The Insider (28 page)

“Am I being taped?” Will asked.

“Yes,” Mary said.

“Who else is listening to our conversation right now?”

“No one.” Will didn't believe that, either.

“I want my lawyer.” Will said the magic words like an incantation and waited for a reaction, a puff of white smoke, something.

Dennis stopped talking, placed his hands on the table, and looked over at Mary with a look of profound disappointment. “You sure this is the way you want to go?”

“I want . . . my lawyer.”

“Okay. Have it your way,” Dennis said, pushing himself up out of his chair. “The longer you go away for, the better it looks in our files. Isn't that right, Mary?”

“He's right. This is going to be good for our résumés, bad for yours.” Mary's voice had lost much of its southern drawl, and she looked at him with a keen glare that didn't seem like an act.

“You should also know that if you don't talk to us, we can't offer you protective custody,” Mary said.

“Why do you think I need that?”

“Because two members of the Russian mob have just been killed. Their bosses just might consider you responsible for their deaths. We've been trying to build a case against the Red Fellas in this city for years. You have no idea what they are capable of.”

“I think I have some idea.”

“Nikolai and Yuri were so low on the totem pole that we'd never even heard of them before you showed up. If their bosses come after you . . . well, you better just hope they don't find you.”

“Can I have the protective custody while I think about whether to talk?”

“No,” Mary said. “You can't be arrested until you've been charged. And we can't put you in protective custody unless you've agreed to cooperate.”

“I thought you were going to charge me with securities violations.”

“Don't worry, we'll have you behind bars soon enough,” Dennis said. “But we can't hold you for insider trading yet. That's not how it works. There's a procedure here that we have to follow.”

“Can we get you a soda?” Mary asked.

“No, thank you. Can I leave now?”

“There's some paperwork we need to finish up,” Mary said. “Just sit here for a while and we'll be back.”

“I want to leave now. If you're telling me I can't do that, then I want to call my lawyer.”

“Suit yourself,” Mary said. “You can use that phone on the desk outside the conference room.”

Will walked purposefully over to the phone, even though he still wasn't sure who he was going to dial. Finally, his mental Rolodex produced the result he had been searching for since he had arrived, a name that he hadn't thought of in at least seven years: his former law school classmate Jon Coulter. He dialed information on his cell phone and got an address for the Law Offices of Jon Coulter on Mission Street, not exactly the hallmark of a successful law practice.

When Will told the receptionist that he was being questioned at the offices of the Department of Justice, he was immediately put through to Coulter.

“Will Connelly!” Jon exclaimed in his flat Chicago accent. “It's been, what, seven years?”

“Are you still doing criminal law?” Will asked, cutting short any reminiscences.

“Yeah, what's up? What are you doing at the DOJ's offices?”

“I'm not in a place where I can speak freely right now, but agents from the DOJ and the SEC are here trying to ask me questions. I think they might charge me. I told them I wanted a lawyer. You're the only real criminal lawyer that I know.”

“What do you think they might charge you with?”

“Well, they're talking about insider trading . . . and involvement with organized crime . . . the Russian mob . . . and a planned terrorist attack. Oh yeah, and I'm also suspected of murdering one of my former colleagues at Reynolds Fincher.”

There was a lengthy silence on the other end of the line, and Will began to wonder if the connection had failed. “I'll be over there in a half hour or less,” Jon said at last. “Don't say anything else until I get there.”

“Okay.”

“Don't even make small talk with the agents. I mean it—say nothing.”

“Okay. I get it.”

As he waited in the empty conference room for Jon to arrive, he recalled the day they met nine years ago when they were both first-years at Boalt Hall. Will first took notice of Jon in his contract law class. Each session, Professor Arthur Silver selected one student for Socratic dialogue, a form of intellectual blood sport in which the instructor quizzed one student throughout the entire hour on the minutiae of a single case.

Will still remembered the day that Professor Silver called on Jon. Everyone in the class took a particular interest in the contest that day because the student more than held his own. For someone who had obviously not spent a great deal of time reviewing the case, Jon acquitted himself surprisingly well, relying on a cursory reading of the case, quick-witted intelligence, and chutzpah.

Professor Silver was a small, balding man who had an impish sense of humor that he used to ingratiate himself to the class as a whole while simultaneously terrorizing and humiliating individual students with his belittling jokes. When Silver resorted to lamely mocking Jon's mispronunciation of
demurrer
(“Oh, so the defendant was shy and modest?”), the class recognized that, to the extent possible in the rigged game that was the first-year law school classroom, Jon had achieved a victory. It was a bloodied-but-still-standing, Rocky-Balboa sort of victory, but a victory nonetheless.

After class, Will congratulated Jon on his showing, and they had struck up a friendship and alliance for the remainder of their first year. Jon was only twenty-five then, but the blueprint for the middle-aged man was already apparent: slightly pudgy and his black hair was already thinning at the temples. A Chicago native, he was loyal to the ways of his homeland—chain smoker, drinker of Old Style beer, hopeless Cubs fan.

As a study partner, Jon displayed all of the virtues and the failings that were hinted at in Professor Silver's classroom that day. He had a quick mind and was able to master the course materials well enough to get a B or a C with relatively little effort. But his studies never achieved the histrionic meticulousness of those who were motivated by the fear of classroom humiliation. As a result, Jon never rose to the level of an A student.

Will always felt a little guilty that he had let his friendship with Jon slip away after the first year. The
Law Review
took up much of his time after class, and he began to hang out with the journal's staff and editors, whose sense of themselves as budding masters of the universe was unhealthy but contagious. Will continued to see Jon over the course of the remaining two years of law school, but their conversations grew shorter and more rote, ultimately reduced to a few comments on the latest travails of the beleaguered Cubbies.

