and he was waging a bitter property battle with his first and only wife. Rather shockingly, he’d married his high school sweetheart only a few years out of law school. Then after a blindingly fast union, he wound up fighting her tooth and nail over her alimony and property demands. Ultimately, he made out like a bandit too, leaving her with little more than an assuredly staggering legal bill.
The prick’s lucky he wasn’t in California.
“Hunter. Where have you been?” asked his paralegal, whispering loudly, interrupting his concentration. She was frazzled for his sake in a sympathetic demonstration of loyalty, a trait exhibited only by the most devoted support staff in the highly impersonal setting of the large law firm. Debbie, her dark hair crimped and looking very eighties as usual, stood at the door, cupping her mouth as she spoke, a misguided effort at discretion that only called attention to their conversation, making things appear direr, not as she probably intended. She nervously glanced over her shoulder, scanning the immediate vicinity for eavesdroppers with clout, more commonly referred to as partners.
Hunter, with his eyes still scanning the document’s contents, glanced up in Debbie’s direction, trying to maintain at least some semblance of composure. As trustworthy as Debbie was, she was still vulnerable to the unrelenting probing sure to follow by the firm’s other paralegals and secretaries. They were information carnivores with a voracious appetite for meaty gossip. Hunter wouldn’t put it past them to have their own underground listserv, devoted exclusively to the gratifying topic of the rise and fall of the firm’s most promising lawyers. Despite the appearance of cohesion in a large firm, it was still support versus the lawyers, town versus gown.
“Jesus, you look like shit,” she observed, getting a closer look at his exhausted and gun-shy expression.
“Didn’t I tell you that I’d fire you if you ever held back on me?” he asked, deadpan, making eye contact with her for the first time since last Thursday. The truth was that he and Debbie made a great team, a relative rarity when it came to associates and their paralegals. Typically, the support staff abhorred the lawyers in the office, the unfortunate recipients of obsessive-compulsive behavior, inconsistency, and passive-aggressive verbal barbs. Hunter, more than any other associate at Whitman, bore the remarkable distinction of being the most well-liked and most flirted-with lawyer. He barely noticed, though.
“You can’t fire me,” she retorted. That was actually true. He’d have to get authority from the partnership, which meant Mancini made the call. And when it came to attractive staff, he had a tendency to come down on the side of the support—female, naturally.
“I know. Just posturing.”
“Save your little lawyer tricks for the courtroom, Gray.”
“I’ll get my fix anywhere I can, considering I might never see the inside of a courtroom again after this week’s over.”
“I won’t let you off that easily,” she said adoringly. “You’re stuck with me.”
“Explain the disappearing act, Houdini.”
“Quick trip to Puerto Rico.”
“And hence the tan.” Debbie’s was always fair, despite the current heat wave. In Philly, it was always more humidity than sun.
“Right,” she replied with a nervous smile.
“Everything all right? Seriously.”
“Yeah. I’m okay, I guess.”
“Everything okay on the home front?” he asked, giving her a caring once-over, checking for any visible evidence of domestic abuse. They both knew what he was referring to, mainly his theory that once every few months or so, her alcoholic husband crossed the line and turned physically abusive. His theory bugged her, and he knew it, in a sibling-administering-strict-love sort of way.
“Yeah. Just the stomach flu,” she said, wincing at the mere thought of hours hugging the porcelain bowl. “Sorry. I thought HR would’ve let you know.”
“Of course not.” For a multi-zillion-dollar firm, there was a surprising amount of ineptitude, which pretty much started in the HR Department. Thanks to their style, Whitman had actually been on the receiving end of a fairly substantial defamation suit brought by a former associate. Someone down there took it upon himself to accuse a poor but far from defenseless attorney of being an IV drug user—crack to be exact. As fate would have it, the side effects from a pregnancy drug were making her unusually groggy. After a write-up and an inquisition sans due process, she was toast. Needless to say, the case settled for a handsome sum, making Whitman’s apology and offer to take her back unsurprisingly unappealing. This was one of several miscalculations that had precipitated Mancini’s ascension to the throne.
“What’s important is that you’re back now,” Hunter continued. “I’m banking on you to get us back on track.”
