29

New York, New York

Blake Dullea was first in line for a deposition conducted by the veteran trial team. Deke had wanted to get Nigel Beech in the hot seat first, but scheduling conflicts pushed the Antriol president’s appearance out several days.

The team had arrived in New York the day prior to Dullea’s depo and once again camped at the Hotel Roxy downtown. Michael had almost stayed behind in Florida. He had not yet heard from Joel, despite receiving the notarized affidavit and the note promising that his veteran colleague would soon get in touch. Michael had left several messages on the voicemail of the new phone number that Joel had provided, but so far there had been no response. He was becoming concerned about his old friend once again.

He joined Carol, Bernie, and Sarah in Deke’s suite to talk strategy and make sure all of their ducks were in a row. The deposition was scheduled to take place the following morning at the law offices of Mendel, Wrecker, and Platt, which was located in the Wall Street area of lower Manhattan. Deke was counting on what usually occurred at depos of low to mid-level management witnesses—the lead counsel top dogs rarely appeared. Instead, they would typically send lower-level partners or associates with marching orders to “protect” the witness with a senseless barrage of meaningless objections and arguments.

“Well, I think we are as ready as we possibly can be, Deke,” Sarah observed. “It is pretty much shock and awe time at Mendel, Wrecker, and Platt.”

Deke smiled at that. This was because he never took the traditional kind of depositions where actual questions were asked. The “shock and awe” method immediately began with an attack centering around the hottest and ugliest documents that had been uncovered prior to the depo. Typically thirty to fifty of the most damning emails, memos, and text messages were displayed on an eight by eight foot video screen, one by one, for hours. Simultaneously, Deke would both humiliate and put the witness in an impossible position of explaining what was plastered across the screen. In all likelihood, the young corporate lawyer there had never seen these carefully chosen documents prior to the depo, and their efforts to defend the indefensible simply made what was happening in the videotaped questioning look even worse.

“Bernie, has our tech team completely set up?” Deke asked.

“Locked and loaded,” the Gold Star Plus attorney answered with a grin.

Bernie was referring to four high-quality video cameras and a sophisticated computer stack that retrieved and displayed select documents on a screen in seconds on demand.

Carol held up the morning’s New York Times. “Y’all see the news out of Maryland?”

They had all seen coverage of the bombing incident the previous morning on CNN, and now, forty-eight hours after the event, the major newspapers featured pieces that were lacking in detail. The Times hadn’t bothered to place their article on the front page, but rather it had been relegated to a brief mention on page three. The headline was vague: ROADSIDE BOMB DESTROYS LUMBER TRUCK.

“We don’t really know much about it, do we?” Michael asked. “The media doesn’t either. What we do know is that a roadside bomb like the one described is way far from an everyday occurrence in the US. Terror comes in many forms on our shores, but rarely anything like what I saw every day in the Middle East.”

Deke rubbed his chin. “I don’t see anything here that leads me to believe that the bombing is in any way related to our case.”

“I’m not ready to make that conclusion, either,” Michael said.

“Me neither,” Carol echoed. “However, you know I have my tentacles in a lot of places. Between us, Sarah and I have a dozen contacts at the FBI. We’ll start making calls today and see what surfaces.”

“If you can, find out what components were in the bomb,” Michael suggested. “And where they might have come from. That will tell us a lot.”

“The FBI plays it close to the vest, as you know,” Carol said. “Sometimes it takes an excavator to weed just a tiny morsel of information out of them. But I’ll do what I can.”

Deke said, “We know if anyone can make a federal agent reveal trade secrets, it’s you, Carol.”

“Ve have vays to make zem talk!” she said with an exaggerated accent.

“Michael, what was the name of that manufacturing company that Joel Hartbeck talks about in his affidavit?” Deke asked.

“SeedDotz.”

“How big are they?”

Michael went to his laptop to retrieve his notes. “Surprisingly not that big. They do have four subsidiaries overseas. One in Germany, one in Turkey, and one in China. Joel didn’t mention this one, but there’s also a SeedDotz affiliate in Saudi Arabia. It doesn’t use the SeedDotz name, but it’s owned by them.”

“And they manufacture materials that could be used to make EFPs?”

“They export machine tools like pneumatic presses and lathes to companies they do business with—and some of them are on the DOJ-sanctioned list. They’re the ones that use the tools and have the capability of manufacturing components that could be used for bombs. They could also be used for a number of other things, too.” Michael shrugged.

