Stolen Thoughts

by Tim Tigner

  As they walked home, she asked, “Are we agreed, strategy session over breakfast at six?”

  They all nodded.

  She sent a text to her assistant, then held Colton back as Trent and Sackler walked ahead. Just the few steps required to gain a bit of privacy so she could vent. “I’m struggling without special assistance from Walter. I knew it would be a challenge, but even expending twice the energy, I’m only half as effective. Obviously, mind-reading isn’t required to practice law, but—”

  “We’ve always relied on it,” Resseque said, completing her thought.

  “Exactly! All our courtroom prep and practices are built around both of us having use of our glasses. We’re a team with a finely tuned and highly effective routine.”

  Resseque nodded. “I get it. Your cart has lost a wheel. After two decades of effortlessly rolling along, you’re suddenly wobbling around beneath the weight of an unwieldy load. I’m going through the same thing. Fortunately, my cases aren’t such a circus.”

  Scarlett had been so focused on her own situation that she’d forgotten what Colton was going through having lost Jim. Well, forgotten wasn’t the right word. It just hadn’t been front of mind. She had no mental bandwidth for anything but the sexual assault case and its implications. “It was a brilliant move on Pascal’s part.”

  “Linking our lives to his verdict?”

  “It’s every client’s dream. We feel for them all—to a greater or lesser degree—but I’ve never been nearly as vested in an outcome before.”

  Colton put an arm around her shoulder. “I know. Me too, and it’s not even my case.”

  “Pascal’s not very pleased with us.”

  “That’s understandable. You had an off day, and then you refused to include him in the strategy session.”

  Scarlett threw up her hands. “It was for his own good. He can’t be allowed to know what’s going on with us, and we needed to discuss our situation to serve him, so he couldn’t be there. It’s so frustrating!”

  “I get it. I’d be frustrated too.” He gave her shoulder a squeeze. “You’re doing it right. You did the post-game analysis and set your team up to play better tomorrow than you did today. Now you need to get a good night’s sleep and pray that Walter and Trent do too so you all bring your A game to court in the morning.”

  “Good point.”

  “With luck, this time tomorrow we’ll be sitting around a table with Pascal, toasting your stellar performance. Take that image to bed with you. Dream it and make it so.”

  “I’ll do that. Thank you, Colton.”

  The apartment lobby was empty when they walked in. Walter and Trent had already gone up to bed. Scarlett hoped they had psyched each other into a positive state of mind the way Colton had her, but she doubted it. Trent didn’t work that way.

  She and Resseque didn’t speak during the elevator ride up. She didn’t want to risk stepping off the mental balance beam, and he seemed to sense that. As she exhaled to relax, to breathe out the day’s stress while literally transitioning from work to home, from plugged to unplugged, on to off, she felt a killer headache coming on. One of those deep-brain pains she associated with the lack of vascular pressure coming from caffeine withdrawal. In this case, however, it was as if the cessation of stress had opened up her mind to the toxins floating around.

  Scarlett knew what to do. She’d drink a big glass of water, take a hot bath, then do some stretching before bed, all with soothing spa music playing in the background and images of a victory celebration dancing in her head. With luck, she’d wake to a much brighter world.

  68

  Hardware and Software

  THE PARTNERS of RRS&S had a strict policy against reading each other’s minds, and that generally extended to the personnel dedicated to supporting their peers. It did not, however, apply to their own staffs.

  It could be argued that their trademark horn-rims were the world’s single best personnel management tool. What could be better than knowing exactly what your employees were thinking? When they were unsure or insecure or feeling overworked or undervalued? When they were hiding disagreement or hoping for praise? In the hands of a professional—someone who had learned to disregard the noise, the stray thoughts, foibles, and fetishes that invaded everyone’s thoughts from time to time—it was extremely powerful.

  Scarlett also used her precious tool to get honest feedback during tense times. “Thanks for coming in early, Margaret.”

  “Whatever I can do, Ms. Slate,” her assistant said, arranging the breakfast delivery. Everyone had their favorite foods, and Margaret knew them all. Each of the assistants did.

  “How are people doing after the funeral?” Scarlett asked.

  “We’re all sad. Chloe and Mr. Anderson are a bit anxious. They want to know what’s next for them.”

  “It was very unexpected, so we haven’t figured everything out yet, but Chloe and Mr. Anderson will be fine. With Jim Rogers gone, they’re more important than ever.”

  “I’ll let them know, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure.”

  Margaret began turning to leave, but hesitated. “Is everything okay, Ms. Slate?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I feel that I’ve upset you. Did I say something I shouldn’t have?”

  “No, no, Margaret. Thank you.”

  Scarlett checked her watch as her assistant walked away. Five minutes to six. Under the circumstances, five minutes would feel like forever.

  “Good morning,” Colton said, walking into the partners’ conference room early, as if in answer to her silent prayer.

  “I’m not sure it is,” Scarlett replied, her voice cracking

  “What is it?” he asked, riveting his full attention on her.

  She stared at him.

  “You’re wearing your glasses,” he said.

  “Have you put yours on today?”

  “No. Why, is there a problem?”

  “Mine aren’t working.”