After graduation, Will perused a list in the law school alumni magazine of the jobs that his classmates had taken. Jon had joined a criminal defense firm in Oakland that Will had never heard of. Now he had apparently opened his own practice. Will decided to reserve judgment as to whether that constituted a step up or a step down.

As promised, Jon arrived in less than a half hour, pushing through the conference room doors with Dennis close behind. Jon looked very much like he had eight years ago, only more so. The waistline had spread a little more and, obeying some principle of male physics, the hairline had receded in inverse proportion.

Jon shook hands with Will and whispered, “What the fuck, Will?” Without waiting for a response, he then turned to face Dennis. “I'm going to need a few minutes alone with my client, but not in this room.”

“Even if we had the recording equipment turned on, which we don't, it wouldn't be admissible,” Dennis responded.

“Just the same. I'd like to use that unoccupied office over there.”

Dennis grimaced. “Go ahead.”

Once they were behind closed doors in the empty office, Will launched into an abbreviated version of his story. As Will spoke, Jon turned from time to time to watch Mary, Dennis, and the other agents as they filed to and from a room adjacent to the conference room.

When Will got to the part about the BART attack and his anonymous call to the police, Jon got up out of his chair and started pacing.

When Will had reached the end of his narrative, Jon said, “Holy fucking shit, man! You've managed to be my first organized-crime case,
and
my first terrorism case—all rolled into one—with a murder charge thrown in for good measure. I didn't think that anyone could manage that trifecta, much less one of my old law school classmates. This is some serious shit, Will. But at least you haven't been charged yet. Frankly, I'm not sure what they're waiting for.”

“What do you propose that we do?”

“We're going to see if we can walk you out of here without someone deciding to place you in custody. Then we're going to regroup at my offices, where I can hear the whole story in more detail. But first I want to see what's going on in there,” Jon said, pointing at the room into which Mary had just disappeared. “Wait for me in the conference room.”

Jon entered the room adjoining the conference room. About thirty seconds later, Will heard raised voices inside. Then the door flew open, and Jon, Mary, and Dennis strode into the adjacent conference room, none of them looking happy. Will was startled to see that following them was Detective Kovach of the SFPD. Kovach was accompanied by someone Will had never seen before—a man in a dark suit, with graying blond hair and squinty eyes. Kovach and the squinting man had apparently been observing the proceedings in the conference room on a video monitor.

The entire group joined Will around the conference room table, with no one taking a seat.

Jon was the first to speak. “So exactly what kind of multi-jurisdictional clusterfuck is this, anyway?”

“Watch your tone,” Dennis said.

“First, let me get the players straight,” Jon said. “I understand what the DOJ, the SEC, and the SFPD are doing here, but who are you?” he asked the squinting man.

“David Pace. Department of Homeland Security.”

“And what brings you to the clusterfuck?”

“I wish you would stop saying that,” Pace said, looking pained. “There's a woman present.”

“Oh, don't mind me,” Mary said, clearly tickled by Jon's dramatic flair.

“I'm sure Mr. Connelly could probably explain my presence as well. His friends in the Russian
mafiya
are apparently doing business with a terrorist named Aashif Agha, whom we're trying to locate. An anonymous call was placed to the police about a possible attack on the BART system by Agha. We believe that call was placed by Mr. Connelly.”

“Is my client being charged with something?”

“I'm just here in an observational role for the time being. We're trying to learn as much as we can about the dealings between Agha and the Russian
mafiya
.”

“You sure you want to take this case on, counselor?” Dennis asked. “Where there's smoke there's usually fire, and we've got more smoke here than when the Oakland Hills burned.”

“That's a good way of putting it, Agent Tyler,” Jon said. “All I've heard so far is a lot of smoke and circumstantial evidence. Does anyone have an actual case against my client? If not, will someone please explain to me why we're still here? Apparently someone said something to Will about some paperwork. . . .”

“That was me,” Mary said.

“And what sort of paperwork is that?”

“Just interview notes, which are now completed.”

Jon swiveled to make eye contact with everyone gathered around the table. “Then I think we're done here.”

There was silence around the table. Will noticed that Mary, Dennis, and Kovach were all casting glances at the man from Homeland Security, probably because his was the agency with the broadest discretion to detain Will, if he chose to use it.

The DHS agent simply shrugged. If Pace had known that Will had sat across a table from Aashif Agha, then Will would probably already be in a federal detention facility, and he most likely would never have even been granted access to a lawyer.

“You're free to go,” Mary said, opening the door to the conference room.

Jon reached into his pocket for a handful of business cards and slid them around the table like he was dealing a hand of poker. “I probably don't have to say this, but I expect that there will be no further direct communications with my client.”

Mary examined Jon's card, then said to Will, “You'd better hope that this guy is very, very good.”

Jon drove Will back to his office on Mission Street, which was in a narrow two-story brick building wedged between a bodega and a pawnshop. Stenciled on the second floor window in elegant script were the words LAW OFFICES OF JONATHAN COULTER. In a cruder block-letter style, apparently added after market realities sank in, were the words ABOGADO—YO HABLO ESPAÑOL.

Mission Street, the main street of the city's Latino community, was never quiet. It clattered to the rhythms of five-and-dime commerce, with
taquerías
and bodegas coexisting alongside vintage clothing stores and bars catering to hipster youth. Most of the stores seemed ready to spring into a defensive nighttime posture, their doors and windows bracketed by steel-accordion fences and medieval iron bars.

They climbed the stairs of the building, past the offices of a Spanish-language record label on the first floor. When Will opened the door, he thought that he had mistakenly entered a doctor's waiting room. Each of the three people seated around a coffee table wore bandages or casts. They all looked up at him with the simmering, subdued eyes of those in pain.