He was only earning a fraction of the salary he'd made at Reynolds Fincher. By the standard of success he'd measured himself against over the past ten years, he was now an abject failure. His prospects of climbing back up to a position at an Am Law 100 law firm were slim. By selling his condo and his BMW and liquidating some of his savings, he had managed to pay down enough of his oppressive student loan debt so that he could actually live on his newly reduced income. He jokingly referred to it as The New Austerity. Somehow, though, it didn't seem to bother him nearly as much as he had expected. He'd even gotten used to seeing the photos of Dana in the
Chronicle
with the mayor-elect.
The first door on the right was Jon's office. His elbow was on his desk, propping up his head about two inches above a file. Jon was preparing for an afternoon hearing on a summary judgment motion in a construction defect case. He was representing the plaintiffs, a Sunset District family whose roof had collapsed.
Jon looked up and clucked under his breath, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”
“Everything okay in there?” Will asked.
“You know, we could actually lose this summary judgment motion. Fuck fuck fuck.”
“Sounds like you're fucked,” Will said, who had learned to take Jon's daily laments in stride.
“Yeah, maybe,” he responded, his eyes fixed somewhere over Will's head, assembling his counterarguments.
Will entered his office and adjusted the blinds to cast sunlight on his desk. He cleared away client files and unwrapped his breakfast burrito.
Claire Rowland entered his office, picked up his burrito, and took a large bite out of it. Claire had declined another job at a big financial district law firm to go to work for Will as his sole associate.
“What was that?”
“You don't pay me enough. You should at least feed me.”
“I think this whole dating thing is undermining the chain of authority around here.”
“Yeah,” she acknowledged. “But what are you gonna do?” She dropped a stack of paper on his desk. “Here's a draft of that partnership agreement for DÃaz.”
“Thanks. Why don't you drop back by at ten, and you can sit in on the meeting when we review the agreement.”
As she circled around behind his desk to leave, she brushed her fingers across the back of his shoulders.
“Hey, don't think that those little incidents of sexual harassment go unnoticed,” he said as she left.
Will ate his burrito, drank his coffee, and examined the stone lions in the façade of the building next door. It was a 1940s movie palace that was now a teeming garage sale of a store where everything was ninety-nine cents or less. Will had purchased his first new desk accessory there: a plastic action figure of a masked Mexican wrestler known as “El Guapo.” El Guapo glared at him over the half-eaten burrito, legs planted firmly apart and hands extended with fingers spread in a grappler's stance. As he stared at a patch of sunshine on his desk, he realized that he was smiling, although he wasn't sure why.
Will's face-off with El Guapo was interrupted by the ringing phone. A sunny voice answered, “Haaah Will! This is Mary Boudreaux of the DOJ!”
“Hello, Mary.”
“I hear you've started your own firm. Congratulations!”
“Well, I joined a friend's practice. But thanks.”
“I guess you've heard about Sam's Bowen's death. Such a tragedy.”
“Yes, it is.”
“You worked with him, didn't you?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Wasn't he your mentor at the firm?”
“I wouldn't go that far.”
“You must be upset. When was the last time you saw him?”
“Mary, you know I'm represented by counsel, so if you have questions that you would like to ask me, you really should go through him. He's right next door, and I can transfer you over to him if you like.”
“No, no, that won't be necessary. I just wanted you to know that Dennis and I were thinking about you. About how lucky you are.”
“Lucky?” Will asked, nonchalantly. “How so?”
“Think about it. Out of the blue, we receive an e-mail from Bowen containing some very incriminating evidence. A smart lawyer like him, you'd think he would have at least held back on delivering the goods until he had cut a deal for himself.”
“Maybe he just wanted to do the right thing.”
“Uh-huh. And then Sam makes an appointment with us, which puts us in exactly the right place at the right time to witness his murder and take down those Russians. Now, you have to admit, Will, that was . . . serendipitous.”
“When you put it that way, I guess you're right.”
“And look where that puts you. Now that we know about Sam, you're no longer the focus of an insider trading investigation. And, in another stroke of luck, one of the tracksuits that we shot at Justin Herman Plaza is going to live, and he's decided to testify against Boka.”
“Isn't that breaking their code of silence or something?”
“When you murder someone with four federal agents as witnesses, your options narrow down quite a bit. Boka has already been taken into custody based on Tracksuit's statements, and the city's Russian
mafiya
are facing their first credible prosecution in years. And all of this is going forward without you having to testify.” There was a long pause.
