The Law of the Sea : A Legal Thriller

by Dave Gerard

  After the lunch break, the trial continued with more opening statements. Indonesia went next. The Indonesian lawyer was not as impressive as the others. But he didn’t need to be. He made a simple argument: Since the Flor de la Mar had sunk just off the coast of Sumatra, it was within Indonesian waters. The United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) recognized the territorial jurisdiction of every state up to twelve miles from its coast. Ergo, the ship belonged to Indonesia. It was a solid argument. I wondered for a moment whether this dark horse might win the day.

  After Indonesia, Judge Graves let some of the lawyers for the intervenors speak. All forty-four of them wanted an hour for opening statements. Judge Graves refused. Instead, he let two or three of them speak for the group. The lead lawyer was a fat old man with a heavy Texas accent and the loudest voice I had ever heard. He rambled on about the importance of family and insisted that the people, not the states or the corporations, should get the money. He jimmied up some kind of genealogical chart and displayed it on a PowerPoint, and proceeded to trace his client’s lineage all the way back to the sixteenth century. Judge Graves looked bored.

  We didn’t make an opening statement for David Marcum. This phase of the case was not about Marcum’s death. That would come later. We had amended our papers to say that Marcum had found the Flor de la Mar, so the Judge knew about our claim. But we didn’t yet have any proof, and Remington said we needed to bide our time before we entered the fray.

  After that, the trial began in earnest. Over the days that followed, witnesses testified about the history of ancient Malacca; about the Flor de la Mar; about the sack of the city; and about the value of the ship. Evidence was presented. Legal argument was made. Countless objections were ruled upon. Expert witnesses were cross-examined. A typical exchange went like this:

  “May I cross-examine, your Honor?” (Bock speaking).

  “You may.” (Graves).

  “Thank you for your testimony, Professor.”

  “You are welcome, sir.” (Malaysian historian whom Bock had given a heart attack. Not looking well).

  “Did you leave anything out of your story today?”

  “No doubt. The history of Malacca is long. And I didn’t want to go past lunch.” (scattered laughter from the gallery).

  “Did you leave out, in particular, the reason for Albuquerque’s ah…action?”

  “The sack of Malacca, you mean?”

  (Ignoring this) “Isn’t it true, Professor, that before Albuquerque’s expedition, a Portuguese admiral named Sequeira sought to establish a peaceful Portuguese trading post in Malacca?”

  “I would dispute that was his intent.”

  “And isn’t it true that the Sultan of Malacca agreed to this, but then reneged on his promise, ambushed the Portuguese, and took them hostage?”

  “True.” (Murmurs from the crowd).

  “And isn’t it also true that Alfonso de Albuquerque sailed to Malacca to remedy this situation, and rescue the Portuguese who were being held by the Sultan?”

  “I don’t think that’s the primary reason why he sailed to Malacca, no.”

  “Right. And isn’t it true that, before attacking the city, Albuquerque tried to negotiate the return of those hostages, and only after that failed, did he take the city by force?”

  “There were negotiations. They were unsuccessful.”

  “Uh huh. So isn’t it true, Professor, that the Sultan of Malacca brought the attack upon himself?” (triumphantly).

  “For the hostages, perhaps there was cause. But for the extortionary ransom demands, no. The Portuguese were there to conquer. This can be seen from the history of their empire’s colonization of India, the Middle East, Africa, and South America—”

  (Bock, interrupting) “But you’re not an expert on the Portuguese Empire, are you?”

  “No. I am not.” “Move to strike.”

  “Sustained.” (Graves, yawning).

  “Back to my question, Professor. Speaking just of Malacca—your area of expertise—wouldn’t you agree there was justification for the attack?”

  “No. I don’t think that the taking of twenty hostages justifies the burning of a city, the wholesale slaughter and subjugation of its inhabitants, the theft of all of its wealth, and its conquest and colonization for the next hundred years.”

