by Reece Hirsch
Even though Claire was usually more than capable of looking out for herself, a depressed woman drinking alone in a bar like Lefty’s was a recipe for disaster. He checked his watch. Eleven thirty P.M. She’d probably already been hit on at least five times by now.
But Will also had more self-serving reasons for rushing to offer solace to Claire. Her discovery of Jupiter’s links with the NSA was just the kind of information that, if leaked to the press, might bring the merger process to a halt. If Grogan was working with the Russians and had gone to the trouble of having Claire fired, then it was also possible that Claire knew something that might help him penetrate the conspiracy.
Will took a taxi to Lefty’s, a marina district bar frequented by boisterous ex-fraternity brothers in their midtwenties. Claire’s choice of venue was ill-advised because of the predatory male clientele, but he could understand the appeal. Everyone was so intent on having a good time, and loudly broadcasting that fact, that it was difficult to think, much less brood.
Will found Claire seated at the corner of the bar, shielded on one side by the wait stand, leaving her with only one border to defend. She was wearing jeans and a white cotton shirt open at the collar. On the stool next to Claire was a callow young man with short black hair wearing a Radiohead T-shirt. He was glancing up from his beer at regular intervals, trying to catch Claire’s eye to restart a failed conversation. Claire was leaning slightly forward over her martini glass, eyes determinedly fixed on the television set above the bar, which was tuned to a Giants game.
Will couldn’t really blame the poor bastard. If they hadn’t been co-workers, Will might have approached Claire in a bar. When they first began working together, he had allowed himself to think about what it would be like to go out with her, even though that was a practical impossibility because she was a subordinate. Largely to console himself, he had concluded that Claire was just a little too intense for him. Like living in a house next to a power line, he decided that long-term exposure to Claire would probably not be good for him, although he couldn’t pinpoint exactly why that was so.
Will tapped Claire on the shoulder, and she turned slowly, braced to repel another onslaught. When she saw that it was Will, her defenses went down and she managed a small, taut smile.
“Hi, Will. Thanks for coming.”
“I couldn’t let you drink alone. Not tonight.”
The guy on the next stool cast a sullen glance at Will and returned to his beer.
“What happened today really sucks.” Will didn’t want to say fired because he didn’t want their neighbor, who was clearly listening in, to know the story.
“It’s okay to say it, Will,” Claire said, taking a long sip of her martini. “I was fired. And it’s going to be okay. Not tonight, but it will be.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that.”
Giving up, Radiohead slapped some bills on the bar and vacated the stool. Will slipped in beside Claire and ordered a beer.
“So do you want to talk about it? Or just drink?”
In response, Claire raised her martini glass to him.
They sat for a while, drinking and watching the Giants game, each lost in their thoughts. Claire finally broke the silence. “That conversation from this afternoon just keeps playing on a loop in my head.”
“So who gave you the news?”
“Teflon Don. The bastard.”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, you’re a partner now, you’re not supposed to be agreeing with me.”
“He’s a dick.”
“I’ll bet you stuck up for me in that partners’ meeting, didn’t you?”
Will dismissed the question with a wave of his hand.
“You did, didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t the only one,” he lied.
Claire squinted at him shrewdly. “See, now I think you’re lying.”
With her instincts for cross-examination, she should have been a litigator, he thought.
“I understand that you don’t want to talk about what happened in the meeting. That’s okay. They’re probably afraid I’m going to file a gender discrimination suit or something.”
Will wondered if she might actually file a lawsuit. He thought of a time last week when he had touched Claire on the shoulder to get her attention as she was reviewing documents at Jupiter’s offices. Were there the stirrings of a sexual harassment lawsuit in the startled look she gave him as she looked up from her papers?
With an effort, Will resisted the lawyer’s instinct to prepare for every situation as potentially adversarial. Claire twisted her feet under the rungs of the bar stool like a kid, bumping her boots on the bottom rung and concentrating on her martini, clearly waiting for Will to offer some words of comfort.
“You’re going to find another great job,” he said. “In today’s market, hardly anyone spends their entire career at one firm. Everyone hits a few bumps in the road.”
“Yeah, but not everyone keeps going. And this feels more like a wall.”
“Are you thinking about leaving the law?”
“I’m thinking about just about everything tonight.”
“Look, you’re a good attorney. You’re going to have a great career. Just hang in there.”
“You know you’re not supposed to be telling me stuff like that, that I’m a good attorney. It muddies the record when someone’s getting terminated for cause.”
“I’m here tonight as your friend. Nothing else.”
“I’m glad. ’Cause what I need tonight is a friend.”
They sat in silence for a moment, and then she added, “I really am trying to get some perspective on this. I’ve been thinking a lot about Ben Fisher. Now I know we don’t know what really happened with him, but my guess is that he was someone who let his job become this all-consuming thing in his life. I’ve certainly been that way, but I want to change. That sounds very twelve-step of me, doesn’t it?”
