The Insider (23 page)

Will looked at Jeff, who shrugged his shoulders. “I'll wait out here for you,” he said.

As soon as the door was closed, Sam said, “What the hell is going on here, buddy? I just heard that you got canned. I couldn't believe it.”

Will went to the window to buy himself a few seconds to think. “Sam, you've always looked out for me here at the firm, but there's nothing you can do for me on this one. If I talked to you about it, my lawyer would kill me.”

“You retained anybody yet?”

“No. I just found out.”

“I know some of the best white-collar defense attorneys in the city. I could make a few calls. . . .”

“Sam, you know you can't help me with this. I shouldn't even be talking to you. You're a partner here, and I don't want to create a conflict for you. If I tell you anything, you're going to be forced to testify against me or lie about this conversation. Everyone knows that we're in here talking.”

“Can't I even line up a referral for you?”

“You know I should get my own attorney. I'll find a good one.”

“Do you know what they're saying around here? That you may have something to do with the Russian mob! They're even saying that there's some connection to Ben Fisher's death! If it weren't so damn serious, I'd think it was funny.”

“Sam, I appreciate that you're trying to help, but I got myself into this and I have to get myself out.”

Sam walked to the window and looked down at the traffic on Sacramento Street. “You know, that didn't sound like an innocent man talking there a minute ago,” he said. “The part about me having to lie if you told me what was going on.”

“Is there such a thing as an innocent lawyer?”

“True enough, but that's no answer.”

“I really can't say more than that, Sam.”

“I stood up for you and recommended you for partnership just a week ago,” Sam said. “You've made me look like a fool.”

There was a knock at the door, and Will gratefully opened it. It was Jeff, tapping his watch.

“I've got to go,” Will said.

Sam, who was now distractedly fingering a stack of papers on his desk, didn't look up. “You watch yourself, Will,” he said.

When Will reached his office, he found that a couple of empty boxes had helpfully been placed on the floor in front of his desk. They wanted him out fast.

Will cleared the collection of toys from his desk. The centerpiece was Atomic Robot Man, a 1950s tin windup with Frankenstein-like bolts jutting from his neck. In ten minutes, he had removed all personal belongings from his desk and walls. He was surprised to see that the items hardly filled a single cardboard box. Inside were his framed law school diploma, a
Black's Law Dictionary
, some laminated offering memoranda tombstones commemorating deal closings, a few CDs, and a Waterman pen. He left the NO SHARKS sticker affixed to his monitor, a caution for the next attorney who occupied the office. Reviewing the meager contents of the box, Will realized just how rigorously he had segregated his personal life from his work.

“I was told to collect the BlackBerry, too,” Jeff said.

Will opened his satchel and handed it over.

“You ready to go?” Jeff asked.

“Yeah, that should do it.”

“You can take all the time you need to pack up. All I'm going to do is walk around the building for the rest of the day.”

“Nah, I'm done.”

They rode in the elevator in silence. As he pushed through the revolving door in the lobby, Jeff offered, “Hey, I wouldn't be surprised to see you back here in a few months.”

“Maybe, but if I don't have an access card, you'll throw me out on my ass again, right?”

“Fuckin' A.” Jeff gave a small nod and left Will standing on the sidewalk.

Will gazed up at the white tower of Embarcadero Four, trying to locate the offices of Reynolds Fincher. Up until that moment, he had been able to tell himself that his work as an attorney was his real life and that everything else that had happened in the past week was a bad dream, a fantasy concocted from too many viewings of the films of Scorsese and Coppola. Will stared up at the building with his box of office furnishings in one arm, CD boom box in the other. It would take a minute or two to turn his back and walk away from his old life to meet his uncertain future. His arms began to ache. He felt like a shipwreck victim clinging to a scrap of wreckage that was slowly going under. As pedestrians flowed around him on the sidewalk, the realization sank in that he was on the outside now. Any protection his relationship with Reynolds Fincher had afforded him was now gone. He and Claire were no longer of any value to the Russians and, in fact, what they knew about their plans posed a threat.

If the Russians had an inside connection at Reynolds Fincher, they probably already knew that he had been fired. Nikolai and Yuri were probably already on their way to kill Will . . . and Claire. He needed to call Claire immediately to warn her.

Will crossed the street and entered a sandwich shop so that he could put down his belongings and try again to call Claire. The phone rang and rang.

Finally, Claire answered. “Hello?”

“It's Will. We need to talk. You're in danger.”

“No kidding!” Claire sounded upset. “There's a lot that you didn't tell me, isn't there? I just got back from the emergency room. Nikolai and Yuri came to see me.”

“What did they do to you?”

“Don't worry. I'm going to be okay. Just get over here.”

“Tell me what's going on!”

Claire banged the phone against something as she shifted it from one hand to the other. “We probably shouldn't be talking about this on the cell.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have that thing they're looking for.”

Will was growing exasperated. “What thing?”

“The keys. I'll be waiting for you.” Claire hung up.

Will hailed a cab on Sacramento Street, rushing to get to Claire's apartment. He could not imagine how Claire had penetrated Jupiter's elaborate security to obtain a copy of the encryption keys. But if she really had them, then he could only hope that Nikolai and Yuri didn't know that yet. The keys were enormously valuable to the Russians and their bosses, and they would have no qualms about killing to get them. The Clipper Chip keys were also valuable to Will because they served as concrete proof of the hidden relationship between Jupiter and the NSA. With the keys in his possession, Will had some much-needed leverage—leverage that could be used to stop the Jupiter merger or prevent Nikolai and Yuri from killing them.

