False Witness Read online

  He sent a text message to Stacie, following the prearranged protocol. Cryptic messages. No specifics: meet me at 6 instead of 8.

  The reply came immediately: ok. problem?

  His one-word response: yes.

  63

  Wellington nibbled at a fingernail as he waited for Isaiah in one of the overstuffed chairs in the law school lobby. His leg bounced with nervous energy. By the time Isaiah showed up, five minutes and thirty seconds late, Wellington was wound so tight he could barely think straight. They would be meeting with Snead in less than ten minutes.

  “’S’up,” Isaiah said.

  Wellington stood and awkwardly shook Isaiah’s hand. Wellington could never quite figure out how to do the “brother’s” handshake. “Sorry,” he said.

  As the two students sat down, Wellington glanced around to make sure nobody else was within earshot. He slid forward on the bulky leather furniture and handed Isaiah a stack of papers he had printed out. “Here’s what I was talking about,” he said. He waited in silence as Isaiah reviewed the documents.

  “Does Snead know you have these?” Isaiah asked.

  Wellington shook his head.

  “Let me confront him,” Isaiah said. “Play off my cue.”

  “Okay,” Wellington said. His heart was saying, Gladly.

  The two students made it to Snead’s office on time, but as soon as Isaiah started talking, Snead held up a palm. He led them into the hallway and explained his fear that the office might be bugged, a prospect that sent Wellington’s heart racing and mind reeling.

  Snead led the students to the teachers’ lounge, a place where Wellington had never before set foot. He had imagined that the place might have a certain mystique to it—the stomping grounds of some of the most brilliant minds in legal academia—but in reality the room was rather boring. It was the size of a large classroom, stocked with vending machines, a microwave, a sink, and an oversize refrigerator. There were a few couches along the outside edges, and several square, restaurant-style tables in the middle. The professors obviously didn’t believe in picking up after themselves, littering the place with old newspapers, magazines, and dirty dishes.

  The law students and Snead cleared one of the tables and took a seat. It was after 5:00 p.m., so the lounge was otherwise empty. If Wellington had had his preferences, he would have kept the meeting in Snead’s office so he could be separated from the intimidating professor by the large oak desk. But he wasn’t in charge of logistics, so he simply slid his chair back a little from the table and crossed his legs.

  “I hope you gentlemen are being careful,” Snead said. “We don’t know for certain that Ms. Brock’s disappearance is a kidnapping, but there’s no sense taking any chances.”

  “Trust me, Professor,” Wellington said, glad for something they could agree on. “We’re being careful.”

  “We’re actually here on a related matter,” Isaiah began. He apparently didn’t believe much in pleasantries. “We want to know why you never told us that you previously represented David Hoffman while you were in private practice.”

  Wellington watched closely as Snead blanched and then recovered quickly. He had been a trial lawyer for years and had lots of practice at getting ambushed.

  “What are you talking about?” Snead growled, his face instantly changing from concerned professor to combatant.

  “Do you deny it?” Isaiah prodded.

  “I’m not admitting or denying anything,” Snead huffed. “If you have a point to make, Mr. Haywood, it would do you well to make it. If not, this meeting is a waste of everyone’s time.”

  Isaiah plopped some documents on the table. “All right, Prof, here’s my point. You represented David Hoffman in California yet chose to keep that a secret.” He slid the documents toward Snead, who made a point of ignoring them. “Wellington found these through Westlaw.”

  Leave my name out of it, Wellington wanted to say.

  “One of these is a breach-of-contract case—Hoffman, who was then known as Clark Shealy, suing because he didn’t get paid on a bond. And here’s one of your rare forays into representing a defendant instead of a plaintiff in a civil case—Shealy being sued for violating some guy’s constitutional rights with an unlawful arrest.”

  Snead’s face gave nothing away. “Are you suggesting some impropriety because I happened to represent a law-abiding bail-bond enforcement agent?”

