Collision (29 page)

“Mr. Falcone,” she said in a pleading voice. “I … you … should … see Dr. Breitspecher before…”

“I understand,” Falcone said, turning the other way.
Doctor?
Then he remembered that Ursula had a doctorate in political science.
From Cornell, I think. Have to look up her thesis. Probably something involving her homeland, East Germany.

Sprague's office door opened and Ursula walked out with her usual Brunhilde stride and pointed toward his office. They arrived simultaneously at his door, which no longer bore his name. She punched the keypad numbers, which, Falcone noted, had already been changed, and motioned for him to enter.

On the top of his desk were three white file boxes and his rarely used Sullivan & Ford laptop. The two photographs of Falcone with President Blake Oxley—one in the Oval Office, the other in the Situation Room—were off the wall, as was a pencil sketch of a Vietnam village, which he had drawn while a prisoner. He had never been interested in doing much decorating in his office. Now, though, its bleakness saddened him. He had spent many hours here, and now those hours had shrunk to three white file boxes.

“You can take these with you,” she said. “Or you can have them delivered, of course at your expense. If you want this desk,” Ursula said, nodding toward it, “you must pay what the firm paid for it plus shipping charges.”

“I'll buy it. Ship it to my address and send me the bill. Anything else?”

She opened the folder she was carrying and, reading from a paper in it, said, “You will leave on this desk the firm's cell phone and laptop, your identification badge, your elevator card key, your Sullivan and Ford credit card, your—”

“I never used that credit card,” Falcone said, opening an unlocked drawer and tossing the card on the desk. “And look, Ursula, there's no need to make this a drumming-out-of-the-regiment ceremony. I'll take what I want right now and leave the rest for you to deliver—of course at my expense. I'll put all the stuff belonging to the firm on the desk and walk out. You can go back to your office and do something useful and—”

“Don't patronize me, Falcone,” she said, looking up and glaring. She looked down and kept reading. “Your health insurance will continue through the end of the month. You will then be required to obtain your own insurance under the Affordable Care Act. The firm will no longer make payments to your life insurance policy, which will remain in place if you continue the premiums. Regarding your e-mail account here, your access to the system is locked. An automatic e-mail notification will alert senders that you are no longer affiliated with the firm. If you have any pending matters that will need the attention of another member of the firm, send an e-mail to me. You will notify clients that you are no longer with the firm. I have drafted such a notification letter. I have also compiled a final compensation payment.”

She handed him two pieces of paper. “The final compensation will be deposited in your account and the account will then be terminated.” She handed him another piece of paper. “Also sign this.”

Falcone glanced at it. “Termination notice? Come on, Ursula. We're friends. Don't make this so … nasty. Your boss didn't terminate me. I quit, goddamn it.” He handed back the paper. “I'll write a letter of resignation that will be short and polite and send it to you via registered mail. And I'll write my clients without any help from you.” He crumpled her draft of the letter and tossed it on the desk.

She handed him another paper and, in her coldest, most official voice, said, “You are hereby reminded that the confidentiality and proprietary-information agreement you signed upon joining the firm will remain in effect indefinitely.”

Falcone accepted the paper, folded it, and put it in his pocket. “Okay, Ursula. You have done your duty. Now go back to work with my fond goodbye. At heart you are a fine person doing her job.”

“I am instructed to escort you out.”

Falcone turned his back and put the law firm's cell phone and keycards on the desk. He lifted the covers on the boxes, examined their contents, transferred the photos and pencil drawing to the box containing his personal laptop, and hefted the box off the desk.

They silently descended in the public elevator. Ursula followed him to the entrance door and said, “I will not miss you.”

“Goodbye, Ursula,” Falcone said. “Tell Paul I left smiling.”

 

52

By word of mouth
and from an item in
Washington Lawyer
magazine
,
the legal community learned that one of Washington's Super Lawyers was at large. “Super Lawyer” is a title awarded by a rating service of outstanding lawyers, and it added to Falcone's luster as a prospective recruit into one of Sullivan & Ford's rivals. But the most attractive attribute of all was his connection with the White House.

