Reading his mind, Solarez says, "If this really is a Chinese operative inside the embassy and they’re aware of Michaels, his research and his son, either our operation in Canada or at Sherwood has been compromised. We need to get to the bottom of this.”
"Yep. They already seem to know way too much, like they have an asset at the lab, or they hacked our servers. We’re counting on this research, and the whole thing may be in jeopardy. Keep me posted, and let me know if the CIA comes up with any ideas.”
Chapter 12
Franklin’s Pitch
With his well-rehearsed pitch running through his mind, Franklin pushes the 31st floor button on the elevator. After announcing himself to the attractive receptionist seated behind the round, modern desk, he sits in one of the client chairs and looks at, but doesn’t actually read, the headlines of the Wall Street Journal. Moments later, he is ushered back to a small conference room with an expansive view of the city’s skyscrapers and the river. The CEO of Hemispheres Airline, David Merland, awaits him.
"David, so good to see you again. How’s your wife?"
"Delores is doing well, thank you. And how about your wife, Melanie?" The businessman takes a seat at the table and Franklin follows suit.
“She’s fine. With one in high school she stays quite busy, of course. Now, the reason I'm here—the plane crash and the $160 million Hemispheres fund used to settle the claims. I assume you’ve heard the news.”
"As soon as the story hit the airwaves I must’ve had 20 emails and text messages. No one has confirmed anything. And if it was true, I should’ve been the first to know, right?” Merland rises and walks over to the window to gaze at the river, then whirls back around. “Surely our lead attorney realizes it’s completely false.”
In actuality, the leaked story is correct. But the how and why is quite complicated, and Merland was sworn to secrecy by the FBI and the counter-intelligence agents who met with him. The arrangement saved his company and its stockholders over $100 million—the massive self-insured portion of the airline’s liability—and it made sense. If a foreign government sabotages a U.S. commercial airliner, why should the shareholders pay? Hemispheres’ insurance carrier, ABG, didn’t fair as well. The $50 million it paid wasn’t reimbursed and never will be because of the national security issues and the secret payment involved.
“My sources are saying there was a monetary transfer—"
Merland cuts him off. "Is there any evidence? Again, do you understand how preposterous it would be for something like that to happen and me not to be aware?” Pretty convincing performance if I do say so myself, Merland thinks.
Franklin’s turn at acting comes next, since he was the one who informed the media and doesn’t exactly possess a cancelled check; he’s trusting Ryan to find the documentation to back him up. "I don't…I haven't…seen any direct proof, but I’m sure the press has something or they wouldn’t put it out there knowing the libel standards.”
“Well, let’s wait and see what they’ve got. What else is on your mind?" he asks, knowing the lawyer too well to think he came in person just to discuss a rumor.
"As I recall, your insurer paid $50 million, and between the airline and your suppliers, you came up with another $110 million. I want to try to get the money back. My office has already drafted a RICO Complaint for D.C Superior Court regarding fraud and concealment by both Andy Michaels’ law firm and the U.S. Government. If they concealed the truth, like if the crash was caused by a terrorist or some type of sabotage, that would be a game changer for sure. The airline did nothing wrong—there was no faulty maintenance, no defective parts—so you shouldn’t pay, and I could get it all back for you, and then some. I’ll even work on a contingency fee—one-third of the settlement or recovery and reimbursement of our litigation expenses, if we don’t recover them ourselves.”
"Taking on the government?” Merland bellows in a gravel-filled baritone. “What if we lose? Does this RICO statute require us to pony up any attorneys' fees to Michaels—or the government for that matter? I imagine the United States can find more than a few government attorneys willing to fight a fraud charge.” He pauses long enough to cool down. “Fine. I’ll talk to the board. The thought of getting the money back is very enticing, but suing the U.S. and a well-known attorney who handled high-profile cases against us will make this airline part of a media circus yet again. Something we need to think about.”
"I don't understand why you would hesitate, especially if the rumors are true and the government hoodwinked you.”
Merland senses a serious knot forming in the upper part of his stomach. He wants to talk to his FBI contact, pronto. "Like I said, I'll discuss it with my officers and let you know."
"I've already talked to ABG.”
“Are you kidding me? You should have consulted me first.”
“Sorry, I didn’t think the sequence mattered,” Franklin lies again. He figured the insurer would want their $50 million back, and he was right. They were willing to cover the litigation costs if the attorneys’ fees were contingent on a recovery, and also if Hemispheres agreed. Without the airline, they wouldn’t commit to anything.
“They’re willing if you are. Since they only paid a fraction of what you put together in the settlement funds, they won’t file without you.”
“They never called me."
"I asked them not to contact you until we talked. Bert Pritchard is who I spoke with, their general counsel. Here’s his card. Give him a call and let me know what you two decide.”
Franklin rises from his seat and Merland reaches across the table to shake hands. He walks Franklin to the conference room door, but no further. He sits back down at the table. There's a fire burning, and I need to put it out and fast.
