“Uh, Penn,” Rusty calls. “We’ve got deputies out here to pick up your dad.”
As I look up at the door, two ACSO deputies enter my office, their jaws set tight. “Mayor, the jail has just been declared secure. The sheriff ordered us to take your father back to his cell.”
Dad’s heavy sigh makes it plain how much he’s enjoyed sitting here strategizing with us, free from manacles and the stink of the jailhouse.
“I’ll see you all in the courtroom,” he says, getting to his feet with a loud creaking. “Goddamn knees.”
“Be glad you got ’em,” Quentin says with a wink.
“Yeah, yeah.”
Dad squeezes my shoulder, then leans down between Quentin and me and says, “Ya’ll make the call about Lincoln’s tape. But either way, I’m going to testify.”
As he walks into the custody of the deputies, Quentin and I share a look of perfectly attuned awareness. We may disagree about most issues in this case, but on one point we are as one: Dad does not need to take the stand.
“Penn, it’s John,” Kaiser calls from my secretary’s office. “Judge Elder wants you over in Shad’s conference room, and he’s in no mood to wait. I need two minutes with you guys before we go.”
“Come in.”
Kaiser waits for the deputies to escort Dad through the door, then hurries into my office. “We’ve got about a minute before we have to start walking.”
I can tell by the FBI agent’s face and posture that he has bad news for us. “Are our families okay?”
“Yes. It’s not that.”
“Then it can’t be that bad.”
“You be the judge.” Kaiser looks at Rusty. “Mr. Duncan, I need you to leave the room.”
“Whaaaat?” Rusty almost whines.
“Go, Rusty,” I snap, sensing more gravitas than usual in Kaiser’s manner.
After Rusty closes the door behind him, Kaiser begins speaking quickly.
“Since 9/11 the U.S. intel community has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into digital forensics. Maybe billions. When your only looks at Osama bin Laden come from videotapes or discs, that’s where you put your money. Every major tech university in the country has a classified program working on new methods to recover, restore, or rebuild captured digital material, whether deleted, erased, shredded, or burned.”
“Shit.” I sense where this is going. “And?”
“The Bureau has the best restoration technology extant today. Better than the NSA, better than the CIA. And a lot better than Sony.”
“What did you do, John?” I ask, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice.
“I’ll tell you what I did,” he says defensively. “I held off asking Shad Johnson for those tapes for a lot longer than I should have. But when Devine was murdered on the stand, I got a call from an assistant director in D.C. And he told me we need to know what’s on those tapes.”
“Wait a minute,” Quentin says. “An assistant director called you out of the blue about a state murder case?”
“This is no normal murder case, Mr. Avery. I invoked the Patriot Act three months ago when I started investigating the Double Eagles. When Snake Knox knocked down our plane in December, we lost new evidence in the JFK assassination. That’s as big as it gets. And after all the deaths we had—Glenn Morehouse, Sleepy Johnston, Henry Sexton, Brody Royal—I’ve had some serious Bureau oversight on me. They almost pulled me out of here when we lost that plane. So you can imagine what keeping your client under protective custody cost me in political capital. Now, I’m sorry it’s come to this, but we are here now.”
The tension in Kaiser’s voice brings back a flood of memories from three months ago. The heated conversations with Kaiser and Dwight Stone about the Working Group and their assassination theory about mobster Carlos Marcello. It’s been weeks since I’ve thought of what was lost in that FBI plane crash: a handwritten letter from Lee Harvey Oswald to his wife, Marina; rifles taken from Brody Royal’s trophy gun cabinet, one of which was supposedly the weapon Frank Knox used to shoot John Kennedy from the Dal-Tex building—
“I understand all that,” Quentin says with some gratitude in his voice. “But has this tape restoration technique ever been used in a civilian trial on American soil? Criminal or civil?”
“I doubt it. The whole technology is classified.”
“Then what the hell are we talking about it for? We might as well be discussing using a laser defense system.”
“You’re wrong,” I tell Quentin. “At this point, the bureaucrats in D.C. will do just about anything to atone for the mess they’ve made of the Double Eagle investigation. Forty years of chasing somebody is too long. If the FBI can’t nail Snake Knox, how the hell can anyone believe they’ll ever apprehend top foreign terrorists?”
Kaiser nods grimly. “As per instructions, I went to Shad and told him we’d like to take a look at those tapes in our crime lab.”
“Nothing more?” I ask. “No hint that the Bureau might succeed where Sony failed?”
“Shad wouldn’t need anything more,” Quentin says dejectedly.
Kaiser looks down at his hands, then wipes them as though trying to remove some invisible residue. “I was prepared to wait until Dr. Cage’s trial was over to request the tapes. But it’s out of my hands now. Shad called one of his Harvard Law classmates, who happens to work for the attorney general. Those tapes are going to D.C. today on an FBI plane.”
“Goddamn it!” Quentin bellows. “I thought those tapes were behind us.”
“You can’t outrun the past,” I mutter.
“It’s far from certain that the lab can restore those tapes,” Kaiser says, trying to offer us hope. “They might get only a partial restoration, or even none at all.”
“How long does the process take?” Quentin asks.
“That can vary. We’re talking about supercomputer time, plus bleeding-edge chemical and mechanical processes. It could take five hours, five days, or five months. There’s no way to know until they start.”
Turning away from Kaiser, I kneel in front of Quentin’s chair. “How bad is this? I mean, if they succeed in restoring the tapes. I need to know.”
Quentin shakes his head. Even if he knows, he’s not about to answer in Kaiser’s presence.
“We’re already late,” Kaiser says. “I told Judge Elder I’d get you there on time. Let’s move.”
After a last look into Quentin’s unreadable eyes, I stand, move behind his chair, and follow as he rolls quickly toward the door, which Kaiser holds open for him.
Chapter 58