The Enemy Inside

EIGHTEEN

For a lawyer worth his salt, defending a case in any court of consequence, there are two things that will generally keep you up nights: unexplained coincidence and the serpent of surprise raising its ugly head in the courtroom.

The fact that, of the countless millions of vehicles garaged in Southern California, Ives managed to smash into the one occupied by Serna, an object of inquiry in one of his stories, would test the limits of serendipity to the mind of any normal juror.

The only answer we have for this is the theory that Ives was drugged and that the accident was staged by others-a preplanned murder. But here, there’s a problem. Between now and trial there is more than a fair chance that the D.A. and his investigators will kick over a rock and discover what Ives was up to, that he was working on a story involving Serna.

Even if they don’t, it is likely from what Alex has told me that Tory Graves, his boss, being the hard-core muckraker that he is, will not hold the story. He will publish whatever he has before we can get to trial. If this happens, the prosecutor could easily jump on our theory, turn our own shield into a weapon, and beat us to death with it.

As I think about this I am searching the Internet looking for something, some clue as to how an external force might take control of a vehicle moving at high speed. This might give us some lead as to how Ben and her boyfriend died, and perhaps how Serna was murdered.

Something catches my eye, an online article: “How Stuff Works: Are Modern Cars Vulnerable to Hackers?” I read it and search further. I find more, another item: “Hackers Reveal Nasty New Car Attacks.” And more: “How Modern Cars Can Be Hacked.” On top of this is a mountain of other material, recent news articles concerning how carmakers are on the verge of developing driverless vehicles, the dream of the future. Maybe we should be more cautious about what we dream of.

As I read on, the small hairs on the back of my neck begin to stand up. High-tech controls have been growing under the hood and inside the passenger compartments of automobiles for more than two decades. They operate the cruise control, setting the car’s speed. They can activate anti-collision avoidance systems, throwing on the brakes. Computer sensors fire airbags. They are used to lock car doors. There are literally scores of tiny “electronic control units” installed in modern passenger vehicles, and more were being added every year.

Most people, like me, paid no attention. Government safety agencies encourage these developments. Sometimes they mandate them. The problem is, as with everything else that is high tech, there is a downside-loss of human control.

One of the articles talks about a high-tech black-bag government agency that had already found ways to crack these systems, to hack them from outside the car, ways to turn them into weapons. There are sensors that, if they are hacked, can be used to turn off airbags, cut off the engine, or bleed the brakes so they no longer work. Some software could actually take over the navigation system of the vehicle involved. You could lock the doors so that the occupants could not escape, screw with the antilock brakes so they no longer worked, turn off the power steering, or limit the car’s turning radius.

And then in the middle of one of the articles, the bombshell. Among the top-end luxury cars was the automated self-parking systems now available on some of the latest models. People love these because the built-in sensors control automated front-wheel movement and make it possible for them to parallel park between cars by pushing a button and merely touching the brake when the car was done. The system was only supposed to work at slow speeds, three or four miles per hour, and in reverse. But according to the article it was now believed that the black-bag computer nerds working for the government had been able to turn this to the dark side. They had managed to trick the car’s speedometer and transmission so that you could hijack the parking system to control the car’s steering and do it remotely at high forward speeds. The theory was that this could be used to turn a vehicle into a veritable deathtrap. It made it possible to orchestrate head-on collisions. I am beginning to think this is more than theory.

I print out the articles, and as they pile up in my printer I turn my attention back to the crisis at hand. The question prosecutors will try to answer if they find out that Alex was working on a story involving Serna. Could they cobble together a theory as to why he might want to kill her? Give the cops an hour and they will come up with a dozen theories, warp their evidence around the best one and run with it. This is likely to be more plausible and certainly more satisfying to the jury than our own-that some other dude did it, but we don’t know who it is.

The answer to this riddle may lie in whatever revelations lurk in the details of the dirt dug up by Tory Graves. This is the surprise package we don’t want exploding under our case in front of the jury.

Harry and I have managed to stall the preliminary hearing in Ives’s case, the question of whether he should be bound over for trial in Superior Court. The outcome of these proceedings is preordained. Alex will have to stand trial. But we have waived time in the interest of delay, the perpetual strategy of every criminal defendant and their lawyer. But in this case we had a better reason than most, something we chose not to share with the judge or his clerk when we did the little dance in chambers to waive time.

If pushed to the wall and asked to produce our client, Harry and I will have to say that we don’t know where he is. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it, at least until our asses are thrown in jail, at which time Harry says he reserves the right to reconsider.