By the time Franklin crosses the polished terrazzo flooring of the lobby, he has considered his options. What if he doesn’t get cooperation from Hemispheres or ABG? He still could file the same action as long as he gets one or more family members who recovered funds from their death suits to participate. Yes, if Hemispheres—for whatever maddening reason—won’t act on it, he still can. He feels a renewed satisfaction thinking he may be able to compensate for the tens of thousands in hourly fees he was screwed out of when he was forced to settle every claim within only months of the crash. The silver lining may still come shining through after all.
Chapter 13
Internship
David fidgets in his chair in Solarez’ office. When he first met the agent at an MIT job fair, he looked skeptically at his U.S. Department of Justice business card. It was a long shot, far from the career he envisioned on his first day of classes at the prestigious university. Yet here he is, a computer technology and surveillance intern for the FBI at the Washington, D.C. headquarters, working on matters affecting the nation's counterintelligence. He has wondered more than once if Solarez was aware of his relationship with Amanda, and if that was the reason they selected him for the summer internship. And with the information Solarez is telling him now, it seems even more likely.
"So you’re telling me Ron Michaels didn’t die? Wait, were you involved in his disappearance?"
The momentary pause before the agent’s response tells David he's right. "Yes, I was on the team tasked with protecting him," he confirms, but offers no further details.
"Well, I have a lot of questions." David pauses, thinking about his train trip with Amanda to Manhattan, where they tried to uncover why a patent attorney named Pletcher had done business with her dad. "Did you follow us when we went to New York to find Pletcher? And the bombing of Pletcher's garage, was that you?"
"There are some things you don't need to know."
"Yes, I think I do.”
Solarez hates having his hand forced by a 19-year-old intern, but the intel he might gain from using David’s relationship with the girl should they ever need it makes him cave. "We were involved. But that information doesn’t leave this room. Now the government is being accused of paying millions to Hemispheres, and we h
ave no idea where the story came from.”
"You don't think Amanda did it, do you? Or her Uncle Andy?"
"No, but we’re concerned for their safety.”
“Anything else?"
"That'll be all," Solarez responds.
As he walks to the cafeteria to meet Amanda for lunch, David wonders if this is the career path he ought to be following.
Chapter 14
Lucent’s View
Claustrophobic. The one word that Amanda keeps thinking while the MRI scanner does whatever it does to get views of her brain. An hour later she’s at the reception window at Dr. Lucent’s office adjacent to the hospital.
"How was your spring semester at UVA?" Lucent asks her as she enters his small office.
"Fine. Right now I'm enjoying working at the farm and helping out with some of the patients at Broken Halo."
"I saw the crash on the news again…"
"The press can't get enough of the rumors. I don't believe them, but it still opens old wounds for me." She sits in a patient chair across the desk from him.
"I understand. Any memories from before the crash you want to share with me?"
"Just one little thing about my high school boyfriend, Jonathan."
"Well that’s encouraging. You remembered something about him from before?"
"Kind of. Jonathan and I were, uh, kissing and stuff when I woke up one morning, so I’m not sure if it was an actual memory or a dream. I’ve seen him a few times since everything happened, and I’ve been made well aware that we dated in high school, so I could have made it up. I’m so tired of being like this, leafing through scrapbooks and looking at photos on my phone to learn about my own life."
A silhouette stands outside the glass door of the doctor’s office. "Let me go see who that is." Dr. Lucent opens the door and talks briefly with a man in the hall, then comes back in and closes the door.
"You didn't tell me you had bodyguards."
"Oh yeah, since the news broke about the government hush money they’ve been with me constantly. It's completely unnecessary, and annoying, but my uncle said the alternative, being put in protective custody, is worse.”
“Your uncle is a smart man.” Lucent turns to the flat-screen TV projecting several images of Amanda’s brain. "The images on the left are from right after the plane crash, and the ones on the right are from the MRI you had today, but I don’t have the radiology report for those yet.”
Lucent starts to compare the images and immediately notices something unusual.
“Amanda, can you give me a few minutes? I want to talk to Dr. Wishart about these. He’s one of the neuro-radiologists and I really trust his judgment. I’ll be right back, feel free to peruse the magazines.” He gestures to the rack on the wall on his way out. He calls Wishart from a phone in a hallway alcove and they agree to meet in the radiology room on a different floor of the building.
In the darkened radiology room, they examine the old and new images of Amanda’s brain.
Dr. Wishart shifts a few around. "No evidence of bleeding or abnormalities on today’s scan.”
"Don't you have a tool to measure the size of the brain?"
He scrolls through several icons on the monitor and selects the one that places graphical anchors around the circumference of an image.
"Can you compare the measurements from both dates?”
Side-by-side images with various marks and numbers appear on the screen.
“Interesting. It’s about five percent larger now."
“If we rule out swelling, that would be pretty unusual, right?”
"Absolutely. If there is any change in size after a TBI, the brain normally becomes smaller as the injured tissue is reabsorbed."
"Well I'm looking at the same films you're looking at. Do you see any telltale indications of swelling?"
Wishart reviews them again. “No.”
"All right, thanks. I want to study these a bit more, particularly the new ones.”
Lucent walks down the hall toward his office where he finds Amanda leafing through a dated People magazine.
