by Brad Parks
“This isn’t really their area of expertise,” Sopko said, then lowered her voice. “And Judge Parsons is known for being sort of prickly when he feels like one side is trying to flex its muscle by bringing in a mob of attorneys. We decided the fewer of us, the better.”
It wasn’t three seconds after she made that observation that the door opened again. Six people in suits—men and women, tall and short, white and black and brown—filed in.
So much for not having a mob.
They began introducing themselves. The lead counsel was Greg Tufaro, who had short kinky hair and the handsome face of a man who belonged on television. He represented the Department of Defense. After that, I lost track of names and agencies. They just kept piling on top of each other.
When they were through, the law clerk said, “Are we expecting anyone else?”
Each side looked at the other. When no one answered, she said, “Okay. I’ll let the judge know everyone is here.”
For five uncomfortable minutes, we tried to avoid staring at each other. Outside, the sun was sinking low. The occasional wind gust buffeted the building.
I thought about Morgan, who would probably be hungry for dinner soon. Aunt Aimee had it covered, but I still got that stab of maternal guilt. When Matt talked about particles being in two places at once, I understood it as a mother. I always existed in two places simultaneously as well: wherever circumstance had placed me, and wherever Morgan was.
The only interruption during those next few quiet minutes was when the court reporter walked in and took her seat in the corner, where her steno machine had already been set up.
When the door opened again, the frame was filled by a man a shade above six feet tall, with wiry gray hair that had stubbornly refused to recede. He wore a blue-and-yellow-striped bow tie.
The lawyers stood up. Sheena and I followed their lead.
“Good afternoon, everyone,” the judge said in an accent that would have been at home in a Kennedy family reunion. “Have a seat, please.”
He took the spot at the head of the table and then introduced his law clerks, both of whom acknowledged the lawyers from the corner where they were standing.
“I appreciate all of you coming on such short notice, and I’m going to value your time as much as I want you to value mine. It is right now,” he said, then glanced at his watch, “five-oh-three. Mrs. Parsons likes me to be home by six, because she won’t start her manhattan until I get there. And, believe me, you don’t want to get between Mrs. Parsons and her first manhattan.”
As lawyers on both sides grinned, he glanced at the court reporter. “That’s not on the record, is it, Francine?”
From the corner, the court reporter said something that made everyone laugh nervously. Naturally, I didn’t catch it. But I pretended like I had and laughed too.
“Okay, good,” Parsons said. “But from now on everything else is on the record, so let’s get started. It’s my intention to issue a preliminary verbal ruling this afternoon and then follow up in writing later. Ms. Sopko, I’ve read your filing. I want to hear, in three minutes or less, why I should grant you an injunction.”
“I’m not sure I can do it in three minutes, Your Honor,” Sopko began. “I—”
“You’re already wasting your time, Counselor. And mine.”
“Okay, Your Honor. Our argument has two sides. One is that the DOD has overreached by shutting down two entire floors of a very important college building. It’s displacing dozens of professors and hundreds of students, so every hour they continue to do that is actually hundreds of hours of disruption. And it’s doing this for essentially no reason. Just because Professor Bronik walked down a hallway on a regular basis doesn’t make it vital to national security. If the DOD wants to keep Professor Bronik’s office sealed, we understand and can abide by that.
“Our second argument is, admittedly, more unusual.”
“I’ll say,” the judge interjected.
I couldn’t help but note his skepticism. I worried he had already made up his mind and was now just going through the appearance of due process.
“Are you familiar with quantum physics, Your Honor?” Sopko asked.
“My parents wanted me to be a doctor,” he said. “I became a lawyer because I couldn’t handle the science classes.”
“Don’t worry, neither could I,” Sopko said, smiling warmly at him. “But that’s okay. Because you don’t actually need to know quantum physics to understand our argument here. You just need to understand evidence. Ms. Aiyagari was able to lead the New Hampshire State Police to the abandoned house where Professor Bronik was being held. A crime scene unit found a fingerprint that was a fourteen-point match, so there’s no doubt he was there. I have just received a sworn statement from Detective Emmett Webster affirming all of this.”
She slid a two-page document toward Parsons. Then she pushed another copy toward Tufaro on the other side of the table.
Parsons extracted a pair of plastic reading glasses from his shirt pocket and hung them crookedly on the end of his nose. He skimmed the first page, then glanced at the second page.
“You’re right,” Parsons said. “You’re going to need more than three minutes.”
“What I would like to stress on behalf of my plaintiff, Mrs. Bronik, is that speed is of the essence. Every minute matters here. Until Professor Bronik is returned safely, his life will be in considerable danger. And while Dartmouth College sees him as an important part of its faculty, he is far more important to his family as a husband and father to a nine-year-old boy.”
Parsons looked at me. My throat had swelled at the mention of my son. I could feel my face flushing.
“His name is Morgan,” I choked out.
“Thank you,” Parsons said softly, then turned to Sheena. “Ms. Aiyagari, can I ask you some questions?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Raise your right hand, please.”
Sheena complied.