Alex’s parents actually don’t know where he is. We have kept them in the dark. We thought about posting a sign on their front lawn telling whoever wants to kill him that they don’t know where their kid is, just as a precaution. But we didn’t.

This morning I made two phone calls. The first was to Tory Graves in D.C. He took the call, then dodged about on the phone for a while telling me how busy he was. Graves did not seem terribly concerned about Alex or his current predicament. In the end he agreed to see me, but only after I suggested that we might need to subpoena him as a witness unless, of course, I could find out what I needed to know in some less formal way. That seemed to soften his hide. It also fed his curiosity. He wanted to know what I was after. I told him it was better discussed face-to-face. We scheduled a meeting on his turf.

The other call was to a lawyer in Los Angeles, Cletus Proffit, the managing partner at Serna’s old law firm, Mandella, Harbet. I wanted to at least plumb the depths with a few of the people she worked with.

I knew Proffit, but only by name. He was one of the pillars of the local legal clique in the state. He had done all the chairs at the county bar up in L.A. and found a place to squat on the state bar’s board of governors when the music ended. He spent a few years, his spare time, doing the bar’s good works, peddling bills to protect the average Joe from the malevolent clutches of scheming lawyers. The test of legal leadership was always the same, to rat out the fraternity. One was expected to do this. It was the lawyer’s equivalent of a priest sporting sackcloth and ashes outside the church door. Your way of saying that you were repenting, but only for the sins of others.

Proffit’s wife, who was also a lawyer, sat on the federal bench. She was mentioned periodically as a likely nominee to the Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

When I finally got through to his office, Proffit’s secretary told me that her boss was back east, in their Washington office on business. She said that he was likely to be there for some time. I got the number and called it.

When I told the receptionist what it was about, that I represented the man who was involved in the accident with Serna, my call was instantly routed, the transcontinental express from my lips to Proffit’s ear in a nanosecond.

The man was full of jovial good cheer, what you might expect from a leader who’d spent the last several years screwing over other lawyers. He told me that Serna’s death was a great loss to the firm, that she was a very special person, and that he would have an exceptionally difficult time finding someone to fill her shoes. He called it a tragedy at least three times in two sentences, and said that he hoped that my client was not too seriously injured.

For someone who had lost an irreplaceable cog in the firm’s wheel, Proffit didn’t seem terribly perturbed that I was calling him on behalf of the drunk, at least according to the early news reports, who had turned his partner into a piece of crisp bacon.

I told him that Ives was fine, but that he was facing some serious charges. I asked him for a meeting.

He wanted to know why.

I told him that I wanted to discuss Serna’s involvement with the firm, the nature of her practice. What she was like, any volunteer activities in the community in the event that we might ultimately have to deal with “victim impact statements”-that is, if my client was convicted. Just general background stuff, I told him. The information any prudent lawyer might gather regarding the victim in such a case.

There was a long pause at the other end of the line. Proffit then suggested that perhaps it could wait until he returned to Los Angeles. He told me that with Serna’s sudden death and all the reorganization in their Washington office that, at the moment, he was simply too busy.

I told him that I already had a ticket to fly to Washington on Thursday morning. Three days from now.

Proffit said he was certain that wouldn’t work. He couldn’t fit me into his schedule. It was impossible. Besides, he hated to see me travel all the way across the country on such a mundane matter.

I told him that I wasn’t, that I already had a meeting scheduled in Washington with another party on Thursday afternoon to gather other information in the case.

In the breathless pause that followed I might have thought Proffit had wrapped the coiled wire from his phone’s receiver around his head. Such were the palpable brain waves resonating at my end: “What other party?” “What information?”

He asked me to hold for a moment. When he came back on the line, it was to tell me that he had conferred with an assistant and that, as a courtesy to me, to avoid inconvenience, they would rearrange his calendar to fit me in. The first step in this process was to find out what time my other meeting was.

I told him that, if necessary, I could probably reschedule it. Nonsense, he said. It was clear that he wanted to meet with me after I had met with whomever else I was seeing. It sounded as if Proffit might want to tie me to the wall in his office and work me over with his stapler to find out who I was meeting with and what they had to say.

When I told him my other appointment was set for Friday afternoon, Proffit immediately said he was busy all morning. Would it be possible for me to hold over or to meet that evening? We set the meeting for seven, at a restaurant near his office. He gave me the name and address, said he would have one of their secretaries schedule the reservation in his name. I thanked him, and we hung up.

