Irreparable Harm (A Legal Thriller) by Melissa F. Miller
Chapter 27
The offices of Prescott & Talbott
Naya found it.
They’d been working for several hours with no breaks and none of the empty chatter that usually accompanied a document review. Connelly had struck out with his database queries. He’d fielded a call from the valet, but it was nothing exciting: the guy was going to leave for the day; the car was still there; and he’d put an overnight ticket under the windshield wiper so it wouldn’t be towed.
He agreed to pay another fifty dollars for the same arrangement if the car was still there in the morning then hung up with the valet.
“It’s getting close to five. Why don’t we work until seven and then get some dinner. Maybe go out and grab something quick?”
He’d been fidgeting for the last hour or so; now, he paced around the small room in a loop. Sasha imagined he didn’t spend much time trapped behind a desk. She was stiff from her encounter on the stairwell and could use a brisk walk and some air.
She was about to agree, when Naya slapped a binder down in front of her.
“Look at this.”
Naya had the closing files from an asset purchase agreement from 2007. Hemisphere Air had sold off eight older 737s from its fleet to Blue Horizons, one of the budget carriers. The binder was open to a draft of the agreement, which, if Sasha understood the firm’s document retention policy, should have been shredded, not hole-punched, placed in a tabbed, three-ring binder, and sent to storage.
A deal, any deal, goes through multiple negotiated revisions. She knew from sharing a printer with a corporate partner that the lawyers for the parties exchanged their proposed edits as redlines. Each side’s lawyer would make changes to the file, save the changes, and generate a redline version that showed the additions as underlined bold text and the deletions as text with a line struck through it. Along with the substantive changes, formatting changes would show up, as well as any comments or questions posed by the reviewer. The result was almost always unreadable.
Trial attorneys engaged in a similar process to negotiate confidentiality agreements, stipulations, and settlement agreements. But their work product usually involved a much lighter edit. Adversaries in a courtroom battle were more likely to look at a wall of text indicating lots of changes to their proposed terms and to tell one another to go pound salt than were partners in a financial transaction.
Sasha skimmed the draft and immediately got lost in all the strikeouts and inserts.
“Help me out here. What am I looking for?” she asked Naya.
Naya flipped to the schedule of assets purchased. She leaned over Sasha’s shoulder and pointed at a series of strikeouts.
“See these five planes? They were originally part of the deal, but in this version all five were removed.”
Connelly came and stood behind her. He craned his neck to see over her shoulder. Sasha knew she should tell him not to try to see the documents, but she ignored him.
“Okay. Do we know why?”
Naya flipped the pages forward. “There’s a reviewer comment here that they were taking out five planes that didn’t conform to Boeing’s standards.”
Sasha looked up at her. “You think they were modified with the RAGS link?”
Naya said, “I know one of them was.” She flipped back to the schedule. “Look at the tail number on the third one.”
The tail number was a plane’s aircraft registration number. It functioned like a car’s license plate, and every civil aircraft has one. And the tail number for the third deleted plane did look familiar.
“You’re sure that’s Flight 1667?”
Naya nodded. “I’m sure. But, we can check.”
Connelly grabbed the laptop and opened the browser to the Federal Aviation Administration’s N-number/tail number lookup. All planes registered in the U.S. had a tail number that began with the letter N. And the FAA was kind enough to make public a database that cross-referenced planes with their N-numbers.
“Give me the number.”
“N-247AA.”
Connelly typed it in. They waited. Sasha realized she wasn’t breathing. She went ahead and breathed.
“Boeing 737, registered owner, Hemisphere Air Lines, Inc., out of service as of two days ago.” He looked up.
“Go to planespotters,” Sasha said.
Several websites existed that would spit out a list of flight numbers that a given plane had flown under, along with cities of origination and destination. All they needed was the tail number.
Connelly went to the site and typed in N-247AA. A list of flights, in reverse chronological order by date, appeared. N-247AA’s last recorded flight was Flight 1667 from DCA to DFW, the night of the crash.
“How did you know about this website?” Connelly asked.
“There are several of them. Some frequent travelers like to see where their planes have been, how often they’ve been taken out of service, and for how long,” Sasha said.
She had once deposed a plaintiff who’d been on a Hemisphere Air flight when a bird had gotten sucked into the engine. The pilot had executed a textbook emergency landing; no passengers were injured. Undeterred, the plaintiff claimed the incident had left him shaken and emotionally scarred. He maintained, however, he had no choice but to continue to fly because his job entailed heavy travel.
In response to a document request, his lawyer had provided the guy’s meticulous logs of his flights—complete with printouts from the planespotters website showing the flight histories of all the planes he’d flown on after the incident. Sasha had noted that almost all of the guy’s flights were short hauls on regional puddle jumpers.
