Morgana held up her beer and shook her head. "I'm good. So what's up?"

A.W. nodded. "Well, we've had our fun, now we need to be serious for a few minutes."

What was this about? Morgana wondered. Probably more information about job duties. Fair enough, more money meant more hours to bill. She crossed her legs and pulled herself fully upright in the chair. Now she was all business. "Serious, like what about?"

Carson said, "Like what it really means to run with the wolves. You're about to find out what it really takes to be a partner at Jones Marentz. This is some truth telling time for with you."

The young lawyer didn't respond. She had zero idea where they were going with this. But she expected they wanted to see increased billables. Which she was willing to give, especially in light of the new partnership she'd been voted.

"Morgana, what you have seen tonight are the rewards that await someone who makes it around here. In this case, you."

"I'm astonished. I had no idea I could feel so good about sending widows home without a dime. Young women with failed nose jobs. It's not a bad trade."

"Is that sarcasm?" A.W. asked.

"Yes. I was only joking. Right now I'm ready to take the Porsche out onto the 90 and run with the wolves."

A.W. selected a cigar from the desktop humidor and automatically passed one to Carson. He lifted the wood box to Morgana, who waved him off. The men lit up and blew swirling plumes over the expanse of teak. It was all very back-roomy, very dramatic. They were definitely out to impress the young lawyer with something or other. She shivered reflexively. She had never been so close to the inside of important matters in her life. For a kid who had come from a modest background, it could all really grow on her in a big way.

A.W. continued in a somber tone that sounded like Eisenhower planning the Normandy Invasion. "The defense of insurance companies and their negligent doctors and hospitals sometimes transcends the law. Insurance companies are special institutions, with fine, long histories and honorable goals for their insureds. Sure, they get bad press now and then but so do all American companies. In the end they demand-and deserve-the very best legal services available. So, in a very real sense their needs sometimes transcend the law."

"'Transcend the law?' What's that?" Morgana cautiously asked. "That sounds like something out of Emerson."

"I mean that if we're going to keep winning for our clients we occasionally have to skirt around the law."

Morgana's back stiffened. Come again? What did he just toss out at me? "Like how? What on earth does this mean, 'skirt around the law'?"

"Like sometimes not telling the whole truth about the case."

"Well, I'm down with that-we keep our clients' secrets."

A.W. shook his head. "I'm not talking about keeping secrets, Morgana. At least that's not all of what I'm talking about.""

"So, what else do we have to guard?"

"Bottom line? Our partners at Hudd Family Healthcare will clean the doctor's and hospital's files before we begin the defense of a case. Sometimes we revise things just a bit. It's only good business. We're professionals and we're often called upon to clean up someone else's mess. So we do whatever it takes to save our clients money."

Something was looking wrong here. Morgana smelled rotting fish. "Meaning what?"

Carson held up a hand. "Let me take a shot at this. Morgana, remember in Pulp Fiction where Harvey Keitel comes to pick up the dead body that John Travolta's character inadvertently splattered all over the back seat of the car. Remember that scene?"

"Sure."

"Well, that's us, we're Harvey Keitel. Except we have law degrees and we're licensed to do what we do. We clean up others' mistakes. We make our own meaning out of the meaning that's presented to us. Do you follow me?"

"Carson, I hate to say this, but that sounds-"

A.W. interrupted. "-that sounds difficult to follow. Maybe. Let's be blunt."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning we omit smoking guns."

Carson jumped back in. "We hide documents. We revise things like nurses' notes."

"We cover up. We protect our clients. It is a religion around here that we do not lose cases. We do whatever it takes to win."

"Imagine Harvey Keitel letting the mob get caught with its pants down? Well, neither do we."

A look of incredulity had settled on Morgana's face. Her eyes were wide and her pupils dilated in disbelief. She knew she was easy to read at that moment yet didn't care. Her stomach flip-flopped in her abdomen and she realized she was slightly nauseous at what she was hearing. "This is getting very thick in here. Let's back up and take a deep breath. Okay? Are you telling me you have been destroying documents in litigated cases? Revising nurses' notes? Are you serious?"

