“But court will close—”
“Did I mention it’s my anniversary? I’d really like to help you out, but compared to the fate of the world, my wife wins out.”
Caroline stopped pacing. The editor was backing out. She needed to stop him.
Eddie poked his head into her office. “Motion’s done,” he said.
Caroline held up a hand to quiet Eddie.
“You don’t have to go back to your office, Mr. Halsgreth,” she said into the phone. “Just read the declaration I’ve texted to you. If it’s accurate, sign your name on a napkin. Take a photo of your signature with your phone and e-mail it back to me at [email protected].”
Across from Caroline, Eddie raised a curious eyebrow, but she ignored him.
The editor huffed on the line but didn’t hang up.
“All right, I’ve read the declaration and signed the napkin,” the editor said. “I’m sending you the picture of my signature now.”
Caroline watched the corner of her screen, waiting. After a half dozen interminably long seconds, the editor’s e-mail appeared.
“Got it,” she said. “Do I have your authorization to attach this signature to this declaration?”
“Yes, yes,” Darren said, impatience creeping back in his voice.
“Thank you. Please enjoy your lunch. Sorry for the interruption. Happy anniversary.”
Caroline hung up and opened the editor’s e-mail. A photograph of a black signature on a white napkin filled her screen. Little smudges of tomato sauce marred the edges of the fabric, but the signature was clean. Good.
Blocking out the tomato sauce stains and shadows, Caroline pulled a tight square around the black ink, cropping the image. Then she captured the signature and saved it as a JPEG.
“What are you doing?” Eddie asked.
She waved him away. “I need to concentrate.”
Her fingers flew across the keys as she loaded the declaration into a template, then grabbed the signature JPEG and merged the documents.
“Almost there,” she murmured, looking at the now-complete declaration glowing on the screen.
“Wow,” Eddie said behind her.
Caroline glanced back at him. Seeing the appreciation in his eyes, she warmed.
“We’ve got fifteen minutes to upload the article, the declaration, and the motion onto the court’s system,” she said. “This is going to be tight. Let’s hope the courts have fast servers.”
“I’ll load the court’s e-filing page so we can start the upload,” Eddie said, hurrying from Caroline’s office.
Suddenly, something horrible occurred to Caroline.
She leaped up from her desk and gripped the frame of her office door, catapulting herself down the hall after Eddie.
“Don’t file anything yet!” she called after him as she ran the direction he’d gone.
She burst into his office to find him with his fingers poised over the keyboard.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“We need a pro hac vice application. I can’t submit the article to the New York court without one, and Louis is out of the office.”
Grabbing Eddie’s phone, she dialed Deena’s extension. Maybe the New York associate could just file the article herself. Or maybe she could sign a pro hac vice application.
No one answered.
Time for plan B.
Pulling up the caption page of the Daubert brief, Caroline found Anton Callisto’s phone number and dialed it as fast as her fingers could move.
Fortunately, Anton answered her call.
“Yeah, sure, send it over,” he said curtly once she’d explained what she needed from him.
Hitting “Hold,” Caroline turned to Eddie, who moved off his chair, making room for her to take over.
“I’m going to work up the pro hac application here. Go on the state bar website and download a Certificate of Good Standing for me,” she said. “Use my desktop.”
“I’m on it,” Eddie said and jogged down the hall to Caroline’s office.
With a couple dozen keystrokes, Caroline opened the document she needed and made the necessary modifications. Then she took the phone line off “Hold.”
“Mr. Callisto, I’ve duplicated the pro hac vice application that I prepared for Louis and put my name into it.” She hit “Send.” “Substantively, it’s identical to the one you signed for Louis so that we could file our Daubert brief.” She paused. “You should have it now.”
“Signed,” Anton said so quickly that it was clear he hadn’t even looked at it. “PDF version of my signature page coming your way now. Good luck.”
“Thanks,” Caroline said, hanging up just as the signed application appeared in her in-box.
