And there was the Ragman's Ph.D. in nuclear engineering. He would assemble the parts into the whole. Kilowatt would create a network of wires with his electrical engineering. Data would disable the city of Chicago's emergency response network. And Maps. He would reverse all surface roads and freeways so traffic flow out of the city would be impossible.

A fifty-megaton bomb.

Capable of an airburst from atop the Willis Tower.

The plan was genius in its simplicity. No airplanes this time, no TSA comparing photos on no-fly lists, no hijackings. From the eighty-fifth floor they would have the perfect platform.

It would level the Loop plus two miles around. Seven hundred thousand would incinerate in the burst. Two million from radiation and burns. Allah would be pleased.

A core of fissile material would come across from Mexico in sixty days.

Then assembly could commence.

LATOYA AND JOHN STAPLES knew Chase had significant problems from the moment of his birth. But just how significant, they weren't told until finally, the third evening after his birth, a neonatology doctor met with them in Latoya's hospital room. She drew the curtain ring for privacy and launched into the case. She-Nancy Jarvis, M.D.-spared them none of what the doctors thought they knew about the baby up to that point. The findings on examination indicated severe mental deficits, but nobody was yet able-or willing, Latoya guessed-to fasten the blame for Chase's problems on any doctor or on any of the events of the birth. In short, the baby was damaged and so far they didn't see him progressing as normal.

On discharge they were referred to Armando Arroyo, M.D. He was a pediatric neurologist. His job was to follow Chase's case.

LATOYA AND JOHN liked Dr. Arroyo as soon as they met him. He was a middle-aged goateed Latino with a huge smile but very piercing eyes. His hair was white and he wore trifocals. He also wore two turquoise rings, as he was a transplant from New Mexico some twenty years ago and loved that indigenous stone. His pleasant manner and exhaustive approach had impressed Latoya, and she had seen his preliminary reports. She thought the world of the man and totally trusted his opinions.

On that first visit he scheduled Chase for films. Images would be taken of the baby's brain and then they would all meet again.

9.

Sanford-Sandy-Green was the head of the Special Claims Unit of Hudd Family Healthcare. He worked out of the home office in Chicago. Special Claims was special because it forged medical records. Never having been one with scruples to interfere, Sandy loved the job. Its work was secret, he operated without supervision, and he hired outside counsel to defend the healthcare provider's doctors, nurses, and hospitals. Payback was extraordinary. The outside guys bought gourmet meals, comped him to ski condos in Aspen, sun condos in the Caymans, Super Bowl tickets, March Madness seats, Bulls games-the list was endless.

Not to mention the cash they coughed up. It arrived in actual brown paper bags.

Sandy Green was fast growing rich and nobody knew-and nobody cared, either, as long as Sandy's Special Claims Unit kept producing patient records and doctor reports that were sandpapered and contained no evidence of doctor screw-ups. Inside the four corners of the records there could be no smoking guns. Keep the doctors and hospitals free of negligence in their records, and anything went, as long as the IRS or FBI didn't snoop.

Sandy was an unvarnished college dropout whose own corners were rough. He preferred shiny, worn suits and scuffed wingtips to high fashion. Yet he answered to no one and how he dressed was nobody's business and so the hell with those at Hudd Family Healthcare who clucked their tongue at him. He performed work that was nobody's business and he would dress however he wanted, plus it was cheaper that way. And Sandy was always out to save a buck. Especially the big bucks at HFH. He treated the health care company's money like his own and the vice presidents doted on him for this.

Sandy's Special Claims Unit was responsible for the defense of all health care claims with a potential for costing the insurance company more than one million dollars. And he was excellent at his job. Not once in four years had a medical malpractice claim cost them over one million dollars. The company's pockets were bulging with cash, and there was enough to go around to Sandy and his staff in bonuses, to make sure the cash piled up ever deeper in the vault.

Everyone at Hudd Family was happy.

SEVENTEEN CLAIMS HAD discovery deadlines running out. The plaintiff's lawyers wanted the medical records that Hudd Family had collected from its hospitals. The lawyers wanted the medical records for one reason: to find the smoking gun, the page or pages that would bury the health care company with a record verdict. But they would never find those smoking guns, not with Sandy's unit running interference. For him the entire litigation business was a game, a time-honored game that was played by the rules of Hide the Ball.

Here's how the rules worked. Sandy's group took in medical records from its doctors and hospitals and then washed those records-removing all taint of wrongdoing-before the records went public.

March 14 was like any other day at the office. It was rainy outside, which made some people glum, but not Sandy. In his peculiar shuffle gait, he stepped up to the desk of Amanda Barr, a cursive specialist working at one of the twenty-five cubicles under his command. It was quiet in the room; they labored behind locked doors and most of them wore headphones to enhance their concentration.