The reason for his resignation was vaguely smoothed over by Sprague as differences over the strategic future of the firm. Whatever the real issue, a dozen firms and two premier law schools sent him cordial greetings and invitations. Falcone, however, decided to try lawyering on his own for a while.

With the aid of an interior decorator and an old friend who was a contractor, he expanded his apartment's home office to accommodate the great mahogany desk he kept at the law office.
I'm hanging out my shingle again,
he thought, reminiscing about that first day in a little Massachusetts town when he slipped a bronze nameplate into the stack of nameplates arranged in the lobby of the office building near the courthouse.

He was celebrating the arrival of the desk when his house phone rang. He picked up the phone and saw the ID panel:
US
GOVERNMENT
. A woman's voice said, “Please hold on for FBI director Patterson.”

The formality surprised Falcone, who was used to direct calls from Patterson. “Sean? This is J. B. Patterson,” said the next voice. “I would like you to come to headquarters to answer some questions.”

Falcone paused before responding. The wording and the tone of Patterson's voice added to the surprise. “Sure, J.B. When?”

“As soon as possible.” The voice sounded official.

“Sounds serious,” Falcone said.

“It is.”

“I can get there is twenty minutes.”

“Fine. An agent will meet you at the entrance and escort you.”

“Escort.” That's not a friendly word,
Falcone thought, running through events since the last time he talked with, and had a drink with, Patterson.

He changed from sweatshirt and jeans to suit and tie, took the elevator down to the lobby, and briskly walked up Pennsylvania Avenue to the hulking J. Edgar Hoover Building, which one architectural critic called Orwellian and another described as having “a rather intimidating, temple-like look vaguely reminiscent of an old Cecil B. DeMille set.”

Falcone entered the courtyard and went through two typical security stops—empty-your-pockets-into-the-dish and walk-through-the-scanning-detector—and was ushered into the small entrance foyer by a member of the FBI's uniformed police force, who asked for his cell phone and handed him a visitor's laminated identification. She then took him to a set of waist-high turnstiles, where a man in a dark blue suit, white shirt, and blue-and-green striped tie was standing. He stepped forward, flashed his identity-and-badge holder, and then slapped it on an electronic pad that read his identity card.

“Put yours next to mine,” he told Falcone. “We have to register your entrance together, and, when you leave, we have to register your exit together.”

As Falcone touched his visitor tag to the reader, he saw the name on the agent's card: Patrick Sarsfield. Falcone stifled a remark about Sarsfield's peripatetic sleuthing and simply said “Right” as the turnstile barrier bar clicked.

Sarsfield nodded toward an elevator, which took them to the seventh floor. Falcone had never been in the director's top-floor suite. Protocol called for the FBI director to go to the White House for meetings, many of which were in the Situation Room. At a desk outside Patterson's corner office, a trim young man, whose quick movements and physique said security detail, rose, opened the door behind him, and motioned them to enter.

Patterson was standing beside his desk in a room that Falcone estimated to be almost the size of a squash singles court. On the paneled wall behind him were an enlarged copy of the FBI's seal and photos of agents who had been killed in the line of duty. Falcone did not have time to count them, for Patterson immediately stepped forward, shook his hand, and said, “I'm not in this, Sean. It's Agent Sarsfield's case.”

Case?
Again, Falcone stifled a remark, deciding that anything said about this odd little ceremony would not do him or his client any good.

Falcone did not take Patterson's arm's-length treatment personally. Patterson was profoundly scrupulous in a town that rarely heard the word. He was not a man of ceremony or puffery. He did not accept invitations to Sunday talk shows, embassy receptions, or other stops on the Washington social circuit. He gave few speeches, and those were usually to law-enforcement gatherings. He was rarely seen on television; when a major FBI investigation ended successfully, he let the persons who did the work stand in the spotlight.