I couldn’t be sure whether Proffit knew anything or if he had something to hide. But I could smell the worry on his breath, even over the phone. There was something about a silk-socked lawyer in the midst of an organizational meltdown in his firm who takes the time to turn on the charm for a perfect stranger. Adjusting his calendar for my convenience. It makes you want to grab your wallet and hang on.

Something was bothering him. Whatever it was, it had Serna’s name all over it. And unless I missed my bet, it had nothing to do with filling her high heels at the firm. Proffit wanted to know what I was looking for in Washington. More to the point, he was desperate to find out who the other party was I was meeting with.

Ana Agirre had lost her ability to track her equipment or the people who had it. With the death of the man near the van and the discovery that the vehicle contained only the satellite antenna and its tripod, she was at a dead end. The van was a rental. She knew that would lead nowhere.

The people she was looking for had the computer and the software, but without the antenna they couldn’t use it. And without a signal, Ana couldn’t track them. She wanted it, all of it, and now. Time was running out on the European contract.

She thought about it for a while, racked her brain. The only lead she had left, and it was a long shot, was the original accident out in the desert. One of the parties had survived. She knew this because she had followed the news surrounding the accident from the moment the tracking signals told her that her equipment had been used and where. She knew Ives’s name because she had taken notes. He was charged with the death of the woman who had no doubt been murdered.

Ana headed to a local library. Online she checked the local newspapers going back a few weeks. There she found the name of the lawyer representing Ives-Paul Madriani. She Googled the name and found the location, the law firm of “Madriani and Hinds,” an address on Orange Avenue in Coronado. She set up to watch the place, at first from a distance from her car in a parking lot across the street, and later from a table in a restaurant very near the entrance to the office where she could see people come and go.

It was probably just another dead end, but if anyone knew anything about the accident that might give some clue as to who had her equipment, it would be either the local authorities or the lawyers involved in the case.

What she saw was a guy who came and went regularly and who occasionally stopped in the restaurant where she was seated having coffee. The waitresses always greeted him by name, Harry. This she assumed was one of the lawyers, Harry Hinds.

She watched and waited. For two days there was no sign of his partner, Paul Madriani. Ana considered her options, whether to approach them under some false guise to see what she could learn about the case, or to try to enter the office at night to look for notes or files that might give her more information. She started casing the office at night, checking the routine of the janitors, taking notes on who worked late.

Ana was hunched down at the office door in the shadows of the small garden plaza fishing for the set of lockpicks in her bag. It was after two in the morning. Dressed in a navy blue sweater, dark pants, and a pair of black running shoes, she blended easily into the night. She was preparing to break into the law office. The restaurant and its bar were closed, everything dark, when she heard the noise behind the building. She moved quickly without a sound along the path, toward the gate leading to the service area behind the office.

Through a crack in the gate she saw him. One man, all alone inside the garbage bin, rooting around, occasionally scraping against the inner steel walls. At first she thought maybe he was some transient. But as she watched she realized whoever it was wasn’t hunting for discarded cans or bottles or other treasures of the destitute. He had taped a large trash bag to the outside lip of the bin. Whenever his hand emerged over the opening it was to stuff papers, what looked like documents, into the bag. He was looking for something, and it wasn’t recyclables.

Ana’s eyes were glued to the action in the bin. After a few minutes the man hoisted himself up out of the large container, over the edge and down to the ground. He grabbed the trash bag from the open edge and quickly headed out toward the street.

She was behind him in a flash. She watched as he entered the passenger side of a car parked halfway down the block toward Orange Avenue. It was a large dark cross-country vehicle, what the Americans called a four-by-four. The driver had the engine on in a second and they pulled away from the curb.

Ana turned and ran for her own car parked just down the street. In less than half a minute she was after them. At this hour there was almost no traffic, only one other vehicle on Orange Avenue that she could see, and it was well out ahead of the 4x4 she was following. Keeping them in sight was not a problem. They crossed over the bridge from Coronado and headed north up I-5.

Ana hung back, following from a distance so as not to alert them. They took the interchange at 94 East. From there they headed north, up 805. They took the exit at Miramar Road. They drove some distance east before taking a right.

As Ana approached the intersection where they turned she saw a sign: MCAS MIRAMAR. It was a military base. As she looked off to her right she could see the car with the two men in it stopped at a kiosk in the center of the road, a small guardhouse. A few seconds later they passed through. Ana didn’t take the turn. She couldn’t follow them there, but to her it all made sense.

The fear growing in her mind was the possibility that the American military, or one of their intelligence agencies, held the equipment that the French techs had designed for her. If that was the case, the authorities already had it. If somehow they used it to their own embarrassment, they might decide to tie it to her. She had to get it back, but she couldn’t go here.