Page 8 of The Proving Ground

I stood up.

“Mickey, don’t leave that here,” Maggie said. “It’s not going to happen.”

I headed for the office door, ignoring her command. As I opened it, I turned back and looked at her.

“It will happen if you do the right thing,” I said.

Then I walked out and closed the door behind me.

5

JUDGE RUHLIN DELIVEREDher rulings by email promptly at nine a.m. Monday. I was in the Arts District downtown at the warehouse where I had once stored a fleet of Lincolns and that I now used primarily for records storage and as an office. In terse rulings short on explanatory backup, the judge simply split the decision, giving both sides a win. She cleared the path for Rikki Patel to testify as a plaintiff’s witness in the case but allowed Tidalwaiv to keep its redactions to the discovery material, leaving me to decide whether or not to delay the trial by going with (and paying) a special master to review the thousands of documents and determine what should be removed from redaction. It was passing the buck. I had actually thought the opposite rulings would come, that I would lose Patel but get unredacted discovery. So I didn’t know how to react. If I had lost Patel, I would simply have sent Cisco out to find another person who’d witnessed the inner workings of the company. Going with a special master would delay the trial by months if not a year or more. And whether or not I chose to delaythings, the rulings gave Tidalwaiv an opportunity to slow the case with their own appeal on the Patel decision.

McEvoy arrived at the warehouse promptly at ten a.m., as I’d instructed him in a text. I walked him back toward the office, but he stopped when he saw two people behind the mesh of a fenced-off area in one of the storage bays.

“Wait, is that a Faraday cage?” he asked.

“With this case, it’s an absolute necessity,” I said.

“That was going to be my first suggestion to you. Can I take a look?”

“Uh, be my guest.”

The cage was a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot cube of chain link. Across the top was a crosshatch of wires supporting copper mesh that also draped down all four sides of the cage, preventing all manner of electronic intrusion. Inside was 144 square feet of workspace. The cage was ground zero forRandolph v. Tidalwaiv.

There was one entrance, through a curtain made of the same copper mesh. I held it open for McEvoy.

Cisco Wojciechowski and Lorna Taylor were standing in front of Big Bertha, Lorna’s name for the industrial-size printer I had leased for dealing with case-discovery materials. Two ten-foot-long tables on opposite sides of the cage held printed documents that were stacked according to category—system development, architecture, testing, and so on. On one of the tables, Lorna had set up a desktop computer with twin wide-screen monitors, a twelve-terabyte external drive, and no connection to the internet. Despite the warehouse’s alarms, cameras, and other protections, that hard drive went home with one of us every night in a locking Faraday bag.

After introducing McEvoy to the team, I explained all this to him.

“You’re going completely off the grid,” he said.

“Trying to,” Lorna said. “As much as we can.”

“Why?” McEvoy said. “Has there been an intrusion?”

“We’re trying to avoid that,” Lorna said.

“We’re taking no chances,” Cisco said.

He said it in a tone that suggested that McEvoy had asked a stupid question.

I walked over to the table with the computer and tapped a finger on the hard drive. It was a duplicate of the one I had left on Maggie McPherson’s desk the Friday before.

“This is what we got in discovery,” I said. “And I think we’d be fools not to consider that a company like Tidalwaiv will take any advantage they can in terms of gathering intel about the case against them.”

“You think it’s bugged,” McEvoy said.

“I think we need to assume, given what’s at stake in this case, that the opposition is desperate to know what we’re up to,” I said. “But let’s talk about that in my office. There are a few things I want to go over with you before we get further into anything.”

I held my hand toward the curtain and McEvoy started that way.

“Nice to meet you,” he said to Cisco and Lorna.

“Likewise,” Cisco said sullenly.

It was obvious that Cisco wasn’t convinced we needed McEvoy.