Lucent brings up the same images and studies the orientation of Amanda’s frontal lobe, central sulcus, and parietal lobe in relation to the inner aspect of her skull. Is the frontal lobe a little too close to the interior of the skull in some of those areas? A traumatic cerebral swelling would be the most logical explanation, but the lack of clinical signs of this condition increases the possibility of actual brain growth. Keeping in mind the hyper-rapid coagulation of blood she exhibited after the crash, he mulls over possible treatments. Whether or not medications or steroids will help her is unclear, and he decides to talk it over with Amanda.
“At your age, we wouldn’t expect to see any meaningful expansion of your brain, but it appears to be larger in the recent scans.”
“Why would it be bigger?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. I’m going to prescribe an oral steroid for now. If the increase is being caused by swelling, we need to reduce it so your brain isn’t pressing against your inner skull.”
Amanda decides to tell the doctor something she has been holding back since he started treating her. “Dr. Lucent, remember when Uncle Andy and I came to your house and I cut myself with scissors to show you how I don’t bleed normally? Well, my dad did blood transfusions on me when I was younger. I have no idea how they affect me, but I’m taking enzymes and nutrients now. I thought I should tell you, in case it’s somehow connected to my surviving when no one else did, or now, connected to my enlarged brain.”
The doctor is surprised by this information and Amanda’s reluctance to tell him until now. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
Amanda feels like she betrayed him, one of the only medical doctors she likes and trusts. Damn, secrets suck. She wants to blurt it all out and tell him everything, but she knows it could harm her dad or her little brother. Maybe Uncle Andy too.
“Because I couldn’t.”
“I don’t understand—”
“The government. I have to honor an agreement we made with them.”
“Who’s we? This doesn’t make sense, Amanda.”
Lucent thought the agent in the hall was some sort of over-protection resulting from the recent media frenzy. Now he’s even more baffled.
“All I know is I was treated with blood transfusions to help with my medical problems and it affected my blood, and my healing. That’s all.”
She abruptly gets up, looking down to avoid eye contact with Lucent, opens the door and walks out.
Dr. Lucent walks quickly toward the door.
“Amanda, wait a second.”
She pauses long enough to look back and shake her head, then continues walking down the hall with the agent on duty trailing behind her, feeling like a big liar.
Chapter 15
Falling Man
He stares at the large photographic reproductions mounted along the wall of the exhibition hall from his vantage point on the bench. Several somber-looking people slowly shuffle through the alcove ensconced deep inside the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in lower Manhattan. They hardly notice Ty Ryan seated along the wall opposite the iconic photos. He sits like Buddha, hands resting along his thighs, motionless. His gaze is focused on the falling man, dwarfed against the enormous black-and-white grainy image of the World Trade Center.
What absolute hell impelled this seemingly voluntary decision? Ryan knows this man’s decision wasn’t really voluntary. He understands hell. Hell forced this man to free-fall from a high floor of the World Trade Center. Death by inferno or free-fall to death—not much of a choice. The image haunts him. Every time he returns to New York he finds his way here, like a magnetic pull. The free-fall guy didn’t deserve to die, only the terrorists deserved to die, and wanted to. This conundrum bothers him.
He feels his phone vibrate in his pocket. He looks at the screen, a text from Liza.
I’ll text you when I’m leaving the museum.
K, he replies.<
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Chapter 16
Liza
The pulsating bass line of the loud techno music pulsates inside Liza Chang’s stomach. Ba-ba boom. Ba-ba boom. She sits two rows back from the catwalk at New York Fashion Week for her company's most important stateside presentation of the year. People are packed in like sardines on folding chairs lining either side of the runway under the mammoth white tent in Bryant Park, Manhattan. It has earned the nickname “7th on 6th” because most New York design houses are on Seventh Avenue, but Fashion Week events are held off Sixth Avenue at the park. The Michael Morse line is slated for 7:00 p.m., after Tom Lord.
Marco, one of the designers for Morse, leans over to Liza. "Oh my God, here we go! I can't stand it anymore!" Thundering synth music plays and a choreographed light display begins.
Camera flashes burst from all directions as the first model in the Morse line makes her way down the catwalk, looking frighteningly thin and somewhat androgynous. She has short dirty-blonde hair and exotic makeup in multiple shades, including pastels that would look ridiculous anywhere but here. Those lucky enough to be in the front row point and converse about every detail of the model’s look, from her shoes and the dress to the jewelry and makeup. In quick succession, a series of additional models appear in Morse outfits until they fill the narrow stage in a single line. At the far end, the first model turns and walks back, giving the audience a second chance to see all the ensembles.
Leaning again toward Liza, Marco excitedly says, "Here's the dress that I managed! Don’t you love it?"
"Absolutely, Marco. It's amazing."
The announcer comments on various facets of the clothing as the models stream by. Between the music, the clapping, and the chatter of the industry pros packing the venue, Liza can’t hear herself think. Fortunately, the hour goes by quickly. Then Liza, Marco and five of the other designers and sales representatives rush behind the stage, hugging, giggling, and high-fiving each other.
Targeting the Telomeres, A Thriller Page 5