She momentarily got lost inside her head. “Hunter,” she said, as if she had something more to tell him.
“Yeah?” he asked, giving her his undivided attention.
A delayed pause. “Thank you for your concern. Seriously.”
“Okay,” he replied, struggling with the appreciation. Humility had always done that to him. Then, gesturing to the rest of the office with his empty hand, “You should be flattered, though. Everything falls apart without you.”
“Of course, it does,” she said, exuding a quiet confidence. She was the best. “So I don’t mean to pry, but I heard about Andy.”
“Pretty insane, huh?” Hunter said.
“Crazy. I am
so
sorry. He’s such a good guy.”
“Don’t you worry about Andy. He’s a fighter. Don’t let the nerdy façade fool you. He’s one tough cookie.”
“And how about you? Should I be worried about you?”
“Absolutely not. That’s a lost cause.”
“Hunter, I saw the fax.” She was referring to the one Hunter was still holding, the one written by Melissa Zane apprising the court’s president judge of the Mediacast order that never came to fruition due to the “tragic unforeseen events.” Of course, every partner under the sun had been copied, which was not unusual where a major client was involved. Albert A. Mancini was first on that illustrious list, even ahead of the partners from
her
firm, as if Zane was intentionally basking in the glory of Hunter’s inevitable demise.
“What? This silly thing?” He downplayed it, crumbling the sheet into a ball and lobbing it into the sleek waste-bin beneath the desk.
“What are you gonna do? Please tell me there’s a logical explanation for all this.”
“I believe there is.”
“And?”
“And I haven’t entirely figured that out yet.”
“Should I even ask what that’s supposed to mean?”
“Probably not.” Hunter smiled, tacitly warning Debbie.
“All right. Just be careful.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Debbie hesitantly started to walk away but remembered something. “Gates stopped by.”
“Jesus,” Hunter said under his breath—he had all but forgotten about the IT guy’s voicemail. Although he suspected the call related more to Gates’s pent-up sexual frustration than anything else, he resolved to go see him on the outside chance Gates had acquired information about the mystery hacker. “Thanks.” Debbie stared at Hunter suspiciously as he blew past her.
T
he door to the firm’s server room, where Gates spent most of his time at a makeshift workstation better suited to a teenage hacker’s bedroom than to an elite law firm, strangely was locked. Gates had an open-door policy, starved for the attention that comes with leading a leper’s existence in such a sizable organization. After a minute or two of unrelenting banging on the fireproof metal door to no avail, Hunter resorted to texting, the preferred communication method among teens and twentysomethings. After keying in the answers to a few obscure security questions, the industrial-strength lock unbolted, and Hunter was ushered into the firm’s nerve center.
Gates, emaciated, pale, and looking as if he hadn’t slept in a week, was holding a mostly eaten, super-sized Butterfinger bar as he greeted Hunter. “Lock, please,” he demanded, sounding paranoid delusional.
“Yes, sir,” accommodated Hunter, bugging his eyes out ever so slightly. He felt like an innocent neighbor who’d just unwittingly walked into a home invasion in progress. All he could do was stay calm, evaluate the situation, and strategize a rescue plan.
“Dude. I’m so fucking dead.” Gates spoke a million miles a minute, sounding like a defenseless character in a slasher movie. “Mancini’s gonna blow my brains out. You’ve got to help me. Please. You’re my only hope, man.”
“Slow down,” ordered Hunter, the words intending to be icy water on someone in the throes of a horrific nightmare. He placed his hands firmly atop Gates’s bony, squirmy shoulders, grounding him by force.
“I can’t fucking believe this. It’s impossible,” he sped away, under his breath. He was in shock, the Blu-ray player inside his head malfunctioning, stuck on the same gruesome scene at two million pixels per frame.
Hunter shook him more vigorously this time until he was sure he had Gates’s undivided attention. Hunter waited until Gates’s nervously wandering eyes locked onto his, which exuded strength and sanctuary.
“Stop.” Hunter paused. “Breathe, Gates. Breathe.” Gates, the good patient, did as he was told. “Good,” observed Hunter. “Now tell me what happened.”