  “Did you tell the federal agents investigating Jamie’s kidnapping about this?”

  “I don’t divulge my prior representations of clients. That’s protected information.”

  “Not when it’s publicly available,” Wellington interjected. He surprised even himself with the comment, but Snead’s claim was so spurious that he couldn’t just let it slide.

  Snead shot Wellington a withering shut-up look.

  “It’s also irrelevant,” Snead said, the color rising in his face.

  Isaiah gave an incredulous snort. “Clark Shealy, your former client, moves to Atlanta with a new identity under the witness protection program. He just happens to stumble into the legal aid clinic where you just happen to be the supervising attorney. He is represented by Jamie Brock. Stacie Hoffman runs this ruse of communicating through me, pretending she doesn’t trust you. And then, after all of this subterfuge, Jamie Brock is kidnapped, and you have the temerity to say it’s irrelevant?”

  Isaiah pulled out his cell phone as Wellington watched the disintegration of the roles between student and teacher. Isaiah had become the interrogator, Snead the indignant defendant. Wellington found himself siding with Isaiah, though he might end up having a nervous breakdown before the meeting was over.

  Snead sighed. He looked from one student to the other, and the anger seemed to drain from his face. “Put the phone away,” he said calmly. “You’re entitled to know.”

  For the next several minutes, Snead did a passable job at confessing. He had been Shealy’s lawyer for a few years in California. They had played cards together. Might have done a little gambling together, truth be known. He had given Shealy some behind-the-scenes advice on his witness protection deal, though Shealy had also hired a seasoned criminal defense lawyer to negotiate the fine points. Shortly after Snead started teaching at Southeastern, about a year and a half ago, Shealy had reinitiated contact under his new name and identity.

  At this point in the story, Snead abruptly stopped and refused to go forward without promises of confidentiality from both students. “I’m about to divulge some serious client confidences,” Snead promised. “I’m hiring you both to help me on this case and therefore need your pledge to keep confidential what I’m about to tell you. If you can’t make that promise, I can’t share this little saga with you.”

  Reluctantly Wellington agreed. Curiosity, and the forceful personality of a law school professor, could be strong motivators. Even more reluctantly, Isaiah agreed.

  Snead folded his hands and continued—a grandfather regaling the grandchildren with fables and fairy tales. Since the students already knew about Hoffman’s prior run-in with the mob, Snead skipped right to the juicy part.

  “Before Professor Kumari died, he put in motion some kind of e-mail process that would send Shealy the secret algorithm within forty-eight hours unless Kumari preempted it. Kumari made Shealy promise that he would sell the algorithm to legitimate digital-encryption companies and send the profits to the church in India so that they could use it to help educate the Dalits. Kumari himself was a Dalit who had managed to rise to prominence despite the caste system. Kumari told Shealy that he could keep a 10 percent commission. And because Kumari ended up sacrificing his own life in exchange for Mrs. Shealy’s, Clark wanted to fulfill that promise.” Snead paused and shifted in his seat. He looked like he could use a cigarette.

  “There was one problem,” Snead continued. “The algorithm sent to Shealy was itself encoded. Shealy was supposed to receive the key from one of Kumari’s friends, but the key never came. That’s why, about a yea
r and a half ago, the man you know as David Hoffman asked me to help broker a deal with a handful of authentic Internet security companies. But I couldn’t get that deal done because Hoffman wasn’t willing to show them even the encoded algorithm until they paid his asking price. Those companies weren’t about to pay until they could be assured that they could decode the algorithm and it would work.”

  Snead lowered his voice to a conspiratorial level. “After those talks broke down, Hoffman said he would keep working on decoding the formula and would contact me when he had solved it. The next time he popped up was when he strolled into our legal aid clinic on that repossession lawsuit. Far as I know, he still doesn’t have the algorithm decoded.”

  Isaiah looked skeptical. “I still don’t understand why you kept your prior representation of Hoffman a secret.”

