Marine One (21 page)

"That's what I'm trying to do."

Kathryn looked around at everybody else in the room. "Everybody okay with this?"

Brightman said, "You're taking a big risk, Kathryn. No offense to Mike, but his credibility may be at risk. All these deposition issues, and the bogus witness. We think the public gets it, but they may not. If he walks into that courtroom with no credibility, if the jurors think he is unethical, attempting to buy witnesses, and accusing the first lady of an affair, they won't cut him any slack at all. I think that's a risk for WorldCopter."

"I agree, but I think the opposite is equally likely. They may know-if they're paying attention-that Hackett is a bad guy, and Mike is fully aware of the traps that are being thrown in front of him. They'll identify with him and hate Hackett. Very possible. If there is any issue left by the time we get to trial, if we ask the right questions in voir dire, we'll be able to disarm it. Do you agree, Mike?"

"Maybe not all of it, but I think we'll get a jury that will give us a fair hearing. That's all we can ask for."

Brightman said, "And facts, Mike. You need some
facts
to convince the jury that you're right. Not just theories."

I
DIALED TINNY
. He answered his cell phone on the second ring. After some preliminary conversation where I told him of the meeting and we insulted each other and challenged each other's heritage, I asked, "You got anything new for me? We're in the last strokes of discovery and trial is right around the corner."

"Yeah, one thing, but what was the meeting about?"

"Case isn't going to settle."

"Never figured it would. Hackett wants this to go to trial and grandstand. It's his biggest moment on the world stage."

"No doubt. But the point of this is that Kathryn told me to tell you to clear your time. She wants you dedicating your time exclusively to this case. Same for all of our experts. It's balls-to-the-wall time, Tinny. And you've got to help me get to this Secret Service guy and prove who was going to be at Camp David. Everything may turn on that meeting and the timing."

"You're killing me. I can't just quit working on all my cases. I've got thirty or forty things I'm working on. I can't just tell them to sit there while I do this."

"You have to."

"Man, I don't know. I can clear a lot of it. There might still be a couple I'm going to have to do things on, but I'm with you. I've got to rent a damned car too."

"What happened to your Vette?"

"Some asshole covered it in paint."

"Construction?"

"No. I mean covered it. I was at Mercedes' eating breakfast. I come back out to my car and somebody has poured gallons of black paint all over it. Windshield, everywhere."

I felt a chill. "Who did it?"

"No idea, or I'd be over at his place right now helping him check in to the ER."

"You think it's related to our case?"

"No idea. Could be. It's a message from somebody."

"You been messing with anyone's wife?"

"Naw, man. I don't do that."

"Then what do you think?"

"Could be our case. Could be one of our State Department friend's boys. Or maybe Hackett knows who I am and had one of his goons hit me for pissing all over their little scam with the bogus witness. Hard to say."

"I don't like it," I said. "They may be talking to me."

"Pretty indirect if they are."

"Call me tonight so we can go over some things."

"Catch you later-"

"Wait, you said there was one thing you wanted to tell me about."

"Yeah, there's somebody in Annapolis who is talking about you."

"No doubt."

"On a cell phone. I'm working on it, and I probably shouldn't tell you anything 'cause this is premature. I'm tracking it down, but somebody is having a lot of conversations with somebody else from New York. At least it's a 212 area code. But you're the subject. Hard to know exactly what they're talking about, 'cause they're assuming somebody's listening. They talk in shorthand or code that I can't quite get. But somebody wants things to go badly for you."

"Male or female?" I asked, my mind racing. "Male, probably white."

"What do you make of it? Could it be a journalist?"

"I don't know, I can just tell that there's something going on, where you're the subject, and they're trying to hide something."

"I don't follow you."

"That's all I got right now. One other thing. I… you know I ain't afraid of nobody. Well, one of those cases I got to keep an eye on is about an Asian gang member here in D.C. He's headed for trial on murder charges, and it's ugly. But the last couple of weeks I've noticed an Asian guy now and then. Has a sort of sophisticated look. Doesn't look like a gang guy to me. Could be the head cheese, but they never show themselves. This guy is different. I've seen him maybe twice, maybe three times. Don't know what to make of it, but I got to keep an eye out. Lots going on, Michael."

"See him around your car?"

"No."

"You've seen him like… he's following you?"

"Can't say. I see somebody I'm not looking for more than once in a couple of weeks in D.C.? I figure something's up. I have no idea who this guy is. Could be an IRS agent for all I know. I'm just telling you what's going on."