A.W. was finally blunt. "Dead serious. And that's not all. When the dollar exposure calls for it we will manufacture evidence."

Morgana's astonishment etched into her face. She looked about her like someone expecting a clown to jump out and scream Surprise! "I hope to God this is a joke. You are bullshitting me, right?"

"Hardly. We'll revise nurses' notes, change times and measurements, we'll reprogram electronic monitors so we get the values we need to win. We'll dummy up X-rays and MRIs so they show no cancer. We do whatever it takes."

"Whatever it takes, Morgana, we're up for it."

Morgana was ready to jump and run. This had to be some huge put-on. "Jesus Christ." It was said like a prayer.

"You see-"

Then Morgana got angry. Slowly, but then it really poured out. "Hold on! I haven't had to dump documents or manufacture records and I've won thirty trials in a row. I've turned over everything."

Carson's face couldn't help smirking. All this Wonder Woman fluff heaped on the kid that night had not impressed him. "Have you? You really think you're special enough that we've let you use actual records? Dear girl, really."

A.W. said, "Who do you think doctored up your files before you were ever assigned to the case? That's what my job called for, Morgana. As of tonight, that's your job."

The roof caved in on her. It was not a joke. Those assholes were serious. Now her look was one of complete disbelief. All she wanted was to run from the room, run somewhere safe, somewhere these things weren't being said. Her hand shook as she reached and placed the beer on A.W.'s desk. She stood and began pacing.

She abruptly halted. "Let me get this straight, A.W. You're telling me I wasn't going to trial with real records?"

Carson, still smirking, said, "Oh, they're always real records-"

Morgana had suddenly had it with the little weasel. She wheeled on Carson as one who had nothing to lose. "Shut the fuck up, Carson. This is between me and A.W. This man is supposedly my mentor. Is that OK with you?"

"What Carson's saying is that our records are always real. They're just not original. Things get moved around. You might say we like to rearrange the furniture before the elves start the defense of the case."

"I can't believe what I'm hearing."

"It's time to face reality, Morgana. This is the way of trial practice in the United States. It wasn't always this way but it sure as hell is now, now that an insurance company can lose fifty million dollars to the wrong patient. The stakes are too fucking high not to stack the deck."

Morgana flopped into her chair but came bolt upright. A sudden inspiration had hit and she thought maybe this could be salvaged at the last second. "Hold it. What if I tell you that I can win my cases without all the criminal activity? Do I get a chance to prove that?" She looked from man to man. Surely they could at least give her the chance to prove what she could do. That she didn't need their dirty dealings.

A.W. shook his head. "Oh, you would win your share, but you would lose your share too. There are lots of negligent doctors and shoddy hospitals out there. Hudd Family can't take that chance. Like I said, fifty million-"

She finished it for him. "-fifty million dollars is too much to risk. I get that."

Morgana looked to Carson. Maybe he understood what Morgana was willing to do, to give it a try the honest way. She doubted it, but she was desperate for a sympathetic ear.

But Carson said, "How else do you think you can earn two hundred fifty grand a year with a Porsche, country club card, tennis club membership, and a month off, all on us? Did you think we're all just an extraordinarily gifted group of lawyers who never lose?"

"Yes, I did. Up until five minutes ago, I actually did think that. I was proud to be here."

A.W. rolled the tip of the cigar in the ashtray. "I'm a bottom line kind of guy. Bottom line is, are you with us?"

"Actually, I'm with me. You of all people should know that." She pulled herself fully upright and straightened her shirt and jacket. "I won't practice this way. What comes next?" Again she looked at each of them in turn. Waiting for resolution, something decent to happen, a light to go off, an acceptable compromise to be served up.

Instead, A.W. said simply, "We won't accept No. Hudd Family would leave us. You're either all in or all out with them. Nothing halfway, Morgana."

Carson added, "Hudd Family is ten percent of the firm's annual billing. If we lost them we'd all suffer beyond imagination."