  “The client asked me to,” Snead responded. “He had his reasons, which must remain confidential. And I chose to abide by his wishes.”

  64

  The night before, just prior to telling his wife good-bye, David Hoffman had slipped a note to Stacie with the designated spot for tonight’s meeting. Every night it was someplace different. They limited meetings to an hour or less. No shows of affection. They arrived at different times and left at different times. They had precise procedures to follow prior to the meeting to ensure they weren’t being followed.

  They lived at different addresses and, technically, in different cities. Since the day David had spotted the triad member in Fulton County court a few weeks earlier, he and Stacie had lived separate lives, meeting only when they knew they hadn’t been followed.

  Despite these precautions, David worried that they weren’t being careful enough. Stacie continued to work at the same day job she had landed nearly eighteen months ago when she and David decided to sell the encrypted algorithm. David had called in a few favors from his prior life, resulting in a new ID for Stacie’s job application, complete with a clean Social Security number and Georgia driver’s license. She was Tricia Martsen at work and Stacie Hoffman the rest of the time.

  For strategic reasons, Stacie couldn’t change jobs. But for the sake of caution, she had applied for and received a transfer of location immediately after David had been spotted in court.

  Stacie was quick to point out that her change in appearance made her less vulnerable than David. When they entered the witness protection program, David had steadfastly refused plastic surgery. “You can’t improve on perfection,” he had said. But the real reason was deeper. The feds had already confiscated his identity, but he would at least keep his own face—flaws and all—thank you very much.

  Making the best of the situation, Stacie embraced it as part of the benefit of the bargain—a government-funded chance to fix a few facial features that she found less than perfect. Rhinoplasty to narrow the bridge of her nose, collagen injections for her lips, and a slight lift of the eyelids to make the eyes look bigger. She had turned plenty of heads before, in David’s opinion, and he worried that with the plastic surgery she might attract too much attention.

  But all of that took place before their trip to India. Before they had gone to visit Kumari’s church in search of the key to the algorithm. When they arrived, they learned that his pastor and some other church members had been kidnapped and brutally tortured, their houses burned to the ground.

  While there, Stacie fell in love with the remaining church members who rebuilt the building and especially with the Dalit children who clung to Stacie at the Christian school. That week in Mangalore had changed Stacie in ways David had never anticipated. She came back determined to decode and sell the algorithm so they could keep David’s pledge to Professor Kumari. And to do so, she was now content to hide those near-perfect features behind thick black glasses, a pale complexion, and a stringy auburn wig.

  Tonight, they were scheduled to meet at the Holiday Inn Express near the Gwinnett Place Mall in Duluth, Georgia, about forty minutes northeast of the city. Some nights they met at a restaurant, others a coffee shop or a mall or a theme park. But, to David’s great chagrin, even on nights like tonight, when the meeting took place in a hotel, there was no chance of being intimate with his own wife.

  He arrived a few minutes early, walked through the hotel lobby as if he were a guest, and found a seat in a white plastic lounge chair next to the small rectangular indoor pool. There were three young kids doing cannonballs, even though the sign said No Jumping.

  Stacie walked through the doors just as the mom came and herded the kids out of the pool. Stacie found a seat next to David and greeted him with the formal handshake of a business associate.

  “What’s with the emergency meeting?” she asked.

  David sighed. This wasn’t going to be easy. “Jamie Brock, one of the law students helping on our case, was kidnapped earlier today. Walter called.”

  “Kidnapped?”

  “She was last seen at the law school about five hours ago. She was under federal protection, but they think some triad members staged a power outage at the law school and nabbed her in one of the dark stairwells.”

  David watched the concern flash in Stacie’s eyes. This would undoubtedly rekindle the raw emotions of her own experience. “I haven’t heard anything on the news,” she said.