“All right,” he agreed, putting his free hand to his mouth and taking a deep breath. “Cool. Very cool.” At least momentarily, Gates sounded like his usual chill, slacker self again. “It’s probably easier if I show you,” he said as he approached his desk, which was littered with empty Dorito bags and Tastykake wrappers. A two-liter of Mountain Dew, other techie gadgets, gag toys, and computer manuals covered the glass desk. Hunter peered over Gates’s shoulder at the twenty-five-inch LCD, trying to keep up with Gates’s programming lingo. “Now you see this?” he asked, chomping on a mouthful of Butterfinger. He typed with one hand and held the chocolate bar nervously in the other.
Hunter saw nothing but a blizzard of letters and numbers as Gates spewed off dozens of DOS commands
prestissimo
. “Now what exactly am I looking for?”
“Just keep watching. It will make crazy sense right about…” He paused and then whacked the keyboard forcibly for emphasis. “Now.”
At that instant, the word “Mancini” came into relief, like a cryptogram solution. He was staring at what appeared to be e-mail exchanges involving Mancini, but Hunter wasn’t entirely sure what it all meant. He recognized the names of other Whitman lawyers as well.
“All right. So here’s the deal. After we met and discovered the security on your machine might’ve been compromised, you wanted me to double check on the keylogger. I was concerned about the usual stuff. Log files being saved to HTML, strong encryption of the log files, DOS-bot, and Java-chat keystroke interception.”
“Just get to the point, Gates.”
“Right,” he replied, accustomed to getting cut off for self-indulgent techno babbling. “Anyway, and not surprisingly, I was right. There was no indication of the presence of either hardware or software applications.”
“Which doesn’t explain how someone could’ve deleted my e-mails.”
“At least not from the desktop.”
“What are you saying? You think someone got a hold of my BlackBerry and did it remotely?”
“It’s possible. I ran the same tests on your laptop, and believe me, there’s nothing. Clean as a whistle.” Hunter quickly recalled whether anyone else could’ve had access to his BlackBerry over the weekend. There was only Sheila and his second chair on the Vito’s case.
Was the PDA ever out of my possession? Would either one of them have either the occasion or inclination to sabotage me with Mancini?
“There’s just no way,” said Hunter defensively. He trusted Sheila implicitly, and Stephanie Diaz was quickly proving herself to be a loyal confidante.
“Okay,” replied Gates, realizing that his theory pushed a button of hesitation and doubt in Hunter’s mind. “I’ll keep looking,” he added, more for Hunter’s sake than anything else. Under his breath, Gates asked himself whether someone could’ve been good enough to hack into the account.
“Good,” said Hunter.
“There is something else, though, dude.”
“Those hieroglyphics on the screen?” asked Hunter, keeping Gates on task with an inquisitive nod of the head.
“Right,” said Gates, sounding more like an airhead than a computer whiz kid. He aimed his bony and thoroughly never-done-an-ounce-of-manual-labor pointer finger at the LCD, keying Hunter’s attention to certain blocks of code. “Now you see that?” asked Gates, as if programming code was everyone’s first language. “All those iterations of Mancini’s name.”
“I see them.”
So what?
“What you’re looking at is the query result for a global system search I did. I actually had to whip up my own little program to do this,” he added, grinning mischievously. He was proud as a peacock. “Just had to enhance my security clearance a bit.”
Hunter glanced quizzically at him, always just assuming Gates had carte blanche to access the firm’s servers.
“To explore the most sensitive data. Stuff I’m not usually privy to. Some of the accounting files and a bunch of other upper-level management content. Various internal memos, the occasional client file, e-mail accounts. That sort of thing.”
“I gather Mancini’s e-mail account falls into that category?” asked Hunter disapprovingly.
Admission by silence.
“Let me get this straight,” continued Hunter. “You hacked into Mancini’s account?”
“Pretty much,” Gates responded contritely.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” As enlightening as the information might be, Mancini’s discovery of the security breach was inevitable in Hunter’s mind.
“I know I screwed up, bro.” Gates paused. “Mancini wasn’t supposed to catch me.” Gates was shaking his head, still in denial about his program’s vulnerability. “I was invisible. A friggin’ ghost, man.”