Will emerged from the taxi into a din of street noise, still carrying the stereo and cardboard box, at the Transbay Terminal on Fremont Street. He needed to make one quick stop to ditch his belongings. The bus station, a gray concrete edifice that straddled Fremont, seemed to have been built from pressed and molded grime. Will knew that his boom box made for an attractive target, so he walked quickly inside, past an array of portable toilets (the rest-rooms inside were boarded shut). The bus station was a large, barren room of gray tile floors and wooden benches the color of old bones. There were no fixtures of any kind, except for trash cans. The place seemed designed to facilitate regular hose-downs with disinfectant. He purchased a locker and dumped the contents of his cardboard box inside, along with the stereo.

After another short cab ride, Will arrived at the redbrick apartment in Jackson Square where Claire lived. Jackson Square was an upscale neighborhood with good restaurants and bars and small, expensive apartments for workaholics who couldn't bear to be far from their financial district offices.

Claire buzzed him up, peering at him through the peep-hole before opening the door. Her face was pale and tense and her eyes were bloodshot.

“Are you okay?” Will looked her over for signs of injury. “What were you doing in the emergency room?”

Claire held up her left hand to display a splint on the little finger.

“Is it broken?”

“
Shattered
was the word that the doctor used. Nikolai found the hammer that I keep under the kitchen sink. At least he let me pick the finger.”

“Does it hurt?”

“What do you think?”

“I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to get you involved in all this.” Will rolled up his sleeve to reveal his razor wounds. “Look what they did to me.”

With a sickened expression, Claire examined the scars, which were still red and swollen. “This isn't supposed to happen to people like us, right?”

Claire's apartment was small, but pleasantly furnished with Oriental rugs and overflowing bookcases that occupied nearly every available inch of wall space. On a desk in the corner of the room was a photo of Claire with the staff of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, her pre-law school job. On the kitchen counter were several pill bottles with the caps off.

“What are those?”

“Oh, I'm just trying to figure out the best cocktail for my particular mix of pain and anxiety.” She picked up an oval, pale orange pill from the counter and examined it appreciatively. “I'm thinking Xanax for anxiety. Nothing too heavy to mix with the Vicodin.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Don't worry. I know my meds. But enough about me. Why don't you start by catching me up on what's been happening in your life, Will? Because now it's happening to my life, too.”

Will told Claire the entire story, beginning with the morning of Ben's death, through his various encounters with Katya, Yuri, and Nikolai. He even told her of his suspicion that Grogan was involved with the Russians and had gotten her fired because of her discovery of Jupiter's connection to the NSA. Claire listened quietly, shaking her head occasionally.

When he finished, Claire smiled a little self-mocking smile. “I thought that seeing you was about the safest thing I could do,” she said. “But you're not the safe guy at all, are you? Turns out, you're the dangerous guy.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to involve you in all this.”

“I know,” Claire said. “Now don't you want to hear about the encryption keys?”

“Do you really have them?”

“Yes, but let me start at the beginning. Nikolai and Yuri came over here and told me I needed to help them get the encryption keys to the Clipper devices. They said that they'd kill both of us if I didn't cooperate. Yuri held my hand down on the kitchen counter, and Nikolai broke my finger. Yuri said it was to make sure that they had my attention. They said they'd be back soon to check on my progress.”

“So how did you manage to get past all that security at Jupiter?” Will asked.

Claire washed down the Xanax with a swallow from a bottle of water. “It wasn't hard, actually. Do you remember Riley Boldin? The programmer at Jupiter that I introduced you to?”

“The one with the crush on you.”

“Uh, right. Well, I went to Jupiter's offices and visited Riley. They let me go back to the due diligence room because they don't know yet that I've been fired. They still have my security pass on file. Technically, I'm still employed by Reynolds until the end of the month. I stopped by Riley's office and chatted him up about what he was working on. He was very happy to talk.”

“I'll bet he was.”

“I asked Riley about all of the high-tech security at Jupiter guarding the encryption keys, and he told me that one of the projects he was working on involved ‘testing key strength' or something like that. He said that it was such a pain for him to constantly go through the biometric scanners and other security devices of the SCIF facility that he had managed to obtain a complete set of the encryption keys that he kept at his workstation. He said even his supervisor didn't know that he had it. He held up this little memory stick. He called it ‘the keys to the kingdom.'”

“But how did you know that the stick contained the keys to the Clipper Chip, and not just Jupiter's standard encryption keys?”

“I told him that as part of the due diligence, I'd noticed that there seemed to be connections between Jupiter and the NSA, but I couldn't figure out what was going on.

“He said that he knew all about that stuff, but it was top secret. If that sort of information was going to be disclosed to Reynolds Fincher as part of due diligence, the okay would have to come from senior management.

“I pointed at the memory stick and said, ‘I bet all of the secrets are on that little memory stick.' He just laughed and said, ‘Like I told you—keys to the kingdom.'”

Will recalled his indiscretion with Katya regarding the Jupiter acquisition and wondered how many times throughout history the most precious secrets had been disclosed because a guy wanted to impress a girl. “So how did you manage to get it?” he asked.

“I asked him to get me a cup of coffee, and while he was gone I put the memory stick in my pocket. I was gone before he got back.”

“But he's going to know that you took it,” Will said.

“Yes, but I don't think he'll tell because he'd probably lose his job if he did. He wasn't supposed to have his own copy of the keys.” Claire walked over to her answering machine and played a message.

Riley Boldin's voice on the tape crackled fuzzily, but his desperation came through loud and clear. “Claire, this is Riley. I know that you took something from my office today. That was incredibly uncool. You have no idea how serious this is. Please call me right away or we could both be in a lot of trouble.”

Claire removed a silver memory stick from her pocket. “What do you think I should do now?” she asked.