Irreparable Harm (A Legal Thriller)
Page 38
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They camped out in the Heinz Conference Room. Heinz was the smallest conference room, but it was Sasha’s favorite.
It had a view of the side of Mt. Washington. Sasha had passed the time in many meetings watching the Duquesne incline cars travel from Grandview Avenue atop Mt. Washington down to Station Square and back up again. Slow, unyielding, constant.
In addition to the view, the Heinz had the benefit of being warm. Probably because of its size, the small conference room was the only one that didn’t have the ambient temperature of a meat locker. Given that the thermostat boxes in the conference rooms were, as far as Sasha could tell, decorative and not functional, this was no small point in the Heinz’s favor.
But, there was no denying, it was a tight work space. Naya and Sasha had fanned out diligence files going back a decade, and the small oval table was covered.
Connelly, who couldn’t help review the files without violating Hemisphere Air’s attorney-client privilege, was relegated to the corner. He sat with his long legs outstretched and resting on a second chair and Sasha’s laptop balanced on his thighs. His task was to query various government databases for information about RAGS.
They’d been working in near silence for about forty minutes when the star-shaped conference phone bleated. Sasha snatched a folder off the top of the thing and pressed the speaker button.
“Conference room.”
Anne at the reception desk said, “I have Bob Metz on the line for you, Sasha. And your lunch order is here. Should I send it in or hold it?”
“Thanks. Naya and our guest will come out to reception and pick it up.”
Sasha looked at Naya and tilted her head toward the door. Connelly couldn’t be in the room while she talked to her client.
“C’mon, agent man,” Naya said to Connelly.
He shot Sasha a look but put her laptop on the chair and followed Naya out the door.
“Go ahead and put him through,” Sasha said.
The connection was terrible. Metz sounded like he was trapped in a snare drum during a rainstorm.
“Sasha?”
“Bob, I’m here. Can you hear me?”
“Barely. Damned monsoon out here.”
She could hear the wind behind him. She looked out the window again. Calm and dry.
“Where are you?”
“At the cabstand at Sea-Tac.”
“You’re in Seattle?”
“Came out here on the first flight this morning. At least the jet stream was calm, gained some time. Miserable.”
She didn’t know if he meant the weather, the flight, or the connection. “What’s going on? Why are you in Seattle?”
“Some sexual harassment case. I don’t know why Viv is so worked up over it, but last night after she talked to Noah, she told me she’d take over the crash and sent me out here. Where is Noah, anyway? He hasn’t returned any of my calls.” Annoyance crept into Metz’s voice.
“Noah’s dead.” She figured she’d just say it.
“Dead?”
“There was a car accident last night. Noah spoke to Viv?”
“I guess so. Viv called me around eight o’clock last night to tell me she needed me to come out here. She said she’d talked to Noah. She agreed we needed to tell the feds about the RAGS link and said she’d take care of it. I can’t believe he’s dead. Was he...driving?” Metz’s tone said everything his words did not.
Sasha just said, “The cause of the accident isn’t known yet.”
“Well ... I’m flummoxed, to be honest.” There was a long pause. “Has Viv been in touch with the partner who’s taking over?”
“Actually, Viv called the firm and asked that I run the defense without another layer of supervision.”
Silence.
“Bob, did I lose you?”
“I’m here. I’m ... I have always liked you, Sasha. You have a great deal of promise, so please know I’m saying this out of genuine concern for your career—you should be careful. You don’t know Vivian.”
Sasha looked out the window, watching the incline’s red wooden cable cars climb and descend the hillside as they’d done for more than a hundred and thirty years, and considered her response.
“I appreciate that, Bob. More than you know. But, I worked very closely with Noah and I think I . . .”
He cut her off. “You’re not Noah. He’s the only outside counsel we have that she hasn’t fired at least once in a snit. And it’s not that she has any loyalty to her former firm, because she doesn’t. If it weren’t for Laura, she would have pulled the business a long time ago.”