“Do you swear or affirm that everything you’re about to say is the truth? If so, say yes.”
“Yes.”
“And you understand that even though we are not in a courtroom, everything you say in front of me right now is subject to the penalties of perjury?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very good. Ms. Aiyagari, if you could, help me understand this . . . thing that happened to you.”
Sheena talked him through the events of the previous evening and the day at hand. Parsons peered at her intently from over his reading glasses.
I couldn’t tell what he thought about any of it. But he was at least listening. When Sheena was through, he removed the reading glasses and stuffed them back in his pocket.
“Ms. Aiyagari, you seem very lucid, so forgive me for this question. But I have to get it on the record. Are you under the influence of any drugs? I know you don’t have a lawyer present, so I’ll remind you that you may invoke your Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if you wish.”
“No, sir,” she said. “I’ve never done drugs.”
“Are you taking any medications that might have a strange reaction with each other? Any medication at all, for that matter?”
“No, sir. I took some Tylenol last night and this morning because my face hurt. That’s it.”
“And would you be willing to submit to a drug test for this court? It would be voluntary, so we’d have a probation officer meet you at your home or workplace, whatever you prefer. It wouldn’t take more than five or ten minutes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay. Now, this house where you led the detective. Had you ever been there before?”
“No, Your Honor.”
“You had never seen it in your life.”
“No, sir.”
Parsons was bobbing his head faintly as he continued to study Sheena.
“And you think if you’re able to go back into your lab and work with this virus, you’ll really be able to tell us better where Professor Bronik is?”
“I honestly don’t know what will happen, Your Honor,” Sheena said. “But I think it’s the only thing that might work, and I’d like to have the opportunity to try.”
Parsons glanced at his watch. “Okay, there are probably a lot of other issues that I’m sure we’ll explore when we have a full hearing, but in the interest of time, I’m going to turn this over to the defendant. Mr. Tufaro? Try to keep it short.”
Tufaro straightened in his chair.
“Thank you, Your Honor. The key fact from our point of view is that Professor Bronik’s work was considered extremely sensitive and important to the Department of Defense and our close partner, the National Interagency Confederation for Biological Research. I hope you understand that I can’t go into details in a document that could become part of the public record. But it pertains to biological warfare, or biological agents that could possibly be unleashed on the public. And because of the unique nature of what Professor Bronik was doing, the DOD would have no immediate ability to combat it. There are no vaccines, no antidotes. Without delving into scaremongering, this is as serious as anything you could imagine in your worst nightmares.
“Beyond that, the government’s use of eminent domain in matters of national security is well-settled law. The takings clause has been understood for hundreds of years to mean the government can seize private property. And there are numerous examples, particularly during the Cold War, of the DOD using eminent domain during times when Congress had made no formal declaration of war. We haven’t had much time to review this—we barely had time to get here. But we’ve been scouring Westlaw to find examples of where the government’s claims of national security were successfully challenged, and so far we haven’t found a single one.”
He paused to let that sink in. When he resumed, his tone was softer. “Mrs. Bronik and her son obviously have our sympathy. But we have an entire nation of citizens whose needs we need to think of as well. And, if anything, Ms. Aiyagari’s testimony only underscores our need to carefully protect this research, because we really don’t understand its full power and what it might be used for. We’re still assessing that threat level. Frankly, the unknown makes it even more frightening. The moment Professor Bronik was abducted, it triggered a lot of alarm bells that made the DOD feel it had to act, and act decisively to contain the risk before something catastrophic resulted.
“In closing, the government’s responsibility is very clear here, as is its authority. And that’s why we’d ask you to immediately deny this request for an injunction.”
Parsons had been listening carefully. When Tufaro finished, Parsons folded his hands in front of himself in a contemplative, almost prayerful gesture.
“How much longer do you think the DOD will want to continue controlling access to this area?” he asked.
“That’s difficult to say. I’m told that we’ll probably want to keep Wilder Hall on lockdown for at least another week.”
A week. Or more.
I felt like the previous day had lasted a year. How was I going to survive a week? And would that already be too late for Matt?
“Is it possible to speed that up?” Parsons asked.
“Not really,” Tufaro said. “This isn’t the kind of work you want to rush. Without boring you with the details of what our hazmat teams do, it’s a very laborious process, and it has to be done with due caution. You can’t just spray some Clorox and walk away. The team is due in tomorrow morning and will get to work right away. We have to make sure the threat is fully contained and eliminated.”
“Eliminated! You’re going to kill the virus?” Sheena interrupted, her voice climbing with each syllable.
Parsons turned toward her. “Ms. Aiyagari, I’ll ask the questions here.”
“We’re not going to kill it,” Tufaro said. “We’ll take it to Fort Detrick in Maryland. It’s biosafety level four—the highest level. It will be stored there until such time as Professor Bronik returns or . . .”
He didn’t finish the thought, nor did he need to. Everyone knew what the alternative was.
Sheena, meanwhile, was clearly intent on ignoring the judge’s admonishment. “But if you take the virus away, there’s no point. I’ll never get this feeling back. I won’t be able to find Matt. You’d be killing him. Is that what you want?”