He waited until Amanda paused writing. You couldn't pay these graphics folks enough money, he thought. They were worth every penny and he treated them with great respect. She finally noticed him and lifted an earphone. He said, "The Klinghoffer case. How are the doctor's notes looking?"

She smiled. She liked her boss. Everybody liked Sandy. "Just about rewritten. Dr. Johnson's handwriting is easy enough to copy." They always used the word "copy." It just sounded so much better than "forge."

Amanda and her co-workers in Special Claims had one thing in common. They were for the most part single parents in desperate need of money, thrilled to have jobs in a very down economy, and paid like kings. Hudd Family Healthcare took excellent care of these secret people. They were highly trained in the art of document forgery. They were sworn to secrecy. Before anyone's first day on the job they pledged a security oath that would have made even the NSA jealous. They passed rigorous background checks run on them by XFBI, Inc., weeding out those with any connection to law enforcement by birth or by marriage. They were paid as much or more than the company's junior vice presidents. They checked in and out each day with ID badges and were all but strip-searched randomly. No one knew when XFBI's doorkeepers were going to run a strip. It could happen once in a week; it could happen twice in one day. The keen eyes of XFBI were on the lookout especially for floppies and flash drives.

XFBI enforced Hudd Family's policy of 100 percent security. Even the staff computers were assembled without USB ports, so external drives or flashes could not connect up. Additionally, no employee had connectivity to the Internet so there was no chance of storing records on the cloud. The entire service was a closed loop.

Sandy handed Amanda a pale blue envelope. "This is for your excellent work this month on your three cases. SCU says thanks!"

She blushed. She knew there was at least $500 inside. Monthly spiffs were another aspect of the job where they were sworn to secrecy. The workers didn't know it, but the cash came from a secret company account in Costa Rica, impossible to trace, thanks to the forward-thinking foreign government and its labyrinthine system of national banking that rivaled the Swiss.

"What's the key to the case?" Sandy asked.

She rolled her eyes. "Dr. Johnson made the mistake of writing in Mrs. Klinghoffer's hospital notes that the clouds on the X-ray had never been visualized before."

"Clouds? Cancer?"

"Yep. The truth was, the same X-rays had been reviewed by a radiologist forty-five days earlier who warned of a neoplasm that was probably cancerous. That report was in her original file."

"So the doctor missed the cancer on the X-rays."

"He sure did."

"I see. How did you handle it?"

"Two things. First, I changed the radiologist's report to read the mass was benign. Second, I changed Dr. Johnson's notes to indicate he was relying on the radiologist's reading. He believed that mass was benign, according to my new record."

His brow furrowed. "What did India say?"

"I called India and spoke with Dr. Hasleym."

"Our radiologist."

"He reviewed the record and suggested that's how it be changed, that we pass it off as a radiology error."

"He wants to have the radiologist report the mass was benign?"

"Yes. So I followed his instructions and now we've got a new set of records ready for turnover to Mr. Klinghoffer's attorneys."

"And the radiologist?"

"Not connected with Hudd. He'll have his own cross to bear."

The case was now a wrongful death case. Mrs. Klinghoffer had in fact passed away after the mass had traveled through her body and attached to organs it then devoured. Mister Klinghoffer had lost his wife of thirty-eight years and he was about to lose her lawsuit as well.

Sandy patted Amanda's shoulder. "Nicely done. What's the next case up?"

"Chase Staples."

"Doctor?"

"Phillip Payne."

"Injury?"

"Uh-anoxia. Catastrophic brain injury. NICU says he'll never live independently."

"Look it over and then let's talk."

"Will do."

He was pleased with Special Claims, pleased with his workers, and pleased with himself for having the brains to do such important work.

Meanwhile, outside the locked doors of Special Claims, Hudd Family Healthcare aggressively pursued new patients through its shiny brochures and colorful advertising, churning out hospital stay after hospital stay, secure in the knowledge it would never suffer a knockout punch.

10.

Morgana Bridgman was wanted by Hudd. Hudd was the second largest healthcare provider in the country, 107 hospitals and 36,000 physicians. Which meant they got sued habitually for medical malpractice. "Habitually" as in every day, several times a day. She was the ascendant medical malpractice defense attorney in all of Chicago. She was twenty-eight, a graduate of Cornell Law, women's NCAA basketball championship team, and a street fighter. They liked everything about her and wanted her to take over all their business in the Midwest. Hudd thought it a perfect match. She had responded positively to their feelers.

What Hudd didn't know, ironically, was her health.

Morgana was in trial the day she got the death sentence. Her own death sentence, it turned out. Which was unusual for a defense attorney in a trial that was not a criminal trial.

It was a three-banger trial-three days total, including jury selection, Bang-Bang-Bang, Jury Time. The plaintiff was a young woman whose nasal passages had buckled following surgery. Morgana's client was the plastic surgeon who had operated to remove a bump from the nose that the young woman had hated all her life. The surgeon followed routine protocols, packed the nose when he was finished, and left the surgicenter. The patient came in three days later complaining she could no longer breathe through her nose.

