Kiah Harmon
I don’t know how I would have got through the days after the break-in without Arlene. I can’t describe the sense of violation, the sense of having been targeted in such a personal way, the shock I felt at seeing my whole professional life so maliciously shredded as if it counted for nothing. It was my personal life too that they’d destroyed with such rage. I’d lost framed pictures of my parents, my college and law school certificates, and other pieces I was attached to. I felt as if I’d been assaulted and dumped naked at the side of some country road with nothing left to me and nowhere to turn. I vomited constantly for three straight days, and I couldn’t stop shaking.
Mercifully, Arlene had been with me when we made the discovery. Seeing my reaction, she sat me down with the blanket she kept in the office wrapped around me, and sent Jenny out, as soon as she arrived, for lots of coffee and hot soup. It was Arlene who quietly arranged for Powalski to make a thorough inspection of the premises before we called in the police, or even told the building management what had happened. If she hadn’t taken that decision, we would never have found the listening devices. She took me home during the afternoon and made sure that I was comfortable before she left, and she made sure that I called Arya and arranged to see her, and she told me time and time again that I could call her 24/7, and that I would be hearing from her if I didn’t call to let her know I was OK.
Powalski called it as a government job almost immediately. Of course, it wasn’t until Dave Petrosian showed up that we knew that the government might have had a concrete reason for ransacking the office. Powalski called it before we had any inkling of that, and he was right. Until Dave arrived I’d assumed that this was an escalation – a serious escalation – of the harassment policy that had begun with the IRS audit. That thought alone was alarming enough. Even Powalski, with his experience of what the government was capable of, was unnerved. It felt as though we were being warned off with a vengeance. When Dave arrived, at least this latest blow began to make some kind of sense, and of course the copies of the loan certificates and the letter he had found at the Treasury were wonderful to see. But the trauma remained, and would remain, at least until we found some way of restoring order and our ability to function as a law office.
That took days of work by Arlene and Jenny. They first had to arrange for the debris to be hauled away and for the office to be deep-cleaned. Then they had to go out and purchase new computers, and rent furniture, and buy God knows how many coffee mugs and all the other day-to-day stuff you take for granted in an office, until we had the leisure, and the insurance money, to buy what we wanted. They also had to do whatever they could to reinstate the files that had been strewn all over the office. Thankfully, although many documents bore ink stains, almost all of them were recoverable, and Arlene had meticulously backed up our computers in the Cloud and on a series of memory sticks. But throughout this time, I remained at home.
After three days I’d been desperate to get back to work. I was going crazy, doing nothing useful at home, my only diversion being to drive myself to Arya’s and back each day; and we were losing time. But Arlene was firm. There was nothing I could do to help in the process of restoring the office, and she didn’t want me upsetting myself needlessly and getting in the way. The office was coming along, and the important thing was for me to be able to hit the ground running once it was fit for purpose again. She was right, of course. I would have fretted the whole time. But by the time I made it back to the office and we ready to work again, we had a week and a half left before we had to go back before Judge Morrow. Dave had called and said that if we needed more time, he would support us, but even with that support, we couldn’t go back to the judge without showing him what use we’d made of the time we’d already had.
On my first day back, I found a fax from Dave, forwarding one from an FBI agent called Marty Resnik. At Dave’s request, Agent Resnik had been in touch with the FBI field office in Philadelphia, and they in turn had been in touch with the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, the headquarters of the Freemasons in the State. Jenny had already been all over their website. It had an impressive historical section, which provided us with some interesting detail of early members, including a certain Benjamin Franklin; but interesting as that was, it didn’t give us a lot to go on in discovering the identity of Jacob’s Brother. The fax was far more detailed. There wasn’t an annual membership list, but there were several lists for the period we were interested in, and in particular one compiled in 1811. The Lodge had also been able to supply details of where many of the members of that time lived, at least in general terms. I have no idea how long it would have taken Powalski to get his hands on that same information. Knowing Powalski, I would have backed him to come up with it eventually, but the FBI could open doors far more quickly than he could.
I called Dave to thank him, and to apologise for what I’d said to him on the day we discovered the break-in. I hadn’t meant it. I was just venting. I knew that Dave would never be party to anything like that, and I felt terrible about it. He said he understood, and that it was already forgotten.
I gathered the whole team around our rented conference table and we went over every name on the list. In the end, we concluded that the two most likely candidates were men from what looked like well-established families whose family seats were within easy striking distance of Upper Merion Township: Peter Hoare and Abe Best. This was educated guesswork, of course, and no more. Jacob van Eyck could just as easily have had close friends in Philadelphia, or even farther afield, but we knew that he had grown frail during his declining years, and there was something to be said for the conjecture that he might have concentrated on friends closer to home. Before the break-in, the plan had been to return to Pennsylvania to take Aunt Meg through the list; to keep in touch with the office as the descendants of likely candidates were put through the LDS family tree procedure; and to see if we could work it out on the ground. There wasn’t time for that now. I placed a call to Alice and asked if Aunt Meg would be prepared to talk to us over the phone.
Two hours later, I put her on speakerphone, and we spoke with her for over an hour. Many of the names rang a bell with her. But the one that resonated most was that of Abe Best. The Bests and the van Eycks had been on good terms for many years, she said, in the old days. She had an idea that Jacob and Abe Best had been partners in some business ventures together. She wasn’t aware of any Bests living in the Merion Township area currently, or for some long time before. But the Bests had also been known for their masonic connections.
We decided to go with Abe Best. As soon as we’d said goodbye to Aunt Meg, Jenny went to work on the LDS site. An hour later, we had a printout of Abe’s family tree, from which we saw that one of his descendants was a woman called Cathy Wallace, thirty-two years old, apparently single. We had to start somewhere. I called Dave, and within an hour, Agent Resnik had got us a phone number and an address in DC, where Cathy Wallace worked as an economic forecaster for a think tank.