Judgment

69

By the time it was almost noon, she was dragging. She hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours, and the coffee was no longer working, just making her stomach sour.

During the ten o’clock break, Duncan came by her lobby. He said hi to Kaitlyn, who got up when he arrived and excused herself.

“Look,” Juliana said, “what we’re talking about — what I’m about to do is — you know. There can’t be any e-mail trace, no texting, nothing, okay?”

“Okay. I understand.”

“Do you know how much money this guy has? Fifteen billion dollars. That’s billion with a B. He’s one of the richest guys in the world. Five million bucks is peanuts to him.”

“But it’s so goddamned risky, babe. You’ve got the police breathing down your neck, and—”

“Dunc, the way they turned over my life, that’s the least I’m owed.”

They both fell silent. Duncan said, “I wonder if this is something you negotiate with him. Like, you know, start at ten million?”

“Why not? That’s nothing to him.”

A long pause. She said, “What have I become?”

“I think you’ve become what circumstances made you. I think you don’t really have a choice.”

Back in court, at two minutes before noon, Juliana checked her iPhone to see if there were any more text messages.

Just that one from the long number at T-Mobile. 12:00 NOON TODAY.

In two minutes, noon was going to arrive. The minute hand on the courtroom clock would click over the twelve.

The plaintiff was sitting in the witness box, testifying about the icy pavement in the privately owned parking lot where he’d taken a nasty fall. She was finding it hard to concentrate.

Instead, she was remembering when Duncan fired the gun. The crash, the man tearing outside through the French doors. She thought about how remarkably calm Duncan seemed when it was all over. He seemed suffused with the certainty of having done the right thing.

And she couldn’t help thinking about Philip Hersh. She’d called the hospital before court started for the day and asked how Hersh was doing. Still in the medically induced coma, the nurse said. She wondered how bad his injuries were going to be. And she wondered what the file was he’d left for her somewhere.

She wondered if Hersh had figured out a way to get to the oligarch, Protasov. And if she’d ever know the answer.

At the stroke of noon — she could see the numerals 12:00 appear on her iPhone — the plaintiff’s lawyer was asking questions of his client, who was in a wheelchair, paralyzed since his fall on the ice.

At 12:01 a message appeared on her phone:

She looked up when the door at the back of the courtroom opened and a uniformed deliveryman entered with a large bouquet of flowers. Her heart jumped. What the hell was going on?

A few people laughed and whispered. This never happened. The deliveryman, who looked like a gawky teenager, walked down the aisle until he came to the bar, which separates the spectators’ gallery from the area where the lawyers and their parties sit.

She watched apprehensively as the court officer, George, leaped up and blocked the delivery guy’s path. He grabbed the teenager’s sleeve. The deliveryman turned, stopped. The two conversed in low voices. Then George took the bouquet from the delivery guy, who turned and walked right out of the courtroom.

“Nothing further,” said the plaintiff’s lawyer.

“And we’re adjourned,” Juliana said.

As the courtroom emptied, she saw George approaching her bench. He was holding the bouquet of flowers, a pastel arrangement of stargazer lilies and pale pink roses, tipping it toward her.

She had crazy thoughts. What if there was a bomb in it, a plastic explosive or something?

“Those were for me?” she asked.

“‘Judge Juliana Brody, courtroom 903,’” George read.

“Who the hell told that kid to deliver to a judge on the bench?” Ordinarily all deliveries to a judge went to her lobby.

He held the bouquet in her direction. “Just hand me the card, please,” she said.

He pulled a small white envelope off the bouquet and passed it to her.

She slipped a white card from the envelope.

It read:

She flushed, her heart suddenly knocking.

She stared at the note.

“It better be your husband,” the court officer said, mock-sternly, laughing.

“My secret admirer,” she said, forcing a smile. “Thanks, George.”

As soon as the lunch break began, she went online and checked a bunch of legal-related websites to see if that video had been posted anywhere. She clicked on sites that ran news about the legal profession, like Underneath Their Robes and Above the Law, to see if anything had been reported. They wouldn’t post the video, of course. They’d post a story about it.

But she found nothing, thank God. At least nothing yet. Finally she Googled herself and waited tensely for a couple of seconds for the search results.

Nothing about a sex tape.

She glanced at her phone. Paul Ashmont from the CIA had left her a message, returning her call. As she was about to call him back, her phone rang.

“Hey,” Ashmont said. “You have Signal on your phone, right?”

“I do.” That was one of the encryption apps Sasha had told her to install.

“I think we’d better use it.”

He called her back a minute later using Signal. She answered the phone out in the hall.

“Okay, you called me. What’s up?” Ashmont said.

“This board meeting of the Protasov Foundation — there are a lot of VIPs coming to Nantucket,” she said. She mentioned some of the names: a former prime minister of the UK, a former female Secretary of State, a senator from Massachusetts. “Security’s going to be tight.”

“Oh, you better believe it.”

“I wonder who does security for Protasov. If he contracts it out.”

“The Russian mafiya does security for most of these guys, these oligarchs,” Ashmont said. “Why? What do you have in mind?”

Juliana called in Kaitlyn and asked her to cancel the afternoon session. She had important personal business to attend to, she said. Then she drove over to Boston Medical Center in the South End. She parked, took the elevator up to the neuro ICU on the sixth floor of the Menino building. She stopped at the counter and asked the nurse where she could find a patient, Philip Hersh.

The nurse looked up and then away, said, “Um, yeah, let me ask someone.”

She got up and went over to another nurse, who was standing at a desk, a dark-haired young woman. They conversed quietly for a few seconds. Then the dark-haired nurse came over and said, “Hi, excuse me, are you a family member?”

“I’m a friend,” Juliana said. “I... my phone number was in Philip’s pocket when he was found.”

She nodded. “Let me page the neurocritical care fellow, Dr. Robiano. I think he’s still on call.” She picked up the phone and spoke briefly. Then she hung up and came around to the front of the counter. “Why don’t we talk in one of these rooms?”

“Oh, no,” Juliana said, her eyes tearing up. “What happened? A few hours ago he was stable.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know any of the details.”

The dark-haired nurse showed her to a small, stark conference room, a round table with four chairs around it. Juliana sat and pulled out some Kleenex.

When Dr. Robiano showed up a few minutes later, holding a can of Coke Zero — still looking like a fifteen-year-old playing doctor — he seemed genuinely saddened. “I’m sorry to tell you that Mr. Hersh died.”

Juliana sighed, her breath trembling. She nodded. The tears were streaming now.

He said, “He had a rebleed in his brain. We took him to the operating room, and he died on the table.”

She nodded, couldn’t talk.

He sensed that and went on. “It’d been touch-and-go since he got here. His injuries were just too severe.”

“When did it — when did he die?”

“About an hour ago. They haven’t taken his body away yet, so if you want to go into his room and spend some time...?”

“Thanks,” she said. “I do.”

When she was able to stop crying long enough to talk, she called Martie and arranged to come by. She didn’t want to tell her over the phone.