"You think he's one of Hackett's investigators?"

"Possible, but I doubt it. But watch yourself. Lots of things going on that we don't know about, Michael. And for what it's worth, I'm getting a feeling Collins had nothing to do with this accident."

"Feeling? What the hell am I supposed to do with that?"

"Don't know. Just a feeling I have. You ever feel a shadow?"

"I don't know. I guess you feel a coolness that wasn't there before."

"Just like that."

"Shit, Tinny."

"I got to go. Hey, by the way, you had any e-mail issues?"

"Meaning what?"

"I don't know. This phone conversation with somebody in Annapolis, they mentioned e-mail. I don't know what he's talking about, but I just wanted you to be aware that there may be something out there. Maybe someone is going to spam your server, I really don't know. Just beware. Call me in the morning." He hung up.

I didn't like the idea of somebody spamming our server or crashing our e-mail server or worse yet slipping some worm or virus into our system. That would be a disaster. I called Ralph, our outside IT guy. He answered his cell on the first ring. "Hey, Ralph, Mike Nolan."

"Hey. What can I do for you?"

"How secure do you feel we are? Could someone cram a virus or worm or something into our system and ruin our databases and the like?"

"Anything's possible. If there's somebody out there malicious and smart enough. They can ruin pretty much any computer system, particularly those that aren't hardened against attack, which yours isn't."

"Set us up. I want to make sure no one can sabotage us."

"I can start doing some things. I'll check out the whole system."

"This morning. I want you over there within an hour."

"I've got stuff backed up to two weeks from now."

"Within an hour or I'm gonna get somebody else. I've got to get this done, this is not negotiable."

"Mike, come on."

"I'm serious as a heart attack. You've got to be there in an hour or I'm going to get Dolores on the phone and get the next best guy. I don't have any time to mess with this. If somebody is going to attack our computer system, if I don't stop them now, when I know there may be something coming-"

"All right, all right, I'm on my way. I'm going to forward all the hate e-mails I get from other clients to you."

"Please do. See you there."

When I walked in and closed the door behind me, Dolores was startled. "Good morning, or rather afternoon, Mr. Nolan. You don't look so good, did you get some lunch?"

"Actually I didn't. Would you mind having the deli deliver a turkey sandwich for me? Whole wheat."

"No problem, sir. Anything else?"

"No. Messages?"

"There were two or three reporters sitting here in our waiting area all morning. I finally told them that you weren't coming back all day and they took off."

"Where'd you hear that?"

"I made it up. I was tired of looking at them."

"Well done."

"Thank you."

"Is Ralph here?"

"Yes, sir, he's back in the server room."

"Thanks." I left my briefcase and jacket behind her at the reception area and walked to the back of the office. I went into the computer room, which was across from the coffee room, and found Ralph sitting on a folding chair with his laptop in his lap and a cable hooking him up to our server. He seemed to be running two or three software scanners at the same time. I looked at his screen and had no idea what he was doing.

"Hey."

"Hi, Mike, how's it going?" he said without looking at me. "Good. So can you upgrade our security?"

"Sure, but something's going on here."

"Meaning?" I asked, still staring at his baffling screen. "Look at this."

It meant nothing to me. It could have been a finger painting. "I have no idea what I'm looking at."

He pointed to the lower-left corner of the screen. "This is a graphic representation of your e-mail and Internet traffic. It's sort of like looking at a galaxy in the distance through the Hubble telescope, where they look at certain invisible light ranges and make them visible?"

"Not sure what that means. What you got?"

"Well, this area right over here should be symmetrical." He took his mechanical pencil from his pocket and pointed. "See this thing right here, this little dent?"

"Yeah. What of it?"

"It's a tunnel."

"A tunnel? To what?"

"Well, every server, yours included, has a system set up to channel access to and from the Internet, control access to e-mail accounts, etc. This line over here represents the symmetry that should be on the screen, but there's this one section that's missing, like a piece that has been chipped away. Or actually a better way to look at it is sort of what it is. It's like you have a country with borders set up, and somebody has built a tunnel underneath the border. It allows people and things to go in and out through the tunnel without being noticed. They don't cross the border, they don't go through the firewall or the virus scan or the other security software."

"What does it mean?"

"Somebody who really knows what they're doing has access to your server and has built a tunnel."

"Can you tell what it's been used for?"