At the same moment, Eddie appeared back at the doorway of the office.
“Your Certificate of Good Standing is on the system now. You just have to upload it with the pro hac application,” he said.
“Good,” Caroline said. “I’ve got the signed application ready to go, too.”
With her fingers flying across the keyboard, Caroline brought up the district court’s e-filing page. While she waited for it to load, she met Eddie’s dark eyes.
“Once we file the pro hac vice application and Certificate of Good Standing, we can file the declaration and then the article,” she said. “We’ve got to do it in that order . . .”
Caroline stopped talking as the court’s e-filing page appeared.
A long list of detailed instructions disappeared down to the bottom of the screen. The Southern District of New York had imposed dozens of rules about how to perform an e-filing. The document had to be properly paginated and properly named. Exhibits had to be loaded separately, also named appropriately, and then linked in yet another field to the documents filed concurrently with them. And then everything had to be uploaded to one site, then disseminated to the service list, which also had to be uploaded separately.
Caroline froze. She had hacked the servers of major corporations yet couldn’t even begin to decipher the court’s e-filing protocol.
Before she could give voice to her distress, Eddie turned and ran from the office.
Caroline stared dumbfounded at the door. What a moment for him to bail.
Seconds later, he returned. Behind him, the bright-red hair of Silvia followed.
Without speaking, Caroline got out of Silvia’s way.
The assistant sat down, and, chewing gum in time to her finger strokes on the keyboard, she began uploading the pro hac vice application and Certificate of Good Standing. She named the document, placed it in the queue, and hit “Load.”
The e-filing server began to slowly absorb the first batch of materials. A white bar on the computer’s monitor showed the speed of the upload. It was slow. Possibly too slow.
Caroline checked the time. They had seven minutes to upload the pro hac vice application, the editor’s declaration, the seventeen-page article, and all 159 pages of backup data.
FILED, the screen read.
Even though the words were flat, unemotional text hovering on a page, Caroline thrilled at the sight of them. They were one step closer.
Without pause, Silvia moved on to the declaration. Named, formatted, and lined up in the queue, it too began the slow journey from Hale Stern’s computers to the server of the Southern District of New York.
Again, the bar on the screen inched along as the document uploaded, and Caroline’s awareness distilled down to the tiny movements of the pixels, willing them to move just a little bit faster.
She glanced at the clock. Five minutes left.
FILED, the court’s website confirmed.
“I’m going to get the data file set up first,” Silvia said. “It’s going to take time to upload. I’ll prep the article separately at the same time.”
“Whatever you think is best,” Caroline said. She wasn’t going to micromanage how her assistant did her job. Silvia seemed quite capable. No surprise that she’d survived as Louis’s assis
tant for so many years, even with grooming habits that the senior partner no doubt disapproved of. The woman was plenty competent.
Watching the upload of the backup data caused Caroline almost physical pain. She squirmed with impatience as the white bar crept at glacial speed. She glanced at the clock. They had two minutes. Two minutes before all of their efforts were for nothing. Two minutes before the gates came crashing down on Dr. Heller’s life’s work. Before the doors of the court slammed shut to litigants across the country.
As soon as the court’s website confirmed acceptance of the backup data, Silvia began the upload of the Heller article. The single object of Caroline’s quest. The singular achievement of her short legal career. And they had one minute, thirty-two seconds to load it.
The white bar began its slow progress across the screen. Caroline’s eyes kept moving back and forth between the bar and the time on Eddie’s clock. They’d come so far. And now they sat on the launch pad, ready to blast off into space or ready to explode.
Fifty-nine seconds left.
Forty-three seconds left.
Unable to watch, Caroline stepped outside Eddie’s office. The graceful hallways and the light- wood credenzas were discordant with the gnawing desperation coursing through Caroline’s gut. They had to be down to fifteen seconds by now. Maybe less.