Falcone nodded and smiled at Patterson and followed Sarsfield out a door leading to a conference room that had one large window overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. Sarsfield pointed to a chair at one end of a highly polished table long enough to accommodate eight or so people. In the middle was a multidirectional microphone.

As Falcone sat down, he noticed an aperture, presumably for a video camera, on the wall nearest the table. Sarsfield took the chair to Falcone's left. Seated on his right were two people whom Sarsfield did not introduce.

Sarsfield gave the time and date and added, “This is an interview with Mr. Sean Falcone in regards to case seven eight six four. I am Special Agent Patrick Sarsfield. At the table are forensic IT specialists Horace Poindexter and Sunithat Agrawal, both assigned to the FBI Laboratory in Quantico.” Falcone noticed that a red light appeared on the microphone stand.

“This is an interview, Agent Sarsfield? And it is being recorded?” Falcone asked.

“Yes to both questions, Mr. Falcone. Do you agree that you have come to headquarters voluntarily at the direct request of Director Patterson?”

“Yes, but I am unaware—”

“On October fourth of this year were you in possession of a laptop that was the property of SpaceMine?”

“Yes,” Falcone said, making up his mind to be the perfect interviewee by answering as briefly as possible.

The specialist, identified by Sarsfield as Sunithat Agrawal, reached down and took from a larger case next to her a laptop encased in transparent plastic. She had the dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty of a bright young immigrant from India. But, knowing FBI personnel rules, Falcone assumed she was the American-born daughter of immigrants. She wore a rose-red suit jacket over a white blouse.

“Is this the laptop that was in your possession on the day in question?” Sarsfield asked.

“It appears to be.”

“Your fingerprints are on its cover and on the space bar and on several keys,” Sarsfield said. “Also, records kept by the manufacturer, Dell, show that it was one of at least forty-five purchased by SpaceMine. So we have good reason to believe that this laptop was the one stolen from your law firm during the commission of multiple homicides on October fourth.” He nodded to Agrawal. She pressed a button and a large screen on the nearest wall lit up with an image of the laptop.

“This is a somewhat unusual laptop,” she said. An image of the open laptop appeared on the screen. Poised over the keyboard were two delicate, perfectly manicured hands without nail polish—hers, Falcone decided, after glancing at the real right hand that grasped a remote control.

After several keystrokes and repeated pressing of the power switch, the laptop's screen remained blank. “As you can see,” she continued, “the laptop will not turn on.”

“But when I had it,” Falcone said, “I was able to turn it on. All I could see was a warning that I did not have access.”

“We managed to reconstruct the commands,” Agrawal said, touching a control on the remote. “Did the first lines look like this?”

On the computer wall screen appeared

WARNING

YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED ACCESS TO THIS LAPTOP. DISCONNECT NOW.

“Yes,” Falcone said. “How—”

Agrawal looked across the table at Sarsfield. “Shall I explain?”

“Let the record show,” Sarsfield droned, “that Technician Agrawal is authorized to explain the procedure in order to expedite this interview.”

“This laptop was turned over to the bureau by the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police. It appeared to be inoperative. We thought at first we were dealing with a dead or cleaned-out hard drive. But I was able to pull some information out of it. We extracted the hard drive, which appeared to be normal for that type of Dell laptop.”

Another click produced on screen an image of the disassembled laptop. She switched to a laser pointer and aimed its beam at the hard drive and a green card laced with wires and tiny components.

“I could see that the card was vastly different from the manufacturer's card. And the hard drive did not resemble any in our collection. But, by using Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology, I was able—”

“Okay, Suni,” Sarsfield said with a quick smile. “Easy with the technology.”

“Oh, sorry,” she said, smiling back. “Well, it all came down to this: Only someone who knew the password could turn it on. And if someone tried more than three times to open it, all data on the hard drive would be erased. That's a very high-risk security system, indicating high-value data. I also found a very interesting feature. The USB—universal serial bus—you know, where you stick in the thumb drive—was disabled.”