  (long pause) “Nothing further.”

  I talked to Remington and Kruckemeyer about this one evening after trial. We were sitting in the hotel lobby, waiting on Cindy to print out the day’s briefing from the business center.

  “How can they justify all that?” I asked. “What Portugal did, I mean.”

  “They can’t,” said Remington. “It was wrong. No question about it. But you also have to be careful about going back in time like that. You might open up a can of worms. Take where we are now, for example. Texas used to be part of Mexico. So did California, until the U.S. annexed it in the Mexican-American war.”

  “But there was cause for that,” I argued.

  “Was there? Read President Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs. He served in the war. See what he says about it.”

  I thought about that. “And there’s also the question of how far back to go,” Remington added. “Before Mexico’s independence, it was a colony of Spain. And before that, it was part of the Aztec Empire. The Aztecs practiced human sacrifice. Should we give the country back to them?” I didn’t know what to say to that.

  “Hell,” remarked Kruckemeyer, “right or wrong, I’d rather be in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Mexico’s run by the drug cartels. They got no law. Government’s corrupt. Good people that try and stop it, the cartels kill ‘em. The police all have to wear masks just to do their job, and the judges don’t last long enough to hear a motion. You think we’d be better off if Texas was part of Mexico?” he grunted. “Then why is everyone trying to cross the border?”

  I was troubled by this, but didn’t have a good answer.

  The trial went from nine to six each day. We settled into a kind of all-consuming routine. During the day, we would attend court and listen to everything that was said, sitting in the back and working on our laptops. After the day’s hearings, we would walk back to the Galvez, gather for dinner at the restaurant, and discuss how things went.

  Over the evening meal, Remington and Kruckemeyer would hold forth and explain what the lawyers were doing, why they were doing it, and reveal all the subtle tricks they played to try to influence the outcome. They talked about how the experts were holding up, and how Judge Graves was taking it. They would also tell war stories of cases past, and we would listen, spellbound, sometimes in awe, sometimes with laughter. Both of them were fantastic storytellers, and it was a rare opportunity. You can bond with people in a trial like in almost nothing else. After dinner, the evening’s work began. We would read and respond to the legal filings that came in at all hours of the day. Time started to blend together.

  At night, after the day’s hearings and the evening’s motions, Ashley, Vijay, Cindy, and I took to gathering for a glass of wine by the pool. The pool was closed by that hour, so we had it all to ourselves. Each night, we would hop the fence, take off our shoes, dip our toes in the water, and unwind for a little while. Vijay would smoke cigarettes, and Cindy would bring a pad and pencil to sketch. I caught her sketching me once. In the black and white hash, I looked tired, and older than I wanted to. Harder didn’t join us at first. But then he gradually started coming. We didn’t talk about the disqualification motion or give him a hard time about it. We all bonded in these quiet nights together by the pool, the dimly lit lamps and the sound of the ocean soothing our tired minds.

  One night, we were gossiping about Loudamire and Quinto, and I mentioned that Loudamire looked like she was cracking up. I told the others how I had seen her sobbing after the settlement meeting a few months ago. Cindy shared that she knew someone who had gone t
o law school with Loudamire, and said she was very smart but had issues.

  Harder nodded. “Apparently everyone at Badden & Bock hates her. Quinto and Adipose told me so at dinner. She’s really smart, no doubt. She was first in her class at Yale. But she’s not well adjusted. The firm puts up with her because she’s really good and bills crazy hours. But she doesn’t have a lot of friends. I feel kind of bad for her, really.” I nodded soberly.

  Mental health problems were common in the legal field. Attorneys often look put together on the surface. But a lot of times, they’re not. Depression, anxiety, and substance abuse rates were all high. Many people came into law school with big dreams but left broken, with bad jobs and a jaded outlook on life.