“Could SeedDotz make bombs if they had someone there who knows how to do it?”

“Anyone with the know-how can get the materials needed, like copper plates and pipes, but they’d also need highly explosive material, too. I seriously doubt SeedDotz is making bombs, though.”

“And where is the US headquarters of SeedDotz?”

Michael glanced at his notes. “Hmm. West Virginia. It’s a bit of a leap I’m making here, but you know what? Geographically, that’s awfully close to Maryland.”

* * *

Long Island, New York

On the morning of Blake Dullea’s deposition, Nigel Beech strode from his palatial Woodsburgh mansion and, nodding to the driver holding the door, settled into his chauffeured bespoke Rolls Royce Phantom Oribe to travel into the city.

Woodsburgh, a village in the town of Hempstead, Long Island, is generally considered one of the wealthiest of the twenty-two villages and thirty-eight hamlets that comprise Hempstead, which lies in Nassau County. The home where Nigel Beech and his wife lived stood on four acres of spectacularly landscaped grounds with lush gardens. The traditional Georgian house, built in 1912, contained eight large bedrooms, a gym, library, office space, a walk-in vault, and a ballroom.

If Beech had wanted, he could have easily taken the train to Manhattan from the nearby Woodmere Long Island Rail Road station. The bank also had a fleet of three helicopters from which he could choose. But Frederick, his English chauffeur, was always on hand to drive Beech to work every morning and bring him back home at the end of the day. Never mind that it took a bit longer with the usual traffic to drive from Woodsburgh to the Bank Antriol building on Wall Street than it did to ride the train to Penn Station, where a different driver would be waiting to deliver Beech to the bank.

The normal route to the city, via the Belt Parkway that ran to Kennedy Airport and around the southern bulb of Brooklyn, competed with the sometimes better-paced alternate course via the Long Island Expressway, which went up to Queens and then west to the FDR Drive for the leg south to the tip of the island. Frederick thought either way was horrendous during rush hour. On this particular morning, he checked the GPS and determined that traffic was lighter going via the Belt. The first part of the route, though, was the same. The Rolls would leave the Beech home, travel north through Woodsburgh, and get on Rockaway Boulevard.

Contrary to his driver’s feelings about the commute, Beech didn’t mind the ride and used the time in the Rolls to catch up on work, read the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, or make phone calls. It was his “alone time,” and he relished it.

He was well aware that this was the morning of Blake Dullea’s deposition. Beech had never liked Dullea or his shadow, Karl Maher. There was something way too smug and self-promoting about those two, and he should never have allowed them to be in charge of the AML unit in Kentucky that was causing all the trouble. It would be interesting to see what the lawyers from Florida came up with, and how Dullea would answer what would certainly be intense questioning.

The Rolls soon entered the stretch of Rockaway Boulevard that was four lanes with a concrete median down the middle. Trees and brush surrounded both sides of the road, giving the false impression that the city had disappeared and the boulevard was in the country. Traffic was uncharacteristically light. Frederick, a man of few words, concentrated on his driving; but he did announce to Beech that they would probably reach the office fifteen minutes earlier than usual.

As soon as Frederick had spoken those words, however, the Rolls Royce was slammed by a force so powerful that the automobile shattered into three sections and catapulted over the concrete median and into the oncoming lane. The massive twelve-cylinder engine block from the Rolls was turned into a seven-hundred-pound missile, slicing through the concrete barrier and sending engine parts and rock through windows and doors of the oncoming vehicles on the other side. Flame and debris showered the boulevard as black smoke rapidly swelled to the size of a building. Other vehicles on the road in front and behind the Rolls were also hit, and some were thrown a distance of thirty yards. Horns blared and people screamed and cried in anguish. Death and destruction had stomped on this little piece of civilization in an instant.

The first emergency crews that arrived on the scene were instantly overwhelmed by a tableau of carnage. It was as if a forty-yard flaming tornado had briefly touched down and gouged a scar across the roadway. The cries of the dying and maimed flittered through the smoke. As the seconds passed, the distant sounds of sirens floated above the scene, but to those there and still able to hear, the wails did not approach quickly enough.

After hours of cleanup, evacuation, and halted traffic both ways, it became clear that the bomb had instantly killed Frederick, whose identity was confirmed by the three remaining teeth that had managed to stay in the clump of flesh that had once been his head. Nigel Beech was found alive in the back third of the Rolls wreckage, gravely wounded. There were sixteen other fatalities that day, including four children.

The second roadside bomb had hit a bullseye.