The doctor beamed a light up her nose. The passageways had indeed collapsed. Morgana's defense was that the patient had slept wrong, against doctor's orders, crushing her nose into her pillow. Result: no airflow.

Morgana paid an expert ENT $25,000 to testify. The expert was young, handsome, Harvard-trained, and admitted with special privileges to three Chicago hospitals. The jury loved him. What the jury would never know was that Hudd Family Healthcare had purchased three doctors for Morgana's case, two men and a young woman. They were all waiting in the wings, wondering which of them would actually be called to testify. In the end, the young doc was chosen because the jury consisted of eight women and four men. The women swooned over his good looks, and the men admired that he treated NFL Hall-of-Famers for injuries suffered in their Sunday brand of violence. Some of the players were Bears greats, and he named names. The men were hanging on every word. The women were hanging on every emotion he expressed, every turn of phrase, and his vulnerability. Perfect jury; the domino tiles fell as laid out.

Morgana wound up with a defense verdict and went 29-0. Better record than any NFL team would ever have.

What Morgana didn't know, however, was the defendant doctor's medical records were lies, compliments of Hudd Family Healthcare and Sandy Green. In the defense of medical malpractice cases, lawyers like Morgana simply assumed that the records they had received from their clients, the hospitals, were genuine. It would never have occurred to her to suspect that the records were forged. So she had won the case using phony records. Did she know that? Absolutely not. Would she have used the records had she known they were phony? Morgana prided herself on the unconditionally ethical practice of law. She never bent the rules and she knew she would never run afoul of the Bar Association's ethics. So the answer was a loud "No!" she would never use forgeries.

When it was ended, she was tired. Way too tired for a twenty-eight-year-old who considered herself the picture of health. She jogged, ate right, didn't smoke, light drinks-maybe a couple of beers on Saturday while she washed the old Volvo, maybe an occasional wine with one of Caroline's fish dinners where her partner insisted a white was mandatory.

It had her perplexed, but not worried, the persistent voice telling her to lie down and nap. So she left for home after the trial, foregoing the office fly-by where you stick your head in, the partners shake your hand and fawn over your twenty-ninth defense verdict, and the senior partner offers you a scotch and a one-on-one inside his office, door closed, reminding you how important you are to Jones Marentz, the medical malpractice firm known and feared throughout Chicago. She passed on all that.

It was a dull, overcast day, windy enough to blow you off the curb, with a blizzard-like snowstorm mixed with sleet mixed with ice. The kind of day that made you want to be inside with your family, shades drawn, coffee brewing, good book waiting.

She dropped off second-chair Manny Rodriguez on LaSalle and bolted north on US 41.

No sooner had she merged into the fast lane than her cell chimed. Dr. Romulus' office. Right off she knew it was ominous, because the nurse said, "Please hold for Doctor Romulus."

"It's never good when your doctor calls you personally," she said to no one.

Turned out he was calling with the hospital workup. The information was conveyed in four short sentences. The jury was back and it was unanimous. It was leukemia and Morgana had six, maybe eight months. Unless chemo worked; which it did-sometimes. And didn't-sometimes. Come in Monday.

In shock, Morgana thanked him for the call, promised she would come in Monday, and ended the call. She balled her fist and slammed it into the dash. "Damn!" she cried. She fought back tears for several miles, trying to remain calm, avoiding the shakes by focusing on the road.

Finally she let a thought break through.

It was okay, in an odd way. It didn't exactly shock her. She had been raised Methodist and had some distant notion about a score on her life being kept somewhere. She was only just now beginning to question where that kind of thinking came from and whether it was valid for her anymore. She was maybe a late bloomer about such things. But she gave herself a little breathing room in that category. She had been very preoccupied with other things than spiritual questions these past five years. Things like staying alive. Things like her relationship with Caroline. Sure, she had sent desperate people home without a dime, but that's what lawsuits were for. Winners and losers. Law school hadn't taught her to seek justice. Law school taught her to win.

She shivered though the seven-year-old Volvo was warm. The March roads were slick and getting worse by the minute, visibility down to maybe a half-mile. By 3:45 roadside lights were appearing in restaurants and farmhouses even as she drove further north toward Evanston.

Suddenly all she could think about was Caroline. They were coming up on their Paper (five years), and they were still going strong. She loved Caroline, who loved Morgana. She could still chase her around the bedroom, Caroline could make her warm on her coldest day, what wasn't to like? Morgana dreaded breaking it to her.

Absolutely dreaded it.

She took Ridge into Evanston.

Morgana didn't tell Caroline at all that night. She figured Sunday night she would ask Caroline to accompany her to see Dr. Romulus. She would tell her only that it "sounded serious."

No sense scaring her to death until they knew more.