“Apparently not,” replied Hunter, injecting a healthy dose of reality.
“I’m telling you.” Gates refused to let it go. “There’s no way, man.”
“Gates. Enough. It can’t be undone. Now it’s about the damage control.” Not an easy feat when it came to someone like Mancini.
“You’re right.”
“So just tell me what Mancini said to you.”
“That’s the thing. The dude is so head trippy. I could tell he knows it’s me, but he didn’t come right out and accuse me.”
“And you’re positive he suspects you?”
“Yeah. It’s just like he wants to see me twist in the wind or some kind of horror movie shit.”
“And this was all in person.”
“This morning. He was waiting for me when I got in. Scared the crap out of me. Christ. The last person I expected to see standing there was friggin’ Mancini. There’s a screw loose with that guy. I’m telling you.” Gates paused, reflecting on the scene. “Joked around about killing whoever did this once he found out.”
“Killing?”
Gates just nodded gravely.
“All right, just stay calm,” advised Hunter, seeing that Gates was getting himself worked up again. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
“I don’t know, dude.”
“Listen. There’s got to be a perfectly logical explanation we can give him.”
“But it’s not gonna matter. He’ll want to know why I didn’t come clean when I had the chance.” Gates’s point made perfect sense.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” replied Hunter, his hand to his chin as he considered possible solutions. And then he latched onto something. “What if you
weren’t
in a position to share anything with him?”
“Not sure…” Gates broke off mid-sentence, still somewhat perplexed.
“What if you were just following instructions? Taking orders.”
“Like the real hackers threatened to kill me if I disclosed anything to anyone?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of your cooperating with authorities on an investigation.” Hunter hadn’t considered Gates’s explanation, and it wasn’t entirely a shoddy one, either. The biggest hole was that by going criminal, as opposed to sticking with a legitimate investigation, Mancini would never think that his actions were being scrutinized by law enforcement. He’d give serious pause before going after Gates this way.
Gates immediately perked up, catching the drift of where Hunter was going with this and liking it.
Finally. A glimmer of hope.
Hunter concocted the rest of the tall tale as he went. “So revealing anything, even to him, could’ve compromised an ongoing investigation into security breaches at the major firms.”
“Right on. I like throwing in the other firm thing, too. Take the focus off of Mancini.” Gates paused. “Yo. My boy over at Kruger did tell me about a real incident not too long ago,” replied Gates, excited by the plausibility of the explanation. “And I’m pretty sure even Mancini, like the other big dogs at the big firms, were downloaded about it. Told to be on the lookout for suspicious activity.”
“Did Mancini come to you with it? How long ago was it?”
“I’m trying to remember,” he said, thinking back. “All that weed back in the day.” Gates was undeniably a nerd of the cool persuasion, the type who got high undergrad and played video games, cutting the classes he aced without even showing up. As brilliant as he was, he could’ve just as easily taught the course.
“He had to have,” Hunter said.
“Actually, you’re right.” Gates’s memory was gradually coming into focus. “He did. That’s right! A few Drexel students managed to hack into the servers and pull all kinds of crazy banking information.” Although it was deviant and very illegal, Gates couldn’t hide that look of admiration all computer nerds exhibited when it came to the impressive feats of their contemporaries. Hackers were a valuable commodity, even to the government. For the most talented ones who eventually got caught, it wasn’t entirely unusual for the government to lure them with lucrative security jobs after they pretended to repent. It was a badge of honor. “They skedaddled with some serious coin before getting busted. One of them blabbed to the wrong person. And Bingo. Brought the whole operation to its knees. Those guys are frickin’ legends, though, man.”
“I bet,” Hunter said dismissively. “But I like it.”
“I hope the dude buys it.”
“He will. So long as Mancini thinks the authorities are involved, you’ll be fine. He’ll have no choice but to back off.”
“Dope,” said Gates, swiveling in his chair to land a high-five. Hunter was obliged to reciprocate. Yet at his core, he was filled with an impending sense of doom. He knew what Mancini and his people were capable of. “So don’t you wanna know what I found in Mancini’s account, man?”
Hunter proceeded to lean in, bracing himself for the bolt from the blue.