"Not really. It's like a real tunnel. Things go through it coming in, and things go through it going out. And unless the things are actually in the tunnel when you're looking, you won't be able to trace them. But…" He raised his hand and pointed his finger toward the ceiling as if he had one piece of information that was much more significant. "Sometimes there are wires through the tunnel, just like in a real tunnel. They have to sometimes have air and light, and they need wires or things that you can follow. This one has a wire. It may be traceable."

Ralph worked on the keyboard for some time, then turned toward me with the laptop still perched on his knees. "It's a tunnel, like I said. Somebody has attached a stairway from your e-mail to the tunnel." He could see my puzzlement.

"What it does"-he thought-"what it does is take every e-mail that you send or receive and duplicates it and sends it through the tunnel."

"So I don't get them?"

"No, you get them. What you'd see is just what you'd always see. But somebody else sees it too."

"Somebody else is reading my e-mail?"

"At the very least."

"Who the hell is doing this?"

"Impossible to say."

"How? Would they have to get into the firm physically? Has someone broken into the firm?"

"No, they wouldn't have to be here physically. I said it's
like
a wire. It isn't a physical wire. Every computer is easily identifiable on a net, and they identified yours, and that's the one that is being used. I can tell you that this is from outside the firm."

"Shit, Ralph. Can you fix it?"

"Sure." He started typing away on his computer. "Are there any others? Would this be like an individual's e-mail site or log-in address?"

"Yeah, it is individual, but I checked all the others. Yours is the only one that has this."

"Does it have access to my computer? Can it get in and see my outlines and my Word documents and the like?"

"Only if you send them as attachments in e-mail."

"How sophisticated is this? Is this hard to do?"

"Top one percent of computer geeks might know how to do this."

I jammed my hands in my back pocket and started pacing back and forth in the room. I stared at his screen for a minute or two, considering. I said, "Tell you what. I've got another idea. Just leave it like it is."

IT HAD BEEN a long day. Too much going on. I was the only one left at the firm, except of course Rachel and Braden, who were always there. My eyes felt like sandpaper, and I found myself taking deep breaths for no particular reason. As I got up to leave and shut down my computer, my phone rang. It was a D.C. area code, but it wasn't Tinny. I answered it.

"Evening, Mike. You're working late."

"Who is this?"

"Thompson."

"My good friend from State. What do you want?"

"I'm just outside. Why don't you come down and talk to me here."

"Why should I?"

"Because I'm a suspicious type, and sometimes I don't like places that are fixed, like offices. Sometimes I like to be outside."

"You can be outside by yourself. You don't need me."

"I need to talk to you. Actually… you need to talk to me. I'm in the gray sedan." He hung up.

Well, shit. That's all I needed. I grabbed my suit coat, closed my briefcase, turned out my office lights, and headed downstairs. I checked my watch. Ten thirty pm. What did this asshole want? He was nothing but trouble. He was probably the one who had screwed with my computer system.

I closed the front door of my office building behind me and looked for a gray, government sedan. I didn't see one. It suddenly hit me that I had been lured out of my building at a predictable time with no one else around. I stepped off the porch and walked to my car. I unlocked it and put my briefcase on the floor behind my seat. I closed the door and looked again. I saw a car parked on the side street down the block. The headlights flashed briefly. So I was supposed to walk over to him in the dark. Not a chance. I leaned against the driver's door of my car and shook my head. I motioned for him to come to me. Nothing happened. I waited. Still nothing. Fine. I opened my driver's door to get in and was about to leave when the door of the sedan opened. Thompson got out. I could see he wasn't alone. Probably the same guy who came with him before.

Thompson passed under a streetlight as he approached me. He was wearing dark clothes and a leather bomber jacket. He had his hands in his pockets. I waited. He walked around to my side of the car. "Don't trust me?"

"No. I don't trust anybody, and that would include you."

"I'm here for your own benefit."

"Just like last time?"

"Yes. Just like last time. You may not agree, but if you had done what I suggested, you wouldn't be stirring up the things you are stirring up."

"What exactly am I stirring up?"

He glanced around. "You have a recording device?"

"No. You?"

"No."

"So what do you want?"

"You have done what I told you not to do. Your investigator continued to talk to my acquaintance in the Secret Service. I warned you."

"I have to protect my client's interests. I have to defend the case."

"No, you don't. If you were smart, you would have listened to me." He turned toward me. "And stayed the hell away from the Secret Service, and your digging about Camp David. All you've done is stir up a hornet's nest, and you can't even see the hornets. They're all around you. And now you can't get them back into the nest."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"I told you I'd have to tell the people involved that you were digging. I told them. They didn't appreciate it. That's all I know. And then you kept digging, and I told them that. Now they really don't appreciate it, and frankly, there's nothing I can do about it."

