The Law of the Sea : A Legal Thriller

by Dave Gerard

  “And you concluded that it wasn’t legal,” I guessed.

  “Right,” Harder said. “Kruckemeyer reamed me for it. He said he just wanted to know the answer, not get a whole formal legal opinion about it. Said now he’d have to share it with the client, and the memo might be discoverable in litigation, if the issue ever came up. Like this.”

  I nodded. I could well imagine.

  “Kruckemeyer explained that you have to know when to put something in writing, and when not to. It wasn’t that the client was actually going to dump anything there—that’s why they asked, and they never did. But some questions, you’d rather not have a record they were ever asked.”

  I nodded. “Bock must have been furious at Loudamire,” I realized. “And then she let slip the memo title in the privilege log…the pressure measurement report…Gunthum shitting the bed at deposition…God. I bet Bock took it all out on her. That’s why…” Harder nodded soberly.

  “What are you going to do, Jack?” Harder said finally. He was looking at me. So was Ashley. I was suddenly reminded that I was lead counsel now. Harder couldn’t help me. Nor could Remington or Kruckemeyer. I was on my own. I wondered for a moment whether I was in over my head. Whether I should have given the case to another lawyer. A more experienced one. But there was no turning back now.

  I thought about what to do. The death memo was the key, I knew. It showed that Lloyd Gunthum had killed David Marcum, and that Rockweiller Industries had covered it up. Their witnesses had deliberately lied under oath, and Bock had suborned perjury. This would blow the case wide open. They could face criminal charges for it.

  But we weren’t supposed to have the memo. Taking it was unethical, and maybe illegal. Especially after what happened to Loudamire. Graves wouldn’t care that it was Ashley that took it, not me. He would skin me alive. Very likely he would sanction me, strip me of my legal license, and maybe even throw me in jail. In front of the whole world.

  But that wasn’t what worried me the most just then. The worst possibility was that Graves might refuse to consider the evidence at all. If the memo was illegally obtained, Graves might exclude it. Fruit of the poisonous tree. That would be a disaster. I knew Bock & Co. would do everything in their power to try and cover it up. They would have to. They might say the memo was fabricated. Or that Kathleen had been out of her mind when she wrote it. I didn’t know how far Rockweiller would go if we pushed them into a corner.

  How could I prove that Rockweiller had killed David Marcum without the memo? Was there a way?

  I also thought about the contract. We still didn’t have proof that it existed. The memo hinted at it, but only in vague terms like “purported” and “alleged.” Those were lawyer weasel words. It wouldn’t be enough for Judge Graves, I knew. We still didn’t have any solid evidence that there was a deal. But that was secondary just then. First, we had to figure out how to prove that the death memo was true. That Gunthum and Rockweiller had killed Marcum.

  Time was short. Soon, Bock would find out that we had taken the memo. Assuming that Kathleen survived, she would go back to her hotel room and find that it was gone. There was no way to put that cat back in the bag. I tried to think of what Remington would do.

  “We need proof,” I said at last. “Proof of what happened to David. Proof that he found the Flor de la Mar. Proof that he was killed for it.”

  “But how do we get it?” Ashley asked.

  I looked at Harder. He was going to have to leave the room for this. Now that he was off the case, we couldn’t rely on his attorney-client privilege anymore. They could subpoena him and force him to give up everything we said. Harder nodded at me, understanding.

  “Good luck,” he said resolutely. Then he walked out and shut the door.

  I turned to Ashley. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said.

  THIRTY

  We flew to Malaysia on Singapore Airlines. The food and service were surprisingly good. Much better than the U.S. airlines I usually flew. The flight took almost twenty-four hours. I tried to get some rest on the plane, but didn’t sleep a wink. Instead, I passed the time in feverish contemplation of what we were about to attempt.

  The night before, I had received a call from Remington. The conversation was short, since he couldn’t give me legal advice about the case. But he said he’d heard where we were going (never mind how) and wished me luck. He said whatever I was looking for, he hoped I would find.