She walked back into Eddie’s office just as the notice came onto the screen.
“Filed,” Silvia said.
“We did it!” Caroline shouted, throwing her arms around Silvia’s neck.
“You’re welcome.” Silvia smiled, gently extricating herself from Caroline’s embrace.
She finally knew what assistants did. They saved your hide.
“That was too close.” Caroline’s hands curled around a cup of tea. Decaffeinated because she was sure her nerves couldn’t handle any more stimulation without her head exploding. “I definitely need to get Silvia something for Christmas.”
“She earned a fruit basket for sure,” Eddie said. He sat across from Caroline in her guest chair, one foot propped up on the edge of her desk.
“Or a new car,” Caroline said. She was only half joking. “I think Louis is going to get her one if I don’t.” With a swell of warmth, Caroline recalled her boss’s gratitude and joy upon learning that they’d managed to file the missing article in time. He’d promised her a celebratory lunch once the Daubert hearing was behind them. A hearing he now insisted she attend with him.
“Your mad skills came in handy, too. You said your dad taught you how to do that stuff? That’s a very cool dad you’ve got there,” Eddie drawled.
Caroline stayed silent. But with Eddie’s warm eyes looking back at her, she found she wanted to tell the story. It was a story she’d told almost no one.
“My dad and I didn’t hang out a lot when I was a kid,” she began. “He was at work pretty much all the time. The one thing we shared, though, was a love of technology. We liked to do stuff together. We used to like to get into places where we . . . weren’t supposed to be.”
She paused to gauge Eddie’s reaction. He looked steadily back at her, with no judgment in his eyes. So she took a breath and went on. “We had fun hacking together . . . until the day the police showed up.”
She remembered the knock at the door. They hadn’t been expecting anyone that night, so she’d opened the door expecting to find Jehovah’s Witnesses. Instead, she found two officers with grim faces and handcuffs.
“What happened?” Eddie asked.
“We’d been hacking a hospital. Just for fun. We weren’t going to steal any information or anything. We just wanted to see if we could get in. Hospital firewalls are especially hard to hack, because they have to protect all of that personal information for their patients.”
“So it was a worthy challenge,” Eddie surmised. His voice still held no judgment.
Caroline nodded. “We hadn’t gotten past the firewall when my dad had to go to work. But I kept at it. I wanted to impress him. I found a weakness in the hospital’s firewall and opened a port. I was going to show my dad later . . . when he got home. The problem was, later that day, cyberthieves used that port to breach the hospital’s security.”
“Did they get patient information?” Eddie asked.
Caroline swallowed, a sense of shame washing over her.
“No, but they grabbed information about everyone on the staff of the hospital. They also got the personal information of every juvenile dependent of every staff member. Social Security numbers and everything.” Caroline stopped talking. For the rest of their lives, those children were going to have to worry about identity theft, about fraudsters setting up fake bank accounts or terrorists using their identities to get passports. And there was nothing she could do to fix it.
“Did you get arrested?” Eddie asked.
“My dad did. The police traced the hack back to our computer. It was my fault, too, of course. But my dad didn’t want to get his little girl in trouble. So he said it was all him.” Caroline looked down. Her guilt was still fresh, easily touched. That she’d breached the firewall to impress her dad just made the whole thing so much more desperate.
“It was a nightmare,” she continued. “This thing we’d been doing together that seemed so harmless . . . it almost cost him his life, really. Even after he got probation instead of jail, I was scared. We never hacked again.”
Caroline remembered the invisible barrier that had seemed to spring up around the study. As if by silent agreement, they never entered the room again. And they never spoke of it.
“And yet, you became a software engineer,” Eddie said.
“It was the natural thing for me to do,” she said. “But I didn’t like software engineering.”
“Really?” Eddie’s tone held disbelief.
“I found it boring yet stressful.”
Eddie raised a curious eyebrow.