With a long sigh, the young lawyer surrendered to her conscience. She knew that if she went along, Caroline would get it out of her and then she'd be toast. Worse, her own conscience would devour her. It just wasn't doable. Even without Caroline looking over her shoulder, she just couldn't pull it off. "I won't do it. Life's too short to practice that way."

"Like A.W. just said, if you're not with us, you're against us. We cannot have that."

Morgana stood and straightened her suit jacket as if she were about to address a judge. "Gentlemen, I'll be around to clean out my desk in the morning. For now I'm going to go downstairs, find my Volvo, and go get drunk."

A.W. shushed her with his hand. "Please. We want you to think this over. Discuss it with Caroline. Look at your financial obligations and imagine trying to meet those obligations without your firm."

"You have no idea how sorry I am to have to tell you, A.W. But you've got the wrong kid. Fuck, I'd rather sell insurance than send my life down the money river. Kiss my ass, both of you."

Morgana turned and left the two men hunched together in a cloud of cigar smoke, the oranges and yellows adorning the walls all at once looking not so warm after all.

She stormed out and fled downstairs to the parking garage.

Tears flooded her eyes and she had trouble finding the ignition.

Too much too late with too little to give. They had made their run at her and she had walked.

It just wouldn't fly any other way. Now to face Caroline.

Guess what, honey? I quit my job, lost my health insurance, and I have very narrow niche skills in medical malpractice defense. Plus I have leukemia. Maybe it's treatable, maybe it's not. What do you want to do this weekend?

She fought back the tears for a good two blocks. Then she collected herself and drove it on home.

13.

Christine Susmann was on top of her game. Since leaving the Army she had worked for Thaddeus as his key paralegal. But she was more than that. She had taught him how to arm himself, how to shoot, and how to protect what he believed in and what he loved. She was tough with an icy calm interior, clear-eyed, ready to do whatever it took to win a case, and had the highest respect for her boss, whom she had watched mature from a boy lawyer into a giant of a litigator and client-smart attorney. Christine had received the CD from Pauline Pepper on Monday; it was now Wednesday and she had devoured its contents.

Together with Thaddeus, in their Chicago office in the American United Building, they were going over what they had learned. Outside the sixtieth floor window the clouds were low and boiling past as the Windy City lived up to its name and winter departed with a flourish of howling wind and ice-specked rain. Inside it was warm, coffee was flowing, and the conference table all but hidden under the mass of documents printed off the CD and now in the process of falling into the system of categorization invented by Christine.

The CD had proved to be a gold mine.

HIS TRUE NATIONALITY WAS UNKNOWN.

Ragman had entered the United States in 2009. Tijuana ICE agents admitted him on the passport of one Luis M. Sanchez. The real Mr. Sanchez existed, if at all, in a parallel universe because he no longer existed in this one.

The real Mr. Sanchez had been a street soldier for a local drug wannabe who got crosswise with the Tijuana Cartel. They had separated his head from his torso, doused it with gasoline, and rolled it through the front door of La Oficina Federales in Tijuana. By the time a fire extinguisher shot forth and the flames abated, the identity of the head was indeterminate. The Mexican police had far fewer forensic tools than American crime labs and far less interest in keeping score of who killed who in the narcotics collective. In short, the Mexican records had it that Sanchez was just another low-life, a bad guy, a puta.

With one redeeming characteristic. An important one.

He had been born in San Diego.

Which made him every bit as American as Senator Dodge from California (D). Which meant in his afterlife he was able to apply for and obtain an American passport. Which he did-in absentia, of course, because he was dead. The passport photo belonged to the new and improved Luis M. Sanchez, lately of maybe Pakistan, though the FBI had no firm idea about this part. It would be easier to trace your own ancestry back 400 years to the Mayflower than to trace the new and improved Mr. Sanchez a month earlier to Pakistan or Iran or Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan or-that's the idea.

