“Maybe, but not when it comes to talking to my lawyers. You won’t
be paying me, you’ll be hiring one of them.”
“And they’ll credit your account,” said Chloe. Smart move.
“My accounts with my lawyers are complicated, I assure you. But
you’ll find them more than worth their fees. Sound good?”
Chloe looked to Sacco as if asking him to confirm the deal. He did.
The three of them exchanged pleasantries, the mood much more conviv-
ial now that a mutually beneficial arrangement had been struck. Chloe
glanced at the cordless phone on the kitchen wall and sighed with relief
as she allowed herself to be shown to the door without having to make
any unusual requests to use the bathroom or get a drink of water or,
God forbid, make a call because her cell battery was dead. Thankfully
the Clover home was like 82% of American homes when it came to its
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choice of home hand sets. She and Sacco drove off in the Mercedes, not
even glancing towards the white plumbing van parked one street over
with Paul and Bee in it.
Paul was thankful that Clover was being pretty paranoid but not very
smart about it. He’d given up using his cell phone apparently, hav-
ing perhaps figured out it was hacked or warned off using it by whoever
told him to stop going online. So he was using his landline, knowing
that legally the government couldn’t eavesdrop on his conversations
with his lawyer. Of course this was the new golden age of illegal wire-
tapping, so Paul wasn’t sure why he was so confident about his security,
but perhaps all he was worried about was what they could use in court.
His “landline” was only on the land up to the base station of his cordless
phone. From there, it was broadcast through the air, and although the
phone probably had a pretty sticker on it that claimed to be in the 5.8
Ghz spectrum (which was hard to scan without special gear), the base
station’s signal was sill in the 900 MHz range (which Bee, her scanner,
and her large antenna could scan with relative ease). He waited all of
three minutes after Chloe and Sacco left to make the call.
Bee would be able to figure out the number he was dialing from the
sound of the tones that went flying by from his speed dial. Paul pressed
the headphones close to his ears and he strained to hear every nuance
of the static-laden signal. “Marsh, Dutton, and Hermann, how may I
direct your call?” said a crisp, professional young man’s voice.
“This is Ken Clover calling.”
The receptionist or whoever paused for just a moment before replying.
“Just a moment, Mr. Clover,” he said, then put them on hold. Paul lis-
tened to Vivaldi for over a minute, wondering if perhaps this delay was
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designed to time out any feds listening in. Paul suspected that was just
something from the movies though. He’d have to look it up. Either way,
it was interesting that the receptionist knew just who Clover wanted to
talk to without him saying.
“Ken, how are you?” a woman suddenly said in Paul’s ear. She sounded
older, with a friendly, almost motherly tone to her voice.
“I’m doing OK, Emily, I’m doing OK.”
“I didn’t know we had a phone conference scheduled.”
“We don’t, and I’m sorry for calling without an appointment, but
there’s been a development. I think I might have a referral for you.”
“We’re not taking new clients right now, Ken, I’m so sorry. I can give
you some names if you’d like.”
“No, no, I know that. It’s not like that. These are people that are sort
of connected with my case. Similar interests.”
“Why don’t you come by and you can tell me more about them. Let’s
see here, how about Thursday at 7 AM?”
“I’ll be there.”
“Wonderful. It’s always a pleasure, Ken.”
“Thanks, Emily. I really appreciate it.”
By the time Paul had taken off the headphones, Bee had already
pulled up Marsh, Dutton, and Hermann on Google. The biggest sur-
prise was that the law firm didn’t have a website at all. They were listed
in various directories and mentioned in some other sites, but they had
a very low exposure level. All Paul could learn from his quick scan
was that they were a Washington DC based law firm with offices in
Georgetown. There wasn’t even any indicator as to what kinds of law
they specialized in, although the few other places where their name
came up were all related to political matters rather than lawsuits. On a
hunch, Paul checked with a database for registered lobbyists and found
all three of the named partners listed there, although there was no
indication who their clients might be or even what kinds of issues they
specialized in. He already knew that this firm was not the same one
that was actually defending Clover against all the charges filed against
him. That was one of the national mega-firms based out of New York.
This was going to require more research.
They waited another half-hour to see if Clover was going to make
any more calls, but he didn’t, so Paul climbed up front and drove them
back to the rendezvous point with Chloe and Sacco. The four of them
made the long drive back to their base of operations up in the DC area.
This time they were, unfortunately, all the way over in Baltimore, where
Sacco had lined them up an empty apartment where some friends of his,
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who were doing aid work down in Ecuador right now, normally lived.
It was kind of a dump in the way that hippified group homes often
are, but it was a clean, secure, and untraceable dump that had neigh-
bors whose wi-fi c1sman could hack, and that’s what they needed. Any
hotel they were likely to find that was quiet and secure enough was on
the system somewhere, and they couldn’t trust any of their fake-name
credit lines or identities now that the Key West house had been blown.
Even the van and the old Corolla they were using had been bought
with cash using fake IDs in South Carolina, and they were paranoid
enough that they’d destroyed those IDs once they’d driven the used
vehicles off the lot.
Once they were back at the Baltimore base, they filled in c1sman on
what they’d learned and then everyone started digging into this Emily
Marsh person any way they could think. Chloe even went out and
bought a new disposable phone, drove into DC, and pretended to be a
reporter doing a story on lobbyists who wanted to interview her, but she
never got past the receptionist’s firm “Ms. Marsh doesn’t do interviews.”