  We arrived in Kuala Lumpur in the late morning. The weather was overcast, and we were greeted with a sweltering, tropical heat. It made Houston and Florida feel dry by comparison. This was the true jungle.

  As we took a cab into the city, I gazed around in wonder. It felt like a different world. Kuala Lumpur was ultra-modern, with glass and steel skyscrapers everywhere, lit up in brilliant colors that were visible even during the cloudy day. The Petronas Towers dominated the city, standing like twin sentinels, their gaze reaching all the way to the sea. Everything about the place felt exotic. It was like a strange mirror image of New York, on the opposite side of the world. The deep, lush green of the jungle loomed in the background. It felt forbidding. As if it couldn’t be extinguished, but only kept at bay. It bided its time, waiting to reclaim its territory in a day when this city of man no longer reigned.

  We arrived at our hotel, checked in, and killed a couple of hours in the lobby. One by one, the team I had assembled began to arrive.

  Vijay was the first. He wore a short-sleeved button-down shirt, a pair of Ray Ban sunglasses, and a grin that stretched across half his face. We locked hands and embraced. Vijay was an independent contractor like me. That meant he could still work the case. We hit a stroke of luck in that. Vijay’s father was from India, but his mother was from Malaysia, so he spoke the language fluently. That made him indispensable for this trip. Vijay relayed to me that Cindy and Harder were insanely jealous. He taunted them over text, promising that he would send them plenty of selfies of him on the beach digging up buried treasure with his bare hands. I tried to smile, but I couldn’t share his excitement. I was too preoccupied with the dangers of what we were about to do.

  The next to arrive was Trevor Thompson, from the Aqua Ray dive resort in Key West. He was dressed in a faded old fishing shirt and cheap gas station sunglasses that made him look even more suspicious than he already was. Thompson had brought Jared Diamond too. Diamond looked even shadier than Thompson did, if that was possible. But at least he wasn’t high. I hoped.

  I had called Thompson two days ago about the trip. The conversation had gone something like this:

  “Hello. Trevor Thompson? Jack Carver here. Lawyer for David Marcum. Remember?”

  “Eh?”

  “The lawyer with Ashley Marcum. Ashley, say hello.”

  (Ashley, “Hi Trevor!”)

  “Hey, girl! And lawyer. What is it?”

  “I’ve got a business proposition for you,” I said. “How’d you like to fly down to Malaysia and help us find the greatest treasure of all time?”

  After convincing Trevor that no, I was not mocking him, and no, I was not a “wingtip-wearing, ass-puckering, horseshit eating lawyer” trying to screw him, he agreed to come, on the condition that I buy his flight and give him cold, hard cash up front. I persuaded him that a wire transfer later would do just as well, and he said yes, and that he would bring Jared Diamond too. Initially I balked at Diamond, not wanting to widen the circle more than I had to. But Thompson was adamant. Diamond was a Gulf War veteran, he said, who would die before he disclosed anything, or kill someone, and that it wouldn’t be the first time. I reluctantly agreed.

  When he arrived at the hotel, Trevor set down his luggage and gave Ashley a big hug. Then he greeted me with a noncommittal grunt. Diamond followed suit.

  The last to arrive was Professor Jacob Schnizzel, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and carrying an oversized suitcase. He was veritably
jumping with excitement. I greeted him and made introductions all around.

  “Hello,” Schnizzel said to Thompson, reaching out and pumping his hand enthusiastically. “Professor Jacob Schnizzel. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  Thompson eyed him warily. “Eh?”

  “Schnizzel.”

  “Schnitzel? I don’t like Germans,” he spat.

  “Neither do I,” Schnizzel muttered.

  “Eh?”

  With everyone there, it was time to begin. My plan was this: we were going to rent a boat and equip it with sonar, a magnetometer, and an ROV. Then we would follow the directions in Manuel Roberto’s confession—the same directions that had led Marcum and Gunthum to the Flor de la Mar. Once there, we would use the equipment to locate the ship, and, if the death memo could be believed, Marcum’s body as well. In one fell swoop, we would verify our theory about the Flor de la Mar, locate the treasure, and find David Marcum’s remains. Then we would return to Galveston as heroes and win the case.