“It sounds healthy,” Will said.
“I think that, in a way, lawyers at firms like Reynolds almost have to be obsessed. I mean, if you’re going to devote twenty-two hundred hours per year to a job—and that’s just the billable hours—well, you can’t turn your life over like that without convincing yourself that it’s worth the effort. You have to buy in. Which means that you look absolutely crazed to anyone who’s outside that environment.”
“Did you know Ben very well?” Will asked.
“I knew he was working on the Jupiter deal, but I never dealt with him directly. He didn’t seem to socialize much. How about you?”
“We made small talk. The last time I saw him we were at the gym. It was the evening before he died. I remember we were running on treadmills next to each other. It got a little competitive.”
“What was the last thing he said to you?”
“Nothing much. He’d lost the key to his gym locker and asked if I’d seen it. That was it.”
On the television set above the bar, a Giants player launched a home run over the right field wall into McCovey Cove, drawing applause and hooting from the crowd. They both smiled a bit as they surveyed the raucous scene. Then, as Claire took another sip of her drink, he could almost pinpoint the instant when her eyes lost focus and she returned to replaying her meeting with Don.
Will nudged her with his elbow. “C’mon. Stop thinking about it.”
“I just can’t decide whether I’m glad this happened or not. I’ve worked really hard to become a lawyer, and I feel like I have to follow through now. Particularly with the student loans I’ve got. But part of me, and maybe it’s just a total rationalization, says that this is for the best. A last chance to do whatever it is that I’m really supposed to be doing.”
“If you don’t stick with the law, what would you do?”
“You know, I feel like I should be able to answer that question, but I have no idea. I know that I want to stop becoming something and start being something. You know what I mean?”
“I think so. Yeah.”
/> “It just seems like no one grows up anymore. We’re always on our way to becoming something else, and we never quite get there. High school, college, law school, associate, non-equity partner. You can get to be thirty-five or forty years old without ever feeling like you’ve graduated.”
“A legal career is what happens to smart people who don’t know what to do with their lives. And once you start down that road, it’s hard to walk away.”
“Right. The money’s too good. But you can always spot the ones who are really into it. Like you.”
“You think so? Believe me, I never thought I was going to end up as a lawyer.”
“Well, it suits you, anyway.”
“I guess so. Probably because I don’t have any other talents to distract me. But listen, about those student loans. The first thing you need to do is get a deferral on payments for a few months. They’ll give you that if you’re out of work.”
“Thanks. I really appreciate that, but I’d rather not deal with reality right now. Maybe tomorrow. Tonight, it’s martooni time.”
Claire set down her glass and flagged down the bartender.
“You sure that’s a good idea?” Will asked. “You’re okay, right?”
“Absolutely. This is the most okay I’ve been all day. One more drink and I will be totally okay.”
“Maybe it would be best to call it a night.”
“No way. If there’s one time when a person is entitled to get sloppy drunk, it’s the night they get fired.” She held up her martini glass and let the last drops, oily with vermouth, slide onto her tongue. “It’s just hitting me a little harder than I thought.”
The waiter brought another round of drinks. They leaned together to be heard over the noise of the crowd.
“After a while, you’re going to reach a point and suddenly it won’t bother you anymore,” Will said. “It’ll be just like you turned a corner.”
“I know you’re probably right. But not everyone is as well adjusted as you. You may find this hard to believe, Will, but some people think I’m a little high-strung.” Claire was self-aware enough to know how the other associates perceived her, so this was meant to be a joke, but she seemed unable to add the smile that might have put it over.
“Actually, there’s something else that we need to talk about.” She removed a couple of folded sheets of paper from the pocket of her jeans and smoothed them out on the bar.
“What’s this?” Will said as he examined the papers.
“The minutes of a Jupiter board meeting. It wasn’t included in the corporate minutes book.” She pointed to a paragraph halfway down the page. “See this? This is what I was telling you about. Jupiter is submitting reports to the NSA about something called the Clipper Chip.”
“You’re not supposed to bring stuff out of the due diligence room. Especially after you’ve been fired from the firm. And how did you get this, anyway, if it wasn’t in the due diligence materials?”
“I did a little due diligence of my own, poked around in a few file cabinets.”
“This just gets better and better.”
“I’ve been talking to my old boss at EPIC, and I think I know what’s going on—”
“Wait a minute. You mean that you’re discussing confidential trade secrets of a client with a consumer privacy rights organization? Are you insane?”
“This is something that needs to be public. Just listen to me for a minute. Have you ever heard of the Clipper Chip?”
“No,” Will said. Giving in to his curiosity, he added, “What’s that?”
“In 1993, President Clinton announced that the NSA had developed a new superstrong form of encryption, based on an algorithm called Skipjack. The program began development under the first Bush administration. Skipjack was going to be made available to the public and would probably have become the predominant encryption method in the U.S. But there was a catch.”