  “According to Walter, the feds are trying to keep it under wraps. They talked to Walter and a few law students and swore them all to secrecy. The feds think the mob is trying to use Jamie to get at us. They asked Walter if the triad had contacted him or me.”

  “How could they contact you?”

  “They can’t. They didn’t. And they haven’t contacted Walter yet, either.”

  Stacie thought about this for a minute and David gave her time to process the implications. In the last few hours, he had considered these developments from every possible angle. He knew it was time for Plan B, though he also knew that Stacie would vehemently resist the idea. She had never liked that plan—a high-risk attempt to nail the triad’s leaders and gain protection in the process. Too little margin for error. Too much depended on their ability to dupe some very smart and ruthless men.

  But what choice did they have? Walter Snead had talked them into staying in the area while he tried to negotiate a protection deal with the government that didn’t require turning over the algorithm. They had concocted Plan B as an emergency measure if his efforts failed. That’s where they were now. His efforts had proved futile. And Jamie Brock’s life was on the line.

  “I hate this algorithm,” Stacie said.

  David knew what she meant. The algorithm was knowledge. Knowledge was power. And power always came with a price. “We didn’t ask for this, Stacie. But we can’t just run away.”

  “There’s got to be a better way than Plan B,” Stacie said, reading David’s mind. “Plan B plays right into their hands. They’re trying to smoke us out.” She sighed, and David could tell she was fighting back tears. “I’m so tired of all the double-crossing and deception.”

  David leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He blew out a deep breath and looked straight ahead as he talked, not wanting to read the look on Stacie’s face. It was time to mention something he had never talked about before, not even with Stacie.

  “Four years ago, hon, when I was frantic to rescue you, I said a couple of desperate prayers. You know, ‘God, I’ll do anything you want if you just get Jessica out of this alive.’ No qualifications. And I meant it. I would have done anything just to wrap my arms around you one more time. But after your rescue, I really didn’t think much about it again until I got the call from Snead today.”

  David turned and looked at Stacie in time to see her eyes moisten. “When Snead called, I thought about how Professor Kumari risked his life for us—for people he didn’t even know. And I had this strange feeling—not really a voice or anything, but just a feeling—that maybe God was somehow saying this is the thing he wants me to do now. Take a risk for Jamie Brock the same way Kumari did for us.”

  “I k
now we can’t just leave Jamie hanging out there,” Stacie said. “But I wish there was some other way.” She hesitated as if unsure whether she should admit what really worried her. “I don’t want to lose you.”

  “You won’t,” David said immediately, trying to muster a little false bravado. “This plan is foolproof. I mean, look who designed it.”

  Unsmiling, she took his hand and gave him a look that said she would see this through to the bitter end. David might talk a good game on the surface, but in reality he drew his strength from her. She had always been the rock in their relationship. And after her spiritual rebirth in India, even more so. Once she prayed about something and committed, all the demons in hell couldn’t stop her.

  “Are you scared?” she asked.

  “Terrified.”

  “Me too.”

  He brushed her cheek with his index finger. The tears pooled in her eyes as she fought to hold them back. He leaned in to gently kiss her on the forehead.

  “Can we get a room?” she asked, looking down. “We need to spend some time together.”

  He nodded and worked hard to hold his own emotions in check. This was not supposed to be the way it all went down.

  65

  Jamie knew how to focus on the task at hand. Olympic caliber—that’s what the newspapers articles had called her. You didn’t become Olympic caliber without intense mental focus, an iron will, and the ability to endure pain.

  She would need all three.

  She rode in silence, staring at the ceiling, forcing herself to concentrate on the psychology of the hostage situation rather than how she got here in the first place. She didn’t know how long they had been driving or how far they still had to go. The back of the truck was like an oven—her skin filmy with sweat, her mouth parched as the desert. She felt weak all over.

  Had they drugged her?

  She needed to get her bearings, and she had to know how far she could push the one man guarding her. She wanted to ride along in silence, but she wouldn’t exactly be bonding with her captors that way.