  I was well aware that the plan bordered on insane. It assumed that we could actually locate the supposed site of the Flor de la Mar based on the confession, which had taken an expert team on the Excelsior I didn’t know how long to do. The plan also assumed that Marcum’s body was still at the wreck site, and that we’d be able to find it at the bottom of the ocean. Finally, it assumed that the Flor de la Mar was actually there, and wasn’t some fantasy cooked up in my imagination.

  I knew the odds against us were long. But I didn’t know what else to do. Back in Galveston, the case was reaching its zenith, and we still had no claim. We had no proof that Marcum had found the Flor de la Mar, or that he had a contract with Gunthum. And although we knew now what had happened to David Marcum, our only proof of that was a privileged memorandum that would as likely get me excommunicated from the legal profession as win the case.

  As long as I knew my plan was insane, I rationalized, that very fact made the plan sane. This was perhaps questionable logic. But I didn’t have any other options. What Remington would think of this plan, I couldn’t guess.

  I didn’t know how to do any of the sailing or the plotting or the finding of the Flor de la Mar myself. But I knew people who did. Trevor Thompson and Jared Diamond knew how to sail, dive, and work a sonar and magnetometer. Jacob Schnizzel knew enough about the Flor de la Mar, and about wreck search theory, to hatch a plan to find it, and identify it if we did. And Vijay spoke the local language, which would allow us to navigate an unfamiliar country. With this team, I felt that I had a fighting chance.

  I had tried to convince Ashley that it would be dangerous, and that she didn’t need to come. You can guess how that turned out. I didn’t have access to firm funds anymore, so Ashley and I opened up a dozen new credit cards between us and maxed them all out, barely scraping together enough money for the boat and equipment we needed. I told the team I would pay them later. The trial was going on even now, and there wasn’t a moment to lose.

  After rendezvousing at the hotel, we set out on separate errands. Vijay, Thompson, and Diamond went to check out the boat that we had arranged. On the way back, they would pick up supplies for the voyage. Schnizzel, Ashley, and I went up to my room and unrolled a set of detailed nautical charts of the Nicobar Islands. We studied them against Roberto’s confession from the Lisbon archives. Schnizzel had plotted out the possible coordinates of the wreck and the route we would take, one that would maximize our chances of finding the Flor de la Mar in the least amount of time. If it was there.

  That night, Ashley and I had dinner together at the hotel restaurant. We sat in a quiet corner and discussed plans for the voyage. Ashley also brought some records that she wanted to talk about. She spread them out on the table. I recognized them as her brother’s banking records, which we had been through some time ago.

  “I’ve been going back through these over and over again,” she told me. “I kept getting the feeling that we missed something. There’s one charge that I keep coming back to.”

  She showed me a statement dating six months before Marcum’s disappearance, and another one a year before that. “Look here,” she said. She pointed to a charge for seventy-five dollars from six months ago. The description simply read “box.”

  “What’s your first reaction to that?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “One of those subscription boxes, maybe? You know, the ones that send you food or shaving cream or whatever once a month.” I had signed up for a cooking box one time, but quickly grew bored with it. It seemed that you could find niche box subscriptions for anything these days. I’d even seen ones for animal skulls and vegan jerky. I wondered with vague disquiet why those particular ones had appeared in my ad feed.

  “But see how there’s no merchant name?” Ashley said, showing me the entry. I saw what she meant. Most of the charges had more detail. At a minimum, you could see the seller’s name and address. This entry didn’t have any of that. “The charge recurred exactly one year before,” she said, showing me another statement.

  “Okay,” I said. “Some type of yearly subscription box, then. I am a little curious about it. But I have to confess, I don’t see why it’s important.”

  “Look at this.” She pulled up Bank of America’s website on her phone. Then she went to the products and services section. One of the things listed were safety deposit boxes. She clicked on pricing. The smallest one available cost seventy-five dollars per year.