“It’s hard to explain. After my dad got busted, tech became like . . . kryptonite to me. But then, once I’d pushed past the fear and gotten back into the game, the stuff I was doing as a software engineer wasn’t interesting. Coding someone else’s designs wasn’t all that challenging or creative. But when I’d think about what was exciting and creative, it was the stuff that got me into trouble, and the whole thing would start again . . .”
Caroline trailed off.
“But it all turned out okay for your dad, right?” Eddie prodded.
“It could have been worse,” Caroline allowed. “He was able to prove he wasn’t working with the cyberthieves—that it was just a fluke that we’d ended up helping them.”
“That was lucky that the police believed him.”
“It wasn’t luck. It was a good lawyer.” Caroline sent a spark of gratitude toward her father’s criminal defense attorney. With his patchy beard and ill-fitting suit, he hadn’t looked like he’d be able to do anything to prevent the weight of the law from crushing Caroline’s family. But he had. He’d known exactly which levers to pull to save William Auden from jail. Watching the attorney work, Caroline had realized that law wasn’t so different from tech. Both followed a set of rules that, once mastered, opened infinite possibilities, depending on the user.
“When my dad finished his probation, he became a cybersecurity consultant,” Caroline continued. “He’s still one, except now he lives back east with his new wife.”
“Why’d you stay with software engineering for so long if you didn’t like it?” Eddie asked.
“My dad left my mom a couple years after the hacking incident. His departure didn’t have anything to do with it—their marriage had its . . . issues. But he pretty much vanished from my life when he moved out. He started dating Lily, the woman he eventually married. When they got together, he got wrapped up with her . . . you know how that goes.”
Eddie nodded his understanding.
“In a way, software engineering was my way of trying to connect with him.” Caroline paused, remembering the distant conversations she’d shared w
ith her dad about her work at the start-up. Those stilted interactions were better than nothing, she’d told herself at the time. Looking back, she wasn’t sure. Working in technology had done nothing to dissipate the awkwardness that had settled between them.
“When my dad moved back east with Lily, I was done trying to connect with him. I felt like I could finally—”
“—do whatever you wanted,” Eddie finished for her. “It was also a way of giving your dad the middle finger for bailing on you, right?”
There was truth in his words, Caroline admitted silently to herself.
“I understand why my parents split up,” she said, “but my dad didn’t have to bail on me, too. When he moved back east, I gave up. I stopped trying to connect.”
“What about now?” Eddie asked. “Are you close with your dad?”
“No, and I don’t think we’ll ever be again. He calls me sometimes, but I just can’t talk to him. Not about anything real, anyway. It’s like he wants forgiveness for leaving. Absolution.”
Eddie studied Caroline’s face quietly for a long moment.
“I’m sure he misses you,” Eddie said finally. “And if you don’t mind me being honest, it sounds to me like you miss him, too.”
“Maybe,” Caroline allowed.
Shaking off the heaviness in the room, Caroline smiled.
“What about you? What’s your story?” She glanced at his expensive watch and gold cuff links. “Charmed career? Biggest struggle was deciding between the BMW and the Porsche?”
Caroline meant it as a joke, but Eddie’s eyes sparked with sudden emotion.
“You have no idea,” he said, his voice dropping to a lower register.
“I’m sorry,” Caroline said, alarmed by the abrupt change in mood.
“No, I’m sorry,” Eddie said. “My family’s from a piss-poor town outside Oaxaca.”
“But you were born here?”
“Yeah, my mama came across the border when she was pregnant with me. Don’t ask me how. She cleaned hotel rooms for pennies until she had me. Then she left me with her older brother and went back home. Uncle Antonio gave me a place to live, but he made it clear he had enough kids of his own to take care of.” Eddie shook his head. “No one’s ever given me a thing. I’ve had to make my own breaks—which wasn’t too easy when you’re the smarty-pants kid with glasses in a rough border town.”
Doubt (Caroline Auden Book 1) Page 15