  Part of this was because of the realities of the job market. A lot of people want to be lawyers, but there aren’t that many good legal jobs. Competition for the best positions is fierce. Most get stuck with mediocre or bad jobs, dead-end gigs that don’t fulfill them and don’t pay a lot of money, either. And even the good jobs are often stressful and require sixty or eighty-hour workweeks.

  The stress is at its peak in my line of work. As a litigator, you fight with everyone all the time. Opposing counsel tries to screw you like it’s their job. Which it is. The Judge waits for you to slip up. Your own side will turn on you if you make a mistake. The client won’t be happy if you lose, which will happen sometimes.

  Contracts and deal work looked less stressful to me. But on the other hand, those lawyers spent their time copy-pasting forms from old deals to new ones, taking flak from the bankers and executives who were actually running the show. When people asked me whether they should go to law school, I usually tried to talk them out of it.

  As the courtroom drama continued unabated, we continued to work feverishly on our own case. We needed to find a way to prove that Rockweiller’s witnesses were lying. We needed to figure out what happened to Marcum. We needed to figure out where the contract was, and how Marcum had found the Flor de la Mar. These questions consumed me night after night. We continued to scour the documents, including the new ones produced every day, looking for anything that would help. I tried calling Riker again, to see if he knew more. But he didn’t return my calls.

  We needed to find something soon. The case was moving quickly. Judge Graves was pushing hard, conscious of the mounting international pressure. There had been reports of an isolated clash between the Malaysian and Indonesian navies in the Strait of Malacca. Graves was not one to be deterred by that or anything else, but he was certainly aware of the ramifications of the case, and wanted to get it over with one way or another. Meanwhile, Wurlheiser was waiting in the wings, trying to sabotage us and force us out of the case.

  Finally, about three weeks into the trial, we caught our break. It came from an unexpected source.

  One of the interesting parts about litigating a world-famous case in the modern era was the sheer number of people who speculated about it. They ranged from news anchors, to experts, to law professors, to random posters on the internet. They all dissected the arguments and court filings in the case—which were public—and boldly opined on what was going on, whether they had a clue or not.

  Among the random posters on the internet, one of the most active was a Reddit subgroup called r/FlorDeLaMar. Reddit was an internet message board. The favorite topic of this subgroup was the location of the Flor de la Mar. They treated it like a puzzle, or a TV show, analyzing clues scattered throughout the case to try and predict the ending. The collective minds of Reddit were remarkably successful in TV show predictions. And in the same way, they proved successful in uncovering an important secret in the case. One that all of the lawyers and experts had missed.

  Bock and Jafaar had been sparring for weeks over what Rockweiller had to disclose about the Flor de la Mar. Judge Graves had mostly let Bock keep things under wraps with the ultrasensitive order. But Graves did make Bock produce a report that Gunthum had made—the formal record documenting the details of the Flor de la Mar find. Naturally, the report was more blacked out than a CIA memo. All of the location information, or stuff that anybody actually wanted to see, was redacted.

  But one particular version of this report, attached to one particular court filing, among hundreds of exhibits, contained a page where certain information was not blacked out. Specifically, it was a measurement taken at the Flor de la Mar site, which yielded this set of numbers: 2043.82, 20.44, 296.43.

  If any of the attorneys or experts actually saw this version of the report, they did not make anything of it. I certainly didn’t. But some of the Reddit posters found it, and started to analyze the numbers, trying to figure out what they meant.

  It was finally a poster named Barre83, a geologist-turned-barre-instructor with too much time on his or her hands, who figured it out: they were pressure measurements. Barre83 knew this because each of these numbers was actually a different way to express the same value. 2043.82 kilopascals equals 20.44 bar, which equals 296.43 pounds per square inch. Barre83 realized that this must be the water pressure at the Flor de la Mar site.

  Even more interesting was this: Pressure underwater increases linearly with depth. That means if you know the pressure under saltwater, then you also know the depth. By reversing the calculations, Barre83 was able to figure out the depth at which Lloyd Gunthum had found the Flor de la Mar: 668 feet below sea level. And just like that, Reddit had solved one of the three geospatial coordinates that represented the final resting place of the Flor de la Mar.

