Authors: Steven Gore
T
he big man is pissed,” the caller said, in a voice both sarcastic and frustrated.
“I don't give a rat's ass,” the Texan answered. “I did the best I could in the time I had. There was no way I could haul out every damn computer in the place. He had a couple in his office, one in his bedroom, and a server somewhere in the house I couldn't even find.”
“He wants you to go back in.”
“There's nothing there.”
“What do you mean, there's nothing there?”
“Just what I said. A rental van showed up a few hours later. A couple of guys cleaned out the place and took it all to Graham Gage's office.”
“Damn.”
“I made some calls. Palmer was the brother-in-law of a guy who works for Gage. Got the job through his sister.”
“Go get it. Take somebody with you this time.”
“What? You said he wanted me to do it alone. If he'd let me take somebody in the first place we wouldn't be in this mess.”
The man laughed. “Let's say our leader has engaged in a soul-searching reconsideration.”
“What is it about these suits? They think it's just a little harmless chess game, until something goes sour and they panic like schoolgirls in a high wind, their little dresses flapping up in their faces.”
“What'll I tell him?”
“Tell him two people, twice as much moneyâin cash and in advance.”
“Where?”
“Same place.”
“Leave a hundred grand in a paper bag?”
“I'll be watching. Nobody's walking away with my money.”
“And keep an eye on Gage. If he gets too far into this thing, we'll need to do some damage control.”
T
hanks for coming over.”
Gage settled into a wingback chair across from Judge Brandon Meyer in his eighteenth floor chambers in the Federal Building. In the orange glow of the setting September sun, the judge's angular features and dark eyes made him seem lizardlike as he sat perched behind the expanse of his desk.
Looking past Meyer, Gage spotted a worn paperback on the credenza, its spine shadowed under the day's legal newspaper. He smiled to himself when he saw that it was
Longarm: Frontier Justice
, one of a series popular among judges who needed to excite themselves with fictional gunslinging before striding onto the bench, and was handed off from judge to judge as furtively as child pornography or balloons of cocaine.
“How many people do you have over there now?” Meyer asked.
“Twenty, plus support staff.”
Gage watched Meyer adopt a nostalgic expression.
“I remember when it was just you, and Faith helping out with the books. Now you've got people working on cases all over the world.”
“And I remember when you were prosecuting petty thefts and DUIs at the Hall of Justice. Now international corporations fight their battles in your courtroom.”
Meyer forced a sigh. “Seems like a generation ago.”
“It was.”
Meyer had been a San Francisco County prosecutor, and then a white-collar defense attorney whose strengths were stealth and strategy, not knowledge of the law, and whose temperament, Gage had recognized from the beginning, would never transition from the mercenary to the judicial. Even a decade later, no one in the Federal Building viewed his appointment to the bench as anything more than his brother's reward for funneling money to swing-state Republicans.
“Landon appreciated your work on his last campaign,” Meyer said.
“I didn't work on his campaign.”
Meyer drew back. “He told me he hired you to find a mole on his staff who was sabotaging his computer network.”
“I didn't work on the campaign. I only made sure he could continue campaigning. There's a difference.”
Meyer made a weak effort to suppress a smirk, and then said, “A believer in the purity of the process.”
Gage felt a wave of revulsion. Justice depended on that kind of belief and a commitment to act on it, and a judge should respect the process more than anyoneâbut he knew an argument with Meyer would be futile, so he just said:
“Something like that.”
Meyer shrugged. “I never understood your relationship with my brother. He'd spend fifty-one weeks a year talking policy, but come back from a week fishing with you up at your cabin thinking he was some kind of political philosopher instead of a politician.”
“It was just him trying out some ideas,” Gage said, “not me imposing any on him, and it was also a long time ago.”
“Well, it stuck.” Meyer smirked, again. “You know what he took to read on the flight to the trade meeting in Beijing last month?”