“And I’m guessing that would be the Clipper Chip?”
“Exactly. Every device that used the encryption method was going to contain a tamperproof computer chip, which would allow law enforcement authorities to decrypt the data.”
“So the chip generated some sort of key?”
“Right. The key was going to be split into two parts. Two separate government or private entities would act as custodians of the key. The custodians would provide law enforcement with the two parts of the key only if a court order had been obtained or if the requirements of federal electronic surveillance laws had been satisfied.”
“So what became of this brilliant plan?”
“Groups like EPIC raised privacy concerns in congressional hearings, and several major tech companies finally joined in, sensing that this was not going to be popular with their customers. The Clipper Chip was perceived as being too Big Brotherish, and the plan was abandoned.”
“But you think that it was never really abandoned.”
“I think the reason that Jupiter has been so successful is because the NSA gave them the Skipjack encryption algorithm. In return, the NSA must have required Jupiter to include the Clipper Chip in the installation of devices that used their encryption.”
“Wouldn’t the manufacturers of the telephones and computers be able to tell that the chip was there?”
“Not necessarily. It could have been baked into the hardware supplied by Jupiter for installation of the encryption application.”
“So each computer using Jupiter’s encryption program generates a secret key, a back door, and Jupiter supplies those keys to the NSA?”
“That must be how it works. The list of chip keys would provide access to all devices using Clipper encryption.”
“Then an enormous amount of damage could be done if those keys fell into the wrong hands.”
Claire took a large gulp of her martini. “Some would say that it already is in the wrong hands.”
Claire continued. “From the NSA’s point of view, doing it this way is probably much more effective in fighting terrorism. Under the original Clipper Chip program, the public would have known that law enforcement could access their encrypted communications. So terrorists would have been pretty stupid to use those encryption products. Now, no one knows they’re being spied on, including the general public.”
Will took a sip of his drink, trying to absorb the full import of what he had just heard. If Claire was right, and he didn’t doubt that she was, then the Jupiter-NSA connection would be a major national scandal if it became public. It was the kind of story that would make the front page of the New York Times, lead to congressional hearings, and damage or ruin major companies like Jupiter and Pearl. For Will, it was also something he could use to stop the Jupiter merger. Of course, such a move would be grossly unethical and would damage his client’s interests, but it gave Will the sense for the first time in days that he had some degree of control over his fate.
Will resolved to start by bringing the due diligence discovery to Richard Grogan in his capacity as co-chair of the corporate department. That was the proper chain of command for him to follow as a partner in the firm, and it might also lead to the scuttling of the Jupiter-Pearl merger. If the disclosure to Grogan did not achieve the desired result, Will could always leak it to the press anonymously, which would surely throw a monkey wrench into the transaction.
“What are you going to do with this?” Will asked, returning the papers to Claire. “You know this is mostly just speculation.”
“Yeah, but I just know it’s true—and I think you do, too.” Claire placed the papers in her purse. “I don’t know yet what I’m going to do with it. Probably give it to EPIC. I’m in no state of mind to decide. It’s been a tough day.”
Will recognized that the Russians must never know about the existence of the list of the Clipper Chip keys. Valter had already asked him to think about whether he could obtain a copy of Jupiter’s encryption algorithm. If the mafiya, or their friend Aashif, ever got their hands on the encryption keys, they would have the ability to
divert electronic funds transfers, commit identity theft, and violate national security on a scale that was difficult to imagine. Finally, Will offered, “How about if I get you a taxi ride home?”
“You know, maybe that’s a good idea.”
Claire was a little wobbly as they crossed to the door, so Will offered his arm and she took it.
After hailing a cab outside the bar, Will climbed in behind Claire. “I’m just going to see you home. It’s on my way, anyway.”
The taxi stopped at a new, redbrick apartment building in Jackson Square. Will asked the cabbie to wait and walked Claire to her doorstep.
When they reached the front door, Claire leaned against him as she searched her purse for the cardkey to the lobby. When she found the key, she slipped it into the front pocket of her jeans and turned her face up to his.
“Thanks for bringing me home,” she said. Claire leaned up to give him what he expected to be a chaste kiss on the cheek.
Claire’s aim changed, however, and she kissed Will full on the mouth, lips apart. He’d had just enough to drink to drop his workplace inhibitions. They were finally interrupted when the lobby door swung open as a pizza delivery boy with an acne-scarred complexion left the building, pizza box warmer folded under his armpit.
“Was that okay?” Claire asked. “Because there were times when we were working together on the Jupiter deal that I thought maybe you wanted to kiss me. Maybe that was just me.”
“No. It wasn’t just you.” Will knew the firm’s general counsel would have hated to hear him say this.
“Would you like to come upstairs?”
“I can’t. I’m sorry, Claire.”
She pulled back from the embrace. “That’s okay. Really. I guess now my day is finally complete.”