"So you set them on me?"

"I didn't do anything. I told you how to avoid this problem, and you ignored me. I told you I would tell them, and I did. When you put a stick in the eye of some people, they don't say thank-you, they put a stick in
your
eye. Simple as that. Especially when it has nothing to do with the accident. If you had just done your job, if you had left Camp David out of this, you'd still be the big attorney with the biggest case in the country. But no. You had to keep going. You had to send Byrd back."

"We follow the truth-"

"Save it. I don't care about what you think you were doing. I'm just here to tell you that you've put a noose around your own neck and it's tightening. I can't do anything about it. And the closer you get to trial, to putting on any evidence, the tighter that noose is going to be."

I shook my head. "This is unbelievable. My government comes to tell me that things are out of its control and I need to watch out?"

"Basically, yes. Your government is telling you that you dicked it up, Mike. You were forewarned and laughed it off. That was your choice."

"Who's so concerned? That's the least you can tell me."

"No, I can't. That's the whole point. I can't even hint at it."

"You talking about violence? You think they'd come after me?"

"No idea. All I know is that the people I told you would be upset, are."

"I've got to find out what happened. The public deserves to know. So does my client."

"You just don't get it, do you? Camp David had nothing to do with it! You're banging on the wrong door, and the people behind that door are sick of it! You can tell the public anything you want! But you should have stayed away from this, like I told you. Now I don't know what will happen." He stepped toward his car. "You probably won't hear from me again. I've got nothing else to say. I tried to stop all this, but now I can't. You're on your own." He walked away.

I called to him. "Let me ask you something."

He stopped and turned. "You working with Hackett?"

Thompson smiled and walked back toward me. "At least you're thinking. He would benefit the most, wouldn't he?"

I nodded.

"But no. I've never spoken to him and don't plan to. He is formidable, I have to admit, but he's the least of your worries at this point."

"One other thing."

"What?"

"You tapping my e-mail?"

Thompson frowned. "That would be illegal."

"Are you?"

"No." He walked away and said over his shoulder, "You do have problems, don't you?" He got back to his car, climbed in, started it, and drove away slowly.

I opened my car door and climbed in. I locked my door and dialed Tinny. I got his voice mail. I hung up.

Two days later we had a hearing in front of Judge Betancourt. It had been on calendar for eight weeks. It was my motion to dismiss Hackett's claims for punitive damages. Making a settlement demand was one thing. Demanding punitive damages to punish the defendant made things much more difficult and risky for a defendant. This case had punitive damages written all over it. Everybody in the country was mad at WorldCopter for "killing" the president. The Justice Department was investigating "fraud" in how WorldCopter had obtained the contract.

I felt like we had effectively deflected those claims in our court filings. Hackett's assertions didn't seem to have the heat they initially had when Senator Blankenship went on television the day of the accident and started throwing around accusations. The truth is usually less dramatic.

We did have one lingering problem, and it might allow the plaintiffs to get through my motion to dismiss punitive damages. It came down to the tip weights. Hackett was zeroed in on that issue. I would be too if I were him. The NTSB hadn't given any indication that there was any other cause. The entire country had become obsessed with the washerlike pieces of metal, and it was an easy theory to explain. Hackett would get an expert to say that was the cause, and that was good enough.

Our
problem
was the documentation about the tip weights was sketchy. For cases throughout the country, companies had got hammered by juries or judges for destroying documents. Such as a case from a computer-memory company that supposedly had held a "shred" day for damaging documents, to others who failed to set documents aside that were relevant to a lawsuit. The juries had awarded punitive damages. And here we were with a dead president, a foreign helicopter, and documents that could not trace specific tip weights to the specific blade on Marine One. You could have the same kind of problem with the chain of custody of a critical piece of criminal evidence. If you can't prove where that piece of evidence had been from the time it was collected at the scene of the crime until the trial, you would be accused of manipulating the evidence.

For the tip weights, we had the purchase order from a Taiwanese company that manufactured them according to the specifications created by WorldCopter. We had the delivery receipt, and the storage records. The tip weights were individually numbered, and when one was placed on a blade, the entry went into the manufacturing logs, and into the documents that went with the blade as it got shipped. The shipping documents showed which numbers had been on the blade that was found by Marine One, but somehow, no records at WorldCopter headquarters confirmed that those were the tip weights that had been placed on the blade when it was balanced. That made it possible for Hackett to say we didn't know which weights were on which blade.