“Laura?”
“Laura Peterson. She and Viv went to college together. They were in the same sorority at CMU.”
Hemisphere Air remained a Prescott & Talbott client because one of the partners’ wives had passed a candle around a circle in some bastardized Greek ceremony with the Vice President of Legal Affairs. Sasha thought the old boys’ club that still ran the firm would find that to be an appropriate sort of progress.
“Sasha?”
“Sorry, Bob. I was thinking. I understand, really.”
“Okay.” He sounded unsure. “Have you talked to Viv, then?”
“Not yet. I didn’t realize you weren’t running this on the inside anymore. I guess I should give her a call.”
“Do not call her.” He said each word as if it was its own sentence. “Do not. When she wants to talk to you, she’ll call you.”
“Got it.” Sasha felt her shoulders tensing. “Well, thanks for the call, Bob. Good luck out there.”
“Wait . . .”
“Yes?”
He said nothing. She could hear him breathing, trying to decide how to phrase something.
“Bob?”
“Um. If you can, will you find out if my return flight was modified with the RAGS link?” His voice dropped. “I didn’t want to ask Viv. But, I thought about it all the way across the country today. Waiting for someone to run the plane into a mountain or a skyscraper or to plunge it into a lake.” His voice was shaking. “I can’t do that again.”
Sasha closed her eyes and remembered the helplessness and panic that had flooded her when she’d had the same thought during the approach to Reagan National the night before. She’d held her breath as they’d swooped over the monuments and hadn’t exhaled until the wheels touched tarmac.
“I’ll try, Bob. What’s your flight number?”
“Uh,” she heard him clawing through papers. “1480. The Friday night red eye.”
She wrote it on a legal pad. Circled it. “Okay. Hang in there, Bob.”
“Thank you, Sasha. You, too.”
She pressed the button to end the call.
She sat thinking about Metz’s cross-country flight until Naya and Connelly returned. He carried a tray of assorted wraps and a plastic bowl of pasta salad. She held the door with one hand and a plate of cookies with the other.
“Oh, good, you’re off.” Naya put the cookies down on the window sill and stacked up the files on the end of the table to clear a space for the food.
Sasha picked out a vegetable sandwich in a spinach wrap and filled a glass with water from the pitcher on the credenza. She focused on chewing with the uninjured side of her mouth.
She wasn’t sure what to do about Metz’s news that the NTSB and TSA had known about the RAGS link since the night before.
The TSA and the Federal Air Marshal Service were both pieces of the Homeland Security monolith. The NTSB was independent, but it worked hand-in-hand with the TSA on crash investigations.
If any one of the three agencies knew about the RAGS link, it would have shared the information with the other two right away. Which meant Connelly had known all along and was trying to keep her in the dark, so his outburst when she told him had been staged. Or he really hadn’t known, which meant. . . what? His investigation wasn’t authorized? Someone at the government was in on the plan with Irwin and Mickey Collins?
“Hey, Connelly?” she said. She thought she’d kept her tone neutral, but from the way Naya’s attention shifted from her plate of pasta salad to the air marshal, it looked like she hadn’t.
“Mm-hmm?” he answered around a mouth full of turkey and swiss cheese.
“I know no one likes the rat squad, but why didn’t anyone at DHS tell you about RAGS?”
Naya mouthed, “rat squad?”
Rat squad. Nick Martino, a narcotics detective she’d met in the corridor at the courthouse and dated for a few weeks, had told Sasha he’d turned down a promotion because it would entail a transfer to internal affairs, also known as the rat squad. Nick had explained he preferred to associate with drug dealers and gang bangers than with the scumbags on the rat squad who investigated their fellow officers.
As it turned out, Nick’s strong opinions had extended beyond his views on his workplace. After a heated discussion about the merits of legalizing marijuana that ended with Nick calling her a moron, Sasha volunteered to handle a series of depositions in Wichita and informed him that she’d be gone for at least a month. That was the last she’d seen of the good detective.
