81

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Paige entered the packed courtroom at 9:45, trailing behind the clerk and Dylan Pierce’s team. The folding chairs that were jammed in the well of the courtroom behind counsel tables were filled with members of the Supreme Court bar who had waited in line for hours to hear this case. It seemed that they were all staring at her.

Immediately behind them, on rows of hard wooden benches, sat the spectators who were lucky enough to get a seat. The ones in the front row were likely those who had camped out all night.

But to Paige’s surprise, when she entered the courtroom, the entire first two rows of the spectator section rose as one and stood at attention. She recognized many of the faces as members of the Virginia Beach–based SEAL teams. They had shown up today, she knew, to show their support and loyalty. The SEAL family coming through again.

Before she sat down in the front row, Paige glanced over her shoulder and nodded at them. They all sat down at once, as if she had saluted them, and it made her heart swell with pride.

“That was pretty cool,” Wellington whispered.

Minutes later, the clerk called the Court to order and the justices came out from behind a huge scarlet curtain, taking their respective seats on the bench. Paige was struck by how intimate the setting felt. In most appellate courtrooms, the podium was a good distance from the justices, conveying a feeling of respectful separation. But here, in the nation’s highest court, the lawyers and justices were just a few feet away from each other. Other lawyers had said that they could hear the Court’s oldest member, Justice Kathryn Byrd, wheezing from the bench. You didn’t have to raise your voice to be heard—this argument would be a conversation, not a courtroom lecture.

Paige studied the looks on the justices’ faces, but they gave nothing away. Before she knew it, Pierce was at the podium and the questions had started flying. He handled them with great aplomb, the perfect mix of formal respect and confident advocacy. He emphasized the separation of powers in the Constitution and how the Court had always honored the role of the executive branch in matters of foreign policy. Our country was at war, he said, and we could not jeopardize the lives of those serving abroad by spilling state secrets every time a plaintiff wanted money in a lawsuit. That was why, from the days of the Totten case in 1875, this Court had dismissed such claims instead of forcing the executive branch to divulge its state secrets.

As expected, Pierce’s argument did not sit well with the more liberal members of the bench. Justice Augustini, who was one of the newer members of the Court and therefore sat in the second-to-last seat on the right, led the charge. As a novelist, she had a knack for imagining hypotheticals that showed the danger of Pierce’s logic. Sitting on the opposite end of the bench was David Sikes. Every time Augustini made a point, he would lob a softball question to make a counterpoint.

Justice William Martin Jacobs III, a bulky man sitting close to the chief, actually scoffed at one of Pierce’s answers. “Seems to me that you’re saying the courts just have to take the words of politicians at face value and can’t even test whether state secrets are actually at issue,” he said, peering over reading glasses. “Just like the old days in the South when the politicians claimed that segregated schools weren’t the result of racist motives and we should stay out of the busing business. We should just take their word for it.”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” Pierce replied calmly. “This Court has a constitutional duty to ensure that the citizens of our country are treated equally, and segregation did not pass that test. But it also has a duty to ensure that the executive branch has the latitude it needs to protect our citizens from terrorists without being harassed by plaintiff’s lawyers and tort lawsuits.”

It was obvious to Paige that the Court’s three conservatives—Sikes, Barton Cooper, and Kathryn Byrd—were all firmly on the side of Kilpatrick and Marcano. The chief was hard to read, but he seemed concerned about the prospect that Judge Solberg’s procedure might result in the inadvertent disclosure of state secrets. “Once that genie is out of the bottle, you can’t put her back in,” he said. Paige knew she couldn’t count on him.

That left the four liberal justices for Paige’s side—Murphy, Torres, Augustini, and Jacobs. But she would also have to win the vote of the Court’s newest justice, Taj Deegan, sitting all the way to the right, who had not yet asked a single question.

What is she thinking? Paige wondered.

Deegan gave a clue just before Pierce’s white light came on. “Isn’t your appeal premature?” she asked. “Judge Solberg was only trying to figure out whether there are state secrets that would require dismissal of the lawsuit. She hadn’t definitively ruled that it can go forward. Isn’t it a little extreme to say that a judge can’t even hold closed-door depositions to test the government’s claims about state secrets?”

Pierce jumped on the question as if he had been waiting for it all morning. “What you’ve seen happen in this case is exactly the problem with such a procedure,” he claimed. “A deposition that was supposed to be sealed from the public has been leaked to the press, and the state secrets that Director Marcano testified about under a promise of confidentiality have been spread across the front page of the New York Tribune. We can’t risk the country’s safety the way Judge Solberg did.”

With perfect timing the white light came on. “I would like to save my remaining time for rebuttal,” Pierce said. The chief nodded, and the lawyer took his seat.

Paige stood quickly, gathered her folder, and took her spot. She paused for just a second, taking it all in. Paige Chambers, representing the warriors of SEAL Team Six, at the Supreme Court of the United States.

“Good morning, Ms. Chambers,” Chief Justice Leonard said.

“Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court . . .”