Will still worried that Boka might choose to come after him one day, but he figured that the Russians still had no idea of the role that he had played in blocking their plans. And since Boka was probably busy preparing his defense to the federal case against him, Will guessed that he was the least of Boka's concerns.
Mary continued, “And then the next day, we find the body of Aashif Agha inside a pier building, less than a mile away from where Sam was murdered. It looked like he had been in quite a fight.”
“You have any idea who did it?”
“I have a theory, but it's not fully developed. Probably never will be. But you've got to be pleased to see that another associate of the Russians has been eliminated, someone who might have come after you. As far as I'm concerned, whoever killed Agha deserves a medal.”
“I couldn't agree more.”
“Now, Will, as the beneficiary of all that amazing, incredible luck, I wanted to know if you have anything that you'd like to tell me. Something that might complete the picture here?”
“I'm afraid I don't, Mary.”
Another pause. “Of course you don't. Just thought I'd ask. I had to ask, right? And as long as I'm beating my head against the wall, I was wondering if you had anything to do with the Senate's investigation into Jupiter's connections to the NSA and its surveillance activities?”
“I'm following that story in the press just like you,” Will said.
Claire's conversations with her former colleagues at the Electronic Privacy Information Center had led to a flurry of Freedom of Information Act requests, front-page press coverage, and, ultimately, Senate hearings regarding how the NSA had used the Clipper Chip, and its relationship with Jupiter, to secretly spy on U.S. citizens. The president had held a press conference berating the
New York Times
for its role in breaking the story, charging that it was “giving comfort to the enemy.” In the wake of the scandal, Jupiter's stock price had plummeted, and the company was hit with class-action lawsuits brought by the company's investors and users of the Paragon encryption program.
“I thought it was interesting that EPIC led the way in bringing the story to light, since Claire was a former employee there.”
“Quite a series of coincidences,” Will said.
“You're probably wondering why I bothered to make this call, aren't you?” Mary asked. “Well, I just wanted you to know that Dennis and I are going to be keeping an eye on you, checking in from time to time. Just to see how you're doing.”
Will's pager began beeping. Cradling the receiver against his shoulder, he searched his satchel for the device. “Thanks for calling, Mary, but I'm afraid I've got an important call coming in.”
As he hung up the phone, he examined the text message on his pager, which read, BERKELEY MARINA WINDS AT 12.8 KNOTS. A PERFECT DAY FOR WINDSURFING!
Checking his schedule, he figured that he could be on the water by one.
Will paddled his board out over the lightly choppy waters of the bay, which were brownish-green from the sediment kicked up by the waves. When he was about twenty yards out from the Berkeley Marina, he uphauled his sail and adjusted the boom until the vinyl caught the wind and filled with a snap. The board jerked forward and he was in motion.
Settling into position, with his feet on the centerline of the board and leaning back against the tension in the sail, he quickly picked up speed. The board bounced over each swell, sending him airborne for one still second before he hit the water with a jolt. With his backhand, he spilled some wind from the sail to regulate his speed. Racing into open waters, he gazed at the towers of downtown San Francisco across the dappled expanse of the bay, which gleamed in the afternoon sun like hammered silver. He spotted Four Embarcadero Center, where he had once worked. His time at Reynolds Fincher already seemed as distant as the tower itself.
Will reached into a pocket of his wetsuit and produced the memory stick. He tossed it into the bay and watched its silver surface glint for a moment like a minnow as the sunlight struck it before it disappeared into the depths.
Skimming across the bay, no longer struggling with the sail, no longer even trying to slow down, he experienced the feeling that was the reason why he windsurfed. It was a moment of perfect, trembling equilibrium between the stillness of his stance and the rushing water beneath the board. He felt the weight of his body counterpoised against the wind in the sail, the cold water of the bay, and the warmth of the afternoon sun on his shoulders through the wetsuit. He let the wind fill the sail, and the dark green water lost its softness and became hard like glass. The boom shivered in his hand, channeling the force of the wind.
As he tacked to remain flush with the wind, he was led farther and farther across the bay until the marina was only a green bump in the distance. Just when he thought he couldn't go any faster, a southerly gust sent him rocketing. As he reacted to the shifting wind currents, hurtling forward through the spray and glare, he realized, not unhappily, that he had drifted far from his carefully plotted course.