“I've hardly talked to him in years, and then only about campaignâ”
“Thomas Hobbes and St. Augustine.” Meyer pulled on the edge of the desk to tilt his chair forward, then pushed himself to his feet, his face screwed up in preparation for the snide follow-through. “As though the solution to the debt crisis can be found in the goddamn
Leviathan
or in the pathetic musings of a sexual compulsive. He would've been better off with Calvin and Hobbes instead of Hobbes and Augustine.”
Meyer scowled and scratched the back of his neck as though chagrined at having taken a wrong turn into an intellectual cul-de-sac.
“You want something to drink?” Meyer asked.
“No, thanks.”
“You mind?”
Gage shook his head.
Meyer walked over to the bookcase on the opposite wall, then poured two fingers of Scotch into a highball glass. He took a sip as he returned to his chair.
“Socorro told me you're wrapping up Charlie's practice,” Meyer said.
“There's not much left.”
“Why you?”
“His brother-in-law works for me, Hector McBride.”
“The giant who was with the DEA?”
“Same one. Socorro and Faith were friends as undergrads at Berkeley.”
“I heard McBride turned down a promotion and resigned on the same day.” Meyer smiled. It seemed almost genuine. “Of course, I never understood in the first place how somebody as huge as Mount Rushmore could do undercover work. Why'd he leave?”
“He figured out the drug war was just a succession of losing battles. He joined the army after 9/11 and went off to Afghanistan, then came to work for me.” Gage tilted his head toward Meyer's courtroom. “I heard you're done with criminal cases, too.”
Meyer assumed a sympathetic pose. “I never relished sentencing poor Mexican kids to ten or twenty years for trying to feed their families by packing a few kilos of cocaine across the desert, so I grabbed at the chance to get out.”
He completed his lie with a smile so insincere it almost made Gage wince.
Veteran judges like Meyer referred to handing out enormous sentences as “pulling the trigger,” but it didn't really count unless the judge opened fire on a defendant who really didn't deserve it, like the desperate and the destitute, and Gage knew Brandon Meyer always charged into his courtroom with his safety off.
“Why'd the other judges let you off the hook?” Gage asked.
“I'm not, completely. I still have to deal with white-collar crime, mostly high-tech, but the bulk of my calendar is civil.” Meyer lowered his voice as though he might be heard in the hallway. “You know a lot of the judges around here. They don't like to work too hard, and those big civil firm lawyers file lots of motions.”
Meyer was as smooth and as deceptive as a chameleon. He and Gage both knew he didn't read briefs, or at least nothing he ever did in court suggested he had. He relied on law clerks to give him summaries as he walked from his chambers into the courtroom. In any case, Meyer didn't decide motions based on their legal merits, but rather on who he wanted to win the case.
A client in Japan had taught Gage the word for Meyer's game:
tatemae
. It meant saying aloud what both parties knew wasn't trueâand Meyer was the master. Nearly everyone who entered the Federal Building played
tatemae
with judges, cushioning their egos and swaddling their insecurities, because almost everybody wanted something, and judges were the only ones who had it.
Gage didn't want anything.
“What did you want to talk about?” Gage asked.
Meyer took another sip from his highball glass, then set it down on a marble coaster and leaned back in his chair. Gage imagined his shoes dangling four inches above the carpet.
“I understand Socorro told you about the mugging,” Meyer said.
Gage nodded.
“I don't expect you to follow up on it. It's low-end work. I'm sure it's been decades since you searched a dumpster. But I'd prefer you didn't tell anyone about it.”
“There's no reason to. But if anybody calls in response to Charlie's posters, I'll have one of my people follow up onâ”
Brandon raised his palm. “No need for you to do that. Just pass on any names or phone numbers. I'll take care of it.”
“I don't expect to hear anything,” Gage said. “It's been a couple of months.”
“You're right. I think it's a dead issue.”
Meyer rose again, signaling the end of the meeting.
Not quite.
Gage remained in his seat.
“A man with a brother running for president should be more careful about where he goes walking at night.” Gage smiled. “Remember what happened to Reiman in Oakland last month.”
A news photographer, responding to a West Oakland car fire, took photos of San Francisco judge Hal Reiman slipping into Rocky's Adult Videos and strolling out a few minutes later with an Asian teenage boy. The photographer followed them to a grimy stucco motel a block away. The photographer's final shot caught the judge and the kid walking into a second floor room.