She’d spent most of his deposition asking him questions about why he frequently flew from Pittsburgh to places like Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Baltimore if he was so terrified of flying. California or Texas, sure. But Pittsburgh to Wheeling, West Virginia, was an hour-long drive tops. She’d waved those logs around in front of him like she was a matador.
He ended up settling in exchange for two free round-trip tickets, completely putting the lie to his emotional distress claim.
Connelly tensed his jaw. “These websites could aid terrorists. Just like those real-time flight tracker websites. Why don’t people think before they make this information accessible?”
Sasha raised an eyebrow. It was news to her that terrorists had time machines. “Connelly, the information is historical. You know what, never mind. Go back to the FAA site, okay? Naya read him the other four tail numbers.”
She didn’t have time to argue with him about access to information or indulge his Patriot Act-induced delusions.
Naya read them off and Connelly typed them into the search box, one by one. All registered to Hemisphere Air. All still in service.
Sasha called Metz and got his voicemail. She hung up without leaving a message and contemplated her options.
Four planes currently in service almost certainly had been outfitted with the RAGS link. Four vulnerable planes. Hundreds, if not thousands, of passengers.
With Metz’s warning not to call Vivian in her ears, she left Naya and Connelly in the conference room to map out the itineraries of the three compromised planes. As an afterthought, she handed off Metz’s flight information and asked them to check it out.
She plunged down the hall to the stairwell and raced to her office. She passed Flora, who was putting on her coat.
“Oh, Sasha, I thought you had left for the day. Um, do you still need me?” Flora stopped with one arm in her coat sleeve; the other sleeve flapped around, red and manic.
“No,” Sasha called over her shoulder. “I have an important call to make. Good night, Flora.”
She raced into her office and pulled the door shut.
Flora shrugged and slipped her other arm into her coat, sending the pile of legal journals flying off the ledge behind her.
“Shoot!”
She bent to gather them up. As she squared them into a stack, she saw the slim UPS
Flora looked at the phone. Sasha’s line was already lit up; she was on her important call. She could wait a few minutes, see if Sasha hung up. She checked her watch. But, if she left now, she could catch an earlier bus, change into jeans, and meet her girlfriends for happy hour.
She peeked at the phone again. Still lit up. She chewed her lip for a minute, unsure. Then she put the envelope on top of the neat stack of journals so Lettie would see it first thing in the morning and turned off the desk lamp.
Having made up her mind, she hurried past Sasha’s closed door on her way to the elevator.
Inside, Sasha stared at the phone on her desk, shocked into silence and wishing she’d listened to Metz.
Vivian Coulter’s anger was booming through the phone’s speaker.
“Do I make myself clear? We are not going to ground four perfectly safe planes because you have some wild theory that they might have been outfitted with the RAGS link. We are working to determine which planes actually have the RAGS links installed, of course, but it’s going to take some time. Right now, we have no reason—none—to believe that any of our planes pose a danger of any kind to the flying public. And even if these four planes do have RAGS on board, there is no basis for thinking someone would or could attempt to access the system. The cause of Monday night’s crash remains unknown. I will not jeopardize the economic health of this company and the interests of our shareholders unless and until someone in the federal government gives me a reason why I should. And, by the way, I note no one from Homeland Security or the NTSB has suggested any such thing.”
Either the tirade was over or Viv was taking a breath.
Sasha took the opening, “I understand your position, but the government appears to have no record of Hemisphere Air reporting that the RAGS link was on Flight 1667.”
No response. A few seconds later, a dial tone. Apparently, her client had hung up on her once her venom had run dry.
There was a light tap on the door, and then Naya cracked it open. Connelly loomed behind her in the hallway.
“How’d it go?”
“Not well.”
“Viv didn’t agree to ground the planes?”
“In a word, no. And then she hung up on me.”
“Well, this is gonna make it worse: Metz’s red eye on Friday is on the list. It’s one of the four.”
Sasha closed her eyelids and pressed her fingers hard against her tired eyes for a minute. Then she stood, picked up her purse, and put on her jacket. “Let’s go.”
“Food?” Connelly asked, hopeful.
“We’ll get food later. We’re going to see Mickey Collins.”
They took the elevator down in silence and crossed the empty lobby in silence. Their shoes on the gleaming floor and the hum of the building’s mechanical systems were the only sounds. The security guard gave them a bored half-wave and went back to his Sudoku puzzle.
After the revolving door spit them out on the sidewalk, Naya finally spoke.
“Do you have a plan?”
Sasha pulled her wool suit jacket close to keep out the wind and checked the street for traffic.
“Nope.”