She waited for Connelly to swallow and answer.
“Presumably because no one at DHS knows about it.” He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and reached for a cookie.
“According to my client, the NTSB has known since yesterday evening. I thought you said the agencies were getting better at sharing information.”
Connelly chewed his cookie, unperturbed. “They are. You must have bad information.”
Naya looked from Sasha to Connelly and back. She folded her napkin in a square and picked up her plate and empty soda can. “I think I’ll check on the trial team.”
She tossed her plate in the trash and the can in the recycling and hurried out of the room before it got any uglier.
“I doubt that,” Sasha said. “Are you lying to me or are your bosses lying to you? Which is it?”
“Maybe your client is lying.”
“Why would anyone at Hemisphere Air lie to me? They can tell me anything, remember? Attorney-client privilege.”
“Which you violated by telling me about RAGS, remember? Maybe they thought if you believed the government already knew, you’d back off. They don’t know you told me.”
They glared at each other. She was pretty sure he hadn’t lied to her. Sasha wasn’t quite the mind reader Naya was, but she’d questioned enough witnesses to have a sense for when she was being lied to. Connelly was far too calm.
“It’s possible. Unlikely, but possible,” she conceded. “But, if they did tell the NTSB and someone is sitting on it, we have a big problem.”
“Yes, we do,” he agreed.
“That means Irwin or Collins has help from inside, right?”
“It would have to be someone pretty high up the food chain, though. What do you know about Collins?”
“Not much. He’s a very successful plaintiff’s attorney. Used to be married to a federal judge. Drives an Aston Martin. He’s a local kid made good. I think he went to Carnegie Mellon for undergrad and Pitt for law school.”
Connelly looked blank. “I don’t know, Sasha. Let’s table it for now. You need to somehow find the modified planes in that mountain,” he said, pointing to the piles of binders and folders that Naya had gotten out file storage, “and I have my own fruitless search to finish.” He tossed his plate in the trash and picked up the laptop.
Sasha knew he was right. Identifying the modified planes was her first priority. The second priority was to find the second guy. Dealing with Collins, Irwin, and their goons was a distant third at this point.
She opened a closing binder. She and Naya had agreed the best course was to review all the deal documents they had on hand for Hemisphere Air. It was the likeliest place to find something out of place.
Whenever a company sold or bought another company or expensive assets (like airplanes), merged, or entered into any sizeable investment arrangement (stock purchase or offering, venture capital deal, private placement, or commercial loan), the zombie hordes otherwise known as junior corporate associates had the thankless task of reviewing all the underlying documents and drafting a diligence memo. It was a tedious, soul-crushing, and vital job.
Based on the due diligence review and resulting memo, the client would decide whether to go forward with a transaction, how much to pay, and which assets or liabilities to include or exclude.
From Sasha’s vantage point, a due diligence review was just about the only task that made a privilege review look pleasant. She’d also heard from friends that preparing a Hart-Scott-Rodino filing to get antitrust clearance was pretty much hell on earth. But, for her money, nothing could be worse than a diligence review.
In a due diligence review, if the associate did her job properly, there was no recognition, no credit, no bonus. If she missed the smallest detail, the ramifications could be huge. Lawsuits, firings, delisting from the stock exchange. As far as Sasha was concerned, it explained why corporate associates tended to be anal, short-tempered, and prone to stomach ulcers.
The only time she had broken her no lawyers dating rule had been to date a corporate associate. It went against her better judgment, but her law school roommate had vouched for the guy. When she called it quits, Joseph had presented her with an itemized schedule of expenses he’d incurred in the course of their three dates and a suggested formula to divvy up the costs based on their respective incomes, who had suggested each date activity, and who he determined had enjoyed it more. Her old roommate had laughed so hard when Sasha showed her the schedule that she’d snorted beer through her nose. She picked up the tab that night, too.
Sasha was certain if evidence existed to show which planes had been modified, some dead-eyed corporate associate had found it.