James Huston - Marine One

The jury was stunned.

I asked Bradley, "Let me just be clear. What was the cause of Marine One falling out of the sky?"

"Fractured tip weight, which separated and threw the blade out of balance. That caused uncontrollable vibration and that blade separating from the aircraft. The helicopter broke up and crashed to the ground."

"And what is the cause of the tip weight failing?"

"A radio-triggered detonation cord built inside the tip weight."

"How would it be triggered?"

"All it would take is a common radio transmitter at that discrete frequency."

"Where would they have done it?"

"They could have been driving by the White House, or in a park in D.C. Marine One takes different routes every time, but usually goes out over the Potomac when heading northwest. Lots of places to park with a small transmitter. No one would notice at all. Could be anywhere. That helicopter is going to come down after the transmission, it's only a matter of when."

"What about the dummy Marine One? You know whenever Marine One is airborne, there's always a decoy Marine One, or two, or three, flying nearby. What if that helicopter had flown over the radio transmission?"

"We'd have to check and see if one of these RFID tip weights was on it. If it was, then it would have gone down. As it was, they got lucky and the real Marine One flew over whoever was transmitting the radio frequency to set off the RFID det cord."

"I have no further questions, Your Honor."

The judge seemed shocked by the developments. She looked at Hackett. "Seeing the lateness of the hour, Mr. Hackett, and the surprise of the testimony, I would assume that you would like to break now and begin your cross-examination in the morning."

Hackett stood eagerly. "I'm not sure I'm going to have any questions, for two reasons. First, the proper discovery and evidence disclosure did not occur, and I do not have enough information to cross-examine him. I have no idea if he's making this up. But since he has testified under oath, and Mr. Nolan has adopted his testimony, I think what he's proved is not only that WorldCopter caused the accident-they're the ones responsible for the integrity of the tip weights-but I think he's now proved that WorldCopter murdered the president. I will be asking this court for a directed verdict on liability and a request that we proceed in this trial only on damages, including punitive damages."

The judge nodded in complete understanding. "We will discuss that in the morning. Court is in recess."

That evening everybody was coming completely unhinged. WorldCopter, including Tripp, including Jean Claude himself, were furious at me for now having proved that WorldCopter murdered the president. They didn't want to hear that I wasn't done, that they needed to wait until the next day before they sent out the lynch mob.

Kathryn was completely baffled and asked me if that was what everyone had been waiting for, for me to prove that it was WorldCopter's fault? I told her to concentrate on the tip weight and not on WorldCopter and said we had found the cause of the accident. But she didn't want to hear that because the cause of the accident fell right on our heads. She didn't want to wait until the next day either. The press was absolutely apoplectic. They had so many things to write about and so many angles to pursue at once that they didn't know where to start. The entire case was flying apart, and little pieces of it were hitting all kinds of things like the hail on Marine One on the night of the accident. Senator Blankenship demanded new hearings on how the NTSB failed to find this tip weight-assuming it was legitimate-and how their investigation could be so flawed. The Department of Justice was considering an action for destruction of evidence by Wayne Bradley and me for finding a critical piece of a federal investigation and not notifying them before conducting "destructive testing." The NTSB demanded the tip weights, which of course we couldn't give them because they were now admitted into evidence at a federal trial. The commanding officer of HMX-1, who had only recently begun flying the Marine One helicopters again, grounded all of them until all of the tip weights could be inspected and x-rayed.

The public cried out through every available means that the president had been murdered, that now it clearly wasn't an accident. And if he'd been murdered, why would a helicopter company want to do that? The conspiracy theories began afresh.

I didn't want anything to do with any of that. So rather than have Rachel serve the subpoena on Grosvenor by herself, I went with her.

We drove to his house in Bethesda, Maryland. As far as I could tell, no one was following us, and no one had any idea where we were going or why, and he sure didn't know we were coming.

Rachel was overflowing. "What an absolutely amazing day. I've never seen anything like that."

"Neither have I. Probably because there's never been anything like that. But the explosions aren't done."

"So what do we have for tomorrow?"

"I think it's better that you not know."

"Why would that be?"

"I just have this feeling that we're not out of the woods, and if this guy that we're going to talk to tonight doesn't show up, I am absolutely dead and I'd rather have you not go down with me. I want to preserve at least a little of your own personal deniability. Of course I could end up in a meat grinder."

She turned to me in the seat suddenly. "Do you really think somebody had Tinny Byrd murdered?"

"Well, somebody sure did. But what you mean is, somebody related to this case."

"Yes. Hackett."

"Or the government."

"What? Why in the world would the government have him killed?"

"They wouldn't. There's no way. People talk about 'the government' like it's a monolith. But all it takes is one lunatic in the government and bad things can happen."

"You think they had something to do with it?"

"No, I'm just telling you I'm not assuming anything. The fewer people that know what I'm up to, the better off everybody's going to be, including me."

The GPS in my Volvo led us right to his front door. The lights were on, but no car was in the driveway. Rachel said, "How do you even know he's going to be here? What if he's out of town?"

"If he's out of town, we're cooked. But he's not."

"How do you know?"

"Because Tinny has a brother."

The two-story brick house of Georgian design was on a beautiful tree-lined street in Bethesda. We looked up and down the street and saw no activity at all. "Let's go talk to him."

We walked to the front door and rang the bell. I stood back so Rachel was alone in front of the door. I heard some activity in the house. Then I saw the peephole go dark. He was looking at Rachel and asked, "Who's there?"

She said, "It's Rachel Long. I'm here with Mike Nolan. We'd like to talk to you for a minute."

"What about?" he yelled through the closed steel door.

"We're friends of Tinny Byrd's. And Mike's a fellow Marine."

The door opened and Mark Grosvenor gestured us to come into his foyer. We shook hands and introduced ourselves. He said, "Really bad deal about Tinny. I can't imagine who would do that to him."

I said, "I can't believe it. He was a smart guy, I don't know how somebody snuck up on him like that."

Grosvenor shook his head. "Actually that's pretty easy, but still it surprised me."

I reached into my suit pocket and pulled out an envelope with my firm's letterhead on the return address. "Here, this is for you."

He took it into his hands, which was all I needed. Now he was served. "What's this?"

"It's a subpoena to testify in trial tomorrow."

He looked at me like he wanted to kill me. "You son of a bitch. You used Tinny to get into my house and then serve me with a subpoena?"