“Better than a chicken dinner in a hotel ballroom.”
Again Nikolas tried to work, and again he gave it up. “OK, OK.” He shrugged. “But don’t tell Emma I said anything. You do not want that woman mad at you, believe me.” Another shrug. “I do nothing illegal.” He hesitated and then revised his last statement. “Perhaps I do nothing really, truly illegal.”
“That’s a start.”
Nikolas sighed. “OK, like I said, it’s no big deal . . . So Emma comes over here. She tells me about this case and your client who won’t shut up about the video. He drive her nuts. Every day, he call her about the video. Not shutting up. So she says to me, can you help? And I says, for you and Mr. Justin, OK.”
“And then . . .”
“I figure out who handles the requests at the city, and I see that the requests are logged and kept in an electronic queue.”
I left alone for the moment the question of how Nikolas happened to unearth this list, which I couldn’t imagine was posted on the city’s public website. “But this electronic queue,” I said, “it’s no good?”
“Correct.” Nikolas nodded. “The list has Cecil Bates like . . . at the end. Be a year before they get to him. So I bumped him to the top of the list.”
So he’d not only accessed this queue, he’d manipulated it. The arrival of the miracle video was losing some of its miraculous patina. “And that’s it?”
Nikolas seemed confused by my question. “You want that to be it? If you want—it can be all I do. It be it. Finished.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I want to know whether you did anything else.”
“Sure?”
“I’m sure,” I said, although I really wasn’t.
“Well last week, Emma says the trial is coming, and we’re running out of time.”
“And . . .”
“So help the city along a little more.” Nikolas considered his words. “I make them more efficient. Here. I show you.”
It was unclear how Nikolas entered the city’s computer system. A blur of keystrokes, and the screens in front of him started to flash. Text and binary numbers scrolled as Nikolas toggled between them. “Takes a few minutes.” He typed something when a cursor began to flash, then did the same when another screen changed color.
“What is all this?”
Nikolas didn’t hesitate or stop working as he responded to my question. “The network.”
“The city’s network?”
“In a sense, yes.” Nikolas continued to type on his keyboard and move his cursor from one screen to the next, explaining. “You see, all the pretty graphics and buttons on your regular computer . . . it’s an illusion. Skin on the body.” He stopped, looked at me, and pointed back at the various screens. “These are the guts. This is everything happening behind what you see.”
He looked at a yellow Post-it Note on his desk, then typed in a username and password. Text scrolled down the screen, and then he reviewed a list of subfolders. “The security videos are here.” Nikolas pointed at a folder named ZZ, and then he pointed at a file about halfway down the list, identified as VID10283740283-ZZ-7-BB-2015. “That’s the one. Each traffic or park camera on the street has a letter identification. This is camera ZZ, and then each day has its own file. So I open it like this.” He pressed a button. “You see how I now find the video, here, and then I send it via e-mail to the clerk who is responsible for the data requests.”
A flash of dread. I wondered whether there was any kind of trail that could lead back to me. “You sent it to her?”
“Yes and no.” Nikolas shrugged. “Figured out who does this at the city, and I use his e-mail account to send it to her. Once she got it, she sends it to Cecil.”
“You helped them along.” By illegally accessing a public employee’s e-mail account and using it to forward a file you plucked from the city’s servers. “Very efficient.”
Nikolas smiled. “Exactly. I helped. I make them very efficient for you. Very American.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The ballroom at the Crowne Plaza was filled to capacity; probably five hundred people were in attendance. In the back, there was a cash bar and tables for the silent auction. The tables were filled with sports tickets, restaurant gift certificates, celebrity autographs, gift baskets, and bottles of wine.
On the other end, there was a stage, two giant screens, and Judge Danny Bryce at the podium. He was a thin man with an athletic build.
His keynote address had already started, and nearly everybody else, except me, was seated politely at their assigned tables.
Rather than make a scene trying to find my table, I instead went to the bar. “Gin and tonic.”
The bartender nodded and went to work. I put my money down, and he handed me the drink. When he made change, I told him to keep it, then turned and listened to Judge Bryce.
He was a charismatic speaker. I’d looked into him a little. Appointed young, he had fifteen years on the juvenile bench well before his fiftieth birthday. He was passionate about kids and had been the presiding judge over the juvenile division for years.
He took the microphone off its little stand and walked away from the podium with it, pacing the stage like a preacher. His image projected even larger on the screens. “Every day,” he said, “I see kids with nobody. Thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-year-old kids charged with serious crimes.” He shook his head. “I look down from the bench, and I see lawyers and probation officers, but I often don’t see a parent with these kids. I don’t see a grandma or an aunt or a cousin. I don’t see anybody. This kid is there, all alone in the courtroom—and the system is supposed to fix that.”
Judge Bryce ran his hand through his hair. “Let’s be honest with one another: the system can’t fix that.” He took a moment, taking a deep breath and letting it out. “But you all can. The people in this room. You’re the educated. You’re the powerful. You’re the elite, and you can make a difference in the lives of the at-risk kids in our community.”