The tip weight bin was protected and in a secure location. The weights were placed on the blade for balancing by authorized personnel. WorldCopter had no doubt that the integrity of the tip weight system was intact, but what they couldn't prove was that somebody hadn't put a couple of extra tip weights in the bin that were not built to specification or had the quality-assurance check at the same level as every other piece of equipment that went on Marine One. The engineering tolerances allowed for materials on Marine One were substantially less than for a general WorldCopter helicopter.

But we couldn't prove that the tip weights on this blade satisfied this specification. We could argue by implication, but we sure couldn't prove it. And Hackett said it was a hole big enough for him to drive his punitive-damages truck through. I think the truck he had in mind was a Brink's truck, but it was his analogy. Hence my motion to get rid of the threat of punitive damages. At the very least, we would find out what he had up his sleeve.

The hearing before Judge Betancourt was set for 9 AM. As usual, the journalists and television crews beat us there by hours. We hadn't had a hearing or been in front of the judge for over eight weeks, so the press was happy to have another reason to reconvene the circus.

I walked into the courthouse and into the courtroom on the first floor on the right. It was the largest courtroom of the new courthouse and was perfect, as Judge Betancourt saw it, for this "important" trial.

Hackett and his minions were already there. He had set up his papers at the appropriate table, the one closest to the jury box, and was seated with his legs crossed, turned toward the door, watching me come in. For reasons that I couldn't understand, we were the only ones in the courtroom.

Hackett looked smug and said, "Morning, Rachel."

"Morning," she said.

I walked up through the bar, let the gate swing behind me, and placed my briefcase on the table opposite him. He turned in his chair and followed me with his eyes. I said quietly to Rachel, "Go check the tentative."

She nodded and walked back to the entryway of the courtroom and examined the document pinned to the corkboard. It listed all the motions being heard that day by the judge, and her tentative ruling on each one. Rachel returned, looking surprised. She leaned over and said in a whisper, "Tentative is to grant."

I was as surprised as she was. I never thought Betancourt would have the nerve to dismiss the punitive-damages claim. Hackett seemed unusually sanguine for that tentative. And he didn't seem prepared for the hearing.

The court clerk entered the courtroom followed by the court reporter and the bailiff. They took their positions, and the bailiff suddenly said, "All rise."

We stood as I continued to look around in wonderment as the journalists were not swarming into the courtroom. The bailiff announced the judge, who took her seat, and asked the clerk to call the calendar.

"Number one on calendar,
Adams et al. v. WorldCopter
, case number C334232."

The judge looked at us with her reading glasses on her nose and began, "Mr. Nolan-"

She was immediately interrupted by the doors being opened from the back and the two men guarding the doors walking into the courtroom. They were followed by other men in dark suits, then ultimately by the first lady, Mrs. Adams. She walked down the aisle with grace and an insistent presence. No one said a word. I immediately knew that the Secret Service had been there since two hours before the hearing. They had checked out the entire courtroom, every seat, every piece of equipment, and had kept the courtroom cleared except for the attorneys and the court personnel until the first lady entered. They had been waiting outside where she would arrive in a place that was unobtrusive. They had others watching the door to make sure that people didn't enter the courtroom and had spoken with all the journalists, who knew not to go inside.

She walked toward the small gate that kept the audience separate from the attorneys and the clients, pushed the gate aside, and walked over and sat down next to Hackett. He nodded at her and she smiled back at him. The Secret Service sat beside her, behind her, and in the corners of the courtroom. Then, and only then, did the journalists and other members of the public file in and fill the courtroom as the judge looked on.

Judge Betancourt continued, "Mr. Nolan, it's your motion. Do you have anything to add?"

I stood. "No, Your Honor. We will submit on the tentative."

She looked up from the papers over her reading glasses, surprised. "Are you sure?"

"Yes, Your Honor."

She turned from me. "Mr. Hackett? Do you have anything to add?"

Hackett stood slowly, dramatically. "I think the Court fully understands the implications of eliminating punitive damages in this case when WorldCopter has defrauded the government, lied about its clearances, hid documents about what caused this helicopter to crash, and put parts on the helicopter contrary to the contract, which calls for a verified numbering and precise record of every part. They have violated the direct orders of the United States government and have now killed the head of that same government. With respect, Your Honor, if any case ever called for punitive damages, it is this one." Hackett sat. The former first lady sat quietly.