  Colton whipped his horn-rims from his breast pocket and put them on in a single fluid motion. He stared at her as his face paled. “Mine either.”

  “What’s going on?” Sackler asked, as he and Trent entered the room.

  “We— We appear to have lost it too,” Colton said, his voice off by an octave.

  Trent shifted his gaze back and forth between them a couple of times before donning his own glasses. “Oh, my God. How could this happen?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question,” Colton said. “The billion-dollar question is: can we fix it in time to save Pascal?”

  “Is there a chance that it’s the glasses? That some component exceeded its shelf life and they’re all failing at the same time?” Sackler asked. “I tried all my pairs over the weekend, but I didn’t test anyone else’s.”

  Everyone turned to Trent, who assembled and maintained their devices.

  “It’s possible. I was just reading a story about how our Stealth aircraft suddenly became visible to radar one day. Turned out that DuPont changed an ingredient in the paint without informing the Air Force. Off the top of my head I can’t think of what our faulty component could be, but it’s worth checking.”

  “You keep our old pairs locked up in the shop, right? Let’s try them first,” Colton suggested.

  Trent had converted the panic room in his apartment into a workshop that was easy to secure. “Do you want to come with me, or shall I run for them?” Trent looked at his watch. “We need to be in court in three hours.”

  Colton said, “Run. We need to leave from here.” He turned to his fellow attorneys as Trent made his exit. “If it’s not the glasses, what else could it be?”

  “It’s either hardware or software, right? There’s no third option,” Sackler said.

  “The software being our brains,” Colton clarified.

  “I can think of a third option,” Scarlett said. “There could be interference, like a jamming signal.”

  Colton turned to her, visibly
impressed and pleased. “Right! The Wall Street guys are constantly doing outlandish things to increase their transaction speed by a few billionths of a second so they can arbitrage the system and scoop the next guy. Who knows what secret new technology they might have installed nearby.”

  “I hope that’s it, but I seriously doubt it,” Sackler said. “It’s affected me everywhere I’ve been, including Tavern On The Green.”

  Colton waggled his hand. “Maybe it’s a satellite thing. Or some new cell phone technology that’s everywhere the carrier’s phones are.” He held up his Samsung. “This could be the problem. You know how precise our system has to be. How accurate the calibration.”

  “Good points. I pray you’re right.”

  “I do too,” Scarlett said. “But I have to say the thought that it might be a software problem scares the skin off me. What if this is the early stage of whatever killed Jim?”

  “A disease that we and only we are getting?” Colton asked with a skeptic’s intonation.

  “It could be environmental. When the Russians poisoned that guy in London by putting polonium in his tea, he wasn’t the only one who got sick. The whole bar became radioactive. People were coming and going for weeks getting radiation poisoning before Scotland Yard figured out what happened.”

  “What are you saying?” Sackler asked.

  “I’m saying we have a crazy, deadly situation and in the interest of saving our lives we should consider every angle.”

  “Including the Russians did it?”

  “That was just an example. Point is, if it’s our brains and not our glasses that are malfunctioning, we need to look for environmental factors and enemies.”

  “What kind of environmental factors?” Colton asked.

  “Well, the glasses themselves, for starters,” Scarlett said. “We’ve been beaming other people’s thoughts into our brains for twenty years. Maybe there are side effects.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “I don’t either. And unlike you, I was never a scientist. You guys invented the technology, not me. Can’t you run some experiments? Figure it out using ferrets or whatever?”

  Sackler removed his worthless glasses. “None of us have been in a biology lab for decades. I’ll speak for myself, but I very much doubt the other guys feel differently. I’m way too rusty to work on something so sophisticated. Seriously, how much of your college calculus classes do you remember?”

  Scarlett set her glasses aside as well. “If you can’t do laboratory experiments, then at the very least we need to get ourselves laboratory tested. Let’s use our wealth and connections to have our heads thoroughly examined without disclosing why we’re concerned. If this is a side-effect of our technology, we need to know.”

  “I already did some tests,” Sackler said. “But now that you mention it, I was looking for specific things based off recent events: food poisoning and stroke. It makes sense to go broad and deep. The question is when?”

  “Colton can call in sick and go now. We can go tonight. Colton, will you make arrangements with Dr. Kahn?”

  Resseque nodded. “I’ll head over there as soon as Trent confirms that reverting to old eyewear doesn’t fix the problem. Meanwhile, I think we need to consider the other environmental option.”

  “What other environmental option?” Sackler asked.

  “The non–side effect one,” Scarlett said as her stomach shrank another size. “The one where this was intentionally inflicted through some devious means, like the Russian polonium thing.”

  Sackler nodded. He understood. “Cassandra.”

  Colton surprised Scarlett by smiling. “What is it?” she asked.

  “If it’s Victoria Pixler and not Mother Nature who’s causing our problem, we’re well equipped to fight back. All we need to do is let Fredo know that she’s here.”

  “How do we get him to New York without revealing our identities?” Sackler asked.

  “That’s easy. We tell him she’s after Archibald Pascal.”

  While Scarlett nodded along with her peers, another idea struck. “We should modify Fredo’s instructions. Change the order from kill to capture. That way we can learn what she’s done, and how to fix it.”

