Page 42 of Pursuit of Happiness

“Somebody has to.”

“Not true. I could represent myself.”

She nodded like she was considering the idea. “True. You could.But why would you want to when you could have a seasoned professional like me?”She swore she detected a hint of a grin. “I brought you something.”

He didn’t ask any questions but watched intently as she used thehard edge of a file folder to puncture the packing tape on the box. Afterdigging through the packing material, she pulled out a laptop and plugged itin. “This is an air-gapped computer. I assume you know what that means.”

He cocked his head and nodded in approval. “It’s never beenconnected to the internet.”

“Yep.” She reached into her briefcase and pulled out a flashdrive. “This is a flash drive that I purchased yesterday. I took it to the FBIfield office and watched them copy the discovery for your case on it, you know,the documents that Judge Solomon told them they had to unredact.”

“He issued his ruling?”

“Oh, so you have been paying attention.” She smiled to soften hersarcasm, pleased that something had penetrated the walls he’d thrown up betweenthem. “He did issue an order. The government still has time to try to locatethe encrypted documents, but they had to provide us with copies of theoriginals for the documents they already provided to us. I brought a copy ofSolomon’s order if you want to see it, but the highlights are as follows: wecannot make copies of the documents and you will not be able to keep them inany form with you here at the jail. I did get him to agree to let you use acomputer during our visits, but we can only view the documents on a computerthat has not ever been nor during the course of this trial will be connected tothe internet. The bonus to you is that you can be sure there is nothinginstalled on this laptop that could capture our conversations and sendinformation about our activity out into the world.” She reached into her bagand pulled out a pad of Post-its, peeled one off, and placed it over thepinhole for the camera. “See, I planned for everything.”

“You think I’m paranoid.”

“Maybe I just think you’re really cautious. Let me guess, you’veseen plenty of violations of privacy in your time at Folsom.”

He nodded so slightly she would’ve missed it had she not beenpaying careful attention.

“I’m going to go out on a limb and say that some of thoseviolations were committed by government officials.”

Again with the almost imperceptible nod.

She pointed at the laptop. “Let’s make a deal. For now, you don’thave to say anything about the documents, simply mark anything of note for meto look at later. We’ll figure out what to do next if you unearth any smokingguns.”

“Who paid for the computer?”

Stevie paused for a moment, struck by his focus on extraneousdetails, but sensing he has some important reason for wanting to know. “I did.I plan to try to expense it, but you don’t need to worry about that. There’s nocost to you.”

She detected relief in the way his shoulders relaxed and theconcern in his eyes dissipated slightly. She imagined that whatever he’d beenthinking when he chose to send classified documents out into the world was nothingcompared to the reality of sitting in a jail cell, not knowing who you couldtrust. She wanted to ask him if he had friends or family to be a support systemwhile he was going through this mess, but she shoved her questions aside.Considering how little he spoke at all, she couldn’t waste her time with him onthings that didn’t directly pertain to the case. “You ready to start looking atdocuments?” she asked, hoping her plan to involve him in this document reviewwould get him to open up more.

His only answer was to fire up the laptop and reach for thedrive. He studied it for a moment and then plugged it into the USB port. Shewatched, fascinated, as his hands sped over the keys and the screen in front ofthem turned into a giant bunch of unintelligible letters and numbers. Screenswhizzed by faster than she could read them, but she suspected it wouldn’t havemattered anyway since what little she did see was nonsense. After a few minutesof this, he minimized all the open windows on the screen and turned the laptopso that it was situated directly between them.

“Do you want to drive?” he asked.

“I think you should,” she said, earning another look of approval.

“There’s an index, but it’s not very helpful. Probably designedto bury important information.” His fingers flew as he spoke. “We should comeup with a list of keywords if we want to find anything specific, but aside fromthat, we’ll have to page through all of these if you want to know the scope.”

“How many documents are there?”

He opened the utilities on the computer and clicked on the drive.“This drive has a capacity of two hundred and fifty gigabytes, and it’s aboutfifty percent full. Each gigabyte can comprise anywhere from two thousand tofive thousand documents, assuming they are only documents and not videos orlarge-scale images.” He tapped his fingers on the desk and furrowed his brow.“I’d say anywhere from fifty thousand to a hundred thousand pdf documents.”

She held in a groan. This wasn’t the first time she’d worked ondocument heavy cases, but they weren’t that common in the PD’s office, sincethe kind of cases that usually generated that kind of paper tended to be thekind with big money on the defense side. “Well, either I’m going to have tomove in here with you, or we’re going to have to figure a way to plow throughthese documents in time for a July trial date.”

They could probably push the trial date off, but she hated to dothat with him in custody since it only delayed his chance at freedom. It mightbe time to start trying this case in the court of public opinion. She’d heldoff on speaking to the press for all the usual reasons, but maybe it was timeto make them work for her instead of the other way around. Emily hadn’t askedfor a gag order, probably because she knew who she was dealing with, andSolomon’s protective order about the discovery only pertained to revealing thecontents of the documents she’d been provided, but was silent on whether shecould talk about the case in general. Generating sympathy for her client in themedia might bring Emily around to a better plea offer that didn’t involveBarkley flipping on someone else since she didn’t hold out much hope the scantconversation they’d shared today was going to suddenly morph into him runninghis mouth.

She filed the idea away, resolving to speak to Joe and get hisadvice, and turned her attention back to the computer screen. Despite herdetermination to focus, the words started to blur and her thoughts wandered. Injust a few days, Meredith would be back on her side of the country. The pollshad her neck and neck with Lankin with Meredith a lock on both coasts andLankin still with a slight lead in the South, but Stevie didn’t give a damnabout polls. All she cared about was that she was about to see Meredith again,and this time she was going to make the most of what little time they wouldhave together. Meredith had already sent her a plane ticket and instructionsfor the car service that would drive her to Meredith’s apartment building,undetected. At least Stevie liked to think that Meredith had been involved inthe planning, but it was more likely the arrangements had been made by Jen orone of the interns working on the campaign. She didn’t care how it happened aslong as it happened.

She shook off the distraction and focused her attention back onthe computer screen.Justget through this work, and you’ll get your reward.Believing thepromise, she spent the rest of the next hour letting Barkley explain thedocuments they were viewing. A lot of it was fluff, designed to slow down herability to review everything, which, based on her experience, meant there wassomething exculpatory contained on the drive. They just had to find it.

Chapter Thirteen

“What do you mean the plane is grounded?” The minute the wordsleft her mouth, Meredith regretted the shrill delivery, but the idea that shewould be stuck in Atlanta watching the election results while Stevie was in NewYork at her apartment, was bitter icing on the shit cake of a day she’d justhad.

“We’re working on it,” Gordon said, “But worst-case scenario, weswitch up the schedule and stay here tonight. I’ve already got someone checkingon a room block downtown.”

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