  It dawned on me. “You think the charge was for a safety deposit box.”

  “Yes. That’s why there’s no further detail about the merchant. Because the merchant is Bank of America itself. They probably just say “box” to keep it discreet. Like how they send you credit cards in unmarked envelopes.”

  “Right. And you think there’s something in that box.”

  She nodded. “I think that’s where he put the contract.”

  Later that night, Vijay and I sat down at the hotel bar, ordered a couple of beers, and wrote a scathing letter to Travis Scott at Bank of America demanding immediate access to the safety deposit box. It was more of a manifesto, really. We berated Scott for failing to disclose the existence of the box and accused him of violating the discovery rules by not doing so. If he didn’t give us access, we threatened to subpoena the entire Bank of America leadership team down to Galveston, Texas, haul them in front of Judge Graves in what was now the most famous case in the world, and move to sanction them for hiding key evidence about David Marcum’s death.

  We had a grand time writing the letter. Scott would not have as much fun reading it. After we finished, we put the letter in a sealed envelope and left it with the hotel clerk, with instructions to send it via the fastest available mail the next day.

  The next morning, we took a car to the nearby harbor of Port Klang. We picked our way through a crowded fish market, with all sorts of sounds and smells and people yelling in languages I didn’t understand. There were live prawns and lobsters and fish of all kinds in big water tanks. I watched as shopkeepers plucked them straight out of the tanks and into a bag or a frying pan on request.

  Once through the market, we reached the docks. After some searching, we came to a medium-sized boat, rigged up with equipment and gear. Vijay talked business with the owner while Thompson and Diamond stomped around on board, checking this line and that chain.

  Schnizzel climbed aboard excitedly, looking around at everything like a curious child. “Is this a 5900 side scan sonar?” he asked Thompson, pointing at a long machine on the deck.

  “Huh. It is,” said Thompson, seeming surprised that Schnizzel knew this.

  “Fantastic,” said Schnizzel. “I’ve read so much about these. But I’ve never seen one in person. It’s bigger than I thought.” Schnizzel ooh-ed and ahh-ed over the magnetometer and the small ROV that was attached to the vessel. The ROV would be able to dive down to where the Flor de la Mar was, like Exce
l Resources had, and even retrieve a piece of it. It had cost me about three maxed credit cards by itself.

  We set sail on the Strait of Malacca at noon. Thompson took the helm, and Diamond sat beside him, chain-smoking cigarettes in a silence as perfect as Zen. Schnizzel sat with them, asking questions about the gear and how they planned to use it. Once Thompson realized how knowledgeable Schnizzel was, he was awed, and hung onto Schnizzel’s every word as he described the location and contents of treasures both known and unknown.

  Vijay, Ashley, and I lay on the deck, enjoying the ocean breeze and the calm blue waters. I checked my email during the first few hours, anxious about developments in the case. But reception soon faded to zero, and I gave it up. Vijay tried to send a selfie to Harder and Cindy, but he had no coverage either. Ashley, Vijay, and I gave up on the electronic world and traded it for the real one. We looked up at the sky and talked about anything and everything but the case.

  The Strait of Malacca felt like a superhighway. Oil tankers and cargo ships dotted the blue waters in every direction, calmly steaming toward their destinations. The Strait was so crowded it looked almost like a festival, a gathering of yachts somewhere in the Mediterranean. But instead of beautiful white sails scattered across the horizon, the ships were massive, blocky cargo vessels, sedately trundling along to bring oil or food or machinery to wherever they needed to go.

  That evening, Vijay cooked a gourmet dinner for us under the stars. Most of what we had packed was canned beans, frozen food, pasta, and other things you bring on a sea voyage. It was intended to last, not to taste great. I had made the mistake of letting Jared Diamond buy some of the food, and he came back with something called pemmican, which was a paste of dried meat, fat, and berries that had been invented by indigenous peoples of North America and probably last used by European explorers in the Arctic at the turn of the nineteenth century. I guess they were out of Cliff bars.