“Ms. Aiyagari, please,” Parsons said, more sharply this time.
Sheena’s mouth finally closed. But she had no trouble meeting his gaze.
Parsons crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. I could guess that he had been leading up to a very judicial kind of compromise, telling the Department of Defense to speed things up a little, then saying, “Look, Dartmouth, this is the best we can do.”
But there would be no splitting the baby this time.
No easy answers.
He wasn’t looking at anyone now, his eyes searching the dimming light outside the window for answers. I could practically see the machinations of his decision-making process. His breath seemed to have gotten short. His arms rose and fell across his chest each time he inhaled, then exhaled.
Then, suddenly, he was looking directly at me.
“Mrs. Bronik, my heart goes out to you and your son,” he said. “Truly, it does. And please understand how difficult this is. In making a decision like this, I have to weigh the potential harm and the potential good of each possibility. In this case, the threat the government is talking about is theoretical—something bad might happen if this virus falls into the wrong hands. At the same time, the threat against your husband is also theoretical—something bad might happen to him if Ms. Aiyagari can’t find him.
“So I’m weighing two theoretical threats against each other. Except, on one side, the threat pertains to potentially thousands or millions of people, while on the other side, it pertains to just one man. That’s some harsh math, I realize. But—”
There was a knock on the door. It didn’t distract me from my misery over what was about to happen, but it did seem to derail the judge.
Annoyed, he started to say, “Now what the—”
“I’m sorry, Judge,” said a woman as she stuck her head in. “They said it was an emergency and that it pertained to the Dartmouth case.”
She opened the door wider to allow two men to enter. One was a massive stone-faced man with a build so powerful he barely fit into his suit.
The other—who seemed quite comfortable walking into a roomful of strangers and taking charge—had a large head, a long face, and stooped shoulders.
I recognized him instantly, but only because I had googled him so many times.
“Hello, Your Honor,” he said. “My name is Sean Plottner.”
CHAPTER 40
For Sean Plottner, the path to a Concord courtroom had started with the Matt Bronik video.
Plottner had sent it to his contact at the state police, a captain by the name of Angus Carpenter, the man Plottner had first been put in touch with when he offered the reward. Perhaps a bit starstruck by Plottner’s money—it happened a lot—the captain had reviewed the video and found it highly credible.
Just as Plottner had hoped he would.
Then Carpenter began oversharing about what was happening on the state police’s end. He told Plottner a remarkable story about a young Dartmouth postdoc guiding a detective to an abandoned house where Bronik had been held.
She had gotten there perhaps twenty minutes late. But, still, the police found Bronik’s fingerprints at the residence.
Carpenter presented the narrative as if it was the manifestation of something supernatural. Didn’t it beat all? Wasn’t it incredible?
Plottner was not quite as awed. He had listened to Bronik talk about his work for an hour. The quantum world was a place where the incredible was business as usual.
Carpenter had finished by telling Plottner about the emergency injunction request now pending in federal court. That’s what led to a team of Plottner’s lawyers hastily drafting an amicus brief in the matter of Dart
mouth College and Brigid Bronik v. Department of Defense, et al., which mostly consisted of a transcript of the Bronik video.
And, sure, he could have filed it with the court and left it at that. Except Plottner knew all about judges and their bubble of self-importance. He had learned, the hard way, to show obsequiousness in the face of federal judicial might.
All it took was one pissed-off judge to seriously mess up your day.
Besides, there was no substitute for being there in person.
The helicopter made quick work of the trip from Plottner’s house to a helipad near the federal courthouse in Concord. And before long, Plottner was entering the chambers of the Honorable Benjamin Stuart Parsons with the formidable shape of Lee Michaelides in tow.
Plottner was met by a staff member, upon whom he began impressing the notion that no, this really couldn’t wait.
Lee had nothing to add. But his presence may have been persuasive, because moments later they were escorted into the judge’s conference room.
“Hello, Your Honor,” he said. “My name is Sean Plottner. I own Plottner Investments. This is Laestrygones Michaelides, my director of security. He goes by Lee.”
“Laestrygones,” Parsons said in disbelief, slightly dumbstruck as he looked at Lee. “Aren’t the Laestrygones the tribe of man-eating giants from the Odyssey?”
“Yes,” Plottner said. “That’s why I keep him well fed.”
Lee stood behind his boss with no expression on his granite face. If he even understood they were talking about him, he never let on.
“Forgive our interruption,” Plottner continued. “I’ve filed an amicus curiae in this matter. It mostly pertains to a video of Dr. Bronik that I’d like to show you. I think it will be of great interest to everyone in this room.”
“And who are you again?” Parsons demanded.
“Sean Plottner,” he said again, like that alone should have been enough to settle matters. “The video won’t take more than thirty seconds of your time. If I may, Your Honor?”
Plottner was holding up his laptop, looking for the judge’s permission to set it down. If the man didn’t say anything soon, Plottner was going to proceed as if he had been granted permission—as was his usual response to most things in life.