“The difference, my friend, is that I was just passing through,” Meyer said.
Gage stood up. “But a photo might make it seem like you'd reached your destination.”
A
lex Z's head bobbed and his shoulders rocked to his band's newly recorded tracks in his second floor office in Gage's building as he probed the copies he'd made of Charlie Palmer's hard drives.
Gage tore off a page from his yellow legal pad, folded it into an airplane, wrote
Ready?
on a wing, and sent it flying over Alex Z's head. The multitattooed data analyst glanced up as it bounced off the wall and onto his keyboard, then lowered the volume and turned toward Gage. Mid-twenties. Shaggy hair. Earrings both numerous and, on this day, mythological.
“I didn't want to scare you by yelling,” Gage said.
“Thanks.” Alex Z held up a finger. “And you gave me an idea for a song.”
“Glad to help.” Gage pointed at Alex Z's earlobes. “What's with the Greek mythology theme?”
“I'm thinking of changing the name of the band from Cheezwiz to Zeus's Deuces. Some lawyer at Kraft sent a letter to our manager. They didn't like our âSmoking Velveeta' song.”
“Maybe they didn't understand it.”
Alex Z laughed. “I'm sure they didn't. It was complete nonsense. I was just searching for a rhyme for âtoking chiquita.' ”
“Was
that
supposed to make sense?”
“Not that I could tell. But with the kind of music we play, nobody can hear the words anyway.”
“Except lawyers.”
Alex Z hunched his shoulders and spread his hands. “Who would've thought? I always picture them as having big mouths, not big ears.”
Gage pulled up a chair, then gestured at one of the twin twenty-inch monitors on Alex Z's desk. “What did you find?”
“A lot of encrypted files. Some of the ones on the desktop were accessed early in the morning on the day Charlie got shot and some on the laptop and server right after he got back from the hospital.”
“Did the burglar get into them on the day of the funeral?”
“He tried, but couldn't open any. The encryption system Charlie used kept a log of failed attempts.”
“Is there any way to tell if he copied any of the files?”
Alex Z shook his head.
Gage scanned the dozen boxes of Charlie's software stacked next to the brick wall. “What program did he use?”
“FileLock. Pretty sophisticated.”
“So you can't break in?”
“Nope.”
“Viz'll talk to Socorro and get some ideas of the passwords he might have used.”
Gage skimmed the directory on Alex Z's monitor.
“What about a calendar?”
“No entries on the day he was shot.”
“Billing records?”
“Nothing that day either, probably because he never made it back to the office. He went from the hospital to rehab to his bedroom.”
Gage thought for a moment, feeling as blocked as the burglar and looking for a back way into what Charlie was working on that prompted the break-in.
“Can you get into his timekeeping program and get me his records for the last six months he worked?”
“I can't get into the program anymore, but I exported all the data before we shut things down at his house.”
As Alex Z opened the database, he said, “Tansy told me he called you. You know what he wanted?”
“I'm not sure, but I know it wasn't to tidy up his practice. We don't do his kind of work around here. And he knew it.”
Alex Z's fingers tapped his keyboard, and Palmer's records began emerging from the printer. He then pointed at the second monitor.
“You want me to keep working on the antitrust case or pass it off and focus on this?”
Gage glanced over at an unoccupied desk. “How's Shakir working out?”
“He's like a bat. He seems to do his best work at night. I can see why he didn't stay with the Federal Trade Commission. They want nine-to-fivers.” Alex Z nodded toward Shakir's computer. “I've already got him working on the e-mail traffic during the conspiracy. He knows a helluva lot about price fixing and bid rigging. We're lucky you snagged him.”
“Then turn the whole antitrust case over to him. Make Charlie's files your priority. We've got to figure out what he was up to.”
Alex Z took in a long breath and exhaled, then shook his head. “Getting shot must've really rocked his world.”
“Maybe. Maybe it got rocked before that.” Gage reached for Charlie's time logs. “And we owe it to Viz to make sure it doesn't rock Socorro's.”