Steve Martini - The Enemy Inside

You could no longer shock the average American, no matter the scope of the scandal or the damage that it caused. They had come to expect this from their leaders.

For a lawyer worth his salt, defending a case in any court of consequence, there are two things that will generally keep you up nights: unexplained coincidence and the serpent of surprise raising its ugly head in the courtroom.

The fact that, of the countless millions of vehicles garaged in Southern California, Ives managed to smash into the one occupied by Serna, an object of inquiry in one of his stories, would test the limits of serendipity to the mind of any normal juror.

The only answer we have for this is the theory that Ives was drugged and that the accident was staged by others-a preplanned murder. But here, there’s a problem. Between now and trial there is more than a fair chance that the D.A. and his investigators will kick over a rock and discover what Ives was up to, that he was working on a story involving Serna.

Even if they don’t, it is likely from what Alex has told me that Tory Graves, his boss, being the hard-core muckraker that he is, will not hold the story. He will publish whatever he has before we can get to trial. If this happens, the prosecutor could easily jump on our theory, turn our own shield into a weapon, and beat us to death with it.

As I think about this I am searching the Internet looking for something, some clue as to how an external force might take control of a vehicle moving at high speed. This might give us some lead as to how Ben and her boyfriend died, and perhaps how Serna was murdered.

Something catches my eye, an online article: “How Stuff Works: Are Modern Cars Vulnerable to Hackers?” I read it and search further. I find more, another item: “Hackers Reveal Nasty New Car Attacks.” And more: “How Modern Cars Can Be Hacked.” On top of this is a mountain of other material, recent news articles concerning how carmakers are on the verge of developing driverless vehicles, the dream of the future. Maybe we should be more cautious about what we dream of.

As I read on, the small hairs on the back of my neck begin to stand up. High-tech controls have been growing under the hood and inside the passenger compartments of automobiles for more than two decades. They operate the cruise control, setting the car’s speed. They can activate anti-collision avoidance systems, throwing on the brakes. Computer sensors fire airbags. They are used to lock car doors. There are literally scores of tiny “electronic control units” installed in modern passenger vehicles, and more were being added every year.

Most people, like me, paid no attention. Government safety agencies encourage these developments. Sometimes they mandate them. The problem is, as with everything else that is high tech, there is a downside-loss of human control.

One of the articles talks about a high-tech black-bag government agency that had already found ways to crack these systems, to hack them from outside the car, ways to turn them into weapons. There are sensors that, if they are hacked, can be used to turn off airbags, cut off the engine, or bleed the brakes so they no longer work. Some software could actually take over the navigation system of the vehicle involved. You could lock the doors so that the occupants could not escape, screw with the antilock brakes so they no longer worked, turn off the power steering, or limit the car’s turning radius.

And then in the middle of one of the articles, the bombshell. Among the top-end luxury cars was the automated self-parking systems now available on some of the latest models. People love these because the built-in sensors control automated front-wheel movement and make it possible for them to parallel park between cars by pushing a button and merely touching the brake when the car was done. The system was only supposed to work at slow speeds, three or four miles per hour, and in reverse. But according to the article it was now believed that the black-bag computer nerds working for the government had been able to turn this to the dark side. They had managed to trick the car’s speedometer and transmission so that you could hijack the parking system to control the car’s steering and do it remotely at high forward speeds. The theory was that this could be used to turn a vehicle into a veritable deathtrap. It made it possible to orchestrate head-on collisions. I am beginning to think this is more than theory.

I print out the articles, and as they pile up in my printer I turn my attention back to the crisis at hand. The question prosecutors will try to answer if they find out that Alex was working on a story involving Serna. Could they cobble together a theory as to why he might want to kill her? Give the cops an hour and they will come up with a dozen theories, warp their evidence around the best one and run with it. This is likely to be more plausible and certainly more satisfying to the jury than our own-that some other dude did it, but we don’t know who it is.

The answer to this riddle may lie in whatever revelations lurk in the details of the dirt dug up by Tory Graves. This is the surprise package we don’t want exploding under our case in front of the jury.

Harry and I have managed to stall the preliminary hearing in Ives’s case, the question of whether he should be bound over for trial in Superior Court. The outcome of these proceedings is preordained. Alex will have to stand trial. But we have waived time in the interest of delay, the perpetual strategy of every criminal defendant and their lawyer. But in this case we had a better reason than most, something we chose not to share with the judge or his clerk when we did the little dance in chambers to waive time.

If pushed to the wall and asked to produce our client, Harry and I will have to say that we don’t know where he is. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it, at least until our asses are thrown in jail, at which time Harry says he reserves the right to reconsider.

Alex’s parents actually don’t know where he is. We have kept them in the dark. We thought about posting a sign on their front lawn telling whoever wants to kill him that they don’t know where their kid is, just as a precaution. But we didn’t.

This morning I made two phone calls. The first was to Tory Graves in D.C. He took the call, then dodged about on the phone for a while telling me how busy he was. Graves did not seem terribly concerned about Alex or his current predicament. In the end he agreed to see me, but only after I suggested that we might need to subpoena him as a witness unless, of course, I could find out what I needed to know in some less formal way. That seemed to soften his hide. It also fed his curiosity. He wanted to know what I was after. I told him it was better discussed face-to-face. We scheduled a meeting on his turf.

The other call was to a lawyer in Los Angeles, Cletus Proffit, the managing partner at Serna’s old law firm, Mandella, Harbet. I wanted to at least plumb the depths with a few of the people she worked with.

I knew Proffit, but only by name. He was one of the pillars of the local legal clique in the state. He had done all the chairs at the county bar up in L.A. and found a place to squat on the state bar’s board of governors when the music ended. He spent a few years, his spare time, doing the bar’s good works, peddling bills to protect the average Joe from the malevolent clutches of scheming lawyers. The test of legal leadership was always the same, to rat out the fraternity. One was expected to do this. It was the lawyer’s equivalent of a priest sporting sackcloth and ashes outside the church door. Your way of saying that you were repenting, but only for the sins of others.

Proffit’s wife, who was also a lawyer, sat on the federal bench. She was mentioned periodically as a likely nominee to the Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.