They coughed up twenty-three photographs of him, two headshots from inside a tail car, one of him leaving La Spondia, a mid-list eatery in Los Angeles. That had been in late 2009. Then he had fallen off the face of the earth for two years. Sometime in 2011 he turned up again, this time in Chicago. There were two police reports with his name, one fingering him as the assailant of a sophomore coed from the University of Illinois-Chicago, wherein it was reported by the young woman Sanchez had raped her at knifepoint. Unfortunately she had waited two weeks to report the incident. She had been ashamed and, frankly, scared to death of the guy returning to kill her. He had promised no less if she reported the attack. The other police report had him living on Milwaukee Avenue, in a duplex. A thirty year old known prostitute had run nude from the duplex, screaming and crying for help. The downstairs tenants had come to her aid and called the police. Details were fragmented, but there had been a knife and a long cut across her right breast that would leave a scar but wasn't life threatening. The police questioned Luis M. Sanchez, but he with his roommate swore to the officers the prostitute had cut herself in an attempt to extort money. A report had been taken and lost in the morass of unconfirmed police reports that swamped the Chicago police computers every night of the week.

Upstairs, away from the madding crowd, Sanchez appeared to be sharing space with a French Canadian. The Frenchie was another man. He too was thought to be Middle Eastern. The second man had a Canadian passport, which the agents had traced to another deceased gentleman, a Lavalle X. Fleuve of Montreal. Mr. Fleuve had perished at the age of thirty in a traffic accident while visiting Toronto. He was survived by a wife and three children. The widow had moved on and quickly remarried. Mr. Fleuve's resurrected self surfaced in Chicago, sharing the walkup with Mr. Sanchez.

Welcome to the afterlife, Mssrs. Sanchez and Fleuve.

Christine Photoshopped everything. Resolution shot up fifty percent. She saved her work in Sanchez's file on the cloud. Same process with Mr. Fleuve. This made the men's likenesses immediately accessible, tablet or smartphone. Thaddeus would be able to positively ID or disregard in an instant. Then she began building the Sanchez profile. Age, Physical Characteristics, Nationality, Names, Addresses, and, most of all, Associations.

Right out of the gate Christine knew that "Sanchez" was associated with at least five other men, interchangeable in looks and backstory. All were using false identities, all lived in Chicago, two had Ph.D.s (one in nuclear engineering, Sanchez himself), one programmer, one mapmaker (she couldn't understand how that fit into any pigeon hole), and one operated as a gopher. The latter would be a man who had no visible means of support, who whiled away his days at some mosque or other, meeting with Imams. The FBI had infiltrated the mosques and turned over more names, phone numbers, addresses, employment than Christine and Thaddeus could have hoped for. FOIA, they laughed, you have to love it. The Fibbies said these were Sunni Muslims, the same breed that was about to take over Iraq and throw gasoline on the Mideast bonfire.

Going in, Thaddeus only wanted the one guy, Sanchez. But one had morphed into six. Being an American who was suspicious of everything Middle Eastern since 9/11, the young lawyer's curiosity kicked in.

What were they doing here? he lay awake wondering. Christine said the big action for guys like them would be going on in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Pakistan. Chicago? Really? Why Chicago?

And why did Luis M. Sanchez kidnap Sarai and abandon her in the Nevada desert alone, no food or water, on a day when the temperature blew by 105F?

Of course Thaddeus had paid to get her back. He paid $350 million. Which went overseas to an account in Zurich, not to Luis M. Sanchez, at least not that he knew.

He had to conclude that Sanchez had been a pawn. He had been used by someone. And, Thaddeus was certain, he had been extremely well paid for his service.

In the week following the FOIA record dump Thaddeus and Christine put their heads together. They reviewed, scanned, and compiled. Then they went outside the record for third-party information.

He filed a lawsuit in District Court. The named defendant was Luis M. Sanchez. Thaddeus made no effort to serve the lawsuit-had no reason to serve it. If anything, they wanted Mr. Sanchez never to be aware he'd been sued.

The lawsuit was pure baloney, of course. Not a word of it true, none of the allegations, none of the complaints, nada. But the lawsuit gave Thaddeus and Christine access to many doors.