  Her partners all nodded. They were also more nervous about the medical threat than they’d been letting on.

  “Okay,” Trent said. “I can call him right now.”

  “Put him on speaker,” Colton said. “I want to hear his reaction.”

  69

  From Daydream to Nightmare

  ARCHIBALD PASCAL wasn’t sure how much more courtroom drama he could take. The prosecution’s asinine arguments were absolutely unfair and positively maddening. Yet he had to sit there with a smile.

  To force the required facial expression, Pascal retreated to the solace of his own mind. He was a living legend for good reason. While he hadn’t dropped out of Harvard like Zuckerberg and Gates—he’d earned a degree from Wharton—Pascal had dropped out of a PhD program at Stanford after just a few days. And now he was ranked alongside them on Forbes’ most coveted lists: the World’s Richest people and the World’s Most Influential.

  Racking up that record had not been easy. Or abrasion free. While millions now admired him, still admired him, nobody had ever called him a saint. Power and wealth did not come without costs. Costs to earn them and costs to keep them.

  He would not have been there, in that courtroom chair, if he had not been a wealthy or powerful man. That was the real injustice here. He was being prosecuted for a commonplace occurrence solely because he was powerful and rich.

  And the whole world was watching, because he was powerful and rich.

  Although Pascal had endured plenty of unpleasant situations while building his fortune and name, nothing from his history compared in size or scale to the shitstorm he was suffering now. The humiliation didn’t bother him, not really. Not yet, anyway. No, what chewed his cherries was the requirement to sit there for days on end, sympathetically meeting the gaze of women who were attempting to disgrace and then rob him—while the world watched and cheered.

  It had been bearable when his lawyers were winning. The satisfaction of squarely landed counterpunches had offset the occasional painful jab. But for the past two days, he was taking the hard hits and the bitches were the ones struggling to suppress smug smiles.

  Worst of all, for the first time in years, he was looking at the real possibility of losing something meaningful. Something more valuable than money or even power. Something he couldn’t recapture or buy back. Instead of thanking him for advancing their careers with highly paid jobs, the vengeful cows were trying to steal his time.

  And for what?

  They’d all had sexual encounters a hundred times before and a hundred times since. Why was their experience with him any different? What distinguished that particular tryst from their scores of others? What separated it from the countless other times they’d used tits, winks, and smiles to get what they wanted? Just one thing, and everyone knew it. Pascal had money.

  Unwanted attention? Please. If attention was unwanted, why were they wearing high heels and pushup bras? Why the makeup and painted nails? You want to be treated like a guy? Dress like a guy. But don’t wave a red cape, then blame the bull.

  A knee nudge under the table snapped Pascal back into the moment. He looked over at Sackler, who was pointing to two words scrawled small on his notepad. You’re glowering.

  Just then Wanda Willet, the she-devil who wanted to use his carcass as a stepping stone to the DA’s office, said, “Your honor, the prosecution calls Diane Maestretti.”

  Pascal felt his stomach drop as Slate shot to her feet. “Objection, your honor. Ms. Maestretti is not on the witness list.”

  “Rebuttal witness, your honor. Ms. Maestretti has firsthand knowledge that the relationship between Mr. Pascal and Ms. Barrymore was not always cordial, as the defense just claimed.”

  “Overruled,” Judge Whitcomb said.

  Again Slat
e rose. “Your honor, we’d like to request a short recess to discuss the new witness with our client prior to her testimony.”

  Whitcomb looked ready to deny their motion but then his expression changed. Perhaps he needed a bathroom break. “Granted. Court will reconvene in fifteen minutes at three-thirty.” He tapped his gavel.

  Pascal’s attorneys ushered him to a quiet corner of the courthouse while their bodyguards coordinated to form a human barricade some twenty feet back.

  “Who is Diane Maestretti and why am I hearing her name for the first time?” Slate said, sounding neither calm nor cool and collected.

  “A woman I briefly dated. I’d honestly completely forgotten about her.”

  “Well, now that you do remember, perhaps you can tell us what she’s going to say, so we can attempt to keep you out of prison.”

  “We went out once. That was it. Nothing special.”

  “One time?”

  “One time.”

  “When was that?”

  “About six years ago.”

  “Six years ago is when you had the contentious encounter with Beth Barrymore.”

  “I know.”

  “Did you discuss Ms. Barrymore with Ms. Maestretti?”

  “I vaguely recall crossing paths with Beth while I was out with Diane.”

  Slate turned red.

  Sackler asked. “What will her testimony be? Come on, we have no time to spare here.”

  “I really don’t recall, but after some very expensive cognac, I might have said something to the effect that she was an employee with benefits.”

  “An employee with benefits?” Slate asked. “As in a friend with benefits?”

  Pascal shrugged.

  “Is that it?” Sackler asked. “Tell me that’s it? Tell me nothing else has slipped your mind.”

  “Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, about her, I’m remembering why we never had a second date.”

  “And why was that?” Sackler pressed.

  “The morning after our first date, while we were out at breakfast, mind you—meaning after she’d spent the night—she asked me why I hadn’t stopped when she said no.”