  Once the internet got wind of this, it spread like wildfire across social media, and then regular media. The news admiringly reported on how a bunch of Redditors had solved a problem that all of the lawyers, experts, and great minds could not. “How many lawyers does it take to find the Flor de la Mar?” went the ensuing meme. “r/1.”

  Once this became public, Malaysia and Portugal immediately shot interrogatories and requests for admission off to Rockweiller, forcing Bock to admit it under oath. Bock didn’t try to deny it, and pretty soon the secret was out. I expected Malaysia and Indonesia were even now modifying their searches, and were scouring the Strait of Malacca at a depth of 668 feet below sea level for the Flor de la Mar.

  It also turned out that this information would have particular importance to us. It was the single piece of the puzzle that we needed to put the lie to Rockweiller’s coverup, and finally reveal what had happened to David Marcum.

  It was some days after the news came out that Remington sauntered into my office and sat down. I looked up at him quizzically. He was holding a copy of the redacted report and had a smile on his face. A big, cat-got-the-cream smile.

  “What’s up?” I asked him.

  “I found their mistake,” he said.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Two and a half weeks into the trial, Judge Graves declared a Friday off. We used the day to finally take Lloyd Gunthum’s deposition in a conference room at the Hotel Galvez.

  The conference room was packed. A dozen lawyers from Badden & Bock were there, with another half-dozen apiece for Malaysia, Portugal, and Indonesia. Adding paralegals, assistants, and IT, there were almost fifty people in the room. Laptops, iPads, and extension cords littered the space, making it look like a wired jungle. I half expected the fire marshal to burst in and break up the party.

  Lloyd Gunthum sat in the pole position. Gunthum was fifty years old and looked every inch the former military man. His silver hair was cropped short, and he wore slacks and a dark polo shirt that exposed his bulging biceps and pectoral muscles. Zachary Bock sat on his right, whispering some last-minute advice in his ear. Our eyes met once, and he turned away contemptuously.

  Remington sat on Gunthum’s left, in his usual quiet manner, as if carved out of wood. I sat next to him, with Cindy, Harder, and Ashley next to me.

  I was as tense as a steel spring. We needed to get something done here. Wurlheiser had finally suc
ceeded in scheduling another vote of the partners. Most of them wanted out, and Kruckemeyer couldn’t stall any longer. Remington said they were going to force the issue with or without him. Without bringing home some kind of win, we wouldn’t be able to continue much longer. I had been candid with Ashley about this, and she understood.

  The appointed hour struck. The videographer switched on the camera, and the court reporter made everyone state their names for the record. This took nearly twenty minutes because of the sheer number of lawyers present. Finally, Gunthum was sworn in, and Remington began.

  “Would you please state your name for the record, sir?” Remington asked, with the air of someone who has asked a question a thousand times.

  “Lloyd Gunthum.”

  “What is your date of birth?”

  “November 7, 1968.”

  “What is your occupation?”

  “Diver and salvor.”

  “When you say diver, you mean scuba diver, is that correct?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And when you say salvor, you mean that you specialize in the search for, and the recovery of, items from the deep oceans, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long have you been working as a diver and a salvor?”

  “Over twenty years.”

  “And prior to that, you served with the U.S. Navy SEALs?”

  “I did.”

  “How many years did you serve with the SEALs?”

  “Fifteen years.”

  “Did you see any combat?”

  “Yes,” Gunthum said warily. I could tell it was a sensitive subject.

  “Do you carry a firearm?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What type?”

  “A SIG Sauer P938. I have some others.”

  “Were you carrying a firearm aboard the Excelsior?”

  “I uh…I don’t recall. No wait, yes, I was. I had it.” I waited for more, but Remington just nodded and moved on.