Not, apparently, even on deep background. Sacco suggested calling
his DC area activist contacts, but those were the very people who were
under heavy investigation, probably thanks to Marsh, so they decided
any contact with them was too great a risk. That left hard core online
searching, but even that didn’t reveal much that they could do a lot
with. That night they met around the house’s third-hand wooden din-
ner table to assess their newly revealed foe.
“Emily Marsh, age 54, lobbyist and lawyer.” said Paul from one end
of the table. “What’ the deal here?”
“The deal is,” said Sacco. “We have no idea what the deal is. She’s
a registered lobbyist, but her only registered clients are other lobby-
ists. No direct ties to any corporate or policy groups, but plenty of
money coming in from practically every firm on K Street. Including,
of course, our friend Kenny-boy Clover. They’re also a law firm, but
we couldn’t find any record of them representing anyone in any legal
cases or any public records filings that we could dig up. In essence, she
knows lots and lots of powerful people and they pay her firm money,
but she doesn’t have any firm positions or history of serving particular
interests that I can see. Going through all the forms they file reporting
their lobbying stuff is dense shit, and I can’t be sure I’m reading it right
though. But my general take is that it’s a bunch of bureaucratic hand
waving to cover up whatever it is she really.”
Paul nodded and turned to Bee. “Yeah, OK. So, I went through the
public records and stuff for her, you know finances and whatever. She
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205
owns a house with her husband in Georgetown, worth well over a mil-
lion dollars, although they’ve lived there for 14 years, so I think the
appraisal is, you know, low. She has great credit as you might imagine.
Her husband doesn’t seem to do much of anything as far as I can tell.
No job record for him in forever, but he used to be a lawyer too. He’s
no longer a member of the bar. There are two kids, Milo who’s 24 and
attends Columbia for grad school in philosophy and Melinda who’s 19
and is at UCLA in her freshman year. They own three cars, all of them
Mercedes of different types. No criminal anything on them, not even
parking tickets. No lawsuits filed against them. They sorta seem like a
rich, white family and that’s all.”
Bee looked over at c1sman, who was fiddling with something on his
laptop. She nudged him with an elbow. “Yeah, I know, hold on. I had
an idea while you were… damn, never mind.” He looked up. “OK, well,
there’s not much to say really. No corporate website or anything like
that. It took me forever to even turn up an e-mail address. The mail
server’s beyond secure as far as I can tell from poking around a little.
I could poke more, but I think it’d be useless. If you want to read her
e-mail, you’re going to have to get her to open up a trojan or something,
and even then their system might sniff it out before it ever got to her. So
that’s that. And there’s no home internet connection at all as far as I can
tell. Maybe they’re using some cellular wireless service or something,
but nothing going into the house that I could find. I do have both her
kids’ e-mails though. They were easy. I gave them to Chloe.”
Chloe nodded, “I looked through them. Nothing much there. Nothing
at all about Emily Marsh. Neither of them e-mails their parents or talks
about them much with their friends. Milo is pretentious and well-read
and really likes latina-porn. Melinda spends a lot of time on Facebook
and has a wicked music downloading habit, but again, nothing out
of the ordinary. Both have a lot of friends but neither has a signifi-
cant other. Neither seem to have been back home since Christmas. My
attempt to call their mom at the office got me nowhere. It’s by appoint-
ment only and you can only make an appointment if you either have a
personal recommendation from another client or Ms. Marsh has invited
you to do so personally. The Dutton and Hermann who’re also on the
firm name are both retired. Marsh joined the firm back in 1982 and was
made partner in 1991. The others retired in 2000. I get the impression
from reading between the lines in some of the minuscule coverage that
she might have forced them out. Whatever, they’re both off fishing or
whatever. So she’s the only one in the firm, aside from associates and
aides and what not. Total of fifteen people working there.”
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“So, what do we think?” Paul asked the table. “Follow Clover to the
meeting and make sure that we just spent all this time researching
the right person. I guess there’s an outside possibility that she’s just a
go-between for him and someone else, but I doubt it.”
“I think that’s right,” said Chloe. “We follow him and we have a
camera or someone waiting near her office—which is only five blocks
from her home by the way—to confirm it. But then what? She’s got no
weaknesses that we can see, and I at least am certain she’s got powerful
friends.”
Paul let out a breath and thought it over for a moment. Marsh was
not, as far as they could tell, a criminal of any kind. That didn’t matter
to him in the least—she was behind the assault on their Key West home
and Sandee’s arrest, or at least he was pretty sure she was. Theoretically,
then, she might hold the key to getting Sandee free. But with no obvi-
ous vices, secure phones and computers, and unknown but probably
vast resources at her disposal, there was no obvious way to get any
leverage on her. “Yeah, I got nothing,” he said at last. “Let’s do the fol-
low her around thing and then see where things go from there. Maybe
some obvious weakness will present itself. Or fuck, even some non-
obvious one.”
They started planning for the surveillance, and had everything ready
bright and early the day of Clover’s meeting. They had to, since they
were operating out of Baltimore and had to get going before 4:00 AM
to ensure they beat the DC area traffic and had their teams set up at
both ends. Paul and Sacco took the van this time, while Chloe and Bee
set up cameras outside Marsh’s home and office back in the city. There
were no surprises from Clover, and it didn’t look like he’d noticed he
was being followed. Once he parked in Georgetown, they took the
opportunity of his car being on the street to plant a GPS device on it.
He went in, had his meeting, and walked down the street to have some