Джозеф Файндер - Judgment

“Hold on. Let me talk to you, Mr. Madden. How many e-mails are you withholding?”

“Five, but they’re all part of one conversation, one thread, between Mr. Brod and Mr. Westerfield.”

“And the basis for your claim of privilege?”

“Your Honor,” Madden interrupted, “the e-mail correspondence back and forth between the CFO and the COO contains proprietary and confidential business information that has absolutely no bearing on this case. Which is, let’s remember, alleged sexual harassment.”

“All right,” Juliana said, her hands up, palms out. “Let’s make this easy. I’m ready to rule right now. Mr. Madden, I want you to produce that entire e-mail thread for me to read in camera. And I don’t want to see pieces of paper full of black lines. I want to see the whole exchange. And show me what you propose to redact, and why. Are we clear?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” said Madden.

“Yes, Your Honor,” said Craft.

“I want it within one week,” Juliana said.

She wondered what the Wheelz Corporation might be withholding. Was it the identity of the principal investor? Was that it? How could the top officers not know who owned their own damned company?

Or were they withholding something else?

When she returned to her lobby, she found a couple of phone messages. One was from an assistant to Attorney General Kent Yarnell asking her to join General Yarnell — she actually called him General! — for a drink that night at the Bostonia Club. She was too intrigued by how sociable it sounded — was Yarnell trying to make nice? — to be put off by how last-minute it was. She was amused that Yarnell didn’t extend the invitation himself but instead had an assistant do it. That was officious, of course, and probably meant to send her a message, to remind her of her place in the ecosystem.

The second message was from her old friend Aaron Dunn at the Justice Department.

“Jules, okay, call this number,” he said, and he gave her a Boston-area phone. “He’s a good guy. Works in the FBI in counterintelligence. I told him about you and said you were going to call.”

She was glad the guy was in the Boston office of the FBI. She wanted to talk in person, not over the phone, and preferred not to go to DC if she could avoid it. Rescheduling her court obligations was a massive pain.

She wrote down the name — Special Agent Paul Brickley — and the number on a pink message pad and called it.

At 4:45 she pulled up in front of a new eight-story building in Chelsea, outside Boston, in front of which was a giant stone seal and the words FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION. She parked in the small visitors’ lot and approached the guard booth. The man asked her to put her driver’s license against the bulletproof glass so he could see it. He told her she should lock up her phone in her car because she wouldn’t be allowed to bring it into the building. He buzzed her into a small glass-walled room, where she had to empty her pockets and put her metal objects in a bin and walk through a metal detector. (She’d left Hersh’s knife in the car along with the phone.) Then she entered the main building and handed over her driver’s license in exchange for a small plastic clip-on badge with a red V for Visitor on it. While she waited, she looked over the wall display of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. Nobody she knew.

A few minutes later a door opened, and a man in his midforties emerged. He wore a gray suit and had jet-black hair with a prominent white part. He reminded her of a TV anchorman.

“Judge Brody, I’m Special Agent Brickley.” He had a deep, rumbling voice.

She stood up and shook his hand. He led them to a conference room just off the lobby. There was a table with an Avaya phone on it and a couple of chairs.

“Aaron Dunn speaks very highly of you,” Brickley said. “It’s an honor to meet you.”

“Very nice to meet you. I’m sure you’re busy, and I know it’s the end of the day, so I’ll make this brief. I’m in a difficult position here. I have a concern about a case I’m involved with. I’ve never done anything like this before. But I’ve never confronted a case like this before.”

She gave him a rundown on Wheelz. She concluded: “So it appears that the biggest investor in Wheelz is a Russian oligarch named Yuri Protasov.”

He nodded. He knew the name.

“The financing for the deal secretly came from a bank that’s under US sanctions. So it’s illegal. Which may be why he’s going to such lengths to keep his name a secret.”

Agent Brickley nodded again.

“And one thing more,” she said. She felt faint, queasy. “I just have to say it, no matter how farfetched it may seem to you. A couple of people who’ve found out about this have been killed.”

His expression morphed from skeptical to concerned. He paused a few seconds. “Obviously you’ve found something quite interesting. Maybe even alarming — I think so, for sure.”

“Okay.”

“But this isn’t really our area of concern. It’s really more a matter for the State Department.”

“The State Department?”

He nodded, smiled sadly. “Yeah, they’re in charge of sanctions. Sorry to make you come all the way in here.”

“I see.” Why , she wondered, did Aaron Dunn give me this guy’s name?

“But come to think of it,” he went on, “the State Department shut down their sanctions office a while ago. So there really isn’t anyone at State who deals with it. It may be a matter more for the Treasury Department.”

“Treasury, now? Hold on a sec. The FBI is charged with enforcing US law, and we’re talking about a US law. Am I right? How is this not the FBI’s business? The guy’s breaking the law. That seems pretty clear-cut to me.”

“I know, I know. But candidly and off the record? We’re not in the business of going after Russian oligarchs.”

“You’re not? Even Russian oligarchs who break US laws?”

“It’s a new era. The Russia stuff — you know, our enforcement powers have been whittled away. We just don’t have the staff anymore.”

“How come?”

“I used to be in CD, Counterintelligence Division, in Russian affairs, but most of us Russia experts have taken early retirement or left. Not many left. So Russia is no longer so much of a focus.”

“Seriously?”

“And, you know, the FBI isn’t exactly the apple of anyone’s eye these days, when it comes to funding and personnel and such,” said Agent Brickley. “It’s a new world.”

She returned to her car and sat in the FBI visitors’ parking lot for a few minutes. She took out her phone and called Aaron Dunn in Washington. This time she got right through.

“He said that?” Dunn remarked.

“Yes,” Juliana said. “‘Russia is no longer so much of a focus.’”

“Oh, Jesus. Listen, is there any chance of you coming to DC?”

“If I need to, sure.”

“I found someone who’ll see you. Can you get here Monday?”

“It can’t be any earlier?”

“I’m afraid not. He’s out of town before then.”

I have court , she thought. “I’ll be there.”

She stopped at home before going out to the Bostonia Club to meet Kent Yarnell and found both her husband and her son. She was hungry, and Duncan hadn’t made dinner or picked up any takeout. She’d grab something from the refrigerator.

But first she made a point of chatting for a couple of minutes with both Jake and Duncan. She wanted them to think of her as living at home again, not the wife and mother who was sent into exile at Martha Connolly’s. Her exile was over. Going out tonight, to the Bostonia Club, was an exception. She preferred to be home with them.